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A few more thoughts on Alaska gear & public land

Even people who will never hunt in Alaska want to know what kind of gear a guy carried while he was there, and they might even have some opinions about it. Alaska is kind of the go-to place for all imaginary hunts, survivalist prepping, and bush homesteading, and you can go on YouTube and on any related video find endless debate about guns and gear by all kinds of people, 99% of whom have never been to Alaska. After the “Thousand Overnight Tragedies” essay here a week ago, I got some questions about my hunting kit from people who will never do anything more than a luxury cruise to Alaska. I know well that if a couple guys ask, there are more who want to know but didn’t ask. So here goes, my best advice on how to be properly kitted out for Alaska.

First off, before assembling your Alaska kit you have to determine if you are staying out in the Alaskan wilderness. Plenty of people get air dropped into a remote wilderness spot, tent up near the lake or river where the float plane landed to drop them off, and that’s their base camp they hunt out of every day. It is the same place the plane will pick them up from in a week or ten days. If this scenario is how you are heading into Alaska to hunt or fish, then you need all of the survival gear, various fire starting methods, a beacon, etc. kit that you would need while wilderness hunting anywhere else in North America. My Seek Outside tipi tent with the large titanium wood stove has made all of the difference for how I hunt in wilderness (thanks to Ranger Ian for his guidance on this years ago after I reported how I nearly froze to death in his service territory).

Second, the month of year really makes a difference in Alaska. I have been there in July, August, and September. July and August are usually quite comfortable. In September you are beginning to get some chilly nights, and possibly chilly mornings. Maybe a chilly day. Warm clothing you can easily layer on and off, like a Filson wool vest, becomes critical the later it gets after August ends.

Finally, where exactly in Alaska are you going? Central Alaska encompasses most of the state, and it is kind of the rugged classic interior Alaska everyone thinks of when they imagine Alaska. But all of the state’s coastal areas are really different from the interior, especially as you begin to head north or south of Anchorage. Southeastern panhandle Alaska is a temperate rain forest. It rains there even when it is not really technically raining. Something like fifteen to twenty FEET of rain falls there in the southeast. Obviously you have to be prepared for regular rain if you are hunting and fishing in the panhandle.

If you are hunting out of an Alaskan home, say your friend’s or your cousin’s, or from a lodge, and then driving or boating to your destination each day, with plans of returning before dark, then here is the kind of checklist you will appreciate:

