Category Archives: Primitive Skills

PRIMITIVE IS NOT A BAD THING

Primitive Skills Shelters tools weapons tracking survival

Primitive Skills and Crafts: An Outdoorsman’s Guide to Shelters, Tools, Weapons, Tracking, Survival, and More. By Richard and Linda Jamison.

“Anyone eager to master survival skills for outdoor vacations, or simply to find a fun new family activity for a Saturday afternoon, will be educated and inspired by the practical advice presented here by archaeologists, anthropologists, primitive practitioners, craftsmen, and artisans. These experts help modern readers rediscover the skills that have served humanity for millennia: fire-making, camp cooking, basket weaving, pottery making, animal tracking, and much more. You can even learn how to turn seashells into arrowheads or make glue from yucca plants. Plus, there’s intriguing information on the benefits of a hunter-gatherer diet. More than just a how-to, this handbook provides inspiration to live life to the fullest.” – Author Synopsis

Colorado Muzzleloading Memories

Bowhunting has always been my passion and the bow and arrow my weapon of choice. I might add that this has remained unchanged for nearly fifty years too!

Occasionally though, I have toted around the powder and ball. Not that much, mind you, but enough to know that black powder hunting has its own special romance and charm. And, I have often said that muzzleloading may be the most effective way to take a trophy class big game animal in the west. It may be even more true today.

Here’s a long-lost photo from the early 1980’s, taken in the middle of an epic rain storm on an elk and mule deer hunt on Red Table Mountain near Basalt, Colorado.

The bucks were huge and the elk were plentiful, but I’m afraid that the weather won the week on this trip. I also learned, forever, what it means to “keep your powder dry”.

I can’t tell you how much I now wish that I had taken many more pictures on this hunt, but I do remember being far more concerned about wind, and mud, than taking pretty photos. It rapidly turned into a battle for comfort, and survival, while waiting impatiently for conditions to change. Some hunts are like that, and it’s always best to be prepared, particularly when carrying around the old smokepole.

I did bring back a bucketful of memories, however wet they may be. I can still see those giant mulies staring through the mist and downpour, on a mountain where you can barely find a buck today,

And I can truly say, that those were indeed, the days…

 

An elk and mule deer hunter in northwestern Colorado poses on the deck of a small hunting cabin, somewhere on Red Table Mountain in the mid 1980's. Michael Patrick McCarty
A Dry and Warm A-Framed Port in The Storm. Photograph by Kevin McBride

 

A muzzleloader hunter poses for the camera in northwestern Colorado, about to set off for elk and mule deer on Red Table Mountain in the mid 1980's
It’s All Blue Skies For A Hunting Man. Photograph by Kevin McBride

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