by Mike Calabro

The headline on Yahoo the other day said oil has climbed above $124 a barrel. When are these prices going to stop? It cost me well over $100 to fill up my van the other day. There is no way I can afford to fill my ATV as well. We need to find other sources of fuel to power our toys. Luckily, these guys have it all figured out.

by Mike Calabro

I went out to Silver City, Idaho to photograph and test out the new line of winches by WARN. One of the test riders told me that you can winch up anything. The first thing I pointed to was a 50-foot vertical cliff. We set up a bomb-proof anchor at the top of the cliff and started spooling out the cable when another rider from our group stopped us.

I apologized for trying to destroy their ATV. He said that the winch would have no problems dragging the quad up the cliff — the problem is that some gas could spill out of the tank and no one wanted to be on the ATV while operating handlebar-mounted winch control.

We settled on this, easier, rock face instead.

by Slaton L. White

Ten years ago I went on a week-long salmon safari in Alaska, living out of a slide-in camper in a Silverado equipped with a Duramax 6.6-liter V8 turbo diesel. It was an epic adventure, and looking at my old notes I see I raved about the truck’s performance. “Moved well from a dead stop. Quiet, even at full throttle. MPG: averaged between 11 to 14 mpg.”

A lot has happened to GM since then. After teetering on the brink of insolvency for years, it finally plunged into bankruptcy two years ago. What many people don’t know was that the company came perilously close to Chapter 11 in the 1990s. But they got a stay of execution. Know why? The Silverado. It was just about the only GM product people wanted to buy...and they bought enough of them to help keep the company afloat.

The Silverado was good then...and it’s good now.

I can say that after logging 900 miles in one recently. The 2500 4WD Crew Cab is a stout build, and boasts a maximum towing rating of 17,000 pounds. That means that when you drive it without a trailer or with an empty bed, it’s a bit rough. But when you get some weight on those rear wheels, it tames down nicely.