The one essential tool you need to never get stuck while driving off-road

Over the past decade or so, SUV mania morphed into the crossover craze. For most people, the crossover is the perfect transportation solution—your car looks like a truck (sort of), but you’re not hauling around up-armored off-road gear every time you venture out to Chipolte. The majority of crossovers are useless off-road, and that’s fine. One major exception: the big Land Rovers. When you see an LR4 making the school run in La Jolla, you should feel bad for it, because it’s like a circus bear riding a unicycle. It should be out in the woods, roaming the wild, climbing hills and plunging into mud holes. And at the Land Rover Driving Experience at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, that’s exactly what you can do with it. This is the best kind of off-roading: the kind that happens with someone else’s truck.

And the LR4 is a truck. It’s one of the few vehicles available with a factory winch, and we decide we’re going to use it somewhere out on the 3,000 or so acres of trails that are available to the Rover school. This is beautiful terrain, the corner of North Carolina where George Vanderbilt chose to build America’s ultimate trophy house, and the fleet of Land Rover Driving Experience vehicles are the only ones allowed out on the trails. The $250 starting price for a one-hour driving lesson looks pretty reasonable when you consider the high ritziness of the context.

I head out onto the trails with Greg Nikolas, the school’s head instructor. Our goal is to find some trouble, some obstacle that will test the 9,500-pound-capacity Warn mounted on the front bumper. There are many genres of off-roading—rock crawling, mud-bogging, dune-running—but the Land Rover school is geared to the expedition style. Expedition techniques are intended to get you and your truck from point A to point B without breaking anything, without stranding you in a place you’d rather not be. This is doomsday off-roading, the stuff you need to know when you’re running out the door with your bug-out bag.

People spend thousands of dollars on lift kits and gnarly tires, but if you’re serious about off-roading, your first purchase should be a winch. The LR4 is capable machine, with low-range four-wheel-drive, height-adjustable air suspension and locking center and rear differentials. But even Grave Digger can get stuck. And when that happens, you’re not calling AAA. You’d better have an onboard, built-in tow truck.

To prove the point, we plunge the LR4 into a mud hole that would’ve swallowed up a Ram Power Wagon (incidentally, one of the other vehicles with a factory winch). Nikolas unspools the cable and begins devising a plan to extract three tons of Land Rover from the primordial ooze.

There are two main factors to keep in mind when you’re winching. First, you want to keep the cable as straight as possible—it’s no good if you drag yourself sideways into a tree. Second, you want to unspool as much cable as you can, because a smaller-diameter spool has more mechanical advantage, the equivalent of shifting into a lower gear. So Nikolas attaches a strap and a pulley to a nearby tree that’s reasonably straight uphill, then runs the cable 50 feet past that, off at about a 45-degree angle, to the anchor tree. Neither tree on its own would work very well, but with this setup we’ve got the right direction and maximum pulling power. Fire up the winch, and within a few minutes we’re out and back on our way. Nikolas concedes that in different circumstances—say, nightfall approaching, deep in the jungle of Belize—you might fashion a quick-and-dirty escape from whichever anchor is most convenient. But it is his job, after all, to demonstrate the right way to do things, rather than the most expedient.

He neatly winds the cable back onto the spool, which is something many winch owners fail to do. But if you get the cable all crossed up on the spool, you can chafe it, and chafing eventually leads to the cable failing. And thinking you have a winch when you don’t is probably worse than having no winch at all.

We drive the LR4 back to the school HQ, muddy but none the worse for wear. Out in the adjacent Biltmore parking lot, there are a smattering of LR3s and LR4s here and there, their owners stopping in at the village or the winery. Realistically, few of these rigs will ever see the type of action that we just did. But hopefully their owners will sign up for the driving school and at least learn the depth of the capability built into their daily driver. Because the whole point of owning a real SUV is to keep a reserve stash of adventure in your back pocket, to know what you can do if you decide to quit your commute and set off on the road less traveled.