Navigating Off-Road Adventures with Mathew Giltner in Episode 282

In this episode of "Conversations with Big Rich," host Rich Klein sits down with Mathew Giltner, the executive director of the Nevada Off-Road Association. Mathew shares his fascinating journey from upstate New York to Nevada, detailing his diverse experiences in the Coast Guard, aviation, and the off-road industry. Listen in as they explore the importance of community, the challenges of land access, and the future of off-road recreation.

Mathew's Background:

•  Grew up in New York, enjoying snowmobiling and outdoor activities
• Served 20 years in the Coast Guard, gaining skills in navigation and rescue mission planning.
• Transitioned into aviation, racing airplanes, and flying business jets

Off-Road Advocacy:

• Role at the Nevada Off-Road Association, focusing on multi-use land access.
• Challenges with Bureau of Land Management (BLM) resource management plans.
• Collaboration with stakeholders to ensure harmonious use of public lands.

 Community and Volunteerism:

• The declining trend in volunteerism and its impact on recreation.
• Importance of fostering relationships between clubs and government agencies.

Exciting Projects:

•  Battleborn Trail System: A new initiative to promote rural Nevada through off-road trails. 
• Upcoming Nevada Off-Road Summit in Elko, a platform for education and collaboration.

Mathew emphasizes the value of community engagement and responsible recreation to preserve access to Nevada's beautiful landscapes. His work ensures that future generations can enjoy the same trails and adventures.

Transcript

[00:00:05.100] 

Welcome to Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview-style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the off-road industry. Being involved, like all of my guests are, is a lifestyle, not just a job. I talk to past, present, and future legends, as well as business owners, employees, media, and land use warriors, men and women who have found their way into this exciting and addictive lifestyle we call off-road. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active and off-road. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call off-road.

[00:00:46.460] 

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[00:01:12.500] - Big Rich Klein

My guest this week is the executive director for the Nevada Off-Road Association. His name is Matthew Giltner. Matthew started off life in upstate New York, riding snowmobiles, kayaking, being a kid, went into the Coast Guard, spent 20 years there, started flying and racing airplanes and becoming a pilot, and then moved to Nevada, from upstate New York to Nevada. And now, as an off-road enthusiast, helping others get through the permitting process and to deal with BLM and other agencies. Hello, Matthew Giltner. Thank you so much for agreeing to be my guest today, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

[00:02:02.220] - Mathew Giltner

Hey, Rich. I really appreciate you reaching out. Kind of happenstance. I'm going to guess that you tagged us in after we registered for the ORMHOF gala. Our group is really excited to go down, so it's a cool gig. It gets everybody out. Well, for something that I personally think is an important function. So we're bringing people in from all around the West to set our table, and we're pretty excited about it.

[00:02:27.600] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. I thank you for for doing that. I didn't even know that, actually. No kidding. I know that one of your compatriots there with the Nevada Off-Road Association is Laura Butcher, and I know that they always attend. And so I'm glad to hear that the whole group will be attending. That's great.

[00:02:48.920] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah, we're excited about it. As you know, off-road always has a stigma to it, but it doesn't need to. And it's fun to have everybody get together, act like adults as much as we in the off-road community can, and that's part of good cause.

[00:03:05.320] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly. And it's a heck of an event, that's for sure.

[00:03:09.480] - Mathew Giltner

I've not been, so I'm excited.

[00:03:11.620] - Big Rich Klein

So let's start off with the first easy question, and that is, where were you born and raised?

[00:03:18.500] - Mathew Giltner

So I always like this question when I get interviewed, because it reminds me of the Steve Martin movement, The Jerk. I was born in the center of a circle. I was actually born in I'm generally raised in central New York State, not far from Cooperstown, Finger Lakes area, which is pretty fun because when someone asks where you're from and you say New York, usually the next thing is, A, you don't have an accent, or B, have you ever seen a tree? I'm like, Yeah, I have. Going way back, I was thinking about this this morning. I think I started from off road, even as a child, as a young teen. Gerald Ford was President. It tells you how long I've been out, and we were snowmobilers. Nevada does have a certain amount of snowmobiling, but nowhere near as much as I would like, the type of snowmobiling that I prefer, rather. So we wound up out here and I enjoy playing in the dirt a whole heck of a lot, so we keep doing it.

[00:04:22.140] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. And so at what age did you move from the East Coast to the West Coast?

[00:04:29.400] - Mathew Giltner

I Well, first thing is first. That's the other one. People are like, Oh, you're from New York? I'm like, Yeah. Well, did you move out here to be with family? Like, No, my family is on the East Coast. That's why I'm out here. But the truth is, I Right after high school or thereabouts, I enlisted in the US Coast Guard and did a couple of decades with them. When it was all said and done, needed to decide where I wanted to live. Took a few years, but ultimately, I've been coming out here to Reno. Both my wife and I are pilots, or have been pilots for years, and we used to race airplanes for a hobby, and we would come out here to the Reno National Championship Air Races every couple of years or thereabouts. And the best part of this entire story is we were sitting in a bar, I know, hard to believe. And she said, If you could live anywhere, where would it be? I said, Nevada. And she said, Let's move. That was 100 % of the conversation. I've been out here for more than 10 years now now, and there's not a single regret to be found.

[00:05:34.320] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. Those early years, going to school in New York, what was the area that you grew up in? I mean, lots of trees, lots of farmland. What was your activities like? I mean, besides school.