  1. Rubber rain suit, jacket with hood and pants. My 25-year-old Cabela’s blue rubber rain suit worked fine for both repelling the constant light patter and sometimes more steady rain. It also served as my wind breaker with only a tee shirt underneath. Blue is a bad choice for hunting, because many animals see blue like humans see fluorescent orange. When my blue rain suit finally dies, I will get a green one.
  2. Good rubber boots and also good leather hunting boots. I used both, sometimes on the same day, the rubber ones in the morning and the leather ones later in the day, or vice versa. If you are hunting hard, you need rigid ankle support, and I have not found a better boot for hunting in steep, rugged terrain than the Danner Canadians. I especially relied on the Danners on the SE AK island we hunted for blacktail deer. For this recent trip I finally bought my first “good” pair of rubber boots, the only “hunting style” rubber boots that properly fitted my enormous duck feet, by Irish Setter. These worked great in all wet environments I encountered, many of which were the margins and shallows of salmon streams. A PEET boot dryer is a good thing to have waiting at home at the end of the day.
  3. A light day-use backpack holding extra clothing, extra ammo, food, water, GPS (I use a Garmin 62s with detailed mini SD card maps) a range finder, binoculars, etc is an absolute necessity. My LL Bean hunting pack has accompanied me on hunting trips from the Scottish Highlands to Alaska and a lot of places in between. It is a fabulous and extremely durable, well thought out piece of kit.
  4. Binoculars are essential in Alaska, because it is such big country. Doesn’t matter if you are hunting or fishing, you absolutely must be able to see what is happening around you, if for no other reason than Alaska serves up cantankerous grizzly/ brown bears by the minute almost everywhere you go. And occasionally mean moose. Plus binoculars help you see game you are after, or maybe circling marine birds distantly picking off scraps as larger fish feed at the surface, where you can easily catch them. Leupold has been my USA-made go-to binocular maker for a very long time, after using various Nikons for a while. Yes, you can’t go wrong with Swarovskis or Zeiss, but I am brutal on my gear, and I will cry like a baby if all 265 pounds of me face plants on top of the $3,000 binos strapped to my chest. So I use a pair that are almost as good as the $3,000 pair, but which cost about 800% less.
  5. Range finder. Any modern range finder is useful for hunting in big country like Alaska, except over water. If you are hunting directly over a large body of water, then you need to calibrate your piece, or it will give you whacky results. I use a Nikon Forestry Pro because I work in the forest products and land business, but it has also served me just as well in hunting. I have learned that this model is rugged, because I use mine so much, in so many tough environments.
  6. Knife. Yes, you need a strong, sharp knife to go hunting correctly. I won’t wade into the whole which steel is better than my grandma’s Old Hickory no-snob high carbon potato peeler knife. And if anyone ever says the word “bushcraft” within arm’s length of me, you’re gonna get a healthy serving of country whoop ass. Because I can’t take it any more. The whole “bushcraft” genre is such urban flatlander weekend warrior nonsense, for God’s sake, let it be, leave it alone, leave it behind. A hunting knife can be almost any shape, size, and steel type that has worked well for you in the past. The Inuit and Inupiat just south and north of the Arctic Circle use Old Timer pocket knives, grandma’s ulu made of whale penis and wrought iron, and occasionally a high quality modern “huntin‘ knife” left behind by an appreciative tourist hunter. And guess what…all of these various shape knives work just fine for the subsistence lifestyle a lot of Inuit and Inupiat live. And they kill, skin, dissect, and eat raw on the spot – with their varied assortment of knives – more critters in one month than you will kill in a lifetime of Lower 48 recreational huntin‘. I happen to use various JRJ knives made by John R Johnson of Perry County, PA, because his ATS-34 steel and overall craftsmanship were as good as any huntin‘ knife available anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately, John has not made a knife in almost ten years. Fortunately, for years I bought armloads of knives that he custom made for me, and I enjoy using every one of them every season.
  7. Rifle. Yeah, some guys hunt Bigfoot with a souped up .44 Magnum or 454 Casull handgun. So what. A rifle is light years better than a handgun in every way, and I hunt big game only with a rifle, especially in real big country like Alaska. On this recent trip I carried my friend’s Henry 45-70 lever action, loaded with the Federal Premium HammerDown 300 grain rounds. There are hotter, more effective 45-70 rounds available from CorBon and Grizzly, but I was happy with the 3″ 100-yard performance of this round out of my friend’s rifle. And I don’t know how up to snuff the Henry is with the hotter 45-70 loads. The problem with the Alaska panhandle is that the weather there absolutely eats guns. If the saltwater doesn’t kill your gun, the constant rain and moisture will finish the job. A stainless steel gun like the Marlin 45-70 SBL is probably the best possible hunting rifle for Alaska. And this gun can handle the hottest 45-70 loads. One comment about the Henry: Its rear sight was very frail and kind of sad. It moved around all by itself, which can result in a severe mauling or death by Griz, if you happen to not check up on the rear sight and adjust it as needed every ten minutes.
  8. Backup pistol and bear spray. Bear spray works very well in places without wind or breezes. If you use bear spray in a place with wind or strong breezes, you are likely to incapacitate yourself instead of the bear (insert stupid human hungry bear joke here). I happened to be hunting and fishing in a SE AK place with constant winds and breezes, so I dispensed with the bear spray and kept a .44 Magnum revolver on my hip, loaded with some bear-buster ammo and not the ubiquitous 240 grain JHP that is guaranteed to piss off Griz more than kill him. Speaking of backup, I carried an emergency beacon of unknown make or vintage on most of my hunts.
  9. Clothing. My old tried-and-true Cabela’s Gore-Tex hunting pants were perfect for the cooler days, and my old tried-and-true Columbia nylon zip-off cargo pants were perfect for the warmer days. A wool hunting shirt in red and black buffalo plaid (of course) with some thermal long underwear is all I needed in the early season. I wore a no-name fluorescent orange fleece hat as well as my 2020 Trump hat. Sometimes together when it was cold. Mid to late September and beyond, you need real cold weather gear.

