The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 335: Long Beard

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

Topics discussed: Sharing beds; a Southwestern vibe; MeatEater Laboratories; Chester the Tester, a rotund chef figurine holding a spatula dipped in heavenly chocolate; Tiny, the arsonist and how you can get away with a lot of criminal shit in the US; "How Can I Be Cold But My Balls are Still Sweaty" and other New York Times Best Sellers by Steve; communal latrines and raccoon roundworm; avian influenza hitting the wild turtle population; attending the walleye tournament or your own wedding; the Gila National Wilderness as the first officially recognized wild land on the planet; Aldo Leopold's 1921 article; making a 14.92 mile loop and only hearing three gobbles; scarce water and filtering out rock snot; what goes on in a turkey's noggin; Steve's blanket rule of not gobbling while turkey hunting with his kids; flirting with disaster when you wear those little turkey fan hats; Steve loving wild turkeys more than his kids; the two types of outdoors folk; gratitude over expectation; the land of milk and walleyes; and more.    Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. All right, everybody, I'm going to set the scene for you. We're in a hotel in Albuquerque. Chester, Dirt, and Rick are all in bed together. Pretty nice. Carl's in his own bed.

I got a bed to myself. It's weird that you got your own bed, but then there's three of them in that bed. I might still be smelling bad, man. That could have something to do with it. Seth, that's esteemed frequent guest Carl Malcolm. Seth is sitting on a little, what do you call that thing? An ottoman? Yeah.

Using the bed as a desk, and I'm in one of those little hotel desks, which I can't bring myself to use generally. There's just something kind of depressing about them. I do it in bed. When I'm in a hotel, I type in bed. You look like, this just looks like your office. I know. And I got this little coffee maker going.

You're breaking a big story. There's a beautiful, I appreciate the pon cone framed art on the wall over there. That's a nice touch for the Southwest. No, it is good. It's got a Southwest vibe in here. We're coming off of a wonderful turkey hunt in the Gila Wilderness, which we're going to dive into the significance of that wilderness and wildernesses in general. First off, I've got to talk about a couple of things. Someone, Chester, how many test my meat submissions came in i heard that just that i checked that morning that the podcast came out

yeah and we had cory said we had 25 test my meat submissions is that true well i don't get all of them and i actually haven't had a chance to really go through all my emails yet, just because we're on the road. On the trail. On the trail. This is the hotel creamer. I'm not. I don't know.

I probably have 15, but I don't think Corey's sending me all of them. And then you got criticized by a Warner. What we're talking about is our our mediator laboratories which we started out chester you don't even know yet buddy i got a surprise for you when you see your lab coat that'll be a good look for chester it is well he already knows about his lab coat for some reason i'm. No. I went with the most appropriate Chester nickname. Oh. You're going to be very, very

happy. I wasn't going to tell you, but I can't keep it a secret. Most appropriate. That's good. Chester the Tester. You know, Meat Eater Laboratories Patch. And Chester the Tester embroidered on your lab coat. Oh, yeah. That's good. Are you kidding me? No, I'm not kidding. I couldn't keep it a secret any longer. That's killing me.

So we have a Warner. Tell them the machine we have, Chester, and what we've been doing with it. It's a Warner Bratzler Shear Force machine. We do not have it in the hotel with us. No. Basically, keep it real simple. It's like a scale, and it's got a blade and the blade slices the meat or shears the

meat and that scale will give you the pounds of force that it takes to slice through that and there's a whole scale on tenderness and we're getting a bunch of submissions in for wild game, testing out how tender your wild game is. Well, I'm more interested in how tough it is personally. Yeah. Well, here's the deal, Dirt. It's a little tricky. Go on.

Tell Dirt how it's tricky. Well, yeah. I'm going to get there in one sec like you bite into your buddy comes home and he's like man that elk i shot was tough as all hell let's role play you tell me um oh yeah you do it to me steve i shot an elk in New Mexico in the wilderness, and I got that thing back, and man, was it tough. Shit. That ain't tough. It's not like that elk that I shot up in Montana. That ain't tough.

You want to see tough, you should taste some of my awe, Dad. Oh, shit. If you want to see tough, man, you should test that 20-year-old bear I shot. Well, you know what? Let's send it to Meat Eater Laboratories and find out whose is actually tough. Test my meat? What is it? No, you send it to...

That was good rehearsal. Good rehearsal. You send it to... No, okay. Let's keep the role play going. I'm going to retort. Okay. Well, shit, Chester. Let's send it to... No, okay, let's keep the role play going. I'm going to retort. Okay. Well, shit, Chester.

Let's send it. Let's submit our proposal at meateater at themeateater.com with the subject line, all caps, TESTMYMEAT. I bet you mine is going to be tougher than yours. And Chester the tester will review your submission and decide if you should submit your sample or not.

Yep. And then we're going to give a prize to the toughest game meet that we can get our hands on. It's going to be a heck of a good time. Hopefully I don't... There's a... I'm already getting... I'd like you to work on that one.

On the plane, can you think of a better retort? It's going to be a heck of a good time there's uh you should put that on his lab coat there's already i know that lab coat it's long so down toward the bottom it could say it's gonna be a heck of a good time there's already people writing in like saying like we better do this right because there's so many variables. Oh, yeah. Chester's already been accused in keeping with the times. He's already been accused of spreading misinformation.

But this isn't about COVID. This is about meat testing. Yeah. I mean, we tested a peep. How serious can it really be? But I can guarantee you guys I'm going to do my absolute best to make sure everything is as accurate as possible. There's going to be some bribery sent your way there, Chet. So here's what they do. Here's the conundrum, Dirk, and then we'll move on.

Just keep you posted. This is a very expensive machine. So we can't just do it once and drop it because that would be fiscally irresponsible. So we need to do it a whole bunch to justify having bought this damn thing. Very expensive. Yeah. Here's the thing. Here's where you got a conundrum.

If you're doing it like for real, like you're like breeding cattle and trying to find like what cow, what attributes, whatever diet, genetics genetics whatever yields the most tender blank t-bone yep you want great uniformity so they always cook the meat to the same temperature let it cool overnight cut the core test the core yeah so in doing the game meat thing do you stick to that or do you do a thing where like well let's do it like how one would best prepare it yeah and then and then tell people that because these are two different interesting lines of inquiry one is like because this gives a numeric value to toughness what's like super ass tough chester five five is super ass tough i mean yeah five is tough unacceptable yeah in industry terms it's unacceptable what's acceptable in industry terms um i think around like 2.5

oh wow like three yeah it's like and i've seen some bowls that are at five the top i've seen some sixes okay yeah so you you you get it and you test all these different game meats and be like yes cook to like lab specs it's this but there's an interesting line of inquiry where you, let's say someone has the toughest bull in the world or buck in the world. Yeah. Okay. And you're like, let's sous vide a steak and then reverse sear it and test that result versus putting a cold, wet, half frozen steak on a 500 degree grill yeah and and then testing that be like right like what strategies does one like what what might be the outcome once you have a tough ass bowl yeah or do this, you take the tough ass bowl.

Let's say someone sends you a, uh, a round off a really tough bowl. We'll test it lab specs. Then we'd have like Kevin Gillespie cook it a handful of ways and test those and see, follow me. Yep. That's a good idea. Yeah. that's worst case scenario best case scenario or no or and in all these and then tell them how you already got in trouble tell them the guy do you want to talk about the guy that sent you a mean email wait real quick would you compare a bear then to an elk or would it be elk category well you could here's what here's the beauty of the thing is you could then say yeah you could take what do you got to do like how do you you cook it to what according to lab specs well it doesn't really matter i mean sure it does but i was cooking it medium rare

though i just did that one last time but i think all of them will be cooked to what's medium rare temp typically on like a steak 130 135 135 oh i'm sorry medium rare i think it's like 132 or something 130 132 so i think well seth turned up over there right i think i think what we'll do is like sous vide them to temp, very similar size of meat, and then quick reverse serum so they'll all be very consistent. And then you cut core samples. There's like a little mechanism where you cut core samples out. Yeah, you're supposed to cut three cores.

And here's the interesting thing we already found out um if you if it's rare in the middle and you cut a core you now have a core like imagine you have a cylinder you know let's say you have a cylinder like let's just imagine it's your finger okay your middle knuckle is pink let's say and the ends are more brown where you shear you're getting different scores oh yeah that makes like that more cooked is scoring tougher yeah no sense yeah so like taking a core sample out of that middle parallel with the grain not Mm-hmm. Not perpendicular. Yeah, because then, yeah, you're cutting across, obviously. Yeah. But yeah, some guy wrote in,

just, I don't need to go into it, but he was just saying, like, it's very difficult to do accurate tests like this. Was he making a play to be the person that, was he making a play to be Chester the tester? No, he was just basically saying, like, do it right. That you're spreading misinformation. Was he making a play to be Chester the Tester? No. He was just basically saying, do it right. You're spreading misinformation.

Someone wrote in. This is interesting. He decided to Google. He Googled Chester the Tester. And I'm disappointed to find, and this will change over time. Disappointed? I was disappointed to find

that when you Google Chester the Tester, you do not find Chester the Tester. You find a ceramic figurine of a rotund, pudgy little chef testing, licking a spoon that he has dipped into a vat called Heavenly Chocolate. I can see you doing that too. Is it collectible? Is the figurine like a little collectible?

