The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 049: Off the I-70 Corridor, Colorado. Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis, Rick Smith, Garret Smith, Korey Kaczmarek, and Brody Henderson from the MeatEater Crew.

Episode Date: December 1, 2016

Subjects discussed: varied state rules on keeping roadkill; Janis's Colorado mule deer hunt; mythic timberbucks and doe condos; euthanizing deer; killing elk with a .45 ACP; bogus hunting tips; yoga, crossfit, and hunting-based physical fitness; being off-the-grid on Election Day; Japanese cowboys; and female listeners of the MeatEater Podcast.  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.

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all right we're recording from the i-70 corridor in central colorado is that cool yeah that's cool yeah we're in a place that Yanni is extremely nervous that someone will suss out where we are. I feel like they could look up Yannis Patel and just figure it out.

Yeah, but don't tell him that because he'll get nervous. So we're in a very secret location on the I-70 corridor. And are you still comfortable? Yeah. Do you really feel like it counts as I-70 corridor, though? Because I feel like we're a little far away from I-70 to count.

See, here he is. He's just. All right. Here's a hunt story for you. you now the hunting story starts out with me the prelude is me getting a big old buck how'd you like that brody when i got that buck that was well brody liked it a whole i liked it a whole lot then a couple days later, we go out to try to find a buck for Yanni. And I can't tell you where we were. And go out.

And what happened first? We glassed up some does. Mm-hmm. Then. We're also looking for an elk for you. Yep. Looking for an elk for you. Yep. Looking for an elk. And then Yanni glasses up a buck coming kind of down across below us.

We're up on a perch looking down into some aspen groves and big meadows. And Yanni says, you first noticed something was wrong with it. Yeah. Like his face just looks gnarly. His face looked messed up. In the eights, you couldn't really tell. Turns out, as the buck gets closer, he's got one regular antler. He's got one antler that is laid down.

If I'm remembering this correctly, if I saw what I think I saw, his antler was sort of laying down across the bridge of his nose and then the hook of the main beam was wrapping down around under his chin now i have seen in the past i've seen bucks that had a that would mess up their pedicle so the the part of a deer like the skull of the deer the thing that the the antler protrudes from when it grows every year is called the pedicle and i've seen deer that have damaged their pedicles or just have a squirrely antler and i saw i've never seen one where the antler grew down and then punched out the deer's eye you haven't seen that i have not yeah well my old man used to when i was a little kid my

my old man was the was the local dude who scored for Pope and Young and Boone and Crockett and whatnot. So we got all manner of deer over at our house to look at. And so I saw this buck, and I thought it was a crazy, squirrely-looking buck rack. And I told Johnny, I said, shoot, it's a buck of a lifetime. Then we noticed that he was gimpy and had a very bad limp. And I think what happened to that poor buck was I think that he might have got hit by a car. Yeah. The I-70 corridor was that guy. Along the I-70 corridor, which we weren't terribly far from.

That or the, oh, he got really beat up in a fight. Or he got in a fight and got locked horns with a buck, the buck broke his skull plate punched him in the back leg real hard and he crawls so he crawls up into this little aspen grove and I was thinking

he'll pop out the other side and then Yanni's going to take a crack at him but he never emerged from the aspen grove. We made a plan that we would later in the day go over and jump him out of there and assess just how bad a shape he was in. If you, I've done this in the past. I shouldn't admit this because you, because you could, it's against the law. I have in the past been out hunting and euthanized deer that uh that i encountered but you didn't tag them but didn't

tag them yeah one time i was on a little teeny island and we uh found a deer that had been hamstrung by coyotes or something. And it was mostly dead, but not all the way dead. Way beyond salvaging. Oh, I mean, yeah, it was a mess. It was a pathetic mess. And we helped it along to where it was headed. And two times I found deer that had poor shot placement on the part of some other hunter,

and they were in in in bad bad shape now but yeah if you if you euthanize deer you got to put a tag on it when i was a little kid i remember deer swam two times deer swam our lake and got hung up in fences and one time deer broke its leg we didn't go over there and and we called a game warden or a cop or something the cop came out and shot the deer and said that you cannot shoot that deer. You had that happen, Brody. Yeah, totally did. In my backyard, basically,

I called the Division Wildlife, said there's a deer with a busted back leg. It's in really rough shape. Game warden came over and wouldn't shoot it because it was in a neighborhood. Basically said, I can't kill this deer safely. What's going to happen is going to happen. game warden came over and wouldn't shoot it because it was in the in a neighborhood basically said i can't kill this deer safely what's gonna happen is gonna happen and what happened is that deer probably got killed by a dog or yeah you know something when i was a little kid we were coming

back from tracking a deer and i remember it was one in the morning and my dad was driving a 1979 Jeep Grand Cherokee and he hit a deer so we're coming back from track a deer and he didn't that we didn't find he hits the deer gets out and throws the deer up into the back of the Jeep Grand Cherokee I'm riding shotgun my two brothers are in the bench seat in the back we start down the road and all of a sudden my brothers are screaming because the deer is now standing up in the back of the Jeep Grand Cherokee. I remember my old man pulled over to the side of the road, dragged the deer out of the Jeep Grand Cherokee. Fully alive. Cut its throat, loaded it back in the Jeep Grand Cherokee and we proceeded on our way home.

And I think the next day, if I remember right, this was a long time ago, he notified the police and they brought him over a permit for it. Yeah. Well, Montana recently set up something

where if you hit game, you can take it and, you know. Yeah, that's another law I broke a whole bunch of times. Is that in Montana, you weren't allowed to have roadkill.

Yeah, now though, recently, last couple years, you can. Yeah. Non-trophy game. So you can't keep roadkill sheep, but you can keep deer and elk maybe. But you still have to notify. If it's got horns, you got to report it. Yeah. I think either way, actually.

I shouldn't say it. I used to break that law and kind of half hope that I'd get caught because I wanted to go to a judge. I thought it'd be fun if the fine wasn't that bad. I thought it'd be fun to go into court and be like, yes, I am guilty of salvaging a deer that some guy in front of me hit with a car. And it would otherwise wind up rotting on the side of the road or wind up in a landfill. So here I am confessing my guilt. Like, is this really a big problem i picked up a turkey off the road just a couple winters ago is it legal or illegal i don't know colorado i have no idea i

know guys who put big bumper guards on their trucks though now in montana with the new rule yeah just mow them down hit them so now they go out at night and they'll mow them down, pick them up. You know people. Yes. Who purposefully go out and mow down. Well, they put a big bumper so they can mow them down. Maybe they don't go out and plan to mow them down. But if they see one, they don't need to change. They'll speed up and they won't swerve. Because they want it for what reason? They'll eat it.

Oh, really? Yeah. But if you're hitting them that hard, like, I mean. I was just saying that, you know, there's people out there that yeah the percentage of deer that get hit by cars that are actually edible is you know whatever like there's usually a little something yeah yeah i had a deer on a motorcycle once is there anything left that turned out for you i mean got beat up. We couldn't find the deer, but it's not really relevant, I guess. So what happens with this buck? Here's why we didn't make it back to the buck.

This is something I've been real eager to talk about because I want to hear Yanni's side of this because all stories have two sides. So we walk a few miles. How many miles did we walk? To where we took a nap? It was probably close to we walk to where we took a nap it was probably close to four so we walked about four miles into the mountains the day gets hot ish you kind of get the feeling like you're in that that transitional zone where it's not the morning hunt it's not the evening hunt it's kind of time to regroup have a snack take a little nap.

I lay down to take a little nappy. And it wasn't perfect because the ground I was laying on was frozen and the cold kept creeping up into my body. But as I was doing this, Yanni's like, wants to go over and glass into the next bowl. Yeah, I had a hot ticket in my pocket, so I couldn't take a nap. I was like, well, I better just go. With limited time.

He encounters a horseman couldn't take a nap. I was like, well, I better just go. With limited time. He encounters a horseman who is smoking a joint. The horseman... Not quite. He was about to. Stop correcting me. You're going to get to tell your version. Well, no, but you're telling my version.

You told me that as you approached him, he hid a quote spliff. he did but he wasn't smoking it okay fixing the smoker joint encounters the guy fixing the smoker joint the guy starts out by inviting you to come over and look at a pistol that he has hidden under a branch is that correct let me just say you can you-tell my story, but you can't add things to my story. I haven't added anything. You told me he invited you over to examine a pistol that he had hidden under a branch.

I'm going back to this. A revolver. I'm just saying. Just remember what I told you. Which is legal in Colorado. Yeah, it's legal in Colorado. And Yanni really admires this guy. Because? Because of everything

I'm going to tell about him. The fella is... Can we explain a spliff? A joint. A rolled marijuana cigarette. With tobacco. So now Johnny Cochran here

is saying he wasn't actually smoking he was just handling a joint handling a joint yeah he i'm guessing that it was it was nappy time all across the elk mountains of of colorado you had just fallen asleep and at the same time i walked in the cabin door and he was a little cabin up here like a little shelter he was literally about to fire it up probably have a little lunch and take a nap tells uh invites yanni to come and examine a pistol he's got hidden under a branch tells yanni that he's recently been robbed uh up there on the mountain tells yanni that he's recently been robbed up there on the mountain. Tells Yanni that he had recently encountered some hippies who were throwing rocks at a deer to scare it away.

He, a couple days later, killed the deer. The deer happened to be a tame deer named Fred. Tells Yanni he's been hunting up here on a rented horse for some number of days, has not seen a single elk in those days. He has a homemade coat on. Yanni explained that he had a shirt that he sewed the bottom half of a parka onto, which Yanni liked that shirt a lot. And says to Yanni, listen, you're welcome to hunt up on this mountain all you want. But let me tell you about a magical, he didn't use the word magical, a timber buck so big that you could use its antlers as a swing set, and a person with a large posterior could still sit inside of it. Tells Yanni that even though Yanni is welcome to stay on the mountain,

he just needs to follow the trail down towards the trailhead along the way he will encounter 20 does in a land feature that he refers to as the doe condo and a completely different drainage different drainage yeah he will there wait here not the drainage we came up it was a different we had to go down oh yeah so so go down there you'll find a doe condo you'll know you're there and the buck he explains the i don't think it looks like a normal buck because it's it's and he found a bush to show yanni what color the buck was to demonstrate so yanni would know also told him another identifying feature of this buck is that it will not stop walking. So then.

