My name is Natasha Peterson. My name is Shailee Swenson. And we’re on hell’s revenge. And welcome to jailbreak. Nice. Thank you, ladies. So here we go, another video from Moab, Utah. But this time around, I’m going to show you the biggest, baddest, undisputed, heavyweight king of Moab, Utah, period. No other truck can claim what this truck can claim. Nobody else can do what this truck does, period. And we’re going to get to that. Moab is a very specific place. It’s considered the mecca of four wheel drive. And lots of people build their trucks all season long just to take it out to Moab.

Tested against the gravity defying falls and the crazy slick rock and the jagged rocks in the canyons and everything else. And a lot of them don’t make out too well. I’ve seen way too many rollovers in Utah over the years. And the reason for that is simple. Moab has a lot of places where there are trails that have incredibly steep drop offs on either side. And if you don’t know the trail or you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, this is what can happen. Now we’re talking regular sized suv’s and pickups that are turned into buggies or truggies with full roll cages and things of that nature.

And sometimes you’ve got the guys in there with the full size pickup trucks and they do what they do, and it is what it is. But here’s one thing that goes without question. The larger you make the truck, the bigger and heavier it is, the more difficult and, and incredibly dangerous this entire thing becomes. But to Mike, bigger is better. And there was no convincing him of otherwise. He was building these trucks. All of them were made by the factory for the most part, to be off road. And then they are, quote unquote enhanced by the owners.

Enhance, enhance, enhance. Like myself and many others, but this truck and this actual fleet of trucks is on an entirely different playing field. It is insane. And when you look at this truck, when you’re in a vehicle where you can actually look down into the front seat of an 18 wheeler passing you and then you go up. Hell’s revenge in the same truck, that’s the king, period. Straight up, no two ways about it. And I’m going to show you the truck. I’m going to show you the owner, and then we’re going to take this truck on a sunset trip through fins and things and Hell’s revenge.

This is the entire package, ladies and gentlemen. So here, as they say we go. But first, in the next video, you’re gonna want to check this out because I’m gonna be giving away a bone valley handmade knife sheath and a bone valley saw. I forget the exact name of it right now because I’m an idiot, and that happens. But in the next video, all you got to do is comment to win. You know, we have to buy any merch. None of that crap. Comment, and you can win a $500 handmade knife or not. But here we go.

Here’s Mike, and here’s big iron tours. So if you’ve ever been on the slick rock of moab, you may have seen something like this. This is Mike and Brutus. Mike is the owner and operator of big iron tours. And Mike is a two time Iraq veteran. He’s a helicopter pilot, which has nothing to do with the military. And he’s the owner operator of Big Iron tours. It’s veteran owned, veteran operated, and they do some of the craziest things in the biggest machines running on the slickrock period. These trucks are on 53 inch tires, which make my 37s look like child’s play.

So I actually went on a sunset tour with Mike. I got to meet the people on the tour, and I videotaped everything. But first, let’s hear it from Mike. And how come he decided to go this particular route, being a helo pilot and all? You’d think that he’d want to stick to something like that, but he told me it was just too high stress. And apparently this. This is a lot easier to do. Okay, I’m here with Mike, and this video has been five years in the making because five years ago in 2019, if memory serves, I met up with you, and you had a monster truck called the pain trade, and we took it over.

Hell’s revenge. We did some footage. We did a little bit of an interview, and I promised you that I would get that out there. Well, I took my footage, and I headed back east, and when I got home, I realized that half the footage had zero audio. It was basically useless. And this time around, we bumped into each other a couple of times as I’ve been passing through, and I promised I would get this video done. Well, I’m glad I did stick around because I actually went on the tour last night in this truck. Dude, that was absolutely insane.

Pretty epic, huh? I have done some of the best. I’ve done all the best trails in the United States in one vehicle or another. But I have never gone through fins and things or hell’s revenge in something this big. That was insane, dude, let me ask you, what made you think that doing this was a good idea? Well, you know, it’s kind of a story of wanting to do something a little bit different because, you know, there’s plenty of tours, they’re doing this very similar in some of the same routes as me, but I kind of wanted to give people a different view and a different experience.

