The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 076: The Impossible Hunt

Episode Date: August 10, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with Kurt Racicot and Pete Muennich of Stone Glacier Packs, along with Brittany Brothers and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: Ultralight backpacks; being alone in the woods for a long time; more on the New Jersey Cat Lady; three types of hunting tags; cash tips and guided hunters; Martin vs. Wadell; the brutality of Montana's unlimited bighorn sheep units; suffering; the science of packing meat; the functional quality of neatness; Steve's new marketing slogan ("We Hunt Unlimited Sheep") that Stone Glacier oughta be using; catchin' pus' in shrimp pots; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We put the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Have like your own show.

And I was like, oh, I don't think you're talking about me. Someone wrote in and said to say um your turkey talk did not inspire me but i would love to be able to bottle britney's laugh oh god that's a great comment you don't like that you're not a trick yanni know what you brought up recently that i had that i've been meaning to bring up with other people no maybe think like a lot less of you uh yeah i was just saying that that's gonna happen sometimes janice was saying that when he was guiding elk hunters that when dudes would like there's turnover day right new guys come in janice would look and and hope to get assigned to the person that looked like they were the highest tipper.

How do you tell? That's what I was curious about. Do you look at their shoes or something? You might interpret it a little bit. The newest gear. Because we were talking about tips in general. Tips, yeah. Somewhere we were talking about where they were pooling tips.

I said I'd like that because- You would like that. Well, yeah, because when the new crew rolls in, you can't pick the guys out. Like the dude that rolls in, it's like, I saved $5,000 over 10 years by collecting metal scraps. You're like, I don't want that guy. Yeah, and then at the end of the week, he doesn't kill elk and he tips his dude a thousand bucks.

And you're like, how did that happen? Sounds like a big tip. No, that's a giant tip. I thought you were saying the guy with the metal scraps would not tip well. Well, that's what you would think, right? So you're saying curveball. But I'm saying you can't pick them out. The guy that was stripping down copper wire for 10 years to go on a hunt,

you'd be like, I don't want him. And then it turned out that you couldn't you didn't really know because maybe he had stripped so much copper wire right i grew up this is the last i'll say about this uh you can explain more but i grew up with guys that were so ambitious but not ambitious that rather than get jobs these guys one time went and hot wired some kind of piece of heavy equipment in order to load a spool of rubber coated copper cable into a truck and then spent days with a fire burning off the coating oh my god to sell and like how much copper we're talking about a giant spool so a lot of pounds oh no hundreds

of pounds of copper yeah that's worth some money And had a campfire and just slowly, rather than getting a job. This is working for yourself, man. Yeah, some guys don't. So to back up. So I just felt to you, knowing you, I felt like you would say, or the way I understood you to be before I found out how you really are. I would have pictured that you'd say like, yeah, you know, the guys come in and I look, and I try to find the one who's dreaming the most, the one that's hungriest for this hunt, because I want to team up with him and give him an experience.

And by God, if I need to pay him to do it, I'll do it. I think the guy's dreams the kind of guy you are. The guide's dreams of the client that you want to guide probably change as you mature as a guide. It changes. Because in the beginning, you're like, I want the guy that's never elk hunted, and then he won't call me out on the fact that I've only hunted two weeks more than he has. And then later, you sort of probably get to the person that you're like, man, I want the person that you're like man

i want the dude that's just gonna charge gonna get up at 3 a.m he wants to hunt the top of the mountain every day and hike three hours in the dark every day hike three hours in the dark back every day and then i think probably towards the end at least definitely having with fishing for me is that um i like taking just newbies and beginners that just you know you show them one bugle and elk and they're just like wow blew my and beginners that just you know you show them one bugle and elk and they're just like wow blew my mind that was unbelievable you know um and even if they weren't the best hunters if they at least were just trying into it and you know that's who you wanted to guide so that changes i think you know but you are working and at the end of the week

sure it's nice to go to the bar the big wad in your pocket yeah what was a good tip for how long were these elk hunts five days and what was a good tip at the time what the hunt cost it was it was a bargain basement hunt man yeah it was cheap it was like three thousand ish for archery maybe even a little bit less that's a good deal and uh but we hunted a lot of public land you know and you might run into other dudes. And then I think, like, if you hunted out of the cabin for rifle, it might have been 35, 38-ish, something like that. Is that a good tip? A good tip? I think, like, everybody was stoked. We got it two to one, and you were, like, fine to walk out of there with 200 bucks from each guy.

You know, you felt like you were getting stiffed if they only gave you $100 for the whole week. But every now and then, you did get a dude that threw down the K. He basically doubled, because we were getting paid $200 a day, and so he would double your wages for the week, which was sweet. Cash. Yeah, exactly. Cash. Yep.

Are you related to Mark Roscoe, the former governor? I am. Is that your dad? No, that's my uncle. Yeah, my dad's oldest brother. So you're like politically connected. Oh, yeah. No, not necessarily.

I mean, yeah, yeah. That was in the mid-90s. Yeah, it was. So he had two terms here. And unfortunately, I can't bring the exact dates to you. But yeah, it was in that time frame. And having your own... Do you own Stone Glacier outright? No.

Nope, I do not. You run it? How does it work? Yeah. You like the explain to me. You tell me. I will explain it to you. Can we hear who you're like but you're like the the explain to me okay you tell me i i will explain it to you can we hear who you're talking to is it too early to say who we're talking to no let's do no let's let's do a round table yannis patel is here pete munich pete munich's been on here before i have

um talking goats yeah because pete runs rocky you You know how Giannis has the Rocky Mountain Squirrel Foundation. Pete Munich invented, right? You invented the Rocky Mountain Goat Alliance. Once upon a time. Which is the only goat-focused, mountain goat-focused conservation group. And you were inspired. You had a moment, like a epiphany i uh yeah i saw the governor's tag bighorn tag in montana get auctioned off that wild sheep foundation one

winner for 580 000 and 90 of that money or 580 580 i didn't know it ever went that high oh yeah we got a return to that because that's something i want to talk about anyways talk to you boys about 90 of that money went back to the state of Montana for sheep management and conservation. Yeah. And I love mountain goats and had previously hunted one and kind of inquired about our governor's tag, mountain goat governor's tag. And then kind of started asking about volunteer opportunities and conservation efforts. And that was kind of a quiet answer. So the Goat Alliance was formed quiet answer so the goat alliance was formed

and what the goat tag go for that same year uh the montana governor's mountain goat tag ranges from about 15 to 23 000 i didn't know they had one oh yeah you never hear about that yeah a lot most states do see all right we're already digging a hole man there's so much shit needs to be explained now okay so, so Pete, you also work. Peter or Pete? I see both. Pete, okay. Just go ahead.

But you also work for Stone Glacier. Yes, I do. That's like your main, because you don't make money off running the gold lines. Not a dime. And Kurt, tell about what you got going on now. Okay, so I am the lead designer for Stone designer for stone glacier and i'm also one of the owners the founder yep i'm the founder one oh yep one of yep gotcha yeah we're in the room where you design packs yeah yeah a lot of it you know 90 of it i do right here um nice quiet space

you don't you know no distractions and uh have everything you need right here so yeah um i started stone glacier back in 2012 and then this last year you know we were looking for growth we were looking uh to expand in other markets do lots of other things and we found the right people that wanted to be involved and and so, you know, it's given me the time to move back into the design primarily and focus on, you know, what I need to do to grow the company. You know, back in the mid-90s, I was saying, maybe a little later than that, I was like, you know what, there's no more room in this world for another microbrewery. Yeah.

Just a few. Yeah. Look at Bozeman. There's around 1999 i declared market saturation yeah but um is it like uh is this scary was it scary getting like starting a backpack company no it wasn't scary at all um i i think you know financially it wasn't scary just because of the way that i went about it um i i wasn't looking to hit a home run i wasn't scary just because of the way that I went about it. I, I wasn't looking to hit a home run. I wasn't looking to leverage my, you know, my family's life savings. I was just looking to bring a product to market that I thought was viable that people would use. And, and so that was the only step was actually taking on myself.

Yeah. I talked to other companies, you serious, but they had their own programs going. They were doing their own thing. And so that was the only option. And started very small, minimum run. And this was a side gig. This is not Kurt's full-time job. Yes. Yep, yep, yep, exactly.

What was the full-time job? A full-time job, high-volt job, high voltage electrician in Alaska. Oh. Yeah. That's why this room is plastered with stuffed doll sheep. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. How many years were you up there? Is that a stone?

No, that's not. No, uh-uh. How many years were you up there? I was up there for 13. Oh, okay. So you were stacking up doll rams. Yeah, I was trying. You shot all these doll sheep?

Yep. Yep. Stupid question. What's the brown one? That is a Montana bighorn. That's the unlimited? That is, yeah. I don't want to talk about that a whole bunch.

Okay. And then, Brittany Brothers, you've been out here a bunch of times. How many times have you been out here? Only two times. Really? No, no, no. That's not true. I guess after the episodes, too.

So four times. Can you laugh for a minute? No. You have to make me laugh. No, because a fella, I was just telling Brittany, a fella wrote in last time you were on, and he was saying that he wished that he could bottle Brittany's laughter. He provided full contact information once you called. So I feel like you should chuckle for him now.

Well, it's organic, right? I have to be prompted. I can't just fake it. Otherwise, what would be the fun in that? Yeah. What do you have to say? Did you wind up getting a turkey this spring? No, I didn't.

We went once with Giannis and Helen and her boyfriend came into town and my boyfriend and the whole Petellus clan. And then another time, my boyfriend and I went out east and were attacked by the worst tick infection. Yeah, but those ticks don't matter. Oh, they sure as hell do when you have two dogs that are crawling with hundreds of ticks. Oh, my. Why would you bring dogs turkey hunting?

Were you hunting turkeys illegally? No, no, no. They were just hanging out in the camper. No, they were hanging out in the camper. Pounded the brush and then flushed the single turkey. No, no. We were not hunting with dogs. They were hanging out in the camper while we went in the morning.

But then during the day, I mean, it was like 90 degrees too during the day. So we were hanging out. And then suddenly we realized they were crawling with ticks. So we were like hanging out and then they just like suddenly we realized they were crawling with ticks yeah it's like the problem with those ticks and left the problem those ticks is that when you pick them off you you always leave the parts in you and the parts in you it's like a bastard but they don't they don't really bite onto you for like another for like a day or so no but once they get on you, they get in your waist, they get onto your belt, anywhere, man. And then they grab on and you tear them off and then you think you got them and then it itches and swells up.

You got to get a tweezer and a razor. Oh, I mean, growing up in the South, I pulled ticks off of myself and our pets growing up all the time. I've just never seen anything or experienced anything like that. But these ticks don't carry Lyme. Right. so it makes them cool with me okay well it's like it's like getting bit by uh mosquitoes not gonna get west nile it's no fun still better than the mosquito yeah they don't carry west now anyway so next year yeah without the dogs and maybe no ticks good luck that kind of comes with the territory so i want to talk about these these this bighorn deal a little bit because what's

interesting is that both pete and kurt have done the impossible and killed a bighorn from a and this isn't gonna mean anything to 90 of the people listen kill the bighorn from an unlimited unit um but first i want to back up what uh at what point when you're doing high voltage uh electrician work why uh why were you like man what i really should be doing is is stitching backpacks like why you know what i mean yeah no it was more out of necessity i was i was accessing or trying to access some areas in alaska that you know if you if you could if you can make one trip in and one trip out then you've effectively doubled the range that you could cover but if you had to make two trips out with you know all the extra gear that you're carrying and an entire sheep. Do you mean hunting off the road system?

No, this is all flying. Flying in a Super Cub, drop off at a strip, and then... What mountain ranges were you hunting? Chugash and the Alaska range. Alone, by yourself? Yeah, most of the time. There was a couple of hunts I went with good friends, but that's really where it started.

That's where I learned that I was trying to learn how to sew. Because you wanted to make modifications. I'd gone through most everything. Oh, so you were trying to dick around with your existing pack. That's exactly what it was. To make it like a super pack. Well, lighter. Lighter and just a little bit more function for specifically what I was trying to do.

But primarily, it was weight it was being able to take things out of existing packs and still be able to put them back together so they'll function so like what would be an example what was a back like what would be an example of a backpack that you started right were you like what kind of pack would you buy that you'd want to dick with to make different? Uh, it was, it was pretty much all of them at that point. Like external frames.

No, I didn't, I didn't carry any external frames. Uh, I, I went primarily with the internals. Um, you know,

I had some North face, I had some Arc'teryx and a majority of the time it was removing things and still being able to put it back together so it would work so you know get rid of extra pockets extra zippers extra straps move a strap down lower so you had more load compression uh you know simple things like that and you know slowly i started ending up closer to what we have today um Like a way-ass stripped-down backpack. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. And being able to keep it modular.

You know, interestingly enough, one of the first backpacks I used when I went up there, I don't know if you guys remember or ever used it, was the old Coleman External. Yeah? Yeah. Well, they had different packs that you could put on there. So now you could, you know, at the time, this was early 90s.

You said the Coleman External. Yeah. But you could you know at the time this was you know early 90s external yeah but you said you didn't use external no but not like the not like the true tubular external so this coleman frame was you know a footprint that was very small in in comparison to say you know the kelty or the barney's yeah i mean good packs on that's what we started using alaska when i first started hunting up there was the likeular, I mean, the full-on pins with the key ring holders to hold the pins in and shit like that. Well, and still. Squeaky as all get out. They are squeaky, but they're the go-to if you're hauling moose.

