The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 122: Live from Denver

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

Denver, CO: Steven Rinella talks with Ryan Callaghan and Cody Lujan, along with Brody Henderson and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: Folsom hunters; fidelity to a place; more on morels; squirrely vs. western, revisited; other MeatEater housekeeping items; old Mose the grizz and the ballad of Ed Wiseman; Gore and the rapacious nature of man; an exercise in morality; what's your shot to kill ratio?; a 1/4 pound turkey liver, and more. The MeatEater Podcast Live is coming to Minneapolis. Click here for more information and to get tickets. 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.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now 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. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

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 hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. All right, everyone. Thanks for coming out, man.

All right. I'm going to break with protocol a little bit and do intros. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Giannis, the Latvian Eagle down the end. Cody Lujan, who describes himself earlier as having come from, let me get this right, come from a ranching and Olympic ski jumping family. Thanks. This guy, would you mind? Oh, yeah.

This guy. Competition. But show, show. This guy, you can't see it. He has a hat. He has a farmer's tan on his head. He has the pale lines of his hat stitching. Webbing. Ryan Callahan from... All the way from First Light World Headquarters

in Ketchum, Idaho. And then Colorado's own Brody Henderson, who's on the meat eater crew. Brody's a semi-retired fly fishing guide. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Good way of putting it. But yeah, man, thanks for coming out. And I come through Denver a fair bit. Last time I came through here, I had one of you guys' big giant mule deer box,

which I took back home with me. Earlier, though, another time I went through, has anyone here ever been to the Lindenmeyer, the Lindenmeyer site? You know about this? Okay. So, like, if you go way back in time, the first culture of American hunters that emerged as a distinctly American culture was this group called the Clovis Hunters. And they were Ice Age hunters. So they hunted mammoths and short-faced bears, and they were widely dispersed.

And they developed this very distinctive projectile point called the Clovis point. It's regarded as a diagnostic projectile point, where if you find one and look at it, you're like, that is 13,000 plus years old, and that's who made that thing was the Clovis. Now, around the time when Clovis came, there's debate about how this happened, but all that megafauna the mammoths macedon short-faced bears you know nine genera of large mammals all vanished kind of contemporaneous with the arrival of clovis and out of this came all these different cultures and the culture that emerged here where we are now was this culture called the folsom culture and so most of the ice age stuff was all gone, and Folsom was a group of slightly post-Ice Age hunters from around 12,000 years ago who basically hunted the same stuff we hunt today

because all that crazy stuff was gone. Lindenmeyer is the second most famous Folsom site. The most famous Folsom site is in northeast New Mexico, and it's called the Folsom site near Folsom,. The most famous Folsom site is in northeast New Mexico, and it's called the Folsom site near Folsom, New Mexico. And it's where Folsom was identified. And they had driven 13 bison antiquists up into a dead-end canyon and killed them with atlatls and butchered them all on site. And it was a temporary encampment. But what's crazy about Lindenmeyer, Lindenmeyer, just north of here, is the oldest known place that we have,

which would have been what we now think of as a rendezvous of hunters. It seems as though at times, for some unknown reason, hundreds of Folsom hunters would show up at the Lindenmeyer site. So many, their projectile point's kind of distinctive and it's regarded as the most difficult projectile point to make because they would knock a channel

out of each face of their projectile point and they would haft that thing. So you got a spearhead, a foreshaft, and there's even a camel bone foreshaft that came out of Lindenmeyer. So they were maybe dabbling with some stuff that's now extinct, but they would deal these like little fluted points and they'd halved them in a thing. And that flute, that channel that they would knock out is distinctive of a Folsom point.

And at the Lindenmeyer site, they have excavated 1,000 channels. So that many guys making these very specialized points there. When they were there, they ate jackrabbit, cottontail rabbit, bison. They ate venison. Oftentimes they'll be eating turtle and they ate turtle at Lindenmeyer. So great generalist hunters. And people often wonder like, well, how could it have been that these people who lived at such low population densities, how could they have all found each other and why did they come together? And it's funny because they had, they brought to Lindenmeyer site, they had red ochre that came out of Northern Wyoming and they had tool stone that came out of the Texas panhandle. And it's regarded that the

Folsom hunters lived at such low densities, it doesn't make sense that they did hand-to-hand trading. There probably wasn't enough of them to have trade channels. It's thought that because they had great fidelity to stone sources, they seemed to be more associated with quarries where they would get the very particular type of rocks that they liked to use to make projectile points. They had more fidelity to the stone source than they did to their hunting grounds.

But they liked Lindenmeyer maybe because you're kind of in the mountains, you're kind of on the plains, you have the foothills, there's a lot of stuff to hunt. And there's this big multi-story geologic feature there that's like a red and white bands of rock. And you can see this thing from 18 miles away. There's a theory that you could say to a dude down in the Texas panhandle in Ice Age America, just walk up the edge of the mountains, and when you see, right, that's where we'll meet in five years. And somehow it would work out that these mass accumulations of Folsom hunters would gather at the Lindenmeier site. So I bring that up only because here you have, right, they're generalist hunters.

They eat a wide array of things that people might now regard as a little unusual. And they would gather under this large structure. And here we all are again tonight, 12,700 years later, gathered in the Oriental Theater of Denver, so welcome. There's a couple of housekeeping issues we have to take care of. There's a guy named Dan, and his wife, Ashley, and his daughter, Scout, want to wish him a happy Father's Day. So there's that. Callahan. There's a couple things I've got to finish up. callahan just got it was telling me about a chigger bite on his scrow but i told you that was a confidence steven

uh he didn't show it he didn't show it yeah we've talked many times about cleaning morel mushrooms now brody where can i tell these guys roughly where you live tell them where you live just south of steamboat stagecoach reservoir has anyone here has anyone here found a morel within let's say what's a ferry radius that you would say there are 50 miles has anyone found a morel within 50 miles of of brody's house no yes really that uh do you guys find morels in Colorado, eastern Colorado? But not up in the mountains, though. Not in the mountains.

Not up by us. Point being, Callahan, we've talked at length about cleaning morels. A chef wants you to know that he washes them, does wash them to get all the bugs and dirt off, dries them in a salad spinner a bunch of times, leaves the water that falls out of the salad spinner in the bottom of the salad spinner, places it in this fridge for two days. It somehow holds enough humidity,

and the fridge's climate is such that when you pull the morel out of that salad spinner, it is indistinguishable from when you picked it out of the dirt. Just wanted you to know that another guy uh wants to know this he's trying to figure out when he dies go ahead i would tell this chef that he is losing mushroom he's beating that mushroom up far too much okay so just killing it twice. That means that now this Morel conversation

will have to continue into future. I'm trying to take care of a couple things that just need to be put to rest. House cleaning, yeah, housekeeping, keep it going. A guy wanted to know this. We had talked a lot about, I had talked a lot about what I want to happen to my carcass when I die.

He has it that he wants to be cremated, but then his wife is supposed to take the ash and have it made into clay pigeons and then hold a clay pigeon shoot where his friends come and shoot him out of the sky. So, he goes on to say, I'm not even sure if there's a company that does that. Maybe after First Light, Cal, you could get into that business.

Yeah. Always thinking. Another question, and this is pertinent for something else. Why blouch? Where did blouch come from? Giannis, can you give background on blouch? It's just how you say boom or bang in Latvian. In Latvian. When I learned from Giannis' father, Gian Giannis all Latvians are named Giannis Giannis is yeah that's true like Giannis's father Giannis when I heard the word blouch from him it became my favorite word and everyone assumed that it's B-L-O-U-K-S with a... Yeah, A-U-K-S.

A-U-K-S with a blank. So if you go and look, we have our special Blouch t-shirts, Meteor Podcast Blouch shirts. It is not misspelled. It's spelled the right way. Also, you'll find our posters. There's a story about the poster one day I was talking about. If I was a painter, what I would paint is a scene that was described to me by our friend Brandon Butler, which is he was watching a turkey gobble

on a cold morning, and he described how when that turkey would rip out a gobble, you would see steam come out of his beak. And I was so moved by that, I said that if I was a painter, I would make that painting. And so we had a fan make a special turkey steam-breathing gobble turkey, and that is the story behind that special commemorative meat eater podcast steam breathing turkey poster so that is explained now moving on another thing let me see i want to make sure this is our last squirrel keeping our it is this is the last squirrel keeping last piece of housekeeping and this is another thing we really need to put to rest a long time ago i argued that that when someone says like things got awful western right which i'd never heard i grew up

in michigan but if you're like things got awful western there and i yeah, like squirrely. And people wrote in, a guy wrote in, he's like, no, because Western, there's an implied physical danger in Western that is absent from squirrely. So I did a long correction where I said, I stand corrected. Squirrely is like, he used the example like Giannis stepped on an arrow. The arrow now shoots squirrely. Okay. He used the example of Callahan hit on a guy's girlfriend in a bar. Things got Western, but he, but this guy writes in, he, the correction needs to be corrected. He's from South Florida. And he says, in the motorsports world, squirrely damn sure has a sense of physical danger involved. When you're going down the road and your bike gets squirrely, watch out.

It's not good. And he also says that he introduced me to a term, which is squid, which is a squirrely kid. And another guy wrote in to wind up saying that he says, in addition to Western and squirrely, you need to be aware of two terms from the Northeast, which is snotty and sporty. He goes on to explain he's an attorney, works largely in the legal cannabis market right now, so he's very busy. And he says that if seeds pick up to a level where you're uncomfortable, but it's not perilous, one would describe that as being a bit snotty. If things pick up from there and you really need to be paying attention, things have now gotten sporty. He also uses sporty when describing heated professional discussions.

