Junkyard Find: 1978 International Harvester Scout II Traveler

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

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
Murilee Martin

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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  • ToolGuy This is the kind of thing you get when you give people faster internet.
  • ToolGuy North America is already the greatest country on the planet, and I have learned to be careful about what I wish for in terms of making changes. I mean, if Greenland wants to buy JDM vehicles, isn't that for the Danes to decide?
  • ToolGuy Once again my home did not catch on fire and my fire extinguisher(s) stayed in the closet, unused. I guess I threw my money away on fire extinguishers.(And by fire extinguishers I mean nuclear missiles.)
  • Carson D The UAW has succeeded in organizing a US VW plant before. There's a reason they don't teach history in the schools any longer. People wouldn't make the same mistakes.
  • B-BodyBuick84 Mitsubishi Pajero Sport of course, a 7 seater, 2.4 turbo-diesel I4 BOF SUV with Super-Select 4WD, centre and rear locking diffs standard of course.
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