THE HISTORY OF

"ROSS CREEK TRAIL RIDERS"

BY COTTON MORGAN

The Concho Cycle Club actually started just as a group that wanted to ride dirt bikes, and their primary riding area was the O.C. Fisher Reservoir on the North Concho River west of San Angelo—which, I believe, was just referred to as North Concho at that time. We moved to San Angelo in December 1973 and the club started not too long before then. I'm not sure who the first officers were, but some of the main ones who started it were: C.W. Wiggins (Carty named the Top Gun Trophy for him), Joe Mahaffey, Jimmy Gilmore (Jennifer Juarez's dad), Mike Lomas, Tom Sparks, Tom Alford, Garland Holloway and Jerry Chitsey (Co-Enduro Chairmen when the club earned its first Enduro of the Year Trophy from TSCEC), John Walker, and more that I can't think of right now. We joined the club in mid-1974 and C.W. Wiggins was the President at that time.

Early Riding Areas

As many know, there was a little bit of OHV area designated in the original plan for North Concho, but it wasn't much. Back then we were allowed to ride anywhere below the conservation area of the lake which, since it was nearly dry, was a lot of area. But this was mainly out of the goodness of Delbert Caffey's heart more than anything else because the Corps of Engineers didn't officially allow us to ride anywhere other than the little bit originally designated for OHV use. This being the case, the club thought we should try to find an additional place to ride.

The Lease Begins

Sometime in late 1974 or 1975, C.W. Wiggins placed an ad in a couple of papers wanting to lease land to ride on. One of the responses we got was from a fellow named Bob Hambright who had some grazing land leased west of Blackwell. He offered to sub-lease the property for riding. So, several members went up and rode on the land and thought it had potential. If my memory is correct, there was about 2,300 acres on the place and the club voted to lease it for $2,300 per year. The place included, roughly, Mustang, Headquarters, Turkey Valley, and Deadman's though those names didn't exist. It also included the north end of Ross although we didn't know it and didn't ride over there for some time. At that time, we weren't allowed to ride during deer season since the place was leased for deer hunting, but we could ride all the rest of the year. I'm not sure exactly when we signed the lease but the earliest sign-ins on an old sign-in book was 1 April 1975.

The place had no trails other than animal trails, no roads other than a couple of really rough jeep roads, and the road from Highway 70 to what is now the main gate was very poorly maintained caliche. In fact, we had a cookout not too long after we got the place, it rained the day before, and about half the guys who attended got stuck before they even got to the gate. The other half got stuck between the gate and what is now Headquarters. At that time, we camped over where Headquarters is now and used the old, ramshackle house that Carty re-did for the "Hombres" as our sign-in. We moved to the current camp area after Carty Beal bought the place and built the house where Buddy and Wanda lived.

Credit C.W. Wiggins and Joe Mahaffey for establishing most of the trails in that original part of the lease. Of course, there have been a lot of trails built since then. Later, somebody found out that we also had 320 acres in what is now Ross and Joey Jones established most of the trails over there.

Carty Beal’s Involvement

The first time Carty Beal rode at the lease was March 1976 as a guest of Tom Sparks. He may have known about the place before then because I'm sure that Buddy Dyess knew about it, but that was the first time he rode on it. Carty loved the place and wanted to buy it but, at least as I understand it, he couldn't make a deal with the lady who owned it. At that time, he was also unable to lease it because it was currently leased. So, to make sure that our club didn't lose the lease, he kind of secretly donated the money to Wiggins to pay the next year's lease. Since the finances of the club were open to all the members, Wig had to tell us that an anonymous donor had donated the lease fee, but he NEVER told who it was. But, who else could it have been?

A year later, when the existing lease was up, Carty managed to lease the place. Since Carty had the lease, we thought that the club would lose our lease and not have a place to ride. Once again, we looked for a place to ride and found a place that we could lease near Tennyson. Several of us, including myself and Sam and Sheldon, went and rode on it and decided that it was not as good as what is now Texana, but it was okay, and we would try to lease it. When Carty found out we were looking for another place, he told Wiggins not to lease another place. He said he had leased the property with the intention that our club would have a place to ride. Later, after he bought the place, he said that our club would have a place to ride as long as he was alive.

Hosting Events & Club Evolution

The club's original intent was that "the lease" would only be used for the club to play ride on. We had no intention of ever holding events on it because we knew how hard that would be on the land. Then, Delbert Caffey retired, and we lost our access to North Concho. We didn't hold an enduro in 1980 because of this and, reluctantly, decided to hold an enduro at the lease in 1981. At that time, we were still fighting with the authorities to get back on North Concho, but it was a losing battle partly because it's just so hard to get anything accomplished with the government and, partly, because we lost our enthusiasm because we had a better place to ride, anyway.

So that's pretty much how we came to have "the lease" to ride on. Of course, there have been a lot of changes since then. For one thing, the club has gone through several name changes, all of them because we managed to get into hot water with the taxing agencies. The first time we got into a bind, we decided to simply dissolve the Concho Cycle Club and start over as the CCC Dirt Riders. Seems like successive Treasurers didn't do any better keeping us out of trouble than the former ones so we dissolved the CCC Dirt Riders and became the Ross Creek Trail Riders. The funny thing is that we found out that both the State and the IRS had strung those names together anyway so changing the names didn't really do us any good after all. Just before Joyce left the Treasurer's job, she finally managed to get everything straightened out with the State and with the IRS for the first time, I guess, in the entire history of the club. As a matter of fact, she finished the last of the paperwork with the State after she had resigned to try to make it a little easier for Patti Aston.