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Speaker 1: I t E dot com. Start off, I will I.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've been paying attention, but we've
Speaker 1: been taught. We've been covering Phil's play.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people are definitely aware.
Speaker 1: Listen, man, I was sitting next to a guy who
Speaker 1: was at that place because you heard about it on
Speaker 1: the podcast. Really sitting next to them.
Speaker 2: Really what I bet the last thing that guy expected
Speaker 2: after hearing it on the podcast was like, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go down that plate and sit next to Stephen Reel.
Speaker 1: Well, he was actually next to my daughter Rosemary. It
Speaker 1: was me, my wife, my daughter, him, gotcha. So they
Speaker 1: struck up a convo and then at the end of
Speaker 1: the thing we took a picture and he said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I heard about on the podcast. Came down nice and
Speaker 1: Phil right there. Phil does kiss someone in that show,
Speaker 1: and Krin painted it out like it was gonna be
Speaker 1: real seedy. It made her uncomfortable.
Speaker 3: It was it was just a little peck.
Speaker 1: It was more in a peck, but it wasn't like
Speaker 1: how would you describe it, phil.
Speaker 4: On like a scale, like from from a peck to
Speaker 4: a passionate French kiss. I put it at like I
Speaker 4: don't know, a three.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say a three.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, Well maybe it's different from show to show.
Speaker 1: Oh do you bring it something brings Depending on how
Speaker 1: I feel, I'll mix, I'll slip in a little.
Speaker 2: I won't tell every So.
Speaker 1: Some nights you just bring it. Some nights you were
Speaker 1: like you weren't in the mood.
Speaker 6: No, that's that would be inappropriate, so.
Speaker 1: You would do it the same every time.
Speaker 6: Mostly it made you uncomfortable.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a little bit. I said before. It's like watching
Speaker 5: your brother like kiss someone.
Speaker 1: It made me remotely uncomfortable.
Speaker 6: Step and Steph enjoyed it.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: I did, And then I got home my text Phyllis
Speaker 1: said I didn't think it was that sexy, And he
Speaker 1: said if he ever gets cast and something NC seventeen.
Speaker 6: He'll let me know, he'll be the first to know.
Speaker 1: So are you happy with holladall went Phil? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: think so.
Speaker 6: It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, those all those people I worked with are super
Speaker 4: nice and had a really good time.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can't.
Speaker 6: I can't tell you what it was like to watch it,
Speaker 6: but I hope it was okay.
Speaker 1: Our kids even liked it.
Speaker 2: Don't you have another one coming?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: Our eight year old he didn't give it the best review, sure,
Speaker 1: because he was ready to get going.
Speaker 6: No, he was.
Speaker 4: He probably wasn't interested in like the nineteen thirties Russian
Speaker 4: politics that make up a lot of the third act.
Speaker 1: I can sense that he got a little lost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he got a little lost and the stuff about the
Speaker 1: Russians are and everything. So he probably wouldn't give it
Speaker 1: the best review. But the other ones really liked it.
Speaker 6: That's good, to be fair.
Speaker 7: He'd rather be rolling around the mud.
Speaker 1: Or something like that. It was cold outside, though, so
Speaker 1: I couldn't send them out there getting his boots, and
Speaker 1: then we got I got in a fight with my
Speaker 1: kids up at the concession booth. Oh what Yeah, embarrassed
Speaker 1: myself at the concession stand.
Speaker 8: They wanted some candy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, for whatever reason, the movie theaters the candies
Speaker 1: are huge boxes. Yep, they got Every movie theater in
Speaker 1: the world has the.
Speaker 2: Same yeah, big box.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like what it's like good? What's it good? And
Speaker 1: plannies yeah, pis. So we go up there and I'm like, what,
Speaker 1: pick one box out and they all grab a box.
Speaker 1: I'm like, no, agree on one box. And meanwhile it's
Speaker 1: people behind us in line. So Vince I said, never mind,
Speaker 1: put all those boxes down hard Bet went back to
Speaker 1: the seats. They didn't like that well, and then Ma
Speaker 1: went up and got it. It's just they wound up
Speaker 1: with I won. Essentially, I won because they wound up
Speaker 1: with one box, Okay, but I lost in one You
Speaker 1: came out even joined today by Tyler Freel Alaskan hunter
Speaker 1: trapper podcast or writer guy that shoots bears with a
Speaker 1: stick bow. Yeah, flesher what else?
Speaker 9: I don't know, man, I do, I do, have do
Speaker 9: and have done. I guess a little bit everything. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, you host host under Talk and you cover
Speaker 1: Alaskan outdoor politics and not hunting and fishing yep, yep,
Speaker 1: A bunch of stuff like that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, No, it's uh we I don't know. Try not
Speaker 9: to take take it too seriously. But we you know,
Speaker 9: just a bunch of uh myself and a bunch of
Speaker 9: buddies who you know, we live in Alaska and kind
Speaker 9: of offer a good perspective and talk shit about each
Speaker 9: other and share hunting stories and tips, and I figure,
Speaker 9: if it can be entertaining with a little bit of
Speaker 9: useful information, then uh, then that's a good goal.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and you guys mix it up pretty hard.
Speaker 1: So you guys are into you're into a lot of
Speaker 1: the sophisticated stuff, yeah, which she.
Speaker 9: Which yeah, oh yeah for sure. Which it makes it
Speaker 9: kind of tough because a lot of those, you know,
Speaker 9: are super serious subjects, and uh, you can you can
Speaker 9: dive way into any given one and as a whole,
Speaker 9: it's all just it's it's really more than any one
Speaker 9: person can keep track of, see kind of you know,
Speaker 9: you got to pick your battles. But I try to
Speaker 9: do my best to stay on top of of what's
Speaker 9: going on, stuff that comes up, and you know, I
Speaker 9: can write about that and my my day jobs a
Speaker 9: staff writer for Outdoor Life, so I you know, cover
Speaker 9: cover a lot of that stuff in there as well
Speaker 9: as you know, all my normal my normal duties.
Speaker 1: Great, we're gonna getting all that. We're gonna cover a
Speaker 1: lot of stuff that's going on in Alaska today. So
Speaker 1: you've got any kind of interest in hunting in Alaska,
Speaker 1: wildlife management Alaska. We're going to get into that and
Speaker 1: hanging tune and we're gonna talk about Alexander super Tramp Boss.
Speaker 1: This is the weirdest deal, dude, I've like. So I'm
Speaker 1: just going to tease this. Then we're going to tell
Speaker 1: the story in greater detail, like everyone knows Crack hours.
Speaker 1: John Cracker is into the wild and they made that
Speaker 1: movie out of it.
Speaker 7: Eddie Vedder made that song.
Speaker 1: Made that song. I read that whole here. I read
Speaker 1: that whole book watching an avalanche slide for black Bears
Speaker 1: one day, read the whole book. I didn't read it
Speaker 1: till late in life. The bears didn't get one. But
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of sand hill cranes. It was the
Speaker 1: weirdest thing I always remember that day because there was
Speaker 1: there was nothing was melted off except that avalanche shooting
Speaker 1: sand hill cranees walking up and down that avalanche shoot.
Speaker 9: Those cranes are a pain in the ass man, especially
Speaker 9: moose season right about the time stuff starts popping off.
Speaker 9: Oh my gosh, the crane show up and you can't
Speaker 9: hear nothing.
Speaker 1: All day, isn't that wild?
Speaker 10: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the time I see that.
Speaker 9: It's the thing man.
Speaker 1: Coming through some pass nearby. It's like, turn that off.
Speaker 8: I have never seen that many sand hills, and they
Speaker 8: do that.
Speaker 9: Dance, thousands of them a lot of time.
Speaker 1: So funny you mentioned that man because like, like to
Speaker 1: the last two times we've been moose hunting, it was
Speaker 1: just like everybody like just stop that for a minute.
Speaker 9: Well, and especially you know, you know it's you're working
Speaker 9: with limited time and every dead ass calm morning and evening.
Speaker 9: You know you're wanting like this is the time to
Speaker 9: get some sound out there, and those cranes won't shut up.
Speaker 9: It's it's really irritates again.
Speaker 1: And you're hoping to hear that.
Speaker 3: A lot of times.
Speaker 1: You hit me with your bulgrount real quick. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: just hit me with a volume though.
Speaker 9: All right, I can't, I gotta I gotta sit up
Speaker 9: a little bit.
Speaker 1: You get a little bit of I want to do
Speaker 1: two things. I wanted to hit me with some volume,
Speaker 1: and I want you to do like like our buddy,
Speaker 1: Honis can make a noise. It sounds like an oak
Speaker 1: way off. You know how you feel that noise before
Speaker 1: you hear it. I want you to hit me with
Speaker 1: some volume.
Speaker 9: And hit me with a way off right, let's see.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, now hit me with the ship. Is that
Speaker 1: a bull? Yeah? That's good, dude. All right. So this bus,
Speaker 1: so everybody knows that this kid, Chris McCandless was his name,
Speaker 1: His nickname is his chosen name. As Brosie Brody pointed
Speaker 1: out earlier, was Alexander Supertramp died in his damn bus.
Speaker 1: Uh by MacArthur right.
Speaker 9: No, by Healey, by Hely, right outside of MacArthur.
Speaker 1: Yeah what am I saying? By Healey and the bus
Speaker 1: sat out there and it became a tourist attraction. But
Speaker 1: get that bus. Your family had like camped in that bus.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, way before any of this stuff went down.
Speaker 9: Yeah. So from the time you know, that book became popular,
Speaker 9: I think it was maybe even I can't remember what
Speaker 9: year the book was, but it was right about the
Speaker 9: time we moved to Alaska because I I I was
Speaker 9: born in Colorado, but my dad was born and grew
Speaker 9: up in Fairbanks. And after his After my grandpa passed
Speaker 9: away in like seventy one, my grandma moved them back
Speaker 9: down to Colorado. So that's kind of why we were
Speaker 9: not there. But as soon as that book became popular,
Speaker 9: my dad would just be like, oh, yeah, that was
Speaker 9: our that was our camp. Like we spent many nights
Speaker 9: in that bus, and so that that was all it
Speaker 9: was for a lot of years, and yeah, became just
Speaker 9: kind of a deadly tourist attraction, which it's it's sad,
Speaker 9: and I mean not to make light of it, but uh,
Speaker 9: like people were constantly having to be get rescued trying
Speaker 9: to get out there because there, yeah, how did that
Speaker 9: bus get out in the first you know, all all
Speaker 9: this is like this, this whole story. So after people
Speaker 9: were tired of this shit, they ended up making the
Speaker 9: decision to helicopter it. Took a schnook and helicopter that
Speaker 9: thing out of there, and uh, the University of Alaska
Speaker 9: and Fairbanks got a hold of it and their plan
Speaker 9: is to display it at the museum there. And I
Speaker 9: had written a story about how that was like our
Speaker 9: family's hunting camp back in the day, and the gal
Speaker 9: that was in charge or is in charge of the
Speaker 9: bus for the museum got in touch with me, say, hey, well,
Speaker 9: you guys want to come check it out? And uh
Speaker 9: so we did. My dad and my uncle and I
Speaker 9: went over there and checked it out, and it was pretty,
Speaker 9: you know, pretty cool. They hadn't been in it since
Speaker 9: I think seventy two. Oh, And my dad's like, remember
Speaker 9: when Grandpa, or remember when Dad blew up the wood
Speaker 9: stove by starting by starting throwing gasoline there and there
Speaker 9: to get it going and blew the stack and blew
Speaker 9: the door off and anyway, so as we're sitting there
Speaker 9: talking too, my my Dad's like, I know, I know, mom.
Speaker 9: My grandma had eight millimeter footage of this some work.
Speaker 9: She had a bunch of eight milimeter videos that she
Speaker 9: had had taken and I ended up getting a hold
Speaker 9: of him and digitizing him. But uh so, all this
Speaker 9: and learning from the the kind of the history of
Speaker 9: that bus, they figured out I don't remember the exact year,
Speaker 9: it was maybe like sixty or sixty one, early sixties.
Speaker 9: What year was the bus manufactured, I don't remember, but
Speaker 9: it was a Fairbanks City transit bus for a while,
Speaker 9: and it was part of a project to improve the
Speaker 9: Stampede trail. They got a grant, which is a road
Speaker 9: that goes out across the Techlanika and goes out there,
Speaker 9: and so it was left out there by construction crew
Speaker 9: road constructions. A guy had that was working for that
Speaker 9: crew had bought it and outfitted it as like a
Speaker 9: bunk house to bring his family along for. It was
Speaker 9: like a whole summer project.
Speaker 1: Well how did he get it in there? Though?
Speaker 9: They drug it out there on a road and the road.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but what's the whole deal? Here's what I understand
Speaker 1: about it. What's the whole deal with you gotta like
Speaker 1: cross the river to get to it? Yeah? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: is a winner road or what?
Speaker 9: No, it was I don't know what time of year
Speaker 9: they maybe got across, got their equipment or cross there
Speaker 9: early in the spring or in the winter. But my
Speaker 9: dad they used to just drive across it in the
Speaker 9: fall after because it's a glacial fed river and after
Speaker 9: the water level start going down, they.
Speaker 1: Just so it's like, yeah, so it's only tricky seasonally.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, which is kind of what got him in trouble.
Speaker 9: He came back and you know, tried to get out
Speaker 9: apparently and surprised the river's too high. But uh, yeah.
Speaker 9: So they drug it out there as probably as a
Speaker 9: bunk house for this guy's family, and it broke, axle
Speaker 9: broke or something happened to it, and they just left
Speaker 9: it and intact. And later in the sixties, my grandpa
Speaker 9: had been hunting up the Steeze Country in the forty
Speaker 9: Mile Country and got sick of people dealing with people,
Speaker 9: so he heard about this bus that was set up
Speaker 9: as bunk house and they started hunting out there, so
Speaker 9: through like the latter half of the sixties.
Speaker 1: No kid. Yeah, And that dude died in that bus,
Speaker 1: right in that bus.
Speaker 2: So when did he stop. He's in it as a
Speaker 2: hunting game.
Speaker 9: I think seventy two was the last year, because the
Speaker 9: my grandpa passed away in seventy one, and I think
Speaker 9: it was seventy one, and my uncle has pictures where
Speaker 9: he went back out there the next the following year,
Speaker 9: I think they'd seed said they skipped a year, and
Speaker 9: then seventy two was back out there, and he has
Speaker 9: some pictures with like, you know, moose and caribou cut
Speaker 9: up all, you know, kind of right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I looking at some of the photos right now.
Speaker 1: That's crazy.
Speaker 7: It looks like some people were using it for target
Speaker 7: practice for yeah it uh.
Speaker 1: Oh people shoot? Where is are there today? Like I
Speaker 1: believe the am things that have been shot? Oh we're
Speaker 1: just driving on some and like some BLM land And
Speaker 1: I was like you Al's had the plane ahead to
Speaker 1: shoot that much stuff?
Speaker 5: Yeah, bring it seemed like a seventy two inch flat
Speaker 5: screen TV on public land just shot up.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 1: There was a trend for a while. We talked about this.
Speaker 1: There was a trend for a while out I know
Speaker 1: it's out Missoula where people come and shoot trees down,
Speaker 1: living trees, shoot until they fall over. So a couple
Speaker 1: of quick things, Tyler and I'll get back to this. Uh,
Speaker 1: the wall eye my favorite subject.
Speaker 9: I'm so sick.
Speaker 1: What mean you sick of these guys?
Speaker 8: Just they just I'm not sick of them. I just
Speaker 8: can't wait to hear what they do next.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, this is here's the thing, this is
Speaker 1: this is what this is what everybody saying, this is
Speaker 1: what everybody thinks. So everybody knows. Everybody knows. And we
Speaker 1: had the guy on there's the Walleye cheating scandal where
Speaker 1: the Jason Fisher who's been on the podcast it's conducting
Speaker 1: a walleye tournament. There's some fish that, yeah, do I relate?
Speaker 1: How what degree do I explain this?
Speaker 7: He looked at He looked at their bag, knew they
Speaker 7: weren't four pounder like they weighed at seven.
Speaker 2: He knew they were four.
Speaker 1: Cut them open, and yeah. The guy's weighing fish all
Speaker 1: day long at the end of a tournament, and you
Speaker 1: just know what fish look like, like a twenty inch
Speaker 1: wall that weighs, this eighteen inch wall that ways at
Speaker 1: and some guys bring some fish up and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they got blank pounds of fish. But they weigh them
Speaker 1: up and it's like, wow, that's really heavy. Takes a
Speaker 1: leather man, which is sitting right behind Uncle Chastey in
Speaker 1: a display case, takes that leather man and cuts open
Speaker 1: the walleyes and they're pack full of weights and fish filets.
Speaker 1: These two individuals, what are these fellas' names?
