Zachary Craig Hanson's Blog, page 12

Torched Plans

With less than two weeks until my first bow hunt of this season, things are getting a little dicy. Ya see, every late summer/early fall in the Pacific North West carries with it the challenge of dry conditions, lightning, and the inevitable possibility of forest fires springing up in the wilderness that we hunt.

For the town we live in, Atlanta, this season has been (thankfully) slow… Not too many fires to speak of and none that have immediately threatened town or any structures. However, some of the areas that we love to visit have not been so fortunate.

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Due east of our town, there is the Ross Fork fire, which is burning up a large portion of Idaho’s GMU 43… An area that myself and a close friend hunted last year with an early season deer depredation tag. The irony is that we hiked in from the backside and had to traverse an area (Leggit Lake) that was burned badly two years ago. This unit is pine rich and absolutely stunning — hard to imagine the thousands of acres there that are now burning.

Hiking to unit 43 through Leggit Creek Trail Looking from Unit 39 into unit 43 (All of that timber is currently burning)

To the north of town there is the Everly Fire burning at the north end of the Queens River hiking loop. The Queens River trailhead is just five miles before you enter our little town and is a beautiful piece of country. Just two years ago (pre-babies) my wife and I, with our two friends, hiked that area in early July. Thankfully this fire seems contained by the rocky nature of the Everly alpine lake which may help diffuse the spread.

Queens River loop heading toward Everly Lake

Then lastly, the inevitable happened and I got word that a new fire kicked off this week right where we plan to elk hunt. Started by lightning, the fire is at about 45 acres and is spreading directly to the areas where my buddy had been scouting for us a few weeks back. Silver lining is that with the proximity to Henry’s lake, the Sawtell Peak fire is getting blasted with frequent water dumps from the few aircraft assigned to it.

What does this mean for our hunt? Frankly, I don’t know. Fingers are crossed that the fire can be contained and we can push on as planned… what will be interesting though is to see what will happen to the animal patterns. Will they change? Will animals be pushed out, or in? Time will tell and hopefully by this time next week I am packing my bags and heading east.

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Fishin' for somethin'

Hunting season is almost here, and though I didn’t draw an early season antelope tag this year, I am counting down the days until I head eastward to go hunt elk on the Yellowstone border. In preparation I have (finally) been shooting my bow and breaking in my boots all between daddy/daughter dates while my wife tends to our ravenously hungry little newborn.

Shooting bows and doing hill sprints in the Boise foothills.

Yet, as the hunt preparations comes to a head, the late summer heat and newborn-related sleep deprivation has caused me to start to dream of cooler water related activities — mainly fishing. These thoughts were spurred by digging through our freezer and finding several small whole trout from the Yuba river up near our cabin. Those fish were gifts from a local resident who wasn’t planning to eat them, and made me *think* about getting my own fishing rod to play around with.

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Prepping these guys for a brine before the smoker.

In fact, outside of my one unsuccessful steelhead fishing trip last February, I have never actually caught my own fish! I have, however, clubbed a single trout on the head with a stick while out elk hunting late last year. It was an act that caught me by surprise and made me feel like a true mountain man.

I had been following a creek bottom in the sawtooth wilderness during the late season rifle hunt in mid-November and kept seeing a small trout swim in circles. After watching him for nearly an hour, I decided to put down my rifle and do my best to catch the fish. Taking my glove off, I plunged my hands into the icy water to try and catch the slippery bar of soap.

Clearly, that tactic was never going to work, but my advances seemed to matter none to him and he kept swimming in the same vicinity. So, I went to grab a medium sized stick lying on the bank under a thin layer of snow. With club in hand, I expected nothing to happen as I smacked it on the water close to the fish and was surprised when I saw him float to the top and start to get carried away by the current. Like a neanderthal, I trudged through the cold water to try and catch him before he was out of sight so that he could find a place on our smoker when I got home.

My first and only clubbed trout.

To me, though, it’s pretty amazing what water can provide and I do miss being near lakes, swamps, and the ocean near where I grew up. Taking a boat out on water can provide just as much of a perception change as getting lost deep in the woods of the Northwest. In fact, the last time I was out on a boat was during a trip to the Oregon coast my wife and I took before the birth of our first child a few years ago. We ended up going out to catch some coastline delicacies, crab, and getting them cooked up for a great meal!

