The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 043: Seattle, Washington. Steven Rinella discusses stream access laws with Hillary Hutchinson, Ryan Callaghan, Land Tawney, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.

Episode Date: September 1, 2016

Subjects discussed: the mountain man Jeremy Laramie; trespassing vs wanton waste; halibut fishing in Alaska; King's Grant in Virginia; fishing waters that flow through private land; river left and river right; land owners posting notice vs user responsibility to know boundaries; pissing in boats; fishing in Glacier National Park; Jim Harrison's Wolf and Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire; punchlines, such as "tell em' how my dictate" that are funnier than the actual joke; high holing, low holing, and hole holding; and more.  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 meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right. First thing I'm going to do is screw Yanni over here.

Did you bring my perch flies? No. All right. Yanni, if anyone's been following this, Yanni will not make me my perch flies. And because he won't, I won't do any promotion for his T-shirt company. So I will not talk about the striking red hunt to eat, meat eater collaboration T-shirt that he's wearing right now.

Take that. Because he will not. You know what's a stinker about our hunting fans and our purchasers and buyers is that we make these colors thinking like, man, someone's going to break out of the mold of blue, gray, and white.

We've sold probably almost 100 to 1 blue to red t-shirts. People like blue. Are you plugging your t-shirt company right now? No, no, no. I'm talking about just buyers. The thing about the purge fly that's really driving me nuts is, like, I put a picture up of the purge fly, and people are like, oh, yeah,

it's such an easy tie, you know. But that's not the point. The point is that 20 months ago, I asked you to do a small favor, and you refused. What size hook do you want them on? I'll have to show you. Right there. Well, I'll show you in a minute. I don't know.

Unlike most people who have been fishing for a long time, I can't tell you. I can't look at a hook and tell you. I just know I want to see it. But that's not what I want to talk about. There's a thing I want to talk about. There's a main thing we're going to talk about, and there's a thing I want to talk about real quickly before the main thing. And then I already have a segue that's amazing, how I'm going to get from the one to the other. It's going to be like you're reading a david foster wallace thing when i hit my segue

um you'll see in a minute the first thing i was gonna talk about is cal uh ryan cal hands here cal uh what was the your favorite thing about the week you just spent at our fish shack like your your favorite thing that i did a little wrinkle oh so i went up to steve's fish shack in alaska and it was so overwhelmingly awesome i'm having a hard time picking something out but i loved the harpooning of halibut next to the boat yeah when we get a big halibut up because we're fishing small boats really small 16 foot skiff and 18 foot skiff, I would think people were looking at us funny when they're putting by us and they're purse handlers and stuff out there. Yeah.

And when you get a big fish in a little boat, it's different than a big fish in a big boat. So what we'll do is we get them up and then we'll harpoon them. And then sometimes kind of hog time and then drag them up into the boat. It's fun. Incredibly fun explain that how that harpoon works it's a detachable head on it so what i did is i went down to home depot i mean you can buy them but i went down to home depot and bought a a hoe handle like a replacement handle for a garden hole and drilled it out and put a piece of stainless steel uh doubt stainless steel rod in there and then there's a detachable head you buy where the detachable head slips over the stainless

steel shaft and that's connected to a cable and then you run the cable to a rope and the rope to a buoy so when you stick the fish in the gill cover, you pass through the fish, the detachable head comes off and forms like a toggle on the other side if you get a clean pass through. And then you just throw the buoy overboard. And you watch that buoy kind of go, ho-hoonk, in the water. Yeah, a good fish will pull the buoy.

The buoy's about the size of a beach ball, small beach ball. We didn't see the buoy go under, but we had uh the one kind of yeah 120 120 pound halibut will take that buoy way down you know and we've had it too where you stick them with the harpoon and the rod comes undone like the hook comes out and then you know you go you can disconnect from the anchor line and go chase the buoy and get the fish. It's nice because it pins those gills down,

and you have all this chaos of this thing coming up to the boat, and there's rods and sharp hooks and stuff flying around, and lots of dudes yelling, real, real, real, give advice. So if you hit the fish in the gill cover and get like a good pass through then what you can do is you just once you get the fish out of the boat he's if you hit him in the gill and his gills are bleeding they'll kind of bleed him out anyways but then if he's big you can bleed him and then take the cable and pull it tight and hog tie it around his tail so he's curled up then drag him in the boat and he doesn't go bananas in the boat and the whole hell with it was amazing because like the bleeding process it's

like almost like if you were to i don't know it's a ton of blood like major artery just i mean gives big squirt and then the intestines on a you can case sausage yeah it looks like you can tell him about making sausage casings i've never seen intestines on a fit like discernible intent it was i love the whole thing we opened up a halibut stomach were you there for that we don't know a halibut stomach and it had a seabird in it yeah i was there for that yeah he caught a seabird a diver it was i mean we were doing serious at first i thought at first i thought he had a porcupine because it was kind of uh it was digested partially but then i realized i was just looking at the um the bases of the feathers which seemed yeah so however the hell

you come into that either it died and sank or he grabbed it when it was down fishing um pulled a big chunk of squid out of one a lot of fish bones found a rockfish otolist in one's gut and then what else because so we got bait a lot of old bait a lot of salmon bellies we'll take a on pink salmon you're allowed to use the belly strip of a pink salmon so we use pink salmon bellies hooligans my brother danny dipped up a bunch of hooligans in the 20 mile river they run in the spring so salt the hooligans down and use people call them candlefish it's a very oily fish and uh all amazing information however it will be gone because nobody wants to keep a journal up there like this is all good stuff i think like it will improve well what i'm game yeah but what i'm going

to do though is i want to start take a one of our charts and start putting a pin at all known halibut locations all known yellow eye and all known lingcod locations so we also dove um one day we went out on a good we had a good low tide uh you know lunar cycles drive the tides but there's also a big influence from the sun so when the sun and the moon are aligned right you can get very deep tides and they're normal so you're like tide start at sea level a high tide would be a high high tide would be plus 20 so 20 feet above sea level but a big low tide is only like minus 4 or minus 5. We went out at a minus 3 tide and dove for scallops, rock scallops and cucumbers, and Cal was the boat tender for that. We got an amount of sea cucumbers.

Yeah, you got to Google these things, and they look like this really... It looks like a diseased male member. Seriously diseased. Yeah, like bad. If you had a diseased male member and looked at it while tripping...

Sign me up. That was the voice of Hillary Hutchinson. Oh, I want to do my thing, though. My transition. So, check it out. So, my fish shack's on the beach. Okay? Someone can come walking down the beach in front of my fish shack legally.

I have no right to go yell at them. Right? Correct. That's why we're going to talk about access. Huh? Nice. You guys like that? Mm-hmm.

As though dealing poker, we got five people here. I'm dealing now to you, so introduce yourself, please. Land Tawny, backcountry hunters in English. That's it? Well, what else? Father of two? Like hot tub and sushi anytime. Long live to the beach.

I do have two young kids, an eight-year-old and a five-year-old. Spent a lot of time outdoors. Just got back from the Bob Marshall. Spent my 13th wedding anniversary in the Bob Marshall this weekend. Really? I did. And just us two. You haven't done that 13 times in a Bob Marshall this weekend. Really? I did. And just us two. You haven't done that 13 times in a row, have you?

No. That's three years in a row. Do you know my brother renews his vow every anniversary? I don't know. He's only been married two years. Okay. That's going to end.

That'll probably suck. He puts the dress back on. No, they do not. And they redo the vows. Really? I mean, that's what they like to do. That's what they like to do, right? You know what's cool about where he got married?

He got married on his wife's ranch or family's ranch. Been there for a few generations. They got a family plot where the grandparents and stuff. Everybody's buried. Yeah, they got married right there. So you can see why they go back up there. Oh, for sure.

Where'd you go on the bob? We went in just outside of Seeley, not Pyramid Pass and not Morrell Falls, but somewhere close. Gotcha. And went into this uh lake up on tops about three and a half miles and you get 3 500 uh feet of elevation in that three and a half miles so you held it back in there we got four of them with a gaff no we uh hammered the cutthroats fam really and uh the first lake that we stayed at was dead it had a bunch of leeches

in it no fish and you popped into this one that had a bunch of leeches in it, no fish. And you popped into this one that had a- Like how bad leeches? Like big leeches? Like big ones, like that big. Wow, you think there would be fish because of that. That's why I think when we saw them, like all these leeches are out in the open, just like swimming around. And so we, you know, like it was like, that was a red flag that there was no fish in there.

And then we stayed right there. Because they'll parasite on the fish and kill them? No, the fish will eat them. They wouldn't be just swimming around? You're saying there's no fish there because all the bait's there? No, what I'm saying is when the bait's being that obvious, that means there's no fish there. They've got full rein. It's like bait land.

Right. I got you. So there was no fish there, but there was probably, I don't know, a mile and a half away, there was an awesome little lake where we had a waterfall that was about 40 feet coming off this sheer kind of rock face. And at that inlet, it was just game on. And my wife doesn't fly fish that much. And she just had a ball, and she looked over at me at one point. She's like, you may make a fisherman out of me at some point.

She caught a message. Did you guys bring your kids? No. They stayed with mother-in-law. So we had us two for three days, no cell phones. And, like, there was actually some romance, and we could have adult conversations. Yeah, you know. Man.

You're the best fisherman ever. Yeah, there it is. There it is. My provider at this lake. Grizzly Bear Tracks, like 40 yards from camp. Really? Yeah. I mean, were not there when you showed up and were there in the day or two?

No, they were there. They were probably, like, a day old when we got there which was the way i'd like to see him good i like to see him with the bear still in it well i like seeing bears but not close yeah all right man we saw some cool bears feeding that we were down fishing silvers one night last week and there's five or six bears in there incredible but they take turns because he's staking out this little riffle and when a fish would come out the riffle he grabbed it and he hauled it up in the bushes to eat it and his buddy who was just like basically taking a bath yeah like cool it was hot

his buddy's like cooling off in the pool and he's like oh my turn and runs over to the riffle one grabbed fish head in the woods next one would come to the riffle and it was uh we were sitting in a canoe and you could take your my fly rod and basically touch each bank from sitting in the canoe so it was really tight and there were ultimately six six black bears up there feeding my kid didn't like it he because the bears he kept thinking the bears are gonna get him he was a little nervous but at the end of the day he's like best day ever you know it was great i told him i'm in charge of being worried about bears i'll tell you when it's time to worry about bears and these bears have a lot on their mind besides you who's been around more bears me or you you yeah that was cute. All right. That was fun. Next. My name's Hillary.

Last name? Hillary Hutchison. And I live in Northwest Montana. Mother of? Mother of two. God. Hooligans. Teenagers, 12 and 14.

I don't know why I'm bringing up who's got kids. It's like, I don't know. No, it's good to know. I mean, it's important. It's all part of it. You do what you do for yourself, but also for them and and hope they enjoy it too at some point and if they don't you know now you hope they will yeah yeah no that's important it's good to ask especially you have three kids that's kind of the first thing you ask right yeah then you you know you can complain about your kids with other people yeah yeah you start saying well does your kid eat dirt no neither does neither does mine, I swear. We had breakfast this morning. There was no complaining about kids at all.

