Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: fog bitten and in my case, underwear lessening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. Um, dude, I still like I was
Speaker 1: just telling Joanni about this, like Colorado is a weird
Speaker 1: like from a hunting perspective, is a weird state. How
Speaker 1: so I'll tell you why, Okay, Welle, It's just a
Speaker 1: weird place, right because here, well, I'll get to the
Speaker 1: running of some old hippies out in the woods later.
Speaker 1: So it's like that kind of stuff. But the main,
Speaker 1: the main, and I'll talk about that part of it. Um.
Speaker 1: The main thing that's weird to me is that you
Speaker 1: could have such like like Hodgepodgy landownership issues where where
Speaker 1: it's just like such a weird mixture of little teeny
Speaker 1: bits of public and teeny bits of private and it's
Speaker 1: real messy and public inside private it's messy, And that
Speaker 1: there are so many people hunting, so many people just
Speaker 1: out recreating out in the woods. But then which is
Speaker 1: not normal. That's not weird at all, Like that's just
Speaker 1: like normal, right, that's you find that anywhere like confused
Speaker 1: landownership and shiploads of people is like readily available in
Speaker 1: the United States of America. But you could have that
Speaker 1: but also just have huge, giant freaking bucks running around everywhere. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like how because it's just good habitat everywhere
Speaker 1: you look, I mean from you know, the entire tooth
Speaker 1: western tooth to the state is just mule deer habitat. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I was gonna say too. You know, every buddy
Speaker 1: Jay has been checking out that new ranch down in
Speaker 1: like south central, and it's a big ranch, and he
Speaker 1: feels like there might be like it's like at Acre Ranch,
Speaker 1: and he feels like there might be fifty mule deer
Speaker 1: on the whole place. Poor habitat. Not quite the whole state,
Speaker 1: but like central western, northwestern, northern, you know a lot
Speaker 1: of mule deer habitat. And you keep saying as we
Speaker 1: drive around, you're just like, I can't believe. In every
Speaker 1: direction you look, you feel like there's just a great
Speaker 1: patch of woods that would hide mule deer. When you
Speaker 1: get up on a high spot, you look anywhere, just
Speaker 1: it's just like all mule It's like all mule deer
Speaker 1: country full of dudes looking for deer's but they can't.
Speaker 1: They don't get them all, there's still giants. The fact
Speaker 1: that I spent fifteen years trying to find a big
Speaker 1: buck of Montana, maybe not fifty tone of years trying
Speaker 1: to find like a just like a buck where you
Speaker 1: look and go like holy ship, that's a big meal,
Speaker 1: or you don't gotta think about it. It's hard in Montana.
Speaker 1: Then you get like somehow like in Idaho in Colorado
Speaker 1: and if you see him every day. But we talked
Speaker 1: about this, like Montana runs that late season and they're
Speaker 1: they're easy to kill on novemb you know, yeah, November
Speaker 1: whatever it might be. So yeah, I would say when
Speaker 1: it comes to growing big, huge giant box, if that's
Speaker 1: your goal, um, and I don't know that, and I'm
Speaker 1: not saying it should be because I like like the
Speaker 1: Montana I like the Montana system. You get a general tag,
Speaker 1: so you just go down to the gas station and
Speaker 1: buy your hunt license if you live there or online
Speaker 1: if you don't, and you got what five six weeks
Speaker 1: to hunt, including plus five or six weeks to archery
Speaker 1: if you if you want it. You know, it's like
Speaker 1: have ad a son go including the rut. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure there's like genetic factors and habitat factors
Speaker 1: and severe winners and all that kind of stuff. It's
Speaker 1: playing into it too. But yeah, you can't be letting
Speaker 1: every time Dick and Harry go one and around out
Speaker 1: in the woods during the mulet your rut and think
Speaker 1: that you're gonna have bucks growing to be old, big,
Speaker 1: old huge bucks. And I don't really care because you
Speaker 1: know and that they they manage for opportunity. They manage
Speaker 1: for opportunity. Colorado like isn't short on opportunity, but they
Speaker 1: get you get a week to hunt, not six weeks.
Speaker 1: You get a week, and you gotta pick your season
Speaker 1: and whatever they're doing, it's just, man, I'm just glad
Speaker 1: you Most of these units around here only have a
Speaker 1: couple of hundred of these buck tags. Some units way less.
Speaker 1: That's I think they should make a rule that you
Speaker 1: need to wear a certain kind of hat, a certain
Speaker 1: kind of range hat, or a certain kind of flag
Speaker 1: on your hat if you're hunting the elk, and a
Speaker 1: certain kind of flag on your hat if you're hunting milder.
Speaker 1: Because if I'm hunting milder, in my head, everybody's hunting mulder.
Speaker 1: So anytime I see orange, which there is plenty to
Speaker 1: look at, like orange Blaze, orange off the you know,
Speaker 1: on the other side of the valley, you're canyon from you.
Speaker 1: I look and I'm like, ask some of a guy.
Speaker 1: He's hunting milder, but I'm like, he's probably hunting elk.
Speaker 1: And if you had a little flag system, then you
Speaker 1: know who you were hated and who you didn't really hey,
Speaker 1: who you could go talk to and say, hey, I
Speaker 1: know I noticed your all kin. You see any big
Speaker 1: box around? Yeah? And I could be like, just so happens.
Speaker 1: I was looking at a couple of bulls that once
Speaker 1: I started doing a little map reading, I realized those
Speaker 1: bulls around public Land. And I'll tell you about it
Speaker 1: if you're telling me about the box you've seen. But
Speaker 1: if a guy's on Muler, I'm not gonna go talk
Speaker 1: to him because I'm gonna lie to him. He's gonna
Speaker 1: lie to me, and no one's gonna get anything out
Speaker 1: of that. He like, see any box? Oh, you know
Speaker 1: his unit sucks not a little and two miles off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I went back toward the truck. So all right,
Speaker 1: we gotta back up now. If we gotta get into
Speaker 1: Yanni's how he's dying and we got to get into that.
Speaker 1: You don't want to cover that, no weekend. I'm comfortable
Speaker 1: covering it. Yeah, you should introduce your guests. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: Yanni Janni the lavin eagle who tells us and Brodie
Speaker 1: Henderson say something for yourself. Brodie, I love Big Bucks
Speaker 1: and you cannot lie. Um, Brodie Henderson lives who lives
Speaker 1: Um not terribly too far from here, that's big. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not terribly too far from here. We're nowhere near
Speaker 1: the I seventy quarter this year, you know. And Brody
Speaker 1: lives in the land of big Giant Bucks. But we're
Speaker 1: not even near there. Just to make sure you understand
Speaker 1: that we're not at Brody. We were sitting in a
Speaker 1: log cabin that is not owned by Brady, And if
Speaker 1: Brady lived by here, we'd be sitting in his house.
Speaker 1: So think about that before you try to get all
Speaker 1: sneaky figuring out what's going on. But come down here.
Speaker 1: I have a mulder tag. We're down here taking me
Speaker 1: and Yan you're down here taking care of various pieces
Speaker 1: of business. And um, I got a few days. We
Speaker 1: had how many days to hunt? Three? Four, four? Supposed
Speaker 1: before you miss one, miss one something that I'm not
Speaker 1: even gonna If you don't want to talk about how
Speaker 1: that happened, he can go ahead, But I'm not even
Speaker 1: gonna get into that paperwork problem. Forgot some paperwork at home,
Speaker 1: important pieces of paperwork having to do with whether or
Speaker 1: not you're allowed to go hunt or not. Um So
Speaker 1: lost a little time there and then go out and
Speaker 1: we get into our zone and go on in the
Speaker 1: evening hunt. And we have a friend who has been
Speaker 1: hunting this area for a long time. And this friend's
Speaker 1: got a spot he hunts. He hunts this he hunts
Speaker 1: a ranch, primarily in some in some public land that
Speaker 1: comes up against his ranch. But he's hunting there, and
Speaker 1: we're not wanting to crowd him, and he knows the
Speaker 1: area pretty well, and so he throws us a couple
Speaker 1: of tips about what we ought to be doing. And
Speaker 1: as a nice gesture too, he actually hikes back into
Speaker 1: a little glass and tip he likes and does a
Speaker 1: pre limb check before we show up. And he goes
Speaker 1: up there and and uh finds I think he found
Speaker 1: fifteen doughs from this glass and tip. This guy's strategy
Speaker 1: and he's he's a he's a very successful big giant
Speaker 1: buck hunter. This guy's strategy is he Well, Brodie keep
Speaker 1: explained the first, second, third, fourth and all that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Colorado has four different rifles seasons. First rifles season
Speaker 1: usually we runs somewhere like October ten through that's elk only,
Speaker 1: then five days long and five days. Then there's second season,
Speaker 1: which starts a week after the end of first rifle days.
Speaker 1: No that that one's only a couple of days. It
Speaker 1: ends on a Wednesday, and the next one picks up
Speaker 1: on saturd. That one runs nine days. Then there's a
Speaker 1: weak gap between second and third, and and third usually
Speaker 1: runs somewhere around the first nine days of November ish
Speaker 1: somewhere somewhere right in there. And then fourth season picks
Speaker 1: up a couple of days after third rifle ends, and
Speaker 1: that's a five day season. But there's all like to
Speaker 1: help people understand that because there might be thinking, so
Speaker 1: you can only hunt one week. Talk about all the
Speaker 1: tags you have and what they're all good for. Um,
Speaker 1: I had a third season buck tag, so I just
Speaker 1: I killed the buck a few days ago. Yep, pretty
Speaker 1: good one. And then I have a fourth season bull
Speaker 1: Tag which starts next week. And then I have a
Speaker 1: late season cow tag. What's that runs for a month
Speaker 1: like December fifteenth of January. And then you're walking around
Speaker 1: the black bear tag. That's good for like a whole
Speaker 1: long time, right that they have this like they just
Speaker 1: changed this a couple of years ago. You can buy
Speaker 1: and over the counter with caps, which means there's X
Speaker 1: number of over the counter bare tags available. And if
Speaker 1: you have to say you have a buck tag for
Speaker 1: third rifle season and you buy one of those over
Speaker 1: the counter bear tags, that bear tag is actually good
Speaker 1: for all four rifle seasons. In the unit, you have
Speaker 1: a deer or elk tag four huh. And then there's
Speaker 1: a separate like rifle bear season basically the whole month
Speaker 1: of September, which is a different tag. And then do
Speaker 1: you did you do your mountain lion certification so you're
Speaker 1: a certified Monday? I did. I'm gonna pack a mountain
Speaker 1: lion tag around during that that late season cow tag hunt.
Speaker 1: Who knows, maybe I'll see one. So the third third season,
Speaker 1: we're just focusing on a mule deer here, well elk
Speaker 1: elker rutten during first and second first they're like the
Speaker 1: tail end of the rut would be during first rifle
Speaker 1: um mule mule deer, third rifle mule deer is like
Speaker 1: what I would call like pre rut because like real
Speaker 1: close to the actual rut, and fourth which there aren't
Speaker 1: that many Like the fourth season muled your tags are
Speaker 1: hard to come by because it's route and they don't
Speaker 1: issue very many. They're very tight with those. It might
Speaker 1: be like instead of being might be like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's on a set. My slights for it say about
Speaker 1: enough points to get the fourth season. That would be
Speaker 1: like haunting in Montana for big bucks on November. Um
Speaker 1: sony help this guy that that gives us some intel,
Speaker 1: some hunting info. He is, uh, he really likes to
Speaker 1: hunt the third season and the third season depending on
Speaker 1: whether it can be like real rudding. His hunting strat
Speaker 1: his the way he finds Mulder is he hunts. He says,
Speaker 1: I hunt does now by that he doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: he's shooting at dos. By that he means that he
Speaker 1: is locates every little group of doughs he can find,
Speaker 1: and sometimes big groups are does, sometimes big groups are
Speaker 1: dose and wakes up every morning and goes around and
Speaker 1: checks all those groups of dos, because the box are
Speaker 1: like the dolls are gonna be there, and their little
Speaker 1: configurations kind of like consistency, consistently, but the box are
Speaker 1: like the hand. The deck of cards gets shuffled every night.
