What Really Irks Me About The Outdoors

I can probably name a few things that really tees me off about enjoying the outdoors, whether it be on my dirt bike, in my 4x4 or on foot trying to find that hole where the trout are hanging out. It could be the trash or the rude folks trying to hog all of nature's glory for themselves, usually city slickers.

Those things though don't get me wound up like I get when I get to perusing different publications and websites devoted to us. Now I better add a disclaimer right now that I am not speaking of the tofu eating, granola chomping tree huggers; but I speak about those of us that head to the hills to either throw a line in the water or attempt that one trail that is flat nasty.

What I speak of is the cavern of separation I see between the hunters and fisherman and the motorized off road crowd. Just a few weeks ago, I sat down in my favorite reading chair (yeah, I'm sure someone wants to really know that I do most of my reading on my throne of doom) and opened up one of my monthly magazines. This particular magazine is devoted to the hunting and fishing segment of society and I only get it just in case they may have something interesting directed to my trout fishing self. I flipped through the pages and went to the Letters section and low and behold, what do I find but a couple of letters blasting the magazine for publishing a story about traveling the Alaskan outback on ATVs. So a few days later, I pulled out that particular issue and scanned through the article in question. I was quite amazed that the accusations that these two particular letter writers had made, I could not find.

I am always up for reading about some goofball trashing the land in his choice of motorized conveyance, and I usually get pretty pissed off about it. This time around though, I was irked at a certain segment of the hunting/fishing community.

Throughout my travels, I have always found offroaders that partake in hunting and fishing. And vice versa. A lot of hunters tend to choose a 4x4 for reasons I should not have to talk about, and one could say that a lot of hunters have wandered onto offroad tech forums looking for advice on better offroad performance. Same thing goes for the fishing crowd. The true fisherman knows that a great day of fishing is finding a piece of water that very rarely gets touched. That fisherman needs to have a piece of equipment that can get him there.

Throughout the years, the tree huggers have targeted the offroad community. Trails have been shut down and certain areas have become totally anal about the image to protect the trail from shut down. There is good reason for that unfortunately. Because of a few bad apples. Every group has them.

Offroaders, hunters and the fishing community though share something in common, and that is possessing access to get to where we want to go. There are a hundred groups looking out for each community's best interests, but when it comes right down to it, our three little groups are have the same goal and as of right now, these groups are split apart.

Divide and conquer, eh? Well guess what? Until these three groups come together and unite to fight for their rights as one, then the war is lost.