theuplandsoul

[theuplandsoul]

Sage Grouse Season

"I had been looking forward to the limited sage-grouse season all year. NDOW had closed or reduced most of the sage-grouse seasons in the Silver State this year, and with the continuing downward trend of lek attendance and overall population decline not boding well for the immediate future of this pursuit, I was not going to let this opportunity pass me by like it did last year. For a limited time only. I had a Saturday and Sunday at the end of the season cleared for an overnighter."

Read more on The Upland Soul.

[theuplandsoul]

The Faithful Servant, The Wingmaster

Back in the good old days, perhaps around ten years ago, you could walk around any gun show in America and have your pick of Reminton 870 Wingmasters for around $100. This never really made any sense to me considering this classic shotgun’s intended position in the market, and all the verbiage bandied around by the manufacturer since its inception over six decades ago. “The standard by which all…

[theuplandsoul]

If I Have To Explain It…

"When I let slip to the uninitiated that the hunt I look forward to the most each year is rifle javelina in February, they usually look at me with a mixture of curiosity and blind confusion, as if I had finally assumed the final form of radiation-basted Nevada desert dwellers so accurately portrayed in The Hills Have Eyes. But as the Harley-Davidson Motor Company infamously said… “if I have to explain it, you wouldn’t understand.”

We were as surprised to see a truck full of miners staring daggers at us as they were to see two mugs in camo, slow-roll glassing out of a lifted Toyota on the big bladed mine roads. This was our stomping grounds for years, ever since my Dad started flying out for a few days each season to chase pigs with me in the Sonoran. Sometime in the last 365 days, the mine had bought up all of the state land that used to be wide open to anyone with a hunting license… and we were informed we’d need to find somewhere else to hunt. We turned around, made camp on some nearby BLM and studied maps over two elk steaks as the sun ducked bloodred behind the smoketrees to the West.

One of the benefits to hunting this area in the past was a well-maintained road system, perfect for a hunt with your old man who lives back east, at sea level. Drive, glass, and repeat. Now that things had changed within the unit, it was obvious tactics would need to be adjusted — hoofing it would be an unfortunate requirement.

The next morning we made our way to Plan B, down the road from a well-used stock tank. Two options presented themselves here; one glassing knoll off the road overlooked a wide and rocky wash, and on the other side, steeper foothills covered in cactus but ripe with promise. We split up — Dad would go to the knoll to glass, and I would still-hunt up the topography to look for something in need of a bullet. He took his old scoped .30-30 — I was responsible for bastardizing it with a long eye relief scope — and I took my trusty 7 Mag and we headed our opposite directions.

Coming to the first rise, I could see a thicket of live oaks halfway up the mountain and knew that this must be the place… the tingling of a primordial fold in the brain usually lying dormant in modern man. Once I reached the edge of them, I took the sling off my shoulder, chambered a 150gr copper slug that I figured would probably do the job on a javelina, and began to slink my way thorough the scrub.

I heard them before I saw them… somewhere maybe ten, fifteen yards away from me. Visibility was nonexistent among the oaks. A woof, woof sound that browsing javelina make that is so impossible to describe to the uninitiated, but immediately and unmistakeably arresting.

An intrepid javelina hunter should never go without their predator call of choice. What the hell,I thought. Here goes nothing. I ripped on that closed-reed call and after the opening salvo the sound of hooves on the ground drew closer; two of them homed in on the distress call, loaded for bear. In the thick and shadowed vegetation I could only make out the murky forms of two peccaries, both running full speed towards me. I snapped the big 7 Mag up to my shoulder and cracked off a round without aiming. Right over the top, as is family tradition.

The two javelina turned around and headed back to camp, much like you’d presumably do if you were almost shot in the face by a large-caliber rifle. I tried to catch up to them with no avail. If there’s a creature that can disappear into the myriad crevices and caves dotting the desert face like they can, I’ve yet to witness it.

The next day and the day after that we hiked and glassed around that mountain, trying to bust them again and coming up empty each time. It’s just a javelina tag, so we ambled back to camp a little early each day to enjoy some camp food, quality bullshitting sessions around the crackling fire, and the eerie quiet that carries you to sleep on the nighttime desert winds. We scrambled this past year and came up empty for it, but everything that came with it is worth much more to me than a few extra pounds of meat in the freezer and another skull on the shelf.

