CMC Partners With King of the Hammers and Ultra4Next

Standing here in a compound reeking of gasoline and testosterone, I’m thinking to myself… am I ready to go zero to 60? Sure. Let me take you along for a ride!

I’m out at one of the biggest, dustiest, toughest off-road racing events in the world, and these men and women are out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert to race in the heat, just here for the love of the sport.

If you aren’t familiar with King of the Hammers, it’s a two-week off-road racing event, with different races throughout the two weeks of the event often combining high-speed cross-desert racing with technical rock crawling through desert canyons and hills. Sprawled across a dry lake bed in Johnson Valley, the center of all the activity, Hammertown, reaches a population of 80,000 racers and fans – bigger than Burning Man. It’s the largest event in the hi-desert, with approximately 2.5 million fans also watching online and 770 race teams competing in multiple classes over eight races, culminating in the brutal Race of Kings, widely regarded as the world’s toughest one day off-road race.

A sense of adventure is all around me here in Hammertown as racing teams are wrenching and welding, banging and grinding, all for a chance at the checkered flag. This is an event where off-road racers test their stamina and grit – and their expensive machines. It’s the 20th anniversary for King of the Hammers, and this year’s Race of Kings was expected to be, well, special – especially tough (and it was).

I’m here as one of Copper Mountain College’s student reporters. We’re here to cover the experiences of our CMC Auto Technology and Auto Club students who are participating in King of the Hammers again this year, operating the Lakebed Repair Station, where anyone from BLM rangers to race teams, KOH event staff to off-road enthusiasts attending the event, can come to get help in fixing their vehicles.

This is the second year CMC’s Auto Technology students have participated in King of the Hammers. Auto Club students have also been regularly visiting The Ranch, an off-roading compound in Johnson Valley owned by Dave Cole, one of the co-founders of King of the Hammers, where they have worked on off-road vehicles and met with representatives from the racing and automotive industries throughout the year.

But it all comes together at King of the Hammers, in late January and early February, out at the Johnson Valley Off Highway Vehicle Area. CMC’s presence is at the Lakebed Repair Station where students work on vehicles for donations. The donations are important for the students, especially for those who have had to take time off from work to be at King of the Hammers. There’s also an RV for students who want to stay overnight in Hammertown, with food and even a shower to remove some of the lakebed dust.

This year, CMC’s involvement with the event is evolving. Cole saw a need for the growing off-road industry to find trained personnel, and wanted to explore ways to provide opportunities for students to learn and connect with career options while helping to meet the needs of the industry. Copper Mountain College, located near Johnson Valley, was the first college to participate.

Now, a new nonprofit organization, Ultra4Next, has been formed to support the college partnership with King of the Hammers, and to grow the program nationally. Alex Striler is co-founder and president of Ultra4Next and he stopped by the Lakeside Repair Station to talk about this new and evolving partnership with myself and some of the CMC team.

“I’ve been in motorsports for about 20 years, most recently with Lucas Oil,” Striler explained. “Most as part of the Team Lucas program, where we put on about 400 annual events, 10 percent or so were professional. The rest were amateur. Most were televised.

“During those events,” he continued, “I got to know the back end of racing and how to put on events as well as others, and crossed paths many times with Dave Cole at King of the Hammers. One day, Dave and I started speaking about a big need that we see in the U.S., and that is to make students employable and to create more technical knowledge and technical education for students. Because a lot of lot of students now think they go to college, and they graduate from college, and they’re loaded with debt, and they have no chance of getting a job in the field that they went to college for, or in those studies.

“So what we’re doing is we’re teaching hands-on skills to students through some of our high school and community college partners,” Striler continued. “Copper Mountain College is one of our community college partners, and they bring in students to The Ranch, where students work directly with technicians and mechanics and race car drivers and fabricators and welders, and they learn all those skills.

“We also take the students to shops and factories,” he added. “And when I say shops, I mean race shops. So, they get to learn from potential employers. They get to meet them and learn the skills that they need in order to become employable. When we do a shop tour, it’s not just about, hey, look at this race shop and how cool these vehicles are. Or check out this factory with all this cool equipment – they learn what skills they need to have in order to work in that factory, or work at that race shop to operate that equipment.”

