The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 641: 15 Years of Living Off the Land in Alaska

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Steven Rinella talks with Randy Brown, Ryan Callaghan, Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.  Topics discussed: When polite texts are potentially hunter harassment; eating deer meat shot with lead; when John McPhee offers you the river water you've been drinking for years; when you're sorta in "Coming Back To The Country"; a different Mike Potts; rendering moose fat; state vs. federal ownership lines for Alaska; when Smeagol takes all of your stuff; always looking at tracks; skin on bone and starved out; making a concerted effort to find a win over a woman; being born and raised by wolves in the Alaska wilderness; and more.   Outro song "See You Next Season" by Brandon Gardner Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sometimes when it comes to your personal fitness goals, you just need a plan. Peloton can give you the plan. Absolutely. And Steve, you've got a Peloton. I sure do. And Steve benefits from things like a variety of challenging classes. There are four week strength building classes, running, cycling, everything in between. Peloton can adapt to any goal in this season of your life.

And by the way, the holidays are around the corner. Now is when you need to be on the Peloton. Find your push, find your power with Peloton at onepeloton.ca. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you. Shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case underwearless. We're hunting the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Joined today by Randy Brown from Alaska's Fish and Game Agency. And Randy, I'm gonna embarrass you a little bit, but not bad. It's in the kind of way you wanna be embarrassed,

where you hear a bunch of good stuff about yourself. Okay. Yeah, not where you hear stuff bad about yourself. It's good stuff. You do know it's Fish and Wildlife Service. Oh. Federal Fish and Wildlife Service. Oh, because that's where my brother works. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, okay, I'm sorry about that. Sorry. That was Corinne's problem. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That helps, that's a good tee into why Randy's here. Randy, my brother Danny, who works for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has never once in his life made a recommendation

of someone that should come on the podcast. Ever. I don't wanna say he's stingy with respect, but he just like, you know, he, he, uh, you know, he, he called me and said, you know, who you need to have on this show is Randy Brown. Cause he like in the seventies moved up and lived in the bush in Alaska and lived off the land up in the Yukon and ate like a strict meat diet, raised his kids up there, had all these adventures,

later decided to become a fisheries biologist, got himself educated, was doing all this cutting edge work on these kind of mysterious fish in Alaska. He's like, that's who you should be talking to. I had to convince you to do it? Yeah, you did. So thanks for coming down, man. I had to convince you to do it? Yeah, you did. So thanks for coming down, man.

Hey, you bet. I wish we had you here for like three, two shows, because I'd want to do one show about living in the bush, living off the land in the bush, then want to do another show about fish. Yeah. But we're going to have to condense it, you know? Well, I'm amenable to it. Okay. We gotta do two quick things,

three, a couple quick things before we get there. One, man, you weren't here for it. We had this guy on about quail. People got mad about that. So, I don't know if you know about this Randy but down here there's like a huge problem with Bob White Quail just vanishing across their range I didn't know that a host of problems with Bob White Quail so we had

a guy in who had developed it's like a dewormer they have they have a high parasite loads in some areas, particularly in Texas. They have a high parasite load. So a guy comes in, we call it the episode, What Happened to the Bob-Boy Quail? A guy comes in, he's like, oh, there's all kinds of things that are happening to Bob-Boy Quail. One of them is a high parasite load. So he gets the first FDA approved drug for wildlife that is publicly available. Meaning any Joe Blow can buy this quail feed with a dewormer in it. And you can put it out and try to reduce parasite loads in your quail. And he has found anecdotally and otherwise

through research that it's helpful to quail in some areas where they have high parasite loads to deworm them. But man oh man oh man the whole world, the whole quail world is very upset that he came on because they're like it distracts from the main message of habitat. I disagree because he talked about habitat a whole bunch but anyways we're gonna have another quail, we're gonna have a better quail,, but anyways, we're gonna have another quail, we're gonna have a better quail, not a better, we're gonna have a different quail person on to explain why it's bad, among other things, like it'll be like, that episode will be called

What Really Happened to the Bob White Quail? And in it, I will press the individual to explain why it's bad to deal with, if there's a big problem with 10 parts to it, why it's bad to deal with, if there's a big problem with 10 parts to it, why it's bad to deal with one of those parts. I'm guessing that the ratio between the size of parts is gonna be. Dude, I'm doing a great job

of articulating all of the consternation. Cause yeah, a lot of consternation in the quail world. What was the world before we found was, remember we talked about there was a world, oh, the beekeeping world. Beekeepers get- Oh, very, very particular and sensitive. That was the first time we ever weighed in

on the Bobwhite quail. So we're gonna have a follow-up episode about Bob White Quail and we're gonna talk about that Bob White Quail episode. Quick question from, to put to the people in the room. This is from a fellow named Christian. So he's, let's check this out. What state's he in?

New York. Oh, okay. He's in New York. He gets a, this is a letter. He's 33 years old. Odd that he told us that. He's 33 years old and owns 30 acres. Maybe he likes it, how, how close his age is to his acreage. It says, I'm 33 years old and own 30 acres with his brother in upstate New York.

His father bought the land in the 80s. He said, here's his letter, here's his question, here's his ethical conundrum. Over the last few years, we've been dealing with a landowner who owns the property next to us who is strongly against hunting. Now keep in mind, these guys have owned this place since the 80s, okay? While we are respectful neighbors and hunt by the book, she harasses us every year. Do you have any suggestions on how

to deal with such an issue? So on the day before the opener of New York's gun season, he receives this text. He cleaned out the names because he doesn't want the person to get harassed. His name and her name, he cleaned the names out. This is in New York State. She texts him on the eve of the opener, of the deer opener. Good morning. Here we go again, much to my dismay. You are back to kill the deer. Oh sorry. You are back to kill the deer I love and for whom I provide a sanctuary that for you becomes a killing field. It is a nightmare for me." So before you tell me not to text you again, I'd like to remind you that we share a property boundary. I encourage the presence of deer, and you can take advantage of this. It is not right. And as we still live in a partially civil society, I'm asking you with all civility

to please stay off my land and not take advantage of the preponderance of deer that are here because I provide protection and a sanctuary for them." Best wishes. I'm so curious about what her sanctuary looks like. She signed off with best wishes? And started with good morning and ended with best wishes. Yeah, seems pretty civil. But he's not moving on to her property, he's on his property. He's not on her property. And it seems like she's been doing this kind of thing for a while Before you tell me not to text you again, right? Yeah. I Think Yana said the right approach we talked about it earlier What's that lay it on us? Oh?

Maybe just go pay her a visit with with the warden on your on your hip Have a chat with her. Well unless I don't know at what point it becomes hunter harassment. A text that begins good morning and ends best wishes to a neighboring property is not harassment. She didn't threaten him. No it wouldn't be in there going to like threaten to put her in jail just have the warden give her a little like education. If this is all she's doing is sending texts like this, then Christian should just reply to her and say,

hey, we're not gonna go on your property, we're gonna continue hunting, we do everything by the law, et cetera, and it's over and done. But if there's something more than what we're seeing here, because we're getting just a little snippet of this world, then I would say go and pay her a visit. For sure.

But I would think at this point, I feel at this point, it's like no one wants to get that text, but I mean, she's asking him to do something, he just would reply and say, I'm, um, I mean, I respect my property, thank you very much. I respect your private property, but I'm gonna use my property in accordance with the law, and I expect that you'll behave in accordance with the law. And sorry that we don't see eye to eye on this.

Yana's happy. And then I'd say, have you seen any biggins? It'd make you not wanna hunt that border though, cause you'd be all worried about a deer running on her property. If it runs onto her place and he's only got 30 acres. So I mean not only that's great it's more than I got but um not more than Yanni's got. That's a nice chunk for back East. Well I feel like Yanni's has some

experience here that most of us don't with the psychological burden that overbearing neighbor can put on you. That's right. So if there is more here, because it does just weighs on you, you're like, oh, yep, every shot that goes off, I'm gonna get a text. Every truck that comes up our driveway,

I'm gonna get a text. Every, you know, that does suck. Janis had that very similar situation around a raccoon so he's scarred that's why he's ready to get he's ready to get the law he's ready to throw down yeah if this lady's giving him heartburn it's like here's another listener question so that so so that my official answer I mean if it sounds like from around the room, no, Yanni wants to get a game warden and go over there. Yeah. Like a preemptive, do a preemptive strike. I like it.

Yanni proposes a preemptive strike. I propose, uh, I propose saying, uh, sorry, we don't see eye to eye. I'm going to, I can see just doing nothing also Yeah, just go on with your definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah. Yeah, Joe definitely justifiable to do nothing Yeah, that's totally fair here's another question listener question We got talking recently about preach youing deer meat to give to your kids. Like when our kids, all of our kids, when they turn, like pretty much the day they were nine months old, I would chew up deer meat and give it to them.

Just as like a thing, like a symbolic gesture. And then they would start eating meat at that point. I don't know what they say nowadays, this stuff always changes, but a decade ago, you're supposed to give them meat at nine months or they could chew up meat at nine months. Randy, does that apply when you're living out in the bush in Alaska? Well, I'll tell you what, what we did is take a moose ribs that had been boiled up so nice and soft and

I'd give it to the kids and they would chew on it just like the dogs. That one no meat. Yeah. Well, there's some some meat, not a bunch. Yeah. Do you know roughly what age? Well they were still riding in a backpack for me. I took them around with a Jerry pack, you know, and they loved it. I had two hands to work with and they had, they got to look at everything. Sit back there gnawing on ribs? Yep.

And if they dropped them, the dogs would take him. So this guy's wondering, he just shot a deer. He's a new father, so he had his first kid, shot his first deer with lead ammunition, and now he's wondering if it's okay to have his kid and his wife eat it, because he's worried about the lead, come on. Like, no. Well, first off, when you cut it, just cut around the wound mark,

cut around the wound, and then go satisfy your curiosity that when people look at lead levels, there's not any evidence that hunters that eat a lot of deer meat have elevated levels of lead. There's also a lot of things about inert lead and lead that's like in shot form, but just cut around it. I mean, Paul, if you go and buy what makes you think the stuff you're buying is so like different? I mean, okay,

I don't want to feed them that, but we're going to eat ocean, a big ocean fish. It's really weighing on them. Just make the switch to copper bullets or tungsten shop or small game, whatever. Like sure. It's bugging you that much, but I would cut around it and I mean, that's the main, the, the main thing we, you know, the main thing we, uh, I got a whole bag full of, um, all the lead shot. We pulled out of birds. Yeah. You know what I'm going to do with that? Reload it. No woman. I was at this event,

we did this book event and a woman came and she had this pendant that was like a dish, like a dish. And it was full of all kinds of shot and I was admiring it and it was all the shot from her first turkey. And they sent and her and her husband sent me a kit to make them. sent me a kit to make them. So I'm taking all the shot we've ever picked out all of our food. Cause I always put in a bag and I'm making my wife a necklace and it's got like this resin. So you take the dish and you put all the shot in the dish and it's like a pendant and then you squirt this resin in there and then hold a black light on it. And it makes like a necklace of all the shot you picked out of your food. That's cool. Does your wife know she's getting this? Oh yeah, I've told her about ten times, I haven't made it yet. I got enough for two necklaces, so I'm gonna have one for my wife, one for my daughter. There is another person who wrote in about

pre-chewed food, he says that his mom was a dentist and when he himself had a kid, his mom was like, no no no, don't do the pre-chewed food thing because or a dental hygienist, because she said cavities develop. I don't think I, I don't think the logic is sound, but cavities develop because of bacteria. So if you take food and you chew it up and then you give it to your kid, that might increase their likelihood of developing cavities because you're introducing different bacteria. All their baby teeth are going to fall out anyway. That's why I didn't put it in the notes, because I thought that was like,

it didn't make any sense. Everything is bacteria. And there's nothing on your mom's mouth that isn't getting on you. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's why I didn't include it. But I thought I'd put it up anyway. I think the pre-chewing food thing has been played out. We need to move on. Well, with that said. At least until we get another email.

Or put it on a t-shirt. So Randy, what uh, what drew you to Alaska, man? Like how'd you wind up in Alaska? Where'd you grow up and what drew you up there? So I grew up in Santa Fe, uh, New Mexico. And, uh, so that was a Southern Rockies where my stomping ground as a kid used to fish and, you know, it was more like hunting for those little, uh, little rainbows up in the headwaters. And, uh, and I just, uh, I don't know.

