After all your planning, your prep and your hard hunting, everything comes down to one moment where you've got to succeed or fail in taking your query.

I'm Joseph on Benedict and this is the backcountry hunting podcast and today I want to share a couple of stories that I was a part of recently watching a couple of shooters, attempt shots at significant animals, and some hard

lessons learned. This is all about making the shot in the field preparation and practice and decision making.

So let me share these two scenarios, but first pardon any sounds of wind howling past my truck here, if you don't mind.

I'm sitting in the North Park area of Colorado, overlooking a beautiful sagebrush flat with some willows and a little

creek bottom in the bottom of it. Just trying to get a a podcast recorded in the middle of an elkunt here in Colorado. So two days ago, I was hunting with a friend and a guide with Silver Spur Outfitters by the way.

This is a private land elkunt kind of a cool deal here in northern Colorado, an area I've never hunted, and some very cool terrain and topography that is built

by the local town, which is called Weldon, as the Moose Viewing Capital of the lower 48.

And I'll be darned if I haven't seen more Moose here than I have anywhere,

I think including Alaska.

And some big big big bulls. This outfitter charges a premium for

their most hunts. They only get a couple of tags a year, private land tags, and

they shoot a lot of Boone and Crockett bulls with those two

tags per year. So the hunter I was watching was a youth hunter.

I'm not going to reveal any more details about him as far as specific identity, but he was in

his late teens, let's just say between 15 and 18, and through hard work

and good fortune he had been lucky enough to obtain a cow moose tag for this area, one of the very few, and he was being guided by a local

Fish and Game officer.

Had several days to hunt, it almost closed the deal, but just hadn't quite got a shot off.

My guide and I and my friend found a cow moose down the the drainage from where he and his guide were hunting and so our guide left us there to watch this cow moose while he jogged up the canyon and fetched this young man in his guide. They came down and snuck up around behind us and got eyes on this moose and here's where certain things started to become apparent.

Mostly that this young man had not been able to polish his shooting skills in preparation for this moment.

So I saw the game warden encourage him

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