Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything, um, Seth Morris. Can you tell everybody
Speaker 1: about the deal with the stop sign you were telling
Speaker 1: me about? Oh so um. In in previous podcasts, I've
Speaker 1: heard you guys talk about what you've heard. Turkey's Gobble
Speaker 1: too Yes, um, which is a long, expansive list list.
Speaker 1: Uh so um one. I'm from Pennsylvania. You can't hunt
Speaker 1: on Sundays, So, which is another thing I'd like to
Speaker 1: talk about. Yeah, if there's three things I like to
Speaker 1: talk about, Okay, it's deep Sunday hunting, laws and ship
Speaker 1: Turkey's Gobble Too perfect that's the things I'm interested in.
Speaker 1: So and this this ties in two of those things.
Speaker 1: If you were packing a dip, this would be a
Speaker 1: great story for me. That was that was high school
Speaker 1: I might have been. So this is my kind of story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is all the stuff I like in it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So um on Sunday, So, me and my buddy went
Speaker 1: out on Sunday just listened for birds. It was during
Speaker 1: the season, and we went to the spot where we
Speaker 1: could like look down this big hollow in Pennsylvania. Calm
Speaker 1: hollows you do Yep, you guys can't do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can hollow, No, not holler hollow. Okay, I was
Speaker 1: gonna accuse you of cultural appropriation. It's still the same way,
Speaker 1: but they actually pronounce it. We call him hollows. Really, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you grew up saying that. Yep, dude, I would have
Speaker 1: known what anybody was talking about. I live up curtain hollow.
Speaker 1: That's how I used to live up curtain hollow pencil.
Speaker 1: Someone asked me where I lived, I'd say, up curtain hollow.
Speaker 1: Do you guys say fixing? Some people do? That depends
Speaker 1: on the person. One time I had was getten the
Speaker 1: off from Missouri, and he told me I was getting
Speaker 1: a six pack of guys. So I would just kind
Speaker 1: of rotate through him throughout the week and we get back.
Speaker 1: You know, everybody's telling what they heard, what they saw.
Speaker 1: The old man looked at me and he said, I
Speaker 1: heard a bull over there hollering in the holler. I
Speaker 1: didn't know what he was talking about. They say hollow
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania, yep, huh. Anyway, we're most have been when
Speaker 1: all them boys is up fighting at Gettysburg. They introduced
Speaker 1: when Lee raided the North. They must introduced that term. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know where it came from,
Speaker 1: but they use it. Um anyway, looking over this hollow
Speaker 1: and weren't hearing anything and just getting ready to leave,
Speaker 1: and there was a stop where at an intersection. M
Speaker 1: there's a stop sign there. So I pick up a rock,
Speaker 1: throw it at the stop sign. Okay, stop there. Uh?
Speaker 1: Were you hucking the rock out of stop sign as
Speaker 1: out of vandalism, out of a vandalism impulse? No, it
Speaker 1: was more of like, I wonder if I can hit
Speaker 1: that with a rock. Okay, I got it. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: with you. So I did that, and I hit it
Speaker 1: and two birds fired off up on the hill. So
Speaker 1: we've got the ads hooking rocks that stop signs. That's
Speaker 1: another one. That's something you could just carry on in
Speaker 1: your truck. A rock you don't you want to carry
Speaker 1: against your tire. You gotta get a new turkey vest
Speaker 1: that has a stop sign staples hung on the back
Speaker 1: of here. Um. Northing I want to touch on real
Speaker 1: quick is a lot of people wrote in about this.
Speaker 1: It's not that fresh of the story anymore. But there's
Speaker 1: a famous skier who, Yeah, he's heard of. How many
Speaker 1: people in here have heard of Andrew McClean the skier
Speaker 1: I have not? Mm hmm. You had heard of his
Speaker 1: book that he wrote, the Shooting Gallery, heard of the
Speaker 1: book The Bible of Yeah, Utah's wash Sash Mountain skiing.
Speaker 1: So this guy in his in his uh as his
Speaker 1: girlfriend or wife um famous skier pillars of the community.
Speaker 1: She's actually some kind of assistant city attorney wife. His
Speaker 1: wife Andrew McLean and his wife Polly Samuels McLean um
Speaker 1: out in the woods. Happened to be toting around I
Speaker 1: guess a set of bolt cutters and steal a dude
Speaker 1: in Utah um near Park City, steal a dude's tree stand,
Speaker 1: a couple of tree stands, and steal a trail camera.
Speaker 1: But they screw up and he misses one of the
Speaker 1: trail camps down the trail. So the hunter gets an
Speaker 1: image on his trail camp or the other dude packing
Speaker 1: out his trail cam and tree stands, and he goes
Speaker 1: and puts the image up online and a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred groups help him out bread and the image around
Speaker 1: and pretty soon it gets identified as this famous skier
Speaker 1: in his pillar of the community wife who now have
Speaker 1: felony charges facing felony charges. I guess he just came
Speaker 1: out said it's inexcusable. He has no excuse, horrible thing
Speaker 1: to do. I'd like to know if he's a skier,
Speaker 1: no man that everything. Listen. I haven't dug into it
Speaker 1: too deep, but I haven't read any suggesting that he
Speaker 1: was stealing the stuff because he needed a new tree stand. Well,
Speaker 1: he can't use it now if he's got felony, if
Speaker 1: he gets charged to felony, because we get a felony,
Speaker 1: you can't have a gun, right, Yeah he could bow hunt.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you could bow hunt. I have his tree stand. Oh,
Speaker 1: I see what you're saying, you know, like if he's
Speaker 1: stealing it for hunting purposes and now he can't even
Speaker 1: what's weird is he brought it home. Yeah, he didn't
Speaker 1: just go and throw it down in a ditch donna
Speaker 1: do or a hollo or a hollo. He brought it home.
Speaker 1: I I don't know if he's speaking to what his
Speaker 1: motivations were. Did he really need a tree stand in
Speaker 1: a trail cam? That bad? The like? I don't know.
Speaker 1: I can't back this up. I don't. I haven't looked
Speaker 1: into it, but everything I've read has carried with it
Speaker 1: the suggestion that they were doing it because they think
Speaker 1: that hunters can suck it. But I don't know he hasn't.
Speaker 1: I don't know that he said. It's just like people
Speaker 1: that the insinuation. Why don't just leave that note hunters
Speaker 1: can suck it on the guy's tree stand rather than
Speaker 1: take his tree stand because he likes he's a man
Speaker 1: of action. Did his wife comment, I haven't read where
Speaker 1: she's had a comment. He's got a lot more to lose.
Speaker 1: It sounds like because um, you know, he's he's like
Speaker 1: a person that people look up to in a outdoor
Speaker 1: enthusiast and probably has some has probably enjoyed some level
Speaker 1: of his life and success utilizing public lands. And here
Speaker 1: he is trashed on someone else's legal right to put
Speaker 1: a couple of temporary hunting implements out on public land
Speaker 1: and violation of nothing. So yeah, it looks pretty bad
Speaker 1: for the guy. I'm just I just read the little
Speaker 1: piece of Powder Magazines website did on it, and uh,
Speaker 1: they're also saying, well, they start off by saying that
Speaker 1: there's been animosity between skiers and backpackers toward hunters over
Speaker 1: the years, but it appears, according to reports, McLean decided
Speaker 1: to find takes in his own hands, which I feel
Speaker 1: like it's kind of bullshit because I've been living in
Speaker 1: both those worlds for over well over a decade, close
Speaker 1: to two decades, and I've never had seen any kind
Speaker 1: of animosity between those groups. You laurened man, you've never
Speaker 1: had any like you never had any like a little
Speaker 1: bit of trailhead tension. No, but it's kind of different
Speaker 1: a backpacker or a skier. It's from freaking some lady
Speaker 1: with a little micro dog that's from way out of town,
Speaker 1: not a not a mouth, a recreator like like that's
Speaker 1: or backpackers, Yeah, I got you, maybe some kind of
Speaker 1: animal rights activists, who knows, you know, but animosity between
Speaker 1: hunters and skiers doesn't seem to really I guarantee you
Speaker 1: go dig to this guy's garbage. There's some meat scraps
Speaker 1: in that garbage. I don't really know. I shouldn't say that.
Speaker 1: What am I talking about? I'm saying that he's meeting
Speaker 1: or not a vegetarian, But I'm just bumping Powder magazine
Speaker 1: is putting this out there that you know, someone should
Speaker 1: be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Um yeah
Speaker 1: I never really liked hunters either. Yeah, I don't say
Speaker 1: that and start start a thing where there's not a thing,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah. They end their little piece here by
Speaker 1: saying somewhere a krusty local tips his glass fills. That
Speaker 1: mean because they said not to condone criminal activity. But
Speaker 1: but Andrew McLean may have just written himself deeper into
Speaker 1: backcountry ski lower with this one. No real, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. I'm a little disciple. Want to talk
Speaker 1: about something really really that says yeah, but okay, moving on? Uh.
Speaker 1: In an episode called an Object in Its Shadow, we
Speaker 1: were talking about an area where a ram, a doll
Speaker 1: ram was laying where he had a little cubby of
Speaker 1: rock that protected him his back. So he had he's viewing,
Speaker 1: he's looking out in a panoramic view, but he's protected
Speaker 1: from behind by an outcrop and overhanging outcrop of rock,
Speaker 1: and we were talking about how it's kind of like
Speaker 1: this perfect spot where he can see everything blow him,
Speaker 1: and then he's got a buffer, a barrier behind him,
Speaker 1: so something that comes immediately behind him might not see him,
Speaker 1: And I was saying, how white tail bucks like to
Speaker 1: lay it like that too, where they'll get on kind
Speaker 1: of like right towards the top of a ridge and
Speaker 1: they'll lay up with their back kind of curled against
Speaker 1: the log or an overhang or something, and they can
Speaker 1: look out down blown so they got some protection and
Speaker 1: hit their hidden from behind and can see below. And
Speaker 1: this dude wrote in to say that it sounds an
Speaker 1: awful lot like what the geographer Jay Appleton called the
Speaker 1: prospect refuge theory in his book The Experience of Landscape,
Speaker 1: and he says the prospect refuge theory goes that people
Speaker 1: humans prefer the edges of environments with a vista in
Speaker 1: front and protection from the back and sides, based on
Speaker 1: the evolutionary understanding that this increased the probability of survival
Speaker 1: for early humans by protecting them from unseen dangers. The
Speaker 1: theory is widely accepted and applied as a design principle
Speaker 1: in landscape architecture an interior design. That's interesting. On a
Speaker 1: similar note, Buck Bowden on another episode was talking about
Speaker 1: how and nature things are around and we got talking about, um,
Speaker 1: how we build humans build squares now, and he was
Speaker 1: saying it's just been proven time and again that that
Speaker 1: when it comes to buildings, squares are just a much
Speaker 1: more efficient use of space. And he mentioned imagine that
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of round objects and you stack
Speaker 1: them in place. You have a lot of empty yeah gaps.
Speaker 1: But you build square and fill with right you build
Speaker 1: right angles and fill with right angles, and you find
Speaker 1: that you have a lot less wasted space and more
Speaker 1: usable Yeah. Look at New York City. If everything was round,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't work, It would be a mess, would be
Speaker 1: another quick piece. Dude road in saying he can't listen
Speaker 1: anymore because we talk about DIP too much. I'm sensitive
Speaker 1: to that, and I don't want to talk about DIP anymore.
Speaker 1: But I have a couple of final thoughts on DIP
Speaker 1: because that for one guy that is sick of hearing
Speaker 1: about DIP, it seems like a lot of other people
Speaker 1: dippers want their voices to be heard. So I just
Speaker 1: shook a guy's hand today, great guy, and I'm walking
Speaker 1: up to shake his hand. I see him take his
Speaker 1: finger and scoop out with his shaking hand. With shaking
Speaker 1: hand him to like him like a lot, like him
Speaker 1: a lot. It's a little etiquette. Um, I'm assuming it
Speaker 1: sanitized it. So guy writes in to say this. He goes,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm glad you guys are discussing the finer
Speaker 1: points of dipping. And he was saying that he used
Speaker 1: to follow a hockey player named Miko Savonin, known as
Speaker 1: the Flying Finn. And this guy got himself a a
Speaker 1: plunger used in the application of his ministering drugs two dogs,
Speaker 1: because he would put his dip in his plunger and
Speaker 1: pack it real tight. I don't know what do you
Speaker 1: get out of packing it tight? He's like a nice
Speaker 1: tight pack. Does that make sense? Well, I guess you
Speaker 1: just don't want it to all apart and yelling your teeth.
Speaker 1: He put it in the tube and then use the
Speaker 1: plunger part to compact it and make it into a
Speaker 1: sort of plug. He then put this in his upper
Speaker 1: lip and no one could ever tell it was in.
Speaker 1: We called it the upper decker, not to be confused
Speaker 1: with the upper deck where you pooping this top jack
Speaker 1: of someone's toilet um. And I actually when when we're
Speaker 1: down here today, I have to go buy apart from
Speaker 1: my col or toilet um. Another guy wrote in to
Speaker 1: talk about the same thing where he's saying that in
Speaker 1: high school, dipping was so bad, and him and his
Speaker 1: friends dipped so much that when they came into class,
Speaker 1: the teacher to make them lying up and inspect their
Speaker 1: lips to make sure they weren't coming into class, and
Speaker 1: they took the hide and scold bandits in their upper
Speaker 1: lip to get away from it. He says that they
Speaker 1: would run both upper deckers and lower deckers at the
Speaker 1: same time, and they took the calling it a full
Speaker 1: stadium that customated even that much more fun to be
Speaker 1: different when you had to come in with like a
Speaker 1: chipmunk and have your teacher inspect your mouth and then
Speaker 1: sit down and be like, I still got two in advice,
Speaker 1: stadium to the full stadium is the best thing in
Speaker 1: the world. Man. Uh, that's infer any kind of newsy
Speaker 1: type of objects. We're just coming back from um coming
Speaker 1: back from big Yeah, you could probably go as far
Speaker 1: as it called a big elk hunt. A big elk
Speaker 1: hunt in extreme south eastern Washington State, which is some dry,
Speaker 1: rocky gass country. People that aren't from that area, I
Speaker 1: think like they didn't realize. How about the difference between
Speaker 1: Western in eastern Washington. Like people know Seattle right for
Speaker 1: all of its rain and everything, but you know half
Speaker 1: that state more and half the state lays and kind
Speaker 1: of in the rain shadow of the Cascades where whether
Speaker 1: you know, comes off the Pacific Ocean and the air
Speaker 1: is laden with water. And as all that air gets
Speaker 1: pushed up over the Cascades, that compresses, the water density increases,
Speaker 1: comes out as precipitation and then it's pretty much dry
Speaker 1: air that moves from there, and that and other factors
Speaker 1: has led to like great aridity in eastern Washington. And
Speaker 1: so we were hunting like a really dry ass desert
Speaker 1: ass place in Washington, and the unit, I'll just tell you,
Speaker 1: you could have plucked us from one of those mountain
Speaker 1: sides now up high, because down low in the bottom
Speaker 1: is a different story. But up high, you could have
Speaker 1: taken yourself off one of those mountain sides and put
Speaker 1: yourself on a Mexican hillside and then the Sonora and
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have known you moved. It was a lot
Speaker 1: like Sonora, dry rock, only grass stage lush bottoms. Give
Speaker 1: that place a little bit of soil and a little
Speaker 1: of water, a little bit of shade, and you get
Speaker 1: these thick hell hole bottoms. I'd go far so far
Speaker 1: as the calm hell holes. Yeah, john rock, juniper like juniper,
Speaker 1: ponderosa pine, western hemlock, yep, western hemlock. And then uh,
Speaker 1: and then down the bottoms of a great array of
Speaker 1: fruiting plants. Yeah, they were fern down there, and there's
Speaker 1: green thick aldership, wild rose, elderberry, choke, cherry um, which
Speaker 1: made it feel jungle like. I mean, we're crawling through
Speaker 1: some thick stuff down in there. Uh. The unit, I'll
Speaker 1: just I'll just tell you the unit. People are always
Speaker 1: calling us to ask us about what units we were
Speaker 1: in doing this, and that it was Unit one seventy
Speaker 1: two Mountain View because it's a really hard tag to draw. Um,
Speaker 1: we've explained this to thousand times. But like in hunting,
Speaker 1: you know, if you have if you have the supply
Speaker 1: of animals, it doesn't meet the demand. What you need
Speaker 1: to do is you need to you need to limit
Speaker 1: how many people are getting after it. And so you
Speaker 1: did do these things called permit draws. Right, So this
Speaker 1: area we're hunting, and they only give out I think
Speaker 1: they give out you know somewhere ten you know some
Speaker 1: of years ten or fourteen archery elk tags for a
Speaker 1: unit that's about a hundred square a hundred square miles
Speaker 1: uh and and and and you need to accumulate what's
Speaker 1: called bonus points to draw the permit, So you need
Speaker 1: to have a typically you would need to have applied
Speaker 1: unsuccessfully for one of these units, you know, between three
Speaker 1: and ten years, in order to have any reasonable chance
Speaker 1: of going and drawing the one seven to permit. And I,
Speaker 1: after living in Washington State for three years, accumulated enough
Speaker 1: bonus points to go and draw the unit for one
Speaker 1: seventy two. And what they call it in Washington is
Speaker 1: they call a quality elk unit UM because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff you can just go. You know, in
Speaker 1: the western part of the state, where success rates are
Speaker 1: extremely low and hunting conditions are extremely difficult because you're
Speaker 1: hunting coastal rainforest, UM, you can have a lot of
Speaker 1: people take a crack at it, and since it's so hard,
Speaker 1: very few and kill elk anyway. But in the eastern
Speaker 1: part of the state, where it's open country and just
Speaker 1: to kind of like the elk act differently and it's
Speaker 1: easier to find them, you need to limit access and
Speaker 1: so they give these these permit draws out and I
Speaker 1: drew one of these permits to go hunt one two,
Speaker 1: and I just got like a buddy recommended the unit
Speaker 1: to me. I never stepped foot in the place. Um,
Speaker 1: hadn't even really been that close to it. And so
Speaker 1: it was like one of those rare conditions circumstances where
Speaker 1: you go to hunt big game in a place you've
Speaker 1: never laid eyes on. We show up down there and
Speaker 1: uh ridge tell them the first thing that we saw,
Speaker 1: big old fire, big fire covered in smoke, a lot
Speaker 1: of smoke made for really we've showed up at sunset
Speaker 1: and like pop down this big ridge and look down
Speaker 1: in this valley. It's really pretty. But yeah, did not
Speaker 1: make it easy for glassing some of the days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when we showed up, it was actually too smoky to
Speaker 1: glass the creek. The drainage. Real hunting is Manachi manatchi
Speaker 1: creek and show up and it's just like smoky as
Speaker 1: all get out, hot and sunny. What's wrong on um?
