Speaker 1: My body went forward and my left leg stayed where
Speaker 1: it was, and I just hear this pop in my
Speaker 1: left leg, and all of a sudden, I'm laying there
Speaker 1: and I instantly knew something bad just happened to my leg.
Speaker 2: We're on the second episode of our Alaska story series.
Speaker 2: These harrowing tales of adventure are hard to beat in
Speaker 2: terms of excitement and entertainment. As we listen to these,
Speaker 2: we get a sense, albeit from a safe distance, some
Speaker 2: fragment of what the storyteller felt in the climax moment
Speaker 2: of their experience. We always learned practical things from these stories,
Speaker 2: but stories of crisis, fear, and adventure are internal trial
Speaker 2: test runs for us. Do you find yourself imagining how
Speaker 2: you would have responded in a similar situation and what
Speaker 2: would life be without difficulty? We spend our lives trying
Speaker 2: to avoid it, but trials and tribulations consume the human
Speaker 2: communication experience. We spend an incredible amount of time thinking
Speaker 2: about crisis. We talk about it, we write about it,
Speaker 2: we make movies about it, and constantly fetishize our responses
Speaker 2: to crisis.
Speaker 3: We've got four.
Speaker 2: Wild Alaskan stories on this episode about big mountains, big
Speaker 2: bears and a more internal struggle. The very last story
Speaker 2: on this series, told by Steve Ranella, is one he's
Speaker 2: never told publicly, but we decided to include it in
Speaker 2: hopes that it might make a difference in somebody's life.
Speaker 2: I really doubt that you're going to want to miss
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 4: There was just time frozen and me knowing that my
Speaker 4: time had come and I had lived a good life
Speaker 4: and I was at peace with it.
Speaker 2: My name is Klay Knukem, and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Speaker 2: Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and
Speaker 2: fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 2: place as we explore. Henry Gannette became the chief geographer
Speaker 2: for the United States Geological Survey in eighteen eighty two
Speaker 2: and is considered the father of map making in America.
Speaker 2: In nineteen oh one, he said this about Alaska. If
Speaker 2: you are old, go by all means, but if you
Speaker 2: are young, stay away until you grow older. The scenery
Speaker 2: of Alaska is so much grander than anything else of
Speaker 2: the kind in the world that, once beheld, all other
Speaker 2: scenery becomes flat and insipid. It is not well to
Speaker 2: dle one's capacity for such enjoyment by seeing the finest first.
Speaker 2: I've been enamored with Alaska for a long time. These
Speaker 2: stories continue to paint for me the unique challenges of
Speaker 2: hunting America's last frontier. Our first story is told by
Speaker 2: Alaskan god Austin Manalik about a doll sheep hunt in
Speaker 2: Alaska's High Country meat.
Speaker 5: Austin, So, I'm Austin and Elik, born and raised Alaskan,
Speaker 5: thirty five years living up here and do some assistant
Speaker 5: guiding currently and kind of like a Swiss army knife
Speaker 5: of many things in the hunting industry. So trying to
Speaker 5: figure out and making a living at the Alaska lifestyle. Eventually,
Speaker 5: I guess kind of got there, which brought me into
Speaker 5: an assistant guiding and spending the amount of time that
Speaker 5: I wanted to a field still after start my family,
Speaker 5: getting married, and then pretty soon there after having children,
Speaker 5: and then the bills start coming that you don't see,
Speaker 5: the mortgage, a truck payment, saving up to buy a boat,
Speaker 5: and you know, fueling the addiction is you know, boats
Speaker 5: bust out.
Speaker 6: At other thousand is what it stands for.
Speaker 5: So when you kick off a guided hunt in Alaska
Speaker 5: as an assistant guide, which I am currently working towards
Speaker 5: my registered guide license, you you don't know what you're
Speaker 5: getting into with someone that's a flat lander from Michigan,
Speaker 5: you know, or wherever they may come from, or like
Speaker 5: a very accomplished hunter from Washington.
Speaker 6: You just never know what you're getting into.
Speaker 5: So when you start these hunts off, you can sus
Speaker 5: someone out pretty good within the first ten minutes. This
Speaker 5: is the kickoff of the Alaska season for sheep hunters.
Speaker 5: And I linked up with a registered guide and he
Speaker 5: flew me out, then he flew back, picked up the
Speaker 5: client and dropped him off, and then he dropped a packer,
Speaker 5: very young, green behind the ears packer, twenty year old kid.
Speaker 5: That is the big kickoff. The big show is sheep
Speaker 5: season for sure. I loved all sheep man. I love
Speaker 5: smelling the perfume, the cologne of a doll ram, just
Speaker 5: anyone you can put in your hands.
Speaker 6: It's just it's something magical.
Speaker 5: My spirit animal really the most handsome creature in my
Speaker 5: opinion in the world. The white tuxedo with the gold
Speaker 5: bowl tyes. You know, they're just cool. So we got there.
Speaker 5: I had not been to this area, however, the packer had.
Speaker 5: He had been there the year before, and it was
Speaker 5: kind of the running joke. When I sat the packer down,
Speaker 5: I said, tell me about everything you know about all
Speaker 5: these sheep, the sheep that were missed, the sheep that
Speaker 5: were spooked. I need to know everything because you can
Speaker 5: only get when you're flying in to a place like
Speaker 5: you can't wrap your mind around these giant mountains, even
Speaker 5: with the best aerial mapping, it's just really tough. And
Speaker 5: then making a decision can cost you the entire hunt,
Speaker 5: because if you're going to do a big loop, it
Speaker 5: can be three days, it can be five days. It
Speaker 5: could be the end of the hunt before it began.
Speaker 5: And he said, man, I feel like I am being
Speaker 5: interviewed on forty eight hours like a murder suspect. I'm like, hey, buddy,
Speaker 5: you are you know we all hit it off. It
Speaker 5: was I knew it was going to be a great adventure.
Speaker 5: And the year previous he hiked up this ridge to
Speaker 5: get a look into this drainage after sheep got spooked
Speaker 5: and he found the ram and he was coming down
Speaker 5: the mountain and the previous hunter and the guide were screaming,
Speaker 5: and I believe they shot their rifle in the air
Speaker 5: and he looked up.
Speaker 6: He's like, what's going on?
Speaker 5: He couldn't see, but a bear was chasing him down
Speaker 5: the drainage and then he disappeared into the broccoli.
Speaker 6: The dog here down low and he popped out. He's like,
Speaker 6: what was going on.
Speaker 5: They're like, oh my gosh, you're alive. You had a
Speaker 5: grizzly on your tail. He's like, really, he had no clue. So,
Speaker 5: you know, we're halfway through now about, and we've had
Speaker 5: some rough weather. At this stage, we're like a real
Speaker 5: cohesive unit. We've all shared our stories. That packer told
Speaker 5: us a story about you know, that bear charged me
Speaker 5: the year before and not this nine millimeter and my
Speaker 5: dad made me these custom loads before I left. He said,
Speaker 5: you're going to carry a handgun. And I'm carrying this handgun,
Speaker 5: and you know, for this reason. And he got a
Speaker 5: whole spit that didn't really fit that great like it
Speaker 5: fit in there, but it was it was falling out
Speaker 5: at any rate.
Speaker 6: We did the bigger loop.
Speaker 5: We come around the corner, we find a ram, we
Speaker 5: do a critical stock got in and he missed. The
Speaker 5: client missed, and I was a bummer, and she went
Speaker 5: up and over and said, Hey, no sweat, we still
Speaker 5: got time.
Speaker 6: We're gonna find him. We'll find another one. Don't worry.
Speaker 6: A clean miss. I phone scoped it. I could see everything.
Speaker 6: It's all right.
Speaker 5: So we wake up, we have the coffee, and he said,
Speaker 5: are we still really in this? He was like, man,
Speaker 5: we got a hike out of here. This is gonna
Speaker 5: be tough to get out of here. So we bailed
Speaker 5: off this big shale slide. We're at the back of
Speaker 5: this base and about six thousand feet maybe a little
Speaker 5: bit less. We dropped down about one thousand feet down
Speaker 5: into this basin on a shale slide where you can
Speaker 5: just run down the shale, and basically it's hey.
