The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 875: Grizz Attack, Mountain Lions Rebound, and a $44K Walleye

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

Steven Rinella and the MeatEater crew discuss: Smokejumper Sam Forsag running for Congress in Montana; people getting weird about waterfowl in North Carolina; grizzly attacks at National Parks; spearfishing in Michigan; public land transfers in Alaska; a $44K walleye in Iowa; mountain lion populations rebounding; and more. 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.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Welcome to the news show. On this week, we talked to a former smoke jumper who wants your vote. Spencer catches, I mean reports on a $44,000 Iowa walleye. Some weird old people are being weird about swans and other waterfowl in North Carolina.

We've got a few grizzly tags here in Montana going down, including a fatality. Spear fishermen are coming for your walleyes in Michigan. and I'm joining them. And Dr. Randall reports on public lands transfers in Alaska, plus a whole lot more. Welcome. But first, as always, our news. Hey, please subscribe to the Meteor podcast YouTube channel.

It helps us a lot. You'll be the first to know when new shows drop. Well, you just read that. That's at the meteor. Phil, what's that? No, it's just the Meteor podcast network. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

It's just really helpful for our network if you all subscribe. Yeah, do a solid. Do a solid for your fellow. Me, Eater Rost, we got a new episode dropping today. Me and Yanni have a showdown and meet Yer Rost and me and Yanni's wives judge it.

You know, some pointed out to me. They said they'd never tell anybody this, but they said, someone that watched the cut said, your wife hacks on you. your cooking because she does. But he says she gets visibly defensive when someone else hacks on your cooking.

Interesting. Which I haven't watched to take note yet. I like that. After you guys filmed that, man, Yonis did not have a lot of good things to say about you. He said you were just like scattered all over the place trying to do too much

at once. He said that? Oh yeah. This is all getting cut out by the way. We can't spoil the episode. So our save Tucker Town campaign. Who's got the, oh, the donation deadline is May 14. Yeah. So just, just pay attention to that. And we've just got a couple more days. So again, help me, they're at $163,000 raised out of the $200,000 goal, which will be matched by $100,000 for meat eater and $100,000 from Onex. And what's the closest, what's the closest municipality here? Well, how do we say in your neck of the woods? It's, uh, southeast of

Salisbury, North Carolina. Okay. Northeast of Charlotte. Okay. So two things out of North Carolina today. Just as a recap. Halfway between Winston-Salem and Charlotte. Alcoa, who's heavy the aluminum business, Alcoa owned a bunch of land near the Tucker Town Reservoir.

They'd always manage it as public land. Alcoa wants to divest of that asset. Okay. So one option when divesting from an asset is they'd we'll just sell it off and then people are going to buy it and it'll become like houses. Or you contribute to the effort to like buy it and make it permanently public land. So we're at Mediter working with OnX and we're doing a matching thing. Your donations come in.

We match them dollar for dollar up to the point that we hit 200 grand. No. Is that right? 200 grand of matches. Yes. Something like that. Yes. We have 200,000 in matching funds.

So you guys can go to the Meteeter.com and search. land access and our land access 2026 page will pop up and there's a link to make a donation there. I killed a big old white tail buck on some former Alcoa land. In North Carolina? No. Different state. It's hanging in the meat eater store. What state?

Texas. Why are you being weird about it? I don't know. You're a spot burn Texas? Elko is 10 acres there. That's why I told you Texas and I decided it was okay. It used to be alcohol. I don't know. I heard on that podcast.

There's some deer in Texas. Yep. Like going down there. Randall, did you win? No, I didn't. I didn't. That's a, we're talking about a spoiler alert. Yeah.

Yeah, I went down, by the time you're listening to this, it would be the weekend before last, to the very southeastern corner of Wyoming. Just across from the Kansas, or I'm sorry, the Nebraska border. Journey Turkey's gobble? Nope. Not a single gobble the whole time.

Nope. Nope. Yes, shot the K-R-G- Extreme ELR match hosted by High Plains Precision. So that's extreme. Extreme long range. Extreme, extreme long range. Yes, yes.

And this is something that there's a lot of very dedicated practitioners of the discipline. And I went down there with zero. preparation or training. I finished 1-18 out of 137, and I was going to... Oh, you beat some guys. Yeah, and actually... Yeah, but you were like, you're competing against, like, military snipers.

Yeah, and just mostly enthusiasts, but I had, um, there were only three people who hadn't shot this exact match before, and I was one of them. So I like to think of it as... That's great. That's like... It's not about who beat you. Yeah, that's... It's about who you beat.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was gunning for number 133. and I surpassed my hopes and expectations. How many people did you beat? 19. I feel like you could have said. You could have said 21.

I went down there and bested. Oh, I bested 19 competitors. Hold on. I'm doing all my math rock. But like in some other world, that's like your place is really high. Yeah, I'd say nothing more. Yeah. I bested 19 competitors.

So there's a couple ways of looking at it. Either I exceeded my expectations or I came in near the very tail end of the finishers. I hit like between 23 and 24% of my points and the winner only got 70% of the points available. Wow. So was the longest shot you made in practice or during the match? During the match. During the match.

During the match, my longest shot was 1353. Holy. That was my first. You go over a mile in practice? My longest first round impact. Yeah, I went twice. Well, I had three hits. over a mile in practice. The longest one was

23, 23. You hit at that. Yeah. Oh, I was saying to him that it's long when there's no year that was that year. Yeah. Because he's talking about other distances that had years. Yeah. Like 1985. Yeah, 1833. Yeah. But then you get into a thing that a year that hasn't

happened. That's a long ways of shot. It is. Because then you're like into like 2007. But another way of thing about that is a long way. A 95 yard shot is so much further removed from where we are today that it may be that's more alien than like 20, 29. But yeah, it was good. Did you know you had yourself?

I did. Did you wife go? No. She found out how far away it was and she didn't go. And she backed out. Yeah. So did Phil, actually. I had a couple people that wanted to go and then they found out,

I was driving nine hours and they didn't go. But watch Phil Beck out. It's just basically the drive time. Is that true, Phil? Yeah, I thought it would be a fun time. There was karaoke to be had, so, you know. Yeah, lost my voice. That was a big carrot for me, and I just, the drive was too much.

Does the karaoke rolled into the shooting contest? It's sort of a natural outgrowth of the, we also did trivia. I hosted trivia on Friday night with the match director. What? Yeah. Yeah, this is the whole thing. I got to, when I was deer hunting last year, I got a message on Instagram from Jose Gardner, friend of the program, uh, and he said, look, I host this match in Wyoming in May. And I think

you'd have a good time. Plus, I've always wanted to have ballistics related trivia. And I said, I'm in. Who wrote the trivia, him? No, I did. I did most of it. Did you, did you run it? You said to be too hard for us because it's all about long range shooting. We're too dumb. But, uh, A man who wrote a book on ballistics told me it was good. Afterwards. The trivia. Yeah. Did you have anything in there about the Coriolis effect?

I did. Oh. I probably passed. Have you seen the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlberg? No, I have not. It's a key plot point. Quick thing. I've talked about this book two times on the show, but I didn't know what it was.

I knew that there was some kind of firewood book. And I knew that it had something to do with the Northern Europeans. I'm holding it in my hand. Jim Zumbo gave it to me. This is a fetishist text. If you have a firewood fetish, this book is for you.

But finally, the mystery is solved. Norwegian wood chopping, stacking, and drying. Like kind of redundant. Yeah. Hummet. I think it's Norwegian wood, right? And then that's what it is. Oh, that makes more sense.

Yeah. The talk, okay. That's true. I was, it could be titled, Norwegian wood chopping, stacking and drying wood, the Scandinavian way, or you could read it, Norwegian wood, chopping, stacking, and drying wood the Scandinavian way. Either way, I would have never had a redundancy of words between my title and subtitle. Maybe it's been translated.

Yeah, and there's no better word. But I'm telling you what, man, if you get your jollies. of looking at expertly stacked wood. Phil, how do we where can I put this? No, point at the camera in front of you. Yeah.

Can you zoom in on that? Not an inch of it. If I had that, I'd say no one burned any of that shit. Can they see it good? Can I see what they see? Or can you do that? Oh, yeah, I can show you that.

I want to see if there's, oh, they can see it. Yeah. That's nothing. Look at this. I like how he's used all those pallets. This dude. build a house out of firewood. Wait a minute.

Where's this guy? Is that house meant for burning or living? That's what we were talking about. You can tell a guy like, hey man, just step into that little house there and make yourself comfortable. Can I show this one, Phil? Yeah. Wow. There's nothing yet. Damn. That's nice. Nothing. Because wait till I find the house. Maybe

that needs to be the new calendar. Yeah, there's some dudes in here to stack some wood, man. But there's a guy that made a... Damn it. And also just a quick The title's, I think, a play on the Beatles song, Norwegian Wood. So I don't think it's a translation thing.

Great song. Yeah. Kind of a bummer. The Buddy Rich Big Band has a just face melting cover of it. If you like jazz, just throw that up there. Hmm. Did I ever tell you that jazz? Oh.

Norwegian wood parenthetically, the bird has flown. Can you zoom in on this one film? Yeah. Oh, silo. Wow. That's a stack of firewood. Damn, those people are tall. Long winters.

Well, Jim Zumbo, I never found the house. There's a house made out of firewood in there. Jim Zumbo said he has firewood OCD when he was on the show. He has like a problem with firewood. And so I think he does this kind of deal. Maybe we should do sheds at his place. Oh. Meteor sheds.

Yeah, why has no one done that? Well, no. There you go, Karen. Great idea. Yeah. I'll just call him. Probably love to do it. Okay.

Randall? Me again. Are you doing this? Oh, yeah. For those of you that are gearing up for this spring, summer, or even getting a jumpstart on the fall, don't miss out on our upcoming spring sales starting this Thursday, May 14th. We'll have discounts on First Light, Phelps, FHF, and up to 50% off logo wear on the meat eater's store, we'll have, there is a punctuation missing.

