Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Cleared Hot Episode 17 - Reflections on Vegas and a successful elk hunt

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

It was one hell of a week. I started my hunt with the news that the Vegas shooting had occurred hours before I woke up. There is some great information being discussed, and some wildly inaccurate information being touted as fact. It was and is a tragedy. I hope our country is mature enough to take the time for reflection, and potentially improvement. In other news that does not matter...I was successful in my elk hunt.

I'm back. It's been a hell of a week. Not all of it good, I would say. I actually woke up this last week to start off three days of hunting. And the first news that I saw come across my phone was that the Vegas shooting, it happened the evening before. And as much as I'd love to spend this episode talking about the hunt and the difference that I had in this hunt in Utah, which, spoiler alert, I actually was able to go out into the same area that I was previously where I had a very frustrating experience and turned that initial failure into success and actually had a very successful elk hunt and harvested my first elk with a bow and arrow.

As much as I would love to talk about that for the entire episode, and many people have reached out to me asking for me to do exactly that, which I plan to at the tail end, I got an overwhelming amount of questions about what happened in Las Vegas. And for those of you who aren't living on planet Earth, I'm talking about the shooting at the music concert, the catastrophic loss of life. There's, you know, I sit back and I see the news and news reporters talking about things that I don't think they have any maliciousness. intent. I think that they have very little experience with the tools and the mechanics of what it is that they're talking about. And that can lead to them saying some things that I would say are

not necessarily true. And at the very least, they are uneducated. So I am going to open today talking a little bit about Vegas and then we'll try to end the episode with something a little bit more positive, taking failure into success. So strap it in. It's been an interesting week. Episode 17 coming at you. Smoke. Okay, Kathy, west of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. There's nowhere to start, other than to say that what occurred out in Vegas was an absolute tragedy.

The loss of life was horrific. I think that's the only word that really does it justice. And at the same time, when I look at something like that event, I'm also amazed that in the span of approximately 400 yards, the distance from where that guy shot to the crowd that he was shooting into, every aspect of human nature and humanity was on display. There was insanity and evil, sacrifice and selflessness, chaos, fear, panic. and the desire to save yourself. Everything in between, everything that the human being is capable of probably expressing and doing, occurred within 400 yards of each other.

And when I look at these events, I know that they're, actually I don't know. I would assume that there is a desire for answers and a desire for explanation. And I'll be the first person to admit that I don't know much. I probably don't know anything, but what I have seen with my own eyes is my fair share of what I would call insanity and my fair share of what I would call absolute and pure evil. And there is no explanation. The perfect example is the guy who went into the movie theater in Colorado and shot at people he had never met in his entire life.

Incredible amount of damage. And he asked the guy why he did it and he says, because, well, I'm the Joker. there's just no rational explanation for why people do these things. I don't know if it's a chemical imbalance. I don't know if it's a mental health problem. All I know is that if you're looking for an answer or a reason why somebody would do something like this, I don't think that it exists. Or not something that's going to make sense or help people close the chapter on the

nightmare of their life that occurred for friends or family members or if they're even there in person. I think the only thing you can do, instead of looking for a rational explanation is just to mourn for the victims, support the people who survived, and maybe, just maybe, and what I think is the most important thing that hopefully can come from this is an open, honest, reflective discussion of who we are as a country. I think the odds of the United States of America disarming themselves

hover at approximately just below 0%. I just don't think it's going to happen. I think it becomes a political hot button issue when things like this occur, but nothing actually happens, whether it's from a legislative perspective or a restriction perspective. And I'll talk about that a little bit because I'm not so sure how much that would impact things like this

from happening in the first place. But I just, I feel like we're at a place where we're not going to disarm ourselves. The cat's out of the bag, Pandora's box is open, it's who we are as a country. But I do think we have the chance to sit down and talk or I would like to think that as a country, we're mature enough and objective enough

to sit down and talk and review the current state of affairs and decide whether or not there are things that we can do moving forward that are for the betterment of our society and could maybe potentially make things like this or not like this, but what happened in Vegas more difficult. So let's start with the obvious. I am not a constitutional expert by any stretch of the imagination. Having said that, I understand that the Second Amendment is a hotbed issue. And when it comes to that, I personally wholeheartedly believe in and support.

