Speaker 1: We decided to take a route down that we saw
Speaker 1: on the way up that looked like it was going
Speaker 1: to be a lot easier. That was an illusion, as
Speaker 1: it often is.
Speaker 2: We've been pounding hard over the last six months of
Speaker 2: this Bear Grease podcast, diving Deep into the Mississippi River
Speaker 2: David Crockett and the literary con man Asa Carter. These
Speaker 2: were some of my favorite series. But I need relief
Speaker 2: from the browbeaten history and science. I fear we've all
Speaker 2: become too smart in our proclaimed quote pursuit of understanding
Speaker 2: the world. Remember when William Faulkner said you had to
Speaker 2: understand a place like Mississippi to understand the world. I
Speaker 2: just need some regular old excitement. How about a fresh
Speaker 2: plate of harrowing stories with the tall glass of adventure
Speaker 2: and risk.
Speaker 3: That sounds pretty good, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: This is the first part in our sies of wild
Speaker 2: stories from one of my favorite places on Earth, Alaska.
Speaker 2: America has been enamored and perplexed for the last seventy
Speaker 2: years by its sheer volume of wilderness, wildness, and its
Speaker 2: great beasts. Today we'll hear five stories from five storytellers
Speaker 2: about wild rivers, grizzly bears, widow makers, and even a
Speaker 2: cold night under the hide of a great beast. We've
Speaker 2: never done an episode like this before. We're about to
Speaker 2: meet some great people. I really doubt you're gonna want
Speaker 2: to miss this one.
Speaker 4: And she looked at me, and then she stood up
Speaker 4: and stretched her neck out and cocked her head and
Speaker 4: then immediately went into a charge.
Speaker 2: My name is Clay Nukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlike places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Speaker 2: Presented by FHF gear, American made, purpose built hunting and
Speaker 2: fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 2: place as we explore. Alaska is an anomaly. It's a
Speaker 2: deviation from the standard American state. In the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: naturalists John Muir called Alaska Wilderness a temple, claiming the
Speaker 2: place was still in the morning.
Speaker 3: Of its creation. It's a giant place.
Speaker 2: As a grown man decades out of high school geography class,
Speaker 2: I find myself still trying to grasp its size, almost
Speaker 2: like a math equation with symbols and multipliers. I have
Speaker 2: never been trained to manipulate. It's hard to understand how
Speaker 2: how big it is. The state is over six hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty five thousand square miles, more than twice the
Speaker 2: size of our second largest state, Texas, in larger than
Speaker 2: our biggest three states, Texas, California, and Montana combined. Roughly
Speaker 2: seven hundred thousand people live in Alaska, making it by
Speaker 2: far our most sparsely populated state. Purchase from Russia in
Speaker 2: eighteen sixty seven, you may have heard the term Seward's folly.
Speaker 2: Secretary of State William Seward negotiated a price of seven
Speaker 2: million dollars that's less than two cents per acre for
Speaker 2: the whole state. He was ridiculed for the purchase, like
Speaker 2: someone living in the plains of Kansas might chide his
Speaker 2: neighbor's purchase of one hundred foot yacht now parked in
Speaker 2: the driveway. Alaska would gain statehood in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 2: making it America's forty ninth state. But I'm not here
Speaker 2: to give you a history lesson. Remember I said we're
Speaker 2: done with all that. The first story is told by
Speaker 2: a man that I'm starting to feel like as an
Speaker 2: old friend of mine. His name is Billy Moles, originally
Speaker 2: from Wisconsin. Fresh out of high school, he fulfilled a
Speaker 2: lifelong dream when he headed to Alaska to become a
Speaker 2: hunting guide. Now, after twenty plus years of living that
Speaker 2: dream and spending over one hundred nights per year in
Speaker 2: a tent hunting brown bear, caribou, sheep, and moose, Billy
Speaker 2: is no doubt an Alaskan wilderness veteran.
Speaker 3: Big fast water.
Speaker 2: Is the Achilles heel of a human moving across the
Speaker 2: landscape afoot. It's a natural feature that humans are almost
Speaker 2: completely unequipped to deal with. This first story is called
Speaker 2: The Rising River. Here's Billy.
Speaker 5: This story starts on a small farm in southern Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: A young boy by the name of Don Johnson was
Speaker 5: fishing on the Mississippi River with his brothers wintertime. They
Speaker 5: were on the ice. They were smoking cigarettes. Her dad
Speaker 5: was gonna come by and pick him up, and so
Speaker 5: Don takes the cigarettes and was going towards off shore,
Speaker 5: a little farther out and towards the current, and was
Speaker 5: gonna bury the cigarette butts in the snow. And when
Speaker 5: he went to do that, he fell through the ice.
Speaker 5: Long story, short and nearly drowns, and ever since then
Speaker 5: Don is terrified of death by drowning. So forty years later,
Speaker 5: Don is my neighbor in Wisconsin, fellow farmer. I have
Speaker 5: known him on a little bit my whole life. But
Speaker 5: I'm fifteen twenty years into guiding and he comes to me.
Speaker 5: He's like, hey, I want to want to go caribou hunting.
Speaker 5: And so we put this hunt together, and Don is
Speaker 5: bringing his cousin, Mike, so they're both in their late
Speaker 5: fifties early sixties. And then Mike has his son Greg
Speaker 5: to come along and it's a three on one hunt.
Speaker 5: And pretty much every time I've done a three on
Speaker 5: one hunt it has turned into a debacle. But against
Speaker 5: my better judgment, I agreed to it. I hadn't connected
Speaker 5: all the dots back then as I have now. But
Speaker 5: I take these guys and we go up into the
Speaker 5: Northern Brooks Range early August. We show up into camp
Speaker 5: and they got all kinds of gear, and so the
Speaker 5: next morning we're eating breakfast, her caribou starts coming through.
Speaker 5: We can see them about a mile and a half off,
Speaker 5: and we get into position. Greg shoots a really nice bull.
Speaker 5: It starts to rain, we get that bold taken care of.
Speaker 5: The next morning, it's still raining and we were in
Speaker 5: relatively flat, open tundra, but right across the river there
Speaker 5: was a nice knob, and so what we're doing is
Speaker 5: we're walking across this creek and then we'd hike up
Speaker 5: to the knob, and then we'd sit there all day
Speaker 5: and glass. We could see anything coming. You can see
Speaker 5: five ten miles in either direction, farther than you'd want
Speaker 5: to walk. This creek's ankle deep, maybe mid shin at
Speaker 5: most when we first get there, and so we're sitting
Speaker 5: on the hill, we're glassing for caribou, and this spot,
Speaker 5: this little little the creek. We could see the creek
Speaker 5: out in front of us, and we're not paying it
Speaker 5: too much attention, but I could see there's a nice
Speaker 5: shallow riffle there. Anytime i'm hunting a creek, I'm always
Speaker 5: looking for access points, you know, easiest spots to cross
Speaker 5: the creek. And this this creek was still so shallow.
Speaker 5: It wasn't it wasn't a big issue. And we don't
Speaker 5: see anything the next day, get back to camp that
Speaker 5: night and go to bed. Next morning, we're up eating
Speaker 5: breakfast and I could see the creek was rising, but
Speaker 5: it still was no big deal. Go back up on
Speaker 5: the hill, get fogged out, it's raining, don't see anything
Speaker 5: on next day. So then the following day, same deal.
Speaker 5: We wake up, it's foggy, the river's still raining. The
Speaker 5: river's definitely coming up, but it kind of clears up
Speaker 5: early morning. And I just told the guys like, hey man,
Speaker 5: we're we're gonna have to get out of here. But
Speaker 5: it's too the ceiling is too low to fly, so
Speaker 5: we can't get moved with a plane day regardless. But
Speaker 5: let's go up on. If we climb up on the hill,
Speaker 5: we can sit for a couple of hours, and you know,
Speaker 5: if we don't, we don't get anything, we'll just come back.
Speaker 5: And basically at that point we're gonna wait for the
Speaker 5: have to wait for the weather to lift, because this
Speaker 5: is getting so high, like it could flood out our
Speaker 5: camp because we were camped on a gravel bar. So
Speaker 5: we climb up onto the hill and I'm looking at
Speaker 5: this river and I'm noticing that shallow spot that I
Speaker 5: had noticed a couple of days before, and I'm watching
Speaker 5: watching the river rise up on this big rock on
Speaker 5: the bank and I figured it was rising somewhere between
Speaker 5: an inch and two inches an hour, So I'm gauging,
Speaker 5: and I just decide, hey, we've got until noon after noon.
Speaker 5: If we haven't, we're not after something. We've got to
Speaker 5: be back to camp, because it was about it was
Speaker 5: up to our crotches when we crossed by camp that morning,
Speaker 5: and I knew that we could run the way back.
Speaker 5: We would go back in that shallow riffle kind of
Speaker 5: below our glassing knob, which was about a half mile
Speaker 5: below our camp, but that was much much shallower than
Speaker 5: where we were crossing it camp.
Speaker 1: But I.
Speaker 5: Knew that it was kind of pushing the limits of
Speaker 5: what I was comfortable with it. But I just figured
Speaker 5: for Don and Mike particularly, there was going to be
Speaker 5: pushing their limits to be crossing that river.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 5: As it turns out, about eleven o'clock, we spot this
Speaker 5: hurt of cariboo. They're about two miles off, and I
Speaker 5: just figured, hey, if we're going to go after any
Speaker 5: caribou today, let's go after him. Give them a run.
