As hunting numbers fade, Pa. families and friends keep their camp tradition alive

BARNETT TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Down a bumpy dirt road, between some bare mountain ridges, a six-point buck and a doe hung upside down from the meat pole in the waning light of late afternoon outside Camp Foxfire.

Meanwhile, a half-dozen trucks parked by a utility road nearby, and hunters in camouflage and orange shouldered their rifles by the beds after a late lunch. Soon, they disappeared into the woods of rural Forest County for one last hour, one last chance to bag a whitetail deer before darkness dropped the curtain on Pennsylvania’s opening day of hunting season.

Joe David Jr. didn’t kill a deer that morning and hadn’t in a while. He sat at the living room bar inside Camp Foxfire, his can of Michelob beside a tiny urn filled with the ashes of a late hunting buddy named Bob. He watched the snow flurries out the window. Per camp tradition, Kris Kristofferson played on the radio.

Deer heads and old pictures were mounted on every wall. Most were photos of the elder Davids, the late patriarchs who sipped flasks of Black Velvet whiskey to stay warm and wore cowboy hats, the men who built the camp and took outsized pride in the annual gathering there after Thanksgiving. There were photos of cousins and uncles, brothers and sons, five generations of Davids, and their friends who, for the most part, have never missed a year.

Joe, 57, laughed at his stories but paused, once, between them. The retired police officer held his hand to his mouth, overcome with emotion in the double-wide trailer that doubles as a sanctum for the family. Back home, life’s worries and curveballs — his gravely ill wife, the grandson he adopted when his daughter died — were waiting for him.

Hunting camp isn’t all about deer. Most hunters know that.

“It’s the memories,” he said, wiping tears away. “So many memories.”

Hunting is far more than a hobby in Pennsylvania. It’s a tradition that runs as deep as coal, with familial ties as strong as steel. For decades in many counties, children had off school on the Monday after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the hunting season. For hunters, that Monday was a holy day. Many took off the whole week. Some still do. And yet, despite a brief uptick during the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of registered hunters in the state, and across the country, has steadily dropped in recent decades. As of November 30, the Pennsylvania Game Commission sold 820,099 hunting licenses in 2024, a 37 percent decrease from 1980..

The hunters that remain have grown older.

“The average age of a hunter is increasing, which would indicate young hunters aren’t joining the ranks at the same rate older hunters are aging out. I’d think that sets the stage for the downward trend in numbers as much as anything,” said Travis Lau, a Game Commission spokesman. “It’s not a problem that’s easily solved.”

There’s no one reason why hunting numbers have declined, but the ubiquity of youth sports, video games, cell phones, increased urbanization, rural population decline, and dwindling access to hunting grounds, even societal attitudes toward the hobby, have all been cited. Hunting is very much analog in a digital world, often cold and bloody on a good day, with no guarantee of success.

The Game Commission hasn’t sat on its hands for decades either. In many ways, hunting is better today than in the 1980s. There’s a better chance to shoot a trophy buck in Pennsylvania today thanks to a once-controversial “antler restriction” program that began in 2002 and required hunters to pass up on bucks with small antlers, often called spikes, so they’d grow bigger ones. Before that, hunters would see herds of 100 deer, and most of them would be antlerless does.

The Game Commission added hunting seasons and expanded others too, to offer more opportunities. Some animals, such as coyotes, can be hunted 24/7, 365 days a year.

The biggest update, however, may have happened in 2019 when the Game Commission changed the opening day of hunting season to the last Saturday in November, hoping that weekend hunting would draw more hunters on weekends. That seemingly simple change, from a Monday to Saturday, has also been controversial, particularly with camp owners like the Davids who feel rushed to travel after Thanksgiving. Business owners counted on hunters arriving early and spending money at restaurants, bars, and stores a few days before the opener.

“Nowadays, the guys get to camp on Friday,” said Victor Wilko, owner of the Clarion River Lodge, just a few miles from Camp Foxfire. “They don’t really get out as much as they used to because they don’t have time.

In places like rural Forest County, about 285 miles northwest of Philadelphia, camps outnumber permanent residences. Snyder said the income hunters like the Davids bring to the region isn’t just a bonus.

“Those hunters brought three things with them. Their machine, cash, and a credit card and used all three,” said Bob Snyder, a commissioner in Forest County who used to own an ATV shop there. “The campers are a very large source of income to our businesses in the county. Most of them know the people who have stores, restaurants, bars, etc. by first name.”

On the Friday before opening day, nearly every cabin at Clear Creek State Park, in Jefferson County, had smoke billowing from the chimney. A handful of RVs backed into campsites there too and a few brave souls pitched tents by the icy water. Up the road, the Sigel Hotel Bar & Grill was packed with hunters all night. A sign in the bar welcomed “beer hunters.”

Wilko’s bar and restaurant was bustling too. A guitarist played “Friends in Low Places” in the pub and two house dogs, Lola and Rosie, roamed the hardwood floors, looking to get their ears scratched and bits of cheeseburger. Massive bucks adorned the walls, most taken by the lodge’s owner. Wilko said he’s thankful for any customers on a cold Friday night in late November, but he said the change to opening day changed the crowds.

“They’re still here and we’re grateful, but it’s not the same,” he said.

Despite these changes, hunting registrations still dropped about 7 percent since 2020.