Blue steel heading out into the bay (where the watermelons grow).

All-in-all I think it’s high time my family and I get out onto the water and get some good ol’ seafood to augment our mostly meat based diet. It will also be another opportunity for me to gain some skills in an area where my baseline is, well, zero.

Oregon crab caught by my wife.

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Droppin' Pins

We are close to 15 days until the start of the 2022 general archery elk season. The time of year that brought me to Idaho and the time of year I love the most. Cool mornings, warm afternoons, and the ability to hunt elk, deer, and black bear. Yet, instead of being out in the woods scouting the area I plan to hunt, I am trapped in suburbia lamenting the traffic and awaiting the birth of my second child. Now, that last point may sound like it’s laced with frustration (well, the traffic and dense population does suck), but it’s not… I couldn’t be more happy to add a new future hunting buddy to the mix… BUT, I won’t be having another fall baby if I can help it… Thankfully, though, my DIY hunting partner has come to save the proverbial day. Like some sort of caped superhero he started to light up my phone this last week with a now omnipresent logo in the hunting community, OnX maps:

OnX Maps making life easier!

Yes, my text messages were blowing up as my hunting partner was scouring the woods on foot to find the best areas in our East Idaho hunting unit. The pins he would drop and send to me were all a part of our emerging planned surgical strike on elk during the rut. Each time I would click the little red box with a white X I would get excited to see what topographical surprise lay on the other end of the digital yellow brick road. He shared camp spots, wallows, rubs, known herds, and a bunch of other detail that one can usually only get through being somewhere in person.

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Dense timber near our campsite

Though I usually bemoan technology writ large (…and have focused on trying to live a more digitally sanitized life…) I would be a huge liar if I didn’t say that technology has been my life line this pre-season. Receiving the digital pixels of where we would be hunting allowed me to visualize the area, understand the elevation, and get an idea on the density of vegetation and how animals may travel in the area. Then with actual pictures of the terrain itself to mentally couple with the topographical maps, I have a pretty good idea of what I am getting into and will have a shorter ramp up time once I am boots on the ground.

Fresh Elk Rub If nothing else the meadows, pines, fir, and aspens will be nice to look at!

Of course nothing beats the real thing when preparing, but for many people who don’t live out west this is the norm. Find an area, buy a tag, and spend countless months e-scouting. To be frank, I had never had to do that much as I have always hunted areas that I spend time in year round, but my current pre-daddy redux situation has opened my eyes to a new way of hunt preparation and one that I will likely be employing when I fan out to new states to hunt over the next few years.

Aside from a second child and a new area to hunt in… this upcoming season also brings another element that I have not had to contend with since moving to Idaho… Grizzly Bear. Yep, my central Idaho location *allegedly* holds no grizz and I have been fortunate enough to only have intimate experiences with black bear… who are usually pretty skittish, save for one angry mama bear I ran into in the White Cloud Wilderness. But, this year I will have to be extra vigilant and will be packing both my bear spray and Ruger Super Redhawk .44 magnum.

According to my friends at Idaho Fish and Game, the area we are hunting has what is considered a “dense” population of these feller’s and should add an extra element to the hunt. Taking proper and quick care of any meat we may get will be vital and we will have to keep our heads on a swivel to avoid getting “Hugh Glass’d”. Potential mauling aside, we are pumped for the season and have zero expectations on our success. That may sound counter-intuitive, but with less preparation going into this year’s hunt, there also seems to be way less pressure built up around the experience. A double edged sword that I am sure to unpack in my post-hunt recap.

Anyhoo — It’s time to go shoot my bow and do some burpees, but I will leave you with this picture of a beautiful moose my friend stumbled on while scouting our unit:

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

New Book!

So, the updates have been slow the past few weeks for several reasons:

My wife and I are in full temporary nesting mode as we wait on our second child’s birth any day now;

I am in the final stages of publishing my memoir, and';

I am finally focused on getting prepped for my September elk hunt.

But, as I am emerging from the fog of (book) war, I wanted to share a few things. First of which is the final cover design of my book! I am super excited after working with my publisher’s cover designer to come up with something that I believe is really cool:

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

It captures everything that I wanted it to, down to the details of the microchip extending out into natural branches for the border. Overall, super impressed and excited to share this book in stores.

