The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 276: An Outdoor Recreation Pissing Match

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Rachel Schmidt, Sam Lungren, Brody Henderson, Spencer Neuharth, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.Topics discussed: testing our interest meter; engorged cloacas and Steve's son interrupting turtle sex; Spencer's first tattoo of South Dakota's state tree; Rachel's collection of fly tattoos; gumbo areas and the Bermuda Triangle of turkey spots; Steve's tip to celebrities: you'll get the right attention if you talk about eating squirrels; the Tower of Power, Steve's sebateous cyst, and trucker butt; camping out at highway medians; Sam's delicious aged deer ham; a lobster fight and the UN; exercising treaty rights and how the Sinixt of Canada are not extinct; developments with the Herrera case; locking you out of 60 million acres of public land; how the U.S. recreation economy is bigger than the automotive and pharmaceutical industries; undermining the false notion of "non-consumptive" use of the land; how Steve dogs on people who have camper trailers, but now has a camper trailer of his own; why water recreationists should kiss anglers' asses; the backpack tax; going from being a person in the outdoors to being a parent in the outdoors; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Go farther, stay longer. Okay, quick round of introductions. I'm going to go the opposite way you do that you deal poker. Spencer Newharth. We'll talk about this. Brand new, like, I thought you were too old for a tattoo. Brand new tattoo. Sam Lundgren with his, I don't know if I believe that it's dry age.

Is dry age deer meat sitting here? We'll talk about that. I don't know what, I don't know if I believe that it's dry age. Is dry age deer meat sitting here? We'll talk about that. I don't know what to call it either. Cringe Schneider's here, of course, and she has a desiccated partial fox skeleton that she's running around with. Trying to figure out how to make an art project out of it. Phil, the engineer, Brody, and special guest Rachel Schmidt. So currently director of Innovative Alliances for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Like a staffer.

Yeah. Full-time, no volunteer garbage. No, no volunteer anymore. Paid member. Rachel, you asked about these little wooden boxes in front of you? They're beautiful. Okay. We finally got it. We're not really into it. We finally got our interest meter.

So everybody in the studio has their own wooden box, and they're beautiful, very artisan. It's like an artisan interest meter. Everybody has a wooden box that has an on-off switch and a dial. And we're not going to do this officially yet, but if they find something interesting, like watch, let me tell this story. Okay, now everybody turn yours all the way down and I'm going to tell a story.

I want to see how it works. Me and my son, my 10-year-old, we're sneaking up on a turkey the other day. Nothing yet. It's a red dot, everybody. Well, it's just so all, okay. There's one red dot just indicating it was on. And I just striked a second red dot.

We notice a, I notice, I'm walking point. I noticed a snapping turtle under, oh, someone just lost interest. Because I was up front. You gave yourself a dot. I was up front. You gave yourself the dog. I was up front, so that lost interest. And I notice, under about six inches of water, a snapping turtle laying there. Second red light one.

I'm getting interested now. Third red light one. So I say to my son, James, I'm like, hey, watch. I'll show you how to sneak up and grab one of these things. And I talked about how you can tell by the shape of the shell where his tail is. Light goes on. And I went up the bank, kind of snuck down around, and reached down under there and latched onto his tail.

And hauled him out, and up comes not just one turtle. Green light goes on. See, it's already maxed. All the green lights go on. Not just one turtle comes up, but two turtles come up. And their cloacas are engorged. Making love. They were making love.

And you got in the way of that. Yeah. And the one, so I jacked them both out of the water. The under one drops free, swims off. And my boy, who doesn't like to have an opportunity passing by was adamant that we now uh kill this turtle and butcher it and cook it and just shift focus to that rather than the turkey we're after the turkey is in his mind like that doesn't exist anymore and i was like you're gonna have a mighty big job ahead of you if you're gonna to saw that turtle's head off with a pocket knife.

That's the only way to do it. And then I eventually talked him into letting the turtle go. And so hopefully they joined back up again. Now watch. Turn it back up to full blast. Green lights. Nothing happened to be uninteresting. Or just it's fading.

Now watch. Watch what happens when i say like let's talk about spencer's tattoo injury and sex it's always gonna go the interest meter's going down spencer's tattoo is just oh look no uh what was that rachel i was saying i mean you you're halfway through the story you hit injury or sex you You're always, you're going to get the green light. Yeah, it's going to like. Like that's the hook. The hook is there. So how can you work those themes into that?

Tell everybody what your new tattoo is, Spencer. Is this your first tattoo? It's my first tattoo. Does your wife have a tattoo? She has like six. Oh. Brody, you don't have any tattoos. No.

Does your wife have a tattoo? No. I miss that window. I thought me and my wife were the only people your wife have a tattoo No I miss that window I thought me and my wife Were the only people With no tattoos No I miss the window You know I like

Went through that early 90s period And thought about it And then just never did it Oh I went down to get one And I didn't get it I did too Really

Then I just got too drunk And never made it there My brother My brother Danny Got the world's worst steelhead I mean it looked amazing It looked amazing No listen

30 years ago Whatever the hell it was When he he was like, I don't know, he was 21, 22 years old. It looked amazing. He got a steelhead on his arm and it was like 75 bucks, right? And I was just burning up with jealousy. So I'm like, well, I'm going to get a fly. I'm going to get a steelhead fly because we used to catch a lot of steelhead in Michigan. So I was going to go down there and I go down there and I had $70 and the guy's like 75

and I'm like, I only got 70. And that is why I don't have a tattoo today. No, you could have found $5 of the change in your truck. You would be regretting that tattoo so much now. I have many tattoos. I collect fly tattoos. How many tattoos do you have on you? You're not going to drop your shorts, are you?

No, no, I'm not. Interest meter going up. Look at that. you? No, no, I'm not. Interesting. Oh, no. Look at that. Oh, very cool. Yeah. I collect fly tattoos. Lower back? Well, my first. Reaching up the ribs?

Yeah. My first one is a dry fly. It's the first dry fly my grandfather ever taught me how to tie. It's a royal wolf. And so I got that tattoo in the late 90s before they were called tramp stamps. When you get one on your lower back. So it wasn't a thing. So I got it right there.

And then they became known as tramp stamps. But by that time, I was just collecting flies and they're just wrapping up my back. I've got three saltwater flies coming next. That's great. So how many do you have right now? Nine. Nine. Whoa.

Spencer, you got some work to do, man. I know. So Spencer got a, tell us again what it is. It's about 10 inches long, probably about two and a half inches wide at its biggest. It is a black hill spruce, which is the state tree of South Dakota. It's native to the black hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Looks like track marks running up his arm at a passing at a passing glance you think he was a junkie no it's no i like that

tattoo thank you see i want to get uh i saw a guy that had a tattoo it was the north american continent okay and he had a little turkey foot all the places where he killed his royal slam. I like that. That's good. So I was thinking about doing that. What's the appropriate age for a tattoo? You said I'm too old. I was just teasing.

I don't think there's any. I don't think. It does seem like most tattoos occur between the ages of like 18 and 22, though. Yeah, there's an age when people are susceptible to tattoo artists. I feel like that's shifted, though. I think it's very much shifted. That was the time that I thought a lot about it,

but then it's just continued to fade. I tried to get mine in 1996. My fly. It's not too late. So my wife has like... I know, man.

I'm like... Do it. Start collecting them. That turkey one. Steven Fever. Come on. Cultivate the rock star image a little more. We did get the turkey, the snap turtle turkey.

So it wasn't his first turkey because he got another turkey this year in Wisconsin. But we snuck in on a strutter and got like hundred yards from him and started calling at him and he finally turned and was kind of coming and all of a sudden jake popped up like 20 yards away just all of a sudden here's his head and i told james shoot shoot shoot and he shot it and uh he was this is like this is embarrassing to admit but he was like he didn't say it but you could tell he was like bummed it was a jake but he at that precious, innocent age, it's already registered. I was like, man, I didn't know about that kind of stuff until I was 30 years old. We just thought, turkeys are turkeys, man. Who cares?

Yeah, I love Jake's. Already wanting to see its spurs. There's no spurs! I couldn't believe it. Literally none? No spurs? No, it just had little warts. know little nubbins um yeah so that happened which is my fault because when he got his first turkey it was a long beard with spurs and so we're all celebrating you know i mean yeah you can't you

can't if you celebrate the highs and people become aware of the lows so that was a problem um and then we caught a and ain't quite that's not quite fair almost caught a soft shell turtle that same day too i found the queen mother of all turtle trap yeah i want to go the queen mother of all turtle trapping spots um for a while in high school i would sell them for a dollar a pound turtle soup meat no but you had to take the carapace off had to gut them and take the carapace off what'd you For a while in high school, I would sell them for a dollar a pound. Turtle soup meat? No. But you had to take the carapace off. You had to gut them and take the carapace off. What did you do with the shells?

Various stuff. Give them away. Paint them. I used to paint them on the inside. I'd paint the color of the binding on a National Geographic magazine, like yellow and then lacquer the top. They're sweet. So when's the last time you killed a snapper and ate him? Oh, a couple years ago ago i got one bow fishing

uh in kentucky moving on okay now brody explain what happened to your truck uh is that turkey camp at yannis's secret turkey spot and which i know about yeah you know the general zone. And everything's going great for like three days. We're killing turkeys. And it rained the last night we were there. And I was pulling my camper. So I decided after the morning hunt to go check the road out to see if I could even get the camper out of there.

And got like 50 yards from camp, put the truck in a ditch. Cause it was all gumbo-y. Oh yeah. Bad, bad. You better explain gumbo. Most, nah, a lot of people don't know what gumbo is. I grew up in Michigan where it's sandy. No one knows what gumbo is.

It's just this really greasy, gluey mud that's impossible to drive in. Kind of clay based. Yeah. No bottom. It builds up on itself. It's an expandable. And I actually even put chains on the back of my truck. That made no difference. Because it just, the chain just collect the gumbo.

Yep. So. Was it from snow melt or rain or what? It's just overnight rain. Wasn't even that, doesn't take a whole lot. You know, it's just like a steady rain. Yeah. Hunting those gumbo areas, you can go into a spot.

And then, I mean, it happens quite frequently. If you drive in you know 10 20 miles whatever on gumbo roads and it rains a lot of times you gotta wait a day right and we were you're supposed to go to work or whatever and you just can't man yeah we were prepared to do that even before the chart especially go on private if you're on um private land like we were hunting turkeys on a little chunk of private land the other day and And, uh, was very much like, man, you know,

cause then you piss people off. Right. You don't want to be tearing up their fields. The quickest way to get uninvited to a ranch is to go behind through their gumbo things and. Yeah. Cut ruts in it. Yeah. But, uh,

either way, I won't mention the, the manufacturer's name. Um, but I, I recently got a new truck and that truck has a. Dude, why are you dogging on our trucks, man? Listen, that skid plate that they put on those things, that cloth material, pressed cloth, like that doesn't even qualify as a skid plate. And when I slid into the the ditch it just tore it right off

yeah it's you know it's over the transmission i bet they call it an apron i like it um yeah that was disappointing so it tore that off and poked a hole in the transmission fluid pan which i didn't know so i got like was that steel no it's plastic. Does this hold new tranny fluid in? Yeah. Yeah. Well, here's what they'd tell you. They'd tell you that it's about fuel efficiency and lightweight. Exactly.

It's the most popular truck in North America. I think it's the best selling vehicle in the world. Yeah. I loved it up until this point. Now I love it again because it's fixed. Dude, I love it. It's like having an apartment building. Yeah. If you got kids and dogs and love it again because it's fixed. Dude, I love it. It's like having an apartment building. Yeah.

If you got kids and dogs and gear, yeah, it's great. Anyway, I got stranded for a couple days while the thing was getting fixed. Which, interestingly, is kind of like the Bermuda Triangle of Turkey spots. Exactly. Because Yanni got stranded. Yanni's brother-in-law. Oh. had yanni got stranded yanni's uh brother-in-law oh but yannis was kind of de facto stranded with him because his brother-in-law's truck broke down the same spot last year do you feel like your kids

into turkey hunting now you were saying you got he liked it oh yeah he said he's he wants to do that more than kill a deer because he got to see the whole show you know three gobblers messing around and one came down and yeah, it was cool. He liked it. Yeah. Big time. Did you like doing that grip and grin?

Oh yeah. Yeah. He liked that. Uh, Brody, what were you saying? Like Cody Lujan. Yeah.

Oh, sent us this thing. Um, so this is the same river i'm not being very clear we have a friend cody luhan i don't think he's been on the show though he was at the live podcast in denver the very first one he has been on the show he um big new mexico colorado guy he found a he found a buffalo skull on the y y'all say Yampa, right? I say Yampa. Yana says Yampa, which I think is correct. It's, uh, I believe it's the last, it's one of

the last major rivers in Colorado that's considered undammed. Hmm. Flowing dumps into the green or yeah. No. Yeah. Dumps into the green river. You yeah dumps into the green river you know our own friendly yellowstone river here is the longest

undamned undamned river in the lower 48 yeah and man they used to want to damn that thing so damn bad oh yeah now it's now it's like pride thing they'll never do it oh yeah people fighting them off tooth and nail to try to keep them from damming it now everybody runs around talking about how cool it is it is not damn yep they were gonna put a bunch of dams and a bunch of, I think, coal-fired power plants along it,

which would draw enough water to dewater the Yellowstone. That sounds good. At one point, yeah. Can you imagine? Including damming the Paradise Valley, too. Yeah. That was a proposal. Can you imagine having a big old lake right there?

I'll tell you what. Well, I have a controversial idea about that but i'm not going to get into it so the yampa the yampa um our friend cody found a skull there and he sent us an article about this kind of interesting a guy found quite a while ago but he just donated to a museum a guy found a bison antiquus skull along the yampa and uh radiocarbon dating i think it's about 40 000 years old he just donated to the museum of northwest colorado but reason i bring this thing up is these i don't know what the current story is on these things but the old understanding of it was that you had at the end of the you know during a interglacial period

when glaciers receded um step bison came down and colonized the lower 48 like came down through the ice sheets when they were receded from a melt and then here they were and they kind of like poured forth on this this landscape that was on they didn't have any real competitors, this big grassland grazer. And they were living in areas that, uh, had recently been glaciated tons of territory for them. Great conditions. And they sprouted horns, six feet tip-to-tip. So more like what you think of a water buffalo horns, like going out straight rather than...

