The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 085: Afognak Island Elk Hunt

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

Afognak Island, AK- Steven Rinella talks with Remi Warren, Dirt Myth, Ridge Pounder, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: the impeccable sound quality of the MeatEater Podcast; Dirt Myth's fancy chew; Night Moves; the biggest bears in the world; Bergmann's Principle; grizzly behavior in proximity to food sources; hunting Afognak elk; embracing the suck; people snaking your hunting spot; ethics checks; precipitation as it relates to bear coloration; how to square a bear; is the effort worth the reward?; 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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you um if you listen if you're part of the other percent the 20 some or 30 some percent that listen on stitcher you do the same thing that that's thing one um the second thing you need to do is that was it though right subscribe yeah yeah subscribe so that was the easy one now the eagle is going to tell you uh his little part of this this message you go to the meat eater store which is at the meteor.com and look at some of the badass branded first light gear that we have in stock bo ku chama hoodies in camo and it's solid patterns with the cool meter logo on them there are brimmed beanies what else was there hats t-shirts decals yeah the new hats are nice we have new um richardson 112s with the cypher new first light cypher camo on them with the meteor logo in the ridge pounder's been ridge pounder's been rocking one of those yeah yeah he looks great you wear

do you wear it in chicago when you're just kicking around town all the time he says yeah but he's got that going for him but he cannot cook squirrel and rabbit at all that's it right that's it now for the program now i know that listeners have grown accustomed to the impeccable sound quality of this year digital radio program and that's gonna be a little compromise because we're in a teepee tent in the rain and i know this has happened a handful of times throughout the history of this program. But you just have to bear with it. So if you're hearing a gentle pitter-patter punctuated by loud gusts of wind,

that is the weather of a Fognac Island, which not many folks have heard of, but a Fognac is separated by a narrow channel. Remy, what's that channel called? Do you know? No, not between the islands. I'm not sure. I think just Fog Knack Straight or something.

Yeah, don't quote me on that. I don't know. Well, you're quoted. But, well, yeah, I understand. Raspberry Straight, Fog Knack Straight. Separated by a narrow channel from Kodiak Island. And Dirt here knows Kodiak as being an inferior brand of chew.

Affordable. No, no, good. Kodiak's good or not good? Good. Oh, Grizzly. It's premium. Grizzly, yeah. Do you think Grizzly was trying to nose in on Kodiak's business because Kodiak's known for big Grizzlies? Yeah. What's the chew you said is like a low-grade chew that you don't need to chew

because you have a good job? Grizzly. That's what my pops chews. Not that he has a bad job, but he's more frugal. He's better with his money, yeah. What do you got packed in right now, Dirt? Skull, baby. Skull. He's high living.

If anyone has followed the saga of Dirt trying to quit chew, you was gonna say no progress has been made on the quitting yet to try though really no well no well yeah because now he's hip to a a homeopathic thing he's taking lysine which he feels is gonna mitigate the damaging effects of chew by taking a what are you eating lysine and fresh air lysine is the the pill so you take a pill to just to prolong how long you can chew because it's it's counteracting the the carcinogenic effects of your chew well this is my own theory yeah no i like it i like it um so yeah we're riding the storm out and you know if anyone's familiar with the r.e.o speed wagon song riding the storm out it has you know it's like a real powerful song that gets everyone amped up and it's like really um dramatic but in the song where he's really right he's like at some kind of

cabin skiing and he's just kind of saying like i'm not missing a thing i'm riding the storm out and it's really sort of like you know it's kind of blasé for his hard-hitting of a tune, Riding the Storm Out is. And if he was a real skier, he'd be out there. Well, no, it's just like you feel like he's being more metaphorical, right? Like you feel like when he's like, riding the storm out, you feel like it's metaphorical. You feel like he's in Miami during a hurricane. Yeah, or yeah, but if you listen carefully, he's just like, he's in Miami during a hurricane. Yeah, but if you listen carefully, he's in Colorado, I think.

Or even more metaphorical, he's got a love triangle going on and just really messed up. Or he's going in to get a prostate exam, which I just had my first stuff recently. So yeah, going into that, when I had to get on my elbows on the mat, in my head, I might have done better had I been thinking riding the storm out. But if you listen to it, it's kind of more of a limp Dickie song because he's just up skiing and he gets stuck in a cabin for the night. It's one of those songs that isn't as good. Now, a song that's better, this is just a quick diversion before we get back to what's going on in Fog Nack Island. The Bob Seger song, Night Moves.

Do you know what that song's about? Yes. Tell me what it's about. Well, only because I've had a conversation with you while you dissected it and told me about what it was about. Yeah. Night Moves is about senescence. It's about growing old.

Where he, for a lot of the song, is reminiscing about being out with some gal back behind the cornfield in the 50 Chevy working on their night moves. So he's perfecting the art of love making i gather and but in the end of the song there's like a post script to the song and in the end of the song uncle bobby bob seger chris knows what you're from michigan you know what i'm talking about yeah i know what you're talking about uncle bobby says i woke last night to the sound of thunder. How far off I sat and wondered. So here he is, he's painting this picture of like someone waking up in the middle of the night, counting time, right? I started humming a song from 1962. Isn't it funny how the night moves

when you don't seem to have as much lose he's a it's it's from the perspective it's an old man waking up at night coming to terms with his own death and thinking back on this thing that happened to him it won't happen sad song man true song isn't it funny how the night moves and you just don't seem to have that much to lose and now here he is you know maybe his prostate's gone i don't know um a fog knack island remy uh break break it down for us the island itself just you have a whole spiel the whole picture yeah so we're in a valley but the mountains jet up pretty high it's all uh most of its volcanic activity is what all these mountains come out of the ocean from a lot of volcanoes around here and 1200 feet to be exact

when we were up at top today on the ridge. We were at 1,200? Yeah. We're camped at 350. We're camped low. Not that that's a matter of low enough, but about like 100 yards from us, we got silver salmon jumping. Oh, yeah. Fresh out of the ocean.

Clean salmon, too. Being caught. Yeah, they're pretty aggressive. Remy actually caught one on his first cast, which is a giant on his first cast yep but anyways there we are fog knack island yeah and so there's uh just a few different animals running around elk roosevelt elk which were introduced then there's black-tailed deer sitka black-tailed deer and then you've got the kodiak brown bear which is the king of the island but it is biggest brown bears in the world biggest brown bears in the world yeah up to 1200 pounds so if you think about them it's a bear that's about the weight of

two standard montana elk or more that's a big bear that's huge but these elk are no these elk are no joke either in weight they're about 1400 pounds i would say somewhere in there some of the biggest bodied biggest boggy elk in the world yep for sure and i think it's just because there's this we've seen the grass just head high high protein grass from what I've heard. Yeah, we're kind of in, it's weird about this island is you're kind of in like a, you're in almost like a grassland environment. Yeah, you would think, but there's obviously, there's spruce forests and then there's old growth forests on the other side, just this mountain behind us. But this grass, you just notice all the seed and everything on the top of it. And this morning I found some bear crap out back that was just full of grass seed. Yeah.