Speaker 5: If they're not there, we'll turn around, we'll come back.
Speaker 5: So we run after these caribou where we're hoping they
Speaker 5: are they're gone. Well, there's a ridge right up ahead
Speaker 5: of us, about a ten to fifteen minute hike, and
Speaker 5: we could look over this lip. I said, well, they're
Speaker 5: probably right in there, and so we get up over
Speaker 5: this lip and sure enough there's the Cariboo. They're about
Speaker 5: thousand yards off. So we sneak up around, go up
Speaker 5: in this next little ridge, trying to figure out if
Speaker 5: there was a way we could ambush them. And we
Speaker 5: get up there and there's no where to go. There's
Speaker 5: just no way to really ambush them, to get to
Speaker 5: them without them seeing us. And the whole time, in
Speaker 5: the back of my mind, I'm really nervous of this
Speaker 5: river crossing because now it's about one PM. And I
Speaker 5: didn't want to say anything. I didn't want to make
Speaker 5: the guys scared, and I just said, told the guys, hey,
Speaker 5: that river coming up. We're just going to go right
Speaker 5: at these Cariboo. If they run off, that's fine, but
Speaker 5: we got to take our chances here. And so they understood,
Speaker 5: so we just take off. We start going right towards
Speaker 5: the Cariboo. Well, just as we take off, they get
Speaker 5: up because they were bedded, and they start feeding toward
Speaker 5: us and I'm like, well, let's just wait. But when
Speaker 5: looking back, I could just see all these little little
Speaker 5: minute details. We're just pushing the envelope, pushing the envelope.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: We had two more cariboos still to kill, and our
Speaker 5: hunt basically at this point is more than half over.
Speaker 5: But the caribou are working towards us, and we sit
Speaker 5: and we wait. That takes another twenty minutes. Well, finally
Speaker 5: Don gets a shot opportunity. Boom, he shoots, the cariboo
Speaker 5: runs off, intermingles with the herd, so we couldn't get
Speaker 5: a second shot without risk hitting another cariboo beds down. Finally,
Speaker 5: I just take take my rifle and I just walk
Speaker 5: around and boom, and I just finished the thing off.
Speaker 5: I just I just didn't have any patients because I
Speaker 5: wanted to get the thing killed. Get back to camp.
Speaker 5: We're high five and take some pictures. Don's happy, he's
Speaker 5: got a real nice caribou. We butcher the thing. I mean,
Speaker 5: we're working. I'm slicing and dicing and they're taking the
Speaker 5: bags and we're we get this thing whooped up pretty quick.
Speaker 5: I said, all right, guys, got everything, let's go. And
Speaker 5: Don's like, well, I forgot my binoculars. And I'm like,
Speaker 5: what do you mean you forgot your binoculars and he said, well,
Speaker 5: I think they're up on the hill where we shot from.
Speaker 5: I'm like, he's like, we can get them tomorrow. I'm like, no,
Speaker 5: we ain't come back tomorrow. I said, you guys, see
Speaker 5: that willow bush. I point to it. It's about three
Speaker 5: quarters of a mile away. I said, there's nothing between
Speaker 5: here and that willow bush. I said, you guys, get
Speaker 5: hike into that willow bush, and you do not stop
Speaker 5: until you get to that willow bush. You sit there
Speaker 5: and you wait for me. And I was pretty direct,
Speaker 5: and non recognized that I was pretty direct. He's like, wow,
Speaker 5: I'm I'm I'm hungry. And I said, grab a couple
Speaker 5: candy bars and eat them as you walk. I was like,
Speaker 5: we got to get back across that river again. I
Speaker 5: didn't want to. I wanted to be firm, but I
Speaker 5: didn't want to freak them out. So I run up
Speaker 5: to the top of the hill where we shot from,
Speaker 5: and there was his binoculars, and I still I beat
Speaker 5: him down to the willow bush and I can see
Speaker 5: they're tired. He's like, oh, can we take a break.
Speaker 5: I'm leg you guys can take a break when we
Speaker 5: get back to camp. Let's keep her moving. And they
Speaker 5: just kind of looked at me, and I didn't argue.
Speaker 5: I think at that point that's when they realized that,
Speaker 5: and they were they were cognizant of the river coming
Speaker 5: up as well. So we hike about another mile and
Speaker 5: we maybe a mile and a half and we get
Speaker 5: to that shallow spot. We actually walk a half mile
Speaker 5: further down downstream of camp, but we got to that
Speaker 5: shallow spot and holy smokes, that river was angrier and darker.
Speaker 5: I mean, the water is just so silty. There's no
Speaker 5: reading the river at that point. I mean, it's just
Speaker 5: covered over. It's probably about gosh, I would guess, seventy
Speaker 5: yards across of just water. And now this is up
Speaker 5: to our belt and it was darn near to crotch level,
Speaker 5: almost the whole way across, which three days earlier it
Speaker 5: was basically ankle deep. And I told the guys, Don's like,
Speaker 5: oh my gosh. He's like, I don't know about this,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, Don, I don't know what other options are.
Speaker 5: We could stay here, but you know, the clouds are
Speaker 5: still too low nobody can fly in here. There's no
Speaker 5: place to land on the other side of the creek anyways.
Speaker 5: And I said, well, don't just let me go across,
Speaker 5: and just watch where I go, and go exactly where
Speaker 5: I walk. And I told him, undo your chest strap.
Speaker 5: Only have your belt strapped. And if you go down,
Speaker 5: keep your head downstream, and if you keep your head
Speaker 5: above water, and if you have to shuck your pack off.
Speaker 5: And that's one thing I've learned to get in a
Speaker 5: dangerous situation. You got to keep instructions really really simple.
Speaker 5: And so I go across. Not a big deal. I mean,
Speaker 5: it was deep, but Mike makes it across, and then
Speaker 5: Greg comes and he comes about three quarters of the
Speaker 5: way across, and there was like a little island. It
Speaker 5: was submerged, but it was about knee deep water. And
Speaker 5: so Greg walks to that knee deep water and he
Speaker 5: sits there and he waits. I just told him to
Speaker 5: wait there, and we have Don come across. We've all
Speaker 5: got trucking poles. Don makes it across. You can tell
Speaker 5: he's pretty nervous. He makes it to that island where
Speaker 5: Greg is and it's only at this point it's like
Speaker 5: ten yards to get all the way across, and I
Speaker 5: just told DoD you got it. And that's the deepest
Speaker 5: channel in the river. And so I go about thirty
Speaker 5: forty yards downstream of Don, just in case. And Don
Speaker 5: goes across, and he's right in the heart of the channel,
Speaker 5: and of course you're in fastest water. That's where the
Speaker 5: rocks get small because the small one or the rocks
Speaker 5: get big because the small rocks are swept downstream. And
Speaker 5: Don stumbles and then he kind of corrects himself, but
Speaker 5: in doing so, he puts too much weight on his
Speaker 5: trekking pole, and he bends his trekking pole into the
Speaker 5: shape of an elk. And looking back, I should have
Speaker 5: told him to just throw the thing in the river,
Speaker 5: but I didn't. He corrects himself and I said, you
Speaker 5: got it. You got it. Literally four more steps and
Speaker 5: he's across the river. Well, Don, in his muscle memory,
Speaker 5: he goes to take a step, and then he goes
Speaker 5: to take another step. And when he did that, he
Speaker 5: put his other trekking pole down, or tried to use
Speaker 5: it the one that he had just snapped in half
Speaker 5: or was the shape of an elk. And so when
Speaker 5: he did that, and that support wasn't there. He goes
Speaker 5: down foom under the water, I mean, just like that,
Speaker 5: and now he pops up out of the water and
Speaker 5: it just happens like almost slow motion. He pops up
Speaker 5: out of the water and his eyes are like saucers
Speaker 5: in his mouth. He's just gasping for air, just like that,
Speaker 5: and he's floating down the river like a rubber ducky
Speaker 5: game at the fair. And I'm imagining that as he
Speaker 5: comes by, I'm just gonna grab hold of him and
Speaker 5: just like pull him right to the bank, and you know,
Speaker 5: everything's gonna be okay. But as he comes by, and
Speaker 5: he's got the carribou antlers on his back, and again
Speaker 5: that was a mistake of mine. As I grab him
Speaker 5: and I try to pull him to the bank, I
Speaker 5: realize I should have been pulling in him at about
Speaker 5: a forty five degree and go downstream, And I learned
Speaker 5: that after the fact. But as I pull him, I'm
Speaker 5: getting headway, and all of a sudden, he gets perpendicular
Speaker 5: to the current where he's straight out from me and
Speaker 5: I'm pulling, and then the next thing I know, he's
Speaker 5: just a little bit downstream of me, and then all
Speaker 5: of a sudden, I feel the power of that water
Speaker 5: on his body, his pack, those caribou antlers, and I'm
Speaker 5: getting headway, but then all of a sudden, it just
Speaker 5: I'm powerless, and I am pulled right out into the
Speaker 5: current with Don, and all of a sudden, the bottom
Speaker 5: goes from underneath us, like we can't feel the bottom
Speaker 5: in our feet at all, and we're like crappies just
Speaker 5: trying to get our mouth to the surface. And I'm
Speaker 5: a pretty good swimmer. Don can just maybe stay alive
Speaker 5: on a perfect you know, a perfect pool in a
Speaker 5: perfect day. It's about all he can really do as
Speaker 5: far as swimming. But right below us, this sixty seventy
Speaker 5: yards stretch of river narrows down to a ten yard channel,
Speaker 5: if you will, and it's like raging white water. You
Speaker 5: can tell that there's a big dip in the bottom
Speaker 5: of the river there, and so that's about twenty thirty
Speaker 5: yards below us, maybe forty, And then it makes a
Speaker 5: hard ninety degree bend, and I just tell myself, Man,
Speaker 5: if we get to there, we're dead. And I'm yelling
Speaker 5: at Don, get your pack off, get your pack off,
Speaker 5: and I'm reaching for him as I got a hold
Speaker 5: of him, and I'm trying to find his belt of
Speaker 5: his pack to try to undo it, but I can't
Speaker 5: find it, and Don's face is just like right in
Speaker 5: front of mine, and right away, his fear just kicks in.
