We are the Colorado chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (BHA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) grassroots group of sportsmen and women who are united by a passion to protect and conserve the public-lands forests, mountains, prairies, streams, and lakes that support our hunting and angling traditions.

CO BHA members share a deep concern that the traditional backcountry values — solitude, silence, personal challenge, physical fitness, adventure — which make Colorado hunting and fishing so special, are being lost to habitat destruction from industrial development and motorized abuse and over-use of our public lands. CO BHA works to slow these destructive trends in order to protect our outdoor heritage and assure that future generations of hunters and anglers can enjoy the same genuine back-to-nature opportunities we know today. We believe in managing fish, wildlife, and their habitats as a public trust and a priceless resource. We believe in keeping undeveloped public lands truly wild.

CO BHA, like our parent group BHA, is an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff — a pure grassroots coalition working simultaneously on national, state, and local fronts. We are as active and effective in a given region as our members choose to make us. CBHA is headed by two co-chairs, representing both sides of the Divide, with no rigid bureaucratic structure. This allows for lightning-fast response and action as new challenges to wildness appear, making CO BHA an exceptionally effective sportsman-conservation organization.

Our members are our muscle, our brains, our conscience, and our heart. If you share our values, we invite you to Join Us today.

David grew up in the small northern Minnesota town of Grand Rapids and started hunting ruffed grouse when he was eleven years old. At twelve he hunted deer for the first time, and killed one the next fall with a Ruger .44 Magnum rifle handed down to him by his grandfather.

In college, David was offered an Air Force ROTC scholarship at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and went on to graduate with a BA in political science and second lieutenant bars. After completing his service and additional schooling, David moved to Colorado. In addition to his volunteer work with CO BHA, he is also a life member of the Minnesota Deer Hunters Association, and a world-class mountaineer.

In 2006, our co-chair tackled the world’s highest peak, Mount Everest, reaching over 25,000 ft. on the north/Tibetan side. You can read about David's climbs, travels, and adventures in 4/44/14 I (Four Years and Forty-Four Fourteeners): First Fourteeners, published by Outskirts Press. David currently lives in Colorado Springs and works as an Examiner for the National Credit Union Administration.

John is a 5th generation Idaho native whose family came in the early settlement days before it was even a state. Today he calls Colorado home, and hunts and fishes all over the state, but his preference is for “some lonely mountain stream and all the solitude that wilderness and roadless areas bring…it’s where I go to get my boots dirty and my soul clean.”

After growing up in Idaho and working for the state legislature, while feeding an outdoors addiction as a whitewater river guide and ranger, John received degrees in Natural Resource Management from the University of Idaho. He then ventured east to Capitol Hill where he directed a variety of grassroots conservation programs for Trout Unlimited. At the end of 2005, succumbing to calls from the western topography, John returned to the west and now works for the National Wildlife Federation as the Regional Representative for AZ, CO, ID, NM, and UT.

Although too modest to admit it, CO BHA Vice Chair Matt Kenna is among the top attorneys in America specializing in public-lands conservation issues. Matt, his wife Janet, and their two sons live in Durango, Colorado, where he has practiced law since 1992, defending the wild places we all love, and increasingly need, to enjoy traditional-values hunting and angling.

A native New Englander, Matt fell in love with the West when he worked as a seasonal ranger for the BLM at Grand Gulch in southeast Utah during the '80s. An avid foot-powered elk hunter, Matt also plays a mean blues harp and is an expert skier. Until recently, for three generations, the Kenna family owned and operated Marlin Firearms, Matt's grandfather having bought the famous lever-action sporting arms manufacturer during the depression for $100 down and a large mortgage. "I’ve always seen hunting and conservation as two fingers of the same hand" says Matt, "I feel privileged to be able to promote those twin goals as Vice Chair of CO BHA."

David Petersen has spent most of his adult life observing, studying, and writing about “wildlife, wild places, and wild people with wild ideas.” His many acclaimed books include Ghost Grizzlies: Does the Great Bear Still Haunt Colorado?; Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality, and Wildness in America; and On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life. His latest book is A Man Made of Elk, along with a 20th anniversary edition of Racks: A Natural History of Antlers and the Animals That Wear Them.

(Visit davidpetersenbooks.com for more titles.)

Dave has also contributed feature articles to scores of publications, including Bugle, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Sports Afield, and Traditional Bowhunter, where he writes the “Campfire Philosopher” column.

Traditional archery and bowhunting are Petersen’s lifelong passions.

David, his wife Caroline, and a series of rescue dogs live in the rural San Juan Mountains near Durango, Colorado, in a self-built cabin at 8,000’ in the heart of Rocky mountain elk country.