The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 086: The Meat Tree, Part 1

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

Afognak Island, AK- Steven Rinella talks with Remi Warren, Dirt Myth, Ridge Pounder, Pat O'Connel, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: The sprawling distribution of Ursus arctos; binomial nomenclature, the Linnaean classification system, and the finer details of brown bear taxonomy; Seward's Folly; how elk got to Alaska; bad mofos; a little bit of elk taxonomy; the shittiness of Afognak; quartering an elk in the water, battle scars, busted antlers, and other stories surrounding Steve's bull; getting attacked by brown bear, 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 meat. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, man, first and foremost, before this program starts, go to whoever you listen to this podcast go on there and give the podcast a super good

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We got all kinds of branded First Light apparel and solids and camo, bitchin' hats, shirts. You can also go and get the show notes for the podcast where if we're talking about books music ideas research studies hunting info fishing info it's all there in the show notes so if you if we're talking about something and you're like man i wish i knew what they were talking about i wish i could find that book go there and you'll find the book yeah you could also read the weekly blog pieces that are often written by brody henderson our man brody henderson who's often on this show sometimes by

you he has a very relaxed casual tone on this show so do all that stuff and get it taken care of right away and now for the show uh dirt i notice you're running like a like a like a chew that has a little package around like a skull bandit that is yeah why uh why not the normal kind of just where the little grit pieces get all over your teeth just keep it classy in this nice b&b is that why well too i don't have to spit as much but you're spitting into that that juice bottle yeah what gets me is just disgusting man he's chewing gum chewing chew and spitting in a bottle while trying to talk is that nicotine gum no no one of my favorite stories of dirt's is he had a girlfriend um down in arkansas and he was down there spitting all over the yard visiting her family and the old man took him aside tell that story dirt well they were more liberal people who were barefoot most

of the time you don't think conservatives go barefoot these guys i have a lot of conservative views and i like going barefoot in my yard you wouldn't like stepping on wet grass probably then either that's this guy didn't didn't like me spitting where he was stepping but i don't think that has a that's not a function of his uh that's not a function of his of his politics no that's true they were they were you think that like a conservative would be like yeah man one thing i like is walking and chew spit no that's true i do think politics influence people like you know brought it up many times. Being gluten intolerant seems to be a left-wing ailment. But I don't think

a lack of a desire to walk around and chew spit is part of the political polarization. That's true. They were right on telling me not to do that. They were right-wing? Oh, you mean they were correct? They were correct, yes.

I stopped. I'd spit out on the back 40 instead. you'd take a little walk yeah spit over the fence over the high grass area that was courteous yeah um dirt did you know that uh you know what the word ursus means i know the uh constellation ursus minor yeah okay ursus is the bear family okay okay i didn't know that did you know that of the that the the ursus with the greatest distribution is the brown bear slash grizzly bear no i believe it though yeah because you know eurasia right oh the connection north america just has the widest distribution of any bear there's many versions of it yeah now it's you know they used to call the grizzly bear ursus horribilis which is bad pr because what's yeah horrible it's really horrible

yeah yeah so when you get like a linnaean name you have i think we talked about this before a linnaean like the latin name right is from linnaeus and linnaeus came up with the way we name animals so the domestic dog is you know canis familiaris right that's its linnaean name uh we are homo sapien so self-aware human self-aware hominid um i don't think we have covered this we haven't covered linnaean no are we homo sapien sapien well yeah see that's like that's when things have a that's called trinomial nomenclature so the brown bear slash grizzly bear is ursus arctos but there's ursus arctos arctos or some people like like take take the american bison or american buffalo there is there used to be this idea that we had bison bison bison which was the plains animal and then bison bison athabasca which was the wood buffalo of the boreal forest and we used to just make the you know these determinations were made oftentimes

by morphological differences so you would look and like let's look at the structure of an animal the visual appearance of an animal and draw draw distinctions. But then once we started getting, once genetics got involved, it started showing us that things that we thought, that measured by that parameter, by the genetic markers, things that we thought were very, some things we thought were very similar are in fact not similar at all. They just happen to like accidentally arrive at a place where they kind of look the same right and an extreme version would be birds fly and dragonflies fly so someone would go like they must be closely related but in fact they came to flight through very different paths okay so there you have a thing where like

um convergent evolution so yeah like ideas about convergent and divergent evolution but in those cases like there's similarity there's things that we would see and someone would be like oh they're similar because they both blank but we realize that that doesn't denote like a close relatedness so genetics dispelled some of those misunderstandings but it also showed us that some things that we thought were very different are in fact very close together like for instance that the the abc islands in alaska admiralty baronoff and what's that chick i don't know the name yeah i can't it's admiralty island baronoff island and then uh the sea island they're together there that polar bears that those okay those bears on that island

are like ursus arctos okay so they're like coastal brown bears we'll get more into this in a second chickagoff chickagoff island chickagoff island i think it's how they pronounce chicha yeah there's there's ch in both places oh all right so that one anyway polar bears are are a recent offshoot of ursus arctos so polar bears are if you just from a genetic perspective polar bears aren't are almost like a cousin of or almost like a clade of brown bears. And polar bears are very closely related to the brown bears of the ABC Islands, even though those brown bears tend to be darker than other brown bear, grizzly bears in other parts of the world.

So coloration, if you're like, oh, you might look and be like okay the the the the in the bears of interior north alaska so the grizzlies of the brooks range are tend to be blonde so someone might be like oh so if if polar bears are shoot off of grizzly brown bears i would imagine they're a shoot off of those very blonde ones that are already in the arctic on the north slope of the brooks range when in fact those bears are not tightly related as tightly related to polar bears as are the brown bears of the abc islands now where was i going from there oh so another added thing of that is this is the point i was

trying to get at because i'm trying to go way deep i'm going to talk about a grizzly bear semi-attack but i'm going to go i'm going way deep because here's the thing i just want to clarify a point that brown bears and grizzly bears are all ursus arctos we used to have we used to have this idea that we had all these different subspecies of bears all right so we had like the kodiak brown bear which are the the biggest ones in the world um then you have like polar bears which is their own thing arctis maritimus or something like the arctis maritimus something like that like marine bear um is is regarded as a different species though very closely related and then you have like the grizzly bears of the lower 48 and interior northern canada those are all one species and

the way they talk about in genetics is they talk about it being clades so rather than subspecies they now talk about clades or like genetic groupings of bears that are all kind of the same thing but in hunting lingo and ram you'll be able to chime in on this okay in hunting lingo when someone says a brown bear what they're referring to is a coastal grizzly of alaska correct but now i've always understood though grizzly bears are brown bears but not all brown bears are referred to as grizzly bears see what i'm saying a brown bear is a grizzly so grizzly can be a brown bear or a grizzly but you can't call a brown bear a grizzly because it's completely like you're saying if you were in wyoming you would not be able to say hey i saw a brown bear or you would be able to say i saw a brown bear no a grizzly is a brown bear a brown

bear is not a grizzly the word grizzly is a delineation of where they live yes so so you would be incorrect saying a grizzly on kodiak island by okay but but but what yes if we're if we're switching to hunting lingo okay then yes but even normal lingo no yeah it's just they're brown bears correct yeah we're talking yeah so yeah i think that if you yeah if you're talking like in lenane like scientific lingo it would be that a grizzly is a form of brown bear correct yes yes but just to clarify because people always get that confused is like well is a brown bear a brown bear is not a coastal grizzly yes a grizzly is an inland brown bear yes it doesn't go both ways that's not yeah that's what i'm trying to get okay yes at this point so that that's that's a good clarification like if you want to go read about the whole broad general family of of of these types of bears of

ursus arctos correct that is you would begin the top of the funnel right we're talking about the funnels earlier yep the top of the funnel would be brown talking about the funnels earlier yep the top of the funnel would be brown bears yep and then from there you will find your way into the the himalayan brown bear the the interior rocky mountains grizzly bears these are all classifications of brown bears brown bears yeah so but in like in in the way we in the way that hunting type dudes use the term now, when we're talking about a grizzly, we're talking about a grouping of brown bears that do not live in coastal environments and do not have access to salmon. Correct. They're not exploiting marine resources. Yes.

