The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 110: Up North

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

La Crosse, WI- Steven Rinella talks with Doug Duren, the writer Pat Durkin, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: the thievin' Mississippi River; sous vide cooking; the disappearance of traditional hunting camps; killing 1.4 deer per second during Wisconsin's deer season; the hunt-purity scale; the pain-in-the-ass nature of weddings and birthdays that fall during hunting season; the misadventures of Zebulon Pike; and more. You can now listen to ad-free episodes of the MeatEater Podcast on Stitcher Premium. Your subscription allows you to stream and download ad-free episodes and gets you early access to new releases of the MeatEater Podcast. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We are the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Alright, coming at you, you know, a little bit bug-bitten because I just got back from Mexico and got bit by three different kinds of things.

Those little sand fleas, not the kind you use for fishing bait. Not little ghost crabs, which some people call sand fleas. Bit by those, bit by regular old mosquitoes, and also bit by no-see-ums. At dusk, sons of bitches come for you. I wouldn't have been prepared. Dude, I brought down 40% DEET. I'd put it on my kids' legs, and as soon as they went to bed,

I'd give them a shower because I'm a little bit paranoid about DEET. Rightfully so, since it'll warp your phone, as I found. If you spill this insect repellent on your phone, it'll warp your phone. So imagine what it does to your parts you know your skin cells yeah uh so yeah coming at you partially bug bitten and definitely from the banks of the

mississippi there's a writer that he there's a writer named ben metcalf i don't know if he writes anymore or not he used to he used to write pieces for harperism was also was an editor somewhere no yeah i can't remember who he worked for but he wrote and some of his work would be collected at harper's and this guy ben metcalf wrote a piece called american heartworm and it was about the mississippi so as much as twain as much as mark twain would celebrate the mississippi ben mccaff uh loathed the mississippi river one of his for a lot of reasons one that he feels that any self-respecting river should be able to handle some amount of water without spilling out of its banks and he didn't like it for that

reason another thing is he feels that it's also the mississippi is a con man um and is and stole it like stole its place in the american lexicon because by any reasonable measure, by any understanding of hydrology, the Mississippi isn't the Mississippi. The Mississippi is the Missouri. The Missouri is the great continent drainer. It heads in Three Forks, Montana, where it's Three Forks is the confluence of the Madison, Gallatin, and Jefferson. So it's like the secretary of, at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, you had Madison, Secretary of State. That's over my head jefferson and gal look at who they named after those three fellers okay and all all political figures at the

time they all head together they come together three forks and form in missouri and then that thing flows thousands of miles and picks up a little shit in tributary called the Mississippi and thereby changes its name. What all it's doing is just like picking up a minor tributary dwarfed by like not nearly what the Ohio is when it picks it up. It should be called the missouri river who has this little little known tributary called the mississippi this is ben metcalf's argument because of where it empties not where it begins it's because people saw it and didn't really

didn't really until later fully comprehend like what that watershed was that it was one of the great you know if at the confluence, which one is greater? When they come together? The Missouri's carrying more water. And the Missouri's been cranking along for the Mississippi heads like

Lake Itasca. Yeah, north central Minnesota. So how far from here? Not as far away as western Montana. No, not even close. The river's a con man. Yanni wanted to talk about that. This quick little thing that I found on it,

it just says it was named after the president and two of his cabinet members, but it doesn't say. Jefferson was the president. Yeah, but it doesn't. Tommy Jefferson. But it doesn't say what positions they held in the cabinet. It was like treasurer and secretary or something like that.

Easy to find out. So easy to find out. It's staggering that Yanni hasn't found out yet. Yannis, to recap something we were talking about a talking about, you've been messing around with sous vide cooking. You just did some shanks in your sous vide machine. Yeah. Tell me about that. For 48 hours, I cooked them.

At what temperature? 160. That's hot for sous vide. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, it is. On the hotter side i don't think you look i've done two different recipes now so i'm definitely still figuring out and from what i've been reading online i think there's still a lot of figuring out i think one of the the pluses or

you know pitching points of sous vide is that you have this great window that the meat is done and but won't be overdone you might explain to folks what we're talking about of sous vide is that there's a great window that the meat is done but won't be overdone. You mind explaining to folks what we're talking about? Yeah, what sous vide is? I think the bulk of them might know. My brother just last night texted me wondering if I knew what a banh mi sandwich was.

I've been eating those things for a long time. So here's a guy that didn't know a bond. It was actually on a website called chefsteps.com, which is a sous vide recipe website. That's the sous vide machine I have. Oh, really? Yeah. There you go. They have a squirrel bond me recipe made with sous vide squirrel meat. There you go.

Yeah. My bro made bond me with pate that he made from some game livers, deer liver and something else he put in there. I would bet you, there's no way we could find out, but that it might not be the bulk of our listeners would know what sous vide is. I'm guessing. I would take that bet. Okay.

I wouldn't take that bet. You're saying that of the mugs listening right now, less than half are familiar with sous vide. Yeah. Well, I'm just saying that that's a high probability. High enough where I would take the bet. Sure. Break it down.

But sous vide cooking basically- Hold on. Let me do this. Pat, you know what sous vide is? I was just going to say, I don't know. Mr. Dern? Don't look at me, man. I'm learning. So half of this room

um and they actually count as listeners i really don't that's true it's good um but you basically there's a it's cooking in water and so that you're cooking meat in water actually you cook anything there's vegetable recipes there's fish recipes egg recipes uh but so that you don't uh you know basically boil your meat and get it all soggy you put it into a sealed plastic bag now you can just use a regular old ziploc or if you have a vacuum sealer, you can go that route. The way that the whole system is set up is usually it's used like a large stock pot, maybe a two or three gallon stock pot. And then there's a machine that looks like a, I don't know, it's wand shaped, I guess. And basically half of it plunges down into the water and it regulates the temperature of the water.

And I don't know what the lowest and highest settings are, but you basically just set that, and it keeps it at a perfect temp that you want to keep it at for however long you want to do it. Yeah, like if you're cooking, like let's say you're cooking a roast, and you want to pull the roast for rare, you want to pull your venison roast.

Let's say you're like, I like to pull it at 130 or 125. Well, the oven's 400 degrees. So this thing's climbing, climbing, climbing to eventually reach that and you're intercepting it at that point where you want to nab it out.

Here, you set the water at the final temperature. Yeah, add to the complication of that setup is that you put it you set the water at that final temperature yeah add to the complication of that setup is that you pull it at one temp knowing that it's going to continue to rise to your goal temperature because the outer heat is going to continue to penetrate into the inside right so this you just set it at what you want to end up at exactly so if you're cooking if you know that you like your salmon say at temp, you just set your water bath at that temp, drop in your bag. Yeah.

So, I mean, if you think about it, like if you set it at 160, the meat never gets above 160. Yeah. But what does happen is that there is a breaking down of, you know, proteins, obviously, because I cooked my shanks for 48 hours. 48 hours. 48 hours. That's the thing. But again, the recipe was like 24 to 48. It's like we could have eaten it Saturday night.

Instead, we ate it Sunday night. It's perfect on Tuesday and perfect on Wednesday. Because it's just keeping it at that temperature that whole time. It's holding it at a safe temperature. The temperature's not rising, which I think when you're going for a medium-rare steak is important. But in this case of these shanks, it's obviously continuing to break it down, which is, I whatever, 130 degrees after six hours is going to be different than 130 degrees after 10 hours.

Oh, yeah. I kind of exaggerate about done on Tuesday and done on Wednesday. Same temperature on Tuesday, same temperature on Wednesday, but it has the effect of you can screw it up. You can screw it up. I don't know exactly how yet. I'll know more. I'm going to keep messing around with it but uh well i know how like things that i've screwed up is i've found

that when it comes to cooking wild game for me personally um i don't like i don't like to use the sous vide for like lean roasts that don't have a lot of connective tissue on them such as like if you were to take a whitetail deer and take the sirloin or round roast off the back leg i can get a better effect i can get a better product in my oven that i can get with my sous vide because it gives it to my taste it gives it a sort of pastiness where i think it really shines is when it comes down to cooking things it's it's an easy pretty fail-safe way to cook cuts that are best cooked slow cook strategy i get you like i've taken one of one of the things i made that i liked most with suvi was i took one time a javelina front leg of a javelina which is a rascally little

a rascally little hunk of meat just sounds tough yes yeah you can pull those strands out and floss your teeth with them okay but in that thing i think i gave it like 36 hours um and then it just is like you could just pick it apart with your fingers and it's silky and beautiful yeah well i just kind of tossed those picked all that meat kind of tossed them with oil and then stuck them under a broiler for a minute because the thing with sous vide cooking is you're oftentimes getting it just right but what you get used to and i remember one time a chef like i'm reading about the chef who's wanted to quit being a chef and he says well i just got bored with it um making things soft on the inside and crispy on the outside it just got old to me but like when you do a roast in your oven like one of the nice things about it is you get that like

that like finished outside yeah you know like crispy browned outside and you cut in it and lo and behold there's like this magical red middle and just like the whole thing together all the parts are bigger than any individual part and that texture that meat of a nice roast like that the texture of the meat is a part of it. And if the other way of cooking is breaking that down, then I see where you're. Yeah, because you wind up with the whole beauty of it, like the crispy outside, the red inside. It's like it's all nice together. Yeah. So a part of sous vide cooking, like most sous vide preparations, you'll find that you're going to get it perfect and then sear it after the fact.

Whereas if I'm cooking a roast in my oven i sear it and finish in my oven here you're often like a lot if you look at the sous vide a lot of preparations you're starting it you get it all done it's ready to go then you take that thing out and sear it or people even finish them with like a torch apparatus yeah right like you might like people to do like sous vide scallops and then take a torch and sear the scallop with a torch yeah and really control that then you know so it's real sciencey cooking but as good as it is for some stuff i don't think it's like perfect it's not like perfect for everything no i don't think all of a sudden i'm just going to start having just get rid of your oven i have five buckets in the kitchen, and one says Monday and then Tuesday, Wednesday.