Speaker 1: So he checks those doughs, waiting to see who's gonna
Speaker 1: show up, knowing that these big groups of dos if
Speaker 1: they got a little buck with him, he knows that
Speaker 1: a big box is of find those doughs. So he
Speaker 1: finds bucks by watching does. He tells us about a
Speaker 1: little glass and tit that has some doughs by it,
Speaker 1: some on public, some on private. Our first night, we're
Speaker 1: going there and right away find the five five dos
Speaker 1: on private, No, they're on five dos on public. They're
Speaker 1: only like a hundred and fifty yards from us. But
Speaker 1: the stuff around us is like real thick, giant sage,
Speaker 1: so it's you could have three deer walking around there.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna see unless they have a Stepane's little
Speaker 1: teeny openings. But we got some where we know there's
Speaker 1: some you mean to say, giant painting point and juniper right, No,
Speaker 1: that stage in the bottom, real tall old stage down
Speaker 1: autom that that stage six ft high. So but here
Speaker 1: and there's little little grass patches in the stage and
Speaker 1: you have to catch a deer out in one of those,
Speaker 1: and you just realize, Man, there's a million places you
Speaker 1: can put more deer, and I wouldn't know they were there.
Speaker 1: So when I say there's five, you don't know really
Speaker 1: what's going on. It's just five that happened to be
Speaker 1: mingling around in a grass patch in the middle of
Speaker 1: all this stage, which hides deer real good. But what
Speaker 1: we're seeing is lots of deer, lots of elk on
Speaker 1: the private and where you're at. It's like if you
Speaker 1: imagine if you could just shoot, like imagining to shoot
Speaker 1: a laser at any land feature around you, I would
Speaker 1: say that of those laser shots are gonna hit private
Speaker 1: land if you had a laser pointer right, And you're
Speaker 1: just like, I don't know, there there's a fifty percent
Speaker 1: chance that there is gonna be private in at chance
Speaker 1: that there's gonna be public. You agree, And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of mapping technology out there where you can kind
Speaker 1: of look at overlays to see what's what, and you
Speaker 1: realize that from the spot you're looking at, we're looking
Speaker 1: at deer, we're glassing up a bunch of deer and
Speaker 1: some elk that are on private land, and we're glassing
Speaker 1: up deer that are on public But you would not
Speaker 1: be able to walk from your public patch to that
Speaker 1: public patch because between there is a big barrier of
Speaker 1: private land. Yeah, you couldn't do it in a straight line.
Speaker 1: You'd have to make a j and you're starting at
Speaker 1: the point of the j and go backwards. First swing
Speaker 1: around some private and then you couldn't do it in that.
Speaker 1: You couldn't do it in that hunt. Probably not like
Speaker 1: in the evening hunt. Yeah, but you couldn't because no
Speaker 1: evening hunt definitely not the hunt. If all sudden it
Speaker 1: gets started, starts to feel kind of like evening, like
Speaker 1: which I always know the minute it happens, just just
Speaker 1: like internally it just became evening, I just know. And
Speaker 1: all of a sudden there's deer um. You could feasibly
Speaker 1: be line it to him, but you have to go around,
Speaker 1: get down the road, go out to a highway and
Speaker 1: hike in two miles to get the right in front
Speaker 1: of you. But if you saw a monster, you could
Speaker 1: come up with some kind of plan to get there later. Well,
Speaker 1: that was our plan that we would glass up a
Speaker 1: biggin and then the next day go in there and
Speaker 1: for the sea cout. But what happened was we glassed
Speaker 1: up a biggin that was just absolutely like not on
Speaker 1: public land. It wasn't likely to become on public land.
Speaker 1: He's probably a mile away, right, Yeah, not for a while.
Speaker 1: What do you mean not for a while? Him coming
Speaker 1: onto public land, Well, he's probably gonna take some sort
Speaker 1: of change in the weather. Sure. I mean, what I'm
Speaker 1: saying is I wasn't gonna go and like make that
Speaker 1: my morning plan. Whether short Yeah, you gotta short him
Speaker 1: out of time because I would need to. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to explain, like this tip that we're on, and how
Speaker 1: this tip that we're on works, is that the chances
Speaker 1: of you actually taking a poke from the tip are slim. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a small piece of public that I mean,
Speaker 1: we're almost perched on the edge of the public looking
Speaker 1: at a lot of private. Oh and at dusk, that's right.
Speaker 1: And at dusk we glass up another bagin who was
Speaker 1: very easily walk table. But we all by looking at
Speaker 1: my GPS, we had four hundred and sixty yards of
Speaker 1: public in front of us, and that buck was at
Speaker 1: sixty and not not looking in our direction but going
Speaker 1: watching dolls the other drect so and that buck would
Speaker 1: have been nearly impossible to go after. There's no way
Speaker 1: you could have gotten up on a little perch to
Speaker 1: try to shoot down in there at om. He would
Speaker 1: have been very a difficult to chase after. Am I
Speaker 1: set in the stage here you are. I think you
Speaker 1: described a situation well. And yeah, if you sat there
Speaker 1: for seven days on that little and you were like,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna shoot, I just want to meat buck.
Speaker 1: I'm here for a meat buck. I'm gonna stand this tip,
Speaker 1: you would probably every couple of days gonna meat buck. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because those does were right there hanging out, it would
Speaker 1: be like it would have happened. It was frustrating with
Speaker 1: me for me when I showed up, because we went
Speaker 1: back into that spot. I went in with you guys
Speaker 1: the next morning was we're looking at shiploads of deer,
Speaker 1: but most of them. You're like, well, I can't hunt
Speaker 1: those deer, drisking crazy and looking at deer's fun But
Speaker 1: and then you you glass up another big and that
Speaker 1: was indisputably on private, fixing the leave private. But we're
Speaker 1: looking at um the public land dear that you would
Speaker 1: have to go after another day, we were looking at
Speaker 1: over a dozen oh yeah with bucks with meat bucks.
Speaker 1: But if here too, my freezers jam packed. I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, I like the hunt meat bucks, but I
Speaker 1: was not, and I was these couple these last few days,
Speaker 1: I have not been meat buck hunting. I'm okay going
Speaker 1: home with that one. Yeah, I'm looking at I'm looking
Speaker 1: for that one in a hundred, you know, like buck
Speaker 1: where you're like, oh my gosh, look at that buck,
Speaker 1: Like that's the buck that you gotta. You need to
Speaker 1: be a like have a special set of circumstances allow you.
Speaker 1: You know, that's like the buck you you strive to
Speaker 1: learn how to find. You know. The next morning we
Speaker 1: go back to the same tip and the same thing happens. Oh.
Speaker 1: Another thing happened that was interesting is at one point
Speaker 1: I see a dear, like if you're glass and mule
Speaker 1: deer and observing him, you can tell a lot about
Speaker 1: what is around those dear by reading their body language.
Speaker 1: And and a lot of times you'll find bucks by
Speaker 1: watching does because those are nervous around bucks during the rut,
Speaker 1: So a lot of times you'll see all the doughs,
Speaker 1: like just being very fixed staring into some little hellhole
Speaker 1: brush patch or something, and they don't like it, and
Speaker 1: they're always looking in there. And after a while you
Speaker 1: might start staring in out of the spot and scope
Speaker 1: and find what it is they're annoyed by, and it's
Speaker 1: a box. You find a lot of box like that.
Speaker 1: Because those will be up feeding around, they're kind of
Speaker 1: more a little more freewheeling about how they expose themselves
Speaker 1: and how much time they spend out feeding. And the
Speaker 1: bucks they don't get to be big giant bucks by
Speaker 1: getting shot, So there's a certain amount of like stealthiness
Speaker 1: that goes into being a big giant buck. And I
Speaker 1: don't think that it's I think it's a little bit learned,
Speaker 1: and I think it's a little bit like if they
Speaker 1: were not that way, they'd be dead. So I think
Speaker 1: there's some that just are skittish, Like when you when
Speaker 1: you scare melding, the meal is running away eight out
Speaker 1: of ten meal there are gonna stop if they're gonna
Speaker 1: crest the ridge and be gone. They stop and look back.
Speaker 1: They're kind of like, do I really need to run
Speaker 1: this far? Like is this thing really seriously threatened to me.
Speaker 1: Bucks that do that don't live to be big jaant bucks.
Speaker 1: Bucks that like decide I'm just gonna run over the ridge,
Speaker 1: just never stopped running and run way away from here
Speaker 1: before I stop or sneak just creep out of there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or the real the ones that are really born with
Speaker 1: a gift, don't run with the dolls. The dolls book
Speaker 1: and they make a big show out of how they're booking,
Speaker 1: and then they get on the ridge shout and stop
Speaker 1: and look back. But that buck has taken some completely
Speaker 1: different route through a bunch of like brush without really
Speaker 1: running but kind of like trotting along, and he's just like,
Speaker 1: see you, ladies, I'll catch you after dark. Those bucks
Speaker 1: become big giant box What were the ones that lived
Speaker 1: behind us private fence posts for most of their lives.
Speaker 1: There's different Yeah, there's different ways. You could probably be
Speaker 1: a dumb buck who's always out, a dumb buck who
Speaker 1: likes to always be on a l f alfa field eating,
Speaker 1: but if there's no hunting, he's gonna Yeah, he might
Speaker 1: be just fine. Um Oh, well, I was getting at is.
Speaker 1: I'm watching this dough and I can't figure out why
Speaker 1: she is looking at So if you see a dough
Speaker 1: staring at something, it's like you know there's something there
Speaker 1: that it doesn't like, or it's staring at a buck
Speaker 1: and she's just But I see this dough with the
Speaker 1: look of a dough that's like annoyed and concerned about
Speaker 1: something's presence near her. But she's walking forward like she's
Speaker 1: walking at her object of interest. And that caught my attention.
Speaker 1: So I'm staring at the spot and scope and I
Speaker 1: realized that she's seeing a bobcat. I'm not chasing it,
Speaker 1: but like like making sure it, yeah, where it is.
Speaker 1: I'm keeping tabs on you just kind of like a
Speaker 1: like a like an old lady like yelling at some
Speaker 1: neighborhood kid, you know, like following him along sort of
Speaker 1: like like escorting him out of the area. This bobcat. Oh,
Speaker 1: so that happened, big bobcat. I got a question. I
Speaker 1: couldn't I couldn't judge him. I can't judge way off bobcats.
Speaker 1: Did you have you ever seen mule deer stomped their
Speaker 1: feet like white tails? Do? Yes? Yeah? Did she do
Speaker 1: that at all? Man? Have I I feel like I have?
Speaker 1: I feel like they don't but maybe maybe they do.
Speaker 1: Blow a long time to figure. But you know how
Speaker 1: white tails don't stand there and stomp their feet. Man,
Speaker 1: I want to say that I've seen them stomp their feet,
Speaker 1: but the more I think about I can't think of
Speaker 1: an exact can you, nny? I can't think of an
Speaker 1: exact man. Dudes are gonna be writing in like, dudes
Speaker 1: gonna be writing like a bad out of hell about this. Man.
Speaker 1: I kind of feel like they don't, but we'll find
Speaker 1: out if they do. It's not as much as as
Speaker 1: white tails. I made the mistake one time saying, how
Speaker 1: you know how antelope go under fences not over? Why
Speaker 1: is some go over fences? Right? So people hate? Uh?
Speaker 1: I think there's people that don't like generalities, and there's
Speaker 1: people that just want to be helpful. Yeah, an like
Speaker 1: to go under fences, but there's no absolution. You're gonna
Speaker 1: get ten videos of analope going over fences. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: Brody has to after our second So we did the
Speaker 1: evening sit on the Frustrating I'm gonna call it Frustration Tip.
