Fletching Options

We've upgraded our fletching options for our custom arrows.  Many of the fletching prices have dropped, and the number of options have almost doubled.  For instance, now you can choose Blazer Tiger Vanes, or even just a cock vane in Tiger.  You can choose feathers with the cock feather being barred.  Vanetec VMax and Plastifletch Max are also now an option.  You can also fletch any arrow with Flu-Flu feathers if you choose.

Don't forget that you can also choose your fletching colors.  The instructions to do so are HERE.

Jerry's Colorado Elk hunt

I normally write this blog, but here is Jerry's breakout of his one month long Colorado elk hunt. -Scott


I was very fortunate this year to be able to plan and go on a month long elk hunt in Colorado. I had a very good time but I think it will be the last time I stay for a solid month. I had the opportunity to hunt with my cousin who I grew up with. It took my dads funeral to get us back together. Last year, matter of fact, I was on the way to Colorado when I received word that he had passed away. My cousin BUDDY and I started talking elk hunting trying to get our mind off of the current situation. Out of that came the plan to go hunt together the following year.

My youngest son, Chad, goes with us every year and my dad would always go and hang around camp before he had so many strokes and was not able to travel anymore. But it was pretty cool that my dad and one of my sons would go with us. This year not only did my son get to go, my cousin and his son also. I know my grandsons like to hunt so I cant wait until three generations will be there.

I love to hunt in Colorado, but we also have the chance to try out a lot of the gear we sell. So when you call about a certain item maybe we have field tested it and have a better info than the guy who just sells stuff. From the clothing to the bows, range finders, binoculars, spotting scopes, arrows, broadheads, different gloves and camping gear as well from pots and pans to cooking stoves, sleeping bags, tents, cots and pads. Accessories for the 4 wheelers such as bags and bow holders and also different tree stands. Which reminds me if you leave a stand in the woods for the evening hunt be sure to lock it up as we had one stole from us this year.

Like I said we sure did a lot of planning for a year but of course everything did not go as planned. We were going to try a new location that my cousin and his son had hunted before. However when we got there it was wall to wall people as it was Labor Day and everyone wanted to be in the woods. I can not blame them. So we moved about 30 miles away. We scouted Friday before the season opened and had seen a lot of elk. Saturday morning we headed out and found one bull but he was to far so we watched him walk off. We put in lot miles that morning. Buddy found a place he wanted to hang a stand and Lance, my cousins son, also found a nice place to hang one. I wanted to do some more scouting and still hunting. I glassed several bulls but they were very high and a long way off so nothing good happened other than getting to see some elk.

I was waiting at the trail head and Lance showed up and was grinning from ear to ear. He said he stuck a 6x4 bull and got a good shot on it, but did not track it as he wanted to give it plenty of time to expire. We later found Buddy and we headed to the spot where the elk was hit. It was a good pass through with the Rage broadhead and what A TRAIL OF BLOOD. I do not care about entrance holes, only exit holes as that's where the blood will flow... down, not up and out. We tracked him about 75 yards and right before he died, he decided to give us a work out! He went down in a hole and expired on a steep hill. Lance shot him at about 7pm and it was 2am when we made it back with a load a piece. I could not go any father, but Lance and his Dad went back to get the final load. I think they got back to camp around 5AM. I really don't know as I was sawing logs. This is one thing elk hunters don't talk much about. The work, and I mean work, starts after you kill one. I thank God that I went to the gym and worked out quite a bit. I thought I was ready but I needed to work out much more. While you're planning, remember the maps are flat, the mountains are not and the air setting in your home is great but the air high in Colorado is light and not much of it. So always try and acclimatize yourself for a couple of days before you have to get after it.

A couple days later, Lance and I crossed a meadow, stopped to drink some water when Lance pulled up his White Water binoculars and seen just the tips of elk horns. They had a lot of mass that high, so we wondered what the lower part look like. We thought he had walked up and was looking out into the meadows, so I was going to try and get down wind of him. After Lance was going to give me time to set up, he was going to cow call with a Primos HOOCHIE MA MA. When he called, the elk was not standing looking out over the meadows, he was laying down. When he herd the call he stood up. Lance called again and he simply turned and walked away. I never saw him after the initial sighting and did not know what happened afterwards. We would have tried something different if we had known he was bedded down. I guess that's why they call it hunting and not shooting.

We went back to camp with great story, but Buddy had one to top that. Buddy decided to hunt the same location Lance killed his elk a few days earlier. As he was sitting in his stand he had chance at some cows but let them pass. Then BOO BOO the bear walked by and went in the direction of Lances kill. But Buddy did not have bear tag. That eve he climbed down and met Boo Boo on the same trail and things got little harry as they looked at each other neither one of them wanting to yield. But after a few seconds the bear walked up the hill and turned around and sat down and watched Buddy as if to say “I'll be glad when this hunting season is over!”

