Celebrating and reminiscing about great days on the chukar hills from past seasons. These beautiful moments, funny ones, exhausting ones, and even frustrating ones always remind us of the beauty of the sport and what the culture of chukar hunting means to all of us.
The following is a collection of some photos we’ve never shared and a few of my favorites that you might have seen before. Remembering those wonderful times spent with friends, family, some moments alone, and of course with good dogs will help all of us get through these uncertain times and give us something to look forward to this coming autumn. We again thank you for following us along on this journey over the years. It’s because of you we hope to keep this up another decade.
Winter hunting can be a little slippery.This was a beautiful place to hunt but we found it over grown with cactus, poison Ivy, and rattlesnakes that day. We’ve never been back.Big country, God’s country.Peat honoring 6-month old Susie. The funny thing was that out of camera view, Susie was pointing some cattle on the other side of a fence. I was freezing cold and miserable in this photo but we kept climbing and following the dogs. Sometimes you misjudge what the weather might do and just deal with it.Heading down after I got us lost. We were only temporarily lost but it’s always a little disconcerting when you get turned around and disoriented in the backcountry.Cold cowboy coffee. We thought it would be fun to sleep on the boat on season opener. We brought everything but the kitchen sink and still managed to forget the camp stove. We also had a rude awaking in the middle of the night when we woke up with our boat laying on its side on rocks. We now know that Idaho Power lowers the water level in the reservoir at night.Snowy point. Hauling in a stranded boat of fisherman after we got done hunting. They were lucky this cold day since we were the only other people on the water. Oh, and Bob discovered that in the process of towing this boat we’d shredded our boat’s prop.Angus pointing. I thought he was just resting in the shade but a couple of chukar busted right in front of him. I kicked myself for not being ready with my shotgun. Good day Bob spent spent with his brother Geoff and his Brittany Donner. Dog trio on the rim. Bob can hunt for hours without pulling out his camera so these moments are rare.Opening day, 2018Sam spoon feeding Hannah and Angus. Sam started us on the post-hunt Vienna Sausage tradition. We’ve tried hunting with snowshoes a couple of times over the years. Too much snow was hard on the dogs. A rare two balloon day. Prepping for the perfect after hunt photo. Tough climb but the views were spectacular. The early season is always hot and dry.Vienna sausage post-hunt treat tradition continues.Early season after-hunt cool-down.Trying to get the dogs to look at me for group shot.Huns. I love the expression on Angus. Standing there watching 6-month-old Peat on season opener eating his first chukar and we couldn’t do anything about it. He did the same thing 5 more consecutive times. He hasn’t done it since.It always seems like we spend more time going up than going down. That’s probably because we do.Proud parents of a baby boy Peat. Angus looks dejected. Peat looks like he’s planning the years of shenanigans he’s in the process of executing.Friends forever after a rough start. The Sunburst Brittany Clan. All three kids hiked all day with us in tough terrain.The kid followed us up every mountain. The kid “Jarret” is now a high school junior.Snowballs on Angus and inside my boots. This is the one the day I wished I’d worn gaiters. We went hunting with my brother-in-law only once but it was memorable. Opening day of chukar 2019. We thought we’d only have Angus for a few hunts but he lasted the entire season and is still going strong. My first ever chukar on my first season. Angus pointed and retrieved it, which made it even more special.Heading back to the pickup. Late afternoon hunts are always nice, and I love the light in this photo. Hunting stories in Hells Canyon Beer pub with Sam.Where’d they go? Snow chukar at all. This was when I only carried a camera. At the time I didn’t know what I was missing. Young Angus and Huns. We used a vest for a few hunts but stopped using it. I’m not sure why.Boots with good ankle support is definitely required for chukar hunting. I’m never sure how to hold my bird for photos. I always feel awkward.My Benelli. I use an auto loader but rarely shoot more than once on a covey. It’s always hard to show steepness in photos, this one sums it up.Failed negotiation with Jarret over sharing his Peanut Butter and Cheeto sandwich. Jan 2020 highlight was meeting Custer. He’s on my left and also the nephew of Angus.Not a bad view. Taking a break after the long hike up from the reservoir. Peat on point.Birthday seat covers for my hunting rig.Bob looking for deer while taking the kid bird hunting. Four Sunburst BrittanysThanksgiving Day hunt back in 2016. We made a video of the day and so far it has had 1.6 million views on Youtube. There’s some sort of weird chukar hunting cult out there. 😉Sam and Hannah. Sadly, Hannah passed away this past winter. I take a lot of photos of dogs drinking water, this one is my favorite. Covey Rise. It’s always hard to capture birds in flight.Angus in pursuit of a downed bird that Bob shot when this single busted behind him. Behind the scenes in the early years before Angus turned gray. The year of mega snow fall. We couldn’t hunt but it didn’t stop this Red tailed Hawk. Steep country. I love it. Angus retrieving my chukar this season. We couldn’t go up or down, the only way was across and it was like walking on tiny marbles. I ended up crawling on my hands and knees. Last photo of the 2019/2020 season.
