The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 148: American Prairie Reserve

Episode Date: December 24, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Sean Gerrity, the founder of the American Prairie Reserve, along with Ryan Callaghan, Sam Lungren, Michelle Chandler, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects discussed: questions about Ryan Callaghan; when ballparkin' goes wrong; Santa Claus as a grade-A a-hole; "keep them toes cold" and other thoughts on parenting in the outdoors; Janis as a segue master; the Buffalo Commons and the Big Open; just how game rich was America?; the rabbit going through the snake; access is back in style; grizzlies, wolves, and cougars on the Great Plains; let's talk about bison; creating robust wild game habitat; tight jeans and slip-on shoes; Sean Gerrity's top 3 ways hunters can help; 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 hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Okay, we're going to do this in an unorthodox fashion.

We're going to start with intros. I feel like the other day we were talking and never... It doesn't matter. As though dealing cards with introductions. And then we got like a bunch of housekeeping issues and I need to ask Michelle some questions. I need to get the female perspective on two things. Is that cool, Michelle?

Mm-hmm. Yanni, you going to introduce yourself? Good morning. I'm Yannis Fatalis from the Meat Eater crew. Good morning. I'm Sam Lundgren from the Meat Eater crew. Joining us for the first time. Yeah.

It's the first day in the office. Excited to be here. Get your email hooked up yet? I do. I do. And it's already full. So I really enjoyed that brief 20 minutes before I had any sort of inbox. It was glorious.

Yeah, because there's no responsibilities yet. Yeah. You got things, and I have work you have to do. Right, yeah. I finished my last job Friday at 5. Most people game it so you get two weeks off. Yeah, well, I gave my last employer a month and a half notice, so I figured I better hustle on over here once I got done with that.

That speaks well to your work ethic, man. Oh, thanks. I appreciate that. The Michelle? Michelle. Michelle Chandler from the Meat Eater Crew. Formerly Michelle Jorgensen. I was going to say, who's Michelle Chandler?

Right? Who is this? So you did the old switch, huh? I did the switch, yeah. No, can you, real quick, why? I mean, I'm all for it, man. But as you know, I've complained about it many times. My wife won't do it.

She's mean. I think my perspective on it's a little old-fashioned, but I kind of consider it, I think he's a great man. He's an honorable man. Now you're talking. I'm proud to take his name. Really? Yeah, and to be a part of his family.

So I look at it in that perspective. It's like a validation. Of? Worthiness. Yeah, yeah, absolutely so i'm i'm really on board with it my wife just thinks it's annoying to go change all your stuff around it's not easy they don't make it easy you know first stop social security and every other agency after that kind of yeah passport yeah we did that the other day for a long time she screwed with me by

saying that when her passport expired, she would do it. And then she made this group. Auto-renew. So one of her many emails uses my last name as a little nod in my direction. But no, I'm not honorable or I don't know what. Well, yeah. We all have our own viewpoint of it. And Sean? Hi, I'm Sean Garrity, and I'm a founder and managing director at American Prairie Reserve.

All right. Ryan Callahan. It's my second Monday here as part of the Meat Eater crew. You're doing good. We get a lot of emails about you already. I mean, we always have gotten a lot of emails about you, but we get emails about you. People are curious. Do you have categories?

No. No, just a lot of emails about you. here here you talk and they want to know more um real quick yeah honest you were wrong about some stuff uh often the number of dudes wrote in you were talking about if you were to hire a if you were to hire a dude to pack out your elk, you were ballparking it. Like a horseman? A packer? No, that wasn't me ballparking it.

Who ballparked it? John Edwards from Schnee's. He ballparked it? Yeah. Well, he was off by a factor of a couple hundred percent. Yeah, I thought he was on the light end, even though we were having the discussion. So you felt it at the time. I was shouting that at the radio when I was listening to it.

I was like, 500? That's a a steal yeah dude a lot of people wrote in they're like 500 750 probably more like it someone was throwing around 250 yeah it depends on who you get man it's like yannis calls me and he's got this picture of this giant bull on instagram yeah i'd be like you know what man this one's on me send I'd be like, you know what, man? This one's on me. Send me the coordinates. Yeah, but you're not a packer for hire.

You're just a dude, a guy. A lot of packers for hire also have a hunting license in their pocket. Oh, meaning like I would love to come up and give a hand. Yes. No, I don't agree at all. I don't agree at all. Because then there's no guesswork. It's like, so this is where he was.

I feel like pro packers are- Tight-lipped? No, they're working. You've made that decision. You're a working man during hunting season. If I was a pro packer and all I did was go up and visit places where people had had successful hunts, and then a buddy of mine said hey man um think about heading out this weekend got any what would you do if you were me and i was the pro packer

would i then say oh you know what you know where i've pulled three or four bulls out of in the last week right i don't know that that individual would really have the self-restraint to not just tell his buddies, unless he's a real pro. Well, the real pros get a real pro tip to keep that stuff under wraps. They're like, you know what? Really appreciate it. He's probably also pricey. Here's a little something for you.

Let's not talk about where this bowl came out of guy wrote in about um santa claus saying that with cwd and all the bands on captive cert moving servants across straight state lines he thinks that santa claus is like the mythology of santa claus he's gonna come in looking like a great a-hole for uh tracking these deer all over the whole earth follow i'm saying it's a cute point it's cute um okay michelle two questions from female perspective one did you feel that when we did the like you know the begging and like our episode begging and pleading right okay someone thought that it was i don't understand degrading the women i did see that email yeah she was but why can you help me with that well first what i interpreted from that email was she was saying a you're assuming that your

audience is all men predominantly men right that's not but i don't think that's true it's not true it's you know our our numbers why was she saying we're assuming that i don't know i think she was saying or saying that we're assuming um that sales pitch should only be directed toward men and that by um pitching the you know you're gonna learn how to cook and treat your sweetheart well with this fancy meal that that's perhaps all women care about. I don't know. I think she kind of missed the mark there. You do?

Yeah. Can I lay another one on you? Yep. A guy wrote in. We were talking about, I was talking one day about taking my daughter out and duck hunting and how her feet got cold and she was crying. And even though my wife made me, when we had a daughter, had to my wife made me when we had a daughter the minute my wife found out we were having a daughter but she made me vow to not treat our daughter any different than i would treat our boys when it comes to the outdoor pursuits there's no

right expectations are the same pressures are the same however my daughter laying in the marsh crying struck me as fundamentally different than my boy laying in the marsh crying like it just hit me differently and a guy wrote in to say this very very anecdotal but a guy wrote in to talk about how he works these two guys and the guys are the same age they make the same amount of money very similar dudes uh they each have daughters one of them when they take the when he when he takes the girls out and they would cry he would give in and bring them back home the other one when his daughters would cry he'd make them tough it out give him a tough talking to and make them stick it out fast forward a couple

decades or whatever amount of time and the ones who got to go home when they were cold um all became drug addicts and pole dancers he was explaining and the ones who had to tough it out are uh assets to our country what do you have anything i'm just telling you what a guy wrote right i'm telling what a guy assets to our country. Do you have anything? I'm just telling you what a guy wrote, right? I'm telling you what a guy wrote, and this is not nothing, me, nothing.

When you hear that, what do you feel? I think that that's funny. I also think that that's one way of looking at it or creating an upshot of a scenario, but I also think there's probably a lot of other factors at play there. No. No, can't be, right? Can't be nuanced, introduced.

You don't think it all stems to what happens in the dark? A child's development course in life is all set in the dark marsh? I wish it were. I think life might be a little more enjoyable and simple, but I do think that hard, difficult, challenging scenarios for kids are important, and like they say, it builds character. And I don't know. I think it's okay.

We'll touch back when you have a bunch of parenting experience locked up. No, I'm definitely going to be seeking you out for some advice. Okay. Anything else anybody needs to bring up before we talk about American Prairie Reserve? Speaking of kids being tough, I went skiing for the first day yesterday of the season with my kids. My oldest skied all day with a base layer and then her jacket just wide open. And it was 15, 20 degrees up there.

No wind now. But I'm just like, for all the times when we go through stuff like that, when they're just like in the blind or in the boat or wherever, cold and miserable. And I just want to be like remember when you're up on the ski hill and you're just like things are going your way wide open the wind's blowing right through there you're like you don't give a shit like not even kind of cold and i i was chilly i had two three layers of wool on plus a puffy jacket in my shell that's what makes it hard when they're crying and cold

is you can't tell if they're leveraging something. Because you want to be like, that day I want to be like, I would love, I would pay any amount of money to feel what your toes feel like right now. To know if this is going on or if this

is like an avenue you're taking. Yeah, a little manipulation to get into the next activity. Because my daughter would not have a difficult time manipulating me. My boy, I'm all over it. But again, as hard as you try, it's just different. And I struggle with it being different. Oh, one quick thing too. So speaking of the episode that we dedicated to the meat eater fishing game

cookbook recipes and techniques for every hunter and angler uh we had a thing happen where um reception of the book we didn't we meaning our publisher spiegel and grout random house like like we didn't anticipate the eager reception for that book. I mean, we did, but I didn't know to what degree it would happen. And we ran into a little problem where, it's a good problem to have, where the books were gone. Like a nice, good print run of books were gone the morning of pub day. So there's a lot of frustration out there with people who are trying to go on BNN.com, Amazon.com,

and they're seeing long lead times on book delivery. If you go in and make your order, the book will come. They're making more books. Everything's going to be taken care of. I know it's a little bit frustrating. You still see stuff on our end that's promoting buying the book will come. They're making more books. Everything's going to be taken care of. I know it's a little bit frustrating. You still see stuff on our end that's promoting buying the book, even though there's a long lead time to get it going,

but just trust. Bear with us. The book will ship. It's been really exciting to see how fast the book went and how popular it's become, but there's a little bit of a pain in there of having run out so it's coming more will ship tons more on the way if you place your order your order will be honored and you will get the book um and in the future too we're gonna also through the meat eater.com you can go into

the store and eventually not right now but eventually, but eventually we'll be selling signed copies there as well. That's a ways out, but it'll come. Good? Okay. Sean, you ready? You ready. How annoying is it? How annoying is it when talking about the American Prairie Reserve?

How much do you hate it on a one to ten when people mention the buffalo commons is it totally different or do you see that there's a continuum of thought one being low one is like oh that doesn't bother me at all ten is like why would you bring that up it's has nothing to do with this i think i'd go for a negative two really because it's an exciting portal into talking about history and a trajectory of an idea over time. Oh, okay. And that helps people realize,

because you know when they, oftentimes they start off, it's a negative connotation of Buffalo Commons, and you can actually connect dots to what I think is very positive for the public for this project. I like the question. Okay, so then let's rate it out again.

I'm going to give you another one to ten rate. All right. Your expertise in breaking down like Frank Popper, Mary Popper, the idea of the Buffalo Commons, what precipitated it, where are you at on that? Because I'll do it, but I'll do like a four. Say it again. Like to tell the story of what the Buffalo,

like that idea, right? The sociologist frank popper right right and deborah is it deborah not mary not mary that's a british woman in the dick van dyke and sorry just go ahead oh yeah mary poppins um so so you know it better you know it better me you want to tell the story uh well or i can do it you can correct me where i miss briefly you correct me um very very condensed yeah that's all i just want to get just an interesting idea right deborah and frank who actually keep in touch with us because they're kind of watching this yeah email a little bit and uh like this project but they're

and what's important is they're demographers from rutgers university they're just sociologists and they're interested in why do people move about uh with particularly within the united states what causes people to move north to north south to north in the 1800s what caused people to move out of the northeast down into the southwest and just why why does that how many people are moving when what was the impetus when did the impetus go away and they stopped moving all that kind of stuff so they just theorized as they looked at patterns and themes, which sociologists should do, what was going on in rural areas all over the world, actually, not just the US, but in rural areas, particularly where there's lots of agriculture. And what they noticed was as agriculture, like any industry, commercial fishing or logging or coal mining, whatever it

is, over time, because of increased efficiencies, it needs less and less people to get the same amount of things done. So as people found themselves, hey, 10 years ago, I was part of a threshing crew or whatever it might've been. I was a cowboy, whatever it might've been. And we used to move the cows around and stay real close to them. Now with the rest of the rotation grazing, you don't need so many, just to kind of take care of themselves, whatever.

But the need for people in ag down and down and down every decade. So where do they go? They go to the cities because that's where the jobs are. So what they noticed in the United States, no different over time, particularly 2030s and 40s,

people were beginning to drift towards urban areas where there's more job choice and you can do right by your family economically. And they said, okay, what happens in the vacuum that's left behind? And there's going to be lots of ag being done there, but perhaps some of this would, on its own, without any projects like APR, revert back to more of the wildness that we heard from Catlin and Bodmer

and Lewis and Clark and people like that. It may actually revert back and take over some areas of that. And they said, even maybe the great buffalo will come back. Maybe not as many used to be, but we have big buffalo herds.

And this is about a 20-page paper and page 18, that one thing, there could be a buffalo commons out there. And that ignited the whole thing. Oh, yeah, man. People went nuts, obviously. So that's kind of how it happened. They said, you guys, we're just demographers.

We're just saying a potential theory. We're not starting a project to go do it. Are you familiar with the writer Bill Kittredge? Yes. His book, Hole in the Sky. He has a great many environmental concerns and and uh you know in his writing and writes from an environmental perspective his ranching background yeah um but he had tried to articulate why some why some people felt that uh why some people were insulted by that idea and it would be that you had

generations of people on a landscape who had dedicated their lives to say like making the desert bloom or or to building communities and creating an economy and for someone to and not that the people who proposed the buffalo not that the demographers or sociologists who proposed the buffalo commons um they weren't making a value judgment so to speak they're just pointing out something that could eventually happen but people did some people celebrated the idea and it was and it as kittredge explained it's like a little bit could be taken to be insulting by people whose families fathers grandfathers great-grandfathers had dedicated their lives to like making community and then for people to be uh enthusiastic about the idea of that going away

was an uneasy idea for some people. I think you're exactly right. And the interesting thing is that happened not too long ago. Was it like 30 years ago that first paper came out? Maybe a little longer. But not much has changed in terms of the phenomenon you just described. Deborah and Frank touched a nerve when they wrote that, innocuously, they thought. But it was the the excitement like you said of other people that hey this could be something to watch and be excited

about yeah more public access better hunting things like that wildness coming back um people took offense and it's i think it's uh justifiably human nature when something is going away that you cherish that's precious to you a a lifestyle and growing up in these towns and being proud of uh small town sports and things like that and you've watched it diminish since world war one in many places like in northeastern montana 10 per decade decline in population and then someone says this in the early 80s whenever that came out you're primed to be highly offended because there's already an underlying sadness. Totally understandable. It's a human thing.

There's no bad actors in this situation. Understandable when someone puts a fine point on it and others start to, to a rancher or farmer, pile on with enthusiasm. Yeah. And it hasn't changed. What is the American Prairie Reserve? We kind of missed that. In a real clean way, like what is it? It's a project to create the largest wildlife reserve

ever assembled in the continental United States to be opened up for public access for the public's enjoyment with all the wildlife species that were there for roughly 11 to 12,000 years up until about 18 to about 1890 or so um put all that back perhaps not in pure historic numbers but a lot more than is there now, and create a lot of different ways for people to go out and enjoy it and save that phenomenon I just described for three or four hundred years into the future.