Anyway, there's incredible discounts. Same guys at this Norwegian book title. Daily deals and new products for you to check out. The daily deals, I understand, it's like a different thing every day. And when we're, when they're gone, they're gone. So just keep checking in. Starts May 14th. It's the spring sale.

When did you become the guy who reads the copy in the script? I don't know. I like it, though. I like it. A listener wrote in, this is more news from North Carolina. Did you get more you want to add? No, I'd just like to do more ad reads. Okay.

I think you should do it in the Maybe he can do them until he gets good at him If we ever get an offer from Arby's, I'm all in. I think you should do it in the Ken Burns voice. Yeah.

We could do all kinds of different voices. A guy from North Carolina wrote in, Lake Yeah, Junalusca. What do you think it is? We agreed. June Alusca.

Western North Carolina. There's a lake owned by the World Methodist Organization. Now follow along here. This is about a thing called the Swan Patrol. The lake is approximately 200 acres and is the only major body of water within almost three counties. It's deep in the Appalachian range.

You're not allowed to hunt on it, but guys like to fish it. For the last several years, this writer says, this listener says, a local group that has been dubbed the Swan Patrol has taken up the responsibility of feeding herding, trapping, and relocating local waterfowl. The World Methodist Organization has granted the Swan Patrol

permission to rope off exceptionally large sections of the lake's bank to allow a safe nesting area for the birds. The patrol not only does it to the small population of mute swans that live at the lake, but also to all

types of waterfowl, including ducks, geese, and coots. they regular go out in a group of up to five to six people and feed the birds massive amounts of corn. He's saying they're having such an impact that the birds don't migrate out of there. They just stay there to eat the corn. He says, I know the lake has a right as property owners to restrict bank access, but everyone's questioned around here as if they're allowed to tamper with the wildlife to this extent. No, you're not.

One instance that caused much discussion locally was when a Swan Patrol captured a swan that accidentally went over the dam. They corralled it into a dog crate and moved it back to the upper part of the lake. Then it happened again. He says he's seen them load wild mallards into cages in their cars to take them to other parts of the lake. Is this legal?

No. First of all, how does a swan accidentally go over a dam? That's probably their problem. perception of it. He's just trying to like step out. He says, I will mention like he tells you he's going to mention it. Then he mentions it. The writer says, I will mention. This group does consist of members with ages

ranging from the 60s to their 80s. That's ageism. It is kind of. I don't like it. I experience it. Yeah, because I could be like with those dudes and I might just seem like slightly younger. Yeah. But, you know. Yeah, that's not a thing, like, just for the, that's not a thing you're allowed to do.

He's got a point, though. People that age like to tinker with shit. Yeah. Mess with stuff. They like tinker. Okay, we got a special, we got a special guest in the studio night. Join by Sam Forsteg. Hey, Steve.

Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, man. So what you're doing and the reason you're here, well, you're here for a couple reasons. One, you're here because you're running in the primary. That's right. So for background, if you listened to the show, some time ago, we had on a representative Ryan Zinky, he's leaving. And so there's going to be like, things are getting spicy.

Oh, yeah. There's a vacant seat. You're running in the primary, seeking the Democrat primary. I am. For the Western Montana thing. That's it. Montana's first. What caught me, what caught my interest is your background.

That, and you might get sick of people saying this, but it just kind of, it's like said. Every time I see your name, it's thrown in there how you were a smoke jumper. Smoke jumper. Yeah, union leader. I thought you were going to bring up the sauna, but. What about the sauna? Oh, we got a hell of a sauna in the back yard. You'll come over for the next day. You got a sweet sauna. Yeah. Oh, no. You think the Scandinavians are particular about wood shopping. Oh, you're a woodman. You're a woodman, too. Yeah. So I keep saying this that you're running and that you have no political experience. this is your first time

this would be your first time running for anything more than vice president of my union's local okay so I don't mean no political experience but on the national state of us

yeah yeah and then spent all that spent four years as a smoke jumper that's right tell people what a smoke jumper is well we parachute out of a parachute

into wildfires to stop before they grow um an idea is speed range payload that's how you sell the program we can get there quick fixed wing airplanes put them out while they're small

so you don't end up spending you know tens of millions of dollars fight to fight in a wildfire And yeah, I spent eight years still in wildland fire in the last four as a smoke jumper. I never thought of that as a cost-saving measure. Yeah, that's the idea. Before it's on the national news and stuff. Yeah, I mean, ideally, you get four guys on the ground.

You can put something out at a quarter acre. It's a lot cheaper than you wait until you got to bring a bunch of heavy equipment, hand crews, all the rest in. Yeah. Yeah. How did you wind up with the forest service? Well, I graduated UM over in Missoula, hold it against me. And I worked two or three jobs at a time. I went to school there.

Oh, you did? Yeah. Yeah. Really? Oh, you got your MFA. Yeah. That's right. Well, yeah.

I mean, and also. He also got a degree. Not an honorary degree. Yeah. Well, we both believe Maroon. Yeah, I loved it there. Did not love having to work two or three jobs at a time the whole time. And I still had debt on the back end.

So I figured I'd do wild and fire for a couple of years, pay my debts. And when I heard you get paid to jump out of airplanes into public lands, I figured I had to stick around long enough to do that. Is there an elimination process with that? Like, how do you go about getting in there? There is. So it usually takes folks till their fifth or sixth year. And fire to get picked up by a jump program. Rookie training is a six-week process.

Like you apply for the program. Yep. Yeah. So I applied for three years running before I got picked up my fifth year. Really? Yeah. Fighting fire the whole time. Yep.

I started over in Lincoln. That's how I knew how far north that little half it goes. And I did three years in the Swan Valley and Condon on a hand crew. Okay. And then I got picked up for as a rookie candidate and about 50 or 60% of people make it through. There's about a 40 or 50% attrition rate, washout rate. Allmit. So you get accepted to a program and then there's a washout rate within the program.

Yeah. Like once you're accepted. Yeah. And what, what mechanism do they use to find people's limits? Well, so we, they're kind of standard six week program is a week of hell week where they are just torturing the hell out of you. Depending on the base, you might have a 24 hour line dig. Everybody's got to go through a 110 pound pack test, 85 pound pack test over rough

terrains or going over five, six thousand feet elevation. Um, and really they just kick the shit out of you for about a week. You got to go through units week. It's a whole lot of the technical side of parachuting, making sure you can hook up a parachute harness without any errors. Yeah. Sooting up under two minutes, rappelling out of what would be a tree if you were to tree up. And then four weeks of jump face. And so there's a lot of, a lot of spots where you can mess up and there's not a lot of room for air. Got the idea is they don't want anyone who's going to end up in the program who might be a risk to themselves or anybody else. Because there's four of you in the woods. You don't want to have to be calling life flight or anything like that. How many times did you

jump in on fires? I got 34 fire jumps total and 130 some altogether. Really? How many states? I think eight states I got the jump in. I was lucky. Yeah, all over the west. So you got the jump, you're jumping into places you never been, obviously. Oh, it's some of the most beautiful corners of the country, even Canada, you know, back when they had their big fire season a couple years ago. And you got, you jumped into Canada. Yeah. Yeah. When they had that for, you know, terrible fire season was that 23. Yeah. I want to say, um, yeah, I want to say, um, yeah, I. Yeah. He was lucky enough to be on the first wave of American jumpers to go up in 13 years. And really?

Yeah, four fires all over. And it was, I mean, that, I think they, you know, 10xed what they, with their previous record had been for acres burned. It was just unprecedented. You jump in on a plane, then get picked up in a helicopter or walk out to your road or? Yeah. I mean, the packout is the famous way to get out of there. So you're jumping in. And you see a smoke jumper.

It looks like you got a big diaper you're wearing. That's your packout bag. So got about 110 pounds. If you're not ordering a chainsaw, powerhead's going to be another 25. And usually schlepped that stuff. out of there and find a ride. So they'll often tell you to walk out, like to walk out. Yeah, I mean, that's the standard procedure. If you can get a helicopter and get a rock star exit, absolutely. But I mean, the idea is self-sufficiency. I mean, that's, you talk about cost savings.

I mean, something a lot of folks don't know about jumpers is we manufacture almost all of our own materials. So everything short of the canopy is made manufactured in-house or Kevlar jumpsuits, the bags that were carrying, those pack-out bags. Yeah, a lot of sewing that goes on in the off season. What was the farthest you ever had to walk to get out of there? I think my longest pack out was six miles. Okay. So I got lucky. Not like terror. I thought if you'd have told me 30, I wouldn't have been surprised. But yeah, I mean, I don't know what, I don't know what kind of stuff you were doing in Canada. If it's 30, I'm calling a helicopter. 10 pounds. It's a lot. Yeah. Did you ever have to sleep out there while fighting fire? Oh yeah. So if you're jumping, you should be ready to be out there

for two weeks. What? Yeah. And that's, that's the expectation. Two weeks, you can extend to three. If you're making it to two weeks, you probably didn't catch that thing and you're calling it a bunch of other resources to fight this fire. Really? What's the longest you did spend out there? You know, I had 31 days straight, which was kind of skimp-in- To a place you parachuted into? We parachuted into the Three Sisters Wilderness a couple years back, spent just over two weeks out there and then got rolled into a complex, I ended up managing a little task force, a heavy equipment. Yeah. So you like, whatever, if you got a girlfriend or something, you're like, hey, I'll be back like later or not. Well, the divorce rate is high. Yeah, for a while and fine.

