All those who venture into the outback to spend more than a few hours have a favorite dish to eat while they enjoy the activity away from their kitchen. At least they should have.

Mine is a quickly prepared corned beef hash. In fairness to the guy I learned this recipe from, a fellow I never learned to like, here is another example of an axiom that teaches there is some good in everyone.

In a lamp lit camp kitchen somewhere (I really can’t recall where) I watched him peel some potatoes, chop them into small squares and boil them in barely salted water, peel some onions and stir them about in a spoon full of hot oil and mix them with the done potatoes and a can of corned beef. When cooked on a stovetop until some of the beef browned, the result was some kind of fine!

Now, it always helps to be exhausted from a day of dragging elk quarters over just a skim of snow or hauling big catfish over the side of a jon boat. But I have failed to find a better meal in camp.

One time I found myself in an elk camp (actually a shack built by the members of a group who hunted the same mountain for many years). They had a kitchen of sorts. I volunteered to cook supper one evening when all were tired. I made my hash. My new pals bragged on the hash so repeatedly that it was embarrassing. Before bedtime, they had appointed the low man in their hierarchy to skip the next day’s hunt, drive into Vernal (40 miles distant) to buy a supply of potatoes, onions and that canned beef from the old and skinny beef in Brazil that get chased around in the brush by grizzled gauchos until they (the steers and the gauchos) are scarred from the tough brush and whose flesh is as tough as leather. When finally captured, the old bulls are made into the stuff we call corned beef.

Their tongues, having torn off thorn brush for years, are dried and become strops with which axes and machetis are sharpened, according to sources. Their hides become backstops on shooting ranges to catch the bullets. But their meat is somewhat more tender and is fat free.

I made a batch of my hash this week and as I sat on the porch savoring each bite, I drifted off to sleep, as happens frequently as the years add up.

For a while I was there outside my little mountain tent on the side of Colorado’s Cold Spring Mountain, sitting on a small boulder with my feet near the fire made of the low, dry limbs from nearby aspens. The hash was being washed down with black, scalding coffee that warmed me under my breast bone. I was planning my day. A 2-inch snow fell during the night so all elk tracks would be fresh. I would follow the game trails, all of which circle the mountains maintaining elevation for easier travel rather than treading up and down.

I didn’t know what events lay ahead. But at the end of the day rest would be welcome, the campfire would warm me, the hash would revive me, the sleeping bag would rest me and I would be reminded once more that life is good.