Speaker 5: As a kid who nearly drowned and his whole life,
Speaker 5: he's his only fear, he said, was death by drowning,
Speaker 5: and he just yells at me, Is this the end?
Speaker 5: Is this the end? And I'm like, get your pack off,
Speaker 5: get your pack off. I can't find his buckle anywhere,
Speaker 5: and all of a sudden, I just realized, like Don's
Speaker 5: in shock. And at that moment, I realize like I
Speaker 5: either let go or hang on, and ahead is what
Speaker 5: I call it, just a raging torrent, because that's basically
Speaker 5: what it was. And I'm just like, if we go there,
Speaker 5: we're dead. If we get that far, if we get
Speaker 5: that far, Don's dead and maybe I got a chance.
Speaker 5: And I just realized as like I've got a decision
Speaker 5: to make either a hang on or I let go.
Speaker 5: And at that moment, I just figured, you know what,
Speaker 5: I'm as good with God as I'll ever be. My
Speaker 5: wife knows who I am, my kids know who I am.
Speaker 5: What I stand for what I believe, and I just figured,
Speaker 5: you know, what, if today's the day, if it's if
Speaker 5: Don dies, I die with him. And it's almost like,
Speaker 5: I don't know, maybe within a second, you know, Don's
Speaker 5: still screaming, is this the end? And I'm just trying
Speaker 5: to tread water and swim side stroke with him and
Speaker 5: my toe and in tow and right just right as
Speaker 5: we hit that that lip where that torrent, the angry
Speaker 5: torrent starts, I'm side stroking and all of a sudden,
Speaker 5: I feel gravel in my toes and I start digging
Speaker 5: the toes, my toes into the gravel, and I get
Speaker 5: a couple of steps, and I take about two steps
Speaker 5: towards the shore as much as I possibly could, and
Speaker 5: we're kind of coming up out of the water, but
Speaker 5: we're still being sucked down into that torrent. And I
Speaker 5: just done, and I kind of both I guess lunge
Speaker 5: or in my mind, I'm just lunging, trying to heave
Speaker 5: us both towards short and just prey that wherever we land,
Speaker 5: there's not enough current to push us down into that torrent.
Speaker 5: And when we lunge and we land, we're about we
Speaker 5: basically went underwater, but it was slack enough that we
Speaker 5: stayed there. And so we get up and like, Don's
Speaker 5: cough and water and I'm coughing water, and you know,
Speaker 5: we just Mike is there right there, because he was
Speaker 5: already across the river. He's like, are you guys okay?
Speaker 5: We're like, yeah, we get his pack off, or like,
Speaker 5: where's your rifle? He lost his rifle in the drink.
Speaker 5: He's like, I don't care. I've just never been so
Speaker 5: happy to alive, you know. And yeah, I learned a
Speaker 5: lot on that hunt. Greg. He was able to make
Speaker 5: it across no problem. Later after that, we made it
Speaker 5: back to camp and we get Don all dried out,
Speaker 5: you know, I mean I made a ton of mistakes.
Speaker 5: I mean, there's just no doubt about it. I let
Speaker 5: my pride, my ego and the pressure the pressure, and
Speaker 5: I kept, you know, I just pushed the envelope and
Speaker 5: I knew I was doing it, but I thought I'd
Speaker 5: get away with it. And it almost cost a man
Speaker 5: his life. So we get back to camp and the
Speaker 5: weather later that evening it clears up and Matt was
Speaker 5: able to fly in and he was there to pick
Speaker 5: up meat. But in the end we just decided that
Speaker 5: we'd fly Don out that night too, because we were
Speaker 5: gonna have to move the next day. Anyway. Our camp
Speaker 5: was more or less flooding out. But Don said that
Speaker 5: when he was flying out that night, he said, he
Speaker 5: found himself looking back as long as he possibly could,
Speaker 5: and he only did he look forward when he could
Speaker 5: no longer see the camp. And he said, for some reason,
Speaker 5: he goes, I, I didn't want to look forward, and
Speaker 5: he said, when I did look forward, he said, I
Speaker 5: realized that in Don said this, Don speaking that my
Speaker 5: whole life I was looking back. I was looking back,
Speaker 5: and that fear of drowning, he said, I realized that
Speaker 5: it almost that fear almost killed me. And he said,
Speaker 5: I realized that at this point now, I'm never going
Speaker 5: to let that happen again. I'm always going to look
Speaker 5: forward and don't look back with fear and regret. And
Speaker 5: to this day, Don says that he wouldn't change a
Speaker 5: thing about that hunt, because it changed the trajectory of
Speaker 5: his life forever. And what I've learned in Alaska hunting
Speaker 5: adventures is that adversity is one of two things. It's
Speaker 5: either cement that draws the people together or it's a
Speaker 5: wedge that drives them apart. And every Alaska hunting adventure
Speaker 5: brings a new adversity, it's a new challenge. And what
Speaker 5: I've discovered in life is that on the other side
Speaker 5: of fear his freedom.
Speaker 2: That was a wild story. I've been following Billy for
Speaker 2: over a decade, watching his documentary videos about Alaska, and
Speaker 2: I read his book, Alaska and Me years ago. Billy
Speaker 2: is now a hunting consultant helping hunters who are wanting
Speaker 2: to go on big hunts, and he's doing a lot
Speaker 2: of public speaking events at churches and for groups all
Speaker 2: across the country about his adventures in Alaska. He's easy
Speaker 2: to find online if you're looking for him. Our next
Speaker 2: story hails from the high altitudes of the Alaskan wilderness
Speaker 2: in Mountaincoat Country. Years ago, Alaskan resident Carrie Kegler, at
Speaker 2: my request, wrote a story for US at Bear Hunting
Speaker 2: Magazine about a black bear she killed that was missing
Speaker 2: two thirds of its lower jaw and had apparently been
Speaker 2: without it, presumably for years. The beast was happy, fat,
Speaker 2: and old when she wrote this story. It was clear
Speaker 2: to me then that Carrie wasn't your average outdoors person.
Speaker 2: Here's her story that we'll call Goat Country Night.
Speaker 1: My name is Carrie Kegler. I've been an Alaska resident
Speaker 1: nearly my entire life. My family moved up here when
Speaker 1: I was about four, so it's pretty much all I've
Speaker 1: ever known, and grew up in a hunting and fishing family,
Speaker 1: really outdoorsy. Our dad got us started with hunting and
Speaker 1: fishing and archery when we were really young. I believe
Speaker 1: my brother and I got our archery certifications when we
Speaker 1: were probably fourteen or fifteen. So kind of give you
Speaker 1: an idea there. Like our background, So as an Alaska resident,
Speaker 1: we have a lot of opportunity here. We don't like
Speaker 1: to brag about it, but we're very fortunate in that
Speaker 1: in one year you could have a number of tags
Speaker 1: in your pocket. The generality you could have black tailed deer,
Speaker 1: five of them, caribou, moose, dull sheep. They're very generous
Speaker 1: with the opportunity here. The bear hunters, we love it.
Speaker 1: You could take three black bears per season, and the
Speaker 1: season ends on June thirtieth and then begins on July first,
Speaker 1: so that's six bears a year. You know. You could
Speaker 1: take one brown bear per season. As well lots of opportunity.
Speaker 1: So the story that I was going to share, it's
Speaker 1: my second goat hunt ever. But in the process we
Speaker 1: learned a lot, also got some reminders of things that
Speaker 1: you just don't do or maybe you should do. I
Speaker 1: guess I go back to kind of where this hunt
Speaker 1: began in February of every year, it's kind of like
Speaker 1: Christmas for us because we get to find out whether
Speaker 1: or not we drew a tag. This year was in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, and I rarely ever get the opportunity to
Speaker 1: look up my own name. Yeah, it's one of those
Speaker 1: deals where by the time I wake up in the morning,
Speaker 1: a friend of mine has already texted me and said, hey, congratulations,
Speaker 1: you drew this, or you do that, or oh bummer,
Speaker 1: next time, maybe you'll have better luck. So this year,
Speaker 1: if my friend Ryan had already texted me and said, hey,
Speaker 1: congrats on the goat tag and uh, I'm sure you'll
Speaker 1: do great well. At that time, I didn't have a
Speaker 1: hunting partner, and it's actually pretty tough to find somebody
Speaker 1: that will commit to one to a goat hunt. That is,
Speaker 1: and I had just started dating John Krueger. I told
Speaker 1: him that I drew the tag and he said, great,
Speaker 1: are you know when are we gonna go? So from
Speaker 1: there we kind of made our plans. And at the
Speaker 1: time he was living in Arkansas for work, and so
Speaker 1: we'd made our plans and he flew up here. This
Speaker 1: hunt took place in early September. We had incredible weather.
