Bear Grease - Ep. 128: BEAR GREASE [RENDER] - Thalweg, Flintface, Landbridge, and a River Quiz

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

On this episode of the Bear Grease Render, Clay Newcomb is joined by the usual suspects, Brent Reaves, Misty Newcomb, and Josh “Landbridge” Spielmaker, as well as by veteran Terrell “Thalweg” Spencer and Clay’s longtime friend Ryan “Flintface” Greb. The crew talks about Jeremiah Johnson, the finer points of watermelons, a seemingly indestructible bear, and some catfish noodling. Clay also quizzes the crew on their retention of information gleaned from the first Mississippi River podcast episode and discusses everyone’s favorite parts, including the sound of Hank Burdine’s trim switch and the sheer power of waterways. You’ll wanna stick around for some sketchy river stories from the crew. We doubt you’re gonna want to miss this one. Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is a production of the Bear Grease podcast called the Bear Grease Render, where we render down, dive deeper, and look behind the scenes of the actual Bear Grease podcast. Presented by FHF Gear, American Made, Purpose Built, Hunting and Fishing Gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. Josh. Yes. What about Jeremiah Johnson? Okay, so last week I apparently slowed down just enough for COVID to catch up with me. I have been running hard for three and a half years and I've managed to dodge it. And for the very first time ever, I get COVID. And I'm laying in bed, feeling terrible. And I thought, I was actually scrolling through one of the first time.

of my movie streaming services. I don't remember which one it was. And lo and behold, what pops up? Jeremiah Johnson. And I thought, I need a little pick me up. Yeah. So I just, I'm, I'm, I kick that bad boy on. And, you know, he rolls off the riverboat there. And I'm thinking, this is just going to be awesome. You've never seen it before. I've never seen it. Okay. You know, fight and bear. I'm sure there's going to be bear fights. I'm sure there's going to be shooting game. You know, I'm just really looking forward to it. Having been a kid who grew up on the wilderness family. Have you guys remember those movies of the wilderness family? I mean those were like the greatest movies never when I was a kid. I've seen that thing a hundred times.

So, and then a few minutes later, Christy comes in, lays down and she starts watching it. She's like, now what's going on? What's going on? So I kind of give her a quick rundown and she starts watching it with me. Talk about an emotional roller coaster. That's a to be. Spoiler alert. Is everybody in here seeing it? I don't even know what you're talking about. Johnson? The movie? Never seen it. Oh my gosh.

I thought it was a hay farm. It's considered one of the American grates. You are. It's Robert Redford is a frontier. You're Josh's Mississippi in education. We're always just one step ahead of Mississippi. So Josh has finally seen the movie and you had. I was shocked and appalled.

What was the most significant thing about the movie? We are about to spoil this movie. Yeah. The movie was made in 1974. Okay. You've had plenty of time. or whenever it was made. I didn't, I thought it was going to be like, again, having been raised on the wilderness family,

I thought it was going to be a great, you know, surely there had to be something redeeming in the end. And in the end, the redeeming thing was the hand up by the lone Indian there, and he waves back. But the death and destruction, man. You felt like it was a lot of death and destruction. Yeah, I mean, I didn't see the, until. you know, he gets the look on his face when he's in the burial ground. Like, oh my God, they're going to kill his wife and boy. He knew what was coming.

Yeah. But it was great movie. Very well done. 1972. I have to be honest and say, I did have to turn on the subtitles a couple times just to catch everything that was said. Oh, really? Really? Yeah.

So Will Primos, who was on this episode of the Mississippi River, Bear Greece, is a big, big Jeremiah Johnson. and movie buff. He has, in his office, he has some original photography from the set. Oh, cool. Like, nobody else has. And he is a big time Jeremiah. This is for Robert Redford and that beard. It's a good beard.

It's a good beard. Makes a good meme to send a people. Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the Bear Greas Render, everybody. That's the one. If you are new to the Bear Grease universe, the Bear Gries Render is where we talk about the actual bear grease podcast, which is our documentary style podcast. This week, we had a very, what I thought was a, what I loved the episode.

I learned so much about the Mississippi River. So we're going to talk about that. But before that, we have some very special guests this week on the bear grease render. To my right, we have Josh Lambridge Spillmaker. Nice to be here. Nice to be. Fly fishing extraordinaire. Yes.

Spent the morning. In case somebody hasn't, has just been on another planet, Josh's nickname Landbridge came about circa 2008 when one day at a meeting at our church, I looked at Josh and his mustache inspired me to read a book on the Bering Land Bridge. This is not a joke. I mean, for real, I'm literally talking to the guy and I'm looking at this huge mustache that spanned the right cheek to the left cheek. Of his face.

Yeah, it was like Alaska and Russia. And I was like, Sarah Palin, son was impressed. I said, I know nothing about the Beringland Bridge. And I went and bought a book that's up here called Beringia. Yeah. And so Josh. To Josh's right, our dear friend, long-time friend, Terrell Spence, Spencer.

Could I change the Spence for Thalwag? Ooh, that's a good name. Yeah. That's a good name. Terrell Thalwag Spencer. At the bottom. Thalwag means the bottom of the river. Spence is our local pastured poultry man across the creek farms.

Good to have you. Spence has been on here several times. He's been a featured guest on the Bear Grease podcast. Yeah, unlike some of us. Unlike some of us, yeah. We're going to skip over the mystery guest and go to Brent Reeves, this country life. Good to see you, brother.

Good to be here. How you doing? Good. Great. Podcast. How's this country life? Good, man. Rocking and rolling. Keep, it's just, it gets better and better. Keeps getting better and better. Yeah. It's so fun. Hey, Brent Reeves is an incredible writer. You might not know it, but the writing, like this, this country life podcast, which is also on this bear grease feed, if you're paying attention, you know this. If you're not, you do now, if you're paying attention now.

But, so Brent has a podcast that comes out every Friday on the bear grease feed. It's about 20, 30 minutes long. And this would be something that he would write out. I mean, you don't really sense that when you're listening. It just sounds like a story, but it's actually written out. And Brent can take something that's not... It's really, really good. You wouldn't think you were that interested in, like, watermelons.

I thought that watermelon podcast was fantastic. Yeah. Well, thank you, Josh. Yeah. It's actually been my favorite one so far. I honestly, it's in the running for me. it's it's in what it is when you get down to the granular nature of it really is is excellent writing yeah yeah brint you want to tell them how the watermelon podcast came about yeah you and i were coming back from

matter of fact what we're talking about right now mississippi river yeah episode we went down there with uh talk to dr david you have to say pronounce his last name bidenharn yeah bidenharn and we were on the way back and we just started talking about you know what's what's the next podcast going to be route. We started kicking ideas around. He said, you know what you ought to do? Watermelons. And he said, it is my. He said, I don't care what you do, but I want this included in it. I said, all right. What's that? He said, I, Clay Newcomb, have vowed to myself to eat a watermelon every day of watermelon season. It is true. It's true. Just to clarify, it's not a whole watermelon. Some watermelon. Some watermelon. Well, no, really, we were deep in the heart of watermelon country.