Speaker 1: And right away I get the idea, like like when
Speaker 1: you do something that you get in your head that
Speaker 1: it's gonna be um, you get in your head that's
Speaker 1: gonna be all you can think about, like all the
Speaker 1: good stuff, because if you look online, the reputation of
Speaker 1: this particular unit is that it's prohibitively steep, very nasty,
Speaker 1: but having tons of elk in it, which one of
Speaker 1: being very accurate assessment totally. But we show up and
Speaker 1: we drive to a spot, like every camp spot has
Speaker 1: someone camped in it, and then we drive to a
Speaker 1: spot and it's like, um, just trucks and dudes, lots
Speaker 1: of trucks, lots of dudes, lots of wall tense set up.
Speaker 1: What you don't agree with that, you, Alice, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's all relative to me. It wasn't that out of
Speaker 1: out of the ordinary what we saw go on, but
Speaker 1: it definitely freaked you guys out. You guys definitely felt
Speaker 1: like the pressure. I think, well, I didn't feel It's not.
Speaker 1: I think I was surprised by it because the last
Speaker 1: three trips that I've done have been in Alaska, where
Speaker 1: you just you fly in and you don't see anybody.
Speaker 1: The last three trips you don't those have all been Alaska. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was the last one of fog Mack, and uh
Speaker 1: so you just fly in and see the dudes that
Speaker 1: you're with. You don't roll up to your spot and
Speaker 1: see like a bunch of in the next human trailers.
Speaker 1: I got you, So then you're coming from that. You're
Speaker 1: coming from that context. And then I'm like, oh god,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of people in our spot. But what's
Speaker 1: weird is what is like the weird thing is everyone
Speaker 1: we're talking to. We pulled into place and there's how
Speaker 1: many trucks are parked where we pull in where we
Speaker 1: slept two trucks there, and but both of them come up.
Speaker 1: Both of the guys come up at dusk separately, and
Speaker 1: both of them are like, dude, there's bulls everywhere, right,
Speaker 1: And he's like I was in there working them, and
Speaker 1: Tommy and Doug there camped down the other way. They
Speaker 1: were working them, and Bill and Harvey were working them.
Speaker 1: Jay and Dan are working them tomorrow, and it's like, wow,
Speaker 1: it's a chaos around here. And I got a little
Speaker 1: panicky and decided to go off somewhere. They had no
Speaker 1: elk ended up not having any help because I think
Speaker 1: it was coincidence because later we heard there were elk
Speaker 1: that is on. Yeah, well here's the other part. What
Speaker 1: So we get up on that big hill and to
Speaker 1: the left of us. As a smoke, it's like apocalyptic
Speaker 1: to the left of you're saying the movie Apocalypto. Yes,
Speaker 1: movies a real disappointment, real disappointment. Um, would you love
Speaker 1: that movie? I've never seen it? Okay, what was that
Speaker 1: little look thinking we might we might need to find out? Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh Apocalypto. Okay, it's about is it worth finding out
Speaker 1: for yourself? No. I was drawn to it because it
Speaker 1: involves hunting and hunters. But these are like pre Colombian
Speaker 1: um people in the people in meso America, like indigenous
Speaker 1: hunters from meso America. And the movie actually like ends
Speaker 1: with your ends with the arrival of Um, ends with
Speaker 1: the arrived of Europeans. So it's presuming me the action
Speaker 1: takes place and it's about a guy you know and
Speaker 1: his they get kidnapped by the bad as tex or
Speaker 1: whatever and he needs to get back and it starts
Speaker 1: just like just like Last of the Mohicans, just like, um,
Speaker 1: what was the really bad Mountain Man movie that Leonardo Revenant?
Speaker 1: The Revenuet Like it's a group of dudes. It starts
Speaker 1: out with a bunch of dudes chasing a big game animal. Like,
Speaker 1: if you want to get people sucked into a movie,
Speaker 1: apparently you have a bunch of dudes in a very
Speaker 1: unrealistic hunting situation chasing a big game animal creeping through
Speaker 1: the woods and they catch tape here in the beginning
Speaker 1: of Apocalypto, and knowing that these people probably would have
Speaker 1: used small stone flakes and probably very carefully disarticulated their
Speaker 1: tape here, instead he pulls out like a giant dagger
Speaker 1: and like stabs it into its guts, and I'm like, man, man,
Speaker 1: you know, why are you gotta Why are you gotta
Speaker 1: Just It's always like that when people are hunting movies. Um,
Speaker 1: what was I talking about? It looked apocalyptic, not Apocalypto
Speaker 1: the movie. It looked apocalyptic, like the end of the
Speaker 1: end of existence. But to the right it got tricky
Speaker 1: because some people would hear the sound we heard to
Speaker 1: the right and think it was apocalyptic, and some people
Speaker 1: would hear the sound to the right and think that
Speaker 1: it was utopian, which is a bunch of fricking wolves
Speaker 1: cutting loose. That was cool. Half of Americans, not half,
Speaker 1: a huge percentage of Americans would hear that and be like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, it's also so awesome. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 1: a little subset of Americans who would hear that and
Speaker 1: be like, come on, dude, I don't want to share.
Speaker 1: I don't want to share with those things. They're hunting
Speaker 1: the same thing we were, and they're just basically saying like,
Speaker 1: when hunting, you're trying to be all quiet, not let
Speaker 1: anything know you're around. These wolves are out there, like
Speaker 1: where could I kill you? I'm coming to cut you
Speaker 1: to basis just howling away. And guys, what they were
Speaker 1: saying that those wolves came into elks. Shut up. That
Speaker 1: shuts the elk down. They stopped bugling, wouldn't you. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I f had like a pack of wolves honing in
Speaker 1: on my locale because I was making a bunch of racket.
Speaker 1: I'd be like, easy, there's easy, let's do quiet. Let's
Speaker 1: do this all quiet, like, which totally makes sense because
Speaker 1: we saw that bull with the cows and he didn't
Speaker 1: make a peep. Yeah, we dropped down into that, Um,
Speaker 1: we dropped down into this this thing called the West
Speaker 1: Fork West Fork Trail to spend the night down in there,
Speaker 1: and all we're hearing about all these bulls screaming their
Speaker 1: fool heads off and here's the bull and narrow some
Speaker 1: cows and he never makes a peep. We watched them
Speaker 1: in the evening, slept listen through the night in our
Speaker 1: sleeping bags, woke up in the morning, never a peep,
Speaker 1: and there's wolf tracks right down on the bottom of
Speaker 1: that drainage. People get anxious about those wolves. Man, the wolves.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's why those talk are all living
Speaker 1: on those steep hillsides, because of those wolves being around.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's advantageous to them, Like it's harder
Speaker 1: for the wolves to get a killed. It's way harder
Speaker 1: from the hunt. They don't like hunting on that stuff.
Speaker 1: Lions like hunting steep stuff, but wolves don't like hunting
Speaker 1: steep stuff because wolves hunt by like lions hunt by surprise,
Speaker 1: very short jumps, and wolves hunt by just wearing you down,
Speaker 1: and so they don't like being on that jump. But
Speaker 1: the wolves have only been there for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: so I think there's probably some of that stories unwritten.
Speaker 1: But we get to the spot now it's like all
Speaker 1: these people running around talking about all these bulls and everything,
Speaker 1: and then um, yeah, it was like I did the
Speaker 1: classic like leave Elk to find Elk, right, But you
Speaker 1: didn't like none, did you? Annie? At that point, I
Speaker 1: didn't really care because I figured in that unit we
Speaker 1: would just walk down any trail and it was going
Speaker 1: to be the same thing. Yeah, because we were here
Speaker 1: in bugling Bulls at the same time we heard the
Speaker 1: wolves the first night, but then after the wolves had
Speaker 1: been in there, they shut up. Would you mind to
Speaker 1: introduce yourself? Uh, my name is Lauren Malton. I'm one
Speaker 1: of the camera guys. The first time you've ever been
Speaker 1: out with us, first meat eater hunt, which but you
Speaker 1: filmed like boatloads of hunts. I've had a few years
Speaker 1: behind the camera on different hunting shows like Randy Newburgh's
Speaker 1: On Your Own Adventures, Huntley Ridder's Outlanders, done some random stuff, uh,
Speaker 1: other kinds of hunts, big network TV shows. Yeah, work
Speaker 1: as a freelancer for a company out of Missoula, Montana.
Speaker 1: Do Mountain Men on History Channel. Uh, and then over
Speaker 1: the years have done a handful of other kinds of
Speaker 1: shows like that. And what we're talking about before I
Speaker 1: interrupted you, Oh, just the fact that we were here
Speaker 1: in Bulls Bugle right there out of camp and you
Speaker 1: guys were just mentioning that we left elk to find elk,
Speaker 1: which you know, as always, you never know what to do,
Speaker 1: right You think you just like Joanna said, you think
Speaker 1: it's gonna be like that everywhere you go, and then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden year hiking seven miles and not
Speaker 1: hearing anything. We did tons of like phone scouting, because
Speaker 1: if you go to a hunt a place you've never been,
Speaker 1: you have to start calling anyone you can think of.
Speaker 1: So in the months since we drew the permit, we
Speaker 1: talked to the local biologists, talked to the local game warden,
Speaker 1: talked to it not quite local game warden, talk to
Speaker 1: a not quite local biologists, talked to two guides, talked
Speaker 1: to a former tag holder who talked to another formal
Speaker 1: tag holder, talked to the pizza magnate Jimmy Doran, who
Speaker 1: talked to another former tag holder. Well, I didn't know that,
Speaker 1: and they all said the same thing, like unbelievably good
Speaker 1: elk con which proved to be true. So I thought
Speaker 1: you just would go and leave those elk and go
Speaker 1: find a whole bunch of other ones. Down in his
Speaker 1: bottom was canyons, and um, yeah, we just started wandering
Speaker 1: around out there. There were elk down there. We had
Speaker 1: to glass him up and then they you know, the
Speaker 1: other thing I was thinking about earlier is there all
Speaker 1: these campsites were full, but there were a lot of uh,
Speaker 1: spike and cow tags given out in that unit as well. Right,
Speaker 1: I think the just spike and I think it was
Speaker 1: over the counter. Yeah, anybody. That's the crazy thing too
Speaker 1: about Washington And I remember hearing this because my brother
Speaker 1: lived at Walla Walla for a while. He's working on
Speaker 1: a salmon project down there and live there, and you can,
Speaker 1: like any time Dick or Harry can go into any
Speaker 1: of these units with his bow and hunt spike elk
Speaker 1: over the counter. So you get, you get everybody goes
Speaker 1: like do you have a bull tag? That's everybody. That's
Speaker 1: the first question out of everybody's mouth, because there's a
Speaker 1: lot of dudes scrounging around and they're trying to scrounge
Speaker 1: up a spike elk an adolescent male, a one and
Speaker 1: a half year old male elk, which we maybe could
Speaker 1: have had a poke at one. We saw two spikes
Speaker 1: and one kind of hung out for a little bit,
Speaker 1: saw a couple of spikes. Yeah, we got some good
Speaker 1: chats that. Yeah, I had a spike stander. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: stood there at seventy yards for a long time. Go ahead,
Speaker 1: I got a question, Kelsey Johnson says, girlfriend wildlife artists. Yes,
Speaker 1: specializing in wildlife, and I actually do some gun dog
Speaker 1: portraits as well. Kind of my little special yeah, specialized
Speaker 1: gun dog portraits. Um, real quick. As someone wants to
Speaker 1: get a picture of their dog drawn up, how should
Speaker 1: they get a hold of you? Um? I show a
Speaker 1: lot of my stuff on Instagram. I have my email
Speaker 1: kind of on there for people that want to reach
Speaker 1: out to me. Well, let's just go ahead and just
Speaker 1: tell them where it is. Now, let's go my Instagram.
Speaker 1: It's a k underscore r A E. John's j O
Speaker 1: h n s. So that's kind of my little art.
Speaker 1: That's your art a little YEA. Also work in the
Speaker 1: egg industry yep, Midwestern agg sales big egg, big corn
Speaker 1: and be big big egg and big art yep, big
Speaker 1: bucks down there. So uh, real quick, just as long
Speaker 1: as round the subject. How did you get in the
Speaker 1: business of drawing people's dogs? Ah, that's a good story. Um,
Speaker 1: well I have done a couple just for family members.
Speaker 1: You know, people love their pets right, Yes, they do. They.
Speaker 1: I've done a couple for family friends and then UM
Speaker 1: got connected with I actually saw a photo that Andy
Speaker 1: Tramp from Muddy Shotter Media took of gun dog from
Speaker 1: No Limits Kennels out of Heiser, Kansas. They just did
Speaker 1: a little photography photography session. I was looking for a
Speaker 1: challenging photograph to draw, asked set to get me access
Speaker 1: to that photo and just starting it for fun. And
Speaker 1: Andy's my good buddy from back, so he took the
Speaker 1: kind of got I just was looking for a little challenge,
Speaker 1: you know. It was. It was a good photo of
Speaker 1: a German short hair with a bird in its mouth.
Speaker 1: And um, the owner of the kennel found out about
Speaker 1: me drawing that while I was drawing it, and then
Speaker 1: he he wanted to buy it. So once his client
Speaker 1: base saw the drawing, they kind of I've got a
Speaker 1: little niche down there in that area. The people that
Speaker 1: have dogs from that kind of asked me to do
Speaker 1: portraits of their dogs or drawing to their dogs. But
Speaker 1: how is it different to draw a gun dog than
Speaker 1: normal dog? Um, I guess it's really not. But like
Speaker 1: there's you know, action shots or people have more photographs
Speaker 1: taken of gun dogs. They'll have a toten a bird
Speaker 1: to a dog or whatever. Yeah, better professional photos of
Speaker 1: you know, people are more into that. I guess, like
Speaker 1: more people take pride in their gun dogs. They're just
Speaker 1: like I don't get any you know. And they tend
Speaker 1: to be a nostalgic lot. Oh yeah, bird dog hunters
Speaker 1: are nostalgic, and they tend to be a steats. They
Speaker 1: have like an aesthetic sensibility. They're passionate about their animals,
Speaker 1: that's for sure. So it's it's fun to do, you know.
Speaker 1: I've kind of let got feedback. It's kind of a
Speaker 1: nice little keepsake for them forever. So I bet you
Speaker 1: there's a healthy portion of New Jersey cat ladies that
Speaker 1: would like to have that market some money. She used
Speaker 1: to paint dog porches for people, and they sure as
Speaker 1: hell weren't um hunting dogs. But but yeah, you gotta specialize, man,
Speaker 1: you gotta get no one within a certain circle this
Speaker 1: I don't know who knows that could be the only
Speaker 1: gun dog painter I know. And you put it all
Speaker 1: up on Instagram. Yeah, and it's it's colored pencil, by
Speaker 1: the way, what I keep saying, pain Yeah, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: showed us some of your work and it's amazing. It's awesome.
Speaker 1: Go check it out on Instagram. Um, as long as
Speaker 1: we got sidetracked by then we have Chris gil Ridge
Speaker 1: Pounder here cameraman, and then in Seth Morris is with
Speaker 1: us working for us also for his first time. Awesome trip.
Speaker 1: You liked it. You can do bad jobs. All of
Speaker 1: these guys crossed three. You bought three kinds of cookies
Speaker 1: and they all missed the mark. I tried. I couldn't
Speaker 1: make it. He couldn't make anybody happy, could you. He
Speaker 1: almost won with the oreos, but double stuff. You always
Speaker 1: think that would be impossible to go and buy three
Speaker 1: types of cookies, bring him back to a group of
Speaker 1: hungry guys and have them all turned their nose and up.
Speaker 1: I took a bite and threw it out. I couldn't.
Speaker 1: I could not stomach the one. The like white that
Speaker 1: anyone that wants to do a grocery store, any American
Speaker 1: goes into a grocery store and here's all the cookies
Speaker 1: in the world laid out in front of him. Okay,
Speaker 1: wholes in America, and he's like white chocolate in the world.
