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, ...
Archery
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 This Year
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 ...
Off Script: Free Range Q&A With Correy Hawk of Organic Archery
Correy Hawk is more than a renaissance man — he’s a renaissance badass. A Marine veteran, student of the natural world, and teacher of how to live in it, he can spend weeks in quiet solitude deep in the backcountry with the most minimal gear. He can ...
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 ...
10 of the Best Archery Movie Moments of All Time
A bow is a great weapon for a movie hero to wield. It connects them to warriors throughout time and allows them to take advantage of a bow’s stealth and accuracy (in the right and experienced hands), the same reasons hunters value them today. While ...
How Shooting an MP5 Can Make You a Better Archer
Whenever learning a new discipline or teaching a first-timer how to do something, the most important thing is finding a way to relate to the individual. If someone can tie a new task to something they know well, it invariably “clicks” in a way that ...
Photo Essay: Elk Hunting Sucks, or The Life of an OTC Archery Hunter
For the last four years, I have been archery hunting Colorado’s over-the-counter, or OTC, units for bull elk — with mixed results. OTC means the elk tags are sold to the general public literally over the counter, anywhere you can buy a Colorado ...
Ishi, Pope, and Young: The History of Modern Bowhunting
In 1912, Ishi crouched behind a bush and put his index and middle fingers to his lips. He made a sharp, high-pitched kissing sound — a rabbit distress call. To his left, Saxton T. Pope watched in amazement as a small group of rabbits came within ...
9 Ways to Actually Get Better at Shooting Your Bow
I am not a professional archer. You won’t see me winning any national 3D tournaments or catch me doing burpees before the Total Archery Challenge. But I am, proudly, an effective average-joe bowhunter. I started shooting a compound when I was 12, and ...
Camp Pendleton Marines Engage in the Ancient Art of Bowhunting
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — Appreciation and understanding of various weapon systems are a part of Marine culture. Typically, the M16 or the M240 are the first to come to mind. However, there is a more traditional weapon system being utilized by Marine ...
The Everyman’s Approach to DIY Archery Elk Hunting
I’m a self-taught bow hunter with a passion for elk hunting. The first time I heard the bugle of a bull elk echo out of my computer speakers, I knew I had to go and experience it in person. So that’s exactly what I did. In 2017, my first season, I ...