Speaker 1: You couldn't ask for better weather, clear, cold, great visibility,
Speaker 1: you could see for thirty miles, just just perfect. So
Speaker 1: we flew into a glacial lake and from there we
Speaker 1: got dropped off. We actually we were being dropped off
Speaker 1: as four other goat hunters were being picked up, and
Speaker 1: they were actually successful. Two of the four guys had
Speaker 1: goat tags. They both got, one got a billy, one
Speaker 1: took a nanny. I was surprised at the sparseness of
Speaker 1: the game bag for the fella that had the nanny
Speaker 1: and asked him what had happened, and he said, well,
Speaker 1: when I shot her, she took a leap off of
Speaker 1: a cliff and ended up down at the bottom and
Speaker 1: pretty smashed up. So he ended up climbing down there
Speaker 1: repelling actually and got her. But there wasn't a whole
Speaker 1: lot left when you're hunting goats, they're almost always, especially
Speaker 1: by September, they're gonna be above you know, they're gonna
Speaker 1: be above Alpine. They're gonna be in the rocks, they're
Speaker 1: gonna be they're gonna be high. You can expect to
Speaker 1: see them skyline sometimes and they're gonna be in all
Speaker 1: the little nooks and crannies that and they'll perch themselves
Speaker 1: up there, and they do that so that they can
Speaker 1: get a real good view of everything that's happening below them.
Speaker 1: And they don't like things to be above them. And
Speaker 1: if you're gonna be successful at taking one, you got
Speaker 1: to be in good shape, of course, but also patient.
Speaker 1: You can kind of pattern them for the most part.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you find one that you are certain
Speaker 1: is a billy, they've got characteristics that set them apart
Speaker 1: from a nanny. They're usually a little dirtier, their horns,
Speaker 1: have more masks, but they're also usually alone. So for
Speaker 1: this hunt, we didn't actually get to pattern them so much.
Speaker 1: We really only came across one one billy this time.
Speaker 1: And when we got to the hunting location, we made camp,
Speaker 1: set everything up, took another look at our topo maps,
Speaker 1: and we're just trying to make a game plan, familiarize
Speaker 1: ourselves with the area, and took a peek around. So
Speaker 1: we made camp and went up and over, like I
Speaker 1: would call it, like the foot of this mountain, just
Speaker 1: to kind of get an idea of what was on
Speaker 1: the other side. I mean, you can study those topo
Speaker 1: maps all you want, but you really get a feel
Speaker 1: for what it is that's there when you actually get
Speaker 1: your eyes on it. So we went up and over
Speaker 1: just exploring because in the state of Alaska, you can't
Speaker 1: hunt and fly the same day. So we went up
Speaker 1: and over and just did some exploring and you know, curiosities,
Speaker 1: getting us what's over this ridge, what's over this one?
Speaker 1: And before we knew it, we spotted a goat from there.
Speaker 1: We kind of just hung out, put him to bed,
Speaker 1: so to speak, and went back to camp, made a
Speaker 1: game plan for the next day, and then as soon
Speaker 1: as it was light, we put some gear in our
Speaker 1: in our packs and headed on our way. And one
Speaker 1: of the things I'll mention too, with putting gear in
Speaker 1: your pack before you leave for just what you think
Speaker 1: is going to be a day hunt. If you've got
Speaker 1: that extra puffy you think it's going to be a
Speaker 1: few ounces too heavy. Put it in your bag. Put
Speaker 1: it in your bag. And there's a reason I say that.
Speaker 1: So as we made our way away from camp, we
Speaker 1: had a pin marked the last location we saw the
Speaker 1: go the evening before. The way that the terrain in
Speaker 1: this specific area looks is you've got a glacial lake
Speaker 1: that we were dropped off at, and then you've got
Speaker 1: a big gravel valley that was carved out by that
Speaker 1: glacier that left that lake. And as you get closer
Speaker 1: and closer to the toe of that glacier, you've got
Speaker 1: these braids, these gravel braids of just meandering little creeks
Speaker 1: and streams, and it's all run off from this glacier
Speaker 1: that's essentially melting away. And then in front of that
Speaker 1: glacier you'll see these big tills, which are huge mounds
Speaker 1: of just whatever that glacier left behind. So we were
Speaker 1: near the lake and we were making our way. Instead
Speaker 1: of going up and over the mountain like we did
Speaker 1: the evening before, we went up this valley and decided
Speaker 1: about where we were going to start going up and
Speaker 1: over on the other end of this mountain, closer to
Speaker 1: the glacier. So we did that. We had a pretty
Speaker 1: decent ascent. Nothing nothing scary, nothing really notable. I mean
Speaker 1: it was tough. It was probably about twelve hundred feet
Speaker 1: elevation change, I would say from the bottom. So after
Speaker 1: hours of sitting patiently and glassing and looking, John and
Speaker 1: I decided that we were just going to reposition ourselves
Speaker 1: and cover a little bit more you know, real estate,
Speaker 1: by splitting up. So we're probably at this point about
Speaker 1: two and a half miles or so from our camp.
Speaker 1: So I get to like a little rocky outcropping and
Speaker 1: just kind of looking around and I saw something glimmer
Speaker 1: which it caught my eye. It almost seemed glassy, like
Speaker 1: it didn't belong, you know. I took my biino was
Speaker 1: out and sure enough it was that billy goat. And
Speaker 1: what I had seen was the sun caught his horn
Speaker 1: in a way that it shined like you could actually
Speaker 1: see the shine on it. That's what gave him up.
Speaker 1: And so I went and found John, and we had
Speaker 1: about thirteen hundred yards I guess between the goat and
Speaker 1: us at that point, but we were also probably about
Speaker 1: three or four hundred feet above him in elevation, so
Speaker 1: we had to stay off the skyline and out of
Speaker 1: sight and of course be quiet. So we made our
Speaker 1: path and stuck to it and got to within two
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty yards and he was completely asleep, totally
Speaker 1: zonked out. And so I get set up on this
Speaker 1: really big flat rock because we didn't know how long
Speaker 1: he was going to be there. Sometimes they'll take naps.
Speaker 1: You catch him when they first lay down, and they
Speaker 1: could be napping for hours. So I get set up
Speaker 1: and I did a couple of dry fires, and at
Speaker 1: one point I did a second dry fire, and I'm
Speaker 1: absolutely certain that he heard it. Then he looks up
Speaker 1: and John's moving around. He is a pretty tall guy,
Speaker 1: and I can tell through the scope that this goat
Speaker 1: sees him moving around, and I tell him, hey, he
Speaker 1: sees you, and John says, well, good, maybe he'll get up,
Speaker 1: and I said, uh, yeah, hopefully. So it happened very
Speaker 1: very quickly, but he did get up. I fired the
Speaker 1: moment he turned broadside and he fell right down, never moved.
Speaker 1: I was fortunate this one didn't go anywhere. We got
Speaker 1: down to him, took the obligatory photos and all that,
Speaker 1: and started field dressing him and caping him out. It
Speaker 1: had to be about four o'clock or so by the
Speaker 1: time that we left the kill site. So we got
Speaker 1: all the meat and everything in our packs and we're
Speaker 1: heading back towards camp. This is where we made We
Speaker 1: made a mistake, and I would say it's we broke.
Speaker 1: We broke one of those cardinal rules of mountain hunting,
Speaker 1: and that being you go down the same way you
Speaker 1: come up unless there is no other navigable route that's safe.
Speaker 1: We decided to take a route down that we saw
Speaker 1: on the way up that looked like it was going
Speaker 1: to be a lot easier. That was an illusion, as
Speaker 1: it often is. You can look at a mountain from
Speaker 1: one end to the next and it looks smooth and
Speaker 1: you know, unassuming, but there's cracks and crevices in there
Speaker 1: that you don't see unless you're right there. We took
Speaker 1: an alternative route down, thinking it was going to save time,
Speaker 1: and it did the opposite. We ended up in a
Speaker 1: couple of dead ends. We ended up on top of
Speaker 1: like a huge glacial till couldn't go anywhere. There was
Speaker 1: a river that was probably hip high and going very
Speaker 1: fast underneath a big sheet of ice. We had to
Speaker 1: go back up and around. By the time that we
Speaker 1: lost the light. We'd come to a cliff face. It
Speaker 1: was about one hundred feet above where we needed to be,
Speaker 1: and although we had headlamps, they just didn't cast enough
Speaker 1: light in that kind of terrain for us to to
Speaker 1: safely navigate it. And we were, like I said, we
Speaker 1: were out of light. So the best option was for
Speaker 1: us to just stay put until we could see, and
Speaker 1: that's what we did. So again, this is September in
Speaker 1: Alaska and clear, clear skies, so that means during the
Speaker 1: day it's going to be warm, and at night it's
Speaker 1: going to freeze. It's actually going to frost more often
Speaker 1: than not when it's that clear. It was probably at
Speaker 1: night it was getting down to I would say below freezing.
Speaker 1: It was cold. It was cold, and when we got
Speaker 1: to that patch of alders where we decided that we
Speaker 1: were gonna hang out for the night, I try to
Speaker 1: sleep before it got light. We emptied our packs of
Speaker 1: our game bags full of meat, took the goat cape out,
Speaker 1: and we layered up with all the layers that we brought.
