Field Journal

I dial the scope turret and settle the crosshairs on the cat’s shoulder. I squeeze the trigger. When the rifle resettles on the gut pile, the cat is gone.

I was filming Cam Hanes hunt moose in Alaska when we woke to six inches of fresh snow and zero visibility. Every instinct said stay in the tent. Cam had other plans, and what he said that day has stuck with me ever since.

I killed the ugliest deer of my life in Sonora, then tried to give the meat to the cartel so I wouldn’t have to pack it four miles out. That’s how we ended up on a mountaintop, unarmed, waiting for the boss to decide what to do with us.

Every great hunt ends the same way. You come home, and the high wears off. That letdown has a name, post-trip depression, and it’s proof you did something worth missing. Three simple habits help you come down clean, learn from the trip, and point yourself toward the next one.

We glass where the rules say animals should be. Then a bull tahr stands right out in the wind. Fortunetelling, treating a prediction as fact, steers more decisions than we admit, in the mountains and out of them. How to recognize it, and why to glass the other way anyway.

I thought about subtitling this little short film: how to ruin a kid’s life. But, I didn’t. It references an inside jab between me and Chase, when Laney, his oldest daughter drew a coveted, maybe hopefully once-in-a-lifetime desert sheep tag. Chase references our conversation in the film when he notes, “She may not know what she’s done, but I sure

A Comprehensive Guide The first time I bought boots specifically for hunting, I went into Sportsman’s Outhouse, found the tallest boots with the most camouflage and insulation, and thought I was set. One hunt later, I realized I had made a big mistake and should have stuck to the hiking boots I had put miles and miles on as a

I released our newest video project: Memories: The Stuff Of Life on YouTube and Instagram Sunday. It delivers a message I’ve been thinking about since I was pulled kicking and screaming into middle age several years ago. The message is one from your older self looking back on the years. I used AI to age myself into an old man

“Why are you so obsessed with death?” Geoff asks me as we walk back to the truck. We’d been looking for elk that morning. It hadn’t gone well. His question sticks to me like gum on the bottom of my boot because I’d never realized that’s how my writing lands with people. I don’t know Geoff. This is the first