April surprise

An Outdoorsman’s Journal

Mark Walters sponsored by

Hello friends, I am just about finished with what I believe has been the busiest winter of my life. It included eight winter camping trips and a go-for-it adventure to the state of Mississippi with my 21-year-old daughter Selina. We camped and hunted hogs and deer in the Delta National Forest. As president and founder of Kids and Mentors Outdoors “KAMO” (www.kamokids.org), I have been giving it everything I can to see that all seven of our chapters get back on their feet after the Covid-19 punch in the face that the world took and hopefully is getting past.

This past week I stayed home and spent some time with Selina, who was home for three days and I will soon leave for a canoe fishing trip at De Pere on the Fox River to fish for trophy walleyes.

Two days after I get home, I am heading to Red Lake, Ontario, Canada to visit with my good friends Pete and Elizabeth Hagedorn for Pete’s 84th birthday and to ice fish. The day after I get home, I am heading down to Beaver Dam to speak at a Whitetails Unlimited banquet and the beat goes on.

This week I am writing a “because I can” type of column. In reality, it is to slow my brain and body down so that the overload I am on does not literally overload who I am.

KAMO! We have chapters near Beaver Dam, Poynette, Baraboo, Necedah, La Crosse, Marshfield and Florence. In a years’ time we help a lot of kids enjoy the outdoors. Like just about everything else in the world, Covid-19 kicked our butt. KAMO survived and now we are doing our best to do what our name suggests. We need mentors especially, in Poynette and Marshfield, but everywhere that I mentioned.

KAMO activities can be one-on-ones or group events. It could be time spent in a kayak, around a campfire or in a turkey blind. Please help if you can. Everyone is volunteering, we do background checks and in a years’ time we really make a difference.

As I mentioned, Selina was home. She has not been here since Christmas break and she is and has been paving the way for an incredible future. With double majors in fisheries and aquatic sciences as well as water resources, a minor in soil science and her certificate in wetland sciences as well as a job at UW-Stevens Point in the bug lab, it actually scares me when I think about how busy she is.

The day after school gets out, she is packing her car and heading to Eureka, Mont., near the northwest Montana/ Canadian border where she has been given an excellent internship with the U.S. Forest Service in the area of fisheries.

Two months ago, Selina asked me to give her a good class on running a chainsaw and I did that while she was home. I started with the actual running of a chainsaw, including bar oil and gas/oil mix and ended with Selina doing all of the cutting in the woods including dropping her first tree. I am going to tell you, I was nervous as H.E. double toothpicks when she ran the saw, but everything worked out. When she is in Montana she intends on getting her chainsaw safety certificate.

I said I was heading to De Pere to fish for walleyes out of my canoe. I do this annually. It is as insane as fishing gets with literally boat-to-boat traffic. I will probably be in the only canoe, but three inches of badly needed rain the last few days has created flooding and chocolate milk for river clarity. My river time will be in the dark for the most part. When you catch a trophy walleye in that manner, you have had a good day.

I am hoping that the limited time for my Canada trip does not get delayed in route by snow as there is nothing but below temperatures forecast for the next 10 days. But all in all I honestly thrive on living on this “edge” of the everything way of life, from time, to safety, to cash flow, and the bonuses like KAMO and teaching a young lady how to run a chainsaw.

Sometime between April 1-10, there is a potential for something very cool to happen in my life and hopefully I will be writing about that in a couple of weeks.

At 60 I feel as healthy as I did at 30. I keep the weight down, don’t smoke and moving the body with regularity are some of my keys to my success!

Sunset