Buddy and Lance left after about 2 weeks of hunting and I moved back to the area I hunt in every year. I was by myself but next group as planning on being there in about 4 days. They included a group from our church, Gorden and Jeff, and Chad my son was flying in the following week. But Hurricane Ike and their wife's had other plans. Jeff and Gorden had to ride out Ike and get generators lined up before they left. They were out of electricity for about 5 days. Boy I was glad my sons were home as they took care of everything! Jeff and Gorden were scheduled to be their on Saturday, but it was the next Tuesday before they arrived. After being in the mountains over a week by myself I was glad to see them! My son, Chad, flew in Thursday and the hunt was on.

We have a lot of folks that use traditional equipment. Jeff shoots traditional and tries out different arrows, broadheads and quivers. Jeff always hunts from a tree stand over a wallow or over a trail and has become the most successful hunter out of our bunch. We kid him about the stick and string but I guess the proof is in the pudding. However, he got skunked too this year. They were out of his range and one lacked enough points to be legal. Gorden put a good shot on cow but we never found her after looking all one night and the next day. We do not have clue where that elk went. As always, I learned a lot about hunting in the high country and also a lot about all the gear we researched. I can't wait for next year! I hope Scott can fit it in next year as well. -Jerry Huff

Hurricane Ike

Some of you may have noticed a note on our homepage leading up to and during Hurricane Ike stating that although our phone service was down, business operations continued.

Here is what happened... many of you talk to Laura or Tammy when you call in. Laura lives in Houston, and had to evacuate Friday before Ike came ashore. She evacuated to Madisonville, TX, where Jerry and Nancy live, and where our main office is located.

In the aftermath of Ike, Madisonville also lost power. They were without power until a generator was purchased and installed a couple of days later. Even then obtaining gas for it was no small matter, as all the local gas stations were without power. With only one working computer, and no phone lines in Texas, I helped take up the slack in order processing and customer service via email from my home in North Dakota. Our main server, though located in Houston, was safely running and unaffected in a datacenter. Limited phone support was taking place by Monday.

About on Wednesday, Madisonville's power was restored. This brought Tammy back online, and our phone operations were back to normal.

Laura's home in Houston is still without power as I write this. They are in the process of moving the generator to her home so they can move back in and get the kids back into their own school.

So we made it through. Thank you to our customers for your patience. I do not believe any orders were delayed because of the hurricane, but it was more difficult to contact us via telephone.

As a result of the hurricane, we have made one change. We now have an online RMA Request page, where you can enter the details of your return or exchange and submit it to us. It makes it easier for us as we will have all the details we need in one form, and it should be a lot quicker for you the customer.

Filled my Tag!

Bow Season opened up this last weekend here in North Dakota at noon on Friday, August 29th. Never before had I bowhunted as early as this, as it usually takes the crisp air and turning leaves to get me excited about it. However, we had some nice whitetail bucks on our gamecams so I was excited to get into the stand as the time neared. One of the nicer bucks I caught on video with the Moultrie GameSpy D-40. With a 1Gb SD card, there 297 images and videos and the card was full. About half were videos, as that cam takes a video for each picture taken unless it is too dark because a video cannot be taken with flash. After I took this buck, I went back through all the videos and found him.

Saturday morning I had the south wind I needed, so I snuck into a stand near where this gamecam had been. A yearling doe can in and was eating acorns. Soon another yearling doe came in and a family of racoons. The does chased off the racoons. Then four bucks came storming in, all in velvet. I recognized them from the gamecam videos. The large 5x5 was not among them, but I was not about to do what I did last year. I got too picky and ended up going without. Besides, the second nicest one was among them.

All six deer were within 20 yards of me, but to my right. I was sitting so I had no way to get drawn on them. A quick prayer seemed to help as they ran off another 15 yards giving me the chance to slowly stand up and turn. Back in they came, I came to a full draw hoping he would give me the shot before I had to let down. He did just that, turning at less than 15 yards. I settled the 20 yard pin a bit low and shot. As he spun I could see fletching on one side of him, and the broadhead sticking out the other side.

He only made it about 100 yards, but it took over an hour to find. I called for help, and we ended up tracking him yard by yard, using field point tipped arrows stuck into the ground where we found blood. Leapfrogging arrows gave us the ability to look back to determine the direction of travel. At one point, he started a sharp turn where we found him just a few yards from where I had initially looked on a sweep.

Equipment I used was a Martin Bengal set at 60#, 28" draw. 1/4" G5 Meta Peep, Gold Tip Pro Hunters with a 100gr Rocket Steelhead broadhead, Vanetec vanes, Vital Bow Drop rest, HHA sight, Alpine Soft-Loc Quiver, TRU Ball Copperhead release, Gorilla King Kong stand, Muck boots, Scent-Blocker 3D jacket and pants (which I am not wearing in the pic because it was too hot by then). Scent Killer spray, Alpen 8.5x50 binocs, and a Bushnell Pro Sport rangefinder rounds out the list for this hunt, all of which is available in our store.

