I started bow hunting with an old wooden recurve bow that my grandfather gave me for Christmas when I was 12 years old. It didn’t have much draw weight, but I still couldn’t hold it at full draw for very long. It didn’t have any sights, so I had to ...
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How To Stay Safe in Bear Country
Like most wild animals, bears have an innate and healthy fear of humans. If you’ve ever hiked through the Appalachian Mountains, the Northern Rockies, or the Alaskan bush, odds are you crossed paths with wild bears but never knew it. Bear attacks are ...
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, ...
Winter Storm Uri Devastates Texas Exotic Wildlife and Fish Numbers
Winter storm Uri has dealt a devastating blow to coastal fisheries and exotic game species in Texas, and with only preliminary reports and anecdotal data currently available, officials say it will take months to fully understand the scale of this ...
Private Land Access: How To Earn Permission for Hunting and Fishing
As a fly-fishing guide in Montana, I made a living on one of the country’s most prolific public river-access programs. The rivers I called home, like the Clark Fork and Bitterroot, wound through sprawling private ranches, but thanks to Montana’s ...
No Fences: Hunting Lions in Tanzania
International hunting videographer and photographer Dallas Hemeyer recently sat down with Evan Hafer on the Free Range American podcast to discuss the thrill of hunting lions in Tanzania. While all lion hunting is exciting, Hemeyer explained how ...
How To Start a Gun Dog
Once you hunt over a gun dog of your own, hunting birds without a dog, or hunting over anyone else’s dog, doesn’t feel like hunting anymore. It’s just walking around trying to shoot stuff. A bird dog connects you to the unseen world of scents in ...
Process a Moose Solo: Here are the Tools You’ll Need
Trevor Thompson told the Free Range American podcast recently about the time he was able to process a 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 ...
Doing What You Love: How Dallas Hemeyer Turned His Passion Into a Career
Most hunters reluctantly leave the woods to go to a job they may not particularly enjoy, but Dallas Hemeyer found a way to turn his passion for hunting into a lucrative career. During a recent chat with Evan Hafer on the Free Range American ...
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 ...
Suburban Hunting: Bringing Bowhunting to a Neighborhood Near You
It’s a sunny, abnormally warm early evening in October, and Taylor Chamberlin is about 20 feet off the ground. Looking down from his treestand through the dense canopy, he sees his target: a whitetail cruising for acorns. Chamberlin draws his ...
Why Hollywood Never Gets Hunting Movies 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 ...
Evan Hafer of BRCC Appointed to CSF Board of Directors
The Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) has announced the appointment of Evan Hafer, founder and chief executive officer of Black Rifle Coffee Company, to its board of directors. The CSF works directly with Congress, governors, and state ...
How To Pick Out Your First Deer Rifle
Whatever your reason for reading this piece, you’re somewhat interested in the subject of deer hunting — the adventure, the benefits of harvesting your own meat, or the camaraderie with friends and family. Choosing your first deer rifle shouldn’t be ...
Mountain Lion and Other ‘Bad’ Meat is Actually Delicious
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 ...
5 Reasons Why Hunting, Fishing, and Shooting Will Be Awesome in 2021
By pretty much every metric, 2020 was a dumpster fire. A global pandemic and civil unrest the likes of which haven’t been seen in a lifetime rocked the globe. Normal has gone out the window, and who knows when it will be back. But not everything is ...
Favorite Stories of 2020: Free Range American Editor’s Picks
We are young, but we are mighty. Free Range American launched in October and in just over 10 weeks we’ve published a deep-dive profile on an alt-country rocker, decided once and for all what exactly is the best hunting bino harness on the ...
Check Out Evan Hafer’s Awesome Father-Son Elk Hunt
Earlier this year, Black Rifle Coffee Company founder and CEO Evan Hafer took his dad, Ed, on an epic elk hunt in northeast Utah. The pair haven’t hunted together in 30 years, and hilarity ensues when old school meets new school on the ...
Carl Akeley: The Father of Modern Taxidermy
Carl Akeley had never been to Africa. Daniel Elliot, one of Akeley’s mentors and the curator for the zoology department of the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, invited the 32-year-old in 1896 on an eight-month expedition to Somaliland. Akeley ...
Hunting Trip for Veterans Could Be a National Model for Better Health
This article was originally published on Dec. 6, 2020, on Coffee or Die Magazine. Steve Houghton’s rugged face shone orange in the firelight as he pulled in a deep breath of the frigid Montana backcountry air and shifted in his ...
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 ...
Who the Fuck Is Tim Montana?
It’s about a quarter past 11 on a drizzly July morning in Butte, Alaska, when Tim Montana and his entourage roll into the dirt courtyard of Jeff Heard’s property and pour out of an SUV for a day of four-wheeling in the Alaskan ...
2020 FRA Holiday Gift Guide: The Hunting Wish List
When we’re not making coffee or printing T-shirts, you can bet the crew here at Black Rifle Coffee Company and Free Range American are out hunting. How into hunting is this team? The HR department gives away hunts for filling out internal work ...
A Vegan Hunter and Her First Deer Kill
G is a vegan. Her kids and my kids became friends at Montessori. On our first few play dates, we talked a lot about meat, about hunting, about her experience training as a veterinarian in factory farms. We talked about killing, and sadness, and ...
When an Archery Pronghorn Hunt Goes Wrong
Sitting in the cab of Miles Fedinec’s pickup, beside a dirt road on a high sage flat in western Colorado, I can see through binoculars a pronghorn buck. He’s a half-mile away, standing in the 94-degree heat, and my arrow is pinned ...
The Art of Conservation: Yeti Presents ‘Wild Sheep’
“There is no half way. After his first exposure, a man is either a sheep hunter or he isn’t. He either falls under the spell of sheep hunting and sheep country or he won’t be caught dead on another sheep mountain.” — Jack O’Connor This book is for ...
How to Prepare a Wild Turkey Thanksgiving
I was patiently sitting, hands nipped with cold, listening to my own breath and the occasional squeak sqwuak eek eek from Chad Mendes as he made turkey calls in the Kansas morning frost. We sat for hours, listening to the echoes of gobbles from ...
How the Hunter Recruitment Project Recruits New (Adult) Hunters
Have you wanted to get into hunting but didn’t have anyone to take you growing up? Did you hunt a few times in your early years with friends and family but became overwhelmed by the unending number of questions, such as What camouflage do I buy? Do I ...
Wildfires, Hunting, and Fishing: How the Fires Will Change Your Next Trip
I’m beyond angry. I’m pissed off, standing with two US Forest Service employees while my good friend and hunting partner Anthony Noriega, almost a mile away and 1,000 feet higher than us, inspects the ruins of a man-made fire high in the Idaho ...
How To Deal with Trespassers on Private Hunting Land
Realizing that someone has been trespassing on your hunting property is not a good feeling. This year after gaining permission to hunt a piece of land, I went to scout it in preparation for a friend coming to hunt. There were multiple trail cameras ...