The Fifth C?

Cut, Color, Carat, Clarity…Chemistry?

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In the storm

Naturally, a storm chaser like Chris Jackson must speak of his hairiest, scariest badweather moment.

“We were chasing storms at night, east of College Station, Texas, and we actually had a tornado develop and hit us,” he says. “Thankfully, the main suction didn’t get us—we got caught on the outside—but we had trees and all kinds of debris flying across the road in front of our vehicle. That was a little scary.”

Jackson tells this story with the verbal shrug of a man who’s seen a thing or two. After all, he left a 15-year career as a firefighter in Lexington County to pursue another lifelong passion: storm chasing. He’d always wanted to be a meteorologist, he says, and always “enjoyed seeing the power Mother Nature has.”

“Basically, what I do is go out and document storms, whether it’s in video or picture form,” he explains. When a major system is brewing, Jackson gets to the landfall area a few days beforehand—to scout the area, post cameras, find buildings that provide protection, and talk to people on the ground.

“Once you decide you’re going to chase, for example, a hurricane, and you want to see the worst of it, you better be prepared to live on your own for about a week,” he says. “All your infrastructure is going to be gone. No power, no running water. So, we prepare for that.”

Still, there are considerable rewards to the inherent risks. Besides the followers he’s amassed on social media and the appearances he’s racked up on national news shows, he says he cares most about helping people in weather-stricken need. “Being able to be there and to use the skills I’ve learned over the 15 years in the fire department is real rewarding.”

Chris Jackson

AGE: 37.

RESIDES IN: Cayce.

CLAIM TO FAME: Storm chaser with a growing following on YouTube (@ChrisJacksonSC), Twitter (@ChrisJacksonSC) and Facebook (@MySCWeather).

SIDE HUSTLE: Jackson is the meteorologist for the University of South Carolina baseball team. Before every home series, he works with the grounds crew and coaching staff to ensure no major weather disrupts the game. “That’s a fun part of the job,” he says, “because I’m a baseball guy.”

FAIR WARNING: Jackson is quick to remind you it’s water, not wind, that’s the leading cause of deaths in hurricanes. “If you have moving water across the road,” he says, “you should never drive through that.”

SPRING & SUMMER TRAVEL ISSUE

AS FAR AS MUD-BOGGING TRUCKS GO, the Liva Killa is what you call a beast.

Jacked up on 56-inch mega tires, with a big-block Chevrolet engine capable of making around 1,360 horsepower and 1,260 foot-pounds of torque, the truck is missing its front grill, as if smiling one big toothless grin. Even the American flag on a pole bolted dead-center to the front bumper looks like a tusk when the truck is snorting through 3 feet of mud.

Trucks go wild at Twitty’s Mud Bog

BY HASTINGS HENSEL

PHOTOS BY MIC SMITH

And at the start of the annual Trucks Gone Wild event at Twitty’s Mud Bog, Russell Twitty the Edisto Electric Cooperative member known by some as “The Wheelie King” climbs into the cab using the tread of its tires, the way a man would climb up a ladder, rung-by-rung.

Over the PA system, the emcee asks what surely amounts to a rhetorical question: “Whooooooo wants a wheeeeeeelie?”

The tailgaters who are grilling burgers want a wheelie. The teenagers perched in the beds of their pickups want a wheelie, too. So do all the folks peering under truck hoods and checking out engines. Even the one person in the entire crowd of more than 1,000 spectators who looks like he might not a kid wearing noise-canceling headphones and crouching under his daddy’s truck comes out to have a look.

So, Twitty plays to the crowd. He cranks it up and revs the engine. Someone lights a flare, which wreathes the truck in red, white and blue smoke. Suddenly, in one throaty roar, the Liva Killa’s tires hook in the ground and the truck pops up on its back wheels like a rearing horse. Then Twitty speeds through the 1,200foot horseshoe track and slings mud so high that, as one mud-bogger puts it, “It touches the sky.” t Russell Twitty, who rediscovered his teenage passion for mud bogging in 2005, runs three events a year at his bog in Ulmer. u Drivers pause for the national anthem at the start of last fall’s Trucks Gone Wild event.

The crowd goes wild, roaring with approval, and even the other drivers waiting their turn to race rev their engines in a thundering round of applause. The emcee welcomes us all to Twitty City, where hundreds of mud-loving fans have gathered to see which driver can do something that looks deceptively simple but is decidedly not race the fastest through the mud track and not blow an engine, roll over or get stuck.

It’s the opposite, you might say, of a laundry cycle. Here the trucks go in clean and come out dirty.

“It’s really just cheap entertainment,” Russell Twitty says.

“For around twenty bucks a day, you can’t get entertainment like this anywhere else, I promise you!”

Playing in the mud

Russell Twitty has always been into trucks. Growing up in West Columbia, he had his first jacked-up Chevy in high school. He took the truck to mud bogs wherever they popped up, but then for a while, life got in the way. He worked on the road for a few years for an industrial company, then went back to school for forestry. In 1995, he moved to Allendale and took a job at Collum’s Lumber Products, where he’s worked as a forester ever since.

p It takes a tough truck to compete in a mud bog. Blown engines, stripped transmissions and even lost tires are common pitfalls.

t An excavator that lumbers onto the course to rescue stuck trucks is part of the entertainment.

u Driving back to the sidelines after a run can also present a challenge.

“Around 2005 I started playing in the mud again,” he says. “And 2009 is when I just went hardcore. I started traveling and meeting people, and I’ve been all over the country playing in the mud with my truck in places I never thought I’d go.”

