Heather and Meghan practice casting on the fly rod. Fishing, especially while backpacking, is another easy avenue to introduce people to consumptive outdoor activities. I was a quarter-mile from the trailhead when I remembered I had left the most important piece of gear at the truck. I turned back to retrieve a pair [...]
Clay Hayes, through his books, self-bow building workshops, and YouTube channel, is well-known in the traditional bowhunting community. But since his recent appearance on the History Channel program, Alone, Clay is casting a much wider net these days by outlasting Season Eight’s other participants and surviving 74 days on the shores of Chilko [...]
“Early on, bowhunting to most of us simply meant a ‘walk in the woods’ in search of a game animal.” Glenn St. Charles Bows on the Little Delta, 1997 There have been many archers through time who have helped promote the sport of archery and worked to help show bowhunting as a healthy, [...]
I have been dancing with the wind most of my life. My mother told me that when I was a kid, I loved to chase bubbles floating on the breeze and run with a kite weaving back and forth as I giggled. I ran high school and college track, and had a love-hate [...]
The second day of the archery season brought clouds and a threat of rain. As I eased up the trail along a high mountain lake a shower caused me to seek shelter under an immense fir. Waiting out the rain, I began to have some real doubts about this season. Yesterday morning a [...]
It’s my goal to become as familiar as possible with the lives of the flora and fauna in my eco-region. There is an excess of 3,500 plants in the California Floristic Province, so it is unlikely I will know them all in my lifetime. Likewise, the kingdom Fungi holds a great diversity and [...]
It was just going to be “filling the freezer” to help us get through the rest of the New Zealand COVID-19 lockdown, which prohibited leaving your house except for limited grocery shopping and was enforced by police stops along roadways. Hunting was banned on public land because of the fear that the virus [...]
Desert is not wasteland. Desert is a space of light where cactus gardens grow on the expansive slopes and the horizon flows into the sky. Deeply incised gulches wander amid stands of juniper and around solid pillows of granite. Raptors soar with proficiency and grace, their eyes searching for elusive cottontails hidden in [...]
My good buddy John lives just over the hill in Rapid City, South Dakota, and let me tell you, he makes the best canned venison I've ever tried. One of these days I'm going to beat that recipe out of him, I swear. That stuff is so practical. It can be made into [...]
In 1955, Roy Hoff, the editor of Archery Magazine, took a trip to the Alaska tundra. It was the kind of expedition every bowhunter dreams of—pursuing big game in Alaska, a place which he describes as “that fabulous wonderland where wildlife is so plentiful that to bag a few nice trophies is as [...]
