2025 - A Season to Remember (or forget)

[MarvB]

Damn, the vanishing bull was a dandy Randy great post otherwise by the way- you put your time in both in the field and for the rest of us from the chair/desk.

Best of luck in your 2026 adventures and hope to see you again this spring at the Deschutes Fairgrounds.

 

[elkduds]

@Big Fin , thanks for another great season of Fresh Tracks, the mountains of advocacy and leadership you demonstrate in these forums, and all you do in legislative offices, committee meetings, networking. We'll never know how much you live and breathe this fight. In public land politics, 2025 was much like your hunts: Many opportunities, unaccountable obstacles, some successes, overarching sense of unfinished business. Your vanished bull is a metaphor for unmet expectations and frustration in public lands advocacy. You prepare for the moment, use sound judgement, proceed as experience dictates, and still your quarry eludes you. An epic fail, a monumental humbling? Or instead, just one more adventure with an always uncertain outcome; that can't happen without public lands for wildlife to call home, for hunters to scout and scour, to keep it real in spite of the spastic lurches this life demands? That we have the places and moments to get Western, to strive and sometimes succeed, is only possible while we have public lands in public hands.

When I learn about each new PLT shenanigan, I'm frustrated and angered. I'm also energized and invigorated; because for all the overt and subtle machinations being employed to con us out of our public land heritage, I trust you won't quit defending it. I couldn't quit if I tried. The set of zealots that you rally on behalf of keeping what is ours gives me strength, and more important, hope. Most profound gratitude to you, sir, and to every other HT public lands hero. Next year will be another bumpy ride.