Nicole Johnson right at home in monster truck

When Nicole Johnson and her husband, Frank, moved to Las Vegas in 1996, they didn’t see this becoming their permanent home.

The city happened to sit conveniently between her hometown in Southern California and Provo, Utah, where Johnson had graduated from Brigham Young.

Yet here she is so many years later, Johnson and her family — having grown to four with two teenage sons — are entrenched in Las Vegas.

“We never thought in a million years that we would stay here this long, but we made it our home, and now all our family in California has moved up here,” Johnson said. “We were the first ones. Pioneers, I guess.”

Life can be like, taking unexpected turns, which describes her job as a monster truck driver and how she got to that point.

So Johnson will be at Sam Boyd Stadium on Thursday through Saturday for the Monster Jam World Finals, one of the top names in a sport she didn’t expect to be part of and in a place she didn’t think would become her adopted city.

Johnson, 41, certainly didn’t think she would be a monster truck attraction when she and Frank used to spend much of their free time camping and taking their 1972 Toyota Land Cruiser off road. Those trips were for fun.

But Frank began in 2000 to compete in rock crawling, an extreme form of off-road racing because of the rough terrain.

Johnson was the mother to a newborn and a toddler, and said she “was more of a cheerleader on the sidelines at the time.”

The cheerleading gig ended in 2004 when someone asked Johnson if she would be interested in competing in an all-women’s event.

That event?

The ProRock Women’s National Championships.

Oh, and she won.

“It was like getting bit by the competition bug,” Johnson said. “After that event, we dabbled in it a little bit, and by about the year 2007, we got real serious with it.”

That’s when she and Frank formed Johnson Motorsports and found enough success that it got the attention of the History Channel in 2008. The network featured Johnson in a “Modern Marvels” episode.

Then in 2010 came another major change in her career when Johnson met monster truck legend Dennis Anderson at the SEMA Show in Las Vegas.

“When I met him, I was starstruck,” Johnson said. “He was with his grown son, who also drives. As soon as I said my name, his son goes, ‘You’re that rock crawler.’

“And so they encouraged me to come drive a monster truck.”

She joined Monster Jam in January 2011 and, like in rock crawling, found immediate success. Johnson won nine times to break the tour’s rookie and female records, and she was named the Monster Jam Rising Star Award.

“I think rock crawling prepared me in a really good way because we were driving on some of the most extreme terrain in the world, and we were at crazy side-hill angles and hill climbs and gnarly dropoffs,” she said.

A fan favorite in her Scooby-Doo monster truck, Johnson takes seriously her role as a rare female in the sport.

“I feel like I am competitive against the guys,” she said. “It’s not like I’m out there winning every event, but I am trying to show women and girls that you can be with these big boys. I feel like in some of the areas I have the most success in is truly connecting with the fans more than it is winning competitions.

“I think more than anything this has allowed me a platform that I feel I have a purpose. The bigger purpose in my life is probably to help some little girl who didn’t think they could do something or felt intimidated to do something.”

It’s a comfortable setting for Johnson, and a familiar one.

She and Frank own a side business, Marxman Precision Arms, a Las Vegas gun shop.

“I’m very much drenched in a man’s world,” Johnson said.

Contact Mark Anderson at manderson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2914. Follow him on Twitter: @markanderson65