Speaker 6: You need to just stay, just wait until I get down.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna get out of the way and then you
Speaker 5: come down to me, and then the packer will come down.
Speaker 5: So we don't kick rocks, they don't roll into each
Speaker 5: other and you get hurt coming down. So we did
Speaker 5: the mountain glissade down and we don't have any water left.
Speaker 5: I'm like, yeah, we'll be down in ten minutes. So
Speaker 5: we get down. I'm like, oh, look at that.
Speaker 6: This is beautiful. We're looking at this.
Speaker 5: We're still really up high, I don't know, above four
Speaker 5: two hundred and fifty feet at least, not a tree
Speaker 5: in sight for I don't know, probably five ten miles,
Speaker 5: like not even a shrub. And so we're in this
Speaker 5: kind of broken rocky terrain with these boulders that are
Speaker 5: the size of footballs to beach ball size, and there's
Speaker 5: just a little pocket of water where I'm kind of down,
Speaker 5: and they're sitting up maybe five yards away, maybe less,
Speaker 5: and you know, there's a little rise about fifty yards
Speaker 5: from but we can see this whole valley. But where
Speaker 5: I'm at, I'm down in a hole, but all I
Speaker 5: can see around me is shale and.
Speaker 6: My client and the packer.
Speaker 5: The packer had when he was coming down going back
Speaker 5: to his handgun in his case, his handgun fell out.
Speaker 6: I made sure.
Speaker 5: I'm like, hey, don't keep one in there. No one
Speaker 5: ever keeps any rifle chambered. I'm like, I will let
Speaker 5: you know in a chamber around and so on a
Speaker 5: sheep hunt. You're hiking around the mountains and usually don't
Speaker 5: ever run into gris, and your rifle is usually on
Speaker 5: your pack because if you've got it out and you
Speaker 5: slip and fall, you drop your rifle, it's gonna maybe
Speaker 5: bump scope, maybe not. So he just rifles are in okay,
Speaker 5: And I usually don't carry a handgun hunting sheep, and
Speaker 5: that has since changed after this moment that's coming up.
Speaker 6: I'm filtering this water out of a diesel.
Speaker 5: It's a diesel filter this, you know, diesel filters like
Speaker 5: ten microns or something like that.
Speaker 6: So it takes a while.
Speaker 5: We're sitting there and talking and thinking, you know, the
Speaker 5: hunt's kind of done.
Speaker 6: We're talking loud, and I'm.
Speaker 5: Looking up at them, and the packer has his entire
Speaker 5: handgun apart, and they're talking back and forth, and he's
Speaker 5: telling us the story about his dad custom rounds again
Speaker 5: for like the third time. We're like, oh, okay, cool,
Speaker 5: right on, and I got fifteen rounds in this meg
Speaker 5: and magazine. I've got another fifteen in this one. Okay, cool,
Speaker 5: you know, And he puts it all back together. A
Speaker 5: couple of cosmetic scratches, No big deal, so beside, Zach
Speaker 5: Forward puts the magazine back in and like, right when
Speaker 5: I heard that noise, and he just kind of looks
Speaker 5: at us and says like he says, bears, guy's bears.
Speaker 5: And that's kind of where I'm like, hey, sheep, boys,
Speaker 5: sheep are like, hey, there's caribou over there or you know,
Speaker 5: nothing threatening over here. Just kind of like we're noticing
Speaker 5: something and be aware. He said it like that, and
Speaker 5: I'm like, oh sweet, my client, he has a griz tag.
Speaker 5: This could change the whole hunt as well. So I
Speaker 5: put down the water. I kind of trot up to
Speaker 5: him and keeping my head low, and I'm you know,
Speaker 5: I'm maybe five yards maybe away from When I get
Speaker 5: up to the rise and I look to my left,
Speaker 5: it's a soal grizz with three two year old cubs.
Speaker 5: I look and as I made eye contact with that bear,
Speaker 5: full blown charge. And I have seen charges. I've seen
Speaker 5: bluff charges, and no one to shoot, no one to
Speaker 5: hold them, no one to fold them. This bear is coming.
Speaker 6: Four hour Lives. I grabbed my pack, screaming.
Speaker 5: Hey bear, bear, no, no, no, hey, just scream like
Speaker 5: I don't know what came out of my mouth other
Speaker 5: than the loudest noise I could possibly make.
Speaker 6: I grab my pack. By the time that I had
Speaker 6: done that.
Speaker 5: And screaming, I couldn't turn over my rifle and jack
Speaker 5: around in and shoot.
Speaker 6: It was right there. I mean two three steps.
Speaker 5: I mean like I could have stepped once and touched
Speaker 5: it with my rifle and tip of the nose and
Speaker 5: I had Actually I got the gun out and I
Speaker 5: grabbed a rock. I don't know, your mind is just
Speaker 5: going I grabbed a rock because I was gonna throw
Speaker 5: that maybe a like a diversion or a hitter or
Speaker 5: something as I'm screaming, and then maybe get one jacked
Speaker 5: in as I'm getting chewed on and hopefully someone helps me.
Speaker 6: But as I did that, what I heard was three gunshots.
Speaker 5: You know, in that moment, your mind isn't thinking am
Speaker 5: I gonna die?
Speaker 6: Is someone going to die? Or are we all going
Speaker 6: to die?
Speaker 5: You are just like faced with this the realization something bad, death, malling,
Speaker 5: something is going to happen, and I'm going through these
Speaker 5: motions of like you can play it out in your mind,
Speaker 5: you can think about it all you want, but in
Speaker 5: that moment, it's just absent adrenaline shark eye life death
Speaker 5: face on.
Speaker 6: This is the moment.
Speaker 5: And so in that moment, the packer he shot eight times,
Speaker 5: and we know that because he counted how many he
Speaker 5: had left.
Speaker 6: I heard three shots.
Speaker 5: It was it happened that fast, and all I saw
Speaker 5: around this bear was basically like a halo. And those cubs,
Speaker 5: those cubs, they all stayed right there on that far
Speaker 5: not you know, forty yards away. They stayed there watching.
Speaker 5: And when he shot, he shot in a complete halo.
Speaker 5: It looked like around this bear, all I saw was
Speaker 5: rocks flying around this bear at its feet, under its stomach,
Speaker 5: over its back, over its head. And I'm like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: I only heard three shots, but I saw a lot
Speaker 5: of chaos going around that bear. I started screaming because
Speaker 5: she she had turned and took off, running back towards
Speaker 5: her cubs. And I know exactly how close that bear
Speaker 5: was when she turned and like made semicircle of poop
Speaker 5: that some of it may have splashed her onto our packs,
Speaker 5: like it was a boot length away.
Speaker 6: So she had spun and done that and just took.
Speaker 5: Off getting into this this bear encounter, this packer saved
Speaker 5: my life and his life and the client's life. It's
Speaker 5: just no way around it. He he saved our bacon.
Speaker 5: So like we've we back up. You got one jacked in.
Speaker 5: I'm like, everybody, calm down. We're just gonna stay right
Speaker 5: here and we're gonna wait. So we waited until our
Speaker 5: nerves were calm. This is what we're gonna do. I
Speaker 5: need to track and make sure this thing is not
Speaker 5: when we're not injured whatsoever, and make sure that we
Speaker 5: don't don't have to call the authorities and go through
Speaker 5: with this process because it's it's very serious, you know,
Speaker 5: shooting us sol with cubs or she a bear without
Speaker 5: a tag. All wildlife in Alaska is taking incredibly seriously,
Speaker 5: and the Wildlife troopers don't play. They have all the
Speaker 5: beans in the world to get out there and save
Speaker 5: you a you know, they'll be the first responders and
Speaker 5: they'll save hunters all the time, but to check you
Speaker 5: in places you didn't think you were going to be checked.
Speaker 5: So it's you really really have to play by the rules,
Speaker 5: exactly by the rules, even if your life depends on it.
Speaker 5: So Bear wasn't wounded, Bear lived, Bear got the spoop.
Speaker 5: We went down the drainage and wouldn't you know it.
