It begins tomorrow, with the bow and arrow hunters getting the first week of the season. Then, it resumes on August 25th and goes until December 25th. Bear hunting season is year around.

Time for me to get on my soap box. The problem is that hunting has become sport, and unfair sport at that. There is no walking around quietly in the woods with a rifle in hand. Now, in order to be on par with these animals, you have to have a motorized machine, one that takes you far into the back country.

Momma and calf

As if killing the animals weren’t enough, these machines tear up the trails. It’s been raining hard here – tonight Pete and I went out for a ride and the trails in some places were sodden. There were also places in the trail that had become drainage areas, small creeks.

It is easy to foresee what’s going to happen – the new road, formerly Jim’s Trail, is now Jim’s superhighway. Yes, Mother Nature did bitch slap us with a gnarly windstorm that blew trees and branches onto the trails – and uprooted and left in her wake a huge cottonwood. However, man now has machinery, and with it, he creates his own form of destruction.

How did we as humans become so warped in our thinking? It must a genetic aberrance.

Well, Mother Nature is now bitch slapping harder, world wide. High temperatures and fires in some places, and monsoons and flooding in others. Are we doomed? If we are, well then, we have it coming to us. If we survive for any length of time, we’ll be left with the memories of what once was. The bear, moose, and caribou don’t deserve what’s coming to them.

As it is, as soon as the snow falls, the hunters will get off their ATVs and swamp buggies and take to their snowmobiles. That road will become the wide white superhighway.

The person who purchases the land adjacent to the superhighway, that is Jim’s property, is in for a rude awakening. The now listed, asking price just went way up, so it’s anyone’s guess who might buy his place. I doubt that it will be someone who wants the place as a snowmobiling recreational getaway, but you never know.

I thought that when the price was lower, that we might buy Jim’s place, if only to keep those treating the area like a personal playground and private hunting preserve at bay. Pete said that we couldn’t afford it. Also, and he was right in saying this, this place is enough work. Had we sold this place and moved up there, we’d be re-inventing the wheel. If we were 40 years younger, well yes.

The future, right now around here, looks bleak. As always, I will breathe a sigh of relief when hunting season is over.

Next: 217. 8/10/22: In the Blue Sky Above