The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 917: Out-of-Towners Take Over The News: Murder, Pronghorn, Helicopters, and More!

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

The MeatEater Crew discuss: unprecedented fishing closures; Arkansas is charging hikers; wake-boat impacts; pronghorn migration corridors; and more! Presented by Can-Am: maker of the best ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com 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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We'll see you there. Welcome to the news show. Today we've got Tony waging war on wakeboats, Jordan recounting how a backwoods hermit was charged with murder, Maggie educating us on antelope migration corridors, Brent wants Arkansas hikers to pay their fair share. Mark is covering unprecedented fishing closures across the West and more. But first, our news.

Our news. So satisfying, Phil. I like that. Glad to hear it. Really working your magic with that sounder. We've got all my favorite out of town people here today. That's my news. We got Tony Peterson, Maggie Huddle, Mark Kenyon, Nate Mason, not an out-of-town person.

Jordan Sillers and Brent Reeves. Once a summer, we have them come to Bozeman for a thing. We call the Hoot Nanny. We hang out with our favorite folks, our favorite brands, and spend a few days together. My two favorite things that I saw this week that I think is noteworthy for our audience. The first one was the Can Am EV ATV. They had talked about this ahead of time. they're like, yeah, it's really quiet.

It's actually silent. It's like, okay, yeah, it's silent, okay, silent ATV. It was literally silent. That thing didn't make any noise. I feel like all the hunters there, like, really we're trying to find the noise that that thing would make, and it just didn't make any at all. That'll be a game changer, I think, for some hunters across the country. I didn't know an ATV could be that quiet.

It's as loud as a bicycle, I would say. That is pretty sweet. So many of us have seen the you know electric bikes blow up in our in the white tail world, but I feel like when you have that added capacity of an ATV That's pretty that's pretty slick wildly cool didn't think it was possible everybody I was standing beside said oh turkey season You could cover some ground with that all right More of our news we got Jordan Sillers updating us on the blood trails mini series Jordan Yes so first blood trails mini-series series is out all three episodes. It's called Paradise Prison. It's about hunters and gun owners who were caught in Turks and Caicos, which is a Caribbean archipelago. They were caught with ammunition in their luggage. This came out really in 2024. It really went viral, partly because they were threatening them with pretty serious prison time. There's a mandatory minimum 12 years in prison for this mistake.

that a lot of people, like a lot of hunters, if you travel to hunt, if you go to the range a lot, this is something you worry about and you try not to do, but it's, you know, it can happen. And these guys were, were under some pretty serious threats. And so the mini series covers some things, a lot of things that didn't come out at the time because these guys were on the island. They didn't want to say everything that was happening because they were worried about retaliation. And so now they can kind of share the full story. And it's pretty wild. Our audience is probably vaguely aware of this story at some extent because we covered it in the past.

Yeah, we talked to them at the time. Yeah, we had an article. Steve talked to them briefly. Yeah. So that mini series is out right now. The first time I ever flew on my own in college, I was very anxious about like following all the laws. Like, what if I have one ounce too much toothpaste? They're going to throw me at jail, right?

Yeah. Everything went fine going through TSA. The guy behind me, who I worked with at the time, had a bullet in his backpack. He didn't get on the plane that day. But it made me feel a lot better about my preparedness for flying. One of the women who was caught and jailed, she was actually handcuffed to a chair for four days because they didn't have a facility for her. TSA caught her lotion in Florida, but not the bullets in her bag. Oh, wow.

And they threw the lotion away and led her on the plane. Dude, I made it through one time. I was going to a bear hunt in Quebec, and I had a knife, a metal decoy steak, and turkey loads, shotgun shells in my bag. And they, TSA pulled me aside, and they're like, man, you got a lot of stuff in here. And I'm like, yeah, you got me. And then when I got to my destination, they never grabbed the shotgun shells. So they pulled the decoy stake in my knife, and they just let me through with turkey loads. Terrorist Tony.

That's why they call them that. How many episodes, Jordan? There's three episodes in the miniseries. Okay. Yep. They're all out now. Great. So go listen to them.

Maggie, Haldol, what's your news? What do you got going on? Oh, I got a couple exciting things coming up in August. My niece is five years old, and we're taking her on her first backpacking trip. And she just came up to me last night, and she said, Aunt Maggie, I'm so excited to go backpacking. I've never been on a backpacking trip before. So we're taking her up in the winds. We'll see how it goes.

She's been practicing this summer. She's been hiking. We're not going very far, but a good first experience for her. Mark Canyon, any advice for taking a young child on a backpacking trip? You have some experience with this, right? Yeah, for sure. We've been taking our boys out a long time. And I was going to ask, how many nights, how many miles?

We're only going in about five miles. And it's going to be two or three. three nights depending on how things go. We're flexible. Yeah. But it's a very easy trail. One of the first big back, not big, but one of the first backpacking trips we did with our kids was in the winds up into one of the areas that you and I were just talking about earlier. I won't mention it.

We don't want a spot burn. Yeah, yeah. I know what you're talking about. But, but yeah, bring gummy bears or some kind of easy access, like incentive throughout the hike. So that whenever they're kind of hitting that slowdown period or starting to complain, you can be like, hey, five. more gummy bears or if we can make it to that big rock you get a gummy bear or if we can think dave gardner does for me when we're out so uh so yeah lots of snacks find ways to add like games and stories throughout like story time is like a cheat code when

hiking with our kids if you can just get a story going sometimes they just want to hear like real life stories or other times like last night took the kids for a run and they just wanted me to make up a story. So then we'll kind of do a joint storytelling exercise where I'll start and then they'll throw in like colorful details. Like actually, Dad, he's not riding a horse. How about he's riding a robot cheetah? And then you just kind of go with

that. And so if you can do that, that will get me through those long kind of slogging miles on the backpack and trip. And then yeah, I mean, just for me, it was an expectation reset when it came to camping and hiking with the kids. It just went from

realizing that what I want to do and how far I want to go and what my goals are, that has to just go out the window. If it's going, if it was going to be three miles, but instead we're going to go one mile, but the kids are having a blast, that's a win. And I know they're not your kids. It's not your child. So it's maybe a little different. Maybe you just kick her in the tail and say, get going. I'll have the candy in my pocket, I'm a diabetic. So I got that lockdown. My mom is a school teacher for years. So she's, you know, she's got the activities. I'm sure already planned. It's, it's so fun. It's so. It's so fun to see them out there learning to love these things and experience them you're gonna have a blast oh

i'm very excited here's how ignorant i am to this whole thing you're not going to carry a five-year-old are you no no not so a five-year-old's going to be hiking on on her own our kids probably gosh once they're past two it's really not fun carrying them okay so yeah one thing i learned is that i should have gone longer distances when they were younger because when you can carry them you could actually cover a lot of ground so we could have done like eight 10 mile when they were riding on my back. But we kind of moderated early because there's that worry, like, oh, gosh, I've got a newborn infant.

And if we're seven miles back in the back country and something goes wrong, you know, we'll want to get out. But I could have done it. This was where Nate's first backpacking trip was. And he walked in there when he was two. Okay. If that gives you any idea what my sweetheart's a lot of time in those mountains. I've got to throw a more story.

about a trip with these kids into the same mountain range that you're going into. We did this backpacking trip I alluded to earlier. So at the time Colt was probably two or three and then ever would have been four or five. So it must have been five or six.

Somewhere in that ballpark. But either way, we went in there and we told my parents and my in-laws are itinerary. Like, hey, we're going to be going in on this day. We should be out three days or four days later. We'll be back by dinner. So you should be get a hold of us.

So this was like a part of a broader like 10 or 11 day camping, backpacking trip, some car camping, some in the back country. And our plans changed. I told my parents, my wife forgot to tell hers. So we go into the backpacking trip because of the plans changed,

we ended up being in there a day and a half longer than we were at expecting. So as we are hiking back coming out, someone, you know, says, hey, how are you guys doing? I'm like, are you guys from Michigan? we're like, yeah?

He's like, could you smell it on you? Yeah, are you guys, are you guys okay? Like, are you guys okay? I'm like, yeah, we're fine. Like, there's people looking for it. Like, what? And then we keep walking and then another person says,

hey, are you folks from Michigan? Like, uh, yes. He's like, yeah, the sheriff's looking for you guys. And then all of a sudden it dawned on me. I'm like, Kylie, did you tell your mom about the change in itinerary? She's like, I didn't. So then I had to try to get a Garmin, in reach message out to

my wife's mom while I decided I was going to carry the kids to go as fast as we could and my wife was going to sprint back to the truck as fast as she could to try to call off a search and rescue so we're not having to pay for a helicopter bill or something comforting to know that people are looking for you though

if you go 36 hours too long yeah it was just long enough to get them over the edge they called someone in so there was no helicopter there's no major search and rescue yeah but there was someone out there starting what else you got going on Maggie Oh, the other thing I have going on that I'm excited about is I'm helping out with this more than gatherers.

It's an experience that's over two weekends put on by Wyoming Wildlife Federation. And it's a way for women to get their Hunter's Ed certification. But it's more than that. They get really into rifle handling, like actual hunting skills. how to break down an animal, how to cook an animal. So it's more of an immersive experience than just taking a hunter's ed class, getting the cert. And it's women only, which is cool. I did a duck hunting clinic with Venery out of Montana that is sort of a similar thing at Teller Wildlife Refuge.

