Missouri may be home to some of the biggest whitetail bucks in the country, but it’s also home to one of the most important innovations in all of archery history: the invention of the compound bow. In a display of genuine Show-Me-State pride, state ...
Archery
Get in Bow Shape: A 21-Day Archery Lesson Plan
Are you hitting high, low, or burying carbon in the dirt? Yup, I’ve been there. Shaking so bad that you struggle to bring your pin down on a patch of brown hair, and when you do, you jab the release like a prizefighter? I was president of that camp ...
Chuck Adams, Archery Legend, and His New World Record Sitka Buck
The history of archery hunting has a short but highly venerated list of practitioners. Names like Howard Hill, Fred Bear, Saxton Pope, Art Young, Ishi, and “Chief” Compton populate it, and Chuck Adams is definitely included among them. He’s the last ...
Bowhunting Gear: How to Diagnose and Fix Your Setup in the Offseason
Fall is now a memory. For many reading this, it was an epic season of close encounters with a few blood-soaked arrows. For others, fall was, as it can often be, a season on the brink. Some of you want to delete the past few months from your memory ...
How To Not Die In Your Treestand Safety Harness
Since states began mandating hunter safety courses, the number of hunting accidents, especially those involving firearms, has decreased dramatically. But every year, we read about a few tragic cases in which deer hunters die after falling out of a ...
World Record Bulls: The Top 5 Typical Archery Elk
There are big bull elk. Then there are really big, world-record-class bull elk. The Pope and Young Club awards North America’s finest archery-killed wapiti by size in two categories: typical or symmetrical antlers and non-typical or unsymmetrical ...
Trophy Elk: The Top 5 Non Typical Archery Bulls of All Time
An archery stalk on any elk is no easy task, but getting bow-and-arrow close to the biggest bull elk in the world is another thing altogether. Elk are uber wary, have highly evolved senses, and tend to vanish if they even think something isn’t right. ...
World Record Whitetail: The Top 5 Non-Typical Archery Bucks
No big game animal causes more American hunters to burn vacation days and abandon all adult responsibilities than whitetail deer. From New England to Florida, New Jersey to Montana, and in all the bread-basket, rust-belt, and Great Plains states in ...
World Record Whitetail: The Top 5 Typical Archery Bucks
There are non-typical whitetail deer with racks that are mind-blowingly massive, almost alien sculptures of bone. Typical whitetails are not that. Typicals are the clean, symmetrical, even “ideal” headgear that most hunters imagine when they think of ...
So You Want to Shoot an Archery World Record?
Potential world record big game animals exist no matter your home range. (There’s a freak in every crowd.) But some regions are just downright better than others when producing archery world-record animals. What makes these places so unique? No one ...
Is the New Garmin Xero A1i Pro Bow Sight Ethical?
Garmin just released the newest iteration of their Xero electronic bow sight. The Xero A1i Pro offers significant updates to the original. While many archery talking heads are making noise about this technological leap forward, not many are asking ...
6 Veterans Who Are Killing It on the Archery Range
Archery as a pastime has spread like wildfire among veterans. Quieting their minds and focusing on the simple task of aiming and shooting an arrow is therapeutic for some. Economically minded shooters can reuse arrows over and over until they break, ...
Bowhunter Finds Human Remains Identified as Hunter Missing Since 1968
An Idaho bowhunter stumbled upon a set of human remains on Friday, Sept. 17, while hunting near Hayden Creek in the Idaho Panhandle National Forests. When authorities arrived, they found a rotted wallet with the body that identified it as a fellow ...
Colorado Hunting Accident: Muzzleloader Hunter Shoots, Kills Bowhunter
A rifle hunter unintentionally shot and killed a bowhunter chasing elk in Colorado last week. It's the kind of nightmare scenario hunting safety instructors use to drive home the importance of properly identifying your target. On Friday, Sept. 17, ...
How To Be a Better Archer: Focus on These 5 Bowhunting Fundamentals
If you don't take a purposeful approach to shooting your bow with a focus on bowhunting fundamentals, things will get worse before they get better. I used to track the number of arrows I shot per day on a calendar. After all, the more carbon you ...