Speaker 1: Does that man, it's one of my favorite cookies. Man,
Speaker 1: I like them. Um, well, yeah, no, I want to
Speaker 1: make and do may do they do? Well? Then you
Speaker 1: you mentioned about how you would love a sleeve oreos.
Speaker 1: You're like, I could pound a sleeveal oreos right now
Speaker 1: that I'm joking because I like double stuffers. Okay, well
Speaker 1: that's good double stuff. Honestly, it was the rest of
Speaker 1: us that they were scraping the filling, although I did
Speaker 1: eat probably close to a whole row over the course
Speaker 1: of like a day. Yeah, paro about sugar. Interesting about
Speaker 1: the dull stuff is it's only one F on this stuff.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not double stuff with one f. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The comedian Mitch Edburg you taught about how you had
Speaker 1: a girlfriend Lynn, who spelled it with one end, and
Speaker 1: then later he had another girlfriend named Lynn who spelled
Speaker 1: it with two ends. But she could always tell if
Speaker 1: he said the wrong Lynn because he would go as
Speaker 1: long as long and so he get trouble. You get
Speaker 1: in trouble for it. Uh, what was it like? What
Speaker 1: was the actual first moment when we um Let me
Speaker 1: ask you this, so we go down and go This
Speaker 1: is a question for Jannest because Jannest is actually the
Speaker 1: one I'm the one hunting about, not the one hunting.
Speaker 1: I'm the trigger man because Johannest is the one who's calling,
Speaker 1: which is the hard part. Like any dipship can shoot something,
Speaker 1: but not anybody can call one in. Right, that's the
Speaker 1: hard part, absolutely, absolutely. There are other hard parts for
Speaker 1: this hunt. Yeah, the hiking rounds hard. Figuring out where
Speaker 1: they are doesn't if you're calling it good at calling,
Speaker 1: but you're not in his own with elk, that doesn't
Speaker 1: even much good. Yeah, there's components to it, right, There's like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of components to it. There's there's being
Speaker 1: like in this particular spot, they're sort of finding them,
Speaker 1: which you can. Anybody with a set of ears and
Speaker 1: a pair of binoculars is gonna like find within Yeah,
Speaker 1: in two in forty eight hours of poking around, you
Speaker 1: would know where somebody you will find elk, but you
Speaker 1: will not be happy about where you found them because
Speaker 1: in this unit everything is below you because the way
Speaker 1: the land access works, it's like, imagine this, Basically you're
Speaker 1: hunting the entirety of a drainage, right, so you have
Speaker 1: the unit is kind of drawn around a drainage where
Speaker 1: you have the old ridgeline that forms the head of
Speaker 1: all the tributaries, and you're the only access points are
Speaker 1: up high. Even the lower access points aren't really lower
Speaker 1: because you still have the canyon to drop down into.
Speaker 1: So anytime you look at it elk from a from
Speaker 1: a road, you're looking down to the point where I
Speaker 1: think some people find that it's just is impractical that
Speaker 1: you would pursue them. Yeah, one to two thousand feet
Speaker 1: below an elevation game and drop because you have to
Speaker 1: then move several hundred pounds of ship back up out
Speaker 1: of you have to then pack several hundred pounds of
Speaker 1: the stuff. But if you're successful, but even just dragging
Speaker 1: your own butt up out of that hill after an
Speaker 1: unsuccessful hunt, I think it's real old, but it's front
Speaker 1: of mind. I think it should be front of mine.
Speaker 1: Like one, just going down there and coming back out
Speaker 1: is hard. It's very hard country to traveling. But I
Speaker 1: think for everyone who's hunting elk, you also have this
Speaker 1: idea that you gotta carry this thing back up, and
Speaker 1: so you're like, man, I'm already miserable. What would I
Speaker 1: possibly do in a situation where you know, and It
Speaker 1: might be that that you just can't hunt it, like
Speaker 1: by yourself in that area. The MOS's elk are just
Speaker 1: simply out of your reach. If you're hunting by yourself
Speaker 1: some places and like, depending on where they're at, it's
Speaker 1: almost irresponsible to try to take one by yourself. There
Speaker 1: is a packer that works that unit. Meet a guy
Speaker 1: with mules, you know that that said he can get
Speaker 1: anywhere in that unit? But has that he said? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I talked to him later. But even then when we
Speaker 1: called him, he wouldn't have been able to help us
Speaker 1: pack until the next day. He would have to hang
Speaker 1: the meat in the shade, which may or may not
Speaker 1: have kept it cool enough. And is that always his story?
Speaker 1: Or sometimes can he if he's in the unit? I mean,
Speaker 1: there's only fourteen people hunting, you know how many people
Speaker 1: are are actually gonna call him? So this is a
Speaker 1: mule packer who runs like a little little side business
Speaker 1: just packing. Yeah, I got and I got his name
Speaker 1: through the outfitter that I chatted with. What's cool is
Speaker 1: the outfitter too? We should talk about how we should
Speaker 1: name the outfitter because he was cool enough to give
Speaker 1: us a ton of intel man Yeah, it was bo
Speaker 1: Olsen of Wilderness Adventures. He gave us very accurate Willerness expeditions. Sorry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he didn't have any clients who were hunting that unit
Speaker 1: that year and gave us very accurate information about the
Speaker 1: unit because he can do it because like he knows,
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be back. It's too hard to draw
Speaker 1: the tag. And he got sheep hunters in there too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we saw a nice ram. I was surprised we didn't
Speaker 1: see more sheep. A lot of beds, a lot of droppings,
Speaker 1: lot of beds, a lot of tracks, thinking we running
Speaker 1: into more. We're really looking for him, that's true, but
Speaker 1: we were looking a lot, yeah, but not looking looking.
Speaker 1: We were looking looking for big tan sides. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: you're looking for elk, it's like a low touch look.
Speaker 1: It's not like looking for mule deer or CU's deer
Speaker 1: like you know, glass and for big horns. You actually
Speaker 1: gotta look look. It's kind of like you can just
Speaker 1: kind of go like, oh, pretty much tight, it's not
Speaker 1: an elk on that hillside in that there's not like
Speaker 1: some six hundred pound buckskin colored things standing in there,
Speaker 1: you know, going um, But yeah, I feel like, if
Speaker 1: you had spent more time looking, you might have found more.
Speaker 1: But then we had a lot of eyeballs out there
Speaker 1: with a lot of binoculars. So one ram but a big, nice,
Speaker 1: beautiful It was a beautiful him. Now you honest from
Speaker 1: a caller's perspective, from an ELK callers perspective, why were
Speaker 1: you not interested in? Why could I not excite you
Speaker 1: in the idea of going and trying to work that
Speaker 1: bull who wasn't bugling because you're in it for the bugle? Yeah? Um, well,
Speaker 1: you have a Canadian shirt up. It's a stone Glacier
Speaker 1: T shirt that has the didn't give you an American
Speaker 1: Median maple leaf on it. You know, I meant to
Speaker 1: ask him why they made it. Maybe you know the
Speaker 1: story behind Canadian outfitters and cheat hunters at their packs.
Speaker 1: The guy that wrote in about the full stadium Canadian.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I don't know. I've got nothing wrong, nothing
Speaker 1: against Canada. I don't have anything against those fellers either.
Speaker 1: Got a lot of friends out there, and uh, I
Speaker 1: just you know Bobby as being a little more American
Speaker 1: than that. But that's cool. It's like a little bit
Speaker 1: doing like diplomacy right now. So there's a bull you
Speaker 1: don't want to and I can't get you interested in
Speaker 1: looking trying to work them, trying to go around and
Speaker 1: work him right. So a couple of things that I
Speaker 1: didn't really like about it. There was a road like
Speaker 1: tuner yards above him, which made it intriguing, yeah, because
Speaker 1: you could easily get within tuner yards. About what made
Speaker 1: it intriguing to me was that he was a hiding
Speaker 1: in plain site. He was a bull who was hiding
Speaker 1: plain site, which interested in him. Yeah, because if you
Speaker 1: drove by on the road, it was so steep below
Speaker 1: the road that you couldn't see him. But dude, all
Speaker 1: day long, hunters passed within a hundred fifty yards. Because
Speaker 1: I shot away point where I thought he was, and
Speaker 1: then shot away point and then measured up to the road.
Speaker 1: He's one fifty yards and not forty five minutes would
Speaker 1: go by when you know, just watching hunters go back
Speaker 1: and forth, back and forth, and here's that bull is
Speaker 1: living out his deal. And they could They could have
Speaker 1: because it was so steep, you could have thrown a
Speaker 1: rock off the road bed and hit that bull. But
Speaker 1: you'd have to have one of the fourteen tags to
Speaker 1: begin with. Just something about that bull I liked. I
Speaker 1: liked everything about his little style. And he had to
Speaker 1: hike down into that drainage and up the other side
Speaker 1: to glass him up. Yeah, he just had well because
Speaker 1: we glassed him up off the trail on the first
Speaker 1: day Lake Lake Ridge Trail. Anyways, the hillside he was
Speaker 1: on was steep as could beat. Did you ever could
Speaker 1: uh real quick? Did I ever send you that stuff
Speaker 1: of that buck in Pennsylvania that was wearing a radio collar.
Speaker 1: And what that buck would do when hunting season came,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yah yah, hich No, he would hide on
Speaker 1: the side of the highway. Yeah, ditch. This buck roamed
Speaker 1: all over Hell all the time gun season would open.
Speaker 1: And he goes set up shop about fifty yards off
Speaker 1: a highway and right underneath the deer jumping sign, hiding
Speaker 1: in plain sight. And then uh Rick French told us
Speaker 1: about a place there's like a saddle, and he was
Speaker 1: taught about his whole life. They've been shooting elk in
Speaker 1: this area and there's a spot where they watch. He's
Speaker 1: out going bed and they watched and they go in
Speaker 1: bed on a four wheeler trail and lay seventy five
Speaker 1: yards from a quad Runner trail and just didn't watch
Speaker 1: quads drive by hiding in plain site. But that happens
Speaker 1: a lot. I was talking to my buddy Jimmy Miller
Speaker 1: this morning, who's coming up to visit me next week,
Speaker 1: and he was saying he's been out like the last
Speaker 1: two or three week weekends hunt was bow in Colorado,
Speaker 1: and every single animal he's seen, he's seemed like two
Speaker 1: or three bull elk, half dozen cows, a couple of bears,
Speaker 1: some moose. Everything's been off from near the road. As
Speaker 1: soon as he goes into the woods, he seens zero.
Speaker 1: They're learning more and more dudes are like willing to
Speaker 1: go farther to hunt. All the hardcore dudes that are
Speaker 1: actually gonna kill something or in the woods, and then
Speaker 1: the guys that are just driving buying four wheelers, you
Speaker 1: ain't gotta worry about them. I guess yeah. They gotta
Speaker 1: figured out like they're gonna if I go deep in
Speaker 1: the woods, suns bitches is gonna kill me. I'd rather
Speaker 1: be out here with these guys playing lightweight ball. But
Speaker 1: you know what, the whole this whole idea of roads
Speaker 1: and then being away from the road, being deep in
Speaker 1: the woods that's only a thing that we've made up
Speaker 1: in our own heads. The deer now might not look
Speaker 1: at it that way. Yes, I think they look that
Speaker 1: there's different types of disturbance, And I think that the
Speaker 1: sound of all day long going by they probably don't
Speaker 1: even like, I'm sure it registers him. They don't associate
Speaker 1: it with trouble. Oh I've seen him associate it. That
Speaker 1: bull doesn't, So tell me why you didn't want to
Speaker 1: work him. So he's on like a really steep hill side,
Speaker 1: So I figured like getting into because it's not like
Speaker 1: you're gonna stand on the road and start calling, right
Speaker 1: because I doubt that bull is gonna be like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: that's probably a cow on the road. I go and
Speaker 1: see what she's up to. You think the bull is
Speaker 1: gonna be like no, no, no, and on that phone
Speaker 1: for that super steep So just like being like trying
Speaker 1: to do a setup setting up on a super steep hillside,
Speaker 1: it's just like you don't even you can't find a
Speaker 1: place to stand. You might start descending that hill and
Speaker 1: slide down into him. It was that kind of hey
Speaker 1: you watch out, um. Nothing was he had two cows
Speaker 1: and calm bulls away from cows can be a tough deal,
Speaker 1: and we knew that there weren't a lot of cows
Speaker 1: in this unit. We talked to some hunters that thought
Speaker 1: they had seen bulls, and it had seen half that
Speaker 1: in cows. That was the weirdest thing I've ever seen,
Speaker 1: is um, I've never seen it where you're where there's
Speaker 1: bulls running like groups of bulls hanging out and there's
Speaker 1: no cows. Mhm. That was a beautiful thing, just like
Speaker 1: just every elk hunter's dream. Yeah, it's like you get
Speaker 1: to where you see in elk. You just the assumption
Speaker 1: was it was a bull. You're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: a cow if you saw one, I have a question.
Speaker 1: So like for the new hunter's perspective, is this yeah
Speaker 1: really yeah, not a lot of elk experience. Is this
Speaker 1: like peak rut? Definitely in the thick of it, in
Speaker 1: the thick of it. For the story, they are like
Speaker 1: very eager about going towards the sound of cow elk.
Speaker 1: Yeah too, Steep for you too, Steep, he's got a cow.
Speaker 1: He's not bugling watching him. He was he just like
Speaker 1: was sitting there feeding with his cow, with two cows.
Speaker 1: And so you figar with the word milk toast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was that. I don't know the definition people see.
Speaker 1: Here's the deal man, It's like it's spelled different than
Speaker 1: milk toast. Milk toast is is like a spelled like que.
Speaker 1: I believe it's spelled like m I l q u
Speaker 1: e means lame and different, timid or submissive. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a very milk toast bowl. What's the spelling, Johnie, like
Speaker 1: m I l q u e toast. But my whole
Speaker 1: life I thought it was milk. Like if you guys
Speaker 1: did a blandass meal and toast and soaking milk, R're like, dude,
Speaker 1: I don't want that. Yeah. My father other his term
Speaker 1: for milk toast was a term because he's from Italian ancestry,
Speaker 1: was raised by Sicilian immigrants. He's raised by his grandfather. Um,
Speaker 1: my father had several things that he would use terms
Speaker 1: he would use for people he didn't like, and they
Speaker 1: were they described different types of people. One of them
Speaker 1: was a horse's ass. Okay, that's like a very particular
Speaker 1: type of person he didn't like. I though it was
Speaker 1: a putts, which sounds Yiddish, and that was like another
Speaker 1: type of person he didn't like. But definitely not a
Speaker 1: horse's ask The guy's a putts. Another term for a
Speaker 1: person he didn't like. It's being like a lacking a
Speaker 1: little coordination. For Putts, that was like grumpy or old men. Yeah,
Speaker 1: horse's ass would be like a blow hard, Okay, Putts
Speaker 1: would be someone who messes everything up like a like
Speaker 1: a person just can't incompetence. Then there was a term
Speaker 1: a mingulu morta, which I've talked to people speak Italian,
Speaker 1: and basically he was saying a person who has non
Speaker 1: functioning sexual organs dead more to being dead meanular being
Speaker 1: a and I'm not saying the word right but me
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's basically yeah, so the bull is
Speaker 1: like a meingula more to bull. Well that or he's
Speaker 1: just being super super slick, like he had his two cows,
Speaker 1: he had his little hidy spot. He's pretty happy. He's
Speaker 1: you know, he's got anything going for him. And he's saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: do you ever find that there's a bull that uh,
Speaker 1: that gets cows and shuts up? Oh? Yeah, because he's like,
Speaker 1: why would I why in the world would I be
Speaker 1: like advertising my situation? But you know he still has
Speaker 1: to bugle right to the cow. Like there's the bugle
Speaker 1: between the cow and and him that goes on, not
Speaker 1: just between him and another bull. Right. I think I
Speaker 1: read once that when she says no, he has to
Speaker 1: bugle as like a sign of like like some sort
Speaker 1: of respect type deal will come come. That's in human terms,
Speaker 1: but as in like when it's like he's say no problem, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's cool, I understand, we'll try again ten
Speaker 1: minutes or tomorrow, maybe five. But I've seen I've seen
Speaker 1: it happen a lot. There's like the the you know,
Speaker 1: the hurting or whatever you want to call it that
Speaker 1: he's doing, tending, tending, pushing him around, and then it's
Speaker 1: sort of like it gets close, it doesn't happen, and
Speaker 1: they sort of stopped. He always bugles, but I've seeing
Speaker 1: him bugle so softly that I could see him bugling,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't hear it. Two yards. I could see
Speaker 1: him go into the whole posture, stick his neck out, curls,
Speaker 1: you know, put his head up, see the steam come
Speaker 1: out of his mouth right after he chased the cow,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't hear him. I think that was why
Speaker 1: I think he was just like yeah, and he had
Speaker 1: a bunch of cows. This one that I saw do this.
Speaker 1: He's just staying chill about it. Yeah, so you so
Speaker 1: you couldn't you couldn't work that bull. Maybe maybe now.
