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 ...

The last time BHA’s office operations manager moved, her friends groaned under extra heavy boxes. If she had let them look inside, they would have found her rock collections. Caitlin Frisbie collects rocks on every adventure. It’s that fascination with her surroundings that she picked up from her mother who is a conservation biologist and her father, who by the time she was four, put a fly rod in her hands. “I find it really hard to sit still,” Caitlin said. As a creative kid, the outdoors ...

Katie McKalip, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ communications director, explored Eastern backcountry at an early age while growing up outside of Washington, D.C., in Virginia. She waded through the busy hustle of the city to find pockets of public lands and waters, everything from local ponds and marshes to Civil War battlefields. Being raised near the nation’s capital in a military family resulted in a lot of dinnertime discussions about law-making and policy, conversations that would ...

Ty Smail, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ merchandise coordinator, can usually be found under piles of shirts and packages in the bottom level of the Missoula office, sending off packages of swag to members. The sixth-generation Montanan found his way to BHA in 2017 after many years of hunting. Ty grew up road hunting in eastern Montana, and he adopted the family culture of hunting – one that runs deep: his great grandmother still wanted to go fishing when she was 97 years old, but Ty began ...

Click... “you’ve gotta be kidding me!?”, Adam whispered from behind his binoculars, trying to contain his laughter. “Shut up!” I recanted, as I chambered the round that I had forgotten before the first trigger pull. Being raised in Minnesota, and having private land available to my family, we rarely used public land. Public land hunting conjured up images of pulling up your binoculars and being met in your gaze by the barrel of a rifle as someone looked at you through their scope. It ...