Speaker 1: This is me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything, all right, you freeloaders. There's two, uh two,
Speaker 1: three super important things. I'm gonna tell you about two
Speaker 1: of them, and then as a bonus, the Eagle, the
Speaker 1: Latvin Eagle, your honest who tell us, is gonna tell
Speaker 1: you about the third thing you can do for us.
Speaker 1: So this is a three for one um as a
Speaker 1: total freeloader who doesn't pay for squat and just listen
Speaker 1: to this the digital radio program with like no end
Speaker 1: of their own, no skin in the game of their own.
Speaker 1: The thing you can do to mitigate that some of
Speaker 1: your guilt for doing that is go on to the
Speaker 1: the the the sixty percent of you who are listening
Speaker 1: on iTunes, go on to iTunes and give the me
Speaker 1: Eater podcasts are ripping five star review. It doesn't really
Speaker 1: matter what you right, just's go give it a five
Speaker 1: star review. So like, do that right now and subscribe. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: five star review and subscribe. Just do it right now.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna wait a second while you do it, So
Speaker 1: go click five. Okay, you got it. Okay, thank you. UM.
Speaker 1: If you listen to if you're part of the other percent,
Speaker 1: the twenty sum or thirty percent, to listen on stitcher,
Speaker 1: you do the same thing that that's thing one. UM.
Speaker 1: The second thing you need to do is that was
Speaker 1: it the right subscribe? Yeah? Yeah, subscribe, So that that
Speaker 1: was the easy one. Now the eagle is gonna tell
Speaker 1: you his little part of this this message. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: You go to the meat Eater store which is at
Speaker 1: the Meteor dot com and look at some of the
Speaker 1: badass branded first Light gear that we have in stock
Speaker 1: bow coup Chalma hoodies in camo and it's solid patterns
Speaker 1: with a cool Meter logo on them. There are brimmed beanies.
Speaker 1: What else was there? Hats, T shirts, decals. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: new hats are nice. We have new um richardson one,
Speaker 1: twelves with the cipher new first Light cipher Camo on
Speaker 1: him with the Meteor logo. And Ridge Pounders. Ridge Pounder
Speaker 1: has been rocking one of those Yeah, yeah you are
Speaker 1: do you wear in Chicago when you're just kicking around
Speaker 1: town all the time? He says, yeah, But he's got
Speaker 1: that going for him. But he cannot cook squirrel and
Speaker 1: rabbit at all. That's it, right, that's it. Not for
Speaker 1: the program. Now, I know that listeners have grown accustomed
Speaker 1: to the impeccable sound quality of this year digital radio program,
Speaker 1: and that's gonna be a little compromised because we're in
Speaker 1: a teepee tent in the rain. And I know this
Speaker 1: has happened a handful of times throughout the history of
Speaker 1: this program, um, but you just have to bear with it.
Speaker 1: So if you're hearing a gentle pitter pattern punctuated by
Speaker 1: loud gusts of wind, that is the weather of a
Speaker 1: fog nack island, which not many folks have heard of.
Speaker 1: But a fog nack is separated by a narrow channel.
Speaker 1: Remember what's that channel called? You know? Uh no, not
Speaker 1: between the islands. I'm not sure. I think just fog
Speaker 1: net trade or something. Yeah, I don't quote me on that.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Well you're quoted, um, but well, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I understand Raspberry straight straight, separated by a narrow channel
Speaker 1: from Kodiak Island and dirt here knows Kodiak as being
Speaker 1: an inferior brand of chew. No good Kodiak is good
Speaker 1: or not good good? Oh grizzly Yeah, do you think
Speaker 1: Grizzly was trying to nose in on Kodiak's business. Kodiaks
Speaker 1: known for big grizzlies. What's the chew? You said? It's
Speaker 1: like a low grade choo that you don't need to
Speaker 1: chew because you have a good job, Grizzly, that's what
Speaker 1: my pops choose, not that he has a bad job,
Speaker 1: but he's he's he's more frugal, he's better with what
Speaker 1: what do you got packed in right now? Dirt school baby?
Speaker 1: If anyone, if anyone's followed the saga of dirt trying
Speaker 1: to quit you, you can see that uh I wasna
Speaker 1: saying no progress has been made on the quid you
Speaker 1: have to try though? Really well? Yeah, because now he's
Speaker 1: hit to a homeopathic thing he's taking, which she feels
Speaker 1: is gonna mitigate the damaging effects of chew by taking
Speaker 1: what are you eating? Licening and fresh air? Licening is
Speaker 1: the pill? So you take a pill to just a
Speaker 1: prolong how long you can chew because it's it's counteracting
Speaker 1: the carson genic effects of your chew. What is my
Speaker 1: own theory? Yeah? No, I like it. I like it. Um,
Speaker 1: So we have a riding the storm Out, and you know,
Speaker 1: if anyone's spirit the Rio Speedwagon song Riding the Storm Out,
Speaker 1: it has you know, it's like a real powerful song
Speaker 1: that gets everyone amped up, and it's like really um dramatic.
Speaker 1: But in the song where he's really right, he's like
Speaker 1: at some kind of cabin scheme and he's just kind
Speaker 1: of saying like I'm not missing the thing Riding the
Speaker 1: Storm Out, and it's really sort of like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of blase for his it's hard hitting of
Speaker 1: a tune. Riding the Storm Out is and if he
Speaker 1: was a real skier, he'd be out there. No, it's
Speaker 1: just like you feel like he's being more metaphorical, right,
Speaker 1: Like you feel like when he's like ride in the
Speaker 1: Storm Out, you feel like like it's metaphorical. You feel
Speaker 1: like he's in Miami during a hurricane. Yeah. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: but but if you listen carefully, just like he's in Colorado,
Speaker 1: I think, or more metaphorical, like he's got like a
Speaker 1: love triangle going on and just or he's going in
Speaker 1: to get um, he's going in to get a prostrate exam,
Speaker 1: which I just had my first stuff recently, so yeah,
Speaker 1: like going into that when I had to get on
Speaker 1: my elbows on the map. I was in my head
Speaker 1: was you know it might have been like I might
Speaker 1: have done better had I been thinking riding the storm out.
Speaker 1: But um, it's really like if you listen to it's
Speaker 1: kind of more of a Limp Dickey song because he's
Speaker 1: just up like skiing and he gets stuck in a
Speaker 1: cabin for the night. It's it's one of the songs.
Speaker 1: It isn't as good. Um, no songs better. This is
Speaker 1: just a quick diversion for you get back to what's
Speaker 1: going on in fog Nack Island. Uh. The Bob Seeger
Speaker 1: song Night Moves. Do you know what that song is about? Yes,
Speaker 1: tell me what it's about. Well, only because I've I've
Speaker 1: had a conversation with you while you dissected it and
Speaker 1: told me about what it was about. Night Moves is
Speaker 1: about senescence. It's about growing old where he for a
Speaker 1: lot of the song is reminiscing about being out with
Speaker 1: some gal behind back behind the corn field in the fifties,
Speaker 1: Chevy working on their night moves. So he's like, you know,
Speaker 1: perfecting the heart of love making I gather and but
Speaker 1: in the end of the song, it was like a
Speaker 1: PostScript to the song, and in the end of the song,
Speaker 1: Uncle Bobby Bob seeger crystals like you're from mission. You
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about? What you're talking about? Uncle
Speaker 1: Bobby says, I woke last night to the sound of thunder.
Speaker 1: How far off I sat and wondered. So here he is.
Speaker 1: He's painting this picture of like someone wake up in
Speaker 1: the middle of the night, counting time. Right, I started
Speaker 1: humming a song from nineteen Isn't it funny how the
Speaker 1: night moves when you don't don't seem to have as
Speaker 1: much loose? He's it's it's from the perspective. It's an
Speaker 1: old man waking up at night, coming to terms with
Speaker 1: his own death and thinking back on this thing that
Speaker 1: happened to him. Isn't it funny? All the night moves
Speaker 1: and he just don't seem to have that much to lose.
Speaker 1: And now here he is, you know, maybe his prostates gone.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Um, Farnack Island, me break break it
Speaker 1: down fourth the island itself? Just do you have a
Speaker 1: whole spiel picture? Yeah, So we're in a valley, but
Speaker 1: the mountains jet up pretty high. It's all uh, most
Speaker 1: of its volcanic activity. What all these mountains come out
Speaker 1: of the ocean front A lot of vol can and
Speaker 1: hundred feet to be exact. When we were up at
Speaker 1: top Tony on the ridge we're camped at, three were
Speaker 1: camp blowing, not that doesn't matter, low enough, but about
Speaker 1: like a hundred yards most we got, uh, silver salmon jumping,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, fresh out of the ocean, clean salmon to
Speaker 1: being caught. Yeah, they're pretty aggressive. Ramy actually caught one
Speaker 1: on his first cast cast, which is a giant on
Speaker 1: his first cast. But anyways, there we are Farnack Island. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so there's uh, just a few different animals running around.
Speaker 1: Elk Roosevelt elk, which were introduced. Then there's blacktail deer
Speaker 1: Cia blacktail deer, and then you've got the Kodiak brown
Speaker 1: were which is the king of the island. But it
Speaker 1: is biggest brown bears in the world, biggest brown bears
Speaker 1: in the world. You have pounds, so if you think
Speaker 1: about them, it's a bear that's about the weight of
Speaker 1: two standard Montana elk or more. That's a big bear.
Speaker 1: That's huge. But these elk are no These elk are
Speaker 1: no joke either in weight, they're about four hundred pounds.
Speaker 1: I would say somewhere in there some of the biggest body,
Speaker 1: biggest boggy dulk in the world. Yep, for sure. And
Speaker 1: I think it's just because there's there's what you've seen
Speaker 1: the grass. It's just head high, high protein grass from
Speaker 1: what I've heard. Yeah, we're kind of in It's weird
Speaker 1: about this island. Is you kind of in like a
Speaker 1: you're in almost like a grassland environment. Yeah, you would think,
Speaker 1: but I mean there's obviously there's spruce forests and then
Speaker 1: there's old growth forest on the other side, just this
Speaker 1: mountain behind us um. But this grass is you just
Speaker 1: notice all the seed and everything on the top of it.
Speaker 1: And this morning I found bear crap out back. There's
Speaker 1: just full of the grass seed. So it's obviously a
Speaker 1: pretty rich food source and easy to gather for the
Speaker 1: elk and the the deer and well, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I would imagine the deer do a little more browsing
Speaker 1: on some of the other plants growth. Yeah, everything grows
Speaker 1: larger here. Garrett was calling it, Kong Island is big. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's a thing like in in you know, we've
Speaker 1: talked about Bergman's rule or Bergman's principle number of times
Speaker 1: that mammals tend to be. Mammals tend to be the
Speaker 1: largest specimens of mammals tend to be at the most
Speaker 1: northern point of their range, which has to do with
Speaker 1: heat retention and heat dissipation. So if you just imagine,
Speaker 1: like imagine the white tailed deer um the most you
Speaker 1: know the diminutive forms of white tailed deer, like down
Speaker 1: in the Florida keys we have keys deer like very
Speaker 1: small deer, and everybody knows like the really big bodied
Speaker 1: bruisers from Alberta. So if you imagine the white tailed deer,
Speaker 1: like a large white tailed deer has a lower surface
Speaker 1: area ratio than a small white tailed deer, so which
Speaker 1: is beneficial for heat retention. A smaller bodied white tailed
Speaker 1: deer has higher surface area, which is good for heat dissipation.
