Your phone is useless out here. Not because of the rules, though the rules do ban it. It's useless because there's no signal for a hundred miles in any direction, and the desert doesn't care what apps you paid for.
Every October, teams of two point their rigs into the high desert with a paper map, a compass, a stopwatch, and a four-function calculator. No GPS. No phones. No support crews. Eight days, twenty-five hundred kilometers, and a rule that asks you not to shower every day.
Here's the part that should get your attention. There's no build to hide behind. Street legal only, thirty-seven inch tires max, no roll cages required, and the organizers say plainly that the event is designed for stock vehicles you buy from a dealer. Whatever's in your driveway is already enough. What's missing is knowing where you are.
Teams roll out under the arch at the 2025 Rebelle Rally. Photo: Regine Trias/Rebelle Rally
Eight days, and a sealed box for your phone
The 11th Rebelle Rally runs October 7 to 17, 2026. Technical inspection and the welcome happen Wednesday the 7th, the official launch rolls out of Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Thursday the 8th, and from there it is eight days of competition, 10 to 12 hours a day. Jeep puts the route at roughly 1,500 miles across Utah, Nevada and California. Utah is new this year.
It is not a race, and the organizers are blunt about that. Points come from reaching checkpoints and following a roadbook accurately, and the team with the most points at the end, minus penalties, wins. Speed is not scored. Precision is.
The rig
Every vehicle must be street legal in all 50 states, registered, plated, and able to hold Interstate speeds. No full-tube chassis buggies. Tires must be DOT-approved, sold to the general public through ordinary retail, and no larger than 37 inches by 12.5. Aftermarket suspension is allowed, but stock pivot locations stay. You need three-point belts, a horn audible at 100 feet, two tow points, and a full-size inflated spare with the tools to fit it.
Roll cages and harnesses are not required. Read that again if you have ever assumed this kind of event was closed to you.
Asked directly whether you need a modified vehicle, the Rebelle's own FAQ answers: "NO! This rally is designed for stock vehicles that you buy from a dealer."
There are two classes. The 4x4 Class is four-wheel drive with a two-speed transfer case, so a Wrangler, a Gladiator, a Bronco, a Tacoma. The X-Cross Class is unibody with all-wheel drive and no low range, which covers most crossovers and small SUVs. On top of those sit four special designations for 2026: Bone Stock, 40/30 for vehicles 40 years or older, International Cup, and Electrified. None is a separate class, and there is no cross-class overall winner.
The gear
This is where the rulebook quietly turns into a trail-kit checklist worth stealing. Appendix D requires five gallons of potable water, an extra day of food and prescriptions, an ABC fire extinguisher, a spill kit that can catch and seal away vehicle fluids, and a first aid kit specified right down to a CAT-style tourniquet.
Night-visible devices are required, and the wording matters: four large glow sticks or LED road flares at least 12 inches long, or three free-standing red reflective triangles. Flares that produce heat or flame are not permitted. You are in a dry desert. Nobody wants your roadside emergency to become everyone's.
Teams must also know how to change a tire, and the handbook recommends practicing on the competition vehicle before showing up. For the driveway-sized version, our guide to what to carry in your Jeep and our jack comparison cover most of it.
The blackout
Anything with a connection is prohibited: GPS, cellular, internet, WiFi, bluetooth, satellite. Laptops, tablets, smartphones, smart watches and e-readers all go into a hard case the team supplies, get listed on a declaration form, and are sealed shut by an official for the entire event. Opening that seal for anything short of a genuine emergency is disqualification. For 2026 the organizers tightened the wording further, adding smart watches, e-readers and compass watches by name.
The vehicle's own electronics get the same treatment: factory GPS disabled, bluetooth off, paired devices deleted, and a factory compass disabled if it shows numerical headings, though one showing only N, NE, E and so on is fine.
Your calculator can add, subtract, multiply and divide. That is the whole list. No two-way radios, though a wired headset between driver and navigator is legal. No binoculars. No cameras with more than a 200mm or 12x lens, because that would be reconnaissance.
What you get instead is a compass, a course plotter, map rulers, a stopwatch, an odometer and paper. The rulebook even names the acceptable odometers: a Terratrip 101 Plus or 202 Plus V4 is fine, every version of the 303 is banned, because it takes GPS. If plotting on paper sounds like a lost art, it is a learnable one, and free topo maps are where most people start.
A team plots the day's checkpoints on the hood of a Ford Bronco, 2025 Rebelle Rally. Photo: Nicole Dreon/Rebelle Rally
Checkpoints come in tiers. Green ones are mandatory, marked with a flag and a course worker standing there. Blue ones are optional, marked with a small stake. Black Diamond checkpoints are optional and have no visible marker of any kind, just an invisible set of geo-fences. You plot a point on paper, drive to a piece of empty desert where nothing at all is standing, and press the button on your tracker because your math says this is the spot.