I bought a watermelon this week in Arkansas that was grown in Mississippi. What? Yeah, it had grown in Mississippi on it. We're deep in the heartland of watermelon country. And I just said, Brant, I really want to hear you talk about watermelons. Yeah, it was fantastic. So it was great. You might have heard of the whole 30.

Yeah. And, you know, where like you do this horrible, restrictive diet for 30 days that ruins your family's life. and in the hopes of like cleansing your body from whatever. Anyway. Demons. Yeah. It might bring some out. But Clay does a, he does a watermelon 30.

Watermelon 60. From July 1st to August 30th. And when he's doing the watermelon 30. You don't look like this on accident. The kids and I have committed to doing an ice cream 30 where we eat ice cream all 30 days of during this. There's a parallel to watermelon ice cream. 30 is ice cream 30. So to Brent's, we're still

on intros here. I've got to speed it up here. We're eight minutes deep. To Brent's, right, my lovely wife, Misty Newcomb. Great to have you, Dr. Newcomb. Thank you. So good to be here. Thank you for that formal introduction. Yes, yes. But our mystery guest is Ryan Flintface

right? I know that was coming. Hey, if you've been paying attention to Bear Honey magazine stuff that I've done in the last decade. Ryan Greb is one of my dear friends from, for a long time. We've been buddies.

And Ryan is, man, to describe, okay, first of all, Flint Face, the first time I saw a picture of Ryan, it was on Arkansas Game and Fish website, and they just randomly selected his photo of a bear he'd killed to be on the page. Do you remember that? I do. And I found it on accident. I was like, no. I don't want to be the face of the bear page.

So, yeah, he was the face of the game. Fish Bear page and it was this beautiful photo this huge bear and he just had a face like Flint I mean like wouldn't crack a smile and for every picture I've got him to smile since then

but he Ryan doesn't do much smiling in the photos but Ryan I told Bear this the other day there's not many people in this state that are better outdoorsman than Ryan Greb with any that's quite a

I mean just like you want to talk deer hunting you want to talk bear hunting You want to talk cat fishing. You want to talk turkey hunting. You want to talk food plots. You want to talk anything. This guy is good. Boy, I got y'all fooled.

I've got y'all fooled. Yeah. No, okay, I got to keep going with Ryan, though. I still stand by this. And if somebody proves me wrong, that's great. I like to throw out big stats. And then if somebody can prove me wrong, then that's great. I think Ryan Greb has killed more.

bear per weight than anybody that's alive in Arkansas today. What does that mean? Like his weight? Like that we can bear in his weight? Like his weight? No. Nope. Like Ryan has killed more bear pounds.

Pounds per. Pounds per. Pounds of bear. He's killed more pounds of bear per person. Pounds of bear per person. We're looking for the racial. I mean, there's a lot of guys that have killed big bears. And certainly some incredible bear hunters that have killed like, you know, they've killed like two, 500 pound bears and then, and then, you know, some 300s and this and this.

Ryan has killed. I mean, we don't have to get into the details, but lots of, for 25 years, he's killed big ones. I've laid off of them the last three, four, five years, so I'm sure somebody's catching a chance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you were, you were hunting bears in the glory years of the Arkansas Bear Day. though. Yeah. When you're baiting bears, it gets harder and harder.

I mean, I'm pretty solidified on that statement. I'm not saying it's you can't kill a big bear in Arkansas anymore. People do every year. Right. But the first 10, 12 years when we could bait bears, it was you were learning curve. Oh, now every bear, every bear that's alive has their whole life been, been under some baiting sequence. It was easy. First five, six, seven, seven.

years, you know. Yeah. But now you've got generations of bears that is. Yeah. Born and raised into the bait and game. Yeah. It's a different bear now. Yes.

And just more people out in the woods than your average bears. Yeah. Hey, I want you to tell us the story of when that cub, you told this to River and Bear the other day. I don't want to spoil the story. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And I'd actually had forgotten about that.

Sitting in the tree, middle of the day. I'd sit in all day. You're bear hunting. Bear hunting, yes. And it was hot. You know, Nats biting you 90 degrees. And I just looked down the hill and I see bear coming. Here comes another one.

I was like, oh, it's a sow. Well, it ends up being triplets, you know. Sal with three cubs. Three cubs. They come up there and feed around, you know, do their mowing and squalling. And I think I'd kind of forgotten about this until they brought it up the other day. I think the sow winded me. went to pop in her jaws, and one cub took off running and ran right to my tree, scurried right up

past me, and got even with me, and I scared it, and it ran out on the end of this limb. It just got way out there to where he couldn't hold no more. And he was trying and trying and trying. He fell off, hit so hard, he bounced like a basketball, knocked him silly, and he took off running towards his mom. and siblings and ran head on into an oak tree and knocked it silly again and laid there like it just I thought he just killed himself but he gathered his thoughts

and off he went survival of the fittest thing and you were probably 20 plus I was probably 22 23 feet up so the cub runs up the tree sees you like you could have like poked it in the eyeballs yeah and it runs out on the limb falls out of the tree bounces like a basketball from a 22, 23 foot fall. Yes, sir. Sprints towards his mom

and T-bones and oak tree. Like, he never seen the tree. I guess he just... His eyes should. Yeah. And he hit it hard. Wow. And like I say,

just knocked him for a loop. He had together his thoughts and off he went. And I was like, well, that was my fun for that afternoon. I was like watching car tunes. Yeah. What's the biggest bear you've killed,

Arkansas well in anywhere but I think the answer will be in Arkansas five was it 508 or five oh it's a big bear yeah I shot one the next year the 508 I didn't think was all that big when I shot it the next year I'm talking a true monster come in and I was like if this bear ain't 600 pounds you know and I had it 10 12 yards thought I made a perfect shot and never found the bear. And I would love to go back in time to that day to do all over again. Probably shot it too low. I think I hit it too far forward, is what I think.

Too far forward? Too far forward. How big do bears get in Arkansas, Oklahoma? Like what would be the record? I mean, unfortunately, there's no weight record keeping systems because it's too arbitrary in terms of having certified scales. gutted weight versus live weight. So that's not the way people measure them,

but I have heard of a 650 pound bear that I think was legitimate. Have you heard of any bigger than that? Arkansas. No, I haven't. So this was up there. It was... Yeah, that would be pushing...

It had a... You know, it had the frame, monsters, pigeon-toed, big blockhead, but its belly was... was pretty much dragging the ground. Wow. He literally, there was a fence, a force fence, and the bottom strands was broke. And I can't remember if there's one strand or two strands above it.

He got down on his elbows and pulled himself under, not with his front feet, with his elbows, when he come on to the property. That's three and a half four feet. Yeah. But it was a monster. A true monster. Yeah, they can, for sure, way over 600 here, you know. But it's uncommon. That would be abnormal, though.