Maybe later or maybe in a few weeks. Yeah. It's tough staying in touch with your family. And that's the hard thing about wild and fire. Whether you're a jumper or on a hot shot crew or an engine. I mean, there's just not a lot of consistency and you got to give up your summers, you know, if nothing else. And the only way you make money, especially if you're making $15, 16 bucks an hour,

which was, I mean, my starting wage was $15 an hour as a smoke jumper. Is that right? You only make money if you're making overtime. So if you're not on a fire, you're going broke. 15 bucks an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I see ads outside of the McDonald's better than that. More than that. It's done. Yeah, full time at DQ and Livingston's 20. Well, and a lot, that's what it got me into this. A lot of it is, I mean, our public lands employees are not paid crazy wages by any means. I mean, when I started, I was making 1270 an hour on the engine. And that was the going rate.

I didn't hit 15 until I was a rookie smoke jumper. And when I was vice president of my union last year, well, that's when all the doge cuts and all the rest started. And they ended up firing 360 people in one day, two Valentine's days ago. 85% of them were making less than 20 bucks an hour. Well, that's the new Valentine's Day massacre. It is, absolutely. And there's a lot of inefficiencies in the federal government. Believe me, I've seen them.

It's not people making 13 bucks an hour swinging a tool to keep a trail clear or road clear. Yeah. Right. And it's all the most efficient workers we got. They had GS2s that they were firing in Montana. I mean, that's $11 and some change keeping a trail clear. You know, yeah, it's absurdity. And these are the people who actually do the damn work.

And that's who was losing their jobs, having their lives turned upside down. And when I called our congressperson, Zinkie's office four or five times, I got crickets. So if he's going to take my coworkers and members' jobs, I'm going to come take his. This May, IHart Radio celebrates Asian Heritage Month. Discover powerful stories, vibrant cultures, and unforgettable music. From inspiring podcasts to playlist that span East, South, Southeast, and West Asian artists. We're honoring the voices shaping our world.

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If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not. going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps GameCalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

So when you left, what was the path with leaving that and getting involved and sort of, I don't, you don't call it the, like the policy end of things. Yeah. Like you left being a smoke jumper and then came in and did a union representative for who? So our union is the National Federation of Federal employees. Okay. So not just fire crews. No, it's, it's the forest service branch of the union, the Forest Service council. Our locals, the low, low, national forest, the bitter root and the Custer Galen out here, which we just

organized last year. Okay. And some of the regional offices that are getting shut down right now as they consolidate down to Salt Lake City and Denver and all the rest. That's about 800 public servants, you know, federal employees. And yeah, a whole lot of those folks lost their jobs. And we lost about a quarter of the agency in the state last year. And you were in this, you were in your role when that was going on.

I was. I mean, I stepped into it beginning of January. So I stepped in just in time for all these cuts to start coming down. What was that like? It was chaos. And it was heartbreaking. I mean, truly. I was, we were getting stories and calls from members like Gal Kara down in the bitter route. She was 15 years into her civil service. She was an archaeologist down in Hamilton. She got fired one day with no notice, no cause because she just happened to have taken a lateral transfer in the last year so she could do more remote work while she went through chemotherapy. Um, Kara was not getting rich. I, you know, fell down in Ennis on the Custer Galton who got a text while he's in line at the airport for his mother's funeral, telling him that he's lost his job and he was only a GS5. So he's losing a job.

He was only making $16 an hour out in the first place. And it's, I mean, it is so aggravating because these folks were not making a whole lot to begin with. And again, because this is not where the damn inefficiency is, right? These were the people doing, keeping all of these things together. And there are a lot of ways to sell off our public land selling off the acreage is just one of them. Right. The plan right now for the Forest Service is to be, is to draw it down to one third of

the staffing levels we were at a year and a half ago. You got one third of the people managing all the same lands. That's a hell of an excuse to turn around and say like, well, why ain't that trail clear? it's not working. We got to then point to the ways it's not working out. Yeah. I hear that. I hear that all the time.

I don't know that. I'd be curious to you guys think about this. I don't know. I hear that, but I don't know that that will be the playbook. Yeah. I don't know. I hear it.

Like, a logic would go. We don't need to spend a ton of time on this. But people will express that the logic would be deprive the land management age, of funding have then watch how chaos ensues fires mismanagement and then someone could say look how bad they're doing what a what a what a disaster we need to do something about this and put this in the hands of someone that can better care for it sure like I hear it I'm not saying

it won't happen I just don't know if that that'll be the sure the rhetoric you don't think someone like Mike Lee might like make that argument yes because he makes every argument last time it was it was it was the legal immigration it was wanting to like do things a hundred miles into montana because of a legal immigration across the canadian border so sure there's some grasping at straws yeah well and i'll yeah sure yes and i mean mike lee's gonna go for he wants the acreage right he wants the land itself yeah but what i see on the ground is i mean this is it's not new they're just stepping up the pace of this and i mean i was on a fire this summer we jumped a fire at outside of steamboat

Springs. And 12 of us jump in. This thing goes to 500 acres. And so we're calling a bunch of resources in that three days in, I'm managing a task force of hand crews. And we put in an order for the most some of the most basic firefighting implements, pumps and hoses. And they tell me, well, we're not getting those till the end of shift tomorrow because they just shut down the gear cache here in steamboat. So we got an overnight airmail, the pumps and hoses from Denver. It'll get here tomorrow. We got to have someone drive it up to the line. We'll get it tomorrow night. So not only is the firefighting itself taken longer, but we're paying so much more to overnight airmail thousands of pounds of equipment that used to be stored right there. I mean, that's the point of a gear cash.

Yeah. And those, I mean, those examples are Legion. You know, when I'm putting an order for a hand crew, it's early July and you want a hotshot crew, that's the most capable 20 people you're going to find for firefighting. And they tell me, well, we don't, we don't have any hot shot crews available. So instead of one hot shot crew, we're going to order three contract crews because they have less capabilities than a hot shot crew. So on paper, it looks real good to say, well, one for one, one crew, one crew. But in reality, if you're on the ground, you bet you're ordering more crews,

and we all end up paying so much more. And that's what I mean when I say, another way of selling these things off, right? That's one of the things I came to see about the, like over the months or over the weeks about the doge cuts, was you came to see ways it brought to mine, you came to see that it created a lot of inefficiencies, like sort of accidentally made all these inefficiencies.

And it reminds me this passage in Aldo Leopoldeopold. pulled Sand County Almanac where he talks about, he's talking about ecology. But he's saying people are taking, like, watch parts. And they don't understand what the parts do and they're flicking them out. Yeah. And then someone later's like, you know, being like, dude, that little thing you threw out, that's like, that makes the whole thing click. That collage was important.

And so we've had other, we had a guy from White River National Forest on who took the, took the, took the buyout. He was a supervisor of White Rift National Forest. Man, he came in and told us just, just like insane stories about things that were supposedly going to help or ways in which he was forced to make cuts that turned around and cost money. Cost time created problems from just having this like what turned out to be like a very ham handed approach. Yeah. I mean, you want to know the biggest way that we end up spending more money is if you don't have ground resources to fight a fire. If I jump in there and we're losing this thing because the wind's blowing, well, my best option is to call in air resources.

So you end up calling, I mean, if I'm on the ground, I can't get a hot trucker. That's when you got to call on a large air tanker to drop fire retardant at $7,000 bucks a pop. And I've stood on fires and watched more money than I will make in my lifetime, fall out the bottom of a large air tanker to put retardant along the side of a wildfire. And you know where that money goes? Well, it goes to the contracting service, ridger aerospace that just so happens to be owned by the third richest man of the United States Senate, Tim Sheehe. and you don't have to look too far to see where the incentive structure is. Maybe we're spending more money. It's going to a different place.

I'd rather have that money staying here for someone making $15 an hour on the district or on the fire crew than paying into a contractor where it's just getting sucked out of all our pockets as taxpayers, you know. What do you think drives people, like the time you spent there, what do you think drives people to take a job where they're, I don't want to say compensated poorly, but take a job where the compensation isn't the point. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, there's a, like what drew you to it.

I love, I love being on public lands. I like stomping around to the woods. If you can get paid to do that, especially in remote places, that's the dream job, right? I'm, I'm sure all of us can relate to that.

Beyond that, it's, you know, they call it being a public servant. It's similar to why a librarian would work in a position where they're not getting rich, or my dad's a public school teacher, right?

There's school teachers in the state, making a starting wage of 39,000, $40,000 an hour right now. You know, there is a sense of service to it, right? And there's something rewarding about being able to look back and say, I've been swinging a tool for the last nine days and running a saw. And I just tied in that fire line. And that fire is not going to burn over that thing.

And there are fewer and fewer jobs every year where you can really look at the labor and the fruit of what your hands have done and see what you've accomplished. Yeah. You know, that's a rare pleasure that you can't find very often in this world. I haven't watched everything you've done. and, you know, bend to your talks and stuff, but I followed enough to know that you're, like, your kind of pitch to voters in the state is really,

is really geared toward working, like, you spend a lot of time talking about working, the working class, the working class people. Yeah. Yeah, and I, I mean, when I got, you feel like that's, like that's your background, that's your people. Yeah, I think that's what we're missing, right? I mean, the average congressperson's worth 12 to 15 times,

the average American right now. Um, and you wonder why there's not a sense of urgency to address all these basic issues. that so many of us are living with on the ground. And I mean, I got to the end of the last fire season. And yeah, I have just watched the agency I work for be gutted in the name of efficiency. And I see inefficiencies. Federal hiring is pretty damn inefficient.

It takes nine months to get somebody hired on a $15 an hour job on a trails crew or a fire crew. That's inefficiency, right? Workman's comp or HR, you got people spending dozens of man hours just to chase down a workman's comp claim for somebody broke their back parachuting into a fire. You know, like that that is inefficient. The guy making $13 an hour swinging a tool is not inefficient. And whether it's fire or any other job, you can tell the difference when somebody making the calls has never been on the ground doing the work. And that's what it feels like in this country right now.

