Full stop, hunting is hard.
It's beyond hard. It's the sort of Type 2 fun where you repeatedly ask yourself, "Why the hell am I doing this?"
That's usually after you've climbed 2,000 vertical feet in under two miles with 50 pounds of gear on your back, just for you to glass (use your binoculars or spotting scope to find animals, for all you newcomers) all day and only come away with seeing a moose. Probably one which you don't have a tag for. Or, to begin following the tracks of lions or bears who are clearly having far more luck than you.
So whenever and wherever you can make the task at hand easier, you take it.
Whether that's lightening up your load-out, getting into better shape, doing more e-scouting through apps like onX, practicing more for when the shot comes, or a thousand other things, you do it.
But of all the advancements and technologies to come out in recent years to help hunters hunt harder, one of the most valuable tools are those mechanized beasts we use to get further into the field. And speaking with Hushin's Brian McElrea, someone who's spent a lifetime in the woods chasing big game, his Can-Am ATVs and UTVs are invaluable tools of the trade.
"For us, we're predominantly western big game hunters. That's our main focus. And so with that comes vast tracts of public land access throughout the west, whether it's BLM, Forest Service, et cetera. And all of us from a young age have been leveraging and utilizing different resources to be more effective and cover more country," says McElrea. And while three-wheelers were the "original choice back in the eighties and nineties, [I] obviously progressed into the four-wheel variety," he told RideApart, adding, "It's just a great tool to be more efficient in the field."
On that front, McElrea and the Hushin' crew run Can-Ams of different varieties depending on the scenario.
"We do different styles of hunting," states McElrea. "From a traditional base camp where you might have a wall tent or a camper, we do more of like a mobile truck camp where we're literally sleeping in the back of your truck, and then we do a lot of bivvy-style hunting where your camp is on your backpack and you're hiking into the woods and living off your backpack for a period of, you know, three to seven days on average."
What makes the latter easier, however, are his Can-Ams. "And so for us, utilizing Can-Ams, specifically the UTV variety, we can load up our gear on one of those hunts and, honestly, have a mobile hunting unit." A mobile hunting unit that can go just about anywhere, stow all the group's gear, and not have to head all the way back to the truck or home to grab something they need, forgot, or just want.
"So [our trucks] can be kind of our main base camp that we can leverage and utilize and then from there, we can load up our gear with our packs, our bows, or our rifles, jump into the Can-Am Defender, and get it out to an area we want to get to. It's probably gonna be a little bit more remote. It might be a two-track, it might be something where, you know, can you go on trucks? Certainly. Is it gonna take you a heck of a lot longer? Yes. Are you gonna potentially, you know, scratch up your truck or get it trashed? Yes. So the easier, more realistic option is to jump in the Can-Am and just take that out there."
It, honestly, makes a lot of sense, too. Most new trucks are hella expensive, and you don't want to damage them in the same way you likely used to with older trucks. It'd affect the resale value.
But UTVs and ATVs are meant for this type of abuse. They're meant to be thrown into mud puddles, cross rivers or streams, and stay out in the field for prolonged periods of time. They're meant for backcountry hunts and getting you farther into the field, which McElrea reiterates.
"From there, depending on the style of the hunt, we can cover more country," he says, and that's important when you glass as much as Hushin's crew does.
"We do a lot of glassing," says McElrea, adding, "That's kind of our main way of identifying game. It's just getting up on a ridge and covering a lot of country with our optics, whether that's binos or spotting scopes, and then making a game plan once we find something that we're interested in pursuing."
And the importance of glassing can't be overstated, as well as keeping up your momentum in the backcountry. Getting to a glassing spot and finding game is one thing, but having the energy to get to a glassing knob or spot, finding game, and then going after said game is another. I can tell you from experience, you could get to the spot where you want to look for animals, go on to find said animals, and then be too gassed to chase them when they're ready to be chased.
Reducing your load, whether it's through the use of an ATV or UTV, absolutely helps.
Yet, while some will likely decry the use of these machines to go further and work smarter, not harder, McElrea remains steadfast in his belief that as hunters, we must be good stewards of the public land entrusted to us.
"I know the number one piece of negative critique is people that are going off trail, right?" he tells me, adding, "They're not sticking to the designated roads and trail systems that are legally open during hunting season. So that's obviously something that we would never condone that type of riding or behavior. We gotta stay where it's open. So that's a big element where people would get super frustrated. There's nothing worse than hiking in on a closed road or a closed trail system and then having somebody on any, anything frankly, whether it's a bike that's not legal or a motorcycle or an ATV, that's not supposed to be back there. I think that gives people a lot of frustration when there are certain situations like that."
But all of this is to say that folks who use UTVs or ATVs are what the old guard calls "road hunters," something McElrea is quick to point out they don't do.
"I think where you're hunting, what you're hunting for, and what your style is, you know, again, we're using it as a tool to get from point A to point B more efficiently so then we can begin our hunt. We're not trying to do what's historically known as road hunting," he told me. For the uninitiated, road hunting refers to the folks that use their truck, UTV, ATV, or dirt bikes to get out into the woods, but for the most part, never leave the designated trails to shoot from, i.e. they don't hike into the woods or if they do, only a mile or under. They stick to the road, with some actually shooting at animals from the road.
It's still hunting, though, and it gets people out and about, as well as contributing to Pittman-Robertson, the fund that helps ensure all animal conservation across the United States.
To that, McElrea added, "I think that's where people get maybe at times frustrated because there's more traffic on the roads and there just appears to be people everywhere when in, in many cases, if you're able to hike a little ways off of a trailhead or a road or a certain area, you can oftentimes get away from that traffic."
In other words, it's a tool to let them hunt harder. Instead of stopping at the trail or alongside the road, it allows them to go further, go deeper, and traverse gnarlier terrain by being more efficient, more comfortable, and take less time to get to where you want to hunt. And that, in the hunting game, is paramount as civilization pushes deeper and deeper into our wild spaces.
Some may think that UTVs or ATVs like Can-Am's are cheat codes, but they give you the ability to hunt where others might not want to go or can't easily access. In the end, they're a tool, one that you can exploit to your advantage and hunter harder and smarter.