Yeah, none. So run down, lay out of me kind of your professional scope, your professional purview. It's not a word I use very often. Well, I don't even know if it was used properly, but I'm going to go with it. Yeah, no, so I'm a fly fishing guide in Northwest Montana. I guide for Glacier Anglers. I got to work with Cal over here back in the day. Oh, is that right? You guys work together? Yeah. Okay. Yep. But it's your busy season right now, right? It is a busy season. Yeah, for sure. But I'm kind of making the rounds doing some other things right now, even though it's a busy season.

I've been there for a really long time. And so now I've kind of tried to make use of that time in other ways and I'm trying to balance it a little bit but like I just got back from Washington DC to talk about how climate change is affecting our fishery and so right now in Montana across Montana you know we're in hoot out conditions you can't fish after 2 p.m the river's too low too hot too dry it's really difficult on the fish and so you know seeing a lot of different things happen around montana and you know we're talking about access that's kind of one of them but so i try to you know squeeze some other things in there during my busy season i have a trip tomorrow i got to be there 6 a.m get ready for a full day you're guiding tomorrow yeah yep unless this delays me what are you guys going to go after tomorrow uh tomorrow where what are we

fishing for yeah what we target yeah so our fisheries just cut cutties there's bullies in there the bullies are actually uh doing better this year than i thought they would be but um lots of mostly cutthroat is kind of what we're fishing for yeah it's good man native trout man god i get sick of that trout yeah no it, no, that's what people come there for. Right now, you know, it's in West Glacier. People are coming to see the last of the glaciers, but they're also coming to fish for native West Slope cutthroat trout. It's great. And now people are kind of at the point that they can say it by name.

Like a lot of times it used to be back in the day, people would get on your boat and they're like, so what are we fishing for today? You know, now it's like destination fishery. They know what they're coming for because it's they want to see cuts yeah they want to see it they want to catch them and i caught my first bull trout that guy right there wow you got lucky i mean i mean cal got lucky he kind of showed me how to do it man all right cal introduce yourself is that are you are you satisfied with your introduction? But you do a TV show.

Yeah, I have a television show. And you got to say the fly shop, too. Yeah, and I got a fly shop. You own a fly shop? I do, yeah. Yeah, I own a fly shop in my town. I'll talk about the fly shop first because it's kind of my favorite right now. Do you guys sell harpoon rigs down there? About to. I took copious notes.

Now I know how to make them. I don't have a Home Depot nearby, but I know a bunch of hoes. Plenty of hoes nearby. Train Depot. No, I, yeah, no, the fly shop is called Larry's Fly and Supply. It's called that. It's for Hillary, but it's L-A-R-Y-S. But the reason it's called that is this is the town I grew up in where my shop is.

And when I was a kid in high school in sports, we put our first name on the back of our jerseys one year. And somebody made a mistake at the printer and put a space in between the H-I and L-A-R-Y. So I went running out in the corner and said, hi, Larry. So all the old guys who come to my shop now, they walk into the shop and they're like, hi, Larry. Gotcha. So, yeah, that's why. Larry's Fly Shop. Larry's Fly and Supply. Yeah, I wanted it to be to be larry's bait and tackle but i figured people would actually come looking for crawlers yeah so larry's fly and supply it's uh in columbia falls montana and

then um that's cool yeah i run trout tv that's a good name that's a good name for a shop thanks man i thought long and hard about it not really yeah it Yeah, it's like, no, it's a refreshing name for a fly shop. Well, the other part, too, is it's a dude's name, right? Larry. No, I get it. I get it. That's a long time. And so I was waiting for somebody to come in and, you know, ask for Larry, and it finally

happened this summer. Finally, a guy came in. No, I mean, I didn't recognize him. Most of the time, if anybody in my town, you know, they get a discount and recognize him. It's like their shop, too, kind of a thing. But if they're a tourist and maybe they come in, they're kind of an asshole or something. I'm not going to give them a discount. So I come in and I ring this guy up.

And he leans forward and he's like, well, Larry always gives me a discount. What? Yeah. And I was like, does he? Larry's not here today. It's Larry's day off. You got me. Wow.

Yeah. That's awesome. All right. Anyways, Cal? Ryan Callahan. Get a run around with Steve and Yanni on occasion. And I work with First Light. We make hunting clothes.

Great clothes. Check them out. And I have no kids. You know how to say harpooner in Spanish? Come on. Fiscadoro. Fiscadoro. Yeah. Yeah. I got

that mixed up with your pinky Pinky Tuscadero. Pinky Tuscadero. No kids that you know. Oh. No, but Cal is, you can't look him up. You can talk about that if you want to talk about it. How to, how to.

I tried a dating website. And. And you hit a few dates. Yeah, I went on a couple of of dates first couple of dates in a long time and um i just kind of came to the conclusion that i got a lot of stuff going on and hunting seasons around the corner so i should probably just pump the brakes on that situation so you take the profile down no because it's pretty entertaining when you're sitting on the pot so yanni that's that's sexy image that'll help i can just see them all trying to figure

out what app that is right now all right yanni's yanni's disease c cucumber.com i'll do yanni's for him yanni's got a little maybe my damn flies that's how i was going to introduce myself. The guy that's too busy to make Steve's Flies. I've been shooting my bow. I've been riding my bike. What other recreating have I been doing? No fishing. Chasing the babies. Chasing babies around.

Father too. You cool on that? Yeah. Okay, now. What I want to talk about, I want to talk about stream access. And I'm trying to find a way to even how to address. Oh, I forgot about that. I did that segue earlier.

So now I'm trying to think of a good way into this. It's going to help set the scene. All right. So if anyone is listening to ever walk down the beach, okay, and you're walking down a beach, let's say you're even on a lake or on an ocean, and you're walking down the beach, and you're walking where people have homes or condominiums or golf courses or whatever on the land, and you're allowed to walk down the beach, okay? You're doing a type of legal access there where the water is not privately owned, okay? So land ownership on the ocean or, you know, in the U.S. typically, land ownership on lakes, oceans, large rivers extends down to the water's edge, and there's varying definitions on what the water's edge is, and you can kind of cruise along there.

The same way if you go down to the Mississippi River and watch on the Mississippi River, you will see recreational vessels, commercial vessels vying their way up and down the river with no regards to who owns the land on the banks. Meaning if I own both sides of the Mississippi River, I have no say over what goes on in that river. I can't yell at someone and say, hey, you can't conduct intracontinental commerce

up and down this here river because I happen to own the land on each bank and I'm declaring the Mississippi River as my own. Now, that's the Mississippi. Extend that down, you know, to go smaller and smaller, you have the Ohio River. The Ohio River, giant river, is a navigable river. If you own land on both sides of the river, you can't impede public access and commercial traffic up and down the river. As you shrink down, down, down, down, down, you get to sort to streams, rivulets, creeks, where at some point there arises a question of can the public use this waterway or not? Or with even it can happen,

we're talking about stream access specifically here, but it can happen with lakes too, is can the public have access to the littoral zone, the border between land or the seam where land meets water or the water itself? I grew up on a lake called Middle Lake in Twin Lake, Michigan. Now, Middle Lake, thankfully, I used to hate it, but now I'm mature enough to love it. Middle Lake had a public access boat launch. A fella could, when I was growing up, walk down the public access boat

launch and then walk all the way around the lake. and he could fish and wade and even use the docks along the lake because those docks were built out over public water certain people would love to come out and yell at you um and tell you and try to yell at you and say you weren't allowed there, but I knew enough to know that you were. And that was an access issue. So just because my family owned property on the lake didn't mean we could tell people they couldn't boat in front of our house or walk down the beach in front of our house. At my fish shack in Alaska, I cannot come out and start screaming and hollering at someone who goes and anchors their skiff in front of my shack on the cove I'm on because that's not my water.

That's the people's water. Where this all becomes a debate, where this becomes an issue that's being fought out in courts and around the country is particularly with streams that are kind of on the border of navigable or not um even though i try to stay away from getting too montana-centric with all kinds of montana people here let's talk for a minute about montana and i'll introduce and i'll kind of bring up a creek that i'm familiar with and sort of explain what i'm saying one time there's a creek in montana called lolo creek and it's named after a fella uh who i believe he was killed by a grizzly in there a trapper named lolo um he's buried somewhere around there too like yeah killed by grizzly his buddy buried him up there okay i don't know that story people argue about where he was buried i think someone thought they found where he was buried but he grew by lolo he's a french dude got a mountain got a town named after him got a creek named after him got a national

forest named after him got a peak named after him there's another brewery and breweries named after him a brewery named after another dude named laramie so a guy named laramie comes out to wyoming a mount would be mountain man wally mountain man comes out to wyoming gets killed by indians they stuff them under the they chip a hole in the ice of a beaver pond and stuff them down in there some bitch winds up with a town river mountain range i gotta do just that yeah so uh lolo creek one time i uh hiked over the hiked over the divide of the Bitterroots down into the headwaters of Lolo Creek with a pack raft. And on national forest land, inflated my pack raft during spring runoff and started coming down the river. And I remember that I was in what was regarded initially as a non-navigable stretch of that river. So by floating down the river, I was actually trespassing on whosever land that creek flowed through.

Then I magically hit a point at a bridge where that river became legally navigable. I was then allowed, I then entered a part where I didn't have to be paranoid, and I was then allowed to float through all the ranch land as long as I stayed below what's called high water mark. At that point, it was regarded as legally navigable. Because in the historic record, there is information to suggest that from that point down, people used to float timber. They would stick logs in Lolo Creek at that point and float them down to the bid route and use it for commerce. So the state recognizes that Lolo Creek from that point down is a navigable river meaning once someone has legal access into the river they can wade fish float

other f things as long as you stay other legal activities as long as you stay below high water mark meaning you stay below the bank of the river as described by the water's level at peak point so if it's a drought you can act you can walk in the mud as long as it is where river normally occupies during high water yes and the way that gets defined too is a lot of like it's vegetation change right like you have a definite vegetation change from like stuff that gets defined, too, is a lot of, like, it's vegetation change, right? Like, you have a definite vegetation change from, like, stuff that has water over the top of it so it doesn't grow very well to something that's really well established. So you can kind of tell that difference. Yeah. And it also, like, cut banks and various things. I'm almost done talking.

