It’s hard to describe a place like Ojos del Salado.

Situated in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the otherworldly landscape feels plucked from the pages of a sci-fi novel: stark, surreally beautiful, and brutally unforgiving. At 6,893 meters, the summit is the highest active volcano on Earth, so when BecomingX CEO Paul Gurney set his sights on a Guinness World Record — running the world's highest marathon from its peak — he knew getting there would be half the battle.

Gurney assembled his team of runners, filmmakers, and support crew. He mapped out the journey and timeline. He also hand-picked their arsenal: a versatile fleet of five Ford trucks and SUVs. The team didn’t just use these vehicles as transportation; they became their mobile base camp, trusty trailblazers, and rescue partners.

Setting Out

The adventure didn’t start on the mountain. It started in the airport parking lot. After touching down in Chile with a “comical amount of baggage,” the team’s first order of business was packing the vehicles. Gurney alone had 400 pounds of luggage. The film crew had 45 cases of fragile equipment. The Ford vehicles became pack mules, and somehow, they swallowed every last piece of gear and film equipment.

With the trucks and SUVs all loaded up, their next challenge was fuel, not just for the drive, but for the generators that would power their camp. The fuel requirements for this journey even necessitated doubling back for multiple fill-ups. “Every three to four days, we had to send a vehicle back 200 miles to come with another 300-400 liters of fuel,” Gurney said.

Acclimating Among the Clouds

From there, the convoy began its slow climb. But before the team could even think about the summit, they had to spend two weeks acclimating to the high altitude, rapid temperature swings, and relentless winds. Their first base camp, Laguna Verde, was situated on the shores of a breathtaking lake, 4,340 meters above sea level. At that altitude, inhaling becomes a conscious effort.

While almost every team member had logged time above 5,000 meters before the journey, adaptation was still slow and brutal. The human body needs weeks to produce additional red blood cells and adjust kidney function to carry oxygen more efficiently. Their first sleepless nights were marked with some of the team experiencing pounding headaches, dizziness, and nausea, classic signs of altitude sickness.

Humans need time to adjust. However, the turbocharged engine on the 2025 Ranger® Raptor® has an “oxygen mask” effect. The turbos spin fast to take in the thin mountain air, compressing it with so much force that, at base camp elevation, it creates an atmosphere inside the engine that’s over 2.5 times the pressure of the outside air — allowing the engine to overcome some of the power loss typically seen at high altitudes.

Finding the Path and Pushing the Limits

After playing defense against the mountain’s brutal welcome, the team was ready to go on offense. Their mission? Scout the race route. Yet the roads on Ojos del Salado are more like suggestions, a mix of steep, rocky trails and loose sand. For that, they unleashed their pair of Ranger Raptor models, whose agility and capability helped them continue to push ahead.

Gurney had another audacious goal: Complete the greatest altitude swing ever achieved by a vehicle. While the team pushed their bodies to the limit, Gurney and Aldo Kane, a Ford ambassador and highest marathon runner, tested the might of the Ranger Raptor truck.

At times, the truck’s capabilities surprised them. “Honestly, I thought, ‘There's no way this vehicle can do it,’” Gurney said. “But it just went. It was genuinely incredible.”

In the end, less-than-ideal driving conditions put the record just out of reach. However, Aldo and Gurney still pushed the vehicle to a staggering 5,900 meters. All the while, the vehicle’s control system reacted to the changes in altitude and maintained operation of the hardware within acceptable design limits.

The Final Climb

From the start, Gurney admitted he didn’t know if this marathon would be possible. “I’d always say, ‘We don't know exactly how this is going to go. It's never been done before.’” But even when everything else was a question mark, the team’s trust in the vehicles never wavered due to one simple fact: The engines always turned over. At 4,350 meters, after some of the coldest nights imaginable, every Ford roared to life with the single press of the start button. At even higher altitudes, between 5,600 and 5,900 meters, they continued to start flawlessly on command.

“I’d always say, ‘We don't know exactly how this is going to go. It's never been done before.’”

Paul Gurney, BecomingX CEO

The climb to the start line, the summit of Ojos del Salado, started with the two-hour drive from base camp to Refuge Tejos at 5,820 meters. At 10:30 p.m., the team set off in the Ford convoy, and at 12:30 a.m., they exited the vehicles to temperatures well below freezing and in relentless winds. They set off as a team in some of the toughest conditions imaginable in weather far worse than they’d experienced in the prior two weeks.

After the first two hours of climbing, winds had picked up to over 40 miles per hour (mph), and the temperature had dropped to below negative 20 C (minus 4 F) with windchill. As some team members began to succumb to physical exhaustion and hypoxia, they had to go down — and quickly. They knew they could count on the vehicles to get them back down.

The team began packing people into the warm cabins of the second Ranger Raptor, Expedition Tremor, Expedition Platinum, and Everest, and with the evacuation mission underway, the five remaining runners battled a 60-mph headwind to hike to the 6,893-meter starting line — a lifetime achievement for anyone, but for this team, this was only the start of the main event.

After 11.5 hours, the journey downhill began. With the other four vehicles being used to transport teammates off the mountain, the last remaining Ranger Raptor became the runners’ shepherd. For 16 hours, it crawled alongside them, a rumbling guardian on the side of the world’s highest volcano.

In the end, the team accomplished what they set out to do — and now, they have two Guinness World Records to show for it: Highest Marathon and Highest Marathon Distance Run as a Team. When asked what he learned from this trip, Gurney’s words rang loud and clear: “When you’ve got the right vehicle support, the right backup, the right teams around you, you can do absolutely extraordinary things.”

Diane McGraw is a From the Road contributor.

Always consult the Owner’s Manual before off-road driving, know your terrain and trail difficulty, and use appropriate safety gear.