Hummers: Terminator of All-Terrain

Strapped down for dear life in the back of an 8-foot wide Hummer, my brains jiggled around quite a bit. The safari-type chair was comfortably well-padded, a good thing, considering the pounding my back and bottom gave it. A Sedona ride in one of these babies is nothing like your Sunday drive in the country. But it is an unbeatable excuse to test-drive the abilities of that Terminator of All-Terrain Vehicles - the AM General HumVee.

The original Hummers were designed for the American military to replace the limited-capability jeep. The military dubbed them HMMWV's - pronounced HumVee - short for High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle. It wasn't until 1992 that the beasts became available to the non-military off-road enthusiast.

It's still pretty hard to get your hands on one. Since '92, only 8,000 hit the roads and byways of Americana. List price: $125,000 for the basic, high-frills, factory-line model.

I know about the care of feeding of civilian diesel Hummers: my Pop had several. He bought his first in 93 for a comparative cost of $36,000. "They only came in one color - tan," he recalls.

Dad likes big trucks, monsters he and I can take trolling around mangrove lagoons in La Paz, Baja. We've searched for Lonesome Dove on dusty old mining roads in the scorching Mojave Desert. My father introduced the far southern coast to Arnold Schwartzneger's favorite car when he opened the American Hummer Supply and Service Company in San Diego. My mother was never impressed by all this, but for dad and me, we shared a love of the road less traveled...to boldly go where no jeep has gone before!

This was the premise when I signed on for the No Jeep Land Tour with Sedona's first class Hummer Affair (http://www.hummeraffair.com/files/sedona...

Billed as an "extreme 4x4 adventure" I thought I knew what kind of thrills to expect. Instead, I got an education in the capabilities of this G-force machine that proved my noble Pop and self rank novices.

Founded in 1998 by French-born Marc Balocco, Hummer Affair is an easy excuse for adventure-seekers to pound across boulder-choked stream beds, climb boulders, scale and subsequently descend (read: white knuckles) scary cliffs, and generally get the heck outta dodge.

There's an art to driving these rigs that our guide managed effortlessly: he knew how to read terrain and pick a line across the mangled terrain. Then, for chills and thrills, he'd stick the gears in reverse so we could climb those boulders backwards. "Try this in a jeep!" he crowed. I was suitably impressed.

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