Speaker 1: And of course we both had a couple of coats,
Speaker 1: puffy coats in our tent, but we wish we'd stuffed
Speaker 1: in those backpacks because it was a monumental regret, but
Speaker 1: it was what it was, so we had to make
Speaker 1: the best of it, and there was no sense in
Speaker 1: complaining about it, and we emptied our backpacks. We climbed
Speaker 1: into our backpacks kind of like a little gunny sack,
Speaker 1: you know, and we covered up our cores with that
Speaker 1: billy goat cape and on top of those backpacks and
Speaker 1: just tried to huddle and stay as warm as we
Speaker 1: could for the duration of darkness. And I remember looking
Speaker 1: up at the sky, I think him, man, this this
Speaker 1: is gonna be awful. And it was. It was. It
Speaker 1: was the coldest I think I've ever been. It was
Speaker 1: severely cold. I think maybe the two of us maybe
Speaker 1: out an hour of sleep if you wanted to add
Speaker 1: it all up. But as soon as that sun came up,
Speaker 1: we were up with it and repacked our bags and
Speaker 1: got to it. I can't speak for John, but I
Speaker 1: know that I have never been happier to get back
Speaker 1: to my tent. We were just absolutely exhausted, and you know,
Speaker 1: like I said, like I said, we definitely left that
Speaker 1: hunt with some lessons and some reminders. You know, know
Speaker 1: your limits and don't ignore them and go down the
Speaker 1: way you came up if it's safe, and bring that
Speaker 1: extra layer with you. It was a few ounces, aren't
Speaker 1: gonna hurt you?
Speaker 2: Sleeping under a goat hide on the side of a
Speaker 2: mountain is rough, and it's certainly a pretty Alaskan thing
Speaker 2: to do.
Speaker 3: That was a good story.
Speaker 2: Well, the next story, I'm gonna tell you the best
Speaker 2: I can recall. I've never told this tale publicly, though
Speaker 2: it seared me with a humbling respect for Alaskan backcountry
Speaker 2: that has never left. It happened in twenty fifteen on
Speaker 2: my first ever trip to Alaska. I call this one
Speaker 2: the widow Maker.
Speaker 3: I want to tell you a story about Alaska.
Speaker 2: A little backstory would be that in twenty thirteen I
Speaker 2: acquired Bear Hunting Magazine. I had not worked in the
Speaker 2: outdoor industry full time before. I had done some freelance
Speaker 2: writing and published a regional hunting magazine, but twenty thirteen
Speaker 2: was major break through for me and my family. And
Speaker 2: with that magazine and that opportunity, I had already bear
Speaker 2: hunted quite a bit. But a long time dream of
Speaker 2: mine was to go brown bear hunting in Alaska, which,
Speaker 2: as you might know, for most people, that's probably out
Speaker 2: of reach because if you're not an Alaskan resident, which
Speaker 2: if you are an Alaskan resident, you can hunt just
Speaker 2: on your general tag. If you're not an Alaskan resident,
Speaker 2: you have to use an outfitter, which can be very expensive.
Speaker 2: But as things went, I remember telling my wife, I said,
Speaker 2: one day, I'm going to walk in this house and
Speaker 2: I'm going to tell you that I have secured an
Speaker 2: Alaskan brown bear hunt, and that is going to be
Speaker 2: an incredible day.
Speaker 3: Well, I thought that might.
Speaker 2: Be ten years from then, But two years later, in
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen, I had worked out a deal with a
Speaker 2: brown bear outfitter and I was going to Alaska. This
Speaker 2: would be my first time there. I for all I
Speaker 2: knew it would be the last time that ever hunted Alaska.
Speaker 2: And I remember I secured the hunt in January and
Speaker 2: the actual hunt didn't take place until September, and every
Speaker 2: spare moment that I spent that entire year, I was
Speaker 2: thinking about being in Alaska.
Speaker 3: It consumed my thoughts.
Speaker 2: Well, September came and me and my good friend Scott
Speaker 2: Brown went up there. We're hunting in south central Alaska
Speaker 2: on a river system.
Speaker 3: We flew a beaver.
Speaker 2: From civilization about forty or fifty miles. A beaver is
Speaker 2: an airplane, and we landed it on the river where
Speaker 2: we were met by the outfitter and his guides. And
Speaker 2: as guides were two young guys that I really liked
Speaker 2: still do. And after a day or two in camp
Speaker 2: with the main outfitter, we set off to Spike Camp.
Speaker 2: So me, Scott and two guides went and set up
Speaker 2: a remote camp up this river. And the way that
Speaker 2: you hunt these brown bears is that there's smaller streams
Speaker 2: that feed into this big braided river, and the salmon
Speaker 2: swim up from the ocean and they go back into
Speaker 2: the mouths of these creeks that come in from the mountains.
Speaker 2: That's where they had been born and they'd come back
Speaker 2: to spawn. There was bear sign everywhere, but I quickly
Speaker 2: realized how difficult it was to actually see a bear.
Speaker 3: This was going to be a ten day hunt, and.
Speaker 2: By the fourth or fifth day we had yet to
Speaker 2: see a brown bear. So what we would do would
Speaker 2: be mornings and evenings we would go sit on a
Speaker 2: high bank with some cover on the mouth of this
Speaker 2: creek within shooting distance of where we were seeing a
Speaker 2: lot of bear sign. I remember the first bear that
Speaker 2: I saw on the trip, which would actually be the
Speaker 2: only bears that we saw on the trip. I'm setting
Speaker 2: on the cut bank side of a bend in this
Speaker 2: big creek. You can see salmon swimming all down in
Speaker 2: front of you. It's about ten yards across to this
Speaker 2: gravel bar, and I'm sitting there with my traditional bow.
Speaker 2: This young guide who I've said I like so much,
Speaker 2: is sitting right beside me. He's got his Marlin forty
Speaker 2: five seventy backing me up with the trad bow. And
Speaker 2: this brown bear sow steps out on the gravel bar
Speaker 2: like thirty five yards away. It makes our way basically
Speaker 2: straight towards us and is inside of fifteen yards. And
Speaker 2: now remember, first of all, we can't shoot this bear
Speaker 2: because it's a sow with cubs. Secondly, it's a sow
Speaker 2: with cubs, so it's a dangerous animal. We're within fifteen
Speaker 2: yards of this bear on the ground. It does not
Speaker 2: know that we're there. And I have confidence in our
Speaker 2: situation because my buddy has his forty five seventy right
Speaker 2: over my shoulder. And all of a sudden, I start
Speaker 2: hearing a little movement right behind me, and my guide
Speaker 2: is filming with his phone over my shoulder, and when
Speaker 2: he does, he knocks his forty five seventy, which is
Speaker 2: leaned up against a tree, knocks it over. The gun
Speaker 2: falls on my shoulder, rolls down my arm, and just
Speaker 2: plops onto the ground right in front of me, which
Speaker 2: Number one is dangerous. Number two, the sow and both
Speaker 2: cubs just go lift their heads and just stare us
Speaker 2: down at less than twenty yards now, and he's got
Speaker 2: his iPhone up filming, and I'm thinking, holy cow, man,
Speaker 2: that is not a good time to make a mistake
Speaker 2: like this. And they pretty much ignored us and just
Speaker 2: continued meling around and fishing for several minutes before they
Speaker 2: were out of sight. When they left, I'll be honest
Speaker 2: with you, I scolded that dude. I was probably thirty
Speaker 2: three years old and my gud was maybe twenty one.
Speaker 3: And again I like.
Speaker 2: This kid, but I was like, hey man, you got
Speaker 2: to bring your a game around here.
Speaker 3: And we had a.
Speaker 2: Little laugh about it after I for real scolding. That
Speaker 2: was probably on day five of a ten day hunt. Well,
Speaker 2: that was the only bear we'd seen in five days
Speaker 2: between two hunters and I started asking the guys we
Speaker 2: were hunting one creek. Had we positioned our spike camp
Speaker 2: basically to hunt one creek? And that's where the salmon congregated,
Speaker 2: So that's where the bears congregated. And I said, man,
Speaker 2: is there another creek? I said, me and Scott need
Speaker 2: to split up. There's no sense in both of us
Speaker 2: hunting this same creek. We need to split up. And
Speaker 2: they said, well, there's a creek about eight miles up
Speaker 2: the river, and I said, well, why don't we go
Speaker 2: up there. I said, let's take three days worth of
Speaker 2: supplies and let's me in my guy go up there
Speaker 2: and camp on that creek and we'll leave Scott here.
Speaker 2: So we decided that's what we're gonna do. I want
Speaker 2: to describe now these braided Alaskan rivers. If you've never
Speaker 2: been on one, or seen one from the air, or
Speaker 2: been on one in the water, they are very hard
Speaker 2: to understand. This valley that we were in had big
Speaker 2: mountains almost in every direction, big snow capped, you know,
Speaker 2: nine thousand foot plus mountains, and these snow caps have
Speaker 2: been melting and feeding this river. And the river is
Speaker 2: a light grayish color from glacial till. There's big glaciers
Speaker 2: up in the heads of these valleys. And this river,
Speaker 2: the further you go up it, you're going towards the
Speaker 2: head of the valley, the swifter the water gets and
Speaker 2: the narrower it gets. And this river in places was
Speaker 2: over a half half mile wide, but in that half
Speaker 2: mile there might be twenty five to fifty separate braids
Speaker 2: that were separated by gravel bars in willow flats. And
Speaker 2: the best way that I can describe an Alaskan river
Speaker 2: like that is they are angry.
Speaker 3: I mean, it looks like.
