I went on my first hunt ever at age 35.
I haven’t really thought of it as a thing I needed to do.
I’m highly educated. I have worked in lots of white collar industries and expect to continue to do so for the rest of my career.
So why hunt? And maybe as a follow up, why hunt elk?
I think my journey to hunting elk—and I don’t know that is over—has been long an circuitous. Actually that describes most of life, so I guess that’s fair.
But a decent place to start is the attitude I had after I started working in the real world. I made good money. I made enough to support my family and to spare and I could shop at trendy places like Trader Joe’s and thinks I was shopping healthy.
I wasn’t. (Trader Joe’s doesn’t even try to be a health food store. It’s fresh food selection is worse than basically everywhere. )
Point being: I though I was doing goods things.
Over the next few years, I changed jobs, made more money, but I felt like something was missing. During that time, Jordan started gardening. Really, she started power gardening (after a miserable failure of a first year). And we realized it would be very easy to grow almost all of our own food.
We grew hundreds and hundreds of pounds of vegetables—and it was clear that wasn’t the extent of our capability.
But we weren’t doing much about protein.
Chicken eggs only go so far. And with protein needs being about 125-150% of US recommended daily value, not nearly enough for me.
We overstretched beyond our capacity in 2021 and tried farming, with the intent to do animals (beyond chickens) in 2022, but when we realized we don’t like raising animals bigger than chickens, that went out the window.
But the protein need remained.
We could buy fractional beeves. We did that several times. But there’s always a question of “has this beef been treated well it’s whole life or just some of it, but you’re pricing it as though it has been pastured it’s whole life?”
Sometimes with beef, you just don’t bother asking, you just shut up and pay the price.
On the periphery of my YouTube watching were channels like MeatEater, Cameron Hanes, and Joe Rogan. All presented different aspects of hunting. MeatEater and Steven Rinella focus a lot on the food and a bit on the conservations aspect. Cameron Hanes is a physical monster—driven to be so to be successful hunting elk. And Most people wouldn’t expect a comedian and (possibly) most popular podcaster on earth to be an avid hunter.
But over maybe three years with those things going in the back ground of all the gardening and farming, I realized hunting—and there are many ways to do it—may be a good way to pursue protein.
But how does a non-hunter get into hunting.
You don’t follow the path I did.
You find someone who hunts to be your friend and they help you along the way.
Yes there’s YouTube content. But it’s really about getting better or optimizing draw odds. And none of that is tuned to the new hunter.
And there is a niche there. But it’s not really valuable because every state is so different that there isn’t enough room for an audience state by state.
Being the general soloist I am, I tried to do it all myself.
And what do you know? The first hunt I ended up on was because I basically invited myself along with someone who knows what he’s doing.
I got kinda lucky. I worked alongside this guy in the past and I knew he was a workhorse and I knew I could mostly keep up with him. (And the type of hunt I was looking for was a mountainous western elk hunt.)
(There are lots of types of hunts. And they wall have their pluses and minuses and their proponents and detractors.)
My friend brought two other friends and one of them brought two kids. All of whom had been out before and had been involved with harvesting an animal and retrieving it from the kill site. (Hard work with heavy meat on your back. Especially in the mountains. Or so I’ve heard.)
So I was able to observe seasoned hunters with children and be tutored and trained at the same time. Kind of a perfect scenario for me. For reasons that other posts explain in depth.
So what did I learn?
People hunt for different reasons. They hunt different intensities. And they are willing to go to different lengths.
Perhaps an explanation.
My friend Mikey runs a company that has 25 employees and does several million a year in sales. He “goes hunting” with his family every year, but might have drawn a tag on year in four. He hunts with rifle only and for him, it’s mostly about being with family he doesn’t see the rest of the year. If he gets his deer, he gets his deer.
The friend I went hunting with, Trevor, has worked construction his whole life, and hunting is his personal escape. He goes bear hunting in the spring (and fall) and elk and deer hunting in the fall, and he occasionally goes on big out of state trips. He hunts for meat, but also go get out into nature, recenter himself, and for the excitement of matching wits with nature.
Timmy and Tommy—Trevor friends who came with us—both work very white collar jobs, but as Idahoans, they are lifelong hunters and it was something they loved to do with their dad. So they do it together and with their kids (Timmy brought his two boys).
Tommy played camp support because he didn’t have a tag and had a recent shoulder injury, so drawing a bow was out of the question. But he still came, because he loved the wild and wanted to be in nature. For Tommy it wasn’t about the meat. It was about family.
Tommy got rewarded because he was with Trevor when Trevor called in a big 6×6 bull to about 30 yards. Apparently having something that big screaming at you is an adrenaline rush.
I spent most of my time hunting with Timmy. We were in better shape than everyone else and we’re willing to go and extra mile or two for experiences.
I also got the impression Timmy wanted to practice hunting differently than he had in the past, so we were trying some stuff out he wasn’t super practiced at. We ended up doing 28 miles or so in the mountains over three days.
Over those three days, I saw elk once. I heard a lot of things crashing it trees that might have been elk. But not so clearly that the sounds were definitely elk.
And you know what? Seeing those elk and taking that picture—despite how grainy and zoomed it is—was “success” for me this week.
I don’t think that will constitute success in the future. But for the experience this year it was fine.
A few conclusions:
People hunt for different reasons. Meat, being in nature, conservation (not anyone I was with), camaraderie and friendship. I don’t think anyone really goes because “I get to kill something”. It seems for many people, the killing is the worst part.
Yes, there can be coarse (to the outsider) language used to describe the event, and the killing shot is always impactful, but there is much more gained and shared than only the kill.
Jordan and I have talked a lot about how you become close to the people you suffer with—the people you work alongside—the people who share your struggles.
Not everyone wants the same experiences—I wanted to harvest an animal and that was my primary intent. But for Timmy and Tommy, the harvesting was an afterthought. “If we get it, we get it. If not, we’re having fun.”
And that was a good lesson in enjoying the journey.