You know, people are struggling to afford a roof over their head or health care or all the rest. And the people who are making the decisions have not experienced that. You know, I mean, when I was a kid, my belly was full because of food stamps for a while my dad was getting his feet underneath them. Thank God. You know, there's not a lot of people in Congress who have ever. lived through that or who've been working three jobs at a time and still come up short on rent,

like a lot of people in this state in this country are. And I think that that lived experience influences the sort of policy making you're doing and where you're going to be looking to cut if you are going to be making those cuts. Are you, let's say you get the nomination, are you sweating it for when the whole part of the campaign comes when it's just all like negative, negative, negative, and people are attacking to your left and right? Does that make you nervous? You know, I'll say we're in a primary right now. The election is June 2nd, so everybody make sure you're registered. But I mean, every time I, you know, get a new, a big endorsement or we, you know, have more support kind of bubble up or a social media video pop up, the negativity

starts already. And we're really, I'm making sure to make this a positive campaign and talk about I'm so tired of all of politics where it's just anger, anger, anger, and people screamed into a cell phone screen. Like, that doesn't get us anywhere. That gets us to a Congress that's the least productive in American history right now in terms of bills passed. And I, the policy experience I do got is I did some organizing and advocacy between fire seasons. I worked for the state library association, a group homeless shelters, just trying to do good where I could between seasons. And they still get things done at the Montana legislature. You got to pass a budget. It has to be balanced. They got to pay for everything. And even, you know, we had the first Republican super

majority in state history in 2023. And we managed to get some made for homeless shelters past because we're in Bozeman, right? You have people living on the back of their cars and trailers who've been living here their whole life. That's not a partisan issue. And you don't get those things done by standing in the room and screaming at everybody about everything you disagree with. You have to be able to talk past that and that just feels like a lost art in modern politics. I read somewhere that you were saying when this is all done, you know, that you don't have to go back out and look for a job. Oh yeah, I'm broke. I'm broke. But that's the point, right? I think we need some broke people in politics. Yeah, no, no, man. Like, yeah, you'd be like, you'd be like looking into help wanted ads.

Yeah. And I want to be clear, nothing wrong with success. You don't have to villainize prosperity. for any of this. But it ain't what we're missing when again like the average congressperson is worth 15 times as much as the average person. We we have a lived experience gap in the halls of power and our decision makers. And I actually think that if we, you know, one of the things I talk about what I learned in my advocacy time is there are dark smoke filled rooms in politics. It's called a conference committee. Anytime the two chambers, the House and the Senate pass a different bill, well, they have to reconcile and it ends up with eight or ten people in one room making all of the decisions. for what is going to become law.

And if every single person in that room is worth, you know, multiple millions of dollars, well, you bet they're going to be a whole lot more willing to give away the money we're spending on food stamps or SNAP benefits. They're going to be able to, they're going to be willing to give away the people who are making 14 bucks an hour because they don't know that those are the people that make this thing work. And there are so many ways that we could find efficiencies in our government. We have not found them at all.

We're going to have a lot of rebuilding to do public lands and everywhere else. And I would just offer that if we want a government that actually works for working people who are getting the short end of the stick on a lot of this stuff, we should send working people to Congress so we can we can fight for ourselves. And the way we win this is we don't pick our own multi-millionaire to go fight all the rest of them. You know, that's not our champion. And it has not been working for for too long whatever parties in power. I told you when we met over the phone. I said you and me probably disagree on 50% of things. I don't know some amount. But I think that I think where we're pretty much aligned is I, I, I, I think where we're pretty much aligned is I, I, I, I imagine you're not going to want to entertain ideas about large-scale public land transfers.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And it scares the hell out of me, this notion under the Forest Service reorg of shutting down nine regional offices and turning it into 15 state offices. Like, I don't know if they'll ever be successful in a land transfer effort. But I hope to hell they won't be. And that does not seem like a move towards efficiency. It seems like a move towards, again, taking decision-making further away from where the actual

work on the ground is going on. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to say this is the motivation, but it looks like sort of. of cast rating. But I haven't heard. No one's tried to sell me on it yet. Yeah.

I've only had people tell me all the ways it's wrong. Yeah, I haven't heard. I haven't heard the benefits of it. No, I mean, somehow we're moving decision making for the Forest Service further away from the decision makers in D.C. and further away from where the work's happening, right? Not only do we lose the historic regional office in Missoula, we also lose the D.C. office where if the chief needs to get a message up the chain, you would think he could go across the street and talk to somebody.

We're losing all that. Oh, man. coming and joining us. Thanks for having me. So the primary is the second? Primary is June 2nd. If anyone is curious, you can go to Samphamontana.com and see what we're all about. We've got policies, endorsers, all the rest on there. And you know, you mentioned that we probably, yeah. Oh, I was to say one, I watched one of your videos where you did a house tour. Uh-huh. He lives out of his house is like, that means bigger

nis, but it's like this studio. By hair. Yeah. And he's got his bookshelf next to his stove. And he's like, it's very convenient. That is efficiency. That is what we need. Yeah. I can just reach right over here and grab book. Two more steps you're in the bathroom. Yeah, no steps wasted. And, uh, yeah, and I'll, I, I will just add, you said we probably disagree on 50% of things. Maybe it's less than that, but I'm, I'll just take it a ballpark.

I don't know. Yeah. We haven't talked. We, we talked about land management and we talked about, you know, um, what I found is you agree with we, I find I agree with a lot more than I would expect until I meet somebody. And part of what we're doing in the campaign is a series of civil discourse conversations. So I just sat down with Michelle Benkeley. She's a Republican legislator in the big group of,

Valley and we talked about the fact that we do not agree on everything and that is okay because Michelle knew what it was like to be on the verge of homelessness raising two boys she you know she has worked as a waitress for 15 years in the valley and we agree on getting people basic health care we agree on making sure that people living on the streets have access to mental health service basic things like that yeah and I actually think that is as as important as the policy specifics is just getting back to a place where we can talk past our differences yeah find the things we agree on because there's all these 80 20 issues where we agree on all the basics

and we just spend our time yelling about the stuff we don't. Calling everybody evil. Exactly. Yeah. There are very few people in this world who do not think that they're bringing the good in the way that they see it.

Well, dude, thanks for coming out. Appreciate the time to come talk to us. Likewise, Steve. I appreciate it. All yeah. Thanks. Okay, got a couple of quick news flashes. Yep.

Today, well, actually, now that you're listening to this, it's probably just a couple of days before. It is Steve's favorite person. birthday party or birthday sorry not party hopefully he's throwing himself a party that was good it's uh sir david attenborough uh turns a hundred years old what a milestone um so we gathered a couple of interesting facts about him he has more honorary degrees than anyone else you i want to listen like here's the dirty secret of the honorary degree this is coming from an honorary

blowing up your whole thing, Steve, right here. What it means is you were invited to do a commencement address. So another way to put it was, he doesn't pass up a chance to do a commencement address would be another way of putting it. Right. So he has passed up, he has not passed up 31 more commencement address invitations. I'm done with commencement addresses. Mark my words.

I hate to do this. But according to the Guinness Book of World Records, he's about 120 on a degree short. I don't Ken Burns is way high. I figured like Gaddafi and Saddam had a lot of honorary degrees. Or one of the most. I mean, who's winning? Yeah, shoot. Guinness says it's the Reverend Theodore M. Hezberg, who's the former president of Notre Dame.

Yeah, actually, 32 doesn't seem like a really, really large number. Maybe is one of the most. More than 50. Okay, there we go. The king of Thailand has a lot, too. Randall, thank you for correcting me at the spot. Yeah, we don't have like 100 emails. Yeah, no corrections on this one.

We already nipped it in the bud. Okay. He's had dozens of species named after him, including, I went through a whole list of them, but this one was really cool to me. It's called Nepenthus Attenboroughe, or Attenboroughe, which is a giant carnivorous pitcher plant. So we're looking at a picture here. Imagine a, like, bright lime neon highlighter green and kind of purple-red, that looking plant that holds about 1.5 liters.

It's been observed to have trapped and digested a shrew. And this was discovered in 2007 in a remote area on a Philippine island. What else? He is one of the most, if not the most, Randall, feel free to check me on this. By whose measurement? There are a bunch of websites that I looked at. he's one of the most traveled people in history. Yeah.

Yeah. I think this was Nat Geo. I didn't pull up all. I didn't pull up all my sourcing. The dude never passed a driver's test. Well, that's a different thing. No, it's not. It's like he never passed a driver's test.

He's just been, he's been, with all due respect. I don't want to hack on an old guy. Let me just come out. I'm not going to say any of the bad stuff about him, except this. Okay. My only beef with the guy. Like, I'm sure he loves his coming. It's not my country, so I don't care.

But I'm sure he loves his country, which gets, you know, points, I suppose, even though it's not ours. My problem with this is how many nature documentaries he has ruined with his narration. That's what it sounds like all the time. He is a one-man wildlife footage ruining machine. That's my right. But I guess so many people would disagree because they keep hiring him and those are. He just gets that job over and over again. And I'm sorry.

I've been to like, I'm a Morgan Freeman fan. He's cranking out narration now. And they make him do the same annoying thing. So maybe it's like the way that they're, dude, the minute they get Larry the cable guy to start doing those, I'm all in. If Larry the cable guy was like,

if Attenborough, I don't know how old the brother's going to live. Let's say there's another 10 years. If in 10 years, when he's 110, if he stops ruining nature movies and they just had Larry the cable guy do him, same footage, same material, Larry the cable guy does them, they would be good. That plant just ate a shrewd, dad gum. Yes, it's the same footage. Like 10 years ago, there was a wildlife documentary series, and I can never remember who actually narrated it. Snoop Dogg did it.

I want to say it was like, it wasn't actually Sam Elliott, but it was like, This young Americans heading out on the open range for the first time. And it's like a little bison standing up. But it all sounded like a drama. Okay, hold on. That would drive me nuts. I'm going to move through the rest of these quickly. But one last thing.

