Spring 2022 Backcountry Journal

BACKCOUNTRY

JOURNAL

The Magazine of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers

Spring 2022

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

SERENDIPITY Serendipity (noun): the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.

As I traversed the rocky point in search of a mule deer buck, I suddenly realized I’d been here before.

I recognized the scree, the scraggly Douglas fir eking out a living on the unforgiving terrain, and the ridgeline – sheer cliff on one side, steep and open on the other. I arrived on the grassy saddle and was abruptly overwhelmed. Time slowed. The wind, for once, was still. In my heart of hearts I knew I was about to encounter my quarry. I’d felt this same feeling before with affirming results.

But I didn’t, and at the time I didn’t understand why. Maybe that was what was supposed to happen at this spot at that moment in time. But that feeling … it was hard to dismiss the feeling.

Five years earlier on that grassy saddle, something happened that I have never been able to let go. I was hunting with my good friend, former Backcountry Journal editor Sam Lungren. I’d drawn a coveted bighorn sheep ram tag in an area I’d been tied to for years. I’d caught a tiger by the tail. (Read the Winter 2017 edition of Backcountry Journal or listen to episode 1 of BHA’s Podcast & Blast podcast with Hal Herring for that story.)

On the day in question, Sam and I had split up to cover more country. Late in the day we converged on the saddle. Seconds before Sam arrived, I spotted a herd of sheep, about 30 head that included ewes, a handful of rams and the biggest ram I had seen all season … full curl, lots of mass and broomed horns. While any ram would fill the freezer, this was the representative of the species I had been looking for.

The sheep were grazing about 250 yards away. They had seen me but didn’t seem to care. Sam arrived, and the excitement between us was palpable. We dipped out of sight to get closer.

This proved to be our first mistake, as sheep like to see you coming. When we crested the knoll, they appeared again, this time at 200 yards, but something had changed. Instead of being lined out grazing, they were bunched up like a school of fish, staring at us.

There was no way I was going to take the shot with them bunched like that, so we waited. The herd’s nerves got to them, and they turned tail in a hurry, heading for the scree. I won’t ever forget how that looked. For a brief second I had a shot at the big bruiser, but he was moving fast, flanked by ewes, and I decided not to pull the trigger.

We caught up with him right before dark but didn’t get another shot – either that night or for the remainder of the season. A week or so later, I ended up shooting a younger ram that was fine table fare. The big bruiser has been a ghost in my mind since. I’ve never quite been able to let him go.

That moment this past fall felt serendipitous, like it would

provide closure. How apropos would it be to shoot a buck in this very spot? Very.

Nothing materialized in that moment, and the feeling left me just as quickly as it had come. But my instincts were on target.

I took one more step and looked to my left. Out of nowhere, a mule deer buck was staring at me at 150 yards. I dropped to one knee, steadied my rifle, and squeezed off a round.

I heard the thwack, saw him buck and then watched him disappear downhill into the pines. It took me a moment to realize what had just happened. The inexplicable feeling had produced once again. If you’ve spent any time in the woods, you know what I’m talking about – it’s something unexplainable to those who haven’t experienced it. It spawns thoughts of something bigger out there … something that’s hard to describe but a rhythm of which we all are a part.

I don’t think the ghost image of the bruiser ram will ever leave my mind. Nor do I really want it to. But that day last fall, things came full circle. I finally felt at peace after a half decade. Instead of the angst I associated with this very spot, I had a new memory to add to the quiver.

The pack out in the dark, however? That’s a story for another time.

I can’t wait to swap stories of serendipity in person at this year’s Rendezvous, May 12-14 in Missoula, Montana. People are the most important currency at BHA, and it’s high time we fill our souls with human interaction. I look forward to seeing many of you soon.

Onward and upward,

Land Tawney President and CEO SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 3

SHORT “SIMPLICITY IN ALL THINGS IS THE SECRET OF THE WILDERNESS AND ONE OF ITS MOST VALUABLE LESSONS. IT IS WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND THAT IS IMPORTANT. I THINK THE MATTER OF SIMPLICITY GOES FURTHER THAN JUST FOOD, EQUIPMENT, AND UNNECESSARY GADGETS; IT GOES INTO THE MATTER OF THOUGHTS AND OBJECTIVES AS WELL. WHEN IN THE WILDS, WE MUST NOT CARRY OUR PROBLEMS WITH US OR THE JOY IS LOST.” – SIGURD F. OLSON

THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE NORTH AMERICAN BOARD OF DIRECTORS Ted Koch (Idaho) Chairman J.R. Young (California) Vice Chairman Jeffrey Jones (Alabama) Treasurer T. Edward Nickens (North Carolina) Secretary Dr. Keenan Adams (Puerto Rico)

Ryan Callaghan (Montana) Bill Hanlon (British Columbia) Hilary Hutcheson (Montana) Dr. Christopher L. Jenkins (Georgia) Heather Kelly (Alaska)

STAFF Land Tawney, President and CEO Tim Brass, State Policy and Field Operations Director John Gale, Conservation Director Frankie McBurney Olson, Operations Director Katie McKalip, Communications Director Rachel Schmidt, Innovative Alliances Director Chris Borgatti, New York and New England Chapter Coordinator Travis Bradford, Video Production and Graphic Design Coordinator Veronica Corbett, Montana Chapter Organizer Trey Curtiss, R3 Coordinator Katie DeLorenzo, Western Regional Manager and Southwest Chapter Coordinator Kevin Farron, Montana Chapter Coordinator Britney Fregerio, Controller Caitlin Frisbie, Operations Associate and Assistant to the President Chris Hager, Washington & Oregon Chapter Coordinator Andrew Hahne, Merchandise and Operations Aaron Hebeisen, Chapter Coordinator (MN, WI, IA, IL, MO) Chris Hennessey, Regional Manager

Contributors in this Issue Cover Photo: The sun fights for dominance as morning fog rises above the Appalachian foothills. From a spring turkey hunt with fellow BHA member, Heath Ries, in the Zaleski State Forest, Ohio, by Kyle Iwanicki Above Image: Katie Howard, 2019 Public Waters Photo Contest Stacey Ancans, Nicole Bealer, Josh Fortman, Jearred Foruria, Erin Genest, Zoë Havlena, Tristan Henry, Mateen Hessami, Trevor Hubbs, Bryce Levin, Rebekah Lumkes, Adam Miller, Eric Nuse, Morgon Olson, Jon Osborn, Russell Worth Parker, Danielle Prewett, Sarai Ramos, Andy Reed, Daniel Ritz, Ron Rohrbaugh, Jeff Roberts, Mia Sheppard, John Simoneau, M. Mahmood Tajbakhsh, E. Donnall Thomas Jr., Lori Thomas, Brad Tierney, Peter White, Dan Wilson, Wyoming Chapter Journal Submissions: williams@backcountryhunters.org Advertising and Partnership Inquiries: mills@backcountryhunters.org General Inquiries: admin@backcountryhunters.org

Tom McGraw (Michigan) Ben O’Brien (Montana) Michael Beagle (Oregon) President Emeritus

Ace Hess, Idaho and Nevada Chapter Coordinator Jameson Hibbs, Chapter Coordinator (MI, IN, OH, KY, WV) Trevor Hubbs, Armed Forces Initiative Coordinator Chris Hunt, Digital Media Coordinator Josh Kaywood, Southeast Chapter Coordinator Jacob Mannix, Alaska Chapter Coordinator Kate Mayfield, Office Manager Kaden McArthur, Goverment Relations Coordinator Jason Meekhof, Events and Special Projects Coordinator Josh Mills, Development Coordinator Erin Nuzzo, Grants and Annual Giving Coordinator Devin O’Dea, California Chapter Coordinator Rob Parkins, Public Access Coordinator Thomas Plank, Communications Coordinator Kylie Schumacher, Collegiate Program Coordinator Ryan Silcox, Membership Coordinator Joshua Stratton, Great Plains Chapter Coordinator Brien Webster, Program Manager and Colorado and Wyoming Chapter Coordinator Zack Williams, Backcountry Journal Editor Interns: John Copriviza. Haley Erickson, Brady Fryberger, Jenna McCrorie, Keegan Shea, Clay Vernon, Faith Wells

BHA HEADQUARTERS P.O. Box 9257, Missoula, MT 59807 www.backcountryhunters.org admin@backcountryhunters.org (406) 926-1908 Backcountry Journal is the quarterly membership publication of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a North American conservation nonprofit 501(c)(3) with chapters in 48 states and the District of Columbia, two Canadian provinces and one Canadian territory. Become part of the voice for our wild public lands, waters and wildlife. Join us at backcountryhunters.org.

All rights reserved. Content may not be reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher.

Published Mar. 2022. Volume XVII, Issue II

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The Last

Best Wild

“Here still survives one of Planet Earth’s own works of art.

This one symbolizes freedom.”

-Lowell Sumner, National Park Service biologist, 1953

BY E. DONNALL THOMAS JR. As was our tradition, we spent the first night at the Char Hole. Four miles upstream from the gravel bar landing strip, it made a perfect place to end our first day shakedown hike, during which we adjusted the straps on our heavy backpacks, checked our feet for hot spots, and found the rhythm we’d need to maintain during the 20 challenging miles ahead to our sheep hunting base camp.

After gratefully slipping out of my pack and letting it drop onto the tundra, I climbed a boulder and studied the pool below the waterfall. My eyes required some time to adjust to the optical illusions the current created, but then I saw them: a dozen undulating shapes, each representing a char nearly two feet long. I flashed a thumbs-up sign downstream to my hunting partners, confident that we’d soon be enjoying the best evening meal of the next two weeks – unless one of us actually killed a sheep.

Scrambling back down the boulder, I unpacked my backpack fly rod and dug through pockets until I located my minimalist collection of wilderness flies. I didn’t really care which one of us caught the fish or who cooked them.

It was enough to be camping north of the Arctic Circle again.

Newcomers to the Great North should think of Alaska more as a subcontinent than a state – it’s that huge and complicated. The Southeastern Panhandle and the heart of the Interior differ more from population centers around Anchorage than do many foreign countries. Trying to pick a favorite outdoor venue from this smorgas-

bord of possibilities is probably a fool’s errand, but even though I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in almost every part of Alaska, one location somehow stands out as more majestic than all the rest: the North Slope of the Brooks Range and the adjacent coastal Arctic plain. A surreal world of endless summer days and delicious loneliness, the landscape seems constructed by magic rather than the usual factors of weather and geology. Now, however, it stands threatened by forces no more complex than simple human greed.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – often referred to simply as ANWR or “the Arctic Refuge” – lies tucked up against Canada to the east and the Arctic Ocean to the north. Today it is impossible to appreciate this remarkable wilderness and the challenges it faces without understanding its recent history.

Most of us know that our National Wildlife Refuge System began with Theodore Roosevelt. With the stroke of a pen in 1903, Roosevelt created the Pelican Island NWR in Florida to protect its vulnerable birdlife from exploitation by commercial plume hunters. NWRs have played a vital role in the preservation of American wildlife (and hunting and fishing opportunity) ever since.

Remote even by Alaska standards, the Arctic Refuge is not a place one visits casually. Save for a scattered indigenous Native population, no one knew much about the area prior to Alaska statehood. In the early 1950s, National Park Service planner George Collins and biologist Lowell Sumner explored the area and drew attention to it with a study titled “Northeast Alaska: The Last Great Wilderness.”

In 1956, Wilderness Society President Olaus Murie and his wife, Margaret, made an extended expedition into

Photo: Don and Lori Thomas

YOUR BACKCOUNTRY

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 7

the Sheenjek River valley on the south side of the Brooks Range, there, and the six-pack of beer we’d left in the creek proved every accompanied by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas bit as cold and delicious as I’d imagined. and several young biologists including the later world-renowned We were out of sheep country by then, but I wasn’t quite ready George Schaller. Upon their return, this group lobbied Congress to stop hunting yet. As Doug started a coffee-boiling fire out of for permanent protection of the area. In 1960, President Dwight willow twigs the following morning, I walked down the bar to Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Range there, in- glass for a bear. I hadn’t even sat down before I saw a large blonde cluding nearly 9 million acres of designated wilderness, the federal grizzly digging pikas out of a rock pile on the opposite riverbank. government’s highest level of habitat protection.

Thirty minutes later, we were cautiously paddling our tiny inIn order to address longstanding Alasflatable raft across the current. Although NOW, HOWEVER, IT STANDS Doug was way ahead of me in the Dall ka Native land claims and allot land management responsibilities among THREATENED BY FORCES NO sheep column, he had never killed a state and federal agencies, Congress MORE COMPLEX THAN SIMPLE grizzly with his bow. That fact had made passed the Alaska National Interest him the designated hitter that morning, HUMAN GREED. Land Conservation Act in 1980. None so he sat up front clutching his longbow of the stakeholders got everything they while I paddled and wondered how, abwanted, but the Eisenhower-era Arctic National Wildlife Range sent a firearm, I’d back him up if it came to that. was folded into the newly created 19 million-acre ANWR. While The bear had disappeared by the time we beached the raft, but most of the additional land did not receive wilderness designa- after climbing the bank we relocated him easily as he ambled tion, ANILCA specifically required formal congressional approval across the open tundra a quarter-mile ahead of us. prior to any oil and gas development within ANWR. Although arctic grizzlies and coastal brown bears are members of the same species – Ursus arctos – they are very different animals. While brown bears are living the good life and gorging on salmon, their Brooks Range counterparts have to spend their brief No one shot a ram the year Doug and I went on our marathon arctic summers extracting a whole year’s worth of nutrition from pursuit of the big arctic grizzly. painfully lean habitat. The bear we were following had already Weather had haunted that trip right from the start, delaying entered the period of pre-hibernation hyperphagia, and he wasn’t the last leg of our flight to the gravel bar beside the river and ob- going to stop walking until he found something to eat. scuring the peaks in fog and snow every day we hunted from our His pace may have appeared casual, but it was all we could do to upstream base camp. We had only seen one borderline legal ram keep up with him, and we certainly weren’t gaining any ground. in 10 days of hunting, and the best to be said about the long hike We needed him to find another pika colony, a berry patch, a dead back to the strip was that our packs were light and it was downhill caribou calf or something … but he never did. We followed him all the way. We were still exhausted when we finally reached the for miles before we finally gave up and turned back. gravel bar, but the bears hadn’t found the extra food we’d cached Perhaps that was just as well. When last I saw the bear, the 8 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

Photos: Don and Lori Thomas

breeze was puffing his backlit fur into a golden halo that made him look like a creature in a Renaissance painting. I tipped my hat to him and wished him the best for the winter ahead.

By the time ANWR was created, it was common knowledge that the coastal plain adjacent to the Arctic Ocean contained substantial oil reserves. To the west, the Prudhoe Bay oil field had been actively producing since 1977. The terms of ANILCA identified a 1.5 million-acre parcel of the Arctic Coastal Plain within ANWR boundaries as the “1002 area” and designated it as suitable for oil and gas exploration, although congressional approval would still be required prior to further development.

Over the next four decades, the issue of drilling (or not) on the coastal plain became a prototypical political football. The details rapidly grow monotonous, so I’ll stick to the highlights. In 1986, as chair of the House Interior Committee, Morris Udall successfully acted to kill a bill that would have authorized drilling. In 1989, a similar bill was making its way through the Senate when the Exxon Mobil disaster in Prince William Sound made support for drilling toxic. In 1996, President Bill Clinton vetoed a bill that would have authorized exploratory drilling in the Refuge. In 2000 and 2002, the House and Senate took turns passing drilling authorizations that were rejected by the other congressional body.

In 2005, the House added a clause to an energy bill that would have cleared the way for drilling, but it was removed during the reconciliation conference with the Senate. That same year, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens added a similar clause to the defense bill, but it died by filibuster. A 2015 Obama administration effort to grant permanent wilderness level protection to most of the Refuge went nowhere. Whew.

Proponents of drilling invariably cited the potential to create new jobs and the country’s need for oil independence, the latter consideration despite studies showing that even if all the known oil in the 1002 area could be extracted and delivered to market, it would barely satisfy U.S. energy needs for a year.

Drilling opponents cited the intrinsic value of the country’s largest remaining true wilderness as championed by the Muries a generation earlier. They also emphasized the biological value of

the Arctic Coastal Plain as a nesting area for nearly 200 species of birds that migrated throughout the country and as critical habitat for recently endangered species such as polar bears. Then there is the complex matter of the Porcupine caribou herd, in which Canadians just across the border also have a vested interest.

By the time I made my second trip to ANWR, I had learned that one of the surest ways to ruin a good sheep hunt was to shoot something bigger than a sheep. The obligation to care responsibly for the meat from a caribou or a moose meant the end of most sheep hunts. However, when I saw a band of caribou bedded on a rocky ridge a thousand feet above the valley floor, I had a variation on the usual theme in mind.

I’d already killed a number of big bulls with my bow and didn’t need more antlers on my wall. I could plan on losing a pound per day on our usual sheep hunting menu of freeze-dried backpack food, hopefully supplemented by occasional char and ptarmigan.

What I wanted was a caribou calf small enough so I could cut it all up and get it back to camp that night but large enough to feed four of us for the next week. Since the wind direction excluded the possibility of a direct approach, I circled around to the back side of the ridge, re-checked a few landmarks and started to climb.

Numbering around 200,000 animals, the Porcupine caribou herd is one of the continent’s largest. For millennia, gravid cows have delivered their calves during late spring on the Arctic Coastal Plain, right in the heart of the contested 1002 area. From there, they begin a 2,000-mile clockwise circle by traveling east into Canada before moving south and west again to winter in the southern part of the Arctic Refuge before returning to the point of beginning. Along the way, they nourish an entire population of predators ranging from bears and wolves to raptors and SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 9

“BLM’S DECISION TO VIOLATE LANDS SACRED TO MY PEOPLE AND ESSENTIAL TO THE HEALTH OF THE PORCUPINE CARIBOU HERD IS AN ATTACK ON OUR RIGHTS, OUR CULTURE AND OUR WAY OF LIFE. WE HAVE LIVED AND THRIVED IN THE ARCTIC FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS. WE HAVE LISTENED TO AND LEARNED FROM OUR ELDERS, AND WE KNOW THAT WE MUST STAND UNITED TO PROTECT FUTURE GENERATIONS, THE CARIBOU HERD AND SACRED LANDS.”

Photos: Don and Lori Thomas

-BERNADETTE DEMIENTIEFF

wolverines. The indigenous Gwich’in people, who inhabit much of ANWR south of the Brooks Range crest, depend on caribou as a source of food and hides as heavily as our Plains tribes once depended on bison.

Since most of the herd has already passed into Canada by the time sheep season opens in Alaska, I have never personally witnessed the peak of the migration. Friends have assured me that the event is as spectacular as anything seen on Africa’s Serengeti. Perhaps it’s just capricious fate that placed all that oil beneath the most crucial habitat the Porcupine herd crosses during its travels. Most knowledgeable observers agree that disruption of the coastal plain would be a disaster, for the caribou, the Gwich’in, and ultimately the whole arctic ecosystem.

Fortunately for the Gwich’in, they must be better caribou hunters than I am. After picking my way up through the rocks for nearly an hour, I peeked over the top and saw all the caribou grazing back down on the valley floor, right where I had started.

As much as I hesitate to insert politics into the discussion, the fact remains that much of the pressure to authorize oil and gas drilling on the coastal plain has come from Alaska’s congressional delegation. Elected in 2018, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy has also been an outspoken drilling advocate. In 2017, the House and Senate passed authorizing language in President Trump’s tax bill to mandate the sale of oil and gas leases in the Refuge.

In August 2020, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt announced that the department would begin accepting bids for oil leases on the Refuge and predicted lease sales by the end of the year despite a world oversupply of oil and limited interest from big oil companies.

(A former oil industry lobbyist, Bernhardt and his department faced multiple accusations of ethics violations during his tenure.)

Within the month, a consortium including the Gwich’in, National Wildlife Federation, the Canadian Parks and Wildlife Society and the Wilderness Society had filed suit against Bernhardt and the Bureau of Land Management, charging them with violating the terms of ANILCA, the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Wildlife Refuge System Act and the Endangered Species Act. In announcing the suit, Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, said: “BLM’s decision to violate lands sacred to my people and essential to the health of the Porcupine caribou herd is an attack on our rights, our culture and our way of life. We have lived and thrived in the Arctic for thousands of years. We have listened to and learned from our elders, and we know that we must stand united to protect future generations, the caribou herd and sacred lands.”