I don't know of anybody who would say much different, especially the guides. A lot of the guides that use them in Alaska, it's just a bummer. You throw a hind quarter on there, you have something to lash to. It's just a different animal than this. That's kind of where it all started as far as the sewing portion. So you bought a sewing machine or were you doing it by hand? Yeah, no, I bought a sewing machine or doing it by hand? Yeah, no, no. I bought a sewing machine.

And that was quite the learning curve in and of itself because you get what you pay for. You know, the first one I had was garbage and you just fought it. What kind is that right there? That's a Juki. Are singers good? My mom runs a singer. Don't be bad-mouthed at saying that. Family heirloom.

When I was a little kid, my mom sold our clothes. We wore homemade clothes as little kids. That sounds kind of Amish. Not all of them. We had a lot of homemade clothes. We hunted deer in homemade wool clothes. Wool pants with elastic waist.

A lot of that. Times change, man. I had a follow-up question. Do you use singers? No, back to walking as far as you could and not having to make two trips out. So you were just thinking like if I make it lighter, even if it's by just a couple pounds that will essentially just remove a whole trip yeah yeah obviously okay okay but that doesn't work with just the pack no because you're you're adding with with the with a sheep head and all the meat you got like

45 pounds of meat the head it's like thank god i had eight cut an eight ounce pocket out of my pack it doesn't matter go Go ahead, Yanni. No, it does. It does in the end. No. Okay. So it's, it's, it's the entire, I need to let Yanni ask this question. No, no, I did.

I got it out. I got it out. No, it's the entire, it's the entire program, you know? So it's everything that you carry in the pack. It's the difference between going in on my first sheep hunt where you're 65 pounds. That's what you walked in with. Yeah. Yeah. going in on my first sheep hunt where you're 65 pounds. That's what you walked in with. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a sleeping bag that weighs a pound and a half more

than what I have ultimately. And so you go through your entire gear list, your tent, your stove, you get dialed in on your food. All of a sudden, you're looking at 35 pounds going in. Now you're looking at 30 pounds difference coming out. And so even at my lightest weight, I was still looking in that 110, 120 pound range of one load coming out. You had 30 pounds on that. I'm not doing it. I know that there are guys that are doing it,

but it's like that. Watch your pennies and the dollars take care of itself. That's it. That's it. So, you know, at the end end when i decided i'd gone through i'd gone through all the rest of my gear because you could you could spend money and you could buy that that's all you had to do is just pony up the cash and drop weight out of your pack but once you got to the pack you know what do you mean like like that just buy lighter buying like a lighter stove that works good is going to cost more than a big heavy stow. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you got down to, you got down to, let's say you're doing, you got down to where you could do a nine day, 10 day hunt, 35 pounds. It varied. It varied. So, you know, you're looking at that, you're looking at two

pounds of food a day. So it really depended on where you were going and what you were doing. And so, you know, some of the areas you knew that there was only five days of hunting going this way out of the strip there might be seven days going the other might be 10 days you know it just all depended on the specific hunt so the actual weight that you left the strip from that would vary and it would vary on objects you might fly in with 50 pounds then just hang a bag you're're going to come back. You're going to come back and you're going to go the other way. And then it also depended on the country. So when you go into certain spots, you know maybe it's tight.

Maybe there's only one canyon that they're in there. So now you're not going to carry a four-pound spotting scope because you know that you can glass most of it up with your binoculars once you get there you you just knew a little bit more about the program than say you know what we do when we just go out down the canyon here elk hunting you might be trying to look at something that's two miles away so i i think just the the entire program got more dialed in up there because you're going back to the same spots so you kind of knew exactly what you needed and you'd start cutting those things out and you know so that's that's where you ended up yeah no i can picture that you're saying when you uh when you when you were out doing that kind of stuff you just mentioned because you mentioned spotting scopes um a thing i like about sheep hunting is

you can burn up the ground so quick yeah because you're looking at this like black rock or is that that rich that rick french made that movie yeah yeah black black shale white sheep yeah it's like you don't it's not like glass and koozie or you're like i know i'm looking at ten of them i just can't find them you know it's like is there a white thing sitting there no let's move it is it is but you know it's amazing how much little things like the just the the topography and then the little swales the little cuts do you do this stuff absolutely and light i mean you get up in you get up into that kind of shale country and you get the certain type of light in the middle of the day and things look, rocks look lighter. Everything looks lighter.

The sheep, you know, they're laying in this dark shale. So they, you know, they don't look white like, not all of them look white like this. You know, they're more of a dirty. So you would think that they'd be super easy to find. But, you know, sometimes they're not. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're standing in the middle of a great big green patch and they just stand out from miles away. Sometimes you're right. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they're standing in the middle of a great big green patch, and they just stand out from miles away. Sometimes you're right on top of them.

The worst thing that happened to us hunting sheep one time is that it snowed, which is very frustrating. We found sheep one time after it snowed by just – I eventually found some tracks with my spotting scope and started following the tracks with my spotting scope and started following the tracks with my spotting scope and eventually lost the tracks and I was like, oh, where do you go from there? And I realized it's just I'm staring at it.

Oh, man. That's where they ended. Yeah, and it's like they're not snow white, though. They're like yellow, but it was just eventually the snow melted. We were back in business, but that really feels like you're not hunting real good anymore when that snow happens.

No, that makes it tough. It makes it treacherous, too. What years was it that you were up there doing all this? I moved up there in, I guess it was 96, and then moved back in 2010. Gotcha. Yeah, back in 2010. Gotcha. Yeah, back to Montana. And that's when you started making packs. Did you just quit electricianing altogether?

No, I didn't. I didn't ever quit. I think that's one of the keys to the business, personally. What do you mean? Because I was able to make decisions that are best for the business, not best for me. I wasn't trying to put cash in my pocket. I got you.

I was able to just. I mean, it was key that you kept having a different income. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, you know, it was a really unique decision, but I didn't have to be in a spot where I was trying to pull extra out. So my family had health insurance and, you know, especially when you're, when you're smaller. And I think it allowed, in my opinion, it allowed the company to grow faster.

It's not in my personality to try to go hit up an investor and take out hundreds of thousands of dollars and leverage everything I have. Not that I didn't believe in it, it was just not my personality. And I would rather, I believe that if I was building a good product, that it was going to grow itself. I didn't have to shove it down anybody's throat. And there was a process of going along when you bring the first,

you bring it to market, you get that feedback and you slowly start to make those changes that take it from a good product to an exceptional product. And you need that time. You can't just come up with it. I mean, some people do. I shouldn't say it that way.

I didn't. And I knew that it had room to expand and it needed to grow. Well, you know what's different about them? And I've used a bazillion packs. And I've liked a bazillion packs over the years but it's like some packs you get and you like it's just like someone's like i'm just gonna make a pack like how people make packs my key my secret sauce would be how i market my pack right i'm just gonna go take you know whatever people like and make a version of that and try to sell it it's like a very different

pack yeah i mean you get it you got to mess with it for a minute and then you go through like a day of a little bit frustrated and then all of a sudden you're like oh no shit that's why that's like that and that's a fun feeling yeah to have over the course of a few days where you kind of go like ah i got it now you know i mean you're like your body's like no no, no, no, do this, and you'll be loving. You're like, oh, yeah, that's right. Because it's like really unique features and unique designs that kind of like solve problems that you didn't know were there.

But one of the biggest things is that it's like they're so like, I don't know, tidy. Is that a word you guys use in the backpack industry? I think we're going to start. Like clean, yeah, like clean yeah like clean tidy packs yeah we were eating a real fancy dinner the other night and i told the sommelier remember the wine just he had all these wine descriptions i said you need to start describing certain wines as rough and tumble wines which yeah he wasn't using he was using a lot of more effeminate terminology no but uh in one ear out the other i think but uh

yeah it's like a tidy kind of like clean nothing no shit snagging on brush kind of pack well and that's you should put that on the label new slogan no bells and whistles no shit snagging on brush packs yeah well what i was really hoping to do for myself was to have a pack because at the time you know i was hunting alaska i was hunting sheep uh doing a little bit of moose hunting up there and then i was coming back and i was hunting montana yeah you know when i could get the non-resident you were born here yeah but that was before that unfortunately so i was still having to draw a tag at that point um what do you mean uh well

they have the comeback to hunt you know in montana now so you can but that's only good for one year right that's a good question i don't know because i wasn't ever in that because i think there's like two different kinds like one was just if you were yeah i can't remember how they work but anyways they didn't have that program yeah they didn't have that program so long story short i was looking for i was just looking to build a pack that i could use everywhere and you know the same thing if i was going hiking if i you know whatever it might be so i could pack in all my gear just like you said take it down make it tidy and be able to day hunt out of it still pull my bow keep a tight you know tight footprint on your back and just try to hit that middle ground so that you always had it on.

Because I didn't ever take my pack off. Whether I was packing all my stuff in or whether I was actually hunting, I always had it on. So I wanted to be functional. I wanted to be narrow on the back so you could move. Didn't want it to be noisy. And just like you said, tidy. But then you can blow it up. back so you can move. I didn't want it to be noisy. And just like you said, tidy. But then you can blow it up.

But then you can blow it up. I always have people be like, I don't understand what you always got in that pack. I'm like, a lot of times there's nothing in that pack. But I'm not going to get something and then go on some hell hike back to go get my pack and then hike all the way back up again to go fetch it. That's it. I'm just going to have it with me. Yep. Yep. up again to go fetch it that's it i'm just gonna have it with me yep yep and if you have an empty pack you know and say you're hunting out you can you know you can get a lot out if you have your if you have your frame with you because you're just run man yeah yeah that's why more and more

the packs i like are the kinds that like have a lot of space that actually blow up big but the key is making it that once you tuck it all into itself and cinch everything down, it's like you basically got like a board on your back almost, but it can blow out and be like a gigantic hauling apparatus. And that's the thing too about packs is I kind of always tell my, cause you know, you used to get in situations where you're going to like leave your pack for a minute.

Yeah. I just, I never leave a thing. You know in the apocalypse now, never get out of the boat? I'm like, never leave your pack. They get to where they're like, yeah, I think we're going to make a shot from the ridge.

Let's just all leave our packs. I'm like, yeah, you know what's going to happen then? You're going to get up on the ridge. You're going to shoot. You're going to wing it. It's going to run off. You're going to run over the next ridge to see what's going it's gonna run off you're gonna run over the next ridge to see what's going on you're gonna see it go over the next ridge and next thing you know it's been dark for three hours you don't know where you're at no clue where your pack is no that's it it's like i do i now every time i think like yeah i'll leave my pack i'm like no you will

not leave your pack yeah yeah you're not gaining much in it even if you're carrying all your gear so now if you're at 35 pounds you know know, minus rifle weight, plus or minus, if you always have that with you, you hunt right to dark, you kick out a flat spot, you go to sleep, and you wake up and you go. When you compare that to trying to go back to camp, get back into a spot, trying to figure out where you're at, hiking in the dark, all that other shit, man, you're just way ahead of the game, in my opinion. And that's what I always try to do.

I'm not going to say it always happens, because sometimes it just doesn't make sense. But typically on longer hunts, everything goes with you every step. And then you can back out and throw camp up. Yeah. I don't know if I've ever seen somebody leave their pack behind and have it work out to their benefit. I'm glad.

They're like, thank God, that's my pack. Countless times I've seen, and myself included, dropping packs. Not once. I can't think of one time. It was like, thank God. Thank God I didn't bring my backpack. I've even taken mine off and then got away from it and then thought about it. It took a waypoint.

It's just like, yeah, never leave your pack never leave your pack so did i already mention you guys both killed a thing in an unlimited unit i want to explain this now earlier i called pete and said hey add up how many bighorn tags there are how okay state of montana how many bighorn tags are available in the state of Montana? Lottery tags. That's where we're going to start. I'm going to start even more basic than this. This is for New Jersey cat ladies so they can understand what we're talking about.

No. I'm going to trim this up a little bit and say there's three types of hunting tags you know i need to jump in when you don't like something i'm gonna say because i'm trying to simplify it without two two two types might be the most simple way to throw in governor's tags okay okay okay so you got there's a thing we call over-the-counter tags otc tags it's a kind of tag where if you're hunting deer in Wisconsin, Michigan, wherever, and you can go down to the gas station and buy a license. Anybody, anybody, anytime. You just go in, you buy your deer license. In that situation, the resource is strong enough to meet all of the demand, all of the demand on the resource.

There's no restriction on allocation of opportunity. Anyone who wants to go can go. When you get a population of animals that has more demand than supply, you need to limit how many people are going to get an opportunity to hunt. And you do this by having what we call limited draw tags, lottery tags. And what they do is they find a democratic way to allocate the tags to all the people who wish they could go. And it generally works that you fill out an application and send in a little bit of money or sometimes a lot of money the state does a drawing pulls names out of the hat and then they hand out tags and some tags are lottery draws and it's like if you fill out your materials you'll probably get it right you know you could be you could be almost guaranteed to get it because there's 100 of them available, and in most years, only 95 guys apply.

