Early in life I was introduced to hunting in a positive way and it has become a passion of mine ever since. I was given my first gun when I was three and shot my first deer when I was seven. Before I was thirty I had shot eleven different big game species and I had never been on a guided hunt. The passion or even obsession of hunting can sometimes control my life. I sometimes have hunting trips planned out years in advance. A week prior to a big hunt I can plan on not sleeping much. Many times I spend more time scouting or planning for a trip than actually hunting. The majority of the time I am very successful. Even when I come home empty handed; I would usually feel a sense of accomplishment having learned a lot about the behavior of a species or the area I was hunting.

This year I experienced something very different and I hope to never experience it again. Work has been very demanding, and I did not get much time to hunt. I am at the point in my hunting career that I do not want to shoot just any animal. I want the big one and will not settle for less. I had been deer hunting only a few days and passed several bucks that would make most people happy. I felt that the places I was hunting did not have the caliber of deer I was looking for. I decided to go visit a private ranch that I knew about called the “Dana Ranch” in central Montana. The Dana ranch has a reputation of having record book animals on it. It also has the reputation of not granting access to just anyone.