So it's obviously a pretty rich food source and easy to gather for the elk and the deer. Well, I don't know. I would imagine the deer do a little more browsing on some of the other plants yeah i'm sure they need a fair bit of young growth or grass growth coming out yeah everything grows larger here well gary was calling it kong island everything's big yeah and there's a thing like in in you, we've talked about Bergman's rule or Bergman's principle a number of times that mammals tend to be, mammals tend to be, the largest specimens of mammals tend to be at the most northern point of their range. Yeah. Which has to do with heat retention and heat dissipation. If you just imagine, like, imagine a whitetail deer. The most, you know, the diminutive forms of whitetail deer, like, down in the Florida Keys,

where you have Keys deer, like, very small deer. And everybody knows, like, the really big-bodied bruisers from Alberta. So if you imagine a whitetail deer, like, a large whitetail deer has a lower surface area ratio than a small whitetail deer, which is beneficial for heat retention. A smaller-bodied whitetail deer has higher surface area, which is good for heat dissipation. The same way if you think about an African elephant has big, huge ears,

and a woolly mammoth had very small ears because they use those ears to cool their blood by sending blood into their ears which is exposed to the air to cool it and then other things have strategies by which they try not to expose blood to air but there's a reason i bring that up is there's a principle with islands where generally on islands mammals tend toward diminutive form and here you have these are huge see the weird thing is they're huge islands yeah they're huge they become almost like not i they become almost like un-island like when they're so huge because you know like there's there's enough probably everything's smaller on an island because there's not as many resources

so they they just tend to be smaller but there's a surplus of food here yeah there's more food than animals and there's large predators so the populations the populations here especially for the deer are in extreme flux last year was a phenomenal deer season the year before or maybe it was two years before it was all you could do to find a buck i mean just hunting hard last year bucks everywhere good antler growth unbelievable season this year is kind of down a little bit yeah but it must take some time for that to even out because i mean like the thing has to be born and grow up yeah i mean three to four you know you've got your babies and then about every three years or whatever to grow like a like a yeah mature buck yeah so the winners the winners are a lot harder here so like even the blacktails where you're at

say if you're hunting black sick blacktail and prince of wales these blacktails are way bigger yeah body way bigger body yeah and then their antlers get can get bigger but they don't have as many trophy quality bucks all the time because extreme fluxes in the population and the horn antler growth so there's good old days and not good old days yeah when i'm looking at pictures of sick of blacktails i can pick out the kodiak blacktails oh yeah it's just such a look to them when you're packing one out it feels like packing out a mule deer from montana yeah people think blacktails are just tiny deer not the ones on kong island yeah on kong island now remy is here's a good segue remy is hunting blacktails remy does have a blacktail tag but we're mainly

pursuing elk and so on fog neck of fog neckognac Island, there are a handful of islands in coastal Alaska that have elk herds. Edelin Island. Yeah. Raspberry. What's that? Raspberry Island. Fognac Island have elk herds, and they're all limited draw hunts. Do you know what the draw odds here are?

No, probably 10 i'm just guessing from when i looked a while ago and how many years ago was it that you drew this tag the first time oh i'm not four years four years ago yeah and talk about what happened that made it be that you said you would never ever do this again oh it was just brutal pack out just such a large animal and it was me and my brother on that hunt and so it was yeah it's one of those trips where you're doing it and you just are saying why did I suffer through this? Why did I choose to do this? And then the day you leave, you think about it and you go,

ah, that wasn't so bad. Oh, yeah. You're like proud of yourself for accomplishing it. But the elk were not anywhere close to where we were camping, so we had to go up over the range, down the valley to the other side, shoot an elk, carry it all the way back up. And his was another six miles past mine, same deal, up over range, dropping down, going through brush and terribles.

Yeah, there's nowhere to land aircraft around here. I mean, you can land aircraft on floats. You can land aircraft on floats. There's a couple shoreline bars down at sea level where you can land aircraft on floats. There's a couple shoreline bars where you can, down at sea level, where you can land. Yeah, depending on the tide and the winds. And there's some low lakes where you can land.

Yeah. But there's no way to get... You can boat into some places. But then you got peaks out here that are a couple thousand feet high. Yeah. So you're always going to be climbing from close to sea level to a couple thousand feet. And now you could have it luck out and they be where you camp,

but it just hasn't been my experience. We tried that last year, my dad, during Elk Tag, and we had them spotted the day before the season, like near coast right where we're camping storm rolls in and the next morning they were three miles up gotcha and some other hunters were actually up there and then by the time they got done getting spooked around they were just in a place where you it would take in five days to pack out talk about the time and the hours and distance you guys spent packing elk up here i really i've have it on my because i did log it and i hate saying what wasn't right but it was i can't remember at this point it was what i have on this thing that i saw the other day

it's 80 hours of packing so that might have been 40 hour 40 hours a person or it could have been 80 hours total i can't remember now but you're going from this location you're going up 1200 feet yeah and then down 1500 yeah because you're almost back down to sea level yep we're on his bull we did to get from camp to his bull and back was 5 000 feet 5 000 vertical vertical feet so and we would start we started an hour before sunup hike up there get there um get there just about noon lunchtime, and be back just after dark. And you had to move 700 pounds. Yeah, about 600 pounds.

600 pounds. Yeah. And that's boned out. You know, I've been putting in for this tag for well different versions of it i've been putting in for like some version of these tags yeah different spots because there's many units on like raspberry island and here's a bunch of units a lot of units here some are easier to draw than others and i've been like putting in for him for over a decade and never drew it really and then rami drew it four years ago and vowed to never come do it again and then i said let's put in his partners

and he was like okay so we won't draw it anyway so it doesn't matter and then we drew it and then we drew it and so here you sit crap no you sit in the rain with fog in a tent i would do it with you because i know that it would it would be actually easy there's just certain people i would do this hunt with my brother was one of them you come with you'd be another you get the helicopter experience celebrities and helicopters yeah and you knew you were going to draw when you apply exactly because that's how it works in Alaska. But it's a big, like, just to be totally transparent, like, the guys we work with on our crew,

you know, we're out here filming, and the guys we work with on our crew, we always split meat up after our hunts, usually, like Eve and Steven. Which is great. And everybody packs meat. So it really is like a tremendous advantage. Oh.

Because we're going up the hill with six packers. When you have six packers. I mean, six people. Yeah. That is two additional days of two people. Yeah. That's huge. So if you think about, we shot two bulls, and we had two guys.

So if it was one trip with six guys, well, in each bull you had three trips, but it was actually more than that. Yeah, what was it? What we did on one of them was we did, like, point A to B to c to d to e to f and just had it in trees the whole way so we'd oh like the cash the whole thing bounce the whole thing like in a continuous line and then we got it to a for what purpose so you didn't have to go all the way back every day you're still walking the same amount of miles you are but it gets the cash oh i got no because you got you've got bears you just go from tree to tree so you're never you don't want to you can't just skin it out and just leave it at the kill site and oh i'll be back

here yeah you know and the other thing is we can check on it at a closer point yeah because my thought is if it's hanging in a tree at camp or hanging in a tree 400 yards away or a mile away it doesn't matter it's hanging in the tree at some point it needs to come back to camp but you can utilize your time a little bit better yeah if you get a bull down you start ferrying him from points because to go and because you have a mountain in the middle you know so if you get everything to the base of the mountain or to the top of the mountain, it's a lot easier than having to walk up that 1,000 feet, the main pass, and then drop back down and then drop back up.

So you get up there and do your work and just try to move the whole thing. Exactly. the whole thing exactly yeah you know when you draw the tag um the the the fish and game department will sends you kind of like a little note illustrating some of the challenges and with this one they seem to be they're particularly pointed about the challenges of the hunt and i noticed that when i drew a copper river um buffalo tag they had there was like a long letter it was like a couple page letter being like but now that you have this thing this tag here are some things you should pay attention to um and it had to do with you know ice flow and free and access issues and just really lays out for you in a way that's almost kind of pessimistic sounding here the note that your tag comes with is about one these things are huge

and people shoot them too far away and get in over their heads and two it says you know the carcass the kill site will be claimed by a bear yes usually within the first night yeah it was saying you have to get the meat away from the guts when i shot my bull we had to we had to actually go a different route to stalk him because there was multiple bears amongst the herd of elk big bears like big boars and there was a couple there was one south cubs on the other side so we're kind of dodging bears we watched one go into where we were actually planning on walk like this patch of alders we're planning on walking down through so then we rerouted around that patch of alders i shoot my bull we get up to it the bear decides to wake up out of the patch of

alders the wind's blowing toward him and he's just got his nose up as we're skinning and cleaning i mean he knew it was there and and so we had essentially with the two of us one guy on bear watch while the other guy's cutting it up because it was thick in there and we knew that the bear knew where we were and he was coming our way at some point they're fully habituated to gunshot being a meal here. I don't know. I don't know if there's really enough. I don't think there's enough of that, but they know. They just know.

They smell something. They smell dead elk. And I mean, maybe. They're definitely a were-elk. They probably kill elk calves. Yeah. And kill elk. Well, two interesting bear stories.

