Locally Raised, Nationally Proven: How a Farmington Local Became an Off-Road Legend

So choosing Farmington as my headquarters was a very natural fit. We have a great employee base here that is very passionate about Motorsports and off-road and stuff like that too, but it’s a small, you know, tight-knit community that I grew up in, it born and raised here, and I just, I love everything around here. It has all the stuff that I love. You know, you, we’ve got the lakes and the rivers and can be 14,000 feet up in the mountains and snowboarding. You know, we’ve got this amazing open desert with the BLM area that the shop literally backs right up to so we can drive our off-road vehicles right out to choke Cherry Canyon. It’s a great place. It’s always been home. All my family’s here and I just, I love Farmington. You know, there’s a ton of places all over the world we could go live, but this is where we chose.

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What’s up everybody? I’m Loren Healy and this is the RTR Off-Road Shop. I grew up here in San Juan County, went to school in Aztec, born and raised in in this area, and really influenced my whole life of growing up here with Choke Cherry Canyon and rock crawling and desert racing and everything that goes on around here. Left about eight years ago to college and ultimately had a kid married my wife, and we moved back here. When I moved back here to Farmington after going to college, I was working in the oil and gas industry and started dabbling in rock crawling and motor sports a little bit. And so I went out, tried this race called King of the Hammers out in California, and naturally was just good at it from spending time in the desert and growing up here. The second year I actually won the King of the Hammers, won it a couple more times, won a bunch of championships, and that just really evolved from, you know, me as burning the midnight oil wrenching on these vehicles in my garage at my house to a full on motor sports team. After about five years of that, I quit my job and came out, have been doing this for about 10 years now as a, as a full-time motorsports team. Yeah, it’s just really evolved into this crazy huge dream that, you know, you never would’ve thought was possible, but it’s, it’s been an amazing ride and you know, now we’re almost 20 years deep into this. We race all kinds of different stuff, so, you know, side byside, we’re racing stock Broncos down in Baja, very heavily modified ultra four trucks that we go race, the king of the Hammers, where, you know, with my background of rock crawling here in Farmington, naturally evolved from this crazy slow rock crawling race into a very fast-paced desert race. And it mixes all this together and I always joke that it’s like a eight to 10 hour car crash of two miles an hour to 120 miles an hour, and it’s really survival. This year. Only two people finished. I barely missed doing it this year, but it’s, it’s that draw that always keeps me coming back. It’s a crazy challenge and it’s unlike any other form of motor sports. Some of my accomplishments as a racer is, you know, definitely win in King of the Hammers a couple of times. Have won seven or eight championships through different classes racing. That type of series have won the Baja 1000, I think five times, five years in a row now, in the stock class. My goal, we just started building a trophy truck, so my goal is to get to win that race. Overall, we’ve won it in multiple different classes a few times, but now it, it’s time to go for that overall in the trophy truck and, which has always been my boyhood dream. Just got the chassis from the engineer and are getting ready to, to get moving on that stuff. The easiest place to follow along is social media, Facebook, Instagram, just under my name, under Loren Healy, we do do some short form YouTube stuff. The races are live stream, so a lot of that stuff you can actually, we put cameras inside the race trucks where you can sit inside the race truck with us and go do these races. And then there’s exterior live, live streams that’ll give you overall experience of the races. But that’s, that’s about the best way to follow up. We’re still finishing up the shop here. We just moved in a few months ago, but I do want have an open house and invite the community here, here shortly for everybody to come inside and check out all the race trucks and, and just see what all of it’s about.

Thank you for watching this edition of the Local News Network. To learn more, visit Loren Healy on Facebook and Instagram. And for more stories like this, visit Farmington local.news.