So they're limiting, but it's easy to draw. The third kind of tag is like – I'm going to do the third kind A and the third kind B. The third kind A is what's called – So simple. No, never simple no never mind so much the third kind of tag is awarded not democratically but it's awarded to a highest bidder okay and there's very few of those in the country the reason i bring that kind up and that's the thing that there's a thing called landowner tags i am doing a and b 3a is a landowner tag where a guy owns a big ass chunk of land and it provides core vital habitat and so the state rewards this individual for providing good wildlife

habitat by giving him some tags that he can do with as he wishes and he can sell them, use them, give them to his nephew. 3B is a governor's tag that's sold to the general public highest bidder. Is everybody cool with this? Yeah, it makes good sense. You want to do it? I like it. With the governor's tag. Statewide permit. Okay.

Governor's tags, what makes governor's tags so valuable is that many of them, you can hunt all year anywhere that they issue tags. What do you mean all year? There's some governor's tags. 12-month season. Yeah. So you buy the Arizona governor's tag. What? Because here's the thing.

With sheep, it doesn't matter because he doesn't shed his horns. Yeah. He's not like, you know, so you could feasibly hunt him when you can hunt when no one's hunting with sheep it's cheaper if you draw like if you get the governor's tag elk tag you're not going to go in may and shoot some bull with six inch velvet stub sticking out the top of his head right but with sheep it's like why not So they sweetened it up by letting you hunt year round, and they sweetened it up by... You're telling him to get rid of that gum?

I'm telling him to get rid of his gum. I wasn't popping it. I wasn't out. He handed me gum. He was like, oh, you want some gum? I was like, no, dude. I don't want some gum. I want you to take your gum out.

So where was I? We're talking about governor's tag so a governor's tag but yeah but so you can hunt anywhere in the state but you can't hunt anywhere in the state you can hunt anywhere in the state that hunting for that species is allowed in some form or another sure yeah i mean that makes sense yeah right so it's not like someone's backyard yellowstone right or glacier because you got a governor's tag. The highest selling governor's tag in the country happens to be in Montana. Correct. And every year,

it always makes the news. Oftentimes, it goes to a guy who owns a chain of sandwich shops. A man with a chain of sandwich shops likes to buy the governor's tags. The guy that owns Jimmy John's, right? The same guy.

It's the same guy? He's bought it a handful of times. He's bought it some number of times. Wait, is it limited to just Montana residents? No, no, no, no, no. I don't think a Montana resident has ever bought the Montana governor's tag. Oh, okay. Oh, what a bummer.

And it's always in the vicinity of between over $300,000. Every year is a little different, but I think between $200,000 to $500,000. So with that kind of timeline, what's the percentage of that person? What's their success rate? These guys, they're not hunting them, though. They're trigger men. When a guy buys the governor tag, what he does is he hires a whole posse he hires a posse of eager young fellers who go out and scour in this state they scour the missouri breaks so the

biggest rocky mountain bighorns in the world is the generalization the biggest rocky mountain bighorns in the world come out of the missouri breaks there's some tankers in alberta what's that area in alberta mine yeah catamon catamon but big big ass you're like yeah just stay if just stand behind a bighorn. Look at the way the scroll. I was going to ask you because we had a video on YouTube of you telling Joe Rogan about how big those. A volleyball. Yeah.

Hanging way below its belly line. What did I toss you in the garage the other day, Giannis? Yeah, I was picking up meat for the cookbook shoot that we're actually in town doing. This is great. And he's like, hey, do you have any use for these? And he throws me a set of frozen sheep testicles. You need to make an extra big pack for packing those up. So that's the governor's tag.

Now, when a dude buys a governor's tag, this guy, generally, you're a trigger man. The guys that buy those are trigger men. They don't have time. They're not going to go out and spend their whole summer out sweating their asses off. What's ironic is that they have all of the time in the world. No, they're- Not here. Not here.

That's the difference. In Montana, you have to hunt within the- Well, the draw season. Some seasons. Every state handles their governor's tags ours is in the general hunting season just like everybody else who would draw the tag but other states it's 12 months yeah basically what they get here is they get to hunt any unit so um and actually i don't believe that there isn't any area here that they can hunt that there isn't already uh i've never heard yeah i've

never heard of exclusive access no they don't have exclusive access. So what's the incentive? Go to the Missouri River Bridge. You can go anywhere you want, and you can go to places that might only otherwise give out one tag. Oftentimes a guy will buy a governor's tag because he already knows what he's going to be going after. Correct. Because they'll get 10, 20, whatever. They'll hire glassers who will go out to the areas that everyone knows holds big bighorns. And these guys are like, these are real woodsmen. Those are the guys hunting the ram.

And they'll put together a dossier on every sheep they can find in the unit. And the guy will peruse the dossier. Come on. The detail of this kind of stuff would blow your mind. This is insane. I'm giving you the version that doesn't make people that angry. So, but so the incentive, like long story short, the incentive is that they spend a lot of money and then it goes back into

conservation, right? Yes. Okay. Therein lies the rub. So, okay. I wasn't getting all this shit. Now I'm going to get a little more. Okay. In, okay. I wasn't getting all this shit. Now I'm going to get in a little bit more. Okay.

In 1842. Let's back up. In 1842, Martin versus Waddell was a Supreme Court decision. And it was a Supreme Court decision that settled a dispute between an oysterman, a commercial oyster harvester in the New Jersey Meadowlands, and a landowner who traced his ownership of the land to a land grant made by King George II to the Duke of Earl, I believe. And when King George II gave this land to the Duke of Earl, who passed it along down the line to him, he gave him the land. And with the land came all the fishings, huntings, hawkings, and fowlings.

Because in Europe, when you own the land, you own the animals. Right. Okay. Now, a guy's out picking oysters. The guy says, you can't pick oysters i own the oysters because i own the land up against the water where you're picking oysters goes all the way to the supreme court the supreme court decides they say this they say because we have the declaration of independence and the Declaration of Independence stripped all of the rights of the sovereign, stripped all of the rights of the king, and gave it to the people. So by virtue of the Declaration of Independence, we are deciding that the animals in this country belong to the people.

They do not belong to the king. And the animals will be administered on the people's behalf by their state. And it was meant to be that we had a system of the democratic allocation of wildlife. Governor's tags are a perversion of the democratic allocation of wildlife because you're selling it to the highest bidder. Lottery draws are democratic. Put your name in the hat everyone's at the same chance however here's where it's the kind of thing where i don't agree or disagree because 90 of that money is spent on the ground right for bighorn conservation and bighorns are absent like

we've done a lot for recovery we haven't even scratched the surface on putting bighorns back where they belong like elk are 90 absent from their historic range in this country you would never get that because it seems like elk are everywhere but they're not there used to be elk in michigan you know and i mean there's some number but they said like if you looked at elk distribution in this country at the time of european contact is the whole damn country almost right so there's a lot of work to be done on bighorns and it's a big ass chunk of money every year that's fair maybe it's not fair it's very very hot topic hot contentious topic and both sides are right which means they're both wrong my first year is guiding in arizona i can't remember i think i was still sc scouting because I didn't have the client with me.

But I was going to hit this spot up that was like two hours almost from where I was staying via truck and then like side by side because the road was so rough. So I get up, trailer like 30 minutes, get to a rough road, pull up side by side, and then run another hour and a half in the dark, try to get to this spot at daylight to see who was hanging around. She saw no elk. Oh, I think I was just going to check a water hole. You're dying. Yeah. As I'm kind of closing in on the spot where I'm supposed to be.

Huh? Yeah. You already have down in this area. Can you add this on your story? Yeah. Down in this area, you could take a bucket of water and dump it out on a road and a bull would come out and wallow in it. Yes, sometimes.

Tell that story. Add it in somehow. Weave it in. Yeah. I don't know if they've ever actually made a wallow, but I think that they had seen spots where there was like old tracks maybe like the remnants of some wallowing in a road like in an old dry out mud pit and they said huh I wonder what would happen

they happened to have whatever it was 50 gallons of water in the truck for whatever reason probably to fill up the trailer and they dropped 6 gallons into this mud hole and put a trail cam up in the tree and came back 24 hours later. And sure enough, there's a bull rolling in it.

It's a dry place. That was a good job. You weaved it right in. So continue. But yeah, I'm buzzing down the road two hours through the darkness and trying to look at my GPS, make sure I'm in the right spot, getting ready to start hiking. And I kind of see the flash of where my lights might hit some other tail lights And, uh, I kind of see like the flash of like where

my lights might hit some other like taillights or something as I'm kind of getting closer, I'm getting to park. And I think I had to park, maybe it was like the end of the road or I forget what the reason was, why you had to stop there. But anyways, I'm pulling in and I come like around one more corner. And also I can see that there are trucks there, you know, and there's some people and they're awake too must be hunters i mean that's the only reason people would be out there you know it's an awake at that time of morning and as i pull up it's like the whole camp is like who's that you know and they turn and i must have seen 20 headlamps turn in my direction and they're just

shining up all these trucks and i'm like holy. And I kind of got scared because I'm like, what, what, what, what, what, what? Why are you guys all out here in the middle of nowhere? It's a giant kangaroo. It's a party. And so I just kind of kept rolling, went on, did my scouting. And then later, it didn't take long, you know, through who I was with. You know, there was some texting and phone calls. And they're like, yeah, did you guys have a guy down here this morning?

And they're like, yeah, we've been on a big bowl and we've got 70 trail cameras out. Um, you know, we've got the guy coming in tomorrow and I was like, all right, I'm not going to hang out here any longer, but it was the governor's tag. Yeah. Wow. Governor's tag. But yeah, I mean, I'm not kidding. It was like 20 headlamps all turned at once.

Like who's rolling in here on our spot on this big bowl that we've been looking for? So then what kind of tips do you think that those guides get? How well do you guys know about this stuff? Can you fill in some of the details on the dudes that find the rams for the governor's tag guys? Have you been involved in that? No, I haven't. I haven't. Does that interest you?

No, not necessarily but but not because i have anything against it uh there's just you know i'd rather be scouting for myself yeah honestly so um now when you say you have nothing against it what do you mean i mean i don't have anything against it but what do you mean by that well i think it is something to be against it it no no i personally don't, I think that it's a hot topic. It's interesting because... You mean just for the reasons we were talking about? Yeah, yeah. Some people don't like the idea that you can just go buy what somebody else has to put in for.

But you have the chance to go buy it. I have the chance to go buy it. I could mortgage my house. I could do any of those things and throw my name in the hat if it was that important to me. The fairness of it. You're saying you would mortgage your house to buy the governor's house.

Technically, you could do that. You got to be like, wait till your wife's in a super good mood for that shit. I don't know what kind of mood you'd have to have. Sweetheart, I was going to talk to you about something. Something to get about. No, but I mean, we're all free.

We're all free to raise our hand at those auctions. I'm with you. I'm with you. Yeah, and I see both sides of it. And it's different. But if someone said, hey, you're good at finding sheep. Would you like to do some scouting for me? You just wouldn't.

I don't have time. I don't have time. I don't have time to go scout for myself these days. Maybe it's just a different spot that you're in. I've never been approached to it. I'm not. We do have several close friends that have been involved in that process. Yep, yep, for sure. And you hear all different types of stories. Like I was saying with the 10, you know, you hear all different types of stories. Like I was saying with the, you know, 10, 12 guys.

The guys I know have been involved are, you know, a couple of guys out there busting their ass to do scouting. Year-round. Year-round. Well, I wouldn't say year-round. You know, they're typically not in those areas in the winters. But, you know, throughout the summers and, yeah, I mean, somebody pays for it at the end.

Somebody's paying for them to be there. Those are the woods they are they are those are like the crack command those are the crack commando hunters yeah there's no woods in the missouri river breaks there's the brakesman they're planesmen you know and you look at the history of the montana governor tag you know historically they weren't up here hunting the breaks. Back in the early and mid-90s, they were hunting Permaparadise, and they were hunting rock. Oh, were they really? Oh, absolutely.

That's where the governor's desk? Oh, yeah, those guys. I want to say Sherwin-Scott, but I might have it wrong. There was a guy who bought it two years in a row chasing one ram, or as the story goes, somewhere in that 90s time frame out of Permaparadise or one of those units. I mean, it's a true mountain hunt.

I mean, they're in the timber. So you have to take it all with a grain of salt because it's uh did i paint an unfair no no absolutely not take me to task if you know like i just don't know like i described it the wrong way no no absolutely not because but i will say in my opinion i think that there's a vast difference between a governor tag in montana with the guys i know that have been involved in the work and all the rest of it in comparison to what you might describe where you have a 12-month season in one of these other states and a bull gets shot in August when there isn't even a hunting season. So those are two different animals.

Whether one's right or whether one's wrong, I'm not saying, but that's a different deal. Yanni's buddies do some of the governor's sheep desert sheep tags yeah down in arizona and these are some dudes that like to be out they like to be out in the wood or not they like to be on the desert and they like to be out in the desert for months on end and they like to look through binoculars that's what these guys like to do yeah and they're they they're the ones that are hunting those sheep. So Steve, it's just like the guy that that's one point. I'm not going to let you change my mind about not that you're trying to

change my mind or anything like those are the people that hunted the sheep for sure. Every now and then though, I bet you must get somebody that actually wants to hunt on their own and doesn't let some other guys do the legwork. Right? Yeah. There's a good friend of ours, Lorenzo from GoHunt, has the Idaho Bighorn Governor's Tag this year,

and he's going DIY. Nice. Really? Yes. He's going to Hell's Canyon all on his own. Really? Yeah. On the Governor's Tag.