Speaker 2: A war zone in those braided rivers, with all the
Speaker 2: stumps and snags in this gray water that you can't
Speaker 2: see more than six inches if you're standing in it,
Speaker 2: and you're in water up to your shins, you can't
Speaker 2: see your feet. And because the water is colored the
Speaker 2: way that it is, you can't tell how deep some
Speaker 2: of these channels are. So we had a sixteen foot
Speaker 2: aluminum john boat with a jet motor on it. This
Speaker 2: was a really strong vessel design for going up these rivers,
Speaker 2: and me and my god set out with a couple
Speaker 2: of days supplies, going eight miles up the river. But
Speaker 2: the braids change that he didn't know the way. He
Speaker 2: didn't there was no main channel to go on, so
Speaker 2: it was really hard to tell. You know, do you
Speaker 2: go up that braid, that braid there might be a
Speaker 2: big braid that looks like the way you need to go,
Speaker 2: But when you get up there, it very quickly turns
Speaker 2: four inches deep, and so you'll be powering through and
Speaker 2: just gravel out, and then we'd have to jump out
Speaker 2: of the boat, push it, and then go back downstream
Speaker 2: back to the why and then take the other braid
Speaker 2: and we'd go up the braid, and we're just working
Speaker 2: our way, and we got about two miles from camp,
Speaker 2: and it had taken us a while, and we're not
Speaker 2: sure if we can make it eight miles. But I
Speaker 2: am dead set on getting up there. And I'll tell
Speaker 2: you why. For me, this was what I believed was
Speaker 2: a once in a lifetime hunt and probably what scared
Speaker 2: me more than anything. And it's kind of dumb to
Speaker 2: say this, but was not bringing home a bear. You've
Speaker 2: ever been on a big hunt, you probably understand what
Speaker 2: I'm saying. So every time that one of the braids
Speaker 2: would peter out and gravel out, I would say let's
Speaker 2: go back, let's go try another one, and we'd push
Speaker 2: the boat out of the gravel and float back downstream,
Speaker 2: spin the boat around, and go try to find another shoot.
Speaker 2: And we'd get up there and there'd be a huge
Speaker 2: log across it.
Speaker 3: We'd have to.
Speaker 2: Turn the boat around, go back down river two hundred
Speaker 2: yards and go up another braid, and a small braid
Speaker 2: might turn into a big braid, and it was just
Speaker 2: this maze of little streams going through these willow flats.
Speaker 3: Well, we're now several miles from camp, and we gravel.
Speaker 2: Out and we'd push the boat back, get it spun around,
Speaker 2: and get out into the main part of the river,
Speaker 2: which at this point is probably twenty yards wide and
Speaker 2: deep and fast flowing. And I'm standing in the bow
Speaker 2: of the boat, and we're going downstream, but I'm facing upstream,
Speaker 2: so my back is to the direction that we're going.
Speaker 2: My guid he's in the back of the boat, standing
Speaker 2: up with his left hand on the tiller of the motor,
Speaker 2: which is the twist throttle control and steering stick of
Speaker 2: that jet motor, and he is looking back upstream. We're
Speaker 2: trying to find which braid to go on. So both
Speaker 2: of us have our backs turned to the direction that
Speaker 2: we're going. And if you remember, I said that these
Speaker 2: Alaskan rivers are angry and they eat the banks, and
Speaker 2: there's trees that are just waiting to fall into the
Speaker 2: river around every cutbank where the pressure of the outside
Speaker 2: bend of the river is eroding away the bank. So
Speaker 2: I've got my back facing the direction that we're going,
Speaker 2: and just all of a sudden, I just feel a
Speaker 2: incredibly powerful just lam just slammed me in the back,
Speaker 2: and I just go tumbling through the boat.
Speaker 3: Head first.
Speaker 2: I go down and my head is like imagine my
Speaker 2: head on the touching the boat, the only part of
Speaker 2: my body touching the boat, and my feet straight up
Speaker 2: in the air. That is the angle to which I
Speaker 2: saw the culprit for what had just happened, because I
Speaker 2: see what we called widow makers. It was about an
Speaker 2: eight inch log that hung about ten or twelve feet
Speaker 2: out from the cut bank of that river, a dead log.
Speaker 2: And I see that dead log while I'm upside down
Speaker 2: hit the guide right.
Speaker 3: In the chest.
Speaker 2: He's standing in the very back holding the stick, and bam,
Speaker 2: that log takes him and we're going as fast as
Speaker 2: the current is taking us down the river with a
Speaker 2: little bit of throttle, and it hits him right in
Speaker 2: the chest, and I see him go head over heels.
Speaker 3: Out the back of the boat, splash.
Speaker 2: And I am now and now that's what I saw
Speaker 2: when I was upside down. And then I complete the
Speaker 2: somersault and I am now in the back of the
Speaker 2: sixteen foot boat. I scrambled to my feet and I
Speaker 2: see the guide in the water. He's wearing breathable waiters,
Speaker 2: like breatheable fishing waiters. He's completely submerged. I see him
Speaker 2: come up out of the water gasp for air. I
Speaker 2: know that he has all our communication equipment on him.
Speaker 2: He's got the SAT phone on him, he had our
Speaker 2: fire starting equipment. He had all the important stuff on him.
Speaker 2: And here he is going downstream and I'm in the boat.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: All I knew to do was just push that stick
Speaker 2: as hard as I could to the left and just
Speaker 2: wom just ram the boat up onto a gravel bar.
Speaker 3: I just needed to make this stop.
Speaker 2: And I boom, get up on the gravel bar, and
Speaker 2: I'm yelling this guy's name, and I see him just
Speaker 2: floating down the river. The water is probably only like
Speaker 2: navel deep like just below his chest. But it's fast
Speaker 2: moving so he can't really stand up. But I can
Speaker 2: see that he's gaining his footing as he goes down,
Speaker 2: and he's working closer and closer to the bank, and finally,
Speaker 2: fifty to seventy yards down from where I've pushed into
Speaker 2: this gravel bar, he makes his way and crawls up
Speaker 2: on the bank, waiters full of water, and it's over
Speaker 2: and we're safe. When the widow maker this slog hit
Speaker 2: me in the shoulders, I was really sore. It didn't
Speaker 2: really hurt me. I mean, it didn't break anything. I
Speaker 2: remember it had my traditional bow strung laying in the
Speaker 2: bottom of the boat, and somehow me tumbling over that
Speaker 2: bow unstrung the bow. It didn't damage it too bad,
Speaker 2: just banged it up. I was grateful to be alive,
Speaker 2: and as much as I had to take responsibility for
Speaker 2: what happened because I wasn't looking downstream, I was also
Speaker 2: to be honest upset with the goud for you know,
Speaker 2: when you're out in a place you've never been, you
Speaker 2: kind of depend on the people you're supposed to depend on.
Speaker 2: And so I look back now and realize it was.
Speaker 3: It was my fault.
Speaker 2: I mean, I just have to take personal responsibility for
Speaker 2: pushing him to go up the river. And man, we
Speaker 2: just sat on the bank and he dried out. And
Speaker 2: this was the seventh day of a ten day hunt,
Speaker 2: and it absolutely just took the steam out of me.
Speaker 2: It really scared me. I was very It just Alaska
Speaker 2: is such a wild place. It's so remote, and if
Speaker 2: you've never been there, it's hard to understand what the
Speaker 2: place feels like. It's romantic when you see it on TV,
Speaker 2: when you read about it. When you're there, it's in
Speaker 2: some ways it's a lot less romantic, and it's just
Speaker 2: more real, and you realize how small mistakes will kill you.
Speaker 2: Those Alaskan rivers are waiting to kill you. That's just
Speaker 2: the truth. We didn't make it to the second Creek.
Speaker 2: We went back downstream and went back to our camp,
Speaker 2: and we remained there for the final three days of
Speaker 2: the hunt, and I did not kill a brown bear.
Speaker 2: That's the story that I call the widow Maker. I
Speaker 2: still get a little shook up when I recall the shock, surprise, confusion,
Speaker 2: and sheer force of that log closelining me off the
Speaker 2: bow of that boat. The aloneness and vulnerability you feel
Speaker 2: when something unpredictable happens in the wilderness is unnerving. We
Speaker 2: were lucky, no harm, no foul, though, but the scare
Speaker 2: truly humbled me and haunts me to this day. The
Speaker 2: next story is told by Alaskan resident Chad Ferguson, a
Speaker 2: man who I've just met. You're just gonna have to
Speaker 2: hear this one. I'm restraining myself by allotting minimal foreshadowing,
Speaker 2: well no foreshadowing this story I call Gunslinger.
Speaker 4: My name is Chad Ferguson. I am originally from Ohio,
Speaker 4: but I tell everyone that I've lived as many places
Speaker 4: as ten people. If you read any hemingway, you'll probably
Speaker 4: encounter a quote from him that says, when you like
Speaker 4: to hunt and you like to shoot, you have to
Speaker 4: move often and always farther out. And that's been about
Speaker 4: the truth for me. So she and I were just
Speaker 4: talking about this the other day. This is our fourth
Speaker 4: autumn up here. Actually, I have not been in Alaska
Speaker 4: very long. I thought i'd be here the day after
Speaker 4: I graduated from high school and just kind of got
Speaker 4: waylaid with this and that, but finally made a decision
Speaker 4: to come up here, and I'll never live anywhere else.
Speaker 4: And well, I have lived in a number of places.