Ben Pearson Archery

We are excited to announce the addition of Ben Pearson Archery to Ye Olde Archery Shoppe. These innovative bows feature advanced Xcellerator bowstrings, Energy Transfer Inserts in the limbs, and Stainless Steel Limb Bolt Inserts.

As a dealer, we can offer you a great price as well as free shipping on many of the Pearson compounds. The TX-4 offers a blistering 330 fps in a 34.25" ATA and 6.5" brace height. The Z32 and Z34 offer 316 fps with a 7.25" brace height, and your choice of ATA length.

You can find all of our Pearson Compound bows HERE.

Rolling into Summer

Bowhunting season is only about three months away for us North Dakotan's. It is a pretty long season from the end of August through the second week of January. But there is no shortage of deer, even though more are taken each year by bowhunters.

So as we come closer to another season, there are a few items I would like to point out to everyone. The Roscoby Riser Cam is now in stock. This camera shoots to an SD card and screws into your bow instead of a stabilizer. Actually, it also acts like a stabilizer as they needed to dampen vibrations as much as possible for the sake of better video. They are in stock in low quantities. Get one while they are available!


Probably not for the average bowhunter, but if you are investing a lot of money into a hunt, you want your equipment to be top notch. The Carbon Express Aramid-KV is probably the toughest arrow out there. Built with Kevlar, they are as closer to being indestructible than any arrow before it. Spine and consistency are very good, keeping with the Carbon Express reputation.



The last product I want to mention is the Tru Fire Switch Blade broadhead. It is a rear deploying expandable. The tip pushes back and the blades sweep out. To reset the head, just pull the tip back out. It is an ingenious design that I think will catch on.


If you see a note above a product that says "Call for Special Pricing", do just that if you are interested. You may save yourself quite a bit of money.

Now, what do we do up here in ND in the winter? Well, here is a little video of my nine year old son watching his seven year old brother...

Server down! Hardware or Greenware?

You may have noticed we had a catastrophic server outage from about 1pm Tuesday which lasted through Thursday at about 5pm. How could a server outage go 52 hours? When the server is in a datacenter that strives for 99.999% uptime?? When the server has mirrored drives, and rsync'd backups to another machine half the country away? Well, it wasn't hardware that took us and hundreds of other sites down this week.

The company we lease our server from apparently stopped making payments to the datacenter which it leased all of it's servers from at a resellers discount price. Thus the datacenter unplugged all the servers leased by the reseller, including ours! Then it gave the reseller 48 hours to make a payment before allowing the customers to transfer the same servers over to leases from the datacenter directly. This was such a process, that by the time our server was taken down, there was only 30 hours left of this 48 hour period. No notice of this was given to us or any other customer by anyone! The first hint I had of a problem was when I received an email from a monitoring service which monitors our server's uptime. Soon after I received a hectic call from Jerry saying we were down. Then the fun began.

Our reseller first told us it was a datacenter issue. I wasn't too worried at this point because the datacenters are never down long. 99.999% uptimes, remember? After receiving no replies from our reseller, I started investigating and found other customers gathering information on a webhosting forum. The rumor was that our reseller wasn't paying it's bill. The datacenter would not confirm or deny this, but told us we must be patient. Hindsight is 20/20, but I wish I had started rebuilding our site from backups on a second server at this point, 4 hours in.

Offline all night, the next morning the cries are reaching a fevered pitch in the webhosting forum. The datacenter caves on holding until 48 hours as companies with a lot more revenue than ours are begging for relief. But instead of turning them all back on and sorting through the paperwork later, it insists that all paperwork be completed before putting the servers back online. I think I was one of the earlier ones on the list as I was following this very closely. Of course, their administrative services were stretched to the limit with everyone trying to get back online in a mad rush.

About 30 hours into this madness, all of my paperwork was finished and I assumed incorrectly that the end was near. Putting the servers back online was taking hours to do, as it had taken to get them all off in the first place. That night, severe weather in Dallas caused significant damage to the datacenter's administrative offices! So temporary administrative offices were set up to accommodate the customers trying to get back online.

At 47 hours in I submitted a support ticket, which was ignored or perhaps it didn't actually make it in. I'm not sure. At 49 hours in, I submitted tickets to both sales and support, and I received responses back from each pretty quickly. Sales said my server was up and running. Support said my paperwork had to be finished through sales first. So I copied both responses and sent each to the other. Shortly thereafter, we were back online.

So I guess offline backups of a server in a Texas datacenter with 99.999s and daily backups to both New York and North Dakota are not enough when your reseller does not make payments on its leases. Greenware failures can be much more catastophic than hardware failures.

(P.S. In his email to our archery customers explaining why we were down, Jerry said our server was down and had been replaced. I guess I had not explained clearly to Jerry the fact that it was the same server in the same rack, it just needed a new lease.)

Thank you to our customers who put up with this outage. It was the first time in 5 years we were down for more than one hour.