the Second Amendment. But I also think that it needs an asterisk. I don't think it's perfect. I feel like the amendment, which for people who don't know, was passed in 1791, 226 years ago. When it was signed into law, it was probably signed with a feather that was dipped into ink. onto some form of parchment paper or papyrus. The reason I say I think it needs an asterisk is that I don't personally think there is any way the individuals who wrote the Second Amendment had the ability to forecast the catastrophic leaps in technology

specifically when it comes to implements of war that we're going to occur in that time period. Because I don't, I can, can't even keep track of the operating system on my phone or the new technology that's coming out with laptops and computers and phones. I can only imagine 226 years from now if we continue the pace that we're on, the weapons that we have in this modern day are going to look like the weapons of a caveman to those inhabiting this country in 226 years. What I'm saying is You know, our Constitution was designed to be changed.

It was designed to be amended. And I'm not, what I'm not saying is that we need to sit down and do that. But I would like to think that we are mature enough to sit down and have a conversation about where we were when this amendment was signed and where we are now and where we're going in the future. And if a change does need to be made, it can be done. The system is designed to do so. I do understand the position that some people have that if we open the door to change, especially when it comes to rights or removing certain aspects of those rights or what is legal, that it opens the door to removing others. I understand that fear.

And I also don't think that the acts of insane people should necessitate. necessitate or require to remove rights from people who are law-abiding citizens. I totally get this as a complex issue. Most often what I hear after something like this, and I think what is very common is a rush to increase regulations. And the analogy that I'll make for that, and why I don't necessarily think that that's going to work, is that if you wanted to stem car theft

and whatever city in the world has the highest, you know, per capita incident of car theft, if you went after those car thieves by increasing the vehicle registration fees, you would have zero impact whatsoever on car theft. Because the people who are stealing the cars don't care about the laws and they don't care about the registration. When it comes to gun ownership, people who are getting their weapons through an illicit manner or route they don't really care what the regulations are. They're going to operate outside of them because they're already comfortable with the punishment that's going to occur should they get caught.

When it comes to the Second Amendment, my personal thoughts, I think it's essential to people have a means of self-defense. And I fully support the right to bear arms to do that. I think there's an absolute argument and purpose to be made for hunting. And I even support people who want to, you know, they get in. a gun collecting. There's some amazing weaponry, especially historic weaponry. The M1 Grand is one of my favorite guns. If you don't know what it is, go ahead and look it up online. It's, you know, it's an antiquated timepiece in the modern day. But I think if somebody wants to collect that weapon,

they should have the ability to do so. And I also think that any rational and reasonable person would agree that there is a line in the sand at some point that makes a line. certain weapons or certain characteristics of weapons not useful for self-defense, for hunting, or for collecting, that at some point they become purely a tool or a mechanism for warfare, and they should be reserved for those things. And that is the asterisk that I believe should be added to the Second Amendment. We should define arms. As it's written right now, it's very broad. and the issue that I have is, is if you don't have a line in the sand in 226 years, if there is a shoulder-fired nuclear projectile that is defined as a rifle or as an arm,

does that mean that people have the right to own it? My answer to that would be no, because a weapon like that is designed purely for war. And in my opinion, weapons that are designed purely for war should not be allowed to be owned by civilians because there is no use for them in self-defense, hunting, or even collecting. Now, before people lose their mind, I'm going to clarify what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about rifles, even though rifles are used in war. But what I am talking about and what I personally think is a common sense regulation would be the restriction of weapons that are capable of firing fully automatic.

