JUST 3 SIMPLE QUESTIONS

My name is Joe Kondelis, and I am obsessed with bears and bear hunting!

My passion and love for all things outdoors started at a very young age in my hometown of Butte, Montana. Coming from a mostly hunting family, it was a way of life for us, and we spent most of our free time in the hills and on the rivers of Southwest Montana.

My passion for bears and bear hunting didn’t start until much later in my "hunting career." To be honest, nobody in my family really cared much about hunting them, so it wasn’t until I was able to hunt on my own and start my own journey that I became interested in bears.

Fast forward 27 years later to today, and I am more interested in learning about bears and what makes them tick than I have ever been before. While my home now is in Wyoming, where I do most of my bear hunting these days, I have bear hunted in many Western states, including Alaska and several provinces in Canada. While we hunt and live off of deer, elk, and antelope that we harvest each year, I would give that all up happily to only hunt bears! Spring and fall, you will find me with family and friends, spot-and-stalk hunting black bears and running baits for our various youth and veteran hunts.

In 2007, a friend and I started a small non-profit that is now known as the American Bear Foundation. The "ABF" is an all-volunteer organization dedicated to protecting and developing bears and bear hunting opportunities in the United States. We want to ensure there is a future for bears and bear hunting. My work with ABF has included thousands of volunteer hours on the ground doing conflict mitigation, black bear and grizzly bear research, bear hunting experiences, and talking to youth and adults, advocating for bears and bear hunting.

My passion for bears doesn’t just lie in the hunt but in the whole ecology of the bear species in the U.S. I have been very fortunate to help develop studies and research projects across many states to give us a better understanding of bears in their habitat.

While I enjoy studying and learning about bears, my real passion is getting folks into bear hunting and taking out new bear hunters. I love more than anything sharing my passion and knowledge of bears and bear hunting with others. They are an underappreciated and overlooked species, and my goal is to create more deranged bear addicts like myself! That’s why you are here today!

I am always learning about bears and bear hunting, and I truly believe that the second you think you have it all figured out, you get humbled. While I am by no means an expert, I have many years of learning and struggling with bears and bear hunting that are invaluable when shared with someone new to bear hunting. I love a challenge, and my recent bear hunting years have been spent wading through the grizzly maze in NW Wyoming, trying to find black bears. That is an adventure!

When I am not hunting bears, thinking about bears, or working for bears and bear hunters, my wife, Autumn, and I are busy raising our 17-year-old daughter, McKenna. She is quite the hunter in her own right, and it has been one of my greatest joys raising such a strong and independent young woman! I am also on the Governor’s State of Wyoming Board of Outfitters and Guides, a volunteer for Oconto River Kids, and help out with several other hunting-based organizations across the U.S. We have been fortunate to call Cody, WY, our home since 2005 and have so enjoyed living and working in such a remarkable community with in-state access to vast stretches of free spaces and wilderness.