Since 2017, dozens of “mega trucks” from across the country have descended upon the small town of Leakesville in southern Mississippi each year on the first Saturday in April, converging on a 900-foot dirt track just outside the city limits.
Unlike the tires of monster trucks, which measure up to roughly five and a half feet tall, mega trucks instead run tractor-sized tires built for speed and maneuverability. Hundreds of spectators sitting or standing in bleachers watch as two trucks line up side-by-side at the starting line before racing off down the track, their 2,000 to 2,800 horsepower engines allowing the trucks to hit 80 mph after traveling as few as 200 feet.
After running parallel at the start of the track, competitors split off at a set of J-shaped bends, one going left and the other right, then roaring their way down separate directions for the majority of the race until the tracks reconverge at the end, leaving the trucks once again side-by-side as they push for the finish line.
“If you go to a drag race, the fastest cars you’ll see there won’t have this kind of horsepower,” Wild Country Off Road owner Bryan Dearman told the Mississippi Free Press. “You can be up to 300 yards away when they crank up those engines and still feel the vibration in your feet. These drivers aren’t freestyling; they’re racing for a purse, and they’re here to win at all costs, so you’ll be in for a crazy show.”
From Cement to Mega Trucks
Before Dearman, a lifelong Leakesville native, opened Wild Country Off Road in May 2017, he ran a cement plant called Leakesville Ready Mix and an automotive business called Dearman Equipment Company. He wanted to centralize his businesses to one location and began looking for suitable properties around Greene County. His search brought him to the site of an abandoned sawmill just outside the city limits that had sat empty for at least 10 years.
Right around the time Dearman was working on acquiring the land, his son Brent visited an offroad vehicle park. When Dearman heard from his son about the size of the crowds and the excitement he had seen at a race, Dearman realized the site would be ideal for holding similar races.
“We’re right off the highway in a rural area that’s small but densely populated, with around 120,000 people here,” Dearman said. “In big cities the land costs are a lot higher, and you can’t have something like this next to a subdivision either. We had power running to all the buildings already as well, so it made for a great start.”
Dearman had been wanting to try something new and began looking into what he would need to do to open his own offroad park. The scale of the project quickly became much larger than he could have predicted, and he decided to sell his previous companies to devote himself to Wild Country Off Road full-time.
Recreation, Restaurant and Racetracks
Wild Country Off Road occupies roughly 1,200 acres of land, which includes 150 miles of trails, 400 campsites, three miles of riverfront along the Chickashay River, a restaurant and an indoor event center near the main racetrack.
Guests can camp, drive jeeps or all-terrain vehicles—but not trucks—along the trails and fish along the sandbars on the river from February to October every year. While Wild Country’s trails close during the winter, the Wild Country Roadhouse restaurant remains open and the facility instead begins Wild Country Outfitters, which offers mallard duck hunts and a set of 22 cabins that guests can rent out on weekends.
Wild Country Roadhouse serves steaks, burgers, chicken tenders, wings, sandwiches, sausage dogs, seafood and more. The restaurant is open year-round from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Fridays, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays. On days when Wild Country is hosting events, the restaurant serves breakfast from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.
Wild Country also has a 55,000-square-foot event center that hosts banquets for the National Wild Turkey Federation and Whitetails Unlimited, rodeos, and live country music concerts featuring both an in-house band and visiting artists such as Randy Houser and Travis Tritt. Companies can also host catered Christmas parties in the event center during winter months.
After purchasing a number of haunted-house attractions that had gone out of business, Dearborn began using all the disparate parts to transform the Wild Country events center into a 40,000-square-foot haunted house of his own creation every Halloween. The haunted house contains at least 25 rooms on average, arranged in a maze that Dearborn creates using a series of black-painted plywood panels.
‘This Isn’t Your Old Fashioned Mud Race’
The April race at Wild Country is a sanctioned race for the North American Mega Truck Championship, which brings in drivers from roughly 25 states. Wild Country has also hosted the championship finals every year around Halloween since 2020. Drivers compete for purses ranging anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 for the championship finals.
“The engines alone on these trucks cost roughly $150,000,” Dearborn said. “When you add in building the chassis and frame and all the tires they use, it can get up into the $250,000 range finished. It’s a rich man’s sport, and that’s why you’ll usually only have a couple of them that exist in each state.”
In addition to the mega truck championship, Wild Country hosts a race called the Mudbug Bash on the first Saturday in March, which features live music and roughly 10,000 pounds of crawfish cooked freshly on site. The facility also holds races and concerts on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and Labor Day.
“This isn’t your old fashioned mud race; it’s a show that’s far more intense,” Dearman said. “We have jumps on the track just to slow them down because they’d go too fast otherwise, and you’ll see them wreck and flip and try to win at all costs.”
“Anyone I’ve ever gotten to know who comes out here to see these races once, I’ll inevitably see them coming back twice a year,” he continued. “Even if you don’t come for the races, you can bring your ATV out here, enjoy the piney woods and sandbars and just have a great time camping, fishing, clay shooting and anything you can think of.”
For more information on Wild Country Off Road and its full schedule of events, call 601-689-4200 or visit wcoffroad.com.