Coolest guy ever. That's cool. All right. Steve, if someone paid you to go scout for them for the governor's tag would you do it i listen man uh at the time that i would have been at the at a time absolutely but i wouldn't have been qualified like at the time that i would have jumped at the opportunity i wouldn't have been not that i'm qualified now i could make like some sort of argument now that i would be that i would be able to to go scrape up some sheep and maybe

find some sheep in a place that people had known they were there whatever because i like to wander around look through binoculars um but yeah at a time i would have jumped at it but i would have been a shitty hire right fair enough that had later enough. I don't know why I do that job. Camping up there with his girlfriend in some van. So, no. So anyhow, that's 3B. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live

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onx club, y'all. Okay. Okay. Drawing. So the governor's tag. You buy that for a whole shitload of money and you get to go hunt. Right. If you want to draw a tag in the vicinity where

governor's tag holders like to hunt, meaning the best units in the country, you have about a percent of a percent? Yeah, it's about one in a thousand. Is it less than that? Yeah. Is it like a brakes tag? Yeah. You know, we'd have to look up. I can tell you that I've been putting it for 15 years and I haven't drawn it yet.

Oh, yeah. You are less than that. 200 to go. You are less than 1%. 19. I've been putting it in for 19 years. They've been doing bonus points for 14 or whatever the hell it is. Yeah.

It's right in the back of the regs. You can look it up for each unit. But I want to say a lot of them are in that 4 tenths of a percent or 5 tenths. But if you draw, and some tags get better, like, you know, we're just talking about Rams, too, because you can draw you tag. My old girlfriend, you tag first year she ever applied. But we're talking about Rams. There are some units that have slightly better odds. And those tend to be units that don't grow big ass Rams.

But even good odds is shitty odds. Good odds, what you're referring to is a 3% to 5% draw. I don't think there's such thing as 5%. There's no such thing as 3% to 5%. 2% to 3% draw. On some years. That would be the best odds you could find in Montana. Chase, and that would be the extremely good odds.

When those odds come up, it's usually because a weird fluke happened. A bunch of attention focuses somewhere else everyone then looks and goes like oh wow now that the results came out i see that last year you had a two percent chance of drawing in this unit i'm gonna try that next year and that's like yeah you and every other dude in the world is gonna see that and then you're all going to pounce on that unit and then the next year you're going to look and that unit had a 0.5 chance of drawn right because everybody saw that it was a two percent so you're not as long as short of it is you're not going to draw a bighorn tag my brother drew bighorn tag very good um this year no no no a few

years ago a lot of years ago we had fun though, though, man. We had a great time. He drew down just outside of Gardner. Oh, very good. There's an unlimited unit across the road. Oh, yeah. But he drew the Cinnabar Mountain there. Oh, yeah. That was fun. So anyhow, so there's that.

You're not going to draw one. If you do draw one, you're going to get a ramp. Right? Yeah. Well, if you show up and put in some time, you'll kill a ramp. What is it, 119 tags? Yeah, and I don't know if we missed a unit on there, but it was just looking it up beforehand.

97% success rate. Wow. This is off of just the tags issued. Yeah. So that's not even assuming everybody hunted. Yeah, this state has a shitload of relative to all other states. Like this state has a shitload of tags. They gave out 100 plus tags? Yeah, I think it will.

This has it at 119. But I would say it's there within a couple of them. Does it say how many mugs applied for 119 tags? No. Well, it'd have to be for 119 tags? No. Well, it'd have to be times 100, right? Yeah. Or more.

So if you draw, you're going to have a high quality sheep hunt. And if you put in your time, you will kill sheep. But now keep in mind, all this shit has nothing to do with anything. We're just laying the groundwork for what I want to talk about. There are a couple spots where there's a different system in place. And these are the famed, in some circles, these are the famed unlimited units. And they're very remote areas in montana where any where it's over the counter where any time kind of over the counter you got to put in you got to fill out the application and send it in but anyone that wants can go try to get the sheep guaranteed draw yeah guaranteed

draw you fill in your application. You can hunt sheep. Is there a deadline? Yes. There's an application deadline. Bring us in. Bring us in. Sign me up. May 1.

Oh, next year. It's an unlimited unit. By May 1, you send in your thing. You can go. And these are the most, not the most, yeah, like borderline the most rugged areas in the state. I would argue outside of the state. I mean, there's some of the burlier stuff in the lower 48. Nasty shit.

What they do to protect the herd is they put a mortality quota down. Where they're like, anybody that wants can come hunt. But once you boys kill what? Two. Two. Once two get killed. It's over. It's over.

Yeah. So you got to be calling. Just two? Because if it was a draw hunt, they'd be giving out two. Per unit. Per unit. So there's five unlimited units. So there's 10 tags total? 10 sheep can get killed.

Yep. And what's the cutoff? Because I remember with bears and units like that, it used to be like 72 hours. 48-hour buffer period. Yeah. You've got to carry a sample. I feel like, yeah, and I feel like one of them is shorter than that. I think that one on a gardener is 24.

Yeah. How often does it go over, though? Pretty rarely. Every year is a little different. You hear about it happening more back in the day i've heard a lot of stories of you know the 94 satellite communications or yeah yeah exactly people wouldn't get word yeah yeah and in some of the unlimited units uh what makes them tricky is that the sheep aren't even there correct until the weather turns bad

yeah so you could have the whole season passed and the weather never gets shitty enough and the sheep like when we when my brother drew a bighorn tag we're hunting sheep that are coming off lightning peak and you could hunt an open day you could go there and cover every square inch of the unit but they're literally like there are not sheep in the unit correct and then one day there are sheep in the unit. Correct. And then one day, there are sheep in the unit because they migrate down into the unit and then you go down there and there they are.

So some of the unlimited units are like that. But on the unlimited units that have, or they have a mortality of two, there's some years that no one gets the two. Oh, absolutely.

It's very regular. I mean, last year the quota never gets met last year common common yeah last year 502 didn't 500 didn't 300 didn't is what these specs say so yeah i mean half of them and and i think that that's pretty normal that's pretty normal that half of them won't fill out yeah yeah well and you have to take into consideration that the season opens september 15th there's no weapons restriction so you know most people are hunting with a rifle and goes until the sunday after thanksgiving so what is two and a half months and and unlimited numbers of people going, and they can't scrape up two rams. Yeah, they sold 299 unlimited tags last year.

Yeah, that's what the specs said. You got one last year. Yeah. 299, that's it. I'm surprised that it's that low. Yeah. How many sheep got killed? Eight?

Eight. So the success rate was? 2.67% so 2.67% of the guys that throw in on the unlimited get yeah and I mean

it's and that's pretty standard you know those numbers aren't that's not skewed yeah that's a normal year that's a normal year and you know and take all of that's a normal year and you know and take all of these with a grain of salt because you did you know you pull these off the fishing game website so if there's if we're off a tenth of percent oh yeah

so now what year did you do this 2010 did you try a lot of years before you got one two years did you guys get yours did you have you both gotten yours in the same location no different units yeah yeah all right so tell me what happened like give me the rundown of what happened when you did it your first year start with your first trip oh yeah well my first year i had just got done hunting alaska and um i took a ram up there and uh and i was a non-resident i wasn't a resident of montana that time so i bought the i bought the the over-the-counter non-resident tag for the unlimited units and i came down and you mean you were a non-resident montana i was non-resident montana yeah at that time. And I

came down and just gave it everything I had. So you just flew down to Montana with your fucked up backpack that you made yourself on a sewing machine. That's exactly what it was. And struck off into the mountains.

Yeah, struck off into the mountains. Were you by yourself? Yeah. But it was an interesting story because it was uh it was before i don't know it was a few days before the season started and like you're trying to get on one yeah yeah but you know the more i learn about it there that rarely happens really you sure hear about it yeah but it's kind of like you hear the same stories where you have to be there opening day and be on a ram or you'll never fill it. Well, I mean, the data tells you that that's just not the case.

But regardless, so I'm standing in the parking lot and I'm getting all my stuff together and I'm in this trailhead. And there's a guy kind of getting his stuff together. I don't know if he's hiking or what he's doing. But then all of a sudden a rifle case comes out. And we're starting from the same trailhead, and there's only, you know, there aren't a ton of them throughout, you know, these units because you're going into the wilderness. And so I figure, well, I'm going to go talk to him. Wilderness with a capital W, like federally designated wilderness. Yes, Beartooth Wilderness.

Yep. Yep. And so I just said, well, I better go chat with this guy. Yeah, because it's awkward. It's like weird and awkward. Four days in, you take different routes, and you're both standing on the same mountain. So, yeah, I went in and talked to him. He was a really nice guy.

And he said, yeah, this is my seventh year of doing this. And I was like, man, that's awesome. You've got some stamina on this. So in the back of my head, I'm thinking. And he hadn't killed one yet. No, he hadn't killed one yet. He must be a terrible hunter. No.

You know, well, it's that kind of quiz. How long you going for he's uh six seven days you know uh each time and and and so i'm thinking he must be looking for something pretty special so i asked him i said well you know how many how many lego rams you ever seen you know do you pass over some i'm trying to get some information yeah something that you know boot leather but what. Can I back you up? Why did you want to come do this? Had you read about it? Well, I grew up here. So I had always known about it.

You grew up with stories about it. Yeah, yeah. But at the time, it just wasn't as compelling because I grew up in the western part of the state at the time when that's where all the governor tags were coming out of. I mean, they're shooting 190 plus rams out of multiple units out of the west and you weren't going to take your name out of that hat because the odds back then were you know were better than they are now i'm not going to say what they were i don't remember but you were like you felt like you had a chance yeah i'm gonna go for one of the sweet unit yeah and they were right out your back door you know we go and take pictures of them during the winter so you had this you had a chance, right? Yeah, I'm going to go for one of the sweet unit. Yeah, and they were right out your back door. We'd go and take pictures of them during the winter.

So you had this kind of attachment to it as opposed to driving halfway across the state into the total unknown. But I was talking to the guy, and I was asking him how many legal rounds he'd seen, and he said, I've never seen one. And so then I shook his hand, and good luck. I said, well, I I'm gonna go this way if you're going that way and kind of walked back to my truck and was thinking well what do I do now you know this dude sounds like he's put some time in here and then it was pretty much the way my

trip went you know I I covered a lot of miles back in I don't know spent five or six days someone laid some uh waypoint as this might have been pre-waypoint but did someone lay some like, Hey, check here, check here, check there. No. Cause I didn't, at the time I didn't know anybody who had ever hunted it. I've never, you know, I'd never talked to anybody. I, yeah, I didn't have any information and it was before these days where information's out there. Yeah. And misinformation, you know, a lot of misinformation, which is kind of one of the reasons, you know, that we're talking about specifically what it is, because I've fielded a few questions on that. And but yeah, I went in, went in and I didn't turn up a sheep.

A sheep. A sheep. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not certain I saw fresh tracks. Were you seeing sheep trails carved into the screen slides? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can see. So you feel like you're in a spot where they, at least some screen slides? Yeah, you can see. So you feel like you're in a spot where at least some time of the year they're there. Yep, yep.

You see sign. You see sign. But you kind of walk out of there. How many days did you do it? I'm trying five or six days. It wasn't super long. And then I had to go back to Alaska. So after that, though, it was a very humbling experience.

At that point in time, were you like, I'm going to be like a sheep guy? Like, I'm going to be like a sheep dude who hunts sheep? Not necessarily. I think it was just something that was really, really enjoyable. And I knew that within the next few years that we were going to be moving back to Montana. So, yeah, my time in Alaska was limited and saw I was looking for other opportunities and had the time and thought, well, I'm like, you know, go start to get my feet wet.

Yeah. And, but then after that, I, I found out. You're going to have to figure out a lot more than this, or this is what it's going to be. Did you ever hear from that dude from the trailhead? No, no, no, no no i didn't but the sea it didn't get closed and there wasn't a ram taking the first part got closed no not that season if i remember right and um no it didn't how many rams are in there ah that's that's a i don't know i mean if they're killing two there's

got to be like a there's got to be a substantial number of male, a substantial number of rams. If they are open to the idea that two are going to die, they're very conservative with those populations. Yeah. I really couldn't speak to that. That's a tough one. And I think it's tough for everybody, too, because some of it's, like you said, some of it's migratory. So you don't know what you're going to get coming into some of those units. So now you might be making judgments off populations that you don't have access to, except they're there during the winter. Or maybe they're not all migrating that way. You have some

of the sheep that actually don't live in the unit going the other way that might be just on the fringes of the unit you know you have uh some sheep that are you know quote transplant sheep that have been transplanted by one way or another and then you have um um you know these historical herds that have been there since whenever you know start of time. So you have all of these different factors, and I think that's what makes it interesting is that it's not just one population. There's a lot of different things going on, and all of these units are much different when you go into them. And, you know, but that's what makes it cool. But I think it's also, you's also notable to be able to say that it's not a free sheep.

It's not. No. Just because it's the only open tag. And I believe, well, I know it's the only open sheep tag in the lower 48. Canada, you don't need a guide. Alaska, you need a guide. So pretty much in North America, to my knowledge. If you're not a resident of Alaska, you need a guide. So pretty much in North America, to my knowledge... If you're not a resident of Alaska, you need a guide, don't you?