And which type of vehicle does make a difference? Right. Of course, you’re going to be sitting on your tail in most machines, but there’s a vast difference between sitting in a side by side where your butt’s about a couple feet off the ground, versus something like this, where you’re a good six plus feet off the ground. Let me interject real quick. We were on the highway in this coming back to your shop, and we passed an 18 wheeler. And it was the first time in my life that I actually looked down into the cab of an 18 wheeler.

This is a big truck. I mean, those are. What are those, 53s? Yeah, 53 inch tires. Look at the size of those. And they’re 800 pounds apiece. Correct. With the rim. They’re about that. With the rim installed. They’re double bead locks with run flat. So the weight’s stacking up on that. Yeah, they’re, from my estimation, about 800 pounds apiece. Okay, now that I’ve interrupted you and sidetracked you, let’s start with. What is this? So this is an m 923, a two. It’s an old military truck. Started out as a six by six. We had it bob down to about 4ft less for.

So that means you cut 4ft of the frame off to make the truck shorter. Exactly. Okay. Put on a rear steer. Put rear steer on it. So we basically took the front axle off another truck that was timed out and put it on the rear of this. Did a whole refurbished on the axle, made it brand new again. Same with the front. Okay. Put hydraulic in the rear and standard power steering in the front. The same. The same that it came with. And it was crazy because we were moving down some sandwiches trails, some whoop dee doos and such that you can have fun on, but you can also get in trouble on.

And this thing. I mean, we were rolling, dude, stable. And I mean, the way you were steering the front and rear at the same time was pretty epic, man. It was pretty amazing. It sort of gives you a bit of a. When you kind of come up on some of these little side banks where the trail just naturally tilts. Yep. When you use that with this, with the rear steer. It kind of gives you a bit of a snap roll moment where you just kind of go, oh, crap, pop. That’s crazy. It’s fun. So this is a military truck.

What year is it? This one is a 1990. 1990? Were you in the military? I was, yeah. I did four years in the Marine Corps. Well, maybe that’s probably what the banner directly behind you is representing. That’s my unit. Third lar. I forgot that is even there. That’s badass. Light, light armored vehicles with the. So third layer is the light armored reconnaissance battalion. And those are the guys with the guns that are dead nuts accurate. Big 25 millimeter chain guns as turrets. Chain guns. Now, I mean, we’re in your shop right here. I see a helicopter on the wall.

Did you fly a helicopter in the military or were you infantry? So I was infantrying the Marines. But that’s where I learned I wanted to fly helicopters because I got the chance to fly in the back of a big, you know, Marine Corps bird. Right, right. And holy shit, that changed my world. That gave me a new addiction. So I ended up while I was still in the Marine Corps, I had a couple years left, decided I had to fly, ordered all the books, all the information. Just kind of studied up on helicopters until when I eventually got out, I went straight to school privately, got all my ratings, got all my certifications, flew for six years, and then I ended up starting this.

You learned how to fly a chopper from books? Well, I went to school, too. I learned a lot of the ground information, school type, you know, classroom knowledge. And then all my actual application came afterwards. Nice or technical training, I should say so. And then after that, you decided the helicopters weren’t scary enough. You wanted to take the biggest machine you could possibly find and do the scariest trails in Moab in them and fill it with people. Yeah, well, we did that last night and it was phenomenal. The people were so happy. The one thing is I sat in the front with you and I actually know the trails.

The people in the back really couldn’t see how bad it looked from the front. And I guess that works to your advantage. But, man, you were doing it basically eyes closed, no big deal. The view they get is because they’re so far from trucks so big, they can see all the way across and outward of where we’re roughly going. Right. But once we get to it, the details can show up. They don’t see the immediate details, so when that far down, it suddenly dips. They’re just like, it’s kind of. Kind of exciting for them to not be able to estimate exactly what’s happening from moment to moment.

It was amazing, man. I mean, I did not realize how well these things would handle. You put new rubber on these, and you broke them in, you aired them down. It was just absolutely phenomenal. Okay. So when you originally started this scuttlebutt around town was, that ain’t gonna work. That’s not gonna. You know, that’s. It’s gonna be. Something horrible is gonna happen. Well, since I saw you last, you don’t even have the original truck anymore. You’ve moved on big time. We’ve upgraded our trucks a little bit. Yeah. So there was. There were some naysayers that thought it was a bad idea.