Speaker 1: Did the evening sit on Frustration Tip did a more
Speaker 1: Me sit with Brody men Broty on Frustration Tip Brody
Speaker 1: has a split late morning mid morning and me and
Speaker 1: Yanni have to sign that we're going to travel into
Speaker 1: a new area and the landownership where we are so
Speaker 1: screwed that we almost like travel through what I would
Speaker 1: describe as a channel of public land that opens up
Speaker 1: to a bunch of publics too much. But we realized
Speaker 1: from our tip, from frustration tip, we thought we had
Speaker 1: to go back out like hike the short hike back
Speaker 1: out to the road, hopping a rig, go down the
Speaker 1: road and reacts. But you get looking at like there's
Speaker 1: like a little channel of a narrow wedge of land
Speaker 1: that you can sort of trapes through to get steep stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was not Yeah, it's not fun walking to get
Speaker 1: up into a big area of open public and start
Speaker 1: traps through theirfc you don't and falling you in it.
Speaker 1: A dophon unit in there, hike up gets talking about
Speaker 1: arrowheads and whatnot. Get up to the top and find
Speaker 1: a sweet looking area that you could only hunt with
Speaker 1: a hot air balloon or still hunting techniques, or if
Speaker 1: you had good wet ground you can still hunt it
Speaker 1: because you're always seeing these little like one hundred yard
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty yard open aspen patches, but you never
Speaker 1: are getting like the commanding view that I like. Is
Speaker 1: that where you saw the moose. Yeah, he saw moose
Speaker 1: like like him to shake hand. I couldn't see it.
Speaker 1: It was like one of those situations where I'm looking
Speaker 1: at it, but I wasn't like comprehending it. I remember,
Speaker 1: um uh, I can how the Africa or Tom McIntyre. No, yeah,
Speaker 1: McIntyre already says his name was my mess his name up.
Speaker 1: He saw about hunting being in Africa one time and
Speaker 1: the guys with the guy he's with all of a
Speaker 1: sudden stopping him and he's like, you know, it's the elephant.
Speaker 1: He's like, I look and look, I can't see an elephant,
Speaker 1: like nowhere. I look, honestly, trees, tree trunks. He realized
Speaker 1: that's like one of the tree trunks as he's peering
Speaker 1: under the brush, like one of the tree trunks is
Speaker 1: like a leg of an elephant. Some of the moose
Speaker 1: was just standing steep guys right there, right there, And
Speaker 1: I don't know what I was looking for, but I
Speaker 1: was saying, oh, yeah, I mean the moose standing there
Speaker 1: like little ship moose. He was obscured, but Um, I
Speaker 1: saw some rabbit sign went through some real nice open
Speaker 1: aspen grovy kind of stuff, entered into just a hellhole
Speaker 1: where it was a lot more like timber. Noisily bushedwag
Speaker 1: through this timber. Yeah, that's some nasty stuff up there.
Speaker 1: I didn't like to add at all. Squirted a bunch
Speaker 1: of meals you're out ahead of us. I't like that
Speaker 1: at all. And then bust out into and I could
Speaker 1: see it on my map, bust out into the like
Speaker 1: most picturesque gigantic sage flat meadow, like high elevation stage flat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like it wasn't feet something like that. And
Speaker 1: the first thing I say is like like talking about
Speaker 1: like a glass is half empty. We're like, holy shit,
Speaker 1: this is like amazing up here. And I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but everybody know about this spot. This has got to
Speaker 1: be like the spot everybody walks to look at it.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. And even though we just kick some deer out,
Speaker 1: I'm like all down on it because it looks too good.
Speaker 1: If it looks too good, there must be a problem
Speaker 1: with it. But I think at that point we were
Speaker 1: probably getting onto in three miles from the rigs from
Speaker 1: the road, from a trail, and that's like straight line miles.
Speaker 1: There was a lot up and down and we had
Speaker 1: climbed over a thousand feet. It's aways feeling pretty good
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, you knew I was being pessimistic about it.
Speaker 1: About the meadow. We're gonna call it the meadow. It's
Speaker 1: like an elk and deer playground almost up there. Like
Speaker 1: it looks perfect. Yeah, it just has attleit of foreshadow.
Speaker 1: I later had occasion to sleep on that meadow, and
Speaker 1: I was laying in a bed instead of I had
Speaker 1: a sleeping pad. I didn't need it because I was
Speaker 1: laying in a bed of elk dropping. So we just
Speaker 1: crossed this thing and gets where we're overlooking, and you
Speaker 1: cross the stage flat and you went overlooking this big
Speaker 1: canyon that Broidery had told but he had you go
Speaker 1: off there hunting rabbits? Are you hunting deer? When I've
Speaker 1: been up there deer hunting before and grouse hunting rabbits
Speaker 1: down down low down by where the rig was any
Speaker 1: track of lion and a bar threw there. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: Brody told us about this this bitch and uh canyon
Speaker 1: full of aspens. That's good glass. And so we get
Speaker 1: the edge of that, and by this time it's like
Speaker 1: the evening hunt and I perch up on the edge.
Speaker 1: And before I even perch up on the edge, I
Speaker 1: really I was just too deer down below me, and
Speaker 1: they feed up towards us, and it turns into a
Speaker 1: three pack of doze feeds up towards us. I sit
Speaker 1: down and just start watching for more deer, and pretty
Speaker 1: soon I pick up twenty dos in a nice not
Speaker 1: a not a big giant bug, but a nice buck.
Speaker 1: And Yan He's like, I'm gonna go, uh do a
Speaker 1: little scout up and down canyon. Yeah, I just want
Speaker 1: to make sure it was like no real nice vista
Speaker 1: that we were missing. Yeah, did the thing? Did the
Speaker 1: weird shooting occasion happened before or after that? Before? Were
Speaker 1: you sitting by me for the weird shooting things? Okay,
Speaker 1: so a little bit of a weird shooting thing. Earlier
Speaker 1: I was talking about how Colorado's weird. There's always people
Speaker 1: around when we're on the edge of where we're on
Speaker 1: this canyon, rim glassing the bottom of the canyon in
Speaker 1: the other side, like you could see the other side
Speaker 1: was like kind of public but mostly private. Yea canyon
Speaker 1: might be as a little bit in mis leading because
Speaker 1: I start to think about grand canon when you say canyon.
Speaker 1: But there's no real like exposed steep rock cliffs in
Speaker 1: this canyon. It's just like a steep valley. Um. But
Speaker 1: it's like there's nowhere where you can't climb down and
Speaker 1: climb right back up the other side. Sure, and it's
Speaker 1: two you couldn't shoot across it. Yeah, it's a big one,
Speaker 1: too far to shoot across. But right, and we get
Speaker 1: up on our little perch, we're gonna start just observing
Speaker 1: what's going on below us. Yanni picks up two dudes
Speaker 1: perched up on the opposing canyon wall. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that valley wall. Yeah, I told you the story across
Speaker 1: that big aspen draw across it. But higher up than
Speaker 1: us are two pumpkins. And when I say pumpkins, I
Speaker 1: mean dudes wearing Hunters orange. There's two pumpkins, and then
Speaker 1: a while later realized there's another pumpkin below them with
Speaker 1: an orange cowboy hat. And Yanni commented how he has
Speaker 1: a blaze orange cowboy hat. And I speculated that it
Speaker 1: might be one of those covers that you can put
Speaker 1: I think there's like I'm like I said, I bet
Speaker 1: it's an orange cover. If he has an actual blaze
Speaker 1: orange cowboy hat. I like that ship a lot. That's
Speaker 1: what Steve wears too when he's in Colorado. When your
Speaker 1: in Colorado, you wear a big cowboy hat and you
Speaker 1: put the orange cover over it. That's how we do it.
Speaker 1: So see a cowboy hat would have got me thinking
Speaker 1: about what kind of hunter it was. Yes, Listen, my
Speaker 1: friend Ronnie Bam has a maxim. Never wear a hat
Speaker 1: that has more personality than you do. That is why
Speaker 1: I wear baseball hats, not flat rim base definitely not
Speaker 1: a flat brim hat, and I definitely keep my ears
Speaker 1: outside the hat band. About these stormy crombers that we
Speaker 1: like to wear, I was gonna bring that up. They
Speaker 1: work well. I don't have that much personality. They work.
Speaker 1: They work well for you guys. Yeah, But to stick
Speaker 1: to Ronnie Bams max and I wear his baseball hats. See,
Speaker 1: I feel is almost a baseball hat. It's real clothes, right,
Speaker 1: Isn't that how the story goes? That's written on the
Speaker 1: inside of the hate was wearing a baseball hat, but
Speaker 1: you're on an extra flap. They're nice. Well, I do
Speaker 1: wear the first light brim beanie, which is a radar
Speaker 1: hat that's like a trimmed down version of I have
Speaker 1: that level of person I have the personality to support
Speaker 1: that hat. I do not have the personality just support
Speaker 1: a blaze on the cowboy. So so there's two guys
Speaker 1: up high and we're having a conversation about whether or
Speaker 1: not these these groups, the one man group and the
Speaker 1: two man group are affiliate, like are they associates or not?
Speaker 1: And all of a sudden, bouch. One of them shoots.
Speaker 1: One of them shoots like from his canyon wall, like
Speaker 1: apparently shooting over to our zone, but not our zone
Speaker 1: because we're down value. But he's like shooting from his
Speaker 1: canyon wall across canyon. So those guys are like, damn
Speaker 1: near a mile away. Probably no, no, not, I could
Speaker 1: have walked over there in fifteen minutes. Yeah, And he
Speaker 1: was one of them was down low enough down that
Speaker 1: he could he could shoot across. So it's like bouch,
Speaker 1: and and I looked through my binoes and I can't
Speaker 1: tell what the cowboy had. Dude's doing. He's kind of
Speaker 1: like fidgetting around in some brush. But the two guys
Speaker 1: above there are just transfixed with binoculars to their eyes,
Speaker 1: staring across canyon, not even budging, And I'm like, they
Speaker 1: didn't they didn't shoot because they couldn't have gotten into
Speaker 1: positions they're in that fast. It must have been the
Speaker 1: lower guy that shot. So I started watching him, anticipating
Speaker 1: that he's gonna huh, you don't run down, do something
Speaker 1: dramatic and like, you know, a single shot, it's a
Speaker 1: good sign. Well, a couple of seconds later, he just
Speaker 1: picks up his rifle and walks back up the hill like, no,
Speaker 1: he wasn't. He didn't go over to check for blood.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I have no idea what clean miss
Speaker 1: he they kind of like. He starts heading up towards
Speaker 1: the other guys and I'm like, okay, so they are associates.
Speaker 1: They drift off and towards the setting sun, and that's
Speaker 1: when I see a deer coming. I'm like, oh, those
Speaker 1: jokers are spooking deer. But I realized that's not the case.
Speaker 1: And outcomes this just string a freaking dose and they
Speaker 1: come out and start feeding, and there's a nice box
Speaker 1: and in a day, and what I later learned was
Speaker 1: a dinker box because they were fighting for a lot.
Speaker 1: The two bucks are fighting for a long time. Yanni
Speaker 1: goes to take a look around. Tell what it happened
Speaker 1: in your little odyssey. Yeah, um, yeah, So I left
Speaker 1: just as if we can get if there was a
Speaker 1: better advantage of this Aspen canyon. And so I kind
Speaker 1: of you had perched maybe like yards down off the rim,
Speaker 1: and so I popped back up on the rim. I
Speaker 1: go not fifty yards up canyon, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: I'm looking at a doll and I look to my
Speaker 1: peripheral and there's a foaking horn, another dough, probably like
Speaker 1: a pretty spinley, but I don't know, two or three
Speaker 1: year old four by four, you know, like a bucket
Speaker 1: gets your attention, but you're like, probably not today, you know.
