The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 014

Episode Date: July 23, 2015

 Bozeman, Montana. Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis and special guest Randy Newberg. Subjects discussed: assessing the monetary value of one's GPS waypoints; how fitness for mountain hunting is unlike any other kind of fitness; walleye fishing tournaments; finding elk on public land before the rut, during the rut, and after the rut; whether or not the old you is tougher than the current you; the great American fur boom; trapping beaver; Randy's impression of Steve after reading Steve's book, American Buffalo; Randy's belief that Steve is either dumb or full of shit; how old bull elk like to hide out in weird places; the difference between peace and justice, and other marriage advice that will give you more time to hunt and fish. About guest Randy Newberg: Randy is the voice of the public land hunter in America. Decades of chasing all species across public lands has provided both experience and perspective that has allowed Randy to become the leading advocate for the self-guided hunter; hunters dependent upon public lands for hunting access. What started by accident, has grown into two popular TV shows, Fresh Tracks and On Your Own Adventures, accompanied by the long-standing Hunt Talk web forum. Now added to those platforms is the Hunt Talk Podcast where you get Randy Newberg, unfiltered. Randy uses his platforms to advocate for hunters and public access. In addition to representing hunters in Congress and state legislatures, he serves as a volunteer and board member for many hunting and conservation groups. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meat. Hey, this is the Meat Eater Podcast recording out of Bozeman, Montana, hometown of our guest, Randy Newberg, who's been hosting hunting TV programs for a long time. A while.

How long? Well, I think, as my grandpa would say, Moby Dick was a minnow back when I started. Actually, it's weird to say, Steve, but I'm going into year eight. Oh, okay. So I'm not like Methuselah, but I guess you could say I've been there, done that.

Eight years is a long time to do anything. It is, especially I just turned 50, and I'm going to be 51 in November. And you know I do these backpack hunts mostly, and I'm like, I don't think I'm going to live long enough to do another eight years. It grinds on you. You guys know. You do it. You know, I was talking to...

That leads me to something about age that's interesting, but I want to point out to our listeners that Randy, who's seen and done everything, was just marveling. He was blown away by the quality

of the complete guide to hunting, butchering, and cooking wild game. I was. i told you guys they said that that would take most people a lifetime you hear those people and then you guys said well how long do you think i said three years and you guys looked at each other like yep so what so if i'm reading what you're saying right randy you feel like people are going to get their money's worth if when they buy i don't know what you're going to price it at. $25, I think. $25? You're giving it away.

You're giving it away. Right. You should buy two of them at that price. I mean, it's really, I'm sitting up there. Yeah, and you have a background that has to do with you dealing people's money. As a CPA, yeah, I get to disinherit the federal treasury. As a CPA, Randy thinks you ought to buy that book if if you don't buy that book folks you're not going to kill an elk next year that's exactly right i i can

promise you that or if you do kill one you're not going to know how to take care of it out in the field that's exactly right and i was reading janice your piece about tuning up bows where did you come up with all that stuff experience no he No, I told him about it. Oh, yeah? Okay. I told him about it, and he just wrote about it. I think you need to make that into a pocket guide. Yeah, well, I got to say, where did I come up with it? You don't want to carry that book? You don't want to carry it through 400 pages?

It's not like it's – I can't call it original content. I mean, yes, I did put it down in my own words, but it's not like I picked up a piece of wood and a string, and then I eventually learned how to and a string and then I eventually learned how to make a compound and then look how to tune a compound, you know, like all this stuff. Like, yes, I've read, you know, hunting magazines and, and, you know, watched YouTube videos and all this stuff since I was a little kid. And so that's, you know, how it came out, but it's not like I made up how to, you how to get ready for archery season.

Gazillion guys will be like, yeah, yeah, that's how I do it too. Wow. I was impressed. I was thumbing through the book, and I'm just thinking, you know what? This is a serious project. You guys go into a lot of detail on a lot of things. I'm afraid that no one will ever read it. I was half joking.

I mean, I like to plug the book, but I was half joking. But I want to get to the thing about age. When you talk about backpack hunting, how many years do you think you got left? Well, I always tell my wife. Like hunt as you hunt now. Right. I told my wife I want to backpack hunt

until I'm 65. You have a long, it's like you have 13 years of hunting left. Am I doing my math wrong? I'll be 51 in Novembermber so 14 15 seasons but last year i packed out three bulls on my back and how many miles total you packed bulls how many hey gosh i'd be just a guess steve i'm guessing combined all those trips 30 miles well something like that but one of them was out of a canyon in arizona and it was ugly i mean even though it was only two miles each way i remember saying i'm not doing yeah there's different kinds of miles exactly and and my guest hunter had blown out his acl

and before the hunt and he told me he said look i've been waiting for years to hunt arizona i'm deferring surgery until after the hunt do you mind having a guy hobbling along i'm like hey whatever so he went into it saying i'm not gonna going to pack. All right, he told me. I mean, and he was 55, I think. Blew out his ACL playing basketball down in Logan, Utah. And he shows up, and he's got a brace on his knee that looks like, you know, Colonel Steve Austin of the $6 million man. You're too young to remember that, you know.

He had no idea what you're talking about. I know what you're talking about. All right. See, again, we're aging ourselves here. But anyhow, he shoots this bull down in the canyon. Really nice bull. Oh, he shot it. Yeah, like a 320 bull. I'll tell you, I want to interject.

I've never met the guy. I bet that man did not have a torn ACL. I'm going to start saying that. I'm going to be like on every hunt. I'll be like, yeah, I got enough in me. I got enough in me to get down in that canyon and kill a bull, no problem. Yeah. It's just that once that happens, I'm out of here.

I'm out, yeah. You know, so how hard can I hunt for how long? I don't know. You get to a point, and I've said this on a few episodes, where you realize that there are a lot fewer hunts in the front windshield than what are in the rearview mirror. Yeah, I got you. And you enjoy every minute of every day of those hunts

as you see the sand draining out of your hourglass. And you start having this internal fear. Gosh, oh, man, my hip's hurting today. Is that going to lay me up for mal-cunning? Because you know that there's a terminal point when you're hunting anything, let alone backpack out-cunning. So it's like... I'm definitely still just too young and dumb to have those thoughts.

I know. I don't, yeah. Are you or are you having those thoughts? You know. Are you or you have those thoughts? You do. My brother's a couple years older than me. He started working out, lifting weights. Now I've been lifting weights. To train for hunting.

The only thing I'm thinking about, it's like I'm married. I got three kids. I'm not working out because I want to be all go down to the beach. I work out because that's the thing I think about. Not being able to get up a hill. Right.

Or getting smoked by Giannis. That Giannis would get to the hill way ahead of me. You know, I hunt, a lot of my guest hunters are younger than I am. And I drive a desk for a living half the year. And so I have to make a serious point to get out and hike every day. And I'm lucky here in Montana where I live, I'm a mile from a forest service trailhead, going a two-hour hike every day. And mentally, I am in way better shape to handle cold, terrible, miserable, ugly conditions

than I was when I was 40 or 30. I mean, now I'll just put my head down, lean against the grade, and I don't even think about it. If I've got to walk all day, oh, well, I've got to walk all day. Whereas when I was 28, gosh, I had to walk for another 45 minutes to get there. This sucks. Now, it doesn't even faze me. It's like, hey, man, I had to walk for another 45 minutes to get there. This sucks. Now, it doesn't even faze me. It's like, hey, man, I'm still hunting.

I got some buddies who are, you know, they're done. They're cashed it in or whatever. And so mentally is fine. I mean, I wish I had the mental fortitude when I was 28 that I have today. It just comes with age. One thing I think about when I think 28 that I have today. It just comes with age. One thing I think about when I think about getting old and not being able to hunt like I like to hunt is I think that me now would be able to smoke me when I was 25.

Oh, I think if I put myself back to when I was 25, even though I'm 50 now, I would agree. I was inefficient in how I operated, how I walked, how much gear I brought with that I didn't need, all those things. And just mentally, yeah, I could walk myself into the ground today. Whereas in 25, I'd have to sit and have a sandwich after two miles. I had a guy the other day tell me about a principle in fitness. My brother used to joke, or had not used to, has joked that people that are big into CrossFit,

you just get good at doing CrossFit. It doesn't do anything for you. I'll tell this guy that. He says it half-jokingly, but this guy was saying there's this principle in fitness called SED. So it's specific adaptations to imposed demands. Because what I've often wondered about is you could have people who are fit by any measure. Yep. Okay?

But you take them out. Oh, yeah, you really ought to. Before we go hunting the mountains, you really ought to get in shape for oh no i just ran a half marathon bro yeah and you go out and it's like they have never done anything yep it's such a specific thing that i really don't think you can replicate the domain i don't think you can replicate the physical demands of mountain hunting doing anything except maybe like mountaineering. Yeah, I would agree.

And that's why, you know, all my, a lot of my buddies go to the gym. Oh, I gotta be on the cardio. I gotta be working on this. Me, I put 20, 30 pounds in a backpack and I just hike. And walk. Yeah.

Because nothing replicates the uneven ground, the, okay, I'm going up a grade and then down a grade, I'm side hilling, I'm hike. And walk, yeah. Because nothing replicates the uneven ground, the, okay, I'm going up a grade and then down a grade, I'm side-hilling, I'm whatever. Yep. And I just, I haven't found any mechanical device that replicates it. No, you can't. So I just go hike.

Anything you do, like, obviously, any way you can become stronger, you know, and all that, it's like, great, sure, it's not going to work against you, but there's just something about, yeah, the the uneven ground and i think another thing that really starts to throw people is in addition to that stuff in addition just the physicality of it there's all this layered stuff about cold heat boredom um other just discomfort things. Yeah.

You know, uncertainties, change in food. Yeah. When you're younger, all of those get to you. Yeah. And now, doesn't get to me at all. Okay. Throw my pack on. I'm usually hiking up the hill.

I'm in a very light merino wool. And I got some layers. And, yeah, it's cold, but I'm not really thinking about it. I'm just got my head down. I got to get to the ridge so I can glass before the sun gets up. Whereas before, my mind would get distracted. Your mind gets distracted.

You're not focused on hunting. And you just start losing it. Your edge is gone. And then you start getting cold. You start sniveling. You start whining. You start thinking about, oh, gee, I could have been huddled up next to mama this morning. Why the hell did I get out of bed?

Mama? It's a euphemism for Randy's wife, I'm sure. That's right. Yeah. There's a joke to that if my wife listens to this. We ran into Jack LaL lane at an airport one time again no you guys he related to telly savalis kind of man now i'm really aging myself and uh he's he was like the original fitness expert on old broadcast surely not before slim

good body oh way before he was like i mean he was like the first guy so he's like 85 90 years old and he says you know what you young people need to know it takes discipline and i'm like oh okay kind of taking notes here he says takes a real man to get out of a hot bed with a warm woman and go and jump in a cold pool because he needs to exercise. Oh, is that right? Yeah. I'm like, dude, you're 90 years old, I guess. Maybe you know what you're talking about.

