We live in an amazing age of information for new hunters. Most of it is for the new hunter, or at least the inexperienced hunter, and far too much of it is for entertainment value only. Not so with the Randy Newberg’s Outdoor Class at outdoorclass.com. The information provided by Outdoor University is without a doubt the best hunting course I’ve ever taken, online or in-person.
Like most folks, I like to plan “big hunts” well in advance. Like most folks, I don’t actually do it. That’s how I found myself binge listening to Randy Newberg’s Outdoor Class course on hunting pronghorn while on the drive up to Nebraska and Wyoming to hunt pronghorn.
My semi-guided private land archery hunt in Nebraska had me sitting on watering holes in the pre-rut. I’d never hunted pronghorn with a bow, never in Nebraska and never in a blind, so I booked a hunt with an outfitter and decided (too late) that I needed some education. Thus the listening while driving up from central Texas.
After three days of hunting 16 hours a day in a 90+ degree blind, I had seen a total of two pronghorn. The closest was 650 yards away, the other was almost a mile. If I had shown up without the Outdoor University course I would have just thought it was bad luck.
It certainly wasn’t good luck, but the locations were all wrong. According to the course material, I was too close to too much other available water and too close to cliffs, hills, and trees that blocked pronghorn sight lines. And the course was right.
Switching gears to a spot-and stalk hunt based off the information I learned in the course was imminently more successful, getting me close to bucks within hours. I used the course material again in Wyoming, basing the entire hunt off what I learned. I had a great time and a very successful hunt.
I was so impressed with the pronghorn course after my Nebraska hunt that I ended watching or listening to the other courses over the next week, which included over 40 hours of driving. Believe it or not, that wasn’t enough time to watch or listen to it all.
Beyond the pronghorn course by Newberg himself, there’s a wide range of video series and narrations on a host of other topics. These include multiple courses on wild game preparation, butchery, and cooking from several different renowned chefs. If you’re brand new to cooking game, there’s definitely something for you there. For those of us who are already fairly familiar with wild game cooking, there’s a whole video series on taking that cooking to the next, more refined level.
You’ll also find multiple videos series on mule deer hunting, white tail hunting, archery set-ups, rifles and caliber selection, long hunt gear prep, backcountry planning, and even fitness for the hunt. There’s also a series on e-scouting, something I’m really just now getting into and it’s exceptional.
To be clear, none of these are just a single video. Each topic is a series of multiple short videos broken down into easily digestible pieces of information. Each series includes recommendations by professionals on the topic at hand and real-world applications of the information provided. I’m not sure who set up the format, but there’s an overarching structure to all of it that’s both informative an actionable.
Then there’s the University of Elk Hunting section. This is a whole ‘nother level of information, focused entirely on elk hunting. These aren’t videos, but chapters of information written in prose format and narrated by Corey Jacobsen, a professional with decades of experience calling and hunting elk.
There are some short videos and photos embedded in some of the chapters, but really this is long form prose with narration. It’s truly comprehensive. I very much appreciated the section on strategies for drawing a tag, as well as the multiple sections on calling and what to do if calling isn’t working. Really, if you knew nothing about hunting elk and you listen to this course, you’d be far ahead of most of the people who hunt elk.
Access to the entire site is a penny shy of $100 for the year (that breaks down to $8.33 a month). I would have paid that just for the pronghorn course. Or just the elk course. Or the cooking courses.
For the quality of the information provided, Outdoor Class is a heck of a value.
always wanted to hunt wild pig in the west. didnt see that species. no duck hunting either.
Not that many pigs in the western states.