Or almost more like longhorns. No, because water buffalo's kind of got a muskox-y vibe to it, you know? More like a Texas longhorn after you steam... Do they steam it to... Yeah, you know when you see those crazy ones, they like steam them and change the shape on them? It's real common. I did not know that. Really? Yeah, I'd never you see those crazy ones, they like steam them and change the shape on them?

It's real common. I did not know that. Really? Yeah, I'd never heard that. Anyways, big ass long outside of his head's horns. Okay. Six foot tip to tip. Wow.

This one that donated to the museum, it's just the cores. Like the sheaths are gone. But when you see one of those suckers with the sheaths on it, yeah. Can you imagine? One and a half times the size of the current one six foot tip tip that's crazy that's obviously that that's not the kind you found that inspired you to write the book no mine was just a joe blow one yeah now there's this thing called horn core morphology which i was i became a discipline of for a while and it's like you take

all these relative measurements on on buffalo skulls and you can kind of try to age it they just like they used to think they could do that with people too not aging but they used to think that they could like you know like take measurements on your skulls and who's smarter or not smarter what was it called like it had oh yeah like you could tell like intelligent races by like eugenics yeah was that based on like measuring people's skulls i feel like it's teetering on that like craniums are like wow looks like my skulls the smart kind um phrenology phrenology so i initially thought the one i found the first one i found i found a couple since then partially like not as cool as the first one but the first one i found initially i I thought it was an oldie.

But then I had it radiocarbon dated and I had a genetic sample taken from it and it's just a regular one. And they think, the reason I like it is they think that there's a 66% probability that it died within about 10 years of 1770. Oh, that's cool. Just when things were getting going here.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Just when things are starting to heat up around here uh uh crin uh found this thing that's in here and she put in about she she mentions that it's not gonna really mean anything i don't know much about professional sports but i like this guy. I like this guy. A big thing in the news now, the Baltimore Ravens,

like honest to God, if you'd sat me down and told me to list teams, I don't think I would've come up with that one. I'd have been like the Cowboys, the Bears, the Packers,

the ones that were cool when I was a youngster. But after the other week's podcast about Ravens, you know, can. Yeah. When people say the name of the NFL guy, I'm like, fridge Perry. Like, I just don't. No idea. No idea.

Oh, man. So this dude, I like this guy. Cranny's trying to get him on the show. All right. Can you work on that real hard? Sure. you know i know we have nfl listeners ben we're trying to get hold of ben cleveland baltimore ravens guard just got drafted he's making the news all over the place because he eats a lot of squirrels then he had to clarify that his squirrel diet is being overblown he's more of an opportunistic squirrel eater.

He just says he goes into his freezer and he eats what's in his freezer and sometimes there's squirrel in his freezer, but everybody's acting like, this is advice for celebrities. I think that like, if you want to make the news and you can't think of whatever and you just haven't been in the news cycle,

well, probably just talk about eating squirrels because it doesn't piss anybody off. Like if you said like, I eat panda bears, you're going to get the wrong attention right if you eat squirrels like no one's gonna get mad everybody's gonna think it's kind of quirky you'll get some good ink that's my tip my tip to celebrities did you see his quote about the squirrel taste i know that he was saying that he finds them in certain areas that have a nuttier flavor

than in other areas. South Georgia, he said they're quite a bit nuttier. But then when you get up north, they just taste like squirrel now. That's amazing. Dude, I want to have him on the show so bad.

I want to talk about football. I appreciate that he's good at what he does, right? Right. I appreciate he's good at what he does. And then his clarifying quote like i think made it better because he's like i don't eat squirrels all the time it's just when there ain't no deer meat left i like him a lot me too so what happened he's somehow or another what brought it up is he was telling

a story i don't know if he grew up in a hard scrabble family but he's telling a story about when he's a kid, he didn't have anything. There was nothing in his home that he wanted to eat, but they had biscuits and he shot two squirrels out of it. He's talking about making his own food when he was a kid and he shot two squirrels out the window with a 22 and made squirrel and biscuits for himself. Sounds like a cow story.

What's that? It was on a sick day that he was home from school. Yeah. Oh, okay. Love this guy. I don't know maybe maybe he's the worst guy in the world we'll find out yeah i think he's a good guy sounds like it yeah um we're having squirrel for dinner tonight i thought out two packs of squirrel and one pack of rabbits um how you doing it my kids just like it like they like you to Brown it in a pan and then put it in a oven.

Easy. Yeah. I had to eat out last night for a work thing, but they had a raccoon last night. I love it, man. They don't know what they just don't. They don't know enough to care. We were talking about sis. I was explaining explaining it but i couldn't remember it my brother used to have a my brother's old girlfriend we called her to the tower of power uh she had do you care to

elaborate i would like some clarification on this one please he's like not a small person she towered over him are you kidding me yeah he had like an eight foot tall girlfriend um the tower of power just would beat your ass if you got in a fight with her what was her name i don't want to tell her name i honestly can't remember they weren't together that long i liked her a lot i remember uh i remember one time we went, I remember this. We took her duck hunting, and I remember we were eating duck, duck hunting. And I finished my duck leg and threw it and said, like, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, or something like that, and threw the bone. And I remember it hung up in a barbed wire fence. Interesting story. That memory's just stuck in my head.

Where are those dials at, guys? They're all the way down. Turn dials at guys turn those things up turn those things up i was saying how she had a um i remember while they were boyfriend girlfriend she had this cyst removed that had teeth in it okay you guys talked about this the other day i was eating breakfast it's the first time in a long time I just stopped chewing and I was done. Yeah, it's unappetizing. And I don't have a, like. Not a squeamish person.

No. Oh, God. No one wants this toothy. Cis. But in them. But. We have one of our. We had a doctor write in.

The doctor's like, I know you guys got all kinds of doctors that are always writing in, but you don't have many obstetrician gynecologists you write in. And he's correct. I think he's the first obstetrician gynecologist to write in. He wanted to clarify a few things about the Tower of Powers cyst. It's a dermoid cyst. It's an ovarian germ cell tumor very common most women who have one probably will never know it and you are probably close to someone with an ovarian cyst whether they

know it or not and i'm only close to you two rachel and Corinne. So one of you has one of these little buggers in you right now. A toothy little ovary? Is that what we call them? Yes. All of them have hair. And a copious, sebaceous fluid that looks exactly like Papa John's garlic butter. That's too much detail right there. That's how he describes it.

Great way to set up my uh my little tasty treats we brought in here to eat oh yeah we should have switched it we should have switched it we should have switched around though that's a knock against corinne's producing abilities to have put to have not put sam up top yeah before this sorry guys looks like i don't know tape no not taste like looks like papa john's garlic butter occasionally they have teeth sometimes a small jawbone sometimes thyroid tissue even cartilage or tissue related to the eye hmm that's what happened to her carrying a little person around you guys might want to go down and get some kind of exam find out if you might have one of Hmm. Huh. That's what happened to her. Carrying a little person around. You guys might want to go down and get some kind of exam to find out if you might have one of these buggers.

Have you ever looked at video? Are they called, is it sebaceous cysts? Oh, you want to feel one of those right now? Well, or what's the one? Indulge yourself. I have them removed every few years. No, no. Okay, then what am I thinking about? Rachel is touching Steve's head right now.

Yeah, it's right there. I had them one time come in like horns. They grew in exactly perfect for horns. So what am I thinking? I'm thinking of like these like, I don't know, they're like, or pyloric? I don't know. Anyway, but it's like the infection goes in. A woman problem?

No, no, no. It's actually young truckers usually get them. I watched this whole special. It's like a Dr. Pimple Popper special or something like that, right? And it's like they get like an ingrown hair, like usually on their butt because they're sitting on their butt all the time. And then it gets infected, but the infection goes in. And it can actually like these like infected tentacles like go down the legs.

So when they finally get them, it's like this little like zit, but then they start popping it and it's just fountains and they're like squeezing the pus up from the leg and like it's just fountains and they're like squeezing the pus up from like the leg and like it's just fountains of this substance when you're saying fountains i keep thinking about how that community is so drawn to fountain pop too fountain soda fountain 30 ounce fountain sodas and whatnot that might be a contributing factor uh another good clarification came in i was saying that a long time ago i wanted to do and never did it when i was a magazine writer i wanted to do a piece for outside when i used to write there a lot about camping and highway medians like you know in some areas where there's a where you have two

high there's you know highways right like two lane highways interstate highways and they have the obviously the median strip but sometimes sometimes the, the median strips, because of whatever is going on with the road construction, there's hundreds of yards of no man's land. And you imagine deer and whatnot crossing wind up in that meeting and probably find right. Shangri-La. Yeah.

Or like whatever there's probably, and there's no one would go in there. And I wanted to explore those with this guy pointed out, someone wrote in that there is a guy that has a uh youtube thing called camping with steve which makes me jealous as hell because i didn't come up with that it's different steve camping with steve and i haven't watched yet but oning with Steve, he does the whole thing about camping and highway medians. He does. He's an expert in stealth camping. I love that.

I love that phrase. I've employed that a lot in my life. Camping with Steve? No, stealth camping. That's good. Just like, well, I got to pull over and sleep somewhere and I do not want to pay for a hosted campground. So I'll just kind of slide in here. What's the most interesting stealth spot you've.

First time I visited Missoula, Montana, I tried to go hide out in this area under construction, under a bridge. And it wasn't very stealthy because a cop came and found me. I ended up living there for eight years and it's a whole beautiful park now. Under the bridge? Yeah. Didn't go very well. I don't't know that's just what came to mind yeah when you're younger um and you guys are quite a bit younger than i am but you have a very different attitude about like getting kicked out of places do you mean you just want to sleep and the idea that in the middle of the night a cop's gonna bang on the window and shine a light until you can't sleep

there it just isn't it's like oh okay that's cool but now i sort of like live in fear of conflict And the idea that in the middle of the night, a cop's going to bang on the window and shine a light until you can't sleep there. It just isn't. It's like, oh, okay. That's cool. But now I sort of like live in fear of conflict like that. Yeah, absolutely. I would not. I would not repeat that.

Yeah. I just don't like now that kind of thing just makes me like everything to be all like positive. Sure. That I'm okay to like sleep somewhere or camp somewhere. Stealth camping is not. I like positive. Sure. That I'm okay to like sleep somewhere, camp somewhere. Stealth camping is not. I like it. I like that camping with Steve exists and that he's a stealth camper, but I just got,

I'm too cautious now about that kind of stuff. Well, we got money and smartphones and stuff now. I mean, back then it was just like, well, I think I can probably get away with it and I just need to sleep. So yeah,

exactly. You couldn't, you had no quick way to research where you were and to find a good place to go sleep and all that business. Exactly. The cop was super nice about it. He's like, yeah, no, you can't sleep here, but here's some ideas of where you can sleep. Oh, really? Give you a couple of tips? Yeah.

It was real pleasant. I'm sure he's launched those out to a lot of homeless people as well. Probably. I think that's what he thought it was. He thought I was cooking meth under that bridge in my truck or something. Speaking of police officers, I was going to mention this. I got a text message this morning from our friend Guy Zuck, who's been on the show a few times. Back a ways in our library, we had an episode called something like the Brownsback and the Baseball Bat.

And it was about Guy Zuck, who was on the show. And he's an expert turkey caller and does it without he can call turkeys with no calls in his mouth but when he's a kid he had a brownsback turkey and he would call it in and then he'd whoop it with a wiffle ball bat a little bit hit it to spook it not bad just to let it know so that it would become less inclined to be duped. Not bad. Not whoop it bad. I use the poor verb choice.

He would... A slight hazing. Poke it. Love tap it with a wiffle ball bat. And then call it in again. Keep tricking it. Did it work? He's a really good turkey caller. He this morning took out a guy.

He. Where the land. Like he's a land manager. At a property that my friends own. And they use. My friend uses the property to have veterans. And people. Allow veterans and other.

A lot of wounded veterans. go hunt on his place that's kind of his main focus of the properties he owns and they had a guy out there that got a turkey this morning that was shot on duty in springfield missouri five years ago um first time he has fired a gun since he was shot it was first time time hunting. Got himself a turkey this morning. So that was, yeah, Guy Zuck's a good dude. Someone wrote in with a question. Struggling with why people name game animals. We've talked about this a hundred times.

Yep. What's your take on it, Rachel? No. Like old. It's just, I mean, it's about where you come from too. And like, I think a lot of folks in the West, because we don't necessarily like isolate ourselves to like a pocket with like super routine deer. Like that's a foreign concept to us. It's like most of the deer I've ever shot, I've never even seen before. Whereas in the East, like you are, you're in this pattern, you're in the same stand.

You have, you know, deer that are, you know, super, you know, patterned. And so it is a way to, I mean, that's just our nature is to figure out how to mark something so you can keep track of it in your head. So for a while I thought it was super ridiculous, but now I'm like, why do I care? Yeah, it's expedient. Why do I care? I had to wrap my head around it too. I did too because people got clever. Like I only caught it once people got clever with it. Because if you, everybody would be like, you know that one buck?

Right. The buck by Bob's house? That doesn't make anyone upset. I saw the buck by Bob's house again. Yeah, but that's not a name either. That's not a Christian name. I know, but it's an individual that you're communicating about. So the fact that someone would go, let's say it's by Bob's house.

So he's Bob the buck. Why does that all of a sudden become like, oh, I don't know about that. It's fine to say the buck by Bob's house. But Bob the Buck upsets people. You still upset. No, upset me. I was just kind of like, huh, it's weird. Well, you also got the, you got the, like the, the descriptive names too.

Like the big nine, the wide eight. Yeah. Yeah. My dad had, my dad was a huge whitetail hunter for years. And he like had this five-year period where he was just like obsessively rabid after this buck that he called the hook toe. And because it's track, like the front, you know, like they would hook over. And so it always was like this hook and he would like, it was a really big buck. And he, you know, he'd catch its track every once in a while.

And he was just obsessed with it. Did he kill it? He didn't. No, he didn't. Now, Mark Kenyon explained it because Mark Kenyon, he's got a lot of little places he hunts. You know, he doesn't have like some, he's a big white tail hunter, you know, wired to hunt Mark Kenyon. And he's got all these little spots, you know, like 20 acres, whatever. And he's always kind of watching what bucks are coming and going.

