Blanche and I live in Gallatin Gateway, Montana. We are the owners of Wilderness Adventures Press, Inc., the leading publisher of hunting and fishing guide books. I am also the Versatile Hunting Dog Editor of Pointing Dog Journal, a position that I have held for the past 14 years. I am also the author of Training the Versatile Hunting Dog. We hunt wild birds, both upland and waterfowl, with our German wirehaired pointers an average of 35 to 50 days a year in several western states.
Blanche and I purchased our first German wirehaired pointer in 1979 — a male pup that we named Baron. Baron came from a kennel in upstate New York. His parents both came from Germany.
Before Baron, we had an English setter and an English pointer. Both were good, solid gun dogs. However, we wanted a versatile gun dog that could do it all in field and water, before and after the hunt.
In 1984, we acquired another female German wirehaired pointer, Cody, from Doc’s Kennels in Iowa. Cody’s mother was Walker’s Blue Movie, an outstanding gun dog.
We bred Baron to Cody and kept two of the pups, a male and a female. We bred the female, Annie Oakley, to Three Devils Gustav and again kept three females from that litter. We bred two of those females — Belle Star once and Hershey three times — and had outstanding pups from all the litters.
Currently we have five GWPs: Belle and Hershey (both 13 and still actively hunting wild birds), Chukar (our 10-year-old male and the son of Belle and Salty Pete from Three Devils Kennel), and Camas (a 5-year-old female). All of our dogs are outstanding hunters and also family companions. When they are not in the hunting field, they are in our house or with us in our business office during the day.
We test all of our dogs in either NAVHDA or VHDF. We have been awarded two breeding awards in NAVHDA. All of our dogs are Penn Hip tested. They have all scored below .30 — that puts them in the 90% category. That means that their hips test better than 90% of all of the GWPs tested to date.