You can't see anything by sitting still. Especially out west. In an hour you can cover the distance between a thriving city and a crumbling ghost town. Red rocks turn to scorched volcanic craters, then endless bleached-blond sand. Stop for breakfast in Vegas and your waitress might be wearing a co*cktail dress. Just up the road, in southern Utah, lunch is served by women in heavy prairie cotton. Leave the desert comfortable in shorts and a T-shirt and your teeth will be chattering like crazy at the first mountain pass.
This story originally appeared in the May 2020 issue of Road & Track.
In this huge and ever-changing landscape, the Dodge Challenger somehow manages to fit right in. It’s a kind of Western camouflage, ubiquitous without being obvious. There’s a Challenger towing a dirt bike on a trailer, just off Avenue V-8 in California. Another shares a car wash in St. George, Utah. They hover in the opposite lane, seemingly suspended in roiled hot air by Highway 95’s oasis near Mercury, Nevada. They cautiously plod out of airport rental agencies on coltishly skinny wheels.
Some of that’s just time in the saddle. Dodge has been making this Challenger since 2008, a dozen years of production handily tripling the four-year run of the original car. What is it that keeps a model feeling fresh into its teens? What is it that keeps it selling well? After all these years, the Challenger is more than keeping up with the Ford Mustang and Chevrolet Camaro in sales. It recently startled industry observers when it outsold both by thousands of units in the last quarter of 2019. Why? It’ll take a little driving to find out. A spread of Challengers and 1500 miles of the best highway in the West. First, we’ll have to get out of Las Vegas.
It’s 11 p.m. and unseasonably cold. We’re stuck in Sin City’s gravity. We’ve witnessed a street fight and had a photoshoot ruined by a light show, both on the same schmaltzy block. In most places, a six-figure parade of loud, rude Americana would draw attention. In old-town Vegas, we’re not even a sideshow. We wait out the action with the cars lined up under flashing incandescent awnings. The Challengers represent an outrageous array of price and power.
The thriftiest of the lot is the V-6 GT, the only all-wheel-drive variant. At around $35,000, it’s an oddity—a muscle car that begs for snow tires, slush, and ice. Lodged in the middle ground is an R/T Scat Pack Widebody, which doesn’t do much middling at all. It’s a beastly thing, with 485 claimed horsepower. This one has an 8-speed automatic, but perhaps because of the Challenger’s advanced age, it’s one of the rare cars that still comes with a manual transmission as standard equipment. And then, shimmering under the lights, is the Hellcat Redeye Widebody, which is a whole other thing.
It’s hard not to froth about the Hellcat. For the collected testing staff—all millennials or near enough, all genuine enthusiasts, all sports car nuts—the Hellcat feels like a taste of another era. As if Lockheed stamped out a handful of brand-new SR-71s, made them approachable, gave them a warranty, then delivered them into the hands of Cessna pilots. You’re promoted from a geek in chinos to a badass in a space suit. The not-shabby 305-horsepower V-6 Challenger and the Scat Pack’s V-8 combined don’t add up to the Redeye’s raw output. Which makes the Hellcat a glimpse of what uncompromising looked like to a generation that’s only ever known CARB standards, intake restrictors, and traction control. Every single editor finds incredulous joy in this Challenger’s existence, the lack of restraint, the brutal consumption, the hairy-wicked whine of the supercharger and the tantalizing red key fob that allows access to the prodigious 797 horsepower. It offers permission to play. To do great dirty burnouts all the way to the horizon. To roll the dice. And this is Las Vegas. We’d be wrong not to.
That’s how we find ourselves burbling through photo passes in front of a half-dozen cops. Occupied as they are by ever-present criminality, they don’t even raise an eyebrow. Just another weekday night. But as we bask in the glory of our machines, the clock marches on. For all its reputation as a late-night destination, Las Vegas still has sleepy nights, and this is one of them. We’ve outlasted every restaurant we try, shutters and dimmed neon greeting us at every turn. We throw in the towel, eat at the middling restaurant in the casino lobby, and look forward to a morning that doesn’t stink of cigarette smoke, sanitizer, and ancient fryer grease.
A night’s sleep is impossibly restorative. We hightail it out of Las Vegas on Interstate 15 as the sun rises with 350 miles and thousands of feet of climbing ahead of us.
