Mietzke's POST Holden Adventure

A couple weeks ago Mom and Dad came for a visit, and Dad and I went Bear hunting at Holden Lake. I quickly found that the hunting was just the beginning of the work. To be fair the hunting part wasn’t much of a hunt, as the bear came to me while I was eating breakfast. Dad and I went up to the lake on Saturday, walked around a bit and came up with a plan for how we wanted to hunt the area the next day. We got up Sunday morning and started eating a cold breakfast, I was sitting there munching on a piece of beef jerky, and saw a bear walking past our camp out of the corner of my eye. It was so close that my rifle propped against a log was half way from me to it. I got up walked over to my rifle and it was even closer. It was so close its head filled my rifle scope. It was then that the work started, preparing the bear to be carried out on Dad and my pack boards. We worked continuously from 7:30 to 3:30. Then we had to shoulder our packs with about 50 pounds each of bear meat to bring back down the four and a half miles from the lake. By the time we got it all dressed out and ready to pack out, Dad said that if we saw another bear he'd be more likely to throw a rock at it than shoot it. It was, thank goodness, mostly down hill. We left some of our gear up in a tree at the lake, Ang and I went back up to get it on Monday, so I did eighteen miles and four thousand feet of backpacking in three days. Quite a bit more than I have done recently, as a side note Ang, the girls and I went back to Holden Lake the following Friday and spent the night. The girl's first overnight backpacking trip.

It took me a while to post this story, because I know that there are some of you that read the blog that may not approve of, or understand hunting. I didn't want to alienate anyone, but then I thought, "This is something that I enjoy," and it is a good story that I would like to share with you all.