Bidding on the ANWR oil and gas leases didn’t occur until January of 2021 and drew remarkably little attention from private oil companies, probably reflecting political uncertainty and the high cost of energy development in the Arctic. Less than 1% of promised revenues were raised from the sale and a total of nine leases were awarded, only two of which went to private oil companies. The remaining leases went to entities established and governed by the state of Alaska.

Upon day one of assuming office, newly elected President Biden announced a moratorium on the Arctic Refuge leasing program, and in May of 2021 the Department of the Interior suspended the existing leases. Lawsuits contesting this action remain pending at

the time of this writing. Later that same year, in August, DOI began the process of a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement to address deficiencies in the 2019 review.

The Biden administration’s massive Build Back Better Act passed by the House includes several provisions intended to reform energy development on federal lands, including a suspension of the ANWR lease program authorized in 2017 along with a buyback of existing leases. After hitting a wall in the Senate, the White House and congressional leadership are now advocating plans to pursue a scaled back version of the original bill, which is likely to still include the previous language regarding the Arctic Refuge leasing program. The future of this legislative proposal is uncertain; however, as long as a repeal of the leasing program remains viable in the short term, Congress will likely not move forward with the Arctic Refuge Protection Act, which would designate the nearly 1.6 million acre coastal plain as wilderness.

The final chapters of this complex story – if there ever are any – remain to be written.

Despite its size, ANWR is one of the country’s least frequently visited. Friend, neighbor, Fish and Wildlife Service veteran and frequent hunting partner Glenn Elison served as director of ANWR for ten years beginning in 1983. During that time, he estimates that fewer than 1200 people visited the refuge annually. Chalk that up to logistics. There are no roads to or within the refuge, save for the immediate area around scattered Native villages. Getting there requires a bush flight, usually from Barter Island or Arctic Village. The area’s inaccessibility reflects the essential paradox of wilderness. If ANWR received tourists like Yellowstone National Park, it would no longer be wilderness.

Why bother going to all that trouble, or even caring about ANWR’s future? I spent some time considering that question the evening before we were due to fly out on my last trip to the refuge.

Despite the amount of time I’ve spent far from the nearest road all over Alaska, the country, and the world, ANWR affects me in a qualitatively different way. Earlier during that trip, for example, I started to reach for my bear spray when I spotted a brown, furry hump approaching me above the top of the streamside willows. I stood pat and soon found myself surrounded by a herd of musk ox, one of the few North American big game animals I’d never encountered in the wild.

These primitive Ice Age relics co-exist poorly with humans, which is why their U.S. population is limited to the North Slope of the Brooks Range and a few remote islands in the Bering Sea. Yet there they were, standing before me like characters in a dream.

In the future, I’d like to be able to share that dream with family and friends. That will mean leaving the Arctic Refuge the way it is and always has been.

BHA members Don Thomas and his wife Lori live in central Montana with their dogs. They both enjoy wing-shooting, bowhunting and fly-fishing and together have covered these topics for numerous publications. Don and Lori were the recipients of BHA’s 2021 Ted Trueblood Award for their exceptional communications work informing and inspiring people for the benefit of public lands, waters and wildlife.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 11

BACKCOUNTRY

JOURNAL SPRING 2022 | VOLUME XVII, ISSUE II

FEATURES 06

THE LAST BEST WILD

by E. Donnall Thomas Jr.

64

BIRTH OF A PUBLIC LANDS HUNTER

by Russell Worth Parker

69

IN SEARCH OF EXPLOSIVE BLISS

by Jon Osborn

75

BOUNDARIES UNKNOWN

by Adam Miller

79

THE WIND

by Erin Genest

83

COMO TO CASPIAN

by M. Mahmood Tajbakhsh

12 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

BHA member Nels Iverson crosses the Rio Grande in New Mexico with a public land Rio Grande tom. Photo: Zoë Havlena

DEPARTMENTS 03

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

39

05

YOUR BACKCOUNTRY Hoosier Grouse

by Dr. Brian Stone

42

FIELD TO TABLE Pan-Roasted Ptarmigan

by Hank Shaw

50

INSTRUCTIONAL After the Point

by Scott Linden

10

BHA HEADQUARTERS NEWS

15

FACES OF BHA Catherine Danae Elser, Prospect, Pennsylvania

17

BACKCOUNTRY BOUNTY

19

KIDS’ CORNER Going Fishing

by Penelope Gall

Use the Wind for Waterfowl

by Homer Raymundo

DEPARTMENTS 22 CHAPTER NEWS

52

03

45

14 19 21 33 23 25 37

27

In Depth: Paying It Forward PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

by Joel Gay BHA HEADQUARTERS In Depth: Alberta ChapterNEWS Fights for Wild Places

by Neil Keown SO YOU'RE ATTENDING RENDEZVOUS? Rende Recap FACES OF BHA ARMED INITIATIVE Rebekah FORCES Lumkes, Pullman, Washington In Defense of Public Lands and Waters BACKCOUNTRY

by Lt. Col. Andrew BOUNTY Ruszkiewicz and Luke Weingarten

KIDS’ CORNER HUNTING FOR SUSTAINABILITY Echo R3: The Why by

by Ron Trey Rohrbaugh Curtiss CHAPTER NEWS A $40 Million Win for Public Access in Maine

by John Simoneau Washington Chapter Fights for Its Spring Bear Hunt

by Bryce Levin and Dan Wilson Corner Crossing in the Crosshairs

by Wyoming Chapter Board Third Time's a Charm

by Morgan Olson

39

HUNTING FOR SUSTAINABILITY Full Circle

by Nicole Bealer

42

COLLEGE CLUBS Sky to Skillet

by Peter White

COLLEGE CLUBS Building Bridges

by Col. Mike Abell

PUBLIC LAND OWNER The North American Grasslands Conservation Act

by Bethany Erb ARMED FORCES INITIATIVE AFI Members Find Community ... and More Modest Land Mule Deer by Trevor Hubbs

by Brad Trumbo

48 87

FIELD TOFAIR TABLE BEYOND CHASE Venison Enchiladas What Do We Owe the Individuals? by Prewett

by Danielle Corey Ellis

52 88

INSTRUCTIONAL HUMOR SUP 101 All inFishing a Minute by Sheppard

by Mia Jill Grenon McMurray

56 91

PUBLIC LAND OWNER END OF THE LINE Native Trout on Public Lands and Waters

by Daniel Ritz

86

SHORT Trapping the Maple

by Josh Fortman

89

BEYOND FAIR CHASE Long Range Hunting: Thinking it Through

by Eric Nuse

91

END OF THE LINE

Prince of Wales Island, Tongass National Forest, Alaska Photo: Ben Matthews, read “Into the Mystic” on page 58

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 13

HEADQUARTERS NEWS

ROAD TO RENDEZVOUS! In one of the biggest giveaways we have ever dreamt up, BHA is teaming up with longtime partner Mountain Top Motor Co., of Troy, Missouri, for the epic Road To Rendezvous Sweepstakes.

Starting in early April, BHA members will have the opportunity to enter to win a 1998 Chevy Silverado, but it won’t be just any run of the mill 24-year-old truck. The after-market experts at Mountain Top Motor Co. will have gone through the low mileage truck with a fine-tooth comb and added a plethora of mountain ready add-ons like custom wheels and tires, lift, solar system for external power, roof racks, winch and so much more, along with a new custom wrap that will make this the best backcountry

A lone steelheader, Tillamook State Forest, Oregon. Photo by William Smith, 2021 Public Lands and Waters Photo Contest

truck you can dream of. Along with a one-year warranty, the winner of this truck will have more outdoor gear coming from BHA North American sponsors like First Lite, FHF Gear, NRS, Grayl, Costa, Gunner Kennels, Traeger, Stone Glacier, Sport Dog, Vortex, Danner, Fishpond and more. The Road to Rendezvous Sweepstakes will run from early April up to Rendezvous in Missoula, May 12-14, with a lucky winner chosen a week after Rendezvous. Be on the lookout as this outdoor lover's dream rig will be on the road, stopping off at BHA events and public lands and waters en route to Rendezvous. Good luck!

AWARDS NOMINATIONS PORTAL Do you know an individual who deserves to be recognized for their outstanding contributions to conservation or our organization? This is your chance to help us honor their work with one of our 2022 Awards! Award recipients are announced annually at the North American Rendezvous, set this year for May 12-14 in Missoula, Montana!

• • • •

The Jim Posewitz Award for advancing ethical, responsible behavior in the hunting and fishing fields by example, leadership or education The Rachel L. Carson Award for an outstanding emerging leader The Aldo Leopold Award for outstanding effort conserving terrestrial wildlife habitat The Sigurd F. Olson Award for outstanding effort

14 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

• • • •

conserving rivers, lakes or wetland habitat The Ted Trueblood Award for outstanding communication on behalf of backcountry habitat and values The Larry Fischer Award for outstanding corporate contribution to BHA’s mission The George Bird Grinnell Award for the outstanding BHA chapter of the year The Mike Beagle-Chairman’s Award for outstanding effort on behalf of BHA

Nominate individuals and chapters at backcountryhunters. org/2022_awards_nomination_portal. The final deadline for nominations is Friday, April 1.

HEADQUARTERS NEWS

BHA ADVANCES SUNDAY HUNTING Following grassroots successes in North Carolina and in Pennsylvania, where Sunday hunting is now allowed on three Sundays, other states are making progress in repealing antiquated laws to now allow Sunday hunting, thanks in large part to the efforts of BHA chapters.

In Massachusetts, the New England chapter has been hard at work speaking in support of a number of Sunday hunting bills.

The state is now among only a handful of states that has yet to repeal Blue Laws pertaining to Sunday hunting. For hardworking resident sportsmen and women, the ban on Sunday hunting severely limits opportunities to be in the field and share outdoor traditions with family and friends.

Massachusetts Gov. Baker included provisions for Sunday archery deer hunting as well as decreased setbacks for archery hunting in his Fiscal Year 2023 Budget. Encouraging lawmakers in the House and Senate Ways and Means committees to leave these items in the budget is another chance for these opportunities to come into fruition for Massachusetts hunters.

Hunters remain barred from hunting public lands on Sundays in South Carolina despite widespread support for Sunday hunting among the outdoors community. Thankfully, a coalition of sporting groups have joined a large bipartisan group of legislators to sponsor a bill (H 4614) that would provide a simple and needed fix to give hunters the opportunity to head afield on Wildlife Management Areas in the state on both days of the weekend.

The South Carolina chapter has been engaging in multiple public forums on this issue leading up to this point. BHA members from South Carolina can let legislators know where you stand when it comes to on Sunday hunting on public lands.

Visit BHA’s Action Center to speak up for Sunday hunting in Massachusetts and South Carolina and to further efforts in Pennsylvania.

FIELD TO TABLE BLOG We’d love to share your favorite wild game and fish recipes on BHA's Field to Table blog! Email us a short introduction about the recipe, a nice photo, the recipe and simple cooking instructions to see your work alongside many of the best wild game chefs in the business. Submissions can be sent to williams@ backcountryhunters.org.

Antelope bulgogi by North Dakota BHA member Jeff Benda. Find the recipes at backcountryhunters.org/field_to_table

BHA MEAT BAGS BHA has teamed up with Walton's – Everything but the Meat! to package and store your next wild game grind with these one pound poly-meat bags. Whether you hunt public land, private land or a mix of both, BHA believes we should build a community of hunters and conservation advocates that celebrates wild food.

Each bag quotes author, founder of Orion: the Hunters Institute and conservationist Jim Posewitz from his book Beyond Fair Chase: “Hunting is one of the last ways we have to exercise our passion to belong to the earth, to be part of the natural world, to participate in the ecological drama, and to nurture the ember of wildness within ourselves.”

LATEST ON THE PODCAST & BLAST Eduardo Garcia, one of the greatest wild game chefs of our time and the co-founder of Montana Mex, returns to the Podcast & Blast to talk, as always, about life – family, work, cooking, hunting, gardening, foraging, the discipline of awareness and the glories and struggles of the every day. His new TV series, Zest for Life, is available now. Listen to Hal’s 2019 interview with Eduardo if you don’t know his story and then listen to this one, a conversation with a man who was struck down by an unimaginable accident while hunting and who worked his way forward: from the edge of death and the reality of loss, to a life more abundant.

In episode 124, Andrew McKean and Randy Newberg join Hal for a spirited and sobering look at elk hunting in Montana – a place where politics and privatization meet the future of our hunting – and how we might affect that future if we have the knowledge and the courage to act. Montana's private land elk numbers are booming, hunting pressure on public lands is skyrocketing and landownership patterns are changing. What is happening? Where are we going? What does this mean, not just for Montana but for the future of hunting in the fast-growing and fast-changing West?

Find these episodes and more at backcountryhunters.org/bha_ podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 15

COLORING CONTEST WINNERS!

Thanks to all who participated in the winter issue’s coloring contest!

First Place: Bethany Johnson, age 12

Second Place: Piper Gibboney, age 7

Third Place: Owen Lammert, age 8

WELCOME NEW BHA STAFF! Chris Hager Washington and Oregon Chapter Coordinator Born and raised on the East Coast, Chris got his love and passion for the outdoors fishing the coastal and inland waters of Maine and New Hampshire.

Fishing has been a gateway into his passion for conservation, where he has committed his career and personal endeavors.

Now settled in the Pacific Northwest, Chris spends most of his time backcountry hunting, fishing and camping in Oregon’s and Washingtons' coast, high desert and temperate rainforests.

Chris Hunt Digital Media Coordinator Longtime Western journalist and conservation communicator Chris Hunt comes to BHA after more than 16 years working in various media capacities for Trout Unlimited. In 2004, he won the prestigious Dolly Connelly Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism, and he has collected numerous awards from the likes of the Society of Professional Journalism, the Associated Press, the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association, the Idaho Press Club and the Outdoor Writers Association of America.

He's an avid fly fisher and has traveled the world to chase everything from bonefish and permit to pike, bass and trout. Since 2005, he's worked to communicate the efforts to protect great American landscapes, from the Roan Plateau in Colorado to Bristol Bay in Alaska. In his home state of Idaho, he helped push the Idaho Roadless Rule across the finish line and worked to protect the Wyoming Range from future oil and gas drilling. He lives and works in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Trevor Hubbs

Armed Forces Initiative Coordinator Trevor Hubbs grew up near the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers.

His father and two uncles taught him about their particular brand of hunting starting when he was 7. His father was a waterfowler, one uncle a houndsman, and another uncle the last quail hunter in southern Illinois. He grew up chasing raccoons and coyotes behind hounds and running a muskrat trapline starting at 7 years old. In high school, Trevor guided for game farm pheasants and public land ducks. Today, he follows his Irish setters looking for native game birds on public land.

Erin Nuzzo

Grants and Annual Giving Coordinator Growing up in Western Montana, Erin has been fishing the Blackfoot and the Bitterroot rivers when you’d be hard-pressed to see another human being all day! She is still an avid angler, paddleboarder, hiker, runner and snowboarder ... anything that gets her outside! Erin has worked in the nonprofit sector for many years both as a volunteer and as a professional, with experience ranging from fundraising, volunteer management and event planning to marketing and advocacy work.

She brings these skills to good use as the grants and annual giving coordinator, helping BHA achieve our mission and empowering our membership to conserve the lands and waters we all cherish.

Photos courtesy Lael Johnson

18 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

SO YOU’RE ATTENDING RENDEZVOUS 2022?

BY JASON MEEKHOF, BHA EVENTS AND SPECIAL PROJECTS COORDINATOR Get excited. You’re about to be part of the biggest public lands celebration you’ve ever seen. Your mind is about to be blown; you’ll meet countless likeminded people – who come from a vast array of backgrounds – united in the spirit of activism for our shared public lands and waters. Make the most of your experience with the following tips:

Connect Introduce yourself to anyone and everyone. The connections you make at Rendezvous will span the entire continent. People will be there from just about every state and province, and you’ll miss out if you don’t connect with as many of them as you can. Tell stories, share experiences and build a bond or two.

Plan ahead and pick your events Plan what you want to do and get there early, because the tents will fill up fast. A few suggestions include the Field to Table dinner (Thursday night), Brewfest and Campfire Stories (Friday), and of course the Chapter Wild Game Cookoff (Saturday). On top of all that BHA is bringing seminars back in a big way, and this year’s lineup is going to be fantastic!

Meet the people behind your favorite brands This is your chance to meet the people behind your favorite outdoors brands in the industry. Touch and feel the goods from companies that join you in your passion for the outdoors and public lands.

Brewfest is back!

The community really shines as we come together to share excellent Montana microbrews, listen to music and spin a tale or two. Sip one of the many available microbrews and swap tales of your last backcountry adventure. Friday, May 13, 5- 9 p.m. at Caras Park.

Campfire Stories The weekend’s crowning event features amazing stories told by some of the best storytellers on the continent. The full effect of community wrapped around spellbinding stories will have you on the edge of your seat. If you’re at Rendezvous, this is an absolute can’t miss. Friday 8-10 p.m. at The Wilma Theatre.

Follow the tags There’s no doubt that social media plays a big role in telling the story of Rendezvous, and each year there’s a unique hashtag to help you follow along with the rest of the crew. Last year’s photos are tagged #rende2021 on Instagram to get you pumped up for this year’s festivities. Follow the this year’s Rendezvous and make sure to tag all your posts with #rende2022.

Spring weather in Missoula can be unpredictable Combine that with the indoor and outdoor nature of Rendezvous, be ready for 75 degrees and sun one minute and 35 degrees and

Photo: Alex Kim

snow the next. What does it mean? Bring a versatile wardrobe, and if you are camping, prepare for an array of weather.

Rest Up May 12-14 in Missoula isn’t a time for rest. It’s a jam-packed weekend where you are going to want to see and experience all you can.

The week before, get plenty of sleep and eat your Wheaties because come May 12, it’s a whirlwind. BHA Rendezvous is one of the highlights of the year, and it’s over in a blink of an eye. Get all you can from it, and you’ll walk away with your bucket overflowing. It’ll power you through the next year and help carry the flame of our organization to your home communities. We can’t wait to meet you in Missoula.

2022 RENDEZVOUS WILL BE HELD MAY 12-14 IN MISSOULA, MONTANA. Visit backcountryhunters.org for the event schedule, tickets and more information!

THE LARGEST SINGLE LIVING ORGANISM ON EARTH STARTED WITH JUST ONE SEED…

The aspen can regenerate from its own roots. Similar to the grove in this photograph, at 107 acres and 47,000 trees, the Pando Aspen Grove, in Fishlake National Forest, Utah, is considered one of the largest living organisms on the planet.

Photo: Kjos Outdoors

Project Aspen Our shared land. Our responsibility.

It’s up to you to make sure places remain where you can barely be seen.

Contribute to Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ Project Aspen to form the regenerative root structure supporting public lands, water, wildlife and hunting and angling in the future: backcountryhunters.org/projectaspen

REBEKAH LUMKES PULLMAN, WASHINGTON

FACES OF BHA

Washington State University BHA Collegiate Club President

WHAT BROUGHT YOU TO BHA? My first memorable exposure to public lands happened after I graduated from college and moved away from Indiana, where my hunting experiences had all been on private land. I took a job as a wildlife technician in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I lived and worked in the Ottawa National Forest. It blew my mind that I could literally step out my door and forage for berries and mushrooms, go turkey hunting or simply roam the forest for miles and miles on end.

After spending eight months doing just that, I was hooked. I remember immediately telling my coworker that “wherever I end up, I want to live near public land.” Several years later, when I started hearing about BHA through podcasts and coworkers, I was immediately attracted to the organization because of the commitment to conservation, public lands, public outreach and community.

As soon as I moved to Washington for graduate school and knew I would be in the same location for a few years, I reached out to the state BHA chapter hoping to get involved. The past year and a half have confirmed to me why I was attracted to BHA in the first place and brought me into an amazing community that allowed me to connect right away despite having moved from across the country. BHA has brought me new opportunities in the hunting and angling world and helps me stay up to date on the policies that are affecting conservation at a national and local scale.

WHY ARE PUBLIC LANDS IMPORTANT TO YOU?

