Search results for ""Boone Crockett Club,U.S.""

Witness the hard-core determination of North America's most successful do-it-yourself hunters...Thirty hunters. Thirty record-book trophy game animals-most of them taken on public lands. Thirty epic tales to share back at hunting camp. These are the real-world stories behind some of the top-scoring trophies recognized by the Boone and Crockett Club, North America's premier wildlife conservation organization. Traverse the deep backcountry in pursuit of North America's wildest, wiliest big game animals-including cougar, caribou, mule deer, elk, bighorn sheep and more. Witness the hard-core determination of North America's most successful do-it-yourself hunters, who combine physical conditioning with research, fair-chase ethics and shooting prowess to seek out and harvest legendary trophy animals. Learn what it takes to make your mark in the record book from 30 who have actually been there. This handsome volume includes an introduction by Jason Matzinger, the well-known host of "Into High Country" on the Sportsman Channel along with a chapter explaining the science and uses of the record-keeping program by Justin Spring.

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These stories represent the heart of what the Boone & Crockett Club is about - hard work and determination resulting in a fair-chase hunting adventure for a trophy animal. "Legendary Hunts II" offers another glimpse at the heart of our hunting culture - everyday hunters who defied the odds to take an exceptional trophy. You will feel the emotion, pride, care, dedication, and excitement as you enjoy the stories of those men and women who have taken these outstanding trophies.

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Hunting nourishes human bodies, minds, and, in some cases, careers. Like many rural Texas youths in the 1940s, Jack Ward Thomas learned to hunt early on. It provided food for his family and a lifetime of enjoyment. But hunting also brought Thomas to his life's work in conservation, highlighted by his tenure as chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Hunting Around the World offers the best accumulated stories, nostalgia, and wisdom of a quintessential hunter-conservationist. Thomas hunted red stag in the Scottish highlands, doves in Argentina, caribou in Alaska, and all manner of big, small, and feathered game across the United States. But his first and most enduring love was hunting in the "high lonesome" of western wildernesses, most often with his wise companion in adventure, Bill Brown. Thomas's storytelling about those quests is classic sporting literature. Readers will feel the chill of a frosty mountain morning, tense moments as a bull elk wanders into shooting range, exhilaration as well as "pangs of conscience" in making a kill, and the wistfulness of truth that old age and old injuries will someday bring every hunter's backcountry chapters to an end. The field accounts in Hunting Around the World are enriched by the perspective of a man who devoted his life to sustainable management of natural resources. As author, Thomas often switches from his well-worn hunting hat to that of a veteran biologist, field researcher, and U.S. Forest Service chief. This unique insight is what makes Thomas's hunting memoir an unusual and special work. Thomas concludes with thoughtful analyses of why he hunted, fair chase, simple-minded critics of hunting, habitat loss as the greatest threat to both wildlife and hunting, and his final surrenderleaving his cherished firearms to heirs: "It seems sad that I can't pass along my memories that are attached to the rifles, shotguns, and pistols. But that's as it should be. Guns and their owners should make their own memories together."

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When Jack Ward Thomas was named chief of the U.S. Forest Service in 1993, only twelve men had ever known the staggering responsibility, political pressureand extraordinary opportunities to influence the future of America's natural resourcesthat came with the job. Theodore Roosevelt had created the agency in 1905, appointing Gifford Pinchot as its first chief. Now Thomas would shoulder the load once borne by two icons of the conservation movement. Forks in the Trail is a collection of stories about the experiences that shaped the values, knowledge, skills, and decisions of a field biologist who came from a hardscrabble Texas farm and eventually rose to the pinnacles of natural resource leadership in Washington, D.C. Thomas arrived at his new post with a unique set of perspectives and experiences. His formal education and decades of forest, range, and wildlife research had prepared him academically. His rural upbringing and passions for nature, hunting, and sustainable use of natural resources had prepared him pragmatically. But it was basic moxie that ultimately equipped Thomas to confront the most controversial conservation topics of the day, from protecting old-growth timber and spotted owl habitat to the deaths of fourteen wildland firefighters in 1994. Thomas's life is the story of how conservation and natural resources management happened in America during the second half of the twentieth century. But more than just old war stories, timelines, and reiterations of his curriculum vitae, Forks in the Trail offers intensely personal reflections of life lessonsof the foibles, fears, mistakes, adventures, misadventures, successes, failures, and comedies of errors and ego"learned along the way to a full, remarkable career. "During my life," Thomas writes, "I had many adventures, good and bad; achieved beyond my wildest dreams; and, to my lasting chagrin, too often fell short. In the process I learned much; lost often but won some too; suffered the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'; helped foment some troublesome quandaries; and helped in the resolution of others." With tales well told, Forks in the Trail reveals a distinctive life and an illustrious career.

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