Anyhow, that's the inside joke about mama. Getting out of bed from mama. So you were brought up in Minnesota, though. Yep, way up north. So when did you start doing mountain hunts? When I moved to Montana. I went to college in Reno and knew just about nothing about Western hunting

while I lived in Nevada. You didn't hunt there? Yeah, I did. But I was terrible at it. I tried to hunt everything like I hunted whitetails. Throw down a sack of carrots and hang a platform up the tree.

Yeah, there you go. And luckily stumbled into a few deer along the way while I was in Nevada. But when I moved to Montana, I just realized, you know what? If you're going to hunt elk on public land, you better figure it out, Randy, because they aren't standing next to the trailhead. Yeah. And it requires work. As quick as you accept the fact that hunting elk on public land requires exertion,

you get way better at it. It's like you go through this period of thinking there's an easy way, and you don't kill anything. I mean, I hunted elk for six years and never fired a shot at an elk because I thought there was an easier way. People just hadn't been smart enough to figure it out yet. Yeah. And finally, I'm like, you know what?

Well, there's an easier way. Well, yeah. It's called cash. Right, exactly. Yeah, I mean, money solves a lot of problems. You can buy elk, man. But that wasn't the elk you were looking to purchase. Right.

And so after that, I'm like, all right, this is what I'm going to do. And I went in, slept on the mountain that night. Next morning, killed the bull. Like, holy cow. What year was that? That was in 1997. Oh, okay. And I think I've killed at least one bull every year since then,

just doing the same thing. And it was like the light came on. Randy, quit thinking there's an easy way to do this. Yeah. There are easier ways to do it, but public land bull elk hunting on general tags is not an easy endeavor. No, but you've made that your thing, man. Public land elk hunt yeah by accident almost

because of where i live because of the fact that when you get in the tv world elk are sexy i mean what what sells better than a big bull elk screaming in a camera big white tail buck on the cover of magazine well that's probably true. I had a meeting with some magazine editors the other day, and they're like, it's just a fact of life. Oh, really? The best-selling newsstand. Any cover you do, you can't beat that.

It's got to be the biggest buck. So you'll have an article inside the magazine condemning fenced deer operations. But you'll have one on the cover. But on the cover magazine is a fenced buck that you're never going to run into, and then you'll sell newsstand copies. Yeah. Well, let's figure that out. It's just people like.

So to answer your question, a whitetail buck. Yeah. All right. So I kind of got into that. And living in Montana, elk hunting is a big thing. Like it is in Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, other places. And then in the mid-90s, I started applying in all these western states. And kind of going here, going there.

Getting to hunt elk in a lot of different places in a lot of different environments made me a way better elk hunter. Is that right? Because showing up in my backyard in Bozeman, Montana to hunt elk, you kind of know what they're doing. You're kind of doing the same thing every year. Oh, it's for early November. This is where they're going to be.

I show up in New Mexico and their season is, let's say, middle of October. Everything's different. So you really have to get your mind into a pattern and an idea of these are not the same animal I hunt at home. And like you guys know on TV, my statement is I've got five days to figure it out, sort it out, and pack it out. I show up at a place I've never been, and we've got, what, $20,000 invested in an episode. I've got to find some elk.

And it doesn't matter that the weather's crappy. It doesn't matter there's a lot of hunting pressure on public land. I've got to figure it out. Sniveling and whining isn't going to do any good. I can't change the weather. I can't change the hunting pressure on public land, I got to figure it out. You know, sniveling and whining isn't going to do any good. I can't change the weather. I can't change the hunting pressure. So over the course of doing that enough, you become, at least I feel, I've become a much smarter elk hunter than I was.

Yeah. And people watch our show and say, Randy, come on, what's going on here? I never see this many elk on public land. And I don't know what to tell them. It's just, you know, either we're lucky, which we do get lucky at times, but we really have a system of here's how we do it. We spend the first two days figuring it out. Then we collect all the information, we sort it out. And then we got about another two or three days to try to get one on the ground and pack them out. It's that simple.

That raises a whole bunch of questions I got for you, but let me start with one that I already had in my head. I used to feel, like, this is even hard to put, most hunters have, like, a thing they do, okay? So when I lived in michigan like like what you did like the thing you did was we bow on a deer yeah bow on white tails then you do other stuff in addition so like if you're a guy that lives in wisconsin you might just like you like you hunt agricultural white tails but every year you go on a destination hunt. But there's the thing, the main thing.

If you took it all the way, that thing would be left. I've often thought when you draw what your thing is. For a long time when I lived in Montana, my thing was I liked to archery hunt. Again, archery hunt, public land for elk. That's the thing I really wanted to be good at. If I could be good at one thing, it would have been that. All the other stuff I did was auxiliary. Now I travel enough where I don't really have a thing anymore.

But I always wondered, does the auxiliary stuff enhance your ability to do the thing? You're saying that it does. Oh, yeah. How is that, though? Because you'll go somewhere. I remember hunting elk in New Mexico. I remember just thinking this has nothing to do

with hunting elk in Montana. This ain't where the elk would be. This isn't what they'd be doing. I felt like it's like you're not training yourself. You're just on vacation. Before we get Randy's answer to this, we're'm gonna take a short

break for our sponsors and when i tell you steve what really preps me good for elk hunting you're gonna crack up my son and i fish walleye tournaments and you're you're already looking at me like what the hell does this have to do with elk hunting yeah when you fish a walleye tournament or even if you go walleye fishing, and probably bass fishing is the same thing. I don't bass fish, so I can't really say. But before you even go to the lake, you analyze,

okay, what time of year is it? All right, it's June. The walleyes aren't going to be up way shallow, and they're not going to be out on the deep pumps. So right there, I've eliminated about 80% of the lake. All right. What's the water temperature? What's the condition? What are they doing? It's kind of the same thing with elk. Elk do a different thing at a different time of the year based on certain needs. Food, escapement or survival, water, and breeding. Same thing fish do.

And what I found myself doing when I would fish walleye tournaments is I'd figure out one thing that worked and I thought that would work every day, every place, all the time. And I'd catch fish one out of 10 days. And boy, when I found them, I'd just thump them. But then the other nine days I'd struggle. That's how I fish yellow perch.

Same rig. All around the country, same rig, same depth. Sometimes I'd knock the shit out of them. Right. So my son gets bored to tears just doing what his old man does. So he's out there experimenting all the time. And that little guy, he's catching more fish than i am and it starts driving home the point of you know what if you always do what you always done you're always going to get what you always got and elk hunting is kind of the same thing if i go to new mexico and think i'm going to hunt like i

do in montana just because it works in Montana, not going to happen. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps

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Welcome to the, to the on X club y'all. So how does hunting in New Mexico educate you about hunting in Montana? Because it gets you the mindset that when you show up, the very first thing you have to do before you even get there is cross off all the places on your map where elk are not going to be. Scouting is not about finding out elk. It's about eliminating where they're not going to be. Ruling country out. Right. So you look at my map when I start,

anything that's within a mile of a motor, i.e. a trailer, a road, crossed off. Just don't even look there because I know other hunters are going to be there. And then I look at, all right, what is the season of the year? Okay, let's say it's the middle of October. All right, it's kind of the end of the rut. The bigger bulls are going to be off somewhere looking for their survival locations. They're going to be getting away from hunting pressure. They're going to make a living down in a canyon or some other place, just like they do in Montana. But in Montana, they're going to make a living in some really steep, nasty,

blowdown jungle that has a little bit of food and a little bit of water nearby where they can not get shot for five weeks. Just like black timber. Yeah, or some small little pocket, some steep place that you just aren't going to think to look. In New Mexico, it's the same thing, but it's mostly canyons and other terrain differences. So they're going to go there. You're saying he's going to want to be down in New Mexico. He's going to want to be down in the canyon.

Yeah. Yeah. In Montana, we have a canyon country for the most part. No. the canyon yeah yeah you know yeah montana already have a canyon country for the most part no and so it's not that the nuances of the landscape or how those elk behave on that landscape teach me anything about how it how to effectively hunt them in montana it's the fact that it forces you to analyze what is the season of the year based on on that season of the year, what are public land elk doing at that time of year? And based on what they're doing,

what am I going to do to make sure I find them as often as I can? And I don't know if that's making sense. It makes total sense. Because most people will go out in the woods on a public land hunt and they want to think that a new gadget or a new call It makes total sense. Because most people will go out in the woods on a public land hunt, and they want to think that a new gadget or a new call or a new blah, blah, blah is going to bring an elk to them. It very seldom does.

I mean, it might, but you're really hoping on gambler's luck if that's all you're thinking about. The people who, and the the reason what did you guys say in colorado probably what 90 of the elk are killed by 10 of the hunters sure yeah and the reason being is those 10 of guys have a system and they know what to expect when they show up when they show up they've already got a plan laid out either on a map or in their mind they've got three or four options and they're not wandering around opening morning before daylight thinking, well, I wonder if that ridge would be the spot or

da da da. No, they're going to point A and they go there. They don't see them. The afternoon they're on point B. They'll have six, eight spots on their map to check out in a five-day hunt. And two to three of those spots will have elk. And they'll just, through a process of elimination, get there. And when they find the elk, they'll kill one. I think elk are one of the easiest animals in the world to kill once you find them. Once you find them. Finding them is the hard part.

And that's why I do a lot of writing and blogging. And I tell people, as crazy as this sounds, as simple as it is, you can't kill one if you can't find one. So quit worrying about all the techniques and tactics to kill one. Figure out how to find them, because once you find them, you'll kill them. So what's your way of finding them? Yeah, again, it goes back to that whole seasonal thing i i break it down into think about

seasons a lot right i break it down into five periods it's early season pre-rut peak rut post rut and late season and if you gave me one time of the year to hunt and try kill a big bull it's going to be late season let's just say a bull a bull legal bull a legal bull in montana is a branch antlered bull. I'm probably going to hunt them in the peak of the rut in September with a bull. Other states, it might be a different answer. But each of those five seasons, they have a different need. In the early season, you look at it, okay, the bulls still aren't really with the cows,

the mature bulls. They're still putting on the feedback. You compare that to late season, and now they don't really care about food. They don't care about cows. All they care about is getting through hunting season. And they've got these sanctuaries they go to. And they and their bachelor groups go there year after year after year. And what are those places? You said you named two you named in montana yeah i mean blow down nasty dog hair as a general rule

i tell people and this is newberg's first rule of elk hunting is where where hunters go elk don't and so if it's a place hunters can easily get to or don't have to exert themselves to get to don't expect late season elk to be there maybe some late season cows but not late season bulls and i will share information with people about my early season spots or my peak rut locations fine everyone kind of knows where those are but you're never gonna hear randy newberg tell you where one of these sanctuaries are because one they're hard to find two once you find them you can go there every year year after year after year and kill elk in that same spot because these bulls get old by living in these locations yeah Yeah. Define spot, like what size of ground, what size of patch of ground?