Speaker 5: On our way out, I looked up and I said,
Speaker 5: there's the ram that we've been circling. He came back
Speaker 5: down there he is, and we snuck over there and
Speaker 5: shot that ram about six hours later, said, dude, like
Speaker 5: it or not, I told you, we are still in
Speaker 5: this ballgame. Anytime you step foot in the wilds of Alaska,
Speaker 5: you're in the ball game.
Speaker 2: The timing of that packer pulling out his gun and
Speaker 2: having it loaded and in his hand was uncanny. I've
Speaker 2: never been charged by a grizzly, but I know it's
Speaker 2: something that can never be forgotten. Everyone talks about how
Speaker 2: fast it happens. Everybody talks about that this story could
Speaker 2: have ended much different than it did if it hadn't
Speaker 2: been for that packer and his nine milimeter. Austin runs
Speaker 2: a brand called Mission Alaska, and you can check him
Speaker 2: out online and see what he's up to. Good story, Austin.
Speaker 2: Our next story is one perhaps that you've heard. If
Speaker 2: you've been in the meat Eat your orbit for very long,
Speaker 2: do you remember Steve and Giannis's meat tree story. It's
Speaker 2: so good it's worth telling over and over. But I
Speaker 2: have never heard Garrett Smith or Dirt Myth as we
Speaker 2: call him. I've never heard his full side of the story,
Speaker 2: and he played a unique role in this story. I
Speaker 2: asked Jannis and Garrett to tag team on this one,
Speaker 2: so here is their version of the meat tree.
Speaker 4: All right, mister Newcombe, here comes the bear story from
Speaker 4: Garrett William Smith a ka Dirt Myth aka Dirt Steve
Speaker 4: Drew tag for Roosevelt Elk Bull Elk on a Fognac Island, Alaska,
Speaker 4: short flight from Kodiak. I was brought on as cinematographer
Speaker 4: document the hunt. Remy Warren was an additional hunter. Jannis Petelis,
Speaker 4: Janni Timani the Eagle Latvian eagle was a long as
Speaker 4: a hunter, producer, storyteller, and Chris Gill was a second cinematographer.
Speaker 7: And then my buddy.
Speaker 4: Patrick O'Connell was along as a production assistant. We land
Speaker 4: in this floatplane on this lake, on a secluded island
Speaker 4: surrounded by you know, the wild ocean. We set up
Speaker 4: our camp, which includes setting up a bear fence. We
Speaker 4: were forewarned that interaction with the Kodiak brown bear was likely,
Speaker 4: if not imminent, And the plane takes off and as
Speaker 4: as the drum of that that motor slightens us more
Speaker 4: and more and eventually disappears. You You do have a
Speaker 4: moment of realizing that you're in You're in a spot
Speaker 4: much bigger than yourself, and without speaking to it, there's
Speaker 4: a feeling of of clannishness that you uh, You're glad
Speaker 4: you're there with friends and co workers that you know
Speaker 4: have proven themselves tried and true in the field in
Speaker 4: similar situations. Remy had done this hunt before, I had
Speaker 4: suffered greatly. I had success, But it's just it's it's
Speaker 4: a It's an island in a landscape that truly defines
Speaker 4: and tests any hard man or woman on their ability
Speaker 4: to persevere through weather and extremely dense vegetation, wet wet,
Speaker 4: wet wet, an abundance of Roosevelt elk, which are amazing,
Speaker 4: and an abundance of Kodiak brown bears, which are amazing.
Speaker 7: A fog nag is a it's a wild place, maybe
Speaker 7: one of the wildest places I've been. It's got a
Speaker 7: Jurassic Park kind of feel to it. Everything's big. The
Speaker 7: elk or giant, the golden eagles. We saw a giant
Speaker 7: saky salmon that we caught were giant I think it
Speaker 7: seemed to be big there. It's also very wet. It
Speaker 7: never stopped raining, and I remember walking across hillsides and
Speaker 7: remarking that it just felt as though you were constantly
Speaker 7: crossing a stream, like not only were you stepping in
Speaker 7: water marshy grass water, but that it was always moving.
Speaker 7: We had a camp and an in a valley and
Speaker 7: we had to eventually find the elk. We had to
Speaker 7: climb over a pretty big ridge. It took us at
Speaker 7: least an hour to summit and then go down the
Speaker 7: other side of the ridge into a long drainage, and
Speaker 7: that's where we found found these elk. You can actually
Speaker 7: see the ocean from where we found the elk. Well.
Speaker 7: Steve eventually harvests an elk.
Speaker 4: Steve has a shot and takes down this Roosevelt elk
Speaker 4: had a clean shot and it died down in this creek.
Speaker 4: It has one of its antlers broken off from fighting.
Speaker 4: But massive body down in this really steep creek bed
Speaker 4: in the water, which is a pain in the butt.
Speaker 4: So Rammy and Steve and the crew start butchering. The
Speaker 4: elk is totally dressed and begged. It's dark, so it's
Speaker 4: too much meat to pack all the way back to camp.
Speaker 4: But in the daylight we had either pinned or just
Speaker 4: remembered there was a taller tree in the landscape that
Speaker 4: kind of stuck out amongst all the dense vegetation, and
Speaker 4: we start working towards that with half of the elk
Speaker 4: between the six of us, just to give you u
Speaker 4: and we're all strong dudes, all very familiar with having
Speaker 4: heavy packs with meat loaded into them. So we pack
Speaker 4: half of that elk up to this tree and hang it.
Speaker 7: Now, when you draw this Roosevelt elk tag in the
Speaker 7: state of Alaska, you get a letter from the Alaska
Speaker 7: Game and Fish that says, this is an extremely tough
Speaker 7: hunt and by the way, if you kill it is
Speaker 7: almost guaranteed that a brown bear will claim your kill.
Speaker 7: So get your meat away from the carcass and take
Speaker 7: the rest of the proper precautions that you need to
Speaker 7: take to take care of that. So we were expecting
Speaker 7: to have not altercations necessarily, but encounters with brown bears,
Speaker 7: especially once we had one had an elk down. What's
Speaker 7: interesting is that up until that point, which I'm guessing
Speaker 7: was four or five days into the hunt, we had
Speaker 7: not seen a brown beerry. Yet it takes us a
Speaker 7: long time to pack this elk out. Six of us
Speaker 7: pack half of this huge elk out, and we don't
Speaker 7: get back to camp until I think three or four
Speaker 7: o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 4: And because we had to have such a late, a
Speaker 4: long day and then late night, we decided to stay
Speaker 4: around camp, kind of do a little R and R
Speaker 4: and you know, dry our gear out. Life is good.
Speaker 4: Remy still got a tag. We still have half an
Speaker 4: elk hanging in a tree six hours away from camp
Speaker 4: on a kind of a death hike. So the next day,
Speaker 4: wake up early.
Speaker 7: And we decided the next day we'll get up first thing,
Speaker 7: and I said early, going there and get the rest
Speaker 7: of the elk. So we hike over the ridge, down
Speaker 7: the long valley towards where we had left this the
Speaker 7: other half of the meat in a tree. We get
Speaker 7: about four one hundred five hundred yards from this now
Speaker 7: we can call it the meat tree with the meats hanging.
Speaker 7: We're across a small creek or across the bottom of
Speaker 7: the drainage, looking from one side across this creek and
Speaker 7: looking up at this hillside where the meat tree is.
Speaker 7: And we sit there for a solid thirty minutes in
Speaker 7: glass with binoculars. We survey the tree and the surrounding
Speaker 7: area to see if we can find a bear. Nothing
Speaker 7: seems to be there, nothing seems to be stirring, so
Speaker 7: we head on in there. We come in there, taking
Speaker 7: the necessary precautions like you do in bear country, especially
Speaker 7: when you're approaching a tree that has meat hanging in it,
Speaker 7: which is we have bear sprays drawn. We're making a
Speaker 7: lot of noise, a lot of hooting, a lot of hollering,
Speaker 7: and so forth. We pretty much march right up to
Speaker 7: the tree. We get there, we inspect the location for
Speaker 7: bear sign and it seems as though a has not
Speaker 7: been there, miraculously not showing up after half of an
Speaker 7: elk's been hanging in a tree.
Speaker 4: Yeah, worst thinking, All right, half of this day is done.
