Indholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2017 i Outdoor Life

We love a fresh copy of the latest Outdoor Life as much as the next person, but the limited real estate of this periodical can’t contain all the extra photos we’re taking, videos we’re shooting, news we’re reporting, and stories we’re telling. Here are two online features worth exploring this summer. WHY DID IT HAVE TO BE SNAKES? THE PYTHON HUNT Wildlife officials and biologists have been battling invasive Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades for decades. But this problem population isn’t declining—recent studies estimate the state is swarming with 100,000 or more of these snakes. Pythons are apex predators —they can grow to 20 feet long—and they’re devastating south Florida’s fragile ecosystem. So this spring, OL tagged along with Bill Booth, a state-licensed hunter, to learn what it takes to…

I’ll never forget the first time I hunted trout at night. At the time I’d only been flyfishing for several weeks, with limited success. It didn’t help that I was fishing incredibly technical rivers—slow, gin-clear water and bright-sand bottoms made for chronically anxious fish that would scatter like buckshot the moment I got to within casting distance. That all changed when I returned to those very same waters to fish mouse patterns after nightfall. Suddenly all those trout that saw me coming 60 feet away were banging into my kneecaps to eat a rodent, and I started to raise fish far larger than I had thought my river system could produce. If you’ve never tried mousing, you’re missing out on hands-down the best and most consistent big-fish bite of the…

1. UTAH LAND GRAB LAWMAKERS PASSED A 2012 REQUIRING THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT TO TURN OVER LANDS TO THE STATE OR FACE LITIGATION. THE LAWSUIT IS ON HOLD, BUT ATTEMPTS TO STRIP PUBLIC-LAND RIGHTS CONTINUE. 2. MINING IN THE BOUNDARY WATERS PROPONENTS OF A PROPOSAL TO MINE ALONG THE BORDER OF THIS WILDERNESS SAY A MINE WOULD BRING NEW JOBS. OPPONENTS SAY IT JEOPARDIZES THE CRYSTAL-CLEAR LAKES AND RIVERS. 3. FRACKING THE WAYNE UP TO 40,000 ACRES IN OHIO’S ONLY NATIONAL FOREST COULD BE USED FOR OIL AND GAS DRILLING, MOSTLY THROUGH FRACKING, WHICH RAISES A HOST OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES. 4. TIMBERING IN THE TONGASS TIMBER COMPANIES ARE LEANING ON THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO OPEN LOGGING IN OLD-GROWTH FORESTS. A BILL OUT OF ALASKA WOULD LET STATES PURCHASE 2M NATIONAL FOREST…

ONE DAY IN THE SUMMER OF 1985, I wandered into a bookshop and found, tucked away on a shelf marked “Sports,” a book by Michael McIntosh. It was The Best Shotguns Ever Made in America, published in 1981, and it told the story of the legendary American sideby- sides: Parker, A.H. Fox, Ithaca, L.C. Smith, Lefever, and the Winchester 21. The book was drawn from a series of magazine articles written in the 1970s, when McIntosh worked for the Missouri Conservationist. At that time, all but the Winchester 21 were out of production. For such a slim volume (just 185 pages), the book had an enormous impact. By recounting the stories of seminal, forgotten guns, it reignited interest in the American side-by-side in the hearts of many more. My own…

MY SLEEPING BAG IS AS SNUG AS I CAN GET IT, FLEECE DICKEY PULLED UP OVER MY EYEBALLS TO MY STOCKING CAP. SNOT IS FROZEN TO MY JOE DIRT ’STACHE. I’D SLEPT FACEDOWN MOST OF THE NIGHT IN AN ATTEMPT TO HOLD MY BREATH AND BODY HEAT HOSTAGE. FUTILE. IT’S ABOUT THREE HOURS BEFORE LEGAL LIGHT. I timidly shimmy out of my bag. The sky is infinitely clear, like I can see to eternity. A three-quarter moon illuminates the Colorado high-mountain lake I had circled on the map. I’m on base camp number three, six days into my hunt. I’m running out of days, but am grateful for the solitude of this moment and am anticipating an encounter with an elk—any elk. I want meat. I sit in the frigid…