If I have to explain it… you wouldn’t understand anyway."

[theuplandsoul]

Golden Years

"It’s common knowledge among avid upland hunters that game birds follow boom-or-bust cycles that are largely dependent on the habitat and climatic conditions in their home range. You can add all the guzzlers you want and reduce bag limits to near-zero, but unfortunately, there’s only so much that can be done to bolster populations if Mother Nature isn’t intending on cooperating at specific times throughout the year.

Most chukar hunters are also extremely reticent to share anything in the way of, well, any form of information at all. Each of these devil birds is hard-won, and the best chukar spots out this way are protected with blood oaths of absolute silence. For good reason.

I know of the prevailing sentiment back East that the ruffed grouse is the king of all game birds, an assertation which find absolutely ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong; they’re neat. If it was all I had around me, I’d probably like them more, too. But one trip into the arid chukar hills dotted with hundred-year-old mining debris and open-range herds of black baldys and the covey flush after an easy two hundred calorie burn up the side of a cliff should disabuse even the most aggressively proud flatlander of those notions.

It’s been a banner year for chukar hunting out here… wherever here is. Building on two years of average to above-average recruitment, we’ve had the biggest coveys in a half-decade or even longer. More birds in more places and more hunters in more places, if you had to sum it up in a sentence or less.

The highlight was getting Elko Baby his first chukar. I saved one of the wings and dried it out in a sprinkle of borax, and it will go on a plaque with his first Gambel’s, too. This is what the abundance of birds meant to me this season; more trips, weekly trips with the dog so he can do his favorite thing in the world and find the birds.

With each contact he gets a little sharper.

Usually I stick closer to home and chase Gambel’s for the majority of the season. Maybe make a poke or two up north for the devil birds. But this season has been all the chukar, all the tume. Elko Baby likes the chukars. It runs in his blood, hailing from the legendary Sunburst Brittanys kennel out by Hell’s Canyon. Chukar is what they do up there.

He’s young — less than two — and he still has a bit of puppiness left in him. In between solid points and clutch recoveries, he’ll still bump birds here and there. He loves it, and I love his enthusiasm with each flush. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him. I am still getting a handle on the “bird dog training” thing, and I doubt I’ll ever be as keyed-in as most of my friends. Maybe I couldn’t care less.

We hike, we shoot a lot, we have a great time. Him and I.

I’ve spent more days in the field than any season past, not solely for the promise of birds, but for the cumulative experience of it all. It is the archetypal upland hunt, the memories themselves a trophy of the highest caliber as this wonderful boom year has finally wound down.

It won’t always be this way. No real precip to speak of this year as of press time. It seems wildly unlikely that next year will be a repeat of what we experienced for the last few months. Elko won’t always be able to put on seventeen hard miles and get up and do it again the next day. There will come a time when he won’t be here at all.

Some mornings, it’s real hard to drag myself out of bed at 0400 and spend a hundred dollars on gas to drive three hours each way into the chukar hills.

I think about the Aurelius quote — “… is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?” — and about the effervescent nature of every single opportunity we have. It’s some sort of moral mandate not to spoil these chances, these gifts that we’ve been given.

I think, too often actually, about another quote from a few philosophers across the pond.

“So understand Don’t waste your time always searching for those wasted years Face up, make your stand And realize you’re living in the golden years”

The boom years. The golden years. They’re here for the taking and once they’re gone, they’re not coming back."

[theuplandsoul]

First Blood in the UP

"I think that everyone remembers their first hunting trip, but I might remember mine a bit better than most. That’s not because I got my bag and tag limits – it’s because I was almost thirty.

I was blessed to have been born and raised on the Keweenaw Peninsula – a heavily-wooded and thinly-populated finger of land projecting from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula into Lake Superior. I’ve never lived anywhere else but, in my travels, I’ve heard that this is one of the best places in the country for a sportsman.

Growing up, my family spent a lot of time outdoors – hiking, snowshoeing, canoeing, kayaking, camping, fishing – but not hunting. When I was young, my father was a meat cutter and even had a cottage industry preparing meat from the deer that hunters brought in, but we never hunted.