Speaker 1: I just didn't feel like it was a high high odds,
Speaker 1: you know, it wasn't worth it from what it was
Speaker 1: gonna take us where we were and was gonna take
Speaker 1: us to a bore out of this drainage that we
Speaker 1: were in to go back up and out and put it,
Speaker 1: you know, put a half day effort just in getting
Speaker 1: into position. I just didn't feel like it was high
Speaker 1: enough odds that warranted that effort that we should just
Speaker 1: keep hiking down the trail and go into some country
Speaker 1: we hadn't been into and strike up another one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: got you. Um, there's so much to explain down in
Speaker 1: there around like how it like what our thought processes were,
Speaker 1: because there's too many there's like two many options at
Speaker 1: a point in time, you know, when you're down in
Speaker 1: that area right at that point in time. Yeah, just yeah,
Speaker 1: I just wander around like you get frustrated quick and
Speaker 1: and um then you get like that wolf stuff stuck
Speaker 1: in your head. M hm. No, because we were thinking
Speaker 1: We're like, you know, one of the best units in
Speaker 1: the state, and all of a sudden it's been like
Speaker 1: twelve hours, haven't heard a bugle, twenty four hours, haven't
Speaker 1: heard of bugle. Well, when we were in that area,
Speaker 1: we didn't know about the wolf thing yet, right, No, Oh,
Speaker 1: we'd heard him ripping though, Yeah, we had heard him ripping,
Speaker 1: but we didn't know that they that. We didn't get
Speaker 1: the report later that he had been in there, had
Speaker 1: heard some elk and shut him down. Yeah, because another
Speaker 1: hunter later was saying that man, they were going they
Speaker 1: were going good in there, and then when the wolves
Speaker 1: came through, they shut up. And the guide that Janice
Speaker 1: talked to also said that the year before things were ripping,
Speaker 1: meaning bowls are bugling, pack of wolves came through raising
Speaker 1: hell and that it's shut down for three or four days.
Speaker 1: Everybody just gets quiet. Seth. Saw a mountline I did,
Speaker 1: sitting sitting on its ass. Yeah, looking over the mule
Speaker 1: of your spot. That was cool. Yeah, they're cool to see.
Speaker 1: You don't see that too often, No, And I don't
Speaker 1: view them as competition as much. You really should, yeah,
Speaker 1: you really should. Oh, yeah, you think elkill shut up
Speaker 1: from them? I don't know, but they kill a lot
Speaker 1: more elk the wolves do, not per one. But I
Speaker 1: mean like there's just there's just so much more widely distributed.
Speaker 1: I mean they're everywhere, right Like anywhere that has an
Speaker 1: elk has a mountline. Well, it's not the Eastern States,
Speaker 1: the Western States. Every elk is going to run into
Speaker 1: a mountainline. You know. Um you when I was getting
Speaker 1: frustrated by the lack of beagles and you, Janice felt that, um,
Speaker 1: you felt that that it was just we weren't in
Speaker 1: the rut zone. Yeah, we were just in the wrong spot.
Speaker 1: It wasn't that they weren't doing It's just we weren't
Speaker 1: in the place that they were doing it. Mhm. And
Speaker 1: we slowly just made a big long loop and ended up,
Speaker 1: you know, on the other side of the giant drainage
Speaker 1: that you described earlier, where back to where Dave Tom
Speaker 1: Bill will We're all working an infinite quantity of bulls
Speaker 1: out of a bull in a place where the outfit
Speaker 1: that we talked you said that you could just that
Speaker 1: you'd find a bull in every canyon. Well he actually
Speaker 1: recommended that we spend our whole week I was in
Speaker 1: there and then almost kind of accidentally called in the bull. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was calling a little bit just to do some locating,
Speaker 1: to kind of take a sense as of what was
Speaker 1: out there. And uh, we had a bad win for
Speaker 1: this scenario. It's the wind was dropping down the hill
Speaker 1: from the morning thermals. The air was cool, it was
Speaker 1: dropping down the hill and I looked down below me
Speaker 1: in a couple hundred yards away, here comes a satellite
Speaker 1: six point. And you always know you're in a good
Speaker 1: unit when like a like a nice six is a
Speaker 1: satellite and he's coming in silent, and the satellite bull
Speaker 1: being a bull, it's like not a dominant figure in
Speaker 1: the herd. He's just not big enough the man because
Speaker 1: later there was a bull just crank him in that
Speaker 1: same zone. I don't know, I just I just I
Speaker 1: just feel like because he was coming in, coming in quiet,
Speaker 1: coming in, Yeah, he was a sneaky peat. He's like
Speaker 1: a you know, a nice six point bull that you
Speaker 1: know I shoot any day. Um. That's thing. This unit
Speaker 1: has a lot. This unit is kind of we now know,
Speaker 1: is known for bulls that are like seven by seven
Speaker 1: and seven by eight, some crazy bulls. Yeah, I bet
Speaker 1: you we saw them three or five seven by seven.
Speaker 1: So this bull comes just creeping in and then crept
Speaker 1: out seth some creep away wind. Yeah, definitely caught wind.
Speaker 1: So they come in to investigate, and then they quietly
Speaker 1: without announcing their presence, saying themselves, there's five dudes there.
Speaker 1: I'm leaving three smells like five we're doing We're doing
Speaker 1: zero cent control, We're just doing wind. Yeah, there's no
Speaker 1: point at that. What would like what would you even do?
Speaker 1: A wide variety of things. There's masking sense, okay, there's
Speaker 1: like odors that you could put on yourself too. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying these things work. These things that exist there
Speaker 1: are there's a line of clothing. Yeah, it's been kind
Speaker 1: of scientifically discredited, but some people remain firm believers in
Speaker 1: a line of clothing that has a filtration carbon filtration
Speaker 1: system built into it that sort of scrubs your odor
Speaker 1: emanating from your body. I think the problem with that
Speaker 1: is most of the older emanating from your body is
Speaker 1: being exhaled mm hmm, So they make a face mask
Speaker 1: to help filter your exhale. Has that really been proven
Speaker 1: that most of the others actually just coming from your breath?
Speaker 1: I should say most, but just but but but you
Speaker 1: can wear clothes, but you're still breathing out. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: shouldn't say most, but a lot of older you're exhaling
Speaker 1: a lot of I remember like there was like a
Speaker 1: hunters sent concealment gum came around. My dad used the
Speaker 1: hunt with the guy that would during honey season eat
Speaker 1: a lot of carrots. He tried to be food. I
Speaker 1: remember hearing the old nuts one time say that all
Speaker 1: he drank was apple juice, so that way when he
Speaker 1: would pee during hunting season, just smell like apples um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then you got like Doug buck Man during yeah, big. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's also I think that Cabella's made for Bill Winky,
Speaker 1: a full gortex suit that had rubber gaskets ankles, wrists
Speaker 1: and neck and then maybe even a hood. That sounds
Speaker 1: like a good thing to hike up down just wear
Speaker 1: pretty much. Yeah, So it wouldn't work for what we
Speaker 1: did for hunting. You just have it like just the
Speaker 1: pants on top hanging down. You hike into your stands,
Speaker 1: slowly set up, get in there and put the top on,
Speaker 1: seal it all off. Some people out West that I
Speaker 1: know do this and they don't think that it completely
Speaker 1: breaks down, you know, keep you sent free. But they
Speaker 1: look at it as in buying you time before an
Speaker 1: animal might spook from scent and buying you distance that
Speaker 1: you can be from an animal before they sent you.
Speaker 1: But they will have a um plastic toe that has
Speaker 1: completely that has closed, and they probably did some special
Speaker 1: sort of washing too to eliminate all possible set no
Speaker 1: perfumes and dies and whatnot in there. Probably has pine
Speaker 1: boughs in there and some dirt and leaves and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But they have a separate tupperwear for every day of
Speaker 1: the hunt, and it includes everything from underwear, shoes, socks,
Speaker 1: top bottoms, bass layers, everything. Yeah, every day you swap
Speaker 1: out every day. Every day you just yeah, and you
Speaker 1: do the best you can by taking some sort of
Speaker 1: some version of a shower and then you put on
Speaker 1: those fresh clothes so you're not walking around and clothes
Speaker 1: like because this it was a hot hunt this week
Speaker 1: and we were we were going through I felt like
Speaker 1: a sweat cycle twice a day. Uh okay, archery hunting
Speaker 1: white tails, like what my dad did, what we did
Speaker 1: growing up is you kept your hunting clothes outside hanging
Speaker 1: up in the breeze. Before you went out hunting, you
Speaker 1: would shower. We wouldn't use special soap. They make a
Speaker 1: lot of soaps and no deal with no perfumes. There's
Speaker 1: nothing I get more nostalgic about. Sorry to interrupt, but
Speaker 1: is that green? Is it sent away soapy? Like the
Speaker 1: lines all surfaces and Dug Durn's bathroom. But I feel
Speaker 1: like of the white tail woods like hunting camps. It's
Speaker 1: like there's like ten of those bottles in various levels
Speaker 1: of fullness in the shower, right, it's like that green liquid.
Speaker 1: It's meant for your hair for everything. Steve Kendra shower,
Speaker 1: Yeah stuff and when yeah, when I like get in
Speaker 1: a shower and see that stuff, like, it's just a
Speaker 1: flood of memories of like yeah, because that's what we did.
Speaker 1: Exact products. Yeah, green gels soap, so you would keep
Speaker 1: your clothes hanging up in the breeze, take a shower
Speaker 1: with preferably with non perfumed soap. Put where rubber boots
Speaker 1: that you clean. You don't go and buy gas with
Speaker 1: these boots on, right, You put them on when you're
Speaker 1: ready to walk to your stand. You don't go to
Speaker 1: the gas station and get on nasturals. You don't wear
Speaker 1: them in your car. You don't even drive to your
Speaker 1: hunting spot in these clothes. You get to your hunting spot,
Speaker 1: you stripped down, You put your clothes on you've been
Speaker 1: storing in a separate container, and you walk a very
Speaker 1: slowly so as to not break a sweat, getting your
Speaker 1: tree stand, put on your outer layers, and the whole being.
Speaker 1: Of course, you're not gonna like eliminate your scent, but
Speaker 1: like to buy you a few minutes. When I used
Speaker 1: to trap fox um, which are difficult to catch, I
Speaker 1: would do I would have a I would have totes
Speaker 1: that would fill with straw, and I would keep my
Speaker 1: clothes and boot and all my other equipment in totals
Speaker 1: filled with straw, and then would use rubber gloves that
Speaker 1: you would wash fastidiously all the time, and then keep
Speaker 1: your and then only wear those boots on natural ground
Speaker 1: in order to try to eliminate some of the scent
Speaker 1: you were leaving behind when you're trying to catch fox.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of work. But here, like a basic
Speaker 1: here's what we could have done. Like, here's the basic
Speaker 1: thing you do. You least bring some soap and some
Speaker 1: body powder, and every time you hit a creek, you
Speaker 1: try to scrub up a little bit, and a lot
Speaker 1: of guys it's not too much either. And we weren't
Speaker 1: doing this because we're just working the wind. And we
Speaker 1: were to a place that had like steep slopes and
Speaker 1: a lot of thermals. So it's like, if you're willing
Speaker 1: to work thermals, then we did work them very successfully. Um,
Speaker 1: if you're willing to like do that, you can get
Speaker 1: away with this. But if you're in an area that's
Speaker 1: like just famously for swirled winds and stuff, and I
Speaker 1: think you had to do it, and you were really
Speaker 1: just gonna make the sacrifice, at least have your sort
Speaker 1: of like daytime hill climb and close and you might
Speaker 1: keep in your backpack in a bag in your backpack
Speaker 1: your actual stock and clothes. And as part of your deal,
Speaker 1: when you're getting ready for the evening hunt or getting
Speaker 1: ready for the morning hunt, you wash up, put some
Speaker 1: body powder on. Um, people just take a baking bacon soda,
Speaker 1: put in a spray bottle, put some water and bacon soda,
Speaker 1: scrub up, put your clean version of clothes on, and
Speaker 1: try to go about your business. But we just played wind.
Speaker 1: The question came up while we were there if the
Speaker 1: smoke was gonna have any effect on scent too, because
Speaker 1: we were in a smoky area. It was smoking enough
Speaker 1: for reals annoying and you got black, black gunk coming
Speaker 1: out of your nose. I wonder if it affects the elks.
Speaker 1: Has to help. It cannot hurt. There's no way it hurts.
Speaker 1: Does it cover your scent? Has to There's no way
Speaker 1: that they're gonna smell you better amid all the confusion
Speaker 1: of a bunch of smoke in the air. It's not
Speaker 1: gonna like enhance their ability to to detect smell. And
Speaker 1: then the other question was was that activity in that
Speaker 1: area moving the elk out of wherever the controlled burns
Speaker 1: were in closer to where we were. I don't know
Speaker 1: about closer, but I would say that it displaced and
Speaker 1: probably concentrated elk into areas of low activity. And I
Speaker 1: think the fact that all those bugles are coming from
Speaker 1: the bot tend to be coming from the bottoms of
Speaker 1: those canyons is not accidental. I think that the gradual
Speaker 1: activity of humans being around, pressuring and pressuring them is
Speaker 1: has to have the effect of pushing them into places
Speaker 1: where they're just not getting messed with as much. If
Speaker 1: you left with their own devices, they'd probably higher up
Speaker 1: on the slopes. I think about that hard to say
Speaker 1: more water in the bottom, that's true. Um, So we
Speaker 1: keep on hunting. We eventually and this is kind of
Speaker 1: how stuff goes. Have all kinds of adventures. See a
Speaker 1: black bear, see a big horn, see some mule deer,
Speaker 1: have a bunch of adventures. And there's a there's a spot,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a place we want to go hike.
Speaker 1: We want to like access area of our unit where
Speaker 1: the only access point is sort of blocked by a big,
Speaker 1: very elaborate wall tent set up. Like these guys are
Speaker 1: practicing like siege warfare man. They got like a camp.
Speaker 1: I mean, these guys like got splitting malls and stuff.
Speaker 1: They're splitting firewood. I mean they're camped out archery target, backstop, trailers, generators,
Speaker 1: pots and pants hanging everywhere. They did two gallon drums.
Speaker 1: I don't know what was in them for drinking water.
Speaker 1: I have no clue. Barrels of presumably water and maybe
Speaker 1: fuel or maybe just food storage for bears. Could be camping.
Speaker 1: And I want to say, is an extraordinary card on
Speaker 1: a one to ten. On a one to ten, that's
Speaker 1: nine or ten. Yeah, they were dialed. They had the
Speaker 1: wall ten and then like one of those like easy
Speaker 1: up canopies as like a porch. Yeah, you start running
Speaker 1: a tarp over the whole thing, big setup. They've been
Speaker 1: there sixteen days, seventeen seventeen days, um, And I'm uncomfortable
Speaker 1: with uh going and parking right next to their camp
Speaker 1: to hike in because because this comes from being that
Speaker 1: we're filming, I'm really I try to be sensitive of
Speaker 1: like people go into the wood. They're going to the
Speaker 1: mountains to have peace and quiet and and and enjoy
Speaker 1: a level of anonymity presumably, And so I'm always a
Speaker 1: little bit leery about like rolling up on people with
Speaker 1: five guys carrying cameras and just you know, I'll try
Speaker 1: to be sensitive to that because I wouldn't really love
Speaker 1: that a whole bunch if that happened to me. So
Speaker 1: I want to park elsewhere and then kind of like
Speaker 1: slip through their camp. Um park elsewhere and slipped through
Speaker 1: their camp real quiet, and go down below and start
Speaker 1: hunting right below their camp. But we have the show,
Speaker 1: but just a minute, they're rolling in with a bull
Speaker 1: like they're just like we like arrived the camp with
Speaker 1: the like Honestly these second that the truck pulls in
Speaker 1: with the dead bulls, school and meat in the back
Speaker 1: of the truck. And this is the funny thing about
Speaker 1: especialty unit like this too, like a hard to draw
Speaker 1: unit because no one has any ownership. No one has
Speaker 1: any sense of ownership over like their spot. You're not
Speaker 1: coming back or like they said, it will be six
Speaker 1: years and you have a whole new crop about that
Speaker 1: will be working. So he so it's not like a
Speaker 1: most place where no one's gonna tell you anything, you know,
Speaker 1: like hey, where'd you get that limited mallards right there?
