There’s a version of hunting camp that shows up in magazines and on the side of beer cans. Golden light through pine trees, a guy in a clean flannel turning an elk tenderloin over a perfect bed of coals, a tin cup of coffee steaming next to him, mountains behind. Everybody’s relaxed. Nothing hurts.
I’ve been to that camp exactly zero times.
The real one is darker, colder, and a lot funnier. The real one has a guy eating cold beans out of the can with a multitool because the stove ran out of propane and nobody would admit they left the spare bottle in the truck. The real one smells like wet wool and bore solvent and whatever got burned to the bottom of the pan last night. And the food at the real one is the part nobody tells the truth about, which is exactly why I want to.
I’ve got elk in the freezer right now from last fall, and most of it didn’t get cooked in some picturesque way. It got quartered in the dark, hauled out on our backs over two days, and the meals that fed us while we did it were not photogenic. But they were some of the best food I’ve eaten in this state, and I’ve thought a lot since about why that is. So this is the honest accounting. What hunting camp food in Wyoming actually looks like, why it looks that way, and why I’ve come to think it’s one of the most important kinds of cooking we do out here.
The Romantic Version vs. The Real One
Let me get the daydream out of the way first, because I had it too.
When Kimi and I moved to Wyoming in 2022 — on purpose, for the mountains, after the Army had dragged me from San Antonio to Omaha to Denver to D.C. — I pictured hunting season as this clean, almost ceremonial thing. I’d pack in, I’d cook beautiful wild game over a fire, I’d come home with stories and a full cooler. I grew up in St. Louis not caring about food at all. It took the military, and then it took Kimi — who’s a veteran too and a far better cook than I’ll ever be — to teach me to pay attention to what I was eating. So by the time I got here, I was ready to romanticize the whole thing pretty hard.
Then I went.
Here’s the truth nobody puts on the beer can: at hunting camp, cooking is the third or fourth most important thing you’re doing, and most days lower than that. You are tired in a way regular life doesn’t prepare you for. You’ve been up since four, walked miles at altitude, and your feet are wet. It might be snowing in October because this is Wyoming and the weather does whatever it wants. And right when you’re hungriest and least functional, you have to feed yourself well enough to do it all again tomorrow.
That gap — between the version where cooking is the centerpiece and the version where cooking is one more chore competing with butchering an animal and not freezing — that gap is the whole story. Everything real about camp food lives in there.
Weather, Fatigue, and the Tyranny of the Stove
The single biggest thing that shapes what you actually cook is what you’re cooking on, and out here that’s almost never a romantic open fire.
Fire is great when conditions allow it, and I love it — I’ve written before about the long Wyoming tradition of cooking everything over coals, going all the way back to the chuckwagon and the cooks who fed entire cattle drives out of cast iron. But a lot of the time during hunting season you can’t lean on fire. There are fire restrictions in dry years. There’s wind that’ll steal every bit of heat off your coals and tip your pot. There’s snow on the wood. And there’s the simple fact that after a fourteen-hour day, building and babysitting a cooking fire is sometimes more than you’ve got left in you.
So the real workhorse of Wyoming hunting camp is a propane camp stove. Two burners, blue flame, push-button or match-lit, the most unglamorous piece of gear in the kit and the one I’d give up last. It doesn’t care if it’s snowing. It lights when your hands are too cold to feel them. It boils water for coffee in the dark before you can think a complete thought. The romantic in me wishes everything came off a fire. The realist cooks on propane four nights out of five and is grateful.
And then there’s the cold and the dark, which run the whole show in ways that surprise people. By late season the sun is down by the time you’re back in camp, so a huge amount of cooking happens by headlamp. You learn to stir a pot you can barely see. You learn that a good headlamp isn’t a luxury, it’s the difference between a hot meal and crackers. Fatigue is the other silent ingredient. When you are genuinely exhausted, your standards for “good food” change completely — and I mean that as a compliment to camp food, not an insult. A meal that would be unremarkable at home becomes one of the best things you’ve ever eaten when you’ve earned it the hard way.