In high school, the only sport that I lettered in was marksmanship offered through the JROTC program. Then, when I was in my twenties, I bought a handgun for home defense and went through the process of getting a concealed pistol license. Training with my pistol reminded me how much I enjoyed shooting, and it finally occurred to me to take it outside. I just needed to take a hunters’ safety course to get my hunting license for the first time.

I got a lot of questions being twice the age of the next oldest student in the hunter’s safety course at a nearby sportsman’s club but I learned a lot in the course. And I had something that a lot of the other students didn’t have: a place to hunt.

My in-laws live on a cattle farm a few miles out of town and deer, geese, and rabbits can all be nuisance animals to them. While none of them hunted, they were all too eager to let me harvest these pests from their acreage. My father-in-law drove me around the land in their farm truck telling me where the fences were, which fields the cows would be in, and where I was likely to find my query for the day: geese. And rabbits, if I came across any. In the Western Upper Peninsula, a number of species of geese are classified as migratory birds and have intermittent hunting seasons. Rabbits, meanwhile, have a long season and a large bag limit. We’re known for our deer seasons, but these alternatives fit my needs in several ways: they would give me an opportunity to get out before deer season started, they would give me an opportunity to practice with smaller animals, and I knew that these (as well as deer) lived on the in-laws’ farm. My hunting jacket was ancient and a few sizes big for me, but I had considered it a winning garage-sale find as I filled the pockets with 20-gauge game shells. I took the channel lock out of my new pump action, put the case back in my father-in-law’s truck, and began stalking through the back 40.

I knew where I was going – many a time my wife and I had driven to the farmhouse passing geese by the dozen in a field that I knew was just through this line of trees. As I passed through those trees, I was startled by the movement of not geese but a sizeable whitetail rabbit. I didn’t bother raising my barrel. Knowing that I wasn’t yet to where I expected to find the geese, I hadn’t bothered to load my shotgun. The rabbit stopped to take me in from a few yards away. Part of me wanted to draw on the rabbit with my pistol, but the math on whether I could hit the rabbit from that distance with a .38 Special (and what might be left of the rabbit if I did) just didn’t check out. The rabbit ran deeper into the woods as I sighed and dug in my oversized pockets to feed three shells into my shotgun." Read more on The Upland Soul.

[theuplandsoul]

The 1911 Is Still Alive And Well

It is the year 2025.

I am not a math wiz, but that means it’s been at least 114 years since the inception of what many would say is John Moses Browning’s greatest triumph, the M1911 pistol.

While I was aimlessly wandering the approximately one million acres of SHOT Show earlier this year, I was struck by just how alive and paradoxically relevant this design still is, in all its various forms. This is despite the incessant mewlings of forum armchair gunfighters and self-proclaimed “experts” who decry the many perceived shortcomings this design faces in modernity: heavy steel construction, single-stack capacity, manual safeties, and expense due to the amount of hand-fitment required during the construction of this pistol.

Despite all of these things, and the monomaniacal focus many shooters have on practicality uber alles, I was struck by the fact that John Browning’s brainchild is still alive and well in all of its various forms. Colt, Dan Wesson, Springfield Armory, and Ed Brown, all still making wildly popular traditional-minded .45s. On the other hand, you have Staccato and Triarc and Atlas and the Prodigy — all the 2011s with their double-stack magazines and optics cuts and integral compensators.

In the newly-coined words of one of my favorite modern 1911 enthusiasts, comparing these two iterations of the 1911 is a bit like comparing “apples to motherfuckers.” But being spoiled by all of this choice isn’t a bad thing." Read more on The Upland Soul.

[theuplandsoul]

A President’s Day Fly Fishing Boondoggle

"When I moved to the wild and woolly West after a childhood on the East Coast, I had precious little understanding of the way that the world words in this area of the country. Forty-degree temperature swings on the daily, vastness that knows no bounds, and huge variances in snowpack from year to year. That last item is the impetus of this story.

Nobody ever told me that trout fishing in the epicenter of the Mojave desert is middling, to say the least. Driving five minutes down the road after getting off work to wet a line was no longer an option… I’ll take the bad with the good, I guess.