I got to look into it more. Chester's going to, we need to get one of them sons of bitches, Chester. That's the logo. Brandon Butler, who, so I'm'm gonna give a brandon butler update to remind you guys who brandon butler is one he's been on the podcast uh yanni and i have hunted turkeys for him we would call him very much a friend of the show sometime back some friends of his were raising money for him because he reported some poachers who then burned his cabin down. Whoa. The guy that burned his cabin down just went back to prison on a five-year stint,

but not for the arson. Brandon, this is a teaser because Brandon's going to come back on the show to tell this whole sort of, it is a crazy story. It involves a 5'3", 500-pound guy named Tiny. Jeez. Round. Now listen, I'm just going to wet your appetites here for how,

if you're going to commit a crime, America is the country to do it in, man. America, like, this is a great place to be a criminal. They just don't do anything to you here. So you get away with murder in this country. So none of this guy, this guy burns down his place. How do you know that he's not sleeping there? Burns down his place.

He gets him on trail cam, burning it down, and he's not even in jail for burning it down tiny's the the arsonist or the victim he'll tell the whole story i just like that little detail um so he also broke into this other dude's cabin was living in the cabin left his pro left his parole papers in the cabin after stealing a four-wheeler and a generator. Pleads guilty to that, and that constitutes a Class C felon. But he's already a felon anyway, but that constitutes a Class C felon. Burning Brandon's entire house down, on the other hand, is a Class D

felony. Had they convicted him on both he'd get to serve those things concurrently. Great country to commit crimes in. Like if you're going to go do something bad do two bad things. Because you can just do it concurrently anyways.

That's ridiculous. Yeah I'm going to write like a pamphlet. You know how we're going to do that book? Hunter's making the cover for the book the book is called uh you ready we talked about this before but he's making the cover for the book we're starting with the cover it's the book's called uh how could i be cold but my balls are balls are still sweaty how could i be cold but my balls are still sweaty yeah the untold truth about sleeping bags and this is gonna be a book yeah how could i be cold but my balls are still sweaty? The Untold Truth About Sleeping Bags. And this is going to be a book. How could I be cold but my balls are sweaty?

I was thinking about that. The Untold Truth About Sleeping Bags. But I think I should write a pamphlet that says, so you'd like to commit some crimes. And it would be tips for criminals. Apparently, if you do two really bad things, it doesn't matter because you only get to go to jail for one of them oh my god man um he's gonna come in and tell this is this story is great

oh just to titillate you a little more um they also burnt down a ranger station like a forest service ranger station burnt Like a Forest Service ranger station. Burnt down a Forest Service ranger station. Same individual. They felt like they were being persecuted when they started looking into their poaching habitat. Man, these are just terrible people. And he didn't get in trouble for that.

No, you know, in five years, he'll be back out burning more shit down. Gosh. I would think like destroying federal property. Great country to commit crimes in, man. Would be a bigger deal. What a jerk. You know, we were cleaning that turkey the other day,

and I was plucking a turkey. I had blood on my hands, and the feathers kept sticking to my hands. Yep. Got me thinking about getting tired and feathered. Ooh, that'd be good. I'd bring that shit back. And I think cutting appendages and shit off should come back. We talked about this in the car.

Yep, for theft. Yeah, like for burning shit down, you should your your thumb that you strike that you roll the lighter with or maybe get a burn yeah cut your thumb off so you can't work a big lighter anymore burn your other fingertips uh yeah i'm i'm i'm i'm kind of a hard i'm a hard on uh you know like that kind of like potentially fate like burning people's houses down feels bad. I don't know, just old fashioned. I'm going to have to agree with you on that one. Everyone should see the same.

Everyone should see that the same way you do. Well, it's personal to me too because he had so many cool like hunting and fishing artifacts and stuff in there that he lost. Like really cool stuff in there. He lost. Really cool stuff in there. He built the place by hand, man. He's coming on top about that. Guy wrote in too. This is interesting because I've noticed this a bunch, but haven't thought about it much. He recently discovered a raccoon latrine.

I'm sure the group was going to think of a bunch of animals that use communal latrines. Nil guy. No. Nil guy use communal latrines that are as big as a queen-sized bed. It actually forms a hill. Yep. Llamas do, don't they?

What's that? Llamas? Yeah, but I was going to stick to hunting animals. Oh, yeah. Llamas do, don't they? What's that? Llamas? Yeah, but I was going to stick to hunting animals. Oh, yeah. Llamas do a communal latrine. Swamp rabbits do a communal latrine. Otters do a communal latrine. And raccoons do a communal latrine.

What else does a communal latrine do? You see, when you're walking through the woods, you'll find a pile of grouse shit. Did you ever see that? I'd like to have a grouse expert answer me that. I don't know if it's a latrine, but it's like that thing sat there for a while. I often thought that it was in a bad snowstorm. He was sitting there under the snow.

Yeah. What do you think, Carl? Well, the other place you'll see that oftentimes is on the backside of a drumming log where a male likes to hang out in the spring strutting his stuff and you know beating his wings to attract a female they'll pile up a pretty significant little heap of grouse droppings is that right yeah yeah i've seen it where i felt like i said because he ever gone out um when we used to hunt grouse a lot in michigan if you had a bad snowstorm and you'd go grouse hunting you'd bust grouse where there's no tracks yeah they just come busting right out of the snow was there when it snowed and stayed under the snow yeah you'll have like out of the snow and there's

no thing coming in just exiting yeah you'll have a hole and then you'll have the spot where both wings beat down on the side of the snow rocketing out of the snow pile so that's the kind of tube with the yeah but i've seen them like you're saying with dozens of dozens of pellets yeah well you get like a pile behind a drumming log really and a quick cool aside when it comes to trying to capture grouse like for research purposes one of the most effective ways to get them is at those drumming logs because they're very territorial this has a nice link to talking turkeys as well we're gonna talk we're gonna talk i know that there's nothing that a male grouse hates more than seeing another male grouse somewhere near his drumming spot and so the way you capture

him is throw a little mirror up in the back of a trap where a grouse on the drumming spot and so the way you capture them is throw a little mirror up in the back of a trap where a grouse on the drumming log will see his own reflection and by and large you're going to have that that male grouse attack his reflection in the back of that trail really off the drumming log we were i was hunting bears of clay one time and we made the mistake of camping at a drumming log yeah and that thing all night long really is walking around like through the sleeping bags drumming his ass off on that log i'm not kidding you man i don't know if i've ever heard one drumming at night it was going crazy do you remember when you guys there i remember that was we were on that with yanni yeah yeah yeah so he was going nuts like a little generator yeah when I was before

I was old enough to bow hunt I was sitting in my brother's tree stand around it my dad would set multiple tree stands up mm-hmm so you could sit I'll sit with my brother before I was on up the bow hunt and he's bow hunting and I'm hearing and I said to him at one point I always remember as I said to him that guy can't get that lawnmower started so you know we've been talking a little bit about um the sort of emerging turkey hunting opportunity up in the upper peninsula back in our native state of michigan and this past spring um i spent a bunch of time stomping around up there looking for looking for gobblers and one of the super cool things about turkey hunting up there is that first light, right?

When it's like time to start hearing birds gobbling on the roost, the rough grouse are going berserk as well. So you're there listening for gobbles in the distance. And meanwhile, you've got drumming grouse all around you. The geese are starting to head back north. So it's just like this embodiment of spring reawakening and this past spring avian fecundity man seriously and this past spring i was hearing so many drummers that it you know it was a great indication for what the fall hunting season was going to look like and that's one of the ways

of course that they evaluate grouse numbers on the landscapes to do these spring drumming surveys but while turkey hunting you know i was already starting to text my buddies like come mid-october we're going to have some real good grouse hunting based on what i'm hearing out here in the turkey woods and that that definitely turned out to be the case this past fall i read once that with roughed grouse, a limiting factor can be the prevalence or absence of drumming logs. That's an interesting... Because they're so fussy about the height and then visibility around it. Yeah. And that you could mechanically improve your grouse habitat by making appropriate drumming logs

if you don't have them i don't know if you believe that or not i'm so i will preface my skepticism by saying that i'm not a rough grouse expert but when i think about the things you know sort of driving reproductive success typically it's it's limiting factors on the female side of the equation more than on the male side gotcha um now that being said one of the things i loved doing when i was a kid um up in leelanau county the northwest lower peninsula michigan in the spring when i'd be out morel mushroom picking and just being in the woods if i'd hear drumming roughies i'd try to sneak in and see if i could see the male and so i've looked at a lot of drumming logs just out of my own curiosity as a as a kid growing up and there is a striking

consistency in the characteristics of the places that those males like to show off their stuff you know in terms of height in terms of having good visibility around them and obviously you know not unlike a gobbling turkey they're making a heck of a lot of noise to try to show off for the females and that's a very dangerous thing in a landscape where you've got ample predators who love nothing more than a plump rough grouse to snack on in the spring um people folks at home wonder what we're talking about yeah that was that was actually a perfect replication was it anyhow this guy raccoon raccoon defecation piles so he was renovating an old cab and and and discovered one was blown away by the smell and sight of the uh communal latrine it got him

googling later that night, which led him to the CDC page on raccoon roundworm. I wonder if anyone's ever had any experience with raccoon roundworm. It seems to be an extremely rare occurrence in humans, yet extremely common in our Midwest raccoon population. I haven't had,

that's one of those many things I just choose not to pay any attention to like the list of diseases you can get from stuff is so we're going to talk about another disease in a minute it is so long that you just after a while it just you know sounds gross though yeah this one no you don't want that shit no but no I've never taken any precautions to avoid raccoon roundworm and i have looked you know when you're trapping raccoons you like a great find is latrine which usually identifies a den tree uh avian influenza is hitting some wild turkeys in billings montana um near our

headquarters not too terribly far away from our headquarters some guy found a I was just reading an article about this guy finds a turkey dead and thinks he got hit by a car gets looking around and finds six dead turkeys laying around his place and they tested them they tested three of them and those those three turkeys had died of avian influenza geez so it has at least in that case um has moved into wild turkey populations as it spreads naturally through our bird populations i texted uh the wild turkey doc michael chamberlain he said they're at university of georgia they are testing a lot of birds and and he he can speak to this if it changes but this might be dated by the time you hear it but he was saying it doesn't seem to impact wild turkeys quite like is in the and as devastating of a way as it seems to hit other bird species. But if COVID's any indication,

you can probably expect someone to make turkey hunting illegal now because you could get avian influenza from it. Let's hope that doesn't go on. While we have you, Chester and Seth, can you give us a wildlife tour update, please? Yep. I'm trying to think of a cable news.