Even people personally that I knew in my life that thought, hey, this might not be a good idea. So those are. That’s. That’s equipment. Like, it is capable of off roading, but probably wasn’t designed specifically for that. I beg to differ, because in Vietnam, that’s almost exclusively what, like, that truck behind you did is. It would be pretty much always off roading. Really? Yeah. I mean, either the roads that. The roads that they use in Afghanistan and Iraq are what we would consider Moab. Yeah. Off road, you know. Right, right. They’re up rocky trails, and they don’t exactly have road cruise in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Right. So they’re gonna be about as rough as you could imagine to get to certain places. So tell me whatever you want to tell me. Sure. Have at it. So let’s. Let’s do a walk around this truck. So the power plant is an 8.3 turbo Cummins diesel. It can easily carry a truck about twice this weight. So we actually have one outside that’s about twice the weight of this truck. And it totally pulls that thing across the earth. No problem. Then strapped to that, you have five speed Allison transmission, automatic. And then the original axles, we’ve got the original transfer case.

So the stuff that would have been on this during Vietnam type era was rolling. Rockwell equipment. Okay. Relatively, very, very few leaks you’ll ever track from this truck. They’re pretty sill tight after we’ve gone through them. We did put an aftermarket exhaust on because we didn’t want. We didn’t want a loud vehicle. We did that for the sake of being able to have a casual conversation with the truck on a tour and also for the, you know, all the locals and all the people who are going to be around this truck and not necessarily in it.

They don’t want to hear these things. They don’t want to hear the noise all the time. Right. So we, with all of our trucks, go out of our way to make sure it’s quiet. Because the goal is not to be loud and obnoxious. And I’ve noticed there’s some. Some people out there that they. They’ll make it the opposite way they do. As loud as they can. Yes. And it’s just annoying because there’s 150 loud vehicles on the trail every day. Right. It’s just to the point of. Come on. So in the truck. In the truck in the bed that you bobbed.

You’ve shortened this thing. Four foot. You put in professional racing seats or off road racing seats with real safety harnesses. I was actually here when the first cage you guys designed was being done. That roll cage is its own entity. Correct? Can you. Am I saying that right? Yeah. So this is basically its own pod. The whole cage, the cage, the seats, the seat belts. If, heaven forbid. In the event that this truck just gets shredded, the cage and the seats will all be safely protected and stay with it even, no matter what happens up in the front end of the body of the truck.

Not that it would separate. We do a pretty good job attaching everything. But in the event, it is its own little pod for safety. It’s like an escape pod built right in. And this cage is very well engineered and very well built specifically for this exact size of truck. Just engine heavy, so it will handle a rollover. And on this particular vehicle, there’s one thing that I noticed that’s in the rear. Well, we haven’t got to the rear yet. Go ahead, continue. Don’t let me interrupt. It’s still early for me. No worries. So, yeah, nice big fifty three s.

I mean, it’s amazing how big. I mean, it’s to your shoulder. Almost. Almost. And I mean, I’m not a tall guy, but I’m. Neither am I. But that’s a big, big, big tire. So to put that into perspective, I’m about five nine. Right. All right, joe us. Okay. Four point harnesses. Of course, with the bucket seats. This is how we mount most of our passengers with the ladders. We’ll just kind of demonstrate that for you. Okay. We’ve got a nice collapsing ladder. It hooks on every single rail. And then when it’s on the board and unboard, we just set the ladder up.

And we haven’t had really hardly any issues with mobility as far as people getting in. And anytime we do have mobility issues. We have the second best way to mount this truck, or possibly the first best. We have a wheelchair lift that can deadlift 800 pounds. Okay. So if you have anybody with mobility issues where they can’t do the ladder, you’ve added one of these bad larvs on the back. Yep. So this is a fold out wheelchair lift. Basically, it’ll fold flat. It’ll drop all the way down to the ground. We can get whoever in with wheelchairs or if they’re having other type mobility issues, like, they can’t really.

We had a gal the other day. So with this millennium two setup, you’ve made these trucks handicapped accessible. Have you had people on tours that came on board with wheelchairs? Yep. We’ve had quadriplegics. We’ve had people who just had every type of mobility issue from they can’t use their arms to climb up very well because they’ve had shoulder issues or they’ve got other types of issues. This wheelchair lift is slow, steady, and very powerful. It lifts up a couple bodies effortlessly. That’s crazy. That is crazy. And I do like to point and give a shout out to hashtag rolling strong.