It would be abnormal, yeah, for sure. But they make them that big, man. They make them that big. They do. What, do you have any, what's your most memorable bear hunt, Ryan? Probably the Booner I killed up here in Zone 1 on a buddy's place by the, had the old rock. fireplace. Oh man,

that's some beautiful pictures. Yeah. That was, never even got in the tree. Just as I was sneaking into the bait, I seen him making his way up to the bait. I lost sight of him. I was like,

well, to back out of here. You went in there at like one o'clock. Yeah, because I kept getting pictures of this bear. He never would come at night. He always showed up in the day, like every hour of the day,

except I noticed from one o'clock to two o'clock, I wouldn't get no pictures of him. I was like, that's when I need to ease in. Well, as I'm easing in there, I'm 40 yards from the bait site, my stand, and I seen him come up out of the woods to the bait. But there's so much foliage, I couldn't, you know, lost sight of him. So I thought, should I back out, go to the top of the hill, give him half hour, ease back down here, see if he's left.

But I'm like, I'm practically in bow range as it is. The wind is right. I want to see if I can ease up and get a shot at him. So I took my boots off, just sock feet, eased up there, eased up there, got within about 12 yards. And I couldn't see him, but I could hear him. I could hear him. And there was golden rod, you know, the yellow flowers. And he was behind that.

That was blocking my view. And I spotted him at 12 yards. but he's laying down. So I eased up there a little closer and there's one window between these golden rods. I thought if he will turn, I can slip an arrow through that little four-inch window. And the bear never got up.

He pulled himself around. And while he's laying on the ground and reached in the hole in the barrel to grab more bait out. And when he did, I put one right behind his armpit. Pulling his arm up. That bear weighed three... No, it was four...

Four-20. Four-twenty something, yeah. But he had an over 20-inch skull. You scored at 20-and-five or something. 20-and-five, 16th or something, which is over the Boone and Crocket minimum. Right, that's a horse. Yeah.

And what's wild about all these bears is you can kill a 500-pound bear that doesn't make Boone and Croquet. Yeah, really? The biggest bear that I ever killed, Boone and Crocket score, weighed 3-55 or something. Interesting.

And then the biggest weight bear that I've ever killed weighed 550 and did not make Boone and Crocket. Batman? Batman. Didn't make Boone and Crocket? He did not make Boone and Crocket. So is it just the frame or like the head? They're measuring the skull. So for a bear, you measure the length and width of the skull.

So part of it is genetic, just like I might have a bigger head than you, even though you're taller than me. Let's not if you do have a bigger head than you. I have a big head. Spencer's a big end of people. It's kind of like that. And then A, I still really haven't decided. I have never talked to anybody that gave me a biologist, anybody in the country that has given me a legitimately scientific answer

of whether a bear adds mass to his skull with age. Do you understand? Because people have that idea. Oh, that's a 20-year-old bear. He's going to be Boone and Crocket. Not necessarily. Because if he was a smaller skulled bear or an average skulled bear, but there's an idea that their skulls get bigger or widened or thicken with time.

And I have yet to find a biologist, including some really top-level guys that have been able to tell me whether a bear really his skull gets bigger. But hey, one, maybe not the last, maybe just to start. Another story with Ryan, the kids told me, y'all talked about this the other day, Ryan took our kids noodling this week while I was in Montana. That's pretty awesome. Ryan was taking my kids fishing. Yeah, I'll just say, I think it's the coolest thing because our kids, they've gone with Ryan and Clay since they were little.

I'm trying to think about the first time River went. She was probably 12. A little Dainty thing at that time. She told me she was 12 years. Was she 12? Okay. And I'd actually never heard of Newtland before. And I would tell people, yeah, River's going nudeing.

and they would all look at me and be like, Rivers going Newland this afternoon? And I said, yeah. And so people kept, you know, I learned a lot by watching people's faces and how they respond to stuff. So I came home and they were getting in the car. I try not to let on if anything's abnormal.

Like, we're going rattlesnake hunting. We'll see you later. I just got to trust Clay. So they're getting in the car. I come home from work and they're getting in the car. And I said, hey, they're literally pulling out backwards. I said, hey, this is safe, isn't it? Because people just kept going,

Rivers going to you. And Ryan was like, are you? concerned? No, Ryan was there. Clay looked at me and this is, I promise, he hits the car in reverse. They're starting to pull off and he goes, ah, hey, we'll see you.

And he would just pull out. And I was like, well, I guess, I mean, surely he wouldn't put our daughter in danger. But he had, I mean, our daughter's been in the ER off the back of Clay's mules. I mean, a lot. So I don't know if I should be a trusting. That ship has sailed now.

But at that time, when she was 12, I trusted him. Hey, the most dangerous thing about Newgland in the warm weather is probably flesh-eating amoebas in the water. Oh, don't. I think about that from time to time. One of these days, you know, come back with a load. One of these is going to crawl up my nose. Yeah, there's, there's, I remember one year we went and somebody had like, maybe died.

Yeah. Well, they usually do. Yeah, yeah, from just being in that nasty water. It wasn't in this water system we were in, but it was like kind of in the, realm of where we're at. I hate this story. I mean, it's like, what are you going to do, though? You're going to say, yeah, and pull back and reverse.

No need to share that thought never entered my mind. So Ryan and them, Ryan and his buddies have, they're big time noodlers. And now our kids just kind of bypass Clay and call Ryan. Go straight to the horse. I don't even care if plays in town. Clay called me and said, hey, you've got to get my kids out of the house. Rivers watching the Kardashians. Bears playing

Fortnite. You've got to get them involved in something. I got you, Clay. I got you Clay. They had a great time, though. No, we've had a lot of fun over the years. And, you know, y'all rarely keep a fish.

No. I mean, like, hardly ever. Catch so many fish and rarely keep a fish. When the Newcombs go noodling, we keep them all. It's like when Spencer's go fishing. We have, we don't keep. Keep them all, but we usually keep one big flathead a year that will have a big fish fry, well, multiple fish fries. Right. And so anyway, we like some flathead.

When I talked to Clay yesterday, it's like, I'm sure there's no flathead left and you're probably just gnawing on the head or the spine or something like that. Taking turns on the tail. So the story that I want Ryan to tell, us to tell, came because the kids reminded me of it. But when we were in Canada, and the first trip that I ever did for Bear Honey magazine, which kind of marked like an era of my life when I started traveling and hunting, and for about a decade, I prioritized bear hunting over all other types of hunting and was traveling all over hunting. It was an incredible time.

That first year I had Bear Honey Magazine, I got the opportunity to go to Ontario, Canada, in the fall and we put it together pretty quick and Ryan was ready to go. I called Ryan and he was like, let's go. And whose bear was it that you almost, do you know what I'm talking about? I don't want to give away the spoiler. We were loading a bear on the four-wheeler. Was it my bear? It would be my bear.

Okay. Well, we go with this outfitter and we weren't incredibly impressed at first just by the looks of where we were at. It was kind of a do-it-yourself deal. They gave you a camper and some bear bait. and had some places set up and just were kind of like you're on your own, which we knew that.

So we were happy, very happy about that. But we hunted for two or three days and just hadn't seen much. And finally on the third day, they didn't have cameras out or anything. And on the third day, I kill a giant bear.

I mean, just a giant, one of the biggest bears I've ever killed. It was a whopper. We weren't able to weigh it, but we were shocked. And I killed it with my trad bow. And Ryan and I were kind of thinking we were going to go home skunk.

and so easily 400 plus. Well, we did wet. Did we wait? Oh, we did. You're right. We did wet. Yeah, 432. Yeah.

