Today was Day 1 of this year's Pickup Truck of the Year competition and we have a great lineup of new pickup trucks this year.  The lineup includes the Dodge Ram, Ford F-150, Hummer H3T and Suzuki Equator. 

Our day began at the crack of dawn (not really) at Four Wheeler World HQ in Los Angeles.  Since many of us are still recuperating from SEMA last week, conversation was light and hot coffee and/or caffeinated cold beverages were the order of the morning.  Well, for everyone except art director Smith (left) who seems to always have energy.

Holman grabbed my camera and took this photo of me pretending to work.  This is good because now my wife knows that I'm actually doing something constructive while I'm away from the Midwest Bureau.

After testing how the vehicles work while sitting in gridlock traffic for an eternity on the 10 in Los Angeles due to a motorcycle accident, we finally arrived at our secret test facility at Soggy Dry Lake outside of Victorville (oops).  The rocky and rough road in gave us a good opportunity to test vehicle handling and stability at speed.

We had a staff meeting.  Most of us looked forlornly at our BlackBerry's, which don't have service in this remote location.

We then ran our test loop, which tested each vehicles capabilities on a hill climb, rocky trail and finally high speed dry lake bed.

Web guru Gonderman was getting creative on the placement of the Krappy Kam.  By the way, check out some of his work in the video section of fourwheeler.com.  He just posted another video from Four Wheeler of the Year, which took place a few weeks ago.

We stayed out until dark and then succombed to the lure of dinner.  Strangely, our day didn't include any flat tires, which probably really bummed out Stover, who didn't get to change a tire.  We'll try to hook him up tomorrow.

Tomorrows festivities include track testing and an afternoon trail ride.  We'll have an update late tomorrow evening.