So one has to do with what we're talking about. One doesn't. I'll tell the one that doesn't first. We were doing a caribou hunt a couple weeks ago, and the pilot that flew us in and dropped us off in the bush, while we were hunting, he was telling a story where he's flying along in a Super Cub and sees a big chocolate-colored grizzly, like a big mature grizzly, dragging something.

And he gets curious what it is and circles around. It's a big grizzly dragging a sub-adult grizzly. And over the next hill is probably that bear's litter mate, another sub-adult grizzly running off, and the bear's still limp, like he just killed the thing. The next plane that came over, the guy that this guy works with flew over, and by that point, the bear was burying the grizzly, and a couple days later, they flew over, and he was sleeping on top of it. So he was full-on eating it.

The second story is, the guy we flew in with here does some flying for biologists with fish and game and they were out collecting collars like they had been working on a collaring project with brown bears yeah and they had a glitch where um i don't know if it's a glitch but they had you know the collars are timed so they're good for two years and the collar will fall off and they'll go out and pick up their collars and they're out the other day picking up collars and they go to where they had a a a grizzly or brown bear the same thing um picking up a collar and the collar is laying next to a elk carcass a big bull so when his collar fell off he was in the in the act of feeding on a big dead bull he'd

killed or found yeah probably killed yes that leads me to a question because he weighs twice or not i mean he weighs like a lot more than i mean they're big elk with big bears but it's like you know lions will kill deer and elk that weigh three, four, five times what they weigh. He's not going to care. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

Our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x 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, 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. No. I mean, I definitely think that they follow those herds because it's it's a food source it's right there and they'll eat other things along the way but if something

happens or especially they're rutting now i would imagine bulls get injured or wounded or tired from rutting really hard and they're bedded up and they aren't thinking as clearly as they might other times a year so this time of year right now seems to attract more bears and they're the elk are making a lot of noise yeah so i think that that's a an of audio cue to the bears saying oh food over here yeah they can smell them they can hear them and it just attracts them we were one time posted up on a glass and tit watching a group of moose and we went down to me my older brother went down and started putting the moves on a bull that was in this group of moose and our buddies stayed up on the tit we're just observing from high above and they saw a grizzly come in while we were stalking these moose a

grizzly came in and attacked calf really in the group we were stalking that's that would be i mean they're just in there mixing it up with big giant freaking animals man yeah and if he is out eating grass or eating berries why not do that in proximity to all these big mewing bellowing exactly protein piles just like why not you might have an opportunity to get something a little better than grass yeah it's like you could drink if you're single you could drink at home or drink in a bar yeah it's like at least if you're at the bar who knows something good might happen to you exactly is that you could be drinking anyways is there a different have they done studies on like ratio of plants versus like game protein on these brown bears versus other regions like these are much higher on animal because of they because they eat so much salmon

wow okay yeah and they can't distinguish between that or like deer or elk as far as a oh oh i'm sure if you go and do yeah i'm sure if you go and look at like the actual isotopes in them you would tell what they're eating yeah they can get a really detailed analysis on it those like by looking at like stabilized stuff we were down in salta argentina me my wife and we went to have you ever heard of those children that the incas um would sacrifice on mountaintops. They'd take them up 15,000, 16,000 feet and make these little rock holes

and just knock the kids in the head and leave them in there as sacrifices, and they would just basically freeze dry in the high elevations. Dang. Well, yeah, we went to see this one in Salta, Argentina, that's now in like a climate-controlled thing in a museum. And it was a boy. He's so well-preserved.

No, there's three children, and they made a deal with the indigenous peoples that they only display one at a time. And why am I even talking about this? Oh, I don't know what I'm talking about. Isotopes. So they're so well preserved they had feathers in their hair, and the feathers are still perfect, and they still have coca

leaves dried on their lips. I mean, this kid looks like he would stand up and walk away. But he was killed in probably like around 1491, right? Like, just pre-contact height of the Incan Empire. And it was three kids they buried all together. There was a 13-year-old girl, and she had been hit on the head.

They were all full of alcohol, fermented, like a fermented potato drink. They could have blackened them out. So they probably got them drunk, left them up there. The girl probably realized what was going on. Maybe they had to hit her in the head. One of the kids was later struck by lightning at some point, and it's kind of burned a little bit. But no, they're perfect.

They're perfect clothing. Everything about them is perfect. But they can, by looking at tissue samples, they can tell that these kids had, for most of their life, eaten nothing but potatoes. Virtually nothing but potatoes. But in the last months of their lives, had an extremely varied and rich diet.

As they were getting ready to be sacked. And also had hundreds of trinkets from around the Incan Empire. So they're like taking them around on this big tour of the empire and were probably being fed fish and llama meat and all this kind of stuff and giving all these gifts and partying it up

in order to then be taken up. the mountain and left on the mountain. And so they're able to tell not just like what they ate throughout their life but the sequencing of it. Yeah. So that does, I am curious then, why these bears, these brown bears on a fog neck are so much bigger than other bears that have the salmon protein and the black tail and the elk options. It has to be some, well, you got like a genetic factor.

Because what's interesting about these bears, they've been genetically isolated for 10,000 years. There's been, there's like, they feel that it's, the island's far enough off the mainland, there hasn't been any genetic exchange between these bears and other populations for 10 000 years so they're kind of off on their own trip yeah right and i think that you have phenomenal marine resources like very rich salmon resources and in the large game and and grass yeah like great grass and it's a dry area so they're not hunting as often yeah they're not as much pressure yeah it's a trophy area as well but you know the the hunter and the and the food plays a huge part and that's why it is yeah but they're not i mean they're not but the elk are introduced so that hasn't like changed i mean these bears have been big for a long time yeah the hunting writer uh and guide tony ross

he's got a he's got a book about grizzlies and brown bears and he talks about that big boar like an actual like food source an important food source for grizzlies is grizzlies the the older boars on these islands are full-on preying on cubs and it's like a food source for them so they're coming out of hibernation eating grass for a while and then devoting time and energy to just eating bears not to spread their genetics they're breeding but just for a food source that's the thing you hear all the time that it's it's a weird thing when it comes like behavior and people talking about like genetic and the reasoning what animals do so boars tend to like large boar bear black bears grizzlies whatever tend to feed more on bears than other bears do and because it's easy to do they tend to kill cubs and eat them

a thing that people say is that they're like there's a re there's a there's sort of a a sexual advantage or an adaptive advantage to the boar killing the cubs because the like when a female has a female will have her cubs in february or march in a den she'll come out of hibernation with hibernation with those cubs and will not be receptive to breeding she'll spend the entire summer and fall with her cubs den with them again emerge from the den with them and then will become receptive to breeding that june july yeah so she's always skipping she's always skipping a whole year like a bear doesn't drop it's like a deer that'll drop a fawn every year she'll drop cubs possibly every other year

so when a boar so if you look like a boar is the one going around doing the infanticide, the eating of one's own offspring or one's own species, they commit an infanticide, the thinking being that that sow will come into rut that year.

So if he's out in April and May dusting off cubs, sows that would not normally breed with him are now going to become receptive to breeding he might breed them and it's like so advantageous of a thing that seems like they will kill cubs that because of proximity to their home range are very likely their own cubs to rebreed that same sow yeah Yeah. So it's like, but it's like, you look at it and you'd be like, so that's why the bear does it. But I don't, you can't really, you don't really know like why the bear does it. Yeah.

Right? It could be that the bear does it because he's just big. He's not, he can confront a sow and not get killed by her because he's so much bigger than she is. And he can eat the cubs. It doesn't, he doesn't need to get into a giant fight trying to kill the sow and a result of that is that she becomes receptive and he breeds her so it would like reinforce that behavior but it might not be the bears thinking huh man it's a bummer that she's not gonna want to do it this summer if i

eat her cubs she'll become receptive and i'll be able to yeah pour the coals to her and have like new offspring so it's like when you say like why he does it it's a result is different than what the result of he does yeah the the geneticist steven gould talks about that where people like look at a tree and like barks brown what is the selective advantage of bark on a tree being brown and it might might be like, there is no advantage. It's like, what is advantageous is that bark is thick and protective. Maybe a result of it becoming thick and protective makes it brown, but the brown doesn't do any advantage for the tree.