Speaker 4: Let's eat some lunch, throw this meat in our backs,
Speaker 4: get back to camp so we can continue to hunt
Speaker 4: for remis tag. Sit down in a semicircle. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's it's already been a big push just getting to
Speaker 4: that tree. Everyone takes off their packs and we're just
Speaker 4: you know, we're brothers in arms. We're joking and pats
Speaker 4: making these bomber sandwiches and a.
Speaker 7: Couple of reasons. And sandwiches are funny, but the biggest
Speaker 7: one is as the sandwiches get passed out, I noticed
Speaker 7: that Steve's sandwich is just a little bit bigger than mine.
Speaker 7: And I remark to him, Hey, what's the deal? How
Speaker 7: come my sandwich is as big as yours? He says,
Speaker 7: if you want a bigger sandwich, you need to just
Speaker 7: go get your own. Show. That's the last thing he
Speaker 7: said before Patrick O'Connell, who was boiling water on a stove,
Speaker 7: and I can still remember the sound of that stove hissing,
Speaker 7: and that pot started to just shake a little bit
Speaker 7: as the water was starting to boil. Pat says, hey,
Speaker 7: did anybody hear that?
Speaker 4: As soon as he said, do you guys hear that?
Speaker 4: We all looked the direction. We all had heard something.
Speaker 4: Pat was the first to mention, and it wasn't something
Speaker 4: that was lingering. And then it was like there was
Speaker 4: a sound that Pat reacted to and looked and we
Speaker 4: all look over and there's a Kodiak brown Bear running
Speaker 4: faster than anything I've ever seen, run towards our group.
Speaker 7: In that moment, everyone seems to get tunnel vision. Later
Speaker 7: interviewing everybody, no one else can remember what anyone else did,
Speaker 7: their movements, their positioning, which is interesting. Everybody went to
Speaker 7: tunnel vision, but we were sitting in sort of half circle.
Speaker 7: Stee was actually laying down on his side, sort of
Speaker 7: propped up like Jane Fonda doing her exercises, eating his sandwich,
Speaker 7: and the rest of us were sort of a half
Speaker 7: circle around him. Well, here comes this bear, And in
Speaker 7: that moment, all I can really remember is as the
Speaker 7: bears coming towards us, it doesn't really look like a bear.
Speaker 7: There's a brown mass. The edges of the brown mass
Speaker 7: are fluffy, they're almost glowing as the sunlight sort of
Speaker 7: touches the tips of the bear's fur. The fur itself
Speaker 7: sort of has a jiggly yellow rolling characteristic to it,
Speaker 7: as the muscles underneath it move and the fur and
Speaker 7: the fat move across it in the almost waves. The
Speaker 7: center of this brown mass has white teeth and small
Speaker 7: yellow eyes.
Speaker 4: I had never I got to speak for myself, I
Speaker 4: had never been in a situation like that where a
Speaker 4: predator or a life form of such obviously superior strength
Speaker 4: covering a distance so fast that all this thought process
Speaker 4: happens afterwards, we see it all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 4: in our group under the meat tree. My lizard brain
Speaker 4: reaction was flight. I'm not ashamed at all. I mean,
Speaker 4: it wasn't a choice, you know, fight or flight. I
Speaker 4: remember the freeze frame of that bear's shoulders and size
Speaker 4: and speed, and I'm not surprised at all that I
Speaker 4: basically rolled, like spun around and separated myself from the
Speaker 4: rushing on slot by a tree.
Speaker 7: By the meat tree. We knew that we'd have, like
Speaker 7: I said, interactions with bears. Before sitting down, or as
Speaker 7: I sat down to have my sandwich, I had specifically
Speaker 7: taken my pistol, which was in a holster on my backpack,
Speaker 7: and I had taken it out of the holster and
Speaker 7: set it down next to me. I also knew that
Speaker 7: I had bear spray on my belt in a bear
Speaker 7: spray holster for whatever reason. I had also two trekking
Speaker 7: poles that were laid there next to me. But in
Speaker 7: the moment that the bear is bearing down on us,
Speaker 7: my brain does not go to the pistol in orderes,
Speaker 7: it go to the bear spray. Instead. I find myself
Speaker 7: on two feet standing there like Pete Alonzo clutching two
Speaker 7: trekking poles, and as the bear's head is within striking distance,
Speaker 7: I swing at the bear's face. The next five minutes
Speaker 7: of the story actually takes about two seconds to transpire,
Speaker 7: but in that moment I thought, well, it's gonna roll
Speaker 7: me over, I might as well go down swinging. When
Speaker 7: I swing and I feel that I connect, I'm surprised.
Speaker 7: Then I'm ten times more surprised when the last thing
Speaker 7: that I thought would happen was that the bear somehow
Speaker 7: reacts to this getting touched by my trekking poles. The
Speaker 7: bears almost one hundred and eighty degrees and turns out
Speaker 7: of there and leaves our little area. Now from stories
Speaker 7: told to me, Patrick never got off his butt next
Speaker 7: to the stove, watched the whole thing from there. Chris Gill,
Speaker 7: one of our photographers, stood up, immediately tripped backwards and
Speaker 7: was staring at the sky as the bear came in
Speaker 7: and out. Remy Warren made a football type juke move
Speaker 7: to go one way and then the other way to
Speaker 7: get out of the bear's way. Steven Ranella never got up,
Speaker 7: maybe had the bear step on his foot, because later
Speaker 7: his ankle became very sore. I'm bewildered. I'm standing there.
Speaker 7: I don't know what's happened, but as the bear's leaving,
Speaker 7: it almost looks as though it's leaving with one of
Speaker 7: our crew.
Speaker 4: Jannis grabbed a trek and pull and batted it in
Speaker 4: the face. Steve could smell its breath. I mean, everyone
Speaker 4: had their own moment in time with this massive brown bear.
Speaker 4: And then immediately also this is all in matter of seconds,
Speaker 4: immediately realized these crew members that I respect and love
Speaker 4: and want to protect are having an interaction with this
Speaker 4: massive bear, and maybe there's something I can do. So
Speaker 4: I peek around the bottom the downhill side of the tree.
Speaker 4: And when Yanni had smacked it in the face, you know,
Speaker 4: by chance or because of that, well, it decided to
Speaker 4: get out of there below the meat tree the downhill side.
Speaker 4: As I was peeking around.
Speaker 7: Garrett Smith somehow, as he's moving around the tree, he
Speaker 7: trips backwards like imagine you're heels tripping as opposed your
Speaker 7: toes tripping, and he goes to fall on his butt
Speaker 7: and actually lands on the top of the bear.
Speaker 4: And that sucker clip me with its massive shoulder and
Speaker 4: flip me on to its back. I mean, nothing compares
Speaker 4: to that first moment of back to back, the speed
Speaker 4: of which I found myself riding a Kodiak brown bear
Speaker 4: down a mountain side. It was my brain was not
Speaker 4: able to process that this actually was happening. I mean,
Speaker 4: when you put yourself, when you choose a lifestyle to
Speaker 4: test your strength and will against nature, often there's always
Speaker 4: a part of you that knows, at any point a
Speaker 4: factor outside of you your control can happen, and you
Speaker 4: just hope that you can cope with it and deal
Speaker 4: with it in.
Speaker 7: A way that allows you to survive.
Speaker 4: Well. When I got knocked onto that bear's back, and
Speaker 4: it was only was able to happen because the hillside
Speaker 4: was steep enough, I was, I was far enough uphill
Speaker 4: and in that matter had gained the height that its
Speaker 4: shoulder clipped me on my hip and knocked me onto
Speaker 4: its back, and instantly feeling its shoulder muscles and its hide,
Speaker 4: I instantly knew I was dead. And it was very calming,
Speaker 4: and you know, like in any accident, time stills and
Speaker 4: slows down. I was totally cognizant and aware that I
Speaker 4: was riding a brown bear in Alaska, and that the
Speaker 4: outcome was I was being you know, dropped into the
Speaker 4: brush and mauled. There was no there was no there
Speaker 4: was no mentality that, you know, maybe I could knife it,
Speaker 4: or maybe I could flee from it, or maybe all
Speaker 4: of it would end up okay. There was just time
Speaker 4: frozen and me knowing that my time had come and
Speaker 4: I had lived a good life and I was at
Speaker 4: peace with it. The rest of the crew see this
Speaker 4: happen and think it has me, and and it's jaws,
Speaker 4: you know, maybe fifty feet later, I mean a couple
Speaker 4: seconds later, I fall off the bear and then, you know,
Speaker 4: I assume that that's when it's going to turn in
Speaker 4: my life, and just slamming into an alder and I'm okay,
Speaker 4: I'd like get on my knees or something. And I'm
Speaker 4: telling this, I have goosebumps, and often I do because
Speaker 4: it's so vivid in my memory. And I see the
Speaker 4: rest of the crew running towards me, ready to get
Speaker 4: their brother. I run back to them. Everyone's okay, everyone's
Speaker 4: in shocked, but reacting in a very logical way.
