First Written in Quora
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In Colorado, during the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s, though I was engaged in all sorts of mountain sports, the season I looked forward to the most was hunting season. I was able to get an early start on my hunting life having grown up in Adirondack Mountains of Northern New York state, where you can begin your hunting journey at fourteen, as long as it is supervised by an adult. You are free to go about your business alone at sixteen and you could hunt both archery and rifle during separate seasons during the same year. When combined, as an “Adirondacker”, I could hunt for what amounted to two months each fall. During my time there, the seasons were each about a month long. This is the way it was (at least during the seven years (from age 14 to 21) that I hunted there, and for many years thereafter. The state managed Adirondack Park’s 2.6 million acres are comprised of both state and private lands under a policy designed to make a “Forever Wild” zone well distant from the much higher populations located farther south, and, of course, the population centers of New York City and Long Island, and, to a lesser extent, the Albany area and it’s two “Sister Cities”. The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (ENCON) and the Adirondack Park Agency APA) managed hunter populations in the Adirondacks and ENCON alone managed the rest of the state’s hunting units, which varied greatly in hunter numbers throughout the state’s very different hunting regions. I learned by following my father’s size thirteen footsteps up and down some of the most rugged country in the northeast. For my dad and me, archery practice began in June or July, preparing for the season which opened in September. Rifle practice took place throughout the year and was not limited to a few days or weeks leading up to the season, which began right after archery season had concluded. Rifle shooting was just another part of life and we were always prepared for that year’s window of hunting opportunities.
After college, I followed my dream and landed in Colorado, where I would spend a good part of the next thirty years. Colorado is an “either-or” state, meaning you have to choose between archery and rifle seasons and cannot hunt both modes in the same year. If I had to choose overall, it’d have been archery because it’s nearly a month long versus the five to nine day allocations depending on which of the four relatively short rifle seasons a given hunter elects to hunt. Even nine days wasn’t enough time to satisfy my annual needs. So I began a schedule of two years of archery followed by a year of rifle. As I neared the halfway point of my hunting career, I made the switch to archery only and these seasons would go on to contain some of my best hunting memories.
But things changed significantly over the course of those three decades and by the time I reached my late forties, I was coming full circle with my thoughts and feelings about the sport. I can’t speak as knowledgeably about the other Western states other than to say that some are managing their big game animals, namely, deer and elk, better than others. There are simply too many tags being sold in Colorado and far too many hunters in a given game unit at a given time. Because of this, the gene pool for elk on National Forest lands has gotten weaker every year and continues to worsen. You can see it in the size and antler growth of many four and five year old bulls and the mature bulls are getting fewer and farther between in some of the most popular units. With such a huge shift over three decades, Colorado has become the Pennsylvania of the West. Too many small, ratty looking deer with ticks all over them. Ticks in these kinds of numbers are a bio-indicator, a foreboding sign of a tragically weakened ecosystem. I lived in PA for two years and never had any interest in the kind of slaughter that takes place there every autumn. Since the state is so populated with infrastructure such as roads and four lane highways every few miles, a good fraction of the deer get pushed out of the woods only to become roadkill.
For Colorado to recover, it is imperative that a rotation, not unlike those used on crop lands, be enacted for game units to be “rested” for a period of several years, with the units having the poorest health getting preferential treatment. Some adjustments need to be made to the availability of deer to be hunted, increasing the numbers of licences sold in many units with burgeoning deer populations. It’s become a complicated problem, perhaps one with which the newly released wolves can help once they’ve become established. But, because Colorado is the most populated state to have launched a wolf recovery program, we need to treat them with kid gloves and keep our heads about us if the program is to be a success. Only time will tell, but, based on many years of personal and intimate relationships with various parts of the state, I don’t see wolf reintroduction in Colorado as being viable, given how little space there is between populated areas.
At 64, with a weakened body due to several life altering illnesses, I haven’t been able to hunt in the manner I enjoy for several years and will reluctantly say that my hunting days are over. With things being as they are today, I wouldn’t want to hunt anyway. Perhaps armed only with a good camera and certainly not during hunting season. One thing is for sure, Colorado’s elk are in need of some radical policy changes, even if it comes in the form of a more limited income stream for the state. Though revenues from large numbers of hunters have at least been partially responsible for keeping Colorado’s smaller towns on the map, the deer and elk need to come first for a while.
Encountering a bull elk such as the one pictured while hunting on public lands (BLM, National Forest), in Colorado, has become an extremely rare event due to far too many hunters (as allowed by the vast number of hunting licences sold by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife) which has resulted in chronic herd mismanagement and the highly inordinate numbers of elk taken during Colorado’s hunting seasons. Put simply, it has been the short-term value state wildlife officials have placed on the huge sums of money put into state coffers at the longer-term expense of the well-being of the state’s elk (and deer) populations.