And it was really cool because I wanted to get into duck hunting. I'd done it a couple times, but I didn't really have the tools or the confidence to go out by myself. So one weekend just sort of helped me build up my skill set. So I felt able to go out by myself, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to do. So I'm happy to be a part of that, and I'm really excited. More than Gathers, a very clever name. Kudos to whoever came up with that. Jess Johnson, I believe.

Shout out to her. Brett Reeves, what are you got going on? uh well we just launched uh the bear camp uh 12 and 26 uh i don't know mark's in here but clay's not are we feel is this a film or a video film a film a film feature film it's it's been out now for a little bit and got it's not the it's not the regular old bear camp there's some twist and turns in it really and what part of the world was this bear this was in arkansas uh it's it's one we do every year have been doing for quite a while now. And it was in a different part of Arkansas.

We usually hunt kind of down where Clay's from. And this one was in a different kind of more northern part. Kind of a different zone there. And actually had Ted Cople in camp there for a couple of days as part of another thing. It's our CBS Sunday morning. It's already come out. So that was a little different having, having Ted there.

But Lake Pickle, was there and the regular old lukem family and myself and we just it was a good time it's a good film got some good good lessons in there video is out on our youtube channel uh the podcast that talks about that video is also on our podcast network brent was telling me a story yesterday about i think it was the first time you and clay had ever gone on a bear trip together in saskatchewan you had a long boat ride yep I loved it so much. I want you to tell the audience what happened at the end of this 55 mile boat ride. 50 is five and a half hours in a boat in a John boat across Walliston Lake.

It was absolutely treacherous. I thought there's no way I'm living through this. And Clay was in a boat ahead of me. And as they got on the dock probably 30 minutes before we got there. And when we got there, I mean, the water, everything is soaked. water's a third full of the boat's a third full of water and we slide up to the bank and to the little dock that they had constructed there and he's standing at the end and he grabs my hand pulls me out of the boat and i looked at him and i said nobody knows where the love of god goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours and his eyes bugged out of his head and he said did you just make that up i should have said yes yeah yeah Brent actually wrote the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As we all know.

That was the ghost rider for Gordon. Tony Peterson, what you got going on? You know, I have a new fishing project dropping here in a couple days. I hope I have my fingers and toes crossed that this still happens. But a couple years ago, I had pitched a fishing series sort of based on my style of public land bow hunting, which is my favorite thing to do is just show up somewhere new. figure it out and make something happen in a really short amount of time. And so we ended up partnering with onex fish to take that sort of mentality to the water and pick a challenge that was kind of outside of my wheelhouse on a lot of them,

go to a new lake, catch a trophy walleye in a couple days, you know, figure out the whole thing. And those we, so we filmed five episodes, you know, five target species, basically five different states. And those will start dropping here in a couple days, like I said. And it was just a really, it was the most fun I've had in a fishing project so far. So I hope people like it because I think it's pretty cool. On our YouTube channel? Yep. Okay.

I can't wait to see that. I remember you and I riffing on that over pancakes. Yeah. Like a summer or two ago. And it just seems such a great idea. So the fact that it's actually happening is pretty sweet. Man, it was, you know, the challenge with fishing is how do you make it interesting, right? Like a lot of the fishing content coverage is tournaments because it's,

there's built-in drama, but the old school Bill dance style doesn't fly anymore. You know, people need a little bit more at stake. And that one, you know, it just put me in a position to like truly have to figure something out in real time, not get any information ahead of time other than, you know, whatever little e-scouting I could do. And it's, I think they turned out really cool. We caught a ton of fish. I've said this probably a dozen times on our airwaves that Tony Peterson is the best public land, white tail bow hunter that I've ever met that I know and that we're going to see if that now

applies to fishing or not. Well, I appreciate that, buddy. I think it helped me a little bit. The pressure's on because last time somebody talked big about Tony at the mediator sporting clay shoot this last week, everyone thought that Tony was going to win that competition. Except Tony. How'd that competition go, Mark? You know, for me, great.

Oh. Because I did not come in last place, which was my only goal, not coming in last. Yeah. It was otherwise, pretty fun. Me and Tony had a really good time once we got past the live filming portion. Yeah. The live filming portion was the only part where we were kind of like uptight. And then after that, we had a good time.

And although Tony kind of did spiral and I just stayed at my low level. Actually, no, I went like this and dropped off a cliff. And Mark started at the bottom of the valley. and climbed his way to the top. It was actually fun. We'd live streamed like a two-hour sporting place competition for my outdoor TV. We were all paired up with somebody,

but we were competing on our own. My partner was Janice, and I was doing considerably better than Janus, like almost doubling his score, to the point where I was like, son of a gun, I might win this thing. Turned out Janus got last. So Yonis was not a good representation

of how the crew was doing. I was just in the middle of the pack, but I was like, oh, man, Yanni, if this is how Yanni's doing. I'm going to get the first place on here. That did not happen. At least you got to live with some hope for a while. Yeah, yeah, for too long. Mark Canyon, what's up with you? Well, big news outside of work is that I moved to Montana.

I'm no longer an out-of-towner, Spencer. Okay. I mean, I'm kind of out of town. I'm like, I'm an hour away, so I'm not going to be here as much as you said. But I'm sort of local now, which is exciting. Can still smell the Michigan on him, though. Yeah, it's fresh. It's been like just a little over a week, but so far, so good.

Congratulations. We're all very excited. Thank you. Have you around here more? Yeah. Going to be a new trivia competitor in the room more often now. Come in. We need, uh, we need some more competition for Nate and Brody and Randall and Steve.

Yep. Well. So we made Mark move to Montana. Just to spice those things up. But yeah, it's been an adventure. You know, I feel like the last six months. months have been nothing but chaos trying to, you know, find places, sell places, figure out where to go. We were still, you know, a number of different locations we were considering.

So trying to weigh all the benefits. And then making the final decision, should we move, should we not move? It's been a thing we've talked about for like a decade. And just finally realized with the kids growing up so fast, if we want them to grow up out here and have these opportunities in this community, we better do it. How about learning how much stuff you had that you did real? as you had crazy when I got that stormore building I had my move my office from upstairs in the house to out there my studio and guys says man I got a dump trailer if you needed I'm like dump trailer dude I'm all off like three sacks of garbage or three sacks of stuff I don't use and long story short

I used the dump trailer that's what we had to use to get all that stuff that I didn't realize I had good opportunity to cleanse yourself so so speaking some Brent, speaking of you and speaking of my move, one of the great benefits of moving out here is that now I can go for runs right from my house out like into some beautiful stuff where previously we were on a paved road, lots of traffic. It was no fun running from home. But now we can just like take off, be in beautiful country on a dirt road. So I got home last night from all these meetings we've been talking about. And I pulled in the driveway and both my sons run out the door and they're like, Dad, Dad, Dad, can we go for a run? And I was like, sure. That's not a thing that they're

typically asking to do but they want to go for like a trail around with dad it's 830 at night or whatever it is I'm like okay let's do it so throwing the running gear we start going for a run and we're talking they're asking me about the trip what I was doing with you guys and I'm asking them about what they were doing and they brought up the fact that while we were at one of these meetings a couple days ago I was FaceTiming with them and then Brent and Janus walked up and started talking to the boys on the cell phone and and my young son I bring yeah what did you think about Brent And he's like, yeah, you know, he's really funny.

I'm like, yeah, he is. He's like, ever at my eight-year-old, he says, I used to think that was just a random old guy that hung out around the meeting in your office. I'm like, no, he works here. Both things can be true. Random old guy who works here. So I got a good chuckle out of that, Brent. You're so much more than that.

That's funny. What other updates you got for us, Mark? The only other thing is, you know, my new podcast series, We kind of teased it months ago when I was in here last. It's now out there in the world. It's called Future Wild. We're seven episodes in. That's on our new meat eater conservation feed.

We used to be, you know, Cal's podcast is still there, but now it's my podcast as well. And these are more deep dive interviews into the world of hunting and fishing and conservation, some different kind of angles on things. We've had some different types of guests than maybe we typically hear from. That's been refreshing and fun. for me and hopefully for the audience too. We've talked to people like Avonjanar, the founder of Patagonia, talking about his kind of way to simplify his outdoor experiences and how that might apply to conservation. We've talked to a famous climber about how the outdoor recreation community and the hunting

and fishing community might be able to work together more often to protect public lands and things like that. Our most recent episode just came out with a renowned Caribou biologist from Alaska, talking about what's going on with caribou populations across the world, which a lot of folks don't seem to be paying attention to, but it's very important to start paying attention to. So it's been fun. Hopefully people have been enjoying it.

It's on the Meteor podcast, YouTube podcast network and all the other places. New episodes every other week, correct? Every other week. Yep. What day of the week? Thursday. Every other Thursday. You can listen to Future Wild.