Oh, maybe 60 acres. Yeah. They will make a living in a 60-acre spot all the way through hunting season. In Montana, we've got a five-week rifle season. After the first shots, all hell breaks loose. The older bulls are in their bachelor groups, and they are going to the ugly,

nasty places. They're going to be places that are hard to approach because of wind or noise or other things. And even if you do approach it, there's going to be a fast escape route. Yeah. And it just, I can almost look at a map now anymore with topo lines and say, there's going to be elk there. Okay. But how does that play into your idea that once you find them they're easy to kill he's protected by the wind he's got a good escape route you just got to wait him out i think most people when they find an elk get way too excited i gotta go kill him i finally found one and they burst in there

they think oh over here the wind's blowing out of the south while you get over the other side of the drainage or on the other hillside and it maybe is blown out of the east and so before they even get there they've already announced to the elk what's going on yeah and they see an elk bedded and they're afraid another hunter's going to come shoot them that's what i always think and i just wait them out like Like how? Like what? Sit there until they stand up and offer me a shot or I get to some place that says, all right, I'm 280 yards away. I know he's down in there.

He's going to feed. I can see his tracks in the snow where he feeds every night. I'm going to let him feed up there and I'll kill him. And I might have to wait until a half hour before the sun goes down. But if I wait, I'll kill him.

I don't know. I'm making this sound overly simplified. No, I like everything you're saying. But when I first started hunting elk, I made it way too complicated. I was looking for magic calls and gizmos and all this stuff, and it just didn't work. I got a great anecdote about a late-season big bull that was killed. Some guy finally killed him, but he was in Gunnison.

And I want to say, I can't remember if it was a – I don't think it was a tough-to-draw unit because I think as the story goes, I know that he was about like a 360-something bull, so pretty darn big for Colorado, Gunnison Basin. And during the rut in September, this bull would rut on private land, and it was like right adjacent to town. I want to say it was right outside of Gunnison. So everybody would see him.

It was just a giant bull rutting around, rutting around. And then like rut would go by, rifle season would come around, and this bull would just disappear. Well, finally, one dude is just like literally glass and just like the same mountain that's been behind this bull forever and like looking way high up in the alpine way above tree line and there's like this little patch of willows and there's like 100 yards away there's like five like dwarfed little whatever engelman spruce or you know whatever lives way up there you know just little like six foot trees and gets out of spot and scope he starts looking

real hard and he thinks he can see tracks like connecting the two you know so he's like i'm gonna start looking at that patch he climbs up and gets a little bit closer and sure enough at like 10 minutes before dark uprises out of these five little spruce trees, this giant bull, and he walks like 100 yards over these little dwarf Thai alpine willows, and he loses him in the dark. Next morning, he's like watching,

and just as he's cracking light, he just sees those antlers disappear in those five little spruce. He went up there, waited him out, killed that bull, and he said the pack job was just like something out of like a k2 documentary just like ice axes crampon just like scooting along the edge of this

basin you know 11 plus thousand feet high but yeah i mean he's got him hanging on his wall now and and plays right into it i don't get to think we were hunting uh mule deer a couple years ago in colorado it was into the i don't know what we were hunting mule deer a couple years ago in Colorado and it was into the, I don't know what season it was, but there had been a couple seasons going on. And then we were just like looking through my spot and scope looking for mule deer

and just seeing a nice bull and be like, you son of a bitch. That's where you hang out? Yeah. Like a post-rut situation. I've had that happen a lot of times in Colorado. I mean, I try to go deer hunting there every two or three years, and I'll be looking in these little pockets for bucks and does,

and I'll be like, just like you said, you SOB. But I know I could probably come back there year after year and find him or other bulls around there. I just, I don't know, I try it when I do seminars about elk hunting and I'm not an expert by any means. I just have a lot of experience. That doesn't necessarily make you an expert. I try to tell people, think about what time of the year you're hunting and what are the needs the elk has at that time of year? In the peak rut, they don't care about food. Back to when I said the best way to kill a big bull is late season with a rifle.

The other would be at a water hole in a hot climate in the middle of the day during peak rut. I've been lucky and drawn Arizona and New Mexico and Nevada, Utah. I've drawn a lot of those tags for archery. What happens is the bulls take their cows up to bed them in the morning and they usually stop and get some water somewhere along the way. And once they bed those bulls and they defend them from a few satellites, those bulls will sneak away from the cows about somewhere between noon and three o'clock and they will come out in broad daylight, get a quick drink and head back up to those cows.

I've seen it so many times that when I have those tags now, I don't go back to camp and take a nap at noon. I'm sleeping at the water hole or I'm sitting at the water hole. I wouldn't be able to hunt with you because I like to take my nap. I'd have to nap from 11 to

12 and wake up and get ready for that. I think it's those sort of little tidbits that in Montana you maybe never really thought about it and then you went to a really hot climate where it happens more often and you notice it and you go, well, maybe on a hot September day, this happens in Montana too.

And so, you know. Yeah. You know, that's the thing too, like what I was talking about earlier about, like having your like core activity and then just all the experiments. We're kind of talking about ways in which you become educated in general. But I found at the same time that was ideal, I found that I don't respect, and I don't mean respect like in a way like you know or let me use a different word i don't admire the hunting prowess of people who've just figured out

a thing yeah it's the one trick pony yeah like you know it'd be like some dude like yeah like in september he catches a ton of salmon trolling in front of that river mouth. He's the man. I was like, yeah, but anything could happen. That fishery, whatever. I kind of admire adaptability. I don't know people that kill a buck every year, and then whoever owns the farm they're hunting on sells the farm. They never hunt again.

He's like the dude that's like, yeah, old John, man, every moping day he gets his buck. And it's like, yeah, but it's just like I have my little thing. So through traveling and experimenting, I find that just adaptability in and of itself is valuable. Oh, I agree completely. It makes you feel more comfortable. Because I used to feel very vulnerable when I first started hunting here, when I first started hunting elk here.

I felt very vulnerable. Like, man, would we be screwed if somehow this trailhead were to gain popularity? Oh, yeah. We'd be done. Because the only thing we know is you park here, walk there, and they're there. And if they weren't yeah what the hell then right so i do like the kind of stuff you're saying like go anywhere and have a like a toolbox that you can you know yeah i draw upon i i've just been lucky to get to hunt elk in so many places you might not even be

comfortable answering because it sounds like you're're tooting your own horn or whatever, but how many states or what states have you killed public land elk on? Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada. Should have last year in Utah. In two weeks, people will get to see. You guys know how it is. 18 yards of bulls standing there, and I'm with my archery gear thinking, come on, buddy, take one step.

And either the camera's got them or I don't have them. So I could have added Utah to that list if not for a very lucky, lucky bull last year. But this is all like do it on your own. Yeah. That's still seven states. Is it? I think that's what I got to.

Yeah. You know, and for me, I don't really even think about it in terms of numbers. It's like. No, no, that's why I hesitated to ask you. I mean, it speaks for itself. Yeah, it's like no no that's why i hesitated to ask you i mean it speaks for itself yeah it's just experiences you know a classic example of a learning experience is i'm in new mexico it's archery season i mean it's blistering hot i go up high and everyone else is up high

high like what eight thousand feet trying to get in some ponderosa and i got my spotting scope out on this rock and i'm looking down and i see all these elk out on the flats in these grasslands grab my gps and my map i'm like shit that's blm so i go down there and there's some guys camp there and i'm like you guys hunting these elk out here oh no you'll never be able to get up on them. You can't call them in. Well, I grew up spotting stock hunting in a lot of ways in the big woods of Minnesota, as weird as that sounds. You're trying to find some place where a buck is hanging out, and you're trying to see him before he sees you,

because if he sees you first, one big jump and he's gone. Still hunting. Yeah, pretty much still hunting. So I'm thinking, you know what? Those elk got to bed somewhere out there. I go out there and I get to looking around and I can see where they're bedding. Wherever there's a break in the terrain, just a rock pile like six feet, you know, drop in a rock, they're bedding right up against those rocks.

For shade or for protection? For shade. Yeah. I go out there, and within a day, I arrow one of those bulls at like two yards. And we come packing it out. I saw that. Yeah, we come packing it out,

and the guys, we walk past their camp, they're like, where the hell did you get that? Out there. And I could have shot other bulls on that trip. and the guys we walked past their camp they're like where the hell did you get that out there and i could have shot other bulls on that trip every time i've went back to that spot and been lucky enough to draw those elk have figured out no hunters want to come out here because it's about a three mile hike it's hot there's no. But there's no hunters either. Yeah. So elk will go where they're kind of like this fluid animal that moves in response to pressure. Kind of like water.

I mean, you push against the water balloon and the water moves to a different spot in the balloon. It's kind of how these elk are. So every year I hope I draw that tag because it's so consistent i go to that trailhead i walk out there no one's gonna be there and they're gonna be out there yeah so it's just one of those things though if you have enough experiences and go to enough different places you kind of have those discovery moments and say and what's funny is like if someone tells you like that's just describe that hunt but put an antelope in there they're like oh yeah for sure we'll go after those antelope way out there in

the flats but then someone puts an elk out in that same country and no can't kill those things yeah and i don't know i think we on tv have a tendency to maybe create some narrow-mindedness among hunters from the standpoint of what works or how wide your thinking should be. Yeah. I mean, these are smart animals. They've figured it out. They've somehow, you know, a bull that lives

six years on public land, he's no dummy. Just like a whitetail that lives past three years in the Midwest. Yeah. He's no dummy. And don't discount some of the things they will do to stay alive. They just have figured out how to stay alive. That spot you're talking about where you say you know if you go there.

To me, man, my most valuable possessions in life are those just handful of things. Just like reliable things. And you really rarely have more than a half dozen. And I'm not talking just one species. I mean just like the things that work and now and then for whatever reason you just scratch them. Do you know what I mean? Or you haven't done it in so long. It doesn't feel like a thing anymore. It's like knowing the junk that works.

Stuff goes away. I used to be... Because it feels like stuff changes. One of my things that I counted is the ability that we would pound steelhead at the 6th Street Dam in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. Right?

I haven't done it in forever. They haven't changed the dam. They haven't changed the river. The steelhead is still there. But I feel like somehow if I went back, like I wouldn't be able to do it. I like lost it as my thing, you know? Yeah. I haven't done it so long.

I almost feel like telling people. I recently had a thing where I had a friend move to a place i used to live and i'm imploring i'm begging him to go sit a certain avalanche slide to see if a bear came out yeah because i hadn't hunted in a decade and he goes up to say i went up there's ally. I'm like, no, you're not listening to what I'm saying, dude. It doesn't matter. The chute will be fine. I don't care how much snow you got to wade through. Park your damn car, walk up there, and look.

And he thinks I'm trying to help him out. I'm just trying to know, do I still have a thing or not here? And I'm telling him, you go this one time. And he goes up, calls back, I saw a bear. I'm like, never go there again. That's it. I just needed to know that I still have that little thing. Yeah, it works.