Speaker 1: And uh, they kind of see any kind of don't
Speaker 1: and they get close enough whre I could have shot
Speaker 1: with my bow. So it's a nice little, nice little encounter,
Speaker 1: a little wildlife moment. I could farther up, don't see
Speaker 1: much else, don't see a better risk to turn around,
Speaker 1: come back and walk all the way past where Steve
Speaker 1: sitting and start to look over more of the canyon,
Speaker 1: and uh, I think I saw between looking down in
Speaker 1: the canyon and doing at a loop, another two does
Speaker 1: and another fork at horn and no more mugs, no
Speaker 1: well way off in the distance. Because I was I
Speaker 1: was almost assuming it might have been the same guys
Speaker 1: that had laughed and they had just you know, done
Speaker 1: a loop and then pop popped out lower in the camp.
Speaker 1: Because it was you could glass up this over on private,
Speaker 1: you could glass up this little cabin. They had all
Speaker 1: kinds of trucks parked. They were headed down down canyon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just as some foreshadowing, boy that those boys get
Speaker 1: some shooting them later, just as foreshadowing. So Yanni comes
Speaker 1: back and then we got like an hour left when
Speaker 1: I get back to Steve's and you and you say,
Speaker 1: I'm all geeked out about these dolls that are way
Speaker 1: far away, and you say, um, there's not enough time.
Speaker 1: Even if we were to find a big giant buck,
Speaker 1: there's not enough time to put a move on him. Anyways,
Speaker 1: Let's take our little bit of and just do a
Speaker 1: little because it's a real nice trail, do a little
Speaker 1: still hunt down this trail. Since we noticed a bunch
Speaker 1: of deer starting to pop up top here and We're
Speaker 1: going along nice and easy, and it starts getting like borderline.
Speaker 1: Find some of the deer again. First, find some of
Speaker 1: the deer you saw again, keep moving, marveling at how
Speaker 1: amazing this area is up here, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden spook some deer. It's kind of like borderline too dark,
Speaker 1: probably like borderline legal end of legal shooting light, like
Speaker 1: within minutes of the end of legal shooting light. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean I was watching the clock because I definitely
Speaker 1: wanted to get to those like to where I knew
Speaker 1: we could look over into stage flats and went about
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes left and it's a kind of light with
Speaker 1: it with your naked eye, yeah, you're probably not seeing
Speaker 1: real well. But you know, with optics you could eat
Speaker 1: cleanly kill an animal, no problem. Yeah, well, I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about I'm not talking about whether I could have,
Speaker 1: because I've been in a lot of situations where you
Speaker 1: could cleanly kill animals way outside of legal shooting light
Speaker 1: with optics. Oh, because the moon or something snow. Yeah, anyways,
Speaker 1: we're within I was watching were a full moon and
Speaker 1: snow on the ground like round the clock. That's true.
Speaker 1: So anyhow we jump I hear noise and see flashes
Speaker 1: a deer, and Yannie runs ahead to try to get
Speaker 1: a look at before to get away, and sees, yeah,
Speaker 1: they have kind of bailed off this edge, And so
Speaker 1: I run down the trail maybe I don't know, fifty yards,
Speaker 1: thinking I'll catch him just down below. I'd have been
Speaker 1: there just an hour earlier, and there's a big sage
Speaker 1: flat Well this was, you know now, HARKing back to
Speaker 1: how we're talking about bucks that grow to be big
Speaker 1: and old, is these I think a dough and two bucks.
Speaker 1: I think again, it's pretty pretty dark, a bucking two
Speaker 1: doughs throwing the other buck to in this talk about
Speaker 1: the buck who is not a contender to grow into
Speaker 1: a big, old, giant buck, all right, because well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll come back to him. But these two quickly put
Speaker 1: binoculars on. They have already made up probably two yards
Speaker 1: I'm guessing maybe more. And I mean they are just
Speaker 1: flat out. There's no stotting. And if you don't know
Speaker 1: what that is, it's basically when they pronged, then when
Speaker 1: they're hopping, they are just like flat ears, pinned back
Speaker 1: like rum slow, just burning sage, and they're like, I
Speaker 1: I catch him in my binos, and a half a
Speaker 1: second later they're into the timber and I just remember
Speaker 1: seeing like no anilers, a whole bunch of andlers and
Speaker 1: then a little bit less anglers on the rear one.
Speaker 1: I'm like, holy shit, they're in here, but we just
Speaker 1: bumped them. Then Steve catches up to me. We're overlooking
Speaker 1: the stage flat. He's like, oh, there's another dear, you
Speaker 1: know like that, Keep looking, keep looking, maybe there's more.
Speaker 1: And yeah, he's not a contenter for getting old, because
Speaker 1: what was he was forky? He was like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's like, I'm I gonna get all excited about these
Speaker 1: guys coming through here with a gun. Those guys look
Speaker 1: like trophy hunters. What could possibly happen to me? So
Speaker 1: he's not he doesn't have that special little thing. But
Speaker 1: maybe it takes time, Maybe that dude will get paranoid.
Speaker 1: That yeah, so that I was trying to Yeah, I
Speaker 1: tried to add that in earlier, that some of it's learned.
Speaker 1: He that, uh, you have a handful of your bodies
Speaker 1: get shot out from next to you and it probably
Speaker 1: starts to instill in you, Yeah, some of that paranoia.
Speaker 1: Then we just take a hike in the water, and
Speaker 1: then we take a long hike in the dark. And
Speaker 1: my only comment on the hike was that throughout the
Speaker 1: day we climbed Grant over a long period of time,
Speaker 1: quite a long ways and once you come instant all
Speaker 1: into just a late night in the dark march down
Speaker 1: the hill. See that we were traveling downhill longer and
Speaker 1: farther than I ever imagined we had gone, because we
Speaker 1: did a big loop. Yeah, you had me worried because
Speaker 1: he's like, man, it took like two hours to get down.
Speaker 1: I'm like ninety minutes. Ninety minutes. We were like practically
Speaker 1: running down the damn hill and then we hit the
Speaker 1: we hit the road and had always to hike back
Speaker 1: one point seven miles from the truck. But when he
Speaker 1: said it took ninety minutes to get down, I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't that long to get up. You got a
Speaker 1: little turned around the dark. Never ever been here before.
Speaker 1: It's dark. Yeah, it's not. It's not the best trail spots. Well,
Speaker 1: you guys did it in the in the light today,
Speaker 1: so can you follow it. There's a couple of spots
Speaker 1: where it what the trails is, uh like when you're
Speaker 1: on a trail. The trail is usually good in the
Speaker 1: shitty areas, and you're getting the good areas and people
Speaker 1: just fan out. So every time that trail hits the meadow,
Speaker 1: people are just like the kind of scatter. And then
Speaker 1: you gotta yeah, because that's the spot where you can
Speaker 1: actually talk to your buddy and walk with Soody walks
Speaker 1: up next to you. You guys talk about what you're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then you gotta get to the end of the
Speaker 1: meadow and you gotta like pace around trying to find
Speaker 1: out how the trail leaves enter some falls trails. And
Speaker 1: we got off in the dark on a dry wash,
Speaker 1: thinking we were on the trail, and we're on the trail.
Speaker 1: We're on a dry wash, and events you come down,
Speaker 1: find a little creek to get some water through out
Speaker 1: of water, there's five to seventy cartridges laying there, which
Speaker 1: I have no idea, some do, I don't know. Some
Speaker 1: dude crouched down and get some water and then dumped
Speaker 1: out of his pocket full am I don't know. Five
Speaker 1: to seventies shells laying there looked like Ramanton cor locks.
Speaker 1: Where are they still there? When you came back? Yep,
Speaker 1: I stuck them all nose into the mud, made like
Speaker 1: a little uh install Asian art with him in the mud,
Speaker 1: except some guy with a horse must have kicked him over,
Speaker 1: because three of them are laying off, but they're still there.
Speaker 1: Um hit the road and then Yanny walks it was
Speaker 1: one point seven miles and gets the rig and comes
Speaker 1: back and fetches me. Now we're staying in a little cabin,
Speaker 1: and we make a plan. We set our alarms for
Speaker 1: three forty five am. Right, and Brody, you're gonna come
Speaker 1: to meet us, And no, you weren't. You had bailed
Speaker 1: you take the kids in. No, he had bailed. Set
Speaker 1: our lars with three forty five am, so that we
Speaker 1: can get back up in the zone before it gets
Speaker 1: light out up on our perch, canyon perch. But all
Speaker 1: night I'm not sleeping well because like Yanni just rummaging
Speaker 1: around an e benu. I'm like, what's going on? And
Speaker 1: he's having like a heart attack. I wasn't having a
Speaker 1: heart attack. Thing goodness, but talking about your problem this
Speaker 1: is the way I'll being like an episode of Oprah,
Speaker 1: because we're gonna talk about like you having like a
Speaker 1: health scare and the triumph of finding out what was
Speaker 1: going on? We don't have that. Who's that guy that
Speaker 1: was always like, oh yo, take some rhubar backs track,
Speaker 1: it'll cure that. Garrett. No, doctor Oz, I was taking
Speaker 1: doctors go ahead. This is like a doctor Oz episode.
Speaker 1: Garret probably give us some that tinsture that he likes
Speaker 1: to put on his tongue when he's everybody's sick around him. Um. Yes,
Speaker 1: I've been dealing with these symptoms for I don't know,
Speaker 1: five to fifteen years fifteen years ago. It was the
Speaker 1: first time I remember having something that where I was
Speaker 1: in police um with my wife before we got married,
Speaker 1: angling angling, doing some bone fish angling, staying at my
Speaker 1: buddies place. Who owns the Blue Water Grill down there
Speaker 1: on what's that call Ambigas. Yeah, if you ever down there,
Speaker 1: it's the only place you need to go eat, go
Speaker 1: to the Blue Water And um, well real quick, Brody
Speaker 1: did used a guy down there? No, I just fished
Speaker 1: down there. Yeah, Brody used to do some hosted trips
Speaker 1: ye down there. Um yeah. So we had been angling
Speaker 1: in the hot sun, possibly gotten dehydra or whatever, and
Speaker 1: I sort of had a like a fluttering heart feeling,
Speaker 1: maybe like a miss beat something along those lines, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't kick it, and so I end up going
Speaker 1: to the doctor down there in the last which like
Speaker 1: it's kind of scary in him itself, just because you're
Speaker 1: in another country. Yeah, they speak English, so yeah, and um,
Speaker 1: they could really you know say what it was like,
Speaker 1: you needed to go check it out. They gave me
Speaker 1: something to call me down. I was fine, and uh
Speaker 1: I got home. When you get my heart checked out,
Speaker 1: had to e k G. I can't remember where the
Speaker 1: test they ran and I said I was fine, No,
Speaker 1: no problems. So like ten years probably went by, and um,
Speaker 1: one night just wake up in the middle of the
Speaker 1: night and sort of have like an increased heart rate
Speaker 1: and again sort of it like fluttering heart feeling and uh,
Speaker 1: and stuff's going wrong with your heart man itself? Again,
Speaker 1: is not that like there's no pain associated it's not scary. No,
Speaker 1: But I'm no doctor. I'm no doctor. But I told it.
Speaker 1: When your heart stops, when your heart stops working, that's
Speaker 1: not good. Nothing you can feel it. Yeah, So it
Speaker 1: it makes like something like an immense amount of anxiety
Speaker 1: when you feel that, you know, but there's no, like
Speaker 1: I said, no pain associated with it, you know, It's like,
Speaker 1: it's funny because I've had a lot of injuries over
Speaker 1: the years, and you know, I've had both knees blown
Speaker 1: out and fixed in the last few years, and none
Speaker 1: of that stuff really makes me nervous because you're just
Speaker 1: like whatever, it's like bones and muscle, and it's like
Speaker 1: they ain't gonna kill me, right, But when your heart's fluttering,
Speaker 1: you're thinking what's next? It might kill me. So but
Speaker 1: until until two nights ago, I'd always just call myself down,
Speaker 1: walk around, make a phone call to my wife. It's
Speaker 1: always seemed sort of like talking to people are engaging
Speaker 1: somehow sort of takes my mind off it, and I
Speaker 1: would get rid of the flutter, you know, because it
Speaker 1: would be like a every three or four breaths at
Speaker 1: the end of the next shale, you just feel like
Speaker 1: this little like extra just enough to be like what
Speaker 1: what was that? What the fuck? What was that? You know?