And doing this requires the purchasing of privately owned land. As a small aspect of the strategies that we're using, one unfortunate part of it is you have to buy the land. I say unfortunate because it's a horrendous lift to go find the money and then get the land deals done. And it's a really, really big project. But it's a small part of the overall thing, which is putting in the visitor infrastructure,

helping people understand how to move about without disrupting anything from leks to wildlife corridors to whatever else. How do we work with nature and all that? There's a lot to be done. And the private land assemblage, which is a key component to make this whole thing work takes just an extraordinary amount of time and effort

and stress so again because you can have a roadblock of a relatively a quarter section of land yeah that is absolutely necessary to open up a hundred thousand acres of land, 240 blocking 100. Oh, it happens all over the place. So, you know, the last two properties we got out there, you can see on the map, the two crow and the pianist people are now, the instant people hear we get some part of a property, they'll say, can I go out on that? Say, yes, this way, this way, we've got to fix this bridge.

We don't want you falling off the bridge. Wait until we fix this bridge across the Judas. But you can come in here, this way, this way. We've got to fix this bridge. We don't want you falling off the bridge. Wait until we fix this bridge across to Judas. But you can come in here, park here, go right across our private land, access all this public land on top of the big sag or whatever. We get maps we hand out to people. You can download on Avenza Maps or whatever you want to use to show people how to move about and access every single piece of public land that's on there.

And so that's, I think, that's, I think some people, I'm just going to guess, Steve, that people are interested in our technique and our strategy and all that. But some of it behind it is why a lot of us quit our day jobs to do this. My life was going just fine in my early 40s. A lot more lucrative than working for a nonprofit, I can tell you that. Why would you do this? And this is really, really exciting to be a part of. I'll just speak personally.

Don't look on the website. I'm not speaking holistically for APR right now. But to me, and I started thinking about this in 1999 when I met the WWF guys that are going, how do you think we ought to go about this? And there's a lot of, it was a really interesting time. But I started hunting with my dad. And probably first, rather than leaving me home, you're talking about your little kids, he probably finally acquiesced and let me go when I was seven or eight. So that'd be the mid-1960s in Montana.

I grew up mostly in Great Falls. My dad had elk camps. He guided a good bit. He had elk camps in the high woods, then west of Augusta, up on Sun River Canyon and across Gibson Lake, that area, back behind sawmill flats and all that stuff in the 60s. But even coming out onto the flats around Haystack Butte, or we'd be down in the Dearborn, a lot from mule deer, come out here in this country for pronghorn whenever he was fortunate enough

to get a tag that was pretty exotic to come out to northeastern Montana from Great Falls, looked like the end of the earth, it felt like. But we would go to ranches, and he would have the name on a piece of paper. There was no electronics back then. Knock on the door, go in and sit down, have hot chocolate, and sit there for an hour and a half and talk with a rancher, and we would have access. And they'd say, well, here's my private section. You go in there, please close the gate and go over here, and you can park in that corner corner just climb right over the top of it you'll have all this public land but you can if you see something on the private that's fine how many tags

you got my dad i got an a tag and a b tag okay you know we just i watched this discussion from the time i was eight years old lots and lots and lots of times all over the state not too much in the southwest dylan we didn't really honestly didn't get down there. But there was a way of operating at that time, and this sounds trite and too simple, but I hope this can be a part of bringing that back. I hope when people look at APR, they go, that's how it kind of used to be, but you don't even have to sit in the kitchen.

You don't have to take that step. So if you go out to Sun Prairie or various other areas, you can see exactly where you go. We took down the gates and we put in cattle guards. That eliminates a lot of problems. Put in cattle guards and the idea of leaving gates open goes away. It's at our expense. And we say we want you to be able to find this.

We have some warnings about getting stuck. Some of you know what gumbo is. We lose a lot of people out there. They eventually get out. Nobody's been lost forever. But a lot of surprises, people who haven't seen gumbo before but uh i if you look at just me personally i'd like to take it back to how things were like 50 years ago and it was better because i've been here i've i know this i've been around hunting all big game hunting all my life and bird hunting is a

part of culture in our family my mom hunted with her out six um it's uh things have changed and all this to me i was listening to your thing on public access you show i can't remember when it was but i listened to your show on public access yeah and uh people where you guys were getting into the details on corner hopping i just thought how dumb is it that we've gotten to this place that you know do you own the airspace above that corner? It just seems, can you use a pole vault? No. I guess people own the airspace.

It's just something's happened. And I'd like to just, I think it's become silly. And what I'd like is a three and a half, three, three and a half million acre area that's well taken care of. You don't wreck it. And a lot of Yahoo's run around on motorcycles and tear it up that people can go, this makes sense. We've, we've, we've, we've rejected some of the silliness. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want because people wreck things quickly if there's not rules and parameters and sideboards.

Anyway, just so I want you to know what's behind this. It's not, it's not a wonky technical business thing. There's personal motivation behind it by me. And now we've words anyway just so i want you to know what's behind this it's not it's not a wonky technical business thing there's personal motivation behind it by me and now we got over 40 employees our new ceo she's terrific allison fox has put together a group of people that are really really fired up about what i'm i've just described so when are you like is it fair to say that you're the architect, like the original architect of APR? Architect would be a push. Maybe general contractor.

Okay. I guess explain how the idea came about. And if you're real good, tie it into what we just talked about with the Buffalo Commons. If I'm real good. Help me out, Michelle. Okay. Remind me if i space this out the idea if you had a number of historians here in the room we would all probably argue about which decade it came about but let's just get back in the relatively early 1800s after the

french fur trappers from hudson bay had come out and started describing this incredible wildlife phenomenon that they saw 10, 15 years before Lewis and Clark got here. Lewis and Clark chronicled that because the president said, you shall write down every single thing you see. So inadvertently, we got these great journals, particularly this 300 mile ride spot that we're seeing, we're working in that they didn't see anywhere on their 4,000 mile round trip walking from St. Louis to the coast and back. But later on, other people came too and corroborated what was there. George Catlin, the painter,

who was out probably 20 times in the 1930s and the 1940s, wrote some incredible books. But in 1936, he said, every time I come out here, he didn't use these words, paraphrasing, blown away by the wildlife situation in this one particular spot, about 300 miles wide,

south of, in what we now call the Breaks region, the six-county area. And he wrote back to Congress and said, we ought to save this beautiful thing as a nation's park. This is 40 years before the Park Service even got going. He said, this has got to be saved, and it's going away. Beavers getting trapped out of here. Hunters already have.

There's no cows at this time. There wasn't cows for another 20 years. Just bison and all that. Catlin kind of nailed it so sorry that was 1830s 1830s did i say did i say 1930s yeah sorry about that oh i know that was dark ages man 1930s yeah exactly 1830s sorry about that um getting used to my little uh echo chamber here than my headset um but afterwards a lot of other people said the same thing park service came up in the night now we had a as you know the park service got going in the 18 1870s with yellowstone and we had a golden era of building parks and i think if catlin had still been alive he'd say well of course they're going to pick this this is going to fit fit in the suite

of parks that people are imagining, Roosevelt and everybody else. But we had a pretty darn good run. But our last one, Grand Teton National Park, we did in 1950. We haven't done anything big since. We called a stop. 70 years of nothing.

No more parks. We did amazing things. Yosemite and Grand Canyon and Everglades. They like topography, man. Well, topography, aesthetics, mostly was about aesthetics. Yeah, yeah. And for the most part,

if you go back and take a look at it and look at Ken Burns' greatest idea films and things like that, pretty much was for views and getting people out in nature, but nature as through the viewer aesthetic view. And they passed over the grasslands. So other people,

particularly some FWp biologists david daniel lickman in uh in uh in uh colorado in the 90s said gosh we really blew it we should make someday we should get rid of this park idea back up and make some sort of protected area up here um the paupers didn't really go that far we already talked about them the guy who really probably nailed it i think who deserves the credit is a guy named Robert Scott, Bob Scott. He was a rare book dealer in Missoula, Montana, and he came up with, who knows what he came up with? The Big Open. Oh, okay. He did the Big Open.

The Big Open was the first time he said, the Buffalo Commons was a demographic shift statement that was happening in the world. Rural people going to the cities and perhaps certain areas would be rewilded on their own. Bob Scott in the early to mid-1980s said there ought to be a protected area right here. Five million acres, two-thirds south of the river, a third north of the river. We're going to call it the Big Open. That'll be the name of the thing, just like Big Bend National Park. But you can hunt in it. I'm going to call it the big open that'll be the name of the thing just like big ben national park but you can hunt in it i'm going to bring everything back full ecology i've got his paper it's like 30 pages long he wrote it in the 80s he was the first to totally nail it and he went

around taught to college students all over the united states he was a huge cult hero had a hard time starting any any uh a business uh to around it and he got more than can you imagine the blowback in the 80s timing is everything right so that was a big one nature conservancy you can say more about bob he's a great guy but but back up to the big open a minute yeah so he was like can you set the the stage a little bit like set the table about what is up there where you have this the cmr you have large federally managed lands already in place right yeah what we have up there well i think bob rightly uh he's very astute um he said this the thing is this can be affordable one of the reasons we stopped making national parks is because it got extremely contentious just really hard and

the park just service said, it wasn't because they were out of money. They're tired of being beat on. Like this is not the highest and best use. And Grand Teton, it was a lot to get that shoehorned in and then be done. That was rough. You know, the Snake River Land Company and

all how to get that in. It got to be very, very difficult and contentious. Because you're excluding so many activities. Excluding activities, ranching, farming, everything else, excluding commerce. And in our society, you know, capitalism, it better be able to make money some way

or it's going to have an awful, amazing, intrinsic value that's really clear to everyone that we back away and not want to make money on that piece of land. So yeah, it got difficult. But he said, how about this? 80% of it's already there because we have BLM land. We have state sections.

We have 1.1 million acres of the CMR. Native Americans, both Belknap and Fort Peck Reservation will be into this. And he said, all the puzzle pieces are there. You only have to get a little bit of private land, glue it all together, airbrush it, bring the animals back, not mammoths and mastodons and short-faced bears etc but the stuff that was there just 150 years ago before it was eradicated we're so close we're so close and that's what he crystallized when he talked about the big open how did he have a square mileage idea of what would be like an adequate size grasslands park? He often said 5 million acres.

And for context, what's Yellowstone? 2.1, 2.2. Okay. So to make a patchwork of federally managed lands, state lands, reservation lands, and then private purchase lands, state lands, reservation lands, and then private purchase lands, you would make something twice as big as a grassland. I don't want to call it a park, but what's the good word? Honestly, Bob, if he somehow hears this podcast down the road,

he may write an email and say Sean was slightly off or really off. But it's probably the closest model we have out there is the Blackfoot Challenge over by Ovando. What are you shooting for? He was assuming ranchers would stay there. Okay. And he was assuming they would allow, they

would allow hunting on their properties. But what he was trying to get them to do is tolerate, by an order of magnitude, more wildlife out there. Use less fences, bring the idea of cowboys back, push your cattle around, bison go that way, prong over that way, elk go that way. You got your, you move your cows around kind of deal.

Yeah. So managing a fenceless cattle operations in the midst of wildlife abundance, I think it was very much a Blackfoot challenge oriented. So Bob, please write in, correct me on that. But I think, so that's the model, not a park, not no hunting. Definitely he was big into access.

It's pretty cool. It's very, very interesting. Surprisingly how close to what we're doing. What happened then? Are you comfortable with how we're walking through this? Yeah. You don't mind? No, it's great.

Okay. It's cold outside. It's warm in here. I'm good. So what was the next? Like if we imagine that this is like a continue there's some sort of continuum of inspirational thought right two more steps really important ones and all the way along i think what i want to make sure is people feel

like there's a lot of credit to pass around this is like a rugby game the ball has been going down through the ages and people working hard trying to crystallize and trying to change hearts and minds to see how this can work. So from Catlin to Lick to – I'm going to skip over that because I don't think the Poppers are trying to push anything. They're just making a statement. But Bob Scott was pushing hard. Go ahead. The Poppers is interesting to me because that was – I remember –

I would have been too young to remember when it was proposed. But that was the first idea i heard about this and it was like a really just interesting concept so i i bring it up because in my understanding of that landscape and in this story that was my point of entry so well i i think you're right to see it's not only did you intersect time when you're old enough to have consciousness to see it, but it's also they were trying to say, guys, this is a trend. And I spent more time in a for-profit business than I have a nonprofit business. And trends, I want to talk about that later if we can, put something in the queue, is what trend. It's really important to take a look at long, long-term trends. And that's all they're trying to say is, guys, here's a trend that we see because we think about it every day,

and we just want to put it out there that it's happening in Brazil, all over the world, and it's happening here. So you might want to think about it. That was their point of view. Now, if you're going to get mad at somebody, get mad at Bob Scott or me or Nature Conservancy or WWF because we're really talking about doing something. So the next really important Nature Conservancy of Montana deserve a lot of credit for crystallizing moving forward in the early 90s and mid-1990s. They took a look at, well, if you were, if

by chance anybody was to try to fire up this, not the park service idea after Teton, but try to save a big space, I mean, really go for it with guts. Try to save a big space. We're in the Northern Great Plains, all five states and two provinces of Canada. We're in this Northern Great Plains, all five states and two provinces of Canada. We're in those Northern Great Plains.

It's a bioregion. I mean, it's an ecoregion, they call it. Where would be the best spots to really, really go big? And they identified 10. Thunder Basin and places in South Dakota. Where's Thunder Basin? Now my buddy from WWF is going to kill me. Thunder Basin is in Southern Colorado.

Is that right? South Dakota. I'm not familiar. Yeah. Look it up, Yanni. Yanni's going to look it up. And my buddies from WWF are just cringing right now because they don't know where it is because I

haven't been there. But anyway, and they wrote a seminal article on if you were to do it, here's 10 spots top ranked if someone was going to do it. We're not saying we're going to do it here's 10 spots top ranked if someone was going to do it we're not saying we're going to do it and so they that got were wildlife fun a cast of characters probably eight or nine really innovative thinkers inside wwf this wwf us not out of switzerland and they took a look at dang this is amazing let's take the ball again and run with it and how can we how can we get something

going that actually someone, light the fuse on this, just get someone to consider doing it? As they looked at the 10, this area in Montana came up probably in the top two or three for a variety of reasons. So much public land is already there. So hopefully, this is a misjudgment, but people can't possibly howl about it because 80 percent of its public land it's the public's land we're turning it over to the public taking down keep out signs and fences and more wildlife what's not to like turned out there's plenty that i learned um the public uh can be upset about um so it's it's affordable that's really really important trying to buy all this land would cost you maybe, I don't know, $20 billion to do if

you had to buy it all private, right? But because you don't have to buy it all or hardly buy anything at all to make the model work, it's affordable. Really important from TNC to their credit in WWFs is the amount of intact grassland that has not yet been plowed. It's been there for thousands of years. Looks like it did all the way back to the Wisconsin Glacier, right? And then the wildlife history. So in some of those other places, big, yes, they're cheap.

Yes, the land's intact, but there's no record of them having the population numbers and the diversity of wildlife that all those people I mentioned earlier saw. Even though they didn't meet each other, they all reported the same thing. This is just unbelievable cornucopia of wildlife here from grassland birds, waterfowl, the ungulates, the predators, everything. Yeah, so they had an open grassland environment that had… A history. Yeah, so you had… Unique history. Bison, elk, mule deer, white-tailed deer, grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes, badgers.

Yep. All the grassland birds, everything. It was just, we can talk, we could take a whole podcast. Why was that as compared to the other 10 areas? How come there wasn't that kind of stuff that you'd see in the Sandhills in Nebraska or up in Saskatchewan or Calgary? How come it just didn't have that kind of concentration? But that's for another time, but it did. So I think, and then what happened was, uh, we'll keep this short, but

our wildlife fund was struggling to figure out a model because there are no models to, to copy anywhere in the world. Blackfoot challenges something like it a little bit, but the landowners stay in the fences stay up and the public a lot is not allowed onto their property. So the grizzly bears can move up and down the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor, but you're not able to move as freely as that bear is because you're crossing private property. The added thing with our model was it would be open to the public and we take down signs and take down fences and invite people out to enjoy this. And that's where we're a little bit different than what was happening over there. So wide open, the public owns this land.

