About Us

We started in 1998 as a loose group; Phil & Patty Bender began by cleaning up a couple of knolls on the private property southwest of the storage facility. There was so much trash that Mark Bayglen made up some flyers and posted them in 4 Wheel Parts, Folbeck's, and Donny's. We had a good turnout for that first cleanup, about 20 showed up for about 5 hours. Wasn't on public land, though, and there were many garbage bags to put out on the curb. Subsequent cleanups started on the private property and worked up onto public land; by 2000 we were cleaning up the entire Hunter Lake Trail.

The club still wasn't formalized until 2002 when Tim Albiniano, Mark Bayglen, Mike Rosario, Phil Lantrip and I were relaxing at the Old Waldorf near UNR after a Peavine cleanup. Several name possibilities were on the table, and Phil Lantrip suggested the name Hills Angels. It stuck. We agreed that there would be no officers, no dues, and no bylaws in order to eliminate potential cliques and power struggles within the group. It's all volunteer, any monies collected are freely donated. Mark frequently acts as MC at club meetings, while Phil Bender is the liaison to the Forest Service and handles land issues.

Between 1998 and 2003, Phil Bender was working on getting the Forest Service to recognize HLT as the motorized route it was supposed to be between the 2 sections of the Mt. Rose Wilderness. In June 2001 he had Larry Randall from the Forest Service in Carson City as his guest in his CJ-7 for a trip to Hunter Lake. In October 2001 Gary Schiff, then District Ranger for the Carson Ranger District, accompanied Phil on a similar run. Both stated that there was no reason to close the route, and Phil indicated that our group was willing to patrol and maintain it all the way to Garson Road and all routes in between.

Subsequent to these trips, Larry Anderson came onboard as OHV Manager for the Carson Ranger District, and several trips over the HLT with Larry Anderson plus the two earlier runs laid the groundwork for the cooperative agreement between Hills Angels and the Forest Service. Prior to 2001 the Forest Service had ignored requests for the Adopt-a-Trail Agreement. At the present time the Hills Angels 4x4 Club has about 2,500(4,000 as of 2016) hours in Hunter Lake Trail and Peavine cleanups and bulletin board installations, plus work on non-motorized places such as White's Creek and Keystone Canyon. The early cleanup operations from 1998 to 2001 weren't documented to the FS because we didn't know we should have done so.

Current steel bulletin boards used by the Carson Ranger District were designed by Phil Bender to try to minimize vandalism and have them last longer. We do have a very strong belief in treading lightly, using designated routes, and keeping our local 4 wheeling trails open and clean.