I just want to lay a little more basic groundwork. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be good to touch on, too, on where the whole definition of navigable comes from. Yeah, because there's commercial use. different no but that's the thing it's actually more of a federal thing and it's kind of like an accepted federal definition oh there is of the waterways it's actually the states that are more fighting over the the land which is kind of what we're talking here because it's the the access of the land you know if you're if you're talking about walking down it and not just floating it like the army corps of engineers have always been the ones that have kind of like set the

base level for navigable and some states define that differently by saying as long as you're doing anything it could be commercial could be fishing could be hunting or any sort of recreating but i mean you said it it's like like lolo, they were pushing logs down it, you know. But some sort of use like that, you know, deems it navigable. But the Army Corps of Engineers have been the ones that have kind of like set the definition for that. And then the states take that and kind of interpret it. Well, the states look at it, too, as at the time of statehood,

did we use it as a highway? Did we use it as the main mode of transportation to kind of build our cities and our towns and start to create that commerce? So if you're able to look at it and say that at our time of statehood, this is how we built our state, we used this waterway as the way to actually build our existence here,

then that's the way that they're able to win lawsuits in Utah, for example. Okay, I need to do something real quick. I need to point out, before people get too lost, I want to point out why this matters. Why this matters is all these definitions we're talking about pertain to you if you like to hunt and fish and recreate and float. They pertain to you because there are people out there,

wealthy, very well-connected people out there, who are trying to limit down, very aggressively try to limit down where you can go on the water. There are a lot of people who own land and they're like, why in the hell can Joe Schmo come floating down this river and cross in front of my land that is for me i don't like seeing it i wish they weren't able to come down and catch the fish that live in this river or whatever because it pisses me off i paid a lot of money worked hard all my life and now i got any old asshole can come floating down the river in front of my house and it gets a little more complicated than that too like for instance

you might you have people um who want to sell the idea of exclusive access on rivers and so they're trying to limit downstream access and access points that's why this kind of matters um let's go back real quick to the montana issue 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 sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law

makes it that they can't join. Whew! 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 that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

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Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Montana recognizes by law, right? It's recognized in Montana.

You have legal stream access. Yes. If you can legally get into a river, you're allowed to use it. But where is it becoming a thorny issue? So I think it goes back to something you just said, is I think a lot of folks that are moving into Montana that, one, don't understand the culture, but then, two, were sold that piece of property. Like, you are buying a piece of Montana. And so they're like, oh, I love that piece.

Three miles of exclusive access on. Which is, they aren't told the laws that are in place right now that explain to that that any, you know, asshole can go, like, you know, fish and float and wade in front of them. Just regular old poor people floating by. Me included. And so, like, when they buy that piece of property and then they see that person, they're like, whoa, wait a minute. And so I think they're being sold a bill of goods a little bit that they're not getting told the whole truth when they buy that piece of property. Like some big figures in this debate, people who are trying to limit access on things that people have always accessed. Can we say the names? Yeah.

Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab, Jim Kennedy. I mean, those are the two biggest ones. And he's part of the Cox Communications. Yep. He's got— Sailor Lane was the big— Sailor Lane I mean, those are the two biggest ones. And he's part of the Cox Communications. Yep. He's got, you know. Sailor Lane was the big. Sailor Lane, yeah, down off the Ruby.

And so I think that, like, these are billionaires that have lots of money. And so, you know, like what they tried to do in Montana was first they tried to change our stream access law. Now, the state legislature, you know, has all sorts of hearings that happen over in Helena. And, you know, I think medical marijuana was a big one not too long ago. And maybe 150 people show up to that medical marijuana. You start talking about straight- What are you saying? When they had a medical marijuana-

Like hearing. Hearing. There's 150 people that show up. That's kind of a big deal. 150 people who want to smoke weed and let everybody know they want to. Want to express their- No one shows up at something like that to say, I don't want people to smoke weed. There's plenty.

Oh, really? Oh, yeah. That's a whole other conversation. Because people get way more excited about wanting to smoke weed than they do about not wanting people to smoke weed. There's a culture in Montana that doesn't want it. There's a lot of people that show up to those things.

They would show up to be like, I don't want... Yeah, it's the root of all evil. I don't even smoke weed. Reefer madness, dude. But so, like, there's 150 people that show up to that, where you'd think there may even be more. But a stream access hearing comes up, and they can't even hold it where they want to hold it. They have to have it in the old Supreme Court chambers, because 450 people show up with pitchforks. And now that one is like 100 to 1, where you have 100 people saying, don't take our access away.

And one person saying, please, you know, we want it for ourselves. Oh, what's the pitchfork? And the pitchfork is basically saying, don't take our access away. And one person saying, please, we want it for ourselves. What's the pitchfork? And the pitchfork is basically saying, hell no. I mean, there couldn't be anything more. Saying, hell no, I'm going to pitchfork a floater, or I'm going to pitchfork an angel. He's using it as a symbol. I'm like, when the mob shows up.

Oh, so they didn't actually have a pitchfork. No, no, sorry. I thought it was a symbol. You can picture at Trump rallies, it all of a sudden became a thing to bring a pitchfork. No, no, sorry. I thought it was a symbol. Yeah, no. You can picture like at Trump rallies, if all of a sudden it became a thing to bring a pitchfork with you. Right. Like people, everyone would have a pitchfork. You just picture it. Leave your pitchfork at home. But, and so like 500 people show up

and so I think I just, it shows you how much this matters to Montanans. And so, we were able to stop them from changing any kind of laws. A while ago, they just, like the last legislative session, they had a bill that was forward that said anything any place that had an irrigation structure on it was now um going to become off limits to stream access and so any kind of structure that comes off of a river or off of a

stream that we have access to right now if it was anything was being used for irrigation then we wouldn't have been able to float it and we'll fall back off from it back off from it all right here's my here's my nightmare right now my nightmare right now is people aren't understanding what we're saying yeah that's fair all right there's really good examples that's what i want to talk about because i just want to clarify something first off the laws have traditionally been interpreted a certain way for the people and there are people we named a handful like like high profile cases would be land owned by charles swabb land owned by cox land owned by other individuals who own

land right now and they're trying to make it they're trying to say let's step back get our lawyers involved and see if we can find a way to prohibit people from accessing a stream they can now access. And one way they do that is trying to find legal ways to, like, legal wrangling methods. So the first thing they tried to do was legislatively. Second thing they tried to do was just legal wrestling that you're talking about. Like changing definitions or challenging definitions. Challenging definitions. It goes all the way to the Supreme Court.

I think one of the arguments when they were in front of the Montana Supreme Court was, one of the questions was, do you want to change the Constitution of Montana? And they said yes. That's what they're trying to do is change the Constitution, which you do by laws. And so there's the legal side. They've lost the legislative level. They've lost the legal language. What was the argument in the legislative level?

It's like a private property takings. That should have never been in the place. It was a takings back in 85 when it first got established. Gotcha. So they were saying, you're taking my private property by letting Joe Chaveau float down a river. Exactly. But if you look at the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Constitution has waterways as a means of travel. And it says every U.S. citizen has a right to these thoroughfares, basically.

They're a road as much as a road. Yeah, again, no one's arguing that if I go and buy some land in Missouri and Illinois, that I can shut down commerce on the Mississippi River. Right? Correct. You wouldn't get far. But it's these, you know,

as you get smaller and smaller and smaller, people start be like come on now this is ridiculous i could throw a rock across this river you shouldn't be able to come through it and to go back to you and jimmy and i sitting in the canoe that i mean you could jimmy six years old get underhand rock from bank to bank we had an incredible time on that river and there's a lot of people out there saying that would say you should have checked with the landowner right yeah all right go back though so they've tried it legislatively they've tried to legally like and the legally was changing the constitution yeah i mean that's what they'd have to do they just say like to hell with it if that's the case let's just rewrite the whole thing yep and so

they've lost both those and so now they're're trying to change the Supreme Court in Montana. So if you can't win at a legislative level, which is basically the people, right, you can't do it at the court level, now they're trying to do it at the Supreme, like at the highest level, so that they can get different judges in there that will interpret the law in a different way,

and so that we, stuff that we have now doesn't give way and so that we uh um stuff that we have now doesn't uh give us the protections that we have on stream access so you know and when you think about the billions of dollars they have and these guys they don't they're not used to losing right and so they're not going away and so like right now in montana there's a supreme court race that is vitally important to this whole issue meaning Meaning what? Well, I mean, so like, I think it was 5-2 last time that this was decided at Montana Supreme Court.

So this would make it 4-3 if this person got in. And that takes one more and all of a sudden we're tied. And there are people who would be sympathetic to the landowner side. Yes. And lots of money are at stake too. Here's a challenge for you. Act like you're a wealthy landowner.

Give me his argument. I agree with the real estate part of it. When you want that chunk of Americana for the right reasons, okay? Let's just say, you know, you want to get your family out there. It's beautiful. You've worked really hard all your life. You know, you've saved up and you really want that kind of chunk to pass on to future generations, right? So those are reasons to want to be a landowner in Montana.

And you're an honest, hardworking kind of person. And you're going to be a steward of the land. And you're going to be a steward of the land, and you're going to take care of it, and you're not going to even, like, develop it in rape and pillage, right? This is your plan. So you go look, and you find the perfect spot. And, God, a river runs through it. You know, is the spot marge we're gonna move out here we're gonna bring all the grandkids they're gonna come for christmas this is gonna be amazing

and then you buy it you get sold this this piece of of americana this whole view that you've wanted you've worked hard all your life and you get out there and shit there's hillary standing out in the middle of it looking like a fish hippie down there not only hillary but her two screaming teenagers exactly and all of their homies yeah so you know and you're like this isn't what i signed up for this isn't what i want what i want and there's people walking through my property and you're thinking that the river is a property and then the other thing that you start to worry about is, oh, my gosh, what if somebody gets hurt? I'm going to get sued. What if somebody gets hurt down there?

What if somebody drowns down there? What if I want to fish there later tonight and they've completely sore-mouthed all my fish? What if they make a mess? What if they take a dump behind that tree? What if all of these things? And you're like, this isn't fair. That's my backyard, right? My personal opinion about some of the—, and you're like, this isn't fair. That's my backyard, right? My personal opinion about some of this.

Oh, you're still role-playing? No, no, now I'm out of it. I'm out of the role-playing. I didn't know if the role-play person was good. Sounds like, man, this is a very good role-playing person. No, now, now, if that was me. But tell me what's wrong with that vision. Or your personal opinion about that vision.

Right. So that's the small-scale small scale you know person who just kind of wants their own chunk for themselves um but the the bigger problem also is those small pieces and those people add up to bigger picture of like larger landowner opportunities um and i'm not saying that just the smaller owner is okay. I'm fighting for stream access, you know, for the public. But all of those small arguments for those small five-acre plots that have little bits of river running through, kind of all are voices that can add together and can actually hurt everybody's access and everybody's use. So my argument is not just about access because pretty much everywhere you go, you have access, meaning you can access the river.

It's also use. So it's the way we use the river. Once you access it in a public place, then you can walk all the way up and down it below high water mark. And then it's our use. We need to be able to fish it. We need to be able to float through. We need to be able to anchor up. We need to be able to have an amazing shore lunch.