That was good. The continuing walleye adventures of Chester the Tester and Seth. We got one! I'm on a boat! I'm on a boat! Chet and I went out to St. Peter, Minnesota, to the Alumacraft headquarters and picked up our boat. Right from headquarters. Yep.

Got a tour and everything. Quick tour. Quick tour. Real quick. Can I back up for a second? Yeah. My comment about them making turkey hunting illegal, I want to point out that when the pandemic began, the state of Washington, which by and large is no friend of the american outdoorsman uh the state of washington

banned the practice of fishing as part of their covid response let's just remind people this is not a thing that happened a long time ago go on go ahead seth makes a lot of sense. Anyway, we went to Alumacraft, picked up our competitor 185 FSX boat that we're going to be fishing out of for the tournament season and brought it home. And Chet and I have been working our asses off rigging it. Yeah, this is like when you guys get done, I think the military is going to want this boat. Yeah.

It's pretty sweet. It's like a spaceship. We got no excuses. But we're learning a lot on how to like, I have not a ton of experience with like electrical work. Yeah, Chet and I have never rigged a boat before, and it has to be done in a way, a specific way, so everything doesn't interfere with each other. Lay out your electronics package for people. Well, we have three Helix 12 screens,

which is kind of the main unit that you're looking at. We have a Minn Koda ultrex trolling motor that has a built-in um 2d sonar 2d sonar we have that uh hummingbird three mega 360 hooked to the trolling motor we'll have a skimmer in the back we'll have a side imaging, down imaging in the back, and then we'll have a Mega Live unit on the side, and they'll all be talking to each other. What are they talking about? Just where the fish are. Do you guys feel like, I'm all for it,

but do you feel like you're going to be right in line with the competition, or are you going to be like out swinging them with the electronics? No, not out swinging them with electronics. A lot of those dudes have that and more on their boat. And is there a limit to what you can do? What do you mean? I mean, yeah. Inficient, the tournament?

Is there a limit to how much technology you can introduce? Not as of now, I don't believe. I don't think so. Which is kind of crazy because, you know, as technology gets better and better, especially in like tournament fishing, where's the line, right? Mm-hmm. But, man, it's sure fun to use that stuff. Yep.

You know? Like in the Olympics, you can't take a lot of drugs. No. Right? No. So I could picture in the wall at tournament, they might do something down the road about electronics. Yeah, you can't be doping up your electronics too much.

We have all this stuff hooked up to some lithium batteries that at last minute, we were supposed to get lithium batteries, ended up not getting them. But our friends up at towns and marine last minute help us out big time that's great thanks to those guys yeah that was big help the reason why we're in such a hurry is because we went on this new mexico trip we get back we have a few days and then we got to head out to our first derby our first tournament out at fort peck so right before we left this is how we left the boat and it's sitting in seth's garage right now so i've been thinking about it all weekend you know that's funny because i've been laying in

my sleeping bag thinking about how i'm gonna plant my garden really what i'm gonna put where you're laying there about where to put yeah yeah that's why you're not sleeping every time chet and i got like a second together on this hunt we're like hey uh what do you think about what do you think about this distribution panel yeah but so we this is how we left the boat. We got the whole front of the boat rigged up with the Helix 12 screen. It was going to our battery, then to our distribution panel, then to all that stuff up. So it should have worked, should have turned on.

So like we get it all set up. We're excited, you know, like rubbing our hands together. Like, here we go we're turning on the first unit press the button nothing no power you know when they make a movie about this that scene is going to be a lot like in the chevy chase christmas movie oh yeah yeah yeah when he gets all the christmas lights done and plugs and nothing comes on yeah that'd be a great scene for the movie yeah yeah after after doing a bunch of troubleshooting, I determined that our fuse panel is faulty.

God, man. What just happened to casting and reeling, man? We're going to be doing a lot of that too. But no, I get you. Yeah, I mean, you can put a shitload of electronics on your boat, but at the end of the day, you've got to be a good fisherman. Still got to work the jig. You've got to work the jig.

You've got to know where fish live, how fish react to stuff. How many episodes are you guys going to make about this whole thing? Four. Only four? Yeah, it's just like a little test. It makes sense because it's like three tournaments. And then rigging. And then, yeah.

The first one is us just kind of more self-filming. The next three are going to – Chris Gill is going to come along with us. So it will be way higher quality. That's a high class. That's a high class. That would be great too because he likes to fish. Yeah. Yeah, and we're not doing the traditional meat eater like don't break

the fourth wall deal yeah so chris is going to be like a character in it no he'll be fishing too he won't be fishing but there'll be some banter uh this is great it's gonna be fun he cannot fish just for everyone out there there's people like a little bit like oh they're gonna have a third person in boat we're gonna have cameras rolling the whole time. So by all means, if you want to sit there and look at that little GoPro SD card for nine hours and watch Chris film us, there you go. So because somehow having a third person on the boat might be interpreted as a way to cheat. I don't know. Like he's got a walleye hidden in the camera.

Competitive advantage. Well, you just have another person casting, right? Yeah. That's why they don't. But you're going to take a GoPro, position it so it's filming the whole boat, and then there will be no interruption in the footage, and you're going to let it run all the way through. And should someone ever want to say,

I want to know what happened on that boat, you would provide them with the entire day that they could analyze to see if there's breaks in the footage, and they could watch everything that happened on that boat for nine hours. Yep. You got to be careful about which direction you're peeing off that boat.

Do you guys have a way, you guys might want to think about um i don't know if it'd work you'd have to get a big satellite dish shit on that boat but imagine if you uh were able to people that could just live stream during the whole tournament that'd be great that would be great there'd be a lot of a lot of electronics a lot more electronics yeah well yeah there's no limit to it right you guys like that shit why that shit instagram live yeah it'd be a lot of... A lot of electronics, a lot more electronics. Well, yeah, there's no limit to it, right? You guys like that shit. Instagram live.

Yeah, it'd be great. One more question for you guys. I'm real excited for you, but are you... How would you rate going into the tournament season? How would you rate your cockiness? Mine's very low okay i don't want i don't want that's a that's uh carl just introduced me to a new phrase which the value laden term oh sure i don't want to use a value-laden term um cockiness like no one wants to be cocky like are you would

you confidence is a good yeah how would you like okay let me say this. If I came, if I was a future seer, and in many respects I am, but if I was a future seer and I came to you and said, turns out, Chester, at the end of all this, you will have placed how many people, roughly? Could be a hundred. Let's say there's a hundred. Let's say we knew.

In my thing, I was like, I saw the future. There were a hundred and let's say there's a hundred let's say we knew in my thing i was like i saw the future there were 100 boats you placed 40 yeah would you be like damn dude that's great better than i thought or would you be like huh i'd be real happy with some top 20s. Yeah. I think 40 would be like, eh. Because I know we don't have any experience fishing tournaments. You guys got a lot of experience fishing. We have a lot of experience catching walleye. We know how to catch them. And we're going to work hard.

Yeah. We don't have the experience that some of the guys have on these lakes. And, like, yes, we could go to any of these lakes and catch a bag but some dudes are gonna go and catch a bag of high 20s to 30 inches because they just have it dialed and you guys are gonna roll in with five 13s like that could be a thing to have that could be a thing to happen. That could be a thing to happen. I think we'll do better than that. I think we have potential to place in the...

I think we can place in the top 10 in one of these three tournaments. That's bold statement, Chester. Where are the other two? I know we can do it, but I don't... I mean, it's possible for sure. Yeah. Are you at liberty to say where the the three locations are yeah it's uh tiber fresno and fort peck all it's all public information

reservoirs in montana there's a fourth one at canyon ferry but it's on my wedding day here's the thing his home waters he's he's skipping his home water day to get married that's the stupidest thing in the world especially when i found out that he doesn't need to be at his own wedding how's that because montana lets you proxy marriage from the boat yeah he could assign he could assign me stand to be him and i could stand up there with his girlfriend and he could just turn me that is so crazy i'm just gonna stay silent on this one so i don't get myself i want to say i support your decision just for the record i do i do not you would not

bail let me tell you let me tell you a story let me tell you a story one time that i don't want to say, I don't want to use names, but a very famous author told me a story. He had a kid he was mentoring. Okay. Yep. And it wound up that he got an assignment lined up for the kid he was mentoring for a very prestigious publication. And he's like, now's your chance. I can't because that's my family vacation weekend. Oh, that's a little different.

