We sat under an old blue tarp trying to stay dry in a stout rain while glassing a narrow drainage in the Bitterroots. I had just killed a good bear in Idaho a few days before and pressed on into Montana hoping to tag No. 2. “What are you going to do ...
Food
The 5 Best Summer Barbecue Recipes That’ll Punch You Right in the Mouth
Barbecue season is here, and it doesn't matter whether you burn a charcoal kettle grill, fire up the propane, slow-roll pellet smoke, or have hickory chunks soaking — meat and heat are summer AF. Of course, it's easy to get into a barbecue ...
Survival Garden 109: Harvesting Your Crops
When is the best time to harvest the homegrown gems from your vegetable garden? When they’re ready. Harvesting time depends on when your seeds or seedlings hit the soil and how long it takes them to germinate. If you didn’t track the dates, simply ...
Cheesy Good Classic Wild Dove Poppers
For years, I avoided wild-game poppers. I thought they were pretty unimaginative. Deep down, I knew they were delicious, but the cliche appetizer wasn’t the kind of thing I got excited about. But as the dove breasts in my freezer reached the verge of ...
Survival Garden 108: Preserving Your Harvest
What good is a survival garden if you have to eat everything right away? Come July, it’s all about the harvest — picking, eating, and stockpiling for a rainy day. That means food preservation and finding the best method to keep you in veggies all ...
Star-Spangled Burgers: 3 Wild Game Masterpieces To Celebrate America This Fourth of July
To celebrate Independence Day, we’ve put together three original recipes for wild game burgers that will help you win this Fourth of July weekend — a basic cheeseburger for weirdos unsure about venison, an Americana steakhouse classic, and a ...
This Bill Would Criminalize Hunting, Fishing, Trapping, and Animal Agriculture
Initiative Petition 13, or IP13, was filed in Oregon in November by a Portland animal-rights activist with almost 1,100 sponsorship signatures. In the latest development, if by July 8 supporters collect the 112,020 signatures required to move the ...
A Simple, Delicious Classic: The Panfish Po’Boy
If you’ve only caught one fish in your life, it was probably a panfish. Most anglers cut their teeth on bluegills, pumpkinseeds, and other little scrappers. While panfish aren’t known for being particularly challenging to catch, they're downright fun ...
Survival Garden 107: Dealing With Pests
At some point, your garden will fall under attack. Enemies range from mites to deer. These garden pests can devour root systems, eat seedlings, snip leaves, and crush veggies. A survivalist gardener must assess crop damage, identify the culprit, and ...
Field to Table: Biscuits and Wild Turkey Gravy
Biscuits and wild turkey gravy opened my eyes to the possibilities of wild-game cooking. I shot a bird that morning, and I decided to cook it up for a staff meal at the restaurant where I worked. My not-so-outdoorsy co-workers hammered it, then ...
Survival Garden 106: The Gardener’s Weekly Checklist
A weekly gardening checklist prevents “Garden Gone Wild” overgrowth in the backyard and ensures that your project gets the needed attention to produce the best veggies around. It’s all about watering, weeding, mounding, thinning, and guiding the ...
Discover the Life-Altering, Mind-Melting Power of a Wild Turkey Cheesesteak
A good cheesesteak will make you question your whole life and then scoop another dollop of Cheez Whiz. It's like driving too fast or smoking a cigarette — part of the appeal is flirting with the inevitable. It’s not a matter of if it will kill you, ...
How to Make Moonshine: A Down-and-Dirty Guide to White Lightning
No matter how hard I try, I can never escape my redneck past. In fact, the older I get, the more I just embrace it. When you say the words “West Virginia,” three things come to mind: Marrying your sister, John Denver, and kick-ass moonshine. Let me ...
Roadkill for Dinner: Why Harvesting Roadkill Is Actually Ethical and Tasty
Roadkill for dinner? In a short time, it could drive you to madness. After a while, your standards related to what you will and will not consume dramatically lower. In normal circumstances, one would not order a freshly trampled raccoon from a ...