And though I am finalizing the last bits of the internal layout, the targeted release date is set for Tuesday October, 11th. It will be available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and at most other large book retailers (yay!).

That said, one question I keep getting from people I talk to about the book is, “How did you write your book?” which is often followed by, “I have an idea for a one but I don’t know where to start.”

Those same questions plagued me for years until I finally sat down in 2017 and wrote my first book — which was a pure experience in discipline and over-editing for a product that I now look back on as “just OK.”

So, for this project I sought help. I ended up shopping my abstract around for sometime before landing with Lioncrest publishers and getting the chance to sit down with New York Time’s Best Selling Author, Tucker Max. Sitting with him I was able to talk through and learn about what it really takes to write a book that people actually want to read. (He actually has a book on these methodologies for those interested)

The biggest takeaway? You need to get your ideas on paper, fast. What that means in reality is that you need to get a rough outline and then start writing. And when you write you DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT go back and re-read or edit any single line until you are done getting every thought out of your head.

This type of exercise was new to me as when I used to write (even this blog), I would scribble out a sentence or two, and then immediately want to edit it to make it sound better… What Tucker was asking for was not only new, but it was also extremely hard. The discipline to not re-read what I had written the day before was nearly unbearable when I started, but after a few weeks it became second nature.

That approach, coupled with discipline to wake up every morning for six weeks and pound out 400-3000 words, was what got me over the finish line so quickly. Now, the steps that followed having a 47,000 word vomit draft completed were equal parts frustrating and difficult, but I will cover those forays into the world of editing in a later post.

Until then, I will be getting back into mountain-shape and waiting for the birth of our second child!

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Bear-y Exciting

With Spring bear season ending 12 days ago, I finally got a chance to go and pull my remaining trail cams and sift through the thousands of photos (mostly of leaves and rain)…

So, this post is just a collection of some of the coolest photos! What I love about these photos is it shows how healthy the bear population is right behind our home and in Idaho writ large. Such cool animals! There are also a few other fun photos as a bonus of deer, elk, and other critters!

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Nice black bear roaming around! Bigger bruiser cruising through in the middle of the night. Cool color phase bear. Young bear seeing if there is anything to eat in the barrel. Little yearling poking around. Big ol’ butt on a bigger boar. Beautiful color phase bear. Young one getting in a nice stretch. Nice looking bull elk being extra creepy. Someone found the trail cam. I smell a new disney movie!

Thanks for reading Let Me Die Learning! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Suppressed Thoughts

After monkeying around in Boise for the past few weeks my family and I were excited to get back to the cabin for our last full week of peace and solitude before we enter final prep for baby number two’s arrival. We were lucky enough to have some close friends and hunting buddies join us for the first bit of the weekend to celebrate July 4th.

To kick off the celebrations we all decided that our time would be best spent out in the woods with our little families. We also figured it would be a great time to get some elk training in by carrying our kids in heavy packs… Something I was pining for since my back is slowly healing from my recent bulged disc.

On Sunday morning, we loaded up the crew and hit the trail for a nice long early morning hike with our little mini-me’s attached to our backs. It was a lot of fun and my daughter loved it. She pointed out every flower we passed and was in awe of the river and birds that were surrounding us. My shoulders and legs, however, quickly reminded me that I am far from the shape that I should be in for the upcoming season. This little jaunt gave me some motivation to double down on my rehab in order to get back into the swing of summer training ASAP.

The other fun thing we got to do this weekend was to spend time hanging out and sending some lead down range. Now, this is not a wholly uncommon occurrence for us given that we have a 500 yard steel gun range out of our back door, but today was a bit different. Ya see, last Wednesday uncle sam finally pulled through and I was able to pick up my first in a series of suppressors that I have ordered for my handguns, carbines, and hunting rifles.

Suppressors in the USA have an odd stigma. They were popularized by movies such as James Bond and Jason Bourne and are now ubiquitous in the special operations community, but they also serve a great purpose to the civilian population— especially hunters. Each one of us is only blessed with two ears (if we are lucky) and preserving the internal workings of those organs is vital. Shooting large caliber rifles, pistols, and carbines with any sort of frequency can start to take a toll on your hearing even when you wear proper ear protection. So, attaching a perfectly legal suppressor to all of those tools makes great sense when you want to train more, but also keep your hearing in tip top shape.

