2024 Chevrolet ZR2 Silverado LD, HD, and Colorado Are Well Suited for Hammer Town

• Chevrolet offers three trucks with ZR2 setups: the Colorado, Silverado, and Silverado HD. We got to try them out in the dusty, boulder-strewn confines of the King of the Hammers trails in the Mojave Desert.

• Offerings on the trucks include: skid plates, tougher front and rear bumpers, lifted ride heights, bigger MT tires, and Multimatic DSSV dampers.

• Prices start at under $50,000 for the Colorado.

Jeep has the Rubicon, both the trail and the 4x4; Ford has the Raptor, which can go anywhere fast; Ram has the TRX, which can fly off jumps and not destroy itself upon landing; and Chevy? Well, now Chevy has Hammer Town.

King of the Hammers is a mondo-tough four-wheel-drive rock-crawling festival held way out in the middle of nowhere, California, a couple hours northeast of LA in the Johnson Valley area of the Mojave.

As far as rock crawling goes, there may be nothing tougher, certainly nothing that has boulder-strewn mechanical slugfests like the ones you’ll see in The King of the Hammers January 18 to February 3, 2024. Read our stories about KoH here and here, and maybe here, too. It’s impressive what those contraptions can get up and over out there in the Mojave.

And it was impressive that Chevy thought highly enough of their new ZR2 family of 4x4 trucks to bring them all out to the KoH torture site and let us have at them.

Specifically, Chevy chose the KoH rock playground to introduce to us the following:

• The Colorado ZR2, $48,295, which Chevy says “…builds upon greater performance and midsize packaging of the standard truck. It includes as new features for 2024 the Colorado ZR2 Bison, with 35-inch tires and new jounce control dampers.” Specifically, that’s Multimatic DSSV dampers, off-road rocker panels under the side sills, unique front fascia, rear bumpers, fender flares, a three-inch lift, 33-inch MT tires, and even a “Flow Tie” emblem on the grille. That’s on top of the truck’s 310-hp/430-lb-ft 2.7-liter turbocharged four-cylinder mated to an eight-speed automatic.

• The Silverado 1500 Light Duty ZR2, “…an off-road capable, multi-purpose half-ton pickup Silverado LD customers expect.” It includes your choice of either a new-for-2024 305-hp, 495-lb-ft 3.0L Duramax turbodiesel inline six-cylinder engine or a 420-hp, 460-lb-ft 6.2-liter V8 with variable valve timing and direct injection. It also gets DSSV dampers, skid plates and Goodyear Wrangler Territory MT tires. There is also an LD ZR2 Bison – same added features of Bison on Colorado minus the jounce control dampers. Prices: $71,895 for the diesel, $73,590 for the gas engine.

• And the mighty and powerful Silverado 2500 Heavy Duty ZR2, which is all-new for 2024. Chevy calls it, “…a capable hauler for towing and payload necessities that are crucial for HD customers with off-road credentials worthy of the ZR2 badge.” You can get a 401-hp 464-lb-ft 6.6-liter gasoline V8, or the king of all Chevy torque, the 470-hp, 975-lb-ft (yes, 975!) Duramax 6.6-liter turbodiesel V8. I drove the HD ZR2 Bison off-road in Johnson Valley. Prices: $72,595 for the gas engine, $82,085 for the diesel.

The ZR2 is the most off-road capable family of pickups Chevy has ever offered. And it wanted to show the world, or at least the automotive press, how good they were. So there we were in Hammertown contemplating a run up Chocolate Thunder, one of the truck-tossing trails that make up the 12 or so brutally steep boulder storage areas up which the world’s best rock crawlers would bounce come February.

How tough is Chocolate Thunder?

“Body damage is likely!” said trailsoffroad.com.

“Recommend two lockers, recommend a winch,” said “Trail Reviews with Mel Wade.”