We started 2022 heading into our third year of the COVID-19 pandemic and got introduced to Omicron and all its siblings and children. 2022 also seemed to be the year where the effects of climate change really hit home in the PNW. For all the weirdness though we actually did quite a bit this year and spent a lot of time outdoors truffling, hiking, camping, hunting and fishing.
2020 totally sucked between the Coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns, wildfires and finally Lira injuring her knees so I had hopes 2021 would be a huge improvement. As I write this we are pretty much back in the same place we were in winter of 2020 with the new omicron variant raging in Seattle and the rest of the world and the obvious impacts of climate change hammering us with snow and, for Seattle, extreme cold. The year has been full of pandemic canceled plans but has some bright spots with Lira making a full recovery by summer time and taking on new challenges this fall.
2020 was by far the worst year for pretty much everyone. In my case maybe 2014 was worse since I was sick the entire year but 2020 has been one thing after another mostly hijacked by the Coronavirus pandemic. I had such big plans starting the year, I had stopped working (again) and was looking forward to several big hunting trips, camping and travel to the LA sunshine. All that lasted about eight weeks.
I grew up fishing for bass and panfish for the most part like most people in the Midwest who fish. When I was in middle school my dad got way into bass fishing and was part of the semi-pro bass tournament circuit in the Midwest so I used to get dragged all over the place to fish. We mostly threw plastic worms, spinners and crank baits but at times I would fly fish for them. When I moved to Des Moines after college I got serious about fly fishing for bass and spent many days on the Middle Fork of the Raccoon fishing for smallmouth or out at a lake fishing for largemouth.
Last week we finally broke out the NOBO and headed over to the Teanaway Forest, one of the closest places to home where campgrounds were now open after COVID related closures followed by a 23-day manhunt for a murderer who was holed up in the area. Turns out I was turkey hunting on a day when the guy who killed another turkey hunter was on the loose and Catherine and I were foraging another day, they just hadn’t announced it and started the closure yet,.
They re-opened the outdoors in Washington on May 5th and after a week of letting the crowds thin out I decided to start getting back out there. Lira and I have been hitting the lakes early in the morning to avoid the crowds and the boat ramp backups. It has been fun getting out on the water but our freezer isn’t filling up too fast, I’m in a streak of losing fish and bringing home one per day out when I hook two or three more. I need about 8-10 trout to get the trout supply in decent shape for the rest of the year so I’ll keep at it while I can over the next few weeks.
Yesterday I went turkey hunting for the day over in the Teanaway. Tough to do in a day trip with no scouting but it was great getting out into the woods for a full day. I covered a range of spots in the DNR land over there and put in about 8 miles of walking with a lot of calling and sitting in good looking spots. The highlight of the day was when a mule deer walked out into one of my spots. The deer knew something was up but wasn’t quite sure what to make of me and it finally just walked off after looking in my direction a few times but not really spooking. Of course the only turkey I saw was walking across Red Bridge Road as I was driving back home. I may try to get in one more day before the season ends just because it was so nice being outside all day and not having to deal with running into other people at all.
I have no idea what this is all going to mean for fall so I’m hoping to take advantage of as many local opportunities as possible to get a deer in the freezer and do a bunch of bird hunting. All I know is that I’m glad we have a fairly well stocked freezer at the moment from last year and between that, our garden and CSA we don’t even need to go to the grocery store too often.
Another year gone by already and what a year it was. I spent a lot of this year dealing with a relapse of SIBO and some other health issues but still managed to get outside every single day, got in a lot of hunting and fishing and had quite a few good trips locally, to the LA area and to British Columbia. So much, in fact, I couldn’t even really get it all in the picture grid.
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My friend Mark and I had tried to get together for a turkey trip last season but didn’t pull it off so this year we set one up in Oregon so I could go after my first Rio Grande and he could go after his first turkey ever. He got us booked into the Big K Guest Ranch outside of Elkton on the Umpqua River for one day of turkey hunting and one day of fishing. I decided to fly down to Eugene instead of doing the 7 hour drive down and back and it worked pretty well since the ranch had a shuttle and I knew I could pack light for a two day trip.
2018 was a good year but a tough year in several respects and I’m actually kind of glad this one is over with. Thanks to Lira I hiked close to 2000 miles this year and we managed to get out and do quite a bit of fishing and hunting, logging 108 days total in the water, hills or fields. I also somehow managed to build a boat for the sole purpose of taking her fishing with me since she coludn’t quite work out in a float tube. Catherine and I had a lot of fun spending many days exploring the Middle Fork Valley this year and also camping and hiking on the Oregon coast.
Up until this year Lira and I spent all our time hunting pheasants but this year that changed. Yes, we still hunt a lot of pheasant but we also started hunting frequently in Eastern Washington for other upland birds as well as spending some time in the woods hunting grouse. Trust me hunting is the appropriate word for grouse, we didn’t spend much time killing grouse. So far this season we’ve added four new species of birds to our list.
Chukar have sort of always intrigued me as a game bird ever since reading East of the Mountains by David Guterson. Tough terrain to say the least and they are hard to hit. Early in the year we hunted some planted chukar at Cooke Canyon just to get Lira onto a new bird. While deer hunting in Ellensburg we saw so many chukar that I decided it was time to hunt them for real and have spent several days now along the rimrock and high flats searching for them. We have managed one wild chukar and that is one Lira literally grabbed out of a bush.