2015

Damn, time just keeps on flying by.

Happy New Year- hope you all have a happy and prosperous 2015 with timely rains, lucky draws, the right set up and plenty of time out in it!

Happy Holidays, and quail

Happy Holidays!

Hope you all are keeping well and spending some time with friends and family. A and I dashed down to south Texas to be with my folks and family, dashing back up to NM for work this upcoming week. With the New Year holiday, it'll be a short one and, weather permitting, we hope to get out for quail. There are a few blues around. Earlier this year...

Click on that picture above and check out the left hand side of the road.

Rolling up- see em in the bar ditch? More visible when enlarged.

Here is a laggard. These birds were pretty tame, safe on private land. Coveys that get hunted tend to flush away from the truck and hit the ground running.

With a bit of the grass on the range, Booker earns his keep finding the fallen birds. Though he loves any sort of bird hunting quail aren't his favorite. Fortunately, we came by a tank that held ducks and he got to do some proper Chessie work.

A dropped a drake Redhead. Not a great snapshot, but I ran out of space on the memory card and managed to not record half a dozen that, no doubt, would be better.

Maybe we'll get some snow- the blue quail will hold a little better than and the dog likes the cold.

Third part

While A had a very good draw for big game this year, I can't exactly complain. We put in for oryx, pronghorn, elk and deer and, while she drew another pronghorn I drew a bull elk tag, the first one I've put in for in six or seven years and the first one I've drawn in nearly a decade. One of the nearby mountain ranges has a good elk hunting and the muzzleloader season falls just about the time the rut is in full swing down in the southern Southwest. Drawing is long odds, but, if you do draw out the bulls are likely to be distracted. So, very shortly after A's antelope hunt, the weekend after, in fact, it was time for my elk hunt.

Work took its usual toll on our schedule and so we found ourselves driving up into the mountains late on a Friday afternoon as rain showers marched here and there over the country. Starting up in elevation, we even saw a little snow on the side of the road.

Old, tired, out-of-shape, wimpy, or perhaps wise, rather than set up the tent in the dark and the rain with the prospect of snow overnight, I opted to spend the night in a very nice hotel in a tourist town on one edge of the hunting unit. Warm bed and a hot shower made a 4:30 get up easier, while a tall coffee and an Allsups burrito (semi-native hint: get a crispy one that has been in the hot box for a while) got us headed to our choice of starting places. 

I suppose that such a start might be a modern classic, the very low rent version of McGuane's "New Rugged". No long pack string heading up days before the season, setting up a wall tent and scouting, not even winding up into the country in a pair or convoy of pickups, setting up a group camp and checking out familiar country. Instead, A and I drove blacktop, gravel and then dirt in turn, getting to the mouth of the draw we were looking for just about a half hour before daylight. Overnight, the weather had cleared and the wind had died, leaving the woods cool and fresh, just a bit more chilly then shirtsleeve weather.

As I was loading the rifle, we heard the first bull bugling.

I'm pretty much a novice at hunting with a muzzleloader, having only had one previous hunt and having fired fewer than a hundred rounds through my rifle. In keeping with the spirit of a primitive weapons hunt, I use a traditional style mountain rifle with fixed iron sights. Not completely traditional, that rifle has a fast-twist barrel to shoot longer projectiles rather than a round ball. With 90 grains of Pyrodex  black powder substitute, the rifle will put three 350 grain bullets in a three inch circle at a hundred yards. In the last decade I have yet to see or speak to another hunter who uses a traditional style muzzleloader, most of them using primer fired in-line guns with scopes.  In any event, full of the optimism opening day usually brings, I set off up a ridge on one side of the draw while A hung out down below.

