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Mia Anstine writes for Women’s Outdoor News, Western Whitetail Magazine and Beretta

Welcome to another episode of “Whitetail Rendezvous.” This is your host, Bruce Hutcheon. We’re heading down to southwestern Colorado today, in Pagosa Springs, meeting up and talking with just a dynamic woman who represents a lot of women in the outdoors, Mia Anstine. She’s co-owner of Wolf Creek Outfitters, but Mia is more than just a hardcore, gets the job done, takes care of her clients, outfitter. She is a writer for “Women’s Outdoor News.” She probably writes “The Comfort Zone” for “Western Whitetail Magazine.” She has a blog with Beretta, and she’s an active board member with the local chapter SCI, Safari Club International. She served, as well as I have served, at the Colorado Sportsman’s Round Table Committee, representing sportsmen throughout Colorado, with its director [inaudible:00:01:03]. She’s also a professional member of Professional Outdoor Media Association. Mia, welcome to the show.

Mia: Hi there. How are you?

Bruce: I’m awesome. I’m just excited to be chatting with you. I talked to Barbara Baird. She was on the show a couple months ago, and she said, “Man, if you ever can get Mia out of the mountains and off her horse and get her on the show, she would be awesome.” So let’s talk about Mia, and let’s just talk about Wolf Creek Outfitters right now. Give yourself a little self promo. What I didn’t say in our warm-up, Mia, is that at the end, you’ll have a couple minutes to give promos and shout-outs to sponsors, to friends, to anything or any person, any entity that’s supporting you, or anything else you’d want to say.

Mia: Okay.

Bruce: Got it?

Mia: Sounds good.

Bruce: Okay. Let’s start off with Wolf Creek Outfitters. Let’s talk about that.

Let’s start off with Wolf Creek Outfitters. Let’s talk about that

Mia: Well, my husband and I co-own Wolf Creek Outfitters. He ran it when I met him, and he’s kind of got me on board, helping him take out new hunters and mentor the youth into hunting. It’s something that I really enjoy doing, spreading the traditions to the next generation, so we can ensure that they continue on. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s something that . . . As you said, I spend a lot of days up in the hills and riding horses, scouting, hunting, and just trying to educate others into what hunting is about.

Bruce: Now what game animals do you hunt?

Mia: We hunt elk, mule deer, black bear, and [inaudible:00:02:50] turkey. We do that in southwest Colorado and in northern New Mexico.

Bruce: Now have you ever hunted whitetail deer?

Mia: This is great that I’m on your show, and it’s a whitetail show, because we just got back from an event with Remington [SP] Country in Missouri. I’ve actually been on two whitetail hunts, and both of them have been unsuccessful. The first one, I learned what sizes in that location in Minnesota, where shooters . . . I saw a couple that I wasn’t quite sure if were shooters, and I tapped on them. When I returned to the lodge, they told me, “Yeah, that was good that you packed.” So I ended up coming home empty-handed after the Minnesota event. Just this past month, in Missouri, I went with my daughter. I was myself and Jessica Callam [SP] at Remington, she and her daughter. We went on a whitetail hunt there, a mother/daughter hunt, and it was a lot of fun. But believe it or not, we came up empty-handed again. We could’ve shot either sex.

Jessica and her daughter saw a couple of does the second evening, but it was past shooting light. My daughter and I, we didn’t see a single mammal until the very last morning. We saw two squirrels. So I don’t even know if there’s whitetail there.

Bruce: Oh, my goodness. I’ll just throw this out. I left home October 24th, came home November . . . two days before Thanksgiving. I never had a doe under my stand, and I saw over 30 bucks. None of them were shooters. I have set limits now. You know? I’m very selective because I want to grow in class.

Mia: Yeah.

Bruce: I really do. If you want to shoot the first deer that you see and take that meat home and eat it, hey, I’m all for that. Personally I’m at a point now that if it doesn’t meet an age class, and I didn’t say horn size . . . I said age class.

Mia: Yes.

Bruce: There’s a huge difference. Sometimes . . . Well, we’ll get into that at a different thing. This show is about you.

Mia: Well, you mentioning that, I completely understand, because my daughter is 17. She developed into quite the hunter. Since our whole family hunts, we generally have meat in our freezer. So we are able to be a little more selective. As you said, it’s not necessarily the size, but we definitely look for mature animals. She has hit a couple of young bucks that had kickers and looked a little crazy, as far as the Colorado mule deer that’s here. They were still young, and she chose . . . She opted to pass. Not every year you fill your tag. She didn’t fill her tag, but it’s a choice that you make when you’re in the field, and it’s something that I admire her for, already understanding that we want that guy to get bigger and eventually pass his genetics on, so that we can have more big deer.

Bruce: Now, share with our listeners just a couple things you learned, first from your hunt, lessons learned from Minnesota, and lessons learned from Missouri, just a couple things.

Mia: Okay. Lesson learned from Minnesota. That was . . . Those hunts were in November. In Minnesota, it was in 2014 when the northern polar blast came through. So I ended up being delayed on my flight, and I missed the first day of the hunt. So I was cut down to only . . . We did morning sits and evening sits in elevated box blinds. So I missed . . . I only got to do three sits. But something I’ve learned, being from mule deer country, is you look at whitetail, and I always thought of Texas whitetail that I had seen crossing the highway like, “Oh, my gosh. They look tiny.” So when I showed up at this lodge, the guys there were outstanding. It was at Kruger [SP] Farms in Starlight, Minnesota. I asked them, “Please help me, because I don’t know what to look for.” You know? They were so helpful. They had different mounts on the walls, and they said, “This one’s a trophy. Absolutely shoot this. This one is average. This is what you would want.” They also are trying to grow the herds and pass on genetics. So they definitely showed me another mount, and they’re like, “This is something you definitely don’t want to shoot because this is a youngster.”