President’s Day falls on the third Monday in February. If you’ve spent any time in this area of the country, you know that you can look up in elevation on the third Monday in February and see feet and feet of snow piled on the mountains. Spring hasn’t even thought about springing yet. This would all be news to me, who had moved to Nevada one month before and assumed all of it resembled the cholla-strewn bajadas of the Eldorado Valley.

In the epicenter of the state there exists a wild and free stream which will go unnamed for the purposes of this article. With (presumably) rotenone treatments planned to remove invasive trout species and further the recovery of the endemic Lahontan cutthroat, all bag and possession limits on brook and brown trout had been lifted, and, as a day off of work, mid-February seemed as good of a day as any to rip some lips.

As I ascended the forest road winding away from the pavement, mottled and melted patches of snow became more homogenous, and after a few dozen minutes had fully metamorphosed into a blanket of the purest white.

It was February in the Great Basin, and this place captured that essence to a T.

The time came to turn off what could be generously called the main thoroughfare and onto the two-track that I would follow for two or three miles to the trailhead, where I’d then don my waders, grab my fly rod, and descend into literally limitless fishing nirvana. I had to rely on the GPS and a tired old carsonite marker, as nobody had traveled down this road in the last few snows. I turned right, rolled down the window, and leaned out; the snow was up to the wheels, but my All-Terrains hung on for a bit. Just a bit, really.

Wheelspin. Shift into four and rock the car out. Proceed again. Wheelspin. Repeat.

This went on until I buried it pretty good in a muddy patch under the later of freeze-thaw ice and snow. The recovery boards came out and after a while we were back on our way again. Only a few miles to go.

And again.

I am a pretty obstinate individual, but there reaches a point when even I will understand the reality of the situation and tap out accordingly. I had reached this point. Looking at the maps… a three mile hike down to the water, fish, and then a three mile hike back. Doable?

I got out of the truck and the snow was up to mid-calf as I made my way around to the back and popped open the hatch. I had all the correct possibles with me; I slid my pack out of the trunk and in went the reel, rod, my trusty chest pack, a thermos full of coffee, a few snacks, and my landing net. I put on my waders and wading boots — perhaps not my best idea — and began to posthole through the snow drifts in the general direction of the water.

Once I got going, the arid cold was plenty tolerable, but progress was slow and miserable. After what was likely only a quarter mile of progress, I pulled out my maps and looked at the breadcrumbs and the elapsed time. So close, and yet so far…

The round trip would take hours longer than expected; regardless of any fishing action, the trek down to the river and back would be cutting into that safety buffer that becomes so much more important the older you get. I got the sense that I needed to be out of the high country before the night’s cold set in and things froze back up, and I my greenhorn self wasn’t going to allow anything to go so sideways while flying solo out here in the remotest reaches of the Great Basin.

You gotta know when to fold ’em. Time to turn the horse into glue. Throw in the towel. Hang up your spurs. Discretion is the better part of valor, as we know.

And so I turned around and retraced my steps in the most literal fashion back to the Toyota sitting there, shimmering and onyxlike, amidst the monoculture snow. Contrary to the title of this story, there would be no fishing today. No brookies or browns. No creel full of dinner for the rest of the week.

I got back to the truck soaking in sweat (another rookie mistake) and hastily threw everything back where it had come from. Except the still-warm coffee.

I sipped it as I gazed out through the windshield at the panorama of some paradoxical future and present. Of a missed opportunity and of a lifetime more to come. Of failures, and successes within those failures. Of pursuits where technical victory is secondary to just being there — to being the man in the arena. Where doing the thing is the point, not the thing itself.

I thought that even though my line stayed dry today, I probably got the best of what the universe wanted to tell me anyway.

Good trip."

[theuplandsoul]

Caldwell Stinger Shooting Rest

As one matures and takes the science of shooting more seriously, one’s attention inevitably turns to the tools of that particular trade; the things that make these exploits both more efficient and more accurate. Like a lot of other shooters who blindly stumbled my way into firearms shooting in some high school friend’s back forty (or wherever else we could go and get away with it), things were…

[theuplandsoul]

.38 Super – The Thinking Man’s 9mm

"It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that I was not around in time in order to stop the mass adoptation of some little European cartridge as the standard defensive round of the American public — the 9×19 Parabellum.