That mentorship ended that second. Oh, totally. Family's important though. He's like, you don't want this the way you need to want it. And I would say there's nothing more important i would say there's a giant difference there's a giant difference there yeah happily ever after walleye fish i love walleye fishing too but i'm with you hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew, our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,

24K topo maps,points and tracking that's right you were always talking about uh we're always talking about on x here on the meat eater podcast now you um you guys in the great white north can can be part of it be part of the excitement you can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service that's a sweet function as part of your membership you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites

are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all i gotta tell a good so here's a good story uh if you uh harken back

this is the set we don't normally do this i don't like to do this this much but so our uh our uh beloved friend bubbly doug was a lot he was allowed to do some follow-up on on cwd after our episode with ted nugent and then uh so we revisited the nugent episode with doug doing a rebuttal uh and now we're revisiting our nugent episode again with a with a really detail-laden story from a guy so when nugent is now we're talking about how nugent used to do whiplash bashes and we had attended some whiplash did you ever attend a whiplash bash can't say that i have but you were passed on the highway by ted driving that zebra stripe zebra stripe bronco yeah which that's down by jackson michigan yeah that's that's as like as important as a whiplash bash when you're in high

school so a guy's like he was working backstage security for a nugent concert up at the castle in charlevoix it's one of the rare occasions when ted missed a shot on stage oh now at the end of the show ted was as a security guard points out ted was so physically exhausted he needed help getting back to the dressing room was spent. Okay. The assistant said, I'm not supposed to do this, but I need to leave Ted's bow here while I help him back to his dressing room. Can you keep an eye on it until I come back and grab it?

Well, of course I said yes. And he left. He says there's a lot of activity going on as people were leaving and breaking things down at the venue. So it was very hectic backstage at one point a guy walks by the table and just nonchalantly grabs Nugget's bow the security guard goes up to him and says what are you doing? he says I'm supposed to bring this back to Ted

about that time Ted's assistant walks up and asks what's going on. The security guard said, this guy's trying to take Ted's bow. And it was revealed that this person is in fact trying to steal Ted's bow and has no connection to Ted. The security guard summons a police officer

who then escorts the man off property. The police officer thanked him escorts the man off property. The police officer thanked him for stopping the crime. The assistant explains that that Boa is never supposed to leave Ted's sight and they made a mistake. Now, she,

Ted gets word of this whole thing, comes out of his dressing room and gives him the broken arrow that broke upon Ted's miss on stage he says Ted walked up shook my hand said thanks for helping out tonight and handed me half of the broken arrow

which he had signed he's offering to donate it to the land access initiative auction house of oddities nice that's a cool offer now i texted ted to be like does this ring a bell he said i remember everything but i don't remember that but i'm gonna email him the thing and see if it feels legitimate. We will be adding that to the Auction House of Oddities for our land access initiative. Another thing I want to point out about the land access initiative. Then we've got one more thing to talk about.

Then we're going to get into the turkeys and the Gila. We recently got a note from the family of a guy named John Penowitz. His wife wrote in. She said, I was just a face in the crowd of a guy named john pennewitt his wife wrote in um and she said i was just a face in the crowd at one of your live shows in houston and she was pointing and she gave us the the news that not sure what happened but her husband john pennewitt who was a big fan of the show um had passed away young with kids and they had in lieu of any kind of flowers or anything they had requested that um family and friends make a donation to our land access initiative this is john pennewitt from down in texas his family and i had heard that a lot of donations to the land access initiative are flooding in on behalf of John Pennewitt.

So don't know what happened there, man, but really, sorry for the loss. And thank you for the support, though it seems like a not ideal scenario. The corner crossing dudes in Wyoming, we've been covering this real heavily, found not guilty. But here's the weird part. There's a civil case. Do you remember when OJ killed his wife in a waiter? He was found not guilty for the criminal thing. Like, he didn't do it, right?

But then was found guilty in civil. not guilty for the criminal thing. Like he didn't do it, right? But then was found guilty and civil. Like when the family does a civil thing. So apparently the landowner is going after these dudes in a civil court case. See how that shakes out. The thing about that, I'm looking at you, Carl, because I feel like you'd be interested in this whole thing. I am interested in it.

And two thoughts that come to mind. One is you kicked off talking about America being a good place to do a crime. This sort of flies in the face of that, right? The idea that you could be tried. Just from the standpoint of being facing a court and being tried criminally and then being tried again in a civil suit for the same allegations right so sort of a you know yeah like the jews didn't murder them criminally but he murdered them civilly i will refrain from commenting on the OJ case the other thought is you know the the public access the corner-crossing thing as an outdoors man myself who spends a lot of time stomping

around on public ground that's an issue that that I am very interested in and care a lot about and also one you know as an employee for a federal agency that you know in a forum like this my opinions and thoughts on it are probably best kept to myself because it's something that affects the agency i work for but i can tell you you know there's a lot of times i've been looking at a chunk of ground and thinking to myself man it'd be great to great to cross this you know this fence intersection and hunt that other stuff and i've gone so far in new mexico is to call a number of wardens to ask that question to find out and you know essentially gotten answers that were sufficiently um

murky that i wasn't comfortable doing that and And I can be more specific. Like one, one warden here said from the state game and fish perspective, we wouldn't, we wouldn't come after you for that, but I can't guarantee you that the local sheriff would feel the same way about it. Dave Wilms, who's our, uh,

resident expert on this, uh, situation notified me about the verdict, but then said, please do not think that this somehow overturns any understanding. This doesn't change anything about corner crossing writ large. Yeah.

It's like these individuals in this instant were found not guilty. This is not like a Supreme Court case that throws out or reestablishes precedent. It's just like these people. If someone got found not guilty of something, that doesn't mean that what they were charged with ceases to be a thing. Yep. So folks need to know that. Yep.

All right, Carl. Tell me, make me like wilderness areas man make you like wilderness i think i just did i already love actually i think you already did love them but after but hit me after this week hit me with them about the gila well you know i spent about 10 years getting to know the gila wilderness and when i you know when my wife and i made the decision to move from the midwest to the southwest one of the things that really drew me to this part of the country was the history of this landscape these landscapes and helping shape sort of the trajectory

of conservation in America and globally and then also the fact that you know today this ratio of population to public land in a place like new mexico is so small that ratio there's so many places you can go and get off the beaten path and uh really you know be away from the masses and the gila is one of those spots where if you're willing to put the miles in you can get into a little corner of the universe where you're very unlikely to have a lot of other folks around and you know i anticipate as we're talking about this particular chunk of country people are going to be wondering like why you know why are we advertising how great the gila is um and then simultaneously saying it's a great place to find

solitude, right? If you're, if you're throwing out a banner saying the Gila is an awesome place to visit, doesn't that kind of undermine the opportunity to get away from folks? And I would point out the Gila wilderness has over 50 different trailheads, 560,000 acres, and all the travels by primitive means, either walking in there on your own legs or pack stock. And so by all means, I want people to come around and poke around that landscape and get to know it and also understand the story of how the Gila helped really shape the wilderness movement globally, because we're coming up on the hundredth anniversary of the administrative designation of the Gila in 1924, as the first, um, officially recognized wild land anywhere on the planet.

What did they call wilderness back then when there hadn't been the wilderness act um there's an article that so we'll talk a little bit about aldo leopold i'm sure he was one of the you know he was arguably the greatest champion uh for that that sort of formal recognition of wild lands there were other players as well a guy named arthur carhart for example making a case for not developing a lake up in colorado called trapper's lake and he and leopold were going back and forth talking about the right balance between developing federal lands you know bringing in roads and trails and cabins but then also like where's that line where do we where do we say okay we've got enough development let's set some places aside where the highest and best use might be retaining their sort of

primeval characteristics a recognition and a sense of humility that we're not going to make these places any better through through our own management and so you know the gila um that was a place that leopold pointed to as sufficiently unique and wild and like a last best chance in new mexico to have a place that could be a two-week pack string um into the wilderness so his the language that he used in a 1924 article for outdoor life magazine was a plea for wilderness hunting grounds that was the language as opposed to a designated wilderness area he wrote about a plea for wilderness hunting grounds and part of the definition he used was a landscape large enough to contain a two-week pack trip free of roads huh really yeah that's what he's looking at that's what he's looking at yep and he preceded that article um you know outdoor life magazine was a great place to kind

of reach the masses but i think from a professional standpoint an even more important point in the timeline was in 1921 he wrote an article for the Journal of Forestry in their November issue and the title that article was the wilderness and its place in forest recreational policy which sounds a little bit wonky the titles like okay but it's really important because what he did in this article he's talking to all of his fellow professional foresters right this is like the the preeminent outlet for the forestry profession globally the journal of forestry and leopold was one of the first students from the yale school of forestry which was established by Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the Forest Service.

And you're talking forestry as in chopping trees down and selling them. Yeah. Yeah. This idea of, and, and, you know, Gifford Pinchot is one of the, one of the giants of the conservation history of our country as well. The first chief of the Forest Service. He established the Yale School of Forestry. He was a great thinker around

conservation. And he had this idea of sustainable use, wise use, and the language, the greatest good for the greatest number over the long run. And for a society like ours to manage these public resources in a way where we're maximizing their value. And so when we talk about multiple use on our public land system, we're trying to balance a variety of needs and harvest a variety of renewable resources. So we're talking about forest products. We're talking about rangeland. We're talking about water. We're talking about recreational opportunity. We're talking about habitatangeland we're talking about water we're talking about recreational opportunity we're talking about habitat for fish and wildlife all these different

uses and it's not a matter of just roll back for a second there because when you say forest projects you're talking about like timber yeah absolutely um minerals yep minerals are part of it as well and then when you talk about water, you mean like pulling water that like, like wilderness areas, national forest land often is the top of the sort of food chain on water. Like these are head, tends to be headwaters. Yeah. So water, clean water coming off these places

that are utilized as drinking water for people and utilized to water to irrigate. Absolutely. And in fact, when the, when the, when the forest reserves were initially being established by our country that recognition that advantageous flows of clean and abundant water from these forests that was one of the key drivers of the establishment of the forest reserves that and timber production early on those were the things that really were focused on and you know later on uh congress passed the multiple use sustained yield act which brought in those five that i gave you in total so we're talking timber water recreation

fish and wildlife habitat and forage for range you know livestock got it and it put that that act the multiple use sustained yield act put those five on equal footing and so one of the challenges for a multiple use agency like the forest service is just balancing all those competing demands but the brilliance of what leopold did in this 1921 article is you know to his colleagues who are all deeply immersed in this thinking around the greatest good for the greatest number over the long run he made the case that there's a point where additional development starts to compromise that goal because as you think about all these different potential uses of the national forests having some fraction of that landscape managed in a way that it provides the unique kind of opportunities that we've experienced this last week that needs to be part of the equation

and so there's a point where additional development undermines the ability to deliver the greatest good for the greatest number over the long run so he kind of used the logic and the training that he had received this gifford pinchot mindset to argue his case very eloquently for why uh places like the gila you know, we walked by some timber out there, some of these ponderosa pine trees that are over 100 feet tall, a couple hundred years old, straight as an arrow.

