BowCast Blog

After an extended hiatus over hunting season, I’m back to blog.  My apologies for hooking some of you on the backcountry blogging, then leaving you, cold turkey to suffer through withdrawals on your own.  I just finished up my last trip a couple of weeks ago to North Dakota.  I went anticipating a mule deer hunt, but ended up spending a handful of evenings in a stand for whitetail in arctic conditions.  With the wind chill, the temperatures were in -10 to -20.  I’ve determined you have to be a pretty hearty soul to live in North Dakota.  I hunted with my recurve and unfortunately was not able to capitalize on the opportunities that were presented to me. 

   Now, like the rest of you, I’m busy dreaming and planning for ’09.  The drawings will be approaching in a few months and I’m looking for a new area to put in for mule deer in Colorado.  I’ve decided to give it one more year in my old stomping grounds in Nevada, despite a serious decline in the trophy quality over the past few years.  Too many rifle tags taking out the older age class deer when the snow pushes them down to the lower elevations.  I’d pass on it in ’09, but I’ve decided to take my wife on my next trip up there.  I’d like here to see the mountains that have meant so much to me the past 10 years.  I don’t anticipate finding many big bucks, so to make the hunt more interesting, I’ll be packing my recurve instead of the compound. 

I’ve gotten quite a few inquiries over the years about solo bivouac hunting and how I overcome my fears. Spending time; hours, days or a week or more alone can be challenging for anyone. Living in a society where close and frequent contact with other people are the norm year around for one’s whole life, suddenly finding yourself alone in unfamiliar surroundings with no one to depend upon but yourself can be disconcerting, to say the least. The time I get to spend out in the mountains alone often makes my most treasured memories. But, it wasn’t always like that. I struggled when I first started hunting solo. Actually, my first solo bivouac attempt was aborted. I was only 17, but had all of the ambition youth are known for. I’d backpacked into the Yolla Bolly Wilderness from a campground base camp. I didn’t know anyone at the campground, but the presence of other people was comforting and the thought that I might bail out on my mission because I’d get lonely never even crossed my mind.

 

I’ve gotten a handful of requests to post my gear list. Over the last decade or so, I’ve tested a bunch of backpacking and bowhunting gear in the backcountry. Some of it has stayed, much of it has not. I continue to try out every new gadget on the market that seems like it could improve my equipment list or my experience in the outdoors. What I’ve got in my pack works well for me and I feel is some of the best stuff out there on the market.

 

Tent:

We survived another 102 miles on the PCT.  A couple of the highlights; we covered about 50 miles through the desert—the other 50 through the mountains and snuck through about 30 miles of trail that was closed due to a recent fire.  By the second day, Kyri had 6 blisters, 3 matching ones on each foot.  I started off loading weight out of her pack, then carried the whole thing on the 4th day.  The last day we started out at 8,800 feet with snow on the ground and temps in the low 40’s and descended to the desert floor north of Palm Springs, where we were greeted by 105 degree temps.  My water filter gave out on us the second day.  The filter needed to be replaced prior to the trip.  In my infinite optimism (stupidity), I figured we could squeak one more trip out of it.  That left me drinking out of the most suspect water source we encountered on the entire trip on the second day.  On day 3 we detoured by a restaurant where I borrowed a couple of ounces of bleach.  2 drops per liter of water and it will render even the nastiest water safe to drink after 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, I seemed to have contracted a case of giardia from that one untreated water source.  I spared my wife and let her have the balance of the filtered water we had when we came on the stagnant stream I got the water out of.  She cast me one of those sideways glances when I stated we were going to need to get water out of it—never mind the tad poles and slime.  When you are in the desert, there aren’t a whole lot of options for water, sometimes you have to take what you can get.  Unfortunately, I didn’t get the new filter from MSR to test out before we left.  But it is good to know that giardia isn’t a totally disabling experience, though I certainly wouldn’t recommend you go out and contract it to see how your body responds to it. 

   Another thing I found interesting was how much our appetites decreased.  Last year we dumped about 8-10 lbs of food halfway through the trip when I realized we had brought way more than we were eating.  Remembering that from last year, we reduced the contents of our daily food bags, but still ended up with too much.  It seems the heat really reduced our interest in eating and hiking for a week hadn’t quite got our bodies to recognize the increased metabolism and thus need for more calories.  On the last day, we ran across another hiker that was lamenting a 3 day food shortage.  He was going to have to make a 9 mile round trip detour in town to be able to re-supply to make it to his next food shipment (he was a through hiker).   We dumped our large food cache off on him.  It was like seeing a kid on Christmas morning, especially when he discovered the elk jerky.  I was happy to be relieved of the weight and help out a fellow hiker.  Later that day we ran into a European kid that he had shared some of the jerky with and he was thanking us as if we had been handing out pockets full of gold.  Good stuff, that jerky is!

I thought I would call out one of the comments I received about the bear mauling directly on the blog.  Thanks for the question, my response is below. 

 

South is off on a pig hunt, but before he left, he was sure to send me some pics of his bear mauling that he mentioned in his last blog entry. I thought you would all be interested, so I posted here so you can all see. Below pics are showcased in Cameron Hanes' book, Backcountry Bowhunting . Funny thing is, South hasn't even shared with you how he has also been bit by a Rattlesnake, and pawed at by a Mountain Lion. But I leave it up to him as to when and where he shares those stories with all of you. Gotta respect this guy's dedication to the backcountry hunting!

