The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 135: Titillation

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew, along with Chris "Ridge Pounder" Gill, Loren Moulton, Seth Morris, and Kelsey Johnson.Subjects discussed: is it okay to use holler’ in Pennsylvania?; a new addition to things that get turks to shock gobble; upper deckers, lower deckers, and the full stadium; scouting a Quality Elk Unit; camp cookies; hiding in plain sight; running through bushes, rolling logs, beating the snot out of the woods, and Jani's other elk behavior imitations; Janis's elk calling epiphany; being a slave to one's passions; greed; 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.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We call it the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Seth Morris, can you tell everybody about the deal with the stop sign you were telling me about?

Oh, so in previous podcasts, I've heard you guys talk about what you've heard turkeys gobble to yes um which is a long expansive list giant list uh so um one i'm from pennsylvania you can't hunt on sundays so which is another thing i like to talk about yeah if there's three things i like to talk about okay it's dip sunday hunting laws yep and shit turkeys gobble too perfect that's the three things i'm interested in so and this this ties in two of those things if you were packing a dip this would be a great story for me that was that was high school i might Oh, okay. So this is my kind of story. Yeah. This is all the stuff I like in it. Yeah. So can't hunt on Sunday. So me and my buddy went out on Sunday just to listen for birds.

It was during the season. And we went to this spot where we could like look down this big hollow. In Pennsylvania, we call them hollows. You do? Yep. You guys can't do that. Yeah, we can. Hollows, not hollers.

No, not holler. Hollow. Oh, okay oh okay i was gonna accuse you of cultural appropriation it's spelled the same way but they actually pronounce it we call them hollows really yeah you grew up saying that yep dude i wouldn't have known what anybody was talking about they said a hollow i live up curtain hollow that's where i used to live up curtain hollow in penn. If someone asked me where I lived, I'd say up Curtin Hollow. Do you guys say Fixon? Some people do. That depends on the person. One time I was guiding a fellow from Missouri,

and he told me I was guiding a six-pack of guys, so I would just kind of rotate through them throughout the week. When we get back, everybody's telling what they heard and what they saw, and the old man looked at me and he said, I heard a bull over there hollering in the holler. I didn't know what he was talking about huh they say hollow in pennsylvania yeah yep anyway we're must have been when all them boys was up fighting at gettysburg they introduced when lee raided the north they must have introduced that term yeah i don't know i don't know where it came from but they use it um anyway there you are looking down there we are looking over this hollow

and weren't hearing anything and we're just getting ready to leave and there was a stop we're at an intersection and there's a stop sign there so i pick up a rock throw it at the stop sign okay stop there uh were you hucking the rock at a stop sign as out of vandalism out of a vandalism impulse no it was more of like i wonder if i can hit that with a rock okay i got it yeah i'm with you so i did that and i hit it and two birds fired off yeah up on the hill so we got to add hucking rocks at stop signs that's another one that's something you could just carry around in your truck fired off. Yeah. Up on the hill. So we've got to add hucking rocks at stop signs. That's another one. That's something you could just carry around in your truck.

A rock? You don't even have to carry your stop sign. I was going to say, you can get rocks anywhere. Set it against your tire or the nearest tree. You've got to get a new turkey vest that has a stop sign stapled to the back. Hold on, the back of it. Another thing I want to touch on real quick

is a lot of people wrote in about this. It's not that fresh of a story anymore. But there's a famous skier who Yanni's heard of. How many people in here have heard of Andrew McLean, the skier? I have not. You had heard of his book that he wrote,

The Shooting Gallery. Yeah. I've heard of the book. Which I the shooting gallery yeah i've heard of the book so which i believe is kind of the bible of the utah yeah utah's wasatch mountain skiing so this guy and his and his i don't know if it's his girlfriend or wife um famous skier pillars of the community she's actually some kind of assistant city attorney. Wife, his wife. Andrew McLean and his wife.

Polly Samuels McLean. Out in the woods, having to be toting around, I guess, a set of bolt cutters and steal a dude in Utah near Park City, steal a dude's tree stand, couple tree stands, and steal a dude in Utah near Park City, steal a dude's tree stand, a couple tree stands, and steal a trail camera.

But they screw up, and he misses one of the trail cams down the trail. So the hunter gets an image on his trail cam of the other dude packing out his trail cam and tree stands. And he goes and puts the image up online, and a couple of hunting groups help him out, spreading the image around. And pretty soon it gets identified as this famous skier and his pillar of the community wife who now have felony charges, facing felony charges.

I guess he just came out and said it's inexcusable. He has no excuse. Horrible thing to do. I'd like to know if he's a skier. You mean a hunter? Of course he's a skier. I'm sorry, a hunter. No, man.

Listen, I haven't dug into it too deep but i haven't read any suggestion that he was stealing the stuff because he needed a new tree stand well he can't use it now if he's got felony if he gets charged a felony because once you get a felony you can't have a gun right yeah he could bow hunt oh yeah he could bow on out of his tree stand oh i see what you're saying you know like he really screwed up if he's stealing it for hunting purposes and now he can't even what's weird is he brought it home yeah he didn't just go and throw it down in a ditch down into a holler or hollow or a hollow he brought it home i i don't know if he's speaking to what his motivations were did he really need a tree

stand and a trail cam that bad the the i don't know i can't back this up i don't i haven't looked into it but everything i've read has carried with it the suggestion that they were doing it because they think that hunters can suck it but i don't know he has i don't know that he said it's just like people's the insinuation why not just leave that note hunters can suck it on the guy's tree stand rather than guy's tree stand rather than take his tree stand. Because he likes, he's a man of action. Did his wife comment?

Haven't read where she's had a comment. Maybe that was her. He's got a lot more to lose, it sounds like, because he's like a person that people look up to and an outdoor enthusiast and probably has some, has probably enjoyed some level of his life and success utilizing public lands

and here he is trashing on someone else's legal right to put a couple temporary hunting implements out on public land in violation of nothing so yeah it looks pretty bad for the guy i'm just i just read the little piece of powder magazine's website did on it and uh what's their take they're also saying well they start off by saying that there's been animosity between I just read the little piece that Powder Magazine's website did on it. What's their take on it? They're also saying, well, they start off by saying that there's been animosity between skiers and backpackers toward hunters over the years. But it appears, according to reports, McLean decided to finally take matters into his own hands, which I feel like is kind of bullshit

because I've been living in both those worlds for well over a decade, close to two decades, and I've never had seen any kind of animosity between those groups. You, Lauren? Why would there be animosity? Oh, there is, man. You've never had any little bit of trailhead tension? No, but it's kind of different seasons almost. Dude, but not from a backpacker or a skier.

It's from freaking some lady with a little micro dog that's from way out of town. Not a mountain recreator that skiers and backpackers and hunters. Oh, so you're being specific to skiers. Or backpackers. Yeah, I got you. Maybe some kind of animal rights activist. Who knows? But animosity between hunters and skiers doesn't seem to really i guarantee you go dig through this guy's garbage there's some meat

scraps in that garbage i don't really know i shouldn't say that what am i talking about saying that he's a meat eater not a vegetarian yeah but i'm just bummed that powder magazine is putting this out there that you know someone should be like oh yeah yeah yeah i i agree um yeah i never really liked hunters either yeah don't say that and start start a thing where there's not a thing you know yeah they end their little piece here by saying somewhere a crusty local tips his glass the hell does that mean because they said not to condone criminal activity but but andrew mclean may have just written himself deeper into backcountry ski lore with this one no way yeah that's what i'm

saying i'm a little disappointed with talk about someone that can suck it really really that's what that says yeah i bet okay uh moving on uh in an episode called An Object in Its Shadow, we were talking about an area where a ram, a doll ram, was laying where he had a little cubby of rock that protected him, his back. So he's looking out in a panoramic view, but he's protected from behind by an outcrop an overhanging outcrop of rock and we were talking about how it's kind of like this perfect spot where he can see everything below him and then he's got a buffer a barrier behind him so something that comes immediately

behind him might not see him and i was saying how whitetail bucks like to lay like that too where they'll get on kind of like right toward the top of a ridge and they'll lay up with their back kind of curled against the log or an overhang or something and they can look out down below them so they got some protection and they're hidden from behind and can see below.

And this dude wrote in to say that it sounds an awful lot like what the geographer, Jay Appleton, called the prospect refuge theory in his 1975 book the experience of landscape and he says the prospect refuge theory goes that people humans prefer the edges of environments with a vista in front and protection from the back and sides based on the evolutionary understanding that

this increased the probability of survival for early humans by protecting them from unseen dangers the theory is widely accepted and applied as a design principle in landscape architecture and interior design that's interesting very wow on a similar note buck bowden on another episode was talking about how in nature things are round and we got talking about um how we build humans build squares now and he was saying it's just been proven time and again that that when it comes to buildings squares are just a much more efficient use of space and he mentioned imagine that you have a bunch of round objects and you stack them in place you have a lot of empty yeah a lot of gaps but you build square and fill with right you build right angles and fill with right angles and you find that you have a lot less wasted space and more usable

yeah look at new york city if everything was round, it wouldn't work. It'd be a mess. It would be. Another quick piece. Dude wrote in saying he can't listen anymore because we talk about dip too much. I'm sensitive to that. I don't want to talk about dip anymore,

but I have a couple final thoughts on dip because for one guy that is sick of hearing about dip it seems like a lot of other people dippers want their voices to be heard so i'm i just shook a guy's hand today great guy and i'm walking up to shake his hand i see him take his finger and scoop out a with his shaking hand with shaking hands oh brother like him too like him like a lot like him a lot that's a little etiquette maybe um i'm assuming it sanitized it so guy writes in to say this he goes you know i'm glad you guys are discussing the finer points of dipping and he was saying that he used to follow a hockey player named miko savonin known as the flying fin

and this guy got himself a a plunger used in the application of administering drugs to dogs because he would put his dip in this plunger and pack it real tight i don't know what do you get out of packing it tight. He'd like a nice tight pack. Does that make sense? Well, I guess you just don't want it to fall apart and get all in your teeth. He'd put it in the tube and then use the plunger part to compact it and make it into a sort of plug.

He'd then put this in his upper lip, and no one could ever tell it was in. We called it the upper decker not to be confused with the upper deck where you poop in the top tank of someone's toilet um and actually when we're done here today i have to go buy a part for my Kohler toilet um another guy wrote in to talk about the same thing where he's saying that in high school dipping was so bad and him and his friends dipped so much that when they came into class the teacher to make them line up and inspect their lips to make sure they weren't coming into class and they took to hide in skull bandits in their upper lip to get away from it

he says that they would run both upper deckers and lower deckers at the same time, and they took the call to a full stadium. That must have made it even that much more fun to be dipping when you had to come in with like a chipmunk and have your teacher inspect your mouth and then sit down and be like, I still got two in. Tell your buddies, I got two in tell your buddies i got two in still got a full stadium the full stadium is the best thing in the world man uh that's it

for any kind of newsy type objects we're just coming back from um coming back from big yeah you could probably go so far as called a big elk hunt a big elk hunt in an extreme south eastern washington state which is some dry rocky ass country people that aren't from that area i think like they don't realize how about the difference between western and eastern washington like people know seattle right for all of its rain and everything but you know half state, or more than half that state, lays kind of in the rain shadow of the Cascades where weather comes off the Pacific Ocean and, it compresses. The water density increases, comes out as precipitation, and then it's pretty much dry air that moves from there. And that and other factors has led to great aridity in eastern Washington. And so we were hunting a really dry-ass, desert-y-ass place in Washington.

I'll just tell you. You could have plucked us from one of those mountainsides. Now up high because down low in the bottom is a different story. But up high, you could have taken yourself off one of those mountainsides and put yourself on a Mexican hillside in the Sonora and you wouldn't have known

you moved 1,500 miles. It was a lot like Sonora. Dry, crumbly rock, only grass, no sage. Lush bottoms. Yeah. You give that place a little bit of soil and a little bit of water and a little bit of shade, and you get these thick hellhole bottoms.

I'd go so far as to call them hellholes. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I would agree with that. Jungle rock, juniper, ponderosa pine, western hemlock. Yep, western hemlock. And then down the bottom is a great array of fruiting plants. Yeah, there were fern down there. There was green, thick.