But I'll tell you what's cool, though, is you could take a couple – let's say because you did shanks, right? How did they turn out? Great. So I did a cicadier shank, the whole shank in a bag. It had a whitetail sh shank and then i had one bag i think they had three or four of those again do you know the name of that little it's like a shank but you know it's not connected to the bone it's connected to that yeah the big tunnel the name of

it that goes up on the hind leg you kind of get that big shank like piece right it has all that same sinew and collagen and stuff running through it and um the ones on the bone were just delightful this silky smooth wonderful flavor um and no dryness at all about them the the antelope little football tendon chunks i just described um just still a touch of dryness and it wasn't the sous vide's fault. It's just the cut of the meat. It just didn't have as much fat, connective tissue, whatever it is as the shanks that were on the bone.

That's the thing with all forms of cooking is not all hunks of meat are made equal. No. If you took some sirloin meat and went and did a shank preparation for it, it's going to be miserable. But there's something about those pieces that have all that collagen or stuff that breaks connective tissue, silver skin, tendons that break down into that just like silky beautiness.

I love it. Well, to say the nice thing about it is if, let's say you're having some folks over for dinner, you could bag out servings, stick them in that thing, and you don't know you're eating at 5 o'clock or 8 o'clock, right? Yeah. You could bag out servings serving stick them in that thing the day a day and a half before two days before a day before whatever for your particular

preparation knowing that at the second you want to reach in there and cut those bags open it's all ready but you're not just you're not just like putting you know you're putting all the ingredients in there. You can. Of the meal. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. If you're doing shanks, you're putting all the osso bucco, all the things that would traditionally go into osso bucco,

in that bag and sealing that bag up and putting them in there. What I'd like to mess around with a little bit is like I was thinking about maybe putting a couple sprigs of thyme in there, a sprig of rosemary, some butter. I'm wondering if it'll impart that flavor. Oh, yeah. I pack that bag full of good things to eat, even when doing something like the javelina shank. For me, though, cooking those loin and loin and like quality roasts yeah it's like i get such what i

get out of my oven cannot be beat yeah yeah so for you it's more of a replacement for basically braising technique it's a nice that's a nice fail safe time friendly it takes a lot of time to do it but it's good preparation. And when you said that you're putting all kinds of good, so you're like putting vegetables and all kinds of things in with it? Sure, you can, knowing that the vegetables are going to be mushy. Because even then, everything

has its own cooking time. It's becoming such a popular thing now that there's no short, you can go find recipes for anything. If you go buy a sous videv device it's going to come with a book you realize every damn thing you've ever eaten now one thing uh um steve uh kendra he's he's been doing salmon like i gave him some salmon from the fish shack he He's doing salmon in his sous vide and loving it. Really? That dude's a sous vide fool now.

He knows about it. The timing different on that? I'm calling Steve. He damn sure knows about it. He likes it. I sent him some vacuum bags, and he was more fired up about sous vide-ing with him than he was about freezing them. Huh. and them huh speaking of steve i was also telling you that i made his uh fennel sausage recipe um which it's just it's it's so good it might be so good because it is so simple but literally all

it is is fat salt pepper and fennel well meat yeah so you got your buck yeah you got your buck meat then you cut some fat in yeah a lot of fat it's his recipe was 50 50 that's a bit much and i had the sausage it's phenomenal but i think it's like yeah but i wanted the first time i want to do it i want to follow the recipe because i feel like you should and then you can tweak it because you just never know otherwise so next time i probably will cut it back to 40, maybe even 30. Yeah. And my thinking, it goes beyond what tastes good. 50-50, at some point it ceases to be a wild game dish.

That's true. At some point it becomes, it's like a hybrid. It's all a hybrid. Like my brother used to be like a real pierce, and he wouldn't put any domestic fat in his game meat. He would just, if he was making burgers, he'd crack an egg in there so he's one danny he'd crack an egg in there so he could make a hole together in a patty yeah that's extreme i think 50 is extreme i find my personal comfort zone in the 10 to 20% fat. Yeah.

But I feel like to me, sausage, it can't be sausage if it's not like greasy enough. There's got to be some grease left in the pan because otherwise I feel like you're just eating this like thing that kind of tastes like sausage because the flavor is there, but something is just not sausage-like because you've taken too much fat out. Okay, then let's come up with a different word for it. Meat sticks. No, that's not right. I get what you're saying.

Sausage-flavored dry meat. Ground, dry, ground meat. Sausage-flavored dry meat. I'm cool with that. But his sausages were good. But yeah back to it and the recipe came out wonderful i mean it's just so simple fennel i mean it's all you're like tasting and salt pepper and it's wonderful does he toast his fennel first i don't know if he the recipe didn't call for it that's a good trick man when you're making sausage like whatever like sweet Italian, any kind of sausage, you're putting fennel in there.

Take all your seeds and toast them. Right. And what does that do? Smells your whole house up like fennel. Fennel? Smells good, man. I don't know if it then goes away, but it's just really pleasing. If you toast them and you get them all warm, like coriander, fennel, whatever, you put

them in a pan over a burn just a dry pan over burner and kind of shake it and they'll kind of let off like a like an oil yeah and they'll get very fragrant then you throw those but if they're still warm you throw those in your coffee grinder if you're doing like if you're like pulverizing a little bit then you really got something that smells nice i think it's got to add to the flavor because there's a lot of dishes like when you're cooking indian food a lot of of times you've sauteed your onions and maybe a couple of the other things that you're sauteing like that in the oil that might take five or ten minutes.

And before you add, let's just say if it's curry, before you add the coconut milk and your carrots and peas and chicken or whatever it might be, when you throw the spices in, you let them kind of cook and toast in that pan for a couple minutes to you know release extra flavor and then you add in the rest of the ingredients so i'm sure it works the same for that fennel yeah the next thing i'm going to sous vide and this is the last we'll talk about it i still have two big ass yellow eye fillets that i've been eyeballing in my freezer and i want to get to them

pretty quick they last they last a lot longer in salmon in the freezer because they're not that fatty but i'm gonna do those i'm gonna do those guys with my sous vide machine i used to have a giant sous vide machine that came with like what looked like you could wash a child in the tub but i gave it to my buddy pooter because now I got that smaller one. Pat, Durkin, Doug Duren, the cousins. Durkin and Duren. The Durkin and Duren cousins.

Pat, okay. It doesn't really matter what you say because it's not going to change my mind. Who has, tell me about your opinions on, your findings on wound loss. I was going to say,

before I even said what you said, I was going to say, no matter what I say right now, I probably won't change your mind. Well, you were going to preface it. Yeah, I was going to be my preface. I'll start by saying one article I've always liked

the way I handled it was I broke it down one time in our Wisconsin gun season to show that our peak deer season was the year 2000, where we killed like over 400,000 deer. In Wisconsin. In Wisconsin.

And we basically, if I broke it down to show that, we were killing about 1.4 deer per second during that nine-day gun season. You break it over the course of a nine-day season. And then I started calculating, I started looking into it, to kill 1.4 deer a second. Hold on a minute. So, all right. Did you ever figure it out like on opening day?

No. 100%. I actually did that, but I don't have that at the tip of my tongue. No, I actually did break it down by opening weekend and then opening day and then the rest of the season. I had this whole article on this whole topic. So real quick, on opening day, of the 400,000 that got killed in the season,

can you guess how many got killed on opening weekend? Yeah, typically opening weekend, I think they figure close to 65, 70% gets killed opening weekend. Then it just kind of goes down, peaks back up around Thanksgiving because we always have our season around, starts the weekend before Thanksgiving, that ends the Sunday after Thanksgiving. How big was the deer herd this year, the year you're talking about? That was like an all-time record number.

So I think they calculated 1.5 million deer or so, 1.6 million deer, they estimated in that population. And they were able to pull a harvest of 400,000 out of it. Yeah, it was even more than 400,000. And that was at the time regarded as like wildly too many deer. Oh, yeah. I mean, well, I think realistic people thought that was too many deer. We had too many deer. Too many deer on the ground, not getting killed, but too many deer alive but then you go into um what hunters want though and there's a

lot of hunters that year that was a pretty mediocre to average season you know so you always get those arguments you people are never happy never happy as i said so the last time we talked deer make people stupid just just the way it is um but to continue my my discussion though is i um i got curious about that for shooting that many deer you know deer per second and i think last season was is 0.62 deer per second the last gun season 2017 2017 was 0.62 deer so 0.6 deer per second. Right. And in 2000, it was? More than double that.

Okay. Averaged out over the course of nine days. Averaged over the course, yeah. During hunting hours. I just was doing some math there. Right. I was like, wait a minute. Exactly.

Oh, yeah, you got to. Yeah, I broke it down by hours of shooting light, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. I see it. Okay. And then what was fun then was I took those kind of numbers and started digging into the research I could find on how many shots get fired for each deer killed.

And there actually is some research around Wisconsin from the 70s, and there's research from South Carolina in 1999, that time period. Ontario did this one time. But basically, Wisconsin back in the 1970s, and some of the research they did, it was averaging between 3.5 and 7 shots per deer taken was about what was coming at. What?