I just, uh, wanted to, I wanted to live out in the woods. I'd read some of these, uh, you know, books like a, the big sky and some others, baby gothries. Mm hmm. Yeah. And, uh, and I always felt like I was born in about a hundred years too late, but, um, but

so, so that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go out into the woods and, and, uh, I had a 10 speed was my transportation at the time. So I, um, when I finished high school, I had a 10-speed was my transportation at the time. So when I finished high school, I had got accepted up to university in Fairbanks and came up for one semester and quit and went and milked cows for the rest of that year and then moved out to the woods up onto the.

Who'd you milk cows for? It was, they had a few dairies up in that Palmer-Wassilla area just north of Anchorage that were partially subsidized by the state. milk cows for? It was, they had a few dairies up in that Palmer, Wausilla area just north of Anchorage that were partially subsidized by the state. Okay. They never did, they never did make it so they could compete with milk being shipped up from lower 48 because they, I think just with the cold and the inability to grow a lot of the grains, they had to ship grain up to increase milk fat and in the dairy world,

it's my understanding that milk fat content, that was what determined the price they got from it. And so they were always on the edge. But I worked at this one place, room and board, 700 bucks a month, and you were there milking, it was about 200 cows twice a day. It was pretty wild. They fed you, housed you, gave you 700 bucks. Yep. And you milked 200 cows.

Yeah. How long did that take? Well, it was about four or five hours of milking, if I remember right. You milk them in the morning and then milk them in the evening. And at this point, you're 18 years old, roughly. I was 18. And when you say you went live in the woods, how's that even begin? Like what, like what? And when you say you went live in the woods, how's that even begin? Like what? So there was a buddy of mine that came up with me. He and I used to kick around in the mountains and winter camp and everything.

So he and I had picked out off of a map that we were going to go up onto the Teutonic River downstream from Eagle. What year was this? So it was 1976. So was the Homestead Act still in play there? No. Okay. I might be jumping ahead, but I just curious.

So the deal there was a Homestead Act opening in the late 60s, I believe, and another one in 73. There've been some state land dispersals as well, but those two acts were before I ever got out there. And then the state gave away, they would have these land lotteries in various places. But it was kind of screwy I thought because you were going to have a bunch of people going out into the same place and nobody could have made a living with that many people in those places. And a lot of them didn't really survive, you know, they would go out there, build a cabin, and then realize, I got to get in here with an airplane, there's four other people with places and a lot of people

left or never proved up on it. So too many people trying to draw from the same resource? That's right. Yeah, so out on the Yukon, people were organized 10 to 20 miles apart down the Yukon up the side creeks. And so that was sufficient distance, you know, provided they could, you know, establish trap lines in different places that they could make a living off of the, off of the country there. They weren't stepping on each other's toes. So when you, when you tried to pick a spot, how, how did you know, how did you know that you wouldn't be crowded in with other guys or didn't you? We didn't and in fact

we went down to Tatondak River and there was a guy named Dick Cook who lived there and and Tatondak River, so this is right up near the border with Canada right where the Yukon comes in. There's the town of Eagle, it's got a road to it, and then Circle is downstream about 160 miles. And then there's several of these tributaries, they're a canoeable. And so Teutonic River was the farthest upstream of those tributaries. Well, actually 70 Mile River was, was that was from the South, but, but the Teutonic river flowed for about nine miles in Alaska before it plunged

into the Yukon. But you had big mountains there. The Ogilvie mountains sets a big range goes from, um, you know, Dawson area all the way over to the border between the Yukon and the Porcupine river. You know, all along that border is the, over to the border between the Yukon and the Porcupine River. All along that border is the western side of the Ogilvy. Big limestone mountains with sheep and of course we didn't know any of that, but we knew there were mountains there. But Dick let us know that he had a place five miles up to Tondick and a place down on the Yukon.

And that there wasn't enough room for us. And there wasn't. Did you just run into him or you knew he was in the area? Or how'd you make contact with him? We made contact on the river. We were lining up the Teutonic River. Oh, to go establish a place to live. Yeah. You're like, damn, there's a cabin here. Well, we didn't see the cabin. He was downstream of that, but we pulled over.

He was talking, well, he saw us on the way in, and this guy Charles was about six and a half feet tall, and I was just about six. And so when we came back down, even though we realized we weren't gonna be able to make a place there, we went up and explored around and fished and walked in the mountains and things. On our way back down though, Dick was talking with John McPhee.

That was the here John. John McPhee came out there. That's cool. I'm aware that you had a run in with McPhee while he was writing, coming into the country. Right. Right. So you pull up and he's literally talking to John McPhee.

Yeah. And John McPhee dips his cup into the river and offers it to us. And we're like, we don't need that. We've been drinking the river. What the hell did you do that for? Because he was amazed that there was a river that was clean enough that you could drink out of. That's what it was.

And so he was, I don't know, offering it to us. We would kneel down and drink water and whatever. But yeah, but as it turns out, Dick was, when John was with Dick, Dick was looking at our tracks and he's telling John, okay, well you can tell one guy's really big, because of the stride lanes and everything. So John ended up, what did he call Dick? The grand swami of trackers or something like that.

But Dick never told him that he'd seen us before. So anyway, yeah, what a deal. But, uh, so you're, you're sort of in coming into the country. Sort of not really, but sort of. And, uh, and then we headed back to Eagle because we didn't know what the heck we were going to do. And, and when we were back there, there was a fire that was taking place on the Canadian side

of the border just north of the Yukon. And the Canadians and the U.S. have these agreements. And so the BLM put the fire, they went out and worked on that fire and they hired me and Charles out there. And so we went and worked on a fire and during that period of time, I met this guy, Mike Potts. And Mike Potts had, he lived in the village, he married a gal in the village and he had a trap line.

Was that his real name? Yeah, Mike Potts. You ever hear of John Coulter? He's a mountain, he's a, they used to call it the Yellowstone Coulter's hell? Yeah. Okay. He was over by where Seth lives in 1808 and he was with a guy and they got caught by the black feet and that guy's name was Mike Potts. Oh. And they cut Mike Potts all up in little bits and smeared him all over John Coulter and then Coulter, then they made Coulter start running and that was Coulter's run. That was Mike Potts. Yeah, yeah. Different

Mike Potts. That's a different mic pops. Yeah. Sometimes when it comes to your personal fitness goals, you just need a plan. Peloton can give you the plan, absolutely. And Steve, you've got a Peloton. I sure do. And Steve benefits from things like a variety of challenging classes. There are four week strength building classes,

running, cycling, everything in between. Peloton can adapt to any goal in this season of your life. And by the way, the holidays are around the corner. Now is when you need to be on the Peloton. Find your push, find your power with Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Hey guys, earlier this year we launched Meat Eater Kids podcast and we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it, we were going to make more and you did and we did. And we're dropping a bunch new, five new meat eater kids podcast episode starting November 25th.

Again, it's a kid's show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts. There's a little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson. There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to kids focused conservation organizations. So Meat Eater Kids podcast coming back round two.

Meat Eater Kids. Find Meat Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts. Well, so Mike, Mike always, well, he, he, several times he had people come out to his trap line, south of Eagle back on the North work of the 40 mile and, uh, and help him do building projects or or haul meat and various other things and so he invited me to go out there with him that that winter and he had a dog team and a couple of cabins and wanted help with hunting and I went with him Charles got involved with with gold mining. This is six and a half foot Charles.

Yeah. Yeah. And so he went gold mining and I went trapping. And it was kind of like an apprenticeship, you know, building cabins with moss jinking, which is a wonderful way to go just with materials that you find out there in the woods and then and then taking care of meat we went it ended up getting a bear and a big moose that was really fat you know that these animals go through these cycles of fat and lean and big bull before they go into rut has enormous amount of fat on

it and so Mike showed me how to showed me how to cut that stuff off and be able to render it into oil. So rendering moose fat. Yeah. And he was using that moose fat as a frying medium or like for baking or what was he doing with the rendered moose fat? Well, yes, it was it was to for frying, but it was also just to eat with your

meat. And then there was cracklings that was left over and those were also so the deal with eating straight meat is you got to eat meat and fat. And we would use it that way. Sometimes we'd render as much as 12 gallons, I think, was the most. We weren't rendered off a single big bowl. Damn. That's kidney fat. Kidneys, kidney fat that can fill a five gallon bucket. Once you take the kidney out, jam it in there.

And then all sorts of other fat in the intestines, ribs the brisket the back. So you were using primarily internal fat not the external fat not the back fat? We used the back fat too. Did you have separate uses or was it all just one oil at the end of the day? One oil. Okay got it. And moose fat is hard so you know when you if you take it at room temperature it'll crack off in a chunk. You know, it's not like butter or anything like that. You know, it just, it breaks off in a solid chunk that you can throw in the frying pan, melt it out, fry the meat, and then when it starts cooling off you can dip it and get a big swath of the fat on the meat. So that was our main- Then you take your thumbnail and scrape it off theath of the fat on the meat.

So that was our main- Then you take your thumbnail and scrape it off the roof of your mouth. There is that. But the good thing about moose fat is if you render it clean and decant it and pour it off into a bucket, it will keep through a summer.

So you can have it without spoiling. Bare fat on the other hand, we'll go rancid if it's not kept very cold. So it's very different. You know, bare fat is, is more of a, of a liquid, almost liquid at room temperature, but it won't keep, you can't keep it for over, over a summer. I mean, you could, if you had it in a freezer, but of course we were dealing with whatever the temperature was outside.

I feel like I've had it survive just in the pantry at the house for a year plus, but. It goes rancid. Yeah, my experience was it went rancid. And then it becomes dog food, because they don't care. Sure, sure. Can you give, you're talking about some pretty specific places on the map, and I think you're doing a good job for people that know that area of Alaska. Can you

give just a little bit bigger of a geographical context? Because I think Eagle sort of as like the jumping-off point for a lot of people that want to do what you did, and just kind of where that lies and why it's there and why people that are drawn to that are drawn to Eagle. I think that's important. Well yeah so that's right at the border with Canada. I mean it's just like 10 miles downstream of the border. And back in those days anyway, that was after the Native Claims Settlement Act and before Anilka and so there was kind of a void and all that a lot of the land in Alaska at that point was just sort of managed by BLM. Didn't we do a podcast on that Native

Native claims? Yeah, aspects of the Native. People are wondering. Yeah. Can I do it real quick? Yeah, go for it. Um, and correct me where I'm wrong here. During, it was during the Carter administration, they finally, they, they finalized a lot of it, but for a long time, Alaska, a lot of the land in Alaska was in a sort of managerial limbo. That's correct. Right. And it was, they knew that, that, that, that native Alaskan tribes would, would claim some, and some things would become park, but for a long time, it was just in a, in a limbo.

And then during the Carter administration and then leading up to the trans Alaska pipeline and oil and Prudhoe Bay, they started to figure out with greater clarity. This land is, is, this land is going to be park. This land is state land, this land is native land, this land will be BLM land. Is that fairly accurate? Yeah, they discovered the... So the statehood act laid out basic acreages of land that would become part of, of, uh, the state, um, ownership versus federal ownership and, uh, and that there had to be some sort of native, uh, claim settlement, but it

wasn't figured out. They didn't have it all sorted out on where it was going to be or, or other things like that. There were some parks, you know, like the Denali was already there and the Arctic, they called it National Wildlife Range and rather than a refuge. And that, so there's things that were already sorted out for the federal system. When they found oil and they were looking for a way to get it south, the Secretary of the Interior at the time, Udall and he essentially stopped everything, put a hold on everything and so that was the incentive to get the native land claims settled.

Right? Got it. If you're going to put a pipeline through we better figure out what land it is. Yeah, like who's going to end up owning what? Right. Yeah. And so that took place and right. Yeah. And so that took place and it also laid out the D2 lands, which were the federal lands conservation areas, refuges, parks, other things like that. Not necessarily where they were or how big each plot was going to be, but that there would be these parks and refuges in various places. So in this area that we're talking about, like what Yanni asked about, where basically where the Yukon River flows out of Yukon territory into Alaska, at that time in the 70s, a lot of people were moving into that area because you could just go

live, right? Yeah, and it was, so the deal was that BLM, what I heard was BLM had gone up into the 40-mile country and gone down and burned two cabins they considered to be trespass cabins. And they got taken to court over that and the legal response was that they had to consider any cabin they thought was trespassed, they had to consider any cabin they thought was trespassed. They had to deal with it in the courts before they did anything with it. They couldn't, they had to treat it like private property and so they were just like hands off, we're not gonna deal with it.