Speaker 1: And um So, so the other night it happened twice.
Speaker 1: We went to bed like nine early, and like ten,
Speaker 1: I wake up and feeling it. I'm like, fuck, well,
Speaker 1: Jennifer's at home butcher butchering my dear left her. So
Speaker 1: she's been sending me text like what about this? And
Speaker 1: what about that? So I knew she was up, so
Speaker 1: I called her and you know, so she's chatting me
Speaker 1: up and kind of talking me down and it goes away.
Speaker 1: It's fine. I like, all right, Cony, to get some sleep.
Speaker 1: We're getting up in like freaking three hours or something.
Speaker 1: So go back to sleep and at two am wake up.
Speaker 1: Same thing. And I don't know still to this day,
Speaker 1: like what's the um? Like what causes it? Like what what?
Speaker 1: What's the what kicks it off? Right? We're sleeping in
Speaker 1: a small cabin. Steve's got too many logs on the fire.
Speaker 1: It's like a sawny in here, so it's hard to sleep.
Speaker 1: My body might be stretched from that. We did a
Speaker 1: pretty big hike, so I could have been you know,
Speaker 1: tuck it out or or um just what's the word
Speaker 1: I'm looking for it, you know, just after some strenuous activity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like in the past, as it happened, like mostly at
Speaker 1: night when you're sleeping. One time I had a UM
Speaker 1: during the day episode. I was actually elker deer hunting
Speaker 1: in Montana a couple of years ago, and the same thing.
Speaker 1: I kind of just started going back down the hill
Speaker 1: and got my mind off, and by the time I
Speaker 1: got to the truck, they're going away and I end
Speaker 1: up actually driving to a different different trailhead going hunting
Speaker 1: for the evening. But anyways, to night twice in one night,
Speaker 1: and I had had enough. So I've been there multiple
Speaker 1: times when I'm like, man, I should just go to
Speaker 1: the doctor right now, go to the hospital and get
Speaker 1: it checked out. So I'm sitting here. You want to
Speaker 1: catch it. You want to catch it where the doctor
Speaker 1: can actually see, because you couldn't even tell you were
Speaker 1: even entertaining the idea that it's just something that exists
Speaker 1: in your head. Yeah, right, because it's sole minor, you know.
Speaker 1: And this like after now talking to the cardiologists, um
Speaker 1: p A, I can now back that up because she's
Speaker 1: saying that, like, so, well, we'll get back to that
Speaker 1: um at two thirty in the morning. I'm like, yeah, Steve,
Speaker 1: I kind of feel like I want to go to
Speaker 1: the hospitals. She's like, well, let's fucking go. I'm like,
Speaker 1: all right, let's go. It's about a time. So we
Speaker 1: drive the nearest I proposed the hospital. Yeah yeah, well,
Speaker 1: well yeah, I'll just curiously what's happening to you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think I had said that, Like I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like thinking about anyways, it's not important because I
Speaker 1: just I just had a morbid curiosity. I just wanted
Speaker 1: to have I just want to want to go nap
Speaker 1: in the hospital chair for a couple of hours. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's funny. As I'm sitting there all hooked up to
Speaker 1: the machines, They're like, yeah, you're all set. If you
Speaker 1: want to, you know, buddy to come in and hang out,
Speaker 1: that's fine. I'm like, no, he doesn't need to. He's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: well he's sleeping out there anyway. Come on. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we go and uh, you know, they just do the
Speaker 1: normal check up and ask me what's up, and uh
Speaker 1: hook me up to the machine. All the machines that
Speaker 1: monitor your heart rate. I don't know what. They're just
Speaker 1: a regular monitor it's called but you know, you get
Speaker 1: a couple of tabs on, you get a little pulse
Speaker 1: deally on your finger. Um. They hit me with the
Speaker 1: saline flush, which I think I've had before, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's really interesting. I she's like, yeah, you're gonna taste
Speaker 1: it or maybe smell it. I'm like huh, And she's
Speaker 1: like telling me as she's doing it, and immediately like
Speaker 1: my mouth is full of salt, like holy shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: She's like yeah, it happens. And they gave you some
Speaker 1: add a van. Yeah. So well they also hit me
Speaker 1: with some liquids and then it kept It was good
Speaker 1: because the sentence kept going so they were able to
Speaker 1: see it on the monitor. They set me up with
Speaker 1: the e k G, which is basically just like the
Speaker 1: next level of hard monitors. So now instead of having
Speaker 1: like two things attached to you've got ten, you know,
Speaker 1: said have technacles. I'm in all off of you. And uh.
Speaker 1: Before they gave me the ada van, I'm like, but
Speaker 1: don't you don't want to do that to you because
Speaker 1: it's gonna melow me out and symptoms will probably go away.
Speaker 1: And she's like nope, no, that won't do it. So
Speaker 1: it's just like it's like in your head, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: as you're thinking that you're dying. Yeah yeah, which was
Speaker 1: odd because I'm normally having like a very nervous reaction
Speaker 1: to the symptoms and to have the symptoms happening and
Speaker 1: in my head just being like yeah, whatever, heart flutter,
Speaker 1: no big deal. Because when my old man was dying.
Speaker 1: Hospice gave us liquid ada van and liquid morphine to
Speaker 1: put with an eye dropper into his mouth when he
Speaker 1: was struggling for air. So I was familiar with that
Speaker 1: adavan when you told me that story. So, and they
Speaker 1: diagnosed you with something called three things, um, three possible things,
Speaker 1: well to for sure one possible. Later the when I
Speaker 1: talked to the cardiology um p A, she said that
Speaker 1: on my e k G report she didn't actually see
Speaker 1: the s VT, which is the acronym for superventricular a cardia,
Speaker 1: but she did see the palpitations and premature atrial contractions.
Speaker 1: What she also said, which is interesting, which backs up
Speaker 1: my um I thought earlier, my hypothesis that I had
Speaker 1: that it could just been in my head. She's like,
Speaker 1: in most rooms, nine out of ten people have palpitations
Speaker 1: and premature atrial contractions and just basically like fluttering or
Speaker 1: extra beats or misbeats. But they might only happen once
Speaker 1: a day or once a month or once a year,
Speaker 1: or they could be just like so slight that the
Speaker 1: person does never notices it. So she's like, it's quite common,
Speaker 1: but most people just aren't noticing the it's happening. To him,
Speaker 1: you just when it happens to you, you just have
Speaker 1: any very acute to that sense, and you're you know,
Speaker 1: and me that's going on and it wakes you up
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night. She also thinks that
Speaker 1: I might have shortness of breath. They kept asking about altitude.
Speaker 1: You know, what would cause something shortness of Belize is zero.
Speaker 1: Belize is zero, that's right. And I live at five.
Speaker 1: We're only at you know, six or seven? Now, Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I mean the the uh, we don't. We
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what's up now. She said that I
Speaker 1: do not had the SPT here at least she didn't
Speaker 1: see that. So she recommends that I go see the cardiologists.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping they have an appointment next week in Bozeman.
Speaker 1: But what's up? She did tell you? No more? Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: So here's the weird part. Because the paperwork says the
Speaker 1: lifestyle changes are a good idea, and it says the
Speaker 1: exercise right, yeah, they tell you. So they give a
Speaker 1: piece of paper that says exercise, but tell him don't
Speaker 1: do anything. Yeah. It's funny, man, because it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's always like that in the hospital because you look
Speaker 1: around and most other people don't look like you. What
Speaker 1: I mean by that is, you know, I'm knowing like
Speaker 1: you know, podium athlete. But just like, yeah, I tried
Speaker 1: his heart exploders. I do my part in trying to
Speaker 1: keep myself healthy. And when you're in the hospital a
Speaker 1: lot of times just surrounded by people that aren't that healthy.
Speaker 1: And it was the same thing two nights ago. And
Speaker 1: so I think this paperwork is sort of written most
Speaker 1: of the time for the average like, what the hell
Speaker 1: a little exercise is that what you're here for? It's not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gonna help, you know, help you out to walk
Speaker 1: around a little bit more. Whatever. So, yeah, so the
Speaker 1: morning hunt is blown. Morning hunt is done. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: we come back and we're sleeping when we should be here.
Speaker 1: And they've told you any now that until he finds
Speaker 1: out what's actually going on with his heart, be sure
Speaker 1: to stay well, hydrated, rest, no strenuous activity. So what
Speaker 1: I was talking to the cardiology uh gal, the p A.
Speaker 1: I'm like, what exactly, there's no strange activity because we've
Speaker 1: got this hunt plan. It's gonna be you know, three
Speaker 1: to four miles, a couple of thousand feet elevation hopefully
Speaker 1: suss like probably not, you know, not a good idea.
Speaker 1: You need to go figure out what it is. So, um,
Speaker 1: we can leave it at this. She thinks that it's
Speaker 1: most likely benign. And then I just have the flutter
Speaker 1: like everybody else has, and I just feel it more
Speaker 1: and most likely a CARDIOIY is gonna give me some
Speaker 1: sort of a drug that so when I have these
Speaker 1: sort of episodes, I can take this drug that will
Speaker 1: basically like like smack my heart and knock it out.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, it's like a pill form of a defibrillator.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of what it sounds like. That's one word.
Speaker 1: And again all you doctors are nurses, don't need to
Speaker 1: write in about it. Um, I'm sure I'm not saying
Speaker 1: exactly what this isn't It isn't verbatim from what she
Speaker 1: told me, but I will we'll check back in on this,
Speaker 1: but I'm gonna go get checked out. There's two words
Speaker 1: I struggle with superfluous, which I just said that time,
Speaker 1: but sometimes I can't. That means like more than necessary
Speaker 1: and then what's the thing that app your heart with later?
Speaker 1: That word is hard for me to say. Um, So
Speaker 1: the morning hunt is ship bagel. You have a hard
Speaker 1: time with bagel? Yeah, dude, I just avoid it, like
Speaker 1: you know, you go to them around Doughey Deals, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it starts with me. They you put cream cheese on them. Um,
Speaker 1: So you were waffling on your plan at that point, Well, yes,
Speaker 1: I was, because we've spent so much time on Yi's
Speaker 1: a little health scare that I didn't know if I
Speaker 1: really had. I don't know if I had time to
Speaker 1: get up into the zone. But and um, into the
Speaker 1: zone is set camp up. We'll get up in the
Speaker 1: zone and having like a reasonable evening hunt and then
Speaker 1: a reasonable morning hunt. And after much vacillation and trying
Speaker 1: to try trying to cajole Brody into joining me at
Speaker 1: my hunt, but but it was it was I was
Speaker 1: springing on him a little too sooner for him to
Speaker 1: make proper plans um with family and work issues and
Speaker 1: all that. So I rushed. I finally get pulled my
Speaker 1: ship to get enough from Okay and rush in and
Speaker 1: pack up my overnight gear and Yanni drops me back
Speaker 1: at the trailhead and I got my overnight gear and
Speaker 1: I want to get up into the zone. And I
Speaker 1: start hiking up and the whole time I'm following lots
Speaker 1: of horse tracks overlaid with two sets of boot tracks
Speaker 1: that were not there the night before. So I'm feeling
Speaker 1: like enormous amounts of stress that there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: mugs up in the zone and I'm assuming like horse
Speaker 1: hunters are out and boot hunters are out, and I'm
Speaker 1: like three quarters the way up to the zone and
Speaker 1: I find out who the boots belong to is I
Speaker 1: run into a couple of old hippies who are out
Speaker 1: hikings describe. I want to hear what two old hippies
Speaker 1: are bearded dudes or with like bandanas around their hands
Speaker 1: like Willie. No one had a Hawaii themed baseball hat
Speaker 1: blue with palm trees and suns on it and stuff
Speaker 1: like a Hawaii like I had that I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: the personality to support a Hawaii themed baseball hat in
Speaker 1: an orange vest. And one had an orange bandana tied
Speaker 1: around his head with hair, you know, long hair and
Speaker 1: a beard, like are you do you saying that I
Speaker 1: don't know what old hippie when I see one who
Speaker 1: just get a kick out of it, because when I
Speaker 1: say old hippiot mean that like a guy who was
Speaker 1: in the counter culture at the time when being in
Speaker 1: the counterculture was countercultural. So like he was in his
Speaker 1: twenties in the sixties, okay, And that if you embraced
Speaker 1: that lifestyle at that time, apparently it's very hard to
Speaker 1: shake and you carry with you visual cues in the
Speaker 1: old manness that kee me to that. And also you
Speaker 1: can't shake the lineup of the age, right, So you
Speaker 1: were in your teens in the late sixties and these
Speaker 1: things click and that look, and I'm like, I don't
Speaker 1: think you were a big conservative in the late sixties.
