Is the Rebelle Rally the Ultimate Overland Training Event?

Lead photo by Tim Sutton

The scene is a familiar one: a golden desert sunrise, a cup of steaming coffee in hand, and a game of vehicle Tetris to prepare for the day ahead. Cold, stiff fingers are gradually warmed by the sun, eagerly grasping maps, hauling duffel bags, and closing zippers. A sense of the unknown is inescapable. Engines rumbling to life, we continue along dirt paths, searching for the next view or obstacle, learning more about ourselves along the way. The overland traveler may know this routine by heart, but so does anyone competing in the Rebelle Rally.

Rally coverage has hit Expedition Portal and Overland Journal fairly regularly for nearly a decade, but if you’re new to the event, the Rebelle is an eight-day, off-road navigation rally in which competitors use maps, compasses, and roadbooks to locate checkpoints throughout the deserts of Nevada and California. The checkpoints, carefully chosen by Founder Emily Miller, must be located without GPS as the rally prizes precise navigation over speed. It is a tough event filled with curveballs and sleep deprivation and often involves meeting the parts of ourselves we’d rather not (or so I’m told).

While there are plenty of vehicle recovery and four-wheel drive training courses available and a variety of workshops offered at expos throughout North America, there are overlanding skills that can only be gleaned from experience. Certainly, you could argue that the ultimate training for overlanders is to, in fact, go overlanding. That is true to a certain extent. However, preparing for and competing in the Rebelle Rally may offer a way to fast-track many core overlanding skills.

There are many overlaps, including needing to secure funding or sponsorship, preparing your vehicle for a specific task and the terrain, and how to pack efficiently and effectively. From teamwork to fuel management, creative problem solving, and driving to remote, beautiful places courtesy of varying topography and environments, all while knowing how to return home safely and, hopefully, with your vehicle in one piece, the two endeavors lend well to each other.

There are also major differences. The pace of the Rebelle Rally is, overall, much more urgent, without time to linger or enjoy a spur-of-the-moment camp spot. After all, it is a competition. You are allowed a GPS device, iPhone, and connection to the outside world via a cell phone signal while overlanding. And, as a navigator, it is unlikely you’re up at the crack of dawn, courtesy of a clanging cowbell, spending the following hours plotting points on a large paper map.

All of this is merely conjecture based on my presence on the Rebelle Rally course for the past few years. I have never competed or trained, only witnessed, listened, and watched. I do have the overland experience, but to truly understand, I reached out to several Rebelle Rally competitors for their take on the subject.

Boom or Bust: Relationships and Teamwork

It is unusual for most people to spend every waking moment with a friend, travel mate, or significant other. Being on the road tests your patience and brings idiosyncrasies to light that would otherwise be buried in busy schedules or time away from each other at work or school, putting you in unusual situations that cause stress or require quick problem-solving. The Rebelle Rally can make or break relationships, but so can overlanding.

Eva Rupert and Azure O’Neil, who competed together in 2023, both come from an adventure motorcycle background. “Before I even knew that adventure motorcycling was a thing, I would pack up my old crusty Honda and take it out into the desert,” Eva says. “When you’re traveling on a motorcycle, whether in the US or abroad, you are just so open and exposed to the world around you—that’s what I love so much about it.” Currently living in Bisbee, Arizona, Rupert manages the Jonquil Hotel with her partner, Sterling, and plans the Desert Adventure Rally, a four-day riding event held nearby.

Azure, who traveled the world by boat in 2005, and has overlanded through 31 countries on both two and four wheels, funding her travels by taking on odd jobs such as harvest winemaking, swabbing decks of scuba diving boats, and reporting for a TV news station while abroad for her local Sarasota, Florida, hometown. She joined the Overland Expo team after volunteering as a speaker and presenter. O’Neil and Rupert worked together at Overland Expo for the better part of a decade, handling the stresses of event planning and maintaining a strong foundational friendship throughout.

