The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 134: An Object and Its Shadow

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

Anchorage, AK- Steven Rinella talks with his brother Danny Rinella, Army veteran Levi Meyer, Chris "Ridge Pounder" Gill, along with Dirt Myth and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew. Subjects Discussed: risking life and limb for household birds; the ballad of Jani Tsimane; dipping, smoking, and chaw dawgs; Matt Rinella's primitive navigation tool; Danny's swollen uvula; the blond bombshell of the grizz world; Ovis dalli and its rocky, nasty, glaciated homeland; full curls, double broomers, and other marks of a legal ram; poaching and the state's response; God's penthouse; Janis's bear protection; Danny's fall down the mountain; angle of repose; an object and its shadow; squirrely glacial weather; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We host 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. A couple quick questions.

Dan, are those hippie prayer flags hanging in your window? Yeah, they are. Really? Why is that? Is that really the message you want to send to the outside world? I had nothing to do with that. That was an art project of, I believe, my daughter at school. So they indoctrinate children up in Anchorage to hang Tibetan prayer flags in their windows?

Yeah. Does she know what it means? I don't know what lesson came along with that, but that was an Anchorage public school district art project, yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Second question real quick. How do you fill those bird feeders? Karina, my wife, walks out the window onto that roof right there every few days and

pours bird seed in there she risks life and limb for those birds yeah yeah yanni do you remember the the song i wrote um yanni yanni chimani i do king of the cassare i do remember that i would have had i known at the time had i not just learned the other day that you were that you chewed tobacco you dipped chewed dog yeah as a listener wrote in you were a chaw dog you chaw dogged it for 17 years i would have written that into the song because the song captures your whole life right you almost would have had to you couldn't have omitted that important yeah i was brought up doing latvian things and now he wears a latvian ring. I would have put a... Grandpa come from a land far away.

I would have put in a long passage about all that chewing tobacco. Me spitting and smoking. Why did you get out of it? Why did you get away from chewing? For the health benefits. But there are no health negatives look at dirt yeah i feel great i don't know i feel it's like a 30 above 35 year old he should have easily beaten the uh senior in the uh arm wrestling contest yesterday but it ended in a match draw in a draw and so i feel like he's a little he should be stronger than he is

you feel that the dip is what it was why you beat him arm wrestling oh no i didn't beat him it was a draw that that dip wasn't slowing him down i thought you got him in the end you guys you guys quit at a draw yeah yeah that's what we're talking about we need to rematch if you'd have had a hat and turned it backwards like in sylvester salone's over the top either one of you i think you would have i don't know man that was that didn't help chris no well nothing would help me i'm not i'm not putting anybody down but uh no you both of you guys were turning purple at the end. I haven't seen... Dirt pulled a heart muscle. Yeah. Arm wrestling. So at what age did you start being a tobacco user?

I probably started smoking cigarettes at, I don't know, dabbling at 12. You were running cigarettes at what age? Certainly by the time of high school, I think I was smoking fairly regularly. And you were distributing cigarettes at a young age. Yeah. I told you a story about how I got caught at Latvian Summer High School

within the first two or three days of being there. Because I had a couple cartons of cigarettes that some older kids bring in for me. And I got turned in. I got ratted out by a roommate. For selling? For selling cigarettes, yeah. But I told my dad.

And the funny part of the story is that Danny and I were talking about how it's better to try to teach your kids. Put everything on the table. Bring stuff to you as opposed to finding it out. Oh, yeah, and then not get mad at them when they tell you. Only get mad at them when they lie to you. Most kids' parents lived, who knows, days away or flights away from Latvian Summer High School, but we were only 30 minutes away, which is good and bad because I had access to things

that got me into a lot of trouble, right, because we could just zip home and get into trouble and bring things in. I do happen to know where there's a bottle of vodka. Yeah. Exactly. I'll be back in 60. But, yeah, so instead of waiting for the letter to get to my dad, I just told him.

He was like, hey, well, you know, next time when you want to sell something, you should sell, like, candy or something like that, not cigarettes. And he was like, hey, well, you know, next time when you want to sell something, you should sell like candy or something like that, not cigarettes. And he was off. Because you think he had something else on his mind. Yeah, I think he must have been distracted. Because I was expecting a real talking to, real whooping, you know. But he kind of sloughed it off and left me kind of bewildered as he drove away. So you got out of smoking and then you transitioned.

No, no, no. into chaw-dogging. Was there an overlap? Oh, definitely. I had a program because I sort of tried to remain an athlete even through my heavy partying years in high school.

And so I would chew all day so that I could like, if I knew I had a volleyball game or some sort of sporting activity in the afternoon and then smoke cigarettes as I partied after that I knew guys in high school that was the move when they're trying to cut weight for wrestling oh yeah oh my god those guys in high school they walk around with a giant one liter oh yeah good friends of mine man wearing garbage bags around yeah filling bottles full of spit.

Johnny Merchant, Craig Christensen. That's not healthy for you. Dropping the weight. No. They look like they're skin and bones by the time it's time for a match. You're hearing the voice of your first time around the show. That's true. Levi, I don't even know your last name.

It's Meyer. Levi Meyer. Yep. Fresh out of the military. Kind of. Yeah. Kind of't even know your last name. It's Meyer. Levi Meyer. Yep. Fresh out of the military. Kind of. Yeah, kind of. Lay out your military deal real quick. Yeah, so I joined in 2009 in the Army.

Became a medic. Went to airborne school? Yeah, right out of the gate. Went from medic training to airborne school to Iraq within like a one-month period. Whoa. It was quick. And then hung around Afghanistan? Yeah, later in my military career, went to Afghanistan.

And then got out of active duty army December of 2016. And you're having a chew right now. No, I spit it out. You spit it out? As a courtesy for you, Steve. I saw you spitting in that little cup. No, it doesn't bother me. Dirt's having a chew.

He's spitting into a Starbucks cup. Do you know I hang out with the guy that manufactures the sleeve on that cup? I went turkey hunting with him. Matt Cook. Oh, yeah, you know him. Yeah. That's what he thinks. So, Yanni, you dipped for all those years, then quit.

Yeah. Yeah, I think I finally was able to kick it like probably early like done done late 20s oh earlier okay weren't you telling me that you relapsed though at one point like you quit for a long time in that time period that you i can't remember yeah did you guys see me have that dip the other day oh yeah about five seconds suck the marrow out of it uh as i said i spit it out so quick so i was able to suck the marrow and that stuff dirt can you can you share with us the i'd like to follow up though with you asking why i'm not talking about this but go ahead no follow up no i'm not another big reason i quit is that eventually

and you know everybody battles this you know when you're trying what when you're trying to quit right it's just like it's it seems so impossible and eventually i came to a point where i said you know i have like i have to be stronger than this stupid little thing that's in this little tin you know like i just like i can't be so weak that this little thing is going to control me you're hearing this dirt oh yeah and so i just said that and that that almost became more important to me than the health benefits just being like being able to say f you to the addiction you know f you to the chew dirt doesn't feel that way well like i said i'm not i don't want to quit quite yet was it 42 and a half you did though a month ago you wanted to

quit uh yeah maybe the other day dirt smoking up a mountainside and i brought up you know the way that the the chew could impact that And he was saying that when they do start carving away pieces of his face, he's going to have better air pass through. More aerodynamic. Be more aerodynamic and won't have like all the wind resistance that his current facial structure gives him. Share with us what that lady was telling you who used to work on ski lifts with you.

Oh, she said she was always, she held chewers at a higher regard than smokers because all the chewers in her life were doers like you know wrenching fencing what have you smokers or watchers smokers or watchers dude that is so true man it never occurred me till you said it oh yeah it's so true dudes that dip are generally productive people yeah because it's hands-free yeah smokers are like watchers and like oh you know a smoker he's the kind of guy i say well i wouldn't do it that way yeah that's never gonna work flicking his ass everywhere yeah that's not how you do that i wouldn't do that a dipper there

is the anomaly though of the guy guy or gal that can just lip it and just can take that smoke going into their nose and eyeballs, and it's like it's not even there, and they can work right next to a chewer. It's an anomaly, but I've seen them. They light it, and it just stays between their two lips, and they're just doing stuff. A buddy of mine growing up, he viewed the whole world through one eye because he would tip working on his car, he would have a cigarette in, tip his head, close the upper eye, or the down eye, I guess, where he had the cigarette dangling off.

And just keep going. Yeah. You never hear of anybody taking a dip break. No. A smoke break. Any dipper can't afford to take a break. No, they're too much i really would like to get into it no i would like to get into it

no i want to get into it i'm afraid of i'm afraid of the transition period where you gotta throw up but here's the deal i went through that with alcohol without even thinking about that thing like if you say like if you're young you're like hey i want to start drinking people aren't like oh man you get so sick at first no one says that no but it's true when with alcohol without even thinking about it. If you're young and you're like, hey, I want to start drinking. People aren't like, oh man, you get so sick at first. No one says that. But it's true. When you're learning to drink,

you have to throw up a whole bunch. But they don't talk about it. It's like an open secret. With dip, they scare you by being, yeah, but you got to get sick at first. I never did. You took right to it. Yeah. Sam Hould, I was telling,

Danny gave me my first chew. Yeah, I fish with him now. Yeah. To that point, though, we were talking about the memory loss of any type of suffrage. Suffrage means the right to vote. I don't remember if that's a word I'm thinking of. Suffering? Suffering. Suffering.

But, like, you know, like, we were talking about, like, we're like, man, that was the craziest hike we've ever done. It's like, oh, no, there was this one, that one, that one. You forget. And with someone brought up, oh, you brought up childbirth. Mm-hmm. A lot of women will forget how painful the first one is, re-reminded when they have their number two or three or onward. And you're saying that your learning to dip actually did cause pain?

No, but other people forget that drinking and maybe tobacco use initially had a rough start with their system. Yeah, and the other reason I'm drawn to dipping or would like to get involved in it is because there's no lung problems. No. And you know what? I got a theory. It's just vanity.

It's like, do you want your face all carved up? Potentially. Because a smoker, not only is he useless because he's only got one hand and one of his eyes is blind all the time. And can't be around flammable stuff. Yeah, and you've got to keep him away from your flammables. Can't pump his own gas.

Pretty soon, that same smoker can't do shit if he wants to because he's destroyed his lungs. But a dipper can keep on working. But you've got to watch your heart still with the dip. Oh, you do? Yeah. Restriction of blood vessels. Oh, you do? Yeah. Restriction blood vessels. Oh, there is a downside to dip.

No, no, no. But see, I have a theory about this. I may have told you guys. I know I've told some other buddies. But I feel like because I'm chewing often. You're chewing right now. Yeah. My blood vessels, they're having to work.

But when I go ski touring or when we go on big hikes, I'm not chewing. you're chewing right now yeah my blood vessels like they're having to work but when i like go ski touring or when we go on big hikes i'm not chewing and i like get that bonus regular blood vessel size you know i mean it's like no i don't know it's like training with a weight vest and then when you go actually do the activity you don't have that weight vest and you're just like just ripping yeah so when i don't have a chew in i'm like oh damn this is what is it also like high altitude training where people were like exactly he's working out right now yeah he is he charged up the mountain man that one day just oh there's something to it because that loo man that was the moment when i said dipping is something i want to get involved yeah

because everything else is the same. All things are equal except he dips the most. No, no. I brought up the point. My time I have much more spare time to be out doing cardio activities because I don't have a

family or a house or pets or anything. Yeah, that's a good point. think that's the that's the main thing i mean you know doing something every day the other day when i was thinking about uh how you got to throw up a lot when you want to start when you want to get into drinking even long after i remember coming home i don't know why you're hiking your mind kind of wanders and i was remembered to coming home once i had to somehow i came in when i was living in western montana missoula i had this banana tree and uh i remember a couple times over the years coming home from the bar and puking into that banana tree pot it was a giant

pot like head to my bedroom and just getting over there and puking in there and just composting it in man like stirring it into the soil stirring it into the potting soil man just composting it in rather than trying to because it kind of you wouldn't get to it till the morning you know and then it'd kind of filter right because all the liquids go through and do whatever you're i'm getting a little nauseous right now yeah you drink composted in and i remember having that banana plant man i kind of love that banana tree. And one time I was moving, it was 10 below zero outside. And I got my van all heated up. And I wrapped it in plastic and took that thing just long enough to go outside down,

put into a vehicle. It froze to death. Really? Yep. That fast? Just, yeah. And then the leaves froze. It wilted and died.

Was it you were transitioning in your life too? No, no, no. no no no wasn't like it wasn't feeling like it wasn't it wasn't like the psychological trauma didn't get to the plant yeah interesting yeah you drank some funky stuff though like in mad dog and or was that that was earlier well yeah because you know like most people at that age you know we didn't have any like a lot of money to like to really be putting into that kind of stuff so we you know you go out to the bar we always drink before you go to the bar bottle at that age everybody does that you're like oh still yeah because you can't be going down and getting the whole project taken care of at like such a high rate of pay you know yeah or like so you'd have drinks before yeah yeah

we drink like boons snowberry what was that stuff ice fishing oh god snowberry creek or whatever the hell it was flavor i remember coming home from work and drinking a bottle of boons in the shower a whole bottle of yeah just getting cleaned up getting ready to go out and just go to the shower the cold shower the cold bottle of boons farm and drink it i used to love drinking it kind of amazed me that i don't drink at all now because i used to love it yeah that's funny you'd be like banana plant this is for you i'm doing this for you feed you later yeah don't say i never don't say i never fertilized you're a baby bird in the banana plant any any else anybody wants to add on this if you could go back and never ever have a drop of alcohol not a chance man not a chance um for a handful of reasons

all what i shared like i was always very suspicious of people that didn't drink i'd be like what's wrong with that guy and um now i'm not but i was and so it kind of led me into like all my friends that i'm still friends with, we used to fish together, drink together, and hang out together. And so if I wasn't drinking, like, I don't know who I would have wound up hanging out with. Do you know what I mean? Like, our bonds were all formed around, like, shared interests, which included alcohol. So if I had missed all the nighttime stuff yeah who would i be hanging out with now a bunch of lamos i don't know

right like eduardo garcia says you're forged by fire man i think that all that being hung over and trying to fish and that's the fire that forges you so the for that reason and two in the writing world like alcohol is a real problem in the writing world um you know i mean it's like it's just no joke that like there's a lot of alcoholism among writers but by being a avid drinker i was able to associate with and hang out with and spend time with writers because they would all connect around the act of drinking. So I formed a lot of good relationships with writers by being a drinker. If you weren't a drinker, I don't know who you –

I can't picture any of the people that had a big influence on me. I look and when i think like what was going on like that was the whole thing that's what you were doing you're like going over so-and-so's for drinks going to the bar to drink it's been going on ice fishing to drink so it like to say like you never drank it's like okay presumably that means you missed out on all of that and other people get in other places but i don't know where i would have gotten it that means you missed out on all of that. And other people get in other places, but I don't know where I would have gotten it. You know?