Yeah. This is in one area. This is one of these qualifiers where I'll never convince you because most studies are taking place in controlled settings because you can't just go out in the landscape with all the variables and get anything interesting. And so anyway, so you had this variability because they had different kind of seasons. They set up one season where it was antlers only. So the guy had to be more careful when you shot that you weren't shooting a buck so that that kind of

cuts down how many how many shots are being fired then if you have a wide open season where anything's legal they were shooting a lot they shot like almost twice as many shots in those kind of seasons but then i looked at um i found this this research from south car, looked into that, and they were shooting only 1.2 times for each deer they killed. And those guys, though, were sitting up in basically a shooting house, ready for rest, nice setups where they're touching out the shots, like a real precision-type shooting. And then you had other scenarios. So none of these things are all equal.

I'm getting that here. So the South Carolinians, when they looked at this, they were shooting not much. Not much. 1.2 shots per deer. But who was super high again? Wisconsin. Man, you guys. Yeah.

It was in the 70s. Of course, too. Well, that's not what Doug brings up, though. Fair point. It's a fair point because plus they're hunting an area where guys couldn't go in, set up tripod stands that couldn't hang all these different things. A lot of it's probably being shot off the ground offhand. And so the conditions weren't like South Carolina had.

Yeah, it's probably more like... Shitty scopes. The way us old guys used to hunt. I took a lot more shots when I was younger. So what I did, though, is I looked at all these different variables and thought, really, this ranged from 1.2 deer per shot to over seven. Seven shots per deer. Yeah.

I just can't understand it. I'm not calling you a liar. I just don't understand it. Where a lot of that comes from is that you're shooting lever actions pump shots shotguns that kind of stuff some automatics and and they're showing to that once a guy um missed a shot well he had follow-up shots and like half the guys shooting that first shot were missing the shot so right and then the dude takes off and bang bang bang all of a sudden there's lead in the air so you can see he does that three times or he does that two times and then gets a deer fine yeah

and you think well i've been in public hunting grounds up the river here in um winona minnesota back in the early 90s and i remember thinking every time it sounded like one of those shotguns went off because it was a shotgun-only area, it sounded like they were shooting all five shots out of that semi-automatic shotgun or pump shotgun. It was constant. And so I guess I'm not that shocked by hearing that seven was the average in this one particular. It was one hunt that just went on like that. Yeah, if you go read Yanni's buddy, Jack O'Connor.

I call him Yanni O'Connor.nor jack o'connor all those guys did was shoot yeah they'd crawl up on a herd of something and it'd be that the you know 20 rounds and then they'd go up and like analyze the performance first shot caught it you know low across the chin. Second shot, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth whiffed them. My seventh shot really anchored it down. So, sure. Yeah, so what I did, though, is I averaged them. I thought, well, seven is obviously throw that one out. That's the other extreme.

But average result, my average came up to 3.45 shots per second. well seven is obviously throw that one out one's you know that's the other extreme but average is out and you came up my average came up to 3.45 shots per second i mean per per deer and so then i started calculating that i thought well last gun season wisconsin if you use 3.5 3.5 3.45 shots per deer last year in wisconsin we were shot close to 800 000 rounds to get to get that number of deer we brought brought in last last fall and during that season that i talked about our record season it was up in uh you know i think a million and a half shots and well then i went and i thought i looked at the top 10 deer states in our country in that year 2000 and i came up to it was like 12 and a half million rounds if you're using that as your average

for being fired so then so i'm working my way back to your discussion here you and i have it's just too staggering for me though well it's huge and so when when we get in these discussions about wounding i've always maintained that in my own experience it's it's tougher when i look at every deer i've killed i've killed over a hundred of them i think when i've shot the ones the rifle i didn't didn't always know if i got them or not by the by the way the deer responded where i thought most deer shot the bull i've always known if i hit them or not by the way the deer responded. Where I thought, most deer I shot with a bow, I've always known if I hit them or not. I mean, I don't think I've ever been shocked, you know,

that I missed one or I hit one that I thought I missed, that kind of thing. That's a good point. Yeah, gun hunting. Yeah, bow hunting, you don't, yeah, bow hunting, you don't usually like can't tell if you. Yeah. You typically know. You might shoot and then not be clear on the quality of the oh that's that's common yeah i mean

you talk that's almost not not quite the norm but it's pretty it's typical not to be a little like man i don't know it looked like it might be a little far back or a little high oh when you talk to guys that track deer with with with dogs and they ask the guy where'd you hit this deer and a typical bow hunter would say, right here. Right in the pocket. Right in the pocket, right behind the shoulder. And they find the deer,

and it's got, you know, in the hams, you know, who knows where, you know? Yeah. So I've always thought that if you were to really get some research on this, what research we have, and find out what the percentages are

for bull hunting versus gun hunting i'm i'm pretty well convinced that it's about equal i mean really yeah it's it's in because we but again what what the the you know i pull coals on my argument because all of those studies have been basically done under pretty controlled situations. Bow hunting, the ones they've been able to study are typically controlled situations. It's like the one that's famous for the initial one that we often refer to, if it up here at Camp Ripley, a couple hundred miles from here in Minnesota. And there they had their initial wounding percentage of deer wounded was, I think, around 28%, 25% right in that range. But then they figured that they realized, well, just because a deer is wounded

doesn't mean it's dead. It doesn't mean it's not going to be recovered. And sure enough, they found that in that situation, there's a lot of hunters in that camp. And these are weekend hunts, I should have said, too. It's strictly a two-day hunt, then it's done. So it's a real controlled situation. What they found was that they're averaged over four,

I think it's like four different hunts they studied. Only 13% of those deer were never recovered, of those deer that were shot and hit in some location. Only 13 13 on average weren't recovered what does recovered mean taken home taken home you know the guy dragged that deer out of the off the off the camp's property now um then there's also inedible condition yeah yeah yeah because you know at sunday at at this is a saturday sunday hunt that they did at camp Ripley.

Sunday afternoon, the army basically throws you out. You can't go back and look for your deer. If you don't have it, tough luck. You know, so that was the unrecovered deer was 13%. And this was which weapon? Bow and arrow. Bow and arrow. And when was that?

That was back in the early 90s. And so that's one study then other studies they've done one was out in connecticut in that suburban area one was over in iowa in a suburban area then there's like a naval weapon station out in maryland did one well not too long ago they wrapped it up about 10 years ago and theirs was in one of maryland i think their wounding rate was um i think 18 percent where they these were deer that were hit and not recovered now that one in connecticut was about i think 14 13 14 and the one in iowa suburbs was about 13 14 so and then then the one with now now switching to rifle.

Now, how many of these rely on self-reporting? Well, they all rely on self-reporting. That's what, okay. Yeah. That's why earlier when I said that no matter what you say, I won't. Right. Because I know that relies on self-reporting. Yeah.

But what they find too is self-reporting typically is that if you get the people right on the spot when they come in most of these guys like in these in these suburban hunts these are guys that um i'm pretty sure the one in well i know the one in connecticut was a shooting test he had to pass a shooting test of bow and arrow to even be allowed to hunt and i think the one in iowa had that kind of speculation so above average archers then well yeah that's and then, that's another factor that these are people who are dead serious bull hunters who know that taking long shots is used to increase the risk. But what I found interesting looking at that South Carolina study with a rifle, these were dead serious riflemen. And these guys, they're sitting there with basically little tripods in their shooting setup.

They're typically shooting 150 yards and 125 yards. And they found a real split. Once you start going beyond 125 yards, even these guys were really good. They started hitting more deer and not knowing if they hit them, losing them, that kind of thing. But every shot taken, every deer fired at in that study they had dogs they'd go out there and look around and in that study that they ended up finding out that um they figured the wounding was about fit was about 15 to 20 percent wounding loss even with that these really good shots shooting controlled settings not taking these long flyers they were

still you know had a 15 to 20% wounding loss. And a lot of those deer they'd never would have found if not for the dogs going out there and finding evidence of a hit that they thought they missed. You know, because, you know, everyone here has been in situations where you're fired a shot 150 yards across a field or whatever. You walk over and you look around, look around, look around,

you can't find any sign. And a lot of people give up, not looking any further there's no snow cover in many cases and that's the other factor that all these moving parts is what makes a wounding loss so hard to ever really pin down for sure is that you have so many different conditions so many different ways that things can go wrong that it's hard to really quantify this stuff. But what we have been able to quantify really shows pretty strikingly similar results. So that's why I say I would have a hard time being convinced that bull is wounding any more on a percentage basis than rifles. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join 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 OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the to the OnX Club, y'all. Handful of thoughts. Yep, go ahead. In keeping with

today's political atmosphere, I'm just going to ignore the data. Okay. And just go with what I know is I'm just gonna go what i know is right um but i had yeah i okay a couple things one is this isn't this is not to me this is not a moral argument okay like to me the um i think each person strives to well damn sure better strive to be as effective and humane and as efficient as possible um and i think that when you go into the woods, no matter how high your skill set and how good your intentions, there's always the chance that something can go wrong.

And it will if you stick at it long enough. And you'll hit something that you don't find. It just happens. Totally agree. One is more or less a fact. One method of hunting, we could even break out crossbows and break out trad archery and break out conventional archery tackle and break out firearms. No matter how much you break it down and start comparing them, to me, you're not trying to find a value judgment. You're not looking for who's right, who's correct, and who's incorrect, who's right, and who's wrong. I'm not chasing after that. So it makes the discussion, yeah, it's almost an academic subject, I think.

But it can inform things. I am generally, that's one thought. Another thought is I'm generally leery of just anecdotal stuff. But in a case like this, I have so much anecdotal evidence gathered over such a long period of time where I'm able to rule out the inherent errors of self-reporting or just from experiences and the experiences of people who i'm very close with and i understand their skill sets um i you haven't changed my opinion i feel that if you take something like like you take something like elk okay take something like elk i think that there is a much higher rate of wound loss and this is informed by personal opinion as well as opinion

of many other people there's a much higher rate of wound loss on elk with archery equipment than there is the firearm equipment it's like i'm just i know i just know as bad as that sounds well and i'm not telling you what to do with that i'm not telling anybody what to do with that piece of information but it's a thing it's like a debate that comes up all the time but here's the thing go ahead but part number three this and then it's yours again part number three is we don't know the mortality question. Okay. Right. I one time found, I was out on a backpack a trip. Well, llama backpacking, you know, backpacking with llama trip in the summertime and the Idaho panhandle. And I lost my spoon and found an elk carcass or elk skeleton and was trying to figure out what bone would be most suitable to craft a new spoon out of that I could reach into a freeze dry bag with. And I started looking at the thoracic process on the vertebra.