Yeah. 432 on the hoof. I had the 10%. I'm real cautious about weights. I was thinking we didn't wet. On the hoof? Yeah. Guts and all.

It had the biggest front pads of any bear I've ever seen. I mean, it was huge. Yeah. And it did not score Boone and Crockett. It green scored before drying 20 and 1 16th and dried under 20. Oh, wow. But it was a great bear, 9 years old.

Is 20 the cut off? 20 is the boon and cricket minimum. 21 is the all-time. It's a complicated story. But we're loading this bear up on a four-wheeler. We'd gutted it by now, so it weighed less than that. We're putting it on the rack of a four-wheeler. And what happened?

Y'all were on the ground going to lift. I got up on top of the four-wheeler, which is four-wheeler had like a bed on the back of it. A rack. Yeah. And I was going to pull as they were going to lift. Well, this bear weighing 400-something pounds, you think, well, it's going to be a struggle. Well, when it was one, two, three, I pulled, they lifted, well, they come up way too fast. I had one foot in the bed of that four-wheeler, and they put that bear up on my leg.

and pushed me off the four-wheeler. Well, everything went off the four-wheeler except my left foot. His left foot is on the rack, up against the rack. The bear comes over the top and pins his foot on the rack, and Ryan falls off the four-wheeler. Was that a desirable place to be? No, man. It had a, like a bed, like a wall.

Like a six-inch. Yeah. Did you break your leg? I thought it did. Man. Hey, when I saw. saw it happen, I still cringe when I think about it. Because I thought our trip to Canada is about to get really weird because we're going to be going to Canadian hostel.

And Ryan's broke. I mean, I didn't know how it would be physically possible for, because his foot never moved and his body is on the ground. Like, I still, to this day, don't know how it didn't break your leg. I still don't have, I've got an ankle bone here. This one don't show anymore. Hold on. Let's see. Let's see.

You got two angles on that. There's ankle bone here. No, not one there. It's like it shifted over. Does it feel funny? No. Can you see in the dark? Yeah.

Yeah, that was bad. I just knew it was going to be bad. And he just kind of bounces up and just kind of like limps around for a minute. And he's like, all right, we're good. I know why he don't smile. The next morning it was sore. That's when I was like, yeah. It was sore the next.

It was like at the threshold of something was fixed to shatter. Man. Oh, yeah. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a full of blood.

Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried. under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. he's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on

Apple, I Heart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Well, Mississippi River podcast. You guys don't know it, but there's a quiz. I knew it. We're going to... I'm not doing well on the quiz.

We just started a three-part series, Mississippi River. It's going to be... a significant series. Let me start off by saying this is one of the hardest series that I've ever done because everybody, well, first of all, if you're going to tell a story about the Mississippi River, like, what are you talking about? Like, it's not like David Crockett or something really specific. There's always, you know, with that, there's this definitive data that you have. The Mississippi River is just a big story. And I just knew there was kind of a hole in my understanding of this country.

by not knowing a lot about the Mississippi River. So I started going to experts. And I knew there were certain categories of interest that I had, which I wanted to know about the natural system of the river, just as it stands as a natural feature, like the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River, the Pacific Ocean, you know. So I wanted to understand the dynamics of the river, number one. Number two, I wanted to understand the culture,

how that river has influenced culture, particularly on the lower Mississippi. That's where most of my interest lay. And so I knew I needed to talk to people. I also wanted to learn about the fishery of the Mississippi River. Like I'm interested in the wildlife and the fisheries. And so I started going to all these different people, and everybody was so knowledgeable about their one little section

that it was sometimes hard to get a picture as big as I needed to get. And John Barry, oh man. Now, he was the man. There's probably not been a guest on Bear Greece that would be as, I mean, he's a big time writer that has nothing to do with hunting per se. And so Misty went with me to, we went to Washington, D.C. to interview John Barry for an hour. and that book,

Steve Ronella is the one who told me when I said, hey, I'm going to interview John Barry author of Rising Tide. Rinella was like, hey, when you look at like top ten lists of American nonfiction,

he said Rising Tide's always there. He's like, that's like a incredible book of, so having John Barry on was really interesting. He's a really interesting guy too. So I sell that to say. I kept, excluding John Barry,

who had this kind of very general, like big knowledge, like, I just kept going to different people, different people, different people. I think I interviewed seven different people, like full interviews,

like hour and a half plus interviews, and then, and building the series. So it's been a lot of fun. And it's pretty tough. But I want to, you know what, my labor,

I want to see if it was in vain or not. Uh-oh. I want to know if you guys were even paying attention. Because I'm not sure if you were or not. This will be the third quiz that we've done. Josh Cheats. Hold on. No, you hold on, Jack.

I don't cheat. Yeah, you do. You're the cheater. You can't count. On the podcast on the last render, you were like, okay, we're going to do a quiz. And then we never did it. I know. Sorry, guys.

We actually did a quiz for Clay on Coleria. We're just trying to identify what Choleria was. Yeah, we were going to do a quiz. We were going to do a quiz. But the conversation was just so rich. Rividing. I felt like the quiz would have gotten the way. So there's two quizzes.

How are you? Two quizzes. We're doing a crockett quiz. So the way this works is the first person that blurt's out the right answer gets the point. All right. I think there's seven. What do you want to do it? to submit the answer by email?

Yes. I think you should raise your hand. What if everybody had a buzzer or a squeakle toy? Oh, I think we need a... Like family feed style. Yeah. Yeah. I could get shakers.

Shakers. But then everybody would shake. Just nonstop. Okay. I think this is what we're going to have to do. We can make our own beeping. Josh, what's your sound? It's not going to want to be heard.

Here we go. I believe there are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight questions. The one at the end of this with the most points wins. Okay, I feel very under- The first one is going to be some low-hanging fruit. You're supposed to listen to it, Josh. What is the thaw-wag of a river? Deepest point of the channel.

Terrell Spencer, deepest point of the channel. You got to blurt it out. When I take people fishing on my river, I tell them about foul-wag. Oh, yeah, yeah. This is like, you knew this before. I wanted to, like, be friends with that guy. I think you should get an extra point just for already.

The Thalwag. The Thalwag. The Brant and I are getting a boat. Brent and I are getting a boat. Spence is dead. Thalwag lives. He has that, he definitely has a competitive advantage today. Yes.

Because Malachi Nichols wouldn't be a boat partner with me. Me and Brent are getting a boat. You trade it up, buddy. Yeah. And we were going to name it the Thalwag. So that gets awkward, man. That was never an option. Well, but then I was like, you don't want to name your boat the bottom of the room.

So I'm going to go ahead and say this. This is going to be big news in the future. Most likely the name of our boat is going to be the Laurentide. The Lauren Tide? Come on. You took a lot of shots at the Lauren Tide. I mean, how cool the name is that? The Lauren Tide.

the Laurentide ice sheet. Two mile thick ice sheet that carved out. You were taking a lot of shots and now you're praising it. Well, no, no, no. I didn't ever say anything negative about the Laurentide Ice sheet.

