When Louie Zitting and his brothers were kids, his dad would call them “little jerks” whenever they got into trouble. That trouble, though, was the most fun.
Today, Zitting, his brothers and his family are known as the Jercs, a group of rock crawlers in Utah. They take their modified Jeeps, trucks and buggies for extreme off-road driving in Moab, Utah, where they spend days and nights camping out.
There are two components to rock crawling that make it “really fun,” Zitting explains.
“The go slow. Crawling over rocks and stuff is really technical, so it just kind of, like, caters to the nerdy part of my brain that likes all the physics of what’s goin’ on. The other side is to be able to go flying through the desert really fast.”
Zitting adds: “Technique versus intensity is really important with rock crawling. You wanna learn the feel of it before you start to use the right pedal too much. There’s times when you need to give it the intensity, but you just gotta know when that needs to happen.”
Video by Marston Sawyers.
11min 45sec
HD file size: 214 MB
SD mov file size: 148 MB
Please note: For smoother viewing of HD videos, please download the entire file to your hard drive before watching it (right-click and choose Save Link As...).
Additional reading: CrossFit and GPP by Tony Leyland, published Sept. 13, 2012.