Hunting the Last Wild Places: The Frank

The mountain men and native tribes before them hunted game that could live their lives and never see a human. In our idyllic sense of the American West, hunting in unaltered wild country was a romantic ideal mythologized by the mountain men. America is not as wild as it was 200 years ago, but many hunters today are still looking for that wilderness experience mythologized by the mountain men, searching to connect with our origins as a species. And yet while much has changed, places still do still exist where you can immerse yourself in a landscape and hunt wild game that are largely devoid of human disturbance.
We believe that wild places, and the opportunities they provide for hunters, are worth protecting. There are still wild places left in the Lower 48 states where you can hunt on public land that is nearly as wild today as it was 100 years ago, but those places and the experience provided by them for hunters are disappearing.
In this film, we follow two friends who embark on a late fall hunt in the 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness of Central Idaho. The name of this massive wilderness, the largest contiguous designated wilderness area in the lower 48 States, honors one of Idaho's greatest U.S. Senators, the late Frank Forrester Church III. While Brad and Charlie are in pursuit of rutting mule deer bucks, they are also in search of a wild adventure in a landscape that still looks much as it did more than 100 years ago. Along the way, they reflect on the significant conservation legacy left by Senator Church and what it means to hunt in protected lands like these.