Sometimes, characters in movies make inexplicably stupid decisions, the kind that make you scream at the screen in fury. In survival movies, when the stakes are incredibly high, dumb characters making dumb choices is even more infuriating than it ...
10 of the Best River Misadventure Movies Ever Made
The thing about taking a river trip is that it’s kind of a one-way affair, and once you’re committed, you have to just take the ride or hike out. Most river adventures in movies go bad when a group either accidentally navigates into unexpected rapids ...
PBS Hemingway Documentary Gets to The Man Behind the Legend
An ordinary man has many limitations, especially in the way of ability and longevity. A legend, however, continues to grow and reshape itself, uncaring of the passage of time. The bigger the legend, the more it evolves as it grows, often becoming ...
30 Action Movie References in ‘Tropic Thunder’
Tropic Thunder (2008) is a comedy about a fictional award-winning movie, which was made about the ordeal behind the making of another fictional movie, which was never actually finished or released. See, there’s the real movie Tropic Thunder, and ...
How ‘Dances With Wolves’ Changed Westerns Forever
The evolution of a film genre usually happens gradually, with different films offering incremental innovations or outside-the-box thinking until they all add up to a significant gear shift. After all, genre fans are genre fans for a reason: They like ...
The Tools You Need To Process an Entire Moose, Solo
Trevor Thompson told the Free Range American podcast recently about the time he processed an entire moose by himself on a hunt in British Columbia. He ended up filling his tag with a great bull early in the week, so he had the time and ...
Understanding Blades: The Survival Knife
There is no such thing as a survival knife. Knives have been called that and have been marketed that way — as some kind of magical tool that will save your ass in some unlikely situation. But that idea is inherently flawed. Sure, some general ...
2 Contemporary Movies That Get Hunting Right — Mostly
For the many unfavorable, unrealistic depictions of hunters and hunting in movies, you’ll find only a small handful that feature more positive, truer-to-life examples. Two films from the past couple of decades stand out in this regard, and believe it ...
The Best and Worst Climbing Movies Ever Made
A team of Nepalese climbers just became the first people to ever summit K2 in the winter. The group of 10, including nine Sherpa and one Magar, paused 70 meters short of the summit, which stands at 28,251 feet, to wait for everyone to catch up before ...
Meet Cal Fire’s Pranay Manghirmalani
It takes a special kind of person to stride into the hellscape of a raging wildfire and do battle with an actual force of nature. Pranay Manghirmalani is one of those people. He talked with Free Range American about where he’s from and why he does ...
Why Hollywood Never Gets Hunting Right
In trying to think about great hunting-focused movies, I came up woefully short, and the few movies I could conjure were mostly period pieces specifically about hunting in Africa. The most current movie I could muster is Wind River (2017), though ...
10 of the Best Archery Movie Moments of All Time
A bow is a great weapon for a movie hero to wield. It connects them to warriors throughout time and allows them to take advantage of a bow’s stealth and accuracy (in the right and experienced hands), the same reasons hunters value them today. While ...
Why Hunters Should Eat Mountain Lion and Other ‘Bad’ Meat
In a recent talk on the Free Range American podcast, hunter, biologist, and filmmaker Donnie Vincent talked about a mountain lion he’d arrowed in British Columbia and how much everyone in camp had loved the meat from the big cat. “We’d cook a ...
The Real Hugh Glass Versus What We Saw in ‘The Revenant’
When The Revenant came out in 2015, it made a big splash for a few reasons. The film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio earned a best actor Oscar for his depiction of legendary mountain man Hugh Glass. The bear-attack scene made headlines, too. But is it real? ...
Do a 7-Day Smartphone Detox This Holiday Season
When times are tough — like pretty much every day of 2020 — a lot of us reflexively retreat into our phones and the alternate reality of social media. It’s a dopamine hit that’s immediate and conditioned. But deep down, we know we spend too much time ...
Becoming the Squirrel: Hunters vs. Vegans on Social Media
Maybe hunters and vegetarians — and even vegans — aren’t all that different? Biologist, explorer, and filmmaker Donnie Vincent raised this question in a recent chat he had with Evan Hafer on the Free Range American podcast. “I don’t like the ...
Why ‘Unforgiven’ Is the Best Western Movie Ever Made
It’s painfully easy to romanticize the Old West. Whether reading stories or watching them unfold on a screen, people can’t help but gravitate toward the idea of a righteous gunslinger with a dusty brand of chivalry — or at the very least, a loose ...
How Shooting an MP5 Can Make You a Better Archer
Whenever learning a new discipline or teaching a first-timer how to do something, the most important thing is finding a way to relate to the individual. If someone can tie a new task to something they know well, it invariably “clicks” in a way that ...
Best of the West: ‘Wyatt Earp’ vs. ‘Tombstone’
Back in the 1990s, a weird thing happened in Hollywood. Movies with incredibly similar plots were made and released at almost the same time — with one inevitably tanking and the other being a box office smash. Sometimes, years later, people realized ...
The 10 Best Holiday Adventure Movies and What We Can Learn from Them
There’s just something about holiday movies. They’re like holiday music. After about 10 minutes, you’ve had enough for the whole year already and you have a weird urge to shove that candy cane you’ve licked into a sharp point right into your ear. ...
The True Story Behind ‘Jeremiah Johnson’: What We Know (and Don’t)
Back in the frontier days, it was not uncommon for the lives and deeds of famous gunfighters and personalities of the Wild West to be greatly exaggerated in newspaper stories and dime novels, until an entire alternate, bloviated life history attached ...
Relax in the Shot: Tension Only Magnifies a Miss
It happens to every hunter and every target shooter: A particularly difficult target presents itself, and the stakes are high. Naturally, you make an effort to try harder, to bear down and concentrate — to not fuck it up. But those who know, know ...
Setting a Wingsuit World Record
In 2015, Andy Stumpf, a retired Navy SEAL, broke the standing world record for absolute distance flown in a wingsuit, covering 18.257 miles and falling 36,500 feet. It was a hell of an accomplishment, considering he volunteered for the undertaking ...
10 of the Best Adventure Movies Ever Made
A good adventure movie has a few necessary ingredients. You need a protagonist, or a group of them. There also has to be a mission — a goal, a reason for setting out. Then there’s the journey. It can be a literal journey — into space, up a river, or ...
The Top 10 Movies NOT To Watch Before an Outdoor Adventure
When preparing for an adventure outdoors, it’s important to have your gear squared away — and your head squared away, too. To that point, here are the top 10 movies you want to avoid at all costs before a big trip into the wild. These films provide a ...
How a US Air Force Combat Controller Survived a Double Parachute Failure
Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is scary. Having your main chute fail? Even worse. Having the backup fail? Shit just got real. And that's just where Jared “CCT Peaches” Pietras, an Air Force Combat Controller, found himself during what was ...