Speaker 5: Chase and I don't want to I think really the
Speaker 5: most important one is.
Speaker 1: So these guys become real famous for this cheating deal.
Speaker 1: Then one of them gets in some other trouble soon after,
Speaker 1: he violates a restraining order and he equips his kid
Speaker 1: with a bunch of fake one hundred dollars bills and
Speaker 1: they go and sends them down to the bowling alley
Speaker 1: to buy stuff with the fake hunt our bills. It
Speaker 1: makes the news. Now he's in the news all over again,
Speaker 1: including at the meat eater dot com. He's in the
Speaker 1: news all over again. Also deer poaching. However, this is old,
Speaker 1: not new deer poaching. He's getting it. He's getting in
Speaker 1: trouble for stuff he did a long time ago. Like,
Speaker 1: for instance, let's say if I was twenty and I'd
Speaker 1: gotten in trouble for setting snares illegally, and then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, my buddies are like, oh, you know
Speaker 1: what to one night we were out jack lighting cottontail rabbits,
Speaker 1: right and be like, you know, the guy got in
Speaker 1: trouble for setting snares, he's in trouble now for jack
Speaker 1: lighting cottondeal rabbits. And I'd be like, I did that before.
Speaker 1: So everybody's telling on me now about everything that's a
Speaker 1: situation he's in now, and I think I'm apologizing for
Speaker 1: I'm just saying now it's like now they're just you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like secrets are coming out.
Speaker 2: Well, I thought I read something about this where he
Speaker 2: had gotten in trouble for this prior to the Walleye stuff.
Speaker 2: I think that's understanding, and that his license revoked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, do you there? I jump it.
Speaker 9: What are we buying one hundred dollars bills at a
Speaker 9: bowling alley?
Speaker 1: It's a great question.
Speaker 9: We're worried about all this stuff. That's issue me.
Speaker 8: There's some other stuff in there too.
Speaker 1: The real issue is uh he so it was incriminating
Speaker 1: about the counterfeit money. Is they have text exchange where
Speaker 1: his kid, he gives his kid this money and it's
Speaker 1: like it says, like not actual money. It says like
Speaker 1: it's like movie money, and like movie money looks pretty real,
Speaker 1: but it says you know, and what the hell says
Speaker 1: movie money on it? Something sends and then they text
Speaker 1: about it. He's like, dude, it worked. Great. Send someone.
Speaker 1: He's like, Bobby's gonna come by and get some more
Speaker 1: like it worked, you know, And they're celebrating that the
Speaker 1: counterfeit money was accepted.
Speaker 7: But I just at this point, you know, it's not
Speaker 7: like a new you know, I thought there had been
Speaker 7: rumors about him being a poacher flying around for a
Speaker 7: long time.
Speaker 2: Well he was I think I think he was a
Speaker 2: convicted poacher.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and the scrutiny from everything else certainly didn't help
Speaker 7: his case. And like there's a lot of people eyeball.
Speaker 1: On him that there's an age component because people in glasshouses. Right,
Speaker 1: So we broke all manner as youngsters in high school,
Speaker 1: we broke all manner of laws. Let me tell you,
Speaker 1: for instance, ignorantly. No, let me tell you for instance.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell this about a guy that's not alive anymore.
Speaker 1: Nothing you can do to him. Smelt dipping with Eric
Speaker 1: kern Okay, we're smelt dipping near White Lake Channel where
Speaker 1: some smelt were spawning up on the gravel bar. No
Speaker 1: one knew about not going into the creek, spawning along
Speaker 1: the shoreline. And here comes by a salmon feeding on smelt.
Speaker 1: Eric Kernan scoops it up and it is in the
Speaker 1: smelt net. Now there's no way in hell he's gonna
Speaker 1: let it go. But that's an illegal capture. He puts
Speaker 1: the salmon down his waiters. You want to talk about
Speaker 1: a mess. How old we were in high school? We
Speaker 1: were olden drive.
Speaker 5: So Chase Kaminski is thirty six and he's accused of
Speaker 5: deer hunting between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty one. Twenty
Speaker 5: thirteen is ten years ago, which would make him twenty
Speaker 5: six time.
Speaker 1: Too old for poaching. But let me just clarify, like
Speaker 1: I'm not saying, let me get to my broader point,
Speaker 1: and this isn't about me, this is Eric. Well, no,
Speaker 1: because in our time, we sold our smelt to a
Speaker 1: guy in high school tenth grade. I think sold smelt.
Speaker 1: That's illegal. Point being if I had gotten in trouble
Speaker 1: for something, all these infractions that seem like just minor issues,
Speaker 1: like Eric caught a sam and put in his waiters,
Speaker 1: dip smelt with the salm and nose first down into
Speaker 1: the ankle of his waiters for like whatever amount of
Speaker 1: time and then like took the salmon back out later. Okay,
Speaker 1: all this like stupid stuff that I would never let
Speaker 1: my kids do. But all this stupid stuff, if you
Speaker 1: didn't got in trouble and all of a sudden all
Speaker 1: this came out, you'd paint this really damning. You'd paint
Speaker 1: this really damning portrait of an individual who just had
Speaker 1: to be around a lot of like dumb decision.
Speaker 5: Making around it or the ringleader of it.
Speaker 1: I'm not condoning. I'm saying like it makes reading this,
Speaker 1: it makes me look and say, man, at a point,
Speaker 1: like when all the dirt comes out, all the dirt
Speaker 1: comes out, it winds up looking. I just would invite
Speaker 1: people out there who grew up in a rural atmosphere
Speaker 1: and grew up like like a redneck upbringing to think
Speaker 1: pretty hard. Okay, to think pretty hard.
Speaker 2: Oh, they probably didn't when they were that age. They
Speaker 2: probably just did shit and didn't even think about it,
Speaker 2: think about it. I was on on nextually other day
Speaker 2: looking at all the old spots I used to hunt
Speaker 2: when I was real young and realize that none of
Speaker 2: that ship was public.
Speaker 1: I thought it was all public back then. We thought
Speaker 1: public was that no one yelled at you when you
Speaker 1: were there, never got yelled at us.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I'm gonna look at that old
Speaker 2: turkey hunting spot I used to go to all the
Speaker 2: time and realize that it was deep into someone at
Speaker 2: private property.
Speaker 5: You know, Steve, we should start a new We should
Speaker 5: start a new segment called confession Confessions.
Speaker 1: I don't and here I would, I wouldn't even know
Speaker 1: where to begin, but here's the thing about it. It
Speaker 1: was so unusual by it. So in those days, like
Speaker 1: you would have your mom, Your mom would apply for
Speaker 1: a dough tag.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, that was very common in my circle.
Speaker 1: So my mom might draw dough tag and you get
Speaker 1: the the dope for mom. And I'm not like, I
Speaker 1: just don't want to act like I don't want to
Speaker 1: sit here now and act like I don't want to
Speaker 1: sit here now and act like things didn't happen. That happened.
Speaker 1: So with this fella now, with all this stuff coming on,
Speaker 1: I just beg it looks bad, but just think about
Speaker 1: your own life and think about the things you've done.
Speaker 1: And once it came to be like like, are you
Speaker 1: really telling me that if you like to drink? Are
Speaker 1: you telling you never drove home when you might have
Speaker 1: blown a drunk? But what does that look like when
Speaker 1: you get caught.
Speaker 7: I don't think that's the same as this guy though,
Speaker 7: because he's just kept doing that shit and knew it
Speaker 7: was wrong, Like this wasn't like oh back when I
Speaker 7: was a sophomore in high.
Speaker 1: School, you know, and cheating in him stuff and Walleyes
Speaker 1: full of Walleye flays is like on a whole other
Speaker 1: and like cheating people out of money and winning boats.
Speaker 7: I think it's fair to say this guy's like a criminal,
Speaker 7: a great a dirt bag.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got another confession for you when I got
Speaker 1: my When I for Christmas, I got a Marl and
Speaker 1: for Christmas, I got that bolt Action Marl and twenty
Speaker 1: two mag that everybody had for a while. And pulled
Speaker 1: a car over next to this thing called Tamawalla Lodge
Speaker 1: and saw a fox squirrel perched up on a tree
Speaker 1: and shot it out of the car window and then
Speaker 1: ran and got it and jumped back over the fence.
Speaker 1: Do you feel a lot lighter someone had seen me
Speaker 1: do that?
Speaker 2: You know what?
Speaker 1: Like the list of things would have been illegal discharge
Speaker 1: of firearm like I don't know this insane looking rap sheet.
Speaker 7: But also back then, like maybe that would have happened,
Speaker 7: but there was I also feel like there was a
Speaker 7: little bit more tolerance for that kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, stay tuned for next week's edition of I'll make
Speaker 1: a list, because if I have a run for political office,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna do this anyways.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's better to preempt it.
Speaker 1: The first thing I'm gonna do is, here's everything bad
Speaker 1: I've ever.
Speaker 8: Said, now your planed, Steve, what you're gonna do?
Speaker 1: If I do, that's what I'm gonna do. No one's
Speaker 1: gonna come and say, like he I'll be like, dude,
Speaker 1: So I'm I already told you every boy that, So
Speaker 1: I'm like, list, should I did this? Real bad tell us?
Speaker 1: Here's the thing that's even more surprising than the fact
Speaker 1: that that fella has been in a lot of trouble Japan.
Speaker 1: If I were to name for you place, if if
Speaker 1: I said you name for me countries that have a
Speaker 1: lot of bear attacks, it goes something like this America,
Speaker 1: and then they'd be like dah Canada, and then they Russia.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't know what to say. Oh yeah, you'd probably
Speaker 1: get Russia.
Speaker 7: Russia.
Speaker 1: Japan has had one hundred and sixty seven bear attacks
Speaker 1: this year.
Speaker 5: That's a lot.
Speaker 1: So you got to think about the positioning of Japan.
Speaker 2: What kind of bears are those brown bears?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, think about the position of Japan.
Speaker 5: Like I thought they were black bears.
Speaker 9: They got both. I think do they have black pers
Speaker 9: have black bears too? I don't know if they're not
Speaker 9: like American black bears, but some kind of.
Speaker 1: Someone should look this up. I'm pretty sure that's correct.
Speaker 1: But if you imagine the illusions right like when you
Speaker 1: look at I wish we had this for scale. I mean,
Speaker 1: just how far the allusions stretch out? Sure, Like it's
Speaker 1: the width, like you imagine how big, Like you could
Speaker 1: fit Texas, California, most of Montana into Alaska and then
Speaker 1: the illusions basically extend Alaska by that distance. It's distance
Speaker 1: all over again towards Japan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and just looking at the map, it looks like
Speaker 2: it's about the same distance as it would be from
Speaker 2: the coast to California to Hawaii.
Speaker 7: I mean, Japan gets a lot of the same kind
Speaker 7: of salmon run.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's yeah, that's what it's like a it's like
Speaker 1: a Pacific rim, you know. And so they have this
Speaker 1: like this suite of wildlife. Do you remember we had
Speaker 1: the bear researcher in general all around good guy, Carl Melkaman,
Speaker 1: And he talked when he talked about being researching bears
Speaker 1: in China, and he was saying, yeah, he's saying, man,
Speaker 1: the weird thing about is everything's kind of the same
Speaker 1: but a little different. So he said, like you look
Speaker 1: at a tree and be like man, it's a lot
Speaker 1: like our beech tree, and there'll be a grouse. Be like,
Speaker 1: that's a lot like our grouse. A little different. That's
Speaker 1: a lot like our grouse. And the bear is like,
Speaker 1: it's a lot like our black bear, but a little different,
Speaker 1: he says. But the whole thing would fly out the
Speaker 1: window when you're looking as a big golden monkey. He goes,
Speaker 1: we don't have one of those. But anyhow, they got
Speaker 1: this bear like like such a bear issue in Japan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they look they're set to it that they've exceeded their
Speaker 1: twenty twenty record. Twenty twenty three has already passed up
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty record of one hundred and fifty eight
Speaker 1: bear attacks in Japan. Woman was just mauled to death.
Speaker 1: All these bear attacks three fatalities, including a seventy nine
Speaker 1: year old woman maul to death in her backyard. Bears
Speaker 1: outskirts of Tokyo. They say it was a poor crop
Speaker 1: of beech nuts. This is reported in Bloomberg. A poor
Speaker 1: crop of beech nuts has left led to more bear
Speaker 1: human interactions and they are offering like a compensation program
Speaker 1: to bear hunters five thousand yen for each bear they shoot.
Speaker 9: Is that really?
Speaker 1: What does that mean? Why do you have forty five
Speaker 1: dollars krinn, that's not what they're paying them.
Speaker 5: Let me see, so yen is like it is like
Speaker 5: about one hundred and twenty five or so to the dollar.
Speaker 6: Let me just check that.
Speaker 9: Well, you just got to watch Seinfeld and get the
Speaker 9: creamer when he has the dudes that are millionaires that
Speaker 9: have a million yen and he consmits them to spend
Speaker 9: all their money and they end up sleeping into chest
Speaker 9: of drawers.
Speaker 2: I would love to know, like.
Speaker 7: What their current management system is as far as hunting goes.
Speaker 5: Yes, five thousand yen is like thirty three bucks right now,
Speaker 5: that's the bounty, and there's yeah, and there's the Usuri
Speaker 5: brown bear in the Japanese or Asiatic black bear.
Speaker 1: What does the bear cause in all the trouble? I
Speaker 1: remember Carl Malcolms saying the Asiatic black bear mixes it
Speaker 1: up lots of scrabby little bear.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can't, I don't see that.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that's the one. I'm only saying that that's
Speaker 1: the one because Carl Malcolm was saying, it's like a
Speaker 1: it's like a it's like a got a temper. It's
Speaker 1: like a fighting little bear.
Speaker 5: Oh, there's a there's a picture in the Bloomberg article
Speaker 5: of a group of hunters searching for a brown bear
Speaker 5: that was on the loos in Sapporo a couple of
Speaker 5: years ago. So maybe it's about both of them, both
Speaker 5: both black and brown bear.
Speaker 1: I mean, just don't picture iteez.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 9: I think they have a commercial market for bear meat
Speaker 9: over there be anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we covered that. MM have a vending machine. There's
Speaker 1: a guy that you can buy bear meat out of
Speaker 1: a vending machine.
Speaker 9: It was expensive, Yeah, I remember seeing that pop up.
Speaker 5: Thousand yend just doesn't seem like a lot. I know
Speaker 5: that the that the dollar is strong to the end
Speaker 5: right now.
Speaker 1: But still fifty bucks is like no, man, fifty bucks
Speaker 1: like that that'd be like just good, that'd be like
Speaker 1: a good price for like a rack. Like really, that's
Speaker 1: great fifty bucks for bare That's a lot of work, dude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so but if you can turn around and uh also
Speaker 1: to do the sale right, speaking of bounties, that was
Speaker 1: Krin's transition like that, speaking of bonies. This this is
Speaker 1: this is one of those perennial stories that pops.
Speaker 7: Up now and then but the numbers just keep getting higher.
Speaker 1: Yeah, an angler earned. Can we get into the Can
Speaker 1: we get into our personal connection to this or you
Speaker 1: think we should not?
Speaker 5: If you want to, I think that's fine.
Speaker 1: An angler earned one hundred grand.
Speaker 8: Now earned?
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know what he's got into this for overhead.
Speaker 7: He's got a lot of time.
Speaker 8: What kind of boat does he have?
Speaker 1: So on the Columbia River in order to as part
Speaker 1: of a salmon restoration program. I'm a back way up.
Speaker 1: All the dam building we did on the Columbia has
Speaker 1: the long term impact of really imperiling a bunch of
Speaker 1: salmon runs. And you know, people say, some people when
Speaker 1: people look at I've gotten to this before, some people
Speaker 1: look at like why did the US win World War two?
Speaker 1: You know, and you can get in all these things
Speaker 1: like one way, we were able to produce more aluminum
Speaker 1: more quickly than anyone else. So we're, you know, we
Speaker 1: want that that's the limiting factor that allows to win
Speaker 1: World War two? How they do that well, because we
Speaker 1: had all these dams on the Columbia which generated so
Speaker 1: much electricity, and smelting aluminum requires a lot of electricity,
Speaker 1: and so we're you know, the long and short of
Speaker 1: it is, they damn the shit out of that river,
Speaker 1: and it's just the salmon runs are basically not salmon
Speaker 1: runs anymore. And there's all these efforts now to try
Speaker 1: to find some possible way to begin dismantling some of
Speaker 1: these dams. But it has all this implication for agriculture
Speaker 1: and shipping. It's one of the biggest problems that your
Speaker 1: kids will be hearing about. Your kids will probably hear
Speaker 1: a lot more about it than you will in your lifetime.
