Sixty-seven-year-old Bill Austin has put 130,000 miles on his 1993 Jeep® Grand Cherokee. He's driven many of those miles the hard way -- through woods, over rock and water and generally jostling through 30 Jeep Jamborees in the past five years.

"It's the challenge of the trail," says Austin, who lives in Orlando, Florida. "It's the people that you meet, and the areas that you get to see. We get people out there every age from six months to their eighties. It keeps us all young. And if I don't have a Jeep, I can't go on the Jamborees."

Some 7,000 Jeep owners and their families take part in these off-road weekend adventures each year. The Jamborees offer a chance for hard-core four-wheelers and first-time off-road drivers alike to experience some of America's most beautiful and remote scenery.

All Jeep vehicles are welcome on the Jamborees, and about 20 percent of participants bring a Grand Cherokee. The 34 Jamboree locations include the mountains of Maine, South Dakota's Black Hills, Baja California and many spots in between.

"We've been told over and over again that every manufacturer would kill for a program like this," says Jill Smith, president of Jeep Jamboree USA.

The Jamborees got their start in 1953 when Jill's father, a California logger, decided to lead a caravan of Jeep vehicle lovers along the Rubicon Trail, a 22-mile route to South Lake Tahoe. It's a boulder-strewn stretch generally considered one of the toughest four-wheeling trail in America.

In those days, the only four wheel drive we had was the Jeep," says Jamboree founder Mark Smith. " It's still the toughest and best."

The elder Smith has served as a Chrysler consultant since 1982, and Jeep Jamboree USA now hosts 34 weekend events a year. More than 100,000 people have taken part since the program's inception.