And some people define it as all legal activities. And all of the activities that I experience and that I do on public lands, we see as for the entire population, for everybody to be able to do. Now, what happens when we all do that together has to be out of respect, right? So you have to respect the land. You have to respect the private landowners. So if you've got private landowners on either side, maybe it's the same one who owns both sides like you were describing before. And this water runs through and we have public access at a certain point, but we've walked down or floated down, fished down, and we're going through their private property. property um the water is ours as a public to use the fish are all of ours to share and enjoy the rocks that are tumbling and moving all the time are all of ours there's stream beds and i want to

point i want to interrupt real quick just point out a thing the water is owned by the state the state doesn't relinquish the water right as it flows through your property right the fish are owned by the state and the state generally will not relinquish the rights of the fish that are living in the water that they own right that's flowing across your property exactly so now if you're the if you're the private landowner and you recognize all of these things then we have a great partnership right because you've still got your land and then we as fishermen and recreators are going to respect it. That means, no, you guys don't run your dogs up in there. Don't let your dogs go running up above high water mark. Don't make a big camp, you know,

that's going to potentially have wildfires that could go up into their property unless you're really certain that you're in an actual legal spot, you know, be really respectful of those private landowners as we use what is our right, you know, it is our right to use this waterway and have a blast, but God, you know, I mean, we have to really respect ourselves by respecting those private landowners. Comes with a bit of responsibility. Yeah, and you know, it's unfortunate because I hate to see people mess it up and and um it's one of the things i see happen is as we're floating along you know and if i'm guiding and and i've been guiding the same stretch of river for a long time you know up in the middle fork and niac as you

know cal if if you haven't been there in a little while you float now you see these big private property signs that there never were before because there are sections of private property along there and it's always always been private in a couple of these stretches, but we've always had the ability to float through. We still can. But when you see those private property signs, it's like, oh shoot, somebody must have messed up. One of us must have gone up there and picked huckleberries on their property. One of us must have run our dogs up there. Something happened to piss those guys off. Or maybe it's just fear maybe they they're new landowners there and maybe they're afraid that we're going to so it's important for two reasons we now can make it

right by making sure that we do the right thing now and then also be telling people that this is a partnership this you know you've got your land you worked hard for you know you own it we all together own this water and this fish and and the rocks and we can work together on it i sound like a diplomat but i'm not no no i like no i appreciate what you're saying i think it's important to point out what i when i used to butt up most uh sort of my crash course is stream access and my crash course and landowner relationships came when we used to do a lot of floating for ducks and geese okay and i remember early on when we got interested in floating rivers for ducks and geese like rivers that

flowed through ranch land i called i trust we're gonna get away from montana real quick here but this happened in montana i uh called fishing game and uh i was saying okay so fella can float the bitterroot i understand um we're gonna float down and jump shoot pass shoot for ducks and geese I was saying, okay, so fella can float the Bitterroot, I understand. We're going to float down and jump shoot, pass shoot for ducks and geese. What are kind of things are we up against? You know, like for instance, where I grew up in Michigan, I can't remember what it is, but you can't fire a gun within 450 or some odd feet of a structure on someone's land. So even if you're on your own land, if your neighbor's place is within that distance of your border,

you got to get written permission from that neighbor before you fire off a firearm, no matter what direction you're aiming it in. I was just curious, is there anything like that going on? I was told there that the only problem I can foresee is that you'd hit someone's house. If you hit someone's house with your shotgun, that's negligence. And that is a problem for you. But no, go for it. So we started doing a lot of floating for ducks and geese.

And one day we're putting in at illegal access on the East Gallatin, fixing the float through there. And a guy comes racing up to tell us that we had gotten our set he was the landowner and to explain that we were in a catch-22 he was saying uh i'm watching you when you hit a duck down and it lands on my land if you go to get that duck i'm gonna get you for trespassing if you don't go and get that duck i'm gonna call in for wanton waste. So watch it. And we always were real careful about not tipping ducks over on the guy's property. But that was the first time I ever started really getting into that use thing. And again, for him, I imagine he's motivated by a handful of things.

Maybe the guy likes to hunt ducks. And just on a purely selfish level, he's just kind of pissed off that he can't have this private supply of ducks. Maybe on another level, he's pissed off for watching guys send ducks sailing off into his alfalfa field. And they don't go pick it up because they're afraid to go trespass. And he sees some real wasteful activity and might wonder, why in the hell would you float such a small river that you can't go retrieve birds off of without trespassing on my land and then leave like crippled ducks laying around it's outrageous just because someone is i'll just point it out like like you did just because someone's opposed to stream access might be based off of various things i don't want to to sell it as this like rich poor kind of thing, which is tempting to do

when so many of the most vocal critics of stream access happen to be billionaires who are coming from other cultures into a place and being a little bit baffled by what goes on. A lot of the homeowners don't know. I mean, that's the bottom line, is a lot of them don't know that it's not theirs. They bought this and they don't know. And I've spent a lot of the homeowners don't know. I mean, that's the bottom line is a lot of them don't know that it's not theirs. They bought this and they don't know.

And I've spent a lot of time in Utah with my friends I fish with there kind of going door to door, even though we know we're going in a legal spot. And that spot's, you know, the Provo and the Weber have just been pushed down because so much public use has been locked down. And so now when there is a public spot and you go in there, you talk to the homeowners around it just to chit-chat with them and see if they know what's up. They know the laws, and every time it's appealed, then everybody gets confused.

And a new one-mile piece of water opens, and then that gets appealed, and it's shut down and open. There's a lot of confusion that goes on around it, like you were just saying with the show. People are like, ah, what's going on? Which is kind of why back country hunters and anglers is, is really focused right now on putting together one place where everybody can go to learn about what laws are applicable where you live.

Yeah. Which is a great resource. And segue. It is a good segue because what's that river in Virginia? Jackson. Okay. This is an interesting river. Now, I'm going to lay some groundwork. You tell me

when I mess up, and I'll tell you when I run out of stuff I know about. Jackson River in Virginia was a warm water river, warm water stream. They put in a big tailwater dam. Correct? Put in a dam that created tailwater.

Put in a dam that created a tailwater. What a tailwater is is where you build a dam and you build a big impoundment of water. Now, when you impound water or have a lake, the water at the surface tends to be much warmer than the water down below, as is known to anyone who's ever been swimming and dived

down to the bottom. And it gets real cold all of a sudden. A tailwater, instead of drawing, instead of releasing water from the surface, which is like what a beaver pond does, right? Where the water flows off the top of the beaver dam. A tailwater releases water from the bottom of the water column and it sends out cold water. What a tailwater does by sending out all that cold water is you create a cold water fishery, and it allows cold water species to flourish. Trout like cold, well-oxygenated water.

Tailwaters generally are great for trout because you're sending continuous cold water year-round. It's not sun-baked and all heated up. And you can have places like the White River in Arkansas, the Jackson River in Virginia that will support great trout fisheries because the fish are always getting nice cold water, no matter how hot the weather is. This river had never had a stream access debate. It was just a river people could use. The tailwater came in and it also became a destination trout fishery. Landowners along the river were like, man, it would be sweet if only I could fish these trout.

Bummer that all these other mofos can come down here floating and fishing. They got to digging around and realized that when King George I and King George II did some land grants back in the old timey times, in the 1700s, they'd be like, man, you're a great guy. You've always done great service for us. Here's a gigantic hunk of land. This is pre-US. This is when we were a colony. They would, that when he granted, when King George granted chunks of land,

this sort of initiated the idea of private property ownership in the U.S., he pointed out that you own the whole damn river and everything that's in it. So based on that, now that there's something in there that I really want, based on that, we're going to get together and make a play to say no one can access the Jackson River of Virginia except private landowners along the banks. It's so complicated, if I understand this correct, that the fishing game in Virginia, rather than trying to clarify the issue, it's so complicated that they just alert anglers and floaters to the fact that you may encounter landowners who are making certain claims we don't know what to tell you break that all down well and i think it's it's gone like there's been a lawsuit over it there was actually a kayaker who got like busted by one of these landowners and they said he was

trespassing so they there was a lawsuit over that to try to fine him for trespassing and uh this has only gone from what i know it's only gone to one level um of judge and that judge decided with the landowner and so right now like that area is closed down to to fishing to floating to anything and so i like to me though steve like that, that's what we were trying to get away from when we created America, right? And, like, when you think about, like, we established this country to where the water belonged to the people and the wildlife belonged to the people. You've already, you know, we've talked about that earlier.

And, you know, the state kind of is our manager of that. And to me, that flies in the face of that. And so I think if somebody challenges that up to a higher court, I think we will win that one. Because when I start hearing King's Grants from the 1700s, I'm like, that's what we revolted against. That stuff doesn't matter anymore. Because if it did, then the East Coast would look a lot different

than it does right now. KG doesn't get to do that in America. No, no. So to me, I think that one will be challenged and we'll win. But right now, it's't get to do that no no so i like like to me i think that won't be challenged and we'll win um but right now it's definitely a confusing piece yeah as far as the the what the way you know the european system and the american system so the european system um goes back to like think of robin hood right robin hood was Hood was a poacher because the king owned the wildlife and Robin Hood would go out and hunt.

You could get in a lot of trouble for hunting in England and other places because wildlife only belonged to wealthy landowners. The U.S. is a direct repudiation of that system where we have an excellent arguably, and I'm not just

saying this because I'm American, we have an excellent arguably and i'm not just saying this because i'm american we have the best wildlife management system in the world which has been proven again and again to work very well and we have what's called public ownership of wildlife. Wildlife is held in a public domain, meaning that if a trout is swimming in a river, it doesn't matter whose land he crosses. He remains the property of the people of that state, the public. If an elk jumps, if an elk is in Yellowstone National Park and he jumps a fence and goes onto National Forest land and he jumps a fence and goes onto National Forest land and he jumps another fence and goes onto BLM land and he jumps another fence and goes onto a private ranch and jumps another fence and becomes into a municipal park,

throughout all of his wanderings, he has remained a possession of the people. Now, you might be able to control access to that elk, but you never take ownership of that elk. So one thing that's at stake when we're talking about access to waterways is it's a way, it's a tool by which people can come in and try to subvert our system and try to take ownership of wildlife resources that belong to the American people. It's just one of many tools in a tool bag that you can use to claim something that traditionally is not yours to claim.

Now, tell me about another river. There's a good story from a Missouriouri river right not the missouri river but a river well i mean i think the like the story in missouri is about all their rivers i mean i think you know a lot of people think that this is just a western issue yeah that's what i'm trying to get away from because yeah growing up in michigan i remember one time when i used to run mink traps i was at cedar Creek where M120 crosses Cedar Creek. And Cedar Creek is a navigable river.

And I remember having a DNR officer, basically a fish and game officer, come and tell me that I had to pull my mink traps on the upstream side of the bridge because downstream side was Manistee National Forest. Upstream was private ownership i would jump into the creek on the manistee national forest side go underneath the bridge and waders and then set mink traps in the water on the upstream side which i knew to be legal he was confused about the issue and told me that i wasn't actually allowed to do that i had to stay on the downstream side even though it's a legally navigable river.

So, what was my point there? Well, I think what you're trying to say is... Oh, that it's not a Western issue. It's not a Western issue. So here I am, a dude traveling in Michigan, having the same conversation, but for some reason it's become like... I don't know why it's become a West...