Speaker 1: I feel like you were left of center in the
Speaker 1: late sixties and doing drugs. That's my read on his
Speaker 1: facile smile, cheery. No, But they were talking to me aloud,
Speaker 1: So I was planning. I was hiking up listening to
Speaker 1: them up ahead of me and thinking their hunters and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, like, it is it okay for me to
Speaker 1: say that you are b a h bad hunting And
Speaker 1: I said, hey, fellers, just generally keep it down. But
Speaker 1: I get up and it's just two dudes out enjoying
Speaker 1: the joining being alive in America. I don't like and
Speaker 1: it was a beautiful afternoon. It was, and he says me,
Speaker 1: is it hunting season? And I said yeah, and he goes,
Speaker 1: are you sure? And I said yeah, and he goes
Speaker 1: a good The guy wore this orange. They said. I
Speaker 1: got a friend one time hunted all day and it
Speaker 1: wasn't eve hunting season. Didn't know untill he got home
Speaker 1: at night. Then he said, it's good to see someone
Speaker 1: out hiking without horses, and um, I said, yeah, we
Speaker 1: do a lot of walking. And the other guy goes, well,
Speaker 1: even if you do have horses, you still gotta hike
Speaker 1: a lot if you're hunting. And with that we bid
Speaker 1: our farewells and they went down the mountain. Well it's
Speaker 1: nice to I mean, no negative input whatsoever. Nice, no
Speaker 1: we had. I'm glad I ran into Gladiated. I'm just
Speaker 1: like just a regular Colorado. Yeah. I feel like that
Speaker 1: um age hippie because there's like there's newer, younger hippies.
Speaker 1: You know, they might not have been they weren't in
Speaker 1: their teens in the sixties, but you know who I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. But I feel like that um era of hippie. Um,
Speaker 1: it's not anti hunting. These were guys that were hunting,
Speaker 1: probably because or who's relatives whatever, the old kind of that,
Speaker 1: like the old kind of hippie. Now okay, I have
Speaker 1: relatives that were hippies and they live the tepees and
Speaker 1: eight porcupines and stuff. They shot with longbows because there
Speaker 1: was like back to the land. There was like a
Speaker 1: back to the land element to being the hippie. And
Speaker 1: also you have you get a commune, you raise chickens
Speaker 1: and pigs. Animal the animal rights movement didn't really like,
Speaker 1: didn't really take hold to a little bit later, you
Speaker 1: know in Pete with Pete Singer. Well, yeah, we recently
Speaker 1: learned that it was almost an offshoot of the civil rights.
Speaker 1: Civil rights Yeah, so yeah, I don't when I see
Speaker 1: an old hippie, I don't go like, oh, this guy
Speaker 1: doesn't like hunting. I mean, some bitch probably as far
Speaker 1: as I know, used to hunt like the wasn't. He's
Speaker 1: not so avid that he keeps track of win's hunting
Speaker 1: season or not. But they like the connection to the land. Yeah, connections.
Speaker 1: I see those guys in some damn mountain biker or
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, of course, Anderson speaking, I love
Speaker 1: mountain bikers too, But I don't know I would rather
Speaker 1: run into non hunting old hippies on the trail than
Speaker 1: than dudes are out pounding the ground with with high
Speaker 1: end optics finding all the boxers. I was relieved to
Speaker 1: find out. The last thing I wanted was to turn
Speaker 1: out to be like two young whipper snappers out there
Speaker 1: like pounding the ground, and I'd be like, how man,
Speaker 1: I gotta deal with these guys. So you all you
Speaker 1: are old enough to call young hunters whipper snappers. No, no,
Speaker 1: but you know what I'm saying, Just get back from
Speaker 1: my point. All the time I'm behind boot tracks thinking
Speaker 1: that I need to overtake or whatever that I'm on
Speaker 1: tainted ground that's already been hunted. It was a rage building, No,
Speaker 1: it just was really eager to find out. I was
Speaker 1: eager to see when their tracks split from the trail.
Speaker 1: Turns out the tracks lead me to a pair old
Speaker 1: hippies were headed back downhill. So then I'm like a
Speaker 1: little bit excited because I'm getting up into the zone
Speaker 1: prime time. But our tracks in the night have been
Speaker 1: obliterated by up hill horse travelers, So I'm real worried
Speaker 1: about these horse guys. Now, see that doesn't usually worry
Speaker 1: me because they're usually going in further than Yes, that's
Speaker 1: what I was banking on. And I find that guys
Speaker 1: don't do good spot and game from horseback. There's too
Speaker 1: much there's you're you're you're paying attention to other stuff.
Speaker 1: Got horses. It's an unstable viewing platform. So movement just
Speaker 1: like a guy blasted you on a horse oftentimes not
Speaker 1: This is not general I mean this is not true
Speaker 1: cross the board, but just generally speaking, I think of
Speaker 1: a guy on a horse is potentially missing game. Well,
Speaker 1: you gotta make sure you're gonna stay alive on a horse.
Speaker 1: Number one. That's the weird thing I always see, like
Speaker 1: people are paranoid. Like I always kind of have a
Speaker 1: little chuckle about people who carry weapons because they're afraid
Speaker 1: of mountain lions and black bears. But you'll meet guys
Speaker 1: on a horse who have a pistol and they're not
Speaker 1: in a grizz country like and I look, I wish
Speaker 1: grizz has lived everywhere, but he Uh. When you see
Speaker 1: a guy on a horse with a pistol for grizz
Speaker 1: in or for black bear and mountainlin protection, I'm like,
Speaker 1: the safest thing for you would be to shoot that
Speaker 1: horse between the ears, because it's gonna wind up having this.
Speaker 1: That thing is gonna kick you in the head. Maybe
Speaker 1: maybe not this year, but next year or the year
Speaker 1: after that, you're gonna get beat That horse is gonna
Speaker 1: beat you, senseless man. Horses are dangerous. No, we were
Speaker 1: hanging out with a guy here. Um oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it was two days ago medical here broke five
Speaker 1: ribs and crippled up from Because I love horse, I'm
Speaker 1: not doubt I'm just saying, like, like if I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, like, what's more like it gonna injure me
Speaker 1: in my life? A horse or a lion, Absolutely a horse.
Speaker 1: So but now it's getting on towards the good time time,
Speaker 1: and I get up into the zone and I get
Speaker 1: to where we spooked the big box timber Bucks, timber Bucks.
Speaker 1: I get to where we spooked him, and I didn't
Speaker 1: realize quite how close that place was. And even Yanni
Speaker 1: felt active spood was we spooked him, but it was
Speaker 1: dark and no one shot at him, and the wind
Speaker 1: wasn't really in their favor. I don't think they spooked spooked.
Speaker 1: They were just think we bumped him. And Yoni was
Speaker 1: even saying I wouldn't be surprised at those bucks. He
Speaker 1: was steering me. He was steering me to go to
Speaker 1: that exact and watch the stage flat they were by.
Speaker 1: I didn't like that plan, but those just gives you
Speaker 1: an idea that yon He's take on it was that
Speaker 1: that buck isn't he didn't leave the county, but you were.
Speaker 1: You also needed a camp somewhere. Yeah, I could have
Speaker 1: slept anywhere. But Yan he's like he was, He's like
Speaker 1: the buck didn't like moved a wyoming or something like.
Speaker 1: He's around. And I get up to the big Queen mother,
Speaker 1: what is that what we're going to call the medal?
Speaker 1: And the horse tracks are still going, no sign any
Speaker 1: horses anywhere, and they could have been anywhere and all
Speaker 1: day long. And I get to the big meadow and
Speaker 1: I got maybe fifty minutes legal shooting light left, and
Speaker 1: I and I pondered the idea that I would still
Speaker 1: hunt the edge and reject that because it just seems
Speaker 1: a little bit like I'm gonna spoot game that I
Speaker 1: might want to be there in the morning. And I
Speaker 1: pond of the idea also of going over and looking
Speaker 1: off the piering ledge where we watched the guy who
Speaker 1: took a poke the day before his rifle, but decide
Speaker 1: instead to go into a little standard timber that's kind
Speaker 1: of like an island out in the middle of the
Speaker 1: Queen Mother of All stage meadows, and I'm gonna set
Speaker 1: up there. So I get up to where I'm gonna be,
Speaker 1: and I even make a plan on, get my tripod
Speaker 1: out and set my shooting v up on the tripod,
Speaker 1: and I'm just gonna sit for twenty minutes this medal
Speaker 1: see what all is going on. And but I'm getting
Speaker 1: cold because I got a sweaty clown up the hill.
Speaker 1: So I kind of hunker in and well, first I
Speaker 1: was like glass everything around me. It was like nothing there,
Speaker 1: and I kind of get down. I'm digging around my backpack.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna change my add some layers, and I even
Speaker 1: got my pants, my belts opened. My pants are undone
Speaker 1: because I'm thinking I'm gonna add a couple of things
Speaker 1: and talk add a shirt and tucking into pants and
Speaker 1: get all cozy for the evening. Six it's getting cold
Speaker 1: and I'm in the middle of side look up and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, now where nothing was a minute
Speaker 1: ago is a very nice, A big old buck a
Speaker 1: hundred plus yards going directly away from me. He'd come
Speaker 1: out of this little finger of aspens. It was going
Speaker 1: away from me. And without even fixing my pants, I
Speaker 1: just raised my rifle and lean it on a tree.
Speaker 1: And this thing is just walk and walk and walking
Speaker 1: and showing no sign of like doing anything other than
Speaker 1: he's grabbing a bite now and then I think of grass.
Speaker 1: But he's not even kind of turning. He's just going
Speaker 1: dead away from me. And I think like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: have to follow him and try to veer side to
Speaker 1: get a broadside shot, because I wasn't gonna take a
Speaker 1: shot going away shot on him. But I'm like, no,
Speaker 1: some minute I stepped clearer this timber, he's just gone
Speaker 1: like face me or not face me. He's gonna just
Speaker 1: sense my presence. So, in a I don't have buck
Speaker 1: fever yet, I don't think, but in a panic you
Speaker 1: had decided you wanted him, though, yeah, like nothing you've
Speaker 1: ever wanted in your life. Because when I see my
Speaker 1: scope up, I knew I could just see the frame.
Speaker 1: And when I see my scope up, I could see
Speaker 1: all these extra points sticking out of the points and
Speaker 1: little TV does it from most guys little teeny bucks.
Speaker 1: Little teeny bucks don't have little teeny points sticking out
Speaker 1: of their points. Generally, if you see a big frame
Speaker 1: and it's got little teeny stickers, as they say, which
Speaker 1: is a term I do not like extra people junk with.