Speaker 1: The same way, if you think about an African elephant
Speaker 1: has big, huge ears and a wooly mammoth had very
Speaker 1: small ears because they use those ears to cool their
Speaker 1: blood by sending blood into their ears, which is exposed
Speaker 1: to the air to cool it. And then other things
Speaker 1: have strategies by which they try not to expose blood
Speaker 1: to air. But there's the reason that bring that up.
Speaker 1: There's a principle with islands were generally on islands, mammals
Speaker 1: tend toward diminutive form, and here you have but these
Speaker 1: are huge. See. The weird thing is they're huge islands. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're huge. They become almost like not they become
Speaker 1: almost like an island, like when they're so huge because
Speaker 1: you know, like there's there's enough. Probably everything is smaller
Speaker 1: on an island because there's not as many resources, so
Speaker 1: they just tend to be smaller. But there's a surplus
Speaker 1: of food here. There's more food than animals, and there's
Speaker 1: large predators. So the populations, the populations here, especially for
Speaker 1: the deer, are an extreme flux. Last year was a
Speaker 1: phenomenal deer season. The year before, or maybe it was
Speaker 1: two years before, it was all you could do to
Speaker 1: find a buck. I mean, just hunting hard. Last year,
Speaker 1: bucks everywhere, good antler growth, unbelievable season. This year is
Speaker 1: kind of down a little bit. Yeah, but it most
Speaker 1: takes sometime, I am for that to even out, because
Speaker 1: I mean, like the thing has to be born and
Speaker 1: grow up. Yeah, I mean three to four. You know,
Speaker 1: you've got your babies and then about every three years
Speaker 1: or whatever to grow like a like a mature buck. Yeahs,
Speaker 1: the winners are a lot harder here. So like even
Speaker 1: the black tails where you're at, say, if you're hunting
Speaker 1: black sick of black tail and Prince of Wales, these
Speaker 1: black tails are way bigger, way bigger body. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then their antlers get can get bigger. But they don't
Speaker 1: have as many trophy quality bucks all the time because
Speaker 1: extreme fluxes in the population and the horn grow antler growth.
Speaker 1: So there's good old days and not good old days. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I'm looking at pictures of sick of black tails,
Speaker 1: I can pick out the cordiac black tails. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this is such a look to them. When you're packing
Speaker 1: one out, it feels like packing out a meal deer
Speaker 1: from Montana. People think black tails are just tiny deer,
Speaker 1: not the ones on Kong Island. On Kong Island, now
Speaker 1: Remy is here's a good segue. Remy is hunting blacktails.
Speaker 1: Remy does have a black tailed tag, but we're manly
Speaker 1: pursuing elk and so on Fogna Fognack Island, there are well,
Speaker 1: there are handful of islands and coastal Laska that have
Speaker 1: elk kirds. Edeln Island, Yeah, what's that? Raspberry Island, Fognack
Speaker 1: Island have elk kirds and they're all limited draw hunts.
Speaker 1: You know what the draw odds here? Um? Now, probably
Speaker 1: I'm just guessing from when I looked a while ago.
Speaker 1: And how many years ago was it that you drew
Speaker 1: this tag the first time? Oh I'm not four years
Speaker 1: four years ago? Yeah, and talk about what happened that
Speaker 1: made it be that you said you would never ever
Speaker 1: do this again. Oh, it's just brutal pack out, just
Speaker 1: such a large animal, and it was me and my
Speaker 1: brother on that hunt, and so it was. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: one of those trips where you're doing it and you
Speaker 1: just are saying, why did I suffer through that? Why
Speaker 1: did I choose to do this? And then the day
Speaker 1: you leave, you think about it and you go, that
Speaker 1: wasn't so bad. You're like proud of yourself for accomplishing it.
Speaker 1: But the elk, we're not anywhere close to where we
Speaker 1: were camping, so we had to go up over the range,
Speaker 1: down the valley to the other side, shoot an elk,
Speaker 1: carry it all the way back up and his was
Speaker 1: another six miles past mind, same deal up over range,
Speaker 1: dropping down, going through brush and terrible. Yeah, there's nowhere
Speaker 1: to land aircraft around now. I mean you can land
Speaker 1: aircraft on floats in and you know you can land
Speaker 1: aircraft on floats. There's a couple like shoreline bars where
Speaker 1: you can down, like at sea level where you can land, Yeah,
Speaker 1: depending on the tide and the winds. But little there's
Speaker 1: some low lakes where you can land, but there's no
Speaker 1: way to get You can boat into some places, but
Speaker 1: then you got all but you got peaks out here
Speaker 1: that are a couple of thousand feet high. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you're you're always going to be climbing from close to
Speaker 1: sea level to a couple of thousand feet And now
Speaker 1: you could have it luck out and they'd be where
Speaker 1: you camp, but it just hasn't been my experience. We
Speaker 1: tried that last year my dad drew in alk Tag
Speaker 1: and we had them spotted the day before the season,
Speaker 1: like near the coast right we're camping. Storm rolls in
Speaker 1: and the next morning they were three miles up and
Speaker 1: some other hunters were actually up there, and then by
Speaker 1: the time they got done getting spooked around, they were
Speaker 1: just in a place where you had taken five days
Speaker 1: to pack out. Talk about the time and the hours
Speaker 1: and distance you guys spent pack in the elk up here.
Speaker 1: I have it on my because I did log it,
Speaker 1: and I hate saying what wasn't right, but it was.
Speaker 1: I can't remember at this point. It was what I
Speaker 1: have on this thing that I saw the other day.
Speaker 1: It's eighty hours of packing. So that might have been
Speaker 1: forty forty hours of person or it could have been
Speaker 1: eighty hours total. I can't remember now. But you're going
Speaker 1: from this location, you're going up feet and then down. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you're almost back down on the sea level. Yep,
Speaker 1: we're on his ball. We did to get from camp
Speaker 1: to visible and back was five thousand feet five thousand
Speaker 1: vertical vertical feet. So and we would start we started
Speaker 1: an hour before sun up, hike up there, get there, um,
Speaker 1: get there just about a noon lunchtime, and be back
Speaker 1: just after dark. And then you had to move of
Speaker 1: seven pounds, six pounds, six hundred pounds, and and that's
Speaker 1: boned out. You know. Over the I've been putting in
Speaker 1: for this tag for well, different versions of it. I've
Speaker 1: been putting in for like some version of these tags.
Speaker 1: Different spots because there's many units on like Raspberry Island,
Speaker 1: and here's a bunch of units, a lot of units here.
Speaker 1: Some are easier to draw than others. And I've been
Speaker 1: like putting in for him for over a decade. It
Speaker 1: never drew it. And then Rammy drew it four years
Speaker 1: ago and vowed to never come do it again. And
Speaker 1: then I said, let's put in his partners and he
Speaker 1: was like, okay, so we won't draw it anyway, so
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter. And then we drew it. And then
Speaker 1: we drew it. And so now you sit in the
Speaker 1: rain with fog in a tent. I would do it
Speaker 1: with you because I know that it would It would
Speaker 1: be actually easy. There's just a certain people I would
Speaker 1: do this hunt with my brother, helicopter ceties, celebrities and
Speaker 1: helicopters and you knew you were going to draw. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: because that's how it works in Alaska. But it's a
Speaker 1: big like just to be totally transparent. Um, well, the
Speaker 1: like the guys that we the guys we work with
Speaker 1: on our crew, they were you know, we're here filming,
Speaker 1: and the guys who work with on our crew, um,
Speaker 1: we always split meet up after our hunts usually like
Speaker 1: even Stephen, everybody packs me. So it really is a
Speaker 1: like a tremendous advantage when you have because we're going
Speaker 1: up the hill with six packers. When you have six
Speaker 1: packs and six people, that's that is two additional days
Speaker 1: of two people. That's huge. So you think about we
Speaker 1: shot two bowls and we had two guys, So if
Speaker 1: it was one trip with six guys, well in each bull,
Speaker 1: you have three trips. But it was actually more than that.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. What was what we did on on one
Speaker 1: of them was we did like point A to B
Speaker 1: two see two D to E to F and just
Speaker 1: had it in trees the whole way, so we the
Speaker 1: whole thing bounced the whole thing like in a continuous line,
Speaker 1: and then we got it to A so you didn't
Speaker 1: have to go all the way back every day. You're
Speaker 1: still walking the same amount of miles you are, but
Speaker 1: it gets the cash because you've got you've got bears.
Speaker 1: You just go from tree to tree, so you're never
Speaker 1: you don't want to. You can't just skin it out
Speaker 1: and just leave it at the kill site and I'll
Speaker 1: be back here, you know. And the other thing is
Speaker 1: we can check on it at a closer point, because
Speaker 1: my thought is if it's hanging in a tree at
Speaker 1: camp or hanging in a tree four yards away or
Speaker 1: a mile away, it doesn't matter. It's hanging in a
Speaker 1: tree at something and it needs to come back to camp.
Speaker 1: But you can utilize your time a little bit better
Speaker 1: if you get a bowl down, you start ferrying him
Speaker 1: from points because to go, and because you have a
Speaker 1: mountain in the middle, you know, so if you get
Speaker 1: everything to the base of the mountain or to the
Speaker 1: top of the mountain, it's a lot easier than having
Speaker 1: to walk up that thousand feet there that the main
Speaker 1: pass and then drop back down and then drop back up.
Speaker 1: You know, you get up there and do your work
Speaker 1: and try to move the whole thing. You know, when
Speaker 1: when you draw the tag um, the Fish and Game
Speaker 1: Department well sends you kind of like a little no
Speaker 1: illustrating some of the challenges, and with this one they
Speaker 1: seem to be they're particularly pointed about the challenges of
Speaker 1: the hunt. And I noticed that when I drew a
Speaker 1: Copper river um buffalo tag they had that there was
Speaker 1: like a long letter, was like a couple of page
Speaker 1: letter being like but now that you have this thing
Speaker 1: this tag here are some things you should pay attention
Speaker 1: to UM and it had to do with you know,
Speaker 1: ice flow and free and access issues and just really
Speaker 1: lays out for you in a way that's almost kind
Speaker 1: of pessimistic sounding. Here. The note that your tag comes
Speaker 1: with is about one, these things are huge and people
Speaker 1: shoot them too far away and get in over their heads.
