It was the So Cal Chapter that turned me sour. I am good friends with kartsic and have nothing but good to say about guys like djblade, gsequoia, cal, goatman, kyung, johhny and a few others. I have read with much interest the posts of Dr Moab and IntrepidXJ in the Adventure section.
Unfortunately the "Black Sheep Crew" are allowed to run wild and unchecked on the So Cal Chapter forum and they stand for everything that is wrong with the "outlaw" side of offroading.
Drinking and driving is my biggest pet peeve with offroaders. On my very first NAXJA run there was a drunken night run. When I inquired as to why it was allowed I was told it was OK because it was not an officially sanctioned NAXJA event. It was my last NAXJA run.
http://www.vimeo.com/1695887
This video was shot of the Black Sheep Crew in the San Bernardino National Forest. The camp host had to call the rangers. Shortly after the video ended a drunken night run commenced that lasted until daylight(mainly because they got lost)
And then......
http://www.naxja.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1009790&page=5
Reply 74. It was reported and nothing was done.
It was the last time I will have anything to do with NAXJA.
FishPoet,
Please do not take this the wrong way, but as someone who has almost nothing to do with Naxja you are entirely unqualified to state that nothing was done about the BSC situation.
Do you know why that group called themselves the 'Black Sheep Crew'? It was because they had already been informed that behavoir and attitude was unwelcome within Naxja, so they took their ball and went home.
That thread was handled poorly, and eventually a moderator lost his powers and was replaced over it - but the situation was addressed by the club, out of the general publics eyes, where such business belongs. (Naxja is after all a club that has a forum, and not just a website like so many other 'clubs' are).
For a couple of years now you have been slandering Naxja offline and online, over a single event (or perhaps 2-3 in a short time frame) by a group of people who went out of their way to affiliate themselves *NOT* with Naxja, and over a brief period of poor moderation in one out of 30 or so subforums.
When I joined Naxja in 2004, I found a tight family of Cherokee owners who enjoyed camping and wheeling together. Some years later the club started to lose that, and following sound advice I was given as a child:
"If you don't like how something works, fix it.".
I am now in my second term as a club director and the SoCal Vice President.
I don't expect you to run out, join the club and start running for offices, but if you aren't prepared to at minimum start by submitting something the chapter or national board of directors for Naxja, please stop crying to the rest of the world.
As for others comments that Naxja has a lot of younger and more mouthy members in tech these days, I'll have to concede that is true.. and as long as no one sticks around to set a good example, that is what people are likely to see, too. :/
-Cal
ps: EP guys, please forgive me for intruding on your forum here, this just really needed to be addressed some time and some place, it ended up being here.
