June’s Woman of the Wild-Christine Appleberg

By Christine Appleberg

How does someone who grew up in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago become an avid outdoorswoman, president of a bowfishing club and editor of a hunting website?

I credit my parents, particularly, my most understanding mom.   She started a lot of my interest by teaching me to fish and then how to fillet the fish that we caught.  This lit the fire in me that nature was not only wondrous and fun, but often downright tasty.  And despite her desire to see me wear cute frilly dresses and act like a proper little girl, she never attempted to quash my fascination with the outdoors and nature, even when I kept a live red bellied snake in my dancing ballerina jewelry box.

Gaining permission to hunt where I lived was difficult but finding a place to trap was far easier.  Even in the waning days of the fur boom there were plenty of raccoons, ‘possums and skunks on the edges of suburbia for a kid to catch.

When I checked my traps I often carried my Browning Nomad recurve bow and a mismatched assortment of arrows with me.

The bow was a gift from my older brother and the arrows were whatever Kmart had on sale.  I knew nothing of arrow spine, or bow ‘tuning’ concepts.  At 45lbs @ 28″ the bow was far too heavy for me. Yet, a surprising number of rabbits, squirrels and the occasional woodchuck became dinner and tanned hides due to my bow.   Deer were scarce in the area back then, so while I did buy a mail in permit a few times, I never actually went hunting for them.

After high school I went to college in Bottineau, North Dakota.  Going from the Chicago suburbs to ND was quite a culture shock.  If I remember correctly, there were about 7 million people within a 40 mile radius of where I grew up.  There was only a little over a half million people in the whole state of North Dakota at that time.  While this meant I had to accept that there were no real pizza places or sushi bars for couple hundred miles of my college, the upside was outstanding.

There were miles and miles of State Wildlife areas teaming with critters and hardly any people.  Creatures quite exotic to someone from Illinois, like moose, elk, pronghorn, mulies, snowshoe rabbits, jack rabbits, ruffed grouse and porcupines.  There was an unbelievable amount of waterfowl around too.  The college even had a bird cleaning area for the students. However, my only attempt at waterfowl hunting resulted in me shooting a single blue winged teal, which dropped into the middle of a slough.  I had to wade into the cold water and mud to retrieve it and this experience chilled me on water fowling. My other hunting adventures were more productive, and I kept myself busy with rabbits, ruffed grouse, furbearers and even took my first turkey in ND.

It was also in North Dakota that I started to get serious about archery.  A very entertaining and patient sporting goods shop owner and his wife helped me get set up with JVA Astro Stinger bow.  Even back then this was not a very high tech bow but I became enamored with it.  I shot it every day.  At my first outdoor tournament I won the women’s division but what really made me proud was that I would have been in fourth place had I been competing in the men’s division.  I also managed to win a moving target competition. I was officially hooked.

It was still a couple of years later, when I moved back to Illinois, that I finally started to make a real attempt at hunting deer.  Like most of my other outdoor pursuits, I am a self-taught deer hunter which means that I made a whole lot of dumb mistakes.  One of my first deer bowhunting  experiences I made the mistake of sitting down right in the deer trail and waited for a deer to show up. This was thinking like a trapper rather than a hunter.

Sure enough, a nice buck comes ambling down the trail and just about runs into me.  I was desperately trying to pull my bow back but was unable to because I was overcome with a serious bout of buck fever.  When the buck finally noticed the weird blob waving a bow around in front of him, his eyes bugged out and he simply bounced off the trail snorting (and I swear laughing) at me.

It only took once to learn that lesson but I plenty of learning to do after that.  Thankfully, I was fast learner (and lucky) and did tag my first deer that same year.  Like most hunters today, deer hunting makes up the majority of my hunting time afield.  However, these days I find myself referring to deer season as the ‘off-season’.   Don’t get me wrong, I love deer hunting. However, my latest outdoor obsession lets me pursue my quarry day or night, warm or cold weather, and I can do it, literally, with a boatload of friends.

Bowfishing.

Bowfishing combines the ‘thrill of the hunt’ with fast paced archery action and it’s only as serious as you want to make it.  I am blessed with a great circle of friends and truly some of my fondest memories are times we’ve had together bowfishing.  It’s a sport where on a good day or night you will shoot so many times you may simply become too tired to shoot anymore. Laughing, yelling, high fiving and plenty of ribbing is all part of the sport. After a good bowfishing outing, a new appreciation of the simple things like a hot shower and good soap are realized.