Speaker 1: And two it says, you know, the carcass the killsite
Speaker 1: will be claimed by a bear. Yes, usually within the
Speaker 1: first night. Yeah, so saying you have to get the
Speaker 1: meat away from the guts. When I shot my bowl,
Speaker 1: we had to. We had to actually go a different
Speaker 1: route to stock him because there was multiple bears amongst
Speaker 1: the herd of elk, big bears like big boars, and
Speaker 1: there's a couple there's one south cubs on the other side,
Speaker 1: so we're kind of dodging bears. We watched one go
Speaker 1: into where we were actually planning on walk like this
Speaker 1: patch all thats we're planning and walking down through, So
Speaker 1: I mean rerouted around that patch of alders. I shoot
Speaker 1: my bowl. We get up to it. The bear decides
Speaker 1: to wake up out of the patch of alders. The
Speaker 1: winds blowing toward him and he's just got his nose
Speaker 1: up as we're skintting clean. I mean, he knew it
Speaker 1: was there, and and so we had essentially with the
Speaker 1: two of us, one guy on bear watch while the
Speaker 1: other guy's cutting it up because it's it was thick
Speaker 1: in there, and we knew that the bear knew where
Speaker 1: we were and he was coming our way. At some point,
Speaker 1: they're fully habituated to gunshot being a meal here enough,
Speaker 1: I don't think there's enough of that, but they know,
Speaker 1: they just know they smell dead elk, and I mean
Speaker 1: maybe they're definitely aware of the probably like kill elk,
Speaker 1: calves and kill well to interesting bear stories. So one
Speaker 1: has to do with what we're talking about. One does,
Speaker 1: and I'll tell the one that does. At first, we're
Speaker 1: doing a caribou a couple of weeks ago, and the
Speaker 1: pilot that flew us in and dropped us off from
Speaker 1: the bush while we were hunting, he was telling a
Speaker 1: story where he's flying along in a in a super
Speaker 1: cub and sees a big chocolate colored grizzly, like big
Speaker 1: mature grizzly dragging something and he gets curious what it
Speaker 1: is and circles around. It's a big grizzly dragon a
Speaker 1: subadult grizzly, and over the next hill is probably that
Speaker 1: bears litter me another subadult grizzly running off and the
Speaker 1: bear is still limp like he just killed the thing.
Speaker 1: The next plane that came over, the guy that this
Speaker 1: guy works with flew over and by that point the
Speaker 1: bear was burying the grizzly, and a couple of days
Speaker 1: later they flew over and he was sleeping on top
Speaker 1: of it, so he was full on eating it. The
Speaker 1: second story is the guy we flew in with here
Speaker 1: does some flying for biologists with fishing game. And they
Speaker 1: were out collecting collars like they have been working on
Speaker 1: a collaring project with brown bears, and they had a
Speaker 1: glitch where, um, I don't know if it's a glitch,
Speaker 1: but they had You know that the collars are times,
Speaker 1: so they're good for two years and the collar will
Speaker 1: fall off and they'll go out and pick up their collars.
Speaker 1: And they're out the other day picking up collars and
Speaker 1: they go to where they had a grizzly or brown
Speaker 1: bear the same thing. Um picking up a collar and
Speaker 1: the collar is laying next to a elk carcass, a
Speaker 1: big bull. So when his collar fell off, he was
Speaker 1: in the in the act of feeding on a big
Speaker 1: dead bull he had killed or found, Yeah, probably killed. Yes,
Speaker 1: that leads me to a question, because he weighs twice
Speaker 1: or not. I mean, he weighs like a lot more
Speaker 1: than I mean, they're big with big bears. But it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, lions will kill deer and elk a weigh
Speaker 1: three or four or five times that they weigh. He's
Speaker 1: not gonna care, no, I think that. I mean, I
Speaker 1: definitely think that they follow those herds because it's it's
Speaker 1: a food source. It's right there, and they'll eat other
Speaker 1: things along the way. But if something happens, or especially
Speaker 1: they're running now, I would imagine bulls get injured or
Speaker 1: wounded or tired from running really hard, and they're bedded
Speaker 1: up and they aren't thinking as clearly as they might
Speaker 1: other times a year. So this time of year right
Speaker 1: now seems to attract more bears, and there the elk
Speaker 1: are making a lot of noise. So I think that
Speaker 1: that's a an of audio que to the bears saying,
Speaker 1: oh food over here. You know, they can smell them,
Speaker 1: they can hear them, and he just attracts them. We
Speaker 1: were one time, pulls it up on a glass and
Speaker 1: tip watching a group of moose, and we went down
Speaker 1: to me and my older brother went down and start
Speaker 1: putting the moves on a bull that was in this
Speaker 1: group of moose, and our bodies stayed up on the tip.
Speaker 1: We're just observing from high above. And they saw a
Speaker 1: grizz they come in while we were stalking these moose.
Speaker 1: Agrees he came in and attacked calf. Really in the
Speaker 1: group we're stalking, I mean, they're just in there, mixing
Speaker 1: it up with big, giant freaking animals. Man, And if
Speaker 1: he uses out eating grass eating barries, why not do
Speaker 1: that in proximity to all these big, mewing, bellowing protein piles.
Speaker 1: He's like, why not? You might have an opportunity to
Speaker 1: get something a little better than grass. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you could drink. If you're single, you could drink at
Speaker 1: home or drinking a bar. It's like, at least if
Speaker 1: you at the bower, who knows something good might happen
Speaker 1: to you exactly? You could be drinking anyways. Is there
Speaker 1: a different have they done studies on like ratio of
Speaker 1: plants versus like game protein on these brown bears versus
Speaker 1: other regions like these much higher animal because they because
Speaker 1: they eat so much salmon and they can't distinguish between
Speaker 1: that or like dear or elk as far as Oh, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure if you go and do yeah, I'm sure,
Speaker 1: if you go and look at like the actual isotopes
Speaker 1: in them, you would tell what they're eating. They can
Speaker 1: get a really detailed analysis on it, those like by
Speaker 1: looking at like stabilized stopes. We were down in Salt
Speaker 1: Argentina and my wife and we went to have you
Speaker 1: ever heard of those children that the inca's Um would
Speaker 1: sacrifice on mountaintops. They take them up, you know, fifteen
Speaker 1: sixteen thousand feet and make these little rock holes and
Speaker 1: just knocked the kids in the head and leave them
Speaker 1: in there as sacrifices, and they would just basically freeze
Speaker 1: dry in the high elevations. Well, yeah, we went to
Speaker 1: see that. These this one in Salt Argentina. This now
Speaker 1: in like a climate controlled thing in a museum. And
Speaker 1: this it was a boy. He's so well preserved. I
Speaker 1: can't know. There's three children. And they made a deal
Speaker 1: with the indigenous people that they only display one at
Speaker 1: a time, and why aren't even talking about this? Oh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talking about this isotope. So they're
Speaker 1: so well preserved. They had feathers in their hair and
Speaker 1: the feathers are still perfect, and they still have coca
Speaker 1: leaves dried on their lips. I mean, this kid looks
Speaker 1: like he would stand up and walk away, but he
Speaker 1: was killed and probably like around right like just pre
Speaker 1: contact height of the Incan Empire. And it was three
Speaker 1: kids they buried all together. There was a thirteen year
Speaker 1: old girl and she had been hit on the head.
Speaker 1: They were all full of of of alcohol, fermented like
Speaker 1: a fermented potato drink, so they probably got them drunk,
Speaker 1: left them up there. The girl probably realized what was
Speaker 1: going on. Maybe they had to hit her in the head.
Speaker 1: One of the kids was later struck by lightning at
Speaker 1: some point. It's kind of burned a little bit. But no,
Speaker 1: they're perfect. They're perfect, clothing, everything bottles perfect. But they
Speaker 1: can by looking at tissue samples, they can tell that
Speaker 1: these kids had for most of their life eating nothing
Speaker 1: but potatoes, virtually nothing but potatoes, but in the last
Speaker 1: months of their lives had an extremely varied enriched diet
Speaker 1: as they were getting and also had hundreds of trinkets
Speaker 1: from around the Incan Empire. So they're like taking them
Speaker 1: around on this big tour of the empire, and we're
Speaker 1: probably being fed fish and llama meat and all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff and giving all these gifts and partying
Speaker 1: it up in order to then be taken up and
Speaker 1: left on the mountain. And so they're able to tell
Speaker 1: not just like what it was eating, what they ate
Speaker 1: throughout their life, with the sequencing of it. Yeah, well
Speaker 1: that's so that does. I am curious then why these bears,
Speaker 1: these brown bears on the fog neck, are so much
Speaker 1: bigger than other bears that have the salmon protein and
Speaker 1: the black tail and elk options. It has to be
Speaker 1: some well you got like a genetic factor, because what's
Speaker 1: interesting about these bears, they've been genetically isolated for ten
Speaker 1: thousand years. There's been there's like they feel that it's
Speaker 1: the islands far enough off the mainland. There hasn't been
Speaker 1: any genetic exchange between these bears and other populations for
Speaker 1: ten thousand years, so they're kind of off on their
Speaker 1: own trip, right, And I think that you have phenomenal
Speaker 1: marine resources, like very rich salmon resources and in a
Speaker 1: large game and like great grass and it's a dry
Speaker 1: area so they're much pressure. That's a trophy area as well.
Speaker 1: But you know, the writer and the and the food
Speaker 1: plays a huge part and that's why it is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but they're not I mean they're not. But the elker
Speaker 1: introduced so that hasn't like changed. I mean, the bear
Speaker 1: has been big for a long time. The hunting writer
Speaker 1: uh and guide Tony Ross, he's got a he's got
Speaker 1: a book about grizzlies and brown bears and he talks
Speaker 1: about that big board like an actual like food source.
Speaker 1: An important food source for grizzlies is grizzlies. That the
Speaker 1: older boars on these islands are full on praying on
Speaker 1: cubs and it's like a food source for them. So
Speaker 1: they're coming out of hibern nation eating grass for a
Speaker 1: while and then devoting time and energy to just eating bears,
Speaker 1: not to spread their genetics through breeding, but just for
Speaker 1: a food source. That's the thing you hear all the
Speaker 1: time that it's a it's a weird thing when it
Speaker 1: comes like behavior and people talking about like genetic and
Speaker 1: the reasoning what animals do. So boars tend to like
Speaker 1: large boar, bear, black bears, grizzlies, whatever, tend to feed
Speaker 1: more on bears than other bears do, and because it's
Speaker 1: easy to do, they tend to kill cubs and eat them.
Speaker 1: The thing that people say is that they're like, there's
Speaker 1: a real there's a there's sort of a uh, a
Speaker 1: sexual advantage or an adaptive advantage to the boar killing
Speaker 1: the cubs, because the like when a female has, a
Speaker 1: female will have her cubs in February or March in
Speaker 1: a den. She'll come out of hibernathan with hibernation with
Speaker 1: those cubs and will not be receptive to breeding. She'll
Speaker 1: spend the entire summer and fall with her cubs, den
Speaker 1: with them again, emerge from the den with them, and
Speaker 1: then we'll become receptive to breeding that June July. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she's always skipping. She's always skipping a whole year.
Speaker 1: Like a bear doesn't drop. It's like a deer that
Speaker 1: will drop fun every drop cubs possibly every other year.
Speaker 1: So when a bore, so if you look like a bore,
Speaker 1: is the one going around doing the infanticide, the eating
Speaker 1: of one's own offspringer one's own species. They commit infanticide,
Speaker 1: the thinking being that that sound will come into rut
Speaker 1: that year that year. So if he's out in April
Speaker 1: and May austin off cubs, sALS that would not normally
Speaker 1: breed with him are now going to become receptive to breeding.