“Our goals were basically to get all of the blue and green checkpoints we could in the morning, not die in the desert in the afternoon, and be good teammates to one another and to other people,” Azure laughs, recalling their priorities during the 2023 rally. One of the team’s objectives was to preserve their friendship, putting that relationship above all else. “How you handle disagreements or differences of opinions is a true test of character,” Eva notes. “I feel like having traveled so much in the past with my boyfriend and making those on-the-fly decisions meant having that communication.”

Azure says that part of being a successful rally team for them was ensuring they had aligned goals. “We wanted to do really well, but we also wanted to feel good about who we were as humans at the end of the day.” This meant helping other teams change tires or dig out of the sand. “Those were special moments,” she says. “Human interactions and friendships are the wealth currency of our lives. That’s my perspective, anyway. I feel like the Rebelle is like that as well, learning from other women and opening yourself up to being helped by other people and the kindness of strangers.”

Azure believes these experiences translate well to being on the road. “Some of my dearest friends are travelers we met along the way and went through dodgy areas together, teaming up to carry water, fuel, food, and divvying tasks. Those relationships and the people we meet are so enriching to the overland experience. I think that takeaway from the Rebelle is huge.”

Self-Sufficiency and Personal Growth

Penny Dale, an interior designer and Ford Performance rally navigator from Vancouver, British Columbia, spent 2016 overlanding 45,000 kilometers from Canada to Argentina with her partner. “I think the thing that stands out for me in that experience was that there were so few women on the road traveling, and the ones who were weren’t in the driver’s seat, in general,” she says. “It was interesting to see the dynamics of it. I found it pretty rare to meet other women, so it was an amazing trip, but sometimes it was kind of lonely not having somebody to connect with who isn’t your partner.”

When the trip finished, Dale’s relationship ended shortly after. She wanted to continue overlanding in some sense—maybe not necessarily by taking another big trip, but by working on the skills required for the road. “A lot of that is around self-sufficiency. I asked myself, If I’m going to do an overland trip on my own, how can I be best prepared?”

Photos: Richard Giordano, Nicole Dreon

The Rebelle Rally offered the promise of honing navigation skills, feeling comfortable making tough decisions, and being part of a dynamic team. What Dale didn’t expect was the self-development lessons that came from competing. “During the first year, I realized how poorly I gave myself grace when I did things I didn’t think were the most right,” she says. “I say most right because there are different degrees, right? I realized this wasn’t just an issue in the rally— this was how I did things in general.”

“The rally is so much more intense than people think,” Dale admits. “There’s a mental game of waking up at 4:30 am day after day, in dust, sandstorms, and freezing temperatures, and being handed something so unknown, trying to execute the [checkpoint] plotting within two hours, and being on the road for 10 hours straight with minimal breaks.” Throughout the following year, she focused on letting go of the desire to control everything and admitted vulnerability during moments of life that involved the unknown, being a beginner, or not knowing the answer. How did she do? “It was really cool because it worked,” she says. Each year since—2024 marked her sixth rally—she’s chosen a key word to focus on. “I learned new lessons about myself during the rally that made me a more resilient, resourceful, and thoughtful human.”

Rebelle Rally skills have carried over into other areas of her life, too. During a multi-stage backpacking trip outside of Pemberton, British Columbia, she used her mapping experience to examine the route—there were minimal details online—to lead her hiking partners through the backcountry. Following the map contours of each river valley and knowing ahead of time what kind of terrain to expect was second nature, preventing her from losing the trail. “It was one of the first times where I was like, wow, my [navigation] skill set really applies.”

Vehicle Preservation, Recovery, and Technical Driving

Rasa Fuller and LeeWhay Pasek have rallied together for 4 years and have been friends for over a decade. Rasa, a director at Honeywell Aerospace, has been driving and co-driving her 2004 Toyota Tacoma through the Desert Southwest for 20 years, seeking out historic airplane crash sites and exploring old mines, watering holes, distinctive rocks, and fantastic campsites. “Even though we’ve got the 20-year-old vehicle that’s been around the block, we’re doing really well preserving it and keeping it going,” she says.