DESPITE THE ELABORATE and often confusing scoring systems used in various handgun competitions, as with any of the action sports, winning comes down to speed and precision. Shoot faster than everybody else and make the hits in the right place on the target, and you ace the competition. It’s really that simple. This drill will help you build some of the skills needed to pull that off. The first is to draw and fire the first shot with precision. It’s easy to be fast; it’s not easy to be fast and accurate. As Bill Jordan said in his classic book on gunfighting, No Second Place Winner, “The history of gun fighting fails to record a single fatality resulting from a quick noise.” I might add to that something we hear…

I was afraid the lady clerk who’d seen me pocket the package of red plastic capgun caps would come after me. Caught shoplifting, I didn’t think to put them back. Instead, I rushed out of the store, nearly running, heart pounding, and hid in the back seat of our family’s car, parked around the corner. I’d be seen if I walked to the other stores on Main Street, where the rest of my family was shopping. Word would be out. Shopping in Sterling was a rare treat for our family, and now I, a felonious 9-year-old, had spoiled it. I didn’t want to go to prison; I wanted to go home. I hated those caps in my hand, but I was too scared to return them. Every time I pass…

IF WE USE YOUR STORY, WE’LL SEND YOU THIS BOOK! ”THIS HAPPENED TO ME” HAS BEEN A FIXTURE OF OUTDOOR LIFE SINCE IT FIRST APPEARED IN ????. WE’VE SINCE COMPILED SOME OF THE MOST HARROWING, HAIR-RAISING MISADVENTURES READERS HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED IN A SINGLE VOLUME. IF WE RUN YOUR STORY, YOU CAN PORE OVER THE ??? PAGES OF THIS ACTION-PACKED BOOK KNOWING YOU’RE IN GOOD COMPANY. WANT TO BUY A COPY INSTEAD? THEY’RE AVAILABLE AT OUTDOORLIFE.COM/THTMBOOK STORYTIME We publish true adventures. Only those used will be acknowledged. Send to THTM@ OutdoorLife.com (preferred), or Outdoor Life, THTM, 2 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Include a daytime phone number.…

Last December, the nation’s first off shore wind farm went online. Located 4 miles off Block Island, R.I., these five turbines are undoubtedly a harbinger of things to come in terms of renewable-energy resources. But perhaps even more intriguing is their future as fishing hotspots. That windmills can generate electricity is fact. That they can act as FADs (Fish Aggregating Devices) is somewhat open to conjecture, but optimism abounds. Up and down the East Coast, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has designated Wind Energy Areas. Some are just in the planning stage, other areas have been leased. Off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., for example, there are three current proposals for wind-farm construction on a much larger scale than the one off Block. In January, the Long…

For a portion of the angling population, the beauty of fishing lies in its simplicity—a hook, a bobber, and a warm summer’s day by a lake is about as complicated as it ever needs to get. Then there are the rest of us. We want to learn fish secrets—all of them. We gearheads also dream, mostly of fish-finder-screen fireworks. And that’s precisely what we were staring at while fishing Lake Superior’s Chequamegon Bay last summer. Our sounder was so loaded with arcs that I thought I had mistakenly hit simulator mode. I wasn’t surprised when Jim Kalkofen hooked a big smallmouth on his first cast. But I was stumped when 20 minutes passed without another bite. “I’m baffled,” Kalkofen said from the rear casting deck. “They’re so thick I thought…

America’s federal government manages more than 640 million acres in the United States, about a quarter of the nation’s land. But an influential group of anti-federalists argues that that’s too much to be effectively managed, and its members are pushing legislation that would give or sell federal land to state and local governments, or even sell it to private entities in order to pay down the national debt. Opponents of this federal-land divestiture movement say that states are ill-equipped to manage large blocks of public land because of the costs associated with fighting forest fires and maintaining roads, fences, and other infrastructure. Besides, selling the public estate, they say, is fundamentally anti-democratic. What’s really at stake here? Responsible use of public funds, for sure, but also hunting and fishing access,…

Practice is only as good as you make it. Spend the off -season shooting your bow at known distances in the familiar range of your yard, and you’ll be quite adept at drilling dots on a block target. But unless you intend to spend the fall drilling dots on targets, that practice can only take you so far. When it comes to the activity you are practicing to perfect—placing arrows on deer, elk, and other animals that tend to show up at unpredictable distances and angles —your training sessions should mimic the real world as much as possible. This is where 3-D targets shine. If you’re fortunate enough to live near a commercial course with a full array of 3-D targets, take full advantage of it. But what if there…