Got it. And so there were people that went down onto the Yukon and there were people doing this in a lot of different places, but that was where I knew about at the time. But there was, it was sort of a, you just had to kinda negotiate with neighbors, with other people that were living there for a place that wasn't gonna step on somebody else's toes

or interfere with their trap line. And that's what Dick did with us. He said, you can't do it. And we're thinking Santa Fe time. I don't wanna say we'll be at least a mile away. He said, no, no, 20 miles. So when you spent that, when you did that apprenticeship with the guy,

did that lead you to find a place you could go set up in? Yeah. So there was a, he did it the year before with this guy named Little John, Little John Gaudio and, and Little John was out there on the 40 mile trapping at a different cabin. That same winter that I went out and helped Mike help mike helped him finish a cabin in the snow and then uh... uh... took care of uh... we had a moose and uh... and a bear and so i took care of those

out of his main cabin well he went back and then came back out later uh... november something with his dogs during the winter little john and i spent a lot of time together and we decided we were going to go, well we were initially going to go up the Colleen River the next year. And when we started down the Yukon though, Colleen is a big tributary of the Porcupine River.

So to get there you'd have to go down to Yukon, couple hundred miles and then up the, up the Porcupine, couple hundred miles and then up the Colleen River. How were you guys, were you guys getting in by bush plane? Or were you like traveling by boat? Or like, how were you getting into this remote stuff? How were you and little John hanging out together? Weren't you 20 miles apart?

It's doubling canoes. Yeah. And we were lining, we had no motors. Yep. And, and so, uh, and then the winter dogs, of course. Yeah. So little John had dogs. I didn't at the time, but I ended up getting a couple of puppies and, uh, and, uh, off

of litter and so, and so when we started down to Yukon though, we had two canoes. He had a canoe and I had one. And we got down, part way down, and found out that nobody was living on the Kandik River. Kandik River is a big tributary of the Yukon there, um, between Eagle and circle. So it's about 80 miles mouth is about 80 miles downstream of, of Eagle. And it also headwatered in Canada and float for over a hundred miles through. Through Alaska. And we decided there was a guy living at the mouth of the, of the Candic river and it was a guy named Fred Beach and, um, and he told you no one's upstream of me. Well, several other people did too.

They knew that there was nobody up there. And he reiterated that and said he rarely makes it past three miles up. He had two dogs. And so we decided we're going to go up there and check it out. And so we started lining up the river and feeding ourselves along the way. We had a gill net and we would shoot beavers and feed us and the dogs in that way. We'd shoot squirrels sometimes for the dogs. What was your lining up process and what type of mileage could you make going upstream like that?

So lining is a process where you have about a hundred foot long rope and one end is tied to the front of the canoe, one is to the back. Lining is more easily done if they got a little keel on the bottom. And so what you're doing is adjusting these two lines so that that canoe stays offshore and tries to stay parallel with the current. So a big gravel bar, you just walk up on the gravel and it's out in the water pulling it along. And then when you want to create a cross, you jump in it and cross and go up the other side. If you have to get by a drift pile or by a big cut bank, you might use a pole, about a 10-foot spruce pole, and just push yourself off the bottom to get past. So are you kind of walking backwards when you're lining

them? No, it's not that much. Well, if you were hauling a moose you might. Yeah, not enough drag. Not enough drag. It just goes real smooth. So by adjusting the the two lengths of that rope you're just adjusting the angle of the canoe and that's it's basically fairing in the current Yeah, you have it that it's straight out from you. You can not even downriver. Yeah, just about yeah And so there's boulder fields on the Candic River and so you could you it's if you had got a keel It's like power steering you can go around between rocks and everything so whereas if you don't have a keel it's kind of bumps against shore it doesn't go very well at all. How many miles were you making on that big river? You know sometimes ten miles more often six or eight a day. Yeah and you... So we get, so I don't know if you know this, but

when the second world war came along, the government ended up, when we got involved in it, they shut down materials that could be used for the war effort from going anywhere else, and all of the mines in Alaska with a couple of exceptions got shut down and what people back in the 30s and early 40s were doing is trapping in the winter and then working the mines in the summer and so the the fur industry went down too and and they left and so that was all the cabins that we found on the Candic were of that vintage, you know. So we were coming there 40 years after anybody had been there. And so we went up river with one canoe

and one of us would walk the spruce groves looking for cabins and the other would line and switch off here and there. And we found a few cabins, but none of which were functional. Because back then they didn't have a lot of the waterproofing tarps and various other things, and so they would develop a leak somewhere. They used tar paper on the roofs and sometimes dirt over that or moss. But if but if they ever got a leak, you know, then you'd get a rot going on and the roof would fall in or a wall would crash out or something like that. But what we did see was big piles of moose antlers.

And then in the upper river, big piles of caribou antlers too. So we thought- Piles? Well, what do you do with them? I mean, from the people that were living there? From the people that had lived there. I see. And they wouldn't, they wouldn't do anything with, they'd bring them in, but they wouldn't

do anything with them, so they'd throw them in a pile. I see. And they would last for a long time. And so, I mean porcupines chew them and squirrels and things like that, but they, they, they were still there. That was a good sign because you're thinking... And we thought, why go to the Colleen? We're gonna come up here. And that's what we but they were still there. That was a good sign because you're digging through. Why go to the Coaline? We're gonna come up here, and that's what we did. And then when you were seeing all those antlers, it would show you where people had lived

and also show you where places that might be good hunting. Exactly, and in almost every case, there was a thin area, open lead or something in the Candic River for water in the winter. They were great places. Dry spruce woods and good water. And you found a guy that had starved to death, right? I did, yeah. Me and Fred, we found him. He was nowhere near a big pile of antlers. He was not. He was nowhere near a big pile of antlers. He was not.

Well, so little John and I had gone up and we had built two cabins, were mostly built two cabins. And then we went back to Eagle and got traps and things and stoves and we came back down. And Fred came with us and a couple other folks who were interested in having line cabins, just cabins, emergency cabins, you know, if you get wet because these rivers that will overflow and sometimes you need to get past anyway and so you get wet and having a cabin in various places was beneficial. So Fred wanted one about 10 miles up the river and he's the one that kind of designed this. It wasn't a very good

cabin. It was about five feet tall on the inside and there weren't any windows. And the door was just a piece of plywood that we had found in a drift pile out on the Yukon. And it just had these leather hinges on it. So that was what that, and then a bunk. It was about six feet wide by nine feet long. Just somewhere to survive. Somewhere to get out of the cold and have a fire.

And that's where Smeagol ended up going. We called him Smeagol. Well, so the deal with him, he came down. Who's this guy? This is the dead guy. The dead guy eventually. Oh, sorry. So, eventually, he's not there yet. You knew this guy before he died. I did not, but Fred had seen him. Fred was this gregarious guy that lived at the mouth of the Candac, and a lot of different people would come in there. There was a slew that you could catch pike and things. And so everybody had it on their maps.

They would go in there and he would go over and trade things, a beaver hide for a sleeping bag or various things like this. And one year, this guy that we called Smeagol, he called himself John the Baptist, but he and a buddy of his had floated down from Canada on a raft, on a log raft, and there was a big cabin just like a mile upstream of the Candig, and they had seen that and gone to spend the night there. And his buddy, during the night, shoved the raft off and left. And so he wakes up the next morning.

He ditched him. He ditched him. Ditch Smeagol. And so, and so he, he had the clothes on his back, the sleeping bag and, and, uh, and a shotgun, a 20 gauge, you know, those Rossi's with the external, he had a 20 gauge shotgun. You just got to wonder how much background have you, have you tried to do any background? Like the ditching the partner is that bad character of which one? Yeah who was the who was the who was the sort of dick you

know? I have no idea I have no idea but but this guy wandered down and he didn't know Fred was down. John the Baptist Smeagol. John the Baptist. Yeah, wandered down to, and this is like early September, he wandered down to the mouth of the Candac and saw that there was somebody in this cabin across the slough. And Fred came over and got him. And Fred was always like, you know, happy with the system, you know, always wanted to show it to somebody. A canoe back on a lake where they go to hunt ducks and muskrats, you know, and various other, you know, a cache here or there, you know, and, and, um, just so unclear, like he had a sweet setup and he'd share it. He'd want to share it. Yeah. Yeah. Like I catch pike here. I do this

there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, and he was not very ambitious, so he only, he might get a links or two, he was not very ambitious, so he only, he might get a Lynx or two, you know, in, in Trappin or in 8 or 10 Martin and you know, that would be enough for him. He, he just didn't, uh, wasn't very ambitious. And so anyway- I'm not a very ambitious guy out there, though. It's gotta be fairly ambitious. Maybe. He didn't build the cabin. They called it Morris's it was from back uh... uh... yeah but but anyway he he uh... he decided that he was going to go back east that fall any told he told this guy uh... that uh... he had to catch a ride or build a raft and go to circle

they couldn't stay there but the guy stayed and fred got a ride there was a there was a uh... a barge called the Brainstorm that ran out of Circle and it would go up to Eagle and Dawson. I got interrupted just because I got lost from it. So Fred's living there. Yeah. Okay, let's just stick with just calling him Smeagol. Fred's living there, Smeagol comes down. Smeagol's been abandoned by his buddy. Now, who says they're going back? They gotta go east? Fred had his plan to go back east.

So he had a bunch of food stored. Oh, but he says, you can't stay here at my house. You can't stay at my house. You have to find a ride to Circle or take a ride. I'm gonna be gone. I'm gonna be out of town. And when I'm out of town, I don't want you here eating my food.

That's right. Got it. Sorry about that. out of town and when I'm out of town I don't want you here eating my food. That's right. Got it. And Fred got to town by hailing this barge. The barge would pick people up. I mean it was a big enough barge it could haul like a dump truck you know on its deck and building materials and things and it would go down and go to Fort Yukon and then up to Okro on the Porcupine in Canada. But that was that barge's route, right? And the road that would, you know, where supplies were loaded was circle. And so anyway, Fred got a ride up and went back east hitchhiked back east and spent till it was early November when he got back to Eagle and put his it wasn't frozen yet there were there were ice flowing you know but he he went

downstream in his canoe in amongst all these ice chunks in November yeah in November not ambitious well he knew how to do stuff you not ambitious, let me tell you what I'm picture. Sometimes when it comes to your personal fitness goals, you just need a plan. Peloton can give you the plan. Absolutely. And Steve, you've got a Peloton. I sure do. And Steve benefits from things like a variety of challenging classes.

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and Fred was, he was pissed, and then he left a note on the door, and Fred was, he was pissed, and then he left a note on the door, I'm up at Three Mile Cabin, John the Baptist, you know, and so, and so Fred goes up there and this guy, this guy has been eating his jarred fish, he's been eating the moose that he had and has sewn clothes out of furs that Fred had. He's loaded all of our ammunition.

We had, Fred had this metal box bolted to a tree that would kind of like an under bed box on a truck. And it was back in the woods behind his place. But of course he'd shown this guy that. And that was where all of us, me and Fred and little John had reloading materials there. And so he had loaded everything. We all shot 243s and so he had loaded it all. But with different, you know, you shake it and it's none of it was consistent.

We're like, this is not good. And we had to get a bullet puller then eventually. Oh, and undo it all. Undo them. Yeah. We weren't going to shoot them. We had no idea. But what do you think? Right. You're like, this one's good for grouse.

So one's might, might take down a moose. Maybe. Yeah. So, so, uh, so anyway, um, I had left my snowshoe. I had store bought snowshoes, but I left them down there because I wanted to build a pair. And I knew that if I had a store-bought pair, I wouldn't. Yep. Right? And so I had left a pair down there and built a new set.

And, but anyway, Fred is pissed off at this guy. Fred used to grow pot on the roof of that cabin. He would throw dog shit up there and then he would throw seeds. It wasn't any good. It's psychedelic weed, that's like mushrooms. Yeah, it wasn't any good. It wasn't good weed? What?

It wasn't good weed? No. Not like not for the area? Good weed or not good weed in general? Baggers can't be choosers kind of weed. It was. It would give you a headache more than it would give you a high. But anyway, this guy had smoked all his pot too. He was living high on the hog while you guys were gone.

And Fred got pissed about that and he said it wasn't any good. I mean the goal of sticking around. Anyway, Fred says, you gotta go. Circle or eagle after it freezes up, you gotta go, because I'm gonna kill you otherwise, right? And so, this guy says, I'm not going either. I'm going to Chalkicik. So Chalkicik is on the Black River flowing down into the Porcupine, and it's a long ways north from the Kandik River. But that's what this guy says.