An hour later, I could hear a couple of bulls regularly bugling at each other, the problem being that they were on the ridge opposite my location and the wind was not in my favor to even head that direction. I eased down slope until I came to a small tank at a fork in the draw and decided to wait a while in hopes that the thermals of the warming day would swing the wind around and let me make a try at one of the bulls. As I sat back from the tank and listened to the elk while watching some cattle drink, I heard what is perhaps the worst sound known to a modern foot hunter, that being the buzzing, putting grumble of a number of 4-wheelers. They were quite some way off, over another low ridge from the elk, but easily where they could hear the bulls. For fifteen minutes I sweated as the machines grumbled away out of sight, greatly relieved and more than a little surprised as the sound faded out of range. Apparently, the riders never stopped and turned off their engines, so as to hear the elk up above them. Some half hour after that, the wind switched around. Impatient, I made myself wait fifteen minutes by the clock to before heading up towards the elk, just in case the breeze tried to switch around some more.

The wind held true and before long I was up on top, working through thick mixed timber toward the bulls and straining my eyes with every step to try to spot satellite bulls or cows before they noticed me. Coming to a little saddle, I was about to head toward the bull on my right, who was moving a good bit but sounded a little more guttural than all but one of the other three bulls I could hear. Before doing so, I poked over to the left to look into the shallow swale coming off the saddle. As soon as I did so, I saw a piece of elk, which a little glassing revealed to be a feeding cow. Soon I saw another and they move in and out of sight as they ate. Having a favorable wind, I very slowly crawled up a little on them to where I could see down into the draw as well as a decent part of the saddle. From that position, it was mostly a matter of waiting and hoping that the heard bull, who was moving about and bugling up on the other side of the shallow draw, maybe a hundred yards away, would come into range and view.

After about forty minutes, the bull down the draw came up into sight, moving through the timber down toward the cows. Before I could find a lane and get a shot, he moved back out. Just about that time, an some elk further up the ridge must have crossed my wind, as then came trotting and running down the far side of the draw and pulling the cows I had been watching with them. Figuring I was blown, I eased a little further in that direction, only twenty yards or so, to have a bit better view of that side of the swale in case there was a trailing bull. Despite the commotion, the herd bull bugled again and, as soon as he did so, the bull from down below came charging in- literally at a trot and bugling as he came. I suppose he thought the herd bull was moving his cows off and he had to make a challenge right now. In any event, his path was directly toward my new location. At about twenty-five feet from me, he paused at a large downed log preparatory to jumping over it, and I rolled over a little and shot him, knocking him down immediately. He got back up and so a reloaded as quickly as I could. Mortally wounded, the bull stopped after stumbling fifty yards and I knocked him down again. He continued down the draw another hundred yards before falling for the last time, taking another bullet through the lungs in the process.

I have a new appreciation for the amazement expressed by hunters from the turn of the previous century regarding the shock affect of modern smokeless cartridges and the high-velocity projectiles they propel. Despite three good fatal hits, the bull was able to get up and travel a fair distance before succumbing. I don't think he'd have gotten up a second time had I been using my '06. 

Once he was down I dropped down the ridge and into the draw, then down to where A was waiting near the truck. Having dropped off my rifle, driven a little nearer, and gathered my help, A and I got up to the bull and got to the business of dressing and quartering him out. That process, along with three round trips to the truck, took us over six hours.

Packing out.

Once the load gets around a hundred pounds, there's no real way to get it comfortable that I've found.

Once back at the house, we rested an evening and then began cutting and packaging meat, which took longer than the hunt and the pack out lasted. Good work, though, and a year's worth of red meat. I was a bit concerned that a rutting bull would be strong, but it is as good as any elk that I've eaten.

I have best luck keeping meat in the freezer wrapped first in Saran, then butcher paper. Long way around an elk!

The sign below can often be paraphrased "good hunting".

Stew

 
The weatherman tells us that tonight we're going to have the first of a series of fairly hard freezes- mid-20s, so that's it for the last of the figs, basil, tomatoes and peppers. The weather today would be familiar to anyone who has spent much time in northern or higher elevation NM (even though we aren't northern or highland)- not much breeze, brilliant blue sky, but chilly, particularly in the shade.