They are in the interior. Those bears tend to be, to have a grizzled appearance. They tend to be silvery, blonde, lighter. And your coastal bears tend to be, coastal brown bears tend to be darker brown. Yeah. running to chocolate the bears a the the largest of this whole group of bears which are many and varied from romania and the himalaya all over the damn place the largest ones live on

uh the kodiak Archipelago. Yeah. Which includes a Fognac Island. A Fognac, Raspberry, Kodiak. And those minor islands. Did we talk about this the other day? And the Alaska Peninsula. Yeah, and the peninsula.

Did we talk about this the other day that those bears, the bears on Kodiak and a Fognac and Raspberry have been genetically isolated for 10,000 years? Did we cover this he did we did touch it yeah okay so they've been off doing their own on their own vibe for a long time big mofos very big as my son would say no bad mofos he doesn't know what a mofo actually spells out to you but

he knows that there are animals that are counted as bad mofos. I'm just laying a little unnecessary groundwork for what's going to come next. Now, where we left off on the last episode, we were fixing to do some elk hunting on a fog neck. And just as a primer, if you watch television, you'll know certain television shows,

after every commercial break, they out of a courtesy as a courtesy to the viewer and also as a courtesy to their budget spend some minutes just recapping what they covered a moment ago which saves them money in production and also like gives you keeps you up to speed if you're just joining the program we uh me and remy warren drew some elk tags on a fognac island and a fognac island is just separated from kodiak island by a narrow strait and i remember the name now kopernikov straight that might not be the exact pronunciation but you know and raspberry straight yeah a lot of stuff out here has a ruski name a russian name russian name and then there's shelikov which is the big more open ocean between the mainland that's the rough real rough

seas there yeah and since we did a real clumsy uh and since we did a real clumsy recap of uh of general bear uh taxonomy let's do a real clumsy recap of coastal Alaska history. Now, the Russians worked real heavy in this area, and they would use this area for fur trading. So seal, and they'd come in here primarily targeting sea otters or buying sea otters from indigenous hunters, whaling, all that kind of stuff and then we bought it uh you know seward bought it for like five bucks and people were real mad at the time that he got ripped off and turned out he'd gotten himself into a gold mine um so that's how this place came into u.s ownership it wasn't five bucks but he got a scream deal i'm being uh i'm being extreme here in my uh in my

assessments of what he paid for it but yeah he got a scream and deal on it people were kind of pissed they called it seward's folly thought he got ripped but in the end i mean he the guy did a great turn for his country yeah um so in some of the areas in coastal alaska there's like still kind of a russian influence and names you you notice in in coastal Alaska, there's like still kind of a, a, a Russian influence and names you, you notice in this area in particular, there's a lot of Russian names in this area from the long, even the airport, English and Russian. Is it really? Yep.

Okay. All the signs. Uh, now, so we drew these, these, these, these, these elk tags. Now a Fognac Island does not traditionally have elk. And the elk, they captured, I think, 19 or 20 calves in the early decades of the 1900s from the Olympic Peninsula. When I'm in my bedroom, looking out of my bedroom window, i'm looking at the home range the former home range of the elk that now live on a fog net yeah and they did two releases one of the releases was just calves which you think would have just gotten wiped the fact that that worked is mind-boggling yeah i can't that just seems like oh hey what's this yeah without some like old boss cow right

without some boss cow who's got some background in dealing with bears. Just surprising that they could have lived. And it wasn't even that many. It was eight Roosevelt elk calves captured on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State in 1928. And then they didn't even cut them loose until 1929. So they somehow kept the sons of bitches alive for a year. Turned them loose on that hell hole. But the thing they had going for them is a familiar terrain,

like dank, wet, just dank, wet, nasty. The Olympic Peninsula is pretty steep too, isn't it? I mean, it goes from sea level straight up. Dude, it's vicious. Yeah. It's viciously steep, viciously thick. Guys that can go, you know, guys that can routinely go in there on public

ground and kill elk oh yeah in coastal coastal washington pat yourself on the back yeah it's like i haven't done it once i haven't i haven't even given it a shot i haven't been there that long and haven't really given it much haven't given it any shot yet but i've known enough to know that a dude who can consistently fill an elk tag in coastal washington on public ground is a hunter's hunter oh yeah bad mofo yeah a bad mofo that's consistently doing that jason phelps he cut his teeth on the game call maker jason phelps that's his world man so the fact that like that him and his buddies like do it is testament to it's just it's just like nothing like you end up on some glass and tit like spying on elk and then sneaking over and getting them you're just in there shaking hands with them yeah for those

dudes like you know the whole like 60 yard pin it's like if you're getting a shot it's 10 yards yeah top pin yeah you don't you can't. Anyhow, so they got these elk from there, kidnapped them. I got a question. Lay it on me. It may be premature. Oh, there's a chair. But did the elk that got relocated to Fognac have their size and general demeanor paralleled the native Olympic Peninsula elk?

That's a great question, D question dirt i'm glad you asked it uh roosevelt elk are the biggest of the elk now remember you can answer this body size body size so what so you have for elk man this is turning into a taxonomy episode for elk from hunting perspective elk or elk they all got the same damn name but we break them up um uh we break them up into different classifications they're definitely not subspecies but classifications rocky mountain tule roosevelt yeah and i guess now i could be wrong he's living like two places yeah well calif yeah coastal california the valley right yeah well yeah from like bishop to the coast but and then there's um maybe they aren't around anymore manitoba milk

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 orstakes, and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps 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.

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And they may have been larger than Roosevelt's, but now currently Roosevelt's here. Yeah, because what was the native elk of like Michigan and Wisconsin? Probably Manitoban. I'm not positive. Because those reintroduction efforts were all done with Rocky Mountains. Yeah, correct. That elk was probably extirpated. Man, a lot of like... Yanni, are you on this fact-checking, correct. I think that elk was probably extirpated. Yeah. Man, a lot of like...

Yanni, are you on this fact-checking, man? I am. You can also... Or you're like shopping. You can also throw in... He's doing a Amazon fresh order.

He's like, geez, right? Bananas are that expensive right now? I really want to get my new sand volleyball court lines. I've been pricing those out.