And I thought, damn, that looks like a great spoon. So I picked up one of the vertebra to be like the one that had the longest thoracic process. So the one that's kind of like above the animal's hump and lo and behold embedded within the bone the bone entirely healed around it is a muzzy broadhead their slogan is bad to the bone i put pictures of this up on we'll put a picture up in the show notes but so here's this thing growing around it. Now the guy that shot that arrow, maybe would,

would probably be surprised to learn that, that thing took the hit. Somehow the arrow shaft unthreaded because it was just a naked broadhead, no piece of shaft on it, unthreaded because it was just a naked broadhead, no piece of shaft on it, unthreaded. The elk healed around the broadhead. And I know that died in the winter because it died with dropped antlers. So however long it takes to completely encase a broadhead and calcified bone on your vertebra, that guy might think, oh, he might be all depressed still

about that bull he killed and couldn't find when it wasn't dead. So that's the other thing is, when we talk about wound loss, we're just saying like you didn't find it. But what we don't know is what's lethal and what's not lethal. So that matters to me.

Mm-hmm. But what you just the story just told isn't that a pro bowl pro bowl if you take a pro and con no i don't look at it as either i'm just saying what i'm saying is in sussing out the answer which i'm interested what i was trying to build up there one is one nothing you say is gonna change my mind that was point one two it doesn't really matter i except for just it's good i just like to know stuff yeah i'm not gonna like go and make like right like well if i was like ruler of the world and i had all the answers in front of me i wouldn't like go and make a decision around it except for except for in cases like for instance when you're there's some bear units in alaska where when you wound a bear you not your tag

that kind of thing i'm generally in favor of i'm open to that and in favor of that in places you wound the animal you're not your tag but that leads again into point three because that's under the assumption that you've removed an animal and what we don't know in this is it's hard to tell it's hard to tell it's hard to study the survival rates so you fire an arrow whack you get a hit you trail the blood there's no blood you start cutting circles you come back the next day cut a million circles can't find blood your buddy can't find blood he brings out his fail-safe dog the dog can't find anything um is it dead or not so that was that was the part three is like you still don't know even when you know right and the

thing i was gonna say is that i fully agree with you on the idea that this is not a moral discussion i i've always the other thing i should have said too i could have prefaced it with is that we're the only predator with a conscience yeah you know we're the only predator that tries to make a science out of how we go about this stuff we really try to figure out what's the best freaking way to kill that deer every damn time, you know, down dead. And because you think, well, when a hawk hits a rabbit, I've been on hawk hunts and it's pretty fascinating. They're pretty good, but they have wounding loss.

Predators have wounding loss. So I will never get into this right or wrong discussion. I think that to me is bullshit. It's part of the equation. It's just, I think think hunting is we're the only ones that worry about it as humans so but one of the things i'll say more i think real quick and then let doug say something because doug's raising doug's waiting to go here um the thing i'd say about about the story with the arrow wound, one thing that I think we can say from some of the research too is that a deer that's wounded with a bow and arrow is much more likely to survive the wound and go on.

And it might not be, it's not nice, it's not pleasant, I'm sure, to carry a broadhead around in your spinal column or in your shoulder blade or in leg bones. Jim Bridger did it. Yeah, but humans have done it too. broadhead around in your spinal column or in your shoulder blade or leg bone jim bridger did it yeah i mean but humans have done it too and so i was saying jim bridger carried a initial carried a arrowhead around on his back i think about your dad your dad walked around how many years with pellets in his 13 shotgun pellets in his foot yeah so it happens and it's i'm not excusing it

but i'm saying this this stuff happens and another story i remember um from a hunt on doug's place first time you and i met was um tyson having a bad shot on a deer and it was a shot that if you made that shot with a bow and arrow that deer would have been healed up in probably a couple days and gone on and never looked back. Whereas it was a high hit in the back and the meat of the back. And I remember there was hair everywhere on the impact area. And Steve. Never a good sign. Yeah, never a good sign.

And Steve went down, went after it and caught up with it and finished it off. Ran it down in the woods, as I recall. And so I think if you look at it that way, one of the things that came out of that naval station, naval weapon station study with bow and arrow was that they figured that the deer that they knew weren't recovered, that they knew they were wounded but not recovered, they figured about 6% of those went on to have normal lives and just continued on with their— What percent? 6%.

6% of the deer that they could not recover, they knew were hit, but not recovered. And then they compared that with the deer that were hit by motor vehicles on that base, and that was more like an 11% died, whereas only 6% of the bow and arrow ones died. Oh, hold on a minute. Or did I reverse that?

Go ahead. 6%? I think I might have gotten it reversed. You got it reversed. I think I reversed. Basically, deer are more likely to die when they're hit by a car than they were by a bow and arrow once they're out on their own moving around. It was only like 6% of the ones that were hit by a bow and arrow died and 11% hit by cars died.

Yeah. Yeah, so I think I got it right now. Of the ones that were hit but not recovered. Right, of the ones hit. There's still ones that were probably, definitely ones that were hit, not recovered and died from the wound, but that happens too. Doug, what were you raising your hand about? Man, there's so many things.

First one is, well, we know guns kill is a more effective way of killing deer than bows are. Maybe not on, well, yeah, on an individual basis because we kill way more deer in a much shorter time. Way more people doing it. Yeah, more people doing it in greater range and more shots. Well, I know you're right about deer going on with arrows in them because over the years, I've killed at least a half a dozen with a rifle that are carrying a that have got a wound from a bow or have a arrow in them or whatever and those were I guess those were the there was a another point but I don't remember what it was now because you went off on another thing that was trailing no yeah well of course it was your fault uh oh i know what it was it's interesting to me

uh the comparison one of the things about bows and you're talking about vertical bows i think because one of the arguments now that i'm hearing against crossbows from some vertical bow people is oh these guys are taking shots that they shouldn't take, and they're wounding deer, and it's sort of like the opposite argument of some gun hunters. And vertical bows, you know, wounding and that sort of thing. So it's just interesting how all these things, to me, you know, meld together, and then you make your own choices on it. Is that crossbow lingo now, to say vertical bows?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Cross, vertical, sure. Because in Wisconsin, we keep fighting about it, so they kind of find a way to distinguish the two.

Well, I'd say bows and crossbows. Vertical bows. Come on. Well, crossbow, vertical bow. And it's a thing right now. I just feel that that word came from the crossbow vertical bow and and it's a it's a thing i just feel that that word came from the crossbow community it didn't come from the bow community no it's from a well i yeah i don't know either but it just it is it's important to clarify because otherwise

yeah a bow a bow right but a bow versus a cross i mean a crossbow is a bow well that's not good on that. Yeah. See that for a different podcast. Yeah, and the thing I'd say there too, though, in this naval weapons station research, they looked at crossbows too. Oh, they did? And it wasn't, I think they actually,

they came out a little bit better on that. And one of the more fascinating parts of that study was that the expandable broadheads actually performed better than the standard injection or where you put your blades in like a fixed blade. Well, they're not totally fixed blade because fixed blade in my mind is still the ones you sharpen yourself. They're replaceable blades. Yeah, replaceable blades. I still like replaceable blades just because I don't like the questioning and the worrying about,

will that thing open the way it's supposed to? But in a study they did in Maryland, those actually came out better for more effective overall. Expandables. Expandables did. And I think that's one of the things, I know that's one of the things they say about shooting the crossbow, is to use an expandable blade. Yeah, and then you get in there to make sure they don't fly open

when they get shot down in the bow because it's such an explosion coming out of those things compared to a regular bow. Just the air resistance. Well, plus it's such a hard impact coming out of that. Those are 165 pound draw weights.

They're shooting those arrows out. But see, like, getting back to the elk point of view, that's where you and I still want to agree, because I think, well, I've seen guys out in the West, it's real flyers on elk, you know, long, hellish long ways. Yeah. And I think... You're starting to change my mind damn if those guys know if they they're hitting these big these these are big animals and they can god they

can take a pounding and not even show it you know and but you know i like the fact that at least in our modern era of hunting that we're talking about these things and trying to figure out what's what's ethical what's an ethical shot. And one of the things I had fun with when I was at Deer Enduring Magazine back in the 90s, we actually did a poll on this trying to figure out from our readers, what's an effective range for the bow and arrow in your mind? What do you feel comfortable shooting at? And the thing that was always interesting was that everyone's just perfectly conscientious

ethical hunter when that deer is at less than 40 yards the bow and arrow and less than let's say 200 yards of the rifle she just started putting the big antlers on them the leads in the air the arrows totally man i have the same exact problem yeah and i so i always think well you know i brought a couple quotes here that where we like to think we're making progress in our approach on shot selection. And, you know, Steve will probably know this one. Who wrote this? It is a good rule always to try to get as near the game as possible. At the same time, I am a great believer in powder burning, and if I

cannot get near, I will generally try a shot anyhow if there's any chance of the rifle carrying it to it. Yanni O'Connor. Anyone want to guess? Elder Leopold. Close, but not. I got that one too.

Do you know about him? That's my next quote. Who would be left? I don't one, too. Do you know about him? That's my next quote. Okay. Yanni. Who would be left? I don't know. Elmer Keith. Teddy Roosevelt. Ah, Teddy Roosevelt.

