Photo courtesy of Pennsylvania BHA member John Conte III   By Don Rank   Despite routinely boasting some of the largest numbers of hunters in the United States, Pennsylvania is one of the few remaining states that either restricts or completely bans hunting on Sundays. On Nov. 27, 2019, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed Senate Bill 147 into law allowing for three Sundays to be open to hunting. Those three days represent a major victory for hunters in the Keystone State. Sunday hunting ...

We're excited to launch our new video series, “Friday Night Ties”.  Join us weekly as a roster of all-star guest tiers brings you a new fly from a new region to help inspire your time at the vise and fill your boxes. Each video will offer step-by-step instruction for tying the fly and offer tips and tactics for fishing the pattern. This week’s guest is Rob Parkins, BHA’s public waters access coordinator. He will be tying his favorite backcountry attractor pattern. The “Parachute Capt. Moe” ...

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of the Backcountry Journal Take action on the BLM e-bike rule here   I’m not one to pass up a shot on an elk. My hunting buddies all give me a hard time about “ruining a great bow hunt” prematurely, as I tend shoot the first legal elk within comfortable range. I would argue my approach has been dictated by the fact that I’ve largely been limited to hunting Colorado’s increasingly crowded over-the-counter archery units ...

I’m not going to write a love song here the way I normally might about the virtues of wild greens. My love for them is stronger than ever, but in these strange times it feels more appropriate to cut to the chase. Chances are you’ve got bigger things on your mind than the omega fatty acid ratios in wild greens vs. cultivated ones—things like your health, your loved ones, your job, your future. I’ll save the sonnets for another day. In uncertain times we reach for comfort food, but at the risk ...

As a lifelong Western big game hunter, I’ve spent countless hours studying handheld GPS units and smartphone devices to navigate the tangled web of public and private lands to access hidden hunting spots. And as a former North American board member and co-chair of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, I know that many BHA members similarly use these technologies to explore our nation’s 640 million acres of public lands. For more than a decade, handheld GPS mapping devices have revealed millions of ...