Posted by Trevor Rushford on 2/8/2024 to

12-Hour Yukon Mountain Man Challenge

I ran in another RCEC Enduro this past weekend, and it was a lot of fun! The Event is called the 12-Hour Yukon Mountain Man Challenge. It’s a 12-hour straight of RC’ing in the harsh winter climate of Vermont. As some may know, I love enduro events and hold the record for the longest enduro with an RC, 64 Hours.

So this event was a cakewalk, right? Hardly. This was my 3rd Yukon challenge, I have done the 24-hour and now two 12-hour enduro’s. We have run in three different places with this last one being one of my favorite places thus far.

We had 20 people sign up for the event, and only 14 finished. The point is to run the entire enduro with the RC you started with. You can only take breaks for battery changes, bathroom, or to eat.

We started at 9:45 am so that meant we finished at 9:45 pm. I decided early that I was going to run my RC4WD Toyota 4 Runner TF2 I named Harsh Lemon. The build was updated to rock the K44s with the XVD axle set. I also swapped to the 1.7 Baja Pro X’s, as I thought they would have a good time in the elements, and I was right. They performed very well with everything I put it on. One highlight was the head-to-head pushing contest on a sheet of ice. I was out-powered and undersized, but those tires gave me the traction on the ice I needed to win every single time. I beat 6 RCs in all.

We ran all day on hard crusty snow, deep water washouts, swam with ice chunks, big dirt mounds, mud, a huge rock garden, and a cool trail we cut through a swamp. We had several people break their RCs, go to their backup RCs and some just broke everything and chose to leave. The RC action was fun as we drove in new places, and down a scale stream, all the while we were on the lookout for wildlife!

The lowest temperature we got was 20° which was on the warmer side of this event, while the coldest record for the Yukon Challenge is -18°. We dressed warm and had our food ready to go with a potluck of crockpots, baked goods, and plenty of quality H2O to keep us going.

The TF2 Toyota 4 Runner was strong all 12 hours. We survived the event with zero damage and we were ready to go another 12 hours if needed. I was happy with how it was handled, and I drove it harder than I was expecting as we were jumping off frozen jumps in the snow, swimming deep in frigid water and deep mud, and climbing hard rock lines. The TF2 was built with hard scale trailing in mind, but not set up how I would typically set up a truck for the long enduros. I would have had a stronger servo in it, plastic driveshafts are my favorite weak point in harsh conditions rather than anything labor-intensive to fix in a frozen climate.

Overall, it was a great time and I look forward to the next enduro with a purpose-built TF2 for this type of longevity in mind. The Harsh Lemon did an amazing job and I can’t wait to get it back out on the trails with it after the rebuild.

Happy Trailing,