slickrockpack

it depends on what the person's background is, having guided thousands of people in my lifetime I discovered that ll my fther and grandfather had told me about guiding was indeed true, though I doubted them at the time when I was a child. never sit with your sport on a run if they come from the city ( which was anywhere south of tupper), my father explained, because they come from a society where to NOT talk is considered rude they will have to speak to you, they have been taught to make small talk and chatter away to be sociable, so always leave them alone on a run. never leave them unoccupied, a pace counter is a good thing to leave them and ask them to count the deer on one string and small game on the other, they do not come from life of silence and solitude and the woods will bore them in short order this and other advice was proven true time and again. the greatest issue my guides and I ever had was keeping the sports in the stands and still. the creator of the trail timer camera sold us some of the very first ones and we set them up facing the stands or posts, and then put an album of photos in that stand so the hunter could see their own stand and all the critters passing by it with time and date ont eh 35mm photo, it helped a bit to make them sit a stand longer but nothing would keep them on post as long as we needed or as still. imagine making Richard petty drive 30 miles an hour on the interstate, its not how they are conditioned, so if a book keeps them in stand so be it, it's not that hard to kill a critter anyway, but most people probably can't do it from their couch.

I have always loved muzzleloading. it was a big part of our lives and I think too, growing up holding a powder horn and listening to stories about great great so and so's trip with Ashley or his great great's exploits in the such and such war, or holding a ridiculously heavy musket while being told it was the first gun made on this continent by my 7Gs great grandfather who was armourer of the Trained Band and used this gun to protect the Virginia settlement made me spend much time envisioning the exploits I myself would have with a muzzleloader too when I was old enough. today I don't shoot them as much as I once did, mainly due to eye issues, but once not so long ago our shooting was measured in tons of lead shot per year. There are very few things in this country and others that I have not shot with a front stuffer, and they added a level of enjoyment to a hunt that otherwise would have simply been a killing. I am happy to see so much hunting with smokepoles happening on here, they are an addiction, no doubt. the last year I was back east in spring time I hunted turkeys with my great grand nephew, he did not get a turkey with the flinter but he came close, because of the length of the barrel I had it propped on a stick for him and he couldn't move it to get on the tom that came in, but I did shoot one so that I could teach him to make a wingbone call and how to split and sand the feathers for his arrows, not to mention show him how to get rid of the sponge without tossing his cookies. I found a photo of the day I took his father to a shooting preserve so he could learn to shoot pointed pheasant with his flintlock, the back of the photo says 17 pheas and 1 woodcock, the hearing plugs and shooting glasses were much appreciated that day and the point driven home to him by the day's end. the crows were a double, something very tricky to pull off on crows with a fowler, I was a machine that day. The deer in fallen leaves and ferns is mainly to show how nice it looks when you take a moment to arrange a photo, leaves are added by tossing onto the deer, the fern covers the bloody bullet hole. Its a fat little one sided spike went 133 on the home scales and was fork tender, the other is a nice rack buck that I usually pass on but was the last day of the last year I would be home hunting, or so I thought, and look at how crappy it looks tossed in a bloody bed of my truck. woodcock, grouse and ducks are self explanatory I think.

you have to use the metric stuff

if you can't already read sign then start off by learning to track and read sign. a hunter can look at a series of tracks and tell what made them, male or female, the weight, what the animal is doing and what the animal is going to do because all of its physical characteristics and its behavior is told right there in it's passing. then it's simply a matter of finding the foods bears prefer in the area you are looking in, find its foods then find its tracks and follow them, soon you'll see that the bears feed in the beeches in the morning and the oaks in evening or they are staying in and around the cherries right now or hitting the blackberries hard. simply put yourself on a post by their feeding area and shoot one or as I prefer, track one down and try to get a shot. have fun, you're starting an addiction

I see no dark side, it's everything the compound shooters said their bows were when we didn't want compounds allowed in our primitive seasons we fought so hard to get started to begin with. But anyway..... one of the guys from that shop stopped by to try our shotgun silencers out before buying them from us and he said yes, that the recall was the rope cocking device and that the centerpoint scopes have a lifetime warranty from crosman and the sniper 370 has a 5 year warranty so that doesn't sound like a bad deal. the price point reminds me of the bear whitetail and polar bear compounds Kmart used to sell back in the early 70's, its a cheap way to get into the game, and the video review on here certainly sows it is a quiet, capable 50 yard hunting bow. Makes me want one

moose are declining across the whole usa range except in CO, and we don't have many to begin with our local herd is estimated to be around 5,000 animals, it's rare to see them more than once a week now, wasn't long ago you'd see 3 or 4 every night but grizzlies and wolves have changed their ranges and behavior. It's not uncommon to find moose now above treeline, anywhere they have to go to avoid the bears while their calves are on the ground.

very nice shots!