Alders. Yeah, wild rose, elderberry, chokecherry. Which made it feel jungle like i mean we were crawling through some thick stuff down in those thick ass jungles uh the unit i'll just i'll just tell you the unit people are always calling us to ask us about what units we were in doing this and that it was unit 172 mountain view that's right because it's a really hard tag to draw um we've explained this a thousand times but like in hunting you know if you have if you have the a supply of animals that doesn't meet the demand what you need to do is you need to you need to limit how many people are getting

after it and so you do these things called permit draws right so this area we were hunting and they only give out i think they give out you know somewhere 10 you know some years 10 or 14 archery elk tags for a unit that's about 100 and square 100 square miles uh and and you need to accumulate what's called bonus points to draw the permit so you need to have a typically you would need to have applied unsuccessfully for one of these units you know between three and ten years in order to have any reasonable chance of going and drawing the 172 permit and i after living in washington state for three years accumulated enough bonus points to go and draw the unit for 172. And what they call it in Washington is they call it a quality elk unit. Because there's a lot of stuff where you can just go in the western part of the state where success rates are extremely low and hunting conditions are extremely difficult because you're hunting coastal rainforest um you can have a lot of people take a crack at it and since it's so hard very few

of them kill the elk anyway but in the eastern part of the state where it's open country and just to kind of like the elk act differently and it's easier to find them you need to limit access and so they give these these permit draws out and i drew one of these permits to go hunt 172 and i just get like a buddy recommended the unit to me i never stepped foot in the place um hadn't even really been that close to it and so it was like one of those rare conditions circumstances where you go to hunt big game in a place you've never laid eyes on we show up down there and uh ridge tell them the first thing that we saw big old fire big fire everything just covered in smoke a lot of smoke made for really we've showed up at sunset and like popped on this big ridge and looked down in this valley it's really pretty but yeah did not make it easy for glassing some of the days yeah when we showed

up it was actually too smoky to glass the creek the drainage we're hunting is manachi manachi creek and show up and it's just like smoky as all get out hot and sunny what's wrong y'all um and right away i get the idea like like when you do something that you get in your head that it's going to be um you get in your head that's going to be all you kind of think about is like all the good stuff because if you look online the reputation of this particular unit is that it's prohibitively steep very nasty but having tons of elk in it which wound up being very accurate assessment totally yeah but we show up and we drive to a spot and like every camp spot has someone camped in it and then we drive to a spot

and it's like um just trucks and dudes lots of trucks lots of dudes lots of wall tents yeah set up what you don't agree with that you're honest i mean it's all relative to me it wasn't that out of out of the ordinary what we saw go on but it definitely freaked you guys out you guys definitely felt like the pressure i think well i didn't feel it's not i think i was surprised by it because the last three trips that i've done have been in alaska where you just you fly in and you don't see anybody the last three trips you've done those have all been alaska yeah it was the last one of fog neck and uh caribou oh so you just fly in and see the dudes that you're with you don't roll up to your spot and see like a bunch of yeah the next human's

like trailers 20 to 50 miles away yeah i got you so then you're coming from you're coming from that context yeah and then i'm like oh god there's a lot of people in our spot but what's weird is what is like the weird thing is everyone we're talking to we pull up in a place there's how many trucks are parked where we pull in where we slept two trucks there and but both of them come up both of the guys come up at dusk separately and both of them are like dude there's bulls everywhere right yeah and he's like i was in there working them and tommy and doug their camp down the other way they were working them and bill and harvey were working them jay and dan are working them tomorrow it's like wow it's a chaos around here and i got a little panicky and decided to go off somewhere that had no elk.

Ended up not having any elk. Which I think was coincidence, because later we heard there were elk in that zone. Yeah. Well, here's the other part. So we get up on that big hill, and to the left of us is smoke. It's like apocalyptic to the left of us. You ever see that movie Apocalypto yes no gibson movie's a real disappointment real disappointment um what'd you love that movie

no never seen it okay what was that little look thinking we might we might need to find out yeah oh apocalypto yeah okay it's about is it worth finding out for yourself no okay i was drawn to it because it involves hunting and hunters but these are like pre-columbian um people in the people in mesoamerica like indigenous hunters from mesoamerica and the movie actually like ends with your ends with the arrival of um ends with the arrival of europeans so presumably the action takes place in like 1491 let's say it's about a guy you know and they get kidnapped by the bad aztecs or whatever and he needs to get back and it starts just like just like last of the mohicans just like um what was the really bad mountain man movie that uh

leonardo revenant the revenant like it's a group of dudes it starts out with a bunch of dudes chasing a big game animal yeah like if you want to get people sucked into a movie apparently you have a bunch of dudes in a very unrealistic hunting situation chasing a big game animal. Creeping through the woods. And they catch a tape here in the beginning of Apocalypto. And knowing that these people probably would have used small stone flakes and probably very carefully disarticulated their tape here. Instead, he pulls out a giant dagger and stabs it into its guts.

And I'm like, man. Man. Why you got to mess up history like that? They missed that one, huh? It's always like that when people are hunting in movies. What was I talking about? So we're up on that point. Oh, it looked apocalyptic.

Not apocalypto, the movie. It looked apocalyptic, like the end of existence. But to the right, it got tricky. Because some people would hear the sound we heard to the right and think it was apocalyptic. And some people would hear the sound to the right and think that it was utopian, which is a bunch of freaking wolves cutting loose.

That was cool. Yeah, that was cool. Half of Americans, not half, a huge percentage of Americans would hear that and be like, oh my God, it's so awesome. Yeah. But there's a little subset of Americans who would hear that and be like, come on, dude. I don't want to share. Yeah. But there's a little subset of Americans who would hear that and be like,

come on, dude. I don't want to share. Yeah. I don't want to share with those things. They're hunting the same thing we were. And they're just basically saying like, when hunting you're trying to be all quiet, not letting anything know you're around.

These wolves are out there like, we're going to kill you. I'm coming to cut you to pieces. Just howling away. And guys, what they were saying, those wolves came in, the elk shut up. It shuts the elk down. They stopped bugling. Wouldn't you?

Oh, yeah. If I had like a pack of wolves honing in on my locale because I was making a bunch of racket, I'd be like, mm-mm. Be like, easy there. Easy, easy easy let's do quiet let's do this all quiet like yeah which totally makes sense because we saw that bull yeah with the cows and he didn't make a peep yeah we dropped down into that um we dropped down into

this this thing called the west fork west fork trail to spend the night down in there and all we're hearing about is all these bulls screaming their fool heads off. And here's the bull in there with some cows, and he never makes a peep. We watched him in the evening, slept, listened through the night in our sleeping bags, woke up in the morning, never a peep. And there's wolf tracks right down in the bottom of that drainage. People get anxious about those wolves, man. Them wolves. I wonder if that's why those elk are all living on those steep hillsides

because of those wolves being around. I wonder if that's advantageous to them. It's harder for the wolves to get a kill. It's way harder for them to hunt. They don't like hunting on that stuff. Lions like hunting steep stuff, but wolves don't like hunting steep stuff because wolves hunt by... Lions hunt by surprise very short jumps and wolves hunt by just wearing you down and so they

don't like being on that jump but the wolves have only been in there for a couple years right so i think it's probably some of that story's unwritten but we get to the spot it's like all these people running around talking about all these bulls and everything and then um yeah it was like i did the classic like leave elk to find elk right which you didn't like none did you annie at that point i didn't really care because i figured in that unit we would just walk down any trail and it was going to be the same thing yeah because we were here and bugling bulls at the same time we heard the wolves the first night but then after the wolves had been in there they shut up yeah would you mind introduce yourself uh my name's lauren moulton i'm one

of the camera guys one of the cameras this is the first time you've ever been out with us first meat eater hunt yeah which yeah but you've filmed like boatloads of hunts i've had a few years behind the camera on different hunting shows like randy newberg's on your own adventures huntley ridder's outlanders done some random stuff uh other kinds of hunts shots big network tv shows yeah work as a freelancer for a company out of missoula montana do mountain men on history channel uh and then over the years have done a handful of other kinds of shows like that.

Go on. What were you talking about before I interrupted you? Oh, just the fact that we were here in Bowles, Bugle, right there out of camp, and you guys were just mentioning that we left Elk to find Elk, which, you know, is always you never know what to do, right? You think just like Yana said, you think it's going to be like that everywhere you go, and then all of a sudden you're hiking seven miles and not hearing anything.

We did tons of, like, phone scouting. Because if you go to hunt a place you've never been, you got to start calling anyone you can think of. So in the months since I drew the permit, we talked to the local biologist, talked to the local game warden, talked to a not quite local game warden, talked to a not quite local biologist,

talked to two guides, talked to a former tag holder who talked to another former tag holder, talked to the pizza magnate Jimmy Doran who talked to another former tag holder. Oh, the pizza magnate Jimmy Doran who talked to another former tag holder. Oh, I didn't know that. And they all said the same thing.

Like, unbelievably good elk hunting. Which proved to be true. So I thought you just would go and leave those elk and go find a whole bunch of other ones down in these bottomless canyons. Yeah, we just started wandering around out there there were elk down there we had to glass them up and then they you know the other thing i was thinking about earlier is that all these

campsites were full but there were a lot of uh spike and cow tags given out in that unit as well right i think the spike just spike and I think it was over the counter. Yeah. That's the crazy thing too about Washington. And I remember hearing this because my brother lived in Walla Walla for a while. He's working on a salmon project down there and lived there. And you can, like any Tom, Dick, or Harry can go into any of these units with his bow and hunt spike elk over the counter so you get a you get everybody goes like do you have

a bull tag that's everybody that's the first question out of everybody's mouth because there's a lot of dudes scrounging around and they're trying to scrounge up a spike elk an adolescent male a one and a half year old male elk which we maybe could have had a poke at one. We saw two spikes. And one kind of hung out for a little bit. Saw a couple spikes. Yeah, we got some good shots of that guy. Yeah. Had a spike stand there.

Yeah, he stood there at 70 yards for a long time. Go ahead. I got a question. You want to introduce yourself? Sure. Kelsey Johnson, Seth's girlfriend, new hunter. Wildlife artist. Wildlife artist, yes. Specializing in

wildlife and I actually do some gun dog portraits as well. Is that right? Kind of my little specialty, yeah. You specialize in gun dog portraits? Yeah. Real quick, if someone wants to get a picture of their dog drawn up, how should they get a hold of you? I show a lot of my stuff on Instagram. I have my email kind of on there for people that want to reach out to me. Well, let's just go ahead and do it. Just tell them where it is now. Let's go. My Instagram.

It's a K underscore R A E Johns. Spell that part. J O H N S. So that's kind of my little art. That's your art business. My little, yeah. But you also work in the ag industry. Yep.

Midwestern ag sales. Big egg. Big egg. Yeah egg big egg yeah corn and beans big egg and big art yep big bucks down there yep so uh real quick just as long as we're on the subject okay how'd you get in the business of drawing people's dogs oh that's a good story um well i have done a couple just for family members you know people love their pets, right? Yes, they do. I've done a couple for family friends and then got connected with, I actually saw a photo that Andy Tran from Muddy Shodder Media took of a gun dog

from No Limits Kennels out of Heiser, Kansas. They just did a little photography session. I was looking for a challenging photograph to draw. Asked Seth to get me access to that photo and just was starting it for fun. Yeah, and Andy's my good buddy from back in Maryland. Who took the photo? I just was looking for a little challenge. It was a good photo of a German shorthair with a bird in its mouth and um the owner of the kennel found out

about me drawing that while I was drawing it and then he he wanted to buy it so once his client base saw the drawing they kind of I've got a little niche down there in that area the people that have dogs from that kennel ask me to do portraits of their dogs or drawings of their dogs. But how is it different to draw a gun dog than a normal dog? I guess it's really not, but there's action shots. Oh, okay. There's probably more photographs taken of gun dogs.

So they'll have a tote and a bird, tote and a dog or whatever. Yeah, better professional photos of you know people are more into that i guess i feel like more people take pride in their gundog they're just like some i don't get any like wow you know and they tend to be a nostalgic lot oh yeah bird dog hunters are nostalgic and they tend to be esthetes they have like an aesthetic sensibility they're passionate about their animals, that's for sure. It's fun to do. I've gotten a lot of good feedback.

It's kind of a nice little keepsake for them forever. I bet you there's a healthy portion of New Jersey cat ladies that would like to have... I'd rather not tap into that market, but hey. My friend Rye used to paint dog porches for people, and they sure as hell weren't hunting dogs. Really? But yeah, you got to specialize, man.

You got to get known within a certain circle. So it's good that you're known within that circle. I kind of fell into this. I don't know. Who knows? You're the only gun dog painter I know. Really? And you put it all up on Instagram?

Yeah. And it's colored pencil, by the way. What did I keep saying? Paint. Colored pencil. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, Seth showed us

some of your work and it's amazing. It's awesome. Go check it out on Instagram. As long as we got sidetracked by it. Then we have

Chris Gilridge Pounder. Yeah, I'm here. Cameraman. And Seth Morris was with us working for us also for his first time. Yep.