Speaker 1: He might breed him. And it's like, so advantageous of
Speaker 1: a thing that seems like they will kill cubs that,
Speaker 1: because of proximity to their home range, are very likely
Speaker 1: their own cubs to rebreed that same sou. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's like, but it's like you look at and be like,
Speaker 1: so that's why the bear does it, but I don't, like,
Speaker 1: you can't really don't really know like why the bear doesn't. Right,
Speaker 1: It could be that the bear does it because he's
Speaker 1: just big. He's not he can confront a sow and
Speaker 1: not get killed buyer, because he's so much bigger than
Speaker 1: she is, and he can eat the cubs. It doesn't
Speaker 1: he doesn't need to get into a giant fight trying
Speaker 1: to kill the sow, And a result of that is
Speaker 1: that she becomes receptive and he breeds her. So it
Speaker 1: would like reinforce that behavior. But it might not be
Speaker 1: that the bears thinking huh, man, it's a bummer that
Speaker 1: she's not gonna want to do it this summer. If
Speaker 1: I eat her cubs, she'll become receptive and I'll be
Speaker 1: able to pour the coals that were and have like
Speaker 1: new offspring. So it's like when you say, like why
Speaker 1: he does it, it's different than what the result of
Speaker 1: he does. The geneticist Stephen Gould talks about that where
Speaker 1: people like, look at a tree and like, bark's brown.
Speaker 1: What is the selective advantage of bark on a tree
Speaker 1: being brown? And it might be like there is no advantage.
Speaker 1: It's like, what is advantageous is that bark is thick
Speaker 1: and protective. Maybe a result of it becoming thick and
Speaker 1: protective makes it brown. But the brown doesn't do any
Speaker 1: advantage for the tree. It's just some It's like some
Speaker 1: random offshoot that doesn't really matter. So when you look
Speaker 1: at like nature and you think that everything has a purpose,
Speaker 1: something's are the result just or yeah, the result of
Speaker 1: other issues like why do you salmon jump so much
Speaker 1: into getting ready to spawn? Some people say it's because
Speaker 1: they're trying to knock their eggs loose, which they have
Speaker 1: a very hard time believe. And do you hear that. No,
Speaker 1: I've never heard that they're trying to loosen their eggs act.
Speaker 1: That doesn't make any sense. I don't know why do
Speaker 1: they jump? There might be no doubt, only do he
Speaker 1: have reason for the females. You start to come up
Speaker 1: with the reason for the male and females jumping. So
Speaker 1: when people are like why do they jump, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't know that jumping is really
Speaker 1: doing them any good. It might be some other a
Speaker 1: product of something that does make sense that makes them
Speaker 1: have the tendency to do that, but it's not like
Speaker 1: they're getting something out of it. So they can get
Speaker 1: out of the water and see where they're going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: bears up there, so yeah, the bears are huge and
Speaker 1: that's a good point. So like the el we'll get
Speaker 1: back to elk. But bears out here are drawing. This
Speaker 1: is another draw I put in for every other you
Speaker 1: only put in every other year. Every other year I
Speaker 1: put in for nonresident non guided cody at counts. What
Speaker 1: that means is anybody wants to help with a guide
Speaker 1: can go anytime they want. No, they have to draw
Speaker 1: as well. I'm pretty sure they draw Outfitter sponsored tag.
Speaker 1: What you're gonna get, yes, something, yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1: What's hard to get is it's hard for a non
Speaker 1: guided resident to draw. And I can hunt here without
Speaker 1: a guide because my brother is a resident of Alaska.
Speaker 1: But that's a very difficult tag as non guided, nonresident.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of outfitters sponsor. It's much
Speaker 1: easier to draw a tag with a sponsored outfitter, like
Speaker 1: their clients get preference. The resources managed the resource, the
Speaker 1: Brownberry Resources managed to support the guiding industry in this area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure exactly how many tags they would get
Speaker 1: or whoever gets the tags. I haven't really looked at. Well,
Speaker 1: you have a you have a much money. If you
Speaker 1: sign up with the outfitter, you have a much higher
Speaker 1: chance of drawn then than a hunter host. But you
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's the case of having a
Speaker 1: much higher chance of drawing than a resident hunter. I
Speaker 1: believe that it is, man because I could be. I
Speaker 1: could because a lot of people. What's that you're in
Speaker 1: the same pool you are, as far as I recollect,
Speaker 1: we don't have the paperwork with us. I know it's
Speaker 1: in my tent um because I've put in for uh
Speaker 1: cheap tag in the chew catch. Yeah, but that's a
Speaker 1: whole different place and thing. Yeah, but if it's uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't. I honestly don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: think that you're saying that there's a draw an outfit
Speaker 1: or draw the outfitter. The brown Bear outfitters have a
Speaker 1: quota all their own. Oh I'm not Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure about that. I don't know. I would. I have
Speaker 1: no cliff. So I put in a ton of times. Well,
Speaker 1: every other years always be the spring hunt. So every
Speaker 1: other year I put in for a non guided, non
Speaker 1: resident spring Kodiak hunt and never draw it. Yeah, what's
Speaker 1: a tough tag to draw? So yeah, that helps have
Speaker 1: big gass bears. Then in an area where you're allowed
Speaker 1: to kill, in a road accessible area where you allowed
Speaker 1: to kill, where residents are allowed to kill two grizzlies
Speaker 1: a year, it tends to put a crimp on the biggins,
Speaker 1: tightens them up. Yeah. Now back to ELK. What are
Speaker 1: your thoughts on the whole deal on the ELK here?
Speaker 1: I mean, how do you come like what does it
Speaker 1: compare like in your mind to like hunting Rocky Mountain ELK? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's similar to hunting elk in an
Speaker 1: area where there's there's a big herd, but that one herd,
Speaker 1: you know, moves around. So there's a lot of similarities
Speaker 1: between Rocky Mountain elk and these elk um you know.
Speaker 1: I think the only difference is just the terrain that
Speaker 1: they're in might be a little more open, well at
Speaker 1: least or roar hunting. It might be a little more
Speaker 1: open than some other elk areas. But what I noticed
Speaker 1: both times is you don't really get those in Montana.
Speaker 1: You might have five elk here and a herd of
Speaker 1: twenty elk there, and these different basins. It's almost like
Speaker 1: they all group up right now, and they're in one group,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of no elk country. It looks
Speaker 1: like there should be elk and you don't see anything.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of miles in between where the
Speaker 1: elk are, But once you find them, you're in them thick,
Speaker 1: and then they might just be gone somewhere else. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The bull the bulk of the of the normal like
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountain elk hunting that I've done has been in
Speaker 1: an area where in the firearms season, like during the
Speaker 1: early archery season, they're pretty well dispersed. Yeah, but by
Speaker 1: the time the late firearm season starts in late October,
Speaker 1: they group up into these giant groups and it's like
Speaker 1: hunting them kind of well. People talk about where is
Speaker 1: the herd because you're chasing after these balls of three
Speaker 1: four traveling together, and it means that there's one place
Speaker 1: that has elk in a lot of places that don't,
Speaker 1: which I have kind of grown to hate. It's terrible,
Speaker 1: it really is. Because it's nice to get to go
Speaker 1: up on a ridge and glass this valley and go
Speaker 1: okay and think there's a possibility that there will be
Speaker 1: an elk here, but if immediately there's either a hundred
Speaker 1: of them or there's none of them, and that kind
Speaker 1: of sucks. It makes it tough because you have to
Speaker 1: travel a lot. It makes it easy to find them
Speaker 1: when you're in the area where they're at, obviously, but
Speaker 1: because you're not down to it's all that down time
Speaker 1: in between, you're not gonna miss the ball out that
Speaker 1: big no I mean socially, yeah, they'll be standing, they'll
Speaker 1: be making noise, they'll be doing something, so you can
Speaker 1: find them if you're in that close enough proximity where
Speaker 1: you have a line of sight to them, but that oh,
Speaker 1: I might bump one on the way there, and you
Speaker 1: just you just don't. What's preventing us right now from
Speaker 1: even hunting is rain and fog. Yeah, which you which
Speaker 1: is like that's a factor everywhere, But fog is like
Speaker 1: a peculiar thing of like the coastal environments, and there's
Speaker 1: nothing that shuts you down as hard as fog shuts
Speaker 1: you down. You need to be able to see. Rain
Speaker 1: is one thing. If it's high cloud and it's it's
Speaker 1: just wet, you can still figure out where they're at.
Speaker 1: But when you're talking about going five miles and they
Speaker 1: might be at the end of this and you need
Speaker 1: to I mean, you're trying to run into one herd.
Speaker 1: It just is not advantageous to do it when you
Speaker 1: can see twenty ft we I was on a goat
Speaker 1: hunt here in the Laska one time, hunting mountain golts,
Speaker 1: and we hiked into an area that we knew to
Speaker 1: have some and sat in the fog for three days,
Speaker 1: just going insane. We actually found an old mining camp
Speaker 1: and so we found a torch, a pro pain tank,
Speaker 1: backpack that stuff back to our camp and we're like
Speaker 1: spending time experimenting with heating rocks with a with a
Speaker 1: weed burning torch and then bring the rocks into our
Speaker 1: tent to see how warm we could make it. I mean,
Speaker 1: just like honestly killing time. And then one day the
Speaker 1: fog blows out and realized that the whole type and
Speaker 1: sitting there it's just there are just goats everywhere above us,
Speaker 1: like they would have been just there there the whole time.
Speaker 1: There's no way to see them. Yeah. You well, if
Speaker 1: you had a week of fog and you're hunting, you
Speaker 1: could do in two hours of clear no fog what
Speaker 1: would take a week of figuring in the fog? Or
Speaker 1: more like we might Yeah, if we wake up to
Speaker 1: my own clear it's it's gonna be like easya, you
Speaker 1: gotta go, Yeah, you just gotta go. It's a different
Speaker 1: it's a different game. What were you saying, The success
Speaker 1: rate of that of the harvest of the Roosevelt's extremely low, right,
Speaker 1: I yeah, I mean last the time. I think it's
Speaker 1: a combination of factors. I think that people get the
Speaker 1: tag and they don't hunt real hard, or they don't
Speaker 1: want to or can't physically get to the animals and
Speaker 1: get them back to and just don't show up and
Speaker 1: don't show up. A lot of people wants to have
Speaker 1: very low not just low success, but they have low
Speaker 1: participation because it's to get out because you think like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll do like, I'll put in and then the more
Speaker 1: you find out about it, distance, time, money, whatever, people
Speaker 1: just like wind up like, uh, never mind. Yeah. Well.
Speaker 1: The other thing is, if if I was someone that says,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd really like to shoot at Roosevelt Elk,
Speaker 1: I would suggest them not come here to do it.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a million places that you could go,
Speaker 1: and it would be a hell of a lot easier
Speaker 1: to get to, a lot easier hunt, and probably more animals.
