Table of contents for August 2025 - Big Game in Bowhunter

“IMMERSE YOURSELF IN THE OUTDOOR EXPERIENCE. IT WILL CLEANSE YOUR SOUL AND MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON.”—FRED BEAR THE ANNUAL Big Game Special is a favorite of many readers, and it’s not hard to understand why. After all, what serious bowhunter doesn’t dream about pursuing exotic species in faraway lands that seem a world removed from the familiar? Sure, a three-hour, Back Forty sit for whitetails before or after work is a nice respite from your day, but a week-long or fortnight adventure into the unknown is a true escape from reality — and it’s that escape the hunter’s spirit inside us craves. As I prepared the features in this issue for publication, I was repeatedly struck by how the various authors expressed this sentiment, and how simply spending time…

NUNAvUT is a unique fragment of this giant blue marble we call home. This vast and remote Canadian territory is the kind of place where, if that distant boulder you’re studying with binoculars suddenly morphed into a wooly mammoth, you wouldn’t be shocked. Little has changed on this stretch of Planet Earth over the long blink of natural history, and while the mammoths are gone, there remains primordial evidence thundering across the tundra — the shaggy muskox! One cannot observe the rumbling gait of a herd of muskox without having visions of mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. When you tell people you’re traveling to hunt in this wild place, accessible only by plane or boat, the response is predictable. “Nunavut?” they ask. “Where’s that?” Geography isn’t a strong suit with most…

HOYT CONTINUES its never-ending push for excellence in all aspects of bow manufacturing, with the goal of creating the ultimate bowhunting and target rigs. Each year, Hoyt finds ways to improve and produce a bow lineup that can be found atop many podiums and in countless hunting memories around the globe. One of Hoyt’s premier hunting bows for 2025 is the Alpha AX-2 32, a bow featuring a more forgiving string angle and excellent balance through its machined aluminum Tec-Lite Riser and In-Line accessory-mounting system. The bow’s VitalPoint grip fights torque, while the HBX Gen 4 cams offer draw-length customization down to the quarter-inch, along with three letoff options and a choice between a hard and extra-hard back wall. Parallel split limbs, Hole Shot V2 string silencers, a string stop…

Excalibur Hybrid X Excalibur’s new-for-2025 crossbow offering — the Hybrid X — ushers in a new era, employing a cam system in tandem with Excalibur’s signature recurve limbs for the very first time. The result is the company’s most advanced crossbow yet, capable of producing bolt speed up to 435 fps from a compact, reverse-draw configuration platform that measures less than 30 inches long and just 10.8 inches wide when cocked. Finished in Mossy Oak Country DNA camo, the Hybrid X weighs 8.3 pounds and features Excalibur’s ChargerX integrated cocking/de-cocking crank mechanism that reduces cocking effort to just 14 pounds. Comes with Overwatch scope, quiver and four bolts with fieldpoints. $2,199 | excaliburcrossbow.com Benchmade Mini Taggedout A quality knife is a must for any deer hunter, and Benchmade’s new 1534…

Q IT’S TIME to deploy my trail cameras for deer season. What are your tips for trail-cam placement? — J. McClure, via email A WHEN IT COMES to trail-camera placement, most folks think about the areas where they plan to place cameras — food plots, field corners, heavily used deer trails, scrapes, bedding areas, etc. Obviously, where you place your cameras is extremely important; after all, you can’t catch a great buck on camera if you don’t have a camera where he lives! But in this response, I want to focus on how you place your cameras in the field. This is almost as important as where you place them, and you can put this advice to good use no matter where your cameras are. First, you need to think…

INDUSTRY ICON Mathews Archery doesn’t miss a beat. On the heels of the extremely popular 2024 LIFT that brought an all-new design to the Mathews lineup, the company immediately went to work making the LIFT platform even better. The result of that effort is the 2025 LIFT X. In addition to the SwitchWeight X Cam system, skeletonized reflex riser, BridgeLock Technology, 3-D Damping, Nano 740 Harmonic Damper, String Stop and the past-parallel position of the limbs brought over from the LIFT, the LIFT X is home to new, more durable ARC7 split limbs, easy tunability via patented Limb Shift Technology and the company’s Bond Grip system. The LIFT X is available in two models based on your preferred axle-to-axle length — the LIFT X 33 and LIFT X 29.5 (the…