And to explain why I feel that way, I'm going to talk a little bit about exactly what happened in Vegas. So what I heard a lot from the media was that the full auto or the modification to the weapons, and I am not an expert on a bumstock by any stretch of the imagination. I had to look it up. I had never heard of one until they started being reported by the national media. What I heard time and time again, full auto or the replication of full auto increased the lethality of what happened in that event. And yes and no. That is partially true and it's partially untrue. There's a combination of many, many factors. If I had to choose between somebody

shooting at me on fully automatic or semi-automatic, I would choose not to have somebody shoot at me. But if I was forced to, I would take fully automatic fire every, single time. Why? Because you can't hit a damn thing at distance. And now people will say, well, how did the shooter hit so many people? It wasn't a matter of him precisely firing his weapon at individuals. It was a matter of having a crowd that couldn't go anywhere and pulling and holding the trigger and getting as many rounds downrange into that crowd and allowing the damage to do what it did. And that's why I said it's a combination of factors. It was more than just the fact that the weapons had been modified to replicate fully

automatic fire. It was the elevation. It was the crowd. It was all of those things. It's not just any one of those things that cause this level of death and destruction. I get asked all the time, how many times, actually, especially in the days right after this event, I get asked how many times in my career. was I on full auto or did I use my weapon on full auto? And the answer is never or very close to

never, maybe one or two times. And the way I describe it is there's only two types of people that actually use fully automatic weapons fire. They both start with the letter A. The first one is actors. I really think a lot of the stereotypes around full auto and the way that people think that weapons function and that effective fire is actually imparted on a target comes from things they see in television and movies and it's crap if you actually want to hear what you're shooting at you don't shoot on full auto so actors and the other a is assholes like the guy who was elevated in that position who didn't need to be precise who could for lack of a better term spray and prey on a crowd that had no ability to move.

So for most of NATO forces, you carry an M4 platform, which is a 556 rifle, and it has a selectable firing switch. The first one is unsafe, meaning it's in theory if you pull the trigger, nothing is going to happen. I'm sure safety's failed very statistically at a microscopic amount, but on safe, the weapon shouldn't fire or function. The next selector switch is going to be to semi-automatic, meaning that every time that you pull the trigger, one round is going to be fired out of the weapon. And the third position,

actually I take that back. I have seen some that have three round bursts, meaning for each time you depress the trigger, three rounds will be fired. That is controlled by the mechanics of the weapon. And then the last selector switch, if you were to have another one, would be fully automatic. You depress the trigger, the weapon will continue to cycle until it runs out of ammunition or it jams. The reason that I never use my weapon on fully automatic is because I actually wanted to hit what I was aiming at. There's two types of weapons. Actually, I'm sure there's a bunch of type of weapons, but I'm going to talk about two. The first one is a point weapon system. And by that, I mean it's precise. I'm talking about the M4 or maybe the Mark 16, which is a version of, or it looks

very similar to an M4. Functions in very much the same way, shoots the same caliber around. It's a selectable fire weapon, like I was just describing, and it can be used for precise fire. You aim, squeeze the trigger one round at a time, and it's a very accurate weapon,

out to multiple hundreds of yards. The other type of weapon that commonly is encountered in the military is an area-type weapon, like a 50-cow, or an M-60, or a saw. those three weapons in and of themselves, and there are more weapons than just those three, only have one firing position. The weapon is either on safe or it's on full auto. And it's on full auto because it's an area weapon.

You're not trying to take well-aimed, precise shots. Most of the time you're trying to get overwhelming fire superiority, break contact, or penetrate a hardened structure. But even those weapons, you're talking. to shoot them in control bursts to not only manage and monitor your ammunition and the heat of the weapon, but to be more accurate. So in essence, what the Vegas shooter did was to take a weapons platform. And I haven't seen a list of every single weapon that was in the hotel room. And to be honest with you, I'm looking at the, in air quotes, crime seam photos of what the weapons that were

found inside of the hotel room. In essence, there were some, you know, there were some, you know, there were rifle platforms. I did not see any belt-fed machine guns. And when I was talking about the area weapons before, each and every one of those is a belt-fed machine gun. It's not fed by a magazine. Every weapon that I saw was a magazine-fed weapon. So I'm going to say that those are point-weapon systems,

meaning they can be used again for precision fire. By increasing the rate of fire and because of the fact that he didn't have to be precise, he basically turned a point-weapon system into an area-weapon system. It wasn't a matter of precision fire. It was a matter of him being almost impossible to miss. And for the people he was shooting at, like I said at the beginning, it's an absolute tragedy. The best that they could hope to do would be to save their lives and the lives of others.

