by Nate Kennedy

It’s not very often that “out of town” is less than 30 minutes away. The Minnesota Horse and Hunt Club in Prior Lake, MN, is just that, however. Located on over 600 acres of pristine preserve hunting grounds for pheasant, partridge, quail, and turkey hunting, with horse stables and extensive sporting clays, trap and skeet shooting areas, it is one of the premier hunt clubs in the United States. Add a hunter’s lodge with room for a comfortable group of 15+, full kitchen and a monstrosity of a stone fire place, and you’ve got the recipe for an out of town experience within city limits.

But that’s not all the club offers. On site there is also a bed & breakfast, a bar/grill, and a fine dining restaurant (Trigger’s), serving everything from pheasant fingers and salmon salad to elk, bison and beef cuts, perfectly prepared to order. Mike Kermes of the Minnesota Land Rover Club, also a member at the MN Horse & Hunt Club, arranged a perfect overnight event with the right dose of shooting, eating, drinking and Land Rovers.

The MN Land Rover Club shooting event was originally planned for the last weekend in January. Sanity, however, crept in, and on the club’s suggestion, Mike changed the date to a time when warmer weather could be expected. We Rover owners are as tough as the next group, but spending 8 hours shooting guns in -10˚ degree weather is simply not appealing. Even with a cigar and a warming scotch in front of a fire afterward, -10˚ is too cold for a casual event.

Luck was on our side in late April as a weather front passed to the North, carrying rain and cooler weather. The unrelenting wind found us, however, and blew dust from every early spring walking path into our eyes, on to our teeth and into every crevasse of our equipment. With the dusty conditions and the 1,500 clay pigeons we shot (at), our guns were in need of a deep cleaning.

The week before our event the MN Horse & Hunt club hosted the US Open pheasant hunting championships under wet and muddy conditions. By the time we arrived the ground had dried into mildly deep ruts with no give under the weight of a Polaris 4-wheeler, let alone a Rover. We searched the grounds for any type of axle-deep off-roading adventure but in the end decided the stories around the camp fire would be more entertaining than dirt road driving by moonlight.

We awoke Sunday morning, still digesting elk, pheasant, salmon, walleye, bison and I’m sure a piece or two of lettuce, to the once-terrifying, but now harmonic, sound of continuous gunfire. Bruce Springsteen has a lyric: You get used to anything, sooner or later it just becomes your life.

It took a mere 24 hours for the MN Land Rover Club to trade the sound of a grumbling Rover engine for the sound of an over-under Beretta. Are we that easily swayed to other hobbies? I think, in our Rover hearts, there is a space for any hobby that involves the outdoors. Particularly the types of hobbies that an enthusiast can drive to in a Rover.

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