The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 137: Bulls, Bucks, and Pre-Chewed Meat

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Kurt Racicot of Stone Glacier, Mark Kenyon of Wired to Hunt, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: revisiting Kurt’s impossible hunt; creating problems for yourself; Mark Kenyon's Montana public land whitetail hunt; taking note of squirrels; dreaded shots; making your kids eat more than just buttered noodles; gear that you brought but didn’t use and gear you shouldn't have left behind; cutting books into thirds; Tom Petty's tracking of a single bee to its hive; 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 meat. 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. We putt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Kurt Roscoe, dude, wrote in.

To say that you were harder than a woodpecker's... I want to say like a woodpecker's pecker, but that wasn't what he said. But it had a ring to it, but it was like harder than a woodpecker's beak. But I don't think that was it. I guess that's a compliment. It is a compliment. But he was referring more to the eating of your trick,

of your hot tip, of just instead of putting boiling water into freeze dry food envelopes you just put regular water in there at noon in order to be fully rehydrated by nighttime yeah and that makes one harder than a woodpecker's, or whatever it was. Were you employing that strategy on your? I did a couple of days, yeah. Yeah, but it got so cold. That was one thing I didn't mention before is it got so cold that sometimes it just never rehydrates.

It was freezing. It was snowing. So that can create its own problems too. So what were you doing then? I brought more fuel. Surprisingly enough, after our conversations, I got to thinking about a couple of things. And I thought, you did.

You did on several things. The first thing is that I brought a pair of sunglasses. Oh, you did? Yeah. But they were a cheap pair, and I lost them on the hike in. So they didn't do me much good. So some dude's loving it. Yeah, yeah.

I liked it, and then I stuffed them in my pocket. Next thing, they're gone, and that's the way it goes. See, I haven't brought – I didn't bring sunglasses. Doll sheep hunting, I didn't bring a milk hunting. You talked me out of it. And we wouldn't have used them on our sheep hunt. There was maybe a day. But, you know, up there too, I feel like the sun's so low.

It's not like, you know, up there too, I feel like the sun's so low. It's not like, you know, at those higher latitudes, right? Where you're not getting that like direct sun as much. It just is like, you've seen that stuff where you're hunting at super high latitudes where, especially get later in the year where it just seems like it's dawn.

And then sometime around one or two o'clock, nothing changes, but you just all of a sudden register it as evening. Yeah. Because the sun is at this super low, shallow angle, way off at the horizon. And it just is like dawn all day, and at some point, you just jump to thinking of it as evening, and it never feels like midday. No. It's almost a flat light. It seems like almost like a cloudy day yeah type of it's

never that just you know bearing down on you yeah but you went out and uh so you tell us what happened because we'd like talked about the prelude this is this is kurt doing the impossible hunt yeah so um explain the impossible i like to call it the impossible hunt, though I've never done it. Yeah. Well, so we've talked about it before. There are five districts in the state of Montana that are, they call them the unlimited sheep hunts. And they're unlimited in the sense that anybody can purchase a tag from anywhere and go. And each one of the units has a quota, typically right around two sheep, two legal rams, which in most cases ends up being a five-year-old ram. It's a check their eggs, but kind of a four and five-eighths or what would I say? A little under three-quarter.

And so from there, the season stays open for about two and a half months, all the way through regular rifle season, as long as the quota stays open and that's really kind of the how many times you try to do it uh i've hunted it four years and killed one ram killed one yeah yeah well i i should clarify it i will have hunted at four years by next year so yeah i've hunted it three years so far because if you get one you have to take seven years off next year so yeah i've hunted at three years so far because if you get one you have to take seven years off take seven years off yeah so you just finished your seven year hiatus and went this year yep went this did see a single hold on i don't understand this was your fourth season or not no next year will be my fourth season okay like how many times

are you gonna you did it once yep you did the unlimited unit once you saw sheep or didn't see sheep i didn't see sheep okay you did it once and didn't see it you did it once. Yep. You did the unlimited unit once. Saw a sheep or didn't see sheep? I didn't see sheep. Okay, you did it once and didn't see it. You did it again, killed one. Yep. Waited seven years. Yep. Did it, and we'll get to what happened.

Yeah. Didn't see shit. Nope. And then next year you're going, who knows? Yeah, yeah, who knows? That'll be the fun part. Didn't see a single one. Nope, didn't see a single one.

Were you looking? Yeah, that's all you do yeah so you went into like your secret special canyon yeah yeah which you hunted before i did didn't see any in i did well i headed that direction i made it nine miles in when i hunted it the last time and this time i went a bit further and got about 17 miles and uh you know kind of started working my way back from there. And, yeah, that was just the program. You know, you get to a nice spot where you can glass

and then spend as much of the day behind the spotting scope and binoculars as you can, just trying to pick out, you know, you're looking at little rock slides, avalanche chutes, anywhere you think that's going to hold game and just keep changing your angle try and find embedded during the day and obviously the hot times are in the evenings and in the mornings so they're pretty uh crepuscular like just like an elk or a mule deer like you're going to see them on their feet mostly early and late yeah i think typically but the other thing i found too is uh that i haven't found necessarily especially elk is that you'll see them get up and move around during the day at random times like take a leak

and shift around no i've caught them i've caught them feeding okay now in the middle of the day or you know late mornings um so yeah you just never know I think the key is just to be behind the glass and be ready for whenever they are moving. What name for me the mammals that you saw that weigh over two pounds? I saw grizzly bear, black bear, goats, a couple of mule deer on the way in, and that was it. It's a pretty devoid of game. No elk? No elk. Not even an elk track. of game. No elk? No elk.

Not even an elk track. How many grizzlies? Just one. Yeah. Way off or up in your business? No, he was just right across the canyon right where I was glassing for sheep. Yeah, just rummaging around. What was the blackberry doing?

He was running away from me. I jumped him in the timber coming back out. Yeah. No elk? No elk. And how many days did you spend glass out. Yeah. No elk? No elk. And how many days did you spend glassing? Six. I was in there six.

And then the unit shut down? The unit shut down, yeah. Have you talked to the guys that wound up getting them? No, I didn't. Have you heard any rumors? Yeah, you hear little rumors. I don't know exactly where they were. But the first one happened pretty quick.

And then the second one was a few days into the season. And did you run into any other sheep hunters? I did not, not where I was, but when I got back to about the nine mile mark, uh, I saw a couple more camps in that area. And then, you know, a few other camps on the way out from there. Yeah. Yeah. So talk to anybody.

I didn't know. Uh, I just, nobody was around horse camp. There was one't. No, uh-uh. Nobody was around. Horse camp? There was one camp that was a horse camp. I was really surprised to see horses back in there. I hadn't seen them that far. Because it's too rough a ground for horses. Yeah, yeah. I'm no expert on horses, but it is just chunky, rocky, boulder,

lots of exposure in spots. So, yeah, I was surprised to see him there. What was the longest period you sat sitting in one spot, that you spent sitting in one spot without moving at all? Probably three or four hours. Then I'd try to get up and at least change, you know, by a couple hundred yards. But the wind, so my camp was up over 11 000 feet and i just you'd have to find spots that are secluded or hidden behind rocks to just because

the wind it just relentless freezing your butt well it's cold and then you can't keep your glass still oh that kind of wind yeah yeah you know 30 40 mile an hour wind coming across some of those plateaus during the day so that eats away at your soul after a while it does dude it starts to make you feel like you're going a little bit insane man yeah it can't wind does it does yeah so you know but being able to tuck off of one edge and get into some you know larger boulders there's a lot of structure in there so if you can find a nice spot but it all just depended on wind direction and you know where you were but i had uh i have several other friends that were hunting the district so including me there was you know four other groups of good buddies that i talked to after they got out and

between our four groups you know one group saw two sheep and so it was just it was one of those years you know they're there they're not so do you feel that they were in your did you just hunt one canyon no i hunted i i had a i had a plan where i just sequentially worked through the different canyons and it really depended on on the time of day too because there's some stuff you can't glass in the morning that they'd be better to glass in the evening or the sun comes up you get the glare you just can't pick it apart like you need to or or the wind you know it's hard to be on one side of the mountain when you're getting this constant wind coming through in the morning seeing nice beds and nice sheep shit and everything

uh no there isn't a lot up and that's kind of the difference is I was glassing from a spot that really isn't going to hold sheep. Where you're sitting isn't going to hold sheep. Yeah, from where I'm camping. That's it. Yeah, trying to find good vantage. You should have been with us, man. We saw a dandy.

Yeah. Real dandy. Different state. Yeah, if you had a permit in southeast Washington. Yeah, a lot of beds beds a lot of tracks and then one nice big ram so is the fact that you're calling this the impossible hunt because it's an unlimited hunt everyone's going and they're chasing them and there's just success rates are like abysmal yeah for example the unit i hunted this year they didn't ever take a ram out of last year. Two and a half months season.