It's like some random offshoot that doesn't really matter. So when you look at nature and you think that everything has a purpose, some things are the result of other issues. Like why do salmon jump so much when they're getting ready to spawn? Some people say it's because they're trying to knock their eggs loose, which they have a very hard time believing. Do you hear that? No, I've never heard that.

They're trying to loosen their egg sac. That doesn't make any sense. I don't know. Why do they jump? There might be no good reason. That would only be the reason for the females. You saw it come up with the reason for the males. Yeah, you see males and females jumping.

So when people are like, why do they jump? And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know that jumping is really doing them any good. It might be some other, a product of something that does make sense that makes them have the tendency to do that but it's not like they're getting something out of it so they can get out of the water and see where they're going yeah yeah any bears up there yeah any bears oh time to jump so yeah the bears are huge and that's a good point so like the elk we'll get back to elk but bears out here are draw this is another draw I put in for every other year.

Every other year, I put in for non-resident, non-guided Kodiak hunts. What that means is anybody that wants to hunt with a guide can go anytime they want. No, they have to draw as well i'm pretty sure they draw an outfitter sponsor tag which you're gonna get you need something yeah something like that what's hard to get is it's hard for a non-guided resident to draw and i can hunt here without a guide because my brother is a resident of alaska but that's a very difficult tag is non-guided non-resident but there are a lot of outfitter sponsor it's much easier to draw a tag with a sponsored outfitter yeah like their clients get preference the the resources managed the resource the brown bear resource is managed to support the guiding industry in this area

yeah i i'm not sure exactly how many tags they would get or whoever gets tags i haven't really looked at look at that here like what's the breakdown well you have a much you have a much much if you sign up with an outfitter you have a much higher chance of drawing. Than a hunter host. But I don't know if that's the case of having a much higher chance of drawing than a resident hunter. I believe that it is, man. I could be wrong. We will get a lot of people calling to correct us. Yeah, you're in the same pool.

What's that? You're in the same pool. You are? As far as I recollect. It's too bad we don't have the paperwork with us no i know it's in my tent um because i've put in for uh uh sheep tag in the chew gatch yeah but that's a whole different place and thing yeah but if it's uh yeah i don't i honestly don't know yeah i don't think that you're saying that there's a draw an outfitter draw the outfitter the brown bear outfitters

have a quota all their own oh yeah i'm not sure about that i don't know i would i'll i have no clue so i put in a ton of times well every, every other year, because I always do the spring hunt. So every other year, I put in for a non-guided, non-resident spring Kodiak hunt and never draw it. Yeah. Well, it's a tough tag to draw. Yeah. So, yeah, that helps have big-ass bears. Yeah. Then in an area where you're allowed to kill, in a road accessible area where you're allowed to kill,

where residents are allowed to kill two grizzlies a year, it tends to put a crimp on the big ones. Exactly. Tightens them up. Yeah. Now back to elk. What are your thoughts on the whole deal? On the elk here? Yeah. what are your thoughts on the whole deal on the elk here yeah you mean how do you

like what does it compare like in your mind to like hunting rocky mountain elk yeah i mean it's similar to hunting elk in an area where there's there's a big herd but that one herd you know moves around So there's a lot of similarities between Rocky Mountain elk and these elk. You know, I think the only difference is just the terrain that they're in might be a little more open. Well, at least where we're hunting, it might be a little more open than some other elk areas. But what I noticed both times is you don't really get those in montana you might have five elk here and a herd of 20 elk there and these different basins it's almost like they all group up right now yeah and they're in one group and there's a lot of no elk country that looks like there should be

elk and you don't see anything so there's a lot of miles in between where the elk are but once you find them you're in them thick. And then they might just be gone somewhere else. Yeah, the bulk of the normal, like, Rocky Mountain elk hunting that I've done has been in an area where, in the firearm season, like, during the early archery season, they're pretty well dispersed. Yeah. But by the time the late firearm season starts in late October, they group up into these giant groups.

And it's like hunting them kind of, well, people talk about where is the herd. Yeah. Because you're chasing after these balls of three four hundred elk traveling together and it means that there's one place that has elk and a lot of places that don't exactly which i have kind of grown to hate it's terrible it really is because it's nice to get to go up on a ridge and glass this valley and go okay and think there's a possibility there'll be an elk here but if you'll either see them immediately there's either a hundred of them or there's none of them and that kind of sucks yeah it makes it tough because you have to travel a lot it makes it

easy to find them when you're in the area where they're at obviously but it's all that downtime it's all that downtime in between you're not going to miss a ball elk that big no i mean especially gonna be standing up yeah they'll be standing they'll be making noise they'll be doing something so you can find them if you're in that close enough proximity where you have a line of sight to them yeah but that oh i might bump one on the way there and you just you just don't what's preventing us right now from even hunting is rain and fog yeah which you which is like that's a factor everywhere but fog is like a peculiar thing of like the coastal environments and there's

nothing that shuts you down as hard as fog shuts you down yeah you need to be able to see rain is one thing if it's high cloud and it's just wet you can still figure out where they're at but when you're talking about going five miles and they might be at the end of this and you need to i mean and you're trying to run into one herd it just is not advantageous to do it when you can only see 20 feet we i was on a goat hunt here in alaska one time hunting mountain goats and we hiked into an area that we knew to have some and sat in the fog for three days just going insane we actually found an old mining camp and so we found a torch a propane tank backpack that stuff back to our camp and we're like spending time experimenting with heating rocks with a with a weed burning torch and then bringing the rocks

into our tent to see how warm we could make it i mean just like honestly killing time and then one day the fog blows out and realize that the whole time i've been sitting there it's just there are just goats everywhere above us like they would have been just they were there the whole time yeah no way to see them yeah you what if you had a week of fog in your hunting you could do in two hours of clear no fog what would take a week of figuring in the fog yeah or more like we might yeah if we wake up tomorrow and it's clear it's just gonna be like easy just you gotta go yeah you just gotta go like now's your chance it's a different it's a different game what were you saying the success rate of that of the harvest of the roosevelt's extremely low right i yeah i mean last time i think it's a combination of factors i think that

people get the tag and they don't hunt real hard or they don't want to or can't physically get to the animals and get them back to king and just don't show up and don't show up a lot of people have very low not just low success but they have low participation because it's to get out here because you think like oh i'll do like i'll put in and then the more you find out about it, distance, time, money, whatever, people just like wind up like, oh, never mind. Yeah. Well, the other thing is if I was someone that says, you know,

I'd really like to shoot a Roosevelt elk, I would suggest them not come here to do it. Yeah. I mean, there's a million places that you could go and it'd be a hell of a lot easier to get to a lot easier hunt and probably more animals but it's just the fact of this is something different it's in a cool place and not that many people have done it and you just so i'm just drawn to give it a try the first time i ever put in for this i had no clue about it it was more of an accident than anything but i put in for

everything else so put in for elk here my brother called and says like hey we drew elk tags i was like what yeah i forgot about that shit i better try to figure out where these things even are yeah i think that there's some things there's some things. There's something to a handful of people really seductive about the idea of coming to this part of the world and coming to these crazy islands with these crazy giant bears and hunting these giant damn elk on them. Yeah, because their antlers are actually pretty small yeah but their bodies are huge yeah they don't have big old racks no i mean the last one i got was a giant like for this for alaska for the area i mean a pretty large six by six which i think is you know it was way above average um but you know i was pretty lucky to get a good bull like that.

And then we saw another one. My brother could have got one, but we ended up calling in. When we were trying to call the big bull, a small bull came in, and he just said it was so cool to have that bull in his lap. It was 5x5. He just shot it. I was like, all right, awesome. Gave up on the big one.