We're going to build our first fire of the fall and, in further recognition of winter, have our first pot of green chile stew. A and I have slightly different takes on this dish, she favoring a modernistic, wide ranging interpretation wherein whole kernal corn, pinto beans and other ingredients are incorporated. Rather than nuts, twigs, berries and flowers in my green chile stew, I adhere to a more basic version comprised of only a few ingredients. Monday, we had our last pizza margherita of '14, tonight we'll enjoy a late fall or winter dish. Should you decide to make a basic, NM style green chile stew, I'd suggest:

1 pound or so of pork, beef, orxy, antelope, deer or elk, in ascending order of preference, tough cuts, cut into decent sized chunks- about 1/2 inch by 2, no larger than 2 inches by 2.

2 medium onions, in a fairly large dice

1 cup (or more to taste) of New Mexico green chiles, roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped.*

1 can of tomatoes, either whole or diced

about 1 1/2 pounds of peeled potatoes, cut roughly the same size as the meat

flour for dredging, salt, pepper, and a bay leaf

In a dutch oven or 6 quart pot, heat a little oil over medium high heat. Brown the meat pieces that have been dredged in seasoned flour, with all excess flour shaken off, on each side and in batches. Set the browned meat aside on a plate, then add the onions to the pot and cook until translucent. Stir the onions around once they've sweated some to get the browned bits from the meat up from the bottom of the pot. Add the potatoes, tomatoes, chile, bay leaf and meat back in, along with any accumulated juices from the meat, and pour in enough water to cover all the ingredients. Once it has come to a simmer, reduce the heat to keep it there and let it simmer slowly for a couple of hours. Check the seasoning and add salt to taste. Once everything is tender, serve with flour tortillas or other bread.  Whoever gets the bay leaf has to do dishes. Good for dinner, breakfast, in camp or at home.

You can make the stew without flour if you choose, the potatoes will thicken it up some. A claims that browning the meat without flour give a more meaty, complex flavor to the dish, and I'd believe her except that she'll throw garbanzo beans or black olives or whatever in the pot and still call it green chile stew. A and I switch off on pots of green chile stew, from her more catholic approach to ingredients to my more basic style. The proportions above are general, I'd just suggest plenty of chile, as it is supposed to be green chile stew, not just stew with chile in it.


* If you don't know about New Mexico style green chile, you'll have to read around a bit, as that is a subject unto itself. In the fall, many residents of the Southwest buy the green chile pods, have them roasted, then freeze them for use all winter. If you don't have access to a green chile roaster in season, you can roast "anaheim" or New Mexico green chiles over a gas flame, barbecue, or in a hot oven, slap them in a plastic bag to sweat for fifteen minutes, then peel, seed and chop. Alternatively, the internet is your friend. New Mexican green chiles, often called Anaheim chile in stores, is important to the dish. Poblanos or other chiles will have a very different flavor. It might be good, but it won't be right.

Second Installment

Against most odds, A drew an pronghorn permit through the public draw for the second year in a row. In New Mexico, most of the pronghorn are found on lands that are either private or that are private, state, and BLM in checkerboard. Decades ago, the State pioneered trapping and translocating pronghorn to take advantage of available habitat. Eventually, to encourage landowners in pronghorn-friendly practices, the Game and Fish Department developed a system whereby landowners who permitted hunters from the public draw on their property to hunt pronghorn are given a number of transferable license authorizations that they can give away, sell, or keep in their discretion.

Over time, as the very good hunting for pronghorn in New Mexico became better known and the market drove prices for the private land authorizations up, the allocation of tags has shifted to ever-more landowner tags and fewer available for public draw. As a result, drawing an antelope hunt through the public lottery is a rare event and two in a row is extraordinarily fortunate.