So you got your backlog down fact-checking, Giannis. Merriam elk you could also throw in there. Manitoban, as Remy said, eastern elk. I'd have to dive a little bit farther to see what they think is still alive or not. But the main species are the tool the rocky mountain and the roosevelt yeah just roosevelt are the largest bodied rocky mountain are the largest antlers and just in configuration and size i would say the tool oak are the smallest body and their antlers grow more like a red deer which is a crowned effect at the tops just to get

a picture yeah now just to make just so people just so listeners don't think we're dumb for not knowing all the answers here a lot of the answers are unresolved for instance for instance of all the types of bighorn sheep there used to be a idea that there was also the audubon bighorn and the audubon bighorn was in eastern montana in the dakota badlands okay and it had been shot out by miners and killed out by the introduction of domestic sheep and through disease introductions from domestic sheep now there's questions of like is the audubon sheep was it legitimately its own sheep or was it just a Rocky Mountain? So when you get into all this taxonomic stuff, it's like there used to be like a set of understandings

that is getting eroded by inputs of new information. At a time, I think that people talked about 34 types of caribou or some crazy thing like that. And now that list has been greatly reduced to now all caribou and reindeer of north america europe and asia are now regarded as the same species different clades of the same species from a genetic perspective so where were we oh yeah so they take these calves from the olympic peninsula and cut them loose out there and then they do another introduction and eventually that herd on a fog neck gets built up you might go like well why would you go and turn a bunch of

animals that don't belong somewhere loose somewhere and that's a great question because it's a practice that we were engaged in very heavily in the early 1900s that we're not engaged in now. You would never get the green light now to go and establish a population of elk on an island where they were not native. Because the fear would be that you were going to upset a delicate ecological balance but in the early 1900s and prior to that in other places there was just this idea that all animals should just be everywhere that they that it would kind of work particularly big game animals so on kodiak they cut loose black-tailed deer which are not native there they cut loose mountain goats which are not native there they cut loose elk on neighboring

a fog knack which are not native there as well as as reindeer they call them reindeer because they were a domestic herd that ended up just becoming feral yeah so caribou so you would never like you would never in a million years get to go ahead to do that now no buffalo a lot of it too yes a lot of it too i think has to do with the way if you if you lived on kodiak island during this time when they introduced these animals you're looking around you're going well this is a land of plenty but there's not a lot of red meat running around yeah there's bears and there's fish and there is no way to get food to kodiak island yeah so everywhere else in alaska you can set up a settlement and you can go shoot a moose you can go shoot a but you're going to get sick of eating brown bear meat i would imagine yeah so they release

sick from it so they release these animals primarily as a food source to get people that come here go oh yeah i can live off the land here i'll start a settlement and i'll raise a family and i'll do whatever and we'll make yeah but you're you're acting like i'm making a value judgment no no no i'm just saying i'm just the rationale yeah the rationale of like why then it was even thought of yeah now okay let me lay this one on you because you're you're like a you you've you're at this point on news for for an american you're an expert on new zealand right as far as americans go i'm not talking about okay yeah new zealand when they were doing all these introductions they were they were doing introductions earlier there than they

are here yeah than they were here but there was committees called familiar like familiar familiarization committees yeah who whose goal it'd be like sort of the equivalent of a conservation group today called the Familiarization Committee, I believe, whose goal was to establish the fauna of Europe into New Zealand to make it more like home. Yeah. So when you're in the park and you see a red squirrel run by, you're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. So it was like people just back then were into, yeah, for all kinds of motivations, were into like, why not have more game animals on the land? Sounds good to me. The funny thing about it to me is that you would never get it to go today.

Probably not. Because now you need to establish that it was present and was extirpated by human causes. In order to do, and we don't do introductions, we do reintroductions. If you can establish that it was historically present and wiped out by people, this wouldn't fit. Though during the Pleistocene, there was an elk in interior alaska but they cut them loose here because like why not why not have more meat on the ground what's funny about it to me is that you have those those introductions that occurred and they manage them in perpetuity even though they would never get the green light to establish it now.

So they're like, well, they're here now. Now we're going to manage it in a conservative fashion. They don't want them to explode in numbers. And they're able to control the valve through how many hunting permits they issue. Yeah. permits they issue yeah um so inadvertently i think i now believe they made the most difficult elk hunting on the planet um by cutting these elk loose on a fog knack island if i could go back in time i would find the guy that came up with that idea and i would punch him in the face so where we left we were fixing to do some hunting and it was foggy um you couldn't see

shit right and rainy rainy and foggy miserable camping conditions horrible at times miserable camping conditions but remy had done the hunt before on a fog knack and we were kind of like following our hunt plan was to mimic Remy's previous hunt plan. Yeah. Like Remy's just like, I don't, I can't tell you what's going to happen.

I don't really know if it works like it worked before. Um, and we can find them in a Valley. I found them in, it's just going to come down to, will we get a chance to like, have a look? Yeah.

Will the weather cooperate? If the weather cooperates it's not gonna be it's not gonna be that it's a challenging hunt it's just a challenging like set of experiences yes right because you've got to get through the shitty weather to get to the point where you can shoot one then you have to get that one that you shoot back to camp. And the terrain lends itself very poorly to easily getting back to camp. No two ways about it. It sucks walking through. It looks nice.

You could watch the episode and say, I would make it there in an hour. Four hours later, you're going to be slogging through stuff really discouraged well we put some numbers to it it took us five hours to travel 2.7 miles yeah the way the crow flies 2.7 miles as yeah so two point to cover 2.7 miles as the crow flies, with your travel route deviating from that straight line just from topographical features, took five hours to travel there. Not dilly-dallying. That's hard hiking.

Hiking for five hours straight. Not doing what Doug Duren refers to as Jimmy Dickin. Yeah. It very well could be double the actual distance. Yeah. Easily, I think. I don't think double. But you can't, you can't, there's no such thing as walking a straight line.

No. And there's some major climbing involved in between and that major climbing, I just, the way that brushes, I feel like it's, it's very similar to walking through knee deep snow or boot high snow. The amount of energy you've going through that. I think it's even worse. Cause like if you get,

if you get into a situation where the tall grass or like the alders grab your leg, then you trip and you don't have that in snow you know so like you're expending energy trying to keep yourself up when like the yeah the brush gets too thick it's like wading through snowmen it's like rain yeah who can grab it tiny snowmen who want to knock you down the whole time um hold on i want to go back to the point about it being double let me explain okay not only are you going zigzagging right because we like oh you're going to dig in the zag you're going away from camp to

get to a pass and then you go across a ridge up over the you know the top of a you know small knoll to another pass to then go down so you've got the zig and the zag but then also you figure when you're going up like you said like camp's only 20 feet over that pass right because you're at the top of the pass and you're looking almost straight down at camp and so that that um linear distance as the crow flies is only whatever what is it 500 yards 800 yards right like you can make the shot with a rifle almost. It's so steep. But you're actually going down twice that. Yeah, at the top of that peak that we had to go over, you're at 1550.

And camp's at 350. And you could definitely lob a 22 round down into your tent. Not lob. You could shoot a 22 round down into your tent from that peak. Yeah, because it's so steep yeah it's it's as steep as you'd want to walk oh yeah without ropes probably 45 degree i'm just saying there's a lot of distance it's not accounted for when you talk about i wasn't factoring in the zig or the zag i was factoring in just the, you know. Up and down. Yeah.

