Many of you have hunted for years, and it is this natural thing that happens like squirrels burying nuts. We just do it, and our seasonal clock runs without our thinking--it just does it. We were introduced to hunting by our fathers or uncles, or maybe a friend's dad who took us under his wings, and helped awaken us to the power of the outdoors.

For me the awakening came through sequential events. As a little kid reading stories of Daniel Boon, Davie Crocket, Jim Bowie and Lewis and Clark, the love of the frontier awakened in me. At the age of 12 my dad brought us to Ohio City, Colorado, to spend 2 weeks with a friend of his who had grown up there. Now mind you, at this time we were living in Los Angles and these two are worlds apart. The next year we spent the whole summer at Ohio City and that fall my parents moved to Gunnison, and I thought I had just died and gone to heaven.

I got my start hunting just tagging along with my dad as he hunted--I think he took me along to be the primary dragger just in case he got something. We never got anything, but I loved the stalk--looking for sign, the smell of the woods and being in there with my old man was the best. Most of my teen years were spent in the woods in some way or another. Working in logging camps, snow shoeing, or working for mining exploration companies--all of it was outside and in the woods. Funny how things work. I shot my first elk with my old man tagging along. I had bought a late season left-over elk tag for the area just west of Frisco, Colorado (Unit 371) and we had snowshoed about a mile up the hill west of I-70.

There in the late morning we found a bunch of tracks going into a stand of aspen trees, and following the tracks took us to the elk, one of which I shot without much ceremony. We gutted and cleaned it up, chopped her in half, and guess who got to help with the dragging?!

Life's an adventure. Get a Map, Edwin Watters