5 Bucket List Adventures

for anyone who thinks I have accomplished just about every outdoor feat on my list by now- well I’m far from being done.

I’m pretty confident everyone has a bucket list of hunts and adventures that they’d like to accomplish at some point in their lives. It may take time to save the money or make the opportunity a reality, but I’m a firm believer in coming up with goals and then working to make things happen.

I have a ton of things I’d love to do, but this list showcases my top five. A few are a little more dangerous than others, but I’m positive each and every one would be unbelievable.

Swim with the Great White Sharks. This has been on my bucket list for quite some time but I just haven’t had a good opportunity or time at the end of a hunt.

Peacock Bass on the Amazon. Everything about an adventure on the Amazon River sounds like fun to me! Peacock bass are said to be pound for pound one of the most aggressive and hardest fighting fish out there. I would also want to see everything the Amazon River and rainforest have to offer including the giant anaconda snakes.

Call in a brown bear, wolf and mountain lion. Predator calling animals is definitely one of my absolute favorite ways to hunt. Anytime you can trick a predator, it’s an adrenaline-packed experience. Things can change and if you’re not careful you could quickly become the prey. In my book it’s the ultimate feat as a hunter because you have taken something that’s basically at the top of the food chain in the wild, and tricked it using your hunting skills, putting you at the top. Everything has to be perfect to fool these ultimate predators, but when it works it is truly amazing.

San Carlos Apache Elk Hunt. As an elk hunter I’ve been pretty lucky to enjoy some incredible elk hunting over the years. Some hunts have been extremely physical, some work out perfectly, some never do pan out, but if there was one place I could do the ultimate elk hunt it would be the San Carlos Apache Reservation hunt in Arizona. I’ve watched the videos, spoken to them at the Safari Club International convention. The quality of bulls at that reservation is truly in a league of its own. The amount of elk encounters during a week hunt and the chance at a bull of a lifetime is in my opinion the best opportunity in the world for trophy elk and stunning footage.

Calling Predators at Night in Africa. On our last trip to Mozambique we were lucky enough to be within 40 yards of a leopard for several minutes during daylight hours. To watch an animal like that move around and do its thing is something I wish everyone could experience. To take that to the next level I think going out and calling predators at night with thermals would be next level excitement in Africa. There are so many predators in one location there and you truly wouldn’t know what you might call in. It could be a leopard, lion, hyena, jackal—the list goes on, but this is something that would be the ultimate predator hunt.