Somewhere around your kid’s thirteenth birthday, the conversations get shorter. The door closes a little more. The phone becomes a third person in every room. If you’ve got a teenager, you know exactly what I’m talking about — and if you’re a hunter, you’ve probably wondered the same thing I did: what if I just took them to the mountains for a week?
Last fall I took my daughter Bella on her first bull elk hunt in New Mexico. She was fifteen, about to turn sixteen. We filmed the whole thing, and it’s out now as an episode we called DAUGHTER. But I want to talk about the part that doesn’t show up in the hunt footage — the reason I actually went.
The goal was a bull. The point was my daughter.
Let me be clear about the difference, because it matters. The goal of the trip was to find and kill a mature bull. That’s real, and we chased it hard. But the goal was never the point. The point was to spend real, uninterrupted time with a teenage daughter who — like every teenager — is getting harder to connect with as she gets older.
Out there, all of that noise goes away. No to-do list. No pressure. No stress. No cell phones splitting our attention. You’ve got one job — find a bull — and everything else in life just falls off. You can feel the lightness of it. You can feel the peace.
And here’s the thing nobody tells you about a week in elk country: it’s mostly boring. Long stretches of glassing. Naps in the sun. Sitting and waiting. But that “boredom” is the whole gift. It forces you to just be in each other’s presence. We talked more than we’ve talked in months. And some of the best moments were the ones with no words at all — just the two of us on a hillside, connected without saying anything. You don’t get that at home.
Why I filmed it (and why she almost said no)
Two reasons I brought the camera. One, I genuinely love filming hunts. Two — and this is the real one — I wanted Bella to have something to look back on someday and watch our time together.
Honestly, she doesn’t love being filmed. She thinks the camera gets in the way of the hunt, and she’s completely right about that — it does. She agreed to it this time because it was such a cool hunt. But I put this episode together differently than we normally do. It’s not a kill-shot highlight reel. It’s structured as a letter from me to her, walking through the lessons a single hunt can teach you. She may not fully understand all of it right now. My hope is that years down the road, she will.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: this experience isn’t for me to remember. It’s for her. Of course I’ll carry it the rest of my life. But the valuable part — the part that matters — is that she carries it the rest of hers.
The missed shot, and why I wasn’t mad
On day two she got her chance and her first shot missed — caught a twig — and wounded the bull. If you’ve hunted long enough, you know that gut-drop feeling. I knew exactly what she was going through, because I’ve been there myself.
That feeling that you messed up. That you let your dad down, let yourself down. That you put an animal through unnecessary pain. The fear that you won’t be able to get a second shot in to finish it and recover it. Those are heavy feelings for anyone, let alone a fifteen-year-old. I understood every bit of the pressure she was carrying in that moment.
But that’s hunting, and that’s life. You don’t get to control everything. What you do control is what you do next. She steadied up, made the follow-up shot, and put that bull down. That’s the moment I’ll remember — not the miss. The one after it.
She earned that bull
I’m proud of her for this one. She worked hard. She got up early. She put miles on her legs without a single complaint. She went through the trials and came out the other side with a bull on the ground and a stack of lessons most adults never learn. She even packed out a heavy load the couple miles back to the truck — and I know that was tough on her, but she did it.
That’s the stuff you can’t hand a kid. They have to earn it. And the mountains are one of the last places left where they still can.
If you’ve got a kid, take them
You don’t need a trophy unit or a perfect week. You need time, a shared goal, and a place with no signal. Whether that’s a New Mexico ranch elk hunt like ours, a mellow cow elk hunt that’s perfect for a first-timer, or a backcountry pack-in — the animal is just the excuse. The connection is the point.
Watch the full DAUGHTER episode, and we get into the lessons of a hunt deeper on the Hunt Podcast. If you want help planning a first hunt for your son or daughter, reach out to us or browse our hunts — we’ll help you build the trip around the kid, not just the tag.
Take the week off. Leave the phones in the truck. Go make something they’ll remember for the rest of their life.
Hunting is not a hobby. It’s an obsession.