Now, on a trail, you're going several miles an hour. A good hiker is covering a few miles an hour on a trail. So that's a thing. So anyways, we finally get, like, you can't hunt. This is a generalization. Generally, with notable exceptions, one cannot fly and hunt on the same day in Alaska because it would encourage the practice of locating animals from the air, landing your plane, and shooting at them, which they don't typically want. And then the places where you can fly and hunt on the same day are places where the quarry isn't really conducive to that kind of approach anyway like generally like hunting blacktail deer it just generally doesn't line out that you would like find a blacktail from your plane land and shoot it they're just a different kind of critter in a different kind of habitat caribou it would work out real well and you're not allowed to do it

you need to let have a night pass and you hunt the next day so we couldn't hunt the first day we landed not that we had any opportunities anyways then the next day was just fog um and then we hiked up to a spot where we could look down into a valley known to be frequented by elk um based off remy's past experiences and in conversations with uh pilots who fly over the area all the time. And then just walked up, said, wow, it's real foggy, walked back down, soaked. The next day, walked up, said, wow, it's real foggy, and walked back down, soaked. The next day, walked up, said, wow, it's real foggy, and then we decided to hang out. Oh, that was the third day.

Yeah. Or what day was the day that we walked through the real brushy shit oh that was the third day yeah or what day was the day that we walked through the real brushy shit that was the second day second day i was on our way up to see that it was foggy yeah and then we walked out that was the third day we flew we hiked up to the top direct third day was the lake hike okay yeah we stayed low and then up i'm just clarifying for my own mind fourth day we went straight up yeah and said man it's foggy let's start a fire you can see whisperings whisperings of clearness yeah coming and going devoted a lot of time to trying to start a fire put up some tarps to get out of the rain and all of a sudden i would make like an angel noise, but it wasn't like an angel-like clearing.

It was like clouds would blow through. We're saying fog. It's not fog. It's rain. You're in the clouds. Yeah. Clouds, rain. You're in a cloud.

It's not fog. You're in a rain cloud. White room. You're just like up in a, you're like in the thing. When it's raining, the thing that's, the rain's falling out of your, standing in that thing. Yeah. The ceiling.

Because fog sounds nice. Yeah. Yeah. so you're you climb up into a cloud and then there's like rain around happening around you it's like a garden hose with the mist setting on all the time yeah exactly yeah but these clouds would blow and there'd be gaps between the clouds and during the the gaps between these clouds we we're looking down, and lo and behold, 2.4 miles away, a bull is standing there. Like, kind of like sent from the heavens. And then the bull probably vanishes into a little thicket and then we notice in a creek bed down below the bull we notice

what looks like two or three other elk that make a real quick appearance and they're quite a ways off and so we started hoofing down toward these elk uh travel that distance which took a lot of time so now it's already into the afternoon right yeah late afternoon no and no time to stop for lunch oh that's right never that's right we did not even have time to eat never any food and find

the bull that we saw. Find the bull that was sent from the heavens to walk out of an alder patch and present himself for view. Find him bedded up on a little high spot, a little high grassy, a grassy knoll. Grassy knoll. And get a, and here in this area, it it's like all great like kind of like waist high grass

some chest high grass some knee high muck and then here and there a big ass spruce tree we get a big ass spruce tree between us and the bull and the bull's laying there and lays there for a long time right up until the point where we get about 300 yards away from it and i'm getting ready to prop my rifle up and take a poke at him should he stand up and he just walks and vanishes yeah crazy at this point we start talking about how maybe it's getting a little late to be trying to do this that was that like probably 30 4 yeah we're saying it might we might even though it's not dark it might be getting into foolish territory but continue on to be shooting because we have to remember we're still in that giant bear country but we have yet to see a bear

yeah evidence of bears like bears walk in the lake we're camped on had had had what seemed like must have been a pretty healthy sockeye run just based on the amount of carcasses strewn around on the beach some bears feeding on them and while we were in there there's a lot of steelhead in there and a lot of a lot of cohos or silvers are in there as well and so you'd see some bear tracks on the beach, and then you'd kind of stomp them out and find a new bear track on the beach. And one day on one of the trails up by the pass, we had bear tracks on our tracks.

So they're around, but hadn't laid eyes on them. But you're aware of their presence, and you're mainly aware of their presence because your whole life you've been hearing about Kodiak bears, right? The bad mofos who adorned the chew tent. Ursus, what did you say?

Arctos. It used to be Heribus. Lewis and Clark, it was Ursus Heribus. So they got tangled up with them a little bit. Yeah, they're right. Now, so we keep pressing on and kind of give up on the bull that we knew about remy ripped a few bugles did some cow call nothing in the world was going to stand that or we didn't know what he did he left laid down

couldn't locate him couldn't find him can i say something real please something that gave me a perspective on the like the height of the shit you're walking through was when that elk disappeared so it's like on any other hunt you'll see an animal going to a small like timber stand or tree stand you're like yeah of course it could disappear this elk which is massive what like how many pounds is at least about 300 we didn't cover that we got okay oh we didn't even answer this question you're proven to be extremely valuable today extremely whether they were larger yeah yeah but so when this so you're looking at this elk and you're like looking at the landscape and it looks fairly close because it is 2.4 or whatever and then actually when it

disappeared we were 300 yards away yeah and he literally in what looks like you know like pile of sticks yeah knee-high bush anywhere else totally vanishes like ceases to exist vanishes like you guys are glass in that small chunk i mean it was a tiny area not a sign of them no but then not but i would say ceased to exist but then all of a sudden he rematerialized later in fact had not ceased to exist yeah he was just from our yeah view perspective had just like was no longer on the earth yeah was sucked up a phantom a phantom phantom elk now so backtrack to dirt's earlier point roosevelt roosevelt elk are the biggest bodied of the elk yeah but the biggest versions of roosevelt elk are here i didn't know that yes they're the largest they are larger than the

their native they have bulls up there, here, where we are right now. They have bulls, or within a few miles where we are right now. They have bulls that have tipped the scales at 1,300 pounds. Wow. Mm-hmm. Ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah.

That's like a cherished news. When you pack one on the Gi right on the giants like they're saying that when you pack one you could be packing 700 pounds of meat and the boned out skull and antlers yeah biggest of the big giant that'd be some that'd be some bone alaska game of fish has 700 to 1100 on average for bulls, which is quite a span there. But that includes the other islands as well? Or is that just?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, raspberry. Because the ones on Ellerton are substantially smaller. Edelin. Edelin, sorry. So Fognac has the largest of the large Roosevelt elk. Yeah, but you know, in these weights, they're varied.

But as far as like finding the biggest you know if you were going to go out and have like a find the biggest bull thing you would go here and weigh all these bulls and you turn up the largest specimen um so you keep yeah and you just look at that it's like they're just stout man like stout so we keep pressing along because up ahead of us, we got some cows. And then we hear a bugle rip out ahead of us. And normally when you're hunting out in most places, in the Rockies or whatever, you'd hear a bugle rip out ahead of you, and you'd sit there with your binoculars for a couple minutes.

You'd be like, oh, there he is. But here, that ain't going to happen. And this mountain we're walking across the face of there is i'm not exaggerating there is a full-on balls out creek every 30 to 50 yards yeah yeah and i don't understand where it's coming from and when you get to the creek it is a i would say at least a chest to head high straight drop with devil's club in the middle. Yeah. So it's like ranging from, yeah, you're right. Like ranging from a six to 12 foot goalie with a full on creek that you could like set up a grist mill in.