Speaker 1: As part of the salmon restoration program, they're trying to
Speaker 1: limit they're trying to kill off predators of salmon smoke, and.
Speaker 7: The dam's also created ideal conditions for this pike.
Speaker 1: You build a giant structure that impedes the movement of fish,
Speaker 1: and on top of that, you then create a reservoir
Speaker 1: system that gets loaded up with small mouth bass and
Speaker 1: pike minnows, and and that's stuff just hammers all the
Speaker 1: salmon smelt smolt that usually in the past we don't
Speaker 1: even really have to worry about paciforous predators. It's all
Speaker 1: part of big mass. So there's like the elephant in
Speaker 1: the room that's not really the accurate to put it,
Speaker 1: because people do talk about it. There's the core primary issue.
Speaker 1: The core primary issue is damning on the Columbia. You
Speaker 1: can love the dams or hate them, but it's like
Speaker 1: an objective reality that the dams on the Columbia are
Speaker 1: driving salmon runs to extinction. You can be like, eh,
Speaker 1: price you pay or whatever, but that's just the truth,
Speaker 1: however you feel about it. So, since you can't take
Speaker 1: care of the main issue, they're always trying to take
Speaker 1: care of like little minor issues. And one of the
Speaker 1: minor issues is predation on salmon small by pike minos.
Speaker 1: So they've set up a bounty program. What's the pike
Speaker 1: mental worth? They set up a bounty program where you
Speaker 1: can kill pike minos.
Speaker 7: It's a varying rate, six of dollars a fish for
Speaker 7: the first twenty five over nine inches, twenty five to
Speaker 7: two hundred fish eight two hundred plus ten.
Speaker 1: So a dude krin talk to the guy that runs
Speaker 1: the program. A dude netted himself. He caught ten thousand
Speaker 1: northern pike mentos, landed himself one hundred grand. So that
Speaker 1: becomes the headline. But I don't know what he's got
Speaker 1: in it. For expenses. Yeah, I mean, and we tried
Speaker 1: to get him to come on the podcast. But these
Speaker 1: guys that are making big that, these guys that are
Speaker 1: making living fish and pike mintos. What's funny is you
Speaker 1: think that like they would be like, well, here's how
Speaker 1: I do it. Let's get them all to save the salmon.
Speaker 1: But he doesn't want to damage the resource.
Speaker 9: Right, He wants to make sure he's got it.
Speaker 1: He doesn't want anyone to know how he does it
Speaker 1: because he doesn't want to damage the resource. They're supposed
Speaker 1: to Yeah, I'm sympathetic.
Speaker 5: There's supposed to be some steep competition and all kinds
Speaker 5: of drama around, like who's known locally to be like
Speaker 5: one of the top.
Speaker 8: Sounds like a reality show. We should do.
Speaker 1: No, they've been approached in fact, But isn't it funny
Speaker 1: that this whole thing is to try to kill off
Speaker 1: pike mentals. And then there's the guy that figures out
Speaker 1: how to really do it, but he doesn't want to
Speaker 1: talk about it because he doesn't want everybody killing.
Speaker 8: If we can test that, I.
Speaker 5: Was going to suggest that, like they take off some
Speaker 5: time next season.
Speaker 7: You can get you can do a little practicing for
Speaker 7: those things right here in Montano.
Speaker 1: The weird deal is these northern pike mentals are a
Speaker 1: native fish.
Speaker 7: Sure, and then uh, like Colorado, Utah, they're like a protected,
Speaker 7: threatened or endangered species.
Speaker 1: They can't have.
Speaker 9: You know, they're doing very poorly there.
Speaker 1: Twelve thousand people are getting after it. Twelve thousand people
Speaker 1: are catching one hundred and fifty six thousand pike mentals.
Speaker 1: But one dude is catching ten thousand pike mentals. Dall's
Speaker 1: he doing? You know, netting? He's netting probably maybe a lot.
Speaker 1: Would that guy say? Is he rotten and reeling them?
Speaker 7: Or That's the thing is like, what's the what's a
Speaker 7: legal method of take for this? Because like netting you'd
Speaker 7: have buyketch of.
Speaker 9: But if you can person like purse seeing them where
Speaker 9: you can?
Speaker 1: You know, I think they're hooking line and the man
Speaker 1: you think well. In Karen's notes from her conversation, she
Speaker 1: uses the term reeled.
Speaker 9: Yeah are you?
Speaker 1: Are you not just hammering away with facts right now?
Speaker 1: You're on the phone with the guy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, But I just I just put some book points
Speaker 5: in there, So I probably wrote reel because he said real, Yeah,
Speaker 5: I don't think I just pulled that out of thin air.
Speaker 1: So that's not what you're gonna say. I just for
Speaker 1: some reason, I thought.
Speaker 7: I thought it was rotten reel catching for some reason.
Speaker 1: Has pulled it out of.
Speaker 10: Think it's something I think if it were rotten real
Speaker 10: I would take I would run a fly rig on
Speaker 10: the river where you got flies.
Speaker 1: Up. This is the first year that someone that this
Speaker 1: is the first year that a single er angle that
Speaker 1: a single angler. I don't know if this is that true.
Speaker 1: The first year that a singler single angler earned a
Speaker 1: hundred k. The guy that earned a hundred k should
Speaker 1: really come on the show. I won't you ask you
Speaker 1: any specific questions.
Speaker 5: He knows us, but he.
Speaker 1: Knows he was flattered, right, yeah, yeah, it just come
Speaker 1: on and you can. We'll bleep out anything that you
Speaker 1: don't any trade secrets.
Speaker 5: You know what we can do if we like record
Speaker 5: him in the studio. You know how like with those
Speaker 5: documentaries they just kind of do a silhouette. You can
Speaker 5: just totally like.
Speaker 2: Getting the picture with a bunch of special forces dudes,
Speaker 2: how they like blur out their eyes will.
Speaker 1: Blur out your We'll give you a mob. We'll give
Speaker 1: you a mob. Informant keep a low profile, blur out
Speaker 1: your eyes, any specifics about where you go or what
Speaker 1: you do. And in terms of like word getting out, dude,
Speaker 1: word is out. This is a widely reported thing. We'll
Speaker 1: give you like a bunch of free clothes, cook up
Speaker 1: some I'll have you for dinner. I'll have you for dinner.
Speaker 1: We'll give you a brand new play knife so you
Speaker 1: can flay your pipe. Mentals up and uh, and a wallet.
Speaker 1: You put all your money in wallets. Oh yeah, because
Speaker 1: you need it haul around all that money. Give two walts.
Speaker 2: You might need a backpack that money.
Speaker 1: We'll give you a backpack you put all your money in,
Speaker 1: and just come. We'll give you a duffel to put
Speaker 1: all your money in, and you come on the pod
Speaker 1: has to talk to us. In twenty twenty two, the
Speaker 1: rewards went like this, So the rewards for to five anglers.
Speaker 1: So the top five anglers in twenty twenty two sixty
Speaker 1: nine K, sixty three K, fifty six K, fifty four K,
Speaker 1: forty three K.
Speaker 5: Then it really drops off. Then it really okaya, But
Speaker 5: I didn't know if it was like then by like
Speaker 5: twenty grand it drops off, but it drops off.
Speaker 1: So was the one hundred k guy in that top.
Speaker 5: K yes, okay, yes, so he's a command like the
Speaker 5: top couple are always our trading places.
Speaker 8: Ten percent of the anglers catch eighty percent of the fish.
Speaker 1: That's true in general with hunting. Yeah with yeah, hmm
Speaker 1: hundred command master angler one.
Speaker 7: Hundred and fifty six thousand of those things they removed
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty three. Wonder if it's doing any good?
Speaker 5: God love that a guy in the show Pike Mino's good.
Speaker 2: I just want to know what else he's catching.
Speaker 7: They used to eat him back way back in the day,
Speaker 7: the Mountain Man era.
Speaker 1: You know what, it looks like it could be better
Speaker 1: than it is. It looks like you, like a wall
Speaker 1: I had sex with a sucker yet have teeth.
Speaker 2: Speaking of that, I wonder if you could turn around
Speaker 2: and sell those to like, like uh for trapping bait
Speaker 2: or something trapping babe.
Speaker 7: They sell them for bait up in Northwest Colorado for
Speaker 7: lakers and ship small ones.
Speaker 1: My boys didn't get into the soccer fl a business.
Speaker 1: Speaking of what you guys sent in a picture and
Speaker 1: puts on. So we're trying to we're trying to like
Speaker 1: get everybody's great cell phone or sell not cell phone
Speaker 1: trail cam. Get everybody's great trail cam pictures. You know,
Speaker 1: it's so funny it guys sent a picture of three
Speaker 1: wild hogs all lined up in a exactly sensitive I'm
Speaker 1: being sensitive here to a family.
Speaker 5: They're a vertic we lined up in.
Speaker 1: A copulatory posture, free in a copulatory train. And the
Speaker 1: caption he wrote, I can't get over the cash he wrote,
Speaker 1: is try to add a small town. But it looks
Speaker 1: like a small town to me. I mean, this looks
Speaker 1: like a big city. It's like all the woods. All right.
Speaker 1: Back to our special guest, Tyler Freele, And here's where
Speaker 1: I want to start. Tyler, what in sam Hill is
Speaker 1: going on with doll sheep? Okay, doll sheep numbers and
Speaker 1: doll sheep closures and break the whole thing down to
Speaker 1: me and vast tracks of federal that you can't hunt,
Speaker 1: tell us.
Speaker 9: The whole Danswerry.
Speaker 1: All right, so you've covered You've covered this heavily.
Speaker 9: Yeah I will, I'll do my best.
Speaker 1: And yeah, what's a doll sheep?
Speaker 11: Uh?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 9: There, Alaska's native wild sheep thin horn, very similar to
Speaker 9: a stone sheep. They're predominantly all white. It's kind of
Speaker 9: their their characters. They're defining characteristic they live in, whether
Speaker 9: they say like officially seven or eight mountain ranges in Alaska,
Speaker 9: pretty widespread all the you know, pretty much all the
Speaker 9: suitable cheap habitat in Alaska has doll sheep on them,
Speaker 9: and the population you know, goes over into Canada and
Speaker 9: then transitions to stone sheep and then you know big
Speaker 9: horn sheep down below.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a that's the thing i'd read. There's a
Speaker 1: book that are biologists out of Fairbanks put out. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like it like a magnum opus. There's some
Speaker 1: wildlife biologists, but he's kind of explaining that, you know,
Speaker 1: what's what's the sheep in Siberia snow sheep. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of different subst You kind of imagine it's
Speaker 1: like band of this like band of sheep, ye, right,
Speaker 1: it would be uninterrupted. Yeah, so at a time, like
Speaker 1: if you went back to the places scene when you
Speaker 1: could walk from Siberia to Alaska, it's just like this
Speaker 1: band of sheep, and it would go from Siberia into Mexico. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right all down through like through Yukon territory. All the
Speaker 1: Canadian rockies down and this thing would kind of like
Speaker 1: peter out in Mexico, and it would they would if
Speaker 1: you were to walk that journey, you'd probably recognize this
Speaker 1: that they kind of like gradually changed. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: they started out big and burly and dark and they
Speaker 1: end up smaller and white. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Small. Yeah, Well because the snow sheeper even smaller typically
Speaker 9: than dull sheep from what I understand, but which it
Speaker 9: may have been. This guy here, Wayne Heimer, who was
Speaker 9: a longtime sheep research biologist in Fairbanks, was kind of
Speaker 9: like the you know, one of the original cheap management
Speaker 9: and research by bile just uh in the state of
Speaker 9: Alaska at all.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Tyler brought me this book, doll Sheep Management in
Speaker 1: Alaska from Place to Scene to Present by Wayne E. Heimer.
Speaker 9: Yeah. So, uh, these sheep are all all throughout Alaska,
Speaker 9: and uh see where they're picking a spot to start with?
Speaker 9: Uh with the way the situation now, So it's a
Speaker 9: little bit of history, uh after statehood. Before statehood and
Speaker 9: Laska was a territory, Uh, efficient wildlife was managed by
Speaker 9: the Feds because it wasn't there. State didn't exist then
Speaker 9: and at state what.
Speaker 1: Was the yeah, that's yeah. So so prior to statehood
Speaker 1: there was no sort of like territorial game management Agency.
Speaker 9: No, it was all it was all the FEDS. And frankly,
Speaker 9: like I mean, he talks, Wayne talks in his book
Speaker 9: about how a lot of this management quote unquote was
Speaker 9: like guess work, Like they didn't really know nobody knew
Speaker 9: like what we really had except for certain you know,
Speaker 9: certain areas closer to populations, you know, towns and whatnot,
Speaker 9: and so into what we had in like the early on,
Speaker 9: I think even in the territorial days, they had like
Speaker 9: a three quarter curl rule for shooting rams, which that
Speaker 9: was just borrowed from big Horns. That's what they did
Speaker 9: for big horns. So they just this might work. And over,
Speaker 9: you know, over and over Wayne's decades of research, they
Speaker 9: developed like the full curl mature ramp theory that you
Speaker 9: know and kind of goes along with vlarious geists, you know,
Speaker 9: sheep sheep theories to develop the full curl management strategy,
Speaker 9: which you know is kind of all kind of if
Speaker 9: I don't remember touchback, I tend to my brain kind
Speaker 9: of fires off in different directions a lot of times.
Speaker 9: So so, uh, last it becomes a state, gets tied
Speaker 9: up to the wildlife and the duty to manage them.
Speaker 9: And the next like probably the biggest, well the biggest
Speaker 9: impact you know to hunters was Anilka and Anska the
Speaker 9: Alaska Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and then Alaska National
Speaker 9: Interest Land Conservation Act, which those were a from what
Speaker 9: I understand, a trade off to get the Trans Alaska pipeline.
Speaker 9: So it was it was during the Carter administration. They
Speaker 9: wanted they discovered oil and prude O Bay needed a
Speaker 9: way to get that oil to market. So the Trans
Speaker 9: Alaska pipeline was the solution. And to get that, they
Speaker 9: the Carter administration wanted all this federal land set aside
Speaker 9: and you know, for conservation purposes to protect it, which
Speaker 9: I think is you know, a pretty good thing. So
Speaker 9: and I don't know all the details. I wasn't I
Speaker 9: wasn't around back then. This is uh I think it
Speaker 9: was finalized in nineteen eighty, but our two senators uh
Speaker 9: Ted Stevens and Gravel, I didn't like what Jimmy Carter
Speaker 9: wanted to take. I don't know all the details in that,
Speaker 9: but Carter basically told him, you're gonna give it to
Speaker 9: me or I or you're gonna come back in a year,
Speaker 9: begging for me to take it, and they said, you
Speaker 9: don't have Alas Wayne describes, they told Carter that you
Speaker 9: don't have the balls. Well, he'd had the balls, and
Speaker 9: he signed an executive order. I think it was using
Speaker 9: the Antiquities Act labeling or I don't know again details
Speaker 9: but basically took subsistence hunting as an described it as
Speaker 9: an iniquity in this executive order and locked up huge
Speaker 9: portions of Alaska immediately, like you know, you're going hunting
Speaker 9: there this fall, No, you're not. And my uncle describes
Speaker 9: this like he was going cheap hunting and he was
Speaker 9: gonna go sheep hunting the wrangles in a certain spot.
Speaker 1: And this was a political move by Carter.
Speaker 9: Yeah, to get a nilka, to get the land set
Speaker 9: aside that he wanted for anilka from one of like actually.
Speaker 1: Leveraged, yeah, leveraged hunting access for a greater political vide.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And it and it was a big impact to the
Speaker 9: economy too. You know, it affected outfitters, resident hunters, everybody.
Speaker 9: And so my uncle describes it as, you know, he
Speaker 9: heard about this and then uh, you know went to
Speaker 9: state fishing game in the state's official position was non compliance.
Speaker 9: They told, you know, they told him, unless a FED
Speaker 9: sees us, see you pull the trigger, have a nice hunt.
Speaker 1: Oh really, so these guys have been real legit.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, big time. And uh after a year that
Speaker 9: they uh yeah, they went and they gave him an
Speaker 9: ilka and so yep, they came back.
Speaker 1: He was right, you know, he took and saw. They
Speaker 1: then they ended up settling where they got the corridor.
Speaker 1: I mean they run that. I mean just for just
Speaker 1: people understand. Like early we're talking about how big Alaska is.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know what it is top to bottom. Well,
Speaker 1: just like the Brooks Range, it's all the size of California.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's five, like five hundred miles from Prudo Bay
Speaker 9: to Fairbanks and so that that then it's got another yeah,
Speaker 9: another three hundred fifty you know, I mean maybe three
Speaker 9: hundred dish miles.
Speaker 1: It depends on where you're measuring from to You could
Speaker 1: run the picture that you're you're trying to secure land,
Speaker 1: you're trying to secure rights to a corridor that is
Speaker 1: a thousand mile you know, almost one thousand miles.
