The Calgary Bow Zone

In November 2014 I traveled to Alberta to hunt whitetail and mule deer. I had used Bowhunting Safari Consultants, an agency that represents and handles the details for bowhunting trips around the world, to book me on a hunt in Iowa – at the time Iowa was reputed to be the best state to find big whitetail deer in the US. It usually took three years in the lottery to draw an Iowa archery tag, so I completely expected to hunt there in 2014, but unfortunately I didn't draw. So I asked Jay at BSC what my backup plan should be. He gave me a couple options and I selected Alberta.

Triple S Outfitters is located in Calgary's "Bow Zone," and run by Stuart and Ruby Sinclair-Smith. They guide hunters on moose, elk, mule deer, and whitetail deer - I would have tags for both a whitetail and a mule deer buck. The Zone is designated archery only, though at the end of the year they do allow shooting of does with shotguns and muzzleloaders. Triple S is the only outfitter that lives in the Zone and only guides bowhunters. In camp this week were Craig and Phil - both from upstate New York. They had been there for a week and Craig had scored on a 180 class mule deer, spot and stalk at 45 yards. Phil shot a 170 class muley through the heart at 60 yards - that deer was Phil's 270th. Phil was a 69-year-old electrician, and Craig was forty-something, and in charge of security for a division of Boeing. They have hunted all over the world and are serious trophy hunters.

My first sit was an unexpected bonus - the early flight from Boston had me arriving just after noon, and so I had enough time to shoot a couple arrows, and head out to a stand. I hadn't expected to hunt until the next morning. Stuart put me in a ladder stand at the bottom of a draw, and there wasn't much cover in the poplar tree all stripped of its leaves. I stood as the sun was getting low, wanting to be ready if a deer came in, keeping movement to a minimum. The worn cheap metal stand creaked when I shifted my weight - it wasn't a perfect setup, but it was a bonus half day on my six day hunt. Just a half hour after I settled-in a doe appeared from downwind. She seemed edgy, but not too upset. Right behind her was a young buck. Both hung up in their tracks, looking around. As the wind swirled he must have gotten a whiff of me, and he bounded off to the east. The doe gradually worked her way south, looking back at me from time to time. A couple hours later a doe walked through from the south to the northwest, and then darkness fell and I waited for Stuart to pick me up.

Ruby and Stuart were in their 70's, living and ranching on 1 1/2 "sections" of land - a section is a square mile, 640 acres. Viewfield Ranch was established by Stuart's father in 1919, after he emigrated from Scotland. They raise calves to be sold to feedlots, and grow hay and canola. Their kids live locally, along with several grandchildren that like to come hang out at their grandparents house to be pampered. We were staying in a part of the main house that has a couple bedrooms, bathroom, dinning area, and living room. The decor is all stuffed trophy animals - elk, deer, bears, antelope, cougars, rams, moose, buffalo, caribou, reindeer, stuffed owls, and a bald eagle in flight. The eagle was found dead by a neighbor - in the US a private individual cannot own so much as a bald eagle feather, much less a whole stuffed animal ... but this is Canada.

During lunch on our second day we watched an elk herd of about 300 animals take out the neighbor's barbed wire fence. It was Saturday and there was a Christmas craft fair in a nearby town, so folks from the city were stopping to gawk at the elk herd. The cars were hemming the animals in so they couldn't go where they wanted to. On edge, they ran across a field to get away from the cars, but every field is surrounded by barbed wire. The first dozen or so animals could see the approaching fence and leaped it, but then the others just ran right through it. An amazing sight to see. Elk were always nearby the whole week and one day a young bull bedded behind my stand - chewing it's cud for a few hours less than 100 yards away. I kept looking back to see if he was still there and, through the falling sleet, at times I could only see the movement of his jaws as he chewed. I saw several coyotes, a moose, and a weasel with pure white fur and a brushstroke of black on the tip of its tail. When he scurried along on the snow he was impossible to see, as if he was wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak. Just eyes and the black tip moving among the scrub willows, the rest of him was a blur, fuzzing-out the bits of color on the snow beneath him as he passed - at first I didn't know what I was looking at. Talk about camouflage.

The Bow Zone gets hunting pressure, and there are a lot of people and cars coming and going, ranchers working their land. The deer are cautious, wary, on-edge, and the lack of natural cover doesn't help. There are the occasional spruce trees, but mostly the rolling land is a mix of poplar and diamond willow, cropland, and weed choked cuts in the process of reverting to bush. In this part of the world people call anything that isn't cultivated agricultural land the "bush."

