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Dundee
dentists
searches out game
instead of cavities |
When not peering into patients' mouths,
Allen Methven s often in the wild hunting game |
By Gunnar Olson, Newberg
Graphic reporter
E-mail Gunnar at golson@eaglenewspapers.com
|
 It’s almost a surprise Allen Methven could talk about elk hunting at
all last week.
At this time last year, Methven, a Dundee dentist, was in the southwest tip
of Colorado, at the North Mountain Wildlife Preserve. From a ridge on the 10,000-acre
ranch a person can take in a view of New Mexico, Nevada and Utah in one sweep of the head.
In 2002 he was there guiding an elk hunt. If he had guided this year’s party, it
would have been the ninth year in a row and the 11th year he was a part of the party.
“It’s driving me crazy (not being there),” Methven said last
week from a table in The Dundee Bistro. He added he might just have to call the hunting
party to see how they were doing.
Methven said he’s handed off the guiding duties to the landowner’s
son, Scott Hughes. The duties had become too much, he said. Also building a house and
planting a vineyard in Dayton has been taking up much of his time away from his patients.
The bugle of the elk can be heard all through the hunting season at the
ranch, he recalled. In Oregon, he said, “as soon as bow season starts, they shut
up.” The elk know better than to give themselves away.
At the ranch, near Telluride, Colo., that’s not the case. The 10,000
acres only sees 12 hunters each year, and the elk herd has benefited as a result.
“Every year the herd is getting bigger,” Methven said.
The welfare of the herd has also been well served by a plot of land at the
center of the ranch. Designated as the elk’s “sanctuary,” no hunter is
allowed to take an animal in this roughly 1,000-acre area.
A week at the ranch in Colorado, Methven described, is almost civilized.
Available to the hunters, for $4500, in addition to one big elk, are cable TV, The Wall
Street Journal and meals prepared by a chef. Roughing it, it would seem, is all relative.
But the accommodations aren’t as nice for all the trips Methven guides.
For the last seven years he has reserved land in Aniak, Alaska, where he leads moose
hunts. On these trips he and his customers are dropped off 150 miles south of the Arctic
Circle, and as many miles from another person.
“It’s a whole different feeling when you could be a meal for a
grizzly bear,” Methven said.
Food for the excursion is kept 50 yards from the tent, as are the clothes in
which any food was prepared. Methven sleeps with a revolver under his pillow, and
won’t leave the tent to relieve himself unarmed.
“It sounds miserable,” he said, “but it’s pretty
cool.”
Methven said guiding trips in Alaska gets him away from the pressures of a
confined workspace — his office — and, more literally, a mouth. Out there
it’s 25 degrees for 10 days, he said, and all you have is a tent.
One might say Methven knows the true meaning of roughing it.
* Methven offered one tip to people interested in getting a guide:
Before you book, call not one but several of the people who have been there before. It
sometimes happens that brochures lie, promising services that aren’t there, as he has
found out by experience. |
|
From Oct. 22,
2003, Newberg Graphic
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