Speaker 7: Like I said, it happened in two seconds. There are
Speaker 7: sandwich fixings and parts and pieces spread out all over
Speaker 7: underneath the met tree. Now nobody goes to pick those up,
Speaker 7: and everybody's pretty shook up, and there's a lot of
Speaker 7: going on and a lot of people. You're taught to
Speaker 7: yell hey bear when you're in bear country to keep
Speaker 7: the bears away or to let them let the bears
Speaker 7: know that you're around. In that situation, when someone yells
Speaker 7: hey bear, everybody starts pointing bear spray and guns in
Speaker 7: the direction wherever the person is looking that just yelled
Speaker 7: hey bear. So we immediately made a rule that no
Speaker 7: one could yell hey bear anymore unless they actually saw
Speaker 7: a bear. But we pretty much circled up, collected our gear,
Speaker 7: and Steve actually climbed into the meat tree and handed
Speaker 7: down the second half of the elk, which we then
Speaker 7: loaded onto our backpacks. And then we moved as what
Speaker 7: you would see an army platoon in an old army movie,
Speaker 7: moved through the jungle where there's sort of everybody you know,
Speaker 7: pointed in a different direction and sort of you're making
Speaker 7: a circle, and you got eyes in every direction. And
Speaker 7: we moved as this sort of group down away from
Speaker 7: the meat tree, crossback across the creek and got out
Speaker 7: into a big meadow where you could see easily one
Speaker 7: hundred yards in every direction, which is where we probably
Speaker 7: should have been having our sandwiches and tea in the
Speaker 7: first place. I can remember that what my wife said
Speaker 7: when I called her maybe three or four days after
Speaker 7: the event, and before I could even start telling her
Speaker 7: what had happened, she could sense in my voice that
Speaker 7: I had experienced something of great magnitude.
Speaker 2: It's still hard to imagine dirt being carried on the
Speaker 2: back of that bear that far. I've been fortunate enough
Speaker 2: to spend a lot of time in the field with
Speaker 2: Dirt over the last couple of years, and he's a
Speaker 2: uniquely genuine person. I'd say it would be impossible to
Speaker 2: not like him, especially when you see his work ethic
Speaker 2: and his continual upbeat attitude and old Yannis. I can't
Speaker 2: say enough good things about Yiannis either. Thanks for the story, guys,
Speaker 2: I'm glad that you're alive. Our next story is told
Speaker 2: by another Alaskan guide.
Speaker 3: His name is Caleb Martin.
Speaker 2: He's gonna be taking us high into Goat Country. Meet Caleb.
Speaker 1: My name is Caleb Martin. I'm a lifelong Alasson born
Speaker 1: and raised. Avid bow hunter. I've shot thirteen mountain goats
Speaker 1: with a bow. Now I'm a big game hunting guide.
Speaker 1: I guid an Alaska mountain goat, dull sheep, and Kodiak
Speaker 1: brown bear. I average around one hundred to one hundred
Speaker 1: and ten days in the field and solo hunt ninety
Speaker 1: plus percent of the time. So this year I found
Speaker 1: out in February that I drew a mountain goat tag
Speaker 1: in an area somewhat close by to an area I've
Speaker 1: been before, but it was kind of the next unit
Speaker 1: over a big steep country.
Speaker 8: I'm wet.
Speaker 1: You know mountain goats, you know they thrive in the
Speaker 1: other coastline in Alaska and southeast coastline because it's really wet,
Speaker 1: steep train they can get away from predators, they can
Speaker 1: regulate their body temperature, and has got great feed for him.
Speaker 1: So I booked a flight earlier in the year with
Speaker 1: a air service I'd used in the past, and he
Speaker 1: could fly me in there, but he was going to
Speaker 1: fly me in late in the evening because from his
Speaker 1: experience he had found out evening flights in that area
Speaker 1: he can normally sneak in between storms, and that's exactly
Speaker 1: what happened.
Speaker 8: I worked out pretty well.
Speaker 1: August sixth I'm touching down eight o'clock in the evening,
Speaker 1: fairly uneventful flight. We saw some goats on the way in,
Speaker 1: but not in my unit. Landed and set up temporary
Speaker 1: camp for the evening. And so the next day, August seventh,
Speaker 1: it was drizzly raining on and off, but got into
Speaker 1: some goats. Being so early in the season in August,
Speaker 1: typically people hunt goats more later in the year, but
Speaker 1: with my busy guiding schedule this year, I only had
Speaker 1: the beginning August to hunt this tag. But the consequence
Speaker 1: of that is that the ghosts this time of the
Speaker 1: year are much higher on the mountain, and so, you know,
Speaker 1: the goats that I did spot that day, I spotted
Speaker 1: a couple of good herds and a couple of billies,
Speaker 1: but they were in really far off reaches, and I
Speaker 1: was it was kind of starting to set in that
Speaker 1: you know, this is gonna be a kind of above
Speaker 1: average goat hunt. I've hunted a lot on Kodiak and
Speaker 1: those areas, you know, the tallest peak, you know you're
Speaker 1: maxing out at like four thousand feet, but here, you
Speaker 1: know it, you're looking at five six thousand feet, super
Speaker 1: steep faces, really thick brush. Everything's still live, still green,
Speaker 1: So the vegetation super thick salmonberry's are just getting started.
Speaker 1: And it was just kind of starting to be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is going to be a grinder, Especially solo packing
Speaker 1: out an entire goat.
Speaker 8: You know, you're looking at packing out between.
Speaker 1: One hundred and twenty and fife hundred and fifty pounds,
Speaker 1: depending on what you'd carry with you. So when I
Speaker 1: go into these kind of hunts, I like to carry
Speaker 1: a lot of different safety gear, and I've learned over
Speaker 1: thirteen different hunts that carrying rock climbing and repelling gear
Speaker 1: can come in extremely handy. So I carry a black
Speaker 1: Diamond rock climbing harness, a device to repel down with me,
Speaker 1: and on this particular hunt, I carried about one hundred
Speaker 1: yard climbing rope with me. On the eighth I started
Speaker 1: making my way up the mountain and man, it was beautiful.
Speaker 1: I just kind of linger and work my way up,
Speaker 1: and it actually ended up taking me about eight hours
Speaker 1: to get up to the sub alpine level where I'd
Speaker 1: seen goats but not so high to be up and
Speaker 1: kind of their natural walking paths in that area, and
Speaker 1: finally I make it up there at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, and now I'm about two thousand, twenty five
Speaker 1: hundred feet of elevation and get up there, find a
Speaker 1: flat spot for the evening with a little trickle of
Speaker 1: water next to it, and threw up tent for the
Speaker 1: evening and called it good and just crashed. And so
Speaker 1: I slept that night, and I woke up the next
Speaker 1: morning after you know, making some coffee from a little
Speaker 1: trickle a mountain of water, and it rained, started raining
Speaker 1: sometime in the middle of night, rained all through the
Speaker 1: next night. August night, they unzipped the tent and it
Speaker 1: just socked in. Can't see ten feet. So some days,
Speaker 1: like August ninth, it was a tent day. I just
Speaker 1: spent twenty four hours in a tent, reading books on
Speaker 1: my phone, looking through my pictures and my videos that
Speaker 1: I took, and just trying to stay in my little
Speaker 1: cocoon and not spread scent over bump into any animals.
Speaker 8: And it was kind of funny.