Maybe it's just the genre. And happy birthday, David Attenborough. We talk about you all the time on the show. Thanks for listening. There we go. But shouldn't we as like a new whole, you know, video show thing that we do is like film some nature documentaries and have, you know, different folks? You know what?

them. Why don't you? That should be a new thing. You voice. Here's how I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it like this. You're going to be watching the amazing footage. I'm going to come in now and then I'll be like, that's a blue shark.

You're going to narrate it the same way you narrate it to your family at home. Yeah. I'm like, no, no, no. Those are rainbow smell. I'm going to say stuff like that. Because that's all I'm wondering. It's like when I'm watching, I'm like, I just want to know what it is. I don't want to hear you.

do like verbal gymnastics of throwing your voice all over it. I just want to know. Is that a blue shark? But I think we should do versions. It's like the Steve series of the same video, the Randall series of the same video, et cetera, right? Perfect. So do you remember that show, what's called like mystery?

Mystery science theater? Yeah. They like comment on a movie as they're watching it. What you should do is comment on a narration as you. You know how they like to like, you like, oh, the two animals. love each other and they like make them like people and shit. This little fellow is taking a stroll. Orcas.

Because I know when you're watching that stuff with your family, they're like, they don't actually do that. That's not true. I think we've got, we're on to something here. Okay, moving on. So we've talked about this before, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina and whether or not on a state level. they'd be able to manage Atlantic Red Snapper.

And that's now the case. So those four states have extended seasons. I'm not going to go through all the details, but like last year in 25, the season for commercial snapper was two days. Before that, it was just one day. And this year, it's about a month, month and a half in most of these states.

So greatly expanded number of days to fish snapper. Recreation. Recreational. Sorry, sorry, I said commercial. Recreational. Okay. Some bear attacks. One, unfortunately, we've discovered is ended in the death of a hiker.

This took place in Glacier National Park, which is in Montana. The body of a hiker was found after being reported missing. on the Mount Brown Trail, about two and a half miles up that trail, 50 miles from the trailhead. No, no, no. He was 50 feet from the trail. Sorry, I just said miles, my goodness.

50 feet off the trail. And when he was found, it looked like the injuries that he or she because they haven't released the identity. of the individual. The injuries made it seem as though there was an encounter with the bear. So that was just the other day.

First fatal attack in Glacier since 98. I can't believe that. You're just drawing like an arbitrary line. There's been plenty of fatal attacks in like Northern Continental Divide. Sure. But I can't believe they went 28 years without having one.

When was Night of the Grizzly? 60s? It was it? 60s? I don't know. Was it that long ago? easy to find. And the other incident happened.

67. Just in our backyard in Yellowstone, there were two hikers that happened to be brothers and they were mauled. Initially, one in serious condition, one in critical. I think reports say that they are both probably going to make it. They're in a hotel, in a hospital, in an hospital. And they were they were both airlifted. So hopefully they make it. And you know how this one,

they do like the last time, you know, and it's usually some long time ago. Yeah. The last time someone was, so it's the spring, right? The last time someone was injured by Bear in the park was the fall. Yeah. Yep.

So September 25. So and then the last fatality in, Yellowstone from a bear was 2015, so much more recently than the last fatality in glacier. Now closed down a section of the park. I was fishing in that closure area. Three days before this. Oh, no kidding. I don't think they should do that. They closed a big area. It's like I was just looking at the map like five by like almost 20 mile area. That was that was the other day. So I'm not sure how long they'll continue to keep that close. It's just temporary, but that,

that area is closed to visitors. Two guys got, this is pretty crazy. Two guys in Montana got charged with having two hundred and twenty-three ducks over their limit. Two guys are hunting in the Sun River in January. And they, again, they're hunting on private land.

and a game warden sees him. He goes up to see what they got going on. Two guys, okay? Daily bag limit to seven ducks. These two guys have 66 ducks laying there. Then they go to one of the guys' shops, and they had, that brought the total up. When they go to his shop and see, like, his butchered,

partially butchered and butchered ducks, brings them up the 223 ducks. He had two days in January when they killed 120 ducks. His claim was that it had been a six. slow year. It had been a slow year, and he was just trying to get stocked up. I understand trying to explain yourself, but it ain't like that's going to get you out of it. Like the Warren's going to be like, oh, yeah, okay.

I understand. Give me your best, give me your best shot here. He's like, yeah, he's like sitting in like a mountain of dead ducks. Give me your best, like, help me understand what I'm saying. Yeah. It's been a slow year. and to be like I'm not justifying this in any way at all but it's actually impressive that they were like butchered and stored yeah what's impressive this is the thing people always

overlook on stories like this I feel I have to say it I'd say to say it what's impressive this is the thing you shouldn't say but but I'm just going to say it that is some very good duck hunting. Yes. That is one of them days. They must have hit a migration like perfectly. Most of my brain goes toward you sons of bitches. But a part of it goes to what in the hell spot they got. Yeah.

Again, not. They've been a slow year and then it got really, really, really. That is an amazing two guys to get. A 66 duck morning is an unbelievable day of duck home. Well, maybe you can find out where that was. The funny thing is that's a slow day down in South America. Those guys are shooting hundreds of them a day. Yeah, unbelievable hunting.

And also probably, I hate to say it, probably good wing shooting. I'm going to stop. Probably. Unless they're just going to swat. They're neighbors somewhere in Bozeman. Maybe someone feels like getting a tip from them to pass to you. Yeah. Unbelievable day of hunting.

But also very, very, very bad. Also very bad. But within that, I recognize what an unbelievable day of hunting. This May, IHeart Radio celebrates Asian Heritage Month. Discover powerful stories, vibrant cultures, and unforgettable music. From inspiring podcasts to playlist that span east, south, southeast, and West Asian artists. The voices shaping our world. Listen now on the free IHard Radio app

And at iHardio.ca. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that guys. gobblers are looking for.

I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com.

I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy to use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. Moving on to mountain lions. Pretty cool story out of Minnesota. They discovered what they,

they discovered the first like set of kittens. It says breeding mountain lions, but like they can't necessarily confirm that the breeding took place in Minnesota. If you want it, you got that video. I have a feeling it took place. thereabouts. Yeah.

I mean, but some people like, she could have walked in. Sure. Okay. But this just happened in April. Researchers from the University of Minnesota's Voyagers Wolf project, which is, um,

Voyagers National Park, but this was, this video was taken just south of the park. Uh, first confirmed evidence of Mountlines reproducing in Minnesota than more, and more than 100 years. Look at there. And like,

Obviously, they knew right where those things were. That's not a Mississippi Jaguar either. I mean, that's a mountain lion. Yeah. So it's a female and three subadult. No way. They believe that these kittens were probably born seven to nine months ago, so fall, fallish of 2025.

Minnesota's had no documented cougar reproduction for over. a century. They've seen, they're seen occasionally. Often, like, we hear this story over and over again, like transient males wandering in from places like South Dakota. The South Dakota mountlines seem to get around a lot, but that's all deer hair all over the ground. Yeah, yeah. You see a hoof flapping. Yeah. Look at that, man. What a cool freaking cat. Yeah. So they were historically native to Minnesota, became locally extinct because of same old reasons, hunting overhunting habitat loss, predator eradication campaigns.

Poisoning campaigns. Yep. And since the early 2000s, they've been seeing them now and then, like I said, coming in from Western states. And it's kind of a connection to a broader recovery in the Midwest. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula,

what was it, Steve, last year? you got the I can't remember it was last year the year before but yeah some cats some kittens showed up in Michigan kitten one so that was the first one they found some kittens

and this was in the UP in Michigan um and we're looking at a picture of a kitten hiding under a truck tire yeah very cute little kitten at one point they they saw these things and then they were seeing them without the mom around so they're like

oh you know they probably died. They probably didn't make it. Well, fast forward to this past winter and you can't at the very top of the screen you can see a set up. Oh yeah. So it's like and it's insane. That's them.

So it's the mom man. Running a logging road. Yeah. So Wisconsin they're seeing more lions. So like they're coming back and it's a pretty cool story. Bring them on dude. And then long is like bring them on. And then when There's those stable, good population, bring on a mountain lion season, and I'm happy. Yeah, man.

And the way I look at is maybe those extinct eastern cougars are going to come back someday. All those dudes back, all those dudes back 20 years ago, all over those areas. That sounded crazy. They would see them, and the people would be like, you're nuts. Yep. And they're right. But then at the same time, in Mississippi, you are crazy. Yeah, yeah.

But like Pennsylvania, New York, like, you could see them. getting to like the eastern continental divide in the Appalachians and doing fine. Yeah, man. That's crazy. Yeah, it's a cool story. And here's my message to Americans. No, you will not be killed by a lion. That's my message to Americans.

And this story loosely ties into another Mount Lion story that came in. We had a fan write in about it to have us cover it. He was pretty worked up about it. In Texas, they're looking at changing a little bit how mountain lions are managed. And the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is urging commissioners to adopt a new reporting system for mountain lines in the state, which would basically be, if you kill a lion, you've got to report it within 24 hours. And I think now mountain lines are kind of handled like Berman in Texas. Texas weirdly. And I don't know, I think that Texas don't, I'm not sure a lot of Texas are aware of this.

You are an anomaly. Yeah. Mountain lions are generally, across their range in North America. Highly managed. Mountain lions are generally managed as a big game species. Just if you're in Texas, and I'm not telling you not to be worked up about this, because I'll get to that in the minute. But if you're in Texas,

this is a message to you. Like here, we have regional and unit quotas that when those quotas get filled and they have female and male components to them, it doesn't even matter if the season's over. The quota gets filled. It just shuts down.

There's like mountain lion tag draws. Yeah. And generally, like, you're only allowed one a year, no matter, like in most states where it's legal, a hunt on it. for a permit.

Wyoming manages them like a big game animal. Idaho manages them like a big game animal. Colorado manages like a big game animal. So a little bit, it's like, yes, you have to report them. I hunt turkeys in Wisconsin. You have to report a turkey. You have 24 hours or 48 hours to tell them you got a turkey. So like the simple fact that you'd have to report a lion is not unusual.