Speaker 1: Does just say anything to you about it? Like I
Speaker 1: know now, not even to ask obviously, I'll be like, hey,
Speaker 1: what mountain range were you in or what like river
Speaker 1: were you hunting? But but this guy, he had it
Speaker 1: took him six points, so he had six unsuccessful application
Speaker 1: years drew the unit and he just spills the beans
Speaker 1: because who cares. Someone told him about it. And it's
Speaker 1: this little corner of the unit where um, this little
Speaker 1: corner of the unit where you're kind of on National
Speaker 1: forest land, but boxed up against some private stuff. And
Speaker 1: he just ribes an area where there's seven or eight bulls,
Speaker 1: um that they were like butcher and a bowl and
Speaker 1: there's more bulls bugle in a hundred yards away. Mayhem
Speaker 1: and craziness. Yeah, it sounded good. And we go down
Speaker 1: into this area and it was like it was sort
Speaker 1: of the elk hunting. It was the elk hunting that
Speaker 1: you always dreamed that you would experience but somehow never
Speaker 1: get to experience. But there it was. We're gonna skip
Speaker 1: forward to there. We've been on a long time and
Speaker 1: I want to spend time on on No, I understand,
Speaker 1: I want to make surely you're already jumping ahead of that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I want to spend particularly time on the when
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the one we got, but the setup
Speaker 1: where you called in a a scar attering of bulls
Speaker 1: into a location. Right, We go down in this area
Speaker 1: and there's some not a lot going on with some
Speaker 1: bulls ripping vegle in here and there. It's like started
Speaker 1: in a slow morning, almost nothing. We heard a couple
Speaker 1: of descent vehicles. We kind of get to the edge
Speaker 1: of the private property. It sounds like there's one on
Speaker 1: the private then maybe a different bulls, you know, vehicles,
Speaker 1: but it's not like it's not a big rough ball
Speaker 1: like we were expecting, like we've been told about. But
Speaker 1: eventually we get where like, oh, there's a few bulls
Speaker 1: going like later in the morning, and it's mixed. It's
Speaker 1: like half open grassland and half dense timber. Very they're
Speaker 1: pretty steep area and we're kind of like halfway between
Speaker 1: the top land, like halfway between the ridge tops and
Speaker 1: half between the bottoms. And you can hear bulls enough
Speaker 1: for you couldn't even really tell who was what right,
Speaker 1: just as like a bunch of bulls going off and
Speaker 1: you start calling, walk through how that went, what you
Speaker 1: were doing? Well. First we got to a spot that
Speaker 1: seemed like a good spot for a setup. And I
Speaker 1: usually look for most importantly is I like to have
Speaker 1: a break in the terrain that I can hide behind.
Speaker 1: That was gonna if the bull wants to come and
Speaker 1: see what's making the noise, he's gonna have to come
Speaker 1: and look over that breaking the train, whether that's like
Speaker 1: a thick strip of vegetation, he's gonna come look through,
Speaker 1: or most often times in the mountains, it's going to
Speaker 1: be some sort of a ridge or like a horizon
Speaker 1: that you could be two hundred yards away from it,
Speaker 1: you could be twenty yards away from it. But if
Speaker 1: you want to see over it, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: come right to the edge. Yeah. Picture of the worst
Speaker 1: case scenario would be that you're in a room and
Speaker 1: there's a loud noise of a cow and a bull
Speaker 1: comes into the room and he's like very quickly able
Speaker 1: to say that there is definitely not a cow in
Speaker 1: this room. That would be a bad situation. The best
Speaker 1: situation is he'd be like, where's she hiding? There's so
Speaker 1: many places she could be, yeah, or yeah, you're forced
Speaker 1: him to come to the doorway, yeah, to be able
Speaker 1: to look into that room he's coming and walk around
Speaker 1: the room. Yeah, no, just stick his head through the
Speaker 1: door at that point. At that point, if we've done
Speaker 1: everything right, you ought to be able to get a
Speaker 1: shot as long as he's not you know, facing some
Speaker 1: wonky direction, you know. But if he comes in there
Speaker 1: to look inside the room and go what's going on
Speaker 1: in here? Then that should be like the point of
Speaker 1: the shop. Yeah, And this was a knife edge was
Speaker 1: like he's in the hallway. He's not gonna come to
Speaker 1: the doorway. You're probably not getting a shot. And this
Speaker 1: is a this is a knife edge ridge. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like we're going we're walking down the ridge. It's kind
Speaker 1: of steep, but it drops off steeper to the left
Speaker 1: and to the right hill just sort of wraps around
Speaker 1: and he's bugling in this timber to our right that's
Speaker 1: wrapping around. And yeah, so you pick a tree to
Speaker 1: set up in front of with Chris. I just I
Speaker 1: don't know, western hemlock or a dug fur maybe probably
Speaker 1: want Yeah, good spot for me, man, I got all
Speaker 1: the footage. Yeah, bad spot in two ways, but I
Speaker 1: won't explain why it's a bad spot until we get
Speaker 1: to the part where the bulls started coming. Okay, so
Speaker 1: uh yeah, I just, um, I'm trying to think when
Speaker 1: I actually started out on the ridge, because like, until
Speaker 1: I feel like there's no reason for me to actually
Speaker 1: start hiding in that bedroom in air quotes until I
Speaker 1: know he's coming. Until then, I might as well stay
Speaker 1: kind of where I can see a lot and sort
Speaker 1: of be digesting the situation. And um, because I might
Speaker 1: see him a hundred yards away, I might see his
Speaker 1: antlers moving through the timber, and then I can adjust
Speaker 1: if I don't hear him down there or something. So
Speaker 1: I just kind of hide in plain sight, just kind
Speaker 1: of sitting around on calling and just seeing if we
Speaker 1: can get him worked up enough ntil he's moving our direction.
Speaker 1: The antlers on the elk, that's the point I want
Speaker 1: to bring up real quick. The antlers on the elk
Speaker 1: are extremely useful for hunting calling elk because you're always
Speaker 1: gonna see that bulb. Not always, there's a good chance
Speaker 1: you're gonna see that bull before he sees you by
Speaker 1: seeing his antlers, yeah, because he's got these things sticking
Speaker 1: two three ft right, So when he's like rolling up
Speaker 1: over a hill, he can't see what's up ahead. But
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, it happens time and again where you
Speaker 1: get to glimpse him before he has a chance to
Speaker 1: glimpse you, and then take it, take the necessary action. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I just started with some light cow calling, which
Speaker 1: should be just a couple of mus here and there,
Speaker 1: and uh, he seemed pretty responsive, you know, being pretty
Speaker 1: good bugling right on top of it. Yeah, And then
Speaker 1: it doesn't really mean that much, like you're not getting
Speaker 1: all excited at that point, Well, I'm not. I'll tell you.
Speaker 1: What makes me excited is what happens next. It's better
Speaker 1: better than not you no, no, no, no, you're right.
Speaker 1: But as we saw a night or two before this,
Speaker 1: you can make beaut you can make You can sit
Speaker 1: there and make bulls beugle for two hours, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can be trying to read into what they're doing.
Speaker 1: But after a time you'd be like, that thing will
Speaker 1: not budge. So just getting them, just getting them the
Speaker 1: bugle doesn't mean much. What means something is all of
Speaker 1: a sudden it's quiet, and he rips again, and he
Speaker 1: is very definitely moved way in your direction. Then your
Speaker 1: heart rate goes, then your heart's in the back of
Speaker 1: your throat. So at that point i'll sort of I've
Speaker 1: fell off that ridge to the left metaphorically and got
Speaker 1: down there where I was in the bedroom. He was
Speaker 1: gonna have to come and he was gonna come out
Speaker 1: onto that spine and look down that hill to see,
Speaker 1: you know, the cow that he thought was down there.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, I continue to call and us usually
Speaker 1: at some point, like if I don't feel like the
Speaker 1: cow calls are doing enough, I'll start to add in like, oh,
Speaker 1: another bull is showing up to be like, hey, dude,
Speaker 1: if you want to you know, if you want in
Speaker 1: on this party, you better get over here, because someone
Speaker 1: else just showed up. And so I'll do a couple
Speaker 1: of things to imitate that. One you can bugle, sound
Speaker 1: like a bull bugle and and sort of challenge the
Speaker 1: other bull. And then you can make a lot of
Speaker 1: loud noises like a bull is tending a cow, which
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen in the wild, there they they
Speaker 1: chase them, and so they get run through bushes and
Speaker 1: they're cracking sticks, they're rolling rocks, especially on yeah, especially
Speaker 1: on steep hill sides. And so I'll start doing that
Speaker 1: to the point of working up a sweat. Yanni puts
Speaker 1: on put takes off his jacket, puts on gloves, grabs
Speaker 1: a big old log, and starts beating the snot out
Speaker 1: of the woods, hurdling rocks, kicking, jumping, banging. The beating
Speaker 1: the snot out of the woods is more like you're
Speaker 1: raking a tree. That's kind of what you're going after.
Speaker 1: When you start stomping and running and jumping through stuff,
Speaker 1: you're sort of like acting like to elk, which is
Speaker 1: you know, you're talking about now over a half a
Speaker 1: ton worth of animal probably running through the woods. I'm
Speaker 1: only two pounds. It's hard to replicate that, right. You
Speaker 1: have to do a lot more so. A lot of
Speaker 1: times I'll pick up like a ten or twenty foot
Speaker 1: log that then touches more bush as I'm moving through
Speaker 1: the woods, and I definitely get hurt doing it. But
Speaker 1: I think most people here, some of the people here
Speaker 1: where I think we're so blown away is by the situation.
Speaker 1: It's probably hard to even like grasp what all is
Speaker 1: going on. It's like seth and you can attest to that,
Speaker 1: and probably Lauren to that. When I would do that
Speaker 1: the very first time, the bull would go from like
Speaker 1: a pretty excited bugle to like his insides turning inside
Speaker 1: out or however you want to put that, like just
Speaker 1: like almost going from like a bugle whistle into more
Speaker 1: of like a blood curling Just I can't take that. Uh,
Speaker 1: talk about your epiphany, you're elk calling epiphany when people
Speaker 1: tell you to go in the woods and call three
Speaker 1: times for the whole day. Yeah. When I learned or
Speaker 1: was taught about calling out, it was all diaphragms. There
Speaker 1: was a couple of biting bowls probably on the market
Speaker 1: back then, and probably some external reads too. I just
Speaker 1: hadn't really gotten into it yet, but it was diaphragms,
Speaker 1: and everybody taught us like very soft, simple cow what
Speaker 1: I would call cow chirps. Just that, and go into
Speaker 1: a meadow in an hour before dark with the wind right,
Speaker 1: wait for the thermals, and make two or three of
Speaker 1: those chirps between the time you get there until you're
Speaker 1: about to leave. And that was it, because that's just
Speaker 1: how you called elk. Anything else was too much, too much,
Speaker 1: You're just gonna run him out of the woods and so.
Speaker 1: And it took me years, and you know, and of
Speaker 1: course reading books and watching primost the Truth about Bulls
Speaker 1: videos and stuff and being like, you know what, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try some other stuff. And then I got good
Speaker 1: enough with the diret frame where I could go yeah,
Speaker 1: and then also a five point comes trotting over the
Speaker 1: hill and you go, well that kind of worked, you know. So,
Speaker 1: but it took three or four years too talk myself
Speaker 1: into trying to to have the boldness. It makes me uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: super fun to watch and film your honest going off
Speaker 1: like he's an elkin was. He had such enthusiasm throwing
Speaker 1: logs over rolling rocks down the hills that I wanted
Speaker 1: to join. And I'm holding the camera trying to keep
Speaker 1: the camera steady, but I'm like, I can probably help
Speaker 1: him out here. I want to kick a rock, actually
Speaker 1: got to throw rocks. Okay, Yanni. Here here's the way
Speaker 1: of expressing this. Yanni makes so much noise that at
Speaker 1: one point, jumping ahead, at one point a bull comes
Speaker 1: in between us and spooks and runs off down the hill.
Speaker 1: And it caught my attention, like, whoa, Oh that must
Speaker 1: be y Honest, I thought the same thing. I'm not happening.
Speaker 1: I heard that, and I was like, oh, back, and hey,
Speaker 1: what about the bull that was standing between us? That
Speaker 1: didn't even because you're so fixated on what was going
Speaker 1: down below us. I was like, wow, that really sounds
Speaker 1: like a damn elk running off right there. Yeah. So eventually,
Speaker 1: you know, so there was he there was a six
Speaker 1: point bull. Yeah yeah. Eventually the idea that there's multiple
Speaker 1: bulls and two are getting closer. Yeah, but I think
Speaker 1: that the young five point is what broke. The six
Speaker 1: point satellite bull came in quiet. He didn't come in quiet.
Speaker 1: I watched him multiple times. There you go, But I
Speaker 1: want to talk about where I messed up. Okay, round
Speaker 1: this ridge I'm calling a knife edge ridge, but it's
Speaker 1: like a half bevel it's one sided bevel knife where
Speaker 1: it breaks away very steep and rocky to the from
Speaker 1: from if you're looking downhill, lookers left breaks away very
Speaker 1: steep and rocky into the rights as a gradual timbered roll.
Speaker 1: And the bulls are the main bull we're calling to,
Speaker 1: whose bugle in the most is off to the right.
Speaker 1: I set up from basically out in front of a tree,
Speaker 1: right on the knife edge ridge, thinking that he's gonna
Speaker 1: stick to his course and come up and I might
Speaker 1: get a broadside around him. I should have anticipated I
Speaker 1: should have not been on that knife edge ridge, because
Speaker 1: what when I'm happening to white is bulls came up
Speaker 1: and hit that and it's the perfect place to travel.
Speaker 1: It's just this nice clear They came up the ridge,
Speaker 1: beautiful clear descending ridge. Even later, damn bull cow bull
Speaker 1: cattle came up the same ridge. It's just like a
Speaker 1: natural travel corridor. And I didn't anticipate that. Stupidly, I
Speaker 1: didn't anticipate that, you know what, I bet this thing
Speaker 1: is gonna hit this ridge and take this ridge up,
Speaker 1: So that I'm sitting on the ridge looking down, expecting
Speaker 1: to get a shot off my right, and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, like without any announcement besides of some early bugling,
Speaker 1: here he comes like dead, like he's not stopping face
Speaker 1: to face. And there's one dead tree in front of
Speaker 1: me that was six seven yards close, very close. And
Speaker 1: the second his head gets behind that dead tree, I
Speaker 1: draw my bow and I like, what am I even
Speaker 1: gonna do? Unless he comes out broadside. He of course
Speaker 1: sees me drawing my bowl through the trees, and we
Speaker 1: just have a stare down through a tree that was intense, man,
Speaker 1: until I couldn't hold my bow back anymore. But a
Speaker 1: lot of times in that situation, man, it could have
Speaker 1: so easily gone the other way where he sees you up.
Speaker 1: But he still takes two or three steps it comes
Speaker 1: out from the tree, and instead of turning his whole body,
Speaker 1: he only turns his head and looks at you, and
Speaker 1: he goes, oh, what was that? And all of a
Speaker 1: sudden he's just presenting you with like a perfect listen,
Speaker 1: this is all hindsight, because even when I had my
Speaker 1: bow back, I was I was expecting that he'll step
Speaker 1: out from behind the tree and he'll be turned broadside,
Speaker 1: thinking I might be leaving but looking at me. But
Speaker 1: he was so close that wouldn't have mattered. Mh. But
Speaker 1: that's now. He did. He spun, but he spins, and
Speaker 1: often here's another bowl coming up the same exact trail.
Speaker 1: So that was the five point. He did that first,
Speaker 1: and then the six point came in behind. And then
Speaker 1: there's a six point standard, and it's six point was
Speaker 1: much warier, never came into never came into range. The
Speaker 1: five point. It's so convinced that there's a cow. He's like, yes,
Speaker 1: there's a man with a bow here too. Let me
Speaker 1: try a couple of different angles of approach, and he
Speaker 1: kept getting lucky and lucky. At one point, him and
Speaker 1: the six are both standing perfect wide open broadside at
Speaker 1: sixty seven yards, which I'm not gonna which is not
Speaker 1: a poke. I'm gonna attempt my bow um on a living,
Speaker 1: breathing creature. And then they're both staying there, staring the
Speaker 1: six leaves, and he's just gone. He goes off and
Speaker 1: starts biggling a hundred yards way again when he's done
Speaker 1: coming in. And meanwhile, this five point is just like
Speaker 1: probing trying to find a path in, and an unbellant
Speaker 1: to me eventually finds a path in and comes in
Speaker 1: between me and the honese. Yeah, I mean he's basically
Speaker 1: just on that knife. For it is just like I
Speaker 1: don't know, ten or fifteen yards behind you, ten yards
Speaker 1: from me, fifteen or twenty yards from Lauren, and he
Speaker 1: sits there and half acidly feeds and just look lifts
Speaker 1: up his head, looks, looks, looks, feeds a little bit,
Speaker 1: listen his head up, looks, looks, looks, looks. I had
Speaker 1: no ideal standing there, and the wind must have been
Speaker 1: blown to him. And that's what's crazy, is that even
Speaker 1: though like he's getting whiffs of man guarantee at this point,
Speaker 1: and he still stood there. For yeah, it seemed like
Speaker 1: a man. I mean footage is full frame bowl standing
Speaker 1: there kind of wondering what's going on, And we're so
Speaker 1: focused on what's going on below us, because there's still
Speaker 1: bulls ripping and wandering around below us, that I had
Speaker 1: no idea that you just standing there. Even when he
Speaker 1: ran off, I was like oh yeah, this is making
Speaker 1: an elk running noise. I think one of you guys
Speaker 1: that figured it out and spin spun around that he
Speaker 1: was standing there. I don't know there was some movement
Speaker 1: down below ever knewuntill I was told we have a
Speaker 1: little pow wow and talk about what all is going on? Um, Like,
Speaker 1: holy cow, I can't believe that happen so close and
Speaker 1: Allso there's another bull coming and one or a new
Speaker 1: bull comes in, gets wind takes off the same bulls
Speaker 1: messing around. Meanwhile down below us there's all these other
Speaker 1: bulls still going off, and then it starts getting hot,
Speaker 1: and they settle into like a dark north face and slope,
Speaker 1: and it winds up that just for an hour plus
Speaker 1: probably you just hear two bowls calling. We're watching other
Speaker 1: damn bowls winding around, but two bulls just calling and
Speaker 1: calling and calling from his north face and slope. And
Speaker 1: north face is significant because it's not a sunny and
Speaker 1: so you have a lot of timber and thick understory,
Speaker 1: and they can in there and getting the shade and
Speaker 1: hang out for the day. But they're just calling and
Speaker 1: calling and calling and calling, and by now the days
Speaker 1: heated up, so now you have the uphill thermals, and
Speaker 1: we make a pretty roundabout plan to go on a
Speaker 1: round about fashion and circle around and get up wind
Speaker 1: of this bowl, this little timbered bowl where he's elk
Speaker 1: are hanging out and get in close enough to shake
Speaker 1: hands almost. I thought we'd be within three hundred, but
Speaker 1: I think we ended up being within a hundred when
Speaker 1: we set up. Yeah, he was close. No, I think
Speaker 1: we were about a hundred seventy yards seventy Where does
Speaker 1: that number come from? My GPS unit? When we trailed him,
Speaker 1: I think he came off that. I think he came
Speaker 1: off that same my feeling who was up in that
Speaker 1: same betting area because when because when you first cow called,
Speaker 1: what did I say to you, Pounder? I don't remember.
