Two area sportsmen honored at the 2009 Lethbridge Fish and Game Association annual banquet have a couple of lifetimes worth of memories to explain their love of the outdoors in Southern Alberta.

Steve Prokop, presented with a life membership, recalls as a surveyor standing atop the Milk River Ridge beholding  “grass as far as the eye could see. Not a building in sight. It was unbelievable, especially to the fellow from Czechoslovakia who was standing beside me.”

Prokop became a fish and game association member in the late ‘50s. He’s now 74 and retired but still gets outdoors year round. As association bird chairman for six years in the ‘90s, he visited pens the LFGA had to raise pheasants at a farm north of Raymond.

“I was involved in feeding and watering the birds three days a week.”

He’d also travel to Brooks during the spring to pick up pheasant chicks for release in the area. Then in the fall, he’d help with release of 2,000 pheasant roosters into southern Alberta habitat.

“All it took was our time and our gas.”

Tyler Roszell, the grand aggregate, winner, remembers fondly sheep hunting and camping in the mountains with his father. Now, he spends as much time as he can in the mountains with his own two sons. The family routinely camps and fishes there a couple of weeks during the summer.

“I can’t get enough of the outdoors,” he says, in wonder at the sheer size of the South outdoors, from the mountains to his brother’s farm near Aden, at the foot of the Sweet Grass Hills. That’s where he’ll begin 8-year-old son Justin’s hunter training, with a .22.

“There are lots of gophers on the farm.”

Tyler was surprised to win the grand aggregate award, based on a complicated formula that tallies points from antler measurements on a mule deer and white tail deer he entered. This was his first award in 26 years of hunting.

For Steve Prokop, being outdoors is award enough as well.

“When I’m fishing on the Oldman River, I see so much wildlife, fishing is sort of incidental. I can come home happy even if I didn’t get a bite.”

He is current fish chairman for the association. As well, for 14 years he co-ordinated the area hunter survey, which provided feedback for fish and wildlife officers.

Association President Brian Dingreville says the banquet last Saturday drew 290 people, “more than we’ve seen in 15 years.” He attributes the steady rise in interest on a family-orientation focus.

“We had lots of young people there,” some of whom received awards for their entries.

Part of the growing interest in the banquet parallels the 30 per cent membership growth in the past year to 1,250.

“A lot of that comes directly from the use of our gun range” at Peenaquim Park in the north side river valley. Member Allan Friesen has spearheaded a standard gun-safety course to train shooters on range use.

“It’s been a huge success,” says Dingreville.

“Our club has reached a maturity,” he says. “They’re just happy to be here.”