Chuck did not grow up in a hunting family. His dad was not a hunter, nobody in the house was, and the closest he got to the outdoors as a kid was fishing. That changed when a friend invited him along on a deer hunt in his late teens and he killed a doe on his first sit. Something clicked that day that never unclicked. He spent the next several years borrowing gear, hunting permission ground, and learning everything he could from anyone willing to teach him. By the time he had kids of his own he was the one doing the teaching.

Chuck hunts whitetails and turkeys across Iowa and has built his access network the old fashioned way, knocking on doors, maintaining relationships, and treating every piece of ground like it could be gone tomorrow. He talks about mobile hunting setups, why he switched from a climber to a saddle, and how hunting pressure on public land pushed him to get more creative with private access. He also gets into the father and son dynamic, what it looks like to raise kids who actually want to be in the woods, and the morning his son shot his first deer while Chuck sat in the same stand he killed his first one from years earlier.

This episode covers Iowa whitetail hunting, turkey hunting, permission access, saddle hunting, and what it looks like when a first generation hunter builds something worth passing down. A Hunter's Legacy is built for stories exactly like Chuck's.

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Kyle grew up without much hunting exposure until his dad took him to gun camp at twelve years old. He shot the biggest doe and the first kill of the season, won both pots, and never came back down to earth. From that point on he was the youngest guy in camp doing the most miles, walking the ridges while everyone else sat on stand, learning the woods the only way he knew how. By the time he was old enough to hunt on his own, he was building tree stands out of scrap lumber and welding his own out of angle iron in trade school and hauling them home on the school bus.

Kyle spent nearly a decade hunting public land after losing access to private ground, had a gun pulled on him by a neighboring landowner for hunting too close to a property line, and kept showing up anyway. He eventually got back on private land, started running a saddle setup, became a staff member at a mobile hunting expo, and picked up an ambassador role with a tree stand company. He has killed some of his best deer mobile hunting, including a gross scoring 151 inch buck he hunted for four straight days.

He also talks about getting sober seven years ago, the legacy his dad left behind, and what it meant to watch him shoot a deer out of nowhere in the backyard after decades of casual hunting. This episode covers public land pressure, mobile hunting gear, crossbow hot takes, and what keeps a hunter showing up year after year no matter what gets in the way. A Hunter's Legacy is exactly where Kyle's story belongs.

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John grew up with no hunting family and no mentor, just a buddy, a .22 LR, and some creek bottoms to run around in. They trapped muskrats and coons before school, shot anything that moved, and figured it all out the hard way. That foundation turned into decades of bow hunting across multiple states and continents, all with bows he built himself from Osage wood he split by hand. He has made hundreds of bows, harvested hundreds of animals, and still will not pick up a compound.

These days John runs a certified blood tracking operation using wire-haired dachshunds bred in Europe specifically for this work. He does not charge. He just shows up with his dogs and tracks until the deer is found or it is not. He has found deer with zero blood, zero arrow, and zero sign other than what his dogs told him. He talks about how dogs read declining health pheromones, why a good tracking dog will find deer a drone never will, and what it feels like to walk up on somebody else's dead deer and get more excited than the hunter does.

He also bear hunts in Canada every fall, hog hunts in Texas every winter with traditional bows, and once tracked a wounded bear through thick brush wearing flip-flops while his rescue party walked into a yellow jacket nest on the way to help him. This episode covers traditional archery, self bow building, blood tracking dogs, bear baiting in Ontario, and why John gave up deer hunting most days just to run his dogs instead. A Hunter's Legacy is exactly where a story like his belongs.

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Nathan grew up in a subdivision outside of Washington, Missouri, but his heart has always belonged to a stretch of farmland two and a half hours north. His dad put him in a tree stand at seven years old, and before the sun even fully cleared the horizon that morning they had already seen ten deer. The tenth one was a basket eight pointer that Nathan shot, tracked through a hayfield, and had mounted on the wall. It has been hanging there ever since as the deer that started everything.

Twenty three years later Nathan is still making that drive north, building food plots, changing ratchet straps, hanging cameras, and chasing deer that most people never get to see in person. He killed a 187 inch buck in 2022 on a field edge over radishes after his grandpa talked him out of staying home. He shot a 135 inch buck last December and found him still alive fifteen hours later frozen in position at five yards. He hunted a five and a half year old giant for three years, made what looked like a perfect shot, and never found him. He also has a neighbor who has fired bullets through his box blind multiple times and another neighbor's son who threw a rock through his brand new Redneck blind window. Through all of it he keeps planting, keeps climbing, and keeps showing up.

This episode covers Missouri whitetail hunting, food plot management in drought conditions, broadhead selection, stand safety, and what it looks like when somebody refuses to quit no matter what the season throws at them. A Hunter's Legacy is exactly where Nathan's story belongs.

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Nelson Chandler has been hunting the ridges and valleys of northwest Georgia since 1974, when he was ten years old and his dad handed him a single shot sixteen gauge with buckshot and said let's figure this out. Neither of them knew what they were doing, but Nelson missed a buck that first morning and has been chasing deer every season since. Fifty years without missing an opening day. He went from hunting off the school bus every afternoon after class, to working twenty-six years as a Walker County sheriff's deputy, to now finishing out his career at the county road department and planning his retirement around hunting season.

