Sportsmen Ride Right (SRR) is a coalition of sportsmen who use motorized vehicles to access public land hunting and fishing. Like hunting and fishing, off-highway vehicle (OHV) use is a legitimate use of public lands that requires responsible management. As motorized users, we know the importance of access to our public land, and recognize that the privilege of motorized access comes with the responsibility to protect vital fish and game habitat and follow the rules of the trail.
Sportsmen Ride Right, the Evolution of an Idea
By Tom Reed & Greg McReynolds
Clark Collins gets the credit. On a warm Wyoming summer day a few years back, Collins, the founder and first executive director of the Blue Ribbon Coalition looked around the room and said: “It’s your guys who are the problem.”
“What do you mean?” someone in the audience asked.
“Sportsmen. Elk hunters. Fishermen. You guys are the ones who are causing a lot of the problems with motorized vehicles,” responded Collins.
For those of us in the room, it was a classic “ah-ha” moment. Collins was speaking to a gathering of sportsmen. More specifically, he was speaking to the employees of Trout Unlimited’s Sportsmen Conservation Project. We looked around at each other and thought, “You know, he’s right.”
Today’s motorized vehicle users come in many stripes, but the majority of the users are us—people who ride our machines into backcountry areas to hunt and fish. Sometimes, these are also the people who go off trail illegally to retrieve downed game, who cut switchbacks, who abuse the privilege. And these “bad apples” give all of us a bad name. Those who ride recreationally aren’t the problem, said Collins, and he was right. People who ride strictly recreationally, who have a passion to ride, are quite often those who join clubs, who do good work on the land, who work hard to educate, inform, and get out to maintain trails.
From that moment back in 2008, we realized that we needed a new idea, a new effort to reach out to our own as Collins advised. We needed to talk to sportsmen about the ethics of riding right, about balance.
Thus was born the idea of Sportsmen Ride Right. Since that time, we’ve met with others like Brian Hawthorne at Blue Ribbon Coalition to get ideas on how to reach our own. We look forward to continued work with BRC and other groups to ensure that our activities are preserved for future generations.
We’ve come to the conclusion that pointing fingers is not going to protect the habitat and access that sportsmen rely on. Much like our predecessors implemented bag limits and set us on the path of the North American model of wildlife conservation, we too must take the high road and start making sure we leave a legacy of reasonable motorized access and quality hunting and fishing.
While BRC has done an excellent job of representing the recreational riders of public lands, it took Collins to bring that point home to us, and provide us with the seed that has become SRR. Until now, no one has represented the motorized sportsman, the person who rides their machine to access hunting or fishing. Not BRC, nor any other group on a national level. Until now.
Sportsmen are focused on quality experiences, quality animals and the ability to have long, over-the counter seasons, while maintaining access to that quality.
For sportsmen, motorized access is a means to an end. And that mentality has led many of us to be land abusers instead of stewards.
It’s all the rage to blame our deficiencies in managing motorized recreation on a few rogue users, the “bad apples.” The truth though, is that we are all culpable. When we head onto public lands in a motorized vehicle, it doesn’t matter if that vehicle is an all-terrain vehicle, a one-ton pickup or a Subaru; we have to recognize that at some level we are all motorized users and we all have an impact.
So, like hunters and anglers have always done, we are taking charge of our own. We have nothing to hide and no hidden agenda – just a simple mission; to get the entire sporting community to embrace and practice compliant OHV use on public lands. Our goals are simple and common sense, like visible identification on all motorized vehicles on public land, and education ethics targeted specifically at sportsmen. We’ll work hand-in-glove with renowned organizations like Tread Lightly! and state and federal wildlife agencies. Sportsmen came up with ideas like catch-and-release, poaching hotlines, stamps to fund habitat and taxes on ammunition for habitat funding. Moreover, sportsmen have always funded nearly every dime that goes into state wildlife agencies.
We refuse to simply blame, criticize, shout and argue without coming up with solutions. Solutions that start with our own and partnerships that form and back those solutions. That’s what SRR is all about.
