A Ski Rack for the Jeep

Last month I bought my wife a new Jeep Wrangler. The first addition is getting a ski rack for it since there is snow falling in the mountains around my house. Unfortunately the Jeep Wrangler is a tough car to outfit with a ski rack. You can mount one on the hard top but that involves drilling holes. Besides we don't yet have a hard top as ours came with a soft top.

I didn't want to wait for one to arrive by mail and so I headed to the local ski shop. Both Thule and Yakima make ski racks meant to mount on bike carriers that attach to trailer hitches. We wanted a ski rack that attaches to our spare tire. The ski shop just had ski racks for the top of a car. Next we headed to REI. REI had the Thule racks and we were able see that we needed to get their rack for skis that attaches to a bike rack. We also saw that they have a bike rack that attaches to a spare tire and is compatible with the ski rack we need. Unfortunately the combo was rather expensive at $465 for both.

Being a computer expert and knowing that you can always get a better price online, I came home with my wife and we fired up the computer. Guess what? Everyone wanted $465 for the combo. I couldn't believe that a better deal didn't exist on the Internet. In the end, my wife and I headed down to REI and made the purchase. As I am an REI member, I was able to use my 20% discount on a single item. I used it on the more expensive piece of the 2-part rack. That means the local store had the better price than the Internet.

We brought everything home and looked at putting it together. In the end, we decided that the best option for our ski rack was actually to mount it to a trailer hitch bike rack we already own. Since we bought both pieces from a local shop, we can take back the piece we don't need, save ourselves $200, and not have to pay shipping costs. Sometimes it pays to shop at a local store instead of trying to buy everything online.