Speaker 1: But it's just the fact of there's something different, it's
Speaker 1: in a cool place, and not that many people have
Speaker 1: done it, and you just so I'm just drawn to
Speaker 1: give it a try. The first time I ever put
Speaker 1: in for this, I had no clue about it. It It
Speaker 1: was more of an accident than anything I put in
Speaker 1: for everything else. So put in for Elk here, and
Speaker 1: my brother called and says like, hey, we drew Elk tags.
Speaker 1: I was like, what I forgot about that ship? I
Speaker 1: better try to figure out where these things even are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that there's some things. There's just some like
Speaker 1: there's something to a handful of people, like really seductive
Speaker 1: about the idea of coming to this part of the
Speaker 1: world and come to these crazy islands and these crazy
Speaker 1: giant bears and hunting these giant damn elk call them, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean they're aunts are actually pretty small, but
Speaker 1: their bodies are huge. Yeah. They don't have big old no.
Speaker 1: I mean the last one I got was a giant
Speaker 1: like for this for Alaska, for the area, I mean,
Speaker 1: a pretty large six by six, which I think is
Speaker 1: you know, it was way above average. Um. But I
Speaker 1: was pretty lucky to get a good bull like that.
Speaker 1: And then we saw another one. My brother could have
Speaker 1: got one, but we ended up calling in. When we
Speaker 1: were trying to call the big bull, a small bull
Speaker 1: came in and he just said that was it was
Speaker 1: so cool to have that bull in his lap was
Speaker 1: five by five. He just shot it. I was like,
Speaker 1: all right, awesome, gave up on the big one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just he was like, it was more about the experience.
Speaker 1: We could have hunted and snuck in on the big one,
Speaker 1: but to have that bull just come right in and
Speaker 1: be calling and just that cool. I mean he just
Speaker 1: looked cool and him the bulls screaming, and my brother
Speaker 1: shot it pretty close. It was just a cool experience.
Speaker 1: So you know, is it just about the experience, not
Speaker 1: necessarily the rack or any thing, um. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's you can go other places and hunt the
Speaker 1: same species a lot easier, bigger ones or whatever. But
Speaker 1: it's just something to try and doing different. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's a lot of people that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of people say, oh, yeah, I
Speaker 1: shot a knock on a fog knack Island. No. You know,
Speaker 1: I think about like the participation success thing. Um. The
Speaker 1: year earlier I was talking about, like John kind of
Speaker 1: a similar like a similar sort of hunt, which was
Speaker 1: the Copper River you know, bison hunt in Alaska. Remember that,
Speaker 1: like that year. Remember they gave out twenty four tags
Speaker 1: for that hunt and at the end and that's an
Speaker 1: eight month long season. Wow, you can start hunt I
Speaker 1: think sometime in September and hunt through March. Is that
Speaker 1: eight months? No, it's a big long season, six months
Speaker 1: long season, whatever it is, it's a long season. Well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna add it up right now in my head
Speaker 1: it is, yeah, so so six months long season or
Speaker 1: so yeah, because I can't remember the exact dates, but
Speaker 1: like it's at least half the year long. Out of
Speaker 1: the tags, only four people got one of the animals,
Speaker 1: and I think the vast majority of the of the
Speaker 1: holders never did it, didn't go, or they might have
Speaker 1: gone and just said it's too hard, that's too far,
Speaker 1: that's too hard. Well, that hunt you either got to
Speaker 1: like you're you're either in it or not in. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like this one. There's no way to come
Speaker 1: and do a light version. Well you could. You could
Speaker 1: go and see him at the top of that rage
Speaker 1: and go, you're here, but you go, ah, I don't
Speaker 1: know if I want to carry one back up this mountain.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a sensible way to approach it. It happens, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I would picture of that. Yeah, people probably come
Speaker 1: and they're like, if we can get land somewhere and
Speaker 1: maybe have some come close, we'll maybe do it. Not well,
Speaker 1: hunt deering for salmon. That happens a lot, because to
Speaker 1: be honest, the killing, like to kill an elk here
Speaker 1: didn't seem to me that difficult. It was the the
Speaker 1: more of the hunt. Some hunts are you struggle all
Speaker 1: the way up to the point where you get one.
Speaker 1: This hunt was more the opposite, where it was medium
Speaker 1: tough to actually get one. Not. I mean, I shot
Speaker 1: mine the first morning of the first day, and but
Speaker 1: of the hunt was after you pulled the trigger. It
Speaker 1: was just the packing and the grinding and getting the
Speaker 1: dang thing out. Yeah. So yeah, I mean there's those
Speaker 1: hunts where you just struggle all the way up until
Speaker 1: to kill, and then everything afterwards is just that quick
Speaker 1: pull the truck up the process. And then there's those
Speaker 1: hunts where you can go out and get something fairly fast,
Speaker 1: but you're spending it entire week or more getting it
Speaker 1: back home. Yeah. We made an initial uh kind of
Speaker 1: a like a like a somewhat quixotic walk up the
Speaker 1: hill today, knowing that we would just walk up into
Speaker 1: the fog because you can tell from here it's very foggy.
Speaker 1: So we walked up there and said, wow, it's really foggy,
Speaker 1: and then walk back down. Um, And the whole time
Speaker 1: I was doing that, all I'm thinking about, well, the
Speaker 1: whole time we've been here, except for when we were
Speaker 1: like thinking about how great the salmon fishing was. All
Speaker 1: I'm thinking about is the pack out. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: like weighing on my mind. And maybe because I the
Speaker 1: sucking depending suppending suck, the depending suck is all I
Speaker 1: think about, and I'm worried about, like maybe I over
Speaker 1: oversold the suck. But for that, for the two of
Speaker 1: us where we shot our bulls, it was sucked. Like
Speaker 1: me and Jason both are per fashional elk packers. We
Speaker 1: carry elk for a living, like we guide out. We
Speaker 1: carried to elk a week most weeks for some years,
Speaker 1: ten weeks out of the air. It's like, we know
Speaker 1: what carrying elk is. You know, we pack out a
Speaker 1: ton of animals. Yet this was just a miserable pack
Speaker 1: out you were and I mean, and obviously I got.
Speaker 1: I drank some bad water and got really that was
Speaker 1: midway through because I drank it the first day, but
Speaker 1: it took a while for whatever I drink it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're landed on a lake and we're on the lee.
Speaker 1: We're kind of on the know around the let the
Speaker 1: lead around the wind driven side of the lake and
Speaker 1: the lakes full of dead salmon and beaver chewed sticks,
Speaker 1: so you know, there's beaver fever and he's needs here waters.
Speaker 1: And we found a little trip coming in flowing off
Speaker 1: under a hill, and my first thought was that trip
Speaker 1: is great and drank it, and then remy talk about
Speaker 1: haven't gotten sick up here before, So now I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like half waiting around to get sick. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's I know that one will be fine. Yeah, Well
Speaker 1: I got I got me a little emergency pack of ciproal,
Speaker 1: so when things go down from water, I'm gonna be.
Speaker 1: You'll be fine, I'll be I'll give you You're always
Speaker 1: supposed to take full doses, but I'll share my sip
Speaker 1: rose perfect. Now I think, uh that water filtration is
Speaker 1: one thing that I should probably get better at. I
Speaker 1: hardly ever take water filtration well. Once we got on,
Speaker 1: like I used to take more shortcuts and be lazier,
Speaker 1: but then we got on the sterry pens and that's
Speaker 1: what I need to ultra violet ultra violet little ultra
Speaker 1: violet wands. And I've had the same one now. I
Speaker 1: think I've had the same sterry pen for five years.
Speaker 1: I think I'll start using that. I mean another typically
Speaker 1: just sterilized that part of it. I mean, I'm real
Speaker 1: careful about where I get my water. And I know
Speaker 1: I and my brother looks at you like shakes his head. Nah.
Speaker 1: And I tasted it and thought it was that that
Speaker 1: real soft water and it feels like that horrible taste
Speaker 1: in that like silky texture in your mouth, and I said,
Speaker 1: this is perfect for bacteria. Yeah, my girl got sick
Speaker 1: off elk water. What was that young? I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: you weren't really wanted to go the easiest, lightest way.
Speaker 1: You could always just drop I had done, Yeah, just
Speaker 1: purification tablets. Yeah, that's why I got sick in Arizona once,
Speaker 1: is because I didn't feel like doing that, and also
Speaker 1: because we kind of got screwed up a little bit
Speaker 1: and didn't have any water out in the desert and
Speaker 1: hit some water and I was like there was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna put some tablets of mine and wait, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm thirsty. This looks all right, And
Speaker 1: I got sick as a mofo man. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: the beginning of a long with you for more than
Speaker 1: three days. I think I don't like I don't like
Speaker 1: using iodion for more than three days because it can
Speaker 1: mess you. It's not recommended for repeated use. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: carry iodi and tablets in my kid, but no one's
Speaker 1: in my emergency kit. But it's not recommended to just
Speaker 1: use that as a strategy. Now I'm spending day after
Speaker 1: If you're spending like weeks out of the woods ever,
Speaker 1: you just can't be drinking all that iodine. Yeah, kills
Speaker 1: the good bacteria in your system. You never feel refreshed.
Speaker 1: You always. It's that weird. I don't know. The water
Speaker 1: just isn't the same, isn't the same? No, ridgie, you
Speaker 1: haven't said anything. Hanging it in, man, I'm riding the
Speaker 1: storm out, Chris gil Ridge Pounder right in the storm.
Speaker 1: You have nothing that's on your mind. I did have
Speaker 1: a thing about Ramy's point about over exaggerating the suck
Speaker 1: and that I don't think that you are over exaggerating
Speaker 1: the stuck based on like the minor hike that we
Speaker 1: did today with like the waist tall grass, like grabbing
Speaker 1: at your feet and doing that with like a super
Speaker 1: heavy pack of meat. I feel like that's a I
Speaker 1: feel like that's going to be a pretty tough, pretty
Speaker 1: Oh the little our little foray today didn't make me
Speaker 1: be like, Oh, if anything, I think it's it's steep
Speaker 1: in that the grass. It's steep. Yeah, when everything in
Speaker 1: my power to go back face first down the mountain,
Speaker 1: you're a full summersault. Well we're I was looking for
Speaker 1: you to pop up. You were downhill, like twenty ft
Speaker 1: from where I started to disappeared. You took a roll
Speaker 1: in the grass of today. My foot got hung up
Speaker 1: and I just went straightforward, face forward. It doesn't look
Speaker 1: like shintang from a distance, but it's it's got some
Speaker 1: shintang qualities like New Zealand shintang. I thought we were
Speaker 1: introduced to shintang in British Columbia. I thought that's where
Speaker 1: it grew. What's the stuff that in New Zealand and
Speaker 1: talked about the really bad to walk through stuff. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's like come yeah, yeah, that's the real thick that's
Speaker 1: the sticker stuff. Yeah. Shintang is like, um, it's like
Speaker 1: carpet juniper. It's like when you get like stunted growth
Speaker 1: first because it too high wind bad or high elevation
Speaker 1: where they grow not high but out. Yeah, it's very
Speaker 1: difficult to well that monkey scrub because you just like
Speaker 1: you look like a monkey crawling through it. No, here's
Speaker 1: the thing I want to bring up and get you
Speaker 1: guys o paint on it. We kind of touched on
Speaker 1: this and the reason that I want to bring this
Speaker 1: up is because it relates to a previous episode where
Speaker 1: my brother Matt was on and we were talking about
Speaker 1: stealing people's spots, stealing people's hunting spots, and we're having
Speaker 1: a debate, Um, if you go It started out like this,
Speaker 1: if you go hunt with a guide, so you're going
Speaker 1: to guided trip, is it ethical for you to just
Speaker 1: go back the next year and hunt that spot. Well,
Speaker 1: you're your guide. Know what you're gonna say. Give me
Speaker 1: your take on it. Here's my take on it. I
Speaker 1: am a stickler when it comes to hunting spots. I
Speaker 1: will never hunt a spot that someone else takes me into,
Speaker 1: and I expect the same from other people. I think
Speaker 1: that it's now Here's the other thing that is, if
Speaker 1: you communicate with the person and say hey, I'd like
Speaker 1: to go hunt this spot and they're like, yeah, that's cool,
Speaker 1: then you can do it. And the same as a guide.
