If I asked you to imagine a typical King of the Hammers (KoH), you’re probably conjuring images of boisterous drunks in trucks yelling about rock, flag, and eagle while a 1000-hp trophy truck rips by them at over 100 miles per hour on the whoops of a desert landscape, and it’s incredibly fun! But you also probably think of the nights in Johnson Valley, where high-octane speeds and a day of crushing Coors finally caught up with the crowd, and they all feel the need to act like they’re as good on the trail as the professionals. The result is a lot of wrecked rigs, fights, and fireworks that all too frequently result in a couple of lost fingers.
I’ve regurgitated those same talking points, and not even as an indictment of the event itself, but rather a natural conclusion of all the circumstances. Hell, the creator of the event himself, Dave Cole, is painfully aware of the reputation.
“The knuckleheads with the fireworks? That’s just got to stop,” said Dave.
The truth is, after spending a day in the Valley with Dave, the Hammerking Productions team, and a handful of riders, I’ve learned it’s so much more than that mess. In all actuality, it’s a grassroots affair that has a lot of care for the land they ride on for those three weeks. But first…
How to Make Friends and Fight the US Military All At Once
Dave Cole was already a competitive rock crawler with championships under his name before the inaugural King of the Hammers. At the time, the off-road racing market was small, and rock crawling was an even smaller slice of that pie. That had to change.
“We needed to do more to make a more exciting sport,” said a barefoot Dave in his garage. “The Marines petitioned to take the land and close down the OHV area that I love to wheel at.”
The thing is, Johnson Valley, where Hammers is held, is super close to the exhaustively named “Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms,” and the military reallyyyy wanted the real estate for training and other things that make Marines go “OORAH!”
“And one of the main criteria that [the Marines] had for not taking this land […] was that there was nobody coming here,” said Dave.
With the valley that Dave calls home being eyed by one of the biggest and baddest fighting forces on earth, he decided to do the only rational thing you could do in that situation: he picked a fight with the US Military, not with fisticuffs or other forms of violence, but by creating the festival we all know and love today.
As the story goes, there were 50 people interested in competing, and he charged them $600 to enter, giving him $30,000 for the effort, with the only real cost of the event being a small event fee of $1,300. With the winner getting a purse of $10,000, Dave was left with a cozy little payday for something he was already doing with his pals for free.
The inaugural event had roughly 1,000 people there, but word of the event and its energy got around fast. Before he knew it, he had enough media coverage that you could stack all the magazines, and they’d be seven stories tall.
As KoH grew to a multi-week festival that regularly brings crowds of roughly 100,000, it also got a little more Mad Max-ian and found itself looking more like the train crash that some folks just can’t look away from. Don’t judge that book by its cover, though, because Dave almost looks at Hammers as the gateway for people to become better behaved off-roaders, and it seems like it’s working.
Just One Bag of Trash
“You can get free tickets just by picking up a bag of trash. Just show up. Go pick up a bag of trash. It’s out there.”
I won’t lie, I didn’t see a single piece of trash across the desert the whole day we were out there, which is a testament to the fans holding themselves accountable during the event and the cleanup crew that comes after.
“If 80,000 people came out here and trashed it, we’d never be able to pick it up in three days,” Dave said. “Because 80,000 people take care of it and look after it, and also help clean up as well, when we go to clean up, it’s much less of a burden.”
Even with an incredible starting point, Dave and a team of volunteers, comprised largely of folks from the Gambler 500, hit the desert with trash bags and grabbers while the tens of thousands of attendees pack up and make their way back to their daily lives.
“They go out at like 6:00 a.m. every morning and just kind of walk through the spectator areas for some light cleanup because it’s not that bad,” he said.
“That’s the only way it’s possible. It’s not because we’re doing heroic efforts, it’s because everybody else is too,” Dave added.
Keeping the chaos of an event like this localized to Johnson Valley makes sense because it’s a place with very little vegetation and wildlife compared to a dense forest with a delicate ecosystem. The way Dave looks at it, having the event here saves areas like Big Bear from the folks who give off-roading a bad rap.
“I want to preserve the off-roading period, not just here,” Dave said. “If you learn to be respectful of the land here and how to be accountable when you go back to those places, you’ll bring the good vibe with you.”