Awesome trip. You liked it? Love it. for us also for his first time. Yep. Awesome trip. You liked it? Love it. You didn't do a bad job. Thanks. Both these guys crushed it, man. You bought three kinds of cookies and they all missed the mark. I tried.

You couldn't make anybody happy, could you? No. He almost won with the Oreos. Who would have known? The double stuff. You always think that would be impossible to go and buy three types of cookies, bring them back

to a group of hungry guys and have them all turn their noses up. You think it would be impossible? I took a bite and threw it out. I couldn't, I could not stomach

the one, the like white macadamia. I'm not white chocolate. I'm blaming Pepper's Farm. White chocolate. That's not Seth's fault. Anyone that walks into a grocery store,

any American goes into a grocery store, any American goes into a grocery store and here's all the cookies in the world laid out in front of them. Okay? Whole aisle in America. Yep.

And he's like, ooh, white chocolate macadamia. I mean, dude, no one in the world does that, man. It's one of my favorite cookies. Get a variety, man.

I liked them. Well, yeah. No, I want to make, man. I liked them. Well, yeah. No, I want to make and do. I made do. You made do. Well, then you mentioned about how you would love a sleeve of Oreos. Oh, you're like, oh, I could pound a sleeve of Oreos right now. Yeah.

And you went, I got double stuffers. But I told you, too, that I'm joking because I like double stuffers. Oh, okay. Well, that's good. Double stuff. Giannis had something to say about that. It was the rest of us that were scraping the filling out. Although I did eat probably close to a whole row

over the course of like a day. Yeah, Yanni's paranoid about sugar. Interesting about the double stuff is it's only one F on the stuff. It's not F. It's not F. Double stuff with one F. Yeah. The comedian Mitch Hedberg used to talk about how he had a girlfriend, Lynn,

who spelled it with one N. And then later he had another girlfriend named Lynn who spelled it with two Ns. But she could always tell if he said the wrong Lynn because he wouldn't go, mm, as long as long. And so he'd get in trouble. He'd get in trouble for it. What was the actual first moment when we... Let me ask you this.

So we go down and go, this is a question for Giannis, because Giannis is actually the one, I'm the one hunting, but I'm not the one hunting. I'm the trigger man. Because Giannis is the one who's calling, which is actually the one. I'm the one hunting, but I'm not the one hunting. I'm the trigger man because Giannis is the one who's calling, which is the hard part. Like any dipshit can shoot something, but not anybody can call one in.

That's the hard part. Absolutely. Absolutely. There are other hard parts for this hunt. Yeah, the hiking around is hard. Yeah. Figuring out where they are. If you're good at calling, but you're not in a zone with elk, that doesn't do you much good.

Yeah, there's components to it, right? There's a lot of components to it. There's being like, in this particular spot, there's sort of finding them, which anybody with a set of ears and a pair of binoculars is going to like find within yeah and two in 48 hours of poking around you would know where some you will find elk but you will not be happy about where you found them because in this unit everything is below you because the way the land access works it it's like, imagine this. Basically, you're hunting the entirety of a drainage, right?

So you have, the unit is kind of drawn around a drainage where you have the whole ridge line that forms the head of all the tributaries and the only access points are up high. Even the lower access points aren't really lower because you still have the canyon to drop down into. So anytime you look at it out from a from a road you're looking down to the point where i think some people

find that it just is impractical that you would pursue them yeah one to two thousand feet below you in elevation gain and drop because you have to then move several hundred pounds of shit back up out of you have to then pack several hundred pounds worth of stuff well that's if you're successful but even just dragging your own butt up out of that hill after an unsuccessful hunt i think gets real old to a lot of people but it's front of mind i think it should be front of mind like one just going down there and coming back out is hard. It's very hard country to travel in. But I think for everyone who's hunting elk, you also have this idea

that you got to carry this thing back up. And so you're like, man, I'm already miserable. What would I possibly do in a situation where, and it might be that you just just can't hunt it like by yourself in that area this most of those elk are just simply out of your reach if you're hunting by yourself some places and like depending on where they're at it's almost irresponsible to try to take one by yourself yeah there is a packer that works that unit meet guy with mules you know that said he can get anywhere in that unit.

Is that what he said? Yeah. Yeah, I talked to him later. But even then, when we called him, he wouldn't have been able to help us pack until the next day. So we would have to hang the meat in the shade, which may or may not have kept it cool enough.

Is that always his story? Or sometimes can he react faster? If he's in the unit. There's only 14 people hunting. How many people are actually going to call him? This is a mule packer who runs a little side business just packing. Yeah, and I got his name through the outfitter that I chatted with.

What's cool is the outfitter too. We should name the outfitter that i chatted with what's cool is the outfitter too we should talk about how we should name the outfitter because he was cool enough to give us a ton of intel man yeah it was bo olson of uh wilderness adventures he gave us very accurate wilderness expeditions sorry yeah he didn't have any clients who were hunting that unit that year and gave us very accurate information about the unit yeah because he can do it because like he knows you're not going to be back it's too hard to draw the tag and he guides sheep hunters in there too yeah we saw a nice ram i was surprised we didn't see more sheep a lot of beds yeah a lot of droppings a lot of beds a lot of tracks i was thinking we'd run into more but we were looking for them that's true but we were looking a lot of tracks. I was thinking we'd run into more. But we were really looking for them. That's true.

But we were looking a lot. Yeah, but not looking looking. True. We were looking for big tan sides. Yeah, when you're looking for elk, it's like a low-touch look. Yeah. It's not like looking for mule deer. That's true.

Or coos deer, like, you know, glassing for bighorns. You actually got to look, look. It's kind of like you can just kind of go like, oh, pretty much tell you there's not an elk on that hillside. Yeah. In that there's not like some 600-pound buckskin-colored thing standing there, you know, going, what? But, yeah, I feel like if you had spent more time looking,

you might have found more. But then we had a lot of eyeballs out there with a lot of binoculars. Saw one ram, but a big, nice, beautiful ram a lot of binoculars. Saw one ram. But a big, nice, beautiful ram. It was a beautiful ram. Yeah. It was a big one. Now, Giannis, from a caller's perspective, from an elk caller's perspective, why were you not interested in, why could I not excite you in the idea of going

and trying to work that bull who wasn't bugling? Because you're in it for the bugle. Yeah. Why do you have a Canadian shirt on? It's a Stone Glacier t-shirt that has the Canadian

maple leaf on it. I meant to ask him why they made it. Maybe you know the story behind it. A lot of Canadian outfitters and sheep hunters that are using their packs. The guy that wrote in about the full stadium? Canadian. I don't know.

I've got nothing against Canada. I don't have anything against those fellas either. I've got a lot of friends up there. I just thought of you as being a little more American than that. That's cool. You're doing diplomacy right now. So there's a bull. He don't want to bugle, and I can't get you interested in trying to work him.

Trying to go around and work him. Right. So a couple things that I didn't really like about it. There was a road like 200 yards above him. Which made it intriguing. Yeah, because you could easily get within 200 yards above him. No, what made it intriguing to me was that he was a hiding in plain sight he was a bull who was hiding in plain sight which made me interested in him yeah because if you drove by on the road it was so steep below

the road that you couldn't see him but dude all day long hunters pass within 150 yards because i shot a waypoint where i thought he was and then shot a waypoint and then measured up to the road he's 150 yards and not 45 minutes would go by when you know just watching hunters go back and forth back and forth and here's that bull just living out his deal and they could they could have because it was so steep you could have thrown a rock off the road bed and hit that bull but you'd have to have one of the 14 tags to begin with just something about that bull i liked i liked everything about his little style and you had to hike down into that drainage and up the other side to glass them up yeah he just had well because we glassed him up. Yeah, he just had the perfect... Well, because we glassed him up off the trail the first day.

Remember? Lake Ridge Trail. Anyways, the hillside he was on was steep as could be. Did you ever... Real quick. Did I ever send you that stuff of that buck in Pennsylvania that was wearing a radio collar and what that

buck would do when hunting season came? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hide in the ditch? No, he would hide on the side of the highway. Yeah, in the ditch. This buck roamed all over hell all the time. Gun season would open

and he'd go set up shop about 50 yards off a highway. Yep. And not a bunch. I've heard of that. Right underneath a deer jumping sign hiding in plain sight and then uh rick french told us about a place there's like a saddle and he was talking about his whole life they've been shooting elk in this area

and there's a spot where they watch these elk go in bed and they watch and they go in bed on a four-wheeler trail and lay 75 yards from a quad runner trail and just sit and watch quads drive by elk hunters i believe it hiding in plain sight i bet that happens a lot hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, 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, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. I was talking to my buddy Jimmy Miller this morning,

who's coming up to visit me next week, and he was saying he's been out like the last two or three weekends hunting with his bow in Colorado, and every single animal he's seen, I think he's seen like two or three bull elk, half dozen cows, a couple bears, some moose. Everything's been off or near the road. As soon as he goes into the woods, he's seen zero. They're learning.

More and more dudes are willing to go farther to hunt. All the hardcore dudes that are actually going to kill something are in the woods. And then the guys that are just driving by on four-wheelers, you ain't got to worry about them, I guess. Yeah, they got it figured out. If I go deep in the woods, sons of bitches are going to kill me. Yeah. I'd rather be out here with these guys playing lightweight ball. But you know what?

This whole idea of roads and then being away from the road, being deep in the woods, that's only a thing that we've made up in our own heads. The deer and elk might not look at it that way. Yes. I think they look at that there's different types of disturbance and i think that the sound of all day long quad runners good rendition that's good quad going by i think they probably don't even like i'm sure it registers them they don't associate it with trouble oh i've seen them

associate it that bull doesn't that bull no so tell me why you didn't want to work them so he's on like a really steep hillside so i figured like getting into because it's not like you're gonna stand on the road and start calling right because i doubt that bull is gonna be like oh yeah there's probably a cow on the road i'll go and see what she's up to you think the bull's gonna be like no no no no i'm not falling for that super steep so steep. So just like trying to do a setup, setting up on a super steep hillside, it's just like you can't find a place to stand. You might start descending that hill and slide down into him.

It was that kind of hillside. Hey, watch out. The other thing was he had two cows. And calling bulls away from cows can be a tough deal. And we knew that there weren't a lot of cows in this unit. We talked to some hunters that thought they had seen where there's bulls running, like groups of bulls hanging out and there's no cows.

That was a beautiful thing. Just like... Just every elk hunter's dream. Yeah, it's like you get to where you see an elk and the assumption was that it was a bull. You'd be like, oh my god, a cow! If you saw one. I have a question.

So like for the new hunter's perspective, is this? Is that you? Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Not a lot of elk experience. Is this like peak rut? This peak rut.

Definitely. In the thick of it. In the thick of it. Okay. Good to know for the story. They are like very eager about going toward the sound of cow elk. Okay. Yep.

It's too steep for you. Too steep. He's got a cow. He's not bugling, watching him. He just was sitting there feeding with two cows. You familiar with the word milquetoast? Yeah. He was that.

I don't know the definition. Yeah, what's milk toast? Well, people, see, here's the deal, man. It's spelled different than milk toast. Milk toast is like- Is it spelled like Q-U-E? I believe it's spelled like M-I-L-Q-U-E. Means lame, indifferent.

Timid or submissive. Yeah, it's a very milk toast bowl. What's the spelling, Yanni? Like M-I-L-Q-U-E, toast. But my whole life, I thought it was milk toast. Like, imagine a bland ass meal. And I dump a bunch of milk on it. We either take toast and soak it in milk, right?

You're like, dude. I don't want that. Yeah. My father, his term for milk toast was a term because he's from Italian ancestry, was raised by Sicilian immigrants. He was raised by his grandfather. My father had several things that he would use, terms he would use for people he didn't like, and they described different types of people.

One of them was a horse's ass. That's like a very particular type of person he didn't like. Another was a putz, which sounds Yiddish. And that was like another type of person he didn't like, but definitely not a horse's ass. The guy's a putz. Another term for a person he didn't like. Just being like lacking a little coordination for putz?

Is that what that was? It's like a grumpier oldier old man yeah a horse's ass would be like a blowhard okay a putz would be someone who messes everything up like a like a person just can't incompetence yeah then there's a term a mingula morta which i've talked to people who speak italian and basically he was saying a person who has non-functioning sexual organs dead more to being dead mingula being a and i'm not saying the word right but me you know he's basically i get it yeah yeah so the bull was like a mula Morta. Bull. Well, that or he's just being super, super slick. Like he had his two cows.

