Two feet of snow is not exactly what you wish for when you are scheduled to bow hunt elk the last week of September. Yet if you were in a high country camp almost anywhere in the northern Rockies this past fall that's exactly what you had to deal with. Did it affect the hunting? What do you think? Thankfully, it didn't last but for thousands of hunters in the field it was a real show-stopper. At exactly the same time, hunters in New Mexico were dealing with a very different problem. Bull elk are by far the most vocal of any antlered game during the rut and September is typically the month to bugle them up and call them in but with temperatures well above normal throughout the southwest this past season the elk rut was somewhat of a non-event.

If you are spending hard earned money on traveling around the continent to hunt sooner or later you will learn three things about weather;

1. It can be the single most important factor affecting the success of your hunt
2. You can't control it
3. Invariably and without notice, it changes

Veteran hunters usually deal with it better than the first timers and a positive attitude is probably your best defense. After all, a big part of why we hunt is the interaction and connectivity we realize when we immerse ourselves in nature. Furthermore, when you journey to the extremes of the continent in pursuit of various big game you should expect to endure nature's extremes; out-of-season blizzards, sideways rain, fog as thick as soup and ever present wind.

Caribou will spoil you. In the last four years excluding 2006, if you hunted caribou on Quebec's northern tundra with a reputable outfitter, you probably shot a couple of nice bulls. For the most part the migration has been pretty consistent for several years and even the unpredictable arctic weather had been relatively stable. Not so this past fall. It was a boon or bust kind of a season. Some camps had literally thousands of animals around them while many others, often in close proximately, had none. To complicate matters, outfitters attempting to move hunters to more productive areas were frequently unable to fly do to fog or other weather factors.

Did you know that the hurricane season and hunting season coincide? If you hunted moose in Newfoundland the first week of October you do. You see, due to a meteorological phenomenon nearly every hurricane that forms off the US east coast in the central Atlantic eventually traverses across this rocky Maritime island. Attempting to hunt in rain, sleet and 60 mile an hour winds; now that's a challenge for the hardiest of souls.

Mother Nature had more up her sleeve than usual this past fall. Case in point; hunting couples Dave & Barbara from Tunbridge, Vermont were forced to where sun screen as they sat their Illinois tree stands in record breaking heat during what should have been the October pre-rut. Apparently the big bucks in their heavy winter coats figured it was too darn hot to be out making scrapes and tearing up trees. During the exact same week their good friends Bruce and Barb from Hartland were dealing with three feet of snow in the Colorado Rockies and the reality that the elk had already moved down into the valleys.

While 2006 seemed to have a greater number and diversity of weather events, it is important not to lose perspective or be too quick to draw broad conclusions. Charles Lindsay in New Brunswick will tell you that the bucks around his Lindsay's Sporting Camps outfit never got really rutty. That did not however, deter his customers from taking some huge rackers and when it was all said and done their harvest was better than average. The situation in the Midwest was similar, once the weather cooled off, deer activity rebounded and by the end of the season those outfitters that always seem to show their clients the most success had average or even better than average stats. While hunting is tough during a Newfoundland hurricane, weather is a changing force and plenty of American sports had ultimately successful hunts with harvest totals comparable to any other year.

So even though nature's nuances can have a major impact on any given trip and you can't control it, it does change. Hunters who accept weather events as part of their sport even with a still empty freezer will nearly always have a better attitude than those that need to blame someone or something for their lack of success. What's amazing is that more often than not, the sport with the positive attitude and shoulders broad enough to carry a little adversity are the ones who consistently have the most rewarding trips.