So it was really nice to go into that stand a day late and have an idea of what I was looking for, but one thing that I looked at was those Minnesota deer had the size of bodies of the mule deer down here. So it was . . . You definitely . . . I look for the mature buck with the big chest and stuff like that, but their overall body size was quite a bit bigger than what I had envisioned before I went there. The style of hunting in the box blind, that was new to me. I had hawk hunted in the south in box blinds, but this was a blind with a heater and was enclosed. So it was like 30-below out, but I was toasty inside there. So that was a new experience to me, which I really enjoy in my travels. I actually go on a lot of different guided hunts because I like to learn what other people are doing, how it works, how it doesn’t work, and why they do it. So that was really exciting, just to see what they did.

I saw a lot of whitetail there, unlike in Missouri. In Missouri, I think that, of course, the moon had to do with it. The rut had a little to do with it. Just their phases. They were coming in at night instead of during the daylight. So we were unfortunate in that aspect. There, I just learned mostly . . . I didn’t see any deer. So I didn’t learn as far as their patterns. Their pattern, just like the mule deer, they run at night. I did learn that. It’s very similar. We were being filmed. So our blind scenario was a lot like what I do when I take kids. We [inaudible:00:09:04] hunt, partially so I can show them tracks. We can look for sheds. We can look for different things out in the wild, but also because they get bored sitting. So I carry net blinds with me, and we can . . . If they get bored, we can relocate and put up another mesh blind to conceal their movement.

That’s kind of the setup we had in Missouri because of the filming. They wanted to be able to see our reactions and what was going on. It was nice to see that you can actually hunt whitetail that way. Hopefully we’ll get another chance here in the next few weeks to go to another area and have another go at it.

Bruce: Thanks for sharing that. Listeners, you heard that Mia went two different states, had a great time and learned some lessons, but she came home empty, but she still had a great hunt. Would you agree to that?

Mia: Oh, yeah. They definitely both were great hunts.

Bruce: Let’s talk about family time. In the warm-up, you expressed the desire to kind of chit-chat about that a little bit. Share with our listeners the importance of family time in the outdoors.

love the family time in the outdoors. It’s something that people don’t think of when they think of hunting if they’re just getting involved in it. They don’t realize the connections that are made out there

Mia: I love the family time in the outdoors. It’s something that people don’t think of when they think of hunting if they’re just getting involved in it. They don’t realize the connections that are made out there. As I mentioned, even with other kids that I mentor and take on hunts, when you’re out in the woods, there’s a lot less distractions. There’s no television. Even if you sit in the blind with a video game when you’re out there, it’s just you and the other hunter. Sometimes there might be two or three hunters, but it’s quality time, sitting in one place. It’s really neat to see a child’s reaction to seeing a turkey vulture circling and see what they have to say about it or even asking the kids about, “What do you think is over in that shadow? Or what does that stump look like?” Things like that, or having them guess what a track is or a piece of scat. What is that?

That time is a lot of learning and a lot of bonding, and it’s something that I think has brought my daughter and I a lot closer than a lot of other families are afforded the opportunity of. I really had decided to pass it on to my daughter, the hunting tradition, because I grew up in Pagosa Springs up until high school, in college. My parents, they divorced, and my mom moved me to San Diego. I never really realized what a gift the outdoor connection was until I moved to the middle of the city. Although I enjoyed the city and made a lot of friends, it really dawned on me that a lot of them had never gone fishing, and a lot of them had never and probably will never get the opportunity to hunt, much less look at tracks or scrapes or a piece of sage brush when it’s blooming, something like that.

So that’s actually how I got into writing. I started writing for some friends there in San Diego that were like, “What are you doing? What do you do there?” I would write stories about my day, whether it was scouting or just going for a horseback ride or whatever, and I would email it to them. More and more people . . . Some of our hunters are like, “What are you doing? Why are you typing away on your computer?” I explained to them, “Well, I’m sending this to my friends and back to my grandfather.” They were like, “Really? Can you email it to us?” Then eventually I started my personal blog, sharing the stories, because more and more people were wanting to know. It just grew from there.

I believe Barbara Baird [SP] from Women’s Outdoor News, she was the first one to say, “Hey. Can I share this story on Women’s Outdoor News?” Then from there, as you said, I write for “Western Whitetail,” and my comfort zone articles have actually transitioned more into peer reviews and tips, hunting tips and tricks for women who already hunt or who maybe want to hunt. That’s where all of that came about, was my mentoring and sharing with others.

Bruce: Let’s stay right with the writing. Great segue. Let’s talk about your drive, your passion, your goal to help inspire other women. I shouldn’t just block it off as women. I would say anybody who’s interested in getting outdoors, by reading your words . . . How does that inspire them? What message do you want to send out to those people?

Mia: Well, I hope to inspire people by sending the message . . . I try to keep it simple. I try to share information without getting too technical and scaring some people away, but I also try to share my history, as I said, growing up here and then moving to the city. I actually . . . I personally didn’t grow up hunting. My dad and my brother hunted, and they would bring the game back, and I’d [inaudible:00:14:10] and help my dad cut and package and put it in the freezer. It wasn’t until I was actually quite a bit older, and I became a single mom. In my attempt to fill our freezers, it was amazing to me. I always wanted to hunt, and I told my dad. I said, “You know, for $49 in Colorado, I can buy an elk tag and fill my freezer.” So for my birthday that year, he got me a rifle, and he was like, “Go for it.” You know?

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