Coach

What makes you think it's a dog? Must be a Mastiff.

Nice!!!

I'm cleaning out the garage and I've got these two big tents that I haven't used in a long time. One for sure is a "Greatland" (Target) brand, the other I'm thinking is a Coleman. They have all the poles, etc. and are very good tents. I think they are both in the 12' by 12 range. One has a separate sleeping area and cooking area with netting. Because they are both free, I'm not setting them up for pix. Full refund if you don't like them. Since we started "Camper" camping these things have just been sitting around. I'm in the Pinetop/Lakeside/Show Low area - first come, first served, no shipping. More stuff to come. PM me for a meeting spot.

Two campfire chairs with footrests - not sure what to call them - beer drinking chairs? One in blue one in green, free, no shipping first come...

Badminton/volley ball net with rackes, and horseshoes. Kind of a beach sport pack - free. Doubt it's been opened.

You got'em Ajo, but this is a first-come deal. I'm giving them to whoever shows up first. If you want me to hold them, PM me and let me know when you are going to be here. I don't want to store them any longer than necessary.

The rain is pouring, the rivers are flowing, it's catfish time! Took my oldest sons to my favorite catfish hole yesterday and had a great over-night trip. We let a few go, had some twist off the stringer but sill had a 30+ pound stringer. Fun trip with the boys before school starts.

Gotta love those city bucks! Seems last year there was a huge buck with in-town shots of him right in Colorado Springs.

Not the Verde, this was upper Salt.

Leica and Swaro are best bar none. Then you get into Nikon, Vortex, etc. I used a Nikon 800 for around 10 years and it was one of the best pieces of equipment I ever bought. I gave the Nikon to my son and am now using the Vortex Ranger 1000. It is better in a lot of ways than my old Nikon, in that it is smaller and just has better ergonomics - button placement, snap to your chest strap, that kind of thing. But in ranging, it gets really confused if there are branches or thick cover. Long ranges, it does OK, but not better than the Nikon I used for so many years. One other thing I loved, but almost hated about the Nikon 800, you could put 4 AAA batteries in that thing and they would go for years, literally. You just kept thinking it should be time to replace the batteries, but it just kept on going. It was way bulkier than the current range finders, but that was one reliable go-to hunting tool that served me very well over more than a decade. I hope it serves my son, Matt, as well as it did me.

I have no gripes with guides, or anyone who hunts with guides. For a lot of people, paying for services is natural. When the water heater or air conditioner breaks down, you call a plumber or AVAC person, get a glitch in a light switch call the electrician, flat tire, call AAA. Time for a kitchen or bathroom makeover, pay somebody to handle it, from the concept to completion, you never get your hands dirty. Maybe I'm weird, but I just can't do things that way. If I had the very best elk or deer tag imaginable, I couldn't stand paying somebody to hold my hand through the hunt. I don't mind branching out and meeting people and exchanging information, but it's not the same. I recently re-built our entire house- not because I wanted to - but a simple tile job turned into a nightmare because of the way it had been done by "professionals". I had never laid tile in my life and re-tiled 2600+ feet with all kinds of decorative touches that we would have paid a fortune for, and people still ask us who did it for us. I could go on-and-on with the DIY analogies. Bottom line, you are your best guide. You don't know everything, but I guarantee there are people willing to point you in the right direction. If you are willing to get some starters, just enough to get going, then do the rest of the hard work, you'll see that you don't necessarily need to hire a guide, you just need to ask for a starting point, which are plentiful on this site, and do the rest on your own.

Cool father-and-son trip! Very nice.

Great looking Shotgun. Bump for a really sweet gun, even if it is upside down. LOL.

Another fan of the Havalon - they are an awesome tool. However, while I know some people like to use them as their only knife, I do like having a Buck 119, and my Browning Kodiak, especially when dealing with big jobs like multiple elk. The Havalon is great for skinning and some detailed work, but when boning out I really like a good full sized, fixed blade knife. And the Browning Kodiak, with a saw and gut hook, I can't even begin to count the animals I've processed with that knife.

Man, that looks like a TON of fun. I've always wanted to tap into some of those Lake Powell Strippers! LOL. All joking aside, looks like a phenomenal trip, and those stripers are some of the best eating fish. Back when my wife and I were just dating, some 20+ years ago, her family would go to Powell every summer in a cabin cruiser and take me along. The only rule was, I slept up top under the stars far from their daughter, which was fine with me because I fished all night. None of them liked to eat fish until I did a little beach-front fish fry of stripers and cats I had caught one night. From that point on they all looked forward to some fresh caught fish. Looks like you guys had a blast - catching fish, hanging with good friends, just priceless. Thanks for sharing.

Cooked them up tonight and had my parents and Carrie's mom over for a nice fish fry with some sausage and cheese stuffed mushrooms. Even though they were skinned at the river I cut off the skin membrane and chunked up the meat pretty small then soaked the chunks in buttermilk. After a couple hours in the buttermilk they went to buttermilk/egg wash and then dredged in a mixture of flour, cornmeal, Zatarain's Creole seasoning, Cavendar's, Some Old Bay crab boil, lemon pepper, garlic powder and fresh cracked black pepper and a little bit of crushed red pepper. Then into the 350 degree oil. They came out super good. Crunchy, a little spicy, not too salty, no fishy flavor or mushiness - it was a very good batch of catfish.

Yeah, I'm with you on that - The way I prefer to cook catfish is a little too hot for the fam, so I use Cholula or Tabasco with lime after it's cooked. I'm sure you already have a good recipe for spicy hot fish and poultry, but I'd like to compare notes some time if you want.