And he might at any given time be sort of aware of eight or ten deer and he watches them over the course of many years it's like what the hell is he supposed to do and and i've also found that like in especially mark's situation it's it's very useful for creating a narrative to allowing people to follow along with it to give you the idea of deer he's recently killed, I think it was Tran, Frank, Droopy. The wide eight, the tall eight. The one he tried killing was Holyfield. So those are like the names. What was the name of that crazy buck you shot in Kansas last year?

I'm trying to think. Oh, I'm disappointed. I don't remember what they had named him. That buck's got to have a name. He had a name. I don't remember. But that was an example, too remember what they had named him that buck's gotta have a name he had a name i don't remember but that was an example too where they had you know pretty much any deer that we would lay eyes on had a name we have a very interesting white tail that lives around our yard and we he's still just like the one big buck oh that one we were looking at last maybe last fall yeah he's looking. He's all velvety.

I have a hard time. I'm sure there's people that are good at it. I have a hard time telling what's going to happen, but he's got celery stalks of velvet coming out the top of his head. I mean, not the individuals, man. I'm talking about when you buy all the celery still hooked together. That's an exaggeration. And then cut one of those in half.

A lot of stuff going on. And then cut those in half. That's what it looks like. Big velvet knobs coming out. Call them celery. Yep, the celery buck. But here's a question. Where does that all dovetail with like anthropomorphizing animals? And then I've heard many people say like i'm gonna go and get my

deer this year or that's my bear you know like over the course of a couple of years you think you see the same animal you know you're unsuccessful at you know killing the thing you know and and it's like that's mine and it's like, it's as though that animal knows you. Of course not. But if you kill it and tag it, it is legally yours. It's going to be mine. It's legally your property. Sure, sure. Well, yeah, okay.

So they're just calling your shot. Well, I think more than anthropomorphizing in this situation, like the naming of a deer, it's more of, I think, maybe the way way our brains work is we just like something that's routined in our life we like to label it like you want you want to classify it you want to label it you want to because it's something that's familiar and i think that's maybe the way our lives are i mean just our brains kind of worked whereas i don't know if you're necessarily like like giving that animal some human character yeah you're not putting a bow tie on it and imagining its relationship with its skunk best friend and they go off and have adventures. Thank God. You're calling it the Y-Date. Yes.

So, yeah, I just think it's maybe just where our brains work or want to work. I don't know. Guy from Oklahoma wrote in his hunting buddy's a farmer, and he's talking about how they winter cattle on their place. And he says that they feed corn, and then a lot of geese come out into the pastures where these cattle are at and pick the undigested bits of corn out of the nur.

And he's wondering what everybody thinks about that. Eating those. But man, if you eat a duck anywhere, you're eating that. If you eat a turkey anywhere in the American West. Yeah. If you eat a cow, you're eating cow shit like i mean come on like they're eating you've seen them out in a path yeah they lick themselves and they're coated in nerd and they it's all over in the grass they're eating i mean everything deer i'm sure are

picking up shit when they're eating let me let's be clear if you're eating the mints that are on the lake hostess table as you're leaving restaurants, you too are consuming some fecal matter. Yeah, it doesn't bother me. Now, we one time had a duck hunting permission in a pretty famous waterfowl area. And we got a duck hunting permission where there was a municipal sewage facility. And it was so bad. I mean, we got a lot of ducks there. It was so bad that there were prophylactics now and then.

So you were hunting in the treated stuff or the untreated stuff? You know, I was never clear. It sounds kind of untreated. We were down the line. We were down I was never clear. It sounds kind of untreated. We were down the line. We were down the line a bit. We were down the line a bit and it had a lot of aquatic vegetation. I was in some kind of later settling pond. I'd have to go back and revisit. We didn't

pay too much attention at the time. I later realized it seemed like a good way to get hepatitis. The topic of plastic in the environment. And man, we're like, man, we got this place all to ourselves. And when the guy gave permission, he didn't even hem or haw about it. I was like, I can't believe no one has this spot. Yeah. We hunted it for several years.

So I don't know. That doesn't bother me. All right, Sam. Now after we talked about those little toothy sis. And shitty ducks. Eating nerd. Sam Lundgren here texted me one day and was asking about okay i just to clarify i feel like you said have you ever tried to dry a how would you put it to me i see i think i said have you ever tried to do like a prosciutto ham

with a deer yeah and i said that won't work yeah well and you're you're basing that off i think off of trying it with hogs in texas that there wasn't enough fat on them to maintain the moisture in there. Because when I did it successfully with a friend of mine who's like a charcuterie expert at a restaurant, he was dismissive of all this stuff. And then we made it with pig legs with the skin on scraped skin on pig legs okay which worked very well really yeah but there's a lot of protection right all the fat all the skin right right and and there are a lot of methods for kind of emulating that with with deer and i mean let me apologize up front that do not, did not get into the science of this as far as I could.

I mean, I've, I've, I've read a lot. This is my, this is my, this is my first attempt at it, but basically both my freezers were full cause I killed a moose last year, as well as a bear and an elk and a deer and a turkey and a bunch of other shit. And, uh, I had one deer ham left and both my freezers were like packed to the brim. And I'd always kind of wanted to do like a big whole muscle cure. Yeah. Read a lot of stuff online, mostly just kind of like experimental blogs and stuff.

I just ate some. I'm turning my dial up. Should we pass this? Yeah, pass it. So you're talking about the process. Yeah, so the process, what I did was I just salted the bejesus out of it for three weeks. Like just rubbed it all over the exterior of it. Yeah.

And then, and so I just like had it out in a pan. And it was all kinds of water coming off it? All kinds of water. Lost pounds of water. Room temp? Colder than room temp. It was like out in the garage at my last place in cool weather. Yeah.

I killed my my buck like mid-november oh so you did it back then yeah you did it right you like you never froze the thing or anything never froze it i got you so you probably probably deer pulled the skin off and started putting all kinds of salt on yeah yeah shot shot the deer gutted it dragged it out which i don't usually do but we had a skiff of snow and I was a mile and a half from the truck. And I was like, ah, you know, seems easier. Uh, hung it for a week, butchered it, and then just like left that ham, hung it for a little while longer than, than salted it, uh, real heavily for, for quite a while, took off pounds and pounds and pounds of, of, of water.

Just sitting in the tub? Kept flipping it, um, on a tray. And so I would like pour off the water occasionally and flip it, put more salt on, rub off the old salt, put more salt on. Then after three or four weeks, took it out and washed all the salt off, hung it out in the sun for a day. Because after I washed it, I, you know, wanted to, didn't, you know, wanted to rid it of that moisture. Yeah. Then I put on more salt, a little bit of curing salt, dried garlic, dried rosemary and pepper. And then kind of let that set up and kind of make a little bit of a crust.

And then I melted down a whole bunch of lard that you gave me and allowed that to kind of cool and then just kind of painted it over. Oh. I caked it, just caked it almost probably, probably a quarter inch thick in lard, but, you know, thicker in some places. But I, I mean, I put on like five or six pounds of, of lard and then I took. What's that whole leg weight? 20 pounds? Yeah.

25. 25. Yeah. When it started. So after I coated in lard, then I wrapped it in just a, just a cheap game bag. So cheesecloth and then kind of bound that up with paracord and hung it in that basement. I was living in, um, in a dark closet. So ambient temperature of the house.

So, you know, fifties, sixties, no sunlight, um, and just ambient moisture for Montana. So, you know, generally pretty arid. Uh, and then when I moved to my new place, it was, I put it in the, in my, I got it like a, it's like a house on top of a big, big ass garage and hung it in the, in the basement out of the sun. Same thing, you know, forties, fifties, sixties, a lot of air movement, not much sunlight. As soon as it starts to get hot out, you want to cut that thing down because once you're getting into like 70, 80 degrees, you're going to run into different types of mold and you're going

to run into, um, just run into more trouble. It's going to dry out. It's going to this and that, the other thing. And so two, three weeks ago, whenever it was uh it was like it was getting real hot and i'm like just started getting nervous about it and decided to just chop it down cut it up and and see how it was um and honestly i was surprised by how moist it was oh man silky yeah i ended up smoking a lot smoking a lot of it after i after i parted it out because it was so moist and it was, it was still very much raw. It did not, the cure did not really penetrate. And, and, and, and next time, and, and, and I have reached or. What do you mean?

Why do you think the cure didn't penetrate? Yeah, it's salty. I mean, it feels like that salt got in. Yeah. But like, but you know, what you're tasting here is smoked as well. Like really low light smoked, but it just, it, it felt very raw. You know, what I wanted to do here is like trail meat, you know, something you can kind of throw in your backpack. Um, but yeah, I was like, again, I was shocked by how much moisture is, was maintained.

And, and I feel like it's got kind of a fattiness to it from having that lard coating. Um, yeah, so. It's a great texture. Yeah. That's the best thing I've had. Did you have any mold on it? Yeah. Yeah.

The outside definitely had some white mold. Um, there, uh, there were some little black spots that were appearing and I think that might've been like kind of concurrent with that hot weather. Um, the outside, you know, that,

that, that lard kind of seeped through the cheesecloth and it was starting, it was starting to look pretty fucking weird, to be honest with you. Um, I mean, it was very, very yellow and kind of congealing at the bottom,

but it didn't, I, but I would always get, you know, go. Like if you moved out and left that hanging in the garage, someone would throw it away and not eat it. Someone would call the cops is what they would do.

Probably. For an investigation. Probably. Yeah. But man, I mean, I got 10 pounds of sliced, you know, or well, like ready to be sandwich meat. And so, and like that was some good cheese on some sourdough and then toast it up. It's like, it's, it's really good. It's silky.

And you could kind of, when you take it, you can kind of almost roll it into a ball. Yeah. You know, you can take a piece and kind of trim that. If you trim the edge away. That's exactly it. That's one of my. You can take the meat and make like a little sphere out of it. It tenderized the crap out of it. And man, like exceeded my wildest expectations. yeah man that's good i'm gonna try that

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Sam, are you checked out on the lobster fight? I am. Okay, explain this lobster fight thing. There's a lot of stuff in the news, like UN peacekeepers coming to Canada to settle a lobster fight. A tribe in Canada, Saip Kanakatik, on the Bay of St. Mary,

which is on the Bay of Fundy. That's a giant cutout of Nova Scotia. That's the biggest tide swing in the world, right? One of them, Bay of Fundy? I think Bay of Fundy might be the biggest tide swing in the world. I heard it was somewhere in England because where I grew up is one of the biggest. Okay.

All right. Big tide swing there. Big tide swing. I was familiar with the up is one of the biggest. Okay. All right. Big tide swing there. Big tide swing. I was familiar with the name, a lot of the towns because the show Trailer Park Boys is set in that area. Wouldn't expect everyone to know that one. Listen, man, it's a phenomenal television

program. It is. It is. And I don't even like shows. Bay of Fundy is correct. 53.5 feet. Whew. Holy crap.

Wow. So last year, this First Nation tribe in Canada decided that they were going to have their own lobster season. The Canadian Fisheries Ministry has, you know, a set season and- Like federal, right? Federal. Yeah. Federally set season. So kind of like their version of our, like, you know, NOAA or National Marine Fishery Service. Um, so this, this tribe, you know, is, is trying to, uh, you know, really kind of build more of a.

Kind of a career path for their people, create more jobs in, in lobster fishing. And they believe that the, that the lobster populations can sustain a more intensive fishery than the, the, you know, the Canadian government believes. Um, last year they went ahead and did this fishery. They just, they went for it, um, and, and caught a whole bunch of lobsters, but there's a lot of people in that area who were very upset about this. There was people pulling their, going up and pulling their pots, stealing their pots, two different- Presumably other commercial operators who were operating under the federal law. Exactly. So you can- And here they are like, you're catching lobsters that I can't catch. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So you see where that they might perceive unfairness but it got really out of hand the um that like mobs attacked

these uh lobster storage facilities in uh west pub nico um and you know stole lobsters and then they eventually burned one of those places to, to the ground. Um, the cops came, people were arrested. Um, but, and like, what, what I read, you know, is that the cops were just glad nobody died. It, but really nasty stuff. The, the chief of the, or leader chairman, let's see what it was. He chief. Yeah. Um, chairman, let's see what it was, chief, yeah, was assaulted. One of the tribal members' vans was set on fire.

Really nasty shit, really nasty. And they really insist that, you know, they're right across the way from Maine, and Maine conducts a year-long lobster season. And they think that they should be able to do that in order to really access those markets and build up their fishery and their kind of way of life. And they're planning to do it again this year. And it got so nasty last year, and they're basically fighting against the, you know, the federal government of Canada. And so they have this year requested UN peacekeepers to come in and- Dues in little blue helmets. Yeah, exactly.

To come in and avoid the, the violence. Um, that's very wildly out of the question because- Yeah, but it's interesting because it ties into the thing we were talking about the other day the other day we had a a law student who's from the choctaw nation and he was explaining like he's explaining the concept of sovereign nations that when our government um wanted to strike like when our government wanted to negotiate with tribes they had to for our government to negotiate with an entity like it can't negotiate with an entity that's not a sovereign thing so tribes became legally sovereign

nations so it's interesting you'd say like no our sovereign i know this is canada but like our sovereign nation our tribe is in a dispute with another sovereign nation of Canada. And what happens when two sovereign nations are in dispute? Oftentimes the UN. Yeah. But, but the UN always, uh, yeah, it's far fetched.

I think it's the logic is, I think it makes a point. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, uh, it got a, it got a lot of attention.

Sure. It got a lot of attention. We wouldn't be talking about it. We wouldn't be talking about it right now if they hadn't requested UN peacekeepers. Right. a moderate livelihood from fishing and hunting, um, which, which opened the door for first nations in Canada to be able to hunt and fish outside of the established regulations and, um, you know, pursue more, more subsistence kind of hunting and fishing. But then there was a follow-up to that um that indigenous treaty rights are

subject to regulation uh as long as the regulation is shown to be justified on the grounds of conservation or other public importance but it'd be helpful for people listening to kind of understand this where i want to give a stateside like a u.s version of something similar where um in your home state sam in washington with razor clams i was reading about the regulatory structures for razor clams so there's a basically there's a shellfish management panel right and it includes representatives from the state of washington and it includes tribal representatives from coastal tribes they together like with with each of these representatives are each of these representatives are represented by biologists who do shellfish surveys

and they start out saying like what is the harvestable number of, say, razor clams on said beaches? It's already agreed that the percentages of whatever is there are allocated tribal, state, state being to anyone that goes and buys a state license, tribal being just to tribal members. So they already know how they're going to cut it. They just don't know how big the pie is, but they know how they'll slice the pie. And every year they need to, or whatever, I don't know if it's every year, every two years, whatever. They need to come to an agreement like, okay, how big is the pie? And then we'll cut it in half.