Speaker 1: I unzipped the tent twice that day, and at one
Speaker 1: point I had a pretty decent black bear at about
Speaker 1: two hundred yards and then another instance, I actually saw
Speaker 1: a billy on the other side of the valley. While
Speaker 1: the forecast wasn't too hopeful, you know, everything was going
Speaker 1: extremely well. I was having a very good experience. August
Speaker 1: tenth came around. I unzip the tent door and it's
Speaker 1: still kind of foggy, but I look right where that
Speaker 1: black bear was the day before. There's a billy standing
Speaker 1: right there, two hundred yards outside of the tent, and
Speaker 1: the wide open straight from my tent door straight out.
Speaker 1: I zip the tin up a little bit more and
Speaker 1: I just watch him for a bit, and then after
Speaker 1: a little while he kind of goes up on the
Speaker 1: rocks and beds down. So I try to make as
Speaker 1: little as movement as possible and unzip the tent and
Speaker 1: grab my gear and slip up into the rocks to
Speaker 1: try to get out of view. At one point I
Speaker 1: thought I could come up level with the goat and
Speaker 1: make about a seventy yard shot straight across, but it
Speaker 1: might be able to see me. And the wind was
Speaker 1: a little finicky, and I was like, WHOA, just be patient,
Speaker 1: Why are you rushing. It's opening morning.
Speaker 8: You gotta go.
Speaker 1: It's betted, you know, Just take the long way round,
Speaker 1: and it just worked out textbook.
Speaker 7: You know.
Speaker 1: It came all the way round out of you came
Speaker 1: over the top. I knew kind of where I'd want
Speaker 1: to shoot from and it would be a close shot,
Speaker 1: and so I just started looking around.
Speaker 8: Sure enough, I peek.
Speaker 1: Over to my left and there there's the top of
Speaker 1: a goat's back right there. So I range find it
Speaker 1: thirty one yards and I could tell the direction of
Speaker 1: the goat is coming.
Speaker 8: And as soon as the top of its back.
Speaker 1: Breaks the ridge, I come to full draw. It takes
Speaker 1: two more steps and it's given me a perfect broadside
Speaker 1: shot and it's looking away from me, and I just
Speaker 1: give it a nice double lung, clean break thirty one
Speaker 1: yards passed through the goat turned spins, goes about twenty
Speaker 1: yards and falls over. And it's like ten o'clock in
Speaker 1: the morning, opening morning. Gotta goat down solo with my bow.
Speaker 1: You know, the range trickling down. But it's not bad.
Speaker 8: That just happened. So that evening.
Speaker 1: The pilot texts me after he got done with his
Speaker 1: bear tours for the and said, hey, I could get
Speaker 1: you at one o'clock.
Speaker 8: Can you make that?
Speaker 1: And I'm like, man, it's only a mile. It's straight downhill,
Speaker 1: but it's a mile. It's like no problem. And I
Speaker 1: even start looking at photos, thinking, man, the route I
Speaker 1: went up was okay, but I reader I seen a
Speaker 1: couple of ridges that now that I'm up top, maybe
Speaker 1: I could cut over a little bit.
Speaker 8: And make an even better route down.
Speaker 1: So wake up this morning. I'm like, I don't even
Speaker 1: eat breakfast or coffee this morning. I just get in
Speaker 1: a gotta go mode, suck it down tight everything's on
Speaker 1: there because I'm gonna have to beat some brush.
Speaker 8: I'm gonna have to go.
Speaker 1: Down some cliffs, some rocky stuff, and I'm going down
Speaker 1: this other area. And I could tell right off the
Speaker 1: bat like man, maybe I should have sticked to the
Speaker 1: route I was familiar with. And that's always a little
Speaker 1: bit of a gamble there too. So I start going
Speaker 1: down through the brush and it's getting steeper and steeper.
Speaker 1: So I'm coming down through these alders. I got one
Speaker 1: trek and pull in my hand. I got a full goat,
Speaker 1: all the hide, all the meat, and all my spike
Speaker 1: camp and gear, and then all my camera gear on
Speaker 1: top of it. And I'm just pushing through this brush
Speaker 1: and keeps catching my pack, catching my pack, and I
Speaker 1: pushed through it.
Speaker 8: At one point, well, my.
Speaker 1: Pack was getting caught, and when I pushed through, my
Speaker 1: body went forward and my left leg stayed where it was,
Speaker 1: and I just hear this pop in my left leg,
Speaker 1: and I'm just down on the ground on my face.
Speaker 1: I got all my load and packing gear and everything
Speaker 1: on top of me, and my left leg is screaming,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, I'm laying there and I
Speaker 1: instantly knew something bad just happened to my leg, you know,
Speaker 1: immediately I go back to that internal dialogue. Okay, I'm
Speaker 1: on a steep mountain side, I'm really high up.
Speaker 8: I'm solo.
Speaker 1: I'm fifty miles into the wilderness by air plane.
Speaker 8: You got lue leg. What can you do?
Speaker 1: But I sat down on my butt, got my whole
Speaker 1: pack and everything on, and I just start scooting from
Speaker 1: one alderbush to the other a little bit out of time.
Speaker 1: I just get in this. Okay, you gotta move. You
Speaker 1: can't stay here. You gotta move. And I start scooting down,
Speaker 1: scooting down, going from alderbush all the bush and I'm
Speaker 1: just on my butt plowing through salmon Berry's that are
Speaker 1: four foot tall. And at one point I come out
Speaker 1: of this thick shrubbery and it's just this open face
Speaker 1: and there's no alders.
Speaker 8: It's just wide open and there's a.
Speaker 1: Little trickle water, little waterfall going down the middle of it,
Speaker 1: and it's straight down. I'm at the top of it,
Speaker 1: and there's I can't climb back up. I got one
Speaker 1: hundred plus pounds on my back. I got nothing to
Speaker 1: grab onto and I'm thinking, I can't move. I need
Speaker 1: to get rid of my pack or I'm going to
Speaker 1: fall down this face. And so I had to cut
Speaker 1: my pack loose. And it was a nerve and terrifying,
Speaker 1: you know, you have like at the moment, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of thinking, Man, I've spent all year shooting
Speaker 1: my boat, preparing now my two thousand dollars bow, I'm
Speaker 1: about to let rip down to this mountain.
Speaker 8: But you got to come to terms with.
Speaker 1: Yourself, Like Caleb, it's you or the gear. You're about
Speaker 1: to fall, Like, make a decision. And I let that
Speaker 1: pack roll and it just starts going end over and over,
Speaker 1: and I'm just watching stuff fly.
Speaker 8: You know, it's going through the trees.
Speaker 1: But I'm watching it because the bottom line is it
Speaker 1: still got my tent and my sleeping bank. I'm hurt,
Speaker 1: but worst case scenario and I can get in my
Speaker 1: sleeping bag. I get my tent of a super bright
Speaker 1: orange tint for this exact reason, and somebody could come
Speaker 1: find me if they need to, and I will survive.
Speaker 1: But I watch it roll all the way down, and
Speaker 1: then I was able to maneuver and scoot on my
Speaker 1: butt get down this waterfall, and finally get down to
Speaker 1: my pack. Now I'm on kind of this platte that's
Speaker 1: about one hundred yards across before it drops down again.
Speaker 1: And so I'm like, Okay, I can't scoot on my
Speaker 1: butt across here. I need to find out can I
Speaker 1: put weight on my leg? And if I can't put
Speaker 1: on weight on my leg, now it's time to determine
Speaker 1: do I need to get rescued or can I make
Speaker 1: this happen?
Speaker 8: Yes or no?
Speaker 1: And first I stand up without the pack. I put
Speaker 1: weight on the inside of my leg, and I mean,
Speaker 1: talk about a terrifying experience I've never felt before. Worried
Speaker 1: that my leg's gonna collapse, my bone's gonna stick out
Speaker 1: the side of my shin or something. Right, and I
Speaker 1: stand up and everything's pretty good. And then I take
Speaker 1: about two steps and I put weight on the outside
Speaker 1: of my leg and dam I'm just dropped instantly right
Speaker 1: on my face. And at that point, I was thinking
Speaker 1: about ditching my gear ditch and my goat ditch and
Speaker 1: my goat meat. So that's not an easy decision to
Speaker 1: just be like should I ditch everything and go for it?
Speaker 8: So I'm like, okay, well, let me just see what's
Speaker 8: going on.
