I'm 20 years old. What's your excuse?

I was stationed in Germany when I was 19. I didn’t have an earth shattering WiFi payment but I made up for that with some pretty hefty bar tabs at the Green Goose in Nuremberg. It was awesome yo!
 
Elk hunting and the need for immediate affirmation don’t always closely associate. My excuse is the distraction provided by warming fires, coffee, and kippered snacks with my boys. I didn’t get a picture of the elk that had just smelled us and ran away.43FC7B38-EC17-42BE-90F6-2937B588D625.jpeg43FC7B38-EC17-42BE-90F6-2937B588D625.jpeg
 
Sardines and Vienna Sausages? I can't believe an elk was able to pick up your scent with those treats wafting through the air currents.;)
 
Why do people always say this crap. I'm only mildly interested in what you've done, I've literately no interest in what some dude 100 years ago that shares 6.25% of your DNA did or where they may have lived.
Connection to place man. It's a big thing for a lot of us. Generational landscape and cultural knowledge of a place is a pretty rare commodity.
 
Connection to place man. It's a big thing for a lot of us. Generational landscape and cultural knowledge of a place is a pretty rare commodity.

Yeah I don't buy it, I think it's just a means of trying to exclude others using something you did nothing to earn.

This isn't to say you can't be proud of your heritage or have a strong connection to a place, but announcing it like it makes your opinions or perceptive more valid is total BS. Saying you spent your whole life somewhere and know it well, I dig that and that is something to add to your resume, but where great gramps lived... that piece of trivia is just that.
 
Yeah I don't buy it, I think it's just a means of trying to exclude others using something you did nothing to earn.

This isn't to say you can't be proud of your heritage or have a strong connection to a place, but announcing it like it makes your opinions or perceptive more valid is total BS. Saying you spent your whole life somewhere and know it well, I dig that and that is something to add to your resume, but where great gramps lived... that piece of trivia is just that.
We don't seem to disagree on many things but this is one of them. I know for damn sure exactly what conditions my hometown gets "feet" of snow. It is a very specific set of conditions that learned from my Mom, who learned it from her father, all of us growing up within the same 1/4 section. I take a helluva lot of pride that I killed deer every year through school in the same cut between patches oak trees because my grandfather showed me the exact spot and how to hunt it. Or that the elk that winter above the house never used to, NEVER were even seen in our area, going back to the 1920s. Or that we're slowly converting from Doug Fir to White Oak, that the creek runs less that it used to. That we have less uplands birds, less coyotes, and more bobcat than we have for the last 100 years. And I didn't need WDFW to commission a study, or a university to collar a bunch of critters to tell me that.

So when the Cali transplants move in next door and tell me they watched the news and it's going to dump snow tomorrow I know they're full of chit. They have no connection, they have no knowledge of our place. And if you want to disregard that kind of knowledge as anecdotal then we'll have to respectively agree to disagree.

Now all that being said, we ain't got no RZRs...
 
We don't seem to disagree on many things but this is one of them. I know for damn sure exactly what conditions my hometown gets "feet" of snow. It is a very specific set of conditions that learned from my Mom, who learned it from her father, all of us growing up within the same 1/4 section. I take a helluva lot of pride that I killed deer every year through school in the same cut between patches oak trees because my grandfather showed me the exact spot and how to hunt it. Or that the elk that winter above the house never used to, NEVER were even seen in our area, going back to the 1920s. Or that we're slowly converting from Doug Fir to White Oak, that the creek runs less that it used to. That we have less uplands birds, less coyotes, and more bobcat than we have for the last 100 years. And I didn't need WDFW to commission a study, or a university to collar a bunch of critters to tell me that.

So when the Cali transplants move in next door and tell me they watched the news and it's going to dump snow tomorrow I know they're full of chit. They have no connection, they have no knowledge of our place. And if you want to disregard that kind of knowledge as anecdotal then we'll have to respectively agree to disagree.

Now all that being said, we ain't got no RZRs...

I'm not disagreeing with any of this... most of your comment is about first hand experience. You have a connection to a place through seeing it first hand, that is valuable. You have earned knowledge of a place by spending time, blood and sweat there in that place.

Here is a clarifying example of what I take issue with, hasn't to my knowledge actually happened although things like it happen all the time:

Mr. Newberg goes to a Montana Game Commission meeting to discuss herd dynamics, tag allocation, shoulder seasons etc around Bozeman. Randy is a transplant to MT, that said he has spent what 20-30 years there hunted and fished a ton and been involved with seeming every conservation org in the area, ostensible gathering knowledge first hand and by listening to others. Randy has boots on the ground experience, in my mind he has a strong resume and is an important voice to be listened to... he gets up on the mic at the meeting and makes his point about how shoulder seasons are a product of human intolerance of elk and not true carrying capacity and that they should be eliminated.

The next person to go before the commission is Steve, his family is a wealthy MT ranching family that has owned a ranch in the paradise valley for 5 generations. Steve is 32, his family sent him to Andover for highschool (east coast boarding school) then he went to Vanderbilt for college. After college he lived a few years in Colorado, then made a bunch of money in California in the tech industry and moved back to the family ranch with his wife last year. Steve spent years 0-12 living in Montana then this last winter. He hunted a few seasons in College, but only on his Ranch and never on public land. Steve gets up on the mic says he is 5th generation native, and thinks there are too many elk in paradise valley and that shoulder seasons should be continued.

Steve is trying to use the cache of his grandfather working the land to make up for his total lack of first hand experience. Steve is discounting Randy, because Randy's dad or grand dad didn't live in MT.

You may argue that this isn't the norm... but I see it all the time, honestly I originally developed a bad taste for it from my family. Just because my great grandfather moved the family to CO and started a bunch of business in grand county doesn't mean anyone in the family knows anything about SW CO, also just because my 7 generations back grandfather was one of the founders of the Republic of Texas doesn't mean that I know diddly about what's currently going on in Austin and it would be absurd for me to use that familia tie to try and insert myself into the conversation.

I'm sure I've butchered this a bit... but essentially I'm saying that things you have done or accomplished belong on your resume... things other family members have done do not.

Everyone should be evaluated based on their own merits and actions. Family, money, skin color, gender, race... I don't give a crap, what do you bring to the table.


Totally ok to have family pride... I want to have bagpipes at my funeral, because the Scottish pride runs deep... doesn't mean that pride should hold any weight in conservations about land use or policy.
 
No excuses here. I'm 73 now, I'm also 5th generation Colorado and I moved to Montana about 50 years ago. I also killed my first elk when I was 20, but back then the Razor 4 wheeler hadn't been invented, so I did all of my hunting off my hind legs.

I live by myself now, and I can't eat an elk every year, so I no longer need to kill an elk every year, but I have killed 35 elk. This year I'm planning on DIY hunts for pronghorn antelope, deer, and elk here in my now home state of Montana. Also, next week I'm going to Newfoundland, Canada for a combination moose and caribou hunt, and in December I'm going to Kodiak Alaska for a Sitka blackmail deer hunt.

I may be slowing down a little, but I don't plan on quitting any time soon.
 

Forum statistics

Threads
110,814
Messages
1,935,401
Members
34,888
Latest member
Jack the bear
Back
Top