Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i Game & Fish West

With temperatures in the 90s or above in many parts of the country, August seems like a long way from hunting season. Those of us languishing in the heat and humidity of the dog days can barely muster the gumption to hang a trail camera. But if you live or hunt in the West, you know August signals the start of pronghorn season in several states, despite the sweltering heat. The early openers are just more reasons to like this unique, but accessible, big-game animal. A summer vacation built around a hunting trip certainly sounds appealing. With some planning and a little luck in calendars lining up, parents can take kids on a pronghorn hunt before the school year starts. Although a lot of hunters call them speedgoats, pronghorns are…

Truth is, none of us probably has as much time as we’d like to spend in the woods, and as life gets more and more hectic, that time seems to dwindle to even less. I’m certainly right there with everyone else. My hunting time is easy to summarize: weekends and one week of vacation time each year. That’s it. There’s no wiggle room, no variance. What’s odd is I still have the same goals, drive and expectations I had when I was able to spend much more time chasing bucks with a bow. I’m going to hunt at least three states this fall, and I have every intention of filling every buck tag I have available. To do this, I make sure I waste as little time as possible. The…

Some scientists say there are 100 trillion ants on Earth and that their combined weight approaches the total weight of all humans on the planet. That’s good news for trout, which eat ants, and nowhere is that more evident than in lakes and streams in and around old burns, especially when there are downed logs in the water. But ant “hatches” are hard to see and even harder to time. A few years ago, a group of us fished a wilderness river in an old burn in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness, riding horseback on the old Indian trails. After we tied the horses, my friend Tracy Wilson and I spent some time working a slide hole with a long, deep run and a lot of boulders. On 10 casts with…

Any day on the Columbia River, an angler could put a trophy 4- or 5-pound smallmouth in the boat; the trick is sorting through the 12-inch fatties that make up the bulk of the catch. An angler’s potential to top the 8-pound-plus Oregon state record improves with every hour on the water, and I’ve had fish close to that big at the end of my line more than once in August and September. On one memorable September day, my friend Larry Hutchens was running the boat and outdoor writer Doug Wilson was along. I started with a Rat-L-Trap while Wilson employed a TTI-Blakemore Swim-N-Runner and Hutchens cast a Yakima Bait Timber Tiger. Hutchens cut the big motor quite a ways from shore near a hump where smallmouth bass gather to…

American outdoorsmen—especially those of us in the West—are blessed with something often taken for granted but not available in most other places on Earth: millions of acres of public land open to hunting, fishing and other forms of recreation. Those lands belong to all of us, and within the parameters of hunting and fishing seasons, some road closures and very few other limitations, we can come and go as we please all year round. I cut my teeth hunting Western public lands in my home state and many others. Some 50 years later, some of the most productive and fun hunting I do each year occurs on public land. When utilizing public land, you can be sure that you’ll often run into other people. Most of them will be just…

Despite wanting to gain 2,500 feet in elevation, I didn’t leave the tent until daylight. I knew that elk were bedding high in a timbered draw, but I wasn’t sure where they were feeding at night or exactly how they reached the secluded sleeping grounds. If I left in the dark, I might pass by the elk or spook them. If I waited too long, the herd might be bedded and hard to approach. Halfway up the mountain I found a herd of elk grazing in an open meadow surrounded by aspens. A lone bull fed with the cows, and when I let out a cow call, the bull lifted its head and bugled. Cutting the distance to 300 yards, I called as I moved, and the bull kept answering.…

The dark form that slid from beneath the clump of overhanging willows to inspect my fly was impossibly long. For the few moments that I watched it hang in the gentle current, my mind almost wouldn’t let me believe it was a trout. The flow in which I stood wasn’t much wider than the length of my rod, and on top of that, Brooks Hansen and I had spent most of the morning with nary a confirmed sighting of a cutthroat. And yet, when the fish turned in the clear water to go back to its lair beneath the willows, I swore I saw a rose-colored gill plate and big black spots on its tail. “Did you see that!” I gasped. “What was that?” “Huge fish,” said Brooks, just as…

It could be argued that the origin of the modern precision rifle cartridge was in the late 1970s when Dr. Louis Palmisano and Ferris Pindell created a cartridge and named it the 6 mm PPC. It was based on the .220 Russian cartridge. Palmisano and Pindell reduced the body taper of the case, gave it a 30-degree shoulder, and necked it up to 6 mm. It became very popular for benchrest competition, and some have gone so far as to claim it the most accurate centerfire rifle cartridge ever created. About 45 years later, Hornady introduced the 6 mm ARC cartridge. The 6 mm PPC and the 6 mm ARC are dimensionally very similar. The primary difference is that Hornady specified a rifling twist rate of one turn in 7…

It was mid-afternoon by the time the shooter buck I’d been watching finally moved over a ridge, giving me a window to commence a stalk. Fifteen minutes later I was glassing from where I’d seen the buck and its harem disappear, but there was no sign of them. Then, more than a mile away, flashes of white caught my eye. Setting up the spotting scope, I watched smaller bucks chase does in circles through the sagebrush. Moments later, my buck stepped into view. The pronghorn was easy to recognize, and just the sight of it made me gasp. Its body dwarfed those of the inferior bucks in the group, and its black face almost shined. But it was the right horn that jutted 90 degrees to the side of its…

There are at least two great things about August bass fishing. First, the weather tends to be stable, so bass settle into some of the most predictable patterns of the year. We know they’ll be taking advantage of low-light conditions to feed early and late, and that water temperatures will be higher, along with the fishes’ metabolism and need to feed. Second, after the sun is up, light levels and temps will cause bass to move to one of three areas: deep water, moving water or heavy cover. And since deep-water fishing is often a difficult hit-or-miss game, and moving water can be tough to find on a lot of reservoirs, heavy cover—or at least the heaviest available cover—is generally going to be our best bet and the most fun…

Founded in 1971, CVA has become an industry leader in the development of technologically advanced in-line muzzle-loaders. Over the last decade, CVA (part of the BPI family, which also includes Bergara, PowerBelt and others) has climbed to the top of the muzzleloader market and is now America’s top-selling muzzleloader brand. Building on its reputation for providing customers with guns and accessories at the best value, in 2019 CVA launched its first centerfire rifle, the Cascade. Earlier this year, CVA introduced the upgraded Cascade XT (X-Treme). CVA notes the XT is designed to be “precision-oriented” with key features to make it a multi-purpose rifle for a variety of hunters. For example, a heavier fluted barrel (No. 5 taper) improves the balance of the rifle and allows multiple shots to be taken…