On the steep ascent the winds were blowing hard and the dogs were having a hard time pinpointing the birds and singles were busting wild from the grasses and the minute you blinked one would take off like a missile.
Halfway up the ridge, I stopped on top of a rocky outcropping to wait for Bob who was below me. That day my legs felt great and for once I was pushing the pace up the mountain and getting to the dogs on point before him. He made it up to me and we stood there a huge gust of wind almost blew me off my feet. He said, “I’m not standing next to you anymore,” as he looked over the edge of the rocks and down a steep drop off.
Looking down waiting for Bob.
We continued climbing higher up the ridge. Peat located a covey of chukar above me, and he held the point religiously but just before I could get close enough, the birds –impatient — busted and flew downhill. All that elevation gain for nothing. I grumbled to myself about it. We continued up for a little longer before bailing out completely because of the very high winds at this point on the ridge. I’d remembered my very experienced bird hunting friend Sam telling me once that “The birds are at ground level and out of the wind; they’ll be there.” They were there but I wasn’t ready for them or couldn’t get to them. On the way down, Angus went on point in a rocky draw just above me. I waved my arm and got Bob’s attention and pointed in the direction of Angus because he couldn’t see him. A covey of chukar busted and flew downhill overhead in between us and we both shot at the exact same time and a single chukar fell to the earth. I thought it was my shot that hit it, and Bob thought he hit it. This was the first time this had happened to us. It didn’t really matter to me whose bird it was, it was a shared experience and I don’t keep track of my shooting average anyway.
Just over half way upShared bird, shared moment
We stopped on the downhill to take a break after a long steep descent from the ridge top. I was tired and needed to eat something. I sat down on the ground with my shotgun planted firmly between my knees pointing up at the sky and pulled out a piece of cheese and some crackers, sharing some of it with Peat. It had been a hard hunt, an exhausting one, and a frustrating one. I sat there and watched a herd of elk in the distance grazing.
Herd of elk
After resting for a few minutes, Bob and I continued traversing across a steep slope where I found a narrow game trail and started following it. Stepping off the trail to walk around a rock on the trail my boot slipped on a patch of slick mud and before I knew what was happening I was tumbling down the mountain with my shotgun flying out of my hand and into the air. Everything happened so fast. Bob below me witnessed the whole thing and while I sat there on the ground stunned he yelled, “Are you okay?” Feeling my limbs, nothing was hurt. I felt lucky. I looked around for my shotgun and found it uphill laying on the ground with the barrel pointed right at me. The safety was still on, but this was the first time chukar hunting that I felt like something really bad might have happened.
A few minutes before I fell
Over the course of the season, our rule is not to hunt the same place twice, and increasingly as we’ve gotten older we find ourselves hiking more miles and gaining more elevation, and finding very remote places each time out but I’ve also managed to end up in some very questionable nooks and crannies with loose rocks and boulders. I have done my share of crawling on my hands and knees or on my butt to negotiate them. I wonder how long I can keep this up.