All right, our last bit of our news this week. an update from Steve we have a video here i have yet to see it all i know is he has a new fish cooking method take it away phil yeah everybody here's a new splash for you we're on a 40-foot vessel called sweet caroline uh bin frobit what's this bay called robsumet roboisher bay nunevin with a man named tommy whittle who comes from a long line of fishermen and he's making dinner what do you call it corned fish. He's corning fish for dinner. We're on the deck of the boat. He's got a big ass fish tub. We've got cod and he's got charred. And he's laying down a layer of salt in the bottom there. Like fish salt, rock salt. Like coarse salt. This is for dinner tonight.

So he's got a sprinkling of salt on the bottom. He's got three cod blades, two char blades. Now he's putting salt on top of it. His father-law says all of his food is too salty. But he doesn't understand. So he's sprinkled salt on there. Okay, so you're going to let him sit like that. How long? Three hours.

Three hours. I saw the time his father on the phone. His father says he has people all over, people from New York, They come up, they eat this, they say it's the best fish they ever had. So he sprinkled salt all over. You're going to let us in three hours. Three hours, then we're going to rinse it off with some potatoes in the pot for 20 minutes.

They're suffering. Corn fish. Corn fish. Corn fish. Tonight we're trying to dip, we're going to do cod and chairs. Yep. So they also make salt fish for salt cod, but this is just corn fish for tonight. Three hours with a sprinkling the salt, brings it off.

Correct. And then you make like a bra, you get your potatoes, stick in the air, put it in a pot, enough water to bury the potatoes and the fish. We brought them for 20 minutes. We'll come back later and tell you how we like it. There you go. Brilliant. Okay, for you people that can't see this because you're just listening,

we're fixing to have a shot of whiskey, which is part of the fish cooking. Cheers, everyone. Great trip. Cheers. Okay, it's a return to our newsflash. It's four hours later. The fish was salted. What, you don't agree?

No. The fish was salt. The fish was salted in what we call rock salt. Fisherman salt. A light dusting, the flaying, a light dusting sat for three hours, pulled it out. He rinsed it in salt water. He cut up potatoes. He put the potatoes in a pile.

the fish in the pot. That's it. The potatoes, the fish. Fresh water in there, covered it. Boiled it for how long? I have about 20, 22 minutes. I would say. The easiest best fish recipe. Definitely. Very good. This is a new recipe. That's what that's why this is news because this is a new recipe. Do you like it? Oh, it's super good. It's amazing. Yeah. Warren? Wonderful. David E? Love it. I would eat again. He was asking where to buy that salt. And then they're telling me I can make it. Chadwick? Oh, that was delicious. Another news item is we just watched the polar bear climbing around a hill for a while, which was the first polar bear I ever laid eyes on, so I'm happy

about that. And then shortly thereafter, a caribou, you know, which you've seen a bunch of and I almost cut my leg off. But you do. And the chef saved my leg. Thanks guys. You can see that video on the Meat Eater podcast YouTube channel. Go watch this episode. Traveling with an amount of salt in their boat that you'd think they're going to de-ice a Home Depot parking lot. That was a significant amount.

How big a part and if it's part of the permanent part of the recipe that you drink whiskey before you eat that. Mandatory. If they got Steve to take a shot, it must be an important part. It must be pretty important cooking. I don't make oiled fish taste good. Most of us aren't scouting or working on our property as often as we'd like. We've got jobs, families, and a limited number of days in the tree each fall. So the work you do now matters.

On X hunt, put your trail camera photos on your map. Dials in wind and weather for the exact spot you're hunting. And there's a powerful deer movement forecast rooted in data from trail camera images. So when you do get out there, you've already got to play. You may not get more days in the woods this season, but you can get more out of the days you have with Onex Hunt in your pocket. Download it today and make the most of the time you have. Behind every night spent making the kids' lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies?

Will the pasto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Meat Eaters Elk Camp is live, and if you're anything like me,

this is the time of year you've been thinking about since the end of last elk season. Elk camp isn't just another hunting trip. It's the place where the planning stops, the excuses disappear, and you finally get to spend time in the mountains with the people who matter most. Whether you punch a tag or not, those mornings around camp and those miles on the mountain are the things you remember. That's why we pulled together the Elk Camp collection over at the Meat Eater Store with the gear we actually reach for this time, Veer.

And while you're there, check out the limited edition Meat Eater Phelps Easy Estrus Cal It sounds sweet. We only have a few, so when they're gone, they're gone. Head over to themeataterstore.com to see the full Elkamp collection and get geared up before the season gets here. All right, up next is your news. Your news is brought to you by banish suppressors. All right, we have two listener emails we are reading today.

This first one is from the meat eater trivia question legend. Leland Hart, he sends me more emails, I think, than any other trivia listener. He says, howdy me, Dieter podcast crew, should I feel bad for making jerky out of backstrap? Is that a worthy purpose for such high quality cuts as the loin? Should I slice with reckless abandon or save the precious backstrap for more elevated purposes? I think this is an easy one. Don't turn that thing into jerky. What's the rest of the room think?

I like using the bottom round. Like when I'm cutting up the hind quarter, I just take the bottom round and slice that and vacuum seal it into strips and then when summertime comes around, thaw that out and make jerky.

Don't use the backstrand. I think in the Midwest Whitetail world where some people are taking a lot of deer, it's a little bit more common. Like I've got a buddy who regular is killing five, six, seven deer a year. And so he's like, yeah,

I'm going to dedicate some of that backstrap to some primo jerky. And he loves it. We were just talking about this on a group text the other day. You know, if you've got the supply of why not diversify. Yeah, you can kill like, I don't know, five or six deer. I only kill one or two a year in Arkansas. And I know folks that will put a whole deer into either sausage and half and half, sausage and jerky. I think it's too precious, those back straps.

There's not enough of them. There's not enough pieces of meat on a deer that are just like, the perfect shape, the perfect size for all the more fun traditional preparations of backstrap. It even feels a little sinful to like throw a backstrap into grind, which I've seen people talk about if you're, you know, really trying to impress the mother-in-law with a venison burger. You know, maybe you throw half a backstrap in the grind. Even that seems kind of wrong. Well, that's why we live in America, Spencer. That's right.

That's right. So some of the room says you can. others say no Jordan what do you think I think if the backstrap is just so easy to get out of there like you might as well just slice it up

and make it into stakes I don't I don't really see why you do jerky but I'm like Brent I also only kill a couple of deer maybe maybe two so it's precious to me any other thoughts for Leland there's better cuts out there bud throw those whole backstrap on the grill some jerky it on all

All right, Nate Mason's got this next email. Yeah, we had an email about a wag bag getting a listener out of a ticket. This is from Donovan. Hey, media crew, never thought I'd say this, but a wag bag. And for those of you don't know, that is a bag that you poop into so you can pack your feces out of the backcountry. A wag bag got me out of a ticket. Earlier this year, my girlfriend and I were backpacking through a canyon in Grand Staircase, Escalante region in Utah. It was a three-day trip, and on the second day, we ran into a ranger on the trail, who asked for our overnight permits.

When we got to the trailhead, they'd run out of permit slips. So we just wrote our names and information on a piece of paper and dropped in the box. By the time we ran into the Ranger, there really wasn't any way to prove it. As he looked over our packs, he noticed the two wag bags hanging off the back. He said that anyone who cared enough to pack those in was helping take care of the land, thanked us for doing our part, and sent us on our way without a ticket. Man, that's a good story. I love a good poop bag story.

You guys ever get out of a ticket for being good citizens, although you might have have been in a sketchy situation well i got out of a ticket not because i was being a good citizen in the hunting world but because somebody felt bad about my bad fortune in the hunting world so to to make a long story short i had hit a buck and spent three days trying to find him and couldn't recover him this was down in ohio so i remember leaving after that three days of searching just soul crushed and it was late i was driving home from southern ohio up to michigan It was like 11 o'clock at night. The whole drive home, I was festering on it, just upset about it thinking.

And I'm on some backcountry road, almost home, now almost to the Michigan border. And all of a sudden, I see lights behind me. And I got pulled over for speeding. I was like, I don't know. I don't know what it was. Those Ohio cops do. So I must have been going decently over the speed limit. And he pulls me over and asked me how fast I was going.

If I knew how fast I was going, I was like, honestly, I'm not sure. I'm kind of in my head right now. And he looks in the back and he sees like camo, just hunting gear in the backseat in my truck. He's like, oh, you've been hunting? I'm like, yeah, I have, just come back from a hunt down in Southern Ohio, and he's like, you get one. And I kind of gave him a short version of the story. He's like,

no, but I got a shot at one, you know, three days ago and blah, blah, blah, blah. And I've been searching for him nonstop ever since, haven't been able to recover him. It's, it's been a rough couple days. And he's like, man, I've been there too. You just be careful going the rest of the way home and no ticket for you. You've had enough of a bad day.

Wow. Was he highway patrol? Yeah. Oh, those, those guys got me good yeah yeah man this guy was this guy's nice nice good on him this guy can give you a story from the other side of that oh i can i can remember the time and this was probably 25 years ago but i was working radar coming down the highway and it was five minutes till 10 on a saturday night i meet this car doing 90 though the lights on they pull over and i walk up to it and it's in a rural part of uh of the county and across a field you're can see there's a dirt road you go on up the highway and turn off but across this field you can

see a nightlight at a house so I walk up to the car and then the railroad the window down and this it's a young girl and she is sobbed and I said I see your driver's license and I can see her crying I said are you okay she's yes sir but I'm going to be late and my mama told me if I'm not home by 10 I'm going to be grounded and I said well how far do you got to go she said that night light right there that's my house I said I said, well, five minutes, you're not going to be late, but you're driving too fast. Let me see your driver's license. She starts boo-hooing.