And so- Further into the bush. Further. Yeah. And so, and so Fred outfits him with some grain and some rice and some beans. Some stems. And gave him a 22 pistol.

Holy cat. And this guy takes off with my snowshoes, right? And cruises up the Candig River, because he's going to go up the Candig and over into the Black River drainage. And so, I came down late, he left late November, and I had, so I... Freaking dark too. I was, yeah, I was staying in this cabin above Johnson Gorge, so about 30 miles up the river, and so I would line a canoe up there and spend the winter, but there was a pass you could go over some mountains and down to the Yukon, and I preferred to do that and run the river because the river would would overflow and then your trail would be gone and things So you could you know get to a place that it was all water

So I I came down flow meaning that you get water flowing on top of the ice. That's right Yeah, so so once a river freezes over you get snow on it. Sometimes the The flow is is enough that it It doesn't have enough room underneath the ice as it starts thickening up, weight on it and things. And it'll seep up into the snow over the ice and then it's slushed for a while until it reaches the surface and refreezes. But anyway, so I had come down over this pass and come down to get my snowshoes because the ones I built I broke and I had to splice them or anyway I had I had I got down there in early December

like 10 days after Smeagol had left Fred and Fred says well he took your he took your your snowshoes and I said let's go and and get him. And so we started walking up the river, but that was a really big snow year. And it was, we went about five miles up and I decided, yeah, heck, he can go wherever he wants. But I'm like, he's not gonna make it to Chalkicic, no way. And it actually became a topic among all of us living on the river. And it actually became a topic among all of us living on the river.

And, uh, well, we all, we all knew from being out there that you can't make a living with a 22 pistol in the winter. You might shoot a grouse or a squirrel or something like that here or there, but you can't feed yourself that way. And he didn't have enough food to start with. Something tells me his buddy had a reason to Abandon him after hearing this story. I think maybe so. Yeah, we've honed in on who's the dick Yeah, I think maybe so so just to pause here for a second. Yeah again

It became a topic amongst everybody on the river What I imagine this is mostly in your heads with little bits of being together Because keep in mind right now. We're in the days of instant gratification. Point being right there, cell phones, text messages. Right. Hey, sorry about that. No, that's over here. Oh, it is.

Well, I should put mine on airplane too. So, um, yeah, Phil will tell you not to have that thing on the table either. Okay. Yeah. Sorry to get interference sometimes. Throw it on your coat over there. I'm going to turn it off. Yeah. Yeah, you're doing great. Large preamble just to ask, how often are you all getting together to have conversations in person? Hey, we had good dog teams. We cruised around.

And we did talk. And we did have big gatherings of their Christmas, New Years, and various other things. No, we talked a lot. There'd be people traveling just to say hi or to share some meat or whatever. But there was

discussion. Everybody uniformly said there's no way he can make it to Chalukytsky. But there were those that said he probably waved somebody down, an airplane. But we didn't have hardly any airplanes ever go by us there. And some people thought, well, maybe he went up a little bit and then walked around Fred's place and got onto the river and walked a circle or whatever, you know, and it's like, no, we pay attention to tracks. You know, living out in the woods in the snow country,

you're always looking at tracks. There's nothing that gets by you with tracks. And so we were like, nah, he's gotta be dead, you know? And so the next spring, so the Candig River is great And so the next spring, so the Candig River is great in the fall, has lots of moose and other bears and things like that, but in the springtime, the Yukon's the place to be because there's the flyway. You get all the waterfowl coming into Alaska is going by there. And then there's these big south-facing bluffs on the mountains that butt up against the

Yukon. And they call them step community, you know, because they're just at that angle. They'll drain all their snow really early in March sometimes, and you get all this new growth coming out, even though everywhere else, you know, there's still three feet of snow laying around. new growth coming out even though everywhere else you know there's still three feet of snow laying around and and the bears would come out early there so it was the Yukon was the place to be in the spring feeding yourself and so that left me with my canoe up at my upper place at 30 miles up and so I would have to walk the ridge and down and then canoe down to get my canoe back in the spring so that's what me and Fred did we went up and walked down to get my canoe back in the spring. So that's what me and Fred did. We went up and walked in and get my canoe

and we're coming down and when we come to where this cabin is back in the woods, we come around this corner, I see my snowshoes hanging in a tree right there. We're a couple hundred yards up the river, you know, we came around and I say Fred, Smeagol's around and I say Fred smegles here And he's not alive and and we get up there and you knew he wasn't alive Well, he couldn't have been alive. We didn't have any food there and the snowshoes were still there and the snowshoes were there He didn't walk away. And so we get up there. We got five dogs. Okay, I had three and Fred had two at that time All the canoe with you. No, they're running the ball. I see. Okay, they're just keeping up. Okay, I had three and Fred had two at that time. All in the canoe with you? No, they're running the page. Oh, I see. Okay. They're just keeping up. Yeah. And so we get there and walk up

to the cabin and the dogs are all running around, you know, and they are just really, they focus on dead things, right? They really like, you know, if you shoot a bear out of a tree or get a moose, you know, they want to be there. It's just like that's the thing of interest. So I opened the door and, because I knock on it just in case, but, and there's this sleeping bag on the bunk. The bunk had been nine feet long and three feet wide and it was just these little black spruce back and forth big ends back and forth and then you know on on two poles that were notched into the walls and so and so all of those poles except about three feet of them had been burned hip and he had a saw in the in the house and so i picked him up and he was light and i brought him outside

he was in his bag yeah he's in his bag. And so we took him out. In Fred's bag. Fred's bag. And it was, he was so skinny. His eyes were sunken into his face. And we took his clothes off because we just wanted to see what had happened there and he was seriously skin on bone there was no meat he had starved out and and at the 22 was hanging on a nail in the back wall and so he definitely didn't kill himself yeah and and the dogs they were like 20 feet away looking the other way. They wanted nothing to do with this. You can see their ears are turned back to us,

so to say we're paying attention, but they didn't want to be anywhere as near. It was almost like, you know, one of the, what we were thinking was one of the gods has fallen, you know, and, cause I don't know what they think of us, but I think that may be. Oh, that's what the dogs think. Yeah. Oh, that's what the dogs think. Yeah.

Oh, that's interesting. They didn't want nothing to do with it. They didn't want to be near it. They didn't want to smell it close, nothing. And so we, we debated. How long at that point, how long you think he'd been dead? I really don't know.

Was he froze? He had been froze, but he was thawed then. Thawed out again. And hair was starting to slip on his forehead, but he didn't smell rotten. And, uh, and so, and so we were thinking, what do we do with this guy? You know, we don't have a shovel, the ground's

still frozen. We can't bury him. Do we try to take him somewhere? Do we take him to circle? That would be at least a three or four day process to get down there. The Yukon was packed with ice on both sides at that point in time, you know, break up it,

put a bunch of ice on the banks. Neither of us had a penny. And we were making our living day by day going down the river. And if we went down to Circle, we didn't know anywhere where there would be, where to go for food, whether we could get him down there without him. We thought we could put ice in, have him in the bottom of the boat with ice, but that would put us out, because we would get down there and we'd have nothing, no way to make a living. And so we just decided we're going to leave him here. And we put him back on some tundra a little ways away.

And we took off. And then he was, I went back there later in the summer and he was gone. So something had- Did you guys eventually get word out to like some authority? We told people, but there wasn't anything anybody could do. We didn't know who he was. As far as you know, has he ever been identified? I have no idea.

Probably a lot of people, that happened to a lot of people up there. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think he was out there because he wanted to stay in touch with his family, right? So yeah, we should probably skip forward to what a fella does when he gets lonely and he figures he's gonna need a companion out living this life. Yeah, we could go on this forever. Yeah, because otherwise go on this forever. Yeah, because otherwise we aren't gonna be here all day. Which is fine with me.

I'll just cancel a couple upcoming calls. Yeah. No, I mean, that's amazing. I mean, if you guys thought about it that much, I think it's longer than I would have thought about it. It would have been like, well, hopefully that 22 isn't rusted Use the sleeping bag Fred took the sleeping bag no

Yeah, and you got your snowshoes. I got my snowshoes Yeah, I was just thinking too like if he was that emaciated had you guys found him alive Probably wouldn't be anything you could have done for him. Oh, I think that would be hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where did you wind up? Um, you eventually found your territory. So did your whole time in the bush wind up being in this river system that you're talking about now? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And eventually got to where, like Yanni was saying, eventually got to where you wanted a companion. That's absolutely true.

And the dogs weren't cutting it. Dogs weren't cutting it. Well, they were great, but it wasn't the same. Yeah. Yeah. And I wasn't running into single women out there. How many years have you been doing it before you decided to head into the Fairbanks?

I think I think three. Okay, so you're still young. Yeah. Were there some couples out there or was it mostly single men doing this thing? No, there were couples out there. There were yeah Yeah, most most of the other people out there were couples. Oh, I see. Yeah. They would they come around. So you were third wheel. Well, not really. I wasn't there. I was a one wheel. When you say most of the people out there, like how many people are we talking about? There were about 20 people or so that lived between Eagle and Circle. Okay. Yeah. And how many miles is that? It varied, 160 miles. Okay.

Yeah. And how often would you see, like how long would you go without seeing people? Well, so when I was up the Kandik, it would be months. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. My father, he came out to visit the first year that I was out there,

that I spent on the Candac River. So I'd been out on the North Fork at 40 Mile. And it was funny because he was working for Park Service. He was a historian down in Southwest region out of Santa Fe for a while. And then he got offered a job in Alaska to deal with the D2 lands, which became the park lands. He was park service, so that's what he dealt with. And he was up in Eagle dealing with stuff relating to the Yukon, what became the Yukon Charlie Preserve. And he got buried in effigy there by somebody,

because Eagle did not like it, that his federal lands were coming around. Preserve. And he got buried in effigy there by somebody because the eagle did not like it that his federal lands were coming around. But you know they were kind of laid out in statehood and they were laid out in the native place. That's crazy that your dad ended up like right near you. So I didn't I had no idea he was there but when little John and I had gone up and gotten the traps and everything we were we were at our canoes ready to shove off and my had gone up and gotten the traps and everything. We were at our canoes ready to shove off and my dad pulls up. And he says, he says, Randy, where are you at now? And I said, well, at the Indian Grave Creek. That's one of the tributaries of the Kandik. And

that was 60 miles up the Kandik and that was the cabin I was going to be staying in. And he says, he says, I'm'm gonna come and visit you for Christmas. And when I say fine, you know, and we took off and he took off and come that time of year. And so I didn't have a calendar or a watch or anything, you know, out there. So I don't really know when that was gonna be. But little John had been at the lower cabin

near the pass to the Yukon, and he had made a trip over there and found out they were doing a big Christmas shindig at this one place on a lake beside the Yukon. So he came up to get me, and I said, I can't go. What if my dad comes? He says, he's not going to come. How's he going to get up here? And I said, it would be horrible if he came and I wasn't go. What if my dad comes?" He says, he's not gonna come. That's, you know, how's he gonna get up here? You know? And I said, it would be horrible if he came and I wasn't here. So I stayed. I was getting caribou. And I was the only one getting caribou out there at the time. And so little John leaves and goes over to this party. And I'm hauling caribou in from a place

that I'd gotten a few and at the time, the limit was no more than 10 a day. No more than. No more than 10 a day. And so anyway, I'm hauling this caribou back with the dogs and I hear this airplane come in and circle around and land. And it was Ron Warblo who ran,

they had an air service out at Toke, and he was in a 185 on skis, and Ron was not gonna leave and be at my place unless it was warm and fresh tracks, you know, and which there was. So I come back, I hear that plane leave, and I come back and my dad is there. And he has a number 10 can of cookies and a thing of cough drops and he didn't bring any other food. He thought I had a bunch of food. I've got just

moose fat, moose meat, and caribou meat, and that's it. And I had no coffee, no tea, no nothing, right? And he's going to try to quit smoking. So he's got... Did you have salt? I had salt. And so he has Copenhagen, because he'd been a smoker pretty much all his life that I had known him. And so he has Copenhagen there to try to ease things up. Well, he had a few different things he was dealing with. One, you know, the eating just meat. And all I would do is fry it in a pan and then eat right out of the pan.