Speaker 1: I said he's up on that ridge top up there,
Speaker 1: and I said you come forward. Oh that's right, and
Speaker 1: we had to bump. Yeah. Well, I said it's safer
Speaker 1: now he's up high. And then he quickly like it,
Speaker 1: very quickly, not up high, but I think he rolls
Speaker 1: up out of those beds that we later found. It's
Speaker 1: interesting from our perspective, it sounded like he was below you. Yeah, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: not that first he was higher than eye level at first,
Speaker 1: for for for seconds he was It didn't take long
Speaker 1: at all, and he was on the moon. There was
Speaker 1: two balls that were in there. One was bowls everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like if I put my how do you explain this?
Speaker 1: If I put my two hands together. The bull we
Speaker 1: killed was in my right hand, that that bowl, and
Speaker 1: the bull we didn't was like in my left hand
Speaker 1: up higher because that that thing kind of like from
Speaker 1: our perspective, had like this two bulls, like it seemed
Speaker 1: like two separate timber bowls that actually weren't that way
Speaker 1: once we got in there, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: But the bull that we were mainly after when we first,
Speaker 1: when you first called, he was higher than the eye
Speaker 1: level and there's all those beds up there. That was
Speaker 1: not good. I was trying to prevent that when we
Speaker 1: went in there to set up, but did not want
Speaker 1: to be blowing. I thought he was blow us just
Speaker 1: from where yeah, from where we from where we were
Speaker 1: just I thought it sounded like he was blow us.
Speaker 1: But when we set up a little bit higher than
Speaker 1: you guys, you know, when we started calling, so I felt, well,
Speaker 1: I mean it doesn't matter especially either way. Either way
Speaker 1: he ends up below it, which is where we wanted
Speaker 1: him because we had and we had and we had
Speaker 1: a set up where we had a really probably the
Speaker 1: best wind we'd had the whole trip, and you had
Speaker 1: that that same thing, a different kind of barrier, but
Speaker 1: like a barrier basically like a little rock a rocky
Speaker 1: ridge spine, the same exact thing. Yeah, And we get
Speaker 1: set up like we don't know, really know before he
Speaker 1: starts calling, we don't know where the bull is gonna
Speaker 1: come from. We don't know where he is, and we
Speaker 1: don't know what his avenue of approaches. So you have
Speaker 1: to kind of get in the spot where you got
Speaker 1: a little bit of a game plan about, well, if
Speaker 1: he seems to me this way, it will go there.
Speaker 1: Do I have a shooting lane? If he seems to
Speaker 1: go that way, I'm gonna duck over there. Do we
Speaker 1: have a shooting lane? And we kind of had a
Speaker 1: number of scenarios. I had three setups in my head
Speaker 1: where I could stay at one spot and know that
Speaker 1: I could duckt to my right and have shooting lanes
Speaker 1: going for one approach. I could bounce out and get
Speaker 1: out in front of her behind a ponderosa and cover
Speaker 1: a bunch more and in the off chance that he's
Speaker 1: somehow circled way up higher than us, I knew that
Speaker 1: I could go out around this rock outcrop and see
Speaker 1: up that direction, and you had in your head places
Speaker 1: where you could go to keep it where he couldn't
Speaker 1: see the source of the noise. It was very like
Speaker 1: pretty perfect situation. There wasn't one of those like make
Speaker 1: do things. Yeah, we knew it there. It was only
Speaker 1: so much timber that he could be in, and uh,
Speaker 1: it's he's not going anywhere. It's a hot day. It's
Speaker 1: a hot sunny day at eleven thirty in the morning,
Speaker 1: and he's in his bed and location and he's not
Speaker 1: going anywhere. And we were we were within fifty yards
Speaker 1: of the edge of the timber, So it wasn't like
Speaker 1: we were trying to call him a mile away, which
Speaker 1: can be a big time hindrance, which I think is
Speaker 1: what you were talking about when we worked those three
Speaker 1: other bulls. They're not in your strut zone, yeah, like
Speaker 1: you were, just we were just not close enough to
Speaker 1: pressure him. Yeah, we worked some other bulls where we
Speaker 1: had watched one of these bulls and he kind of
Speaker 1: had like his place where his little area where he'd
Speaker 1: wander back and forth raising hell. And we're trying to
Speaker 1: like invite him into some other part of the mountain,
Speaker 1: which calling turkeys, I think is the same thing. It's
Speaker 1: hard to like, it's harder to call a turkey into
Speaker 1: someplace he's not hanging out as it is to call
Speaker 1: him over to a different part of his hangout zone.
Speaker 1: And the biggest reason we did that is because the
Speaker 1: the opportunity to get closer really wasn't there. It was burned,
Speaker 1: it was open, wasn't live. Timber just wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of space places where we can circum prevent his position,
Speaker 1: you know, without making like a four hour tour. And
Speaker 1: as soon as you started going on this bowl, he
Speaker 1: got out of his bed and he was pissed, but
Speaker 1: he did not want to leave his timber patch, so
Speaker 1: he trapped. It's a pissy sound sounding sound, but he's
Speaker 1: actually not pissed, no I know, but it's just an expression.
Speaker 1: He's definitely not pissed. He's excited. I guess say he's
Speaker 1: pissed because um, because the sound that he makes sounds
Speaker 1: like sounds like if you were projecting that sound, you'd
Speaker 1: be like, I'm gonna punch a hole in the wall,
Speaker 1: you know, or you think of a bull that not
Speaker 1: a bull but a cattle bull bull cow. They get
Speaker 1: mad when he grunts the snorts when he's pissed. But
Speaker 1: he's pissed. I'm not as familiar with the vocalizations of
Speaker 1: mook cows. You've never been like snorted at by cows
Speaker 1: that are mad at you. They don't want to make love,
Speaker 1: do you? They might get out of it. So you
Speaker 1: say like pissed, But he's definitely not pissed. He's in
Speaker 1: he's he's uh, this isn't a word I like to
Speaker 1: throw around lightly. He's titilated. He's titilated by the sounds,
Speaker 1: and it's very excited. But he's also not wanting to
Speaker 1: He's also been around the block long enough. He's old,
Speaker 1: and he knows that there's At the time, no, no,
Speaker 1: I knew because the sound owns he was making the
Speaker 1: sounds he was making. He reached down ridge Pounder's throat
Speaker 1: and grabbed dude. Ridge Pounders ridge powder couldn't handle it anymore.
Speaker 1: Thank god, there's stabilization on that lens. Dude, because I
Speaker 1: was like when he finally came up into view, I
Speaker 1: could see him like kind of pacing below through the trees,
Speaker 1: and I would like seeing that. I was already like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, I shouldn't be seeing this. And then
Speaker 1: when he came up the hill and was like looking
Speaker 1: at us, I was like looking at me as I'm
Speaker 1: filming him. Yeah, I was just rattling, like if you
Speaker 1: had had enough, you had said you'd had enough. Oh
Speaker 1: my god. Emotionally hand, I can't take another one. I
Speaker 1: have a heart attack. It's so intense. And he's just
Speaker 1: right there. And then he just like turns and faces
Speaker 1: us and just lets one rip, and I'm just like
Speaker 1: trying to make sure that I like the whole time,
Speaker 1: I never looked at him in person. I don't think
Speaker 1: that you found it emotionally taxing. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard, man. I just kept looking through the camera
Speaker 1: and that was the only thing that kind of like,
Speaker 1: they're so big, especially this one, and they want it
Speaker 1: so bad, my goodness. Yeah, it was intense. A slave
Speaker 1: to one's passions, slave to one's passions, to his detriment.
Speaker 1: It would be like if you we're single and you
Speaker 1: gotta and you get a booty call from someone in
Speaker 1: the middle that late at night if the bars closed,
Speaker 1: and you're like, man, it's probably a thirty chance that
Speaker 1: someone's gonna shoot me when I go over there. But
Speaker 1: now I'm gonna risk there. But this dude, and I
Speaker 1: knew he was big because everything about the sounds he
Speaker 1: was making, because at that point we'd watched a number
Speaker 1: of like big bulls bugle in and you get there's
Speaker 1: like it's sort of get tuned into like we like
Speaker 1: and there's a there's like a thing at the end
Speaker 1: of their bugle that just is you could like feel
Speaker 1: the weight at the end of the bugle and you
Speaker 1: could be like, oh fun, like you want to go
Speaker 1: down and offer him up. The halls met elliptics between
Speaker 1: where I was seth Lauren on one side of the ridge,
Speaker 1: and you got to be like you were in the
Speaker 1: bowl with him, and like, yeah, there's a whole different
Speaker 1: sort of like the acoustics are different. The acoustics just
Speaker 1: the space that the sound takes up. It's pretty wild
Speaker 1: and on their same hillside and they're doing and you
Speaker 1: can just you can pinpoint them, so you're seeing his movements.
Speaker 1: You know, you're you're you're not. It's almost like it's
Speaker 1: so he's so close and you can pinpoint the noise
Speaker 1: so exactly that it's like you're not actually watching something
Speaker 1: because you're looking into a timbered bowl with a lot
Speaker 1: of brush. You're not actually watching it, but you like
Speaker 1: it kind of occurs to you that you're not watching
Speaker 1: it because you feel as though you're watching it because
Speaker 1: the sounds are so constant and and and allow you
Speaker 1: to pinpoint just looking right down where thing. You feel
Speaker 1: like you're like observing him wandering around. And then he
Speaker 1: realized I'm not even seeing him, but it's just like
Speaker 1: the audio is so spectacular, but I'm paints is very
Speaker 1: vivid picture and he's doing a number of vocalizations. He's
Speaker 1: making a cow call, but not yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: think that was the first time I've ever heard of that.
Speaker 1: He would kind of go and then bugle and he's
Speaker 1: just going boom mm hmm boom. He must have done
Speaker 1: that a lot room He's seem to do it when
Speaker 1: he's walking pacing. I got a question for you guys. So, like,
Speaker 1: you know, when your turkey hunting, you gotta bring him
Speaker 1: in close. And if your white tail hunting with a
Speaker 1: rifle out East because this is the first archery hunt
Speaker 1: I've ever done. But the other two hunts that I've
Speaker 1: been a part of where you get close to the animal,
Speaker 1: are like out East white tail, like Midwest white tail
Speaker 1: where like you're generally pretty close, and Turkey, where you
Speaker 1: get pretty close but like you don't. Like when I
Speaker 1: saw those animals come in, I wasn't like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is crazy, but like when that elk came in,
Speaker 1: it was like an experience because there's so much bigger
Speaker 1: than you are. Yeah, in the in the in the
Speaker 1: there's so much more that can go wrong. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: that was there's like a you're like, because I get excited,
Speaker 1: but it's not dread. Yeah, when the bulls coming, it's
Speaker 1: it's like that's what you're there for. But for me,
Speaker 1: it's sixty dread. Yeah, dread that I'm gonna spook it,
Speaker 1: Dread that I'm gonna wound it, dread that whatever. It's
Speaker 1: just not I'm not in a happy spot. When a
Speaker 1: turkey's coming, I gotta smile. It's ear to ear man,
Speaker 1: it's all up. Yeah, turkey time. I'm like, yeah, it's coming,
Speaker 1: this is great. When the bulls coming. I'm like, oh
Speaker 1: oh man, go back, Oh my god, no, but yes
Speaker 1: he's coming. There's no getting out of this. Now you've
Speaker 1: done it to yourself. Now you just gotta like take it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just gotta take it. Something is really gonna happen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like this is really going on. Man. The pressure is high,
Speaker 1: you know, not only for the hunter but the camera guy. Like,
Speaker 1: so that adds to your intensity beyond because you don't
Speaker 1: want to mess it up, just like your bowshot, you know,
Speaker 1: it's that important, don't mess the shot up. Well, here
Speaker 1: comes this bull and you're looking at the screen. You're
Speaker 1: not looking at reality, You're looking through this camera lens.
Speaker 1: And it becomes you know, in my focused am I am?
Speaker 1: I doing this right? Is everything? I'm going together because
Speaker 1: this is the five seconds I have to nail in.
Speaker 1: And we've got five people in there. Yeah, a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of people. We got a caller, a hunter,
Speaker 1: three camera people. Yeah, it's a lot of stink. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of yeah, a lot of variables. So this bowl, well,
Speaker 1: I'm Sorryry about like three percent chance you can walk in.
Speaker 1: You're gonna get shot. This bull knows enough, he's been
Speaker 1: around the block enough to know that he does not
Speaker 1: want to leave that timber line. It was very reluctant
Speaker 1: to leave that timber line and just paced up and down,
Speaker 1: not wanting to go out into the open, out into
Speaker 1: the grass and come up the hill. Just walk in
Speaker 1: the timber line, screaming in agony. Yeah, but not. He's
Speaker 1: just really happy and excited. J honest, is making him
Speaker 1: feel like there's an another bull right over that ridge line.
Speaker 1: You never gave another bugle. You gave him the sound
Speaker 1: and that set up. We never went to the other bull.
Speaker 1: Didn't need it, just but you busted ground, didn't You know.
Speaker 1: You're rustling, rustling around a little bit, but more just
Speaker 1: like just general elk if an elk's on the steep hillside,
Speaker 1: just feeding. They're making more noise than than just a
Speaker 1: couple of cow calls here and there. You know, it's
Speaker 1: just adding some just some death to the picture I'm
Speaker 1: trying to paint. You know, you didn't go a full
Speaker 1: Yanny on him, No, but you were making some You
Speaker 1: were making the ground noises to you, you were pulling
Speaker 1: grass out of the ground, making it sound like they're feeding.
Speaker 1: That That was pretty Yeah, he gets detail oriented. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the hell he's doing. When he started
Speaker 1: ripping up grass, it's working, and he, like Yanni, wore
Speaker 1: that bull down. Yeah, he finally had to come and
Speaker 1: stay in the bedroom. Man, I'm gonna have to walk
Speaker 1: up out of here now because the wind was just
Speaker 1: He had not a prayer because what he wants to
Speaker 1: do more than anything is he wants to go around
Speaker 1: and get a whiff. Yeah, and he's like, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you when it's a cow. You don't tell me when
Speaker 1: it's a cow. I'll go up and have a smell.
Speaker 1: But there's no way for him to do that without
Speaker 1: really doing some kind of roundabout trip out in the
Speaker 1: open at noon on a hot sunny day. There's no where,
Speaker 1: there was no way for him to do it, and
Speaker 1: I think he was aware of that in his own
Speaker 1: elky way and eventually just was like okay, and a
Speaker 1: smart elk hunter typically, a smart bow hunter typically and
Speaker 1: this is a lot of experts will say this, including
Speaker 1: our good friend Jason Phelps, the game call maker. Um,
Speaker 1: he's like, sure, there's a risk of you being out
Speaker 1: in the open when someone's calling for you and you're
Speaker 1: and you got the bow there's a risk of being
Speaker 1: out in the open, but because you're gonna get spotted
Speaker 1: more easily. But the risk of you being out in
Speaker 1: the open isn't as great as the risk that comes
Speaker 1: from you being not having good shooting lanes and having obstructions.
Speaker 1: So he's like, sure, when there's a tree and you're
Speaker 1: in front of the tree, you're more exposed to the bull,
Speaker 1: but that's not as bad as being behind the tree
Speaker 1: and having so many places you can't shoot. Very common mistake,
Speaker 1: I think. But our first setup, when you called in
Speaker 1: the multiple bulls, I was out in front of the
Speaker 1: tree and that was good. In this setup, it was
Speaker 1: blazing sun. To be out in front of the tree,
Speaker 1: you were illuminated like something on display. And he had
Speaker 1: a lot of ground. He had a lot of open
Speaker 1: ground across and it wasn't like a confusion of trees.
Speaker 1: It was like a tree in a ton. The open
Speaker 1: space he had to cross. And I felt that I
Speaker 1: was just asking a little bit too much, So I
Speaker 1: got up where a small ponder roast that was between
Speaker 1: me and the bull's line of approach, and I snapped
Speaker 1: some limbs which fit in. Because there was a lot
Speaker 1: of Joanni was making some noise. Anyways, I just like
Speaker 1: busted off limbs, not even trying to be quiet, just
Speaker 1: grab him and snapped the limbs off and had a
Speaker 1: couple of pockets. And I was trying to will that
Speaker 1: bull up the left side because I had a good
Speaker 1: cover and a great shooting hole through the tree if
Speaker 1: he broke to my left. But he starts coming and
Speaker 1: he breaks to my right. And now in the psychele
Speaker 1: like in the for me man like I get rattled.
