Are you in a 4wd club? | 4WDTalk - Overlanding and offroad Forum
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Are you in a 4wd club?

Derral Fiske

Derral Fiske

Well-known member
We don't have any around here and a buddy gave me the idea of starting one. If you are in one, how often are you meeting up? And do you need to have people sign wavers of liability?
 
I have been in clubs since the mid 80's. People come and go so, the size varies. I like a group of at least 20 people. Right now I think were about 25. If your starting a group, its very important to have meetings or gatherings every month at the exact same date/time. If your chaotic, you lose people and your back to the beginning. You also need at least one trip every month. This can be a day run or over night. Most people cannot do Friday to Monday because they work. The same goes for mid week trips.
If you start this, you will be organizing and leading runs. Once you get a good group together its easy to get others to lead runs. Until then, its probably going to be just you.

Over my life I've been in several groups. A couple were great but we went diffrent directions over time and it fell apart. A few I didn't mesh with the people and moved on. My current group is great. You will encounter people who say clubs or groups suck. They didn't mesh with the group and most likely gave up. Its also possible they got into several groups and the groups sucked. Maybe its just them, who knows.

The group before my current group was actually pretty good. The guy who was in charge had no clue how to organize and had never actually done any off roading. He also didn't like having meetings. The trips were a mess. Myself and another guy tried to help but he didn't want help. I guess he felt we were trying to take control of his group. The group fell apart after about a year.

Your question about liability is tricky. Are you collecting money? One word there, don't. Your just some guys who want to go camping and you let people tag along.
If you need to offset some costs for say a campground, you split the fee between everyone. Eventually people will donate to the group to offset any cost involved. At this time, my current group doesn't have any.
Rate your trips by skill. Most people just want to go camping remotely.
At your meetings, talk to new people and see if they have any experience. Never take someone on a hard trip who has never seen dirt. If you do, your asking for trouble. Then theirs the "Skilled" guys. If they whine about the trip not being hard enough, do you have people to go on hard trips? if not, they will eventually go away.
Do not allow any drinking or drugs on the trail. Your call about camp.
The more you allow, the more you have to watch for liability. Its not hard to weed out "that guy". In my life, I've only encountered a couple and they normally go away.

Starting your own is a bit of work but is also very rewarding. You need a way to communicate to everyone. Before internet, I was in charge of the monthly news letters. Now having a place to chat or post up coming and last min trips is essential. Face book kinda works but the cascading text makes it hard to do anything but chat. Web space is pretty cheap. A club web site with a section to post diffrent trips is the best for organization. Some web sites will give you a spot for your club for free.

Not wanting to turn this into another of my 10 page reports, I'll stop here.
I think you should do it if you have the time. The worst is the club breaks up and you end up with one or two more friends.
 
Years ago I was, but we were meeting up once a month, sometimes we all would just hang out in parking lot because it was so late in the day when everyone arrived, so it turned out every other month we actually went out. Other times it was like a Cars and Coffee meet.
 
I was for a brief time, but stopped going because we never did anything fun. We would drive to location and people would just sit around and talk, nothing really fun. So now I just head out solo or with a couple of close friends.
 
I joined one a few years ago, but stopped going because the person running it was always late and then had this deva attitude. Now there is a Meetup group I head out with from time to time. But really though, I'm a solo person and head out alone most of the time.
 
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