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ROD COLLIN, a veteran Yukon sheep guide (“Can Sheep Hunting in the Yukon Survive Another Century?”), has spent the last 40 years of his life migrating to the mountains every fall. Each August he leaves his home, his wife, and all their dogs to lead hunters into the high country, and he doesn’t come home until October, when he’s finished grunting in rutting bulls. “I hunt and guide so that I can live this kind of life,” he told me. When most hunters think about annual migrations, they conjure images of southbound ducks, or elk headed for their wintering grounds. It’s easy to overlook the fact that we’re migrating too, as we head to our deer camps and backcountry wall tents. And those instincts to go—when the breeze turns crisp and…
BY RHETT WILLINGHAM OF CRAWFORDVILLE, FLORIDA AS TOLD TO DAC COLLINS ILLUSTRATIONS BY AJ FRENA A FULL-TIME firefighter in Taylor County, Florida, Rhett Willingham says he’s always been close with his sister, Addison Bethea. While growing up in the Panhandle, they’ve spent countless days fishing, hunting, and exploring together. The two siblings also try to make time to collect scallops every summer, and Willingham says that ever since the season opened on July 1, Addison had been bugging him about getting out… You can read the full story about Addison’s rescue here. We publish true adventures. Send yours to THTM@outdoorlife.com…
NICK SCHRIVER looks at highways the way a contractor looks at your house. He sees trouble spots that can use some touch-ups, if not total reconstructions. The maintenance supervisor for the Montana Department of Transportation’s northeast field office, Schriver is tasked with making sure roads in his district are intact and as safe as intended. His is no office job. Instead, Schriver drives a thousand miles of two-lane in his MDT pickup at least once a week, noting damaged signs, crumbling asphalt, plugged culverts, and roadkill. Always roadkill. His district includes some of the gamiest landscapes in North America, swaths of open prairie that pronghorn antelope cross on their thousand-year-old seasonal migrations, riverbottoms full of whitetails, and Hi-Line two-lanes dotted with grazing mule deer. Schriver takes me on a tour…
IT’S DARK and raining on the Canadian prairie. Most sane people are still tucked in bed or just putting on a pot of coffee. But the group of us getting soaked to the bone setting out decoys and brushing in A-frame blinds in a cut pea field are all certifiable. We’re jonesing for cupped wings, and the only way to get our fix is to wake up before the ducks and geese fly from their roost waters to these grain fields to feed. The morning is full of the usual anticipation, plus an extra helping. That’s because we’re hunting one of the oldest birds in the world: the sandhill crane, a flying, 4-foot-tall velociraptor with a wingspan of up to 7 feet. At first light their distinctive purrs break the…
I’M 7 MILES OFFSHORE from Lorain, Ohio, being verbally abused. To get here required an alarm set for well before dawn, an hour-long drive from my motel, and a backbreaking run across a Lake Erie that woke up on the wrong side of the bed. It’s the kind of rough that’s not so shitty you need to call it off, but shitty enough that your calves and ankles are going to feel it later from helping you keep your balance all day. I’m trying to get into a good position to crank in a fish, but I’m not getting there fast enough for a frantic Captain Ross Robertson. “You need to move to the front of the boat right now!” he yells. “How am I supposed to reach the tip…
ON A HILLSIDE a half mile below us, three rams graze on lush, green grass. A few hundred yards to our left, four young rams are bedded in a dirt patch. And across the valley, on the far ridge, dozens of white dots flicker in my binoculars. Before today, I had never seen a live Dall sheep, though I had read about them, watched videos about them, edited stories about them, and dreamed about hunting them for years. Now there are Dall sheep all around me. Through my binoculars, the distant sheep look like Mary’s little lamb, fleece white as snow. But through my guide Rod Collin’s spotting scope, turned up to 60X, I can see their stocky, muscular frames. I can see brownish-yellow horns curling back behind their ears.…