Speaker 1: I put my whole pack on and I kind of
Speaker 1: hobbled a little bit six inches.
Speaker 8: It's like, okay, so you can move forward. So I
Speaker 8: just start doing that.
Speaker 1: I took my knife and I cut a couple piece
Speaker 1: of alders as crutches as little checking poles, and I
Speaker 1: can move six inches at a time. And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't move fast, but I can move. And then
Speaker 1: I also was like, man, you got a repelling harness
Speaker 1: and climbing rope, so if you get into a hairy situation,
Speaker 1: rope up, and then you want to at least fall
Speaker 1: off the mountain. And so I start pushing forward and
Speaker 1: get down back into some cliff faces, and I come
Speaker 1: to an area and I'm like Okay, I can repel
Speaker 1: from this point to this point below me. I could
Speaker 1: re anchor up, work my way down a creek bed
Speaker 1: about a quarter mile and make it back to the
Speaker 1: lake and I'm home free, and so roll my pack over,
Speaker 1: and I realized in that moment that my rope was gone.
Speaker 1: It was somewhere on the mountain above me, and I
Speaker 1: had no idea and I did not even realize that
Speaker 1: I lost it when I cut my pack loose. And
Speaker 1: it took me another five hours to get down there
Speaker 1: from that point. So I finally made it off, soaking wet.
Speaker 1: My rain gear and everything is just completely shredded, but
Speaker 1: came off the mountain missing a lot of gear, but
Speaker 1: had all my meat, had my hide, had my goat.
Speaker 1: Got to the landing strip ten minutes before the pilot landed.
Speaker 8: So I got back to.
Speaker 1: The orthopedic surgeon and the basic diagnose was at a
Speaker 1: full thickness rupture.
Speaker 8: Of the ACL.
Speaker 1: I had a tear in my PCL of moderate grade
Speaker 1: sprain in my LCL and my MCL. I had a
Speaker 1: fracture in one of my bones in my knee, and
Speaker 1: my entire knee was full of fluid from the trauma
Speaker 1: of not only falling, but repeatedly falling down the mountain.
Speaker 2: That sounded painful and stressful. It's hard to imagine what
Speaker 2: it would feel like to have that happen to you
Speaker 2: that far back, and that alone. That goat hunting is
Speaker 2: not for the faint of heart. And this just happened
Speaker 2: in August of twenty twenty three, so we hope that
Speaker 2: you're healing up strong, Caleb. He hosts a podcast called
Speaker 2: The Alaska Outdoors Podcast that you can find online if
Speaker 2: you want to learn more about what he's up to.
Speaker 2: Our final storyteller is none other than Meat Eater's own
Speaker 2: Steven Ranella. I'm grateful that he told this story, and
Speaker 2: I think you'll come to understand why he hasn't told
Speaker 2: it at length before. I'd advise parents to listen to
Speaker 2: this one first before you decide if it's age appropriate
Speaker 2: for your kids.
Speaker 3: Here's Steve.
Speaker 9: I spend about, you know, usually added up a month
Speaker 9: or so in Alaska every year. Most of the time
Speaker 9: I spend in Alaska. The biggest block of time I
Speaker 9: spend in Alaska is when I spend two weeks every
Speaker 9: summer at a fish shack.
Speaker 3: We have on an Island in.
Speaker 9: Southeast Alaska, and that's largely where this story takes place.
Speaker 9: This is a story I've never told publicly, and I
Speaker 9: hesitate to do it now. Almost a problem for me
Speaker 9: is as a writer and someone who does TV. So
Speaker 9: many of the stories I have, I use them as
Speaker 9: quick as I make them. But this story never really
Speaker 9: fits in. It just doesn't fit in any place. It
Speaker 9: has to do with a guy I grew up with,
Speaker 9: a friend of mine named Eric Kern. We went to
Speaker 9: school together, so we different elementary schools because we were
Speaker 9: a little bit far apart, but then they put us
Speaker 9: in the same you know, junior high. We went to
Speaker 9: high school together. I have just all these memories with
Speaker 9: him as kids, like.
Speaker 3: Details, you know, weird details.
Speaker 9: I remember one time me and him were sitting on
Speaker 9: the Pure Marquette River in Michigan with our girlfriends and
Speaker 9: we kind of thought it was raining in a weird
Speaker 9: way a little bit, and then we realized we were
Speaker 9: sitting had a campfire underneath a couple of trees that
Speaker 9: were just loaded with turkeys, and there was so many
Speaker 9: droppings hitting the ground that it made it seem like
Speaker 9: a weird light rain shower coming through and I remember it.
Speaker 9: His mom bought this heater for their house that burned
Speaker 9: cherry pits. She would buy these big truckloads of cherry
Speaker 9: pits and he'd have to go out in his driveway
Speaker 9: and rake them around in the sun till they got
Speaker 9: all dried out. She could use them to burn. And
Speaker 9: but one of the bigger decisions in my life he
Speaker 9: was involved in. So when we got out of high school,
Speaker 9: of course we went to regular college. We both went
Speaker 9: to regular college in Michigan, and then he split and
Speaker 9: he he came out to Montana to do a PhD program.
Speaker 3: And it took me, like I think, it took me
Speaker 3: an extra semester.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it took me an extra semester to finish college
Speaker 9: because I kind of.
Speaker 3: Bumped around a lot to different schools.
Speaker 9: And when I decided to go to graduate school, I
Speaker 9: got accepted with a full ride at Colorado State. But
Speaker 9: now I got accepted just regular accepted to a graduate
Speaker 9: program in Montana. And you know, all logic would say
Speaker 9: that you'd go to the place you didn't have to
Speaker 9: pay to go. But Eric came home and he was
Speaker 9: in Montana, and he really wanted me to go to
Speaker 9: Montana and me and him were down in this bar
Speaker 9: I'm sure it's not there anymore called bo Nicky's, and
Speaker 9: sitting in bow Nicky's. Man, if it was there, I
Speaker 9: could show you exactly where we were sitting. And he
Speaker 9: convinced me, based on hunting and fishing information, he convinced
Speaker 9: me to go to Montana for graduate school, and that,
Speaker 9: you know, changed my life. I met all the is,
Speaker 9: I met all these writers, and you know, became a
Speaker 9: writer and had things happen to me that wouldn't have
Speaker 9: happened otherwise, it'd have been a completely different path if
Speaker 9: we hadn't had that conversation in that bar. As we
Speaker 9: got older, you know, I was I was the best
Speaker 9: man in his wedding. He stood in my wedding. You know,
Speaker 9: we got older, yet we had children. Eric had a daughter.
Speaker 9: We lived near each other. I would oftentimes, you know,
Speaker 9: stay at his house for extended periods of time. He
Speaker 9: would come up to my fish shack every summer, and
Speaker 9: it was just an annual tradition, and we just kind
Speaker 9: of fell into this habit of just being friends and
Speaker 9: not thinking about it much. Eric eventually had this horrible
Speaker 9: tragedy and one of the reasons I don't like to
Speaker 9: talk about this is because Eric survived. He survived by
Speaker 9: his wife. He's a very very dear friend of mine,
Speaker 9: and they lost their daughter in a automobile accident, and
Speaker 9: it was she didn't die immediately. It was just it
Speaker 9: was the most brutal thing I've ever witnessed. And we
Speaker 9: spent time down there with them, my wife and I
Speaker 9: spent time. I spent time down there with them and
Speaker 9: in a hospital down in Denver. It was just the
Speaker 9: most horrible thing I've witnessed. And Eric's wife was just
Speaker 9: like so, you know, resilient and ultimately, but it was
Speaker 9: it was terrible on Eric. And about a year, maybe
Speaker 9: a year after this, we're up at our fishek like
Speaker 9: we would do every summer he would come up, we'd
Speaker 9: fish halbit and I have all these pictures of him
Speaker 9: over the years holding different halibit and stuff. And one summer,
Speaker 9: a couple of years prior to this, he and I
Speaker 9: had been out fishing in with some other guys and
Speaker 9: we're two different boats and we're coming back in pretty
Speaker 9: rough season.
Speaker 3: We finally made it into sheltered water and.