No. It's unusual that your state manages them like opossums. Yep. Like there's no close season, no bag limit. And here's where I empathize with Texans that are worked up about this is my understanding from private conversations with people who are in the know is that this is coming from. You always got to look at where is it coming from? Like if it was houndsmen and mountain lion hunters saying, you know what, we should all get together and have a reporting structure. Then you'd be like, okay, these are probably guys. you could trust and you know who's it coming from what i've been told privately is this is coming from people whose aim it is is to end the harvest or killing of mountain lions and so that's why people are suspicious that's what like it says hunters and some hunters and trappers have been vocally opposed to it because they see this as a step towards ending the take of mount lines in Texas, which man, if you're going to fight that battle, Texas is probably not the

state to fight it in, but... No. No. I sit on the fence on this one. Because like report, like, there's a certain size of something. Like a hundred pound cat. If you've killed a hundred pound cat,

it just isn't surprising to me that they would want to know. Like at the state, that the state fishing game agency would be curious to know that you killed a big game animal. That and it's not like this is not a shocking thing. Probably because of how they've been managed historically in Texas. The, like,

which is not managed. The fishing game department probably doesn't have a lot of information on them to begin with. And this is a good way to start gathering some data on mountain lions. But if it's coming from people who are like our goal here is to end the mountain lion hunting. Step one is to do this. thing. Make it harder. So that we can get some reporting and then use that reporting to turn it into how there aren't many lions around or whatever. Yeah. And it's going to, you're going to be Dan if you do, Dan, if you don't. If that's where it's coming from. If it's coming from an anti-hunting

org or anti-hunting people, they're going to, they're going to screw you either way. You're all going to report. And they're going to be like, my God, Texans are slaughtering a thousand mountain lines a year. Or none of you report. And they're going to be like, my God, there's no mountain lines. Yep. Like, there's no, if it's coming from the wrong place, you cannot win. Yeah.

But again, I just feel like Texas, good luck fighting that battle, you know, if that's where it's coming from. My message to Texans is, I don't know. I don't know what to think about that. I'm going to tell you about walleye weekend. Last weekend, May 2nd and 3rd, was. Walleye weekend at the Iowa Great Lakes. The Iowa, I'm sorry, the Iowa glacial lakes.

The Iowa glacial lakes are in northwest Iowa, refers to a chain of lakes with the headliners being Okabogey and Spirit Lake. Those are the two biggest natural lakes in the state. Those lakes are known for two things. One is they have a very strong boat culture that gets a lot of Bachelor and Bachelorette parties to wind up there. Here is me at a Bachelor party there. What's on your face?

I was trying to figure that. out. I think we were playing beach volleyball that day and being dumb. You're smudging. So I don't know what was on our face. This was probably circa 2013. Is that a KG? You look great. Were you even an illegal drinking age back then, Spencer? Yes, I would have been freshly

21, I think, wearing a Stefan Marbury Timberwolves jersey. Yeah. So that's thank you. That's one thing that Okabogey has going on. The other is they have really great fishing. Got it. Like some of the best fishing in the state. Multiple state records have come from Okoboji and spirit.

Northern Pike, Smallmouth Bass, Muskie, Tiger Musky, White Bass, Freshwater Drum, all of those Iowa State Records were caught in these two lakes. Here is a picture of the state record musky that was caught by Kevin Cardwell on Spirit Lake in 2000. No. That, that musky, that musky. 50 pounded. Are muskies native? Is that a tiger musky or a musky?

That is a standard musky. But the Tiger Musky state record also came. Yeah, but that's a bullshit fish. I mean, with all due respect, I've caught him, it's a bullshit fish. Just a hybrid. But with all due respect. With all due respect, they can control, like, rough fish populations. I know, but it's a make-believe fish.

It is. I don't, I'm not. It's a make-believe fish. I would imagine they are native to Iowa, Brody, because the Mississippi River forms their border. What the hell is thinking? I was thinking, because he's from South Dakota. I know. Every time he says something, I feel like he's talking about South Dakota.

He can be showing, like, jungle pictures. And I'd be like, I didn't know that was in South Dakota. So I you know the The Spirit Lake and Okabogi They got good fishing and good bachelor parties Walleye weekend now it's been going on for 40 years It's put on by the Iowa Great Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce

Is it cool? I think it's like Glacial lakes? I don't know glacial Okay it's the Iowa It is the Great Lakes We should have had Rob Sand report this Iowa Great Lakes area chamber of commerce They've been doing this for 40 years

Last year they had record breaking attendance 2300 participants from 22 different states. It costs $30 to enter. And that entry fee puts you in the running for a bunch of raffle prizes, door prizes, a big old trophy that they give out at the end of the weekend. And then all sorts of contests. Here's some of the contests that you're entered in. Heaviest Northern Pike.

Heaviest walleye. Heaviest stringer of three walleye under 19 inches. Heaviest stringer of five. Back up. The heaviest stringer of three walleye under 19 inches. I'm assuming this plays to their limits. Like your limit is three wall line. You can only have one over 20 inches, something like that.

I assume that's where this is more on it. I think it plays the people shoving sinkers in their stomachs. It just plays into a very boring way in. They have all kinds of contests. My favorite one, though. What was the biggest pike? This year wasn't big. It was like nine pounds.

That's not a real special pike. My favorite one of them all, though, is the heaviest stringer of 10 bullheads. Oh, that's one. That's good. I like that. What did that come in at? I will get to that later here. I don't want to, I don't want to ruin that part of the story.

The real prize, though, and this is why everyone enters. Is it bullheads under eight inches? No, no, just any bullhead. The real prize, this is what gets them, you know, to have 2,300 people sign up. It's a chance to catch one of the 10 tagged walleye. Now, these 10 walleye are tagged with what's known as a floy tag. It's a little wire tag. It's like an inch or so, depending on the fish in the state.

It has a series of numbers on it. It usually goes around the dorsal fin of a fish. It resembles like electrical wiring. I was just going to say it looks like a chunk of wiring hanging out of the fish. Yeah, or a cord from a weed ear, maybe. There's a Wally Dog in there. Typically, Floyd tags, they don't contain any microdata. These are not chipped things.

It's just basically an ID tag. The numbers that you see on the exterior of the tag, that's what you get with these things. Now, the tagging is done by the DNR, and these fish are released about a week before walleye week starts or walleye weekend starts. they're released in both Okaboji and Spirit Lake. Oh, no, they catching local Wally Dogs? Yes. Tagging them and putting them back.

Yes. They're not bringing out of town Wally dogs in there. I think these are Wally from Spirit. Could that be like a little weird? If the DNR is doing it. He's all hungry. He doesn't know what's going on. I'm guessing they're not pulling.

Typically states don't have like a brood stock of walleye. They're going out and they're getting their walleye wild and getting their eggs that way. Now the tag is done by the DNR. and then they released a week beforehand, 10 of these walleye between Spirit and Okabogi. If you win the grand prize, this year that was $44,000 for catching one of these tagged fish. And if multiple people catch a tagged fish,

the pot gets split between them. That rarely happens. I was thinking that could get expensive. It could. What I've learned is that their $44,000 prize is insured by a third party in case this were to come to fruition. that way they're not always sweating out. They're going to pay this out.

What's the time frame for catching it? So the contest starts at midnight on Friday and it ends at noon on Sunday. So you have 36 hours. So like you couldn't catch a tag fish a month later and be like, give me my money. There is a side pot that happens. You pay an extra $20. And if you catch one of these tagged wildlife throughout the rest of the summer, I think you have until August, you get a much smaller prize.

But they're still relevant. But this 36 hour window, this is where when you want to catch. catch one of the 10 tagged wall. This feels to me right for, um, like a really smart person to figure out what's up and rig it. Mm. Because all they're doing is they're logging that tag number. Mm-hmm.

Someone has access to that tag number. You don't think you'd have to provide the tag? You, you bring the fish in. I know. It's all, when they let them go. Mm-hmm. Someone knows the tag number.

And it's not released to the public because then you'd have all kind of walleye with that tag number. Mm-hmm. Someone knows. Mm-hmm. Maybe they got some way that, like, they only know half of it and someone else knows half of it. I'll have to ask around. I don't think it would benefit you, though.

Again, there's no microdata. There's no, like, chipping these walleye. All you need is tag with that number and put it in a walleye and go, ha. Okay. Yeah, if the DNR wanted to help cheat the contest, they could rig it some way. So 36 hours. It's a spy movie. And to win the $44,000 grand prize.

Now, people take this very serious because of the pot that's available. and they start fishing at midnight when walleye weekend begins. Well, this year, walleye weekend starts with a lot of excitement. At 3 a.m., which is three hours into the contest, a tagged walleye gets caught. The anglers immediately head to the bait shop. They have their fish verified to claim their prize.

But it turns out this tag was from last year's event. What? 2025. So it doesn't count. She's holding a 2025 tagged walli. So she went in there thinking she had that much. money and didn't? Did not count.

The really heartbreaking thing is the floy tag was the same color. So like seeing the yellow floyd tag, it's like we did it. We got the $50,000 walleye. Let's go claim our prize. So a real devastating start for wallace. Oh, that put me right back. It's drinking, man. Now it gets worse.

It gets worse. It gets worse. I can't handle the heartbreak. Seven hours later at 10 a.m., a second tagged walleye shows up at the bait shop. Here's what happened. The anglers said they started fishing at midnight. They caught a limit or roughly a limit. I couldn't get the exact details in how many walleye, but they had a number of walleye.

