“opening day”

In 2013, only weeks before the annual “Harrisburg show” was to begin, the event’s producer announced it had banned the sale or display of AR-style rifles. The sporting world was angered, and responded en masse to force a boycott. A year later, the NRA stepped in to rebrand the event the Great American Outdoor Show.

Read on for our Members' Best hunts of 2021.

The night before opening day is too late to learn that you’re missing tent poles or the moths ate holes in your sleeping bags. And opening day is too late to learn you've picked a game unit with more hunters than game. Best do a test-run.

In 1985, we launched a program to facilitate friendly competition among youths 18 and younger that would advance hunting skills including wildlife identification, orienteering and rifle, shotgun and archery marksmanship. Today, thousands of hunter education volunteers and parents still conduct this program at the state and local level to produce safer, more skillful and more ardent American hunters.

This latest Member's Hunt comes from Douglas E. Lierle of Lone Tree, Colorado.

In 1949, New York asked the National Rifle Association for help to improve hunter safety afield. The four-hour course that followed was a “pioneer effort” that has saved lives ever since. Today, no one can imagine American hunting without hunter education as a prudent rite of passage.

Want to come away with a buzzer-beater buck? Here are five things to not do, along with alternative choices to go with instead.

Three generations of the Gouger family have gathered every fall to hunt deer on a 128-acre farm in northwestern New Jersey since the 1950s. None of them has ever called it a “deer camp.” The place is just “the cabin.” But every hunter of the farm is aware the hunt endures today in the face of encroaching development.

This latest Member's Hunt comes from Lance Powlison of Oregon City, Oregon.