Never drank in the woods. Ever. I mean, on overnight backpacking trips, maybe like a little nip. Never went out on a backpacking trip or on a backpack hunt and got drunk. Ever. Yeah, we all, growing up, we always used to look down on the

the type of hunter that went to deer camp and just got sloppy drunk every night didn't get up in the morning to hunt you know like there was like the beer drinking type of deer hunters and then there was like the guys that were out there to shoot deer yeah and when they were in town, they got wasted, but not out in the woods. Time and place, yeah. So no, no regrets about it. I regret having quit it. We haven't quit. You had a day. They quit you.

They quit me, and I miss it terribly, man, because everything's so funny. You know what I mean like stuff's not funny anymore no we've had a lot of laughs on this trip sober i remember one night we were drinking in danny's kitchen laughing about how he was afraid to touch his dog's penis like now like he just didn't like the he just didn't like the idea of it right yeah like if we weren't drinking if we weren't drinking it wouldn't come up it just came up now yeah he's like i just feel like i'm invading his personal space he's like i don't want someone grabbing me there there's that one spot just too low on a belly rub man yeah he's just like i felt like yeah he's just explaining it so that's like the kind of

insight that you just miss out on when you're like, when you're just same all day long. Well, I tell you, my older brother has been sober for seven years. Now, when someone says that, then I think that they had a drinking problem. Oh, no. Not a drinking enthusiasm. Yeah, he just wrong time, wrong place kind of drinking. But now he is a madman, nonstop.

He's got 100 projects going on all the time and always getting shit done. But he doesn't think anything's funny, I bet. No. Yeah. I mean, it's different. Like you said, the social aspect is different. But that's something I noticed watching him not drink is his time management is way different. Because if you drink, you can kind of sit in the backyard and like bullshit and drink but if you're not drinking you're like let's do something

yeah you want to go fix something yeah exactly yeah i can't relax yeah exactly i need to if i'm gonna relax i need to have a beverage or something usually yeah like that used to be my other thing too even at home with my wife we'd have a couple drinks and relax but now neither of us can relax yeah we just work which is a good thing and we just work and not laugh at anything make sure not to start laughing yeah no fun um anything else on that subject levi you good oh you know we haven't discussed with you at all, though, Levi? You fixing to quit chewing? Yeah, I suppose. I mean, I'm not really like dirt over there.

He had to bring like two logs out in the woods. I only brought two cans, and one of them got washed out. The other one's still good. You lost one to a creek? Yeah. Oh, no, it got rained on. Oh, washed out. That alder grabbed it, the one that grabbed your ears.

I'm kind of a dipping a dipping enthusiast not a addict i suppose do all do all chaw dogs run it along the bottom like you'd never run along the top lip i've known some guys who do that i do top yeah i told you that that nurse told me keep keep the cancer guessing you just move it move it around yeah do you ever run uh a double horse a double horseshoe just really good glassing spots after you might run a double horseshoe no no have you run a horseshoe yeah i mean in college we kind of do how much you could get in your mouth yeah are you kidding me that'll make a man sick yeah oh yeah i remember being in the kitchen and like when on a slow night you start thinking of ways to like just mess with people and so it would

be like could you do a half cup of cayenne pepper on your testicles you know and everybody would start pitching in money that's called homoeroticism at a certain point someone would say okay for 60 bucks i'll try it and then one of the other things would be like okay can you get a whole tin of chew into your mouth and keep it in there for whatever would be a minute or five minutes you know yeah and i don't think anybody could ever pass that no same exact experience yeah yeah you had it you did it no no but i've been in those scenarios and that came up and the buddy who did it got sick. Yeah. It's hard for me to reconcile what you majored in, photojournalism, with the activities that you engaged in in college.

I was different than most of the class. Me and one other guy kind of chummed around. It's hard for you to picture photojournalism majors getting together to try to fill a two-liter bottle with chew spit. Well, those guys weren't in my program. My roommates that we filled did our science project. Installation art. Yeah.

No, that wasn't with my classmates i was just with buddies mile city buddies yeah that i can picture yeah exactly um moving on do you yeah you feel we should just come out and like right away just say rather than creating a uh rather than creating any kind of tension or suspense. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't think it matters. Just why don't you say what I'm talking about? I think what you're talking about is to say that we just finished up a unsuccessful sheep hunt. Unsuccessful doll sheep hunt.

No lesson to be learned. If you're looking at success as a dead sheep. That's what I'm talking about. We could also look at it as successful as we made it in there and cover some serious terrain

and came out without any injuries and without any major problems. Yeah. They made a TV show. Right. A beautiful TV show. Well, we don't know that yet. Oh, yeah.

And found some sheep. Found some sheep. But if someone said, hey, was your hunt successful? No. Yeah. And then you go like, well, define success.

I just think you kind of like playing around. You're being a little bit annoying. Yeah. You're being a little bit annoying. You'd have to say no, but it was great. Yes. Oh, yeah. Okay.

So what we did, went to all sheep hunting in the Alaska range. And the Alaska range is, check me if I'm wrong on this, Danny. It's like a southern Alaska mountain range. Or sort of like might divide the southern, you'd call that the western Alaska range. I think that's, you know,

everything south of, all that sheep country that's south of Denali Park, people commonly refer to as the Western Alaska Range. I mean, yeah. Western Alaska Range. But the Alaska Range in general is a big, speaking of horseshoe dips, it's a horseshoe shape. Yeah. Kind of a shallow horseshoe that on its eastern edge kind of feeds into the coastal ranges. Well, if you consider Wrangles coastal.

But yeah, it kind of blends into the Wrangles over on the far eastern side. And then on the western side, they kind of tow off down toward the Alaska Peninsula. Yeah, they blend into the Aleutians down there. Yeah. toward the alaska peninsula yeah they blend into into the illusions down there yeah in the the top of the if you imagine the alaska range is a very shallow u the top of the u is the the no a very shallow inverted u yeah the top of the u is the most northern portion yes yeah that's that'd be like central alaska range that's how fish department of fishing game refers to that area central alaska range yeah and it's not

narrowing it's not like giving away a spot to say we're in the western alaska range because the whole thing is 500 miles long huge mountain range yeah um we had hunted doll sheep before in other portions of the Alaska range I'd be so specific as to say the central Alaska range in this trip we were going into an area to hunt let me lay our groundwork piece down what Alaska has

is they have there's several species in Alaska you're not allowed to hunt without a guide if you're a non-resident. Basically, if it's white or has great big long claws, you cannot hunt it if you're a non-resident without a guide. Without a guide, referring to mountain goats, dull sheep and grizzlies or brown bears. So, but there's a, there's a catch. A resident, a resident Alaska hunter can hunt those things with family of second degree

kindred so if you're a fella in alaska you can take non-resident relatives cousins uncles i think even brother-in-law it's pretty loose yeah yeah i can never remember where the line is drawn but that's because i only ever hunt with my two full-blooded brothers, so it's kind of irrelevant. Yeah, but it includes cousins, uncles. I believe it includes in-laws, I think. Yeah, I'm not sure. Then those people can hunt with that.

There was a little movement a year ago or so to get rid of that. There's a group called the Resident Hunters of Alaska who got a real beef with non-resident hunters. And they had put together something for consideration, which would have ended the rule. Are you sure that's who that was coming from? I thought you told me that. Yeah, yeah, check me on this. But that might have been coming maybe from the guide industry a bit too.

I'm not 100%. Okay, so scratch that. That might not be true. I don't want to put blame or praise, however you view it, in the wrong place. They were trying to roll it back a little bit and not... They wanted it to be... Okay, so whoever it was.

Let's take this case. My brother Danny is a resident of Alaska. He and I go sheep hunting together. We can both hunt sheep at the same time what the what the rule change that was proposed would be that if we're hunting and i shoot a sheep we both have to like notch the tag yeah that was the yeah meaning i get a i get a ram it counts against your harvest yeah my annual limit of one ram yeah so we could go together and if i get one basically you got one yep but that uh that thing didn't go anywhere so i'm able to go hunt doll sheep in alaska as long as i'm within as long as i'm with you and they spell it out like you got to be together you're hunting together side by side

um we've done this quite a few times over the years not quite a few times but four i think we've gone sheep hunting four times together that sounds about right yeah and uh this time we went into an area we had really no prior experience in because of a friend who's an outfitter turned us on to a spot where he guides some clients and kind of cut us loose in there so we're doing like a trip that would be how would you put it in in guide language johnny all of our own gear right yeah all our own equipment and gear but someone's saying go here yeah we just called it a drop camp basically when we did it yeah and sometimes we would actually supply some stuff with drop camp and i guess you know buck did buck supplied us a little a few things

big tarp and an axe yeah which was hey it was really nice to have that tarp pre-set up you know yeah um yeah i'd call it a drop camp for the most part i mean most guys i think they're going to do a drop camp if they get anything from the outfitter it might be a basic shelter but you're pretty much you're you're going to be bringing most of your own gear and this area is like so you you're you're coming to anchorage and then a lot of stuff works in the bush and danny can speak this a lot better but the way a lot of stuff works in the bush and danny can speak to this a lot better but the way a lot of stuff works in the bush especially like kind of mountain hunting and stuff you're always using you're not always you're typically flying in on super cubs which can land on gravel bars

ridge tops you can land them anywhere but a super cub can only hold a pilot and one passenger. So oftentimes when you're flying into remote hunting locations in Alaska, you get staged up somewhere on some remote large airstrip and then use Super Cubs to do the last little leg of bringing you in. That's fairly common. Yeah, but it could be from a strip along the highway somewhere too you know the hall road or one of the you know other highways around the state we've done that before too where we've driven to a place and had a plane meet us there and shuttle us in you know that's closer to the hunting spot than say anchorage or fairbanks or wherever the pilot's

coming from yeah it already gets elaborate like there's a there's a anywhere you're hunting if you're hunting like the western brooks range so basically up toward the you know the portions of alaska that seem to be looking over into siberia um there's an area there where you you go to fairbanks drive up to a lake no a strip you drive up to a strip on the Alaska Pipeline Road. I'm just talking about one air carrier that we've used to hunt caribou. You drive up to an actual strip. Isn't it a strip? Mm-hmm.

So a landing place. Get on a plane there and go land at another strip in a bush community, like an off-the-grid community. And they're going to they're gonna float plane and take the float plane to go land up on lakes up in the caribou country in the north slope tons of different configurations or we've also hunted sheep where you load your stuff from your truck into a super cub and yeah fly up in that too but this particular area is a little bit of a hall and bigger like a greater distance than you're going to cover um efficiently in super cubs so

we flew out to a remote military airstrip do we name that one not yet no should we a remote military airstrip well it's not military i think it was built by built by the military yeah it's not yeah but like a maintained by yeah gravel strip there's a lot of those in alaska yeah they're scattered around yeah for sure and we fly in there we're all six of us so we got two hunters and four guys in our crew and we we fly out to this strip and it's like a real hub of activity because it's a big enough airstrip you can get big aircraft in there and bring in quad runners side by sides all manner of vehicles and then there's an elaborate road network that leads out from here. And so it's like a place to fly in stuff, set up a camp, and then cruise around on this whole isolated road network and trail network

and cruise around and hunt this vast area of moose, caribou country. I got a quick question. Is that road system attached to anything if you were wanting to drive in, or is it totally independent outside of that airstrip? No, I think the Alaska Range, because it's on the other side of the Alaska Range. Right, Danny? There's no way. Yeah, you couldn't drive there.

I mean, you could snow machine there in the winter. Yeah. But there's not a road. There's not a road, no. So people come in there in large aircraft sometimes and can fly and stuff. We just land out there. So you land in a strip. It's a gravel strip.

There's a couple outbuildings, the Alaska Troopers. Here's another interesting thing people should know about Alaska. In Alaska, you don't have what's called a game warden. So you have all your game laws fishery and game laws are all set by the state and the department of uh what do they call it here it's the board of fish and the board of game respectively make those laws the laws yeah and then what's your like uh dnr here it's alaska fishing game last department yeah we have a dnr too but they handle land and minerals and that sort of thing but alaska department of fish yeah we have a dnr too but they handle land and minerals and

that sort of thing but alaska department of fish and game regulates hunting and fishing but all enforcement of fish and game laws comes down to state troopers yes yeah the why yeah there's a oh oh i guess it'd be like the wildlife division of the state troopers yeah does enforcement yeah so you don't appear you don't say you don't say I'm gonna report you to the game warden nope call me today I'm calling the troopers at this strip there's a trooper's shack too like a little shack at this strip and there's all manner of uh oil drums gas cans quad runners and just like the sort of general I don't call it detritus but there's a lot of general, like in Alaska, if you can land a plane, there is going to be rusty barrels laying around. And this has its fair share of rusty barrels.

Yeah, because what goes in does not go back out easily. Yeah, and we'll talk about that when we talk about the pilot that picked us up. His just dismay at something that we would be bringing back to town um and you get there and you think like oh man like you could sit here days and nothing would happen but just constant activity planes landing people up to all manner of things and just like like we land there here comes a couple dudes on a quad runner another plane comes in and we help some guys unload a quad runner out of the plane and they're taking off to go to their hunting camp which is 30 miles away one of them runs off in the bushes

and a while later comes back with another quad runner and they both take off one on the brand new quad runner one on the old quad runner, and head off to their 30-mile-away hunting camp. And, yeah, it's an interesting spot. But we get there, and then we got another guy who flies a Super Cub. This guy that flies a Super Cub is going to shuttle us into our spot up in the mountains. And what's funny is you got to do because of our crew you gotta do six

trips and each trip takes 40 minutes or so so it's 20 minutes up into the mountains unload some stuff come back and you're dealing with small weather windows so when you're doing this you gotta make sure the first guy that goes has his camping gear and everything he needs to survive for the night and then the anyone left behind also has so that the that the the forward people have all the stuff they need to survive and the left behind person has to have stuff to survive because at any given time the weather window is going to close and we'd already missed a day and a half because of bad weather so sure enough enough, five of us get in, then the weather window ends. And there are five of us are up in the mountains ready to hunt,

but some guy is still hanging out at the – Yeah, which is the first time it's ever happened to us. To have the hop in interrupted. Yeah. But other guys we fly with will bring in three super cubs. Yeah, that's true. They got like a little wolf pack of Super Cubs and they just get it done.

Like when there's a window, they're going. Right. This is much more just one dude cuffing back and forth flying 100 yards off the ground. Three tops, yeah. Dude, those flights are so cool though, man. So much fun.

Oh, it's really the best. Did you ask him why he did that? Why he flies so low? Yeah. At first, I thought it was because it was so foggy, but then it was clear and he was flying just as low. I think he likes to look for moose antlers. Well, there's a bunch of reasons.

Yeah. Give them to me. That is one. Another one was that when it is foggy and the ceiling is super low, because he knows every single cut bank and down log and the way the river turns and cliffs and whatnot, from flying low so much, he can fly low even when the ceiling is low and be comfortable in there. Where he's saying, yeah, it's a beautiful day. And if I go up to 1,000 feet right now and buzz along, I'm not gaining anything from that beautiful flight up there. I need to be down here continuing to become intimate with what's down here i need to know every single gravel bar where when if possibly this shit hits the fan i can land i can make a

move i'm looking for spots where i can drop people in the future you know he's scouting he's scouting yeah constantly yeah bringing in information you know and in information. And he's a big shed hunter and hunts moose sheds from his plane. And he said that takes a special skill set because you need to fly along and know where all the sheds are. And then eventually you got to find a place to land and you got to be good enough

that you can walk and pick. You can spend your time then walking and retrieving all the ones you found and again landscape knowing the landscape was he saying that he picked 1300 or 13 000 pounds of moose antlers i didn't catch that wow yeah i didn't catch that either 1300 is impressive until you think how much a moose antler weighs. He might have said he picked 13,000 pounds of moose antlers. No way. It must have been 1,300 pounds. Wow.

