There’s an old terabyte drive I bought a decade ago to back up the hard drive on my old computer as things were getting a bit glitchy and the blue screen wake-ups of the machine suggested the loss of most of my information was highly inevitable. Before synchronized back-ups through cloud storage became cheap and popular (and included with most new computer purchases), I’d take a few minutes every couple of months to drag and drop the contents of my desktop and a few important folders loaded with outdoors stories, photos, and journal entries along with other necessary day-to-day information and send them through the black USB cable into the small flat rectangle for digital safekeeping. In time, that portable drive has become the repository of all I’ve done outdoors, and while seemingly unnecessary now, it serves as a backup to my automated overnight online backup, because, as the old outdoors saying goes: “if you have two, you’ll have one; if you have you have one, you’ll have none.”

There are pictures of my first summer back from college, amassing a pile of 1.3-MB photos from my primitive digital camera along the shores of the Sheyenne River, as I wrote about my developing adventures on my home flow. Minus a zoom or any HD options on the early Canon model, those memories remain stuck in the dimensions of 800×600 pixels, but still provide a link to those formative years, along with a number of the first columns I wrote as I began to figure out patterns of pike, bass, walleyes and crappies in and around eastern North Dakota and Western Minnesota’s lakes country.

As I became a more devout deer hunter in the late aughts, several file folders on the drive served as a photo dump for all the animals that came wandering in front of my trail cameras. The best received names like “Big 5×5,” “Bachelor Group” and a particularly tender “Doe and Fawn Hugging,” while the rest accumulated for future consideration as stock photos, their filenames unchanged from “IMG_9344” and the like. Thousands of those pictures were downloaded from SD cards, which were then wiped clean and reinstalled into one of several cameras hung on trees down the Redwood River valley in southwestern Minnesota, a monthly ritual from June through the end of the hunting season in December.

There are victory photos of friends posing with roosters in hand against a backdrop of CRP on the Dakota plains, scenic shots of blazing maple trees along a ruffed grouse trail in October in northeastern Minnesota, green bass held high over the warm waters of summer, and crappies glistening in an icy sheen on a frozen lake in winter. All of these things and more are preserved on the drive sitting alongside the computer on which I type, a history of sorts for all of the niches in the outdoors I have explored and those passions which have stuck, including the step-by-steps for all of my favorite lures and flies, and ultimately the fish I’ve caught with them as part of stories written and memories shared. Like that golden tacklebox where the best lures which have survived countless fish and escaped the toughest snags are retired to be reviewed, relived, and perhaps later regifted to another angler down the road, the memories are preserved for inhospitable weekends like this past one, or any time I need a recharge from the past or a quick photo to accent a column or story.

However you store your hunting and fishing memories — on a removable drive or memory stick, social media, on your desktop, in a physical photo album, or perhaps just upstairs in your head — taking some time to make sure they’re all there, and more importantly using them to recall great times on the water and in the field, and assess how life has changed along with your tactics and perhaps your locations, is an important part of growth. No matter the phase in life, the changing interests or pursuits, or what the season’s weather and opportunities brought, each new physical trek into the wild and mental stroll through the past provides insight into what was, what is, and hopefully what’s to come … in our outdoors.