The Athfinder didn’t emerge from careful market research. It began in the summer of 1996 with three rugged, amazing, regionally-notorious high schoolers, one restored pickup, and a bag of jo-jos warming on the dash. Everything since has been the long, expensive, occasionally magnificent process of building the machine those kids deserved.
Three friends begin driving the back roads every weekend in search of the ath. Jo-jos from the Texaco. Rodeo by Garth Brooks loud enough to bow the windows. Encounters along the way include older girls at the lake with an inexhaustible supply of lotion, the mythical wolf-girl of Highway 12, Mr. Peaches (bait dealer, local oracle), and a shirtless man at the truck-stop counter with “sweat and sour” smeared across his chest. They don’t find the ath. They come close enough to know it exists.
One goes east. One stays and gets very good with his hands. The third we are not discussing. The truck is sold to a cousin who never deserved it. The search is paused. It is not abandoned.
Photographs exchanged intermittently. A cliff face in Wyoming. A switchback in the Dolomites. A dirt road outside Moab. Captions always read the same: “Close.” Careers are built. Kids are had. All three men grow more sexy with age, which is both inconvenient and medically unusual.
Chance meeting at a gas station in northern Nevada. Ninety minutes of standing talk under fluorescent lights. Decision made: stop searching, build the vehicle the ath deserves. First sketch appears that night on a cocktail napkin. Crude, oversized, financially irresponsible, exactly right.
Prototype exceeds projections. Ground clearance hits 14 inches. Suspension goes deeper than any engineer thought possible. Endurance testing concludes after a particularly demanding stretch of unpaved road in Montana made two test drivers weep.
The Athfinder wins “Vehicle Most Likely to Be Compensating for Something” at the International Automotive Awards. We accept proudly. We are compensating for nothing. It’s all real.
What began as a private search between three teenage boys in ’96 is now available to anyone brave enough to go looking. The doors are open. The keys are on the seat. Your ath is out there.