Speaker 1: If there's somebody that hunts with me and they're like oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd really like to hunt this next year.
Speaker 1: Then I would be like, Okay, let me give you
Speaker 1: some really good spots to go into. They don't because
Speaker 1: the places I hunt or in proximity to what makes
Speaker 1: it convenient. There's a million places that I would love
Speaker 1: to hunt, but I'm not gonna go drive thirty five minutes.
Speaker 1: But if you're just coming from wherever, you might as
Speaker 1: well go hunt that spot because I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be there, you know, so let me help you out.
Speaker 1: Here's the places to go. We won't be we won't
Speaker 1: be interfering with each other. Yeah, because this last week,
Speaker 1: there's well we were talking about this is in Montana.
Speaker 1: It seems like there was an influx of nonresident hunters
Speaker 1: this year, and I think partially due to the fact
Speaker 1: that there was a world record bowl killed on public
Speaker 1: land in Montana. So everybody sees that and they go, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hunt Montana this year, So they pick a
Speaker 1: spot in Montana and maybe places where I don't know.
Speaker 1: I think the people that did this were from Minnesota
Speaker 1: or Michigan or Minnesota. But it's like in Montana, you
Speaker 1: especially elk season during the rut, you're doing a lot
Speaker 1: of calling. Don't really want to space yourself out between
Speaker 1: other hunters. You know, it's not advantageous to you or
Speaker 1: the other the whole lake. There's one dude, you go
Speaker 1: drill hole next to day. So they these two people,
Speaker 1: these two individuals had that mentality. They parked behind my
Speaker 1: truck and just like, walk into this small area. Were
Speaker 1: you guys hearing any bugle in? We are, well, no ship,
Speaker 1: you're here bugling right up on the ridge and you're
Speaker 1: walking toward it. Because it's it makes no sense. It's
Speaker 1: a different mentality, but maybe we're there from that's the
Speaker 1: way that they do it. They see a truck, that
Speaker 1: must be a good spot, hang our stand there. It's
Speaker 1: just fishing. I accept that with fishing. Like if I'm
Speaker 1: out on a lake right and I got some holes
Speaker 1: drilled and a guy shows up, I think he'd be like,
Speaker 1: I'm gathering the dance where the fish are and he
Speaker 1: comes over, and I would think nothing negative about that person.
Speaker 1: Duck hunting, it really bothers me. Well, yeah, and it
Speaker 1: bothers me even way more. Big game hunting now now
Speaker 1: rifle season, when there's people everywhere, Yeah, vehicles get stacked
Speaker 1: up at trailheads, this, that and the other thing. That's
Speaker 1: completely acceptable. But when you're bow hunting and you're calling
Speaker 1: and you're trying, the success is based on you working
Speaker 1: an animal and tricking its behavior is a certain way.
Speaker 1: And they're calling and you're calling, and you're calling each
Speaker 1: other in and the elk and all that ends up
Speaker 1: at the end is two hundred staring each other in
Speaker 1: the face. I mean, yeah, it just doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: So but but but you kind of veered off on
Speaker 1: me there. But I'm saying, that's the spots spots, so
Speaker 1: he so we had this conversation, were like, if you
Speaker 1: were on a guided trip, is it okay to go
Speaker 1: to that spot? And my brother was saying, I can't
Speaker 1: remember how how like fervent he was in his belief,
Speaker 1: but he's saying, like, it's different in that situation because
Speaker 1: you were paying. You were paying someone, so it makes
Speaker 1: it a different relationship. But you're paying for that trip,
Speaker 1: you're not paying for like the spot. If you guide,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna buy your spot. The guy would say, well then,
Speaker 1: because I don't view this as being me selling you
Speaker 1: the spot. Or if you're like, here's a blank check,
Speaker 1: give me all your hunting spots right now, and whatever
Speaker 1: number you think it's worth on it, and then you know,
Speaker 1: if you buy like his knowledge, then it's one thing.
Speaker 1: But I don't think it's I don't think it's ethical.
Speaker 1: So we're kicking it around. This isn't even what I'm
Speaker 1: meaning to bring up. I'm just as a prelude. He
Speaker 1: was pointing out that it is a different relationship than
Speaker 1: a friend thing, and he was saying he agreed with everyone.
Speaker 1: It's in the conversation that the primary crime, a capital crime,
Speaker 1: I'm talking out behind the wood shot twenty two round,
Speaker 1: behind your ear crime is to have a friend take
Speaker 1: you hunting and then to go in and hunt his spot.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, without without sayings, especially if that guy were
Speaker 1: to say that, don't hunt this spot. Yeah. Now, the
Speaker 1: only crime worse than that crime is to go in
Speaker 1: there with other people, yeah, and introduce those other people
Speaker 1: to the spot to the point where we're young. My
Speaker 1: dad was like, it's just He's like, it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: You cannot do it. You never ever take anyone friend
Speaker 1: or not ever, no one into a spot, was his
Speaker 1: perspective on it. Yeah, that's that's I agree. So we're
Speaker 1: having this whole conversation, and Matt, after discussing this, just
Speaker 1: had it happened to him. He took someone he works
Speaker 1: with into one of his favorite spots. That person things
Speaker 1: along her boyfriend. Then apparently it just happened where that
Speaker 1: couple takes another group of people and they go in
Speaker 1: and hunt the exact spot, and he just found out
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, that's so when I'm talking to someone
Speaker 1: about hunting or in areas that I hunt, I will
Speaker 1: never ask them intentionally. I will never say, oh, where'd
Speaker 1: you or because I I do not want to know
Speaker 1: anywhere someone is hunting, because I will find on my head.
Speaker 1: I don't want it in my head because I will
Speaker 1: find that spot on my own, and I do not
Speaker 1: want someone to So when I go to like a
Speaker 1: new area or whatever, I generally just ask questions. But
Speaker 1: I like to find my spot myself because I know
Speaker 1: that if I find a spot that's good, I want
Speaker 1: to be able to go back there as many times
Speaker 1: as I want. I would rather find it on my
Speaker 1: own than have someone tell me and me not be
Speaker 1: able to do what I want, because I probably would
Speaker 1: have found it either way. So that version of that
Speaker 1: happened to me where I got accused because my my again,
Speaker 1: my older brother. He goes hunting and turns out that
Speaker 1: there's a guy at work with standing at the trailhead
Speaker 1: of the spot that he had been really wanting to
Speaker 1: check out, and he right away it comes to me,
Speaker 1: He's like, what's up with that? And I'm like, I swear,
Speaker 1: I swear I did not say, and it turned out
Speaker 1: it was pure coincidence. In the investigation. Then the ensuing investigation,
Speaker 1: it turns out that that person was operating on a
Speaker 1: whole other tip that had its own lineage, and those
Speaker 1: pure coincidence. But dude, I was very nervous when confronted,
Speaker 1: like maybe I screwed up and said something. But this
Speaker 1: situation he's in now, yeah, he knows the story better.
Speaker 1: Am I doing right with the story? Yeah? You can
Speaker 1: nailed it. Oh, it's excuse me. It just makes me
Speaker 1: feel sick. It could be that water I drank, but
Speaker 1: there has been a long enough incubation period. It just
Speaker 1: makes me feel sick. Stealing people's spots, Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think that that right there is the barrier to entry
Speaker 1: to hunting, because nobody wants to share their spots. Because
Speaker 1: people are apt to just jam because they'll just steal it.
Speaker 1: They will, and of course other people it's like, of
Speaker 1: course it's not your spot. People will find it on
Speaker 1: their own. But it's just like it's just a thing
Speaker 1: that I had a friend a few years ago line
Speaker 1: me out on some spots, you know, and I had
Speaker 1: them in my GPS, and they were in my GPS
Speaker 1: for a while, and I eventually went through and I
Speaker 1: was like, you know what, it's really not right. And
Speaker 1: I went through and deleted all those way points because
Speaker 1: they had names that were like, um, like Richard's Bowl. Yeah, nicknames. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like a way point that says Richard's Bowl. And I
Speaker 1: would look and see that in my GPS, like if
Speaker 1: I lose my GPS and so guys, like there was
Speaker 1: a shot of bull right right there, and I deleted
Speaker 1: it for fear of ever being the source of a leak. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have a I have a smap book in this
Speaker 1: Nevada map book that I used to you know, I
Speaker 1: used to use a while ago, and I would mark
Speaker 1: my spots, but then I would mark fake spots because
Speaker 1: there was so many times that I'd have to give
Speaker 1: the map to someone. You're like, oh, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: and they needed that map, but there was a lot
Speaker 1: of hidden so that thing coded. Yeah. I mean, let's
Speaker 1: just say if Hillary Clinton's emails were encrypted like that
Speaker 1: map problem problem. That thing was locked tight. There's markings
Speaker 1: all over. But now I looked at it and I
Speaker 1: was like, I have no clue. Way, You're like, I
Speaker 1: don't remember seeing shiploads of deer up there, but that's
Speaker 1: not true. Why would've written in this year map book? Yeah,
Speaker 1: big bullason. I'm always a little incredulous I'm looking at
Speaker 1: a map would be like Deer Mountain. I'm always a
Speaker 1: little bit like, it can't be that way anymore. No.
Speaker 1: I feel like at the time maybe it was an
Speaker 1: aptly named, but generations of dudes looking at Deer Mountain
Speaker 1: that's probably made it not so. And sometimes it's that
Speaker 1: Iceland Greenland thing. They just named it that. And then
Speaker 1: no buck Hills, the spot that really really strikes my interest.