I've written about a few incidents like this on my blog. Specifically, I know I wrote about the nightclub shooting in Florida and also the theater shooting in France. And the reason that I wrote those particular... I don't actually know what it would be called. An essay or an article, whatever. It was a blog post. The reason I ended up writing that is because in those particular situations, the people who

were shooting were very close to the individuals that they were shooting at. And they could have easily been overwhelmed by the individuals in the nightclub or the theater. Now, there would have been loss of life by many of those people, but the overall body count would have been less. And to summarize what I wrote, you know, sometimes, or at least in my opinion, I would rather go out fighting than on my knees. And in doing so, you might save the lives of others.

So in some situations, it's actually better to run at the sound of the guns. In this particular situation, that is not applicable. The shooter was separated by distance from what I can find online. It's about 1,200 feet or 400 yards. He was in an elevated position. and the individuals that he was shooting at, the venue itself, I've heard the exit strategy defined as constrictive or what we would call in the military a choke point.

And just think about a funnel that gets very narrow, very fast. You can only fit so much of fill in the blank through that funnel. The combination of those things removes your ability as somebody who is receiving that fire, doing anything other than one of two things. putting something that stops bullets between you and the person's shooting at you and helping others. That's pretty much your two choices that you have. Now, when it comes to helping others, I can't stress enough learning and understanding the basics of first aid.

If you don't know anything else, learn how to stop bleeding. One of the best tools that I've ever encountered for that or probably exist to this day is the tourniquet. And when I first got into the military, tourniquets were viewed as, I don't want to say they were viewed negatively, but they were viewed as used as a measure of last resort, where I would say now guys are carrying two in three tourniquets, and it's a measure of first resort.

Because just like the weapons of war advancing in technology, so is our medical ability. And they used to be really worried if you would have a tourniquet on for over 60 minutes. And I now know of people who have had tourniquets on for 12, 16, 18, 24 hours, and have still had, you know, the ability to recover that limb that the tourniquet was on. So learn how to stop bleeding. If you are going to take action and try to help people in a situation like that, you're also

going to have to learn how to triage. And that means the ability to look at three people who have a variety of injuries and to be able to go at the one you're going to have the most success with. Somebody missing a part of their head versus somebody bleeding out of their leg. I'm not, I'm not here to tell you what to do, but from a medical person, perspective, I would go after the person who was bleeding from the leg. The last thing is, if you're going to go and you're going to try to help people, you need to try to remain calm.

If you can remain calm, the person that you're going to try to help is going to remain calm. And I understand that the panic that had to have ensued in that environment was probably overwhelming and it crashed on people like a tsunami. Be the person who isn't affected by that, who maintains their wits, who can make decisions much like the, I read a story about a Marine who stole a vehicle that had keys in it, and was driving people to the hospital. Cool, calm and collected using his head, because in that moment, that's really all you can do is save your life and save the lives of others.

If I was king for a day, the discussion that I would like to have with regulators and those that are in power, and I'm not saying I would want to drive this down anybody's throat, but the discussion that I would like to have is, do we or should we have the right to own automatic weapons? And in my mind, automatic weapons are weapons that are designed for war. By its very nature, war is incredibly violent. And the tools that are created for use in that environment are created with lethality in mind.

Nuclear weapons, J-DAMs, napalm, landmines, all of those things are incredibly violent and they're designed for one thing and one thing only. perhaps some of the tech that we use on the battlefield would be best served staying there. And I'll go back to what I said previously. I fully support the Second Amendment. I think that everybody should have the right to defend themselves. I think the people should have the right to hunt. I think the people should have the right to collect.

Let's look at this from the perspective of self-defense. Does a fully automatic weapon improve your ability to defend yourself? Let's say at your house. I'm going to say absolutely not. for the sole reason that if you choose to use a fully automatic weapon to defend yourself, your accuracy is going to be drastically reduced in an environment that is not ballistically safe. If you go full auto inside of your house from a distance that is beyond, I'm going to say, three to ten feet, and even at that distance, if you are not completely prepared,

especially if the caliber is increasing for the recoil of the weapon and to fight to hold that weapon on target, it is going to get away from you. Go to a gun range somewhere that allows fully automatic weapons fire. Actually, I take that back. Go to a gun range probably anywhere in the U.S. and take a look not only downrange, but take a look at the roof and the baffling system inside of the range. Those roofs are going to have bullet holes.

