by Tom ReedIn a little more than two weeks, I will saddle a good mountain horse at the edge of one of Wyoming’s largest wilderness areas. My hunting partners and I will load four pack horses with ten days of food, a wall tent, sleeping bags, and hunting gear. We’ll work with an unspoken ease, a familiarity born of repetition and remembrance. This will be our eighth year at this trailhead and memories will be carried with us as easily as these good graceful horses will carry us up this trail. ...

Why do I hunt? It’s a lot to think about, and I think about it a lot. I hunt to acknowledge my evolutionary roots, millennia deep, as a predatory omnivore. To participate actively in the bedrock workings of nature. For the atavistic challenge of doing it well with an absolute minimum of technological assistance. To learn the lessons, about nature and myself, that only hunting can teach. To accept personal responsibility for at least some of the deaths that nourish my life. For the glimpse it ...

by Aldo LeopoldA deep chesty bawl echoes from rimrock to rimrock, rolls down the mountain, and fades into the far blackness of the night. It is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow, and of contempt for all the adversities of the world.Every living thing (and perhaps many a dead one as well) pays heed to that call. To the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh, to the pine a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow, to the coyote a promise of gleanings to come, to the ...

By Jim MartinWhat do a salmon fisherman off the mouth of the Columbia near Astoria and another angler fishing in southeast Alaska, and a third fishing in northern California all have in common? Roadless areas on National Forests in Oregon and central Idaho.   Recently, the conservation group Trout Unlimited released two reports illustrating how important pristine areas on public land in Oregon and Idaho are for hunters and anglers. The reports encapsulated what many of my fellow hunters and ...

By Holly EndersbyGold tamarack trees glow like candle flames against the dark fir. Pine and spruce on high, blue ridges and deep green canyons fade into the horizon. The pack string of mules is strung out on the steep trail behind me, each loaded with elk meat and camp gear. Low slung clouds swirl around us as we slowly make our way back to the trailhead we’d left ten days ago.The Eagle Cap Wilderness in Oregon’s northeast corner is a land of rugged mountains and deep canyons interlaced with ...