Up to that point, no one that had seen the buck had seen it standing still. Stop walking. Never stops. Doesn't stop. And has peculiar colored antlers. So Yanni reports this to me, and I have a little chuckle about it. Like, ah, it's funny. But then Yana then spends the rest of his day walking up and down the trail.

And we spoke to, first, a couple of fellows who come through on mountain bikes. Then we spoke to a couple of ladies who come through on mountain bikes then we spoke to a couple ladies who came through on mountain bikes then we spoke to a fella come walking up the trail on a pleasure hike then we spoke to a gal with a nose ring come walking up the trail on a pleasure hike re-spoke to the fella who was on the pleasure hike while later the horseman who clued us in on the mystery buck somehow was coming back up the trail, yelling with his vest half on. He had a vest with one arm on. And we heard him yell at the horse that he rented.

He yelled, get up there, you're starting to piss me off. And he rode by on up three more mountain bikers rode on down he's wearing headphones too wearing headphones he's got headphones on no they're ear protection headphones oh okay um three more mountain bikers come zooming through and yanni still stays still is hunting that trail walking up and down that trail waiting for the mystery timber buck black horn a black horn okay that that was my impression now you give your version of how we spent our day yesterday although i get we forgot about the uh he killed

six elk with his 45 oh that's why he has it yanni was trying to figure out was he carrying the pistol because he's been robbed or what and he goes oh no when i'm riding my horse oftentimes i'll get into a situation where a bull will come streaking across the trail and i pulled out and i'm like bam bam bam and I've killed six like that. Now, we later learned that this fella had reported to someone else that he'd seen 17 elk that day. When he told you he'd seen none. When he told Yonder, you go ahead and hunt here all you want,

but you might be interested to know about a mysterious timber buck that happens to be lurking down on yonder mountain bike trail. A ways away from where he was. Yeah, and I have... The moral of this story is a story of love. There's no other explanation of why I would have spent the day with Yanni if I didn't love him.

Love conquers all. There's logic and there's love and that was love. I appreciate that. That I sat on that trail. I mean, it's fun. We socialize with all manner of people coming and going, but it was a frustrating day of hunting now what what what how do you how do you what what what do you how would you describe our day this is what i've been anxiously awaiting to hear well i think that up until the point of uh you know after the basic after the morning hunt and and the, it's all the same. And then when I leave you. So my story was correct up till I fell asleep. Yeah. I just feel like you just left out some parts.

Please. So when I walk up to the cabin, the guy's been successful. He's hiding. I see me hanging. He killed a deer. Yeah. They killed a couple of deer, they killed a couple deer. Frank, I told that.

He killed Fred, the tame deer that the hippies tried to scare away. Yeah, so he's got meat hanging. I didn't leave that out. He went up there with a giant crew of other hunters. They had like six or seven people out there to start the season off with. He's the last guy remaining. Because it was hot. It was hot and horrible hunting. We're like on day probably seven of a nine-day season.

So pretty shitty season really for most hunting conditions. I mean, we battled through it. For someone to basically camp out for seven days, I'm like, yeah. He's working hard. This guy's getting after it. So as I'm seeing him tuck away, he little split he's kind of you know doesn't want to show me up on the above the door there's a note remember the note yeah but this the but the note doesn't have any effect on on how silly the day on how silly our hunt plan was

the note doesn't is it to make the listener be like, oh, yeah, that was a hot tip. No, I just feel like it gives a little character background on who this guy is and why he's up there and why he's just had a bad week. Rick. He's frustrated. Let's do this.

Rick. I'm going to unbiased. What do you imagine I'm trying to say with the story that i'm telling we were imagining what you were trying to say all day long well i think what are you what is the point i'm trying to convey i mean i i glass the hillside you guys are on so i'm thinking all right they're wandering around it's big potentially there's animals there but it's multi multi-user experience over there see i mean, I'm glassing up.

What are you saying? When telling the story, what's the funny part of the story? Basically, you went on a nostalgic hike with Giannis. I forgot to even get into that part. Turns out that Giannis, the first time he ever went elk hunting by himself, some guy had sent him up that creek. So, and the whole thing, I'm like, why in the world are you walking up and down this trail waiting for this mythic timber buck to come out

that's so big that a large bottomed person could use it as a swing set and it turns out that he was on some weird strange memory lane i don't think that's strange that's natural that's normal did you you've also forgot about right before we actually put our packs on started hiking down the mountain i looked at you said know what, I don't care if it's timber bucks or 160 bucks. I said, I feel like there's some does around here. He killed a buck. His buddy killed a doe. There's some does around here.

It's November 12th or 13th. We need to find some does. I'm kind of excited. Now, this area, it's a small, very, very small drainage. Near the I-70. Totally near the I-70. It doesn't. I mean, the whole drainage might only go how long?

A couple miles. Brody, how many animals? How many elk and how many deer? Let's talk about that before you get too fired up about this spot. What are you doing? I i gotta take a leak carrots out of here i know that yannis is fed up he's fucking he's done like i know it seems odd but i also know that yannis has and his buddies and his brother and a whole crew of people have killed a pile of elk on that mountain. And the drainage you walk down in the afternoon, I've killed a bunch of elk up there too.

Really? Yes. But how do you avoid hitting the people? One time Giannis said, if Brody had to kill an elk and he only had one spot to go to, that's where, that,

I can't say the name of the drainage, but but just the drainage you came out in the evening creek random creek yeah when the fat that's wet and the honest was probably right like if i if you were like dude you've got a day to kill an elk where are you gonna go you would go up there and i would not go in where you went like the mountain bike no no no pleasure cruise no no i wouldn't go in where you went i would go in where you came out and listen again we're the whole multi-recreational thing is happening because we're dealing with like this weird like you know late you know, middle of November where the highs are, you know, 65, 70 degrees. Yeah. Normally, it's two feet of snow in there.

There's a lot of people. There's nobody else besides hunters. There's a lot of people up there that are waiting around to go skiing that would normally never be there this time of year. Yeah. Let's talk about mule deer. You act like you're trying to. You guys act like you're trying to prove me wrong.

I'm not trying to prove you. I opened the whole thing up just to try to get a better understanding of what in the world we were doing. You were going on one of Giannis' multi-drainage tours, which he's famous for. Walkabout. A little memory, a little high likelihood for some animal.

Here's the point I was trying to make. When I was asking you, Rick, when I was asking you what the point I was trying to make was, I was trying to make... What was the answer that I should have given? The answer you were supposed to give

was, man, you wouldn't guess that Giannis was so gullible. For hunting intel? Yeah, he was so gullible as to think that he was getting a hot tip and not that he was getting scent packing

out of an area that a fellow was trying to hunt. Scent packing by means of an outlandish story it's possible the only thing i didn't understand is you guys went way past where because he told us a land feature that didn't exist but he did find does at the doe condo no we never identified the doe condo and yeah we saw a doe and twin fawns hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our

raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. 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. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing

on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. 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 visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Either way, you had a nice walk. Nice walk, yeah. You met some nice people. My story failed.

My story failed. The point of the story is you think you know a guy, and then you learn that he's completely gullible and doesn't know when he's having his chain yank. Can I have a closing thought on the whole thing? If nothing else came from my interaction with him other than we packed up and hunted. I, at least, hunted my way down that hill in a very keen, like elevated hunting sense.

Whether it was because the timber box or seeing does or whatever. But I took a very serious approach to the whole rest of the day. That is what gets animals killed and gets animals in freezers when you hunt like that. When you're like, no, the day is over. It's hot.

We got hikers and bikers and blah. Yeah. Let's get to it. That's when you got your thumb up your butt and you're like, Oh my God, look at that thing. No, you can't see 50.

We were in thick Aspens. You can't see 50 yards in any direction you hate aspens now no i kind of do can't see 50 yards in any direction non-stop pedestrian traffic and we're like waiting for a a a giant antler timber buck come blackhorn down the trail i told you i was i'd be happy with any buck coming around i was like i feel like there's some deer around but it was cool shit you came down through how gorgeous let's change forgot how beautiful that place this thing i want to talk about that's been asked i i do oh you're closing thoughts sorry oh that's how you get no that

was it meanwhile i'm over there trying to kill a buck while you guys are taking a tour of the country and you guys were in were in what I would consider to be an actual hunting spot. With an occasional hiker. You know what? It's what makes our hunting spots that Brody and I share here good. Yep.

It really does. Yeah. They're hard hunting spots. And I'm glad that people are frustrated by them and can't always understand them and you know or never maybe never come back and hunt them again sorry suckers i'll be hunting them again you know hey there's some of your spots i'll hunt for the rest of my life no you won't and i got a lot of friends they're gonna like hunting and then when i'm laying it off the mat

my buddies i'm gonna be like this is where the timber buck lives this is probably in there there's a timber buck in there if you're feeling social go to this place you want to meet some ladies no okay so i want to change the subject um the thing we get asked about like emails come in and people ask questions the one thing i think that comes up perennially uh that comes up often is the the issue of physical fitness hunting based physical fitness you know i'm talking about yes sir now has everyone in here has everyone here done yoga a couple times times. How many times? Yes. I paid for it twice, but I stretch a lot, which I feel like is the same thing. Yeah, yoga is stretching. Yeah.

But you've paid to stretch twice. Yeah. No, I respect yoga. Good answer. Good answer, Gary. And I know that Rick's been there a thousand times. I've been doing it since I was 18, which back then, 98, 1998, not a lot of dudes doing the yoga.

