We are almost to the halfway point of fall 2024, and oh baby, has it been a good one! Fall is my favorite season, largely due to the incredible variety and quantity of opportunities to harvest wonderful food from the land through fishing, hunting, and foraging.
The blog post covers some of my recent highlights fishing, hunting, and foraging, and tries to point you in the right direction if you want to pursue some of these same opportunities.
Let’s get to it!
2022 was an incredible year of new hunting experiences and also some challenges and missed opportunities. I want to share what went well, what didn’t and what I’ve learned from it in a way that will hopefully help you on your learning journey as well.
So, as I’ve shared earlier, I’ve got this place in Prosser, WA that I rent out as an AirBnB / VRBO and I’ve been beyond excited to spend time over there myself enjoying the unique harvest opportunities that are more suited for the areas east of the Cascades.
So last weekend, I decided to try my hand at goose hunting!
With my 2021 elk hunting season now being over, I get to write about and share some of the many lessons learned and stories from the woods. I know I basically didn’t touch the blog or YouTube channel during this period as I was trying to balance being in the woods, family obligations and joys of having a new puppy in the house.
I did keep my IG/FB followers mostly informed of how things were going though (pacificnwbestlife on IG and facebook.com/pnwbestlife on FB). Read on if you wish to learn about the shot I took on an elk during the season.
Another epic elk hunting trip in Utah with a good friend came to a close last week. While we didn’t tag out, I learned some very good lessons about elk hunting in high elevations that I can definitely apply to the local opportunity in the PNW.
There’s also some extremely useful gear I discovered that I will share about as well.
This is my first year hunting elk in Western Washington, but I’m learning a lot and putting in the time to climb the elk hunting learning curve quickly. I wanted to share this, not from the perspective of an expert, but from the perspective of someone seeing elk hunting fresh, which means if you to are trying to get into elk hunting, my learning journey could be valuable to you as well.
Hunting for elk in Utah during winter is an amazing experience whether you get to fill your elk tag or not.
On this Utah elk trip, we ended up with a whole lot of tag soup, but this was largely a factor of the deck not being stacked in our favor.
I’m not always as excited to write about trips that didn’t result in punching tags or fish. However, any hunting trip where you experience the kinds of backcountry views we had, where you learn a lot that can be applied to the next season, and where you stay safe and warm (mostly), is a great trip.
The very first fishing trip I remember was an amazing and epic trip to Lake Curlew in north eastern Washington.
We caught rainbow trout to our heart’s content. As many fish as we hooked, I think I was the one who ultimately was hooked, as I’ve not been able to go very long without thinking about fishing after that trip.
We went back to Curlew a few more times and the drive up would always be one of the best parts. The beauty of the hills, mountains, and woods of northeastern Washington was truly enchanting to me.
Returning to this area for the first deer hunt of my lifetime seemed fitting and driving past the lake filled my mind with these memories.