The 2026 King of the Hammers runs from January 22nd to February 7th. You can buy tickets here, and maybe, find trash here. And if you’re pre-annoyed with the idea of driving hours back to the city with that bag of trash, Dave will sweeten the deal a bit more for you:
“I’ll even throw it away for you. I’ll put it right in my dumpster.”
You can watch more from my day with the King of the Hammers team by clicking on the video below!
Top graphic images: Griffin Riley
I came back to this after reading it yesterday, and just wanted to offer something that might make me consider paying attention.
A single sentence with nothing explaining how that’s gonna happen doesn’t really endear this event to me further. Either restructure the event to be about the racing, and disincentivize the knuckleheads from coming; or accept it as your brand and move on.
I think it’s a shame that so much of the idea of KoH is the pockets of shit show that happen around the desert at night.
Most of the racers are amateurs with garage built racecars that are out there for two weeks for the chance to say they are a KoH finisher. Their teams are volunteer family and friends who are supporting the dream. Walk up to just about any garage and ask to look around and they’ll welcome you with open arms and talk as long as you care to stand around.
You’ll be hanging out somewhere and a race car or two will buzz by you during open practice.
It’s easy to avoid “Chunder” at night. Find (or bring) your community; the desert is big enough for everyone.
As a chemist, I always read KOH as potassium hydroxide. I had considered joining a local Jeep club but found the membership a little too right-wing for my tastes. The British car club I am a member of is a bit more my style.
Oof. This piece was posted yesterday and has still only garnered eight (now nine?) comments. Not a knock against Griffin at all, but I think it’s obvious that the subject matter and audience base is anathema to the readership of this site — which is also one of the reasons that this site is such a welcome relief from so much of the noise and bluster (read: “rock, flag, and eagle”) that defines the rest of the automotive space in 2026.
Do I love the idea of going wheeling in the California desert and camping out under the stars? Absolutely. Do I want to attempt to do that amidst a crowd of 80,000+ belligerent “off road enthusiasts” armed with side-by-sides, fireworks, and liquor? Abso-fucking-lutely not.
This is neat and all, but didn’t Mercedes go to this and have a not great time? The founder may want to change things but this is a hard no for me in the current state with the current group of miscreants.
Yeah, based on Mercedes’ account of the event, “hippies” is not a particularly accurate description of the average attendee.
Which is a shame because I would love to go to a hippie KotH. I spent the 2024 eclipse at a hippie farm and it turns out hippies are super chill and easy to get along with.
YMMV. As a youngster I found that hippies looked nice but were mean, but the punks looked mean and were nice. Not always true, but true enough to be a loose rule.
I am finding in my adulthood that all of the studded leather and black jean punks in my community are the most welcoming and caring people I could imagine. What a world!
Griffin told me that things were different this year than when I went in 2022. Indeed, when I looked at his photos, this year looked a whole lot less like a political rally, which is what it was like in 2022. But yeah, the rest of the partying is either going to be something you love or hate. The great thing about KoH though is that the desert is so huge that you don’t have to hang out with the drunks fighting each other with fireworks. Find a small group, hit the sand, and have fun. Or do what I did and ride solo.
Also, the guys who run Sons of Smokey (the same guys behind the original Gambler 500) are pretty awesome people.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that led me to hang up my wheels after years of owning a Jeep. I ran into too much of this kind of thing on the trails. And they didn’t pick up their trash.
“Attendees fight with each other.” Let me nope right on out of here.
Went once, have no desire to go back. Lots of the attendees spoiled the whole thing for me. My employer tried to get to go out and work our booth at KOTH this year but thankfully I was able to get out of it.
I’m glad they pick up trash but everything else I’ve heard about this event confirms that I want nothing to do with the people that attend it.
I should be clear that the Gambler 500 guys are not part of the attendees I’m referring to. From all accounts they seem to be a genuinely good group of people.
Correct. Both groups apparently pick up trash, but I think the level of rowdiness you can achieve with ten weirdos in the woods (Gambler) is significantly less than 100,000 drunks in the desert (KoH).
Unfortunately, it seems that when any event/happening/scene (of most any kind) gets to a certain number of people, it’s hard to keep the a-holes from making the biggest (negative) impression.