Speaker 9: I think it's I think it's I think the pipeline
Speaker 9: is eight hundred miles roughly. But so it was a
Speaker 9: big deal and they gave him a milka. And then
Speaker 9: so there were already some existing National parks Denale, which
Speaker 9: was McKinley at the time, and a few others. So
Speaker 9: this created a bunch of new national parks Wrangle, Saint Elias,
Speaker 9: and Gates of the Arctic National Park up in the
Speaker 9: Brooks Range and created and it created a lot of
Speaker 9: you know, also National Park Service managed preserve lands. It
Speaker 9: expanded and I believe it also expanded. An war was
Speaker 9: in existence at the time, but I think that expanded it.
Speaker 9: And you know, basically federal lie or created all these refuges, parks, preserves,
Speaker 9: all this stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is it kind of the way I've understood it.
Speaker 1: I never I never knew this thing about how they
Speaker 1: settled it. But the way I've understood it is that
Speaker 1: like that move forced a lot of people to decide
Speaker 1: how they're going to carve the pie up. Yeah, for sure, right,
Speaker 1: Like and they had like formalized ownerships. Okay, so all
Speaker 1: this federal lands, some will be this, some will be
Speaker 1: that the state's going to get this, Uh, and then
Speaker 1: are going to get there and and it forced a
Speaker 1: sort of codification of who owned what in that state.
Speaker 9: Oh for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And then and that's just the base layer to it.
Speaker 9: Then you get into another layer of like management styles
Speaker 9: and principles and uh what the word, you know what
Speaker 9: how to describe it? You get into the preservationists versus
Speaker 9: conservationist mentalities. Uh so anilka effectively, like I mean a
Speaker 9: lot of and there's still like the people that were
Speaker 9: around like do not like Jimmy You don't want to
Speaker 9: bring up Jimmy Carter around them because they've got some
Speaker 9: still source to a very sore and uh and a
Speaker 9: lot of peop but don't understand why. But that's that's
Speaker 9: why they just took it. And uh, you know the
Speaker 9: result of even just wrangle Saint Elias and gates of
Speaker 9: the Arctic National Park. Gates the Arctic at the time
Speaker 9: they figure had six thousand to ten thousand cheap, so
Speaker 9: just they cut a huge chunk out of what hunters
Speaker 9: could access.
Speaker 1: The least visited national park. Yeah, it makes zero sense,
Speaker 1: but it's a national park. It makes zero sense, you know.
Speaker 9: And a lot of this country I'm fully behind protecting it,
Speaker 9: you know, like I don't I don't want to destroy
Speaker 9: or see all that stuff destroyed. But let us use
Speaker 9: the freaking lands man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's been I mean hunting it has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with that.
Speaker 9: No, no, it doesn't. It doesn't.
Speaker 1: You know, like let let people like the most most
Speaker 1: ridiculous land use Oh for sure, we have zero implications.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and in fact, you know, like where the world
Speaker 9: record doll sheep was killed is now in the Hard
Speaker 9: Park Wrangle Saint Elias National Park, and oh is it
Speaker 9: really Yeah, there's a guy a ram Glaciers where Swank
Speaker 9: killed that ram, and since that you would think, oh,
Speaker 9: well there's got to be all sort of those rams
Speaker 9: running around in there. And that's not the case anymore.
Speaker 9: Since that became a national park. I mean, people quit
Speaker 9: using it as much. There's still some subsistence allowances, like
Speaker 9: if you live in glenn Allen or some of these
Speaker 9: other little towns, you can hunt the Hard Park, but
Speaker 9: you can't. The access is extremely restricted.
Speaker 1: Can you explain this is the term out here Alaskans
Speaker 1: use all the time. Can you explain hard Park? Okay,
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, no, so so explain it, like you're taught,
Speaker 1: like explain it, like if it was Yellowstone.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so yellow says, I know nothing about Yellowstone. But
Speaker 9: you have Yellowstone National Park, which is hard National Park.
Speaker 9: You cannot hunt there. You gotta have a beare proof
Speaker 9: food container in your backpack, you gotta you know, all
Speaker 9: these The list goes on for rules.
Speaker 1: It's the hard part, hard park.
Speaker 9: So the preserve is technically part of the park, but
Speaker 9: it a lot has allowances for the general public to hunt.
Speaker 9: You know, they still got some some pretty silly rules.
Speaker 9: But you can hunt preserved the takeaways. You can hunt
Speaker 9: preserve land. You can't hunt hard park land generally.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a soft park man myself.
Speaker 9: Oh I'm a.
Speaker 1: The you guys got so many terms that like I'm
Speaker 1: just rattling off, and you know, I love it. I
Speaker 1: love it. But yeah, so when I hear when I'm
Speaker 1: talking to friends mine up there and I talk about
Speaker 1: like the hard part, you know, and I always look
Speaker 1: to people that I know have no idea what they're
Speaker 1: talking about, and I'm like, or if they're gonna ask
Speaker 1: what he's talking about, they never do.
Speaker 11: No.
Speaker 9: Well that and that like, I'm glad you asked that
Speaker 9: because with a lot of Alaskan issues. There's a big
Speaker 9: disconnect between understand like what some of the details and
Speaker 9: context of what goes on up there versus what the
Speaker 9: general sure outside as we call.
Speaker 1: It, that's another term, the outside.
Speaker 9: Yeah, like I'm a like, I'm a stranger in a
Speaker 9: strange land right now.
Speaker 1: I saw their day that this country has. I'll tell
Speaker 1: my buddy Danny who's from Hawaii, Danny Bolton. I was
Speaker 1: telling them that this country hasn't effectively integrated Hawaiians and
Speaker 1: Alaskans yet because they're so bad. They're so bad at
Speaker 1: lower forty eight yard there, like, I don't give me
Speaker 1: the state that borders Illinois, I don't. I don't know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well I would be at that point if my
Speaker 9: kids weren't learning some geography.
Speaker 1: Story and learn a thing or two about jo They
Speaker 1: got this.
Speaker 9: States game that we've been playing, and yeah, luckily as
Speaker 9: a reference map. So anyway, so that's what a hard
Speaker 9: park versus soft park. Then you have wildlife refuges, which
Speaker 9: are in all all the parks and preserves are managed
Speaker 9: by the National Park Service. The US Fish and Wildlife
Speaker 9: Service manages refuge lands. And there's a ship pile of those.
Speaker 1: About thirteen percent of the state, and that's been an
Speaker 1: issue we've spent a bunch I'm on covering over the years.
Speaker 1: Is the whip saw of the whip saw of the
Speaker 1: Feds overriding states wildlife management practices on refuge land ye
Speaker 1: meaning refuge and yeah, the whip saw of the Feds saying, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna, we're gonna take away management practices you have
Speaker 1: traditionally exercised on portions of your land, like Obama brought
Speaker 1: it in, Trump brought it out.
Speaker 9: That was the whole.
Speaker 1: The most Yeah, it was.
Speaker 9: It was like, it's such a yeah, so steer me
Speaker 9: back to sheep.
Speaker 1: But this is all essential to understand this whole thing,
Speaker 1: which is a really complicated but interesting thing that I think.
Speaker 1: Remember earlier, I was saying, your kids are gonna hear
Speaker 1: a lot more about the dams and on the Columbia
Speaker 1: than you will, because your kids are probably gonna see
Speaker 1: a lot some of those dams come out. If you're listening. Now,
Speaker 1: that's just my crystal balling. My crystal balling is you're
Speaker 1: going to see that that what Tyler is talking about
Speaker 1: in Alaska is going to become more and more of
Speaker 1: an issue in the American West and elsewhere. Yeah, meaning
Speaker 1: this like this sort of going from an ethnic standpoint,
Speaker 1: who has access to.
Speaker 9: You know well, and initially, you know when I was
Speaker 9: I was actually talking with Wayne about this the other
Speaker 9: day when they were first drafting a nilka, you know,
Speaker 9: because a nilka brings in subsistence use. Ye, And initially
Speaker 9: it was I Wayne said, initially the language was race
Speaker 9: oriented for subsistence use. And then they're not in our
Speaker 9: in our modern world like we that's not okay. And
Speaker 9: so they basically the primitive like search and replace with
Speaker 9: a location based or where you know where you live.
Speaker 9: So the funny story, I I actually was listening to
Speaker 9: that episode where you guys were talking about this, the
Speaker 9: latest back and forth.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 9: I was listening to it while I was sitting in
Speaker 9: a blind in Alberta over a bait pile, waiting for
Speaker 9: a pack of wolves. And I was interrupted by a
Speaker 9: pack of wolves that showed up. And despite my you know,
Speaker 9: my my delusions of being a frank laser, I only
Speaker 9: hit two of them. But uh so, the one thing
Speaker 9: you talked about the administration, the administrations I think do
Speaker 9: have something to do with it. But I think that
Speaker 9: it's more of a factor of what people in place
Speaker 9: at the agencies in Alaska are restricted from or allowed
Speaker 9: to do by an administration. Like I don't think Joe
Speaker 9: Biden's a mastermind, like yeah, decide there, like.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm den digging, you know, he's not like personally.
Speaker 9: No, no. And but what it is is I think, well,
Speaker 9: in this case, it was the back of the back
Speaker 9: and forth is just exhausting. But you know when under
Speaker 9: under the Obama bomb administration, it was all preserve National
Speaker 9: Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service managed lands
Speaker 9: and then it got reversed, and then this time I
Speaker 9: believe it was just the Park Service pushing it. But
Speaker 9: I think that's a matter of just the Park Service saying, look,
Speaker 9: we can get away with this right now, because they
Speaker 9: generally and I know there's a lot of good people
Speaker 9: work for the federal agencies to take with the grain
Speaker 9: of salt, but there's the axis of evil of sorts.
Speaker 9: The Park Service is kind of the most restrictive or
Speaker 9: worst one when it comes to allowing hunter access, and
Speaker 9: they've got a long history of let's say, managing to
Speaker 9: for minimum human interference with the landscape is like a
Speaker 9: politically correct way to put it, I think, And so
Speaker 9: they do that through regulation, you know, and some of
Speaker 9: it has you know, there's stuff you'd see in US
Speaker 9: Fish and Wildlife. But the key is, I think it depends.
Speaker 9: It's more depending on the people that are in place
Speaker 9: in different positions at these agencies in Alaska than an
Speaker 9: administration telling them.
Speaker 1: But there is a there is a real trickle down
Speaker 1: because the heads of these agencies are appointed by the administration.
Speaker 9: The Department, the Department of Interior, you know, Secretary of
Speaker 9: the Interior has does have a lot to do with it,
Speaker 9: and they'll know. I'm sure there's something.
Speaker 1: In the head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
Speaker 1: Yeah for sure.
Speaker 9: So in this all, this whole like appointed position thing
Speaker 9: trickles down to the Federal Subsistence Board and the issues
Speaker 9: like we're dealing with with them.
Speaker 1: But we're gonna get into that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So that's where.
Speaker 1: But you got to understand that this is great. Don't
Speaker 1: don't be embarrassed about the level of detail because it
Speaker 1: has a very complicated wildlife manage thing and it's educational.
Speaker 9: Like sometimes I have to just take a break from
Speaker 9: it because it's it's just depressing an entire to keep
Speaker 9: up with all of it. It's and that's part of
Speaker 9: the tough thing about it. Like the fight is you can't.
Speaker 9: You can't, like it's too much for any one person
Speaker 9: to keep up with.
Speaker 7: Like speaking of the fight, is this like while all
Speaker 7: this is going on, like is Alaska fishing games perspective? Like, man,
Speaker 7: this is just like not a fight we can win
Speaker 7: like that it's not.
Speaker 9: Worth like they're they're trying, you know, like I think
Speaker 9: there are some I'm not wearing specifics of them, but
Speaker 9: there are, Like I know they have like lawsuits and
Speaker 9: they're like that's their only recourse, right, but their position
Speaker 9: is that it's illegal what the Feds are doing, that
Speaker 9: the state has title to all the wildlife and the
Speaker 9: responsibility for managing it. And it's just to me, looking
Speaker 9: at as each one of these federal closures rolls out,
Speaker 9: it just to me, it doesn't add up. And like
Speaker 9: we can get into that too, but like the A
Speaker 9: plus B equill see like does not equal see.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll get to the get to the moves that
Speaker 1: are happening around doll sheep, so doll sheep, but also
Speaker 1: get into the you know, there's the issue of severe winners,
Speaker 1: severe winners, low numbers. But then there's also the suspicion
Speaker 1: that that's being there's also the suspicion that that's being
Speaker 1: like exploited for political game.
Speaker 9: I think it absolutely is, but so doll sheet and like,
Speaker 9: you know, backing up into the doll sheet management, I
Speaker 9: did recently get to go to a presentation kind of
Speaker 9: on the status of everything and some of the history
Speaker 9: by one of our current cheap research biologists. He you know,
Speaker 9: that he laid out the history of since you know,
Speaker 9: since the data was being recorded of cheap hunter numbers
Speaker 9: and harvest. Harvest is basically the only hard data like
Speaker 9: that we could find in a lot of those years
Speaker 9: because it was before surveys, and surveys is another is
Speaker 9: another interesting kind of sidebar to that. But so cheap
Speaker 9: have had a lot you know, the like cariboos especially,
Speaker 9: they'll have population swings or any other big game animal
Speaker 9: in a like relatively natural state, their populations oscillate and
Speaker 9: sheep are very sensitive to weather conditions. They can't they
Speaker 9: don't dig for their food in the snow, so they're
Speaker 9: they're very dependent on wind blown slopes for their feed
Speaker 9: in the especially late winter, and populations have been like
Speaker 9: you know, there was a big crash in the third
Speaker 9: I think the thirties, and there's been isolated just total crashes.
Speaker 9: In nineteen ninety. There's an interesting diagram he gave of
Speaker 9: showing the uh, the number of sheep and sheep hunters climbing, climbing,
Speaker 9: climbing basically to double what it is now of harvests
Speaker 9: and sheep hunters. Wasn't really yeah, I mean it was
Speaker 9: well in this year. The last two years have been
Speaker 9: really low harvests, but uh, you know, the numbers climb, climb,
Speaker 9: climb of hunters and harvest. And then nineteen ninety it
Speaker 9: just like there was a huge crash in the central
Speaker 9: Alaska Range in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Oh, and you'll see that sheep population crash reflected in
Speaker 1: the harvest now and in participation as well.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, for sure, Like now there's there's half the
Speaker 9: sheep hunters participating now than there was like three or
Speaker 9: four years ago, and it was half the sheep or no, yeah,
Speaker 9: I mean it's the numbers have taken a hit. So
Speaker 9: the winters between twenty twenty two, so twenty twenty, twenty
Speaker 9: twenty one, and then the following winter both had like
Speaker 9: real like pretty state wide tough condition winter conditions and
Speaker 9: it hit hammered on a lot of sheet populations. And
Speaker 9: it's not it's not great news, like they're the sheet
Speaker 9: populations are down pretty much statewide, and.
Speaker 1: There's there's an additional there's an additional irritant about this
Speaker 1: as you're talking about the way populations can recover, but uh,
Speaker 1: it takes ten years ago trophy, Well, yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, it's it's like takes I mean,
Speaker 1: you you take a white tail buck, you can have
Speaker 1: a smoker white tail buck in four years. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: it's it's a slow process show.
Speaker 9: And you know, and the way, you know, the full
Speaker 9: curl look under what we'd call full curl management, you know,
Speaker 9: whereas a ram is legal to kill once he's full
Speaker 9: curl or eight years old, and there's some other criteria,
Speaker 9: but basically eight year old rams are at the time
Speaker 9: in their life when they become dominant and take over
Speaker 9: most of the breeding, and then their mortality just shoots
Speaker 9: through the roof once they're eight Steve has said it
Speaker 9: at their and then they're dead. Basically once they turn eight,
Speaker 9: they're on borrowed time though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's no, like there's no like old man period. No, No,
Speaker 1: it's like on top of your game if you like,
Speaker 1: if it'd be like if dudes died at like thirty eight.
Speaker 9: I just turned thirty eight, so I yeah.
Speaker 7: So Tyler, like, with these cheap declines, is there anyone
Speaker 7: like pointing finger at a finger at hunter harvest as
Speaker 7: any kind of impact or is that like not?