Yeah. It's open to non-resident aliens. You can come in here from any country and buy that tag the same way. So there's really no restrictions on that portion. It makes it a very unique thing that way. But in the same respect,

it's not very successful. So what happened the second time you went? The second time I went, Did you come in with a new attitude? Yeah, yeah, completely different attitude. What happened? Yeah, I just changed my whole program about everything that I was

going to do, and it was the only thing I did. Same unit? No, different unit. Right next to it. And what did you do differently? I spent a lot more time glassing. Like up valley floors or from big glass and tits? It's kind of a little bit of everything, you know, because it just depends on where you can see from.

And I just tried to spend as much time as I could. That's really what it comes down to. I don't think that there's no trick. There's no, that's, I mean, if there was a trick, if the historical data, if the historical kill data was always accurate and guys kept going back there, there wouldn't be a sheep unit staying open

for two and a half months. So, you know, that's, I think that's the cool thing about it is that they just do what they do and you got to figure it out that year so um probably then then that's that's what makes the the population sustainable the hunt sustainable because it almost self-manages yeah so what happened so what happened uh? How many days did you carve out? I was going to stay in for 13. I ended up staying in for 12, I believe.

11 or 12. And then it was, well, it had to have been 11 because I ended up getting a ram on the 10th day. And ironically enough, as I was working through my plan, how I was going to work through the different drainages that I was hunting, I'd spent a day and a half glassing this one area because it's big country. It takes a lot of time to cover it, and there's a lot of timber. You could sit there all day, and all of a sudden something appears.

So you have to be very patient. And I had moved one drainage down, looked back to where I had just spent the last day and a half, and there he was. And it was right at dark. And so I tried to get whatever sleep I could that night and then got everything loaded in my pack well before daylight so I could make it back over to the glassing spot and try to pick him up again first thing in the

morning and I did I made it over there and I found him found him that morning and he was feeding out in this slope pretty exposed by all by all standards kind of where they were hanging out. But I knew the sun was going to be moving around on him. And so he dug a bed right there on that, right just up out of where he was feeding. And so I waited about another hour, hour and a half, and sure enough, sun came back around. As soon as the sun got on him, he picked up and went down into the timber. Oh, really? Yep.

So he kicked out of bed and didn't use it for long no not for long at all textbook sheep move as soon as the direct sunlight got on him he moved yeah they don't like it no yep and and so then i don't know it was probably 9 30 10 o'clock in the morning and it took me the rest of the day to get over to the other side got up above him found the bed that he was in that i had put him to bed in and he wasn't there and this was probably not you mean not the one in the timber but the one he the second bed oh so you saw him going to timber and lay down yep so i'm going to bed and then i was able to pick that one up and so i knew he had to be in the area but i

just you know had kept working up and down this rock spine, trying to pick up anything, figure out where he went. And all of a sudden, he just popped out in this little avalanche chute, and it was about 300, 350 yards, and the wind was just, the thermals were just howling. And I mean, probably blowing 25, 25 30 and he just came out walked straight across it was probably only 20 yards open i never had a shot and he disappeared into the timber on the other side and i just yeah i mean it was it was and it was timber kind of forever out there there was no big opening so you feel like he had picked you up at that point or no no no absolutely

not he's not gonna feed in that timber though it's not grassy in there no no it's not but there was definitely enough grass okay that they can travel in the timber too though oh just could go to who knows where they can boogie out of a spot yeah yeah and so i spent the rest uh right until dark trying to find him and i had moved down this rock spine and got my spotting scope out and i found him and he was bedded behind this big pine and he had just tucked in just right i couldn't see him until i got into the right vantage point and there he was and had had my one shot kind of through the one area, and I figured, well, this is the only opportunity I'm going to have. But it was a great, solid rest. You're on rock, laid down, had all the time in the world, worked through it.

But there's a horn requirement in there. There is, yep. It's got to be three-quarter curl. Yeah. Or is it a half curl? You know, it's from the base then everybody should look at the regs right don't take my word for it but it's from the base of the front base of the horn through any portion of the eye back and they write that differently depending on the unit right like

some of the some of the that i don't know about i don't know yeah that i'm not sure i mean i'm not saying from one unlimited unit but is that the same as it is for limited units? I believe so. I think it is. So they run the same legal ramp. Yeah. So it doesn't have to be all the way. I always thought it was the corner of the eye.

Three-quarter curl. Okay. Looking at them sideways, it's got to go 75% of the way in a circle. Yeah. And you had to figure that out. Yeah, but from the night before, I had looked enough. And as soon as I, you know, it was coming back up, you know, coming off of that bottom.

And I could see the horn coming back up. So that's a pretty. Was he by himself? Yeah. How do they determine that then? Because isn't it for doll sheep it has to be all the way around? Full curl for dolls. Yeah.

Well, there's three things. Like in Alaska, there's three things that make a doll legal. Full curl. So you're looking at him on the side. He's got a 360-degree circle. Or you count eight annuli, so eight growth rings. Or he's broomed. Now, he's broken off both of his lamb tips completely. So I guess how do you determine,

why is it different in one state and different in the other? Does it have to do with how old they get in general? Well, there's units in Idaho that used to have horn restrictions, and now they don't have horn restrictions. Is that just because there's more? Well, what I heard was this, and this is just like a dude who used to guide there telling me, and a lot of times you don't know the motivations, right?

A lot of times there's rules in place and people have ideas about it, but without really digging into it, you don't know like why really did it be. But a guy explained this to me. I think went no horn restrictions because I think there were some cases in which people were not identifying rams properly. And then due to the remoteness of the obligation of a person have to make a person who's maybe never hunted sheep before maybe not never hunt sheep again without putting the situation where they need to be able to judge the legality of that ram they got rid of that requirement in that area and they just said it's up to the hunter's discretion you're allowed a ram and and not made it to where people i one time we were sitting and checking a ram were you there we were checking the doll ram in alaska one time

and while i was there i saw three illegal rams i got there and there was a guy checking an illegal ram not knowing it was illegal there was a illegal ram sitting there that they had just confiscated from a guy and a warden came in with another illegal ram that he had just taken from a guy that was trying to hide it from him so i saw four rams during my visit mine being one of them and the other three were people bringing rams in and them saying, I'm sorry, that's not full curl. I had a friend one time that had one held and he got it back. And in the end, they said, it's 15 16th curl. We'll let you keep it. Oh my gosh.

Listen, there is nothing more stressful in life. I'm talking even when your wife, like her water breaks, there's nothing more stressful in life than the minutes that pass between you touching that trigger on a sheet and you getting up to that sheet. It doesn't matter how much you look. It's just like, it's not fun. Half curlers. Legal. No. Three quarters. I i'm sorry what am i saying three-quarter three-quarter curl legal so he's i'm looking at the sheep right now by himself yep so if he wouldn't have shown up or if you just not look there i might still be hunting them have you ever gone back have Have you done it again?

No. Well, you're out for seven years. Once you kill. I get my tag back next year. You never get to really get that good at it. Yeah. There's a few guys who have. Got good at it. I read a book about

the unlimited units. No, there's a book about bighorns. There's a big section in it about the unlimited units. And there's some guys who had some legendary status. They'd got two or whatever. There are people that'll go for a hat trick, try to get one from each district. So what happened?

You got one on your first attempt? Absolutely not. Oh, no. I don't know if we got to the end of Kurt's story there. You're sitting on his bed. Well, he shot the sheep. Yeah, I got him. You got him.

There's more? I think the night of camping after you shot the sheep is the best part of the story. So I think we should hear about that. 20 rams came rolling through? No, no. The sheep went for a roll. Yeah, the sheep went for a roll. Yeah, the sheep went for a roll. I ended up finding it there at dark and ended up just kicking out a flat spot behind a tree. But it was interesting because you had focused on it for so long.

And I'm sure lots of people have experienced things like that where I couldn't sleep. I was just so excited. But not in this excited way where you want to jump around and dance at Jake or something. Like a friend of mine said, not like you want publishers clearing out. No, no, no. Kind of like it's just hard to take it all in.

I threw up within an hour of shooting mine. I puked. I don't know what imbalances were going on in me, but water wouldn't stand down. Yeah, it's very similar. This is heavy, heavy grizzly bear country.

And now you're camping with a dead animal. With your arm around it. Yeah. But it happened. It was all right at dark. With a dead animal. With a dead animal. Your arm around the deck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, but it happened. It was all right at dark.

So I, you know, other than, you know, taking care of the general cleaning of it, you know, I hadn't started any butchering or anything. But, you know, from there, it was just because there were so many grids in the area, it was back to the whole thing that we're talking about, being able to make one trip. That makes a big difference to not have to leave it behind, not have to figure out you're in the wilderness, you have to sling it. But that's a way bigger animal than a doll sheep. Well, and you can't cape and cap the skull. You have to bring out the entire head.

Yeah, you have to take everything out, and that's a load. You can't skin the head. You can't skin the head, no. What's the thinking on that? That's a good question. I can only speculate because they don't publish it in their eggs or anything, but my guess would be that they can validate it's only 48 hours old because you have to check it in in 48 hours.

Yeah, I got you. It allows them to make some determination absolutely yeah you have you know the eyes yeah there's a lot of forensics that they can put together it's not somebody's walking over into the next unit you know showing up three days later and saying hey yeah i shot this dry ass skull yeah yeah for sure well then it took you the better part of two days to get to your truck yep yeah yeah i was just barely under the limit but yeah i mean it's uh yeah it's it's a very unique experience i i i'm looking forward to going back again up again next year yeah you're gonna go oh yeah no brainer out of those 300 people you think that were that hunted it last year what do you think the average number of days put in per hunter i don't know you know and i don't know

how to calculate that because i i was never quizzed on how many days that i spent i don't know if you were i i could take an educated guess at it i would say 75 of the people that buy the tag go hunting oh you think so i think so yeah is that too high i haven't dabbled in this at all but i i feel like that's got to be high okay well the only just from called 60 40 areas just some units where i know like even limited draw units where you do look at like participation rates um i'd be i don't know i could be wrong i i would be i would be a little bit surprised if 75 of people put in some time of the people that do go hunting no opinion somewhere in there

of the people that do go hunting i like to believe that these are pretty serious people that are investing their time and they i've never talked to anyone who's done it who was like not an accomplished hunter well i think people do try to go get their toes wet and very quickly decide this is not for them and this is not fun. And I think there are people like that that buy the tag and pretty quickly throw the towel in. But on the flip side, the guy's filling tags and the guy's doing it year after year pretty hardcore about it.

There's a pretty hardcore scene that goes out and does it, and I would argue puts in seven to 15 days looking for sheep and still not finding sheep. And you have to. I mean, if the success rate's only less than 3%, you're going to have to put in some time. Things are going to have to go your way. You're going to have to have a lot of things all come together.

You can be the best hat dude in the world, but if you're not in the right place at the right time, it's not going to happen. So I think that that's kind of the interesting part. It is. It's just a lot of time. So it's not like something you would go out every weekend and go do. You need a big chunk of time, like five to seven days.

If you want to be serious about it, yeah. The nature of the country, it wouldn't work to do weekends. You're not going to go out for a couple hours after work. No, no. A lot of the sheep country takes better than a day to access. And while there are trails into this country, you're not spending a majority of your time on them. Or if you are, you're probably not seeing sheep.

Yeah. So how many times did you try before you got one, Pete? I killed a ram on my fourth year. So I met Kurt in 2012 and never knew anything about unlimited sheep hunting but very quickly got the bug just from talking with kurt and um the next year 2013 was the first year i bought a tag and i would argue i had better intel than were you guys were you guys were you guys uh working on backpacks together at the time? Yep. Yeah. I was working at Schnee's at the time.

And when Kurt brought Stone Glacier to market for a short time there, Schnee's was the exclusive retailer. I was the marketing director of Schnee's and met Kurt and shot some product videos and photos with him and learned up on his backpack company that he was starting. And pretty quick there was building him in my garage after work to help kurt get some chores done yep so that's where my involvement with stone glacier began just kind of after hours lending the helping hand when kurt wasn't able to get everything done but anyways 2012 met kurt 2013 bought my first unlimited tag. And what I was saying was I would argue that I had some of the better Intel of, of unlimited sheep hunters. Kurt had done a tremendous amount of homework that he was generous enough to share with me. And I felt like I went into it with a lot of information. Yeah. Which in hindsight really doesn't mean a whole lot.

Is that right? See, I thought it was like when I've, because I've thought about this a good bit over the years. And I don't know why, because some stuff is this way. Or maybe I wished it was this way. I thought it was like, once you know what's up. But it's just different all the time. So the most valuable piece of advice Kurt gave me, beyond the maps, beyond the spreadsheets, the most valuable piece of advice kurt gave me beyond the

maps beyond the spreadsheets beyond every little piece of advice he gave me the most valuable thing that ever stuck to me was don't go chasing dead sheep ah i like that because you you get some information i'm gonna get a hat that says that there's been five there's been five rams killed there in the last 12 years it's got to be be the spot. Don't go chasing dead sheep. He's not there anymore. And there's a lot of truth to that. There is a lot of truth to that. Because like you're saying, if that was the case,

the seasons would all close in a couple of days. Correct. It would. And it's just not. And the other factor that you need to take into consideration is these are timber rams. These sheep live a tremendous amount of their life in the trees. So visibility is so low.

