Check Out This Wicked Articat-Powered Hill Climb Dirt Bike!

It took me a few minutes of digging around through the rest of the Mc Kivich YouTube channel to figure out exactly what I was looking at, but once I got my head wrapped around what’s going on, I really took a liking got this little project.

Over three years in the making, this dirt bike was literally hand-built to tackle the world of Hill Climbing! We’ve seen some other forms of hill climbs lately, notably a few SUV’s built to take on the insane sand dune climbs in the Middle East, but none of those builds took this amount of time or dedication, nor were they custom built from the ground up by hand, instead starting live as a production SUV and transformed into hill climbers.

This bike started life as a pair of wheels and a pile of tubing, taking shape as time, funding and motivation allowed. With decades of experience in the hill climbing community, Mc Kivich knew what he wanted from this bike and how he thought it best to bring his vision to life, and the result is the ridiculous setup you see here.

The centerpiece of the build is the badass 1,000cc two-stroke Articat snowmobile engine that cranks out 160 horsepower and sounds like it’s ready to tear a seam into the side of the earth with every blip of the throttle.

While this is just an impromptu test session and the bike still needs a little tweaking on the tune to be competition ready, you can tell this is going to be a wicked ride once it’s dialed in. Just watch as the rider kicks up a huge rooster tail of dust and gravel with the slightest twist of the throttle, that snappy two-stroke power band singing to the hill climb gods above and letting the competition know what they’re going to be contending with once the project is complete. The plan is to compete at the Great American Hill Climb in Billings, Montana this coming weekend, if all goes well. Maybe we’ll have some more footage of this thing in action soon!