Well, I think he said 30 aside. 30 pounds aside on the big ones. That's a lot of moose antlers, man. 13,000. He flies a ton. I can't remember the hours he was saying he does but yeah but he's probably picking him up in the spring oh yeah because he's not flying yeah and when he's when he's flying hunters he doesn't have time for that yeah he was ripping us you know like yeah he was go go go and then he finished shuttling us and he had a bunch more

guys you know in other places so mark mark canyon walking around picking up those deer layers man he shit his pants about this style of shed hunting man shed hunting out of an airplane so he likes to do that and he was saying that he also uh hunt snowshoe hares yeah yeah because when he turned white in the ground the snow melts he can go out and locate little pockets of white rabbits and find a place to land his plane and go snowshoe hunt that's pretty cool he's a cool dude i didn't realize he i asked him he he's going 110 miles an hour when he's empty that's with the tailwind was it yeah i think 80 is what the plane can do 80 is top speed this dude super cub is stripped down so light like he likes to keep it real light so he can land on super short strips and carry more shit we've never put in so much stuff into a super

cup like we did with john he has the hand start so he has to be like the old world war one flying aces who got to go out and yell contact and turn the prop because he tore out his starter and the battery so he starts his super cup by going out he's got to get the throttle just right inside to start it and in one fluid motion it takes him like three or four turns grabs the prop you call it the prop right yeah grabs the prop turns the clockwise hand prop it kicks and he's got to fly back around we'll put up a video of him doing this in the show notes he's got to fly back around and hit the throttle and pull himself up in the plane every time i'm

like why in the world you do that he says i cut 70 pounds out of the plane he also got rid of the back seat and just put a little carbon fiber piece there and he took a piece of uh he took a piece of ridge rest and cut it out for a pad so like that seat is ounces the paint a super cup has 40 pounds of paint on it what you know 40 pounds of paint his paint his his plane is painted the same color as most the landscape is yeah the same color like a slate gray same color as all the shale and i I told him, I said, man, when you eventually burrow this plane into a mountainside, they're never going to find you. And he said, well, that's not my intent for that to happen. But he said, but kind of, because I don't like

to let people know where I'm laying on my plane. So I like to keep it camouflaged. If that means they don't find me, that means they don't find me. Steve, remember when we flew in on that that moose float on the in the north side alaska range remember that second pilot that helped shuttle he had that little tailwheel cessna where he stripped the paint off of it you remember this no but i remember flying in a helio courier i thought no no that was cheap hunting that was cheap one but this is on that moose float trip um we did with

the raft how come we haven't done that float anymore? You know, a friend of mine did it last year. And he went up in that same hanging valley. Did he kill bulls in there? Yeah, he shot a bull. He said they were running all over in there. Yeah, we killed three bulls, didn't we? Yeah, yeah.

But anyway, one of our pilots had just stripped. He had a little Cessna. Maybe a 185. And he had, No, 180? Anyway, I don't know planes very well. But he had stripped the paint off of his plane at 40 pounds. He made it 40 pounds lighter, and he had 40 pounds more payload. Yeah.

And it looked like it's a bare aluminum, just like tinfoil plane you know it's nice wasn't he saying oh i was just gonna say if you want to look this guy up and fly with him which i don't do that highly no no i don't think that's smart really no hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

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

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Okay. He mentioned something about paint that slides better, right? Wasn't he? On the floor. No, you're thinking of Danny. You're thinking of the new paint Danny put on his boat bottom. What's that paint called you put on your boat bottom? I think it's a few different kinds, but don't want to the one i that uh i even brand turned me on to it

it's called gator glide it's just just really slick but you know how grippy that aluminum is man on the rocks yeah yeah so grippy so it's like a truck bed liner that's slick slick or the bottom of your boat slick it's like get it off the rocks it's like it's like teflon coating the bottom of your boat yeah and they're like they're one of the you know the rivers we run are super shallow when you run up on a sandbar gravel bar or whatever like i can just go out there with one finger now and pull my boat off makes that much of a difference huge yeah gator glide yeah a lot of that technology comes out of the southeast i bet you oh yeah my whole boat's a my whole boat's like a louisiana setup you know but they work well flat bottom air, air-cooled engine.

Yeah. You can run it across wet grass. Yeah. Is it a jet, this boat out here? I'm going to check it out. Yeah, yeah. No, it's not jets. It's a mud motor, you know, like, I think inspired by the Southeast Asia, you know,

air-cooled long shaft. And then mine's a particular one. It's a Go Devil. And that company was started by, I think, I'm pretty sure it was a Vietnam war vet that came back from Southeast Asia and thought, oh, man, that's a slick setup. We can use this in Louisiana and started making them.

That's pretty cool. There's a million places that make them now. Yeah, it's got like a Briggs & Stratton engine, like a five-foot prop, like a five-foot shaft. Five-foot shaft. Yeah, it's just an air-cooled like a riding lawnmower engine you know my mine's a 24 horse and it's got a it's just a u joint and a drive shaft and there's no there's no clutch there's no gears it's just when they start the

motor the prop is spinning and you lower that prop into the water and it goes and that's that's all there is to it yeah because people don't dick around motors what like generally an outboard is water cooled so you got to have enough water where the lower unit's down and there's an intake thing in there and it's taking water up cycles it through the system and pisses it back out so it takes some water to run it um the other thing is these things you rocks and stuff don't hurt them they're starting to take a toll well i've been running that thing for geez 15 years in rivers you know and and my my skag's getting pretty beat up and it's starting skag's actually starting to unweld from the oh yeah yeah so i'm going to take it apart and get somebody to reweld it you know but no that's taking a lot of abuse i remember going duck

hunting with you in the dark out here one time going through a hole and feeling the boat as that thing hits sam yeah that's an awful feeling hit like a pot of sandwich yeah yeah i hate that it only happened a couple times not only that's going to happen no matter what motor you're on yeah depending on what's going on where were we the pilot i messed up the paint thing but we were breaking down no i'm glad you brought it up because dudes don't want to know about that right gator glide put it on the bottom of your boat um he was trimmed down though our pilot trimmed down dude he could take like the one time he took off to go pick up another dude he just like what looked like 30 feet and he was airborne oh it was almost like a helicopter man it was crazy

his rig is just super cool man those things got way of crashing yeah what's even crazier is that when we got there i looked down like man i know that son of a gun oh yeah yeah he and i worked together for maybe three months. In Colorado, right? Yeah. In Edwards, Colorado. Ptarmigan Sports. He was a mountain guide? I don't know for sure if he was a mountain guide. I'm guessing he's done some guiding, but he was just a professional climber.

Yeah. So we get to the spot, and basically the spot we start out where we land, we're just landing on a gravel bar in a river, and we're about, to get a sense of this, we land at probably, not probably, I think we landed at 3,500 feet above sea level. The surrounding peaks are seven or so. The very, very highest. highest yeah and we're about

five well six to seven river miles to what would be the head of this stream we land on the stream we land on has a big wide gravel bar what do you call that dan big white gravel bar no like the whole bed how do you describe that bed oh i'd like a braided riverbed braided riverbed yeah it's a couple hundred yards wide yeah um and usually the the it's braided let me like usually the channel is occurring in multiple places so it's got this big like this big broad gravelly thing and everything's very shallow and just kind of meanders across and changes constantly like the channel gets rewritten every year from yeah and in most places that the you know any most spots along that river the channels and you know two or three places at once you know it's never in a

as rarely as it in a single channel yeah and to get a sense for like you'd cross it when you got to cross it's about hip deep and hauling ass knee deep and hauling cross it when you got to cross it's about hip deep and hauling ass knee deep and hauling ass yeah when you got to cross the main channel it fluctuates a lot though that surprised me oh yeah it's like someone it's like god dicking with the water valve yeah in a shower yeah because like oh it's hot today the glaciers are melting fast tons of water it rains somewhere but not here tons of water yeah and the silt load goes up and down where it looks like chocolate milk then it's clear just in a day chocolate milk clear chocolate milk clear up down up down changes constantly um and we're like seven miles from the head of this thing this thing's headed by

this probably has like three heads right you go kind of like two main two main channels that feed into it and we're we get dropped off about seven miles from the head of these from the head of these two things and the first day here's another rule in alaska that gets thrown out a lot you can't hunt with some exceptions there are exceptions to this most of the exceptions are around deer in southeast alaska and some caribou units you can't hunt on the same day you fly in alaska preventing you from on a non-scheduled flight if you fly in a jet into somewhere you know that's a or even a smaller plane if it's a scheduled flight you know into wherever uh that doesn't count yeah but a charter or your own plane or whatever the same day you've been airborne you cannot hunt yeah and And that speaks to what they're trying to prevent one from being able to do

is find an animal from the air and land a plane and go shoot it. Instead, you got to find it from the air, land a plane, wait until what?

3 a.m. Wait until 3 a.m. And then you can go. And the reason like a lot of states have legal shooting hours. legal hunting hours. But because of the peculiarities of at this latitude, the peculiarities of day length, Alaska doesn't do legal shooting hours with sunset, sunrise, except for waterfowl. Yeah, I assume that's federally mandated. Yeah. So when you land, you got to wait.

Because even if you're hunting, you could be hunting the very early season when it's 24 hours of daylight. So it's not like you got to wait until it gets dark and light again or whatever. It's like 3 a.m. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was darkest point of the night. Darkest point of the night.

Even though it could just be dusky all night. Yeah. Like you can still see. Like when you wake up, even just now, when you wake up in the middle of the night to go take a leak, you can check around for bears. Yeah. It's not that dark. Matt and I have watched sheep all night long. We've kept tabs on sheep throughout the night.

You leave a spot and scope on them. It never got so dark that you couldn't tell that they were there. Yeah. Remember that time caribou hunting? Matt went wandering way off and shot a bull way off somewhere. He's gone late, butchers it. He says it starts to get kind of dark. He sits down for a while.

It gets light. He says, well, I guess I just stayed out all night. Then he comes wandering into camp at 3.30 in the morning. He's like, I think I just was out overnight. We kept the big old fire going for him too. Thinking he was lost out in the tundra i'm so worried about him um that was pre like having gps units and whatnot yeah and in reaches and no i mean he might have

had gps but that was before that i said like i remember no his navigation thing was this oh that's right we were camped at the confluence. Yes. So he knew he was going up with water flowing back toward camp on the right side, water flowing back toward camp on the left side, and they eventually met at a V, and he was camped at that V. So he said he knew he could wander around anywhere, and as long as he followed water, he would. That's good, yeah. As long as he didn't cross the river and followed water he knew that he would come back and land back in camp that's safe

i remember that same trip remember that grizzly come up the other bank and starts wading across the river oh yeah and matt went out in his waders and tried to scare it back up scare it back up on the air bank. What happened? Bear took off. That was my good optics epiphany that I've talked about many times where we had a dude who had just come off a guide and our buddy Chuck had just come off a guide for moose on the peninsula or something or had the year before and had been given some good spotting scopes

and binoculars. Yeah. And I'd always had shitty ones. And we were watching a grizzly coming up and I'm looking some good spotting scopes and binoculars. Yeah. And I'd always had shitty ones. And we were watching a grizzly coming up, and I'm looking through his spotting scope, and you can see the wind hit its side and make this little cowlick that kind of drifted around on his body in the breeze, and I'm like,

I'm getting some of these sons of bitches, man. And we landed, so we landed on this river, like, what, I think about six miles to the head of this thing. And oh, I was getting at how you can't hunt the same day you fly. So because Levi was the sixth guy in, he couldn't, a careful reading of the rule would be that he can't even hunt with us. Can't assist. Yeah. But if he's with you.

By hanging out. If he's like, hey, what's that white thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he's ineligible to hunt the first day we get in so we do like a little short jaunt short being relevant i feel like it was jaunt we decided to hit a tributary the first tributary upstream from our camp we

decided to explore out the tributary and so we walked it from 35 the mouth of that tributary. And so we walked it from 35, the mouth of that tributary is 3,500 feet. And we start up this tributary in the rain and climb maybe a thousand feet and then you can't see anything where your visibility is a hundred yards. Now and then you get little pockets where you can see. And I think we sat there,

we set up a tarp in the rain and there's no sense of plowing through a place you haven't seen yet when you're in the right kind of country you can't just plow through in the fog because you're not doing yourself any good and we sat there for four hours I think took a nap

shivered sat there under a tarp for four hours drank some tea eventually it started to get a little bit clear and we climbed up to a saddle that was at 5100 feet waited a while got a couple open windows in the fog to look down the next valley i feel like we should plug the tea that everybody should try that i mean sam bar tea yeah dude i love that freaking tea man remy turned me out of that tea yeah yeah yeah i don't know fog neck right there's a there's a tea company

talk about giving away the goods for free man it's a tea company called kobok not even for free because they charge a lot of money for that damn tea kobok something tea company yeah you're giving away the plug for free to them, but I feel like you're sharing valuable information. I'm sharing valuable information, but I'm doing it with the one hesitation that it just doesn't make sense how much they charge for the decaf version. Oh, Sandbar stuff you guys were drinking was caffeinated?

No. Caffeinated is normal price. Decaf is twice as much, but I like to drink it at night as my hot drink. What's the process that makes it? Why? They wash it with chemicals. It's a danger to your uvula. Yeah, don't eat it.

Danny got a swollen uvula, maybe, from eating the tea. Sandbar tea from Kobach Tea Company is the best shit in the world, man. It's good, man. It's like, it's got is the best shit in the world man good man um it's like i don't know it's like it's got all kinds of stuff in it man it's got cloves in it cinnamon for sure cinnamon in it oh my god that's good you had a spicy thing when you bit into it that one time you had like a peppercorn or something well someone from the thai restaurant must have been

over there and flicked one of them little freaking peppers in there just to screw with somebody it it was it it would had a cinnamon flavor to it but it was way hotter than eating like a piece of cinnamon so i don't i don't know what that was yeah i was i was sitting next to you danny you practically broke a sweat at all and i can handle some hot food but that was insane i'd like to know what's in that shit man but you buy it at the anchorage airport and up top they got the caffeinated and down low they got a little area with the decaf. They charged too much for the decaf. To the point where,

after I got turned on to it, I went online and on their website to buy some and was so insulted by the price that I didn't. Because I'm like, what? Am I, like, growing up, when I was growing up, up someone said to me someday you will buy really expensive tea online i've been like bullshit well i'm sitting there drinking a bottle of boons fireman's shower

coming back from coming back from welding uh welding raw iron droppers to hang conveyor lines on. If you'd have told me, someday, Sonny, you'll be buying little several three-ounce bags of tea for $13 online out of punching the face. I'll buy it in the airport because if someone said, someday, you'll

buy a bag of tea in the airport, I'd be like, sure, I don't know. I wouldn't have been i wouldn't have been like uh nervous about that yeah revelation so i can't bring myself to buy it online um but yeah that shit's good hits the spot on a rainy day too is that good yanni yeah yeah up on this saddle we're trying to weigh out um whether to sleep there or head back down sleep there thinking in the morning you might get a better view wasn't it like nine o'clock or ten i mean it's late yeah it doesn't get dark till 10 30 it doesn't get dusky till 10 30 at night then i can't tell what the hell time it gets light in the morning. Yeah. Six, I guess it gets light at six.