Triple S uses a combination of tree stands and blinds - I think Stuart mentioned having 90 set up around his ranch, plus that of the neighbors that let him hunt their land. He has access to a few thousand acres within a short drive from the ranch. He has lock-on stands, ladder stands, and several "bale blinds" that he made himself - they look like a bale of hay, but are really made of hay-covered plastic over a metal frame. He said that one time the wind caught one of these blinds and ripped its stakes out of the ground, sending it rolling for a mile across two roads.

The bale blinds are mounted on wagons and Stuart puts them out in field edges where he's seeing deer. I hunted in a blind one morning - it had fine fabric mesh window coverings that you’re supposed to be able to shoot a fixed broadhead through, but keep deer from looking in and seeing you draw. The problem that morning was that the window I wanted to use was covered with a layer of ice from the freezing rain the day before. I got in there in the moonlight, and was puzzled by why the window looked and felt like it was covered with plastic. I called Stuart on the radio and he told me to cut out the fabric so I could shoot. The problem was that now the deer could see inside. The carpet was squeaky in the cold, as was a board on the wagon below. Unfortunately no deer came by to test the viability of the noisy footing and cut-out window.

There is a lot of coming and going on the hunted land, so the deer are accustomed to vehicle traffic. On the other hand, they don't like people on foot. All the stands are located close to a field or road so Stuart or Ruby would drive us right to our stand and pick us up at the end of the day. Stuart wants his hunters to stay up in the tree until he drives-up. I think it's primarily an effort to not educate the deer about the stands, but I also don't think he wants hunters getting lost or hurt. The Alberta government says that there are no grizzly bears in this area, but Stuart got photographs of seven grizzlies on trail cameras in the past year. I assure him that I will be sure to stay in the tree until he arrives.

When its dark, Stuart drives with his lights out. "No reason to tell them where we are," he says. Stuart drives fast on fields and cart paths that he's known all his life. There are ditches, bumps, trees, and large rolls of hay that must weigh a ton, and here we are flying past them with the lights out and seat belts off. I can just imagine the conversation with my wife, probably at the hospital, "So, why weren't you wearing your seatbelt?"

"You really can't wear it driving around the hunting land ... bulky clothes, you know, and any minute you might have to get out and shoot something."

"And you had the lights out on the truck?"

"Yeah - we didn't want to scare the deer."

"why was he driving so fast?"

"we needed to get to the stand ... it was going to get light soon ..."

"Hmmm ..."

Stuart has devised a communication strategy that allows him to keep in touch with his hunters, but not alert the deer. We each have radios with earpieces, and the system is that he will tell us what's going on and ask us yes/no questions. When we want to respond, we press the talk button, but don't say anything - this sends a burst of static over the radio. One press for yes, two for no, and three if we want something or need different questions. In Stuart's experience, the earpieces can fall out, and then he's broadcasting to the deer, so he duct tapes the earpieces in. Each night when we take off the radios we rip a quantity of hair out from around our ears. Phil says that this will eliminate the need for his barber to trim his ear hair. Between the cold and the duct tape, my left ear feels leathery weeks after I return home to Maine.

Triple S has a variety of tree stands, and each is named for the first person who used it to shoot a big buck or bull, or some other noteworthy event. I hunted from Jeff's Stand, and Steve's Stand, the Chainsaw Stand, and The Bear Stand, among others. One night at the dinner table Ruby and Stuart's grandson Kyle mentioned that The Bear Stand had a colorful history involving his grandmother. There were the usual protestations that result when someone mentions a potentially embarrassing story, and then Stuart proceeded to tell the story about when he and Ruby spotted a bear there. They had to go back to the ranch to get Ruby's bow, and grabbed the wrong arrows - the arrows belonged to a friend who is considerably shorter than Ruby. She shot arrow after arrow at the bear, but each time hit only trees. The arrows were so short that their broadheads almost cut Ruby's hand, and her accuracy was way off. Finally Stuart handed Ruby one of his arrows, and she put the bear down in a heap. The Bear Stand was where Craig shot a big buck the last day of his hunt.