Yeah, he was like, it was more about the experience. We could have hunted and snuck in on the big one yeah he just he was like it was more about the experience we could have hunted and snuck in on the big one but to have that bull just come right in and be calling and just that cool i mean it just looked cool and him the bull screaming and my brother shot it pretty close it was just a cool experience so you know it was just about the experience not necessarily the rack or anything um but yeah i mean it's you can go other places and hunt the same species a lot easier or bigger ones or whatever but it's just something to try and yeah do different yeah i mean i don't there's a lot of people that yeah there's not a whole lot of people that say, oh, yeah, I shot an elk on a Fognac Island. No, you know, think about, like, the participation success thing.

Earlier I was talking about, like, John, kind of a similar, like, a similar sort of hunt, which was the Copper River, you know, bison hunt in Alaska. I remember that, like, that year, I remember they gave out 24 tags for that hunt. And that's an eight-month long season. Wow. You can start hunting, I think, sometime in September and hunt through March. Is that eight months? No. It's a big long season.

Six-month long season, whatever it is. It's a long season. I'm going to add it up right now in my head. It is. Yeah. Six-month long season. I'm going to add it up right now in my head. It is. Yeah. So, you know, six months long season. Or so. Yeah.

Because I can't remember the exact dates, but, like, it's at least half the year long. Out of the 24 tags, only four people got one of the animals. I think the vast majority of the holders never did it. Didn't go or they might have gone and just said uh that's too hard that's too far that's too hard well that hunt you either got like you're either in or you're not in it's kind of like this one there's no way to come and do a light version well you can you could go and see them at the top of that ridge and go you're here but you go i don't know if i want to carry one back up this mountain yeah i mean that's a sensible way to

approach it it happens yeah so i would picture that yeah people probably come and they're like if we can get land somewhere and maybe have some come close we'll maybe do it if not we'll hunt deer and fish salmon yeah that happens a lot because to be honest the killing like to kill an elk here didn't seem to me that difficult it was the the more of the hunt some hunts are you struggle all the way up to the point where you get one this hunt was more the opposite where it was medium tough to actually get one not it i mean i shot mine the first morning of the first day and but 90 of the hunt was after you pulled the trigger it was just the packing and the grinding and getting the dang thing out yeah so yeah i mean there's those hunts where you just struggle all the way up until the kill and then everything afterwards is just that quick yeah pull the truck

up throw them in drive into the process yeah and then there's those hunts where you can go out and get something fairly fast but you're spending an entire week or more getting it back home yeah we made an initial uh kind of a like a a like a somewhat quixotic walk up the hill today knowing that we would just walk up into the fog because you can tell from here it's very foggy so we walked up there and wow, it's really foggy. And then walked back down. And the whole time I was doing that, all I'm thinking about, well, the whole time we've been here, except for when we were thinking about how great the salmon fishing was, all I'm thinking about is the packout. Yeah.

It's just like weighing on my mind. And maybe because I've... The suckiness, the pending suck. The pending suck. The pending suck is all I think about. And I'm worried about like maybe I oversold the suck. But for that, for the two of us where we shot our bulls, it was suck. Like me and Jason both are professional elk packers.

We carry elk for a living. Like, we guide elk. We carry two elk a week most weeks. For some years, ten weeks out of the year. It's like we know what carrying elk is. You know, we pack out a ton of animals. Yet this was just a miserable pack out. And, I mean,

and obviously I got, I drank some bad water and got really, really sick. Yeah, Remy drank some El Gualo water. That happened before the packout? That was midway through because I drank it the first day, but it took a while for whatever I drank to just, yeah,

to incubate. Yeah. So we're, we're landing on a lake and we're on the Lee. We're kind of on the, no, we're on the, not the Lee. We're on of on the, no, we're on the, not the lee.

We're on the wind-driven side of the lake. And the lake's full of dead salmon and beaver-chewed sticks. So you know there's beaver fever in these near waters. And we found a little trib coming in, flowing out from under a hill. And my first thought was, that trip's great, and drank it. And then Remy's talking about having gotten sick up here before. So now I'm kind of like half waiting around to get sick. Yeah, but that's, I, no.

That one will be fine. Yeah, well, I got me a little emergency pack of Cipro. So when things go down from water, I'm going to be. You'll be fine. I'll be hurting. No, I'll give give you some i know you're not supposed you're always supposed to take full doses but i'll share my sip roll perfect now i think uh that water filtration is one thing that i should probably get better i hardly ever take water filtration well once we got on like i used to take more shortcuts and be lazier but then then we got on the SteriPens.

And that's what I need. Ultraviolet, ultraviolet, little ultraviolet wands. And I've had the same one now. I think I've had the same SteriPen for five years. I think I'll start using that. I mean, part of it. Well, I typically just sterilize everything. Part of it, I mean, I'm real careful about where I get my water. And I know places.

Except for that one time when it was dirty. I was just real thirsty. And my brother looks at me, like, shakes his head. Nah. And I tasted it and thought. This is getting good. It was that real soft water that feels like that horrible taste and that, like, silky texture in your mouth. And I said, this is perfect for bacteria.

Yeah, my bro got sick off Elkoala water. What was that, Yanni? I was going to say, you weren't really wanting to go the easiest, lightest way. You could always just drop iodine. Yeah. Just purification tablets. Well, the problem is you've got to wait 15 minutes. Yeah.

That's why I got sick in arizona once is because i didn't feel like doing that and i was so because we kind of got screwed up a little bit and didn't have any water out in the desert and hit some water and i was like ah everybody said well i'm gonna put some tablets of mine and wait and i was like i'm thirsty this looks all right and i got sick as a mofo man. That was the beginning of a long trip for you. That iodine messes with you for more than three days.

I don't like using iodine for more than three days. It's not recommended for repeated use. I carry iodine tablets in my kit, but no one's in my emergency kit, but it's not recommended to just use that as a strategy. i'm spending day after if you're spending like weeks out in the woods every year you can't be drinking all that iodine yeah kills the good bacteria in your system you never feel

refreshed you always it's that weird hmm i don't know the water just isn't the same. Isn't the same. Now, Ridge, you haven't said anything. I'm taking it in, man. I'm riding the storm out. Oh, Chris Gill, Ridge Pounder. Riding the storm. You have nothing that's on your mind? I did have a thing about Remy's point about over-exaggerating the suck in that I don't think that you are over-exaggerating the suck.

Based on, like, the minor hike that we did today with like the waist tall grass like grabbing at your feet and doing that with like a super heavy pack of meat i feel like that's uh i feel like that's gonna be a pretty tough pretty tough go oh the little our little foray today didn't make me be like, oh, this will be fun. What was I thinking? No, I'm dreading it. It's steep in the grass. It's steep.

Yeah. You took a digger. Remy, Remy, Remy. I was doing everything in my power to go backwards. I fell face first down the mountain. Did a full somersault. Well, where I was looking for you to go backwards. I fell face first down the mountain. Did a full somersault. Well, where I was looking for you to pop up, you were downhill like 20 feet from where I disappeared.

You took a roll in the grass today? Yeah, today. My foot got hung up, and I just went straight forward, face forward. It doesn't look like Shintang from a distance, but it's got some Shintang qualities. Like New Zealand Shintang. What does Shintang from a distance, but it's got some Shintang qualities. Like New Zealand Shintang. What does Shintang mean? I thought we were introduced to Shintang in British Columbia.

I thought that's where it grew. Oh, yeah. No, you're right. You're right. Tangles your shin. What's the stuff in New Zealand they talk about? The really bad to walk through stuff? Oh, it's like...

Gore? Come back here. What is it? Gorse? Yeah. Yeah, that's the real thick. That's the sticker stuff. Yeah, Shintang is like carpet juniper.