Speaker 9: The waves are so bad we couldn't see the boat
Speaker 9: behind us, and so we're just kind of hanging out
Speaker 9: in this little sheltered channel waiting to find out what
Speaker 9: happened to the boat behind us, make sure they're all right.
Speaker 9: And that took a mooch and rod, so like a big,
Speaker 9: you know, ten foot very light action salmon rod, and
Speaker 9: had this little teeny bucktail jig, and I decided to
Speaker 9: drop it down and see if I could jig up
Speaker 9: a little rockfish in this little channel, and hooked into
Speaker 9: this pretty nice hal but about a forty pound halbit.
Speaker 9: We had such a riot land in that halbit on
Speaker 9: that little jig, on that mooch and rod, and it
Speaker 9: shredded this little bucktail jig. The only thing left was
Speaker 9: like the lead head and some thread. And I came
Speaker 9: back and stuck that bucktail jig in a two by
Speaker 9: four doorframe and it lived there. And it was there
Speaker 9: that summer following the death of Eric's daughter. And the
Speaker 9: weirdest thing, man, is uh. At that time we had
Speaker 9: this at our fish shack. We had this pro pane
Speaker 9: refrigerator and it was old there was always given us problems,
Speaker 9: and we had a carbon monoxide detector that sat next
Speaker 9: to that that sat next to that fridge because it
Speaker 9: was always given us problems with the combustion element on there.
Speaker 9: And Eric was up and our carbon monoxide detector goes
Speaker 9: off by the fridge, and me and my brother Danny
Speaker 9: get down there and we looked around. We figure out
Speaker 9: the problem. I don't want to go into a bunch
Speaker 9: of details, but this little apparatus had become like kind
Speaker 9: of discombobulated, so it wasn't burning efficiently. Got it fixed,
Speaker 9: The carbon monoxide detector was still fine. Left it there
Speaker 9: next to the fridge. The carbon monoxide detector wouldn't never
Speaker 9: went off.
Speaker 3: But Eric, he.
Speaker 9: Refused to sleep inside of that fish shack for the
Speaker 9: rest of that trip. Was so concerned about carbon monoxide
Speaker 9: that he would not sleep inside of that fish shack.
Speaker 3: Okay. He in other.
Speaker 9: Words, he wanted to hang on to life with such
Speaker 9: tenacity that he wouldn't sleep in there. Meanwhile, I'm in
Speaker 9: there with my kids, okay. And if you want to
Speaker 9: talk about holding on to life with tenacity, I hold
Speaker 9: on to my children's lives with great tenacity. And had
Speaker 9: I thought there was any issue being in that shack,
Speaker 9: I would never have allowed that my kid to be
Speaker 9: in there, but I knew it was fine, the detector
Speaker 9: was fine. But that that always sticks in my head, man,
Speaker 9: that he wouldn't sleep in there. He slept outside. But
Speaker 9: then he goes home. And there's like so many details
Speaker 9: of this i'd give, but I don't want to give,
Speaker 9: just like I already feel like I'm violating. I feel
Speaker 9: like I'm violating some level of respect just talking about it.
Speaker 9: There's so many details i'd give, but he goes home
Speaker 9: and takes his own life, and like that little detail
Speaker 9: about that carbon monoxi ideal just always will stick in
Speaker 9: my head. So the last place I saw him was
Speaker 9: there at the shack fish and Halibit And we really
Speaker 9: have any kind of decorations in our shack, but we
Speaker 9: keep a big picture of Eric in the shack. So
Speaker 9: every time I go to Alaska, most of every time
Speaker 9: I go to Alaska and I walk into that shack,
Speaker 9: he's there and all and so many of our friends
Speaker 9: from from those years that knew him well hang out there.
Speaker 9: And it's like that single picture has turned.
Speaker 8: It.
Speaker 9: Like the single picture in the shack almost makes the
Speaker 9: shack like a.
Speaker 3: I don't know, man, like a mausoleum.
Speaker 9: It's not overpowering, but it's just there and and I
Speaker 9: always have this tight association with.
Speaker 3: You know, that shack with Alaska.
Speaker 9: With him having seen him there, and it's just in
Speaker 9: that setting sticks in my mind. Well, I'll tell you
Speaker 9: something that we wrote below the picture. There's this Rudyard
Speaker 9: Kipling poem. In the poem, I memorize the poemhen I've
Speaker 9: always liked it. It goes, what of the hunting hunter?
Speaker 9: Bold brother? The watch was long and cold? What of
Speaker 9: the quarry you went to kill?
Speaker 3: Brother? He crops in the jungle? Still? Where is the
Speaker 3: power that made your pride? Brother?
Speaker 9: It ebbs from my flank inside? Where is the haste
Speaker 9: that you hurry by?
Speaker 3: Brother? I go to my lair to die?
Speaker 9: And so on the bottom of the picture we wrote
Speaker 9: where is the haste that you hurry by? And if
Speaker 9: there's a thing I think about, man like, if there's
Speaker 9: a useful part of this, if there's a.
Speaker 3: Justification for kind of sharing this, it's that you.
Speaker 9: Really don't know what's going on with the people around you.
Speaker 9: And if there's people you're concerned about, you have to
Speaker 9: pay attention and you have.
Speaker 3: To be more than a detective.
Speaker 9: Right, He wouldn't sleep in a room because a carbon
Speaker 9: monoxide detector went off in that room. How do you
Speaker 9: know what's going on with people? A friend of mine
Speaker 9: lost a buddy of his to suicide, and he was
Speaker 9: telling me one day that now when he asks people
Speaker 9: how they're doing, and they go good, he said, and
Speaker 9: I always follow up with, but how are you really doing?
Speaker 9: And I think that that's important, and I don't always
Speaker 9: take that advice. But the thing is, when I go
Speaker 9: to Alaska and I walk into our shack, I'm reminded
Speaker 9: of that all the time. And perhaps hearing about this,
Speaker 9: you know, will maybe change something someone does.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you.
Speaker 9: That's the last thing I'll say about it. As folks
Speaker 9: have pieced together the chronology of events, I can tell
Speaker 9: you that I feel that if someone had called him
Speaker 9: that morning, you know, and said, like, how you doing,
Speaker 9: I feel like he'd still be here.
Speaker 2: Suicide isn't something that's fun to talk about, and honestly,
Speaker 2: I never thought it would come up on this podcast,
Speaker 2: but it's incredibly relevant to this day and age, and
Speaker 2: it wouldn't take long to find the staggering statistics of
Speaker 2: the people who take their own lives each year The
Speaker 2: reasons are too varied and too complex to address right now,
Speaker 2: but what Steve emphasized is well taken in that as friends,
Speaker 2: we need to work to be more aware, we need
Speaker 2: to probe for deeper answers, and we need to stay
Speaker 2: close to the people.
Speaker 3: That we call our friends.
Speaker 2: Or maybe the tables are turned and you're the person
Speaker 2: that's in crisis listening right now, and in that case,
Speaker 2: I want to tell you that you are valuable enough
Speaker 2: and that your life is meaningful enough that if you're
Speaker 2: hiding some deep stuff, find a way to share it
Speaker 2: with someone you trust. I personally find incredible hope in
Speaker 2: the midst of trying times of which me and my
Speaker 2: family have had our fair share, and that hope for
Speaker 2: me I find in a personal connection with God for
Speaker 2: me that is very very real, very functional, very powerful
Speaker 2: and available to all. I can't thank you enough for
Speaker 2: listening to Bear Grease. We've all got a lot to
Speaker 2: be thankful for this fall, and I wish you the
Speaker 2: best in your hunting.
Speaker 3: Good luck.
Speaker 2: If you're out there, elk hunting, whitetail hunting, bear hunting,
Speaker 2: squirrel hunting, grouse hunting, whatever you're doing, be careful out there,
Speaker 2: be aware and celebrate the fact that we get to
Speaker 2: do what we do. Be sure to check out First
Speaker 2: Light's new whitetail gear. They've got a whole line of
Speaker 2: stuff that's made for whitetail deer hunters in the South
Speaker 2: at first light dot com. Check it out and I
Speaker 2: love it. I hope you guys all have a great week,
Speaker 2: and I look forward to talking to all those folks
Speaker 2: on the Render next week.