I hunted from single ladder stands, double ladder stands, and lock-on stands. The ladder stands were mostly on the short side (15 feet or so) and located in groves of poplar trees, but some were buried in a spruce tree or two to give more cover. The lock-ons were mostly in tall spruce trees, though The Bear Stand is a lock-on in a poplar tree, not far off the ground. Steve's Stand is in a huge cottonwood tree, and very far off the frozen ground. It has to be over 30 feet up, and you go up a series of ladders to get to the top - I have never hunted from such a high stand, and I am someone who likes to be up high. No shooters came by the evening I hunted Steve's Stand, and I did wonder about how such a height would affect any shot angle I might have. Hunting from a high lock-on was better because your scent and movement were more concealed but, like most of the stands, shooting lanes and directions were often limited.

Phil, Craig, and another hunter I talked to before going to Triple S all hit tree branches when shooting at deer. The quality of stands were similar to the other guided hunts I have been on, except the shooting lanes were sub-standard. I have learned to not cut too much when setting a tree stand so you will maximize concealment, but I think that the shooting lanes on these stands were unnecessarily clogged. And in some cases it was obvious that the stand worked best for someone a lot shorter than my 6' 3" frame.

The stands were also far noisier than I am used to. I always monitor the noise coming from my home stands, and work to make sure that the squeaks and creaks are eliminated. Only a few of the Triple S stands I hunted did not make noise when you moved your feet or shifted your weight. The single ladder stand that I was in when I passed-up shooting a 125 class buck made a bunch of noise and actually shifted back and forth several inches if you were standing and shifted your weight. You couldn't really stand because that would significantly truncate your shooting lanes. You were forced to sit, and your only shot angles were to your front left - a tall left-handed archer would be out of luck in that stand. I spent one whole morning with the wind blowing my scent right into my only shooting lanes - a fox and a doe told me all I had to know about where the wind was blowing my scent. The beautiful red fox put on the brakes, did a 180, and beat a hasty retreat when he was about to hit the first lane. It was a tough stand that I hunted twice because of the scrapes and rubs nearby - once when the wind was wrong and once when it was perfect. The metal stand was cheaply made - when you shifted your weight seated, you could actually feel the metal mesh platform that you were sitting on pop in and out with your weight. Unfortunately I was standing, giving my butt a rest, when another large buck came in and saw me move.

Many of the stands were economy models with light gauge metal mesh platforms that might be ok for limited personal use, but were dished and creaky after years of guided hunting. When you hunt from a stand and a deer comes in from a side that you aren't positioned for, you must move your feet to take a shot. There were only a few stands at Triple S that I was comfortable repositioning my feet when a deer was near. Several times does came in on-edge because they had heard a pop or a squeak that didn't belong in the woods. The cold weather didn't help, adding squeaky snow and ice to an already difficult situation.

Triple S is a mom and pop operation, and I bet that trimming shooting lanes and evaluating stands is not high on the list. They have had a lot of success over the years shooting deer, moose, and elk from these stands. Several of the stands are so old that the screw-in steps up the tree have grown-in to the point that there is only an inch sticking out and new steps screwed in beside them! The stands may have been replaced, and they are safe, but its clear that they have had a stand in that same location forever, so its just human nature to not evaluate them regularly. And to be absolutely clear, I am being picky. But when you spend thousands of dollars to hunt for a trophy deer, you have every right to be picky. Stuart needs to have his grandson Kyle (he's a big guy who loves to hunt) go through a third of their stands every year and make improvements. Check for noise, clear the lanes, and just generally look for ways to improve the hunting experience from that location.

We had a wide variety of weather the week I hunted Alberta. The week started warm, and we were well over 50 degrees before a front moved through, but the second half was cold. The front brought freezing rain, snow, and then the mercury dropped. For the last three days the mornings were below zero and the highs in the teens. Before leaving home I spoke to Stuart and mentioned that I planned to bring a Heater Body Suit (HBS). He said that I could bring it, but I wouldn't need it. I get cold very easily and found that the HBS makes it possible for me to sit in a stand all day in reasonably cold weather. Nevertheless, the forecast for Calgary was colder than I'd ever hunted, so I was apprehensive going on this trip.

I started hunting without the HBS, and it was warm enough to not be a problem, but then it got colder and a few times I was getting very cold around pickup time. In the first stages of hypothermia, I was shivering and doing isometrics to stay warm. Because of the need to be as well concealed as possible, and to not move while on stand, Ruby and Stuart were skeptical of me using the HBS. Ruby clearly did not want me to use it, and said as much, even though she was not familiar with it. She said that some hunters had worn clothing so bulky that they couldn't draw their bow. I explained that the HBS was made for bowhunters. It was like a sleeping bag with feet, and that straps allowed you to unzip and shoot while the suit was held in place behind you. I think all she heard was the sleeping bag part.

