Every year for the past few years, Land Rover has arranged and hosted a multi-day overlanding and off-roading adventure course with a number of challenging physical, logical, and dynamic vehicle tasks. It calls the experience Trek. The automaker invites a wave of media and influencers to the experience which I had the privilege of attending this year, sharing a 2022 Land Rover Defender with two teammates for two days of exercise and camping.
I was told to expect a weekend transiting between Land Rover's headquarters office in New Jersey up to Vermont in a new Land Rover Defender—2021 MotorTrend SUV of the Year—doing "off-road" challenges, teasing me with a couple of days of fun driving. But day one, I found myself clueless to what was about to come, paired with strangers in what turned out to be a bizarre outdoor corporate boot camp of sorts. The challenges of Trek change every year, but here's everything, both exhausting and exhilarating, that Land Rover is putting its Trek teams through this year:
The regular Trek event is typically organized as a competition for participants of small teams of employees from Land Rover dealerships and dealer groups across the country, each of which sponsors one of the dozens of black and orange Trek-branded and gear-customized Land Rover Defenders used during the event. Each vehicle is tagged with its dealer name, and we were told the dealerships often sell off their Trek Defenders as "new" once the (relatively low-mileage) competition is over, with some enthusiasts apparently seeking out Trek-used models.
This year, the Trek vehicle of choice starts with a base, four-door 2022 Land Rover Defender 110 model, but is clearly modified with accessories and gear. The Defender 110 P300 model features a turbocharged 2.0-liter I-4 gas engine good for 296 horsepower and 295 lb-ft of torque mated to an eight-speed automatic transmission and driving all four wheels.
Unloaded, Land Rover says this setup can get the Defender from zero to 60 mph in 7 seconds and reach a top speed of 119 mph, though weighed down with all of our equipment, we certainly felt slightly limited by the powertrain in highway settings—not to mention all of the wind noise coming from the massive cube of a tent mounted on the roof at highway speeds. I'm not sure I could live with it for a full season, let alone year-round if you live in an accommodating climate.
For gear and equipment, our Defenders each had a powered winch and winch controller, which ended up getting plenty of use over the weekend, as well as a winch kit with pulleys, straps, and gloves. Each SUV was also dressed with Land Rover's available Explorer Pack which comes with a raised air-snorkle-like intake next to the windshield, improved wheel arch protection with tougher body panel materials, and a waterproof side-mounted lock box which we used to store a jack and tire iron. Land Rover also outfitted black-painted side tubes, a spare tire cover, a fridge in the rear cargo area, a retractable awning, and an available roof-mounted collapsible tent that one of the team members ended up sleeping in over the weekend.
I was the first of my group tasked to do anything. It was a relay foot race, where each team member had to take turns crossing a field, army crawling under a net, climbing a hill, crossing a three-pointed balance beam, heaving themselves over a 5-foot wooden wall, and then we lapped the entire headquarters building before trading off to the next member.
After that, each team had to remove the water jugs from the side of their Defender, run to the opposite end of the building to fill them up with a hose, and then carry the full jugs back and remount them in a set amount of time.
The next challenge involved pushing a classic Land Rover Discovery in Trek livery using only PVC tube piping rolling under the vehicle platform. That was fairly straightforward. Fairly exhausted already, we then packed up and set off from New Jersey to Vermont, where more challenges met us upon our arrival at Land Rover's Experience course near Equinox resort.
Land Rover hosts these Trek events at their national Experience centers, one of which is at the Equinox resort in Vermont, and there are other setups at the Biltmore estate in North Carolina and at the Quail Lodge in California. These Experience locations are typically employed for off-road customer driving and training, and you can bring your own vehicle or use one of the company's. Classes and training programs range from an hour, to a half day, to a full day, at various prices.
