Utah
The winter weather is looking incredible for big game outing this fall. According to our partners, foresters, and biologists in the field who have been watching the snow-pack everything is looking incredible for our 2025 hunting season.
The crappie connection within our family runs deep, goes back decades to when my dad would tell us stories about his fishing trips to Canada, where they feasted on slabs night after night. Then, before I moved from Minnesota to Kansas, my dad, brother, and I followed through on the dream fishing trip for all of us, motored out one morning in the cold blue dark, over an hour from camp, to a remote spot where crappie bit fierce and fast on anything.
The long hike made his pulse jump. He gasped for air like he was making hook shots at the basketball court, and his ego was still in a relatively positive place. Last night, he slept in his truck at a trailhead below; the tight space gave him a crick in his neck. He took a minute now to check the GPS on his phone; he still had a quarter mile further to go before cresting out. Back on his feet, he took a long pull from the rubber hose over his shoulder and got back to it, headlamp beam bouncing out ahead. Mentally, he was humming along to KC and the Sunshine Band, a song he didn’t want in his head but wouldn’t go away, and as the chorus played over and over, he crested the bowl at 9,300 feet.
I know quite a few hunters who have always wanted to try corning their venison around St. Patrick’s Day but the concept, to them, seems complicated. If you are one of those folks who have wanted to partake in the aforementioned Irish tradition but have shied away in past years, I promise you this is one of the easiest ways to prepare and cook venison. Basically: if you can properly trim silver skin and add ingredients to a pot, you can corn and cook corned venison.
Deep in the Black Hills National Forest the Mule Deer foundation is hard at work building strategic habitat for mule deer and a litany of other species.
The USDA Forest Service manages nearly 200 million acres of public land all over the country. That’s a lot of ground to cover, especially when you consider the agency’s mandate to make decisions on how best to utilize and maintain the land for “the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.”
Here are three very easy recipes for fur, feather, and fin appetizers. For the sliders, you can use any venison (whitetail, mule deer, elk, caribou, etc.). For the Buffalo Pheasant, you can indeed substitute any upland bird (even waterfowl, I suppose) and incorporate this somewhat homemade buffalo sauce. For the bacon-wrapped jalapeño poppers, you guessed it—you can use any fish, from saltwater to freshwater to scuzzy pond water fare (e.g., catfish).