Striler said the organization is growing quickly and is speaking with large race teams “that have some really cool, very state-of-the-art, very big operations,” and Ultra4Next is seeking to place students in those organizations for internships and mentorships to fulfill the organization’s goal of making students employable in the industry.

“Copper Mountain College does a fantastic job of creating a booth where students work on spectator vehicles and in many cases, race team vehicles,” Striler said. “You know, every race team is a small business and they’re here conducting their business, which is racing, trying to promote themselves, trying to create sponsorships and sponsorship opportunities and of course, win races. And sometimes they get so busy that they can’t do everything in their own pit. So, Copper Mountain College has a booth where race teams can come and actually work on their cars. The students work on spectator cars. If there’s something that goes wrong when you’re out in the desert, students jump in and get hands-on experience. In the racing industry, we call everything a car, whether it’s a truck, a UTV or an actual physical car, we call them cars. So, to keep those cars running, we need mechanics, we need technicians, we need fabricators, we need welders. But then to promote those businesses, we need marketers, we need videographers, we need content creators. And Ultra4Next is a foundation that helps students become talented in those skills and makes them marketable and employable among the industry.

“It’s been a great partnership because it provides a service for attendees that come to the events as well as it provides education for the students and hands-on experience,” he explained. “And once again, it allows them to meet people and network and hopefully maybe meet somebody that becomes a potential employer one day. So, what we’re doing now is we started out very grassroots and all about automotive technology and all about racing technology, fabrication, welding. But it’s expanding because not every student wants to wrench on a car. Not every student wants to fabricate or weld. Some want to get into marketing, some want to get into media. So now we have media students following the auto shop students to events and recording that experience.”

Hey, that’s me. I’m out here at King of the Hammers doing exactly that – documenting the experiences of our Auto Technology students. While I’m out here, I’ve got the chance to ask Evelyn Sheffield, CMC’s Dean of Instruction, CTE and Career Services, about this partnership.

“This is a great opportunity for our students to partner with Ultra4Next,” Sheffield said. “It’s going to assist our students in creating their goals in the auto department or in any opportunities that they have that they would like to grow in their success with the auto industry.”

Dean Sheffield is working on growing CMC’s partnership with Ultra4Next and King of the Hammers. And on the ground out here at King of the Hammers, Instructional Assistant Kristian Murin Nies has been instrumental in organizing and operating CMC’s Lakebed Repair Station, from transporting students to and from Hammertown to ordering tools and supplies, setting up the station and RV, and overseeing operations.
“It’s been an amazing opportunity for the students this year,” Murin Nies said. “Getting out here is unique because being at the college results in a sterile environment sometimes, we create problems to solve problems. Being out here, we run into problems that were caused from being out on the trail. Trail damage, modification, accessories. We run into a variety of different situations that result in real world problem solving.

“Getting these students out here and getting them hands-on provides them that experience that’s required to make them stand out in the field that’s continuing to grow. And so we’ve kept busy out here. We’ve been out here, I think five or six days and working with Ultra4Next. It’s been a blessing because they provided us the resources and the infrastructure to keep us going.”

“The students are doing a great job, and the hands-on is key because they’re literally working on actual spectator vehicles, race vehicles, vehicles that the staff uses in order to put on the event,” Striler added. “Our philosophy is pretty simple. It’s a mind expanded by new ideas never goes back to its original boundaries. So by opening the minds and opportunities for the students, it gives them ambitions and hopefully creates a desire to, to get into the industry. But it also introduces them to a lot of the people who are involved. It’s not just about working on the cars, but it’s about meeting the race teams and the companies that are involved with the racing industry so that one day after graduation, they can become employable.”

“This is a great opportunity for our students to have that relationship with Ultra4Next,” Sheffield noted. “And we are very thankful for having our students out here. I know that they had a great opportunity fixing quite a few cars out here, and connecting with other individuals as well. One of the things that we also would like to look into is opportunities for our other students in our different CTE fields, for example, our Criminal Justice students, our Fire students, EMT students as well to come out here and participate in other ways. So, this is an exciting partnership that we’re going to be continuing, and we’re excited to see the growth and the connections that we could have with this.”