Yeah. But that's sort of like the moving piece there. Absolutely. And that comes out of the 1974 bolt decision, which, which was a by-product of the salmon wars and, and it, where there were, there was actual gunfights out in like the Straits of Juan de Fuca among commercial salmon fishermen. Um, and what, what that did was reaffirmed the treaty rights of, of the tribes in Washington and, and, and cut it in half. It's at 50% for tribal harvest, 50% for, for non-indigenous. So that plays out across salmon, steelhead, everything, any fish you can, or, or shellfish you can, and crab and everything you can think of in Washington's 50, 50. It frustrates the hell out of people. Cause I think a lot of people look and,

um, I mean, I'm frustrated to hell out of people on both sides, I'm a hell of a lot of people because I think a lot of people look and I mean, it frustrates a hell of a lot of people on both sides, I'm sure, but a lot of people look and they think themselves, I'm an American. I belong to the state. We're all Americans. I thought the whole thing with America is all Americans are equal. Why is this not divided equally? Why do some Americans get, you know, and

on the other hand, people are like, well, it would be all mine were it not taken from me by your ancestors. And so I'm pissed too. And it's getting especially, it's getting especially sticky with steelhead right now, which are declining precipitously and Washington's implementing all sorts of different regulations. But one I wrote about this earlier this year is that they banned fishing from a boat on most of the coastal rivers for steelhead.

Just all they're trying to do is- You got to hop out of the boat. Exactly. Just trying to reduce the catch rate. But, you know, kind of a bit of the elephant in the room in that discussion is the fact that all of those rivers are still being gillnet for wild steelhead by the tribes. And catch and release does count as take, uh, on, on, under some more recent court decisions. Um, but you know, that, that it's, it's a harder, harder mathematics now that the, you know, a lot of these steelhead runs are like under a thousand and the tribe still asserting their 50% take on a very small escapement.

Um, but you know, it's, it's, the math is a little, the math is pretty fuzzy. Yeah. Um, because it's, you know, it's gill nets and stuff. And it's like, you get these days a week estimating how many you're going to get. Um, you know, to me, it's important that they still have that, the right to do that and maintain those traditions. But on the other side of the coin, like, and some of the tribes are totally at the table here, like, Hey, there's a problem.

We're trying to fix it. We're in our working with WDFW and the other stakeholders to try to solve those problems. But then there's, there's some other tribes who are like, go pound sand, look at the bolt decision. We have the right to do this. Yeah. I think that's one of the areas where there's a lot of frustration would be that exercising tribal rights takes precedent over sort of like the state of the resource. Yeah.

And at a point, it gets into the finger pointing. It's like, well, the resource wouldn't be screwed up if it weren't for you guys. Right. But it's like, okay, but it's still screwed up. It was white men that put canneries on the mouth of all those rivers, you know, 80, a hundred years ago. And all that's true. And all that's true. But does that then mean that when you have a population of a thousand fish entering a river, does the fact that it's your fault mean that we should continue to kill half of them every year as a display of our tribal rights? It's tricky. No, it's tricky as hell. You want a good segue?

Yeah, please. This connects Washington with Canada. Great. Phenomenal. So this was another Canadian Supreme Court case that was just decided. In 2010, Rick DeSwattle of Washington State, he lives on the Confederated Colville Reservation north of Spokane, crossed up into BC and killed an elk out of season without a license. Crossed on foot? No, in his truck.

Like went up there with his wife. So it wasn't like he wanted to cross the border without knowing it. No, no, this is very deliberate. He killed this elk and then reported him and then went and told the game warden, hey, I killed this elk and I'm exert i'm uh exerting my cross international boundary yeah he's a member of the cynics tribe or the arrow lakes people that were traditionally uh lived in the arrow lakes region of british columbia i don't know where that is but i'm told it's up there the last canadian member of that clan died in 1953 and it had been declared an extinct clan by the Canadian government.

Basically, when they're making the reservation systems and everything, and more around the turn of the century, that band mostly moved to Washington just because they kind of got squeezed out of that area and very few were left and then the last of them died. But I got a quote from Rick DeSwaddle in 2017. He said, I knew for a fact that my ancestral grounds were here. If somebody didn't start this, then it would never get going. So he was cited for this elk. Like he just went in and said, hey, I did this. And I'm exercising my treaty right. He was cited. He was acquitted in trial. And then the government of BC appealed and lost and then appealed and lost and then appealed to the Canadian Supreme Court. just recently ruled that he had the right to do that, that he is a Aboriginal person of Canada.

Let's see. It's ruling the Supreme Court of Canada affirms that regardless of citizenship or residency, Aboriginal peoples of Canada do have rights and those rights are protected by the Canadian constitution. And this is the first time that the Supreme Court of Canada do Canada do have rights and those rights are protected by the Canadian constitution. Um, and this is the first time that the Supreme court of Canada has interpreted what it means to be an Aboriginal people of Canada. And that does not require living in Canada. It only requires that your ancestors did.

Hmm. Was this his intention when he killed the elk? Yes, this was, this was definitely his, this was his goal. Did they seize the elk? That's a great question.

I don't know this one as well as Herrera. It's going to be dry aged by now. That's really interesting, man. Yeah. You want to think there's huge ramifications for it. I mean, it's legally interesting, but i don't know that it's going to be that's you know the with with all of these it's easy to make a lot of smoke yeah but but it's not always it's not always like it does not always born out that way. It's hard to tell in practice, like in practice,

will there, would there be a flood of individuals leaving Northern Washington, driving into BC and shooting elk? Or would it be a thing that like, will that become a thing? Or is it just that it'll be, I wanted to clarify that I could. And 10 years ago by,

and you don't hear of anyone going elk hunting in BC from the Colville. It's hard to know. It's a way, it's a ways to, it's ways to travel. And that, that country up there is vast. Um, and I'm not convinced that the elk hunting was, it would be better there. And I believe that they have, you know, treaty

hunting rights in Washington too. So yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a, that one's a head scratcher and I need to read more into it. It's an interesting kind of dual citizenship.

Yeah. We're going to hit on something quick that we talked about quite a bit. I don't know when the hell, long time ago, the Herrera case in Wyoming, very similar in that has to do with like, you know,

trying to clarify, codify treaty rights. There was a guy on the Crow Reservation, Herrera. What was his first name? Clavin. Clavin Herrera was on the Crow Reservation in Wyoming. Yep. Former game warden. In January 2014, he and two friends crossed out of the Crow Reservation in Montana.

Oh, sorry. Into the border. Yeah, into Wyoming. They crossed the border on foot. They still insisted they didn't mean to, that they didn't know they'd crossed the border, but kind of immaterial at this point. And they killed a couple elk. Onto a national forest, Bighorn. Bighorn National Forest.

Um, locals found some partially bushered animals, uh, reported it to game warden. He conducted an investigation, um, which was assisted by the fact that Claven Herrera reached out to him, um, asking if he had, like had knew about some poaching or something like that. Cause he was, he was a warden at that time and which led this, this game warden, Dustin

Shorma, who I've, I've spoken to, um, started looking at Herrera's Facebook page and saw pictures of him with elk that he's like, that looks like it's on the Bighorn National Forest. Um, went up into that area, was able to match those photos, um, to elk carcasses. Was Herrera a tribal game warden or? Yeah, tribal game warden. Yeah. Um, all three men were charged with poaching and the animals were confiscated. Two of them pleaded guilty, but Herrera claimed, um, that under the 1868 second treaty of Fort

Laramie, um, that it guaranteed his tribal right to hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon. So this had been litigated before in 1896. That's an interesting language in the treaty. Very interesting. So long as game can be found thereon, because it would say that- It wasn't, at one point, elk were extirpated from the Bighorn National Forest. Yeah, but all this stuff was there. I mean-

Yeah. It's just weird to say that, let's say there was no game there. And then someone's walking around, they said, well, I'm hunting. And somebody's like, but there's no game here. You're violating treaty rights. There's no game here. It's just a weird thing to add in.

I guess they probably mean like in perpetuity. Yeah, but you know, 1868, you know, as well as I do, the, you know, the bison were on their way out in that area. And so, and some people I've spoken to about this are like, yeah, that was an acknowledgement of the fact that like they saw it as like we're wiping it out we're wiping out this this area of of game and and they're well aware no one's gonna hunt it just just strike and all

these things are so carefully worded i would love to talk to the person and be like well if there's nothing there who cares i would love to hear them go like, oh, yeah, but. Right. Here's why I want to clarify. But the word unoccupied is by far the most interesting. That's the sticky one. And so this went before the Supreme Court, January 2019. And they were really interested in unoccupied. And it was pretty interesting to read the transcripts because they were just like goofing off on like what could signify occupation. Because there's past cases that have said that the area became occupied when Wyoming

became a state because all states enter on the same footing and are able to manage the game and the hunting within their territory. A whole other court case said that those treaty rights had been extinguished when the Bighorn National Forest was designated. Became occupied by the Forest Service. Exactly. Became occupied by the Forest Service. The Supreme Court of the United States disagreed with that. They didn't go so far as to overturn that specific opinion. And it's interesting because that specific opinion was the exact same thing. It was a Crow tribal member crossing into Wyoming, into the Bighorn

National Forest and killing an elk. And so there's, and that does Supreme Court decision from 1995. But then there's another Supreme Court case, Minnesota versus Millox, band of Chippewa Indians, that designation of public land did not extinguish hunting and fishing rights. And so basically all the Supreme Court said is that there is unoccupied land. It did not become occupied by statehood or designation of the Bighorn National Forest. They toyed around with the idea. It's like, if it's close to a road and a trail, maybe that's occupied. But like, you know, a big ass wilderness area, like you'd be hard pressed to prove occupancy because you literally can't live there or stay there,

like permanently occupy the area. So they said that there is not occupancy and that the treaty right is well and good. But as the Supreme Court usually does, it's very narrow ruling. And then they remanded it back to the lower courts. But they come back and say, like, you people are going to need to better define some things. Exactly. Alito was like – the real issue here is the concept of issue preclusion because this same court case has been played out before. In 1995, a Crow tribal member killed an elk on the Bighorn National Forest and was prosecuted, and they said that that area was occupied. So basically this first lower court just went back on that. They're like, issue preclusion again, because the Supreme Court of the US didn't address

that except in the dissent. And they said, issue preclusion. So now this is being appealed up from the county circuit court to the Wyoming circuit court, which will likely hold in favor of issue preclusion again. So it'll likely get appealed again, but where a major speed bump in this comes. And so, you know, a lot, a lot of people were supporting this guy, Claven Herrera going to the Supreme court. And there's the presumption that he'll go there maybe, maybe two more times to work out a bunch of these issues, but he's gotten himself in a lot of trouble with the law since then.

In 2020, he was charged with stealing a car in January, buying meth in March. When they seized his phone, they found 850 images containing explicit materials related to children. To be clear, these are all claims, right? This hasn't been gone through a jury trial or anything. No, but he's been officially charged with these crimes. And then in July, he was accused of strangling somebody. The family member. Gets you all the time.

Yeah. So this case was like- It draws into question his ability to revisit the Supreme Court. Exactly. And it also draws into question his ability to maintain the pro bono support of some of the biggest and fanciest law firms in the United States because all those lawyers, you know, are always thinking about their public image and a and pro bono giving pro bono support to an accused child pornographer does not look good. And even the Crow tribe isn't isn't happy about this anymore. And they've been like pushing it and pushing it and pushing it.

So like what some people who are reading the tea leaves now are like, they may drop this appeal. They may they may settle this. They They may settle this. They may end up not pursuing it. And because the concept of issue preclusion makes it so difficult because this exact same issue has been litigated before. So they may take a step back, let this one slide. And next time it goes before the Supreme Court, Clavin Herrera may be in prison. So they're like, they may take a step back and let somebody else go push the issue some other time. And if they were smart about it, they would have them poach an elk on BLM land

or shoot a deer in the Bighorn National Forest because the issue of crow to Bighorn National Forest and killing an elk out of season, that's already been litigated. And that's why we're stuck on this issue preclusion thing. So they need to take a fresh crack at it if they want to get their hunting rights in Wyoming. But it's worth mentioning that after that Supreme Court decision, Montana was like, yeah, you guys are good. Like on public, federal public land in Montanaana the crow tribe can exert their treaty right but why wyoming's fighting can you back up for a second and just explain that because there's

probably people that aren't familiar with what's going on like what her air is trying to establish here presumably is that they can go hunt these unoccupied lands without following state fish and game laws. They're exercising their right to kind of follow their own hunting regulations, if you will. Like they can just go where they want and when they want and hunt how they want rather than following state laws. Exactly. Exactly. Okay.

And I think the last time that we had covered this, we sort of drug it out to like the most extreme example would be them going into like Yellowstone. Which is within, within the territory there, their old, um, territory. Right. Yeah. Especially you said federal land in Montana, there's like 3% of Yellowstone National Park. That's federal land in Montana. Yeah.

So my, but Montana doesn't regulate the hunting within Yellowstone National Park. So that'd be a question for the park service specifically. But since we're into the concept, you know, of optics here that one's that's not a good look you would get congress involved in on the wrong and on again against you um and congress would be the final arbiter of something like this so it'd be real bad idea for for them to ever go try to shoot something in yellowstone um and And that would go very poorly. Go through. Oh, I had a comment before you jump on the next thing.

What was interesting when this went to the Supreme Court was there's all these details, like rumors that you hear. And I don't know how substantiated they are. That I had heard a rumor. Again, a rumor. Unsubstantiated. Like, I don't have any evidence of this, but I heard a rumor from someone that one of these elk had been shot, don't know 17 or 18 times i don't know if that's true or not i had heard that and i think it is borne out that they were only like gourmet butchered

only part portions and some elk not heads and back straps some some yeah so the heads and back straps one elk not touched at all right and. And then you factor in the, the, these new revelations or these new things that, that coincidentally involve this individual. It's all immaterial to the court. Yeah. Like no one's saying like the court, the Supreme court isn't going to be like, yeah, well, he only just cut the head off. That's not cool.

