Game changers: The Colorado women taking their shot at hunting

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LA SALLE

For the amount of birdshot peppering the air and pheasants falling from the sky, a lot of laughter was ringing across a field at the Heritage Sporting Club in La Salle on a warm day in December.

A line of seven women, plus two springer spaniels and a wire-haired pointer, were walking across the field in a horizontal line, like the long arm of a center-pivot sprinkler. They were four students and two guides plus Erin Crider, the owner of the outfit they were learning to hunt with, Uncharted Outdoorswomen. 

In a flash, the older spaniel, Callie, bolted toward a bush followed by her pup, Bandit. One of the guides, Caroline Yielding, shouted for one of the students, Danielle Peacock, to “follow them! Get up there!” On command, Peacock picked up her pace, hustling to the bush. A pheasant exploded from its depths and Peacock lifted her shotgun and fired, hitting the bird at close enough range that she “pillowcased” it, hunter slang for sending feathers flying. 

Depending on your sensibilities, hunting is humane, important, the full expression of being human. Or it’s inhumane, brutal and unnecessary in an age when practically any food you want is in the case of at least one grocery store in Colorado. 

For the women out hunting in December, it ranged from fun, empowering, a new challenge and a way to have complete control over some portion of the food that nourishes their bodies to something that makes them feel badass and truly self-sufficient, and able to move across the land and connect with nature in a singular and empowering way. 

For Peacock, a 33-year-old clinical researcher and native of Texas who moved to Colorado in 2021, it’s a way to be more than “just the girl in the kitchen cooking wild game, but the one that harvested it, cooked it” and shared it, like she did with her family, on Christmas, in the form of pheasant-stuffed jalapeño poppers and a story that no packaged appetizer could have helped tell. 

This is hunting as Crider wants it to be for women: rough, real, raw and joyful, with a big dose of feminism thrown in. Or as she put it during a recent interview with The Colorado Sun: She wants any woman to be able to go into a store, ignore the guy at the counter “who thinks she’s a little weakling,” pick out the gun of her choice and “stare down the guy’s soul.” 

It’s good she started Uncharted Outdoorswomen, then. The number of Colorado women who want to hunt is growing, yet they are stymied by a lack of opportunities to advance their skills, Crider says. Her mission, with her pack of women guides and eff-the-patriarchy attitude, is to change that by making her clients — all women — so adept at hunting that once they’re properly schooled, they never need her services again. 

Colorado’s robust population of women hunters  

According to the most recent U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey of fishing, hunting and wildlife-associated recreation, 3.1 million U.S. women hunted in 2022. 

That number is misleading, though, because methodological changes prevented the service from comparing it with previous years, said Jerry Leonard, an economist with the federal agency. 

But 70 years ago, the service showed just 4% of women hunted. And in 2011, “the number of female hunters in Colorado was not a reportable statistic because the Census Bureau determined that the sample size was too small,” Leonard said.

In 2023, however, Colorado Parks and Wildlife data showed a record-breaking 84,384 women applied for big-game hunting tags, and in the past 10 years 5% to 9% of hunting licenses have been sold to women. 

In 2023, 4,246 participants who identified as female took one of CPW’s hunter education courses, a number that dropped slightly last year to 3,874. But Joey Livingston, a CPW spokesperson, said between 2023 and 2024, CPW received more than 200 novice adult and Women Afield mentored hunt applications for fall and winter big-game, small-game and waterfowl hunts, and that women applicants typically make up between 25% to 35% of the total applications for mentored hunts in a given year. 

All of that mentored hunting is free of charge, although participants pay for their license and any park passes, Livingston said. And there’s a fair amount of opportunity.  

“The statewide Woman’s Afield program can confirm at least 30 big-game hunts and three turkey hunts in 2024,” Livingston said. CPW also offers women regional hunting, fishing and archery clinics or seminars, with one area office offering 15 to 20 pronghorn hunts for women in addition to the Woman’s Afield program. 

