5,200 Rigs, 50 Trails and a Seat for Everyone: Trail Hero Turns 11 at Sand Hollow

At the bottom of a wall of red sandstone in Sand Hollow, a Jeep Wrangler on big tires points its nose almost straight up while a guide in an orange shirt stands below, one hand on the rock, calling tire placement. Above him, the line of rigs waiting their turn stretches back into a slot of rock. This is Trail Hero, the off-road week in Hurricane, Utah, and in 2026 it ran from Sept. 28 to Oct. 3 for the eleventh time.

By Off Road Xtreme's count, the event drew about 5,200 registered vehicles, 210 participating companies and vendors and roughly 33,000 attendees. More than 50 trails ran from approachable Level 2 routes to Level 9-plus obstacles for heavily modified machines. Wranglers and Gladiators, Broncos, 4Runners, Land Cruisers, Tacomas, full-size trucks, side-by-sides and full competition buggies all shared the same red rock.

That mix is not an accident. It is the whole point.

Why Rich Klein started it

Trail Hero's founder, Rich Klein, has been around off-roading his entire life. "I grew up in an off-road family and experienced my first rollover when I was only two years old, so you could say this lifestyle found me before I was old enough to choose it," he told Off Road Xtreme.

The event began in 2016 out of a fight over land. "When I saw public lands threatened with closure, I realized someone needed to step up and build a voice for motorized access, especially for veterans and people with disabilities who rely on vehicles to experience the outdoors," Klein said. "That is ultimately why I launched Trail Hero."

That last part is the key to understanding the event. For a lot of the scene, access is about keeping trails open so people can wheel. For Klein, it is also about the people who cannot reach a canyon rim any other way than in the passenger seat of a lifted truck.

A different kind of hero

The numbers Trail Hero reports back that up. According to the event, its programs have helped more than 1,000 people with special needs and more than 4,000 veterans experience Southern Utah through motorized recreation, and it donates more than $80,000 a year, Off Road Xtreme reported. Beneficiaries include 4 Wheel to Heal, the Red Rock Center for Independence, Racing Anxiety and land-use advocacy groups, while the Utah Public Lands Alliance and the Utah 4 Wheel Drive Association are among the organizations tied to its access work.

Klein says the hero in the name has nothing to do with winning. "What defines this community for me every year is watching complete strangers step forward to help someone else," he told Off Road Xtreme. "You see drivers offer up a seat, help someone into a vehicle, guide them through technical obstacles, and make sure they feel completely included."

He described the moment that matters most to him as the look on someone's face at the top of a trail, "especially someone who believed the outdoors was no longer accessible to them." At that point, Klein said, "the machines and obstacles become secondary."

The Fallen

The trail that best captures that mission is The Fallen. It is rated Level 9, one of the hardest routes at Sand Hollow, and Off Road Xtreme reported it was built by local veterans in memory of fallen service members. More than 100 drivers ran it during the week.

It is a trail where tire size alone does not get you through. Rock gardens and steep ledges demand that a driver know exactly where every tire is and what is underneath the truck, and trust the guide outside the window. One organized group of more than 20 vehicles took about five hours to complete it. That is what serious wheeling looks like at Sand Hollow: slow, careful and very much a team sport.

The guides

For an event this big, the trail guides are the infrastructure. Their orange shirts were all over more than 50 trails during the week, Off Road Xtreme noted, helping drivers through obstacles they had never seen. On the photos from Trail Hero, they are the people standing in the most precarious spots, one hand on a fender, calling out lines.

That guided structure is also what makes Trail Hero work for newcomers. Level 4 runs like Top of the World, which climbs toward views of the reservoir and red cliffs, ran the same week as Level 9 routes like The Fallen, so a mildly built daily driver and a full trail rig both have somewhere to go.

The 17-year-old champion

If there was a competition star at Trail Hero 2026, it was Brett Dickey. The 17-year-old arrived for the BFGoodrich Tires Trail Breaker competition on Sept. 30 in his No. 17 competition buggy, fresh off a big milestone. Off Road Xtreme reported that Dickey had just received his 2026 W.E. Rock National Championship Series trophy in Farmington, New Mexico, becoming the youngest driver ever to win the national championship in the Unlimited class. He had already won the Trail Breaker in 2024.

His father, Matt Dickey, spots for him through the family's Beast Buggy Motorsports team. A father-and-son team putting a teenager at the top of national rock crawling is about as good an advertisement for the sport's future as you could design.

Not just a vendor show

There is a commercial side to Trail Hero, and it is big. The Vendor Show at the Washington County Fairgrounds filled booth after booth with lighting companies, camera systems, floor liners, recovery gear and suspension. Brands sponsored trails, ran media drives and launched products there. That is how events of this size pay for themselves, and it is worth reading the sponsor coverage with that in mind.

But the reason the brands show up is the people, and the reason the people show up is that Trail Hero offers something most off-road events do not: a week where a veteran, a kid with special needs, a family on its first trail ride and a national champion in a tube-chassis buggy are all on the same rock.

The first step

Klein's advice for newcomers is not about lift height or tire size. "The idea of becoming a hero always starts with a simple first step forward into the unknown," he told Off Road Xtreme. "Once you become the hero in your own story, the next step is to become a hero in someone else's story."

For the lifted truck and Jeep crowd, it is a useful reminder of what all that suspension is for. Thirty-sevens and a winch look great in a parking lot. They look better parked at the top of a trail with someone in the passenger seat who never thought they would see the view.