Yeah. Every fit. Like I was like, where is the water coming from? It's coming from that cloud that sits on top of the mountain all day long and all night long yeah most days even trying to be like yeah so i'll be like to yas like yeah so you'll hit a spruce then cross 13 streams and the 14th will be in the 14th stream bed well that's like a a function too of the um uh you know which direction the face is pointing because i feel like on the other side of that drainage it wasn't like that but you still have the same water it

just comes in the form of these like giant grassy marshy meadows where the streams instead of being like that kind of cuddy canyon feel to them it's just like a stream that is just moving through grass and so yeah yeah like it's like an alluvial fan where you might hike across 200 yards of water from the rock guard on your boot up to your ankle. It's just kind of moving across an alluvial fan. It looks just like a flooded field. You're just walking in a flooded field. With some slight current.

Well-irrigated hayfield. Yeah, but with some movement. With a slight movement of the water. So we keep pressing along, and we've got these cows out ahead of us. And at this point, I'm having a lot of trepidation. I'm aware of the time. I keep looking at my GPS being like, no matter what happens, this is going to turn into a late one yeah and all of a sudden remy spots pretty incredible spot eagle eye man a real eagle eye

spots a bedded one horned bull and what he spots is the antler so he spots a single antler a fork a fork in a pile of branches yeah the pile of kind of couldn't believe it once you like learning what you're looking i'm like cow that was a good spot laying down he's got one six point main one main beam with six points on it and the way these elk look they kind of if you're familiar with a red deer where they get the crowns on top the way these elk antlers look they're so compact they get like a red dearest quality to you'll get like a little three-point crown on top so he's got like a main beam that comes out of a base that's bigger than a beer can yeah and i think the way their antlers grow is just a function of their size. They're so big and they've got so much weight that when they fight,

they need stout antlers at the base to keep from breaking off. So the bulls that have the bigger bases and the heavier antlers are going to be the ones that can plow through the other elk. And fight they do. And fight they do. So we wound up seeing three bulls. We saw three bulls. Broken antlers. Yeah. I think we saw three bulls broken antlers yeah like i think we saw more bulls who are missing so this dude did bust up so so the way these antlers work is like it's way

bigger than a beer can when it grows out of his head but then the eye guard is sort of mashed down into the base as well so it's like the eye guard seems almost kind of come out of the base rather than having like a chunk you kind of put your hand around and then the eye guard it's like the eye guard seems to almost kind of come out of the base. Rather than having like a chunk that you kind of put your hand around and then the eye guard. It's like the eye guard and the base are kind of mashed together. And it's this really like thick stout antler with very short tines coming out of it. So he's got an eye guard, then two tines, then like a three-tined crown coming out of the top. And the whole thing, the whole, I mean, the whole main beam isn't three feet long. No. Yeah, probably. Short short crazy looking little antler um and then one of them he just snapped off above his eye garden the thinnest spot is snapped off on it but he's laying there

kind of unaware of us but facing us and kind of mess around and i'm like trying to get lined out on a shot but he's like facing us too much now one time years ago hunting with ryan callahan i took a dead-on shot on a bull moose like a brisket shot which would just devastate a deer right basically that's a little colic that forms on their chest you know and i hit that and it just wasn't a lethal shot on a moose just too much meat and bone and whatnot and uh i was lined up on them and i had some sticks in the way remy had a clear angle i moved over you call that the bull a little bit to try to i was trying to get you to get it to not run off because he was becoming aware of our presence he knew we

were there stood up eventually he turned enough where i could snake one in on a like a quartering a steep quartering to a shot and and that shot would have done would have done the trick uh i you know after an autopsy i realized that shot would have eventually it would have done would have done the trick uh i you know after an autopsy i realized that shot would have eventually it would have done the trick probably within some number of yards but he spun started running and i hit another one that shattered his front leg but he already had his lung shot out and he then tumbled down into one of the deeper creeks and landed smack ass in the water yeah and like in the water formed a small dam yes yeah and formed an impound when he hit the water he formed an impoundment this creek is how far down from probably 30 30 feet yeah 30 30 feet and probably only 10 feet wide oh yeah maybe that's how steep

it was and there's a waterfall just behind him yeah picturesque yeah very very steep canyon the worst place he probably could have fallen on that hill dude and the minute that happened and the minute i walked over there you know it's like if something's gonna be you know it wasn't even like celebratory because you're kind of like oh man it is getting late we are a five hour walk from camp and it's already like it's evening yeah yeah it's evening now such a big body too yeah i want to remind listeners that this turns into a grizzly bear story or this turns into a brown bear story um so we start cutting on it and remy pointed out that he did kind of like having the elk laying in a creek because it was easy very easy to keep things clean yeah you would make a cut you'd be like oh man there's some hair on my knife then you just like hold your knife in the creek

everything was like looked licked clean yeah at the kill site but um there was no way to like move it around a maneuver you just had to start working at what was exposed so we pulled the you know skin it down the spine worked to hide off got a back leg off got a shoulder off got a back strap off boned out the ribs with the gut still in the thing boned out the neck removed the head got a tenderloin out with the gut still in the thing got it rolled over um and these are 100 pound quarters probably yeah the shoulders probably not but i think the back leg i think i yeah the the quarters of the front shoulders i would say were very similar to a back quarter of a average size rocky mountain elk yeah and i think the back legs were like

borderline like moose legs like probably 100 pounders when you say yanni yeah very hard to pick up yeah so then we got the whole thing rolled over are you are you still conducting fact checking oh really what's what's uh what's what's what's what are you on well i'm going through uh remember when we had uh we did the uh five questions from frank van mannen um talking about grizzly bear okay uh so i just pulled that up it was just refreshing so because i know we're gonna probably talk about numbers about uh how many exist in the world 200 000 oh no the like percentages of bear spray versus firearms and that sort of stuff

oh yeah all that all that stuff that i now know to be so um flipped it over did the same thing all over again did you guys see the the battle wounds on the first side or the oh that's what i want to talk about well i'm talking about he's a fighter fighter so on like everywhere on him is bruises and like where he fell it wasn't rocky so like he didn't get bruised up in his he took quite a tumble. Old battle scars. Some scar tissue, some yellow bruising. Bruising on his ribs. And keep in mind, he had that broken antler.

He didn't break that antler like thrashing brush. I was going to make a point, too, about the broken antlers. You see a lot of broken tines in a lot of places, right? Like where I've guided, where Remy's guided. You probably see broken tines compared to broken main beams is probably i don't know a hundred to one it could be everyone we saw was broken main beams yeah now there's competing i think there's competing um theories on why some areas have a lot of broken why elk and some areas have a lot of broken, why elk in some areas have a lot of broken antlers.

And I'm sure that there's someone that knows the proper answer, maybe not. I've heard that it has to do with mineral quality, that some elk antlers are inherently weaker. Elk in some areas produce a weaker antler because of mineral quality in the soils. And I've heard that it's a function of, and Remy shared this one with me,

that he believes a better explanation is that it's more of a function of cow to bull ratios. Yeah. The amount of time spent fighting to breed. Yeah, that in areas where you got 10 cows for every bull, a bull is able to stay out of skirmishes. But in these areas where you have high bull to cow ratios they're spending more time in the dominant struggles and they're just

breaking more antlers yeah i feel like that's the accepted theory down in arizona in the trophy units is that they just they're managed very well for a you know equal bull to cow ratio and the bulls just have to do a lot more fighting. Because you go to a neighboring unit that's got the same terrain and everything but just managed different, not as many broken antlers. Yeah. Because of the three Fs, fishing, fighting, right? Yeah.