Good luck if you go DIY hunting in Alaska. DIY solo is my thing, and I think it is the most fun way to wilderness hunt. The challenge with DIY in Alaska is it is so big, and the critters are so big, and the distances are so big, and the civilization is so small and so far away. You really can’t do a DIY hunt by yourself in Alaska. It is not safe, and a thousand things can go wrong after you are successful and kill the animal of your trophy dreams. Go with a friend, go with a guide. And be smart about balancing your kit with practical items you are truly likely to need. Hunting in Alaska is not automatically a survival test or a Bataan Death March. You don’t go to Alaska and automatically plunk yourself down in the woods and start doing a video on (puke) bushcraft. It isn’t all dangerous, nor is Alaska all wilderness. Plenty of good hunting and fishing is available a decently brief drive out of any of the major cities, but it does get better the farther out you go.

Speaking of going further out of civilization, all this amazing hunting and fishing and trapping in Alaska is possible only because of the huge critical mass of public land there. Yes, I agree that federal and state agencies sometimes mis-manage public land. And sometimes those agencies end up “mis-managing” their relationships with the American citizen taxpayers who pay the agency staff and who own the public land the agencies are supposed to steward. But I think that public land is one of the very few things that government does pretty well. And even when government staff screw it up, the public land is still there afterwards.

A thousand overnight tragedies

Normally, the smell of rotting fish is a signal to clean out the fridge or to leave the area you are in. It’s a universally bad smell, and no one normal wants to be around it. But it was a pervasive good sign where I happened to be standing, because it was associated with the freshly dead salmon heads and remains at my feet that had not been here the previous afternoon. A thousand individual tragedies had occurred along this stream bank overnight, as bears had picked muddy bank spots to grab spawning salmon and take them uphill where they could eat them without the fear of being ambushed by humans, or bigger bears.

We had hunted and fished along a roughly seventy mile vertical stretch of southeastern Alaska for over a week, and in addition to beginning to smell a little fishy myself, I had also saturated and possibly satiated a cavernous need inside me. It is an ever-present deep, clawing need that most wilderness seekers share, be they bikers, hikers, canoers, campers, photographers, fishers or hunters. Sorry, I am not going to quote Thoreau or Muir or Roosevelt on the tonics, joys, highs, or benefits of directly experiencing wilderness. My own wilderness pleasure is gained from simply not seeing a single other human being (except my hunting/fishing partner, when I have one) anywhere near where I am hunting or fishing. That unusual moment results in me feeling like I have better than average odds of achieving my goal, because I have the whole landscape to play without intervention.

On this trip, my “public” goal was a wolf, a blacktail deer, and/or a big black bear better than 300 pounds. Hides and skulls alone were going to come home with me. Edible meat was going directly into my buddy’s freezer. All of the many salmon I caught on the trip went into either my buddy’s smoke house, into his freezer, or into my stomach. It pleases me to report back that chum (dog) salmon directly out of the ocean taste damned good. It is also a fact that chum salmon do not keep well overnight, and that even halibut turn up their noses at it. I suppose freshly caught chum can be immediately canned, but given that there are usually better alternative salmon species to eat and can, I don’t see why a person would make this choice.