Speaker 1: Another way, point I had that I deleted from the
Speaker 1: same guy that lyned me on and some elk spots
Speaker 1: is away. Point was called the laundry Shoot. His naming
Speaker 1: was because elk come pouring through there as though it
Speaker 1: were in a laundry shoot. So I had it on
Speaker 1: my GPS and I'm like, hey know, someday maybe, But
Speaker 1: then I'm like, because the no one's gonna look at
Speaker 1: that and know what that means. But I got rid
Speaker 1: of that one. To the laundry shoot. Yeah, lest someone
Speaker 1: steal my GPS and look at that name and be like,
Speaker 1: m provocative title, let's go there to the shoot. Yanni
Speaker 1: got anything do you need to on the uh that
Speaker 1: topic there? No. I feel bad for your brother. He
Speaker 1: asked me first if he was being a dick for
Speaker 1: calling these folks out on going to the spot with
Speaker 1: other people, and I said, hell no, he did an
Speaker 1: ethics check on me about you. Oh where you went
Speaker 1: in to meet up with him? Somewhere is this year?
Speaker 1: Last year? Yeah, you know he called me about this.
Speaker 1: So Yan is going to meet my brother hunting and
Speaker 1: the minute Yanni gets there, my brother killed a bull
Speaker 1: already same day. Yeah. So you get there and he's like,
Speaker 1: I just killed the bull. So you went and helped him,
Speaker 1: uh pack up and he loads his elk onto his
Speaker 1: lamas and hikes it out. Yeah, but we had to
Speaker 1: cut it up and get it hung a tree. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would take us until three o'clock in the morning.
Speaker 1: It's long night three in the morning because he lost
Speaker 1: the elk in there to a grizzly once, or lost
Speaker 1: a bunch of lost meat to a grizzly. That's the
Speaker 1: thing I should add. This is a grizzly hell, whole
Speaker 1: lots of grizzly bears. He refers to it so lovely
Speaker 1: as the grizzly pit. The grizzly pit um lots of bears,
Speaker 1: and they haven't been haunted since nine and do not
Speaker 1: give a ship about people. They just don't care. Ye,
Speaker 1: no fear. So he stay hikes out out to bring
Speaker 1: his elk up to a cooler where he can get
Speaker 1: it in a walking He gets in and gets an
Speaker 1: updated weather forecast and it's a bunch of snow coming.
Speaker 1: So he calls me, and I got him on speaker
Speaker 1: phone with my wife and he calls me. He's like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: I need to like do an ethics check with you,
Speaker 1: because I don't want to go back up in there
Speaker 1: just to get dumped down with snow. But Yanni's up there.
Speaker 1: What how would he sort of take or how would
Speaker 1: he view if I just didn't show up for a
Speaker 1: few days until the snow melts and everything and it
Speaker 1: gets all nice, and I said, you cannot do this
Speaker 1: to me. You can't do this to me. And he's like,
Speaker 1: all right, I'll go buy some warm clothes because he
Speaker 1: hadn't even packed his warm clothes with. Yeah. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been pissed. I would have been understanding. It just
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been fun on my end. Yeah, mostly because
Speaker 1: you'd be wondering, you know, you start wondering, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: mind up hiking out to go figure out that have
Speaker 1: them to him? So yeah, I told him I presented
Speaker 1: like he'd be almost kind of doing it to me
Speaker 1: a little bit, So you owe me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: It's nice to have company in the grizzly pit. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we didn't see any um, but we saw a few
Speaker 1: of their tracks after that big snow. I mean some
Speaker 1: of these tracks we did it. We put I put
Speaker 1: both of my boot tracks inside of one pad. I
Speaker 1: put both my boots inside of it, and you could
Speaker 1: see the outline of the Grizzly Bear track in the snow.
Speaker 1: Well that's a big Bear track because too is how
Speaker 1: in the distance. Sometimes when you look at a grizzly
Speaker 1: bear track, you're like, oh, is that a human walking?
Speaker 1: At first, you know, because it's just like they're both tracks, right,
Speaker 1: But then when you really look back at your own
Speaker 1: track and you look at that thing, the only way
Speaker 1: you can confuse it too would be if a human
Speaker 1: was walking in snowshoes, because it makes you have that
Speaker 1: wider gate right, because we walk, we almost put like,
Speaker 1: you know, one ft in front of the other. That's
Speaker 1: saying even when when he's that's right, when he's walking
Speaker 1: or she, I mean there's you know, eight to twelve
Speaker 1: inches between you know, with wise between the two tracks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um duncan Gil Chris, I remember reading this long ago,
Speaker 1: like like I gotta I gotta back up. When there's
Speaker 1: ways of measure of bears. Ways people discussed bears. There's
Speaker 1: three ways people discussed the size of bears. In the East,
Speaker 1: they talk about how many pounds the bear was. The
Speaker 1: reason they do that is because they have bears that
Speaker 1: you can get at right. You can like you can
Speaker 1: put them on a scale, shoot him, get him into
Speaker 1: a truck, and then go away the bear. So they'll
Speaker 1: be like this bear wade x pounds. No one like
Speaker 1: in Alaska, Like Jenny is never gonna tell you what
Speaker 1: a bear wade. It's extrapolated from other things, um so
Speaker 1: one the other. The second way to that people just
Speaker 1: gouss bears is it's squared hide. So you skin of bear,
Speaker 1: lay the skin out, and then you need to not
Speaker 1: stretch it, but like kind of pull it tight and
Speaker 1: let it lay there on on its own accord, not
Speaker 1: like pegged out, and you adjust it until you have
Speaker 1: the tip of nose to tip of tail measurement the
Speaker 1: same as the claw tip to claw tip front leg measurement.
Speaker 1: So he's splayed out arms outside of like a cross.
Speaker 1: And in order not tweak it where you're like really
Speaker 1: get the clause far apart, which shortens up the you
Speaker 1: know you're pulling hide and shorten up the length. It's
Speaker 1: called squared so you get him to wear tip of tail,
Speaker 1: tip of nose is Let's say you're looking at a
Speaker 1: black bear and it's six ft two. Then you measure
Speaker 1: tip of front claws to tip of front claw and
Speaker 1: that's six ft two. You'd say it's a six two bear.
Speaker 1: Squa aired guys that just pull him to grab the
Speaker 1: nose and grab the tail and pull and then measured.
Speaker 1: That's like just the bullshit measurement. The third and final
Speaker 1: way you measure bear, the official way as you dry
Speaker 1: the skull for I don't know, you clean the skull,
Speaker 1: dry it for six months, measure the length, measure the width.
Speaker 1: Add those two numbers together, right, that's it. That's it
Speaker 1: school size. That's like the main official way to measure,
Speaker 1: But it doesn't really reflect condition of the bear because
Speaker 1: theoretically you could have some freak bear that had a
Speaker 1: giant skull in a dinky body. Oh yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: Prince of Wales bears genetic yeah, Prince of Wales bears
Speaker 1: tend to have a much bigger skull to bodies, a
Speaker 1: bigger skull to bodies aze racial than other bears, so
Speaker 1: they get big skulls without being giant squared hides. Same
Speaker 1: with bears in like Vancouver. But and I think a
Speaker 1: lot of it to you is uh the amount of
Speaker 1: time the bears spend out as well. But like California
Speaker 1: has bigger scold bears and they don't hibernate as long
Speaker 1: as say Montana bears and coastal bears don't, So I
Speaker 1: don't know why that would affect there, but the overall
Speaker 1: size there's yet it seems to be a correlation. There's
Speaker 1: interesting correlations with bears. I only get back to measuring
Speaker 1: bears um because what remind me to get back to
Speaker 1: tracks and Duncan Gil Chris and stuff. But another interesting
Speaker 1: correlation of bears is if you take a map that
Speaker 1: shows rainfall annual precipitation and lay over that a map
Speaker 1: that shows high prevalence of color phase bears. Color phase
Speaker 1: bears occur in arid areas. And I could be wrong,
Speaker 1: but I think it's like if a place gets twenty
Speaker 1: inches of rainfall, the bears are jet black. Less than
Speaker 1: twenty you get higher prep the the d ried is
Speaker 1: the higher prevalence of blonds, browns, reds. The more rain,
Speaker 1: the more likely with black bears that they're gonna be
Speaker 1: jet black. That makes sense when you start line ended
Speaker 1: up with like places you know, Yeah, you go down
Speaker 1: New Mexico, southern Colorado like dry places, it's like they
Speaker 1: get geeked out to find a black bear. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: then you go other places like California and or no
Speaker 1: black ones are rare there. But if you go the
Speaker 1: coastal coastal areas, you know, to find a color phase
Speaker 1: one there, it might be near impossible. I've looked at many, many,
Speaker 1: many bears in coastal like coast Alaska, many many you
Speaker 1: know they're just black because like bears are black. You
Speaker 1: do you think that if the Now what I'd be
Speaker 1: curious is if the area receives more rainfall. I don't
Speaker 1: think that they be more black because where I can
Speaker 1: it would be such a slow process. Where I guide
Speaker 1: for bears just it seemed like all we ever saw
Speaker 1: was color face bears. Now we can't find any color
Speaker 1: face bears or not as many. I think it would
Speaker 1: be too slow. I think to the to like track
Speaker 1: the phenal the phenological response to increase precipitation would take
Speaker 1: thousands of years. Where do you think it's something of
Speaker 1: like what they have to eat? My feeling is that
Speaker 1: it has to do with um the camouflage and the
Speaker 1: lushness of the vegetation the air bears just as a
Speaker 1: theory that bears that are living in lush vegetation where
Speaker 1: there's like a dark understory, right, they can get away
Speaker 1: with that jet black eridescence down in the shadows. And
Speaker 1: bears that are living their lives out in black bears
Speaker 1: are living their lives out in the open and sun
Speaker 1: baked areas. It's a couple of things. I think it's
Speaker 1: better camouflag lag and they're not sucking up as much heat.