That's the housekeeping portion. So thank you for bearing with us. Now to get into some of the meat here, try to think of how best to bring this up. There's something we need to resolve. Okay, I'm going to do this. The five people present up here on stage, to start out, we're going to handle it like this. Is there a grizzly bear in Colorado right now? Okay. Okay.

If you believe yes, raise your hand. Oh, look at those. All right. There's a little background to this. We've been quibbling or getting snotty or getting Western over this issue the past couple of days. I will say, I don't know if there's a grizz in Colorado here today, but I can say unequivocally, some of you know my background in the woods and otherwise, but unequivocally, I witnessed a young male boar grizzly in northern Colorado last year,

just a few miles south of the Wyoming border, out in some sagebrush. And that's where I stand. And that's fantastic. Yeah. So it's kind of like, can we go into a little background? Yeah, let's go a little background. Let's go deep dive. Let's do it. Okay. Deep dive. Let me consult my stuff here because I want to give you guys like a little background on the issue. Oh, I should point out. I usually like to point out when there's a good transition. Do you remember earlier

talking about how the Folsom guys brought Ochre down from Wyoming? Huh? Huh? I remember that. Vaguely, yeah. Grizzlies coming down from Wyoming. Right.

You like that transition? Red desert grizzlies. So where are you leading us? I'll give you about a four out of ten. What's that? Yeah. I'll give you about a four for a good segue. As the ochre.

Brody, you were saying yesterday, what do all famous grizzly bears from the old days share in common? Old. Old Ephraim was the last bear in utah you know new mexico had an old grizzly of some name old mose old mose old nine toe uh old silver now old mose i want to talk about old mose a little bit because brady uh brody and i were talking Old Mose recently, who met his end in 1904. Old Mose was a bear that his name comes from the fact that he moseyed around. And you'll find when you're looking at like old famous bear stories,

like the last grizzly here and the last grizzly there, they share in common an extraordinarily long lifespan. Where Old Mose seems to have terrified people for 40 years. And to account for the fact that he was terrifying people across the entirety of the state, the same rascally bear that refused to be caught, someone had to account for how he could be everywhere all at once, so he naturally became Old Mose, as in the moseying around bear. And Old Mose's legend starts with a guy named Jacob Radcliffe, who's out hunting deer and elk, gets mauled by a bear in 1883. His buddies find him, he's dying in the woods. They load him on a horse, bring him down to a ranch,

and he expires with probably my favorite dying words of all time which is boys don't hunt that bear and this was down in the arkansas river drainage that was arkansas river drainage i think so yeah okay so people then don't take his advice and they just start hunting that bear and every bear that anyone goes near turns out to be old Moe's. And there's a guy where, at a point, there's a skeleton turns up. And there's a skeleton, some boots, some spurs, and a carbine, and the bones have been gnawed on, and that death is ascribed to old Moe's, of course.

Eventually, in the spring of 1904, a couple guys, so this is a year after the Wright brothers had their first sustained flight in a heavier than air vehicle to set it in time. In 1904, a guy named Wharton Pig and James Anthony gets some hounds and they get after old Moe's and they catch it and it turns into a very squirrely very Western shootout Anthony later describes hitting old Moe's behind the shoulder and he used the term that I still know what it means was my new favorite term he hits it in the shoulder and the bullet lodged up against on the other side a place that he describes as the sticking place which like that the shoulder blade maybe that muscle behind the shoulder is there like a spot don't you think wouldn't that be like a like if you're gonna knife a hog or like you know what i mean like the sticking place

that's the place where you stick that pig that's got to be right yeah that's got to be it i haven't thought of that yeah yeah i thought he meant that there's like a spot that he finds that his bullets wind up in without exiting the sticking place but he means like the entry point yeah that'd be a great name for a bar actually man yeah that definitely trumps um you know west bond my brother wanted to name one the repeat offender um but uh yeah and the sticking place that's got to be what the sticking place means so so dies old mose and kind of like so dies a legend and then it winds up being that the last bear vanishes let me just

make sure i'm getting my facts straight here the last bear in colorado up until a point the last bear was what year was that brody the last when they think they killed the last one was 52 52 government trapper a government so that was like a known thing where a government trapper goes out and on contract kills one yeah that was in the san juans where they were known to be like the last holdouts of a bear of grizzlies in colorado and then somehow weirdly and this is where this, weirdly, and this is where Cody, this is the thing that starts to add up. This is where it starts to add up. This is where shit gets squirrely, right?

This is where things get squirrely. Because, so 1952, the last grizzly's gone. But in 1979, along comes Ed Wiseman. Can you tell the battle to Ed Wiseman. Can you tell the battle to Ed Wiseman? He's walking down a trail. Where? Again, the San Juans.

In the San Juans. In the San Juans. Let me do basic math. What's 79 minus 52? 27. 27 years after the last grizzly's been killed. Right. Here's Ed.

He's archery hunting, apparently, in I believe what's a wilderness area now. I don't think it was then. It may have been. But the story is obviously convoluted as these kind of things go. But supposedly he gets jumped by a grizzly and manages to,

and this is like before archery hunters were commonly using compound bows so he's hunting with a art he's hunting with a reeker bow wood arrows gets jumped by angry grizzly and uh manages to kill it by stabbing it with the arrow and in the heart like i mean like right in the sticking place right in the sticking place and uh you know they investigate the whole thing because some people later claim that he shot the bear his hunting partners claim that yeah his hunting partners some and i don't this is just internet lore right but like some of his hunter partners later said, no, no, no, no, no. He got onto it in a meadow, put a stalk on it and arrowed it. Right.

But he passed a lie detector test when they interviewed him. Yeah, he did pass a lie detector test. And no one contested, like there's no one that contested the legitimacy of the bear. It was confirmed by, I believe, confirmed by biologists as a grizzly. And they went and searched the whole state after that i was five years old yeah and they launched a very oh the thing to add in about this bear she is it was a sow right it was old arthritic its claws and teeth were wore down but but it had at some point in its life bore young right so it had been a reproductively viable

bear where we sit right now the closest grizzlies are 200 miles away right probably over 200 from here southern southern end of the wind river range so here you have a 25 year absent is that what that math comes out to a 27 year absence oh from 79 from the last bear 40 79 no no i'm saying that first absence yeah and then there's one bam miraculous now like some so some writers get involved in this right like rick bass did a did a book about it and peterson david peterson did a book about it and Peterson, David Peterson did a book about the search, but no one's ever then turned up proof. Now there's a ton here, but I just want to throw this out real quick. Uh, a bow hunter from Australia named Adam Green tree saw one last year. He's in a tough spot though. Not being

American, he's in a tough spot because like if I was in Australia, okay, let's say I go to Australia and I'm like, oh, hey, oh, by the way, the wombats aren't distributed how you guys understand wombats to be distributed. You can imagine the degree to which right the resistance i'm gonna get so he's like it's like a it's a tough stance to take as someone who can't represent lifelong exposure to to grizzlies and black bears 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

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Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Walking through this thing a little more. So they did an exhaustive search. The consensus, the scholarly academic consensus is no, but people routinely come forward and oftentimes credible people come forward and you're like, I saw one, right? Absolutely. Is he credible? Am I credible? I regard him as credible. I have the cross sunburned in the back of my skull. He's got a cross, he's got a sunburn, like he's got a farmer's tan on the top of his head.

The guy spends time out in the woods. Now, you get into like, why does this matter? And I think that, so give your stance on why it matters. Wow, how deep? You don't like doing this? How far down the rabbit hole do we want to go? I think it matters from a few standpoints. I mean, I think people have literally just a basic right to know, you know, if these animals are here, I think there is a potential safety issue going forward.

I don't think there's many of these bears, but, you know, we call it kind of in my world, the sage telegraph, which is a lot of, you know, communications between ranchers and people who live in rural communities. And so, you know, conspiracy theories run rampant no matter where you are, especially when it comes to apex predators, wolves, wolverines, and now grizzlies apparently. And so anywhere where I saw this bear is um coming to find out three other families had uh apparently seen the same animal within like a five or six mile radius within a two-week span of when i saw it so i think people have we need to know if these

animals are actually coming down through here especially with what's going on with uh now that the state has finally admitted that we haven an established wolf population here in Colorado. Which used to be only kooks said that. Right. They haven't admitted that there's an established wolf population. They've admitted that there's wolves traveling into the state. No, I believe there was

because we had some of the wolf meetings. I'm also from Steamboat Springs. We had for the wolf meetings, there was a statement and uh perhaps i'm wrong but i do believe that it said that it was an established wolf population in jackson park some wildlife guy that we talked to today so the wolves are transient only but a bunch of them but we see them yeah there's a lot of them so i think you know in the same breath i think it's important for people to know what what's going on uh here in colorado we've had a confirmed wolverine

we've got wolves what's keeping the grizz from crossing the state line confirmed wolverine in colorado there was the one that ended up in north dakota the rancher that rancher shot he was whacking he was yeah exactly yeah but you know we've talked about this before, but a wolf came out of Michigan's upper peninsula and got killed in Missouri. A known wolf, like an identified wolf. So things will pack up and leave. Oh, absolutely. So is it possible that grizzlies are trickling down,

matriculating into Colorado? I think absolutely. Very many? No. As far as you're right to know, though, Colorado has a lot of black bears. Right. Tons of black bears. So the fact that you know a grizzly bear is out there, is that going to change your behavior at all? No, I don't think it's going to change your behavior. You always need to be better. You know, well, exactly. But

I mean, in terms of... No, but you'll be carrying trekking poles. You'll be, yeah, trekking poles. Yeah. Carry a good poking stick. A good poking stick. You know, bear spray. I mean, like you, you know, I spend a lot of time around black bears and seen a lot of really big black bears go in their graves.