He had his little hidey spot. He's pretty happy. He's got everything going for him. And he's staying quiet because they're wolves, right? Yeah, because they're wolves. Yeah. Do you ever find that there's a bull that gets cows and shuts up? Oh, yeah.

Because he's like, why in the world would I be advertising my situation? He still has to bugle to the cow. There's the bugle between the cow and him that goes on, not just between him and another bull. Yeah. I think I read once that when she says no, he has to bugle as like a sign of like some sort of respect type deal. Oh, come on. Come on.

That's in human terms. Okay. But as in like when it's like – He's saying – When he bugles, he's saying, no problem, baby. Yeah. Like it's cool. I understand. We'll try again 10 minutes or tomorrow.

Maybe five. But I've seen it happen a lot. There's like the herding or whatever you want to call it that he's doing. Tending. Tending, pushing him around. And then it's sort of like it gets close, it doesn't happen, and they sort of stop. He always bugles.

But I've seen him bugle so softly that I could see him bugling, but I couldn't hear it at 200 yards. Really? I could see him go into the whole posture, stick his neck out, put his head up, see the steam come out of his mouth

right after he chased the cow and i couldn't hear him i think that was why i think he was like yep and he had a bunch of cows this one i saw do this he's just staying chill about it yeah so you so you couldn't you couldn't work that bull maybe maybe not i just didn't feel like it was a high high odds you know it wasn't worth it from what it was going to take us where we were and was going to take us to a bore out of this drainage that we were in to go back up and out and put it, you know,

put a half day effort just in getting to position. I just didn't feel like it was high enough odds that warranted that effort that we should just keep hiking down the trail and go into some country we hadn't been into and strike up another one. Yeah. Gotcha. hiking down the trail and go into some country we hadn't been into and strike up another one yeah got you um man there's so much to explain down in there around like how like what our thought processes were because there's too many there's like too many options at a point in time when you're down in that area. Right at that point in time.

Yeah, just wandering around, and you get frustrated quick, and then you get that wolf stuff stuck in your head. No, because we were thinking we're in one of the best units in the state, and all of a sudden it's been 12 hours, haven't heard a bugle 24 hours haven't heard a bugle well when we were in that area we didn't know about the wolf thing yet right no oh we'd heard him ripping though yeah we'd heard him ripping but we didn't know that they saw their tracks didn't that that we didn't get the report later yeah that he had been in there had heard some elk and shut him down, because another hunter later was saying

that, man, they were going good in there. And then when the wolves came through, they shut up. And the guide that Giannis talked to also said that the year before things were ripping, meaning bulls were bugling. Pack of wolves came through, raising hell.

And then it shut down for three or four days. Everybody just gets quiet. Seth saw a mountain lion. I did. Sitting. Sitting on its ass. Yep.

Looking over a little mule deer spot. Yep. That was cool. Yeah, they're cool to see. You don't see that too often. No. And I don't view them as competition as much no you really should yeah you really should oh yeah you think elk will shut up from them i don't know but they kill a lot more elk than wolves do not per one but i mean like

there's just there's just so much more widely distributed i mean they're everywhere right yep like anywhere that has elk has a mountain lion well not almost not the eastern states the western states every elk has is going to run into a mountain lion yep you know um you when i was getting frustrated by the lack of beagles and you yannis felt felt that you felt that that it was just we weren't in the rut zone yeah we were just in the wrong spot it wasn't that they weren't doing it it's just

we weren't in the place that they were doing it and we slowly just made a big long loop and ended up you know on the other side of the giant drainage that you described earlier. Back to where Dave, Tom, Bill, Doug, Will, George were all working an infinite quantity of bulls out of a bull in a place where the outfitter we talked to said that you'd just, that you'd find a bull in every canyon. Where he actually recommended that we

spend our whole week. Was in there. Yeah. And then almost kind of accidentally called in a bull. Yeah. I was calling a little bit just to do some locating to kind of take a census of what was out there.

And we had bad wind for this scenario the wind was dropping down the hill from the morning thermals the air was cool so it's dropping down the hill and i looked down below me and a couple hundred yards away here comes a satellite six point and you always know you're in a good unit when like a like a nice six is a satellite and he's coming in silent and the satellite bull being a bull it's like not a dominant figure in the herd he's just not big enough how do you know he wasn't the man because later there was a bull just cranking in that same zone i don't know i just i just i just feel like because he was coming in

coming in quiet coming in quiet i see what you're like because he was coming in quiet. Coming in quiet and timid. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. He was a sneaky Pete. He's like a nice six-point bull that I'd shoot any day. This unit is kind of, we now know, is known for bulls that are like seven-by-sevens and seven-by- eights and crazy bulls yeah i bet you we saw three or five seven by sevens yep so this bull comes just creeping in

and then crept out seth saw him creep away yep just caught caught wind yeah definitely caught wind. So they come in to investigate, and then they quietly, without announcing their presence, go away. They say to themselves, there's five dudes there. I'm leaving. Smells like five dudes. Saw three.

Smells like five. We're doing zero scent control. We're just doing wind. Yeah yeah there's no point of that what would your control be like what would you even do a wide variety of things there's masking scents okay there's like odors that you could put on yourself to i'm not saying these things work. I'm saying these are things that exist. There are, there's a line of clothing. Yeah. It's been kind of scientifically discredited, but some people remain firm believers.

And a line of clothing that has a filtration, carbon filtration system built into it that sort of scrubs your odor emanating from your body. I think the problem with that is most of the odor emanating from your body is being exhaled. So they make a face mask to help filter

your exhale. Has that really been proven? That most of the odor is actually just coming from your breath? I shouldn't say most, but just... You can wear clothes, but you're still breathing out. Yeah, I shouldn't say most, but a lot of odor. You're exhaling a lot of odor. I remember there was a hunter's scent concealment gum

that came around. My dad used to hunt with a guy that would, during hunting season, eat a lot of carrots. He tried to be food i remember hearing the old news one time say that all he drank was apple juice so that way when he would pee during hunting season just smell like apples um yeah but then you got like doug buckman durin yeah buckman His urine draws in big bucks. There's also, I think that Cabela's made for Bill Winkie a full Gore-Tex suit that had rubber gaskets, ankles, wrists, and neck, and then maybe even a hood. That sounds like a good thing to hike up and down. Dude, I was going to say, why not just wear a trash bag and go stomp around?

Pretty much. Yeah, so it wouldn't work for what we did. For whitetail hunting, you just have it like just the pants on, top hanging down. You hike into your stand slowly. Set up. Get in there, put the top on, seal it all off. Some people out west that I know do this, and they don't think that it completely breaks down, you know, keeps you scent free, but they look at it as in buying you time before an animal might spook from scent

and buying you distance that you can be from an animal before they scent you. But they will have a plastic tote that has clothes that they probably did some special sort of washing to to eliminate all possible scent, no perfumes and dyes and whatnot in there. Probably has pine boughs in there and some dirt and leaves and whatnot.

But they have a separate Tupperware for every day of the hunt, and it includes everything from underwear, shoes, socks, top, bottoms, base layers, everything. Randy Ulmer, your belt. Yeah. Wow. Every day. You swap out every day every day you just yeah and you do the best

you can by taking some sort some version of a shower and then you put on those fresh clothes so you're not walking around in clothes like because this it was a hot hunt this week and we were we were going through i felt like a a sweat cycle twice a day yeah yeah now uh okay archery hunting wh Whitetails. Like what my dad did and what we did growing up is you kept your hunting clothes outside, hanging up in the breeze. Before you went out hunting, you would shower.

We wouldn't use special soap. They make a lot of soaps with no perfumes. There's nothing I get more nostalgic about. Sorry to interrupt. But is that green, is it ScentAway soap? Yeah. Like that lines all surfaces in Doug Dern's bathroom. But I feel like 90% of the Whitetail Woods, like Haunton Camps,

it's like there's like 10 of those bottles in various levels of fullness in the shower, right? It's like that green liquid. It's meant for your hair, for everything various levels of fullness in the shower. It's like that green liquid. It's meant for your hair, for everything. Steve Kendrath's shower. Yeah. Steve Kendrath's shower is full of that stuff. When I get in a shower and see that stuff, it's just a flood of memories.

Yeah, because that's what we did. Same exact thing. Products. Yeah. Green gel soap. So you would keep your clothes hanging up in the breeze, take a shower preferably with a non-perfumed soap, Yeah, green gel soap. So you would keep your clothes hanging up in the breeze, take a shower preferably with a non-perfumed soap, wear rubber boots that you clean.

You don't go and buy gas with these boots on, right? You put them on when you're ready to walk to your stand. You don't go to the gas station and get unnatural. You don't wear them in your car. You don't even drive to your hunting spot in these clothes you get to your hunting spot you strip down you put your clothes on that you've been storing in a separate container and you walk very slowly so as to not break a sweat get in your tree stand put on your outer layers layers, and the hope being, of course, you're not going to eliminate your scent, but to buy you a few minutes.

When I used to trap fox, which are difficult to catch, I would have totes that I'd fill with straw, and I would keep my clothes and boots and all my other equipment in totes filled with straw. And then would use rubber gloves that you would wash fastidiously all the time. And then only wear those boots on natural ground in order to try to eliminate some of the scent you were leaving behind when you're trying to catch fox. It's a lot of work. But here's what we could have done like here's the basic thing you do you at least bring some soap and some body powder and every time you hit a creek you try to scrub up a little bit yeah and a lot of guys it's not too much either and we weren't

doing this because we were just working the wind and we were in a place that had like steep slopes and a lot of thermals so it's like if you're willing to work thermals and we did work them very successfully um if you're willing to like do that you can get away with this but if you're in an area that's like just famously for swirled winds and stuff and i think you had to do it and you were really just going to make the sacrifice i can at least have your sort of daytime hill climbing clothes and you might keep in your backpack, in a bag in your backpack, your actual stock

and clothes. As part of your deal, when you're getting ready for the evening hunt or getting ready for the morning hunt, you wash up, put some body powder on. People just take a baking soda, put it in a spray bottle, put some water in some baking soda,

scrub up, put your clean version of clothes on and try to go about your business. But we just played wind. The question came up while we were there if the smoke was going to have any effect on scent too. Because we were in a smoky area. It was smoky enough where it was annoying.

And you got black gunk coming out of your nose. You wonder if it affects the elks. It has to help. It cannot hurt. There's no way it hurts. Right. Does it cover your scent? It has to there's no way that they're going

to smell you better amid all the confusion of a bunch of smoke in the air it's not going to like enhance their ability to detect smell and then the other question was was that activity in that area moving the elk out of wherever the controlled burns were and closer to where we were. I don't know about closer, but I would say that it displaced and probably concentrated elk into areas of low activity. And I think the fact that all those bugles tend to be coming from the bottoms of those canyons is not accidental. I think that the gradual activity of humans being around,

pressuring them, pressuring them, has to have the effect of pushing them into places where they're just not getting messed with as much. If you left it to their own device, they'd probably be higher up on the slopes. Think about that. Hard to say. More water in the bottom.

That's true um so we keep on hunting we eventually and this is kind of how stuff goes have all kinds of adventures see a black bear see a bighorn see some mule deer have a bunch of adventures and there's a there's a spot there's a place we want to go hike we want to like access a area of our unit where the only access point is sort of blocked by a big very elaborate wall tent setup like these guys are practicing like siege warfare man they got like a camp i mean these guys like got splitting malls and stuff they're splitting firewood i mean they're camped out archery target

backstop trailers generators pots and pans hanging everywhere they did two 55 gallon drums i don't know what was in them. Drinking water? I have no clue. Barrels of presumably water and maybe fuel? I have no clue. Or maybe just food storage for bears. Could be. Camping. I want to say it's an extraordinary car. Dude, on a 1 to 10, on a 1 to 10, that's a 9 that's nine or ten yeah they were dialed they had the wall

tent and then like a one of those like easy up canopies as like a porch yeah they're running a porch you start running a porch a tarp over the whole thing big setup they'd been there 16 days 17 17 days yeah um and i'm uncomfortable with uh going and parking right next to their camp to hike in because because this comes from being that we're filming i'm really i try to be sensitive of like people go into the woods or go into the mountains to have peace and quiet and and enjoy a level of anonymity presumably and so i'm always a little bit leery about like rolling up on people with five guys carrying cameras and just you know i'll try to be sensitive to that because i I wouldn't really love that a whole bunch if that happened to me. So I want to park elsewhere and then kind of like slip through their camp,

park elsewhere and slip through their camp real quiet and go down below and start hunting right below their camp. But we have in the show, but just the minute they're rolling in with a bull. Like they're just like,. We arrived at their camp and honestly, the second that a truck pulls in with a dead bull's skull and meat in the back of the truck.