We're actually going to count the private land as accessible, too. We want you to be able to walk across it and not get locked out and have the donut holes and corner hop and all that stuff that you guys are familiar with so so when you hit on corner hop i think it'd just be helpful for everybody listening if if you kind of just to jump back say like if you had to buy all of it it would cost 20 billion so like the the grid system out here the jeffersonian grid system right um we have private sections um that can basically open up the access to public sections. And so just like quick and dirty, you guys, I think basically you have like a third deeded. Roughly 100,000 deeded, roughly 300,000 that you count as part of the APR. Yeah, and that's how the ratio is going so far. It's a good question.

People are going to be lost right now. Yeah, I think what's important is... Now that you did that, you better do it. I guess if you're paying attention, you're like, well, what do you mean if you had to buy all of it? So then you're saying we didn't have to buy all of it. And that is the deal. You have this checkerboarded landscape where there's public land that you cannot get to because you have a section or two sections of

private ground. So you buy the private ground and you essentially have two extra sections of land because that public land, the private ground was the gateway to the public land yeah i'm cool is that helpful yeah the jeffersonian part would be when they were parceling out and handing out chunks of land they would often create a pattern of federally owned or state owned and privately owned land that resembled when looking at the grid work that resembled a checkerboard where things are joined up corner to corner sections of land joined up corner to corner so you didn't wind up with big contiguous pieces of ownership in some areas nice tidy squares um typically spurring off railroad lines so that's cool

i'm happier okay i feel like we're missing something right now like a thing i want to touch on um what is i feel we haven't done this yet like what is the apr what is the APR? What is the American Prairie Reserve? We kind of missed that. In a real clean way, like, what is it? It's a project to create the largest wildlife reserve ever assembled in the continental United States. To be opened up for public access for the public's enjoyment

with all the wildlife species that were there for roughly 11 to 12,000 years up until about 18 until about 1890 or so um put all that back perhaps not in pure historic numbers but a lot more than is there now, and create a lot of different ways for people to go out and enjoy it and save that phenomenon I just described for 300 or 400 years into the future. And doing this requires the purchasing of privately owned land. As a small aspect of the strategies that we're using, one unfortunate part of it is you have to buy the land. And I say unfortunate because it's a horrendous lift to go find the money and then get the land deals done. And it's a really really big project but it's a small part of the overall thing which

is putting in the visitor infrastructure helping people understand how to move about without disrupting um anything from lex to wildlife corridors to whatever else how do we work with nature and all that there's a lot to be done and uh the the land private land assemblage which is a key component to make this whole thing work, takes just an extraordinary amount of time and effort and stress. So, yeah. Well, again, because you can have a roadblock of

a relatively, a quarter section of land. Yeah. That is absolutely necessary to open up 100,000 acres of land. 240 blocking 100. Oh, it happens all over the place. So in the last two properties we got out there, you can see on the map, the two crow and the

pianist people are now, the instant people here we get some part of a property, they'll say, can I go out on that? Say, yes, this way, this way, we've got to fix this bridge. We don't want you falling off the bridge. Wait until we fix this bridge across the Judas. But you can come in here, park here, go right across our private land, access all this public land on top of the big sag or whatever. We get maps,

we hand out to people. You can download on Avenza Maps or whatever you want to use to show people how to move about and access every single piece of public land that's on there and uh so that's let me i think let me i think some people i'm just going to guess steve that people are interested in our technique and our strategy and all that but some of it behind it is why a lot of us quit our day jobs to do this my life was going just fine on my early 40s a lot more lucrative than working for a non-profit i can tell you that yeah why would you do this And this is really, really exciting to be a part of. I'll just speak personally. Don't look on the website.

I'm not speaking holistically for APR right now. But to me, and I started thinking about this in 1999 when I met the WWF guys that are going, how do you think we ought to go about this? And there's a lot of, it was a really interesting time. But I started hunting with my dad. And probably first, rather than leaving me home, you're talking about your little kids, he probably finally acquiesced and let me go when I was seven or eight. So that'd be the mid-1960s in Montana. I grew up mostly in Great Falls. My dad had elk camps. He guided a good bit. He had elk camps in the high woods, then west of Augusta,

up on Sun River Canyon, across Gibson Lake, that that area back behind sawmill flats and all that stuff in the 60s but even coming out onto the flats around haystack butte or we'd be down in the deer born a lot from mule deer come out here in this country for uh pronghorn whenever he was fortunate enough to get a tag that's pretty exotic to come out to the northeastern montana from Falls. It looked like the end of the earth, it felt like. But we would go to ranches, and he would have the name on a piece of paper. There was no electronics back then. Knock on the door, go in and sit down, have hot chocolate, and sit there for an hour and a half and talk with a rancher,

and we would have access. And they'd say, well, here's my private section. You go in there, please close the gate and go over here, and you can park in that corner, just climb right over the top of it. And you'll have all this public land, but you can, if you see something on the private, that's fine. How many tags you got? My dad, I got an A tag and a B tag. Okay. You know, we just, I watched this discussion from the time I was eight years old, lots and lots and lots of times all over the state, not too much in the Southwest, Dylan, we didn't really honestly didn't get down there,

but there was a way of operating at that time, and this sounds trite and too simple, but I hope this can be a part of bringing that back. I hope when people look at APR, they go, that's how it kind of used to be, but you don't even have to sit in the kitchen. You don't have to take that step. So if you go out to Sun Prairie or various other areas,

you can see exactly where you go. We took down the gates and we put in cattle guards. That eliminates a lot of problems. Put in cattle guards and the idea of leaving gates open goes away. It's at our expense. And we say we want you to be able to find this. We have some warnings about getting stuck. Some of you

know what gumbo is. We lose a lot of people out there. They eventually get out. Nobody's been lost forever, but a lot of surprises, people who haven't seen gumbo before but uh i if you look at just me personally i'd like to take it back to how things were like 50 years ago and it was better because i've been here i've i know this i've been around hunting all big game hunting all my life and bird hunting is a part of culture in our family my mom hunted hunted with a ROT6. Things have changed.

And all this, to me, I was listening to your thing on public access. I can't remember when it was, but I listened to your show on public access. Yeah. And you guys were getting into the details on corner hopping. I just thought, how dumb is it that we've gotten to this place? Do you own the airspace above that corner? It just seems, can you use a pole vault? No. I guess people own the airspace.

It's just something's happened, and I think it's become silly. And what I'd like is a three and a half, three, three and a half million acre area that's well taken care of. You don't wreck it. Not a lot of yahoos running around on motorcycles and tear it up. That people can go, this makes sense. We've rejected some of the silliness. It doesn't mean you can do anything you want because people wreck things quickly if there's not rules and parameters and sideboards. Anyway, just so I want you to know what's behind this. It's not a wonky technical business thing. There's personal motivation behind it by me.

And now we've got over 40 employees. Our new CEO, she's terrific, Allison Fox, has put together a group of people that are really, really fired up about what I've just described. How do you guys raise money to buy the lands that you've bought? And how many acres does the American Prairie Reserve own now? I should have a lifeline to call back to the office, but I think we're at 92,000 private acres. Okay. And owned is a squishy owns, just like if you have houses, you own some of it and the bank owns other parts of it so but we own better than 60 of all that land you see on the map free and clear so we

manage a balance sheet very very carefully and but yeah those are our private acres um i think all told we're a little over 400 000 acres with state sections as you were describing and blm sections hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there,

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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. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all.

The way we get the money, I say unfortunately because it's hard, is just pure fundraising. Yeah. It's asking people, describing to people in various ways, sometimes using social media, sometimes on our website, sometimes flying all over the place and sitting down one-on-one. If you can finally get a dinner with them or something, say, this is what I'm doing. We'd like to take this next step. Would you like to help us take this next step?

People 100 years from now will really appreciate the action you might take here because of this. And if they like it, they don't always, but if they like it, they'll say, I'm not going to give you money right now, but keep me informed. Maybe in a couple years I'm kind of tied up right now with some other commitments. So you go back over and over and over and over again. Biggest miscalculation

I made leaving for-profit business. My old company is still running. It's been around about 35 years in Silicon Valley. I had no idea how hard fundraising was going to be. I thought, it's like sales. You do it for a while when you're small and you finally get the sales team

and you get a VP of sales and you're good. Then you don't have to do it. It's not like that. It's unbelievably difficult, particularly in a very crowded fundraising environment in the world. If you take a look at what people give to philanthropically, they give to their churches,

they give to their alma maters, they give to the arts, and way, way, way, way down below, you've seen these top-ranked lists is conservation. It's like a sliver. Within that sliver, a lot of competition, a lot of sharp elbows. You got to move it, and non-stop you can't hardly

stop for a brass i've been doing it for 17 years do you do you primarily draw small donations from private individuals or do you primarily draw like large donations from extraordinarily wealthy people we do everything our strategy on fundraising is everybody go long. So we've got a huge team that focuses on this because unfortunately got to buy the land. It's expensive. The way it works right now is we get money from all 50 states in the United States and 10 different countries around the world. If you put that in a top rank, the most people donating to American Prairie Reserve are Montanans. And then a descending order down to there.

I can't tell you all 50 how it actually stack up, but I can send it to you if you want to put it on your website or something. Some people are what you call sustaining donors. They let us hit their credit card for five bucks a month. We love those people. Lots of those people adds up to a lot of keeping this project moving. So that's the big one. That's the big thing we're trying to grow. And there's some thousands of people in that arena. But to buy these properties, you also do have to have in your portfolio a certain number of bigger donors. So there's 40 or 50 people out there that can give

that we have to travel a lot to see. Some are in Montana, most unfortunately are not. So even to have a cup of coffee is a plane ride, expensive and difficult, time consuming. But they will sometimes give us enough to get with a few other people, enough to take a run at a particular medium-sized piece of property or something like that. So it's everybody and everything, Steve, across the gamut. Have you guys had pieces of land that would fall within the area you're trying to do this come up for sale, but you weren't in a position to try to make a play on it? Or are you usually able to, when something comes up for sale, to get in there and try to be a purchaser? The only time that was not the case were things there's a short

anomaly and that was in the tech crash couldn't have been a dumber time to start this project in 2001 because the tech crash tech crash happened in 2002 anybody i knew had money they didn't have money anymore it's pretty bleak that was the only time for about a three-year run when there was not property out there that we would like to buy since then since i'd say about 2006 if and i've been around every property we've deal deal we've done we've done 29 of them so far any snapshot in time on that whole continuum until this morning this morning is still true there's far more property for sale on this map than we can afford to buy okay so there's like and more than half of those people have called us and said, before we go on the multiple listings,

would you like to do it? Because, you know, with the rumor mill, they know how we operate, fair price, all that kind of stuff. We perform well. It's frustrating because we don't have the money to buy all six at once. That's always the case.

It used to be like there was two, and there's like four, and probably about five or six years ago now Now there's probably five, six, seven properties. Any given time, any morning I can come in and see which ones are there. It's just a matter of, you do something like the PN of the two crow and you got to, that's a rabbit going through the snake and you got to get that digested before you can go eat some more rabbits, right? That's a bad analogy, but it makes us feel it's hard to, you can't move. You just go, wow, I'd love to be able to do this. And what happens is eventually we lose those to other buyers. Generally, someone will buy it and plow it up

for farming. Or another reason we lose property is actually is we're in a bit of a buy-in that other people don't have to deal with. We're a non-profit. We're audited every year. So it kind of looks like this room. People I've never seen before come into the table, open up their laptop, except they have white shirts and ties on, and they're the auditors. And they audit every move we make, and they tear our books apart, and they see where we got our money, how we spent it, and all that kind of stuff. One thing you got to do as a non-profit is spend your donor money uh responsibly so if we're paying out of fair market value that range they'll soon go why are you doing that you're just throwing money around that's not responsible you get a bad ranking you

can lose your status as a non-profit you're done you can become a for-profit but you can't be a non-profit by doing that so we have to work within a range. If we have more time, another podcast will show you a map of where property that I just would have loved to have had up on 191 by Fort Belknap. And we did have the money to do what we thought in the range, for instance. We get to the very top of the range. We call up and say, we'd like to get this offer before somebody else gets this. And they go, I'm not even going to put that in front of the owner. We already have two offers well above that. And we back off. And they're bought by local ranchers. They're not by Californians to buy or build a 10,000 square foot house. We just lost one south of the Tucro

actually down by Winnett. It was really, really perfect for us. Three ranchers bought it and they paid more than we were willing to pay. So I got story after story of that. There's a lot of painful ones that we would have loved to have had it, some up and around Malta. A state legislature beat us out one day on a phone call, an auction. We got to the top of what we think we could justify, and we had to back off. And he bought it for far more than we were willing to pay.

So that happens. There's a misnomer out there that we can pay anything, and we're to back off. And he bought it for far more than we were willing to pay. So that happens. There's a misnomer out there that we can pay anything and we're driving up prices. Absolutely not. Completely false. How often do you run into a situation where a landowner just doesn't want to sell it to you because they have an emotional connection

to it being a working cattle ranch that fits their definition of what that looks like and that they're adversarial to the idea that their sort of legacy and work on the land would be upended and they don't want to sell it to you yeah less than five percent of the time but it does happen how is it articulated to you when that does happen i don't want to take the flack from my neighbors that I sold to the APR. Um, a funny thing though, it does happen where someone will say, I'll sell it to somebody else. If they sell it to you, that's not my fault. Yeah. Yeah. No, but the truth is you guys are technically running cattle, right? Um, properties that have leases or BLM

in order to keep certain BLM leases, right? You got to have a working component to it. Yeah, for the most part, you need to keep some grazing animal on there to maintain your allotments that are associated with your base property. You can rest it. The BLM allows you rest for two years, three years.

You can ask for another extension or whatever. But yeah, we do lease, and I'm going to get these numbers wrong. I'm going to throw out, we got somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 cows on our property right now. Most of the property we're looking at is leased out. Part of that's a business decision.

This is a very expensive project. Leasing it out is you rent it until we can get there with our model to have bison and other things. We lease it out, and that helps our overhead costs. And some leases are three years. There's some out there. There's a big one over in Valley County. That was a 12-year lease. I think they had about 4,000 yearlings on that,

something like that. So, and that's, I just want to clarify that situation, where it's land that you own, and you're allowing a local cattle operator to graze cow-calf pairs or whatever, to graze cattle on your land. Correct. Yeah.

And are you guys doing some, you know, cow-calf pairs or whatever to graze cattle on your land. Correct. Yeah. And are you guys doing some, you know, like trying out some different practices as part of that lease? As far as, do you guys write like a grazing management plan or anything like that right now? Very specifically, we do. And we call it the Phrasey Scale for grassland management. And it has nine points on it. How we want to see riparian areas look.

How big we want patch sizes. Like we don't want too small fencing pens. Total amount of fence for easy wildlife movement. So a big priority for us is American Prairie Reserve is trying to maximize for biodiversity, not for livestock poundage offtake. We're happy to deal with livestock producers, but they got to realize our number one thing is we're optimizing for nature and biodiversity. So we'll say, if you want to lease on our place, and not everybody does, but most people look at it and think, okay, that's not so bad. I've changed a little bit. A lot of times we'll say if you want to lease on our place, and not everybody does, but most people look at it and think, okay, that's not so bad.