Incidentally, about those salmon: Alaska’s management of its salmon runs has been so good, so professional, so scientific, and so successful, that there is actually a glut of salmon in the streams and on the American market. Therefore, wild caught salmon prices are way down. A lot of commercial salmon boats were out netting, and the cannery we visited was in business, but with diesel fuel at about eight bucks a gallon there and salmon at eighty cents a pound, it’s hard to see how the netters will survive. But thanks to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, the bears have plenty to eat before denning and hibernating for the long, cold Alaskan winter.

Goals are critical on a wilderness trip. Even stupidly simple ones. You have to have goals before you set out on a trip like this, or else you will wonder what the heck you were doing out there when you get back to civilization. My actual personal goal was simple: To fish and to hunt as much as I could, and this goal was easily met. On this trip, I was often able to do both hunting and fishing simultaneously: We slowly trolled salmon spoons behind the boat while glassing the shorelines for critters. A rubber dinghy towed in the backwash provided us the ship-to-shore transportation we needed. See a salmon stream that is calling your name? Go ashore and hunt it, and look for salmon-eating black bears to fill some tags; and look out for the griz. We saw a lot of griz.

Only saw wolf tracks in one very remote spot, and I passed up the one black bear I had a shot at. Only twenty feet across the salmon stream from me, he was either a genetic runt, an ancient-looking yearling, or maybe a female. Whatever kind of black bear he was, he was crabby enough to growl at me before shambling off to less crowded fishing spots. I wouldn’t shoot a bear that small in Pennsylvania, and I sure wasn’t going to fill my Alaska tag with it. Maybe I will go back for the spring bear hunt in 2024.

Despite fighting our way up into the interior of an island known to have blacktail deer, we saw none and feared the griz there more than we were willing to keep going after deer. Signs of griz were everywhere. I picked and popped high bush cranberry and high bush huckleberry while noting the increasing deer browse the farther in and higher I got. But it was a veritable jungle, and surprising a griz up here would mean my certain mauling, possibly my death, and so I decided to nicely frame my deer locking tag when I got home instead of risking life and limb to fill it. I headed back out and found Merlin asleep in the sunshine on the beach.

A loud thud on the bottom of the boat awakened me from my cramped sleeping position, and I rolled out of my sleeping bag onto the cabin floor, which was cluttered with gear and guns. Walking out onto the deck to look for the source of the thump, I saw a sea lion, a seal, and a pod of porpoises chasing salmon all around us in the early morning dimness. Mist rose from the water, and then the rosy tint of dawn’s first sunbeams lit up a nameless glacier high up in the crags across the water. I felt stoned on all this Mother Nature. Like I said, I was there just to hunt and fish, and whether or not I went home with the physically tangible results was not nearly as important as absorbing and sucking up the magic around me and filling that big, hungry, empty cavern in my soul. You just can’t have this magical experience without public lands, and some of that designated as wilderness. This, these, we had.

Cleaning a day’s catch of salmon, fresh in from the ocean

Overnight tragedies, spawning salmon scooped and eaten by bears

Alaskan salmon management has been so good that there are actually “too many” salmon, if there is such a thing

Reflected is the Chilkoot River, where we fished with the bears and a gaggle of international tourists following them up and down the river

Dawn on a glacier

Trolling spoons for salmon, towing our dinghy, and glassing the shoreline for critters. This is hunting and fishing at the same time

A picture like this is worth about a trillion words. Wilderness is freedom

Our boat, our beach

Captain, oh my captain. One of my heroes and a good friend

My hunting kit. A Henry 45-70 lever rifle (not crazy about the cheesy rear sight), a JRJ knife, rugged Leupold binoculars, home made dried fruit and jerky

Grizzly sow and cub eating salmon as they spawn upstream from the Chilkat River. I saw a lifetime supply of griz on this trip.

