This week we’ve started our preparations for our annual hunt trip. It became annual tradition for me only last year, so it will be exciting for me to get a second chance at a buck. The Hunt Trip is such a big deal in this household that it deserves it’s own capitals. Everything revolves around this trip; Weddings, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Pregnancies. My boyfriend’s sister had to change her entire wedding plan to accomidate. Don’t plan a wedding for September, I’ve been told, It’s hunting season.
Rifle season for our zone (B6), starts October 21, so my boyfriend’s dad planned our trip for October 18-28.
We hunt in a remote location in the mountains of Siskiyou County, outside of a small town (or village, basically), called Sawyer’s Bar. It’s about three hours from our house, or half as the crow flies; an hour and a half from my childhood home. To get there takes about two hours of Interstate travel to Yreka, where you turn left at the stoplight and pass two gas stations – one which is still under construction, four fast food joints (a Taco Bell where I started my first official job), a Starbucks, an Autozone, a strip mall containing: a Jcpenney’s (where I started my fourth job and quit in frustration with management), a lovely privately owned restaurant called Linda’s Soup Kitchen that makes amazing sandwiches (with gluten free options!), a Sally’s Beauty which I heard was going out of business or already did, a Papa Murphy’s – the only place we’d buy pizza, a Dollar Tree, the ruins of a Payless Shoe Source – where we bough our school shoes each year, a Raley’s, the DMV, a building that has never been occupied as long as I can remember, an O’Reilly’s and a Walmart Supercenter. Then there’s a second smaller mall across from it that used to have a Blockbuster that I would go to with my mom back in the day, that’s now some sort of cell phone or internet service center and an army recruiter. Once you get through the forest of coorperate America, you take Highway 3, over forest mountain, all the way to Scott Valley, my childhood home.
The first town in the valley is Fort Jones, where I grew up. You pass straight through town, past the Post Office, the Creamery, a little Boutique that went out of business that my friend used to work, a restaurant named after the Bob Marley song “three little birds”, where the Mayor works as a cook – that my brother used to work also as a cook, a doctor’s office, a dentist, what used to be a cute little florist shop now turned into some dance studio for children, the hardware store, the bank that used to be the first branch of Scott Valley Bank – the oldest independent bank in California – where my mom used to work, now turned into some bank that charges fees like taxes, the tiniest stone museum you’ll ever see in your life (that has a taxidermied two headed calf inside), a boarded up restaurant (from a water heater explosion), a restaurant and bar, a church, a laundromat, what used to be a Deli now turned into an apartment, a cafe made out of an old property management company that closed, a Ray’s (small grocery store), a restaurant called Dave’s Place, the only gas station in town, a tire store, a Napa Auto Parts, a minimall that used to be a bowling alley, pizza place and doctor’s office which has been turned into storage and offices and then a bridge over the Scott River and miles of alfalfa fields.
Onto the next town (or a village), Greenview, which has two businesses up against the highway, a feed store and a privately owned gas station, and then you pass by Kidder Creek, and down through the pine trees and fields until you come up on a church that my great-grandparents built with ten year’s worth of donations, it’s tall and proud stained glass window featuring Jesus, a work of art designed by my father.
Etna is the biggest town of the three, it’s the only town with a high school, two Breweries and a Distillery. You have to take Main Street through town to Sawyer’s Bar Road, passing a Dotty’s (a burger joint named after the original owner who served the best soft serve ice cream and burgers and owned a pet Elephant), a historical statue, a motel, a church, the Elementary school, a Ray’s, the bank, the police station, Paysteak Brewing (my favorite bar and restaurant with gluten free beer and bread!), Denny Bar Restaurant and Distillery (which used to be a drug store with an ice cream parlor where my grandma would take me after church sometimes, that my brother now works at that I worked at in the Spring as a hostess and temporarily a cook. Down the road is the cemetary, where my step-grandpa (but we don’t count half or step in our family) is buried, and recently with his brother (my great-uncle) right beside him. Then we go over Etna Summit which is one of the peaks on the PCT trail, and follow the windy road until we reach the town of Sawyer’s Bar, and then a few miles farther to the camp ground where we stay.
Up there, we’ll spend the next two days getting settled in our camp, before we venture out to hunt Mule Deer, Black Bear and Mountain Quail.
This year I only have a deer tag, but I might stop and buy a bear tag.
It’s been over a year since I pulled out my .270, which still has my boyfriend’s blood in the bolt from our fiasco with testing reloads. We bought Barnes copper bullets 150 grain (California outlawed lead for hunting, so now we have to use steel or copper), Winchester brass, Hodgdon Varget powder and primers. During the winter we reloaded our own rounds and put them to the test, some of mine jammed in my gun and it cut my boyfriend’s hand trying to get them out.
Why do we reload? Because copper rounds vary in price – mine are $35 – $40 for 50 rounds depending on where you go. California has also suspended online purchases for ammunition, and implimented a background check for every box of ammo you purchase, charging $1 per check and a check per every single box of ammo, not just a total purchase. So rather than cater to new laws, we decided to buy reloading equipment and make our own rounds so that they will be all the same, weigh the same and shoot the same. Incidentally we will also be using steel shotgun shells.
Contrary to popular belief, I am not a cold blooded killer. As a hunter I do my job to help protect the species. By hunting, we make sure that deer and bear don’t overpopulate and create a lack of food or habitat and bring on disease that might kill off the entire species. After killing the animal, you thank it for providing for your family and you wear it’s blood to honor it. That’s why hunting as a sport is regulated. In Calfornia at the very least, you must have a tag or stamp to hunt as well as a liscense.
So we’ll prep from now until the eighteenth.
The Country Girl's Lifestyle Blog 