She's going to make me late. I said, no, just let me see your license. She hands me your license. I said, well, I tell you what, I think you can make it home in time. But today's my birthday. It was not my birthday. You sing me happy birthday, and I'll let you go. And she said, really?

And I said, yeah. She said, okay, happy birthday to you? I said, no, no, no. I want you to sing it like. like Patsy Klein was singing to me. I want you to make me feel it. And buddy, did she ever? She said, happy birthday, it was the best thing.

Where is this going? So I gave her the license back. I said, okay, now you go home, you'll be home before your curfew, but leave earlier and go home. I don't want you driving fast. She drives on, that's the end of the story, or so I would think. Two weeks later, I get a call at the office.

This lady gets on the phone that the secretary says, hey, Brent, there's a call for you. Let's get us on the phone. She says, Brent, this is so-and-so. I'm like, yeah, hey, how are you doing? She said, was your birthday last week? I'm like, no. Why?

She said, well, my daughter got stopped for speeding. And she came in the door telling this, this, the story. And I said, I went to school with her. She said, there's only one person that would have done that. It had to be here. I'm like, yeah, it was me. But I didn't want to write the girl a ticket, you know, and her mom and dad's going out to pay it.

So I thought, you know, if I give her a lasting impression or something, that it would be good. And so I guess it was. You're a good cop, bro. Yeah, yeah. It's a good cop. Now, if I'd have been in Ohio, she's straight to jail. Ohio State Patrol, man. Yeah.

Yeah. Moral of the story, I guess. Pick up your poop. Yep. And sing. Sing happy birthday to the cops and drive the speed limit in Ohio. Drive the speed limit. And tell him you hit a deer recently and you're trying to find, even if it's like June, be like, officer.

I'm just trying to find this buck. Buck and recover him. Yeah. All right. Next up, we have the news. First up, we've got Nate Mason covering a Cabellus helicopter pilot. Oh, yeah. You all may have seen the story about a helicopter-assisted Cabela's run in Wisconsin on August

1st, 2026. But what you haven't heard is the story of the man behind the yoke, Dennis Pipping, using my permission seeking super sleuthing skills. I got on the horn with Dennis. And, you know, like a lot of the headlines, they highlighted he's a senior citizen and he wanted to skip traffic and the vibe that I thought they were kind of

trying to portray him as was like maybe an eccentric millionaire or this confused old man or something like that. That couldn't be further from the truth. I'm not familiar with the story. He took a helicopter to a Cabellas? Yes, he landed a helicopter in a Cabellas parking lot as we found out

to do his preseason hunting grocery run. Okay. Dennis is a blue-collar concrete man with a love for big old white-tail bucks. And before we get into the specifics of that August 1st run, I wanted to figure out where the journey to a Cabela's HLZ or helicopter landing zone begins. And so in 1984, Dennis started flying. You got his VFR, a visual flight rating purely out of love for the game. He's looking at planes his whole life and was like, I really want to do that.

So he bootstrapped the hours, got his initial rating. And he soon graduated. He just kept rolling. felt limited by VFR, so he got an instrument rating, then he got his multi-engine, and eventually got his commercial. And that was because he took up a neighbor who happened to have an engineering firm, and that neighbor said, I need you to fly my engineers around to the various job sites. And so he did that. At the same time, Dennis is growing his commercial concrete business, pipping concrete, which specializes in manure storage and methane digesters, among other

large-scale ag-focused concrete products. In a process, I don't fully understand. and farmers use these, especially dairy farmers, use these facilities to either create fertilizer or biogas. The scale of these projects is what I want to comment on. These manure tanks start at a million gallons and have gone up all the way to 30 million. Those 30 million tanks are 516 feet across and 20 feet tall. For reference, an Olympic swimming pool has about 660,000 gallons. So that's 44 full pools.

Olympic swimming pools of manure. It's about a week's worth of water in Bozeman, or recently a data center in Fayetteville, Georgia, owned by Quality Technology Services, consumed 30 million gallons of unmetered and unpaid for water during construction. And so that gives you the scale of these manure plants. Going back to Dennis' business, as it expanded,

he pulled the old Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and purchased a jet to manage his business activities. That worked for a while, ponderance of his jobs are in the Midwest. So he swapped that for a helicopter, a Robinson R44 Raven, which you can see in the articles. This brings us to Saturday, August 1st, 2026. As it turns out, Dennis is a big white-tail guy. He's got a great chunk of property in Fondalak County, and he's also got an 80-acre parcel in Buffalo County. He's running a few cell cams on both. He's got some deeries keeping tabs on, and so Dennis invites his neighbor to knock out their pre-season shopping list

down at Cabellas. They hop in the old Robinson. He hops in the old Robinson, flies to his neighbor's house, his neighbor hops in, and then he proceeds on to Cabellas. Landing there, before he landing,

he takes all the necessary precautions. He recognizes the HLZ, brings her down. They run in, they grab their batteries, their cameras, whatever else. They check out.

They pass a cop as they're checking out. They're loading up the helicopter, and that cop comes back out, extremely politely, really respectfully. It says, I'm responding to a drone.

own incident. I think this is what, this is a very large drone, but I think this is what I'm responding to. And he asked, do you have a license for this thing? At which point, Dennis produces his license as well as his, as the permits and

the regulations that cover all this. And basically, if you're a helicopter pilot and you're following all the other laws and regulations, you can land pretty much anywhere you want as long as you're not providing reposing a hazard to people or property on the surface. And so he explained that to the police officer.

The police officer said, sweet, thanks, have a great day, and sent him on his way. And so the next day, he takes all his groceries he got, flies up to Buffalo County, and sets up his new cameras. According to Dennis, he put this camera in a spot that he never hunts and he would never think of, but his wife told him you should throw this camera here and got a picture of sweet butt. So if you can pull that picture up, Phil. Yeah. That's a, that's a, look at that split G2. Oh, goodness. That's a big one.

Give me a score on that, Tony. From that. I know it's tough. Picture was taken two days ago, August 4th. I mean, 160's, right? Oh, at least. At least, yeah. Man.

So that's the result of his whole trip. Is a picture of that big old buck? Yeah, you want to kill a 160? You just got a helicopter in. Yeah, he's got a helicopter in. I think me and Tony's chances are significantly plummeted than if that's what's required. That's auto-rotated. He, uh, following this trip, you know, a few days later, he starts getting Facebook notes, calls from people like me and whatnot. And he wanted to make sure everything was copacetic with Cabellas. And so he calls a store manager. And the store manager says, please come anytime. You're a loyal customer. All his business cards, like his company cards are Cabela's cards. So he can just shop at Cabellas for free on all the points. Um, but they, they, they, they well, he wanted to make it very clear. The Richmond, Wisconsin, Cabellas welcomes all modes of transportation to their store. And so Dennis is going to keep,

ongoing. He wanted to communicate his gratitude to law enforcement, the Cabela staff, and the community for their respect and support of his aeronautical adventures. And he said, it's no different than rolling up to a gas station in a snowmobile or pulling up to a restaurant in a boat. And we would all like to see more acceptance of the

vertically inclined methods of transportation. Finally, Dennis offered a discount to any member of the audience in need of manure storage or other agricultural concrete work. So if you're a meat eater, audience member who needs them, just hit up pipping concrete. He's national.

Dennis being a concrete man makes me think of how Vegas like has all kinds of conventions going on any giving day. I used to go to Shot Show about every year. I think I've been there three or four times. This again happens in Las Vegas and Shot Show is the world's largest gun

convention. It just like kind of takes over the city for a week. But there's still other things that are happening in Vegas. I imagine Tony knows where I'm going with this. The three big shows in Vegas, while shot show is going on, is shot show. There is the concrete show. So you got all the concrete folks.

And the third one is the porn awards are happening. All at the same time. And so Vegas has like this really wild. Yeah, Tony, you know about that. Yeah, of course, tell me. A lot of crazy ingredients get dropped into Vegas for this one week every January, the porn award, the gun convention and the concrete people. And you try to kind of suss out,

Like, who's this, you know, Nate Mason over here is he looked like he's concrete guns or porn? Dude, you know, and you know who's flying in first class? I've got an answer for that and it's not the answer you won. You know the guys flying in first class? It's the concrete guys. Yeah, yeah. There was one instance where I was at a blackjack table, just making small talk. And this dude sitting next to me was trying to figure out like what he was doing here.

He owned a strip club in Atlanta. So he was there for the porn awards and shot show. He was doing a two-forb while he was there. Yeah, good for him. He had to run some tight security at his gentleman's club there in Georgia. Wow. They call that...

Don't worry, I'll bleep that out. Okay. Now we're over to Tony Peterson to talk about wakeboats. So, first off, I would just like to say, unlike Nate Mason, I actually appreciate the Ohio law enforcement offers. I spoke too soon. I'm sorry to my Ohio. Actually all law enforcement officers.

