Our Outdoors

Our Outdoors: More to Come By Nick Simonson With the blue tent cover flipped over us and the ice hole before him meticulously cleaned after an entertaining five minutes of scooping, my nearly three-year-old son A.J. was receptive to dropping his first wriggling minnow down the silver-blue cylinder toward the gravelly bottom below. I clicked open the bail on the reel while he held the cork-and-electrician-tape handle and the yellow foam bobber hit the slush free surface of the eight-inch circle with a plop and his small split shot and fathead spiraled down the hole.  He laughed as the foam […]

Our Outdoors: The League By Nick Simonson   Case upon case of 12 gauge shells piled up in the safe room at the trap club as a line of volunteers – some of them fellow coaches, some parents and some shooters – daisy-chained the 100 brown boxes of ammo through the snow to their resting place along the wall.  While it will remain there for a few more months until the spring league kicks off on April 3, it serves as a sign that what will surely be the nation’s biggest shooting sports season isn’t far away.  With one introductory […]

Our Outdoors: Get a Bead On It By Nick Simonson When it comes to fast moving water, or big fish lurking below the school, nothing gets an angler down to business like the addition of a heavy, flashy bead at the front of a fly.  Whether it is a rapidly-flowing stream harboring trout in deeper pockets or tucked into the slow water of pools several feet deep, or the larger panfish that occupy the bottom strata of the group in a lake or a pond, a bead helps get traditional fly offerings down to these fish and set off strikes […]

Our Outdoors: A Perfect Reminder By Nick Simonson   We were five-for-seven heading into the homeward turn of a slough on a year end pheasant hunt.  Seemingly every rooster that got up in shooting range went down in shooting range.  The couple that escaped did so by the very fibers of their long tailfeathers which waggled in the breeze after some amazing evasive maneuvers. It was a great afternoon patrolling the frozen doughnut sloughs with rings of cover around solid icy middles that seemed to hold a bird in every fifteen minutes or so of walking.   Despite the incredible […]

Our Outdoors: The Late Season Experience By Nick Simonson   The end of the year provides unique opportunities to put a bow on hunting adventures and taking advantage of those chances to get outdoors, whenever they come and whatever the conditions are, gives one last look at an autumn gone by and excitement for next year’s time in the field. Christmas weekend provided one such opportunity for my visiting brother and me on a large chunk of public land just a few miles down the road. The bone chilling cold of the past few weeks had frozen the swampy surface […]

Our Outdoors: In Picture By Nick Simonson     This weekend, while waiting for the lakes to freeze to a point where I felt comfortable (next weekend, most likely) and watching another batch of shovel-worthy snow accumulate, I found myself wandering around the house, finishing out hunting-season-delayed honey-dos.  One task on my list was cleaning the accumulation of magnetic letters, address labels and other items that had piled up in that limbo of the refrigerator top.  As I sneezed my way through the dust and sorted a variety of flotsam and jetsam of daily life that had washed up on […]

By Nick Simonson THIS IS IT!  THE BLACK FRIDAY BEHEMOTH!  THE MILLE LACS MONSTER! HOPP’S HAIL MARY! Here’s the fish that IS BREAKING THE INTERNET, probably because it could have broken the state record – and IT IS EXCLUSIVELY YOURS as a loyal publisher of Our Outdoors!  Only I have been granted an interview thus far with the angler who caught this monstrous 56×28.5 inch fish, and you’ve got the scoop as well.  So please, get this out and get this week’s column up on all of your media! Marshall Hopp of Valley City, N.D. (originally, Milaca, Minn.) with the […]

By Nick Simonson The weather has sent the signs that first ice is just a few days away!  As things cool off across the upper Midwest, anglers look for hot early-ice action.  With that anticipation comes Our Outdoors’ annual installment of The Hottest Stuff on Ice showcasing what’s new and needed for fishing this winter. Ion Ice Augers brings an improved offering to hardwater this season with its Ion X model.  With a 60 percent longer battery life, the X will punch more holes with zero exhaust.  (Image Courtesy of Ion) Marcum offers up the first flat-screen on-ice sonar with […]