And so I like to think, and I've been around a lot of grizzlies in my guiding days in Alaska. So I like to think I'm a somewhat decent, credible witness when I see these things. And then when I see a picture and my buddy shows me a picture of a bear that... And you showed me that picture. Yesterday. What did you think that was? But here's the thing.

I didn't take the picture. Right. And it's a picture of a picture. I could show you my phone right now and I could be like, look at all this. But you didn't know you had giant lingcod in Colorado. What do we have here? We were on stagecoach yesterday. Yeah, where else could I have gotten this picture?

And that's the tough thing about saying that you saw an animal like that in a state where they don't exist. You walk out on that limb and go on a live podcast and talk about it. I've always sympathized with those guys because oftentimes those guys wind up being right. How many people said, how many people tried to explain away every mountain lion in the eastern U.S. as an escape pet? Where soon you have what must be this very thriving

industry of mountain lion owners that no one really knew about who are habitually cutting loose their pets dropping off the park man yeah and after a while people had to come to terms with it doesn't make sense but some number of these things must be packing up camp in the Black Hills of South Dakota and deciding to go many hundreds of miles relatively undetected. So, sure, man. And I want to clarify my perspective on it. I want to sort of nuance out my position on it.

I think that I take, see, it's so complicated. I can't, it's inexpressible by the English language. If someone right now said, hey, did you hear the news? A car hit a grizzly in Colorado. I wouldn't even be a teensy bit surprised because for one of those things to travel 200 miles out of Wyoming and turn up in Colorado wouldn't surprise me in the least. What I don't like though is the idea that there's this known breeding population that there's people with vested interest in concealing the idea of this thing,

that it's meant to be kept secret. Because in this day and age, secrets don't get kept well. When they were down to having only a handful of, like the Florida cougar, they were down to having a handful, but you couldn't keep from getting hit on the road. Like things just have a way of turning up. And this is

like my, one of many, but kind of my favorite anti Bigfoot argument, right? Where's the Sasquatch bones would be that if you look at the way rare species just get killed and turned up dead and get shot by people whose livestock is getting attacked, getting attacked, chasing their kids, they shoot it. It gets hit by cars, it just dies, it turns up dead in the pond, whatever happens, it's like, even when we're down to like having some known quantity of things, we can't stop them from dying all over the place. So when people talk about these wildlife populations, that there's no carcasses turning up anywhere, it becomes like hard to believe that the necessary

things are in place to do it. The idea that if they catch them in Colorado, they bring them back to Wyoming. How is that going over with the state government in Wyoming? Those guys are doing their damnedest to get rid of a handful of them. Are they just launching them overboard with a catapult? Here, take them back.

Callahan proposed the idea of an underground railroad for grizzly bears. Take them, take them back. I do like, there's plenty of unknown out there with tons of large mammals that we feel extremely familiar with. Like look at all the new data that's showing up on mule deer migration corridors. Like,

like we just confirmed the on mule deer migration corridors like like we just confirmed the longest mule deer migration and that's an animal that most people would consider themselves extremely familiar with the root of which is now looking to perhaps get riddled with yeah uh things that would then destroy that migration corridor um But to jump to the point is, like, look at, you know, all the data that we're getting off of these GPS collars. A great one is they had a collared sow grizz in Montana. She covered an incredible amount of country

and did some absolutely bizarre things, including Flathead Lake in Montana is a huge body of water. It's seven miles long, two and a half miles wide at its widest point. And this grizz swam out to the dead center of the lake, turned around, swam back. Nobody ever saw this.

Just wanted to see what was out there. Oh, no people. There was no eyewitness. No eyewitness. It was just tracking data. It was just tracking data. It was just tracking data. And, you know, we never, nobody would ever be like, oh, yeah, the grids are just going to swim out middle of the night in the middle of the lake, paddle around for a little bit. And then they do that all the time.

So there is quite a bit of unknown that I think does go on. Yeah, and that's what makes it kind of beautiful. And like my goal, and we've talked about this a thousand times too. My goal is to, and most of the guys that hang out with agree with it, would be like, my goal would be that we would recover grizzlies in all suitable habitat. The agreement falls apart when we discuss like, well, define suitable habitat right there's there's

a lot of people who know this issue very well and they say like we've kind of done it except for the exception of one spot perhaps two and they're not here nobody likes raccoons in their garbage cans in san francisco yeah when it's a 600 pound raccoon it's probably gonna be a bit more of an issue yeah it's slightly unnerving and being with your kids like you know everyone wants to get their kids involved in the outdoors to be out with little kids in places that have like a like high densities of grizzlies it's like this added thing but you know what 95 of al, it's like they're dealing with it just fine. There's people up there, not many, but they're there.

Right there. So here's a startling, grisly statistic that shows kind of the power of misguided humans. Let me find this. Between 1850 and 1920, grizzlies were extirpated from 95% of their historic range in the lower 48. Then from 1920 to 1970, they were extirpated from half of that. So you've got them whittled down to being on a couple percent, a couple percentage points of their native range, right? That's like, we had elk did we did about the same to elk and we've now recovered elk on 10 14 of their native range they're still absent from 90 of their native range and we're still trying to make progress in that and i just cannot as much as i understand the complexities the political aspects of it what it means for the ag industry, everyone, as much as I see that, I'm like, I can't, I just can't accept that that's something that as human beings in America, that we can

be okay with having something like that on the edge. So I just, you know, I'm not saying here, but if I did hear that someone turned one up in a definite sense, I wouldn't get that feeling like, oh no, I'd kind of like almost a little bit secretly be like, yeah, it's like it's bringing wild back. Yeah, it's like, it's awesome, man. It's like when a bison chalks up a head knock in Yellowstone. You're kind of like, all right. Didn't a lady just get, that's the most common Yellowstone injury. I think a lady just got gored today or yesterday in Yellowstone. Yesterday, I think, yeah. When I was researching my Buffalo book, it was talking about a very common animal-related related injury there would be a puncture

wound to the upper buttocks yeah so there's that one so speaking going back to grizzly bears and populations uh which states now have uh and restoration of species which states now do we now have grizzly bear hunts coming on board here well possibly two possibly two states will initiate grizzly hunts possibly you know i say possibly because who knows where litigation is going to come out idaho might do a tag and wyoming might do up to a couple dozen with female quotas built into it. And then they have, we've identified like recovery areas. So when we talk about like, if we say like, we should recover them on all suitable habitat,

there's this idea of what those suitable habitats are. Northern Cascades, so in Northern Washington, you have the Northern Cascade ecosystem. And Secretary Zinke recently came out and declared his support for recovering bears in northern Cascades. Right now in the northern Cascades in the U.S., there maybe, maybe is one or two grizzlies there right now. They flirt with the border. Cabinet Yak has 50. Yep. Selkirk's 80.

Selkirk's have 80 northern continental divide a bunch northern continental divide has over a thousand greater yellowstone ecosystem has 800 possibly possibly more in all these places because of how we count them it's usually the the number is usually the minimum the upper end of the population we don't really know and then there's the one spot that we say we could get them or could have them and don't and that's the bitterroot well the yak as well i mean the yak cabinet yak wilderness is i i believe the least visited wilderness area in the lower 48 um we used to hunt black bears in it man you'd like stumble into grizzlies and there's only 50 of them yeah so i mean we've recorded 50 bears there or is that an we've recorded x

mountain extrapolated that out to 50 but it's extrapolated out because what people are looking at is you're looking at female home ranges and then you kind of like based off sexually mature females, how much area do they need? You make these like, these basic map shapes where you put in like known females. What would their range be? And then just from general dynamics, you understand the ratio of cubs and males

and you model it out. It's not like someone goes up and goes, one, two, three, four, five, and gets to 50. When people have a birthday, my kids like to go, are you one? Are you two two and they call my older brother man they get old by the time they got up to the right number but yeah they don't like they're not counting them but and you get into that area and this is like the last thing i'm gonna say about with this idea of like because like right now there's a lot of talk where people in Colorado are toying with the idea like, do we want to reintroduce wolves or let them trickle in? Because there's different

sort of like social tolerances, right, to reintroduction and trickling in. And for a while, people talked about that we'll take grizzlies and cut grizzlies loose in the Bitterroot. If we take them and reintroduce them into the bedroom, they're going to have an experimental status. So not regulated as tightly because they were a reintroduction. And some grizzly advocates feel that it's better, well, let's just let them walk in on their own, which is eventually going to happen anyway. Because if they walk in on their own, they carry with them full ESA protection.

We had the idea, we're just going to make a barrel trap and put some in there, just to get the whole thing over with. Right. Uh, never got around to that, but it was like an idea we toyed with was let's just push this along and get it to his logical conclusion. But, um, it's, it's like a thing that you guys are wrestling with. And someone said today that they're like a government agent was saying he's highly, what was he saying? He doesn't think that Colorado would do a wolf reintroduction, right? Right. I don't want to say who said this.

Well, he said Parks and Wildlife is completely. Official stance. But that's Parks and Wildlife. That's not the people who are actively trying to move towards reintroduction. Yeah. He said Colorado Parks and Wildlife, they show up on their own they're welcome here yeah what's your take cody yeah just recently tell me what did the guy say to you recently if you're a big game hunter like if you're a big game hunter how could you possibly why be pro predator at all

because the more you know the less predators the more big game we have to hunt as big game hunters what's your take hey you know it's a it's a tough one it's you know i'm kind of an image i'm going to take the easy route and be an in-betweener here, but I love having apex predators in one sense. It's these big wild animals that are back in wild country. There's nothing more beautiful that you can think of. On the other hand, you think of the state of our current mule deer population in Colorado, you think of the state of our current mule deer population in Colorado. You think of our elk population.

