Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
Media Backcountry Journal media Backcountry Journal
Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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This article originally appeared in the fall 2020 issue of Backcountry Journal.
BY RYAN BUSSE
As a young man I once stood on a mountain ridge so beautiful that I now find it impossible to describe. It was summer and a bird dog was at my side when I discovered the place that would change my life and come to be part of my very being. Like a military bootcamp, it broke me and then built me back up – wild, harsh and unspoiled by the hand of man and owned equally by all citizens of this ...
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The Indiana Chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (BHA), the voice for our public lands in the Hoosier state, is excited to announce a new volunteer partnership with the U.S. Forest Service in the Hoosier National Forest. Located in southern Indiana’s hill country, the Hoosier National Forest consists of 204,000 acres of hardwood forests, streams, and backcountry trails. Known to outdoor enthusiasts as simply “the Hoosier,” this forest is Indiana’s largest public-land holding, ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
Every book's reading starts with a set of expectations and hopes. I picked up a copy of The Lochsa Story because it took place nearly in my backyard, a place I spend more time than any other; my hope was to learn a little more about my favorite wild country – the one I hope to one day have my ashes scattered in. It seemed almost required that I read it. But what I ended up gaining from the book ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
There is a time for reflection, philosophy and politics. And there is a time to lighten up.
The cure for solemn self-importance is Pat McManus. No one can wring more laughs out of a hunting, fishing or camping trip than the Idaho-born journalism professor who cranked out essays month after month for Field & Stream and Outdoor Life magazines. His essays are nostalgic and farcical. Their wry jokes, ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
Dan Flores is a gifted storyteller and chronicler of the history of the Great Plains and wildlife of the American West. American Serengeti describes a magnitude of life on the great plains that will send your imagination spiraling. He captures its true identity, helping the reader understand the history of the wildlife that calls it home and how we have shaped the landscape and wildlife ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
A River Runs Through It is a memoir of Maclean's adventures as a young man in the mountainous western Montana backcountry. Heralded as a classical American story, Maclean describes fly fishing on the Big Blackfoot River and working in the woods for the U.S. Forest Service. I originally read A River Runs Through It while fly fishing on an alpine backpacking trip in western Wyoming. After a day ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
Approximately 10 years ago I picked up this book after a reading a magazine interview with the author, David Petersen, in which he nobly described hunters as the type of hunter we all strive to be – thoughtful, hardworking and conservation-minded. This book includes a carefully selected ensemble of personal essays that dive deep into the motivations and ethics of hunters from different walks of ...
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
I’ve read both of Greenberg’s popular books: American Catch and Four Fish. What I like best about American Catch is that it deals not only with the problem of conservation but also the issue of what we eat. The book discusses everything from New York oysters and the destruction of their habitat to the topic of salmon in Alaska and the Pebble Mine and Bristol Bay debacle.
American Catch is an ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
Reiger’s American Sportsmen is an expanded look into the entwined history of sportsmen, ethics and policy that shaped what we now know as conservation and sustainable management.
Many sportsmen and women, and even historians, are quick to stop at George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt – obvious pillars in the Progressive era of the late 1800s and early 1900s – when mapping the lineage of ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
A professor assigned my class Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the book credited with launching the modern environmental movement, my senior year of college. I hadn’t heard much about the classic then, but I was intrigued enough by Carson’s concern for the future, and the promise of a good grade. I quickly understood why it is a critical read for conservationists and how it popularized the field ...
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This article originally appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA, support your public lands and waters and get four issues a year of Backcountry Journal in your mailbox, and unlimited digital access to current and back issues.