Along with CPW’s offerings, there are organizations like Artemis, the all-women’s arm of the National Wildlife Federation, founded in 2017; Becoming an Outdoors-Woman, which went on hiatus in 2019 but returned last year; Timber to Table Guide Service, which offers guided hunts for gals; and women’s classes through organizations like Northern Colorado Pheasants Forever.

But CPW has more male volunteers than women so more men end up teaching women, Livingston said. Artemis currently has no Colorado ambassador, though organizers say one is coming. Becoming an Outdoorswoman teaches hunters ed, game processing, archery and skeet shooting but doesn’t offer actual hunts “yet,” Colorado Wildlife Federation spokesperson Anna Zak said. And the women at Timber to Table are “wicked talented” and “great teachers” of game butchering and processing, says Adam Gall, who owns the outfit with his wife, but they don’t guide. 

But none of these have Uncharted’s “special sauce” of being women-led from the top down, said Yielding, who learned to hunt in classes and clinics led by Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and Pheasants Forever before hunting on her own and becoming a guide. 

In a Backcountry Hunters pheasant hunting clinic that was almost identical to Crider’s, but led by a man. “Our instructor was great, but instruction really translates a lot better when women are explaining it to other women,” Yielding said. “We know the way we need to share the information with each other, which breaks down barriers.” 

Crider knows this from hunting with guys, who can be “so bro,” with them “showing off what kind of gun they have versus being helpful,” she said. “With women teaching and learning from each other, it’s, ‘This is a semiautomatic. This is a pump-action. This is a break-action,’” and, “‘Oh, your gun’s different. Can I hold it? Can I try it?’ I feel with certain men it’s more like, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, I already know everything.’ They’re not going to help each other.”

She’s also found, through running Uncharted Outdoorswomen, that although more women are getting into hunting, they are also quickly getting out, “because the continued opportunities for growth don’t exist for them.” 

“You know, like, there’s someone in their life that will take them one time,” she said, “but there’s not a series of events where they can continue to level up their confidence in their skills.” 

That does exist in CPW’s free Rookie Sportsperson Program, which pairs a participant, “generally a family, with a wildlife officer or two, for a year-long program that covers the gamut of hunting topics,” Livingston said. But spots are extremely limited — 20 per year — and Livingston said “getting in is highly competitive” requiring “a thorough vetting process with in-person interviews because it is a big commitment.”

Crider wanted to expose more women to hunting and give them more opportunities to learn, so four years ago, she started Uncharted Outdoorswomen out of her house in Black Hawk. 

Crider’s journey

When she moved to Colorado from Missouri in 2014, Crider didn’t know the first thing about hunting. But she quickly became “very confident in the fly-fishing department,” having spent a lot of time outside during her childhood. 

She lived with her dad and brother, “just existing,” she said, and spent most weekends at her grandma’s house in the country. 

There, she fished for crappie and bass, and became friends with some girls down the road who lived on a ranch. They’d ride horses. She’d help with the cattle. She liked “vaccinating them and stuff,” so when it came time to go to college, she chose agriculture school at University of Missouri. 

But when her dad died and she took over paying her tuition, she had to deal with “rolling over accounts and combining assets.” And when a banker treated her like a dope, saying, “just pay me $1,500 and I’ll take care of everything,” she responded, “I’ll have your job” and went on to do so through on-the-job training and class certifications.

That went so well that by 2009 she was blending her agriculture background with her newfound financial savvy and advising mostly “landowners, farmers and women of wealth” on how to manage their money. She quit financial advising in 2020, when, she said, she’d “made it to the top,” didn’t like what she saw and decided her mental health was worth more than the money. 