And this is the funny thing about a specialty unit like this too. Like a hard to draw unit. Because no one has any ownership. No one has any sense of ownership over like their spot you're not coming back or like they said it'll be six years and you'll have a whole new crop of elk that'll be working so he so it's not like a most places where no one's gonna tell you anything you know

like hey where'd you get that limit of mallards right they don't just say anything to you about like i know now not even to ask i'll be like hey what mountain range were you in or what like river were you hunting but but this guy he had his it took him six points took so he had six unsuccessful application years drew the unit and he just spills the beans because who cares? Someone told him about it. And it's this little corner of the unit where, this little corner of the unit where you're kind of on national forest land, but boxed up against some private stuff.

And he describes an area where there's seven or eight bulls um that they were like butchering a bull and there's more bulls bugling 100 yards away mayhem and craziness yeah sounded good and we go down into this area, and it was like, it was sort of the elk hunting. It was the elk hunting that you always dream that you would experience, but somehow never get to experience. But there it was. Yeah, we're going to skip forward to there. We've been on it a long time, and I want to spend time on.

Yeah. No, I understand. I just want to make sure that you're already jumping ahead to that. Yeah, because I want to spend particularly time on the one. We'll talk about the one we got. But the setup where you called in a scattering of bulls into a location. We go down in this area, and there's not a lot going on, but some bulls ripping.

Bugle in here and there. It started in the slow morning. Late daylight, we heard almost nothing. We heard a couple of distant bugles. We kind of get to the edge of the private property. It sounds like there's one on the private. There may be a different bull, you know, bugles, but it's not like, it's not a big rut ball

like we were expecting, like we'd been told about. Yeah. But eventually we get where like, oh, there's a few bulls going like later in the morning and it's mixed. It's like half open grassland and half dense timber very they had pretty steep area and we're kind of like halfway between the the top land like halfway between the ridge tops and halfway between the bottoms and you can hear bulls enough where you couldn't even really tell who was what, right? Just was like a bunch of bulls going off.

And you start calling. Walk through how that went, what you were doing. Well, first we got to a spot that seemed like a good spot for a setup. And what I usually look for most importantly is I like to have a break in the terrain that I can hide behind that if the bull wants to come and see what's making the noise, he's going to have to come and look over that break in the terrain, whether that's like a thick strip of vegetation he's got to come look through or most oftentimes in the mountains it's going to be some sort of a ridge or like a horizon that you could be 200 yards away from it you could be 20

yards away from it but if you want to see over it you're going to have to come right to the edge yeah picture the worst case scenario would be that you're in a room and there's a loud noise of a cow and a bull comes into the room and he's like very quickly able to say that there is definitely not a cow in this room that would be a bad situation yeah the best situation is he'd be like where is she hiding there's so many places she could be yeah or yeah you're forcing him to come to the doorway yeah to be able to look into that room he needs to come in and walk around the room yeah no just stick his head through the door. At that point, if we've done everything right,

you ought to be able to get a shot as long as he's not facing some wonky direction. But if he comes in there to look inside the room and go, what's going on in here? Then that should be the point of the shot. Yeah, and this was a knife edge. If he's in the hallway and he's not going to come to the doorway, you're probably not getting a shot. Yeah, and this is a knife edge ridge.

Yeah, it's like we're walking down a ridge. It's kind of steep, but it drops off and gets steeper to the left and to the right, the hill just sort of wraps around. And he's bugling in this timber to our right that's wrapping around. And yeah, so you pick a tree to set up in front of with Chris, just a, I don't know, Western hemlock or a Doug fir, maybe, probably one or two.

But I picked a bad spot. Yeah. In hindsight. Good spot for me, man. I got all the footage. Yeah, but reinforce bad spot in two ways. But I won't explain why it was a bad spot until we get to the part where the bulls started coming okay so uh yeah i just um i'm trying to think when i actually started out on the ridge because like until i feel like there's

no reason for me to actually start hiding in that bedroom in air quotes until i know he's coming until then i might as well stay kind of where i can see a lot and sort of be digesting the situation and um because i might see him 100 yards away i might see his antlers moving through the timber and then i can adjust if i don't hear him down there or something yeah so i just kind of hide in plain sight just kind of sitting around calling and just seeing if we can get them worked up enough to at least move in our direction the antlers on elk that's a point i want to bring up real quick the antlers on elk are extremely useful for hunting elk calling elk because you're always going to see that bull not always there's a good chance you're

going to see that bull before he sees you. By seeing his antlers. Yeah, because he's got these things sticking two, three feet. So when he's rolling up over a hill, he can't see what's up ahead. But you're like, oh, that happens time and again. Where you get to glimpse him before he even has a chance to glimpse you and then take the necessary action. Yeah. get to glimpse him before he even has a chance to glimpse you and then take it take the necessary action yeah yeah so i just started with uh some light cow calling which would be just a couple muse here and there and uh he seemed pretty responsive you know bugling pretty good bugling

right on top of it yeah and then uh it doesn't really mean that much like you're not getting all excited at that point well Well. I'm not. I'll tell you what makes me excited is what happens next. It's better than him not bugling. Yeah. No, no, no, no. You're right. But as we saw a night or two before this, you can sit there and make bulls bugle for two hours. Right.

Yeah. And you can be trying to read into what they're doing, but after a time, you'll be like, that thing will not budge. Mm-hmm. So just getting them to bugle doesn't mean much. No. What means something is all of a sudden it's quiet

and he rips again, and he has very definitely moved way in your direction. Then your heart rate goes. Yeah. Then your heart's in the back of your throat. So at that point, I fell off that ridge to the left, metaphorically, and got down there where I was in the bedroom. He was going to come out onto that spine and look down that hill

to see the cow that he thought was down there. And so, yeah, I continue to call. And usually at some point, like if I don't feel like the cow calls are doing enough, I'll start to add in like, oh, another bull is showing up to be like, hey, dude, if you want in on this party, you better get over here because someone else just showed up. And so I'll do a couple of things to imitate that. One, you can bugle, sound like a bull bugling and sort of challenge the other bull. And then you can make a lot of loud noises like a bull is tending a cow,

which if you've ever seen in the wild, they chase them. And so they get run through bushes, and they're cracking sticks. They're rolling rocks, especially on steep hillsides. And so I'll start doing that to the point of working up a sweat a little bit. Yanni takes off his jacket, puts on gloves, grabs a big old log, and starts beating the snot out of the woods. Yeah. Hurdling rocks, kicking, jumping, banging.

The beating the snot out of the woods is more like you're raking a tree. That's kind of what you're going after. When you start stomping and running and jumping through stuff, you're sort of like acting like two elk, which is, you know, you're talking about now over a half a ton worth of animal probably running through the woods i'm only 200 pounds it's hard to replicate that right you have to do a lot more so a lot of times i'll pick up like a 10 or 20 foot log that then touches more bush as i'm moving through the

woods and i definitely get hurt doing it but i think it's effective man most people here some of the people here where I think we're so blown away by the situation you it's probably hard to even like grasp of what all is going on but like Seth and you can attest to that and probably Lauren too that when I would do that the very first time the bull would go from like a pretty excited bugle to like his insides turning inside out or however you want to put that. Like just like almost going from like a bugle whistle into more of like a blood curling. Yeah.

He's going. Yeah. I can't take that. Talk about your epiphany. You're out calling epiphany. When people tell you to go in the woods and call three times for the whole day. Yeah, when I learned or was taught about calling elk, it was all diaphragms. There was a couple of biting bulls probably on the market back then and probably some external reads too.

I just hadn't really gotten into it yet, but it was diaphragms. And everybody taught us like very soft, simple cow, what I would call a couch or just a, and go into a meadow in an hour before dark with the wind, right? Wait for the thermals and make two or three of those chirps between the time you get there until you're about to leave. And that was it.

Cause that's just how you called elk. Because anything else was too much. Too much. You're just going to run them out of the woods. And it took me years. And, of course, reading books and watching Primo's The Truth About Bulls videos and stuff and being like, you know what?

I'm going to try some other stuff. And then I got good enough with a diaphragm where I could go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then all of a sudden a five-point comes trotting over the hill, and you go, oh, well, that kind of worked. But it took three or four years to talk myself into trying it. To have the boldness. It makes me uncomfortable super fun to watch and film yannis going off like he's an elk

in the woods he had such enthusiasm throwing logs over rolling rocks down the hills that i wanted to join and i'm holding the camera trying to keep the camera steady but i'm like i can probably help him out here i want to kick a rock I'll show you how to throw rocks. Okay, here's a way of expressing this. Yanni makes so much noise that at one point, I'm jumping ahead. At one point, a bull comes in between us and spooks and runs off down the hill. And it caught my attention like, whoa, oh, that must be Giannis.

I thought the same thing when that happened. I heard that, and I was like, oh, Giannis is back. And then I was like, hey, what about the bull that was standing between us? Because we were so fixated on what was going down below us. I was like, wow, that really sounds like a damn elk running off right there. Nailed it.

He's got it down now. Yeah, so eventually, you know, so there was a six-point bull. Yeah, eventually the idea that there's multiple bulls. Yeah. And two are getting closer. Yeah, but I think that the young five-point is what broke the six-point. A satellite bull came in quiet. He didn't come in quiet.

He didn't? Not true. Oh, you saw him bugle. I watched him bugle multiple times. Well, there you go. But I want to talk about where I messed up. Okay. Around this ridge.

I'm calling it a knife edge ridge, but it's like a half bevel. It's a one-sided bevel knife where it breaks away very steep and rocky. If you're looking downhill, looker's left breaks away very steep and rocky and to the right is a gradual timbered roll. And the bulls are, the main bull we're calling to who's bugling the most is off to the right. I set up where I'm basically out in front of a tree,

right on the knife edge ridge, thinking that he's going to stick to his course and come up and I might get a broadsider on him. I should have anticipated. I should have not been on that knife edge ridge because what wound up happening twice is bulls came up and hit that and it's the perfect place to travel. It's just this nice clear. They came up the ridge from the bottom.

Beautiful, clear descending ridge. Even later, damn bull cow, bull cattle came up the same ridge. It's just like a natural travel corridor. And I didn't anticipate that stupidly. I didn't anticipate that, you know what? I bet this thing is going to hit this ridge and take this ridge up so that I'm sitting on the ridge looking down, expecting to get a shot off to my right. And all of a sudden, without any announcement,

besides some early bugling, here he comes, dead. He's not stopping face to face and there's one dead tree in front of me that was six seven yards close very close and the second his head gets behind that dead tree i draw my bow and i'm like what am i even gonna do unless he comes out broadside he of course sees me draw my bow through the trees and we just have a stare down through a tree that was intense man until i couldn't hold my bow back anymore but a lot of times in that situation man it could have so easily gone the other way where he sees you but he still takes two or three steps it comes out from the tree and instead of turning his whole body he only turns his head and looks at you and he goes oh

what was that and all of a sudden he's just presenting you with like a perfect opportunity listen this is all hindsight because even when i had my bow back i was i was expecting that he'll step out from behind the tree and he'll be turned broadside thinking I might be leaving, but looking at me, but he was so close it wouldn't have mattered. But that's not what he did. He spun. But he spins, and often here's another bull coming up the same exact trail. So that was the five-point that did that first, and then the six-point came in behind him.

And then there's a six-point stand there, and his six- point was much warier never came into never came into range the five point is so convinced that there's a cow he's like yes there's a man with a bow here too let me uh try a couple different angles of approach and he kept getting lucky and lucky at one point him and the six are both standing perfect wide open broadside at 67 yards which i'm not gonna which is not a poke i'm gonna attempt my bow um on a living breathing creature and then they're

both standing there staring the six leaves and he's just gone he goes off and starts bugling 100 yards away again but he's done coming in and meanwhile this five point is just like probing trying to find a path in and then unborn to me eventually finds a path in and comes in between me and janice yeah i mean he's basically just on that knife ridge just like i don't know 10 or 15 yards behind you 10 yards from me 15 or 20 yards from lauren and he sits there and half acidly feeds and just lifts up his head looks looks looks feeds a little bit lifts his head up looks looks looks looks i had no idea he was standing there and the wind must have been blowing to him and that's what's crazy is that even though like he's getting whiffs of man guarantee at this point and he still stood there for it seemed like a minute yeah it seemed like a minute i mean footage is full frame bull standing

there kind of wondering what's going on and we're so focused on what's going on below us because there's still bulls ripping and wandering around below us that I had no idea that he was just standing there. Even when he ran off, I was like, oh, yeah, this is making an elk running noise. I think one of you guys figured it out and spun around that he was standing there. I don't know. There was some movement down below.