[00:05:56.580] - Mathew Giltner

Well, yeah. So it's interesting because I grew up in a family that, I would say, is not necessarily the outdoorsy type, for lack of a more generic way to phrase it. But my dad was a member of the local sportsman's Rod and Gun Club. We would snowmobile there. There's a big old barn. We'd leave our equipment up there. For anybody listening to this today, there's a snowmobil. We're talking like moto skis and snowmobiles made by Montgomery Awards of all places, if you can imagine that. And it was all trail riding. And ultimately, after my time with the military, ended up back there for a few years. And it was really nice because we could ride from our house, which was right on the outskirts of the community, from our house, maybe straight line to the Pennsylvania border on the south of 50-ish miles. But we could ride from there all the way to Canada on maintained trails that are maintained by the clubs. And that's That, I think, is probably one of the things that I try and carry with me now as I work with so many different clubs throughout the state of Nevada and some of the national groups as well.

[00:07:10.220] - Mathew Giltner

If it's not for the volunteers that step up to host your poker run or do a desert cleanup or things like that, we lose all this stuff. And it's hard in today's environment because everybody wants to do everything on Instagram, Facebook or what have you and not actually join. And numbers are down for volunteers. So we just try and make it as attractive as possible because our work as volunteers, as we recruit volunteers, is what keeps our land open for everybody. So it's hard, sometimes frustrating, but it's definitely a valuable mission.

[00:07:46.080] - Big Rich Klein

As an off-road event promoter, I understand the difficulty in getting volunteers.

[00:07:52.380] - Mathew Giltner

Oh, I imagine. I imagine. I volunteered here with the race community, Best in the  Desert, Legacy, Snore, rather, to a certain extent, more of an admin side there on some projects they have going on. Valley Off-Road Racing, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I'm working a race for them this weekend.

[00:08:14.940] - Big Rich Klein

Nice. Yeah, it's after 25 years of putting on events, when we first started the rock crawling events in the late '90s, early 2000s, all the enthusiasts were all about trying to help. Nowadays, it's much more difficult because all those enthusiasts are trying to spend as much time by themselves or with their small group wheeling anyway. So they lost interest in that.

[00:08:49.320] - Mathew Giltner

That's true. And this is not a phenomenon limited to off-road recreation. You take a look at things even like the Boy Scouts, Little League, Church groups, Elks, Rotary, and all those. All those type of groups have a very, very low percentage in membership compared to, say, 30 years. People just aren't joining. I think that's a detriment. I also think that's why we, in the motorized community, have a problem with bad behavior, because I learned how to snowmobile from Old Man Nasser. He was a member of our club. Now what happens is their entire training revolves swipes around swipping a credit card at the power sports dealer. It's like, You're killing us, man. You're killing us.

[00:09:37.080] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, they're not taught the etiquette from the last generation.

[00:09:41.060] - Mathew Giltner

No. Not at all.

[00:09:42.500] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. That's one of the problems with the side-by-side community. Oh, yeah. More so than the Jeep community, although we're seeing it in a lot of the new Jeepers as well. They go out and buy a vehicle, and they go out and rip around, especially the side-by-side, because all the commercials are going through the water fast, burning around a burn, acting like their little racers.

[00:10:13.720] - Mathew Giltner

I led a ride for our local club, I don't know, two or three weeks ago, and it's on a Forest Service road that has about a half a dozen creek crossings. We had some new riders with us. So I pointed out that make sure when you're going through the water in your side by side, you go as fast as possible. They all did it at least once. Well, let me... I'm sorry to derail a little bit here. But so with the deep community and the Overlanders in general, they seem to be a little bit more club-oriented, more socially-oriented, I would think, than the power sports side. Is that something that you're seeing, too, or is that just my imagination?

[00:11:03.000] - Big Rich Klein

No, I agree, at least in smaller groups. There's very few that go out by themselves or just one or two. We see it on the Rubicon. The old timers go out by themselves. I'm one of those that have a tendency to do that. I wheel a lot alone. But that comes from everything that I've done over the years, setting up race courses and finding rock formations and doing that stuff. I'm always exploring, and it's hard to get somebody to go out for two, three, four days in a row. So the club, I don't know if it's so much as a organized club, but I see groups of individuals where you'll have seven, eight to 10 plus vehicles together when they're Jeeps or the Broncos, they want to be with like people. You won't find very many groups where you've got the brand Jeeps, the JLs or the JTs, and a CJ7 with them. Occasionally, you see that, but it's not real common. You see a lot of the Broncos together. And same thing with the overlanding. The guys with the rooftop tents are all together, as opposed to the guys with the trailers.

[00:12:23.140] - Mathew Giltner

Roof top tent. To me, it sounds like a thrilling adventure.

[00:12:28.360] - Big Rich Klein

Well, I've owned a rooftop tent for quite a while. First, it was on a trailer, and then we sold the trailer and bought a different rooftop tent, a hard shell. And primarily it's for when the grandkids are with us.

[00:12:40.640] - Mathew Giltner

Oh, there you go.

[00:12:41.540] - Big Rich Klein

But, occasionally, we use it as well, especially when we're on the rebel rally or if we're out pre-running an area that I want to go into, to lead a group in or something like that. But I try not to use the rooftop tent much because going up and down the ladder three times a night to satisfy my bladder can be overwhelming at times.

[00:13:10.800] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah, so you mentioned the Rebell Rally. That's one of the things I'm fascinated by. My time in the Coast Guard, I was primarily a navigator and a mission planner. And to me, I'm basically like this gigantic map nerd. So I see that event as probably one of the cooler things that's out there, but I'm a dude, so I can't go.

