I love this time of year. Fall. The leaves are the most beautiful shades of red, yellow and orange. The good Lord and a Tikka .270 packed my freezer with little white packages. Last, but not least, I was present when one of the greatest fishermen I know finished up a Cutt-Slam.
After a successful antelope hunt, six-year old G-Baby and I drove up to...let’s see...yup...No Tellum Lake 2 to catch his final cutthroat. Two years ago, he caught his Bonneville, Colorado and Snake River cutthroat in just three days. This year, with a little help
from Game and Fish biologists, we found the perfect spot for him to catch his last cutthroat. The Yellowstone. Probably my
second favorite to the Bonneville. After only one wrong turn, we arrived in a valley surrounded by trees and mountains. There is a little trail that goes around the crystal clear lake. The water was so still it was hard to differentiate between the real mountain and the reflection. Fall perfection.
I set G-Baby up with a lure and gave the little guy a tutorial, since most of his fishing has been the ole garden tackle standby. As I am explaining the importance of reeling in the line as opposed to letting it sit, I feel a hard strike. It was a fighter and G-Baby was a solid match. He pulled in one of the most beautiful red spawn colored fish I have ever seen. He popped off the line right as he hit the shore, swimming into the deep. We knew we were in the right spot as anytime you catch something on the first cast, it is good luck.
I watched my son eyeball the lake, channeling the great Bambino as he pointed to a sweet spot and cast out. It wasn't
minutes later that he had a fish on, yelling for help and reeling as his little arms got tired. G was not about to back down and would
go headfirst into the lake before letting the Cutt best him. With a
little coaching and a lot of persistence, he managed to reel that fish right to shore. This Yellowstone put all other Yellowstone’s I have caught to shame. G-Baby grinned ear to ear as he held up his trophy while I snapped a picture. We released it back into the clear blue lake, in awe of the majesty of creature and country.
We fished for another hour or so and caught one more sizable Yellowstone. It was a perfect day to spend some time in the great outdoors. I may not be the best parent – patience is not my strong suit, but when I am fishing with my kids, I feel myself becoming a better dad. Nothing beats a guys trip with one of your sons, hunting, fishing and just being grateful for what we have.
-Long Rifle
This morning, during a routine blog stats check, we noticed something that caught our eye: 5,000 views! That means 5,000 times somebody has clicked on our blog. Thank you so much! We’ve had views from the U.S., Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Canada, Romania, Brazil, Colombia, France, United Kingdom, Japan, India, New Zealand, Iraq, Hong Kong, Poland, and Egypt. A full 81 were just Russia! (So, if you’re a 3EM reader in Russia, Спасибо так много для чтения!) Thank you so much to all of our readers around the globe and we hope we can give you a taste of the Wyoming outdoors no matter where you are! With Grandpa as the post coordinator, the Ranger as the publisher, the Apprentice as the idea thinker, Long Rifle as a writer, and both Rangermom and Apprenticemom as editors, we make a pretty good team. We fired up 3EM in mid-January, and had explosive growth. We reached our first thousand views in two weeks, and 2,000 within two months. We’ve had so many nice comments from all of you, and we hope to just keep on growing. So from all of us at 3EM, we thank you for making this blog what it is today. We hope it has enriched your life and given you a taste of the Wyoming outdoors in God’s great Creation.
-Three Elk Meadow
One of the things I love most about Wyoming – in fact, the rural West – is our “live and let live” attitude. We recognize that we aren’t all alike, and that’s OK. Maybe it’s a product of low human density or maybe it’s about the fact that most of our families – shoot, ALL of our families unless your last name is Her Many Horses or Standing Elk – came from someplace else. There’s nothing like being a short timer in a new place to help you be pretty tolerant of other folks.
So I try never to get real judgmental when it comes to the way other folks hunt or fish. I’m mostly a fly angler, but I don’t care if you want to fish with gear. That’s your call, not mine. As long as you’re legal, I’ll fish with you any day. Like my buddy Dave says, “If you want to fish, bring your fly rod. If you want to catch fish, bring a Zebco and some nightcrawlers.” Same goes for hunting. If you want to shoot some prairie dogs, go for it. For me, it’s about as exciting as watching grass grow. But if you want to vaporize some rodents with your .223, I’m not going to get in your face about it. The last thing hunters or anglers need is to be fighting among themselves these days. There are plenty of folks who view us as an embarrassing anachronism and would love to see hunting and fishing go away entirely.