And if we should ever meet anywhere, I hope you guys remember that I, Tony Peterson, support you while Nate Mason does not. I only have a bone to pick with Highway Patrol. You guys have a cool logo, but I should just drive slower. What you should do is be quiet. All right. So this is an issue that's sort of near and dear to my heart living in Minnesota, fishing a lot of lakes, fishing over in Wisconsin.

the court case that I ran across that put me on this sort of, on this trajectory with this story is based in Wisconsin, but this is happening all over, which I'll get into. But wake boats are becoming a big thing. And for people don't know, most recreational watercraft are designed to either minimize wake or at least not amplify it. Not the case with wake boats. Now, these boats cost, on average, $65,000 to over $300,000.

which is bonkers for a boat on a, on a lake, right? Or we would think so anyway. Maybe not the helicopter to Cabela's crowd. But why are they so expensive? So these boats have a couple features that drive me nuts. One is a premium audio system. Yeah. I figured that's where you were doing.

Man. That's where half the budget goes on a wake boat. If you don't, if you've never been around one of these suckers, when they're cranking some music and know how that sound carries across the water, that's not what I'm going to talk about. What kind of music do they like, traditional? Not the kind of music I like. Okay, a lot of hip hop. Give me an example of like a playlist you would hear.

A lot of hip hop, a lot of bro country. A lot of stuff that you might not necessarily want to have blasted in your face when you're fishing with the kids or whatever. These boats are expensive for another reason. They have ballast systems so they can draw in water and change the weight of the boat. So some of them can draw anywhere from like... That's what they're doing? Yeah. I had no idea.

So they can draw in anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 pounds of water, which changes everything. They also have these things called surf tabs on the back, which work with that different weight to create custom waves, essentially, depending how fast you're going. You can create waves out the right side, the left side, big waves, little waves, but they're meant to make waves, wake boats. They burn a lot of fuel, they make a lot of waves, and they don't make a lot of recreational boaters happy. So this is kind of the route and where I'm going with this issue. There's the pro wake boat crowd, and then there's the anti-wake boat crowd, and now they're meeting in the court systems. And you're going to see this a whole lot, I think. The pro-wake boat crowd, they say we are licensing our boats, we are being legal, we are buying a legal product and using it in a legal way on the water.

they argue that they're being discriminated against constitutional rights are being infringed the whole thing. The other side says, you know, these boats, which account for, at least in Wisconsin, from my research, accounted for about 4% of sales in 2025 out of all boats. The other side says, you know, if you're fishing, if you're a kayaker, which kayak fishing is super popular right now, if you're a stand-up paddleboarder, essentially if you're not a wake boat person and you're using the water, this is impacting you somehow, right? Like if you're, just imagine being out there in a kayak and having four foot rollers hit you all day long. There's that component. There is also the component of the ecosystems of our lakes.

And this is a big one. We haven't, so this is kind of one of those things. You see this with forward facing sonar and some of these other issues that are really hot right now. there was no reason to do any scientific research on whether wakeboats were impacting lake shore habitat, fish ecosystems, because we didn't have them before. Now we have them, so this research is starting to kick in. University of Minnesota doing a study on this, a bunch of different methods to try to figure out how is it impacting vegetation, how is it impacting sediment levels in the water and how long that takes to settle because that has impacts on all kinds of things in fisheries. And what they found was, no surprise, that this is happening.

Now, to be... Negatively. Right. To be as objective as I can be in this issue, every boat that you operate in shallow water can have an impact to some extent, right? It's a scale issue. So, long story short, some of the recommendations coming out of this research and coming out of these, you know, kind of, I don't know if they would call themselves anti-awake boat.

but definitely concerned more about the fisheries. They are suggesting they should be operated in at least 20 feet of water, give those waves a little time to dissipate before they hit shore, keep them at least 600 feet off ashore. That study that the U of M did used a bunch of different cameras, a bunch of different ways to measure it, it's a scientific study. It's not just anecdotal stuff. And you're going to see a heck of a lot more of that.

What you also have as a component of this, which we understand on our side of things, is the amount of money that fishing generates. And so if you look at Wisconsin, it's estimated that fishing contributes about $2.3 billion in revenue every year and supports well over 20,000 jobs. So when you talk about, you know,

a very small contingency compared to the overall population, using wakeboats, loving wake boats, feeling that they're just, they're doing their thing and it's not impacting anybody. You have to have, you have to, factor that in how it's affecting this this huge revenue generator. And this isn't just a Wisconsin specific thing, right? You can you can find this in a lot of states. Wisconsin, for example, sells 1.2 million to 1.4 million fishing licenses a year. In Minnesota, I think it's 1.1

or something. It's big business, right? So you're starting to see regulations come into place, but they tend to be like city ordinances. We haven't seen anything obviously at a federal level. you're starting to see some stuff show up at a state level. But so far it's mostly been city ordinances, right? The season might still be months away, but if you're anything like us, you're already living in it. You're pulling up maps when you should be working,

checking trail cameras first thing in the morning and playing out a whole bunch of what-ifs related to that buck you've been watching grow all summer. The off-season is not downtime. It's just a different kind of hunting. An on-X hunt is built exactly for the, that. Trail cameras tied directly to your map, wind and weather for your exact location, and property boundaries with land ownership data whenever you need them. Download on X hunt

and make the most of the dwindling time between now and season. Behind every night spent making the kids lunches, there's a lot of suspense. Will they finally eat the veggies? Will the Pesto survive the first bite? Will the lunchbox come home empty, half full, or come home at all? And will you finish episode 8 before you're done slicing the cucumbers? Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Meat Eaters Elkamp is live, and if you're anything like me, this is the time of year you've been thinking about since the

end of last elk season. Elk camp isn't just another hunting trip. It's the place where the planning stops, the excuses disappear, and you finally get to spend time in the mountains with the people who matter most. Whether you punch a tag or not, those mornings around camp and those miles on the mountain are the things you remember. That's why we pulled together the elk camp collection over at the meat eater store with the gear we actually reach for this time veer. And while you're there, out the limited edition meat eater Phelps easy estrus cow call it sounds sweet we only have a few so when they're gone they're gone head over to the meat eater store.com to see the full elk camp collection and get geared up before the season gets here so the the lawsuit that I saw

a couple of a couple of people from Florida owned lakeshore houses in a county in Wisconsin this town that this lake is on that they're on enacted an ordinance that that that restricted the usage of it didn't ban it but restricted some usage of wakeboats they sued saying their constitutional rights were being infringed i just saw uh last week that a federal judge as it worked its way up through the court system a federal judge tossed it because he said you haven't proven any damage yet which is where it gets a little bit weird with this stuff because even though a city a city a city can slap an ordinance on a body of water and say, you can't do this, you can do this, whatever, there's no enforcement. And so there was actually no real damage suffered by them. But when you start going down this rabbit hole of wakeboats, you start seeing these court cases popping up. I found some in Minnesota. There's several in Wisconsin. There's at least 59 communities in Wisconsin when I was researching this that have slapped some kind of ordinance on against wakeboats or limiting them, this is going to be a thing that's coming state level, I would assume within the

next couple years, especially as you see a lot more of this research on this fisheries coming out. Yeah, the footage that you see from the cameras they have underwater, it's really revealing, like what that can do to a fish. You'll see a blue gill sitting in 10 feet of water who the wake boat comes over, and they just like get pushed out of the camera frame. And then they fight their way back. And then the second wave comes and they get pushed out again. And place like, Wisconsin, Minnesota, that's loaded with warm water species. They spawn in very shallow water. It's easy to envision how that could affect a fish's bed that's up in knee-deep water if these

weight boats are driving by, you know, a dozen times a day. Right. So we just, we just did a project up on Lake of the Woods on the Canadian side. And when you're on that, when you're in that lake, it's rusty crayfish everywhere. And rusty crayfish came from the Ohio River Base. in the 1960s at some point, dropped into this lake, somebody's bait bucket or whatever, they have taken over, knocked out the native crayfish. And what rusty crayfish do is literally alter their habitat by snipping vegetation. And so the diversity of species in their game

species, game fish species to target has changed. You don't find large mouth really, the smallies are blowing up, the walleyes are blowing up. And so you start thinking about that and go, Yeah, that's a that's a multi-decade thing, but it was it was directly because of the impact on the vegetation in the lake now you look at this like you said and you watch vegetation getting uprooted. You watch the sediment level not settling and changing that'll change water temperature that'll change which kind of species can live in that band of the water column. It's it's not going away. Yeah, the water clarity. That's also really meaningful. You'll see you know, after the wake boat comes over, the water goes from clear to just you know covered in sediment. Right. And. And, and. And that's something that's not going to take a decade to find out. It's going pretty quick. Right. And you think about, you know, if you're a lakeshore owner, you know, you see a lot of work to mitigate lake shore loss, right? Because it's just going to start peeling back up your yard.

And you think about, you think about throwing those rollers all day long. And you'll see, you'll see arguments against it. Like, well, a bass boat, which is what I own, that throws a weight too. It's like, it certainly does. But I don't go out and drive for six hours a day in a circle, in a circle, You know what I mean? So this is this is a unique situation. You're also not going just up and down, hot roddened by the shore to show off to all the girls.