So you're establishing that you were doing yoga before yoga was cool. Yep. But you were doing it to meet chicks, and you admitted that. Nope. You said you did it to meet chicks. Backpedal. I mean, there were some nice-looking ladies doing the yoga back then, but no, that's not the place to hit on chicks. I still feel like there aren't nice looking ladies doing the yoga back then but i know that's not the

place i still feel like there aren't a lot of guys doing yoga i mean where i really have yoga with my wife the classes that i'm in i mean half the class is is meant yeah nearly half i've been to yoga four times so i have like a level of expertise about on the subject four that's all i've been to yoga god you were speaking like you were uh no my, my wife likes to go. We have date nights, and my wife likes to go. She wants me to go with her to yoga, and she wants me, then we go to dinner. So four times. We do other things, too, but this is one of the things in our repertoire. Yeah. Four times we've gone now where she goes it's 104 degrees in the room so it's hot as shit yeah like a tropical tropical situation dark mostly dark yeah you go in there it's 104 degrees everybody you lay down you're already you don't have anything out i just wear my swim trunks you don't

have any shoes pants nothing just i go in my trunks, and you lay down on a mat, and they kind of build you up. They invite you to – they build you up in a way that doesn't work for me, but I think it works for some people where they invite you to – they want you to thank yourself for going to yoga. That's not true? Well, I'm not into that part of it but they do but the one man there's like it's like flavors ice cream yoga like you know yeah no i'm talking about the

place the one you you go have you been ever brody never my wife does i mean there's a lot of different flavors and some are more spiritual based some are pretty just physical yeah so they tell you to build you up they tell you they're like they're like uh try to think of an example no no this is beyond it this is like something they would actually say they say you know leave the world be the change you want to see the world will be waiting for you yeah you owe it to the people in your life who rely on you to take a moment for yourself and thank yourself and dedicate this session to yourself right yeah then they'll be like now take your heel and bring it up so it touches your nose. And hold it there for an hour, right?

If you can't, don't worry. Just do what feels good to you. Know that you can always come back to a comfortable position. Now put your pinky toe around to the back of your skull while standing on one foot yeah right and you proceed to stretch your ass off for 90 minutes yeah and they play really bad music they wouldn't need to like there's good like you can play the national or in some rate and select radio head cuts and have the same effect but they'll go with like anya yeah they need to they need to move towards the indie radio heads

and you know how like they have in square dance there's like a person that calls square dance like grab your partner do-si-do there's like the lady like that wanders around sort of in this loud whisper calling the session trying to inspire people no she's like calling square dance but calling like poses the next stretches you're going to do. Encouraging or? No, criticizing. She calls it. She's like, okay, we're going to do this.

Then we're going to do that. Take a step back. But I haven't started talking about the benefits of it. No, there's a group of hunting guys talking about their yoga experiences right now. Yeah, how are we circling to hunting fitness? Because I think that after my four times and after Yanni's experience, which he's going to touch on, I think that it is one of the, I think it's a great thing to do for hunting fitness.

But you've only done it four times. Are you going to continue to do it? I have enough experience with physical activity and stuff that I think, yeah, I'm starting to really think so because I think as far as injury prevention prevention as far as slinking through the woods and crawling under and over all kinds of garbage right like holding uncomfortable positions and just being like comfortable but are you gonna go pay to do it or just gonna do it at home i think we pay to do it i wouldn't know how to do it at home

because you need the lady to call it yeah you need you need a little guy like you can i mean obviously you can go to youtube and do yeah i mean that's how i'm saying because you're in a hot room full of people sweating their nose my wife my wife does it all the time with apps and shit like that oh really yeah did she get the house 104 degrees no it's helpful having somebody tell you to do something you don't want to do exactly and then and then when you really don't want to do it anymore they're still telling you keep doing it it's also how no they're telling you hey if you can't do it it's cool go back to a happy place but then there's some person to the right of you that is just killing it up and so you're like i gotta prove to them that i it's it's also helpful when

you've paid to do it because then you're invested in it oh yeah i'm the kind of guy like if i paid to get in there and it turned out they were just gonna beat my fingers with a hammer i would still stay right i'm like once you commit it's like going to see a shitty movie right you're gonna watch till the end i bring this up it's like in hunting if you pay attention to hunt media there's a big thing of like uh where dudes are trying to get their neck out past their ears big weights yeah as though it like has something to do with hunting lifting weights and like squats like that one time they were they were honestly god 45 minutes into the hike they tip over they tip over. They tip over, yeah. I would say that one physical trait of all of us is pretty skinny upper bodies.

Yeah. Like, our legs are all pretty strong. Maybe dirt. Dirt is a little dirty. Dermot was just checking his bicep to see if that actually was true. But I feel like there's a lot of dudes out there that, like, on the surface are in way better shape than me.

But if you go do the shit that we do, they just collapse mentally. That's because it's a kind of fitness. Like, people think that in shape means that your neck's wider than your ears. Right. But it's like, in shape for what? Like, if you are in a lot of fights. Like, if you get in a lot of power fights. Like, Corey is older. Yeah. They'll yeah let me like yes you're in shape but like

in shape means to be it needs to be sort of like in shape for what thing yeah yeah and i think that if you were gonna just based on limited experience and when i'm home like i get a lot of cardio in hunting when i'm home i do weights and four exercises and stuff but i'm starting to think that the real thing rather than trying to be like a thick neck you know um i think that being all limber and stuff like that's good totally what's your thoughts on that yeah i know you're a real advocate of yoga yeah i'm thinking i just had to re-up my – I usually buy a 10-pack pass that costs me, I think, $75. And I think I just bought my fifth one. So I'm up to 40-some classes. You've been to yoga 40-some times.

Yeah. Ten times more than me. In the last year or so, maybe a year and a half. And I also think it builds some core strength. I believe that that's true. In me. But not in a way that like pumping iron will. You know what I mean?

Like it's a different kind of. Well, I think it's a different way to get to a similar result. Yeah. To a similar end product. I think it's more effective. I mean, like in our class, a lot of times we'll have like a 10-minute session when you've kind of done all the stretching and the kumbaya for a better word. The kumbaya stuff kills me.

It kills my wife, though, too. My wife's like, let's get down with it. Let's get down with it. She gets real antsy. What I do like is that it's a real mental challenge because we always talk about like staying in the moment. Who talks about that? The teacher. And in our in our classes they're like you want to basically be concentrating on what you're doing and you're breathing and that's it so if you

have thoughts coming into your head like what you're gonna be doing at work because I often go like in the middle of the day at 2 p.m. really and so I'm thinking and oftentimes I'm like okay what am I gonna do with the last hour and a half of my day before I go home? And so it's a real good challenge for me to say, you know what? Don't think about that right now. You need to be thinking about your reading and like what you're trying to do here right now and just stay in the moment. Let those thoughts come in and then go, come in and go. Like don't, cause if you, I feel like if you're sitting there for five minutes being like, yeah, then I'm going to write the, uh, do do this i'll maybe do some receipts and some

reimbursements and write a budget for the next episode and then i'm like oh shit you know i'm not doing yoga anymore um so i like that aspect of it you know like it is like leave the outside world focus on what you're doing there at the moment um yeah that's that's what turned me off to it and what still turns me off to is i'm a secular person so i don't like the the um i don't like them sort of laying on you a mystical eastern mysticism yeah a mystical aspect because i don't think and i know that they would say that's all one in the same like the eastern mysticism is what makes the exercises good but i think that you could be doing all that and the same like the eastern mysticism is what makes the exercises good but i think that you could be doing all that and they could be saying i want you to think of the nastiest

devil person doing the most horrible thing to someone else and and fill your brain with that thought and do all those exercises and your body would come out the same like i don't think your body cares that you're doing weird eastern mysticism in your head while doing the exercises. I would like to have a yoga place. I don't know much about it. They don't do mental masturbation. They don't do that you're pretending to be Eastern. The truth be told, Bikram, which is a pretty popular form of yoga.

That's the hot yoga like my wife likes to do. It's like a franchise. Is he the criminal? Yep, he's the criminal. He's a molester. Molester, for sure. He accused a mol franchise. Is he the criminal? Yep, he's the criminal. He's a molester. Molester, for sure. An accused molester. Is he a convicted molester?

Accused. But I would be comfortable saying whatever. An accused molester. Yeah. But certainly one of the kind of prophet-type personalities where he thinks he has some sort of yes and yoga but he created a series of postures that i think are pretty damn good and there's very little in his dialogue which is copyrighted which is basically all the it's like starbucks it's the

starbucks of yoga you go there and you know exactly what you're going to get you're not going to have a teacher that it just comes up with whatever they feel they want to do because you know they're 20 years old and i thought this is a good idea but it's a set of postures in a series in a specific order and there's very little spiritual uh component to it and and hatha yoga is a physical type yoga but is it even yoga if there's not a mind body connection i mean that's that's the whole thing right if it's just body it's calisthenics basically that's a good point but i mean the history of yoga modern yoga is basically a amalgamation of calisthenics and some some historic like spiritual practices all meshed together i mean the yoga that we think of is like the one that that america i don't know found out about in the 60s or 70s was like a colonial combination of, in India,

but there was like Western influences of military calisthenics and like aerobics. I mean, it's not as simple to say as like, oh, the practice that we're doing now in the yoga studio you go to is like some 2 000 year old yoga practice yeah it's new it's like a california roll yeah i mean yeah it's just not that old yeah so and it all seems to me it seems like a no-brainer that there is a mind body connection

that doesn't seem like but you're also trying to commercialize a very basic religious physical but in in our modern lives uh we do a lot of activities that are not very good for us sitting at computers all day long um and so doing doing it doing something where you have to be uncomfortable kind of think within yourself uh it seems like a pretty so you say you dig the the no i don't the religious part no no i dig the physical component like you are uncomfortable they are telling you to do something uncomfortable and say like embrace that discomfort continue to do it and don't freak out yes i like that the room is hot as i mean it is hot and you want like you walk in there and you're like uh can i can i leave now and there

are people do people not freaking out breathing under no breathing and understanding that your body will tell you to freak out because you're not used to something, but that does not mean that you are not able to cope with that stimulus. You can control your body's response to things. I like what you're saying because I will oftentimes, I think that diving in very cold water, you get in very cold water and You get in very cold water

and there's way, like if you're free diving and there's like bad waves and there's just a lot of stuff going on. You tend to be like all of a sudden realize that I'm freaked out for no reason. Just like the atmosphere, the circumstances.

I'm in this water, like your whole life you try not to be in cold water, your whole life you try and like not to be in cold water right you turn the shower on you keep sticking your hand in there to make sure that when you get in there it's not like that yeah and you get in it and i feel myself all of a sudden i'll catch myself be like why am i freaked out just calm down yeah calm down and breath is a big component to it and breath is a big component to yoga just calm down. Yeah. Calm down. There's not a problem right now. And breath is a big component to it.