In these little places, I am a big advocate for conservation. And a lot of people know I sit on the board of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. One of their people came to me and said, Randy, would you auction off your GPS with all your weight? And you talk about mixed emotions because I, you know, I. You didn't do it, did you? No, I haven't. You would have done it, but you lost your gps so you couldn't i found that gps are you kidding me yeah oh yana saw me a couple months ago i was in panic mode

my gps with all of this cherished hard randy newberg's yeah yeah i'd lost it i'd been on muskrat trapping and i couldn't find the damn thing well i have these custom seat covers made and i put it somewhere where i wouldn't forget where i put it yeah and that's where i was i found it in may sometime but so now you can auction it off then no i i've never got i will someday auction it off but it kind of like what you were saying, Steve, about respect for people who are adaptable or whatever. I respect people who want to go out and figure it out, who want to take the journey rather than be led to the destination and say, here he is shoot him yep i mean the guy who just racks his brain and works and goes out before work or whatever on the weekends and you know he's skimped for time but somehow he shoots a bowl every year that guy's got my respect yeah i like that guy i always like i always want to help that

guy out me too and i always want to help out the guy with this kid yeah oh the dude home with his kid in my eyes like hey you know what i would do but um yeah man the the thing about auctioning off it's just like like you said you're a proponent of conservation um it just brings up a thing that i think about all the time is when people talk about the need for hunter recruitment yeah the hunting will have, that the thinking goes that for hunting to survive politically, I mean, I'm not telling you that, just for listeners, that for hunting to survive in today's political climate, we need to have healthy, robust numbers, right?

Yep. But a thing that critics of that say, including many friends of mine, critics of the idea of hunter recruitment, will be like, well, why would you want to increase the likelihood of someone being in your spot? I hear it all the time. And when I get asked by people, and I often will give talks, and the thing that always comes up when I give a talk is people will be what can we be doing or why are hunter numbers stagnant or why is the average hunter get older so you know what what what do you see from the people you meet i'm like you know

what inspiring people to want to go is not a problem right there's plenty of motivation out there yeah the cost i don't think it's like there's not a lot of people. There aren't tons of people who want to hunt but can't because of the cost. They're not hunting because they don't have a good spot. And a lot of people aren't willing to just make the sacrifices necessary to find good spots. I've found I take people out, take them on amazing trips, and then they aren't going to replicate that amazing trip unless they do tons of hard work to find their own stuff and that's it for them yeah and when it comes down to it so like i like so if i was consistent with what i'm saying i would give up all my spots

true you would because i would be able to make a handful of people but it's just not something I'm willing to do. And some people, like my older brother, he just thinks that all this talk is just ridiculous. And I've listened to some of your podcasts where this topic's come up, and I'm kind of torn between. I'm all about making sure opportunity exists, but not handing it to them. I think the worst thing you can do for a prospective hunter is to hand them something.

I found that to be true personally. And just show them the easy way. Oh, well, that's all there is to that. And you've cheated them out of the entire experience of what hunting really is, in my mind. Yeah. I don't think that's the value that people, when people say hunting recruitment, that's not what I think of. Bringing them out there, make sure they kill something the first day. No.

Let them get a little cold. Let them maybe feel a little lost. Let them have to work. That's the part that is going to make them a hunter for the long term it was if it's easy there's no reward in it yeah i don't want to make new hunters just for the sake of doing it no if you told me if i signed some treaty with the non-hunting public and said we'll never mess with you. In perpetuity, you will not be messed with politically

or environmentally. I'd be like, okay. Then I just want to be the only guy that hunts. As long as you're telling me that you're not going to mess with the habitat, you're not going to mess with the hunting rights,

that's fine. I'll just be the guy. I'll take that job. I've heard you talk about your brother's opinion on this. And growing up in Michigan, I'm assuming it was a little bit like where I grew up in Minnesota, where everybody hunted and fished. Everybody. Well, every household. Right.

Every household. Yeah. everybody well every household right every household yeah i mean i did not know anyone who really ate beef growing up until i went off to college i didn't realize how much beef chicken and pork got oh man we know definitely we ate all kinds like we ate there was all around domestic meat was there but they everybody hunted but it wasn't like uh it wasn't like a subsistence area behind the stretch no and so the the point i'm getting to is because some people grow up in that environment where you just work your butt off and you hunt and you fish and you trap and you do all those kind of things you you encounter experiences that shape and form you, so you don't need to be quote-unquote recruited as a hunter.

Everybody I grew up with, they were going to be hunters because we came from a society of hunters. That was our identity. You weren't, oh, I'm a carpenter and then I'm a hunter. It was the reverse. No, I'm a hunter. It's just who you were. If you were a young kid, you looked up to the guys

who were hunters in your community or fishermen or trappers or whatever. And so I think a lot of quote unquote problems we attribute to hunting recruitment are just the environment or atmosphere in which we're trying to bring them into it. You know, trying to bring someone who's only

exposed to nature or to the natural world for one day out of a year, you're not going to convert them to being a hunter like we think of a hunter. You have to put in the effort and the work to immerse them to a level where they understand all the other parts of hunting you know i thought about that because i've been um befuddled at times by taking people out on that one day a year thing you know like okay i took you on this like we

flew up we did like a caribou hunt surely you'll now be a hunter and then they just never hunt again yeah i don't understand dude but then we were talking about this not long ago i feel like but if someone took me sailing they're like hey man you want to come sailing for a day like oh why not later are they, they're like, I can't believe he never became a sailor. No, dude, I just thought it'd be interesting to go sailing for a day. We went sailing, that's great.

I mean, do I regret going sailing? No. Do I want to be a sailor? No, it was fun. I think a lot of people look at it that way. I look at it like, do you self-define as a hunter or not i do and that's because most people don't look at the world that way i i

when people ask me i i think we were doing an interview with you guys i think and someone said randy introduce yourself randy i'm randy newberg hunter it's. That's who I am. Yeah, professionally, I'm a CPA and everything else, but everyone who knows me, all the people I hang out with, they're hunters. And we look at the world through a lens that is so much different than everybody else. And I used to think that I was the same as everybody else. But after you have enough of these life experiences,

interacting with enough people who don't hunt or see the world differently, you realize that hunting gives you a vision of the world like nothing else. I mean, nothing I can think of compares to the vision of the natural world you get if you are a hunter. You mentioned trapping a couple

times yeah before we get into traveling too far let's just take a quick break so randy you mentioned trapping a couple times and now you mentioned that a hunter looks at the world in a way that no one else looks at it i'll tell you that when i'm driving down the road and I drive over a bridge and I look off the bridge, no one is looking at what I'm looking at. Or not no one. Very few individuals, a select few individuals are looking off the bridge that way. Exactly. individuals are looking off the bridge that way. When I drive through a valley and I'm looking up the mountains, I do not

see what other people see. I think that hunting in some way makes it very difficult to look at the natural world with passivity. Completely agree.

You're looking at it sort of in a way, and it sounds egotistical, but you're looking at it in a way like, well, how does this pertain to me? In some way, like where are the animals or what's up with that spot? And I can only see it that way. If I go on vacation, we just went on family vacation to Hawaii. The whole time, I'm looking up those hills being like, now, what would a fellow find up there at his bone arrow?

You know what I mean? I can't not see things that way. My wife has just been baffled by my inability to just sit on the beach. I am the same way. My wife will say, is that all you think about? When I'm sitting on the beach, i am the same way my wife will say is that all you think about yeah i'm sitting on a beach yeah yeah i think about one thing when when we're doing whatever you know we might be driving down the road and i'm like on our way home i want to stop there mckinley you're saying about the bridge because at that culvert right there i'm pretty sure i

could trap a muskrat yeah that's what i was getting out i said like driving over bridge like yeah so i grew up trapping in michigan you grew up traveling to minnesota yeah a lot of the i don't know 50 i need to lay a little little bit of groundwork here like when you're trapping you run what's called a trap line and no one just sets a trap like you run a trap line your trap line. No one just sets a trap. You run a trap line, and your trap line might be six, what we call sets or locations where you have a trap set. Or in the case of a mink long liner, you might have 200, 300 traps out, or what you call sets.

So when I was trapping, 50% of my sets that I would make would be on public right-of-ways of bridges. Yeah. For mink and muskrat. Mink, muskrat, raccoon. Yep. So I divided trapping up in my head, water trapping, land trapping.

So land trapping, you'd trap as early. We'd start land trapping. I can't remember now when I would do it. I'd start land trapping. I can't remember now when I would do it. I'd start land trapping October 10. And you'd have 20 days of land trapping before water trapping opened up. During land trapping, I would target red fox. But I would get gray fox. And I would get raccoons that weren't that valuable because raccoons hadn't come into prime quite yet.

And then November 1, I would start water trapping zone 2. When I started water trapping zone 2, I would set tons of public right-of-ways where you are climbing into, it's not public land, you don't have permission on the land, but you could park your car on the bridge or park your car on the side of the road and sort of skirt down the bridge abutment, get down the river, and then make your set below the high water mark.

So you just learn. The same way now as a hunter I look at like a brushy strip between two cornfields in a certain way yeah driving over bridges i had a way of i would just be able to assess it so quickly yeah whether it was interesting to me or not and i a lot of people ask me well how has trapping helped you as someone who hunts because you you still trap oh yeah, yeah. I mean, Giannis, you came with me one day last year. I just sent all the muskrats to Canada to the fur auction, and they sold them two weeks ago. What was your average for large?

Oh, it was terrible this year. There was an article in the New York Times yesterday about how fur is coming back. Oh, no. They've been saying that for a bazillion years. Thanks to Putin, the Russians are trying to invade everything in Eastern Europe, so at least for a guy who's a muskrat mink guy like I am. Two years ago, I got $12 a piece for a XXL muskrat. Which is one in five muskrats. This year, they were $5 a piece.

I mean, premium winter skins but you know two weeks out of my winter i get to go and goof around catch 300 muskrats a few minks some raccoon dozen beaver and it's just you'll catch 300 scratch we always call them scratch yeah you'll catch 300 scratch in two weeks oh easy if i if i didn't have taxis and to worry about i could catch a thousand of them in two weeks yeah Oh, easy. If I didn't have taxis to worry about, I could catch a thousand of them in two weeks. It's crazy. What I trapped... I trapped a lot

of muskrats, but I trapped fox, coyote, and incidental of that would be raccoon, possum, skunk on dry land. They have possum in Michigan? Are you kidding me? Really? I didn't know that.

We didn't have them in Minnesota. I didn't know they had them. I bet they do now. Probably. There's two things. There's two animals that are traditionally southern that have been really expanding the range northern. That only has to do with climate change.

I don't think it has to do with just slow adaptability. Raccoons. Well, several. Javelinas seem to move northward all the time yeah opossums are moving northward so yeah get that stuff incidentally then i would trap muskrat mink beaver raccoon and then you were allowed depending where you were one or two river otters and i would really work hard to get my otters but i wouldn't sell my otters into the fur market. I'd sell them into the taxidermy trade. Oh, okay.