We're always a winter or two away from major winter kill. What happens if we have a huge apex predator population explosion, you know, a couple of big wolf packs step into your favorite elk hunting unit, and then you have a winter kill on top of that? Then what's going on? Then all of a sudden we have a big problem. So, you know, from a few different perspectives. Not a problem for the wolves. Not a problem for the wolves. I mean,

Colorado's a smorgasbord, man. I mean, if you look at, yeah, if you look at what we've got going on here in Colorado, I mean, this is the ideal target for wolves and grizzlies. I mean, we're covered up with animals. We're a pretty special state. So selfishly, I agree with that. You know, I don't want these animals killing my deer and elk and wiping out my herds. And maybe there's a little ignorance in that statement, but on the other hand, you know, I love wild, these wild places and wild things. So you know, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. Yeah. I remember when elk, when, when wolves came into the areas that we hunt elk after, like what happened very quickly after the Yellowstone reintroductions,

I remember a guy that we would bump into in our elk hunting area. He would be, he would kind of like get worked up about it, but he'd be like, you know, you got to share though. Got to share, got to share. Like walking them through. But the thing that I come back to, man, it's like you look into sort of like you try to like look into your own heart. And I remember the first wolf track I saw, man, I was ecstatic.

Not for what it meant, not like, oh, what is this going to mean down the road for tag allocations? But just in the immediate moment, right? In the immediate moment, there's sort of this really satisfying like, holy shit. That was the moment i had last year and when i take people to hunt in alaska always the thing that they always say always i hope we see a wolf yep or a or a grizzly it's just like always well exactly and that's what's so funny people travel travel to Alaska. To go see the wolf. I hope I see a wolf.

Or going to Jack's and going to the park. I was sitting in Frank Church Wilderness with a buddy of mine who was working in there with a big outfit. It was pretty fun. We were in this pup tent at the end. There was the big wall tent, nice wall tent, cook tent. There was a nice wall tent for the clients, another nice wall tent for the clients. And then it's like, you guide bums, figure it out.

And the remudas out there, you know, corral full of hot fence, mules and horses, and they're kind of talkative all night and they're pawing the ground, frozen ground. You know, it's really loud, and it's full moon, just like, you know, you're in a glowing tent in a full moon and can't sleep, and first wolf howl I ever heard, wolf cuts loose, and everybody goes dead silent, And I would easily trade a freezer full of elk meat for that moment. I mean, that was a special, special moment. Another thing I return to when I think about this,

I feel like it's a point I brought up before, is why, like the guys that are just dead set anti-predator across the board, why do those guys all want to hunt Alaska so bad? I said, you wouldn't like it at all. There's big stuff running around, all toothy, crazy stuff running around everywhere. But I think that people would answer is there Alaska guards very jealously, jealously it's right to do predator management. So they've got a nice balance. And I think that some people fear probably quite rightfully. So some people fear that if,

if wolves get very like heavily established in Colorado, if, you know, in a decade, we're talking about grizzlies being like heavily established in Colorado. If, you know, in a decade, we're talking about grizzlies being like absolutely established in Colorado, that there's the idea that like politically and socially, the state fish and game agency isn't going to have any latitude to do management, to like factor in various stakeholders in the conversation. I think if people knew that this will happen, these animals will come.

When they come, we will have management authority and we will manage with deer hunters, elk hunters, all people in mind and find like a good balance. I think that people's tensions wouldn't be as high. I mean, all they got to do is look to Montana, right? I mean, has it been a doomsday scenario up there for you hunting elk? Not at all. And they got, I mean, they found as much as it was going to be

that Montana having a wolf season was going to be the end of wolves, they found it ain't that easy. Well, these wolves do. They got smart. Oh, yeah. You're still finding elk, too. What's that? You're still finding elk, too. that you're still finding elk too yeah

plenty i've got as good at elk hunting up there as i did in colorado and there's this beautiful time in there where people are so used to blaming wolves that they actually cease to hunt and if you're out there hunting it is like the best elk hunting on the planet and all you have to do is be like oh yeah it's full of wolves oh i i've run into guys who were like in their truck and had given up because they caught in a wolf track but you know what that guy would have given up no matter what he'd give up because his wife's mad at him he'd give up it's like some's gonna make him give up uh does anybody else have anything on wolves or grizzlies?

Yeah. Oh, please. You saw a grizzly in Colorado. They're all named Old Something. Yeah. Can you name them, Cody? Oh, man, we'll call this one the Old Lujanski. The what?

The Old Lujanski. Oh. Keep it in the family name. You're going to name them after yourself. No, I'm just trying to. There's enough. What are you going to name something something like that a ghost grizzly you know it's an old ghost grizzly except this one wasn't old c uh cpw colorado parks and wildlife they do have a form right if you look at it grizzly sighting form they have a grizzly sighting form which

like if you got this they don't. Grizzly sighting form. They have a grizzly sighting form, which like if you got this, they don't have a Bigfoot sighting form. Do they? Well, Bigfoot's blurry, right? Yeah. Was it blurry? Yes or no? Exactly.

So there's like, they got a form, man. There's a reason that people make forms. So if you guys out there see one, go fill out the form. And he said that the warden we talked to today said he wasn't comfortable with the idea that they investigate possible sightings. But he used like a look into it. They'll look into it. What did he use?

Look into it. Yeah. He didn't want to say like quite like I wouldn't say we investigate. We look into it don't worry about it checks in the mail we'll think about it so does that now another colorado news piece that i want to get into can you um can you lay out the gore range i think since he spent so much time well i can do it but yannis is

like the gore range expert here i did a little bit of hunting in there but um a lot of you guys probably i'm sure some of you've been up there there is the gore range that runs from vale north towards steamboat there's uh gore pass which goes between uh breckenridge and bale there's gore creek that runs from bale down into the eagle river there's gore canyon on the colorado river near kremling did i say gore pass gore pass actually tapone is kremling and there's this gentleman, British gentleman, that spent a lot of time. You should talk about his rampage. In my notes, the top of my notes is,

Gore is what you might call an asshole. Now, how many people here know, like, Gore has everything named after him? Do you guys know who Gore was? The story of Gore? Gore. So. Gore? What's that?

Al Gore had the internet name. Oh, that's Al Gore. Al Gore. So, what's that? Al Gore had the internet name. Oh, that's Al Gore. So, this is something we've discussed in the past, was like Laramie. So, Laramie has got how much stuff named after him? Laramie shows up, he's like kind of a mountain man. No one knows anything about him, except he was named Laramie,

and the minute he showed up in Wyoming, was killed and stuffed through the hole in a frozen beaver pond. The dude winds up with half the state named after him. Okay. So Gore, here's Gore. So Gore is a, he's an Irish Lord. So he's the aristocracy. Comes West in the 1850s to go on a little hunting trip. Now, an interesting fact about this is Gore figured he was going to come up through New Orleans and come up the Mississippi and then go up the Missouri. But he gets word from a Mormon missionary in London to avoid New Orleans due to a cholera and malaria outbreak. Lands in New York instead.

He is packing with him 75 rifles, a dozen shotguns, a brass bed, a steel bathtub featuring his personal crest. He travels with his own personal fly tire. It takes dozens of carts and wagons to haul Gore's hunting equipment. He makes his way out to the Platte River, where he hires Jim Bridger, famed mountain man Jim Bridger, to be his hunting guide, and they set to kill him. And they kill him for two years. They hunt the Arkansas. They hunt the South Platte. They get up the Montana. They hunt the

tongue, the powder. They hunt the Yellowstone. Gore likes to sleep till 10. Then he likes to get up and hunt until after dark. By his own calculations, he kills 2,500 buffalo, which he leaves to rot, 105 bears, perhaps 40 of which were grizzlies. He kills 1,600 deer and elk. Indians are going to their Indian agents to complain about this particular individual's waste of resources. Even Jim Bridger gets sick of him. Eventually, everyone's mad at the guy. His trip's coming to an end. He goes down to Fort Union on the Missouri, and he wants to sell his gear to the James Kipp, who ran the fort there. James Kipp gives him what he perceives to be a shitty offer. Now, a lot of guys might. Bro bro, you've been in the guiding business.

How many of you guys have all guided? Everyone here is guided. Rich clients give you stuff, am I not? Is this right? Like, oh, here's my binoculars, Sonny. I mean, doesn't this happen? Sure. It's real hard to convert that into gasoline.

Yes. I have found. But it's a thing, right? It's a thing that happens. You give your guide stuff, not gore. Gore is offended by the offer. And at Fort Union, he, and this is witnessed by many, he starts a giant pyre

and burns every single thing that he had brought with him out of spite. He burns Conestoga wagons. He burns freight wagons. He burns Red River carts. He burns a silk tent. He burns all of his carpets. He burns his down-filled pillows. He had brought over an Indian rubber rubber raft that no one had ever seen. He throws that on the fire and burns it. He burns his meteorological equipment. He burns his entire personal library. Bridger, later in his life,

talked about Gore, and the part of the story that interested Bridger was that Gore introduced him to Shakespeare. Gore would read Bridger's Shakespeare at night, but he burns all of his Shakespeare text. He had kept meticulous journals through his whole journey. He had kept meticulous journals through his whole journey. He burns his journals.

Hands Jim Bridger $750 and leaves only with his hunting trophies. Then he winds up with a mountain range, a mountain pass, a canyon, lake, creek, and wilderness area that he never stepped foot in named after him. Yep. Hashtag winning. Which violates even the government's idea. Like, explain, like, what it is that you're supposed to do.

