Upside down buildings, Titanic replicas, wax museums, Dollywood, and over 20,000 Jeeps scattered in between. Smoky Mountain Jeep Invasion is back in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee for its 14th annual event!
Just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, over 50,000 Jeep enthusiasts flocked to the LeConte Center for a three-day event packed with community meetups, vendor booths, custom builds, and muddy trails. If you’re in Pigeon Forge during the event, it’s highly unlikely to see any other vehicle but a Jeep.
Presented by Hankook Dynapro Tire
What Is Jeep Invasion?
For one weekend each year, Pigeon Forge becomes a gathering place for the Jeep community. The LeConte Center is packed with over 300 vendors showing off everything from tires and suspension to recovery gear and Jeep accessories. Outside the event center are more vendors, the Show and Shine competition, and the Mountain Mile, a 1-mile-long on-site off-road course featuring hill climbs and mud holes.
The area offers something for everyone, whether it’s heading into the National Park for the day, touring a replica of the Titanic, riding the coasters at Dollywood, or the endless options for minigolf, mountain coasters, and go-karts. You couldn’t scratch the surface of this area in just one weekend.
Hankook Dynapro at Jeep Invasion
Hankook was back at Jeep Invasion with the same lineup of Dynapro tires we saw at Bronco Stampede, including the Dynapro XT, Dynapro AT2 Xtreme, and Dynapro MT2.
The Hankook team also gave attendees a chance to win a set of tires during the event. With thousands of Jeeps rolling through Pigeon Forge throughout the weekend and many different use cases, from street-focused daily drivers to trail-only rock crawling builds, Hankook displayed tires for any application. My favorite being the all-terrain / mud-terrain hybrid tire, the Dynapro XT. The XT is visually more aggressive than the AT2 Xtreme, but what really interests me is the 3PMSF rating and 50,000-mile, 6-year warranty. What an awesome happy medium for people wanting more off-road capability out of their AT tire while not sacrificing safety in snow and ice conditions. Not many hybrid tires in the market can check that many boxes.
Paratroopers and Twin Turbo V8s
During the event, Jeep had planned a launch for a new product featuring a team of Paratroopers soaring over the event. As the crowds swarmed towards a large wooden box that seemingly fit a Jeep of some kind, I overheard speculation of a new Gladiator 392, an anticipated model of Jeep’s truck platform with the 6.4L Hemi from the 392 Wrangler. The official reveal was a bit anti-climactic with the unveiling of the Smoky Mountain Edition Wrangler, which simply put, is a Willys Wrangler with some new stickers.
Although this “new model” was a bit of a letdown, the rest of the show was far from that! As we wandered around, I drooled over classic Jeep Wagoneers, a Twin Turbo V8-swapped CJ-7, and fancy new tech like FOX’s Live-Valve suspension systems. It’s also common to find show-focused builds featuring massive 26-inch rims, subwoofers engulfing the entire trunk, and neon-colored vinyl wraps. Although these builds are not my flavor, I think that’s the point of this event. To bring people together, in person, around one common interest. Jeeps.
