Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What does being a BackPack Hunter mean to you?!

What does backpack hunting, and being a backpack hunter, mean to you???

I am 35 years old now but I started backpack hunting at 14 years old with my hunting mentor - named Stan Lowe. He was in his 60s at the time and was a forestry colleague of my father's. Stan Lowe showed me places in the remote and rugged NZ mountains that took such a firm grip on me that i gave up all competitive sports to focus on backpack hunting. I lived and breathed it. And every backpack hunt was hard graft; every animal killed ended up in the kicthen pot and then spoken of on a Sunday night roast dinner where i would reflect on my adventures and share them with my family who were not huntwrs; but appreciated the venison or wild pork.

My first solo backpack hunt was an overnight trip into the Kaimais of new zealand (North Island) and I was only 16 years old. But by the age of 17years i had finished school and left home - and spent every breathing moment looking at maps for the next backpack hunting location. And at the time, I would backpack hunt in pursuit of wild pigs, red deer or sika deer - species all of which were scattered throughout the state forests and national parks of my region.

At 18 i moved out of the local district to go to univeristy and onto bigger and better pastures. The Southern Alps of Nz. A backpack hunters paradise. Chamois, Tahr, Pigs, red deer, Wapiti (elk)... all became part of the staple diet.

Fast forward to today and i am blessed with a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters 6 and 4years old. And while I love them all dearly - with a love that has no finite end - I also have this burning desire to leave them for weeks during the year to quench my other endless passion - backpack hunting.

How can i be so selfish to leave my young family, i sometimes ask myself? But the call of the wild is strong. And i need it to feel complete. I need my family but i also need the remote wilderness.

Backpack hunting has taken such a firm hold of me that it is hard for me to place in words.

What does being a backpack hunter mean to you?

I am now trying my hand at self-filming my backpack hunting expeditions in hope that film will convey what words alone cannot.

Here is a recent backpack hunting adventure for Sambar deer into the Victorian Alpine National Park of Australia. My hunting films are generally not short action packed films that tell the whole story in the time it takes to play a rock song... They are intended to simmer away at what it means to me to be a backpack hunter.

day 1  https://youtu.be/MiBy-_w2NSY

day 2  https://youtu.be/630uF7oKYCU

Best wishes from the Southern Hemishphere and God Bless

MountainMan

Being ethical.

I guess I could throw my backpack in my Polaris, ride around, pretend I’m backpack hunting.

Were I to get back into it, backpack hunting and backpacking in general would mean a good chance of another Baker's Cyst. I had one back in '95 that left me self-rescuing on one leg. I'm damn lucky I didn't decide to shelter in place and let it heal up. The darn leg swelled up like a watermelon. I drove back home and had to be lifted from the car.

In 2003, I had another. On the last day out of a long weekend trip, I had what I thought was a charliehorse. I was with three other folks and we were only 10 miles from the car. We split up my gear and I hobbled out. However, the next weekend, I was back out on the trail. The damn cyst ruptured and sent me sprawling. It felt just like someone had hit me in the calf with a baseball bat. It sounded like it too. There was a loud WHACK! from my leg. The guy behind me was sure it was a rattlesnake bite. We spent 20 minutes looking for the snake, before I realized there were no bite marks. We were just doing a 15 mile day loop and this all happened in the first mile. Trip cancelled, and I went back and watched my leg swell up like a watermelon again. The next day we had a 200 mile ride back to town that was agony.

Bottom line: at 50 I had to promise the doc I'd stop carrying a load on my back.

About 8 years ago, I hatched a plan to do the Sheltowee Trace as a series of day hikes. It's long, but not all that strenuous. I started building up to it and right away started getting fluid in my calf. They did an ultrasound and found a mass of gelatinous goo in the middle of the muscles that had the shape of a dead rat. It took 3 months to dissipate.

Unfortunately horses are no longer permitted to be taken into our national parks, or I would own a pack horse for sure, which is why you don't see them in Jamie's videos. Hunting with pack horses are no longer part of the culture after that changed in the sixties.

