Who am I

My Story

I grew up in Davis County, Utah, as the youngest of five kids. Much of my youth was spent focusing on sports. I obsessed over football and let baseball and wrestling take up what was left of my attention. However, from a very young age, there was a nagging desire in the back of my head—hunting. I felt it in my bones; I knew it was something I was supposed to do. My maternal grandpa is probably to blame for this. My mom's side of the family hailed from Idaho, and I spent many of my weekends as a young kid sitting on my grandpa's lap, scanning through hunting magazines and gawking at the mounts that lined his walls.

Most folks who hunt do it for one simple reason: their fathers did. I am an outlier to this statistic. Growing up, I began to look at hunters the same way most kids probably look at astronauts. I knew there were people going on these incredible adventures into places unknown to me, and they would bring home the best meat I’d ever tasted and antlers from the coolest-looking animals. I wanted a piece of it. Bad. I cannot explain the desire any more than to say that something in my head was programmed to hunt. Though he didn’t hunt himself, my dad never grew tired of buying me hunting DVDs, reading me books about Davy Crockett, or entertaining my constant hounding to hunt—or at least he never admitted it.

​

When I was 8, I began to accompany my mom's oldest brother on his hunts. I look back on those times fondly, especially as I get older and better understand the sacrifices he made. It’s not easy to hunt with kids, especially the uninitiated. They whine, hate the cold, get bored, and can’t come close to keeping up on hikes. But he was doing something far more important than I realized at the time—he was planting a seed. As soon as I turned ten, and the state allowed it, my grandfather took me on my first mule deer hunt in eastern Idaho. It was all downhill from there. I haven’t missed a season since.

​

I started Rise N Tine my junior year of high school with a couple of buddies, though the idea had been in the back of my mind since that first fall I ever hunted. As soon as I pulled the trigger on a deer, I had one thought: how do I do this for the rest of my life? I had two consistent loves growing up—writing and hunting. I read an unreasonable amount as a kid; it felt like my dad and I finished a novel every week. I also had a mountain of hunting magazines. I knew I had to write, specifically about hunting. The idea of Rise N Tine was about something different; it was about the love of hunting and sharing that with people. I wanted to share my love of hunting and my stories so that a young man might see them and be influenced by them the same way I was.