I just said it seems kind of arrogant to me that we would name it like it was a pet. I feel like you didn't really appreciate all the topsoil we have. In your face. No, no, no. I'm a big time. If you had a garden up in that hollerted

You would appreciate alluvial soil. Spence lives up to holler from me and he claims I stole all his soil. And for the record, both of you guys have the same degree. Environmental soil science? Environmental soil and water science?

Yeah, pretty close. I went grad school for stream ecology. What we ought to do, right? Streamicola. I forgot about that. I put them in a jar and shake them up and see if they'll fight. Right.

Like two beta fish. 55-gound ground. If it came across as, negative about the Laurentide Ice Sheet, it wasn't. I just was making note of no human. Like, it actually has no correlation to like thinking. It is crazy. It was just like, it's amazing. No human that we've had correspondence with actually saw it, but we know it was here because of the cryptic diary of the earth. It's interesting stuff. The cryptic diary of the earth. One for Terrell. Thoult. Thouwax Spencer.

This might stick. What is the name for a concrete map placed on the riverbank to stop erosion? Revitment. Who said that? Brent Reeves. What was it? Revetment. Revitment.

Brent Reeves. One, Thalwag, one. I mean, you got Josh. Ryan, Graves zero, Josh, Zero. Misty Zero. It comes a fly fishing. He'll get it. I had COVID.

So it made your brain a little foggy while you were listening to this. Yeah, COVID fog. River Park Hey, Josh has a real boat. He has a brand new boat. You got a name your boat. S.S. Lambridge.

Oh, are you kidding? Yeah. Excellent. I got a honey. What's the name of your boat, Ryan? Gertrude. Man, Ryan's so dead serious. He's like, name your boat.

Are you guys kindergarten? Misdemeanor. Missed. Yeah. Well, they'll want to fit on the road. Oh, my goodness. Hey, I got a honey of a canoe that you didn't mention. It's a locally made canoe.

Oh. Yeah. It turns on a dime. Two brothers canoes. That's what's on the side of it. Made locally, you think? It's local. It's local.

Arkansas? Yeah. Really? Two brothers. They're sweet canoes. Okay. Okay. Question number three.

For the last, how many miles does the river's bed lie below sea level? 100. And 20. It's 15 foot below at Vicksburg. That question probably could have been worded with a little more clarity. Come on, Trebek. How many miles up the river Is the river below sea level?

This was stated twice on the podcast. How many miles up the river is the river? 50 miles. How deep it is at Vicksburg? 50 miles. New Orleans. Well, the answer lies in how far Vicksburg is from the coast. Was it 400 and something?

Come on, come on. 420. $450. $450. Right. Flip face grab. Are you kidding me? I wasn't congratulating and you.

What are you talking about? Yeah. So for the last 450 miles of the Mississippi River, the bottom of the river is below sea level. Like not a little in like 240 foot. Is that what they said in? Well, okay. No. There was a 240 feet, but that it's 15 feet below Seaville and Vicksburg and like 170 at the

mouth of the river did you guys understand why I needed clarity like I felt like John Barry kind of dismissed me when he was like yeah it's always been like yeah but I was I thought perhaps it was because you know dr. Biedenharn he told me he's like when man puts his foot in the river a river system is so dynamic any any water flowing water system is incredibly dynamic and if you put your foot in the river in St. Louis. Anywhere. It affects, you know, this is hyperbolic. Exaggeration to make a point. Put your foot in the river in St. Louis. It affects New Orleans. Yeah. And so I thought maybe the river being that far below sea level was something that we had done.

Because what we probably won't get into because it's just too boring, but it's also too exciting not to talk about, is all the ways. that they, I mean, you could write books on the Mississippi River Commission in levees, jetties, and outlets. So there was this huge controversy in the country for 50 years about how to tame the Mississippi River. And there was a levees only crew. There were these guys that were like, levees only. That's the way to do it. And then there were other people that wanted levees and outlets. and basically the levees only thing failed because of the 1927 flood and it like was the biggest natural disaster in American history.

Johnny Cash wrote a song about it. Did he really? How high is the water, Papa? And that's about the 1927 flood? Oh, dude, that's big. I didn't know that. Big River and that song are my two favorite Johnny Cash. My grandpa.

And I'm not even a potomologist. My grandfather went to southeast Arkansas. when he was born 1913, that happened in 27. So he was 14, and he went down there to help recover folks and the flood victims. How far over did it get? How far west did it? They went to Lake Village, which is right there on the river. Yeah.

He said it was horrible. Wow. Well, we are going to talk more about the 1927 flood in different ways they did things. but the on a different podcast yeah like actually on some of the later ones so we'll save that so 450 miles up

it's below so that money yeah yeah okay what is the term for a river whose banks are mobile and shift meandering and weaving through its floodplain alluvial bam thou lag two an alluvial river

yeah an alluvial river Yeah, an alluvial river, its banks are mobile and shift. It meanders and weaves through its floodplain. Josh, did you even listen to this? I did. Josh is looking a little glassy eye. Yeah, no. The answer is over land bridge.

Josh's daughter got married this weekend. Yeah, my daughter got married this weekend. We had a fantastic time, but man, marrying off a kid is at a lot of work. We were tired and we didn't even do anything. We just celebrated. Yes. All right. For Josh's oldest daughter getting married,

we're giving him one bonus point I told you I'm a cheater Okay Question number four The current score is Two for Thalag Spencer One for Ryan Flint

For a Scrabb And one for Brent This Country Life Reeves And zero for Josh Zero for Misty Okay the Mississippi And the Amazon rivers Are the only two major rivers

To not have this Dams A dam. Well, it needs a little more clarity. At the mouth. Bam! Josh Landberg's filmmaker wins. Two points.

2,400. So what Dr. Kilgore with two else said was that the Mississippi and the Amazon were the only of the big rivers of the world that don't have a dam at their mouth, which is a pretty big deal. And you know what? I didn't want to say this on the podcast because it kind of ruins the buzz about the Mississippi. River, but those guys talked about the Amazon, the Amazon is the beast of planet Earth. Yes. Like the Mississippi River is like pretty small in comparison to the Amazon. Like it's not like the flow on a big flood day from Mississippi River, I want to say,

is around 4.5 cubic, 4.5 million cubic. feet per day that comes out of the mouth of the Mississippi River, which means imagine a one foot by one foot by one foot cube of water. Do you understand that, Ms. No, Dr. Yes, you've gone to send me. Can you visualize that? No, no, no, no. I just know sometimes, sometimes, um, careful.

Just stop talking. Okay, imagine that. Imagine that. And, uh, imagine 450 million of those little boxes. flowing past you. Are we talking too fast? Oh my gosh. Steve Rinella gave a great example about,

he said it would be like seeing 400, 4.5 million soccer balls go past you. The soccer ball is about one cubic foot. I thought that was a good example. Well, didn't I say that would supply Texas for a year? A couple of days, like two days. Wow. But the Amazon has 20 million cubic feet

per day at high water. Wow. But what's interesting about the Amazon is that all the other big rivers of the world, like the Nile, Mississippi, the Congo, the Yangis, the Gangesi, whatever. What's it called?