When it breaks
There are no chase trucks and no team mechanics. The handbook puts it plainly: the rally is not a spectator event, and friends, family, or personal mechanics do not accompany the teams. Nobody may follow you, meet you, or communicate with you. Outside assistance from anyone other than a rally official or another registered team is disqualification. That covers bumping into a friend on course.
A Land Rover Discovery buried on a dune ridge, day seven of the 2025 rally. Photo: Tim Sutton/Rebelle Rally
But teams are explicitly allowed to help each other, and this is the part worth sitting with. Competitors may give each other mechanical or physical assistance on-course with no penalty at all. Two teams can dig each other out, swap a tire, share tools, and lose nothing. What they cannot do is ride in each other's vehicles, tow each other along by following or leading, or touch each other's trackers.
So the rulebook builds a strange and rather good incentive. Everyone out there is competing against you, and helping you is free.
Competitors work a Ford Ranger off a dune at sunset, day seven of the 2025 rally. Photo: Ernesto Araiza/Rebelle Rally
When a team genuinely cannot solve it alone, help is a call on a rally-supplied satellite phone, and it costs points rather than ending the rally. Calling for a recovery when you are stuck costs 10 points. Mechanical help, fuel, or a search when you cannot find a known location, cost 20 points each.
Back at base camp the economics change. Teams get two hours of self-repair and two hours of rally mechanic time between stages, both free, after which repairs cost money and mechanic time costs points. Each team may also check in up to two sealed parts bins the rally hauls from camp to camp. Break a seal and it is a flat 10 points, once per bin, a penalty deliberately set lower than the one for having staff track down parts for you.
None of that applies on the Marathon stage, which runs two days with no base camp at all. Teams self-camp; there is no Mechanics Park, and whatever you brought is what you have.
The daily rhythm is a 5 a.m. wake-up cowbell, a mandatory 6 a.m. driver briefing, and rations picked up on the way out. Camp runs on solar generator power, so no hair dryers. Water gets packed in, and wastewater gets packed out, which is why the handbook asks competitors to keep showers to five minutes and not to take one every day.
The part that isn't in the rulebook
Jeep's entry this year is Team 129: Nena Barlow, returning for her 10th Rebelle, and first-time competitor Hannah Felton, in a stock Jeep Gladiator Mojave.
Barlow has been in the four-wheel-drive business since 1996, runs Barlow Adventures, a training and guided-trip outfit working across the Southwest, and is a certified International 4WD Trainers Association Master Trainer. The Rebelle credits her with four first-place finishes. Felton is an off-roader, welder, and fabricator whose experience runs from building vehicles to competing in them.
But the thing that actually decides a Rebelle is in neither of those records. In a TEDx talk called "You Are Never as Lost as You Think You Are," Rebelle founder and director Emily Miller described what happens physically the moment the map stops matching the ground: "Your heart rate rises, blood pressure rises, breathing changes, you start to sweat, we lose the ability to concentrate, to think straight."
Then, she says, people do one of three things. They freeze. They drive in circles, and in competition they drive faster while doing it, getting more lost more quickly. Or they blame: the technology, the teammate, themselves.
That is the actual opponent. Not the terrain, and not the other teams.
Which is why the best Rebelle story is not about winning. Speaking to SEMA News, competitor Cora Jokinen described the last day of her first rally, when she and her teammate worked out they were not going to make the podium and went looking for people stuck in the Glamis sand dunes instead. "We helped six teams get unstuck," she said, "and it was really rewarding."
Another competitor, Kathryn Reinhardt, lost a tire on day one and then broke her jack. She described what followed as frustrating and frightening, and credited the support of other teams with getting them back on track.
Nobody scored a point for any of that. There is an award for it, though. The Team Spirit Award is voted on by the competitors themselves, and it sends $5,000 to the winning team's chosen charity. Not to the team.
Competitors on a dune at the end of day seven, 2025 Rebelle Rally. Photo: Regine Trias/Rebelle Rally
The rigs that actually show up
The interesting thing about the Rebelle entry list is how ordinary most of it is. According to Stellantis, nearly one-third of the private teams take on the rally in their own daily-driven Jeeps. Not builds. Daily drivers. The rest of the field is stranger than you would guess.
A Jeep Wrangler running a gravel wash on day three of the 2025 rally. Photo: Regine Trias/Rebelle Rally
Two sisters, Rochelle Bovee and Melissa Vander Wilt, have run a 1969 Ford Bronco they inherited from their father, who bought it new. When its original 302 died two months before the 2021 event, they replaced it with one pulled from a 1989 Mustang and went anyway. It carries the 40/30 designation, which recognizes anyone taking on the Rebelle in a vehicle 40 years or older.