That said, obtaining a suppressor is an absolute beast in this country. Waaaaaayyyyy back in in 1934, the newly created National Firearms Act introduced a $200 tax stamp that had to be purchased with the sell of any new firearm to ensure that the owner was properly registered. Overtime this started to apply to suppressors and the excise tax in the form of a tax stamp stayed consistent ever since that time.

However, purchasing a suppressor in 2022 is not just as easy as paying the $200 tax stamp and walking out of the store with your “can”. In order to be registered with the NFA, you must create a trust. For me, I used website that helped me create my family gun trust — They took some info and sent me a whole stack of papers on thick card stock that had to be notarized. Once that was done it was time to go to the local sheriffs office to get a whole set of finger print cards created (You will need two for each silencer you want to purchase) and then to Walgreens to get passport sized photos.

Prepping to shoot the suppressed B&T 9mm GHM

Once you do all of that legwork it’s time to go to your favorite gun store to pick out what suppressor(s) you want. At the time of purchase your store owners will likely charge you a small fee to process your paperwork (~$20). You will hand them copies of your trust, two finger print cards, and two photos. They then will go onto the ATF’s newly created digital system’s website to input the particulars of the suppressor you are purchasing as well as all of your info.

Up until this past January when the ATF rolled out their new digital system, the store would send in copies of your info via snail mail and you would be waiting for ten months or more to get information back as to whether you passed their screening. Now, if everything checks out, you can get your Tax Stamp and suppressor in as little as seven weeks (which was the case for me).

Home defense preparedness… don’t want to wake up the baby!

Overall it is a great investment and can truly help you in the back country as your large caliber hunting rifles will have reduced recoil and quieter shots — which has many secondary benefits of which I will go over in a later post.

All-in-all we had a great weekend celebrating our freedoms, enjoying the smell of gunpowder, and spending time with great friends!

September is Coming...

The sinking of the titanic must have been a sight to behold… and I managed to pull off my best reenactment of that sinking ship in the aqua-tots swim parking lot a few days ago. You, see for the past few weeks my wife and I have been battling COVID and stomach bugs and in that melee I managed to bulge my L4 disc while clearing logs off of our cabin property.

Why does that suck? Well, for starters… it has triggered a bunch of other muscular issues in my back, which included the upper-back spasm that put me on the asphalt in that aqua-tots parking lot, but more so it has almost completely halted my normal working out.

Usually this time of year I am just starting to kick my fall Elk hunting training into high gear. I start to pair back on jiu jitsu to avoid injury and dive into a heavy and high volume workout program from Mountain Tough Fitness. It is called their 45-70 program and it consists of leveraging your hunting pack as your main lifting tool and leverages sandbags to simulate weights. Aside from the packs, it also throws in a metric crap ton of lunges, runs, and pull-ups for good measure. I’ve used it for the past two years and have felt ready to rock n’ roll each September when archery season for Elk kicks off…

But, as Murphy would have it, I am currently in “Learn to treat your body better and focus on longevity” mode as the years of wrestling, ultra running, and jiu jitsu seem to have finally caught up to me. Despite the physical hurdles, the truth is that the mental hurdle is way harder for me to tackle. All I want to do is go out my front door and sweat and suffer until I wanna curl up and quit… and then do it again. However, that’s just not happening.

So, I am trying some new things to try and rehab my back (the smart way) and get back into my heavier training a little later this year — hopefully in time to be ready for those bugling September elk. To do that, I joined the Y. Yes, while we are in Boise waiting on baby #2 I have retaken up my main childhood sport of swimming. Every day I am trying to get in at least 1500-2000 yards of pool work in, in hopes of staying fit and stretched out. After the pool work I am pushing myself to stretch in the hot tub and then top it off with a few cycles of the steam room broken up by a cold shower.

The awesome Boise YMCA Aquatic Center.

To me, the process feels painfully slow, but I am hopeful that within a few weeks I will be able to add in some light weights and start to shoot my bow with more frequency to prep for the upcoming season(s). For those out there who are dealing with injuries or just plain getting older… let me know how you deal with these things :-)