Photo courtesy: Rebekah Lumkes

After my firsthand experience in Michigan, I value what public lands bring to the people: the ability to recreate outside and areas for natural habitat to be restored. I think being outside in any way, shape or form can bring many mental and physical health benefits to an individual, and there is something awe-inspiring about hiking through a plot of public land and knowing you own it. Living in an area now that has more public land than I’ve experienced before has allowed me to get outside more, introduce other people to more outdoor activities and find new activities to try. Over the past year I’ve spent hours backpacking, hunting, fishing, kayaking and trail running, and I know it has brought me more happiness and peace of mind than if I had been doing something else.

In 2019 I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and spent 4.5 months living on public lands and consider this one of the most beneficial experiences of my life, in both personal growth and in my mindset. A period that would not have been possible if not for public land. I met dozens of hikers that were finding relief on the trail and realizing the values of being unplugged from normal, everyday life.

WHAT IS YOUR INVOLVEMENT WITH THE WASHINGTON STATE BHA COLLEGIATE CLUB? I am currently president of the club. After moving to Washington for graduate school, I reached out to Kylie Schumacher (BHA collegiate club coordinator) about becoming more involved with BHA, and I realized the club needed a spark of life after covid threatened to wipe it out. We’re in the rebuilding phase right now, but I am already loving the community I’ve found and the things we’ve been able to accomplish in just one semester. It’s been encouraging to see both veteran hunters and students who have never tried hunting or fishing before joining the club and contributing, and I hope to continue that growth this year.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT FOR STUDENTS AND OTHER YOUNG ADULTS TO GET INVOLVED IN PUBLIC LANDS CONSERVATION? There are a lot of studies out there that discuss the declining hunter numbers nationwide, which not only has detriments to conservation in America, but I think to society as well. Most students and young adults I talk to about BHA are genuinely interested, and even if they may never hunt themselves, I think it’s important for my generation to care about the lands around them and also realize what they can do on those lands. Realizing that you own the land changed my own mindset in Michigan, and I think more young adults will engage in conservation when they learn more about and use public lands.

HOW DO YOUR SCHOOL AND CAREER ASPIRATIONS TIE INTO YOUR WORK WITH THE BHA COLLEGIATE PROGRAM? Currently I am working on my master’s degree in environmental science, focusing on mule deer conservation.

A lot of wildlife research happens because of access to public lands and because of the large areas of natural habitat public lands often provide. Eventually I hope to either work for a government agency as a biologist, where I would be directly involved with public lands, or work for an organization like BHA that promotes outdoor recreation and conservation.

Whether or not I do this professionally, I hope to always be advocating for public lands and working to involve other people that I meet.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 21

22 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

Hunter: Josh Yoder, BHA member Species: whitetail State: Wisconsin Method: bow Distance from nearest road: 2 miles Transportation: foot

I’m an old-fashioned fellow – no social media – but I thought this buck deserved to be celebrated. This magnificent public land buck did all the work. Making a living in the deep contiguous forests of northern Wisconsin, avoiding hunters and managing stress on public land.

Considering where I harvested this deer, it’s very likely he never had the benefit of agricultural diet, rather gaining his subsistence from logging slash, acorns and whatever else big woods had on the menu.

With all that said, I was more than blessed to capitalize when I caught him on his feet in daylight. I hung a stand an hour before sunrise and he came sauntering by at 7:40 a.m. heading to his bed.

I’m fortunate to live in an area with a lot of public ground and have been archery hunting it for the past 26 years.

It wasn’t until the past decade that I realized how lucky I am to have it. If it goes away so does hunting, speaking from my own experience; I probably never would have started without relatively easy access at the age of 13.

Love the work you guys do!

-Josh Yoder, Northern WI

BACKCOUNTRY BOUNTY

Hunter: Chloe Christiansen, BHA member Species: black bear State: Oregon Method: rifle Distance from nearest road: two miles Transportation: foot

Hunter: Mackenzie Jeffress, new BHA life member Species: desert bighorn State: Nevada Method: rifle Distance from nearest road: two miles Transportation: foot

Hunters: (left to right) Gavin Bunn, Ryan Bunn, BHA members Species: pronghorn State: Wyoming Method: rifle Distance from nearest road: one mile Transportation: foot

Hunters: (left to right) Josh Watts, Cole Watts, BHA members Species: wood duck State: Mississippi Method: shotgun Distance from nearest road: one mile Transportation: foot Anglers: Jack and Davey Palmisano, BHA members Species: bluegill State: Michigan Method: ice Distance from nearest road: one mile Transportation: little feet

Email your Backcountry Bounty submissions to williams@ backcountryhunters.org or share your photos with us by using #backcountryhuntersandanglers on social media! (Emailed bounty submissions may also appear on social media.)

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 23

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KIDS’ CORNER

ECHO

Illustration: Andy Reed

BY RON ROHRBAUGH The two coyotes leapt between Echo and the injured buck. White, curved canine teeth gleamed as the two worked a crisscross pattern to keep Echo off guard. When they were just 15 feet away, within easy range to pounce on Echo and tear him to shreds, the crisscrossing stopped. Ole One Ear crept forward and crouched low, coiling his legs to spring for Echo’s throat.

Echo did not run. Instead, he drew his bow and took aim, ready to release an arrow into the alpha’s soft underbelly when he lunged from mere feet away.

Suddenly, a puff of wind hit Echo on the back, carrying his human scent straight to Ole One Ear. The big male instantly registered recognition of a predator greater than himself. Under pumping legs, the two coyotes forfeited the buck and sped off to join the rest of the pack. Now it was just Echo and the buck, whose knees were beginning to buckle from his injuries.

Echo was already at full draw, and he knew what had to be done.

He picked an imaginary spot on the buck’s heaving chest. The selfbow’s string let out a hushed whoosh when Echo let it slip from

his fingers. The dogwood arrow and its stone tip took the buck cleanly. Echo watched the light go from the buck’s eyes, and the stillness of death came over his body. Killing was never easy, and this time was no different.

BHA member Ron Rohrbaugh is a professional wildlife biologist, author/freelance writer, and hunter-conservationist. He is the author of more than 50 feature articles in various hunting/outdoor magazines, the LIVING WILD with the Orions series, and A Traditional Bowhunter’s Path. Ron lives with his wife Debbie and two young children in a log cabin on the Allegheny Front in north-central Pennsylvania.

Editor’s Note: This story was excerpted from “Echo,” the first book in the author’s series “LIVING WILD with the Orions.”

It follows 11-year-old Echo Orion as he navigates a family rite of passage to become a “Sure Enough Mountain Man” on the brink of his first hunting season. Learn more in the review at backcountryhunters.org/echo_living_wild_with_the_orions or purchase on Amazon Smile and choose BHA as your preferred non-profit organization!

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 25

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CHAPTER NEWS

A $40 MILLION WIN FOR PUBLIC ACCESS IN MAINE

BY JOHN SIMONEAU A few years ago I was hosting friends for whitetail hunting camp, and we were looking for a new place to explore. Studying the state websites and mapping apps we decide to visit the 6,000acre Kennebec Highlands Public Reserve. I mapped out a loop with drainages, saddles, wetlands and fading skid trails. While climbing to the first saddle I thought I heard an occasional duck call. Finding the deer sign I was looking for I settled in to sit.

I could hear the sound of moving air before I recognized the first duck in the flight just over the treetops. Moments later the thunder of shotguns down in the pond down below confirmed that I had heard duck calls; we were not the only hunters enjoying this public land today. I only caught a glimpse of fleeing deer tails in a thick stand of beech saplings that day, but my mind was spinning with thoughts of public land hunting opportunities I’d found.

Maine is over 90% privately owned, and access to Kennebec Highlands was never guaranteed until it was protected by the Land for Maine’s Future program. Unlike most states, by tradition much of Maine’s undeveloped private woodlands, streams, lakes and remote ponds have been open to public access. However, access is being lost as development spreads into rural areas and owners uncomfortable with hunting traditions post their land.

To counter these trends, LMF has been Maine’s primary funding vehicle for conserving land and guaranteeing public access since establishment in 1987. In that time LMF has administered multiple bonds and instances of general fund appropriations.

With prior funding the program has completed many projects, including 62 water access sites,1,272 miles of shoreline on rivers, lakes and ponds and just under 604,000 acres of conservation and

recreation lands. This includes 333,425 acres of managed forest and farmland that conserve working landscapes, keeping lands in private ownership with permanent conservation agreements.

While LMF has been a successful program, new funding ceased in 2012 under the administration of the prior governor. The New England BHA chapter has advocated for renewed LMF funding since 2015 through letters to the editor, an op-ed in one of Maine’s major newspapers, social media and legislative action. During the 2021 legislative session, the chapter testified on multiple LMF bills about the importance of the program to protect public lands for hunting, fishing, hiking, boating and other traditional uses.

The LMF statute has always included the language, “Hunting, fishing, trapping and public access may not be prohibited on land acquired with bond proceeds, except to the extent of applicable state, local or federal laws, rules and regulations and except for working waterfront projects and working farmland preservation projects.” In 2021 there was an organized effort to remove that language from these measures. The chapter helped successfully defeat this effort by calling on members to provide testimony in support of hunting, fishing and trapping on LMF projects.

While LMF has traditionally been funded by bonding, in 2021 it was included in state budget and American Rescue Act fund negotiations. With overwhelming votes in both branches of Maine legislature and the governor’s signature, the most recent budget provided $40 million in new funds for the program. Over the next four years LMF can spend up to $10 million annually to secure outdoor recreational access, protect wildlife habitat and preserve working landscapes.

The chapter also successfully supported a bill prioritizing LMF projects that would protect critical deer wintering areas in northern, eastern and western Maine. To ensure habitat benefits will not be compromised, these lands will be managed by the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

To help stretch LMF funding, the New England chapter’s Maine leadership team also supported legislation to fund a backlog of state park maintenance using $50 million of the state’s American Rescue Act funds as a match for federal Land and Water Conservation Fund grants. BHA also helped defeat a bill that would have severely limited the area in public land and publicly held conservation easements.

With a freshly funded Land for Maine’s Future Program, the chapter leadership team in Maine is awaiting opportunities to comment on management plans for new acquisitions.

As for my explorations at Kennebec Highlands, I have returned to hunt deer, turkey, grouse and bear. This fall I realized the small stream I was crossing is connected to a trout pond, so in the future I have a blue line to follow with fishing rod in hand. Projects like the Kennebec Highlands will help Maine provide sporting opportunities for future generations.

John Simoneau is a BHA chapter leader from Maine who is passing on his passion for the outdoors to his two daughters. He spends any free time hunting, fishing and training a young bird dog.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 27

CHAPTER NEWS

BHA’S WASHINGTON CHAPTER FIGHTS

BY BRYCE LEVIN AND DAN WILSON On Nov. 19, 2021, the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission held a vote to address proposed changes to the structure of the limited entry 2022 spring bear hunt. While public notice for the meeting stated the vote was regarding language and opportunity updates, it quickly became apparent that the issue of bear hunting in Washington was actually at stake. The vote concluded in a 4-4 tie, ultimately shutting down the 2022 spring bear hunt.

The FWC consists of nine governor-appointed members who are mandated to “establish policies to preserve, protect and perpetuate fish, wildlife and ecosystems while providing sustainable fish and wildlife recreational and commercial opportunities compatible with healthy and diverse fish and wildlife populations.” They work closely with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, receiving recommendations from WDFW biologists and holding meetings allowing public input to set regulated hunting seasons and both commercial and recreational fishing seasons.

How did a nine-member commission end up voting 4-4 on this issue? That is where things get interesting. In January 2021, two new commission members were appointed by the governor to fill two of the three the seats vacated by commissioners whose terms had expired at the end of 2020. The third seat, an Eastern Washington seat, had still not been appointed 12 months later – resulting in an eight-member commission at the time of the vote.

At the Oct. 22 meeting, the two newly appointed commissioners, Lorna Smith and Fred Koontz, went on the offensive and peppered WDFW staff with a long list of questions – targeting the accuracy of their data and questioning the ethics of the spring bear hunt.

In response, WDFW biologists provided a 100-page document citing their methodology for obtaining data, unit by unit harvest, population estimates and den emergence and harvest timing, to name a few.

Historically, public comment at FWC meetings has been 28 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

limited to in-person comments only. But in response to the pandemic, the commission now allows public comment via Zoom, opening public comment to citizens anywhere in the country.

With this new tool on the table for anti-hunting individuals and organizations across the US, the FWC was inundated at the same Oct. 22 meeting with comments, often citing fallacious emotional arguments opposing the hunt as unethical and cruel.

In response to the season being put on pause, the Washington chapter has filed a joint petition with The Inland Northwest Wildlife Council to amend the Washington Advisory Code allowing the spring bear hunt to continue in perpetuity. This petition was accepted and voted to advance by the commission at a special meeting held on Jan. 21, triggering WDFW to engage the commission and public to initiate the rule making process for a 2022 season that is now back on the table. If the new proposed rules are adopted by the commission at the March 17 meeting, two very positive outcomes would be achieved: a reinstatement of the spring 2022 season, and the removal of the loophole requiring that the season be approved annually by an affirmative vote – leaving only rule changes open for debate and vote in the future.

The chapter authored a letter, co-signed by national and regional conservation organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, TRCP and the Sportsmen’s Alliance, calling on the governor to appoint a commissioner to the open seat and affirming hunting as a key component of conservation in Washington state. In addition, our chapter leaders, with the support of BHA staff, have engaged in a massive education and action campaign that played a significant role in this becoming a national flashpoint – collaborating with other organizations, providing press interviews, educational podcasts and coordinating calls to action across social media. We got what we asked for on Jan. 24, and new commissioners were appointed, but with virtually no engagement with or input from conservations groups.

While the headline has been the Washington spring bear hunt,

Photo: Jeff Roberts, PNWild

FOR ITS SPRING BEAR HUNT

the true issue at hand is a new, coordinated attack on the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation – one in which hunting, angling and science are subordinate to emotional appeals and conjecture. To quote Clay Newcomb, “Backcountry Hunters & Anglers need to guard the gate.”

While we have rallied to guard the gate in response to the attack on our spring bear hunt, the truth is that the gate needed guarding at a much earlier point in Washington.

Conservationists need to be proactively engaging with their decision-makers before hunting opportunities are on the chopping block. Advisory committees, commissions and their appointees hold sway over what the future of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation will look like in each state and across the country. It is our duty to be informed, engaged and advocating that the right people are making the right decisions to protect wildlife, access and opportunity.

BHA member Bryce Levin is a conservation and policy leader with the Washington chapter based out of Lake Stevens.

He enjoys hunting, fishing and spending time with his wife, daughter, and dog, Gus. BHA member Dan Wilson is the secretary for the Washington chapter with an academic background in anthropology.

Residing in Spokane, Washington, with his wife and son, he is an unaccomplished muzzleloading hunter, upland bird chaser and fly fisher.

UPHOLDING THE NORTH AMERICAN MODEL Across North America, BHA chapters are fighting for science-based wildlife management: ARIZONA: An organized group of advocates is attempting to ban all hunting of mountain lions, bobcats and bears by utilizing the comment period currently open for its 5-year hunting season setting guidelines.

The Arizona chapter is working to drive comments from members in support of hunting through this process.

CALIFORNIA: Following up on a failed attempt to ban all black bear hunting, a petition (2021-027) was filed in early January with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which attempts to eliminate all bear hunting. The California chapter is working through the commission process to oppose this proposal.

COLORADO: A bill has been introduced (SB 22-031) that would prohibit any hunting or trapping of mountain lions or bobcats. The Colorado chapter has launched an action alert and is coordinating with other hunting and angling groups to kill this bill.

NEW JERSEY: For years, the New Jersey chapter has been working to reverse an outright closure of the bear hunting season, which was egregiously initiated by the New Jersey governor through an executive order with no scientific basis.

OREGON: The chapter is working with a coalition of hunting and fishing organizations to educate our community and help stop Initiative Petition 13 from advancing. This proposed ballot measure would criminalize hunting and fishing in the state and put an end to our outdoor traditions.

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CHAPTER NEWS

CORNER CROSSING IN THE CROSSHAIRS

BY BHA WYOMING CHAPTER BOARD In the fall of 2021, four non-resident hunters were issued citations by a Carbon County, Wyoming, sheriff's deputy for criminal trespass. The four hunters never touched private lands; they used a ladder to cross between adjoining corners of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

Prior to the citations being issued, both the local Wyoming Game & Fish Department warden and a different Carbon County deputy had told the hunters that their actions did not constitute trespassing. After successfully harvesting elk, upon their return to their camp, the hunters were met by the awaiting deputy and issued the citations. Rather than accepting the charge for accessing their public land and paying the fines, the hunters have all pled “not guilty.” Their cases are pending.

The term “corner crossing” refers to the act of stepping from one corner of a parcel of public land to another parcel of public land. Often, parcels of public land are made inaccessible due to being “landlocked” – completely surrounded by private land on which there is no easement, public road, public trail, etc. Corner crossing utilizes legal access to a given parcel of public land in order access another piece of public land sharing an adjoining corner, akin to moving pieces across a checkers game board.

Corner crossing can provide access to relatively small parcel of land; in some cases, however, it may be the only potential means of access to otherwise-inaccessible large tracts of public land.

Corner crossing is neither explicitly legal nor explicitly illegal in the state of Wyoming. One similar case was tried in Albany County in 2004. In this case, the judge found the hunter “not guilty” of trespassing when they corner crossed to archery elk hunt in 2003. This “not guilty” determination per Wyoming Statute § 23-3-305 had no binding effect on any court. Shortly thereafter, Wyoming’s then-Attorney General Pat Crank published an opinion that corner crossing, when the intent is to hunt, fish or trap on public land, doesn’t violate the aforementioned statute.

However, the opinion notes that does not mean corner crossing is lawful, and may be considered criminal trespass per Wyoming Statute § 6-3-303 depending on the factual circumstances of a given case.

In this particular case, the Wyoming chapter believes the factual circumstances will show that the four hunters did not commit criminal trespass.

The chapter acknowledges private landowner rights, inclusive of all private landowners’ rights to grant or deny permission to access their property on an individual basis. We also acknowledge the important role of private land in the maintenance of healthy populations of game species in Wyoming. The chapter also supports the prosecution of people who knowingly and willfully trespass and/or cause damage to private lands and strongly recommends that hunters and anglers take time to build a relationship with the

landowners adjacent to their spots. This may result in more access and opportunity but at a minimum will improve communication and dialogue.

In regards to this particular case, the chapter has carefully reviewed the language in the relevant statutes, § 23-3-305 and § 6-3-303, as well as the affidavit provided by the hunters and a 2019 memorandum regarding these statutes provided by WGFD Deputy Chief Warden Scott Edberg. Accordingly, we believe that the actions of these hunters did not constitute criminal trespass.

Prior case law pertinent to corner crossing is limited both within and beyond Wyoming. We believe a “guilty” determination in this case would have a direct negative impact to hunters’, anglers’ and trappers’ ability to access our public lands. We believe a “not guilty” determination will not set a precedent, i.e., have a legally binding effect, but will nonetheless add a decision to the legal record that supports the argument that corner crossing does not constitute criminal trespass.

The Wyoming chapter supported the creation of a GoFundMe to offset the cost of these hunters’ legal representation team.

Should any or all of the hunters be found guilty, if they appeal the decision, these legal representation fees may prove to be costly over time and at various levels of courts. Therefore, donations will be held until a final decision is issued in a court of law for each of the four hunters.

Any funds raised through the GoFundMe that are not needed to cover the accused hunters’ fees for legal representation will be donated to WGFD’s Access Yes program, which we have supported through donations since our inception as a chapter.

The Wyoming chapter and BHA headquarters also worked to create BHA’s Corner Crossing Pledge with the intent to keep interested persons abreast of relevant news on this case, as well as similar cases or related initiatives in the future.

It must be recognized that this all occurred because one private landowner decided to press charges against these hunters, who went out of their way to corner cross in a legally permissible manner. The hunters and the Wyoming chapter are simply responding to these charges.

Regardless of the outcome, Wyoming BHA recognizes the need for collaborative work to solve the corner crossing gray area.

