Benefactor
- 15,584
- First Name
- Michael
- Last Name
- Murguia
- Member #
-
0000
- Ham/GMRS Callsign
- KM6YSL
All, it is my great privilege to announce @Kent R as Overland Bounds West Coast Ambassador!
All of our ambassadors share an appreciation for our Founding Principles and a love of the great outdoors, and a drive to inspire others. Kent has embodied this behavior through actions, inspiring others, helping online, explaining how the Overland Bound community works and how we provide value to other organizations through our software and network, and showing up in person to Overland Bound Rally Points to meet new and established members alike.
I could go on. He has done so much behind the scenes to help our community. The West is my home region, and I am thrilled to have Kent as its Ambassador. The West is a huge region and he will be working together with @KEFA 4427 @VCeXpedition and @Narbob , long time friends and supporters of Overland Bound, as well as our trusted Facebook group administrators Chris and Frank.
Kent has our trust, and my ear. Please say congrats and consider him a representative of our organization. He strengthens our community, and is on-board to manage the West Coast Region.
A bit more about Kent:
Grew up in Northern Calif., lived in Southern Oregon for 10 years after retirement, moved back to California 5 ½ years ago. I live with my wife in Placerville, CA.
I’ve been a sailor, camper, hunter, fisherman, off-roader for almost 50 years. I spent 30 years as a firefighter and an instructor at our local college fire tech program and had my own construction company as a side job. I am now “retired” from those occupations and my wife and I have a small business making custom shadow boxes. Whenever I can, I am off on overlanding trips. (Most trips aren’t long enough because of our business.)
Having spent my life in public service and teaching, I want to get back to my passion of helping people. Working in the sport of overlanding, I want to help people learn to do it correctly, safely and with the understanding of maintaining the natural environment. I believe the OLB forum and meet-ups are the place to start because the personal connections motivate people to actually get off the pavement and to start exploring with a group or on their own.
LONG VERSION
Born in Florida, grew up in Northern California. Started my love of the outdoors with sailing at a young age. I find overlanding is a lot like sailing when it comes to packing and coming up with ideas to fix things. Did this competitively for a while in high school but left it to go camping and hunting. As I grew up, our family would load up the VW bus and take off for the mountains on a regular basis; getting lost was always our favorite time. I was hooked.
After high school I worked as a mechanic and spent almost every weekend either in Sebastopol working on a ranch, hunting big game and fishing, or with a group of friends who taught me how to drive off-road correctly. From this point on I probably never had a vehicle that wasn’t four-wheel drive.
1974 – Became a firefighter at 20 years old and this gave me the ability to get nicer four-wheel drive pickups and I could now afford new MT tires instead of re-caps!
1975 - Met my wife and conned her into going camping and off-roading.
Got away from camping for a bit in the late 70’s to buy a commercial fishing boat with a buddy. We fished for salmon on our days off from the FD and made little or no money, so that wasn’t a long experiment. So, I tried construction and that worked for me as a side job and I’ve been building for about 40 years, give or take.
Once our daughter was born in 1982, we started camping in trailers or tent camping - loading our 12’ aluminum boat with all the gear and heading to some lake for days at a time. (I hope this is where she gets her love for the outdoors since now her and her husband have their second Four Wheel Camper and my old CJ7 to tow.) They’ve taken our 18-month-old granddaughter camping 3 times already.
2003 - My wife and I retired from the fire service in May ’03. We fled California and moved to Grants Pass, OR to be closer to the things we loved to do. My wife loves to take wildlife photos and with my hunting background we could get fairly close to shoot with a camera rather than a gun. Our place in OR was in the middle of nowhere at the base of a mountain and an outdoor-lovers paradise. Jeeps, ATV’s, jet and drift boats and so on, were the way to get around.
2010 (approx.) - I kept hearing about something called overlanding and one day I was fueling my Jeep and someone pulled in with what we now call an overland vehicle. Not sure they really used it for its intended purpose, but it was cool. After some conversation about Jeeps vs other types of vehicles (I didn’t win this conversation because it was a Defender), the one thing that struck me the most was the high-tech storage boxes on the roof rack. I was using Rubbermaid containers with bungie cords and these new style boxes were awesome; maybe these people actually knew something I didn’t.
I started to research what overlanding was, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out that we had been doing it for the past 40 years just calling it “camping” and “off-roading”.
Around this time, I found the Overland Bound forum. We were trying to move back to CA at the time so overlanding or joining anything wasn’t a priority and I just kept reading the forum but not participating.
2013 - moved back to CA and right into the heart of off roading in the state - El Dorado County home of the Rubicon trail. Worked on getting our business up and running again (ShadowBoxUSA.com) and started to get out on the trails when we could.
2016 - Finally pulled the trigger on an OB membership and the rest is history.
2018 - So now, after off-roading, 4-wheeling, camping and overlanding for very close to 50 years I find myself drawn to helping people new to the sport and making sure they do it correctly, safely and with understanding of maintaining the natural environment. I hope to help make it possible for the next generation to enjoy the great outdoors. By this, I mean our granddaughter who at 18 months constantly signs that she wants to go outside and play in the dirt or water and climb on anything you can drive - lawnmowers, cars, quads, Jeeps, tractors. I see a little kids’ electric jeep under her tree next Christmas.