And then go dip buckets of water. So I had water and meat and fat, that's what I was eating. And then for light, I had a moose fat candle, you know, an old, like a tuna fish can with a bent piece in it and a bit of old Levi as the wick. And you'd have to set it on the stove. You'd have to set it on the stove to melt it and then you could light it and it would keep going mostly and give off just a candle light. So that was my light. And so he ended up asking me to carve him a pipe at one point and because he's gonna start

smoking his Copenhagen because it wasn't it wasn't doing enough for him but man when people do that move when they do the when they do like the they're gonna quit something yeah and they're gonna be like well I'm gonna take advantage of this remote or out of the country thing. Yeah. They never, they never factor in the people that are around them. Yeah. I know. And then they go and like, well I decided I'm gonna quit drinking. Yeah. You know, I'm gonna quit smoking while you and me are away for a while. I just talked to an outfitter who, they had to fly a guy out. Really?

Yeah, DTs. Cause he's like, this is the perfect opportunity for me to stop drinking. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I bet those cookies your dad brought were good. Oh, we finished them immediately.

We just dug into them and ate them up. I had, you know, I was adapted to the meat at that point in time to just meat, but I still enjoyed some other things. And so, yeah, I gobbled them down. Did you ever lose your salt tolerance? Like, did you ever lose, did you ever get to the point where you didn't even want salt on the meat? No, never. You always wanted it salted.

Yeah, I liked it salted. Have you ever read Stephenson's My Life with the Eskimo? Absolutely. Yeah, when they would go into these, in with these groups, in with these Eskimo hunter, they would find that to keep your supplies from getting diminished, they would salt everything because they hated salt. Oh, that was a protective measure against getting it me. Yeah so you'd have your stash of food right? Yeah. They would just salt it. Yeah. And then no one would touch it because they salted it. Because they didn't do they didn't do dietary salt. Eskimo didn't. No. He says if you salted meat they don't want nothing to do with it.

Don't you think they were getting salt from seal fat and stuff like that? They weren't using it as a seasoning. You know if you eat a fish out of the ocean, he's not salty. No, but just your body chemistry, don't you need a certain amount of iodine? Oh, yeah. He mentions it multiple times that they don't want salt,

and then he eventually arrives, Stephenson arrives at a point because he has to go without for months and months. They run out of salt. He goes months without salt eventually and then gets where it ruins it for him. He doesn't want any kind of salt on his food and he talks about it being like a, it's a learned, that eating all that salt is learned, it's a learned taste and you get, if you go without it for a couple years or whatever, you don't, you can't eat salty meat anymore.

No. So what he says, he was wrong about a few things. So he did mention that, uh, that, uh, they considered polar bear liver to be, um, toxic, which you couldn't eat it without toxic amounts of vitamin A. Yeah. That's a widely held belief. Is that not true? Yeah, I think it is true.

So, but it's also true for grizzlies. So me and little John, at one point after eating dried, uh, moose meat for a week, um, we ended up getting a grizzly and, and cut him up and we're a frying heart, liver and kidney in a full pan load. And we both got Headaches that just pounded us for a couple of days. Hmm. We couldn't get up and I think it was vitamin A poisoning No kid. Yeah, and so I think that it's not just polar bear, but it's the predator livers Did you get that grizz with the 243 or a trap? Yeah it? Absolutely. Yeah, 243, yeah. That was your gun, huh?

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes when it comes to your personal fitness goals, you just need a plan. Peloton can give you the plan, absolutely. And Steve, you've got a Peloton. I sure do. And Steve benefits from things like a variety of challenging classes.

There are four week strength building classes, running, cycling, everything in between. Peloton can adapt to any goal in this season of your life. And by the way, the holidays are around the corner. Now is when you need to be on the Peloton. Find your push, find your power with Peloton at onepeloton.ca. Talk about, I'm not trying to move you along, I'm just curious. How old were you when you decided that I'm gonna make a go of it And I need a wife and kids

well, so I Must have been I must have been 20 or 21 when I decided I was gonna make a concerted effort to to find a woman so I so I built a raft and I floated down to Circle and I hitchhiked into Fairbanks. And I had been at the university for one semester, so I knew there was these personal things. So I left a personal note on there. I don't know exactly what it says right now, but it was something about a trapper.

Haunt, you went, you made a raft, go to circle, hitchhike to Fairbanks and then make a, like a, like a little flyer for yourself. Yeah. With the little tear off. A little advertisement. No, there were no tear off. Yeah. No, that was my first attempt.

Oh, you know, you know, it's the cutest thing in the world is, uh, uh, Paul's daughter, Paul and Jen's daughter, Brooke, at the meteor store downtown. She's got a tear-off tab for school cleaning. That was bummed, dear dad. I saw only one thing was tore off, so I don't know if it was there that long. I was going to tear a couple more off just to make it look a little hotter. Well, maybe that's representative of folks not killing stuff walking into the meteor store.

Well, it could be that, or it could be that social media is her preferred mode too. Yeah. Anyways, go ahead. So you make an ad. What did you say? So not only that, but I had a dog with me and a rifle. So I had the double strap rifle, right? And just because then it's like a little backpack.

I got you. And that's how I carry my rifle to this day. And, um, um, and then the dog had a dog pack. And so what we did is we would walk down the road and I would shoot, it was big rabbit year then, and I would shoot rabbits on the road and, uh, uh, for our food as well as hitchhiking. Finally got a ride all the way to Fairbanks and then ended up getting a ride on the other route

going to, to Eagle and then built another raft and came down downriver from Eagle. In fact, I ended up stopping at Dick Cook's place and in the spring that year and he wanted to go hunting sheep. And so we took off into the mountains there and he gave me a 257 Roberts that he had and with with different he had different bullets loaded up for different purposes right there was you know for a moose load or to a goose load or to you know all these different things. So he's got like five shells and and we go up after sheep and And I get a shot at this

This big ram and it and it it was a poof and there's this bit of sleeping bag Fiber that comes out of it. So it's a download right but it hits him in both elbows boom and he's down. And... What's a download? Like a birdshot load type of deal? He was using the the ticking for wadding? Is that right? That's right. So you're not putting near as much powder in. And so it's a slower... it's a bullet that's not gonna... I mean we did that for squirrels and grouse too. We used full metal jacket in 243.

And you just stuff the, you fill the excess space down. Yeah, because if it's laying there and the powder is just spread across the bottom, it can, they say it can back pressure. But Dick had not kept, this is a smegle with all his things, that's what we would have run into if we just started using those.

But he had assured me, Dick had assured me that these were all big loads, which they weren't. So this ram gets up on his back legs, I don't know how he got up, and ran on two legs over the edge, and Dick ended up dispatching him down the hill a little bit. But that was a crazy situation there. But then I got in my raft again after we had come down off of the mountains.

Dick? How long was this sheep hunt? One day. I gotta tell you this is the most interested I've been in a get in the lady story in a long time. And meanwhile you set your trap, you got baited the trap with this note. Yeah, I never got any, it was my mailing address was P.O. by General Delivery Eagle, right, and I never got anything, so that was a failed attempt. What did the note say though? Um, Trapper living up on the Yukon is, uh, seeking a woman. I think something like that. Nothing about any kind of criteria. Young and handsome Trapper. Yeah.

He said, yeah, 21 years old. You didn't put anything about like, you didn't put down any parameters that you were hoping to like achieve here. I did not. No. Did you put your age down? I don't think I did. I think, see it was a failed attempt, okay?

It was my first attempt, but it was a failed attempt. Let's hear about the successful one. So I went in again the next summer. And so, but there's a problem, you know, to get to have a, to develop a relationship, you know, I was going to have to move into Fairbanks and get a job and everything, and then, and I just couldn't do that. You know, you were going to miss, you know, the king salmon season, you were going to

miss the moose season, you're going to, you know, it doesn't work. So, I went in and happened to be there during the solstice fair. They have a big party on solstice every year. And Karen, my wife of 43 years right now, was sitting taking care of somebody else's dog in front of a live music band. And so I sauntered over there and we struck up a conversation. Well, she was taking classes up at the university to go out and teach. And, um, and I asked her if she wanted to come and join me.

And she said, when you go. And I said, tomorrow, was she kind of a hippie? Yeah. Birkenstocks. Yeah. Everybody called us. No, I'm trying to river the whole thing. Watching a dog at a music,stocks. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody called us hippies on the river. The whole thing, watching a dog,

add a music thing. Yeah. But back then hippies were kind of hard. Like they'd go live in the woods, different than. And they'd shoot stuff. Oh, there's still plenty of them in Alaska. I call it, it's the hippie redneck of Alaska.

Like they're rough and tough, but kind of hippies at the same time. Yeah, I suppose. I didn't, I didn't, but kind of hippies at the same time. Yeah, I suppose. I didn't, I didn't, uh, if they were hippies, I don't see anything wrong with them. Yeah. They, they, they were great people that lived out there and high functioning, doing a lot of different stuff. Sure, man.

I mean, taking care of dogs and putting up food for the winter and dealing with salmon and building cabins and traveling all over. Yeah, it was a high functioning group. When you met her, how abruptly did you lay out what the proposal was? Oh, within a couple hours. And- Yeah, he said he's got one day to make a decision, right? Well, are you leaving? And she says, I'm not going to go, but give me what,

where do I write you? So she would write me and then, and then the postmaster in Eagle would, would give these letters to people to go down river. And so I would get a letter from somebody when I was down on the Yukon. And of course I had to borrow stationary, you know right back but But we exchanged I don't know three or four letters. Uh-huh during the course of that summer and fall and

Then I was up the Candik River and didn't get any more mail until until I went down to the Yukon one time and and she had she had put in her note that she was traveling down to San Francisco where she had gone to college and so I came down and met her at the airport in Anchorage. So, get this, I've got a beaver coat and moose hide pants, muck lucks with beaver tops to them, beaver mittens and hat, and I get on an Alaska Airlines jet out of Fairbanks, and they take me just like that down to Anchorage, right? And my dad meets me down there, and he's like,

Jesus Christ, Randy, you can't dress like this in the city. So he takes me out and gets me new clothes and boots and stuff like that. And so I met her though at her airplane, and I had a ticket to go with her. So I went down to San Francisco with her and spent a couple weeks. And then she was teaching in Akiak,

which is down in Lower Cusquim, a village down there. And- I don't wanna diverge from your love story, but when you got to San Francisco, was it like, holy shit, culture shock kind of thing? Oh yes. Yeah. I mean, I'd grown up in Santa Fe, you know, so I mean, it isn't like San Francisco, but.

Yep. No, it was, yeah. It was culture shock. Yep. She took me to New York one time, because she grew up back on the East Coast, and I'm like, oh, that's Martin, or that's, you know, Musgrat, there's Martin. Oh, that's, you know, Musgrat.

There's, you know, Foxburg, you know, all these different fur coats that people were wearing. And, and I also said, don't let go of me because I don't think I could make it out of here. And so anyway, we've had a lot of great adventures, but, but I did go down there with her and we got married the next year out on the river. That's awesome. So you've been together how long?

43 years. And when you got married, did she move up on the river with you? She did. And I took her to one of our cabins that was about a 9 by 10 cabin and showed it to her thinking, there it is, this is the place. And she's going, I don't really think this is a good place for me, but we'd already been married, okay. And so I says, or we can go up river a mile or so

and there's this old cabin that was there and we could build a new one and that's what we did and we built the biggest cabin that was out there on the river. How big was it? It was 18 feet square inside and two story. Oh well it wasn't full two story it was a two-thirds loft. Yeah. Mansion. It was a big one. Were you peeling those logs or just leaving them and letting the bark fall off eventually? I left them. They were dry trees though. Oh. Like fire-killed trees or?

No, they weren't fire-killed. It was a big grove, a spruce tree that was growing along the Candic River and there was a green swath that was maybe 50 yards in width and then there was a dead one and I think the permafrost just came in underneath them and killed them. But they were big trees, big dry trees, all of them. So firewood was not a problem ever. At that point were you building with a chainsaw or all hand tools? A bow saw and an axe. And a two inch auger for pegs. No, I didn't have a chainsaw for a long time. Were you moving them on the snow or how are you transporting big logs like that? An 18 foot

what's the diameter? They were 20 feet long and the big ones were probably 12 inches at the butt and you know nine or ten at the small end. They're real uniform. I just would grab them and haul them in. Yeah, there you go. You know how like normally if you're married it'd be you know like you might get in a big old fight about I don't know like, we should stay home this Christmas or no, we should go to so-and-so's this Christmas. And that might be like a thing. Yeah. As you were married living out in the bush like that, was there like a major version of that? A major version where it was like, we should live like this, living off the land out in

the bush or we should go live in the town. I mean, is that like a constant source of tension? No, it really wasn't. I think the biggest tension initially was when we were leaving Eagle with our supplies in our double-end canoe, getting ready to go up the canic for the winter, Karen came up with this industrial size box of toilet paper. And I'm like, we can't fit that, Karen. We can't fit it. She goes, it goes, or I stay.