By Zack Williams
There is something uniquely public about cutthroat trout. They reside almost entirely in wild, mountainous rivers of the West – undammed, wild, free places – the vast majority of these flowing through public land from ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
I’ve read a handful of books in the past couple years that I think should belong in the Backcountry Hunters library, but the one that stands out most and should be required reading for all conservationists and hunters is John Taliaferro’s recent biography, Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West. I really wasn’t too familiar with George Bird Grinnell ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
When I think of Desert Solitaire I remember a little riverside camp I scraped out of the grass and brush by the Colorado, not far from Moab, Utah, near the mouth of a canyon that’s since been re-named Grandstaff. I was a year out of college and living on public lands: national forests in South Dakota and Wyoming, national monuments in Arizona, BLM lands in Utah, for seasons at a time.
Edward ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that public lands will always need advocates. Since the beginning, there have been unremitting attempts to privatize our lands for the short-term benefit of a few. In order to be an effective advocate, it’s important to understand how we got where we are today, collective owners of 640 million acres of public lands.
Mark Kenyon takes us on a journey ...
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By Garrett Titus
The crisp turquoise spring water ripples across the front of my canoe, with the gentle strokes of my paddle and the soothing melody of stirring songbirds the only sounds as I traverse downstream. Steam is coming from the water like a fire that has almost burned itself out, while the sunlight pierces through the sycamores, providing me a clearer path through the rapids and root wads. The river bluffs rise high above on either side almost as if to point my eyes to the ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
In Bloodties, Kerasote brings the reader along with him on three journeys, and each involves hunting but from vastly different viewpoints, motivations and outcomes. His time is spent with natives on the ice edge in Greenland, Westerners in pursuit of rams in Siberia and on a journey home to hunt elk in Wyoming. Each is a story about people and how they interact with one another, the critters ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
Long before he was “The Meateater,” Steven Rinella was just another hunter dreaming of a premium tag and the next adventure. One of his early works, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, is the story of receiving one such tag and the ensuing journey. This book is the perfect blend of hunting, adventure, conservation, science and history.
Starting with the unearthing of a bison skull by ...
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This title is part of BHA's Jim Posewitz Digital Library: Required Reading for Conservationists
Published posthumously in 1949, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is as close to a bible for conservationists as any work can be. In it he discusses things like a “land ethic,” which simply says: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
He reflects on predator control in service of better ...
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We are all partakers in something that is inherently good. The backcountry awakens a pent-up wonder that is innate to our existence. As we breathe in the mountain air or witness the majesty of the river bottom, we are connected to all those who came before us.
By John Cook
I grew up hunting the Mud Creek bottom in East Texas. As early as I can remember I was following my dad through the mature hardwood bottom on the north side of our deer lease hunting squirrels. I can remember being ...
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Full digital issues of the Backcountry Journal are available to BHA members. Check out a preview below, or click here to join BHA. Already a member? Click here to log in.
News for Immediate ReleaseSept. 26, 2019Contact: Katie McKalip, 406-240-9262, mckalip@backcountryhunters.org
The newest issue of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ magazine is available today
MISSOULA, Mont. – The fall issue of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ quarterly magazine, Backcountry ...
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Photo by Alex Kim
This article first appeared in the Fall 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal. Join BHA and get the journal, quarterly, in your mailbox.
By Corey Ellis
While recently rereading Beyond Fair Chase by Jim Posewitz, the founder of Orion and a conservation legend and expert in hunting ethics, I was struck by a section that had not caught my attention before; the section was titled, "Physical Fitness as a Part of Preparation." Although we often think of fitness in preparation ...
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By Sam Lungren, Backcountry Journal editor
This piece was published in the Fall 2018 issue of Backcountry Journal.
Since this article was published, the Biden administration has begun their reconsideration of the previous administration’s decision to extend leases for copper mining in the Superior National Forest upstream of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. In August 2021, President Biden's Secretary of Agriculture told the public that he was waiting for a legal opinion from ...
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by Tovar Cerulli - Orion: The Hunter's Institute
The image is familiar: A hunter crouches beside a dead deer, grinning into the camera. What do we make of this picture?
We all see the hunter’s smile. We all see the beautiful animal, now dead. And we all recognize some connection between the two. From there, though, interpretations diverge wildly.