I wore Scentloc long underwear, another set of warmer long johns, a battery powered heated vest, two pairs of socks with plastic veggie bags in-between as a vapor barrier, super insulated Goretex dark camo coveralls, uninsulated snow camo coveralls, a neck gator, baseball style cap, Scentlock warm hat, lightweight fleece gloves, and a handmuff around my waist. I put a Thermacare 18 hour heat wrap around my middle, and up to three pairs of chemical hand warmers in the muff. 1200 gram insulated high rubber boots kept my feet fairly warm, considering how cold it was, though I did wiggle my toes most of the day.

The hardest thing was to get out of the house, into the truck, and up into my stand without breaking a sweat. After a half-hour or so on those below-zero mornings I would unroll the HBS and slither it on, all the while trying hard not to make noise in the creaky stand. After I defied my guides and broke-out the Suit, the cold wasn't really a problem anymore. While Craig and Phil were in camp the routine was to hunt in the morning from 45 minutes before shooting light until 11:00, come in for a big lunch, and then go back out from 2:30 until dark - this makes sense before the rut when deer are moving between feeding and bedding, and back to feeding. Toward the end of my week I requested to hunt during the middle of the day because we had been seeing bucks paired with does at all hours. On two of the coldest days I was in my stand all but an hour or so during the late morning lull. The rut was kicking in and I knew that bucks could be moving during midday.

My best opportunity came on the second to last day. We headed out at 11:30 to a stand where, a few days before, Phil had seen what he thought was a Boone and Crockett whitetail monster chasing a doe. Ruby and Stuart took me to a lock-on in a stand of poplar and I climbed up, put in a hook for my bow, got my gear settled, and watched a coyote trot past. It looked like a great location but, as soon as I was settled, Stuart radioed me that they had seen a nice mule deer buck traveling with a harem of does, and they were going to move me. I packed up, climbed down, and hiked back up the hill to the car. Despite the cold, I was starting to sweat, and my safety harness was constricting. They sped through the fields to get in front of the mule deer, stopping to let me out at the sit-down shifty ladder stand with limited shooting lanes. They sped off while I got set up in the stand, still wearing the harness, though the ladder stand was so low I didn't really need it.

As I waited for the muleys Stuart came on the radio and told me that they were heading my way and to get ready - something like that always gets your blood flowing. After a while I saw a few mule deer does walk past about 100 yards to the east, followed by the buck - later Stuart told me that the buck would probably have scored around 175, which is a nice buck indeed. I was now at the shifty stand, and settled in for the rest of the day.

The wind was blowing from the east, carrying my scent away from where the deer were expected to travel, and toward some thick blowdowns that formed a natural barrier. 19 yards away was a rub and a scrape, and another buck scrape was closer. The rub was an old cedar fencepost about six inches in diameter that had been used and abused, losing a noticeable amount of its thickness. At home we never see rubs on such a thick tree or post - large deer tend to rub larger trees. This rub had a fresh pile of wood shavings at the base of the post, indicating that it was an active rub. I believe that many scrapes are one-time actions of a cruising buck, but that rubs are more meaningful and can indicate the home turf of the buck. It was great to be sitting so close to such fresh sign.

It was now afternoon, and before too long I saw movement from the south. A fork-horn buck was moving toward me. He moved cautiously, probably intending to go over and rub his antlers on the post, but he paused and then changed direction, moving off to the southwest. He hadn't smelled me, and I hadn't moved, so it was just another example of how fickle deer are when they move through the woods.

An hour or so later, around 2:15, I spotted another buck coming slowly from the southwest. My first glimpse told me that he had much bigger antlers, so I quietly unzipped and reached for my bow. I held the bow upright in the cold with a cam resting on my leg, hooking my release to the string. As the buck approached, moving at an angle toward the post, I studied his rack. He was an eight point with good mass, but his tines were not long. I looked at his body as he moved across my field of view, and he didn't look old - his hindquarters had the lean look of a younger deer. I guessed that he was 3 or 4 years old and would score around 125 inches. I am not expert in judging deer, but he didn't knock my socks off. He probably would meet the Pope and Young 125 inch minimum, would be a trophy back in Maine, would edge out my Delwin Drive buck for number 2 status on my wall, but he wasn't what I came all the way to Alberta for - especially when Phil had said a Booner was in the area. So I passed. He approached the post without having a clue that I was there, and gave it several good rubs before cruising off to the north. As he rubbed, he presented me with a perfect quartering-away shot and I stared into the kill zone as he had his front leg forward, exposing his vitals. It was a good thing that he didn't linger much longer. I have always thought that if a debatable buck hung out in from of me long enough I would say "what the hell" and shoot him. You can only resist temptation so long.