Speaker 1: That would mean it stuff you don't want, Like you
Speaker 1: don't want garbage, right, you get rid of it. I
Speaker 1: want these things badly. I've decided to call them gold
Speaker 1: little golds. And I wanted shooting real bad. So I
Speaker 1: say to him, to the buck, I say hey, and
Speaker 1: it works like a charm kinda. He doesn't spend. I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: in the perfect world, he's gonna stop spinning broadside. But
Speaker 1: what he does is he looks back and turns enough.
Speaker 1: And this is the point where buck fever happens. I
Speaker 1: now officially have buck fever because he turns slightly and
Speaker 1: I think to myself, Oh, you can sneak one in there,
Speaker 1: Like I got enough exposure where I could sneak one
Speaker 1: in there that last rib and bou and the deer
Speaker 1: humps up like like jumps humped up and kicks like
Speaker 1: a heart shot. That's what I think happened. I think
Speaker 1: you're in the I think I put one in the
Speaker 1: boiler room. Because when you hit a deer in the heart,
Speaker 1: it humps up. If you hit him too far back,
Speaker 1: he slumps down out. If you see a deer arts
Speaker 1: like a cat, what's that moving yoga? Not downward dog,
Speaker 1: but upward it is? Can't cow cow cat cow. If
Speaker 1: you see a deer, do like a yoga move where
Speaker 1: you archer backup like or like a cat, hunch his
Speaker 1: backup fast. He's hit good. He does it. He does
Speaker 1: the thing that says to me, after a lifetime of
Speaker 1: watching such things occur, it says to me that he's
Speaker 1: hit good. And he turns at a ninety degree. He's
Speaker 1: like a hundred and probably like a hundred seventy yards out,
Speaker 1: spins at a ninety degree and starts just hauling ass
Speaker 1: across me, now broad side, looking at his right side
Speaker 1: as he's running, and I'm expecting him to tip over,
Speaker 1: and he's not tipping over, and he's not tipping over,
Speaker 1: and he's gonna vanish into an aspen patch. So, thinking
Speaker 1: I've already hit him and I'm now dealing with a
Speaker 1: wounded deer, I swings through him. I come from behind him,
Speaker 1: so that my cross theirs in my scope passed through
Speaker 1: the center of his body, and just like I'm leading
Speaker 1: the duck, I passed through and touched that trigger at
Speaker 1: the end of his neck because he's already wounded. And
Speaker 1: that way, if you're off on your lead, you have
Speaker 1: a whole lot of room to be off. Yeah, at
Speaker 1: that point, you're just trying to get more at that point,
Speaker 1: just trying to bullet into him and bouch and he
Speaker 1: just goes down like like down, like he's been hitting
Speaker 1: the spine. Yeah, And I go over there and sure enough,
Speaker 1: he's just like as Bryan Callan would say dead or
Speaker 1: a wedge, as Jerry Clower would say, graveyard dead, just dead.
Speaker 1: And he's got a hole in his neck and that
Speaker 1: thing doesn't have another scratch on him. I totally buck
Speaker 1: fever in my first shot. It's weird that he like,
Speaker 1: I wonder why I jumped where you were there? You
Speaker 1: skinned him. There is not a scratch on that deer.
Speaker 1: Maybe he felt the breeze. I don't know. I would
Speaker 1: have never like, well, maybe he jumped out of the
Speaker 1: way of the bullet. Yes, he felt the bullet coming.
Speaker 1: He could be that he could be like there's a
Speaker 1: certain bigness and the oldness the buck gets where not
Speaker 1: only does he know to run away when they run
Speaker 1: and when to sneak, but he also knows when to
Speaker 1: jump out of the way of bullets. I never, in
Speaker 1: a million years, I would never have taken a full
Speaker 1: on run shot at a buck. It's just not something
Speaker 1: I would do. I'll doing a wild pig, but wouldn't
Speaker 1: do it on like a a cherished animal that anyone, right,
Speaker 1: because the chances of you getting a bad hit are
Speaker 1: so high. But if you've already wounded it and you
Speaker 1: gotta go find it anyway, it's like, yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you don't then you don't have like you know, like
Speaker 1: like pursuing wounded game. You don't talk about like ethical
Speaker 1: shots And was this wounded that? That's that's all out
Speaker 1: the window, and now was just get it dead? So
Speaker 1: I don't even deserve the buck. I don't know about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a little harsh. So I go over there, an
Speaker 1: area is dead and there's no cell phone stating anywhere.
Speaker 1: I don't have a vehicle because I got dropped off.
Speaker 1: But you've got a beautiful stage flat to camp in Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I uh got the deer, and there's something any
Speaker 1: that arts wants you to drag some part of you
Speaker 1: that Arts wants to drag ship over to a tree,
Speaker 1: like psychologically got him out to drug him over to
Speaker 1: a tree. And I didn't want to leave him there
Speaker 1: overnight because I thought Kyletes would get them. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of Coyle tracks around there, so I kicked a
Speaker 1: weigh all this out in my head and in the end,
Speaker 1: and I know that Brodie's coming up. Brody had made
Speaker 1: a plan to meet me up there around eight am
Speaker 1: for the day's hunt. So I'll just make a fire,
Speaker 1: cook some house, then go to sleep like ridiculously early,
Speaker 1: like sixty five or something like that, because this is
Speaker 1: like dark and I don't want to leave my deer
Speaker 1: to get eaten. So I just set my tent like
Speaker 1: literally like next like if I rolled up to like
Speaker 1: if like it would be like I could like spoon
Speaker 1: the deer through the tent wall and just kinda want
Speaker 1: nothing getting at him. Set my alarm for three forty
Speaker 1: five am, wake up three forty five am, make a
Speaker 1: cup of villa, and run down and actually catch Brody
Speaker 1: ten ft from his truck. Had up trail six o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning. We have a cup of hot Cocoa's surprised, Brody,
Speaker 1: who's that guy with that? Yeah, because I got up
Speaker 1: so early, I knew i'd make it back. But way
Speaker 1: before got dayloight having a cup of hot cocoa and
Speaker 1: go back up and here's the thing. We get back
Speaker 1: up there and it's nothing but dudes. We were surrounded
Speaker 1: like how, I don't understand, and all down in the
Speaker 1: camp my beloved Aspen Canyon. I think they're actually below
Speaker 1: the like there where it opened up, but the same canyon,
Speaker 1: just down lower. It is just like it. Remember hunting
Speaker 1: that Dug Durns and opening day in Wisconsin that we
Speaker 1: had at least at least a box am and no
Speaker 1: one shoots once. No, it was three or four or
Speaker 1: five at a time, volleys of shots. And there's three
Speaker 1: dudes perched up magically who like somehow weren't there the
Speaker 1: night before. There's three dudes perched up on the big
Speaker 1: magic meadow. Yep, they must have been having a deer
Speaker 1: drive down. I heard like I heard one boom swap. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you could hear the pumpkin strike. But even that guy
Speaker 1: did a volley, but then he just shot some more
Speaker 1: just out of the joy of the general trigger happiness
Speaker 1: of American guys like her knelt back onto the private
Speaker 1: or something. For a while. They were shooting so much
Speaker 1: even that idea out. So there's three guys observe in
Speaker 1: the medal. Two were kind of together and once off
Speaker 1: in the air. So I just want to explain too,
Speaker 1: if it sounds like weird to maybe if you're an
Speaker 1: Eastern listener that were like so like upset about all
Speaker 1: these shots, because if you're like, if you're a dude
Speaker 1: from the other side of the Mississippi, you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like Opening Day or Opening two days. Like you
Speaker 1: hear shooting all the time in the white tailed deerwoods
Speaker 1: out west in the in the Greater Expanses. It's just
Speaker 1: simply not like that the shooting was so voluminous. Can
Speaker 1: I use that here, that there's so much shooting going
Speaker 1: on down And eventually we get to where the deer's
Speaker 1: all butchered out except for just skin in the head,
Speaker 1: and Brody has the just out of curiosity wander over
Speaker 1: to get to the edge of the canyon to see
Speaker 1: what's going on down there. All the cracking and bouching,
Speaker 1: and I sat up and so we got all the meat,
Speaker 1: like the meats all done. All the meats well, we
Speaker 1: kept So we had the four legs. Hole took the
Speaker 1: back straps off, Bondless took the tender loins off, just
Speaker 1: as tenderlines. The rib cages saw the rib cage off.
Speaker 1: So we just hauled out whole rib slabs. Took what
Speaker 1: are the neck we could because I, you know, done
Speaker 1: a number on the neck and then I was skinning
Speaker 1: the head out. You know, what I was thinking about
Speaker 1: today is like I used to take, oh, a multi tool,
Speaker 1: Like when you're skinning the deer's head off, it's hard
Speaker 1: to skin around the base of the antler. Is that
Speaker 1: getting this? Oh yeah, I mean it's chuck, no big deal.
Speaker 1: So when you're skinning at the pedestal, Yeah, when you're
Speaker 1: skinning around the pedestals, it's a bastard. I used to
Speaker 1: take a multitool screw driver and prior it off there.
Speaker 1: But on that now I used to Now, like my
Speaker 1: skin and knife, I used like a really and I
Speaker 1: see you like you use use a version of this too,
Speaker 1: a really like stout short blade that hidden Canyon bench
Speaker 1: made is like my new favorite knife. He might like
Speaker 1: a little bit different than short. Yeah, you're just like
Speaker 1: a short yeah, like you could stab and do with yours,
Speaker 1: And he'd be like, can that for like a very
Speaker 1: short blade? But it's like knights man, Yeah, and it's stout,
Speaker 1: like you said, yeah, and I got pride, you know,
Speaker 1: ball joints and stuff exactly. It mind's a little bit longer.
Speaker 1: It's called a steep country like. It's got a blaze
Speaker 1: orange handle on it, which helps you because when you
Speaker 1: got deer half time trying to find things. Very time,
Speaker 1: you get a leg free and you go, like take
Speaker 1: care of the leg and hang it at tree eight.
Speaker 1: You come back if everybody looks for your knife for
Speaker 1: a while. So it like cuts that down a little
Speaker 1: having a blaze arge handle on it. But with that thing,
Speaker 1: that short, stout, fat stiff blade, I can just smoke
Speaker 1: that hide off those antler bases without ruining the blade.
Speaker 1: And you can still pry a little without worrying about
Speaker 1: like just blowing your edge right off. You can kind
Speaker 1: of like you don't want to like get scraping it
Speaker 1: against But it's just like a more it's a sturdier,
Speaker 1: heartier blade. I like that thing a lot that that's
Speaker 1: my like kind of like favorite of of of the
Speaker 1: knives they make. But then cut his tongue out skinned him.
Speaker 1: You got back. We popped the eyeballs I had popped
Speaker 1: one eyeball, popped a second eyeball. Um, yeah, popped the
Speaker 1: lower draw. I told you about the Sika deer I killed.
Speaker 1: It was missing. An eye got poked by an antler,
Speaker 1: and Brody asked the same question everyone asked, was his
Speaker 1: Was his dead eye facing you? And I point out no,
Speaker 1: I was dealing with his live eye. I was not
Speaker 1: getting unfair advantage. Um, And that was it for chopping
Speaker 1: that deer up. As we're finally getting done skinning and
Speaker 1: loading their packs, here comes. It looks like a Western movie.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, man orange like seven horsemen in a pack
Speaker 1: string come by. Don't even give me a broidery. The
Speaker 1: time of day one little buck on a saddle, six
Speaker 1: or seven six hunters, Well you had no ship. They
Speaker 1: didn't give you time. Today. You guys are the assholes
Speaker 1: in the middle of the magic meadow at daylight with
Speaker 1: a campfire. But think they were coming through like they
Speaker 1: were coming through like mid morning, and I get the
Speaker 1: feeling they had probably packed camp up early morning, like
Speaker 1: they were way like they were. One of my theorious, well,
Speaker 1: you're you're gonna say this, go ahead and say what
Speaker 1: you're gonna say. No, I just think they've gotten up
Speaker 1: for like, I think they're way in past hunting pass
Speaker 1: where we were. No, you know what My theory is,
Speaker 1: We'll never know. I think they were on the other
Speaker 1: side of the metal. I think they were. No. No,
Speaker 1: I think they're camped up somewhere, and I think maybe
Speaker 1: they packed up and rode down and on the way
Speaker 1: down decided to do a morning hunt. Slow slow roll. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't totally make sense, but I could you could have.