However, we do not believe that a person’s or group’s right to due process should be forgone in the name of “collaboration.” Instead, we support a country with checks and balances, including those embedded within and guaranteed by the United States judicial system at all levels. The outcome of these legal proceedings can only stand to inform and thus improve statewide problem-solving on this issue, which is one of many reasons we feel it imperative to not limit the scope of the legal proceedings to the financial resources of the defendants.

Sign the Corner Crossing Pledge at backcountryhunters.org/ sportsmen_s_corner_crossing_pledge

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YOUR LINK TO THE FOOD CHAIN

CHAPTER NEWS

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM BHA’s Oregon chapter contributes to stakeholder funded land purchase and formation of Minam Wildlife Area.

Photo courtesy: Tristan Henry

BY MORGAN OLSON A longtime dream of purchasing more than 15,500 acres of privately owned timber and rangeland to create the Minam Wildlife Area, permanently securing public access, has become reality. The $19 million purchase had been attempted at least two other times in the past without success.

Recently, Hancock Natural Resource Group, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife inked a deal to purchase the highly utilized ground, which provides winter range for up to half the area’s big game herds and will be owned and managed primarily by ODFW and in part by the Oregon Department of Forestry. The first phase of the purchase for more than 4,600 acres is complete as of late 2021, and the second phase totaling more than 10,900 acres is targeted for completion in 2023.

The Minam Wildlife Area, located on the northern edge of the Eagle Cap Wilderness, serves as a gateway to Oregon’s largest wilderness, visited by more than 20,000 users annually. This area was first occupied by the Nez Perce and later the Cayuse, Shoshone and Bannocks tribes. They historically used the area as a hunting ground for bighorn sheep and deer and as a place to gather huckleberries, and it was where the Joseph Band of the Nez Perce spent their summers.

The Minam River, flowing through the area, is also identified as one of the primary tributaries impacting the Grande Ronde ecosystem, which is a part of the Snake River system and provides critical habitat for endangered salmon and steelhead populations.

This land purchase will conserve approximately 160 miles of perennial and intermittent streams providing spawning, rearing and migration habitat for fish.

For decades this property had been owned by a handful of different private timber companies that supplied logs for local mills – an important part of the local economy. This property will continue to be maintained as a working landscape for timber and range management, while also focusing on wildlife and habitat improvements.

Historically, the timber companies have allowed public access and/or have been enrolled in the State of Oregon Access & Habitat program. Funds for this program, raised from auctioning and raffling big game Governor Tags, are used to pay for public access and habitat improvements on private lands.

The Oregon chapter of BHA contributed to the project by donating $10,000 toward the purchase for phase one and is now raffling a fully guided buck mule deer hunt on The Nature Conservancy lands located in northeast Oregon on the famed Zumwalt Prairie Preserve, with 100 % of the proceeds from the

raffle tickets going towards the second phase purchase and/or access projects in Wallowa County.

Future projects on the property may include developing a trail system for access to the Eagle Cap Wilderness and constructing a foot and pack-animal bridge across the Minam River.

A huge thank you to HNRG, RMEF and ODFW for recognizing the unique aspects this property has for public access and wildlife management. Had it not been for the conservation foresight, this property would have likely been sold off as smaller parcels making public access and effective wildlife management very difficult if not impossible. The Oregon BHA chapter was able to contribute to this amazing project through the generosity of our members, and we look forward to supporting these opportunities into the future.

Morgan Olson is the Oregon chapter’s conservation/habitat director. In addition to BHA, he also serves as president for Union/ Wallowa County chapter for the Oregon Hunters Association and as hunter representative for the Oregon state board of the Access and Habitat Program.

Editor’s Note: The final chance to snag a ticket for the Zumwalt Prairie Preserve mule deer tag raffle is March 25. Scan the QR code or visit the Oregon chapter’s Facebook page to get in on the action.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 33

Chapter News & Updates

ALASKA • • • •

The chapter continues to engage in subsistence management issues.

Held a virtual “Small Game Hunting in Alaska” event with ADF&G small game biologists.

Held a virtual discussion and presentation on the effects of climate change on Dall sheep with Roman Dial, PhD, and ADF&G biologist Tom Lohuis.

Submitted written and verbal testimony in opposition to the West Susitna Access Road.

ARIZONA • •

The AZ chapter hosted another successful Hunting for Sustainability event in partnership with the Northern Arizona University BHA collegiate club.

The chapter is monitoring this year’s legislative session once again and will make you aware of any bills that require attention.

ARKANSAS •

Our 2022 chapter board retreat will take place over a weekend in

34 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

•

January, with the Ozark National Forest as our backdrop. We’re excited to develop our chapter plan and goals as it relates to our events, policy initiatives and membership engagement.

An awesome event we’re excited about is the Ozark Black Bear Bonanza! It will take place in Bentonville on March 5 and feature none other than Arkansas native Clay Newcomb! This event is being co-hosted by the Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma chapters.

BRITISH COLUMBIA • • •

Represented BHA’s values and vision in B.C.’s Together For Wildlife strategy at the Minister’s Wildlife Advisory Council wildlife dialogues meeting.

The East Kootenay Region funded and assembled a 24-hour CWD testing drop-off location. Facilities like this are important for early detection of CWD in B.C. We were accepted as a member of the Provincial Hunting and Trapping Advisory Team, where we can offer our perspective to government officials to improve the sustainability of management practices of game species.

CHAPTER NEWS CALIFORNIA

•

•

ILLINOIS

•

•

The chapter provided written comment to the California Coastal Conservancy’s revised Public Access Guidelines, highlighting the importance of hunting and fishing access and opportunity along the coast.

BHA joined a letter advocating for the inclusion of wildlife overpasses to the Brightline West high speed rail project that would otherwise create impenetrable barriers to movement for desert ungulates.

BHA hosted a campout, duck hunt and wild game potluck at the Mendota Wildlife Area to start the year with a bang.

CAPITAL REGION • • •

The Capital chapter teamed up with The Maryland DNR and hosted a very successful mentored deer hunt. We also cooked up some wild game for all to try.

The chapter put together a call to action to support Virginia’s SB 8, which would remove current public land restrictions on Sunday hunting.

We held our annual holiday sweepstakes and raised over $2,000 to help support our efforts in public lands and waters for this year.

• • •

• •

We hosted three Hunting for Sustainability workshops through our college clubs at the University of Montana and Northern Arizona University. Topics ranged from waterfowl to small game, but all were focused on recruiting new student hunters.

In total, BHA’s college clubs put in nearly 1,500 volunteer hours and completed over 30 work service projects in 2021. We end the year with 100 student leaders and over 1,000 student members.

The program launched their inaugural Critter Classic, which is part stewardship competition, part R3 effort. Points were earned for each small game hunter/license, bag of trash packed out and small game recipe submitted. Murray State University (Kentucky) took the title of Critter Classic Champion.

COLORADO • • • •

Kassi Smith was recognized as BHA’s Member of the Month for October 2021.

Matt Roberts was appointed as a habitat watch volunteer for the White River National Forest.

Brittany Parker, Genevieve Villamizar and Andrew Coe volunteered to serve as assistant regional directors for our new Roaring Fork Valley Group.

Kris Hess volunteered as an ARD for the Boulder County Group; Chris Slaughter volunteered as an ARD for the Central Rockies Group; Eric Jones and Noel Worden were appointed as Denver Metro Area ARDs.

FLORIDA • • •

We are currently planning R3 events such as archery introduction and education beginning late spring.

We are wrapping up another robust schedule of small game hunts across the state, which provided opportunities for new and experienced hunters alike.

This turkey season we are continuing to encourage hunters to pick up litter as they hunt.

• •

•

The Georgia chapter held its first annual Public Land Squirrel Hunt.

We also have continued to have pint nights across the state and have grown our “state captains network.”

The Indiana chapter initiated its first membership recruitment campaign for 2022. We raffled off two great prizes to new members who joined BHA between Jan. 7 and Feb. 27.

The Indiana chapter met with our two U.S. senators regarding the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act. These meetings were conducted in order to both give and gain insight about RAWA and the viewpoints of the senators.

The Indiana chapter co-hosted our first event with our BHA chapter to the south in Kentucky. The joint pint night was very successful, being held in Louisville during the ATA Show. We look forward to more joint efforts!

IOWA • • •

The Iowa chapter was back at the Iowa Deer Classic (March 4-6) talking public lands.

The chapter, as a member of the Iowa Conservation Alliance, will actively work with Iowa legislators on policies impacting Iowa’s public lands and waters in the upcoming legislative session.

We launched a call to action supporting a reassessment of a permit allowing a large feedlot (11,600 head) on Bloody Run Creek, a popular trout fishing destination in Northeast Iowa.

KANSAS • •

•

The Kansas chapter, Walton’s, Inc. and Pass It On – Outdoor Mentors hosted a deer processing clinic in Wichita attended by over 50 people.

The Kansas chapter is continuing its engagement on a proposal by The Big Bend Groundwater Management District #5 regarding the Rattlesnake Creek Watershed Plan to improve water flows to Quivira National Wildlife Refuge.

The Kansas chapter participated in the Beers of the Kaw, hosted by Friends of the Kaw in Lawrence in November.

KENTUCKY • • •

GEORGIA • •

The Illinois chapter is working on a water access issue involving the DuPage River, and we continue to educate on the benefits of public waterway access.

Several members helped a habitat group stock smallmouth bass at Lake Shelbyville. Thank you to the Corps of Engineers for the opportunity and partnership.

We kicked off 2022 with a pint night at The Cabin in Glen Carbon, and we look forward to attending the Illinois Deer Classic.

INDIANA

COLLEGIATE PROGRAM •

After the detection of chronic wasting disease in two mule deer bucks in Idaho this past deer season, Idaho Fish and Game organized and implemented a surveillance hunt of the surrounding areas in order to determine the prevalence of the disease.

•

A portion of grant funds received from MTN Dew Outdoor Grants was directed to the Jackson Purchase Foundation’s Maggie’s Landing Access project on the Clarks River in Western Kentucky.

Chapter leaders assisted in CWD sampling during the opening weekend of modern rifle season.

Gov. Andy Beshear has created a new position, Sportsmen Liaison, in his cabinet to connect directly with KY sportsmen and women.

Additionally, he has filled a vacancy in our Fish and Wildlife Commission’s 6th District.

The chapter board expresses its deep condolences for the losses of life, property and public land in Western Kentucky following the devastating weather outbreak on Dec. 10.

IDAHO •

The Idaho chapter supports the purchase of a 275-acre parcel of land by the BLM utilizing LWCF dollars. This land is critical winter range for both deer and elk.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 35

MICHIGAN • • •

The chapter held another successful women’s event in October – newer hunters got to experience upland game hunting and become more confident outdoorswomen! More are being planned!

Upcoming event centered around sporting dogs: addressing field injuries and overall health.

We will be holding a Michigan ice fishing event – how to, and why it’s so damn fun!

•

•

MINNESOTA • • • •

Members met with the DNR commissioner and other conservation stakeholders to discuss a moratorium on transfer/buyout of captive cervid farms to combat CWD in the state.

The chapter held our Winter Rendezvous, which featured spearfishing, winter camping, ice fishing and a wild game cookoff.

BHA members built and placed shooting benches at the Pillsbury State Forest shooting area, sponsored by BHA and MDHA. The chapter gathered at Bent Paddle Brewing in Duluth in December.

MISSOURI •

The Missouri chapter, in partnership with the River Access Coalition, helped raise funds through donations and the auction of raffle items donated from local businesses and sponsors to help with legal fees to support the re-opening of the Lindenlure access point of the Finley River in Southwestern Missouri where concrete barriers currently block river access on a public road.

NEW MEXICO •

•

•

•

•

Stoked a firestorm of public comment that led FWP to rescind some egregious hunting proposals that would have further privatized our elk herds.

Cohosted a sheep count with Fish, Wildlife & Parks and the Montana Wild Sheep Foundation; auctioned a llama packing trip from Access WILD; advocated for Recovering America’s Wildlife Act at a pint night with chapter corporate sponsor Burch Barrel.

Supported efforts to build a new archery range and expand another in northwest Montana; helped fund four scholarships to University of Montana students for non-resident hunting and fishing licenses.

NEBRASKA • • •

Our T-shirt design contest opened in January – a chance for a lucky someone’s design to be featured on a Nebraska BHA shirt to be sold at Pheasant Fest.

Nebraska BHA members manned a booth in the public lands pavilion at Pheasant Fest in Omaha, March 11-13.

We’re building a strong relationship with Kinkaider Brewing, starting with several pint nights held at Kinkaider Brewing locations.

NEW ENGLAND • • •

Rhode Island members participated in a special legislative study commission focused on protecting shoreline access.

Massachusetts recently opposed five legislative bills that attempt to restrict the management of forests and wildlife habitat on public properties by the state agencies charged with managing them.

BHA volunteers helped Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife with a deer butchering workshop at the Swan Island Wildlife Management Area. Maine BHA also took part in a DIFW stakeholder committee on Sunday hunting, which is currently not allowed in Maine.

•

• •

•

Board Member Shawn Paladini hosted a pint night at the Sparta Pour House in November.

Secretary John Provenzale hosted a pint night at the Tindall Road

36 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

The chapter sent a memo to Gov. Hochul opposing bill A6182, which would make two WMUs subject to legislated antler restrictions, rather than science based restrictions decided by the DEC. She vetoed the bill, paraphrasing portions of NYBHA’s memo as her basis for doing so.

We collaborated with the National Deer Association, The Nature Conservancy and Hunters of Color on a Field to Fork event that mentored eight new BIPOC hunter-conservationists.

The chapter joined the Staying Connected Initiative, a partnership of 50-plus organizations/agencies across the Northeast and Canada, seeking to conserve, restore and enhance landscape connectivity across the region to protect native wildlife and plants from habitat fragmentation, development and climate change.

NORTH CAROLINA • • •

Our fourth annual Trashy Squirrel Hunt was awesome! Folks across North Carolina had fun in the woods, chasing squirrels and packing trash off our public lands.

The Clubs & Councils initiative continues to grow. Want to get involved in your area? Reach out to northcarolina@backcountryhunters.org.

Our first state rendezvous will be in March 2023. It’s a major undertaking, and we are committed to excellence. Interested in joining as a sponsor or vendor? Get in touch now!

OHIO • •

Held our annual planning meeting in February to kick off the year.

Began hosting in-person events once again, with fly tying events and pint nights and more being scheduled throughout the year.

OKLAHOMA •

•

NEW JERSEY •

For the second year running, BHA and NMDGF manned trailheads in the Albuquerque foothills to explain the archery deer hunt to concerned local residents and hikers, where we spoke with over 800 individuals.

Our efforts to protect public access to New Mexico streams and rivers are coming to a head, with oral arguments scheduled before the state supreme court on March 1. We’re hoping for a positive decision this year.

We said goodbye to 2021 with a holiday party in December, which featured a presentation on big game migration and a wide selection of wild game dishes and charcuterie.

NEW YORK

MONTANA •

brewing Company in Robinsville.

The chapter proudly hosted its first mentored hunt in cooperation with the NWTF, led by board member Adam Paladini at the Wallkill Wildlife Refuge, which included three days of instruction, hunting and the processing of the deer taken during the hunt. This was hopefully just the first of more mentored hunts to come.

New Jersey is eager to add additional board members as the Garden State chapter grows. We began interviewing potential candidates in January. If you are interested in helping out, please contact our chair, Gerald, at newjersey@backcountryhunters.org.

•

The Oklahoma chapter is finalizing the 2022 calendar of events. In 2021 we hosted a couple new events like a 3D archery shoot and controlled burns on public lands as well as service projects creating new fish habitat. Stay tuned for more on a larger scale in 2022.

One such event that we are excited to announce is Total Archery Challenge making its first stop for 2022 in Oklahoma – April 1-3 in Broken Bow. We hope to see you there!

Our chapter anxiously awaits opportunity to be involved proactively in helping protect Oklahoma public lands from a legislative standpoint this session. We welcome any and all support.

CHAPTER NEWS OREGON •

• •

We are very proud to offer a buck mule deer tag raffle with 100% of proceeds supporting access initiatives in Northeast Oregon. Please see the chapter in-depth in this issue and our social channels for more information and to enter.

The Oregon chapter finished the year strong with vitalizing events focusing on upland bird biology, fall turkey hunting and the art of chasing the late-season blacktail bucks.

Finally, the Oregon chapter board welcomes two new board members, Karl Findling and Elijah Brown, who bring a remarkable breadth of expertise and experience to our team. With an already ambitious calendar of events and priorities outlined for 2022, we anticipate a busy and rewarding year in the arena!

UTAH • • •

WASHINGTON •

PENNSYLVANIA • • •

The chapter held a “Become a Member in December Sweepstakes,” giving away a squirrel hunting package. Over 100 memberships were sold during the month.

Pint nights were held in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas.

The chapter has become a daily presence in the capital, cultivating relationships with legislators and officials in both the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

SOUTH CAROLINA • • •

Our state began the official process to approve Sunday hunting on public lands with proposed bill H.4614. We support this legislation and continue to push hard for this initiative.

We plan to host our first annual chapter rendezvous this spring, with a focus on Sunday hunting efforts, as well as a little turkey hunting on the side.

We have a veteran hunting and fishing program in the works and plan to roll it out this spring.

SOUTH DAKOTA •

The South Dakota chapter is looking for more board members.

Email southdakota@backcountry hunters.org if you are interested.

SOUTHEAST • •

The Southeast chapter recently lead an awareness campaign to prevent a proposed “no hunting” buffer on Malmaison WMA. The proposal was overturned with the help of our members.

The Southeast chapter’s Backcountry Jubilee took place March 12 at Oak Mountain State Park outside of Birmingham, AL.

TENNESSEE •

In response to the devastating band of tornados in early December that tore through Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, Tennessee BHA Board member Jeremy French coordinated BHA members and Quail Forever members to collect and dispense much-needed supplies to victims in the devastated towns of Dresden, TN and Mayfield, KY. Upon personally visiting the area, he was moved to coordinate an even bigger operation for the area’s underserved children who would not have a Christmas. Jeremy spearheaded an effort with fellow board member Mitchell Pique along with Quail Forever and Dresden’s “Be the Village” to have an event where 700 children would meet with Santa Claus and receive Christmas gifts.

The Utah chapter submitted a letter to the Bureau of Land Management’s St. George Field Office in support of the proposed Sandy Ranch land exchange in Utah’s Henry Mountains.

We supported the Utah DWR’s proposals surrounding in-season prohibitions on transmitting trail cameras and night vision use.

The chapter hosted its first chapter holiday party since the pandemic began and closed the year by kicking off its new board member application process.

• •

Submitted a petition to the Fish and Wildlife Commission, alongside the Inland Northwest Wildlife Council, asking the commission to revisit the 2022 spring bear hunt vote that resulted in a 4-4 tie, and remove language from their agenda that leaves the season open each year for cancellation. (See In Depth on page 28.)

Authored a letter to Gov. Inslee asking to appoint the two open Fish and Wildlife Commission seats with balanced and experienced individuals who value science-based wildlife management.

Proudly provided a grant to the World Salmon Council to support youth education and science-based field trips.

WEST VIRGINIA • •

As we gear up for the 2022 state legislative session, we’ll be keeping a close eye on every bill related to hunting, angling and public lands.

For 2022 we plan on hosting four in-person events. The Trash & Trout river cleanup will be in March. We’ll also have two pint nights throughout the year and be participating in the Public Land PackOut in September. Stay tuned to our social channels for more details.

WISCONSIN •

• •

The Wisconsin chapter funded a deer carcass dumpster at our adopted wildlife area, Goose Lake Wildlife Area, and hauled away 6.68 tons of deer carcasses that were collected during the 2021 gun deer season.

The chapter, in collaboration with BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative, helped organize a muzzleloader hunt for veterans during the muzzleloader deer season.

We are growing and excited to announce five new board members to represent new areas of Wisconsin. Wisconsin BHA continues to expand our grassroots awareness campaign through a growing podcast audience, monthly newsletter release and planning 2022 work days and events.

WYOMING •

• •

The chapter and other partners raised over $65,000 to pay legal fees for the four hunters cited for criminal trespass for corner crossing.

This case is expected in court April 2022. Any remaining funds will be donated to Access Yes, a program that incentivizes private landowners to allow public access for hunting and fishing and acknowledges their partnership.

WY BHA continues to fight the Columbus Peak land exchange to protect access to quality backcountry hunting opportunities.

