Daniel MacIsaac
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 24/99) - Tony Howton said there are two requirements to be part of the convoy of Land Rover drivers rumbling their way up and down the continent.

"You have to be either English or nuts," he said, "and I'm both."

Actually, he's Canadian, too. A semi-retired business consultant living in Calgary, Howton said he first drove a Land Rover while enlisted in the British Army in 1952. It was evidently love at first sight, because Howton said he still spends his days tinkering with the practical, luxurious beasts -- buying discarded vehicles from the British base at Suffield, Alta. and piecing them together.

"I may be one of the oldest drivers here but I've got one of the youngest vehicles," he said. "She's called Bitsa -- a bit of this and a bit of that -- and I just put her together a week and a day ago."

Bitsa certainly received a baptism of fire. Howton took her over to British Columbia where he met up with 13 other Land Rovers for the drive up the Dempster to Inuvik -- a trip organized by the Border to Border Expedition Society.

Created in 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the Land Rover company, the society was the brainchild of enthusiast Simon Burns. It was registered as a non-profit organization and attracted 56 like-minded Land Rover lovers for a 10-day expedition of classic and modern vehicles from Canada to Mexico.

Last week's trip to Inuvik was, then, the second such expedition and the second leg of a journey that began in Tiajuana, Mexico, on Aug. 28. Many society members ended their trip in British Columbia while others, like Howton, joined on. Among those who made the whole trip up were Antonio Manega and his wife, Elena Wortham, of Houston, Texas.

"I just talked to my grandmother in Mexico City," said Wortham. "She knows all about the North because my grandfather was a great adventurer and took her to Alaska."

Wortham said the most difficult part of the journey was the ride through Death Valley in California, when drivers had to share gas to make it out of the desert.

But it was clear that scrapes and close-calls make these drivers love their machines just that much more. Originally produced as a farm vehicle in 1948, Land Rovers have undergone serious evolution -- and those that pulled into Inuvik represented a mixture of brand-spanking new machines to classics to Howton's hybrid. With the youngest driver only 17 years old, the expedition also attracted a variety of enthusiasts, all of whom were praying for rain as it turned out.

"We're happy when there's lots of rain," said Scott Blanton of Vancouver, Washington, "because then it'll be nice and crappy on the way out."