Jared Bednar sat motionless on a tree stand, high up in thick South Carolina wilderness, when a 2016 phone call changed his life.

The Colorado Avalanche offered Bednar their head coaching job. A dream scenario warranting massive celebration. Just one problem, though.

Whitetail deer season.

“We were hunting and then he came in. I was like: What’s going on?” recalled Brett Marietti — a former ECHL teammate that owns property outside Charleston where Bednar hunts — in a recent phone interview. “He says: I just got the job in Colorado. He wasn’t even high-fiving or nothing. … We still hunted that afternoon.”

Bednar is truly at peace in search of a trophy buck. He told The Denver Gazette: “In this job, you’re dealing with people all the time. It’s nice to just decompress and get back to the people who know you best, your friends and family, and that’s what they like to do as well.”

I get it.

This exclusive feature on Bednar’s outdoor passion is my last story before taking a weeklong vacation. Bad timing, I know, with the Avalanche playing four games over that span and twice in Finland for the NHL’s Global Series. Yet my (wonderful) bosses recognize the personal importance of a time-honored tradition in my family.

Our annual Colorado second-season rifle elk and mule deer hunt.

It began in the 1980s when a few Front Range outdoorsmen, my dad included, studied maps of the White River National Forest for a remote location to successfully hunt on non-motorized public land. Their search led to a remote camp location about two miles from the nearest public access road, tucked away in thick timber near a spring-fed pond for drinking water.

The hunters hauled up gear and supplies on their backs and with wheeled carts for a weeklong tent camp at 10,000-plus feet of elevation. Bare essentials only. Now, three decades later, my family returns to the same spot each fall to purify our minds and fill our freezers. It’s a hunting origin story that sounds awfully familiar to Bednar.

“Same for me with my dad,” Bednar said. “He was RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) when I grew up in Saskatchewan. It’s obviously pretty outdoorsy. Your vacations are spent camping and going to the lake on the long weekends. With my dad being a cop, we were into hunting and shooting. It’s just something that we did. It was always fun.

“Ironically, I wasn’t into big game hunting when I was there, as good as it is in Saskatchewan. Just because it’s always hockey season. In South Carolina, they have a longer hunting season. It starts August 15th, so I try and go at the end of the summer. … It’s always a little bit tight. But it’s also a nice getaway right before the season starts to come back focus and rested.”

Bednar’s longtime hunting buddy, Marietti, recently purchased his own land southwest of Charleston after previously leasing from a local farmer. The privacy allows Bednar to enjoy the spoils of nature with zero disturbances. His attention to detail that helped win a Stanley Cup translates to his hunting success.

“We’re sitting in a deer stand up in a tree, still hunting, for whitetails. You drop off Jared, and then pick him up two-and-a-half hours later,” Marietta said. “Then he tells you for five hours about his hunt. He likes his details. He could tell you what the bird did, and then he heard a sound, but it was just an acorn. … We trophy hunt, so buck wise, we’re only shooting stuff that we’re going to put on the wall.

“He’s a totally different guy when he’s out with us in the woods. He gets to relax. He doesn’t have to worry about someone taking a picture of him or recording him doing something. He can let his hair down a little bit and enjoy himself, the outdoors and his friends. There’s nobody else out there. Anybody in that kind of spotlight would feel the same way.”

Achieving work-life balance coaching or covering 82 NHL regular season games before a long playoff push is nearly impossible. We both seek peace in the focused silence of a long hunt. Bednar’s schedule, someday, will allow him to pursue elk and deer in the Rocky Mountain high country.

“I’m doing my homework out here in the Colorado area,” Bednar said. “I’d like to buy land someplace.”