Just about all the hunting in New Zealand is 'backpack' hunting, and involves a lot of walking, fly-camping, and river crossings. For any kind of hunting other than the back of a farm, you need to be able to carry a pack at least several kilometres from a road, and often over very rugged terrain. However, NZ has an excellent public hut system in the back country.

It was a surprise for me when I first got on the internet that a lot of the American hunting forums had separate backpack hunting sections, as if it was a specialist activity. I sort of thought everyone hunted deer like that. But I have found that the way we hunt deer is sort of like what people do for elk hunting in the States.

People also don't have private family land for hunting, deer leases, or deer camps the way they do over there. I really wish we did; it means that hunting can often be more family orientated in the US, and I think we miss out on that a lot.

So the average attitude towards hunting is a little bit different, there more of a combination and crossover of exploring, hiking, alpine climbing combined with hunting. I think most New Zealanders would find, say hunting red deer in the highlands of Scotland, fairly tame.

Backpack hunting, to me, means I load up the pack, take my rifle and other accoutrements, walk a long way into the mountains, spend a few days sleeping on the ground, shoot nothing, then walk back out. If I ever shoot a big ram, it's going to be an awful lot of work. At 69 years, I probably don't have too many of years of these hunts left but I'm planning on a half dozen years anyway. GD

NZmountainman: Thank you for the links to your wonderful films I really enjoyed them - they were beautifully filmed.
And I was so amazed at the terrain and forests there - not what I had become "used to" when viewing films of Australia.
Thanks again.
I still back pack Hunt at age 70 and have "back-pack" Hunted for Black Bear, Mule Deer, Elk, Mt. Goat and "over-nighted" once on a Moose Hunt.
I wish I had taken MORE pictures along those ways.
Keep up the good work.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Video #1...where you say..." an 8km walk into uncharted terrain"

Being national park, the terrain is likely not 'uncharted'.

You will find Alpine National Park on the gov. mapped list...
http://services.land.vic.gov.au/maps/imf/search/Topo30Search.jsp

I gather you ventured into that wilderness with the use of old school topographic maps or GPS maps?

[

Wow that is unfortunate and sounds incredibly painful. I hope the injury is healed now and that you can get back out there.

ME: Doc, everytime I do this, I get a sharp pain in my leg!

DOC: Stop doing it!


That's pretty much the way it stands. I'm turning 60 next month. I can still do day hikes, and I can still camp. The trick is to have the gear already there at the end of the trail so I don't have to schlep it. That's good enough for me.

Another term for Baker's Cyst is "The phantom golf ball." A lot of golfers get it. The cyst explodes and the fellow is sure he's been hit by another player's ball.

The first time it happened to me was 0300 on the night before I took off for an overnighter. It hit me while I was out of my tent coming back from peeing. It didn't dawn on me that normal cramps don't make noise. I thought it was just a charlie horse and took Ibuprofen and hit the trail the next morning, doing a 900 foot ascent before leveling off on a ridgetop. I figure I'd gone about 2 miles before I realized this was no cramp. For whatever reason the climb up didn't hurt as much as walking on the level and going down was unbearable. I was running 4 hours late, I'd drank all my water eaten all the Ibuprofen and I still had over 8 miles to go, and there were thunderstorms due. I thought about leaving my pack, but I gutted it out and went back down and got to my vehicle about sundown.

I've already done that trail once since, with my wife in 1997 before the kid arrived. He's now 20, and I've promised him we'll do it together once before I'm too old and lame. The midway point of the trip is an abandoned fire tower with an access road, so we can leave a vehicle with my stash there.

NZMountainman,

I envy you living in New Zealand. My Wife and I that place and plan to spend six months there after our aging pets expire. I still backpack hunt here in Colorado. I have had trouble finding other people who will do it with me so I often go alone, and I kinda like it that way. Now that I am 58 my trips are shorter in distance, packing an elk out alone is no joke as I’m sure you understand. If I could just recruit a a younger hunter!

Backpack hunting for me means freezing my ass off and sleeping on the ground....:)





Much prefer this these days...