Junkyard Find: 1978 International Harvester Scout II Traveler
Because I think that any highway-legal vehicle made by a farm-equipment manufacturer is interesting, I photograph IHC Scouts when I see them in the junkyards I frequent (and we have not seen a truck in this series since October, so we’re due). Living in Colorado, this happens often.
Here’s a ’78 Scout II Traveler that I spotted in my local U-Pull-&-Pay.
Like most of these trucks, this Scout has some rust in the usual spots.
If you’d like to see all the Scouts I have photographed in wrecking yards, here you go: This ’70, this ’71, this ’72, this ’73, this ’74, this ’74, this ’79 and this ’79.
The last year for the Scout was 1980, so this is almost as new a Scout as you can find. The V8 engines available for ’79 were the IHC-made 304 and the 345, and I’m not enough of a Scout expert to tell them apart at a glance.
The Traveler had a long wheelbase and fiberglass roof and was the top-of-the-line Scout in 1979, listing at $7,657. Compare that to the $7,373 1979 Chevy Blazer.
Complete with rousing disco music, this ad showed how the Scout was the perfect blizzard vehicle. These trucks were (and are) extremely popular in Colorado, but beat-up ones tend to get discarded and replaced with 21st-century SUVs nowadays.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Unlike a lot of vehicles in this series, this one at least looks like someone bought some parts from it. Good.
On 'Bring a Trailer' this is worth real money.