Based in Grafton, New Hampshire, LeeWhay is a world traveler, physical therapist, and homesteader. Her comfort zone lies in reading maps and navigating the best routes through unfamiliar territory—whether using a map, plotter, compass, or GPS. Like many Rebelles, LeeWhay began as an overlander first and enjoyed tackling the Simpson Desert and Canning Stock Route in an 80 Series in Australia and traveling throughout Europe and Morocco. “I think using paper maps and looking around at the terrain helps my overlanding experience and reading terrain out in the field,” she says.

Photo: Richard Giordano

“I have a lot of experience driving the Tacoma on the kind of roads the Rebelle takes us on,” Fuller says. She and her husband, Craig, are weekend warriors when it comes to overlanding. “What I didn’t have a lot of, though, were quick recovery skills. And I’m referring to sand right now.” Craig, she mentions, has a lot of vehicle recovery experience in desert and mountain environments—but sand is a different beast. “The Rebelle helped me learn how to handle it,” she explains. “How does the vehicle feel? What do you do when you get stuck? How are you going to manage the situation? How do you know what your vehicle is capable of?”

During the rally, LeeWhay uses her navigation skills to choose the easiest route possible when possible. Her experience on Australia’s Canning Stock Route emphasized the fact that as overlanders, we aren’t always in a location where help is close by if things go sideways. “Even though we need to do some sketchy things sometimes, we’re both in the mindset of avoiding just banging through it. Our priority is always don’t break the truck.” From remote parts of the Southwest to overlanding abroad, Fuller and Pasek know the importance of vehicle sympathy. At the end of the day, we all need to get home somehow.

By their third year of competition, in 2023, Fuller and Pasek felt confident enough to enter the difficult sections of the Imperial Sand Dunes in Southern California. This marked the first time they weren’t nervous about the dunes during the competition. With additional training and experience, they knew what they could handle. After the rally, Rasa took her husband on a joy ride through the dunes. “He was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing! I don’t think we should do this!’ I said, ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing.’ It was my first experience doing something like this with Craig. It was a lot of fun to show him a skill I had gained from the Rebelle.”

A Rebelle Who Started Overlanding

When Azure O’Neil and Eva Rupert signed up for the 2023 rally, they heard time and time again that the camping component was the hardest thing for many of the women to wrap their heads around. “We were like, this is something we just do for fun all the time,” says O’Neil. Similarly, Rupert hadn’t considered what it would be like to sign up for the event without overlapping experience. “Maybe you’re not used to camping and driving long distances for so many days—that must be a huge challenge.”

I initially assumed most Rebelle Rally participants with overland experience started with the rally first, but, in fact, the opposite is true. Most Rebelles with a connection to overlanding heard about the event at an Overland Expo or Overland Adventure rally event. Only a handful of Rebelles began short- or long-term overland trips because of their rally experience. One of these women is Thayer Low.

Based in Colorado, Thayer is a past rally partner of Penny Dale’s. A shared love for Land Rovers initiated a conversation on Instagram, which eventually brought them together as teammates. Low, who owns an LR4, discovered the Rebelle Rally while reading an Alloy & Grit magazine article. “I thought, wow, that sounds totally awesome. If other women are doing that, I would like to do it, too,” she says.

To prepare, she went all-in with navigation practice and completed off-road training with Bill Burke. “I went camping and off-roading with friends quite a few times. Setting up the tent and being on my own in the wilderness was what I was least comfortable with.” Her camping experience was limited to parking up in her grandfather’s Westfalia as a kid, which, she admits, was “kind of a different experience.”

Gaining confidence after her first rallies, Thayer began overlanding with her husband and twin girls to Baja, Alaska, and throughout Utah and Arizona. She says many of the skills she took from the rally have become second nature. “Looking for small roads to explore—I gained that from the Rebelle. Sometimes we’ll find these amazing camping spots by noticing a cool road and saying, ‘Let’s go take a look.’”