BHA's #MentorMonday is a weekly effort to recognize those who have coached us, encouraged us and helped make us who we are as sportsmen and women. If you have a mentor that you would like to recognize on the Backcountry Blog, please send us a one to two paragraph entry and photo here.
I was lucky to have a lot of hunting mentors. One of them was C. Randall (Randy) Byers. Randy was a neighbor of mine growing up in Idaho and his sons, Tod and Kirk, were about my age. Randy outfitted us all with bows and arrows at a young age and we terrorized neighborhood cottontails, then graduated to pheasant, chukar, pronghorn, deer and elk. I took this picture around 1984, when we were warming up in Randy's camper after a snowy spring turkey hunt. Randy was records chairman for both Pope & Young and, later, Boone &Crockett. But I'll never forget when he went out of his way to stop by my house and congratulate me on my first deer, a yearling whitetail. That, he said, was a trophy too.
Ben Long, co-chairman, Backcountry Hunters & Anglers
Kalispell, MT
About Ben Long
Father, outdoorsman, author and conservationist living in Kalispell, Mont. Nanoinfluencer.