This isn't the units where they're trying to wipe them out. No. Right? No. That was a little bit different. That was a very unique situation down in the Tendoys here. And that was like a pneumonia thing. That was a pneumonia thing.

Yeah. That they decided to turn over and ask the hunters to help with the management of it. I have 17 bighorn points. Can I do the unlimited hunt without using my 17 points? That's a really good question. I'm not sure. I believe you can because, man, I want to go. I know at some point you'd lose them though, so I don't know if you could put in or if you could.

That'd be something you'd have to check in the rigs. What I needed to happen is you to get one and then you to want to go and just mess around during your seven-year period. For the next seven years. And I would go with you after I draw my regular one. See, that's probably a good plan. So there's a lot of steps that need to fall into place here,

but I'm kind of curious about it, man. Yeah. Okay, so not a single elk. A lot of steps that need to fall into place here, but I'm kind of curious about it, man. Yeah. Okay, so not a single elk. A lot of wind. A lot of wind. Were you regretting, or were you liking it? Oh, no, it was perfect. It was a great hunt.

Yeah, the only thing is it just wasn't long enough. It snowed on you. Yeah, it snowed on me one day. And in my position, one of the things that's that's really important is getting good days of field to test your products so that was that was a big part of being able to do that and those type of conditions are very conducive to doing that to see the limits of stuff yeah i see the limits of stuff and see how they truly perform because it's one thing to go out and wear something for a hike. It's a totally different thing to live in it.

Yeah. Yeah. So. What kind of stuff are you testing? We have. Like future things? Yeah. Yeah.

We have quite a bit of stuff coming out here in January. Yeah. You can get all tight-lipped now, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's some of it that I'm not. Just give me like a, you know, like a... Whatever you can.

Well, I'll just say I was very warm at night in my sleeping bag. Oh. Yep. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a couple coming out in that line, so... Really? Yeah.

Side zip or center zip? Side. Classic. Yep. Vent vent then you can vent yanni's been running like the old school in this hoodless sleeping bag for warm weather yeah i didn't know they made those anymore i didn't either well it's a special um nemo makes it it's uh i think it's called their argali tensor combination but it's meant to be like a warm weather backcountry hunters setup where no hood to lighten it up no bottom insulation lighten it up your sleeping pad slides in there to act as your bottom insulation so i mean the whole rig is i, the bag compresses down to like this. I think it's right at a pound.

It's a 15-degreer. You know, the pad is a pound. So your whole kit's at two pounds, and it's even got like a waterproof sort of barrier over the bottom two feet. So if your feet are sticking out from underneath your shelter, you know, if you're just running a tent or something, you know. So it's pretty good. But, yeah, as it gets colder um you like you miss

that hood so you guys did make a sleeping bag just say just say would you just come out with like a single 15 or would you come out with a zero 15 i think i think if we were gonna do it we'd probably come out with two. Yeah, if you were. If you were, would it wind up being like a negative and a 15? It would probably end up being in that 15 and then a zero range. That's probably a lot of hypotheticals. Those are the only two you need, I feel like. And they'd be conservative at that rating.

And then these would probably be filled with parts from a bird or parts from an oil field. Very, very likely from a bird. Parts from a bird. Yeah. Woodpecker beaks. Water repellent birds. I was going to ask.

After 22 decades, I think, of sleeping in bags. You slept in bags for 22 decades? Sorry. Two. Is that what I meant? Like from the Old Testament. I was trying to say. You're from the Old Testament when people would live to be 600 years old.

I was trying to say 20 years and then somehow as I was saying it, it turned into decades. You switched. But I've had a negative 20 and I've had bags I think as warm as 40 or 45. And just like those fringes, sure. If you got all the money in the world and you just want to have every bag for the specific situation, sure, have them.

But for me and what I do and how I hunt, a 15 and a zero gets it done. I'm a four. I like four because I got got a way ass negative, which is nice at times. I don't use it that much, but I have a way ass negative Nemo bag down. Then I like to have... But you understand the peculiarities of my life, man. We're like, I get a lot of gear.

This isn't like I'm going down to the store and buying all these. No, I know. I was trying to present it when I was saying- From a normal- For like an average Joe. Okay.

Then I'm going to present the average Joe. So scrap the one because you can combo your bags anyways. You can take two bags and combo them. So scrap,

I would never go buy the mega negative. I would have a zero, a 15, and then this isn't like breaking the bank because when i'm up at my fish shack and stuff and it's super warm but you got to bring a sleeping bag i like just a summer weight bag but they don't charge any money for those anyways right so i don't even

think you need that synthetic summer weight bag i feel like you can just rock your 15 or 20 degree bag but open i use that in the summer that's okay that's what you use so run it like a blanket i've done that yeah yeah um so meanwhile we while you were out there did you got the dates were you hunting were you hunting whitetails at the same time when was he hunting i was in uh say the seventh no i went in the 10th okay so that's when i ended my hunt yeah i hunted from the first through the tenth no snow i was down way down the valley the other side of the state yeah it's funny these two things that mark canyon's deal and your deal would be in the same state because you're like hunting bighorns at 11 000 feet 11 000 feet and marks out in the badlands ish badlandish yeah that sort of

appearance yeah it's hot and low chasing whitetails and what was going on what was your deal well i was hunting montana first and then if i could fill my montana tag i was going to go over north dakota and try to fill a tag over there. You just got little spots. Public land. How many states do you have little whitetail spots in? Oh, geez. Five, six, seven.

Something like that. I usually hunt Michigan, Ohio, and either Indiana or Illinois or Nebraska or Iowa, one of those states, usually those three states every year, some cycle there. And then I've been adding in a western state every year. A new western one. But I love Montana, so I've been hitting that the last three years.

Do you ever go out and hunt whitetails in Wyoming? No, but I want to. I've looked at it. I have some ideas of where to go. You don't hunt any public land in Michigan, do you? No, I do. You do? Southern Michigan?

Southern and northern, yeah. I've got some southern land stuff that I hit on days when the conditions aren't great to go into my really good areas. I'm trying to wait for the right times to hit that stuff, but I still want to hunt. There's a couple pieces of public land that I kind of dive in and try aggressive tactics that I wouldn't normally try. What kind of public land? Administered dive in and try like aggressive tactics that I wouldn't normally try. What kind of public land? I'm, you know what? Administered by who? Yeah, like county stuff.

Okay. We used to hunt some public land in Michigan that wasn't even really that public. It was like a property owned by a township. So nothing you're looking at is ever going to say like, hey, go here. You just got to know it. There's no like, if you go to a state website and they're like, here's places to hunt, it's not going to name. Yeah. It was a township where someone had at one point, I don't understand how this works.

Someone had at one point in time came in and they surveyed the whole thing. We're going to break it up into lots. And this is on a lake. They're going to break it up into lots. I don't know how it happened, but it fell back into the township's hands. And we hunted waterfowl on it, trapped turtles on it shot a lot of ducks off it there were deer on it hunted squirrels on it public land but kind of like no one locals treated it publicly but it was not like a destination public land onyx opening up open up everyone's eyes that

kind of stuff right yeah but it doesn't interpret it for you, though. You might look and be like, that's Township. We went down and asked the Township. The Township had a commissioner. And we went down there and said, what is up with this? And he kind of said, I can't tell you not to go on it. I can't tell you to go on it, but I can't really tell you not to go on it. And we took that to be, go ahead.

Yeah. We took that to be the welcome invite. Yeah, that's reasonable. So you chase them on county land? And some state land up north. We've got my little family deer camp, it's a little 40-acre piece, but it's surrounded by state forest.

So I grew up hunting that state forest, just roaming around the swamps, and that was this huge wilderness to me as a kid but you haven't gotten at michigan yet this year no it hasn't opened up yet october 1st yep they still run the october 1st opener they do that's just a few days away i'm excited been looking at cameras you're heading out there now yeah after this i'm gonna get in the truck and drive 24 hours back home. And three days from now or four days from now, get after those whitetails and home. And what happened?