Huh. Because they were a novelty item. Right. So when I was traveling to Michigan, a bobcat in Michigan was worth $15. Right. Taxidermies give you $120 for it. Yeah. Here, right now, a good Western, as they call them, lynx cat,

even though it's not a Canadian lynx, a really good colored spotted belly, $500, $600. Taxidermists will still pay you $100 for them. Yeah, so it would vary. Whereas beaver, back then when in my area, coyotes were just coming in. So I remember the first two coyotes, I sold them to taxidermists. Okay. Because people were still kind of like, wow, a coyote.

And people weren't as tied in then as they are now. Just like pre-internet, somewhat pre-internet. So it's like what you had access to. I always argue now that the souvenirs are obsolete. Can I stop you there? You said somewhat pre-internet when you were trapping? Yeah, because I remember I had email. No, way pre-internet when I started trapping.

When I quit trapping, there was a university email thing. Okay. Because I was going to say, the internet, for me, when I was trapping growing up, Al Gore hadn't even graduated from college yet to invent the internet. But anyhow. Yeah, I want to clarify the point. I set my first trap, caught my first muskrat in 1984, 10 years old. Way pre-internet.

But I'll say, when I quit trapping, at 22 years of age, there was, at the college I went to, there was some kind of university email thing, and people were just starting to mess around. So, yeah. But at that time, when I sold those two coyotes, it was around that time. I was saying that people used to have, where you could go into a taxidermist, and they're like a provincial bunch. You go into a taxidermist and be like, here's a coyote,

and it wouldn't occur to them that there's guys out west with stacks of coyotes. Coyotes stacked up every which way, and they're begging someone to take off their hands and be like, holy shit, I'll buy that coyote off you. So it was like that at the time. As a side note, I was going to say, like, souvenirs are going obsolete. Like, people were like, well, I went to France. You know, I bought you this bottle of wine. But, dude, buy that bottle of wine at Safeway, man.

You know what I mean? Like, I could go online and buy. There's nothing I can't – unless you find something out in the woods, there's nothing you can't give someone they just can't get. So it's weird now to buy people. You go to Hawaii and buy a seashell necklace. It's just weird because I go to seashellnecklaces.com. But we're also going to bring up, I mean, that was great about trapping.

So you're 10 years older than I am. Which means you hit the fur boom. Right. I missed the fur boom. The fur boom definitions vary. It's largely accepted that the Great American Fur Boom, 1978 to 1982. Yeah. I hit it perfectly. Some people fudge it by a year or more. But there's just this explosion of good fortune for fur markets.

Having to do political, economical, fashion. Commodities. It's a hedge against commodities. When the dollar is going one way, furs can be going another. All those things came together. Everything exploded. Fur prices, anything with fur on it

skyrocketed in value. Overnight, every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the world went out and bought a bunch of traps. For sure. It was unbelievable how many people in my little town of Big Falls trapped. Now, you've got to figure adjusting for inflation.

Yeah. Muskrats. It was like the era of the $6 muskrat, but we're talking in 1979. Yeah. In 1984, my first year in college, I came home for Christmas break, and me and my uncle, my uncle uncle and i we got 600 muskrats in a week and we trapped in what what's that trap and what kind of cover like what kind of habitat up in these beaver flowages in northern minnesota you up north of highway 2 you were allowed to cut

the tops off their their rat houses yeah and so you'd cut it off put a couple traps in there put the lid back on patch it all up you'd have your trap on a long wire so when you walk by the muskrat got in your trap and you knew because he went down the hole into the water pulled the pulled the wire up against the hut and this you can't molest the hut oh really okay in southern min Minnesota at that time, you couldn't. I think you can now, but we would go do that. And one guy would just walk around these beaver flowages and pull the muskrats out of the traps, put the traps back in. And the other guy would sit out of fire and skin muskrats because if it was 20 below, if you didn't skin them right away, they were hard. Oh yeah, you weren't going to get them skinned. And so at that point in time, to be a college freshman and come home

and get five, six bucks for muskrats and your half of them is 300, I went back to college for winter semester. Man, it was dominoes and high-quality beer that semester. It was just how it was dominoes and high quality beer that semester. It was just how it was. I came back spring break of that college year, and we caught 125 beaver in a week. And we were catching them so fast. That was Trappin' Order, Minnesota. Yeah.

And like a lot of my buddies, we were catching so many, we didn't have time to skin them all. And the fur buyer would come, and we'd have them laying in the basement of my uncle's house, stacked up literally like firewood. And the guy would say, 20 bucks them laying in the basement of my uncle's house stacked up literally like firewood and the guy would say 20 bucks a piece in the round in other words you didn't have to skin them anything he didn't size them it was just 20 bucks a piece take them and he'd just sit there and slap his 20 bills on the table and we were just i mean we thought we had really hit the lottery. So yeah, furs sold in three ways. You sell it. During the fur boom, trappers got interested in trapping faster than they could learn their trade.

Correct. And there's a lot of people out for a quick dollar, and they weren't interested in sort of the discipline and art of being a trapper. And they would sell a lot of fur round. Yep. And round means on the animal so fur buyers like let me add a layer out of this there's three ways to sell fur there's three ways to sell fur meaning in the round i got too many ideas going at once here there's two ways that you actually sell for a fur buyer like a country fur buyer, or a fur auction.

Yep. During the fur boom, you had country fur buyers, just like a guy buying fur out of his garage. Yeah. He's selling to the auctions. And the same trappers can basically sell to those auctions as well. But to sell fur to an auction, you've got to sell it fleshed and dried. That's hard. It's harder to learn how to flesh beaver than

it is the trap beaver yeah during the fur boom guys would go out and trap and just every night on their way home from trapping go to the country fur buyer and sell fur in the round to the fur buyer or you could skin it which is the easy part and sell it green. I sold all my raccoons, all my beaver, green. Skinned, but not fleshed and stretched. But I could sell them at a small auction that way because I could just freeze them in a big chest freezer. So during the fur boom, you had a lot of guys that didn't know what end of a knife was sharp.

But they were trapping and selling to fur buyers in the round. But you're walking and selling Red Fox in the round for 60 bucks. Yeah, it was crazy. But again, remember we're talking about 1979. Right. And you take those dollars for inflation.

I remember. It's like having a couple hundred dollar red Fox. Right. In 1982, my senior year in high school, that fall, I caught 50 some mink before school, just running a trap line on my in high school. That fall, I caught 50-some mink before school, just running a trap line on my way to school.

And I think I averaged like 24 bucks a mink. That's male, female. In the round. No, I mean, because they're quick to skin and dry and stretch. Yeah, because they come off clean. Yeah. Like a mink, you don't have to flush them too much. No, it's easy.

And I just think about that now i'm like man if i could get whatever 24 was in 1982 if i could get that today i'd have to get out outdoor tv because i'd be trapping mink all day long but you you in a way you were getting screwed because what i want to say was when i came in in 1984, I was coming in on the euphoria of the fur boom, but without the prices. There was a lot of information out there. There was a lot of traps, used traps out there, but I had missed it by a couple of years. Yeah. But I came in at a time when there was still effort because it hadn't gone totally bad yet.

We would get, and I was 10. I couldn't really start any earlier. The first day I ever set traps was I set traps at midnight on November 1st, 1984. By 7 a.m. on November 1st, 1984. It's like I have an alibi for that day, dude. I can tell you exactly where I was. By 7 a.m., we had three muskrats. I think we had nine traps.

We had three muskrats. Two were caught. One was caught in front of Joe Babcock's house in a 110 Conabare. One was caught in front of this foster family's house on North Lake, 110 Conabare, and we caught one on the north trending side of Crazy Mary's Point in a number one single long spring trap set under a stump where a bank then entered. I could tell you every damn detail of that day in 1984. And we sold those muskrats for, I think, our big ones that year. We caught 20 the first year.

And my old man lent us the money. I have an older half-brother. He gave us six number one long springs, Victor Long Springs. Then what we did is our old man lent us money. He drew up a little contract, even on yellow legal paper, and lent us enough money to buy one dozen Northwoods, one 10 connoisseurs.

Okay. And we caught our first year trapping 20 muskrats, one smallish raccoon and made enough to not only pay for the connoisseurs we bought, but to go buy a bunch more connoisseurs. And I was off running. Yeah. Because at the time, if you caught a buck mink, a buck mink is worth twice as much as a female. pay for the coni bears we bought but to go buy a bunch more coni bears and i was off running yeah because at the time if you caught a buck mink a buck mink is worth twice as much as a female

right and it's even then minks held because you would get 40 bucks for a mink yeah oh it's it was crazy and i remember my two brothers one time late in the year i like quit i pulled out of our trapping collectives i trapped my two brothers i can't remember what something's going on at school but anyways they went to set some more muskrat ponds and i didn't participate and they came home and picked up two mink out of muskrat sets i remember them dudes walking door with 40 bucks a piece and being blown away i remember 1986 i shot a mink with a.32 Special, took its head off, and bored a groove down the center of his back.

And we took it to a fur bar named Abe Salicina, and Abe Salicina offered me like $4 for that mink, and my old man cursing him out. Really? Because he thought you were getting bad treatment? Yeah. He said, I invite you to sell that mink for more somewhere else. And the dude wound up being right.

No one would take the mink. He was missing all the good parts. So now here you are. What? You said you were 22 last time you trapped? So I trapped from the time I was 10 to the time I was 22. And I thought I was taking – I was so into it. I was paying.

I remember paying a guy named Mark June, who later became like a video whitetail guy. I remember paying Mark June 250 bucks for a day's lessons in trapping red suburbia red fox. So do you miss it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I still set traps because I eventually settled

into the thing I like to do is trap beavers through the ice. I love it. It became my thing. I liked everything about it. We would go out in the ice December, January with a push broom and push broom snow away on the ice looking for bubble trails. Exhale trails. Take axes and chainsaws and shit and get down through that ice. And stringing snares and stringing 330s and I

loved every minute of it. I liked falling through the ice. It's like I liked everything about it, man. And I still now will trap I trapped a beaver this spring. I'll still trap it and I'll send it and get it tanned and I'll have it made into stuff. I trapped my own hat. I trapped my own mittens and I'll send it and get it tanned, and I'll have it made into stuff. So I trap my own hat. I trap my own mittens.

I got some stuff getting made right now. I got a beaver that my brother's having made into a hat for his wife. So I'm still in the fur business, but I'm into personal use. Gotcha. And then I eat the beaver meat. I like beaver meat. But I'm not trapping numbers like I used to. No.

I'm just after a beaver. And I know some people are listening to this and probably thinking, man, these guys, they're off their rock here talking about trapping. But if you've trapped, you understand the excitement of laying in bed at night thinking, oh, that last set I made tonight, that's going to catch one in the morning. And you almost can't get to bed at night thinking, oh, that set, that last set I made tonight, that's going to catch one in the morning. And you almost can't get to sleep at night. No, you can't. It's worse than the night before opening day of deer season.

I could never sleep between setting because we'd go out and set at midnight. For strats. I never did that. Well, because we lived in a high competition area. Okay. We'd pick, like, what's the primo spot. And we'd set, start setting midnight, and we'd set, even up into whatever age, when I quit trapping, I would still set traps from midnight through to dawn up to dark.

