Good Day to all of you and a Happy New Year to everybody!

Here's a post I just made on the Jeep Forums....for what it's worth, I'd like to copy it here.

Don't be shocked if you see alot of empty, unused forums here at the Texas Offroad Network. This is a new idea and it will take time to grow. With your help it will. We have chosen to create forums for every club we could find in Texas....then leave it up to them to decide whether our efforts, and the visitors who come here searching for info and news, are worth supporting. The future of offroading depends on us all coming together. This massive arrangement of searchable forums is our solution to make that potential a reality.

Most of you do not know me since I am primarily a dirtbike rider, not a Jeeper or 4WD user. This Texas Offroad Network is an idea that could never be attempted before the internet. Right now, we are a small volunteer group of scattered 4WD/Jeep/ATV/dirtbike club members, club webmasters, club officers, and other offroad enthusiasts and supporters, with little more than an idea and the motivation to make something good happen. We sincerely hope you will join our efforts and offer whatever small contribution of info or knowledge or advise you can for the benefit of others looking for what you have.

There are over 50 4WD/Jeep clubs in Texas and the surrounding states. For about two weeks, I sat staring at my computer every day for several hours trying to figure out which of the 50 Jeep/4WD clubs to create forums for here at T.O.N. and which would be most likely to become active supporters of our project....to use the forums to inform others and promote offroading beyond their local area. Not having a background knowledge of the clubs I was trying to help, I felt totally incompetent to even write a basic description for each club, much less try to express to our visitors a sense of what each club is about and what they have to offer. The more I thought about it, the more overwhelming the task seemed to me. My only solution was obvious.....

We here at TON have chosen to create a forum for every Jeep and 4WD club we could find. Whether these clubs will ever find these forums or not....or use them to help their members and others here at TON....is up to fate and the officers and members of those clubs who are already here and have contact with our brothers in offroading. Yeah, that's right....a dirtbike guy called Jeepers "our brothers".....don't get all freaked out. Like I said this is a new idea for offroading in Texas.

As Board Member of the Texas Motorized Trails Coalition, I want to encourage everybody involved in any kind of offroading in Texas, and the surrounding states, to consider our future when deciding who are "our brothers" and who are "them"....and make your choices according to what you want your children to experience. This website is an extention of that same idea. We have the opportunity to make information that we would never have the chance to know about available to all of us. By sharing information and open discussion and debate, we can grow as a community.

As a recreational past-time, the combined user groups represent one out of every ten homes in Texas. As a movement.....and as a political force.....we deserve to be considered seriously in Austin and Washington. Texas has the tenth largest economy of any country in the world. We, as offroaders, are part of that economic power....and we forget who we are sometimes. Our goal here at TON is to bring all those splintered, scattered groups together for a little dialog to see what we can do for ourselves....rather than sitting back and complaining about what others are doing to us.

Without your support, this website and database....and the idea that sparked its' creation....may disappear like a grand sandcastle on the beach. The bonds we create will be the cement that holds our castle together against the tides of opposition trying to drag us down. We hope YOU will choose to support this effort by submitting just one piece of information to the collective knowledge. On behalf of all the volunteers here at TON....thank you for joining our project.