The Animal Comes First
Here’s the part the magazine version leaves out entirely, and it’s the part that most changes what dinner looks like: if you actually get an animal, the food on your plate becomes an afterthought to the food in your pack frame.
When an elk goes down, the clock starts. You’ve got an enormous amount of work to do, fast, often in fading light and dropping temperatures, and all of it matters more than what you eat that night. The animal has to be field dressed and broken down. The meat has to be cooled — which in Wyoming’s fall is usually the easy part, the cold does it for you — and protected and packed out, sometimes over multiple trips and multiple miles. Good meat is the entire point of the trip, and ruining it through carelessness or fatigue is the one failure you can’t undo. So everything bends around the processing.
What that means in practice is that on the days when hunting is actually working, you barely cook at all. You eat whatever requires the least from you. A backpacking meal you add hot water to. A handful of jerky and a tortilla. Cold leftovers standing up. The irony is thick: you are surrounded by hundreds of pounds of the best meat in the world, and you are too busy taking care of it to cook any of it. That elk doesn’t become dinner for weeks, until it’s home, hung, cut, wrapped, and in the freezer. (When it finally does, that’s a whole different post — that’s a seared backstrap under herb butter in a warm kitchen, which is about as far from camp as cooking gets.)
The good camp cook plans for this. You build your menu assuming you might be wrecked, butchering by headlamp, with no energy for anything that takes real attention. If you get a calm night, great, you cook something nicer — but you never count on it. That’s the first rule of feeding people in the field: plan for the worst day, and be pleasantly surprised.
What Actually Shows Up on the Plate
So with all that working against you — weather, dark, exhaustion, a stove instead of a fire, an animal that eats your whole evening — what do hunters in Wyoming actually eat? Here’s the honest menu, the stuff that really shows up, year after year, camp after camp.
Breakfast that you can make half-asleep
Breakfast in hunting camp happens in the dark and the cold, before you’ve fully woken up, and it has exactly one job: get calories and heat into you before you walk out into the weather. Nobody is making eggs benedict at 4:30 a.m. when it’s nineteen degrees.
What works is simple and fatty and fast. Eggs scrambled hard in a cast iron skillet with whatever meat’s around — bacon, sausage, breakfast links — and dumped into a tortilla so you can eat one-handed while you lace your boots. Coffee, always, strong and immediate, out of a beat-up enamel camp mug you’ve burned your lip on a hundred times and would never replace. The breakfast burrito is king of Wyoming hunting camp for a reason — it’s hot, it’s portable, it’s all the food groups that matter when you’re cold, and you can eat it walking to the truck.
Lunch that lives in your pocket
There usually isn’t a lunch, not a real one. Lunch is whatever you carried out that morning, eaten on a rock while you glass a hillside, often half-frozen because it rode against your back all morning. Jerky. A smashed sandwich. Trail mix. A candy bar gone brick-hard. Maybe a tortilla rolled around cheese and summer sausage, the unofficial state lunch of anyone who hunts here. The whole point of midday food is that it requires no cooking, no stop, no fuss. You eat it where you are and keep your eyes on the country.
Dinner, where the real cooking happens (if it happens)
Dinner is the one meal where camp cooking gets to be cooking, on the nights you have anything left to give it. And when it does, it leans hard on one piece of gear: cast iron.
A heavy cast iron Dutch oven or a big skillet is the heart of camp dinner because it does everything and forgives everything. One pot, one heat source, minimum cleanup, maximum calories. The classics show up over and over because they work: a giant pot of chili that gets better every night it’s reheated. Cowboy beans with whatever meat needs using up. A skillet of potatoes, onions, and sausage that tastes like the best thing in the world when you’re that hungry. Pasta with a jar of sauce and browned meat, because carbs are king when you’ve burned six thousand calories. Soup, stew, anything you can eat out of a bowl with a spoon while sitting on a cooler.