[00:13:31.760] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. Well, eventually, there may be something along the same lines for the guys to enjoy as well. And I think that... I mean, it's been discussed, and for all 10 years of the... We're coming up on the 10th year, the 10th running of the rebel. From day one, I suggested to Emily that the guys after the first year were like, Oh, what are you afraid that we're just going to go out there and beat the women? Well, no, not really, because these women are really good at numbers. And they take this stuff really serious. And the guys that think they're racers and think that this is a racing rally are going to be completely overwhelmed when they have to plot everything on a map using a pencil and compass and laying out the points. If they haven't had the experience of doing that, whether nautically or in the military somewhere, they're going to It's not that easy. I mean, I learned it in scouting and jumped back into it 50 years later, or 40 some years later, and was like, Oh, my God, this is a lot more difficult than what I did in scouting.

[00:14:59.280] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah, well, nowadays everything's in your pocket anyway on a phone. It's like, I got a GPS. You're like, oh. Yeah. You're not going to read the trail, read the trail.

[00:15:07.580] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly. And this has nothing to do with GPS. I know. As a staff member, I get GPS. I get to go set out and put out the markers, that stuff, and pick the markers up. And I don't have to plot my way to them, which is good. That's awesome. I'd be out there a lot longer than these ladies. But what we thought about is taking the the the rebel in one direction. And the rebel is, it's really done nicely. I mean, they've got showers and toilets and big tents for the, for for the meetings and the group stuff, and Michelin chef and crew.

[00:15:54.460] - Mathew Giltner

I'm glad to see that they're ruffing it when they're not out on the course.

[00:15:57.880] - Big Rich Klein

Right. They still have They've got to set up their own tents. They still got to break down their own stuff. But the thing is, is that with the men's run, is run the women one direction, and at the end, the men the other way, and make them do all freeze-dried food, and to cook their own stuff, and use wag bags, and wet wipes, and take away all the luxuries, but make them run the course backwards, and then see how these guys like it, because the women would do it.

[00:16:34.520] - Mathew Giltner

I always laughed at my idea of ruffing it, is not sleeping in a tent, it's staying in a hotel that has sketchy WiFi.

[00:16:42.340] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, we used to call it My ruffing it is going to a motel 6. Yeah.

[00:16:51.060] - Mathew Giltner

Well, even I'm above a motel 6.

[00:16:54.520] - Big Rich Klein

So anyway, let's get back into your history, what student were you?

[00:17:04.300] - Mathew Giltner

I mean, it's hard to say. I'm one of these people who is a lifelong learner, as My team at Nevada Off-Roads says, From the Book of Matthew is this incredibly weird data point that we had forgotten about. So school for me was never a challenge. It's probably the right way to put it. The best part about it for me was once I enlisted the veterans and the programs that were available, VA, what have you, paid for me to go through college and everything else. When you're a sailor and you're out to see for a month or two at a time, whatever the case may be. You got a lot of time on your hands, so there's a lot of time to read and study and fulfill those criteria, which is nice. The downside is that when I got out and when I retired out of the Coast Guard, I was qualified to do exactly three things. One of them was teach, the other was to fly airplanes, and the other was to drive a tugboat. I didn't want to do any of the three. I actually ended up flying I've been a business jets for a few years, which is nifty to a certain extent, but after a while, you realize you're just driving the bus.

[00:18:24.320] - Mathew Giltner

The education part has never been a challenge for me. I know that I am fortunate that my brain works that way because not everybody does.

[00:18:32.200] - Big Rich Klein

True. Did you play sports or anything through school?

[00:18:38.960] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah. So football, track, stuff like that. It was interesting in that my... This is a great story. So my grandfather, my father, everybody's super athletes. And I'm, again, I'm just average on pretty much any of that type of stuff. But the funniest part was my My brother was offered a full ride scholarship at something ridiculous, like 12 schools for baseball and for football. But the best one ever was when the football, sorry, the baseball coach from Annapolis called him and said, Hey, would you like to come play baseball for me at Annapolis? And my brother said, Do I need to join the Navy? And the coach goes, Yeah, that's how it works. So my brother goes, No, thank you. So But we're a family of overachievers or underachievers, depending on your point of view. My oldest brother, PhD. My sister is an attorney. My other brother is a heart surgeon, and I retired at 38. I won.

[00:19:49.940] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Exactly. And where did you serve in the Coast Guard?

[00:19:57.760] - Mathew Giltner

I was forced, forced America to be stationed in Key West, Florida for three years. But I did it for you. I did it for you. But I was a news Coast guy, so I had about six years at sea on different ships or cutters, because Coast Guard does cutters, not ships. Yeah, so I did a couple of ice breakers. I was executive officer of a patrol boat. Also, what's called a medium endurance cutter that would do it, narcotic stuff. That's when I was in Key West. And a lot of that time was sitting off of offshore, catching bad guys, smuggling drugs when that was still illegal before you could go to the dispensary and buy them now. However, I understand I can go to the dispensary now and get a 10 % discount as a veteran, which is remarkably funny for me because I used to throw those people in jail for smuggling marijuana. But anyway, so with all that, and then we also we did a lot of stuff down right off the Coast of South America, a lot of moving people in and out of countries that we're not supposed to admit that we were moving people out of countries.

[00:21:07.400] - Mathew Giltner

So we're just weird stuff like that to see. And then when I came ashore, I became a rescue mission planner. I ran a lot of... I mean, 14 years, so we can do the math on that with probably 700 missions a year. It adds up. But I mean, if you've seen the movie The Perfect Storm with George Clooney or Marky Mark or whoever it is, that was one of the missions. That's the type of stuff that we ran. So it becomes a very dynamic thing. And decisions that you make have to be made instantaneously and backed up with the rest of your team. And these are the things that I carry forward now. And what I find fascinating about it is that this is why I generally get jacked up about much of anything. Because in the great scheme of things, if Mayor Jones is a little reluctant to let us build a staging area for OHV and really pushes back, you put it on that scale of how important is this guy being angry at me compared to the life experiences that got me where I am now. So it's the metaphor of hitting snooze on the smoke detector.