 

Public Lands: Public good, public love

Someone named this September “Public Lands Month,” and while I have no idea who did this, or why they did it, I’ll take it nonetheless. Because like the vast majority of Americans, I totally, completely, absolutely love public land. Our public parks, forests, monuments, recreation areas, and wildlife management areas are one of the greatest acts of government in the history of human governments.

As a wilderness hunter, trapper, and fisherman, I truly love the idea of public land, and I love the land itself. No other place provides the lonesome opportunities to solo hunt for a huge bear or buck, either of which may have never seen a man before, or to take a fisher and a pine marten in a bodygripper or on a crossing log drowning rig, than public land.

If you want a representation of what is best and most symbolic of America, look to our public lands. They best capture the grandeur of America’s open frontier, the anvil upon which our tough national character was hammered and wrought. It was on the American frontier that Yankee ingenuity, self-reliance, and an indomitable hunger for individual freedom and liberty was born. And yes, while it was the Indian who reluctantly released his land to us, it was also the Indian who taught us the land’s value, so that we might not squander it, using it cheaply, profligately, and indiscriminately. Public lands are the antidote to our natural inclination to use land the same way we use everything else within our reach.

Some armchair conservatives argue that our public land is a waste of resources. That it is a bottled-up missed opportunity to make even more-more money, and if only we would just blow it all up, pave it all, dam it all, cut it all right now, etc, then someone somewhere would have even more millions of dollars in his pocket, and daggone it, he really wants those extra millions on top of the millions he already has in his pocket. When all our farmland is paved, that same armchair conservative will have nowhere to grow food to feed us, and apparently he will learn to eat dollar bills (he already thinks Dollars are what we survive on, anyhow, so it’ll be an interesting test of reality meeting theory).

But the truth is it’s mentally sick to talk about how much money you can get for selling your mother, or for selling your soul, which is what our land is, take your pick. Hunger for more money than a man knows what to do with, notwithstanding. But some things are just not worth valuing with money, and no number of payments of thirty pieces of silver will ever, ever amount to anything in comparison to what is actually in hand, our public land.

Others complain that public land is communism, but what do they say about the old English and New England commons, where villagers pastured their collected cows? Were our forebears who fought at Bunker Hill fighting for communism? You know they weren’t. Sometimes sharing isn’t a bad thing, and sharing some land is probably one of the best things. If Yosemite or Sequoia National Parks were privately owned, no one from the public would be there, right?

Americans are fortunate to have in their hand millions of acres of public land that they can access, from Maine to Alaska to Hawaii and everywhere in between. Little township and county squirrel parks, big state forests and parks, and vast national parks like the Appalachian Trail and Acadia are all magical experiences available only because they are public.

It is true that LaVoy Finicum was murdered in cold blood by out of control public employees over a legitimate debate with tyrannical, unaccountable public land managers in Oregon. But that is not the fault of the public grazing land there, any more than a murder can be blamed on the gun and not the man who pulled its trigger. We need to hold accountable those who screwed over Finicum and those who murdered him, not blame the land on which it all happened. Despite some failings by public land managers, of which Finicum’s murder is a great and sad example, public land remains one of the very few things that government actually does well and right almost all of the time. Corrective action is just one new administration away, as selected by the voters.

If you want to see untrammeled natural beauty for campers and hikers, or if you want to experience bountiful hunting lands for an afternoon or a week, then look to the public lands near you or far away from you. Everything else – nearly 100% of private lands –  is either dead, dying, or slated for eventual execution at the hands of development.

We need a lot more public land in America. We need more to love in life, and nothing compares to loving a whole mountain range, a river, a field or a forest. It will love you back with nurture and sustenance, too.

Hang glider leaps off of Hyner View State Park, surrounded by a couple million acres of Pennsylvania state forest and state parks

 

Down below Hyner View State Park is the Renova (Renovo) municipal park, with some historical artifacts from past freedom-ensuring conflicts, reminding the next generations of the sacrifices made so they can enjoy iPhones and Starbucks

 

Yours truly standing high up in the Flatirons above super-liberal Boulder, Colorado, in the background, demonstrating “Trump Over Boulder” in case any hikers had missed the shirt. None had missed its presence there, by the way. Lots of public land here, enough for everyone to share, even Donald Trump! (and yes, there are a lot of boulders here in the photo).