 

 Sorry for the delay in getting this post up.  It has been a little crazy around here.  As promised I'm going to tell you about the water filters I was at the Outdoor Retailers Show.  The first one is from MSR.  The filter is smaller and lighter than any others that I've tried and it blows the doors off of the competition in speed.  The Hyperflow Pump is what they are calling it and it weighs just 7.8 oz.  It is hard to expect great performance when you are getting such a compact, lightweight unit, but the manufacturer boasts 2.75 liters per minute!  That is almost 3 times the speed of most of the filters out there.  I tried it at the show and was surprised at how little effort it required to use.  Also, a great boon to it's design is that it is field serviceable; no disposable cartridge to plug halfway through your trip.  It takes a couple of minutes to disassemble the pump to backflush the system, but the inconvenience is well worth the benefit.  I've had my disposable filter pump leave me high and dry when filtering murky water. 

   Another new pump that I thought was worth adding to your equipment list is the Platypus Cleanstream.  It is a gravity filter with using the same filter technology as the MSR Hyperflow.  With this filter, simply fill the 4 liter bag, elevate it above the other and the inline filter does the work for you.  It is spec'd at 4 liters in under 2 1/2 minutes!  Cleaning the filter on this one is even easier, simply disconnect your "dirty" water bag and elevate the filtered bag.  The filter gets back flushed, dumping the sediment back onto the ground.  Unfortunately, I don't have a weight spec to provide you with, but their stuff is usually really light.  I'd expect no different from this one. I'll be field testing one or the other of these filters on the next leg of the Pacific Crest Trail my wife and I are hiking next month and I'll give you feedback if either is anything less than excellent. 

 

   Adding extra weight to your pack is something we all try to avoid.  If a piece of equipment can be omitted from your pack and it doesn't effect the outcome of your hunt, then it takes a pretty strong argument to carry the extra weight.  For some, the stove is one of those items.  Many make the argument that they'd rather just eat MRE's and ditch the stove.  While I'd agree that we're hardly out there trying to have a resort experience, keeping your body fueled is a very crucial part to your success in the field.  I've written more in depth about the weight trade-off for MRE's vs. freeze dried in past issues of Eastmans', and Cam Hanes included a couple of those pieces in his book Backcountry Bowhunting.  The jist of it is, you can carry heavier food (MRE's), or carry a stove and lighter freeze dried food and oatmeal.  If you have ever lived off of MRE's for a week, you'll certainly feel for our troops.  While some of them aren't bad at all, the diet gets old pretty quickly.  A hot meal from the wide variety of freeze dried meals available, plus the bonus of coffee or hot chocolate in the morning pretty well seals the deal for most of us backcountry hunters. 

Besides providing a more comfortable nights' sleep, sleeping pads provide another important function; insulation. I vividly recall one bivouac trip I made. In an effort to shave a couple of pounds or so off of my packs weight I decided to leave my pad at home. Several hours into the night, with chattering teeth I realized what that second function was. Since that time, technology and innovation has reduced the weight and bulk, now providing several options at around and just under a pound.

 

One of the bulkiest items on your gear list for a bivy hunt is probably your sleeping bag. If it has not been replaced in the last couple of years, chances are you can not only shave off some weight, but also significantly reduce the bulk. Almost all of the major sleeping bag manufacturers are offering sub 2 pound 3 season down bags now. Some have reduced the weight down to as little as a single pound and can be stuffed into a sack half the size of a nerf football. For my early season hunts in August and the first week of September I like a bag rated at about 30-35 degrees. Any later in the high country and you are increasingly flirting with the chances of sub-freezing temperatures. For those hunts I drop down to a 20 degree rating. Some of my favorite bags are from Western Mountaineering, Marmot, Mountain Hardware and Feathered Friends.

 

Down is graded by measuring how many cubic inches it takes to weigh one ounce. A 600 fill is 600 cubic inches per ounce. Several things to keep in mind as you shop for a featherweight bag is the higher quality the down, the lighter the weight and the better the insulation it provides. You should be looking for a minimum of 700-fill-power, with 800-900 being preferred. The difference between a 600 and a 800-fill-power bag of the same temperature rating can be over half a pound. The higher the number, the greater the loft and compatibility for the same fill weight.

My goal in this blog is to help you learn the ropes of backcountry hunting. Whether you are a seasoned veteran or have never spent the night out in the wilderness, I think there will be something for everyone. I invite your questions, comments and critiques. The first several entries I plan on covering gear choices in greater detail than I was able to cover on the podcast. After that I’ll go into some specifics about mule deer hunting in the alpine. As I get input and feedback, the blogs will likely take off on other tangents of the readers’ interests.

Through the years I’ve spent in the mountains, I’ve had more than one fellow bowhunter comment that I put in way more effort trying to fill my tags than I need to. I the west can be hunted without the burden of a backpack, but that is one of the things that appeals to me. My first bivouac trip was a solo venture when I was 17 years old. Since that time I’ve spent the majority of my hunting seasons well off the beaten path. I love getting to hang around a campfire in the evenings with a couple of buddies, swapping old stories, but even more anticipated is throwing a pack load of gear on my back and leaving base camp for a few days. Maybe I was born a couple of centuries too late, but I love the feeling of being the first person to glass a big canyon or distant ridge (even if it is just for that season). Often times I leave base camp with a specific destination in mind, only to get lured further and further. Having a bivy camp on my back gives me the freedom of wandering further and longer without having to worry about what I’m going to eat or where I am going to sleep. It gets me further into the backcountry, farther away from other hunter pressure, provides me the flexibility to be able to move if I encounter hunter pressure and allows me to hunt undisturbed animals. The “work” part of carrying my pack all day has become just another part of the hunt; I don’t think of it as an anchor, rather a liberating piece of equipment. It gives me great satisfaction knowing I’m carrying all I need to survive for up to a week at a time.