Wow. And I would get a lot of sets out. I would punch in usually more than to dark. Wow. And I would get a lot of sets out. I would punch in usually more than 75 sets. Wow. For a mixed bag, from otter to scratch. It was never that competitive for me. I mean, everyone kind of, okay, Randy's going to be out here. John's going to be out there.

No one bothered. But before we get done or get too far... I'll just get started on talking trapping. Giannis is sitting there looking at us like, man, these guys can really spin it out. Before you make your point, I want to say one last thing about the people think you're off the rock

about trapping. I remember making an observation and I'll stand by this today. The most skilled outdoorsmen are trappers. No doubt. I agree. And here's how I'll prove this today. The most skilled outdoorsman are trappers. No doubt. I agree. And here's how I'll prove it. If you fish, there's people out there who just fish. Yeah. Right?

Now, anyone that hunts knows how to fish. Correct. Anyone that traps knows how to hunt fish. That's exactly right. It's just like, you know what I mean? It's just a thing. You're better, a trapper's better than everybody else. You learn.

You know more bits of, and I often talk about, I remember, I made this point before about guys who hunt lions with hounds. People would be like, oh yeah, what's the challenge in shooting a lion out of a tree? And then I met some houndsmen who hunt lions. Oh, they're. And I realized, that guy holds more bits of

information in his head. If you could somehow quantify information the way we have digitally and add up how many bits of hunting information does a guy who shoots whitetails on his father-in-law's farm in Wisconsin, how many bits of information are

in his head? And how many bits are in a houndsman's head? He has gigabyte upon gigabyte more information in his head. Yeah, I agree. A trapper, a good trapper, you can't, when you talk about reading sign, the ability to read sign, and it's just in spatial awareness and having a landscape map in your head you can't get closer to it than a hardcore traveler yeah the anticipation that that trapping requires as

far as anticipation of what that animal is going to do just makes you think and experiment so much more than hunting does because trapping they are stepping within you know a two inch area you got you gotta say i need him to step right here okay archers yeah 40 yards is good enough a circle 40 yards yeah which means an 80 yard circle right circle with an 80 yard diameter right and we're talking about a circle that's an inch and three quarter yeah and i know some archers who are just badass woodsmen but try get that to a two inch circle and the benefit is with archery you need to be there when it happens right with trapping you don't need to be there when it happens true anyhow i i want to get to this point steve so i read your book about your bison hunt in alaska i mean i i knew you back when you did your show on travel channel and and uh i lucked out i drew a free range bison tag in montana for jan and it was

january 2013 i said all right i gotta go find a good bison book i read your book and you are either a stark raving nut or one hell of an author that makes that hunt and the danger involved seem way greater than it is, or you just have a death wish. I read that and I said, this guy is, he owes the world the tragedy if this is how he conducts himself out in the wild all the time was it is this just like a really good piece of writing or was it really that wild it was one it was like the most intense 10 days that i've spent hunting it's some of the most intense reading i've ever had but here's the thing here's i'll take a couple things it's like that's a different kind of hunt like the copper river hunt yeah is a difficult hunt and it used to be much more difficult because at the time i drew it all the land

along that river was inaccessible because it's tribal land. Now, they have a set access fee for people to draw that tag. At the time I drew it, there was no such thing. So you have this river and there's herds of animals that migrate a good distance, 40 miles.

They calve up by these glaciers in the Wrangles and they winter down in these gravel flats, these willow flats along the Copper River. And there's willy-nilly distribution. It's a humongous area with maybe 100 animals in it, spread out over a ton of ground. And at the time, you could not hunt the river corridor. All the huntable land, you could find them down below high water mark, on a gravel flat that was below high water mark and kill it there.

As long as it didn't go up. If it walked up, you're screwed. Or you could get past the buffer along the river by wading up a tributary stream because then you're fine, you're below high watermark to get into the hunting area. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy,

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meet. onxmaps.com meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. The year I drew a tag, they gave out 24 permits. Four guys killed an animal. The season's eight months long.

They find that most people don't show up. Once you find out, they send you a letter. After you draw the tag, they send you a letter. They used to. This is 2004. They send you a letter saying, okay, you drew the tag, but basically you're screwed because there's serious land ownership issues. You have tag but basically you're screwed because there's serious

land ownership issues you have to understand what you're getting into it's like there's major access issues there's a lot of barriers to this yeah i went and the minute i drew it i sold the story of this before going i sold the story of this to a magazine, outside magazine, where I was a writer. And at the time, I lived a very hand-to-mouth existence. So I'm doing a story that will offset my cost in doing this.

So I'm going to get like 4,000 bucks to do the story. The hunt, all everything in is going to cost a lot. I had to do it. So I find now when people say, well, why did you write a book? Why did you write your book? There's two reasons.

There's not the real reason, but there's this reality reason that oftentimes has to do with money. Right. This is pragmatic. I got to do it. money right and it just is pragmatic i guess like well because i was gonna write an article about it you know and i sold the thing why'd you want to do it well i'm very interested in buffalo i only write about what i'm interested in i got in as the story chronicles my interest in buffalo spawn was spawned by me finding a buffalo skull in the madison range here in montana in a weird place, like 9,000 feet above sea level in the mountains.

I went up having a genetic line extracted from it. I had it radiocarbon dated. The book tells this big story of buffalo in America. But the minute I found that skull, I was like, man, I'm going to write a book about these animals. I just don't know what the storyline is going to be. And then I drew that tag. So I had a lot riding on finding the Buffalo and killing it. And I got into situations doing that that were, and I chronicle all this in a very detailed

way. And when I was doing that book, because some people just fabricate whole cloth, and then publishers get in trouble and writers get in trouble. So when I wrote that book, they made a big point. I had to go over everything on maps, provide names for people for them to call. They just wanted to know. But I could take you up there right now and walk you through it. you see what I'm talking about, it would all make sense in that you're confined, in my case, you're confined to either being in the Dadina, Nadina, or Chetislina River. You're not going to get to Antel's River. The only way to get to Antel's River is to wait until it freezes, which is like the other

guys that killed Buffalo are hunting off snow machines. Going up the frozen river. Wait until the river freezes. Okay. And they're killing them in the winter when the bad weather has pushed them down into the willows. The letter I got from Fish and Game that says you're screwed points out successful hunters on this hunt. That's why they give you eight months. It starts September 1 and you have eight months.

The reason they give you that is because the river freezes. They say most guys that kill buffalo on this hunt do it off snow machines when the animals are pushed down in the river flats but you should be aware that river hasn't frozen in three years okay they hadn't been killing any buffalo off that hunt when i first drew the tag i was like sweet i talked to my brother i got a brother in anchorage He's got friends with snow machines. I'm going to go up in March, and we're going to go up. You got your low daylight, but you just basically cruise the river up and down, up and down until there you're standing and gnawing on a hunk of willow

out on a willow island. It got where it just wasn't going to be. And so I got this idea that I'm going to have friends bring me down, and we're going to hunt together. And I'm at first like, oh, we'll find one on the river. So I get my brother, two of our buddies who are avid rafters, and we get down, and there's three main river areas we have identified as being areas where they've been killed in the past.

We pass one, pass the other, get to the third, and have seen a set of tracks. These guys have jobs. They're not starving like you are. They're like, sorry, dude. I'm like, I guess our only option here is that you'll leave me here. Cell phones and shit, that's not going on no you'll leave me

here and you'll come back and get me like a week over a week from now on a sunday and i'll be back down here i have no way of getting up or down the river i'm on the copper river at the mouth of a tributary and i got a little patch of ground I'm looking at. You're not doing shit because I can't even leave the little island I'm on because I'll be on off land. And I know I'm going to write about this, so I can't do like a wink and nod. I could get checked into, or I'm also very vulnerable because I can't have a dead animal land somewhere I can't have it land. At that point, it's like I'm going to have to just start. I'm just going to have to put waders on and wade up this cold-ass river by myself.

And if I find one, and I did, shoot a 1,000-pound animal that I need to then move by myself down to where I can get it into my buddy's raft next week. And there begins like a whole set of problems. Right. So you had invited me. And so like, yeah, it was like,

it's not replicable, but it's like it all, it seems weird. Like the shit that I had to go through. But when you start factoring in like these decisions, and I'm constantly being egged on by a couple things. The rareness of drawing the tag.

They've since made it retroactively once in a lifetime. Once you draw a buffalo tag in Alaska, and there's some gravy hunts. There's like the Delta Junction hunts are basically shooting buffalo out of oat fields.

Once you draw a tag, it proves you once left that once you draw it, you cannot draw it again. I'm not talking successfully harvest. Once you draw, you can't draw it. So I'm now incapable and I was correct. It was literally a once in a lifetime hunt. And I knew that I wanted to write my damn article and I wanted to then write my book and

the way to do that was to kill that buffalo because i and just before that i read your i wasn't gonna leave yeah you had called that summer and said hey we should go to southeast alaska and do a sick blacktail hunt and then you and Dan came down with limes, I think, and we had to cancel that hunt. And then I read this. And a bunch of other hunts. Yeah. And I read that over the course of that fall,

I'm reading the book. And I'm like, if this guy takes this many risks just to write a freaking story, I'm really glad he got limes disease disease and i'm not up in the alpine of prince of wild island trying to survive with this crazy ass because it i mean looking back on it do you say what the hell was i thinking no no okay because as a reader it was just one of those great it was just one of those great hunts and and i'll say this man it's we had a conversation this you know on this podcast we had a conversation about um you know like the way how

filming or writing affects the experience of hunting. It does. It's become inseparable for me now, though, because I've been gifted the ability to do things and go places and have experiences that I just simply would not have ever had were it not for writing and filming. Because I simply wouldn't have had the money and time. I have, yeah, I got a lie, I'm not filming. But I've had a lot of other problems, like small problems,

large problems, dangerous situations that in large part I just was egged into those situations somehow by one by my desired because I got friends that never stepped foot near filming never stepped foot near writing they get in all kinds of situations but it does tend to I'd be lying if I said

it does tend to add a second layer of motivation it does I feel that do things and stay out doing them tend to add a second layer of motivation. It does. I feel that. Do things and stay out doing them because I almost wish it wasn't true, but it's true. It is. I may have, watching my buddies, and I wasn't as experienced in the

Out of Doors in 2004. I think it was to the 2004 hunt yeah standing on that bank in a strange place in alaska watching my buddies say like see you and like there's you know you got grizzlies saw a wolf right up from camp. It's like, yeah, there would have been a strong thing to be like, yeah, you know. It's just not the right year. But I was like, no way, man. Because as much as I'm a dedicated hunter, I guess I'm like a dedicated writer. Yeah. And I've spent a lot of time in Alaska.