I've changed it a little bit. A lot of times we'll ask them to have a lower stocking rate than they would like to have, take it right to the wall, maximum they can have. Lower stocking rate, you know, it's too easy to say, but kind of the take half, leave half idea. Leave half for wildlife, for the forbs and the grasses and things, for pronghorn and everything else. So lighter touch on the ground with a few less cows than you might like so you got to accept that uh sometimes fencing out riparian areas um being okay with some fire now and again um having some natural uh uh water course things like less use of spreader dikes or no use of spreader dikes and being okay with beaver dams and things like that so there's these these sorts of things uh they're not

draconian or particularly arduous and we'll show them how to do it and we give them time to get there but if you don't want to do it um uh within our uh way of operating then yeah maybe we're not a good match right so far we haven't any trouble leasing out. We don't have anything empty. We generally get six, seven, eight phone calls like that. And is this a program, are you guys saying that this is going to get phased out over time or do you think long-term you're going to have some chunks that are going to have some grazing long-term or domestic cattle grazing long-term. No, that's a good point. So I think one way to look at this is we're thinking about our idea is down the road.

And Allie Fox, who's a lot younger than me, will much more likely see this end situation. You'll have what we might call a core reserve area, right? And that is going to be a very amoeba-like circuitous border. The days are over drawing a square on the map like Yellowstone Park. The only way it's defined is who will sell to us. We have no control over who sells to us. But eventually you have this core area that might be between 3 million acres, three and a quarter million acres, something like that. And in a six county general area, north and south of the breaks, north and south of the CMR, et cetera. Outside of that is a boundary or the next, if you think about another area outside of

it, maybe like you think about fishing 200 miles offshore, go quite a few miles, whatever it might be, 40 miles around that whole thing, a band around that, is all cattle, frankly. I don't know what's going to be there. We don't have any control. I can't tell you what 400 or 500 years from now, but probably the next 100 years, it's going to be a very robust cattle industry there. And then even beyond that, we believe there are wildlife areas that our Secretary of Interior is now talking about corridors between us and the Rocky Mountain Fund and corridors down to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where elk and other critters can move back and forth. So you saw this, somebody around here is knowledgeable about which house bill that was, but that Zinke just put out and said, I want to take a look at these corridors, wildlife corridors between areas. We've got to start thinking about how do we make those

sociologically soften so critters can move back and forth in these things. So three things, there's a core, there's an immediate surrounding area, maybe 30 or 40 miles thick. And then there's also this corridor idea that's going to these two other big ecosystems. We consider this a huge ecosystem of about 8 million acres. That's where water drains into the milk or drains into the Missouri. So in the core, to your question, eventually over time, those properties right now are staged with cattle on them. Over time, what's happened on White Rock, on Dry Fork, on Sun Prairie, on Sun Prairie North, we'll turn those cattle off and we'll turn bison onto them as the grazer as the legal grazer

because you have to have a grazer llamas sheep goats horses cows bison you got to have something in there or you'll lose your allotments i imagine that like you you talked about your your personal interest in this and you grew up hunting um i imagine that a good majority of the donors that are really paying high high dollar amounts to you guys are probably deeply suspicious or adversarial to hunting would be my guess like i know that you have a lot of interest from like national geographic society right and they're like very antagonistic to hunters like what um how do you how do you weigh that out like do they know do you talk about that you have an interest in hunting and i know that hunters go on there now but i imagine that the long plan

wouldn't be that right they probably don't like that idea donors there are one uh that the majority that's not correct uh i don't know i I'm asking. That would make my life even harder to get this thing done. It'd be very difficult, that philosophical divide. So I'd say there are some. As far as people who are squeamish about it or queasy about it, I don't know, 20%. It's somewhere between 15% and 20%, I would say, something like that. And where you knock that down to about 3% that don't want to hear it, I'll say, you know, people have been out there for 11,000 years hunting animals. People have been a part of the landscape.

First, it was thrusting spears. Later got the idea of atlatls. Later got the idea of archery. Yeah, that number's sitting at about 15,000 right now for the fashionable. Keeps going. I think it's going to go deeper. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah well mate well 16 maybe because uh i think i heard you on one podcast i was listening is it dan flores

were you talking with i can't remember who you're talking to about the idea you correctly said the oldest has been found and was it um southern south southern south america yeah there's older stuff out of austin texas out of austin texas yeah so how do you, anyway, so a long time ago. A long time ago. And people have been hunting, whether they're throwing or chucking a rock at something, or finally affixed a stone to a spear. So people have been hunting out here for a

long, long time. All right. So that's the most important thing. And I hate to use the word sustainably, so we'll use that, but it seemed to work okay. Yeah, there were some periods of very unsustainable hunting practices going on. Right, right, right. Exactly.

Also, let's not get into that. But what I would say to people, because this has come up a lot in the last 17 years for sure, is, well, aren't you guys going to be like a park and not allow hunting, right? So, look, what our goal is, first and foremost, is extraordinarily robust wildlife populations, which do not exist there now. Our job is to create robust wildlife populations, something you'd see in the Serengeti. You're going to be

astounded if we are successful. Give us a couple of decades to pull this off. It's a lot to do. You're going to be astounded. In other words, don't worry so much about the hunting. If you have that and you have access or you're happy, is it just a philosophical thing about hunting or you think they'll take all the wildlife away?

So then realize, okay, well, if you have Serengeti-like stuff that I can see and I can go view it and show my kids and my grandkids, then yeah, it all can fit for sure. So that takes care of a lot of it, is that people have been doing this for thousands of years, and we're not about to let hunters knock back, knock it back until there's no, we're not going to let them kill everything, right?

And I tell them about my background in it, I understand the whole, the whole sport of it and all that. And it goes away pretty close. Like, well, I still don't like hunting. And they might say, why do people shoot so many coyotes? Why do you have to shoot 50 to

75 coyotes? I can't explain that to you. Why don't they trap a swift fox? What did a swift fox do to you? It's the size of a house cat. Why do you need to trap that thing? Are they going to eat it or nail it on their wall? I can't explain that to you. Why do they have to sit down with a tripod and shoot 300 prairie dogs at a go? What that about i can't explain that let's move on to other things you want to give me some money for some land you know so yeah yeah so there are some places where i think hunters may be shooting themselves in the foot in terms of capturing the hearts and minds of the general public but as far as big as far as as far as pure big game fill the freezer kind of thing people can uh people can get that for the most part.

You say robust numbers. Like if you're going to compare it to what Yellowstone has now, is there like a way that you guys can articulate that? Yeah, Yellowstone has 3,000 to 4,000 bison. Well, I want to be – this will make my crew that I work with very nervous when I start saying numbers. So, because you can always argue with it once you get a number, but bison, I think it's on

our website. So I can say that. I think we could, most importantly, Yellowstone and us is a bit apples and oranges because you have size, but you also have habitat and elevation. So bison from 6,000 feet to over 8,000 feet in that habitat, and on the sides of that volcano or in the bowl of the volcano there,

as you know, is very different than where we are at 2,400 feet with amazing forage and, again, a history of wildlife that Yellowstone never had. Yeah. Or the Rockin' Alps. Yellowstone, the habitat's all confined to the riparian areas. I mean, not all, but there's all confined to the riparian areas. I mean, not all,

but there's a lot of alpine timbered stuff that isn't doing much good for those animals. Depends on the species. For wolverines, they're pretty happy with that high stuff. It depends on,

and by the way, you have to realize who you're talking to. I'm talking about just for, I'm saying like, when you look at like the size of Yellowstone, the fact that it can support,

or you know, I mean this number, this is a hotly contested number, but the size of yellowstone the fact that it can support or you know i mean this number this is a hotly contested number yeah but the fact that yellowstone can support three to four thousand knowing that some number are going to drift out every winter uh that i feel like an equal patch of ground out where you're talking about would be able to support a higher number? Scientists would say the carrying capacity for wildlife where we are is indeed higher than the exact same number of acres.

If you had 3 million acres at Yellowstone, smack in the middle of the colony there, in the volcano there, and 3 million acres where we were, but they're looking at numbers, we're looking at pollinators, grassland birds uh all kinds of game species predators etc so we're looking at the important thing is we think of it like a coral reef we're looking at every single thing that moves or breathes or digs or flies or whatever a very small subset of our bigger view of wildlife or biodiversity is game animals but

you agree that you guys are known for the people's popular understanding of what you're doing as sort of this emblematic keystone species as you're known for doing bison recovery i mean that's like that's in the air and i hope this podcast can help correct that so help me with that but can you humor me for a minute can we talk about that for a second let's talk about bison so we're i mean i wrote a whole damn book about it. I'm interested about it. I read your book about it. It was quite good, by the way. And someone told me, it's funny to go,

hey, before you go on this podcast, you got to read his book. This book just came out. It's really important to read it. And I go, he wrote another one? I'm digging around. I look on Amazon. I saw the one. It was 2006, 2005, something like that.

I read that. Where's the new one? This is going to be stupid if I don't read his book on bison yeah that was 2008 but we got a new cookbook out that's it's a very important book but like what just okay okay I'm super interested in let's talk about bison yeah I can't tell you how interested I am in black-footed ferrets everything okay I am genuinely but just because it's it's it's a right yeah it's a big thing and a big just because it's a, right? Yeah. It's a big thing. It's a big deal. And it's a, like I said in the title of my book, it's an icon.

Yeah. So what could, lay out for you what it could look like in terms of that animal. greatest bison viewing human experience in regards to bison that anybody alive today in North America has ever experienced. Far beyond Yellowstone. That's what I think it could look like. Sure. Part of that is numbers.

We're shooting for, with regards to bison, a minimum of 10,000. That's a floor to get there. That's our goal is a floor. Okay. It depends on the year, of course. a minimum of 10,000. That's a floor to get there. That's our goal is a floor, okay? It depends on the year, of course. In Yellowstone, you could be 3,500, 4,500, once in a while over 5,000.

So imagine 10,000. But because it's the prairie, it's much more viewable. And because of how they don't have to leave, they're in a bowl where we are. They're in a bowl, right? Not on the top. It's a convex situation. And every time you get sun on the south side of the slopes there,

you open up even 30 below zero, you still get open grass and sagebrush and lots of really good forage without having to pack out anywhere else and go somewhere. So I think them being able to stay, be located and stick there is real good. We can support more numbers. Sometimes people say 10,000 bison, that's bigger than anything in the lower 48 states.

Isn't that just going to be kind of nuts? And I say, well, take a look at those six counties there. There's 450,000 cows. Is that right? 450,000 cows in those six counties we're working right now. So I think you can fit 10,000 bison back in there.

In fact, maybe 15, 20, and you're still not getting in the way of, that's a lot of cows. Yeah. And in Montana, there's a lot more cows than that. There's almost a half million cows in that. Yeah, two and a half million in the whole state, roughly. 2.4, 2.6, depending on the year.

I think last year was just about 2.5 million cows. So, yeah. Do you have the human population in those six counties too yes fun numbers to balance yeah i imagine the big um charismatic predators playing to this like you talk about an intact ecosystem right um you know grizzlies are nosing their way out onto the great plains um wolves are expanding what what what do you picture the american prairie reserves relationship with grizzlies and wolves would be and what do you mean like what are the what are sort of the the obstacles there i picture those two species uh well black bears cougars wolves and grizzly

bears i picture them being there and before anybody jumps on that and says well they'll be there they're bringing them in we're not we can't touch those animals uh they're not going to come in on horse trailers with us or anything like that. But I've been around longer. I mean, you already got lions there. Definitely got lions.

They suspect they got back from the little belts about, they were completely extirpated. They expect they got back maybe mid-1990s from the little belts, but they were all gone from this particular area. And we can get back to that, but most scientists I talk to, including FWP biologists, don't believe there's a viable,

genetically viable population. We're putting out too many tags right now for it. They're really, really need to, they're bottleneck, they're too small, but could be a robust population. But what I've seen is, again, we have cabin up in what's called Gibson Reservoir. My dad built with cheap used material from UBC Lumber in Great Falls, Sun River Canyon.

And when you talked about a grizzly bear in the 60s, it was a real anomaly. I mean, if somebody saw one, we talked about it all winter, that somebody saw a grizzly bear doing something or a track. Well, 70s, maybe a little bit more. 80s, a little bit more. And now, as you know, it's so full, a huge success story starting to spill out onto the grasslands. And it used to be just 10 years ago, kind of for a visit in the summer,

just take a walkabout and go back into the mountains. Well, now you can't go back upstream to that concentration from a habitat standpoint, and they're having young on the grasslands. But then in my mind, I'm thinking Tiber Reservoir, Chioto Conrad, various other places. Now they're east of Fort Benton, and now they're on this map. They just killed two at Denton right there, and now they're by White Sulphur Springs. Just three weeks ago, FWP got one on a camera trap just a little bit west of Harlow, Harloton,

right? So they are well into that red air already. three weeks ago fwp got one on a camera trap just a little bit west of harlow harloton right so they are well into that red air already and so that with us doing nothing wolves are moving north also from the southwest in that direction too into the crazies and the little belts now doesn't take much to find out where they are uh expanding so I would expect, why would they not get to where we are because they're already on this map already? It doesn't take very long. Plus the habitat is fantastic.

If you're an omnivore, the breaks is terrific. And the history of bears there, if you read Paul Fulari's Lewis and Clark Among the Grizzlies, encounters every single day as they came to that area, they were thick, right? So no, it's no surprise. It's not that much of a stretch to figure out why would grizzlies want to be here?

Because that's where they were all the time anyway. Yeah. What I think we got to make it okay, back to the Rocky Mountain Front, is now I go back up there and I know ranchers who we used to knock on the doors when I was a little kid. Now I'm 60, but I still remember that area. And the ranchers are like, yeah, we see them.

Don't have that much of a problem with them. They don't slaughter my cows, and we've learned to live with them. There's a couple little adjustments you got to make, but they're not yelling for FWP to come kill all these bears. They don't belong here. They're not like great white sharks or something. Take them away. It's become normalized.

So to your point, Steve, what do I see is that over the next 10 or 15 years, there'll be a lot of anxiety because they've been gone for a long time. And then that front edge, that leading edge of the wolves or the bears will be, people are looking for how do we live with them. FWP is starting to do seminars, evening seminars in Stanford and Denton and other places saying, you live in bear country now. Here's what we've learned looking 200 miles to

the west about how to live with them. You kind of got to get ready for this. We don't have the money to helicopter every single bear back to the front. It ain't going to work anymore. So. You know, for a while, Wyoming was spending, for every grizzly bear in Wyoming, even though they're a federally protected species, every grizzly bear in Wyoming, Wyoming was spending over half on each bear in its state than what Idaho spends per kid in public school.

Expensive. Yeah. I think if, and if you're a hunter and you want to have to BP to spend money on things you want, opening habitat, things like that, helicopter rides for one animal at a time is taking money away from you getting on more land and more social change stuff and getting public access. And, you know, so it's a public, they don't want to do it either. So what I see is them being there, it's going to take a long time, but I think it will get normalized exactly how we've seen it in Montana, 200 miles to the west. Very normalized. No big deal. Yeah.

A thing that happens right now is when a grizzly does strike out, and oftentimes when a mountain lion strikes out into new country, they get in trouble and then they die i mean they get trouble on a highway getting hit by a car or they get in trouble with just coming up against that the human wildlife interface right and they kill something or turn up on someone's doorstep like that's usually the end of the story because they're going into areas where conflict the opportunity for conflict is rich especially with an animal doesn't have a set core home range that it knows well yeah he's seeing it for the first time too and they stumble into trouble i think that by if you were to create this big block of habitat where they were welcome or presented with a place to live yeah that where they were less likely to come up against that wall yeah the very hard wall of civilization i think that that would probably aid in their hanging on and perhaps creating breeding pairs and more you know static animals right that had like a spot where they could live so i mean it's definitely something that could

assist in the expansion recovery of the species whether or not you took an active role in that or not just by creating the habitat right our role is to create habitat so that everything can be there not to drag it all in we did with bison is the only way we get them there from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota and from from Elk Island Canada the only

way to do it is trucks and trailers and everything. In the beginning, we don't need to import anymore. And swift fox, you actually have to put them in a little cage and bring them down so they don't get hit crossing the highway and let them out somewhere. Other than that, everything gets there on its own, like cougars did. Well, let me go back.