[00:22:25.180] - Mathew Giltner

We got time. We'll fix it.

[00:22:28.600] - Big Rich Klein

Right. That's That makes sense. I had a friend that was stationed with the Coast Guard in San Francisco Bay Area, and he was the guy that hung from the cable out of a helicopter doing cliff rescues and sea rescues with sinking ships and people that were stupid and get stuck on the cliffs of the Pacific Coast.

[00:22:57.260] - Mathew Giltner

You hear this a lot. It's like, Oh, it must have been really exciting. You train for it, you train for it, you train for it. So when you actually have to do it, it's really not quite as bad as everyone would think. And in times of stress, you revert your training. So here I am, decades later from that first time walking into boot camp. But some of those values are lifelong, and a lot of the training is lifelong. I'm also a big proponent of people stepping up to serve others. But either way, yeah. So it's just a matter of everybody learns something every day. You may not notice it, but you do. And the important thing is taking those nuggets of knowledge or wisdom or experience and and keep them the good ones and keeping those with you because you're going to need them in the future. You always do.

[00:23:50.740] - Big Rich Klein

Right. So let's talk about airplanes. You mentioned the airplane racing. How How did you get into flying?

[00:24:02.000] - Mathew Giltner

This is actually another one of those... No kidding. So my grandfather died probably first part of the 1990s, I would guess. '93, '94, somewhere in that area. And we held a memorial service, and when my dad's cousin, and someone can help me out on this, I guess that's my second cousin or something or whatever. But either my dad's cousin came up for the memorial service in a bright red, 1939 Beachcraft Stagger Wing. Wow. Google that image. It's an amazing airplane. So it's got a big old Pratt and Whitney radio engine on the front. It's a cabin biplane that you can fit five people inside of. So after the service, we drove him up to the airport. And as he took off, I like to tell the story in such a way that his wheels turned one revolution on the on the asphalt before he was in the air, tucked the wheels away, slept his wings left, right to wave goodbye, and then pealed off. It was just the most elegant, coolest-looking airplane that you can see flying. And it's like, we need to go learn to fly. So my wife and I both went to our local airport.

[00:25:19.870] - Mathew Giltner

I was still on active duty at the time. Learned to fly took me less than two months, which is unusual, only because I wasn't working a schedule where I could have three or four flight lessons in a week. You don't lose what you learned in the last session. Right. Bought our first airplane, boy, I think four or five months later. May, not even that long, I don't even remember. And then a friend of ours said, he goes, I'm going to cost you more money than anybody you've ever met in your entire life. And he's pretty much right. So we started flying. We did our first airplane race from Gallup, New Mexico to, I want to say Charlotte, North Carolina. Wow. Yeah, it's basically like a five-day event. You do 300 miles a day. It's a handicap speed race. Each airplane has a maximum speed that it's capable of producing. So that our airplane at 180 horsepower or whatever it was, could be racing against somebody with two of the light combing 540 engines. So that's putting out from memory somewhere around 700 horsepower total. So you would do this race over three or four days, where the case may be.

[00:26:47.520] - Mathew Giltner

And the most fascinating thing about it was, it was whoever came closest to or exceeded their benchmark speed, which there's a way that you can fly those and determine what that is. But at the At the end of the race, the top five places would be less than 60 seconds apart, which is pretty amazing after a 1,000 or 2,000-mile race, rather. It would be that close. We were doing something right, and then We changed out of that airplane to one that was a little bit faster. And then, because things are weird, I went and got my multi-engine commercial rating to fly twin engineer aircraft and took my check ride. This is just timing is everything, right? So I have my check ride scheduled for the end of September in 2001. Well, September 11th happened and everybody was grounded, so nobody was flying. Finally got my multi-engine check ride done. I want to say November-ish, time frame of 2001. And with 26 hours multi-engine time, if anybody listening to this as a pilot, they're not going to believe the next words out of my mouth. With 26 hours multi-engine time, I got hired to sit right seat part-time in a business jet because the guy that was the captain was flying for a company, and his mentality was, I know that you're not going to kill me.

[00:28:17.740] - Mathew Giltner

So it's not who you know, it's who knows you. I started flying for a living on my days off, still on active duty. And then when I retired, I transitioned into full-time time in the Lear-Jet series, 30 and 50 series, and some Citation 500 time as well. But we raced for probably 15 years, both in our Piper and eventually in our To our Mooney when we had that. It was just like off-road racing. Everybody knows one another as far as the competitors go. Everybody knows one another when it comes to the promoters and so on. And We enjoyed that. It gave me a tremendous amount of experience flying around the United States. The running joke is that you can put me anywhere in the Lower 48, and I've got somebody that I've flown with or known or can have coffee or a cocktail with in less than an hour. So it's not a bad way to be.

[00:29:18.040] - Big Rich Klein

No, I understand completely. Traveling the United States, putting on over 400 events in my lifetime. Just about anywhere I go, I know people. So if I ever have an you while I'm on the road, whether it's in the semi truck, or in my Jeep, or my pickup truck, it's like I can make a post on Facebook and get help within minutes. It's amazing.

[00:29:42.140] - Mathew Giltner

And it's not... Presumably, you have the personality to do that because you haven't pissed off everybody in your life. Not everybody. I know, but there's a list. I understand.

[00:29:56.060] - Big Rich Klein

Yes, there's a list.