Why it's deemed... Why it's perceived as a Western issue. When we got like Virginia, and we got what you're going to talk about. Yeah, so Missouri, I mean, they've tried to do the same thing they've tried to do in Montana, is change the laws. And so in Missouri, you do have the right to weigh it up to the high water mark in Missouri.

And so there's been two attempts now at their legislature to repeal that and change the law. And so the people, once again, in Missouri, the show me state, stood up and said, no, not here. And so that said, these folks aren't going away you know i mean that want to kind of take this this stuff for themselves and so i think that's one of the things is like this vigilance like i mean it i think and we've talked about this before on on the whole public lands divestiture issue is that we're a very young country and there's been folks trying to take things for themselves ever since roosevelt kind of you know started this whole you know idea of the land belongs to the people and and there was stuff that happened before that too but the reason that we still have public lands and public hands

and the reason we still have stream access is because countless people have stepped up and said that's not that's not what america is america was established in a different place or in a different way just how you described it, how it's different from the European model. These things will continue to happen, but in Missouri, yeah, there's definitely an attack on stream access and they were able to push it down,

but that doesn't mean it's not going to come back again. KL, what do you think about all this? I got a case in New York State. Oh. Okay. This information comes from a beautiful, young, smart attorney in Helena, Montana. They used to date? Yes.

What happened there? Like, why did that relationship not work? Oh, like I said, we just, you know, grew apart. You know, part of it is, yeah, this bird dog that she didn't train to hunt birds, and I just couldn't wrap my head around that. And that caused a rift in your relationship? Yeah, things kind of separated from there. And you called her up and sent her some sort of message?

Yeah, so she did some bird dogging. Is she married now? No, no, she is not. When you guys text, is there any innuendo? Always, but that's just kind of her sense of humor. There's no chance it's going to get going again. I don't think so. I think I've burned that bridge down.

Whatever she is helping right now. Let's think about that. She's an environmental lawyer. She wants halibut. Typical. What's the New York State deal? Okay, so 2013, access was challenged in New York. A man's canoeing down a navigable waterway.

He has to portage his canoe. That portage takes him across land that is posted for no trespassing. Landowner... Because of a beaver dam or whatever. Yeah, a log in the river, some sort of obstruction. And so the landowner sues, or, you know, tries to ding this guy for no trespassing. He brings up the navigable waterway in the u.s constitution says that you can use uh land even above the high water mark to get around obstructions got you to navigate this thoroughfare essentially in 2016 new york supreme court

declines to rule so uh what happens is, since they declined to rule, the predetermined laws stand, which means you can trespass on somebody's land to continue your travel. If a log or a beaver dam or whatever. Right. You can't hang out there. You just have to keep going. Correct. Yeah, I read this morning that portaging, because it falls under something you would do while boating, hunting, fishing, whatever, that would then be encompassed in using that waterway. And so it would fall under legal use and not be trespassed.

The right to navigate includes the necessary incidental use of bed and banks. Oh. Now, Yannis, explain, like, when you work, because every state's different, explain the situation in Colorado. Is that where there's weird shit, like, you can float down the river, but you can't set an anchor? Yeah.

Explain that. That is weird. Well, and I think that's where it does get really tricky, and which I was talking about earlier, is because they have the Navigable Waterway thing figured out, where they can't put a fence across it and keep it from going down it. But Colorado, the state, has chosen to say that the land underneath is owned by somebody and not by the people. Just the water is owned by the people. Not the vessel holding

the water. Exactly. Even though all these rocks are tumbling down. Yeah, I never thought about that, but you made a good point. It's like that riverbed is just constantly changing. Like your rock is on the neighbor's rock or the neighbor's property, you know, every year. Yeah, I'd be out there being like, give me my rock back, you son of a bitch. That thing rolled down to your land.

So no, man, we I don't know if you guys had to do that guy in here in montana but in colorado i mean there's this trick you do with your raft is you'd pull him behind you would know every single rock that had just enough like reverse current where you could pull in and you'd have to re-rig everybody's flyer you get way too far ahead explain the problem oh yeah so you're floating down these rivers that you want to fish. And it's private land on both sides.

Both sides. And the bed. Give me some names of rivers. The Eagle River, the Colorado River, the Roaring Fork. It doesn't matter.

Any one you're floating in that state. Big famous rivers. Yeah. If you're going through private property, you cannot anchor. You can't pull over.

Can't wade. Can't wade. Can't get out of the boat you can't even stick your boat onto a rock to stop you can't push pull can't push pull you can't grab willow branches hold yourself in place nothing you just you and the water that's it that's the only so you can't beach up on a rock that's out in the river. No. Stress best. Because you're using that dude's rock. Yeah. So what we would learn how to do is you'd find just the right rock that had just enough

eddy for like a 12 and a half foot super puma. And you'd pull in there and you'd have the guy actually in the back looking down and be like, let me know if I'm bumping that thing. And you'd sit there and like, just do these little feather strokes and drop your oars underneath your knees. Tie, tie, tie, tie, tie. Put them back. couple little feather strokes tie tie tie tie tie why can't you look up on the bank and there'd be the dude on the atv just sitting there watching just waiting and he knew who i was you know i mean he just he'd have the cell phone and be calling the shop you know yeah he's on that rock again just passing you pee off the boat they

have to pee off the boat? Yep. Oh, they can't climb up on the bank to pee. You know, when we were fishing this week, our boat was so filthy, I had my boy peeing right into the boat. I was like, it ain't going to hurt anything now, man. This boat is so full of slime. Drink some more water.

Here, we need to clean this thing up. First, I had him peeing over the edge, but it was so wavy, I'm afraid he's going to fall over. Then I had him peeing in the bucket. Then it was so wavy, I'm afraid he's going to fall over. And I had him peeing in the bucket. Then towards the end, I'm like, just go ahead. There's a lot of very defined systems up there for the fish shack, as you well know. And whenever one of those systems falls apart, it's so apparent as to why you bring X amount of buckets, a cooler, scrub brushes, stuff like that. I noticed one time he was whizzing in the boat and Callahan picked up a perforated

basket full of shrimp tails and moved it up to a seat. We had about three inches of muddy guts, blood water in the bottom of the boat. And he's like, hold on, I gotta pee. Steve and I are cleaning shrimp right there. And it's a laundry basket full of the shrimp tails.

No, it's not a laundry basket. A perforated basket. It looks like a laundry basket. Yeah, but it's not. They sell them. It's a fishing basket. Really? Me and Yanni found that one beachcombing.

Oh, nice. But, yeah, it looks just like a laundry basket. Yeah, you have never found it. For the folks at home that do not know. It's a laundry basket. No. Yes. No. Yeah. It duty. You have never found it. For the folks at home that do not know. It's a longer basket. No. Yes. No.

Yeah. Anyhow. It's like six times more expensive. He whizzes into this six inches of filth and Callahan then picks up the shrimp

and tells like, oh, that's what's going to gross you out? It's not that it's full of rotten. You make concessions. Okay. So,

what was I talking about? Oh, so you can't get on the bank and take? Oh, so you can't get on the bank. Yeah, you can't get on the bank. But I was going to say it was always just like a minor issue on most rivers. But as soon as like the Blue River below Green Mountain Reservoir, giant private ranch down below there gets a bunch of giant fish stocked into it that are fed and like words getting out how are they stocking and feeding fish they do river the gunnison's like that too the upper gunnison well

so how do they know the fish aren't going to get away like in texas they got that shit down i don't think they care i think this is my private stock it they can you can feed fish in a river is that i don't know i don't know about all places i don't know if you can do that in montana or even here i've never heard of that no the bucket brigade kind of thing in glacier national park is largely frowned upon yeah do not plant fish in my zone yeah i imagine not it's a bummer on that you know on the first time ever fishing the gunnison, I expected to be a madhouse.

I was down there visiting some shops for work, swung in to fish with the old yellow dog. Who's that? Well, literally my old yellow dog. Oh, your dog. Oh, okay. I thought it was a guy. I thought it was a guy I'd never heard of before. No, no, no.

And I'm fishing away, and everything's great, and then I catch this fish that is so obviously a like a pin raised you know super round nose nubby little yeah just that stalker look pellet head yeah pellet fed you know i'm just like what is you know kind of killed i had no idea so is that stuff this guy or his manager on this ranch, when they were trying to push back a little bit, they would know, because you can only float it at certain levels. Before you just, there was wing dams, all these river improvements to make pools. And so when it got too low, it was just too dangerous to drive the boats over these dams.

So they would know, like, okay, the river's coming up. They're going to release water. There's going to be a a bunch of fish a bunch of guys coming down to fish it they would just power feed these fish for days ahead of time so that when you float it through there i mean you can see them all sitting on the giant giant they don't want to eat they're all filled up totally full bellies you're kidding me the story i like is this dude uh this was in the bad country hunters and anglers magazine this dude had was selling what state was this in he was selling exclusive access on a stream so there's like a developer who's selling exclusive access on a street that was that was virginia or that's virginia no it's not no it's a street. That was Virginia.

No, it's not. I know that was happening in Virginia too, but maybe it was Utah. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. 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. Whew.

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slash meet OnXMaps.com slash meet welcome to the OnX club y'all I should know that i felt like that was on wasn't it the provo or a tributary to the provo where there's like that big development yeah yeah yeah for sure or now they're suing because he yeah so he sells he's he's got a developer gets a chunk of property and he tells people

you're buying exclusive access turns Turns out it's not. It's public access. So the people get pissed at the guy they bought the land from. The guy they bought the land from, the developer turns around and sues some other dude for having messed this whole thing up. I mean, that's the whole thing at Victory Ranch up in Utah. I mean, it's a development, right? This is the place. Yeah.

Tell this story. Well, I think one of the main things is if it's a development, you aren't doing your own research necessarily on that area. It's almost like in a lot of these kind of large subdivisions, you have these amenities that are just described to you, right? And that kind of, to you, is one of the amenities. If you're doing your own research, you look into what river you're buying your property on. But if it's a big subdivision,

you just know it's kind of one of the things. Like, for example, we also, there's this, like, big orchard over here, and, like, we're going to put, like, this big group swimming pool in the middle, and, oh, there's a river here. There's all these amenities, right? And so i think a lot of these people um were kind of told that this is just one of those basic amenities that you get as part of it and that was sold to them as exclusive um access and use but then when it turned out not to be then they're like well let's make it so i got you you know and they're like we can't give you your money back wait wait let me

call my lawyer yeah and so they start to find out it's not and it wasn't like just going quietly into the night it was like okay well we're gonna fight for to make it as we said otherwise what how much value is that reducing and whatever it was that they purchased how much of that was because of the river right so they can't like give their money back they already bought they already have their landscaping out, they already whatever. And so now instead of just saying, actually, we messed up, they're going, let's change the law and let's make it yours.