Well, no, I do that. I didn't know. Not as effective. What do you do when these wakeboards go past you and your fishing? Have you ever chased them down and gave them what for? Well, no, I haven't. And I don't, I mean, it's a tough situation, right? Because they are doing, they're being legal, you know, like they're doing their thing.

You know, it personally drives me absolutely. nuts but it's like I'm also kind of a freedom guy you know but if that's why I like I like this study by the U of M and I hope there's a bunch more out there coming because if you can just demonstrate that listen this is not good for the fishery I'm like okay regulated yeah yeah what are what are the ways that this is being handled like what do these ordinances look like what are some options for like kind of living together and like coexisting yeah they just damaging are they just outlaw like straight up banning no boat No, and that's the thing too. That's part of the reason why that case got tossed because it wasn't like they couldn't use them.

Yeah. So it's distance to shore, time of, you know, amount of time in the day, because you'll see this, you know, with jet skis, right? Like some lakes, a lot of places they can only be used to like sunset and they're off the water. Yeah. So we already have precedent for this. Yeah. But it's like, you know, you're talking to city ordinance with no enforcement versus a state regulation. And so it's, it's a little muddy. But. it's in it's very individualized you know there's nothing that's I didn't find anything that was like flat out we're banning these like you just can't use them pull them yeah but I'm sure that they're worried that that's coming it looks like it would be maybe restrictive to bodies of water certain sizes or something you know once you get below a certain acreage of surface water right right and it is and it's also you know if you if you have a town on a lake in the Midwest upper Midwest probably a fair amount of the tax revenue is tied to recreating on that lake that's not,

you know, wakeboats. Yeah. You know, so it's, there's, there's a lot of financial incentives in there, too. Yeah, this, this is something that you see talks about across the country, but I feel like Minnesota and Wisconsin specifically are sort of the, the tip of the spear on this so far. That, that seems like it's where there's a real collision of lake life between the people who like to fish and the people who like to, you know, uh, be pulled behind a boat or, or, you know, ride a wakeboard behind a boat. Yeah. I, and I don't even think, I think that what we know, we're

so used to kind of defaulting to the fishing side of things, but there are, you know, we, we spent a lot of time on lakes in Minnesota. There are a lot of people who like to get up and go for a nice paddle board, you know, paddle across the bay or whatever. And I, it's interesting to me because it might be a time when we would pair up with people who generally aren't into blood sports. Yeah. It makes me think too about that being that far north. Don't you have it like a limited window when you would be out there swimming? For sure.

As opposed to being. Well, and that's part of the problem too is, you know, you have maybe four months a year where the water temp is right for everybody to be out. So there's all these competing, you know, recreational opportunities. Yeah. More to come. I imagine this conversation will be very different, you know, next year or five years from now. Maggie Haldow, what's going on with Pronghorn migration corridors? Well, this isn't the newest news, but I was involved with this, so we're going to talk about it today.

Great. So on June 26th, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon officially designated the first Antelope Migration Corridor in the nation, which is pretty big news. It's over 2 million, I think that's right. Yeah, 2 million acres. And this has been in the works for years. years. So the part of the process I was in was a working group. It was sort of like the final review of this, but it's backed on 20 years of data collection that the game and fish have done. So I was in what was the governor appointed local working group. So I live in Pinedale, Wyoming.

That's in Sublette County. It consisted of commissioners from Sublette, TIEC, Piton, Lincoln, Sweetwater counties. I think that's all of them. And then various stakeholder groups. So I was representing wildlife conservation and hunting. There were also representatives for industry, ag, motorized wreck. So we had like a lot of different opinions, you know, different looks on how we should be approaching this. So what we were tasked with doing was looking at this 150 page biological risk assessment compiled from the game and fish.

And so what they had done at this point was identified the corridor from all this data that they collected. And so it was broken down into originally 10 segments. That got whittled down by the time we were reviewing it to eight segments. So it was our job to look this over, see if the corridor provided too many protections, not enough, what other recommendations we would give. So we met with representatives from counties, people like planning and zoning, oil and gas reps, a lot of wildlife biologists took some time for public comments every month. So this was like a six-month process that we were meeting and going over all these details. So the actual designation, what this doesn't do, I'll go over. I think it's important to recognize that private land is included in that two million acres,

but it's not really impacted by designation. There's nothing that private landowners can or can't do because of this. If anything, there's a benefit. They're more likely to get funding dollars to do things like habitat improvements or fencing improvements on their properties. If they have old barbed wire fence that they want to make wildlife friendly because they're located within the corridor, they're more likely to get the funding dollars for that now. So the corridor itself is broken down into low, medium, and high-use areas, and then there's stopovers and bottlenecks. and the way the protections are distributed within the corridor are dependent off of that.

So, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. Like, low and medium use areas have the least amount of protections because the way the GPS collar data, you know, they're seeing the least amount of migrations happening in these areas, but they're still enough to determine that, yes, this is where the animals are using this area for migration. So it's the way that the wording is phrased is like surface disturbances. And what that means is like new developments, drilling a gas well, drilling a mine, setting up a solar facility.

So if you're doing any of these things on public lands, you have to go through a process. You have to speak with the BLM. You have to speak with the game and fish. So this sets up sort of the conversation that these, industries have to have with Game and Fish and BLM in order to develop these areas. So low and medium use, surface disturbances can occur, but human presence is limited during migration periods, and each segment of the corridor has a window of time during spring and fall migrations that sort of determines when these human present times, if that makes sense.

So it gives a buffer period of like, okay, this is when people should not be in this area. So it's the same, but a little bit more intense for high use areas. So high use areas, it's defined as surface disturbances shall not disturb the functionality of the corridor. So a high-use area you can develop there as long as it's not impinging on how antelope migrate through that area. So the difference between that bottlenecks are where the protections really come into play. And that's where the corridor has been funneled down to this small area where there's a lot of antelope moving through a very small window. So an example of this, down by Rock Springs, there was a bottleneck. And so there was a cliff on one side, a highway on the other side, and things got pushed through really fast.

There was a solar plant that was put in the middle between the cliff and the highway. So the antelope have nowhere to go, nowhere to move through there, except for the highway. So back in 22, 23, we had this really. severe winter. We also had pneumonia. We had really, really crazy animal die-offs. I mean, there were there were just herds of animals that laid down and died on the side of the roads. It was devastating for our populations. So this was one of those areas, these bottlenecks where they recognize that, okay, we have to keep these open because if not, that's where you're going to see piles of animals on the side of the highway if we don't keep this open.

So bottlenecks only make up 7,500 acres of public lands within this corridor. And that's where there are no surface disturbances allowed and no human presence during migration. So the bottlenecks are really where the most protections come into play within the corridor. And so it's really not a super strong legal, like, it's not law. in Wyoming. It's guidelines for development. It provides opportunities for conservation dollars, and it opens the potential for more protections for pronghorns and more years to come. And, you know, when we were asked to apply to this group, we were asked to consider the Teddy Roosevelt quote,

conservation means development as much as it means protection. And I think what this corridor designation does is a pretty reasonable balance between those two things. You know, we need development to support our communities. It pays for some conservation efforts. Like, we can't exist in a world without development.

So we need to be able to do it in responsible ways while still being mindful of our other natural resources like wildlife. So this designation isn't saying we can't develop. It's only saying that in those very fragile bottleneck area.

So I'm really proud that we got this pass through to designation. I really, you know, our antelope populations have been bouncing back and it's good to see. It's promising to see. And I hope this opens up more money for more fencing work and more habitat change. And, you know, hopefully maybe one day some good karma for me so I can draw an antelope tag. Do you think that like the private ranchers who live along this area, are they aware of this new recommendation? Or if they were listening right now, this would be news to them? No, I think they're aware of it.

I think, you know, we had ag representatives there. And I think there's a big push for ranchers to change to wildlife friendly fencing in our areas. Which would look like what? So for pronghorn, it means moving the bottom wire up. because they tend to go under. The issue is that 22-23 winter, we had an abnormal amount of snow at lower elevations, so the fences were buried.

So there's, you know, there's this push for new research to figure out what can fencing look like in the winters when they can't get under it. There's lay-down fencing. There's areas where we have gates that we can open. So it's, there's more opportunities to research sort of how we can work with ranchers.

Because, I mean, we have a ton of public land where we live, but there's also a ton of private land. I don't live around a lot of people. I like it that way. But it's, you know, private land, it's just as important for wildlife as it, as public land is. I think something worth noting on this one, too. And first off, kudos, Maggie. Thank you so much for being a part of this program.