Not only are there next to no sheep in there, the few sheep that are in there are extremely hard to find because they're spending so much time in the trees. So I started in 2013 2013 and i dove head first into it and i went on a big rip big week-long expedition and i think i went in like five days before season opened and on night one i had scouted quite a bit that summer i think i had done three different backpacking trips that summer into the beartooths, never seen a sheep, just scouted country. Night one, hiking in, saw like eight, nine sheep. And piece of cake. I just thought I had it figured out. None of them were legal rams.

It was a family band, ewes and lambs and a couple young, two, three-year-old ram, banana heads is what we call them. And I was like, well, there's got to be this big brother coming up behind him. So I camped with him him i camped with him that night i spent the next morning with him i was like there's no big brother here yeah and as much as i wanted to hang out with those sheep because you're you're looking at the easter bunny i mean you have found an animal you are not supposed to have found so it's a fascinating animal to spend time with and to look at and as much as i wanted to sit there and stay

with those sheep it was like there's nothing to shoot here keep moving never saw another sheep a week so that was my year one actually this is a whole nother story but what okay would it work when does season end after thanksgiving so you're still not into the rut well it matters some of these districts are very unique there are migratory areas and some of the unlimited areas that with the right snowstorm and with the right day on the calendar things might be a little easier than normal and they know what i was going to suggest is whatever like to wait for him no that's a tactic to wait for rams to find find use late that is at the tail end of the season when the rams might be starting to think about rut that absolutely is a tactic

that people use and i think they've used successfully but yeah it's tough it depends on where you're at though because you know some of some of that rutting you know they move up to winter so now you're now you're at you,000, 10,000 feet. They grow up to shit that's been blown off. Yeah, yeah. So the different herds do different things in there. All right, so on day three of that first year, I was camped on a really cool spot, kind of perched on a cliff,

a very steep spot with a big drop-off below us. And I had a great view, and I was posted up there for about a day and a half. And out comes a humongous black bear way below me. I'm like, that's a big bear. And then I'm like, it's feeding on something. It's like messing with something and digging and feeding on something. And I put the spotting scope on it.

It's eating a mountain goat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Wow. And I don't know if he killed the mountain goat if the mountain goat fell and died but he is consuming a large dead white animal down below me i'm like that's a big bear and i love mountain goats that's not cool that he's eating this mountain goat so i like had it out for this bear and like don't a couple days of not seeing sheep you get burnt out quick you lose i mean i think the stamina required this the

endurance the mental endurance endurance yeah of not seeing an animal day after day after day it's exhausting and it's very discouraging and so this bear showed up like that'll work bear season didn't open till the same day that sheep season open long story short i watched this bear showed up. I was like, that'll work. Bear season didn't open until the same day that sheep season opened. Long story short, I watched this bear the next day go into another drainage. I was in the next drainage a couple days later. And here's this big giant bear again. And so I wound up shooting this bear. It was the worst decision of my life.

I now had to pack a black bear out of the Beartooth Wilderness. It was a psychotic move. In hindsight, yeah which is a damn shame because i had just gotten into the best sheep habitat that i had touched that whole week and i had to put a bunch of bear meat on my back and walk out yeah so that was year one and that was a very humbling experience and pretty discouraging um did it year after year did not see a legal ram until summer scouting of my third year and i i don't know how i can speak for kurt here but i've when i found a legal ram you feel like you are looking at santa claus no i can see that i can't i when I found a legal ram, you feel like you are looking at Santa Claus. I can't even begin to explain to you the feeling of seeing an animal that you are

not supposed to have found. So it's a really cool thing and it's super addicting. So I found a sheep summer scouting and had my plan. And so three, four days before season, I was heading back in to the general area where I had seen this ram during the summer and couldn't find anything. Season opened, opening day, I'm hiking up into a drainage. And as I'm coming over this big saddle, here come three hunters towards me.

And I realized that they've got a mountain goat on their back they're goat hunters and they filled a tag on opening day and I just talk I'm great goat congratulations hey what are the odds you've seen some sheep or a legal ram oh yeah we saw one this morning like you gotta be kidding me you saw you saw a ram santa you saw you saw santa red suit this morning he was here so they were like and i and i grilled him i was like let me be like let's talk in detail about what you saw and where and exactly what it was and they were very confident that they had seen a legal ram. So I climbed the highest peak to my right in that saddle. From that saddle, I went 1,500 feet up to the tippy top of the peak. And I sat down.

And I sat. That was 8 a.m. in the morning. No, 7, 8 a.m. I ran into those people. Get up on top of the peak. I sat there all day. I was like, I know he's somewhere. He didn't vaporize. I sat there all day i was like i know he's somewhere yeah he didn't vaporize i sat there all day and 30 minutes before dark this ram comes loping through the saddle where i'd talked to the goat

hunters really like full run he looked scared i i you know hunter it's opening day there's some traffic there's pack trains coming through some of these drainages. There's some commotion compared to a normal day. This ram just comes running through. Long story short, I camped on that ram. It wasn't opening day. I apologize. This was prior opening day because I spent a day and a half with this sheep,

not able to shoot him yet. So that's what it is goat season opens before unlimited season yep so these goat hunters filled their tag call it september 12th i can't shoot this sheep until september 15th so i find him put him to bed i lived with him for i didn't leave him for you know i lost sight of him throughout the day and stuff but i spent the better part of two days with this sheep. The night of September 14th, next morning is opening day. This sheep beds 300 yards from my tent.

Just me and the ram. That's it. He's 300 yards away from my tent. I'm like, that's great. Sun's going to come up. I'm going to go dump this thing, and I'm going to get this ram. Well, that night, a horrible blizzard blew in. Hardcore snowstorm came in.

And really nasty weather. And so I got up in the dark, and I was like, I don't care. It's nasty out. I know where that sheep was sleeping. He's got to be somewhere close there. Even if he moved, he's somewhere over there. So I go out in the dark, and I got soaking wet and really cold. Sun came up, sheep's gone.

In hindsight, that sheep definitely hightailed it down into the timber when that weather blew in. I looked and looked for him that morning. And as hypothermia began to set in and as more bad weather began to blow in, I quickly realized i had to leave it's like i can't i can't stay up here in this state so i hiked out i went home i did a load of laundry slept in my bed and i came right back and i hiked back in and i spent a lot of time looking for that sheep never saw him again really so are you glassing up all kinds of elk and shit when this is going on, or is it not like that? The place is pretty void of life. Grizzly bears.

A lot of grizzly bears. I see a lot of grizzly bears. Sometimes you see goats. But no, I've seen one in my four years of hunting in there, I've seen one elk herd, a couple mule deer, a couple goats, and a bunch of bears, and a couple sheep. So what year was that? That was my third season.

So that's like I'm dialing this in a little bit. I'm starting to regularly see sheep. I'm feeling a little more confident about it. And then year four is almost repeat. Opening day, found a ram. Weather blew in. Lost the ram. Bad weather blew in.

It was like absolute repeat. I went home. I walked out of there. Hiked all the way out to let the weather. You can sit in your tent for 48 hours. You can hike for 10 hours and get out of here. Yeah, like it happens. It's like this wet, shitty snow.

You think like. You're like, I got three days of this. I'm going to go eat a cheeseburger. Yeah, two days later, you're hot as shit again and it's all sunny. Yeah. So I went home, weathered the storm, did some laundry, went back in there. Turned up. No, I didn't turn up cheap.

I camped next month. My tactic throughout my four years of hunting, which I still think is the most productive way to do it was to get to the highest point you can. And I don't think that's exactly Kurt style, but that's how I hunted the unlimited is I would go to the tippy top of stuff and I would post up and I would spend whole days sitting on mountaintops where I could just see everything. And then you'd turn around and you could see everything over there. So just keeping visibility in your favor. And something I wasn't good at before I was hunted sheep and was talking with Kurt about sheep hunting a lot was the sun.

How important it is to plan your day around the sun. To work with it. Work with the sun. Don't work against it. Always plan your whole day around, I'm going to be glassing to the west in the morning. I'm going to be glassing to the east at sunset. Yeah, what Pete's saying, this is a tricky thing, man,

because if you're up in a glass and tit and you got 360 degrees of stuff you want to look at, when the sun's bad, for one, you're looking one direction, everything's shadowed. And you look in another direction and everything's just glowing nice. It's like you got to make a decision where, like, I'm going to ignore the shadowed shit. As good as I know it seems, as much as there's probably animals over there i'm gonna ignore that and just glass the stuff where the sun is really working for me but it takes like that takes discipline oh yeah because personally you waste your time staring at that shitty stuff when meanwhile the good side they like the animals glow oh yeah when the sun hits them

yeah you got to put everything in your favor and using the sun to your advantage while glassing is certainly a good place to start. Because then you said they start moving too once the sun hits them, right? Yeah, a bighorn sheep on average I don in a shady, nice little spot, and at 10, 30, 11 a.m., when the sun gets up a little higher and the direct sunlight is hitting that sheep, more often than not, he's going to get up, and he's going to go find his second bed for the day. But he might move 20 yards. Sure, yeah.

Put 20 yards into the timber. Yeah, he might move on the other side of his tree. Yeah, gone. into the timber yeah he might move on the other side of his tree yeah gone yeah so uh anyways went back in and turned up a ram right at first light same ram no no different sheep and uh so you're like you're like joe unlimited now no jim no jim unlimited turned up some sheep right at first light made a quick move on them and No. Jim. No. Jim Unlimited. Turned up some sheep right at first light, made a quick move on him, and moved in tight on him, and he pegged me.

I wound up being within 100 yards of this ram. Bumped him. Oh, and he was bug-eyed, staring straight at me when I shot him. Oh, that's the one you got? Yeah, I got him staring straight at me when I shot him. Oh, that's the one you got? Yeah, I got him. Gotcha. 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 a high-end 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 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 onxmaps.com slash meet. OnXMaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. So now you got seven years. Seven years.

Well, I drew a permit in Alaska, so I'm going sheep hunting next month. Oh, what'd you draw? Toe hook or delta? Chugach. Oh, you did? Yeah, I drew a Chugach permit, so I'm going dull sheep hunting in August. Get one of these white ones, hopefully. Yeah, man.

But that one, because you don't have a relative up there, you got to hire a guide. Correct, yeah. That'll be fun though it'll be awesome yeah it's gonna be a really fun trip you're gonna fly in no it's a hike in only it's uh oh you got state it's the state state park it's upper eagle river which is uh you start at the nature center i think i'll have to connect you with my brother man okay you guys need resources and for sure i'm going up on monday actually oh yeah so maybe we go get lunch or something yeah but whatever you know stuff it's hiking there's no landing strip living when you live in anchorage you find a lot of dudes

have a lot of dead shit in your garage throughout the fall man because that's this is his like having a house therapy we're like hey man can i use your freezer can i use the amount of uh what's funny about his house is the amount of bear spray. A lot of it. And milk crates. Milk crates of bear spray because everyone flies to Alaska, buys bear spray, then they always

somehow wind up sleeping in his house or storing shit in his house and he has crates of pepper spray in his garage. That's good, man. Those those are good stories is it worth it like is it too hard are you interested in going i'm not like asking because i want i'm not asking like take me but um is that not interesting is it just like too hard to be like okay i'll throw in with a buddy of mine is it the kind thing you kind of got to be doing it for yourself i was not really into solo hunting when i started this whole endeavor i in fact didn't like it i

and it was something you have to get comfortable with because you find out really quickly it's very hard to find somebody to join you in the middle of the elk rut on a two percent hunt on a two percent hunt yeah because if you had some sweet tag like like i like to jump in when friends draw like bitch and tag me too because like yeah we're gonna go in there it's gonna be shit running around everywhere we're gonna shoot a big old one let's go but to have it be like no we're not gonna see anything we're not gonna get anything or you like to come there's lots of bears we would like to come to watch me not get anything it does interest me i think i will spend some time in the Unlimiteds this year. It does interest me. I've got a couple of good friends

who are giving it hell several years into it now. It does interest me because we get to do it again. Every seven years, you can try again. It's really exciting because Kurt gets his tag back next year. Dan, you'd be loving.

Is it helpful if someone did want to go and like i'd like to go and just glass up with you is that helpful is it just want to be not helpful because then you got to deal with too many people's attitudes more eyes yeah i mean it's more eyes they can split yeah exactly yeah i've i've never been in that situation i can't really speak to it but i would have to think if you have somebody that's like-minded that wants to spend the time and they want to pound glass

they don't get antsy they're patient they know the program but if you want to go along and think that it's like running gun and elk during the 20th of September on the chase

it's not it's just a It's not. It's just a lot of misery and miles and then sitting for long periods of time. It's a nasty place, man. It is. There are lots of different ways that people

can go about it. I know guys have been successful many different ways, but typically you're not going to go jump one up out of the timber. Is pack stock helpful? No, you can't take a horse into this stuff. No. It's too shitty.

