There's an area in southeastern Oregon where there's some very good El-County.

And 20 years ago you could get a tag over the counter there for the archery season.

I don't know if you still can. over the counter there for the archery season.

I don't know if you still can.

I haven't been back, but I spent a really great nine days in there

with my friend Ron King of Fox Archery and my brother and my good buddy Paul

Balin and we had all been recently outfitted with some packs, some new modular packs that had been designed by a company

that shortly after that went belly up and bankrupt and vanished into thin air.

So I'm not even gonna bother to tell you the name of the company,

but I will tell you this.

They had thought of everything.

These packs were modular and adaptable and versatile and you could switch this and change that.

And we thought these are going to be really great. We headed in there all about five or six miles to base camp and then we're hunting another three or four miles out from there.

Man, we were each probably packing 60 to 70

pounds and we hadn't even brought our old dried and true backpacks because these

things well they're the cats meow, you know, this is the future.

Within a mile we knew we'd made a serious mistake and by the end of that hunt, the packs were falling apart, seams were tearing out,

half the plastic buckles had broken, and we were sore than we've ever been from carrying some weight and we didn't even

get an elk.

We had some good close calls.

We're all hunting with traditional bows and so getting a bull, you know, is not a real high

likelihood. That wasn't the fault of the pack of course course. But what I'm saying is, even though we didn't get an elk and we weren't carrying a huge amount of weight out, we were done with those packs. We gave them back to the manufacturer with some feedback as kind as we could muster, you know, and went back to our tried and true packs that we've been using for years.

...