Junkyard Gem: 1987 Subaru GL 4WD Wagon with 324k miles

When I'm walking the rows of a car graveyard in search of historically significant subjects for this series, a Toyota or Honda needs at least 400,000 miles showing on the odometer for me to consider photographing it based on final mileage alone; discarded Accords and Previas with better than 300k miles are a dime a dozen. With Subaru, however, it's another story; even in Subie-centric Colorado, I don't run across many that drove past the magical 299,999-mile mark. Today we've got one that accomplished that feat, found in rough shape in a Denver self-service yard.

Yes, 324,780.5 miles traveled during its three-plus decades on the road. That makes this car #2 in the Murilee Martin Junkyard Subaru Odometer Hall of Fame, after a 1998 Legacy Outback wagon with 341,418 miles and before a 1993 Impreza wagon with 319,554 miles (plus a 311,342-mile 1997 Legacy sedan I haven't written up yet). Keep in mind that Subaru only began using six-digit odometers here in 1981 (in 1993 for the Justy), and that electronic odometers that are difficult to boot up in the junkyard took over the U.S.-market Subaru world in 2000, so I may have walked right by some half-million-mile Pleiades-badged vehicles.

Subarus of the 1980s weren't as sturdy as they are today, in my opinion, but I think the main reason their owners don't keep them going when expensive things break is that they tend to upgrade to a bigger and more powerful 21st century Subaru rather than pay for a transmission or head gasket job on their beloved-but-decades-old cars. It's something of an unofficial state law that Colorado residents must own at least one Subaru (I have two, a '96 Sambar and an '04 Outback wagon).

Though Subaru never used the Leone name on its North American products, that's what we have here. The first Leones showed up in the United States in 1972, going through several generations until the final ones were sold here as 1994 models.

For most of the 1970s and all of the 1980s, the U.S.-market Leone was officially called simply, «the Subaru,» with the exception of the Leone-based BRAT pickup. The trim-level designations thus ended up being used as de facto model names for these cars; most Subaru aficionados