Oh, you can do that better than me. Like, to get a place named after you. Ideally, you'd be an American citizen first, right? Be helpful. You go discover, you go explore something. You map it out. Meaningful contribution. You give people useful information

that are going to be there at some point in the future. And someone says, hey, that guy did a good job. Let's name that mountain after him. But Gore just gets it out of sheer inertia. Right. But there's a petition that brody was talking about now this is your area of expertise yeah so this is the day and age where we're kind of conscious of our history and mistakes we've made in the past and names that shouldn't

have been named and so there's a movement to rename to wipe wipe Gore's name off the face of Colorado's mountainsides. And I'm not sure how much traction it's gaining, but... You can sign the petition. You can sign the petition. Yep, yep. And I believe what they want, it's the Shining Mountains is what they... They would like the Ute to name them, but a name that's been proposed is the general term for the Rockies, which would have been the Shining Mountains.

Yeah. In the Labian Eagle Key. He spent a lot of time in there. A couple more quick facts about Gore. It was the most expensive hunting expedition ever mounted at the time, and Gore never cocked his own rifle oh really so i'd be like cal cocked my rifle now i'm gonna shoot you know uh it reading about his thing it's

reminiscent so like gore like winds up being a villain right like we now perceive as villain and oftentimes like i'm the guy i'm the kind of guy that oftentimes when I hear like, Oh, we're going to rename something because of our contemporary perspective. Oftentimes I get a little uncomfortable feeling because I don't think it always works to take a contemporary notion of morality and like a, like a sophisticated progressive sense of morality and apply it to people 200 years ago who probably in their own time were progressive right but it but they they but it'll never keep up like you're always going to find some things so the more you go back and analyze you're looking at people who further times were like outstanding like regarded as outstanding individuals with really sophisticated

thoughts about human rights and sophisticated thoughts about what we ought to be doing and how we ought to be as a nation and what our aspirations and goals should be but there's this blemish and we we fixate on the blemish and it kind of makes me uncomfortable yeah but gore in his own time was hated was hated but maybe you don't maybe maybe you leave that name there to just remind you like like, hey, man, don't do that. Yeah. You know? Well, that's what I'm thinking. Like, Colorado School Kid, what an amazing lesson.

You're like, oh, Gore Peak. I wonder how that got named. Going to look this guy up. I mean. And you learn about, like, the rapacious quality of man. Yeah. Because otherwise it, like. And that's got to stick with you.

The Shining Mountains is a great name, but then no school kid ever learns about Gore because it's wiped off stick with you the shining mountains is a great name but then no school kid ever learns about gore because it's wiped off the face of the map right so i don't know yeah like maybe there should be one of those interpretive highway signs that just says like hey an asshole hunted here yeah i don't know man do you think there were people at the time being like boy that's terrible but he's creating a lot of jobs that's good that's good uh yeah i don't know man I don't know, man. I don't know about it because here's the thing. We all love Roosevelt, right? And if you want to go find, if you want to find a guy that was up to

that, go read a little bit about Roosevelt's when he got out of office and he did his big African safari. Right. No difference. No difference. But he, right, was, oh, that was just how they did things back then. Because he wound up doing us some good turns. So even our interpretation of morality is sort of like, is influenced by all these other things. Like his Africa trip,

anyone that describes his Africa trip, any writer that talks about it can't help but having the giant list of all the crazy stuff he packed. Quite similar to the list I gave a minute ago. But he's our great hero. So I don't know. The packing list for River of Doubt.

Yeah. Extensive? My God. I mean, you could almost call him gore with a conscious right like he came around at the end you believe so he died single i don't know i mean well he did a lot for us right conservation wise oh i like one history of gore that i read the writer took some level of satisfaction in the fact that he died alone

maybe i don't know if he was like he might have been but you know what in the end he died alone so he must have had a good life you know i don't know i'm just was like, he might have been, but you know what? In the end, he died alone, so he must have had a good life. I don't know. I'm just like, the writer took it as, it wasn't meant as a dig. I was just wondering. Okay, so let me say this. You are, you are commander of the universe. And on your daily docket of decisions is,

hey, should we change the Gore range to the Shining Mountains? You've got so much to do that day, you've got to make a snap decision. You need to know right now they're making the new signs. Do you do it or not? Oh, man. Before we had this conversation, I was all for changing. Now I'm rethinking it.

You're rethinking it? I can't tell you how many times I heard Yonah say, I was back in the gore. Yeah. I was back in the shining mountains. That sounds good. It does. But there's nothing wrong with the gore either.

But when you know the history of it, it kind of stinks, right? But now I'm conflicted because I'm wondering if we should be changing those little blemishes or do we leave them just to remind ourselves? In my mind, there's a gap here. The gap being, why did they name it after him? We know it's named after him. But I guess maybe I'm missing something here. But I don't know why they named it.

Was it because he came and did all these amazing expeditions and created a name for himself? Or because he was an ass? There's an explanation for how it started to happen, but it's not satisfactory. Okay. It wasn't them being like, happen, but it's not satisfactory. Okay. It wasn't them being like, man, that was a good guy. He was cool. It wasn't like that.

It was just more of an issue of convenience. They were naming a lot of things at the time, right? So he came along at the right time, was kind of notorious, and they said, you're the man. Yeah. Okay. Rolls off your tongue.

The gore. This morning, I was forechanging. Now, here I am, master of the universe. What was the title? Commander of the universe. Commander of the universe. Keep it. That's my official make the sign, keep it.

I'm with you. Yeah, like it's what it is, you know? You can't erase history by changing the name, and you shouldn't want to, right? Yeah. You shouldn't try and cover it up. I don't know. Me, man.

Kellyanne? Learning opportunity. This is similar to the issues that are going on in New Mexico with regard to monuments that were named after famous Spanish conquistadors that created horrible atrocities against Native Americans and Pueblans. And, you know, do you keep these because that was an important part of history, or do you change them because this guy was such an ass and did so many bad things to so many bad people?

Slavery and genocide were just tools in the tool kit back then. Yeah, you know. and did so many bad things to so many bad people. Slavery and genocide were just tools in the toolkit back then. So, yeah. I mean, these issues are being looked at all over the place right now. I say change it. Change it. Hell yeah. Okay.

I've called it the gore my entire life. Commander Cody. Commander Cody. It's interesting. I saw him live. That's a band, yeah. Commander Cody. Hot Rod Lincoln. Wow.

He opened up for Steppenwolf. What? Wow. All right. Cody commander interesting I saw him live it's a band yeah commander Cody hot rod Lincoln he opened up for Steppenwolf yeah wow all right uh can we are we ready to move on yeah that'd be cool I'm cool no one knowing anything more no yeah you good I'm good okay now what's going on just checking in time how are you doing good do you think doing? Good. Do you think it's immoral? Do you think it's immoral or what's the opposite of immoral? Is it immoral or okay to shoot a bedded deer? I'll go with okay. Okay.

Can you give me your thinking on why it's okay? Um, I think I just lay out why some people would say maybe it's not okay first. Sure. Right. You wouldn't agree that we agree that that would be a fine approach. Okay. You're going to say it's okay. And tell us why it's not or why some might view it as not. Yeah. because i think if you don't have the context of that then why even have this conversation understood but i think that well there's two reasons i think a lot of people say it's not okay to shoot a betta deer or whatever big game animal uh one being that you're not seeing like the the body sort of stretched out and you're not able to identify exactly where the vitals are and where exactly you should place your bullet or arrow.

The other one being that somehow you've caught an animal sleeping or off guard and that you're at such an advantage that you should feel, I guess, morally bad about it and that you should, like, give the animal a pass because it's taking a break. Yes. That's my understanding. Those are the main two reasons why people are sort of not— Yeah, like, I don't want to see that as a sportsmanship thing.

Like, you're not supposed to shoot a duck off the water, right? Yeah. Like, somewhere in there. Yeah. But we've all decided that's okay so so i i say it's okay because um one i feel like if you know and and the anatomy enough and if you have a like a rifle or whatever uh weapon with enough power, and you know the vitals, you can still place that bullet right where it needs to go, even when it's crouched up and bedded.

And as far as giving it a pass because you caught it sleeping, you should be considered an excellent hunter because you snuck up to a bedded animal because everybody knows every now and then you catch one that's actually asleep. But more than likely when to a bedded animal because everybody knows it's like okay every now and then sure you catch one that's actually asleep but more than likely when they're bedded they're still aware or or the one next to them is aware nobody's actually completely asleep on the job right it's not like you caught like the platoon sleeping you snuck in there and got the jump on everybody yeah right so i think when you sneak into when you sneak into a bunch of bedded deer or just one,

you should be considered an exceptional hunter with exceptional skills. And not be said that somehow you got over on one. I feel you on that. And remember we met a guy that was kind of the opposite, where his wife didn't want to eat meat from animals that looked at him. Right. I do remember that. She'd be like, did it look at you?

Mm-hmm. No. Okay. Right. So it didn't matter if it was bedded or not. No, that was her thing. It became, rather than saying like, oh, no, you snuck up on this thing, and it's bedded down, her thing would be like,

just from looking at it like a sort of outsider perspective, be like, once it's aware of you and staring at you, you've kind of like lost, like something went wrong there and it wasn't like you, you know.

You've said that before though, like you prefer to shoot animals that have no idea you're there. Way prefer it. Way prefer it. Like when I'm, it's in everybody's story. You had no idea it's like

people love that part of the story yeah man not aware that i was there i'm gonna start whistling first just to let him know get him to stand up well you know like kevin murphy blows the horn right when he starts his before he starts the hunt the guy that wrote in about this do you want to know i i hesitated at first to even share this detail his dad was so opposed to shooting do you know what i'm talking about his father is so opposed to shooting a bed of deer that his father once found a wounded deer that had been hit by a car and he'd kind of watch it around their property he kept trying to catch it on his feet but it would always cut through their property and lay down. So it's already wounded and he's basically trying to put it down,

but also be able to eat it before it goes bad. He goes and gets a Red Ryder BB gun to shoot the deer to get it to stand up to then shoot it with a muzzleloader. This guy writes in a letter explaining this and saying, what's your take on it? Wow. Give it a fighting chance.