It's been done. But it doesn't give you a big advantage. No. No, I mean, some of the country, some of the units can't even get. The biggest advantage you can give yourself is time. You just have to clock. You just have to go punch the clock yeah now how often does it happen um that day one you know different ends of the unit whatever like day one bam bam two guys or vouch two guys get them you you hear about the old war story i mean there's there's stories of that happening and i've never

heard of it happening in recent years but it has happened it's definitely happened where opening day three sheep get shot got you and then there's still a 24-hour grace period where you can legally harvest a sheep within the next two days so i'm with you yeah so give me a um give me like a give me a big uh stone grace your sales pitch man you ever done that before got our general manager right here this is job sell a ketchup popsicle to a lady in white gloves bud that's a fact that's a line from tommy boy if nobody else picked up i got a good sales pitch I had seen them around a bunch I was like yeah another backpack

another hunting backpack they looked pretty good I had touched them in Schnee's and farted around a little bit with them I think I even had one Pete had shown me how to use it I carried it around a little bit. Why don't you tell everybody how we met?

How did we meet? We met in a bar. In a bar, right? We met in a yoga class. I like that, man. That was later. Yanni goes to Broga. Kurt gave me a yoga pass for Christmas one year.

I was doing some yoga. I walk in, this guy's got a meat-eater t-shirt on. You love it? I've been there six times, yeah. It's the best. I like it a lot. My wife wanted me to go last. There's a guy with a meat-eater shirt on.

I'm like, hey, you hunt? He's like, yeah. In fact, I produced this television show called Meat Eater. I'm like, oh, cool. That was pre- This was the first time I saw you. The podcast with Randall, and we went out to dinner and had beers. We went turkey hunting the morning before that podcast.

We've had some great turkey hunts. I'm a real redneck turkey hunter. Like you bushwhack. Just kill them. Just get the turkey killed. And Giannis is such an artsy turkey hunter. It's got to be this beautiful setup and I just shoot the bird.

Anyway, sorry, I totally cracked you off. My memory doesn't serve me right. You're talking about stone glacier packs. Yeah, you were doing a big old sales pitch. Yeah, act like I'm an investor. Can I tell you the follow-up story to the yoga class? I'm like, oh, sweet. Yeah, good to meet you.

I see you here again. Don't see Pete. Don't see Pete. Don't see Pete. Because he only had one pass. No, I think he – The guy is a stingy Christmas ghost. He was chasing something else that was in that class that wasn't a serious –

That rhymes with class? It might. And he's like, yeah, didn't work out for me. Not doing yoga anymore. Oh, no. Waste my time down there.

I remember it a little differently. Getting all stretchy. Well, I'm there quite often still. I know you are. Haven't seen you around. They call them yawning yoga. Do they?

Yawning yoga? Broga. But no, like a lot of good it does. You all crippled up all the time. Blowing your knees out all the time. I tell you, I can't wait to go back in now that this knee is going to be scoped

and fixed. I'm going to get the flexibility that I have in my left knee and my right knee. You saw some stone glitches. My right side pigeon is going to go to the next level. I can bend over now. I can bend over and. I can bend over. And palms flat on the ground.

Knees locked. Yeah. That's impressive. That's good. That's quite powerful. I can't even touch my toes when I bend over. What's that? I can't even touch my toes.

You're not as bendy as I am. That's very clear. That's right. So anyhow, here I am. I'm like, hey, man. I was thinking about getting a pack pack. What do you think I should get? Oh, you probably don't get this.

I got this special sales pitch from Kurt at the now the old showroom. Why can't I have the sale? Why won't you give me the sales pitch? No, because he doesn't hang around in the showroom. He doesn't hang around in the showroom. He's down here with the juke. He's stitching. But I was just about to go backpack hunting with your brother or llama hunting

and uh it's kind of like like backpack yeah yeah light now ladies and gentlemen he's not i mean hunting llamas he means hunting with llamas as pack animals i've at llama yeah that llama but you were not hunting llamas it was like in a dish. It could have been a house cat. I've had alpaca. You've had alpaca? It just tastes like very tender beef. Tastes like meat? Yeah.

Was it all super cooked, or was it like a steak? No, it was like a steak. Oh, see, I didn't get that. Yeah, yeah, no. It was presented like a steak. It was very tender. Really? Yeah, it was really good.

I'm going to tell my brother. I was into it. Backstrap, maybe. I don't know, maybe. Plan B. I know, guy. I got a good place to hunt llamas. Give you my brother's address. So, I can't even remember. Are you giving a sales pitch or not? I'm trying.

And I was getting ready to go hunting with your brother, and I had the Solo 3300. And I'm in there, and I'm like, yeah, I'm telling Kurt and Pete. I'm like, yeah, I don't know, man. I don't think this pack's going to be big enough because we're going in for six nights, seven nights maybe. And I think I need a little bit bigger pack. And Kurt's like, oh, no, you don't.

I did 14 days in a limited sheep unit with this pack. I'm like, oh, okay. Show me, please. And yeah, so he showed me how to run basically the, what do you guys call like the load sack? Load shelf. No, not the load shelf, but what's the sack that goes in? The wedges between the pack and the frame.

Load cell dry bag. Load cell dry bag. He's like, so you just take this, put your food in here. So this is, it basically looks like a very, a tidy game bag. That's tight. Water resistant. Yep. Yeah.

And, uh, you can slip it basically between the pack and your frame. Yeah. Cause the whole bag will kind of move away from the frame. Yeah. And then you just, he showed me, then he just said, yeah, you just walk into the woods. And then when you get to your spot where you're going to hunt the best part about what I liked about this system is that you just pull that out, pull out your cord, throw it up in a tree. Now you've got your food hung, and you just cinch down your backpack.

You've got an extra tidy pack now, and off you go. I was like, man, that's the shit. So I was going to start just like adding attachments and extra bags and this, that, and the other. And instead, I walked into the woods lighter on that trip you know because of that pack and that system and uh i was sold liked it yeah no and it works so slick man i mean the whole time i was hunting when we talked about this earlier but i had the capability to carry a quarter out had we gotten something but while i'm hunting i felt like I have a little day pack on. No, that's what I like.

It weighs nothing. You kind of forget it's there. In your own pack that you use, do you guys put the white hang bags? Do you use those or do you not use them? I use them. I do not connect them to the backpack. You use it as a – I use them to organize my things. You don't hang it inside there?

I do not. I find myself kind of liking to hang it in there, but I was curious if you guys did. It's easy to find. Yeah. Because I put a couple extra shells and shit. Oh, yeah. And I can just reach in there.

Oh, I use a bunch of them. I'm very organized in my backpack and have little kits and stuff. But yeah, more often than not, I not pulling them out and throwing them in. Yeah. I just like, I like having it where I can, even in the dark, it's right there.

Yeah. I just know when I put my hand there and I drag it out. No. Giannis touched quickly on the ability to carry a quarter out and our load shelf feature and the ability to carry something between a frame and a bag. And that's worth talking about for a second, which is the physics behind why carrying something in a load shelf configuration, i.e. keeping heavy stuff close to your back, is the smartest way to carry heavy stuff off a mountain.

And Kurt's done some cool experiments, and we've got them all on our website um to where the lateral forces that the pack is going to affect on you are much smaller when the heavy load is vertically oriented up and down your back close to your center of gravity rather than moving away from your center of gravity so you can't change gravity 100 pounds 100 pounds 100 pounds yeah you can change the forces that that weight is going to put on your body once waving back and forth pull you around yeah yeah the closer you can keep the heavy stuff to your back the better it is what about lower or higher conventional wisdom is lower yeah well it it changes because it all depends on the center of gravity of the body right so uh take for example in a standard pack if if you it if you

wanted to you know you're working off of that that general fulcrum angle you know well just just that just that leverage the the angle that it comes up so the the farther you move it away from your back the more leverage that oh i'm gonna have okay but the point that you're going to work from is the center of gravity of your body you know somewhere in your hips that's that's that's the fulcrum that's where it's you know moving you back and forth so you can move the load higher and achieve the same vertical amount of leverage as as if it was as if it was lower but the problem is is now you're lateral you know you're left to right now you've increased that leverage going that way so you know there's this there's this this this medium where you where you try to get it close enough to offset both leverage.

And what we've found is when you draw it out on AutoCAD and you figure out the density of the meat and you figure out the density generally of the gear that you're carrying and you start moving it around, and you're going to get a center of gravity of your pack at some point. So you move it here. It might move up. It might move down.

So the key is being able to get it the most in line, obviously with your, your center of gravity, you know, which is generally going to be in the center of your hips. And so, yeah, no one ever put a quarter in right side up.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great example. A little top heavy. Yeah, because it's physically in the same spot vertically. Yeah. But, you know, now you're left to right, front to back, you know, being able to control it. So, yeah, that's kind of the concept behind it

is just being able to increase stability and any advantage that you can get. If you're only packing it a few hundred yards to your truck, obviously it doesn't make that big of a difference. But if you're under that same load for two days, you have to manage the meat. So now you have to be able to get out, especially in sheep hunting. If you're in the Northwest Territories, you're even earlier in the year in Alaska, you're in early August, you don't know what kind of weather you're going to have. So you can't just leave it in a ball of meat. You're going to have to get it out, get some air on it, get it cool, try to get it on ice if there's a glacier around, whatever you can do to take care of the meat. So now being able to manage it and keep it clean and then be able to repack it. So if you just end up with a ball of meat in the middle of your pack

with all the rest of your gear, there's a whole other level of dynamics you need to start to work with. That's the thing I think a lot of people don't realize is how much, in those kind of hot days, August, September, how much you're messing with that stuff. Oh, you have to be on it all the time. Airing it out, putting it in the shade, taking it out of the shade, putting it in your bag. You can't just throw it in a garbage bag and put it in your backpack and then think it's going to be two days later going to be on it all the time. Airing it out, putting the shade, taking it out of the shade, putting your bag.

You can't just throw it in a garbage bag and put it in your backpack and then think it's going to be two days later. It's going to be like that. No, that's it. You could lose it quickly. Yeah, you're keeping an eye all the time. Getting the heat out of it quickly right after you take it. So yeah, that's kind of the concept behind it is twofold. One of it is an easier way to manage the meat once you have it, keep it as clean, and keep as much of it as you can, obviously, and not lose anything.

And then being able to have it in the most comfortable spot. So are you digging the backpack business? Like do most years you you know go and sell more packs than you did the year before and stuff like that oh yeah yeah yeah no i i dig it a lot i really like it you're in it to stay oh yeah yeah you think you'll start making all kinds of other shit too oh you never know there's there's a there's a lot more time to work on stuff like that right now you know yeah well we might do fanny packs murses yeah yeah but you're not kidding about making other stuff i'm not kidding about that no no i mean there's you're gonna go make some other thing what would you go make

oh like what like completely out of pack but like what class of like yeah. What would be mountain hunting gear? Okay. I think things that go along with it. That naturally go along with it. The stuff that you pull out of your pack. So you're not like a new kind of claw hammer? No. That's a lot of work.

It'll stay in high quality mountain gear. Yep. For sure. Yeah. I mean, that's the fun part about it. Give me a tip. Okay, put it this way.

What would be something that you'd be like, say it finishes sentence? You know, Steve, I wouldn't be surprised if down the road I made a blank five i've made i've made a piece of gear that you're gonna be carrying in our back in in a stone glacier backpack so something i might tote around in my pad there is a lot of cool stuff on the drawing board oh really yeah oh yeah that's fun yeah it is fun i think that's that's the best part of the business as far as i'm concerned britney how'd you cut your leg up so bad? Chicken wire fence. Digging a wire fence?

Chicken wire. You trying to restrain some chickens? No, I have a little five-month-old puppy that likes to get into my garden beds. Oh, you're trying to keep it out of the garden. You got any concluding thoughts, Brittany? I don't want to go first. I don't. to i don't want to go first i don't i don't i got shit i got nothing all my questions are answered i was gonna say it's easy for kurt to uh go sheep hunting in september in the middle of the rut in good elk country here because he's already got a whole uh corner of his man cave here they're not even on

the wall there's a sewing room sewing room um was just let me see how many are there one two three four five any more biggest ones in the garage five here there's five more others just beautiful six point bowls that anybody would be happy with so once once you've amassed these, then you're like, eh, whatever. Elk, schmelk. I'm going sheep hunting. I don't care if I see any animals anymore. I've seen all the animals. You're just out here to suffer. I had an old client once tell me after we killed a six-point bull

that was maybe as big as the smallest one that I'm looking at here, and he said, yes, you can never have too many six-point bulls. I agree with that. I agree with that. Six points is six points. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think like,

yeah, I think I got a muley box. I feel like you can't just, there's no, I could see that. Like you'd say you can't have, I'd never be like, like for instance,

for instance, like I went musk ox on no desire at all to go musk ox on. But I'm saying like, yeah, I think that people find their kind of, a lot of guys find their thing, you know, like how many, how many buck racks have we caught up hanging in Doug Dern's in the buck

man juice room? 20. I don't know. Not all his, but I mean, you know, he's not, he's not like, Oh, you oh, two more and I'm done.

It's just not how he looks at it. What was your concluding thought? That was it? Can't have too many big old... Can't have too many six points. And that's how you get to go unlimited sheet planes after you've amassed a little fat pile. Now,

what's up? So your wife doesn't like you can't put antlers and whatnot up in your living room? No, I could. I like having everything right here. Just right in one spot. Condensed. I like my space. Yeah.

Yeah. That's one of the things I like about my wife. I put anything anywhere I want. People are always like, oh, I can't put it in the bedroom. It's like, dude, I would say I would go get a new wife, but my wife, my wife doesn't mess with me about stuff like that, man.