Yeah. And breath is a big component to yoga. And I think of you guys hustling towards animals, like full aerobic threshold, breathing hard, and then you have to take a shot. And you have to control your breath. And that's something you can practice. It's like overcoming this physical discomfort,

calming yourself down. It's like this, it's a mind-body connection where you're saying, I'm freaking out right now because I just ran up this mountain and there's this buck I've been looking for for six days of investment and all this existential stuff is coming into play but you just have to like like chill yeah i had that happened to me the other night where after we shot the buck and it was getting dark it was

hard to get over to where the buck was because i go down a big hell hole should we start with the whole buck story from the beginning though wait i got i got something i gotta add oh the portions of it well it's amazing story portions of it so we get on to a buck before we get off the yoga thing because i put yoga and crossfit in the same category it's like it's like good at something in order to be good at it. No, no, no. But doing something, simulating something to get good at something that you actually apply. And it's like, why don't people like CrossFit and yoga? It's like, I'm going to do these things that will make me better in the outdoors. Why not just go spend time in the outdoors? If you have spare time, I don't go biking, climbing. Like that's my attitude.

Yeah. It's like, you're in this controlled environment trying to be comfortable in stress. Why not go, like if you have time to do an hour of yoga session, go on a hike, go on a run, go on a hike. My brother observed that the only thing CrossFit makes you good at is CrossFit. Yeah, yoga is similar to some extent. And that's all activities, right? All activities are inherently activity-specific, like the brain games,

like all the, you know, crossword puzzles, like to increase your mental acuity or whatever. Yeah. Most studies point to the fact that you just get better at doing crossword puzzles. Yeah. I got you. Uh, but there is cross training is effective. And if you just remember back in the eighties, we saw go cross training. If you just, if you run all day in the 80s we used to all go cross training if you just if you run all day long every day uh that's all you're gonna be good at you know you usually you often get injured yeah and so it's a way of still exercising recovering and gaining some new like and all of us endurance athlete hiker types our hamstrings are like so incredibly just taught very inflexible i mean yanni's proud now that he can touch his toes but

it was probably a new i can get i can lay my hands flat on the floor can you really so can i no but you guys are missing my point it's like get outside outside. No. I'm anxiously – I so badly want to get back to your point. Yeah. But I – But Rick, I'm trying to – I think you need to diversify. I'm trying to get to your point. I'm trying to figure out what Rick's point is.

You got to diversify. Diversify outside in an uncontrolled setting. To your point, I'll say that – I'll lead it off by saying this. I have an acquaintance who's a very accomplished mountaineer. And he'll have things where he's going to go do something and he'll be like, you know, you should know before we go do this. Oh, no, no, no. I do CrossFit.

So climbing this 14,000-foot peak, not a big deal. I do CrossFit. We get these rocks and we carry the rocks around um keep our score on a chalkboard and then they're like do you know what i mean it's like not the same thing the best way to train for hunting is to put a 30 pound pack on your back and go walk around where you're gonna walk around yeah where you're gonna hunt yeah not like oh i'm ready for hunting season been hitting the stair master yeah like that has nothing like rick saying yeah with anything yeah but it all it's not over in nature you can yeah your activities can but a lot of people have like

these you know weird scheduled lives that we basically don't participate better nothing it's all better than yeah yeah i will agree with that no it's not the thing there's two things when i'm gonna take a new person on a rugged hunt, I tell them two things. Get your boots and break them in and get in shape. They never do

either of those things. There's no... Get your boots broken in or warm. How many times? Don't work. Roll the lawn in them. Yeah.

People will not do those two things. There's no way 90 minutes of CrossFit four or five days a week prepares you... It's 20 minutes. Whatever it is. There's no way 90 minutes of CrossFit, four or five days a week, prepares you. It's 20 minutes. Whatever it is, there's no way it prepares you for a 16-hour day of looking for deer,

hiking for deer, running after deer, and being mentally drained the entire day. Seven days in a row. Yeah. No, there's seven days in a row yeah no there's there's nothing nothing but it will give you if you already have some endurance base uh it'll it'll help you in some yeah you can't go do that i mean obviously like if you're you're out of shape athlete and hiking all over the place and then you're in crossfit for two months and you haven't hiked once and you go hiking you're gonna feel fine but you can't transition from basic crossfit

to go this is the thing it's like it's any of the endurance things it's like if you just lift weights and you expect to like go i don't know be a big big game hunter. Not going to happen. Go walk. Got to be in nature. Pack weight. Walk. It's low intensity for long hours. Side-hilling, falling down. My, uh... I can't remember the quote.

Is it hard, Steve? The quote is what hard? Walking. Yeah, walking's hard. Yeah. It depends for how long. Walking isn't like a pretty... The kind of walking that this kind of hunting entails, the only reason I know it's hard yeah it depends for how long walking isn't like a pretty kind of walking that this kind of hunting entails i only reason i know it's hard is because i see so many people

fail so miserably at it yeah i know but is it hard for you no no because you've been doing it for a really long time exactly you don't do a lot of yoga the reason you do a lot of hunting yeah that's what you got to do no that's like that's kind of one of the things I was going to get at is like, what do you do to stay in shape for hunting? It's just like, you kind of like hunt to stay in shape for hunting when I'm home. And if I'm not going to hunt for a week or I'm not gonna be out in the woods or mountains for a week,

then I'll do weights. I don't know why. But if you had the opportunity, I mean, you're obligated in other realms, but if you had the opportunity, you would go out and, you know, go up to a peak or something yeah he's climbing yeah instead of hunting but i can't go that's not something i'm gonna go do for an hour no but for just performance perspective

like if a sprinter just ran 100 yard 100 meter dash just ran 100 meters they're not going to be very good at it. No. They have to do all sorts of different types of training. They do very short things, very long things, weights. To optimize your specific activity, you have to do other things. But I think a huge point that's being overlooked here is the mental aspect of it.

You've got to know that you're gonna like it's gonna be a shitty day like you're gonna hurt you're gonna fall down you're gonna be sore you're gonna be tired like shapeage if you're gonna spook animals if you don't know that going into it then you're just it doesn't matter how good a shape you're in i feel like that's a real good point mental yeah yeah if you're not able to do it that's why there's two things i was going to talk about i was going to mention what's wrong you don't you almost look like you're in pain he is he's not mentally just focused on his pain cory is someone saying something you just don't Legs and lungs. Our friend Rort, Denver, he ran the, for a period in his career, he ran the BUDS program. So it's the elimination course for the Navy SEALs.

He ran that program for Alabama. Which is obviously extremely grueling yeah it's mentally physically he said all we're looking for we're just looking for those people who cannot who cannot quit he says there's probably many ways to find them we find them through the application of cold water and pt he says you could find the same people you know with hot water or whatever it's like you're just looking for the guy that won't quit sleep deprivation or what yeah other other military disciplines it's just like we're going to put a ton of weight in your backpack and you are just going to walk you can eat as much as you'd like you're just going to walk and we can eat as much as you'd like. You're just going to walk. And we

will then find the couple percent of you who cannot quit. Yep. Another funny thing he said to me was I was asking him how they do pushups there. And he said, you can do them however you want. You're going to do 5,000 of them today. It is. It's that endurance, that pain tolerance. Yeah. The people with no quit in them. Yeah.

And there is some physiological things going on too. I believe so. I believe so. But I think that a big part of like, yeah, to bring it full circle, I think a big part of hunting fitness, and I'm talking about like very demanding kind of like yeah uh to bring it full circle i think a big part of hunting fitness and i'm talking about like very demanding kind of like wilderness type hunting um is just finding it in you to be calm and stressed so it's like it gets dark i'll say the other night we got this buck i found myself stressed for a minute like by the time got over, I shot it with 12 minutes of legal shooting light left. By the time I got over to where it was,

couldn't find it, I knew I had a good hit. Couldn't even figure out where it was because I had to cross a canyon to get over there. And I was like, oh, it's dark now. And I was just like creating problems in my head. It's going to be so late by the time, whatever. And just be like, just catch yourself.

Because I see sometimes people don't catch themselves well. I remember one time we got a little bit turned around in the Arctic and a guy I took hunting, it was his first hunting trip ever, just took off into the night. He got so freaked out about where we were headed that he just got in his head in some direction and just went and he like had a panic attack i think that's a big part of it and i think a big part of it too is just like having to be there just like that uh trying not to quit yeah like

you got it like halfway or three quarters of the way up the mountain when you're like this sucks you need to be able to look up and be like okay i just got to keep walking yeah no big deal i was talking to an old man one time at i was at the rocky mountain elk foundation thing in las vegas and was talking to an old man he's a very accomplished big game hunter and you know he did a lot of sheep hunting then we got to talk about the demands of sheep hunting and i kind of like veered the conversation toward aspects of physical fitness and it made him uncomfortable and he said really it just kind of comes down to putting one foot in front of the other yep it's a project i look at it as a project but i will say like when you're hunting with other dudes or chicks or whatever like it can be tough because like

we might be on the same like level of mental and physical ability but like there's no way I can walk up a hill quite as fast as Giannis because his freaking stride is five times longer than me. He's nine foot tall. You know what I mean? Tonight he was... Retired? No, he wasn't going too fast tonight.

He's creeping. Normally the eagle is faster than I am, but tonight I kept kind of bumping into him. But you know what I'm saying? Like when you hunt with – even if you hunt with someone who's in shape, like you still might not be on the same timing. You know what I mean? Exactly.

Yeah. Like you're going to get there when you get there. But – Yeah. The Eagle's a fast walker. Everyone has their strengths. My final thought here on the yoga... Why do you hate this conversation so much?

I don't hate it at all. I feel like you live it in pain almost. I really enjoy it. Oh, you're... Yeah, I'm like thinking about the next time I'm going to go to my yoga class. We're going to go together. Or go on a bike ride.