In this period of time, you guys know this. I'm sure you've watched FWP's movie, Back from the Brink, and read the books. What happened out here were every bighorn, every elk, every grizzly bear, every wolf, every bison was completely wiped out in this area. There wasn't one left. The elk came back in ranching trucks with FWP in the 1950s, so they were brought back, right?

The Rocky Mountain sheep, I heard you're talking with Garrett and those guys from the Sheep Foundation. They brought those back, I think, from Castle Reef and the Rockies to put them back in the rakes in the early 1960s, something like that, late 1950s. So a lot of stuff has been brought back.

I think we're pretty much at the end of trucking stuff in, and now it's just letting populations grow. The predators will get there on their own, and you can tell every year that the movements are happening. It's a foregone. It's a historic inevitability. They're going to return. Let's say everything was for let's say you don't like this let's say everything was for sale right now that you that you guys felt like when you got a thing

like to make this work it needs to be x big yeah right yeah Let's say it was all for sale right now, and it was just market, like standard market value. What would it cost? To buy all of it? You're probably talking about another 40, 50 properties. Between 200 and $300 million. Roughly. Maybe a little little more time value of money

you have to put a qualifier on there how much time do we get to buy it if it's all available and it's all for sale if we buy it over 15 years it's going to cost more because the time value of money and property out there goes up about three percent sometimes four percent a year the longer you wait the much much more expensive it gets so but that amount of money would push this landscape piece up to done million four million acres because of contiguous because of the public land leverage aspect of it so yeah here's how we we often say people say well you know one of the reasons it's hard to do these projects, they're so darn expensive.

That's why the government got out of the business, et cetera. But think about it this way. This entire project, everything, all the management, all the remodeling costs, there's a lot of work being done out there, people doing it right now today while I'm sitting here in this warm office, is purchasing the land,

all the remodeling and the operational costs, and a very large endowment, which will keep it going forever, like a university endowment, so you don't have to have the vagaries of administrations and like Yellowstone has $650 million maintenance backlog right now. We want to avoid that, so the endowment's baked into that entire thing. Right about $700 million. That's the price of the project. People go, that's a lot of money.

Well, think about it this way. I don't know if any of you sports fans, but watch football or something like that. Not at all? No. Used to be. So the Raiders, Los Angeles Raiders, you know, or I mean Oakland, they're going to move to Las Vegas. So they just kind of got to build a stadium, right? So they just priced that stadium out $1.8 billion.

Atlanta Falcons just did one just before the last Super Bowl, $1.6 billion. Dallas Cowboys just did one, $1.2 billion. Minnesota Vikings, et cetera, et cetera. We'd build up a new football stadium almost every year in this country. It's like that. From the idea to the paint's dry,

you're playing games three years. Average $1.5 billion. So for the biggest reserve ever created in the United States, at 3.5 million acres, a million acres bigger than Yellowstone Park, less than half the cost

of one new football stadium. And that's a stadium I'm interested in going to. $15 hot dogs. You want to go play some games on that stadium. Where the heck are you going to get that hot dogs play some games I'm just saying where the heck you gonna get that money to say if you got a good idea money doesn't exactly fall out of

the sky but you can tell just by that sports story entertainment venues performing arts centers operas wings of hospitals are regularly in the six eight nine hundred million dollar just like that yeah I mean Mark Zuckerberg andff bezos are always losing that amount of money today during losing that amount of money today in value during um fluctuations in the stock market right so there's a lot of ways to make it seem approachable but it's still a bunch of money

yeah yeah so our our fundraising crew our fundraising crew if they could call in they'd say but tell them that's not easy and it's not easy uh to raise that um it's a lot easier to raise money for a football stadium or anything else uh because people look at it as a big economic driver driver it doesn't have a it doesn't have a big footprint well it's also you have a village you have it's a tribal thing okay I'm I have a I have my Packers t-shirt on yeah we need this much money where can I send in my 10 bucks or whatever else it is so we don't have in this kind of situation or a lot of

things around the world I work with geographic when I get back to the hunting idea I think it's not this nuance they're not as I can tell they're actually into market hunting including the chief scientist, Jonathan Bailey. What now? With National Geographic.

Let's get back to that in a second. But I think one thing that's hard about conservation, I'd like to get onto actually, while hunters, I think, are blowing a huge opportunity to make things better in Montana, is people don't get organized. There's no sense of tribe or we're together. So you have a few tribes, you have Ducks Unlimited, you have Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Deer Foundation, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, but not enough for critical

mass. Hunters could not pull off a fundraising thing to build a stadium and hunters are not organized enough to actually make big time gutsy conservation happen because they don't want to be a part of a big don't want to be a part of a bigger tribe like packers fans or atlanta fans and you get things done in numbers you get things done with gusto if you pull together numbers so we have to go beyond montana to build this thing because everyone's sitting back waiting for us to be done and say you're done yet can i go in and shoot something it's kind of irritating yeah but one of the things people say is they say that you won't guarantee

hunting access in perpetuity. I don't even know what the hell that means because I don't know what, who has made that guarantee. Right. I mean like, I don't know any private ranchers that have made hunting access a guarantee in perpetuity or how they would go about doing that. Well, I think. But that's a criticism. Well, I think, yeah, there's a criticism

but here's a couple of things on again again yeah i don't even know what like i said i don't even know what that looks like right how one would draft up a guarantee of hunting access and perpetuity but but it's the thing people say and there's suspicions that what will happen is you know all this i'm just telling you what i hear out walking around on the streets well i hear too the suspicion is what you're going to do is you're going gonna do this then you're gonna be like ha suckers it's a park right that's what that's the accusation i've heard most frequently leveled at this is that i mean it has been mixed up in the national park i mean just having that

right that phrase in there has complicated this enormously i imagine or if you don't even get there to go back to the first part of this conversation, right? You got private land. Private property rights in Montana are strong. And as we already explained, you got private land that is the key to locking up or unlocking a bunch of public land. And what is going to guarantee that you guys just don't exercise private property rights that everybody else does and says yeah you know what actually

we're not going to let you on today because all of that land is hunt like whether the api are never existed all that land was accessible to hunting 80 of it yeah so like you had ranchers that like their families were hunting people were out hunting it so and also relative to you got to also understand like the the power of the relative perspective what lewis and clark saw then there are many explanations for why they saw the abundance of wildlife they did and what george catlin saw there um granted it's not anywhere near that now but relative to what people are experiencing elsewhere you ever hear of shifting paradigm syndrome shifting baselines yeah yes okay that is still the land of milk and honey okay remains relative to everything else that people are seeing that remains like this great wildlife haven right so from it like not that you have a struggle hunting understanding the

perspective i hear from people the perspective is it's pretty great yeah it's all open to hunting hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season.

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slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. Um, why would I take the risk of removing millions of acres of huntable land from hunting? Because people are just like really suspicious about the long term plan. Right. That's all. And I don't even know.

Like when I have it, I always say, dude, dude i don't know i'd like to talk to that guy you're right well i think the shifting baseline thing is very interesting to me on two things one is the amount of wildlife that used to be out there. So it's, it's kind of a bit frustrating. Sometimes saddens me that people go out there and see what's out there now. And they think it's good. I don't think it's good. Uh, I think there can be a lot more and I've covered that country a lot of times in airplanes, all kinds of aircraft on foot twice. Now I've walked 185 miles, the entire length of that map map west to east biked it on my mountain bike i've been out there hundreds of times and i was raised to look for game i was absolutely

trained to do that as a kid right and a lot of our folks who are with apr big game hunters and you go out there you go it's it is really unbelievable. This is empty. It is absolutely empty. I've had folks from Fish, Wildlife, and Parks in aircraft flying back and forth, fly 100 miles. They said I can go anywhere I want. So they're a pilot. Fly around UL, Bend, whatever. Seen any elk yet?

Nope. Go south of the river 20 more miles. Seen an elk yet? Nope. Go a little further. Seen any more elk? Seen an elk? Not one.

And this is 100 miles, slow and slow. Or walking with us, 185 miles. The last time we did it, 185 miles, we didn't see one elk in the 90 period. And you hear Lewis and Clark or whoever else coming up, they didn't even start hunting until 4 o'clock in the afternoon when they got done working and they got

enough elk to feed 40 people every night. If you tried to walk upstream and start elk hunting, imagine just every night your job, two of you, two guys, to go out and get elk to feed 40 people. Could you do that? You'd have some pretty hungry people in the first

three days, right? It's just not the same. So I think one baseline that shifted, I think we have an amnesia about what used to be there. Yeah, man. How do you deal with that amnesia? It's a big thing. And there's no one book, would be nice,

but I brought about nine books here that you read and you have to take bits and pieces from each one and piece the one together and realize it spans 50 years. They never met each other. They're all saying the same thing. That's some interesting cross-referencing. The other shifting baseline, you're all pretty, very young and i'm looking around the the five of you but in the 60s and 70s it was a different experience the baseline of walking up to a

ranch was like yeah go ahead in the deer born even if somebody who owned the deer born which they did they were in california in the late 60 We'd call them down there. My dad found out who it was. Gary Cooper's old ranch and Tom Mix. And we got to hunt mule deer down there. It was just great. Or we'd go and want to hunt elk or whatever else. It was most likely, unless you got somebody really crabby,

oh yeah, how long are you going to be here? Well, if we can put our camper over there, just a couple days. Got a lot of deer. Is that okay? Yeah, it's alright. My dad got really good. It was either George Dickle or Old Crow. And they bring a fist and you're in. And I got a whole bunch of brownies because the lady was very nice to me, little kid.

I tried to look really cold. So another baseline is you guys feel like you're locked out because the attitudes have changed. Now you knock on the door and they say, no or hell no. Go away, private property, don't bother me, or sorry, it's leased out.

That was not a factor. So you've got a baseline now where private property, very unlikely you're going to get on it. Somebody's gotten to it before me, an absentee landowner, a grouchy landowner, or another hunter that's leased it out. That's not what I found is normal. So taking it back to normal is both wildlife populations and apr being like by the time you get there the fences are gone

the keep out signs are gone and there's a new sign and it says welcome to american prairie reserve and that's the entrance to our private property that makes sense and you'll see that if you go i think you i think that if yeah i think that that makes sense i think that that would be that that's exciting to people and i know like you have way bigger like you guys have a mission and you're driving toward the goal and i don't expect it to be that um i don't expect it to be that this is all meant to be in service of of humans like You're doing something for wildlife. And humans. My background's in psychology and sociology. I'm very interested in human beings.

And I think as we pull further away from nature, you've probably seen Richard Liu's Last Child in the Woods, the nature deficit disorder idea. Adults have that disorder too. And I think sometimes it's just hard to, where do I go? Where's something big enough where full ecology is happening? My wife and I, we've probably been

our 37 some odd years together, been to about almost 40 different countries around the world. We like diving. You get down on a coral reef, you feel really small, particularly when you see sharks come by. But you get on a big coral reef in Panama or Honduras or somewhere, and you look at that and just go, that's unbelievable. You're looking at the entire thing, how it all works together, the plants and the animals, the little stuff, the big stuff, everything. And I think, unfortunately, from a terrestrial standpoint, what most people think about the outdoors when they drive around, they see fences and cows or crops which is cool but nothing against that we own a beef company so i'm not against cattle yeah that's for sure but i have a statistic here this came from natural natural agricultural service statistics you guys don't know how many acres there are in Montana? No. No. I know how wide it is. 93 million acres.

How many acres in agriculture, ranching and farming, out of 93 million? 59 million acres out of 93 is in ag. That's 64% of the surface of Montana is in agriculture. So I think normally, of course, when you go out there and drive around, that's mostly what you're going to see. So I think though, there's a coral reef-like thing out there to just be stunned by the beauty

and be stunned by the diversity and the richness of wildlife and nature and biodiversity. Just knock your socks off. I think it used to be like that. It can be again without putting a dent in the agricultural industry, not a dent or a world food supplier or anything else. So that's, to me, that's what's really exciting and make it accessible to people. As far as saving things permanently, the answer

is yes, in due time, and you're taking a snapshot in time, you're looking at the first third of a really big construction project. So if I'm building a house and there's sheetrockers there and there's no tapers, not even sheetrockers, framers and plumbers and concrete and all that, and you walk in and say, where do you want this couch? Say, hang on, hang on.

It's a total mess right now. Give me a couple months. Then I'll tell you exactly where the couch is going to be permanently and forever in perpetuity. You want to know where that couch is going to go? I don't know yet. I haven't even stood in the living room the walls aren't up yet yeah so when you say how come you're not putting permanent easements across your land

right now because we don't even understand the land it's huge the last property we bought is 52 000 acres that's our 29th one just to get to know that and how the wildlife moves around how do we know where to put a permanent easement right now it's in block management go out and enjoy it 10 12 years from now we'll know where we put something that sticks forever one of the problems of conservation easements i hate to say but we'd be much more likely to put conservation easements where and i we have montana land reliance easements we're already starting to do some nobody knows about that but we're starting to put things in easements you got to be awfully careful if you were able to sit down with the easement entity every 10 years and say how is

it working did could we shift the footprint of the building envelope over here or we made a mistake on that road it's too close to the creek bed and it's really messing up the travel of this particular species the pronghorn don't like it, they're spooked or whatever. Can we go up around this hill over here and then down this other side? And they go, you had your chance. Never, ever, ever is that discussable. Ever. So when I come from business, nothing in nature is like that. Nature evolves, it's adaptable, it's resilient, it shucks and jives with new information. And I don't want to be trapped at this point into something that is never discussable again. No matter if you made a horrible mistake, you can't change it. Yeah.

So Fish, Wildlife, and Parks does the same thing. They want to put easements on. We would like to. We like FWP. I'm into block management and all that. But right now, they want to put rest rotation grazing on the private land if they do conservation easements. And rest rotation grazing, even the BLM

is beginning to break open and look, they have 11 experiments around the West right now taking a look at the change or evolution towards something called outcome-based grazing management. Outcome-based. So I can read to you, you want to hear what that says? Outcome-based grazing management. Outcome-based. So I can read to you. You want to hear what that says? Outcome-based grazing emphasizes conservation performance, ecological, economic, and social outcomes, and cooperative management of public lands.

This will help demonstrate that permitted livestock grazing on public lands can operate under a less rigid framework than is commonly used in order to better reach agreed upon habitat and vegetation goals. Shared conservation stewardship of public lands while supporting use such as livestock grazing and other things. So what they're saying is rather than forcing you to use a technique like restoration grazing, we're going to force you to nail the outcome. Good looking forage for, yes, you can extract,

it's an extraction industry extract some to go in your cow and raise the poundage but there's got to be left for wildlife a lot left for wildlife shaggy mosaic of habitat not good you know I love the outcome outcome based grazing idea that the BLM is now spearheading that's really cool I think it's very smart

they're experimenting and adapting rather than saying rest rotation forever even 500 years from saying rest rotation forever, even 500 years from now, rest rotation, be all, end all, no innovation possible. I don't think that's a good way to look at it. So we're going to be pretty slow on FWP easements if we have to put in rest rotation. Not that we don't like FWP, but they're forcing a technique. I often use the analogy as I like a lot of history books. I'm reading one right now about ships in the late 1700s

and these Spanish Corsairs and the privateers, they got these boats to chase down the big boats that were laden with all kinds of products and they just, they couldn't carry as much

but they're super fast. Well, they set up the sails and everything. French, I'm sorry, French Corsairs and they'd catch all the, they'd catch these ships and they would, their ship couldn't, one ship couldn't take it all but they brought three but they're really fast, chase'm sorry, French Corsairs. And they'd catch all the, they'd catch these ships and they would, their ship couldn't,

one ship couldn't take it all, but they brought three, but they're really fast, chase them down, take all their stuff and then leave with it. And it was well-known technique. And the people who were hauling stuff go, how do you beat that ship? And what we could have said right there is the Spanish, the French Corsairs are so fast.