And yes, sometimes, on a good night with a fresh animal and a little energy, somebody throws fresh tenderloin or some quick-cooked backstrap on the heat and it’s transcendent — the one genuinely magazine-worthy meal of the trip, eaten by headlamp, gone in four minutes. That happens. It’s just rarer and less central than the daydream suggests. Most nights it’s the chili, and the chili is the truth of hunting camp.
If there’s a dessert at all, it’s cast iron too. A Dutch oven cobbler on the rare warm-enough, fire-allowed night is a genuine event — I get into exactly how to pull that off in Dutch oven peach cobbler the Wyoming camp way. A bubbling cobbler out of the coals after a brutal day is the kind of thing that makes grown hunters go quiet.
The Gear That Makes or Breaks the Kitchen
I’m not a gear-for-gear’s-sake guy, but camp cooking is one place where a few right tools change everything. The propane stove and the cast iron I’ve already made my case for. Past that, a couple things earn their weight.
A good knife matters: a sharp boning or fillet knife is the tool you’ll reach for both at the animal and at the cutting board, and a dull knife in cold hands is how people get hurt. And if you’re serious about bringing the meat home in good shape, a vacuum sealer for game processing back at the house is what stands between you and freezer burn on an animal you worked that hard for.
None of this is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a camp that eats well and one that’s miserable. The romantic version skips the gear, because the gear is the unsexy truth: feeding people well in the backcountry is a logistics problem before it’s a cooking problem.
Why This Cooking Matters to Wyoming
It would be easy to write all this off as just roughing it — eat what’s easy, don’t be precious, move on. But I’ve come to think hunting camp food is one of the most honest and important kinds of cooking we have in this state, and I want to make that case before I sign off.
Wyoming is a place defined by distance and weather and self-reliance. There’s a straight line from the chuckwagon cooks feeding trail crews out of cast iron a hundred and fifty years ago, to a guy in a wall tent today feeding his buddies chili by headlamp after a fourteen-hour day. Same instinct exactly: simple, hearty food, cooked well, for tired people far from a kitchen who’ve earned their appetite. That’s not a lesser kind of cooking. It’s the original kind, the one all the fancy stuff is built on top of, and when I cook in camp I feel connected to this place in a way I don’t quite feel anywhere else.
It’s also the most honest food there is, because the conditions strip away everything that isn’t real. You can’t fake your way through a meal when you’re exhausted and it’s snowing. You find out fast what actually feeds people and what’s just for show. Camp teaches you to cook for nourishment and morale first and Instagram never, and that lesson has made me a better cook everywhere — at home, on the back porch, in my own kitchen in Casper. I cook mostly Mexican and Mediterranean food when I’m home, nothing like camp chili, but the instinct camp drilled into me runs underneath all of it: feed people generously, don’t fuss, make it count.
And the food tastes better out there, full stop. Not because the recipe is better — it isn’t, that same chili is mediocre in my kitchen — but because of everything around it: the cold, the work, the exhaustion, the fact that you earned it with your legs and your patience. Hunger really is the best seasoning, and hunting camp serves it by the bucket. A bowl of beans you’d ignore at home becomes unforgettable when you’ve spent the day hauling an elk down a mountain in the snow.
That’s the part the beer can can’t show you. Not the golden light — the earning. The food at hunting camp matters because of everything you had to do to get to it. And that, more than any recipe, is what makes it Wyoming food.
So here’s what I want from you. If you hunt — or if you’ve ever cooked for hungry, tired people far from a real kitchen — tell me what actually shows up in your camp. The dish your group makes every single year. The disaster that became a legend. The thing you eat cold and standing up and secretly love. Drop it in the comments, or tag @wyofood with a photo of your camp kitchen in action, headlamp and all. I want to see the real version, not the beer-can one. The real one’s always better.
— Sean