There’s no hard data on the number of hunting camps, and no strict definition of what a “camp” is. Many are off-grid cabins that rarely get used outside of hunting season. Others are vacation homes, with hot tubs and arcade games. Some hunting camps, like those in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, are spartan, more like cinderblock barracks, a simple place for a slew of hunters to sleep and eat. Some camps, like the Davids’, are owned by families and filled with loving touches of home, and some are owned by hunting clubs, a collective with one thing in common: a love of deer hunting.

In Pennsylvania, anecdotal evidence suggests that pound for pound, the state may have the most of any state. Four Game Commission surveys between 2011 and 2024, found that about a quarter of all firearm deer hunters in the state hunted from a camp.

There are Facebook groups for hunters looking to join a camp, others for people who want to buy one, and groups where members simply show off the woodwork and write emotional tributes to long-gone grandfathers who first put a rifle in their hands.

“This is our piece of heaven on earth,” one member said of his Tioga County camp.

On the real estate website Zillow, there are 738 listings in Pennsylvania tagged with the keyword “hunting,” many of them have hundreds of acres of land. Dialing down, the Center for Rural Pennsylvania found that approximately 34, 800 of the state’s 5.8 million residences were financed by second mortgages or a second mortgage and a home equity loan, though it’s unclear how many are strictly used for hunting.

One unique component of Pennsylvania’s camp culture is the leasing program administered by the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources’ Bureau of Forestry. The bureau leases a surprising 4,000 campsites across Pennsylvania and State Parks has about 400 leased campsites. The campsites are typically a quarter-acre, leased to individuals or groups, to maintain cabins solely for recreational purposes, a department spokesman said.

DCNR stopped leasing campsites in 1970, but existing leases are grandfathered in and rarely change hands. There’s a Facebook group for DCNR cabin owners too.

Before Camp Foxfire was built, earlier generation of Davids, immigrants from Lebanon, would drive together in a Cadillac from Aliquippa, northwest of Pittsburgh, sharing a rifle. One man would hunt for a while, while the others stayed warm in the car. Then they’d switch off.

Joe David Sr. bought a quarter-acre lot in 1972 for about $1,500 and Camp Foxfire was born. The first camp burned down in April 2003 but the Davids had a double-wide trailer delivered and hooked up to the utilities in time for hunting season that year. All of them men take pride in the fast turnaround after tragedy.

“We were not missing a year,” Joe Jr. said.

The decline in hunting numbers hasn’t gone unnoticed at Camp Foxfire either. There were four hunters at camp this year, including Anthony Colalella, whose mother is a David. He remembers years when they had 15 people crammed in there.

Colalella isn’t the patriarch of the family but he’s the best hunter of the bunch. He shot both the camp’s deer on opening day and he’s also passionate about keeping the tradition going with his children.

“Hunting is more of a lifestyle for me,” he said.

At 4 a.m. on opening day, he and his longtime friend, Mike McWilliams, were busy layering up in the kitchen, turning themselves into onions. They wore long johns and “scent block” layers so the deer wouldn’t smell them, along with insulated hunting suits and orange hunting gear stuffed with hand warmers. Layering up is tricky, they said, because you don’t want to sweat before heading into 15-degree weather for hours.

“I like to take my time going up the mountain,” Colalella said.

Colalella’s uncle, Danny David, was leaving before them, grabbing a two-way radio before walking out into the dark. They all traded “good lucks.”

“I think he’s going out there too early,” Colalella said. “But he always does that.”

By 3 p.m., Colalella and McWilliams had finished gutting the deer and they gathered by a bonfire behind Camp Foxfire, warming their legs. Neither could remember a colder opener, and Colalella’s never missed one. The men talked about the Pittsburgh Steelers and their beloved Aliquippa Quips, one of Pennsylvania’s most storied high school football programs. They talked about the deer they saw at sunrise, the shots they couldn’t take, and bucks they dream about, like the one they nicknamed “Bosa” that lives in the forest beyond camp.

A few, random rifle shots rang out while they spoke.

“I hope he survived today,” Colallela said of Bosa while nudging the logs with his boot.

All along the dirt road, hunters were returning to camps, simple buildings stuffed with bunks with names like “The Lazy F,” “Pap’s Place,” and “Camp Cockeyed.” A Polish camp across the road had a hand-painted sign, celebrating 50 years, hanging out front. Many trucks had deer in the beds or draped over baskets on their hitch.

Danny David, 64, was still out there, somewhere up a mountain, waiting for a whitetail to come into range before sunset. Danny, a contractor, is always the last one back to camp, which is tough because he makes the giant hoagies layered in a slew of deli meats.

Danny finally came back in the dark without a deer, his face red from the cold. Anthony lit the stove and everyone congratulated him for his two deer. Soon, the crew was crunching into the toasted hoagies and swapping stories. Most of them were a little blue and full of laughs, like the story about the “goofy” cousin who messed with the television during a Steelers game one Sunday night at camp and lost the signal.

“I am really into the Steelers. I wanted to kill him,” Colallela said.

“Anthony was steaming mad, ” Danny said, laughing.

“But hey, these are stories you’ll cherish, for the rest of your life,” Joe Jr. said.

Some couldn’t stay in the woods the whole week while their wives and fiances held down the forts at home. It was too soon to think about next year’s opening day, though the men couldn’t imagine anything but death stopping them. They were here, now, at camp, with deer on the meat pole.

“This right here, what we’re doing right now, is what got me into hunting, wanting to come up here to camp with these guys,” Colalella said in the kitchen. “Once I was old enough to finally get here, just sitting here and taking in all the stories and all that, you know, I was like, ‘Wow, there’s no place I’d rather be.’ This is my Christmas.”