by Bob Stearns

By Editors

Those long waits in the stand or the blind can be a little easier with these gloves that let you access your spartphones' features, like the Rut Reporter app...or, you know, Fruit Ninja.

by David E. Petzal

I’ll spare you the usual litany of reasons why the world as we know it is coming unglued. Needless to say, you should be shopping for the occasion, and if you’re looking for a good fixed-blade knife, here are two that are so similar in purpose and construction that I decided to review them together.

The Ranger Puuko is made in Finland, where it was designed as a survival knife by a Finnish officer named J.P. Peltonen. The original Ranger has a 6-inch blade, but people noticed that if you lopped an inch off that, it would make a dandy hunting knife. And so the Ranger Puuko you see here has a 5-inch drop-point blade made of forged tool steel hardened to Rc 58 and coated with Teflon, a 5-inch handle of hardened rubber, and a totally cool leather sheath with a safety liner and an internal rubber keeper that snaps down on the handle and holds it firmly in place.

It’s not a pretty knife, or a finely finished one. It’s meant to be used very hard. The blade is thick and strong, sharpens very easily to a blood-curdling edge, and holds that edge reasonably well. The price for the either the 5-inch-blade Ranger or the 6-inch is $169.50 from kellamknives.com.

The second knife is a brand new one from Cold Steel, and can best be described as a Ka-Bar on steroids (pictured below). It’s called the Leatherneck SF (for “Semper Fi”) and follows the general lines of the Ka-Bar, but with improvements. The 6 ¾-inch blade is made of a steel called SK-5, which is the Japanese equivalent of American 1080, a high-carbon tool steel. It’s hardened to Rc57-58 and came to me with an appallingly sharp edge and kept it extremely well. As with the Ranger, this blade will rust, and so it, too, is coated.

by Slaton L. White

Ten years ago I went on a week-long salmon safari in Alaska, living out of a slide-in camper in a Silverado equipped with a Duramax 6.6-liter V8 turbo diesel. It was an epic adventure, and looking at my old notes I see I raved about the truck’s performance. “Moved well from a dead stop. Quiet, even at full throttle. MPG: averaged between 11 to 14 mpg.”

A lot has happened to GM since then. After teetering on the brink of insolvency for years, it finally plunged into bankruptcy two years ago. What many people don’t know was that the company came perilously close to Chapter 11 in the 1990s. But they got a stay of execution. Know why? The Silverado. It was just about the only GM product people wanted to buy...and they bought enough of them to help keep the company afloat.

The Silverado was good then...and it’s good now.

I can say that after logging 900 miles in one recently. The 2500 4WD Crew Cab is a stout build, and boasts a maximum towing rating of 17,000 pounds. That means that when you drive it without a trailer or with an empty bed, it’s a bit rough. But when you get some weight on those rear wheels, it tames down nicely.