The Epic Outdoors crew has expanded! A few months ago we added Cache Lynn to our team. Many of you may have already listened to him on the Epic Outdoors Podcast or talked to him on the phone as he has worked with Wyatt, Jason, and Adam and our License Application team and has dealt with many of our clients. In expanding our staff, we looked for someone who was as passionate about hunting and helping Epic Outdoors members succeed as we are. Enjoy the following introduction article by Cache.
I grew up in a small town in central Utah where I lived a very active and busy life. Growing up I was involved in normal sports like baseball, football and basketball. Baseball was my main focus and I played a ton of it. When I wasn’t at school or at our family ranch, where we ran 80+ head of cattle, I was often found on a baseball field, during the warmer months. The ranch took up a lot of time and took priority most of the time. In the fall, I spent time gathering cows on the mountains of Spanish Fork, Utah, where we would often see people hunting while we waited for our own season to open, on years when we had permits.
I grew up as the average kid, hunting my home state with family on the general season rifle hunt, just like many other families did. I was lucky enough when I was 13 to harvest my first buck which was an 18 inch, 3 point. It was a little bit of a rodeo when we saw him and a few does walking through the sage brush. I still to this day get teased by my brother and brother-in-law about not wanting to shoot the buck without my shooting sticks. He was 200 yards away and the sticks were gone. They tease me because I yelled in an absolute panic, “Where are my shooting sticks?” Looking back, there was no reason to be panicked, the buck wasn’t going anywhere and we had tons of time. However, as a 13 year old kid, about to shoot his first buck, it was going to be a bad deal if I didn’t have them.
I cherished every hunt because they didn’t happen often. As a youth, each time I went on those hunts, I would always dream of being able to do it more than we had time for. As I grew older, one of my brothers had started college and became pretty serious in the late fall and winter about hunting coyotes, which I found very fun and interesting. He had been home for a weekend and I convinced him to take me out to call in a coyote. Just a few minutes into our first stand, I saw and killed my first coyote and man I was hooked! When I was in high school and had a driver’s license I would take any extra time I had and call coyotes. I began to get a pretty good grasp on it, did fairly well for myself and helped teach a couple friends along the way. I also hunted deer when I had a tag and, in my later teenage years, I started getting into elk hunting and hunted an over-the-counter archery spike tag a few times. Once I left home and moved to Cedar City, Utah, hunting consumed me. I found that I had a lot more time to spend hunting and fishing, so I did. I spent hours researching, scouting and helping on different hunts for friends and family, as well as for myself. As I started learning more, I wanted to apply in other states but, at that time, I was attending Southern Utah University and it just wasn’t in the budget.
Shortly after moving to Cedar City, I met an amazing girl, Madi, and we got married. Her dad would be the catalyst for my first out-of-state hunt. Having only hunted general or OTC tags up to that point, I had found success on hunts by putting in a lot of dedicated hours and hunting mature animals. Which resulted in me being able to harvest a great archery buck. I had scouted and known about him for 2 years prior to the opening morning of the Utah general archery hunt. It ended about as quickly as it began and the buck we’d named “Towers” was taking a ride home in the truck.
Madi’s dad had some points built up in Colorado and later that fall, not too long after I killed Towers, I finally got my first taste of an out-of-state hunt. Because I had done an extensive amount of research and watched so many hunting videos in an effort to learn from other people, it didn’t seem foreign to me when we arrived and took time before the hunt opened to find some country we wanted to hunt.
The craziest part of that hunt was that after we arrived and got camp all settled, we had time left in the evening to take a drive up the road and look at some country. No more than a half mile up the road, we saw some does cross in front of us and a nice buck was with them. We stopped and looked at the buck as he wove through the aspens and agreed that we had to mark that spot and take a look around there once the hunt started. Little did we know, we would end up killing that exact buck only one ridge over, in a big drainage, 6 days later. He was a pretty, mid 170s class deer, about 27” wide. We saw a ton of deer on that hunt and I fell in love with the state.
Since that time, I have taken part in a bunch of different hunts in other states. My knowledge and passion has grown for hunting western big game and I am building points in states throughout the West for myself. I have gained a great deal of knowledge from my hunting failures as well as successes. I look forward to hunting my personal tags every fall, as well as helping family and friends whenever I can, because I know there is no better way to learn than being in the field and experiencing it for yourself.
I would encourage everyone no matter how much time you have, or have not spent on the landscape, to continually look for opportunities to get out and learn. Enjoy the experience of western big game hunting. Next season is never guaranteed, so get out there and get after it.
Lastly, I can’t thank Epic Outdoors enough for adding me to the team and allowing me to share my passion and some of the knowledge I have gained with people like you. It’s been a dream of mine to work here and I’m excited to help you with your hunts and help you fulfill those dreams of harvesting some of God’s most amazing creations.
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