Big believer in powder burning. Shoot to get hot, shoot to stay hot. Oh, Teddy. He was from that era of just getting the lead out. Yeah, and the idea that, well, if you don't shoot, you certainly won't get it. Hornaday, too. Yeah. When you read about Hornaday's expeditions, when he was doing museum collecting,

he's museum collecting, but they would just kind of get where they're in the ballpark and everybody just starts a-cracking. Yeah. There's something to be said, I think, right now in this conversation about the sake of being of getting close or just being 100 on your shot not because of the ethics

but because you want to be efficient and just be a good hunter and even though there's like say giant antlers right but if you're a poor hunter that's i think when you're like i'm gonna let some lead fly because this is my one opportunity. I think if you've achieved a certain level of hunting prowess, you will say it is too far. Either I will get closer now so that I know 100% when I shoot, I'm going to kill that thing, or I will let it walk, and I will return tomorrow and change my position, my tactics,

or whatever to get closer you know what i mean i think and there's a certain point where hunters you know don't just let lead fly because you know whatever ethics out the window like you said we're the only ones that think about that if you're just trying to be like the best hunter out there at some point you you're just gonna say no i to be successful i can't shoot right now. Yeah, I think there's an element of ethics. There's an element of aesthetics. There's an element of pragmatism. Being that I would like, yeah,

I like to think that it bothers most people that you would cripple something up and not find it, so you'd want to be eliminating that um any self-respecting person right wants to be good at what they do and they put their mind to something and become good at it a strong marker of you not being good at it is that you wound stuff and it runs off when you're supposed to be killing it and then pragmatism is like you want to get the thing so if you're looking at man i could take a poke at 500 yards my rifle i don't know if i'll get it or not um i'm gonna get to where i know i'm gonna get this thing and i know damn sure i'm gonna kill it

too but it takes a level of experience to be able to, in that moment, make that decision. To make all those decisions. I think when people let the flyers go, when people just start blouching for no reason, is when they probably can't see their way through to getting closer. Maybe, perhaps. Another quote I wanted to share with you guys. This is from about the same era, a little bit later. One large

whitetail looked at me at 70 yards. He jumped at the flash of my bow. My arrow stuck in the ground on a second jump. If he had stood still, I would have hit him in the neck. This was written in 1927. Aldo Leopold. Aldo Leopold.

70 yards. He took a poke at 100 yards with his bow that's taking a poke too that's like trad archery that's the thing I'm not taking cheap shots at these two guys because I think we had these discussions I know Janice and I have talked about in Doug's backyard

I know they're a guy I know my capabilities I have talked about in Doug's backyard. I know they're a guy. I know my capabilities. I know at 60 yards of bow and arrow, I start falling apart. Some days I'll be out there. I can drop them pretty nice at 60 yards. Next day I can't. So I know that's not for me a realistic range. But I do know guys who can time in and time out, nail 100-yard shots of bow and arrow.

But I still will always say, you're still counting on that deer to be standing there, and assuming you have a wide-open shot, while that arrow arcs, and I don't know what it is on a compound bow today, shooting a 75-pound compound bow, but I do know on the crossbow, and I saw it the other day, where at 100 yards, a typical crossbow has to arc at 92 inches above the sight plane to drop it into 100 yards. So these guys make all these outlandish claims about how accurate those crossbows are. I think, I don't know, I just have a hard time believing most guys using the crossbow

can get those kind of shots to drop in there and learn fairly quickly. That's not realistic. Because I think Steve and I had a little conversation, just a quick question. I don't think Steve got back to me on it. But I get fascinated with elk hunting because I think when I've been elk hunting, I can see where you'd have more wounding loss than what I have gotten used to hunting deer from a tree stand. Because hunting deer from a tree stand, you're typically getting them in their tight quarters. And I think nothing, very few things I've ever killed go down faster than a broadhead through the lungs at 20 yards. I mean, that's just deadly effective.

But I think when I started elk hunting back in 2005 with the bow and arrow, nothing is fixed. You know, you get used to that tree stand situation where you can control your shots. You can control where you're going to shoot. All those kind of things you can start controlling a little bit through discipline. It doesn't happen with elk hunting. You know, it's happening fast. You're on your ground. You're at eye level.

Wind changes. Everything is making changes fast. elk hunting you know it's happening fast you're on your ground you're at eye level the wind changes there's everything this is making changes fast and i realized this is tough shit this is a lot harder than anything i've ever done in the whitetail woods that's where i started thinking i last year i killed uh my first elk from a tree stand and i and i almost felt like cheating because it was so much easier to control that shot than it was when I was on the ground at eye level trying to pick a spot to the brush on an animal that you're waiting for it to come into a spot

where you can stop it quick, get the shot off. What were you set up on? I was on a wallow. Early seasons, like the fourth day of the season is Labor Day weekend national forest national forest yeah yeah and and that's got me thinking though that what time of day did that bull show up uh i think i shot him around six o'clock in the evening five five thirty six o'clock in the evening came into wallow came into wallow by himself yep he just stood there

that's interesting perfectly um not quite broad, but he just turned a little bit, gave me a perfect, you know, right down the pipe, you know, 18 yards. How far were you at 18 yards? Really? And then he jumped up, went up the hill about 40 yards and down. Was that wallow, when he found that wallow, was it muddied up? A little bit, but it was interesting. This is one of the fascinating things I loved about that experience was that

he never actually made it to the wall itself. He stopped maybe 15 yards uphill in this little, just muddy, little bitty seepage type stuff coming up. And he sat with his nose right down that mud. And you could just hear the sucking the water out. There's little bitty

rivulets coming down that mountainside. That's interesting. And it was just fascinating as hell. And then he'd just stand and look around and he's facing the whole time and finally he's turned a little bit gave me the open you know side shot and i but compared to hunting off the ground like i said i almost felt like oh god and then i actually had guys well yeah here's the problem yeah go ahead there is no problem because it might have felt easy, but look at the amount of, I mean, you did a good bit of woodsmanship to get in the situation. You went out, identified an active wallow.

Make no mistake, I do not feel guilty. I mean, I say that, and I say it felt like, oh, geez, that was so easy. But I know damn well it wasn't because that was like 12 years in the making. You know, to get that, where I where i actually fought spot you could actually feel confident putting a tree stand up and go into trouble putting a tree stand up on this area we hunt it's kind of i didn't think about in most cases this is a waste of time you know elk are so unpredictable to move in here and there and here we found one spot your tree stand up oh you, you'll see nothing. It's possible there's no elk within two miles. Yeah.

Three miles. I just find all those kind of discussions of shot selection, how we do setups, all that kind of stuff interesting. And then you get into the thing you're talking about with that bull walking around with that arrow wound. You think, well, was he really

suffering the whole time or not? That thing healed over and how much, I mean, it can't feel good. But then you read some of the research that's done on humans and how humans react to soldiers in battle. And there's some really fascinating research from Anzio, where your dad served, where this doctor was keeping notes on these guys that were wounded. How much pain are you in? And they found a lot of cases that 70% of these guys had just awful wounds, and they barely felt it.

And it wasn't a shock, because he could talk to these guys, ask them, what are you feeling doing this kind of stuff? But it was not the kind of bad pain that you'd expect. And then they learned, too, that some of these guys who were manic, who were just wild with apparent pain, they could calm them down with a drug that would make them sleepy, basically. And what they started to start to think and figure out was what was so much the pain that was was hard on these guys it was the anguish the tread that what they're like you know the clint eastwood movie um young forgiven you know a hell of a thing killing man you're taking away all of your head and all you ever will have and humans understand

that you know they're 18 years old, knowing that this is probably going to kill them, and they're just, it has to be just devastating to them. So that's where I always try to balance all this stuff as I'm hunting, thinking, let's not tie ourselves in knots over this. We want to be good ethical hunters,

but let's realize that the wilds is a tough place to live. And these animals suffer a lot of stuff that, We want to be good ethical hunters, but let's realize that the wilds is a tough place to live. And these animals suffer a lot of stuff that, you know, but humans do too. Humans are awful tough too. So, I don't know. I find a lot of stuff fascinating. Pick up the tree stand thing because you later had an interaction with someone about your tree stand elk. Yeah. So, one of the reasons I emailed Steve was this guy writes back to me, and he actually says to me,

he tried to make me feel a little bit guilty about using a tree stand to kill an elk. And he says to me, well, what do you think Steve Rinella would think? I said, I don't know. I'll ask him. But my first reaction was, well, I don't claim to know Steve as well. I know other friends in my life, but I think Rinaldo strikes me as a practical guy that if you put your time in and you find a good spot and you want to hunt it that way, go for it.

Dude, my brother has, he's got an idea of the hunt purity score. Okay. So it allows you to factor have many to to factor in many different variables yeah just to then arrive at a fixed score and you can have 20 inputs and do a hunt purity score so when i run your situation through my hunt my personal hunt purity score calculator yeah uh unguided okay so you're just out there dude out there on his own yep not relying on a guide because you have a guy to like oh yeah i killed it we bugled a bull in and shot him but the guy did everything and he probably shot the thing better than you did too you were if anything

you were a hindrance on the whole process right you were the trigger man yeah so that's not the case okay not that you can't still you could have a guy and still score a great hunt purity scored as you put in all the factors that go into a hunt purity score right it's not it's like just one of what's your problem why you give me the latvian smirk no i'm just enjoying this the hunt purity score if there was such a thing so and each each and each to his own right yeah yeah so when i'm running pat durkin's when i'm when i'm giving a hunt purity score to pat durkin's tree stand elk this is what i'm thinking about self-guided public land now public land not that you can't have a great hunt purity score on private land. Done a lot of it myself. But in the hunt purity score calculator, that score is high.

