Note: This piece isn't completed yet, but it will be soon. 

Come the first weekend of October 2018, I was more than ready to go on my second pronghorn hunt. My grandparents helped me pack our stuff into their SUV, before we headed north towards Carr, Colorado.

Outdoor Buddies had posted themselves on 30,000 acres of public ranch land to hold the great pronghorn hunt of 2018. Well over 70 hunters were expected to hunt on that land over the weekend, with the vast majority of them arriving early Saturday, including myself. I was worried about how congested the land could get with so many hunters, and how that would affect the availability of the pronghorn. At the same time, I assumed that the pronghorn must be well overpopulated in that region if over 70 tags were issued for them on 30,000 acres of ranchland.

Pronghorn get along very well with cattle. While cattle graze on the grass, they leave the forbs behind for the pronghorn to eat, and also help fertilize the land so even more forbs and grasses can grow. Before cattle, bison were the ones eating the grass, fertilizing the soil, and leaving the forbs behind for the pronghorn, but since bison still have a long way to go before they repopulate the plains like cattle, pronghorn now rely on cattle to survive just as much as they relied on bison. This is why ranchland is usually so heavily populated with pronghorn, and must be well regulated so the pronghorn don't overgraze the land.

Pronghorn rarely, if ever, eat grass. Most of their diet consists of silver sagebrush along with most species of prairie wildflowers, also known as forbs. Occasionally, pronghorn will dig down in search of roots, or fatten themselves up in a field of winter wheat if they are available. Forbs are just as important to the plains ecosystem as the grass. If the pronghorn overgraze the land of its forbs, other animals that rely on forbs, such as prairie dogs and deer, will also be threatened. Everything in the wilderness exists in a delicate balance that must be regulated and protected. Hunting, as it is today, ensures that the delicate balance of nature is maintained so the wilderness and wildlife can survive, thrive, and multiply.

It took me and my grandparents about two hours to get to Carr, Colorado from their house in Aurora, Colorado. Carr is barely a town. It's actually a township with a single lonely post office in the middle of the plains. The post office is less than 10 miles away from the Wyoming border, and only about 20 miles away from Cheyenne, Wyoming. The hunting grounds were just west of Carr, so once we took the Carr exit off the highway, we turned left instead of right. We took a few more turns down some backcountry roads, and finally arrived to the Outdoor Buddies hunting grounds. My grandparents wanted to visit the hunting grounds before we got to the hotel, so we knew where we'd be headed the next morning.

It was very windy and cold when we got there. Outdoor Buddies set up camp in the middle of a flat valley, near a stockyard, surrounded by treeless hills and plateaus as far as the eye could see. There were two canvas tents set up next to a few porta-potties, and a large camper parked several yards away from the tents. There were also several vehicles parked around the campsite, and only a couple people working to set up their tents, which looked quite difficult to do in that wind.

Me and my grandpa walked up and knocked on the camper's door. Immediately, the door opened, and we were greeted by a smiling younger volunteer with a sparky hunting dog in his arms. He let us in, and the CEO of Outdoor Buddies greeted us with a handshake. He was playing cards with more Outdoor Buddies volunteers around a dining table which took up most of the space in front of the camper. Most of the Outdoor Buddies volunteers were young and middle-aged women, along with a few older men. All of them were just as friendly as the CEO and the man with the dog. I relaxed, knowing I'd be in good hands during the hunt.

My grandpa commented on how small and isolated the camp was, but the CEO assured us that by nightfall, there would be a lot more tents and campers set up by those who chose to brave the cold, windy nights on the plains. Most hunters chose to stay in hotels within 30 miles of the hunting grounds, including me and my grandparents. We were staying in a Comfort Inn in Fort Collins, which was a popular hotel among hunters and volunteers who were with Outdoor Buddies.

We also found out that the hunting grounds were split up into roughly eight sections which included the south hunting grounds, far south hunting grounds, southeast hunting grounds, north hunting grounds, far north hunting grounds, northeast hunting grounds, western hunting grounds, and far western hunting grounds. There were several acres in the middle of the western hunting grounds that the land owner did not want to be hunted, which was marked with a few land markers, a windmill, and a gate. Other than that, we had 30,000 acres to hunt pronghorn, which is about 47 square miles.

My grandpa and I thanked everyone in the camper and told them we'd be down before dawn the next morning, and then got back in the warm SUV where my grandma was waiting for us, reading a book.