Even as busy as I always was with working and my church callings, I always made it a point to make time for coaching the kids in little league baseball and softball, and taking them on hunting trips. These included Cedar Fort, Nebraska, Wyoming, Book Cliffs, South Fork, Fairview and Provo Cirque. We also spent a lot of time participating in 4H and FFA where the kids would go to stock shows to show lambs and steers.
Every fall, we go on deer hunting trips and we take the horses to ride up into the mountains. I haven always taken the boys with me, and because of those experiences over the years, they have all become hunters. They became very interested in it because I always took them with me.
Every year in October, I would take the boys out to a place called Cedar Fort, Utah, which is where their grandmother was born and raised. There we would hike up into the mountains at 5 mile Canyon and Little 4 Canyon to go hunting for several days. We would hunt deer and sometimes elk, but the most impressive animal for me is a buffalo.
Probably my most memorable hunt was the first hunt I ever went on. I shot my first deer out above Cedar Fort in little 4 Canyon when I was 26 years old.
30 something years ago my brother, Pharis, and I were friends with a fellow who was an accountant in American Fork, Utah. He arranged for us to go to one of his clients in Haigler, Nebraska who raised 25,000 acres of corn each year and we were allowed to go hunting on his property for pheasants. Pharis indicated that we should probably get a white tail deer permit the first year that we went. As the years went by we would hunt some pheasants and quail but primarily became a whitetail deer hunt.
We usually spend about five or six days every fall in that city in Nebraska and go out to various areas from there to hunt. They were usually split up in groups, so we went out maybe four of us in the group. We’ve also built excellent friendships back in that area with some of the local people. Every year when we go out, we end up going to dinner with some of them, renewing our acquaintances, and talking about old times. It’s just really been a great experience for my whole family.
Most of my grandchildren, if they’re not invited, get upset that they weren’t considered to go each time. Some of them who can’t go because of education or other things that they’re doing are upset because the rest of the family is going and they can’t go with them. That’s been a good family tradition.
We still go hunting here locally, in the state of Utah and some of the surrounding states like Colorado and Wyoming every year. We do quite a bit of riding on horseback, and we go to various places, usually taking the horses in a trailer to a certain area, and then we get out to ride up on top of the mountain. In the Uintah’s we do a lot of fishing on those kinds of trips, and most of the family have enjoyed that.
In the last ten years, it’s probably been mostly deer that we have hunted.
