Alaska is one of the few outdoor venues I know that consistently exceeds its own high expectations. That view may be difficult to sustain when you’re facing your third straight week of horizontal rain on a wilderness float trip or packing out a moose your friend shot a mile too far from the nearest floatplane lake. Nonetheless, the Great Land bewitched me when I first moved there 40 years ago, and it still does whenever I return.
But like float...

The term “weekend warrior” is  sometimes used disparagingly, but the truth is most hunters have little choice in the matter when it comes to time in the woods. Weekdays are consumed by the responsibilities of work, school and family, and hunting happens on Saturdays and Sundays. For most hunters, it is hardly the perfect scenario, but it works well enough.
Now just imagine if you lived in a state where “blue laws” restrict or outlaw Sunday...

More people are buying hunting licenses than they have in a generation, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s data. But other data from the same agency has consistently reported a downward trend in hunter numbers since the 1980s, creating palpable fear in state budgeting offices ever since. As states lost license sale and excise tax dollars, some looked to federal funds to fill their coffers. They chose to access those federal tax dollars...

A few years back, shortly after our family moved into a new home, I killed a cow elk in the federally designated wilderness area just a mile from my back door. It wasn’t until after I had notched my tag, quartered the elk and packed the meat down the mountain that I realized how lucky I was to live next to 44,000 acres of wilderness where I can hike, camp, fly fish for trout, and hunt dusky grouse, snowshoe hare, black bear, deer and elk.
I̵...

Thanks to DNA research, we now know coyotes migrated to the Eastern United States via two routes: across the South, where they spread into Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas, and around the Great Lakes, where they occasionally bred with wolves along the way. Those northern coyotes filtered down through New York, Pennsylvania and into northern Virginia.
Science doesn’t make for a good campfire tale. It also doesn’t seem to get much attention on...

Earthjustice cites their slogan “Because the Earth needs a good lawyer” as justification for continuing legal fights to keep grizzly bears on the Endangered Species List. That group and others like it routinely claim to speak for wild places and wild creatures.
In contrast, public servants at state and federal agencies often feel ensnared in the environmentalists’ lawsuits. They say those self-proclaimed “good lawyers” too often waste taxpayers...