They don't do one of them. They don't fish. But they spend more, they're able to devote more of that energy to the one after the other. So, where was I? Oh, the hole in his rear ham.

He had, I'm skinning his rear ham and I'm like, oh, someone, like I must have shot a third time that I forgot about because he has a large wound on his rear ham. I'm like, oh, someone, like I must have shot a third time that I forgot about because he has a large wound on his rear ham. But when you skin the hide back, it's like a perfect inch diameter hole punched through his hide where a tine punched through his hide and then went into his rear ham several inches. Yeah.

It was just an infected mess. Just beat up. Yeah. he should take up fishing yeah so he'd probably do pretty good fishing around there um so that was weird trim that all out so now now we're entering like so so so here you are you got uh we got six guys because it was me and Remy, and then we have our crew guys. And a perk and liability of this line of work is that when you come out, crew guys get an equal cut of all the meat if they want it, but they also carry it. Would we share if they didn't carry? I wouldn't expect it to be shared if I didn't carry. I also carry it. Would we share if they didn't carry? I wouldn't expect it to be shared if I didn't carry.

I also wouldn't want, like, I'd feel bad. We would, but maybe not as much, because we share with the office crew as well. Not on this one. No. So when you carry, do you feel... You're carrying your one-sixth portion. Yeah, so Ridge, when you carry elk portion yeah when you so ridge when you carry

elk or when you pack meat do you feel like i'm packing meat in order to get some or you like i'm packing me just because this is a sucky thing that needs to happen a little bit of both i like if i'm thinking i'm going to take any home i'm not just going to watch you guys carry a bunch of weight in some shitty terrain i want to like help out but you guys already have a ton of gear with you yeah and it and when we do get strapped up with me well at least me at garrett's kind of a superhuman dude so he can still charge up hills but i it makes me a little slower so i can't like run out and get all the shots that i normally do when we're on we're unloaded but i just like especially this one i just i just couldn't sit and like hike out

with an empty pack because we're in a we're in like a like just kind of uncomfortable situation yeah yeah so we got all this meat and we know that um because we're gonna be hiking in the ground so bad like the walking is so difficult that and it's already and it's dark out now that we know we're not gonna even though there's six of us and six people can carry like trail hiking six people can absolutely move a normal elk with like not that big of a deal really like if you're just like go ahead and trail walk for a few miles you just pick the whole thing up and go but this is kind of out of the question because we have so much vertical to gain and lose we're not on any kind of a trail for the bulk of it and we have a very

large patch of brush we should also mention at this point when the last meat went in the bag it is pitch black yeah yeah headlamps oh yeah pitch yeah pitch black yeah so the first thing we need to do is go earlier i was mentioning how now and then there's a big ass spruce we had before it got dark identified a spruce tree that would be adequate to get whatever meat we couldn't carry up into the tree and this spruce was directly uphill from us so we get done butchering the elk and the first step is to because now it's dark and you got a nice gutty smell blowing everywhere the first step is to try to get some separation of the meat and the guts thinking that when a bear or any kind of predator really comes in and claims a kill site. They I'm anthropomorphizing a little teeny bit,

but probably not too much. They know that they might lose it to the next thing up. Okay. So you find a kill and you don't, you can't just assume that it's yours for the next five days. So what things generally do is devour soft tissue because you can just wolf it down. It's high-calorie food, and they'll come in and mop up. Like, the liver goes quickly.

The lungs, just anything you can just soup right up. It doesn't take a lot of work. They like to get on that stuff first. So the general thinking in bear country is if you remove your your meat like your bone-in quarters or whatever remove them from the guts there's a chance that a bear is going to come in and the first thing he's going to do is claim the thing with the the the the soft tissue the greatest amount of smell all the blood he's going to pick that and you might grease off with your meat if it's separate so we move all our meat not far but out of the gully up onto a little grass another grassy knoll and then we take half of it load our backpacks with half of it and hike that up in a spruce about probably 12 to 13 feet up in a spruce tree

with the theory that nothing can get it yeah mature grit like cubs brown bear cubs can climb a tree but eventually that you know, a distinguishing feature, a morphological difference between black bears and brown bears is that black bears have a short, hooked claw. Grizzlies have a long, relatively straight, more sickle shaped claw and as a grizzly gets big and heavy those claws the way they're long and straight those claws do not lend themselves to climbing they're more for digging yeah they got a digging claw they spend a lot more time flipping rocks digging roots it's just their food resources are used differently. They tend to live in more open country, can live quite happily in the total absence of trees.

You do not find black bears in the absence of trees. The old adage is to tell a difference between a black bear and a grizzly is if the bear climbs up a tree and eats you, it's a black bear. That's an interesting thing to bring up. In coastal Alaska, the islands, there are some minor exceptions to this, but this is generally true. It's a truism. The islands either have black bears or grizzlies.

So Prince of Wales Island is a black bear island, right? Admiralty Island north of there is a grizzly bear island they don't co-mingle on islands if it's a suitable habitat i keep saying if it's suitable habitat for a brown bear that's who's going to live there if it's black bears on an island it's because it's not suitable habitat for brown bears if it's not suitable habitat for brown bears it's probably all not suitable habitat for brown bears, it's probably all heavily timbered, and there's no open country, and they tend to like open country. Yeah.

They use it better. So we get it up in a tree because he's not going to be able to climb the damn tree and get the meat out. Then we go back down to by the kill site, get all of our meat, and start hiking at 10.30 p.m. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or

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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 hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team.

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to the on x club y'all get to our camp at 3 30 a.m yep eat some freeze dry go to bed about 4 30 a.m fairly exhausting yeah tuckered out tuckered out it was a full day full tuckered full on tuckered yeah now by the time you get like a reasonable amount of sleep and also then wake up and regroup like you got a mess right you got stuff to clean up we had to get the meat we brought home um get it you know get it situated in a way that we're happy with we put it inside a hot wire we have like a little portable hot wire fence we put the meat inside there but the next day we wanted to establish another hot wire fence that wasn't the same hot wire fence that contained our tents get the meat out of the ground in another tree.

So originally, the night we got back, all late at night, we put the meat inside the hot wire fence that also contained tents. And the next day, we wanted to get it up in a tree where it could breathe out and be up in the breeze and have its own containment hot wire fence around it. Did all that. Had some show business stuff to take care of oh well i had a bunch of fish catching to do what's that we're talking meat though because it might be hard to come back to it but uh since you guys dropped it off you're in your mouth do you see something i don't know i thought you're chewing teeth and thought you were chewing on like some hard candy or something which i thought was disrespectful i do have a little uh pith stuck between okay that's fine that's fine um but uh because we're the meat hung for what was it three days

four days and we were a little bit worried about the condition of the meat but you guys took it to the processor and i'm guessing got to handle it and look at it and smell it. How was it? Good. Did it fare well? They thought it looked good. I thought it looked good. What? Yeah, see, now we're, man, talking about, that was a way out of order. That was a way out of order thing to bring up. Looked fine. Looked fine.