Speaker 4: I've lived in Wyoming, I've lived in Oregon, lived in
Speaker 4: Pennsylvania of course, where they've got black bears, lived up
Speaker 4: here for a few years, and so I've seen a
Speaker 4: few bears in the wild. Not a lot of bears
Speaker 4: in the wild, but I've seen a few bears in
Speaker 4: the wild. And you can chalk this up to coming
Speaker 4: from the Midwest after too long down there, or you
Speaker 4: can chalk it up to reading too many outdoor life articles,
Speaker 4: or I don't know what, but I was certainly, I
Speaker 4: certainly have a lot of bear fear, Like when I'm
Speaker 4: in the backcountry hunting here for caribou or moose or whatever,
Speaker 4: even ptarmigan, Like I've always got bear spray with me
Speaker 4: or a forty four on me. So very bear aware,
Speaker 4: you know, like lifelong camper. So you try to be smart.
Speaker 4: You don't fry bacon and then crawl in your tent.
Speaker 4: You say hey bear, hey bear, when you're walking through
Speaker 4: places where they might be and where they might not
Speaker 4: be able to hear you coming, and just try to
Speaker 4: be smart. And so I would definitely characterize myself as
Speaker 4: somebody who is bear aware, bear smart, and bear afraid. Yeah.
Speaker 4: In fact, I'll tell you something. I'll tell you something
Speaker 4: that I wrote in another essay, and it's an anecdote
Speaker 4: about a guy that I met up here, and he
Speaker 4: and his cousin they grew up here. Anyhow, he and
Speaker 4: I were in the truck riding somewhere when we were
Speaker 4: king salmon fishing, and he said to me, I'll tell
Speaker 4: you when I quit being afraid of bears, And of
Speaker 4: course I'm all ears. He was bear hunting, actually bear baiting,
Speaker 4: and he had this big grizzly come in to the
Speaker 4: bait and he said that grizzly bear didn't make a sound,
Speaker 4: I mean, didn't even break one little twig. And it
Speaker 4: occurred to me that if they can be that quiet
Speaker 4: anytime they want to, they could take you anytime they
Speaker 4: want to. They don't or they don't, Varied Moften, And
Speaker 4: that's when I quit being afraid of bears. And boy,
Speaker 4: that made a lot of sense to me. That made
Speaker 4: a lot of sense to me, right, because you can
Speaker 4: really make you can worry yourself to pieces. It was
Speaker 4: a beautiful fall day, quintessential autumn weather. I was moose hunting.
Speaker 4: It was early September, blue skies, some light clouds now
Speaker 4: and then, and the colors were really starting to come on.
Speaker 4: I mean everything was pretty. In fact, to this day,
Speaker 4: the desktop on my laptop the background is a picture
Speaker 4: that I took from this trip, and it's just so pretty.
Speaker 4: It looks like it was painted by an Impressionist painter.
Speaker 4: I was out for a week moose hunting. I had
Speaker 4: not been to this area before. It's a special walk
Speaker 4: in area, and I'm here to tell you that there's
Speaker 4: not enough of those here in Alaska. There's more ground
Speaker 4: than you could ever cover in ten lifetimes. But you're
Speaker 4: going to need a plane, a boat, and some buddies
Speaker 4: that have planes and boats to go do it. But
Speaker 4: there are some walk in sites. This one has a
Speaker 4: trail and you can take a bike on the trail,
Speaker 4: non motorized, non electric bike with a little trailer, which
Speaker 4: was my plan. Fact, that's exactly what I'm be doing
Speaker 4: here in a couple of weeks, going back to the
Speaker 4: same area. And yeah, I was out for a week
Speaker 4: solo moose hunting. I had not been here before. I
Speaker 4: had seen some moose, some guys that were sub legal,
Speaker 4: as they say, less than fifty inches. And then I
Speaker 4: saw one that was probably four three miles from me
Speaker 4: for sure, maybe a little bit more than that. And
Speaker 4: I was already eight miles in from the truck. So
Speaker 4: when you're solo, you know, hauling out, you know, what
Speaker 4: could it be? I mean, it could be nine hundred
Speaker 4: pounds after he's you know, gutted and skinned. You got
Speaker 4: to think about that, right. I Mean, there's plenty of
Speaker 4: people that'll say, don't shoot a moose farther than a
Speaker 4: mile from the truck or the landing strip, and that
Speaker 4: just wasn't an option for me on this hunt. And
Speaker 4: in fact, a moose that I had watched for a
Speaker 4: couple of days on this trip, either him or one
Speaker 4: that was like him, between where I was and that moose.
Speaker 4: A couple of other guys went in after me, and
Speaker 4: I told him I've been watching this moose, and a
Speaker 4: couple days later they were coming out with a real
Speaker 4: nice one. So I fancy that it was the one
Speaker 4: that I'd been watching and just didn't have the you know,
Speaker 4: gumption to go after. And that's something else I've had
Speaker 4: to learn about being up here, is you don't want
Speaker 4: to be foolish, right, And you always have to have
Speaker 4: a plan for recovering the game. But I'm pretty confident
Speaker 4: that people will figure it out, you know. So if
Speaker 4: he's a little deeper than you wanted to be and
Speaker 4: it's going to be a little more effort, he just got.
Speaker 1: To dig a little deeper.
Speaker 4: It was late afternoon and I am eight miles into
Speaker 4: a walk in unit. I had about an hour hike
Speaker 4: to get to a good glassing knob, and I had
Speaker 4: my rifle strapped on my backpack, three to zero eight
Speaker 4: bold action strapped by my backpack, and a forty four
Speaker 4: magnum on my hip belt. I always carried bear spray
Speaker 4: with me, but that day it happened to be zipped
Speaker 4: in my backpack for some reason. But I round a
Speaker 4: corner on the trail and I look up the trail
Speaker 4: about fifty yards and there's a big brown bear it
Speaker 4: would turn out to be a sow grizzly, And she
Speaker 4: stand a broadside and she looked at me, and then
Speaker 4: she stood up, stretched her neck out and cocked her
Speaker 4: head and then immediately went into a charge. And I
Speaker 4: mean she was every bit of seven feet tall, and
Speaker 4: here she comes, so it's the only thing I could
Speaker 4: get out before I had to do something, and I
Speaker 4: had no time to think. I didn't feel any fear,
Speaker 4: I didn't have any thoughts at all. I just immediately
Speaker 4: unholstered my forty four, put both hands on her, and
Speaker 4: followed her in. And she starts running down the trail
Speaker 4: towards me, and at about twenty paces, she stopped, turned
Speaker 4: around and took two steps going away from me, and
Speaker 4: then she looked back over her shoulder and I was
Speaker 4: still standing there. She immediately flipped back around and charged again.
Speaker 4: And when she hit twelve paces, and those were measured
Speaker 4: off after the fact, I shot three times as fast
Speaker 4: as I could with my revolver, just right into the
Speaker 4: middle of the bear and hoped for the best. She
Speaker 4: winced at the shots, and I didn't know how many
Speaker 4: times I'd hit her, but it was almost like she'd
Speaker 4: been stung in the chest by hornets. She kind of
Speaker 4: pulled her paws up to her a little bit and
Speaker 4: recoiled a little bit, and she turned at those shots
Speaker 4: and ran thirty yards back up the trail, and then
Speaker 4: she bailed off to the right into the scrub. The
Speaker 4: colors were just starting to get pretty so the dwarf
Speaker 4: birch was starting to turn red and the willows were
Speaker 4: starting to turn yellow, and the brush in that air
Speaker 4: is about four or five feet high. She just disappeared
Speaker 4: into that off the trail. So I immediately, you know,
Speaker 4: polster my revolver, drop my pack, get my rifle undone,
Speaker 4: chamber around, dial it down to two X, and I
Speaker 4: just start creeping up the trail, which might seem like
Speaker 4: kind of a crazy thing to do. Maybe it was
Speaker 4: the wrong thing to do, but if I was going
Speaker 4: to do any more hunting, I had to go forward,
Speaker 4: not just that night, but you know, in the next
Speaker 4: few days. And I needed a dead bear, not a
Speaker 4: wounded bear. So again I didn't even really think about
Speaker 4: it. It wasn't like I made a decision. I just got
Speaker 4: my rifle off, got the magnification dialed down, started walking
Speaker 4: up the trail, and I'm just like, you know, on
Speaker 4: the scope, off the scope, on the scope, off the scope,
Speaker 4: like looking for any patch of brown fur that I
Speaker 4: can see. And as soon as I see a patch
Speaker 4: of brown fur, I shoot right into it. I don't
Speaker 4: even know what part of the bear it is, and
Speaker 4: chamber another round and I'm watching for movement, trying to
Speaker 4: pick her up again, and then finally just stretching my
Speaker 4: neck out and standing up real tall. I could see
Speaker 4: that she's laying there and she's still, and that it's over.
Speaker 4: So of course I go up to her. And as
Speaker 4: I'm walking up the trail, I can see every few
Speaker 4: feet there's a splattering of bright red blood off to
Speaker 4: the left of the trail, so I knew that i'd
Speaker 4: hit her in the heart or in the artery at least,
Speaker 4: But it almost immediately started to dawn on me just
Speaker 4: how incredibly lucky I was. Because she was only twelve
Speaker 4: paces from me at a full run, and she's weighing
Speaker 4: four hundred pounds is what I estimated her at she
Speaker 4: was a very big bear. I could barely move her
Speaker 4: when I got up to her at the shots. She
Speaker 4: decided to turn around and run back up the trail,
Speaker 4: and she ran thirty yards, which was a lot farther
Speaker 4: than she was close to me when I shot her,
Speaker 4: so she could have just as easily flip of a coin,
Speaker 4: decided to keep on going forward, and while she was
Speaker 4: dead and didn't even know it, she could have knocked
Speaker 4: me down, broke me up, bit me up, maybe you know,
Speaker 4: severely mauled or maybe even killed me and then died herself.