Last year, we hunted barely broken country with quite a bit of creosote bush and other low cover.  This year, A's assigned area was almost all grassland, broken up into low ridges and hills.

Some of it was pretty flat.

Also in contrast to last year, there were relatively few antelope on the property. We saw a couple of medium sized bucks and one barely legal animal while scouting, but once the hunt started we only found the barely legal buck until another medium sized fellow popped up with a doe. We first saw them when driving from one area to another and they spooked at over a mile distant, so we kept on driving until over a hill, then stopped and got out to circle through a low draw to see where the pair had gotten to. Where they had gotten to was out of the immediate vicinity. Lots of migrating raptors, though.

After that, we got up on a ridge, walked to different vantages, and glassed for a while with no pronghorn coming to view, then decided to drive to the other end of the area. While on the way, the buck and his doe stood up, then ran a big circle around us. A got out and got a little way before they popped up over a ridge and the buck had to good grace to stop, whereupon she finished her hunt with a single well-placed shot.

After that, it was a quick drag, field dressing, skinning, quartering and a night to rest before getting on with the processing.

All told, a very nice hunt- not as many chances for stalking up on animals as last year, but some good time out in the country, a clean kill of a nice buck, and some prime protein in the freezer.

If she draws pronghorn again next year, I'm going to insist she starts buying lottery tickets!

First installment

Timeliness is inherent in the idea of blogging- it is, after all, a web log in concept and writing about things past, unless inspiring a current thought, is contrary to the idea of a "log". That's not working so well for me right now- here we are in duck season,  past our big game hunts and nearly to quail season, and I'm going to talk about September, when so many good things start. Regardless, and getting back to the last post, a while back A, Dad and I headed up to Alaska for another week of silver salmon fishing, as suggested in the post below.

If you hit the "fishing" label on this blog you'll see accounts of other trips or thoughts inspired by those trips, and I'm not sure I have too much new to say. The area is lovely, the air clean and crisp off the spruce forests, glaciers, and sea. The people are generally friendly, the town small and visiting fisherman apparently a welcome supplement to the income from commercial harvest. Traveling a couple thousand miles to catch fish is considered perfectly reasonable if one is so unfortunate as to not live a stone's throw from the ocean. This year we ran into a couple of groups from Sweden, who presumably live within a relative stone's throw of an ocean, just not one with silver salmon.

We arrived on the tail end of a big rain event. In a place where precipitation is measured in scores of inches (or multiples of feet), that means quite a bit of water. A few years ago, we saw seven or eight inches in twenty-four hours, but this was bigger. Fortunately, as we got there the streams were coming down and full of fish. The first couple of days saw rain, and sideways rain, but our last three days were nearly completely sunny, unprecedented in our ten or so years up there for the season. Further, the streams had dropped considerably and still had plenty of fish in them, so we did well.

One interesting thing about fishing for silvers is that there is a cycle in terms of the size of fish, apparently much like grouse or hares cycle in population. Last year, the fish ran the smallest we had seen them and it got me worried about things like the commercial herring harvest, and long term effects of oil spills and purse seines and all sorts of other things. All that bears watching, but this year the fish ran large, nearly the largest we've seen in twelve years.

A caught a limit, 3 fish, that totaled 38 pounds in the round- two thirteens and a twelve. In terms of sport, this translates into fish that can pull you around the river and that require some care in playing and handling.

That's my Dad with a fifteen pound silver, which is a conservative weight, as it bottomed out a fifteen pound certified Boga-grip, so there may be some change involved. Second biggest fish any of our parties have ever caught up there and Dad's only fish on that tough day. Still, a bright fifteen pound cock with sea lice on him goes a long way toward beating a skunk. Here's a closer look:

Damn big fish.

Wait- what's that? A moose by the side of the road? Must be up North!

We had a couple of good hikes, one of which came after I mis-remembered the trailhead necessary to take us into a particular stretch of stream.

We managed to get on the right trail and to get into some fish.

