Time to open a new chapter in a satisfying career!
Hello, everyone! Welcome to the new Chuck Adams Archery Website!
When I was a kid, hunting magazines were king of the media. I would run to the mailbox each month for the latest issues of Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, and Field and Stream, and spend hours devouring the adventure articles inside. Hunters like Jack O’Connor and Fred Bear were my heroes.
My dad was a college English professor, and he believed I should follow in his footsteps. Pop was an avid gun hunter, the same as both my grandfathers. To this day, I am the only bowhunter in my family. As much as my dad loved the out-of-doors and accurate rifles, he scoffed when I said I would like to be an outdoor magazine writer. A solid tenured position at a university was where the money and security were, he argued. But like my dad, I had my own stubborn ideas on the subject.
So after a brief stint of using my college degree in English to teach kids creative writing at the local university, I left boring classroom life to chase my dream. After two years as an editor for the recently launched Petersen’s Hunting magazine in Los Angeles, California, I became a full-time writer with more than 30 outdoor publications asking me for stories and photos. Leaving the smog and clutter of LA was wonderful, and I was lucky to hit the hunting magazine boom of the late 20th Century dead-center. I settled down in a rural area with plenty of elbow room and lots of nearby hunting. This lifestyle let me combine two things I loved most—hunting and writing—into a satisfying career.
The past several decades have been a dream come true, with more work always available than I could possibly handle, and the chance to vanish into the deer woods and elk mountains between August and November with a bow in my hand. Along the way, during eight frantic work months each year, have come hundreds of seminar and keynote speaking engagements, dozens of TV guest appearances, and the publication of ten hunting books. It has been a great life. Somebody had to do it, right?
But sadly, the Golden Age of outdoor magazines is slowly fading away. Nothing lasts forever, and so it is with print publications. Popular, widely circulated titles like Western Outdoors, North American Hunter, and Bow & Arrow Hunting have permanently closed their doors. My boyhood favorite, Outdoor Life, was recently reduced from 12 to 4 print issues per year, and after a brief struggle as a mere skeleton of its former self, vanished entirely into the digital “Cloud” in late 2020. Field and Stream, another famous and iconic magazine, also suffered its own print media death last year. Bi-monthly Bowhunting World magazine was suddenly cut back to two thin and paltry print issues per year in 2020, much to the disappointment of avid readers. There are rumors BW might also vanish onto the Net before long.
I still write for strong and popular print magazines like Bowhunter, Bugle, and P&Y Ethic, and should have a full speaking schedule again once the COVID outbreak subsides. But now there’s a little more time in my busy life to write self-published books, post regular blogs to this website, and market some unique and special products and memorabilia available nowhere else. Keep your eye out here for some really exciting stuff in the months and years to come. I look forward to jamming these new web activities into my normal eight months per year of hard work, so I can still vanish with my bow each summer and fall. Maybe I’ll see you in the hills as well as on this new site!