Yanksi. We're representing our major here. Dale bumpers, man. Dale bumpers. Environmentalist. Most of those rivers run north and south, for the most part. The Amazon runs.

east and west, or it runs from the west to the east, but and it runs across the widest part of the South American continent. And so it is just has this huge drainage basin. And it's very little, is developed around the Amazon. So there's very few, maybe no, I don't want to say how many dams, but it's relatively an undammed river. Christy Spielmaker's bent to the Amazon. Has you really? I would like to go to the Amazon. That's a pretty good position. Heck yes. Who here would like to go to the Amazon? I do. Can you fly a rock?

Ryan's in. He caught. It gets like a 200-pound fish. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, my friend Keith Sutton down in central Arkansas, who is a, in Arkansas, he's kind of a legendary hunting fishing rider. He, for a time, was going down to the Amazon quite a bit, and he caught an undiscovered stingray, freshwater stingray that no one had ever documented. Really?

He was down there fishing one year. and caught this stingray, and he pulled it up, or he saw it. Maybe he pulled it up to the boat and it got off, but he had a real good look at it. And he goes back to America and starts to research, and there's nothing. And he's like, I know what I saw.

The next year he goes back. It's a version of this story that's similar to this, okay? This may not be words. So you may be misrepresenting him. I mean, a little bit, but it's possible. I just want to say that because I've recorded him tell this story before, so you could go back and actually hear it from him on the Bear Honey magazine podcast with Keith Sutton. But the next year, he goes back down there to the exact spot he lost that fish.

And within like 10 minutes, catches another one. I'm serious. He went and caught it. And it was a 200-pound freshwater stingray that had never been documented by science. They name it after him. I don't think they named it after him, but he was able to get in touch with the fish guy that they believe that somebody in the 1800s

had documented it one time. But that's all they had seen, so it was never... That's crazy. But it's just like, that kind of stuff can still happen on the Amazon River. That's pretty crazy. Yeah, it was. I thought it was crazy.

So, Josh, your score is two. He don't have two. One and, like, a mercy point. At least my extra points were, awarded by someone else and not myself like Brent. This time. I feel like this is the kind of thing I talk to my kids about. Okay.

Question number five. How long did it take the Europeans? 120. Revisit the Mississippi River after DeSoto discovered 120 years. Yes. Did y'all like hearing what Mark Twain thought about that 120 year gap? I thought that was interesting. and I was reading fat.

It's wild to think that the Soto saw it, and it was 120 years. But isn't that like, that's the thing with rivers, we take them for granted? Yeah. You know, you just see a river and you think, nah, it's just a river. You see a mountain and everybody wants to name it and climb it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I don't know. Well, but when Mark Twain put it in the context, as he said that entire time, there were people on the east coast. you know there were there were Europeans that were

about around and about on the east coast and then they still didn't even know where that river went okay there was some good stuff in that book yeah life on the Mississippi and I sent you I was actually reading that

and your suggestion when we started and then is it a spoiler if I read that thing that I sent you the other day that I laughed out of that was in the part that I well you know what I You skipped over. I skipped over.

Yeah, read it, read it. Yeah, my favorite part of that whole, it was actually in that same paragraph. Mark Twain said, if somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start 15 costly expeditions tither, one to explore the creek and the other 14 to hunt for each other. That made me laugh out loud because that's so true. And in 1883, that's what was going on. on. That book was written in 1883. Yeah. So like there was some genuine exploration going on in this continent. Unlike it's going on today, you know.

They were exploring land like today we're exploring technology. Yeah, yeah. If you think about like Elon Musk and these people doing wild stuff going to the moon, making electric cars, making chat GPT. And we're kind of like, wow, the frontier. You know, this, this, back then it was, what's that direction? We don't really know. The actual frontier. That's not the best analogy, but you guys get it.

Okay, according to Dr. Biden-Harn, the deepest point of the river is how many feet be. Bam, thawag. I'll get that. I'll get that to Nisi. I definitely knew that one. I definitely knew that one. Huh? I did because I like to hear the whole question.

That's not Spentz's fault. No, it's not Spentz's fault. Last question. I feel a little bit. This question. We did a half point. Don't know. It's all yours.

It's all yours. You said it first. Neighbors share. Rules, you know. I think he chugged a red bull before this question. Okay. What year was the Mississippi River Commission formed? This is kind of a boring question.

It is. It is. And I still don't know the answer. 1887. 1984. That's what I was going to say, 1948 too, but I think there was a wrong.

I don't feel bad if I take a wrong answer. It was 100 years before the year. of my birth. Oh, 1879. Bam. I finally get one. I get one. Who won?

Who won? Who won? I think it was great. I had five. No, he didn't. Terrell thowwack, Spencer. I'm surprised I'm surprised that

I'm surprised that the question of how many miles unfree flowing water. That's a great one. Which I'm fully expecting Isaac Neal to walk in here with that tattoo. Yeah.

What did you think about the tattoo suggestion? 2400. With the Eagle. The Eagle. Was it an eagle or a hawk? Eagle. Eagle. Yeah.

I had a lot of people. There's a lot of hype around that the Mississippi River should have been called the Missouri River. Because the Missouri River is longer than the Mississippi. And people say things such as the Mississippi River is not great until the Missouri comes in. I got a question. Okay. I think it said that there was not a dam on the Missouri River for 1,200 miles. Yeah, it said. Why is that? I don't know anything about the Missouri River. So it's compared to the Arkansas, and you don't come very far out of the Mississippi until you get to. What's the first one? Is it Murray?

No, down at Dumas. Dumas? Yeah. I don't understand what would make the decisions around not damage. Is there not commerce or commercial? on that like there is the Arkansas River? I don't know. Don't know. I really don't know. That's a good question.

Are the Arkansas dams navigation-wise, or are they power? It's mostly navigation. Yeah, mostly navigation. Yeah, I think they go as far as Tulsa, maybe, on the Arkansas River. Yeah. Some rivers, it could be, there's some, I don't know. I don't even know enough to. I'll figure out the answer, though, because that's a good question.

You don't get no point. I get zero. Zero. Zero. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag.

And there was a pool of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, IHeart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, I'm going to have to say this again. I'm going to address this again in an actual Bergerie podcast in probably a tighter way.

But I think name in rivers is really interesting because rivers are named typically from their mouth. The bottom. the bottom and the way this country was settled by the Europeans that came here it was settled from east to west so the people came to this land that the Native Americans the Kwa'pals called Arkansas and they found this giant river and so they said the Arkansas River and then when they went up to where the Arkansas River started it was in Colorado yeah so I mean in theory it seems like there's more namesake this is the Colorado River started in Colorado but just simply based upon where the people,

the direction the people were coming from when they named it. And that's exactly why the Missouri River is called the Missouri River. And not the, not the, where's the headwaters of the Missouri in Montana or Wyoming? Yeah. I'm not even sure. I think it was Montana.

Yeah, I think it's Montana. You know, and so the Mississippi was kind of the same way. That most of the interaction with that river was down in the lower part of the river with LaSalle and these guys, you know, LaSalle and De Tante were the first guys to, it was a transliteration, meaning that it was a, it was a word in a different language that we just kind of were like, Mississippi.