Mostly, though, this trip was sunny skies and fresh silvers just up from the salt water.

Weasel!

This curious little fellow came out of the alders to check us out at close range. With any luck at all, we'll head back up there next year. I still haven't caught enough silver salmon on the fly rod.

3 thousand words

Actually, just a teaser. A and I managed to front-load our fall just a bit. More later.

Leucistic dusky grouse

The blue grouse I grew up with has fallen prey to the splitters (yes, yes, I've heard- DNA, distinct geographical populations, etc. etc.), and now is the dusky grouse.

Recently, A and I were up in the north central mountains of NM looking for edible mushrooms when we came across a leucistic grouse, of the now dusky variety, part of a family group or covey.

Ghost bird:

A normally colored member of the covey:

What a cool variation. I hope the white bird makes it through the season and is able to pass those genes along.

Bounty

Slow on blogging, but A and I have been getting out into the country a bit lately and I should try to catch up.

Firstly, a little while ago some friends tipped us off that the bolete mushrooms were flushing in Northern NM, so we headed up to our old stomping grounds for a quick overnighter in the back of the truck, hoping to replenish our supply. Success!

We found enough boletus barrowsii to fill our winter supply jar.

Soups, stews, and sauces will all benefit for the next year or so. We managed to dry a few more than fit in the jar, but didn't quite load up.

 Shortly thereafter, we made a day trip to our nearby mountains for elderberries, hitting it just a bit early. Nonetheless, we secured a good supply of this necessary component for a favorite jelly. We also found a couple of the largest examples of the cauliflower mushroom that we've yet come across. Sparassis radicata or Sparassis crispa, most sources relate that radicata is the western variant. Regardless, these were prime and delicious.

Our friend Jeff introduced us to a really nice technique for cauliflower mushroom, that being to saute it fairly slowly in butter until tender and then keep going until it browns a little and crisps up- an excellent side dish to almost anything, but particularly game meat.

Next, we went to our first organized mycological foray, this one by the NM Mycological Society- an interesting group of folks with a lot of expertise to share. This year's foray was based in Las Vegas, NM, and we stayed in the great old Plaza Hotel. A bit ragged around the edges after over a hundred years of operation, our room was quiet and very reasonably priced. Just around the town square we found a brew pub and a restaurant next door that served the hottest green chile I've had in a long time, some of the most typical northern New Mexican food we've found in years. Combined with lovely weather (cool and rainy) and some relatively new country to explore, it was a great weekend.

Last, for the Labor Day holiday weekend we headed back up north, to look for mushrooms again and perhaps take advantage of opening day of bird season. The first day was absolutely chilly at 9,000 feet of elevation, a welcome change after a long summer.

Since hunting didn't start until September 1st, we spent the first couple of days picking currants and mushrooms, checking out country and scouting around. Band Tailed Pigeons were loafing in some spruce and fir along one ridge each of those days, but strong winds apparently pushed them elsewhere once the season opened. Big birds, they'd come bombing out of the tops of the spruce on the steep hillside and, if we had gotten into them, the shooting would have been really tough. We also looked around for grouse, seeing them before the season but having no luck on opening day. Perhaps later in the year.

Mushrooming was more successful. The king boletes were pretty scarce, but we found nice stands of chanterelles, our first encounter with that prized edible in NM.

Back home, we tried a cream of mushroom soup as suggested by Hank Shaw. It was good, but we're still a bit ambiguous about the shrooms, not having found the best flavors to go with them and spoiled to the aforementioned king boletes and cauliflowers. Further experimentation is assured by several packages of chanterelles sauteed in butter and squirreled away in the freezer.

Also for later in the fall is the wild red currant jelly we put up from the prolific ribes encountered in the high country (A has keyed them out as ribes montigenum).

A couple of hours of picking (and pricking) resulted in a nice batch of currants.

Which in turn became a slightly tart jelly.