I mean, I know how your Montana deal went down, but explain the whole, like what your situation was. Yeah, so this was a piece of public land east side of montana um basically what i look for when i'm finding these spots is is public land that is either adjacent to or intersects with a river with a river corridor so looking for those riparian areas where there's that great cover and food that these whitetails need in these arid areas and what's kind of cool about western whitetail hunting versus at home is at home the whitetail habitat is spread out over everywhere these deer are all over the place in montana or wyoming or colorado or the dakotas it's it's kind of crammed down into these smaller corridors so you can't amazing i noticed that in my house i mean there's like a distinct line where it's like below that line that's where the whitetails live and above that line is where the mule deers when i'm sitting in my new house

we got whitetails zigzagging across our yard and last night we uh with the spot and scope we glassed up two like impressive mule deer bucks up above our house nice you got anyone white to hunt in your backyard yet it wouldn't go over it wouldn't go over i about saw our car about hunting one this morning oh man um about our car about tagged out yeah morning, though, man. Our car about tagged out. Yeah, it'll happen. But yeah, so over the years, I've found a handful of different little spots like this. And this is a spot that I'd gone and scouted and shed hunted this spring, looked it over real good, found a lot of antlers, liked the looks of it. When you're out there, are you seeing other tree stands, other trail cams?

No, not at all. It was very different than back home. And again, I think it's because people here don't care about whitetails. It's Mark's untouched whitetail paradise in eastern Montana. Do you ever feel like weird that pig in mud? Yeah. It's great because everyone thinks these are little like rats running around their farms, and I'm just the happiest kid in the candy store yeah i've heard them called that they call them like field

rats or prairie rats or something like that so i've never seen another tree stand in north dakota i saw tree stands but in the money the dudes were like hey what are you doing what are you after i do express surprise yeah oh really white tails there's elk there's elk there's elk up there i'm like oh no you got it all wrong sonny at three years ago i bumped into two guys whitetail hunting the same section i was hunting they were just walking around it with their bows um and then they saw me a tree and hey and they turned their belly crawling on them just yeah i mean they weren't to that point yet but they were upright you do that you don't do that I haven't, but more people are testing the waters with that,

and it's intriguing to me. I've been seeing more folks chase whitetails on the ground and showing that it's certainly possible with a bow. So it's something that I'm thinking about experimenting a little bit more with. I've been trying a lot of new things. I'm going to be doing a bunch of new things this year as far as that kind of stuff, using some different gear to get in the tree. We can talk about that later.

But instead of tree stands, I've been shifting to a tree saddle, which has been something really interesting that helps a lot with the public land kind of stuff I do. So, yeah. So you came out and shed hunted this spot. Yeah. As a scout and measure. Yep. Walked it, found antlers, confirmed what I thought from maps and from previous times,

kind of walking around the area. And what I really like to find is, like I said, this public land that intersects with that riparian area. But if it's particularly hard to get to in one way or another, that's, of course, something that is a benefit to any public land hunter, right? You guys talk about that with elk and mule deer same thing with whitetails it's just that the bar for being hard to get to is much lower for a whitetail hunter so a mile mile and a half walk it's like most whitetail guys just won't do that i'm not saying that they won't but just typically it doesn't happen yeah and it winds up being like because in that type of hunting too

you have a lot of guys that are going out after work going out in the morning you just kind of want to get up and, right? Yeah, it's not like all expedition-style hunting. It could be counterproductive because it's like... They don't care. Yeah, the whitetails aren't necessarily living five miles away from the high-replant site. Park your car. So the two spots that I, in particular, was interested in getting after on this trip one of them you had a piece of public

land that was from the road to a river and then that piece of public land that was not very productive it was grazed over no cover um didn't seem that the deer used it much except for grazed over by cattle yeah and sheep um i didn't think that they were using it except for... Not bighorns. These are like the boshy. Field rats. Yes, the true field rats. And they weren't using this area in daylight. Maybe crossing it at night, but it wasn't going to be a spot I'd want to hunt. But there was a piece of landlocked public land back behind some private land that you could get to if you walked that river.

So we talked about this the other day, but the basic gist of this situation was I assumed that with the stream access laws in Montana, you could walk that river to get past the private land and hunt the public land. After talking to some people, hearing some different ideas on this, it sounds like there were some gray areas around that, whether or not I can legally use the public waterway to get to the public land so i had gotten permission from this private landowner whose land was around the public in the spring to shed hunt it and scout it and everything coming into the hunting season i called him again a week ahead of time just to confirm hey is it still okay that i walk the river to get to this public land that's tucked behind yours he expressed you know that no not now not now and you're not saying i want to hunt your place you're saying to him i'm not hunting your place i'm passing through exactly and not and i'm not even going to be on your ground i'm literally going to walk the i'm going to walk in the river i'm going to wade to the river below the below the banks no deer are going to hear me

see me smell me i'm not going to mess up anyone else's hunting. I'm just going to walk the river, step up into the public land. Any beaver sign in that river? Not much, surprisingly. Make tracks? Nope. Didn't see anything like that. You ever kill whitetail deer, Kurt? Yeah, I have.

I was living over in the western part of the state where I grew up. Have you done that out there? On the western side of the state? That grew up. Have you done that out there? On the western side of the state? Yeah. Dude, that's like White Hill Central, man. We go up by my sister-in-law's place. It's like nasty thick.

But people can rattle in. People rattle in big giants over there. Well, my trip next year. That's what you need to go do. I want to next year do a backpacking White Hill hunt in like northwestern Montana or Northern Idaho. Backpacking to some of that stuff and chase whitetails. Dude, I would so happily go.

And I know some. Let's do it. I got some hot tips, hot leads. I think that would be really cool. Okay, so go on. No beaver sign. Yeah, no beaver sign. Kirk got a whitetail.

Kirk got a whitetail. I got permission in the spring, but in the fall when I called back, it was like, probably not. I've got family that's going to be hunting his property. So kind of threw me for a tail hunt whitetails hunt whitetails yes they have a like a grandson or son-in-law or something like that who does like to hunt whitetails um and what's is he a wired to hunt fan i don't know i didn't go that far um but what's cool what's what makes this piece of public great i already mentioned the first in the riparian area number two it's hard to get to because to get to it you have to do this long hike down the first piece then you have to take half mile down this river

the third thing that's great about it is that on the private land is food the best food source all around these big alfalfa fields so you've got irrigated alfalfa irrigated alfalfa fields so tons of deer coming in to feed on that private land and this public land is really nicely tucked right behind that basically and they're bedding up and what they're bedding in uh like russian olive bushes and some intermittent cottonwood groves you know have you seen this down there because i've seen this in that part of the state where they're actually going up into the canyons hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes and our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers

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Yeah. To bed. See, I didn't see that in this area, but I was pretty far from the canyon walls. Like the area I was hunting, it was wide enough at that point. You point those areas where the sandstone bluffs come down and actually form like yeah like classic like rock wall yeah because we've been in hunting mule deer and have sat at night and watched whitetails come out of the juniper and ponderosa

and there's these little like canyons they're got the bottoms got green ash and come out at night and just do these long treks down and to hit that riparian stuff and then come up through the sagebrush and shit and filter up into these little canyons to go to bed at night they're incredibly adaptable animals it is amazing the different types of areas they can make work in this area there was so much concentrated cover right there along the river that they were just packed in there. So this public was kind of really nicely settled right behind the food, kind of in the midst of the bedding, but a bit of a transition from the best bedding to the food. So long story short on all this is that I ended up being worried

that I wasn't going to have any more permission. So I was looking at the maps, trying to find a few other spots. But when I showed up, went and talked to the landowner, had a really nice conversation with him and his wife. And this is, you know, it's okay. Our family isn't going to be now here for another week or two. Were you greasing some palms? No, I was just, no grease and palms, just having a nice, friendly chat. Just a nice boy, nice, wholesome a nice boy nice wholesome boy nice wholesome boy showing pictures of your baby uh yeah i did oh come on man really you got manipulative no it just came up in conversation i'm not gonna hold that back he really wants his daddy to come back with a deer yeah he's home starving doctor says you can't eat anything but deer meat i don't know how i did it but some way or another i did get permission um and yeah and i was really excited about that because i had all those

things going for it and then you didn't have to be looking over your shoulder like we're talking yeah you don't want to do that i didn't want to do anything great means i when i was a younger man gray meant go now gray means man i don't know yeah it's not i just hate that feeling not worth it i hate the feeling yeah i 100 agree so it was great to get that green light feel really good about that so i was just camped off the road my truck sleeping the back of my truck camping there and then every day would go and hunt these deer and the fourth thing that was so good about this area was that that river allowed you almost perfect access and

exit without notifying deer that there was a human hunter in there at all because i could get into that river i was like four feet below the banks so i would walk that riverbed leaving no scent because i'm in the water almost the whole time couldn't even find you yeah no one thing and um and then basically i'm able to hop right up on shore and get up in a tree. So you're wearing chest waders? Hip waders. I bought, I was stupid, I bought like $15 packable waders. Did you buy wiggies?

No, they're Hodgman's or something. That's where you went wrong, man. Yeah, I guess so. You gotta buy wiggies for Easter socks. I don't know, for that long of a hike, I don't know if they would've. Yeah, but you put them in your pocket. You know what those are.