It's like, it doesn't matter to them. No one's asking them their opinion about that. It's like, it doesn't matter to them. No one's asking them their opinion about that. It's like, can you go shoot out? And so all these little details that in your head are like, I don't know, man, seems real,

you know, seems fishy. It doesn't matter. It definitely matters now because, you know, the, even, even the members of the Supreme court are going to take note of,

of some of this bigger. Oh, really? Bigger stuff. But like, especially like Holland and Hart and the Crow tribe, they don't, they may not want to have this guy's name tied up in this big court case. It's just, it's a bad look and politically disastrous. So they. One final note I want to point out. Again, charged. Yeah.

Right. Right. Alleged. Yeah. Like he was charged with, it hasn't gone to court. There's been no like jury verdict, charged. Yeah. And.

So people can charge with stuff that they didn't do, but that's, he was charged. And I, and I know a bunch about a bunch more stuff that is purely alleged not charged, and I'm not even going to go so far as to mention it here. Yeah. But, you know, formal charges. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Try to – here, let me tee this one up. I want to talk about this one, too.

Then we're going to move on to some different subjects. But I don't know where to start. In Alaska, you have, Alaska's different. You know, we hear down here in the lower 48, you hear about reservations, right? Tribal reservations. In Alaska, when they kind of divided up Alaska formally, we created these tribal corporations, right?

And they maintain a lot of subsistence, tribes up there maintain a lot of subsistence hunting and fishing rights. Game is managed through like federal subsistence boards and a move in favor of tribal interests that limited big game hunting on federally managed public lands. Limited big game hunting to exclude certain individuals and to make it certain like big game hunting for moose certain times a year only open to tribal groups or subsistence subsistence yeah subsistence groups um and those are pretty small areas now in alaska there's a move to, I think, does it encompass 60 million acres of federally managed public land? 60 million. To make it that tribal members, or tribal subsistence. Am I messing this up?

Or is it just federal subsistence? Federal subsistence. Okay. And I think it's important to, yeah. 60 million acres of federally managed land would be closed to not just non-residents of Alaska, but closed to residents of Alaska. 60 million acres closed to residents of Alaska. And during the fall big game season, only open to federally recognized subsistence users. Just to demonstrate my own biases, I hunted this area one time for care, which would now be, if this goes through,

which would be illegal for me to do. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really important within this one to acknowledge that... Rhode Islands. Yeah. This is not a tribal thing. This is, this is not a tribe versus, versus the white man.

This is, this is everybody against everybody. A lot of these communities are very diverse and have, you know, a lot of Korean influence. And, uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of white people in all sorts of races out there. So it's, it's, it's more locals versus outsiders. And that 60 million acres is really easy to picture. If you like think of Alaska, it's basically like the upper left-hand corner. It's a giant area unit units, 23 and 26 a the, um, Northwest Arctic. Um, and the, and so the, uh, the, the, the subsistence board up there in April submitted a special action request to close that, um, that, that special action request is submitted to the federal subsistence board. Um, that board is made

up of three local subsistence hunting community representatives and five representatives from government agencies, including the BLM, the Forest Service, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Basically, they've been getting really upset with with, with outside hunters coming in, like you and me flying in, they think it's disturbing the migrations. But it's not a, it's not a resource issue. It's a social issue. It's a social issue. There's the herd.

The herd is strong. There's a lot of animals. It's people don't want to deal. They don't want to deal with other people. It's not like someone can say like, Hey, that caribou are vanishing. It's that,

um, there's plenty of animals, but the spot I go to, and sometimes there's other people there and I don't want those other people to be there. Well, and you need to explain that. Like, so it's, what is subsistence?

What is the subsistence community? Like, what's the difference here? Certain zip codes, you're a subsistence user. You can qualify for subsistence. Not in a major urban area. Is that an economic space thing? Yeah, I think. No, it's not.

You could be Bill Gates with all his troubles. Not in a major urban area. Is that an economic space thing? Yeah, I think. No, it's not. No, it's not. You could be Bill Gates with all his troubles. Bill Gates could live in certain areas. It winds up being the majority of Alaska and be a local subsistence user. It has nothing to do with your means. It has to do with your primary place of residence. What I'm saying is what's the difference between subsistence and say if I went up there to hunt? You would not be up there hunting under subsistence law. You would not be hunting under federal subsistence.

Let me give you a for instance. It can be like five caribou per day. You know where my fish shack is? Yes. Okay. If I lived at my, if I moved to my fish shack, okay. Yep. And that became my primary place of residence was at my fish shack.

I would be able to right now on federal lands, my deer season as a, as a, or if I lived in Fairbanks or Anchorage or anywhere in the lower 48. Okay. As a person that lives in Montana, has a fish shack there, I can hunt deer on federal lands starting on August 15th. If I lived at my fish shack full time, I could start hunting deer, I think, sometime in June. I'm limited to only antlered deer. If I lived at my fish shack full time, I could shoot does. If I lived at my fish shack full time, I could run a halibut long line with 30 hooks.

If I lived in my fish shack full time, I could run 90 black cod hooks on a, on a long line. Yeah. That's what I would have. I would have no halibut limit off my long line. That's why I have, I have a halibut limit of two per day.

This way. Could you use a gill net for salmon? The subsistence rules and regulations are different. Yeah, you can run. And it's funny in some areas because you could live in Anchorage. But there's areas where if you go and you're an Alaska resident in a subsistence area, you can then operate under subsistence regulations. For instance, a person from Anchorage could go to certain areas on the Alaska Peninsula and run a drift gill net for sockeye. Does your brother do any of that?

Like, does he have access to that? No, I don't know. But, you know, they do. See, I get a little bit over my waders on this because they go dip. Like, he every year goes dip netting. So he every year goes to the copper or kenai whatever these rivers um and they'll go down there and it's like you're allowed 25 sockeyes for the head of a household and 10 sockeyes for every additional household member

and you can net them can you explain the principle of i mean I think we know what subsistence means as a word, but the principle of establishing subsistence. Yeah, it was that when Alaska entered into statehood. No. Anilka. That's what established. As we know it today. Okay, go ahead. Yeah.

So the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, I probably got that backwards, but in the 70s, which was what, you know, under the Carter administration, which was what kind of created the tapestry of federal public lands that we know today in Alaska. That's what established the regional subsistence boards and the system that we know. And it also gave preeminence of subsistence harvest over recreational harvest. So in any of these considerations, subsistence comes first. The people who, the people who actually live off the land, they get,

they get, they get first, they get first helping. Yep. Always. But no, go ahead. It doesn't need to be that you act,

they don't define it. It doesn't need to be that you act. They don't define it. It doesn't need to be that you actually live off the land. It's where you live. Right. Right. That was also a billionaire. Yeah. And eat Twinkies.

I have a great example. And you could be a subsistence. You can be a subsistence user. It's just where you live. And I think, and I'm pretty sure when I was talking about the dip netting, I don't even think that's federal. I think that's a state thing. Okay. That's still state. I think dip netting is still states. I'm sure a thousand I was talking about the dip netting, I don't even think that's federal. I think that's a state thing.

Okay. I think dip netting is still state, so I'm sure a thousand people will correct me on that. Again, man, it's a Byzantine regulatory structure that I know little snippets of. I am not a subject matter expert on this stuff. Yeah, and it is really interesting. Byzantine might be a good word for it because these regional subsistence boards of which there are 10, um, basically can do a lot of the season setting for the area within, you know, within their kind of their, their territory. Um, so the, this, this regional subsistence board in the Northwest Arctic has

submitted this special action request to close caribou and moose harvest during the caribou and moose season for just this year. That's what the special action request, 2021, August and September, closed to non-federally qualified subsistence. There's no way that's the final goal here. No, of course not. No, and it's worth pointing out here that

the state game agency hates this. Hates this, yeah. Because their management authority, their management authority is being pulled or attempting people are attempting to pull their management authority from a quadrant of the state and it's not even an issue of resource abundance no not at all and they're fighting that that the one you mentioned that from a couple years ago previously the nelchina unit uh gU, they're fighting that in court tooth and nail. And they said, Ben Mulligan, who I talked to last night, said all avenues available to us, this is all out war against this. So there was a hearing on April 23rd before the Federal Subsistence Board, and that was pretty interesting. I wasn't actually able to go to it, but it ran four and a half hours long. They opened a five-day written comment period.

All of this is brand new. They're used to being a rubber stamp agency. thanked for everything they do by these subsistence communities because their does their their government governing structure is meant to be very permissive towards these regional subsistence boards and to be to assist them in what they would like to do and the changes they'd like to seek and they're not used to anybody paying any any the slightest bit of attention there's never more than a dozen people there and it's mostly just like agency representatives they took um spoken testimony from 106 people over six hours or something um there were 14 in support of this special action request and 92 against it um there were several like entire families including the grandfather father son grandson kind of grandson. Because you're locking out.

A lot of stuff in Alaska, you look at it being like outsiders versus insiders. Certain bag limit things and non-residents pay more. They have less access to resources. And that's fine. That's how it goes in every state. This is like Alaskans against alaskans yeah this is saying to alaskans um you just lost access to to like the northwest quadrant of your state on federal land yeah are the it's also a violation there's always been not always i think that in the country we strive towards this sort of like

separation of church and state you have a lot of federally managed lands right and i think that's a great system federally managed public lands are pretty secure and i like federally managed public lands wildlife on it at its best is managed by the state some people be like well how can they both how can it be okay for the government to manage land and stay so managed wildlife it just works really good and i don't like to see where it wound up yeah it wound up and it's been successful and people don't want to see it interrupted. Yeah. Ain't broke. Are the locals that are in support of this, the minority of locals that are in support of this justifying it because they're saying they're having a harder time feeding themselves or what?

So that's what they're saying. They believe that caribou migrations have been drastically interrupted and they're blaming that on outside hunting where a lot of people are like might be climate change the snow patterns the weather patterns the seasonal uh temperature has been a lot different well plus migrations route migrate i mean it's a whole field of study yeah caribou migration routes change gradually all the time and this caribou population is growing. It's like plate tectonics. They drift all over the place. Yeah. For 20 years, they'll cross a river in some place. And then 20 years will go by

and they don't come within 100 miles of there. Yeah. And like SCI and BHA and TRCP all submitted comments on this and have taken an active role. And that's what, I mean, BHA specifically in my article about this, I quoted you guys saying like, hey, you know, might be some other things. But there's also an element of, there's a lot of stuff in the testimony and in the special action request about poor treatment from outsiders that people are rude to them when they run

into them on the Kobuk River that they're like, this guy was an asshole to me. It's a social issue. It's a social issue. It's a, it's completely social issue. I don't think you can hold 60 million acres of land hostage over some people not getting along. There are other ways to solve, there are other ways to resolve issues. Especially when people have, you know, a constitutional right to the same access to that, you know, forest service or U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ground. We first covered this on the website on April 16th. Now over a month later,

has the sentiment changed at all around this or do like organizations and the state and everyone else, they all still have the same stance as a month ago. The trenches are deeper. Um, this is likely going to, the going to go before a vote of the board in mid June. The date hasn't been set yet. Um, and ADF and G is, is very worried that it's going to pass. That's Alaska's fishing game. Alaska's fishing game. My, my, my contact Ben was, was saying that it's like, it's very likely that this will pass.

The board may try to, the board may try to dismiss it. They may try to seek compromise. They may also pass it. So like I said, there's eight members of that board, three of which are regional subsistence representatives. One's Bureau of Indian Affairs. So that's four in favor. The rest are federal agencies. The one from the park, the guy from the park service is new. So they don't really know how he's going to go, but they've, and they've had a, they've had a hung vote before because it's, it's even number. So like that they're, they're working on that math. They don't know, but they're definitely bracing for this to go through.

You know, this is like, if you have any interest in any interest in hunting or fishing in Alaska, this is something you got to pay attention to. And we're talking about the guy crossing from Washington to BC to shoot an elk. It's significant legally, but what is it really going to mean? This right here, because there are plenty of other areas.

We're already talking about 60 million acres. There are plenty of other areas that say, oh, you mean we can just cite the fact that we don't want to have to deal with competition as a reason to shut down millions of acres of federal land and make it that it's for us only. You don't think that that's going to be an appealing prospect to people? Yeah. Yeah.

It potentially completely rewrites. What if they said Prince of Wales is, you know, for black tail, the black tail deer harvest has been. Because one time

I was going to fish this spot and there was another guy there. And he had a bunch of TV cameras with him. What the hell are you doing in there? No, this is, this is a

perfect example. I mean, populations are growing. There are more people on the landscape, more people, you know, using all of the space and interacting. And social science is a huge problem. And we're not equipping our agencies with social scientists like we should. We're, you know, we're expecting these biologists who are used to managing animals, right? That's their job is managing animal populations.

They're now in the throes of managing people and the people interaction with the people and then the people interaction with the animals. And they need more tools in their chest to be managing this. What would be, in your opinion, what would be one of those tools? Literally more social scientists working with the agencies, actually dealing with people interactions so the biologists can work on the animals um it's about people interaction you see things like that in montana all the time you see you know the madison going crazy you see controversy over there you just see this stuff is happening it's increasing increasing as more people are outside enjoying everything that we enjoy. Yeah. Explain your job a little bit.

My job? Director of Innovative Alliances. Yeah, I don't know what that means. Yeah. So I have created and building out a business development and fundraising arm for backcountry hunters and anglers. So, yeah, basically I like to call our team the Energy Development Team. Okay. So we're out finding resources to support all call our team, the energy development team. Okay. So we're out finding resources, um, to support all of our members work on the ground. What does that look like?

Money. Fundraising. Fundraising. Yep. And partnerships working with people. Like you've been on BHA's board for a long time or BHA volunteering and board member positions, state level. Yeah. I have a super fun career path and life that has led me in amazing directions.