Yeah. Bike ride to yond. Steve, when you're there, we're going to go. go together or go on a bike ride yeah bent by right to yond okay so when you're there we're gonna go but you're thinking about what i do really enjoy just doing yoga i want to get better at doing yoga but this hunting season i felt as good as i've ever but not maybe not ever maybe not as because i felt when i was 20 and and l cut for the first time but like in a long time just like and it's the like the it's not it's not like hunting do you feel like you were in better shape when you were 20 no way well i was probably still smoking cigarettes at 20 but smoke my 20 year old self

i just drink so much stuff, man. Yeah, I think, yeah. But anyway, sorry, go ahead. It just surprised me that you, because I would. Somewhere in there, I was like, I quit smoking cigarettes, and I got in pretty good shape. I started running, you know, Vail Half Marathon. Quit drinking quite so much.

Yeah, probably not. But I was going to say, it's like the uh the things that like even if you went hunting more and try to replicate it and you're like i'm gonna go out and train to hunt today on the mountain with a backpack on and i'm gonna sneak up on deer you're still just not gonna put yourself somehow in those positions that you actually do when you're hunting it's like it'd just be almost too hard to like mentally be like oh right now i'm gonna act like i got into some deer and get down on my knees and then kind of go halfway down and just kind of sit there on the side of this mountain like this with my knees stuck on a rock yeah for 15 minutes and that's

like it's a good idea to be like oh i'm gonna go train on the mountain to hunt yeah but that's where yoga i feel like yes in these positions where i'm like all my knees and i'm like okay it's gonna i gotta sit here because if i if i do like this they're gonna see me i'm gonna get up on like you know like lift my head up another foot she's gonna see my head or whatever those are the kind of like things that were yoga i'm like man i feel great doing this right now i've been stuck in this position for 40 minutes and i'm not like in pain or stressing about it that i need to move my leg yeah so i get that yeah what else big bucks and little bugs you want to talk about big bucks little bugs what about coyotes too oh yeah two times this week we had coyotes come and run off

uh or harass run off or harass and or harass bucks we were looking at. Well. One was. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. Well, one. The interesting buck. The smart buck. The very interesting buck just let everyone else go and stood still for an hour. Yeah. He was in a little aspen grove with a bunch of does. I don't know how many does came out of there.

Eight. The eagle glasses up three coyotes coming down the mountain. Charging down the mountain charging down the mountain says they're going to go into that aspen patch where all the deer are deer come out of there i likened it to squeezing the tube of toothpaste just deer started shooting out of the aspen patch and there's a buck we were watching in there knew he was in there a good one stands up and that son of a would not move this stock still he's like i'm not going to be running out here all excited getting shot at by guns i like where i am i'm going to stay i'm brushed out and let the ladies run around and

i am not yeah moving because dudes that move get shot at the coyotes moved through he stood for a while longer and ever longer back down forever longer and then laid him right back down even though all of his ladies had left yep they came back aspen patch cleaned out yeah they came back to him a couple did couple did but it cleaned out and he was like weighing it that's how big bucks get big he's weighing in his mind he's like what's worse i'll stomp that coyote he's like they're all running i'm not gonna expose myself in the middle of the day because what's a coyote gonna go after a running deer more than likely later we got to see the same buck brody two. The same buck where we saw him see a person, in this case Brody, no fault of Brody's. Some doles were running around getting all excited. He just very kind of like slowly, not a lot of hubbub, just kind of crept out of the area no hopping and jumping around sticking his head up he's just like yeah that was a smart buck yeah you see like watching him you go like that's how you become six years old with all manner of people out trying to kill you but

coyote round number two was kind of a completely different situation. That buck played his cards completely differently. Yeah, he was just with those does. Those does booked. He was with eight or nine does. Coyotes come rolling through. The does all booked spill off the hill.

A couple minutes later, four drift back around right where they came from but not him yep that buck decided that it was worthwhile to go to a new area to just be away from the action for a while yeah didn't go far went to where he could just watch stuff happening i felt like but it's good it's funny to watch the like the gears turning in the head man yeah assessing risk yep in arctic dreams barry lopez has a he's talking about polar bear how long a polar bear can live and he has a line in there where he says that um some of the bear doesn't make any mistakes 25 years that's

impressive yeah and i just thought it was like a good way of putting it if he doesn't make any mistakes yeah and learns not to make mistakes yeah doesn't make mistakes yeah what's a deer make mistakes what's a i mean a big buck what's their long term six six year old yeah can be has ancient big but like in if they weren't going to get shot what's their life expectancy in the wild not i could tell you this not nearly as long as females because they run themselves too ragged so you have like 20 year old cow elk turning up all the time a 10 year old bull is very old yep no like dull sheep again you can have used 18 19 years old a ram tends to go very quickly from being top dog to dead dog i think mule deer pop off the top man that goes for everybody because they deplete themselves

it's not it's okay to say not getting shot at but i think it's important to add on to that that it's like you know we always talk about like hunter mortality you know getting shot as like such a small percentage of why these animals are dying right you know at these at any age but like like you're saying they wear themselves ragged and so they're more susceptible to you know starvation. Predation. And predation. And so a lot like wolves and yellowstone, they're always taking down big, worn-down bulls. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You'll find it in certain areas. Lions target.

Lions will target, rut it out. They're slow. No, and I imagine it's very probably closely related. A big buck that's in his prime and a buck that's about to. Well, prime and over the hill is. Or is a year apart, right? I think. Yeah, I mean, I think a seven or eight-year-old mule deer buck is ancient.

And they don't have like a retirement. No. They don't have like, oh, look at those young bucks off chasing those ladies it's like last year was a really good year and now i'm dead i think that would go for humans like a good 20 years and then there's like the special old horse pasture and you're always like what are those horses like they're like they did their work now they just get to live out their days on that patch yeah because they closed all the slaughter facilities but we also got to see uh no more glue we also got to see a lot of cool

young buck behavior too yeah which is you know the thing that brody and I were talking about is um I think I like a hunting mule during open countries you you see so much body language and social interactions with the animals yep so you get to view them for a long time something you mentioned last night brody after that close encounter with the doe and two fawns is their vocal interaction that yeah yeah a lot of people i may not know it i mean i'm sure ste Steve and Giannis have heard it. But if you're real close to them and it's a quiet day, they talk to each other a lot, like little grunts and mews and stuff. And people don't think a deer is like a vocal animal, but I've heard a lot where a doe talks to her fawns.

And it's cool if you're close enough to hear it. In one of his turkey hunting tapes, Will Primos talks about with turkeys, he says there's all the sounds you know because he's talking about when you just sit and have turkeys come by you, they're making all kinds of noises. Yeah. But not noises that carry it all.

But when you're super close to them, you realize they're constantly carrying it. Yeah. Like inaudible to you, like you're not going to hear it 50 yards right on the right there you realize like man they are just communicating yep i'm here i'm here i'm here i'm here to each other you know and then the body language too like we saw those fawns like bickering with each other and getting nasty with each other and the the young bucks nose and the does and the

does not paying attention to them the big bucks chasing does and giant circles the thing i like a lot is uh when you're glad when you glass up some deer that you locate other deer based on that you'll yeah you'll realize a deer is there that you cannot see based on the tension in the group of deer when a new deer is coming. The buck I shot today, the doe stepped into a little opening that was a deer's body width wide and she turned around and looked down the hill

and I knew that that buck was behind her. I couldn't see him, but I knew it was coming. She's not there because it's a phone yeah do not because this is that dude yeah this had his nose in my ass yeah yeah yep yeah no when we were first classing those ones up and we just saw does and we didn't even see the buck but then we saw i saw through the that's right you even said you said terrible little lcd viewfinder on

looks like she's getting pestered yeah you said you said, I just saw one of them get pestered. Turns out there was a buck in the group. Very true. Yeah. You don't see that sitting in a tree stand with a bunch of hardwood oaks around you. You don't see the deer white tails long enough to see

much of that. Yeah. I think it does happen, not nearly like it does when you get to spend a whole morning watching watching a big from a thousand yards away just over the course of two hours of interaction among one you know group of deer it's super cool i mean it was cool to go from pow which was our last hunt you know where he catched just a glimpse of a deer such glimpses and this this this round we saw so many deer and glassed up so many like it was every hunt so many stocks and so many like like from my camera guy perspective like over the rifle whether we were going to shoot or not i had you know the host in frame with the

animal yeah it's just a cool it's a cool thing me and cory did see an interaction that in pow even though the the glimpses are so fleeting of deer when you're in the coastal rainforest we saw an interaction where i blew a fawn distress call, and a doe came in with a fawn, and then for whatever reason kicked the shit out of the fawn. Like 10 feet away. Not 10 feet. I'm exaggerating, but extremely close.

20 feet, man. Like you've been a bad child kind of thing. I was wondering, because she comes in, because she's coming running in to protect. Presumably, it's like you're making the sound of a fawn getting attacked. Yep. She runs in to defend the fawn. The fawn follows her. I wonder if she's saying-

Get out of here. To the fawn, if she's saying, don't- The same way, if you see, if you're with your kids and you see like an altercation break out in a parking lot it like if your kid were to like run toward the altercation or a fire or something yeah you would like into the altercation right you'd be like what get no what are you doing yeah you go over there you know or like yeah anything like that and i kept wondering like what was the thing there where she turned and she kind of they both stood up yeah like she was with her from yeah though but she got she also could have been saying like all right if we get closer we see the predator this is what you have to do you need to

stand up and like get ready to punch up yeah because they both kind of kicked at each other like yeah like remember what i taught you? Like this, mom? Let's get abusive. Let's get feisty. No, they were there for a while, too. Yeah. Yanni's buddy, Jay Miller, was just telling me the other night about, I didn't see how I didn't use his full name so folks can't look him up.

Keep it secret. Yeah, Jay Miller. I mean, there's lots of them. He had a buddy of his call up. The guy, every time he cuts hay bales, Jay Miller's buddy cuts hay bales open, round bales, or no, probably square bales. Either way, he takes all the twine and lays all the twine over the fence and over the years has built up quite an accumulation of twine on the fence where he feeds his livestock.

A buck comes in there to get hay. Leftover, you know. Leftover hay. And he's feeding around where all the twine is and gets himself so wrapped up in the twine that he's stuck to the fence. For some reason, I think they were like loops. Loops?