Oh, yeah, You got one. The ones without the feet, the one for the plastic boots, but I've also seen. Oh, because then, yeah. That probably lets them last a long time. Yeah, yeah. They last for a long time. What we're talking about is, have we covered this before? We must have talked about it in our dull sheep hunt recap.

Yeah, explain them. It's basically just, it looks like an oversized sock that comes all the way up to your crotch almost. And it's just got, at the top end of it, it's got a little clip that goes around your belt. And the bottom has just a very thin rudimentary sort of sole but they're big and baggy enough that you can just slip them right over your boots so every time you get to a stream crossing you just pull them out of your pack we were crossing the stream so

much we were we were just hanging them off our shoulder strap and we'd get there throw them on take five or ten steps to get across the stream and then you know take them off and put them back on yeah and they roll up like way smaller than a nerf football yeah they're probably a pound pound and a half what's the the fabric or what what's it made of it's a 70d nylon i think some of them there you go yeah it's it got the product yeah no there's a couple of uh sometimes they use a 210 nylon, some of them are a 70D, depends on which ones you get.

And then I believe they use, it's a full urethane coating is what they create the. So it's reasonably strong stuff. Yeah. You wouldn't want to bushwhack through a bunch of beaver chewed sticks with them, that's for sure.

The guy that we bought them from said, if you just leave them on and just start and hike up the you know stream bed crossing the stream and then hike on dry rocks for a while you're gonna put holes in them quick so i got something kind of like that but it must be the the much less quality version of that this is 15 on amazon basically it was like an oversight garbage bag that I slid up both my legs. I've done that too. Contractor bags? Well, yeah. Kind of essentially that's what it was. You can get a lot of miles out of crossing creeks

on contractor bags. Probably more than I got out of the east. It was that deep though, huh? You needed it up to your hips. Yeah, their spots were up to your hips and I ripped it the very first crossing. I ripped a big hole in it. Then the rest of that night, I had to just wade through it and filling it with water. I was like, well, okay.

So I got soaked that first night. Had to drive an hour and a half to the nearest town the next day and bought hip waders. Oh, then you bought hip waders. Yeah, good hip waders, like those irrigator ones. Yeah, I'm with you. Casey, climb up out of the creek, no smell, all nice and dry. All nice and dry. All nice and dry. No beaver sign.

Slip up into your spot. Are you carrying a tree stand around on your back? Yeah, so usually I've got a tree stand and climbing sticks that I bring with me, which are basically like a big metal stick that's got three steps on it. You strap that to the tree, climb up, strap another one to the tree, climb up. But this year, like I said, instead of the tree stand i've got this saddle which is kind of like a rock climber's harness or like a arborist harness yeah um and then so i attach these sticks to the tree so i can climb up to 15 20 feet or whatever and then i attach a rope with a prusik knot on the end of it

that basically allows me to adjust the height of this clip. Suicide Prusik or double Prusik? I don't know. It's pre-tied. Two wraps on top and two wraps on bottom? I don't know. Pre-tied. I didn't pay too much attention to it. Oh, it's pre-tied.

I got you. Yeah, it's all part of it. We had a big conversation about this the other day. When I used to do arborist work, like when you tie a Prusik, if you look at it, it's got like four wraps. Two wraps above and two wraps below. When I used to do tree climbing work,

you would just do two below and one above, and you could control it with your thumb. The slightest amount of thumb pressure would open the knot, and you'd... like fast. You're supposed to do two wraps, then you've got to forcibly pull the rope through the knot but the guy i worked for would call it a suicide knot he didn't like it but it was just

really nice because it's just like a little flick your thumb that knot would open up and you're you know this would have been definitely been two on top two on bottom i'm only bringing this up because we were just discussing this because the same knot is great for tightening tent guidelines. Yeah, I can see that. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, so basically you've got to just clip into this thing, and then your knees are up against the tree,

and then you're just kind of hanging, sitting. Not just like legs falling asleep and stuff up there? No. You've got a platform that your feet can sit on. So there's a couple different options people do some people just keep their they have their climbing stick pegs there at the at the foot level or they'll put in a handful of other steps around the tree or you can attach a small platform so what i was using is you're basically a tree stand a cast aluminum i think tree stand type platform, but a tiny

miniature version of that. So instead of like a 30 inch long tree stand platform, this is like eight inches by 10 inches, this little tiny thing that you can attach to the tree that just gives you someone to keep your feet. And it gives you like a pivot point to allow you then to pivot in different directions around the tree. So I could shoot almost 360 degrees anywhere around this tree, spinning around, leaning left, leaning right, um, all the time. You had to practice a lot out of this thing, huh? I did practice a little bit. Yeah. But it was, it was much more intuitive and comfortable than I had even expected. And so instead of going in there with, you know, let's say a 10 or 12 pound pack of sticks and then a 12 pound or 13 pound tree stand plus my camera gear, plus my backpack, plus my bow, range finder, all that other stuff.

Instead of that, I'm able to cut like 13 pounds right off the gate without carrying that tree stand in. Um, so it's much lighter weight hiking in much less work getting set up in the tree and, um, comfortable. And so that first night was the first time I ever hunted in it, was that first night of the season in Montana. And snuck in there, got up into a tree, and was in this spot where I thought, based off what I'd seen in the past, walking around, seeing this area, these deer were going to transition from that Russian olive type brush

where they were bedded through this small little open cotton woody Grove towards the private land where that food was behind me. And, uh, that's what happened. Basically I was, you know, while I was getting set up in the tree,

I had two small year and a half old bucks come by. And then over the course of the night, just deer after deer, after deer flooding out of there. Squirrels like that Russian olive. Yeah. Eat it. I believe it.

Did you see fox squirrels in there? Yeah. I mean, I saw a little bit of, I'm sure I saw squirrels. I don't know if I paid enough attention to say what they were, but. If you saw.

You're going to have to correct that. I'm not a squirrel guy. No. I'm not a skunk guy, but if I see a skunk, I'm like, I register it. There were so many white tails in there.

That was all I could focus on. You weren't registering squirrels. No. No, it's a non-native plant. It's a real deleterious plant. I have heard about that that it was brought in like the depression era wasn't it it's fast growing you can make wind rolls out of it i think that was what but uh it's you know it's displacing native trees yeah and it's just yeah it's like a it's all over the place out there

on the preparing squirrels like it but the deer love it on the prairie. A lot of squirrels like it. But the deer love it too. And I saw a lot of deer, and eventually, almost in the same couple minutes, a mature buck, a group of five bucks came by on one side of me, including one mature buck that I would have tried to take, and then behind me another mature buck, both about 80 yards on either side of me. And no one out there hunting? Nobody else out there hunting. It's my little playground.

And they look all summery. Yeah, because most of them are still in velvet, still have their summer coat, kind of orangey coat. Beautiful. I mean, it's neat to be out there in the woods at that point when you're seeing deer like that. Makes their antlers look big. Makes their antlers look really big. Because their necks are thin.

They don't have any puffy hair on. They look strange. Their faces look kind of emaciated yeah and i know they're fat and happy and that time you're so so fun because these deer aren't such a consistent pattern you know they're they're gonna bed and go to feed they're gonna bed they're gonna go to feed that's basically all they do because they're not playing grab ass they're not playing grab ass they are very comfortable because they haven't been hunted yet it's the very beginning of the season so you can really see this deer acting very naturally going about their everyday life and They're not playing grab ass. They are very comfortable because they haven't been hunted yet. It's the very beginning of the season. So you can really see these deer acting very naturally, going about their everyday life.

And that's just fun from a deer enthusiast. Like I just love watching these critters. Getting to be in that kind of situation and seeing deer do deer things, you know, rather than back home in Michigan and by the time you get to late October, these are deer that feel like they're in the middle of a war zone that are hardly moving in daylight at all. And you're not going to see mature bucks hardly at all or anything like that. They're all nocturnal. Out here, I'm seeing four and five and six-year-old bucks happily hanging out, playing with each other, sparring, doing different things.