And those bullet holes are there from one of two things. One is somebody who's had an accidental or a negligent discharge, and the weapon went off before they had the sites aimed downrange. And the second one is, is somebody who's unable to control the recoil of their weapon, generally on semi-automatic, and it rises up on them. Imagine that happening and say you're in a two-story house, and you decide to go full auto, and you have children living on the second floor of that house. How comfortable do you feel in that non-ballistic environment?

To me, there's absolutely no argument. It doesn't make you any safer in that environment. And how about in a crowd? And not that people are going to be rolling around with fully automatic weapons, concealed, I hope, but a restaurant, a movie theater, a car wash, I mean, fill in the blank. I can't think of anywhere where a decrease in accuracy is going to increase your ability to defend yourself. Now to the hunting front, does fully automatic weapons fire help you hunting?

I don't think so, but I'm open to there being some very unique species that would require that. I just can't happen to think of it. I can't think of a single animal that you would hunt or that your hunting would be improved by using a weapon that is on fully automatic. Why? Because you can't hit anything. In my mind, it just doesn't make sense. I can't think of a rational and reasonable justification for fully automatic weapons outside of a theater of war.

Now, what I often hear, again, like I said at the beginning, is people literally, sometimes screaming, you know, it's our right to own, you know, to own and to bear arms. And I get that. I understand that that is what it says. But that's not enough justification for me.

It's your right because it's words written on a piece of paper called an amendment to the Constitution. It was designed to be changed. It's designed to be updated. And I don't understand how a rational and reasonable person can resist sitting down every two and a quarter centuries and upgrading their operating system. Does the potential negative downside outweigh our wants and desires? I can't speak for anybody else. I can tell you personally, I think it does. But at the very least, I think it should be discussed.

Now, another thing I hear often is this Jacob's ladder of escalation. You know, law enforcement has the ability, from my understanding, the ability to have their weapons on fully automatic. They have the ability to source weapons that have that as a shooting option. It doesn't mean that they have to do it. And the government obviously has weapons that are capable of fully automatic weapons fire. So the civilian populace wants to have something that can give them equal footing and equal opportunity in case they need to defend themselves against the government or law enforcement. It comes down to, you know, if the bad guys have them, then the good guys need to have them too.

I agree. I think the military and the law enforcement should have them. Those are the good guys. And for everybody who's worried about being overmatched by their government, I just want to make one point. All right. Our government has a nuclear arsenal, stealth bombers, submarines, drones with smart bombs, tanks, the ability to see at night, the ability to see heat. I mean, I could go on and on and on. You're already overmatched. You're fully automatic. weapon is not going to protect you against those things. And as far as this topic goes, I'm just going to close this out. And again, everything that I've said is just my opinion. I'm not a champion for any of these things, but I do hope that people can listen and discuss and think and process.

So I'll end with a question. Could an incident like Vegas occur with semi-automatic weapons? Absolutely. It absolutely 100%. could. Could that much damage be inflicted without guns? Yes, it actually could. Did a little bit of research on the truck attack in Nice, in France. I do think that absent weapons, or I did think that absent weapons, it would be really hard to murder 59 people and wound 500 others. And then I did that research. And what I found is that Nice is that 86 people were killed and 458 were injured, even if we attempted to remove firearms from this country, which, like I said at the beginning, I think the odds of that are less than 0%. Insanity and evil are still always going to find a way

to get done what they want to get done. That doesn't mean that we can't have an objective overview of our current state of affairs, the current laws, the current regulations, and potentially make some improvements. That's all I want. I don't want to, necessarily take anything from anybody, but let's just take an objective look at where we are and maybe make our system better. So now on to the second topic that people were reaching out and asking about. The hunt I just finished in Park City. All I can say is what a difference a few weeks makes, but most importantly, what a difference

a change in perspective makes. I went back to exactly the same place a couple weeks later. So the behavior of the animals was a little bit later. But going into my second trip, I was almost at the point where I didn't care whether or not I successfully harvested an animal. I was happy to be going back out and pushing myself in the field. I was happy to be working hard. I was happy to get any animal interaction and experience that I could while I was out there.

