WORDS: Christian Glazar IMAGES: Samson Hatae & Andy Best Family Archive
e like to say, “Scouts Always Come Back.” But for some longtime enthusiasts, they never went away. And for adventure filmmaker and photographer Andy Best, his Scout truck has always been there for him and his family, especially when he needed it most.
Andy was born into a Scout family; for decades, his great-grandfather and grandfather operated Snake River Equipment in Idaho Falls, ID, where they sold farm equipment and leased parcels of land to the local agricultural community — precisely the customers the rugged, go-anywhere utility vehicle was designed for. His father drove a ’78 Scout® Traveler™ that he bought from the family dealership; Andy learned how to drive in it, and then a Scout II carried him through his high school years.
After finishing film school and launching his outdoors-focused career, Andy has spent a significant amount of time living on the road with his wife and later, his two young daughters, wintering in Baja, Mexico, and then following the fair weather across the North American West on assignment, setting up camp while scouting locations and filming for clients. He wasn’t using a Scout truck for this work, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how perfect — how right at home — the old truck would appear in these settings.
“One day about 12 years ago I had a dream about it and getting it involved in my work,” Andy recalls. “I called and asked my dad if he still had the ’78 Scout Traveler, because he hadn’t been driving it for a longest time, and he said, ‘No, I actually sold it.’ But all was not lost.
His father had sold the truck on the condition that if the new owner didn’t do anything with it within a year, he could buy it back — and it had been a year since he sold it.
"So basically, boxes filled with our life from 13 years ago and the Scout Traveler was all we had. It went from being a project car to saving us when we were in a bad way."
“I bought a plane ticket and flew one-way to drive it from eastern Idaho 700-plus miles to Portland, Oregon,” Andy says. The truck had been sitting unused for the better part of 15 years, but it didn’t take much effort to prep it for the journey. “We changed the oil, topped off the fluids, I got new tires on it … The magical part about it is, some of the features weren’t working at first, like the horn, the radio, some other things. But on the drive, each of these things started to come back to life. I had my cousin with me, who’s my best friend, and we had an amazing adventure driving this old, cool truck across the roads that I’d been driving all through college.”
Andy’s father gave him the same condition he had given the previous owner: if he ever wants to sell it, he has to let him know first. But that seems unlikely to happen. “He told me he was so happy because it’s like the truck needed me more than he needed it,” Andy says. Meanwhile, the dream of turning it into an adventure rig and artistic muse would have to wait in the face of building a career and starting a family. The Traveler went into storage in Bend, Oregon, while Andy and his wife lived on the road for a couple of years.
They moved off the road to start a family, but not long after the birth of their first daughter, Andy realized that he didn’t want to miss out on her life during his frequent travels for work. “I’d have to drive to shoot things, so we just moved back out on the road in 2019,” he says. “Then COVID happened, we had a surprise baby and quarantined in an Airbnb for a few months, then moved back on the road with the two girls.”
Raising a family of four on the road in a slide-in camper was an experience Andy cherishes, but it was not a permanent solution. “We were getting to the point where we needed to figure out school, and we were just kind of done living in a truck and moving every second,” he says. They were drawn to the mountains of southwestern Oregon and found a place to settle that checked all the boxes for them: a small town, not too far from the natural beauty of the coast and the redwood forests and Crater Lake.
They left Arizona, where they had been working on some projects near the Mexican border, bound for their new home, when disaster struck just three miles from their destination: they were T-boned at 70 miles an hour on the blind crest of a hill. “They hit the bed of our truck and everything was just annihilated,” Andy says. “All of our belongings, the truck, the camper. We had a really cool set up and it was part of my work, and all of it was destroyed.” Miraculously, his family escaped without injury.
“That night we basically just salvaged what we could, and that was all we had until we could get back to Bend to get our Traveler and the rest of whatever we owned that had been sitting in storage since before we first moved on the road,” reflects Andy. “So basically, boxes filled with our life from 13 years ago and the Scout Traveler was all we had. It went from being a project car to saving us when we were in a bad way.”
In the year since the wreck, the 47-year-old Scout truck has done yeoman’s work, racking up about 3,000 miles running errands, bouncing down the bumpy, two-mile-long dirt road that connects their house to civilization. Andy has invested in some basic maintenance, replacing all the rubber parts, like hoses and belts, but the winters spent on Idaho’s salty roads have taken their toll on the quarter panels. Still, “I go over to it and pump the pedal twice and it starts right up,” he says.
“It has some cracks and rust and stuff, so some dust gets in,” Andy admits. “Old trucks smell like gas. The kids weren’t super into it at the very beginning, but I keep telling them it reminds me of my childhood, going to our cabin near Yellowstone. It’s kind of grown on them, and it’s become sort of a character in our lives.” During a recent snowstorm, Andy even used the Traveler to help pull out neighbors who were stuck — just as his father had done with the same truck decades earlier.
“When we got into this accident, it literally caught us,” Andy reflects. “I was worried at first; it’s an old truck, we’re about 45 minutes from town. But it was such an amazing thing to fire it up and I was on this kick where I was like, ‘you know what? I don’t want to get a newer truck. Why do I need more?’
“I really like the idea of simplicity; simplifying life, living simpler,” he says. “I caught it at an early age and drove two states away to film school and I think I got this bug of wanting to be free and to be a wanderer. Then, when I started doing documentary projects, I liked the idea of getting the Traveler involved because it’s magical to think that something so old still can serve a purpose. It turns out it does it really well, and it doesn’t really take a whole lot. Just, you know, getting dirty.”