Yeah, I feel like it's just like stunted growth furs. Yeah, because spruce will do it too. Wind-battered high elevation where they grow not high but out. Yeah. It's very difficult to wait to call that monkey scrub because you just like you look like a monkey crawling through it now here's the thing i want to bring up and get you guys opinion on it we kind of touched on this and the reason that i want to bring this up is because it relates to a previous episode where my brother matt was on and we were

talking about stealing people's spots stealing people's hunting spots and we were having a debate um if you go it started out like this if you go hunt with a guide so you're going a guided trip is it ethical for you to just go back the next year and hunt that spot well you're your guide so i know what you're gonna say give me your take on it here's my take on it i am a stickler when it comes to hunting spots i will never hunt a spot that someone else takes me into and i expect the same from other people okay i think that it's now here's the other thing that is if you communicate with the person and say hey i'd like to go hunt this spot and they're like yeah that's cool then you can do it and the same as a guide if there's somebody that hunts with me

and like oh you know i'd really like to hunt this next year then i would be like okay let me give you some really good spots to go into that don't because the places i hunt are just in proximity to what makes it convenient there's a million places that i would love to hunt but i'm not going to go drive 30 45 minutes but if you're just coming from wherever well you might as well go hunt that spot because i'm not going to be there yeah you know so let me help you out here's some places to go we won't be we won't be interfering with each other yeah because this last week there's well we were talking about this is in montana it seems like there was an influx of non-resident hunters

this year and i think partially due to the fact that there was a world record bull killed on public land in montana so everybody sees that and they go oh oh, I'm going to hunt Montana this year. So they pick a spot in Montana and maybe places where, I don't know, I think the people that did this were from Minnesota or Michigan or Minnesota. But it's like in Montana, especially elk season, during the rut, you're doing a lot of calling. You generally want to space yourself out between other hunters yeah you know it's not advantageous to you or the other it's not like ice fishing it's not like the whole lake if there's one dude you go drill a hole next to that

so they these two people these two individuals had that mentality they parked behind my truck and just like walk into this small area. Are you guys hearing any bugling? We are. Well, no shit. You're hearing me bugling right up on the ridge, and you're walking toward it. It makes no sense. It's a different mentality, but maybe where they're from, that's the way that they do it.

They see a truck. That must be a good spot. That must be where to go. Go hang our stand there. It's just completely different. That applies to fishing. I accept that with fishing. spot that must be where to go hang our stand there it's just completely different i accept that with fishing like if i'm out on a lake right and i got some holes drilled and a guy shows up i

think he'd be like i'm gathering that that's where the fish are and he comes over and i would think nothing negative about that person right duck hunting it really bothers me well yeah and it bothers me even way more big game hunting now now rifle season when there's people everywhere yeah vehicles get stacked up at trailheads this that and the other thing that's completely acceptable but when you're bow hunting and you're calling and you're trying the success is based on you working an animal and tricking its behaviors a certain way and they're calling and you're calling and you're calling each other in and the elk i mean all that ends up at the end is two hunters staring each other in the face yeah i mean it just doesn't make any sense yeah it just

doesn't make any sense so but but but you kind of veered off on me there but i'm saying that's spots yeah spots so he so we had this conversation where like if you were on a guided trip is it okay to go to that spot and my brother was saying i can't remember how vote how like fervent he was in his belief but he's saying like it's different in that situation because you were paying you were paying someone so it makes it a different relationship but you're paying for that trip you're not paying for like the spot yeah if you said the guide i'm gonna buy your spot the guide would say well then you're not coming with me because i don't view this as being me selling you the spot or if you're like here's a blank check

give me all your hunting spots write down whatever number you think's worth on it and then you know if you buy like his knowledge then it's one thing but i don't think it's i don't think it's ethical so we were kicking it around this isn't even what i'm meaning to bring up i'm just as a prelude he was pointing out that it is a different relationship than a friend thing and he was saying he agreed with everyone in the conversation that the primary crime a capital crime i'm talking out behind the woodshot 22 round behind your ear crime is to have a friend take you hunting and then to go in and hunt his spot. Oh, yeah. Without his knowledge.

Without saying permission. Oh, that's a bad deal. Especially if that guy were to say, don't hunt this spot. Yeah. Now, the only crime worse than that crime is to go in there with other people. Yeah. And then introduce those other people to the spot to the point where we're young my dad was like it just he's like it doesn't

work you cannot do it you never ever take anyone friend or not ever no one into a spot was his perspective on it yeah that's that's i agree so we're having this whole conversation and matt after discussing this just had it happen to him he took someone he works with into one of his favorite spots that person brings along her boyfriend then apparently it just happened where that couple takes another group of people and they go in and hunt the exact spot and he just found out about it yeah that's so when i'm talking to someone about hunting or in areas that I hunt, I will never ask them intentionally. I will never say, oh, where'd you, or, because I, I do not want to know anywhere someone is hunting. Because I will find that spot on my own.

I don't want it in my head. Because I will find that spot on my own and I do not want someone to, so so when I go to a new area or whatever, I generally just ask questions. But I like to find my spot myself because I know that if I find a spot that's good, I want to be able to go back there as many times as I want. I would rather find it on my own than have someone tell me and me not be able to do what I want because I probably would have found it either way. Yeah. what i want because i probably would have found it either way yeah so that a version of that happened to me where i got accused because my my again my older brother he goes hunting and turns out there's a guy i work with standing at the trailhead

of a spot that he had been really wanting to check out and he right away comes to me he's like what's up with that and i'm like i swear i swear i did not say anything and it turned out it was pure coincidence in the investigation the ensuing investigation it turns out that that person was operating on a whole other tip that had its own lineage. And it was pure coincidence. But, dude, I was very nervous when confronted. Sounds like maybe I screwed up and said something. But this situation he's in now, Yanni knows the story better. Am I doing right with the story? Yeah, you nailed it.

Oh, it just gives me, it just makes me feel sick it could be that water i drank but there hasn't been a long enough incubation period it just makes me feel sick stealing people's spots yeah and i think that that right there is the barrier to entry to hunting because nobody wants to share their spots because people are apt to just jack because they'll just steal it they will and of course other people it's like of course it's not your spot people will find it on their own but it's just like it's just a thing that i had a friend a few years ago lined me out on some spots you know and i had him in my gps and they were in my gps for a while and i eventually went through

and i was like you know what it's really not right and i went through and deleted all those waypoints because they had names that were like um like richard's bowl yeah nicknames yeah like a waypoint that says richard's bowl and i would look and see that in my GPS. Like, if I lose my GPS, and some guy's like, there was a shot of bull right there. And I deleted it for fear of ever being the source of a leak. Yeah. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle

or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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Welcome to the OnX x club y'all i have a i have this map book this nevada map book that i used to you know i used to use a while ago and i would mark my spots but then i would mark fake spots i had a shitload of deer because i there was so many times that i'd have to give the map to someone you're like oh yeah you know and they need that map but there was a lot of hidden so that thing coded yeah i mean let's just say if Hillary Clinton's emails were encrypted like that map, no problem. There would be no problem. That thing was locked tight. There's markings all over.

But now I looked at it, and I was like, I have no clue what any of this says. You're like, I don't remember seeing shitloads of deer up there, but it must be true. Why would I have written it in this here map book? Yeah, Big Bull Basin. ever seen shit loads of deer up there but it must be true why would i've written in this here map book yeah big bull basin i'm always a little incredulous i'm looking at a map it'd be like deer mountain i'm always a little bit like it can't be that way anymore no i feel like at a time maybe it was aptly named but generations of dudes looking at deer mountain that's probably made it not so and sometimes it's that iceland greenland thing they just named it that and then no buck hills the spot that really really strikes my interest another waypoint i had that i deleted from the same guy that lined me out in some other spots. His waypoint was called the laundry chute. His

naming was because elk come pouring through there as though it were in a laundry chute. So I had it in my GPS and I'm like, hey, you know, someday maybe, but then I'm like, because no one's going to look at that and know what that means, but I got rid of that one too.

The laundry chute. Lest someone steal my GPS to look at that and know what that means, but I got rid of that one too. The laundry chute. Yeah. Lest someone steal my GPS and look at that name and be like, hmm, provocative title. Yeah. Let's go there. To the chute. Jan, you got anything?

Do you need to wedge in there? Weighing on that topic there? No. I feel bad for your brother. He asked me first if he was being a dick for calling these folks out on going to a spot with other people. I said, hell no. He did an ethics check on me about you. Oh. Where you went in to meet up with him somewhere.

