Vaughn Micciche, 26, resides in Baltimore, MD, and on his family’s farm in Stewartstown, PA. When he’s not riding bicycles, farming or straining his Land Rover, he works as a web and database consultant –ed. Text & photos: Vaughn Micciche

So I bought a Land Rover. I am not sure why I pulled the trigger on the Discovery II. I didn’t get such a great deal and about three months later gas prices rose rapidly. I do remember hopping in for the test drive and falling in love. I felt like if I were a truck I’d probably be this one.

At the time I worked as a data geek for an investment firm in Baltimore, MD, requiring a 45 minute commute from my family farm in southern Pennsylvania. Right away the Disco changed the way I looked at commutes and farm chores. If the tractor wouldn’t start, which seemed to be the norm, I’d just hook the hay wagon up to the Rover.

My first real off-road experience came on the commute to work one morning. A tree had fallen across the road and its girth was too great for the stock Rover. That provided the only excuse I needed to just go through the woods to bypass the tree. I found myself deep in the woods on an old logging path, with my return to the road blocked by a tall bank. The path led along a hillside covered in wet leaves, then into a washed out creek bed and then back onto the main road. Along the hillside I remember worrying as the truck slid sideways because of the leaves. I just took it slow and kept the front of the truck as high on the hill as possible. Things got hairy when I reached the creek bed. Old tires and mud covered roots combined to get me pointed directly at a tree heading downhill onto the road. I tried backing up, but the bald tires had no traction in the mud.

I only had about 20 feet to go, but I couldn’t go through the tree and I couldn’t back up the hill. Fortunately I carried some chain and a come-a-long; doesn’t everyone on their commute?

I spent the next 20 minutes ratcheting the truck — in gear — backwards up the creek bed, then pulling the front exactly where it needed to go by ratcheting the front of the truck sideways. I would switch from having tension on the come-a- long and the truck in park, to taking it out of park and letting the cable pull to the left, then repeat. Finally I had the Rover aligned perfectly to get between the trees. I rolled out onto the road about 400 yards past the original fallen tree.

As the day progressed at work, I collected a pretty large pile of dried mud under my desk. No one understood why I decided to go through the woods rather than just take a different road, no one understood why I enjoyed getting covered in mud while trying to get the Rover unstuck. Never mind, I was hooked.

My Discovery would also become a major part of my bike life. In high school, I discovered a sport called Observed Trials. Basically you take a mountain bike and ride it on adverse terrain: over rocks, logs, cars, really anything that’s not a normal trail. In competition, someone will carve out challenging sections and then the competitors get points each time they put a foot down. At the end of the day, the winner is the rider with the lowest score — kind of like Land Rover trials courses, with your foot touching the ground equivalent to your Rover hitting a cone. This sport became my life through high school; it provided a distraction for my mind and a physical outlet that proved more rewarding than the team sports administered by the school. I remember sitting in class and imagining that I was riding across the chalk tray, hopping my bike from chalk piece to chalk piece or jumping up on to the eraser. We used to call it “section tick,” and now the same thing happens when I see a good track for the Rover.

Over time, the sport of Bike Trials has ebbed a bit and now has a much smaller following in the US. To offset this decline, I started to organize my own competitions. So now each season I organize 3 to 4 competitions and compete in  6 to 8 for local and national points. The Disco has morphed from a bad weather commuter vehicle into a traveling base of operations for my cycling adventures. Last winter I spent a lot of time in the garage enhancing my Discovery. I installed a new transfer case shifter that actually locks the truck into true four wheel drive; this was the biggest pain because I couldn’t get my sausage fingers to fit where they needed to go. I also installed a two-inch lift kit and bigger tires. Then I mounted driving lights up high and behind them, a hard shell rooftop tent from Auto Home US. A deep cycle battery with a marine isolate switch let me run a 12V refrigerator. This second battery required that I relocated the coolant reservoir. I ordered a gutter mount ladder rack to support the rooftop tent. Rather than burden the Rover with steel load bars for a roof rack, I ordered some aluminum bar stock of the same dimensions and pared 60 pounds from the rooftop weight. Completing a project on the truck felt so much more rewarding than projects at work. Just doing something tangible with discrete obvious benefits is like a breath of fresh air.

Not surprisingly, the best places to hold Bicycle Trials competitions also provide awesome places to take a capable off-road vehicle. The first East Coast competition for the season took place at Allegany State Park in Salamanca, NY. Before I bought the Discovery, the road to the good riding used to be one we walked; this time when we arrived at 2:30 am, I flipped on the lights and started to drive up into the middle of the competition venue. Quickly we reached a spot where the tires would each spin as the traction control cycled around; the hill and rocks were just too steep. Once I engaged the diff lock we popped up out of the little pit and continued up the trail with all our camping and competition supplies, bikes, and fire wood rattling and shifting all over in the back of the Rover. We nestled the truck in next to a boulder that dwarfed us, set up the rooftop tent and 5 minutes later we went to sleep. The next three days and two nights were spent setting up, competing in, and tearing down the competition. I fell early in the day, putting a sizable gash in my shin, but managed to pull out a 5th place finish in the Pro class. All weekend people asked how I got the Discovery up there and if I slept in that thing on the roof. Lingering competitors and gawking tourists gathered to make a pretty sizable crowd which watched us come back down the trail on Sunday.

Cycling provided the impetus for three other weekend camping excursions in 2009. Sequatchie, TN, the home to the US Trials Training Center, also provided the site for the qualifier event for the World Championships. Three of us piled all our bikes and gear in and drove 10.5 hours for the event. Two of the three qualified for the team; I trashed my ankle, but it wasn’t a total loss. I found some really fun ATV trails mixed with some fireworks. Any time you can drive up tight trails and blow stuff up at night, it’s a good time. The trip home was the real bummer though, with my ankle swelling larger with each passing hour.

Three weeks after the Tennessee trip I put on a Speed Trials competition at the NJ State Fair. Speed Trials is the same as typical Observed Trials but, rather than scoring based on points, it’s simply based on the fastest ride through the obstacle course. This trip didn’t have any four-wheeling adventures, but it did have plenty of camping antics; I towed a trailer with about 50 feet of ladder bridges, 40 feet of scaffold, and an entire stunt show setup. I’m not sure how we managed not to bend the trailer axle in the 4 hour drive to and from the event.

Towing the overloaded trailer past 106,000 miles was the last straw for my Discovery’s head gasket. By the end of the trip the truck felt as though it was in 3rd gear most of the time. Taylor Congleton at Rovers North diagnosed the problem; low power and an internal coolant leak equaled a head gasket replacement. Over three days and 26 hours I had torn down the engine, milled the heads, replaced the valve seals and built everything back up. I’d never done anything that complicated on an engine before; it worked on the first try and man, wasn’t I proud!

In 2009, I took 2nd place in North America, traveling to and camping at all but one competition in the Disco II. The truck has far surpassed my expectations. It’s mainly my own fear and driving skills that hold it back. It’s tough to find challenging, accessible trails on the East Coast, but it’s not hard to have fun with the truck. It has become an enabler of adventure and the source of tons of good stories.

For more information on Bicycle Trials competition, see www.trialsin.com. Vaughn Micciche invites inquiries at Vaughn.micciche@gmail.com -ed.

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