Breaking the Curse: A Decade-Long Elk Hunt
The first year I hunted elk, I drove from New York to Colorado in my beat-up Tacoma and camped high on a forest service road. I wanted to kill my first one solo and with my bow. I hiked in by myself on the second day of the season. A few miles deep, ...
The 8 Best Archery Pro Shops From Every Region of the United States
Not all archery pro shops are created equal. The best have competent bow technicians, a wide inventory spanning all budgets, and a welcoming, friendly, instructional atmosphere. Unfortunately, a shop that has all of these attributes is often the ...
Bowhunting Elk: 7 Last-Minute Efforts That Can Improve Your Chances
The bugling was nearly constant as my guide made cow calls, and I cracked sticks to impersonate live elk. It took at least 10 minutes, but our ploy was more than the satellite bull could stand. With the wind blowing in our faces, the bull cruised ...
What the Pros Use: Archery Gear at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games
Archery was added to the Olympics at the Paris Games way back in 1900. Many facets of Olympic archery have changed over the last 120 years, including the bows and arrows used, the attire, and regulations. Today, the standard ...
A Guide to Olympic Archery in the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games
Punching paper targets might not be as thrilling as sending arrows through bugling bull elk, but Olympic archery is still exciting to watch — especially when you know exactly what's happening. Archery is one of the sports that will be ...
Bowhunting Starter Kit: Everything You Need to Archery Hunt
So, you want to bowhunt. Welcome. It's rewarding, and in many ways, a life-changing pursuit. There is, however, a learning curve. There are several learning curves, actually, the first of which is gear, so using a bowhunting starter kit to make sure ...
Zuckerberg Shoots Bow, Throws Spear, and We Don’t Know WTF To Think
When not flagging your drunk uncle Larry’s anti-vax posts, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently shoots bows and throws spears. No, seriously. In his trademarked blue shirt and sunglasses, the fifth-richest man in the ...
Archery and Shit Talking: The Second Annual Veteran Adaptive Athlete Shoot
The second annual Veteran Adaptive Athlete Shoot (VAAS) took place at the Black Rifle Ranch in Boerne, Texas, in April. Inspired by the Total Archery Challenge, VAAS is a way for adaptive athletes — particularly wounded veterans — to take on their ...
Starter Kit: Build a Backyard 3D Target Range
Smacking a bag target, arrow after arrow, is hardly good bowhunting practice. Often, it’s done in the wide open and on flat ground in pleasant weather. Plus, the bull’s-eye is blatantly obvious. Anyone who can hold a bow with minimal training can ...
Starter Kit: Build Your Own Home Bow Shop With 8 Must-Have Tools
A loud bugle pierced the mountain air and woke me like a double-shot espresso. The bull was on a mission to confront another bull bugling in the background. I nocked an arrow and assumed the position as he appeared about 70 yards out from the timber. ...
The 7 Oldest Pope & Young Archery Records
If you’ve spent any time with old-guard archery hunters at the local greasy spoon or in the garage after a day in the field, you’ve heard the words “there was a time when” on more than one occasion. Those words are faithfully followed by stories of ...
Doing Epic Shit Together: BRCC’s Veteran Adaptive Athlete Shoot
Sitting in a mobile chair that bore more resemblance to a tank than a wheelchair, Paralympic athlete and Army veteran Lia Coryell drew back her compound bow. The meadow was briefly silent, save the occasional chirping of birds and rustling of live ...
Archery Exercises That Will Bulletproof Your Bow Draw
It takes a metric crap-ton of reps to be a proficient archer, let alone a good one. There’s so much to work on — drawing, anchoring, finding your sight picture, not getting target panic, and the list goes on. But going from zero to dozens of bow ...
Kifaru’s Aron Snyder on Compound Bow Versus Stick Bow
Not only is Aron Snyder the president of Kifaru International, a company that specializes in extreme outdoor-adventure gear, but he’s also an avid traditional bowhunter. Having hunted exclusively with a traditional recurve (which he both jokingly and ...
Going primal: The challenge of traditional bow hunting
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 ...