That's the end of the shipping innovation. Let's just go with those forevermore. This is what the French naval use, his Corsairs sailing ships, right? Yeah. Forever. Well, try to run one of those in the America's

Cup today. Not going to do very well, right? And the idea of rest rotation being, and I've talked with Alan Savory over email. He knows about our project, likes our project, or Russ Hormé's idea of restitution, great for the time, but there's probably going to be, give it 100 years, I bet it will evolve. And locking down on this now as the best and we can quit thinking about it, there's no innovation necessary. I don't think it's the right way to go.

So we're going to be slow on easements because easements are forever. We'll protect it, but just give us some time to get to know our land so we know what we're doing let me ask you about another management that makes sense it makes perfect sense okay i want to ask about another management obstacle i could foresee and how you picture this yeah um when you get the if you build a contiguous block and it's a lot of mixed ownership there's gonna be federal lands state lands privately held lands tribal tribal lands in the block it's gonna be really hard to get everyone on the same page in terms of management meaning there are places right now where for instance like bison which you imagine functioning as wildlife but

in this state they they fall under the domain of department of livestock under a lot of situations so you what is the com what is the conversations you're having with federal land managers if you look toward the future what are the conversations where you're saying we want to look like this and we want the chunks that are under your administration you know to assist this but it seems that you're going to have these internal very hard borders where management goals management practices are anything but unified yeah it's a good concern but i feel just the opposite i'm um quite optimistic about being able to come to a uh shared set of practices we're never going to own the blm they own that and run that we're never going to manage the public's wildlife that's fwp not going to own or run the state lands but uh an example sun prairie on your map there that's about uh 25 26 000 acres right so you're

up into nearly 40 square miles of land it's big a lot of bison on there and so what we have when we first got there there was miles and miles of cross fencing. Fencing out the state sections and the BLM pieces, which are the light blue on that map. We talked to the BLM. They go, what do you want to do? We said, well, this is different, but we would like to take a cattle off and put bison on. And we'd like year-round grazing. And we'd like to have no interior fences. And we showed them lots and lots of science papers about how bison can basically rotate themselves.

And that we will, at that time, it wasn't at that time, this was many years ago, we said, we will, can you judge us on outcomes? Come down and take a look at the habitat after we've been there for a few years. First, we asked them, what do you want this to look like? Which sometimes a lot of landowners don't do.

We invited the BLM, we said, take a look at this, tell us what you want this to look like? Which sometimes a lot of landowners don't do. We invited the BLM. We said, take a look at this. Tell us what you want this to look like. I'd like this a little taller. These forbs are pretty hammered. I'd like to have this looking like this, et cetera. Plant diversity, plant height, things like that. And some hit hard, some not so hard because they're

big in the grassland birds, as they should be in different kinds of habitat. So we started with outcome-based grazing in 2005 with our first property. Eventually, they said, you know, you guys seem to know what you're doing. They let us take down the fences between our private and our BLM. Later, the state did the same thing. We took down the fences between those two entities and the state. And we have two or three state sections inside there. If you go to Sun Prairie North, I think, Steve, what you'll see is an example of the future. You go out there and you see, first you see species.

You see elk and you see some. We don't have very many. Pronghorn, they're starting to come back. Mule deer, a little bit of whitetail, not usually on there. And bison. And those animals walk across BLM and then state and then private, and there's no fences. They have no idea where they are.

What's really cool, we have a campground out there, it's full of elk hunters right now, right in the middle of some prairie where you're looking at. The hunters also, they know where they are, but there's no signs and there's no fences. They walk across unimpeded across the landscape. They're going private to BLM to state to private. It all looks and feels the same.

That's a big area. That's half the size of the entire Gallatin Valley here. So that's a microcosm of the future. We've done it once. All you got to do is scale that up. It can happen. And the agencies, particularly the on-the-ground people, the FWP, real good to work with. We don't see eye-to-eye on everything.

No way. They don't want to move as fast as us. What with. We don't see eye to eye on everything. No way. We don't, they don't want to move as fast as us. What's something you don't see eye to eye on? With fish life in parks? Yeah. One is the, well, one is the need for rest rotation grazing.

Do we really have to do that? Yeah. Okay. One is necessarily the amount of hunter days if we do a conservation easement. So easements, we're having a little bit of difficulty right now because we put a conservation easement. So, easements, we're having a little bit of difficulty right now because we put a conservation easement.

They'll say, we want 1,000 100 days on that piece of property. I say, well, 1,000 100 days right now is okay, but what if we're down to only this many bighorns? How do we control that later on? Yeah. Or they're on our private property.

What if it starts to get out of control in terms of people driving off-road and things like that? This is never discussable again, right? So we're going to go slow on that. But in terms of… So you strike agreements every year or however? Well, we inherited some purchased properties that already had FWP easements on them.

Okay. And some parts, some aspects of the easements feel too draconian to us and unchangeable and undiscussable. So we're going to wait a little while before we do more until we're absolutely certain that 1,100 days is the right or number or 700 or 1,200 or whatever else. We got to get to know the properties.

So, but we do agree on lots of things like we'd like to have um more of certain critters pronghorn whatever it might be yeah and uh working on pronghorn studies right now we're engaged collaborating with them on the possibility of reintroduction of possibility of reintroduction of swift fox uh they have an interest we have an interest it's all about timing that's gotta seem like an easy win because i can't believe there's a big anti-Swift Fox lobby. You never know. They might bite you.

I don't know. They're about that big. Yeah. That's like pretty cuddly, man. No one's going to get pissed. Because most people are never going to know they're there anyway. Right. And they're nocturnal.

Maybe prairie dog shooters. They'll get mad. Yeah, but they will tell you that there's too many prairie dogs. So they'll be glad to have the assistance. Swift Fox don't eat prairie dog shooters. They'll get mad. It's going to trip. Yeah, but they will tell you that there's too many prairie dogs, so they'll be glad to have the assistance. Swift hogs don't eat prairie dogs. They eat bugs and grasshoppers and stuff like that. They don't eat prairie dogs? No kidding.

Prairie dogs are bigger than they are. Yeah. We bumped into one down in Mexico that I went to. So I think the important thing, BOM, the range cons, the on-the-ground F2EP guys, what we're interested in, for instance, and I really want to get to before we, so don't end this until I get to this. It's really important how I see hunters and what hunters can do. That's hunters that might trust us in our long-term vision. What hunters can do at the APR?

In Montana, I think. Okay. I think, you know, being in hunting in the 60s and 70s, I was, you know, definitely big into hunting, member of the NRA, all that kind of stuff. I was just living in hunting camps and things. But I think hunters are making some mistakes now that are hindering where things they want to go in this state, whether it's access or population numbers or whatever else it might be. So let me know when you want to get into that. Go ahead, man. How much time we have. How much time we got?

You got time to do all that? I got a lot of questions. A lot of questions. Can we jump back to the relationship with FWP? Sure. So I think we missed a big one is, is where are you guys at on the bison conversation, right? Cause we got wild bison and we got livestock. You guys have bison as livestock right now, correct and you man and you're that there's some benefits to that um but long-term goal is bison as wildlife so can you comment on like where i'm assuming right that that is the long-term goal correct yeah i oh so we got a lot of bison right now about 800 or so and we're on a flight we have to flatline them now because we're waiting for our next approval of the next pieces of property where we can go out like Sun Prairie. So we're in phase going around this block again to where we are allowed to put bison out on the BLM. So we have to hold, but that'll take off at some point.

I can't predict when, when we get approval for our environmental assessment and we go. Because I think that's one thing, like earlier you hit on it, well, like, yeah, to satisfy the grazing piece of this BLM lease, we turn that over, we turn cattle off and we turn bison on and then a lot of people are probably like, well, bison's a wild animal, right? Yeah, well. In this case, you get to satisfy the lease by turning bison as livestock onto that lease. So bison have, as you know, a very funny dual citizenship status in Montana. Ours, there's nothing confusing about it. They are livestock. We pay a livestock fee, about $4.20 a year on

every single animal, just like you pay like $1.50 on a cow, $4.20 or whatever on a bison. They are a livestock animal on paper. Meaning you pay the BLM. I just want listeners to understand. You pay the BLM a fee to be able to allow to run your livestock on BLM land the same way a cattle ranch would do. $1.60 for a cow calf, just like exact same price as a cow. Same price. Exact same price as a cow. Same price.

Exact same price as a cow. Yep. And the other thing I was just talking about, this is a Department of Livestock fee. There's a lot of fees associated with having livestock to different entities. So we pay exact same as cows, in some cases more.

Department of Livestock charges, for some reason, more for a bison than for a cow. So right now, I foresee for quite some time, because as you take a look at trends, I want to get back to some of that, the trends you look at,

the trend of bison on the way to becoming wildlife, I think it'll eventually happen down the road, but it's not happening very fast. So I think our bison are going to be livestock for quite some time to come. I'm perfectly okay with that, probably beyond my career lifetime, I'm guessing. Is there anything, oh, sorry, go ahead.

I think the way I look at it, are we going to try to ram it through somehow? I think the way I look at it, back to we started the podcast with looking at females. Let's go back to females. I'm finding Michelle just raised her hand. I think I look at it like women's suffrage and it was in the late 1840s in this big meeting in seneca new york where they all of a sudden

they realized women should have the right to vote susan b anthony and a bunch of other folks started different organizations and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed but that that that first seminal meeting where they got the epiphany that women should have the right to vote was in the late 1840s in Seneca, New York. And you know when they got the right to vote. 1920. 1920. I mean, how obvious is it? That's when all those guys got together and decided to give them that gift.

Some of you. Well, it's about time. Maybe even some in this room think that was a big mistake that they ever got. Who knows? But, you know, that took, think how long that took and how obvious that is i think what polls keep saying i don't know a little over 60 percent of montanans like to see wild bison in montana that's one indicator of a trend they just became our national mammal that's another indicator of a trend remember that uh every animal moose grizzly bear you just name it

goes anywhere it wants mont Montana except for one. Who's our national mammal and 60% of the people in Montana. Every time you poll, more people want to. But look at women's suffrage. 70 years to get the right to vote after people realized it was the right thing to do. And a lot of people, even in 1920, were still upset that it happened. And I think bison, I don't know, sometimes historic inevitability, whether it's legalized marijuana, gay marriage,

right to vote, bison in Montana, can take a long, long, long time. What was your question, Michelle? He kind of answered it. I was going to say beyond social tolerance and acceptability of this animal, what other factors do you think are inhibiting that acceptance?

I think at different times, like in the women's suffrage example, at different snapshots in time along that continuum until it actually occurs and you tip over the edge and it's there. I think the moment we're sitting in right now, which is kind of the only thing I can live with because it's today, is lack of understanding of the animal itself because it's been gone for so long. So the people that are most afraid, concerned, skeptical, whatever it might be, I find there's a correlation. The people that have the most vehemence against it have had the least experience with the animal. Our direct neighbors who see them all the time

across the fence, here's our cows and there's our bison, hundreds and hundreds of bison, even watching them in the rut when they're really going at it, they go, not a big deal because they've been desensitized. They know us and they know the bison because they see them all the time. The people that are most hot about it, the

further you get away from our bison, the more people get upset. You start seeing those signs, those huge green signs that say, don't buffalo me. Yeah, there's all kinds of signs. But does that answer your question, Michelle? Yeah, well, I think the other thing. At the moment, it's just lack of understanding because it's been gone for so long.

Not unlike a bear. Yeah, you also have, there's this big sort of theoretical debate about them where it's like clashing worldviews. But the debate will get hung up on, there's details along the way, like in Yellowstone. There's kind of like, we're sort of in this debate about what is this animal? What's our relationship to it? Is it wildlife? Is it livestock? But then the debate gets hung up on a snag, like brucellosis, right?

And brucellosis, like the disease spread issue. It winds up being that you can avoid the big conversation about where are we headed as a people. What is our relationship with wildlife and native flora and fauna? And you go like, well, yeah, but let's hang it up on brucellosis for a minute. Yeah. And I think that there will always be a thing of the day where the debate centers around that. Bruce, and I, you know.

And that's probably not even an issue because you guys probably have quarantine disease-free. Yeah, we do. In the early 2000s, that was a really big one of the brucellosis. But then we sat down with a lot of rancher groups, sometimes 50 at a time in a circle of chairs at Second Creek Hall in Phillips County and us. And they say, tell us what you're that time, Elk Island National Park. We do all 20 diseases, reportable diseases by the Department of Livestock, not just brucellosis. Make sure they don't have it as they load up.

They get TB, tuberculosis checked on both sides of the border. It's just a law. So they have to be quarantined here, but it's for TB. When they get here, they sit for a couple of months, then they go out onto the landscape. We also do testing, random testing,

knock them down with tranquilizer darts, take hair and blood samples, send that in, so we get a report every year of how the herd health is doing. A lot of people don't test that much. And those tests are available to anybody who wants them. If ranchers want a hard copy, just come over, we'll give you a hard copy, We'll show you exactly what got back. So completely open book and transparent on that.

So the Bruce Losis, actually, it pops up a little bit here and there. But since really after 2010, 2011, it's really tapered off to, it's gone for the most part. A little bit here and there, but mostly it's gone. And now the idea of wild bison and what they will do to us and damaging property and yeah that's what i was gonna say like then it becomes and you get my point yeah there will always be another thing and so then it's like well the integrity of fences yeah that's really what's at issue for me is the integrity of fences and and now we'll talk about that for a long time so bison crash our you know bison crash fences and we'll say fish wildlife and parks one of the

best things they've done for us. A lot of good things they do. It's a good organization. They helped us design the most wildlife friendly fence we could possibly imagine. Wildlife and people friendly fence. So it's 44 inches at the top.

So elk can sail over. We've got a lot of cameras that show elk sailing over. Pronghorn underneath, 18 inches off the deck, off the bottom. So the pronghorn can hit it at some pretty good speed. They don't have to go back and forth and

back and forth. And then there's one hot wire. Bison don't like that hot wire. Oh, okay. All solar paneled. It's all solar powered in one and a quarter mile increments, so the whole fence doesn't go down. But you watch wildlife, we want to make it like Gore-Tex, sort of.