That’s not ours. That is wheelchairs for warriors. So that’s an organization, a 501, that goes out of their way to provide these top shelf, off road wheelchairs for veterans. Right. I’ve seen some of the setups they’re coming out with, and they’re insane. They are. They are insane. So rolling strong people. You know, you’ve done it, you’ve been overseas, you’ve seen what happens to people, and it’s good to support it when they get back home, because sometimes, sadly, the government doesn’t actually pick up the slack like they should in some cases. And that’s all I’ll say. You hear real horror stories about that, right? This is one of the organizations that we like to cooperate with and help out any way we can, because they’re just a great group, great people.

I’ve met almost everybody in their entire organization. Every one of them are just salty people. Nice. Nice. I love the license plate, too. It took me a minute to decode it. Tons of fun. Yeah, the little seven year old girl that was on there figured it out right away. I’m like, yeah, it took me a day. That little seven year old on here last night, she was awesome. She was awesome. Nope, not at all. Okay. Uh, we’re looking right at it. Yeah, that’s the rear steer. So there we are. That’s the package right there. That’s what really sends this truck over the edge.

Hopefully not literally. Not literally, but, yeah. I mean, we did this. The steering on this thing gave you capability. That was insane. Like, I saw her in action and you were wheeling it like it was second nature. No big deal. You know, driving the group of the truck and steering front and rear, that’s. That’s quite a bit of things. It’s a lot going on. You keep a train conductor for the first while, pretty soon it becomes natural. But, yeah. So we. We, of course, always overbuild. Whatever doing, we want to make it stronger and more powerful and more tolerance than anything we’d ever possibly need.

Right. For two reasons. One, it’s going to reduce maintenance substantiallY. Two, safety. Right. You know, safety is second. Right. Did it take you. It. Did it. Scratch that. Did it take you a while to find somebody to work on the truck that you were actually comfortable with? They’d get it done for a decent price, but in a timeframe, in a timely manner. I got lucky. I ran into a group called midnight four x four, and those guys, they flat do solid work and boys equipment as well. They do excellent work, and I’ve had a very long standing, continuing relationship with both organizations.

Nice voice equipment. Midnight four x four. I’ll tell you what they do. Put out a good product. It looks beautiful. Everything that’s under here is beautiful. YoU know what I mean? Mechanically speaking, the truck looks brand spanking new. Yeah. And I mean, you’ve got a massive. Is that a six by six in the back? The white one, that’s a four x four. That’s a four x four. That’s a massive truck. Until you see this next to it, it’s just. It’s insane, dude. It’s insane. It almost doesn’t exist in the same room when it’s with this thing.

And I love your shop. This is like a. This is like a pharmaceutical place. Yeah. We try to keep it clean, organize. It is nice. It’s nice. All right, guys, you want engine bay? What do you want to do? Whatever you want to talk about, because I will keep distracting you inside, tracking you for no reason. It’s what I do. That’s what we’re doing here, is getting questions. So, yeah. It supports a 70 gallon diesel tank. Tank which we. I really don’t have to fuel up too often. It’s surprising how far this truck will go on 70 gallons.

Wow. It’s unreal. Like, sometimes it’s so far, I go, oh, when’s the last time I put fuel? And I better check. And it’s always got plenty of fuel. What did you say about the tree? Everybody dies. What did you say? Can you say that again? Everybody seems to die. At some point, I will admit her logic is far more sound than mine. I agree. I agree. How old are you? A seven year old with better logic than me. Imagine that. You all should be very scared that I’m driving instead of her. So with all that in mind, let’s get to the actual off roading.

And unlike other dudes I’ve rolled with that are in the service industry, we’ll call it in Moab. Mike actually cares about his, the people that pay him for his service, to the point where he literally picks everybody up. All the guests that are booked for the tour, for the night, the day, whatever type of tour it may be, because he offers all types of different tours, you can find them right on his website. He picks them all up individually at the hotel room. And Mike’s demeanor, as serious and straight laced as he seems to be when he’s behind the seat, it is entertaining.