When she couldn’t find anyone to fish with, she revived a Facebook group, Colorado Women on the Fly, and found her people that way. It led to her guiding fly-fishing and meeting women spin-casters who were into hunting. A few happened to be guides, and for them, “fly-fishing was kind of an artistic concept, maybe a little hippy dippy,” she said. But during the winter she learned to duck hunt “and now all of a sudden I’m walking around with a shotgun.” 

Then her new lady friends “were like, ‘oh wait a second, hang on now, she kills shit and she’s a little hippy dippy,’” she said. “Then it was just me begging them to take me hunting and them begging me to take them fly-fishing.” 

A collaboration soon developed in which she dreamed up the perfect weekend skills camp for adult-onset hunters like her. Her new pal, lifelong hunter and big-game guide Sarah Cousins, taught the skills. 

In 2021, Crider started Uncharted Outdoorswomen, which she says has been profitable since 2022 because she has low overhead and her guides are employees, not contractors. 

“The guides run everything through my platform, which allows them to create opportunities to share their skills. But I deal with the insurance, the legal documents and other things,” she said.  

Yielding likes how that lets her “focus on making the experience of an upland (bird) hunt really great for the student.” 

In 2022, Crider employed 10 women to guide 50 hunts and classes. By 2024, she had 25 to 30 guides leading 75 hunts and classes. But finding and keeping guides with the right combination of availability, talent and passion has been difficult, she said, for the simple fact that so few women have the skills needed to guide. 

Crider said they also have responsibilities most men don’t. “Women are taking care of mom or dad or in-laws. They’re getting married. They’re pregnant. Men do not care for babies or their parents like women do as often. So it’s just really hard to find the talent with the time and the passion.” 

On the other hand, Crider has had guides come to her wanting to escape their current situations. 

“Maybe someone is getting a divorce because they were in a bad marriage. Or they’re sick of corporate America,” she said. Or they’re tired of seeing so many men — and so few women — in positions of power and influence. Uncharted’s profit isn’t quite enough to pay them to be full-time guides yet, but Crider says ask her again next year. 

The Crider method 

Crider’s ability to provide more work to employees could change if the growth trend for women in hunting continues.

Or if Uncharted’s growth trajectory continues. In 2024, revenue grew by 28%. 

Her ideal clients are “women that have the means and funds to go and learn how to do this stuff. But they’re also savvy enough that they don’t want to hire a $500 fly-fishing guide every time they want to go fly-fishing.”

“They are not tourists,” she added. “They live there. A lot of them are moms. And they are really over not knowing how to do anything when dad takes the kids out to go fly-fishing, and he’s pissed because all he did all day was untangle shit. But if mom knows how to do that too, then now they’re a team, and maybe dad can fly-fish a little bit and mom can untangle stuff.”

In her one-day pheasant hunts “you get in there, you learn how to use a shotgun, you learn how to work a field, and you meet other people to go hunting with, so you don’t have to pay us to do that again,” she said. 

Other offerings range from wildflower hikes to an archery camp to learning how to change the oil in a vehicle. You can learn to shoot a muzzleloader or process your own game meat. 

Then there are the small-game hunting clinics, upland bird and waterfowl clinics and multiday big-game skills camps. All are priced in such a way that they are “a very special yet affordable thing” for a woman who wants to learn something the first time and only once, Crider said, “instead of spending thousands running around trying to learn about the wrong gun, (only to find out ) you had the wrong ammo and getting yelled at by men like I did.” 

Her classes prices from $45 for a moonlight snowshoe hike to $200 for a half-day of ice fishing. It’s $325 for six hours of pheasant hunting and $750 for a three-day fly-fishing retreat. 

Crider’s services outprice CPW’s free hunts, which Livingston calls “an amazing service” that’s “essentially a guided hunt with an educational twist. It would cost thousands of dollars for a similar service from a guide or outfitter and they wouldn’t get that educational component.”

But Crider says Uncharted is “still way underpriced” compared to the same opportunities offered by male outfitters. 

Her most expensive offering is a four-day elk hunting camp in the Gunnison National Forest for $3,000 — thousands less than most guided elk hunts.