The speed limit jumps back up to 75 mph as the road passes through the outer suburbs, the thrum of V-8s interrupted only by the screech of A-10 Warthogs climbing out of Nellis Air Force Base. Our convoy is aimed at Utah’s mountains, and the route is full of silky-fast highway. Few stretches of road make a better argument for a big engine in a long, low coupe. In 1974, the last year of the original Challenger’s run, Nixon set the national speed limit at 55 mph. What a betrayal that was to anyone who has ever basked in the warm hypnosis of a creeping throttle, the West blurring past. Before we know it we’re out of Nevada and into Arizona, nipping at southwest Utah. We’ve all come to the same conclusion by breakfast: In any trim, the Challenger is a solid choice for highway duty. Surely its prowess on the open road has something to do with its popularity. That, and the absurd depth of trim levels. A brand-new V-6-powered Challenger SXT starts at less than $30,000. Throw a handful of tasteful-ish options at a Hellcat Redeye Widebody and you’re into the 90s. If you have a whiff of credit and a little enthusiasm, Dodge wants to build you a Challenger. Even then there are enthusiast sweet spots about every 15 thousand dollars or so. We stake out preferences over hash browns and eggs just over the Utah line.
Our route is a massive figure eight connecting achingly beautiful places. At the top of the map, our destination for the day: Capitol Reef National Park. The bottom, Death Valley. In between are vast tracts of public land we’re just itching to explore and shrink down to manageable size by our combined 1600 horsepower.
Turn off the interstate in Cedar City and the road climbs as fast as the temperature drops. This big grade onto the Markagunt Plateau is the first of dozens of awe-inspiring Utah roads, and the hairiest. It’s bright and sunny, but the mercury keeps plunging. The first snow appears on the roadside just out of town, and with it comes a tense realization: The Hellcat is on fat, slick, summer tires. In no time at all, the chill and the runoff of melting snow have the big Redeye chattering its fronts through ever-tighter corners.
The climb is tense, but the view is gobsmacking. Fresh snow caps miles and miles of cinder cones. We stop at a lookout to take in the view, the smell of fir, spruce, and winter as energizing as coffee. With the cars turned off, it’s dead quiet. Such a contrast from the roar of the highway or the dull casino score of Las Vegas. our machines are astonishing Scattered among the lava flows are stands of bristlecone pine. They’re beautiful, weathered trees. The oldest living things on earth. Older than the Challenger, even.
The road up to the plateau is plowed during daylight hours. It might be open, but it’s not busy. We see a few local pickups, the occasional Ford Ranger, and another Challenger, black where it wasn’t streaked by a crust of road grime, hard-used and not looking even remotely flummoxed by the cold.
It’s all skinny roads out to Capitol Reef National Park. Little farming towns scattered through pretty valleys, all nestled down for the long winter. The tourist trade is slow this time of year. Visitors can get stop-overs like Butch Cassidy’s childhood home all to themselves.
Capitol Reef is quiet for a national park, especially so when there’s snow topping the red cliffs. The scale of the place can creep up on you. The massive bluff is a classic monocline, a vast upward thrust of earth that exposes 200 million years of geologic history in its endless hues and shades of rock. It’s breathtaking. Formations in Martian reds and sage greens tower over the little two-lane that cuts through the park. Giant domes, crisp white like capitol buildings in the sun, give the place its name. Follow the road further and a lush valley packed with old orchards adds vivid green life to the red rock, making for lazy, shady hiking to see 1000-year-old petroglyphs carved into the canyon walls.
One of the great wonders of Capitol Reef is its accessibility. You can have an emotional experience, really be set back on your heels by the size and wonder of our world, without leaving the hermetic entrapments of your vehicle. But please, do. The main road dances around spires and towers and through thin canyons. It’s an exceptional experience, a binding one, an important one. And as good as it is from the seat of your car or your RV, it only gets better as you explore. Easy little trails pay off in heartbreaking beauty. Short walks lead to adventures through maze-like stone, and open up to views that leave you staggered.
In the tourist season, the Capitol Reef Resort rigs up fancy teepees and Conestoga wagons around fire pits. In February, with temperatures dropping into the single digits overnight, guests are aimed at their more traditional accommodations. Either way, you wake up to a view of the sun just starting to warm miles of sheer red rock.
We turn south in the morning, aiming the Challengers at another high pass and one of the greatest roads in the West. Utah’s State Route 12 is 123 miles long and not an inch of it is dull. The road connects Capitol Reef to Bryce Canyon and winds through protected lands for most of its length. It’s as scenic as it is challenging. It’s bliss. Here, the Scat Pack comes alive.
Back at that little diner we’d bet that the middle of the Challenger lineup would be a sweet spot, and over the rises and bends of Route 12, it proves us right. There’s nothing nimble about it. No razor-sharp handling or race car-like weight transitions. It’s a big car that does little to hide its mass. But it’s sorted. Brake early, take a set, and fat rubber does the heavy lifting. As soon as you get a sniff of a corner exit, the V-8 rewards you for your patience. It’s engaging driving, the kind you can get wrong, and more enjoyable for it.