All of our ambassadors share an appreciation for our Founding Principles and a love of the great outdoors, and a drive to inspire others. Kent has embodied this behavior through actions, inspiring others, helping online, explaining how the Overland Bound community works and how we provide value to other organizations through our software and network, and showing up in person to Overland Bound Rally Points to meet new and established members alike.
I could go on. He has done so much behind the scenes to help our community. The West is my home region, and I am thrilled to have Kent as its Ambassador. The West is a huge region and he will be working together with @KEFA 4427 @VCeXpedition and @Narbob , long time friends and supporters of Overland Bound, as well as our trusted Facebook group administrators Chris and Frank.
Kent has our trust, and my ear. Please say congrats and consider him a representative of our organization. He strengthens our community, and is on-board to manage the West Coast Region.
A bit more about Kent:
Bio
Kent Reynolds (OLB #1632, Kent R)
SHORT VERSIONKent Reynolds (OLB #1632, Kent R)
Grew up in Northern Calif., lived in Southern Oregon for 10 years after retirement, moved back to California 5 ½ years ago. I live with my wife in Placerville, CA.
I’ve been a sailor, camper, hunter, fisherman, off-roader for almost 50 years. I spent 30 years as a firefighter and an instructor at our local college fire tech program and had my own construction company as a side job. I am now “retired” from those occupations and my wife and I have a small business making custom shadow boxes. Whenever I can, I am off on overlanding trips. (Most trips aren’t long enough because of our business.)
Having spent my life in public service and teaching, I want to get back to my passion of helping people. Working in the sport of overlanding, I want to help people learn to do it correctly, safely and with the understanding of maintaining the natural environment. I believe the OLB forum and meet-ups are the place to start because the personal connections motivate people to actually get off the pavement and to start exploring with a group or on their own.
LONG VERSION
Born in Florida, grew up in Northern California. Started my love of the outdoors with sailing at a young age. I find overlanding is a lot like sailing when it comes to packing and coming up with ideas to fix things. Did this competitively for a while in high school but left it to go camping and hunting. As I grew up, our family would load up the VW bus and take off for the mountains on a regular basis; getting lost was always our favorite time. I was hooked.
After high school I worked as a mechanic and spent almost every weekend either in Sebastopol working on a ranch, hunting big game and fishing, or with a group of friends who taught me how to drive off-road correctly. From this point on I probably never had a vehicle that wasn’t four-wheel drive.
1974 – Became a firefighter at 20 years old and this gave me the ability to get nicer four-wheel drive pickups and I could now afford new MT tires instead of re-caps!
1975 - Met my wife and conned her into going camping and off-roading.
Got away from camping for a bit in the late 70’s to buy a commercial fishing boat with a buddy. We fished for salmon on our days off from the FD and made little or no money, so that wasn’t a long experiment. So, I tried construction and that worked for me as a side job and I’ve been building for about 40 years, give or take.
Once our daughter was born in 1982, we started camping in trailers or tent camping - loading our 12’ aluminum boat with all the gear and heading to some lake for days at a time. (I hope this is where she gets her love for the outdoors since now her and her husband have their second Four Wheel Camper and my old CJ7 to tow.) They’ve taken our 18-month-old granddaughter camping 3 times already.
2003 - My wife and I retired from the fire service in May ’03. We fled California and moved to Grants Pass, OR to be closer to the things we loved to do. My wife loves to take wildlife photos and with my hunting background we could get fairly close to shoot with a camera rather than a gun. Our place in OR was in the middle of nowhere at the base of a mountain and an outdoor-lovers paradise. Jeeps, ATV’s, jet and drift boats and so on, were the way to get around.
2010 (approx.) - I kept hearing about something called overlanding and one day I was fueling my Jeep and someone pulled in with what we now call an overland vehicle. Not sure they really used it for its intended purpose, but it was cool. After some conversation about Jeeps vs other types of vehicles (I didn’t win this conversation because it was a Defender), the one thing that struck me the most was the high-tech storage boxes on the roof rack. I was using Rubbermaid containers with bungie cords and these new style boxes were awesome; maybe these people actually knew something I didn’t.
I started to research what overlanding was, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out that we had been doing it for the past 40 years just calling it “camping” and “off-roading”.
Around this time, I found the Overland Bound forum. We were trying to move back to CA at the time so overlanding or joining anything wasn’t a priority and I just kept reading the forum but not participating.
2013 - moved back to CA and right into the heart of off roading in the state - El Dorado County home of the Rubicon trail. Worked on getting our business up and running again (ShadowBoxUSA.com) and started to get out on the trails when we could.
2016 - Finally pulled the trigger on an OB membership and the rest is history.
2018 - So now, after off-roading, 4-wheeling, camping and overlanding for very close to 50 years I find myself drawn to helping people new to the sport and making sure they do it correctly, safely and with understanding of maintaining the natural environment. I hope to help make it possible for the next generation to enjoy the great outdoors. By this, I mean our granddaughter who at 18 months constantly signs that she wants to go outside and play in the dirt or water and climb on anything you can drive - lawnmowers, cars, quads, Jeeps, tractors. I see a little kids’ electric jeep under her tree next Christmas.