Not only does he pick you up, not only does he entertain you, but he takes you around and actually explains the history of what it is you’re seeing in Moab, which is phenomenal, in my opinion. So here we go. So after he picks up all the guests for the tour, for that night, he explains to them where they’re going, what they’re doing. He shows them how to lock themselves into the safety harnesses. He shows them that there are snacks and beverages available, and he introduces them to Brutus, who will be your tour guide. Because the truck literally follows Brutus the entire trip.

If you look to the left at 09:00 you can see Brutus out in the lead. And the tour has officially begun. Here we go. The most interesting thing to me about this entire tour was the diversity of people on this tour. We had from ages seven years old to 81 years old, male and female, all different walks of life, all different parts of the country. And everybody absolutely loved this. You would have thought they were on a bullet train or something else instead of a massive truck. The biggest truck in Moab doing the toughest trails. The craziest thing I’ve noticed about this is that his truck with a load of passengers, there’s 14 people total in the vehicle, if memory serves correctly.

And this truck literally handles better on the trails as far as tipping side to side, front to back whatnot, than my vehicle does in my last vehicle, in the last jeep that I was in on fins and things. Now, fins and things isn’t the worst trail, but it. I’ve absolutely, without a doubt, seen. Every other time I’ve been on it, somebody’s flipped over, you know, so you can absolutely get hurt. Mike has. Has been able to dial these trucks in amazingly because he’s. This is his fifth truck, and he has one hell of a sense of humor, if you listen closely.

In this clip right here. He scared me. All right. Should we crab walk this hill? That’s crazy, dude. I can’t handle one steering wheel. You’re doing two at once, I would expect this is relaxed, right? This is like a helicopter idling on the ground, right? What is that? I’m here. Is that your transfer case or your brakes? Yeah. Is that what it is? The truck’s just bringing its temperature down. It’s got a clutch fan on it. Gotcha. So it kicks on when it’s a little hot and turns off when it’s not. I ask so many questions because when I start editing, I just start blathering.

You know what I mean? All right, you see the sign here? We got a decision to make. Oh, boy. We going easy or hard? Hard it is. You wish. Every now and again it’s fun to pretend like you get a choice. That’s right. That’s right. All right. Every now and again all right. That bad feeling I have. Okay. You know that bad feeling I mentioned earlier? No. It went away. Turns out it was just gas. When I become gassy, I get to be a fussy little guy. Good point. Petrol. All right, here we go. Let’s get on the good stuff, huh? Like I said, you guys, welcome to the video.

Once it’s done that way, everything I video, all six cameras. You got it too. I’m glad this worked out, man. Complaining about it. I’m like, it’s too high. It’s gonna be an outrageous sunset, I’m sure. Oh, my. All right, now, if you look straight ahead where Brutus is at, you’re gonna notice the trail takes a turn for the worst. Don’t you worry about that little guy. That little guy. Worry about that little guy. The beauty is they can’t see the trail from back there. They sort of see my way ahead. This was scary in my haiti because I couldn’t see over the hood.

Yeah, that’s what got me. You know, I like how Brutus is using the environment to his advantage. Yeah. We are now approaching dead man’s drop. Yep. Just don’t look. And it’s not real. It’s not really called I just think it sounds sporty, regardless of what it is called. Good luck, and maybe I’ll be ever in your favor. Also, remember your training. That’s right. Notice the angle of the camera. All right, so maybe it’s not that big a deal, which you can imagine if it was, right? Uncle. Dude, you scared the shit out of me. That scared me a little bit, too.

The agility of this truck and the ability of the driver is absolutely. There’s no one that comes close. And I know I’ve said that about others, but here’s the deal, and everybody should understand this. When you’re doing things like this, any type of an off road trail, the smaller the vehicle, the more agile and easy it is to do. The larger the vehicle, the more ridiculously dangerous it gets. And now you’ve got other people’s lives hanging in the balance. And Mike makes it look like a walk in the park. I asked him why he stopped flying helicopters, and he said, because of the stress.

This, to him, like he said, is simply a walk in the park. This truck, on its 53 inch tires, handled things that other vehicles would have a really hard time on. This particular drop he’s doing right here. Your truck, any average vehicle, ends up doing a nose stand on the front bumper until you finally fall out, unless you do it wrong and then you crash. I remember that. Right? I remember that. The drone just takes 1 minute to start up. So here it is. Here’s where he made the iconic hell’s revenge look like child’s play. Everybody that four wheels, everybody that’s into adventure or high risk, dangerous type activities, this is the mother load right here.

