Who is John Barklow? John Barklow is the Big Game Product Manager at Sitka.  Before coming to Sitka, Barklow served in the United States Navy for 26 years. As a Navy diver, he worked all over the world and eventually began teaching diving to Navy SEALs. In his spare time, Barklow pursued his mountain guiding credentials and began teaching these skills to the military as well. Post 9/11 he was reassigned to Kodiak, Alaska, where he trained special operations forces to live and fight, unsupported, in remote mountain ranges. During the first year following 9/11, the U.S. military lacked suitable gear for modern day mountain warfare—their gear had not been updated since the Cold War ended. This meant that Barklow and other members of the military turned to high-end mountaineering and outdoor companies to provide the technical solutions th...

Photo credit: Jesse Eckley There’s a scene in the movie Lonesome Dove where Captain Call gives Newt a six-shooter on their way to steal horses in Mexico. As he hands him the gun Call says, “It’s better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.” I feel the same way about most of my hunting equipment, including game calls. And that theory proved true just a few years back, at last light, when I was about 10 yards from a bull elk in a wallow. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear every heavy breath and the plop of his hooves when they came free from the gumbo. This was a situation where a lot could have gone wrong, but because I spent a couple bucks on a mouth call and was prepared to use it, the hunt ended in my favor. It had taken me six years and hundreds of boot miles to finally draw on a bull, and the call h...

St.Joe River Fishing Report The Joe has been fantastic of late. Even with the heatwave, this stream produces fish all day long. I fished up there for two days last week and had two great days. Fish were receptive to all sorts of things, including small beadheads, beetles, ants, hoppers of many sizes and colors, PMDs, caddis and even some small streamers. A parachute Madam X with a small Pheasant Tail dropper was a great rig. I ran my dropper maybe 12-18” behind the hopper, but actually got more eats on the dry than the dropper. You might need to expand your tippet selection right now. I fished quite a bit of water ranging from the upper river above Gold Creek and Red Ives all the way down low to Marble Creek. All fished great. This week should be dynamite as we are suppose to get a change in the weather, meaning 70s and 80s and a chan...

Let’s talk about the gun itself before we get into the business side of this firearm review. Why did Kel-Tec make this gun? Kel-Tec is a firearms manufacturer that is known for being on the cutting edge of creation—from foldable rifles that take handgun ammo, to the PMR30, Kel-Tec makes firearms that may be considered, “Out there,” in traditional firearms circles. So why did Kel-Tec produce a .22 WMR handgun with a factory magazine capacity of 30 rounds? To answer that we need to look at one of the most well-known and expensive handguns on the market. “Developed by FN back in 1989, the 5.7x28mm cartridge was envisioned as a replacement option for 9mm submachine gun use. The idea was that a smaller cartridge that was lighter in weight and capable of [high velocity] would be a compelling option for NATO, Law Enforcement, and prot...

Weston Clark, vice president at Duel Game Calls, was born in Riverton, Wyoming, which pretty much means he was destined to hunt elk. In a recent interview, Clark told us he was enthralled with elk by his seventh birthday and he recalls packing elk out of the mountains when he was eight. He was imitating elk calls in third grade. “As soon as the first snow would fall, my friends and I would start to circle up the girls on the playground bugling like bulls,” he said. “That’s the kind of trouble I would get in when I was in grade school.” Click here to see the selection of Duel Game calls that Weston has helped design and produce. A guide for many decades and a lifelong elk hunter, Clark has a passion for communicating with animals. “Communication as manipulation, that’s the height of hunting for me,” he said. “To call in ...

My collection of fly-fishing photos dates back to the 1980s and mixed in among them are hundreds of images of my two Labrador retrievers, Moose and Shadow. Check out what we offer online at North40.com for the four-legged members in your family. Those dogs are long gone now, but I still enjoy looking at photos of them and remembering all the interesting times we had together. When I had those dogs I was on the water for a 150 or more days a year and they were with me at all times. When I wrote books about fly fishing, I told stories about those dogs and included photos of them in the mix. By the late-1990s, when the dogs were in their primes and the books were circulating well, people started recognizing Moose and Shadow on the water, which was always a nice way to start a conversation and make new friends. Read my IFTD 2017 write up her...

Sunday morning found me on the road, headed to meet up with Luke Mckee. As I crossed the Okanogan River I could see an armada of boats on the Columbia River, plying the water for chinook salmon. The Brewster Salmon Derby was coming to an end, but that was not going be our target for the day. Here's a bass pattern you might wanna tie up. Instead, our sights were set on the smallmouth bass that live in the Okanogan. Ten minutes later I was pulling into Luke's place. He was just finishing changing the irrigation water and was still sporting rubber knee-high boots and shorts. I loaded my rods and gear bags into his boat as he made himself look more like a real fly angler, whatever that might look like. Once the boat was loaded we were off, and 20 minutes later the boat was in the water. Need a new fly rod? AKA: Have you seen the Winston Air?...

It didn't take long for me to hit the the Clark Fork after I saw flows at 6,000 cfs, and holding strong. Conditions were great! Not a cloud in the sky and an occasional breeze to keep me cool. Water clarity was excellent. There wasn't much of a hatch going on. The caddis clung to the streamside trees. Occasionally a cutthroat exploded on the surface, but not frequently enough to predict when the next rise might occur. Surprisingly,I didn't see the occasional white mayfly I usually find on the water this time of year. Check out our gear selection online here. Fishing was fairly tough. We spent close to four hours on the water, and only had a handful of trout to show for it. I did swung up a beautiful 15" cutthroat on a #6 olive Woolly Bugger . . . on my second cast of the day. A few casts later, I missed what felt like a small fish, or a ...

I’ve received some puzzling reports about the fishing on north-central Washington’s Methow River for the last couple of weeks, so I thought I would look into it for myself. The reports indicated a serious scarcity of the bigger westslope cutthroat trout that my home river had become known for. I was able to get on the water at around 7 a.m. The first run was close to my home and has always served as a go-to spot that never fails to yield one or two 18"-24" cutties. I rigged up my ECHO ION XL 6-weight with a 210 grain AIRFLO Scout head. Grabbed one of my go to streamers, a #8 Sculpzilla, and started swinging the run from the top down. Picked up a couple small size rainbows in the 8"-10" range. Only found one small cutty that was about 8". Puzzled I went back to the top of the run, changed streamers to a Skittish Smolt, and repeated th...