Why do we love doing a sport that could be potentially dangerous? Jack Kerouac wrote, “Pain or love or danger makes you real again.” I don’t know about this.
Lately, my mind keeps wandering back to the chukar hills and sitting on the hillside with Peat by my side on that cold and very windy December day watching those elk. It was a moment when my only complaint or worry about anything was that my ears were cold, the birds were busting wild, and I wasn’t sure what I’d make for dinner that night. These were innocent times.
It wasn’t until this past chukar season or lately that I’ve worried about my health or my mortality, but these last few days have been surreal around here. Our school has closed for who knows how long, sports canceled, jobs lost, life interrupted. As of today, we don’t have any cases of COVID-19 in our county but if things go as they have it’ll be inevitable. I’m anxious not knowing what the future might bring for the world, our country, our town, our school, our neighbors, or for us.
I appreciate you reading this post. You’re probably sick of reading about the virus and might be hoping this post would be an escape from it, but it has affected each and every one of us in different ways. I do know one thing for sure: the birds will still be there in the chukar hills this fall when things hopefully get back to some sense of normality.
Until then, I hope you and your family stay safe out there.
I was looking for a file for an assignment on Hamlet this afternoon and came across this thing I wrote for one of my classes a few years ago. I’ll often write alongside my students on an assignment, or model something before-hand. But I’d forgotten about this. I thought I’d share it here since it has to do with Peat, and because it’s not only about him or birds. The other thing I talk about might connect somehow to bird hunting. Maybe it doesn’t. But it’s part of who I am, or was, or will be. What’s beautiful to you? As avid bird hunters, surely we see many things outside the terrain of partridges that move us. For this assignment, I asked students to 1) define beauty, and 2) describe the most beautiful thing. This was my response to both.
Definition of beauty: beauty is a feeling of being overwhelmed by pleasure in something. It could be a thought or idea, a physical object, a landscape, a smell, a whole person or creature, an experience, a sound that lasts just an instant or an entire concert of music, or a physical sensation. It could be almost anything, but whatever it is, words cannot adequately describe the beauty. Words fall short. Otherwise, beauty wouldn’t be beautiful; it would be ordinary.
The most beautiful thing to me is: it’s a toss-up between two things. The first is watching my puppy go on point, and the second is watching a stranger help someone who is having trouble with something. I picked the first because I love Peat (my puppy) but can’t explain what that love is made up of except to say that it’s the whole experience of getting him at 7 weeks old and wanting to kill him nearly every day for his first year or so but working through that, and realizing that every night he calms down and presses himself against me in bed and passes out from exhaustion and has fur that’s softer than God should have been allowed to make; this little guy’s bird-finding instincts are miraculous and when he’s looking for them and suddenly finds them what he does is even more miraculous and beautiful: he freezes instantly in the weirdest posture, with his neck bowed to the ground and his nose up, and one of his front paws is lifted daintily off the ground, and he will not move until the birds fly. See, I’ve tried to explain what’s so beautiful about this, and even if I wrote ten million words, they couldn’t adequately express the feeling of beauty to me. The second thing is similar to the first in that I can’t really describe how moving it is to see a stranger help someone in need. There’s just something about seeing that that makes me feel the world is okay and that people really are good, or can be. In a world where you usually notice how mean people can be, and how most people, strangers, seem to be out for themselves and screw everybody else (especially when they’re driving!), it’s overwhelming to see the opposite, partly because it’s kind of rare but also because it shows we can love without judging, and there’s something about that that is so good I could never in a million years describe it.
My problem is that anything that I want to be good at, I take it seriously and have the tendency to get obsessed with it. Years ago, I raced bicycles at an elite level and for 12 months a year my life revolved around bicycles and the bicycle racing scene. It was eat, sleep, train, travel all over the place to race plus I had a full-time job on top of that.
