Some Things Are Worth Sharing

Laying Tracks: Stories of Our Dads

There’s no clean line where a parent becomes the student and a child becomes the teacher. It doesn’t announce itself. It happens quietly, the way most important things do, over years of early mornings and long walks in the dark. And these lessons are passed down not always in words but in repetition, shared silence, and the inheritance of instinct. 

Call it something like meiosis, the wisdom dividing and doubling, carried forward without anyone noticing the moment it changed hands. It happens somewhere between the crinkling of a breakfast burrito wrapper in the blind and the first time an adult wishes for just one more hunt with a parent. Somewhere in that unspoken divide, the roles shift. The student becomes the teacher, and the teacher keeps teaching anyway. 

Young Sons

Dylan Dowson packed monster trucks alongside turkey calls when he took his four-year-old son turkey hunting. They were up before the sun, gear and snacks laid out the evening before. And by the end of the morning, they had a bird on the ground. 

“Right after I shot that turkey, my son said, ‘I will never forget this day’,” Dylan remembers. “The smile on this face was honestly one of the proudest dad moments I’ve had.”

Dylan stands at the beginning of the arc. His boys are three and four, just old enough to know that something meaningful is happening but not old enough to know why. Everything is still in front of them, and Dylan knows exactly where he is in that timeline because he can still return, vividly, to the moment his own father began it for him. 

“I remember that morning like it was yesterday, walking through the canyons with a flashlight,” he says. “I remember him lifting me up so I could see the deer at first light before the big buck stepped out. I remember him setting me down and shooting just an absolutely beautiful mule deer.”

Dylan still hunts that canyon. “Every time I walk through those same places, those memories from more than 20 years ago just come flooding back.” 

Now he’s the one laying the track. 

Each hunt gets a specific color on his map. Waypoints don’t only mark locations, they mark stories. His oldest already recognizes what the colors mean, and the questions follow naturally. Is that the elk in the freezer? Is that where you shot him? It’s all starting to take shape. 

“One of the coolest things I think I can do as a father is pass down Tracks and trails and Waypoints of where Dad shot his biggest buck in Colorado or where Dad packed out a raghorn bull elk five miles into a nasty canyon in Wyoming,” Dylan says. “They can follow my footsteps even long after I’m gone. Maybe we don’t experience those places together. But I just envision my two boys going to a place and putting their bootprints in spots that I put my bootprints in, even before they were born.”

For Dylan, the lessons are simple, though they may take a lifetime to understand. There are things worth waking up at 4:30 a.m. for, worth hiking miles in the dark for. Success isn’t guaranteed, and you meet it with gratitude when it shows up. And when it doesn’t, you just keep going.

“Hunting makes me a better person,” he says. “A better father. A better husband. I hope that’s what sticks with them over the years.”

The Times They Are A’Changin’

Rewind twenty-something years, and Jared Larsen is three-and-a-half feet tall and chopping through cattails behind his dad and older brother. 

C’mon, Jared. Keep up.

“I recall very vividly that I had to run to keep up,” Jared says. “He wasn’t one to slow his gait because he has a six-year-old behind him. It was the six-year-old who had to quicken his gait.”

That was the first lesson. Jared’s father, Dan, was the one who read the land and called the shots. Jared absorbed it all, though not always patiently. Where his father could sit and wait, Jared needed to move. 

Years passed, and the shift began in Jared’s teenage years. “It wasn’t ‘Dad, what do you think?’.” Dan says, “It was ‘Dad, this is what we’re going to do.’”

One hunt in particular stands out. Jared made the call, belly crawling into position and committing to a plan, and it worked. To this day, it’s the only multi-bearded turkey Dan has ever taken. 

After that, the pattern held. Jared began choosing the hunts, setting the plans, and mapping the routes. “Every year I pick a spot and say, ‘Hey, meet me here—let’s go turkey hunting’,” Jared says. “And it’s never’maybe.’ It’s ‘You tell me the days, and we’ll be there.’” 

“I just show up,” Dan says, laughing. “He takes me from A to Z now. I’m more of a tag-along.” He pauses, then adds, “And now he’s the one telling me to keep up.”

Both of them recognize what’s happened, even if they don’t linger on it. The roles have shifted, and the student has become a teacher. But teaching, it turns out, doesn’t end. 

“He still throws ideas back my way,” Jared says. “And I think, ‘Yeah, after 65 years, you’ve still got a good idea or two in you, old man.’”

And for Dan, what matters most isn’t the hunts themselves or the places they’ve been. “He understands, earlier than I did, that success isn’t in the deer pole being full,” Dan says. “It’s the experience.”

He taught that lesson. He just didn’t know at the time how closely his son was listening. Now, Jared feels the weight of time in a way he didn’t before. “I’ve had more camps with my dad in the past than I’ll have in the future,” he says. “And that weighs on me every fall.”

Every animal he takes, his first call is to his father. He’s climbed hundreds of vertical feet to find a signal after a kill just to make that call.

“I’ll do that every time,” he says. “For the rest of my life.”

Full Circle

From where Greg McHale stands, he can see the entire arc at once. 

His father is in his late seventies, and they’ve been fishing together since Greg was two. They learned to bowhunt together. When Greg was young, still trying to understand who he was becoming, it was around hunting campfires that the real conversations happened. 

“You’re figuring out who you are out there,” he says. “And then you come back together, around a fire, and that’s where you talk about life.”

What stayed with Greg weren’t the specific hunts as much as the principles they carried: perseverance, follow-through, and the quiet refusal to quit. “If you’re going to take something on,” Greg says, “you take it to the end. In hunting, it’s never over until it’s over.”

Last season, in the Yukon, he watched something he couldn’t quite put to words at the time. Ahead of him, his father and seven-year-old son moved through alder and brush. One old, one young, and both struggling without complaint. 

“I was watching my son become this little machine,” Greg says, “facing adversity and just dealing with it and, at the same time, watching my father do the exact same thing.” He stood there, caught between them, and understood what he was seeing. He tried to fix it in his mind. 

Don’t forget this. Not this. 

Now, he does whatever it takes to get his father into the field. Distance, difficulty—it doesn’t matter. 

“It’s about the experience,” he says. “I will do whatever that man wants to get him into the wild places so he can just experience that.”

He pauses. 

“Maybe one more time.”