Was this this year or last year? You didn't know he called me about this? No. Yanni's going in to meet my brother. The minute Yanni gets there, my brother killed a bull already. Same day.

You get there and he's like, I just killed a bull. You went and helped him pack up. Mm-hmm. And he loads his elk onto his llamas and hikes it out. Yeah. But we had to cut it up and get it hung in a tree. Yeah, that would take us until 3 o'clock in the morning. It was a long night.

3 in the morning. Yeah. Because he lost the elk in there to a grizzly once, or lost a bunch of elk. Lost meat to a grizzly. That's the thing I should add. This is a grizzly hellhole. Lots of grizzly bears. He refers to it so lovely as the grizzly pit.

The grizzly pit. Lots of bears, and they haven't been hunted since 1974, and do not give a shit about people they just don't care you know no fear so the next day he hikes out hikes out to bring his elk up to a cooler where he can get it in a walk-in and he gets in and gets an updated weather forecast and it's a bunch of snow coming so he calls me and i got him on speakerphone with my wife and he calls me he's like hey man i need to like do an ethics check with you because i don't want to go back up in there just to get dumped down with snow but yanni's up there what how would he sort of take or how would he view it if i just didn't show up for a few days until the snow melts and everything and it gets all nice? And I said, you cannot do this to me.

You can't do this to me. And he's like, all right, I'll go buy some warm clothes. Because he hadn't even packed his warm clothes with him. Yeah, I wouldn't have been pissed. I would have been understanding. It just wouldn't have been fun on my end. Yeah. Mostly just because you'd be wondering.

You know, you start wondering. What happened to him? Yeah. You'd wind up hiking out to go figure out what the hell happened to him. So, yeah, I told him. I presented it like he'd be almost kind of doing it to me a little bit. So you owe me. I appreciate it. It's nice to have company in the

grizzly pit yeah yeah we didn't see any um but we saw a few of their tracks after that big snow golly i mean some of these tracks we did it we put i put both of my boot tracks inside of one pad i put both my boots inside of it you could see the outline of the grizzly bear track in the snow well that's a big bear track because you know what i noticed too is how in the distance sometimes when you look at a grizzly bear track you're like oh is that a human walking at first you know because it's just like they're big tracks right yeah but then when you really look back at your own track and you look at that thing, the only way you can confuse the two

would be if a human was walking in snowshoes because it makes you have that wider gait, right? Because when we walk, we almost put like, you know, one foot in front of the other. That's a saying even. When he's, that's right, when he's walking or she, I mean, there's, you know,

eight to 12 inches between, you know inches width-wise between the two tracks. Yeah. Duncan Gilchrist, I remember reading this long ago. Like, I got to back up. There's ways to measure a bear. There's ways people discuss bears. There's three ways people discuss the size of bears. In the East, they talk about how many pounds the bear was.

The reason they do that is because they have bears that you can get at, right? You can, like... And you can put them on a scale. Shoot them, get them into a truck, and then go weigh the bear. So they'll be like, this bear weighed X pounds. No one, like, in Alaska will, like... Generally, they're never going to tell you what a bear weighed. It's extrapolated from other things.

So the second way that people discuss bears is it's squared hide. So you skin a bear bear lay the skin out and then you need to not stretch it but like kind of pull it tight and let it lay there on its own accord not like pegged out and you adjust it until you have the tip of nose to tip of tail measurement the same as the claw tip to claw tip front leg measurement so he's splayed out arms out side like a cross and in order not tweak it where you like really get the claws far apart which shortens up the you know you're pulling high and shortening up the length it's called squared so you get them to where tip of tail tip of nose is let's say you're looking at a black bear and it's six foot two then you measure tip of front claw tip of front

claw and that's six foot two you'd say it's a six two bear squared guys that just pull them to grab the nose and grab the tail and pull and then measure that's like just a bullshit measurement the third and final way you measure bear the official way is you dry the skull for i don't know you clean the skull dry it for six months measure the length measure the width add those two numbers together right that's it that's it skull size that's like the main official way to measure. But it doesn't really reflect the condition of the bear. Because theoretically, you could have some freak bear that had a giant skull and a dinky body. Oh, yeah.

In fact, Prince of Wales bears tend to have a much bigger skull to body size ratio than other bears. So they get big skulls without being giant squared hides. Same with bears in Vancouver. And I think a lot of it too is the amount of time the bears spend out as well. I don't know why but California has bigger skulled bears and they don't hibernate as long as say montana bears yeah and coastal bears don't so i don't know why that would affect their but it affects their overall size there's yeah it seems to be a correlation there's interesting correlations

with bears i'm gonna get back to measuring bears um because what remind me to get back to tracks and duncan gilchrist and stuff but another interesting correlation of bears is if you take a map that shows rainfall annual precipitation and lay over that a map that shows high prevalence of color phase bears color phase bears occur in arid areas and i could be wrong but i think it's like if a place gets 20 inches of rainfall the bears are jet black less than 20 you get higher prep the the drier it is the higher prevalence of blondes browns reds the more rain the more likelihood with black bears that they're going to be jet black. That makes sense.

And you start lining it up with places you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You go down New Mexico, southern Colorado, dry places. It's like they get geeked out to find a black bear. Yeah. And then you go other places like California. Or, no, black ones are rare there, but if you go the coastal areas, to find a color phase one there, it might be near impossible.

I've looked at many, many, many bears in coastal Alaska, many, many. They're just black. It's like bears are black you know do you think that uh if the now what i'd be curious is if the area receives more rainfall do you think that they become more black because where i guide it'd be such a slow process where i guide for bears was it seemed like all we ever saw was color-faced bears now we can't find any any color phase bears really or not as many i think it'd be too slow i think to like track the phenol the phenological response to increase precipitation would take thousands of years or do you think it's something of like what they have to eat based on. My feeling is that it has to do with camouflage

and the lushness of the vegetation. That would make sense. The bears, this is the theory, that bears that are living in lush vegetation where there's like a dark understory, right, they can get away with that jet black iridescence down in the shadows and bears that are living their lives black bears that are living their lives

out in the open in sun baked areas it's a couple things I think it's better camouflage and they're not sucking up as much heat they're not getting as hot because to have that if you're a bear in Arizona

and you need to be out like eating prickly pear, you know, and you're out there and it's 95 degrees and you're jet iridescent black, it's got to be a much more miserable experience than it is when you're a blonde-faced bear as far as heat. The same way like in super hot areas they run red Angus and not black Angus cattle, and they run black Angus cattle in cold places. Back to Dunk. So the three ways to measure things.

Duncan Gilchrist says that if you want to know what a bear is going to square, you measure the width of his front pad and add one. And he says that'll tell you what the barrel square. Yeah, I've done that, and it seems to be fairly consistent. Yeah, I've done it right. Or I go by it. No, well, I've gone and measured after shooting the bear. Like, it's a five-and-a-half-foot bear.

And be like, yep, and I'll just measure the pad. It's a four-and-a-half-inch pad. Just measuring it on the multi-tool, just casually, not like getting all scientific about it. But generally, I've found that it's generally kind of true. So if you find a six, if you find a black bear pad that's six inches, you're looking at a nice, big. And you've got to do the front.

Front pad. Which would be the rounder one, not the elongated one. Correct. Not the elongated one. The front, yeah, the front wide one. This way. So if you're finding a track like that, I mean, the point being, I haven't laid a tape measure to the width of your boots,

but if you're looking at a track that's full on that big, you're looking at like a legit. Well, yeah, I'm doing it right now, and outside to outside is probably 9 inches, maybe even a little bit bigger. But see, that's where I feel that's kind of the reason I was bringing it up. There's no way those are 10 foot. there's no way there's a 10 foot grizzly down there remember that was in the snow too yeah like deep snow gotcha yeah because i'd say eight inches you know so that changes that it's not like a track that you found in the

mud you know no or the dirt yeah because if i find a track in the mud that's five inches i don't add an inch no oh in the mud where it's inches. I don't add an inch. No? Oh, in the mud where it's splayed out. Yeah. Yeah, I got you. And when I was checking it, when I've checked it, I was checking it, like I said, measuring the actual pad. So you need like a nice, good track. Not that he's all splayed out in some sandy beach where it, you know, squishes out to the sides.