I started working with BHA as a volunteer when I worked for a firearms manufacturer. Actually, Kimber Manufacturing sold know, started displaying at Rendezvous back, you know, like eight, nine years ago. Like you'd go set up a booth. Yeah, go and set up and talk about guns. And that's how I got to know BHA. I just, you know, in that action, started interacting with the members of BHA and was just like so awestruck by the amazing people who are out there really caring about and loving public lands and wildlife and hunting and angling heritage. And so we started to get more involved with the

organization. Then, you know, through volunteering and everything, became a board member on the national board. And then I ended my work. I was tapped as I was working for the gun manufacturer, kind of living a pretty awesome life, just roaming the world, hunting and shooting. That's kind of what my job was. So no one can really argue with that. I know you guys don't know what that's like, but not at all. The governor of Montana came and tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, I heard you might be good at creating this thing called an office of outdoor recreation. And I said, I don't even know what that is, but sounds amazing.

Maybe I would be. No problem. No problem. Let's figure this out. So Montana was the fourth state to create an office of outdoor recreation. And I said, I don't even know what that is, but it sounds amazing. Maybe I would be. No problem. No problem. Let's figure this out. So Montana was the fourth state to create an office of outdoor recreation. I started working for the governor in late 2017. Who were the other three? The very first was Utah, followed very quickly by Colorado and Washington. So Montana became number four, quickly followed by Wyoming. Then there were eight of us.

The eight of us formed what's called the Confluence Accords. And now there are 16 states, I do believe. And what are the offices? Like what is the sort of purpose of the offices of outdoor recreation? Yeah, the purpose of the offices of outdoor recreation, I think it's the culmination of something that we've all known for a very long time and we've seen for a very long time as economies grow and change in states. So, you know, back at the turn of the century, states like Montana or other states, they discovered like, oh, agriculture is a really important part of our economy. Like this is a big contributor or livestock, right? Like ranching, farming, like these are really important parts of our economy. Like this is a big contributor or livestock, right? Like ranching, farming, like these are really important parts of our economy.

And so they would form like Department of Agriculture and state. And so like an office dedicated to protecting, guarding. Yeah, just making sure. So the Office of Outdoor Recreation in Montana House and the governor's office, they're all very similar but different in some ways. But it's really formally identifying that outdoor recreation is a very significant part of state and federal, the federal economy. And so why don't we have, and it has tentacles and fingers and like everything. And so why don't we have one person that's their job to look through everything through that lens of outdoor recreation and identify what is helping this economy, what is hindering this economy, what are the unique facets of this economy that we need to look at in a different way. So really, I mean, this is

conversation and work that's been going on for years and years, but it's just slowly manifested itself into this. So yeah, it's very interesting. It's very positive. It's great. And then the winds of change, right? So you came in under a governor. He termed out? Yep. Yep. I worked for Governor Bullock. He was a two-term governor. He's done. And then will the office continue to run under different leadership? It still remains to be seen. It's a permanent office that's been created, and it's up to the new governor if they want to appoint somebody. Have they staffed it up? They haven't staffed it. They haven't staffed quite a few things. Is there an argument for that? Is it

plausible that they would be like, that didn't need to happen, and now it'll go away? Sure. Anything's possible, for sure. But you're not involved in that conversation? Oh, no, not involved in it at all. But, you know, it would be unfortunate. You know, for Montana, you know, a very significant portion of our state's economy is linked to outdoor recreation. We have these amazing numbers. In 2016, the REC Act was passed. And that was actually the federal government, like, identifying that, like, wow, the recreation economy is like really huge. Like how big is it? And so they passed the REC Act and that basically mandated the Bureau of Economic Analysis to establish a sub account, like a prototype sub account, really, you know, identifying, you know, what does outdoor recreation contribute to the economy? Because like you and I, like we all sit in this room and we're like, oh my God, outdoor recreation is what we do. It's our way of life. It makes us feel good. It makes us feel alive. We're healthy. We're happy. We all make our living around this. Like

I was a fishing guide for a while. I was in the ski industry for a while. I was in the gun industry. Like that's how I have made my livelihood is through outdoor recreation. So clearly it has this economic impact. So actually there are three, I believe, economic firms that worked on them. One is here in Bozeman. It's called Headwaters Economics. They consulted with the BEA. They created the very first economic numbers in the U.S. related to our GDP

as it relates to recreation. Their first numbers were, I believe it was 2.2% of the U.S. GDP is contributed to outdoor recreation. And that's everything. That's the spectrum. That's the barefoot tree walking, sleeping under the stars, and going out and killing stuff, right? That's the whole rainbow of us.

But, man, I've seen some, too, that capture these huge numbers. And you look and they're counting, 40 foot Winnebago's. Absolutely. That's part of this. Yeah. It's motorized. It's non-motorized. It's a wide,

you're casting a wide ass net. I'm a super. That's the outdoors for some people. Yeah. But I'm saying it like it catches a lot of stuff. It does. It catches a lot of stuff. And so to put it into perspective,

2.2%, that's twice the size of the U S automotive industry. That's twice the size of the U S pharmaceutical. automotive industry. That's twice the size of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. So it's a huge, you know, portion of our economy. The part that I think is really interesting is, and I'm going to botch this one. The numbers are not quite right. But I believe there's like, I think it's like 72. Like if you look at GDP, there's like 72 categories of like basement GDP.

And when somebody establishes like a sub-account, they actually say, OK, like what parts of this is contributed? But outdoor recreation touches like some ungodly number like I think it's like 68 of 72 like basic U.S. GDP functions. So recreation like has its fingers in everything. Do you think there will ever be a secretary of recreation in the U S? So here's the, but here's the funny part is like, I've now worked with some really remarkable people in DC and you know, with the park service and the BLM and the forest service and just so many great people.

There was a period of time where we actually had an office of outdoor recreation federally for a brief period of time. And I- Under who? I don't know. We've got to go look at it. But I remember he was like, yo, back in the day we had this. And I was like, what? I didn't know about that. So yeah, it's really interesting. It's great. Where were you born?

I was born in Whitefish, Montana. So that was your tie to, is that where Kimber's based? No, the sales office. There's parts of it in Kalispell. Okay. Yeah. So I'm a Montana girl. I have been told I'm embedded like a tick.

And I guess I'm going to own it. I just am owning it. Yeah. My entire adult career, I've traveled the world. And every time I come back to Whitefish, I'm like, and I'll live in the best spot. You know? So, yeah, I've actually, my parents were born there. My grandparents were born there.

I was born there. I'm fighting like hell to stay there and raise my boys there. It's a great place to be. How many boys do you have? I have two boys. Um, there are 12 and 14. Do you, um, when you were little, did you, did you, like, did you like think about and identify that there's an outdoor industry in which you would work or was it just that that's what life was and it didn't seem like a thing you would move into?

You just went into it. So I don't know if we were – I don't know if it was classified like that. But yeah, very actually apparent because I grew up – my dad was a hunting and fishing guide and a knife maker. And so literally I spent my summer breaks as a bow ornament on his, on a whitewater raft going down the middle fork of the flathead, right? Like that was, he took me to work with him. I would go on fishing trips with him. I would do seven day packing trips with him. Like that's how I spent my summers. And so my dad was in the rec business, right? Like he was a guide and he knew all of this. And something that I look back on, you know, because I was exposed to so many people coming to experience what I lived, like it was my everyday.

And like there are people that are saving years and they're coming and having experience, like a once in a lifetime experience. It's literally changing their being. It's changing their thought patterns. And I didn't have the context to put that in, but I watched it, right? I would watch these people just like lose their minds and just, you know, see everything. And like, but the water, like I can see the bottom and like how, you know, like it's so deep. You know, my dad would crack wise jokes. Like they're like, how deep is the water? He'd be like, just high to a duck, you know, like a, you know, typical guide, you know, thing.

But I didn't know, like the thing is that I understood is that I didn't know where they came from. And I didn't know what their like life was like. But clearly I have it way better than they do. Yeah. Because they were dying over what I just called my everyday life. And obviously as I grew older, like I definitely, you know, I started to put that into context. You know, I started working in fly shops before I was old enough to pull a paycheck in exchange for fly tying material and fly rods. It was like my sport that I did. I was a competitive rifle shooter.

Like, I didn't. Everybody's like, you're tall. You're a big girl. You must be a basketball player. I'm like, I can't dribble a ball to save my life. But it has a trigger. It's a totally different story. And so as a competitive rifle shooter, you know, I thought about leaving, you know, to go to school.

Wasn't interested. Wanted to stay in Montana, University of Montana. Resource conservation is my degree. I chalked it up to being an overeducated fly fisherman because they were like, okay, so to get a job, you got to go to Oklahoma or Nebraska and, like, work on mud puddles. And I was like, I'm not signing up for this. I'm staying in Montana. And so I went into the organic produce industry like randomly because I could stay there. So I was actually like brokering produce from field to table on the national market at the age of like 22.

And then I got a knock on the door and they were like, hey, we heard you sell stuff and you're from Whitefish and you can ski. We've got a ski in, ski out office. You could be a regional ski salesperson for Big Mountain Ski Resort. I was like, you want to pay me more money to have a ski and ski out office? I'm going to travel the U.S. partying, golfing, skiing, and drinking, and convincing people to come ski.

I can totally do that. I got this. I totally golf. You're hearing this, Spencer? I totally golf. I like it. Doesn't he not look like a golfer, though? He doesn't look like a golfer, but I golf with a lot of guys who look like you. The golfiest in this room. Yes.

And now he's got that tree tattoo and stuff. I am. They're not going to let you golf anymore. I drink. I show up to drink and then I golf while I'm there. Yeah. So that's great. A big beard and a tattoo out on the golf course. I spent my, like, I spent my 20s, like, just, like, in the ski industry and just, like, having a great life.

Was married, had kids, and decided I'd stay at home, stayed at home and work part-time. And then was like, okay, I'm going to go back into, like, the work, you know, work. Like, what do I want to do when I grow up? And I was at a Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation banquet, and I was with my cousins, and I was pretty drunk. And I turned around, and I saw all my buddies that worked for Kimber. I was like, oh, Kimber. I got a Kimber. They sell guns.

I love guns. I could sell guns. So I just inquired and ended up getting hired on and worked for Kimber for eight years. And now here I am. Is your dad still a guide? Is he still alive? He is still alive. He is not guiding.

He's a knife maker. So my great-grandfather started a knife making business called Track Knives that turned into Schmidt Knives. And so my dad actually has always been a knife maker, but then would just guide on the side, stopped doing that. He actually was in blacksmithing. He's done amazing blacksmithing work, but he no longer guides. Is he, is your old man, and like if you imagine your grandfather and stuff, are they sympathetic to the cause of BHA or would they have been like reflexively not?

Love. They do? Love. My dad loves BHA. Loves it. Loves it. flexibly not love they do love my dad loves bha loves it loves it um he's you know he's even i've helped him write op-eds in support of like wild and scenic rivers and um my grandfather actually was super tight with my grandfather he and i he was my best fishing buddy and i'm so thankful to have had all those years fishing with him um but uh no it's it's very like they're

they're um very like they're BHA people for sure. So they didn't have, they didn't, I mean, you're telling me they didn't, but even, like, dating back that far, they didn't have a sort of a reflexive, like, not really liking strong public lands advocacy or restrictions on public lands that might be like hinder industry well so and i come from so i come from extractive industry so my grandfather was in the timber industry for 60 years okay um and so he was involved in you know like i mean like seriously like the logging of the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and in whitefish whitefish was a timber town. The original name of Whitefish was Stumptown because it was clear cut and the railroads came in. And so Whitefish is this,

like literally this quintessential snapshot of the evolution of the West and the economy and how things are shifting. And Whitefish really kind of, I think, was like a little bit of head, like one of the first towns to go through that. But literally the generations of my family, like, paint that picture. My grandfather was in banking and mining, right, with the other grandfather.

And so what happened, though, is that obviously in the 80s, I mean, like, timber harvests and everything, like, you know, there were yellow signs everywhere that was like, this family is supported by the timber industry, right? Like, when the timber industry was crashing, it was putting so many people out of work, continued to put people out of work through the 2000s. Right. Like all the mills were shutting down. But what was happening is like at the same time that like the timber industry and everything started to go down, Whitefish is this amazing little community with this lake that's really fun to like boat on and then there was a bunch of people in town that thought this like big bald mountain up on top you know out of town would be kind of fun to like go downhill on and those ski things yeah like you know back in the day like my other grandfather

was one of the first people to pioneer big mountain ski resort um which um you know it's it's so you you saw this like gradual increase of like this recreation opportunity as the timber industry dove and that crossover period is was in my life and that was a really hard time um and now you you do see that recreation um you know resort kind of community growing and evolving into then it you know becomes amenity based and then it becomes and it starts pulling in oh yeah man so you guys your family would be like um it's almost like this like larry mcmurtry novel about the i don't even know who that is like lonesome dove man oh okay i was thinking like last picture show more like river all my friends are going to be enemies okay oh no is it all my friends are going to be strangers anyways he writes about the transformation of the american west so if you capture like

generationally loggers miners and then like big game guides and then outdoor recreation it's like just the evolution so the flat the old west of the new west man when you talked about like okay so like do my my grandparents and you know my grandparent my father like do they find like this like resentful like nature of like more protection on lands and it's like actually that area the flathead river system was one of the first wild and scenic river systems in the country and as a result like they were the first ones to see it laid out it had zero impact on anything anyone did it only improved the way of life and improved everybody's you know just, just lifestyle. And so, yeah, like, so it's totally different, you know, up there. Every time, you know, more protections established, like, the more the community thrives and the better people are doing.

