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.