With the Liva Killa, he’s bogged through mud from Texas to Saskatchewan and almost everywhere in between, participating in a hobby-sport that grew in popularity after World War II, when personal pickup trucks got upgraded with military mechanics.

For years he helped host a nearby mud-bogging event at a track in Wagener, but then Twitty found a piece of land closer p Fishtailing through the deepest part of the track, this competitor sent the mud flying—and brought the crowd to its feet. t Many fans, like Madisyn Romine of Summerville, like to watch from the front safety rail and don’t mind getting dirty in the process. u Accidents happen. If a run goes wrong, EMTs and an ambulance are nearby when medical help is needed. to his home in Ulmer. And when he got hooked up with the Trucks Gone Wild national series of races, Twitty’s Mud Bog grew into what it is today a thrice-yearly event that brings people from all over the country and world.

These are fans like Jimmy Apps, who drives down to Ulmer every year from Pittsburgh because he prefers the mud races like Twitty’s over the free-for-all mud bogs he attends in Pennsylvania.

“Up there it’s just like a big party in a field,” he says, “but this is more organized.”

Or mud-bog fanatic Chrissie Rollman, from Summerville, who likes to be right up next to the safety rail like a hockey fan would like to be up by the glass. She says, “I’ve seen it all out here. Rolls, flips. I love it. And this is the best, most family-oriented of all the mud bogs.”

The race is on

Not even an hour before he pops his opening wheelie, Twitty is standing in the bed of his regular pickup truck to welcome all the mud-bogging drivers in the day’s race, which is the third and final in the 2022 series. He has some important news. They have set up the track today so the drivers will have to go counterclockwise, racing through a smaller mud pit before rounding the corner and finishing their lap in the

TIGHTKNIT COMMUNITY (from left) “I pretty much eat, sleep and breathe this,” confesses Jordan Twitty, Russell’s daughter; “I love the camaraderie, all the people. I just love it,” says Blaine Heffelfinger of Branchville; Mud-racing truck customizer and enthusiast Nick Jellyman of Summerville says, “No matter what tire or horsepower you have, there’s a spot for you.” bigger pit. The rains haven’t been too bad recently, and the pits are a good 3 feet deep.

“Now, I know nobody likes turning right,” he says, but no one seems too worried.

One man with a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth even cries out, “Oh, I do!”

This turns out to be Blaine Heffelfinger, of Branchville, the head honcho of the five-truck Godfather Racing team, who says he’s won more Twitty trophies than he has from anywhere.

“It’s just fun,” Heffelfinger says, trying to explain why somebody might put in hours of truck maintenance only to blow a transmission within one run, or bust a tire, or get so stuck that they have to be towed out by the excavator. “I love the camaraderie, all the people. I just love it.”

It’s a sentiment you hear echoed throughout Twitty City. Sure, there are cash prizes and trophies to be won for the trucks that make it the fastest through the pits, but more important than any of these are the pure pleasures of mud and sport. And good old-fashioned bragging rights. And showing off.

Even the crowd’s heckling, of which there is plenty, is all in the mud-fun spirit.

“You can’t park there!” one guy jokes when a truck gets stuck, but the driver only raises a defiant fist and revs his engine, spraying mud everywhere.

Nick Jellyman, who once worked as a machinist for Boeing but who now works full time customizing mud-racing trucks in Summerville, says the sport is friendlier and less competitive than, for instance, drag racing.

“This is a super tightknit community,” he says. “When someone breaks down, other guys will sell them or let them borrow a spare. No matter what tire or horsepower you have, there’s a spot for you.”

Jellyman, for his part, got into the sport watching Twitty compete at the Hampton Watermelon Festival. Now he’s got his own beast The Termigator, which runs on a stock John Deere motor but which has the biggest tires out here today at 75 inches tall.

“This thing can go, maybe, 10 miles an hour,” he says, “but it can get through anything.”

He says this with the same kind of beaming pride as he does when he explains that he did some of the custom work for Twitty’s Liva Killa. He calls Twitty an inspiration and his “bog daddy,” and he points out that the whole thing feels like a big bog family.

But for many out here, their bog families are literally their families.

“One thing about me and him is that he’s the better driver,” Blaine Heffelfinger says, patting his son Riggs on the back, just before Riggs races off and blows the transmission while taking the first right-hand turn. (All the proud dad could do? Shrug and say, “That’s just part of it!”)

And then there’s Jordan Twitty, the 19-year-old daughter of Russell and Amanda, who’s been racing since she was 10 and who drives Twitty’s Princess (a Chevy Colorado “beat from one end to the other,” as her dad puts it). After her second run of the night, in which she’s competed against the likes of Dirty Bo, Vengeance and Tazmaniac, she fishtails it past the finish line, putting her squarely in the Top 5.

She’s all smiles as she unbuckles her seatbelt, gets out from under the roll bars, and takes off her helmet.

Get There

Twitty’s Mud Bog is located at 4396 Buford’s Bridge Highway in Ulmer. The 2023 races will take place June 10, Sept. 16 and Nov. 17–18. For details, call (803) 259-9252 or visit twittysmudbog.com.

“It’s definitely for adrenaline junkies. I’m always looking for this kind of high, no other kind of high. I pretty much eat, sleep and breathe this,” she says while waiting for her next run. “Every weekend we’re on the road going somewhere, so this is really all I know.”

Her dad comes over to hug her and discuss the run, but then he’s right back coordinating the next driver. The long night is young, and a lot of mud-slinging is yet to come.