A Place You'd Never Go
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Last year, I was high in the Anaconda-Pintler Range hiking with my two dogs when I ran into three other hikers. They were struggling to get a phone that had fallen about ten feet below them on a steep ridge. Using my trekking poles, I sidehilled down, picked up the phone, and handed it back to them. They were sweet, funny, and loving the high ridges of this particular nook of the wilderness. It’s an exceptionally beautiful spot.
“Weren’t you worried?” One girl asked.
”Worried about what?” I replied, thinking she was going to ask about hiking alone or maybe falling on the steep angle. It wasn’t an issue; there was a switchback trail about another ten feet below. It was a typical mountain angle.
“Isn’t it illegal to go off trail?” One of the hikers was from the area, and he countered that no, it wasn’t, you were fine to go offtrail here.
”I’m actually a hunter,” I told her, “I spend most of my time in the woods off trail.” The impasse wasn’t hostile, but a slight discomfort hit the air. We had a discussion about what it’s like to hunt for your food, and the local friend backed me up about the normalcy of hunting and offtrail recreation in our area. I pointed out spots that I’d gone offtrail from the ridge, where I knew elk traveled and I’d found bear sign. I explained that I too had lived a city life but spent the previous decade dedicated to exploring wild places and finding a now worn-in sort of comfort in the woods.
After we parted, I felt happy to have been able to share a small piece of that transition with the hikers. I climbed over the pass and hopped off trail, found mountain goat fluff, and tucked myself on a high ledge where I watched the wilderness stretch out to the horizon. A hawk circled hundreds of feet below me, trolling the treetops. I could hear birds and squirrels alarm their squawks then fall into silence.
The Places I’d Never Have Gone
When I first began hunting, the world suddenly opened up to me in a whole new way. I wasn’t simply scrolling through AllTrails to find a new trailhead. I was diving deep into public lands, learning the differences between state land, BLM, National Forest, Wilderness, Wildlife Management Areas, and more. I studied Montana’s Block Management program, then a whopping 7.2 million acres of private land that is publicly funded by Montana FWP for hunting access.
I found myself on a vast private ranch, searching for pronghorn on giant sage flats, spotting them from too far away, and watching them fly across the landscape like falcons to parts unknown. I climbed down into the canyon heart of the Missouri Breaks, where I hunted mule deer with bighorn rams not 200 yards away, bedded and watching. I sat in a blind on a wash in Texas, while feral hogs snorted their disapproval at my scent and giant whitetails passed through without skipping a beat. Tucked into a corn field pit blind, I watched as dizzying flocks of geese circled down in a broad tornado of motion, arcing their wings for perfect landings among 200 hand-stuffed decoys. And I’ve filed miles upon miles of game trails, picking up elk scat, squishing it between my fingertips, and yeah — smelling it to see how fresh it is.
The times, my friends, they certainly have changed. All of these places are off the recreational maps. I never would have found them if hunting hadn’t brought a new life to the landscape that I felt called to chase like a bloodhound on a scent line. The first time I caught a whiff of elk so close that I could nearly taste it still registers like bells in my memory. When I first caught a single antler tip of what would be my first tagged buck still shines in my mind like a beacon in the sage. When I saw the brilliant colors of a pheasant rise from beneath my spaniel’s muzzle, I gasped in delight.
What I keep coming back to is the surge of diamond-like sparkle that hits my hunter’s brain each time I find something new and exciting. It could be as small as picking up the baby tooth of a bighorn in a red sand canyon, or the knock-down drag-out power of a bull elk cutting off my bugle and running into my call. But I know that these are experiences I wouldn’t have shaken out of a recreational life. There’s no need to. You don’t follow game trails when your destination is a high alpine lake. You don’t go out on a private ranch without permission.
First, you need a reason to step off of the trail. Hunting gave me one.
Becoming A Participant
What I love, what I profoundly love, what has changed me from the inside out — it’s not the act of filling a tag. Across the past ten years, that has been a rare occasion. It’s the act of being on the landscape, doing what my friend and public lands advocate Randy Newberg taught me is participating on the landscape.
