By Sean Etter

Just over a mile up the hiking trail, I leave the comfort of the graded switchbacks and begin bushwhacking up the ridge. I’ve been eyeing this spot on my topo map for a while now and it is, I believe, at an elevation where the mast crop will be heaviest this fall. Immediately I am waist high in poison ivy. That’s okay, though, because the overstory is predominately of white oaks—big ones with spreading crowns—so the decision to continue is no decision at all. 

Alternately wiping sweat from and peering through the binos, I make my way up to the highest point on the ridge where an exposed patch of ivy free bedrock grants me a rare vista to the North. It occurs to me that I might be the first person to stand in this spot and witness this view in years. Ahead, the Blue Ridge Mountains roll into the Carolinas like waves on a turbulent sea.  As I sit admiring this perspective, an overwhelming sense of gratitude and obligation is all I feel as I reflect on where this all started. 

2012. Not so long but it feels like an eternity now. We were both a few years out of college when my friend, Joe Burnam, brought up the idea of trying out a bowhunt for bears in the mountains of North Georgia. We had heard stories from friends who had been successful, and to us it sounded absolutely incredible. Chasing bears on foot, in the backcountry, with stickbows. This was the stuff of western mountain hunting. I have to say it sounded too good to be true. But we started poring over maps and the very first time I made the two hour drive north to put boots on the ground, I found the padded marks of a young bear only a half mile up a gated logging road. 

I think I made a half dozen scouting trips that summer to different areas and when hunting season finally rolled around, we had settled on a series of converging ridges deep in the mountains that were heavy with white oaks. We set up tents in a primitive campground on a small trout stream and spent the entirety of the Friday before the opener scouting. As luck would have it, the area we chose was at an elevation and a slope orientation that did have an abundance of white oak acorns that year. I would later learn that this type of thing was such an anomaly that I would have to, at least, ponder on the possibility of some sort of divine intervention in my life. Joe and I chose different routes that day and covered nearly twelve miles of steep country, but it did pay off eventually. Near the very end of the morning I found several trees that had been freshly climbed, including one where the scat under the tree was so fresh that I slipped on it like a banana peel in a cartoon. 

Joe and I had been in tent camps many times before. We had met in the forestry program at the University of Georgia and it wasn’t long before we were showing each other our favorite haunts. Throughout college we were in the woods constantly. Mostly, he taught me. We did everything. We shot wood ducks in WMA beaver ponds, deer on National Forest hunts, fileted piles of white bass and crappie during spawning runs, ran catfish jugs, and, most of all, traded our turkey hunting hollows. 

It had been a while since we had shared a camp though, and I can remember the sense of excitement the night before that first push into the mountains. I had bear hunted in Canada at least a dozen times but this was totally different. I remember lying in my sleeping bag that night with a sense of trepidation, but the sound of the freestone creek must’ve overridden that and the alarm at 3:30 a.m. was soon an annoyance. 

We made it five miles to our spot before daylight. Very wet, but otherwise no worse for wear. I left Joe at his tree with whispered hand signals just as the very first hint of gray light pushed down from above. Proceeding on another quarter mile, I found myself moving slower and slower as I approached the bear battered white oak. Upon rounding the bend in the trail, I could hear a large animal feeding under the tree amongst the waist high vaccinium. 

I honestly don’t recall recognizing it was a feral hog or nocking an arrow, but I know I never removed my pack and certainly remember the whispered sound of the recurve limbs and the blurred spiral as the fletching disappeared behind the sow’s shoulder. 

The blood trail was brief, but the following adrenaline surge was not. By 11:00 that morning, we would be packing out the shared load of pork as Joe relayed with me the story of his bear encounter. He had had at least two bears feeding behind him in a gulley and had decided on a much better ambush spot for the following morning. 

Our blisters were worse by the next dawn, but the temperature had improved dramatically. We were shivering in sweat drenched camo by the time we separated. When I passed by the carcass of the pig from the previous day, all I could find to know that it even existed was a greasy drag mark leading down to a briar thicket. Some lucky bear must’ve found the offal in the preceding few hours. 

