Hello all! I hope this update finds you all in great health and you are enjoying the summer to its full potential. I recently got back from attending the district meetings and still disappointed in the attendance. I know we can do better and with better attendance, we can work together to make this association better and work more efficiently to keep public lands open for all of us to enjoy! How can I motivate you to attend the district meetings? Email me: josh@cal4wheel.com

I was unable to attend the North District meeting in person; however, I attended online and had a great time catching up with everyone who attended in the north. Thank you, Jim Bramham, for leading a great meeting. We discussed the upcoming Sierra Trek and the immense amount of work to be done to get everyone safely up the road and to Meadow Lake. like some meetings, there just isn’t a whole lot to talk about and we were all done around lunch time.

The next meeting I attended was the South District meeting in person. Little bit of a drive but was nice to see Don Rybarczyk lead his first full meeting with newly elected Membership Chair Danette Starksen. Bonnie Ferguson was under the weather and did not attend in person but battled technology and attended via Zoom. The location was great, our old room at Bass Pro Shops. Again, great to see everyone and catch up since the last time. We discussed Operation Desert Fun and its new location and a potential new run in the south – “Mohave Trek”. There will be some more about this later

I attended the Central District meeting in person in Santa Maria. I left my house at 3AM and made it there just in time for the meeting to start at the Santa Maria Gun Club. An amazing place to have a meeting other than the lack of internet but great weather and dare I say best food I have had at a district meeting provided by the Santa Maria 4-Wheelers. Thank you for the great hospitality from the Central District! Somehow, I got talked into leading a run to Mirror Lake for the High Sierra Poker Run on Labor Day weekend, so, if for nothing else than to see me mess that up, you should register today! https://cal4wheel.com/high-sierra-poker-run

We have two very important events coming up here in the association: Sierra Trek and High Sierra Poker Run. Both events are looking for raffle prizes and I’m hoping by telling you about that in my update, it will motivate you to go look through your garage/shop and find stuff that you won’t use or would like to pay it forward and donate it to either event! If you have a raffle prize and would like to donate it to either event, please feel free to reach out to me and I’ll get you in contact with the right person.

Going to keep this one short this time, I have to finish packing for Sierra Trek and the following board meeting coming up the week after (who scheduled that?). Please be safe out there and I look forward to seeing all of you at Sierra Trek and the hard work the countless volunteers have put forth to make this happen! Thank you John and Rene Allen for all your hard work and thank you to all the masses of volunteers working tirelessly behind the scenes to make this event happen!

In closing, as I’m writing this letter, I just found out that former Cal4Wheel President, former Natural Resource Consultant, and my friend Jeff Blewett lost his daughter yesterday. Please keep Jeff and his family in your thoughts as they traverse this horrible situation.

‘Til the next update…