That's just neat. So I was enjoying it from that perspective. You're painting a compelling picture. It's not that great. You should not come out and hunt Montana for whitetails. All that said, it sucks. It sucks pretty bad. But yeah, the basic gist of that first night was that I saw a couple nice bucks

that I would have gotten a shot at if I could have been close enough, but they were out of range. So I snuck out that night after everything had passed through and had a game plan for the next day. And the issue, though, was that the next day I had a wind direction that would have been blowing into that bedding area. And I knew this spot's so good, I wanted to go back in there right away. I'd seen all these bucks. I knew if I moved my stand, but I moved where I hunting like 60 yards farther north to where most of those

deer came by i thought i'd be able to get a shot i was pretty confident you still have the wind be good well if the wind was good i could move 60 yards up there but wind wasn't good that takes restraint man it takes restraint to bag it because the wind's bad yeah and it was yeah it was tough like i so badly wanted to go back in there i'd'd seen so many deer. I was like, this is such a honey hole, but I just knew if you wait till the conditions are right, you will kill a deer there. If you go back in there tomorrow and just hope to get lucky, you're going to, you're gonna mess it up. So I said, nope, I'm not going to go to that honey hole. There was one other piece of public I'd seen on the maps that looked pretty good and I hadn't been to ever before. I thought, well, I'm going to give this

other spot a rest, wait till the wind's right. I'm going to go check out this new spot. And this new spot kind of had all the same things going for it that night number one spot did. It was along the riparian corridor. It was hard to get to, and it was tucked behind private land that had food on it. But what made this one hard to get to versus the first was that rather than walking a river i had to walk more than a mile up on top of this big bluff and then go down one of those steep nasty canyons like you were talking about like basically sliding down this canyon i had to bring tent poles because i didn't have trucking sticks or anything so i had poles like uh like a tarp pole yeah so it was not ideal but it's all i had and i was like well i need something to give me some kind of support as i'm sliding down this so got down in this not so bad that

you needed to repel in not so bad to repel in but that would have been sweet that would have been that's next year um but got down in this canyon got in this little piece of public land again and same kind of deal they were deer bedded back in this public russian olive cotton wood brush they would transition through this little piece of public out towards that private land with the alfalfa um but again wasn't right close enough so i did see another mature buck that i would have shot at if i could have but he was about 120 yards away a bunch of does some little bucks um not quite as much action as the first night but again it was i felt good like i've got a second i've got a second big huge giant buck uh not a big huge giant like when he got

i'd say similar okay in that like definitely you know three four five year old somewhere in that he was probably four or five years old and um he was a 10 pointer kind of tight and tall like 130s somewhere around there maybe 140 if we're if we care about score at all you're like that's a nice ball there's a buck yeah i mean it was a buck like oh yeah yeah um so it's cool to see that too far away so then i waited till they all went through way till after dark till everything had transitioned off to those private fields, snuck out of there again. Now I know I've got two different spots I can work with. So depending on wind direction, whatever other conditions might change,

I can adjust now. You're hunting by yourself? Yep. Yep. Just car camping by yourself? Just car camping, sleep in the bed of the truck, make a little hot dog on the grill at night, drink a beer, pass out. Don't you wish you had a story like this, Kurt?

That sounds nice. And there's this one ram that's coming and there's all these rams coming by me and hot dogs and some more rams. Yeah. It's a different situation. Couldn't decide which ram I wanted to go after.

Yeah. We could go on for a while with the juxtapositions here. Oh, yeah. Same state. Very, very different experiences. So then what happened? So next day, the wind was right for the first area. So now I'm going back to the honey hole.

Honey hole number one. Going back to honey hole number one, and I now have learned something since the first night. I know that the majority of these deer weren't traveling through the middle of this kind of transition. The majority of them were working this edge along the northern spot so i snuck back in there this time with the better waders because i had to go down and get the good waders and knowing that i want to go set up in a new tree snuck in there got in there pretty early hanging your tree in a cotton hanging your sling in a cottonwood yep cottonwood andwood. And got set up, same kind of deal as the first night.

These deer were moving pretty early in the day. They were very comfortable. Dude, yeah, the video you have of you shooting the buck you shot looks like 100 degrees out, middle of the damn day. Yeah, so I'm not going to talk, that's day four. We're still on day three. I'm just jumping ahead. But yeah, each day was warm. I'm just saying, it looks like daytime. But yeah, each day was warm. I'm just saying it looks like daytime.

Yep. All this activity was happening. Daytime, pretty warm. And again, it comes down to these were comfortable, not very hunted deer. Yeah. And I was kind of secretly able to get pretty far back in their movement pattern. Right? So these deer were moving past me relatively early in the day because they still

had another couple hundred yards to get to the wide open field where they're going to feed um so most of my it was getting dark like 8 30 or something like that maybe or 8 50 at night it was getting dark and these deer were coming the majority of the action i was seeing was between like 5 45 and 6 45 so several hours before dark they were passing by me and then making their way out to these fields so that night got in there here come the deer started seeing some young bucks some does but i was a little worried because the first group of deer i was seeing they actually cut in they were heading right towards me but then about 60 yards before they got to where i was going to be they cut into this russian olive stuff and kind of skirted inside

away from me just out of range in this thick stuff and i'm thinking in my head in my head i'm like gosh is that what those deer did the night before and my memory was just wrong did i set up 30 yards away from like the perfect spot and i'm gonna have another night here frustrated seeing all these deer go just out of range so for the the last first half hour sitting there kicking myself and thinking, should I just pull everything down and move 30 yards? But there's already deer moving all over the place. Decided to stick it out. And glad I did because around 615 or something along those lines,

I'm looking over my left shoulder trying to see if there's anything behind me. And when I turn back, there's a big giant buck at 15 yards right in front of me in my main shooting lane right there um came i fall asleep no no i was looking this way and then turn around he's there looking at you no just kind of waltzing through and this is like full velvet big like a tall tine kind of curling in great big giant 10 pointer um beautiful deer and it was a situation instantly knew oh yeah that's that's a buck i'd like to get a shot at um the issue was that you know he what he must have done is he must have come out of that russian olive and there was one big bush in front of me at about 20 yards and if that deer came from the left or right of that bush, I would have seen him. But if he came in on that direct line where the bush was in between,

I would never know until he was right there. That must be what happened. I see him there. Two other nice bucks come behind him. It's a bachelor group of these three bucks. He's right there. He'd be the ideal shot. When I planned this all out, when I sat in that tree,

I was like, this is where I want to get a shot at. Well, that's where when i sat in that chair i was like this is where i want to get a shot at well that's where he was right now but he was there before i was holding my bow before anything so i see him register okay that's that's a buck i want to get shot at and at the same time i try to grab my bow spin into position and turn my camera on and swing the camera around to get film of him. Wired on. Yeah, wired on. And of course, I was not able to do that fast enough before he got behind some branches and I couldn't get a shot. I was like trying to weasel my way.

Can I spin around a little more and like slip it through some of these branches? But I knew that I wasn't going to risk some kind of walking shot. He didn't spook. He walked right in and was just kind of like, I think if I wasn't going to risk some kind of long shot. He didn't spook. He walked right in and was just kind of like, I think if I remember right, he started coming straight at me. These other two bucks with him did come directly to my tree stand or my tree, my steps.

And we're like sniffing around underneath there. Um, and eventually one of them caught wind of something that they didn't quite like. And one of them bolted, they didn't blow, they didn't really freak out, but the one bolted and that caused the other two to kind of bounce off and they stopped kind of looked around and then just walked away but no shot opportunity and that

was frustrating you know had a great public land buck there in range close encounter couldn't make it happen um but that's how it goes and then the salt in the wound at the end of the night was that the mature buck that I had seen walk by this spot the first night the reason why I had moved to this new area he goes walking by where I sat the first night at the end of the evening so again I had seen two different nice shooter bucks

that was day three any questions on day three? no day four I appreciate you guys hearing about my whole long whitetail story it's not nearly as adventurous as kurt's uh big mountain trip but no it's actually yeah there's more exciting we're gonna talk about here in the show notes we're gonna post all these gps waypoints oh great so day four a cold front hits so it's going from like 80 and 90 i think that day like day three was like 90s and now cold front was hitting overnight it was going to drop 20 to 30

degrees so the next day day four is going to be a high of i think in the 60s so i knew this front's passing this is going to get the deer moving even earlier i believed this there's it's been great action already but this should ramp up even more cold fronts are one of those things that more consistently than any other factor will get white till on their feet and moving so you guys because they get cold i don't think it's because they get cold i think it's um probably because there's some kind of biological drive like you gotta start packing on the food yeah just triggered something like that um so whatever it might be i figured they'd be moving earlier so i'd been like i mentioned seeing most of the activity like 545 to 645 somewhere around there so i've been getting

into the tree like five on this day i was like i should get in there at least an hour and a half earlier than that just in case so that's like six hours before dark kind of ridiculous for early season whitetail hunting you never see that kind of activity early in the day but it's been great i better make sure i'm covering my butt so sneak in there get to that tree at 3 30 in the afternoon i'm up in the tree at 3 35 settled my camera's set my bow's set i'm comfortable i grab a bottle a bottle of water because it's still a good hike, and there was like a mile and a half hike. Otter nuts in there. Yeah.