Speaker 9: So that's yes and no, yes and no. So that
Speaker 9: that does play into some of the excuses used for
Speaker 9: closing these areas. And they're like some areas got hit
Speaker 9: harder than others in some areas already have been experiencing
Speaker 9: a ton of pressure compared soul like for the amount
Speaker 9: of hunters that are out there, Like, yeah, there's fewer
Speaker 9: legal rams running around, you know what Wayne Heimer the
Speaker 9: fishing game, Like all those biologists they and they are
Speaker 9: doing studies right now. Start they started a study this
Speaker 9: year to compare a hunted area versus a non hunted
Speaker 9: area that are basically side by side to compare this
Speaker 9: ram mortality. So some of these people are taking Geist's
Speaker 9: theory and what Heimer kind of verified that if you
Speaker 9: remove all the mature rams from the landscape. As you know,
Speaker 9: we're in Heimer's study area in central Lascarens during the
Speaker 9: three quarter curl days, like there was not any full
Speaker 9: curl rams running around really, and they observed like a
Speaker 9: higher mortality in younger rams, understandably because they did more.
Speaker 9: They're more disorganized, they're less you know, less Uh well,
Speaker 9: I don't even know that they're less able to cope
Speaker 9: with the circumstance the breeding, because the older rams tip
Speaker 9: off pretty pretty quickly too. But there, you know, nobody's
Speaker 9: buying it, you know. And the position is that hunting
Speaker 9: under a full curl reg regulation has zero impact on
Speaker 9: that recovery has zero impact. And even Heimer stuff showed
Speaker 9: it because they went from three quarter curl to know,
Speaker 9: with a lot of resistance, to seven eighths curl, which
Speaker 9: was kind of a compromise between three quarters and full
Speaker 9: and then they moved a full curl. And then you know,
Speaker 9: people were afraid that you make these restricts, these restrictions,
Speaker 9: there's gonna be a lot fewer harvestable rams. Well, after
Speaker 9: a few years, boom, then you're at a different level
Speaker 9: and it's a lot healthy in like this. I've only
Speaker 9: ever known that world during the full curl Yeah, me too,
Speaker 9: the full Curl era. You know, it's and I still
Speaker 9: kind of think of myself as a pretty young sheep hunter.
Speaker 9: I've been doing it for twenty years. Every year and
Speaker 9: I just feel every year I feel like there's more
Speaker 9: I got to learn about them. But uh so the
Speaker 9: hunt like it's in the federal side. People will argue,
Speaker 9: which I'll get into that. So you have the Federal
Speaker 9: Subsistence Board, which I think is kind of the more
Speaker 9: they get, the more the box has opened up and
Speaker 9: they can and you know, people are seizing these opportunities.
Speaker 9: So the Northwest art at Caribou Herd, I don't know
Speaker 9: if you guys have talked about that, that closure, which
Speaker 9: that's a closure that doesn't make any sense. They closed
Speaker 9: it to non locals because and that's a whole other
Speaker 9: layered thing. They closed it as non local hunters because.
Speaker 1: It's basically like a quadrant of the state.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, huge huge. I think they didn't get it
Speaker 9: in the northern twenty unit twenty six, but a huge area.
Speaker 9: So they they we've on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've on a carribo that are closed now.
Speaker 9: Yeah, the uh, the excuse was because the population is
Speaker 9: in decline, and it hit that, you know, their survey
Speaker 9: conveniently with a margin of error or the degree of certainty.
Speaker 9: The survey hit it on just under two hundred thousand animals,
Speaker 9: which a whole other entity called the work you know
Speaker 9: that Northwest Artcurred Working Group has in their kind of
Speaker 9: they have like a rubric for different management levels and
Speaker 9: intensity of management and suggestions. They're just like a consultation
Speaker 9: group made up of a lot of different parties that
Speaker 9: can make recommendations for management. They don't have management powers,
Speaker 9: but so it hit this two hundred thousand level and
Speaker 9: you're getting proposals from this you know, regional council that
Speaker 9: makes recommendations to the Federal Subsistence Board, which it's like
Speaker 9: a it's like a carbon copy sort of of the
Speaker 9: States model where they have regional Advisory account committees. These
Speaker 9: ones are councils. So they get this proposal to and
Speaker 9: they've happened, but they get this proposal to close the
Speaker 9: area to non local hunters because you know, they cite
Speaker 9: because the herds in decline. You so in theory, you
Speaker 9: know a reason would be to recover numbers, and because
Speaker 9: they assert that non local hunters are impacting and diverting
Speaker 9: the caribou's migration, which I wrote a story on this.
Speaker 9: I talked to the National Park Service biologists who did
Speaker 9: a lot of this study up there, and he said,
Speaker 9: there's no evidence to support it. And the driver, you know,
Speaker 9: if you learn anything about caribou herds and like a
Speaker 9: lot of animals, the drivers of populations are the mature cows.
Speaker 9: You know, mature cows have calves and caf recruitment. Those
Speaker 9: are the two most important things. So non local hunters
Speaker 9: kill about three hundred bulls per year, whereas they estimate
Speaker 9: they don't know, they estimate subsistence harvest at about like
Speaker 9: ten to fourteen thousand animals, which you know, like that
Speaker 9: subsistence resource is important. Don't get me wrong, I'm not
Speaker 9: knocking that, but just the equation doesn't make sense. And
Speaker 9: so they they and but they close it to non locals.
Speaker 9: They don't even make any recommendations to stop shooting cows
Speaker 9: and caps. So it just doesn't add up.
Speaker 1: It's like that you're like, you you're taking advantage of
Speaker 1: the situation to remove an annoyance. Yeah, that has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the resource.
Speaker 9: And you can you know, I could get my ten,
Speaker 9: I could get My life would be better.
Speaker 1: My life would be better if there weren't non locals here.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and this and this is getting a little and
Speaker 9: I understand those sentiments, and they exist in a lot
Speaker 9: of places.
Speaker 1: Out there, but it's ubiquitous.
Speaker 9: You could get a little tinfoil hattie. But I've been
Speaker 9: told by guys like this that have been around, had
Speaker 9: seen this whole process that you know, you're not crazy
Speaker 9: to suspect that there's some interplay between the agencies and
Speaker 9: these committees and crafting these proposals. Oh you know, so
Speaker 9: and it gets worse. So the Caribo one happens, then,
Speaker 9: you know, all of a sudden cheaper in trouble.
Speaker 1: So just to just to put like a very clear
Speaker 1: point on it, just the people that are follow who
Speaker 1: don't follow this issue, you're normally chinliehud. Okay, if you
Speaker 1: look at a normal wildlife resource, like from a lower
Speaker 1: forty eight perspective, you look at a normal wildlife resource,
Speaker 1: you might imagine the pie being divided up between what
Speaker 1: we'll call what they call recreational hunters and fishermen and
Speaker 1: commercial use. Okay, so let's say we're gonna go out
Speaker 1: to the East coast. We're gonna go to the East coast,
Speaker 1: Chesapeake Bay. We're gonna look at like some fishery. It'd
Speaker 1: be that there's the recreational harvest and the commercial harvest right,
Speaker 1: and those two on some resource, and those two entities
Speaker 1: are gonna be at odds. They're gonna be just generally
Speaker 1: gonna be arguing over who gets a bigger piece of
Speaker 1: the pie. Right, the commercial the recreational industries are gonna fight, like,
Speaker 1: we want more fish. You're messing up our fishing. You're
Speaker 1: inflicting our ability to make a livelihood. This tension always
Speaker 1: exists all over the place. In the in the Rocky
Speaker 1: Mountain less than lower forty eight, there's there's constant tension
Speaker 1: between you know, it's not ugly necessarily, but there's tension
Speaker 1: between outfitter okay and and non outfitted. So it's a
Speaker 1: it's a minor issue. But there's outfitters who are like,
Speaker 1: we would like to have more permits so we can
Speaker 1: do more guiding and have more clients. And then non
Speaker 1: guided hunters are saying, we would like to have greater
Speaker 1: animal tag allocation go to us and not peeling off
Speaker 1: so much for the guides or the conflict could be.
Speaker 1: We have you have state residents and non residents, and
Speaker 1: that's the sort that's attention, meaning state residents. Like you're
Speaker 1: giving you're letting too many non residents come in and hunt.
Speaker 7: It's impacting side x percent of tags for non residents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like why I've been applying for a sheep tag
Speaker 1: for thirty years? How could a non resident get a
Speaker 1: sheep tag? And when I live here, I never got
Speaker 1: a sheep tag. All these sources attention. In Alaska, you
Speaker 1: have this additional layer of subsistence, so you know, the
Speaker 1: same way you have like local non local, commercial, recreational,
Speaker 1: you have this element of people that live in rural
Speaker 1: areas having a right to subsist and having a different
Speaker 1: set of regulations that would govern your fishing practices. For instance,
Speaker 1: where Seth Seth and I have shacks in southeast Alaska
Speaker 1: and we fish under a set of regulations, and but
Speaker 1: if if we were to move there and live there
Speaker 1: and make that our legal address, we would also fish
Speaker 1: under completely different right. We can set long lines for hal.
Speaker 2: Of it right there and keep species that we can't keep.
Speaker 1: We set like one hundred hooks, skate for black cod whatever,
Speaker 1: and right now you're allowed eighty year, but you could
Speaker 1: set you have unlimited black cod harvest if you live there.
Speaker 1: So it's just this added source attention. Oh yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: and like like like fighting over the pie.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and it's you know, as an example of how
Speaker 9: silly some of it is, Like it has nothing to
Speaker 9: do with how much wild game you eat. And I
Speaker 9: will you know, I say again, like I think protecting
Speaker 9: with your income, protecting the subsistence lifestyle and and just
Speaker 9: the ability to hunt is important. But I can't hunt
Speaker 9: spring waterfowl. I live right outside of Fairbanks. If I
Speaker 9: move thirty miles down the road, I can hunt spring
Speaker 9: waterfowl when they're all nice and fully plumed up. And
Speaker 9: it's a sort of subject. And I'm not even a
Speaker 9: duck hunter.
Speaker 1: So at high level, like many issues, at high level,
Speaker 1: the sort of bifurcation of subsistence and non subsistence makes
Speaker 1: you get it makes tons of sense. But like anything,
Speaker 1: when you get down into like like, hm, you mean
Speaker 1: so if I move across the road, yeah, yeah, literally,
Speaker 1: and all I could make I could make I could
Speaker 1: have a salary of a million dollars a year and
Speaker 1: I could move across the road, I'd be subsistence.
Speaker 9: Yep, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But I'm dirt poor on this side of the road
Speaker 1: and I'm not subsistent.
Speaker 9: No, that's exactly how it is. And to complicate that, well,
Speaker 9: there's what FEDS consider subsist us and state. The state
Speaker 9: considers all residents of subsistence user, but they generally are.
Speaker 9: Their goal is to satisfy subsistence needs of state residents
Speaker 9: through the sport, hunting and fishing regulations. So they closed this, uh,
Speaker 9: the you know, the the northwest start occurred, you know,
Speaker 9: Unit twenty three for cariboo and moose. It's not completely closed.
Speaker 1: Way, my big, big wrap up, my big explanation. Sorry, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you brought me back on track. Okay, So, but like
Speaker 1: I mean thousands of square miles right, oh.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I can't remember. At one point I added
Speaker 9: it up. It was like sixty million acres.
Speaker 1: Or something like that. No, so, meaning so you're what
Speaker 1: you said.
Speaker 9: They closed it for moose too, Yeah, for for moose, moose,
Speaker 9: and caribou for non locals during Basically it's not year
Speaker 9: round because like I in the winter could go up
Speaker 9: there and hunt caribou, but during the time when everybody
Speaker 9: is wanting to travel up there and hunt.
Speaker 3: In the fall.
Speaker 2: Yeah and uh, and they say moose are on the decline.
Speaker 9: Decline out there. But in you know, carent had had
Speaker 9: given me an article by Seth Seth Cantner, who I
Speaker 9: think he lives up on the Kobuk and he has
Speaker 9: you know, has some books and like he offers like
Speaker 9: his perspective and you hear this a lot, and like
Speaker 9: the anecdotal stuff and observations over time I think are important.
Speaker 9: But you also have to look at the a larger context.
Speaker 9: You know, me and me in an outsider and if
Speaker 9: you know, I can understand someone living there who for
Speaker 9: years and years and years, there's thousands of caribou came
Speaker 9: right through this down this trail every single year. We
Speaker 9: could count on it, like I would feel very strongly
Speaker 9: about it too. But being on the outside, not really
Speaker 9: having any any fingers in that pie, you look at
Speaker 9: historically like, well that heard wasn't always that big, and
Speaker 9: in nineteen seventy five there was only seventy five thousand
Speaker 9: of them. I think it was the roughly date and
Speaker 9: number that I looked at because there you look at that.
Speaker 9: That working group has some newsletter publications and you can,
Speaker 9: you know, pretty easily skim valuable like details from that
Speaker 9: and some of the historical context. But they you know,
Speaker 9: they even have in some of their newsletters they have
Speaker 9: quotes from some of the elders that talk about remembering
Speaker 9: when there was no caribou out there and they just
Speaker 9: had reindeer, and then the caribou started showing up and
Speaker 9: pulling the reindeer. They would start shooting all the caribou
Speaker 9: that came because they didn't want to take the reindeer
Speaker 9: with them, and they did. But there there never used
Speaker 9: to be caribou come out there, at least for you know,
Speaker 9: X period of time. There never there never was caribou
Speaker 9: that came out on Seward Peninsula like that out of
Speaker 9: that herd. And the Park Service biologist Kyle Jolie I
Speaker 9: think was his name, he told me that, you know,
Speaker 9: because I kind of posed the questions like, well, what
Speaker 9: do you what do you think when you're or me?
Speaker 9: And he and he was very tactful in how he answered,
Speaker 9: not like definitively, but just giving me some context. You know,
Speaker 9: I'm like, well, do you know half expecting it to
Speaker 9: be climate change, because that's what a lot of people
Speaker 9: will will dive on to, you know, as you guys
Speaker 9: have been talking about that's the popular monetarily beneficial culprit.
Speaker 1: But it's it's a catch all and is deserving of
Speaker 1: a conversation. It is, it's become a catch all to
Speaker 1: explain everything, and it doesn't explain It doesn't always explain everything.
Speaker 9: No, And the way he put it was he said,
Speaker 9: think about this, he said, you know, he didn't blame
Speaker 9: climate change. He said, think about this that herd changes
Speaker 9: in size and number said. When a caribou herd, you know,
Speaker 9: grows exponentially, it expands its range. When it shrinks, the
Speaker 9: range change the range, and migration patterns shrink too. So
Speaker 9: that's just you know, in a lot of these issues,
Speaker 9: like the overall length of time, you look at and context.
Speaker 9: And I've learned a ton just by you know, reading
Speaker 9: about some of the cheap, cheap management history. But so
Speaker 9: this closure happens, and then we have a couple of
Speaker 9: bum winners and the sheep are hurting, and then up
Speaker 9: pops another proposal, which you know, I want to be
Speaker 9: cared because I don't know the guy, and I don't
Speaker 9: want to be careful. I want to be careful, not
Speaker 9: to not to just sling mud. But on paper, the
Speaker 9: Central Brooks Range closure is the result of one guy
Speaker 9: and he, you know, he's kind of a leader of
Speaker 9: a small community, and they're in Wiseman, and their council
Speaker 9: wrote this proposal that is not scientific at all. Basically says,
Speaker 9: I drive the road and all the and all the
Speaker 9: mature rams are gone. There's nothing left. And you know,
Speaker 9: and I think they have they have a pretty you know,
Speaker 9: it's right next to gates of the Arctic National Park
Speaker 9: and this is this is bordering hard Park National park
Speaker 9: land where only subsistence hunters can hunt. And I don't
Speaker 9: think there's not very many of them that do it,
Speaker 9: only like in isolate like at an Anactotic pass. You know,
Speaker 9: I'm sure those guys, those guys subsistence hunt some sheep.
Speaker 9: But and so they formalize this proposal, and the Federal
Speaker 9: Subsistence Board passes it, closing the whole Central Brooks Range
Speaker 9: on federal land. There's some small state land portions, but
Speaker 9: most of it just yeah, it locked up. And the
Speaker 9: only reason given is, you know that the sheep are
Speaker 9: on the brink and they need you know, we surveyed them,
Speaker 9: which the state and the FEDS do their aerial surveys differently,
Speaker 9: like that's a whole entire another subject. But they close
Speaker 9: all this up, which includes I mean, it's it's the
Speaker 9: most like user friendly kill. I killed my first sheep
Speaker 9: hiking in up there on that path in two thousand
Speaker 9: and four when I was eighteen, and so they closed
Speaker 9: like the best like walk in access opportunity. It's not
Speaker 9: that walking guys are killing a bunch of sheep. The
Speaker 9: success rates low just in general, and there's some areas
Speaker 9: that people will fly in that kind of within that
Speaker 9: you see, yeah, yeah, you know, but the opportunity is there.
Speaker 9: And they also close the five the corridor, which extends
Speaker 9: five miles on either side of the Dalton Highway. That's
Speaker 9: bow hunting only. And that's the heart of what like
Speaker 9: where he's talking about up there's no legal there's no
Speaker 9: mature rams left at least, you know, that's the way
Speaker 9: his proposal.
