Bowcast at the Bird – 2010 was a blast! I met Rocket Ryan (who was actually working a Professional Bull Riding event on Saturday night) in Salt Lake City, UT on Friday afternoon and we headed up to the Snowbird Ski resort to meet with Anthony Dixon and Shawn (Launch) Monsen with Full Moon Productions (FMP) for some dinner and get a feel for how the weekend was going to go. When we up to the ski resort, as usual, there was lots of old friends already there and one in particular, Corey Benge from Montana, (a very experienced and accomplished bowhunter in his own right) and we started kidding each other and ended up placing a $100 bet on who could shoot better on BATB’s (Bowcast at the Bird) SMOKER course. That night we also got to meet a lot of new bowhunters that I am pleased we can now call friends!

The next morning we jumped on the chair lift and up to shoot one of their four 3D courses in the beautiful high country of Utah. The courses were laid out in the picture postcard beauty of the Snowbird summer slopes with a beginners, intermediate, elite and the infamous SMOKER course.

The first day was a lot of fun and Rocket Ryan (who had been in TX working some rodeos and had not been able to bring his bow) ran camera to capture the shooting before he headed back down the mountain to work the West Jordon,UT PBR. Saturday we had a chance to shoot three of the 4 courses (all but the smoker course) and then I got to go to dinner with Mark Renner, Branden VanDyken, Joe Arpin, Cory Taylor and the rest of the be the decoy.com guys and Eric Nothe and the Pimpmybow.com crew. After dinner we hung out,visited, laughed, and caught up with everyone’s upcoming hunting schedule and swapped some great stories looking forward to the next day’s shooting (It was also fun to catch up with Chris Denham of Wilderness Athlete and his son Mark)

The last day brought us some rainy conditions and Rocket and I headed up to meet Corey Benge and the be the decoy.com crew and shoot the SMOKER coarse (where all the winning $$’s in the bet were going to be donated to Brodie Swisher and his Montana Youth Bowhunter Camps). The Smoker course was phenomenal! We had 10 targets of various yardages and extreme uphill and downhill shots (one was a mule deer at 80+ yards and you shot it for 67 yards). The kicker was you only got 2 arrows (1 primary and a mulligan) if you missed and broke it then you had to use your mulligan arrow for the rest of the round and if you missed and broke that you were DONE!) The scoring was a little different too, instead of the usual 12-10-18-5-0 score the small 12 ring was worth only 10 points and the 10 was worth 8. If you missed the vitals instead of getting the normal 5 points you got zero!

Unfortunately I missed and shattered my first arrow on target 3 and Corey was a rock. We had a great time and Corey had ice running through his vanes and at the end Outback Outdoors donated a $100 to Brodie’s camps as Corey put the whooping to me. (Branden VanDyken out shot both of us and he wasn’t in the bet!)

The event was a blast and Rocket and I even got a chance to have Shawn Monsen and Anthony Dixon help us draw for the 2nd Quarter Bowhunting Gear Giveaway for a set of new Nikon Monarch Binoculars (check back soon as we are going to be posting the video of the Nikon Bino winner soon). Already looking forward to next year and I feel we at Team OO are ready for this years archery big game season!

Thanks to Shawn, Anthony, Aneal Roney, Mathew Burrows… etc and all the Bowcast and FMP crew that put this event on …. YOU HAVE TO GO NEXT YEAR!!!

Hey all sorry it has been so quiet around here at OO. I have been SUPER busy!!

Just got back from a GREAT time with the family in California (Disneyland) and got to see it through the eyes of my 4 1/2 year old. It was awesome!

My wife Sandy and I hung out with all my family and then we went back to Phoenix to see Sandy’s dad and we met my little sis and her husband in Tucson AZ for a triathlon where Sandy and I posted personal bests! It was a ton of fun, too!

I have one more triathlon on Aug 7th in Denver then it will be hunting season and I should be in really good shape to chase critters in the Rocky Mountains with my bow.

Couple things…. I am heading to the Bowcast at the Bird (http://www.bowcastatthebird.com) with our FMP (Shawn “Launch” Monsen and Anthony Dixon) buddies this weekend and Rocket Ryan is flying into Salt Lake for a PBR Saturday night (Talk about killing two birds with one stone) to join me and capture it all on video.

Also we will be drawing (and videoing the drawing) the winner of our 2nd quarter Bowhunting Gear Giveaway (a set of Nikon Binos) and will get the results up as soon as I get back! Thanks so much for checking in with us in the off season and I promise I will get the last part of the turkey webisode up ASAP!

Trev

I am finishing up the final touches on my seminar (including some great Outback Outdoors hunting action videos) that I will be giving at the Thunderbird 3D shoot in southern NM this weekend. They are expecting 350-400 shooters from TX, AZ, NM, and even Mexico for this huge archery event in its 19th year.