[00:29:58.700] - Mathew Giltner

But I mean, that's where it boils I'm not going to. It's interesting. People want to say that we as humans and as Americans, we're just all really grumpy and angry and self-centered. It's like, no. Generally speaking, everybody wants to help everybody. I'll give you a perfect example. You're an off-road guy. You're out on a trail and you break something. My God, within seconds, there's like 30 people there trying to help you. It's the same thing. It's across society. Now, I can do my little man curmudgeon thing if you want, get off my lawn or what have you. I'd like to see those values continue, and I think they're going to irrespective of where our communities are nowadays. But I'm not in charge of that.

[00:30:47.220] - Big Rich Klein

The only time I get curmudgeoned like that is when I'm on my boat and somebody's speeding through the marina and creating a wake. I'm like the marina wake police.

[00:30:58.880] - Mathew Giltner

Well, I'll tell you something right now, you never want to drive with me. I am freaking Mr. Speed Limit. I'm not kidding. If it says 55, I'm doing 55. I am that guy. But here's why. Every time I've lived on a street that's had a 25 or 35 miles an hour speed limit, what annoys you the most is some Jackass going down the road at 50. So I have to assume that if I'm in your neighborhood and I'm doing 20 miles over the speed limit, I'm going to be pissing you off. So if I'm going to get angry about it, then I have to behave that way when I'm everywhere else's, too. So true, true.

[00:31:38.320] - Big Rich Klein

I try not to do that in residential areas or anything, but I will admit that I drive That cushion from the speed limit to where I know most law enforcement officers will give you a break.

[00:31:58.820] - Mathew Giltner

Where you have a fight Any chance anyway. Right.

[00:32:01.160] - Big Rich Klein

Or an area that I know that the law enforcement officers never visit. Right. Or I've never seen one yet. And since I do so many miles, I normally know where those people sit, especially in like, Nevada. I just made I took a trip up from Vegas yesterday, and it was, to be honest, I never saw, I saw two sheriffs in Nevada, and I saw one sheriff in California, my whole trip.

[00:32:31.660] - Mathew Giltner

There you go. See, I wouldn't know about California. I'd like to point out that I never crossed the state line because everything I own is illegal over there.

[00:32:39.980] - Big Rich Klein

You know what? I'd have to agree. I'm here Our permanent residence is in Idaho. Our temporary residence is in California while we're taking care of my mom. Everything that we own is registered in Idaho, where our permanent residence There's a vast difference in what's legal here in California as to Idaho.

[00:33:08.940] - Mathew Giltner

I think that's probably the understatement of the day.

[00:33:13.100] - Big Rich Klein

We're not just talking vehicles. We're talking just life in general.

[00:33:16.940] - Mathew Giltner

Oh, you're preaching to the choir.

[00:33:19.260] - Big Rich Klein

I like to think of of of Idaho as the last great free state.

[00:33:25.740] - Mathew Giltner

Well, Nevada used to be, but unfortunately, The big joke is like, oh, you just moved here from California? Huh? Weird. But then again, I have to take the next breath and go, Well, I'm from New York. We all have our crutches to bear, right? Right.

[00:33:47.000] - Big Rich Klein

So let's talk now about off-road and what you are doing now with the Nevada Off-Road Association. Now, is there a The difference between the Nevada Off-Road Association and the Nevada Four-wheel Drive Association?

[00:34:05.040] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah. So there's a lot of overlap. Larry Calkins over at Nevada Four, a great guy, and I've known him for many years as well. They are the big irons. They're the jeeps, the street legal stuff, and we're the power sports. What we do that's a little bit different than what Larry does, and this is not at Larry by any means, We understand that the multi-use of our public lands is exactly that, multi-use. So whether you're on a horse or on a quad, our paths are going to cross, metaphorically, or I guess figuratively, too, but nonetheless. So when it's all said and done, what it boils down to in a nutshell is that if I lose my access, the horse people are losing their access.

[00:34:57.520] - Big Rich Klein

Correct.

[00:34:58.010] - Mathew Giltner

And the hikers are going to lose their access or whatever. And so we try to make sure that the decisions that we're advocating for are positive to everybody in recreation. We do have a heavy bias, obviously, to motorized off-road, and we don't compromise on that. But we're not going to go and try and close an area to hikers just so that we can have a place to ride vehicles, for example. So that's a big part of what we're doing. But where it came from is... Talk about snowmobiling when I was a kid, and even when I was an adult. The fact that Nevada does not have many trails. There's a few, but for general conversation's sake, we can actually say there are no trails in Nevada because the Bureau of Land Management is so far behind in their management plans that you can't designate an old mining road as a trail. So that became very, very frustrating. And then, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, we started trying to make a difference with our local club, the Pine Nut Mountain Trails Association in the Carson Valley. I tried to make a difference and provide the motorized community a well-managed trail.

[00:36:27.180] - Mathew Giltner

All we got was pushback from the Bureau of Land Management because, again, they don't have any other resource management plans. The resource management plans are the governing document for each of the different units within the Bureau of Land Management. Roughly speaking, there's 13, maybe 14 of those units in the state of Nevada. A resource management plan in a perfect world is about a seven to eight-year document, meaning that a couple of years after you put it out, you start working on the next revision. That seven to eight-year document, the average time on them in the state of Nevada is 27 years out of date. So it's not even... It's ridiculous. And to be clear, I'm not poking fun at BLM. It's no one individual's fault. Resource management plans are, by default, a political document, and I talk about this a lot. So if you have somebody sitting in the executive office who their focus is on minerals extraction, you're going to see a lot more mining and oil-focused resource management plans that are signed into effect while that person is in executive office. If you have somebody in there that is more conservation friendly, by the same token, that's what you're going to see on these resource management plans during that individual's time.

