“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are not just words in the Declaration of Independence. They are words to live by, and perhaps nobody is living them harder or better right now than Clay Newcomb of the Arkansas Ozarks, owner of Bear Hunting Magazine. Clay is a mule trainer, a bear, whitetail and small game hunting obsessive, a dog man, archer, writer and filmmaker. But he is first and foremost a man of faith and family, and that fundamental strength is the foundation of a ...

Hal travels to the Bears Ears National Monument to meet with Angelo Baca, a filmmaker and storyteller who grew up in and around Blanding, Utah, and has roots in this country that go back, literally, thousands of years. Baca has roamed far in his life – a competitive distance runner whose athletic career took him east and eventually to a doctoral study at New York University that focuses on the decades-long effort to protect the Bears Ears country. For this conversation with Hal, he is home ...

Rudi Roeslein came to St. Louis, Missouri, as a child from the refugee camps and ruins of post-World War II Europe. He became an inventor and an international industrialist who never lost his deep love for hunting and conservation. Rudi has invested $60 million of his own money creating successful renewable natural gas projects in north Missouri and pursuing what he calls “the 30/30 Vision” – a plan to restore 30 million acres of marginal cropland to native prairie in just 30 years. At a ...

Born and raised in Choteau, Montana, Maggie Carr is a wilderness hunting guide, backcountry skier, skilled horse and mule packer and co-owner of the unique wilderness outfitting business DropstoneOutfitting, which offers packstring-suppported hiking trips in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and adjacent public lands of Montana. Maggie’s family has been here on the Teton River since her great-grandfather was a horseback doctor in the wild homestead years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ...

What’s it like to be in charge of one of America’s oldest and most read hunting and fishing magazines? As the spring issue of Outdoor Life hits newsstands, we bring you the wild minds behind the stories: Senior Editor Natalie Krebs, Hunting Editor Andrew McKean and their venerable leader, Editor in Chief Alex Robinson. This is the work, this is the experience and the adventure, and, in today’s changing media landscape, this is the sacrifice and lack of security that comes with the dream job. ...

In the West, it’s called “the checkerboard” – one square mile of public land (640 acres, called a section) then one square mile of private – a direct result of frontier-era policies where the federal government gave away millions of acres of land, some to homesteaders but many to politically connected industries such as the railroads and timber companies. The idea, beyond just enriching a privileged few and scoring political power, was to encourage development of the West – timber for ...

Colorado’s state trust lands have been held in an iron fist by some of the most anti-public access policies and regulations found anywhere in the Western states. The battle has been simmering for decades: Clearly, Coloradoans were demanding change. Since 2012, BHA’s Colorado chapter has been leading the battle for increased access … and Colorado Parks and Wildlife responded, announcing last summer the opening of 500,000 acres of state trust lands for fishing and hunting over the next three ...

This story originally appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal By Hal Herring For author Matt Miller of Boise, Idaho, life is too short to be a fishing purist. His work as a writer on the environment and conservation takes him across the United States, and he fishes wherever he goes, for whatever is there, with whatever method, be it throwing carp heads under a big bobber for monster alligator gar, trying to net cisco on the freezing shores of Bear Lake in Utah, tossing ...

Hal meets with his old friend (and sometimes editor) Matt Miller in Matt’s hometown of Boise, Idaho, to talk about life and Matt’s new book Fishing Through the Apocalypse: An Angler’s Adventures in the 21st Century. Matt and Hal have known each other since they both started out writing for Bugle magazine before the dawn of the present century, and Matt – an obsessed fisherman, elk and deer hunter and mentor to a nascent fishing and hunting son – has traveled the world as the longtime ...

  Here’s a special edition of the BHA Podcast & Blast, just in time for Pheasant Fest 2020! It’s guns, it’s dogs, it’s wild flushing roosters on the wind, it’s conservation and clean water and better farms…and it’s Howard Vincent, the grand leader of Pheasants Forever, laying down the history, the future and the now of American upland bird hunting. Join us from the SHOT Show in Las Vegas on a coffee-fueled deep dive, and get ready for one of the best times in American hunting: Pheasants ...