What was there, what's the Indian way, Mitch, uh, yeah, it was tough. I struggled with that. More than collar. It was two words. Yeah, more than that. It thought he had colored. It was, I didn't really do it justice. There were multiple.

There's so many ways that. But it was Mice sepacuei or... I've got a question, how confident are you that... I'm... The pronunciation of that. Oh. High. Very high.

You like that? Golf club. Yeah. Yeah. Very high. Okay. Mm-hmm. And...

How confident were you of cholera? Low. You had to hear the fever. Hey, what... I like to think about these things. what is it what did it make you think when it was suggested on bear

grease that maybe one day the Mississippi River won't be called the Mississippi? And just how our society will be forgotten like the Catehocans or all the others. Yeah. That was I was cleaning out a chicken breeder at the time that was a thinker. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I can tell you where I was at. I was checking my corn. This is like JFK. Wow, where were you at? Yeah, this is a touchstone for our generation. When we talked about renaming this. When you realized, you were insignificant. Well, I mean, that's the point.

Think about the great civilizations. There were incredible civilizations. You know, this whole idea that we came in into a wilderness is just untrue. These people walked into great civilizations that look different than European cities. We translated as wilderness. And these people had... I mean, they knew what that river was called. And then here we are, a couple hundred years,

I mean, 500 years later, we're guessing at what they called it. And we're not even calling it what they called it. We're calling it what it sounds like they called it. You know, they call it the Mitya Supikani or whatever, Michi of Sipi or whatever. The ones that survived. Right.

And there's, yeah. And then this Peter Pitchland, the Choctaw, he in this letter this official it was a letter that was he the one that said that we always pronounced everything wrong yeah yeah and so he was like heck they didn't even get the transliteration right it was this meaning the river without any age and uh yeah you can just imagine how loosely translated some of that stuff was and so yeah i just thought it was an interesting thought all the it will remain will be our plastic yeah water bottles on styrofoam and Grocer stacks, though.

Yeah, yeah. What stood out to you most, Misty, about that podcast? Well, what you learned. My favorite part was actually the very beginning, hearing John Barry read the poem. I thought that was pretty amazing. Pretty... Strong, brown God. And my second favorite part was hearing Hank Berdyne, his voice described as the voice, what a crocodile.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Alligator, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was pretty good description. Yeah. Did he do the voice over for... foghorn leghorn that's two podcasts I think in a row with

with good descriptions because the other was Davy Crockett we talked about being like a wildcat and was it half out wildcat whatever it is the Arcanso description of himself Arcanso as being the half

man half alligator half horse that's right my middle son we're like that's you buddy yeah yeah yeah

I thought John Barry's intro was cool. That was his favorite poem, and I asked him if he would read it for me, and he read it. Brent, what's that to you? What was your favorite part? I like talking to, and I still can't remember how he said. Beed and Harne? Yeah, Dr. Bitt was with me when I went down there. It was cool, man.

That whole complex is, wow, it's pretty cool to get in there and talk to those folks. But to hear, he talked about a lot of stuff that I'm sure that won't be out there. there because it's just, man, it was so technical. Right. Yeah. But it was really the best thing that I wish that people that are listening to this could have been there watching him talk about it. Because seeing some visiting with somebody and watching them talk about something that

they're very passionate about. And he can spend his whole life studying that thing. And to me, he looks like he's just, it's excited to talk about it today. How long has you been down there? Years. Like 30 or 40 years. 40 years he's been doing it least it would he seems to be just as excited about it now as he was in but the him talking about that revetment one of the questions i got right in the challenge that

josh didn't get how cool that was that it scoured out 60 feet below that thing and then before they could get in there and do something about it he to field back in 40 feet yeah it's pretty crazy yeah and it was but that's i mean and that's going on everywhere all the time in that thing it's the river is changing how he talked about it he talked about it like it was an animal you know like it would have life to it and I guess it does in that way because it's always changing and growing and going on well it was really cool just to sit there and listen to that guy who who really knows this stuff yeah Brian what stood out to you was it birdine you were in the boat with

the very first thing you hear before anything is spoken is the tilt trim switch I'm thinking here's a guy that is hands on he's immersed in the river he's on it while he's talking about it so I'm thinking this is a big deal of this guy he was probably born and raised and is on it day in, day out. So I was really entertained by his conversation. Yeah, yeah. He's a cool guy. He's a cool guy.

Hey, you got to tell me, but we're going to end with you telling us your best near-death story on a big river, Ryan. Be thinking about it. Spence, what stood out to you? Excuse me, Thowag. Thow wag. Thalwag. I lit up like a Christmas tree when I heard that word.

He's the farmer who's like I'm amongst my people. That and potomologists. But no, I, when he was talking about just the river's ability to do work, and he talked about slope and he talked about volume. And, you know, I couldn't help but thinking of, you know, we've got a creek in our hauler. We've got our farmland where the river runs through it. And I just think of floods.

You know, I've been up on our properties for, shoot, a long time now. And, you know, I've seen some big floods. I don't know. I just, that's where my mind goes. And then extrapolating that to the Mississippi. When you talk, you know, like when you look at old maps and you see how much it's changed. And I don't know what you're going to talk about in the future. Like a lot of this was me.

I really am interested in this. So I just, I was like, ooh, I hope Clay has a talks about that. I hope, like, I hope this is a 10-part series. Yeah, yeah, you know, I'm all in a nerd, y'all. But I enjoyed that. So, like, just all the scratches. I mean, it was almost like you're going on a deli tray with a sampler platter, all the little things you type.

And maybe you'll get into them, maybe you're not. But I don't know, it was just tangent after changes in my mind. And then I really liked when he called it the Fourth Coast. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's good. I've never heard that. Punk rock that used to call, like,

the west coast left coast so like i don't know it just like it made me chuckle him calling it the fourth coast be a good t-shirt coast full coast is it the fourth coast yeah old hank oh hang yeah that's good josh i i i just i'm always fascinated and my family makes fun of me because they're like oh dad's doing math again but i love i love the statistics just like the 2400 miles without a dam all the soil that gets moved all the volume of water It boggles my mind. I mean, honestly, it makes me more amazed at our creator and when I think about this stuff, like to design this.

And it makes me, you know, I was out on the river this morning, and I took a couple of guys that were in town for my daughter's wedding. And I took them up to the dam. And the dams we have here in Arkansas are pretty impressive structures. I mean, they're amazing structures. And then to think about the Mississippi River and how we've learned to utilize it, it just, it puts me in a state of awe a little bit that we've been able to harness a lot of the power of that and use it for our lives. And I think I loved how you talked about finding out how the Mississippi affects our lives. Like we don't really know. And so to just to just break it down and make it evident for us is really interesting.

to me. There was a quote where it talked about trying to master it's like hubris. What was that? Do you remember that quote? Well, John Barry, a lot in his book Rising Tide talked about the hubris that it took for man to even think he could tame the river. Yeah. And we've had some, we've got a bridge in our county that has washed out repeatedly and they just keep adding more and more concrete to it. And there's a part of me that rejoices every time. Every time it washes out. Wipe down and ends up, parts of it end up on my property because I'll never learn. but it's just that hubris, you know, and the amount of force and power, and it looks so simple, but they're so deep,

and there's so much under the surface in a river. And it really, like, I'd be curious to hear your stories, because if you've ever been out on a body of water and realize you shouldn't be out there, it becomes really quick, really fast, or really apparent really fast, how powerful those rivers and water bodies are.