Speaker 7: Reach for context like how many sheep, how many dollars
Speaker 7: sheep are in Alaska, and how many get killed by
Speaker 7: hunters a year?
Speaker 9: So I couldn't I don't know that the like current
Speaker 9: and historic population estimates, but I can tell you at
Speaker 9: up to a peak in nineteen ninety, I want to say,
Speaker 9: it was like a couple thousand sheep getting killed a year,
Speaker 9: and then it's gone down to this year. They don't
Speaker 9: know that it's even gonna break four hundred.
Speaker 1: Are you serious?
Speaker 9: Yeah? But with that and you know, and it's been
Speaker 9: like the situation is not great. It's it's a hard
Speaker 9: time to be a sheep hunter in Alaska. But the
Speaker 9: relationship between there's a linear relationship between the number of
Speaker 9: hunters and the heart and the number of harvest, you know,
Speaker 9: uh Wayne, in my discussion with him the other day,
Speaker 9: he talked to one of the Wildlife troopers who you know,
Speaker 9: take it with a grain of salt, but their impression
Speaker 9: was that the success rate in Unit twenty A, which
Speaker 9: is Central Alaska Range, you know, it's it's a very
Speaker 9: hard hunted area, that the success rate was relatively pretty
Speaker 9: much like normal, you know, and the and the age
Speaker 9: structure of rams that's been getting killed is the same
Speaker 9: as it always has been.
Speaker 1: My brother who lives in alask and he likes to
Speaker 1: hunt sheet he said, when you look at harvest data.
Speaker 1: A lot of times it tells you more about the
Speaker 1: weather than it does sheet.
Speaker 9: But absolutely it can.
Speaker 1: Meaning you know, we've hunted up there in years when
Speaker 1: you just have these massive systems that just make poor visibility.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And he's like, you'll you'll then see that reflected, and
Speaker 1: you'll see that reflected, and how many rams are getting
Speaker 1: no for sure broad and you can't and you look
Speaker 1: and you want to try to draw these sort of
Speaker 1: like population trends out of things that could have been
Speaker 1: like it was cloudy.
Speaker 9: Yeah, or it was smoky, yeah, Like we had a
Speaker 9: lot of late wildfires this year and a lot of
Speaker 9: country was smoky. But over time, like the data, it's
Speaker 9: pretty consistent. It's not like an enormous amount of younger
Speaker 9: rams are getting clipped off or sub legal rams, Like
Speaker 9: the percentages are all pretty much in line with what
Speaker 9: they have been historically.
Speaker 1: Do you think it would make it all if the
Speaker 1: stuff that is getting closed to if the stuff is
Speaker 1: getting closed to hunters, do you think it'd make it
Speaker 1: like this discussion of moot point, if it actually if
Speaker 1: sheep numbers improved, then they actually opened this landscape back
Speaker 1: up again, or do you think this is just like
Speaker 1: a play, and that's how it is now.
Speaker 9: I think it's a play. I think theoretically if it
Speaker 9: in most sheep hunters, any serious sheep hunter, if there
Speaker 9: was strong evidence to show that, hey, if we stop
Speaker 9: hunting these sheep right now, we're gonna like the population
Speaker 9: is gonna recover quicker now that and you get into it,
Speaker 9: like you have to, you have to kind of define
Speaker 9: what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: Because because they are still hunting.
Speaker 9: Yeah, because well because talking to talking to a biologist
Speaker 9: whose interest is like maximum sustainable yield, you know, just
Speaker 9: wanting to have huntable populations and looking out for the
Speaker 9: well being in general of the of the sheep as
Speaker 9: a whole. He's gonna be talking about one thing. The guy,
Speaker 9: you know, the one of like the some of the
Speaker 9: very hardcore sheep hunters up there that are like intensively
Speaker 9: like self managing sheep they find and have been, you know,
Speaker 9: in spots, have been for years. You know, the guys
Speaker 9: that are saying like I don't want to shoot a
Speaker 9: ram unless he's ten years old and has reached his
Speaker 9: potential or he's genetically inferior, like, you know, they get
Speaker 9: really into it. You know, there may not be with
Speaker 9: a lot of pressure under the full Carol rule. There
Speaker 9: may not ever be a huge abundance of giant rams,
Speaker 9: but there's gonna be huntable rams, and even a lot
Speaker 9: of Like like Wayne and a guy named Joe Want
Speaker 9: have been doing age recording like age studies for harvested
Speaker 9: rams to show that in the you know, part of
Speaker 9: this age structure thing that if a rams harvested when
Speaker 9: he was ten, he was legal the year before, and
Speaker 9: he was legal the year before that to kind of
Speaker 9: get an you kind it's got an extrapolation, but you
Speaker 9: kind of have an idea of all right, well, how
Speaker 9: many more legal rams were out there after the season
Speaker 9: that they've just been able to pretty much punch holes
Speaker 9: in the argument that we're killing every ram is assusing
Speaker 9: we're clipping them all off.
Speaker 1: Let me explain thing you said, because this is interesting too.
Speaker 1: A RAM can become legal, So in the general management
Speaker 1: area is a ram can be legal three ways. He
Speaker 1: gets full curl, and what that means is if you're
Speaker 1: looking at him in profile, his horn describes a three
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty degree circle. So like the imagine a
Speaker 1: curled RAMS horn, the tip comes around and appears from
Speaker 1: a side view to join up to the base, or
Speaker 1: he's eight years old, and that would be that you
Speaker 1: count annually because they don't always grow. They don't always
Speaker 1: grow in a tight curl like they can grow in
Speaker 1: his wide spy or they're never gonna hit full curl
Speaker 1: or not never. But yeah, they'll be eight years old.
Speaker 3: But not full curl.
Speaker 1: And the only way you know he's eight is there's
Speaker 1: these things called annually. They have a growth ring. And
Speaker 1: if you know what you're doing, and you really need
Speaker 1: to know what you're doing, like to shoot a ram
Speaker 1: off of growth rings, you gotta it's risky, you gotta study,
Speaker 1: You got to look at a lot of sheep and
Speaker 1: really know how to use optics and all that. But
Speaker 1: you can, theoretically, and now that's beyond theoretically, you can
Speaker 1: count growth rings and kill a ram that's eight years old. Thirdly,
Speaker 1: that ram can can braid off or snap off the
Speaker 1: tips of his horns, and it has to do it
Speaker 1: in a way that there's a thing on a ram's
Speaker 1: horn called lamb tip, so it's its first year growth.
Speaker 1: It used to not be clearly explained, but it's clearly
Speaker 1: explained in the regulation, it has to grind away or
Speaker 1: snap off that whole tip. If he does it on
Speaker 1: both sides, he's never gonna become full curl. Then he
Speaker 1: becomes legal. But young ones don't really do.
Speaker 9: That, yeah or yeah, or you can't count on him
Speaker 9: because you could never fairly judge whether they would have
Speaker 9: been full curl or not. Like there's some slash like
Speaker 9: but yeah.
Speaker 1: Generally, and that's called it double.
Speaker 9: Broomer, and it's you know a lot of times older
Speaker 9: rams will be like that.
Speaker 1: So so what Tyler's talking about is if you go
Speaker 1: and you look and be like people are shooting full
Speaker 1: curl rams, there's still legal that there's still legal lams
Speaker 1: on landscape. It meaning if you shoot a full full
Speaker 1: curl and he's and you count his age rings, his
Speaker 1: growth rings, he's got ten annually, he's been legal and
Speaker 1: not dead, yeah for two years.
Speaker 9: And they'll also they'll also measure horn segments to show,
Speaker 9: you know, to show that, hey, this ram has been
Speaker 9: full curl, because you can look at him and judge
Speaker 9: like how long. But yeah, so so he.
Speaker 1: Slipped through the cracks as they might look at a
Speaker 1: ram and be like he was managing to slip through
Speaker 1: the cracks as a full curler. Yeah. Yeah, so every
Speaker 1: ram that's full curls not getting killed.
Speaker 9: No, not not not even remotely. You know, there may
Speaker 9: be on a macro level, there may be this creek
Speaker 9: there's no legal rams in right now. But on a
Speaker 9: large scale, yeah, that that regulation protects that, you know,
Speaker 9: younger age structure, younger rams generally, and uh, you know
Speaker 9: that like you get some weird sometimes, you know, you
Speaker 9: get a real young ram that just has tremendous growth.
Speaker 9: And I've told myself, I don't want to shoot another
Speaker 9: seven year old ram. But if there's a seven year
Speaker 9: old ram that I think is over forty inches, are
Speaker 9: probably gonna pop him, I'll make that sacrifice.
Speaker 1: You're not interested in a seven year old ahead of
Speaker 1: tight That's just.
Speaker 9: That's just legal.
Speaker 7: When uh, when these closures are happening on federal land,
Speaker 7: what what's happening on state land with Alaska fishing game?
Speaker 7: Like are there have they adjusted their management style?
Speaker 9: They're still you know, they're no, their management style is
Speaker 9: the same, and they're like there's different issues that can
Speaker 9: be contentious, you know, like gout, you know, guide a
Speaker 9: different guy out on state land Outfitters are not held
Speaker 9: to it. They're an exclusive area where only they can
Speaker 9: outfit there. So you get some conflict like that. But
Speaker 9: the takeaways that that you know in these areas for
Speaker 9: decades that full curl through a lot of big population
Speaker 9: swings and crashes and booms, has shown that it allows
Speaker 9: the sheep to recover back to that healthy level just
Speaker 9: by you know, you may you may, you may have
Speaker 9: hard hunting for a few years, but you have the
Speaker 9: opportunity to go and harvest a serp like a ram
Speaker 9: that is a surplus to the population, and not feel
Speaker 9: bad about it because you're not You're not having any
Speaker 9: any sensible effect on the population itself.
Speaker 1: I want to hit another point here, which which I
Speaker 1: think is a little bit to the crux of the issue.
Speaker 1: You've spoken on it a bit, but I'm gonna tee
Speaker 1: this this comment up by I talk about something that
Speaker 1: happens in our own state here in Montana in the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, around two thousand, there's a region of
Speaker 1: the state, like the state's broken up in these seven
Speaker 1: The state of Montana's broken up into seven regions, and
Speaker 1: then each region is broken up into all kinds of units,
Speaker 1: so they can they can manage wildlife on a very
Speaker 1: micro level, and he's in you know, a unit. They
Speaker 1: use the term union district district. Sorry, regions are broken
Speaker 1: up into district. The district could be like a drainage, right,
Speaker 1: so you have broadly, it's the state of Montana, six
Speaker 1: hundred and forty six miles east to west. The state's
Speaker 1: divided into seven regions, and each of those regions has
Speaker 1: dozens of districts. Yeah, sometimes dozens of districts, meaning there's
Speaker 1: micro management occurring. In two thousand, two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: two thousand and two, in Region seven, they were giving
Speaker 1: out something like thirteen thousand pronghorn tags. Every one of
Speaker 1: those thirteen thousand people that would draw up prong horn
Speaker 1: tag could buy up to two dough tags pronghorned dotags.
Speaker 1: So in those years, I was going out pronghorn hunting
Speaker 1: usually with three tags in my pocket. Numbers are down,
Speaker 1: They're not down because the habitat destructure down because of
Speaker 1: weather issues, predation, weather like variables, right, not like not
Speaker 1: like wholesale destruction of habitat. And what is it now,
Speaker 1: seven thousand, nine thousand, Okay, no one's walking around with
Speaker 1: two dough tags in their pocket. Some number are walking
Speaker 1: around with a dough tag in their pocket, but they've
Speaker 1: cut almost in half the allocation. Now I'm not sitting
Speaker 1: here saying they're stripping my rights. It's like, I have
Speaker 1: a lot of faith that these allocations are reflective of
Speaker 1: the situation on the ground, Meaning I have state and
Speaker 1: I have faith in my state Fishing Game agency that
Speaker 1: my state fishing Game agency is doing a a generally
Speaker 1: great job of counting wildlife, making an assessment about what
Speaker 1: the harvest rate can be, and doing it. And I
Speaker 1: would look at be like, hey, my prong horn hunting opportunities,
Speaker 1: you know they've been cut in half, sure, but but go.
Speaker 7: On, Well it's it's easy to look at it and
Speaker 7: be like, well, what they've cut dough tags? Right, So
Speaker 7: I feel like and general tags in general, the general
Speaker 7: tag is either sex. You can't just go buy do
Speaker 7: go kill those wholesale anymore, which is how you keep
Speaker 7: numbers where you want them, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But what the point I'm making is there's been
Speaker 1: a massive reduction in the amount of prong horn hunting opportunities,
Speaker 1: but it's reflective of the situation on the ground. Meaning
Speaker 1: if we get like prime conditions and prong horned numbers. Skyrocket.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of faith that tag allocation, well, skyrocket.
Speaker 1: What we're talking about here with this is like is
Speaker 1: like a The problem here is people don't have that
Speaker 1: faith because rather than being like, oh, it's going to
Speaker 1: a draw, it's going to this is going to it's
Speaker 1: just like shutting down huge chunks of ground. Ye, And
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of faith that they're gonna turn
Speaker 1: it back on No's and it winds up being like
Speaker 1: one of these situations where like as you demonstrate non
Speaker 1: resident caribou hunters up in that northwest quadrant of the
Speaker 1: state killing three hundred bulls or something like that, it's insignificant,
Speaker 1: meaning someone's looking and they're saying, there's a thing I
Speaker 1: want to happen. I'm gonna use this. I'm gonna bullshit
Speaker 1: everybody and use this thing I want to happen and
Speaker 1: make a thing I want to happen happen. But I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do it under a dubious justification, meaning I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do it by talking about something other than what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about.
Speaker 9: I think that's exactly what's happening.
Speaker 1: And you don't. It's hard to have faith that that
Speaker 1: sheep numbers will improve and that five years so now
Speaker 1: they're gonna be like welcome back hunters.
Speaker 9: Well and even and it was a two year closure, well,
Speaker 9: I mean, anything could happen, obviously, but I don't think
Speaker 9: anybody's expecting it to open up because it's not. And
Speaker 9: people hunters tend to, I think, you know, and cheap
Speaker 9: like we tend to want to grab it any solution
Speaker 9: that's going to flip a switch and make and bring
Speaker 9: it back, make it right immediately. And it's not going
Speaker 9: to happen like that. It's going to take a long time.
Speaker 9: But just by the nature of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the only way to really find out on the
Speaker 1: issue is the wait and get out of these sort
Speaker 1: of like dull sheep dark ages and have some recovery
Speaker 1: and then stand back and say, okay, but if you're
Speaker 1: looking better, what's going to happen now?
Speaker 9: But I think as far as if you're looking at
Speaker 9: what what we can look at to justify doing this
Speaker 9: or not doing this, We've been through cheap crashes and
Speaker 9: had even even through like more you know, liberal hunting.
Speaker 12: Strategy them and you know, like it just the data
Speaker 12: that we have show in your implies shows whatever you
Speaker 12: want to say, concludes that hunting is just not doesn't
Speaker 12: have an impactful doesn't play an impactful part on the
Speaker 12: overall sheep as a whole.
Speaker 1: Yeah, meaning you got you like, when you send a
Speaker 1: hunter into the mountains, that hunter can only get one thing.
Speaker 1: He can get a full curl ram. Yep, A full
Speaker 1: crew ram is a dead man walking exactly, not the
Speaker 1: thing that's driving that population.
Speaker 7: The last number I can find is like roughly forty
Speaker 7: thousand sheep. And if they killed four hundred.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I'm sure it's not right. Yeah, No, it's
Speaker 9: a very small percentage of the sheep population that gets killed.
Speaker 9: And uh so if one guy you know, And this
Speaker 9: is why it's all very suspicious to me, and I
Speaker 9: think there's some cahoots. And my personal opinion is that
Speaker 9: the Federal Subsistence Board had their mind made up before
Speaker 9: they ever even got the proposal. Sure, you know, at
Speaker 9: the recommendation of one guy who's just says I drive the.
Speaker 1: Road, and don't I've read writing about his reports.
Speaker 9: Yeah, so it does. It doesn't add up. And you
Speaker 9: want to go a step further. This year twenty twenty three,
Speaker 9: a few days before the season, the Feds surveyed the
Speaker 9: Yukon Charle of the forty Mile Country Tannana Uplands, and
Speaker 9: the Park Service comes out with this announcement that they're
Speaker 9: requesting an emergency closure of the Federal preserve lands on
Speaker 9: the Charlie River in the forty Mile Country. And because
Speaker 9: they're mighty person and it was uh and it was
Speaker 9: a you know, as result before there's sheep, yeah for sheep, honey,
Speaker 9: because they're because their survey numbers were so low. And
Speaker 9: I'll just hint at Wayne Heimer, who's done flowing a
Speaker 9: lot of sheep surveys, and any guy who's flying surveys
Speaker 9: or if you're flying around a cub looking for sheep,
Speaker 9: you are not seeing all the sheep that are there. Wayne,
Speaker 9: like he you know, told me estimates Wayne that in
Speaker 9: his sheep surveys he figured he was seeing at most
Speaker 9: sixty percent of the sheep that were there. So there's
Speaker 9: that tidbit. There's just a lot of hard side of
Speaker 9: a mountain. Yeah, yeah, you know, And they're like I
Speaker 9: can sit at a mount look at a mountain, or
Speaker 9: up a drainage all day and not see a damn thing.
Speaker 9: And at eight o'clock in the evening.
Speaker 6: Boop, sheep, sheep, sheep.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 9: So it's fallible, but they they do this survey imperfect,
Speaker 9: but it's like the best thing you can do, yeah,
Speaker 9: for sure. And uh so they survey this and you
Speaker 9: and for people that don't know that Yukon Charlie area
Speaker 9: is kind of it's marginal sheep country. There's spots of
Speaker 9: sheep country and the population is historically like sparse, like
Speaker 9: it's there's been cheap there for as long as anyone
Speaker 9: has known. But they're not like concentrated. It's not like
Speaker 9: the last age.
Speaker 1: You'd think that there weren't. Yeah, I remember being surprised
Speaker 1: with Pilot's pointing and saying, like I saw a ram
Speaker 1: there one time. That's a bit it had to walk
Speaker 1: through the timber to get.
Speaker 9: There, well, and and that and something to consider when
Speaker 9: you're saying, you know, you've seen the conclusions they come
Speaker 9: to with this survey. Those sheep are sparse, and they're
Speaker 9: down in the trees a lot, and you just find
Speaker 9: them like talking, you know, I know old timers have
Speaker 9: hunted and flown it for fifty years, and like they're there.
Speaker 9: You'll find them in the weirdest spots. So you have
Speaker 9: all that to consider, but we need to close this area,
Speaker 9: and it averages one point four rams per year killed
Speaker 9: in the entire area.
Speaker 1: Basically, you can they can say they saved that.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's again like there's nothing and not only not
Speaker 9: only well it is because not only it's an emergency closure,
Speaker 9: not that. I don't believe that they give much about
Speaker 9: public input anyway, other than they have to sit and
Speaker 9: listen to it. Sometimes no public input. They just closed it.
Speaker 1: And it was funny my body flying through that country
Speaker 1: one time, my buddy showed me a spot where he
Speaker 1: picked up two dead heads.
Speaker 9: Yeah, because he.
Speaker 1: Saw all the blood and snow. Yeah, and some wolves
Speaker 1: that killed two rams. It's funny that little incident was
Speaker 1: more rams than hunters killed. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, How it is.
Speaker 8: How much of an impact I mean this subjec like,
Speaker 8: do you think wolves are playing on these sheep?
Speaker 9: I think predation is is certainly an impact in fishing
Speaker 9: game is considering how how they do you know, you
Speaker 9: talk to you know, and and one of the things
Speaker 9: like that people ought to keep in mind. They closed
Speaker 9: the fishing game. State fishing game went along with closing
Speaker 9: the entire western half of the Brooks Range a few
Speaker 9: years ago due to you know, they had a weather
Speaker 9: event and sheep were low, and you know, at least,
Speaker 9: you know, you kind of got to take everything with
Speaker 9: a grain of salt. But you talk to some old timers,
Speaker 9: you talk who remember, well, all the outfitters up there
Speaker 9: used to go airplane the heck out of wolves every spring.
Speaker 9: Whether it was legal or not at the time, they
Speaker 9: just did it. And you know, whether that's the reason
Speaker 9: there was a big boom of sheep out there or not,
Speaker 9: you know, like you can take it for what it's worth,
Speaker 9: but it does play a factor, but it's it's kind
Speaker 9: of a case by case thing. You know, some coyotes
Speaker 9: in the Alaska Ranger a big sheep press editor, but
Speaker 9: brad winling our sheep. You know that current research biologist
Speaker 9: talked about a study over a couple of years that
Speaker 9: a guy did observing lambs. One year, the leading cause
Speaker 9: of mortality was drowning because there was a lot of runoff,
Speaker 9: you know, and then the next year it was golden eagles. Yeah,
Speaker 9: you know, so it's it all plays a factor for sure,
Speaker 9: and I think you know, predator control is the one
Speaker 9: button that could feasibly pushed, although I don't think it
Speaker 9: would in every case, would be would make.
Speaker 1: The difference, It's not necessarily.
Speaker 9: But so they closed. They closed it like a few
Speaker 9: days before the season for basically and there's not even
Speaker 9: an established subsistence sheep hunt in there. So why is
Speaker 9: the subsistence board closing an area that doesn't have a
Speaker 9: subsistence sheep hunt? They said, for you know, possible future
Speaker 9: subsist you know, just some bullshit reason and the subsistence to.
Speaker 1: Keep to keep some aspirational sheep hunter from basically wasting
Speaker 1: his time in the area.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, you know, and uh and you uh you know, hey,
Speaker 9: when I man, I was on a roll, lost my train,
Speaker 9: you're doing so we uh you know, you close this
Speaker 9: area and uh boy, I'll get it. Reminds me of
Speaker 9: a sheep hunting presentation I gave one time where my
Speaker 9: computer quit working. I had, Yeah, it was sweating it then,
Speaker 9: but so where was that we you know, they closed
Speaker 9: this area. So the subsistence board, you might think, oh, well,
Speaker 9: that's like some like democratically elected type of thing. All
Speaker 9: this federal Subsistence Board is the heads of I believe,
Speaker 9: five agencies Park Service, Fission, Wildlife BLM, Forest Service, Bureau
Speaker 9: of Indian Affairs. And then I think it's three people
Speaker 9: that they appoint or someone at interior points. So the
Speaker 9: voting majority of the Federal Subsistence Board making these decisions
Speaker 9: is just the agencies. It's just them doing what they
Speaker 9: want to do.
Speaker 1: Essentially, this is my this is my last question on
Speaker 1: this subject, and this is like total gut. Do you
Speaker 1: think it's being driven Do you think it's being driven
Speaker 1: by anti hunting sentiment like what we're seeing in Colorado,
Speaker 1: what we're seeing in Washington, like by an animal rights agenda,
Speaker 1: or do you think it's being driven by a agenda
Speaker 1: of uh, I don't want to deal with other people.
Speaker 9: I think I think it's a little bit of both,
Speaker 9: but the UH. And it goes back to this seemingly
Speaker 9: long standing mode of regulating to keep people, like for
Speaker 9: regulating for minimal human use of the landscape. You know,
Speaker 9: there was a excuse me, Dave's killer bread coming back
Speaker 9: to get me, Jill you But so like years I
Speaker 9: just an anecdote years ago, I remember one of the
Speaker 9: the refuge manager for Anwar was trying to ban vibrant
Speaker 9: bootsoles in antwar because they tear up the tundra. Hmm,
Speaker 9: when the impeliots, it's just still.
Speaker 1: Get Did you get anywhere with that?
Speaker 9: No? But no he did not, but got it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Like there's like a like a sentiment like that
Speaker 1: that like to look at the landscape and see human
Speaker 1: however ephemeral, yeah, and non permanent, but like to see
Speaker 1: that level of human use is sort of like falls
Speaker 1: outside of what they feel is the best.
Speaker 9: Yeah. I I think that's that's probably the biggest way,
Speaker 9: which would be like a total preservation and it's a preservationist,
Speaker 9: you know. That's why you see kind of a tearing
Speaker 9: of it. You know, the Park Service is the quote
Speaker 9: unquote worst than you know, fish wild life then b
Speaker 9: LM unless you're unless you're a small time minor.
Speaker 1: But but but hunting isn't you know, I don't even
Speaker 1: think like like the kind of hunting we're talking about
Speaker 1: isn't incompatible with like unless you're one hundred percent preservations
Speaker 1: hunting isn't incompatible with the preservations perspective.
Speaker 9: You're preaching to the choir man.
Speaker 1: But but I want, but I want to have time
Speaker 1: to I want to have time to jump into our thing.
Speaker 1: Give me your take. Give me your take on what
Speaker 1: should happen with.
Speaker 9: Anwar as far as the oil drilling stuff.
Speaker 1: Give me your take on how how people in your view,
Speaker 1: how should people sort of conceptualize anwar, and what's your
Speaker 1: take on what should happen in ant war.
Speaker 9: You know, I'm not even convinced at this point that
Speaker 9: that we need to or should drill it. I'm kind
Speaker 9: of somewhere in the middle, you know, kind of undecided.
Speaker 9: I don't see an imminent need to drill it right now.
Speaker 1: So you just you mean, from a national security perspective,
Speaker 1: from economy, oil prices, I think there's I think in Alaska.
Speaker 9: Alaska is a resource state for sure, and there's a
Speaker 9: balance to be struck between development of those resources and
Speaker 9: what we want to keep as untouched or is what
Speaker 9: we perceive it to be untouched, you know, like the
Speaker 9: Aryan ant war that they you know, is kind.
Speaker 1: Of up for so ant wir just just clarify Arctic
Speaker 1: National Wildife PRESU And so this there's been a long
Speaker 1: simmering the state.
Speaker 9: People from the state have been pushing to open this
Speaker 9: area ten O two they call it, which was set
Speaker 9: aside as for potential oil exploration and drill and eventual drilling.
Speaker 5: And I.
Speaker 9: I don't want to talk out of my ass because
Speaker 9: I don't remember a lot of the details. But there
Speaker 9: was a book on the creation of ann War and
Speaker 9: how that area was not originally supposed to be part
Speaker 9: of it. It could have been folded in there with
Speaker 9: a nilka. I don't know, but the ten o two area, yeah,
Speaker 9: the ten o two so, and that area was our
Speaker 9: It was completely seismic surveyed in the eighties, like as
Speaker 9: a lot of Alaska people think of Alaska as being
Speaker 9: completely untouched. Man, there's seismic lines running everywhere. Yeah, and
Speaker 9: uh so straight straight yeah, well, excuse.
Speaker 1: Me, Tyler got into a bread seed stuff in his throat.
Speaker 9: It's ironic. We got a cop and then we got
Speaker 9: a coffin shaped table here, so as and as uh well,
Speaker 9: my good buddy and hunting partner, I call him doctor
Speaker 9: Frank Schultz. He's not really a doctor, but that's a
Speaker 9: whole nother story.
Speaker 1: He was.
Speaker 9: We recently discussed he would talk to someone who was
Speaker 9: actually I think it was there one of their family
Speaker 9: members were actually participated in this statewide survey. You know,
Speaker 9: seismic survey lines where they in the winter they wait
Speaker 9: for the ground to freeze and drop the dozer blade
Speaker 9: and go ye. But different, different kind of subjects. So
Speaker 9: I think the important thing, whether we end up drilling
Speaker 9: it or not drilling it, is just to look at
Speaker 9: a little there's a little more context around than what
Speaker 9: the general public knows. You know, you get a lot
Speaker 9: of or back when it when it was like kind
Speaker 9: of the hot button issue, you get a lot of
Speaker 9: like emotionally driven pictures and sure arguments made to be
Speaker 9: like well, you know, any reasonable person would oppose this,
Speaker 9: but you know they'll they'll say, like the caribou of
Speaker 9: great concern, which they are, but you know, there's these
Speaker 9: theories that it's gonna death to make the porcupine caribou
Speaker 9: herd if we if we move into that area, well
Speaker 9: there's drill pads like fifty miles away, and the the
Speaker 9: data or any like data we could look at fifty
Speaker 9: miles away, or I guess Pruto itself is more farther
Speaker 9: than that, but right next door. The central art occurred
Speaker 9: exploded during the expansion of prudo bait oil fields in
Speaker 9: the pipeline, and there was a lot of worries. There's
Speaker 9: a lot of worries about what would happen with them.
Speaker 9: I mean they built like sections of the pipeline that
Speaker 9: go underground for Caribo to cross, because that was a
Speaker 9: big concern. They didn't know what they'd never seen anything.
Speaker 1: Like what they would do with the overhead structure.
Speaker 9: And as you know, time has shown they don't care,
Speaker 9: and they'll in fact like flock to the pipeline and
Speaker 9: a lot of the oil field buildings because the windows
Speaker 9: run under them.
Speaker 1: It's like it's like you almost take it like a
Speaker 1: like a propaganda photo that came out of that time
Speaker 1: would be Caribou getting in the shade of the pipeline.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The love it, you know, and even
Speaker 9: even the you know Jim Reardon who wrote Alaska's wolf
Speaker 9: Man and wrote a lot of a lot of stories
Speaker 9: for Outdoor Life over the years. I have the original copy.
Speaker 1: That's one of my favorite books of all time.
Speaker 9: Oh me too, It's it's phenomenal. So one of he
Speaker 9: wrote an article kind of pre pipeline, like wondering what
Speaker 9: what the heck's going to happen? Yeah, yeah, it's a
Speaker 9: it was a two part story. I've got the original
Speaker 9: copies of them.
Speaker 1: But uh, but the caribou that I mean, if caribou
Speaker 1: did well in prude Obey with the oil, it wasn't
Speaker 1: because of the oil. It was just because it's a
Speaker 1: cyclical Yeah, I think so, I guess someone could look
Speaker 1: at say it didn't have it didn't have obvious negative
Speaker 1: impacts on an already cyclical thing, and in fact we
Speaker 1: saw the up down cycle continued. Yeah, I think the
Speaker 1: I think you still saw good peaks, you know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think at the very least you could say
Speaker 9: that that has shown that they're not incompatible.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: So there's you know, and that's one of the big
Speaker 9: one of the big arguments. And in kind of looking
Speaker 9: researching this stuff, I uh, a guy had sent me
Speaker 9: a I think it was Environmental Impacts Impact Environmental Impact
Speaker 9: study by the American Ecological Society, and their assertion was
Speaker 9: that the three D seismic survey that would have to
Speaker 9: happen would be the riskiest part of the whole because
Speaker 9: they've got to roll this equipment around. But they did
Speaker 9: concede that that the environmental regulations for conducting that are
Speaker 9: so strict that they should it should keep you know,
Speaker 9: some of these things they're worried about happening from happening.
Speaker 9: And that's another thing that people don't understand quite how
Speaker 9: restrictive the rules are, even in existing oil fields and stuff.
Speaker 9: I haven't worked up there a bunch back in my
Speaker 9: my pipe covering days. I was on jobs up there
Speaker 9: and saw some of it. But a guy put put
Speaker 9: it to me was pretty good illustration. He said, if
Speaker 9: you're up you know you're up there, and you have
Speaker 9: a half million dollar piece of equipment, and a seagull
Speaker 9: lands and makes a nest on there, you can't touch
Speaker 9: that piece of equipment till that seagull's gone.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 9: It doesn't matter if you got to get another one
Speaker 9: shipped up there to use it for the time being,
Speaker 9: it doesn't matter. You can't touch it, you can't interact
Speaker 9: with it. Where's a reasonable person to be like, all right,
Speaker 9: sorry about your luck this year, mister Siegell. You know,
Speaker 9: I guess it would be missus seagull.
Speaker 1: But miss.
Speaker 9: I had to read strange times these days.
Speaker 1: Did the Willow did the fact that they expanded into
Speaker 1: that Willow oil field? Did that take pressure off of
Speaker 1: the ant war conversation about whether or not to move
Speaker 1: into antwar it may have, you know.
Speaker 9: And I think a lot of the uh, I think
Speaker 9: a lot of ant war is just like used for
Speaker 9: political jostling as much as anything. I don't know that
Speaker 9: there's like a very real, like realistic possibility that it's
Speaker 9: gonna happen anytime soon, And I don't know that it's needed,
Speaker 9: you know.
Speaker 1: So so you feel it's like that argument is chilled
Speaker 1: out right now?
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, for sure, you know, there's always going to
Speaker 9: be people that want it, but whether and there's always
Speaker 9: going to people be people who don't want it no
Speaker 9: matter what. But whether it even is like a relevant
Speaker 9: issue right now, Like I think there's a big it's
Speaker 9: a it's a in my opinion, it's kind of a
Speaker 9: distraction from I think the loss of hunting opportunity that's
Speaker 9: just like cascading throughout the state. Now, I was more
Speaker 9: of an important issue to me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I worry about both those things. And the reason
Speaker 1: I worry about them in tandem, and I don't think
Speaker 1: it's like I worry about them both, but I worry
Speaker 1: about them both from the same perspective, is that I
Speaker 1: want there to be as much wildlife on the ground
Speaker 1: as possible, and I want hunters and anglers to have
Speaker 1: maximum access to that wildlife. So the restrictions, the sort
Speaker 1: of the seemingly arbitrary kind of conniving restrictions on hunting
Speaker 1: access bothers me, as does the loss of wildlife habitat.
Speaker 5: Ye.
Speaker 1: So if I look at like from my perspective, if
Speaker 1: I look at a thing where you have a chunk
Speaker 1: of land that's not exploited and it's cordoned off, and
Speaker 1: there's a basic understanding of it being unexploited, even outside
Speaker 1: of any like super detailed understanding of where the boundary
Speaker 1: lines and how the boundary lines are drawn and any
Speaker 1: fuzziness about that, I would just look and say, like
Speaker 1: I will look from my perspective and say, theoretically, even
Speaker 1: though I'm even though I might not understand every nuance
Speaker 1: of every drainage and all that, I would say, if
Speaker 1: there's chunks of ground that aren't touched, I celebrate not
Speaker 1: touching them.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And that's and that's a logical thing.
Speaker 1: In terms of just maintaining in terms of maintaining wildlife habitat.
Speaker 1: Because however you play, I don't think I like toy
Speaker 1: with the global perspective but I more imagine, like I
Speaker 1: look sort of my perspective as very American, like like
Speaker 1: the United States of America, right, And of course you know,
Speaker 1: I pay extra concern around my immediate area, and I
Speaker 1: do a lot of hunting in a particular state. So
Speaker 1: I look at the wildlife politics in that state. I'm
Speaker 1: not in all asking, but I look at it as
Speaker 1: a place I love. It's part of a country that
Speaker 1: I love. And so I look at a thing like
Speaker 1: a wire, I'm like, man, I don't I don't want
Speaker 1: to mess with it. I don't want messic I don't
Speaker 1: want to mess with any of the areas we have
Speaker 1: that aren't developed. Yeah, Like, and it's just it's just
Speaker 1: for me, it's as simple. It's just as simple as
Speaker 1: if there's big chunks of ground that aren't developed. I
Speaker 1: just hate to see him developed. Yeah, because I think
Speaker 1: that down the road one hundred years from now, two
Speaker 1: hundred years from now, I won't be around. But when
Speaker 1: looking at when weighing it out, I'm like, two hundred
Speaker 1: years from now, that'll be celebrated like that, that that
Speaker 1: decision of restraint, and you look at like even to
Speaker 1: take something, and I don't want to make too much
Speaker 1: of a point about this. But you take something like
Speaker 1: what wrote what Theodore Roosevelt did when he was creating
Speaker 1: the National force system. He pissed everybody off when he
Speaker 1: did the Midnight Forest, which is what twenty some he created.
Speaker 1: Twenty some that they didn't call him national force at
Speaker 1: a time serves the exact number.
Speaker 10: Uh.
Speaker 1: Here, there was a there was a bill moving through
Speaker 1: Congress that was gonna make it that was gonna strip
Speaker 1: him of an ability to create national forests, and he
Speaker 1: was going to veto it, but he knew sentiment against
Speaker 1: him was so high that if he vetoed it, his
Speaker 1: veto would be overridden. So they call him the Midnight
Speaker 1: Forest because his ability to create these things would expire
Speaker 1: at midnight. He then goes and creates like twenty four
Speaker 1: or twenty seven more preserves, and then it wakes up
Speaker 1: in the morning and signs a bill saying he can't
Speaker 1: do it anymore, and what happens. They carve him on
Speaker 1: Mount Rushmore. So I'm just saying, like, like, over long
Speaker 1: periods of time, I think that that that that over
Speaker 1: long periods of time, that that desire to create undeveloped
Speaker 1: areas and protect undeveloped areas is celebrated. But I'm so
Speaker 1: myopic in my intro and so my opic and my
Speaker 1: views that if you do all that and make it
Speaker 1: that people can't hunt it, I look, it's not a
Speaker 1: win anymore.
Speaker 9: No, I feel, well, yeah you did, but.
Speaker 1: You threw out the baby with the bath water well
Speaker 1: and a lot of people. Man, it's a win in
Speaker 1: some like some hazy distant environmental way perhaps, but like,
Speaker 1: it's not the win I'm after. Yeah. The win I'm
Speaker 1: after is access for like access for people who hunt fish.
Speaker 9: Yeah, you know, and sometimes that access is going to
Speaker 9: be tough, but at least you have the.
Speaker 1: Opportunity theoretically whether or not you get, whether or not
Speaker 1: you go there or not. Like, I don't know. I
Speaker 1: still I never have hunted the Frank Church. Never hunted
Speaker 1: the Frank Church, the celebrated wilderness area that we have
Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight, I never hunted there. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't be surprised if I died. Never hunted there. I
Speaker 1: like it being there. I would be livid if they
Speaker 1: tried to strip hunting rights from it. But I've never
Speaker 1: been there. Yeah, Tommy, never, you know, It's just like
Speaker 1: I like knowing it's there. Yeah, and it's a win
Speaker 1: that it's there. It's a win that you can hunt it. Yeah.
Speaker 9: I think that's a totally reasonable way to look at
Speaker 9: it too. I think just when and not arguing for
Speaker 9: or against because a lot of these projects, you know,
Speaker 9: these potential projects and whatnot that come up, I'm not
Speaker 9: even necessarily for them or against them, or I kind
Speaker 9: of lean. I lean that way where I don't want
Speaker 9: to see development that's not necessary or is going to
Speaker 9: be irresponsibly done or what that. But yeah, the uh,
Speaker 9: I feel the same way that what good. You know,
Speaker 9: not necessarily that it's not good to have that land,
Speaker 9: but if I can't hunt it, or you're taking my
Speaker 9: opportunity to hunt it, so you know, so a few
Speaker 9: guys can have a private playground understood.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what was your take on this is kind of
Speaker 1: like another one that sort of went away. What was
Speaker 1: your take on Pebble Mind? That was the thing that
Speaker 1: generated enormous amounts of interest from out from outsiders.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it was huge.
Speaker 1: How did you sit on that?
Speaker 9: I generally kind I just leaned against it. I didn't
Speaker 9: have like a firm but it's like, eh, you know,
Speaker 9: it just it seemed like talking to people who live
Speaker 9: in the area and like have a lot of vested interest,
Speaker 9: like personal interest, it probably was not the right thing
Speaker 9: to do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So, but you didn't you didn't view it as
Speaker 1: that this is the thing that will break a last No.
Speaker 1: So now what's your what's your take on do you
Speaker 1: what's your position on Ambler Road?
Speaker 9: I would I'd say I'd lean more against it because
Speaker 9: I mean, well, for one, they're not going to offer
Speaker 9: any public access supposedly, but they did say that with
Speaker 9: the pipeline or the adult the know, the Hall road,
Speaker 9: initially that was not not a public access.
Speaker 1: Road, and initially it was not planned to ever be.
Speaker 9: No, it was just strictly an oil an oil company road,
Speaker 9: you know, or oil oil resources road. So yeah, at
Speaker 9: that point, you know, my outlook is like, well, do
Speaker 9: we really need this here right now?
Speaker 1: And it's not going to increase your access anyway.
Speaker 9: It's not going to increase my access. If there was
Speaker 9: like a firm plan to you know, to allow some
Speaker 9: hunter access, you know, yeah, I'd be okay for it,
Speaker 9: I'd be I would be more willing to that might yeah,
Speaker 9: at least create like a win. Yeah, for sure. Like
Speaker 9: there's there's a road outside of Fairbanks. You guys drove
Speaker 9: right by it to Pogo Mine, and it's not near
Speaker 9: as long a road or through as controversial a territory.
Speaker 9: I remember guys when they first put that road in,
Speaker 9: would take their four wheelers up there and sneak, you know,
Speaker 9: they weren't supposed to, they would. They couldn't do anything
Speaker 9: to you if you're off the road. They just couldn't
Speaker 9: catch you on the road speaking to some you know,
Speaker 9: some some sketchy stuff. And the hunt was up was
Speaker 9: pretty good up there for you know, till they really
Speaker 9: cracked down on it. But there's still no public access
Speaker 9: to that road. You know, Like the resources are important
Speaker 9: and access to them is important, but you know, it's
Speaker 9: just got to be balanced.
Speaker 1: I think. So tell folks how to tell folks how
Speaker 1: to find all your work, because if you if you're
Speaker 1: interested in you know, I always use the term wildlife
Speaker 1: politics if you're interested in wildlife and management in Alaska.
Speaker 1: Plus we've spent all our time talking about like some
Speaker 1: controversial political stuff. But you're also very accomplished, avid hunter.
Speaker 1: Do you everything from fur handling, like I said, hunting bears,
Speaker 1: with long bows.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we got to have him back to talk some
Speaker 7: fun stuff.
Speaker 1: Talking about fun stuff. So, but tell people how to follow,
Speaker 1: like where to listen, how to follow your adventures.
Speaker 9: Yeah. So I'm staff writer for outdoor Life, So outdoor
Speaker 9: life dot com and published on what on uh usually
Speaker 9: a couple of stories a week. I do like a
Speaker 9: triminted a lot of gun stuff, a lot of like
Speaker 9: gun reviews, stuff like that, but all dip into important
Speaker 9: you know, Alaska based issues and the odd you know,
Speaker 9: hunting story. Like the most narrative stories are like are
Speaker 9: my favorite.
Speaker 1: Like most everything I read about the issues we've been
Speaker 1: talking about. Most everything I read is your work.
Speaker 7: You're gonna sounds good because it's no nonsense.
Speaker 9: No, And that's what you know. Which is funny is
Speaker 9: I'm staying with my coworker, our shooting editor, John snow
Speaker 9: here in town. He lives here in Bozeman, and uh
Speaker 9: like he's he's put a tremendous amount of work into me,
Speaker 9: and like this is how we're gonna be, this is
Speaker 9: the type of gun content we're gonna do, and just
Speaker 9: it's it's a lot of fun. I love my job,
Speaker 9: So old Life dot Com and Uh, I have my
Speaker 9: podcast is.
Speaker 1: Called thunder Talk and that's your own podcast.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's mine. Okay, So it's uh, it's a fairly
Speaker 9: like it's just me and other hunters and from Alaska.
Speaker 9: I mean, we talk about Alaska last you know what
Speaker 9: we've been up to this last week kind of fixed
Speaker 9: you know, I had to fix this generator. Here's how
Speaker 9: I did it. There's a whole variety of just kind
Speaker 9: of you know, loose like casual stuff, but a lot
Speaker 9: there's there's so many people up there. I'm not that
Speaker 9: special up there, Like I'm just a dude. There's a
Speaker 9: lot of cool people who do a lot of cool
Speaker 9: stuff up there, and that's kind of what I want
Speaker 9: to share in my podcast. So it's called thunder Talk.
Speaker 1: And yeah, to get one, but you guys have that
Speaker 1: you still do that mergery? Do those making my boots?
Speaker 9: I have some stickers at I don't have, but I have.
Speaker 1: Like the hoodies with Mickey What do you guys call
Speaker 1: them boots?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 9: Yeah, no I can. Uh, I've been getting bugged to
Speaker 9: do another order of those, so I'll make sure. I'll
Speaker 9: make sure you get one right now.
Speaker 1: You got your uh, you got your talks, thunder talks.
Speaker 9: This is how I get all my clothes is I
Speaker 9: just do bulk quarters of clothes and sell some of
Speaker 9: them and then I don't have to buy clothes. But
Speaker 9: uh that's the old Skidu tundra one cylinder.
Speaker 1: And tunder talk is anywhere you find podcasts. Anywhere you
Speaker 1: find podcasts, and you're on social media.
Speaker 9: Social media, uh Instagram, primarily just at the Tyler freel
Speaker 9: because I couldn't think of something more.
Speaker 1: Do you do you like or hate when people write
Speaker 1: you emails and hey, I want to come up? Where
Speaker 1: should I go?
Speaker 5: No?
Speaker 9: I get a lot. I get a lot of it.
Speaker 9: So that's kind of part of it. I mean, my
Speaker 9: that's my station is you know the type of stuff
Speaker 9: I do, And that's part of it. And I can't
Speaker 9: always get back get to everybody, but I try to
Speaker 9: give what help. I'm not gonna tell I'm not gonna
Speaker 9: tell you where I hunt where I don't.
Speaker 1: You don't give cordon no no, but guidance.
Speaker 9: But you know, logistical like get a lot of logistical
Speaker 9: questions stuff like that. So yeah, I'm happy to happy
Speaker 9: to entertain that stuff as best I can know. And uh, yeah,
Speaker 9: I do piss some people off occasionally, you said, you
Speaker 9: mentioned long bows. You would think that shooting a grizzly
Speaker 9: bear with a stone arrowhead.
Speaker 1: Would be universally celebrated or.
Speaker 9: Me, So you would think that would be more controversial
Speaker 9: than shooting one with a six or five creed more.
Speaker 9: But you would be wrong.
Speaker 1: Seriously. Oh yeah, Oh you get more pissed.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, way more when it's on a video that
Speaker 9: I could tell you I shot this with a three
Speaker 9: thirty eight and you would believe me. Anyway, that's a
Speaker 9: whole other.
Speaker 1: People are Yeah, people get annoyed. Well, we got to
Speaker 1: have you back on to talk about like the good
Speaker 1: not the good stuff.
Speaker 9: We have the fun stuff. Yeah, not depressing talk about.
Speaker 9: So I'm sorry if I was waiting like.
Speaker 1: It's not depressed. I think, like I I watched with
Speaker 1: fascination because I think that they're So it's just a
Speaker 1: really great lesson about It's a really great lesson about
Speaker 1: land access, land administration, the pushing pull of different interests.
Speaker 1: You can learn, you know, I mean when when it
Speaker 1: comes to fighting about wildlife, Uh, you'll learn the most
Speaker 1: watch in Alaska.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I think so it's still pretty well has got
Speaker 9: like a.
Speaker 1: Dozen big game animals. I mean, it's just like, there's
Speaker 1: a lot. There's a lot going on up there. If
Speaker 1: you're interested in how these battles get fought and won
Speaker 1: and lost. Look to Alaska, man, you know it's uh
Speaker 1: and and following your work's a great way to follow it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I appreciate you coming on.
Speaker 9: Man, but Alaska sucks. Don't tell your tell your friends.
Speaker 1: Sure you should make it seem a lot worse.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like, and then they closed the whole state to non
Speaker 1: resident All right, thanks a lot, ladies and gentlemen. Tyler
Speaker 1: Freil check him out. Uh he's at outdoor life dot com,
Speaker 1: thunder Talk, Instagram, Instagram, like at Tyler Freil at the
Speaker 1: Tyler Freeld one. Yeah, don't go to some bake Tyler
Speaker 1: Friel last week, thank you.
Speaker 11: I love those dag big big white tails, those bag
Speaker 11: bi big white tails. I love those beach by a
Speaker 11: shot g e E tales. I love those beachy bi
Speaker 11: white tales.
Speaker 3: Big white tails, big white tails, big white tales are great.
Speaker 3: Hold what fun it is to sit in the freezing
Speaker 3: cold tree all day? Big white tales, big white tails,
Speaker 3: big white tails are great? Hold, what fun it is
Speaker 3: to sit in the freezing cold tree all day, dashing
Speaker 3: through the woods for the morning light, turns grave across
Speaker 3: the fields and draws creep in all the way, climb
Speaker 3: into the tree. Big bucks are on the wave. What
Speaker 3: fun he is to sit and wait for my gosh
Speaker 3: don deer all day? Oh big, I'm sorry?
Speaker 11: What is this?
Speaker 3: Pisocado strings?
Speaker 2: Who do you think?
Speaker 1: I am?
Speaker 11: Enya?
Speaker 2: Get this add here?
Speaker 1: I don't want to hear it.
Speaker 2: Thank you?
Speaker 3: Big white tails, big white tails, Big white tails are great.
Speaker 3: Hold fun it is to sit in the freezing cold
Speaker 3: tree all day. I hope sand dreams are high the
Speaker 3: he's finally here. Mark said, it's the most wonderful time
Speaker 3: to kill the whitetail deer bingch points and pettings where
Speaker 3: you'll find me hang? It's want to feet in a tree,
Speaker 3: grunt tubes, my bowel inspector camos really campy be.
Speaker 1: He or two ago?
Speaker 3: I thought that this was fun, But now I'm frozen
Speaker 3: to my seat and the good times they are gone.
Speaker 3: I've ate up all my snacks, my hands and toes
Speaker 3: are numb, and we're gonna climb down from my stand.
Speaker 3: That son of a but decided to come.
Speaker 11: I love those Beagy be whiteas those you rug Beagy
Speaker 11: Big White tales.
Speaker 3: I love those Beagy Big Doug Yo eight shot g etails.
Speaker 3: I love those big white tails all day