On a recent morning I stepped out with the dogs at daybreak. Beneath a clear, dawn sky, the air was crisp and calm. When we came inside 20 minutes later, I thought it was pretty nice outside. Glancing at the thermometer, I saw it was 16 below.

While the rest of Minnesota has experienced a warm, snowless winter, up here at the Tip of the Arrowhead, we've had snow and cold temperatures.  True, even our weather has been unusually mild, but proximity to Lake Superior and the Canadian border means we get always get a real winter with snow and ice and below zero temperatures. That's why moose live here.

Recently, a chef who wrote a book about hunting and cooking was interviewed on Minnesota Public Radio. She talked about making a recent trip to Colorado to do a cooking demonstration. While there, she was taken fly-fishing on a local river, where the guides and other anglers refused to keep fish for her to use in her demonstration. She told the MPR interviewer she was miffed by their catch-and-release ethic.

"I don't believe in catch-and-release," she said. "It's playing with your food."

For more than 20 years, the Minnesota DNR has kicked off the New Year by hosting a Roundtable for groups and individuals interested in fishing, hunting and conservation. For years, the event was intentionally held outstate in St. Cloud, but it was moved to a metro location a few years ago. This year, for the first time, the Roundtable was held in St. Paul, just a stone’s throw from the DNR’s central offices and the State Capitol.

The tone and content of the Roundtable varies somewhat from year to year, but it is fair to say the event is a finger on the political pulse of Minnesota outdoor issues. The big news at last weekend’s Roundtable was the announcement of a new wolf hunting and trapping season beginning this year. After nearly four decades of federal protection, Minnesota wolves are scheduled to be removed from the Endangered Species List on January 27.

Last July, Minnesota's state government shut down when the Governor and Legislature couldn't agree on how to balance the budget. Our duly elected met in St. Paul, presumably to resolve budget issues and reached agreement on, of all things, wolf hunting. While taxpayers worried about such mundane topics as public school funding and rising property taxes, lawmakers made sure the state could open a wolf hunting season as soon as the animals were removed from the federal Threatened Species list. In recent news reports, DNR officials have said they may hold a wolf season as soon as this year.

The hunting authorization alters Minnesota's existing wolf management plan, which called for a moratorium on hunting and trapping during the first five years of state control.  The moratorium was recommended by a citizen's committee convened in the late 1990s to provide balanced public input to the DNR's wolf management plan.  As a member of the citizen committee, I can say killing or not killing wolves was the core issue we confronted.

Will a nuclear waste storage facility be constructed in the Lake Superior Basin? The answer is: possibly. Canada’s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is presently looking for a site to construct a storage facility where nuclear waste will be buried in rock 500 meters to one kilometer underground. Based on geological features, areas near Lake Superior are suitable for such a facility and some communities on the Canadian North Shore have expressed interest in the project.

Recently, officials from Nipigon, Ontario, traveled to Toronto and met with representatives of NWMO for a detailed briefing and a tour of the Pickering Waste Management Facility where nuclear waste is currently stored on an interim basis. The visit was called a “Learn More Opportunity.” Mayor Richard Harvey emphatically states this does not mean Nipigon tossed its hat in the ring as a potential nuclear storage site.

The last Ford Ranger rolled off the St. Paul assembly line last week, marking the end of an era for manufacturing in Minnesota and for small, light-duty trucks. Feeling a little wistful, I half-considered buying one of the last Rangers, but my 2001 model is doing just fine. Still, it’s sad to know that when the time comes to replace it, I won’t be able to do so with another Ranger.

In 1987, I bought my first pickup truck, which was also my first new vehicle. As pickups go it wasn’t much—a gray, four-cylinder Ford Ranger with a standard transmission and two-wheel drive. But it was a big step forward from the cars I’d driven previously. High clearance and good gas mileage made the Ranger a truck well suited to my lifestyle.

About a year ago, veteran dog musher Tim White of Colvill graciously shared an interview he conducted with the late fur trapper Mike West, a patriarch of Minnesota mushing, which was published in Winter 1972-73 issue of Northwoods Journal. West ran long, canoe country traplines and trained sled dogs and drivers for the Army during World War II.. The entire interview was a bit long to reprint, so, with full credit to White, a paraphrased version follows here.

Mike West grew up in Worthington. In 1921, he acquired his first Malamute puppies in Shelby, Montana, from a man in Shelby, Montana, who brought a pair of dogs back from Alaska. A chance meeting in a barbershop with Benny Ambrose, a trapper who lived most of his life on remote Ottertrack Lake along the Canadian border, introduced him to the canoe country. Ambrose said there was money to be made in fur trapping.

They say the best trait for any hunter is patience. Hod Bolinger of Albert Lea has plenty of it. In 1971, the first year Minnesota held a modern moose season, he applied in the lottery for a hunting permit. He continued to apply for permit every year a moose season was held since then, but was never drawn for a permit.

“I always applied for the zone near my cabin,” says Hod, who has a place on Tom Lake north of Hovland. “I knew the country and thought I could get a moose there,”

The recent deer season taught me something many hunters already know: Deer bleat calls work. Nearly every deer I encountered while sneaking through the woods responded to a bleat call--a small canister that makes a noise similar to the bleat of a lamb. Some approached me, including the doe and buck I killed on separate occasions, and others remained in my near vicinity for 30 minutes or more.

You could say the call worked like magic. Sure, some skill was involved. I was able to sneak near the deer in the first place and be positioned so they couldn't detect my scent. I also had the ability to be extra-patient and to not over-use the call. But without the bleat can, it's very unlikely I would've had the same hunting experiences.

This year, it was hard to tell if Minnesota was holding a firearm deer season or a horse race. The media focuses on dead deer, also known as “the harvest,” in reports of the hunting season. Many headlines during the hunt compared of how the current season’s kill matched the previous year.

In the 2011 horse race, hunters were slow coming out of the gate opening weekend, with the Duluth News-tribune reporting the kill was “Down by a Third.” The low death toll was blamed on windy weather, which apparently affected deer movements. Hunters gained some ground after the winds subsided and narrowed the harvest gap after the second weekend of the season, leading the Minneapolis Star-Tribune to report the “Harvest Stages a Rally.”