Sure, I carry that cartridge myself most of the time, but something about sticking it to the Krauts twice using big-bore .45s and then turning around and adopting the technology they used to lose with just doesn’t sit right with me. It would be like if the GIs parked their flathead-powered roadsters, handled business, and then came and immediately threw them in the crusher and started driving around in Volkswagens. Some things just ain’t it.

What’s worse is that the Americans developed a perfectly viable alternative to this European cartridge all on their own — the .38 Super, or in the parlance of its time, the Super .38.

Without getting into a protracted history lesson, the .38 Super was born from the earlier .38 Auto, and first chambered in Colt’s 1911s in the pre-WWII era; it was specifically designed for this firearm. It found fairly widespread use among both lawmen and gangsters at the time, and perhaps most infamously played a role in Bonnie and Clyde’s final gunfight in the hands of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. Its popularity waned in the post-war era until IPSC shooters revived it somewhat because of the advantages it presents versus competing with a similar major cartridge such as the .45 Auto.

Perhaps the best way to compare these Axis and Allied powers is with the ubiquitous 124/125 grain bullets that can be fired out of both cartridges. Almost every 9mm loading with 124s you’ll find is subsonic (which is under 1,125 feet per second, in case you’ve forgotten. It happens.) between 900 and 1100 feet per second, with . Of course, if you drop down to the lighter 115gr bullets for plinking you will be supersonic, and you can also load my preference of 147grs at 1,000fps.

With the same bullet in the .38 Super, you are looking at 1,000-1,200fps according to the Hornady manual. Lyman 48th has a loading beyond 1,300fps, and the Vihtavuori manual claims over 1,500fps with a 124gr bullet and a 5.5″ barrel. With numbers like this the cartridge stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the .357 Sig and Magnums.

In real-world applications with defensive loads in both chamberings, it seems unlikely that an assailant would really be able to tell much of a difference between

As a .357 Sig shooter as well, it appears to me that the .38 Super did what the Sig set out to do about seventy years beforehand. Why has this all-American handcannon largely been relegated to the dustbins of history?

Because of the old Strother Martin’s Razor — failure to communicate. The gun makers and the ammunition developers not marching in lockstep. The hardware not supporting the software, if you will. Another case of a great cartridge that never received the support it was due. The original 6.8 Western.

Because you can’t go out to Guns.com and buy a double-stack .38 same-day that doesn’t look like a comical race gun, no matter how much you or I would like. STI (now Staccato) offered a double-stack 2011 chambered as such, but those uncommon, to say the least. Chip McCormick offered a frame kit for a double-stack .38. Many of the custom smiths will still build you one (including Guncrafter), but obviously it is real slim pickin’s for practical .38s compared to their European counterparts.

So the Super .38 might be best enjoyed in Browning’s original single-stack creation — still the pinnacle of fighting handguns in the most practiced hands.

A single-stack .355-caliber handgun might not make the most sense as a practical carry arm in 2025 on paper, or on the computer . Then again, if you aren’t living in any of the blue-plagued American inner cities, maybe it makes more sense than it would appear at first glance. The unequivocally-finest sidearm of the 20th Century, chambered in a high-powered and modern caliber with more capacity than the big .45s.

Three yards, three seconds, and three shots? She’ll do the job just fine. Just ask Frank Hamer."

[theuplandsoul]

High Country Deer in Nowhere, Nevada

"

I made my first camp at the trailhead 100 yards from an abandoned mining cabin in the national forest. It was a beautiful Great Basin Halloween night as the flicker from the palletwood fire licked the sagebrush around the trailhead. I fell asleep to the trickle of flowing water, a wholly uncommon and welcome phenomena that I’m not accustomed to from my base camp in Las Vegas. Before the sun comes back up, I’d be out on the trial in pursuit of my first mule deer.