WY BHA will launch a quarterly newsletter this spring. Stay tuned.

YUKON •

We’re working to build our chapter’s board structure and finalize a 2022 chapter plan.

TEXAS • • •

The Texas chapter board met in Houston for its annual planning meeting, where we discussed our focus and goals for 2022.

We hosted another mentored hog hunt in January, introducing adults to hunting, conservation and stewardship.

We continued outreach by tabling at the Flies and Flame Expo, Troutfest, Fly Fishing and Brew Festival and pint nights with Duck Camp in Austin and Houston.

Find a more detailed writeup of your chapter’s news along with events and updates by regularly visiting www.backcountryhunters.org/chapters or contacting them at [your state/province/territory/region]@backcountryhunters.org (e.g. newengland@backcountryhunters.org)

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 37

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FULL CIRCLE

Collegiate club scholarship recipient goes from beginner hunter to mentor for others through BHA’s R3 work.

Photo courtesy Nicole Bealer

BY NICOLE BEALER I grew up in the suburbs of north Houston, far away from the Montana culture of field-to-table harvest in which I am now immersed. Though I loved wildlife and the outdoors, I did not come from a hunting family and was never exposed to the idea of fair-chase hunting on public lands. A burgeoning career in wildlife biology brought me to the Rockies, studying species like mule deer and elk, and I moved to Missoula in the autumn of 2019 to study at the University of Montana.

I was interested in learning to hunt but assumed it would be years before I was able to hunt myself. After all, I didn’t have the gear, a rifle or the know-how to harvest an animal. It was at a BHA collegiate club meeting, where I was just hoping to connect with others interested in hunting, that I heard about the Rebecca Romero Hunting Legacy Award – a BHA and The Wildlife Society scholarship created by the Romero family after Rebecca, a former BHA UM club member and new hunter, was tragically killed in a hit and run accident. Though doubtful of my ability to undertake my first hunting season so soon, I submitted my application. To my surprise, I was selected, and my life was forever changed.

That fall, the UM club helped connect me with the gear and mentorship I needed to get out hunting, and I was incredibly lucky to harvest a mule deer buck on the banks of the Missouri River. In the moments after I pulled the trigger on a living thing for the first time, I watched my buck fall to the ground and sat in the profound silence of my ringing ears. I felt so many emotions: grief, gratitude, pride. I learned to quarter my deer in the field and butcher and package him at home. I learned to prepare and cook his meat and fell in love with the sense of purpose I found in the process. I realized that hunting for my own meat was a real, feasible option for me – a young woman from the suburbs who had never owned a gun.

The following year I became an officer for the UM club and

HUNTING FOR SUSTAINABILITY

discovered my passion for sharing hunting opportunities with others – as I went through the Romero scholarship process again, this time as a member of the selection committee. Though still a relatively new hunter, I started hunting on my own for the first time. I spooked deer, struggled to find bucks and failed to capitalize on opportunities one way or another, learning valuable hunting lessons at every step.

Teaming up with another past Romero awardee, Nicole Ballard, I finally harvested an elusive whitetail buck and helped Nicole kill her own mule deer buck. We celebrated our capacity to hunt successfully as two young women in the woods, still relatively new to the sport, and my confidence and love of hunting grew.

This past autumn, I stepped into the role of hunt coordinator for the UM club and directed my efforts towards sharing hunting experiences with new hunters. I spent countless hours organizing the Montana Hunter Mentorship program, a partnership between the nonprofit MHM, directed by James Goerz, and the UM BHA club. MHM connects hunting mentors with those interested in learning and provides a place for all of us to gather and hunt at the Goerz lodge. I helped select another group of Romero awardees and connected them with gear and mentorship – much as I had once connected. My days were filled with flurries of emails, planning food logistics and corresponding with potential mentors and mentees.

As the pieces came together and the season unfolded, I was filled with satisfaction watching hunters new and old from all over the country learn together in the woods, listening to stories of incredible moments afield and enjoying the fruits of successful harvests.

After a busy first few weeks of the season managing MHM business, I shifted my focus to my own hunt. For this, my third season, I once again pushed the boundaries of my own capabilities.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I set out alone and encountered a group of mule deer high in the mountains. After a slight bit of intervening chaos, I set my sights upon a magnificent mule deer buck and fired one round. The weight of my harvest hit me again as I approached this monarch of the mountain. The adrenaline faded in my body and the urgency to begin the task ahead grew.

I quartered my buck on the mountain, struggling to exert every ounce of power that my body possessed as the light faded into a SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 39

spectacular sunset and spruce grouse roosted in the tree overhead.

After loading my backpack in the dark, I fought through a brief but nerve-wracking bout of disorientation in the shadows of night. A couple of hours later, I finished hiking out my first load of meat and reveled in the intensity of the experience, the honor of harvesting such an animal, and the pride in having the capacity to do it by myself.

As I move onwards from this hunting season, I think about Rebecca. I wish she could see the powerful women who have entered the world of hunting through her legacy. I was never lucky enough to know Rebecca personally, but my life is forever changed by the impact of her story and her family’s gift. I earn a deep sense of satisfaction in harvesting my own food and transforming an incredible living creature into delicious meals for myself and my loved ones with my own hands. The trials and triumphs of hunting have reshaped my understanding of who I am in relation to other living things and, maybe most importantly, to myself.

I seek now to share this love with others, to lend the tools and the confidence to other young women who want to take their place in the food chain.

Nicole Bealer is an undergraduate wildlife biology student at the University of Montana who spends as much time as possible in the woods. In her second year of leadership, Nicole serves as the hunt coordinator for student chapter of BHA's UM collegiate club and strives to welcome others into the world of hunting and fishing.

Contact her at nicole.bealer@umontana.edu.

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Editor’s Note: Every fall, BHA’s University of Montana collegiate club and the University of Montana student chapter of The Wildlife Society accept applications for the Rebecca Romero Legacy Hunting award, which honors Rebecca Romero’s life by supporting a cause she was passionate about.

The award covers the cost of a non-resident hunting license for out-of-state students with a focus on new and female hunters.

Learn more at backcountryhunters.org/rebecca_romero_ hunting_legacy

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BY PETER WHITE The pursuits of hunting and fishing aren’t easy pastimes to incorporate into life on campus as a university student. For one thing, on a student’s budget you are continuously flipping a coin between a piece of new hunting gear and a required textbook.

Plus, if you are new to campus, it can be hard to find accessible hunting and fishing areas and to meet like-minded peers for company in the field.

Since 2019, the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan Campus has been home to one of Canada’s first BHA collegiate clubs. As leaders of the club, we’ve organized conservation-focused guest lectures, annual fishing events, learn-to-hunt webinars and in 2020 received funding from the Public Land Owner Stewardship Fund for an Indigenous-led stream reclamation project.

While our club weathered two years of online gatherings, we were eager to begin the fall 2021 semester with something outside, where we could meet other students interested in hunting.

Having identified some of the barriers for students to become involved in hunting, fishing and public lands, we launched Sky 2 Skillet, an initiative aimed at connecting students with each other and the outdoors, all through the link of waterfowl hunting and conservation.

The idea was to first create a “gear library” – an entry-level amount of equipment for club members to sign out. And then we aimed to host an education day in the field to learn from mentors and their trusty four-legged retrievers. We wanted to make the experience as inclusive as possible and to break down barriers; we assembled a community of Indigenous and non-Indigenous hunters, able-bodied and people experiencing disabilities, postdoctoral fellows and undergraduates and both experienced and rookie hunters.

42 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

The first Sky 2 Skillet event started on an early December morning. Under a cold, bluebird sky, our group of students followed mentors to a river oxbow located on a nearby parcel of public land. After a decoy and safety demonstration, we were ready to watch, learn and – for a few hours – hunt.

The echo of early shots rang during a successful morning, as the mentors and more experienced members of our club worked to teach others. The dogs’ tails mirrored the smiles of our newly acquainted group. And by the time the last morning flyovers became fleeting, we were buzzing for lunch.

With the help of some Okanagan-harvested moose sandwiches, we broke down the morning’s hits and misses, which led to the conversation of waterfowl and wildlife management as a whole. As a group, we considered the challenges faced by not only students, but by all those who enjoy the outdoors near a rapidly expanding campus and an ever-urbanizing valley.

Ella, one of the new-to-hunting students of the group, reflected, “I am grateful to come away with an understanding of the process of the hunt and how to then prepare the harvested animals for a meal.”

For Mateen Hessami, a club founder, the day was “a powerful intersection of conservation, food security and mental health.

Hunting was only a tiny component of this initiative, and by the end of the day, we had shared muddy boots, cold fingertips,

Photos: Peter White

BHA's University of British Columbia Okanagan collegiate club is helping students overcome barriers to hunting.

Photos: Mateen Hessami

Peter White is a graduate student at UBCO, where he also sits on the board of BHA's collegiate club. Upon finishing his research on the spatial ecology of bighorn sheep in Alberta's Rocky Mountains, he looks forward to more time in the hills chasing elk, deer and the odd bison.

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stunning sunrises, hardworking dogs and some wild-harvested food. We made a community in the marsh.”

The Sky 2 Skillet event culminated a week later when a few members of our group processed and cooked the ducks we harvested. We took the hearts, breasts and legs and kept a couple of carcasses for stock. Then came the cooking; we made a homemade risotto with roasted zucchini and cooked the duck breasts in … you guessed it, a cast iron skillet! The first bites left us bewildered that duck could taste so good, be so rich in flavor and color and be so attainable for us.

“They learned about conservation in action and public land access,” our club advisor, Dr. Adam Ford, said when recounting the event. “And while the mentors shared their knowledge with eager listeners, the most important teacher for everyone that day was the wildlife, the water and clear skies.”

For our budding club, Sky 2 Skillet addressed the challenges we witnessed on campus with the benefits we as hunters have found in the field. By making gear available to those in need, connecting mentors with the less experienced and ending it all with a good meal, we have found a working formula to help grow our club and the values of conservation into the future.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 43

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ARMED FORCES

AFI MEMBERS FIND COMMUNITY ... AND MORE

Photo: Josh Bent

BY TREVOR HUBBS BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative is a group of North American veterans from all branches of service who understand the power our land has. Whether it’s Coastal Carolina swamps, a logging road five miles into the Maine hardwoods or a misty mountain view in western Alberta, AFI members know there is something special to these places. They have walked across the chasm of leaving the service and through our public lands have come out the other side.

The military is designed to indoctrinate members into its way of life. This is an effective war fighting tool, one that forges some of the deepest bonds in the history of human relationships. Leaving those bonds behind for a civilian life can in many ways be more stressful than anything in the military. AFI aims to help with that transition.

Recently, AFI members finished a backcountry hunt in the mountains of Western Montana. It is through experiences like this that veterans can begin to heal and find who they once were.

“We aren’t scholars, philosophers or doctors, and we can’t explain why this works, but we’ve seen the doctors and physiologists and they don’t have the answer either. All we know is the world just feels better out here. … I feel better out here,” said AFI leader (former) and Army veteran Morgan Mason in his greeting to the group as we arrived in camp Thursday. “Our job is to find a way to show the advantages of this readily available and widely distributed public land to everyone going through what we’ve been through – in the hope that they can find the peace that we have.”

AFI took 22 veterans from all over the U.S. and brought them to a secluded camp deep in the mountains of western Montana to fly fish and hunt turkeys. But more than these pursuits, these veterans came together to learn the history and organization of our public land. Most importantly, AFI is training these men and women to take this program to their respective states and replicate this process for veterans in Wisconsin, Colorado, Indiana and beyond.

Aside from the hunt, the obvious takeaway was the conversations and relationships forged. I was privileged to hear men and women from multiple service branches, around the

campfire, discussing everything from the works of Jack London to state-specific conservation issues and potential solutions based on shared experiences.

The most important but least surprising revelation is that no one there came to hunt or fish; we came to help each other. Veterans from all walks of life took four days away from their loved ones and traveled thousands of miles because they thought they could help someone work through the same thing they went through.

This event ignited in them that deepest sense of duty they once lived for and gave them a voice to help other veterans like them.

“We experience something in these woods besides each other’s company,” said BHA AFI Member Richard Hutton Jr. (USMC) during one of these campfire evening discussions. “The wind, the cold, the rain – all are a part of this process. Seeing a bear work up a near vertical embankment or watching elk drink from a river in the valley does something to you.”

The reasons veterans take the oath to serve their county are as diverse as the veterans themselves. When you ask them why they joined, not many would say the land. We don’t realize at the time, but this idea of public lands and waters, including recreation, is an almost uniquely American right. The idea that there are lands set aside for anyone to go and experience would be a strange notion in so many other countries.

I hesitate to call what we experienced in those Montana mountains a healing experience; it was more subtle and yet more profound than that. The wind rushing down the mountain through the sleeping camp every morning and the rustle in the meadow grasses of the valley whispered to us the answers to our questions – even if we didn’t always understand.

I like to think it was thanking us. It’s as if even though we didn’t realize at the time of enlistment, the mountain was part of what we fought for, and the mountain knew. The mountain recognized us as a part of itself and thus gifted to us inner peace and purpose.

That may seem a little deep for a camp of combat veterans. Maybe you just had to be there.

Trevor Hubbs is BHA’s Armed Forces Initiative coordinator. He is a hunting dog enthusiast who grew up on the bluffs and floodplains of the Mississippi and Ohio river confluence.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 45

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FIELD TO TABLE

VENISON ENCHILADAS

BY DANIELLE PREWETT I grew up eating at hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex restaurants that served classic combination plates, and I always ordered the enchiladas. This recipe is an homage to one of my favorite meals from childhood, and I love making it with wild game. What makes this special is that the enchiladas are topped with chili gravy, a red chile sauce influenced by Northern Mexico and a staple in Tex-Mex cuisine. Trust me, this is a delicious recipe that the whole family will love.

Danielle Prewett proudly serves on the board of the Texas chapter of BHA and is a wild foods contributing editor for MeatEater. She treasures the ability to harvest food on public land and water and celebrates the natural bounty in her kitchen.

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VENISON ENCHILADAS RECIPE Enchiladas 1 lb ground venison 1/2 yellow onion, chopped 3 cloves of garlic, minced 1 tsp kosher salt 1/4 tsp black pepper 1/4 tsp cumin 1/4 tsp oregano 12-14 corn tortillas (6”) 12 ounces cheddar and Monterey jack cheese Oil for cooking and frying

Chili Gravy 1/4 cup oil or lard 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 1 1/2 tbsp tomato paste 1 tsp kosher salt 1/2 tsp black pepper 1 tsp cumin 1 tsp oregano 2 1/2 tbsp Ancho or red chili powder 2 tsp grated yellow onion (1 tsp. dried) 2 tsp grated garlic (1 tsp. dried) 2 cups venison or chicken stock

INSTRUCTIONS 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and lightly grease a casserole dish or cast iron pan.

Make the venison filling. Heat a large sauté pan over medium-high heat and brown the ground venison. Season with salt, pepper, cumin and oregano. Set the cooked venison aside in a large bowl.

In the same sauté pan, add another drizzle of cooking oil if needed. Sauté the onions until soft and golden in color.

Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Transfer to the same bowl with the venison and mix.

Make the chili gravy. Reduce the heat on the burner to medium. Give the pan a minute to cool off if needed. There shouldn’t be much oil in the pan – if there is, pour it out and add in ¼ of a cup of oil or lard. Sprinkle in the flour and whisk constantly until the flour is smooth and there are no lumps. Cook for a few minutes until the roux is lightly golden.

Stir in the grated onion and garlic and cook briefly to release aromas.

Slowly pour in the stock while whisking constantly to keep the gravy smooth. Add the tomato paste, salt, pepper, cumin, oregano and chili powder. The chili powder will immediately thicken the gravy, and it should have the consistency of tomato sauce. Turn the heat off and remove the gravy from the burner. Keep in mind that the gravy will

7.

8.

9.

thicken slightly when baked and as it cools. Add a splash of water if needed.

Fry the tortillas. Set a separate sauté pan or griddle over a burner on high heat. Add a teaspoon of oil or lard to the bottom. When the oil starts to sputter, use tongs to lay a tortilla down for 15 seconds, flip, and fry the opposite side for another 15 seconds. The tortilla should bubble up when frying, but remain soft and pliable. Transfer to a tray lined with paper towels to soak up the grease. Fry each tortilla and add more oil as needed.

Assemble the enchiladas. Pour chili gravy across the bottom of the casserole dish or cast iron pan in a thin layer.

Place a small spoonful of chili gravy onto a tortilla, and scoop in some venison. Top with a little cheese and roll up the tortilla. Place the stuffed tortilla seam-side down inside of the baking dish. Do this to each tortilla until you have filled the casserole dish. If you have leftover meat you can mix it with the chili gravy and pour it over the top of the tortillas. There should be enough gravy to generously coat.

Top the enchiladas with a handful of cheese and cover with foil.

Bake the enchiladas for 10 minutes, then remove the foil and bake another 5 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbling. Serve immediately with beans and rice.

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 49

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INSTRUCTIONAL

SUP FISHING 101

BY MIA SHEPPARD

Photo: Arian Stevens

The shadow moved to my fly under the golden reflection of the sun. Twitch. Twitch. The smallmouth attacked the damsel and ran. As I reeled in the bass, the board drifted slowly downriver.

Fishing from a stand up paddle board is one of the most exhilarating ways to hunt and target freshwater and saltwater fish, solo. Whether you’re planning to float a river or explore the saltwater flats, a paddle board can provide advantages not found wading or by canoe or kayak. When you are standing on a SUP, you have the advantage of looking out and across the water from above. It’s easy to see shadows moving and set up for a cast.

With the advancements in paddle board design, there is tremendous stability and room for gear. Fishing from a paddle board allows you to cruise the shoreline, fish shallow areas and get away from crowded water. And they are easy to both paddle and transport. Having the right gear and a little practice will help you achieve both balance and success. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

52 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

Photos: Mia Sheppard

Essential Gear: Two of the most important pieces of gear are your leash and your PFD. Leashes attach to the board and your ankle or waist and are necessary for keeping your board close to you if you fall off. I recommend a coil leash or a waist attachment with a quick release if you plan to run whitewater.

There are two types of boards: hard boards and inflatable boards. Inflatable boards are far superior for fishing. Made out of PVC, they are more versatile, durable, compact and light to transport. Boards are typically 10’8” to 12’4” long, between 3239” wide and weigh 24-30 pounds.

Boards have removable, interchangeable fins – to let you customize your setup – that act as a rudder aiding in easy turning and keeping the board tracking straight.

The next essential piece of gear is the paddle. Paddles are either carbon, fiberglass, wood or plastic and can be a fixed length or adjustable. I recommend a paddle that is adjustable, with a fiberglass shaft and plastic blade. Fiberglass is lightweight and the plastic blade is durable.

Fishing Gear: Being prepared and organizing your fishing gear will help you have a fun day on the water.

A Scotty rod holder is essential; it will secure the rod to the SUP when you are paddling. For other gear I have an NRS tie down strap attached to the rings on the board and a couple carabiners for clipping sandals and water bottles too. A waterproof fishing pack is great for storing a fly box, tippet, snacks, first aid kit and Garmin InReach. A small cooler is nice for keeping food and drinks cool, and it can act as a seat.

Paddle Height: To determine the correct paddle length, stand on flat ground, hold your arm up above your head and outward at a 45-degree angle. This is roughly how long your paddle should be, but once in the water you will need to adjust it to what feels comfortable for you.

Getting On and Off the Board: After you have pumped up the board to the correct PSI and have adjusted your paddle to fit you, it’s time to practice getting on and off the board.

When practicing, make sure the large center fin is no longer attached to the bottom to avoid damage. Place the board in

shallow water or start on a flat surface. Center the board to where you are standing. Place the paddle horizontally across the board in front of the board’s center handle. Mount the board by placing your hands on the center of the board, then put one knee on at a time and position your knees on each side of the center handle – shoulder width apart, facing forward.

Grab your paddle in hand, while looking straight up at the horizon, slowly bring one foot forward, then the other and then stand up. You can place the blade of the paddle on the board and this will help you balance and stand up. The handle of the board again should be right in the middle of your feet. That is the center-point of the board and the most stable part. Once you are on your feet, put your paddle blade in the water, which will help you balance.

