The Upland Soul

It’s August. Archery hunters are already putting animals in the freezer, but those of us rifle hunters and bird hunters need to wait at least another month before we can hit the field in earnest. It’s a great time to brush up on all of that deferred maintenance you’ve been avoiding to make sure you can make the most of the season without issues. I’m not a trained mechanic, but I did attend the…

On July 24, it was determined that a proposed ballot initiative disingenuously titled “People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions” Act (also referred to as IP28) failed to garner enough signatures to advance to the November ballot. As has been covered extensively, the bill would have outlawed hunting, fishing, trapping, and cattle ranching, among other extremely common and…

This year hasn’t exactly been going to plan, for reasons I won’t get into here. “Outdoor time,” beyond sitting on the back patio, has been limited. I suppose everyone was overdue for a bit of a break, because schedules and things miraculously opened up and the family was able to grab a cabin somewhere in the mountains of southern Utah. Naturally, I jumped at the chance to fish the headwaters of…

For almost a year and a half now, we’ve been bringing you stories about not drowning, bovines, steelheading, cool-looking ducks, excellent literature, and injuring your spouse on each Tuesday. Going forward, we’ll instead be posting on Wednesday, beginning next Wednesday, June 3, with another article from one of our favorite contributing writers, Dana Crandell. In the meantime, we hope you’re…

You can spend any amount of money you’d like to on a toilet — anywhere from $100 to several thousand dollars, apparently. All of them serve one essential function, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, even the expensive ones can’t save you from making a real mess of things. As it turns out, fly lines are very similar to toilets. In the world of trout fishing, you have perfectly serviceable…

Somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half outside of Las Vegas (depending where exactly in the city you are and how fast you drive) past the prisons but before the drone base, lies the small, weird little town of Cold Creek on the north side of the Spring Mountains. If you don’t live there and don’t feel like navigating pucker-inducing rock garden of Wheeler Pass, there isn’t a whole lot…

While I usually have no difficulty expressing my opinion on things, I’ve somewhat struggled to write this review. Most of the blame for this lies with the fact that I feel more than a little personal attachment to Robert (Bob) McMichael’s world of “Chukar Culture.” His blog, Chukar Culture will always be connected at the waist with chukar hunting in general for me. It was recommended to me over…

I hate clutter, and even more than that, I hate wasting my time. A big source of inefficiencies come from packing and unpacking from a trip, as well as cleaning off things that got dusty, wet, or (on a good day) bloody. Everyone has different ideas about how they like to run their gear, and mine are dictated by a limited amount of storage space, “car camping” vs. “backpacking” setups and the…

I enjoy puttering around SHOT Show each year. The bar for every product in this entire industry is so high now that things that used to be “revolutionary” are now just ho-hum — I’m looking at you, you people who just re-barrel a 700 action into a weird-looking synthetic stock. The hunting industry is also very consumeristic, which is fine with me. However, I like old guns and things made of…

Alright, here’s the deal. Every year, I brave the morass of humanity concentrated in the Venetian’s massive conference complex to find cool stuff relevant to the readership of this site. If you want to read all about the latest new striker-fired plastic thingy, there’s tons of places to read about that. (Actually, there were a couple cool new striker-fired guns from Smith & Wesson, so we might…

Howdy. After three years of writing, one year of editing, four years of re-editing and two years of more editing, I have finally completed my book, Threat Lev Fly Fishing in the 21st Century. Today’s the on-sale date and you can now buy it wherever books are sold, so I suppose now is as good as any other time to share a few thoughts about my newly-birthed child — what it is, what it isn’t, and…

If you have been in “the game” long enough, you undoubtedly have a bin, drawer, box, or otherwise a stash of holsters. Since holster fitment, comfort, and use-cases are just as inherently personal as your selection of the sidearm itself, one person’s dream holster will be another’s steaming pile of unusable trash. This is most common with concealed carry holsters, since your body type and…

As everyone has heard, the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.” While there’s some obvious comedic value to this aphorism when looking back on an unsuccesful hunt, its roots run deeper — as deep as you’d like them to go. In fact, it’s turtles all the way down. Every year, I head off into the mountains, or the desert, or the sagebrush…

In most of North America, big game hunting rules above all else. This makes sense, of course, given the great successes of the North American model of wildlife conservation over the last hundred years and the relative plethora of opportunities to hunt ungulates that most people in the country have available to them. These opportunities also provide the ability to fill that freezer with the…

I love fishing. And hunting. And camping in general. I hate packing and unpacking the truck after every trip, I hate losing things or not knowing where things are, and I hate burning precious morning fishing time fiddling around with my gear. If you’re reading this, I suspect that you share some of these sentiments, and also only have a finite amount of recreation time that you’d like to make…

One of the most vital, but frequently neglected, things for an outdoorsman to have in the field is a well-thought-out first aid kit. This goes doubly if you are bringing a dog in the field with you; as intelligent as (most of them) are, their curious nature and the sheer amount of distance that they cover increases the likelihood of a mishap, and we all need to be prepared. My primary objective…