Speaker 4: You know. So it just occurred to me almost immediately
Speaker 4: how incredibly lucky I was on this. And the other
Speaker 4: part was that I'd hit her at all. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm not Roy Rogers with a six shooter. You know,
Speaker 4: I don't practice, I don't compete. I mean, I sided
Speaker 4: him in sure, but you know, hitting a running target
Speaker 4: like that's not something you practiced very often. So I
Speaker 4: just felt really lucky. So, you know, I start to
Speaker 4: I try to get her moved around a little bit.
Speaker 4: I wanted to take some pictures, but I just couldn't
Speaker 4: move her. And it was also pretty late in the
Speaker 4: day for as far back as I was, and I
Speaker 4: knew that since I had a tag that area, you
Speaker 4: don't have to have a locking tag. So if you
Speaker 4: have a hunting license and the bears are in season
Speaker 4: and they were, you know, I could tag the bear legally.
Speaker 4: And I was happy to do that because I was
Speaker 4: definitely going to be keeping this one. You know, it
Speaker 4: would be easy for me to say that I'm a
Speaker 4: brave man, but that just wouldn't be the case. You know, like,
Speaker 4: I'm not a quarterback who's had to face down linemen
Speaker 4: coming across for that crushing sack. I'm not a veteran
Speaker 4: who's ever had to operate under fire. I've never rushed
Speaker 4: into a house that's on fire anything like that at all.
Speaker 4: And I'm just happy I didn't run. But next time
Speaker 4: I might run, you know, I mean, I hope not.
Speaker 4: But there was no time for a reaction. Like I
Speaker 4: saw her, I said, I uttered that expletive. I immediately
Speaker 4: took my forty four out and there was just no
Speaker 4: thinking about it at all. And after everything happened that
Speaker 4: I told you, and from the time I saw her
Speaker 4: to the time that I was taking my pack off,
Speaker 4: I mean, it was less than ten seconds. There she
Speaker 4: was here, she comes, bang, bang, bang, and now she's
Speaker 4: running off. So you hear people say that I didn't
Speaker 4: have time to think or I didn't have time to
Speaker 4: be afraid, and that was absolutely the truth. So I
Speaker 4: get my pack off, you know, I shoot the rifle.
Speaker 4: I finally see that it's done. I walk up to
Speaker 4: her to see that she was not breathing. Probably should
Speaker 4: have put a safety run into her. To tell you,
Speaker 4: the truth had been something else that would have been
Speaker 4: smart to do, but I didn't. You know, the African
Speaker 4: guys will tell you it's the dead ones that kill you,
Speaker 4: and I did feel very calm. I called my partner
Speaker 4: and I told her what happened. I had one bar
Speaker 4: reception and after that I texted a couple hunting buddies.
Speaker 4: I'm like, you would not believe just what happened, And
Speaker 4: ten minutes later I was shaken so bad I wouldn't
Speaker 4: have been able to hold a glass of bourbon.
Speaker 2: Chad is undoubtedly better trained with the pistol than he
Speaker 2: gives himself credit for. However, if he had it to
Speaker 2: do over again, the outcome could have been different. Encountering
Speaker 2: an aggressive grizzly at close range is a life altering
Speaker 2: interaction that I'm certain imprints someone at the psychological level,
Speaker 2: and now I'm totally speculating here, but probably even at
Speaker 2: the DNA level. Somehow our offspring know what almost killed us,
Speaker 2: and we make subtle amendments to adjust, trying to avoid
Speaker 2: the same fate. That was a good story, Chad. I'm
Speaker 2: glad you were prepared for the worst. Well, we'll end
Speaker 2: with a short story from doctor Randall Williams, the resident
Speaker 2: historian of Meat eat Or Incorporated. Randall spent eight years
Speaker 2: as a fishing guide in Alaska, and he's got a story.
Speaker 6: My name is Randall Williams. When I was twenty two
Speaker 6: years old, I took an offer through a friend of
Speaker 6: a friend to go up and work at a fly
Speaker 6: out fishing lodge in Alaska. I kept going back each
Speaker 6: summer and guided my last trip in the summer I
Speaker 6: got married of twenty fifteen. For all those years, I
Speaker 6: split my time and my world belongings between Montana and Alaska.
Speaker 6: Every year, at the end of the season, I'd roll
Speaker 6: up all my stuff underwear, T shirts and a couple
Speaker 6: pairs of jeans and a hoodie and a big blue
Speaker 6: plastic bag. These bags we used to pack fish for clients,
Speaker 6: and I'd tuck it all away in my cabin so
Speaker 6: that it was waiting for me the next summer. I
Speaker 6: had a pair of extra tufts that lived up at
Speaker 6: the lodge, and I had a big box of books.
Speaker 6: That way, I only had to fly with my fishing
Speaker 6: gear and my personal items. I had my Alaska stuff
Speaker 6: and I had my Montana stuff. Now late May through
Speaker 6: mid July was king season. These were extremely long days
Speaker 6: with all that daylight. You wanted to be at your
Speaker 6: spot well before legal fishing hours at six am, and
Speaker 6: you're often going out after dinner until fishing clothes at
Speaker 6: eleven PM. In July we started getting sakeyes and then
Speaker 6: silvers and chums through August, and by late August and
Speaker 6: the early September we were targeting rainbows. It was an
Speaker 6: education to say the least, and I saw my share
Speaker 6: of wild, weird stuff, bears, boat crashes, cabins getting swept
Speaker 6: down river. We even had the troopers come out and
Speaker 6: conduct a manhunt in the drainages around the lodge. One
Speaker 6: spring and another summer we found a bunch of coffins
Speaker 6: and human skeletons from the old mining days as they
Speaker 6: washed out of an eroding cutbank. This was only in
Speaker 6: Alaska kind of stuff. But the biggest shock I think
Speaker 6: I ever faced up there happened on May twentieth, twenty fourteen,
Speaker 6: And that was the day I flew out to the
Speaker 6: bush for the summer and realized the only pair of
Speaker 6: underpants I had were the ones I was wearing. Now,
Speaker 6: remember the closed system I mentioned earlier, Well, that was
Speaker 6: a system that worked great until it didn't. I'm sure
Speaker 6: a lot of people that have worked intense seasonal jobs
Speaker 6: are familiar with this feeling. You get to the end
Speaker 6: of the season and you tell yourself, I am never
Speaker 6: coming back here. Long hours, hard work, nightmare clients, and
Speaker 6: in my case, at the end of the summer twenty thirteen,
Speaker 6: i'd gotten engaged a few months before I came out.
Speaker 6: I thought I was done, so at the end of
Speaker 6: that summer, I threw all my clothes in the burn
Speaker 6: barrel and torched it, and I forgot all about doing
Speaker 6: this until May the following year. For a while, my
Speaker 6: lack of underwear was a crisis. You can imagine it's
Speaker 6: just about impossible to hit a strategically timed wash cycle
Speaker 6: in the middle of king season. And then the whole
Speaker 6: situation became a source of entertainment for everyone in camp.
Speaker 6: We kept a running tally. When I was asked to
Speaker 6: record this story, I reached out to my old boss
Speaker 6: to see if he could remember the details.
Speaker 1: His reply, I know it.
Speaker 6: Went on for over a month. I was just talking
Speaker 6: about that to some of the guides this summer. Another
Speaker 6: fellow I worked with replied, I know you broke two
Speaker 6: weeks for sure, maybe a month. Then another guy responded
Speaker 6: with a photo of the underwear in question, which we
Speaker 6: nailed up above the front door to the guide check.
Speaker 6: After the situation was resolved, was finally able to fly
Speaker 6: out with a five pack of Haynes and a special
Speaker 6: pair of Superman undies to celebrate. That photo shows a
Speaker 6: whole bunch of threads hanging from a stretched out wastebind
Speaker 6: nailed into a rundown shack, and next to it on
Speaker 6: the wall as a hand drawn sign reading as follows
Speaker 6: certified thirty three days of continuous use. Randa Williams, June
Speaker 6: twenty third, twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: Only in Alaska, You, my friends have just been punked,
Speaker 2: and he walked right into it. It was almost as
Speaker 2: foolish as me standing on the bow of that boat
Speaker 2: looking upstream while we were heading downstrength. Regardless of if
Speaker 2: you have clean underwear, Alaska is a wild place, from
Speaker 2: raging angry rivers to cold nights under a out and
Speaker 2: go hide to charging grizzlies. Alaska's stories are forever intriguing,
Speaker 2: and we're just getting started. I can't thank you enough
Speaker 2: for listening to bear greats hunting season is upon us.
Speaker 2: Be sure to check out first Light for all your
Speaker 2: hunting clothing this year, including whitetail and waterfowl gear. I've
Speaker 2: been wearing first Light for almost a decade and it
Speaker 2: would be hard for.
Speaker 3: Me to wear anything else.
Speaker 2: And thanks to everyone who bought a phelps Acre and
Speaker 2: Grunt and Bleak Call. They sold out in about twenty
Speaker 2: four hours. We're trying to get some more made as
Speaker 2: quick as we can, so stand by. I hope you've
Speaker 2: got big plans this fall. Be careful out there and
Speaker 2: have some adventure and just be aware what's going on
Speaker 2: around you. I can't wait to talk to all the
Speaker 2: folks on the Render this week about these Alaskan stories.