I mean, they'd be beautiful lumber if they were milled. You could look at some of those stands and calculate a value of the forest products that are not being harvested in that landscape. But you're balancing that against values that are much more difficult to put a price tag on. Like what would be the value of the experience we had this past week in dollars and cents? It gets a lot more difficult to calculate than bored feet of lumber right but leopold's point was if you're trying to think about managing these multiple uses um it makes sense for us

while we have the opportunity in the early 1920s to start recognizing we're not making more of this stuff and if we if we go down the path of developing it it's virtually impossible that we're ever going to undevelop it right we're not going to we're not going to rewild these places if we go down that path so we have this opportunity we have this this this door is open now in the early 1920s to say a place like the gila yeah there's other values that we could potentially extract there but the highest and best use of this place would be preserving it in its primitive condition, not trying to make it better, not trying to open it up for extractive uses, retain it for its wildness. And that was

a very radical idea in his professional circles but he argued it on this logic that everyone was steeped in the pincho idea of the greatest good for the greatest number over the long run uh it how could it have been that right like it couldn't have been that radical because they got it done you wouldn't be able to get it done now i think that's true i think you wouldn't be able to get it done there's no way dude no no um and it had like by the time they got around to like doing the wilderness like codifying the wilderness act and what 68 was it 64 so it was a full 40 years between the administrative designation of the Gila and then the national wilderness act, which was signed by LBJ in 1964. And that was overwhelmingly popular.

It was overwhelmingly popular. Yup. That's right. Just to give people a sense of what we're talking about. So we, we, we debated this statistic the other day, 2.7% of the land area in the lower 48, 2.7% of the land areas designated wilderness. So when people are like griping, they can't ride their bikes on designated wilderness.

It's like you could ride your bikes on the other 97.3 percent of the country. Is it really that big of a deal? Yeah. They ride, you have 97.3 percent of the country to ride bikes on and when you're thinking about managing these different recreational opportunities um you know there's always going to be those those points of conflict but having some places where you know you don't have the mechanical advantage to cover ground um you know i think again it comes back to this idea of just trying to provide opportunities for the different user groups that

strike a balance and it's you know one one thing i've come to recognize in my career in natural resources at this point is um you're never going to be in a place where everybody's just like high-fiving and saying yeah this is perfect because you know because people don't see eye to eye but at the core of it you have a lot of different angles of passion coming in around this resource that lots and lots of people care about the public land system and how we're managing it so when we're getting that that friction around an issue like bikes in wilderness for example rather than lamenting the fact that you're always caught in this tension as a natural resources professional i like to remind myself the reason that tension exists is because so many

different people care about this shared resource for so many different reasons and i you know that that brings me a lot of optimism because people are engaged and if people weren't engaged if people didn't care i think that would be you know a much less fortunate place for us to be so mentally as a natural resource professional i like to try to stand that stand that in an optimistic place when things are really tense and frictions arising just remember people care people are engaged that's a good thing um when you're wrestling with like why would you tell people about a place like the gila right uh another thing to consider,

I think is that we have so many acres in this country that are in limbo as potential future wilderness area. Hmm. There is a lot of land that's like wilderness. What do they call them? Wilderness study areas. Wilderness study areas where it's currently undeveloped. Yep.

There's sort of like temporary restrictions on certain practices. And at some point, decisions will be made about how those areas are going to roll. Yep. That they're going to sort it out. They're in limbo right now. Some, undoubtedly, some of these wilderness study areas will get wilderness designation and some will lose their protections. Right? And as those debates happen, I think that the more wilderness advocates you have are going to land, are going to help more of that stuff land under permanent protection rather than temporary protection yes i think there's truth to that and you know another aspect of this you know sort of trade-off between highlighting how cool a place like the gila is

versus keeping you know keeping things on the dl um the gila is versus keeping, you know, keeping things on the DL. Um, the Gila is not unique in providing opportunities to do the kind of things that we were just doing. The heel is one place of many where folks can go out and whether it's Turkey hunting or, you know, looking for spruce grouse or going after a mule deer or trying to catch a cutthroat trout. Yeah, the heel is one amazing place. And take some time to educate yourself about where your local opportunities are to work your tail off to get into a place where you're leaving a lot of the other folks behind at the trailhead

who might not be as willing to go as deep as you want to go. Um, I mentioned to you this week, Steve, I've hunted wild turkeys in wilderness on all five national forests in New Mexico. So the Carson, the Santa Fe, the Cibola, the Lincoln, the the gila they all have wilderness areas with turkeys in them and i've hunted turkeys in all those places so i want to point out real quick that we're not talking about turkey hunting where you're like oh there's 20 of them yeah no yeah well yeah yeah it's not by any many square miles of what would be, that would strike you as phenomenal turkey habitat with no turkeys. Or with scattered turkeys.

I'm saying there's a lot of square miles. Yeah, yeah, that look good. There's, okay. You go out, let me put it this way. Okay. You go out to Bubbly Dog's place. Yep. Okay.

Find me a square mile of turkey habitat without a turkey on it. Yeah. Can't do it. Yeah. Okay. But I could go out and damn sure if someone went out to the Gila. Yeah. And made me a square.

You could put that thing somewhere. A square mile square. I could find places to put that square. And then they could like stop time and have people comb it and they'll be like there is categorically no wild turkey i i agree i agree with your assessment on this square mile turkey habitat it is it is absolutely a conscious decision to go past many many turkeys to get to the edge of the Gila wilderness and then opt in on working, like physically working much, much harder to find and hunt gobblers.

Garrett, explain physically working. Yeah. Give some of the mileages, like give some of the mileages you put in this week. I don't want to, I don't want to sound like, you to sound like a blowhard or like I'm making stuff up. You guys had a track function on. I did not. And I'll be honest. Who had the track function on? Chester.

You guys did in one day. I don't know why everybody's all starting to act like they don't know what I'm talking about. You guys in one day. 15 miles. You're rounding up. 14.92. You did a 14.92 mile loop and heard how many gobblers three right and killed potentially two to three i would say

and killed how many zero yeah 14.92 mile loop we were joking, like this idea of like, we're going into the secret spot deep in the wilderness. You could share every waypoint. Tell, we could, you know, post it on mediator.com

and very few people would actually go. I'll tell you, like, here's a good story along these lines. So, April of 2020,

it was like right at the, right at the peak of, you know, the pandemic, everybody, you know, the world was in turmoil. And I thought to myself, you know, the language of social distancing was just starting to kind of be used. And I'd been toying with the idea of doing a backpack, like a solo Gila backpack Turkey hunt. And, you know, I was sort of joking with my wife. I'm like, this is going to be social distancing to the extreme. Cause the closest person will probably be, you know, 15 miles from me. And I packed back in and, you know, it was fortunate enough to, to shoot two gobblers and I plucked them and had them, uh, hanging from my backpack. And they're both, you know, both long beards so I had I had I used my shotgun sling over the back of my neck and I had a gobbler hanging from each end of my sling by the feet and then I had these plucked birds with their beards dangling plus my my big backpack and I hiked out you know in one trip out and I was just getting back to the trailhead and I ran into another group of guys coming in.

They're like, what the heck is this guy doing? They were real excited about seeing some turkeys. Day hunting or backpack hunting? They were, well, I don't know exactly what their plans were. They had pretty good packs on. But they were excited to see a successful hunter coming out with two long beards. And so, you know, we started having a little conversation. conversation and i said i'll tell you guys exactly where i was and i pulled out my map and pointed to him on the map where i was going and the looks on their faces because they'd come in you know i'm

like so we're here and i shot these birds over here well some of them some of them may not even believe you but believe me when carl tells you he was like way the heck over there he was probably there and then he went even farther so i'm not condoning the idea of putting coordinates on uh on the meat eater website i want people to go out there and find you know figure it out but um no i think it's a very small fraction i'm just saying like for the most part have at it yeah have at it man it's just not it's not those spots that we hunted that were yeah turkey densities are not super high but those are like my best spots that i took

took this group into and you know that was that was after trying over a dozen different trailheads, hiking, I'm sure, hundreds of miles. I mean, we totaled it up, I think, somewhere over 70 miles this week is what we put on. Well, you, you did a marathon one day. I did close to a marathon one day. Yeah, that's another important thing to point out to people. Yeah, that is an important point.

Go ahead. When it's hot during the daytime. Yep. So let's say you wander eight nine miles into the wilderness yep and kill a turkey yeah guess what your ass is doing going back to the truck to drop the turkey off yeah it's not like it's not like red meat it's not like big legs of deer that are pretty durable yeah it's poultry it's not like red meat. It's not like big legs of deer that are pretty durable. Yeah. It's poultry.