I lucked out. My grandparents live there. I got three uncles who live there. And I go to some crazy places in Alaska. And the risks, just Alaska itself has inherent risks like no other place. Yeah. And then you are there alone and anyone who has

been on a free range bison hunt, like you and I have, and you tip one of them over, you walk up to it and say, what in the F am I going to do here? Seeing one at Yellowstone Park or seeing one at the local bison farm does not do it justice to when that thing's laying on the ground, it's cold, you're wet, and all you have is a knife. Yeah. And you add all those together and you did this in alaska i was just like no freaking way the day i killed that one i was camped on a ridge it's like a ridge but basically at the top of a canyon like the plateau above a canyon you know

seemed like a ridge but it actually didn't drop off the other side. But, uh, I was, it snowed. I was sleeping under a little red tarp, red on top, silver on bottom. I had that tarp strung up and I was actually burning Buffalo chips because they had wallowed. They had wallowed in that area in the summer. I had a little mound of them stacked up under my thing. I just had a tarp sleeping bag, Buffalo chips, backpack. And, um, woke up in the morning it was all like wet snow had fallen and i was gonna light up start my alcohol stove

to make some coffee i was like well i better take a look down in the canyon you know um before i start my stove up and i just grabbed my rifle and peered over, and just like there was the freaking herd of them coming down, maybe because of the snow, just single file. And there was a big cow, and they're up toward the top, and it was wet snow. And I shot her with a, I'm left-handed, I shot her with a right-handed.300 mag I'd borrowed from a buddy of mine.

And that thing started going down that wet snow. It's a long drop. A very steep pitch. And when it hit a stand of aspens or poplars, I mean, it shattered. I mean, it was like a bowling ball

hitting bowling pins, man. But just like smash! And just stuff flying everywhere. And I went smash and just stuff flying everywhere. And I went down and that thing was so entangled in trees. I couldn't lift its head up.

I remember I just started I was like, I'm just going to try to get a back leg off that thing. And I eventually dragged the back leg away. And then I cut a little gate to try to get some guts out of it. It was just it for three days. Wow.

For three days, I cut and carried. And that didn't even get it down to where I needed to get it to. I cut and carried just to get it down to the tributary. Wow. So of all of the crazy things that writing and filming has maybe pushed you a little further than you otherwise would have, you look back, is that one of the defining ones that you say, you know what? There's nothing else I could have done in my ordinary life that would have given me this experience, this sense of reward, this sense of accomplishment?

It was four. There's four trips that made. I guess there's four trips that made. I feel like you're interviewing me, Randy. But there's four trips that made. I'm just curious. Yeah. There's four trips that made me like who, when I think of like who I am,

as a hunter, there's four trips that made me who I am am that's one of them all four were in alaska okay uh the first was the first caribou hunt i went on on the north slope of the brooks range we just like pickup truck canoes me and my brothers just had no idea what we're getting into the second was the first time we went on a very unsuccessful doll sheep hunt. Just park a truck, cross the river, start hiking. Nine days, saw one ram about three miles away that was sub-legal. The third was a successful sheep hunt we went on where we killed two rams. Just self-guided. And then that buffalo hunt.

Are the ones that if I could give everything else if I had to keep four and give the rest away I'd keep those four. No doubt. Well I'll quit interviewing you. I'm overstepping here but I'm just curious because now that I reflect back on having hunted for 38 years and tagged along with my grandfather and my dad even before that, I look back and there's just certain events that I'm have done in my life outside of being a hunter

would have exposed me to that, would have allowed me to walk away with that perspective, maybe that confidence, maybe pushed myself to that edge of saying, what the F am I doing here? Yeah. But then somehow being able to pull out of that, and I've not been in combat, i'm you know i'm i'm not trying to equate hunting to what it's like to be having guys shoot at you or anything but of hobbies and activities or passions in life i can't think of anything that would have given me those experiences

of you know i could probably list a handful of them like you do. And so now when you get to be 50, you reflect back on that and you're like, well, shit, am I just kind of out to pasture now? Am I done with those really cool experiences or do I got more of them ahead of me? And you kind of get in this reflective mode at that point. And then you start interviewing the host of the show. Because you feel like you're a statesman those challenges and tough things that happen to you and the discomfort and the like rewards and all that that makes a special caliber of person i like all manner of people i hang out with all manner of people but when it comes to

like being comfortable around people in bad situations or like being comfortable around people in bad situations, or being comfortable around people in the outdoors, guys that have been through the military, mountaineers, and big game hunters tend to be people that I just feel comfortable around, that I feel reliable. Do you know what I mean? When you're with people and

just people you got to take care of yeah people that not only take care of themselves but take care of everybody else i remember a guy talking about some people he fished with and he said steve you got to wait in line just to wash a dish do you mean meaning like the dudes he hangs out with like if you want to wash dishes get in line buddy everybody wants to wash them dishes it's like that level of just like attacking problems yeah you know there's not many things in life that give i'm sure there's more than i'm naming yeah but lifetime exposure to those things seems to make the kind of guys you got to get in line if you want to wash the dish yeah and i maybe i'm biased because just about everyone i hang out with is a hunter and so i can sit here and share these kind of experiences

with them and i can have this very wow yeah i get that to its greatest detail and when i'm in the field with them i'm very comfortable around them there's some people where if you gave them a butter knife, I'm so uncomfortable, I think this guy's going to figure out how to cut his thumb off with a butter knife. There's just some of those people where you're like, I've got to get the hell out of here. I'm not going to have any fun if I'm with a guy like this. Usually, they don't have the background of the three types that you mentioned,

the military, the mountaineers or big game hunters and maybe there's a couple other similar yeah i'm sure there's more for me it's just yeah that's why i asked the question of you know how profound that hunt was that's the situation i'm in now is you know i got kids and my wife and i had this ongoing debate where i exposed them to i'm not negligent anyway but but I exposed them to what might be regarded as dangers by a big segment of the population. To me, it seems very pedestrian, not dangerous at all. But some people might regard activities that I expose my kids to as being not age-appropriate or being a little bit dangerous. And I'm always like, yeah, age appropriate or being a little bit dangerous. I'm always like, yeah, okay, that's a little bit dangerous.

He might cut his finger. The thing I always point out, we were having this conversation the other day, and someone's like, everybody keeps talking about my kid cutting his finger with his knife. I always cut my finger with my knife when I was a kid. Who didn't? Let's not act like that's the end bad. That's just a given.

He's going to cut his finger. Let's deprive him of the dangerous stuff, but at what act like that's the end bad. Yeah. It's like, that's just a given. He's going to cut his finger. But I'm always like, okay, let's deprive him of the dangerous stuff. But at what danger does that come? It comes at a huge danger, I think. Like, later on, it's like, you wind up with a helpless person. And there's other ways to get there. It's like, you know, I don't know if there's, like, some Bible passage, like, there's many ways to get to whatever. There's other ways to get there.

I'm not saying, like, if you don't hunt and fish with your kids, you're going to have crappy kids because it's certainly not the case. No. Because you can get there a bazillion ways. Right. But from my exposure, my experience,

where I come from, the way to get there that I understand, the way to get there that I can present to my children is very much that way. Yeah. Because them watching me write isn't going to get them there. True. It's just not.

Them watching me record podcasts isn't going to get them there. Them watching me flay fish, it's hard to explain. I feel as though that might. Really? My son felt a lot of danger when he'd see me balancing the debits and the credits. He's like, Dad, the way you really handled that. That abacus. You are the Charlie Daniels of the abacus, Dad.

Man, I feel comforted now. You've taught me the life lessons. Yeah. And it's a false, in some ways you might regard it as a false world now because in my mind the nature of subsistence has changed. For people who live anywhere outside of a small handful of locations around the world, the nature of subsistence hunting and fishing, I always say, I'm going to eat fine, dude.

You can take hunting and fishing away from me. I'm not going to tell you I'm going to starve. It's not like reality TV. If they don't get this, they'll die. It's just not true but i guess i've just in some way opted that i i believe in elements of that subsistence lifestyle right still pertain all right and the main risk of imminent starvation isn't there but there are tremendous risks of like character um fortitude understanding how to use stuff yeah how to use physical objects yeah my son went to college back in new york and i wondered man how is he gonna fit in back there

you know he's coming from montana we did hunt fish you know shoot whatever and he's going to an ivy league school that's kind of well it's known to be not like montana yeah and so i'm worried that okay he goes there how's he gonna fit in how's he gonna cope with the different environment and the things he learned in the coping skills that he brought from hunting and fishing and understanding how a natural world works, he blew through it with no problem. I was so impressed with how adaptable so much of what he learned as a hunter, fisherman, shooting, cutting his finger with a knife when he's six, shoot your eye out. I mean, he had a BB gun when he was like five. But he was in a whole group of people that were not exposed to that. And he kind of emerged from that not just unscathed,

but almost like a leader that they look to. Because I think a lot of people would look at the Woods' upbringing and say, oh, they might miss out on some sort of social aspect that they're going to get more if you grow up in a big city like New York. But that's not the case. It's like you still have to have all those relationships and communicate with people and work through all that, and you're probably going to learn it because of the hardships in an even better way, in a stronger way, where, like you're're saying he went there to that ivy league school and people are like wow

this dude like yeah he's strong and just his perspective of ability to look at a more complex problem and not need it to be sanitized down to little compartments of you know oh well this is a historical question no he i think hunters I think hunters as a general rule, people who understand the natural world can stand back and look at a bigger, more complicated problem with multiple variables like you see in the natural world and other people struggle with that. Yeah.

And I didn't really give it much thought until watching him go through that process and watching some other kids, his friends go through that process and watching some other kids his friends go through and do similar things in different places and i we'd have the discussions of how you fitting in there fine what do you mean you know like yeah well you're the one walking around with camouflage boots on an ivy league campus and everyone else is you. You got your Mad Bomber beaver fur hat on and your chopper mitts. I don't care. I'm warm.

He was able to put everything in just a very simple solution, very pragmatic. And so this whole idea that we got to kind of coddle everybody, back to your point of what is the future danger of removing all the dangers today yeah i think we end up with kids or they become adults that can't handle a lot of things that maybe some of us just take for granted i remember being out with uh i bought this this sit on top kayak called a big tuna kayak, very stable sit-on-top fishing kayak.

And I bought it very much in mind that I would fish with my boy. We moved to Seattle area. There's a lot of water around there. I just wanted something that I could get in the water. And the whole time, like, sit-on-top, the whole time, like, what if the kid falls in the water in the winter? And I was like, all my thinking was like, how he's going to not fall in the

water. And we go out. I got bundled up. Obviously, I don't let the kid near a boat without a life jacket on. We get out in the water. I mean, it's January, February, Pacific Northwest. And he was offended, but I later accused him of just basically jumping out of the kayak. He just like, all of a sudden, he's in there, and then he's in the water.

It seemed to me like he did some kind of barrel roll out of his seat into the water. He fell very much. He did not want to be in that water. And like, all of a sudden, he's just just there and then he's floating in the water. Uh oh. You know. And I haul him out of there. At first my mind's just racing.

You know. One, the wrath of his mother. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I didn't have him out of the water five seconds. I was glad he fell in. Teach him. Because I'm kind of like, one have him out of the water five seconds. I was glad he fell in. Yeah. Teach him. Because I'm kind of like, one, falling out of the boat.