Survival Garden 105: How To Plant a Garden
It’s time to plant a garden. Survivalist gardening is all about simplifying the planting process while not compromising crop production. It’s about growing kick-ass veggies while removing all the time-consuming, obsessive crap from gardening. It’s a ...
An Outdoorsy, American Spin on a Vietnamese Classic: The Wild Turkey Banh Mi
When the French colonized Vietnam, they brought their food with them. The baguette, pâté, crème caramel (or flan), and other culinary staples found their way into Vietnamese kitchens and melded into the already vibrant food culture. The Vietnamese ...
Local Smoke: 5 of the Best Barbecue Joints in America
Barbecue is personal. It captures the flavor of a region, a community, or a culture. It celebrates struggle as much as it does success. Those who work in wood, fire, smoke, and meat are storytellers. They carry on traditions, which is why we flock to ...
How To Eat Everything: A Guide to Edible Flowers
The landscape is edible. Sure, pick the wrong mushroom and you might take an unexpected trip — or die. Those odds are pretty low but scary for some nevertheless. A better, more risk-averse starting block for new foragers is flowers. They’re generally ...
How to Make A Slow-Cooked Pulled Venison Roast
When speaking of venison recipes, tenderloins and backstraps tend to be the heroes, with some version of sausage or stew meat not far behind. The good-old venison roast simply doesn’t get the love and attention it deserves. In the slow-cooked meat ...
Survival Garden 104: Planting Cold Crops
Survivalist gardening is all about knowing what works ahead of time. Take planting cold crops, for example. Most people have accepted Memorial Day weekend as the start date for the planting season; however, experienced gardeners know late March to ...
Survival Garden 103: How To Prep Your Soil Before the Season Starts
If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that a global panic disrupts supply chains and creates scarcity. Many grocery stores issued buying limits on certain food items, prices skyrocketed, and store shelves thinned out. Realizations of just how dependent ...
Survival Garden 102: Starting Seeds Indoors
Assume an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, were to hit. Would you be able to provide food for your loved ones? Do you know how to take one seed and turn it into hundreds to ensure a food supply for years to come? Harvesting seeds and using them to ...
How To Make Kombucha at Home
Kombucha, a fermented tea enjoyed by pharaohs, emperors, and kings, is a popular homeopathic cure for sour stomachs, bloating, cultivating a healthy gut biome, and sluggish energy levels. It’s become a go-to drink for adventure athletes like ...
St. Patrick’s Day Moose Meat Shepherd’s Pie
North America is full of large and — if dealt with properly — tasty ungulates. One of which is the grand ole dinosaur of them all, the moose. Moose is a main staple at my table because of the incredible amount of meat from the big Canadian bull I ...
10 Cheap, Classic American Beers Made To Drink Outdoors
Our dads and granddads knew the deal. It didn’t matter the location or season. Beer was cheap, American, ice-cold, and best enjoyed outdoors. Hunting camp, fishing trips, summer league softball games, horseshoe pitching, drive-in movies, barbecues, ...
Survival Garden 101: Why You Need To Plan Before Planting
Free Range American celebrates self-reliance and self-sufficiency, and a survival garden is one essential part of that lifestyle. This growing season, we’re rolling out step-by-step directions taking you through the planting process while removing ...
Superfoods: How to Make Bone Broth
Endurance athletes have long known the power of salty, high-protein, high-fat bone broth for in-event energy and post-exercise recovery. Health food companies have caught on, too, with a litany of frozen broths and powder concentrates available now ...
5 Uncommon Chili Ingredients You Need To Try
You probably think your chili is the shit — and it could very well be. But even the best chili recipes leave room for some interpretation. A little moxie, instinct, risk. Chili is a fine balance of several senses in several dimensions. Yes, it’s a ...
Bison Sliders With Air-Fried Sweet Potatoes
The American buffalo — or yanasi in Cherokee, tatanka in Lakota, and scientifically Bison bison — has provided food for native North Americans for millennia, as well as served as the wildlife icon for the continent itself. In the not-so-distant past, ...
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 ...