Yeah. What percent, now as a fishing guide, what percent of time do you spend in your terrain where you guide? What percent of time do you spend fishing water that is flowing through private land? Well, 100% of the water on which I guide is public access, public use. So it's the Middle Fork and the North Fork of the Flathead. But River Left on the Middle Fork, fork for example has a significant amount of um privately owned property can you explain river left so river left is as the river is flowing everything on your left so even if it doesn't matter your boat around yeah so if you're looking upstream river left is

going to be on the other side so river left is always left side as the river flows river right is always right side as the river flows so on the middle fork of the flathead, river right, 10 feet above high water mark, technically is Glacier National Park. So that's all national parks. So you know that that's all public land. You just know that's what the boundary is as a professional guide and hopefully as a private floater as well.

It's not a permitted river, so anybody can float it. And then river left is going to be state, federal, and private land. So it's split up just in different zones based on kind of state ownership, and it's for service, and it's also privately owned. And it's important to note in Montana, the landowner does not have the responsibility to post that land. It's the user, the person, that has the responsibility to know yes where those boundaries

are and where you are as a human being that's good that's good shit to get into right there i want to talk about that and that's that's complicated but but it's that's huge that's what i was saying before it's our responsibility as the user to be well educated otherwise we're going to get those big bright orange reminders on the trees and i hate floating down the river guiding my people and that's what they see, you know, private property, keep out, dah, dah, dah. Because if those are gone, it looks like this, you know, beautiful place that we all know and love. And you take your photo and, you know, carry on. And it's great. And you, and you point out, and you, you believe that a lot of those signs are there because of us public users not respecting law and not respecting people.

I haven't seen it. I haven't seen disrespect really on the river where I work. I think locals are great. I think the visitors are great. I think the visitors do a lot of homework. The biggest way they could do that is by going with guides, by having somebody show you how to do it, and maybe next time they'll come back they can do it themselves.

But I think a lot of it is um somebody either did something wrong or there's the fear that something bad will happen there the private landowner is afraid that um somebody's going to come up on their property and something bad's going to happen or maybe they're going to sue them which isn't out of uh which isn't unreasonable yeah they're they're going to somebody's going to get hurt and in their sue home or else maybe they'll break into their house. I mean, people love to have that back deck open, you know, facing the river all the time. Somebody going to come in and steal my shit? You know, can I let my kids play out there? And there's all these people coming by. Is that even safe? You know what I mean? It's that typical fear in America that we have. And it's hard for me just

because I've grown up there and I've worked there for so long to see that change happen and it's like oh man no it's just me hey you know it's cool I'm not gonna hurt you you know and so I think that's just kind of one of those growing things we see in America is a fear and a love for that to stop and we have to be the ones to stop it just by being really respectful of those private landowners for sure so to answer your question about like who's um when when i guide is it private property is it is it um state or federal it's really cool that it's a mix like cal said it's up to us to know the rules and where i work it's really cool that it's a mix now on the north fork of the flathead the boundary goes right smack dab down the river um in the middle of the river deepest part of the deepest channel exactly so um if you're floating the river. Deepest part of the deepest channel. Deepest part of the deepest channel, exactly.

So if you're floating the river, river right is going to be that mix of state, federal, and private land. River left is going to be all park side, Glacier National Park. So the Middle Fork and the North Fork form the two boundaries. The boundary is right smack dab down the middle. So that's why we tell everybody to get a fishing license. But the river is administered the same way, or you actually can't fish one side of the river without a certain license? No, no, you can fish both sides. It's hysterical because that's

why in Glacier National Park you don't have to have a fishing license. Actually you can fish in the park without a license and it's free. But we make everybody get it because same thing like you were talking about the ducks. You catch a fish and then on park side where it's free or whatever and it swims over to the other side and like you landed on the other side you know up for debate a little bit so everybody gets it everybody has to get a fishing license and we try not to park you don't really um camp river left on parkside because you don't have a backcountry permit you always camp river right where it's for service um because you know that's a forest service camp even if it's not an established camp you can camp there without

it being an actual campground but it's got to be on the public land yeah but then i used to fish smallmouth uh and a lot of other things on the delaware river which is a wild and scenic you know a designated wild and scenic river, flows between, in the stretch, isofish, flows between New York and Pennsylvania. Wild fish and smallmouth be caught over the years, nine different species of fish out of that river. But anyways, those two states came up with a collaborative agreement, which is pretty nice.

I wish it happened more, where you could hold a license from either side and fish both sides. And they came together and made a regulation with bag limits and methods and seasons that made it so that river was jointly managed in a way that made sense to people. When I used to live in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, you have a gigantic river to St. Mary's River, which one side's the U.S., one side's Canada, and there was a line running down there that was not easily discernible, and the seasons and structures were very different on each side of that line. It would create a lot of confusion for people out in boats.

There's a story a buddy of mine, a guy who works at Benchmade, was telling me about a bass fisherman who's in a tournament in the Mississippi River. And it's very confused, like what states waters you, and he's worried that several different states come together. And one of the states, you can't high-grade fish, meaning if you catch a fish and put in your live well and you got a limit and you catch a bigger one you turn one of those fish out and put the bigger one in so unknowingly he crossed the line and high graded a fish

in another state and and broke a state law and wound up losing some absurd amount of money because it was a fishing tournament over that little differentiation there. And it does get a little bit complicated. I was always glad, like, I thought it was cool that Delaware did that, but that's usually not the case. You can get into some really confused shit when one side of a bank is owned, you know, is managed in some way, and the other side is managed in a different way. To the Colorado point, I was just trying to think about what it would be like to not be able to

touch the rocks in the beds and stuff like that where I guide, because I'm out of the boat all the time, not just, you know, to fish it right. You know, sometimes we walk the boat, sometimes, you know, it gets so skinny, I don't want to use my oars, I don't want to bang rocks or whatever. And so, you know, I'll move the boat myself. But also because being stewards of that river means we have an awful lot of things we have to do to help. We pick up a ton of trash, for example. You know, get people out of a jam. Like I'm pushing boats off. You remember Callahan.

Like all these people coming down, they get stuck on rocks themselves. You're pushing them off rocks all the time and helping people out, giving people directions. You know, what happens if you see trash? You're not allowed to go pick it up because you're afraid of getting in trouble you know i mean it just seems weird to not be able to be an actual steward of the entire piece that everybody's got this own little bubble that they go into it's not it's not the right way where i'm at i'm at it with with some of the other things i can totally i totally understand the other side of the issue.

I understand it because, like I said, I grew up on a lake that had public access. I own a place now that has it's on public access waterway. I understand both sides of the issue because I understand the feeling of

man, does it suck that on the lake where i grew up when the bluegills come up on the beds in early june they get hammered by dudes who walk down that access i understand you'd be like man i should call up and do a little sniffing around and find a way to make it that they can't come and do that. Because people are just like that. I think that we're like that over fish and game where I imagine that the earliest wars we fought as our species, definitely the earliest wars we fought in this country

were wars that we fought over access to fish and game. Who's hunting grounds or who? When you go, when Lewis and Clark were traveling through, traveling across the West, a lot of the places where they recorded the greatest concentrations of game turned out to be contested hunting grounds between different tribes. The no man's lands borders between different tribes where it was not safe to go hunt and fish because of the chances you'd run into your competitors and those areas tended to concentrate game so we've always kind of like fought over access

points and fought over rivers and fought over control of the ohio and control the cumberland gap on and on and on because we wanted those little things for ourselves. I get it. But the same way I do when it comes to issues of clean air and clean water, what I do when it comes to issues of public access, I am generally going to just instinctively side on the side of access, public access. It doesn't mean I don't understand the other arguments. I could go in and argue them all day long, and I could probably be

fairly convincing at it. I have that much of a grasp on them. But if we don't watch out and protect public access, I feel as though we are going to slowly just get beat. Well, here's my Pollyanna pipe up. Here's what I don't get about that private ownership. It's I love the hell out of sharing it. I mean, your Bluegill thing, too. I guarantee.

Yeah, that's where you and me are different. Well, I don't know. I don't know. There's something about going out there and helping people get into them. I guarantee. Yeah, that's where you and me are different. Well, I don't know. I don't know. There's something about going out there and helping people get into them. I mean, really. And I challenge, I bet you have that, too. I don't. Maybe not. You're like that now with your fish

shack. Come on. I like to share the fish sack, however. How much time did you spend trying to get me a yellow eye? I was the only person fishing in the boat. I think it was the writer John Geert who pointed out, great fishing writer, pointed out there's two kinds of fishermen. There's the guys in your party and then there's the assholes.

So, yeah, I love to take people out. But at the same time, now, there is a native tribal corporation that owns a lot of land near my fish shack. When they go in and cut timber, they clear cut it. They annihilate the place. The one I'm talking about, Sea Alaska, they're going in to do a big cut right now. Just what we saw.

And they are going to annihilate all the old growth on the two big inlets by my place. It's their land, right? It's their property. It makes me feel sick. The destruction that we saw in three days without them taking a stick of lumber out. Not one stick of lumber out.

Just getting things prepped to start taking lumber out. Dynamite. Dozers. It's old-growth timber. They will go after every scrap of old-growth they can get. So it's private land, you know? And I do. There are parts where I look and go like,

it can never be. Like, why can't a tribal corporation look at that and be like yeah i kind of like it like that it's just there's just something about it's just oh it kills me it kills me this is just kind of right we got to bring her back to a point point being i understand all the complexities and idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies right i don't want someone telling me if someone came and said, hey man, you can't do that on your property. I'd be like, what? Meanwhile, I look across the beach and I'm like, how can them sons of bitches do that on their property? So it's just like, we are full of personal biases and we're always looking out for our own wellbeing. I could point to you, Hillary, and say, well, you know what? You're running a business, selling flies to people who

are fishing on rivers that flow through private land. You guide clients, right? So you're just looking out for your bottom line, and that's why you're trying to dress up this issue as something that benefits the people when we're really talking about your money. Right. I just need the money because if it's shut down, I won't get to. But that's a really good point. I mean, that is actually a huge part of it look at all of the guides look at all of the outfitters who we all work together for our livelihoods and we all go

to grocery stores we all send our kids to school all this you know continues on so it is true it's a very good point looking out for public lands and public access and use is a way of sustaining our families and sustaining our livelihoods especially in a lot of these small towns where we've got three months to do so. So hell yeah, I want to sell the flies. I want to get people on the rivers. And it is a way of looking out for myself. Can I point out something about the tribal corporation

that's clear-cut in the land? They are wonderful about public access. You don't need to ask. You can hunt and fish on their land. Go ahead. See, that's a weird dichotomy. Yeah. So it's complicated. Timber is a renewable resource. My house is built out of wood. That shit got cut down somewhere. It provides jobs, all that. But we always have these things, but we are always sort of looking out for our personal interest.