And so- Laid it right out. She laid it right out. I says, there's moss, Karen. And she goes, not gonna use it. This toilet paper goes or I'm not going. And so the toilet paper came. That was, that was, I mean, it didn't last for very long.

Cause, uh, cause you started using it all. No, no, no, I didn't. I didn't use it. She did. But, um, but, uh, but she, she, she made her position known. So, so we went out into the woods and built that place and stayed there a couple she made her position known. So we went out into the woods and built that place and stayed there a couple years

and then she wanted to go and teach again. So we went together out to, in that case, it was Chivak out on the Yukon Delta. And that one didn't pan out very well because they had financial problems. That was a BIA school and they hadn't accounted for all of the funds from the year before. So BIA was withholding funds.

So none of the teachers got paid for like four or five months. And we had, she had student loans, various other things and couldn't go that far. So she quit and got a job in Nondalton. So I'm dealing with moving dogs, sleds, you know, all this other stuff. And Nondalton was a wonderful place. That's over near Lake Clark, um, Southwest of Anchorage, um, beautiful place. And we were there for a couple of years. And then did you set up a trap there too then? No, I hunted but I didn't trap. I hunted and I fished. I put gill nets under the ice down there and would catch 20 or 30 of these great big humpback whitefish and some lake trout

virtually every night and in Nondalton once the lake froze up. And so the town, the folks in the town there, would come down with these sleds, because they knew I was using it for dog food. So they would trade dried sockeyes for fresh whitefish. And we did that all winter for two years. It was wonderful. And you were making no cash money at that point?

None. You personally? Yeah, none. I did build my first birch bark canoe there though, in Nondalton. Just for fun? In the teacher's housing. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah.

To learn to do it. I wanted to learn to do it. Yeah. And so these three, these three old guys, there would, when they heard I was, I was starting to build this, they knocked on my door and I opened it, they walk in, took seats, and they would sit there pretty much every day. It just watched. Every once in a while they'd say something about how they used to do it, but, but nobody had been making, making birch bark canoes up there in the old way since about the, sometime

in the 1920s, they stopped building them. They had got canvas then and they started doing canvas boats that were a bit easier to build. But anyway, it was great and they gave me suggestions, like to mix caribou hair cut up small into the pitch for doing the sealant on the birch bark canoes. Makes it more like a fiberglass or something. Yeah, yeah. And like straw in adobes and things like that. Yeah. Holds it together. Did you continue to use that skill in your lifetime?

I built, um, I think 11 or 12 birch bark canoes. You're shitting me. Really? Yeah. Athabascan style once. I like, uh, I built two Eastern style. Um, but the Athabascan style is a little different construction. And so I just thought we're in Alaska. We'll do them this way.

Yeah. Damn. Well, uh, at this point you've gone to school one semester. Yeah. That's true. So why did you like, how, so you're, how, how educated are you now? I mean, you got a lot of school now. A lot of school. Did you go to graduate school?

Yeah, I did. So that was really one of the more traumatic things was moving into town. Traumatic things for me. So we went back, let me, please. We went back in the woods, we went out a couple times when Karen taught in Eagle and for a little bit and I would go out on trapline then. But at one point, you know, that remember the Native Claims Settlement Act happened

and Anilka happened and all of a sudden, you know, Nilka happened and all of a sudden, people were, there was a desire to start claiming land or getting land that would go to one entity or another. And in the interior, Doyon was the big regional corporation and they had selected the land that our cabin was on. It had been BLM land prior to that and it was just outside of the Yukon Charlie Park boundary and Doyan said that they hadn't figured initially because we communicated

they had not decided how to deal with trespass cabins, how to permit them or not and everything. Well, finally in 1990, they sent us a note telling us that we had to leave, that we couldn't be out there anymore. The tribal corporation did. Yeah, yeah, the Doyon Native Corporation. And so, but we were getting ready to go anyway because we had one dog team and it couldn't take all of us

on a big trip into Eagle or to visit other people. So, you know, we had like five or six dogs at that time, great big 100 pound, 120 pound huskies. They were wonderful animals. And, but in order to have the kids with their own teams or Karen with her own team, so you can travel as a family, it would have been really costly. You can't fish in the Yukon, but go 30 miles off to live. You can't move that much stuff. And you got to feed those dogs. And you got to feed all the dogs. You can't move that much stuff. And you gotta feed those dogs, right? And you gotta feed all the dogs. So you mean like you can't move all that fish?

Can't move the fish. You know, if you live on the Yukon, that was a resource that people used, but we didn't. And so I wasn't willing to go and try to manage a couple of dog teams. How would we even go along the river, you know? These guys already ran the banks, and you know, the Yukon, we would run them for a while until they got tired and then throw them in a canoe and they would, you know, we could manage it

that way, but, uh, it just wasn't going to work. And so we were getting, did you have no fishing on your, on your river? No char or grayling or there were grayling, there were grayling, there were suckers, long-nosed suckers, there were round whitefish, there were a few species, but you couldn't feed a dog team with them. You might feed them overnight. In the lower part of the river there were northern pike, not in the upper part of the river. They didn't go up there. Anyway, we were getting ready to go anyway and so we just asked for a year

leeway from Doyon so that we could come in with a ski plane and move some things and take care of the cabin so it wouldn't be a trash pile at some point. So they granted that to us and then we went into Fairbanks. And that was, I hadn't worked a job since I was in high school, well, the milking the cows period, you know, just out of high school. And Karen had, she was a full out teacher. She could go into Fairbanks and boom, she's teaching. And I was struggling, what the hell do I do now?

And there was this one log yard and I thought, well, I do log stuff. And so I walked over there and asked if there was any work and this guy has these giant logs, that big scribe log houses get built out of, you know, 40, 50 feet long, you know, in dirt and bark and stubs and everything. I'll give you $10 a log for peel them. You know, I'm like, well, that isn't even enough to do our rent on a monthly basis or

pay for the kids' daycare or whatever, you know. You know, I had a gig for a while doing those logs and it was like, I feel like it was 30 cents a foot is what we would get paid. Yeah. That's a miserable job, man. Yeah, I peeled a lot of logs and when it's your own, you know, it's just one thing,

but peeling them for 10 bucks a log. So then I said, I'm gonna go to college. And so I went back to college. He's walked over there. Yeah. Yeah. And so I had one semester of credits and went there and was gonna go into biology. Because I thought, if there's anything I can do, it's some job in biology where they go out in the field and do stuff, you know? Because we met people out on the Yukon taking care of peregrines.

We met people that were doing fisheries work or forestry work, and we thought, I can do that. That would be something I'd do. Or you'd run into professionals out doing their jobs. That's right, yeah. And so that's what I did. And my first job was with BLM, a seasonal job. This gal, Randy Jant, who was a biology,

biologist with BLM, was doing waterfowl brood surveys and wanted to hire somebody to be able to do that. But they had to know the birds and I knew all the birds, all of the ducks and the geese and everything. You could see them from a mile away flying and know what they were. And so she took me out to test me around these. There's two lakes by the airport when they get a bunch of ducks in the spring. And, and of course I could identify them all. No problem.

And she's going to be okay. Well, you might work. And, and they were really nervous because here's this guy. I don't know how old I was 33 or something like that. And, uh, Nan didn't have a job since he was a teenager. You know, it made him a little bit nervous but they took the chance. And so I was going to college in the winters and then working for her doing waterfowl brood surveys. I started to do fisheries work with BLM and

finished a bachelor's degree in 1996. And one of the guys I had worked with at BLM was running a big project on the Yukon for Fish and Wildlife Service. And I walked into the office and he says, you're the man I want. And he hired me to work out on salmon down at Rapids, which is down near the mouth of the Tanana River. Did you kind of like, did you fall into the fisheries thing or was that something you were like interested in

and wanted to hone in on yourself? That was really opportunistic. Or was that something you were interested in and wanted to hone in on yourself? That was really opportunistic. So in my undergraduate work, I had done mammology and ornithology, and I did fish biology. There were these different, but I'd also done microbiology and genetics and I liked them all, cell biology. I thought that they were all pretty fascinating. And did physics and chemistry and math and everything too. But so I started there and the first year, you know, we have this big fish wheel running

and we're tagging chum salmon, fall chum salmon, at 450 fish a day putting these spaghetti tags in them. We were doing a Mark Recapture project trying to estimate the population upstream of the Tanana and while we were catching all of those chum salmon, sheafish were coming through in August and September to the tune of you know 60 or 80 a day going through the fish wheel. Can you describe a she fish for people that don't know what they are? She fish are a great big fish eating white fish and they can be as much as can be as much as 30, 40 pounds or more and well over a meter long and they're a really great fish. It's like a tarpon and a whitefish had sex.

Right, exactly. It's kind of like that. Not that I've ever caught one. They just been described to me. Yeah. I think that tarpon, uh, give a much, uh, more profound fight than she fish do. But, but she fish are, are, uh, they're a wonderful fish. Sometimes when it comes to your personal fitness goals, you just need a plan. Peloton can give you the plan.

Absolutely. And Steve, you've got a Peloton. I sure do. And Steve benefits from things like a variety of challenging classes. There are four week strength building classes, running, cycling, everything in between. Peloton can adapt to any goal in this season of your life. And by the way, the holidays are around the corner. Now is when you need to be on the Peloton.

Find your push, find your power with Peloton at onepeloton.ca. When you got into this work and got into school and all that, like the whole time that you know that you were real bright, like that you had like a book learning ability. I mean, you had to felt so feral and wild, right? Well, there is that. But like to come back to it, were you surprised to be like, Oh, I can be in had felt so feral and wild, right? Well, there is that. But like to come back to it, were you surprised to be like, Oh, I can be in these classes and get A's on my tests and write papers. Well, or did you feel that that was there all along? I didn't really know.

So there were several of my friends that told me there's no way you're going to be keep up with these, you know, early 20s test taking machines you know yeah and and but I ignored it and and I did just fine my dad hung out with this my dad was fought World War two and live his bodies were all World War two guys and there's a guy that lived across like across our lake and then over to Smith's and across the next lake and he had been as and across the next lake. And he had been a pilot during world war II, but he was kept in a POW camp. He got shot down, was kept in a POW camp. You know, the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh.

This guy was Charles Lindback. He was telling me that when he got home from the war, he just assumed he'd go to school on the GI Bill. He said that he went and sat there one time and right off the bat, he's like, there's no way. And just walked out, like couldn't do it. Couldn't do it, you know? That's what's hard for me to picture. Like that you went off and got like undoctrinated

and went wild, but then came back and got redoctrinated. Like redoctrinated. Yeah, I suppose that's true. I don't know. It was a wild time, but it was really hard to come to grasp the change coming into town. And I struggled for a while trying to figure out what the hell am I going to do? Yeah, because you're living like, you're living like, kill a rabbit, eat it. Yeah.

Catch something, sell it. Cut a tree down, make a house. So many efficiencies. Yeah, all of a sudden Also playing this like long game, like, Oh, if I do this for four years, I'll get like a tech position and then maybe I'll get like a job. And the things that you have to do in school, right? Where you're like, okay,

I know this doesn't matter. Yeah. But I know no one will ever ask me this as long as I know. Whereas like jump back to last year, if you didn't do what mattered, bad things could have happened. Yeah, yeah. But I imagine just doing homework wasn't necessarily what the challenge or what the irk was, right?

Like what was the biggest thing that you sort of, that you had to come to grips with or face head on when you made the change? Like just in general in life, like what was it that confronted you that really made it difficult? That's a good question. I guess, you know, that had been my identity for so long being out in the woods, coming in, it was like struggling, and our older boy, he struggled with it too. Did he? Oh yeah, yeah, he did, and he just saw himself as being the woods person that he was, and he got over it. Although, see, he teaches applied math at University

Colorado Boulder, right? And on his webpage, it says, Jed Brown was born and raised by wolves in the Alaska wilderness. So he he encompasses that he likes it and and likes that that was what he did for the first pretty much eight years of his life and he still we he and I had gone out sheep hunting and and things for several times and that's all really fun yeah Yeah, I guess, you know, when I realized that if I'm gonna get into a job that I'm gonna like, I gotta go through this, the university. And once I kinda came to grips with that,

I just, I would just go there, I'd just do it. And it wasn't all that hard. It was just, I mean, there was time element to it, but. Was it tough being around people all the time? Going from like not seeing people for months to being around people every single day? I don't, I don't really, that's probably, probably true. That's not something that I remember as an issue though. Gotcha. We did get a place that was kind of by itself and there was woods around it and I really liked that.