Is how I understood it, because he was like taking the loops off the bale somehow, and then just, instead of cutting it, taking the loop off and throwing it over a single post. I understood it as he was taking the loops off, because then that gives the buck something to actually get caught in, because I feel like it was just like one string and it you don't really get caught up yeah so he had thrown these loops over like a single post and accumulated them over years and years and years and right in that area there

was leftover hay buck come in eating that got entangled and gets entangled then tell them what happened. He's a Japanese cowboy. As was explained to us. It was very important that we understood that part of the story. Well, yeah, because then you get to do whatever you think your Japanese cowboy accent is. Mr. Miller was doing that accent. He loves the guy. Great neighbor, I think it is. But anyways, he says he's got a buck stuck in the uh the twine and uh i guess he went down there with what did he say he had he had a sickle

a sickle which behind the hell the cowboy had a sickle i don know. But he was going in there and jumping in. Jay Miller. Yeah. Slicing two, three, four, how many ever chunks of twine. Jumping out. And then when he finally got the last chunk that freed that buck, that buck stood and looked at Mr. Miller and said, you must be the one that caused this problem.

And then came after him, and I believe, I'm trying to think now, the story went that he grabbed him by the horns, but still the force pushed him, because we were talking about the power of work. Yeah, and ripped parallel lines up each, ripped through his jeans parallel lines up each leg. And he said that he'll never do that again. Never do that again. ripped through his jeans, parallel lines up each leg. And he said that he'll never do that again.

Never do that again. The next time, the GFD's cowboy calls me up about a buck stuck in my throat. Staying out of it. We had this buck wandering around our neighborhood a few years ago. We would call him Bropey, a big buck, but he had this rope. Was he named kind of after you? No, no. R We called him Bropey, a big buck, but he had this rope. Was he named kind of after you? No, no. Bropey? Bropey. Rope, because he had this length of rope in his antlers.

And I had a buddy that lived across town from me, not far away, a half mile, called me up and said, Bropey's got this four corn. Bropey was big. And I don't know why a four corn would have been messing with him but it was after the rut and they were fooling around or whatever and he got this four

corn stuck in his antlers and the rope busted that four corns neck and he but the fork he was still alive and they had to come and shoot that four corn and cut him loose from that buck is that right right in town, yeah. Now, you know how you were wondering why they'd be fighting? Yeah. Years ago, my brother had a bighorn sheep tag. And we glassed up some rams. And it was a nice big ram that we were after.

But he was running with a bunch of little shavers. And we crawled in on him, and he got all set up, waiting for a shot, and the big one just wouldn't get up. The little ones would honestly, I wish I had this on film. The little ones would go up to the big one and hook their horn onto his horn like you're hooking a car to a trailer to try to drag him onto his feet to spar wanting to play with them basically yeah but they come into his curl yeah hook their curl on his curl and try to back up

and lift him up onto his feet maybe a way of learning or something now and then he would get up and do a little number with him and in fact it was one of those times that boom yeah and he was yeah it was his last fight the last fight he was ever in but yeah it was like they just wanted to yeah square up with mr bank you know just Big. I think there's more to it, though, because they do a lot of that, the sheep especially. I think bucks and bulls do it, too, outside of the rut when they're not actually fighting. I think a lot of it is

because they don't have a mirror to look at and go, oh, I'm a 180 class thick horn timber buck. I'm kicking ass. That's how they have to look at who's around them and then go and feel what it feels like when they're putting their heads together, fight a little bit, spar a little bit,

and they don't always have to do it to the death. They can do it gently. Very gently sometimes. They can get a sense of what they have on their heads and what kind of dominance they could maybe exert then later, actually during the rut. In particular, I've seen late season bulls very gently sparring with each other, just like tickling antlers.

We saw that hunting with Cal. We saw a couple of bulls kind of tearing it up late. Now, I never looked into the seed of validity of this, but I remember reading something to the effect of that oftentimes a big buck will spend a lot of time with bucks outside of his age class. And someone was postulating that it alleviated

some stress that if he's hanging out with a bunch of peers there's more uh hierarchical fighting going on and when you have these sort of separated age classes they don't need to spend as i don't know this is is total BS or not. It sounds plausible. So I'm saying like a theory on that was it's easier for them to be in a situation, one that's like a very clearly established hierarchy. That makes sense. Like to me, that makes sense like post-rut.

But like pre-rut, like when they're still in velvet, you often see like a bunch of bucks of the same class together yeah because they're just not mad at each other that time of year you know that's why um it's stressful for me to hunt with the eagle right yeah because we're always like who's better at glass who can walk faster faster? And there is like this. If I help with dirt, I know I'm going to outglass him. He's not stressful. I think dirt has. Can you out-hike him, though?

Can you out-hike him? I can out-hike dirt. You guys. I'm working on my eagle eyes. I think your assessment of dirt needs to be upgraded because he's starting to see animals a lot, I feel like. Dirt is getting good? Yes. Better, not good.

I can't out-hike them. I can't out-carry them. I can't out-gir them, but I can out-glass them. You definitely don't have as much chest hair. I can't out-hair them. Corey, what do you think about all this? You've been pretty quiet. No, this hunt has been awesome.

I mean, it's challenging in the physical sense, but then again, like you said earlier, about watching the personalities of each animal because you can see so far out there and learn a lot about them. You can almost maybe pick up on personalities of each animal, which is really cool. Without anthropomorphizing the whole thing

like oh that's a cute one she's angry and yeah well you get to name them like like we that one buck that steve got we got to watch it we got to chase it for 10 hours yeah yeah both of us how he his approach with the ladies. Aggressive. Storming. That guy needs to learn a thing or two about finesse. That was the longest hunt I've ever been involved with for one animal. And both of us were involved. Hours in a day.

I mean, it was dawn until dark. Non-stop. It was shortly after daylight until 12 minutes before yeah yeah that that was yeah one of the most satisfying hunting days of my life for sure hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join

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out if you visit OnXMaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yanni, what was that closing thought you had about Dartmouth?

It was... If you're ready for your closing thought. Yeah, if we're ready to go there, I can kick off. Is there any other pressing issues we need to discuss that would fall outside of closing thought? Hikers and bikers. rick real quick have have you got have have ladies contacted you have women contacted you based on me plugging you as a single man i received one message on one

on the salt takes that just said I'm a lady, and I listen to the podcast. So there is a woman. There is a woman listening. There is a woman. There is a woman who's listening, right? Well, I feel like there might be more than that. There used to be two. My mother-in-law used to listen.

My instrument, you kiss her. Yeah. Listen, you want to hear a story that I feel horrible about? I'll tell that story real quick. But first, Rick, one woman has contacted you. Yeah. That's it. There might be more, but you haven't checked.

There might be a few that have followed me, but they haven't sent me. They haven't reached out. No. They're being coy. Or just, you know. Not interested. Yeah. They followed me to see all my Instagram photos, and they're like, yeah, this guy.

Yeah. He's too artsy. Too artsy. But at the very least, you do have female listeners, Steve. That's good. You should be proud of yourself. So Giannis' mother-in-law. Giannis' father tells

me a rather colorful story. I relate the story. Don't put any spin on it. Just relate the story. And she gets so mad at me that now she says she won't listen anymore.

When all I did was told something that was told to me. Is she mad at your dad? Probably. Oh, you think so? I don't know. Would that upset him? I don't think she's actually mad at anybody. But she didn't like it.

Just disapproving. Yeah. But you see the situation that puts me in, where I'm just telling a story someone else told me. It's like shooting the messenger, man. Okay, you're closing thought about dirt. Trying to think why we were talking about this, about what we were all doing.

Is it about getting up to go to school or about getting up early or something? Oh. And Derek pipes up with, I had to milk a cow every day before going to school. That sucked. Someone else must be complaining about having to shovel snow or make oatmeal or something.

No, it's just getting up early and then i couldn't have cocoa blasts no we were getting nostalgia about uh our moms and how they would prepare the morning and oh will always wake us up in the morning yeah yeah that's what i was talking about yeah that's right yeah yeah everybody else is getting warm milk and tea. Dirt had to just get kicked out of bed to go milk the cow. And I thought to myself, you know what? I do not have another peer that I can certainly think of quickly that can say that as a child,

they were milking the cow before they went to school every day. Well, my friend Farley had to milk a whole shitload of them, but that was a family business. So it's different. We got on rolling cars today, and Dirt's like, yeah, my brother rolled a car twice. Both times he was racing me. Both regretful moments.

So that's all you got? Yeah, I just think that that kind of adds for the people that are following along. No, I don't mean it's bad. It adds a nice little layer of character to Dirt. You kind of know where he came from. I didn't mean to think that it wasn't enough. I just didn't know if you had a little more you needed to get out. Corey?

I don't think I would ever plan a big mule deer hunt around a big election because I think it took away a little bit from our – It was very distracting. Very distracting at one moment because we were in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone service, no contact with anyone. I think we waited a day before we found out who was going to be the next president. We didn't have our satellite phone. Didn't have the satellite phone.

We put it in the truck because probably weight or room in the raft or something. We asked some guy in a boat who won. Now, I had that happen during Bush-Gorere where we put off a trip for the election the next day no one knew and we're like well let's just go anyways we went then did a float trip for four days came out well who won they still don't know another another popular vote winner loser yeah exactly popular vote electoral vote yeah it was it was like it was like so um yeah it's hard to it was an odd it was just a way to camp like not the delivery was no it was just weird i... You're like, so who's president of the United States of America?

No, and we're not... Who's our leader? We're not a group of people that doesn't care. I think all of us, in our own way, are politically engaged and very much care about the process and the outcome. And to sit up and be glassing for was both uh satisfying and disconcerting like it was a strange combination of like thank god i'm not watching the pundits like give me the play-by-play like at the time i was like oh this kind of feels good that i'm like kind of removed from the

process but then once the process was over and i knew people knew i was like oh my god i can't believe i don't know what the outcome is like and then we we ultimately were interested and we found out via radio and then there was a lot of uh disbelief yeah This is my personal concluding thoughts, but we found out on radio and Steve said, Trump won. I was like, oh, are you

screwing with me? You know, like everybody in the nation. I think everyone in the whole country because it had been pounded into your head that it was impossible i'm on radio with with steve who's hearing this information via somebody else you know and it's like are you just messing with me like and no but i really all day hoped that i was being messed with a little bit. You were upset. Yeah, I was like, I felt ill. But I did...