[00:37:56.660] - Mathew Giltner

So I don't take the position that one is better than the other. Certainly, Certainly, one side benefits the motorized community more than the other. But those are the facts that we can't get around. What we've decided to do, and we started this about seven years ago and came above board, so to speak, about five years back, to start working on having a singular go-to for the entire state for the motorized off-road community for the power sports site. Larry, again, is the big iron sign. So we've been doing that. And the focus is to work with all stakeholders, no matter what you're doing, whether you're a mining company or you're a race company, and making sure that when we're all trying to work or recreate in the same place, that is being done harmoniously. Perfect example. There's a small event that happened recently. You might have heard it's called the Vegas Terreno Race. I know. I know. Just pass it. But there's also a gigantic construction project going on for the Greenlink high voltage lines that starts all the way over on the other side, the east side of Las Vegas, and comes all the way up to Churchill County.

[00:39:19.160] - Mathew Giltner

Well, sure enough, the Race Route went right through one of their active construction zones. So we worked with the Bureau of Land Management, we worked with Nevada Energy, we worked with their contractor, and we worked with Best in the Desert to make sure that where those areas conflicted, that our race community, because again, that's really where our focus is, that our race community was able to have their event safely that didn't interfere with the construction because this is a multi-billion dollar project. And the Bureau of Land Management was happy, so they didn't them up on their permit later on. And the testament to success of doing that is we didn't get a single phone call from anybody during the race. And other races have gone through there, and that's not been the case. And we have another one coming up with Snore. I always want to say score, but it's Snore, that's coming at the end of October. We've already started the process to make sure that they get their area safely marked and manned to go through that construction area no matter where it is along the lines. That's why we are successful, because we don't go in there with an ego and say, You must X, Y, Z, because that doesn't get you anywhere.

[00:40:44.700] - Mathew Giltner

Perhaps the most surprising thing, or at least I think it's the most surprising thing, me as an individual, I do not care whether you race or not. I really don't. But what I care about is when the government steps in and says, You cannot race, that's where we have a problem. If you decide not to race, that's up to you. But when the government comes in and says, You can't, that's where we double down and work our butts off to get you that permit. We're probably on 50 different special recreation permits at any given time in the state of Nevada. We are the SRP go-to. So anybody that's listening to this, wants to put on an event, we don't charge for it. It's already paid for it under our grant. And you need some advice, some handholding, or if you need us to help you write that permit, just give us a It's pretty easy.

[00:41:32.060] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, I know that my partner Jake with We Rock was... I don't know how much he used Laura as a go-between, but I know that that's where the process started, at least. And that was good, because in the old days, when I was doing Vora and Cal Rocks back in the day, and it was just so cumbersome and such a pain in the butt to work with some of the offices there in Nevada.

[00:42:05.700] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah, it is. Again, I'm not making fun necessarily at any of the actual individual staff members. The system is broken. There are better ways to do it. Do I think that having a 30-mile poker run on established roads, they have to have a permit? No, but they do. So what do we do? We help them I get that. I also don't think that that same 30-mile run for the ACME off-road club should be measured and forced to perform at the same level as best in the Desert or Legacy or Snore or Vora because they're different events, but the federal government doesn't see it that way. It's a one size fits all, which is problematic. We're working on it, baby steps. But the nice thing is that we have a really good personal relationship with every single BLM office in the state. We can find answers to the questions quickly because we know the right people. And none of us are afraid of the government. I spent 20 years with the government. You're not going to get my eyebrow up. Right.

[00:43:20.120] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah. Back in the day, I've been doing this for 25 years now, that I would find is I'd go into offices, and some offices were really easy to work with, and then all of a sudden they'd become hard. And what I found is that as the personnel in the office changed, and typically it was somebody with experience would move on to another office, and then they'd get somebody fresh out of college that just got their degree in something, whether it was archeology or geology or whatever, ecology, that that person was there to try to make a mark. And the processes that were easy all of a sudden became difficult because that person was like, well, I'm not going to just rubber stamp this because you've done it in the past. We've got to go now look for this butterfly with one extra spot, or this frog with one toe that's shorter than all the others, or whatever it might be. I remember one time I had this, I knew that the racers would want to want to cut this corner. And I said, there's a two track across here. Can we just use that instead of taking everybody around this big night, out farther than a 90 back, and just do a 45 between the two parts of the road.

[00:44:54.760] - Big Rich Klein

And they said, no, you can't do that. And I said, okay, why? And they said, well, there's an an archeological site right there. And I said, there is. I said, I saw a spot where it looked like somebody in the '60s emptied their trash out of the back of their truck. And they go, oh, yeah, that's an archeological site because it's been there in more than 25 years. And I mean, it was literally cans, and it looked like old paint cans, and some old gas cans, and just a bunch of garbage that somebody had dumped 40 years ago. Yeah.

[00:45:31.840] - Mathew Giltner

Did you hit him in the head with a hammer? I mean, what?

[00:45:35.940] - Big Rich Klein

I wanted to, but I think I did it verbally, and that's probably some of the reasons I had problems.

[00:45:43.800] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah. Well, What is it? Mark Twain says something of the effect of what other people think of me is none of my business. What do I care? No, but you're right. Another Almost identical type problem, right? So there was an event going on. The Eastern Sierra, ATV, Jambury, runs out of Walker, California. But most of the riding is in Nevada because, well, we're in Nevada. But nonetheless, one of the clubs had their volunteers lead one of their rides, and the guide read the map incorrectly and went about five miles up a county road before he turned into the mountains, which was also a county road, rather than taking the trail, we cut the corner that was on the permit. And the Bureau of Land Management threw a fit. I'm like, You got to be kidding me. This guy was on a county maintained road, two of them, and you're having a fit because he didn't go onto the trail, which is never maintained. And they doubled down, and the rec planner got a little bit, in my in my opinion, short with the permit holder. And it's still one of those things that comes up to this day.

