GNCCRacing.com: Tell us a little bit about yourself and the property.

Skeet: Well, I’m one of three children. We were raised right here in Palatka and our father was in the timber business. We had access to large tracts of land, and my dad continued to acquire land piece by piece. That’s how we ended up with what we have now, which is what we call Rodman Plantation. It is 6,300 acres, and the park here sits on about 1,200 acres of it. The rest is still used for timber and cattle and stuff like that.

So about how long has the property been in your family?

We acquired the first piece about 20 years ago and then the rest we’ve gradually added on since then. So the easiest answer is for about 20 years now.

Do you have a favorite spot on this piece of land?

Not really, it’s hard to pick since the property is so diverse. It’s got everything from high sand hills to deep swamps. If I had to pick though, I would say I like the swamps best. I kind of think swamps are pretty. When there’s nothing going on, I sometimes like to go out there to relax.

Why did you decide to open a riding park?

Well, it all started out because they were having trouble with people riding and mudbogging in places they really shouldn’t have been, like lake bottoms and roadside ditches, places like that. So, the county came to us and asked if we could come up with something for them to ride legally instead. We studied it, and we picked out this piece of our property you’re standing on now. We started it slowly about 12 years ago, and now we’ve become one of the biggest ATV parks in Florida for sure, maybe in all the southeast. We have people come here from all over the country and even up in Canada. Sometimes from all over the world.

Are you a riding enthusiast yourself, or did you just end up in this line of work because the county needed a hand?

We just kind of happened into it because of the county. When I was growing up, we were all involved in rodeo and horse riding. I’ve never really ridden a motorcycle, but we do have four-wheelers that we have always used for working the ranch, and now we use for maintaining this park as well.

So, you competed in rodeo when you were younger?

Yes, actually in high school I was vice president of the National High School Rodeo Association. So, I went to nationals finals in tying events … I didn’t do rough stock, I hopefully had better sense than that (laughs)… So we stuck with calf roping and bulldogging and team roping, that kind of stuff. I’ve always been involved in it, but it got to the point where it was so competitive, and when I was no longer able to be competitive and win, it got the point where it was no longer as fun, so I slowly backed out of it.

Well, I’m pretty sure running a place like this keeps you busy enough as it is! What does an average day of running this place look like for you?

Well, it’s just like any other facility, there’s always work to be done. And as we’ve grown now too, like said that park is a little over 1200 acres, and the more land there is the more maintenance there is to do. During the spring and summer there’s always grass to mow and fences to weed-eat. There’s a lot of trail maintenance and inspection that we have to do – of course there’s picking up trash and grooming the trail and mud pits. The main thing though is keeping things as safe as possible, we’re really concerned about that. So, we also ride the trails a lot looking for things like trees that are dying or diseased and might be getting ready to fall, removing limbs that are growing out into the trail, things like that.

Besides hosting the Wild Boar GNCC, what other kinds of events do you guys have here?

The Florida Trail Riders has an event here in the fall. Twice a month now we do the mud bogs and ATV events. Around Thanksgiving we also have s big mega-truck race in the mudhole over here (gestures toward the mud pit), it’s a five acre mud pit that we use for mud bogging. We’ll set up a course in there for those mega-trucks. We put up $10,000 in prize money, so that draws drivers from all over. We usually have five or six thousand spectators come watch and a lot of drivers as well.

Why did you guys decide on the name Hogwaller for this place?

Well, we first thought of it because we had hogs on the property, and we were opening the place to have mud bogs, and a lot of people associate pigs with mud. We liked that theme and decided on “Hogwaller” which was kind of a joke… we spelled it hogwaller instead of hog wallow. We were kind of making fun of this and how everyone says it, we didn’t know if this was going to be a fad or whatever, and this turned into something much bigger than that.  

Overall are you glad things went that way though?

 Oh yeah! It’s been good. It’s been a lot of work, like any other thing. It grew past what we ever expected – we’ve got a licensed restaurant here now, a state-licensed campground, just a lot going on. I’m happy with it.

Now this isn’t the first GNCC to have taken place on Rodman Plantation... Based on the timeframe you gave me earlier, your family would have been involved with the old GNCC round here, right?

Yeah, that’s how I came to know Jeff Russell so well. John Ayers was actually the first person I met from GNCC, somebody told him about our place, this was in like ’01 or ’02, something like that and he and come out to look at it. Then Jeff came out to look too, and they decided to try it out. Now, this was the other side of the property up by the old plantation house though, not where we have the Wild Boar now. That old race was called the Hurricane, and I think it’s kind of ended up as GNCC lore now, how wet it got at the last one. It rained and rained, just never stopped raining and it had to be one of the muddiest things they’d ever seen. After that they didn’t come back for a few years after that (laughs). Jeff is a friend of mine and we stayed in touch even though we weren’t doing a GNCC here. The GNCC folks are good people, they’ve always been great to us. Then when we opened this place up I talked to Jeff about it, said that it could rain the whole week and be flooded everywhere and we could still hold a race here. So he came out again and he said that he thought it would work, and we have been racing here ever since.