And he’s doing it in a 13, 14,000 pound vehicle on 53 inch tires, like a walk in the park. And the beauty part about this is he’s rolling directly into the sun. This is a sunset tour. So I’m kind of freaking out because I’m sitting right next to him and I can’t see a thing. I cannot see a thing. The sun’s directly in his eyes, but he’s prepared for it. And like he had said previously, this truck is an extension of himself. If you’ve driven any type of a vehicle of this caliber, of this nature, you understand that after a while, things just become second nature.

And if you have the type of a mindset where you can learn how to fly a helicopter from books and schooling on your own simply because you want to, you are usually above most others. You know what I mean? People that think loud exhaust are amazing, people that don’t you know, I don’t know. Mike’s just a different type of guy. That’s all there is to it. I’m going to leave it at that. But this is the bread and butter. And I got as much footage as I possibly could and some was lent to me. We’ll call it that.

How about that for the people that want to, you know, you know, who you are. Also, once he gets to his objective, which is the dinosaur tracks, he does a tour and gives a very comprehensive, very well spoken portrayal of what the people are standing on, what they’re looking at, and what it meant in our history. And we’ll get to that in a little bit. I’m putting all this footage in because this footage took a lot of work. So it is what it is. You can skip. There’s chapters in this video, feel free or don’t, but this is amazing stuff.

And nobody else can say they did this. Doing this in a big hummer is cool, but it still is not a bobbed six by six at all. There’s just no two ways around that. So there it is. All right, so that’s the dark interior. Let’s talk about the cool stuff. So what we’ve been driving on tonight is known as the petrified standards. That’s all these rocks. But what we’re standing on is not a part of that formation at all. Now, this formation that we’re on, about 190 million years ago, this was the top layer in Moab.

And that kicks off the early Jurassic period. Now, during the early Jurassic period, Moab was much closer to sea level. Right where we’re standing would have been less than 500ft above sea level. Now, where we’re standing right now is about 4700ft above sea level. So huge. About 4200ft in variation. Going down. Well done. On a few occasions, I accidentally drove out of here in rear wheel drive because I forgot I didn’t have to pull it. Everybody does that, though. They just don’t say it. Yeah, everybody does that. But my point is, I was full of loaded and I couldn’t get down.

Oh. Oh, my bad. Okay, I didn’t catch that. But climbing that lap in two will drive along. Yeah. Wow. You can do a lot of stuff in 200 drive with these trucks. But a great way to take away some of the stress from your tail end is being pulled. Right, right. It’s good to de stress your vehicle where you can. Now, everybody likes the new exit. I don’t, but I only ran it a few times. Going out, coming in, coming out. My worst part of the day, for me, it, you gotta love everybody stacked up on you, right behind you like you’re getting ready to go through a door.

Normally I let them go by, but. Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. It is what it is. They saw you there. How’d you get you one last time? Got me good. That’s what I’m good at. I’m a professional. When we get down to the parking lot, I’ll tell you something I wasn’t going to say until we were done. Yeah, usually I let the guys, if anybody catches up on the trail, I usually let them get by. We’re filming some and they should be using to make sure to back off. There’s too many guys that ended up eating the truck in front of them.

It lost his brakes or whatever, and you would pancake them. They’d learn a valuable lesson. B’s. So I kept thinking, all the, uh, all the ill, all the ill will I have towards the wrecker guy, watch us get up here and need him. Yeah. I was like, don’t change. Don’t say it. Actually, I’d go get my own. I hope so. So after doing what seemed physically impossible, we simply air the truck up, we, meaning Mike and his dog, and send everybody on their way. Everybody was happy. It was amazing how well he interacted with the guests and how much the guests enjoyed this trip.

And like I said, the guests ranged from seven years old to 80 years old and everyone had a great time. If you want to book your own tour, this is something like hang gliding or bungee jumping. This is insane. And again, Mike and big iron tours are literally the kings of Moab, period. There’s no two ways around it. If you enjoyed that video, hit the like, share and subscribe. Leave a comment below and I will return the favor. All links will be in the description box below. I am out.
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