It's not durable. Um, it doesn't hold up and heat. So you then got to turn around. It's not like you're going to have like a butt pole strung with turkeys after a week of hunting. Once you get one, you got all his ass back.

Yup. Like within 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Your timing was fortuitous cause you got to send your bird back with me. So yeah, there was a day. So there was another 17 miles. I think that, yeah, that day.

22. Helped me out with the numbers. You guys have a better sense. But that morning. We did eight, right? Garrett and Chester and I hunted the morning. And you figured that was around eight miles. And then we came back to our camp.

I loaded up with the two birds, eight dead batteries, because we've been filming and I wanted to get a bunch of those batteries out. Big batteries. Pound each. Yep. So filled up my pack, hiked back to the trailhead we were thinking six and then back to camp 12 plus eight and then we and then we relocated camp that night another how far back in four three or four yeah we're thinking four in that bottom yeah so whatever that is eight plus 12

plus four so 24 24 miles that day to get the birds out. And you were bummed we weren't camped deeper in. Yeah. Yeah, I told you guys to, we got to be careful about using place names,

but I told you guys, like, go to this, go to this point on the map. And the last mile to get there is, it's a rugged, it's a rugged drop down through this canyon and i've been back in there before so i was getting myself all pumped up for that final mile and you know i'm just like

all right i only got a mile to go i'm gonna beat the darkness and get back to where these guys are and then i round the bend and there's a tent sitting there in this little meadow i was like oh it's such a such a letdown man because i Because I was all pumped to get that last stretch. But then when Steve came back that evening, there was really good news. Yeah, you'd almost shot a bird that night. Yeah. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps

that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24k topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right, we're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can

be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt

team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. To give people a sense of what it's like to hunt here, like a lot of the traveling, not all of it, but a lot of the traveling is down in canyon bottoms.

Mm-hmm. And in what year is that big fire? That was 2012. Yeah. The Whitewater Baldy Complex Fire. So it obliterated a lot of the trail system. Mm-hmm. And you might be like, how does it obliterate the trail system?

When you get a big fire, a bunch of things happen. One, it's all the trees fall over. Yeah. So the trees are laying on everything. And then also a lot of rock moves, like a surprising amount of rock moves when trees die. So you lose the vegetation yep and all this kind of like glue holding the rocks together yep so rocks just start falling everywhere um and you lose a lot of soil the soil comes because everything runs off because

the vegetation is not protecting it so in the bottom of these canyons there's all this like relatively new rock all over the place and trees down and just obliterates trail systems. Yep. Still, but you're traveling in canyon bottoms. And a weird thing from a turkey hunting perspective is when you're in some of these canyon bottoms, it's like lizards and shit running around. You're just getting baked by the sun. It's all rock. Everything's burnt.

You're like, there's no way a turkey lives back in here. Yeah. But you climb out of these canyons and you have these sort of, you almost want to think of them as like these islands. And this whole network of canyons, you have these like islands of pines that were like big enough and rugged enough to withstand the fire. Yeah. And you have these little green oases, not in the little flat tops but in the tops yeah and if you go look at enough of these you'll find one where there's maybe like a gobbler yep who will gobble once in a while we had some cooperative yeah no we did but it was like you

know we did we got turkeys yeah but there's also like you could also see that to go explore it without years of your own explorations to add on to it could be like you have to you'd have to like walking and listening yeah and it's not like a going in there and blasting away at turkeys no this is a this is a form of turkey hunting for a fraction of the folks that like to go turkey hunting i think it's not for the faint of heart and you know again you drive by a lot of turkeys just to get to the trailhead where you where you'd start hiking. I mean, the surrounding Gila National Forest is fantastic turkey hunting.

You don't have to go to the wilderness. But if you decide to go to the wilderness, you have to be thinking about turkeys as a small piece of a much bigger set of experiences. when i heard that we were going turkey hunting in new mexico i knew we were going in the back country but i was not mentally prepped for what we actually did like i knew we were going in the back country but it wasn't what i expected i mean how so because of the little problem you developed? The Gila monster? Let's not worry about that. Gila monster. It's in the past, Chester. No, but the miles.

The miles. The miles. I mean, I knew they're probably, well, I guess I didn't really know what to expect for bird numbers. I think I heard somebody say they were you know you had to they were a little more sparse and you had to work for them yeah but i didn't know we were gonna uh you know start the day by climbing up an 800 foot cliff it was it was closer in my opinion it was closer to an a backcountry elk hunt than it was closer to a backcountry elk hunt than it was like a turkey hunt that I'm used to.

I'm not comparing turkeys to elk people. Don't get fired up. You're packing a lot of shit on your back, camp, food for multiple days. You're hiking a lot of miles and you're hunting out of a backpack deep in a wilderness and a lot of what you're doing is dictated by water availability yeah which is trying to find water that changed

dramatically since the last time you were in there yeah yeah you know we were talking logistics before this trip and i was you know telling you guys oh yeah great water no don't worry about water at all and we did fine but you know like our first camping spot the last time i hunted that in 2020 i was filling up my filtration bag from a waterfall and this year we were like skimming we were skimming rock snot out of our nalgene bottles from a little puddle. It was like a totally different canyon. And to Steve's point, I think you mentioned the water kind of bringing life to the landscape. The turkey sign that we saw around those limited

water sources, the place where you got your second bird, that was a beautiful little spring and meadow. And we had that really great encounter with the fan the bear family that had been splashing around near our one little you know mud puddle of drinking water that we had at our first camp so you know those little points of water on the landscape become epicenters for all manner of wildlife um including the turkeys i was surprised on how many mountain lion and bobcat tracks we saw.

Yeah, I've never seen so many lion and bobcat tracks as we did. And we've been theorizing what might have resulted in the lower turkey numbers because while we did find birds, I would say somewhere in like the two thirds of what I'm used to seeing range of birds. So pretty significant, um, decline from past hunts and could be any number of factors, but there's no shortage of predators on that landscape. Um, lots of mountain lions, uh, lots of bobcats, obviously coyotes, um, Mexican wolves are in the area. Um, no shortage of critters, I mean, black bears, no shortage of critters that would be more than happy to, to eat a turkey. And I think that might have something to do with their, you know, their willingness to vocalize as well, potentially. well potentially yeah that was my pet theory is that you're just advertising your your

you know you're advertising your location to like a host of things that would love to know where you're at yep uh one of the things that was consistent from turkeys everywhere that i found is that they're conscious of them or not they're like attitude changes so much from one day to the next yes that would be like if someday if you can imagine like uh that you die right and you get some glimpse into like all like you get a glimpse into the answers of the universe right like it's all revealed to you yeah the first thing i'd be like is what like what's with turkeys you get one question so like one question what happens in the turkey's brain from monday to tuesday i think of a turkey in particular we get to like a camp spot we go to

a known one of carl's known turkey hangouts yeah and we're just doing a listening post in the evening you know and there's a bird i wouldn't say he's hammering, but he's definitely gobbling at dark. Yeah. Okay. And if a bird gobbles, this is my ratio. If a bird gobbles once at dusk, he's going to gobble 10 times in the morning, meaning

way more apt to gobble in the pre-dawn moments than the evening. Gobbles his ass off for a nighttime gobble. Yep. Go back in the morning-dawn moments than the evening. Gobbles his ass off for a nighttime gobble. Yep. Go back in the morning and the son of bitch never gobbles once.

Yep. From the tree. Hits the ground. We're calling to it. Hits the ground. Gobbles twice and then never gobbles again the rest of the day.

As far as I can tell. Yep. We go back that night to listen for him to gobble to find out where he's going to hole up for the night yep never gobbles well once that night yep zip go back in the morning he gobbles what a hundred times we kill him he gobbles what the hell happened like he gobbles a hundred times across a little canyon, flies down, gobbles a bunch, crosses the canyon, comes up to us, and Steve kills him. Gobbling his ass off.

Yeah. What was going on today that was not going on yesterday in your little walnut noggin? You guys see a hen with him at all? No. Did we ever? Never heard a hen. No jakes either, right? No.

Jakes don't exist there. They all get killed by bobcats because they're gobbled too much. They're born longbeards. They're born longbeards and they drink dirt. I think what happened that morning is, you know, this week we had Venusus and jupiter really close to aligning and that morning it was those planet the planetary proximity that he just couldn't take it he had to hammer away on the roost when he saw those planets lining up

i would love to understand and then our last morning hunting yeah we that was a great morning man seth's bionic seth was he his purpose in life is hearing gobbles seth seth has seth has great ears he alerts us to the breath here's a gobbler and and we decided to go up and find that gobbler in the morning and we go up gobbles his ass off from the tree and i think his buddy gobbled once or twice. Yep. We start calling to him. Not really replying. Hits the ground and shuts up.

Yep. Or so we think. Later in the day, we track it down. Here he is gobbling again. And there's two gobblers. Just kind of wandering around. One of them gobbling. No hens.

No hens. Yeah. We're them and it's like it's like zero interest and you'd be like what exactly are you doing in life just broing out like what like keeping. Like, what are you doing? Keeping the predators guessing. Why are you gobbling now and then, but you have zero interest in anything? Like, what is your day's plan? When you woke up this morning, you thought what? Man, trying to get in the head of a turkey. Like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to walk around and gobble.