I felt like you had to use a headlamp from about 10.30 until five. Depending on what you're doing. Yeah, if you needed to grab your bag. Yeah, if you're just walking down the gravel bar, you didn't need it. But like around camp and looking in your backpack. Yeah. Yeah. No sign of sheep up there. Nope, not that day.

Couldn't really see that well, though, right? But also a sign. Yeah, on those ridges, often on those ridges, we saw them in a few places, but on those ridges, you'll see little beds where they kick out a little bowl,

you know, and didn't see any beds, didn't see any fresh tracks. Decided not to sleep up there, dropped back down, and then walked from that saddle, which I think was 50, 100 feet, back down to our little base camp.

And Levi had come in that day, so he was eligible to be out with us the next morning. The next morning, we headed up to go explore the headwaters of this river that we're on. Dirt Miss River. Dirt Miss Creek. Dirt Miss Creek. No joke.

I'm not being coy. The river has no name. It's amazing that there are rivers in Alaska. Any river that size in lower 48 would have a road on it. There is no river that size in lower 48 that have a road on it yeah there is no river that size and lower 48 that doesn't have a road i shouldn't say no but very few rivers that size and lower 48 would not be would not have a road in the bottom of them dude even like little trickles have got names down in the 48 you know here you there's rivers in alaska big enough to take a boat down with no name

yeah and those a lot of the the smaller rivers that do have a name, they're all mine-related, like Motherlode Creek or... Goldfinger. Lucky Strike Creek or... Bankrupt Creek. Yeah, Hardluck Creek. so uh um dirt yeah we go up dirt myth correct and we decided to explore first the right branch and that day that that's the day oh you know we saw using lambs that day so think about yeah by camp so think about doll sheep is maybe danny knows what the answer to this is lambs and ewes get the good spots

they get the rich feed you know yeah i mean they get the cush location yeah i don't think they're excluding the rams i i you know i assume it's that those is that that the that the lambs you know growing so rapidly at that point in their life need that you, you know, highly digestible, high-protein, really green diet, that doesn't require a lot of effort to get, you know. It's thick. It's lush. And, you know, the rams can afford to be, you know, up higher

where there's just not as much food because they're not actively growing so fast. So they're taking the security. I'm just intuiting that. Well, I heard a guy one time say this, and I don't like it because it makes the ram sound altruistic, but first off, let's say this. So we're hunting for doll sheep, Ovis dolly. I think that's how you say it.

Like Salvador dolly, the painter, but it's Ovis. And doll was a naturalist and explorer. Got the sheep named after himself. Interestingly, Dahl named the Alaska range. Well, he named it the Alaskan range, and it became the Alaska range. But the dude whose name was given to the Dahl sheep is the guy that named the Alaska range. And a Dahl sheep is a pure white mountain sheep big curly horns like a big horn um you know they rut late october early november yeah late yeah hang out up around the

glade like they're like in the imagination they're associated with the rockiest nastiest highest most glaciated stuff like they they're the highest mammal on the mountain. The highest hooved, right? Well, you see caribou up in there sometimes, too. Yeah, yeah. But, I mean, like, for year-round living, though. Yeah, yeah. They eke out an existence up there.

And they don't migrate down to the low country when the snow flies. They got to be on the windswept. They stay up in the windswept. They don't wind up living down in some dude's alfalfa field or like down in the valley bottoms they stay up and they're just they live up yeah yeah but there's some interesting exceptions too though i mean they're always on you know they need to have escape cover nearby they're always in rocky you know craggy terrain but like you know you drive down turn again arms off to anchorage and you know you're at sea level and you can look up a few hundred yards.

Sometimes on the highway, there are doll sheep there, you know. And so in that circumstance, you're not high up, but you do get the rockiness and the cragginess that they – Yeah, no, I see what you're saying. So they don't care about the – they don't necessarily care about the elevation number. It's just like what – Those two usually go hand in hand, though. Yeah, like where that – where their preferred habitat happens to exist in those areas.

But we see a bunch of used lambs. And used lambs are kind of predictable because like if you see like a whole – you see like a dozen animals laying in kind of a meadow, meadow-y bowl up on a mountainside, you just know like that's lambs in use. Yeah, if it's realside you just know like you're like that's lambs and ewes yeah it's real green and lush like oh there's some lambs and ewes that scope out yeah like that gives it away and also the whole the number of them because you can find big groups of rams but like when you see like a dozen or something laying in the really green patch like that's lambs and ewes um but as we and we saw some lambs used in the morning but as we press up we see a single

sheep way ahead of us and I'm thinking ram only because he's by himself he's laying in a used spot but there's only one of them and eventually we get up there and find that it's a way not legal ram

a legal ram in Alaska is this universal not legal Ram, a legal Ram in Alaska. Is this universal or are there still any Ram units? There's a least. Yeah. A big chunk of the chew gatch a few years back went to from, from, you know, basically over the counter to a lottery.

And, and in that unit, they went to, for that lottery tag, now they went to any RAM. Tell us why, because I was interested. Yeah, that's interesting stuff. But there's this hypothesis, I guess it probably is, or maybe there's some... Don't say this yet until we say what a legal RAM is.

Okay. Lay out what a legal RAM is and then talk about the hypothesis. So, yeah. So, a legal RAM is a, talk about the hypothesis. So yeah, so a legal ram is a full curl ram. And so that's a ram whose horn has grown 360 degrees from the base to the tip. Or is eight years of age. So you would see eight growth annuli that are formed each winter of the ram's life or if both horns are broken off um i mean substantially broken such that the whole

the whole lamb tip the first year of growth is absent from the horn and they grind they scrape them off and break them off yeah yeah yeah but that's a mark of an old ram and you know so you know a ram with two broken horns isn't certainly is well it's very unlikely to be full curl but it's certainly going to be old so they've kind of um that that's another way you can and those are those are still pretty rare though yeah double broomers i haven't laid eyes on a double broom no i haven't either and like big horns virtually all of them are double broom to get to a certain size so those are the three ways to make a legal ram the most reliable way is a full curl you look at the side the horn should form a 360 degree circle

yeah from the from the right angle so when you're at the right angle that that horn should be perfectly round if you're too high or too low, it should be more of an oval oblong shape as your sort of perspective on the horn changes. So when you're looking at exactly, think of it as a helix, and when you're looking straight down that helix, the perimeter of the horn should be perfectly round,

and the tip should swing all the way around and meet the base or exceed the base and that would be the mark of a full curl ram there was cool tips that you pointed out as far as the angle and stuff of it coming out of the skull because when they're looking dead on at you yeah or no no when we when our perspective was elliptical and it looked like a full curl maybe and looking from down below looking from down below they look for the not full curl lamp ram looks full curl when you're looking from down below but you pointed out the angle at which the the curl starts can be somewhat uh a clue at

it being an older mature that they look on a younger ram it's not as like it looks more sweat back up top you know i think that probably has something to do with the mass but it looks like it like sweeps back in a more abrupt fashion i think it just hasn't got as like heavy up top yet or something you know it hasn't achieved like its biggest diameter yeah because that's where it's growing from yeah so they seem to have like it's like like he's been running real fast and it kind of mashed his horn the the angle of the tip is telling too because you know on a younger ram it's pointing more forward and as that curls more it's you know eventually it's pointing you know more backwards yep or out depending on the sort of configuration of the horn so talk about the

talk about this area where they went and he ran like talk about the thinking that might guide that so i don't know yeah i don't know all the you know the details on it but there's um you know there's this notion and it applies to you you know, fish and wildlife and any managed species that if you are non-randomly harvesting animals that you can potentially, you know, you have the potential to drive sort of artificial selection, you know, against or for some natural feature, right? And so...

Some people think this is a laughable idea. Is it really? I mean, there's certainly some... They think it would take thousands of years. Well, I know the fish literature a lot better but you know uh like size at maturity and fish you know a few a few generations in the lab of of artificially selecting the smallest breeders you can drive size and maturity down in just a few generations is that right yeah all right i was saying not me i don't know enough about it to have a good opinion. I'm saying some people.

They're talking about like, do you, by just picking big bucks, they're talking about whitetails. Are you driving down whitetail size? If, but we're not talking about whitetails right now. To the extent that it's genetic and not environment, the potential is there. But no, I don't think anyone argues the potential. But I think you would say to affect, it would take thousands of years to affect that change. I think people are starting to realize in a lot of ways evolution happens a lot faster than – I mean, this is an instance of evolution.

Yeah, for sure. I think that in recent years, people are starting to realize that evolution happens a lot faster potentially than what the former sort of gradualism notion of evolution is. I know. I crack up when people are like, I don't believe in evolution. So you don't believe that if I went and killed every adult that was over five feet that you would see a movement

toward shorter adults over time? Or you don't believe that corn used to be real small and now it's big? Or how about pesticide-resistant insects? I don't believe in evolution. Come on.

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, there's this notion that by having a full curl regulation in effect that you're selectively cropping off the rams with the greatest horn growth potential or those that have a horn configuration that tends to grow in a full curl. There are plenty of mature rams running around, and their horn grows in such a way that it doesn't curl into a curl. I think the first three doll rams, I don't know of the first gang of doll rams that you, me, and Matt killed.

We're all eight. None were full curls. No, Matt's had a full curl okay matt had one full curl horn that broke when it fell um my very first ram had one full curl horn but you yeah you and i when we shot two rams together they were both eight or older and neither of them were full curl. And weirdly, the guy that checked mine in wrote it down as full curl. Oh, interesting. Obviously not full curl, but obviously eight years old. Yeah, there's some interesting judgment calls we made there too because I've seen people down at Department of Fish and Game

haggling over age and full curl or not. And when you get those horns checked, and they're having a very hard time coming to consensus on some of those attributes. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, yeah. those horns checked and they're they're having a very hard time coming to consensus on whether it was some of those attributes yeah yeah yeah so anyway there's this notion that yeah if you are if you're you know if you're cropping off all the horns that are that grow into a full curl that you're sort of driving the genetic genetics away from that type of horn configuration and so my understanding is that that the whole chugach and Eram setup was sort of an experiment to see what effect that's having.

Can you excuse me a second? Dirt, you doing okay over there? It's like you're generating so much noise over there. Oh, sorry. You all right? I'm great. Do we need to unplug you? Mm-mm.

Go ahead. So when they went to that lottery system, they just said, okay, let's just have a lottery. Let's try an any-ram scenario to alleviate that selective pressure against a full curl or a horn configuration. But then the harvest rate is going to go way up so we're going to limit the amount of participation and so they put a lottery on oh i got you yeah yeah and so i haven't been following that i don't know what the you know there's just certainly people

at alaska department of fishing game that can talk very intelligently about that here's a here's a case example from the frank church area in idaho with bighorns and again like a regulation change will happen and oftentimes they don't like a state department will change a regulation and they don't say here's why we're changing the regulation just the regulation changes and people are left to speculate about why it was the regulation that's that's poor outreach there i know but it happens in like the case example the guy a guy we often get questions about this why is it illegal for a non-resident to hunt in a wilderness area in wyoming for big game without a guide okay so if you're a non-resident wyoming you want to hunt a wilderness

there you have to hire a guide i recently was asking some people that work at the state like state employees for like hey how did this rule come to be and what are sort of the decisions that were made and they were demonstrating to me that or the stuff i looked at and also what everybody says is it's like for it's a serve it's the guiding industry it has to be driven by the guiding industry right i could i could see jumping to that conclusion yeah yeah but there's no articulation of it anywhere it has to they talk about safety same here is that right yeah that's that's i think that's the sort of the stated rationale for the guide requirement for grizzlies mountain mountain goat, and mountain sheep.

Yeah, but it has me to protect the industry, which is fine. But here's the thing with the Frank Church is they felt that they had a three-quarter. It was a bighorn unit, and it had to be a three-quarter curl. So on a bighorn, the way to tell three-quarter curl is you've got to take from the base of the horn and draw a line through the corner of the eye and if that line hits horn that's a three-quarter curl ramp they felt in this very very rugged very very remote area that there were too many cases of people in the back country making a bad call in killing rams that weren't legal and then not reporting it this is what i heard and so they just went to an any ram thing to try to cut back on unreported mortality of rams because it was

areas just too hard to police too hard to monitor yeah so they presumably had to restrict the number of permits at that point too yeah but it was that's what i heard like a problem was i heard that from a guy who guided the area that was his that was his understanding of what was going on they felt was putting people in too much of a bind so we walk up this thing and find this ram are we good on that obviously not a legal ramp um So we walk up this thing and find this ram. Are we good on that? Obviously not a legal ram. Did that morning we run it?

Oh, we ran into a grizzly. A blonde, blonde, blonde grizzly. Blonde, long hair. Gorgeous. So long and shaggy. She looked almost, what did I say? I thought it looked like something dead when it was sleeping yeah i thought it looked like an old rotten because it was all haggly like it was yak like yeah yeah or like a muskrat yeah and a blow in the wind yeah looked like a i think our initial guess was it was a dead caribou laying there on the side of the hill

when yanni told me he sees something but it was funny because he's like, I see something. It was like two little black things bobbing around by it. And I looked through my binoculars, and I think I'm looking at something dead and mostly decayed just because of the way that it was so disheveled. And he says, yeah, but there's two black things moving around on it. And in my head, I'm like, well,'s got to be there's ravens feeding on some long dead caribou carcass and it's kind of like looks like a bunch of hair scattered around when in fact it's a blonde sow with two little

very dark almost black cubs, which I hadn't seen. That color difference. Yeah, it was striking. That's the thing people say in judging grizzlies, like interior ones, is oftentimes the bigger males are darker brown, and the female is not true in all cases. With gri it's like with with grizzlies everything's like tens too right tends to this tends to that that oftentimes you find that the big males are darker brown and oftentimes you find those real blonde ones are females when they get to maturity but she was blonde beautiful and And just chowing the blueberries.

Yeah, party mode. They eat them like they're pissed at them. They eat them like they're going to get away. Like they're exacting revenge on blueberries, man. And washed her for quite a while, feeding her around. Cubs were sleeping. Cubs kept taking naps. And they just take naps wherever they see fit, man.

And then she took a nap. Short power naps. Yeah, they take taking naps and they just take naps wherever they see fit man and then she took a nap short power naps yeah they take power naps just wherever man but i think they were napping too because it was like a little break in the weather yeah it's kind of sunny when we saw them and they were just like curl up they'd kind of snuggle they'd like spoon and that saw would she would take a little nap now and then just lay lay down, wherever she happened to be, just lay down mid-stride and kind of doze. Me and Chris were saying it was cool observing that scene because that was the first grizz we'd seen since a Fognac, just kind of a nice, peaceful.