We're being on that working group. That's amazing. You know, this is a pretty renowned migration route, right? It's branded very nicely, the path of the pronghorn. But this is the longest known land animal migration route in the lower 48 states. So these pronghorn are going from around Grand Teton National Park, 150 to 200 miles all the way down past where Maggie lives in Pinedale into that Green River Valley. So that's a substantial distance, pretty amazing wildlife feat that's still happening in the lower 48. But, you know, there's a lot of change.

and you can speak to this much better than me, but with the gas field in Pinedale, with the growth of the community, there's a lot of fragmentation of that habitat now, right? There's a lot of development now that is making these protections so much more important. So this is like very important at a crucial time as that area that they used to pass through that they depend on is changing rapidly. Yeah, and I forgot to speak to this, but we've already had the mule deer migration corridor established in the area. We've have things like winter range areas acknowledged that sort of restrict access. We also, you know, this benefits more than just pronghorn. There's studies out that show sage grouse and pronghorn have a lot of the similar habitats.

So this is sort of, I see this having a ripple effect that this is going to impact positively more than just one species. You know, it's, it's, it's, helping our whole stagebrush ecosystem, because it is, it's a huge amount of land. And it's, I mean, looking at how things have changed, it's impossible to ignore the changes, you know, with development, but it is what it is. That's sort of, there's no way around it. So I think the more we can have conversations like this and set up for success, with, you know, responsible development.

So we're being mindful about, like, how we can do this without putting a solar plant, you know, and in a place that is going to be a pinch point where animals are moving. I think the better we will be going forward. Aunt Maggie, and that's how I'm going to refer to you from now on, is Aunt Maggie. Is there been a lot of, or any substantial pushback on any of the things? There was some. I mean, we went back and forth a lot.

there was a point during the process where I thought people didn't want it to be designated because they thought, well, this isn't doing anything. This is just going to cause troubles for me, you know, trying to get permits to drill a gas well. So we had a lot of pushback. But I think, you know, I think people realize if they want to drill, if they want to mine, if they want to, you know, set up a data center in this place that we live, we care a lot about other resources. sources there too so they're going to have to come to terms with that so you know they pushed we pushed back we came to an agreement and and there are we put out i mean it's a multi-page document of recommendations of things um going forward because we heard things like well you know the BLM doesn't always listen

to what's written in the mule deer migration corridor recommendations and there's disconnect between them in the game in fish. So, you know, we put out that there should be an MOU. And nothing that we wrote was necessarily like a legally, like, defined thing. It was just like, hey, we think that the governor's office should do this. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here, but just getting to the point of designation as something that's worth celebrating. Good stuff, Maggie. The season might still be months away, but if you're anything like us, you're already lived.

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All right. Now we have Jordan Sillers bringing some Blood Trails flavor to The Duce Show. What do you got, Jordan? That's right. So this is a story that I've been paying attention to for a little over a year. And I hope to cover it in greater detail in a Blood Trails episode. But as you'll see, see now is just not quite the right time for it. So Ian Eccles was a 46-year-old turkey hunter who went missing in Kiddeus, Kitittes County, Washington. And so this happened back in 2020. And so like I said, I've been tracking it for about a year now, but there was recently a major update just last month, which we'll get to in a minute. I also spoke with one of the game wardens

who was involved in this case. So you're going to get some information here, which is why you listen to the Meet Eater News podcast, that you're not going to get anywhere else. So to give a little bit of backstory here, Ian was last seen on May 17th, 2020. And the plan was to, he was going to go turkey hunting with his buddy,

but he was going to go up and can't buy himself the night before and then meet up. the next morning. This is near the town of Liberty in Washington. It's kind of a mix of there's a big national forest there. There's also some some state land. His buddy goes up the next morning and he doesn't find Ian. He's not where he was supposed to be camping. And so he goes hunting, but he's kind of increasingly concerned. This is Ian's friend. And so he calls Ian's other friends. They come up to look for Ian because they're like they're concerned. It's not like they think maybe, you

know, he's, he went to a different campsite or maybe he got lost in the woods and like, he needs help. We need to go find him. So they're looking for him. And they're not super concerned until they see Ian's car. It was a Toyota FJ cruiser, but someone else is driving it, someone that they don't recognize. And the back windshield of the car was broken and like gone. And they knew it was Ian's car because the driver was wearing.

Ian's hat and they recognized his hat and so they flag him down they're like hey like where's Ian and the guy just drives off and so at this point like we're pretty concerned so the sheriff's office gets involved it becomes a you know a manhunt basically not only for Ian but also for this guy that was driving Ian's car and so about a week later they find Ian's car it had been abandoned And what they find inside is not promising. There was blood everywhere. It looked like there'd been some kind of fight. The back windshield, it appeared, had been shot out rather than broken in some other way.

And so along with all that stuff, they find Ian's ID, so they know it's his car, but they also find the ID of someone else. This guy's name is Jorge Oma Alcantara Gonzalez. And Alcantara was kind of a known criminal in the area. He hung out like in the woods and he was implicated in another vehicle theft of an elderly woman who was found dead inside her house. He had her car at one point and it's unclear what his involvement is there. He's also linked to like robberies of like cabins in the area, things like that. So they're looking for this guy. Three days later, a warden sees a guy carrying a shotgun in the area.

And he doesn't know who it is. But like at this point, all the hunters had been like, you guys need to be out of this area. They cleared the area of hunters because they're looking for, you know, a murder suspect. This has been a week now since he's been amazing. Yeah, yeah. It's been about a week, maybe a little bit more. He sees this guy carrying a shotgun. He's like, hey, you need to stop and talk to me.

The guy drops a shotgun runs into the woods. it's Ian shotgun. They think it's Alcantara. So they know he's like out there. Just like hiding out in the woods. And so, you know, at this point, like the manhunt is huge. The game warden I spoke with said one of the biggest man hunts in the history of the state. Tons of agencies involved like the warden service, the sheriff's office, the feds are involved.

And the warden I spoke with really emphasized like the danger of this hunt. And you can kind of imagine like you're a game warden looking for this guy. You're walking through the woods. You don't know whether he's like behind a tree looking at you from a ridge. Like he's clearly armed. He's, you know, dangerous. He knows how to survive in the woods. And so it's a very dangerous operation for these guys like looking for Alcantara.

His family was pretty cooperative. And they sort of explained like, yeah, he goes up there and like lives in the woods all summer. You know, he forges, he poaches, he, you know, probably steals from cabins to just, like, survive. So he just, like, lives up there. So, and it's a giant area. Like, it's extremely difficult to, like, find, like, search through every nook and cranny. They got close a few times. The game warden said they found fresh human feces that they had reason to believe were his.

And so they, you know, where they know he's close. they dispatched like playing clothes wardens to just like act as hikers right and so if they run into him he won't just run away um so they did that they set out trail cams hoping to you know hoping to spot him somewhere but this is like he he said it was kind of like a siege strategy because it's such a big area you're not going to like find him wherever he's hiding out you're just going to kind of keep the pressure on until something happens right and so so something did happen, 23 days into the search, so now we're into June of 2020. Someone calls from a cabin and says, hey, I see someone in my neighbor's cabin, but I know

they're not supposed to be home. And so they think, okay, this is a pretty good, and I think they had reason to believe he was in that area. So the ward and I spoke with went up there with three other, two other guys. So there's only three of them up there. And like, in this type of situation, you would want more guys, right? you would want more people to like get this guy out of this cabin because they know he's armed. But they also know he's slipped away several times they like need to find him.

So they go up there. Sure enough, they see him inside. He's like making food in the kitchen. They see a gun next to him. And they, you know, I imagine the conversation, maybe Brent, you can speak to this, was like, do we wait for other people to show up or do we just go in? And they decided to just go in. So they approached the house.

They yelled like, hey, come out with your hands up. I imagine, like, if he'd grabbed his gun, it would have ended much differently, but he didn't. He came out of the house. He was arrested kind of without incident. That's good. Yeah. So it ended well in that sense. The story gets a little confusing at this point.

So this happened all the way back in 2020. This guy is clearly suspected in a murder. But everyone was kind of confused because. because he wasn't charged with murder. He was charged with eight other felonies for stealing the car, stealing guns, and he pleaded guilty and went to prison. So everyone's like, what's going on?

This guy's clearly implicated he's been named, but not charged. What we've since found out is that the strategy was, we're gonna charge him with these felonies, we're gonna get him off the street or out of the woods, right, where he can't hurt anyone. get him in prison and then build the murder case against him so this is the big update that happened just last month as his release date was approaching for those other felonies he was charged with murder and you know the case is pretty convincing they have the forensic evidence from the car

there was they have GPS evidence linking him to the area they have a apparently they have go pro footage of him like using Ian's tent and like his stuff the like three days after Ian went missing. Who's GoPro? I'm not sure, actually. It could have been Ian's. I imagine it was. But at the same time,

and this is all speculation, right? I don't know exactly all the evidence they have because they haven't released all of it. The defense could argue, like, hey, this guy just found Ian. Like, he just wandered in, found Ian. Ian was dead. He got scared.

he, you know, put Ian's body somewhere, stole all his stuff. He didn't have anything to do with murder, right? You can imagine that kind of defense. And so you can see why they took all that time to build this case. Yeah, abuse of a corpse is a lot different than... Right. It is. Did they find Ian's body?

Well, and that's the thing. That's like the kind of, you know, besides Ian's death, the most tragic part of this story is that they still haven't found Ian. Damn. And so you can also imagine, again, pure speculation. You can imagine some kind of plea deal where he tells them where he left Ian. He gets closure for the Eccles family as part of some kind of plea agreement. But who knows?