Give it a fighting chance, yeah. Hunting with you. Yeah, we ran into that scenario in New Mexico on a pronghorn hunt. Yeah, and I crawled up on an antelope and shot in the bed and heard all kinds of shit about it. Yeah, and ran into that scenario in New Mexico on a pronghorn hunt. Yeah, and I crawled up on an antelope and shot in the bed and heard all kinds of shit about it. Yeah, and prior to that, I mean, it was actually a pretty cool stock.

It was really open country, and we had a herd of cattle just come blasting through, and it provided the only bit of cover for the first part of the stock. And then you went in and belly crawled and finished this amazing stock, got out in the middle of it. I mean, there was grass about this tall. and then you just caught a rash and a shit yeah crawling around the hot ass sun right i was dragging my rifle behind me cack the storms all up and down and it was like you weren't manly right because it was laying down it's like come on man so so what is your take would Would you do it? My take is I have

taken animals and some of the best stocks in my life have been totally creeping up on an animal and killing its bed. On the flip side of that, I have had animals lost with me by somebody shooting an animal and not hitting the animal right when it was bedded because I have had that happen. And just this past year, I had that happen. It cost a family member of mine a bull. And so on a bedded bull elk. So it happens. So if you know what you're doing and you feel confident with it and you are going to own your shot and you've completed that stock, I think you go for it. If you're not confident with it and the animal's not laid just right, don't take the shot. Kyle Hand? Yeah, it's so hard and I always have a hard time with folks who are like,

absolutely, 100%, this is the only way you can do it. Because hunting's just not that way, that's why I love it. it's got no end to the variables right there's animals an animal does what it wants and the conditions are unknown so uh my general rule of thumb is no do not really client though really it compresses commander of the universe compresses the area um you have more your i feel like your odds increase of uh destroying good meat and patience kills man just wait for that thing stand up put it through both lungs minimal meat loss done deal now that being said you know you can very very well find that scenario where everything is perfect the animal's bedded and you have just that beautiful window through the vitals and and it's great but yeah generally i say do not shoot wait are you coming from the client

perspective what you're telling clients or you individually here i typically hold off myself yep yeah what about a client no go 100 of the Brody? Well, before Callahan spoke up, I was going to say I prefer to shoot everyone bedded, but... The only shot I'll take. I had to wait a while for it to bed down. Yeah. Now I got to think about it. I mean, I have shot, you know, I shot a bull elk at less than 20 yards with the rifle bedded down. And he was just as surprised as I was when I, but now Cal's like got me all feeling guilty about it.

So. You're on your personal journey. You know what people say like to people like go yeah or no. And they just measure the volume when you're doing like an audience survey i don't want to do we're measuring the volume i just want for when i put this to the audience test i just want you to say yep like that loud not all kinds of screaming just a nice yep uh Would you change? Okay. All those in favor of switching the Gore range to the Shining Mountain range, say yep.

All those in favor of it keeping its name. Yep. Huh. All those that think it's okay to shoot a deer, say, in its bed, say, yup. Yup. Yup. They progressively got louder, you know. I don't know shit about shit.

Cheering for your team. Okay, so we have at the Meteor podcast, we have a man who's kind of emerged as what I like to call our philosopher in residence, which is this guy, this dude, Luke Rine, who happens to be with us here tonight, who sends in all these kind of like really perplexing hunting questions, ethics questions, enough to where, like I started to take notice of this fella, that he really knows how to get in there and grapple

with some of the hunting conundrums. And like I said, he's in attendance tonight. And he had this question, which is an interesting idea is like, what winds up being your shot to kill ratio in big game hunting? Pointing out that a one-to-one ratio, meaning, you know, every, you, you, you kill an animal with every shot you fire might not be the most ethical ratio because in some things it might be that the minute you if you hit an animal for purposes of having a quick humane kill you might quickly follow it up with a second shot in order to ensure that it's going to like die really quickly so bragging a one-to-one might not be as good as if you had like a higher ratio because you just want to sure

to like put them on the ground quickly and efficiently in the case of hunting something like moose or elk so what is your shot to kill shots fired to animals killed ratio uh Uh, 1.3, 1.3, but lifetime. No, I just was, I just running through in my, I just like ran some calculations from like a year from the last year. That's where I'm at. I mean, I haven't like, I haven't like kept the, I haven't like tracked the data, but I'll point out that last year, big game hunting, the only time I shot twice, the first one would have been fine. I just happened to shoot twice. I mean, it was like a fog neck. Like a shot.

That's not true. You don't think so? Which bug? Oh, no, you're right. Yeah yeah so like 1.7 or whatever 1.4 yeah no you're right yeah i bet you everyone that they think about it the number will grow okay let me let me put it let me put it this way let me put it in a more conservative way it's not two. Between one and two. It's not two.

Is it big game only, or are we counting small game too? No, you're not counting like hunting dogs. No. There's more? Real quick. Okay, quick and give us the last part. Yeah, I got you. I'm saying if you miss, you got to count it. Yeah.

Yeah, but I don't have that problem. Yeah, it would be like not two, not two. Yanni's running very high right now. Yeah, Yanni said I had some Western hunts. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Three on my coos, two each on my last two antelope. Last cow was two. Last five squirrels were three apiece.

Yeah, I don't know. So, yeah, what does that give me? You're plus two. Yeah, I'm plus two. Cody? I'll just go with Colorado last year. One on my muley buck. One on my pronghorn buck.

Wait a minute, because you missed your muley buck before that. That's what I heard. No, my gun didn't fire. What does that count? Did you pull the trigger? Oh, yeah, you said you pulled the trigger. Yeah, I pulled the trigger, and I didn't even get a click or anything. Does that count?

That doesn't count. That doesn't count. And then two on my bull i pulled the i shot him he didn't move so i immediately shot him again and just to be sure and walked up there and two two vital shots so four shots three animals okay now let's hear cal's amazingly known cal's 0.75 like amazingly low number. Yeah, this is good. This is humbling.

Bowl one. Mule deer one. Bowl negative four. What does that mean? At the time, I was like, I am inexplicably missing. Now, that's not true. The fact of the matter is I have quite ignorantly just not been shooting as much as I used to. And my rifle skills have clearly fallen off the map.

So I went back home to Montana on our real misery hunt and found another nice bull in there and missed three times, not four times. Missed three times. Okay. At sub 200 yards. Callahan. Okay. At sub 200 yards. Callahan. Yeah.

I can give you all the scenarios, but that's not the question. I can give you the full meal deal, but I missed three times. Under 200 yards. Okay. And I had a, here is the bull because it was so confused that it ran directly at me and now it's at 40 yards. And I'm like, well, now only a jackass would miss. And I had the safety on and did the, huh. How had I not heard the story? It was saving it.

Well, yeah, it's not a good story. And it got away. And it just, it got away, gone. I mean, it was the full, I told you about that, huh? And it was like 30 mile an hour winds the whole time. Yeah, no, you did. The wind wasn't a factor because we were down in this hell hole and the driving snow. And I had all the time in the world.

I had my pack down in like two feet of snow. So I was basically like sitting on a couch. Had deadfall in front of me. Had a perfect rest. And I was like, just take your time. Just take your time. Just take your time. And one of those, yeah.

And I did. And I missed. Over a course of period of time. Yeah. Yeah. Good question. Brady? Hold on, but the gun was off, right?

No. It wasn't? No, no, but the gun was off, right? No. It wasn't? No, no, no. This was off. So I got lost in the numbers somewhere. So you're running a plus two, absolutely. So... Six.

An arrow, bull, one bullet for the mule deer, three misses on another bull. Which I did feel bad about. I'm not like a math genius. I'm not a math genius here, but like. Two animals, seven shots. Right? Three plus.

You like divide this into this and. Yeah, so these are like 3.3. Yeah. There you go. A cow moose, one shot. M Cow moose, one shot. Mule deer buck, one shot. Cow elk, three shots. They all hit her, but it was three shots to end it.

Is that the end? That's it for last year. Sub two. But I feel like one year is such a small sample size too. Okay. Can we move on? Yeah. If you do, you're solid with sub two.

Yeah. Comfortable? I think there's year's eyes probably more in Cal's range. Thanks, Luke. This guy starts out by saying, I have absolutely zero axes to grind. Somebody tell me more. He goes on to ask this.

He's going out west. He's from Georgia. Going out west on his first big-time Wild West hunting trip, which he says he does not want it to get squirrely. What is a specific pronghorn? He's going on an antelope hunt. Pronghorn antelope hunt. He wants to know a specific piece

of pronghorn antelope hunting gear. Not just general universal gear, but antelope gear. Kneep pads. Oh, yeah. Oh, does everybody get to pick one? Everybody gets to pick one. I'm doing knee pads.

Antelope specific. Yeah, I like it. Construction knee pads. Since I saw you do this, I'm going to go with bipod. Ooh, well played, well played. Yeah, I'm going to go with bipod. Ooh, well played, well played. Yeah, I'm going to go with optics, you know, binos. Universal gear. Yeah.

You're talking specific little niche gears. Not normal general gear. I feel like bipod's specific enough, right? It's specific enough. I accept that answer. So do I have to go with like a pair of 12 or 15, 12 power binos? There we go. 12 power binos. There we go. 12 power binos. Yep.