It was like cleansing, man. Yeah. Oh, I can appreciate grizzlies again and not be terrified. Yeah. No, that's good. It's like when I get all mad at my kids and i'm yelling at them all the time and i'll feel bad later and i'll go give a big snug yeah yeah you got snug by that it was a cute scene man those cubs napping and that sow just kind of cruising

around yeah it's hard to picture that they just have such a ferocity yeah yeah except for you can picture dude if you walked up if she's sleeping and those cubs are sleeping 50 yards away and you washed up you walked up and grabbed one of those things you can imagine her response man well if we were on that side of the drainage the wind the wind was blown in such a way that we could have popped up on them unexpectedly i feel like that would be a good move man in this area is just pockmarked with where they're digging up ground squirrels. Holy shit, well, they put a lot of energy into that. Oh, my God, dude. Some of the ground that they dug up was insane. The size of the rocks that they'll just like.

They'll dig holes big enough for you to climb into. Yeah. The most surprising thing was the altitude that they were digging those things up at. Yeah. You're at like 6,000 feet, and they're still throwing boulders around for those little snacks. They're up there for, it's like they got to be up there for really no no really no other reason yeah up to dig up marmots and dig up ground squirrels and dig holes like like i said like foxholes you can climb down into them can you imagine being that ground squirrel the horror i got nothing i got nothing dude if you could imagine

if uh like a pita person right could witness that spectacle that they'd be so anti-grizzly yeah because the horror of that little ground squirrel family oh yeah tucked away all like nice and cozy corner and they know that that thing just out there like throwing out head-sized boulders and then eats them all alive yeah that little squirrel family is just living out a children's story, a children's fairy tale. Laying on little beds of grass clippings. And the next thing you know, it's just. The roof of the house comes off and the monster swallows them all.

And we've watched them eat them. They eat them alive. They just grab them and throw their head back. Yeah, I was suspecting. And then that thing's alive down the belly being like, no, no, no. The acid of the digestive juices. That's what gets you.

Yeah. It's like Jonah and the whale, man. Mm-hmm. Do you know what Jonah and the whale is, Dirk? Oh, yeah. I don't know if you had Bible learning. No, I was raised Catholic. Good for you.

Yeah. Yeah. She was eating berries, though. We slept you. Yeah. She was eating berries, though. We slept for the night. Tented out. And the next day, I look up above camp, and lo and behold,

a bunch of rams. But no freaking legal rams. Was it four or three? That was two, three, four, five, and six. Number one being the one youngster. The one youngster that was living on the U lamb patch. Yeah. That he really liked.

And then. Five separate. Two, three, four. No, there were four and they later picked up a fifth. Yeah. Two, three, four. No, there were four, and they later picked up a fifth. Yeah, two, three, four, and five. Rams number two, three, four, five came rolling up above camp, and we gave those a good scrutinizing.

And they were kind of like really spread out in the age thing, you know? A few years old up to probably like seven. Enough for this Ram looking from down below seems legal, but he's just like not. And I always like to give everything the benefit of the doubt. Like one time, we talked about this before. One time, me and Yanni were hunting mule deer, and here comes a mule deer that just got hit by a car. So his antler is, one of his antlers is busted off,

but flopping down by his face. And when I first saw that, first thing out of my mouth was a buck of a lifetime because i give everything the benefit of the doubt and i saw those tines and i thought this must be a gigantic buck just then i realized no he's just a forky with uh i just saw i saw he even had tines by his jaw you know and stuff then i was like oh never mind just a little buck that got hit by a car. Do doll sheep ever grow in a non-typical way? Or is it like you'd see something totally crazy, like just genetically?

Like a straight horn? Yeah. Yeah. Or just some weird like... Ibex or something? I've never seen anything besides the fact that they snap them off and abrade them off. Yeah.

They like are now there's some variations some of them some of them kind of spiral out from the head and some of them no he's swing more into the jaw no he's talking about asymmetry between left and right oh no no they seem to be pretty even though i've seen one that was very like funky deformed didn't even have like a curl at all. It just kind of came out and just down. It's just like this big. Like it had been damaged at some point. It's got a big mass of horn.

You saw a photo of it? Yeah. Would that be sought after? Just like a non-typical wreck? Sought after by me. If the other side's legal. Yeah. if the other side's legal. I killed, the second one I got

was broomed on one side and full spiral on the other side. Broomed because it broke. It's abraded. It's not snapped. I got another one that snapped, but it didn't snap all the way. But you can grab the end.

You can grab the end and wiggle it. But it wasn't an abrasion. I they probably always maybe not always but i think they might snap them and then abrade them but what it seems that they don't like is they don't like it and some rams don't like it in their peripheral vision it seems and so they'll work on them i've even seen big horns scraping their i've seen big horns on you on you know wild horse island where that new world record one came from i've seen bighorns out there just scraping scraping his horn i also watched one bud a tree i was i was out there i can't remember i think i think he if i remember right he rammed a tree he rammed a ponderosa pine 72 times in a row what yeah bad day i was just counting how many

times he's doing it it's that bad day for the pine man i even went down and examined that pine when he got done and plucked some hairs out of it nice yeah he just kept he just was ramming the tree it was like he's like in an insane asylum man maybe he had that he's stuck on an island yeah he's training is that what it is it's just practice for the fun yeah one time we were floating we were floating river hunting mule deer and i kept thinking someone's shooting a 22 i'm not joking but you kept i kept being like why would be like shooting a 22 off up there eventually realizes bighorns smacking heads it was late october big or maybe early november and bighorn they were in rut and the bighorns were up there cracking heads that sounds like a gun going off that's a story like a story i always tell my brother drew a big horn tag

and we kept going down to this area to try to find sheep and couldn't find sheep and i got to be like dismissive where i look up on this hill and i'm like oh it's mule deer way off on this mountainside i'm like oh there's a couple mule deer up there and all of a sudden two of these mule deer stand up on their back feet, tuck their front arms up, run at each other, and smack heads. I'm like, oh my god, it's sheep! Big hearts! Oh, I want to see that bad. Yeah, they do. They tuck

their arms and... Remember that Mountain Dew commercial? No. Where there's a dude who takes... Was it Surge? Maybe it was Surge. He takes a big gulp of this soda pop and goes at it with the Ram. Now, you guys, you like to spit chew spit in Dew bottles. No, I don't drink Dew.

Because most guys that dip, I notice they really have a tendency to want to spit into a Dew bottle. This came up when we were talking about the redneck call. The guys, they have to drink the Mountain Dew, and then they do the redneck call. guys they have to drink the mountain dew and then they do the redneck and they thump their tin can and other rednecks come running in their direction uh where were we on sheet seeing yeah so the band of rams man and i look at like i said i give everything the benefit of the doubt you know like i want it to be legal but it's just not legal we got pretty close to them too later we got yeah no there's no doubt in my mind that we like it's not one of those things where i'm like man i feel

haunted i remember hunting doll sheep but danny one time we were hunting with another buddy of ours and he put a stalk on a ram like we determined a ram or like that ram's legal he put a stalk on the ram got within rifle range and comes back down the mountain, there's no shot. He's like, I don't think it's legal. Man. He had to leave. He had to take off. And we went and re-found the thing all over again. Well, we did a bunch of hunting first.

Couldn't find a bigger one. And like, oh, let's go back and check on that guy. We found that one and shot it in those four-crow ram. So you found it, second-guessed it, didn't think it was legal, and then? Someone else second-guessed it. Wow. We were pretty convinced. Yeah. It was harder than I expected.

It's scary, man. To be fair, that was a small ram. Yes. It's a very small horned ram. Yeah. But he had a full crow horn. Yeah. So if you put one down that is kind of right on the line of legal, and then you go to get it checked, what are the consequences? They the consequences they take it away from you you just that's it and i probably find you yeah the last

ram the last ram so i've only got like i've gotten two so i say the last one i mean the the second doll ram i got was out of a special management area that has really big rams and so there i was had the luxury of a ram that was like well in excess of folk i mean just you look at them he's like that's some bitch way full curl right um so then you're all cocky when you go down to fish and game so go down there not having any apprehension about what you know not having like even in the back of your head there's no like man what are they gonna what if they right and we your head, there's no, like, man, what are they going to, what if they, right? And we get there, and there's a dude checking a ram, and they hold his ram.

And I come in the door, I'm thinking, that thing's not full curl. They hold his ram. A trooper comes in with another ram that he had confiscated, where he goes to check a guy at an airstrip, and he's like, did you get one? Yeah, I got one. Let me see the head. Oh, it's in the bottom of my pack. At which point, he gets real interested to see the ram.

Not even kind of. Like, this one's, like, no argument to be made for it. Finished checking my sheep. It's a mandatory check. Like, you have to bring the head down to have it check finish checking my sheep here comes another couple guys they pull out a ram i'm like that's no way is that ram legal and then the the guys were already kind of getting like you know i didn't see where that one led but they were already sort of in the seconds we had to look at it they um had you could tell it wasn't gonna go well for

that guy so it happens more often than you'd think there was i saw counting mine there were four and three of them three of them one was not even under consideration two Two of them were like, I looked and I'm like, there's no way. And the biologists were definitely sort of, on one had said, we're holding it. One had already been confiscated. And one, it wasn't going well for the guy. When they take that plug, that's the definitive age thing, right? No, that plug is to market for legal trafficking. Oh, okay. When they plug it.

They drill a hole and drive a plug into a metal. What is that thing? It looks like a shell casing almost. They drill a hole and pound it in there. Yeah, yeah. It's discreet. You always got to look for it when you go to find it. Yeah, they put it in a spot where it's kind of hard to see.

It's got a number on it. Yeah, I think it's just proving that you had your ram sealed. And if you have a fresh ram head in your possession without that plug in it then that's trouble for you so if they if they confiscated what happens to the meat in the head they auction the they auction the heads off and then the meat does it go to waste or what do they do with it i'm sure it doesn't go no i don't know what they do with it i guarantee it doesn't go to waste food bank sure yeah that'd be my guess do you get any like hunting right restrictions if you shoot an illegal ram like do they like yeah there's a system there's a system in place that's people should

know about um there's a cooperative of states and it grows all the time where when you lose your hunting rights in one state yeah for a while it's like seven states in the west had this cooperative where if you lose your hunting rights in one state you lose your hunting rights in the whole and i think that that cooperative you lose your rights in all states that are involved in the cooperative and yanni can maybe check this i feel like it's up to like 42 states that's a lot man that's good and i feel like i think i remember the scene that texas isn't I remember the scene that Texas isn't one of them. Texas isn't one of them.

I think I've never seen it, but I could be wrong. We should check to make sure. You mind checking that, Giannis? That's interesting. So then- You doing all right, Giannis? Mm-hmm. That's good, I think.

So, yes. But when you hear someone losing their hunting rights, it's egregious stuff. Oh, so you could make a slip up and shoot like a seven-year-old ram even if you think that you're not doing anything wrong bring it in and i don't think there's any way to bring it in you're not gonna lose your hunt rights guys that lose their hunt rights it's usually like legit poaching serial poachers yeah or you just did something not like you made a mistake but you did something like intentionally though i do remember a guy i do remember a guy killing a grizzly that he mistook for a black bear but i

think there was an attempted cover-up and i remember he had a ten thousand dollar fine seven years revocation of his hunting privileges he was from pennsylvania but lost his hunting privileges in a western state and i remember if i remember right it was right when when pennsylvania joined that that cooperative so i remember thinking like man he can't hunt at home now man but i think in that case too i think that it involved some deception yeah so is it fair to say that if you call yourself, you make a mistake, call in, report yourself, they're going to be more lenient on you? Oh, is that totally?

Yeah. Like more lenient being, yeah. Just in terms of like in a relative sense, I would say like, yes. Because there still has to be some punitive action, but you know. Confiscation for sure. Yeah. Confiscation for sure.

But you might not get hit with a $30,000 fine. Yeah. fine yeah i can't really speak so i'm sure there's plenty of case scenarios to look at but i've had the conversation with quite a number of people and everyone has always expressed to me that um that that when you self-report it's a lot better for you right than when you don't and so like this dude that tried to hide the ram and we actually got to talk to that trooper for a while the guy that tried to hide the ram from the dude was seriously annoyed sure oh yeah did he had to play that little game oh i bet and he and we even i think i even asked him at the time i'm almost certain i asked him at the time um if that like colors his impression of the case and he was like absolutely man when i gotta like force you to let me look in your backpack is a lot different than you let me look in your backpack.

Yeah. Right. There was a poacher around where we have a family cabin in Sealy Swan. Night sniping big mealy bucks. I think I heard about this guy. He's from Pennsylvania. Oh, okay. I didn't hear about this guy.

But he got jail time. I mean, it was bad enough. It was crazy. What states are trying to do now is, I shouldn't say trying to do now. A thing that states do, and I think it's becoming a more popular idea, is trying to apply the right economic value to the resource that you've taken. Because it used to be that you could shoot like a trophy bull elk, and you could poach a trophy bull elk, and you could poach a trophy bull elk,

and the punishment would be worse if you stole someone's lawnmower out of their garage. So you can steal a $300 lawnmower, and it's this misdemeanor offense that could come with the potential of jail time, right? But you could shoot a trophy bull elk, and we're just treating it like it's nothing we're treating like it's just like essentially valueless entity and you get like some little slap on the wrist so now when like there are several states possibly more that have gone in and said like

they apply the boone and crockett scoring system or take another scoring system and apply it to poached animals and if you turn out to be like a and it's trying to differentiate like your pot hunter from yeah me from like someone who's like really going out to try to like harvest high-end trophy animals and then coming in with a fine system if you're shooting like really valuable animals like what is that animal's value to the hunting community and what exactly have you stolen you might have stolen something that's worth twenty thirty thousand dollars whoa well that dude that it should be treated as such rather than you shot a cottontail rabbit yeah out of season because it was getting into you know your shit yeah just like that it's not all the same thing well that that guy in silly swan i was

told or read that he poached enough big bucks that it affected that entire region's genetics. I don't know about that. Not genetics, but, you know, they weren't breeding. Like, he was... He was putting a hit on the hunt. Yeah. Yeah. There was an interesting situation near Fort Campbell in Kentucky

where these guys were sneaking into the closed-off areas on the base, like the impact areas. So, like, you you know on any big military installation where you've got ranges and you know aircraft ranges and things like that we're shooting live ammunition basically the backstops of those areas are just coated and like unexploded ordinance and you just don't want to go back there they're just completely closed off areas so what ends up happening is these you know deer will never get hunted and they live in those areas and they're licking like the sulfur off the rounds and stuff they get huge yeah giant giant racks so these guys who weren't in the military they're just living outside the base

they were able to drive in uh through like one of the back gates and they were sneaking into those areas that are full of like unexploded bombs and poaching deer year round and they got busted and they had like you know 40 heads sitting in a barn somewhere in kentucky with really really interesting they had like like parachutes um like for flares you know what i mean like it's like stuck in their antlers stuck in there yeah stuck in their antlers and stuff there's you know photographs in the newspaper they're just these really unique heads bomb range bucks all kinds of stuff all over their heads yeah they got them all i want to say they got the seven-year ban as well there's a i was talking to a uh conservator like a game warden one time who was given a presentation and it was

about his idea that the same he had this idea that was like there's like serial well put us a different way he was adopting something that's well known in criminology and applying it to poaching which would be that you have serial criminals so like like most law enforcement agencies the fbi they're focusing on like serial criminals thinking that you could reduce by removing 10 of the criminals you could affect 90 of the crime right so that's why you put so much emphasis into like organized crime rings because it winds up being there's like a ring of individuals and they're involved in extortion prostitution drug trafficking auto theft right and if you can find these these core groups and take those groups down you're doing more to eliminate theft than you are by going after all the petty individuals who are doing like onesies twosies right and this guy had come to this opinion he had all this data to back

it up that 90 that 10 of your poachers are doing 90 of your poaching and and and he got into he was into this idea of like who are these individuals what are their motivations and what are their markers and he was giving presentations to other state agencies to try to describe what he would call super poachers. Like what is their motivations? And a thing he found again and again, it's like the garages and the sheds that they don't tell anyone about, they're just full of trophy animals.