Nelson hunts a mix of leased ground, permission farms, and family property in the ridge and valley country just south of Chattanooga. He has been bow hunting Illinois for whitetails since 2004, killed a 138-inch buck in 1986 that still ranks in the county, and came within ten steps of what he describes as the biggest deer he has ever seen anywhere, only to watch a limb deflect his arrow in Illinois in 2020. He talks about the rut happening on the same dates on the same properties year after year, why he does not trust anybody who says temperature shifts the rut, and why finding a place to hunt is the single biggest threat facing hunters today.

He is also getting his grandkids into it, mailing out permission letters every offseason, and hitting the weight room fifty years into a lifting habit he started in 1978. A Hunter's Legacy is built for stories like Nelson's, fifty years of Georgia whitetail hunting from a man who has never stopped putting in the work.

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Hunter Childs goes by Rooster, a nickname his grandpa gave him for quoting John Wayne lines from True Grit so well it just stuck. He grew up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin near Webster, where the county forest system runs for miles, the dirt roads are sand and gravel, and the duck hunting is as good as anywhere in the country if you know where to look. His grandpa taught him to road hunt grouse from a Tahoe on snowmobile trails, his dad dropped him in a canoe with two boxes of shells and told him to figure it out, and somewhere in between he became one of the more passionate duck hunting guides in northern Wisconsin.

Rooster shot his first duck at six years old, his first wood duck at fourteen, and has spent the years since learning every bend of river and shallow slough in Burnett County worth knowing. He floats the river with a canoe instead of a big duck boat, times his hunts around frozen interior lakes when every bird in the county piles into the moving water, and guides people into spots most hunters will never find on a map. He also talks about Wisconsin's wolf problem, bear hunting with hounds, the reintroduced elk herd at Clam Lake, forty-two coyotes in three days in North Dakota, and the time his shotgun flew out of his hand and sank to the bottom of a river in November.

This is a northern Wisconsin hunting story about ducks, wolves, grouse, predators, and a guy who would rather float a river alone all day than sit in a blind waiting for something to happen. A Hunter's Legacy is built for stories like Rooster's, from first-generation guides learning the river to guys who still haven't found their shotgun.

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Shannon Kortman has been in a wheelchair since he was two years old, paralyzed from the waist down due to spina bifida. He was adopted by a family who refused to let a diagnosis define what their son could do, and that mindset stuck. Shannon did not grow up in a hunting family, but when a man named Doug, another wheelchair-bound hunter, reached out and said he wanted to take him on a deer hunt in Michigan, something lit up that has never gone out. That first eight point buck at a high fence ranch in 2010 was just the beginning.

Since then Shannon has turkey hunted his way onto Michigan Out of Doors television, shot bears in Michigan and Canada, and built a content platform called Anyone Can Outdoors to show other people with disabilities that the woods are still open to them. His Canada bear hunt last spring ended with a bear so large it broke the arm of the excavator trying to weigh it, somewhere north of 400 pounds and now heading toward a full body mount.

Shannon is also a certified counselor, a Sunday school teacher, a public speaker, and one of the most naturally gifted storytellers to sit down with A Hunter's Legacy. This episode is about deer hunting, turkey hunting, bear hunting in Michigan and Canada, and the kind of faith and grit that keeps a man in the woods no matter what life puts in front of him.

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Every hunter has that one story they wish they could take back. In this episode, we're pulling the most embarrassing moments from the A Hunter's Legacy archives and putting them on full display. No filters, no excuses, just hunters being honest about the dumbest things they've ever done in the field.

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Randy Scheel grew up in rural Iowa chasing pheasants and rabbits through fence rows and creek bottoms, tagging along on hunts before he was old enough to carry a gun. His dad passed away when he was young, and it was his brother-in-law Paul who really brought him into the outdoors and kept him there for decades. When Paul's health declined and dementia set in, Randy returned the favor, tracking down a light enough shotgun and setting up one last pheasant hunt. He got it on video with his phone, dogs on point, Paul shooting a rooster, the excitement on his face. That was the memory Paul held onto even when he could not remember people anymore.

Randy hunts whitetails and turkeys across Iowa and spent fifteen years managing sixty acres of timber in northern Missouri before selling it to move closer to home. He is a longtime member of the National Wild Turkey Federation, runs Jake's Day events for youth hunters, and recently launched one of the first adult turkey hunting courses in his county, filling all fifteen slots almost immediately. He talks about what it looks like when adults decide they want to get into hunting later in life, why he thinks hunting shows have done more harm than good, and how pheasants are adapting to timber cover in ways that did not exist a generation ago.

This episode covers Iowa pheasant and deer hunting, food plot management on small acreage, coyote calling, and why Randy believes patience and getting back to basics is what the hunting community needs most right now. A Hunter's Legacy is exactly where stories like his belong, from the guys who gave everything to the sport to the ones just getting started.

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Share the show with a buddy who lives for cold mornings, heavy packs, and quiet woods.

Every hunter has that one story they wish they could take back. In this episode, we're pulling the most embarrassing moments from the A Hunter's Legacy archives and putting them on full display. No filters, no excuses, just hunters being honest about the dumbest things they've ever done in the field.

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Ready to share your hunting legacy? Apply here.

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Share the show with a buddy who lives for cold mornings, heavy packs, and quiet woods.