Speaker 1: I've I've done enough Like rifle hunting, I'm like almost
Speaker 1: clinical about it. Um, I've got to like an almost
Speaker 1: clinical space about shooting my rifle in real world hunting situations.
Speaker 1: But with a bow, it's just things are so close,
Speaker 1: and you're so aware of the mistakes you can make,
Speaker 1: and there's so many more mistakes you can make, and
Speaker 1: it's so much less forgiving that all that stuff enters
Speaker 1: your head and and I've got it distilled down, Like
Speaker 1: I've mentioned this the hunter times before. When I was
Speaker 1: a kid, my dad would put a sticker on our bow.
Speaker 1: He had these stickers and said, stay calm, pick a spot, um, now,
Speaker 1: my little manstra that I try to put my head
Speaker 1: is like elbow up, pick your spot, elbow up, pick
Speaker 1: your spot, elbow up. Because I'm like, if I can
Speaker 1: remember to do those two things, I feel that everything
Speaker 1: else falls into place. Like if I can just like
Speaker 1: get in my head like and do that, that's like
Speaker 1: the baseline of my that that's the of my like
Speaker 1: personal checklist. Like everything else falls into place if I'm
Speaker 1: doing that. And this bowl mingled so long, and when
Speaker 1: he first showed up, I was so rattled, but I
Speaker 1: got he lingered so long that I that I got unrattled,
Speaker 1: and I got my mantra in my head and I
Speaker 1: was ready, you know. I felt like I was ready,
Speaker 1: and I felt like I was ready to place an arrow.
Speaker 1: And he starts coming and I was like feeling very
Speaker 1: confident and very confident. And he comes up, and sure
Speaker 1: enough he comes up with the in line with the
Speaker 1: center of my tree, where there he is in range,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, why did I not get in front
Speaker 1: of the tree? Why did I get in front the tree?
Speaker 1: And then it puts you in this like negativity spiral
Speaker 1: that starts to happen. He breaks out and then he's
Speaker 1: like looking at me like not knowing what he's seeing
Speaker 1: but looking at me. Um turns away. I get a
Speaker 1: range on him. He's thirty two yards but obscured by
Speaker 1: the tree. He moves and so his left his right
Speaker 1: side is facing me, and then he kind of turns
Speaker 1: so his left sides facing me. And at this point
Speaker 1: he's very interested in what I am because I'm trying
Speaker 1: to like get and I have to get down on
Speaker 1: my knees. But he doesn't budge. And I got down
Speaker 1: on my knees and I get my bow back and
Speaker 1: he doesn't budge. And I got where I felt like
Speaker 1: things were exactly right, and I had my spot picked,
Speaker 1: I had the right pin in the right place, I
Speaker 1: had my elbow up, I had I thought everything was perfect.
Speaker 1: I touched that release and hit him back behind the ribs,
Speaker 1: and my god, the feeling of of failure and self
Speaker 1: loathing that like overcame me in that moment of being
Speaker 1: that Um, like my brother put it best, man like
Speaker 1: for me, like my perspective put it best. Where when
Speaker 1: he messes up a shot, he's like, why am I
Speaker 1: so greedy and want this so bad that it actually
Speaker 1: in that it actually impairs my ability to do it?
Speaker 1: Like i'mself I wanted so bad that it become self defeating.
Speaker 1: So I can punch paper all day along with my
Speaker 1: bow and call my shots all ranges, all day long,
Speaker 1: punch and punch and punching. But the into something I
Speaker 1: really want bad, I can't do it. Like when it matters,
Speaker 1: it all falls apart. Rogan says, it's consequences. He says,
Speaker 1: we're like, we become intimidated by consequences. Isn't that how
Speaker 1: he put it? I freaking up. It's interesting. So you
Speaker 1: enter an arena. I was talking about this with raising kids.
Speaker 1: I don't mind putting them into an arena of consequence,
Speaker 1: meaning I don't mind letting them play with a hatchet
Speaker 1: um And I think a lot of parents are afraid
Speaker 1: of letting their kids in the habit an arena of consequence.
Speaker 1: But they're like, when you're pulling the bow back and
Speaker 1: trying to kill something in weighs six hundred pounds with
Speaker 1: an arrow, it's like the consequences get so high, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, there it is like the easiest ship.
Speaker 1: Like in all the target shooting, I could never shoot
Speaker 1: an arrow that far off at that distance, but there
Speaker 1: it was, and my God was that like the one
Speaker 1: of the worst moments for me. I've been through it before.
Speaker 1: Doesn't get at you better. I didn't get to see
Speaker 1: it well. In your defense too, we did review the
Speaker 1: footage and he clearly jumped the string. He was gone
Speaker 1: before the arrow left. The bow man clearly dumped the string.
Speaker 1: It seems like it's hard, It's like it's so hard
Speaker 1: to piece together, but it seems like he was sprung. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but do you hear much about up There's some animals
Speaker 1: that are famous for jumping the string. Oh sure, but
Speaker 1: no elk do it when they're tuned up like that.
Speaker 1: I mean I saw him do it over the years
Speaker 1: of guiding. Not a lot, but they do it. People
Speaker 1: talk about access. You're being literally gone by the time
Speaker 1: the arrow gets there. Now, there was a frame where
Speaker 1: you could see your arrow in like a dark patch
Speaker 1: of timber moving through, and then you could see the bowl.
Speaker 1: Like when you pause footage every and if nothing's moving,
Speaker 1: everything's like clear, it looks like I'm just a regular photograph.
Speaker 1: But as soon as something moves, you get a little
Speaker 1: bit of motion blur. And there's a shot where that
Speaker 1: arrow was going through and that bowl is like starting
Speaker 1: to get blurry. He's already on the move. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you can see that he's already like whoa, And then
Speaker 1: he just pushed forward just enough, probably just to kick
Speaker 1: it back. In my collection of interesting ship I have
Speaker 1: a deer skull that has a three bladed a steel
Speaker 1: feral type three bladed broadhead from the fifties that's embedded
Speaker 1: perfectly into dear's brain pan and the entrance hole is
Speaker 1: right dead center in its forehead. And it was from
Speaker 1: my father, and he there was a deer feeding in
Speaker 1: a field and vehicles would go by, and the deer
Speaker 1: wouldn't spook that bad from the vehicles was so used
Speaker 1: to highway traffic. My dad had his recurve and and
Speaker 1: had had his body take his van with the door
Speaker 1: open so that my dad could jump out of the
Speaker 1: moving van into a ditch with his bow to get
Speaker 1: the approach. So his buddy drives by slowly. My dad
Speaker 1: rolls out of the van into the ditch, um the
Speaker 1: deer watches the van roll away, and my dad rolls
Speaker 1: up with his boat and lets an arrow go, and
Speaker 1: so much time elapse between the noise of the arrows
Speaker 1: release that the deer was able to swing its head
Speaker 1: around in the direction and blackout its chest with its
Speaker 1: own head and caught it right there and dropped. He
Speaker 1: killed it. Yeah, but it jumped the string and the
Speaker 1: worst worst way imagine. Um. So yeah, man, the arrows
Speaker 1: is back and I was feeling real, real down. Um.
Speaker 1: We went and laid low for a few hours. It's
Speaker 1: probably three hours, because here's the thing, man, Like, if
Speaker 1: you get a situation like that, you should lay low
Speaker 1: a long time. But it's so hot. It's hot, and
Speaker 1: we're very far away from the vehicle, and you got
Speaker 1: dark coming. There's coyotes and bears and wolves hanging around. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's, like I said, very warm, uncomfortably hot that day,
Speaker 1: lay down for three hours, swarmed with flies and bees
Speaker 1: and ants like that kind of weather, and start trailing
Speaker 1: and it's just pinpricks. Remember I think Seth you said,
Speaker 1: like literally a pin prick. It's like if you dipped
Speaker 1: a pin and all the blood we were find it
Speaker 1: would be like on the left side of his line
Speaker 1: of travel, he would brush off blood about three ft
Speaker 1: off the ground. One of the clues we found to
Speaker 1: help in the tracking is Jana's found a scratch mark
Speaker 1: on a tree that was where the knock of the
Speaker 1: arrow scratched the tree. Yeah, he split two trees that
Speaker 1: weren't that far apart in the knocks scratched. And we
Speaker 1: were tracking. We were looking for heavy foot, heavy tracks,
Speaker 1: heavy foot, heavily placed foot tracks, footprints, um following those,
Speaker 1: trying to coordinate those with little pinpricks of blood. I
Speaker 1: didn't think about it now, but when he brushed against
Speaker 1: that tree, or was forced to brush against that tree
Speaker 1: with that arrow that was still stuck inside, that probably
Speaker 1: did a fair amount of damage. I thought a lot
Speaker 1: about that, even at the time. I was like, that's
Speaker 1: like a whole that's helpful. Um, So it would be
Speaker 1: that you'd get a bit of blood, and you'd find
Speaker 1: us set of tracks and and make sense of the tracks,
Speaker 1: and follow the tracks and try to corroborate your instincts
Speaker 1: with another drop of blood that verifies that it's right
Speaker 1: or not. And we're tying little ribbons in the trees,
Speaker 1: and so you can also sort of get this sense
Speaker 1: of travel. And it really made sense to me that
Speaker 1: he would have followed the river bottom but didn't, and
Speaker 1: uh cut up and we tracked him and how many
Speaker 1: hours you think it took roughly three trailed for three hours,
Speaker 1: and you traveled three miles of zig zagging. Your GPS
Speaker 1: showed that you traveled three miles. Yeah, you had a
Speaker 1: phone with the on X app on it. And since
Speaker 1: we started tracking, we went. We moved the track one
Speaker 1: seventy yards as the crow flies, but you zig zag
Speaker 1: three miles looking for droplets of blood. Three and then
Speaker 1: so now it's about six hard dark is eight. It's
Speaker 1: about six, and we're here an elk. I jump and
Speaker 1: out at seventy five yards away from me, and I
Speaker 1: hear it storm off and then go quiet, and we
Speaker 1: suspect that, like we bumped him, now we have to
Speaker 1: wait till the morning two get after him. And that's
Speaker 1: bad because it's gonna be it's not getting cold at night.
Speaker 1: It's not getting cold at night. And then hike takes
Speaker 1: a couple of hours to hike out of there. Go
Speaker 1: back to what I did. Last thing I did is
Speaker 1: I took and shot away point in the in the
Speaker 1: cardinal direction that I thought the sound was and guessed
Speaker 1: that it was maybe seventy five yards away and set
Speaker 1: that way point. And we went back up in the
Speaker 1: morning and Jonas and Seth started trying to work the track,
Speaker 1: like work out the track and the trail. And I
Speaker 1: jumped ahead to where I thought it jumped from and
Speaker 1: looked there and couldn't find the bed. But eventually we
Speaker 1: found where it laid down and bled, and I went
Speaker 1: to the where I thought the sounds had gone and
Speaker 1: where the sound ended and picked up a little pinprick
Speaker 1: of blood, and that let us jump the trail quite
Speaker 1: a ways. Yeah, Lauren actually found that bad that he
Speaker 1: was better than then. We had a fair amount of
Speaker 1: blood in it, but yeah, you made a big jump.
Speaker 1: We jumped like a solid and a hundred yards and
Speaker 1: then the weirdest saying one of the weirdest things ever
Speaker 1: happened in the woods happens all of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: hear what I swear is a person whistling. That's what
Speaker 1: it sounded like to me too, And it took me
Speaker 1: a few minutes realized it was in fact a person whistling.
Speaker 1: And at this point we traveled up where we're only
Speaker 1: less than two yards from a property boundary, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna get pre yelled at by a landowner or
Speaker 1: something like why else is this guy like hot to talk?
Speaker 1: To us. At this point, we're very close to what
Speaker 1: would become the end of the blood trail. This guy
Speaker 1: is another bowl hunter out and he glasses up a
Speaker 1: bull laying in a weird spot and it wound up
Speaker 1: being the heat glass stop our dead bull, and had
Speaker 1: gone down there to take pictures of it to show
Speaker 1: to his friends and act like he got her, make
Speaker 1: a gag on his friends. And he starts yelling to us,
Speaker 1: and we realized that just that, I mean, we would
Speaker 1: have hit it and wouldn't be long. We would have
Speaker 1: hit it anyway. Yeah, we'd probably been on it in
Speaker 1: less than fifteen minutes there. It was piled up. In hindsight,
Speaker 1: I believe that when we jumped it, I think it
Speaker 1: ran down that hill and died. I know you don't
Speaker 1: agree with that take. That's what I think happened, just
Speaker 1: because of how it was piled up there and what
Speaker 1: was going on with the where it was, and he
Speaker 1: ran down the hill and died. But it was a
Speaker 1: warm night, it was a warm morning. We had a
Speaker 1: long hike in there, but this point it was hot out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we found him. I think about ten am. All those
Speaker 1: flies that had been on us, we're on him, and
Speaker 1: at that one it was like a big bowl, man.
Speaker 1: And at that point it's just like getting in there
Speaker 1: and and and it's like a thing that's had. I
Speaker 1: can tell you that the four it's happened to be
Speaker 1: four times out of many, not just mine, but me
Speaker 1: being present for four big game kills where meat was
Speaker 1: lost because the heat, and they all had to do
Speaker 1: with Three of the four had to do with not
Speaker 1: finding an animal the day you got it, but finding
Speaker 1: it the next day. Three of the four. The fourth
Speaker 1: was just just having my first out west hunting experience
Speaker 1: and not realizing how quickly things can go south if
Speaker 1: you're not careful. The other three were all from We're
Speaker 1: all from not finding something to have to find finding
Speaker 1: something the next day, but lost lost meat, lost a
Speaker 1: considerable amount of meat, yeah, possibly half the animal, which
Speaker 1: is like makes it sickening. Man. It's like you want
Speaker 1: to be happy, you know, you want to be a
Speaker 1: have you bought it, But in the end, it's like
Speaker 1: it's just always winds up being like a little bit tainted,
Speaker 1: and it's like a bull of a lifetime, man, Like
Speaker 1: I won't get a bull like that again. I mean
Speaker 1: maybe I will, but I don't deserve to. I don't
Speaker 1: expect to, but you always got that and you and you,
Speaker 1: and so you run in your head and it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you try to do your shot right, and you did.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's an excuse why, like maybe you jumped the string.
Speaker 1: Well that's partly your responsibility to don't shoot arrows and
Speaker 1: stuff that's aware of you. If it's already like hyper
Speaker 1: keyed into your presence and it's already like half thinking
Speaker 1: about bolting, maybe you don't let the arrow go, but
Speaker 1: you did because you're greedy. Then you blow your shot,
Speaker 1: and then you're like, Okay, the thing to do when
Speaker 1: you blow your shot is give it a while, give
Speaker 1: it a long time, so you don't pressure it. So
Speaker 1: you give it a long time. If you bump it,
Speaker 1: don't keep going back out pick it up the next day.
Speaker 1: But if you pick it up the next day, there's
Speaker 1: you know, you gotta wait twelve hours whatever, You gotta
Speaker 1: give it plenty of time. During that time, spoil itge occurs.
Speaker 1: So you run back in your head. You're like, man,
Speaker 1: all these ways in which I wish we would have
Speaker 1: done things better, but it's like I feel it kind
Speaker 1: of did everything you're supposed to do when the and
Speaker 1: he sort of wound up with a shitty outcome. There's
Speaker 1: no lesson. Oh, it's definitely some lessons within our experience.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's like a hard lesson, not
Speaker 1: a hard lesson. There's no like next time, No, but
Speaker 1: next time you jump on when you're trailing it, you're
Speaker 1: gonna go running after it. No. No, but these lessons
Speaker 1: would be would just would be the sort of like
Speaker 1: reinforcing lessons that you would do what we did because
Speaker 1: I think that we did end up with a because
Speaker 1: with our blood trail, we could end up not finding
Speaker 1: him and we could have bumped him some more and
Speaker 1: he might have not been laying out on an easy
Speaker 1: rage to find him. He could have gone another half
Speaker 1: mile farther and died in some hell whole tangle where
Speaker 1: you know, the dude from the nest side didn't see him.
Speaker 1: We lost the blood trail, lost the heavy tracks as
Speaker 1: he comes out on the open ground with his rocks
Speaker 1: and it's hard to track. So you know, I feel
Speaker 1: like we like did pretty good. There's been a lot
Speaker 1: of other many much worse scenarios. There are lessons to
Speaker 1: be learned in fortifying things you already think are true
Speaker 1: because it makes you more certain. But in some ways
Speaker 1: this shook that up because, like I said, the thing
Speaker 1: is when you bump something, never pressure. But I think
Speaker 1: if we had walked over it would have been land
Speaker 1: or dead. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll never know learn when
Speaker 1: we think about all that. That's the end of my story.
Speaker 1: The end of my story. It worked out, big, huge
Speaker 1: giant bowl, were stuck with it and recovered the bowl
Speaker 1: of a lifetime for you. Uh yeah, to everyone's credit,
Speaker 1: I think it was. It was one of the best
Speaker 1: bits of tracking. Yeah, very much a team effort, best track.
Speaker 1: And I've been around rich ponder he even, uh, I
Speaker 1: was getting in there despite what about this orange leaf?
