Crowdfunding campaign aims to restore round-the-world Jeep, send it to finish the trip

Photos courtesy Restore Jeep on Facebook.

Just a mile or so. Despite driving 56,000 miles down two continents and up two others in the same Jeep, a single ferry trip negated Loren Upton’s dream of driving the entire route over land. Nearly 30 years later, Upton’s family has started raising funds to restore that Jeep and send him to Israel to achieve his goal.

“Restoring this jeep would mean the world to a man who spent most of his life chasing his dream,” Laurence Upton, Loren’s nephew, wrote on the GoFundMe for the crowdfunding effort. “Doing what most men would consider unthinkable or crazy.”

According to Out Back of Beyond, the website that chronicles the elder Upton’s various adventures, Upton – a former Marine and bridge builder then living in California — envisioned a sort of round-the-world expedition which he called the “Roads End to Roads End.” He would start at the Arctic Ocean in Alaska, proceed down the Pan American Highway to the tip of Chile, then ship to South Africa and reverse course northward to end up at the Arctic Ocean. His only stipulations: The entire trip (save for the shipment from South America to South Africa) must take place over land; it must take place in the same vehicle; and that vehicle must be American-built.

Upton’s first attempt, at the wheel of a 1972 Ford F-250, kicked off in June 1975. It ended — as so many Pan American Highway attempts end — in the Darien Gap, an essentially lawless and totally roadless expanse of remote jungle on the border of Panama and Colombia. However, the inhospitable jungle had no direct hand in putting a halt to the attempt; rather, Upton turned back after the unsolved murder of expedition member Larre Starkey.

A couple of years later, Upton bought a brand-new Jeep CJ-7 for a second attempt. While he managed to cross the Gap, he did so only with the assistance of a raft of dugout canoes that transported the Jeep about 12 miles. Deciding to press on regardless, he only made it as far as Ecuador before he drove the Jeep off a cliff. While Upton was thrown clear, he “sat in stunned silence, watching the Jeep’s headlights cut through the misty darkness as it flipped end over end.”

Another brand-new CJ-7 took Upton to the Darien Gap again in 1979, but after a contentious meeting with a Colombian official looking for a bribe, Upton left the Jeep there and returned home in disgust.

It took until 1984 for Upton to make another attempt at the Roads End to Roads End. This time, he bought a used 1966 CJ-5 (dubbed the Sand Ship Discovery), left from Prudhoe Bay in June of that year, and spent multiple rainy seasons – 741 days total – traversing the Darien Gap, aided in part by Laurence. Also this time, he and Patricia, who would later become his wife, made it to Tierra del Fuego and across the South Atlantic to South Africa without crashing or turning away.

In September 1987 Upton headed north from South Africa into the Central African Republic, and then east into Sudan to follow the Nile River north into Egypt. Not far from the Nile itself but miles from civilization, Upton snapped an axle shaft, sending him and Patricia on a 70-day trip by raft, truck, train, plane, and boat to Khartoum in search of spare axle shafts, the replacing of which took Upton 15 minutes.

Their next obstacle, the Middle East, proved even trickier than breaking down in the middle of the desert. As Patricia wrote on Out Back of Beyond:

In order to remain entirely on land from Africa to Europe we had to drive through the Middle East. At the time we were there, October of 1988, the political situation was still rather delicate and we were unable to drive from the Israeli Occupied West Bank into Jordan. And traveling through Lebanon at that time was definitely out. We got to within one mile of the Jordanian border and had to turn back. Swallowing the bitter disappointment of not being able to drive from Israel to Jordan we returned to the Sinai and took a ferry boat up the Gulf of Aqaba to Aqaba, Jordan.

On through Syria, Turkey, Europe, and the Soviet Union they continued, ultimately making their way to Gamvik, Norway, where they ended their trip in July 1989.

In the years since, the Uptons have held on to the Sand Ship Discovery and kept an eye on the Middle East in hopes of returning to complete the one-mile drive from Israel into Jordan. While the situation overseas has improved, the Jeep has deteriorated, as has Loren. “He has some ongoing medical problems that are beginning to cause some concern,” Patricia wrote. “His memory is beginning to fade; due to wet macular degeneration his eyesight is also fading; and then there is the fact he IS 82 years old and is not as nimble as he was thirty years ago.”

To help Loren realize his dream, Laurence has set up a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign with four distinct goals: to restore the CJ-5, to send Loren and Patricia to Israel to make the crossing into Jordan, to find a permanent home for the CJ-5 in a museum, and to hire an author to transcribe and compile Loren and Patricia’s journals into book form.

As of this writing, the crowdfunding campaign has raised $1,650 of the $20,000 goal. The Uptons hope to complete the Roads End to Roads End sometime next year. For more information, visit Out Back of Beyond or Restore Jeep on Facebook.