We had a bird feeder right outside of this window. And so, so I would, it was definitely a good place for me because I would come in and decompress if there was decompressing to do. So was it, was it all fisheries research after that first job at the fish wheel? Yeah, so I got into the, I got into the the honors program as an undergraduate. And in the honors program, I did work out in Colbe. I did a small mammal survey following after Murray's work in the 1920s. And that got put into what they call an honors thesis. The honors program paid my way, essentially. They paid my tuition and which was a good

thing. But it also there were classes you had to take in that that were I don't know maybe maybe a little more philosophy and anyway it was it was it was a good thing and and so once I went once I got into that fish job though, I've had that same job the whole time. I mean, I wasn't hired permanent initially. It was a technician. But the sheafish work, there was a fellow, John Burr, that worked with the fishing game department at the time.

And he came by to see us at work down there. And he said, you guys really should do something with these sheafish. We've been working to try to figure out where they go to see us at work down there and he said, you guys really should do something with the sheep. We've been working to try to figure out where they go and where they came from for a long time. And we were doing telemetry work with the chump salmon as well, not only the spaghetti tagging, but a telemetry program with it.

And so we just, with towers that were up in the drainage, so you could tell when they swim by these towers they would get a record and and so that's what I did for my master's degree and and I I put out radio transmitters three years in a row and also did that otolith chemistry and was able to show that these fish spawn in this big braided region of the upper Yukon flats Right in the main stem. Nobody had a clue and and then when they finished in mid-october they head back down to sea and And spend the winters in the estuary or perhaps nearby coastal areas. I don't know

No, I get it. No one knew what the hell they did. Nobody did. And like in brackish water, like high saltwater content? Yeah. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that, that's crazy. Yeah, and those that go down there feed all winter,

whereas there was a lot of them since then, you know, telemetry programs with the sheafishish a lot of them just sit in the Yukon and I have this vision of them with their pectoral fins in the gravel and their mouths open facing up river and just spending the winter that way not feeding just not feeding sit yeah dormant yeah yeah and so so that was that's, that's one of the papers that I just sent off to a journal. We'll see how they accept it. You know, they sent it out to review and everything, but I think it's an important piece because not all the populations do that, you know, spawning populations of the she-fish. Some of them don't go to sea and some of them do. And why? Who knows?

But that's for somebody else to figure out. But so that's what I did initially for my master's degree and because I had done otolith chemistry work, the professors up there, anybody else who wanted to go into otolith chemistry would get me tagged to be on their committees. And so I've been on 12 different graduate committees with people doing otolith chemistry work.

And I think largely because of that, the university gave me an honorary doctorate a few years ago. Well, that's cool, man. Yeah. So, so yeah, I got PhD so to speak more or less. Uh, I got another question for you about the living in the bush versus coming into society. When you're on the bush, like, I'm trying to think of how to put this, you know, being alive now in today's atmosphere, you become very aware of all the cultural conversations, right? And you become aware of like how you, who you identify as, you know, you're like you, who you identify as.

You know, you're like, okay, I identify as, you know, an American, identify as a member of my family, I identify as a member of my community, right? When everything's so stripped down, like the way it was, and you're not aware of all the, like every little thing in the news or every little societal fracture that's going on, every blow of campaigning, like the presidential campaign season, right? Where do you sort of land in terms of what you are or what you identify as?

Do you want me to like, do you feel like, like, well, I'm an American, you know? Or where do you land at what you are? Are you a community member of the Yukon? If someone says, who are you? What are you? What would you have said? You mean now? No, no. Sorry, when you were living in the bush. What would you have said? You mean now? No, no. Sorry. When you were living in the bush, like what would you have said? If someone asked you sort of like explain yourself to me year or what? Yeah.

I, I, um, it was, it was much more, um, as a, as a resident of the, of the woods. Yeah. Yeah. I remember my brother came and visited me one time, flew in on a, on a ski plane and we mushed around, it was in the woods. Yeah, I remember my brother came and visited me one time, flew in on a ski plane, and we mushed around, it was in the winter, and he was during Reagan administration, right? He's going like, how can you sit out here, you know, when the real world, there's so many things going on.

And I says, I think this is the real world. That's how I felt. This is the real world. I didn't know that Reagan was president, right? I had no clue. That's kind of what, that's what I'm getting at. And I didn't care. It didn't affect you.

No. And I mean, maybe it did, but I didn't know. It did in a macro way. Like it did in a macro way, meaning, you know, like oil prices. Right. You know, I mean, like these things would come, these things would come for you.

Yeah. I didn't buy any gas because I didn't have any motor. But yeah. You know, like eventually it'd be that you got a letter saying you got to move off the land. And that is in a macro sense, all this global stuff is impacting you.

But that's like, but when you're out there, like that stuff falls away. And you're just, you're a guy in the woods. Yeah. You're not all pissed off about who's using what bathroom. Not even a little bit. You're a guy in the woods. Not even a little bit, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, I've tried to bring it into, I mean, it was definitely a big part of who I am and how I think about things, you know, you know, that, that at all, I don't know. Some of the, some of the social issues that are so so much conflict right now it's like I don't really care what somebody else does you know I just I just don't and or who somebody is you know I just I try to I try to treat people just like people

you know men and women here straight, whatever, I don't care. It's not my business. I have a hard enough time taking care of myself. I'm gonna take care of everybody else too, or try to define their problems, I don't think so. Do you have any regrets about the timeline that you spent, how you spent your life? Not even a little bit.

You know what was weird? All my friends at college, when I said I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna go and live out in the woods, they're going, oh, you can't do that, you gotta finish college, you know, you're gonna ruin your life and everything. Neither of my parents told me that at all. I don't know what they thought I was getting into,

but they didn't discourage me at all. Not even a little bit. And I find that surprising, but. Do you still do like field work where you get to go spend extended periods of time like out in the woods or? Two falls ago was my last field project. Over the last few years,

I've been losing my central vision. It's a genetic mutation that doesn't usually affect older folks, but it is with me. So I have a hard time right now. I'm not driving. I can't read a book. I can read it on a computer with high contrast and stuff. But that last project, we were fishing for sheafish and that was big enough I could see it. But I wouldn't drive a boat right now and I wouldn't be the one taking measurements and things like that. And so my functionality in the field has declined to the point where I won't, I'm not gonna be going out anymore.

How old are you now? 66. Give me 67 in a couple of weeks. What, give me a piece of marriage advice. I don't really know. I just, I treat Karen like a princess. Oh, I haven't tried that yet. That might be where I went wrong.

You started out right with the toilet paper move. Yeah, that's not princess treatment. And the new cabin. Oh, that's princess treatment. Yeah, totally. Yeah, no, and I just love her to pieces and always have and always will. Yeah, I don't know.

That's been your attitude. It's been my attitude, yeah. You're not like, well, I'll see next year, I'll see the next year after that, how I feel. Jesus. No. That's good, man. Dude, there's a lot of people that view the world like that, man.

I get it, but are there any plans to live in the woods again? Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. I mean, we kind of live on the outskirts. We have a 40 acre plot of land with nice birch and spruce on it where the latest cabin big big scribe log place that That I built Let's see I started in I started that one in my late 40s finished it in in mid 50s we've been living there for Gotta let those things settle, you know? Yeah, so I love it. I love it. It takes a little work to maintain, but got a great big sauna,

maybe wood-fired sauna, which Dan, he helped get the stove for out of Wasilla. Oh, okay. He and his boss went up and picked it up. He's still feeding yourself with that's my question. Game. Uh, yeah, to some extent. Yeah. Yeah.

I went moose hunting this year, but we didn't, we didn't get anything. Which is rare. So, so my, my, uh, moose hunting adventures have been to go up to that same place where we lived up on the candy. And, uh, there's just some good lookouts and open country and you know when you live in a place for long enough you know

where the moose are crossing and so we've always seen sometimes several bulls and we go up a couple of my buddies and I go up there and we've never come back without a moose except for this time and we just never saw a bull. Do you guys call? Yeah, we call. Can you rip a call for me? Okay, so I have been around when cows call. So this is a real call.

And it is very similar to a cow, regular dairy cow ball. similar to a to a cow regular dairy cow ball that's it that's your call that's a cow call yeah you don't do any of that crazy cow call like no but they do that yeah and and and so if it's a small bull you want to do a cow call because a big bull hit me with your normal like, okay, get out there. You're there. Okay. All right, boys. We're going to start hunting. Everybody be quiet.

You're going to do what? Hit me with it. Well, see if it's, if you're looking for a big bull, you know, it's going to be a grunt. No, no, no. I don't mean the bull noise. I mean the cow noise. I did do it. That's your main

That's your main That's your main cow call that you're using that is okay. You never do the big long plaintiff like No, my buddy does this guy Scott McLean. He goes up there. He's got a fiberglass Accelerator type thing and and he'll do that and then do a couple of grunts afterwards and it works too. But you were saying cow call for small bulls bull grunt for big bulls. So if you do a big grunt and it's a small bull he doesn't want to be anywhere near a big bull. Yeah. And if we see a small bull around we would always do cow calls. And they'll come. And one of the beauties of this particular place is that you can see how these bulls are responding.

I mean, they could be even a mile away. And then you'll see this, this big antler's turn. And they'll start walking your way. And if you do it too much, they'll go away. And so you just want to let them do their thing. Yeah, man, why do you, don't worry, we're gonna wrap up pretty quick here, but I just got a couple technical questions for you. In your mind, why would a bull walk two miles to come and do, like walk like he's just coming. There's nothing in the world's gonna stop him.

And then all of a sudden he's like, but I'm gonna lay down then walk away. Lay down for a couple hours then get up and then get up, go the other direction. Like what is he, what is in his mind? Well, I have no idea to tell you the truth. I, I think that there are some bulls that get really damaged in fighting. Oh, okay. Um, we were watching, there was a big bull and a little bull, well, uh, kind of a bullwinkle, um, walking along this one open hillside at one point and they were not responding to us at all. And the big bull would, would hit this little bull every once in a while. And finally the little bull turns around and nails him in the butt with his horns and then

hauls ass across this hill. And we watched them with the big bull after this little bull go over a couple of hills across a stream and then up another hill until they disappeared. But that little one had to know that he was going to be on the run because that bull was going after him. Yeah. And I think, I mean, we've, we've got them when they're punctured. So he's coming in and he's like, man, I'm not going in there and fighting. I'm going to linger on the outside and see what's happening. Or, or he doesn't hear it again and, and thinks it may be not there anymore. I don't know. It's hard to

get in their head man. I know but I do know that if you if you grunt too much or if you call too much, they're going to turn off. Sometimes when it comes to your personal fitness goals you just need a plan. Peloton can give you the plan. Absolutely and Steve you've got a Peloton. I sure do. And Steve benefits from things

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at onepeloton.ca. You know what you mentioned that, that little bull hitting that big bull in the ass. Uh, me and Seth last year, we were messing around with, um, we were messing around with, uh, there's a, uh, company, Dave Smith decoys, and he makes a posturing buck. So it's a buck that's kind of all bristled up and you'll see other bucks come and you always think when you see bucks fighting, you associate them being antler to antler, nose to nose, of course, right?

Yeah. Because they're squaring off. But here he is, he's looking at a buck, but the buck doesn't move. So you get to see what he would prefer, how he would prefer to fight in a situation where the buck isn't always facing at him. He would prefer to fight, come in behind it, get alongside of it, and drill it right in the rib cage. Like that's what he wants to do. Yeah. So you mentioned that little bull hitting that little bull in the ass or something like that. Like I imagine when they can get the jump on each other they probably do and that's a way different hit than hitting antler. Oh

yeah. When you're driving those tines into something. Yeah. Every once in a while these big bulls will lock their horns together. You see it get stuck. Yeah and I've never I've never seen it in practice but I've seen those the sets of antlers that are put together. Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks has one sticking, hanging up right over their information thing and where people come in to get hunting license, fishing license, things like that. And there's also one in Eagle. This helicopter pilot had spotted these two bulls stuck together.