I love talking bowhunting anytime, but this will be even more special as I will be back in my home state with my cousins who really helped me get into hunting to start with…. (and my dad will be running the video camera capturing the excitement as it happens for future Outback Outdoors Webisodes.)

I will be speaking on the heart of a bowhunter and why 10% of bowhunters kill 90% of the game… should be a good time! If you can make it over the Sacramento mountains, I would love to see you there!

Trev

Colorado mountain lion hunting in the high country is breath taking and humbling. First in the sheer beauty of the country they prowl in, but second reason it is breath taking is because OF the nasty rugged high country they call home.  As the mt. lion helps to maintain the natural balance of the ecosystem (which I learned from Adam the importance of that balance and how predators have a place in that) I feel as they these awesome killing machines help me to remember my place in it to.

I sit at my laptop typing this update feeling as if I just was hit by a truck. Yet I smile as I look back at the incredibly rugged mountains that in the last 3 days we were ALL over (Easy to be fond of them now as I take a sip of my coffee and adjust the back tension of my office chair).

The last day was by far the most physically demanding. We started at the bottom of a huge hogback and once again, having not been able to cut a track, “took a walk.” The elevation gain wasn’t too bad, maybe 2,000-2,200′ but the snow on the north and west slopes was brutal. We knew we had weather coming so this was going to be our last hurrah.

We climbed and climbed and sometimes could only go 4 to 5 steps in waist deep snow, then we would hit a rock bluff where we literally “rock climbed” up the faces of the red sandstone bluffs. If Nick, the dog handler, made it up he would toss down a rope making it much easier to traverse such sheer cliffs. May times the “pucker factor” was quite high and then we would make it to a south facing ridge where we could climb unimpeded by the deep snow.

We did cut 2 bobcat tracks and were lucky enough to pull the dogs off quickly so we didn’t loose a ton of time chasing them down. At about 1:45pm (we started a 8:30am) we had hit the top and made a big loop where we had hoped we would jump a lion laid up in the bluffs of those sunny south slopes. At that point the storm moved in, the wind picked up, and the snow started falling. I think it was at that point that we knew we had been out foxed by a master hunter, the mountain lion.

I can honestly say that this was not the funnest hunt I have ever been on, the company was GREAT, the dogs worked beautifully, but the intense physicality of this year’s lion hunt opened our (Adam and I) eyes to the fact that we should and could have been better prepared physically…. Altogether it was a great HUNT and although we didn’t kill it is one that will help motivate me the whole year… especially in the off season. Oh and next year we are going in late January or early February not the first part of muddy March!  BRING ON THE THUNDER CHICKENS!!

Question…. Normally we don’t show footage from this unless we kill or have an exciting encounter, would you like to see this experience and the thrill of the hunt ? Email me and let me know if this “experience” is something you would find entertaining and educational!  trevon@outbackoutdoors.net

Today was another rough  one, and unfortunately NO lion tracks… if Bobcat season hadn’t closed 4 days ago we would be in the money!

We didn’t cut any tracks on the snowmobile, so we “took another walk” with the dogs. Honestly it wasn’t near as rough as yesterday (Partly because I took my pack from 40 -20lbs and partly because we didn’t have to climb up through such a steep north facing canyon) we hit a lot more south facing slopes hoping to jump a lion “kicking it” in the sun.

Tomorrow we are going to hit it hard again, but will working some REALLY rough country. We are going to work up and over a hogback ridge that holds a lot of lions but it is pretty rugged. Conditions are really tough as we have DEEP (knee to waist) snow in some areas and then on the southern slopes it is turning muddy. We will have to luck into a fresh track tomorrow under those muddy conditions, but it will be SUPER fresh!

Wish us luck and hopefully tomorrow we tree a huge cat and can finish what we started! Here are a few more pics from today…

Colorado Mountain Lion hunting is one of the most rewarding and (to be honest) the most physically demanding bowhunts an archery hunter can do. Well, at least the way we at Outback Outdoors do it. We feel, as I have stated many times before, the hunt is not the shot but rather the hounds working the scent and the trail.

Today we probably went 6-7 miles in somewhat adverse conditions (3-4 foot of snow and mud) and NEVER turned up a track. Many hunting shows will never show that, but rather showcase the dogs being turned onto a hot track and the the next thing you know they are shooting a cat out of the tree. But to us at OO that is not the hunt.

Don’t get me wrong our way is not the “easy” way… showing the “casting” of the dogs over a 4-5 mile canyon deeply embedded in snow is extremely rough, but it is the REAL hunt! Today we turned no track but tomorrow, hopefully, will be better. I am “trashed” so I am going to bed, but until tomorrow good night, and remember there is only one Outback Outdoors!!