I only sat during the middle of the day twice - one day I saw two larger bucks cruising and one day I saw nothing. Other than Craig and Phil, I never saw another hunter on the thousands of acres we hunted, so the hunting pressure was not a factor. The week I was there was the very week Deer and Deer Hunting magazine's Charlie Alsheimer predicted would be the best time to be in the woods because, due to the moon phase, the bucks would be doing the most cruising during daylight. I started to suspect that the doe to buck ratio was out of balance, so I asked Stuart and Ruby if they knew what the ratio was. They didn't, but they knew that there were far more does than bucks.

If does outnumber bucks by a large enough ratio, the bucks do not have to move very far to find their next willing mate. We saw bucks paired-up with does, a good indication that they are mating, and we saw bucks chasing hot does, so we knew that we were in the peak of the rut. Despite being in the right place and the right time, I didn't see an abundance of cruising bucks, so I'm thinking that there are more than enough does to go around at Triple S. Stuart gets at least one elk for the freezer each year, because elk tastes better than venison, and the folks from the city come out during the primitive weapons hunt for does and shoot mule deer because they will just stand there. It seems to me that they need to make an effort to shoot more does each year to get the ratio back closer to balance.

With the stands, shooting lanes, and buck/doe ratio, my hunt at Triple S was not great, but unfortunately Ruby kept it from even being good. We got off to a bad start, and it just kept going south. Everything I said to her seemed to be misinterpreted. At one point I thought that maybe she just wasn't good at expressing herself, but I finally reached the conclusion that she wasn't even trying.

A couple weeks before the hunt I emailed Jay at BSC asking if I would have Internet access at Triple S. His response was, "I just called Ruby and they do have the internet for you. She said her grandson has is (sic) ‘messed up though’ so not sure what that means!" In 2014 I was running a company with 100 workers and got at least 150 emails per day. That week I had a few important business issues brewing so having easy Internet access was critical. I took Jay's response to mean that Triple S either had access, or it was on the fritz and would be fixed by the time I got there - after all, they are in a suburb of Calgary, which has a population of 1.1 million, so it wasn't like I was going to be out in the bush. When I hunted in Saskatchewan I was way out in the middle of nowhere, hours north of Saskatoon, but the lodge had wifi and I was able to keep my head above water back in the office.

The first day in camp I asked Ruby about getting onto the Internet to check email. She said they didn't have Internet. I panicked.

To avoid international roaming charges I had deleted the access information from my phone - Nate, my IT director had recommended this. With no phone access to the server back home, I tried my IPad, figuring that I could get cell-based data with roaming charges. My iPad wouldn't connect to the Rogers network. Craig let me tether to his phone the first day, and I eventually called Nate, put the account back on my phone, and called ATT to sign up for an international data plan. For the balance of the week I was able to do business via my phone - not as nice as the iPad I usually use on international trips, but doable.

Unfortunately, in the midst of my panic, I let Ruby know that she had told Jay that I would have Internet access, that it wasn't true, and that it was a big deal for me. In retrospect, I should have kept my mouth shut.

Ruby’s reply was, “are you calling me a liar?" That set the tone for the next week.

Even though I tried all I could to repair things, saying that it "was just a miscommunication," agreeing with whatever she said, complementing her cooking, walking on eggshells, it was to no avail. There was no mending this fence. When I couldn't find my watch and asked her to keep an eye out for it, she said, "well, nobody here took it!" When she asked if I liked ANY of their stands, and I mentioned that that the shifty stand had been great the second hunt when the wind wasn't blowing my scent into the shooting lanes, she said, "well, we can't control the weather!" Any question was taken as a request, and any comment as a complaint.

On the other hand, Craig and Phil got along with Ruby like they were the best of friends, which I think they were. Ruby and Stuart are nice people, and Stuart was always very nice to me - the problem was that once Ruby turned against me, she didn't really try to make me feel comfortable. It was like an SNL skit with Craig and Phil playing the part of the prodigal children and me the adopted loser. After they left it was sad. The lively dinner conversation, mostly between the four of them, shut down to awkward silence. The only positive reaction to me from Ruby the whole week was about my snow camo coveralls - she loved that pattern. Everyone did.