By 9:00 a.m., I had been staring at the broken limbs of that white oak for 2.5 hours and the mileage of the hunt was beginning to take its toll. I wasn’t asleep, but in the limbo between wakefulness and slumber a twig snapped behind me. Every hunter knows that sound. It’s not the drop of an acorn or the rustle of a gray squirrel. It’s the sound of an errant footstep by a large animal. My heart went into overdrive and in one motion I turned to face the bear who was 15 yards away staring straight at me. He obviously didn’t recognize me immediately as a human in this remote place, but he wasn’t going to stick around to ask questions either. It was now or never, so I canted the bow to 90 degrees and snapped the shot. He wheeled just at the release, but the hit looked perfect to me. 

Every hunter knows the feeling when things go from complete elation to heartbreak. Your arrow deflects off a twig at the last second, you find gut matter on the blood trail, or your friend tells you that the bear you think you just killed ran by him a quarter mile away with the arrow buried harmlessly in his shoulder. The third was my experience and the blood trail confirmed it. It makes me absolutely nauseous to wound an animal, but I felt very confident this bear would be just fine in a few days. As it turned out, Joe had gotten the joy of watching a very small bear feed on acorns within bow range for quite a while as well. 

Hiking out that first trip, the only souls on thousands of acres, I recall the feeling that something had changed for me. Something down deep in my very being. The mountains of the Southern Appalachians were going to play an integral role in my life. And, as it turned out, in the lives of my two unborn children. I’ve thought often about how strange it is that the catalyst for this overwhelming passion began with something as benign as a five-minute phone call from a friend. But, if I’m being honest, it happened long before I was even born. It was only possible because of the forward-thinking leadership of our conservationist forefathers. 

 “If there is any one duty which more than another we owe it to our children and our children’s children to perform at once, it is to save the forests of this country, for they constitute the first and most important element in the conservation of the natural resources of this country” - Theodore Roosevelt.

As Americans, we have been blessed with something very rare in the modern world—a heritage of wild lands bestowed upon us by the generations before. My little piece of heaven, that I couldn’t learn in two lifetimes, is the Chattahoochee National Forest. It covers about 750,000 acres and encompasses most of the land in the northern counties of the state. But outside of that within an hour’s drive, I could be in the Nantahalas which hold 528,000 acres or the Pisgah with another 500,000, or the Cherokee with 640,000. All told, the United States citizens own 640,000,000 acres of public lands. Wild places where you and I both have the right to pick up at any time, throw the pack over your shoulders and take off. Hunting, fishing, hiking, paddling, camping, mountain biking, horse riding, mushroom picking: the opportunities are as limitless as the scale of the lands, and they belong to every one of us. These grounds are constantly under attack and, as hunters, I think we need to be on the front lines of this fight at every turn. Remember, once these lands are gone, they’re gone forever. 

Being that this readership is comprised mostly of bear hunters, I think I can safely assume that it’s comprised mostly of public land hunters as well. Please ask yourself, what are you doing to protect these precious gifts? It can be as simple as joining a conservation organization like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers or the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, or simply writing an occasional letter to your elected officials. They do read them and they do respond to pressure. It’s not hard to stay up to date on the current issues anymore either. There is an ever-growing number of podcasts, email streams, newsletters, etc. that can keep us all in the loop. Please, for the sake of our children, let’s keep these politicians and industrial interests in line with the natural values that shape our lives. 

My friends and I have had an annual bear camp on the opening weekend of archery season every year since. I look forward to it more than any event on the calendar. In that time, we haven’t packed out many bears but there have been a few. We’ve flung more arrows than we have punched tags. It’s more a time to renew friendships in the lives of people who live too distant and too busy.

About four years ago now, I convinced my wife of the value of those mountains and we bought a small cabin on the edge of the National Forest. My daughter, Willow, and son, Wyatt, I hope, will want to inherit it, along with the knowledge I can give them. It’s taken more than a few pairs of boots, but I hope to be able to teach them the things that I appreciate. Where the best white oak ridges are, which streams have native brook trout, how to tell a chanterelle from a jack o lantern mushroom, etc. Nothing would make me happier in this life than for my children and grandchildren to hunt, fish, and forage the same mountains that I have. It’s both my legacy and their heritage, just as these public lands are for all of us. 

Clay Newcomb always says, “Keep the wild places wild, because that’s where the bears are”, and I totally agree. Let’s keep them public, too.