And I guess that’s why I’m up on the 3EM soapbox today. I want to suggest that we need to think about something a bit. Here it is: long distance shooting. An outfitter friend tipped me to this trend at least a decade ago and it’s grown like a cancer since then. He said that he was getting clients every year who weren’t really interested in hunting, per se. They just wanted him to get him within 1,000 yards or so of a game animal so they could set up like a military sniper and kill that animal from some amazing distance. These Chris Kyle wannabes have even spawned an entire niche of expensive weaponry to do their thing: 6.5 x 284, .30/.378, .338 Lapua - heck I’m sure there’s somebody out there looking down the barrel of a .50 BMG at some unsuspecting antelope as I write this. Just Google “long distance shooting” and see what you get.
But let’s be real clear about what this is: It is shooting. It is dang cool to be able to hit a milk jug at 1,500 yards. Never having been much more than an adequate shooter on the best day I ever had, I’m impressed with someone who’s willing to learn to hit a target almost a mile away. The evolution of both rifles and optics has enabled regular people to achieve amazing accuracy at amazing distances, given a willingness to shell out a lot of cash for the appropriate technology and a lot of practice.
But let’s be equally clear about what it is not: It is not hunting. Hunting is much different than shooting. Hunting is about a deep knowledge of and a deeper reverence for wildlife. It’s about understanding the history of hunting in America and the conservation miracle that hunters and anglers brought forth in the last century. It’s about knowing where these critters live and how they live and sharing a bond with them and with the wild country they live in. It’s about having an attitude of gratitude for the opportunity to be there and a willingness to work very hard to get close enough to make one, clean humane shot. It’s about feeding the people you love with the meat when it’s all over. All told, being a hunter isn’t something you buy, it’s something you earn.
So if you’re into target shooting at ultra-long ranges, God bless you. By all means, shoot a lot. Buy some real expensive guns and reload a lot – the excise taxes on all those guns and reloading components fund a lot of cool conservation work. Get good at it. I want you on my team if there’s ever a zombie apocalypse. But if you’re out there shooting at an elk at 1,100 yards, shame on you. You’re not a sniper – you’re a lazy slob, and you’re certainly not a hunter. Don’t post your kills on social media – I don’t want the rest of society to confuse you with someone I care about. Those are not targets, they’re wild, free-ranging animals and they deserve more respect than you’re ever going to be capable of giving them.
-Grandpa
My dad had just shot his antelope (a nice two year-old buck) and we were in the process of quick quartering and boning out the quarters on the back of the pickup. The game warden came and checked per usual, and everything checked out - we were good. So we went off in search of many more antelope for the freezer. Not far along, we saw a group of about ten antelope on the side of a hill. So Grandpa, the Ranger, and I went down a goat path of a two track, around and up the back of the hill. When we got to the top, they were gone.
So then we split up - ApprenticeDad, Grandpa, and I in one truck and Mark, Grandma, the Ranger and the dog in the other truck, going the opposite direction. So we looked and looked, occasionally seeing a jumpy buck 500 yards from anything that remotely resembled a piece of cover. Then finally on the way to lunch, we saw a group of about seven and according to Grandpa, they were about 200-250 yards away (I don’t quite believe him). So I plopped the tailgate down and took a crack at the last one in the bunch (a yearling buck) with my trusty .243. There is a very distinctive sound when your bullet makes contact with a body, kind of a thwack. We heard a thwack but he didn’t go down. So Dad and I headed after him. When we saw him, I put the scope on him, took a shot and he dropped deader'n a stone. And I was so happy.
-The Apprentice
The Ranger:
Inhale, exhale, the cross hairs find their mark, but still moving too much. Her ears twitch; she notices something. Inhale, exhale. The cross hairs are steady now. Inhale, exhale. Finger tightens on the trigger. Inhale, exhale. The trigger is pulled back far enough and at once the firing pin drops. 6 grams of gunpowder are suddenly ignited. Their gases build up and build up inside the cartridge until they can stay in no more. They have to get out. They have so much pressure that a little pointy piece of lead, covered in bronze, suddenly is pushed out of its case and starts heading out the barrel. Through its way out, spiraling grooves along the barrel give it a spin. It exits the barrel and moves at 3,200 feet per second, around Mach 3, the maximum speed of an SR-71 Blackbird. As it penetrates her skin, it has so much velocity and inertia that little can stop it. It turns everything it hits into jelly. She goes down like a ton of bricks. Another successful antelope hunt for the Ranger, 2015.
-The Ranger