Because here you are dealing with a lot of competition, things outside of your control. So it's like an added difficulty, right? Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking a hind 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 MeatEater 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 x club y'all um a little bit of woodsmanship there's a lot of wallows out there there are more wallows out there that are not going to be visited by a bull tonight than there are wallows what What the hell are you smirking about, Doug? Man, I feel like I need to keep my face down. Listen, there are more wallows. There are more wallows in the woods. What was the date you killed this bull?

September? September 4th. Okay. September 4th. Go to the state Pat was in and go have a monitor, get a volunteer to sit on every single wallow in that state. And more than, there's going to be more people whose wallow doesn't get hit by an elk that night than does. Definitely.

So he had to pick a good, pick the right wallow. Here he is. Self-guided. In a place you hunted a little bit. Finds a wallow. Determines that this is the, this is where I'm going to stake my claim. Presumably, you had to tote that tree stand through a lot of uncomfortable toting areas. On a hot day.

On a hot day. So there's your hunt purity score climbs up. Now, you had to pick where you're going to hang this stand. Factoring in wind, not just wind, but how the wind is going to change as the thermals shift, as the air starts to cool, as the sun begins to set. So Pat's running all this shit in his head as his hunt purity score climbs. Like I just, like nowhere in it,

there's nowhere in it where I'm looking, I'm like, man, that's a real shrinker. A real hunt purity score shrinker. The bow and arrow gives it a higher hunt purity score in my personal estimation. That gives it a higher hunt purity score than if it were a fire arrow.

If you use a trad bow versus a higher hunt purity score. If you made your own arrows and napped your own heads higher than the end. Higher hunt purity score. Many things go into a hunt purity. You could make your own bow, make your own string, make your own arrow shafts, nap your own head.

Make your own hunting clothes. Find a roadkill turkey, make your own fletching, and still have a real low hunt purity score depending on the other inputs. So that in and of itself right but like the hunt you're describing to me is has is very pure yeah i like the sounds of it thank you so and we packed it ourselves it was a great story to read too i really enjoyed those those uh columns about it yeah it was great and and you kept your nerves oh because you know what oftentimes when something's coming in you don't get calmer no not especially not the else sometimes it's almost beneficial to have something happen fast and this one actually

played out over about five minutes where he came in i thought i was gonna nail him right away and then he came and came right to me straight on. That's what I'm getting ready to shoot. He turns and walks right straight at me. And then I had to let down twice, and it was just a fun experience. You know another thing I factor in? A lot of people probably don't, but I do. Whether it was aware of you or not.

Yeah, he had no idea I was there. That counts a lot in my personal hunt purity calculator. I'm interested about the tree stand setup relative to the wallow. Downhill, because you're playing a downhill thermal? No. I looked into everything around it to figure out where I could put up a stand and have a decent chance. And I ended up having to go uphill from that wallow. And knowing that as the thermals start dropping,

if anything's coming down from below, I'm not going to have a chance. It'll just be going down. And that was my fear is that, yes, they come from downhill, where I think they're going to come from, most likely. Or all I could hope is they're going to be up on the side hill more or across the way more and filter through that area. But the thing is too, sometimes I, when I'm hunting whitetails too, some of those situations

you can't always predict where they're going to come from. You think you can, but then in this case, the bull came exactly from where I did not expect him. He was uphill from me and I heard a twig snap and then he looked up and here's this bull. Oh shit, there's a bull. And I haven't had buck fever like that in a long time where even though i've been elk hunting a lot and had a lot

of encounters that one just really had me jacked up and then by the time i got where i could shoot though i was i wasn't calm i mean that the heart's still hammering but uh it was i i will always make a point like at trade shows if i see like um i've seen like tiffany lakosky make some hella hella good shots uh on deer caribou and elk and i walked up to her one time and i said you know i know you take a lot of shit from people because you know she's a a pretty girl, blonde girl. I think sometimes she comes across ditzy to some people. But you watch some of the shots that girl's made on TV. I think that girl's got some real ice in her veins because I've seen guys blow those kind of shots.

Gotcha. Yeah, and so I respect that because I think to pull off a shot like that, especially with a camera over your back and knowing what's on, you know, basically what's at stake here, and you make a big investment on a hunt like that and the time involved, then you pull it off. I think that's commendable. I respect that because, you know, I've blown those kind of shots. I mean, who hasn't?

And so anyway, so like I made that shot that night, and that bull piled up, you know, like, you know, 40 yards away, I watched the whole thing, damn, I felt good. Yeah.

And those kind of moments just, you know, I think, that's why we're out here and I'll never, that's why I said, I make the comment that I felt a little guilty because it seemed so easy,

but I think, yeah, it's not really guilty, just that, you know, it's not really easy. You know, you know better,

you know how hard it is to get those shots and know get those situations that work out and how many situations don't work out oh yeah when you're out there just getting ground down by the situations that don't work out when something does work really good it's almost like you feel like you've stepped into like you've walked into a hallucination yeah that you're hallucinating that it worked yeah it's that surprising i mean like i actually just got close to that elk and ran an arrow through its lungs and it fell over dead it's more plausible that i'm hallucinating right now than that just happened yeah um we've been talking about thermals i want to explain it real because i feel like some people might not get what we're talking about so when you you're – thermals happen when you're in a – I mean, you can have thermals without topography,

but a thing you kind of bank on in mountainous country is that warm air rises. So I'm not telling you this, Pat. I'm just telling Joe Blow out there. Warm air rises. So in the morning when the sun starts to come up and the day starts to heat up, you're generally going to wind up having uphill winds. And then in the evening as the sun sets and the air cools, you're going to have, you know, it's going to switch.

Sometimes we will get set up where we're going to do a stalk on an animal and you'll just sit around and wait depending on where it is and the best approach. You'll sit around and wait for when the thermals shift because you'll know that at some point today I know that at whatever

time, whatever time it happened the night before or whenever the evening sets on, that the wind's going to shift possibly to the point that it overrides the normal predominant wind direction but sometimes you can just have like so much wind if there's a weather pattern moving through or whatever you can have so much wind that that sort of natural wind not natural that's not the right word for it but just that that general wind direction conspires with the thermals to just make swirling air, which is very frustrating. When it's not up or down, it's just everywhere.

Yeah. We live and died by thermals when I got it in Colorado in a particular spot, which is kind of a good example of the morning hunt. Because in the morning, too, you usually have a downhill thermal, just because it's like the coldest right at sunrise or whatever i mean right at daybreak 30 minutes before sunrise it's you know coldest part maybe so you got that downhill thermal but we had this knob that you could kind of sit on and it was i don't know at least a thousand feet down to this hayfield and these elk would be out in this hayfield you know we actually couldn't hunt out there so which is one of the reasons we hadn't just you know gone and ambushed them down there

but they would be coming towards us you know as it got light and coming up onto that hill but thermals like right at your back so you'd have to sit there and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and they'd be screaming and ripping and you're just like sitting there with your puffer just watching it watching it and just hoping for the day to warm up before they quit bugling and so many times i mean you'd wait sometimes till 8 39 i mean you've been sitting up there for two plus hours and then finally you just like you start feeling that constant you know uphill thermal and we would just bail off that hill you know try not to break a leg as we ran down in there you know and then we start calling but yeah you mentioned the some places have so much wind that when i went to guide in north park for a year

it's just a windy part of colorado like up there by uh walden and i remember like halfway through the elk season being like i seriously haven't used my wind checker or thought about a thermal for a month because it was just constant. Like every day, you're just like, oh, the wind's out of the east. It's going to be out of the east all day. We never thought about thermals there. I'll tell you another good thermals trick is a creek. Well, a creek will in the daytime cool the air above it,

and you could have a wind direction going some direction or another you drop down into a creek bed and you'll find that it's a downwind that there's a strong downwind current created by that water and you can creep up creek beds or streams that are flowing and be the whole time in nose hitting you like wind hitting you in the face as you go upstream, even though the wind is different 100 yards up the hill. I was once creeping up a creek on the north side of it in the timber, probably a foot to 18 inches of snow, powdery snow, silent as can be, and I'm probably 50 yards above the bottom of the creek.

And we're trying to catch up these elk that are feeding in the quakies on the south-facing slope, pretty narrow canyon. And we're working our way up it. We get to the elk. We get all the way so we're exactly parallel to them. And I'm feeling the wind. We got just a nice downhill thermal. And we're just like, there was no clear shots.

But there's like 20 cows up there. And we're just waiting for a good shot. And all of a sudden, I see a couple noses pop up. I'm like, what? There's no way. I'm like, we're freezing here. I can just feel it going down towards the creek. And eventually, they bust.

Three hours later, I think we killed a cow. But I think what actually happened is that the thermal came down, pushed our scent to the creek bottom. And then instead of just keeping flowing down the creek it must have just gotten onto that warm hillside that the sun was hitting the south facing and it carried it up right to him I mean no explanation

you will sometimes have stuff with you or you just can't understand how it with you yeah and it's yeah stuff like that probably and it even argues where I'll be like who moved Yeah. And it's, yeah, stuff like that probably. And he even argues. Or I'll be like, who moved?

Who moved? Someone moved. Like, no, they moved. Then it wouldn't have spooked. I've seen it done where like Bob Fulcrat, he studies demonstrations with air currents where he'd use a smoke bomb to show how when you think it's going this way, well, it goes that way for a while,

and then it just starts moving off again. Hard to play that stuff. Pat, tell me why the old-time traditional deer camps are disappearing. That's been one that I've, being the sentimental sap I am, I always think that's how deer hunting should be, where you pull into a camp for basically a whole nine-day season like they used to do.