Landing a Fish: Lift the rod high so you can move the fish.

Gingerly get down on your knees and bring the fish to the edge of the board, if it’s a small fish you can land it by hand; if you are targeting bigger fish have a net ready.

Safety: Before you go, check the weather. If it’s going to be windy, use caution. Or if you’re going to a new spot, find out if there are rapids or what the tides are doing. Always wear a life jacket.

Always have a leash attached to your ankle or a breakaway leash on.

When the river is high, you will be moving – and there is a sweet spot for drifting while fishing. If you experience a boat wake or chop, don’t panic! Your legs are like shock absorbers, let them handle the bumps by relaxing your feet and bending your knees to flow along with the movement of the board. If you’re going to fall in, just let it happen! Sometimes going for an unexpected swim can be fun and cool you off in the dead of summer.

If you are looking for a new way to access your favorite fishing spots, give paddle boarding a try; you’ll dig it.

BHA member Mia Sheppard is an outfitter, guiding on some of the best rivers to fish and paddle board in Oregon. She is also a mother, hunter and aspiring beekeeper.

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PUBLIC LAND OWNER

NATIVE TROUT on Public Lands and Waters

The importance of access and a sense of place in the native trout journey of a lifetime

“Place ... refers to not just geographical locations ... but rather to an evolving interactive relationship between an ecological system and the people who ... use it as their habitat.”

- Bryan Norton,

Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, 2005.

56 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

BY DANIEL RITZ In February 2020, I met BHA’s chapter leaders and regional staff at the chapter's annual meeting near my home in Boise, Idaho.

That was the first time I met Ace Hess, the Idaho and Nevada BHA chapter coordinator. Shortly after meeting Hess, he asked about my current projects and interests. At that time, my pursuit of the Western Native Trout Challenge was still a lofty pipedream driven largely by my own angling inexperience, curiosity and dissatisfaction at my soulsucking, full-time job.

“Well ... what’s your favorite native trout?” Hess asked me with a bit of a smirk. While this test was not conspicuous, it was refreshingly stimulating. Finally, I might get to work with someone with a pulse.

“That’s a tough question, but I’d have to say westslope cutthroat trout,” I responded. “It’s not necessarily about the fish, but in my opinion, westslopes live in the most beautiful places in the world. They’d have to be my favorite if only because they live in my favorite places.”

By that, I meant the densely forested and largely undeveloped interiors of Idaho and western Montana. Hess nodded in unspoken agreement as if my words were music to his ears.

More than nine months and 23,000 miles of travel later, having completed the Western Native Trout Challenge – catching and releasing each of the 20 native trout and char species and subspecies of the western 12 states of the United States – the concept and importance of place and place-based conservation is clearer than ever.

Reflecting on this life-changing journey, the concepts of public lands and waters and the opportunity to access those lands and waters – key pillars of BHA – are responsible for some of the most valuable lessons of my trip. And I can see that two rules I set for myself from the outset did much more than just refine my experience.

Photo: Daniel Ritz

Rule #1: No professional assistance To be clear, this isn’t a slight on the guiding and outfitting community.

I have a number of friends and colleagues who are guides. They offer an invaluable service soaked in experience and context. But, for the purpose of this specific project, I felt it was best to explore the experience of the average person and eliminate as many barriers to entry as possible.

Rob Parkins is BHA’s public access coordinator. Parkins doesn’t have kids, so, if you see him out there in the field or on the water near his home in Eastern Idaho, buy him a cold one because he’s probably tired from working to ensure future generations have access to America’s public lands and waters – even if they aren’t his.

“Without clean water, and access to that clean water,” Parkins said, “there is no fishing … there is no opportunity for engagement … there’s no pull to advocacy.”

Parkins’ words rang loud and clear in states like Nevada, Wyoming and Utah, where public access lies at the center of the native trout experience.

In Nevada, home of the threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout, streams that once held salmon all the way from the Columbia River basin are now choked off due to privatization and resource extraction that has Lahontans largely isolated into small headwater systems. As I traveled from north of Reno, where I’d stood on a ladder pitching and stripping streamers in the snow to the largest cutthroat in the world at the now Instagram-famous Pyramid Lake, to fish for the high desert mountain stream form of Lahontans, exiled to their respective headwater refuges, I SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 57

saw a bit of the path unfolding before me. All was not as it seems “It’s important to remember that (things such as) overcrowding regarding the native trout of potentially the world’s mecca of fly are mainly social issues,” Parkins said. “Largely [speaking on fishing. stewardship], I feel that education is key. Increased signage could This feeling returned upon my landing back in Idaho from go a long way towards educating the public. Think about it: How Alaska, where I immediately set out to begin the Mountain many [public land users] check out the information kiosk at the West leg of my journey. It was my goal in each of these states to trailhead or gather at the signage at the boat ramp?” successfully complete their respective “slams” (i.e., programs to I took Parkins’ commentary to mean that public access not only benefit conservation where you catch each of the native gamefish allows the community to engage with the environment but also species and subspecies of the state). Considering Wyoming and serves as a sort of forced portal to education – a gateway that Utah are both border states to my home, I thought it was important could celebrate what currently is and, if carefully curated, could to fulfill the contextually dense guide us into the future. experience of the Wyoming Cutt Speaking of that future, it “Public lands are the last, best hope Slam and the Utah Cutthroat was in New Mexico, in pursuit for native trout and salmon in the face of Rio Grande cutthroat trout Slam. of climate change. In fact, 70% of the In southern Wyoming and high in the Carson National then again in Utah, I experienced remaining habitat for native trout in the Forest, where I fully embraced first-hand the access issues and the humbling notion that access West is found on public lands.” careful planning it takes to and public lands does not mean -Corey Fisher pursue the native trout species of exclusive use or prioritization of Public Lands Policy Director for Trout Unlimited the region. In Wyoming, driving recreation. Public lands are for a single track road in the remote the people, all of the people. In red rock desert, I became acutely aware of the checkerboarded and order to connect communities as well as waterways, I would need often difficult to navigate public lands and waters inhabited by to embrace being more than “the trout guy.” the Colorado River cutthroat, often described as the West’s most I had left home a naive but very curious fly fisherman. I had set beautiful cutthroat subspecies. It was also in Wyoming, near the out to “do it myself ” in order to reach and enable more anglers, Tri-Basin divide within the Bridger-Teton National Forest, where especially communities that have historically not been socially or three rivers flow into three separate drainages – each containing a geographically connected to public lands and waters. As altruistic distinct strain of cutthroat trout – where I felt an understanding of as my intentions were from the outset, the reality quickly set in a West I had never been forced to know – one that is profoundly that I wasn’t doing this by myself at all; I was doing it in places we and inherently connected. all share and are all responsible for.

Parkins stated that Montana, where I pursued the iconic Yellowstone cutthroat trout along the shores of the mighty Rule #2: Catch all native species on public lands within their Yellowstone River, could be a future battleground state. Once native habitat range considered the gold standard of stream access law, future access to fishing for famed species such as the Yellowstone cutthroat, While they are key to our anthropocentric fishing experiences, westslope cutthroat and Arctic grayling could be restricted due the West’s public lands and waters hold more value to native trout to increasing bureaucratic support for privatization of access to than just as mechanisms for our access and recreation. natural resources.

“Public lands are the last, best hope for native trout and salmon In an attempt to understand more of the reasons people would in the face of climate change. In fact, 70% of the remaining resist or discourage access to public lands and waters, I asked habitat for native trout in the West is found on public lands,” said Parkins about issues that frequently – and understandably – Corey Fisher, public lands policy director for Trout Unlimited. surface regarding their impacts to public lands.

“Protecting and restoring public lands means that we are 58 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

Photos: Daniel Ritz

As pure as genetically pure can be Yellowstone cutthroat trout, Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming

In the Bridger National Forest, Wyoming, in pursuit of Bonneville cutthroat

SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 59

protecting and restoring the sources of cold, clean water that are important today and critical in the future for trout and salmon populations to be resilient as we experience longer periods of drought, increased wildfires and warming stream temperatures.”

Utilizing Western Native Trout Initiative “Fish Maps” that clearly show native trout habitats, I was able to curate missions into the brush to encounter native species – of which robust populations exist only within cold, clean and undeveloped waters.

Such is the case for the westslope cutthroat and the redband trout in Idaho, as well as myriad species in the Tongass National Forest in southeastern Alaska – including Dolly Varden and coastal cutthroat trout.

In Idaho, westslope cutthroat trout historically inhabited the largest range of any of the native trout of the West. Thankfully, they still do enjoy the most prolific range largely thanks to the protections offered by federally managed lands at the headwaters of major waterways, as well as careful management by state agencies like Idaho Fish and Game.

Due to wildfires, I was unable to access a number of “highlight-reel” fishing spots in central Idaho, but that untimely complication also forced me to recognize that native species flourish in abundance where undeveloped lands abound. In my initial failures to catch bull trout in Oregon and then in Idaho along tributaries of the Salmon River, I became very familiar with the beauty and abundance of the often misidentified, abundant but largely undervalued westslope cutthroat trout and ColumbiaBasin-lineage interior redband trout.

In addition to salmon and steelhead, the Tongass National Forest, the single largest national forest in the United States, is home to a number of native trout and char species. Ripping wet flies through chromed-out Dollys patrolling the saltwater shore feeding on salmon smolt and then again in swollen coastal streams north of Juneau, I reaped the benefits of the Tongass’ 60 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

largely intact 9.5-million acre roadless zone, which hosts some of the most crucial habitat for iconic species anywhere in the world.

While in Alaska, I fished with a full-time fishing guide, former commercial fishing industry business owner turned conservationist who affectionately referred to Dolly Varden as “the people’s fish.”

It wasn’t lost on me for one second that the people’s fish resides and flourishes within the people’s waters.

Having lived and worked there for a time, I must admit I have a somewhat complicated personal relationship with the state of California. That said, in retrospect, my time there in pursuit of its native species may speak louder than any other.

To my surprise, more than any other species, people asked me, “Where will you catch a golden trout?”

To which I would respond that I would be catching a California golden trout in the Kern River drainage – its (only) historical native habitat.

“Where’s that?” was the usual response.

High in the headwaters of the Kern River drainage, staring out at Mt. Whitney across the eastern Sierra Nevadas, I realized just how far and just how distant some of the most iconic and recognized native trout actually felt.

But they were there, and I was able to get there. Despite the 100-degree-plus temperatures and low waters, beautiful California golden trout spooked from my shadow as it appeared over a small, cool creek meandering across a high alpine meadow.

Crouching, I made an uncharacteristically effective 30-foot cast into the wind. Almost instantly upon landing softly on the water, a beautiful golden body with a bright red belly launched itself from the pool to take my fly.

As I reeled in the fish, I thought about where I was. In California, much like the rest of the United States, communities come in flocks to enjoy public lands. Within those public lands, native trout species – regularly referred to as the proverbial canaries in Photos: Daniel Ritz

the coal mine regarding the health of complete ecosystems – are being pushed to the edge.

Releasing that Califonia golden trout, I saw my friend (not an angler) watching studiously from the opposing bank. He had a radiant smile on his face as we watched the fish swim away.

It had taken a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of kindness from strangers and no shortage of good fortune, but ... what a fish. What an experience.

In case you’re still saying to yourself, “Yes, but why are native trout important, anyway?” I can only assure you I don’t have the space in these pages to articulate all the reasons I subjectively believe and why science objective shows you they are crucial.

But what I can assure you is that when you go, you’ll know.

All we need to do is guarantee these places remain pristine and accessible – these beautiful public lands and waters that are homes and highways to the iconic native trout and char of the West ... for what remarkable fish they are and what life-changing experiences the search for them holds.

BHA member Daniel Ritz is based in Boise, where he works as the communications and outreach coordinator for the Idaho Wildlife Federation – advocating for the conservation of Idaho’s fish and wildlife, habitat and outdoor heritage. He runs a bird dog named Trout and has a cat named Julio. You can read more of his work at JacksExperienceTradingCompany. com Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho, in pursuit of westslope cutthroat trout

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BIRTH OF A PUBLIC LANDS HUNTER

BY RUSSELL WORTH PARKER

Photo courtesy: Brad Tierney

When I met Brad Tierney in 1995, I knew he was someone exceptional.

Brad was a 21-year-old Marine lance corporal fresh from the Corps’ notoriously challenging scout sniper course at Quantico, Virginia. I was a 23-year-old Marine second lieutenant fresh from the 15-month process that supposedly qualified me to tell him what to do. We were both long on enthusiasm and short on experience. But Brad had desire.

At an age when many young men are still looking for the easy way, whether training for the tactical and technical aspects, preparing for the physical rigors of his job or searching out better ways to do it, Brad Tierney wanted to do the work. He wanted the fullness of every experience. In the words of a friend of mine, Brad had “the will, the thrill and the skill.”

That description is perhaps only more true now.

With Brad in Washington state and me in North Carolina, life, careers and geography conspire such that we have only kept in loose touch over the years. But it seems we’ve lived lives in parallel. We both left the Marine Corps in the late 1990s. Then 9/11 changed everything for us both. I went back in the Corps.

Brad picked up his rifle to ply his trade in the private security world.

Two decades later, we are both home for good. There will always be the pull of the tests found in the world’s less gentle environs, but now they take us both to America’s wild places. True to form, Brad pursues them with the kind of passion and intention of which I’ve only ever been able to muster a percentage. Brad’s journey to insert himself more fully into what Allen Morris Jones calls “the process,” in his brilliant book A Quiet Place of Violence, stands as a model for how a public lands hunter is born.

mentor’s close tutelage, he also saw the elk sign that brought them all back the next winter for his first bull elk. It was another chance to learn. Brad smiles as he explains, “It took two days to get the bull broken down and into camp, then another three days to get him packed out.” His knees swelled horribly with the weight of elk and the terrain. Now he factors both into his off-season training.

Hunting without training, education and experience is really just wandering around the woods. Wandering around is a fine pursuit, and one with which I am deeply in love. But if Brad is honest, it’s not one we share completely.

Brad wants to fill tags. “For me, 99% of hunting is … I want to be successful at whatever I’m hunting for because I’m taking away from my family time. I’m going there to fill the freezer with healthy meat for my family, and I feel like it is selfish to just have an enjoyable time. I don’t like telling my kids I didn’t get anything. Homecoming with meat is a night and day difference.”

There is no ego with Brad’s approach, it’s just in his nature to see anything he does to its utmost expression. I think back to the 21-year-old Marine of whom I was so fond when he says, “I’ll do whatever it takes to fill the tag. If the hunt is miserable but I kill the animal, that’s OK. If I have to lay on a wallow for days or go up and over a hill or a crawl through a blow down? It’s OK, I’m in.”

For Brad, that challenge only comes on the vastness of public land. Asked why, Brad pauses and looks off, gone somewhere else for the moment, somewhere steep and craggy. Then he turns back.

“Public land hunting is like the difference in being free or living under a dictator. Your hunt is your own. I think if people are given a lot of direction, it’s an arbitrary limit. But left to their own devices, who knows what they’ll do? The outliers will go in amazing directions. If you can imagine it, and you put in the work, you can do it on public land. If it goes well or goes poorly Brad was not raised in a hunting tradition. He was interested in … it’s on you. Your fitness, your training, your preparation … the concept, but with no mentor, without someone interested in you own the results.” seeing him develop those skills, there It’s a perfect summation of the was no chance for a boy living in the “IF YOU CAN IMAGINE IT, AND YOU intrinsically American opportunity suburbs to learn the complex skills PUT IN THE WORK, YOU CAN DO offered by our 640 million public required of an outdoorsman. A few acres.

IT ON PUBLIC LAND. IF IT GOES years later, the Marine Corps certainly He wants others to have that WELL OR GOES POORLY … IT’S offered him some of the mechanics experience too. Asked if he’s mentored useful to a hunter. But again, there other hunters, he initially says, “Not ON YOU. YOUR FITNESS, YOUR was no one with whom to discuss TRAINING, YOUR PREPARATION … yet. I will in the future because my ethics, game recovery and biology. kids are getting older.” But that denial YOU OWN THE RESULTS.” Brad finally connected with three is not altogether accurate. hunters at his gym in 2017. They’ve become his mentors, putting him on the path he’s been seeking since he was 18. By design, that path seems most often uphill.

On his first hunt, Brad found himself in a public area he chooses As a former Marine Corps Scout Sniper School instructor, not to disclose, only saying it was an unsupported, spring bear rifle an accomplished long-range shooter with decades behind the hunt in a backcountry area characterized by “super steep cliffs.” gun and a partner in a business focused on building the best Brad and his two hunting partners each filled over-the-counter custom hunting rifles they can imagine, Brad has the resume to bear tags, and Brad was reborn as a public lands hunter who feels, charge weekend wannabe sniper students by the score. Instead, “like I have to climb 2,000 feet to deserve to kill something.” inspired by the opportunities to volunteer with other veterans, That hunt led him to return the next year and notch another he’s found a way to channel years of experience in marksmanship, bear tag in challenging terrain. Continuing to learn under his rifle building and selection, gear set up, and yes, physical fitness, SPRING 2022 BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL | 65

Photos courtesy: Brad Tierney

to teach hunters for free simply because he believes “effective hunters are ethical hunters, it’s intertwined.” That’s a philosophy he’s developing as part of what he calls “Steel to Table.” Whether shooting steel in training, forging steel in the gym, or steeling yourself mentally to the challenges of hunting public land, it takes inuring yourself to hard work to put meat on the table.

Brad credits his mentors for his approach.

“They’re 99% of why I am where I am. They’re serious dudes, not in demeanor, but in prep. It takes a lot of work to thrive. For example, Nate is an elite athlete, but he’d rather be known as a good hunter. He’s super fit, he works out year-round, does gear research, adapts his gear constantly. That’s a trait common to all three of my mentors. As hunting season comes, he makes super detailed packing lists and updates them constantly. All food is prepped in advance, so there is no time that you could be hunting when you’re not on it.”

That shared work ethic gave a relatively new hunter the opportunity to have striking success afield. His personal ethics make the means even more impressive.

Brad Tierney is nothing if not a man pursuing the purest and fullest experience he can as a hunter. I mentioned Allen Morris Jones (BHA Podcast & Blast guest, episode 122) because I often turn to him when thinking about hunting. I also think of Brad Tierney, a public lands hunter of the kind I believe Jones was thinking when he wrote the following: 66 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

“Of course, the animal you’re really hunting is the animal within yourself, buried under the layers of light, noise and speed. If left undisturbed under this shell, you will finally come to believe in nothing past it – no fresh air, no growing leaves; and worse, you’ll believe that such things never existed. But if caught in time you can take a breath and consider how strangling the air inside had been, how tepid. And if you begin hunting … then! Then you dwindle, fading with each step into the ropes of grass around your legs, into the smell of pine and wood smoke and the taste of rain.

You hunt until you have forgotten even your own name, losing it in the plenum of names, the diaspora, the fabric of unspoken words.”

As Americans, we all have the opportunity to hunt for the animal buried within ourselves. The question is whether we are willing to put in the work required. For Brad Tierney, the answer is yes, but it’s only found on our public lands.

BHA member Russell Worth Parker is a retired U.S. Marine who writes and enjoys the outdoors in Wilmington, North Carolina. He would rather hunt duck than anything, though turkey is a close second, and he's trying not to ruin a new Lab pup before next season.

He is the lead for the BHA Armed Forces Initiative at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

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IN SEARCH OF EXPLOSIVE BLISS

BY JON OSBORN A fine line separates isolation and solitude. Both involve the state of being alone, but feelings of loneliness follow isolation – something that isn’t normally true with solitude. In his iconic and enduring essay, “Testament of a Fisherman,” Robert Traver noted, “in the woods I can find solitude without loneliness.”

Over the past two years, the world took a crash course in isolation. Pandemic protocol may have limited our exposure to infectious diseases, but those precautions carried unintended consequences. In a desperate attempt to stay physically healthy, society’s overall mental health suffered on a broad scale.

Statistics vary widely, but the Washington Post recently reported that 40% of Americans wrestled with some form of mental health and/or substance abuse issues during pandemic. Of these, 18- to 24-year-olds were most affected, with the CDC reporting that one in four young adults “seriously considered suicide.” Even now, months after the medical community developed a vaccine for covid, folks are still suffering the lingering effects of the Pandemic Blues.

