Public land editor
Curt Bellamy
Thirty one years as a range technician on public land in Utah, which mostly meant walking it and writing down what he saw.
Region
Northern Utah
Hunts
Mule deer, general season tags
Seasons afield
Forty plus
Day job
Range technician, retired
Carried longest
One drop point, twenty years
What does a range technician actually do?
He walks allotments, counts forage, maps water and files reports nobody reads. That is the job, and it is the best deer scouting education available.
Curt did that work across three field offices in northern Utah, from the Wasatch back side out to the sage flats. Long before he hunted a unit he had already mapped its springs, its burns and its fence lines for somebody else’s paperwork.
The habit never left him. He still keeps a paper notebook, still writes the date and the wind at the top of the page, and still trusts a set of boots over a satellite image.
How he hunts
Mule deer on general season tags, mostly alone, mostly high. He glasses more than he walks and walks more than he shoots.
He is not a trophy hunter and says so plainly. The seasons he counts as good are the ones where he learned a new piece of country, not the ones with the biggest antlers.
He has firm opinions about pack weight and no patience for gear that only works in good weather. Most of what he carries has been in the field for a decade or more.
I have passed more legal bucks than I have taken, and I do not lose sleep over a single one of them.
Curt Bellamy
On knives
He carried the same drop point for twenty years, put it through more than a hundred animals, and retired it when the blade got too short to be honest.
Field care is where he gets particular. He learned to break down animals from a rancher who did it fast and clean with almost nothing, and he still thinks most hunters overpack blades and underpack patience.
These days he cares more about who made a knife than what it says on the box, and will happily spend an evening on grind geometry with anyone unlucky enough to sit near him.