They head home around 4 a.m. After four hours of fishing, they throw the walleye on ice, go to bed. They get up at 9 a.m. to clean their fish. And it's then when they realize that one of their fish is tagged. Because they were drunk. They didn't previously. Maybe I don't know what their BAC was. But they find that when they go to clean one of their fish,

15-inch walleye has a tag on. So this time, the tag is from 2026. So it's an eligible fish. But here's the problem. The fish is stone cold dead. And the rules explicitly state that a fish must be alive to count in the contest. What? Fish, Phil has a picture of the flyer for us.

And this is just page one. I highlighted the three spots where it says this. Walleye must be alive. All fish must be alive. walleye must be recently caught alive and tagged. So they mean it when they put in the rules that your fish has to be alive. And that fish is deader. Very dead.

He was thrown on ice. To be fair, it's a walleye. Come on. I mean, who, you know? Hey, rules is rules, man. That was one of last year's fish. Yeah. Rules is rules.

It was a 2026 fish. It was thrown on ice. Poor guys didn't realize it. Damn. They were hauling them in so fast. They weren't looking for tags. Then what happened? Well, I talked to Mason from Stan's bait and tackle.

He was the one who checked in both the 2025 walleye at 3 a.m. And the dead walleye at 10 a.m. He personally knows the anglers who caught the dead walleye and they want to remain anonymous. But I got a lot of details from Mason. He said the anglers were aware of the rule. They pretty much knew when they brought the fish in that they weren't going to get their $44,000 prize. But they went registered anyway. Then someone from the Chamber of Commerce showed up and confirmed the bad news that this fish was no longer

eligible because it was dead. Mason said the anglers were pretty bummed, and that they had basically accepted their fate before they even got to the bait shop that morning because they knew what was up. There's also this other wrinkle in this story. The two men didn't know which one of them caught the walleye. Yeah, I was going to create another issue. They're drunk. They're just throwing walleye as on to a cooler. This creates some other issues. It's an individual tournament, not a team tournament. And then they also administer a line detector test. And under this scenario, neither one of them would be able to firmly say that they legally

caught this fish during the tournament hours. So the whole thing was layered with problems. Again, Mason said that these guys knew they messed up and they didn't really hang their heads too much. He said they plan to get the walleye mounted, actually, to commemorate the experience that they had. Remembering the giant missed opportunity. That's right.

See that wall? A life-changing amount of money. You kids would have gone to college. If I hadn't just throwing that walleye on it. Yes. And actually, the community has handled the news worse than those anglers did. Oh, yeah. Phil is now going to play for you a clip of someone from the Chamber of Commerce making this announcement at Walleye weekend.

I want you to listen to how the crowd reacts, just how devastated they are. This video is via Travis Chin. Take it away, Phil. Got a call for Mason at Stans yesterday afternoon. Have a tag walleye coming in. Good news, bad news. Good news, tag walleye coming in. Bad news. Walei is dead. On the rule sheet. All tag fish, all fish must be alive.

So that fish was not alive. Unfortunately, the folks fished until 4, 4.30 in the morning, went home to their nap, got up to clean fish. Oh, crap, we've got to tag walleye. So we felt extremely horrible about that. The other issue is it's an individual tournament, right? This isn't a team tournament. They didn't know which angler caught the fish. So that's a double. Oh, okay? Mason is here from Stance, and they don't want to be recognized,

but they're going to get a prize that Mason is providing on behalf of Stans Baten Tackles. So let's give Mason a big hand. Just a lot of sad news Those folks had delivered I would have, I feel like I would If I was that guy I'd have told the story

In a different order Do you know what I mean? Yeah, okay Give us an example I would have done like a narrative He told he he Spoiler alerted his story Our radio celebrates Asian heritage month

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And at iHardio.ca. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors,

where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no. no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back

together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's like the biggest reason folks are upset.

It's something Mason told me has been talked about for years. the rules of the tournament conflict with Iowa's AIS aquatic invasive species rules. This is from page 18 of the 26 Iowa DNR Fishing Handbook. In big red letters,

it says, quote, help stop the spread of aquatic invasive species. It's the law. Then below that, they explain the clean, drain dry regulations

and say, drain water from all equipment, motor, live oil, bilge, transomwell ballast system. Before you leave a water body, drain plugs must be removed at the water access.

remain open during transport. So as you can see, that makes it really difficult to deliver the Chamber of Commerce a live walleye when they're making you pull plugs. They should say unless you have a $44,000 Wally Dog, then it's okay. Yeah. Despite this to Mason's knowledge, this has never happened before. This has never been a problem where a dead walleye shows up during the contest. But as you can see, I was rules.

He's nitpicking. Make it hard. So no one won a big price. Nobody, nobody has won it. No. But Mason has said that they've been. mumbling about this problem for years, the community at large, and that he actually heard that this week there's going to be a meeting to talk about these clashing regulations that they have.

You know, maybe this $44,000 walleye is what's going to finally inspire a change to allow an angler to bring in a legal walleye that's not transporting water from a lake you're not supposed to. God, man. What happens? That story's got layers, dude. What happens the prize money if no one wins? So it includes is the next year, actually.

Yeah, the weekend tournament's over. Again, if you paid the extra $20, you have a chance to catch one of these walleye later this summer. It's a much smaller prize at that point. And my understanding is the prize money will increase next year because of that. You know, you talk about that insurance outfit that insures those kind of things. Yep. I was at this event one time and there you could roll. It was a conservation org event and you could roll dice to win a truck, brand new truck.

I think you had to take a five or six pack of duc. ice and roll all one of a kind, which is, I looked it up at the time. It's not going to happen. I've seen it happen. You have? Yatsis. Yeah. I think it wasn't it. No, no, no, it wasn't it. I think it was six. Shakeda is five. Five. Yeah. And I think it was six. Anyways, they had the, the insurance guy was there. I was shooting the breeze with him. Um, you know what he did? He's got these dice. He's got this thing out. He had, he weighs, he weighs all the dice. inspects all the dice and he took a caliper

a digital caliper to the dice you have to yeah and no one even came close to win that truck I paid for a shake a day for the table at the bar

and this was a few months ago and Randall won the damn thing and so we like started going crazy it was a $70 pot so I bought I bought the most loaded nachos I could for the table and

And then I thought the server wanted to cash us out, and I gave her all the cash, which included a rather generous tip. And I said, you know, the rest is for you. And she said, I know. And then it was too late to take it back. It was the most sort of passive aggressive. In that moment, I went from feeling. Why was she mad at you?

I went for feeling very large to very small. And then very large again. Why was she upset? I don't know. Were you guys being rude? No, I thought we were, no. Places out of business now, so. Yeah.

I'm surprised. So you guys went out drinking without me. Yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah. There were other coworkers. I think a lot of that stuff happens to be honest with you. You should feel even worse. You just seen the group.

I think that happens a lot. Yeah. It was never. You want to go out drinking? No. What was never acknowledged? If that pot had been like $1,200, Randall, what, what percentage would I get of that for for buying your $1 shake a day?

I would have, I would have ordered some sort of strange, uh, curiosity off eBay for you. That's related. to rocks or made up animals. Yeah. Because I would have felt entitled to a little bit of that. Yeah. Yeah. I want to be asked to do stuff, but I don't want to be asked.

You know, I'm just going to say no. Yeah. Now, at the end of the video earlier, you heard the dude in the mic say that Mason from Stan's bait shop gave the two anglers a prize because he felt so darn bad for them. Mason didn't need to do that. These prizes come from the Chamber of Commerce. And he said that Mason, that they felt like, you know, they deserve something. So he gave him a couple St. Croix Tournament rods.

Oh, great. Which is like, that's a great walleye rod worth a north of, you know, 300 bucks, so good on Mason. Awesome. That's a great tackle shop. And while I had Mason on the phone, I asked him for a fishing report so I could deliver, you know, some real information to our Iweegean listeners. Here it is. Spirit Lake has been pretty good for 12 to 14 inch walleye, but you need to do a lot of sorting to find the bigger ones. There's some good cropy and perch fishing, too.

Okoboji guys are doing real well on 17 to 19 inch walli. Some 20 plus inches being caught, not quite. as much action is spirit, though. The panfish and bass bite has been hot lately for either lake. He recommends trolling crank baits in 8 to 15 foot of water. Sweet spot seems to be around the 10 to 12 foot range. He says guys are also finding success pitching jigs around the basins in 18 to 20 feet of water. So there's your mid-May fishing report for Iowa.

I was excited. Iowa's great lakes. Now to circle back, what I found to be the most interesting part of the contest is the 10-stringer bullhead contest. The winner this year had a bag of 14.32 pounds. That means his average bullhead was about one and a half pounds. That is a lunker bullhead. Chris Daisy, he was the champion for the fourth year in a row. Here's a post-game press conference interview that Dave Mashhoff got with Mr. Bullhead champion.

Play it, Phil. We're here at the 44th annual Great Walleye weekend, and the heaviest stringer of bullhead was 14.32 pounds, also won by Chris Daisy of Spirit Lake and this is the fourth year in a row that you've won that category, Chris. What's the secret? Lots of fishing, lots of night trawers and lots of sore fingers. Well, what were you using for bait on those bullheads? Mostly night drawer, leadhead, just casting up underneath the tubes there at Buffalo Run up on the grade. So that seemed to be a pretty hot spot?

No, this was a hard year for bullheads. It took a lot of fishing, a lot of sording. What do you attribute the tough go for? My grandpa used to bring me up here as a little kid, so I just keep it going. You said it was kind of tough fishing for the bullheads. Colder water, or what do you attribute that to? I think it is, yeah, a lot of colder water. We had a cold snap up here, so it slowed everything down. I mean, the big wally were biting good this weekend, but everything is slot fished,

so I had to go for something. Well, congratulations again. Fourth year in the row on the heaviest stringer of a bullhead, 14.3.2 pounds. You don't want to see Chris Daisy entering your bullhead contest. No. He's going to clean up. I'll tell you, that interviewer. This is Dave Mashhoff.