Somewhere beneath the tangled mess of motherboards and megabytes, we yearned for fresh air and wild places, for solitude free from isolation. Deep down in the root cellars of our souls, we longed to stand among trees that affirm our insignificance and hungered for windswept prairies stretching to distant horizons.

It’s ingrained in the human DNA. Traver knew it, and in our hearts, we do, too, whether we verbalize it or not.

Solo camping goes against the grain of a society conditioned to indoor living. Heading out alone sounds daunting at first, but it’s eye-opening, empowering and inspiring. Besides, solo Photo: Lake Superior coast, Michigan, Stacey Ancans

camping offers an organic, doctor-approved remedy for terminal mediocrity, chronic lethargy and persistent cases of Pandemic Fatigue.

Camping sans companions might sound like an obscure concept these days, but for folks like Stacey Ancans, it’s a way of life. This adult-onset adventurer’s love of wilderness and public places stems from camping in the Utah desert: “It just seemed so special to be able to wander around out there in the desert and not see anyone for days,” the self-described introvert reminisces. And although she enjoys hiking with others, Ancans often prefers striking off alone, where she seeks out an experience she calls “Explosive Bliss.”

These encounters always differ among individuals, but one thing’s for sure, Explosive Bliss is easier felt than described. For Ancans, it’s revealed beneath the immensity of starry skies in the desert Southwest. Others might feel this phenomenon hunting elk in the mountains or standing in a river, surrounded by rising trout. In any case, there’s always a common thread: Explosive Bliss is best experienced alone.

Unfortunately, solo camping is often viewed as irrelevant, even dangerous. Women, especially, get lectured from an early age: Don’t go out there alone; it’s not safe. Couldn’t you at least bring a friend along?

“My parents raised me to be independent,” Ancans explains, “but they still had misgivings when I began forging into the woods alone.”

Truth be told, Ancans’ first experience backpacking in Pigeon River Country (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula) wasn’t without challenges, but she learned a lot in a short timeframe. For one, hammocking in high summer wasn’t the best idea after all.

Bloodthirsty mosquitos whined and dined on her flesh, but the humming hordes were only the beginning. Ancans plucked at least a hundred ticks off her Australian shepherd that first evening.

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Photo: Sarai Ramos Photo: Stacey Ancans

Come nightfall, the haunting call of loons made the hair stand up on the back of her neck, and sleep came in fits and starts.

But the following morning, Ancans awoke excited that she’d accomplished something that most Americans haven’t ever experienced.

An overactive imagination is a solo camper’s worst enemy, Ancans affirms. She’s comfortable alone in her own head but has experienced plenty of mishaps over the years. Once she woke up to a black bear straddling her car, and another morning, she

70 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

found a ring of mountain-lion tracks encircling her tent. It’s easy to slip down a mental rabbit hole of irrational fears, and proper preparation is important, but Ancans encourages anyone considering a solo outing to simply get out there and give it a try.

Having logged numerous solo trips since that initial debacle in the PRC, Ancans actually feels safer alone in the backcountry than in a traditional campground surrounded by people. Proof, yet again, that familiarity breeds confidence. Solo camping also promotes a sort of poise that few other experiences can: selfreliance, independence, courage. Plus, these skills translate directly into everyday life, fostering virtues that Ancans tries to promote among other women. “Besides,” she adds, “I do some fantastic thinking out there.”

Ancans isn’t alone. Take Sarai Ramos, for another example.

Camping wasn’t part of her experience growing up, either. As a child, her family constantly moved around, chasing jobs across Iowa, Florida, Mexico and Minnesota. Home – wherever that was at the time – was awash with turmoil and chaos.

During those formative years, family vacations consisted of impromptu overnights at low-budget motels. Stability proved elusive, and Ramos recalls an intense desire to escape her situation.

She longed for something different, but at so young an age, it was difficult to articulate exactly what that meant.

“The outdoors was a game changer,” she remembers, although arriving at that place was a process. “I tried camping once as a teenager, and it was horrible.” Then one day in her 20s, Ramos went solo camping along the Au Sable River – a big step, considering

Photo: Sarai Ramos

her relative inexperience. Then again, life had changed by then.

She’d graduated from college, gotten married and started a career.

Being outdoors alone for the first time, Ramos was surprised by feelings of paranoia and nervousness. There was no logical reason for her fear, and she soon realized she was simply out of her element.

A journal entry from that night say it all: No matter how tough you are, nature has her own way of making you feel like you’re a kid sleeping by yourself in a very dark, dark room.

Insight stems from adversity and personal trials. The next morning, Ramos awoke beside the river, a bit weary, but not too tired to pen an austere observation about the Au Sable River: The flowing water. Non-stop sound. Nothing like it.

Solitude can be eye-opening.

My first attempt at solo camping as a teenager was similar to those of Ramos and Ancans, but different as well. It was early January, and my crude marsh-grass shelter sagged beneath a half-foot of fresh snow. A fire crackled just outside the entrance, reflecting heat and light into the snug little lean-to.

At first, I was smug, feeling far more Jim Bridger than middleclass suburban teenager, but false confidence never lasts long. As the weak winter sun slipped behind a row of hemlocks, tension wormed into my chest. Retreating into the warmth of my mummy bag, I closed my eyes and drifted off into a fitful world of strange, daunting dreams.

Around midnight, I sat bolt upright in the dimly lit shelter. A mournful howl rippled across the snow-covered bean field, and soon other coyotes answered from a nearby ridge. In my mind’s eye, I could imagine their slobbering jaws and feel their hot breath on my skin. The metallic taste of fear, like a tarnished penny, filled my mouth. The yips and barks tripped a primal switch that made me long for four solid walls and the security of fellow humans.

Peering wide-eyed into the darkness beyond the campfire, I felt my nerves thrum like guitar strings and blood rushed in my ears with a pulsing whoosh.

So much for Explosive Bliss.

Autophobia – the fear of being alone – is one of the oldest anxieties known. I couldn’t articulate it then, but my primitive dread was directly linked to a perception of isolation. In our not-so-ancient past, protection lay in numbers, and separation

The author's grass shelter.

meant peril. After all, predators rarely attack an entire herd; they single out a feeble calf, a sickly adult or some otherwise weakened member cut off from the group. Humans have watched this logic play out since the dawn of time. Anyone who understood the rules of the game survived; those who ignored them perished.

But sensibilities hold zero gravity in the moment. Teetering on the brink of panic, I fumbled for the rimfire rifle propped in the corner of the lean-to. Consciously violating every firearm safety rule, I pointed the muzzle out the door, flipped the safety forward, and pressed the trigger. The pathetic snap of the .22 sounded like a child’s pop gun but sent the song-dogs scrambling away. Working the bolt, I chambered a fresh round and shrunk hesitantly back into the mummy bag, half expecting to hear snapping fangs and stealthy footfalls in the snow.

Few places are quieter than the winter woods on a windless night. Eventually I fell back to sleep, only to awake again around 3 a.m. By then the campfire had dwindled to feeble coals and a wispy tendril of smoke drifting into the endless sky. Blinking, I looked out the entrance of the shelter. Moonbeams cast phantasmic shadows between sycamore trunks, and a great-horned owl hooted quietly from a distant hemlock grove. Exhausted by an endless march of irrational fears, I soon drifted off again.

The dawn of a new day is glorious to the anxiety-ravaged soul, and the next time I opened my eyes, the eastern sky was glowing bluish-purple. I shimmied forward, rebuilt the fire and exhaled a cloud of relief into the brittle air. I’d survived my night alone in the woods – somewhat sleep deprived – but filled with triumph and confidence. In retrospect, the emotion felt something like bliss.

When BHA member Jon Osborn isn’t chasing squirrels, grouse or woodcock on Michigan’s public lands, he can be found fly fishing for trout or smallmouth bass along unnamed streams across the state.

Signed copies of books, Flyfisher’s Guide to Michigan and Northwest of Someplace, are available by contacting him via Facebook or email: ozzy0908@hotmail.com.

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BY ADAM MILLER There is something appealing about doing the impossible, or at least, the exceedingly unlikely. I know I am not alone in this as I brought a friend along to see if we could do the impossible twice in a week.

Or maybe it is more appropriate to say he brought me. Or better yet, neither of us could truly be contained once we had an idea in our heads – an idea that only that person could talk themself out of. Being told you cannot do the impossible just wedges the idea deeper, and the only way to pry it loose is to try it and find out for yourself just how impossible that idea truly is.

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources will tell you that it is not actually impossible. A handful of folks do in fact get lucky every year. Emphasis on the handful. As in five or about that number. Out of the fifty that will try. I am speaking of course of taking a black bear out of the wet and wild country known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. One million acres of dense forest, lakes, rivers and swamps, it’s wild enough to be of the last places woodland caribou were left in the Lower 48, even as late as the 1980s. (Some of us still dream that someday they could return, but that is a lengthy discussion for another time.)

It would not be the first time Tony and I had ventured into the Boundary Waters. Fourteen years earlier, along with a couple of college buddies, in over our heads, we made a week’s trip of seeing the nation's most visited wilderness area. It was a test of our meager skills, patience for one another and, most stupidly, the limits of a very-low caloric intake combined with strenuous activity.

Despite this, the Boundary Waters captured our imaginations and a piece of our souls, never really venturing far from the backs of our minds in the years after. In 2020 we went to see if that soul piece was still there and just how much it had grown in our absence. This time we would be far better prepared with gear and experience but would combine the journey with the primal experience of hunting an apex predator.

Such a trip starts long before you reach the canoe launch.

There are not a lot of bears where I am from and zero hunting opportunities. Using just what I know from hunting other big

game, I spent hours zooming in an out of Google Earth, looking for some key features. And then I’d cross reference that with bear behavior information from internet searches and several books on bear hunting. Then I’d check with the local bear biologist to see what he thought of the areas I’d selected.

Affirmation in hand, we selected a launch point within reasonable paddling distance and applied for the permit.

Launch permit in our back pockets and bear tags in our packs, the point of no return has passed. Aspirations are now realities as we ratchet strap canoes to the truck.

It strikes me how different a piece of country looks through the eyes of a tourist. I had not forgot the splendor of the first time I laid on eyes on some of the most pristine lakes, clearest rivers and largely untouched forests anywhere. Most of the Boundary Waters looks the same as it did when the First Nations peoples would have used it for everyday life; you must look hard to see the marks of humankind.

But it also looks different this time around. This time I am seeing it through the eyes of hunter. A tourist sees the grand picture and is in awe. A hunter sees the finest of details and is in wonder. Where does this lead? Why would that animal come here instead of there? Where did he come from, and where did he go after he left?

Every opening into the trees reveals an ancient game trail and one more piece to the puzzle of notching a tag. Every bend of a river opens up after coming around the bend, revealing a new possibility. This is not the place for horizons; it is the place for up close and personal surprises.

The first day of any adventure hunt is for orientation and making new friends of the local inhabitants. Black ducks are not a thing on the prairies where I am from. But a hen and her six nearly full-grown chicks were a daily reminder I wasn’t in North Dakota anymore. Too trusting, one or two would have made fine backcountry table fare with a swift canoe paddle bonk on the head if you were desperate and unbound by regulation. I doubt any of them had seen humans before, at least not in this place.

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Boundary Waters mining: The latest In January two significant actions from the Biden administration represented big steps to protect the Boundary Waters from proposed sulfide-ore copper mining in the Rainy River watershed of the Superior National Forest.

On Jan. 19, the BLM ended a 90-day comment period on a Forest Service proposal for a 20-year mineral withdrawal in the Superior National Forest watershed that is home to the Boundary Waters. The BLM received more than 250,000 comments throughout the period. While this review is underway, the BLM has initiated a two-year prohibition of issuing new leases within the region. This began in October of 2021.

On Jan. 26, the Department of the Interior cancelled two federal hardrock mineral leases, which were improperly renewed in 2019, in the Superior National Forest. BHA and our partners at Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters applauded this action to protect the most visited wilderness in the U.S. from the impacts of toxic sulfide-ore copper mining.

-Kaden McArthur, BHA government relations coordinator

The plan was to use the creeks connecting the lakes to get to million years of human evolution and generational survival data the places very few ever see anymore. It would require work. It starts pulsing through your body. “You are not the only predator will always amaze me just how easy it is to leave humanity behind here, and you might not be the biggest. You are certainly not the by simply getting past even one beaver dam. You get past two toughest.” and it feels like you have stumbled across a time long forgotten.

But for a bear hunter, being within smelling distance of a bear Without even talking about it, one instinctively drops their voice on only your second day of hunting in a new place is one great to whisper levels and is careful to avoid even a light paddle splash. sign that all your preparation has been vindicated. You have found Such a thing feels out of place here. a bear, against all odds. You have completed maybe the hardest The initial sign is good. A lot of game trails lead down to the part. Now you just need a clear shot. creek. The berry plants we have seen are lacking; the crop is long The situation was nearly ideal. We had stopped to check out gone. Bears will be hungry for their next meal. The question now what we hoped would be a way into an old burn that might be is how we best convince them that meal is here, where we want overgrown with all the things a bear likes to graze on. But what them. Several spots are selected for the next day’s honey burns, we could not verify until we actually laid eyes on it was that it was depending on the wind direction. A plan in place, we back out as a tangled mess of deadfall and new growth jack pine. Visibility quiet as possible and return to was limited to less than 10 There are some hunting experiences that camp. This is not a place you yards. Like I said, thick. But want to figure out in the dark clearly the type of cover an take us back to a more primal stage of on your first day. humanity. The experiences that make the hair old bruin preferred.

The next day, the reality of Baiting is not allowed on the back of your neck stand on end and in wilderness areas and how difficult this will be sets kick all your senses into overdrive. in. It is not vertical like the rightfully so. It would spoil mountains. But it is thick. the country, I think. What Really thick … like “binoculars are mostly useless” thick. Like the Minnesota DNR suggests is doing honey burns to leave a you don’t so much walk as you crawl or climb through it. Thick, scent source and let the bears come in. So that is what we did. like “you will make so much noise even getting 100 yards from Where we had smelled the bear, we set up our tin can and Sterno the creek every critter bigger than a weasel that can’t take to the lamp apparatus near the creek’s edge and then canoed back across trees will be long gone before you ever get in rifle range” thick. the creek to a rocky outcrop to watch over it. The rangefinder And it is like that everywhere. There is no easier place. Busting confirmed a 125-yard shot with a clear line of sight. Then we through the trees to find openings in the forest is not going to waited. happen with any level of stealth conducive to hunting. We need And wait we did. Smelling one was as close as we would come. to draw them to the creek. Where best to do that?

I consider it a success. Depending on the wind, we followed the There are some hunting experiences that take us back to a more same pattern through the week. Set up a honey burn on one side primal stage of humanity. The experiences that make the hair of the creek. Paddle to the other side and set up in cover to watch on the back of your neck stand on end and kick all your senses as the honey slowly smokes into the trees, hoping to lure a bear into overdrive. A bull elk bugling so close to you it hurts your into trying some of nature’s best candy. It just was not meant to ears … or the smell of a bear – unforgettable. On first whiff, 2 be.

76 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

Photos: Adam Miller

from the other. No body of water is isolated for long. Damage done to one is damage done to all. That is why protecting the Boundary Waters in its entirety and perpetually is so important.

There are so few places like it left on earth.

This impossible hunt will continue to be attempted by me and others like me, so long as we are allowed to try. And by that, I mean so long as it is not destroyed by industry or our misguided best intentions.

Thirty years from now, I hope my son and daughter to have their own deeply primal experiences, as the smell of that bear’s grandchild fills their nostrils with wonder and fear. In doing so, they will draw a direct connection to me and the same wonder and fear experienced by every other hunter who had stepped foot on that hallowed ground and realized they were not the only predator.

As we packed camp, I made special care to make sure my soul piece was planted not far from the fire pit but near the water’s edge, should it choose to do a little light traveling about in my absence. I pondered about what a special place this was. How it manages to capture and hold onto a piece of a person’s soul and how easily it could be spoiled. One million acres, over one thousand lakes, countless wetlands and creeks, and all connected as they slowly drain from south to north into Quetico Provencial Park and eventually Hudson Bay. It is impossible to separate one

Adam Miller is a recent BHA life member with two kids, two hunting dogs and the world’s most understanding wife. When he’s not hunting or fishing, he finds some time to give back as a hunter’s education instructor.

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THE WIND

Photo, Sean McCain, 2020 Public Land Owner Photo Contest

BY ERIN GENEST

us. My dad always told me, “Step where I step,” as to not disturb any outside ground. But this time it was impossible since we were We sat on a cluster of rocks, overlooking a broad valley near running. Luckily the wind was in our favor, which muffled the Bridgeport, California. To our left about a thousand yards was sound we were making. my dad’s Jeep, a little black dot to us now. Above us a couple We got to the top of another rockpile, out of breath, beads of hundred yards was an old hitching post with corrals; it appeared sweat rolling down our faces. to be abandoned and reminded me of those old black and Dad, looking through his binoculars. “Do you see them? I white Spaghetti Westerns my dad would watch at home on the think we lost them.” weekends.

I looked down, which was about 200-foot drop, and there they I surveyed the valley below us. I had never seen such desert-like were: five does, and two bucks. land: dried up tumbleweed, Manzanita bushes starving for water, “Dad, they’re right below us!” the creek below us barely flowing and dust blowing everywhere.

My heart pounded so hard I could hear it in my ears. This It was late October, and there was no sign of winter coming any was the moment my dad had trained me for. My adrenaline was time soon and not one buck to be found. pumping, and I could barely breathe. Could I do this? Shoot an As Dad and I sat, eating our lunches, I closed my eyes and felt animal for food? I’m a girl. I’m a blonde. What am I doing here? the wind on my face for just a moment. I smelled dirt and the Can I go back to camp now? Am I ready to take a life? remnants of horses and cows from the abandoned corral above us I didn’t have a rifle of my own, so I was using one of Dad’s. He and heard the sound of the tumbleweeds and branches blowing was 6 feet 1 inches tall, 230 pounds. I was 5 feet 2 inches and in the wind. It wasn’t a perfect day to barely 100 pounds – so small in stature that outsiders, but it was perfect to me because I Dad’s rifle didn’t fit my body, and I had to I stopped second was with my dad. tuck the butt under my arm to see through guessing myself. This is I was 15, and this was my first big the scope. Which, of course, is not advised what I was supposed to hunting trip with Dad – just me and him, and how people get black eyes, but I had my best friend. be doing; this is a part of no choice.

Then Dad caught movement through I aimed, held my breath, pulled the who I am. I am a hunter. I his binos. It was a herd of six deer, but he trigger and shot one bullet into that buck. am my father’s daughter. couldn’t make out if there was a buck in I got him! On the first shot. I got him! My the group. They were far away, at least 800 legs quivered and collapsed underneath me yards. as adrenaline coursed through my body.

Dad looked at me and said, “Well, do you want to go for it?”

Dad stood up and yelled, “ERIN, YOU GOT HIM! COME “Sure, this is the first movement we’ve seen all day. Let’s do it!” ON, LET’S GO!” He was already running down the mountain.

We packed up our gear, I shoved my half-eaten sandwich down “I’ll meet you there in a minute, once my legs start to work into my pack, and we ran as hard and as fast as our legs could carry again.”

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Dad ran down from the Jeep, leaping over the creek.“I thought you got eaten by a mountain lion! I couldn’t see you with all the brush! You blended in! I was screaming for five minutes! DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN!” He hugged me, and I said I was sorry again as we loaded the gear, rifles, and my buck into the back of the Jeep and headed for camp.

As we were driving back to our campsite, I felt the wind again.

Wind to me symbolized the change that day. A change in me. Out with the old and in with the new. I felt more like myself, who I was meant to be. Who I was meant to become. Who cares if I was a girl, blonde and 15? I completed something many men only wish they could do: shooting a buck and bringing home food for their families. I became a hunter that day. But I also realized that it wasn’t about the hunt at all. It was about bonding with my dad and how proud he was of me for carrying on the tradition.

Hunting for our family is not just about killing an animal, taking a picture or putting it on our wall. It’s tradition, laughs around the campfire and funny stories told over and over, year after year. It’s spending time with your loved ones, making memories and feeding your family. It’s being closer to God and conserving the environment.