It’s always a pleasant surprise when trails in hyper-remote areas still look like trails. Following the creek up into the mountains, I navigated alder thickets and aspen groves making my way up into the alpine. Through the canopy I could see the sunlight cresting over the tops of the jagged peaks 4,000 feet above me as I realized my surroundings. Magpies sailed from aspen to aspen, and the patchy snow on the ground revealed the presence of deer, bobcats, and lions. This place was a paradise, and I had the reassuring feeling that finding my deer would not be a problem. Several small creeks crossed my path as I wound my way up through the basin, out of the wet aspen stands that smelled earthy of dropped leaves, and up into the mountains proper.

An hour or two later, four miles back, and five thousand feet higher than where I started, I found a small knoll near the top of the ridge to make camp, dropping the heaviest items in the pack off and making my way across the sagebrushed mountainside to the greatest glassing knob a man has ever seen. I pulled out my 10x50s and set up to glass across the canyon to get a lay of the land. It didn’t take five minutes before I was on a small herd of muleys, which I watched for a time as they browsed among the mahoganies that were dotted along the slope before me. Sweeping the glass over to my right I come to the head of the basin, about a half mile away, and once again I spot five or six deer browsing in the late afternoon sun. This was a good day to get my bearings for the area and for the animals and make an actionable plan for tomorrow. I decided I was content waiting and watching for the day.. the stalk would come tomorrow. I watched a small group of deer climb the mountains in front of me and disappear over the top. The sun sets behind the far range to the West and peaceful night falls over the mountains.

The next day was not the same. Cold, cloudy, and windy… this is more of the weather one might expect from 10,000 feet in November. A whole day of scouting, searching, and glassing ‘till my eyes went blurry yielded so sightings of anything at all, and this was the first drop on the rollercoaster ride that I strap myself into every hunting trip. I’d bet a good amount of money that all hunters have an annual pass. A quick snowstorm rolled in from the west smooth like a Wabash, and as it passed by it left no evidence it had ever been there.

The third day of the hunt, November 2nd, more resembled my pack-in day than the blustery weather of yesterday. The sun began to spill over the jagged granite peaks and down into the gulch before me as I boiled up a coffee, squared my gear away, and set out to glassing the valley down in front of my tent before daybreak. I picked apart the mahoganies and aspen groves once more and found nothing save for magpies darting from limb to limb. I felt certain this valley had been glassed out over the past few days and that the herd that went over the far ridge wouldn’t be coming back; time to move on, and resupply my water while I’m at it. I pack up my day gear and head down the trail, farther into these mountains than I’d been before. The range begins to tower over me as the relief becomes greater and greater. I stop, and glass a stand of pines. Moving is good, coveing ground (with your eyes or your feet) is motivating and the places it’ll take you will keep you in the hunt. Nothing in the pine trees – move on to the next one.This continues once or twice more as I get this sense that I was making negative progress, working in the opposite direction that I need to. I’ll find one more spot to glass and then perhaps work my way back where I came from and chase those deer I saw a few days ago now. I was now on top of the next ridge, looking down into a new valley.

Sagebrush wholly encompassed the mountain from the willows down by the creek to the rimrock at the top. A few junipers also dotted the lee sides. It was in the 60s and the golden sun was fully out and warming the sagebrush and the scent of that plant hung heavy in this valley. I continued to make my way down the trail, ending up about ¾ of a mile past my tent when I spied a nice-looking knoll that should provide great vantage into a lot of country for one final glassing stand here. I picked my way through the sagebrush, up the gentle rolling hill. When I got to the top, I was absolutely stunned to find the outlines, and white asses, of at least four deer browsing in the rolling sagebrush meadow below me. Two small antlers twisted out of one. This was it. It was happening. I had decided that my personal maximum range was going to be 200 yards, although it’s common knowledge that a 7mm Rem Mag is effective out to far, far more than twice that range. I don’t think I took a breath as I dug my rangefinder out of my bino pack and lased the buck. 191 yards. Holy shit.

I squared up behind the rifle, chambered one of the Nosler E-Tips, and then pushed the classic three-position safety forward as I fixed the crosshairs on the buck and aimed just behind the shoulder blade. The buck was totally broadside to me, and slowly grazing his was through the sagebrush. The front leg facing me was retracted, and I waited for that small step forward to open up more of the lungs. It seemed like minutes, but probably was only a handful of seconds before Mr. Deer took that step forward and it was curtains for him.