Before we could set up camp for the night, Land Rover gave each team $200 to refill the nearly-empty Defender, which swallowed more than $90 of fuel, and instructed us to spend the rest on groceries. We needed to get enough food for our team of three to eat dinner and the next day's lunch, but we were also tasked with the challenge of preparing an appetizer for a panel of Land Rover instructor judges, which would be rated on presentation, flavor, creativity, and relevance to the Land Rover brand.
My team ended up cooking pork sausage sliders on the camp grill topped with Vermont white cheddar, jalapeños, sriracha aioli, and a fried egg on a fresh onion roll, and we got second place in the challenge judging.
Setting up camp was easy; each vehicle featured a rooftop tent as well as two more ground tents, three sleeping pads, three sleeping bags, and three pillows. All of that combined with the bulky refrigerator equipped in the rear cargo hold meant most of our personal bags and belongings ended up in the second row with a passenger when mobile.
I was anticipating a lot of air-conditioned, slow-paced technical driving before I arrived, and I'm not at all in any sort of physical shape to win an outdoor competition, so let's just say the camp fire, s'mores, and conversation were the nicest part of day one for me.
The next morning began at a chilly, dewey 6:00 a.m. with a pre-packaged breakfast and a massive vat of delightfully hot coffee after we packed up our uncomfortably damp tents. Then it was back into the team challenges, and just like day one, we started with a relay race, this time involving a rope climb along the path through the Land Rover Experience off-road course. Thankfully we moved back into the Defenders from there, and finally started some off-road focused challenges that required us to use a lot of the vehicle's equipment and features.
Two of the day's challenges required me and my team to coordinate in navigating an off-road course with two of us outside of the Defender to guide the driver. One challenge involved us backing our way through a curvy, bumpy, muddy course without the vehicle touching any foam penalty pylons the Land Rover team had installed along the way. This was tricky, as all of the gear in the back of the Defender made it impossible to see out of, and the mirrors were partially blocked by the lock box, etc., so the backup camera really came in handy. We only made it about a quarter of the way through that one before time was up.
We were much more successful in the second team navigation course, where we had to hit a hanging cone with a specific bullseye point on the top left corner of the Defender's roof—here my team nailed four out of five cones after careful orienting and a lot of debate about the best approach. On two of the cones, our team used the adjustable suspension height settings to ultimately make contact with the bullseye.
My team also did well on a challenge where each of the three team members had to attempt to set an identical time around an off-road course, without our phones or any watches. My team finished with only a 14-second differential between our times on pure guesswork (and the vehicle clock).
The rest of the weekend's challenges involved winching, including with the front-mounted powered winch and its synthetic cable, as well as with a couple of pulleys and tow rope, and also with an old-fashioned chain, hi-lift jack, and muscle mass. The easiest winch challenge was straightforward—tow the Defender up a hill with the powered winch, without letting the cable touch the ground. We ultimately kept the Defender in drive to ease some of the pull on the winch and cable, which we'd tied to a tree at the top of the hill, and threw a couple of smooth logs under the cable along the ground to keep it from getting dirty.
One challenge ultimately saw our team use a couple of pulleys and tow rope clipped to the wound-up winch hook to then manually pull the Defender a few feet forward using only the strength of three people. It was exhausting but satisfying. This challenge, along with the two that required us changing a wheel and carrying the spare through an obstacle course, should inspire Land Rover to open a full-time crossfit-style gym.
If you are the sort of person who is interested in signing up for one of these day-trip courses at a Land Rover Experience center, most of the challenges presented to me during Trek 2022 will not apply to the driving program you can expect. Since Trek is supposed to be a competition among corporate teams, our first challenges of the weekend were mostly relay-style or team-building focused, whereas the Experience programs would mostly stick to stuff like off-road navigation and driving skill, and highlight the very capable features of the vehicle.
My team ultimately got third place overall, boosted in points by our second-place success in the cooking challenge and our excellent run in the triple-timed off-road course. Regardless of placement, the highlight of the weekend was exploring the seemingly endless capability of a well-equipped, brand-new Land Rover Defender off-road in the early days of fall with a team of expert Land Rover Experience specialists.