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Luke Combs has spent most of 2026 selling out stadiums, breaking records and generally having the sort of year where finding the next goal probably isn't easy.
But he's found one: heading into the Utah mountains with Jason Phelps to try and finally take his first mature bull elk.
The new Leupold film, Days Like These, follows Combs and Phelps on an early-season elk hunt, but it ends up being about quite a bit more than the hunt itself.
Early in the film, Combs reveals he's 30lbs down and explains that getting into better shape for trips like this has been one of the biggest motivations behind his recent health journey.
“This has been one of the big motivators for me,” he explains. While he managed to get up and down the mountains with the group during their previous New Mexico hunt, this time Combs wanted to be able to properly “hold my own” and not do anything by halves.
That New Mexico trip matters here too. It was Combs' first elk hunt and, as Phelps explains, left them with some “unfinished business” after Combs passed on bulls and returned home without filling his tag.
This time, things ended differently.
After once again passing on smaller animals, Combs eventually got his opportunity and took a mature six-point bull.
His reaction afterwards probably says more about what the moment meant than the successful shot itself.
Combs gathered the group together to pray, thanking God for the day, their friendship and the animal that would provide meat for them, before FaceTiming his wife Nicole to tell her what had happened.
He eventually signed off with a simple: “I love you and I miss you, babe.”
There's a much bigger reason the fitness side of all this matters to Combs, though.
He has spoken openly in the past about struggling with his weight since childhood, but becoming a dad changed the way he thought about his health. Rather than being motivated purely by what he saw in the mirror, Combs started thinking about the things he wanted to be physically capable of doing with his children as they grew older.
In a 2023 interview, he gave a particularly fitting example: if his son wanted to go elk hunting when he was 16, Combs wanted to still be capable of climbing a mountain alongside him.
A few years later, he's 30lbs down, climbing mountains in Utah and explaining that preparing for exactly this kind of trip has helped motivate him to get healthier.
That's what makes the title of the film feel particularly fitting.
Days Like These takes its name from Combs' own song, built around the idea that the moments that really matter can't be bought or manufactured.
A day in the Utah mountains with friends, achieving something he'd worked towards and immediately calling his family to share it?
That feels like exactly the sort of day he was singing about.