If our big game hunts go well, I foresee a Cumberland sauce in the future. Otherwise, it will just have to be buttermilk biscuits with red currant jelly.

Here's hoping the season is proceeding as well for all of you all!

beetles with taste

When A and I first arrived down in southern NM and got a house, we planted fruit trees right away. Even if you're not sure you'll be in a place long, if you get fruit trees in the ground you might get a crop before you know it and, in the Land of Entrapment, it's never wise to predict moving on. Consequently, we put in two cherries, an apricot, and a peach. One of the cherries and the apricot promptly died and the other cherry tree gave up last spring, but the dwarf peach has carried on and this year we've actually been getting a decent batch of peaches off of it.

Alas, despite netting to avoid the depredations of birds and red squirrels, we're still sharing way too much in the way of peach flesh.

The culprits?

Based upon one miscreant caught in the act from this picking, at least some of them are click beetles.

Regardless of the losses, we're pretty happy that our tree is producing in its fourth year. Not enough fruit to can or even freeze, but enough for sliced peaches in the morning or over homemade vanilla ice cream. Peaches, like tomatoes, are one of those fruits that are best ripened all the way on the vine and then eaten fresh. I don't think I've ever purchased a decent peach in a grocery store. Next year, if it looks like we'll get peaches again we'll look at some control so we don't have to share quite as much with them.

summer and bbq

Today dawned cool-ish, cloudy, and very humid with some puddles from an overnight shower. I'll take it as a good portent for the rest of the summer, as it always seems to me that the monsoon season should start around Independence Day if we are going to have a good one.

Chad Love recently posted about the drought continuing in his end of the near-Southwest. In contrast, southeast NM has the prospect of at least approaching "abnormally dry". After no precip for the first four and a half months of the year, we got a big storm in late May followed by some decent rain in June. If the afternoon thundershowers come through for the rest of July and into August, we might actually see some birds this year and the deer, elk, antelope, etc. that have made it this far might go into the winter in decent shape.

Many years we celebrated Independence Day by taking advantage of the opportunity to go up to a wine festival near Santa Fe which features New Mexico wines. That festival is a bit further down the road, so this year we contented ourselves with work, house work, and making another foray into cooking ribs.

This year it was back ribs. A little salt and pepper is all they got before going onto the barbecue, indirect heat only with smoke from oak splits, four and a half hours at around 200 F.
A cold beer and some light reading make tending the fire and the meat barely any work at all.

Meanwhile, sauce, this one a ketchup based recipe with lots of added acid and a fair bit of heat, along with diced onion and celery. I'd post the recipe, but it isn't mine to share.

For the last hour and a half or so, I wiped the meat with the sauce every ten to fifteen minutes to create a glazing. The sauce and glazing technique are both from A's father, who has been making fantastic ribs in a well seasoned  mushi kamado pot for decades. Lacking a ceramic pot steeped in years of smoke and vaporized meat essence, not to mention anything like the amount of practice, I didn't get to quite the same result. Nonetheless,

at the risk of bragging, they came out pretty well. The low heat kept the sauce from burning except on the very ends of the bones, where it formed little crunch bits of carcinogenic goodness, and the meat was nicely seasoned and glazed. Another hour on the heat would have been good, but the meat still falls of the bone. The layer of connective tissue on the inside of the ribs wasn't quite to the point that it completely falls apart, hence the call for an extra hour. All I needed was an earlier start, another couple of chapters to read, and another Shiner (or so).

In a completely uncompensated endorsement, if you can find it, I'd strongly recommend accompanying your summer grilled meats (or winter elk frites) with Korbel's "Rouge"

A medium-dry sparkling pinot noir/cabernet blend, this is a medium bodied red that goes well with well handled game, not so tannic that it overpowers the meat, but still handles the richness of barbecued ribs well. At +/- $12 a bottle, it isn't too much of an extravagance to go with a nice dinner.