The author malingering around the Boulder, Colorado Chautauqua kiosk, silently taunting the invasive liberals gathered and passing through there. And in fact, the Trump shirt earned many double and triple-takes from fellow hikers, unused to experiencing diversity of thought. I did not bite those people, though I was tempted. Great public lands experience!

The Importance of Wilderness

Wilderness rarely makes it into the news.

It usually gets mentioned when a US president designates a new wilderness area, or adds existing federal land to an existing wilderness area. The acreage involved in those events is so large, usually so vast, that it must be newsworthy. It just has to be news. It is impossible to ignore it.

This makes the “very good” news.

Another way to get wilderness into the news is to raise the subject of natural resource management in a remote area that is not declared or designated wilderness, but which has a wild and untouched character. These reports are usually cast as a loss of innocence, a loss of wildness, a loss of something special.

This makes the “very bad” news.

Wilderness as a news topic usually involves one extreme or the other: Very good, or very bad.

The truth is that wilderness, those huge untouched areas with nothing but healthy flowing watersheds, breathing forests, and nearly unlimited wildlife habitat, are of mere flesh and blood. Wilderness gets such short shrift and limited coverage in the news media, because so few people know what it is. It is mythologized for better and worse. That it is nearly 100% public land can complicate things, politically, but the fact is, you will not find wilderness in any other state of being in a developed nation.

Most Americans do not have any real exposure to actual wilderness. Their hands-on exposure to it is either zero or merely driving through or around some wilderness area or region (like northern Maine), and admiring it from a car or picnic area. Few immerse themselves in it.

For me and for many people like me, wilderness is like oxygen. We just have to have it. We must have it coursing through our bodies, supporting our feet as we stand or hike or explore. There is nothing mystical about this experience. No transformative or spiritual worshipfulness. No beams of sunlight directed downward by heavenly forces. It is a purely physical connection that in the context of modern sedentary lifestyles becomes such a stark contrast and unusual experience.

Oh sure, we see the hand of God in Nature. Goes without saying. How can you not see Him there? The genius of life on Planet Earth is beyond magical, beyond scientific.

That I get an endorphine rush from every moment I am out in wilderness is an indication of my own “nature deficit disorder,” a topic worthy of a full discussion some other time and something most assuredly suffered by the vast number of Americans.

Why people do drugs of any sort is beyond me, because I can get a safe and natural high from watching a tree sway in a breeze, or a snowy hilltop dressed in silent snow, or a tiny junco flitting among the snowy branches of a small spruce tree. So much of what we call wilderness is really just the same things going on in your own back yard, except that actual wilderness has much less of some of that animal activity, and a lot more silence and serenity. In designated or de facto wilderness, we do see the more rare and cool “charismatic” animals, like moose, panthers, fishers, bobcats, marten.

As an experience, for wilderness lovers like me, wilderness excursion or immersion is just like eating, or breathing. Its quiet is a quantifiable value, like a gallon of gasoline has a price we pay to keep our vehicles going. People like me simply gotta have that wilderness experience to keep running. In modern American terms, it is like having a really big house. We feel like we belong and must be there, comfy and snug.

One of the challenges with wilderness designation is that most of it happens out West, where there are already hundreds of millions of acres of nationally-managed public lands. Already out there are big wilderness areas that a person could spend an entire summer exploring just one location.

Back East we have hardly anything resembling wilderness, and what we have is easily degraded. It is here in the East that the energy and money must be focused on setting aside wilderness while we still have some few opportunities remaining. Opportunities being those industrial lands no longer useful for commercial forestry or mining.

