Every camping trip I take with my son begins with the same question. “Where should we go?” His reply has been the same since he was 6 years old. “I don’t care.” This response doesn’t mean he is disinterested. It genuinely means he doesn’t mind… Read More
Airports suck. There really isn’t a more eloquent way to say it. In the last month I have flown to Indianapolis once and Los Angeles twice. I may have to make another trip next week. The cities are different, but the destination is always the… Read More
Palisades State Park near Garretson, SD
With every new year, the calendar resets and gives us 365 more opportunities to be outside—hiking, hunting, fishing, camping or whatever it is we enjoy doing in our free time. If your calendar is like mine, most of those 365 days are already accounted for.
Between work obligations, family responsibilities and one or two unexpected home repair projects that demand attention, I estimate the average sportsman has approximately 21 good days to enjoy the outdoors. And that is if the weather decides to cooperate.
So, before my calendar is filled with commitments, I resolve to make a few of my own for 2015. Read More
View of the Cathedral Spires from Little Devil’s Tower
“It’s too hot to hunt.”
I never thought I would be saying these words two weeks into a pheasant season. But when the weather forecast called for highs in the upper-70s, I decided not to risk overheating my dogs. It would be smarter to wait until the temps returned to something resembling fall.
However, I wasn’t about to forgo a weekend of hunting just so I could stay home and work on the yard. I believe the good Lord frowns on people who waste perfectly good days raking leaves. Read More
Rare sunset over Ketchikan Harbor
I don’t have a bucket list, but if I did, fly-fishing for cutthroat trout in Alaska would undoubtedly be near the top. But even as I write the words, it seems like something I would expect to read in a travel brochure and not something I would actually do.
It is too incredible to be real.
To be honest, the idea of taking a weeklong trip to Alaska never seemed plausible—especially when my old college buddy, Brant, half-jokingly suggested it nearly a year ago. I hadn’t seen Brant since we graduated from the University of South Dakota in the mid-80s. But there we were, thirty years later, waist deep in a remote Alaskan lake and casting our lines to rising trout. Read More
The Dakota Sky 