Speaker 1: I found one one spot of blood after we are
Speaker 1: like somebody had found on the way ahead, and as
Speaker 1: we were walking there, I like turned and looked and
Speaker 1: found one spot of blood and I was like, all right,
Speaker 1: I found one spot. I didn't totally fail, even though
Speaker 1: it like it wasn't didn't help the investigation at all,
Speaker 1: But I was stoked that my eyes weren't totally shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a crazy task to have the track just drops
Speaker 1: of blood like that I couldn't see anything. Uh, I
Speaker 1: didn't find a single spot of blood. I saw a
Speaker 1: bed eventually from looking at obvious heavy tracks and a
Speaker 1: wet spot in dirt. So it had to be pretty
Speaker 1: in my face to see anything. So it was amazing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it takes a level of focus that I think that uh,
Speaker 1: most humans aren't normally used to doing. Uh. That what
Speaker 1: it takes to be on a track like that when
Speaker 1: you're going down to when you're going well, when it
Speaker 1: gets down to pin drops every ten or twenty ft,
Speaker 1: it is just so easy to be like, I'm done
Speaker 1: giving up. You know. Sometimes they're on the leaf, sometimes
Speaker 1: on the ground, so you're just kind of like looking everywhere,
Speaker 1: and the leaves had like little me and Stets are
Speaker 1: talking about that there's like weird like as the least
Speaker 1: for changing, there's like weird little like liquid e looking ambery,
Speaker 1: brownish spots like every time you look at leaf you're like,
Speaker 1: oh there's oh no, it's not blood. Um. When you're
Speaker 1: filming Haunts, Lauren, uh, how much you live in like
Speaker 1: the the product and how much are you live in? Uh,
Speaker 1: the the experience of being along. I think it kind
Speaker 1: of goes both ways that It's been a while since
Speaker 1: I've done a real serious hunt, Like I think I've
Speaker 1: had a couple of years off. But before I did
Speaker 1: any hunting filming at all, I really didn't have any
Speaker 1: interest in hunting whatsoever. But that experience and that education
Speaker 1: in in watching people who knew what they were doing,
Speaker 1: change my perspective on all of it and kind of
Speaker 1: gave me a passion for it in and of itself.
Speaker 1: So I think it's a little bit of both. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're behind the camera, if you're producing anything, I
Speaker 1: think you want to produce something that's going to be
Speaker 1: as top shelf as you can possibly make it. So
Speaker 1: that comes into play all the time, ah as being
Speaker 1: a high priority because you don't want to put your
Speaker 1: name on something that isn't taught shelf. But the experience too,
Speaker 1: you know, it can't be replaced by anything because you're
Speaker 1: not going to get that experience as a camera guy,
Speaker 1: as a hunter without going and doing it and experiencing
Speaker 1: and checking it out and learning about it. I think
Speaker 1: about two that you got started filming by filming like
Speaker 1: like extreme white water kayaking and like stuff where people die,
Speaker 1: So you probably uh early on learned, Um, this idea
Speaker 1: that was that it wasn't always something that could be
Speaker 1: separated out, like there was like a real like filming
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, that there was like a real
Speaker 1: risk there, you know, um, and you were living something
Speaker 1: kind of real. You were filming something that was happening
Speaker 1: in a very real way to people. Like it's like
Speaker 1: taking like extremely challenging risks both to capture it and
Speaker 1: what the people were doing. And so it probably felt
Speaker 1: like really uh, like I was saying earlier consequence, Rich,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah for sure. And you always in the back
Speaker 1: of your head wondered if the camera gave that person
Speaker 1: some sort of courage they wouldn't whether otherwise would have
Speaker 1: had uh like someone drowned and you're like, man, he
Speaker 1: would have never done that if we if we weren't
Speaker 1: filming it. Yeah, I mean there was the gnarliest thing
Speaker 1: during White Water for us, for me personally, was watching
Speaker 1: a guy go off a waterfall and break both of
Speaker 1: his legs. It changed his life. He never you know,
Speaker 1: he kept kayaking after that, but it was a moment
Speaker 1: in time in his life that just completely shaped his
Speaker 1: life for the rest of his life. And so the
Speaker 1: consequences were super real, and you kind of, as the
Speaker 1: camera guy, even felt guilty for being there just to
Speaker 1: capture him doing his passion. Following his passion, major consequences
Speaker 1: and that. You know, I think as you get older,
Speaker 1: that priority or that desire to try and push the
Speaker 1: limits changes. But um, I don't know how you equate
Speaker 1: it to hunting. It's just obviously it's very different. But
Speaker 1: you are still taking risk. But you're the consequence there
Speaker 1: is You're like, you're you're you're dealing in life and death.
Speaker 1: You're dealing out death, which isn't the light thing. You know,
Speaker 1: You're out there dealing it. You're Yeah, you're like in
Speaker 1: this position of Yeah, you have like substantial sort of
Speaker 1: power that you're wielding with a weapon, right making choices
Speaker 1: about how things will die. Um, there's a necessity. There's
Speaker 1: like a definite necessity to it. There's an inevitability to
Speaker 1: it for things that typically are dying violent deaths, violent
Speaker 1: painful deaths, regardless of your involvement in it. But all
Speaker 1: of sudden, you're inserting You're you're inserting yourself into it.
Speaker 1: You know, rich is this final thought? Yeah, man, it's
Speaker 1: a chance for your concluder you don't have to have one.
Speaker 1: I don't care. No I got I got one. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I got one. It just took
Speaker 1: chewing some four seats. Yeah, we got into that. No dip,
Speaker 1: no dip on this trip. Just just spits, man, spit seeds,
Speaker 1: just fit seeds. But I don't want to feed your
Speaker 1: concluder to you. Uh, no concluder. I hadn't. I was
Speaker 1: kind of wrapped up in Lawrence. A little thing there
Speaker 1: that was a that was a good man. Um No,
Speaker 1: just the whole experience was crazy. Just seeing those elk
Speaker 1: that close and here in the vehicles and being out
Speaker 1: there is just I hadn't done anything like that before,
Speaker 1: despite being on l hunts before. It was he can
Speaker 1: be religious. I have two clients I know of that
Speaker 1: they came back so many times that they've worked through
Speaker 1: probably all the guides over the years, but that they
Speaker 1: both wanted at least one all of his ashes and
Speaker 1: the other one part of his ashes spread out on
Speaker 1: those mountains that we used to hunt, because it was
Speaker 1: just so special to him to be there in September
Speaker 1: in those woods and and you know it being part
Speaker 1: of what we just did last week off whistle. What
Speaker 1: else you got? Ah, it's about it, man. Both these
Speaker 1: guys killed it on their first mediator trip. Did a
Speaker 1: great job. It was a great to be a part
Speaker 1: of wonderful footage. Wonderful footage which I look forward to
Speaker 1: people seeing. Yeah, me too, Kelsey, I have like a
Speaker 1: concluder question. Oh that's great man. Okay. We talked about
Speaker 1: like the loser ship factor a little bit, and I
Speaker 1: feel like, you know, me as a new hunter not
Speaker 1: having that experience, thinking about it in the future someday.
Speaker 1: A lot of people, you know, they prepare by shooting
Speaker 1: at a target at best, like a total archery challenge
Speaker 1: style preparation. You know, like, what would you say to people?
Speaker 1: How do you how do you prepare for that experience
Speaker 1: where you go out there all of a sudden you
Speaker 1: have a bow and arrow in your hands and there's
Speaker 1: a screaming out, you know, thirty five yards away? What
Speaker 1: what do you? What can you do? My My My
Speaker 1: feeling is that it's the only thing is exposure to
Speaker 1: the thing itself. I don't think it's replicable. Um, but
Speaker 1: that's in season. Yeah. But our friends, but but there's
Speaker 1: people that disagree, like our friend Rory Denver, who was
Speaker 1: involved in in training some of the most like elite
Speaker 1: combat soldiers on the planet, feels that through realistic scenarios
Speaker 1: and constant drilling and realistic scenarios, he feels that you
Speaker 1: can achieve something close to actual experience where you can
Speaker 1: get people into a situation where it becomes roight. It
Speaker 1: becomes so right, kicking in the door and storming a compound,
Speaker 1: did it becomes so rot And you've done it so
Speaker 1: many times you know just exactly what to do that
Speaker 1: when you're doing it for real for the first time,
Speaker 1: you feel like you've already been here. But I don't
Speaker 1: think you can achieve that in this situation. Well that's
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, because like, what the hell would it
Speaker 1: be you only have this situation once a year, because like,
Speaker 1: I mean, I can I've been that close to ELK
Speaker 1: many times in my life, but the pressure wasn't there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the scenario of a route wasn't there. You know. It's like,
Speaker 1: how do you prepare yourself for that intensive experience where
Speaker 1: you're literally losing your ship and you have to accomplish something.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's just it's it's it's exposure to
Speaker 1: the thing itself. I don't think it needs to be.
Speaker 1: I think it would absolutely help if you were just
Speaker 1: standing with someone or with the car, just any amoun
Speaker 1: exposure to it. But it's not a trainable thing. I
Speaker 1: think you can. Yeah, there is just nothing that's gonna
Speaker 1: trip you up emotionally and psychologically that that will like,
Speaker 1: let's say they had like some mechanical elk. You know
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be like, oh man, I've been through
Speaker 1: this before with that super realistic target that has an
Speaker 1: vehicle noise it makes. It just isn't gonna do it.
Speaker 1: And there's some people that are never going to get
Speaker 1: over it. And there's some people that are just cold
Speaker 1: blooded and don't mean that in a negative way. I
Speaker 1: mean some people that can separate. I would like I
Speaker 1: lost it when I had like gobbling turkeys my first
Speaker 1: turkey season this year. So I'm like, man, when am
Speaker 1: I gonna do? You know? I called a turkey and
Speaker 1: for a guy that never hunted the spring and when
Speaker 1: that turkey showed its head, he said, oh my god,
Speaker 1: the turkey, but it's stunned him. Yeah. I think that's
Speaker 1: just like an ongoing question. Everybody has to prepare yourself
Speaker 1: for the fact that you're not going to just be okay. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of times it gets worse because the beginners
Speaker 1: can have like a beginner coolness because you just you
Speaker 1: just so um. You don't even have enough exposure to
Speaker 1: know that you should how excited you should be. And
Speaker 1: so the first couple of times you can, everybody's like, damn,
Speaker 1: you just did that perfectly. It was like no big deal.
Speaker 1: And then the next time you sort of like you're
Speaker 1: just a little bit more relaxed, and somehow there's more
Speaker 1: chemicals entering your brain and your body. And I mean,
Speaker 1: how many times when we were kids both hunt where
Speaker 1: you like trying to pull on that string and you
Speaker 1: were like, I physically can't pull my bow back because
Speaker 1: of buck fever. I had buck I had buck fever,
Speaker 1: might even been doe fever. I was late in high
Speaker 1: school and I couldn't pull my bow back. I had
Speaker 1: a set too high. I don't honestly keep it mind
Speaker 1: when I'm setting my bow like, I don't just go
Speaker 1: to like Max. I go to like dude, when you're
Speaker 1: in panic mode, this bow gunna grease back? Nice, That's
Speaker 1: what I think about. Because I had like you're cold,
Speaker 1: too cold to get it back, and too nervous, And
Speaker 1: so I don't run like I don't just like keep
Speaker 1: cranking until I'm like pulling to get the bow back.
Speaker 1: I can pull my bow back nice thinking about that stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I can call bulls in and get all these
Speaker 1: experiences and sit there and be half asleep on the
Speaker 1: hillside just with a smile on my face, rock in
Speaker 1: your hands on your face. If I if I had
Speaker 1: just jumped over the ridge and put a bow in
Speaker 1: my hand, it's just it's just completely changes, like the
Speaker 1: blood pushures through the roof. But there's things that we
Speaker 1: did in our camp um in Colorado that a lot
Speaker 1: of guys said helped him a lot. Like we had
Speaker 1: a three D course set up, didn't have a bunch
Speaker 1: of targets, you know, maybe six or eight or so,
Speaker 1: and we would set up just funky crazy ship like
Speaker 1: shooting through a bunch of tight aspens where the lane
Speaker 1: was only eight inches, or we'd have them set up
Speaker 1: on a bench and we would make it so like
Speaker 1: we'd all stopped before you could see the target and
Speaker 1: be like, okay, here's how this shot works. Not gonna arrow,
Speaker 1: you're gonna take three steps, you're gonna be able to
Speaker 1: see that elk. You need to draw your bow and
Speaker 1: count to three in your head and make a shot,
Speaker 1: because that's how it happens in real life, right, And
Speaker 1: so we would sort of play out these scenarios. And again,
Speaker 1: these were seasoned hunters, you know, they're out on a paying,
Speaker 1: paid elk hunt. But we would do a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff like that where it wasn't just like we were
Speaker 1: just out there shooting a target or just even if
Speaker 1: it was an elk target, just shooting an elk target
Speaker 1: out in the field. But we would, you know, make
Speaker 1: scenarios up in our heads. You know, we did a
Speaker 1: lot of times have guys shooting stuff that was two
Speaker 1: and three yards away, because you tell you what, a
Speaker 1: lot of dude, especially confound bow guys, they have no
Speaker 1: idea where the arrow is gonna hit when it's at
Speaker 1: two yards, and sometimes crazy ship like that happens, and
Speaker 1: you need to have that confidence to just be like, yeah, whatever,
Speaker 1: all my pins on his heart and touch it off.
Speaker 1: But if you've never gone through that, and also there's
Speaker 1: an elk at two yards or three yards, you can
Speaker 1: very well freeze up and never pull the trigger or
Speaker 1: or or whatever. Just be so and never pick a spot,
Speaker 1: because even in two yards, you better pick your spot
Speaker 1: and not just go, oh, there's an elk and pull
Speaker 1: the trigger. You're gonna end up with one of the guts.
Speaker 1: I took one of my old girlfriends out once and
Speaker 1: we get out from a bugle and bowl and he
Speaker 1: comes over fifteen yards away fully reaction. She never pulled
Speaker 1: her bow back. He's got up, stood there bugle a
Speaker 1: couple of times, walked on the Earth's other bridge. I'm
Speaker 1: like behind her, I get like, what happens? She's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Never pulled the bow. It was just
Speaker 1: too much. We used to make do ten or twenty
Speaker 1: jumping jack's then knock an arrow and take a shot
Speaker 1: in three or three to five seconds, just to get
Speaker 1: their heart rate up. But yeah, still like buck fever.
Speaker 1: I don't think you're you're not gonna replicate it. And
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what makes it worse is messing up.
Speaker 1: It makes it worse the next time. Put in the hole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you start out on flat ground, it puts you
Speaker 1: in a hole. Seth, how ready get after the big
Speaker 1: old flathead catfish. I am I'm stoked for that flatheads
Speaker 1: and some squirrels. H No, I just had a blast, man.
Speaker 1: It was a good group of guys and awesome hunt, challenging, rewarding. Um,
Speaker 1: I'll try to help my cookie game next time. I'll
Speaker 1: work on that dates I'll write that down. But yeah,
Speaker 1: awesome trip. Congrats to get on the big jam bull. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: Do you feel because you've done a bit of elk hunting?
Speaker 1: Do you feel that after're going to a unit like that?
Speaker 1: Does it kind of like make everything seemed like a
Speaker 1: little bit of a bummer? Maybe a little bit. I
Speaker 1: don't I'm struggling with that if all spots were like that,
Speaker 1: spots like do you really need to go back to
Speaker 1: the kind of place where someone blows a call and
Speaker 1: it just explodes with the reach, like the wood just
Speaker 1: explodes the outgoing to other directions? Yeah, her like, dude,
Speaker 1: it's dude, I know that sound the yeah, the morning
Speaker 1: you shot your bull. I don't know. I don't think
Speaker 1: too many elk hunters get to experience something like that.
Speaker 1: That was crazy. No, No, they don't. Yeah, I agree,
Speaker 1: it is to you far between, but hard to appreciate
Speaker 1: those haunts without being out on a bunch of public
Speaker 1: land haunts where if you call a bull a day
Speaker 1: in or even just have an interaction with a bull
Speaker 1: per day, like that's good. What's cool about this is
Speaker 1: public land? Yeah, so it's kind of fun like that
Speaker 1: where it's like there's like at least a chance. And
Speaker 1: we had ups and downs. I mean we had two
Speaker 1: days of zero bugles and feeling like, oh what are
Speaker 1: we doing? Like we have no idea how to hunt
Speaker 1: elk kinda you know, because it's gonna call it would
Speaker 1: cost to go have that, to go buy that experience
Speaker 1: is twenty yeah, close to it for sure to buy
Speaker 1: that experience. But with public land, luck of the draw
Speaker 1: could happen to anyone. Yep. It sounds like not for
Speaker 1: non residents in Washington though, as you explain, I don't
Speaker 1: know what the odds are there and around right like
Speaker 1: there's like great, you know, it's great. Units of Colorado,
Speaker 1: there's units in Utahler's unions in Arizona. There's units of Montana,
Speaker 1: like because units every state, like there's every state has
Speaker 1: a couple of those spots that you could just hit
Speaker 1: without costing what you paid for a vehicle. No, no
Speaker 1: closing thoughts for me other than I can I can't
Speaker 1: wait to. Uh have you learned how to call it real? Good?
Speaker 1: And then called big and I told you already doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be an eight by eight, just a seven
Speaker 1: by seven will be cool. I got that's the one,
Speaker 1: all right. Guys, Thank you all for coming, Thanks for
Speaker 1: having us going hunting jerious. You are