No, I never knew till i was told we have a little powwow and talk about what all's going on um like holy cow i can't believe that happened so close and all of a sudden there's another bull coming and one or a new bull comes in gets wind takes takes off. The same bull's messing around. Meanwhile, down below us, there's all these other bulls still going off. And then it starts getting hot, and they settle into a dark north-facing slope. And it winds up that just for an hour plus probably, you just hear two bulls calling.

We're watching other damn bulls winding around, but two bulls just calling and calling and calling from this north-facing slope. And north-facing is significant because it's not as sunny, and so you have a lot of timber and thick understory, and they can go in there and get in the shade and hang out for the day, but they're just calling and calling and calling and calling.

And by now, the day's heated up, so now you have the uphill thermals. And we make a pretty roundabout plan to go in a roundabout fashion and circle around and get upwind of this bowl, this little timbered bowl where these elk are hanging out. 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.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. And get in close enough to shake hands. Almost. I thought we'd be within 300, but I think we ended up being within 100. and get in close enough to shake hands. Almost. I thought we'd be within 300, but I think we ended up being within 100 when we set up. Yeah, he was close. No, I think we were about 170 yards.

170. Where does that number come from? My GPS unit when we trailed him. I think he came off that same... My feeling is he was up in that same bedding area. Because when you first cow called, what did I say to you, Pounder?

I don't remember. I said he's up on that ridge top up there. I said you can come forward. Oh, that's right. And ridge top up there. I said you can come forward. Oh, that's right, and we had to bump. Well, I said, well, it's safer now. He's up high. Then he quickly, very quickly, not up high. But I think he rolls up out of those beds that we later found.

Yeah. It's interesting because from our perspective, it sounded like he was below you. Yeah, he sounded. No, no, no, not at first. He was higher than I level at first for for seconds he was it didn't take long at all and he was on the move but there was two bulls that were in there yeah one was bulls everywhere yeah it's like if i put my how do you explain this if i put my two together, the bull we killed was in my

right hand, that bull. And the bull we didn't was like in my left hand up higher. Because that thing kind of, from our perspective, had this two, seemed like

two separate timber bulls that actually weren't that way once we got in there you know i'm saying but the bull that we were mainly after when we first when you first called he was higher than eye level and there's all those beds up there that was not good i was trying to prevent that when we went in there to set up, I did not want to be below him. I thought he was below us. Just from where, yeah,

from where we, from where we were, it just, I thought it sounded like he was below us, but. We set up a little bit higher than you guys, you know, when we started calling,

so. I felt, well, I mean, it doesn't matter, especially, either way. Yeah.

Either way, he ends up below you, which is where we wanted him because we had a great uphill thermal. And we had a setup where we had a really – it's probably the best wind we'd had the whole trip. And you had that same thing, a different kind of barrier, but like a barrier, basically like a little rock, a rocky ridge spine. No, same exact thing, yeah. And we get set up like we don't really know.

Before he starts calling, we don't know where the bull's going to come from. We don't know where he is, and we don't know what his avenue of approach is. So you have to kind of get in a spot where you've got a little bit of a game plan about, well, if he seems to be this way, I will go there. Do I have a shooting lane? If he seems to go that way, I'm going to duck over there. Do we have a shooting lane? And we kind of had a number of scenarios.

I had three setups in my head where I could stand at one spot and know that I could duck 20, 30 feet to my right and have shooting lanes going for one approach. I could bounce out and get out in front of her behind a Ponderosa and cover a bunch more. And in the off chance that he somehow circled way up higher than us, I knew that I could go out around this rock outcrop and see up that direction. And you had in your head places where you could go to keep it

where he couldn't see the source of the noise. It was very like pretty perfect situation it wasn't one of those like make do things yeah we knew is there was only so much timber that he could be in and uh it's 11 30 he's not going anywhere it's a hot It's a hot, sunny day at 1130 in the morning, and he's in his bed and location, and he's not going anywhere unless you spook him. And we were within 50 yards of the edge of the timber. Yeah. So it wasn't like we were trying to call him a mile away. No.

Which can be a big-time hindrance, which I think is what you were talking about when we worked those three other bulls. They're not in your strut zone. Yeah, like we were just not close enough to pressure them. Yeah, we worked some other bulls where we had watched one of these bulls. And he kind of had like his place, his little area where he'd wander back and forth raising hell. And we're trying to like invite him into some other part of the mountain.

Which calling turkeys I think is the same thing it's hard like it's harder to call a turkey into some place he's not hanging out as it is to call him over to a different part of his hangout zone and the biggest reason we did that is because the uh the opportunity to get closer really wasn't there yeah it was burned it was open wasn't a lot of timber just wasn't there. Yeah. It was burned. It was open. Wasn't a lot of timber. There just wasn't a lot of places where we can circumvent his position, you know, without making like a four-hour tour. And as soon as you started going on this bull,

he got out of his bed and he was pissed, but he did not want to leave his timber patch. So he trapped Giannis. It's a pissy sounding sound, but he's actually not pissed. No, I know, but it's just an expression. No, he's definitely not pissed. He's excited. I guess you say he's pissed because...

Because the sound that he makes sounds like... If you were projecting that sound, you'd be like, I'm going to punch a hole in the wall. Or you think of a bull, not a bull, but a cattle bull, bull cow. They get mad. He grunts and snorts when he's pissed, but he's pissed. I'm not that familiar with the vocalizations of moo cows. You've never been snorted at by cows that are mad at you?

They don't want to make love, do you? They want you to get out of there. So you say like pissed, but he's definitely not pissed. This isn't a word I like to throw around lightly. He's titillated. He's titillated by the sounds and is very excited. But he's also not wanting to, he's also been around the block long enough. He's old.

He knows that there's things – We didn't know it at the time. No, I knew because the sounds he was making were – the sounds he was making. Raspy. It was big bull. He reached down Ridge Pounder's throat and grabbed Ridge Pounder's heart. Ridge Pounder couldn't handle it anymore. god there's stabilization on that lens dude because i was like when he finally came up into view oh i could see him like kind of pacing below through the

trees and i was like seeing that i was already like oh my god i shouldn't be seeing this and then when he came up the hill and was like looking at us i was like looking at me as i'm filming him i yeah i was just rattling like if you had had enough you had said you'd had enough even before that happened oh my god dude yeah emotionally i was like i can't take another one i'm gonna have a heart attack it's so intense and he's just right there and then he just like turns and faces us and just lets one rip. And I'm just like trying to make sure that I'd like the whole time. I never looked at him in person. I don't think.

You found it emotionally taxing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's hard, man. I just kept looking through the camera. And that was the only thing that kind of like. They're so big.

Especially this one. And they want it so bad. Yeah. My goodness. Yeah yeah it was intense a slave to one's passions a slave to one's passions to his detriment it'd be like if you were single and you got a and you get a booty call from someone late at night if the bar's closed. And you're like, man, there's probably a 30%, 40% chance that someone's going to shoot me when I go over there. But I'm going to risk it.

I'll go over there. It's worth it. But this dude, and I knew he was big because everything about the sounds he was making. Because at that point, we'd watched a number of like big bulls bugling. Yeah. And you get, there's like, it's sort of, you get tuned into like the wee. Like, and then there's a, and there's like a thing at the end of their bugle that just is.

You could like feel the weight at the end of the bugle. And you'd be like, oh, fuck. Like you wanted to go down and offer him up a hall's methyliptic yeah and there's a big difference between where i was and seth and lauren on one side of the ridge and you got to be like you were in the bowl with him yeah and like yeah there's a whole different sort of like the acoustics are different yeah the acoustics just the space of that the sound takes up it's pretty wild and you get to be on their same hillside and they're doing and you can just you can pinpoint them so you're seeing his movements you know you're you're not it's almost like it's so he's so close and you can pinpoint

the noise so exactly that it's like you're not actually watching something because you're looking into a timbered bowl with a lot of brush you're not actually watching it but you but it kind of occurs to you that you're not watching it because you feel as though you're watching it because the sounds are so constant and allow you to pinpoint them. You're just looking right down where it's happening. You feel like you're observing him wandering around, and then you realize, well, I'm not even seeing him,

but it's just like the audio is so spectacular that it paints this very vivid picture. but it's just like the audio is so spectacular. Yeah. But I'm, paints this very vivid picture. And he's doing a number of vocalizations. He's making a cow call, but not. Yeah. You know,

I think that was the first time I'd ever heard that. He would kind of go, and then bugle. Yep. And he's just going, boom, boom, boom, boom. He must have done that 40 times. A lot. A lot.

Boom, boom, boom. He seemed to do it when he was walking. Yeah. Pacing. Boom, boom, boom. I got a question for you guys. Glunking. So you know when you're turkey hunting, you got to bring them in close.

And if you're whitetail hunting with a rifle out east east because this is the first archery hunt i've ever done but the other two hunts that i've been a part of where you get close to the animal are like out east white tail like midwest white tail where like you're generally pretty close and turkey where you get pretty close but like you don't like when i saw those animals come in i wasn't like oh my god this is crazy but like when that elk came in, it was like an experience. Because they're so much bigger than you are. Yeah. There's so much more that can go wrong.

Yeah. Maybe there's like a nervousness about it. You're like, yeah, I got it. Because I get excited, but it's not dread. Yeah. When a bull's coming, it's like that's what you're there i got this i get excited but it's not dread yeah when a bull's coming it's it's like that's what you're there for yeah but for me it's 60 dread yeah dread that i'm gonna spook it dread that i'm gonna wound it dread that whatever it's just not

i'm not in a happy spot no when a When a turkey's coming, I got to smile. It's ear to ear, man. Yeah. It's all up. Yeah. Turkey time. I'm like, yeah, cool. Turkey's coming.

This is great. When a bull's coming, I'm like, oh, no. No, man. Go back down the hill. Oh, my God. No. But yes, he's coming coming there's no getting out of this now you've done it to yourself man now you just gotta like take it yeah you just gotta take it something is really gonna happen yeah like this is really going on man it's a this is a big thing is coming

the pressure's high you know not only for the hunter but the camera guy oh dude yeah so that adds to your intensity beyond because you don't want to mess it up just like your bow shot you know it's that important don't mess the shot up well here comes this bull and you're looking at the screen you're not looking at reality yeah you're looking through this camera lens and it becomes you know am i focused am i yeah am i doing this right is everything coming together because this is the five seconds i have to nail it and we've got five people in there. Yeah, a lot of people. We got a caller, a hunter, and three camera people. Yep.

It's a lot of stink. Yeah, a lot of variables. So this bull, when I was talking to you about the 30% chance you're going to walk in and you're going to get shot, this bull knows enough, he's been around the block enough to know that he does not want to leave that timber line.

Was very reluctant to leave that timber line and just paced up and down, not wanting to go out into the open, out into the grass and come up the hill. Just walk in the timber line, screaming in agony. Yeah, but not. He's just real happy and excited. Giannis is making him feel like there's another bull right over that ridge line. But you never gave another bugle. No.

But you gave him the sounds. On that setup, we never went to the other bull. Didn't need it. It was just cow calls. But you busted ground, didn't you? You were rust and didn't eat it. It was just cow calls. But you busted ground, didn't you? You were rustling around a little bit. Yeah, you rustled. Rustled around a little bit, but more just like just general elk.

If an elk's on a steep hillside just feeding, they're making more noise than just a couple cow calls here and there. It's just adding some depth to the picture I'm trying to paint. Yeah, you didn't go full Yanni on them no no but you were making some you were making the ground noises too yeah you were pulling grass out of the ground making it sound like they're feeding that was pretty small wow yeah he gets detail oriented man pulling grass i don't know what the hell he's doing he started ripping up grass grass. I was like, it's working. And Yanni wore that bull down.

Yeah, he finally had to come and stick his head into the bedroom. Oh, man. I'm going to have to walk up out of here now because the wind was just, he had not a prayer. Because what he wants to do more than anything is he wants to go around and get a whiff. Yeah. He's like, I'll tell you when it's a cow. You don't tell me when it's a cow.