Speaker 1: They're not getting as hot because they have that. If
Speaker 1: you're a bear in Arizona, right and you need to
Speaker 1: be out like eating uh prickly pear, you know, when
Speaker 1: you're out there in its ninety five degrees and your
Speaker 1: jet yourridescent black, it's gotta be a much more miserable
Speaker 1: experience than it is when you're a blonde face bear
Speaker 1: as far as he the same way, like in super
Speaker 1: hot areas they run rend angus and not black angers cattle,
Speaker 1: and they run black angers cattle in cold places. Back
Speaker 1: to Dunk. So the three ways to measure things. Duncan
Speaker 1: Gil Chris says that if you want to know what
Speaker 1: a bear is gonna square, you measure the width of
Speaker 1: his front pad and add one. And he says that
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what the barrel square. I've yeah, I've
Speaker 1: done that and it seems to be fairly consistent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've go by it. I don't know, I've gone and
Speaker 1: measured after shooting the bear like it's a five and
Speaker 1: a half foot bear, and be like, yep, and I'll
Speaker 1: just measure the pad. It's four and a half inch pad,
Speaker 1: just measuring on the multi tool, just casually, not like
Speaker 1: getting all scientific about it. But generally I found that
Speaker 1: it's generally kind of true. So if you find a
Speaker 1: six if you find a black bear pad that's six inches,
Speaker 1: you're looking at a nice big and you gotta do
Speaker 1: the front front pad should be the rounder one, not
Speaker 1: the elongated one. Not the elongated with the front, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the front widest. So if you're finding a track like that,
Speaker 1: I mean, you look at the real point being I
Speaker 1: haven't laid a tape measured with your boots. But if
Speaker 1: you're looking at the track that's full on that big,
Speaker 1: you're looking at like a legit, Well yeah that's I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm doing it right now. And outside the outside probably
Speaker 1: nine inches, maybe even a little bit bigger. See that's
Speaker 1: where I feel. That's what the reason the kind of
Speaker 1: reasons bringing it up. There's there's no way that there's
Speaker 1: are ten foot There's no way there's a ten foot
Speaker 1: grizzly down there. Remember that was in the snow too,
Speaker 1: like deep snow because you know, so that changes the
Speaker 1: change like a track that you found in the mud,
Speaker 1: you know, or the dirt. Yeah, because if I find
Speaker 1: a track in the mud, that's five inches, I don't
Speaker 1: add an inch the mud where it splayed out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And when I was checking it, when I've checked it,
Speaker 1: I was checking it, like I said, measuring the actual
Speaker 1: paths you need, like a nice good track, not that
Speaker 1: he's all splayed out in some sandy beach trips, you know,
Speaker 1: squishes out to the sides um dirt, you final and
Speaker 1: it comes to your mind. Yeah, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: the inevitable suck upon us, hopefully. And it conjured up
Speaker 1: a quote I always hold in my mind that came
Speaker 1: from a buddy and as Rusty Willis. We were talking
Speaker 1: about he built a cabin or he's building a cabin. Uh,
Speaker 1: kind of a hard to reach place, and I asked
Speaker 1: him about, you know, why why put all this effort
Speaker 1: towards something kind of like what you were saying. You
Speaker 1: can get a Roosevelt elk in many places. But uh,
Speaker 1: He's like, you know, people are always wondering, you know,
Speaker 1: is the effort versus is the effort worth the reward? Like,
Speaker 1: what you're putting into something, the struggle does the payout
Speaker 1: you know sufficient? And he said, mind my old man,
Speaker 1: he's building the cabin with his old man. He said,
Speaker 1: are our mentality is the effort is the reward. And
Speaker 1: I think in a case like this that you know
Speaker 1: that is like you're saying, when you guys got done
Speaker 1: with that packout, that effort was more satisfying than the
Speaker 1: actual you know, lining up and shooting this this nice elk.
Speaker 1: So that's on percent true because the story I tell
Speaker 1: is about the pack out. The last thing I talked
Speaker 1: about is how big the plus and the most times
Speaker 1: first thing, Oh, I got a giant, big old six
Speaker 1: by six, big old heavy bases scored me to you know. No,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh yeah, the pack out all fifty Yeah,
Speaker 1: you bring your story like that one time we were hunting.
Speaker 1: I was like, one time we were packing elk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not even not even the hunt partner, just the
Speaker 1: pack part That was the whole, the whole kid in caboodle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you'll remember forever. So I'm looking forward to the
Speaker 1: effort on this trip kind but I'm I'm kind of
Speaker 1: looking forward to well before Steve when you asked if
Speaker 1: I wanted to put in. I said, yea'll put it
Speaker 1: in if you get packers. It was like the condition
Speaker 1: because I was like, I've done this, I don't I
Speaker 1: did it with two guys, I don't need to do
Speaker 1: it with you guys again. I mean, I think if
Speaker 1: it comes easy this time, great, But now I got
Speaker 1: my bows, so I figured that'll be the challenge in itself.
Speaker 1: You know, Yeah, it'll be a little bit easier with
Speaker 1: six of us. Well, quite a bit easier. Yeah, three
Speaker 1: times easier. Right. Well, I don't know, it's it's like
Speaker 1: an in the moment kind of thing. You know. We
Speaker 1: could be all out there a couple of days from
Speaker 1: now and uh feeling in our own heads that's the
Speaker 1: sock is just as bad. Yeah, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: It won't lessen the suck. And yeah, and you can't
Speaker 1: look at a guy and quantify his suck level. It
Speaker 1: only lessens the suck for me because I'm the only
Speaker 1: one with the memory of the previous suck. But it
Speaker 1: can still suck. So I would be going, oh, this sucks,
Speaker 1: but this is man ever really sucked before. This is great,
Speaker 1: And you guys be like this yeah. But the meat, Oh,
Speaker 1: the meat. That's one thing I will bring up. This
Speaker 1: is the best game meat. Those olker that it's the
Speaker 1: best game meat I've ever had in my life. I'm
Speaker 1: saying it's very good. It is. It is like the
Speaker 1: wago beef of elk. It is the just the tenderloin,
Speaker 1: the inner tenderloin that's all you packed. Yeah, that's sock.
Speaker 1: It is softball size. It's the size of an elk
Speaker 1: or a beef filet mignon. I mean, you could cut
Speaker 1: fatty flame mignons out of that tenderline because the way
Speaker 1: that they're just compact there like a they're built like cattle,
Speaker 1: just short and squat and stout, and just the muscle
Speaker 1: every muscle group is just extra large. That's were all
Speaker 1: the way over the final one. Now it's that meat
Speaker 1: is almost I know I'll say it about it, but
Speaker 1: black tail meat is really good figure as well, and
Speaker 1: it almost has that same quality. Is the black tail
Speaker 1: meat where it's almost like it's a marbled fat. It's
Speaker 1: almost like that when you cut into that steak you
Speaker 1: can see the the meat broken down into those lines.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to explain it. When I'm talking
Speaker 1: about where it's Yeah, it's like that tender, fat, good
Speaker 1: piece of meat. It's funny mentioned black tails. I always
Speaker 1: think of like the really really good meats, um doll, sheep,
Speaker 1: black tail, elk of course, and then uh, select mule, deer,
Speaker 1: select resold. Just be like when you and I don't
Speaker 1: care if it's a big buck or not, when you
Speaker 1: start skinning that deer and he's got like an inch
Speaker 1: and a half tall on his realm. This is good.
Speaker 1: This good, dear man. No, I've had some range muled
Speaker 1: here too, but I mean select mule they are extremely good.
Speaker 1: So now I don't I will pick your brain on
Speaker 1: this because some people say, like the black tails, at
Speaker 1: least the ones around here, like most deer have that
Speaker 1: tallow type fat. It's that real waxy fat. But these
Speaker 1: black tails melted down and put wax our boots with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now these back black tails have almost a less tallow
Speaker 1: and more of like a regular fat, like a bear fat.
Speaker 1: Like they're fat is like bear fat, not like deer.
Speaker 1: Somehow diet related. Yeah, I don't, I mean, but and
Speaker 1: it makes the meat it almost like we would will
Speaker 1: me and my dad on the last time we had.
Speaker 1: We shot two bucks, cut off the bacon and fried
Speaker 1: that bacon like deer bacon on the rocks. And it's good,
Speaker 1: like the fat good to eat. But it's like, I
Speaker 1: don't even know. I you describe it squishy fat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't doesn't wax up in your mouth real bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't wax up. It's not waxing only deer. But
Speaker 1: people are saying that I've heard, you know, the old
Speaker 1: timer thing around here is that it's a different kind
Speaker 1: of fat because they need to absorb it faster. I mean,
Speaker 1: different animals have different kinds of fat process different ways,
Speaker 1: Like like a buffalo in the summer's got like full
Speaker 1: on orange fat, looks like a carrot. Yeah, you know
Speaker 1: that's how that when they're eating green certain green feet,
Speaker 1: it's like, so I'm open to the eye. There's something
Speaker 1: about what they're eating that gives they're fat different quality. Um.
Speaker 1: Sure they don't have a bad winter here too, either,
Speaker 1: these critters, which must help them there. I think they do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they generally do have it. They can have tough winters.
Speaker 1: They it's judging from the weather that these like the
Speaker 1: bother was just talking to the pilot about the winter.
Speaker 1: And yeah, the reason that the fluctuation and uh is
Speaker 1: so different than like say Prince of Wales is because
Speaker 1: they have the hard winters kills. A lot of animals
Speaker 1: die in the winter here. I think that I can
Speaker 1: it's about that. Is that like in Prince William Sound.
Speaker 1: In other is the southeast Alaska, the deer you know,
Speaker 1: the high country fills up with snow, but they have
Speaker 1: such good shelter down in the big old growth forest
Speaker 1: and there's a lot you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like protection from weather down there. Yeah, they go down
Speaker 1: to the shore lines in the old girls and can
Speaker 1: do pretty well here. It's just there's so much more
Speaker 1: exposure here. If I'm not having that those those giants
Speaker 1: the exposure because I was just accounting for the snow
Speaker 1: because they're like, yeah, the snow doesn't really hang around,
Speaker 1: you know, at sea level especially, Yeah, I can see
Speaker 1: it being like maybe a little bit nastier conditions and
Speaker 1: a lot of that stuff, like southern part of Kodiak
Speaker 1: is that more open, more like that. A lot of
Speaker 1: the lot of it's like this where it's got it's got,
Speaker 1: but doesn't have those giant swass of old growth I
Speaker 1: mean there are something. I mean, you can see him around,
Speaker 1: you know, when you're flying over. We saw we have
Speaker 1: to see it because it's being fogged in. But if
Speaker 1: you go over the ridge and down to the water,
Speaker 1: do you ever hit like thicker forest at the water's edge?
Speaker 1: Is it stay open like this the whole way stay scrubby, scrubby.
Speaker 1: But I mean just on this side it's all forest,
Speaker 1: So the you should be the north part. Yeah, did
Speaker 1: you do your concluder? No dirt? Did the effort? Is
Speaker 1: the reward? I like that that was a good conclud No.
Speaker 1: I didn't really have a concluder. Yeah. I just continue
Speaker 1: to talk and ask questions, Oh, is there more things
Speaker 1: you need to know? By all means, I'm feeling good.
Speaker 1: I'm ready for a house. Yeah. And then uh, we
Speaker 1: still have like to do. We still need to do
Speaker 1: our hunt. There's two things we didn't get the top about.
Speaker 1: I wanted to do like a status update on public lands,
Speaker 1: which we're gonna have to talk about next time we talked.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to talk about, um, why Remy is
Speaker 1: packing around his bow and arrow this time and what
Speaker 1: happened for him. So we're gonna return to those thoughts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we might have more packing and shooting iron, we might
Speaker 1: have more time sitting in this TP possibly talk about that,
Speaker 1: um Rich tod, yeah, blank man, Remy, anything you want
Speaker 1: to add. No, I mean, I hear the rain stopped.
Speaker 1: I would love to just take this headset off and
Speaker 1: go glass off a buck right now. Yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: even notice the rain did stop. Stuff. The sound quality
Speaker 1: went back to normal sound quality right now. Uh, here's
Speaker 1: my concluder. Uh, this is a cliffhanger episode. This is
Speaker 1: like the episode we did one time when Yanni couldn't
Speaker 1: get a turkey and I we did an episode and
Speaker 1: everybody had all tagged out on turks and then I
Speaker 1: had to get up the next day and go out
Speaker 1: and get Joanni squared away on in Turkey. But we
Speaker 1: left to hang him or no one really knew if
Speaker 1: he was gonna be able to pull it through. So
Speaker 1: this is one of those situations where you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to come back to find out did those fellers really
Speaker 1: get to experience the suck or did they have to
Speaker 1: go home with no suck? So stay tuned and find
Speaker 1: out