This time of my life was way before the internet, social media, and Instagram so I had subscriptions to every bicycle magazine on the planet to get my constant fix. Success back then wasn’t measured by how many followers or likes you had, real or fake ones that are easily bought for a few bucks but actual credentials and race results that got me free bikes, clothing, and a small stipend towards my race entry fees and travel expenses. After 15 years of spending every free moment on my bike and missing doing other outdoor activities, especially in the summer, I got burned out and walked away from the sport and didn’t want anything to do with it.
I’m passionate about chukar hunting and love the sport but I’m almost glad the season is only four months a year. I’m also happy that I’m not in the upland hunting industry because it’s nice to take a break, change focus, and do other things the other eight months. My chukar hunting obsession needs to take a break, yes there is too much of a good thing and I don’t want to get burned out on upland bird hunting like I did on bicycle racing.
I’m a goal oriented person which made me be a successful bicycle racer but I made a mistake at the beginning of this past chukar season to try and hunt my age which is 57 plus hike further and gain more elevation than the season before. I didn’t achieve my goal on the last day of the season and felt a little bit of a failure.
I like the off-season and I’ll be outdoors trail-running, hiking, fly-fishing, and sometimes even riding my bicycle. My plan is to be fresh and excited to switch gears back to chukar hunting this coming fall. Who knows what my next what obsession will be. Mountaineering? I kind of doubt it but who knows, ten years ago I never thought in a million years I’d ever carry a shotgun and kill birds. I do know one thing for next season, I’m not setting any goals for anything.
Some things are rituals. It was never discussed on Saturday but over the course of the last four months it was customary or tradition that we’d bird hunt on every Sunday.
Last Sunday morning while sitting in front of the wood stove drinking coffee and looking out the living room window toward the mountains, Bob said, “Let’s go for a hike after I get done grading papers. Just because the season is over doesn’t mean we can’t go for a hike. Besides, we all need some exercise.” I agreed wholeheartedly.
I grabbed my upland bird pack from the garage and transferred things from it to my day hiking backpack. It was always a practice during hunting season that I’d have a mental check list of things to add to my pack so not to forget something important. It was routine to fill my hydration pack with water, look to make sure my gloves were still in there, to add some dog treats and snacks. Of course this time I didn’t need to worry about packing enough shotgun shells or to remember to put my shotgun in the back of the pickup. One ritual we didn’t break this time was to bring GPS collars for the dogs. Bob accidentally forgot the collars once so as we would drive away from our house, I would always ask him if we have the dog collars. We don’t really need GPS collars if we’re not hunting but Angus is deaf and senile sometimes and it’s comforting knowing we could track him if he wanders off, which he did a couple of times this season.
We drove through town and past a couple of churches with parking lots packed full of big pickups and cars. We’d always joke on our way down to the canyon on a late Sunday morning that we were going to the 24-Hour Church of HELLS Canyon.
It was a beautiful February afternoon. We started up a steep ridge, and the ascent felt easy. We continued our climb for another hour through the sage and bitterbrush, and the dogs went on point down below me near Bob. The sound of a covey busting filled the air. Out of habit, I was expecting to hear the sound of Bob shooting, but it was strangely quiet and I wondered if the dogs were confused why we didn’t shoot. Did they know we weren’t carrying a gun and it’s the off season? Traversing up the ridge we found a few more coveys of Huns but no chukar. We’d hunted here once before earlier in the season but the dogs had found only chukar and no Huns. Weird.
We hadn’t spent a lot of time in the canyon this season, but spiritually I feel like the hills are sacred. The hills are my church. We eventually turned around and headed back down, and I stopped to admire the view of the distant snow-covered mountains and to watch Peat and Angus running through the golden bunchgrass and I knew at that exact moment that this spot I was standing on was where I want to scatter some of Angus’s ashes.
Heading up.Angus with his subtle point. It’s the way he’s always done it.Peat backing Angus who’s way below him.Catching the wind.Strange not carrying a shotgun in my hand or on my shoulder. A couple of HunsPeat watching them fly.A single that busted after the main coveyFunny Peat laying down while honoringPeat honoring Angus again.Sacred hills.Angus of the chukar hills.So long, farewell, and just like a habit we’ll be back next season.
