Outdoor enthusiasts of a certain vintage can recall a time when down vests were called “the Wyoming uniform,” even in neighboring Western states.
Cade Cole of Dubois was taught how to hunt by his late grandfather, Clifford Cole, whose heyday was the 1970s and 1980s, when down vests, jeans, and other such attire were standard issue among hunters and anglers.
Cole is in his early 30s and establishing himself as an outdoors content creator. And thinking of his grandfather and other hunters of that generation gave him an idea.
“They lived in a very different world, technologically,” he said.
‘That Is The Vest!’
Some hunters like to go on “period correct muzzleloader hunts” and the like, said Cole. He himself took the primitive route during an October 2024 elk hunt, taking a traditional bow, virtually no supplies, and challenging himself to live off the land.
For another elk hunt last October in the Wind River Range, he decided to turn the clock back again, but not quite so far.
“Nobody thinks about how much hunting has changed in just the last 50 years,” Cole told Cowboy State Daily.
He traded synthetic fiber camouflage and high-tech gear for denim, flannel, and an old-school “cowboy coffee” pot.
He even grew a thick, period-correct mustache.
“I thought it was just a little tongue-in-cheek humor with the look and the fashion,” Cole said.
Which, of course, had to include a garishly colored down vest.
“I was looking for a year” before he finally found it on a clothing rack in a thrift store.
“I saw it and thought, 'That's the vest. That is the vest!’”
He fudged a bit on historical authenticity, taking along some contemporary video equipment to chronicle the hunt for his YouTube channel.
He also used modern binoculars, because it was impossible to find a vintage pair in good working order that wasn’t priced in the $800 range.
He’d hoped his grandfather could have seen the video, “The Way It Ought To Be.”
Clifford Cole died in June, before Cade could air the video, which includes clips of his grandfather’s recollections.
“I talked to him about it (the video project), and he liked the idea,” Cole said. “He lived a good life. He loved to hunt and fish, and he passed that along to me.”
‘A Lot Less Stressful’
He wanted to hunt with a more traditional rifle with a wooden stock. And preferably with open sights, rather than a scope.
“Even though quite a few guys did have scopes on their rifles back then,” he said.
He had barely left the trailhead when his horse bucked him off and his rifle broke during the fall.
“I had to go all the way back home to get another rifle,” he said.
He had another one that fit the bill: A .308 scout-style rifle (a compact rifle) with iron peep sights instead of a scope.
During his ride into the backcountry, and while camping and hunting, Cole was surprised by how little he missed his fancy hunting clothing and high-tech gear.
“How much hunting culture nowadays is tied in to gear acquisition and all the trinkets and the things we need to buy? All the stuff, the stuff we think we need to take with us,” he said. "When you don’t have all that stuff to be accounted for, it’s a lot less stressful.”
The denim, flannel, and wool clothing held up fine, he said.
“It’s a matter of not getting wet. And, if you do get wet, making sure you get everything dried out right away,” he said.
‘A Denim Tuxedo’
After some intense hunting, Cole found a herd of elk, including a large bull he wanted to pursue.
He bided his time, opting to sneak in for a close shot rather than pushing the boundaries of his marksmanship.
He managed to get right up to the elk, which made him rethink the importance of camouflage, at least for rifle hunting.
“When I killed my elk, I was basically in a denim tuxedo,” he said. “I was out there in all blue.”
“It took me about 45 minutes to belly-crawl in. And I think I killed him at about 33 yards,” Cole added.
It turned out that the bull he shot, while it was sizable, wasn’t the biggest one in the herd he initially had been after.
And that made him reflect on another change in hunting culture. The hunters of his grandfather’s golden era were out for meat, not trophies, Cole said.
“Back then, none of those guys would have passed up as many elk as I did. They would have just shot one and gone home,” he said.
Advances Made Hunting Safer
Bruce Cooper, a seasoned hunter from Bondurant, told Cowboy State Daily he appreciates Cole’s homage to back-in-the-day.
Asked if he had a down vest back then, Cooper responded enthusiastically.
“Yeah, sure! Everybody did,” he said.
Asked if he misses it, he replied, “No, not really.”
While they might have been a symbol of the days of glory, down vests were bulky and “noisy,” he said.
“If you scraped up against a tree branch in it, it would make that plastic scraping sound,” he said. “Modern hunting clothing is much quieter.”
Bows, rifles, and scopes are also far more advanced now, Cooper said.
As an avid archery hunter, he appreciates the advances in modern bows. They sling arrows faster and more accurately than older bows did, greatly increasing the chances of quick, humane kills, Cooper said.
The biggest change he’s noticed since the 1970s and early 1980s is the advent of hunting mapping apps, such as OnX, as well as Google Earth and the like.
Those allow hunters to more efficiently zero in on places where game might be and get a reading on the terrain, Cooper said.
It also makes it much easier to avoid trespassing by mistake because apps like OnX display public and private land boundaries, he said.
Technology can also make it much easier to pinpoint a hunter’s location if things go bad, Cooper said.
"Back in the 80s, if I had fallen down and broken a leg or an ankle, all they (search and rescue) would have known was I might have told my wife about where I’d be parking. And they would have had to send out a party to search 10,000 acres,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