[00:47:05.330] - Mathew Giltner

And anytime they start to push back, I bring it up and do the three stooches poking the eye. Don't get off your high horse there, Homer. I just can't get past the mentality of the government employees of, We're not required to do that. If my time in the military, in the government, if I had ever said that, I wouldn't have made it through my contract. It would have been like, Hey, have a nice day. There's the doc. Walk home. Because accepting the minimum requirement out of any employee that has to deal with forward-facing employee to the public is insulting to the public. I just don't get it. I don't get it, but we have people, even at the state level, that hide behind the, Well, we're not required to do that. I got an idea. Why don't we look at this holistically? What do we need to do to make this successful? But I don't know.

[00:48:04.500] - Big Rich Klein

Sorry. I was told one time- I'll leave the box there for a minute. I was told one time by a recreational planner that it is harder and more work for them to say no, than for them to figure out a way to say yes. I looked at that person, and I told them they were just full of it. Not in those words, but close. And they tried to justify that remark, and it was like, I'm not buying that. No is easy.

[00:48:39.140] - Mathew Giltner

I would have lost my nut on that.

[00:48:40.830] - Big Rich Klein

Exactly. And that's one of the reasons I had problems out of that Carson City office at one time. I have to say that our We Rock event this year went very smoothly, thanks to the work of a couple of Laura Butcher being one of those. And it went very good. And working with the recreational planner, Paul, was also delightful. I mean, it was good to see.

[00:49:16.120] - Mathew Giltner

Carson district Office did a really good thing over the last couple of years. They had the one recreation planner retire who had been there, like something weird, like 28, 29 years. When he retired, they brought brought in somebody new from outside the office. And then they took the major area's responsibility for those three rec planners and rotated them. So you didn't have the same guy that's been camping out, working Moon Rocks, for example, nonstop for 10, 15 years. And that gives you fresh eyes, fresh energy. So Paul, you were just speaking to, moved from Sand Mountain to Moon Rocks as a primary focus. And that's the way that you keep, in my opinion, that's the way that you keep people engaged. If you give them the same project, it just gets dogged down in just horrible, horrible... I don't have to because we tried this back in 10 years ago. No, no, no. All that stuff it's gone because now you've got a fresh set of energy coming out of that staffer. And you and I talked briefly, but by all accounts and verbally, what I was told by the BLM office, your event up there was exceptional.

[00:50:31.220] - Mathew Giltner

So I'm happy to hear that. I'm hoping that you guys will be coming back next year.

[00:50:36.100] - Big Rich Klein

Our plan is to. We were just waiting to hear that from BLM. So hearing it from the backside is nice to, That's nice to know.

[00:50:46.280] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah, I imagine when you get your final after-action report, this time of year is tough for them, and this would not be making excuses for them necessarily. But with the Vegas to Reno and a bunch of other events, getting anything out of them timely right now is difficult. We have a small project here in the Pine Nut Range that we've been working on getting to the starting point for almost a year, and now we're at the point where we're actually going to do a site visit, which is awesome because we get the site visit, then we can start moving along and making things better. When my time here is done at the association, my goal is to make sure that I'm handing the keys off to people who are energized and not going to burn out and have the right focus because none of us are going to live forever. I'm not a fatalist, but there was nothing like the work that we are doing statewide before we started it. I want to make sure that whoever's picking it up is going to pick it up in that same flavor so that in 10, 15, 20 years, that we still have the access for whatever type of recreation is popular then.

[00:51:57.040] - Big Rich Klein

Right. Perfect. Very good. Have we touched on everything that you would like to talk about with the data?

[00:52:08.420] - Mathew Giltner

I've made fun of the government a little bit, so I'm good with that. No, I mean, generally speaking, I know that I touched on this briefly before, but I think the biggest thing that people keep forgetting is that, generally speaking, everybody out there is doing their best. I think that we need to try and get the younger generation to start taking a little bit more responsibility for recreation. Again, I don't care if you're on a horse or on a dirt bike, or if you're doing your first UTV race. All those things have a certain level of responsibility. The way that I phrase this a lot, and my team that I work with probably hates me every time I say this, no one's ever washed a rental car. You went and You beat the snot out of it and you tossed the keys back to Hertz hoping they didn't look too closely.

[00:53:05.200] - Big Rich Klein

No.

[00:53:06.460] - Mathew Giltner

I know, weird, right? But I bought my first TJ Jeep right after running a Jeep out of Vegas and going down to Sedona. So there you go. Which, by the way, I did actually wash that Jeep before we brought it back. But that's the truth. If you don't have ownership, people are reluctant to do everything. What we're trying to do with the association is to allow the clubs to have that ownership by building those relationships between the the OHV community and the federal government. Two of the ways that we do that is through the club, the formal clubs, where if, for example, a club down in in Henderson in Las Vegas, I'll go down there a couple of times a year, attend their meetings, but try and get someone from Forest Services, someone from BLM to come and speak to the club. Because it's a little bit easier to say, Hey, I've got a problem with this issue on the land that you manage when you have a name and a face to go with it. The other way that we do it is we hold our annual off-road summit. We do it every fall.

[00:54:19.290] - Mathew Giltner

Our next one is up in Elco, Nevada, which I think it's the first week of October. Three days, educational format. We have different speakers. We have different grant recipients talking about their projects. We bring in the BLM and the Forest Service. And the first day after the thing's over, we have a no-host social. This year is going to be cool because we're going to be holding it at the Elko County Museum. But the nice thing about that is now that one question that you always wanted to ask somebody from the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service or you, however, Fish and Wildlife, you have that person It's likely that everybody has a cocktail in their hand. That's where those meetings really add value. That's where we show our end users, the guy that just joined the local OHV Club or the Rock Crawling Club or what have you, that these are not big, scary people, and this is how we get our stuff done. Until the Bureau of Land Management gets their resource management plans in line with, well, reality, that's the only way we can do it. We've been monumentally successful at doing those introductions.

