Catching up with a Northwest Colorado classic, outfitter No. 22, Ray Heid

Colorado Hunter: What was your first hunt? Ray Heid: The family that lived right across the road from us, Jack and Uintah Raley, she was a Ute Indian. In fact I’ve got a pair of chaps I made that I still wear, where we used her father’s chaps as a pattern. We started making my chaps I think in the year ’49 and ’50. Then I went on my first hunt in ’50 down in Rio Blanco. Deer hunting. Have hunted every year since.It was unreal. These old Indians, they’d hunted this for so long. We started from their cabin right at Rio Blanco. We started going west, over the rolling ridges down Piceance Creek. Every time we’d come to a top of a ridge, there’d be a bunch of deer in front of us just going out of sight. We’d come to the top of a ridge and I’d

jump off my horse and get my gun out. After about the third time, one of the old Indians, Uintah’s grandfather, said, “Just stay on the horse, boy, pretty soon there’s going to be a big hill in front of us.” Sure enough, we crest the hill and here were all these deer going up the hill in front of us. I shot my first buck. They helped me dress it out and put it on my horse and said, “There’s only one thing now, boy.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “You gotta walk home.” (Laughs) Got to pack the deer home, all the way back.

CH: How’s hunting changed since?RH: In the ’50s and the early ’60s, it was camaraderie. You were out there with the

campfire and the tents and it was more the group to get together. And then it went for a while where it was just killing. If you didn’t get a bull, no matter what you showed ‘em, no matter what kind of scenery they got into, they didn’t have a good time. And I’ve noticed the last few years, it might just be the clientele — we’re doing a lot of families and groups that have known each other for a long time — it’s back to being the camaraderie-type thing.

CH: What’s the biggest challenge now?RH: By raising the prices and then cutting back on the out-of-state hunters and losing their revenue, (the Division of Wildlife’s) catering to the California people who’ve moved here and are

Respect what’s out there, respect the animal. If there’s any one piece of advice, anything, it’s

respect this animal. This is his home and he’s a heck of a lot smarter than you

are being out there.

“

”— Ray Heid

Question & Answer

ay Heid jokes that as the fourth-generation Steamboat Springs resident — who’s now watching his grandchildren grow up as the sixth generation — he almost qualifies as a lo-cal. Starting in 1962, Heid spent each hunting season helping his younger brother Delbert develop his North Routt County outfit-ting business at Del’s Triangle 3 Ranch. Heid, otherwise busy in New Mexico helping the Mes-calero Apache Tribe establish

the Ski Apache resort, took over the operation in 1986. The fam-ily continues to run four camps in national forest lands and the Mount Zirkel Wilderness Area through seven different hunting seasons, along with year-round horseback and summer pack trips.

The fastest septuagenarian telemark skier in the country is quick to relive recent highlights from the two things that mat-ter most, whether it’s tales of

experiencing an elk stampede in hunting grounds he’s been tracking for half a century or of earning the final ski turns of the season on Sand Mountain. But his vigor for the outdoors is matched by his skepticism of wildlife management poli-cies that increase the cost and decrease the number of out-of-state licenses, a move he feels is turning area outfitters into “a dying breed.”

— Dave Shively

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