It has to be a desperately bad situation for them because any wolf coming around or bear coming around would just start eating. Two for one dude, yeah. Eat them alive. Yeah. You still shooting in 243 when you go moose hunting? You know what? I changed to a 6.5 Creedmoor. And the reason I did that is so I could shoot copper

because despite what people's views are with lead, lead in the oafle of deer down in California is what almost put California condors over the edge. Sure, yeah. And when they found out how that was going down because they were testing these condors and they had lead poisoning. But they're eating that stuff where all of that lead fragment is sitting and scavenging all over the mountains there. And the acid in their guts can break that lead down to where it becomes toxic.

I suppose so. I think that's what the issue is. Yeah, but so what I headshot with the 243 was a hundred grain Hornaday bullet. And bullets I think are everything. A lot of people say, oh, it's not big enough for Alaska game. They don't know what they're talking about.

But that hundred grain Hornaday hunting bullet is it rolls back it stays together and And usually on a moose if I shoot it just behind the shoulder. It'll be either in the ribs or the or the skin on the other side with a lot of bleeding through the lungs and And if you shoot it right in the ear it'll just shatter that big vertebrae right behind the head. So it's a very good bullet and I've tried a lot of other bullets like a Nosler partition. Nosler partition do not work in a 243 and the reason for that is that that

back part of it doesn't have enough mass by itself once it explodes. The front part explodes. It doesn't carry through. It doesn't carry through. And I shot a couple of caribou with that load and you have this grapefruit size damage on the outside but it never went into the lungs. And it killed him, but it would not be a good bullet to have.

And so, right now though, I wanted to go lead free. And if you go down to copper in a 243, you're down to 80, 85 grains. And I didn't want to go there. Cause there were people out there that shot 22, 250s and 70 grain bullets and they won't break the neck. They will kill a moose and but they're you know getting down there closer to the edge and the 243

hundred grain that I was using it would break any bone the body, no matter what angle you're dealing with. Some people say, well yeah, but you gotta be really precise. You do with anything, you know? You've got shoot a moose with a.30-06, it's gonna run for a long ways. And yeah, so I changed to a 6.5 Creedmoor, same rifle, Winchester Model 70, but it can shoot a 120

grain copper bullet. I like it. This is my last question for you. Yeah. Then maybe the boys got more questions for you too, but how uh, how do you feel? What's your general attitude about protections of Anwar about the proposed Ambler road, um, pebble mine, pebble mine, pebble mine. Like are you at, with the time you spent and as mo and kind of the equity you've built up in that place,

do you encourage that development around job creation or do you just want, or do you have a view that you just want the wild to stay wild? Like, what's your personal take? As much as you're able to comment on that with your position at work. Yeah, yeah and sometimes I can't. I did, I was part of the biological team on the EIS for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the coastal plain. And one of the big things that's an issue in that, and they put their opinion out, I think it was last week on that, the SEIS that was taking place. But there's no water out there.

None of those rivers flow during the winter. And the oil production depends on that water a lot for ice roads, for the drilling, for the camps, everything. So there's a big hurdle for any of these companies to go and develop that in that they're going to have to figure out how they're going to

get water. There's 600 meters of permafrost. There's a handful of these perennial springs that come from the south side of the Brooks Range, hit these big fault zones and go down and muscle their way up through there somehow. And so there's this water in certain places that will provide a couple kilometers of habitat, water, that all of the fish in those streams, like the hula hula or the Saddle Roach that have fish in them, all of them are there. And the rest of the river goes dry in the winter. And that's true all across that coastal plain. Where they get water?

I have no idea. Some people have thought, well, maybe they'll melt snow. Maybe they'll do a desal plant. Maybe they'll truck it. But you can't truck water across an ice road. You'll break it up and then you'll be just continually doing that. So there are some some steep hurdles to doing that. But there are, and the last time that there were sales there. It was this development group with Alaska, ADA, that bought most of the most of the plots and two companies from somewhere else that didn't have any capacity to develop them

bought the other two. I think just on a speculation that if one of the big companies decided to go in there they would have to buy those leases from them or something and that was what ADA was doing too. ADA can't develop it either and so it's it's I mean they've showed from over in Prudhoe that that they can develop without the oil without ruining places but they got all the water in the world over there so I don't know how they're gonna do it. I don't, no big company bid on the last group. And I think they probably also thought that, okay, this is too fast, you know,

and we gotta see what happens. And so they have that ability right now. It's opened up for 400,000 acres of lands that people could, companies could bid on. I'm not sure when they're going to do that, but they'll have to figure out they would only want to bid if they have some sort of thought on how they would go about doing it. How would they get over some of these hurdles?

It's money out of pocket right off the bat for them. So you can't, because of your involvement, you're not in a position to say what you hope happens or what you wish would happen except that would compromise your so so I I don't I don't really see it quite that way because I'm not I'm not a player and where the whether it should or shouldn't understand and and the the mining is it is a little bit of a different issue I wrote a piece in our community perspective

for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner on some of the mining prospects around in the interior and just laid out the dynamics of acid mine drainage and the longevity of it, how far into the future it will continue to have to be taken care of. And the newspaper, and I just, everybody else puts just their name and where they live and that's what I did, but the news minor looked me up. I mean, they've, they've,

I write letters to the editor every once in a while. They know who I am and, and they, they put my affiliation with Fish and Wildlife Service and I got a little bit of a spanking for that, even though I didn't do it. And I didn't put it on there myself. But Pebble is one of those that has not been approved. But they're gonna, as long as the minerals are there, somebody's gonna come back over and over and over until maybe the politics are right to be able to do it. But that's in Bristol Bay, right? And it's

on that pass going over one side down to the New Shigak, great big fish river, the other side down to Lake Iliamna, the biggest of this sockeye runs in all of Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay is booming, it's been booming for a long time. And that is- Pete Slauson I mean that fishery is booming. It's been booming for a long time. And that is... You mean that fishery is booming. The fishery. Yeah. And it's kind of the hottest fishery in the globe. Yeah. And that pebble mine is an acid mine, and it would require taking care of for thousands of years.

How does that work? I don't know, that's pretty young. I don't know how the hell that works myself. So I wrote a piece detailing that for the Manchow mine. The Manchow mine out in Tetlin is also an acid mine. And the state and the tribe have, and the companies involved have gotten through without having an EIS done, and nobody knew it was an acid mine. And I had gotten some of the documents

from somebody that had gotten it through a public records thing and saw that it was, and brought that to light but they're doing it anyway and and how it'll play out maybe they can take care of it they think they can but it hasn't been looked at from a broader audience but Tetlin will rue the day they did that if it if it isn't going to be contained on their end. Yeah.

It's a big deal. We've got a bunch of them in Lower 48 here that are, I call them oozing sores on the landscape. My geologist friend of mine said he thought that was kind of over the top. But I'm like- Well, has he been to Berkeley pit? I know down the road here. Yeah Yeah, no, and that one's gonna go on it'll outlast humanity it will and that's like An example I always use rec because people are like, oh well technology's changed so much that you're thinking about this old stuff

I'm like, okay. Well, so The Berkeley pit as an example or like a bird lands on it that you're thinking about this old stuff. I'm like okay well so the Berkeley pit as an example where like a bird lands on it it dies. Right. Is that taken care of in your mind? Like technology has made that okay? Like I don't understand the argument right? Well the state has a policy that if somebody is opening up the earth in an acid mine, that they have to put aside a huge bond that will take care of maintenance in perpetuity, they call it. And I mean, I, you know, I don't think that societies are going to are going to, you know, there isn't an investment fund that you could guarantee that it's going to be true for very long. So, oh, yeah. And that's why I like a lot of these companies. They have working permits in the state that they're in, but they're not based there. They're based internationally to give them a little more protection should they just

so happen to default on that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's the way it is in Alaska. Most of these big companies are Canadian or Australian or something. Well, my kids were real little. I made the mistake one time of explaining to them this idea that the sun will burn out, you know?

Like the Sun's kind of like in its midlife crisis right now, you know? And that there'd be a day when the Sun, like it's not getting recharged. Yeah, you know, the Sun like theoretically will burn out and the solar system will die. And that messed them up because they couldn't picture the geological time I was talking about, you know. So I kept trying to walk it back, well probably not, won't really happen, you know. But now I've taken to, now that they're older, I'll tell them, I said, man someday, like all people are gonna be

gone. People are gonna be gone. And a bunch of times gonna go by and the earth's gonna be full of all these kind of new crazy animals. And it's gonna be gone. People are gonna be gone. And a bunch of time is gonna go by and the earth's gonna be full of all these kind of new crazy animals. It's gonna be sweet here. You know, so don't worry about the future. They're okay, they like that version better. They like that better than the Sun going out. Yeah, yeah. It's a hard thing to grapple with even as an adult. When you're talking about these mines, the thousand year mine, yeah. But it, yeah. And then, you know, it's like,

you're stuck with the contradiction, right? Like, we all got these phones and titanium fucking coffee mugs when you're camping and shit. You know what I mean? It's like, it's a mess, man. Being alive's hard. Well, that's true, yeah. No perfect situation, yeah.

But the responsibility, the financial responsibility of the public to take care of these places after these mining companies take it. I don't see the oil in the same way. There's other issues with oil, but it's not, you know, poisoning the landscape in that way. Mm-hmm. Man, I appreciate you coming down to talk. My brother was right. Danny was right. I should get you on the show. I think you gotta come back again someday though.

Oh, I got so many questions, we just don't have enough time. Yeah, what a deal. So you're going from here to see that boy of yours that you raised up in the woods? Yeah, yeah, I am doing that. His daughters, so his older daughter is, uh, his, um, jewel J O U L E. Oh, like the, like the vape.

Yeah. Is that a person? No, like an electric, like an energy. Yeah. It's a measurement of energy. Oh, not like that company that makes vape. And some of's a measurement of energy. Oh, not like that. That's J-U-U-L. That shows where my head's at. Some of his friends, some of his friends were trying to talk him out of it.

Oh, she'll have to tell teachers how to spell it and everything like that. And I think it's a great name, but you may have to pay for it. Yep. So anyway, yeah. And then Neve, their younger daughter, she's wonderful too. That's a pretty name. How's that spelled? N-E with an accent, V-E with an accent. So that's a certain kind of a snow on high altitudes. Really? In the mountains. Yeah. Sounds like you raised your boy, right. Yeah, I hope so. Well man, thanks so much for coming on, man.

This has been great. Yeah, you bet. Yeah, there's still a story or two to tell, but. I can tell that, man. You're an interesting guy, man. Yeah, we didn't even get into like fish. Any of the shit. Grizzly bears, like, oh, I wanna hear more about the dogs

and just weird stuff that you can't explain. Having run into grizzly bears and. Yeah. I wanted to get into about the dogs and just weird stuff that you can't explain. Grizzly bears and yeah. I wanted to get into staying real warm when it's 40 below zero, no tent. But what the, you had to come back. Yeah, yeah, we did that. Will you come back? Will you come back on the show just for a technical,

purely technical questions? Backwards know-how. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'd do it. Nick, can we just coordinate it with your next trip down to visit the family yeah yeah well I'll definitely do that it's like a family in Albuquerque too okay and so one way or another do the Rocky Mountain loop yeah yeah you're gonna run the spine of the

Rockies all the way to the end yeah that's what it that's what it would be I mean well thank you very much thank you thanks thanks for having me this has all the way to the end. Yeah, that's what it would be. All right, man. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. This has been great. Appreciate it, man. Yeah. Well, the huntin' day is over and it's time to pack it in. Stevie got another and I got skunked again.

But that rocky mountain sunset this afternoon was pleasing. But it's my last day in camp, so I'll see you next season. I'll stay in camp so I'll see you next season. There's nothing like a sunrise over mountains in the fall. I hear a distant bugle, he's answering my call. And we may see the warning if we give him a reason But it's my last day in camp so I'll see you next season And if I draw another I'll be back here again. We'll find out in the summer when the lottery comes in. Fingers crossed, my friend.

I wish everyone good luck. I'm headed home this evening. Cause it's my last day in camp and I'll see you next season. I'll see you next season. Hey guys, earlier this year, we launched meatater Kids podcast and we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it we were going to make more and you did and we did and we're dropping a bunch new, five new Meat Eater Kids podcast episode starting November 25th. Again it's a kids show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts. There's a little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson. There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess

what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to kids focused conservation organizations. So Meat Eater Kids podcast coming back round. So Meat Eater Kids podcast coming back round two. Find Meat Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts.