Speaker 1: This is me Eat podcast coming in you shirtless severely
Speaker 1: both bitten in my case underwear lessening podcast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything. A couple of quick questions, Dan, are those
Speaker 1: uh are those hippie prayer flags hanging in your window? Yeah?
Speaker 1: They are? Was that Is that really the message you
Speaker 1: want to send to the outside world? Yeah? I had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with that. That was an art project
Speaker 1: of I believe my daughter at school. So they indoctrinate
Speaker 1: children open anchorage to hang to betan prayer flags in
Speaker 1: their windows. Yeah. Does you know what? Does you know
Speaker 1: what it means? I don't know what lesson came along
Speaker 1: with that, but that it's a Yeah, that was an
Speaker 1: anchored public cool district art project. Yeah, m hmm yeah.
Speaker 1: Second question, real quick, how do you feel those bird featers? Uh? Karina?
Speaker 1: My wife walks out the window onto that roof right
Speaker 1: there every few days and pours bird seat in there.
Speaker 1: She risked life and limb for those birds. Yanni, do
Speaker 1: you remember the song I wrote, Um Yanny your money
Speaker 1: King of the cast a Ray? Do you remember that?
Speaker 1: Had I known at the time, Had I not just
Speaker 1: learned the other day that you where that you chewed
Speaker 1: chewing tobacco, you dipped too dog. Yeah, as a listener
Speaker 1: wrote in you were a chaw dog, you chaw dogged
Speaker 1: it for seventeen years. I would have written it into
Speaker 1: the song because the song captures your whole life. Right.
Speaker 1: You almost would have had to. You couldn't have admitted
Speaker 1: that important. It was brought up doing Latvian things, and
Speaker 1: now he wears the Latvian ring. I would have put
Speaker 1: a grandpa come from a lamp far away. Uh. I
Speaker 1: would have put in like a long passage bom about
Speaker 1: all that chewing tobacco and smoking. So why did you
Speaker 1: get out? Why did you get out of it? Why
Speaker 1: did you get away from chewing? For the health benefits?
Speaker 1: But there are no health negatives. Look at dirt, I
Speaker 1: feel great. I don't know. I feel it's like a
Speaker 1: thirty abuff thirty five year old. He should have easily
Speaker 1: beaten the senior in the arm wrestling contest yesterday, but
Speaker 1: it ended in a match draw, in a draw, and
Speaker 1: so I feel like he's a little he should be
Speaker 1: stronger than he is. You feel that the dip is
Speaker 1: what it was? Why you beat him? Armor assling was
Speaker 1: a draw that that wasn't slowed him down. I got
Speaker 1: him in the end. You guys, you guys quit a draw. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're if you would have had a hat and turned
Speaker 1: it backwards like in Sylvester Stalloan's over the top. Either
Speaker 1: one of you, I think you would have. I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: that was help Chris, No, well, nothing would help me.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not putting anybody down. But no, both
Speaker 1: of you guys were turning purple. I haven't seen like
Speaker 1: dirt pulled the heart mustle. Yeah, a rassling sot. What
Speaker 1: age you to start? What did you start being a
Speaker 1: tobacco user? I probably started smoking cigarettes at I don't know,
Speaker 1: dabbling at twelve, and I certainly if you were running
Speaker 1: crettes by a time of like high school, I think
Speaker 1: I was smoking fairly regularly and you were distributing cigarettes
Speaker 1: at a young age. Yeah. I told you a story
Speaker 1: about how I got caught at Latvian Summer High School
Speaker 1: within the first two or three days of being there,
Speaker 1: because I had a couple of cards the cigarettes that
Speaker 1: some older kids bring in for me, and I got
Speaker 1: turned in. I got rad it out by a roommate
Speaker 1: for selling for selling cigarettes. Yeah, but I told my
Speaker 1: dad and the story. The funny part of the story
Speaker 1: is that we're Danny are talking about how it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's better to try to teach your kids, like gonna
Speaker 1: put everything on the table, you know, bring stuff to
Speaker 1: you as opposed to you know, finding it out and yeah,
Speaker 1: and then not get mad at him when they tell you,
Speaker 1: only get mad at him when they So I had
Speaker 1: to write. Most kids parents lived you know, who knows
Speaker 1: days away or flights away from Laban summer high school.
Speaker 1: But we're only thirty minutes away, which is good and bad,
Speaker 1: you know, because I had access to things that got
Speaker 1: me into a lot of trouble, right because we could
Speaker 1: just zip home and get into trouble. I do happen
Speaker 1: to know where there's a bottle vodka? Yeah, exactly, I'll
Speaker 1: be back at sixty. But yeah, So instead of waiting
Speaker 1: for the letter to get to my dad, I just
Speaker 1: told him and he's like, hey, well, you know, next
Speaker 1: time we want to sell something, you should sell like
Speaker 1: candy or something like that, not cigarettes. And he was off.
Speaker 1: So because you think I think he was, he must
Speaker 1: have been distracted because I was expecting a real talking to,
Speaker 1: real whooping, you know, but he kind of sluffed it
Speaker 1: off and left me kind of bewildered as he drove away.
Speaker 1: So you got out of smoking and then you transition. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: was there an overlap? Oh definitely No. I had a
Speaker 1: pro I had a program um because I sort of
Speaker 1: tried to remain an athlete even as through my like
Speaker 1: heavy partying years in high school. And so I would
Speaker 1: chew all day so that I could, like if I knew,
Speaker 1: I had a volleyball game or some sort of sporting
Speaker 1: activity in the afternoon, and then smoke cigarettes as I
Speaker 1: partied after that, I knew you guys in high school.
Speaker 1: Was the move when they're trying to cut weight for wrestling? Yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my god. They walk around with a giant one
Speaker 1: leader good friends of mine man wearing garbage bags around,
Speaker 1: filling bottles full of spin Johnny Merchant, Craig Christensen. That's
Speaker 1: not healthy for you dropping the weight bitness. Looks like
Speaker 1: they're skinning bones by the time it's time for a match.
Speaker 1: This is you're hearing the voice of of for your
Speaker 1: your first time around the show. That's true, Levi, I
Speaker 1: don't even know your last name is Meyer. Levi Meyer,
Speaker 1: fresh out of the military, kind of kinda lay out
Speaker 1: your lay out your military deal real quick. Uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I joined in two thousand nine um in the Army,
Speaker 1: became a medic. Uh. I went to airborne school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right out of the gate. Um went from medic training
Speaker 1: to airborne school to Iraq within like a one month period.
Speaker 1: It was just quick then. And then hung around Afghanistan. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Later later in my military career in defghagstand and then
Speaker 1: I got out of active duty the Army December of
Speaker 1: And you're having a chew right now. No, I spit
Speaker 1: it out for it doesn't bother me. Dirts, haven't you?
Speaker 1: He's spitting into a Starbucks cup. Do you know I
Speaker 1: hang out with the guy that manufactures the sleeve on
Speaker 1: that cup. I went turkey hunting win that you know? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Thinks so Yanni, you dip for all those years? Didn't quit? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I finally was able to kick it like
Speaker 1: probably like done done late twenties. Oh earlikay, what are
Speaker 1: you telling me? He relapsed though at one point like
Speaker 1: you quit for in that time period that you can't
Speaker 1: rem did you guys? See me have that dip the
Speaker 1: other day? About five seconds out of it so I said,
Speaker 1: I spit it out quick cause I was able to
Speaker 1: suck the Maryland and that of stuff, dirt. Can you
Speaker 1: can you share with us that I'd like to follow
Speaker 1: up with You asked me why I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: go ahead, follow up? I'm not. Another big reason I
Speaker 1: quit is that eventually, and you know everybody battles this,
Speaker 1: you know, when when you're trying to quit, right, it's
Speaker 1: just like it's it seems so impossible. And eventually I
Speaker 1: came to a point, right, you know, I have like
Speaker 1: I have to be stronger than the stupid little thing
Speaker 1: that's in this little tin, you know, like I just
Speaker 1: like I can't be so weak that this little thing
Speaker 1: is going to control me. And so I just said that,
Speaker 1: and that that almost became more important to me than
Speaker 1: the health benefits, just being like being able to say
Speaker 1: f you two to the addiction. You know, the dirt
Speaker 1: doesn't feel that way. Well, like I said, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I don't want to quit quite yet. And a half
Speaker 1: a month ago you wanted to quit. Uh yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: the other day of dirt smoking up the mountainside, and
Speaker 1: I brought up, you know the way that the chew
Speaker 1: could impact that and he was saying that when they
Speaker 1: do start carving away pieces of his face, he's gonna
Speaker 1: have better air passed through, more row, be more aero dynamic,
Speaker 1: and won't have like all the wind resistance that his
Speaker 1: current facial structure gives him. Share with us what that
Speaker 1: lady was telling you who used to work on ski
Speaker 1: lifts with you. Oh, she said she was always she
Speaker 1: held cheers at a higher regard than smokers because all
Speaker 1: the cheers in her life were doers, like you know, ranching, fencing.
Speaker 1: What smokers are watchers. Smokers are watchers. That is so true, man,
Speaker 1: it never occurred me to you said it. Oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so true. Dudes that dip are generally productive people
Speaker 1: because it's yeah, smokers are like watchers, and like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know the smoker, he's the kind of guys I
Speaker 1: would do it that way. That's never gonna work. Yes,
Speaker 1: that was you do that. I wouldn't do this, dipper.
Speaker 1: There is the anomaly though, of the guy or gal.
Speaker 1: They just can just lip it and just can like
Speaker 1: take that smoke going into their nose and eyeballs and
Speaker 1: it's like it's not even there, and they can work
Speaker 1: right next to you it's an anomaly. But I've seen them.
Speaker 1: They like they light it and it just stays between
Speaker 1: their two lips and they're just doing spodymine. Growing up,
Speaker 1: he'd viewed the whole world to one eye because he
Speaker 1: would working on his car. He would have a cigarette
Speaker 1: and tip his head close the close the upper eye
Speaker 1: or the down eye. I guess where he had a
Speaker 1: cigarette dangling off, just keep going. Yeah, you never hear
Speaker 1: of anybody taking a dip break, smoke break. Dipper can't
Speaker 1: afford to take a break. I really would like to
Speaker 1: get into it, and I would like to get into it,
Speaker 1: and no, I want to get into it. I'm afraid
Speaker 1: of I'm afraid of the transition period where you gotta
Speaker 1: throw up. But here's the deal. I went through that
Speaker 1: with alcohol without even thinking about that thing. Like if
Speaker 1: you say, like if you're younger, like hey, I want
Speaker 1: to start drinking, people aren't like, oh man, you get
Speaker 1: so sick at first. No one says that. No, but
Speaker 1: it's true. When you learn to drink, you have to
Speaker 1: throw up a whole bunch. But they don't talk about it.
Speaker 1: It's just a secret. It's like an open secret. With
Speaker 1: dip they scare you a boy being. Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: gotta get sick at first. I never did. You took
Speaker 1: right to it. Yeah, sam hool that was telling. Danny
Speaker 1: gave me my first two. I fished with him. Now,
Speaker 1: um to that point that we were talking about the
Speaker 1: memory loss of any type of suffrage, Like suffrage means
Speaker 1: the right to vote. That's the word I'm thinking of suffering, suffering.
Speaker 1: But like you know, like we're talking about like we're like, man,
Speaker 1: that was the craziest I we've ever done. It's like,
Speaker 1: oh no, was this one? That one? That one you
Speaker 1: forget and with someone brought up, oh you brought up childbirth.
Speaker 1: A lot of women will forget how painful the first
Speaker 1: one is rereminded when they have their number two or
Speaker 1: three year onward. And you're saying that you're learning to dip.
Speaker 1: Actually did cause pain, but other people you don't forget that.
Speaker 1: Drinkings and and maybe tobacco use initially had a rough start,
Speaker 1: was there system? Yeah. The only reason I'm drawn to dipping, uh,
Speaker 1: we would like to get involved in it, it's because
Speaker 1: there's no long problems and you know what, I gotta theory,
Speaker 1: it's just vanity. It's like do you want your face
Speaker 1: all carved up? Because the smoker not only is he
Speaker 1: useless because he's only got one hand and one of
Speaker 1: his eyes is blind all the time and can't be
Speaker 1: around flammable stuff. And yeah, and you gotta keep away
Speaker 1: from your amiables can't pump his own gas. Pretty soon,
Speaker 1: that same smoker can't do ship if he wants to
Speaker 1: because he's destroyed his lung. But you do, a dipper
Speaker 1: could keep on working, but you gotta watch your heart
Speaker 1: still with the dip. Yeah, restriction blood vessels, Well, there
Speaker 1: is a downside to do no, no, but you have
Speaker 1: a theory about it. Yeah, I tell you. I mean
Speaker 1: I've told you guys. I know I've told some other buddies.
Speaker 1: But I feel like, because I'm chewing often, yeah, my
Speaker 1: blood vessels like they're having to work. But when I
Speaker 1: like go ski touring or when we go on big hikes,
Speaker 1: I'm not chewing, and I like get that bonus regular
Speaker 1: blood vessels size. You know what I mean. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like training with the weight vest and then when
Speaker 1: you go actually do the activity, you don't have that
Speaker 1: weight vest and you're just like just ripping. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: when I don't have a chew in. I'm like, oh damn,
Speaker 1: this is what is it? Also like high altitude training
Speaker 1: with people, where are like exactly he's working out right now? Yeah?
Speaker 1: He is. He charged up the mountain man that one day.
Speaker 1: Just there's something to it because that man, that was
Speaker 1: the moment when I said, dipping, it's something I want
Speaker 1: to get involved because everything else is the same. Everything,
Speaker 1: all things are equal, except he dips the most. No. No,
Speaker 1: I brought up the point my time, I have much
Speaker 1: more spare time to be out doing cardio activities because
Speaker 1: I don't have a family or a house or pets
Speaker 1: or anything. Yeah, that's a good point. I think that's
Speaker 1: the that's the main thing. I mean, you know, doing
Speaker 1: something every day. They're day when I was thinking about, uh,
Speaker 1: how you gotta throw up a lot when you want
Speaker 1: to start, when you want to get into drinking. Even
Speaker 1: long after, I remember coming on why you're hiking your
Speaker 1: mind kind of wanders. I remember the coming home once
Speaker 1: I had to somehow I came in. When I was
Speaker 1: living in Western Montana, Missoula. I had this banana tree,
Speaker 1: and I remember a couple of times over the years
Speaker 1: coming home from the bar aren't puking into that banana
Speaker 1: tree pot. It was a giant pot like oat to
Speaker 1: my bedroom and just getting nowhere there and puking in
Speaker 1: there and just composting it in man, into the soil,
Speaker 1: into the body soil. Man, just com posting it in
Speaker 1: rather than trying because it kind of you wouldn't get
Speaker 1: to it until the morning, you know, and then it
Speaker 1: kind of filter, right because all the liquids go through
Speaker 1: and whatever. You're right now, Yeah, you com posted in.
Speaker 1: And I remember having that banana plant. Man. I kind
Speaker 1: of love that banana tree. One time I was moving
Speaker 1: it was ten below zero outside and I got like
Speaker 1: my van all heated up, and I wrapped it in
Speaker 1: plastic and took that thing just long enough to go
Speaker 1: outside down put into a vehicle. It froze to death
Speaker 1: that fast, just yeah, and then the leaves froze, it
Speaker 1: wilted and died. Was that you were transitioning and you're
Speaker 1: trying to No, no, no, no, it wasn't like it
Speaker 1: wasn't feeling like. It wasn't like the psychological trauma didn't
Speaker 1: get to the plant. Interesting. You drank some funky stuff though,
Speaker 1: like in Mad Dog and or was that well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because you know, like most people at that age, we
Speaker 1: didn't have any like a lot of money to like
Speaker 1: to really be putting into that kind of stuff. So
Speaker 1: we you know, you go out to the bar, you
Speaker 1: always drink before you go to the bar. At that age,
Speaker 1: everybody does that, you still, because you can't be going
Speaker 1: down and getting the whole project taken care of at
Speaker 1: like such a high rate of pay. You know, like,
Speaker 1: so you have drinks before. Yeah, yeah, we drink like
Speaker 1: Boon's snowberry. What was that stuff? Ice fishing? Oh god, no,
Speaker 1: berry creek, it was flavor. I remember coming home from
Speaker 1: work and drinking a bottle of Boons in the shower,
Speaker 1: a whole bottle of it, just getting cleaned up, getting
Speaker 1: ready to go out and just go on the shower
Speaker 1: shower of cold bottle of Boons. Fire and drinking. Are
Speaker 1: love drinking that. It kind of amazed me that I
Speaker 1: don't drink at all now because I used to love it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's funny. You'd be like, banana plant, this is for you.
Speaker 1: I'm doing this for you. Feed you later. I don't
Speaker 1: say never, don't say I never fertilized. You're baby burning
Speaker 1: the banana plant any and he will say he wants
Speaker 1: to add on this. If you could go back and
Speaker 1: never ever have a drop of alcohol, not a chance, man,
Speaker 1: not a chance. Um for a handful of reasons. Oh
Speaker 1: what I shared, Like, I was always very suspicious of
Speaker 1: people that didn't drink. I feel like, what's wrong with
Speaker 1: that guy? And um, no I'm not, but I was,
Speaker 1: And so it kind of lead me into like all
Speaker 1: my friends that I'm still friends with, we used to
Speaker 1: just drink. We used to fish together, drink together, and
Speaker 1: hang out together. And so if I wasn't drinking, like
Speaker 1: I don't know what, I don't know who I would
Speaker 1: want up hanging out with. Ye, I mean like our
Speaker 1: bonds were all formed around like shared interests, which included alcohol.
Speaker 1: So if I had missed all the night time stuff,
Speaker 1: who would I be hanging out with now? Bunch of lamos?
Speaker 1: I don't know? Right, Like a Dardo Garcia says, you're
Speaker 1: forged by fire, man, I think that all that being
Speaker 1: hung over and trying to fish and that's the fire
Speaker 1: that forges. So that for that reason, and too in
Speaker 1: the writing world, like alcohol is a real problem in
Speaker 1: the writing world. Um, you know. I mean it's like
Speaker 1: it's just no joke that like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: alcoholism among writers. But by being a avid drinker, I
Speaker 1: was able to associate with and and hang out with
Speaker 1: and spend time with writers because they would all connect
Speaker 1: around the act of drinking. So I formed a lot
Speaker 1: like good relationships with writers by being a drinker. If
Speaker 1: you weren't a drinker, I don't know who you who
Speaker 1: you like? I just you know, I mean I can't
Speaker 1: picture any of the any of the people that had
Speaker 1: a big influence on me. A look and what I think,
Speaker 1: like what was going on with like that was the
Speaker 1: whole thing. That's what you were doing. You're like going
Speaker 1: over so and Souls for drinks, going to the bar
Speaker 1: to drink, its ice fish, going ice fishing to drink.
Speaker 1: So it's like to say, like you never drank, It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: presumely that means you missed out on all of that
Speaker 1: and other people get in other places. But I don't
Speaker 1: know where I would have gotten it. You know, never
Speaker 1: drank in the woods ever, I mean an overnight backpacking trips,
Speaker 1: maybe like a little nip. Never went out on a
Speaker 1: backpacking trip around a backpack hunt and got drunk ever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we are growing up, we always used to look down
Speaker 1: on the type of hunter that went to deer camp
Speaker 1: and just got sloppy, drunk every night, didn't get up
Speaker 1: in the morning and the on. You know, like there
Speaker 1: was like the beer drinking type of deer hunters, and
Speaker 1: then there was like the guys that are out there
Speaker 1: to shoot deer and when they were in town they
Speaker 1: got wasted, but not all the word's time and place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so no, no regrets about it. I regret having quit it.
Speaker 1: We haven't quite equit me and I I do. I
Speaker 1: miss it. I miss it terribly, man, because everything's so funny,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like Stuf's not funny anymore. No,
Speaker 1: we've had a lot of laughs on this trip, sober.
Speaker 1: Remember one night we were drinking and Danny's kitchen laugh
Speaker 1: about how he was afraid to touch his dogs penis.
Speaker 1: Like now, he just didn't like that. He just didn't
Speaker 1: like the idea of it, right, Yeah, Like if we
Speaker 1: weren't drinking it and we were drinking, it wouldn't to
Speaker 1: come up. It just came up. Now He's like, I
Speaker 1: just feel like I'm invading his personally. He's like, I
Speaker 1: don't want someone grabbing me there, or that one spot
Speaker 1: just too low in a belly rub Man. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: just like I thought. Yeah, he was just explained it.
Speaker 1: So that's like the kind of insight that you just
Speaker 1: miss out on when you're like when you're just same
Speaker 1: all day long. Well, I tell you my my older
Speaker 1: brother has been sober for seven years. And when someone
Speaker 1: says that, then I think that they had a drinking problem.
Speaker 1: Drinking enthusiasm. Yeah, he just wrong time, wrong place kind
Speaker 1: of drinking. But now he is madman NonStop. He's got
Speaker 1: a hundred projects going on all the time and always
Speaker 1: getting ship done. But he doesn't think anything's funny. I
Speaker 1: bet nah. Yeah, I mean it's different, like you said,
Speaker 1: the social aspects different. But that's something I noticed watching
Speaker 1: him not drink, is his time management like is way different.
Speaker 1: Because if you drink, you can kind of sit in
Speaker 1: the backyard and like bullshit and drink. But if you're
Speaker 1: not drinking, you're like, let's do something. Yeah, you want
Speaker 1: to go fick something exactly, And yeah I can't relax,
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, I need it. If I'm gonna relax, I
Speaker 1: need it have a beverage or something. Usually, Yeah, like that.
Speaker 1: That used to be the other thing too. Even at
Speaker 1: home with my wife we'd have a couple of drinks
Speaker 1: and relax. But not neither of us can relax. We
Speaker 1: just work, which is a good thing, and we just
Speaker 1: work and not laugh at anything. Make sure not to
Speaker 1: start laughing, no fun um anything else on that subject.
Speaker 1: Lee by you good? Oh you know we haven't discussed
Speaker 1: with you at all though. LEVI are you're fixing the
Speaker 1: quit chewing? Yeah? I suppose. I mean, I'm not really
Speaker 1: like dirt over there. He had to bring like two
Speaker 1: logs out in the woods. I only brought two cans,
Speaker 1: and one of them got washed out. The other one
Speaker 1: is still good. You lost one to a creek. Oh no,
Speaker 1: I think got rained on that alder grabbed it, the
Speaker 1: one that grabbed your dipping enthusiasts. Not an addict, I
Speaker 1: suppose do all do all shaw dogs run it along
Speaker 1: the bottom, or you'd never run along the top loop.
Speaker 1: I've known some guys do this. Yeah, I told you that.
Speaker 1: That nurse told me keep keep the cancer guessing, can
Speaker 1: just move it moving around? Did you ever run a
Speaker 1: double horse? A double horse? Shoe? Just really good glass
Speaker 1: and spots after you might run a double horse shoe.
Speaker 1: Have you run a horse shoe? Yeah? I mean in
Speaker 1: college we kind of do the how much you could
Speaker 1: get into your mouth? Yeah, I don't make a man sick. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember being in the kitchen and like when on
Speaker 1: a slow night you start thinking of ways like just
Speaker 1: mess with people, and so it would be like, kid,
Speaker 1: you do a half cup of cayenne pepper on your testicles,
Speaker 1: you know, and everybody, everybody would start pitching in money.
Speaker 1: At a certain point, someone would say, Okay, for sixty bucks,
Speaker 1: I'll try it. And then one of the other things
Speaker 1: would be like, okay, can you get a whole tenancy
Speaker 1: in your mouth and keep it in there for whatever
Speaker 1: it would be a minute or five minutes, you know.
Speaker 1: And I don't think anybody could ever pass that same
Speaker 1: exact experience. Yeah you had it, you did it. You
Speaker 1: don't know. But I've been in those scenarios and that
Speaker 1: that came up and the buddy you did it got sick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard. It's hard for me to reconcile. You're what
Speaker 1: you majored in photo journalism with the activities that you
Speaker 1: engaged in in college. I was I was different than
Speaker 1: most class me and one other guy kind of chummed around.
Speaker 1: Like you, it's hard for you to picture photo journalism
Speaker 1: majors getting together to try to fill a two leader
Speaker 1: bottle with you spit. Well, those guys weren't in my program.
Speaker 1: My roommates that we filled did our science project installation art.
Speaker 1: Yeah no that yeah, that wasn't with my classmate says,
Speaker 1: it's with buddies, Mile City Buddies. Yeah that picture. Yeah exactly. Um,
Speaker 1: moving on, do you yeah? Yeah, and you feel we
Speaker 1: should just come out and like right away, just say
Speaker 1: rather than creating a rather than creating um, any kind
Speaker 1: of any kind of tension or suspense. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't think it matters. Just what why don't you
Speaker 1: say what I'm talking about? I think what you're talking
Speaker 1: about is to say that we just finished up an
Speaker 1: unsuccessful hunt, unsuccessful dolls, she punt, no lesson to be learned.
Speaker 1: If you're looking at success as a dead sheet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's how I'm That's what I'm talking about. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well we can also look at it as successful as
Speaker 1: we made it in there and uh, you know, cover
Speaker 1: some serious train and came out without any injuries and
Speaker 1: without any you know, major problems. Yeah, I made a
Speaker 1: TV show, beautiful TV show. We don't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and found found some sheep, found some sheep. But if
Speaker 1: someone said, hey, was you was you hunt successful? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And then you go like, well defined success and I
Speaker 1: just think you kind of like playing around you. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're being a little bit. You'd have to say no.
Speaker 1: But it was great. Yes, Oh yeah, okay, so what
Speaker 1: we what we did when dolls sheep hunt in the
Speaker 1: Alaska Range? And uh, the last range is check me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong on this, Danny. It's like a southern
Speaker 1: Alaska mountain range or sort of like might divide the
Speaker 1: south southern you'd call that the Western Alaska Range. I
Speaker 1: think that's, you know, everything south of all that cheap
Speaker 1: country that's south of Denali Park. People commonly referred to
Speaker 1: as the Western Alaska I mean Western Range, but the
Speaker 1: Alaska Range in general, it's a big speaking of horseshoe dips,
Speaker 1: it's a horseshoe shape, kind of a shallow horseshoe. The
Speaker 1: on its eastern edge kind of go feeds into the
Speaker 1: the coastal ranges. Ye consider wrangles coastal. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: kind of blends into the wrangles over on the far
Speaker 1: eastern side, and then the on the western side. They
Speaker 1: kind of toe off down towards the Alaska Peninsula. Yeah,
Speaker 1: blending into into the Allusians down there in the the
Speaker 1: top of the if you imagine the Alaska Range is
Speaker 1: a very shallow you, the top of the U is
Speaker 1: the no, a very shallow inverted you. Yeah, the top
Speaker 1: of you is the most northern portion. Yes, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's that would be like the central Alaska Range. That's
Speaker 1: how Fishing Department Efficient Game refers to that area, Central
Speaker 1: Alaska Range. And it's not narrow and it's not like
Speaker 1: giving away a spot to say we're in the western
Speaker 1: Alaska Range, because the whole thing is five miles long,
Speaker 1: huge mountain range. Um, we had hunted doll sheet before
Speaker 1: and other portions of the Alaska Range. I'd be so
Speaker 1: specific as to say the Central Alaska Range in this trip,
Speaker 1: we're going into an area to hunt. Um, let me,
Speaker 1: let me they groundwork piece down. What Alaska has is
Speaker 1: they have there's several species in Alaska you're not allowed
Speaker 1: to hunt without a guide if you're a nonresident. Basically,
Speaker 1: if it's white or has great, big long clause. You
Speaker 1: cannot hunt it um if you're a nonresident without a guide,
Speaker 1: without a guide referring to mountain goats, doll sheep, and
Speaker 1: grizzlies and brown bears. So but the a there's a catch.
Speaker 1: A resident, a resident Alaska hunter can hunt those things
Speaker 1: with family of second degree kindred. So if you're a
Speaker 1: fella in Alaska, you can take nonresident relatives, cousins, uncles,
Speaker 1: I think, even brother in law. It's pretty loose. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can never remember where the line is drawn. But
Speaker 1: that's because I only ever hunt with my two full
Speaker 1: blooded brothers, so it's kind of irrelevant. Yeah yeah, but
Speaker 1: but it includes cousins, uncles, I believe it includes in laws.
Speaker 1: I think then you can then then those people can
Speaker 1: hunt with that. There was a little movement a year
Speaker 1: ago or so to get rid of that. There's a
Speaker 1: group called the Resident Hunters of Alaska who got a
Speaker 1: real beef with non resident hunters and they had put
Speaker 1: together something for consideration which would have ended the rule.
Speaker 1: Is that what I'm are you sure that's who that
Speaker 1: was coming from. I thought you told me that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: check me on this, But that might have been coming
Speaker 1: maybe from the guide industry a bit too. I'm not
Speaker 1: I'm not okay, so scratch that. That might not be true.
Speaker 1: I don't want to put I don't want to put
Speaker 1: blame or praise however you view it in the wrong place.
Speaker 1: But there was trying to They were trying to roll
Speaker 1: it back a little bit and not. They wanted it
Speaker 1: to be okay. So so whoever it was, let's take
Speaker 1: this case. Danny's my brother. Danny's a resident of Alaska.
Speaker 1: He and I go sheep hunting together. We can both
Speaker 1: hunt sheep at the same time. What the what the
Speaker 1: rule change that was proposed would be that if we're
Speaker 1: hunting and I shoot a sheep, we both have to
Speaker 1: like notch the tag. Yeah, that was the meaning I
Speaker 1: get I get a ram, it counts against your mars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my and you a limit of one ram. So we
Speaker 1: could go together and if I get one, basically you
Speaker 1: got one. But that that thing didn't go anywhere. So
Speaker 1: I'm able to go hunt doll sheep in Alaska as
Speaker 1: long as I'm within as long as I'm with you,
Speaker 1: And they spelled out like you gotta be together, you're
Speaker 1: hunting together, side of by side. Um, we've done it
Speaker 1: quite a few times over the years. Not quite a
Speaker 1: few times, but before I think we've gone cheap hunting
Speaker 1: four times together. That sounds about right. And uh, this
Speaker 1: time we went into an area we had really no
Speaker 1: prior experience in because of a friend who's an outfitter
Speaker 1: turned us onto a spot where he guides some clients
Speaker 1: and kind of cut us loose in there. So we're
Speaker 1: doing like a trip that would be how would you
Speaker 1: put in guide language, Johnny, all of our own gear, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: all our own equipment and gear. But someone's saying go here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we just called it a drop camp basically when we
Speaker 1: did it. Yeah, and sometimes we would actually supply some
Speaker 1: stuff with drop camp and I guess you know, Buck
Speaker 1: did Bucks apply this a little bit, A few things
Speaker 1: big tarpa X yeah, which was Hey, it was really
Speaker 1: nice to have that tarp pre set up. You know. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I call it a drop camp for the most part.
Speaker 1: I mean, most guys I think they're going to do
Speaker 1: a drop camp if they get anything from the outfitter.
Speaker 1: It might be a basic shelter, but you're pretty much
Speaker 1: you're you're gonna be bringing most of your own gear
Speaker 1: in this area is like, so you come into Anchorage
Speaker 1: and then the last of works in the bush. And
Speaker 1: Danny can speak this a lot better, but the way
Speaker 1: it last works in the bush, especially like kind of
Speaker 1: mountain hunting and stuff, you're you're always using your You're
Speaker 1: not always You're typically flying in on super cubs, which
Speaker 1: can land on gravel bars, ridge tops, you can land
Speaker 1: them anywhere, but a supercup can only hold a pilot
Speaker 1: and one passenger. So oftentimes, if you're flying in the
Speaker 1: remote hunting locations in Alaska, you're getting you get staged
Speaker 1: up somewhere on some remote large air strip and then
Speaker 1: use superclubs to do the last little leg of bringing
Speaker 1: you in Like that, that's fairly common, but it could
Speaker 1: be from a strip along the highway somewhere too, you know,
Speaker 1: the Hall Road or one of the you know other
Speaker 1: highways around the state. We've done that before, to where
Speaker 1: we've driven to a place and had a plane meet
Speaker 1: us there and shuttle us in. You know, that's closer
Speaker 1: to the hunting spot than say Anchorage or Fairbanks or
Speaker 1: wherever the pilots coming from. Yeah, it or gets elaborate
Speaker 1: like there's a there's anywhere you're hunting if you're hunting
Speaker 1: like the Western Brooks Range, so basically up towards the
Speaker 1: you know, the portions of Alaska that seemed to be
Speaker 1: looking over into Siberia. Um, there's an area there where
Speaker 1: you you go to Fairbanks, drive up to a lake, No,
Speaker 1: a strip, you drive up to a strip or Alaska
Speaker 1: pipeline road. And not just talking about one air carrier
Speaker 1: that we've used to hunt caribou. You drive up to
Speaker 1: an actual strip. Isn't it a strip? So a landing place,
Speaker 1: get on a plane there and go land at another
Speaker 1: strip in a bush community, and like an off the
Speaker 1: grid community, and they're gonna float plane and take the
Speaker 1: float plane to go land up on lakes up in
Speaker 1: the Cariboo Country in the North Slope, tons of different configurations.
Speaker 1: Or we've also hunted sheep where you lower your stuff
Speaker 1: from your truck into a supercubin. Yeah, fly up on
Speaker 1: that too, But this particular area is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a hall and bigger, like a greater distance than
Speaker 1: you're gonna cover, um efficiently in in super cubs. So
Speaker 1: we flew out to a remote military air strip. Do
Speaker 1: we name that one? Not yet? No, should be remote
Speaker 1: military air strip. It's not military. I think it was
Speaker 1: built by built by the military. Gravel strip. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of those in Alaska. Yeah, they're scattering, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1: And we're flying there. We're all six of us, So
Speaker 1: we've got two hunters and four guys in our crew
Speaker 1: and we we we fly out to this strip and
Speaker 1: it's like a real hub of activity because it's a
Speaker 1: big enough airstrip. You can get big aircraft in there
Speaker 1: and bring in quad runners, side by sides, all manner
Speaker 1: of vehicles. And then there's an elaborate road network that
Speaker 1: leads out from here, and so it's like a place
Speaker 1: to fly in stuff, set up a camp, and then
Speaker 1: cruise around like on this whole isolated road network and
Speaker 1: trail network, and cruise around hunt this vast area of
Speaker 1: like like Moose Caribou country. I got a quick question,
Speaker 1: is that is that road system attached to anything if
Speaker 1: you were wanting to drive in or is it totally
Speaker 1: independent outside of that air stream. I think the Mountain,
Speaker 1: I think the Alaska Rang because it's on the other
Speaker 1: side of the Alaska Range, and I don't think the
Speaker 1: right dangers. No, yeah, yeah, you couldn't drive there. I
Speaker 1: mean you could you could snow machine there in the winter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's not there's not a road. So people come
Speaker 1: in there and in large aircraft sometimes and the can
Speaker 1: fly and stuff like we just had we just land
Speaker 1: out there, so you land in the strip as a
Speaker 1: gravel strip. There was a couple of outbuildings the Alaska Troopers.
Speaker 1: Here's not an interesting thing people should know about Alaska.
Speaker 1: In Alaska, you don't have what's called the game warden,
Speaker 1: so you have all your game laws. Fishery and game
Speaker 1: laws are all set by the state and the Department
Speaker 1: of what do they call it house? The Board of
Speaker 1: Fish and the Board of Game respectively make those laws
Speaker 1: the laws. And then what's your like dn R here,
Speaker 1: it's the Laska Fishing Game Department. Yeah, we have a
Speaker 1: d n R two but they handle land in minerals
Speaker 1: and that sort of thing. But lasta Department of Fishing
Speaker 1: Game regulates hunting and fishing. But all enforcement of fishing
Speaker 1: game laws comes down to State Troopers. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a I guess it would be like the Wildlife
Speaker 1: Division of the State Troopers does enforcement do you know
Speaker 1: if people don't say you don't say, I'm gonna report
Speaker 1: you to the game warden. I'm calling the troopers at
Speaker 1: this strip. There's a trooper's shack too, like a little
Speaker 1: shack at this strip, and there's all manner of oil, drums,
Speaker 1: gas cans, quad runners and just like the sort of
Speaker 1: general called detritus, but is general like in Alaska, if
Speaker 1: you can land a plane, there is gonna be rusty
Speaker 1: barrels playing around, and it has its fair share of
Speaker 1: rusty barrels. Yeah, because what goes in does not go
Speaker 1: back out easily. Yeah, And we'll talk about that when
Speaker 1: we talk about the pilot that picked us off, his
Speaker 1: just dismay at something that we would be bringing back
Speaker 1: to town. Um. And you get there and you think like, oh, man,
Speaker 1: like you could say here days and nothing would happen.
Speaker 1: But it's just constant activity, planes landing people up to
Speaker 1: all manner of things. And just like like we land there,
Speaker 1: here comes a couple of dudes on a quad runner. Uh.
Speaker 1: A Norther plane comes in and we help some guys
Speaker 1: unload a quad runner out of the plane and they're
Speaker 1: taking off to go to their hunting camp which is
Speaker 1: thirty miles away. One of them runs off and the
Speaker 1: bushes in a while later comes back with another quad
Speaker 1: Runner and they both take off, one on the brand
Speaker 1: new quad Runner and one on the old quad Runner
Speaker 1: and head off to their thirty mile away hunting camp.
Speaker 1: And um, yeah, it's it's a it's a rest spot.
Speaker 1: But we get there and then we then we got
Speaker 1: another guy who fights the super Cup and it's got
Speaker 1: to fly. The super cub is gonna shuttle us into
Speaker 1: our spot up in the mountains. And it's funny, is
Speaker 1: you gotta do because of our crew. You gotta do
Speaker 1: six trips and each trip takes forty minutes or so,
Speaker 1: so it's twenty minutes up into the mountains, unloads and
Speaker 1: stuff come back, and you're dealing with small weather windows.
Speaker 1: So when you're doing this, you gotta make sure the
Speaker 1: first guy that goes has his camp and gear and
Speaker 1: everything he needs to survive for the night, and then
Speaker 1: that anyone left behind also has so that the that
Speaker 1: the Ford people have all the stuff they need to
Speaker 1: survive and the left behind person has to have stuff
Speaker 1: to survive because at any given time, the weather window
Speaker 1: is gonna close. And we'd already missed the day and
Speaker 1: a half because of bad weather. So sure enough, five
Speaker 1: of us get in and the weather window ends and
Speaker 1: there are five of us are up in the mountains
Speaker 1: right to humble. Some guys still hanging out at the Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is the first time that's ever happened to you,
Speaker 1: to have to have to hop in interrupted. But other
Speaker 1: guys we fly with will bring in three super cubs.
Speaker 1: That's true. They got like a little wolf pack of
Speaker 1: super cubs and they just get it done. Like when
Speaker 1: there was a window. They're going. This is much more
Speaker 1: just one dude cliff and back and forth, flying a
Speaker 1: hundred yards off the ground, three tops. Yeah, dude, those
Speaker 1: flights are so cool though. That Did you ask him
Speaker 1: why he did that low? Yeah? At first I thought
Speaker 1: it was because it was so foggy, but then it
Speaker 1: was clear and he was flying just as low. I
Speaker 1: think he likes to look for moose antlers. Well, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of reasons. Yeah, that that is one. Another
Speaker 1: one was that, um, when it is foggy and the
Speaker 1: ceiling super low, because he knows every single cut bank
Speaker 1: and down log and the way the river turns and
Speaker 1: cliffs and whatnot. From lying low so much, he can
Speaker 1: fly low even when the ceilings low. And be comfortable
Speaker 1: in there where he's saying, yeah, it's a beautiful day.
Speaker 1: And if I fly go up to a thousand feet
Speaker 1: right now and buzz along, I'm not gaining anything from
Speaker 1: that beautiful flight up there. I need to be down
Speaker 1: here continuing to become intimate with what's down here. I
Speaker 1: need to know every single gravel bar where when, if
Speaker 1: possibly the ship hits the fan, I can land, I
Speaker 1: can make a move. I'm looking for spots where I
Speaker 1: can drop people in the future. You know, he might scout.
Speaker 1: He's scouting, yeah, constantly, Yeah, bringing in information and and hunts.
Speaker 1: And he's a big shed hunter and hunts moose sheds
Speaker 1: from his plane. And he said that takes a special
Speaker 1: skill set because you need to fly along and you
Speaker 1: know where all the sheds are. And then eventually got
Speaker 1: to find a place of land and you gotta be
Speaker 1: good enough you can walk and pick. You can spend
Speaker 1: your time then walking and retrieving all the ones you found,
Speaker 1: and again landscape, knowing the landscape. Was he saying that
Speaker 1: he picked thirteen hundred or thirteen thousand pounds of these sandlers.
Speaker 1: I didn't catch that. Wow, Yeah, thirteen hundreds is impressive.
Speaker 1: Until you think how much moose antler ways. He might
Speaker 1: have said he picked thirteen thousand pounds and moved sandlers,
Speaker 1: but just just it must have been hundred pounds. Well,
Speaker 1: I think he said thirty aside thirty pounds aside on
Speaker 1: the big ones. Um, that's a lot of moves. He
Speaker 1: flies a ton. I can't remember the hours he was
Speaker 1: saying he does. But yeah, but he's probably picking him
Speaker 1: up in the spring because he's not flying and when
Speaker 1: he's when he's flying hunters, he doesn't have time for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was ripping us, you know, like, yeah, he was go,
Speaker 1: go go, and then he finished shuttling us, and he
Speaker 1: had a bunch more guys, you know, in other places.
Speaker 1: So Mark kennyon walking around picking up those deer landers
Speaker 1: his pants. This style of shed hunting man shed hunting
Speaker 1: out of airplane. So he likes to do that. And
Speaker 1: he was saying that he also hunts snowshoe hairs because
Speaker 1: when he turned white in the ground the snow melts,
Speaker 1: he can go out and locate little pockets of white rabbits.
Speaker 1: And in fin a place Land is playing and go
Speaker 1: snowshoe hunting, and it's pretty cool. That's a cool dude.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize I asked him. He's going a hundred
Speaker 1: ten miles when he's empty. That's with the tail wind
Speaker 1: with it. I think eight is what the top speed.
Speaker 1: This dude's super Cup is stripped down so light like
Speaker 1: he likes to keep it real light so you can
Speaker 1: land on super short strips and carry more ship. We've
Speaker 1: never put in so much stuff into a super Cup
Speaker 1: like we did with John. He has the hands start,
Speaker 1: so he has to be like the old World War
Speaker 1: One flying aces who got to go out and yell
Speaker 1: contact and turn the prop because he tore out his
Speaker 1: starter in the battery. So he starts his super Cup
Speaker 1: by going out. He's gotta get the throttle just right
Speaker 1: inside to start it, and in one fluid motion it
Speaker 1: takes him like three or four turns, grabs the prop
Speaker 1: he called the prop right, Yeah, grabs a prop, turns
Speaker 1: the clockwise hand from big kicks, and he's got a
Speaker 1: fly back around. We'll put up a video of him
Speaker 1: doing this in the show notes. He's got a fly
Speaker 1: back around and then hit the throttle and pull himself
Speaker 1: up in the plane. Every time, I'm like, why in
Speaker 1: the world you do that, and he said, I cut
Speaker 1: seventy pounds out of the plane. He also got rid
Speaker 1: of the back seat and just put a little carbon
Speaker 1: fiber piece there. And he took a piece of took
Speaker 1: a piece of ridge rest and cut it out for
Speaker 1: a pad. So like that seat is ounces the paint
Speaker 1: a super cup has forty pounds of paint on it.
Speaker 1: What Yeah, forty pounds of paint. His paint his his
Speaker 1: plane is painted the same color as most the landscape. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the same color like a slate gray, same color as
Speaker 1: all the shale. And I told him, said, man, when
Speaker 1: you eventually buried this burled is playing a new mountainside,
Speaker 1: They're never gonna find you. And he said, well, that's
Speaker 1: not my tent for that to happen. But he said,
Speaker 1: but kind of, because I don't like the people know
Speaker 1: where I'm laying on my plane. Yeah, so I'd like
Speaker 1: to keep a camouflage. If that means they don't find me,
Speaker 1: That means they don't find me. Do you remember when
Speaker 1: we flew in on that that moose float on the
Speaker 1: in the north study lasta range. Remember that second pilot
Speaker 1: that helped shuttle he had that little tailwheel Sessna where
Speaker 1: he stripped the paint off of it. Remember this, No,
Speaker 1: I remember flying in a helio courier. I thought that
Speaker 1: was cheap hunting. That was cheap onunting. But this is
Speaker 1: on that moose float. Trip Um done that float anymore?
Speaker 1: You know? A friend of mine did it last year
Speaker 1: and he went up in that same hanging valley there
Speaker 1: he shot a bully so that that they're running all over
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, we killed three bulls, didn't me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But anyway, that one of our pilots had just stripped.
Speaker 1: He had a little Cessna maybe and he had no anyway,
Speaker 1: I don't know planes very well, but he Um had
Speaker 1: stripped the paint off of his plane and it and
Speaker 1: he had forty pounds he made it forty pounds lighter,
Speaker 1: and he had forty pounds more payload. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: was just a it looked like a you know, it's
Speaker 1: a bare aluminium just like tinfoil plane. You know, it's nice,
Speaker 1: wasn't he saying? I'm just gonna say, if you want
Speaker 1: to look this guy up and fly with him, I
Speaker 1: don't do that. No, No, I don't like that's smart.
Speaker 1: Really No, No, I'll tell you later why Okay, he
Speaker 1: mentioned something about paint that slides better, right, wasn't he?
Speaker 1: On the thinking put on this boat bottom? What's that
Speaker 1: paint called bottom? I gets a few different kinds, but
Speaker 1: I the one, the one that I brand turned me
Speaker 1: onto it. It's called Gator Glide. It's just just really slick.
Speaker 1: But you know how grippy that aluminum is. Man on
Speaker 1: the rocks so grippy. So it's like a truck bedliner
Speaker 1: that slicks for the bottom of your boat. It's like
Speaker 1: it's it's like taplon coating the bottom of your boat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like the one of the you know, the rivers
Speaker 1: we run are super shallow. When you run up on
Speaker 1: a sandbar or grapple bar or whatever, like I can
Speaker 1: just go out there one finger now and pull my
Speaker 1: boat off. Makes that much of a different huge Yeah,
Speaker 1: Gator glide. Yeah, a lot of that technology comes out
Speaker 1: of the Southeast, I bet you. Oh yeah, my whole boats,
Speaker 1: My whole boats like a Louisiana setup, you know, but
Speaker 1: they work well, flat bottom, air cooled engine. You can
Speaker 1: run it across wet grass. Yeah yet boat out here
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, No, it's not jet it's a mud motor.
Speaker 1: You know like I think it inspired by the Southeast Asia,
Speaker 1: you know, cool long shaft and then that minds a
Speaker 1: particular ones a Go Devil, and that company was started
Speaker 1: by I think I'm pretty sure it is a Vietnam
Speaker 1: war Vett that came back from Southeast Asia and thought,
Speaker 1: oh man, that's a slick setup. Is this in Louisiana
Speaker 1: and started making them places that make them down. It's
Speaker 1: got like a Briggs and Stratton engine, like a five
Speaker 1: foot prop like if I have foot chaft. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just it's just an air cooled like a riding lawnmower engine.
Speaker 1: You know, my mind's twenty four horse and it's got
Speaker 1: a it's just a you joint and a drive shaft
Speaker 1: and there's no there's no clutch, there's no gears. It's
Speaker 1: just when you start the molder, the prop is spending
Speaker 1: and you lower that prop into the water and it
Speaker 1: goes and that's that's all. Because people don't dick around motors.
Speaker 1: What like Jenlly and outboard is water cooled, so you
Speaker 1: gotta have enough water where the lower units down and
Speaker 1: there's an intake thing in there and it's taken water
Speaker 1: up cycles it through the system and pisces it back out,
Speaker 1: so it takes some water to run it. Um. Their
Speaker 1: thing is these things you rocks and stuff, don't hurt them.
Speaker 1: They're they're starting to take a toll. I've been running
Speaker 1: that thing for he's fifteen years and rivers, you know,
Speaker 1: and and my my skegs getting pretty beat up. And
Speaker 1: it starts the skegs actually starting to unweld from the Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not going to take it apart and get somebody
Speaker 1: to reweld it, you know. But now that's taking a
Speaker 1: lot of abuse. Remember going duck hunting with you and
Speaker 1: the arc out here one time, going through a hole
Speaker 1: and feeling the boat as that thing hits Sam And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's an awful feeling, like a pot of sandwich. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I hate that. It only happened a couple of times.
Speaker 1: That's gonna happen no matter what motor you run. Yeah,
Speaker 1: depending on what's going on. Where were we the pilot,
Speaker 1: I messed up the paint thing, but we're breaking down.
Speaker 1: So I'm glad he brought up because dudes, I want
Speaker 1: to know about that, right, Gator Glade put it on
Speaker 1: the bomb of your boat. Um he was trimmed down though,
Speaker 1: our pilot trimmed down. Dude. He could. Like the one
Speaker 1: time he took off to go pick up another dude,
Speaker 1: he just like what looked like thirty and he was airborne.
Speaker 1: It was almost like a helicopter. Man, it was crazy.
Speaker 1: His rig is just super cool. Man. Those things got
Speaker 1: a way to crashing. Yeah, what's eating crazier is that
Speaker 1: when we got there, I looked at him like, man,
Speaker 1: I know that. Yeah. Yeah, he and I worked together
Speaker 1: for maybe three months. You in Colorado, right, Yeah, in
Speaker 1: Edward's car Autumn Ptarmigan Sports. He was a mountain guide.
Speaker 1: I'm I don't know for sure if he was a
Speaker 1: mountain guid him guessing he's done some guiding, but he
Speaker 1: was just a professional climber. Um. So we get to
Speaker 1: the spot and basically like the spot we start out
Speaker 1: where we land and we're just laying on a gravel
Speaker 1: bar in the river and we're about to get a
Speaker 1: sense of this. We landed probably not probably then we
Speaker 1: landed at thirty five ft above sea level the surrounding
Speaker 1: peaks or seven or so, the very very highest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're about five, well six to seven river miles
Speaker 1: to what would be the head of this stream we
Speaker 1: land on the streaming landing has a big wide gravel bar.
Speaker 1: What do you call that, dan, big white gravel bar
Speaker 1: like the whole bed. How do you describe that bed? Oh,
Speaker 1: I'd like a braided river bed. Braided river bed that's
Speaker 1: a couple hundred yards wide. Um, and usually the it's braided.
Speaker 1: I mean usually the channel is occurring in multiple places.
Speaker 1: So it's got this big, like this big broad gravelly
Speaker 1: thing and everything's very shallow and just kind of meanders
Speaker 1: across and changes constantly, Like the channel gets rewritten every
Speaker 1: year from in most places that you know, any most
Speaker 1: spots along that river, the channels in you know, two
Speaker 1: or three places at once. You know, it's never in
Speaker 1: as rarely is it in a single channel. And to
Speaker 1: get a sense for it, like you'd cross it. When
Speaker 1: you got across, it's about hip deep and hall and
Speaker 1: ass knee deep and haul and ass. Yeah, when you
Speaker 1: got across the main channel. It fluctuates a lot though.
Speaker 1: That surprised me. Yeah, it's like someone it's like God
Speaker 1: dicking with the water belve in a shower because like
Speaker 1: over today, the glaciers are melting fast tons of water.
Speaker 1: It rains somewhere but not here, tons of water, and
Speaker 1: the silt load goes up and down where it looks
Speaker 1: like chocolate milk. Then it's clear chocolm milk, clear chocolate milk, clear,
Speaker 1: up down, up, down, changes constantly. UM. And we're like
Speaker 1: seven miles from the head of this thing. And this
Speaker 1: thing's headed by this probably has like three heads. Right,
Speaker 1: you go kind of like two two main channels of
Speaker 1: feed into it, and we're we get dropped off about
Speaker 1: seven miles from the head of these from the head
Speaker 1: of these two things. And the first day here here's
Speaker 1: another rule in Alaska. It gets thrown out a lot.
Speaker 1: You can't hunt with some exceptions. There are exceptions to this.
Speaker 1: Most of the exceptions are around deer in southeast Alaska
Speaker 1: and some caribou units. You can't hunt in the same
Speaker 1: day you fly in Alaska, preventing you um on a
Speaker 1: non scheduled flight. If you fly in a jet into
Speaker 1: somewhere you know that's a or even a smaller plane.
Speaker 1: If it's a scheduled flight you know, into wherever. Uh,
Speaker 1: that doesn't count. But but a charter or your own
Speaker 1: plane or whatever, the same day you've been airborn, you
Speaker 1: cannot hunt, and that speaks to um, what they're trying
Speaker 1: to prevent one from being able to do is I
Speaker 1: didn't find an animal from the air and land a
Speaker 1: plane and go shoot it. Instead, you got to find
Speaker 1: it from the air, land a plane, wait until what
Speaker 1: three am? Wait until three am, and then you can go.
Speaker 1: And the reason, like a lot of states have legal
Speaker 1: shooting hours, um, legal hunting hours, but you know, because
Speaker 1: of the peculiarities of at this latitude, the peculiarities of
Speaker 1: day length. Alaska doesn't do legal shooting hours with sunset
Speaker 1: sunrise except for waterfowl. Yeah, that's I think I assume
Speaker 1: that's federally mandated. When you land, you gotta wait, like
Speaker 1: because even if you're hunting, you could be hunting the
Speaker 1: very early season when it's twenty four hours a daylight.
Speaker 1: So it's not like you gotta wait till it gets
Speaker 1: dark and lighting or whatever. It's like three am. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that which darkest, even though it could just be dusky
Speaker 1: all night, like you can still see like when you
Speaker 1: wake up, even just now, when you wake up in
Speaker 1: the middle of night to go take a leak, you
Speaker 1: can check around for bears. Yeah, it's not that dark Matt.
Speaker 1: Matt and I have watched sheep all night long. We've
Speaker 1: kept tabs on sheep throughout the night, and never, you know,
Speaker 1: he would leave the spot ands go up on him.
Speaker 1: It never got so dark that you couldn't tell that
Speaker 1: they were there. Yeah, Mber that time caribou hunting. Matt
Speaker 1: went wandering way off and shot a bowl way off somewhere. Oh,
Speaker 1: he's gone late, butcher's it, he says. It starts to
Speaker 1: get kind of dark. He sits down for a while,
Speaker 1: it gets light. He said, Well, I guess it just
Speaker 1: stayed out all night and it comes wandering into camp
Speaker 1: three thirty in the morning. I think I do this
Speaker 1: out overnight. We kept the ripper could the big old
Speaker 1: fire going for him to thinking he was lost out,
Speaker 1: thinking he was lost out in the tundra. I'm so
Speaker 1: worried about him. Um, that was pretty like having GPS
Speaker 1: units and one yeah, and in reaches and no. I
Speaker 1: think he might have had GPS was before I remember
Speaker 1: his navigation thing was this. That's right. We were camped
Speaker 1: at the confluence, so he knew he was going up
Speaker 1: with water flowing back towards camp on the right side,
Speaker 1: and water flowing back toward the camp on the left side,
Speaker 1: and they eventually met at a V and he was
Speaker 1: canceled that V. So he said he knew he could
Speaker 1: wander around anywhere as long as he followed water, he
Speaker 1: would not as good. As long as he didn't cross
Speaker 1: the river and followed the water, he knew that he
Speaker 1: would come back and land back and camp. That's safe.
Speaker 1: Remember that same trip, Remember that grizzly come up the
Speaker 1: other bank and starts waiting across the river. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: And Matt went out in his waiters and tried to
Speaker 1: scare it back up, scared back up in the air bank.
Speaker 1: What happened? Bear took off. Um, that was my good
Speaker 1: optics epiphany that I've talked about many times. Where we
Speaker 1: had a dude who had just come off a guide
Speaker 1: and our body chunk could just come off a guide
Speaker 1: and for moose on the peninsula or something, or had
Speaker 1: the year before and had been given some good spotting
Speaker 1: scopes and binoculars, and I've always had shitty ones. And
Speaker 1: we were watching the grizzly coming up, and I'm looking
Speaker 1: through his spot and sculpe and you can see the
Speaker 1: wind hit its side and make this little colic that
Speaker 1: kind of drifted around on his body and the breeze
Speaker 1: and I'm like, I'm getting some of these sons. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we landed. So we lent this river like what
Speaker 1: I think about six miles to the head of this thing. Then, Oh,
Speaker 1: I was getting how you can't hunt the same day fly?
Speaker 1: So because LEVI was the six guy in, he couldn't.
Speaker 1: A careful reading of the rule would be that he
Speaker 1: can't even hunt with us. I can't assist. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: by hanging out, by hanging out if he's like, hey,
Speaker 1: what's that white thing? Yeah, yeah, so he's ineligible to
Speaker 1: hunt the first day we get in. So we do
Speaker 1: like a little short John short being relevant, I feel
Speaker 1: like it was a John. We decided to hit a tributary,
Speaker 1: the first tributary upstream from our camp. We decided to
Speaker 1: explore out the tributary, and so we walked it from
Speaker 1: thirty five the mouth of that tributaries three thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred feet and we started this tributary in the rain
Speaker 1: and climb maybe a thousand feet and then you can't
Speaker 1: see anything where your visibility is hundred yards um now,
Speaker 1: and then you get a little pockets where you can see,
Speaker 1: and I think we sat there. We set up a
Speaker 1: tarp in the rain, and there's no sets of plowing
Speaker 1: through a place you haven't seen yet. When you're in
Speaker 1: the right kind of country, you can't just plow through
Speaker 1: in the fog because you're not doing yourself any good.
Speaker 1: And we sat there for four hours. I think took
Speaker 1: a napp shivered, sat there under a tarp for four hours.
Speaker 1: Event she started to get a little bit clear, and
Speaker 1: we climbed up to a saddle that was att waited
Speaker 1: a while, got a couple of open windows in the
Speaker 1: fog to look down the next valley. I feel like
Speaker 1: we should plug the try that Sam Bartiya, Dude, I
Speaker 1: love that freaking tea man. Remy turned me out of
Speaker 1: that tea. Yeah, yeah right. There's a tea company talk
Speaker 1: about giving away the goods for free. Man, it's a
Speaker 1: tea company called Kobak. Not even for freaking charge a
Speaker 1: lot of money for that damn t Kobak something tea
Speaker 1: company you're giving away to plug for free to them.
Speaker 1: But I feel like you're sharing value. I'm sharing valuable information,
Speaker 1: but I'm only I'm doing it with the only the
Speaker 1: one hesitation that it just doesn't make sense how much
Speaker 1: they charged for the decaf version. Oh, sand bar stuff
Speaker 1: you guys are drinking was caffeinated, No, caffeinated as normal.
Speaker 1: Price decalf is twice as much. But I'd like to
Speaker 1: drink it at night as my hot drink. What's the
Speaker 1: process that makes it? Why they washed it with chemicals?
Speaker 1: Mhm danger, Yeah, yeah, don't eat it. Danny got swollen
Speaker 1: uvla maybe from eating the teeth. Yeah, Sandbar teeth from
Speaker 1: cobal Tea called me is the best ship in the world. Man,
Speaker 1: good man, Um, it's like, I don't know. It's like
Speaker 1: it's got all kinds of stuff in it. Man, it's
Speaker 1: got cloves in it, cinnamon, cinnamon in it. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is good. You had a spicy thing when you
Speaker 1: bit into it that one time you'd like a pepper
Speaker 1: corn or some well, someone from the Thai restaurant must
Speaker 1: have been over there, and it's like one of the
Speaker 1: little freaking peppers there just to screw somebody. It was.
Speaker 1: It was had a cinnamon flavor to it, but it
Speaker 1: was way hotter than eating like a pizza cinnamon. So
Speaker 1: I don't know what that was. You practically broke a
Speaker 1: sweat and I can handle some hot food. But that
Speaker 1: was insane. I don't even know what's in that ship man.
Speaker 1: But you buy at the Anchorage airport and up top
Speaker 1: they got the caffey and don low they got a
Speaker 1: little air with the decap. They charged too much for
Speaker 1: the decap to the point where to the point where
Speaker 1: after I got turned onto it, I went online and
Speaker 1: on their website to buy something and was so insulted
Speaker 1: by the price that I didn't because I'm like, what
Speaker 1: am I like growing up? When I was growing up,
Speaker 1: someone said to me, someday you will buy really expensive
Speaker 1: te online, I would be like bullsh Well, I'm saying
Speaker 1: they're drinking a bottle of Boone's fire from the shower,
Speaker 1: coming back from coming back from Weldon Weldon raw iron
Speaker 1: droppers to hang like conveyor lines on um. If you
Speaker 1: had told me someday, Sonny, you'll be buying little several
Speaker 1: three oun bags of tea for thirteen bucks online, out
Speaker 1: of punching the face. So I'll buy in the airport.
Speaker 1: Because if someone said, like, someday you'll buy a bag
Speaker 1: of tena airport, I've sure I don't know that's okay.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have been I wouldn't have been like nervous
Speaker 1: about that revelation. So I can't bring myself to buy
Speaker 1: it online. Um, but yeah, that's it's good. Hits the spot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: up on this saddle. We're trying to weigh out, um,
Speaker 1: whether to sleep there or head back down? Sleep there,
Speaker 1: thinking in the morning you might get a better view.
Speaker 1: It wasn't like nine o'clock or ten. It's late. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't get dark til ten thirty, doesn't get dusky
Speaker 1: till ten thirty at night. And then but yeah, I
Speaker 1: can't tell what the hell time he gets light in
Speaker 1: the morning. Yeah, six, I guess it gets light at six.
Speaker 1: I felt like you had to use the headlamp from
Speaker 1: about ten thirty and till five, depending on what you're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you need it. Yeah, here's what I got to
Speaker 1: grab a ball. You didn't need it, but like fidget
Speaker 1: around camp and looking at your backpack. Yeah, um, no
Speaker 1: sign of sheep up there. Not that day. I couldn't
Speaker 1: really see that well though, right, But also signed, Yeah,
Speaker 1: those ridge often on those ridge we saw him in
Speaker 1: a few places. But on those ridge lines was you'll
Speaker 1: see a little beds where they kick out a little bowl,
Speaker 1: you know, and didn't see any beds, didn't se any
Speaker 1: fresh tracks, decided not to sleep up there, um drop
Speaker 1: back down and then walked in that that's said, which
Speaker 1: said was fifty ft back down to our little base camp.
Speaker 1: And Levi had come in that day so he was
Speaker 1: eligible to be out with us the next morning. The
Speaker 1: next morning we headed up to go explore the headwaters
Speaker 1: of this river that we're on. Dirtmth river, dirt, it's unnamed,
Speaker 1: no joke, I'm not being like, I'm not being cooit.
Speaker 1: The river has no name. This It's amazing that there
Speaker 1: are rivers in Alaska, Like any river that size in
Speaker 1: lower forty eight would have a road on it during
Speaker 1: thes No river that size and lower forty eight that
Speaker 1: doesn't have a roadhould say, know, but very few rivers
Speaker 1: that size and lower forty eight would not be would
Speaker 1: not have a road in the bottom of them, dude,
Speaker 1: even like little trickles have got names down in the
Speaker 1: forty eight. You know, here there's rivers in Alaska big
Speaker 1: enough to take a boat down with no name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and those a lot of the smaller rivers that do
Speaker 1: have a name, they're all like mine related, you know,
Speaker 1: like mother Load Creek or or uh gold Finger flu Creator,
Speaker 1: bankrupt Creem, Yeah, hard Luck Creek, so uh um dirt Yeah,
Speaker 1: we go up Dirtmith Creek and we decided to explore
Speaker 1: first the right branch and that day that that's the
Speaker 1: day you know, we saw using lambs that day. So
Speaker 1: think about yeah by camps, I think about doll sheep
Speaker 1: is maybe maybe Danny knows what the answer to this is.
Speaker 1: Lands and us get the good spotts, they get the
Speaker 1: rich feed, you know, yeah, I mean they get the
Speaker 1: cush location. Yeah. I don't think they're excluding the rams.
Speaker 1: I I you know, I assume it's that those Is
Speaker 1: that that the that the lambs, you know, growing so
Speaker 1: rapidly at that point in their life, need that you know,
Speaker 1: highly digestible, high protein, really green diet. That's that's that
Speaker 1: doesn't require a lot of effort to get. You know,
Speaker 1: it's stick, it's lush, and and you know, the the
Speaker 1: rams can afford to be you know, a higher where
Speaker 1: there's just not as much food because they're not actively
Speaker 1: growing so fast, so they're taking the security. I'm just
Speaker 1: intuning that. Well. I heard a guy one time, stay
Speaker 1: this and I don't like because it makes the rams
Speaker 1: sound altruistic. But first of all, I say this so
Speaker 1: so running for dollsheet. Ovis Dolly. I think it's how
Speaker 1: you say it, like Salvador Dolly the painter, but it's
Speaker 1: Ovis And Doll was a natural US and explorer got
Speaker 1: the sheep named after himself. Um. Interestingly, Doll named the
Speaker 1: Alaska Range. He named the Alaskan Range and it became
Speaker 1: the Alaska Range. But the dude whose name was given
Speaker 1: to the doll sheet is the guy that named the
Speaker 1: Alaska Range. And the doll sheep is a pure white
Speaker 1: mountain sheet, big curly horns like a big horn. Um.
Speaker 1: You know. They run late actorally November, hang out up
Speaker 1: around the glaze like they're like in the imagination. They're
Speaker 1: associated with the rockiest, nastiest, highest, most glaciated stuff, Like
Speaker 1: they there's the highest mammal on the mountain, the highest
Speaker 1: hooved right. Well, you see caribou up in there sometimes too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like for a year round living though. They
Speaker 1: eke out an existence up there, and they don't migrate
Speaker 1: down to the low country when the snow flies. They
Speaker 1: gotta beyond the wind swept they stay up in the windswevery.
Speaker 1: They they don't find they don't wind up living down
Speaker 1: in some dudes alf alpha field or like down in
Speaker 1: the valley bottoms. They stay up and they're just they
Speaker 1: live up. Yeah, yeah, but there's some interesting exceptions too though.
Speaker 1: I mean they're always on you know, they need to
Speaker 1: have escape covered nearby. They're always in rocky, you know,
Speaker 1: craggy terrain. But like you know, you drive down turning
Speaker 1: an arms off the anchorage and you know you're at
Speaker 1: sea level and you can look up a few hundred
Speaker 1: yards sometimes on the highway there at Dollar Sheep there,
Speaker 1: you know, and so in that in that circumstance, you're
Speaker 1: not high up, but you got the rocky nous and
Speaker 1: the cragginess that they Yeah, so they don't care about
Speaker 1: the number that they don't necessarily care about the elevation number.
Speaker 1: It's just like what you go hand in hand, where
Speaker 1: is that where they're preferred habitat happens to exist in
Speaker 1: those areas. Um, but we see a bunch of using lambs,
Speaker 1: and using lambs are kind of predictable because like if
Speaker 1: you see like a whole yo, you see like a
Speaker 1: dozen animals laying in kind of a meadow meadowy bowl
Speaker 1: up on a mountain side. You just know like like
Speaker 1: that's lambs and us. Yeah, it's real green and lush
Speaker 1: like there. Like that gives it away. And also the
Speaker 1: whole the number of them, because you can find big
Speaker 1: groups of rams. But like when you see like a
Speaker 1: dozen of something laying in a really green patch, like
Speaker 1: that's lambs and news um. But as we and we
Speaker 1: saw some lambs used in the morning. But as we
Speaker 1: press up, we see a single sheep way ahead of us,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking ram only because he's by himself. He's
Speaker 1: laying in a U spot. But there's only one of them.
Speaker 1: And eventually we get up there and find that it's
Speaker 1: a way not legal ram, a legal RAM in Alaska.
Speaker 1: Is this universal or are there still any RAM units? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's at least Yeah, part of a big chunk of
Speaker 1: the chewcatch a few years back went to from from
Speaker 1: you know, basically over the counter to a lottery and
Speaker 1: and in that unit they went to that lottery tag.
Speaker 1: Now they went to any RAM. Tell us why, because
Speaker 1: I was, yeah, that's interesting stuff. But there's this hypothesis.
Speaker 1: I guess it probably is or maybe there's don't say
Speaker 1: that yet, Okay, layout what illegal ramas and then talk
Speaker 1: about the hypothesis. So, yeah, so legal ramas is a well,
Speaker 1: it's a full curl ram. And so that's a ram
Speaker 1: whose horn has grown three sixty degrees from the base
Speaker 1: to the tip um or is eight years of age.
Speaker 1: So you would see eight growth annually that are formed
Speaker 1: each winter of the rams life um or if the
Speaker 1: both horns are broken off um I mean substantially broken
Speaker 1: such that the whole the whole lamb tip the first
Speaker 1: year of growth is absent from the horn and they grind,
Speaker 1: they scrape them off and break them off. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's the mark of an old ram am. And
Speaker 1: you know it's so you know, a ram with two
Speaker 1: broken horns is certainly is well, it's very unlikely to
Speaker 1: be full curl, but it's certainly going to be old.
Speaker 1: So they've kind of um that. That's another way you
Speaker 1: can and those are those are still pretty rare though.
Speaker 1: Double broomers I haven't laid eyes on a double broom do.
Speaker 1: And then like big horns, virtually all of the double
Speaker 1: broom they get to a certain size. So those are
Speaker 1: the three ways to make a legal ram the most
Speaker 1: the most reliable ways, it is a full curl. You
Speaker 1: look at the side, the horn should form a six
Speaker 1: degree circle. Yeah, from the from the right angle, so
Speaker 1: when when when you're at the right angle, yeah, that
Speaker 1: that horn should be perfectly round. If you're too high
Speaker 1: or too low, it should be more of an oval
Speaker 1: oblong shape. As your sort of perspective on the horn changes,
Speaker 1: So when you're looking at exactly you know, think of
Speaker 1: it as a helix. And when you're looking straight down
Speaker 1: that helix, the perimeter of the horn should be perfectly round,
Speaker 1: and the tips should come swing all the way around
Speaker 1: and meet the base or exceed the base, and that
Speaker 1: would be the mark of full curl ram. There was
Speaker 1: cool tips that you pointed out as far as the
Speaker 1: angle and stuff of it coming out of this goal.
Speaker 1: Because looking dead on at you, yeah or no, no,
Speaker 1: when we when our perspective was elliptical, and it looked
Speaker 1: like a full curl maybe, and looking from down looking
Speaker 1: from down below, they look for the not full curl.
Speaker 1: Lamp ram looks for a curl when you're looking from
Speaker 1: down below. But you pointed out the angle at which
Speaker 1: the curl starts can be somewhat uh a clue at
Speaker 1: older that they look on a younger ram, it's not
Speaker 1: as like it looks more swept back up top, you know,
Speaker 1: I think I think that probably has something to do
Speaker 1: with the mass. But it looks like it like sweeps
Speaker 1: back in a more abrupt fashion. I because it just
Speaker 1: hasn't got as like heavy up top yet or something.
Speaker 1: You know, it hasn't achieved like its biggest diama because
Speaker 1: that's where it's growing from. So it seemed to have
Speaker 1: like it's like like he's been running real fast and
Speaker 1: it kind of mashes horn. The angle of the tip
Speaker 1: is telling too, because you know, the younger ram it's
Speaker 1: pointing more forward and as that curls more, it's you know,
Speaker 1: eventually it's pointing you know, more backwards or out, depending
Speaker 1: on the sort of configuration of the horn. So talking
Speaker 1: about talking about this area, they went any ram like
Speaker 1: talk about the thinking that might guide that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know all the you know, the details on up,
Speaker 1: but there's um, you know, there's there's this notion and
Speaker 1: it applies to you know, fish and wildlife and any
Speaker 1: managed species that if you are non randomly harvesting animals
Speaker 1: that you can potentially you know, he had the potential
Speaker 1: to drive sort of artificial selection, you know, against her
Speaker 1: for some natural feature, right and so, and some people
Speaker 1: think this is a laughable idea. Is really you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's certainly said. They think it's thousands of years. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: I know the fish literature a lot better. But you know,
Speaker 1: uh like size at maturity and fish, you know, a
Speaker 1: few a few generations in the lab of of artificially
Speaker 1: selecting the smallest breeders, you can drive size of maturity
Speaker 1: down and just a few generations. Yeah, I was saying,
Speaker 1: not me, I don't know if about it to have
Speaker 1: a good opinion by saying some people I'm they're talking
Speaker 1: about like do you are by by just picking big bucks?
Speaker 1: There's about white tails? Are you driving down white tail size? If?
Speaker 1: But to the extent, to the extent that it's genetic
Speaker 1: and not environment the potentials there, Yeah, but no, I
Speaker 1: think I don't think anyone. I don't think anyone argues
Speaker 1: the potential. But I think you'll say to effect, you
Speaker 1: would it would take thousands of years to affect that change.
Speaker 1: I think people are starting to realize a lot of
Speaker 1: evolution have it's a lot faster than I mean, this
Speaker 1: is an instance of evolution. And I think I think
Speaker 1: that you know, in recent years, people are starting to
Speaker 1: realize that evolution happens a lot faster than potentially than
Speaker 1: what you know, like the former sort of gradualism notion
Speaker 1: of evolution is. You know, that's what I crack up
Speaker 1: when people like are like, I don't believe in evolution,
Speaker 1: Like so you don't believe that if I went killed
Speaker 1: every adult that was over five feet, then you would
Speaker 1: see a movement towards shorter adults over time. Or you
Speaker 1: don't believe that corn us to be real small now
Speaker 1: it's big, or how about how about how about pesticide
Speaker 1: resistant uh insects? And yeah, yeah, so anyway, there's this
Speaker 1: notion that by you know, having a full curl regulation
Speaker 1: and effect, that you're selectively cropping off the rams with
Speaker 1: the greatest horn growth potential or those that have a
Speaker 1: horn configuration that tends to grow and a full curl. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, there are plenty of mature rams running around.
Speaker 1: They just and their horn grows in such a way
Speaker 1: that it doesn't curl into a curl. And I think
Speaker 1: the first three doll rams I don't know. The first
Speaker 1: of like the first gang of doll rams that you,
Speaker 1: me and Matt killed were all eight, none were full curl.
Speaker 1: That Matt's had a full curl. Matt's had one full
Speaker 1: curl horn that broke when it fell. Um My very
Speaker 1: first ram had one full curl horn. But you, yeah,
Speaker 1: you and I when we shot two rams together, they
Speaker 1: were both eight or older, and neither of them were
Speaker 1: full curl. And then really the guy that checked mine
Speaker 1: in wrote it down as full curl. Interesting, obviously not
Speaker 1: full curl, but obviously eight years. Yeah, there's there's some
Speaker 1: interesting judgment costs we made there to excessing people down
Speaker 1: at department fishing game haggling over age and full curl
Speaker 1: or not. And you know when you skip those horns
Speaker 1: checked and they're they're having a very hard time coming
Speaker 1: to consensus on some of those attributes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So the Onny way, there's this notion that yeah, if
Speaker 1: you are, if you're you know, if you're cropping off
Speaker 1: all the horns that are growing to a full curl,
Speaker 1: that you're started driving the genetic genetics away from that
Speaker 1: type of horn configuration. And so, um, my understanding is
Speaker 1: that that that helps you catch any RAM. Uh set
Speaker 1: up was and and sort of an experiment to see,
Speaker 1: you know what the fact that's having and so giving
Speaker 1: a second, are you doing okay over there? It's like
Speaker 1: you're generating so much noise over there? You're right? Do
Speaker 1: you do unplug? You go ahead? So when they yeah,
Speaker 1: so when they when they went to that lottery, when
Speaker 1: they went to that lottery system, they just said, okay,
Speaker 1: let's just have a lottery and because let's let's try
Speaker 1: in any RAM scenario to alleviate that selective pressure um
Speaker 1: against a full curl or horn configuration. But then the
Speaker 1: harvest rate is gonna go way up, so we're gonna
Speaker 1: need to limit the amount of participation. And so they
Speaker 1: put a lottery on. Yeah. Yeah, And so I haven't
Speaker 1: been following that. I don't know what the you know,
Speaker 1: they're just certainly people at Laska Department Efficient Games looking
Speaker 1: talk very intelligently about that. Here, here's the here's the
Speaker 1: case example from the frank Church area and Idaho with bighorns.
Speaker 1: And again, like a regulation change will happen, and oftentimes
Speaker 1: they don't, like a state department will change a regulation
Speaker 1: and they don't say, here's why we're changing the regulation.
Speaker 1: Just the regulation changes and people are left to speculate
Speaker 1: about why it was the regulation. That's that's poor outreach there,
Speaker 1: I know, but it happens in like the case example
Speaker 1: of the guy a guy. We often get questions about this,
Speaker 1: why is it illegal for a nonresident to hunt in
Speaker 1: a wilderness area in Wyoming for big game without a guide? Okay,
Speaker 1: so if you're a nonresident Whoming you want to hunt
Speaker 1: a wilderness there, you have to hire a guide. I
Speaker 1: recently was asking some people that work at the state,
Speaker 1: like state employees, for like, hey, how did this rule
Speaker 1: come to be and what are sort of the decisions
Speaker 1: that were made? And they were demonstrating to me that
Speaker 1: or the stuff I looked at. And also what everybody
Speaker 1: says is it's like it's a service. The guiding industry
Speaker 1: has been driven by the guiding industry, right I could
Speaker 1: I could see jumping to that conclusion. Yeah, but there's
Speaker 1: no articulation of it anywhere as do they talk about safety.
Speaker 1: Same here. Yeah, that's that's I think that's the sort
Speaker 1: of the stated rationale for the guide requirement for grizzlies
Speaker 1: mountain goat mountain chief. But it has me to protect
Speaker 1: the industry, which is fine. But here's the thing with
Speaker 1: the Frank Church is they felt that they had a
Speaker 1: three quarters There was a big horn unit and it
Speaker 1: had to be a three quarter curl. So on a
Speaker 1: big horn, a way to tell three quarter curls you
Speaker 1: gotta take from the base of the horn and draw
Speaker 1: a line through the corner of the eye and if
Speaker 1: that line hits horn, that's a three quarter curl ram.
Speaker 1: They felt and is very very rugged, very very remote area,
Speaker 1: that there were too many cases of people in the
Speaker 1: back country making a bad call in killing rams that
Speaker 1: weren't legal and then not reporting it. This is what
Speaker 1: I heard, And so they just went to any ram
Speaker 1: thing to try to cut back on unreported mortality of
Speaker 1: rams because it was areas just too hard to police,
Speaker 1: too hard to monitor. Yeah, so that they presumably had
Speaker 1: looked restrict the number of permits at the point, but
Speaker 1: it was that's what I heard, like a problem, and
Speaker 1: I heard dad from a guy who guided the area
Speaker 1: that was his that was his understanding of what was
Speaker 1: going on. They fell as putting people in too much
Speaker 1: of a bind. So we walk up this thing and
Speaker 1: find this ram would be good on obviously not illegal
Speaker 1: ramp um does that morning we run it spent the
Speaker 1: night ran into a grizzly blonde, blond blonde, grizzly blonde,
Speaker 1: long hair, gorgeous, we're so long and shaggy. She looked
Speaker 1: almost What did I say? I thought it looked like
Speaker 1: something dead when it was sleeping. Yeah, I thought it
Speaker 1: looked like a old rotten because it was hagley like
Speaker 1: it was yack like, yeah, a blow in the wind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looked like I think our initial I guess was
Speaker 1: it was a dead caribou laying there inside of the hill.
Speaker 1: When Yanni told me he sees something, but it was
Speaker 1: funny because he's like, I see something like two little
Speaker 1: black things bobbing around by it. And I looked through
Speaker 1: my binocular is and I think I'm looking at something
Speaker 1: dead and mostly decayed, just because the way that was
Speaker 1: so disheveled. And he says, yeah, there's two black things
Speaker 1: moving around on it. And in my head, I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: it's gotta be those ravens feeding on some long dead
Speaker 1: caribou carcass. And it's kind of like looks like a
Speaker 1: bunch of hair scattered around, when in fact, it's a
Speaker 1: blond sow with two little very dark almost black cubs,
Speaker 1: which I hadn't seen that color difference. Yeah, striking. That's
Speaker 1: the thing people saying judging grizzlies like an interior ones
Speaker 1: is uh, Oftentimes the bigger males are darker brown and
Speaker 1: the female. That's not true in all cases. It's like
Speaker 1: it's like with with grizzlies, everything's like tends to right,
Speaker 1: tends to this, tends to that that. Oftentimes you find
Speaker 1: that the big males are darker brown, and oftentimes you
Speaker 1: find those real blond ones or females when you get
Speaker 1: the maturity. But she was blond, beautiful. Man just chow
Speaker 1: and the blueberries party mode. They eat them like they're
Speaker 1: pissed at them. They eat them like they're going to
Speaker 1: get away, like their exacting revenge on blueberries. Man and
Speaker 1: wash over. Quite a while feeding around, cubs were sleeping.
Speaker 1: Cubs kept taking naps, and they just take naps wherever
Speaker 1: they see fit Man, And then she took a nap
Speaker 1: short power naps. Yeah, they take power naps just wherever. Man.
Speaker 1: But I think they were napping too because it was
Speaker 1: like a little break in the weather and they were
Speaker 1: just like curl up. They'd kind of snuggle, they'd like spoon,
Speaker 1: and that's hour. She would take a little nap now
Speaker 1: and then just lay down wherever she happened to be,
Speaker 1: just lay down midstride and kind of doze. Me and
Speaker 1: Chris were saying it was cool observing that scene because
Speaker 1: that was the first grizz we've seen since a fog nack.
Speaker 1: Just kind of a nice, peaceful cleansing. Man. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: can appreciate grizzlies again and not be terrified. Yeah. Good.
Speaker 1: It's like when I get all mad at my kids
Speaker 1: and I'm yelling at them all the time, and I'll
Speaker 1: feel bad later and I'll go and give them big snug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got snug by that. It was a cute scene. Man,
Speaker 1: those clubs napping and that sud is kind of cruising around.
Speaker 1: It's hard to picture that. They just have such a ferocity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can picture, dude, if you walked up, If she's
Speaker 1: sleeping and those cubs are sleeping fifty yards away and
Speaker 1: you watched up, you walked up and grab one of
Speaker 1: those things, you can imagine her response. Man. Well, if
Speaker 1: we were on that side of the drainage, the wind,
Speaker 1: the wind was blowing in such a way that we
Speaker 1: could have popped up on him unexpectedly. I feel like
Speaker 1: they have been a good move man in this area
Speaker 1: is just pock marked with where they're digging up ground
Speaker 1: squirrels ship when they put a lot of energy and
Speaker 1: oh my god, dude, some of the ground that they
Speaker 1: dug up was insane. The sun little that they're just like,
Speaker 1: they'll dig holes big enough for you to climb into.
Speaker 1: The most surprising thing was the altitude that they were
Speaker 1: digging those things up at you. You know, you're like
Speaker 1: six thousand feet and they're still throwing boulders and it's
Speaker 1: just little snacks like they're up there for like it's
Speaker 1: like they got other for no really, no other reason
Speaker 1: to dig up marmots and dig up ground squirrels and
Speaker 1: dig holes like like I said, like foxholes. You can
Speaker 1: climb down into him. Can you imagine being that ground
Speaker 1: squirrel and I got nothing, nothing, dude. If you could imagine,
Speaker 1: if like a Peter person, right, you could witness that
Speaker 1: spectacle that they'd be so anti grizzly because the horror
Speaker 1: of that little ground squirrel family. Oh yeah, tucked away,
Speaker 1: keep his corner and they know that that thing just
Speaker 1: out there like throwing out head sized boulders and then
Speaker 1: eats them all alive. Yeah, that little squirrel family is
Speaker 1: just living out a children's story at children's fairy tale,
Speaker 1: laying in a little beds and the next thing, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just the roof of the house comes off them,
Speaker 1: swallows them all. And we watched them eat them. They
Speaker 1: eat them alive. They just grab them and throw their
Speaker 1: head back. Yeah, and that thing alive down the belly
Speaker 1: be like digested juices. Yeah, it's like Jonah the whale man.
Speaker 1: You know what Jonah Whale is there? Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you had Bible learning now, I was raised Catholic.
Speaker 1: Good for you. Um, yeah, she was eating berries though.
Speaker 1: We slept for the night tented out, and the next
Speaker 1: day I look up above camp and lo and behold
Speaker 1: a bunch of rams, but no freaking legal rams. Was
Speaker 1: four or three? That was two, three, four or five
Speaker 1: and six number one being the one youngster, the one
Speaker 1: youngster that was living on the u Lamb patch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: did he really liked And then five separate two four,
Speaker 1: and they later picked up a fifth. Yeah, two three, two, three,
Speaker 1: four and five rams number two, three, four five came
Speaker 1: rolling up above camp and we gave those good scrutinizing,
Speaker 1: and uh, they were kind of like really spread out
Speaker 1: in the age thing, you know, a few years old
Speaker 1: up to probably like seven enough for his ram looking
Speaker 1: from down below seems legal, but he's just like not
Speaker 1: you could. And I was like to give everything the
Speaker 1: band for the doubt, Like one time we talked about
Speaker 1: this for one time, me and you were hunt Mulder
Speaker 1: and here comes military that just gotten hit by a car.
Speaker 1: So as antler is, one of his antlers has busted off,
Speaker 1: but flopping down by his face. And when I first
Speaker 1: saw that, first thing out of my mouth was a
Speaker 1: buck of a lifetime because I give everything avant for
Speaker 1: the doubt. And I saw those times and I thought
Speaker 1: this must be a gigantic bus just and I realized, no,
Speaker 1: he's just a forky with I just saw. I saw
Speaker 1: he even had times by his jaw. You know. It's
Speaker 1: then I was like, oh, just a little buck to
Speaker 1: get hit by a car. Do doll sheep ever growing
Speaker 1: a non typical way or is it like you see
Speaker 1: something totally crazy, like just like a straight horn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just some weird I've never seen anything besides the fact
Speaker 1: that they snap them off and braid them off they
Speaker 1: like or some of them. Some of them kind of
Speaker 1: spiral out from the head and some of them, know,
Speaker 1: some swing more into the jaws. There was some asymmetry
Speaker 1: between left and rock. They seem to be even though
Speaker 1: scene one that was very like funky deformed didn't even
Speaker 1: have like a curl at all. It just kind of
Speaker 1: really came out and just down. It's just like this big.
Speaker 1: It could have been damaged at some point. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a big mass of horn, and so a photo of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: would that be sought after, just like you know shirt
Speaker 1: non typical sought after by me? The other side's legal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the uh I killed the second one I got um
Speaker 1: was broomed on one side and full spiral on the
Speaker 1: other side. Room because it broke. It's a braided I
Speaker 1: was not snapped. I got another one that snapped, but
Speaker 1: it didn't snap all the way. But you can grab
Speaker 1: the end. You can grab the end and wiggle it.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't an abrasion. I bess they probably always
Speaker 1: maybe not always, but I think they may might snap
Speaker 1: them and intebrate them. But it seems that they don't
Speaker 1: like is they don't like it in some rams don't
Speaker 1: like it in their peripheral vision, it seems, and so
Speaker 1: they'll work on them. I've even seen big horns scraping there.
Speaker 1: I've seen big horns on you know, the wild Horse
Speaker 1: Island with a new world record one came from. I've
Speaker 1: seen big horns out there, just scraping, scraping his horn.
Speaker 1: I also watched one but a tree I was, I
Speaker 1: was out there. I can't remember. I think I think
Speaker 1: he if I remember right, he rammed a tree. He
Speaker 1: rammed the Ponderosa pine seventy two times in a row. Yeah,
Speaker 1: bad day. I was just counting how many times he's
Speaker 1: doing it. I even went down and examined that pine
Speaker 1: when he got done and plucks some hairs out of it. Nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just kept he just was ramming the tree. It
Speaker 1: was like he's like in an insane asylum. Man, he
Speaker 1: stuck out. He's training. Is that what it is? It's
Speaker 1: just practiced for Then one time we were floating, we
Speaker 1: were floating the river hunting muled heer and I kept
Speaker 1: thinking someone shooting twenty two. I'm not, but you kept
Speaker 1: kept being like why what are they shooting at twenty
Speaker 1: two off up there? And then she realizes big horns.
Speaker 1: It was late October big or maybe early November and
Speaker 1: big they were in rout and the big horns are
Speaker 1: up there cracking heads. It sounds like we're going going off.
Speaker 1: That's story like a story always telling. My brother drew
Speaker 1: a big horn tag and we kept going down in
Speaker 1: this area to try to find sheep and couldn't find sheep.
Speaker 1: And I got to be like dismissive where I look
Speaker 1: up on this hill and I'm like, oh, it's Mulder
Speaker 1: way off on this mountain side. I'm like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: cut Mulder up there. And all of a sudden, two
Speaker 1: of these mules their stand up on their back feet,
Speaker 1: talk their front arms up, run at each other and
Speaker 1: smack heads. I'm like, oh my god, I want to
Speaker 1: see that bad. Yeah they do. They tuck their arms
Speaker 1: and remember that Mountain Dew commercial where there's a there's
Speaker 1: a dude who takes was it searched maybe it was
Speaker 1: surge and he takes a big goal of this soda
Speaker 1: pop and it Now you guys, uh, you like to dip,
Speaker 1: you like to spit juicepit in du bottles. No, I
Speaker 1: don't drink do because most guys dip. I noticed they
Speaker 1: really have a tendency to want to spit into a due.
Speaker 1: B just came up when we were talking about the
Speaker 1: redneck call guys they have to drink them mountain do
Speaker 1: and then they do the redneck and the rednecks come
Speaker 1: running in their direction. Uh where were we on sheet seeing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the band of rams man and I look at like,
Speaker 1: I said, I give everything the benefit of the doubt,
Speaker 1: you know, like I wanted to be legal, but it's
Speaker 1: just not legal. We got pretty close to him too.
Speaker 1: Later we got yeah, no, there's no doubt in my
Speaker 1: mind that we like. It's not one of those things
Speaker 1: where I'm like, man, I feel haunted. I remember hunt
Speaker 1: hunting dolls, sheep, but d any One time we'rehump with
Speaker 1: another buddy of ours and he put a stock on
Speaker 1: a ram, like we determined a ram, or like that
Speaker 1: ram is legal. He put a stock on the ram,
Speaker 1: got within rifle range, and comes back down the mountain.
Speaker 1: There's no shot. He's like, I don't think it's legal. Man.
Speaker 1: He had to leave, he had to take off, and
Speaker 1: we went and refound the thing all over again. We
Speaker 1: did a bunch of hunting first, couldn't couldn't find a
Speaker 1: bigger one, and like, oh, let's go back. And when
Speaker 1: we found that one and shot in those full ram
Speaker 1: so you found it, second guessed it, didn't think it
Speaker 1: was legal, and then someone else second guessed it. We
Speaker 1: were pretty convinced. It was harder than I expected. To
Speaker 1: be fair, that was a small ram. Yes, it's very
Speaker 1: small horned ram. Yeah, but he had a full crow horn. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you if you put one down, that is
Speaker 1: kind of right on the line of like legal, and
Speaker 1: then you go do you get it checked? Like what's
Speaker 1: your content? What are the consequences away from you? And
Speaker 1: I'd probably find you. Yeah. The last ram, the last ram,
Speaker 1: so I've only got like I've gotten too, So I
Speaker 1: say the last one, I mean the second doll ram
Speaker 1: I got was out of a special management area that
Speaker 1: has really big rams, and so there I was that
Speaker 1: had the luxury of a ram that was like well
Speaker 1: and excessive folk. I mean just you look at them,
Speaker 1: He's like that's some bitch way full curl right. Um,
Speaker 1: So then you all cocky when you go down to
Speaker 1: fishing game. So go down there and not having any
Speaker 1: apprehension about what you know, not having like even in
Speaker 1: the back of your head. There's no like, man, what
Speaker 1: are they gonna what if they write? And we get
Speaker 1: there and there's a dude checking a ram and they
Speaker 1: hold his ram and I come in the door. I'm
Speaker 1: thinking that think is that full curl? They hold his ram.
Speaker 1: A trooper comes in with another ram that he had confiscated.
Speaker 1: We're He goes to check a guy at an airstrip
Speaker 1: and he's like, do you get one? Yeah, I got one.
Speaker 1: Let me see the head. Oh, it's in the bottom
Speaker 1: of my pack, at which point he gets really interested
Speaker 1: to see the ramps. Not even kind of like this
Speaker 1: one's like, no argument you made for it. Finished check
Speaker 1: in my sheep. It's mandatory checker. You have to bring
Speaker 1: the head down to have a check. Finished check in
Speaker 1: my sheep. Here comes another couple of guys. They pull
Speaker 1: out a ram. I'm like, the way is that ram legal?
Speaker 1: And then the guys were already kind of getting like,
Speaker 1: you know, I didn't see where that one led, but
Speaker 1: they were already sort of in the seconds we had
Speaker 1: to look at it. They had you tell it wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna go well. For that guy. So it happens more
Speaker 1: often than you think. There was. I saw counting mine.
Speaker 1: There were four and three of them. Three of them
Speaker 1: one was not even under consideration. Two of them were
Speaker 1: like any I looked and I'm like, there's no way,
Speaker 1: And the and the guy in the biologists were definitely
Speaker 1: sort of on one head said we're holding it, one
Speaker 1: had already been confiscated, and one it wasn't going well
Speaker 1: for the guy. When they take that plug, that's that's
Speaker 1: the definitive like age thing, right, No, that plug is
Speaker 1: to market for uh, legal trafficking. When they plug it,
Speaker 1: they drill a hole and drive a plug into a
Speaker 1: metal what is that thing? A shell casing almost that
Speaker 1: they drow a hole and pounded in there. Yeah, just screen.
Speaker 1: You always got to look for it when you go
Speaker 1: to find it. Yeah, they put in a spot where
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to see, but it's got a
Speaker 1: number on it. Yeah. Think he's just proving that you,
Speaker 1: you know, had your rams and field and if you
Speaker 1: have you know, a fresh ram head in your possession
Speaker 1: about that plug in it, then that's trouble for you.
Speaker 1: So if they if they confiscated, what happens to the meat,
Speaker 1: they auction the they auction the heads off, and then
Speaker 1: the meat does go to waster. What do they do
Speaker 1: with it? I don't know what they do with that food? Banquit?
Speaker 1: Do you get any like hunting right restrictions if you
Speaker 1: shoot an illegal ram? Like? Do they like? Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a system, there's a there's a system in place that's
Speaker 1: people should know about. Um, there's a cooperative of states
Speaker 1: and it grows all the time where when you lose
Speaker 1: your hunting rights in one state. Yeah, for a while,
Speaker 1: it's like seven states in the West had this cooperative
Speaker 1: where if you lose your hunting rights in one state,
Speaker 1: you lose your hunting rights in the whole. And I
Speaker 1: think that that cooperative, you lose your rights in all
Speaker 1: states that are involved in the cooperative. And Yanni can
Speaker 1: maybe check us. I feel like it's up to like
Speaker 1: forty two states a lot, man, And I feel like
Speaker 1: I think I remember seeing that Texas isn't one of them.
Speaker 1: Texas isn't one of them. I think I've ever seen that.
Speaker 1: I could be wrong. We should check to make sure
Speaker 1: you might checking out? Yess that's interesting? So then all right, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, yes, But when you hear someone losing
Speaker 1: their hunting rights, it's agregious stuff. Oh so you could
Speaker 1: make a slip up and shoot like a seven year
Speaker 1: old ram, even if you think that you're not doing
Speaker 1: anything wrong. Bring it in and bring it in, right,
Speaker 1: You guys that lose their hunt rights, it's usually like
Speaker 1: like jit poaching, serial poachers, or you just did something,
Speaker 1: not like you made a mistake, but you did something
Speaker 1: like So I do remember a guy. I do remember
Speaker 1: a guy killing a grizzly. Did he mistook for a
Speaker 1: black beverybody? I think there was an attempt to cover up.
Speaker 1: I remember he had a ten dollar fine, seven years
Speaker 1: revocation of his hunting privileges. He was from Pennsylvania but
Speaker 1: lost his hunting privileges in a western state. And I remember,
Speaker 1: if I remember it was right when when Pennsylvania joined
Speaker 1: that that cooperative and I remember thinking, like, man, he
Speaker 1: came hunt at home? Noow man. But I think in
Speaker 1: that case too, I think that it involved some deception. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So is it fair to say that if you call yourself,
Speaker 1: you make a mistake, call in, report yourself, they're going
Speaker 1: to be more lenient on you. Or is that totally Yeah,
Speaker 1: like more lenient being. Yeah, just in terms like like
Speaker 1: in a relative sense, I would say, like yes, because
Speaker 1: there still has to be some punitive action, but you know,
Speaker 1: confiscation for sure, you might not get hit with finer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I can't really speak. I'm sure there's plenty
Speaker 1: of case scenarios look at. But I've had the conversation
Speaker 1: with quite a number of people, and everyone has always
Speaker 1: expressed to me that, um that that when you self report,
Speaker 1: it's a lot better for you, right the one you don't.
Speaker 1: And so like this dude that tried to hide the ram,
Speaker 1: and we actually got to talk to that trooper for
Speaker 1: a while. The guy that tried to hide the ram
Speaker 1: from the dude was seriously annoyed. Oh yeah, did you
Speaker 1: had to play that little game? I bet and he
Speaker 1: and we even I think I even asked him at
Speaker 1: the time. I'm almost certain I aske him at the time,
Speaker 1: Um if that like colors his impression of the case.
Speaker 1: And he was like absolutely, Man, when I got to
Speaker 1: like force you to let me look in backpack is
Speaker 1: a lot different than you let me look in your backpack. Right,
Speaker 1: there was a poacher at our around where we have
Speaker 1: a family cabinet, Seelye Swan night sniping big neely Bucks.
Speaker 1: I think I heard about this guy. He's from Pennsylvania. Okay,
Speaker 1: I didn't hear about this, but he got jail time.
Speaker 1: I mean it was bad enough, it was crazy. What
Speaker 1: states are trying to do now is since they're trying
Speaker 1: to do now, a thing that states do, and I
Speaker 1: think it's becoming a more popular idea, is trying to
Speaker 1: apply the right economic value to the resource that you've taken.
Speaker 1: Because it used to be that that you could shoot
Speaker 1: like a trophy bull elk, and it wasn't as you
Speaker 1: could poach a trophy bull elk, and the punishment would
Speaker 1: be worse if you stole someone's lawnmower out of their garage.
Speaker 1: Like so you can steal three lawnmower and it's you know,
Speaker 1: like this misdemeanor of fence that could come with potential
Speaker 1: a jail time. Right, But you can shoot a trophy
Speaker 1: bullell and we're just treating it like it's nothing. We're
Speaker 1: treating like it's just like essentially valueless entity. And you
Speaker 1: get like there's some of little slap on the wrist.
Speaker 1: So now when you're like there are several states possibly
Speaker 1: more that have gone in and said, like they apply
Speaker 1: the Boone and Crockett scoring system or take another scoring
Speaker 1: system and apply it to poached animals. And if you
Speaker 1: turn out to be like and it's trying to differentiate
Speaker 1: like your pot hunter from me from like someone who's
Speaker 1: like really going out to try to like harvest high
Speaker 1: end trophy animals and then coming in with a fine
Speaker 1: system if you're shooting like really valuable animals, like what
Speaker 1: does that animals value to the hunting community and what
Speaker 1: exactly have you stolen? You might have stolen something that's
Speaker 1: worth well that dude, that it should be treated as such,
Speaker 1: rather than you shot a cottontail rabbit out of season
Speaker 1: because it was getting into you know, yeah, just like that.
Speaker 1: It's not all the same thing that that guy in
Speaker 1: cuy Swan I was told or read that he poached
Speaker 1: enough big bucks that have did that entire regions genetics
Speaker 1: not genetics. But you know, they weren't breathing like he was.
Speaker 1: He was putting it. Put a hit on the who
Speaker 1: put a hit on the hunt? Yeah? Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: an interesting situation you're for Campbell in Kentucky where these
Speaker 1: guys were sneaking into the closed off areas on the base,
Speaker 1: like the impact areas, So like you know on any
Speaker 1: big military installation where you've got ranges and you know,
Speaker 1: aircraft ranges and things like that, we're shooting live ammunition. Basically,
Speaker 1: the backstops of those areas are just codd and like
Speaker 1: unexploded ordinance, and you just don't want to go back there.
Speaker 1: They're just completely closed off areas. So it ends up
Speaker 1: happening is he's you know, deer will never get hunted,
Speaker 1: and they live in those areas and they're licking like
Speaker 1: the sulfur off the rounds and stuff. They get huge, yeah, giant,
Speaker 1: giant racks with these guys who weren't in the military.
Speaker 1: They're just living outside the base. They were able to
Speaker 1: drive in through like one of the back gates, and
Speaker 1: they were sneaking into those areas that are full of
Speaker 1: like unexploded bombs and poaching year year round, and they
Speaker 1: got busted. They had like, you know, forty heads sitting
Speaker 1: in a barn somewhere in Kentucky with really interesting that
Speaker 1: they had like like parachutes um like flares, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, Like like stuck in their antlers, stuck
Speaker 1: in there stuck in their antlers and stuff. There's you know,
Speaker 1: photographs in the newspaper. They're just these really unique heads,
Speaker 1: bomb range bucks, all kinds of stuff all over their heads. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they got them all. I want to say, they
Speaker 1: got the seven year band. There's there's a I was
Speaker 1: talking to do a concert or like a game warden
Speaker 1: one time who was given a presentation and it was
Speaker 1: about his idea that the same he had this idea
Speaker 1: that was like there there's like cereal well put us
Speaker 1: a different way. He was adopting something that's well known
Speaker 1: in criminal criminology and applying it to poaching. What should
Speaker 1: be that you have serial criminals. So like like most
Speaker 1: law enforcement agencies, the FBI, they're they're focusing on like
Speaker 1: serial criminals, thinking that you could reduce by removing ten
Speaker 1: percent of the criminals, you could affect ninety scent of
Speaker 1: the crime. So that's why you put so much emphasis
Speaker 1: into like organized crime rings, because it winds up being
Speaker 1: there's like a ring of individuals and they're involved in extoration, prostitution,
Speaker 1: drug trafficking, auto theft, right, and if you can find
Speaker 1: these these core groups and take those groups down, you're
Speaker 1: doing more to eliminate theft than you are by going
Speaker 1: after all the petty individuals who are doing like onesies, twosies.
Speaker 1: And this guy had come to this opinion. He had
Speaker 1: all this data to back it up, the nine the
Speaker 1: ten percent of your poachers are doing your poaching, and
Speaker 1: and and he got into he was into this idea
Speaker 1: of like who are these individuals, what are their motivations,
Speaker 1: and what are their markers? And he was given presentations
Speaker 1: the other state agencies to try to describe what he
Speaker 1: would call super poachers, like what is their motivations? And
Speaker 1: um a thing he found again and again, it's like
Speaker 1: that they the garages and the sheds that they don't
Speaker 1: tell anyone about. They're just full of trophy animals, and
Speaker 1: they're motivated by the they're they're One of their main
Speaker 1: motivations is they have some criminal background. And one of
Speaker 1: their main motivations is a funk you to the state,
Speaker 1: like Freeman type, don't you you're not gonna be telling me?
Speaker 1: And they usually come out of some kind of that
Speaker 1: they usually have in their past, some kind of situation,
Speaker 1: they felt wronged, they've been in trouble with the cops,
Speaker 1: anti social and it's just like a point of pride
Speaker 1: for them to stick to. The man, I got all
Speaker 1: this stuff, don't you tell me what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1: I hate those type of people. Yeah, the ground and
Speaker 1: he had a lot of pictures the garages and storage
Speaker 1: sheds packed with antlers, like a weird form of little
Speaker 1: trophy room, the secret trophy room. The only I know
Speaker 1: about me and my brother or whatever know about you know.
Speaker 1: Quick update on the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact. That what
Speaker 1: it's called, and now there are forty eight members, including sex.
Speaker 1: The two that are not um Hawaii and Massachusetts. Massachusetts
Speaker 1: is working to join right now. It doesn't say anything
Speaker 1: about what Hawaii's got going on. What are you hunting Massachusetts?
Speaker 1: White tails? Yeah, I mean there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: you hunt there for for big game. I don't know
Speaker 1: if Massachusetts. I won't be surprised here that they do
Speaker 1: not have a bear season. Definitely white tails and then
Speaker 1: all manner of small game foul upland waterfowl. Um, where
Speaker 1: were we on this whole thing? Oh? Why you can't
Speaker 1: go killing on the rams that aren't legal? And I'm
Speaker 1: telling you, man, um, it's hard to judge them. It's
Speaker 1: hard and when I say judge, you might be like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, if you talking about judging the yielder, there's
Speaker 1: no legal ramification. It's just you want to find a
Speaker 1: big one. But with a ram it's like a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of pressure to get to make the right call.
Speaker 1: And the handful of times I've been in a situation
Speaker 1: where you're like shooting, you're walking over there, it's extremely
Speaker 1: stressful because you're doubting your own decision making, even on
Speaker 1: the case of one where was like so clearly mass like,
Speaker 1: it's nerve racking. It's not fun. Oh there's nerve racking.
Speaker 1: The minutes that passed between you touch the trigger and
Speaker 1: you're getting over there is a not fun bunch of minutes. Man. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then we like that drainage up to the glaciers
Speaker 1: at the head of it. It's like a beautiful start
Speaker 1: kind of situation when you get up there where the
Speaker 1: ice is ripping the mountainto shreds, and there's spots you
Speaker 1: can stand where it's just like you can just stop
Speaker 1: and listen and just rock raining down everywhere around you.
Speaker 1: Big rock, small rock. It's just it's it's constant though
Speaker 1: the sound of it like the mountain getting ripped apart
Speaker 1: by the ice. It was. I had a few on
Speaker 1: a doom up that first drainage. It was like a
Speaker 1: death zone. Man. There wasn't anything living up there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was weird when you get the head of it.
Speaker 1: He came back and I saw green for the first time.
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, it makes sense now, I feel better.
Speaker 1: But that was weird. We found a drop moose antler,
Speaker 1: not up in the glaciers, but way higher than any willow,
Speaker 1: you know. And he had somehow wand up there or
Speaker 1: it fell out of or it fell out that duds
Speaker 1: who hunts shed out of his airplane. I think he
Speaker 1: might have dropped. Bear in mind that that was that
Speaker 1: he shed that antler and what December January, that was
Speaker 1: crazy about it. A little later, sometimes February, our pilot
Speaker 1: was saying that the moves hang out out there in
Speaker 1: the flask right, and they hang out there until the
Speaker 1: snows get too deep and the wind piles up the snow,
Speaker 1: and then they'll actually move into that high country to
Speaker 1: find the wind swept places. Yeah, he was so high
Speaker 1: there wasn't any brows up there though, right, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: might not know because he's just digging to the snow.
Speaker 1: I don't know he was. He was a half mile
Speaker 1: above any willow. That was interesting. But yeah, you get
Speaker 1: up around the glaciers and it's like it's like the
Speaker 1: earth at work. Man. What was that Leopold quote you
Speaker 1: guys mentioned that was cool? You kind of Yanni should
Speaker 1: look at it. I want to hear that. Eldo Leopold's son,
Speaker 1: the author of Sand County Almanac, had a son who
Speaker 1: became a hydrologist. Who's got to be still alive. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think it's his son, Luna Leopold. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna tell you what I think it is, and then
Speaker 1: Yanni's gonna tell us what it is. Rivers are the
Speaker 1: gutters through which run the ruins of continents. What's your
Speaker 1: guests that's pretty pretty spot honest fear as I know. Yeah, yeh,
Speaker 1: he's gonna tell us all that. So I think he
Speaker 1: was a he was a fluvial geo morphologist, So fluvial
Speaker 1: geo morphologist. He studied how rivers, you know, create landscapes,
Speaker 1: maintain landscapes. You have a good time up there, obviously
Speaker 1: you can't, Yeah, you can't have a fluvial g and
Speaker 1: more foulges that spends time around rivers. Yeah, what's interesting
Speaker 1: about the glaciers is, uh, it's like huge tall packs
Speaker 1: of ice, but they're filled all the way through rocks.
Speaker 1: It was like a giant rocks grow string to that one.
Speaker 1: All the sediment and the different freezing levels where you
Speaker 1: guys kind of stop. Yeah, I know you can see
Speaker 1: the accumulations and the melt accumulations. You're not find any annie.
Speaker 1: Rivers are the dre the gutters down which flow the
Speaker 1: ruins of continents. Okay, compared again, I said, rivers are
Speaker 1: the gutters through which flow the ruins of continents. But
Speaker 1: it's actually down, so you just missed. You just swapped
Speaker 1: through for down. It's pretty good, not bad. So from there,
Speaker 1: so at that point we've seen uh bandy using lambs,
Speaker 1: sal grizz, two cubs, six rams, yeah, some number rams.
Speaker 1: Then we running around to explore the other fourk of
Speaker 1: that thing and then drive eventually made our way day
Speaker 1: or two later, made our way up into saw those
Speaker 1: rams again. Considerable weather delay. Oh yeah, that's right. We
Speaker 1: got up, I went into another valley and saw the
Speaker 1: same batch rams and the rams kind of drift around
Speaker 1: in weird ways. Man, they're sort of like in the
Speaker 1: same area, but they're using different stuff. And this time
Speaker 1: they were down to the bottom of a big hanging valley.
Speaker 1: Got a real good look at them, but we saw
Speaker 1: the skyline. Yeah, they're hanging out on the ridge, but
Speaker 1: at the same the same ridge we initially saw them on.
Speaker 1: But then eventually they just popped over the other side.
Speaker 1: So you know, they're only you know, maybe what a
Speaker 1: quarter half mile from where we had seen them, but
Speaker 1: they're just in a different valley now, dropped down to
Speaker 1: a different place to feed. They like to go up
Speaker 1: to lay down and like to lay down on I
Speaker 1: don't know, man, it's hard to describe what it like
Speaker 1: to lay down. They love ridge tops, ridge tops, even
Speaker 1: to send finger ridges, rock piles on finger ridges, or
Speaker 1: just like the highest like flat spot, you know, the one,
Speaker 1: you know, I think a spot you'd say, like it's
Speaker 1: like two that's kind of the perfect spot where you
Speaker 1: have two rivers come together and like the ridge rises
Speaker 1: up out of that thing. It gets like real high
Speaker 1: and craggy, and he sits out there and he can
Speaker 1: look down and he can kind of monitor what's going on.
Speaker 1: And the two drainages blown. Yeah, I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time looking down valley and laying a down valley
Speaker 1: direction because they know that nothing's coming from above. The
Speaker 1: primary predator. Though for the lambs, one of the primary
Speaker 1: predators does come from above, because one of the primary
Speaker 1: causes of land mortality is golden eagles. Eagles. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: saw fair fair number golden eagles all and they're always
Speaker 1: go soaring around those ridge tops. You know. Golden eagles
Speaker 1: grab the baby or knock them off and pick the
Speaker 1: carcasses up her feet on the car because after they
Speaker 1: knock them off and make them fall out of their death.
Speaker 1: I had a pilot one time told me that she
Speaker 1: saw a golden eagle carrying on the wing carrying a lamb,
Speaker 1: a doll ram. Golden eagles are hard on mountain goats. Lamb,
Speaker 1: lamb lamb. There's a a bill just wrote a there's
Speaker 1: a bill just wrote like Natural History of Alaska, and
Speaker 1: he had an eyewitness account of a lynx killing a
Speaker 1: doll ram. Oh wow. He eye witness account from another
Speaker 1: biologists of a lynx that ran a doll ram down
Speaker 1: a gully, jumped on its back, bit the back of
Speaker 1: its head and a single linx killing a ramn mean
Speaker 1: links and then wolverines kill them obviously, wolves kill them. Chris, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they kill him. Black beaters, you know black, I'm sure, dude,
Speaker 1: But they don't make the list as much as wolverines.
Speaker 1: I think the top are wolverines and brown bears from
Speaker 1: one area. Tony Rust talks about it in his books
Speaker 1: about hunting Dollar Sheet that they're pretty weak animals. Like
Speaker 1: you know, he's talking about it from like a projectile standpoint.
Speaker 1: You know, arrows hitting them in funny places, bolts hitting
Speaker 1: them in funny places. But it's not like an elk
Speaker 1: that soaks up the lead and then like two days
Speaker 1: later you're still tracking it. You know, three ridges five
Speaker 1: miles away. It's like a ram. Once he takes a hits,
Speaker 1: he's not going far. He's gonna lay down. Not tough,
Speaker 1: not tough in that regard. So you know, maybe a
Speaker 1: bite to the back of the head from the lynx,
Speaker 1: it just slowly starts to take the blood out of
Speaker 1: him and it weakens him enough. Yeah, I should say,
Speaker 1: I kept saying back in the head of the neck,
Speaker 1: but him on the neck killed him. Links We saw
Speaker 1: links print ye saw links tracks, but they're snowsh your
Speaker 1: hair specialist, man Grouse snows your hairs arm again, that's
Speaker 1: what they specialize in. Surprising to see you know that
Speaker 1: he would do that. Man, He's got a square meal
Speaker 1: laid out ahead of him after doing that. He's got
Speaker 1: protected though. He's like to dude with a nice car
Speaker 1: and a shitty neighborhood, just worrying about his Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: you dis imagined how stressed out he is. He's like something,
Speaker 1: someone's gonna take this from him. What am I gonna
Speaker 1: do now? Yeah, hopefully he did it in the Winner.
Speaker 1: One of the main things they're gonna take it from
Speaker 1: him aren't around when all the bears are underground. And
Speaker 1: then we worked out in the area that Dirt Dirt
Speaker 1: dubbed God's Penthouse as beautiful other head of the valley
Speaker 1: like nothing I've ever seen. Dude. At first when he
Speaker 1: said that, I thought you were being profane because I
Speaker 1: associate penthouse with the magazine, But then I remember, did
Speaker 1: its um actually like a type of room, like a
Speaker 1: nice room and hotel? Yeah, real, myth that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the color we're talking about, the colors like of
Speaker 1: the tundra that's like it's crazy, just variations like God,
Speaker 1: it was beautiful man, huge spires covered in snow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just huge, like you think it's like, wow, this
Speaker 1: area is huge, but then beyond it there's so you're
Speaker 1: trying to understand the infinity of space and you're thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: some wight there's a brick wall, but then beyond that
Speaker 1: there's something. Yeah, I mean if there wasn't. Right when
Speaker 1: you're there, like you sort of go like woh, you know,
Speaker 1: look all the space. You go like, but then but
Speaker 1: then up there it's like tens of miles. Well, Chris
Speaker 1: had an interest you could go without running into anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that point about if you could, if you could lay
Speaker 1: down a city block in that landscape perspective, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: just see so much country. When you're up high in there,
Speaker 1: you just see so much it's like hard to take
Speaker 1: in what you're really looking at. I remember taking a
Speaker 1: guy caribou hunting, and he hadn't had a lot of
Speaker 1: experience hunting like open country. Yeah, yeah, and we asked
Speaker 1: him how far Carriby Way. It was a way He
Speaker 1: expressed it in blocks, you know, three blocks. The way
Speaker 1: I've ever think of it it's gonna be a hard trip.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, man, that place is pretty magical. But again,
Speaker 1: no rams using lambs. And by this point we're days
Speaker 1: into the trip. We've lost a lot of time to
Speaker 1: sit in and bad weather. A lot of time to
Speaker 1: sitting in bad weather because when it when it's foggy,
Speaker 1: just can't see cloudy. I kept debating, is it fog
Speaker 1: or clouds? What do you think fog is a cloud
Speaker 1: at ground level? Right? So is that what it is?
Speaker 1: That'd be a good thing for you. I need to
Speaker 1: look up. I think it's the same. I feel like
Speaker 1: it is some of the water man just yeah, because
Speaker 1: it we'd be like we're up in the clouds or
Speaker 1: will be like, oh, we're in the fog by the way,
Speaker 1: just like when when you can't see you just shut down.
Speaker 1: It's not like a lot of stuff where you just
Speaker 1: gotta plow ahead, right, or just wait for one to
Speaker 1: come along, yeah, or just wait because like a thick
Speaker 1: cloud of tiny water droplets suspended in the atmosphere at
Speaker 1: or near the Earth's surface that obscures or restricts musibility. Okay,
Speaker 1: so chemically they're the same clouds sitting in the clouds
Speaker 1: and there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do,
Speaker 1: at least that one when we woke up in the
Speaker 1: in God's penthouse, it was clear, blow freezing. It's just
Speaker 1: nice because you get to look at it all and go, yep,
Speaker 1: we've seen it all, We've cleared it. There are no
Speaker 1: rams in here. Let's move on. Yeah, it's nicer. You
Speaker 1: can have that thirtitude because a lot of times you're
Speaker 1: walking through and you're like, I don't know, Like we
Speaker 1: would just travel when it was when it was cloudy.
Speaker 1: We would also just travel like you're gonna walk three,
Speaker 1: four or five miles into a new zone and then
Speaker 1: sit there hoping that it clears up. Or you have
Speaker 1: to just kind of sit there as the clouds blow
Speaker 1: through and now and then you sort of keep a
Speaker 1: mental picture of a mental map of what you've seen
Speaker 1: or not as the clouds have come through, and you'd
Speaker 1: be like, man, I still haven't seen over in that area.
Speaker 1: Then also in that area clear up enough, you look,
Speaker 1: but it just doesn't feel definitive because you're trying to
Speaker 1: find a white animal in white clouds. You lose a
Speaker 1: lot of time. Danny was telling us something interesting, Uh,
Speaker 1: explain what you've read about the things that factor into
Speaker 1: hunter success rates. Oh yeah, that that The The Efficient
Speaker 1: Game has a cool publication now read before this hump.
Speaker 1: But one of the interesting things in there was that, uh,
Speaker 1: the number you know, they fly annual surveys to index
Speaker 1: cheap abundance And apparently it's not a relationship between the
Speaker 1: number of rams and a given area and hunter success
Speaker 1: that it has more to do with just the weather
Speaker 1: in any given hunting season. Like if you've got if
Speaker 1: you've got clear weather and good visibility, then you gotta
Speaker 1: hire success rates. Yeah, that's gotta be something that's that's
Speaker 1: gonna be something that's applicable in a lot of places,
Speaker 1: but probably nowhere is severe Like you think like weather,
Speaker 1: I think well not waterfowl is huge man like weather
Speaker 1: for waterfowl in some areas where you don't have local birds, right,
Speaker 1: the weather can like ruin the harvest for a particulars. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but in in sheep on it's just like so kind
Speaker 1: of it's so stark, right, either you're hunting or you're not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it can be that you just there's nothing you can do.
Speaker 1: There's nothing you can do. Ducks would be like, man,
Speaker 1: it would have been a lot better had the weather
Speaker 1: been bad. We got a few right at daylight, but
Speaker 1: then they shut down because there's no birth moving through Becau.
Speaker 1: There's no there's no clouds, so they're flying too high
Speaker 1: or whatever it winds up being. But this is like,
Speaker 1: this is yeah, it's just like it's kind of almost
Speaker 1: like on or off to some degree being able to
Speaker 1: hunt and also up in God's penthouse there's care we
Speaker 1: run around. It's funny because like the thing about cares
Speaker 1: think about is how sort of um disorganized and like
Speaker 1: and not not deliberate. They seem like at one point
Speaker 1: in time when we were trying to go through that
Speaker 1: I remember we try to go above that canyon. Couldn't
Speaker 1: have to abort mission and go and sleep and then
Speaker 1: try another route through. Three bulls are trying to come
Speaker 1: down this hillside and they can't see us. The smells
Speaker 1: their way away. We watched three bulls and they come
Speaker 1: and they kind of get confused and they're clearly trying
Speaker 1: to go somewhere in a hurry, and then all of
Speaker 1: a sudden they're down feeding back kind of where they
Speaker 1: came from. And then they were there twenty four hours
Speaker 1: later it was like, so, what was it when you ran?
Speaker 1: They were doing the scene. They were trying to come
Speaker 1: down through the same stuff we were trying to go
Speaker 1: up through, and they realized it was too steep at
Speaker 1: the same time we realized it was too steep. They
Speaker 1: backed off and spent the night uphill, and we backed
Speaker 1: off and spent the night downhill. And then we and
Speaker 1: then we crossed paths with him again the next day
Speaker 1: on the other side of the valley where we could travel.
Speaker 1: I think they were doing the same thing we were doing.
Speaker 1: It's so because they seemed like, I want to h
Speaker 1: there's like the so the largest land mammal migration on
Speaker 1: the continent caribou. Right, they can pull off some really
Speaker 1: astounding feats of navigation. But when you're looking at a caribou,
Speaker 1: particularly up in the moullas, it's like, do you have
Speaker 1: any plan? He's just like, you know what I'm gonna do, man,
Speaker 1: he says, But I'm just gonna run, like holy hell
Speaker 1: over that way. In a while later I'll run back.
Speaker 1: It's so weird watching them. It's weird, what are they thinking?
Speaker 1: They also don't get as scared as other animals of people,
Speaker 1: like because we ran up on them just to film
Speaker 1: and just see them quite curious. And then yeah, they
Speaker 1: came towards us. And then you guys were down at
Speaker 1: camp and me and Danny were still up high and
Speaker 1: then that one bowl just like almost like it spotted
Speaker 1: you guys and then rent them running away. It started
Speaker 1: running uphill towards camp, and then it got really close
Speaker 1: through my range finder. He was twenty nine yards away
Speaker 1: when he finally changed his mind. He was like, oh,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, this isn't my crew. I can pick
Speaker 1: it out. He came to us looking at us. He's
Speaker 1: because I think that they're you know, they're so gregarious,
Speaker 1: and they're such they have such a herd mentality. Uh.
Speaker 1: I feel that when they see something that's like kind
Speaker 1: of the right shape, they think it's another cariboo that
Speaker 1: they're like, I'm not gonna go so close that it
Speaker 1: could pounce on me and kill me, but I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go under the assumption that I'm looking at a caribou.
Speaker 1: It's the only thing I think is especially like out
Speaker 1: on the Arctic, like out on the Arctic slope, where
Speaker 1: you see huge distances most caribou, that you're coming across landscape.
Speaker 1: Most carebl when they see something then in some way
Speaker 1: kind of skirt then in some way want to kind
Speaker 1: of come to you. To they're going, they have to
Speaker 1: be thinking, like I'm gonna rule out that it's a caribou.
Speaker 1: This is the first thing on their mind. And also
Speaker 1: I just think that they the way they travel move,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of them go through life having
Speaker 1: no experience with people. You know, it's not like like
Speaker 1: a like a white tail box to gets me five
Speaker 1: years old, and all that thing has done. His whole
Speaker 1: life is dodged getting killed, and he learns that when
Speaker 1: you see that shape, get out of there. You want
Speaker 1: nothing to do with it. Man, Because I've seen sixteen
Speaker 1: and my friends killed by those things. I think that
Speaker 1: I think that the caribool just for whatever it's like,
Speaker 1: it's more beneficial for them to find other caribou than
Speaker 1: it is to run the risk of that you're running
Speaker 1: up on something that's gonna do it. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of them haven't don't have any human experience.
Speaker 1: That's pretty cool. I think in that country, I think
Speaker 1: a ten year old doll ramp has to have probably
Speaker 1: accrued some human experience. Yeah, we saw tracks in a
Speaker 1: lot of the drainages. We were in human tracks. I
Speaker 1: think that they at that age, I think that they've
Speaker 1: have had exposure or they just learned to be paranoid
Speaker 1: about anything, you know. But like caribou, it seems like
Speaker 1: there's like their success as a species has so much
Speaker 1: more to do with it's just like high fore coundity
Speaker 1: than it does anyone individual. Um becoming a real caging
Speaker 1: and wildly because I just never seen one that was
Speaker 1: like real caging Wiley, Well it hasn't hasn't worked its
Speaker 1: way into their geno, my guess. Yeah. Um, they'd like
Speaker 1: to land the snow a lot because they get away
Speaker 1: from bugs. And that's the thing I know, Like before
Speaker 1: hunting cariboo, you would see him now and then run.
Speaker 1: But you could tell because they would run when the
Speaker 1: wind died. Yeah, because when the wind died, the bugs
Speaker 1: are too bad. And so then they'd run and stop
Speaker 1: and feed and then you'd see you could watch it
Speaker 1: happened enough minutes would go by that they'd pick up
Speaker 1: their swarm of black flies and mosquitoes, and then they'd
Speaker 1: run and stopping, feed and run, and that was just
Speaker 1: there grazing off into the wind. To their grazing pattern
Speaker 1: was just like to get clear of your cloud. Eat,
Speaker 1: Get clear of your cloud and eat. And you'd sit
Speaker 1: there and I remember getting up in the good glasses
Speaker 1: about hunting cariboo out on the Arctic slope, and you
Speaker 1: get up in your good glass about nothing's happening. And
Speaker 1: then mid day of eleven o'clock start to get warm
Speaker 1: and started to get real buggy. And also in the
Speaker 1: lamb would just come alive with caribou because all those
Speaker 1: carribore just nestled into their little dips and valleys and
Speaker 1: stuff where there was good lush feed. And the mosquitoes
Speaker 1: get bad and he starts seeing rolling over all the
Speaker 1: ridge tops as they're trying to run away, and then
Speaker 1: it'd be like good, then the hunting is good because
Speaker 1: you can also see them all around. Then it cool
Speaker 1: off or to get windy, and the amount of movement
Speaker 1: activity would die down. Strange animals, man, I like to
Speaker 1: hunt them, but it's like generally if you get on
Speaker 1: when you're gonna get them. Well, the one broadsided itself
Speaker 1: at like fifty yards maybe to us, and I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: you're just what are you doing? Man, you're just asking
Speaker 1: for it. Yeah, yeah, we could have. We could have
Speaker 1: got Carriban that area. Yeah, I wouldn't want to carry
Speaker 1: one that far. That would have been along. So hunted
Speaker 1: out God's penthouse. Um, Triple Nip, went to Triple Nipple.
Speaker 1: That looks spectacular. No one shot at a tarm again
Speaker 1: on the way to triple that. Yeah, he shot out
Speaker 1: a tarm. We're getting using rat shot, Uh, which isn't
Speaker 1: You said that they're working on a better version of that. Well,
Speaker 1: I I picked up a box that was bigger. I
Speaker 1: mean that's slightly bigger. Shot was like maybe nine shot
Speaker 1: number nine. Yeah, it looks bigger. We're talking about the
Speaker 1: shotgun shells you can shoot out. So you got a
Speaker 1: bear protection you got a bear protection pistol. Just talk
Speaker 1: about what everybody what you have for bear protection? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Smith and Western mile twenty nine. I think that is.
Speaker 1: I don't know we got the exact same one. But
Speaker 1: it's the air Light p D super lightweight. It like
Speaker 1: doubles in weight when you load it with I think
Speaker 1: it more than doubles, but really rounds. It's got a
Speaker 1: bunch of aluminumous titanium. I think yeah, um, but Anyways,
Speaker 1: it's a real popular bear side arm. I think it's
Speaker 1: kind of made for that, right, what the so yeah
Speaker 1: hurts like holy hell sheet, definitely, man hurts your hand. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they make a shotgun show or because it rat shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're not getting many in there. And you know, we
Speaker 1: were talking about why why it's hard, Why it's hard,
Speaker 1: why you get to be a point blank ranging for
Speaker 1: it to work. And it's not really the velocity or
Speaker 1: anythink it's got to be the fact that there's no choke,
Speaker 1: you know, to that round. And so even at ten
Speaker 1: feet barrel, who knows what that pattern looks like. It
Speaker 1: could be spread out to five feet already. It's ridiculous
Speaker 1: that we don't know what the pattern looks like. Good,
Speaker 1: we're gonna pattern in the strip, but we didn't have
Speaker 1: a piece of paper. I kind of forgot about it.
Speaker 1: I never thought, dude, I just know that I've been. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I've been. We had a lot of
Speaker 1: shot opportunities one time hunting. She remember just sometimes being like,
Speaker 1: how in the world did I not get that thing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's it comes down to luck. Eventually that
Speaker 1: patterns will lose. Remember, we're a time we were out
Speaker 1: in the weather was really nice and we weren't even
Speaker 1: setting up tents. We're just laying out into laying out
Speaker 1: in the tund or to sleep. I remember waking up
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night. Remember it was two
Speaker 1: in the morning, but it was earlier in the season.
Speaker 1: There was two in the morning. I remember waking up
Speaker 1: two in the morning. There was a group of time
Speaker 1: in amongst our sleeping bags. They're really active at night, Yeah,
Speaker 1: moving around in amongst our sleep bags. I remember shooting
Speaker 1: one of those of the rat shot but it was
Speaker 1: point blank you know. Um, But other times you shoot,
Speaker 1: you like, what in the world happened? I think the
Speaker 1: effective range of that, it's like stuff is maybe like
Speaker 1: tential feet. You're pretty pretty good. Outside of that, it's
Speaker 1: real hitting this. Uh So we tried that. That didn't work. Um.
Speaker 1: I went to a drainage called triple Nipple. Then went
Speaker 1: around finally and had all kinds of walking, all kinds
Speaker 1: of weather problems. Our eighth the day, I think it
Speaker 1: was our eighth day of hunting. Yeah, our eighth day
Speaker 1: of hunting. The weather got broke and got beautiful, and
Speaker 1: we happened to be in a valley where we could
Speaker 1: get up on a ridge. Got up on the ridge
Speaker 1: and it was like the like the perfect the world's
Speaker 1: most perfect ridge where you could look down into multiple
Speaker 1: drainages if you kept going along this ridge, and it
Speaker 1: was like just like you expected to be, and everything's great.
Speaker 1: We see a band of lambs across the valley. Far
Speaker 1: away use or bandy Use later watched the grizzly stumble
Speaker 1: into those us. I think he's just minding his own business,
Speaker 1: feeding on berries, but scared the ship out of those things.
Speaker 1: They left left the drainage in a single file running
Speaker 1: line on that thing showed up. I look out and
Speaker 1: there's just like sheep running and I'm like, if they
Speaker 1: winded us from two miles away, that's impressive, but it was. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then I looked more carefully, and there's a grizzly feed
Speaker 1: on blueberries right in the little patch they'd been in.
Speaker 1: So I think, I don't I don't know that I
Speaker 1: didn't see what happened. Maybe he does. She's like, what
Speaker 1: the hell, I'm gonna run after him and see if
Speaker 1: anybody's injured. But I didn't see what happened. But they
Speaker 1: were not happy with that situation and totally left like gone,
Speaker 1: um and then Danny sure enough like kind of like
Speaker 1: I felt like, what happened when conditions are so good
Speaker 1: is finds a ram clearly legal? What horn was? It
Speaker 1: left a left horn that was curved in such a way.
Speaker 1: It was like that brand like no stressful, walk over there,
Speaker 1: it's still be stressful. Yeah, it was a solid ram
Speaker 1: as a really nice ram. Yeah. And he's perched up
Speaker 1: in a rock pile just like you described, man on
Speaker 1: a sub bridge that divided a valley in center ridge
Speaker 1: between at the confluence of two streams. That he's up, yeah,
Speaker 1: posted up on that center ridge line and a little
Speaker 1: and he knew what he was doing. Man, not far
Speaker 1: off the bottom, not for off the bottom, tucked into
Speaker 1: a little like it a little cubby that he had
Speaker 1: there with a bunch of rock around him, hard to
Speaker 1: spot from most of you kind of did what like
Speaker 1: white tails like to do. Man, I didn't went to
Speaker 1: most of my life not knowing this, but Ken you
Speaker 1: always talks about this too. Is like those like mature
Speaker 1: bocks like to lay with something with a backdrop. They
Speaker 1: like to lay where they can see out and where
Speaker 1: something can't see him. Good from behind to back up
Speaker 1: into something. He's like, I can see this way. Usually
Speaker 1: if it's if there's a bit too we can cover
Speaker 1: about to seventy and there's it rolls off on three
Speaker 1: sides and they're behind him. There's a log or a
Speaker 1: real thick, dense stand of You know, he wants to
Speaker 1: be obscured from where he can't he wants to be
Speaker 1: hidden from what he can't see, but then you know,
Speaker 1: within clear view site for what he can't see, and
Speaker 1: that's that dude had it dialed and that little spot
Speaker 1: he had. Man, there was very difficult approach. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: bet you a lot of rams and laid over it,
Speaker 1: laid there over a long and if you could somehow
Speaker 1: kill off every rand that lived there and then repopulate it,
Speaker 1: it would be like one's probably gonna find that. He's
Speaker 1: probably gonna be like, yeah, it's a sweet spot. Lay down,
Speaker 1: hard to approach. Yeah, So we're on the ridge. What
Speaker 1: what was I don't I don't even know what our
Speaker 1: elevation was. We topped out it, we tapped out again
Speaker 1: that like it was fifty where we topped out and
Speaker 1: I don't know. We did some up, we did some
Speaker 1: down but somewhere around that mark, and he was maybe
Speaker 1: six ft below us. Yeah, I think he's six feet
Speaker 1: below us. A couple of drainages. Yeah, he was at
Speaker 1: forty you know what he was at forty five? He
Speaker 1: was at forty feet. But just no, there's no you
Speaker 1: can't come from it was impossible to come from behind him. Um,
Speaker 1: little been no way to come from behind him. So
Speaker 1: the first thing, he's ways away and we spot him. Yeah, mile, Well,
Speaker 1: I say, a couple of thousand yards away. Um, And
Speaker 1: we realized that. So Danny watches the Ram through a
Speaker 1: spot because the first thing we gotta do is like,
Speaker 1: we gotta move somewhere, because we had gotten where we
Speaker 1: were in the fog and sat in the fogged way
Speaker 1: for the fog to clear, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: it clears and there's a ram there. So we didn't
Speaker 1: know if we could move because we've gotten where we
Speaker 1: got obscured by fog. And then the first thing is like,
Speaker 1: well can we even move from where we are without
Speaker 1: him taking notice of us moving where we are? So
Speaker 1: Danny's watching him through the spot scope and I just
Speaker 1: start skirting down to the nearest goalie to get into
Speaker 1: to go downhill out of sight, and I moved across
Speaker 1: the hillside, not even a hundred yards, but just moved.
Speaker 1: And Danny watches him to see if he like takes
Speaker 1: interest in what I'm doing, but he doesn't take any
Speaker 1: He doesn't he can't see us. Then one time I
Speaker 1: told you to stop is because if he was pointed
Speaker 1: in our direction, like oriented toward us. And the one
Speaker 1: time I told you to stop, it's because he stopped
Speaker 1: chewing his cut. Oh ship, something's up, and he went
Speaker 1: back to human. I'm like, okay, we're good. He repacked.
Speaker 1: So we're getting this goalie that's gonna kind of like
Speaker 1: deliver us down into his zone, knowing that there's still
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot to figure out. But the cliff
Speaker 1: face he's on. You can see these bands, these discolored
Speaker 1: bands in the rock, and so you know he's like
Speaker 1: I just remember memorizing he's like blow the third band.
Speaker 1: No matter where you go, you can find that the
Speaker 1: cliff he's on and count the bands and kind of
Speaker 1: know like his little zone and start trying to go down.
Speaker 1: This goalie's very treacherous, scary in places there's a lot
Speaker 1: of player You spent a lot of time hunting dollar
Speaker 1: sheet in places where um, if he fell, Like let's say,
Speaker 1: if you like, if you're not gonna like people don't
Speaker 1: just fall all of a sudden, but like if you
Speaker 1: fell in some sort of you would die if you
Speaker 1: felt but it was not like some places you die
Speaker 1: if you fell and you could really pick youre falling.
Speaker 1: A lot of places you realize, Man, if you fell,
Speaker 1: you die, But why would I fall? It's usually that one.
Speaker 1: It's like yeah, if but like, how would you like
Speaker 1: people don't just fall over a fall over rolling down hill.
Speaker 1: It's usually like different where you sort of slip. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you kind of slip and cling down, But if you
Speaker 1: got rolling, there's no end of the role. I had
Speaker 1: it in the back of my mind when we were
Speaker 1: sidehilling and all that stuff, that like if for some
Speaker 1: reason with like the pack or whatever, if I just
Speaker 1: tipped the wrong way and you didn't fall into the hill,
Speaker 1: you fell, man, Yeah, that was the only time. Like
Speaker 1: if I slipped and like tripped and then you end
Speaker 1: up falling the bad way, that's when that's when you're
Speaker 1: not having a good time. And that's the thing I
Speaker 1: was telling myself, when you do when it does occur
Speaker 1: to you. It's hard to get out of your head.
Speaker 1: But I think, like, but all the times I spent
Speaker 1: walking where that's not true. I've never were falling that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've never fallen away from the hill. It only takes once. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you fall into the hill when you fall. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think your natural inclination too, is to just air
Speaker 1: in that direction so much with your center of gravity
Speaker 1: that you lean into it. Yeah. I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out also, like how I was going to self
Speaker 1: arrest with the camera if I did start sliding. I
Speaker 1: was just gonna be like, Bam, don't do that to
Speaker 1: our gear. I would expect that you set it. You'd
Speaker 1: find a place on the way down to set it
Speaker 1: above a rock or something, and then you just go
Speaker 1: unlook your cord and just go. You know, Steve and
Speaker 1: I were Steve and I were crossing. Uh uh you see, guy,
Speaker 1: was that shoot or an avalanche had ripped through right
Speaker 1: and it all went down to the bottom watching avalanches
Speaker 1: all that day was that wet snow. We're mountain go
Speaker 1: hand was wet snow laying out wet grass, and I
Speaker 1: had and Steve was below me. He had crossed that
Speaker 1: snowy shoot and headed down and I was above him crossing,
Speaker 1: and I slipped and I was going down, but I
Speaker 1: had ice axe and it was fumbling loose behind me,
Speaker 1: and I got the ice axe in both hands, and
Speaker 1: I was just starting to dig that thing into the
Speaker 1: snow like it was a pretty clear slope that I
Speaker 1: wasn't about to go off cliff or anything. I was
Speaker 1: just gonna go for a long ride. And oh there's
Speaker 1: one rollover that I couldn't see what was in there,
Speaker 1: but then it was clear again below that, and I've
Speaker 1: got my you swept by me. I kind of tried
Speaker 1: to grab Here's what happened, though. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I told you this at the time or not, but
Speaker 1: I had my ice axe in both hands. I was
Speaker 1: just starting to press that thing into the snow. And
Speaker 1: I see Steve running out and his ice axes dangled
Speaker 1: from his wrist and and all I can see is
Speaker 1: that ice acs like going into my face. I had
Speaker 1: to drop my ice axe to deflect your ice axe,
Speaker 1: and I totally lost my self arrest and rowed down
Speaker 1: for another I don't know what you got hurt. I
Speaker 1: got banged up, Yeah, I mean, it could have been
Speaker 1: a lot worse. But I got banged up. You could
Speaker 1: have died there. I'm saying, like that sort of sort
Speaker 1: of thing, if that's sort of thing where all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you're just going, yeah, yeah, that's certain that
Speaker 1: that circumstance was a relatively benign you know, it was
Speaker 1: a scary ride down the mountain. But if yeah, that
Speaker 1: was over a cliff or into a rock face, I
Speaker 1: mean it could have been. That's what I meant. I
Speaker 1: could have died like that kind of fall where you
Speaker 1: know there's an abyss below you. I had. I was
Speaker 1: totally real interesting example of risk management. And like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're all in the mountains a lot, so we can
Speaker 1: do that, like I said, safely and outside of like
Speaker 1: some freak, you know, weird fall, you're gonna be fine.
Speaker 1: And I was talking to this YOSAR guy Yosemity Search
Speaker 1: and Rescue about big wall climbing and people are always like,
Speaker 1: how can you do that? It's so dangerous and you know,
Speaker 1: how do you're not dying? He's like, well, if if
Speaker 1: you're good at do well, yeah they do, they all die. Well.
Speaker 1: His point that it was like he's like, if you're
Speaker 1: you know, you you're comfortable in your environment. Then it's
Speaker 1: it's an example of like I tell him, if you're
Speaker 1: walking down the sidewalk and you fall into traffic, you're
Speaker 1: gonna die, but you just don't fall into traffic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good point. Yeah, yeah, when you're walk into
Speaker 1: the man if I fell in, Well, dude, every time
Speaker 1: you drive on a two lane road with like a
Speaker 1: fifty five speed limit, you're passing another car within five
Speaker 1: feet of death a velocity of so you don't focus
Speaker 1: on you like, jeez, if I some in traffic to
Speaker 1: be dead, I do think that all time. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: and then you do have this kind of thing I think. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I watched my kid, one of my kids recently sort
Speaker 1: of have the idea of the cooperation it requires for
Speaker 1: highway driving. He was like asking questions about you know
Speaker 1: that everyone needs to be on the same page out
Speaker 1: here driving, but we need to be abiding by the
Speaker 1: same rules and we all want to be alive self preservation.
Speaker 1: But all that said, man, there is like now and
Speaker 1: then there are some moments what we a boarded a hillside,
Speaker 1: we didn't do a hillside because the gap below you
Speaker 1: was there was like a high consequence. It be like
Speaker 1: you it's not like, oh, you're gonna get banged up.
Speaker 1: It's like you're done. Yeah, if you go, there's no
Speaker 1: way to stop. And then there's a then there's a canyon.
Speaker 1: And it was wet, raining and the hillside was coming
Speaker 1: apart and were and we were cold and tired and
Speaker 1: around here like these are new mountains, man, they're like
Speaker 1: very new sharp mountains and they're just falling apart. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a term in geology, angle of repose. It's like
Speaker 1: when a hill relaxes mm hmm, like everything on the hill,
Speaker 1: like the hills achieved an angle that everything on the
Speaker 1: hill is going to kind of stay where these hills
Speaker 1: are not at their angle of repose. No, to demonstrate
Speaker 1: that farther, when we were coming back the next day
Speaker 1: on the easy slope side, looking across, you could see
Speaker 1: where boulders rocks you know, who knows what kind of size.
Speaker 1: We didn't see the boulders themselves, but where they had
Speaker 1: fallen off the mountain. They'd be on shale and screen
Speaker 1: for a while and then they would hit where there
Speaker 1: was actually grass gripping, and it looked like, um, I
Speaker 1: guess it would look like a golf DVD, you know,
Speaker 1: with someone kind of shanks and you get like a
Speaker 1: two to three term. Yeah, shank, it's not I guess
Speaker 1: it's not a what is it? When you make it? Did?
Speaker 1: What do you do wrong? You just dig into but
Speaker 1: you basically make like a big scar in the turf.
Speaker 1: It's a great example. And it was like hundreds of
Speaker 1: yards of this going down the mountains, so there's so
Speaker 1: much lo sitting speed and mass because it's just so
Speaker 1: steep and moving that is just ripping these giant divots
Speaker 1: as it's moving down the hill and skipping some big sections. Yea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We saw several places where they were very fresh landslide,
Speaker 1: some of them big enough that there was like a
Speaker 1: whole new like side drainage that had just released and
Speaker 1: and all that settlement went down to the valley floor
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, there's like a new valley,
Speaker 1: you know, catastrophically formed. I asked about that lake we saw.
Speaker 1: There was a lake on a very peculiar lake in
Speaker 1: a very peculiar place in the bottom of these drainages,
Speaker 1: and you can see where the whole hillside gave away,
Speaker 1: came down and formed a lake. And I was asking
Speaker 1: the pilot and he said, sometimes within the last third years.
Speaker 1: Because of the last few years. Yeah, the a landslide
Speaker 1: had just slept all the way to the valley floor
Speaker 1: and damned up the creek and uh yeah, and then
Speaker 1: there's a obviously a brand new lake there, not a
Speaker 1: lick of vegetation. Yeah, brand new. Yeah. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: landslide was a different color. You know, all the other
Speaker 1: all the other rock around there had kind of a
Speaker 1: rusty orange color to it, and that new slide was gray.
Speaker 1: And I assume the ones that oxydizes turn to that
Speaker 1: same orange color. It gets a patina, sure, yeah, it
Speaker 1: gets pat neated. Um start on this goalie like trying
Speaker 1: to get in the ram zone not like clear kind
Speaker 1: of like obvious what the what the possible shooting perchase
Speaker 1: might be. But because you can't it the ram was
Speaker 1: too far to hit him with a range finder, and
Speaker 1: so you couldn't get you couldn't measure other points. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you're looking at like let's say you're sitting
Speaker 1: there and you're looking at you're looking directly at something
Speaker 1: you're trying to sneak up on, and you're like and
Speaker 1: then before you see like a little rise or like
Speaker 1: a little ridge, and you're like, man, I wonder if
Speaker 1: I could shoot from that ridge and you range find
Speaker 1: the object you're trying to get to, damn, and you're like,
Speaker 1: okay that you know it's eleven yards away. And then
Speaker 1: you range the hill or little knob or something your
Speaker 1: side of it, and you hit that thing and that
Speaker 1: thing is yards away. You're like, money, when I get
Speaker 1: to that spot, I'm in range. I can make my shop.
Speaker 1: But you couldn't hit the ram with a range finder.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of questions about what needs to happen.
Speaker 1: And I was even saying, like this ram like I'm
Speaker 1: definitely not getting the old gut knife out and getting
Speaker 1: it ready yet. But we start down this this we
Speaker 1: start down this shoot. It's really steep and you're kind
Speaker 1: of like on this open screen side. But there's these
Speaker 1: rock bands, these a little like many Chinese walls that
Speaker 1: are crossing, and every one of those is a cliff
Speaker 1: and you kind of pick your way around one like
Speaker 1: dropping the next drainage you go down, it's another cliff,
Speaker 1: and then it's then as you go down it picks
Speaker 1: up where it's got a lot of flow. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of water coming out everywhere, and so then it's
Speaker 1: like these waterfalls. It just it just becomes like it
Speaker 1: just became hard to picture it working out. And eventually
Speaker 1: we get to one spot where you can kind of
Speaker 1: get up and look at the ram and he's over
Speaker 1: six hund yards away, bedded down. It took us almost
Speaker 1: three hours to make it to that spot. Three hours
Speaker 1: to drop down. That did not feel like that long.
Speaker 1: It felt like an eternity. I thought, man, dude, I
Speaker 1: thought it was like I couldn't believe he's still laying there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I was watching those using lambs and they're up
Speaker 1: feeding away. They were bedded when we found them, but
Speaker 1: eventually they're up feeding him. Like he's probably up feeding
Speaker 1: by now because they're upfeeding. But three hours later there
Speaker 1: he is still hanging out. And the wind had been
Speaker 1: like in the gully bottoms, the wind had been going
Speaker 1: up the slope, and we pop up on this little
Speaker 1: subridge where you're looking across, and we just go out there.
Speaker 1: We're up there long enough to even like really get
Speaker 1: serious about making playing that some bit stands up, which
Speaker 1: is never a good sign. Yeah, and I think he
Speaker 1: winded us at six hundred yards. He never looked in
Speaker 1: our direction. Yeah, at that moment, the wind was going.
Speaker 1: You know, we're sort of in the straight in the
Speaker 1: wind of the main valley at that point, and that
Speaker 1: was going, that's a good point the gully. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a little sub winds going up the gullies, but the
Speaker 1: main valley also has its wind direction. And you pop
Speaker 1: up on the ridge out of the gully and I'm like,
Speaker 1: and you hit. I feel that wind the back of
Speaker 1: my neck wheel so far away. I didn't think it mattered.
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden never looked at us. Somebody
Speaker 1: stood up and there's a look to him like they
Speaker 1: don't do anything fast. They don't do anything. Everything they
Speaker 1: do is leisurely and deliberate. And he got up, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm out of here, bro, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get out here very slowly. Yeah, I'm not gonna go
Speaker 1: breaking my leg, but I'm getting out of here. And
Speaker 1: he got out of there. I don't think it helped
Speaker 1: that you had six no, six dudes who haven't showered
Speaker 1: for nine days, six hundred yards out, six hundred yards
Speaker 1: up wind. No, it's like a it's the thing. Man,
Speaker 1: it's like, uh, it's the camera crew effect, you know,
Speaker 1: and you can never measure it. I mean sometimes you
Speaker 1: can measure it, like sometimes you see something happen where
Speaker 1: you like, I'll be like, I'm facing forward and something
Speaker 1: happens where I know I wasn't the one that did it.
Speaker 1: We're all a sudden gets something, gets really interested in
Speaker 1: what's going on in our area. And now, my dude,
Speaker 1: I've been sitting here, man, I haven't moved a moving.
Speaker 1: That's when you get to, yeah, you're damn it, someone moved. Um.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's like a kid that did something wrong.
Speaker 1: That's the only thing that makes me mad. Man. And
Speaker 1: I feel like I've done like clinics and workshops and everything.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to be like, here's how to approach game.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter because even Triple Nipple, we're growing up
Speaker 1: a little box canyon and we get through the last
Speaker 1: box canyon and all of a sudden, the whole Triple
Speaker 1: Nipple Valley and your sons of bitches run out. You guys,
Speaker 1: like run out like a couple like opening the door
Speaker 1: for a couple of dogs in the morning. You guys
Speaker 1: run out of that Box Canyon. I'm like, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? The whole point was this moment. This is
Speaker 1: why we've come up here, was to get here. And look,
Speaker 1: I think it's like what is going on? That goes
Speaker 1: back to your argument of like turning a hunter. Is
Speaker 1: it better to turn a hunter into a cameraman or
Speaker 1: a cameraman into a hunter, you know, because like in
Speaker 1: that moment, I was like, Oh, this is this cool
Speaker 1: thing and like this cool feature, and like it'll be
Speaker 1: a super cool shot if I'm out here and get
Speaker 1: the dudes coming around. But in your mind, both of
Speaker 1: your minds, you're like, this is our like secret zone
Speaker 1: to sculpe this whole thing out. Nobody moved, you know,
Speaker 1: So like the mindset is just you just gotta make
Speaker 1: that switch. Yeah, we're peering out from this little gate
Speaker 1: where we're hidden and tucked away, and it's like if
Speaker 1: there's something here at this point, it would not know
Speaker 1: that we're here. Yeah. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: a cool wide. I was just reading an article. I
Speaker 1: was reading along article about when these uh white supremacist
Speaker 1: dudes were going to give a lecture at Berkeley, Like
Speaker 1: they've been invited by some student club to give a
Speaker 1: you know, one of their white supremacis Yeah, there's an
Speaker 1: article about how Berkeley was handling this, what they're gonna do,
Speaker 1: and um, one of the people who's in charge of
Speaker 1: one of the people that one of the administrators at
Speaker 1: the university is discussing this sort of dilemma. And she
Speaker 1: realized that the way that these people manipulate the lead
Speaker 1: up to the event and turn it into like a
Speaker 1: news event in a social media event, like all the
Speaker 1: lead up and it becomes more about the response. And
Speaker 1: she was saying, like, this person is saying that. The
Speaker 1: metaphor I'm starting to see is like I traditionally viewed
Speaker 1: a lecture and the digital recording of the lecture as
Speaker 1: being an object in its shadow m And I thought
Speaker 1: that this person is gonna come give a lecture, and
Speaker 1: the lecture that they're going to give is the object,
Speaker 1: and then out of this will come a recording that
Speaker 1: people consume, and that's the shadow of the object. What
Speaker 1: you said, what I've come to see when dealing with
Speaker 1: these people is the object is the digital the digital
Speaker 1: portion that's the object. The actual thing is just a
Speaker 1: shadow of it. And I was reading out there day
Speaker 1: at the airstrip, and it occurred to me, like there's
Speaker 1: this thing in recording hunting and making like a hunting
Speaker 1: show is is you like, in a perfect world, you
Speaker 1: imagine that the hunt is the object, okay, and the
Speaker 1: thing that we create is its shadow. But in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, just out of the reality of it,
Speaker 1: becomes that the thing we're creating is the object, right,
Speaker 1: Like there were times when we were we had we
Speaker 1: sat still because there's no way that the cameras could
Speaker 1: withstand that monterrange, so like there's no sense of going,
Speaker 1: so we can't feel in that way, and so you're
Speaker 1: in this struggle where also the thing we're creating, the
Speaker 1: digital impression we're creating, becomes the objects and the hunt
Speaker 1: itself becomes its shadow. And you're always pushing and pulling
Speaker 1: on those two ideas, you know, So what is the
Speaker 1: object and what's the right It was like it was
Speaker 1: a good thing to read at the right moment. It
Speaker 1: was a good expression. That's a good metaphor for that's
Speaker 1: a good way to put it, for sure, and for
Speaker 1: the greater good. I think the object being the story
Speaker 1: digital digitally does does more for people than a successful
Speaker 1: hunt for you without the story. So that's why you
Speaker 1: make that call. But you're right, and it's it's like
Speaker 1: there's no end to it. It's an it's like this
Speaker 1: wrestling match that constantly occurs in your head. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: when I get pissy and frustrated in my head, I
Speaker 1: often think to like that the doing of this enables
Speaker 1: so much of the mean. But it's it's a it's
Speaker 1: a tricky thing that and I'm sure that anyone that turns,
Speaker 1: anyone that turns a passion into an occupation, And it's
Speaker 1: a situation you guys are in in as can because
Speaker 1: here you are. It's like when you come out with us,
Speaker 1: you're working. You work eighteen hour days, you work twenty
Speaker 1: four hour days. Yeah, there's no escaping it. Just sleeping
Speaker 1: in a tent in the mud. Even sleeping is a
Speaker 1: little work. You're burning calorie sleeping. It's hard when you
Speaker 1: gotta go like dig out, when you got to dig
Speaker 1: out the place to sleep. But when your passion is
Speaker 1: is doing that, yeah, that it makes it easy. That's
Speaker 1: what I mean. But you're like, it's am I at
Speaker 1: work or not at work? Working eight days ship one
Speaker 1: big long me and my younger brother, who's a photographer
Speaker 1: as well, went to our older brother who's a carpenter's
Speaker 1: house and was helping to move some dirt, and you know,
Speaker 1: like just manual labor. And we both looked at each
Speaker 1: other like, Damn, We're glad we do what we do.
Speaker 1: We're not out here doing a grind. You know, this
Speaker 1: is hard, and I've done those grinds too. That's why
Speaker 1: I appreciate what I do now so much. I remember
Speaker 1: in high school I worked for this late high school,
Speaker 1: I worked for this industrial painting outfit called Quality main
Speaker 1: Well two of them Pennington Brothers and Quality Maintenance contractors.
Speaker 1: And one time we were, um, I mean, this dude
Speaker 1: from high school, Craig Camp, had to like de grease
Speaker 1: all the like roof trusses in the auto parts manufacturing
Speaker 1: place so they could come in and paint them. I
Speaker 1: remember being up there and we were on these like
Speaker 1: scissor lifts, you know. I remember being up like working
Speaker 1: with the just this endless pile of rags and degrease.
Speaker 1: They're trying to get the stuff so it could be
Speaker 1: cold with paint. And when we showed up, like the
Speaker 1: first shift dudes were there. I me and Craig were
Speaker 1: out there. It was like such a tight deadline that
Speaker 1: were up there, and I'm still in high school. Man,
Speaker 1: It's like a weekend thing organic chemical degrease or press. Eventually,
Speaker 1: those sons of bitches were back again. The first shift
Speaker 1: guys were back, like I recognized that guy from me,
Speaker 1: and Craig started, that's how long we've been up there
Speaker 1: de greasing these things? And I'm like, the whole damn
Speaker 1: shift came through. And then one probably said to Craig like,
Speaker 1: gonna make it through. As if crazy Train comes back
Speaker 1: on the radio. I started playing like a radio and
Speaker 1: like crazy like it wasn't even a new song. We're
Speaker 1: there so long degrease and ship that crazy Train got
Speaker 1: played twice. So I was like, man, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know about shift work. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I'm gonna making this occupation. That's that what was Edd's quote,
Speaker 1: that's that fire that forms us, forged by fire. We
Speaker 1: had another job. Danny worked this job, remember having a
Speaker 1: handship paint off a rail around a sewage treatment tank
Speaker 1: because they couldn't get You couldn't sand blasts or soda
Speaker 1: blasts because they couldn't have the sand or bacon soda
Speaker 1: getting into the sewage because mess up the sewage treatment.
Speaker 1: So you had to read up this little plastic tarp
Speaker 1: from bang out with a ball peen hammer. God dude,
Speaker 1: this is a huge tank and it was the three
Speaker 1: It was a three wrong guard rail around up vertical supports.
Speaker 1: We had to bing off every square inch of that paint. Man,
Speaker 1: we'd come back. We can after we can. And you
Speaker 1: guys like let them play crazy train on the Latin
Speaker 1: just tinking it off with hammers. That's so hard to
Speaker 1: that's so hard to the adend of the medal, but
Speaker 1: just hard enough to knock, just hard enough to knock
Speaker 1: off a chip of paint by half size your pinky nails. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then when you're up there like your biggest problem is
Speaker 1: your camera, guys keep busting out into the open. You're like,
Speaker 1: I can live with it. I can live with this. Yeah, Man,
Speaker 1: that's all I gotta say about that sheep hunt. He
Speaker 1: got away, he got away, he's still out there. He's lucky.
Speaker 1: He'll be getting bigger. He's gonna be a real nice
Speaker 1: one like Doug during Nice Buck next year, Nice Ram
Speaker 1: next year. Yeah, maybe maybe a dead ram before before
Speaker 1: the end of winter. Yeah, they don't get old. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We found uh, yeah, we found it. We found a
Speaker 1: ram skull, a winter kill, presumably right right by camp.
Speaker 1: So yeah, when they get that age, they don't last
Speaker 1: a real long time, even in an unhunted population. Um,
Speaker 1: they just drop off like flies after ten. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think part of it, right, is that is that
Speaker 1: they're just not They work so hard during the rut, right,
Speaker 1: and they're not putting weight on, and they go from
Speaker 1: top of the heat to dead. They get up where
Speaker 1: they're the man and they rut in November and expend
Speaker 1: it's a tremendous, tremendous amount of injury and expose themselves
Speaker 1: to a lot of risk. Yeah, and they go into
Speaker 1: and then they go into the and they go into
Speaker 1: the winter not kicking ass. So you get these used
Speaker 1: it will be twenty and stuff, right, but then you
Speaker 1: get these rams and they and and like I said,
Speaker 1: even this unhunted population that they were doing that. Like,
Speaker 1: I think that when a ram gets thirteen, he's got
Speaker 1: a percent chance of not being alive in a year,
Speaker 1: and that ten, it really drops off. Yeah, they go
Speaker 1: from being the man and nothing, not like us. We
Speaker 1: have this long forty year period of watching ourselves go
Speaker 1: to ship Danny got the final things you want to
Speaker 1: Um yeah, we well we got we started talking about
Speaker 1: it yesterday, but um yeah we should find a time
Speaker 1: and try try giving it their go. So yeah, every
Speaker 1: time I'm hunting the last I come away just like
Speaker 1: obsessing about what I'm gonna do it again. Oh I know,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, I was thinking about this morning. We're
Speaker 1: trying to go on a moose and caribou trip here
Speaker 1: and uh, hunting partners having boat trouble and everything else,
Speaker 1: and man, maybe we should just go back out pounder.
Speaker 1: Uh as a camera person, don't skyline yourself or bust
Speaker 1: out in the open at inopportune times. That yeah, getting
Speaker 1: the mindset of the hunt, that's right, the object and
Speaker 1: act in the shadow, not the cameraman. This outline the
Speaker 1: skyline shots to one of the better. It's a good shot, man,
Speaker 1: that's a good shot. Dirt myth um. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about all. It was really cool watching you guys as
Speaker 1: brothers hunt because I'm really close to my brothers and
Speaker 1: like you guys stories and that was just kind of neat,
Speaker 1: you know, different. Yeah, my other guests, I guess you guys.
Speaker 1: My first exposure to you and your brothers was being
Speaker 1: at your dad mom's house in my city and there
Speaker 1: was a picture of you and both your brothers on
Speaker 1: a mountaineering trip. Damn. Was like some interesting dude. You
Speaker 1: were right, you were right? So that Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: really fun hanging out with you guys and watching you
Speaker 1: hunt together and reminding me yea, my good times, my bros. Janice.
Speaker 1: I just had to reiterate, man, what a pretty pretty
Speaker 1: place that was. I don't We've been a lot of
Speaker 1: places the last five years together, and this one m
Speaker 1: topic first scenery, it's pretty dramatic. It is just yeah,
Speaker 1: every views, you know, brother taking when you get to
Speaker 1: see it. You know, we only had two real bitch
Speaker 1: and weather days out of eight in the field. In
Speaker 1: those two days, man was of something special. I'm really
Speaker 1: drawn to those glaciers, man. Yeah, Like looking at him,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, you're kind of like you don't want
Speaker 1: to hang out near him for too long. Killed by
Speaker 1: rock or just lifeless too, you know, like lifeless from
Speaker 1: not lifeless. Yeah, it is. It's intimidating, man, But I
Speaker 1: like being where you look up and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's like then there's like the n that's where this
Speaker 1: river starts, and the weather is so much squirrelier by him,
Speaker 1: too windy. Yeah, because the ice makes its own way.
Speaker 1: Definitely not lifeless. I mean really, it's the beginning of
Speaker 1: it all, is what you're looking at a good perspective.
Speaker 1: It's the beginning of its cold when you get up
Speaker 1: in there, there's no shaking it. Man, it's a cold.
Speaker 1: It's just going to your bone. Yeah, like they kick
Speaker 1: off their own little weather. They kick off, and they
Speaker 1: kick off a wind, like all that cool in air
Speaker 1: just rushing down off the ice and a lot of
Speaker 1: moisture condensing and that cold air around him. We've got
Speaker 1: snow down August. Yeah, that's the weird thing about Alaska's
Speaker 1: getting snowed out in August. But I already heard was
Speaker 1: my wife was just telling me a little snow in
Speaker 1: the mountains around our new house there. Yeah, alrights, Angeles
Speaker 1: Levi conclus I'm glad to tag along much appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Did you like that more? You like when they make
Speaker 1: you march all around in the military. No, that was
Speaker 1: a lot more fun. No, I had a good time.
Speaker 1: I appreciate the chance to come out and hang out,
Speaker 1: fun hanging with you, Levi. Yeah, that was good having
Speaker 1: you man. Thanks for the puke and rally especially. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was really to go up from puke and to
Speaker 1: better that fast, and it wasn't a drinking puke and
Speaker 1: it was a sick Yeah. So I went to bed
Speaker 1: one night and then woke up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night and had to run outside the tent and
Speaker 1: trying not to peek on your honest, I wonder what
Speaker 1: you're doing out there. Yeah, it ran out they were
Speaker 1: having night tears and never thought that someone was throwing
Speaker 1: up outside tent, which is never a good sign. Ran out,
Speaker 1: and you know, I chucked up my dinner and then uh,
Speaker 1: Johnnie and I did a mega hike to book up
Speaker 1: three hours later and down another ten miles. You know,
Speaker 1: I had to run back to base camp for some
Speaker 1: batteries more than ten miles. Yeah, it was a long Johnt.
Speaker 1: It was a good it was a good huff, but
Speaker 1: definitely worth it. And uh, yeah, what we hope to
Speaker 1: have you back again when you're depending on what you
Speaker 1: got going on. I'd love to for sure. All right,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining us as always, assssssssssssssssssssss