Generally speaking, hunting and hiking are not compatible. Speaking here of big game hunting mostly, and understanding that species distributed far across the landscape often require extensive hiking to find. But, it is always better to selectively walk, and know enough to head straight for those modest pockets on the landscape which a given species will almost always favor, and if you’ve walked enough and continuously to feel as if it was a good days walk you are most likely hunting ineffectively. The skills of hiking come in later, when 150 pounds of meat and gear are 15 miles from the trailhead.

So what then is thruhunting, aside from impatiently going short on glassing and still hunting and rather going in for the symbolic, satisfying, popular, and ineffective practice of taking ones weapon for a mere walk? Thruhunting is changing the calculus of both hunting and hiking, and rather than maximizing either the chance of seeing maximum numbers of a given species or the scenic efficiency of a line through the landscape, combining the two in a way which often gives priority to neither. Thruhunting can be about investigating how a species uses a landscape, or zone, or drainage. Thruhunting can be about tracing a migration route, or walking up and then down the other side of a huge slow mountain over a given day and finding out where the deer have landed that year. Thruhunting is about learning in the landscape as a way to, perhaps, find something to shoot. It also provides for a more multifaceted and less tedious way to hunt, something that can be welcome after too many empty, cold mornings sitting on a knob.

My trip last November is one of my favorite examples. Another would be a canoe trip a few weeks ago, where floating 30 twisty miles saw a coyote napping on a sunny sand bar, two elk drinking in the river, and a bunch of deer interacting with farmland, willow thickets, and little brushy islands in ways that had me at full draw half a dozen times, and would have had a deer in the boat had a paid more attention to that one branch.

A massive opportunity afforded by thruhunting, at least in Montana, is block management; the extensive network of private lands given over to varying degrees of public access for hunting. Some of these tracts are enormous, big enough for an overnighter, and hunting them with travel in mind is unique in several distinct ways.

Hunting is too easily defined by “success”, which means a dead animal, ideally a old and/or large antlered dead animal. And that definition has a lot of meaning. If one large aspect of the value of outdoor pursuits is the objectivity of nature as an immutable mirror for growth and reflection, hunting is perhaps the most objective, insofar as it heightens the world as beyond human control and understanding. But there are different, more qualitative ways to define success in hunting, and finding a given animal in a certain environment has become my favorite.