Still no squirrels, though. I can't say one way or another confidently. I just don't. I would think. See, Dirk can talk. At least you know what kind of tree you were sitting in. Pat Durkin talked about whitetail guys get so focused on one thing whitetails that they be that they that they have blinders to the rest of the world do you feel that you're guilty of that i'm

guilty of that to a degree i'm aware of the things that are of that are relevant to the hunt like i'm so i'm aware of the types of trees that deer like to feed on like i'm aware of the types of trees that they're more likely to rub on i'm aware of the types of plant life that i'm focused on because i know that deer will be feeding on this if you saw a raccoon would you register it i'd probably register yeah i'll register most animals with squirrels i feel like are just a kind of kind of what i don't know they're beneath my radar i guess not not in like a not like beneath me but i just like there's so many of them usually i can't trigger well but you're in a you're in the transition zone you're in the transition zone where does not in this place i'm hunting montana

you're just in the area where they start to where where they you know they're they're in the major riparian corridors, nosing westward. Okay. It's like an incomplete map. Yes, that's true. It's just good to know. When I get back, I will. Do you register cottontails? Yeah, I see a cottontail.

Jump a cottontail, it'll click in your mind. Yeah, I'd be like, oh, there's a rabbit. Okay. Yeah. Turkeys. You register that. Oh, for sure, I register turkeys. You register that.

He'd probably just come back and say, I saw six mammals over three pounds. Under 20. Yeah, but when you're seeing like 60 mammals over three pounds or over 100 pounds, the little two pounders just kind of hard to keep track of. Okay. Well, I'm just requesting for next time that when doing this sort of thing you don't need to tell me if you saw them in michigan because they're they're omnipresent but i'm just requesting that in in these just keep a mental note duly

noted i will put that in the to-do list next time around so there you are there are nuts three grab a sip of water 3 35 in the afternoon grab a sip of water assuming that i'm gonna have some time here to kind of just relax yeah and while i'm in it and i lost my main nalgene water bottle on one of these hikes back and forth so the only water bottle i had was one of those great big steel yeti ramblers yeah and so i'm in my head like this is stupid to be bringing this out in the woods just because it's big and flashy so in my head i was like well i'll have a couple sips right now. I'm not going to pull it out when there's going to be deer moving around or anything.

But take this big swig, and mid-swig, I catch moving out of the left of my eye, 337, here's this big giant buck walking right towards me. Just out messing around. Doing something. It looked in my head, the first thing I thought, I saw the frame of antlers that that's that same buck from yesterday he does not have velvet anymore so he peeled his velvet rubbed it all off overnight in in the moment that's what's thinking in retrospect probably wouldn't have happened that fast but in my head i'm like that much this must be that same deer had the same kind of tall tines curving in um tall brow tines and so i'm not gonna

let that same thing that happened yesterday happen where i wasn't quick enough to get ready so he's coming in i throw the water bottle in my backpack grab my bow turn the camera on spin around get into the position all the while he's slowly kind of walking in and he walks into 15 yards um i mean i couldn't have asked for a better situation and got a shot of him at like yeah 15 and he goes running off and i got an air in public land buck just like that 337 in the afternoon the video is funny because you could you could like the camera thing is funny yeah zoomed way

out and the self-filming self-filming a white town like that's kind of tricky oh it's a whole other deal man yeah but i got him on foot i got on film it's not like beautiful footage or anything but serves the purpose i thought it was great yeah that was a good video but he looks pretty far away that was a nice shot mark definitely wasn't that far what do i need to do just go to uh wired to hunt.com yeah well i'd go to the youtube channel maybe go check that out um it's on the media.com too um and there's a series i did a video every day of that hunt so each day i i showcased what i was doing throughout that day so there's one two three and then day four and five i put in one video at the end because double feature double feature because i shot this buck um and the shot looked pretty good like in my

mind's eye looked pretty good i looked at the footage because it's so zoomed out you couldn't really tell but it looked like it was probably the back of lungs is where i thought the shot was that that's one nice thing about having film stuff it doesn't make it worth it in and of itself but it's a nice thing if we have a film of stuff to analyze yeah huge so based off that i thought to myself well i'm gonna give just just give him a 45 minutes an hour just to be safe and then i'll go down there and look around check for blood do some of that and so that all happened and then i got to thinking well i'm a mile and a half away from the truck i don't have like my buck burrito

i have this like sled that i can use the hells of that thing why not just cut them up carry them out i should have done that but as a michigan guy like we just don't i wouldn't i didn't know and in retrospect of course you can do that because you can do that with elk or mule deer or whatever but in some states back east you're not supposed to do that um so in just my head it was like i'm just gonna drag it out like you always do i saw that little thing you had a little deer dragger yeah so it's just basically kind of like a plastic sold for that purpose yeah it was like 15 bucks i was gonna buy just a sled and then when i looked for a sled on amazon that popped up specifically called like deer dragger and sled or something yeah you get

one of those otter sleds yeah um so i decided to hike back to the truck get that, unload all my gear that I don't need, change into some lighter weight clothes come back in did all that, got back in that night started trying to look for blood the condensed version of this is that I could not find blood that night started kind of body searching

into that thick stuff where I thought he must be I last saw him go into this Russian olive I couldn't believe that he could go too much further but nothing so after dark finally got to the point where it just seemed to be fruitless to keep on walking in there I can't see more than 10 yards in front of me resweating it I was really stressed yeah I was pretty upset um because it just looked like such a slam dunk that I thought for sure that buck would be tipping over just inside the brush and he'd be right there because he ran I watched him run for a couple hundred yards through this open transition. So I was shocked to see that he wasn't down so soon.

Came back in the next morning, first thing, first light. And still couldn't find blood at the shot site, just a tiny little bit. And then after that, no blood trail. I went to the last spot i saw him again and i'd watch the video and i was okay i'm pretty sure he went in front of this tree but behind this bush so i went to that area and then just started walking back and forth just staring at the ground trying to see anything and i did end up finding blood now i have a little bit of a unique situation in that i've got a little bit of red green color blindness so red doesn't

pop as much to me as my buddies. So I'll be blood trailing with a friend. They're like, oh, yeah, blood, blood, blood, blood. And I'm like, oh, yeah, oh, yeah. I have to get down and really look at it. So now for me... You need it to look like the Manson murders before you... For it to be a really easy blood track.

So I found now I look more for the shape of a blood splatter or the glimmer of that little fluid glare. Yeah, the sheen. Yeah, the sheen. Then I spot that kind of stuff. Then I can see, oh yeah, that's red blood. It's a little bit more difficult for me, a little bit slower process. Maybe someone else would have spotted all this blood faster than I did.

I eventually got it. I was able to follow a small blood trail of about 80 to 100 yards. That kind of pointed me into the brush the right way. So now I had a better idea of what his trajectory was. It dried up again, though. Spent the next several hours then circling out from there, trying to find more blood or find him. And it was just that, like you said, that thick, nasty Russian olive stuff crawling around on all fours for most of the time to get underneath it because just deer tunnels through there.

And after four, five, six hours that morning doing that, I stumbled on him. Lo and behold. Lo and behold, there he was. Now, did it look like he had tipped over or curled up? He was tipped over. He wasn't curled up. But I don't know if it was a situation where he was he maybe he had been there for a while i'm not sure i don't know how long it took um but he definitely wasn't like

curled up bedded he was laying there like he just fell was it a cool night it was a cool night but he wasn't all like super stiff and rigor mortis like you see in many cases so the meat was still good the meat was still good i was worried about still good. I was worried about that. Have you tasted it yet? No. It was a situation where it was really hot that day when I found him, and I was worried about that. So I found him. By that time, it was already, I don't know,

11.30 or noon or something in, I don't know, 70s or 80s. And then it took a very long time to get him out of there, drag him through the river, get him up those steep riverbanks. I had to develop a pulley system with ropes to get them up and over the bank. You need to develop a system with a knife and a backpack. Right. Yeah, lesson learned.

We can help you out with that. Yeah. In retrospect, I made things much harder for myself. Because you're not going to drive home with them whole anyway. No. The thing is you can't drive home with them. You can't cross state lines or anything with cwd and all that too um but got them out of there got them cleaned up and what did the uh necropsy reveal of your uh shot placement it was back of lungs

it ended up being a slightly quartering two shot so in retrospect i hadn't realized he was a little bit quartering to me so that shot nicked the back of the lungs liver and then the front of the stomach just a little nick off the front of the stomach and then that exit wound was plugged up with like some of that stuff um and so i think that led to why he was able to go much further than i expected you know those single lung hits at least for whitetails, are notorious for being, it should be, it's a shot you think that deer would die, but many times they don't or they go much further than you think.

So it's kind of one of those dreaded shots that you hear about a lot. Oh yeah, and elk on one lungs, I feel like they'll go miles. Yeah. So I was fortunate he didn't go too far. I found him. It was a little bit of luck

and a little bit of persistence probably. And I was fortunate he didn't go too far. I found him. It was a little bit of luck and a little bit of persistence probably. And I was really, I mean, it was a great public land buck, really fun hunt. So it was great. Then headed to North Dakota. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew.