In it, you help set up camp, sleep in a wall tent, learn how to sight in a gun, learn to stalk, take an ethical shot if one presents itself and field dress your animal to pack the meat out if you’re successful.  

Sarah Gist did the elk camp in the fall. She lives in Lakewood, is in her early 30s and is a principal owner of the political lobbying firm Touchstone Strategies. Her dream is to shoot an elk with her compound bow, which is generally harder than shooting one with a rifle. 

She found Crider through a friend who had attended one of her clinics and when she was looking for a place “that removed a lot of the intimidating and costly barriers” to hunting. 

“To start with, it’s very male-dominated,” she said. “And my dad didn’t hunt so I don’t have family members who brought me into hunting. But I love nature, and I love the idea of being connected to the food I consume. However, where do you start? How do you even know where to go? How do you even know what a legal elk means? Those are things that I would have had no idea of had I not done something like elk camp.”

Success!  

Before elk camp, Gist said she was resigned to doing only target archery. “But after all the things I learned, I actually feel comfortable going out and picking my own game management unit now, instead of having to pay for a guide or wait for somebody who knows what they’re doing.” 

During camp, Gist also learned to identify tracks, figure out if she’s following a bull elk or a cow, and discern “what resources are on the landscape or missing that would attract elk or keep them out.” Her “absolute highlight” was when the group came into a herd of elk, even though they were on private land and they couldn’t shoot. 

“We all got to come to the spot and look at where they were and find them through the spotting scopes,” Gist said. “And we were all just laughing together and I was connecting with other women who were interested in things that I’m interested in. You know, they have that can-do attitude. It was amazing.” 

And between now and next hunting season, she is going to practice the skills she learned, so she can go out on her own or with women she met through Uncharted to try to fill her freezer. 

That’s how it went at elk camp, where Gist said the guides more than delivered on Uncharted’s promise to teach women the skills they need so thoroughly they never have to use their services again. 

She and her guide talked it through. 

She said she’s going to pick her unit, study it and spend time in it prior to her hunt. Then she’s going to buddy up with one of the girls from Uncharted. She hopes she can take down an elk with her bow. 

“But I think it’s really important to define success when you go hunting, because if you get into a herd of elk, I mean, that’s success,” Gist said. “So, you know, you can pay $10,000 to go out with a guide and still come home with an empty freezer, or you can do something with Uncharted, get a whole ton of hands-on skills and make great friends with other women who are interested in doing this.” 

The Dec. 8 hunt was nearing its end when Angie Howes, who is 48, lives in Castle Rock and is a lobbyist for “20-plus clients” through her government and public affairs firm Howes Wolf, shot her pheasant after Honey, the wire-haired pointer, and Callie flushed it. 

Like many of Crider’s clients, Howes is an adult-onset hunter who had no exposure to hunting growing up. 

Out in the field, she’d had two opportunities to shoot a bird, but neither felt right, she said. But when the third pheasant flew into the air, she felt more confident that she could take an ethical shot. So she went for it, squeezing off a round and dropping a bird into the field. Both Callie and Honey tried to retrieve it. But when Yielding handed it to Howes, she beamed, saying, “I can’t wait to see my husband’s face when I bring home dinner!” 

That’s what Crider wants for all of her clients. 

“Now you can say to your friend group of dudes, like, ‘Oh, no, I went to elk camp already. You guys are staying at the Marriott? No, no, I winter camp. Like, y’all can sleep in. I’m gonna be out there at the crack of dawn, and I’m already gonna be out 2 miles. I know exactly where I’m going, because the girls already took me.’” 

And if you go hunting in the same exact spot they took you to after the camp, and you see Crider or her guides sitting there, scoping for elk, waiting to harvest their own food, they’re not going to get down on you. 

“We’re gonna be like please, come sit with us, come hang with us,” she said. “We want you to.”

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.