Hello everyone, guess I'm a bit late. My name is Richard and I live in NE North Dakota, about an hour south of Canada, and a just a few miles from Minnesota. I grew up on a farm west of here about 70 miles and married a farmgirl, and up until the last couple years I did all of my hunting on those family farms (grain, soybeans, corn, sunflowers - about 6,000 acres, the farms aresomewhat largehere). With the price of gas, I've shifted towards hunting closer to home during bow season the last couple years. This is my 2nd year in the contest, and I enjoyed it last year.

I have 2 young children (4 and 1), am an engineer, and spend a lot of time in the outdoors. Bowhunting is my favorite, followed by field waterfowl, ice fishing, upland hunting, firearms deer hunting, and then everything else.

I have a blog where I keep my online hunting journal, which you can find at www.ndoutdoorsman.blogspot.com.

I've been out scouting around 3 nights/week for the last 6 weeks, and have found 3-4 quality bucks, but haven't been able to get on the land I need to in order to hunt them, so in a way, I'm not reallyready for this season yet. By this time last year, I'd been watching my 2007 bow harvest for 2 weeks and had him patterned very well (I took him the 2nd day of the season).

North Dakota has a very early bow opener (1 week from today), although I don't know if I'll get out or not yet for the opener. Glad to meet everyone, and let's have a good time this year.