Yeah, it's not cold here. It's like, it's not like a normal, you know, I mean, you're in a coastal environment here and it's like always cold, but never cold yeah not only ever got below 40 yeah not great meat hanging weather and when it's real wet it's all this rain right so it's a lot of rain and never real cold so when we got back uh flew out and got back to town first order business was trying to find some place to that we could get our meat chilled off because it was already borderline and a thing that there's like a smell that that like bloody game bags wet bloody game bags take on a smell that is like a not a good smell and it's a precursor

to smells you don't want to smell but it's not in and of itself a bad smell but it's an indicator of bad things could happen soon smell it's a little off-putting we were in the bad things could happen soon smell phase from having the meat not being able to dry out because of the rain yeah everything's wet 40 degrees like and it was in a creek too so nothing ever had a chance to dry out no but yeah everything's fine it looked good they thought it looked good too yeah we paid some boys to uh i like that dude's hat retired drug dealer we paid some boys to uh to uh uh process and freeze our our thing for us but to get back to where i was caught some fish um how did we know the uh the

bear fence was hot is there a test or something yeah i hold the i touch the wire and then see what and then i gauge what kind of jolt it gives me and whether i'm not satisfied with the jolt whether i feel that it would be a deterrent or not um and i'll satisfy with that fence point being the point of all this being we don't strike off to the hanging tree you ever hear that bob mold song hanging tree should i throw myself from the hanging tree you don't know that one oh that's a story we ought to tell sometime. That story about that dude. Did we ever tell this story?

The guy, the spurned lover. What's that bighorn sheep hunting area that that dude, Tristan, used to guide in? His name wasn't Tristan,

was it? No, it wasn't. He looked like Tristan. He looked like a dude named Tristan from Legends of the Fall, but his name wasn't Tristan, was it? No, it wasn't. He looked like Tristan. He looked like a dude named Tristan from Legends of the Fall, but his name wasn't Tristan. Long hair, leather cowboy hat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Aaron.

Aaron, thank you. Do you remember the story he told us? Yeah. So he used to guide bighorn sheep in BC. Yeah, in the McKenzie's? Yeah, but it had a name. It's like the blank yeah what's a big horn area up there rami like rocky big horns yeah um the in bc or alberta could be alberta

the alberta bc line uh it's a w word white no oh i would think like the can whitmore it was the whitmore i remember that because i was on that trip in there yeah it's an area i think maybe an area called the whitmore yeah but anyways you're south of stone sheep country in bighorn sheep country i think the spine of that the spine of that range is the bc alberta line yanni look it up the whitmore winmoremore, Wilmore. Wilmore, maybe. So, just a quick digression. This is an interesting story. There's a guy, the outfitter he used to work for used to have a horse packer.

And the horse packer was in camp with his girlfriend. Okay? And the horse packer and the girlfriend get in a fight. He grabs a hunk of rope. Walks off in a huff, never to be seen again. It became like a mystery. Years later, someone is dicking around in that area and finds a skull and spinal column hanging from a rope. What?

They obviously searched for him when he huffed off. Searched for him when he huffed off, but could never find him. Wow. Was assumed dead. Bad argument. Someone finds a skull and a chunk of spine hanging from a rope from a tree and they excavate

the ground beneath them and are able to match up his buckles from his boots and his rivets and stuff from his jeans with what he was wearing when he vanished. So anyhow, the next day we go back to find our way back.

It should be mentioned that the rest day was a glorious glorious day. Drying out clothes. Only day of the whole trip that was bluebird drying out clothes but the sun hooking fish like nobody's high enough in the sky to actually be yeah never direct sun always indirect sun i got a bath and it was warm enough did you yeah dirt showered in the creek yeah i didn't know that oh yeah um i was jealous but yeah the sun went from peak to peak on the same ridge all right so the next day we wake up bright and early and strike off for the hanging tree um takes us i think we had a better route it took us four hours to get to the hanging tree. Now, approaching the kill site,

the kill site's about 100 yards up a small tributary from the main stem creek of the valley. We approached the kill site from across the main stem to get eye level with the carcass, which is laying down in a tributary on the other side of the main stem to get eye level with the carcass which is laying down in a tributary on the other side of the main stem from us and we're able to get a gander in there and see that at least the carcass has not been moved right and think of me if a bear had claimed it quickly he probably would have drug it off and buried it.

It would look different. There's a bunch of magpies in there. And a lot of magpies making a lot of racket. That helps alert predators to something good going on. They feed off that information. But the carcass is there where we left it. Seemingly undisturbed but we still pick a route that goes clear of the carcass up toward the hanging tree now when we get up by the hanging tree we do a number of things uh we got pepper spray drawn was your pistol drawn pistol was drawn yep pistols out pepper spray

out hauling making a lot of noise yelling the whole way up i was yelling to him that i got some spice for that meat that he ain't gonna like because i had my pepper spray out and then we were gonna we told him too that it was if if he did like it it was going to be followed up with some lead chasers so we're being very intimidating in hooting and hollering and yelling we have not seen anything though we've no evidence to think anything is wrong bears no and we glassed that hanging tree or at least i glassed that hanging tree i glassed extensively i glassed it until i could account for everything that was supposed to be in that hanging tree yeah so at that point we've done everything as good as we could do now there's some hindsight issues no no okay from that point

the one mistake i would say but there wasn't an option the one mistake is the hanging tree is surrounded by very thick brush yes but there were no other there was no clear hanging tree how big do you think like the diameter around the tree was clearing yeah like around like from the base of the tree to the like circle of brush i would say it was a from the tree it was a radius of maybe 15 feet yeah yeah 15 20 basically the canopy of the tree yeah it was a heavy thick enough tree and elk must take shade under there when it's sunny like it ever gets sunny it must be because there was i noticed when we were in there in the dark there's a lot of elk shit and bedding depressions under that tree. So on a hot day, they must like to get under there, same way cattle will do, to get under there and bed up in the shade of that tree.

I noticed that. So in hindsight, it was a shitty hanging tree, but there wasn't like a good version, right? Correct. It was a bad choice among bad choices yeah you could only have the foresight having i think been there before to like as you pull the trigger and you watch your elk die in the daylight at that moment to then do a 360 degree scan and make a waypoint on the best hanging tree and we did we did that was the me and remy argued about the best hanging tree yeah yeah but our argument wasn't based on this clearing our argument was

based on proximity no it was based on routes out i was going for a tree in an area that i knew sucked for travel aside of the drainage that I knew was sucked for travel, but it was a known suck. Remy was saying, let's go across. It can't be worse. Because I've traveled across.

And he's like, there are parts that are better. And I said, because it's dark, because we're loaded out heavy, I think we should go for the known suck instead of that in hindsight that would his tree would have been a better tree yeah but so you guys didn't really consider the whole

like open we were not talking about visibility under the hanging tree yeah but either side would have been the same visibility uh yeah both both alder and ald. Alder held holes with lots of goalies. So now here's where mistakes start getting made. I get up to the hanging tree, and I notice a smeared bear shit. And do you remember, does anybody remember me getting down on my knees to examine that shit oh yeah yeah because i would i and my initial thought was that it looked like a of shit that was smeared from a bear a bear track smeared shit

and i got down to examine it and i like, I don't remember that being there, but. It was nighttime. But it was like nighttime, and it looked like a boot. Then I was like, it must be a boot smeared it. Because it was all smeared out. And I was like, we were stomping all around in here. We must have smeared that bear shit. And it was a salmon-fueled bear shit.