I have been bowfishing almost year round for several years now.  I’ve bowfished from Lake Guntersville in Georgia to Saginaw Bay in Michigan and many places in between.   My boyfriend Kendall has a tricked out pontoon boat that has a raised shooting deck, lights, generator and uses a pusher fan instead of a trolling motor to get into very shallow water.   It gets us some weird looks when we pull it down the road but it is an absolutely sweet bowfishing rig.  [If you're reading this Kendall, I do love you for more than your boat!]

I am currently President of the Illinois Bowfishers Club.  It’s a not for profit club that promotes bowfishing in Illinois through education events, outdoor shows and also host several tournaments and fun shoots.   We also work with state and federal fisheries biologists who study both native and invasive non-native species.  This makes the sport not only fun and entertaining but downright interesting too.

If you are someone who is interested in cutting back on your ‘down time’ between deer seasons, I urge you to look into bowfishing.  You might be surprised at just how much it will change your opinion of the ‘off season’.   I will be teaching a bowfishing class for women at an upcoming Women in the Outdoors class in July at Clinton Lake in Illinois.

For information about bowfishing, check out www.illinoisbowfishers.com

I am an editor and administrator on www.HuntingNet.com There’s a wealth of hunting information there that will help a new hunter avoid learning so many lessons by trial and error like I did.

Scouting the Upper Country

With temperatures pushing the mercury into triple digits in our part of the country, it seemed a good time to head to the mountains for a cool down, but really it was an excuse to get a jump on game movement in our newly found hunting grounds (thank you Google Earth).

My brother, Todd, and I had stumbled into a large pond while elk hunting last year and noticed it was full of sign all around it – and located in an ideal spot.  We knew this was a spot where we would spend some time this year, but the plans to spend a week on a backpack hunt in the area started a few months after last year’s archery season ended. Our cousin, Cody Waldo, called me up and started to tell me about a spot he’d found on Google Earth that looked liked a prime spot for an above timberline deer hunt. He started describing it, and pretty soon I realized he was talking about the same area near the pond Todd and I had stumbled into and discussed hunting.  That started the ball rolling and this spring we decided we’d put an honest hunt into it – Cody with an out of state deer tag, and Todd and I trying our luck for deer and elk both.

Summertime, for the western bowhunter, is an ideal time to hit the mountains for scouting as the deer are on their summer patterns – the same patterns they’ll be in for the first couple weeks of archery season before they start their annual slow and steady migration out of the hills. Add in the fact that the high country is looking at conditions fit for living even in July and August, and it’s a perfect time to escape the valley’s furnace and call it ’scouting.’ I can’t pretend to know enough about elk and their patterns this time of year, but it seemed from all the elk tracks up there that elk are already in the area.

We had to race against daylight on Friday night as we had to wait on yours truly to punch out from his day job. As we hiked past the waterhole Todd and I stumbled into and continued on towards the peak new country unveiled itself at each step. The ridge leading to camp was full of knee high grass and foilage – and water was everywhere. There were several natural saddles that were nothing more than giant elk wallows waiting to happen. If I had any shame at all I’d not mention the fact that three grown men high fived over this discovery. When we topped out and laid eyes on the canyon we’d spent all summer virtually learning, it was far above and beyond our best dreams.

When we had been planning the trip, I was telling Todd over the phone I was packing my sleeping bag, but he convinced me that he was just bringing a blanket as a sleeping bag was just added weight. As we unrolled our packs at camp, Todd casually mentioned he saw the weather report for a relatively close town at the same elevation showed the temperatures dipping into the low 40s. My ears perked and I told him, “Well, looks like you and I will be freezing tonight!” Todd looked at me and chuckled, “Not me, I packed my sleeping bag after I read that!”

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night because I was…well, freezing. If I can have one free feeling of malice, I can take comfort in knowing Todd didn’t sleep well, either. So it was no surprise that we got up well before dawn. We went over the ridge and set up on the edge of the drainage to wait for the first streaks of light to change the color of the sky and give us a look at the country we’d been dreaming about for several months. I was thinking there would be deer all over, so was a little dissapointed when, all told, all that we saw was a forked horn, six does, and one nice buck.  Despite elk tracks aplenty, we never saw a single elk. Cody had to remind me that with the hot weather, the deer and elk would both be limiting their movement and there’s a good chance they were moving around mostly at night. It’ll be interesting to see what the next month brings to that country.

Despite the lack of game sightings, we accomplished some essentials – such as finding water, a camping place, and the simple fact of getting to really see the country in person.  We got an idea of where we want to be at first light on opening day after finding out the sun didn’t rise exactly where we thought it would after looking at it on Google Earth.  With the flowers in full bloom, turning the scenery back to a spring setting, it was certainly a trip well worth it!

Gear

Cody: Leupold 10