And the only thing that I kept telling myself, or the thought process that I went to, that I had when I went out into the field, was that nobody's forcing me to take these shots. I am in control of when I shoot. And unless it's perfect, unless the shot has got a high statistical average, and unless I feel good about what's happening and I'm in control, the worst thing that's going to happen is nothing. And that's the perspective that I went into the field with. And so we went out the first day.

We had an afternoon to hunt the first day. It was definitely later into the mating season for the elk in that area of Utah and for people who are on hunters. And I very loosely used the term for myself. But from my understanding, you know, it's called the rut. And that is the time period where the breeding occurs for, the elk and it changes their behavior, much like men change their behavior when they want to breed. You'll see a very different behavioral set of code of conduct from men when they are in that

zone and these animals were no different. So the goal is to try to catch them in that time period so you can call out to them and challenge them as if you are a male bull elk and perhaps threatening their herd of cows, the female elk, or you could make a cow calling noise that would potentially draw them into you. So there's a variety of ways that you can do it. But from my understanding, they only will respond to those things during this very narrow time period. The first time that I was out there, they were in the thick of this time period. They were responsive to both calls. And again, from my understanding, they move around a lot more. And they're just they're not thinking as clearly. So this second trip, the first day that we went out there,

we went out into the afternoon. One of the first things that I noticed, we were, we encountered elk the first evening as well, not from a close distance, but they had a different reaction to both the bugling and the cow calling. So that first day was really just kind of looking through binoculars and seeing what we could see, getting used to being back into the area. The second day we woke up, and it was chilly. to say the least. But in the morning we got to a position where we had seen elk in the previous day. We saw them in their kind of morning routine and walk away from an area.

We had seen them multiple days in the past. And our plan was to get to that area before sundown and try to set up in that area. And then we got snowed on like three times. The weather was shifting. We got all four seasons in about one hour. And it dropped down to a relatively cold temperature. and again, the behavior of the animals totally changed. They were very quiet, didn't see anything.

We got to this field where he had seen elk every single day that I was there the previous trip and the afternoon that I was there the first day. Perfect position. The wind was in our favor. We got into the shadows and sat there lonely until the sun went down. So it got skunked on day two. Very little interaction with the animals. And by the third day that we went out there, which was my last day,

I was almost to a point where I thought we had missed that sweet spot of the rut and it was going to become, I reached out to Dudley and I was kind of letting him know what the situation was and he's like, yeah, you know, it's going to become a point where you're going to need to kind of pattern them a little bit and then intercept. If you call out to them, it might freak them out a little bit. So it's more it switches to the spot and stock type of hunting, which again, not a lot of experience. So all of this, on this second trip for me, was about learning.

It was not about going out and harvesting an animal, even though that's what I wanted to do. It was about learning. Went out there the third day. The temperature was a little bit, actually it was substantially warmer. I would say about 15 degrees. And it was all the difference in the world. As soon as we got a little bit of eastern glow and the sun started cracking up, it was bugling from the male elks like we had heard the previous trip.

we had elk to our left, we had elk to our right, and we got into a great position and just watched the interaction between the male and the female elk. I was in heaven, just taking mental notes, enjoying the fact that I was getting a chance to observe the animals, getting a better understanding of what I could expect. What an amazing experience to see this massive, I don't even know the words to use to describe what they look like. like. But when the, you know, frost on their antlers, every time they would exhale, you know, massive plumes of steam coming out, it was, it was great. If we wouldn't have had a chance to do anything else that day, I would have been happy leaving at lunchtime with that experience,