It was like that gray mush shit from when they're feeding on salmon looked like and it was smashed and i looked at that and was like is that a boot or a bear track smeared that and then i looked at the tree and a lot of the stuff was hung up with paracord and i looked in the tree there's like no scratching on the tree no sign of disturbance and also if something was in there really like trying to climb that tree i felt that he might have actually like busted some of the pieces of paracord in trying to like reach around and do all of his business up there i just saw no other evidence except that smeared ship so then we make a giant mistake and decide to sit down and have some sandwiches and we had a

msr stove with us at a pot and i remember the pot got passed around and everybody was who wanted a quick uh starbucks via was supposed to throw in a small amount of water into the pot i dumped half my water bottle into the pot and there was like a little excavation dugout and i was sitting by that excavation dugout and there's six of us huddled on one side of the tree in a space seeing about like what we're in now it was during this during this packs came off packs came off pepper spray is i set my pack in one area then i got up to grab the pot somebody had sat so now people are actually sitting by packs that aren't there so my pack is now across from us which has our my personal bear deterrent pistol and bear spray my pack is leaning against the hanging tree your pack

is leaning against the hanging tree because then you moved into my so we're kind of we did this weird shuffle where nobody was near their own pack you know the way that we sat but still tight we're configured roughly like people in a living room around a coffee table for instance yeah yeah maybe maybe even a tad tighter than that i gotta say too we were pretty whooped on the hike in and that was a great spot taking away any risk of brown bear perfect chill spot yeah dude you're gonna eat a sandwich that's the coffee yeah it was like it was nice yeah it was like walking into a nice bed i even thought about lighting a fire for no reason just to warm up because we were under that tree it was so nice under that tree the first post hang and tree selection mistake that we made was that we got under the hang and tree and decided to linger unnecessarily long and let our guard down yes what we did that caused us to linger unnecessarily long,

let our guard down, and divorce us from our deterrence, being pistols and spray, was the idea that we would have some sandwiches. Yeah. They would sit down and some coffee so our desire to have sandwiches in an idyllic setting in the relief of having not had our kill site claimed by a bear which the alaska department of fish and game says often happens on the first night.

But we had allowed a night and a half to pass. And to be fair to us, how long was the hike into the hang and chill? Four hours. Yeah, so a four-hour hike up and then down and through thick country. And 1.5 nights had passed. And 1.5 nights had passed. And 1.5 nights had passed. So we got there. We were all pretty hungry.

And it was like thank God a bear isn't here. Yeah, that's how I felt. Because based on my hasty bit of sign reading backed up by Remy's hasty bit of sign reading who also said, oh, looks like a bear had been here. You said it.

Because I came up a little bit later. you must not have felt the same as me same as you is that we trampled it but i i that's why i looked at you and said it like oh did you step you know like was this but i got down on my knees to examine but i wasn't there for that yeah and i did a faulty read on that. I'm taking full blame on sign reading faultiness. I saw what I wanted to see, not what was there. Second mistake was I and others did not say, let's get while the getting's good. Not that that wouldn't have mattered. Wouldn't have mattered.

Wouldn't have mattered because it could have been, now we can look and be like, it couldn't have been any better oh yeah yeah every option from here on out is like it could have been worse there's no way it could have been better likely 100 because of what i'm going to explain happened because our our act of eating sandwiches just the only the mistake of the eating the sandwiches was us letting our guard down. But when we got to the tree, our guard would have been down regardless. Our packs would have been off. We would have been disarray packing up meat.

Yeah. So there's, and just maybe potentially more distracted by climbing and lowering stuff down out of the tree. Distracted and spread out. And filming. Instead we were clustered. Taking a break. So I get my sandwich. Pat makes me

a sandwich that is just, I had come off the heels of having had a bad sandwich. Not just me though. This was Garrett and Chris helped out with these sandwiches. So Pat had made me a really bad sandwich a couple days before and I was saying to him, dry, very dry sandwich and I was, I him dry very dry sandwich and i was i reprimanded

him and and told him as much and told him that when i send the pros and cons this is going down as a bad sandwich he sent he hands over a spectacular sandwich best sandwich like sandwich pastrami chipotle mayo heavily mailed yeah great great. Yeah. Great, great sandwich. Lots of meat. Did you have the stove fired up? Yeah. Stove was on. It was running this whole time. And I was eating my sandwich and some folks were commenting on why was my sandwich so nice.

That was Remy and I. Yeah. You're looking at that sandwich. I noticed him actually looking at your sandwich. I'm like, I've been looking at that damn sandwich too. Looking at his sandwich, looking at my sandwich, and looking at the meat that was still in the bag thinking, you know what?

Why isn't this bullshit? And I was just opening my mouth and beginning to form a sentence to the effect of kiss my ass on the sandwich issue because you didn't see my sandwich last time I had a sandwich, when all of a sudden, there was like, well, Pat,

yeah, stop. Sorry. All right. Go. Steve will not be interrupted. No, not that I won't be interrupted. I'm like,

you act like I, that I'm not going through this in a way that makes sense to me. I think that there is tension in the room. I'm looking around and I'm seeing what I believe to be sweaty palms and people gripping their shirt tails. PTSD. You know what I want to do? You know what I want to do? That's what's causing this, maybe.

I want to have someone. No, I'm not going to do this. I'm not going to do this, but I have a slight feeling of wanting to have someone else run point on explaining how this went. I was actually going to recommend that you tell the whole story from beginning to end. That's not how I'm going to do it. Without anyone else adding in, and then we can autopsy it. This is all thought out. How I feel that this should be approached.

Unless someone else has really sat down and thought it out. Not me. I'm blocking it out. I'm just reliving the experience, not thinking about how to tell people. I mean, we've taken people from the Pleistocene epic up into the sandwich making. Yeah. We've taken people from the Pleistocene epic up into the sandwich making. I feel like I don't know that big mistakes have been made. Oh, man.

Keep it going. Keep it going. My apologies. You're doing great. Yeah. I register an explosion of holy shitness. Now over to Pat. Because Pat is the first person. Pat, what was the first thing amid the sandwich making?

What was the first thing that happened? So I'm listening to everybody praise me for the sandwiches. Criticizing you for sandwiches, Pat. And I'm sitting here enjoying my own pastrami sandwich and thinking how how wonderful that pastrami tastes in my mouth and i hear off to my right some panting some deep you know guttural breathing can you can you mimic it uh it sounded a lot like a dog panting at first like from far away like and just kept getting a little louder a little little uh deeper and scarier sounding sounded angry too and at first it seemed fake because i was like no no way this is happening there's no

way when a bear attacks you he actually makes such a nasty yeah well and there's there's no way like a bear is actually gonna like run up and attack us right now that's just that's just crazy because we're only sitting under 300 pounds of hanging i mean it could happen but you never expect that to actually happen to you yeah i'm tracking and uh and i mean it was something i was like prepared for on this trip you know we knew there was gonna be big bears out there we knew there's potential but you never actually expect to be like straight up attacked by a brown bear and so i'm sitting there i hear these noises and it just like it's like okay this is happening i i think i was the first person to say something like oh my god what's that noise and then all of a sudden within two seconds there's a bear on top of us

all right man i hate to do this to you I know that you are on the edge of your seat waiting to hear what happens when the brown bear that we've been alluding to enters this story. It is worth your wait. What I'm doing to you right now is awful. It's terrible. If a man did this to me, I would punch him. But I'm doing it to you. You're going to have to tune in

next week on the Me Either podcast to hear the final culmination, the resolution of the Afognac Island brown bear attack charge

mayhem story now it's more like with a little bit of with a little bit of panting and then sometimes not this time but sometimes you also get this little treat. Right. We didn't get that this time. No. Tune in next week. you you hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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