0.44" for august so far but it poured last night, I haven't checked the rain gauge but I bet we got 0.04" anyway. cooler wet weather like this will help knock the fires down.

fun to watch and call, taste great.

sporting goods store here has a recall notice up for these crossbows, said something about serial numbers beginning with "015", said must be returned to crosman. just a heads up, that's all I remember of the recall. I didn't read all of the recall it was a full printed sheet on their board, I only read it at all because I had considered buying one until I talked to the people at cabelas and on here and warranty work was a big concern of mine when I was shopping.

hard to get good photos these days, smoke is thick in spots

The old bulls are heading back down to the lower valleys I don't like winter coming but it is nice to have them back, won't be long now

Grizz are up above 10,000 feet right now filling up on moths but the trailheads are full of folks heading up that way too now that big game is open. I expect we'll hear some stories

Clearly they do and it's life with blinders on. I use vehicle inspections as an example, last I knew only 18 states did inspections but if you live in the northeast you'd think well, every state I drive through does it this way so the whole country is like this.....but it's not. It's only a few states in the northeast and the 3 west coast states that have their heads up their butts. Make a break for it

/

tons of them brought back from nam, we brought several barrels of them and handguns back too, the chrome lined barrels lasted great in the jungle and still last today. if the original bolt is in it, and it sounds like it is, its $300 with zero damage, the carved up stock and damaged forearm is probably int he $200 or so range until the bolt is replaced, you probably alredy know this but the sks has a free floating firing pin that gets stuck in the fire position, everytime the bolt closes it fires, safety on or off, it will slam fire until the magazine is empty. the cheap Russian ammo with berdan primers will stick that firing pin forward in the fire position and nothing will move it back until the bolt is dissembled and fixed. there are several companies making replacement bolts for the sks, we had a few bolts and firing pins made and reworked from ben murray he did a great job, ran about $50 a bolt. well worth it if you've ever released the bolt on a 10 round mag in the sks and had it buuurppp right though them, you'll be happy to get that bolt replaced.

well....that's how much men think differently then women...a woman goes to the store, be honest now, you probably do to, and at the store you buy napkins, paper towels, toilet paper, feminine napkins, Kleenex. a man goes to the store he buys coffee filters....DONE. multi use item, no specialized junk.

because NYS license is heat reactive paper, the heat laminating process will turn the whole thing black, try it with a hair dryer on your old license.

I love fall also. I think we all make the mental switch in our minds and not all at once, its little things like grampy says, its the way I pat my pocket for my pipe while tying streamers, at some point I stopped tying little dries for my friends. the way the pointers would wake from a sound sleep and put their heads on the window sills and take deeper breaths snuffing out the window, as if they knew , soon, just out of sight ...Autumn. it's the little change that my wife had hot chocolate this morning, and she emptied her coat pockets, refilling them with new candy bars and granola bars and pipe cleaners, because I never can find mine while we are grouse hunting. its the way suddenly all the horses stop what they re doing and watch us when we leave the house, ears forward expectant....are we going today? is it here? its the way my bird hunting buddies suddenly are calling more and camps in New England I haven't heard from in 9 months are leaving messages on the phone, books on my nightstand by the tapplys, gene hill, corey ford and edmund ware smith are piled there now.....it's coming by small degrees, my shirt collar is not growing tighter yet, but the velvet is beginning to itch, the shorter daylight has the whole house thinking about apples and pumpkins and gloves and boots.....oh yes, it is very near.

yepper, they do that. even a wolf will often move off a carcass when a big tom comes in. The biggest negative, really the only negative to having lots of lions around is you lose power more often, but you have lots of trees back east so maybe that won't be an issue? here they climb the power poles to sleep on the crosstrees and sometimes hang deer up on them, which almost always knocks out the electricity, this is the first house I've ever lived in that has electricity and when its down its a real pain in the butt. I will try adding links to some newspaper articles in nearby Cody, there was a lion living behind pizza hut for a bit til it scared one guy in the neighborhood who made a fuss. http://www.codyenterprise.com/news/local/article_718bc2a0-e227-11e4-a129-d31757064111.html http://www.codyenterprise.com/news/local/article_196d9e6c-79aa-11e4-9cba-c3060e3dcb79.html until the staff here deletes some photos for me I'm about out of room to share many lion photos, I think I have a couple thousand, mostly bayed up or treed. Thought you may find the info in this interesting. maybe not. http://www.codyenterprise.com/news/local/article_df4841ca-0393-11e3-84a8-001a4bcf887a.html

you don't want mice and bees in the blinds, mice means rattlers will be there too, bees mean grizzlies will be snuffing in there, anything that has formaldehyde in the making of it, circuit boards, refrigerator insultation, these things all give off an odor like formaldehyde and many ants bears feed on have a similar smell, attracting grizz to your blind...all bad. Rattlers in there not great either.

worst time of year to be fishing there but that's really not the reason you go on a family camping trip usually anyway is it? Have a ball! what are you fishing for, have a canoe or boat?

double

I really like this Froggy guy