[00:55:34.160] - Mathew Giltner

Then I'm going to give you my end run around the government because, well, again, I used to work for the government. We did something here in the last couple of months. We've been talking about it for a couple of years. And what we did is we followed the Back Road Discovery route, is it BDR? Back Country Discovery route, whatever it is. Yeah. So all those folks are doing is they designate a route saying, Hey, if you want to get from here to here, here's how you can do it on your adventure bike, which is pretty cool. So we did the same thing. We developed the Battleborne Trail system. So anybody that wants to go to battleborntrail. Com, you'll see that we've got our first leg done, which follows the Western side from Perumpt, Nevada, all the way up to Virginia City. It's broken into, I think, four, five four or five days to do it. So it's a big long journey because it's 400 plus miles. But the idea is that you would leave Perumpt and then spend your first night maybe in Bayes or up in Tonopod, depending on your willingness to pound away for hundreds of miles in the desert.

[00:56:47.700] - Mathew Giltner

And a lot of that is to bring people, give people the opportunity to see that Nevada does, in fact, have trails. And the end run around it is because it's like a BDR, it's just a GPS file and a Our website, we're not disturbing the Earth, which means we don't need to do a permit. So people get to go and ride. And a lot of it on the Battleborn Trail part of it, because that's one of the three trails that we have, follows a lot of the race routes for Vegas to Reno and some of the legacy routes and so on. I don't mean legacy like the race company legacy as in historic. People get a chance to get out into the backcountry in a relatively well-known accessible way. Most importantly, it brings money to the rural economy of Nevada. I hate to point this out. Las Vegas might be suffering a little bit of a downturn now in tourism, but Hawthorn, Nevada needs you to go there and spend the night. They really do. And that's where the value is. So we're doing that. And then We're working on one that's going to go from, generally speaking, Carson City, maybe Virginia City, I haven't decided yet, all the way out to Eely, following the Pony Express route, more or less.

[00:57:56.820] - Mathew Giltner

And we're going to follow part of the Donner Party route and everything else. We're just publishing them and letting people get out there and experience and enjoy rural Nevada, because that's the part of the state that needs the economic input from our community. Washoe County, Clark County, They don't need it anywhere near as much as Hawthorn, Tonopaw, White Pine County, Elko, and so on. So we're pretty excited about that, and that's been very well received. So there you go.

[00:58:27.020] - Big Rich Klein

Excellent. I'm thrilled to hear that. Because one of my favorite things is to get out into the Nevada backcountry and just drive dirt roads. I mean, you never know what you're going to come across.

[00:58:44.280] - Mathew Giltner

Exactly. I got talking to a member from the tourism community up in Virginia City recently, and he's also a bit of a history nerd like I am. We're just talking about it in general, and he goes, You know what you got to do? You got to follow the The Donner Party trail, which is easy to do because it's pretty much US 50, more or less. We're going to build that into it. But I got thinking the other day that when you finish one of our trails, by the way, you get a sticker. All you do send me your GPX file to prove to me that you did it. And then you get a free sticker. It's not so bad. It's got like, Battle Born Trail, 1861 Trail, what have you. And hear me out on this. Tell me if you think this is a bad idea. I'm all ears. If we do the Donner Party Trail, we should have a that I did the Donna Party Trail, and it didn't have to eat a single human. I think that's pretty clever.

[00:59:35.740] - Big Rich Klein

And I survived. All limbs intact.

[00:59:41.080] - Mathew Giltner

That's awesome. Well, I appreciate you inviting me on to your podcast. It's actually a lot of fun to talk to you. Nonetheless, our paths have not crossed in person, but they have online and what have you. So I'm excited. I imagine you're going to be at the gala, and I will meet you then face to face. And I'm looking forward to seeing and you guys bouncing around up here in Northern Nevada on your rock crawling thing. And I might... Matter of fact, since we're recording this, I want you to promise me that you'll take me rock crawling because I've never done it.

[01:00:10.450] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely. Be more than happy to.

[01:00:13.000] - Mathew Giltner

Yeah, be cool. I'll scream like a little girl, just so you know.

[01:00:15.680] - Big Rich Klein

That's fine. I'm used to that because you haven't seen me drive. You take a look at the outside of my Jeep and you're going to go, wow, maybe this is a bad choice.

[01:00:30.000] - Mathew Giltner

That's awesome.

[01:00:30.690] - Big Rich Klein

That's awesome. Matthew, thank you so much for spending this morning with me and talking about your program and your life. And I really appreciate. I'm looking forward to seeing you this year at the Ormhoff Gala.

[01:00:43.240] - Mathew Giltner

Yep, you will definitely see us, and I'm looking forward to it as well. And again, I appreciate the invitation more than I can express.

[01:00:50.140] - Big Rich Klein

Thank you so much.

[01:00:51.480] - Mathew Giltner

All right, brother.

[01:00:52.160] - Big Rich Klein

All right. You take care. Have a good day. You bet. Well, that's another episode of Conversations with Big Rich. I'd like to thank you all for listening. If you could do us a favor and leave us a review on any podcast service that you happen to be listening on, or send us an email or a text message or a Facebook message, and let me know any ideas that you have or if there's anybody that you have that you would think would be a great guest, please forward the contact information to me so that we can try to get them on. And always remember, live life to the fullest. Enjoying life is a must. Follow your dreams and live life all the gusto you can. Thank you.