The last evening I hunted from The Bear Stand. TBS is on the edge of a cut alfalfa field near the house, and deer were feeding in the field most hours of the day. With the rut in full swing, and does in the field, there was a good chance that a cruising buck would come by TBS to get to the field. With about two hours before dark, Stuart picked me up from a stand back in the bush and drove me to TBS. He gave me some time to warm-up in the Suburban, and then put me in the tree with no pack or HBS – the stand was a lock-on about 15 feet up a bare poplar tree in a grove of poplars, so Stuart wanted as little mass as possible up in the tree.

Craig had hunted TBS a few evenings before, and he saw two shooters. He was at full draw five or six times as one buck chased a doe around the stand without giving him a shot - there are only a few shooting lanes and a lot of poplar branches. Finally the doe ran into a thicket, and then a little while later came back out, this time with a much better buck. This buck stepped into a shooting lane and Craig shot him. He had to rush the shot and hit the buck a little farther back than he intended - the buck hunched his back and slowly moved off to bed in some trees. This is the classic sign of a gut-shot deer.

Stuart, Ruby, and Kyle watched the deer from a long distance until dark. Everyone went back to camp with the plan to look for the buck the next morning. When they got back on the track the next day they bumped the still-alive deer, and Craig finally finished him with another arrow. It was a great whitetail, scoring around 150 inches - really a nice trophy. Even though the weather was below zero overnight, and the buck had been alive when Craig finished him off, we all noticed the smell when Stuart started to field dress him back at the barn. The buck was rancid. "Bone sour." That's what Stuart called it. The bacteria from the paunch had spread throughout the deer, causing him to rot while still alive. The stench when he was cut open was epic, and it continued as Stuart gave up on the meat and skinned the buck for a shoulder mount. The body was then thrown outside for the coyotes.

When I was up in TBS I could see the Suburban far in the distance and knew that Ruby and Stuart would be glassing the field for action - they would tell me on the radio if they saw anything coming my way that I didn't see. Later Stuart commented that my camo was so good that he couldn't pick me out in the tree - the only giveaway was the red of my face when I looked their way. The temperature was about 15 degrees and dropping, so I have no doubt that my face was red.

Stuart drove within 20 yards of TBS when he dropped me off, and lingered in the Suburban until I was up the tree and getting settled. When he sketched out this plan he said it was because the deer would come out just as soon as he left, and sure enough they did. Does came out from several places, moving far out into the field to feed, until there were about a dozen within 500 yards. A few went by me without a problem, but a pair did so downwind and a swirl of scent must have busted me. I had to freeze in the stand for ten minutes while the mother doe marched back and forth stamping her feet. She looked up at me repeatedly, but couldn't see what I was - she just knew something wasn't right. Finally she moved out into the field, taking her large fawn with her.

As the light began to fade a buck finally did come out and give me the last excitement of my trip. He was a good-looking deer, an eight point that would probably score around 130 inches, and I decided to take him if I got the chance. I hooked my release to the string and waited for an opportunity. He was amped-up on the rut, sniffing the ground and moving back and forth quickly, and I was looking for the right time to draw. Being so exposed in the tree, and him not distracted by a hot doe, I wanted to keep my movement to a minimum - if I drew too early, and had to let-down, he might see all the movement. He kept moving, never coming close to a shooting lane, though the whole time he was less than 25 yards from my tree, and then he ran out into the field to chase does.

As darkness fell over The Bear Stand my Alberta hunt came to an end. Even though the Calgary Bow Zone was my backup plan when the Iowa tag didn't come through, I had really been looking forward to the trip. Triple S sounded like a place you could return to time after time, hunting with a friendly outfitter for whitetails, muleys, and elk. In Maine we just don't expect to get a shot at a trophy buck. It happens every once in a while, but most hunters go their whole life without shooting a heavy racked wallhanger. Hunting out of state is the only option if you want to put several racks on the wall.

I have found in the past that, after adjusting to the routine and pace of hunting camp, I don't want my trip to end. When each day brings a new adventure, filled with close encounters with the animal I love to hunt, you can't help but want just one more day in the field. Unfortunately Alberta wasn't that way. I found myself counting the days until I could leave. The cold was brutal, the stands weren't good, the bucks were not cruising, and Ruby was a bummer - I couldn't wait to leave. I'm sure that others, Craig and Phil included, couldn't disagree with me more, but Triple S Outfitters in Calgary is not a place that I would ever go back to.

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