It could have been like. Now and then. And if I going to do? I'm going to walk around and gobble. It could have been like. Now and then. And if I hear a hen, I'm going to go the other way. They're just sick of the hens. Well, here's the theory. I mean, so the day before, the morning before, 24 hours prior to what you just laid out, you had shot a gobbler in that vicinity who made the mistake of coming to the call. And I'm certainly not,

I'm not going to give more or less credit to a turkey's brain than a turkey deserves. I just don't know. But there was something that happened the day before out of the ordinary on that ridge. A ways away, but ridge and a ways away but yeah a ways away and you know if a hen really needs some male companionship she's going to be motivated to get over there and get to those gobblers and i think the the way that we set up as turkey hunters

um you know it kind of flies in the face of that like we we are never just like aggressively calling and trying to get to that tom the way a hen would be you know when it kind of flies in the face of that. Like we, we are never just like aggressively calling and trying to get to that Tom, the way a hen would be, you know, when, when she is ready to be bred, she is just as motivated to get to that gobbler as any gobbler would be to get to a hen, right? She's going to find that Tom. And so this idea that, you know, we're always trying to pull them off, like trying to get out in front of them, pull them off the ridge, get them to come to us. If we were an actual hen needing to be fertilized, we're going to be getting our butts over there. And those two gobblers were doing plenty for a hen to meet them halfway, shall we say, or even 100% of the way. And we spend all this time trying to get into the mind of a tom, trying to think about what we can do to convince the gobbler to come to us but it's interesting to think from the standpoint of a female turkey if she has that urge if she's at that point where she needs to have her eggs fertilized i would

suppose she is very very motivated to get to that gobbling tom did you guys try a gobble that morning we sure did and no response didn't didn't get any kind of response from that yeah we were laughing that uh he wanted to try the gobble and i was like if we get shot after doing this i'm gonna be very surprised yeah man the the heel is one of those places where yeah i don't i'm not big on using like gobble calls on public ground in the midwest or places where there's high hunting pressure but yeah if some dude if some dude came strolling into the sound of my gobble call i would be absolutely shocked now that i'm hunting turkeys with my kids i made a you have to like make rules you know so you avoid all these like case by like case by case things yeah like in terms of social media

we just like made rules about our kids and social media yeah right uh and that way you're not every day being like well we you know what about this we just like made a rule and then we live by the rule um i said to myself i will never gobble with my kid next to me i think that's sensible and even yesterday i thought about i was like would i violate my no gobble with my kid next to me rule and i was like no i wouldn't violate my no gobble it's good to have a rule and stick to it i know you're a fan of the slippery slope arguments well if i get peppered with a that's me but if uh oh man if i gobbled my kid got shot dude one i'd never hear the end of it for my wife two i'd feel bad as hell yeah well we talked about you know the use of fans a little bit and how effective and also how dangerous that strategy is. And some states go in the direction of outlawing it.

And you used the verb fanning, which I wasn't familiar with, but I'd heard the term reaping. Yeah, that seems more like a heavy metal term to me. Yeah, I don't know. It more like a heavy metal term to me yeah i i don't know like it seems like a heavy metal band yeah yeah and reaping do they mean like yeah i don't know like like reaping the harvest reaping the wheat maybe there's like a grim reaper tie i don't know i don't get it what we're talking about so i just get people that don't turkey. I don't get it. What we're talking about is just people that don't turkey hunt. Good idea. There's been a sort of arms race in decoy quality.

And then at some point, some brilliant person realized that the thing that looks most like a turkey is a turkey. So some guy's like, you want to look like a turkey. Have him be a turkey. so you take a turkey's fan um and and i've done it and you've done it yep you take a turkey's fan and mount it on a handle and dry it so the fans open and when you get a couple gobblers that are out strutting around all carried away or a gobbler out strutting around all carried away you can slink along like a worm holding the fan out in front of you and then when you get in range you can just slip the shotgun barrel between feathers on the fan yeah that is if they don't just come running from 300 yards away when they see that backlit fan

they might come running at you it's like when they there's something about that iridescence of feathers that like like you know how we see whatever like we see neon colors you know there's something about the the they see it they just don't they know what they're looking at like they're looking at a turkey yeah who's who's your buddy who glues on uh down in south carolina robert abernethy buys a shitty bought a shitty foam turkey decoy and then took a hot glue gun i made one as well took a hot glue gun and glued all the feathers from a turkey back onto the turkey decoy for that iridescent i lost track but it was up in the 60s he'd showed he'd showed that he said there at one time it was in the 30s then it was in the 60s that 60 gobblers

had laid eyes on that decoy and it was 59 came within 24 inches of it yeah very effective but this this fanning thing and then i remember these one guys and they got kind of annihilated on social media but they took to they took to making little hats for themselves oh god oh dude they took to making little hats it's a great idea right if you had like a private farm with electrified fence around it i would absolutely do it like if you could somehow say like no human being could be anywhere near here yeah tie a red bandana around your face so they wear a little they wear a little hat they got a little hat a turkey fan hat and they slink through the bushes they're slink up usually crawling across ag fields that turkey hat ain't making turkey sounds yeah making turkey sounds the Making turkey sounds.

And then you can get right up on turkeys. But here's the thing, man. In some states, like in Wyoming, you can hunt spring gobblers with a rifle. Yeah. Oof. It's just a recipe for disaster. And here's a turkey fan. Slinking through the grass. Slinking through the grass.

You can see where it's going to lead. So states have I think Michigan like Michigan clarified it. I think there's two mallards down in the hotel swimming pool. If you look at my Insta story,

you'll get a closer look at them. I don't need to. I can look at the mallards in the swimming pool. That signs underscore west. So. What was I just talking about? Oh, so Michigan made it that you can still use real feather decoys, but they have to be, however they word it. I took interest in how they worded it, but I forgot.

They can't be attached to your head. Can't move them. Yeah. Okay. You can't use it moving got it has to be stationary so you can like i use a decoy i use a dave smith a dsd dave smith decoys decoy he makes that it comes with a fan a fake fan yeah or you just take your own turkey fan and screw it on there. Yeah. And so you can have the fan with you, and you can place it on a decoy, but you can't move the fan around. I have even, and I've killed turkeys this way, I have even been where I'm calling to a tom, and he won't close the distance or won't come over the hill or whatever,

and I can just see his top of his thing. You just take the fan and hold it up in the air if he's fired up enough take the fan and wave it in the air and then lower it down and oftentimes that's enough to get that thing to come yeah but it's also a good way to get shot and if you revisit the episode we did with preston pitman he's been shot twice that's so crazy from gobbling yeah shot twice from gobbling you know what i was thinking you were talking about that the hands usually will go to the gobbler the the rope dragger that you shot did the that was a limb hanger or limb hanger limb hanging rope dragger but he did the same thing like once he saw that the

uh the decoy wasn't coming his way he just kept cruising yeah i think that was a situation where the decoy didn't do me any favors but he was like yeah about this a little bit and then and then the other one on the last day when we were in deep seemed like that gobbler he was like yeah i'm here but he just kept moving too so that seems like that holds up maybe yeah look, the bird that we got, it did seem like he kind of cruised through. There's no way he missed seeing the decoy. No. He came within 15 yards of the decoy and just strutted on by like,

come on, baby, let's head on out of here. We've been making a lot of noise. Let's mosey on down this ridge. Let's go do it in the bushes. Make some love quietly quietly on down here but he didn't pause in that area he was just no he just strutted by he's like here i am let's roll yeah and you know i i had a situation with that bird where um he was he was sort of just above the crest of the hill where i could barely see his white head at that point he had the full-on white head going through the grass. And I had to sit up, and I didn't have a very good shot.

And just before that bird was going to be gone with that drive-by, the decoy, I thought to myself, I'm going to give a couple yelps, and if he picks his head up, I'm going to shoot. And if he doesn't pick his head up, he's gone. Because he was like two feet from being out of sight and i yelped a couple times and he gobbled and picked his head up and i was able to shoot him at that point just before he disappeared out of sight but and that was the only limb hanger you ever saw come out of that area that that is the only like legit limb hanger miriams that i've ever seen in my life in person i mean

i've shot a lot of birds that have you know like the triangular spurs of like a two-year-old yeah gobbler um this one had like the just dark black hooks with sharp sharp points on the tips pick your teeth with them yeah i mean that was that was a sweet gobbler and a lot of weight too. You know, I've not seen, I don't, I think that the first bird you got and the one I got were two of the heaviest Miriam's I've ever seen. I mean, those were meaty birds and oftentimes, you know, growing up hunting Easterns in the Midwest, when I first got out here and got my hands on miriam's turkeys i was like god these things are like half as big but the two that we got were were just dandies uh what's your

real quick uh what's your take on um turkey hunting with a red dot site um it's kind of like wall is a little bit like walleye fishing with 50 million electronics. Yeah, I would say. Sonar system set up. Yeah. It's not that bad. Just like it. Good comparison. Here's a couple of things I'll say about that. I'd never used one before.

Yanni was kind enough to set me up with a shotgun that he recommended I test out. And so I had a loaner shotgun for this trip and I think if I had my druthers I would have just had a bead on there um not like a not like an iron sight no just a like so so the gun I typically shoot has a vent rib with a bead on the end and then the little bead like halfway down the barrel yeah so you can line those up get tight to your shoulder get your cheek down and i i haven't had issues with missing turkeys um now that being said i've got a 20 gauge pump youth shotgun that my wife shoots and i did put a red dot on that oh because we've had a couple of very close

encounters where you know i feel like the turkey got educated she's at a you know she's at an awkward angle or just trying to line the shot up and if you have a bird that's super close and your shot pattern is very very tight you know it's much easier to miss a bird at 10 yards than it is to miss one at 25 yards and you know i think for her she's more comfortable being able to just see that dot at whatever angle her head is and not have to worry about lining up the beads yep so i think there's there's an element to it of um you know having an advantage but the other thing is just being in the being in the hinterlands with another electronic device where you know you might break something like i'm i'm i'm pretty hard on my gear hiking around the way we are and so it's always kind of weighing in the back of my

mind am i going to scratch this thing up am i going to knock it off kilter whereas with a with a shotgun barrel that's got a couple of beads on it just doesn't seem like there's a heck of a lot that could go wrong so the short answer is i see the advantage personally i think i'd prefer the lower tech option yep uh what i'd like to do i can see having one on a quick detach mount yeah i wonder about how consistently you could like reattach it and have it be. Oh, that's the whole point of quick detach mounts. So, sure.

