I QUIT Trad for this......😮

It's true. I'm ditching the traditional bow for a compound. I love shooting traditional, but here's my dilemma. I grew up hunting whitetail deer in Kansas. I started off shooting with a rifle, hunting from as young as I could remember. Then, as soon as I got strong enough, I switched to a compound bow so that I could hunt white tail deer out of treeands and get closer to the action. Now, I continued hunting this way until I got pretty proficient. I remember there being a year in high school when I had shot three deer before halfway through the season. I got my buck as well as two doese's and that's when I thought, let's up the Annie. Let's make this a little bit more challenging. There's actually a deer crossing the roads towards me. These ones are used to humans. So, as long as I keep talking and acting normal, they might come close. There's two ways that hunters go. And one way is the most common, which is I'm getting better at hunting. Let's try to shoot bigger bucks. Let's try to go larger antlers. Let's pass on all these little ones and get a more mature animal. For whatever reason, I didn't wasn't too interested in that. I said, let's make my weapon harder. Let's go with a traditional bow instead of a compound bow. Let's get within 15 yards instead of 40 yards. Let's make my arrows go so slow that my shot placement needs to be even more precise. So, that's what I did. I switched over to traditional archery. Started hunting whitetail deer out of treeands in Kansas. And this was an absolute thrill. Getting within 15 or 20 yards of a white-tailed deer wasn't very difficult for me. With a compound bow, I shot half of my deer within 20 yards. Anyways, I was able to take a couple deer with all Osage orange wood self bows that I had built. Life progressed and I moved here to Colorado and I've been here for shoot since 2025 years at least. Yeah, about a little more than 5 years. Additionally, after moving here to Colorado and I have two kids now, and having two kids makes it harder to go hunting, um, it's not the priority anymore. Kids are now priority, as they should be. And so, my time in the field became less and less. The big difference for me here in Colorado, where I live, to Kansas, is that the closest place to hunt is around a 2hour drive. So, the time commitment changed a lot. It went from being able to drive 20 minutes and sit in a treeand for two hours and get back home in less than three hours total to it not really making sense to go hunting unless I were doing overnight trips. But I continued hunting with a traditional bow here in Colorado. And I've gotten close to many elk actually, but I've never taken one with a traditional bow. So here's what I realized. I'm not good enough at elk hunting yet to take a traditional bow. Maybe if I went on a guided hunt or something, I'd take a traditional bow with local knowledge, someone calling for me, things like that. But me being a beginner elk hunter, or at least that's how I see myself as a beginner as far as skill level goes, taking this trying to get within 20 30 yards of a elk is it's kind of difficult. Additionally, at this point in life, my goal isn't to elk hunt, although I love that adventure. I really like to get the elk meat for my family. So, priority number one is getting meat. And by taking the arguably hardest weapon possible, a bow you build yourself, it makes it difficult, especially when you only have two, five, or even 7 days to hunt and scout for the entire year. It's not a lot of time to go out on public land, over the counter tags, and nail something with a tried bow. Although, it's possible. I flipped the script last year and got a rifle tag. And this was cool cuz I hunted completely different, and I was able to get a cow elk rifle hunting. And it was a lot of fun to be successful. That's when it struck me. Maybe I should rifle hunt and then muzzle loader hunt and then compound hunt and then once I feel confident with all of those, go back to trad like I did the progression with whitetail hunting. So even though traditional is still my favorite to come out and shoot. Today I'm taking my wife's compound bow and tuning it to me so that I can go hunting with this this year and be able to shoot out to 50 yards. How far are we? 44 45. Ooh. Had to fix that. My uh peep site thing, the little little rubber is worn out and it keeps it's sled off. I think I need to see if it'll stay. Yeah, it's staying. Okay, let's try the shot again. Now, this is a beginner bear archery bow. It's the Cruiser G2. I believe they just paint it pink for the female version and then just camo for the male version. It's the same thing. So, it can go 30in draw, 70 lb, which is a pretty cool bow that I can take this down to 3540 lb for my wife at her 26-in draw and also just crank it up to 70 lb at 30in draw for me. My younger brother, not Cass, but the younger one than that um is the the expert on compounds. And I asked him about this bow um cuz he had this back in the day and he said it's it's good. It's just not very accurate. I started shooting it and compared to a traditional bow, these things are easy. That was a really cool arrow flight. I used a practice broadhead and um the compound bows are a cool invention like that. You can just pick it up and do that. I mean, just look at this. I mean, seriously, guys. I mean, come on. How often can you just do that from 35 yards without practice? So, this year I got a rifle cow tag as well as a um archery cow tag over the counter. And so, I'm going to use the compound bow and the rifle to see if I can get two cows. Uh that way we can have meat for the full year because last year the one cow only lasted us about six months. So that's the goal for me with with hunting. Let's shoot this and see how we can do. The other day, yesterday I came and I started shooting this trying to tune it in a little bit and there was 20 30 mph gust. So the arrows were kind of all over the place and I want to see if that was because the tuning wasn't right or if because it was just the wind. I'm using my wife's compound cuz I literally do not own a compound for myself. I might buy one here next year or something if I want to use one more often, but my wife's not hunting this year, so I'm gonna take it. Save the money where you can, huh? All right, 20 yards. That actually didn't look too bad. It's just different than a traditional and the fact that you can just go out without practice and be good immediately. Maybe because I've shot it a lot in the past, maybe that's actually not the case and I'm just like it can learn it again quickly. I don't know though. It just kind of I don't know. It's just easy now with time and practice and a longer bow something that fit me better. I probably could get pretty decent out to, you know, those longer distance, 60, 70 or 80 yards. For this year, we're stopping at 40, 50 yards probably. I'm going to probably shoot out to 50. If I'm consistently um doing well, then then I'll make that my limit for hunting. But when elk hunting, 50 yards and 25 yards is a big difference. So that's why I'm giving up traditional archery for this hunting season to shoot with a compound. I just want some meat. I mean, have you seen the price of ground meat recently? I think it's like $10 a pound at our local grocery store. So according to my calculations, each elk I get is at least worth $1,500. And it's much better meat for you. Oh yeah, I might film some of the hunting if I feel like it. I do have a video from last year of that cow elk hunt if you would like that. I can post that here soon. And uh maybe we'll post my hunt with this this year of me basically backpacking and camping and seeing no elk with a compound bow and carrying around for no reason. With that, I'll see you on the next video. He's rajin.