You know, in Wisconsin, they used to take trains up north. And what's happened is that we made travel, I think, a big factor. There's many factors, of course, but one of the big factors is that travel is so convenient. You can now hop in your car anywhere in wisconsin basically be up north in five hours and then you can be back home on sunday evening really easily it's not not a big trip anymore even when i was a kid in the 70s going deer hunting only only highways going north in wisconsin were all two-lane highways and so the the trip up north was kind of an endurance thing. You just kind of sit there and ride along in those two-lane highways waiting to pass people all the time. So when you got up there, you were in no hurry to come back.

You want to stay up there a while. And you think, well, if that's how it was in the 70s, can you imagine what it was like back in the 40s and 50s where guys would have to drive up there and not always be able to even get down the road to their camp? You know, they'd have to get the neighbor to get a tractor and take them down and haul them in. And so I think that's a big factor that in our society we have now is a great transportation, really reliable vehicles. People just don't have to go in and spend that kind of time in a camp. And then you have the other factors going on in recent decades is that,

well, the old guys, it was worth going up north in northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan, and in Minnesota because there's good deer hunting. Well, it's gotten tougher. The forest matured, and we have all these factors like that where, you know, I've seen as many deer. We'll look at the case of our very own Doug Dern. Exactly. Doug, correct me if I'm wrong, Doug. I certainly will. and we'll look at the case of our very own doug dern exactly yeah doug when he when when correct me if i'm wrong doug and you can certainly will you can speak doug was a boy his old man went to northern deer camp that's right yeah around the farm if you saw a deer you talked about it that's

right you're like holy shit we saw a deer. And everyone for deer season drove up. Now, you got how many deer per square whatever? More than 75 per square mile of habitat. And what's the stocking or the ratio of deer per unit of land in the Northwest? Much lower. So the deer came to you. You don't need to go to the deer. I'm a deer magnet. Well, last time you guys were down at Doug's in 2015, I think it was, right?

Yeah. Gun season. I killed a nice buck that year down about 10 miles from Doug's place on my uncle's farm. And the only reason I'm telling that is because when I drove over to the tax department to get the lymph nodes taken out for the CWD testing, I missed the turn, couldn't find the place, and I stopped a hunter on the road who was just getting ready to walk down into this field. I got talking to him. Well, he's from Hayward, Wisconsin, which is way up north.

And the reason he's down in Doug's backyard, basically, is because the deer hunting up in Hayward sucks. He's driving south. He drove all the way. Complete reversal. To hunt a public piece of property over in Bear Valley. And that's what's happened.

Between the switch in the habitat where the habitat down in southern Wisconsin favors the deer more than up north. And you have, the guys who still hunt up there, they typically aren't going in for five days, Thanksgiving. It used to be a real thing

where you'd go up there and you'd arrive on Friday before gun season, set up camp, and you wouldn't come back until the following weekend or Sunday night. And people were logging

the north woods back then. Much more logging, much more logging back then. Now the logging isn't keeping up with the forest maturation. So the forests keep getting older and older and older and less deer habitat. And so I'm never surprised. Less grouse habitat, less woodcock habitat. Yeah, all those things factor in.

If there's good deer, if deer are thriving, grouse are usually thriving. And those areas are just tougher now. So I think those two factors are probably the biggest reasons. And plus, I think there's just a lot of people just don't like having a faraway camp to take care of. There's a lot of maintenance on any kind of building. Once you put a building on a land 300 miles away, you've got to be up there a lot taking care of it. And I think people like my generation, at least me, I don't like to be taking care of stuff all the time. I just show up someplace and I sleep all that.

I'd rather sleep on the back of my truck than maintain a shack year round for deer hunting. That's just the way I am. Well, and hunting's changed too. I mean, the increase in bow hunting and um you know up north down by us whatever and there's a i mean there's always that talk about the loss of um more of loss of deer hunters fewer deer licenses being sold but yet there's an increase in bow licenses so it's just changing and the style of hunting is changing and yeah there's no you don't do the community deer drives like we used to do and that used to be a big thing up north.

We used to drive along those rural roads in northern Wisconsin, see lines of people lined up waiting to go in and do a big push. And we just don't hunt that way much anymore. But you lament it. Oh, I do. Just because I think it was a cool time. And I still do a series going on almost 10 years now where i travel around different parts of the country and visit deer camps because i think oh i'd like to document

it while it's still around you know whether it's northern wisconsin northern minnesota i'd go down south visit some other deer camps because even down there it's not not that easy to maintain those traditions for a long for a long time a long time. To go generation after generation and maintain that hunting interest, I just use my own family as an example. I think, well, my dad hunted a little bit just to get me going, but he dropped out about the time I was coming along where he really wasn't active hunting anymore. But out of me and my three brothers, I'm the only one that hunts.

And I think a lot of people in our generation just don't have the interest and i look at our hunter demographics and that's not looking a lot great for the future so i think that's a part of americana that's kind of slipping away on us in some areas in some areas yeah and i think like in the you know in the midwest the old idea that you had these sort of unsettled wild lands in the north like we grew up and just like a thing you heard all the time up north up north up north like everyone went like in michigan you didn't do any cross movement you didn't know like east west movement all movement was was north south yeah he's like drove that direction if you wanted to get into something you drove north you wanted to get something good you drove south to get back home eyes were always to the north yeah and the

first time when i left home i went north whatever hundred miles hundreds of miles and set up shop up there yeah uh one last question for you you uh were putting to me is it is it socially acceptable morally acceptable to schedule a wedding on opening weekend of deer season yeah and and my take being a being a wisconsin chauvinist i am and knowing that wisconsin deer hunting deer season everyone knows everyone knows when deer season is in wisconsin and if you don't know you really you really i have to wonder about you how can you not be living in a bubble yeah this is a this is a big thing in Wisconsin. You cannot miss all the blaze orange going usually north, even though people are going east and west too. But you cannot miss all the blaze orange in the road

before our gun season opens. And then just at work, how many people you get around at work who are talking about deer hunting, husbands going deer hunting, girlfriends going with their boyfriends, that kind of stuff. And so I think when you know this is a once-a-year event, pretty much most people have in Wisconsin anyway. My friend Tom Herberlein always had the comment in his research on hunters in Wisconsin that in Wisconsin, you either are a deer hunter or you're sleeping with a deer hunter. Because he didn't mean just in one bad moment throughout the household.

There's always someone in the house who hunts. So I think having all that awareness of deer hunting, especially our gun season, how can you possibly justify having a wedding opening week in a gun season? You know you're going to affect the lives of a lot of people who you're going to affect the lives a lot of people who are either going to skip your wedding or are really resentful that you dragged them out of the

woods for your wedding that you could have scheduled 51 other weekends why would you do that yeah and and i there's there's a reason i got married in mid-july yeah well i i think that's i think personally that's respectful of their people's time and i haven't screwed up i haven't yet screwed up majorly on children's birthdates i got one may 9 in there that is difficult it's difficult but none of them were uh by uh by planning. That one, we're pretty much planning out. And I'm like, at least it wasn't the fall.

I got a May 9 in there, and his mother likes him to be around home on his birthday. His mother doesn't want him to be off doing whatever. I want to be there. It just wasn't great. It wasn't great, but it wasn't horrible there might come a time though where he gets to make that decision to say you know what i'd really like to be out at uncle doug's turkey hunt on my birthday let's can we go had that conversation this year we're gonna go turkey hunting but it's like in my family this didn't come from me

and my family and the powers that be within that family, there seems to be this thing where everyone's all together on birthdays. So it's like the calendar starts to get really crowded. Hold your thought, Doug. The calendar starts to get really crowded when you have, like I do, I have three kids. So there's three, you only got 365 days out of the year. There's three you only got 365 days out of the year there's three of them you get a spouse birthday an anniversary handful of religious holidays it's like if i could do it all over

again i'll just got married on christmas and then married a girl who's born on christmas find a girl yeah find a girl's like birthdays around Christmas, get married on Christmas, and then try to impregnate her routinely nine months before Christmas. Doug, you have a family story about this. I have three things that come to mind about it. One, my Uncle Ralph Zielinski, who was one of my dad's hunting buddies up north when they used to go up north and the guy who i first heard the word mooching from got married on opening weekend my dad never forgave him ralph is now 93 years old my dad's dead my dad went to his grave still pissed off about that why why did he get married an opening weekend i think it was a power thing with i i shouldn't

say because they're both still alive and they might listen to this i don't know i don't know why what the hell that's all my dad's what the hell's the matter with him that's all my dad said uh last year my nephew sam who you all know has and i'm happy to say his name uh had a new girlfriend they'd been going out for about three or four months and he calls me up about three weeks before opening weekend he goes hey uncle doug so i'm not going to be there opening weekend and i said why not he goes well caris family has a wedding out in new Jersey, and I said I'd go along, and I didn't realize it was opening weekend, but now I committed to it, so I got to go. I said, kid, there's two things wrong with that.

First one is, chances are, a year from now, she's not going to be your girlfriend. Yeah. So you just gave up an opening weekend for somebody you're no longer with. Or you are still together. You get married. You said an awful precedent. An awful precedent. I've seen a lot of guys really screw themselves in the courtship phase

by giving up liberties that they think they're going to somehow get back later. You need to. I tell people, I don't care if you need to drive down the road and sleep in a car. Act like you have shit to do when you start dating someone. Just to set the scene.

But you haven't told the story I want you to tell. Which one was that? didn't your old man oh oh my brother so my mom's my mom was pregnant and the due date and i there wasn't a whole lot of planning from what i could tell when we were conceived uh and and my my dad was just a you, he loved going up north and deer hunting. And as it happened, my brother is due like right at the end of that third week in November. And my father started telling my mom, you better have that kid. November 2nd. He was born November 2nd.