Dirt, you got any final, anything comes to your mind? Yeah. um dirt you got any uh final anything comes to your mind yeah we were talking about the the inevitable suck upon us hopefully and it it conjured up a quote i always hold in my mind oh man that came from a buddy yeah and uh this rusty willis we were talking about he built a cabin or he's building the cabin uh kind of in a hard to reach place and i asked him about you know why why put all this effort towards something kind of like what you were saying you can get a roosevelt elk in many places but uh he's like you know people are always wondering you know is the effort versus is the effort worth the reward? Like what you're putting into something, the struggle, does the payout, you know, sufficient? And he said, my old man, he's building the cabin with his old man.

He said, our mentality is the effort is the reward. And I think in a case like this. I like that. You know, that is like you're saying when you guys got done with that pack out that effort was more satisfying than the actual you know lining up and shooting this this nice elk so that's 100 true because the story i tell is about the pack out the last thing i talk about is how big the elk was yeah and the most hunts, oh, I got a giant big old 6x6, big old heavy bases.

Scored me 294, you know. No. You're like, oh, yeah, the pack out all got me in 50 days. Yeah, you bring your story. Not like one time we were hunting. It was like one time we were packing elk. Yeah, one time we were packing elk. Yeah, it's not even the hunt part.

It was just the pack part. That was the whole kit and caboodle. Yeah, it's not even the hunt part. It was just the pack part. That was the whole kit and caboodle. Yeah, what you'll remember forever. Yep. So I'm looking forward to the effort on this trip. Kind of, not really. But I'm kind of looking forward to, well, before Steve, when you asked if I wanted to put in, I said,

yeah, I'll put in if you get Packers. It was like the condition because I was like, I've done this. I did it with two guys. I don't need to do it with two guys again. I mean, I think if it comes easy this time, great. But, you know, I got my bow, so I figured that'll be the challenge in itself. Yeah, it'll be a little bit easier with six of us well quite a bit easier yeah three times easier right well i don't know it's like an in the moment kind of a thing

you know we could be all out there a couple days from now and uh feeling in our own heads that the suck is just as bad yeah that's true yeah definitely it's a good point yeah i don't think it it's hard to measure someone else's suck it won't lessen the suck and yeah and you can't look at a guy and quantify his suck level it only lessens the suck for me because i'm the only one with the memory of the previous suck but it can still suck so i would be going oh this sucks but this man, it really sucked before. This is great. And you guys would be like, this sucks.

Yeah. But the meat. Oh, the meat. That's one thing I will bring up. This is the best game meat. Those elk are the, it's the best game meat I've ever had in my life. You're saying it's very good elk. It is like the Wagyu beef of elk.

It is just the tenderloin, the inner tenderloin. That's all you packed. Yeah, that's all I packed. It sucked, man. It is softball size. It's the size of a beef filet mignon. I mean, you could cut fatty filet mignons out of that tenderloin. Because the way that they're just compact, they're built like cattle.

Just short and squat and stout. And just the muscle, every muscle group is just extra large. Nice. Yeah. That's where all the weight comes from find one now yeah now i am that meat is almost i know i'll say it about but well black tail meat is really good as well and it almost has that same quality as the black tail meat where it's almost like it's a marbled fat it's almost like that when you cut

into that steak you can see the the meat broken down into those yeah lines i don't know how to explain it yeah you know what i'm talking about where it's yeah it's like that tender fat good piece of meat but it's funny you mentioned black tails i always think of the really, really good meats, doll sheep, black tail, elk, of course, and then select mule deer. Select mule deer can be. Early season mule deer is my. Can just be like, when you, and I don't care if it's a big buck or not, when you start skinning that deer and he's got like an inch and a half of talon on his rump,

it's this good deer man you know i've had some rangy mule deer too but i mean select mule deer are extremely good so now i don't know i will pick your brain on this because some people say like the black tails at least the ones around here like most deer have that tallow type fat it's that real waxy fat but these blacktails we used to melt it down and put wax our boots with it yeah now these back blacktails have a almost a less tallow and more of like a regular fat like a bear fat okay like their fat is like bear fat not like deer i got you somehow diet related yeah i don't i mean but it and it makes the meat it it almost like we would we'll me and my dad on the last time we had we shot two bucks cut off the bacon and fried that

bacon like deer bacon on the rocks all right and it's good like the fat yeah good to eat it but it's like i don't even know how you describe it squishy fat. Yeah, it doesn't wax up in your mouth real bad. Yeah, it doesn't wax up. It's not waxy on the deer. But people are saying that, or I've heard, you know, the old-timer thing around here, is that it's a different kind of fat because they need to absorb it faster. Oh, yeah, I don't know. I'm open to the idea.

I mean, different animals have different kinds of fat and process it different ways. Like a buffalo in the summer has got full-on orange fat. It looks like a carrot. Yeah. That's how when they're eating certain green feed. So I'm open to the idea. There's something about what they're eating that gives their fat a different quality. Yeah.

Sure. They don't have a bad winter here, either these critters which must help them in there i think they do hmm yeah they generally do have they can have tough winters you think i'm just judging from the weather that these like the i was just talking to the pilot about the winter and i mean they're well yeah no doesn't hang around the reason that the fluctuation and uh is so different than like say, Prince of Wales, is because they have the hard winters. It kills a lot of animals that die in the winter here.

A thing that I can see about that is that in Prince William Sound and other areas of southeast Alaska, the high country fills up with snow snow but they have such good shelter down in the big old growth forest and there's a lot you know there's a lot of like protection from weather down there yeah they go down to the shorelines in the old growth and can do pretty well yeah i can see here it's just there's so much more exposure here from not having that those giant i guess maybe just the exposure. Yeah. Because I was just accounting for the snow.

Because they were like, yeah, the snow doesn't really hang around at sea level especially. Yeah, I can see it being maybe a little bit nastier. Yeah, it gets cold. And a lot of that stuff, like southern part of Kodiak, is that more open, more like that. A lot of it's like this, where it's got, but it doesn't have those giant swaths of old growth. I mean, there are some. I mean, you can see them around

when you're flying over. We saw plenty of old growth. We've yet to see it because it's been fogged in, but if you go over the ridge and down in the water, do you ever hit, like, thicker forest at the water's edge? Or does it stay open like this the whole way? It stays scrubby.

It stays scrubby. It's really fluent that way. It stays scrubby. But I mean, just on this side, it's all forest. So the north, I guess it'd be the north part. It's heavily timber. Yanni, did you do your concluder? No, dirt did.

The effort is the reward. I like that. Oh, yeah. That was a good concluder. No, I didn't really have a concluder no dirt did the effort is the reward i like that oh yeah that was a good conclusion no i didn't really have a concluder yeah no i'll just continue to talk and ask questions oh is there more things you need to know by all means i'm feeling good i'm ready for a house yeah and then uh we still have like to do we still need to do our hunt there's two things we didn't get to talk about i wanted to do like a status update on public lands which we're gonna have to talk about next time we talk and i want to talk about um why remy uh is packing around his bow and arrow this time and what happened for him so we're gonna return to those thoughts yeah well we might have more time packing his shooting iron we might have more time sitting in this teepee.

Possibly. So we can talk about that. Ridge? I'm blank, man. You got nothing. Remy, anything you want to add? No. I mean, I hear the rain stopped. I would love to just take this headset off and go glass off a buck right now.

Yeah, I didn't even notice. The rain did stop. The sound quality went back to normal. It's good sound quality right now. Here's my concluder. This is a cliffhanger episode. This is like the episode we did one time when Yanni couldn't get a turkey.

And I, we did an episode and everybody had all tagged out on Turks and then I had to get up the next day and go out and get Yanni squared away on a turkey. But we left it hanging where no one really knew if he was going to be able to pull it through. So this is one of those situations where you're going to have to come back to find out, did those fellers really get to experience the suck, or did they have to go home with no suck? So stay tuned and find out.

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