PINE GROVE, Pennsylvania (AP) -- They rumble in on treads called Super Swampers, wearing their hearts on their license plates.
Stephanie Oplinger, left, and Rob Schaeffer work to spot a line to drive her H1 Hummer over a rocky trail.
"PLAYDRTY," declares one behemoth from New York. "HUM THIS," dares another, from Ohio.
The digital board fronting the Shell station at Exit 100 winks back: "Welcome Hummers!"
In the fading light, though, it's impossible to ignore the sign at the Sunoco across the road: Diesel, $4.97 9/10 a gallon.
You've got to be tough to love a Hummer. The soaring cost of feeding a vehicle that swallows a gallon every dozen miles is only part of it. Environmentalists, who've always had it in for you, are winning mainstream converts. General Motors, which presided over Hummer's transition from a badge of military bravado into a symbol of driveway excess, is looking to sell.
But tonight there's no apologizing or self-pity in the ranks of Hummer die-hards. They're here to goad machines that can top five tons over boulders the size of Smart cars, through stewpots of mud obscuring who-knows-what and across obstacle courses of stumps, logs and stones -- it's "like riding a slow-motion rollercoaster," one says.
Maybe mega-SUVs are going the way of dinosaurs. Hummer sales have dropped 40 percent this year. But these beasts and the men and women who love them certainly don't behave like endangered species.
"I told my wife when we bought this, 'Honey, we're investing in steel and rubber,' says William Welch, a Philadelphia surgeon who, cigar clenched between his teeth, offers a guided tour of his lovingly tended jet-black H1.
"If it was $10 a gallon," he says, "we'd still be out there."
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