Sunscreen. I was gonna say like a buff, but sunscreen kind of... 13 bullets. I don't know i'll add another one man and we've done this uh is a white handkerchief flag kind of amazing just for flagging just doing this you want to see him go whoop and they'll oftentimes be like huh is that legal everywhere I don't know if it's legal or illegal how could it be illegal I can't picture being illegal to be like to be

like dude I just was getting my hanky out I was just giving him a heads up like a safety aspect to like there's something white moving over oh shit I shot Steve Rinella 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 our northern brothers get irritated And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater podcast. Now, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the

OnX Club, y'all. We got time for a couple more. We got a couple more? Yeah. We also got to do our closers. Here's a quick question. But I don't think you guys are going to have any perspective on this question. A guy writes in and he says,

I guess this is in keeping with your having eaten coyotes. Have you any advice or experience with the common carp? There is a lot of meat on those puppies. I have. We've cooked and eaten common carp. I've smoked them, ground them up for patties. It winds up being that it's absolutely edible. A lot of people from a lot of cultures raise them for the purpose.

And he's talking about common, like Eurasian carp. Raise them for the purpose of food. You're fine. It's edible, all that. But when I eat them, I don't come away from it being like, man, I cannot wait to go get another carp. And so to me, that's this whole classification of wild game.

It's like, I ate it. It didn't hurt. Not dying to do it again. And I put common carp in that category. Any experience? Haven't. If you have no experience, can you do me a favor? Try it.

Can you, no, no, not that. Can you tell me what sort of like the latest wild game dish you've been on to that you're like, this is what people ought to be cooking? That they might not be aware of. No, they could be aware of it, but it's like, well, you're on, because you made me a very good moose heart taco

two nights ago. Yeah, can that be my answer? That could be your thing. Lay it out. Okay. Yeah, I did a moose heart and an elk heart. We really didn't need both, but kind of carved them up,

got them down to nothing but meat. You know, there's a lot of connective tissue and silver skin on hearts. Because you trimmed all that off? Yeah. I typically do not. I had to, you know, make dinner for the boss, so. Yeah. But, yeah, once you get that stuff off of there,

the gristle and veins and fat and silver skin, it's like very dense kind of soft meat. And I just cut it in strips, marinated it in olive oil, lime juice, carne asada seasoning, grilled it rare, threw it on some tacos. With all kinds of toppings. Yeah, like charred some peppers and onions on the grill to go on it. Some queso fresco. I think that was about it.

Herbs. Yeah, cilantro. Yeah. It's just like a fresh summer meat. Yeah. Well, I was so worried about overcooking it that some of it was definitely undercooked. But I'd rather go that direction than overcooked yeah you still kind of feel it going like this in your mouth but my kids ate it which i i you know and you guys i

didn't hear any grumbling so i love mine we're all here today it's great but a moose heart it's like a guy actually like i posted a picture of the elk heart and the moose heart he's like you should have posted a picture of a deer heart for us eastern guys for size perspective and i said i replied to him i said fist two fists child's head like kind of the perspective i want to back up on carp real quick because i one time did it a scoffier recipe with carp where you cut the carp's head and tail off then you debone and you flay it like debone all the meat and you grind the meat up and mix it with butter and bread crumbs and all kinds of other good things to eat and you reform the carp's body out of this stick the head and tail back onto it, make scales with truffles.

It's like food taxidermy. You rescale the carp with sliced truffles and then eat it. That is good carp. Sounds like it. I don't know. Can you make that next time we was that you make that next time we go carp fishing i could do it again i could do it it takes like about three days what's the truffle bucket um carp i feel like anything when the water's super cold is edible and it's a flawed theory uh and then you know summertime carp they're in

to me like boiling hot water out there in the back bays and and that just does not seem palatable in any way shape or form but you know i was in panama over the winter and that water's always warm, and those fish taste great. Yeah, that's a good point. But people do have that. They're good in the winter. I grew up hearing that about suckers.

But I made one kind of fun fish thing. I always try one extra thing. I had a brown trout ate a streamery a little too deep and kept the brown trout that had not I only say that because I just hadn't intended to have trout that night kind of rearranged the menu and did the trout on blue true tall blue yeah so if you don't know what this is, it's basically you take some aromatics and white vinegar and water. Get that to a high sizzle. And just slide the trout in there. Well, when I gutted this brown trout, it had a liver that was like this big.

I mean, it was like two big thumbs doubled up and i threw that liver in there and it was not to be missed it was fantastic it was good yep in the old days they made true tall blue or blue trout i'm saying it horribly and uh it was it was essential that you put a live trout because its skins would turn a extra vibrant blue but that just doesn't feel quite right and guts in obviously you yeah you get the vinegar broth because what it is is like the skin turns blue for some reason i'll never understand um but if you want to be really blue you put you slip live trout into the boiling elixir, which is just one of those, it's like gore, right? There's just some things we don't do anymore, kids.

Oh, man, no carp. My last name is Lujan, so clearly tacos are pretty big in my household. So I love a red chili taco and just a really good some of the prime cuts from either pronghorn or elk and some good ground red chili from northern New Mexico and some flour and you get the mixture right in your pot and then you dump in your meat and you cook a little pozole on the side, which is like hominy almost. And you mix those up, and you have a big hearty stew. Probably the best.

My favorite meal. And you could probably put a house cat in there, and it would taste good, right? I'll tell you what, man. If you get that red chili, if you get everything mixed up just right, you could throw a carp in there, and it would taste you could throw a carp in there to taste the carp yeah carp tacos but i've had that and it wasn't until i met you that i knew that there was like a terroir terroir what's that word in wine terroir terroir i don't know say it again terroir yeah like uh meaning that that each like each place sort of has its own thing that it imbibes in a flavor, right? And it's like a wine thing that like this hill, the South Hill,

has this extra quality that you don't get when we grow grapes on the North Hill. Oh, yeah, you've got like your hatch valley. But you were like being into what valley chilies come from. Oh, yeah, the hatch valley. Obviously, everybody knows hatch chili, but a lot of volcanic soil. And then for the green chili and then northern new mexico uh the espanola valley is my family's preferred red chili which is green chili that's dried crushed you know ground and um and then each it's interesting

each of the pueblos in new mexico also take pride in our our chill our green chili is better than the next door pueblos green chili so everybody's kind of got their own strains and different ways of preparing it. And you integrate that into your wild game. Yeah, and I integrate a lot of green chili and red chili into our wild game cuisine. My wife does as well. Yeah, honey? Don't lie, because you've eaten carp, because I've served you carp. Yeah, it was good.

You liked it? It was edible. What I did like from that same—we talking about wisconsin right yeah what was good i remembered those uh the ribs that we had off those but they weren't off the carp i think that was a buffalo sucker yeah that's a native fish yeah but those ribs were good yeah like really like meaty good ribs off of a fish yeah like the rib the rib cage man like you cook the rib ribs off of a fish. Yeah, like the rib cage, man. You cook the rib cage off a buffalo sucker, which is like a carp, but it's a native fish,

not a non-native fish. There used to be a commercial market for them in the old days. Did you just fry that rib cage? Grilled them. Grilled them with ramps, which you probably don't have near your house either. How thick are those ribs? Not that I know of.

Are they like quarter inch? Maybe not quite. They're like that thick. Well, there you go. Thin. The bone itself or the width of the meat? The width of the meat, yeah. Oh, yeah, then a solid, maybe even three-eighths.

Wow. So what are you hot on right now? What am I hot on? Turkey liver pate. Tell me more. turkey liver pate meat butter as a bunch of people on Instagram described it which I had never called that growing up

but yeah I took a turkey liver I didn't mean to but I ended up basically soaking it in water for about a week just because I didn't have time and I was almost getting ready to pitch it I'll be honest because like yeah I don't know if it's still gonna be good but it smelled fine so I went ahead and did it and quick recipe um so I recommend anybody tries it because it literally took 30 minutes to not even 30 minutes probably 15 minutes to make and then maybe an hour to let

it set up in the fridge but so you soak it a week yeah soak it a week. Yeah, soak it a week. You probably get away with just rinsing it. But trim it up, chop it up a little bit. And I was surprised because it was a chicken liver recipe that I used, and it called for a half a pound. I was like, oh, man, like how am I ever going to come up with a half pound of liver, right? But the turkey's liver actually ended up being a quarter pound. A turkey's liver is a quarter pound? Yeah, yeah. So I just had to have the recipe. I was surprised, yeah. Big liver. And so chopped it up, and then in a pot with, I think, like a cup of water, you put that in there, one bay leaf, a couple peppercorns, one clove of crushed garlic, and like a half a teaspoon of fresh thyme, I believe.

Simmer for about three minutes. Turn the heat off. Put the lid on it. Let it sit for five more minutes. Strain it out of the water into the food processor. Remove pepper corns and bay leaves. Buzz it until it's pureed. And then I read a bunch of recipes on how to make chicken liver pate, and it varied greatly as to how much butter people put in. So for my quarter pound, I put in roughly three-quarters of a stick of butter. Like the further east you go, the more butter you add. Yes. The more latvian you are, the more butter you add.

Did you say three-quarters? Three- are the more butter did you say three quarters three quarters of a stick yeah three quarters of a stick okay and then uh that's all so it's all pureed up and then i think the recipe called for cognac i didn't have any so i think i put in like a tablespoon of uh coors four no no no it was uh Roses whiskey that had some dust on it. Just straight up whiskey. Yeah. And yeah, so you buzz that another second longer, put it into a ramekin, cover it, put it in the fridge. It sets up and then smear it on crackers.

It was delicious. You love it. Yeah. But, you know, you get to the kind of the point of you're like your creamed cart because you've almost taken what it was and transformed it, you know, so far to something else because you've added something. How long does it take to do that, Yanni? What's that? It sounds like a pretty involved process.