And they're motivated by the one of their main motivations is they have some criminal background and one of their main motivations is a fuck you to the state like freemen type assholes yep don't you you're not going to be telling me and they usually come out of some kind of they usually have in their past some kind of situation they felt wronged they've been in trouble with the cops anti-social and it's just like a point of pride for them to stick to the man yep i got all this stuff don't you tell me what i'm gonna do i hate those type of people. Yeah.

And he had a lot of pictures of the garages and storage sheds packed with antlers. Like a weird form of a little trophy room. The secret trophy room that only I know about. Or like me and my brother would ever know about. You know?

Quick update on the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact. That's what it's called? That's what it's called. And now there are 48 members, including Texas. All right! The two that are not Hawaii and Massachusetts. Massachusetts is working to join right now. It doesn't say anything about what Hawaii's got going on.

What do you hunt in Massachusetts? Whitetails. I mean, there's a lot of stuff you hunt there for big game. Yeah. I don't know if Massachusetts. I wouldn't be surprised here that they do not have a bear season. Definitely whitetails. And then all manner of small game, fowl, upland waterfowl.

Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And, boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully

functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial imagery 24k topo maps way waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function.

As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Where were we on this whole thing? Sheet. Day two.

Oh, why you can't go killing on the Rams that aren't legal. And I'm telling you man um it's hard to judge them it's hard and when i say judge you might be like oh you know like you talk about judging a mule deer there's no legal ramifications just you want to find a big one but with a ram it's like a tremendous amount of pressure to get to make the right call and the handful of times i've been in a situation where you shoot and you're walking over there, it's extremely stressful because you're doubting your own decision-making. Even on the case of one where it's so clearly, man, it's nerve-wracking.

It's not fun. Oh, it is nerve-wracking. The minutes that pass between you touching the trigger and you getting over there is a not-fun bunch of minutes, man. And then we hiked that drainage up to the glaciers at the head of it. And it's like a beautiful start kind of situation when you get up there where the ice is ripping the mountain to shreds. And there's spots you can stand where it's just like you can just stop

and listen, and it's just rock raining down everywhere around you big rock small rock it's just it's it's constant though the sound of it like the mountain getting ripped apart by the ice that was i had a feeling of doom up that first drainage it was like a death zone man there wasn't anything living up there yeah it was weird when you get the head of it yeah we came back and i saw green for the first time i was like oh okay this makes sense now i feel better but that was weird we found a drop moose antler oh yeah not up in the glaciers but way higher than any willow you know and he had somehow wound up there or it fell out of a plane and yeah or it fell out of or it fell out that jude who hunts shed out of his airplane i think he might have dropped it bear out of that dude who Hunt shed out of his airplane. I think he might have dropped it.

Bear in mind that he shed that antler in, what, December, January? That's what's crazy about it. Let's go a little later sometimes, February. Our pilot was saying that those moose hang out there in the flats, right? And they hang out there until the snows get too deep. The wind piles up the snow, and then they'll actually move into that high country to find the wind swept places. Yeah.

He was so high there wasn't any brows up there. Right. Yeah. He might not know it because he's just digging through the snow. I don't know. He was a half mile above any willow. Mm-hmm.

That was interesting. But yeah, you get up around the glaciers and it's like it's like the earth at work man what was that leopold quote you guys mentioned that was cool you kind of yanni should look that up yeah i want to hear that aldo leopold's son the author of sand county almanac had a son who became a hydrologist who's got to be still alive. I don't know. Oh, is his son's quote? I think it's his son, Luna Leopold. I'm going to tell you

what I think it is and then Yanni's going to tell us what it is. Rivers are the gutters through which run the ruins of continents. What's your guess? That's pretty spot on

as far as I know, yeah and he's gonna tell us all that silt i think he was a he was a fluvial geomorphologist so he a fluvial geomorphologist yeah i mean he studied how rivers you know create landscapes oh is that right maintain landscapes yeah he'd have a good time up there obviously nothing he has't, yeah. You can't have a fluvial geomorphologist that spends time around lakes and rivers, yeah. What's interesting about the glaciers is it's like huge, tall packs of ice, but they're filled all the way through with rocks.

Yeah. It was like a- Giant rocks. Grossing to that one, all the sediment and the different freezing levels where you guys kind of stopped for yeah no you can see the accumulations yeah the melt accumulations uh you're not finding any rivers are the dar the gutters down which flow the ruins of continents

nailed it no i didn't nail it you said through right i said rivers okay compare it again i said rivers are the gutters through which flow the ruins of continents, but it's actually down. So you just swapped through for down. All right. That's pretty good. Not bad. So from there, so at that point we've seen a band of ewes and lambs,

sow grizz, two cubs. Six rams. Non-legal rams salgrives two cubs six rams non-legal yeah some number of rams then we ran around to explore the other fork of that thing and then drive eventually made our way a day or two later made our way up into saw those rams again considerable weather delay oh yeah that Oh, yeah, that's right. We got up, went into another valley and saw the same batch of rams. And the rams kind of drift around in weird ways, man. They're sort of like in the same area, but they're using different stuff. And this time they were down in the bottom of a big hanging valley. Got a real good look at them.

But we saw them skyline. Yeah, they're hanging out on the ridge. The same ridge we initially saw them on, but then eventually they just popped over the other side. So they're only maybe a quarter, half a mile from where we had seen them, but they're just in a different valley now. Yeah, dropped down to a different place to feed. They like to go up to lay down. They like to lay down on, I don't know, man.

It's hard to describe where they like to lay down. They love ridge tops. Ridge tops, even descend finger ridges. Yeah. Rock piles on finger ridges yeah or just like the highest like flat spot you know the one you know i think a spot you'd say like it's like two that's kind of a perfect spot where you have two rivers come together and like the ridge rises up out of that thing it gets like real high and craggy and he sits up there he can look down and he can kind of monitor what's going on and the true drainage is blown yeah i spent a lot of time

looking down valley and lay in a down valley direction because they know that nothing's coming from above the primary predator though for the lambs one of the primary predators does come from above because one of the primary causes of lamb mortality is golden eagles eagles yeah we saw fair fair number golden eagles yeah all and they're always just soaring around those ridgetops you know golden eagles grab the babies or knock them off and pick the carcasses up or feed on the carcasses after they knock them off and make them fall to their death. I had a pilot one time told me that she saw a golden eagle carrying on the wing, carrying a lamb, a doll ram. Golden eagles are hard on mountain goats too.

A ram? Lamb. Lamb. Lamb. There's a biologist that wrote Natural History of Alaska, and he had an eyewitness account of a lynx killing a doll ram oh wow he eyewitness account from another biologist of a lynx that ran a doll ram down a gully jumped on its back bit the back of its head

and a single lynx killing a ram lynx mean lynx or a weak ram and then wolverines oh yeah kill them obviously wolves kill them grizz yeah they kill them black bears you know black bears i'm sure do but they don't make the list as much as uh wolverines more i think the top are wolverines and brown bears for one area tony russ talks about it in his books about hunting dull sheep that they're pretty weak animals like you know he's talking about it from like a projectile standpoint you know arrows hitting them in funny places bolts hitting them in funny places but it's not like an elk that soaks up the lead and then like two days later you're still tracking it you know three ridges five miles away it's like a ram once he takes a hit he's he's not going far he's gonna

lay down not tough not tough in that regard so you know maybe a bite to the back of the head from the links it just slowly starts to take the blood out of him and it weakens him enough that yeah i should say i kept saying back of the head of the neck bit him on the neck yeah killed him lynx we saw lynx print yep saw lynx tracks but they're snowshoe hair specialists man grouse snowshoe hairs lynx ptarmigan that's what they specialize in yeah surprising to see you know that he would do that man he's got a square meal laid out ahead of him after doing that he's got protected though he's like the dude with the nice car in a shitty neighborhood he's just worrying about his yeah man you just imagine how stressed out he is he's like some bitch someone's gonna take this from me what am i gonna do now no one's to let me have this. I did the Everton.

Yeah. Someone's going to take it. Hopefully he did it in the winter when the main things they're going to take it from him aren't around when all the bears are underground. And then we worked out a new area that Dirt dubbed it God's Penthouse. Yeah. That was beautiful. The other head of the valley.

Like nothing I've ever seen. Oh, dude. At first when you said that, I thought you were being profane because i associate penthouse with the magazine but then i remembered that it's um actually like a type of room yeah like a nice room in a hotel yeah i was like myth how dare you oh that's right penthouse usually has a view too yeah which that did and the color we were talking about the colors like of the tundra that it's like these crazy just variations oh my god it's beautiful man huge spires covered in snow yeah and just huge like you think it's like wow this area is huge but then beyond it there's

so you're trying to like understand the infinity space, and you're thinking, well, somewhere there's a brick wall, but then beyond that, there's something. I mean, if there wasn't, right? When you're there, you sort of go, wow, look at all the space. You go, but then, and up there, it's like tens of miles. Well, Chris had an interesting... You could go without running into anything. Oh, yeah.

That point about if you could lay down a city block in that landscape oh yeah perspective the size comparison yeah it just you just see so much country when you're up high in there you just see so much it's like hard to take in what you're really looking at i remember taking a guy caribou hunting and he hadn't had a lot of experience hunting like open country oh yeah yeah and we asked him how far caribou hunting and he hadn't had a lot of experience hunting like open country oh yeah yeah and we asked him how far caribou way it was away he expressed it in blocks three blocks away i'm ever thinking man this is gonna be a hard trip uh yeah man that place is pretty magical but again no rams using lambs and by this point we're days into the trip we've lost a lot of time to sit in and bad weather a lot of time to sit in bad weather because when it's foggy you just can't

see yeah cloudy i kept debating is it fog or clouds what do you think fog is a cloud at ground level right so is that what it is? That'd be a good thing for you. I need to look up. There's a fog and a cloud. I think it's the same. I feel like it is. Some of our water, man.

Just, yeah. Because we'd be like, we're up in the clouds. Or we'd be like, oh, we're in the fog. But either way, when you can't see, you just shut down. It's not like a lot of stuff where you just got to plow ahead, right? Or just wait for one to come along. Yeah, or just wait because like... A thick cloud of tiny water droplets suspended in the atmosphere

at or near the Earth's surface that obscures or restricts visibility. Oh, okay. So chemically, they're the same. Thick clouds. Sitting in the clouds. And there's nothing in the clouds and there's nothing you can do there's nothing you can do no at least that morning when we woke up in the in god's penthouse it was clear below freezing it's just nice because you get to look at it all and go yep we've seen it all we've cleared it there are no rams in here let's move on yeah it's nice when you can have

that certitude because a lot of times you're walking through you're like i don't know like we would just travel when it was when it was cloudy we would also just travel like you're gonna walk three four or five miles into a new zone and then sit there hoping that it clears up or you have to just kind of sit there as the clouds blow through and now and then you sort of keep a mental picture of a mental map of what you've seen or not as the clouds have come through. And you'd be like, man, I still haven't seen over in that area. And also in that area, you'll clear up enough for you to look.

But it just doesn't feel definitive because you're trying to find a white animal and white clouds. You lose a lot of time. Danny was telling us something interesting. Explain what you'd read about the things that factor into hunter success rates. Oh, yeah. The Efficient Game has a cool publication that I read before this hunt, but one of the interesting things in there was that they fly annual surveys to index sheep abundance, and apparently there's not a relationship

between the number of rams in a given area and hunter success. It has more to do with just the weather in any given hunting season. Like if you've got, if you got clear weather and a good visibility, then you got higher success rates. Yeah. That's gotta be something that's,

that's gotta be something that's applicable in a lot of places, but probably nowhere as severe. Like when you think of like weather, I think, well, no waterfowl is huge man like weather for waterfowl in some areas where you don't have local birds right the weather can like ruin the harvest for a particular area affects it yeah yeah but in in sheep hunt it's just like so kind of it's so

stark right either you're hunting or you're not yeah it can be that you just there's nothing you can do yeah there's nothing you can do. Yeah. There's nothing you can do. Ducks would be like, man, it would have been a lot better had the weather been bad up north. Yeah. We got a few right at daylight, but then they shut down because there's no birds moving through. Yeah. Because there's no clouds, so they're flying too high or whatever it winds up being. But this is like, this is, yeah, it's just like, it's kind of like almost like on or

off to some degree, being able to hunt. And also up in God's penthouse, there was caribou running around. Oh, nice ones. It's funny because like a thing about caribou I always think about is how sort of disorganized and not deliberate they seem. Like at one point in time, when we were trying to go through that area, remember we tried to go above that canyon and couldn't, had to abort mission and go and sleep and try another route through?

Three bulls are trying to come down this hillside. They can't see us or smell us. They're way away. We watched three bulls and they come and they kind of get confused and they're clearly trying to go somewhere in a hurry. And then all of a sudden, they're down feeding. Back kind of where they came from,

and then they're there 24 hours later. So what was it when you ran? They were trying to come down through the same stuff we were trying to go up through, and they realized it was too steep at the same time we realized it was too steep. They backed off and spent the night uphill, and we backed off and spent the night uphill and

we backed off and spent the night downhill i know and then we crossed paths with them again the next day on the other side of the valley where we could travel i think they were doing the same thing we were doing it's so because they seem as like on one hand there's like the the so the largest land mammal migration on the continent caribou right they can pull off some really astounding feats of navigation but when you're looking at a caribou particularly up in the mountains it's like do you have any plan he's just like you know what i'm gonna do man he says i'm just gonna run like holy hell over that way and and then a while later, I'll run back over there. It's so weird watching them.

