“Where do you take a 3 ton pickup with an off road package and a Cummins turbo diesel under the hood? In Maine, the answer is simple, the county!”
Mark Fleming
Having grown up in a rural area of central Maine, I have always been a fan of trucks. In fact, my first car was a 2008 Dodge Ram with a 3” lift. There is something about this workhorse of a vehicle that is embedded deep in rural areas of the country and, I suppose, in me. When I found out that I would have a chance to photograph the 2016 Titan Pro 4X, I knew immediately that I would have to get out of the city and back to my rural roots. That being said, I’m not sure the lovely folks at Berlin City expected just how far out of the city I planned on going.
Where do you take a 3 ton pickup with an off road package and a Cummins turbo diesel under the hood? In Maine, the answer is simple, the county! For those of you who may not know, ‘the county’ refers to Aroostook County. Aroostook is Maine’s largest and most northern county. Here the terrain shifts dramatically from deep woods to vast agricultural fields. In short, it’s truck country!
During our week with ‘the beast’ as our Titan was quickly named, we traveled over 1,000 miles and hit every possible driving condition you can think of. The goal was to photograph this truck in it’s natural habitat, off road and dirty. As you can see from the images, we accomplished our goal. The truck performed incredibly well. The mixture of rock solid off road performance on the outside and over the top luxury on the inside was incredible. The lifted and reinforced suspension matched with 8 ply off road tires and Nissan’s 4×4 system meant we were never afraid to turn down a muddy or unplowed road. On the inside, we were pampered with heated seats, a heated steering wheel, a Rockford Fosgate sound system and way more leg room than would ever be necessary. Combine these with killer features like a lift assist tailgate and super bright LED bed lights and you have one hell of a truck!
We certainly didn’t take it easy on the poor girl. For a last hoorah, I decided on a whim to take the Titan down my favorite road in all of Maine, the fabled Golden Road. Running over 100 miles from Millinocket to Quebec. The majority of the road is dirt, though from time to time the dust settles enough for you to notice broken patches of what appear to be pavement. Needless to say, this is not the road to test your daily driver on. This road is for trucks. The Titan turned heads on the Golden Road. It quickly became obvious, that this is a truck for people who’s other truck is a Freightliner.
During our adventure down the Golden Road, the truck’s tire pressure monitoring system sounded an alarm. Within 20 feet our rear driver side tire pressure had dropped from the normal 75 PSI to 40 PSI. It was obvious that we had a flat. Thankfully, the Titan’s warning system kept us informed and we were able to get out of the way and to a safe spot to change the tire. Miles away from decent cell reception, we hopped out of the truck, broke out the jack, and dropped down the full size spare. Within minutes we had changed the tire, a 7” chainsaw file was the culprit by the way, and were on our way again.
I can’t say enough about this truck. I suppose the best way to wrap this up is to let you know that within 3 days of dropping off the Titan, I was visiting Berlin City again to test drive some mid-size trucks. I suppose you can take the boy out of truck country but you can’t take truck country out of the boy!