There's, you know, the Whitefish Legacy Partners have started the Whitefish Trail System. And the Whitefish Trail System is this, like, amazing network of trails, multiple-use trails that are in and around Whitefish Trail System. And the Whitefish Trail System is this like amazing network of trails, multiple use trails that are in and around Whitefish. And it was started by residents, four residents, because they were illegally poaching trails on state timberlands. And that timberland was going to be sold off into development. It was a bunch of like bikers that were like, no, this is crap. Like, you can't do that. I was like, yeah, actually we can. And so now we have this amazing trail system that contributes like $6.3 million to the whitefish economy every year

just by its existence. And so, yeah, it's been a very proactive community, very aggressively proactive community with surrounding land managers and just evolving what it is to live there. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join,

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Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. This is a huge deal for Montana. Montana is way behind the eight ball in funding recreation. And then we could go off on tangents talking about who really funds recreation, who funds our infrastructure. And so in Montana, we've been very behind. We don't have any state funding mechanisms of significance to fund trail maintenance and expand all of this kind of stuff. Whereas states like Colorado, it's called GOCO, it's literally like, isn't it like one-tenth of one percent

of lottery dollars in Colorado equals $400 million a year to go towards recreation and conservation. And so we've not, and there was a big paper that was done, I think, in like 2016, and it was statewide funding mechanisms for outdoor recreation and the array of different ways that states will fund it. And Montana literally had virtually no funding. So if you come up with a, oh, my God, this is a brand new tax resource. Like how often does something new come along that you can tax, right? So you've got this new tax, and that's why everybody's like, we want the money, resource? Like how often does something new come along that you can tax, right? So you've got this new tax and that's why everybody's like, we want the money, right? And it's a great

opportunity though for us to, you know, figure out a way to start investing in our recreation infrastructure. Now, when you say, when you say outdoor recreation, I gather that you picture a big umbrella. There's a very big umbrella. You're not just talking about like you think about recreation beyond hunting and angling i do yes but now in your in your new situation at bha you got to kind of refocus right um like you guys aren't like bha isn't beholden to the ski community no no no exactly uh i do appreciate the fact that i come with such a broad background and understanding um i also am you know definitely on the scene when I was an Office of Outdoor Rec, you know, director. I was kind of the hunting and angling girl.

Like, I was that representative. I was that voice in all of us. Because, you know, quite honestly, when I first came in and there were eight directors and then more and we would be having conferences and we would be having discussions, I'm sorry. Hunting and angling is not well represented in the broader conversation about recreation and that was really really concerning to me so that's why i made sure to really um try and elevate that conversation do you mean when people would say from an like from an industry or governmental perspective outdoor rec they were biking skiing correct like rei stuff correct not yes horses warehouse and so Or biking, skiing. Correct. Like REI stuff. Correct. Not Sportsman's Warehouse. And so that's why it's constantly bringing it back around.

And, you know, like I heard you say non-consumptive or consumptive, which is just the most, I hate, hate, hate, hate that. It just provides this. You got your hiker bikers and you got your hunter fishers. Exactly. That's cleaner. We have like differing things, but the notion to me that that would instill in someone who likes to hike,

the notion that they don't consume, they don't have an impact. That's terribly dangerous. That's dangerous. Can you break that down a little bit, Rachel? Yeah, first explain. You better explain

consumptive and non-consumptive. So traditionally it's like, we have non-consumptive and consumptive users. And hunters and anglers are lumped in this consumptive bucket. What about mushroom pickers? No one ever talks about mushroom pickers. Right? The foragers, they're consumptive, right?

They're supposedly killing or taking a piece of the resource with them while they're out there. Now, if you're a rock hound. Spencer. Spencer. You're consumptive, dude. But he's not consuming those rocks. So it. Spencer. You're consumptive, dude. He's not consuming those rocks. So it's difficult. You're like a detainer.

So it's kind of, it's this notion that someone is taking from and or having a greater impact. Do you think that's what it's meant to be? So, well, that's what it's, yeah, consumptive. Absolutely. Like you're consuming a resource. I always thought there was like a little negative thing there, but I couldn't figure out what it was. And then supposedly the non-consumptive is someone who is just simply out, leaving no trace, walking on a trail. Frolicking.

Yeah, like, oh, I'm on the landscape, but I'm causing no disruption. I'm not having an impact on anything. Well, that is complete and utter horseshit. Everybody is having an impact of some level, whether you're motorized, non-motorized, like you name it, everybody plays a part. And that is something where I don't like people, I never tolerated it. If someone wanted to use those, I said, nope, not allowed to use those words. We're all having an impact. You just need to start understanding what kind of an impact you have.

The other week we discussed these guidelines that came out and it was that what does these, someone had done some research on it. What distance do you impact wildlife? So I listened, I was catching up and I was listening. 50 yards on rodents. So. 50 yards on chipmunks and like 1400 yards on,

you know. Yep. And that's the thing is like, people think that they're not having an impact. And so that's something too, like I just feel like the outdoor recreation economy and the people that are in the outdoor recreation economy, like we're talking the reason we're talking about it in an economic sense and the reason we have now a percentage of the GDP and we understand how many tax dollars are going to this. We understand how many jobs are related. that is because we need to speak the same language that all the other lawmakers all the other policymakers are listening to because every other segment of industry whether it's you know like mining industry or you name it they talk about jobs tax dollars like what are we contributing

they're able to do it in really concrete terms but i would imagine wouldn't like a lot of these outdoor recreation companies would not want to be categorized. They would like, they wouldn't want to be categorized as consumptive, say the mountain biking industry or the skiing. Well, consumptive, but contributing. That's the thing is what we're trying to do is we're trying to calculate the contribution of to the economy because that's what everybody else is beating their chest about. What do I contribute? So it's like, okay, what you mean? you get priority because you're touting these numbers? Well, now the outdoor recreation industry has these numbers. And so when you go to a county

commissioner, when you go to your state legislature, that's why I put together a state package on what does the outdoor recreation mean in Montana. Or when you go on a national level, it's like, no, no. Oh, you want to talk about jobs? You want to talk about tax dollars? Oh, I'll show you numbers. And I'll show you bigger numbers in employment because there's so many people. And that's the thing about the recreation economy is it's not 11 conglomerates, right? Like that hold all of the pie.

And there's, you know, there's 11 entities that are pulling all the strings and calling all the shots. This is, I mean, huge numbers of people, like vast numbers of people. Five people working at a backpack company. Between 7% to 10% of Montanans are employed because of outdoor recreation. That's a huge percentage. And that's probably only going to go up. And it's only going up.

There's 400 fishing guides in Gallatin County. How many mountain biking guides are there? Or jobs in mountain biking? I mean, there are some, but it's smaller. It's growing, but everything plays its part. And that's retail, that's gear and goods and all the services. I'm not saying there's nothing. When I look at the big number, when you see it's X billion dollar economy, and you look at it, and I used used to be and i'd see things rolled in there that i would feel are almost anathema you know to

what i like like for instance and i shouldn't say this now because we now have a camper trailer going to the dark side part of the problem man we've got three little kids it's just hard to get everything that is where it's at. With kids, a camper is where it's at. The food is in it. The sleeping bags are in it. Throw bodies in the truck and go. The marshmallows are in it.

Yes. It's like, it's just, and then when you're done, you throw all that stuff back inside there and drive away, and then you spend the whole week digging through it. I stopped feeling bad about it a long time. I don't feel bad about it. I'm going to dog on Big Winnebago's, but I want to clarify that I'm dog on myself. When I look at the numbers nationally, I look and I'm like, man, they're throwing stuff in there that doesn't belong in there. But let me finish because I'm like, that isn't outdoor rec.

That's what that is. Staying in KOA campgrounds. It's just your sliver of outdoor recreation might be a little bit slimmer. Yeah, it's mean. It's mean spirited. But that's what I'm trying to get at the next part of this. I looked at it. I'm like, man, they're throwing in some wild shit into those figures.

But then like, why not? Because if anything you can use to combat the idea when someone says like the National Forest, it's just sitting there doing nothing. It's nice to be able to say, well, on the contrary, X percent of the economic activity that happens in those surrounding towns is to thank for that. X percent of the jobs that happen in those surrounding towns is to thank for that. Real estate prices are tied to that. Tax base. and go like, so don't tell me it's doing nothing.

Because if you plucked it away, you would impact the lives of like a high percentage of people who live in this area. Like I like being armed with those. And all of those figures exist. Yeah, as much as I was a little bit suspicious of when they started drawing them up

because people throw around some crazy numbers. Well, and that's the thing. We just like so the evolving economy of the West, right? So we were used to looking at national forests as timber producing, right? Yeah. And that's an easy like you're going in, you're cutting a stand of timber, you have bored feet, you're doing the calculation. There's the money sitting right there in a tidy pile getting piled onto a truck. Very easy to calculate.

And then you can also do the extrapolation out into the communities and what kind of a recirculation rate you have. But with recreation, it's different, right? You're not just loading things on a truck and it's different to comprehend. But USDA, Forest Service, they have economists. That's what they do. You can go in and you can actually search and find out what is the recreation economic impact impact for such and such a forest on a community and they'll extrapolate it out in their own way um so yeah yeah and we're way past hunters and anglers being like but and here's that's just there for us like but this is where i think hunters and anglers need to so i talk about

infrastructure like the infrastructure that supports the outdoor recreation economy and so like every segment of the economy has like this unique like what's the unique infrastructure that supports the outdoor recreation economy. And so like every segment of the economy has like this unique, like what's the unique infrastructure that defines it or supports it, right? It's not just the roads that go to the parking lots, that go to the trailheads, that go to the trails. It's also open space. It's habitat. It's aquatic habitat.

It's terrestrial habitat. It's view sheds. Like that's infrastructure. Just like a bridge might be important to a certain sector like that's the infrastructure right well by and large like who and what has paid for the infrastructure that the entire recreation economy now sits on it's hunters and anglers like that have like built the foundation that that it's riding on right and the care of wildlife the maintenance of wildlife and that it just is this then the segue of like oh my gosh and there's so

many more users and how are the users helping pay for it and and it there's no silver bullet by any means but you know like passing habitat montana weed money is like one little piece of the pie to helping support that it's getting to be almost a trillion dollar yeah oh for sure so 700 in 2020 they figured uh 788 but this is for the country 788 billion in economic output this is the outdoor industry numbers yep 788 billion in economic output two per one two like you said 2.1 percent of us gdp 5.2 million jobs. And that's domestic. That doesn't count the import of gear, right? Like this is like gross output. They're rolling in, okay. They're rolling in boating, fishing, RVing, hunting, shooting.

Oh, even trapping made the list. Motorcycling, trapping, there's 15 bucks. No, dude, not me buying MB750s. Motorcycling, ATVing, equestrian sports. Yeah, it's huge. It's big. And that's where when I was in the office and you talk about this huge umbrella, like hunting and angling has been a very, very, very important piece to this puzzle. And I really want to make sure that it continues to be very relevant.

And like here, just a little tiny snapshot, right? I talked about like the Whitefish Trail System and Whitefish. This amazing, you know, collaboration between private timberland and state land and federal land and private land, like to put this trail system together. And the timberland is a block management piece in Montana and block management. I'm sure you talk about block management all the time, but it's people enroll their land in for access for hunting. And, um, but you know, it was very important to maintain, like if you had just anybody going in there, they'd be like, yeah, we have a trail system going through there. So there needs to be no more hunting. Cause that's what's happening.

Right. Like it's, but that's not the case. Like that, you know, everyone made sure that like, no hunting is a traditional use here. Like we are all sharing the space. We all need to be doing these things together. So we do need to keep hunting in these areas. Let's just make sure we're doing it in a safe way. So, um, you know, if, if there's not a voice that's constantly talking about the heritage

of hunting and angling, um, angling, it's very concerning. You know, and we oftentimes are talking in this like ancillary bubble, like hunting and angling, like we're king, like, you know. No, man, not even kind of. And so there's a lot of interests out there. And so that's why it's really important to stay in the mix and understand everyone else's perspective and where they're coming at it from. But do you feel that that's the case? And like for everyone in this room, right? Like knocked on folks who, you know, motorbike and make noise and move.

Like our very own Garrett, dirt bike and enthusiast. Right, right. Or like, you know, even you knocking on Yanni for skiing and like not being a true outdoors person. Steve might be the last one trick pony on the planet. We hunt and we fish and that is it. Back away. If you're not a true outdoorsman, that doesn't mean you're bad. I prefer it.

I wish that everyone, like for instance, I wish that everyone that ice fish skied instead. I don't oppose it, but I don't think that they're not true outdoorsmen. No, but okay. So here's where I'm going with the question. Because so much hunting, angling money goes into supporting the outdoors, it seems better in my mind that everyone's like we all do this yeah the whole kumbaya thing but it's hard when you're discussing the idea of hunters and anglers and other outdoor users there's a there's an important distinction here um i think that hunters and anglers have developed an elevated sense of importance, perhaps even a supremacy when it comes to discussing sort of like their share of the pie on public lands or outdoor recreation or however you want to define what we're talking about. Because they have historically had such an important funding role. So a lot of the land management, state management of wildlife,

certain land management agencies, issues having to do with access, wildlife mitigation, disease research, on down the line, were funded by people who bought hunting and fishing licenses so they felt like naturally we need to have a real seat at the table here because we're paying for a lot of this yeah right and we and and other user groups don't have that other user groups don't have that legitimacy yeah i refer to it as an infantile. It's infant, the new, so new users. So like there's hunting and angling, right? And like this evolution

and now there's, you know, like fishing access sites, the stupidest name ever. It's a water recreation site in Montana, right? But it's fishing dollars that paid for them. And now you look at the reality of like how many people that use those fishing access sites are actually fishing. Fewer than the recreation user that never paid a dime for them.

I loved one recently though. I can't remember where I saw it. If you held a fishing license, you didn't need to pay the fee. Yeah. Because they're like, we already hit you when you bought your fishing license. So,

and that's, and that's different states are doing different things. But why, when people show up at those fishing access sites and they're launching a kayak and not fishing, they should be kissing fishermen. Or they should be required to buy a fishing license. And these are all things that have been proposed.

These are state funding mechanisms, and you need legislative follow-through to establish all of these mechanisms. And so it's this gradual step. It's discussed, like, explain what people say when they, because I think you're going to get into this, Brody, is like the backpack tax. Like, no one knows what it means,

but what's it getting at? Well, that you would create the same kind of funding through an excise tax on camping gear or um campers or like mountain bikes yeah and so you know then they're contributing in the same way hunters and anglers are which initially i was like yeah man like they should be paying too. And they probably should. But if they do, then they want to sit at the table. Yeah. I would rather, if I could have it my way, I would have them not pay and not be at the table. Well, they're at the table and they're not paying.

Yeah. So there's the situation you're at. That was an option. Well, and here's the thing. Okay. So you guys are referring to like paying, so like it's license dollars, it's all of that, but it's also then PRDJ dollars, you know, that have.

So like all of that, all of this funding. I got to explain that real quick. I mean, it's overmentioned, but when you buy, if you go buy a pocket pistol, okay, you buy a pocket pistol for 700 bucks for personal self-defense. Whatever. You know, K personal self-defense. Whatever. You go buy a personal self-defense

compact 9 millimeter. 13% of that money funds wildlife. I think it's 10% of wholesale, but close.