Dave Mashoff? You see that move he did? He asked the guy a question. The guy didn't understand and answered something different. He didn't blame. So he just very smoothly did his question over again with different words. And then nailed it the second time and never, it never phased him. Yeah, kept on trucking.

You know what I mean? Professional hard hitting journalism there. Yeah, he's never like, hey, you misunderstood. Or, you know, he just is like, Bam. That's an underrated fish, man, the bullhead. Yeah. Randall, that was a great segment.

That had a lot of layers to it. Like money won and lost. Yeah. Well, the Department of Interior announced this week that they're officially conveyed or have conveyed 1.4 million acres of BLM lands along the Dalton Highway to the state of Alaska. Phil, do you have the, uh, so, so,

So what we're looking at here on the screen is a map of the great state of Laska. And you can see the Dalton highway running there from, goes from Fairbanks up. I don't really know if it officially starts in Fairbanks, but basically goes from Fairbanks up to Prudow Bay up to, like across the north slope. Well, yeah, no, it does. Yeah.

So. I mean, the pipeline goes all the way down. Right, right. So anyway, basically, you'll see this called a, a public land transfer, and that's exactly what it is. However, under the terms of the Alaska Statehood Act, that law authorized the transfer of approximately 105 million acres of federal land to the state of Alaska. And not all of that land has been transferred up until now. So there's, I think what I saw, there's approximately 5.2 million acres that the state was

entitled to and the state has wanted lands along the Dalton utility corridor. The utility corridor is essentially a 244 mile strip of ground along the pipeline that was set aside by the Nixon administration in the 70s with public land, I guess, ordinance, just PLO 550 and 5180. And it was a buffer zone. It also importantly connects a bunch of other public land. So it borders the Canutei National Wildlife Refuge, the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge, and both the gates of the Arctic National Park and Anwar. So it's essentially a strip, a long strip of BLM land that's now been transferred to the state for energy development.

And the way this basically went down was they had passed a route. resource management plan for these BLM lands in the past few years. Congress used the CRA, which is the Congressional Review Act, the same thing that they did with the boundary waters, to nullify that resource management plan. And then Secretary of the Interior Bergram revoked PLO 5150 and 5180 in February, I believe. And then finally, they did the this transfer. So it's been a long, sort of slow running process that led up to this. It wasn't really something that was like out of the blue overnight. The state has always wanted these lands for resource extraction. It's an industrial, yeah, I get, it's an industrial corridor as is.

It's called the Hall Road. Yeah. Right. It's like a road that parallels a giant pipeline. Yeah. And so, so I mean, I talk to several people about. this and their take was it's a bummer that they gave them basically everything that they asked for because some of it really isn't suitable for resource extraction. But they're not going to restrict the state's not going to restrict access off that. No, no, the state is entitled to make these claims. One concern, it doesn't green light Ambler Road, but it removes one of the barriers to building the Ambler Road. And so again, that's the 200-mile road that would cut west across the Brooks range.

And so it's, you know, there's kind of two different, kind of two different takeaways. One is like, yeah, ideally, maybe this wouldn't have happened. But at the same time, the state is entitled to these lands under the statehood act. And so they will eventually get, they will eventually do their claims. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's kind of, you know, wait and see. it happens, but again, like also keep your eyes on, on ambler.

There was some of that, there was some of that transfer down where we hang out down in southeast. Yeah. I mean, the state has, yeah. Uh, I've hunted off that highway a fair bit, but always north of that, always north of those new lands. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, because they own right over the crest, over the, so that there's the seeding, the land their seating is on the north side of the Brooks range and we used to hunt off that hall road north of there yet yeah yeah it's and it's like a popular walk-in area for caribou hunting yeah we were canoe in but yeah you can't you can't fire a rifle within five miles of that pipeline so it's a big bow hunting corridor through there so that's the that's the

news in public lands this week okay over to michigan over to michigan um they have expanded the controversial for no reason they have expanded walleye spearfishing in Michigan so in 2021 the state came in and created a spear fishing season for walleye lake trout and northeast northern pike and they did this experimental thing where they created two zones they made a zone in lake michigan everything south of the southern pier and Grand Haven South, Lake Michigan only, not the interior waters,

was open to walleye spearing. And then they took an area in Lake Huron, and it was south of Thunder Bay. They made it open for spearing lake trout, walleye northerns. Fish that previously you had not been able to do underwater spear fishing.

You could underwater spear, you could through the ice spear northern pike, but you couldn't underwater, spearfish. A lot of walleye fishermen had a connoption about it. What they did was, because they're going to kill all the wallies. So what they did was you had to get a special walleye per, you had to get a special spearfishing permit, and you had to report all your harvest. Okay. They did it for their three years. They had another year with reporting, and now they have greatly expanded spear fishing opportunity, underwater spear fishing opportunity. You may not know this, but like for the, the, who might not? You, I'm going to ask you, for all the like thousands and thousands of walleye rod and real anglers that were mad about the spearfishing, do they know how many, how few people actually?

I'm going to tell them. They're going to know in a minute. That's what I want to know. They're going to know. They're going to know some stats. The controversy is not over. Yeah. With these proposals, so a friend of mine, Jonathan Durka, was, is like, a.

spearfisherman who has like really been ushering this process. I wound up speaking to two commissioners in Michigan over the last months before this happened. I did phone calls to two commissioners and wrote letters pleading for these expansions. And they've done the expansions. Can you pull up the expansion map? These are the Michigan waters. You're not allowed to spearfish underwater spearfishing for walleye, northerns and lake. trout. So you got basically like from Chicago, so the Illinois, Michigan line, or there it's the

Indiana, Michigan line up to, it's like a little wedge Indiana in there between Illinois and Michigan along the shoreline. You can underwater spearfish from the Indiana, Michigan line up to up to the 45th parallel is where they draw that line. And then all the, you know, Grand Traverse Bay is out. So the 40th fifth parallel runs south runs across the state south of traversity there's a little wedge down in eerie yep kind of like south of detroit down to the ohio state line you can spear fish that's right where the is that where the st clair river pops out that's big yeah it's just right there hereon you could do here on all inside the thumb from thunder bay basically thunderbay down to the bottom of Lake Huron, out to the Canadian border.

In northern Lake Michigan, they opened a big stretch along the southern upper peninsula offshore with some key areas removed, and they opened up a bunch of Lake Superior off the northern coast of the Upper Peninsula, minus some big spawning grounds out there that are closed. So that's great news. However, the Chippewa-Ot-Otribes are approaching. protesting, not the expansions. They've written a letter of protests saying they want to bring back reporting and they want to bring back the special license because they're saying there's no way to know how many people are out there doing this.

Well, check this out. Okay. When they open up the spearfishing license, you had to go get a free certificate. You had to get like a spearfishing stamp. Okay. Guess how many people went and got a spearfishing stamp? 43. 112

14 4,000 out of those 4,000 out of those 4,000 guess how many shot a fish 500 200 shot of fish

out of those 200 spear fishermen that shot a fish those 200 people killed a total of 430 Wow they killed 430 wallets. There's probably like half a dozen that are really laying into them.

My buddy, he pulled him out. The number of product drops down to 330. So, so with the Chippewa Auto tribes are saying, well, they're doing so much to promote underwater spear fishing, it's going to blow up if they don't have reporting. And so we need to know what they're up to. Well, angler hours on underwater spearfishing

isn't going up. It just goes down, down, down, as people realize what a bitch it is. Yeah, the barrier to entry thing is just like, it's not something everybody's going to go do. 4,000 guys thought they'd go. 200 guys went. Annual angler hours went from 2,300 to 1,900 to 1,400. Yeah, and I'll bet the 4,000.

Word is out that it sucks. I'll bet the 4, it's cold. You can't see anything. It's cold. And the 4,000 were like, people, are like, I'll get it. It's free.

A lot. They weren't ever going to go. So again, they killed these fishermen, one of these years, these fishermen kill 430 wallies. Now, allow me to ask.

What? Okay. Oh, let me back up. Angler effort, sitting at about 1,400 hours of spearfishing angler effort. Guess how much many man hours

of rod and real effort occur in Michigan? 10 million. 1.4 million. One point, million man hours of fishing effort versus 1,400 of spear fishing effort. Last year in Saginaw Bay, they killed, in Saginaw Bay, they killed 500,000 walleye. Spear fishermen statewide, 430. The Detroit and St. Clair Rivers, 400,000 walleye.

So between Saginaw Bay, which is that little thumb notch, and then down there on the bottom of that little spear fishing area, 900,000 Wally dogs. Spear fishermen, 340. Oh, no, my buddy. Spear fisherman, 430. My buddy on the St. Clair right there on that St. Clair, they're out there hammering them right now, you know. And that, that Saginaw Bay fishery, eight walleye a day, 13 inch minimum. Eight a day. Eight a day, 13 inch minimum.

They are, listen, I don't care how you feel about dudes swimming around underwater with a spear gun. It doesn't matter. It does not matter. I will be there in June hitting it hard. We should do a t-shirt. I'm going to kill all your wall eyes. We should do a t-shirt with you in a wetsuit and fins. It says it doesn't matter.

Or don't worry about it. It does not matter. If people want to go in the water and risk shallow water blackout and get all cold, let them. The question is this. Since it does not matter, I look forward to Michigan passing a salmon spear fishing season. That will be the most awesome thing on the planet. Cannot wait. Would you hit them right outside the river mouse or where would you?

I'm thinking flashers. Oh, you'd go down and No, I think you'd free drift. Yeah. I think you'd just free drift of flasher chains. Maybe some chum. If you can chum, you can't chum, but maybe they'd let you chum, but they're not going to let you chum.

I think you'd have to use a string of flashers. Yeah. Dude, ultimate challenge, man. Big old. And people would be like, They're going to kill all the salmon. The salmon that don't go on there. And the annual report will come in.

It's like, they got two. They got two. Thanks to joining the new show. They got two. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms

called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that got are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods,

they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelps game calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut. for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human.