The Rifleman’s Rifle pressed into my shoulder from recoil and I caught a glimpse of the deer on his back kicking instantaneously. His does busted and ran behind a bluff, out of my sight, as I re-mounted the rifle and scanned for Mr. Deer, should a follow-up have been necessary. I couldn’t see anything, and after waiting a few minutes for him to finish up, I began gridding the waist-high sagebrush to find my first mule deer.

It was around 11 AM on the most beautiful day you could ask for. Temps were in the 60s at 9,300 feet in central Nevada as I puttered around the waist-high sagebrush for 45 minutes before catching a flash of white rump fur.

I cut up the little three-by and hung the meat in a nearby mahogany tree, making it back to camp under headlamp.

The next morning, I made two trips with meat on my back back to the truck for the first time ever. At the tail of the last load, I popped the hatch of the 4runner, sat down on the tailgate, and looked and smelled and listened.

The world was different for me now, and like everything else, I had wondrously little idea what I was getting myself into."

[theuplandsoul]

Ballistol - I Put That S*** On Everything

I suspect an entire generation of firearms aficionados and enthusiasts around my age grew up in front of a computer monitor, listening to a personable old codger from Tennessee smoke pot with the entire gamut of firearms. One immutable characteristic of these videos, aside from the judicious death of two-liters and cigar boxes full of reloads, is one word. “Ballistol.” I know you can just hear…

[theuplandsoul]

A Javelina Safari

"I’ve written previously about my love for bombing around the bajadas of the Sonoran desert in a clapped-out old Toyota in pursuit of the mysterious and, thankfully, largely under-appreciated skunk pig.

The javelina.

I think that any hunt can be what you make it. Easy, hard, comfortable, not. However you want to play it, there is no right or wrong. After a half-decade of exclusively hunting public land from T or C to Couer d’Alene and all of the super-serious social media-oriented posturing that goes along with the culture at this point, I am comfortable enough with myself to be able to admit that I enjoy taking it a bit easy from time to time, and the annual father/son javelina hunt that we embark on every year is the perfect opportunity to… dare I say? — actually enjoy a damn hunt for once.

The wall tent comes out, and so do a few camping tables and the huge, old, and very green Coleman stove. The camp chairs and tables and the propane heater. Ten gallons of spare gas and seven of water… just barely enough. We drive around, walk a bit, and cover ground until we find something of interest. Desert grasslands, live oaks, acacias, and junipers provide the scenery.

It’s not Africa, but I think it’s just about as close as we can get on this side of the pond.

It’s a point of near shame for me to admit that I have not yet actually sealed the deal on one of these pungent critters. No fault of the universe’s… shots taken and missed the past two hunts. Nobody’s fault but mine, actually. This year would be different.

Friday morning we made coffee and hot chocolate with the rising sun and then climbed into my beloved old warrior Toyota and hit the forest roads. Thirty in the morning to sixty five in the day as we drove and glassed and drove and glassed and drove some more, stopping to check tanks frequently.

They were almost all bone dry. It has been a perniciously dry winter out in Sin City, and that appeared to hold true here as well. Whichever water they could find was likely to be used heavily; not just by them, but by deer and coyotes and everything else out here too. We’d get out, hike around, check for sign, and then on to the next one.

We decided to check out a new area of the unit this year. Rather than the classic saguaro- and prickly pear-strewn hillsides of the lower country, we were surrounded by thick live oaks and catclaws that turned into junipers up by camp. Glassing in any real sense was essentially impossible here.

I had enough foresight to make alternate preparations if the hunting turned out to be slow — we could still get our shooting in one way or another, so I turned off down a dead-end forest road and bumped into a side-by-side of other hunters. The driver’s son had shot a pig opening day with a .243, and he was still holding out hope of crushing one with the 8 3/4″ .500 Smith & Wesson Magnum he was toting around. We talked about how dry everything was, except for an old concrete guzzler that we bumped some deer off of this morning. He knew exactly what we were referring to.

We went our separate ways and my dad and I punched holes in paper for a bit and ate lunch.

We bounced along down an unforgiving power line road until we hit the highway, then headed back to camp once again." Read the rest of A Javelina Safari on The Upland Soul.