I'll go up and have a smell. But there's no way for him to do that without really doing some kind of roundabout trip out in the open at noon on a hot, sunny day. There was no way for him to do it and i think he was aware of that in his own elky way and eventually just was like okay and a smart elk hunter typically a smart bow hunter typically and this is a lot of experts will say this including our good friend j Phelps, the game call maker. He's like, sure, there's a risk of you being out in the open when someone's calling for you and you got the bow. There's a risk of being out in the open because you're going to get spotted

more easily. But the risk of you being out in the open isn't as great as the risk that comes from you being not having good shooting lanes and having obstructions. So he's like, sure. When there's a tree and you're in front of the tree, you're more exposed to the bull,

but that's not as bad as being behind the tree and having so many places you can't shoot. Very common mistake. I think early on in bow hunting elk, but our first setup, when you called in the multiple bulls i was out in front of the tree and it was good in this setup it was blazing sun to be out in front of the tree you were illuminated like something on display and he had a lot of ground he had a lot of open ground across and it wasn't like a confusion of trees it was like a tree and a ton of open space he had to

cross and i felt that i was just asking a little bit too much. So I got up where a small Ponderosa was between me and the bull's line of approach. And I snapped some limbs, which fit in because there was a lot of, Yanni was making some noise anyways. I just like busted off the limbs, not even trying to be quiet, just grabbed him and snapped the limbs off and had a couple of pockets.

And I was trying to will that bull up the left side because I had good cover and a great shooting hole through the tree if he broke to my left. But he starts coming and he breaks to my right. For me, man, I get rattled. I've done enough rifle hunting. I'm almost clinical about it um i've got to like an almost clinical space about shooting my rifle in in real world hunting situations but with a bow it's just things are so close and you're so aware of the mistakes you can make and there's so many more mistakes you can make

and it's so much less forgiving that all that stuff enters your head. And I've got it distilled down. I've mentioned this a hundred times before. When I was a kid, my dad would put a sticker on our bow. He had these stickers that said, stay calm, pick a spot. Now my little mantra that I try to put in my head is like, elbow up, pick your spot. Elbow up, pick your spot. Elbow up.

Because I'm like, if I can remember to do those two things, I feel that everything else falls into place. Like if I can just like get it my head, like, and do that, that's like the baseline of my, that that's the, of my like personal checklist. Like everything else falls into place if I'm doing that. And this bull mingled so long. And when he first showed up, I was so rattled, but I got, heingled so long and when he first showed up i was so rattled but i got he lingered so long that i that i got unrattled and i got my mantra in my head and i was ready you know i felt like i was ready and i felt like i was ready to place an arrow and he starts coming and i was was feeling very confident and very confident. And he comes up, and sure enough, he comes up in line with the center of my tree,

where there he is in range. And I'm like, why did I not get in front of the tree? Why did I not get in front of the tree? And then it puts you in this negativity spiral that starts to happen. He breaks out, and then's like looking at me like not knowing what he's seeing but looking at me um turns away i get a range on him he's 32 yards but obscured by the tree he moves and so his left his right side's facing me then he kind of turns so his left side's facing me and at he kind of turns, so his left side's

facing me, and at this point, he's very interested in what I am, because I'm trying to, like, get, and I have to get down on my knees, but he doesn't budge, and I get down on my knees, and I get my bow back, and he doesn't budge, and I got where I felt like things were exactly right. And I had my spot picked. I had the right pin in the right place. I had my elbow up. I thought everything was perfect. I touched that release and hit him back behind the ribs. And my God, the feeling of failure and self-loathing

that overcame me in that moment of being that um like my brother put it best man like for me like my perspective put it best where when he messes up a shot he's like why am i so greedy and want this so bad that it actually in that it actually impairs my ability to do it like i'm self i want it so bad that it becomes self-defeating so i can punch paper all day long with my bow and call my shots all ranges all day long punching punching punching but the minute it's something i really want bad i can't do it like when it matters it all falls apart. Rogan says it's consequences. He says we become intimidated by consequences.

Isn't that how he put it? I forget. It's interesting. It's like you enter an arena. I was talking about this with raising kids, where I don't mind putting them into an arena of consequence, meaning I don't mind letting them play with a hatchet um and i think a lot of parents are afraid of letting their kids inhabit an arena of consequence but they're like when you're pulling a bow back and trying to kill something to weigh 600 pounds with an arrow it's like the the the consequences get so high and all of a sudden

there it is like the easiest like in all the target shooting i could never shoot an arrow that far off at that distance but there it was and my god was that like one of the worst moments for me i've been through it before doesn't get any better no i didn't get to see it. Well, in your defense, too, we did review the footage, and he clearly jumped the string. He was gone before that arrow left the bow, man. Clearly jumped the string. Yeah.

Seems like it. It's hard. It's like it's so hard to piece it together, but it seems like he was sprung. Yeah. But do you hear much about elk jumping? There's some animals that are famous for jumping the string. Oh, sure.

But no, elk do it when they're tuned up like that. I mean, I saw them do it over the years of guiding. Not a lot, but they do it. People talk about axis deer being literally gone by the time the arrow gets there. There was a frame where you could see your arrow in like a dark patch of timber moving through. And then you could see the bull. Like when you pause footage and nothing's moving, everything's like clear. It looks like just a regular photograph.

But as soon as something moves, you get a little bit of motion blur. And there's a shot where that arrow was going through and that bull is like starting to get blurry. He's already on the move. Yeah. So you can see that he's already like whoa and then he just pushed forward just enough probably just to kick it back in my collection of interesting shit i have a deer skull that has a three-bladed a steel ferruletype three-bladed broadhead from the 50s that's embedded perfectly in a deer's brain pan. And the entrance hole is right dead center in its forehead. And it was from my father.

And there was a deer feeding in a field. And vehicles would go by, and the deer wouldn't spook that bad from the vehicles was so used to highway traffic my dad had his recurve and had a had his buddy take his van with the door open so that my dad could jump out of the moving van into a ditch with his bow to get the approach so his buddy drives by slowly my dad rolls out of the van into the ditch. The deer watches the van roll away. My dad rolls up with his bow and lets an arrow go. And so much time elapsed between the noise of the arrow's release,

the deer was able to swing its head around in the direction and block out its chest with its own head and caught it right there and dropped wow he killed it yeah but it jumped the string in the worst in the worst way worst way imaginable um so yeah man the arrows yeah, man, the arrow's just back. And I was feeling real, real down. We went and laid low for a few hours. So probably three hours. Because here's the thing, man. Like if you get a situation like that, you should lay low a long time, but it's so hot.

It's hot and we're very far away from the vehicle and you got dark coming there's coyotes and bears and wolves hanging around um and it's like i said very warm uncomfortably hot that day yep laid down for three hours swarmed with flies and bees and ants like that kind of weather and start trailing and it's just pinpricks I remember I think Seth you said like literally a pinprick it's like if you dipped a pin and all the blood we were fine it would be like on the left side of his line of travel he would brush off blood about three feet off the ground.

One of the clues we found to help in the tracking is Giannis found a scratch mark on a tree that was where the knock of the arrow scratched a tree. Yeah, he split two trees that weren't that far apart. And the knock scratched. And we were tracking. We were looking for heavy tracks, heavily placed foot tracks, footprints. Following those, trying to coordinate those with little pinpricks of blood. I didn't think about it now, but when he brushed against that tree

or was forced to brush against that tree with that arrow that was still stuck inside, that probably did a fair amount of damage. I thought a lot about that even at the time. I was like, that's like a whole... That's helpful. So it'd be that you'd get a bit of blood and you'd find a set of tracks and make sense of the tracks

and follow the tracks and try to corroborate your instincts with another drop of blood that verifies that it's right or not. And we're tying little ribbons in the trees. And so you can also sort of get this sense of travel. And it really made sense to me that he would have followed the river bottom but didn't and cut up and we tracked him. And how many hours do you think it took?

Roughly three. cut up and we tracked them and how many hours you think it took roughly three trailed for three hours and you traveled three miles of zigzagging your gps showed you traveled three miles and there's yeah you had a phone with the on x app on it yeah and since we started tracking, we went, we moved the track 170 yards as the crow flies. But you zigzagged three miles looking for droplets of blood. Over three hours, yeah. And then, so now it's about six. Hard dark is eight. It's about six.

And we hear an elk. I jump an elk. I jump an elk that's 75 yards away from me and I hear it storm off and then go quiet. And we suspect that like, oh, we bumped him. Now,

we have to wait till the morning to get after him. And that's bad because it's going to be a, it's not getting cold at night. It's not getting cold at night. And then hike, it takes a couple hours to hike out of there, go back. What I did, the last thing I did is I took and shot a waypoint in the, in the

cardinal direction that I thought the sound was and guessed it was maybe 75 yards away and set that waypoint and we went back up in the morning and janice and seth started trying to work the track like work out the track and the trail and i jumped ahead to where i thought it jumped from and looked there and couldn't find the bed but eventually found where it laid down and bled and i went went to where I thought the sounds had gone and where the sound ended and picked up a little pinprick of blood, and that let us jump the trail quite a ways. Yeah, Lauren actually found that bed that he was bedded in that we jumped him out of. Had a fair amount of blood in it. But yeah, you made a big big jump we jumped like a solid 100

yards and then the weirdest thing one of the weirdest things that's ever happened in the woods happens all of a sudden i hear what i swear is a person whistling that's what it sounded like to me too it took me a few minutes to realize it was in fact a person whistling and at this point we traveled up where we're only less than 200 yards from a property boundary. And I'm like, oh, we're going to get pre-yelled at by a landowner

or something. Like, why else is this guy hot to talk to us? At this point we're very close to what would become the end of the blood trail. This guy, there's another bow hunter out, and he glasses up a bull laying in a weird spot. And it wound up being that he glassed up our dead bull and had gone down there to take pictures of it

to show to his friends and act like he got it or make a gag on his friends. And he starts yelling to us, and we realized that just that i mean we would have hit it and wouldn't be long we would have hit it anyway yeah we would probably been on it in less than 15 minutes i think there it was piled up in hindsight i believe that when we jumped it i think it ran down that hill and died. I know you don't agree with that take, but that's what I think happened. Just because of how it was piled up there and what was going on with the where it was. I think it ran down

that hill and died. It was a warm night. It was a warm morning. We had a long hike in there. By this point, it was hot out. Yeah, we found him at, I think, about 10 a.m. Yep. All those flies that had been on us were on him.

And at that point, it was like a big bull, man. And at that point, it's just like getting in there, and it's like a thing that's happened. I can tell you it's happened to be four times out of many not just mine but me being present for four big game kills where meat was lost because of heat and they all had to do with three of the four had to do with not finding an animal the day you got it but finding it it the next day. Three of the four. The fourth was just having my first out west hunting experience and not realizing how quickly things can go south if you're not careful.

The other three were all from not finding something and finding something the next day. But lost meat. Lost a considerable amount of meat. Yeah. Possibly half the animal. Which is like, makes it sickening, man. It's like you want to be happy, you know?

You want to be happy about it, but in the end, it's like it always winds up being like a little bit tainted. And it's like a bull of a lifetime, man. Like I won't get a bull like that again. I mean, maybe I will, but I don't deserve to. I don't expect to. But you always got that in your head. And so you run in your head and it's like, okay, you try to do your shot right.

And you did. Maybe there's an excuse why, like maybe you jumped the string. Well, that's part of your responsibility too. Don't shoot arrows at stuff that's aware of you. If it's already like hyper-keyed into your presence and it's already like half thinking about bolting, maybe you don't let the arrow go. But you did because you're greedy.

Then you blow your shot. And then you're like, okay, the thing to do when you blow your shot is give it a while. Give it a long time so you don't pressure it. So you give it a long time. If you bump it, don't pressure it. So you give it a long time. If you bump it, don't keep going. Back out. Pick it up the next

day. But if you pick it up the next day, you've got to wait 12 hours. You've got to give it plenty of time. During that time, spoilage occurs. So you run back in your head and you're like, man, all these ways in which I wish we'd have done things better, but it's like, I feel like you kind of did everything you're supposed to do run back in your head you're like man all these ways in which i wish we'd have done things better but it's like i feel like kind of did everything you're supposed

to do in the end you sort of wound up with a shitty outcome there's no lesson oh it's definitely some lessons within our experience i don don't know if there's a hard lesson. It's not a hard lesson. There's no next time. No. Next time you jump one when you're trailing it, you're going to go running after it? No.

No, but these lessons would be the reinforcing lessons that you would do what we did. Because I think that we did end up with a because with our blood trail we could end up not finding him and we could have bumped him some more and he might have not been laying out on an easy ridge to find him he could have gone another half mile farther and died in some hellhole tangle where you know the dude from the other side didn't see him we lost the blood trail, lost the heavy tracks as he comes out on the open ground where there's rocks

and it's hard to track. So I feel like we did pretty good. There could have been a lot of other much worse scenarios. There are lessons to be learned in fortifying things you already think are true because it makes you more certain. But in some ways, this shook that up because, like I said, the thing is when you bump something, never pressure it. But I think if we'd have walked over there, it would have been laying there dead.