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. What'd you do with your deer? So, because of that warm weather, I dropped him off at the processor. So he got it frozen? He got frozen. I figured just get him in the fridge right away,

and then I could go meet up with my friend who was across the border hunting the other spot. We had some, with that elk I just got, it was hot, we lost a little meat, not a little, we lost meat. And then I got home and I was just like,

man, I just got to dive in and eat some just to find out what I'm dealing with. Yeah. Because I need to set my mind at ease. How was it?

Well, I took a huge chunk of it and corned it because I wanted to be like, Don't you feel like that's going to mask? Well, that's the thing. So here's the thing, I'll work backward from there. So I went to an extreme... Don't you feel like that's going to mask? Well, that's the thing.

So here's the thing. I'll work backward from there. So I went to an extreme because if it's a little bit sour, I don't, you know, it's like you just got a tough, like there's a point at which you're like, yeah, it's a little bit sour,

but not enough to warrant. So as soon as I corned it, looking phenomenal. So now I'll, like I know that, that'll work, right? Like you damn sure know

that you can make like sausage sticks out of it. You can probably make regular sausage out of it. I know that I can corn it and now I'll begin exploring, right, to the point where you're, you know, the end of the rope would be

that you're cutting sashimi slices and putting like a little bit of coarse sea salt on it and eating it. But rather than starting there and having a disappointing experience, I started at, what will I know will be good? My wife ate it. Kids all ate it. No complaints.

I didn't brine it quite long enough, so it was a huge block of it. And when you got in the middle, the brine hadn't hit. A little bit brown in the middle. Had it like St. Paddy's Day. Cabbage, carrots, taters, creamed horseradish. It's so good, man.

Speaking of that. Kids don't like it. So they had to fight with him about how you do. They don't like the corned meat? Sometimes they're like a pain in the ass, man. Like boiled cabbage just somehow struck them as like, what in the world? I don't know why.

Last night, I fried them up burbot. Fried burbot, french fries, and salad. And then the whole dinner, I don't need to say anything. They cleaned that whole thing out. But with making corned meat, I had to be like, dude, you're going to have to square up. Square up in your seat and eat your food square up and eat your food square up and eat your food fried fish don't say anything just talk to your wife

and they just sit there and eat this is good good lessons for me to learn now fried fish all right you got to train them up on it but coming from the Midwest like we're fried fish is pretty normal fried fish and kids just like just give yourself a break now and then. Because we're strict, man.

We're strict. We don't let them off the hook. As far as they're going to have to eat what you're putting in front of them. If I cook dog shit, I'm going to be like, you're going to have to eat that. I think that's a good way to go.

I don't know why. I don't know if it actually even helps. If you came and told me... I think it does. If you came and told me that it was actually detrimental and made your kids worse and less likely to be likable and less likely to be successful i'd still make them either because it's like it's not about i'm not even playing long game i'm playing short game but i don't like to take them to someone else's house when we go to someone else's house to eat and we're like you

know square out eat that's just how that's how it's gonna be i can't i'm not gonna have them go there and have to have someone make some extra thing for them yeah naturally i feel like the kids like idea of menu and the palatability of what they like to eat will naturally just narrow down if you leave them up to their own decisions. Up to their own devices. Oh, wow. For sure. Where the reason I always are like, yeah, you're just going to eat it. This is all we're having?

Like, yeah. Eat it. You know? And that gives them that wide range where, yeah, because we hung out with some family of mine last summer. And it was – Careful. Yeah.

No. Look, I'm just saying how it was, but there was adult food and then there was kid food. Yeah, kids love it. Oh, yeah. If my kid's going to a situation like that, it's like, oh, you could have these buttered noodles. Yeah, right. My kids would eat buttered noodles

every day. You're right. Yeah. You're not there yet. No. He's eating solid food now. Oh, really? Still drinking mama's milk. Still drinking mama's milk, but twice a day he's having some little veggies

or he's dabbling with real food. I gave my kids their first chunks of venison at nine months. I'm going to do that when I get home. We did it where you chew it up and then give it to them like a street pigeon. Like you actually stick your mouth down there. No, but I would take meat, chew it all up, and then give it to them to eat.

They're drinking milk out of their ma's breast. That's true. They can eat some meat out of their dad's mouth. Kurt, you guys got young kids. Do you guys do the... Do you guys do you guys do the like like do you placate them or do you no i know it's uh they they get what we eat and so if you're cooking salmon or eating yeah yeah it's uh that's really all that we have is wild game salmon and

that's that's a majority of our of our diet in one form or another and no uh my wife nicole does a really good job of that and she the other thing we found is if you keep putting it in front of them you know the first couple of times i'll buck it and then you know kind of our rule is well if it's a new food you just have to try it we call it a plate we call it a plate bite yeah yeah there you go yeah it's all kinds of stuff but you know it's it's working because they will be picky if they want. But just the other day, we took them out to sushi. And total experiment. And the next thing you know, they're eating everything there.

Where'd you guys go? Dave's. Oh, my God. It is awesome. But I mean, they're eating calamari. They're eating things that most kids don't want to stick a squid in their mouth to start. But they tried it, it and they dug it. I'll give you a sack of squid because we're still sitting on some squid from Seattle.

But I fried it for them, and they're like, that's good, right? That's squid. Then I grilled them some, and I had to defend that it was actually squid. You're like, that's not squid. Everyone knows that a squid is fried. That's some other bullshit you're trying to slip past me right there. Yeah, that's a fact. Yeah, it's not fun.

It's aggravating. It's just like aggravating at dinner. Just saying the same things over and over. And what I don't get is there will just be that one day when you put it on the plate and they fought it, and then it's gone. They just ate it all. Just one day they decided that, okay, yeah, I'm not going to fight it.

I'm just going to eat this. Yeah, but 10,000 years ago, kids weren't asking for something else. Just had what you had. Yeah, or you went hungry. Probably not even that long ago. I was going to a way safe number. had. Yeah. Or you went hungry. Probably not even that long ago. I was going to a way safe number. Yeah. Yeah.

You got anything you want to add, Kurt? Lots of good hunting stories, man. Lots of good hunting stories. I got a follow-up question on your hunt. Very different hunting stories. Because we talked a lot about gear, you know, before you went out. Was there anything that you brought but you didn't use his gun yeah yeah that's that's what i was thinking as i was hiking out i could have saved a lot of weight by just

bringing some pepper spray um no but funny enough one of the things that i picked up after we talked about it you guys were talking about bringing a multi-tool, like a Leatherman of some sort. I started thinking, what would I do if, you know, a stay-around got jammed in or, you know, a screw comes loose. And, you know, I've had other little things, but I got one of those little tiny Leatherman squirts. Don't know that one. Yeah, it's two ounces. And I don't know exactly how much you'd get done with it, but it's a pretty cool little tool.

It has all that stuff. So, yeah, there was a few things like that that I didn't use. We got into your head. You did. So you got into my head a little bit. Yeah. And then your back came in at 27 instead of 26. Yeah, I know.

Bumped it up. Do you bring a butt pad, like a sitting pad? Yeah, I do. I took a Therm-a-Rest, made those old Ridge Crest or Ridge Runner, whatever. I can't remember what they were called. It's just a real thin foam ones. You can just cut it down. Before they started making the egg crate pattern.

Yeah, exactly. I don't like that. These guys, like guys I work with use the egg crate ones. But we only run it because that's all that's available. Because, yeah, I think we'd all run smooth. And the major gripe is that the water. If it gets wet at all, it just holds it. It's like the land of 10,000 lakes under your butt.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, but I still have the old style. I got like a piece. What I originally did, at one point in time, I got where I cut off just a three foot chunk of my sleeping pad thinking that my legs didn't need to be on a pad anyway now i'm thinking about taking

a couple more inches off that and making that my sitting pad no that's a good trick you know a lot of people do that and then to replace your pad you just put your backpack flat down there just it's not going to pad you but it's going to give you some separation from the cold ground A lot of people do that, and then to replace your pad, you just put your backpack flat down there. It's not going to pad you, but it's going to give you some separation from the cold ground. Especially during the winter, I do that. I sit on my pack all the time. I don't even hurt the clouds.

Rather than sit in the snow and shit, yeah. Yeah, it gets you just that little bit of elevation. Yeah, but no, I use most everything I brought, other than the survival type things. Harder than a woodpecker. But the follow-up question to that follow-up question is, was there anything that four days in you were like, oh, should have brought that.

