Rides, Events
& News You Can Use

Jay's off-road career started about the way you'd hope — a go-kart tearing up the yard as a kid. At 15 he cashed in $500 of babysitting money for a shortened VW dune buggy. A Suzuki Samurai got him through college. Then in 1996 he landed the dream, a 1997 Land Rover Defender 90, and casual wheeling turned into a life in organized off-road recreation.

Nearly three decades later he's still at it. He's led trail rides and run events like the Dixie Run and Mud for Blood, volunteered with the Forest Service since 1997, and served two terms as president of both the Georgia Bounty Runners and the Southern Four Wheel Drive Association. When the Forest Service shut down the Tellico OHV area, Jay helped spearhead the SFWDA / UFWDA / BlueRibbon legal fight to reopen it and lobbied Congress alongside BlueRibbon and SEMA. They didn't win that one — but showing up for the fight is the whole point.

So why this site? A few years back Jay found out — after the fact — about the Venture Unknown Foundation's "Sweep Up the Southeast," where teams fanned out across the national forests and hauled out tons of trash to keep our trails open. Exactly the kind of thing he'd have dropped everything to join. And he missed it, simply because he never heard about it in time.

That stuck with him — and it's where 4x4 Today began. It started as a YouTube channel, where Jay tracked down off-road events and shared them so nobody else would get left out. The videos built a small but loyal following (about a dozen regulars, he'll tell you with a grin), and a couple of years in he realized the mission needed something easier to search than a stack of long-form videos. An events website was the answer — so, in his words, he set out to "make a website nobody will click on."

You're here. So much for that.