No, you don't. And the bullets for it. And the ammo for it. But not reloading supplies. Not optics.

Archery equipment, fishing equipment, but chunks and pieces. Also boating equipment that doesn't involve. Boat gas from when you buy gas from a marina. There's no equivalent of that. There's no equivalent of that when you buy a set of skis. A set of backcountry touring skis. There's no equivalent of that when you buy a set of skis like instead of backcountry touring skis there's no equivalent correct and that's and that was just you know like hunters and anglers um started

funding all of this and you know maybe not the average hunter and angler but no in the 30s but we started funding this out of crisis crisis like we're at the bottom. Like, we're, like, we are losing everything. So then now we have this history of fighting to get it back and investing to get it back. Well, these other recreation, you know,

opportunities, they've never been through crisis. They've never lost anything. They're just getting going. Yeah, there's no place to ski. So, but, but as,

but as a result, like, if now it's just like a bunch of, like, recreation pissing match, right? It's just like, yeah, well, this trail is my trail. I don't want you on my trail. And, you know, it's like, no, your stuff doesn't belong here. And it's like, wow, everybody, if you don't back it up to like 30,000 feet and look at like the real core of like what is enabling us to do all of this. And if we don't work together, you know, like on public lands, on a larger scale,

we'll all lose everything. But it goes back to that consumptive versus non-consumptive, because if they're, quote, not having an impact, why should they be kicking in money? Which is why it was very important when I was in office. There is a 20-year-old document that was done by the Montana Wildlife Society 20 years ago, and it's the impacts of recreation on Rocky Mountain wildlife. And it hasn't been updated for 20 years. And so you can go and look at it. And so I spent a lot of time when I was in office, like this is really important.

Like we need to be able to give our land managers the tools and the scientific knowledge so that they can resolve disputes. And then we can also tell everybody like, look, no, you're having an impact. Like you're having an impact. Like, you're pushing animals around more than a hunter would push animals around because of what you're doing and your actions. And so that's why that was a really, really important piece that is, you know, the work is going forward. They're updating the document. We're finding funding for it. So it was really important to get that done.

It seemed like most of the states you said before, they have an office of outdoor rec, like in the Rocky Mountains. Does it make sense for every state to have that, like Delaware and Indiana? So it's not a Rocky Mountain thing. Well, the first bunch of names were all there. The first, but we've got, oh my God, we've got like three in the Midwest.

We've got Vermont. Sorry, it's been a long time since I rattled these off. We've got Vermont, North Carolina. It's kind of all over the place. So it makes sense for like every state to have this. Sorry, it's been a long time since I rattled these off. We've got Vermont, North Carolina. It's kind of all over the place. So it makes sense for every state to have this. Oh, absolutely. But it's Office of Outdoor Recreation, right? It's the outdoor recreation economy, which is really to see and understand in the last iteration of the national report that came out for GDP.

It had these great infographics because you have experiential expenditures around outdoor recreation, and then you have the manufacturing expenditures around outdoor recreation. And so you see states like Florida and Illinois where every camper on the planet is manufactured, I think it's in Illinois. But you see these like hot red states that are making all this money off of manufacturing the stuff. And then you've got these hot red states that are making all this money off of people using that stuff and experiencing the outdoors. And so you have to know, like, none of these states, like these guys wouldn't be making money in manufacturing if they didn't have a place to go. And if we didn't have the place to go, you know, like it's this symbiotic relationship between the differing, you know, demographic of the United States and our differing economies within states. Yeah. That intrastate stuff makes you think that it needs, that we need a secretary of.

Hey, it's, it's young. We could see this. I'd prefer a secretary of hunting and fishing, but it has to be secretary of outdoor recreation. Under secretary of hunting and fishing, but it has to be secretary of outdoor recreation. Under secretary of hunting and fishing then. I actually did find the history of that Federal Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, which was founded in 1963 by a secretarial order. It was subsumed into a new agency called the Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service in 1977, which was then subsumed by the national park service.

There we go. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So we used to have one. Now we don't. Right.

Okay. Let me hit you up with two last questions. They're big ones though. What, so you're, you now currently you're like fundraising for a nonprofit, backcountry hunters and anglers. Correct.

What do you guys, let's say you had all this money, get all this money. What are the top priorities that you'd like to spend it on? So the heritage of hunting and angling. And then it's the voice of wild public land, water and wildlife. And spending the money. And that's the cool part. BHA, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. And by the way, we're having our 10th rendezvous this year,

and you were the speaker at the first rendezvous at the same space we're having it this year. Yeah, but it was like about three people there. I think a hundred, a hundred people. Yeah, super small. But so this is what I've always found that is remarkable about Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. Backcountry Hunters and Anglers is about its members.

Like it is its members. This is people. These are hunters and anglers that give enough of a crap to be involved, to be active, to support what they love and believe in, right? And so BHA as an organization, we are simply finding resources to elevate their work, to help them do their work, to provide support. Because for as much as we're definitely used to, you know, like TRCP is an awesome organization and it's an organization of organizations and it's, you know, taking the collective voice, you know, of organizations and talking on the national level. And BHA does work on the national level. But you need that. You need organizations to have

these formalized conversations with like policymakers and, you know, involved with legislative actions. But what really moves the mark is the individual voice. And, you know, that is what BHA members do. It's an individual voice. It's that I am an individual and I believe in this and all of these people believe in this too. And so it's this amazing, awesome symbiotic relationship. Like these are just like, I need to up my game. You know, it's just, but the humblest, most amazing, you know, group of people and diverse. I mean, like our demographic is remarkable. There's, you know, it's a third Democrat, a third Republican, a third independent.

70% of membership is 45 and under. And so it's, you know, it's people that are not, it's so much of conservation work is done in the tangible. Like, let's go and put this fence up because I can act and I can do it and I can see it. And I saw the process start and I saw it finish. The hard, long, grueling, thankless slog of working on forest plans, of working in legislative sessions. And so much of the work that's done, it's not tangible instantaneously. It's a long haul. And it's the really hard work that requires patience and perseverance.

So I couldn't be happier to be where I am. And every career move I've made through my life, it moves me one step closer to expelling every ounce of my energy, only working on the stuff that I really, really give a shit about. And that's my family and my life and, you know, public lands in these spaces that has sculpted my life. So the more I can do to support BHA members and the work that they do, the happier I am. The last one touches on something you just brought up, which is your family.

A few years ago, I saw you give a talk and you were kind of laying out the, it was a slideshow presentation. We were storytellers. It was really funny. And you were laying out just how hard it is and just like messy and inconvenient to raise kids in the outdoors. Yeah. Just pull your hair out. Mm-hmm.

Right. What has my life become? Yeah. So what, and I know it's really important to you that you do that, that you raise your boys outside. Correct. What do you think they'll get out of it? Because the other day we had on a spearfishing woman.

I really identify with Kimmy a lot and what her conversation was. She said we were kind of like laying out like how much her dad, how much time her dad dedicated to bringing her spearfishing. And she kind of like dispelled any romantic notions. It was that he was going and he had to watch me. Therefore, I had to go. I don't think there's anything else going on there. Right.

Right. And it landed her where she is, but just like a different version where I am kind of split, I guess. Like I'm going, which means you're going. Yep. But also I really want you to go. I'm in the same boat as you. Yeah.

For sure. Talk about it a little bit. Like, what you want them to get out of it or why it's important to you. Yeah. And I actually listened to that one with Kimmy. And when she was talking about her relationship with her dad and her upbringing with her dad, I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, I really identified with, like, everything she said. I remember my dad.

I remember waking up in the middle of rainstorms, sleeping on the top of gear piles in the back of rafts from overnight trips. And my dad is lining the boat through a precarious rapid. I'm just asleep on the boat. And he's like, you're good, babe. Just go back to sleep. Right? And I've got one of those, like, horse collar, you know, life jackets on. And, you know, it was like that was his job.

And I just got to go with him. Yeah, with my kids and I'm very, very upfront with them because now I have a 14-year-old and teenagers are the worst, but I love them in the same notion. But he's very much flexing his independent muscles and he has had the most idyllic childhood growing up in just the most amazing wild places doing remarkable things. And he's just like, yeah, it's just my jam. I'm just, I mean, if I have my pick, I'm just not really in, I just want to go hunt. I just don't want to go fish. I don't want to go camp. Like I don't want to do that. I'm not really into that. And I tell him over and over again, I say, okay, yep. But I have one that's gone the other way.

So with that guy, I just tell him, I was like, look, you are going to have to go do some of this stuff with me, but I am going to compromise with you. But what's really important to me is that if someday you decide that it's something you want to do, you have a skill set to fall back on. Like you can. And I told him, I'm like, someday you're going to meet this super hot chick and she is going to think that like hunters are super cool and you're probably going to start hunting again. You know, it's just like I want you, I want to know that you have the skills. You can hunt if you want. You can fish if you want. You can ski if you want.

If it's not something that's your top priority, okay, that's fine. But then my 12-year-old is just like this just rabid outdoor kid. Like he's passionate about skiing. He's passionate about mountain biking. But he loves hunting. He loves to go out fishing. He, you know, he's getting his life membership from BHA as a gift for me. And he's pissed that there's not a fly rod incentive.

So I had to buy him his own. He got his own Winston this couple of weeks ago. There used to be a fly rod. I know, but that's not one of the perks at the moment. I remember setting that up. Yeah, exactly. And so he was just like, well, I wanted the fly rod. I'm like, I didn't get it for you soon enough.

Anyway, so, but yeah, he, on the other hand, is like, he's already been like, so. When he was like eight, he's like, so I'm going to go to college in Bozeman because I can go for snow science and I can be a fishing guide in the summer and then I can be ski patrol in the winter. I was just like, oh, man, kid, if I had shit figured out like you, I'm sorry. But I was like, I like where your head's at. I like where your head's at. So yeah, it's, it's, so it, it, it's just a compromise. And yeah, it's, you know, when I was doing that presentation, it was like going from a person outdoor in the outdoors to a parent in the outdoors. It's like this complete rearrangement of priorities in your head. And it's like, I used to, you know, go so hard over here and so fixated and so focused.

And now it's like more about the snacks and, you know, like it's just, it just becomes different, but it comes full circle too. When they were little, did you find that it was just so hard to get everybody out the door? Yeah. And so much preparation. With two mittens. Like so much preparation. Like you were like, like the bags of the gear and the getting in the, like, what did I forget? And it's so much more work. And you understand why some people, if they? Exactly. So, yeah, it's pretty wild, but it's totally worth it.

I think it's worth every minute of it. It's fun. Yeah, because then one day you catch two turtles having sex. Yeah, exactly. You can be like, see that? Last summer. Now let's go get a turkey. I took my kids. We did the Maine Salmon River in Idaho.

And so my kids thought they'd seen whitewater, and they had main salmon river in Idaho. And so I, you know, my kids thought they'd seen whitewater and they had never seen Idaho whitewater. And so I wrote them down the main salmon and even the one that doesn't want to go. Yeah. And the one that's like, well, I don't really want to go, but if I'm going to go and then, you know, you get him out there and he's just like, this is a sick trip. Yeah. He, you know, he just, he loves it. It wasn't that bad. The beaches are amazing, you know? So it all, it all works out. Yeah. 14 and 12.

14 and 12. I'm dreading it. Yeah. See, I still have where everybody likes me. And I know that that's going to go away. Oh, is it? Yes. Yeah.

Damn. It does. And then I think, what, did we, when did we all start liking our parents again it's not that I didn't like my parents but you're like 30 no

my dad died before that happened it was like 23ish it was like post-mortem for me he died and 10 years later I'm like yeah

I kind of see what he's getting at yeah but you know and I look at it like my grandfather he used to take me out fishing all the time too

and you know like we would you know like I remember like driving like two and a half hours to like a fishing spot. And then like we get all of our stuff out and get the flow tubes out. And I just looked at him. I was like, I was like 12. I was like, I forgot my flippers.

And he was just like, okay, we'll pack it all up. Here we go home. You know, just like, it's just the way it goes. It all comes full circle. It's upsetting. Yeah. But man, it's just the way it goes. It all comes full circle. It's upsetting. Yeah. But man, there's like magical moments. Because like my little boy just caught his first, like where he did the cast, the hookup, the reel in, no assistance.

And he was just ecstatic. It's amazing. That's a big moment. And I taught him to say say come to Papa Man. His laugh is the best, man, when he gets going. Well, like my win, my one win this winter was I love to ice

fish. I love ice fishing. And I think it's like the best kid thing too. So drag the 14-year-old out ice fishing. And he's just like, I can't believe this. I'm like, but we're doing it in the afternoon. We're on for the afternoon bite it's all gonna be good

I set up like whole camp chef set up I'm like cooking tacos and I'm just running and like literally it's hot perch and like one boy is like pulling it

I'm like doing a triangle like fish off you know maggot on down the hole fish off maggot on down the hole

flip a taco run back over I'm just like doing this like circle in the hot chocolate and I like I'm doing my own thing. And I hear my 14 year old look at his, his 12 year old brother. And I was like, dude, this is really fun.

It's like, I win. Like I won this winter. I won. I won. That's great. Yeah. It's a good mom. I'm working on it.

Trying, trying hard. Well, hopefully someday you'll be on your deathbed. They'll be like, you know, Ma, thanks, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Ma. When you told me that chick would really be into fly fishing skills, you were right.

She was. All right. Rachel Schmidt, thank you very much for joining us. I was going to do that thing where I tell you for people how to find you. Check out BHA. We talk about it a lot. Everybody is pretty involved and it's a good group of people and you learn a lot of stuff and it's good.

But yeah, if you want to find me personally, Instagram, it's MontanaRayRay, M-T-R-A-E-R-A-E or Rachel Schmidt. MontanaRayRay? MontanaRayRay, M-T-R-A-E-R-A-E. Oh. Latest picture is a giant black drum I just caught in Louisiana. Very pumped about that. Sweet.

Yeah. We'll check it. Are you active on there? Do you put stuff up on there a lot? Yeah. Not as much as some. You don't live by it? No.

No. What are you eating, Brody? More Sam Pam. More pocket meat. I thought you were packing a chaw. All right, Rachel. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us, Pam. More pocket meat. I thought you were packing a chaw. Hi, Rachel. Hey, thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us.

Sam, thanks for bringing down all that stuff. You betcha. Very helpful. Okay, everybody, see you next time. 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,

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