Just got back from Colorado last week from a very successful hunt at Kessler Canyon, which is located about an hour outside of Grand Junction in the western part of the state.

The country there is stunning. The lodge is located in a valley that is loaded with sagebrush and willows and has a clear, cold stream that runs down its center. Drift a fly across any of the deeper pools and chances are you’ll be rewarded by a strike from a native cutthroat.

The lodge itself is the finest hunting camp I've ever seen. I like roughing it in the back country as much as the next person, but this hunt was the exact opposite of that. The food, the sleeping areas, the atmosphere and, most importantly, the guides were all first class. The hunting was very hard: up at 4 a.m., back into camp by 9:30 at night, with not enough time to sleep in between. But that made coming back to the lodge for dinner and a drink all the more sweet.  The operation is managed by husband-and-wife team Dave and Jamie Massey, who do an excellent job making sure that both the hunting and the hospitality are second-to-none.

Rising 3,000 feet on either side of the valley floor are the canyon’s steep walls. Up top you’ve got a relatively flat mountain with a series of ridges that spill off to either side. If you viewed a satellite photo of the high country, the top of the mountain would look like the body of a centipede with a series of ridges going off on either side forming like legs.

Most of time we were hunting we were running up and down and around those ridges, looking for mule deer. The habitat is amazing—the deer have plenty of food, water, bedding cover and escape routes. The only thing that forces them off the mountain is the snow, which usually pushes them to the canyon floor at some point in late October or November.

We saw a lot of deer, glassing over dozens of animals while trying to locate a good buck. With the amount of animals we saw I knew it was just going to be a matter of time.

Unlike with borderline bucks, there was no need to take a second look at this animal’s antlers. He’s got everything you could want in a mature deer. He’s tall, wide, blessed with deep forks, good mass and is very symmetrical to boot.

The shot was a long one—450 yards to be exact. But the rifle, cartridge and optics I was using were ideal for this kind of country and that kind of shot. I’ll post some more details in a bit.

—John Snow

Jon LaCorte finished up a very successful hunt in Kentucky after arrowing this outstanding 150-class buck. I've got a hunt in the same area in November—it will be a rifle hunt—and even though I was pumped up before, seeing a deer like this sends my adrenaline level into overdrive.

This buck came from western Kentucky, which has turned into one of the primo whitetail spots in the country.

—John Snow

There are different reports going around about this monster buck that was recently shot, most of which are in what could charitably be called quasi-English.

But the story here is the picture. This is an amazing deer. For those interested, here’s a quick synopsis of the tale behind the hunt.

The buck, dubbed Houdini, had been on the radar screen of a number of hunters for a couple of years. He made the mistake of showing up at a water hole twice in the three days.

According the one report, the buck is 41 inches wide, has 15 points on one side and 16 on the other and gross scores 322.

Amazing.

—John Snow

The hunt reports are starting to pour it. Outdoor Life publisher Eric Zinczenko just returned from Alberta where he shot this stud of a mule deer.

He was hunting with Mike’s Outfitting and he and his guide, Chris, put a stalk on this buck on day two. Eric used the hunt to christen a new rifle—a Bansner Ultimate One chambered in .270 WSM. The rifle is a tack-driver, turning in half-inch, three-shot groups.

This was plenty of accuracy for this hunt.

With all the Palin bashing that has erupted among the Coastal Elite, and the corresponding horror being voiced about hunters (“Did you hear? Sarah Palin has shot hundreds of wolves from an airplane!”), there was a worthwhile op-ed that ran in the Washington Post about the green values of hunters.

Steve Sanetti, the head of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, expressed very eloquently the eco-friendly nature of our passion:

Here's Ben Maki's New Mexico bull he killed a few days ago with his bow. After a week of humping through the mountains he called this elk to within arms' reach.

Send your photos and stories to [email protected].

—John Snow

I’ve been feeling like a kid who’s been told he has to stay inside and finish his homework while watching his friends through his kitchen window play outside in the front yard. Reports have been coming in from various quarters about the start of hunting season. Here in the office a number of guys have been thinning the local resident Canada goose population, while others have already logged some time in their tree stands, fighting off the mosquitoes in hopes of arrowing an unsuspecting and, at this early point in the season, uneducated buck.

My friend Ben Maki just returned from New Mexico having successfully arrowed a terrific bull elk he called within six paces. “All my pins were in his kill zone,” Maki told me on the phone. “I just drew back and let him have it.”

The elk didn’t even realize he was hit. He trotted off about 25 yards and stopped when Ben hit him with a cow call. “He just stood there for a few seconds and then flopped over.”

Well, my turn is coming up. I’m heading to western Colorado in a few days to hunt mule deer in the rough, high rimrock country around Grand Junction. To say I’m excited would be an understatement. My rifle is zeroed in and my bags are half packed.

What have you got on tap? Send your field reports and photos to [email protected] and make your buddies jealous.

—John Snow

Stud. Toad. Gagger. This is the stuff elk hunting dreams are made of. If you haven’t already, go check out the story behind Clark Guy’s amazing bull that he shot a few days ago on a governor’s tag in Arizona.

Being the gun nut that I am, I was interested to know what he used to kill this gorgeous bull. Here’s what Guy said:

Rifle: Remington 700 Classic with synthetic stock

Caliber: 300 Winchester Magnum

Bullet: 180-grain Nosler Partition hand loaded to 3,100 fps

Scope: Zeiss 3.5-10 

A classic elk rig for sure and an incredible hunt.

—John Snow

I like to recover bullets from game as much as the next guy—maybe more, in fact, given the hours I’ve spent up to my elbows in animals searching for twisted bits of copper and lead.

But I’m never disappointed when an animal I’ve shot gets two leaky holes when the bullet passes through. To my way of thinking, two blood trails are always better than one and, assuming the game was shot through the chest with an expanding bullet of some sort, you will have inflicted a tremendous amount of tissue damage across the entire width of the animal’s body while perhaps further immobilizing it with a broken shoulder or two. No animal hit this way is going to go very far.

From time to time I hear guys mention that a pass-through in an indication of “wasted” energy from the bullet—that somehow the shot is inferior because of the unspecified number of foot-pounds of remaining energy aren’t transferred into the animal.

This is wrong-headed thinking. Simply put, energy doesn’t kill animals. Tissue damage is what kills animals. We’ve used energy and other mathematical calculations as proxies to understanding the killing potential of a given cartridge (and have argued endlessly over the validity of energy versus momentum versus whatever in the process) but the fact is neither energy nor momentum is what does an animal in. If your bullet inflicts sufficient tissue damage on the animal it is going to die and that tissue damage cannot be determined simply by looking at the energy of the bullet on a ballistics table.

—John Snow