I'm just trying to make this point, okay? I'm trying to make this point because I'm trying to say, yes, I have, I'm gearing up to make the point that yes, I have stuff to gain personally from public access, because I like to hunt and fish. But I do think that it's a little bit bigger

than my own needs. I think that I'm on the winning side of history when I say that it's something I think we need to do with an eye toward future generations. Roosevelt talked about preserving wildlife and preserving land for the generations still in the the womb of time, the womb of time, okay? Beyond us. Because of my occupation, I have no shortage. I could hunt and fish the rest of my life on private property and enjoy the best hunting and fishing the world has to offer, right? I happen to be lucky enough to be like, we're doing what I do for work. I have great connections. I don't need this stuff. But I do like to see it because I think about future generations and what will their relationship be to the out-of-doors?

What will their perception of public resources be? Will they have a vested interest? Recently, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Dan Ash, gave a speech, gave a talk, and what he talked about was conservation becoming irrelevant as people turn away from the out-of-doors and become more engaged with just electronics, the indoors, as we become more urban and less rural, that people will just not give a shit what happens with the woods and waters. By enhancing public access and giving people as many opportunities as possible to enjoy the outdoors, to enjoy woods and waters, you increase the likelihood that those same people will stay interested in clean air and clean water. It's the long game game do i gain something from it on a

very personal level on a day-to-day basis yes but i don't think you should take that and turn it against me when i point out that we are talking about something a little bit bigger than catching fish absolutely as ourselves i do that shorthand um that's a lot more eloquent than i would do it but i say it's like like uh access is the gateway drug to conservation. Yes. Right? And so without that access, like what you just said, then why do you care? And so if you have that access and you get out there and you get yourself immersed in it,

and then you start to learn inter-syncrasies of how that all works together and what part you play. So it's just a gateway drug is what it is. Yeah. Ed Abbey wouldn't have written Desert Solitaire if he didn't hang out outside jim harrison would have written wolf right if he hadn't spent a bunch of time in the huron national forest it's like exposure leads to advocacy i also guide a lot of people from the city who are trying to get away from their lives doing whatever it is that they do in the city where you're talking about those are kind of potentially the people who might create less need for woods and waters, but they need to get away somehow, right? So they come away for a weekend and they come out and my point to them is, no,

no, I'm glad you came out here to get away, but you need to not come out here to get away. You need to come out here to be part of it because it belongs to you. It belongs to all of us and you need to continue to contribute to it. So this is yours as much as it is mine. This isn't like Disneyland where this river's on rails, and you've paid, and I'm going to take you around and around in circles. This belongs to you. So don't think of getting away from it, being in the city and having all your electronics in your life. Make it part of your life.

Come out here and say, this is every bit of my life is what I do for my nine to five. I mean, that's the mentality. Yeah, it's like, welcome American to your river. To your river. I mean, this is not you getting away. This is like, this is an extension of your life and then your kid's life. And when they look at it like that, they're like, oh my God, I never knew. And then that ownership comes out in them they feel like god well we gotta we gotta look at protecting this this has to be here for future generations i didn't know i didn't know this was here for my children's children and i'm like how could you not but now you do and so then what happens is then they go back to the cities and they can

be able to make plans to come back next year and maybe it will be two years but it doesn't matter it's in their heart it's in their head they're able to tell their kids they've got their photos you know it's the screensaver on their phone now and they're a part of it and they're going to fight like hell to protect it because they've been there they're connected to it now yeah and they're going to be some of the biggest fighters and and it's soaked in them they're never going to forget that experience i mean i have people who like like ask for photos of some of our trips that I need to send to them. And it's been maybe years since they've come back, but it's because somebody who was on that trip died and they want that to be part of their memorial service.

You know, I mean, it's really lasting impressions and they use it. They're the ones who vote. I mean, any of these guys here, I'll say that, you know, voting is the number one way that we're going to be able to protect it. And those people in cities who potentially you're saying aren't necessarily connected to it, I think are so connected to it because of their small experiences that they will vote for it. Good. Now we're going to do something. No. That was great. That was like you did your concluding thought before we do concluding thoughts.

I can say it again. That's what was worrying me. That's what was worrying me. We'll do concluding thoughts in not the direction you deal poker. Yanni? Oh, man. But, Lan, I'm dictating your – that's a punchline to a joke. We recently got really interested in, um, uh, at my age, I find that punchlines are funnier than the actual joke. Always.

I'd rather just hear the punchline and try to imagine the joke. Like, uh, Yanni's got a punchline, eh, eh, which is funny to me. I know the joke, but I just love the punchline. There's another punchline. Tell them how I dictate. Yanni, tell us your. I don't have any more jokes. I don't have any more punchlines.

My punchlines are too easy. I'm not going to dictate it to you. Yeah, I am. I'm going to dictate to you that, or I'm going to ask of you, that you have your concluding thought dovetail seamlessly into what people can do to find out and get involved. Do you mind doing that? So do whatever you want to do, but...

That was starting to be my concluding thought, so like we were thinking the same thing wiggle it into that okay okay yanni um like i said before last time we did a podcast with land i had my allies and adversaries mixed up but we need to find more allies outside of our little bubble, I think, sometimes of hunting and fishing. And I think, like, to get more people so that conservation isn't irrelevant, you know, we need to, like, expand and always be accepting and joining hands. And I think everybody knows that new hunters and fishermen and new recreators, sometimes the hardest thing, one of the greatest hurdles we hear about all the time is the,

is access, you know, where to go, how to get in there. You know, what do I get into it? So I feel like that's where this, you know,

it makes a lot of sense to me. It's like, let's, let's keep it open. Let's keep it access. Cause that is how we'll get more people into it, you know, and don't be,

I hear it all the time, but it's like it doesn't really work. It's utopian. Why? There's always people, and I support it. There's always people who want to bring in all the stakeholders. Yeah. Okay? But you have so many conflicting stakeholders.

Like the catch and release guys and the harpoon guys. You got like like yes yeah but if they don't have the water then it doesn't matter if they catch and release or harpoon i know but i'm saying i love the idea of having all the stakeholders come together but when they all come together there's always like a lot of little things to squabble about i recently was on a thing oh the sierra club like yeah i wouldn't really describe. I mean, Sierra Club does some, they do a lot of great stuff. It happens to be that they oftentimes are at odds with hunting. Sure. And that's my point is that don't go into that conversation with the member of the Sierra Club

thinking that they are immediately at odds at hunting. Tell them the meat eater message the story i think a lot of times you'd be surprised that you can sway them and get and we can be on the same team yeah no i i i support it i work toward it i but i just am starting to get i've started to get i don't know no i just think that too often we're just doing the opposite, though. Instead of just being like, oh, it's never going to work, we're already like, screw those greenies. They're not going to help our cause. Where maybe they would if you just pitched in the right story,

which I think you do all the time, unknowingly, through your words and show and whatnot. Kyle, wouldn't you agree with that? Yeah. You were saying you showed your wife Meat Eater, right? Yeah. She wasn't going to watch a haunting show. Yeah.

She actually liked it. She liked it. It's a really good show. Yeah. Cal, what's your concluding thought? Is that the end of your concluding thought? Oh. You wanted him to go, yeah.

And I do say yeah. No, I mean, people need to be involved. People need to be involved, and they need at least some taste to know at least what they're missing out on, and at least a little bit of, you know, people like us, what makes us so crazy about it. You know, the thing that bugs me about conversations like this is i think a lot of people have a tendency to argue it as an us versus them um a rich versus poor issue yeah like i was doing earlier and i think that's dangerous as dangerous but it's so hunting it is so easy it is so easy and like i'm not i like i've studied formally, and I know that if you want to win rhetoric, rich versus poor sells.

Yes. There's a lot more of the have-nots than the haves. And as we learn now in the presidential race, you can do rich versus poor even when you're rich, which is weird. Yes. do rich versus poor even when you're rich which is weird yes uh but i'm telling you man if you go out on a big public waterway and jam a harpoon through the gill plates of a big halibut and you watch this plume of beautiful red blood come up to the surface yeah tell me more i'm following you you get so locked in to this that you would fight to your dying breath to protect any access be you a new york state native in a canoe or a montana fly fisherman you know trying to hop over a bridge as a legal access point?

Did I wrap that up? I'm still floating. No, you're good. Do you want to hit any other points? Nope, no sir. Really? Are you still getting text messages from the lawyer? Well, I did today.

Do you want me to call or talk to her? Why? Just to try to patch things up. No. Oh. No. I can make my own bed. Can't do my own laundry, but I can make my own bed. Haley, what's your concluding thought?

No, I think that just what Callahan said is huge. And I will reiterate his reiteration of what what i said too is that your connection to it if it's the big bloody plume it's nature it's wildlife it's the outdoors you're connected to it you under start to understand by your own experience what access means you know and i think that's huge and i think that um yeah it's something different for everybody and it's something different wherever you are and however you play.

But the more that you can tie your own experience into sharing it with others and passing it on down, then that's when we all start to understand it a little bit better. Good. I'm going to come back to you in a minute. You think I have something more to say? No, my concluding thought is a question. Okay. Okay. I'm going to skip out of turn because i want to end with your deal you're cooking i'm just wait

here's my concluding thought if you're as a guide as a guide let's say you take a client out and you you take them down to stretch river you're like like, here's what's up. Here's where the fish like to lay. Here's what we're getting them on right now. Do this, do that. Don't bother there. I know that hole looks just like that hole, but for every reason, there's no fish in this hole. Go fish that hole.

And the next day, there he is. Do you get pissed or are you happy? I'm happy. No, I'm not kidding. But are you not, is that a normal guide feeling or a not normal guide feeling? Yeah, so I know what you're talking about because there are guides that I've been to different places. You know, I fish all over the country and everything, and there's places I go where I genuinely, sincerely have no idea what happens in that fishery. And I step up, and they can tell them and ask them what they're using, what flies they're using.

It'll cover up the fly that they have on their rod with their hand. They don't want me to see it. Or else sometimes guides always talk about how the flies in your hat, up here, these flies up in my hat, this is actually what I'm fishing. But there's lots of places you go where they intentionally put the wrong fly in their hat to make you think, as a visitor, that's what you use. And then you're the dork out there throwing big chubbies and that's not what they're using you're using tiny pmds you know so it's like that it does exist what you're talking about however where where i live in glacier country we have a lot to share so it's not just the rivers and the fish so you honestly don't care no i don't care there he is the next day standing in the hole.

Yeah. And you're like, why do I know this guy? Oh, yeah. Oh, I guided him here yesterday. Yeah. You're like, hey, what's up? He's going to have Giardia in a few hours anyway. No, I'm just kidding.

No, I am. You're talking to a gal with incredible wealth and knowledge of the area, though, too. Some, you know, greenhorn comes in and goes to the spot where he caught the fish he's not going to catch a fish he's going to catch fish in that but you know he's not he's got a lot to learn yeah like yeah i get it they don't know hillary's still gonna do just fine yeah no i it was more of it and i'm not i'm not asking because i want to understand her perspective i'm asking just to understand this thing i'm plotting my head and i'm just curious no and i'm plotting the thing out in my head i know exactly i'm trying to weigh

whether how unethical it is to do what i want to do and i was just seeking some opinion from a guide no i personally have no one that i might go screw a guide over. No, I mean, there's typical. All you guides out there, I'm lurking. FYI, this is what I look like. Can't see me. No, I mean, there's definitely ethics involved, but that isn't one of the things that bugs me, and it happens all the time.

