The Archery Letdown, By Pete Joers

The Archery Letdown

By Pete Joers

Being a self-proclaimed and very dedicated archery bum, I feel I must share a very peculiar chain over events that happened recently, which may help other archers:

The 2010 target season had just ended and what a blast! I never had so much fun flinging arrows with my family and friends, traveling around shooting many of the big tournaments, all topped off with my home club hosting a state championship. It was very busy, but what a blast!

Several times during that busy spring I had received phone calls from other archery bums inviting me turkey hunting. “Nope I’ve got plans…” I’d say, “Tournament here, tournament there, the archery club needs this done,” and so on and so forth.

Tournament season began winding down and it was time to get ready for August bear hunting as well as deer and elk hunting in September plus, as a bonus, I had drawn a quality deer tag for the Quilomene unit in eastern Washington. Time to switch gears!

My preparation ramped up, hiking, biking, shooting, lifting, culminating with chasing big mulies and two weeks in the alpine after the elusive elk. Now this is why I LOVE archery!

November rolled around and I was skunked so far, of course that just meant more opportunity for deer and elk hunting! Thanksgiving arrived and I was out the door headed for new hunting grounds with a bonus tag in one hand and my bow in the other.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I’ve been training and practicing all year, shooting thousands of arrows and I am now in a new area way up in the mountains, with great friends, hunting very hard, and I manage to harvest a great buck; the highlight of my hunting career…a genuine adventure. Once home, I took the buck to the taxidermist, cleaned the blood off of everything, put gear away, and made a movie (we got the whole hunt on video). The fun never stopped, that is, until indoor Multicolor started.

My target bow, which felt so good in my hands a few months ago, suddenly feels foreign, and after shooting it I can’t stand to look at it! I felt like I was just going through the motions: come home from work, go to the club, shoot a round of multicolor, get angry at myself and the bow.

One night when I got home after one of these self-inflicted indoor torture sessions and I see a big set of very familiar antlers sitting on the kitchen counter. “Taxidermist called and said to come pick up your horns, so I did it for you, thought you might like to see them again,” my wife Elizabeth said. With tears in my eyes I pick up the “horns” and instruct my wonderful wife that, “you can not play these, thus they are not horns, they are antlers!” Hugging them to my chest, and not waiting for my wife’s retort, I run off to my man cave. Sitting, thoughtfully looking at this mass of bone, studying every beam and point, I look up and there, hanging in its rightful place at the top of the bow rack, is my hunting bow.

Remembering back to the times I was too busy with “archery” to go archery hunting, things suddenly became clearer. Maybe this is where I lost my passion for archery, and maybe where I will find it again. I started thinking back to ten years ago when I was happy just to hit a paper plate at 40 yards and then discovering 3D and a whole new group of friends. Now we shoot “dots” at 80, 90, and 100 yards. Had I let my passion for tournament archery consume me to the point where I hated it, or had I just let my priorities get mixed up? I had forgotten that the reason I shoot a dime sized dot at 20 yards over and over, and travel the state listening for that beautiful sound of arrow hitting foam, is for that one chance, if it may happen, that the lord graces me with an encounter with one of his beautiful creations; for that one chance to see the wonderful flight of the arrow in the most chaotic of situations.

Setting the antlers next to my hunting bow, I gathered up my target stuff. Turning back for one last look I think to myself, “This is just the beginning of another hunting season. What a fantastic sport we have!”

Breaking the archery mold

In the ever-changing world of archery, whether your focus is toward tournament archery, hunting or you just love the 'release' of shooting your bow, it can be easy to find yourself becoming comfortable with a routine.

Since taking up the sport of archery I have found myself suffering from the stagnate feeling of routine. This became painful evident when friends started referring to my opening day hunting plans as "going back to your good ole' stomping grounds." This signaled to me that I need to break from away from the mold, so when my good friend and hunting partner Pete Joers offered the chance to join him on an epic drop-camp wilderness hunt I jumped at the opportunity.

It is a common for hunting stories to involve months of preparation, training and the days to crawl by as the much-anticipated trip nears. This story is no different as running, backpacking, and gear-refining took on an nearly manic approach.

I was not the only one affected by the upcoming event. Pete took this adventure as an opportunity to revitalize his life, shedding over 30 pounds and diving into the wilderness every chance he got. Connecting with each other between our off season excursions and comparing notes on gear while going over and over stories of the past season became commonplace, further fueling the fire.

I would like to present my hunting adventure as the days passed, giving a blow-by-blow account of what transpired as well as telling the road that led to such an amazing start to the 2011 archery season.

Like most hunters I prefer to know the area that I will be spending my time--in this case 15 days--wandering around. This entails bonsai scouting trips throughout the month of August as the late snow finally receded from my areas. This also meant that trips would serve a double purpose: scouting and bear hunting!

Snow has a strange effect on bear. This is attributed to the high country berries either taking up to a month longer to ripen or, as the National Forest ranger stated, not growing at all. This seemed to be a reoccurring theme throughout the state as my three-day weekends turned into a frustrating search for a bear.

Areas that, historically, held up to six bear on one hillside, at one time, were suddenly devoid of life. The lack of bear made my choice to scout my elk area that much easier to stomach, as I trudged up the trail in the hot summer sun. Accessing elk country has never been so crowded, I surmised, as I passed several groups along my route. It was in between swatting trophy-sized mosquitos, wiping sweat from my brow and dodging horseback riders that things started to get interesting.

I had just completely ate shit on my mountain bike--making sure to strategically land face-first to avoid buggering up my bow on my pack--and decided it was in my best interest to proceed from here on foot. Not a quarter mile from the scene of the crash did I come face-to-face with a black bear who was equally surprised to see me.

Rounding a bend in the trial, I had been admiring a rock formation that was dissected by the trail when I glance into a chest high mountain blueberry patch and noticed a 200-pound bear staring right at me. The bears surprise was evident as I--in plain view--proceeded to drop my pack, unhook my bow, strap on my release and open a pocket to get out my rangefinder. These are all points that I have stressed to others in the past: always have your gear on while hunting! So of course one of the few times I disregard my own rules it come back to bite me--not literally.

Ranging the bear at 28 yards but having no shot due to the hard quartering-to angle, we continued our stare down, that is until a man with two horses rounded the bend immediately to my right, sending the bear into a frenzy in the opposite direction.

The gentleman must have seen my adrenaline-riddled look when he asked, "have you seen anything yet?" I smiled and told him about what had just transpired and he apologized over and over which I still don't understand because, hey, crap happens and it was awesome anyways! So it was back on the trail in search of the next random adventure. This time my bow was in hand and my release securely attached.

The rest of my scouting trip was not quite as eventful and can be summarized like this:

*82 (number counted, there were more) mosquito bites

*only minor lacerations and bruises from my bike crash, no damage to my bow either, thank goodness

*1 more bear within 30 yards. It was only about 60 pounds, which got my blood pumping wondering where momma bear might be!

*20 miles covered with 4,000 feet of elevation gain

*No elk spotted or heard

*One mule deer

*One amazing night of camping under a true wilderness sky.

Oh, did I mention the mosquitos? EVERYWHERE!