My father began taking me into the Mountains of the Sierra Nevada when I was young. I was 4 or 5 on my first fishing trip, where I bloodied my hands on rusty treble hooks, playing with various lures in place of toys while sitting in camp. Most memories from those early pre-kindergarten years are buried and gone within the darkest recesses of my mind, however the memories made in the woods remain alive. Stories of hunts, jeeps, four wheel drive, building fires, and camaraderie stirred within me as a young lad. My father passed on a love of the Mountains, great hunters like Jeff Cooper and Jack O’Connor. My first rifle was a Mauser Action .270. History, gunfighters, the proper employment of a weapon, virtue, honor, morality, chivalry, integrity, these attributes that set men apart were vested into me by him. It was a blessing I took for granted, believing all boys lived this way. A confidence was instilled in me out of which emanated a spirit of enduring adventure conquering the unknown, venturing into the Beartooth wilderness as a teen with friends before winter storms, “just to see if we could survive it.” He’s been there passing on the same, to his grandsons, my boys, as I too, struggle to instill in them, some semblance of that same upbringing. It is incumbent upon us as fathers, to make our boys men, equip them with a rugged hardiness, a boldness to go forward, to stand in the face of elements uncomfortable, and prevail. How often I am let down by my own failures at my role - a sharp tone, a temper or a misspoken word. The hardest task one faces, is being the example you wish you could be, yet seem to never achieve. Let us teach those after us, “To ride, shoot straight and speak the truth.”
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