It is a lot more politically palatable to work on wilderness protections here, in the East, where the majority of the American population is concentrated. Many more people are excited about it here, and far fewer people feel like their livelihoods will be negatively impacted by public land and wilderness. Because we have so little of it.

Wilderness is important because it is in wilderness that our species evolved and lived happily for 99% of our time on Planet Earth.

Wilderness is our natural state of being, where we humans are most at home, most honestly, naturally ourselves. In modern times, it is where we are least distracted by “narischkeit,” meaningless chatter and buzz. In wilderness we can be honest, true, most mentally healthy, if only for a day or two.

This past Fall I killed the biggest bear I have ever seen in the woods, in a designated Adirondack wilderness area where I was on a solo hunt. It weighed close to 600 pounds, and its hide squared over six feet. Its hide is literally over twice the size of the 260-pound bear’s hide I sleep under in the winter. A true monster. The king of the mountain.

Know what’s neat about this hunting experience? This bear had probably never seen a human before, and he stalked and tried to eat me three times. The third and last time he tried was when I lost patience amidst growing fear that I was going to be eaten alive, and I shot him at thirty yards in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Just skinning him took almost two days, because his enormous carcass rolled under a log on a steep hillside.

It was predator versus predator, animal eating (or wearing) animal, the most basic natural law on Planet Earth.

Though I admit feeling remorse for having ended his kingly reign. I had been after a big buck, and only took my foe when he had willingly forfeited his nine lives over the course of two days with me on the mountain.

I have never felt so alive.

Wilderness, it’s in us. It is important to us, to be us.

To be human.

Amidst Obama’s Scorched Earth Exit, Trump Dept. of Interior Pick a Huge Bright Spot

As one might expect of a spoiled, petulant, over-indulged man-child, Barack Hussein Obama is not following traditional presidential transitions.

Instead of spending his time talking about the greatness of America, its promise, its successes, its opportunity, and peacefully transferring power to his successor, Obama has gone on a wild spree of destruction and mayhem across America and in the international community.  Aided and abetted by the mainstream media, which share his anti-Western Civilization agenda, Obama has not been held accountable.

“Monkey-wrenching” might be the right term for this bizarre display of poor-loser behavior.

Dozens of useless but expensive new regulations with no basis in reason or science are being rammed through the executive branch. Same for executive orders. Nearly a thousand violent federal prisoners are being released, having obtained clemency from Obama; these scary men will surely bring unlimited suffering and horrors to American citizens over the next couple years. Like the Guantanamo Bay jihadists released by Obama for the AWOL traitor Bo Bergdahl.

Internationally, Obama has abandoned Ukraine to Russia, Iraq to Iran, Syria to Russia and ISIS, and Israel to its insane neighbors plus all of the anti-Jewish bigots around the world. Failing to veto a bizarre attack on the Jewish state at the useless United Nations last week, the Obama administration left the tiny island of democracy to its own devices while empowering the most radical, evil, violent anti-Western foes attacking Israel today, and America tomorrow.

This destructive scorched earth retreat from a failed eight years is the best that Obama can do. It just highlights his hatred for Western Civilization, Christianity, Jews, hard working normal American tax-paying citizens, goodness.

But you know what? Donald Trump is giving us hope every day for all of the great and positive things his administration will begin doing in three weeks.

My favorite two choices by the incoming Trump Administration are the selection of outsiders at EPA and the Department of Interior.

At EPA, Scott Pruitt is the right guy to take the fight over fake “climate change” directly to the religious fanatics promoting it.

I know EPA well.

It is where I started my career after graduate school at Vanderbilt University, and where I spent exactly seven years vainly trying to figure out liberalism and bureaucratic obstructionism. Oh I did some amazing jobs at EPA, and I had a big impact. But I grew tired of the liberal culture there among the staff. I grew tired of policy battles initiated by unaccountable bureaucrats at war with capitalism (yes, this is a straight up true fact from my own amazing experiences at EPA).