logged it away and it would have made a huge difference for me next year. But as luck happened to have it. We watched a bull elk take his herd of cows to a very, it's where I would have been sitting because it was exposed to the sun. It was still cold out there, but they were basically basking in the sun. Then he chose a position where he was up high and all of his cows were down low, which gave us the opportunity given the direction of the wind to try to come around from behind. And if we had climbed up the back of that hill, the first thing we would have seen were his antlers, which would allow us to know exactly where he is, hopefully get a range, and at that point we could have decided to whether or not we wanted to continue to close the

distance or maybe stand the animal up and take a shot at him. That's the plan we took. We gave him a good amount of time to see it to make sure that they were actually going to be bedded there for a substantial period of time, and off we went. Formulated a plan. We decided to go up and around instead of losing our altitude and having to regain it again, cruised around the back of the mountain. as we dropped down into a ravine to then gain our altitude concealed in another ravine to hook us up behind this animal.

We had one last look at him. He was still bedded there. Everything was looking great. The wind was still in our favor. So down the ravine we go, up the other ravine we go, and about nine-tenths of the way up, we get completely surrounded by female elk. And stood still in the middle of a ravine with some trees and bushes around me for about. 10 minutes just watching these amazing animals eating from bushes moving along closest I'd been to them can't even explain how cool it was to be able to stand there and have in this

environment these animals have no idea that you're there and just to be able to observe their behavior one of the coolest things was it was still in the area where the sun wasn't hitting in the ravines so every breath that they would take was a natural wind indicator and we could tell that just by standing there and standing still, we weren't in any threat of spooking them off. Their breath was blowing at us. About 10 minutes in, it swirled just a little bit. One of the female elk picked her head up and they started going up the hill, not running,

but I think they knew that something was there that they didn't understand. And up the hill they went. We gave them a good period of time and we followed them a little bit and then banked off to our right. And as we were coming through the bushes, had a chance encounter with a five-by-six bull elk that happened to maneuver into a perfect location that allowed me to take a drawback. And the biggest success for me in this whole hunt was when I finally had the opportunity to draw back, I did not feel rushed.

I had the opportunity to wait for him to turn his head away. I was able to draw back without fear of the animal looking at me or seeing at me. And as I was sitting in my anchor position, looking through my peep, I didn't feel rushed. I knew that the animal didn't know that we were there. I knew that I had time. And I also knew that the only reason that I was going to take the shot is because it was a high probability shot. It was an unobstructed shot. And I felt in control.

And when I released the arrow, the arrow broke. clean. I was focusing on my pull through. And I mean, the arrow hit hard. And it was very obvious that the arrow had hit. And, you know, the result is I had a successful harvest of my first elk in my first bow season. And for myself, personally, the most successful part of that was the learning experience and maintaining the mental and emotional control in that moment and maintaining it myself and not surrendering it anywhere else, which is I feel the biggest mistake I made in my first hunt in Park City. And I think the results speak for that ability to do that and that importance of being able to maintain that control in that moment. If I hadn't fired that arrow,

I still would be completely satisfied and happy with that trip. It was a phenomenal learning experience. And the fact now that I have a completely full freezer of meat that I can feed my family through the wintertime and hopefully stretch that sucker out until I can go back and practice again what I've learned this year in the next L hunting season. That is icing on the cake. But I still would be happy even if that didn't happen. So that was the hunt. It was amazing. And the more I get into archery, the more I'm falling in love with it. It's hard. It's not about how many things you can do right. It's about how many things you can not do. wrong and I love it. And that's all I got for this week. Episode 17. Thanks, guys. Thank you to everybody

who's been tuning in. I cannot thank you guys enough for the feedback, the reviews on iTunes. Like I said, good, bad, ugly, indifferent. If you have something to say, if you have a suggestion for improvement, please throw it my way. I'm definitely more than willing to take feedback. I want this to be as good as possible. Thank you to everybody who's buying the shirts. I know we're out of almost every single size. There's another order coming in. The coffee mugs are getting reprinted. They should be in by mid-October.

I'll put those up on the site as soon as they are up and in. And that's it. Again, I can't thank the people who are listening to this enough for the support. It makes it really fun to do. I'm surprised at how rewarding this podcast is to create. And I have all of you to thank for that. Everybody listening. So until next week, see you.