Expert Guides

Traveling to hunt is something I feel everyone should do at least once; it represents an adventure that can quickly make a hunter feel years, if not decades, younger. An unseen valley, an exotic species, perhaps the need for a different rifle or cartridge, it all adds a flair to the sport we love so much. Now, depending on where you call home, the destinations I’m about to list may or may not seem like an exotic place to hunt, but here are ten places that I’ve either fallen in love with or plan to in the near future.

There’s a lot of science behind creating the perfect venison cheese steak, from thinly sliced meat to slowly cooked onions. Venison sandwiches can be a thing of beauty, but they can also be a nightmare. There’s a fine line between the two when it comes to deer, and it’s usually crossed when the lean meat goes from tender to leather.

For deer hunters that have grown restless in their home state, finding a new area to hunt can be maddening. Instead of dropping your money on an expensive lease, though, look to one of these seven states as a potential public land whitetail destination.

Times change, and technology changes along with it. We hunters have an irrefutable connection with the past; we discuss our favorite cartridges — often with opinions based upon the experiences of our forefathers — and we long for the opportunity to recreate those hunts made famous in the hunting literature we adore so much. However, I feel that if our hunting heroes of yesteryear could’ve had the opportunity to use those tools that we now have available, they’d embrace them immediately. And among all the improvements we’ve seen in the last half century, I rate modern bullet development at the top of the list.

Legendary custom builder Ed Brown just unveiled their new hotness, a hunting- and competition-ready longslide 1911 chambered for 10mm Auto.

FLIR has expanded its product line with the ThermoSight Pro Series thermal weapons sights. These sights attach to a MIL-STD/1913 picatinny rail, and would be perfect for hunting feral hogs or predators at night.

For the first time in history, in Special Operations Forces at least, the majority of the killing was done in the dark — with lasers.

Ashbury Precision Ordnance is now offering a lightweight, modern Remington Model 700 built on their accuratized Saber chassis that features AR components.

Since life-threatening encounters occur in broad daylight as well as in pitch blackness and everywhere in between, it behooves us to be able to follow the “know your target” rule not only by being able to see a target but also by being able to aim properly.