Bruce Elfstrom offers beginners' classes for four-wheel driving at his school in Connecticut. Students learn to navigate "an engineered obstacle course on 80 acres of craggy Connecticut landscape, with water features and streams, rocky slopes and deep ditches, all built to blend in with the natural scenery of trees, fields and stone walls." Drivers are couched on how to go "up rock ledges, around and through standing pools of water and sideways across steep grades." The Overland Experts (OEX) school "teaches everyone from soccer moms who want to learn more about driving their SUVs in the snow to explorers, scientists and archaeologists who need four-wheel-drive vehicles to get to remote sites across the world." In addition to training, Elfstrom leads expeditions "to exotic places like Mongolia and Iceland, on which travelers can both hone their driving skills and go places and see things they'd never experience without four-wheel drive." Elfstron "stresses good manners, making sure people go only where they are allowed and that they act responsibly and without adversely effecting the terrain they cover." He also offers "free training to state Department of Environmental Protection agents and to volunteers with the mammal rescue program affiliated with the Mystic Aquarium."
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12-01-2003, 04:12 PM