There’s little room for error. Route 12 transits a bony ridgeline called the Hogback. It’s a wonder of a road, just a thin ribbon of gently cambered turns threading between thousand-foot precipices, not a guardrail in sight. A fall off either side is an easily imaginable thing with unimaginable consequences.
Bryce Canyon comes and goes. We’re spat out into a broad valley and follow the highway south toward Zion, toward more mind-bending red rock. Our machines are astonishing. These cars. All of them, really. All these working pieces that encourage us to travel in an hour a distance that our feeble bodies can scarcely travel in a week. And even with endless horsepower on tap, the density of the beauty in southern Utah seems unconquerable. Even all tied together, there’s still too much to see.
Zion has never seemed so empty. There’s no line backed up at the mile-long Zion-Mt. Carmel tunnel. No ranger with a finely tuned eye for height ensuring that outsized RVs and tour buses don’t get wedged inside. We descend through the tunnel and into the park alone, the whine of the Hellcat’s blower haunting and louder than the rumble of its exhaust. Smitten with that racket and thinking we had the joint to ourselves, deputy editor Bob Sorokanich narrowly avoids a speeding ticket and insteazd enjoys a long chat with the local law about the merits of seeing the West looking out over an 800-horsepower snout.
The cars collect trash after a long stint like a beach after a high tide. They’re increasingly filthy. And wet. And then frozen. And then thawed. This is when we like them best. Lined up three abreast in our motel parking lot, their hairiness betrays their hardness. Tempt these machines at your peril, they say at a glance. Naturally, we do. We set out for Death Valley in the morning. So much of the land we blaze through is owned by the public. It’s all National Parks, Monuments and Forests at the top of our route. As we crack open throttles and aim south, the military takes up the reins. Either way, the numbers are staggering. The federal government manages 63 percent of Utah and just a hair under 80 percent of Nevada. Mountain roads through forest groves give way to long, straight highways through low desert. It’s spooky country, northwest of Las Vegas. We’re paced by a deadly looking drone as it descends into Creech Air Force Base. Just up the road, we glimpse the apparition of Mercury, Nevada, in the distance. Long closed to the public, for decades Mercury housed the families of workers engaged in the daily business of nuclear testing. Residents attended school and church, bowled and swam, while just over the hills to the north the American nuclear arsenal was tested, and tested, and tested. Up the road to the west, the much-contested Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository site acts as another reminder of unintended consequences.
Death Valley is at its best if there’s a hint of spring ahead, and when we arrive, it’s just a week or two until the short-lived wildflower bloom. It’s a surreal place any time of year, but especially so when you can explore. The weather is perfect for it. The tarmac, too. Alien and expansive as it is, Death Valley is also awash in great driving roads. They twist up into the mountains, to ghost towns and overlooks. And your options expand wildly if you have all-wheel drive and a little clearance. Behind the wheel of the AWD V-6 Challenger, we catch digital editor and amateur rally driver Aaron Brown looking longingly down any number of long, graded gravel roads.
The V-6 has been the surprise of the trip. Along as a nod to economy, it’s fresh off a stint of winter testing with sister publication Car and Driver in the frozen wastes of suburban Michigan. The car is by no means sprightly, but its 305-horsepower, 3.6-liter engine is perfectly respectable. Skinny wheels and unflared fenders look ungainly in the company of sinister widebodies, but on its own, the car has aged well. The all-wheel drive that makes it such a peculiar package made it remarkably sure-footed in the cold and wet mountain passes, and more than once, editors in ostensibly faster Challengers were surprised to see its familiar visage sticking in the mirrors. In a family of eccentrics, it’s the oddest of the lot, but there’s more than a little self-deferential charm trapped between those practical all-seasons.
We bunk in famously fancy digs. The Inn at Death Valley is old and glorious. It dates back to the mining days, when any beautiful place was just another opportunity for exploitation. Fortunately for future generations, it’s easier to extract room rates in the neighborhood of $500 a night from Death Valley tourists than it is to extract gold or borax from the soil. We settle in at the little hotel bar, bask in warm light, good feelings and western oil paintings. And we order co*cktails.
In the morning, we head north to tiptoe around Ubehebe Crater before our long drive out of the valley. Fragile purple and yellow wildflowers are just starting to creep over the volcanic soil, and every now and then, Navy jets claw at the air overhead. It’s a fitting end to our trip. A little new life on a grand old thing. In a matter of days we’ve covered a huge distance, seen countless wonders and shared big thoughts over bad meals. All three of the Challengers have been faultless companions. It’s hard to level criticism at a machine that so ably chews up distance and fuel, turning them into experiences and joy. Just like it’s hard to pin down why the Challenger is more likable now than when it rolled out of the factory in 2008. It’s a big, peculiar machine, particularly suited to the big, peculiar American West.