Most important to me, a then 15-year-old girl, it was to spend more time with Daddy. Dad and I went on to have many more hunting trips together, sharing more experiences and making more memories. My dad passed away on Feb. 16, 2020, but I still feel his passion, tradition and love for the sport in every breath of wind.

BHA member Erin Genest is currently furthering her education and enrolled at CSU Stanislaus. She also runs Rustic Euro Mounts from her home. She hikes, kayaks and camps with her dogs and will be going to New Zealand in 2024 to hunt red stag in her father’s memory – his dream hunt – where she will sprinkle some of his ashes.

Photos courtesy: Erin Genest

I watched him run toward my buck, full of enthusiasm and an overwhelming sense of pride. I was proud of myself.

As I sat there on top of those rocks still watching Dad run, I felt the wind again. This time the wind felt different; it felt refreshing and cool. I didn’t hear dead branches moving. It was comforting.

It was peaceful. I stopped second-guessing myself. This is what I was supposed to be doing; this is a part of who I am. I am a hunter. I am my father’s daughter.

Like a newborn foal learning how to walk, my legs were still like Jell-O. Finally, I forced myself up, picked up my gear and rifle and started to make my way down to where the deer had taken its last breath.

Dad couldn’t wait to show me the next step in the hunting process. He taught me the proper way to field dress a deer, which is a lot of work, requiring excellent precision and strength. During the process, we expended most of our energy, and we drank all our water. Now we’re miles away from our vehicle, in the heat of the day, with no water.

Dad assured me that we were going to be OK. We’d drag the deer to the creek 500 yards away so we could fill up our canteens.

I gathered both gear bags and flung both rifles over my shoulders.

Dad dragged the 120-pound deer through the desert. The carcass kept getting hung up on every dead tumbleweed we came across. The terrain was so harsh that it stripped the fur off one side, leaving the buck completely bare. We stopped multiple times to catch our breath and grabbed leaves off the manzanita bushes to suck on, temporarily helping our thirst.

When we finally reached the creek, it was flowing but barely.

It was also downstream from the corrals We used our water purification tablets but couldn’t wait the recommended 20 minutes, downing it all in an instant.

Exhausted, my dad pushed through.

“You stay here with your buck, while I hike up to the Jeep. I’ll be back,” Dad said.

“OK, Dad, I’ll stay right here.”

He filled up both of his canteens again, jumped over the creek and started making the hike to the Jeep, several miles away.

Exhausted, I took off my pack and binoculars and laid down next to the buck. Before I knew it, I fell asleep.

Forty-five minutes later, I awoke to the sounds of my dad screaming my name. I sat up in a panic. “Dad! Dad! I’m right here! I’m so sorry, I fell asleep!”

#PairsWithFreshAir

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Como to Caspian But it wasn’t politics or Iraqi missiles falling in my grandmother’s neighborhood that we talked about; it was fishing.

Fishing for Alborz brown trout at my great grandfather’s little I learned to fish on city lakes – on docks, on rip rap, off walking paths in public parks. My dad started me off, filling buckets with orchard in Fasham. Catching brackish water common carp in the little sunfish to release later, making games out of the occasional Caspian Sea at the cabin. Barbel and zander and lots of fish he golden shiner and introducing me to the serious fun of sneaking didn’t know the names for in English. He had poaching stories, red letter days with endless fish, the big ones that got away. He’d away from real life to spend a few hours on the water.

Saint Paul lakes like Como and Phalen became places of endless show me how to turn a willow branch into a stringer or would discussion, and my father, like so many impatient men who love talk about making homemade cane poles from Russian bamboo. fishing, had endless patience for We would sit on the dock on Como a 5 year old with with a million Lake, or walk around the bait shop It was on these city lakes, looking at rods, and he would questions about the wonders of untangling line and baiting my remind me that we came from the underwater world. It was on hooks, that he wove stories about somewhere – that I too had a history these city lakes, untangling line his own youth fishing in Iran and in the outdoors. and baiting my hooks, that he wove Unlike most third or fourth stories about his own youth fishing helped me connect our adventures in Iran and helped me connect our to places I had never seen but were generation Minnesotans, we didn’t have a cabin or hunting shack up adventures to places I had never part of my own outdoor story. north. As I got older, we ventured seen but were part of my own out more, but still between his work outdoor story.

My father came to Minnesota as a student in 1979. He thought schedule and a lack of Minnesota fishing knowledge, we spent a he’d study abroad for a year, come home and be a big deal because lot of time on those same city lakes. Around 9 or 10 years old I he had been in America. The chaos of a political revolution and a had become old enough to bike with friends to fish. Old enough decade long war with Iraq changed those plans. A few years after to steal a lot of Dad’s tackle and get it stuck in trees. Pretty soon he arrived, he had a wife and child and no idea if he would ever I was able to show him a spot or two, and I was learning on my go home. My father loved – and still loves – Iran, and we talked own to fish the Mississippi and was moving past the panfish that we started off with. about it constantly.

Photo courtesy M. Mahmood Tajbakhsh

BY M. MAHMOOD TAJBAKHSH

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Photos courtesy M. Mahmood Tajbakhsh

If it hadn’t been for those little pieces of public water, my father could have lost his own connection to the outdoors, and I may never have become the fisherman and hunter that I am.

When I was 13 we were able to go to Iran for the first time. I caught my first open water pike in the same wetland complex that the Ramsar Convention was signed. (The Ramsar Convention, or “The Convention on Wetlands,” which was signed in 1971 in Ramsar, Iran, designates “Wetlands of International Importance” and aims for their effective management.)

The rivers he used to catch trout on were fished out, but my uncle found a new river where I caught my first brown trout. I saw and fished the Alborz Mountains, the Caspian Sea. I learned to catch bream with a bamboo pole and slept in the same little cabins and country houses that he had as a boy. Though the Iran of his youth had changed, those days on the dock at Como Lake blended seamlessly with early mornings on the Caspian in our own fishing mythology.

After that trip, my father discovered Whitewater State Park and started trout fishing again. It was like he was a new person. We started camping more, fishing streams. He started going up north for walleye and taking trips to Canada with new friends.

My friends and I started driving, and we fished the cities hard, ventured out of state on our own and started hunting, foraging and setting up our own little camps and cabin trips. We both had graduated to a bigger outdoor world, and our family outdoor story kept expanding.

I had the pleasures in my early 20s of showing my father top quality trout streams with complex access and getting him to begrudgingly lug a 20-gauge around for grouse so we could spend time together. We had both become real Minnesota outdoorsmen.

Dad’s childhood stories had melded with my own and the exciting new trips we were planning on taking.

When I was a kid it seemed normal to me that there would be little lakes close to home to fish. I didn’t realize that we were fishing 84 | BACKCOUNTRY JOURNAL SPRING 2022

on publicly owned lakes – in city parks and on docks put out by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. If it hadn’t been for those little pieces of public water, my father could have lost his own connection to the outdoors, and I may never have become the fisherman and hunter that I am. When we talk about public lands, we so often think of the great expanses of BLM land in the West, the federally designated wilderness areas of the Far North and the sensitive and scenic landscapes threatened by industry.

And those of course are important. But when I think back to those days as a little kid, it wasn’t just us fishing those city lakes.

Other immigrants from other places were reconnecting with their own outdoor heritage, introducing their own children not just to fishing but also to their pasts while becoming new American outdoors people. As advocates for public land, we shouldn’t forget how important little pieces of public land in urban areas can be.

How critical that little, over-hunted wildlife management area near the city is for people who don’t know where else to go.

When we invest energy, money and our advocacy skills into these little pieces of public hunting and fishing, we do more than save a few acres. We create the space for people like my father to teach his own son about his outdoor past and give people like him and me an outdoor future. We have the power not only to save the backcountry for future generations, but to create great outdoor recreation spaces for urban dwellers and the new Americans making their own traditions in the outdoors.

BHA member M. Mahmood Tajbakhsh is an avid outdoorsman from St. Paul, Minnesota.

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SHORT

BY JOSH FORTMAN As I drove away from my house, an involuntary smile emerged from deep down. The truck was loaded with my canoe, waders, rubber gauntlets, a .22 and a few other items I would need for a day of running a water trapline. It had been nearly 20 years since I last trapped muskrats and raccoons as a kid. But this felt very different. I had finally come around to fulfilling a childhood dream of trapping a stretch of wild, public river, absent the frequent change of property owners along the banks that had hemmed me in as a kid in northwest Ohio.

Public land was not a concept that was even on my radar as a kid. As far as I knew, if I wanted to hunt or trap a long stretch of creek or river, the only way to make that happen was to get permission from a long list of property owners, which was not practical.

This time I would be trapping a Michigan state game area – a narrow strip of mostly contiguous public land lining the river.

While it is not a vast wilderness, one’s mind can imagine it as such; the farm fields bordering the SGA are out of sight, and built structures are few and far between.

I’d set a line of 25 traps the previous day, so this morning was my first check. My expectations were low, not knowing if my trapping skills had atrophied over time. The first set location was a few hundred yards past a fork in the river, where one branch became a wide shallow flood plain dominated by invasive reed canary grass and willows on one bank and silver maple on the other. The other branch remained mostly channelized, possibly straightened by human activity. I paddled up the flood plain to a fallen maple that had taken its root ball with it when the wind got the best of it. Next to the fallen tree was a hollowedout tree perched on a small patch of elevated earth surrounded by the shallow flooded timber. Raccoons had clearly been using this little patch, as well-beaten paths between exposed roots were prominent. The fallen tree served as a toilet, with very fresh scat covering the base, while the hollowed tree was likely a den. As I approached, I could see a large raccoon in the first trap, perched on a branch by the fallen tree. The second set also held a raccoon.

The next couple of sets for muskrats came up empty. But paddling between sets, I could not help but notice the density

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BHA member Josh Fortman lives in Mason, Michigan, and enjoys spending as much time as possible in the woods and wetlands pursuing squirrel, deer and just about anything else that makes good tablefare. He is an advocate for the health, social and environmental benefits of procuring some of one's own food – and of course, a lover of public land.

Photo: Josh Fortman

Trapping the Maple

of life surrounding me, so typical of the places where terrestrial meets aquatic. An old stump poked through the water, scattered with fish scales where a raptor or perhaps a mink or otter had a meal. Muskrat push-ups dotted the shallow marsh like pool balls on a table. Leopard frogs jumped from the bank as I paddled too close to their sunning spots. I cannot help but wonder what I would have seen had I been here three centuries before, when the keystone species of this habitat, the beaver, was still plentiful.

Wonder how these habitat creators would have molded this landscape when they were abundant?

Pulling the canoe through the mat of shallow, flooded grass, I could see a line through the floating duckweed near the push-up, where I had a trap set, telling me a muskrat had swam through recently. Pulling the trap out of the water, a familiar feeling of satisfaction came over me – one that I had not felt in quite a few years.

My first check had yielded five muskrats and three raccoons, exceeding my expectations.

As with most outdoorsmen, the purposefulness of my outdoor pursuits has evolved since my early days. Sustainability, conservation and a desire to eat self-procured food have taken an equal footing with the act of the pursuit in terms of importance.

After skinning each muskrat, I removed the front and back legs.

Likewise with each raccoon, while also cutting out the backstraps.

Inside, I trimmed the thick layer of fat from the raccoon quarters.

My wife was kind enough to package, wrap and freeze everything, while I cleaned up in the garage for the evening.

I pulled all of the sets the following day, finishing up with two more muskrats and one raccoon. Coming up to the boat put-in, I had a strong feeling of gratitude for this place – a feeling that I need to give something in return for what it gives me. I donated the check from selling fur to BHA, hoping it will in a small way help to ensure this place and others like it persist. But it’s a drop in the bucket on a landscape scale. We need more places where rivers are left to their own devices, where people can roam, biodiversity can flourish and riparian ecosystems can go about providing those vital services that have allowed our species to exist.

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BEYOND FAIR CHASE

LONG RANGE HUNTING: THINKING IT THROUGH

Deer photo: Jearred Foruria, 2020 Public Lands and Waters Photo Contest. Crosshair: istock/ FORGEM

BY ERIC NUSE What gets you up at zero dark thirty and out the door? If you are like me there are multiple motivators. Some I can satisfy in ways other than hunting. But there are some for which there is no substitute.

Foremost is genuinely participating in the circle of life, being in nature with the intent to take an animal’s life. The other is the deep excitement when you are fully in the moment – “alive man” as Barry Lopez describes it. This deep excitement requires fair chase hunting skills and close interaction with your quarry.

Daniel A. Pedrotti, Jr., of the Boone & Crockett Club, says, “The hunt at its most fundamental level is defined in and by the relationship between man and beast. … We derive our hunting ethics by measuring our choices against this relationship. However, there are two forces at work that would affect this simple truth and diminish the very essence of the hunt – ego and technology.”

If you agree with Pedrotti’s assessment that the core of the hunt is the relationship between predator and prey, then the prey should be given the opportunity to detect you as the predator.

Otherwise, this no longer calls for the very skills (e.g., pursuing, tracking, stalking) that give hunting its essential character. While hunting is about shooting, it is so much more than that.

And if you are agree that hunting occurs within the distance before detection is greatly diminished, within that predator/prey range, is it okay to shoot anywhere inside that distance?

Again, it depends. Some factors you can control with preparation and practice: Is your firearm capable of a killing shot under normal conditions? And at what maximum distance (using hunting positions) is your hold solid, even if buck fever kicks in? Have you sighted in and practiced at this distance?

Then there are the factors you can’t control. The most unpredictable are wind and animal movement. You can minimize these factors at closer ranges, but the effects are greatly magnified at longer ranges. A lot can happen between a shot breaking and the

bullet arriving at long ranges. The result can be ugly. No hunter wants that.

Ego can negatively influence a decision to shoot or not to shoot.

To resist taking a low probability shot, a high level of self-discipline is necessary to combat the images of the trophy rack, media chatter and advertising hype, such as “Built for Long Range” and “1500 ft-lbs of energy at 500 yards.”

One needs to keep in mind that there is a big difference between long distance target shooting and long distance shooting at game animals. You don’t get any “sighter shots” in hunting. A near miss isn’t an 8-point hit; it’s a miss or worse. Finishing a moving wounded animal at long distance is extremely difficult. And most of us can’t or don’t practice at 400-yard moving targets. The reality is at long distances you get one shot.

To paraphrase Orion founder Jim Posewitz: If there is doubt in your mind, it is probably going to come out the end of your barrel. The ethical hunter does not pull the trigger to find out if he or she can hit the animal.

Worthy of further consideration is your ability and willingness to follow up on what appears to be a missed shot. Just because that animal, on the other side of the canyon, runs off after the shot doesn’t mean it wasn’t hit. We owe it to the animal to follow up, even if that means dropping off one ridge and back up the other. Following up is ethical hunting, and in some states, it is required by law.

Taking all of these considerations into account, how do you decide how far is too far?

At Orion we often think of the pile paradox. Imagine you are dropping grains of sand on the ground. When is it a pile? After a while it starts to look like a pile, so you add more and a bit more.

It’s definitely a pile now. OK, take a few grains away. Is it still a pile? Take more and a few more, until finally it’s definitely not a pile.

That’s the problem with trying to answer the question of how far is too far in the abstract. There isn’t a bright line where you can say: With my equipment, hunting in Montana for elk it’s 350 yards, beyond that it’s not a shot. Not 375? Not 300?

Just like in the pile paradox, it is a gray area. Understanding the gray area and thinking it through before a trophy animal appears will go a long ways towards making the right decision in the heat of the moment. You owe it to yourself, to the game and to the future of hunting to get it right.

As the late Valerius Geist said, “Let us celebrate long range target shooting as a fine sport, but let us hone our skills hunting and not take unnecessary chances on living big game.”

There is one thing we have absolute control over while hunting, and that is when and if we pull the trigger.

Eric Nuse is a retired game warden living in Vermont. He is a past recipient of BHA’s Jim Posewitz Award for Ethical Hunting and Fishing. He helped found the New England chapter of BHA and is a longtime board member of Orion. He is an avid conservationist, hunter, fisher and wilderness canoeist.

This department is brought to you by Orion - The Hunter’s Institute, a nonprofit and BHA partner dedicated to advancing hunting ethics and wildlife conservation.

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the Process The elk had slipped over the saddle and bedded among stunted conifers and brush on a steep north slope only minutes into legal shooting light – clearly wary from weeks of hunting pressure. The next few hours saw my friend Ian and I try every angle of approach.

We’d creep in, run out of cover or favorable wind, and back out again. Finally, within sight of the animals but just out of shooting range, with no other alternative, we parked ourselves and waited out the day, battling to stay warm through the zero-degree afternoon and gale-force winds.

The previous year I’d killed a cow elk my first morning of rifle season and next time out a decent muley buck within an hour, after work – roughly equal to the time we now spent freezing our asses off staring at these elk just out of range. I never expected this season to go like last, but I still felt reasonably confident in my eventual success. Even when I sent the winter issue to press last November and wrote about it being crunch time, I figured I’d be talking about my favorite new venison recipe in this issue.

Four hours later though, prone behind my rifle, the elk finally stood and fed toward my shooting lane, only to take flight for an unknown reason, fewer than five steps before my shot opportunity.

I had a nagging feeling that those would be the only elk within range all season, a premonition that sadly would prove correct. Over the course of the next several weeks I would find sobering humility, struggle to wash my mouth of the aftertaste of defeat and finally reflect on what an empty freezer could teach me.

Wanting it more won’t make it happen. When I was a steelhead guide, I was absolutely convinced that the fish could sense it if the angler was trying too hard. Their clenched jaws and bulging forearm veins would send some invisible aura right down the line to the fly – the fish could sense this, and they wouldn’t eat. I saw it time and time again: the ones who wanted a steelhead the most were the ones who would go home fishless. Those that showed up just happy to be there would usually be successful. And then, here I am, hunter, wanting a full freezer so badly that the animals had to know it: elk spooking for no good reason after hours of effort, buck after buck winding me even when the wind was distinctly in my favor.

Don’t sacrifice the process in favor of the end result. Yvon Chouinard once said, “If you compromise the process, you’re an asshole when you start out and you’re an asshole when you get back.” This season I drove past some of my favorite backcountry haunts to a far corner of the state because it offered an either-sex elk tag and higher success rates. I camped next to generators, dodged ATVs and had bullets zip over my head to pursue scared-shitless elk. I then returned time and

time again to the same spot – in sight of a major road but holding plenty of deer – rather than explore the wild places that recharge my spirit.

Sometimes it’s just not meant to be. No matter how hard you try or how much skill you attempt to apply, it’s just not going to happen.

Two weeks before rifle season, I went to check my zero. Hundreds of dollars of preciously rare ammo later, I had to borrow a friend’s gun.

I couldn’t shake the feeling I was jinxing myself mid-season when I replaced my nearly empty but thoroughly broken chest freezer.

I gave it my all. I really did. Nothing was left on the table. With 30 minutes left in my season, safety off, buck in the crosshairs, it seemed like it was finally going to happen, only to have the wind shift for the umpteenth time. And then with literally less than two minutes left in legal light, a different buck stood broadside at well under 100 yards. My safety was again off – I decided not to take an off-hand shot in waning light.

After a decade away from hunting, it was the process that brought me back. I treasure those chances to be fully immersed in wild places – up hours before the first glow of light, listening to every crunch of leaves or snap of a twig with curiosity and excitement. I long for those moments where you’re fully tapped into your sixth – hunter’s – sense, which non-hunters are unlikely to ever experience.

Take all that away, and, if I’m being honest, I’m just as happy with a freezer full of grass-finished beef purchased from my neighbor’s small farm operation.

Which brings me to this point: it’s necessary for me to eat crow and point out that I owe the local farmers among us an apology for using the term “hormone laced, store-bought crap” in last issue, without clarifying that I love local, sustainably produced farm food.

Thanks to Missouri BHA member (and family farmer) Stuart, for pointing out that my poor choice of words was unnecessarily divisive. He politely added, “Many of us in the agriculture world love wild places and wild things as much as you or anyone else.

We make our livelihoods from the ground, and so many of us go to extreme measures to preserve and be good stewards of the land.

I wish that the hunting community and agriculture could learn to grow together, because in some ways we are fighting the same battles with the same end goals in mind.” Wise words.

Next fall’s simple goals: Challenge myself in wilder places. Look around often. Smile more. Let the bucks fall where they will.

-Zack Williams, editor

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