The 2019 Rooster Road Trip has come to an end. Now it's your turn to start planning your own adventure, create your own memories, and inspire others to embrace the upland lifestyle.
By Chad Love
The trip odometer of our truck, freshly-washed and gleaming at the beginning of this trip, but now filthy with the mud of two states and countless lonely county section roads, will roll over a thousand miles before I point myself south toward home. Over the course of these last five days on the Rooster Road Trip I have been fortunate enough to share in an adventure filled with – as all good adventures are – a range of emotions and experiences: laughter, camaraderie, exhaustion, elation, soaring highs, crushing lows, moments of sublime beauty, moments of bitter disappointment, and all the other sometimes contradictory but always complimentary things that make an adventure something to be remembered and cherished.
The difference with this adventure, however, is that from its inception the Rooster Road Trip was designed to be your adventure, too; a reminder that anyone with a desire to create their own awe-inspiring upland experience doesn’t need a huge bank account or access to private land. In fact, all they need is a few days to kill and a map of the millions of acres of public land out there waiting to be discovered. Every mile walked, every hill crested, every dog racing across a field hot on the scent of a bird, every photograph taken, and every memory made over the course of this week occurred on public land that either belongs to or is accessible to all of us.
If this Rooster Road Trip week has done one thing for me, it has served as a reminder that I – a lifelong public-land hunter who sometimes takes this wealth of riches for granted – am lucky beyond belief, as are all of you. Our public lands are an integral part of our national character, and whether you enjoy them as an upland hunter, big-game hunter, angler, bird watcher, hiker, or camper, this nation would be a lesser place without them.
I will never forget watching my young setter slamming into a rock-solid point in the golden light of a western Kansas afternoon, or the look on a co-worker’s face as she connected on the first pheasant she’d ever taken outside her home state.
Highlighting, protecting, enhancing, and increasing the upland opportunities available on our public and public-access lands has always been the primary goal of the Rooster Road Trip, and a core component of the mission of Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever. It is our passion, both professionally as an organization and personally within the dedicated ranks of the people who work here.
By showcasing the staggering beauty and limitless opportunity of these special places, we hope to inspire people to not only get out and make their own adventures and their own memories, but also inspire them to help ensure these lands will always be there.
None of our Rooster Road Trip crew own their own private bird-hunting ranches, none of them are outdoor celebrities, or hunting personalities with access to the kind of off-limits hunting ground most of us can only dream about. Our dreams are made and our bootprints left on the same public ground those who share our passion also walk, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. That’s why we choose to work for an organization which shares that passion and vision.
If you enjoyed following along on the Rooster Road Trip’s week-long, make-your-own-adventure, and if you’d like to help ensure these public lands will always be here to make memories for future generations, please consider
joining Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever today. There is no better time than now, and no better way to start making memories on your own personal Rooster Road Trip.
Follow Pheasants Forever’s Rooster Road Trip online at:
Facebook /
Twitter /
Instagram /
Podcast /
Rooster Road Trip web page
Rooster Road Trip 2019 Sponsors:
Sincerest thanks to our partners riding shotgun:
Apple Autos,
Browning,
Federal Premium Ammunition,
Garmin,
ORCA Coolers,
Ruff Land Kennels,
CampChef,
SoundGear,
Irish Setter, and
Nebraska Game & Parks Commission.