Critics of hunting are apt to see mindless brutality. The hunter has killed, appears to have enjoyed killing, and now gloats over a carcass. ...
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Photo by Barry and Cathy Beck
On an October morning a decade or so ago, I was hunting woodcock in an abandoned orchard. A flight had come in and, in less than an hour, I collected my three-bird limit. That evening I got a call from an acquaintance, a deer hunter, who hunts the same orchard. He asked how I did and if I’d seen evidence of deer. How, I asked, had he known I had been hunting there that morning? He said he saw me on the trail camera he’d placed in cover. I was amused.
It’s now ...
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Image courtesy of Don Thomas
Readers and BHA members outside of Montana may have never heard of the Crazy Mountains, although that is likely to change. One of Montana’s dozen isolated “island” ranges, the Crazies lie an hour’s drive northeast of Bozeman. They offer spectacular wilderness terrain and are home to native cutthroat trout, an over-objective elk herd, deer, mountain goats and large predators galore. Their current notoriety derives not from this natural bounty, but from a heated ...
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Photo by Daniel Wilde
For roughly two-thirds of the 20th Century, hunters and fishers were the bedrock of conservation. But beginning in the early 1970s, the ground shifted. The accomplishments of the conservation movement, to which hunters contributed mightily, began to pale in the face of new environmental issues and a new environmental movement that had priorities not centered on restoration of game and fish and the habitats on which they depend. Indeed, protection of wildlife and ...
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Published in Backcountry Journal Winter 2018 Issue. Subscribe by becoming a member here.
Photo Credit: Bill McDavid
It took me 16 days to tag a Dall sheep in Alaska last year. If it weren’t for my yoga practice, I don’t think I could have stayed mentally strong or returned home injury free. I’m 49 years old, so my yoga doesn’t look like sitting cross-legged under a tree and my goal is not to do a photo-worthy backbend. I practice a combination of meditation, yoga poses, ...
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Published in Backcountry Journal Winter 2018 Issue. Subscribe by becoming a member here.
Photo Credit: Thom Bridge
Interview by Sam Lungren
Author, biologist, ethicist, historian and legendary conservationist, Jim Posewitz is the foremost expert on conservation history and fair chase hunting. He founded Orion – The Hunter’s Institute and has penned five books: Beyond Fair Chase, Inherit the Hunt, Rifle in Hand, Taking a Bullet for Conservation and his soon-to-be-released memoir, My Best ...
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News for Immediate ReleaseOct. 27, 2017Contact: Katie McKalip, 406-240-9262, mckalip@backcountryhunters.org
Inside the Fall Issue of BHA’s Backcountry Journal
The newest issue of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers’ magazine is available today
MISSOULA, Mont. – The fall 2017 issue of Backcountry Journal is landing in BHA members’ mailboxes now. Here’s a look at some of the highlights:
Speechless: Dreams, Nightmares & Wyoming Moose: BHA life member Jared Oakleaf shares how a typo almost cost him ...
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The newest issue of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers magazine is available today
MISSOULA, Mont. – The winter issue of Backcountry Journal is arriving in BHA members’ mailboxes now. Here’s a taste of what you'll find inside:
Is Wildlife Viewing the New Hunting?: In 1960, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted almost 14 million hunting license holders in the U.S. Despite there being 140 million more Americans today, hunter numbers haven’t changed. But wildlife watching is on the rise. Ed ...
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The following was written by BHA's Conservation Director Holly Endersby, after a recent fishing trip to Kelly Creek (Idaho).
Utter the words Kelly Creek to a real backcountry trout bum and she will immediately know you’re talking about an icy cold stream sparkling through a big chunk of central Idaho beginning near the Montana border. A blue ribbon, catch and release trout stream, Kelly Creek eventually mingles its water with the North Fork of the Clearwater River.
A recent University of ...
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