All wildlife can go back and forth, but it stops the bison. That's a trick. That is a trick. Yeah. That's amazing to watch these cameras and a five-point boil elk lazy that's judgmental but all the other elk go over he sticks his head through the fourth and fifth wire just jams through that wire and uh camera shaking all over the place but he's rubbing that hot wire on his belly couldn't care less nothing nothing bothered his bother about that heat that hot wire except the bison they don't like it so they back

off they stay away so we use one hot wire to keep them where they are the other thing we use is tons of water and amazing forage they're happy at home when you're happy at home there's not a lot of pressure to go that direction so yeah some people talk about fences but then we show them our fences and they go wow that actually keeps them in and we got more than a decade and hundreds of bison experience behind us that we know what we're doing so you don't you don't have an epidemic of escapees get a lot of cows on our on our property but that's how it is out there you call somebody to go i think these are your cows because the people on that side have sementals and you have angus these are definitely black do you want us to put them in a corral and

say no can you hold until next week and that's just how it is out there you know particularly bulls they get to fight and push through a fence then they start walking down a ditch and just going out walk about and everybody's pretty pretty easy going yeah how about cows um you had a lot of questions yes go let them rip cow uh i'm good i'm done all right i mean i got questions that i still have i got questions i want to talk about hunters yeah um man i don't

know if you guys are into hunting but i want to talk about yeah i got deep montana roots just as it sounds like you do and uh i was doing a lot of digging you guys gonna out montana each other now no no are you older than me um but it like a lot of the core arguments against apr are are can kind of be summed up like this right so one thing that i got from multiple folks is like oh yeah it's sean garrity he uh he's a real smooth talker wears tight jeans and slip-on shoes okay um which i think is hilarious right because every rancher in eastern montana they wear pretty tight jeans and slip-on shoes they're just called cowboy boots right um and that's how like a lot of these arguments are like driving up land property values um but to me and we talked about it a bunch

and and use this word access in the beginning of this thing we we hit it pretty good but you know like our secretary of the interior at one point he was trying to hijack the word access as a place where you can drive your rv and hook it up to power and water right that's not the access that you and your dad enjoyed on the rocky mountain front bob marshall right um and so i know a lot of folks myself included is is like there there's a hole here that I think, and I think everybody in this room is going to agree with you that hunters do plenty of shooting themselves in the foot. But it's hard. And we do good. We're doing better, I think, every year on activating hunters around issues and, and getting that united voice

that I'm in full agreeance, man, we need to get a hell of a lot better at that. Um, but it's like, so how is APR going to define access? Right. And, and I had one real snide comment where they're like, well, yeah, access might be, you got to go drive around in one of their lifted up sprinter vans in their Serengeti model, right? Yeah. And, you know, I guarantee I'm not going to say anything

you don't already know, right? But, you know, if you're looking for more funding, like every nonprofit is, is like, is there, can you guys add something into your mission statement that is bulletproof and long-term and says yeah we are going to guarantee access to hunters we're going to guarantee hunting long term and that's way we're going to swing these hunters over and be like more favorable long term and maybe we're providing a big chunk of dollars for the fund is there is there some middle ground there no okay are you guys are you guys ironclad on allowing

um swift fox or might you change your mind about swift fox allowing swift fox yeah oh we're working hard to get him in there so that's absolutely you won't but you don't need to leave it open you're gonna change your mind about it. How about CIFOG? Yeah. No. Okay. But it's not in our mission statement.

We're all about CIFOG. It's not in your mission statement though. Here's the reason why, is I think to your question, why are we not going to put that in the mission statement? I've looked at this statement for a long time and we've made it simpler and shorter. We're trying to make it more universal. And so that it fits a lot. Because if I put that in there for hunters,

this is what, to me, that would be what a politician would do. I'm going to promise this for hunters, et cetera. And then you go down the road, I just walk three blocks down. Then I'm going to promise this for snowmobilers.

Then I'm going to promise this for skydivers. Then I'm going to promise this for Audubon people and bird watchers. And pretty soon you got yourself all tangled up in a lot of promises that don't match up. Yeah. So I'm going to pick something really big, not amorphous and squishy, but you know, the

seven points of the North American hunting, North American conservation model. There's seven, the foundation calls them the seven sisters. Those are pretty, those are pretty high, high level things. And it doesn't say this and this and this and access to whatever amounts it might be, right?

And that has endured for a very long time. I think it could use some tweaks. I have some comments about that. And there's tons of contradictions with it. There's tons of things that – Exceptions, yeah. Well, there's tons of things that we're doing that don't jive with the model. It's not working.

Right, yeah. Privatization and all that kind of stuff so what i want to do is try to include everybody and uh and uh you know we want to do is include everybody in our mission statement but not get screwed down so tight that we made this promise back in 2017 to something whatever it might be we'll hear people say well you just you have this in block management the two crow because this other place over here on the pn which is true where you can't hunt elk there's no elk hunting allowed the reason why is we don't have any elk on the pn and the populations out there are pathetic as it is let us build robust populations we'll open it to elk you can hunt mule deer sharp tail pheasants and all kinds of other stuff on the

pn but no elk because there isn't any we did give out two bighorn sheep tags on the pn because fwp's region six four asked us to do that but yeah we're going to try to build right now we're trying to build robust populations we take all this flack see they lied you can't hunt elk on the on the two crow they're against or on the on the pn they're against hunters life is nuanced you have been a lot of block management properties where they have don't touch rules yeah i've hunted all the time i wasn't on in shoto you know north of shoto on solid road up there for pheasants on block management you come on you get to do the morning you get three guns doesn't matter how many people in the party three guns you're off at noon because another crew comes in. And Sundays only because the runners are at church.

They don't want you there on Saturdays because it's too loud. All kinds of restrictions. They're not against hunting. So there's five of us. One of us has to leave a gun in the truck. We just block with the dogs. You just got to adjust. But mostly what we get critiqued by is, I want to be able to hunt and trap everything

or you're not into hunters. I think life is not that black and white. And because of that black and whiteness, frankly, permeates some of the hunting community. That's why hunting's losing some public support, frankly. It's just too aggressive, too in your face, too blunt. And nature is nuanced. And so is a big project like this.

Okay. What's the big advice? That it no oh i was just answering one of as many questions here yeah here's the advice i think you guys could help with maybe you'll say nah we don't want to do that that's your you guys's job so one of the things we get with fish fly from parks and they're not against this you're just going guys we're in a bind here um some of this is region six some region four and we'll say we'd love to have more of this particular thing so let's just focus on elk okay it's not so touchy okay and we said there you know as best we could tell the carrying capacity from a science standpoint out here for elk is if you have 450,000 cows there could be a lot of elk out here. This whole area, whole region, the counts might be 6,000 or 7,000,

maybe a little bit more elk out there. Not much in a huge area. Again, you can spend an awful lot of time, and I have, hunting around any time of the year. You're going to have a hard time finding elk. So robust populations of elk, how do we get there? And how are quotas or population criteria set? The North American Conservation Model says wildlife is set through science and we talk to people

the region they go no landowner tolerance yeah so it has nothing to do with science and carrying capacity and where it can be and can we fit this many in here well you could it's social science yeah so i guess that is social science. Exactly. So you go to a, they say, we would like to raise quotas, but we get extreme pushback from a rancher. And this is going to get onto

something you can do, I think. From a rancher saying, the elk are eating me out of house and home. You're mismanaging me. It's the public's wildlife. It's on my place.

It's eating my stuff. You're mismanaging it. Population the public's wildlife. It's on my place. It's eating my stuff. You're mismanaging it. Overall populations of elk need to go down. Those people say something to the legislature. The legislature says something to the FWP commission. The commission says, lower those quotas. I'm getting a lot of heat up here in Helena. Quotas go down, and that's where a lot of the on-the-ground guys are.

I have no animosity towards the FWP folks. They're in a difficult bind. So imagine this scenario. I was thinking, I was in Spain last year with my wife and we were eating this unbelievable prosciutto and I had time to think about philosophical things. And so I'd imagine, I know the front pretty well. It's where I grew up.

Imagine you had a rancher and they're ranching cows out on the front somewhere west of Choteau, right? Just in those slopes underneath Castle Reef or Sun or Sawtooth and that. A lot of you guys have been up there before. And somehow they're reading something. They go, gosh, you see what these, what prosciutto sells for?

Like a, you know, per pig, what you make. And all you got to do is feed them acorns and things like that. We got to get ourselves about 300 hogs and add them to our cow situation and as a portfolio and make a whole lot of money. And we can get acorns, which is what and add them to our cow situation and as a portfolio and make a whole lot of money and we can get acorns which is what you feed them we finish them on acorns from california super cheap they're trying to get rid of them so they do all that get

the hogs feed them acorns make these beautiful product cut them all up and then they they have to air dry or age for about four weeks so they hang them in the forest on private lands their private land they hang big front shoulders and bad bat on the back quarters in the forest on private lands. They're private land. They hang big front shoulders and back quarters in the forest to air dry. This is the Rocky Mountain Front. They're hanging ham all through the forest. It's grizzly bear country, but grizzly bears are evenly distributed, 20,000 acres, 25,000 acres, grizzly bear territory, home range, something like that.

Everything goes pretty good for about a week or so. One morning they walk out, and there's nine grizzly bear territory, home range, something like that. Everything goes pretty good for about a week or so. One morning they walk out and there's nine grizzly bears in their forest having a great time with those hams. All right. Call up FWP. We've got a grizzly problem here. And they go, what? So I got nine grizzly bears eating my stuff. So, well, do you have a fence around that?

No. Why should I have to fence that? That's the public's wildlife. You're mismanaging them. We need to knock down the overall population of bears. This is untenable for me. It's costing me a lot of money. All right. So you hear that story and go, where do I fall in this equation? How do I think about that? Move it over to where we're working. You have some ranchers and they've moved into definitely elk habitat, kind of like grizzly bear habitat, elk habitat, and they're getting along with cows are just fine and all that, but they've been buying hay on the open market, you know, big one-ton round bales. They decide to produce their own, so they plow in about 300 acres of alfalfa in the middle of native grassland habitat that's been out there for thousands of years in the middle of elk country. Elk might be evenly distributed all over the landscape.

Long about August, you go just about two more weeks and that alfalfa is looking great. It's like electric green neon out there. In about two more weeks, I'm going to cut this and we'll have some nice bales and relatively cheap except for the diesel fuel to cut it and roll it. And they go out there just two weeks before they're going to cut it, and there's 300 elk in their alfalfa field. They call up FWP and say, they're eating me out of house and home. You got to lower these quotas. This is ridiculous.

There's way too many elk out here. And FWP says, you got a fence around it? No. Why should I have to do that as a cost of doing business, to have that fence around that? You're mismanaging the elk, and that is the crux. Those conversations actually go on. There's elk in my alfalfa fields.

Push those animals down so that they'll leave me alone and stop costing me so much money. And FWP will say, how about some cost share? How about we could help you fence that out? We can't pay for everything because we don't have much money right now, much budget. We could bring you some materials and maybe even help you a little bit, but you pay for half, we'll pay for half. Why should I have to pay for wildlife? It's the public's wildlife.

You're mismanaging it. Get them out of here. And I want the quotas. And then he calls the senator to the commission, back to the people, the FWP in Glasgow and says, lower those quotas and a lot of times the fwp will probably come in there and say well why don't you let people on there to hunt them that's a pretty good way to get elk to run away is to let people shoot at them at least for a little while second week of august a little tough if you have a shoulder sheaths in the backs

up into that when they really hit things hard yeah when they're keeping away from your haystacks and things like that but anybody who might hear this story, it's a cultural thing. There's no right or wrong. So some people might say, well, Sean just said it's exactly right. That rancher with the grizzly bears is in a world of hurt. FWP should take care of that. Or the rancher with the alfalfa field, FWP should take care of that. It's exactly right.

It's the public's wildlife being mismanaged. Other people, I don't know, some of of you guys maybe i don't know what you're thinking would say you know that is a cost of doing business if you're going to put an unnatural thing out in the middle of that country be it hams or bright green alfalfa it's your responsibility to fill it out because you're pulling these those elk are trailing from 15 miles away to come hit your stack right whether it's rolled up or veiled or whatever else. And FWP goes, I wish we had more money because when the conversation, I'm in a lot of conversations with ranchers,

it gets down. It's not that they don't like elk. They actually like elk. A lot of them are bow hunters. It's not about the species. It's about what they do to their operation. It's finance, which is a good news for, I think, for you guys.

Because if you can come up with more money, connecting the dots here, if we can come up with a whole bunch more money and we can help that rancher and fence out that field, they will quit complaining to the FWP, the calls from the legislature and the commission stop, and populations can go up, and you will have lots more elk out there,

a lot more elk out there. All it is is finding some money. What we have found, for instance, this is the important thing, what we have found, for instance, this is the important thing. We have found, for instance, with our Wild Sky program, where ranchers get paid to be more wildlife-friendly, wildlife-tolerant, you should say, everything, by the way, wolves, cougars, elk, whatever it might be, we pay them money for that, substantial money on top of what they sell to in the commodity market, so it's an extra bonus. And that money is enough to tip the behavior

in the direction of being more wildlife friendly. That's one example. So I think there are a number of things that hunters could do to conjure up some more money, if you want to hear them. I got six ideas for that. And if we can get more money into the game, you can get those ranchers feeling better.

Those quotas will go up, and you're going to see a lot more robust populations out there. Hit me with the top three top three yeah this is ways hunters could get more money to create more wildlife friendly sean garrity's top three ways in which hunters could pump more money to make a more wildlife friendly habitat regime out there in the united states of america some equaling more wildlife equaling more alive so that you can hunt it you can chase around yeah and have more fun

you got my attention everybody wins well the really big ones i think there was the what was the what was the act in 1936 with the with with the Pittman. Pittman Robertson. Thank you. Wild Life Restoration Act. And all they did was charge on, they put a tax on guns, right? And ammunition. And ammunition. And then the one, there's the one that followed up later on fishing equipment.

I think if you actually lobbied, I'm guessing back country or somebody has lobbyists and lobbied together in Montana and said, we want to do something like that. We want to tax all kinds of stuff. Oh yeah, we want to do something like that. We want to tax all kinds of stuff. Oh yeah, man, we're all over this. They won't do it. So next backpack tax next idea. So yeah, I would just say that comes up constantly. We want to, we want to actually

be taxed more, be really organized, not just one group, but a whole, a whole bunch of people hammer on this, hire some lobbyists until you finally get it through. Took three tries, I think, three runs of the legislature to get rid of cyanide heap leach mining. Takes a while. You got to stay on it. Don't give up. Yeah, so we would tax backpacks, skis, birding equipment. Everything.

Because, yeah, guns and ammo are taxed 13%. Well, the manufacturers are paying 13%. Everything. There's been some other proposals too, like specific to a species. Like, okay, well, what if we lobbied for an additional dollar percent everything there's been some other proposals to like specific to a species like okay well what if we lobbied for uh an additional dollar specific to getting bison back on that yeah right you buy a license plate and it'll go to it yeah if you can go up against industry and get

cyanide heap leach mining out of montana you guys can do this if you're organized and persistent as hell only if you persist no just throw all we tried once, give it up. Do we hammer on? We hammer on this all the time. I love the idea of a backpack tag. Got to do that. Do that. Next one is. That's tomorrow.

Yanni, make a note of that. Here's another one. 13% on birding equipment. This is interesting, is you got to broaden out and let other people help. So I know a lot of biologists, game biologists from FVP,

of course, we could be in the business who work with them. Jeff Hagner actually used to work for APR, who used to be head of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. So he and I spent lots and lots and lots of hours on airplanes and cars and things like that.

For him, it was a job after being with FWP. I talked about, he said, a lot of interesting anecdotes every time. So why don't we raise hunting fees to get more money? Or are there other ways to get more money? Because the revenue is going down. No, they just doubled. I mean, not too long ago, they doubled non-resident fees.

Right. But I mean resident. I'm talking residents. And so they said, we came up with this wildlife stamp idea. We went down the road and said, how about wildlife stamp where we can get people, that we get all these artists to do these cool stamps, like a duck stamp, charge people who don't hunt, but they'll buy the stamps for 12 bucks a piece because they're done by world-class artists and get the full stamp.

