Bring Your Family on Your Hunt

If you want to hunt more, and be more successful, start bringing your family along. No matter how many fights with your brother you have, how noisy your kids are, or how much complaining you have to endure, I promise it will be worthwhile.

Now, I’m not advocating new hunters tote a two year old into the back country or abandon their family in the woods with no forethought on their wellbeing. Rather, if you have the hankering to get out more often, taking your family with you can help the mental math add up to put you in the field more often.

The equation every hunter runs in their mind is something like: number of vacation days minus kids sports tournaments minus the in-laws week at the lake in Michigan, all multiplied by the little girl tea parties attended plus the number of your honey-dos and back rubs given, again all divided by the amount of emotional capital spent when you are away.

That emotional capital drains like the grains of sand in an hourglass, counting every moment that passes while you’re not home helping with the laundry, school runs, lunches, pickup and drop off, chores, and all of life’s other menial tasks. As the hourglass drains, family members begin to wonder why they’re stuck at home going through the motions while you’re out jousting at windmills and fighting Liliputians? The hourglass empties and your own thoughts turn to missed bedtime stories and experiences you can’t get back. That’s when you cut a trip short.

Before I started bringing my family, I went on nature hikes while toting my gun for years. I would have to steal time by heading out alone on a Friday and hunting a morning here or there. It was a blast, but I was squeezing in hunts between volunteering as a coach, competing in track meets, studying for law school and the BAR, then being an attorney, avoiding the wildfires that constantly sweep through my home state of California, and finally all the general husband and dad duties.

I wanted to want to hunt more, but the mental math never added up to make a full week of hunting worthwhile.

Then things started to change when I had the un-original epiphany to merge family trips with hunting trips. My pregnant wife and I were planning on turning a three-day weekend into a four-day trip up to Blue Lakes, California. My wife was far enough along in her pregnancy that it was time to tell our parents the good news, and we wanted to turn the event into a nice trip. However, the trip coincided with the early California rifle deer season.

The plan was to take my Dad out to a ranch a few miles from the lakes and hunt it in the morning before my kids woke up. Then we would come back around ten or eleven in the morning for swimming, boating, lunch, and general dad shenanigans, finally heading back out for an evening hunt.

I didn’t want my wife to be overwhelmed or the grandparents overburdened, so I set them up to be comfortable. I made sure the rooms on the lake shore were far enough from the water to avoid the toddlers making an unseen sprint to the shoreline, but close enough that carrying them and their accoutrements to the water wouldn’t be back-breaking. I made sure the in-laws and my mom were ready to help my wife watch the kids, but I also provided enough tasty adult beverages that everyone could sit back and enjoy the ambiance in the brief respites when you didn’t need to be so vigilant. Finally, my wife still likes me, so I made sure that I hunted close enough to be back regularly to make an appearance.

With my family happy and bolstered with multiple kid-supervising eyes, my dad and I slipped away before dusk on Friday to check in at the ranch. Just a few miles away on small country roads, the ranch has a small cattle operation and leases the rougher parts of the ranch to hunters. On our way in, we spied our first game of the trip - a herd of Tule elk feeding through a cattle pasture 100 yards or so off the road. We pulled over and ogled them through binos.

This was my first up and personal sighting of a Tule elk in my life - it excited me like I don’t dare say in polite company. The smallest subspecies of elk in the country, Tule are still two or three times the size of a blacktail deer. At that time in September, the rut was ramping up. The herd bull ripped a few bugles while I stood in complete awe. That was indeed a first among firsts.

After checking in at the ranch, we made it back to the lodge so we could help cook dinner and put the kids to bed. Dad duties attended to, and a short nap later, my dad and I snuck out well before dawn and parked near the ranch entrance. No elk sightings this time, but I imagine they were there in the darkness watching headlights go by.

We hiked a few miles back into the ranch as the sun lit up the sky but did not yet make an appearance, an oily, dusky smell rising with the mist into our nostrils. Forest fires had been burning all across California for months, and as we made it to a glassing knob, the sun crested the ridge across from us in an orange smoke-filtered fashion. We sat in the hazy glow glassing for a few hours seeing neither hide nor hair before calling it a hunt and starting back to the truck.

I felt good then. We were in good country with excellent sign, I had put my kids to bed and was on my way back to them. We marched across oak scrub on our way back before stepping on a dirt road. I sent a few emails as we picked up cell service again to prevent work grumblings from erupting into shouting, and started making a few jokes with dad.

We spooked up a buck.

It turned and gave us a look at its wide rack before galloping away, following the topographical line along the hill we were skirting.

Neither one of us prepared, we let out a shared held breath after the buck rounded the bend. Dad whispered “You better start running! Give me your pack!”

I tossed him my pack and started running down the road that paralleled the track the deer had taken. I rounded the bend and saw the deer looking back briefly before cresting the next ridge. I kept running down the road. I turned the next bend, and again caught a glimpse of the buck just as it crested the next ridge. I kept running down the road. This was not Goldilocks, so the third time I rounded the bend there was no deer. “Did it turn up hill?” I thought, stumbling once before pushing on, “If it did, I’ll never catch it, but maybe…” As I rounded the fourth bend, about 800 yards as the crow flies from where he first lay, but farther as I ran on the winding road, the buck stood perfectly framed by the twin trunks of an oak looking back at me from about 80 yards up the hill. I shouldered and fired before thoughts could enter my mind.

Spine-shot, the buck thrashed and tumbled down the hill right onto the dirt road ahead of me. My dad walked up just as the commotion subsided. “That was a boom!” He said through a wide smile as he sauntered up “Pack out doesn’t get much easier than that!”

When we pulled up to the lodge around 11am, my wife and kids - ok mostly my wife - looked a little annoyed that we were late. But when she saw my oaf-eating grin as I hopped out of the truck with a little extra bounce, she immediately lit up. I dropped the tailgate to squeals from the girls and chuckles from my in-laws. Nothing beats those reactions. Once they saw that buck I knew we had to keep doing it this way.

Since then, I’ve taken my daughters into the field for pigs and turkey, and I’ve hauled my brothers, wife and kids, in-laws and parents to pig, elk and deer hunts across Montana, Colorado, Arizona, California and Oregon. Whether staying in tents, hotels, RVs, or AirBnBs, everyone has come away from these adventures volunteering for more, and I have loved every minute.

Even though planning for my family to join doubles the amount of planning involved and distracts from hunting hard all day long, the truth of the matter is that I would not have been able to justify most of those hunts if I was leaving them behind. Additionally, every single harvest I get to share with my family is ten times as memorable when they are there to share it with.

So if you want to hunt more and be a better parent, spouse, son, daughter, sister, brother or uncle, take your family with you on your hunt.