In 2023, a Rivian R1T driven by Lillian Macaruso and navigated by Alexandra Anderson won the 4x4 class, the first electric vehicle to win the event.
The X-Cross side is where the assumptions really break. In 2025, Carey Lando and Andrea Shaffer won the class in a Subaru Forester Hybrid Touring. Second was a nearly production-specification BMW X5, which also took the Bone Stock Award. Third and fourth were both Subaru Crosstreks.
And this year MINI enters for the first time in its history, with Felicia Killman driving and Erika Ferrer navigating. The company has not yet said which model.
What to watch, and what to take from it
The storyline worth following is a split. Barlow's previous teammate, Teralin Petereit, with whom she took four wins in five years, has moved to Ford Racing for 2026 and will share a Ranger Raptor with Laura Wanlass as Team 188. Ford is fielding four entries, two Bronco Raptors and two Ranger Raptors. We covered Ford's 2026 Raptor lineup separately.
Both brands are also backing the people who show up without a factory seat. Mopar is recognizing high-finishing privateer Jeep teams with FlexCare Vehicle Protection and Jeep Performance Parts awards, details to come closer to the event. Ford's equivalent, the Ford Raptor Route, gives privateer teams $1,500 toward entry costs and sends the highest-finishing non-factory team to Bronco Off-Roadeo. As Ford Racing's Kristen Goslawski put it, the point is "to show that getting started in off-road competition can be as accessible as buying a Raptor." Jeep brand CEO Branden Coté made a similar case: "The Rebelle Rally is an authentic proving ground for our vehicles and the people behind the wheel."
Worth noting what winning actually pays. First place in each class gets a trophy, guaranteed entry the following year, and a $5,000 credit per competitor toward that entry fee, which the handbook specifies cannot be converted to cash. There is no purse. People do this because they want to.
You watched, or you didn't. Either way, the desert doesn't care. But the rig in your driveway is already capable of more than you've asked of it. The only thing standing between you and out there is knowing where you are.
Rebelle Rally LIVE streams from the course at rebellerally.com/live and on the Rebelle Rally YouTube channel. The full broadcast schedule is still to be announced. Live vehicle tracking and scoring go up on October 9.
FAQ
Can men compete in the Rebelle Rally?
No. The Rebelle Rally is the first women's off-road navigation rally raid in the United States, and each team is two women, one driving and one navigating. The organizers state that all women who meet the criteria, are medically cleared, and are over 18 are invited to participate.
Do you need a modified vehicle to run the Rebelle Rally?
No, and the organizers are emphatic about it. Their FAQ answers the question with "NO! This rally is designed for stock vehicles that you buy from a dealer." Every vehicle must be street legal, plated, and able to travel on Interstates at posted speed limits.
What is the maximum tire size at the Rebelle Rally?
Tires may be no larger than 37 inches by 12.5, and they must be DOT-approved and available to the general public through ordinary dealers or retail sites. Internet-only or single-store tires are not accepted. In the Bone Stock designation, tires additionally cannot be more than 2 inches larger in diameter than what the manufacturer offered for that year and model.
Are roll cages required at the Rebelle Rally?
No. The organizers state that items such as roll cages and harnesses are not required. Vehicles do need functional three-point safety belts or better.
What does it cost to enter the Rebelle Rally?
Entry for 2026 is $8,200 per person, or $16,400 per team. That covers the 10-day event including base camps, safety services, mechanical support, water, roughly 24 meals per person, and entry to the awards gala. It does not include the vehicle, fuel, travel, or the required training.
Do you need experience to enter the Rebelle Rally?
You don't need to be a professional driver or navigator, but you can't just show up. You must complete a 4x4 driving course or equivalent experience and an introductory navigation course before you can cross the starting line; rookies also complete a two-day navigation course.
What happens if your vehicle breaks down during the Rebelle Rally?
Use the rally-supplied tracker and satellite phone to contact officials, and a team of mechanics will come to your vehicle, assess the problem, and fix it if possible. On-stage mechanical assistance costs 20 points and recovery assistance costs 10 points. Other competitors are allowed to help you on course with no penalty to either team.
Photographs of the 2025 Rebelle Rally are used with permission of the Rebelle Rally. Photos by Nicole Dreon, Regine Trias, Ernesto Araiza and Tim Sutton.
Correction, September 11, 2026: An earlier version of this article described Rebelle Rally LIVE as presented by Toyota. Toyota is not presenting the live show for the 2026 rally. Our thanks to Kirsten Tiegen at the Rebelle Rally for flagging it.
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