Inside the Gambler 500, an Off-Road Rally for Picking Up Trash

A monster truck fashioned from a hearse. A Geo Metro made of two front ends welded together. A red SUV with a fire-breathing dragon’s head fused to the hood. If you saw these DIY vehicles tearing through the high desert of central Oregon, “you could mistake it for a scene from a Mad Max movie,” says Brian Kaiser, a 43-year-old photographer from Ohio. But the Gambler 500, which Kaiser attended along with some 2,000 others last June in Redmond, just north of Bend, isn’t a postapocalyptic cinemascape. First staged in 2014 by a ragtag group who explored the woods in cheap cars, the annual off-road rally doubles as a massive trash cleanup. For three days, drivers in imaginatively revamped rigs clear large pieces of garbage—mattresses and couches, abandoned boats and rusted camper vans—from hundreds of acres of public land, which they then transport to designated landfills. “What intrigued me about the Gambler community was the way it brought together people into off-roading and people who care about environmental stewardship,” Kaiser says. There’s no prize for gathering the most junk, but organizers are always upping the ante. The 2022 Gambler’s trash haul totaled 427,000 pounds, and participants hope to top a million at this year’s edition in July. “There’s always this tension around how public land is used, and I think that’s a healthy debate to have,” Kaiser says. “But the Gamblers are giving more than they take. They’re invested in making sure that the outdoors are clean and accessible to everyone.”