Yeah. You know, I think to me, what I wanted to communicate and what I'm maybe most interested in is I want people to understand the complexity of a river system. When I was in college, I took a stream ecology class and I was blown away by the complexity

of even just a gravel-based stream like here in the Ozarks. Like if you remove this gravel, what it does downstream. and even more so on a big giant river that drains 41% of a continent. And I thought John Barry's, John Barry is an excellent writer. And when he, when he, I took, the quote about the physicist, that was from his book. Like he talked about the physicist that said, when I get to heaven, I've got two questions for God. Oh, yeah.

Why relativity and why turbulence? And I think he can answer the first. insinuating that nobody knows nobody knows and and just the turbulence being this mysterious

force unpredictable force that that comes about with free flowing stuff like water or air and it's just so difficult to calculate and the sediment loads of the river

and how big it is and how it moves and it really is like a beast it's an organist I said on the podcast, if the, if the, if the, if you, if the river were a great beast and the banks where it's skeleton and the floodplain where it's flesh, the water would be its blood, and the dirt would be the life in the blood.

And how that, that dirt is basically has built the entire delta of, from like Memphis down, like the Gulf of Mexico used to. come all the way up into the Ozarks. How about him talking about the topsoil, the depth of topsoil in most places as compared to the alluvial plane down there? Yeah. Are you going to cover the fact that we're like shotgun and all that out into the Gulf, like lay on?

I will. That's a whole, yeah, there's some major ecological problems down at the mouth of the Mississippi River. And it's, yeah, I will, but not in detail. honestly. Yeah. Just because there's so much to talk about. I get it. Yeah.

It's so complex. Maybe a private podcast for me. Yeah. Thalwax edition. Ryan, have you almost died on a big river? I don't want to say died, but probably done some stupid stuff when I was younger. Duck hunting. Yeah.

When the river is flooded. Two smaller boats. Too much current. Trying to drive across flooded rock jetties to get to the, other side, the duck hunt and thinking, you know, as the trucks push sideways, you're thinking later. This is a bad. If it would have kept sliding, I'd been 15, 20 foot under the white water.

What do you mean the truck? Water running across. Water running across the levee and you're trying to go from drive across it. Drive across the levee to another point. And it was stupid, you know. Do you have a specific story or no? Brent, you too. No, not really.

You don't, okay. No. I try to be pretty self. I told about that story on one of my podcasts about my brother and I getting hung up on the Arkansas River and the Arkansas River in a bad storm. You know, we made it out to a sandbar in the middle of the river and pulled, just running the boat up on the bank. This cloud, a big storm had come through and gone. And we were still before daylight. We look up and we see stars.

We think it's fine. We're good to go. we get in a boat, we go up the river, then another storm's coming behind it. So it's water, waves are coming over the front of the boat. So when the wind blows up a river, when it blows against the current, this makes the waves bad.

Because the current's going down, but the wind is pushing it up, so it's going against each other. Yeah, this was like three foot swells. Three foot swells were coming over the front of that John boat. It was a 16-foot John boat that was 52 inches wide. And it was like a cork floating out there. So we hit the sandbars as fast as we could go and got off of it.

And lightning is popping all around. The wind's blowing like crazy. And finally it got, it stopped. The light and the stuff stopped. And it got daylight where we could see. And we killed like one or two ducks. And then we got back in the boat. Scared you to death.

And got home. Yeah. It was, it was tough. It was. Have you all ever seen like a canoe that's been pinned when you're paddling or wrapped around a tree? Yeah, well, you try to pull it out and you realize how much forces in that. There's a, well, Josh and I saw a boat. An old John boat wrapped around a tree.

But I've seen big boats like that on the Arkansas, big commercial, like commercial size fishing boats that are just wrapped around like nothing. I know Misty probably don't want to hear this, but if you remember what, two, three years ago, There was five of us in my 18-foot duck boat. One of my children. Many of your children. There was five of us. And a live whale has a big live whale in it that was full of water, full of fish for them to bring home. And we kept watching the cell come from the, what was it, north, northeast?

Well, what threw us off was that it was coming from the east. And we thought, I remember thinking that it was already past us. Gotcha. Because the weather usually in this part of the world comes from west to east. So we were looking back to the west and the clouds were, there was no storm. But to the east, there was a storm. And I thought it was a storm that was kind of moving from the north to the southeast. And we're just seeing the tail of it.

But actually, it was a east. It was blowing from the east and coming on as hard. And that's the way the river's flowing down to the east. The wind's coming out of the east. Oh, yeah. And it was actually didn't start with any. rollers, it started with three foot breakers. Yeah.

With a loaded boat and we should have stayed put. We should have stayed. Really? Yeah. We should have. Yeah. But once you get halfway back. We had probably three miles or so to get back home.

And actually took a detour in to a bay to get out of the wind that I know probably wasn't three foot deep. And I'm thinking, I hope I don't hit us. We made it back. I remember. So all that. is going on, guess what flint face looked like?

Just the same as he always does. No expression. In it, Dan up in that Crohn's dad. That's all you go. We're just like, just getting soaking wet. And I'm kind of looking back at Ryan

to see if he looks nervous. And we don't really even talk. I mean, we just go back to the boat ram. And once we get out, I go, hey, Ryan, was that pretty sketchy?

and he was like, that was pretty sketchy. That reminded me of the time when I rode with Warner Glenn up a big mountain. I've told the story so many times. I rode with Warner Glenn, followed him up a mountain on a mule, and it was the absolute wildest mule ride in my life. And that night over dinner, and he never even looked back to see if I was still there. And when I got to dinner that night, I said, I said, Mr. Warner, if you could, if you were ranking

mule rides and a zero was riding down a gravel road and a 10 was that you died what did we do this morning and he went huh probably about a seven or eight

and I was like good thank God he said yeah if it had been much worse than that you just couldn't have taken him up there Clay like he didn't it never even occurred to him that we'd done something wild that day That was Tuesday.

Yeah, that was like when I was with Ryan. He was like, yeah, it was pretty sketchy. Hey, thanks so much. Cross the Creek Farms. If you're in the Northwest Arkansas region, how can they buy a chicken from you? Just acrossscreeckfarm.com. Man, pasture raised, best chicken on the earth. It really is.

Yeah. Milling her own feed now. The only thing we'll eat. Yeah, man. And tomatoes for the neighbors. For chickens. Brought some tomatoes. Check out this country life podcast.

Landbridge. Did you sell anything? Just tell them to hit me up, I'll sell him something. If you see something Josh has that you want, just hit him up. Ryan, thanks for coming up, man. I appreciate it. You know, legend has it that Robert Redford is jealous of Josh's mustache. That ain't no legend.

That's a fact. Ms. Newcomb, thank you. You're welcome. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen.

But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.