For me, changing EPA’s name to Department of Environmental Health would signal the correct staff culture change and professional alignment. “EPA” connotes a certain outsider status and identity, which suits radicals and gives cover to bomb-throwers in the taxpayer-funded ranks.

At Interior, Congressman Ryan Zinke is a perfect fit, and actually pretty inspiring from what I have read about him.

Zinke is a former Navy SEAL. Need anyone say more….a selfless, patriotic hero, basically. Thumbs up.

But Zinke is also a conservative conservationist, a rarity in my experience.

He’s a hunter. Thumbs up.

Way too many Republicans and conservatives actually oppose environmental protection and wildlife conservation, because in a certain simplistic view, these things get in the way of unbridled, maximal development. And if a bunch of Marxist econuts say one thing, then the truth must automatically be the exact opposite (not…why do conservatives always allow the Left to define the green battlefield?).

It is embarrassing, no, make that humiliating, to hear some Republicans slavering over the opportunity to liquidate public lands. This is proof that the Left does not have a total lock on policy insanity.

America’s public lands are a beautiful treasure, a dowry, a gold mine of recreational opportunity and personal exploration, a huge temple in which to worship God from desolate mountain tops to silent, tranquil remote valleys. I am blessed to have been able to really explore many, many national and state parks and forests from Maine to California over my 52 years, and God willing, I have plans for a lot more exploration of new places across America the Beautiful.

Camping, hiking, fishing, trapping, hunting in far-flung wilderness places are all favorite activities for me and for tens of millions of other Americans.

Being from Montana, Zinke innately understands the personal connection  healthy-minded Americans have to their scenic public lands.

Yes, it is true that public lands are a big government footprint in some places. But they are also one of the very few things that government seems to be able to do pretty well. Though I would suggest eliminating the Bureau of Land Management, as its original charter has long since expired and its staff culture sucks. And I would also look into creative ways to resolve some of the longstanding conflicts over natural resource management and extractive activities on public lands. And multiple use policies require some fine tuning. Like allowing hunting and trapping in the remote areas of most national parks.

I speak from experience here, too, having directly worked with the National Park Service, US Forest Service, and staff from other federal resource agencies.

Not all of these challenges, or problems (yes, they are problems when they threaten to destroy entire pristine watersheds) require an either-or decision or black-and-white policy view. A lot of nuance can be brought to bear. Zinke seems like the guy to do that, which is incredibly refreshing.

See? The clean fresh breeze is blowing out the stench already. Despite the evil darkness of the Obama years, the penetrating shining light of the incoming leaders lightens and cheers my heart, gives me hope from the change.

Zinke and Pruitt cannot be confirmed soon enough.

Let’s make America great again.

It’s official: Sunday hunting in VA

Two weeks ago the Virginia state House passed a Sunday hunting bill out of a committee that had bottled up similar bills for decades before. It was a surprising statement that it actually got through committee.  Then it passed the full state House, which surprised even its most ardent sponsors.

Well, today the Virginia state Senate passed the companion bill.  It allows hunting on private land on Sunday, a private property rights win if there ever was one. If you pay property taxes, say on a remote mountainside property, and you are deprived of 14.2% of your full use of that property for some vague reason, you might get frustrated.  It is your property.  You can shoot 1,000 bullets at a target on Sunday, but you cannot shoot just one at a squirrel.  Laws like this are by their definition arbitrary, the bane of democracy.

Virginia’s governor says he will sign the bill into law.

Welcome to the modern era, Virginia! We are envious of you.

Kudos to Kathy Davis of PA-based Hunters United for Sunday Hunting (www.huntsunday.org), who has devoted the past two years of her life to this issue, and who helped a great deal with getting the Virginia law passed and the lawsuit filed there.  The lawsuit compelled the state legislature to act, before a judge ruled against the state and the entire state was opened up.  While I would like to see public land open for Sunday hunting, I am satisfied with private land as a start to implementing it state-wide.  This really is an issue of the most basic American rights.