Wish I had that. Well, that one morning I woke up and it was just socked in and it was blowing. And I started thinking, man, I wish I would have brought a book book if you could have brought a book what book would you grab what do you uh oh man i don't even know i probably would ask my wife nicole what she was reading grab take her book yeah what's good that's funny because i packed around a uh no actually i did read an article out of a out of a magazine last week. Yeah, I like to bring magazines because I always think in the back of my head I could burn them. Yeah.

And they're light. Yeah, and we're always with the crews, so you don't feel bad ripping articles out and passing them around. I might have told this story before. This is my concluding thought. We got stuck in the fog one time hunting sheep for a couple days. Did I tell this? My brother had a book. It was the biography.

How the hell did he wind up with this book? This isn't on the New York Times bestseller list. It was a really old biography of the first superintendent of Denali National Park. But he had it in paperback. And we got stuck stuck in the fog and so he took it and cut it in thirds right down the spine and he's like well i get the first third first because it's my book and i want to have to read like i read like the second third first and then we because there's three of us switched it around then you got to read the middle or whatever, and then he got to read the beginning, and he got to read it in the proper order.

But that got us through a couple days of sitting in a tent, reading about that guy. The best part of that book, really the only detail of that book I remember is how vital it was for the people he hung out with to kill a bear in the fall for lard that it was just of paramount importance

to stock up on lard were they black bear or grizzly or black bears in the fall to render out the lard for baking because if you didn't have lard just was no fun. Bacon biscuits, wild fruit pie crust. Now, not knowing, can you use the fat from sheep or anything else in the same? It's more like a tallow. It doesn't have, people like,

here's the thing. I was just reading this book, Land of Feast and Famine, which is about fur trappers and the, you know, they kind of were flirting with the edge of the Arctic

and the boreal forest in Northwest Territories. Point being, this is in the early 1900s. Now we look at deer tallow. Deer fat is waxy, and people trim it off because the flavor's off. It spoils in your freezer. it coats the inside of your mouth with wax these guys would trade in they would trade in rump fat

so when you if you kill a summer deer you've seen this Mark no doubt where you skin it along the rump you got these big flat hunks of fat they would square those pieces up and use it as a currency. It was of such value to them to slice and eat it. And that's tallow.

But like you don't, when we were kids, me and my buddy Eddie Luloffs used to take deer fat and melt it on a burner and put it on our boots to waterproof our boots. But it doesn't smell that great. If you take bear fat, which is more like, you know, it's not waxy. So you take bear fat, mountain lion fat would work because that's not waxy at all. We were eating that and that's pretty good.

Pig fat, and that renders into a lard. You can make a similar product with deer, but it's tallow. So have you ever tried rendering deer? Me and Eddie Luloff rendered a bunch of it. And my friend Leighton... And the product you get from that is still...

No, it doesn't smell nice. It's still waxy. And I think it would still be waxy to eat. My friend Leighton would do, he did a couple of versions. He would make a boot waterproofing. He would go out and harvest his own pine pitch. He would track honeybees.

He'd sit in his yard and see a honeybee and he'd watch it. You know the Tom Petty song, I can track a single bee to its hive? Leighton couldn't. He would be in his yard and a honeybee would come by, and he'd watch that honeybee go, and he'd mark in his mind where he saw that honeybee vanish. The next day or whenever he had more time, he'd stand in that spot and wait until a honeybee came by and mark where it went.

And again and again and again until he was standing at the hive with his chainsaw, and he'd chainsaw the tree apart and get the beeswax out he'd go out and harvest his own pine pitch he would wound pine trees and get the pitch and then render down deer fat and combo them to make like a tri-blend waterproofing agent dude was hardcore that's a lot. He was hardcore. He one time had a sheep, and a bear killed a sheep, and he killed the bear, and it ate the bear. The whole thing worked out for him. Might have been a goat. Sat his own goat carcass, mourning over his goat carcass while waiting for the bear to

come back. Dude was way hardcore. He was a tree man, arborist. What was the point i was making point being i don't i don't think you would bake and i can't say this with certitude certainty i don't think you would bake with deer tallow i think that someone should try and i might even try this year but you can definitely bake with bear lard and i one time rendered down fat from a buffalo and that fat was good and i kept some of that in a jar just to see how long it lasts and i kept it for five six years and the color

slowly changed over time it started out pretty orange because the keratin because it was in the summer and their fat turns orange in the summer when they're on green grass um and over time it turned kind of whitish and then kind of yellowish, but it was good to eat. But that fat's good to eat. It's not waxy and it's not off tasting. But the off tasting is something that we've only recently decided is off tasting. Because like I said, if you read about indigenous peoples, they trafficked in it and liked it. They didn't think it was off tasting apparently yeah that's my concluding thought you got a concluder mark you know i guess the only thing i would say is just um we've talked about this in the past but one of the greatest challenges that a lot of hunters especially east of the mississippi deal with is access right yeah

finding places to hunt. Places continue to lose. People are losing permission. Stuff's getting leased up. It's harder and harder to find places. Sold out from under them. Yeah. And I think I just echo the fact that there are a lot of great public land opportunities for white-tailed deer hunters.

I think there's a misconception, and it's changing. Definitely it is changing over the last three to five years. But there's been this misconception that public land for deer hunters is lousy um and there are spots that are really challenging no doubt about it but you can find go down to your state game area and park in the marked parking lot yeah it might be a little chaotic yeah but you can find like really interesting exciting opportunities that you don't need to pay a lease fee you don't need to pay an outfitter um especially if you go west of them if you can take a little drive go west of the mississippi these great plains states have tremendous whitetail hunting opportunities

that are not getting tapped into yet and it's a fun little adventure camp out see some new country eat hot dogs eat hot dogs grill up a steak eat baked beans out of the can check for squirrels pay more attention to squirrels so i would just say you know it's possible it's a lot of fun doesn't need to cost a lot of money um something to consider janice and if you want to be a sheep hunter you don't have to go to alaska and pay twenty thousand dollars or get super lucky. You can come to Montana and just over the counter buy an unlimited sheep deck. Just get abused. Go on a great hike.

Just get a beautiful, scenic, windy hike. No need to bring a rifle, but yeah, you could be a sheep hunter for next to nothing. A guy wrote in, he always looks at the show notes

and sees it, talks to you. It's like your name's always in there, Giannis. He was thinking it was Janice and he's like man this janice person never says shit he's expecting to hear a female it's like steve and this yanni guy but then janice must be someone like an engineer who never gets to talk i i think i've told you this before but one of my first jobs was answering phones for my dad

when his company was just based at his house. After school, I would just roll in and answer phones for two or three hours. Building inspector. This is funny. He's a building inspector. Yeah, home inspector. It was when I was really young, before my voice broke, nobody could tell. So I would just roll with it.

They just thought they were speaking to a young woman, I guess. Janice says, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really? Yeah. I mean, I was young. I was probably, I don't know, 12. So you got good character to be able to do that.

Just run with it. Like, you know, my wife is real mean and didn't change her name to my name. So we check into a hotel. We check into a hotel and they call up and they're like, hi, Mr. Finch. I'm always like, man, man, let me come down there, buddy. How'd that go?

Or maybe that's not a conversation for this podcast. How'd it go? Like, why is she so mean? No, no, no. Like, how did the decision to keep Finch versus- Because she swindled me. She said, well, I don't feel like how did the the decision to keep finch versus because she she swindled me she said well i don't feel like going through all the paperwork when my passport expires maybe i'll do it then passport came and went she went out and got like a little email address that kind of

throws a nod it's it's horrible i have to say i say this is the thing i always bring up like i say like um people have to be like oh the ranellas are coming over and her too my wife's reasoning was she'd had that name already for nearly 30 years so she should have been sick of it right there you go so she kept hers too oh yeah me and yanni man wow got no control we got no control over our women man so that's why you guys get So she kept hers too. Oh, yeah, me and Yanni, man. Wow. Got no control. We got no control over our women, man. So that's why you guys get along so well.

You can kind of commiserate. Our women just run over us, man. We got no say in nothing. That's brutal. We just sit there and just take it. Mrs. Kenyon and Mrs. Rasko? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

No questions there. I bet these days it's 50-50. Mrs. Kenyon and Mrs. Rasko? Oh yeah. No questions there. I bet these days it's 50-50. I feel like I know a lot of gals. I'd be annoyed if my daughter took some dude's name. Really? Yeah. It's from her name. She's got a good name.

It's got a good ring to it. Hold on. There's a name for what you just did. It's called hypocrisy. Double standard. Kurt, you got any concluders, final thoughts? No, man. I'm doing good. You got it all. You're spent.

No, it was really interesting. No, that was mine. It was working off of Mark's telling everybody they can go be a sheep hunter for next year. Oh, that's right. That was a good concluder. All right, man. Guys, next time you got a couple hunting stories you know where to find us come back and join in thanks thanks 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.