Was that cheering you up? No, I was happy to get this news. I felt ill sort of hearing that news. But in a group of people with such diverse political feelings that are all rational and information-based. And so I feel like there's still a very large contingent of America that votes based on feeling, which I respect, but information and facts are really important to me and i think one reason i respect steve so much and we disagree politically slightly i think we're on kind of two

sides of the same coin um but he's an information-based human it's like if there's facts that tell him to believe a certain way uh he looks at them and is like okay that's i'm gonna engage with those facts like yeah yeah and uh and so to be with a group of people that we could discuss uh the trump presidency with with uh with facts and with openness and an understanding that everybody has a different feeling about a lot of different things while we're waiting for a mule deer buck was like a pretty, I, it was a good,

it was a good, I think I would have been much less satisfied to watch this all unfold on CNN in my house by myself because we, we get, we get pretty compartmentalized in our own little bubbles. I think that people are talking about that. But you guys all... The bubbledness is becoming a problem.

It is definitely becoming a problem. But my work with this crew, just in general, I'm not a hunter. I have different political beliefs than I think other people. My feelings about yoga are slightly different than other. But we can all talk about this and not get angry at each other. And I think it's, man, if the rest of America had our little deal going on, we wouldn't have such issues. It was interesting.

We were huddled down waiting for that bug to stand up. And the whole time rick and i are just like talking about the election okay all right that was your concluding thought yeah i loved it now i'm gonna i'm gonna build on that um with a couple thoughts here now i want to preface these thoughts by saying that i made a conscious decision, a conscious decision a long time ago that in my public-facing comments, like in my public-facing viewpoints, I was not going to discuss,

I don't discuss politics. I discuss politics, it just pisses too many people off. It just doesn't feel to me like it's constructive and larger because I sit on I sit simultaneously on both sides of the fence for instance I support clean air and clean water and also a robust military and capital punishment so like I don't have a lot of use for conservative and liberal because I'm an issues person. I look at each issue independently, and I don't look toward what is the particular platform of a party.

Or how can I align myself? Like, oh, since I'm conservative, I must have this opinion. Or let me go check. Let me make a phone call to find out what my opinion is because all i know is that i'm conservative so i don't have that approach um but anyway i try to avoid politics except i do talk about politics when it has to do with issues of wildlife conservation wildlife management hunting fishing how how the political atmosphere is affecting you know our public lands yeah public lands our lives as

hunters and fishermen so that's something uncomfortable talking about um now I'm going to do that. I'm going to talk about something that's going on now and the election in terms of something that I am comfortable discussing in politics, which is public lands issue. Now, some of you may have heard that Donald Trump won the presidency. At this point right now, this is something that doesn't happen very often, but at this point right now, we have one political party. The Republican Party is now, will soon hold the presidency, will hold the House of Representatives, will hold the Senate, and will soon hold, I know it's supposed to be apolitical,

but they will soon hold the Supreme Court if you imagine that their Republicans, their nominees will have a majority in the Supreme Court. Now, I'm going to tell you a fact. The Republican Party has a list of planks in their platform so the Republican Party has an agenda and it's not something that you need to speculate about it's a written out

agenda that the party holds they hold that and not all Republicans believe this but a part of the platform is that we should be getting rid of federal public lands. This isn't like, I'm not telling you like a theory. This is a thing I invite you to go check. The Republican National Committee came out with like a prioritized list.

On this list is we need to be dumping federal public lands. For sale. For divestiture. Yeah. Get them out of, yeah. See, here's the thing is, I don't want to get into, I'm trying not to spin any of this. Right. I have theories about why that is.

Okay. any of this right i have theories about why that is okay but i'm just trying to lay out i'm at this point because i'm so uncomfortable discussing aspects of politics because i'm such a mess politically i'm trying to just lay out like i'm trying to lay out factual things yeah so that's that's a it's on the Republican agenda, dumping federal public lands. And usually, we have a system of checks and balances in this country, obviously, that exists between the Supreme Court, the President, House, and Senate. And we also have a different sort of checks and balances, which comes about where we have two political parties that are on different sides of the aisle and they kind of battle shit out all the time. And that allows things to move slowly.

And I tend to, like, people complain about gridlock, but I'll tell you this about my own personal political feelings, is I don't always look at gridlock as being necessarily evil because when things happen kind of slow and in a measured way, I feel that it lends a little bit of stability to our political lives, our social lives, our economy. And radical herky-jerky shit kind of makes me uneasy. So all these different,

so much of the government now is controlled by a single political party, and that political party thinks we should be dumping the federal lands that we hunt and fish on this is complicated there's an upside to this when you think that that trump isn't he's a republican by name only he's not really republican um if we look at like a republican as being like what the republican party has stood for for the last 50 years. For instance, the Republican Party has generally always stood for

free trade. Trump sees a lot of value in protectionism. So he's at odds with his party in that he has one view of, he has one view that free trade, there's some good parts to it, but free trade has also

cost us a lot of manufacturing jobs and other things and allowed, you know, cheap imports be dumped into our economy and throw our economy off. So he departs from the party line on free trade. The Republican Party has always stood for, promoted a very slippery term, but like traditional family values.

I think if you look at Trump's personal life, some of his articulated opinions, I don't think that he really ascribes to what we might call like traditional family values. So he kind of parts from that there. Very conservative traditional family values. Any religious conception of family values. Yeah. Any religious conception of family values. Now, Republicans have generally over the years stood for containment of the Soviet Union,

which transitioned into containment of Russia. Trump is open to finding common ground with Russia and finding ways in which we might work with Russia instead of in opposition to them. Rick, don't shake your head. I'm trying to lay out unbiased just things that the man has said. I'm agreeing with you. I just frigging, it makes my brain hurt.

Because we're not talking about politics right now. I'm setting up something that I want to talk about. You're right. You're right. Okay. No, I'm agreeing with you, but I just, my brain explodes thinking about Trump. Now, please, Rick, stop. I'm going to cut.

Yanni, I'm going to have you unplug his thing. Your brain explodes too. We're not talking about politics. I know. I'm laying some groundwork. No, you're talking about- Unplug his thing. Trump diverging from the Republican Party.

Which is a thing that is- No one would disagree with that. No, I agree. And my brain explodes with it a little bit. That's all. Rick, you got me all messed up. I'm trying to do something very delicately. You're doing good.

I'm trying to do something very delicately. I think doing good. I'm trying to do something very delicately. I think you're doing... Now, jump ahead. Thursday, January 21st, 2016. I was sitting in Nevada, about 40 yards away from Donald Trump when he said, what did he say, Giannis? You were sitting right next to me.

What did he say about public lands? He wasn't going to sell them off. Not interested in getting rid of public lands. I'm not going to get rid of your public lands. Did you hear him? He did say that. He said it to me and Yanni and hundreds of other people. I heard him with my own two ears and saw him with his own two eyes say it.

Now, the man is going to be under intense pressure to uphold at once a number of campaign promises that he has made. Some of them have been described as outlandish, whatever. I don't want to get into that right now. He's going to be under intense pressure, and he's also going to be under intense pressure to align with Republican orthodoxy on all things. And I do, like I said, I do agree with the Republican Party on many things. I part ways with them on the issue of federal public lands.

I think that people who like to hunt and who like to fish and who like to camp and ride ATVs and enjoy wildlife, what else am I missing? Mountain bikers, hikers. Mountain bikers, skiers, hikers. Those Americans who recreate and spend their time and spend their money and find their passion on public lands. Donald Trump's sons. You need to just, you need to, you need to say, listen,

Steve and Yanni heard you say that yep stay true to that please because entering into a realm where things get turned upside down and people's attentions get abandoned and you make all kinds of compromises i just hope and where do we hunt all week public land yeah public land i mean now i don't want here's the other thing i don't want to act like the public land we have people you know a lot of things we have a lot of people who are concerned with issues like their job we have people who are concerned with issues like civil liberties all americans have big issues and i don't want to people who are concerned with issues like civil liberties. All Americans have big issues. And I don't want to hold up the public lands issues

being the number one problem facing the country. But because I preface this whole thing by saying that there's an aspect of politics I'm comfortable talking about because I really know it well. And that is issues surrounding wildlife management, land use. know it well. And that is issues surrounding wildlife

management, land use. I stay boned up on that stuff. Yeah, me too. And we could not have done... Our entire week could not have existed without public lands. And he stood there in front of me and Yanni

and said, I will not sell your public lands. Not interested I will not sell your public lands. Not interested in getting rid of your public lands. Brody, what's your concluding thought? Don't talk about politics, man. Unplug your damn mic. That's all? Rick, I swear to God, you already did your thing.

I love you and respect you. I'm not going to talk about politics or Rick. I agree respect you. I'm not going to talk about politics or Rick. I agree with you. I guess I should talk about mule deer. You got a conclusion? I kind of want to talk about beavers, but we didn't get there. Oh, please. Please talk about beavers.

I got my first beaver right before the hunt. Tell them about Colorado's rule on beavers. No trapping. Which is bullshit. Well, they're trying to outlaw it well did that what happened with that got destroyed montana so montana had i was i-177 or they had some initiative where you put up you couldn't trap on public land anymore right that didn't go over real well 68 of the vote against that initiative well look at a state like well i feel like it could happen in Montana. No, it couldn't.

