hunting leases

Interesting tidbit for ya'. Our dirt bike club leases land for riding also. The land owners typically find that we generate more $$ for them than hunting leases. I suspect it's because we can have upwards of 200 lease members on a 500 acre property but it's a rare day that more than 2 dozen of them are there at any one time.

Some friends pay $1800 a year just to hunt on around 200 to 250 acres. They have about 16 of them going in on it leaving just over $100 per person. Not that great considering Western PA has tons of state game land in our area.

I understand why private land owners do it and why hunters buy into them. Nearly all of the thousands and thousands of acres of old strip mines and forest surrounding the area I grew up in are part of private leases now. My father didn't jump on right away, so these areas he hunted and road dirtbikes on his entire life with the landowners permission he could no longer even hike on without 'trespassing'. He finally put his name on the waiting list and because he is well known and liked in the area, he eventually got in within a few years and is active in the club but now pays for what he did for free his entire life. I hate it because when I go home, I'm confined to riding on his farm since the surrounding club doesn't permit riding on their leased acres. Like I said, I understand the benefits of doing it for the private landowners, but it still sucks that I can no longer take the rides of my childhood and relive the memories! To me, places that no one outside that zipcode even knows of are as important monuments as the ones in Washington. Places like 'the basspond', Oscar's lookout, rock shanty, Johnson Run, the clubhouse, the old Page dragline, Walburn Run tree farm, etc. are places that I used to frequent on my XR100.

Treejumper, you are probably the only one on here that may have ever heard of any of those spots!