Speaker 1: I mean there was yeah, seven or eight hunters. I
Speaker 1: gotta say, though, Man, if they were rocking like full
Speaker 1: canvas wall tents that you had to almost be packing
Speaker 1: all night long to pull that off for the morning,
Speaker 1: it didn't look like they're geared up like that. When
Speaker 1: you guys were kids that they call all their tents.
Speaker 1: You had wall tens and pup tents, pump tents, I remember, Yeah,
Speaker 1: pup tents for what we called backpack intense. Yeah, dome shaped, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like they were. I feel that they were hunting,
Speaker 1: like yeah, so then we just uh mosey down mosy
Speaker 1: down the mountain with my big old gacket, a couple
Speaker 1: of horse shoes. Yeah, found horse, but you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: Rody kept the lucky horse. Shoot. No, but you always
Speaker 1: be a point to that horse and be like, I
Speaker 1: tell you who didn't get a buck? Yeah, those guys,
Speaker 1: the guy riding them horses. But dude, I'm on like
Speaker 1: a mule. Your streak you are, is that three years
Speaker 1: in a row. Yeah, I'm just glad because I remember,
Speaker 1: like before last year, So you killed the big buck
Speaker 1: in Colorado last year, but before that, you're kind of
Speaker 1: down on Colorado, dude, way out because all I knew
Speaker 1: about was the parts about weird land land ownership and
Speaker 1: tons of mugs. I didn't know about the part about
Speaker 1: big giant bucks everywhere. Now I'm like, Joe Colorado, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get the Colorado hat. I'm gonna get an orange
Speaker 1: cowboy hat that says of big bold letters like I
Speaker 1: heart Colorado. I'm a Colorado man. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think that you know, some people don't hunt here
Speaker 1: because of the mugs, and that's a you know, like
Speaker 1: it's fair. Yeah. I have friends that are like, look, man, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know you guys, are you know killing bucks? There
Speaker 1: of people do. I just don't want to deal with
Speaker 1: that stress of hunting big bucks during an open elk season.
Speaker 1: And I mean to be fair. Like the night you
Speaker 1: killed the buck, you didn't see a soul, you know,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. Yeah, it was like I was. It
Speaker 1: was like I'd flown into It's like I've flown in
Speaker 1: Alaska and last year we didn't have a bunch of
Speaker 1: dudes on top of us. Like if you walk here,
Speaker 1: you had because you got a lot of hidie holes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but here's the thing. I hunt all kinds of places.
Speaker 1: I hunt places where you couldn't find someone if you
Speaker 1: had to write. Okay, So like we hunt areas in
Speaker 1: Alaska where you fly in and the pilot drops you
Speaker 1: off and if you needed to find help you can't,
Speaker 1: or even Prince of Wales, you're not gonna see anybody there,
Speaker 1: you know. And I hunt places where it's tons of mugs,
Speaker 1: but they can't they're not really mess with you because
Speaker 1: you're like you're on Doug's farm and and you know,
Speaker 1: all the neighbors and they're all hunting, but it's like
Speaker 1: it's civic, you know, and you kind of like you
Speaker 1: got like you tell dog like I want to go there,
Speaker 1: and dogs like what, I think you should go there?
Speaker 1: And then you go there and you know that you
Speaker 1: have your little spot right and if you stay in
Speaker 1: your spot, you're fine. There's people around, so there's there's
Speaker 1: all these extremes. This is just another Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: a version. Like hunting comes in many forms, and hunting
Speaker 1: pressure comes to maybe just like another kind of hunting pressure.
Speaker 1: And I think here it's you know a large part
Speaker 1: of it is being able to buy over the counter
Speaker 1: bull tags. In second and third season, like there's just
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of especially non resident hunters that
Speaker 1: are coming just you know, it's easy for them to
Speaker 1: get attacked. Yeah, So if it was that if you're
Speaker 1: hunting elk, you have to have on orange cowboy hat.
Speaker 1: I think they should wear yellow and we should wear orange,
Speaker 1: just so you know something. But I don't tell you, man,
Speaker 1: I'm fired up. What do you do if you have both?
Speaker 1: Like I had to roll in a lot of times
Speaker 1: with the o TC bull tag and my cowboy hat
Speaker 1: with a yellow stripe tight around the hat band. Maybe
Speaker 1: it'll be all feather. If you want to see my
Speaker 1: huge buck, um, we'll put it up on the show. Notes.
Speaker 1: Lots of meat on a buck like that, Yeah, a
Speaker 1: big meat buck. Big. That's what we're talking about today
Speaker 1: because someone's like, oh, you know, it's terrible the bigger
Speaker 1: the antlers, the more than meat, because it's terrible that
Speaker 1: you go out and try to find a big, huge
Speaker 1: buck when it's all about the meat. But we were
Speaker 1: observing today that um, the best play itself. He's got
Speaker 1: a ton of meat is to look for big, huge antlers,
Speaker 1: dark one with extra bling, because then you know that
Speaker 1: he's gonna be the size of a cow elk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean three pounds easily. So if I see a
Speaker 1: big frame with lots of little stickers sticking out, I'm like,
Speaker 1: that is one meat rest and that's a big backstrap
Speaker 1: and a fatty ham big package. And for those of
Speaker 1: you out there saying that we don't know what we're
Speaker 1: talking about, low stinky, old ruddy bucks can't be eating.
Speaker 1: You gotta grind the whole thing, or if that's what
Speaker 1: someone told you, all I can say is learn how
Speaker 1: to cook, you learn how to take care of your meat.
Speaker 1: We Pepsi challenged last year. We Pepsi challenged a year
Speaker 1: and a half old meat buck or the big buck.
Speaker 1: It's like, it's such if you get a buck, but
Speaker 1: I think not only that, but you could Pepsi challenge
Speaker 1: it with an elk or a white tail or whatever.
Speaker 1: This whole like SG freaking out. Yeah, if you take
Speaker 1: that buck. When you're stripping the hide off that buck
Speaker 1: and you finally he's got an inch of fat laid
Speaker 1: out over his un it's like that deer's in good
Speaker 1: shape and it's gonna be good. Meat is the best meat.
Speaker 1: My wife rarely will flag meat. I could cook like
Speaker 1: played out housecat. My wife's not gonna like flag it.
Speaker 1: She has flagged. Moose is being like something's peculiar, like
Speaker 1: it's something about moose she doesn't like. Every time I
Speaker 1: served like big huge meat with the buck meat to her,
Speaker 1: she'll comment. She doesn't comment at all. She just eats
Speaker 1: whatever we make. She'll comment on moose is being like
Speaker 1: something's weird about it. Doesn't like click with her. When
Speaker 1: I cook like big old buck meat, my boy, so
Speaker 1: I was like, God's good. Yeah, it's just freaking good.
Speaker 1: But and I've shot bull elk and like mid November
Speaker 1: and had him like there's just something a little you know,
Speaker 1: a little tough, a little off about them that time
Speaker 1: of year. So it's you know, and elks arguably the best.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I think, yeah, elk has that reputation to
Speaker 1: being the best. And they don't make a bad tasting elk.
Speaker 1: You can get tough elk, but there's no bad tasting elk.
Speaker 1: I had a buck, the worst piece of wild meat
Speaker 1: I ever ate, was from amuly buck. But circumstances, circumstances,
Speaker 1: he slid down the mountain on the snow and landed
Speaker 1: in the sinkhole and boiled in the sinkhole. It couldn't
Speaker 1: get him out of the sink whole until way later
Speaker 1: got him out of the sinkhole, and he was in
Speaker 1: like like very insulated in a little dirt, coughing at
Speaker 1: the bottom of a you know, maybe he was alive
Speaker 1: when he went into the same Yes, I know that
Speaker 1: he was. And here's what happened. So it was like
Speaker 1: unbelievably cold. I shot a buck. He slid down the
Speaker 1: mountain and I order to try to find him. I
Speaker 1: can't find him anywhere. They was like a size that
Speaker 1: he fell into a sinkhole the size of a man
Speaker 1: hole cover. It was kind of hour glass shaped, and
Speaker 1: I could see down in there. I could see that
Speaker 1: he was moving a little bit, and so I blouched
Speaker 1: down in there in the shock wave of the sound
Speaker 1: came back and hit my ears to bead, And now
Speaker 1: my ears are freaking ringing. Man, and we're camped down
Speaker 1: valley from there, and now it's pitch black. I think
Speaker 1: I got him go down. We come up the next
Speaker 1: day with some ropes and stuff. We peeled off our canoes,
Speaker 1: like the bow lines of our canoes and tied them together,
Speaker 1: and my buddy held my ankles and lowered me down
Speaker 1: into the sinkhole, and I was able to get a
Speaker 1: lasso around his antler, and then we all got on
Speaker 1: the rope and dragged the deer up out of the
Speaker 1: hole and drug up. What it looked like if you
Speaker 1: had it looked like if you pulled Bob Hope up
Speaker 1: in his latest two years like this. It was like
Speaker 1: just but like frail, and his muzzle was just gray, gray, gray,
Speaker 1: and he had the rack when you know, you get
Speaker 1: a big rack and then you rack shrinks and it's
Speaker 1: like different than a like a rack. A deer's antlers
Speaker 1: on his way downhill in life are different than on
Speaker 1: his way uphill. So he could be at the same man,
Speaker 1: he could be at the same measurements, but just there's
Speaker 1: a different quality like softer, like they like softer edges.
Speaker 1: It's like a different like his like his. He was
Speaker 1: getting too old. He was still throwing racks off, but
Speaker 1: they were like bad old man racks emaciated and gray muzzled.
Speaker 1: So he was old and he'd been in the same
Speaker 1: hole all night, insulated with his guts in him. When
Speaker 1: we started butchering a deer, I mean, my brother butcher
Speaker 1: that deer, and it's the meat smelled bad, and then
Speaker 1: we started to think that it was getting in our
Speaker 1: heads and it wasn't the meat, but it was just
Speaker 1: like like other that what that the flavor is, just
Speaker 1: like something about the smell of the meat was MASSI
Speaker 1: I remember it got so bad at one point that
Speaker 1: we got we couldn't tell if we're like really smelling
Speaker 1: it or not. And we thought that everything to smell
Speaker 1: and couldn't tell like actual part what cuts actually smelled.
Speaker 1: It got to the point we were heating up butter
Speaker 1: in a pan, and one of us went outside to
Speaker 1: wait outside in fresh air. The other one of us
Speaker 1: cooked a piece of backstrap in a pan in butter,
Speaker 1: floated it in butter, cooked it, and took it to
Speaker 1: the outside. Person who has now been in a clean atmosphere.
Speaker 1: That person would eat that buck met and be like
Speaker 1: that buck meat is bad. Yeah, the only way this
Speaker 1: buck was in good shape. No, that was the only
Speaker 1: bad buck meat I've encountered happen to come off a
Speaker 1: mule there under extreme circumstances. So yes, if you shoot
Speaker 1: a buck and then let rotting the back of your truck, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then say that mule to your taste like x
Speaker 1: Y or z ok, you don't got it for you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of extra few hours because pictures are more important,
Speaker 1: you know. Cripple it up so it's been driving into
Speaker 1: a spot where you can get a good picture. Cripple
Speaker 1: it up so it like runs forty five minutes before
Speaker 1: you find it. Then dink around, don't get the guts
Speaker 1: of it. Drive it somewhere else to take a nice
Speaker 1: picture of it. Hot sun. Sure, I'm gonna have to
Speaker 1: grind it all into sausage all right. Thanks for joining,