It's weird that... What are they thinking? They also don't get as scared as other animals. Because we ran up on them just to film and just see them. Yeah, they're quite curious, too. Yeah, they came towards us, and then you guys were down at camp, and me and Danny were still up high, and then that one bull just almost spotted you guys, and then rather then rather than running away it started running uphill towards camp and then it

got really close i threw up my range finder he was 29 yards away when he finally changed his mind he was like oh wait a minute this isn't my crew i can take it out of here he came to us looking at us he's because i think that they're you know they're so gregarious and they're so they have such a herd mentality, I feel that when they see something that's kind of the right shape... They think it's another caribou. They're like, I'm not going to go so close

that it could pounce on me and kill me, but I'm going to go under the assumption that I'm looking at a caribou. It's the only thing I think, especially out on the Arctic slope where you see huge distances, most caribou that you're coming across landscape, most caribou, when they see something,

they in some way kind of skirt. They in some way want to kind of come to you. They have to be thinking, I'm going to rule out that it's a caribou. Yeah. That's the first thing on their mind. And also, I just think that the way they travel, move, I think a lot of them

go through life having no experience with people you know it's not like a whitetail buck that gets to be five years old and all that thing is done his whole life is dodge getting killed and he learns that when you see that shape you want nothing to do with it man because I've seen 16

of my friends killed by those things. I think that the caribou just, whatever, it's more beneficial for them to find other caribou than it is to run the risk of that you're running up on something that's going to do it. And I think a lot of them don't have any human experience. That's pretty cool. I think in that country, I think a 10-year-old doll ramp has to have probably accrued some human experience oh yeah yeah we saw tracks in a lot of the drainages we were in human tracks yeah I think that they at that

age I think that they have had exposure or they just learn to be paranoid about anything you know but like caribou, it seems like their success as a species has so much more to do with high fecundity than it does to any one individual. Becoming real cagey and wily. Because I've just never seen one that was real cagey and wily. Well, it hasn't worked its way into their genome i guess yeah um they like to land the snow a lot because they get away from bugs and that's the thing i know like before hunting caribou

you would see them now and then run but you could tell because they would run when the wind died yeah because when the wind died the bugs were too bad and so then they'd run and stop and feed and then you'd see you could watch it happen. Enough minutes would go by that they'd pick up their swarm of black flies and mosquitoes. And then they'd run and stop and feed. And that was just their grazing pattern. Off and into the wind, too. Yeah, their grazing pattern was just like to get clear of your cloud, eat.

Get clear of your cloud and eat. And you'd sit there. And I remember getting up in a good glass and spot hunting caribou out on the Arctic slope. And you get up in your good glass and nothing's happening. And then midday, it'd be 11 o'clock. It started to get warm.

It started to get real buggy. And all of a sudden the land would just come alive with caribou. Because all those caribou were just nestled into their little dips and valleys and stuff where there was good lush feed. And the mosquitoes mosquitoes get bad and you start to see them rolling over all the ridge tops as they're trying to run away and then it'd be like good then the hunting's good because you can also see them all around then it'd cool off or get windy and the amount of

movement activity would die down strange animals man i like to hunt them but it's like generally if you get on one you're gonna get them well the one broadsided itself at like 50 yards maybe to us and i was like dude you're just what are you doing man you're just asking for it he's being a caribou yeah yeah we could have we could have got caribou in that area oh yeah i wouldn't want to carry one that far. No. That would have been a long haul. So hunted out God's Penthouse. Triple nip. Went to triple nipple.

That looks spectacular. No one hauled it. Shot at a ptarmigan on the way to triple nipple. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he shot at a ptarmigan using rat shot. Which isn't... You say they're working on a better version of that well i i picked up a box that was bigger i mean that it's slightly bigger shot what was like maybe nine shot number nine yeah it looks bigger we're talking about a shotgun shells you

can shoot out of a 44 mag so you got a bear protect you got a bear protection pistol just talk about what tell everybody what you have for bear protection. Yeah. Smith and Wesson 44. Model 29, I think that is. I don't know. Yeah, we got the exact same one, but I don't know what model it is.

It's the Air Light PD. Yeah. Super lightweight. It like doubles in weight when you load it with. I think it more than doubles, but yeah. Grizzly bear rounds. It's got a bunch of aluminum titanium i think yeah um but anyways yeah it's a real popular bear sidearm i think

it's kind of made for that right i would think so yeah hurts like holy hell to shoot that thing man hurts your hand yeah but they make a shotgun shell everybody calls it rat shot yeah you're not getting many in there and you know we were talking about why why it's hard why it's hard why you have to be a point-blank rating for it to work and it's not really the velocity or anything it's got to be the fact that there's no choke you know to that round and so oh yeah even at 10 feet stubby little barrel and who knows what that pattern looks like it could be spread out to five feet already it's ridiculous that we don't know what the pattern looks like no i know i was gonna pattern yeah we're gonna pattern it

the strip but we didn't have a piece of paper yeah i kind of forgot about it i never thought dude i just know that i've been um i know i've been we had a lot of shot opportunities one time hunting sheep. I remember just sometimes being like, how in the world did I not get that thing? Yeah. I think it comes down to luck eventually. That patterns are loose. I also remember a time we were out and the weather was really nice. We weren't even setting up tents.

We were just laying out in the tundra to sleep. I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I remember it was 2 in the morning, but it was earlier in the season. It was 2 in the morning. I remember waking up at 2 in the tundra to sleep. I remember waking up in the middle of the night. I remember it was 2 in the morning, but it was earlier in the season. It was 2 in the morning. I remember waking up at 2 in the morning and there was a group of ptarmigan in amongst our sleeping bags. They're really active at night. Yeah, moving around in amongst our sleeping bags. I remember shooting one of those at the rat shot,

but it was point blank. But other times you shoot and you're like, what in the world happened? I think the effective range of that stuff is maybe 10-12 feet. You're pretty good. Outside of of that it's like stuff is maybe like 10 12 feet yeah you're pretty you're pretty good outside of that it's real hit and miss uh so we tried that that didn't work um went to a drainage called triple nipple

then went around finally then had all kinds of walking all kinds of weather problems our eighth day i think it was our eighth day of hunting yeah our eighth day of hunting the weather got broke and got beautiful and we happened to be in a valley where we could get up on a ridge got up on the ridge and it was like the like the perfect the world's most perfect ridge where you could look down into multiple drainages if you kept going along this ridge and it was like just like you expect it to be and everything's great we see a band of lambs across a valley far away use or band of use later watched a grizzly stumble into those ewes i think he's just minding his own business feeding on berries but scared the shit out of those things man they left the drainage

in a single file running line on that thing showed up i look out there's just like sheep running and i'm like if they winded us from two miles away that's impressive yeah but it was uh yeah then i looked more carefully and there's a grizzly feeding on blueberries right in the little patch they'd been in. So I think, I don't know. I didn't see what happened. Maybe he does, he's like, what the hell, I'm going to run after him and see if anybody's injured.

Yeah. But I didn't see what happened, but they were not happy with that situation and totally left, like gone. And then Danny, sure enough, like kind of like I felt like what happened when conditions are so good, finds a ramp. A clearly legal... What horn was it? Left.

A left horn that was curved in such a way it was like that ramp. Well beyond full curl, yeah. Like no stressful walk over there. It'd still be stressful. Yeah, it was a that ramp. Well beyond full curl, yeah. Like no stressful walk over there. It'd still be stressful. Yeah, it was a solid ramp. It was a really nice ramp, yeah. And he's perched up in a rock pile. Just like you described, man, on a sub-ridge that divided a valley.

Yeah, like a center ridge at the confluence of two streams. Yeah, posted up on that center ridge line in a little... And he knew what he was doing, man. Not far off the bottom, man. No, not far off the bottom. No, he knew what he was doing, dude. He was tucked into a little cubby that he had there with a bunch of rock around him.

Hard to spot from most angles. He kind of did what whitetails like to do, man. I went most of my life not knowing this, but Kenny always talks about this too is like those like mature bucks like to lay with something with a backdrop they like to lay where they can see out and where something can't see them good from behind to back up into something yeah he's like i can see can see this way. Usually if there's a pitch to it. Yeah, they can cover

about 270 and it rolls off on three sides and there behind him there's a log or real thick, dense stand of, you know,

to help obscure him. He wants to be obscured from where he can't, he wants to be hidden from what he can't see but then, you know, but then clear view

sight for what he can't see and that's that dude had it dialed and that little spot he had, it would very difficult approach yeah i bet you a lot of rams have laid over laid there over a lot oh i bet and if you could somehow kill off every ran that lived there and then repopulate it it'd be like one's probably gonna find that sure he's probably gonna be like yeah it's a sweet spot to lay down hard to approach yeah so we were on the ridge what was i don't i don't even know what our elevation was uh we topped out at we topped out again that like it was 5200 where

we topped out no no we did some up we did some down but somewhere around that mark and he was maybe 600 feet below us okay yeah i think he's 600 feet below us a couple drainages yeah he was at 40 you know what he was at 45 i think he was at 4500 feet but just no there's no you can't come from it was impossible to come from behind him um there's been no way to come from behind him um there's been no way to come from behind him so the first thing he's a ways away and we spot him yeah mile well yeah i'd say a couple thousand yards away um and we realize that so danny watches the ram through a spot scope because the first thing we gotta do is like we gotta move somewhere because we had gotten where we were in the fog and sat in the fog to wait for the fog to clear and all of a sudden it clears and there's a ram there

so we didn't know if we could move because we'd gotten where we got obscured by fog and then the first thing is like well can we even move from where we gotten where we got obscured by fog and then the first thing is like well can we even move from where we are without him taking notice of us moving from where we are so danny's watching through the spot scope and i just start skirting down to the nearest goalie to get into to go downhill out of sight and i move across the hillside not even 100 yards but just move and danny watches him to see if he like takes interest in what i'm doing but he doesn't take any he doesn't he can't see us yeah the one time i told you to stop is because he was pointed in our direction like he's oriented toward us and

the one time i told you to stop is because he stopped chewing his cud oh shit something's up and he went back to chewing i'm like okay we're good he repacked so we're getting this goalie that's going to kind of like deliver us down into his zone knowing that there's still gonna be a lot to figure out but the cliff face he's on you can see these bands these discolored bands in the rock and so you know he's like i just remember memorized he's like below the third band yeah so no matter where you go you can find that the cliff he's on and count the bands and kind of know like his little zone and start trying to go down this gullion it's very treacherous scary in places a lot of loose rock there's a lot of play you spend a lot of

time hunting doll sheep in places where, um, can't make a mistake. If you fell, like let's say if you like, cause you're not going to like, people don't just fall all of a sudden, but like if you fell in some sort of, you would die if you fell, but it was not like some places you die.

If you fell and you could really picture fallen a lot of places, you realize, man, if you fell, you die. But why would I fall? it's usually that one it's like yeah if but like how would you like people don't just fall over all of a sudden yeah fall over rolling downhill it's usually like different where you sort of slip yeah you kind of slip and cling down but if you got rolling there's no end to the roll i always had it in the back of

my mind when we were sidehilling on all that stuff that like if for some reason with like the pack or whatever if i just tipped the wrong way and you didn't fall into the hill you fell that's away from that's what i'm trying to say oh man yeah yeah that was the only time like if i slipped and like tripped and then you end up falling the bad way. That's when you're not having a good time. And that's the thing I was telling myself. When it does occur to you, it's hard to get out of your head. Yeah. But all the times I've spent walking in places where that's not true,

I've never fallen that way. Yeah. I've never fallen away from the hill. Then again, it only takes once. Yeah. You fall into the hill when you fall. Yeah. Yeah, I think your natural inclination, too,

is to just err in that direction so much with your center of gravity that you just – Yeah, you lean into it. Yeah. I was trying to figure out also, like, how I was going to self-arrest with the camera if I did start sliding. If I was just going to be like, bam! No, don't do that to our gear.

I would expect that you set it – that you'd find a place on the way down to set it above a rock or something and then you just go unhook your cord and just go you know steve and i were steve and i were crossing uh uh icy god was that a shoot where an avalanche had ripped through right and it all went down to the bottom we were watching avalanches all that day it was that wet snow we're mountain goat hunting. It was wet snow laying on wet grass. And Steve was below

me. He had crossed that snowy chute and headed down. And I was above him crossing and I slipped and I was going down. But I had an ice axe and it was fumbling loose behind me and I got the ice axe in both hands and I was just starting to dig that thing into the snow.

Like it was a pretty clear slope. I wasn't about to go off a cliff or anything. I was just going to go for a long ride. And oh, there's one rollover that I couldn't see what was in there. But then it was clear again below that. And I got my ice axe. This was so scary when this happened. Because you swept by me.

I kind of tried to grab you. No, here's what happened though. I don't know if I told you this at the time or not, but I had my ice axe in both hands. I was just starting to press that thing into the snow and I see Steve running out and his ice axe is dangling

from his wrist and all I can see is that ice axe like going into my face. So I had to drop my ice axe to deflect your ice axe. I totally lost my self-arrest and rode down for another, I don't know what,

50, 60 feet. You got hurt? I got banged up. It could have been a lot worse, but I got banged up. You could have died? Not there. Somewhere else.

I'm saying that sort of thing where all of a sudden you're just going that circumstance was a relatively benign scary ride down a mountain if that was over a cliff or into a rock face

that's what I meant by could have died that kind of fall where there's an abyss below you. Yeah. I was told a real interesting example of risk management. And we're all in the mountains a lot, so we can do that, like I said, safely. And outside of some freak, weird fall, you're going to be fine. And I was talking to this Yosar guy, Yosemite search and rescue about big wall climbing yeah and people are always like how can you do that

it's so dangerous and you know how do you not die he's like well if you if you're good at what you do well yeah they do that his yeah they all die well his point though was like he's like if you're you know you you're comfortable in your environment then it then it's an example of like I tell him, if you're walking down the sidewalk and you fall into traffic, you're going to die. But you just don't fall into traffic. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. When you're walking down a busy street, you're like, man, if I fell in front of that car.

Well, dude, every time you drive on a two-lane road with like a 55-mile-an-hour speed limit, you're passing another car within five feet of death every time. With 110-mile-an-hour combined velocity. Yeah, you do that thousands of times. Yeah, all the time. So you don't focus on it. You're not like, geez, if I somehow swerved over into traffic, I'd be dead. I do think that all the time.

Yeah, I know. And then you do have this kind of thing. I think, yeah, I watched my kid, one of my kids recently sort of has the idea of the cooperation it requires for highway driving. He was like asking questions about, you know, that everyone needs to be on the same page out here. Yeah. Driving around like this. Like we need to be abiding by the same rules and interests. Yeah. We all want to be alive.

Self-preservation but all that said man there is like now and then there are some well we aborted a hillside we didn't do a hillside because the the the the gap below you was there was like high consequence it'd be like you're you're not like oh you're gonna get banged up it's like you're done yeah if you go there's no way to stop and then there's a then there's a yeah a Canyon and it was wet raining and the hillside was coming apart yeah and we were a day and we were cold and tired yeah and around here like these are new mountains, man. They're very new, sharp mountains, and they're just falling apart. There's a term in geology, the angle of repose. It's like when a hill relaxes.

Everything on the hill, the hill's achieved an angle that everything on the hill is going to kind of stay where. These hills are not at their angle of repose no uh to demonstrate that farther when we were coming back the next day on the easy slope side looking across you could see where oh boulders rocks you know who knows what kind of size we didn't see the boulders themselves but where they had fallen off the mountain they'd be on shale and scree for a while, and then they would hit where there was actually grass growing. Hit the tundra, yeah. And it looked like, I guess it would look like a golf divot, you know, when someone kind of shanks and you get like a two to three foot.