SOME HANDLOADERS get too caught up in load recipes. They’ll pick one from a handloading manual, or get a recipe from their buddy, and then wonder why it did not put all of its bullets into one single hole. Unquestionably, the recipe you use to create your ammo is important, but so is the concentricity of the ammo you load. With concentric ammunition, the case neck and the bullet are parallel with the centerline of the cartridge. Bullets that start down a barrel straight tend to fly that way. Bullets that start down a barrel crooked come out wobbling like Chubby Checker doing the Twist. To see this for yourself, take a box of factory ammunition and sort the cartridges based on runout. (Runout tells you how out of line…

THE FEVER HAS BROKEN. The red-hot demand for black guns and defensive handguns that dominated the shooting market for the past several years has cooled off, largely due to shifting political and economic winds. This has created some uncertainty for firearms makers, who have seen gun sales fall and stock prices drop. For the most part, the manufacturers have responded by introducing new products in a variety of categories and by cutting prices. It’s enough to bring a tear to the eye of any red-blooded fan of free-market supplyand- demand capitalism. As a result, we’re seeing more new guns in 2017 than we have in many years—and the scope of our rifle and shotgun test reflects this. Several interesting trends are evident. The most significant is the presence of hybrid…

Tim Love was the U.S. Forest Service district ranger for the Seeley Lake area of the Lolo National Forest in northwestern Montana for 20 years. He was in charge of managing 400,000 acres for outdoor recreation, wildlife habitat, wildfires, and timber harvest until he retired in 2014. Because he’s retired, he can speak freely about what it was like to be in charge of the public’s land. OUTDOOR LIFE: Did you work closely with state agencies as a district ranger? TIM LOVE: I worked closely with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, which is in charge of managing the wildlife in the state. They had an office in our ranger station. OL: There’s sentiment that state agencies can do a better job of managing the land because they are “on the…

In 2011, the latest year for which we have statistics, 11 million Americans hunted deer. That same year, only 500,000 U.S. hunters pursued black bears, despite burgeoning populations of the game animal, liberal hunting regulations, and relatively litt le competition in either spring or fall black bear seasons. ¶ Maybe it’s our collective fetish with antlers, or a widespread perception that bears aren’t game animals or aren’t worthy table fare, but here are six reasons you should consider hunting black bears this year. 1 Bears are iconic. Their teeth, claws, strength, and resolve to survive symbolize our vast and rugged continent. Black bears have the widest natural geographic distribution of any North American big-game animal besides the mountain lion. Originally, black bears occurred in more places than even whitetail deer.…

Long before the days of dip-coating and silk-screening, outdoorsmen were using spray paint to dress their gear with custom camouflage. Nowadays, even though production camo application is durable and available in a number of proprietary designs, there are still a number of advantages to picking up a “ratt le can” and applying your own camo patt ern. A Krylon paint job will give your gear a layer of additional protection from the elements, and your custom patt ern can match the colors and shadows where you’ll hunt, all for a fraction of the price of production camo. Here are a few easy techniques you can use to make a patt ern that suits your needs and the specific terrain and vegetation where you hunt. STEP 1 APPLY THE BASE LAYER…

?Remember the old Samsonite commercial with the gorilla tossing around the suitcase? Well, that’s me with my guns and shooting gear. I’m tough on my kit. So when I first laid eyes on the Elite Iron Revolution, I immediately wondered: Is this a match made in heaven, or has this bipod met its match? I’ve used this bipod nearly exclusively on my long-range GA Precision 6mm Creedmoor since it was introduced about four years ago. I’ve beat on it, pounded on it, and otherwise treated it terribly, and other than the wear on its finish, it’s as good as new. The only legitimate knocks on it are that it is heavy and it isn’t cheap. But now, Dale Poling, the owner of Elite Iron, has done something about the first…

IF YOU’RE SHOOTING combat-style pistol matches or competing in 3-Gun, you’re not only trying to get good hits, you’re trying to get them fast. That devilish device the range master holds in his hand—the one that goes beep—not only signals that it’s time to start shooting, it keeps a time track of every shot you fire. Shot timers sell for about a hundred bucks, and one might be just what you need to help yourself get a better score. In 1982, Ronin Colman, a shooter who attended the very first class ever held at Gunsite, in 1976, created the PACT Championship Timer. Since then, shot timers have become so reliable and prolific, they’re used to decide the outcome of shooting matches worldwide. But shot timers are also used during training…