Two, if a dude falls out of a boat in really cold weather, here's what you do. We're going to run through it right now so you understand the situation we're in, right? Yeah. And now I look at it like, the one thing i didn't want to have was to fall out of the boat now when i think of like highlights of the last year i'm like man you know it sounds perverse i'm like it was great when uh jimmy fell out of that boat because like look how much content we got out of that yeah like life's content yeah you know well i remember like another time we were

down in baja fishing and i went out in the dark to fish. And I told him a thousand times, like, stay here. Daddy's going to walk out in the dark. Don't move. You know, and I was going out to get a better cast. And I come up, and somebody's just gone. And look, he's, like, rolling around the tide, and I read out and grab him.

And I just kind of, like, drag him up, throw him in the shower. My wife's like, what in the world, you know? But, yeah, now I'm like, yeah, I guess's just kind of like drag them up throw them in the shower my wife's like what in the world you know but um yeah now i'm like yeah i guess i'm kind of glad because in some way i feel like it's adding layers onto him it is i i mean i think about the stuff that i did my parents would have been in jail and we would have been in foster homes in today's world in an actual dangerous environment yeah in my podcast that we were talking about the last week i tried to me and my cousins tried to build a bomb to blow up a train bridge when we're eight years old i mean you think about doing that now but it's one of i learned so much yeah i learned so much about how you can saw a shotgun

shell in half and pull the wad out and dump the powder in a paint can. And I mean, and that if you didn't direct the force a certain direction, all you did was blow a scour hole out between the two railroad ties. I mean, but the stuff that we did was so valuable as I got older in life. And maybe it's because of the path I chose later in life it was valuable. Maybe if I hadn't done all that stuff, I would have taken a different path and people would have said, look at that knucklehead grew up in that little town there. He doesn't know his ass from third base. Or how to blow up a railroad bridge.

But anyhow. All right, so let's – you mentioned it. Plug it. You've been working on a podcast. It deals largely in conservation issues. I'll let you tell me. Yeah, and it's thanks to your friends here at 0.0. We were on a bear hunt last year.

Giannis and Dan were filming me, and we talked about all kinds of things in the rain. Giannis, a hunt-to-eat t-shirt in for me. There you go. What do you call them? The Latvia lover? Yeah, that Giannis. Great t-shirt, magnate, hunt-to-eat. You got a hunt-to-eat t-shirt in for me. There you go. What do you call him? The Latvia lover? Yeah, that Giannis. Great t-shirt, magnate, Hunt to Eat. You got a Hunt to Eat t-shirt, Randy?

I do. Thanks, Giannis. Oh, really? Yeah. Did you give it to him? Yeah, he sent me two of them. Yeah, good plug here. But Giannis is not going to send you one.

You got to go to HuntToEat.com and buy one of his t-shirts. That's right. All right, so anyhow. So anyhow, they're like, you need a podcast, buddy. You're just like spouting off all the time. You're blowing and carrying on. With no one there to listen to. Right, yeah.

Just nothing but a few seals and two poor Camry guys. And so it took us the last part of a year to decide we're gonna do this and so thanks to these guys we have the other podcast that 0.0 produces called hunt talk radio i.e randy newberg unfiltered and it's just me and friends talking about hunting fishing growing up conservation politic a lot of politics, and probably got into marital advice one time, didn't we? You know, we end these podcasts where you get to have a concluding thought. Yeah?

Give me some, not that I need it, but give the listeners marital advice as you're concluding. Okay. I don't like to dictate your concluding thought. No. But if you see fit. Every camera guy I have is like in his 20s early 30s he's getting in this you know thinking of getting married like dan isn't dan getting married this summer all right and so they're all i'm gonna wear the pants in my house and i just about drive in the ditch when i hear him say that i'm like yeah right and sooner right. And sooner or later, it's like, all right,

you've been married 26 years, Randy. Give me one piece of advice. So this will be the concluding thought. I'm going to do marriage advice for mine. Okay. If you want a long, happy marriage, be more interested in peace than you are justice. You don't have to be right.

Being right is expensive financially expensive emotionally expensive and you don't get to hunt and fish nearly as much as the guys who let let them be right half more than half the time they're right anyhow so you know what chances are yeah it's not about this whole idea of justice. I'm right. She's wrong. You'll regret saying that. I proved you that I actually was. Yeah.

I mean, anyone who's been married more than about a month has been down that path. Yeah. And so I just tell everyone, be more interested in peace than you are justice, and all will be well. I have three pieces of barrel advice. Okay. Try to do them quick. Set a very strong precedent. When you meet a man or a lady,

live the life that you want to live 10 years into your marriage. Great advice. Now. Great advice. You will not earn back. You don't get freedoms. Exactly. the noose doesn't get looser it gets you guys who would start dating a girl they're all infatuated and you know it's like thanksgiving at their parents and you know instead of doing whatever and then a couple years down the road like well you know i actually, usually on Thanksgiving,

we usually fish steelhead around Thanksgiving because they're kind of coming into the rivers. It's like, no, you don't. We go to my mom's every year for Thanksgiving. But yeah, well, I mean, normally, it's like, live it, you know. From the start. Yeah, as much,

you're talking about dragging yourself away from mama. Drag, even at its most difficult point. At its most difficult point in the beginning, find it in yourself to drag yourself away from mama. Second piece of Merrill advice I have is... How long have you been married? My anniversary is coming up. I know.

Does that mean one year? No, I got married in 2008. Okay okay so you're seven years into yeah i'm giving advice not from like having with you know weathered time i'm just like okay just observations all right um you guys hear it's like cliche pick your battles oh for sure it's like there's just some stuff like, for instance, issues with my kids, like what they're doing when, who's going to wear it for holidays. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like what their clothes are, like what time we're supposed to get up

or what time they got to be. Just like, okay. Yeah, that's just static. And I'm not saying just the the kids but there's many issues like many matters of of how our house is structured how our time is structured matters of our social life okay there's just a lot of stuff like when you're going to be working when you're not going to be working um then it's like okay you know we're going to be moving okay so like the house we're going to live in. I know I have some input on this, but not a ton.

Drum rolls. Number three. Number three? How can I not remember number three? Oh, read the works of Cormac McCarthy. He never talks about marriage. But read the works of Cormac McCarthy and try to decipher his moral code,

which is consistent throughout his works. And read them and internalize Cormac McCarthy's moral code, and you'll have a better marriage. I'll have to read that. You're making a huge commitment for yourself. Am I? Well, like, is it? Thousands of pages.

It's not a picture book? No. Well, she's wrote many books but start with the border trilogy oh no and i'll sum them up because i'll sum up the way i've interpreted the works okay please there's a morality there where a lot of people want to live in a world that existed before they made the decisions that they've made. Okay. Yeah. You go like, oh, but you're still trying. It's like, I see it all the time after reading Court McCarthy.

I'm like, oh, no, no, buddy. You're trying to live the life that existed before you made a very willful decision to take a certain path here. Yeah. Abandon the notion that you, like abandon the idea that you're somehow going to get out of the situation you're in. Kids, whatever. It's like you're here now. There is no life outside of this. Stop pretending that there is. Yeah.

Yanni? Yeah, that's how long you've been married. You can have a concluding thought. It doesn't have to be about marriage. No, I'll give one about marriage, I think. 12 years. Okay. 2003.

So I got a couple under my belt. They've all been great. This piece of advice actually came from a fishing client of mine. I think I got her a few times. Her? Her, yeah. And she'd been in in a long long marriage and um she basically got dumped for the you know the secretary something along those lines and not the fishing guide she

not the fishing guide she didn't she didn't see it coming and it really beat her up and so she went on she embarked on this you know like it was it was a pull, but it was like a journey. But it was like this pull that she constantly kept up with, and she kept tallies and notes. And when she saw old couples, she always went to them and said, hey, what's the secret? What's your one little tip or whatever? And what she came away from with it all, the number one word that people always said, and everybody's like, oh, it word that people always said, and everybody's like, oh, it's love.

It's like, well, love is bullshit a lot of times. Love just does not have that lasting power. What does is commitment, and I always try to remember that. I'm committed, and I have to believe that my wife is also committed to me, and that always, no problems getting through hard times. Ronnie Bain, who has no shortage of wise observations, was talking to an old man one time that was speaking of his wife. And the old man said, you know, Ron,

I wouldn't give you 10 cents for another one just like her, but I wouldn't take a million dollars for her. And there's sort of a like a fatalistic sort of thing there yeah it's just like that's what i got well i i think any of us who get to hunt travel as much as we do gotta have something figured out and i think that's why a lot of people ask me for marital advice. I'm giving an elk hunting seminar and someone will raise their hand. How does your wife let you hunt so much? Yeah.

And so I feel like I'm going into this Dr. Phil discussion or something. And I told him the best deal I ever made in my marriage was when we built our last house in 2004. I told my wife, you can take 15% of the cost of the house and add it to furnishings. Whatever you want. I don't care. I don't care what color, what size, but I never want to hear a budget discussion about hunting ever again. Yeah. And she jumped on that like a rat on a Cheeto, man.

She was on it. Yeah. And so I hunt a fish. No, I get to hunt a lot but here's the thing though i love being married like oh me too yeah i love seeing my wife i love being married i love having my kids i like to hunt fish yeah it's like so yeah there's and i'm not saying that all everything that i'm arguing is on behalf of you know hunting fish more yeah but i think that like we're saying earlier there's certain lessons to be found in hunting and fishing and there's certain things where you know that's just like something

that's important to me and i've found a way to have it be that it's just like an integral part of the household even though my wife you know familiar with sympathetic towards but would never doesn't self-identify as an avid angler yeah you know doesn't hunt like well certainly fish but doesn't... If she got to list 10 things she is, Fisherwoman wouldn't make the list. Oh, gosh. I'm sorry to keep adding tangential discussions here.

No, no. Everybody's had their concluding thoughts. Randy. This is the longest we've talked. This is the longest we've ever had to actually talk. Oh, really, man? I'm sorry. No, no. I mean, you and me. Oh, yeah.

You and I, we had a long phone conversation one time, I remember. But yeah, it's good. Hopefully, we'll get to do it over a campfire and a fresh backstrap someday. Yeah, while we're all sick from something. Yeah, I don't know. You guys come down with more foodborne ailments. I was telling my wife about some of the things you guys eat because she asked me what I was doing with that bear I shot this year,

and I told them, oh, Giannis wants these hawks in this. She's like, aren't those the guys that get sick every time they cook something? I'm like, yeah. She's like, and you said you were going to go hunting with him sometime? Maybe. Yeah, you only eat anything that comes out of a package. Well, guys, thanks for having me. No, it was great.

It was great. I appreciate all you guys do for hunting. And the message you guys are getting out there is so needed and so valuable, not just to hunting, but how hunting can expand its boundaries to a bigger discussion in society. So I want the last, usually I'll say like, thanks for listening, but plug the podcast again. Hunt Talk Podcast, Randy Newberg, unfiltered. You can go to iTunes and get it produced by 0.0.

Thanks for letting me plug it in, Steve. Tune in. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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