It just got destroyed. I know, but I'm saying if Montana becomes more urbanized, more gentrified. Yeah, the minute Colorado had 51% of its population living in Denver and Fort Collins. On the front range. Yeah, they got trapped. Right. So that's what I was saying. We live in this weird time where on one hand we have people trying to get rid of our public lands,

and then we have this other group of people, presumably from very much across the aisle from that group, trying to lock out an entire user group who's been using a sustainable, renewable resource for hundreds of years, for longer than it's even been a sustainable, renewable resource. Based on the idea that. For hundreds of years, for longer than it's even been a damn state. Yeah. But no one wants, no one can, those people can't wrap their head around an animal dying in a trap, right? No, they can just wrap their heads around the scores of animal deaths that they encounter every week. On highways. No no on their plate yeah

like when they get a chicken nuggets how many damn chickens how many damn chickens are into one chicken nugget i can tell you it ain't one right no but either way i i colorado outlawed trapping yeah 15 20 years ago i don know how, based on a voter referendum, much like they voted out spring bear hunting, hunting bears with dogs, hunting bears with bait. Death by a thousand cuts. Right. But either way, someone was smart enough to say, well, if you can't trap them,

then you can hunt them on a small game license. And I shot a beaver on a small game license 10 days ago right before this hunt and uh with steve's guidance skinned it made a nice little round thing and now i'm gonna have either around by which he means he round skinned round skinned it yep yeah and i'm either gonna do mitts or a trooper hat i'm not sure yet but he's gonna use that he's gonna use the services of clifford's critter creations who does anyone looking to have uh custom work done with your own furs i used to trap stuff and sell it now i trap stuff we just have hats and stuff right for it like my brother last beaver we got he had a nice hat made for his wife but we were hoping on the float portion

of this hunt that we'd run into a beaver it just didn't happen yeah when you look at when what colorado did when when they had the referendum the band trapping colorado i didn't notice till brody told me they just moved all the fur bears to small game over onto the small game list and so this is like the only state that I know about that you can hunt beavers with a.22. Yep. It's the only way. I mean, basically, it's the only way to get a beaver now.

There's like a certain irony there where someone was telling me, if you look at when California banned lion hunting, you look at what the annual harvest was of lions in California. I could be completely wrong, but I feel like it was somewhere in the vicinity of like 300 lions a year the annual harvest was of lions in california i i i could be completely wrong but i feel like it was somewhere in the vicinity of like 300 lines here annual harvest california now you look at what animal control services guess how many lions animal control services kills every year in california that many oh 300 yeah well in colorado they outlawed spring bear hunting, dog hunting, bait hunting. And I'm not at all a big fan of bait hunting for bears.

But the last time they had done – Do you mean that you don't have any desire to do it? You don't think folks should be able to do it? No. People can do it. It's just not something I want to do. I love to hunt bears. But it's just like I like to hunt bears spot and stalk but it doesn't mean that that's not any kind of comment on how

other people like to hunt just how i like to hunt them no but either way colorado the last time they did a major population study on black bears was sometime around the time they banned that stuff and there was x number of bears they recently did a study 20 years later or 15 years later since that's that that type of hunting had been banned and found out the population of black bears in colorado had essentially doubled and now the only way to control that population is a fairly difficult fall bear hunting season. Yeah. But we just talked to a biologist who said they're fixing to start doing some state-sponsored bear control. Right.

Right. So you make it that people, the paying customer, the license-buying customer, who's going to go out and buy a license that supports fishing game and then do a bear hunt get a bear have the meat have the hide it's like oh no it's better if we just have government guys snipe them yeah that's that's that's the solution yeah i mean i would i i would be such a huge fan of a spring bear season. And not with, I don't need dogs. I don't need bait.

I would love to be able to go do a spot and stock hunt like Montana has in the spring. Yeah, and you can't bait in Montana, and you can't run dogs in Montana, but it's not coming from the place that when people are trying to ban the practice, it's like traditional use patterns i think when you look at when i look at hunting um and fishing in the regular and the regulatory

structures that we have i give a lot and i didn't invent this it's it's not it's a common idea but i give a lot of credence to traditional use patterns yeah so what are the things that that people have traditionally done here and it gives you a good framework to understand new things. For instance, so many states are getting out ahead of the drone situation. Yep. And it's so easy to ban drones now for the use of hunting. And I got 13 states, almost every state where you'd even have, where you have open enough country that it would even matter.

Typical Western hunting states. They've all banned the use of drones and hunting why was it easy to do that it's not a traditional use practice yeah there's no resistance in fact hunters are the most vocal yep proponents of getting out ahead of the drone situation and banning the use of drones and hunting so there is like a real there's a reverence toward traditional use practices and when we go in and say like when we go inside to try to pluck out traditional use practices that we've already formed the successful wildlife management system in conjunction with you're going to hit a lot of resistance from hunters and fishermen yeah but when you turn that decision over to people who have no connection to hunting and fishing, then a traditional youth pattern can be just yanked out of existence, basically.

People who are like, you know, I wouldn't know a lion if it was chewing on my foot, but a fellow damsel shouldn't be able to hunt them. Right. Oh, you know what we glassed up tonight? I keep forgetting to talk about this. We glassed up an ermine. Oh, really? Yeah.

Pure white. Pure white already? That's what makes aned up an ermine oh really yeah pure white pure white already that's what makes the ermine ermine you know well normally people you know i know that normally there's snow this time of year and that dude doesn't know there's that dude better watch his ass he's gonna get nailed by a rafter yeah yeah because he just looks like you can't miss him man looks like a piece of paper blowing along across the mountain they're tough bitches climate change happens faster than uh faster than they can figure it out. It looks like a piece of paper blowing along across the mountainside. They're tough son of bitches, though. Climate change happens faster than they can figure it out. He's like a little white hot dog just running across the sage flower. Yeah, I was going to say he glassed up another one the other day.

Yeah, I think we were on the river and glassed one up. How come you didn't tell anybody about it? Those guys are fierce, man. Yeah. They'll kill a jackrabbit. Yeah. We had one hanging out in our yard last year oh man oh but you're concluding thought i kind of hijacked your concluding thought no that that was that was

basically it other than you know thanks to rick and garrett for just hanging tough with me the last few days yep tough old coots yep rick likes those midnight uh not midnight he likes those late night um midnight hikers he says he enjoys them you know actually I really part of me does not like them especially early on when I started doing this it's like oh it's dark

we should go home now and now I'm like oh this is awesome we don't know where we're going and there's probably some cliffs we're going to encounter and everybody's headlamps

are going to be terrible except mine so they're going to be like Rick hey come over here get some light Dermot throws a pebble down and it counts

how long it takes to hit and he decides if he can jump or not the best one and I think somebody's phrase that the, what was it Brody? Something about the

path of least resistance. No, I like to say the path of least resistance is often the hardest way to go. I think that's a really, really good metaphor for life. Like you think, oh, drainage, we don't have to climb any hills.

Until you get to a waterfall. Yeah, until you get like a 30-foot waterfall and you're just stuck there and you're like, huh. Now we'll be climbing a hill to get around this bitch. Yeah, now we've got to do some effort. So there is this sense that there's no free lunch. You've got to put in your time. You've got to put in your effort. I'm just going to go down that hill.

I want you to know, in that drainage, I was not caught by surprise by all those falls. I've walked down those things many times. But I do like the severity of them. Your optimism of like, oh, yeah, let's pass backpacks

down this little short waterfall hop that we can all climb down. And then you're like, oh, this next one's good. And then you look at it, you start climbing and you're like when you walk up to the oh okay maybe maybe not scary i got a little ahead of myself yeah we made it out fine yeah um dirt life's good when you're sweating outside seeing country well for this man is a poet. A hairy poet. I wish we had a website to post that Starbucks photo. Can we put that on the... Yeah, me and Dirt Myth hitting Starbucks.

Sweating. Not that that wasn't enough, but you feel satisfied. Yep. Maybe after that picture, my dad will want to hit up a Starbucks for the first time. Oh, yeah. Yanni's dad. Yanni's dad, who I'll point out,

as much as he believes he's Latvian, and he is by descent, an American-born man tried to tell me that he has never, ever had a Starbucks coffee. Folgers Manor? What is he?

Not even that he's tried to avoid it. He just says that it's just never happened. I don't know if that's really possible because I feel like you'll say to some dude like, oh, hey, can you grab me a coffee? And it'll be that kind. The thing is, is that my dad's not, he hasn't ever been much of a coffee drinker.

And I think that the way that we consume coffee, like our generation, how often we're like, much of a coffee drinker and i think that the the way that we consume coffee like our generation how often we're like get me a coffee let's go to the coffee shop like my dad like he would look at that and be like that's 750 annually that i can instead be putting here like you're an idiot for going to spend that kind of money on cups of coffee and white you know cups and in a way he's right so i think. In a way, he's right. I think that's kind of how he's gotten out of it. So you believe him when he says that? Yeah. Well, he's damn sure

had some now. Those Vias. Which we love. That's something we should discuss sometime is how Via is the way to go for backpack coffee. Rick, did you do one? Did you get a concluder? Oh, yeah. I had the whole trunk. Rick, did you do one? Did you get a concluder? Oh, yeah. I had the whole trunk.

Do you want me to go on? I would, man. I got a chore for you, Rick. I got a chore for you, Rick, and we'll check back in. I want to find a word or a phrase to explain this. You can come up with it.

You know when you try to gauge someone's judgment, right? So you get to know someone. You're trying to figure out. And over time, you're like, yeah, this is a very reliable figure. Yeah. I have a problem, not with anyone in this room, but I have a thing that i've identified over the years where what when someone's opinion is always that that you should that you look it's like always

the easy thing but they never say like it'd be easier to but they always have a different reason but then when you look you go like oh but your reason is easier. And over time, you realize that every time an issue comes up, they have the easy idea, but they never want to do it because it's easy. They always try to sell you on it with a different explanation. It's like a rationalization of something with some other ulterior motives. So you're like, hey, let's go up there and look for a buck. And they're like, man, I feel like we should go down there and look for a buck. And then the next day, you're like, hey, let's pick up these big, huge rocks and throw them.

And they're like, I was thinking we'd pick up these little rocks and throw them. Throw them further. We can throw them further because they're little. And over time, you go like, man, every time this guy has ever had a suggestion, it's always happened to be the easier. I would say that's the problem of modernity right there. Yeah.

I want you to think about it and think about and think of a way to describe some people just don't want to work hard no yeah i want something more like um like a like a specific psychological i'll i'll give you a little starter all right then we're done this eco-feminist val plumwood writes about that just take take An eco-feminist does. Oh, yeah. Is that a guy or a girl? Girl. I was going to say, you can't be a bro eco-feminist.

Yeah. Well, you could. I am, you know. All right. With that. Tune in next time. Ha ha. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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