And a lot of times, to be real honest, to take it a step further, people will come into my shop, and they'll book a trip with me, and then I'll draw them a map for the next day, literally, and give them the flies for the next day because i want them to do it right i don't want them to go out there and do it wrong so if they book a trip so you'll say they fish with you on monday yeah they're still in town yeah you're like okay here's what you ought to do tomorrow yeah you bet and it's going to be legit like it's super serious i'm not going to send them in the

wrong spot i'm not going to send them where i want them to go because that's not where the fish are or anything like that. It's really, really sincere and honest. And the reason is, is because I know what I'm talking about and I want them to do it right. I don't want them to, you know, mess it up out there. I don't, I don't, I want them to go out there with as much knowledge on their own that I can give them in my boat. And I really do, again, maybe it's Pollyanna, but I feel like most of the guide community is the same way. We want to educate people about the fishery. We don't want them sore-mouthing fish.

We want them taking care of the fish. We don't want them to not pinch their barbs. We want barbs pinched. We want them to have fun so that they come back and experience it. We don't want to send them out. Or stand on private land. Yeah, or stand on private land or make a mess. Like, we want them to have a freaking blast.

Like, we do. to have a freaking blast. Like we do, we really sincerely do. And so, no, it does not bother me when I see somebody out there publicly fishing a place that I've guided them previously, or I also don't look at them and go, oh, those could be my dollars. Like I could have taken them today. You know, I think, I think that that rising tide floats all boats, more people out there and and when i say more people i'm not advocating for crazy pressure on these rivers i'm saying that the more public access we have the more spread out we can be if we start to pinch ourselves down by limiting public access then then that's gonna happen that's gonna start to happen i've seen it in utah all the time

i get high hold and low hold by people and by guides, actually, in Utah all the time. Explain that to me. High hold and low hold? Yeah. So many holds. So there's, if you're fishing and somebody drops in on you, same kind of goes in where you are, and then they go above you and you're working your way up, maybe? Oh.

And then they steal that hold, that's, you're getting high hold, and then same thing for when you're getting low hold. And in same thing for when you're getting low hold. And in boats, it's real easy to low hold somebody else. You pass them, and you can drop in on them. And a lot of times, that's ethically okay because you're leapfrogging. You kind of get into this rhythm where you can leapfrog in boats, and it can be okay. But if you're both anchored up and fishing, and then you get ready to and they drop in before you, you know, that can be low holding you too.

You're getting ready to go and they look over their shoulder and see you and then push, push, push and go. And they're kind of low holding you. So it can happen on foot and it can happen in the boat or whatever. And that's just regular guide ethics, but it happens more when there's less public access because now you are in a battle. And now I am racing against the clock and on fish and, trying to get, you know, my people happy. And I think that just recreational fishing on foot, that's when the fights happen.

That's when people are like, this is my water. This is my water. Because now you're pinched. In Utah, when we've got one mile we can fish in a certain stretch and you've got six people all just blowhole in each other then that gets real tense you know and you're not going to catch fish because people are tromping all over the place so that's what happens when we have less area not a real good outdoor experience no absolutely let me ask you this question one day i was fishing and waiting and i come around a corner there's a guide he's got this little picnic you know they set up those little tables and the clients there and they got like wine out it's

just like absurd so they're having like the little shore lunch cheese and crackers right oh yeah and he's camped out on this hole and on my way up waiting up i fished the hole where he's camped out having his lunch and And this guy goes ballistic. Out of line or not out of line? You know, again, I might be different about this. Not out of line for me. I mean, like, for me, again, I swear to God I would invite you to come up and have some wine with us. You know, I mean, that's just because.

We got in a screaming. Unbelievable. Yeah, not out of line for me. No, it's like, it's not. We're taking a break. And he was in a Unbelievable. Yeah. Not out of line for me. No, it's like, it's not, we're taking a break. And he was in a boat. Yeah. I can see that conversation happening at the bar if you bumped into each other later on. That's part two of the story.

With your clients on the shore. No, that's absolutely not. Part two of the story is we wound up drinking in the same bar. Yeah. And my girlfriend was a bartender in the bar, and he had a girlfriend who was a bartender in the bar, and we wound up hashing it out later in a much more friendly way and agreed to disagree. He said, no way. He goes, you don't know

that I have fished it, am going to fish it, I'm holding the hole. No, that's not a thing. You can't hold a hole. That guy's from out of state. There is no holding the hole. No, let the hole be free. I hope that's not what you're. No. Let the hole be free.

I hope that's not what you're listening to. And I'm sure he is. And he's changing his ways right this second. He's like, man, you know what? That thing that happened 12 years ago. No, but if you came to Montana right now, I think, you know, where we fish and stuff, that's not a thing. You don't hold the hole.

No, you don't. It's ridiculous. You don't stick a stake in it and fly your flag. No. I want to tell a whole holding story. You don't. It's ridiculous. You don't stick a stake in it and fly your flag. No. That's the only reason you're floating this thing you're telling the public. I want to tell a whole holding story. Do you know what time we started, Johnny? Yep. About wrapping it up time?

Talk on it. Well, real quick. We used to fish Great Lakes whitefish in the Sioux Edison Hydroelectric Dam. And there's like 42 turbines. And for whatever reason, turbine number 27 would get a lot of fish in it and old men like to fish it and they would get up very very early and go tie off that's where the water comes out of the turbine there's for whatever reason these studs in the ceiling you could tie a rope around the stud and hold yourself right in the outflow turbine and drift flies for

whitefish we would go to the bar and close the bar, then get in our boat and go sleep in the turbine. And that would be very irritating to people who would get up at five. Yes. And we were just sleeping in sleeping bags in the bottom of a boat holding the hull. That would lead to some cross looks. That is hero hull holding. Yes.

That is. Land? I've learned a lot of new terms today. Hero hole holding is the newest one. Remember what I asked. Yeah, yeah, no. I think part of my concluding thought is I think this piece about us versus them. I think we all lose when that happens.

And whether that's the rich versus poor or private landowners versus the unwashed public, I think we lose. Who loses? I think we all lose. America. America loses, really. And I think one thing that anglers can do a better job of, Hillary brought it up, being stewards, but it's also not being bad actors.

We talk about the garbage that gets left at places, or letting your dogs run. I mean, that's all stuff that we can control on our end to make sure that those relationships stay better. And alleviate tension. Alleviate tension. And I think another thing that Hillary brought up is knocking on doors.

And even though you know that there's public access there and you can legally access it, letting them know that you're going to be there is just one of these friendly things that I think we're getting away from in this society. And I rode down the plane from Missoula was sat next to a guy who's a land owner and we were talking about this issue and he said you know i have a place down southwest montana and above my house about a mile there's a river access site below my house there's a river access site and people are trespassing all the time through my property and when i go out and try to have a normal conversation with them and be hey there's legal access up river and down river and then you can wade back and forth all you want we get in a big yelling screaming match about no this is my river and i have stream access and so yeah that to me that then that story gets told by that

landowner to another landowner and then that is that way for another 10-15 years that one story so i think we can be better actors as just uh anglers in general um and and so that's a segue into then knowing what the laws are, right? And we've talked about some of the differences, and I'll just take, you know, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado as a difference. In Montana, where we have great stream access, you know, I can access up to the high water mark. I go down to Wyoming or Colorado, and we've talked about it. If my anchor's in the water, I'm trespassing. I can't really wade at all on private land.

Like, know the laws. And so that you know that, like, I think we've talked about how in Montana, private landowners don't have to post their land for trespassing. Like, know the law. It's the user's responsibility. It's the user's responsibility to know the law. And so as backcountry hunters and anglers, that's what we're trying to do with our Stream Access Now campaign first,

is just create awareness. And so and so one you keep yourself legal and so you know i go to another state and i'm over a bridge and i see some awesome sexy water i want to go access that but i got to know the law before i jump and put my toe in one because i can get in a lot of trouble in the position i'm in but two like that's just a good thing for me to know so the first one is just like knowing what i think the laws are but then as something cal said is that if you don't know what you have then why are you going to try to stand up and defend it so that's one if you don't know that things can be better then why would you work to try to make them better and so by understanding the differences of stream access laws all across this country and what it is for you in your own state you can decide on whether that's a place where uh you want to try to make it better or if it's something you want to hold

on to so i think that education piece is gigantic and as confusing as some of this stuff was today and i get i appreciate you keep on uh bringing that back and we'll slow down and like explain this it's because this stuff gets complicated really quickly and so what we're trying to do is create a place where you have one place to go where you know what is legal, what is not, and how to find that information. We're compiling that right now. State by state. State by state. And nobody's ever done that before.

What's stream access like in Hawaii? I will tell you here in December, I'm going actually, my mother-in-law turned 70, and believe it or not, on Kauai, there are natural occurring, not natural, but they planted them, but now they're naturally reproducing rainbow trout on Kauai, which is going to be absolutely crazy to go fish these little teeny streams with a guide first,

and I'm going to try to figure it out for myself, so I'm going to do it maybe one or two other days. And go to their honey holes. Go to their honey holes. I'll be sitting on there. I'm going to hole-hole on them. I'll be a hero hold holder i'll be a howley hero hold holder so i think it's that education piece uh first um and then second like there's like we've heard

about a couple of them already but down in utah utah stream access coalition uh montana it's really the public land water access association there's these groups that are kind of starting to build but down in Utah, Utah Stream Access Coalition, Montana, it's really the Public Land Water Access Association. There's these groups that are kind of starting to build coalitions in these states. And so we want to, one, help amplify their voices. And in places like New Mexico where they just lost a bill by four votes in their state legislature that restricted stream access, we want to make sure there's a coalition so the next time that we have an opportunity to get that law changed that we have people coming coming together and so that's happening in new mexico and so we want to you know

we can't be all places all the time what we can be is as facilitators and amplify voices right and so trying to educate and motivate and then inspire people to do stuff so um stream access now is this campaign uh we've had an awesome corporate partner i mean hillary talked about how you know this is a huge piece of business right if you don't have access this whole fishing industry pretty much goes away and yes there will still be people fishing but it won't be as robust and sustainable as it is right now and so you know um yeti has stepped up costa fish pond sage reddington um fly lines women in montana's make an awesome little lanyards out of used fly line. So like

industry... Fly vines. Yeah, fly vines. The industry understands it and then I think the public is starting to understand it but they need to be educated about it and that's really what we're doing. There you have it. Is that, so is there like a website? Stream access now. You can go to this.org. You can also

find it through our backcountryhuntersandanglers.org site. We have it on there as country hunters and anglers.org site. We have it on there as well. All right, folks. Stream access. Now, next time you find yourself buzzing along fish and walleye,

and you realize that you got a golf course on one side and a house on the other. Think about it. Stay tuned in. All right. Thank you guys very much, man. Thank you.

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