No, like I said, 15 minutes. Are you kidding me? No, it was quick and easy. That's the thing that happens in wild game cooking where, and we talked to us a bunch with Steve Kendrott's very wonderful 50% venison, 50% pork fat sausage, is at what point is it no longer wild game? A quarter pound liver and three quarter sticks of butter, I would still like, the fact that it's liver makes me be like, it's extra wild game, right? It's like extra wild game. So I still feel like, the fact that it's liver makes me be like, it's extra wild game, right?

It's like extra wild game. So I still feel like that counts as a wild game dish. It was good. It's very definitely a wild game dish. I'm glad you brought up the, uh, his sausage though. Cause I was talking about this with your brother and we were talking about like adding too much fat, wasting a bunch of fat, right? Cause you end up with a pan that's got, you know, sometimes a of uh well you cook those sausages that i made right there's like a half inch of fat that

they're floating in by the time you're done cooking but i feel like there's something else going on inside the sausage that when you when you cut down the fat because you're thinking like oh all i have here is waste right because all this extra fat i put in here but something else is going on inside that sausage it's changing the character of that sausage with that much fat in there yeah right even though it's all like there's a bunch left and drift out like when you cut that one compared to what you make with 25 fat even though it's like there's a bunch of rendered out fat what's left over is is a much different product you're right because it gets like i think you had once said that you described someone's sausage as though you had browned a bunch of

burger and crammed it into a sausage casing right where why is it being like it's like kind of like ground meat in a tube and the fat you're right even though the fat comes out there's something about the high fat ratio that still makes it that you bite into and you're like, that is sausage. You guys all right? So that's what you're hot on to. Yeah.

I'm definitely going to do it again next year. My liver pate. All right. Concluders? Oh, you were supposed to bring something up. I'm going to do it right now. Is that your concluder? Use it as your concluder.

Sweet segue, yeah. Are we doing concluders? Let her rip? You were thinking about doing a segue? Into my concluder. But are you going to segue off of the moose heart? Because you could do a double segue. That's a double segue.

Maybe you should do that. Let me think how to t.e.o speaking of heart my first concluder is thank you to everyone for coming out tonight my uh my second concluder is um there's only eight of these chairs in existence but these are these handy dandy new yeti chairs so these are cool very comfortable my third concluder my third concluder is uh hey brody i keep thinking about that uh moose heart taco you made me. Speaking of moose, we were talking to a Colorado Parks and Wildlife officer today about other recreational users on public land besides hunters and the impact they may or may not have on game and other wildlife. And Cal has been involved a lot with kind of bringing those recreational users together with hunters to like join up in this fight to protect our public lands which got me

to thinking about this thing that happened up i believe at brainerd lake not that, a couple years ago. Where a, I think he was an archery hunter drew a moose tag for the Indian Peaks wilderness there which is right there by Brainerd Lake. And legally shoots a moose within close proximity of the trail head. The moose kind of saunters through a meadow and promptly dies in front of some freaked out hiker types, which led to that area, like that area being closed within a one mile radius for moose hunting so that no more hiker types get traumatized by animals dying in front of them, which kind of irritates me because...

Well, also, it could happen anywhere. Like, a hiker could be hiking on any chunk of public land and be like, oh, my God. I just witnessed the life and death cycle. What kind of place is this and so like if we're gonna share public land with these other recreational users which i'm all for we gotta share right like hunting's hunting and things die and like i understand why it happened because it's in close proximity to Boulder and. But that shouldn't, but that shouldn't matter.

No, don't do that. Don't do that. Because Brody, you also, Brody provided his own counterpoint earlier that they had opened up like a, like a, basically a green space cow hunt there that went on very well. Exactly. I'm some of you guys probably from maybe some of you guys hunted it that when I saw it, I was like, there's no way they're gonna pass this cow hunt it like right outside the city city limits of boulder on open space like county land there's no way it's gonna go and it went over very well you know they reduced a herd of elk that was largely out of control because it wasn't getting hunted and it went over. Did anyone kill one

there? Anyone hunt it? Good luck. I feel like they should have charged those hikers more for having the experience of witnessing, of witnessing such a rare occurrence. occurrence yeah like you watch it on you pay cable television to watch that stuff right yeah you know that's my brother was recently telling me when he's watching uh uh animal chasing another animal he roots for the animal to get away no i always find myself coming i hope he catches it yeah it he's like oh man I get depressed if I was hiking I'd be like go down go down go down yeah he got him

say it again how many points did you have for that field there you got in Colorado no points nope um Calhoun you got a concluder yeah so not this year Nope. Calhoun, you got a concluder? Yeah, so... Not this year.

Yeah. Thank you guys very, very much for all the public landowner T-shirts and all the compliments about our public lands, and they're amazing, and the Hunt to Eat T-shirts, and it's awesome, and I hope you guys do more than just wear a good-looking T-shirt and get involved in this process. It's very easy. And to talk about this experience that Brody's talking about here, I think it is incredibly easy and incredibly unproductive to kind of be like, screw you, I'm a hunter, and I paid for this and i'm in fact i'm

paying for most of your guys recreation opportunities it's so fun to do that though it's so fun and it's so easy it's just not productive so uh trailhead diplomacy is something i always talk about i like it you just have to have a little bit of patience. You have to look at all this as a learning or a teaching opportunity, learning opportunity for both sides. And you got to be willing to listen just as well as you explain your position. But, you know, all this stuff is, we like to think of hunting as a right, but it's just something that we really get to go out and enjoy and it is a very real thing that it it could go away we could see it happen so

uh i think all of us as responsible human beings adults and hunters have to go out there with a willingness to educate and make sure that this is around for a long, long time. That's a tough one to follow up on. Thank you. But kind thought riding on cow's coattails there i think back in the day here in colorado 1940s 1950s we had a lot of tremendous people who were world-class outdoor recreationalists ski jumpers basically our 10th mountain division guys what did they these are all the original outdoor recreationalists and that generation was also fishermen and big game hunters. And so somewhere those paths, recreation, hunting, and fishing have diverged. And so I think it's up to us now, going on with what Cal was saying, to kind of bring that full circle through trailhead diplomacy or otherwise,

and just education, recruiting new hunters. And one thing, you know, that I see, uh, last year I was bummed out. I was driving through Northern Colorado through on a national forest road. And I kept driving past camp after camp of dudes in the middle of the afternoon. They're all saying, no, you didn't see a grizzly bear. They're saying there's no grizzly bears here. There's no hippies here. Um, so I was bummed out because I wasn't seeing any kids. I was just seeing a bunch of dudes here and a bunch of dudes there. I came over this little rise into a patch of aspens and looked up and there was two kids walking up the road with a 22 smiling at me. And it was a brother and sister hunting grouse with a rifle and their dad walking, uh, right

behind them and kind of made my day. And I was like, God, we need more of that out in the woods right now. And I think, you know, and so, you know, imparting not to go too long here, but you know, life is like roll a toilet paper, man. The more you get into it, the faster it goes. There's so many excuses not to take a buddy or a new hunter or a child hunting. And so you've just got to take it upon yourself to make that happen. Every opportunity you get, because every day that goes by you don't do it, is a day that you didn't take someone else and bring them into this room

that is full of people that do what we love. So that's all I got. Ronnie? Getting all warm and fuzzy in here. Can you tee me up something? What's that? Can you serve me up? Can you tee me up something, too?

Like try to segue you into something? Yeah, give me an idea. No, I'm taffed out, man. I'm taffed out. You're taffed out? Oh, boy. That's funny because the warden today mentioned that, too. That struck me, and I think you guys heard it today,

where he mentioned that 10, 20 years ago, like, every camp he went to, there were kids in there, and a lot of times it was just mom, dad, and kids, and just kids that were not even old enough to hunt, but, like, every camp he'd stop at was like that. And now they literally get on the radio and go, oh, yeah, we'd stop at was like that and now they literally get on the radio and go oh yeah we just stopped at a camp that has people under 30 in it um so he was pointing to that as you know being a fact that we don't have this like younger generation coming up where we used to a lot he said the average age was 56 or something something like that i think

there's a thing that happens and I found it, and this is like just tacking on to your concluder, but the thing I found that, I don't know if it was that something's changed, but I know a lot of guys now that seem to be that they're like very busy and they're kind of protective

of these little times when they can get away. And it's kind of like there's a lot of people that don't want to be bothered by, there's sort of this mentality of not wanting to be bothered by the annoyance of having kids. Right? And so I think that now, maybe it's not something new,

but there's this kind of reluctance to be drugged down by how, I mean, they're little and they're hard to deal with. I have three little kids, and when I'm fishing with them, I'm sometimes not the person I want to be. James may ask you a question or two. And I got to just go like, okay.

Yeah, I usually don't even get to pull the trigger when I have my kids with me. So you can't, there's no even ratio of pull to dead shit. Yeah, you're like bullet fired deal. It's like no one's shot. You might as well leave your gun at home. But then I now and then collect myself. I remember when I was getting a vasectomy at one point, the doctor went like this.

And then I knew, I was like, why have I been laying here 25 minutes? But yeah, I'll be like, this is my kids. Be like, just pull it together, pull it together, pull it together. And then come back out and be like, okay, everyone, we're going to get all these hooks out of everybody. We're going to rebate and we're going to get back in the water, man.

It's like, you got it to get them out. Thank you again for coming out. Yeah. I love all you guys. One more minute. Oh, you got another concluder? Please. It'll be fun. But we will be at the front doors. He's going to sign some books as long as we possibly can. And before you guys all get up out of your seats, oh, yeah, don't storm out of there. We'll be there.

So you just, you know, nice and easy. Make your way there. But before you leave your seats, we have a couple hats. Does anybody like hats? For you? Oh, you got a stack? oh yes they're toss those oh these are the meteor hats these are town town hats All right. I'm out thank you thank you guys

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