Is that a golf term? Yeah. Shank? I guess it's not a, what is it when you make a divot? What do you do wrong? You just dig in too deep. You just hit too low. But you basically make like a big scar in i know yeah in the in the turf that's a great example and it was like

hundreds of yards of this going down the mountain so there's so much velocity and speed and mass because it's just so steep and moving that it's just ripping these giant divots as it's moving down the hill and skipping some big sections oh yeah we saw several places where there were very fresh landslides some of them big enough that there was like a whole new like side drainage that had just released and and all that sediment went down to the valley floor and all of a sudden there's like a new valley you know catastrophically formed i asked about that lake we saw there was a lake and a very peculiar lake in a very peculiar place in the bottom of these drainages and you can see where the whole hillside gave way came down and formed a lake and i was asking the pilot he said sometime within the last 30 years but wasn't the last few years yeah the landslide had just sloughed all the way to the

valley floor and dammed up the creek and uh yeah and then there's a obviously a brand new lake there not a lick of vegetation yeah i mean it looked brand new yeah yeah the landslide was a different color you know all the other all the other uh rock around there had kind of a rusty orange color to it and that new slide was gray and i assumed that once that oxidizes it's gonna turn to that same orange color it gets a patina sure yeah it's patinated um start down this gully like trying to get in the ram zone not like clear kind of like obvious what the what the possible shooting perches might be but because you can it, the ram was too far to hit him with a range finder. And so you couldn't get, you couldn't measure other points.

Yeah. Cause if you're looking at, like, let's say you're sitting there and you're looking at a, you're looking directly at something you're trying to sneak up on and you're like, and then on, before you see like a little rise or like a little ridge, you're like, man, I wonder if I could shoot from that ridge. And you range find the object you're trying to get to, the animal, and you're like, okay, it's 1,100 yards away. And then you range a hill or a little knob or something your side of it,

and you hit that thing, and that thing's 800 yards away. You're like, money. When I get to that spot, I'm in range. I can make my shot. But you couldn't hit the ram with a range finder so there's a lot of questions about what need to happen and i was even saying like this ram like i'm definitely not getting the old gut knife out and getting it ready yet but we start down this this we start down this chute and it's really steep and you're kind of like on this open scree side, but there's these rock bands,

these little mini Chinese walls that are crossing, and every one of those is a cliff. You kind of pick your way around one, drop in the next drainage, you go down, it's another cliff. Then as you go down, it picks up where it's got a lot of flow. There's a lot of water coming out everywhere. Then it's like these waterfalls. It just becomes like, it just became hard to picture it working out and eventually we get to one spot where you can kind of get up and look at the ram and he's

over 600 yards away bedded down it took us almost three hours to make it to that spot three hours to drop down that. Yeah. It did not feel like that long. It felt like an eternity, I thought, man. Dude, I thought it was like 30 minutes. I couldn't believe he was still laying there. Yeah.

Because I was watching those ewes and lambs, and they're up feeding away. They were bedded when we found them, but eventually they're up feeding. I'm like, he's probably up feeding by now because they're up feeding. But three hours later, there he is. Still hanging out. and the wind had

been like in the goalie bottoms the wind had been going up the slope and we pop up on this little sub ridge where you're looking across and we just got there we're only up there long enough to even like really get serious about making a plan that some bitch stands up which is never a good sign oh yeah and i think he winded us at 600 yards he never looked in our direction yeah but at that moment the wind was going you know we were sort of in the straight in the wind of the main valley at that point and that was going that's a good point the gully yeah there's little sub winds yeah going up the gullies but the main valley also has its wind direction yeah and you pop up on the ridge out of the gully, and I'm like, and you hit, I feel that wind

in the back of my neck, but it was so far away, I didn't think it mattered. And all of a sudden, never looked at us. Some bitch stood up, and there's a look to him like, they don't do anything fast. Nope. They don't do anything. Everything they do is leisurely. And deliberate. And he got up and was like, I'm out of here, bro.

I'm going to get out of here very slowly. Yeah, I'm not going to go break on my leg, but I'm getting out of here. And he got out of there. I don't think it helped that you had six dudes who haven't showered for nine days. 600 yards upwind. No, it's a thing, man. It's the camera crew effect, and you can never measure it.

I mean, sometimes you can measure it. Sometimes you see something happen where I'll be like, I'm facing forward, and something happens where I know I wasn't the one that did it, where all of a sudden something gets really interesting, what's going on in our area. And I'm like, dude, I've been sitting here, man. I haven't moved. Anybody moving? That's when you get the same look no yeah you're like oh damn it

someone moved um i feel like it's like a kid that did something wrong yeah that's the only thing that makes me mad man and i feel feel like I've done clinics and workshops and everything where I'm trying to be like, here's how to approach game. But it doesn't matter. Because even up Triple Nipple, we're going up a little box canyon. And we get through the last box canyon and all of a sudden, the whole Triple Nipple Valley. And you sons of bitches run out.

You guys run out like opening the out like a couple like opening the door for a couple dogs in the morning you guys run out of that box canyon i'm like what are you doing the whole point was this moment this is why we've come up here yeah was to get here and look i think it's like what is going on that goes back to your argument of like turning a hunter is it better to turn a hunter into a cameraman or a cameraman into a hunter you know because like in that moment i was like oh there's this cool thing and like this cool feature and like it'll be a super cool shot if i'm out here and get the dudes coming around but in your mind both of your minds you're like this is our like secret zone to scope this whole thing out

nobody move you know so like the mindset is just you just got to make that switch yeah we're peering out from this little gate where we're hidden and tucked away and it's like if there's something here at this point it would not know that we're here yeah meanwhile i'm thinking like oh that's a cool wide. I was just reading an article. I was reading a long article about when these white supremacist dudes were going to give a lecture at Berkeley. They'd been invited by some student club to give one of their white supremacist. Like freedom of speech.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's an article about how berkeley was handling this and what they're gonna do and um one of the people who's in charge one of the people one of the administrators at the university is discussing this sort of dilemma and she realized that the way that these people manipulate the lead up to the event and turn it into like a news event and a social media event like all the lead up to the event and turn it into like a news event and a social media event like all the lead up and it becomes more about the response and she was saying like this person saying that the metaphor i'm starting to see is like i traditionally viewed a lecture

and the digital recording of the lecture as being an object in its shadow. And I thought that this person is going to come give a lecture, and the lecture that they're going to give is the object. And then out of this will come a recording that people consume, and that's the shadow of the object. But she said, what I've come to see when dealing with these people is the object is the digital portion. That's the object is the digital the digital portion that's the object the actual thing is just a shadow of it and i was reading that the other day at the airstrip and it occurred to me like

there's this thing in recording hunting and making like a hunting show is is you like in a perfect world you imagine that the hunt is the object okay and the thing that we create is its shadow but in a lot of ways just out of the reality of it becomes that the thing we're creating is the object right in the hunt like there were times when we weren't we had we sat still because there's no way that the cameras could withstand that amount of rain yeah so we're like there's no sense of going so you can't film anyway and so you're in this struggle where all of a sudden the thing we're creating the digital impression we're creating becomes the object and the hunt itself becomes its shadow yeah and and you're always pushing and pulling on those two ideas yeah you know so what is the object and what's the right

it was a good thing to read at the right moment yeah like it was a good expression it's a good metaphor for it that's a good way to put it for sure and for the greater good i think the object being the story digitally does does more for people than a successful hunt for you without the story yeah so that's why you make that call but you're right and it's it's like there's no end to it it's a con it's like this wrestling match that constantly occurs in your head yeah and when i get pissy and frustrated in my head i often think too like that the doing of this enables so much of the of the doing of it yeah do you know what i mean but it's it's a it's a tricky thing that and i'm sure that anyone that turns anyone that turns a passion into an occupation yeah and it's

a situation you guys are in in as cameraman because here you are it's like when you come out with us you're working you work 18 hour dayhour days. Yeah. Yeah. There's no escaping it. Uh-uh. You're just sleeping in a tent in the mud. Even sleeping is a little work. You're burning calories sleeping. It's hard. It's hard.

When you got to go like dig out, when you got to go like dig out a place to sleep. But when your passion is doing that. Yeah. Then it makes it easier. That's what I mean. But you're like, so am I at work or not at work, man? Not at work. Because if I'm working around, this is an eight-day shift.

One big long. Me and my younger brother, who's a photographer as well, went to our older brother, who's a carpenter's house, and was helping him move some dirt. And just manual labor. And we both looked at each other like, damn, we're glad we do what we do. We're not out here doing a nine-to-five grind. This is hard.

And I've done those grinds, man. Oh, me too. That's why I appreciate what I do now so much. I remember in high school, I worked for this, late high school, I worked for this industrial painting outfit called Quality Maintenance. Well, two of them, Pennington Brothers and Quality Maintenance Contractors.

And one time um me and this dude from high school craig kemp had to like degrease all the like roof trusses and auto parts manufacturing place dude so they could come in and paint them and i remember being up there and we're on these like scissor lifts you know i remember being up like working with the just this endless pile of rags and degreased or trying to get the stuff so it could be coated with paint. And when we showed up, the first shift dudes were there. And me and Craig were up there. It was such a tight deadline that we're up there.

And I'm still in high school, man. It's like a weekend thing. Organic chemical degreaser product. And eventually, those sons of bitches were back again. The first shift guys were back. I was like, I recognize that guy from when me and Craig started. That's how long we've been up there degreasing these things. I'm like, the whole damn shift came through.

And the only way I said to Craig, the only way I'm going to make it through is if Crazy Train comes back on the radio. He started playing radio. And it wasn't even a new song. We were there so long, degreased and shit, that Crazy Train got played twice. Then I was like, man, I don't know. I don't know about shift work.

I don't know if I'm going to make it in this occupation. That's that, what was Ed's quote? That's that fire that forms us. Forged by fire. We had another job. Danny worked this job remember having to hand chip paint off a rail around a sewage treatment tank oh god because they couldn't get you couldn't sandblast it or soda blast it because they couldn't have the sand or baking soda getting

into the sewage because mess up the sewage treatment so you had to sit right up this little plastic tarp and bang on with a ball peenpeen hammer. Oh, my God. Dude, it was a huge tank, and it was a three-rung guardrail around it with vertical supports. We had to bing off every square inch of that paint, man. We'd come back weekend after weekend. Did you guys like rhythm? Play crazy train on the ladder? Just tinking it off with hammers.

Not so hard to the addendum of the metal, but just hard enough to knock off a chip of paint about half the size of your pinky nail. You guys would be good. So yeah, then when you're up there, your biggest problem is your camera guys keep busting out into the open. You're like, I can live with this. I can live with this. Yeah, man. That's all I got to say about that sheep hunt.

He got away. He got away yeah he's still out there if he's lucky he'll be getting bigger he's gonna be a real nice one like doug duran nice buck next year nice ram next year yeah maybe maybe a dead ram before uh before the end of winter yeah they don't get old yeah we found uh yeah we found it we found a ram skull uh a winter kill presumably right right by camp so yeah when they get that age they don't last a real long time even in the unhunted population um they just drop off like flies after 10 yeah yeah i think part of it right is they is that they're just not they work so hard during the rut right and they're not putting weight on and they go from top of the heap to dead yeah they get up where they're the man and they they rut november and expend this tremendous tremendous

amount of injury and expose themselves to a lot of risk yeah a lot of predation risk and they go into and then they go into the and they go into the winter not kicking ass. So you get these ewes that'll be 20 and stuff, right? Yeah. But then you get these rams. And like I said, even this unhunted population that they were doing, I think that when a ram gets 13, he's got 100% chance of not being alive in a year.

Whoa. And at 10, it really drops off. Yeah, they go from being the man to nothing. Not like us. We have this long 40-year period of watching ourselves go to shit just slowing down uh danny got any uh final things you want to add um yeah we well we started talking about it yesterday but um yeah we should find a time and try try give it another go oh so yeah every time i hunt in alaska i come away just like obsessing about when i'm gonna do it again oh i know you know yeah i was thinking about this morning we're we're trying to go on a moose and caribou trip here and uh my hunting partner

having boat trouble and everything else man maybe we should just go back out cheap hunting do a hike in founder uh as a camera person don't skyline yourself or bust out in the open at inopportune times that's your concluder yeah getting the mindset of the hunt that's right the object and the object in the shadow not the cameraman his outline yeah the skyline shots the one of the better shots. Oh, it's a good shot, man. It's a good shot. Dirt myth? I was thinking about it all week.

It was really cool watching you guys as brothers hunt, because I'm really close to my brothers, and you guys' stories, and that was just kind of neat, you know, different. Yeah. From other guests, I guess, you guys. My first exposure to you and your brothers was being at your dad, mom's house in Mile City. And there was a picture of you and both your brothers on a mountaineering trip. I was like, damn, those look like some interesting dudes.

You were right. You were right. So that, yeah, it was really fun hanging out with you guys and watching you hunt together thanks dude and reminding me of my yeah my good times my bros janice i just had to reiterate man what a pretty pretty place that was i mean i don't we've been a lot of places the last five years together and this one might top it for scenery it's pretty dramatic it is just yeah every view is you know breathtaking when you get to see it you know we only had two real and weather days out of eight in the field and those two days man it was something special i'm really drawn to those glaciers, man. Yeah.

Like looking at them, I mean. Yeah. You kind of like. Yeah, you don't want to hang out near them for too long. Seems like a good place to get killed. But they're fun to look at from a mile away. Good place to get killed by a rock. Or just lifeless too, you know.

Like lifeless from, not lifeless. Yeah, it is. It's intimidating, man. But I like being where you look up and you go like, oh, there's like the end. Yeah. There's like the end. That's where this river starts. And the weather is so much squirrelier up by him too.

Windy. Yeah. Because the ice makes its own wind. They're definitely not lifeless. I mean, really, it's the beginning of it all is what you're looking at. It's a good perspective. Yeah, it's the beginning of life. No, it's cold though. When you get up in there, there's no shaking it, man. There's a cold that's Yeah, it's the beginning of life. No, it's cold, though.

When you get up in there, there's no shaking it, man. There's a cold that's just going to your bones. Yeah, like they kick off their own little weather. They kick off a wind, like all that cooling air just rushing down off the ice. And a lot of moisture condensing and that cold air around them. Yeah, we got snowed on in August. Yeah, that's the weird thing about Alaska is getting snowed on in August. Yeah, that's the weird thing about Alaska is getting snowed on in August.

I already heard, my wife was telling me a little snow in the mountains around our new house there. Yeah. All right. Los Angeles. Levi, concluders? Hell of a hunt. Glad to tag along. Much appreciated. Do you like that more you like

when they make you march all around in the military no that was a lot more fun no i had a good time i appreciate the chance to come out and hang out for sure fun hanging with you yeah that was good having you man thanks for the puking rally especially oh yeah dude yeah that was really to go from puking to better that fast. And it wasn't a drinking puke, and it was a sick puke. Yeah, so I went to bed one night and then woke up in the middle of the night and had to run outside the tent and try not to puke on Giannis. Yeah, I was wondering what you were doing out there. Yeah, I ran out.

I thought I was dirt having night terrors. I never realized that someone was throwing up outside the tent, which is never a good sign. Ran out and, you know, chucked up my dinner, and then Yanni and I woke up. Did a mega hike. Yeah. Woke up three hours later and went down another 10 miles. Had to run back to base camp for some batteries.

More than 10 miles. Yeah, it was a long jaunt. It was a good hook. But definitely worth it. And yeah. Well, we hope to have you back again, depending on what you've got going on. I'd love to, for sure. All right. Thank you for love to, for sure. All right.

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