Maybe I'm wrong. We'll never know. Learn everything about all that. That's the end of my story. It's the end of my story. It worked out. Big, huge, giant bull. We stuck with it and recovered the bull of a lifetime for you.

Yeah, to everyone's credit, I think it was one of the best bits of tracking. Yeah, very much a team effort. Best bits of tracking I've been around. Rich Ponderonder he even was getting in there despite what about this orange leaf yeah

I found one one spot of blood after we are like somebody had found one way ahead and as we were walking there I like turn and look and found one spot of

blood and I was like all right I found one spot I didn't totally fail even though like wasn't didn't help the investigation at all you know but I was stoked spot. I didn't totally fail, even though it didn't help the investigation at all. But I was stoked that my eyes weren't totally shot. Yeah, that's a crazy task to have to track just drops of blood like that.

I couldn't see anything. I didn't find a single spot of blood. I saw a bed eventually from looking at obvious heavy tracks and a single spot of blood. I saw a bed eventually from looking at obvious heavy tracks and a wet spot in dirt. So it had to be pretty in my face to see anything. So it was an amazing track. Yeah, it takes a level of focus that I think that most humans

aren't normally used to doing, what it takes to be on a track like that. When you're going down to pin. Trail something. When you're going, well, when it gets down to pin drops every 10 or 20 feet, it is just so easy to be like, I'm done.

I'm giving up. Sometimes they're on the leaf. Sometimes they're on the ground. So you're just kind of like looking everywhere. And the leafs had like little, me and Seth were talking about that. There's like weird, like as the leaves were changing, there's like weird little like liquidy looking ambery brownish spots. Yeah.

Like every time you look at a leaf, you're like, oh, there's, oh, no, it's not blood. Yeah. So when you're filming hunts lauren uh how much you live in like the the product and how much you live in uh the the experience of being along i think it kind of goes both ways. It's been a while since I've done a real serious hunt. I think I'd had a couple years off. But before I did any hunting filming at all, I really didn't have any interest in hunting whatsoever. But that experience and that education in watching people who knew what they were doing, changed

my perspective on all of it and kind of gave me a passion for it in and of itself. So I think it's a little bit of both. You know, if you're behind the camera, if you're producing anything, I think you want to produce something that's going to be as top shelf as you can possibly make it uh so that comes into play all the time uh as being a high priority because you don't want to put your name on something that isn't top shelf yeah uh but the experience too you know can't be replaced by anything because you're not going to get that experience as a camera guy as a hunter without going and doing it and experiencing and checking it out and learning about it i think about two that you got started filming by filming like like extreme

whitewater kayaking and like stuff where people die so you probably uh early on learned um this idea that it wasn't always something that could be separated out like there was like a real like filming that kind of stuff that there was like a real risk there you know um and you were living something kind of real you were filming something that was happening in a very real way to people right like it's like taking like extremely challenging risks both to capture it and what the people are doing and so it probably felt like really uh like i was saying earlier consequence rich oh sure. And you always, in the back of your head, wondered if the camera gave that person some sort of courage they wouldn't otherwise would have had.

Like if someone drowned and you're like, man, he would have never done that if we weren't filming it. Yeah. I mean, there was the gnarliest thing during whitewater for us, for me personally, was watching a guy go off a waterfall and break both of his legs. It changed his life. He never, you know, he kept kayaking after that, but it was a moment in time in his life that just completely shaped his life for the rest of his life. And so the consequences were super real. And you kind of, as the camera guy, even felt guilty for being there just to capture him doing his passion, following his passion.

Yeah. Major consequences. And that, you know, I think as you get older, that priority or that desire to try and push the limits changes. But I don't know how you equate it to hunting. It's just, obviously it's very different, but you are still taking risk yeah you're not taking but you you the consequence there is you'd like you you're you're dealing in life and death you're dealing out death which isn't a light thing you know you're out there dealing it you're yeah you're like

in this position of you have a substantial sort of power that you're wielding with a weapon, right? Making choices about how things will die. There's a necessity. There's like a definite necessity to it. There's an inevitability to it for things that typically are dying violent deaths violent painful deaths regardless of your involvement in it but all of a sudden you're inserting your you're inserting yourself into it you know ridge is this final thought yeah man oh it's a chance for a concluder you don't have to have one i don't't care. No, I got one. Well, I don't know if I got one.

It just... You took up chewing sunflower seeds. Yeah, we got into that. No dip. No dip on this trip. Just spits, man. Spit seeds. Just spit seeds.

But I don't want to feed your concluder to you. No, concluder, I was kind of wrapped up in Lauren's little thing there. That was good, man. No, just the whole experience was crazy. Just seeing those elk that close and hearing the bugles and being out there. I hadn't done anything like that before, despite being on elk hunts before. It was cool.

It can be religious i have two clients i know of that uh they came back so many times that they've worked through probably all the guides over the years but that they both wanted at least one all of his ashes and the other one part of his ashes spread out on those mountains that we used to hunt because that it was just so special to him to be there in September in those woods and, you know, being part of what we just did last week. Yeah. Do your far off bull whistle. What else you got? That's about it man both these guys killed it on their first meteor trip

yeah did a great job it was a great crew to be a part of capture some wonderful footage wonderful footage which i i look forward to people seeing yeah me too kelsey i have like a concluder question oh that's great man okay we talked about like the lose your shit factor a little bit and i feel like you know me as a new hunter not having that elk experience thinking about it in the future someday a lot of people you know they prepare by shooting at a target at best, like a total archery challenge style preparation. You know, like what would you say to people? How do you prepare for that experience where you go out there, all of a sudden you have a bow and arrow in your hands

and there's a screaming out, you know, 35 yards away. What can you do my my feeling is that it's the only thing is exposure to the thing itself i don't think it's replicable um but that's in season yeah but our friend but there's people that disagree like our friend rory denver who was involved in training some of the most elite combat soldiers on the planet, feels that through realistic scenarios and constant drilling and realistic scenarios, he feels that you can achieve something close to actual experience where you can get people into a situation where it becomes rote it becomes so rote kicking in a door and storming a compound right that it becomes so rote and you you've

done it so many times you know just exactly what to do that when you're doing it for real for the first time you feel like you've already been here but i don't think you can achieve that in this situation well that's what i'm saying. Because like, how do you... I don't know, what the hell would it be? You only have this situation once a year. Because like, I mean, I can... I've been that close to elk many times in my life, but the pressure wasn't there.

Yeah. The scenario of a rut wasn't there. You know, it's like, how do you prepare yourself for that intensive experience where you're literally losing your shit and you have to accomplish something? I feel like it it's it's yeah it's exposure to the thing itself i don't think it needs to be i think it would absolutely help if you were just standing with someone or with the caller just any amount of exposure to it but it's not a trainable thing

i think you can yeah there's just nothing that's going to trip you up emotionally and psychologically that that will. Let's say they had some mechanical elk that went, you know? Not the same. You're not going to be like, oh man, I've been through this before. With that super realistic target that has an elk bugle noise it makes, it just isn't going to do it.

And there's some people that are never going to get over it, and there's some people that are just cold-blooded. I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean some people that can separate. Cool. I would like, I lost it when I had like gobbling turkeys, my first turkey season this year. So I'm like, man, what am I going to do, you know?

I called a turkey in for a guy that had never hunted this spring. And when that turkey showed its head, he said, oh my God. Yeah, I know. Killed the turkey. Yeah. But it stunned him. Yeah. I think that's just like an ongoing question.

Everybody has to prepare yourself for the fact that you're not going to just be okay. Well, a lot of times it gets worse because the beginners can have like a beginner coolness because you just, you just so, you don't even have enough exposure to know that you should, how excited you should be. And so the first couple of times you can, everybody's like, damn, you just did that perfectly. It was like no big deal.

And then the next time you sort of like, you're just a little bit more relaxed and somehow there's more chemicals entering your brain and your body and i mean how many times when we were kids bow hunt where you like would try to pull on that string and you were like i physically can't pull my bow back because of buck fever oh yeah i had but i had buck fever my even meant have been doe fever. I was late in high school and couldn't pull my bow back. I had it set too high. I don't honestly keep it my own.

I'm setting my bow. I don't just go to max. I go to do when you're in panic mode, is this bow going to grease back nice? That's what I think about. Because I've had like you're cold too cold to get it back and too nervous and so i don't run like i don't just like keep cranking until i'm like pulling to get the bow back i can pull my bow back nice thinking about that stuff

yeah and i can call bulls in and get all these experiences and sit there and be half asleep on the hillside just with a smile on my face rocking your hand if i yeah if i had to just jump over the ridge and put a bow in my hand it just completely changes like the blood pressures through the roof but there's things that we did at our camp um in colorado that a lot of guys said helped them a lot like we had a 3d course set up didn't have a bunch of targets you know maybe six or eight or so and we would set up just funky crazy shit like shooting through a bunch of tight aspens where the lane was only eight inches or we'd have them set up on a bench and we would make it so like we'd all stop before you could see the target and be like okay here's how this shot works knock an arrow you're going to take

three steps you're going to be able to see that elk you need to draw your bow and count to three in your head and make a shot because that's how it happens in real life right yeah and so we would sort of play out these scenarios and again these were seasoned hunters you know they're out on a paying paid elk hunt but we would do a lot of stuff like that where it wasn't just like we were just out there shooting a target or just even if it was an elk target, just shooting an elk target out in a field. But we would make scenarios up in our heads. We'd a lot of times have guys shoot at stuff that was two and three yards away. Because you tell you what, a lot of dudes, especially compound bow guys,

they have no idea where their arrow is going to hit when it's at two yards and sometimes crazy shit like that happens and you need to have that confidence to just be like yeah whatever all my pins on his heart and touch it off but if you've never gone through that and all of a sudden there's an elk at two yards or three yards you could very well freeze up and never pull the trigger and whatever. Just be so, never pick a spot because even at two yards, you better pick your spot and not just go, oh, there's an elk, and pull the trigger. You're going to end up with one in the guts. I took one of my old girlfriends out once,

and we got out in front of a bugling bull, and he comes over 15 yards away, full erection. She never pulled her bow back. He got up, stood there, bugled a couple times walked down the earth's not a bridge i'm like behind her i get like what happened she's like i don't know never pulled the bow it was just too much yeah we used to make guys do 10 or 20 jumping jacks then knock an arrow and take a shot in three or three to five seconds just to get their heart rate up yeah but yeah still like buck fever i I don't think you're not going to replicate it.

And I'll tell you what makes it worse is messing up. Messing up. It makes it worse the next time? Puts you in a hole. Yeah. If you start out on flat ground, it puts you in a hole. Seth? Had a blast. Ready to get after that big old flathead catfish i am i'm stoked for that flatheads and some squirrels uh no i just had a blast man it was a good group of guys and

awesome hunt challenging rewarding um i'll try to up my cookie game next time yeah tate i'll work on that tate i'll write that down but uh yeah awesome trip congrats again on the big giant bull yeah um do you feel because you've done a bit of elk hunting yeah do you feel that after going to a unit like that does it kind of like make everything seem like a little bit of a bummer? Maybe a little bit. I'm struggling with that. If all spots were like that spot. It's like, do you really need to go back to the kind of place

where someone blows a call and it just explodes with the reach, like the wood just explodes without going the other direction? Yeah. Who are like, dudes, it's dudes, I know that sound. Yeah, the morning you shot your bull I don't know I don't think too many elk hunters get to experience something like that

that was crazy no no Janice I agree it's few and far between but hard to appreciate those hunts without being out on a bunch of public land hunts where if you call a bull a day in or even just have an interaction

with a bull per day like that's good what's cool about this is public land yeah so it's kind of fun like that where it's like there there's at least a chance. Yeah. And we had ups and downs. I mean, we had two days of zero bugles and feeling like, oh, what are we doing? Like we have no idea how to hunt elk kind of, you know? Because it would cost to go buy that experience is $20,000. Yeah, close to it for sure.

$15,000, $20,000 to buy that experience. But with public lands, it's the luck of the draw. Could happen to anyone. Yep. Sounds like not for non-residents in Washington, though, as you explained. I don't know what the odds are there. It's expensive.

But around, right? There's great units in colorado there's units in utah there's units in arizona there's units in montana like there's units every state like every state has a couple of those spots that you could just hit without costing what you paid for your vehicle no no closing thoughts for me other than i can't wait to uh have you learn how to call real good and then call big and i told you already doesn't have to be an eight by eight just a seven by seven will be cool i got it down that That's the one. All right, guys.

Thank you all for coming. Thanks for having us. Going hunting. Cheers. You are? Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service

as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.