You could have a rifle zero to 200 yards and take on and off a quick detach mount. It goes right back to zero. Yeah, I guess I would just stick by my statement. For me personally, give me a bead. I'm good with that. You did make a good shot with that, though. I appreciate it.

I mean it worked out great. No complaints. Lower tech's good by me. Let me tell you something. This isn't about red dots. Okay. If there's two things I like in life, it's about walleye boats. If there's two things I like in life, it's about walleye boats.

If there's two things I like in life, it's federally designated wilderness and turkeys. Okay. If there's three, it's my family. I was debating. He's not necessarily giving them an order. No, it's an order. Turkeys?

No. Federally designated wilderness. My children. He's not necessarily giving them an order. No, it's an order. Okay. Turkeys? No. Federally designated wilderness. My children. That's saying something, man. Really? So I'm going to focus on the top. Jeepers, man. I don't know.

I'm not agreeing with Steve, but I'll say this. Steve has had an appreciation for turkeys and federally designated wilderness longer. It predates my children. Yeah. It'sally designated wilderness longer. It predates my children. Yeah. It's like a longer romance. It predates them. Yeah. There's something to say for years under your belt with those first two.

So I'm sticking to my guns here. It predates them. They don't listen to the show. So I can get away with telling the truth here. What word did you use though? It wasn't love. What was it? Federally designated wilderness? No, no, no. If there's two things.

I love. Two things I love. So what about hunting turkeys in federally designated wilderness? That's what I want to say. Okay, I'll let you fill in the blank. We can hunt turkeys in 49 states everywhere but Alaska in the US

at the time of European contact there were turkeys there were probably turkeys in what is now 39 states so there are 10 states running around out there that have turkeys that didn't

I happen to live in one of them. California did not have turkeys. Montana did not have turkeys. Idaho did not have turkeys. Washington did not have turkeys. Hawaii did not have turkeys. Oregon, right? Oregon did not have turkeys.

Okay. But the Gila damn sure did yeah um it's big enough if you have like a romance with the wild turkey yeah uh and the wild turkey has and to some degree has a romance with us meaning that the turkeys are one of the are kind of one of the winners of civilization right they like crops okay one of the things in montana like one of the things that allows turkeys to exist in montana's agriculture right why were there not turkeys there why did turkeys not spread up from areas of, like, come up from Colorado

or come over from the eastern Dakotas into Montana? Too severe. Yeah. Too severe. Not enough food. Too severe. Why are they there now? They're there now because of agriculture.

Yeah. If you're in southeast Montana or whatever, and you're shooting at a turkey, that turkey probably, almost certainly spend its winter picking grain out of cow shit. Yep. I love those turkeys to death. Oh, yeah. More than my kids.

But, right, but, but to go, so to be able to go into a wilderness area yeah and hunt turkeys that have no reliance on no relationship to folks yeah gives you kind of a glimpse back to i mean there was you know gives you a glimpse back to a time when so much of the landscape hadn't been kind of influenced interrupted manipulated by humans it's like you're watching you're looking at native turkeys living on a native landscape and you're going like so that's kind of what they did yes it might even be like that's kind of the density in which they occur yeah where you know it's not like what's so hard about hunting turkeys my grandma's got 100 in her yard right now yeah she lives next to the cemetery you know it's like yeah but that's not one of the turkeys I'm talking about I don't love

the I like my kids more than those yeah turkeys um but to see that like like this is probably what it seemed like there's scatterings of this or scatterings of that here and there there's a turkey right it's really educational yeah and they i think you're painting a great picture and the birds at that at that point become in my mind the embodiment of the landscape it's like an integral part of what makes that landscape what it is and there is no artificiality about it there's no supplemental support you know those birds are out there existing the way they have for thousands of years they'd be there with or without people doing what they're doing strutting and gobbling and reproducing and eating and going to those little water supplies and you know i think there's places where we're calling birds

that have never heard an artificial call before you know they're hearing they're hearing a man-made turkey call for the first time um but it gives you a chance to experience the place in a very speaking of value-laden terms a very pure sort of way and i love you know i love hunting turkeys in places where there there is you know an agricultural presence and supplemental calories on the landscape um and it's worth pointing out that you know historically turkey habitat it's always been widely variable in terms of the productivity of the land so there would have been more easterns that more easterns let's say in wisconsin a higher density than there would have been miriams in new mexico just given the productivity of the landscape yeah yeah but once you start layering on the human presence um

it's it's a different kind of experience and a it's it's it's a different kind of connection to a different kind of place and again the word in my mind that keeps coming around is this idea of just a pure representation of a wild landscape and an interaction with an animal that embodies a very, very cool place. And every, you know, every bite of these turkeys that we're eating, those are calories that have come in the form of crickets and grasshoppers and gamble oak acorns. You know, it's like this litany of food resources that are sparsely distributed on the landscape, but also embodiments of that place where humans are not the predominant factor it's just the land doing what the land has always done it's good stuff man i love it good stuff i love it too man uh you know how i'm gonna say i got two final things to say about you okay when i was going to introduce you you know how we were talking about a thing yesterday where I was saying that, that I've been all around the country,

everywhere you go, everywhere you go, Alaska, Florida, New York, California, everywhere you go, you'll find two outdoorsmen,

two types of outdoorsmen. There's the one where everything's all fucked up now fishing game ruined it there's too many people now the wolves got it all whatever right there's that guy always there lost his. Everything's used to be good. Right? And then there's always the guy that when he wakes up in the morning, he can't get to it all because he's in Eden. Totally.

Right? We were talking about that and I didn't point out. One of the things I respect and admire about you is you're the latter. I've known you in a lot of places. And you're the guy that's like, you just can't get to it all. Right? And you're going to carry that with you no matter where you go. Thanks, man. That makes you a good outdoorsman, right?

The second thing I was going to say is like, having a life working for a federal agency. I, I, I hope that someday you don't get, um, I hope your enthusiasms hold out. Oh, I guarantee they, they will. Um, cause just the criticism and stuff could just drag you down, man. Well, man, to having having your work to having your work like misinterpreted do you know what i mean that shit's gonna i hope that doesn't ruin you it's not going to um and in part it's because i feel sincerely privileged and fortunate to be making a living in a line of work where

the things that we're, the things that we're thinking about and talking about and trying to work through, um, go far beyond a job or collecting a paycheck. You know, both of us, probably all of us here in this room have had a lot of jobs where you're just like i got to make some money to be able to feed myself and pay my rent but to be in a line of work where every single day there's a connection between the things that you're working on and places and animals and relationships between people and land that matter to you in a deeply personal way what percentage of the global population has the privilege to make a living in a way like that where their their personal identity and passion and value set are so closely aligned with the way that they get to earn their keep

and i give you my word i will never get to a point where i am jaded you will never hear me complain about what i'm doing or the challenges of the job because this work is supremely important. We're talking about literally the places and the resources and the questions that define our prosperity as human beings in this country, in my opinion. And it is a privilege to be in that line of work. Thank you, man.

I appreciate it. Next time someone's like, those assholes at the Forest Service, I'll be like, you mean like Carl? Carl? He's not so bad. Hey, one other thing I want to say, man, that idea of

the two different kinds of outdoors people and the folks who like to, you know, sort of see the negative and then the folks who there aren't enough hours in the day with this group of friends and colleagues, you know, like every single person in this room and, you know, the folks who are affiliated with the work that you guys all are doing, I think are wise enough to recognize that there aren't enough hours in the day. There aren't enough days in the week. There aren't enough weeks in the year to get to it all. And I don't care where you are in the United States. If you look around where you live, there is some fantastic and likely untapped outdoor opportunity for you to capitalize upon if you're creative and open-minded about it whether you're in a big city or whether you're in new mexico or wherever the heck you might be the opportunity abounds and that is not the case in many other countries around the planet today like the context of america more, we are in the land of plenty.

And if you're whining about a lack of opportunity, you are missing the boat, man. Yep. So get out there and enjoy it. Land of milk and honey. Land of milk and honey. And walleyes.

Gratitude above expectations. Gratitude, gratitude above expectations, man. Yeah. There's a lot, a lot of good stuff to do out there the land of milk and walleyes and electronics that might be what you guys need to name that boat that's gonna be the name of our movie milk and yeah when we make a movie later on about you guys matt damon's gonna play. Yep. Do you see that? Totally. Oh, Chester and Matt Damon. Who's Seth? Matt Damon's not handsome enough.

Seth would be... Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin. It's so funny. If Josh Brolin... Daniel Day-Lewis. If Josh... He retired.

If Josh Brolin was a lot younger, Josh Brolin could play Seth. He needs a haircut. So do I. I just watched a Josh Brolin movie where he had long hair like Seth American gangster I tried to get Steve to tell me that he didn't like my hair and he didn't do it so I think he likes it I like it Seth a lot of people like yeah I want a dog on a dog on a close friend no never yeah right you don't do that alright everybody thanks for joining you 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. On-ax x hunt is now in canada it is now at your fingertips you canadians the great features that you love in on x are available for your hunts this season now the hunt app is a fully functioning gps with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones aerial, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.