Pine donkey, you hit the nail on the head. Sometimes with guys this age they act like rivals. Both of my older boys were great on this trip. They carried their part and worked a good camp, didn't fight, and just recognized dad was trying to create a memory for them. It hasn't always been that way. Glad it was this time.

Nice bucks Shane. You always have a knack for finding the dandies.

Blade, not sure if what you are talking about is the same thing I found. I have a ceramic block that came out of some power lines. If you use Arkansas stones or Japanese water stones, this particular ceramic block has a hardness that I haven't seen in commercial sharpening stones. I can post up a picture, but it looks just any white ceramic block. As I am trying to learn how to sharpen by hand, I start with diamond sharpening stones or any coarse stone with oil or water, depending on the stone, then slate (Arkansans stone), then down to this hard ceramic, and finally a leather strop. When done right, you get the "pop" of hairs when shaving with it. There are a lot of degrees of sharpness, like how does it cut paper, or hair. If you lightly pull the blade against your forearm skin and the hairs "pop" off, you know it's beyond surgical sharp. If the hairs lay over or take pressure to cut you are close to "shaving" sharp. If you are chapping the skin, and still not shaving hairs, it's dull.

Not sure what set the fire under my wife a couple years back, but she's got the canyoneering bug like I have the hunting bug. I had a previous post of some of our slot canyon adventures in Southern Utah. http://www.coueswhitetail.com/forums/topic/41312-back-from-utah/?hl=%2Bback+%2Bfrom+%2Butah At this point we've at least scratched the surface of slot canyon hiking in Utah. Ding and Dang, Spooky and Peek-a-boo, some rappelling around Moab. Carrie now has some much tougher adventures for us in mind, so she, along with her mom, enlisted the whole family in the Flagstaff Extreme Rope Course, just to see what we could do, and what we need to work on. For what it's worth, only around 20% of people who attempt to do all four courses actually make it through all of them. The day we did it, there was lightening close enough to shut down the course just as we were finishing the second, or "Blue" course. In all honesty, I was pretty tired already from having done the first two "easy" courses. But my kids were busting through the courses, and my mother-in-law, who actually planned this whole thing were ready to re-do the blue course, and move on to the red and black. As a family, we have done some pretty decent canyoneering: But to me, this was totally different. It look a LOT of upper body strength, a lot of hand strength, and a lot of balance. By the end of the blue course, my hands wouldn't even work any more. They were so cramped up, I couldn't extend my thumbs or fingers. At the end of the day, my 3 sons, my wife, and my late-60's mother-in-law, and even myself, made it through all 4 courses, repeating the second or "blue" course. Carrie's Mom - late 60's what a bad-butt grandma! Check out those biceps! My old-man self trying to navigate one of the medium obstacles: I don't even have pictures of the obstacles at the upper end of the red and black courses. I was literally too wiped out to get pix. On Red you have to do as crazy balancing act on swinging logs that force you to switch your weight back and forth. On Black, you don't just have the swinging log footholds, you literally step into iron rings suspended by a rope, while you are close to 60 feet up. It's a really fun course, at the beginning, and at some point you have to choose whether it is worth it to go all the way through. For younger folks in really great shape, it's probably fairly easy. Once you get up there in years and start to lose that core and upper body strength, it can be a real challenge.

Had to fix up the post. Somehow, all the pictures ended up in a post without text, and the text ended up in a post without pix

A lot of great stories out here on this thread, which is a GREAT thread btw. I just want to commend you CWT members on how you have conducted yourselves when these situations arise. As much time as I've spent out there, I'm sure I have stepped on someone's toes, but never on purpose. If I accidentally messed up somebody's stalk and got confronted for it I will look back on these stories as an example of how to be patient and apologetic. The one story I have where I, along with a buddy actually got yelled at for ruining a hunt is kinda funny, but probably pretty common. My friend and I set up for turkey along an old logging road well before first light. It was his tag and I was just there to tag along. We had a gobbler going but when light hit, he went the opposite direction. We followed that logging road down to the Black River calling occasionally and saw some birds fly out of the roost down to the river. We stopped calling and just stalked down to them using their normal sounds to get on them. My buddy sneaks over a break, locates the Tom and puts a nice one-shot kill on him. So now it's getting late in the morning and as we are hiking out, the bird over my buddy's shoulder we're talking and laughing and just recounting the hunt. We follow the trail up to the logging road we started out on and close to the main road we see a blind that clearly wasn't there when we started, and this guy gets out (It's now like 8:30) and looks at us kind of disgusted. I ask how things are going and he replies "Good until you guys showed up". So, this guy basically parked right next to us, followed the most obvious path and set up a couple hours too late, and blamed us for ruining his hunt. All we could do is keep walking back to the truck and chuckling about what a knot-head this guy was. #1, you can't sleep in when turkey hunting, and #2, if you park next to someone's truck, there's a reasonable chance that they are hunting in that area. LOL. I've been on the receiving end more than once, but probably only one guy I would consider an absolute jerk. This guy parked right next to us, hiked up to the glassing area we were on, said "hi" on his way through and proceeded to walk through the area we were clearly glassing. Accidents happen, and usually people are pretty considerate and avoid stepping on each other but this guy flat out didn't care, so gets to be called out as a jerk. I have a better term but since this is a family-oriented site, let's just call it a "shmoosh shmag".

Dang - would have taken the bipod. If the sale falls through, PM me.

If shipping is reasonable to Lakeside (around $10-12), I will take the arrows.