Two weeks later, dad's going north. Good for him. Good for him. One of my old newspaper buddies back in the early 80s, Penny and I started our family. Our firstborn, Leah, was born in January of 85. And so we planned it. We made sure that we didn't start all this stuff

until we had you know and penny got pregnant right away so it was january for leah ellie came along in july the only one we came close to missing on was carson our our youngest and she was born right before uh well she's born september 12th and this and this before i was out that this before i was elk hunting oh and so this is you're still white you're still eastern white i was still eastern whitetail hunting so you thought september was a great you thought it was really a hot boring month i thought oh we we stood in the home on that one you know just really it was close but um i i was telling some guys that worked at you know they something about um i can't remember how we got talking about

because none of these guys were hunters but when i mentioned the fact that penny and i planned and she wasn't like it wasn't like i was holding a gun to her head we just talked about in practical terms when do you want these kids to arrive and when we kind of for my schedule it worked out better if i'm if you want me home to help with the kids it's better if it's outside i'll hunt it when the calendar and some lovemaking. So that's one guy saying, people like you make me ashamed of the male species. God, I couldn't be prouder of you. And I thought, well, hey, if my wife understands, this all matters to me.

I don't give a shit what this guy. I know I missed the mark a little bit on a May Niner because of Spring Bear and Turkey. But when you factor in, I also got a mid-December, and I got a late January. And the late January, which is the best one I got, was accidental. So it's like even when I'm making mistakes, even when I'm making mistakes, I'm hitting the right target. What do you got, Yanni? I'm not really throwing him under the bus,

but I missed our now good friend Brody's wedding because it was a September wedding. I can't remember exactly when, but my wife had to go with a friend of mine. You sent your wife to your buddy's wedding? I was elk hunting. It was September. And Brody understood, I suppose. Yeah.

What the hell was Brody getting married in for? I don't know. I wish. I didn't like. Yeah. I don't know. I'm assuming Brody's listening. Yeah, he will be.

No, but what are your, for throwing offspring, what'd you hit? Oh, August 7th and December 5th. So, yeah, both good. Yeah, perfect. Good shooting. December 15th for me, so, yeah. Yeah, just one. Right in the perfect spot.

Yeah, I can't say that. That was planned. That was dumb luck but you started to realize that the odds are it's going to be okay because there's more months when it's okay to have a kid than there are when it's not okay to have a kid yes there's plenty of room that it uh figure things out without really causing hard feelings. Yeah, it's not like you're asking the impossible. Yeah, to me it's just being reasonable and realistic. Because when I got married, when we got married it was December 6th,

I just saw the Navy and Penny's mom made it clear that she's not moving to Wisconsin with me unless she's married. And so I looked at my schedule and thought, well, deer season's this this how about two weeks after after deer season so that's what we did yeah all right doggy concluders i was fascinated by the wallow conversation and you giving pat so much credit about uh i was pumping them up pumping that wallow finding that wallow all the woodsmanship that goes along with all these various places where it might be. Purity pouring in. And it just reminded me so much of being able to figure out where turkeys roost and

hijacking them on the way there. It takes good woodsmanship to find out where a turkey's roost is. To find out a turkey's roost and then bushwhack him on his way in there. Pat, concluders? Yeah, my concluder is that I know you guys like history. And when I realized we were going to be meeting in La Crosse, it made me think of an old lieutenant named, he never lived to an old age.

I think he died at age 34 in the War of 1812. His name was, you probably know of, Zebulon Pike. Oh, yeah. Pike's Peak. Pike's Peak. Well, did you know those two? The great Western explorer. Did you know those two, Pike's Peak?

Nope. There's one just down the road here, just down the river here in Iowa. Is that one? Yeah. Yeah. You go down to Iowa, 500 feet above, right across from Prairie du Chien. And Prairie du Chien is where the Wisconsin River meets the Mississippi River. Right across from there is a 500-foot bluff, and he named that one Pike's Peak II.

That was the first one he named. Really? Yeah. The guy had kind of like a phallic sort of hang-up. He was, yeah, well, just about 15 years ago, they had like, I think it was a centennial over in Minnesota. And this guy referred to Zebulon Pike as, he said something like, it's 200 years since this exploration he made up in Mississippi, and he's still not Lewis and Clark. He's still basically, no respect for the guy. And one of the reasons that they don't respect him to this day is because one of his missions from President Jefferson was to find the headwaters of the Mississippi.

So he went up to central Minnesota, north central Minnesota, and decided that Leech Lake was the headwaters of the Mississippi. Well, of course, time went on and they realized, no, it's actually to the west a little ways, and it's actually Lake Itasca. So he blew that. But while he's up there, he sent his soldiers to work on dugout canoes, because they had to keep exploring, so he had them make these dugout canoes. And they're all wondering, why the hell would you make your men make dugout canoes when you have, we're among the Chippewa people, the Ojibwe, and they make, they're famous for these birchbark canoes.

But this guy insisted on his dugouts. Well, they sank very quickly. They sank with all his powder and Zebulon Pike decided, well, let's try the powder out. So he had the guy spread this gunpowder over all these, all this, I think probably canvass canvas or whatever cloth they had in those days. And then they set it high enough above a fire they thought was safe. Well, it burned his tents up.

So that's tents burn up. He's ruined everything. And this kind of reputation, these kind of things he did, the things he was famous for, these real screw-ups, but at the same time, he had some respect because he was a tough survivor type guy. He'd be sick and he'd work through sicknesses. But his place in history, the people who studied him kind of referred to him as the B team of Lewis and Clark. He was not in their league.

See, I didn't know this about him. I didn't know that Pike was kind of not slick. Yeah. And he went, Jefferson, then after this exploration of this part of the world, Jefferson sent him to explore the southern regions of the Louisiana Purchase. Because Lewis and Clark were up doing one in the northwest. And he went down in the Colorado area. And he got to Pike's Peak, the mountain he named Pikes Peak out there

and he decided he was going to try to scale Pikes Peak. Well, it got to be pretty cold and they gave up that idea and he decided that this place, this mountain can't be climbed. So they gave up on the idea. Then they started pushing southward. I think then his message or his mission

was to find the Red River someplace down there. Well, he got his troops all lost. They eventually got captured by the Spanish army. And then apparently his people, his men, were thankful that they'd been captured because they finally had somebody in charge that knew what was going on. They're not lost anymore. Yeah, so then eventually they let him loose, let him go back, they'd been captured because they finally had somebody in charge that knew what was going on. We're not lost anymore. Yeah, so then eventually they let him loose, let him go back.

But he ended up dying not that long after that. He fought in the War of 1812 and when they were invading Toronto, he got killed in Toronto at age 34. Pike died at 34? Age 34. Geez, I think Custer was 36 when he died.

I always read some way of life as like when I hit 36 and I was like, well, Custer died now. You take stock when you hear people dying. Yeah, Mozart died at 37. Did he? Yeah. Zebulon Pike

died at 30? 34. He was a general by that time but he was you know yeah he was dead at 34 that makes me feel like i do nothing he sucked at everything it sounds like well put he had a good publicist apparently yeah name big mountains hey man uh you know the story about uh um laramie okay so laramie's a guy, he's a mountain man, not even. Shows up out west hoping to be a mountain man. Quickly gets killed under, depending on who you ask, how he got killed.

He might have got killed by some Indians and stuffed down a hole in the ice in a beaver pond. There's different versions of events, but total greenhorn. Shows up on the scene. Very quickly is dead murdered killed in the action mountain man action winds up with a town a mountain range a peak a river and on and on and on for doing shit any idea of how he got that kind of

why they picked his name out i'm guessing it was like because whatever beaver how he got that kind of, why they picked his name out? I'm guessing it was like, because whatever beaver pond he got stuffed down through the ice in became Laramie River. Yeah. And then people. And the name just rolls off your tongue. It is a pretty name, yeah. Now Bridger, there's a guy that deserves it. Yeah. And got everything named after him.

Yeah. So that's my story from this part of the world, from Zebulon Pike's search up here. Yeah, the moral of the story is look for the highest thing you can see around and name it after yourself.

So there are two Pikes Peaks. Not yet, I didn't know about the Wisconsin one. Well, it's actually Iowa. Oh, I'm sorry. It's right across the river from Prairie du Chien. Laramie Peak.

No. I'm sorry. Pikes Peak. the river from Prairie to Sheen. Laramie Peak. No. I'm sorry. Pikes Peak. Pikes Peak, Iowa. Yep. I'm going to climb that one. Yep, 500 feet. You can drive right to the top of it.

Is it 500 feet? Yeah, it's 500 feet, so it's like, what's that? What's 14 divided by 1,400? Do I have my five? I can't do that kind of math. I always screw it up. It's somewhere south of 500. It is a cool spot, though.

It's on 128th, the height of Pikes Peak. But that's our Pike story. So he's like, dude, next time I name a mountain, I'm not doing it like this. Well, he also apparently picked that spot pike's peak for an army fort he he suggested the army they build a fort there well then the army engineers came through years later looked at look things over and said no prairie duchene will do just fine they're building it up on the mountain they're up on the bluff they're building it down in that with a confluence of the wisconsin river and mississippi river so they could command the rivers yeah and not to carry their stuff so far yeah so he wasn't

good at citing forts either his long list of things he wasn't that good at all right doug duran no i know yeah yeah i gave my i'm just saying your name i like to end things by saying names like that thanks Thanks for having me. Nice being here. Yeah, if it was the beginning, I'd be like, Doug Duren. But at the end, I'm like, Doug Duren. Doug Duren. And Patrick Durkin.

What's your middle name, Pat? Edward. P-E-D. P-E-D. Okay. Did you have any closing thoughts today? No. Don't have any.

Nothing. Yep. I'm spent. All right. Thank you, Pat. thoughts today? No. Don't have any. Nothing. Yep. I'm spent. All right. Thank you, Pat. Thank you, Doug. Thanks for having us. Hey, folks.

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