I'm not saying yours does either. You just like to keep it all tidy. Yeah. I like my space. You like to have this way. You come down, I come down here. That's what I want to say.

They all are. Yeah. All I have to walk. They all are tied to the fan of Buffalo too. I take it. Cause I see two pieces of art with Buffalo on them. Yeah, actually, my sister painted that one for me. Oh, wow.

Yeah, back in the day, but yeah. You know what I like about you most, Kurt, is that you keep everything real neat. I have a real problem with neatness. You should see a picture of his garage. I like it too much. I like it too much. I don't have a problem keeping neat

I like it so much that it becomes a thing in and of itself it's like there's a great functional quality to neatness right but for me neatness is an end in itself do you understand what I'm saying

that's when it becomes a problem yeah well a four and a six year old take care of that in itself. Do you understand what I'm saying? That's when it becomes a problem. Well, a four and a six-year-old take care of that. I got a two, four, and seven. Two, four, and seven. We have a fish and shack, and my brother, who likes stuff neat too, he's like, when he closes his eyes and pictures it in the future,

he pictures a Coast Guard station. Like that neat. know yeah i like it but this no this room doesn't make which brother matt matt's trick to neatness though is to get rid of all your shit he says he goes when i shut the door in my house i like to sound like i'm walking into a gymnasium so his need is just to expunge the house of all items. So it's like his house is about as empty as a house could be. Because that means there's nothing to straighten up because he got rid of it all. Just like stripped.

He lives a monastic, like a fairly monastic life. He lives nine hours away from his wife. They have separate homes that are nine hours apart. Wow. When they hang out, it's like, they're like, like a dating couple having a good old time.

Good stuff. Yeah. And it's not like they're not about it. They're not about it. Like, Oh, we're just trying to get through this. Right. And then it'll be like they're not about it they're not about it like oh we're just trying to get through this right and then it'll be that they're like just very fine with that him having his very neat house without even having her shit cluttered

well i i figured out you got one now you got a rip lay it on me it was that i'm excited to hear this concluding thought well like when you guys? Lay it on me. I'm excited to hear this concluding thought. Well, like when you guys first asked me to be on this particular podcast, and you said you were going to talk about sheep hunting the whole time, I was like, I don't really have anything to contribute, which I didn't have much. But what I will say is that I think you guys, I went into it thinking like,

I don't think I could ever do a sheep hunt or would ever want to do one. I think you guys, your enthusiasm definitely changed my mind. I'm not going to do it next year. me today but you always you always apply but like you're like i'm not applying for a shoot no britney told me today that she would have a hard time shooting a bull elk because they're too majestic oh my she has a thing of like the majestic quality i don't know and you want to see majestic you should see them up close once they're dead. But that's the thing. Yeah, I don't know.

It's like I feel like, and I've just never, I've never had the opportunity, so I can't say like what would happen like in the moment. You know, it's hard. It's one thing to say it now sitting here, but it's another to say it like actually in the moment. But I don't know. Like I feel like if I saw one, would just be like like last season last season um we my boyfriend I went hunting in for mule deer in the Missouri breaks and I had an opportunity at like a huge um boxter buck and I like I was just like my boyfriend was like are you

gonna just what's going on here like my jaw was on the floor so i don't know it's weird to me that it's weird to me because that seems like a patriarchal perspective but to have a woman say that she grants a male animal a higher majestic score that's entirely possible than a female seems like i like it because it's unexpected i would just expect to have i I would visualize that as this very patriarchal view of animals. I don't know. I think it has something to do with- The male is more, he's the special one. The female is unspecial.

He's more spectacular. I mean, he has these incredibly huge antlers that took him a long time to grow those. No, he grows them in a few months. I don't know. I mean, it's just like there's something more like majestic to the way that they look. It's the fastest growing thing on earth. I don't know. It also has, I don't know.

I can't explain it. I can't explain it. No, you don't need to. That was a good one. Kurt, you got anything you want to add? Boy, I don't. You ever get shocked messing around with high voltage electricity? I guess you don't get many chances to have it happen.

No, it's kind of a one-shot deal. Would you ever combine the two somehow? High-voltage packs? I thought about it. Going to Thai fashion and make fancy packs with glow-in-the-dark. Yeah, with your specific tools. That's a tough one to go. People will spend a lot of money

on their recreation. They really won't spend it on their work necessarily. It'd be fun. You're not going to make a souped up tool kit for... I don't think so. Compete with Lowe's and Home Depot. Never been shocked.

You got anything you want to add that you didn't get a chance to... Lowe's and Home Depot. Yeah. Never been shocked. You got anything you want to add that you didn't get a chance to, like you were wishing had come up, but it never came up? No, no. I mean, I just appreciate you guys having us on, and it's been a lot of fun. Good. Yeah.

Learned a lot. It came on. I hope you can sell a whole shitload of packs, man. Well, thank you. Yeah, yeah. We're going to keep hammering on it. I think you guys need to start two marketing campaigns. One would be Tidy.

Tidy packs. Write this down. Okay. Two would be We Kill Unlimited Rams. You just have a sign that says that. Yeah. Non-guided. We Kill Non-Guided Unlimited Rams.

Well, you know, it's funny. That would be my only closing comment on that is that the unlimited sheep hunt is people are pretty tight with the information. The guys who go in there and spend the amount of time, you know, you own it. You earn it. But in the same respect, you can have all the information in the world from guys that have been successful and go in there and not see anything. It kind of reminds me of Fight Club or something.

The number one rule, right? First rule of Unlimited Cheap Hunting. Do not talk about Unlimited Cheap Hunting. Sorry. You guys haven't done anything bad because you guys haven't even named like a range. No.

Mountain range. Yeah. But that's a question I have is do you feel like it could be a possibility that you might get your tag back next year and that you could hunt every year until you're like all right i'm over unlimited sheep hunting and net not kill another ram well there's only a 2.57 chance that i

you know that i'll take what's i mean obviously you're a positive thinking person because you're going to go in there and try and every time you walk in there you're thinking i'm going to kill one but like that's a realistic possibility you could hunt another 20 years and not kill another sheep yeah and it and i think it depends on you know how you where you hunt what you want to do do you want to spend more time exploring it do you want to it not that this is going to happen and it might sound silly to say but i'd almost be disappointed if you walked in there and only spent three days after waiting seven years and you got one, you, I mean, you wouldn't turn it down and I don't want to, but there is, there, there's a lot to being able to look up at that and, and, and say, you know, I invested a lot of time.

There were a lot of good memories went along with it. That might be the representation of it right now, but really what was special was just the stuff that I got to experience where, you know, how you grew back there, how you overcame things that you didn't think maybe you would. Those times when you haven't seen anything for nine days and you start to question, why am I here? If you could be spending time with my family right now, I haven't seen anything for nine days. And then the 10th day, something's there.

It just happens like that so you know all of those things that you start to grow and then you start to apply that to say elk hunting where you're seeing many elk in comparison yeah and and it it changes your your perception of hunting i think is probably the most positive thing that's done for me because you pay more attention to you know all the little things that happen opposed to just you know the big things when something's standing in front of you yeah so because some days there are no big things yeah many days most days yeah yeah and and you're you know after nine days of being by yourself that doesn't happen very long you are very often you start to run out of things to even think about no most people most people, it's an interesting dynamic.

Most people, it will never, ever happen. Bring a book. Or three. Yeah. Bring a book. Work with the sun. That was a ringer of a closing thought right there. Do you have any final thing you want to add, man?

Things that didn't come up that you wish you'd got to talk about? I want to talk about a big old puss we just caught in our shrimp pot but i'm not gonna talk about that right now okay it was actually my buddy's shrimp i am i am so confused about big octopus okay yeah we got big octopus i'm thinking of a cat so a shrimp you want to talk about something that never happened you guys think unlimited sheep hunt is like seeing santa claus Yeah. Getting octopus in shrimp pots. Just like, you know. Doesn't happen. You pull a lot of shrimp pots.

Now I get octopus. Go out there a day. And I boated over to my, like, a buddy of mine was out pulling shrimp pots. And he was kind of mad that I wasn't coming to help him. And I don't want to go because it's a very difficult area to take a skiff to. And I go over there. And he had eight in the water. He pulled six he's kind of pissed not really pissed but he's annoyed um hook it up pull a pot big old puss man yeah cool he's in my freezer right now i was all geared up to talk

about that so tell me how you're gonna cook it Because we did that a couple of times in Alaska and we never really got it figured out. Yeah, it was really good. You had to work at it. There's a couple ways people do it. One way is you take a switch. I know that one chef likes to use an apple

switch, a stick, and beat the snot out of it. Or in Japan, switch a stick yeah and beat the snot out of it or uh in japan they'll take a bucket and they'll have salt coarse salt in the bucket and put it in the bottom of a five gallon bucket with a bunch of very coarse salt like a brine punch it no just put it in the bottom and just start punching the legs and punching the legs and working around and punching, punching, punching. Are you saying this is to kill it? No. Oh, to kill it? How do you kill it? Tenderizing it.

Oh, I see. You're tenderizing it. Yeah. To kill it, you got to cut way lower than you think it would because the brain sits low. This is to tenderize it. To tenderize it. That's crazy.

Yeah. So you just, you ever watch Giro Dreams of Sushi? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a scene in there where someone's tenderizing an octopus. That's right. Just beating it in the Bible bucket. That's crazy. My mentor in all things salt water

parboils them. So 30 minutes. No beating at all. He gets pissed when you say parboil. He likes to say roll boil. He roll boils them. The arms for 30 minutes. And then this outside skin kind of comes off.

You scrape it off. Then he packs it in a dry brine, four to one. Then he smokes it. Then he jars it. And it is the best shit on the planet, man. My closing thought, Roger, is, man, does that puss sound good? Man, I want some octopus for dinner now um mine would just be to encourage people to try new things and collect as many experiences as you can and if unlimited

sheep hunting is one of those things go for it yeah there's only 300 other guys out there trying to kill 10 sheep just know what you're getting. Just know what you're signing up for and the realities of it. And it's the most rewarding thing. Oh, yeah. That getting out there and doing stuff thing is so important. Yeah. If we're just getting into general life shit. Because when you're laying there dying.

What do I do? We got a couple minutes. You're not going to be like, man, am I glad I didn't do that unlimited sheep hunt. Right? It's just not going to be what you say when you die. Unless you're dying on the unlimited sheep hunt. Unless you're dying in the birch wilderness. Whatever you say, I'm not answering because I'm done talking. Okay.

I don't know if this is the time for this story. Go ahead. Because what if he wants to tell us the story himself? We're going to possibly go in and hang out with Poswitz and do some podcast recording. Just tell us. You guys know Jim Poswitz, one of Montana's greatest conservationists? Well, he's a national figure. Yeah.

He's a national figure. But he did most of his work here. Yeah, but very influential contributions. You could say that he, you know, not single-handedly, but he certainly spearheaded the effort that kept the Yellowstone River from being dammed there. Helped keep it the longest free-flowing river in the country. But I was hanging with him the other morning,

talking, doing some recording of some other stuff. Sorry. Can I just take something? I thought you were done talking. Well, I messed something up. The longest freestone river in the lower 48. Not the country. Copy.

Okay. And Jim, I think, is 82 this year and drew a goat tag. I think the second or third time. He's like, I think, is 82 this year and drew a goat tag. I think the second or third time. He's like, I've already killed. I think he said he's killed two. He's like, I've already killed two. Don't need to kill a third one. But he says, I'm not giving this one back so that someone else can go kill him.

I'm going to give this goat a pass. There's a goat up there that's going to get to live another year. But because of his health, he also cannot make it up to go and it's the first time i asked him this is the first time health is keeping you off a hunt he said yep i said shit if i'm 82 and i get to say that yeah this this year's the first year i'm not going up on the mountain because of my health. It'll be a good life, right? He added to that to say that, he said, that's all cool. I'm happy with it, whatnot.

He says, I hope when the time comes or when there's that moment, I think you can all kind of get what I'm getting at here. He's like, I hope to see what that goat is seeing. Wow, that's a beautiful thought he's stout he's a good thinker yeah i know i wasn't saying anything but uh talking to jim you knew you were gonna talk to jim posbys no i'm not talking i'm channeling jim posbys so i'm not actually saying jim posbys was talking about uh you know he's an elderly man and a couple years ago he was out hunting and near his home in helena and he's climbing up to a place to hunt elk a place where he knows elk come through and i gotta shit i got myself in the situation i was in earlier okay before i tell you this got to tell you some other things.

Now, Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt. So Roosevelt has this famous quote where a guy said like, so earlier I talked about how it came to be that the wild animals belong to the people. You know, Roosevelt wanted to be conservative and conserve wildlife. And so someone once said to rolls but like if it belongs to us and it's ours why can't we just go get it all and he said it doesn't just belong to you it belongs to those americans still in the womb of time what a line so posowitz is going up to hunt. And he becomes aware of a father and two kids behind him on the trail. And the father is holding the kids back because he's reluctant to allow his kids to come smoking up past some old man.

And Jim realizes that they're like purposefully plodding along out of deference. And he says that he turns and talks and says, I want you to go ahead. And he says, and he's telling the story, and he talks about them passing him. And there are three generations worth of those people that were in Roosevelt's womb of time out sharing the resource. Wow. He's a profound dude, man. That sounds like it. Yeah. He's got some real zingers.

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