Steve’s butt had become distractingly large.
We were in college in 1998 and our treestand safety devices consisted of brown waist belts looped into another belt buckled around a tree. Looking back, I think I would have preferred just falling and busting some bones than hanging with the pythonesque constriction those things would have put on us. Steve, the lean guy he was, and not having the cash for a legitimate tree stand, had shoved a pillow he slept on the night before down the seat of his camo overalls so he could sit comfortably on an elevated limb. God help him if he actually needed to draw his bow back. None of us that trip to his family’s farm were burdened with that need.
As I stood comfortable and secure in my stand last week winding down the 2014/15 deer season, I was struck by how much tech has become available to us bowhunters from just 16 years ago. I wondered what it would be like if I could harness the 1.21 gigawatts (and a Delorean) required to go back in time and show 1998 Tim what he could look forward to. It is 2015, the year Marty McFly visited in Back to the Future II and while we don’t (yet) have hoverboards, we’ve still got some pretty cool tech. Here are some of the things I would show me:
We’ve got frickin’ laser beams!
Pacing out yardages and sticking reflective push pins into trees won’t be necessary. In the palm of your hand,
with no danger of sterilizing yourself, you’ll be able to measure distances… even angled trajectories with lasers! Really, rangefinders are pretty incredible, like something you’d see in an old GI Joe cartoon or Star Wars. Silently and instantaneously, you can bounce a beam of light off any object, and then calculate its distance by the time it takes the light to return. Crazy.
Trail cams
So you’ve been tying sewing thread across trails to determine if the path is hot? You can even tell if it’s a buck the higher up the thread is broken? Cool. What about getting 10 megapixel nightvision digital images of whatever’s coming through? Or video?
What’s a megapixel? Don’t worry about that right now.
Trailcams are like a James Bond gadget. A motion sensor kicks off a bank of infra-red leds and in turn triggers a shutter to snap the image…and there’s no film to take to the one hour photo in Walgreens for developing.
Smartphones
Need to figure out how to get way back into the woods near a bedding area? Just pull up a satellite image of your location on a smartphone (a cellular phone that’s become more powerful than the computers onboard the Discovery) and triangulate with orbiting satellites to determine your position. Then navigate in real time to your desired location. Simple.
Once you’re there, you can send a quick text message to your buddy that you bumped three deer on the way in, or message your wife that you’ll be home later than you originally thought. Just watch for misspellings.
After you kill a great animal, take some 16 megapixel really good pictures of it with that same cell phone. On the ride home, the phone will wirelessly connect to your vehicle’s audio system and play any combination of the 4,000+ songs stored on it. Not bad for one device.
Safety Harnesses
You can throw that oversized belt of a safety harness away. In 2015 we have purpose-built full body harnesses that won’t cut you in half should you fall out of your stand. It’s a major advance that most won’t appreciate, except those who have actually fallen and been caught by a waistbelt.
Bow Tech
Your Oneida is flinging arrows at 230 fps? How about a much quieter 320 fps with almost no handshock at the shot? With parallel limbs, high efficiency cams and space age materials, even today’s value priced bows outperform the flagship models of the 90s often times requiring less draw weight to get the same kinetic energy.
On the whole, life here in the future is pretty good for the bowhunter. It’s not perfect though. They’re making drinks loaded with sugar, then bottling them in camo wrapped cans and marketing them as “energy drinks.” There are even more products and clothing lines today making veiled claims that their products completely eliminate odors. Remember those smartphones I mentioned earlier? They’ve been known to distract hunters from deer walking right past them.
Living here in the future it’s easy to forget how far we’ve come and what incredible innovations are at our disposal. It helps to go back in time every now and again to really appreciate how far we’ve come. There are probably other things I’d tell 1998 Tim. Get out of the POG market ASAP, don’t sweat Y2K, beware of a stalker girl from Rochester, IL…but I think my buddies and I would still be more interested in what’s in our bowhunting future.
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