He said everywhere we went, particularly in Livingston, that got shouted down by hunters. Why would they not want that? It's more money to manage game and make things work better at all, go into game management. He said, you know what people said, and it was hunting guides and hunters, and the loudest, most volatile one was over in Livingston one night. He said, we just backed off. Hunters said, we don't want anybody else at the table besides hunters

deciding what happens with Montana wildlife. And what a great idea to get lots of money for people who aren't going to compete with you and try to shoot that deer. They just want to go out and look at birds and they're glad to buy a stamp so they can help, so we can have more grassland birds and whatever else. I think hunters chase away other people because you want to own the discussion. That's a big mistake, I think. There's lots of people in Montana. Wildlife viewing is on a dramatic increase,

decades-long increase. There's a lot of money in those people's pockets, and you're leaving it on the table. Here's another one. With sports, so I don't know if any of you golf or ski at Bridge or Bowl or whatever else. I'm anti-golf. Definitely no golfing. Iing i don't golf either okay let's not go with that i'm joking i'm not anti-golf my father was a golfer so anybody downhill ski ever your hunting is not keeping up

with the increase in price of sports i bought my first season pass in 1978 at bridge or bowl i think it was 110 seemed like a king's ransom at the time. Almost killed me to pay that much money. I mean, that was, didn't leave me any money for gas to go, so it was a bad move. Had to hitchhike or, you know, get rides up there in college.

And now, let's see. At Bridger Bowl, I think a season pass is 800 bucks. If you want to go skiing one day, I think it's $59 for one day. And you can get a 10 pass thing for 510 bucks. So just look at other sports like golfing for three hours. That'll cost you 40 bucks for one time for three hours. Skiing one time from 930 until four o'clock in the afternoon, 59 bucks. So you can get an elk hunting season pass, $10 for your general tag. And what's the elk tag now, $15?

I don't know. It's $15. I always buy the sportsman's pack. So you can go to like 120 for all of it. So if you want to go elk hunting in Montana, for gosh sakes, one of the best places in the So if you want to go elk hunting in Montana, for gosh sakes, one of the best places in the world, you want to go elk hunting in Montana, 10 bucks for your general tag, and it's $10.

So 20 bucks. 600 for a non-resident. 800. I'm just talking about, forget that. Not on residents. You guys sitting right here, right? You get a season pass to hunt elk in Montana for four straight months for 20 bucks.

Yeah. And FWP says every time we try to raise it, people come absolutely unglued. So yeah, you'll never hear, okay, okay. So I know you're like throwing out like general recommendations for general folks. I don't think that, I mean. I think for general folks.

We did, how long did it take? You're not paying up. Sam, you probably know. How long was the duck stand set at 15 bucks? Oh, I mean like 40, 50 years? They didn't even get it adjusted for inflation when it came up. Yeah, no, no. So you're right, man.

I think the hunters can't come. So if you can't do it. We want it all, man. If you can't, yeah, we want it not to pay. I don't care if those dumb skiers pay that much or those golfers or boaters or anybody else. We don't want our tags going up. And I hear, I actually argue on a chairlift with people someone who's got an 800 ski tag saying if i have to pay twice what i'm paying now i'm done i can't hunt said yeah but that bottle of high west whiskey cost you 45 bucks yeah and that mossy oak stretchy thing

you just showed me the other day that was 90 bucks let's just take all the stuff out of your car and put you in pick strip you too you're standing there naked for a few minutes i want to price everything that you use to hunt and you can't pay 45 bucks for an elk tag yeah i think i think a couple of your ones are things that people are already talking about but they're not doing it yeah there are things that people are talking about there's a robust conversation you know i i i like them there's a lot of movement there the one i really agree with you on i think that that yeah i think the people are really resistant understanding like knowing where the money goes and the good that it does i think there's an irrational resistance to paying a fair price for the opportunity. So FDAP's revenues,

they're $59 million a year that they get for game stuff. They do other stuff, fishing, but $59 million a year. If you get that to $100 million or $120 million or $150 million, now we're going to start to get a lot more access and a lot more animals. That's the most point. To pay those ranchers,

to fence that stuff out, they're calm, more wildlife. But it gets down to money, I believe. So if the easiest thing, if none of this stuff, because legislation would change and all that kind of stuff, hunting groups could also get together. FWP has an FWP foundation. There's nothing in it.

It might have almost nothing in it. If you guys all got together, formed some organization, and you just raised money for the FWP foundation, just like APR, money straight into that into that raise three four million bucks a year that's a lot of fences around alfalfa fields that makes a lot of ranchers happy that gets the fwp region six region four off the hook no more screaming at them you got too many elk here or bears eating my prosciutto or whatever else now i'm happy i'm cool because i'm a. If I'm a rancher, a lot of them are. And now all of a sudden those quotas can go up.

Just give, just today when I leave, write a check to the F2B foundation. You don't have to ask anybody, no change of Congress or laws or anything like that. Just give them the money. But earmark it for that. I want it for wildlife damage. I want it to be helped for wildlife damage and

fill that bucket up. Fundraising is hard, but you you guys if you got with your with steve's reach and that mouthpiece the reach that he has and just say i want you guys just like i want you to buy schnee's boots or i want you to buy my cookbook or whatever else oh and by the way you guys do not go to sleep tonight until you write a check to the fwp foundation well it's big damn country, and Montana's just one state. You're talking to a lot of hunters here, though. Yeah. What if everybody wrote 50 bucks?

50 bucks. Every guide, everybody wrote 50 bucks. You'd get millions. Or buy three duck stamps. Whatever it is. But you guys ought to be jamming for millions under that foundation. But you say to the foundation head, I want this earmarked only for wildlife damage mitigation. And pretty soon we'll have wildlife coming out of our ears.

You guys can control it. You know, we do a thing here called hot tip offs. Yeah. That's your hot tip. Is it? Yeah. What do you think of it, Steve? I love it, man.

I wish everybody would give thousands of dollars tomorrow. Yeah. I wish they would buy 10 duck stamps and give thousands tomorrow to their fishing game agency. Yeah. I don't not wish they would do it. That's a good point though, right? It's like in closed circles, I kind of spin this argument different ways. But hunters is a group.

That's just, you can pick any group and there's some nasty examples out there too but hunters are can be a diverse group and there's plenty of hunters in this bell curve that are spending a lot of money a lot more money um than that 50 bucks every single year to a lot of different groups right trying to get this ball rolling and and keep it going right so yeah man there's there's plenty of folks within our our ranks that are doing the bare minimum and a long time ago we said you know buying your duck stamp and your hunting and conservation license is is just enough anymore. It used to be the price of admission. In the 1930s, it was.

Yeah. Price of the game went up. Yeah. I'm looking to wrap her up here. I'm not making an excuse. Yes, but there's also big historical stuff. The hunters that we grow up dreaming about okay that we tell the narratives of and talk about john coulter um you mentioned the guy that you

know the guy that was a chart one of the guys was in charge of hunting game to supply the lewis and clark expedition was a feller by the name of john coulter um we all know daniel boone um davy crockett jed smith okay are sort of the legacy that has shaped the identity of american hunters were guys that didn't pay to go out and be in the woods they got paid to go out and be in the woods so there's like your bar you know there's this there's this this thing that it's like you have the right to go out and extract said resources without a lot of pushback and red tape. And there's people that have an expectation about that. And I think that those expectations need to get up to speed. I agree.

But there is a way. If you want to look at it, where did our mind frame come from? That that's mine. I should be allowed to go out and get it. You don't need to, it's not hard to understand how we came to view it that way. So when something. You said the country was founded on it. When something has a real long track record, like a mentality that has a long track record it's difficult to spin it and

people did a big move toward changing it and night you know during the franklin roosevelt administration with the wildlife restoration act um when we had to you know people were like had to start doing a duck stamp that's a big step people had to start using non-toxic shot to hunt waterfowl like oh my god i'd rather quit duck hunting than do that right so you have people go not kicking and screaming into the future but kicking and screaming into the present man i mean it's like hard so but anyone that's involved in wildlife policy in any kind of serious way and anyone's involved in hunting and fishing in america in any kind of serious way realizes and really better realize that fun that wildlife costs money it's here because we've made it's not here by accident it used to be here by accident and it was here

despite all of our best efforts to remove it now it's here for the simple reason that we've decided that it's valuable and that we're going to make sacrifices to have it be on the ground. And a structure was put around it, like hunting seasons, things like that. It's here because we decided to have it be here. And what got missed, I think you're on a very good track, an important track. One thing that got missed, kind of snuck up on people, like a ski resort. When I first started skiing in the 70s at Bridger Bowl, why the tags keep going, or the prices keep going up? Well, you look at the infrastructure that's there to create a good experience for you from keeping the ski patrol warm with a little hut, those chairlifts, obviously, safety things, people, all that kind of stuff.

Well, when we decided to put that structure around FWP and say there's seasons on hunting so we don't eradicate everything anymore and somebody has to maintain that structure, Fish, Wildlife, and Parks has nearly 700 employees. That's game wardens and trucks and laptops and radios and gas and buildings, all that stuff, and going out there and buying easements and buying property. That's a huge infrastructure, expensive infrastructure there so that you can have a great hunt. They're out there while we're sitting here drinking coffee. They're out there busting their ass,

arresting somebody, trying to open this, closing a gate, whatever, doing a talk, slideshow. Doing disease research. These are good people at FWP and they are broke because people go, I shouldn't have to pay for hunting. 10 bucks, you raise it 12 bucks, can't do it. While we load our bourbon and our guns in our $50,000 truck, I shouldn't have to pay for it. It's a right. It's a God-given right. Well, it's not a God-given right to ski a bridge or bowl for free. There's a huge cost. We live in a capitalist society.

Hunters need to pay up and everybody will be be happy it's not that much money compared to what you got on your body when you're archery hunting you just take the cost of your poly pro maybe your boots and one sock that's all you got to give i feel like um you know that i take that point well but at the same time i really believe that fwp should really hold other users accountable too in terms of like really giving back they try they try with the stamp i get it hunters shout them down i know it but hunters won't shout them down if they want to do like a um uh ski tax i could i'll make you a personal guarantee yeah if they want to impose a 13 to 14 percent tax on ski equipment in order to um fund wildlife in america yeah i i i can promise you you won't hear a lot of gripe from

us but that's not true we've had this discussion it is true that hunters are no no no it's true that hunters are are like the way that it is and now at the table and there aren't a lot of other voices well just they should give the money but have no input all right looking to wrap her up uh i appreciate the call out yeah oh i don't mean i'm not trying to be obnoxious no no no no no some people will obviously take it that way and we'll be offended i'll hear about i appreciate it oh yeah people are always offended by everything someone's offended by us trying to sell our book which is a public service dude what are you gonna say someone's Someone's always offended. That was it.

No, it's great. I appreciate hearing that from the outside. Not really from the outside. I consider you one of us, but I think we need to be doing more of that. Got to work together, and the solutions are the solution. It's not undue.

I mean, when people say, how in the world do you think you can take on this project from scratch, a private enterprise, to raise $700 million and build this whole thing? It's got to get organized and execute over a very long period of time. Can't just give up because you hit a few frustrating bumps. So that's how you guys can do it.

Yeah. Well, we've done an extraordinary amount of work on behalf of American Wildlife. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we should do a lot better work going forward. Thank you very much. Tough questions. You did some of them.

You dodged a couple. Did I dodge them? Yeah, a little bit, but it was good. It was good. I liked it. Because you know what? It wasn't a dodge. You just don't know.

I understand. Some stuff I don't. I know. The older I get, you guys, you're young. The older you get, the less certain you are about a lot of stuff. Can I give you a, you said, can I give you a conc a lot of stuff. Yeah. Can I give you a concluder? Oh, you're allowed to have a concluder. I'm not going to let anyone else have a concluder. I had looked at it.

I'm not going to take a concluder, but I'll let you have a concluder. I hate to steal you guys' concluders. Here's what I like people to take away. They probably, even you guys, might have another thousand questions. I'm glad to come back any time to try to answer them. Something that didn't sound quite right. Say, we got to get back in here and straighten this out, whatever it was. Glad to do it. Please do. People listening, what I'd like you to take away is you can count on us to keep going.

So we've done 29 property acquisitions. We're adding about 35,000 acres a year to our model. We will work our butts off to keep this thing going and keep adding more wildlife habitat. We'll work really hard to take that habitat and move it into something that is going to support a huge amount of wildlife, but also change the baseline for what is normal today in Montana. And when you come out, you'll see less fences, you'll see less takeout, keep out signs, more signs saying welcome to prairie american prairie reserve on our private land and we want to make things like corner hopping and all that kind of stuff moot because the fence isn't even there we've already done that we can

show you in thousands and tens of thousands of acres where we've already done that where it's a it's a you don't have to say that you just walk right across our private there's checker the world of checkerboard goes away because you can't see it anymore, right? But we'll also put in infrastructure. We're just finishing our second really big campground right on 191. It'll be open in the spring, but there's hunters and others. So we'll put in campgrounds, 15 bucks a night. If you think that's exorbitant, you can camp on the BLM right next door for free, guerrilla camp. We're doing a 200 mile wide hut to hut system, one of the biggest hut systems in North America. There's hunters using those huts right now

based out of the PN. We're moving west to east all the way across towards the Fort Peck Dam. So we'll put in things for you. We'll buy the land, we'll remodel the land, we'll work on wildlife populations. We'll put in places for you to stay and make it easy for you to move about.

Try to take it back in some ways to the old days. But you guys can help us mostly by helping, barking up the wrong tree by hammering on us for access. All I can say is don't worry about it. Come talk to me. Come talk to anybody, our CEO, Allie Fox. Just ask, are you guys really serious about public access? And then once you feel good

about that, help us build wildlife populations. And you can do that by some ideas we just talked about in the last half hour. The issue is the population. So because everybody's chasing around tiny little fragments of what used to be there. We can grow that up big, everybody's going to win, but you got to help the ranchers. They're working on 3% margins. They need some help. No matter what you think, whether they should share the cost or whatever else, let's just help them. We'll get more wildlife.

That's what I'd say. We'll keep working. All right. Save your concluders. I had a good one. All right, Yanni, go ahead. I want to hear Yanni's. I'm pushing AP one. I did too. All right, Yanni, go ahead. If you really, if you really. I want to hear Yanni's. I'm pushing.

And then Sammy gets to do yours. I'm pushing APR and I feel like, you know. Well, you're going to push it. Like he was saying about with the Bisons, like the farther away you are from them. Like, I'm anxious about Bison. I don't even, because I don't know that much about him, you know. I just know what's on the park. So the same thing with APR. It's like people need to go up there and check it out.

Like you said, it's wide open right now. Go check it out. Go see what's going on out there. There's hunting opportunities up there now. We don't need to talk about what they are. Go online and go check it out. And I think a lot less people would be scared of the whole thing if they just probably took a drive up through beautiful Montana

and go and check it out, right? In fact, come hunt. Right now today as we're sitting here, there's people out in the snow hunting bison. There you go. Go hunt some bison sam thanks oh yeah i was just gonna say that my dad thinks that you already have your 10 000 uh bison floor there uh not too long ago he walked out of the tent in the morning goes sam come look there's thousands of bison i'm like what are you talking about like i think they only have like a thousand bison. And I come out and it's, you know,

it's that grainy first light kind of dawn. Where were you? You're on AP. You're on AP. Yeah, don't say it, man. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

And I go, well, yeah, I see those three that are right up there in the foreground. He's like, don't you see all those other ones? I was like, that's sagebrush. No, but what I wanted to say was that first time I went out in that country, I was reading Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, a biography of Meriwether Lewis. And talking about this area, Stephen Ambrose said that it is the area that's least changed since Lewiswis saw it and that was just so inspiring to me in that moment because i was like six seven miles back in hiking chasing around elk um and it's just

magnificent country and it it always uh plays with my imagination to to think about what it looked like you know that 200 years ago when they saw it and how cool it would be to have that kind of population level again for wildlife someday good it's great glad you're getting out there we're trying to get people to see it it's a long ways and so many people have questions i actually never been there a lot of montanas have never even seen it well kelly might as well wedge one in um boy i've talked a lot about a lot of good stuff gotta have you back glad to come back yeah i definitely need to make a field trip that's it that's all i got all right everyone thanks for joining us Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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