“Copper Mountain College has done an outstanding job of integrating the students into the real world with this opportunity,” Striler said.
“It truly has been a blessing,” Murin Nies added. “I mean, it’s part of being out here, of being rural. You know, the job opportunities are sometimes scarce and finding something that makes these students feel like they appreciate what they’re doing and love their work is harder to come by out here. So having this partnership allows these students to open those connections up and allows them to stay in the community that they enjoy, but also to survive and live affordably.”

Kent Stevenson, a part-time Automotive Technology faculty member said he enjoyed being out at King of the Hammers with the CMC students.
“It is a blast to be here,” he said. “It’s all about the students. We are very connected to King of the Hammers and the students are working hard. The students are well prepared to do the work.”

The races were fun and we also went out at night to a spot called Chocolate Thunder and there were a lot of people rock crawling in the dark and I was scared for them because I saw someone tip over. I also spent some time as Spike, CMC’s mascot, in Hammertown, and covered the experiences of one of our students, Anthony Jimenez, who raced twice while out at King of the Hammers. I caught Sublime in concert at King of the Hammers and we got to cover part of the Race of Kings on our last day in Johnson Valley.

Kei Bjork and Rubin Molina were my fellow CMC student reporters out at King of the Hammers this year. We all had to obtain press passes and we had opportunities to conduct interviews, shoot photos and video, and to see the off-road racing world close and personal. But at the heart of it were our very own CMC students. Kei, who was not only part of the student media crew, but is also a member of CMC’s Auto Club, noted that when we spoke after the event.

“It was an amazing experience,” she said. We got to see the students and all of the involved staff and faculty, and it was an amazing turnout. We got to see the students and what they were capable of. My favorite memory at King of the Hammers was just working hard with the media crew and getting real world experience and just seeing the lifestyle – the hustle and bustle of putting on an event like this from the inside out. It was a great opportunity
“The Auto Club was very prepared.,” Bjork added. “We had a lift and tools. We did some maintenance on vehicles that came in. We had some camping trailers and food, and it was an overall great time and a great way to build a relationship.”

“CMC’s Auto Club is building up the next generation of car junkies for one of the world’s fastest growing industries right now, similar to the 70s experience, and it’s a big boom,” Murin Nies said. “Our goal is to get in on this. It’s early, so Copper Mountain College and its students can get first-hand experience with next gen technology as well as prepare them for working on these vehicles in an expanding field that will only continue to get bigger! This allows them to meet some of the industry experts and find opportunities that might not pop up when you do your normal job search. These can be word of mouth positions.

“The resumes of the students that participate in the King of the Hammers will be given to industry professionals, and even if they don’t stay in our local community, we can make sure that no matter where they move, there’s somewhere along the line that we can help them find job placement,” he added. “We had a few students that graduated the program spring of 2025 that we successfully placed in positions in Utah and South Carolina. Students have gotten to work with Ford Racing as well as local welding and race teams.”

Out in Hammertown, CMC students found they were quite capable and up to the challenge. Some have already been hired for positions within the industry, and many of them are already looking forward to next year’s King of the Hammers and to continue to join the Auto Club on trips out to The Ranch where they can learn and grow from this incredible experience that has come about from the partnership between Copper Mountain College, King of the Hammers, and Ultra4Next.

King of the Hammers is one of the more exciting things that happens in the California desert. I cannot wait for next year and the famous Cowboy Tacos to stuff my face.

One of my very favorite things that happened at the King of the Hammers this year was that Anthony Jimenez, one of the Auto Club members, got to race with his truck and the whole Copper Mountain College Auto Club cheered him on with vigor. It was really exciting to see him race! Thanks to all at CMC, King of the Hammers, and Ultra4Next who made this experience possible. As the dust settles, just remember the races are now finished and the checkered flags are put away, but the memories will live on. God speed… I’ll see you at the 2027 King of the Hammers!