The street-parked old cars I photograph in my Denver neighborhood live at one mile elevation, give or take a few feet. Drive about 100 miles southwest from here, however, and you’ll end up in Leadville, which stands at two miles above sea level. Last weekend, I ventured out to Leadville and found this painfully original 1947 Dodge brush fire truck parked downtown. (Read More…)

Sometimes I wonder how it’s even possible for some vehicles to slip through all the steps that should stop them from washing ashore on Crusher Island. Something as useful as a kei-sized dump truck, for example. (Read More…)

GM cars start any 24 Hours of LeMons race with a big Index of Effluency advantage, and when you throw a big couch and handtruck in the bed of your Chevy S10 and spend the weekend hurling the thing around a twisty road course full of much faster vehicles… well, for the Greene County Moving Company, the end result was LeMons racing’s top trophy. (Read More…)

Is it possible for a Jeep Cherokee with a 60s-technology AMC power to finish in the top fifth of a race on a crazy road course full of off-camber turns and dizzying elevation changes? No, it is not possible. And yet… (Read More…)

Battered old pickups tend to survive on the steets longer than their car counterparts, since a smoke-barfing, rod-knocky Joad Family-style truck can still haul a load of stolen copper wire just as well as a cherry Adnan Khashoggi Edition™ Blackwood. Still, the time comes when the duct-tape bills (or, in this case, the parking-ticket fines) can’t be paid, and another California veteran hauler faces the cruel steel jaws of The Crusher. (Read More…)

While the large numbers of Scouts on the extremely urban and snow-free Island That Time Forgot never made sense to me, it’s no surprise that the tough little International Harvester trucks still roam Colorado in large numbers. Still, with so many Scouts, some are going to end up facing The Crusher, and that’s what’s happened to this battered ’70. (Read More…)

I’ve become quite familiar with the burning-coolant/oil/misery-combo smell of a blown head gasket/cracked head, what with the scent being such a frequent olfactory treat at LeMons races, and so I knew what was happening on I-25 in downtown Denver once I got within nose distance of this scene. (Read More…)

This truck has been parked a block from my house since I moved to Denver in June, but early-1950s GMC and Chevy trucks are sort of like fire hydrants or street signs to me— they’ve been around so long that they just seem like standard street accessories, and I tend to overlook them. Finally, I went over and got some shots of this great-looking survivor. (Read More…)

Some of you may be more familiar with this friend of the catering and drinking-water industries in its Chevrolet Step-Van guise, but I’ve always preferred GMC’s name: Value Van! I ran across this fairly complete example in my local self-service wrecking yard, quite close to the Simu-Wood™ LeBaron Town & Country wagon. Me and the Value Van, we have a history! (Read More…)

American-made overhead-cam engines were almost as rare as reliable South Vietnamese presidents in the mid-1960s, so I did a doubletake when I spotted one in a Denver self-service wrecking yard. (Read More…)

You’d think that the zilch-o-torque characteristics of a Wankel engine wouldn’t be so great for hauling heavy loads, and you’d be right! Adding an automatic transmission to the mix, as is the case with this ’75 Mazda pickup, no doubt made for some interesting driving experiences when hauling, say, a dozen sacks of concrete mix in the back. (Read More…)

In my first Denver winter after a driving lifetime in coastal California, I’m now experiencing my first real taste of driving in snow. My ’92 Civic is doing pretty well (i.e., I haven’t crashed or become stuck yet), but I’m starting to eyeball Craigslist listings for IHC Scouts and FJ40 Land Cruisers. After spotting this Toyota in my neighborhood, I may have to forget about the Scouts. (Read More…)

After 45 years of work, it’s time for this 1965 F-100’s steel to return to the foundry. Will it be reborn as a shiny new F-150… or as a FAW Tianjin Weizhi? (Read More…)

Here’s a totally practical daily driver I spotted on the south side of Denver a while back. (Read More…)

When Raoul Duke, protagonist of Hunter S. Thompson’s best-known work, goes to cover the story of the ’71 Mint 400 race, he attempts to observe the race from a Ford-owned truck. When I saw this ’72 at a Denver wrecking yard a few days ago, I figured I might be looking at that very same truck! (Read More…)