Who knows? You know, what if that will happen. So, you know, if you live in this area of Washington State, I know his family, you know, before hunting season every year, does some media. Like, hey, please be on the lookout for our, you know, our brother, our son. Because he's still up there somewhere. And no one knows where. Yeah. Brent, how common is that, that, like, you would know without a doubt that this person did this crime, specifically a murder, we just, like, can't get the courts to, you know, agree with us yet?

It's the without a doubt thing. It has to be without a doubt, you know. And then it's, I've seen that, I've seen that similarly happen before where you, you've got a lead pipe cinch conviction on something that you're going to get them to confess to or that you, they don't have to confess that you can get them to. signed yeah I'll do you know six years or whatever and then you know we build the case from that so I knew where he was going with that when they didn't charge him with murder to begin with all yet well they don't have the facts yet and you're gonna do that once you know you take somebody in their found not guilty right and have all your ducks in a row then you know your SOL to do it again that ain't gonna happen yeah jord what's it gonna take to make this into a full episode do we need a conviction yeah so at this point in the case no one's talking because the the guy's been charged but not

convicted and so prosecutors you know are never going to talk to me and then they also tell the family hey don't talk to the media because and I get it and I'm not like it's fine because they don't want to mess up the case they don't want to mess up the prosecution by releasing some kind of information and so that's really what I need to do a blood trails episode is you know access to people who can tell me what happened and right now that access just isn't there so I'm waiting for you know the the trial to happen okay we'll be on look look out for that yeah all right Brent has an update around hikers in Arkansas what do you got Brent man it is the first

of its kind in Arkansas that I'm familiar with and it has caused a bit of a the social media blow up but while on wildlife management areas which is areas in Arkansas that are completely owned by the Arkansas by the state by the Gaming Fish Commission lakes and ground, which I think makes up like 12% of the total public land in Arkansas is state-owned and managed by the state. To access that now to paddle a boat, hike, birdwatch, or non-hunting or non-fishing activity, just to be there, you're going to have to buy a $10.50 permit. And it has it went into effect July the first and man all my social I get messages all the time about so can't believe there's such big money grabbed by the gaming fish all they want to do is is make extra

money so they can waste it on something else and but when it first started I started I started tried to keep an open mind about what was going on what was happening so I started talking to other hunters and then I eventually started talking to the administration of the game of fish a good friend of mine is a deputy director and I absolutely see it you know the trend has been like in out west I think you guys are probably more familiar with this type of permit access permit than we are like you got to buy a pretty expensive permit to drive through Yellowstone and you're not I mean, that's, that was a new one to me. My first trip out here, I thought, let's go Yellowstone.

Okay, well, first thing you got to do is get a permit. I'm like, oh, to drive on the highway, you gotta be kidding. So it's a reflection of that that is the use change has, or the usage has changed over the last few decades, where there are more people who are going there that are not just hunting and fishing. So it's a bigger impact on the area. with a bigger impact on the area it's going to cost more to regulate it upkeep and that kind of stuff so i think this this regulation for this permit is an absolute got a counter person counter to see how many folks are actually using the land because you know you can they got a formula to use by how many

game war just check fishing license and hunting license and the surveys that they send out for who's who's using this piece property and they can kind of get a idea of the impact they're going to have on that but no idea about folks that are not hunting and fishing there the caveats to the permit is if you're under 16 if you're 15 and under you don't have to have a permit the game of fish can sanction activities to do it like you know 4h or f f f a or academic groups going out there to study if you have a fish license or a hunting license you're exempt from it. So it's obviously a, to me, you know, try to figure out how many folks are doing it. And in the, there will be penalties for it if you don't have it.

But it was implemented in July the 1st and there's, they've got a grace period to where they can get the word out and people can realize, you know, if I'm going out there to watch redbirds, I've got to have this permit before I go. And the interesting thing that I saw was when they did this, they did this survey back in February, went from February the 19th to March the 6th of this year. They put that survey out to all license holders of anything in Arkansas. They got 8,477 responses to the WMA permit question. that specific question support for it was at 41.5% opposition to it was 24.7% and 33.8% had no opinion.

Like they didn't care. But it kind of goes back to the social media thing. The social media ain't very social because the majority of things that I see on there is negative for it. And it was, you know, almost half. of the people that were supported it. Do they have a guess as to what kind of revenue this will drive? They didn't. They don't. And I think that's part of it. They really have no idea how many people are going out there. But with that revenue, if it's, if it is, you know, significant, it's only going to improve, I think. I think it's a good thing. And I think everybody should pay their way. I'm paying my way to go out there. So let me ask you this because the most common devil's advocate here, for our side is, you know, we buy hunting and fishing licenses like crazy.

We support the management for fisheries, wildlife, you know, in a disproportionate way, generally in a lot of states. Right. When you, so like a backpack tax or whatever, this hiker tax on the surface, it's like, yeah, we let somebody else pitch in if they're going to be, you know, recreating out there. But at the same time, do we want to give up a spot at the table? Do we want to give up any level of, you know, power we might have? in the decision-making process because of how we like to use it.

And so there's, it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Like, we want more people to pay, but it, these groups start pitching in. Yep. They have a seat at the table. Yeah. And they might not like a shooting deer. Well, that ship's sailed though. Like, they already have a seat at that table.

So they might as well be paying for it. Like more and more and more of those other interest groups are having more influence. Well, that's true. And so, regardless of what we may want, this idea that claiming that forever we're the only ones to pay for it is going to give a sole right to dictate how things are managed. That's just not holding up anymore. Definitely won't be in five or ten years. Well, another part of it that I liked is, you know, if you're buying a permit for this one of

12 places there in the state of Arkansas that the game official owns, that money is federally law. It's a federal law. That money goes back to that specific spot. So that part. That's good. And this is $10 a year, right? Yeah.

Yeah. $10.50 a year. $0.50. I mean, like, we have, we have things like conservation stamps that are, you know, through game and fish that it's like, you have to have one with your hunting tag. If you use game of fish lands, like, you have to have one. Yeah, that won't buy a state duck stamp. There's things like that. But, I mean, if you're going to use, you know, like a pit toilet or whatever, toilet paper ain't free, you know, road maintenance ain't free.

Right. You can't, there's no such thing as free lunch. So I think if you're going to bitch about a $10.50 a year, you can maybe go deal with your own stuff. Thanks, Amy. You can pack out a white bag. What you're saying that brings PTSD to me when I see, like, in Minnesota, when they're like, we haven't raised the fishing license price in 17 years and we want to raise it a buck and people lose their mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, there's always like an immediate shock to the system, but it only takes a few years. And it's just very normalized. And you're just like, yeah, it's the $10 thing you pay to go enjoy public lands. If you want to watch birds or use the pit toilets that they offer. Yeah. Well, Utah tried this, like, pretty recently. And the backlash was so severe.

They like, forget it. They abandoned the effort. It's crazy. Well, I'm going to be for it. So we send the hate mail to Spencer. Okay. And then I'll tell you to send it to Mark, who has our last story of the day about some historic fishing closures across the western part of our United States.

What do you got, Mark? Yeah, well, since we're, you know, we've been talking for a while. We'll try not to belabor of this too much. But the headline here is that high water temperatures across much of the West have been leading to catch and release fishing closures that are at, you know, kind of all-time highs now. This is something that over the last decade plus, you know, anybody who spends time, especially trout fishing out in these western states, has gotten used to seeing this. happening more and more and more seemingly though every year and just recently some some relatively

attention grabbing new updates of that have have popped up most notably your home state of Wyoming has implemented the first voluntary closure is what they call it for catch and release fishing on the renowned snake river so this is iconic water that runs from yellowstone national park through grand titan national park to the state border this is kind of like the jewel of Wyoming, of fly fishing, imaginations. And now from noon to sunrise, they're asking anglers to stay away. They're asking anglers not to be out there catching these fish because of the fact that these high water temperatures, which lead to lower oxygen levels as well, put high stress on

these fish. And this is happening not just on the snake, but also many of the other major rivers in Wyoming. It is impacting the Green River, the North Platte River, the New Fork River, the Big Horn River. And actually there's a full closure now on a segment of the Big Horn River, which is another huge draw, huge tourist draw to Wyoming. Then if you move on down, you've got similar hoot owl restrictions across almost every major trout fishing river destination in Montana. I think it is 24 rivers, at least 24 rivers now have hoot owl restrictions, which is what they call.

Yeah, explain that because that was a new term for me. Yep. So Hoot Owl is something similar to what Wyoming put into place. In Montana, that means from 2 p.m. on, they're asking, and this is not so much a voluntary closure, but an actual more enforceable closure on Montana rivers. Houdaulal means after 2 o'clock, catching, catch and release fishing is a no-no. So that's 24 rivers, at least 1,200 miles of river is covered by that in the state of Montana now. Most of them are like very notable bodies of water.

Oh, yeah, beaverhead, Yellowstone, Big Hole, Bitterroot, Gallo, in Missouri. I mean, creme de la crem of what trout anglers are traveling to Montana to go experience. Now half the day you can't experience them. In Colorado, at least 19 rivers now have similar restrictions, something like 635 river miles impacted. And state officials are calling that unprecedented. So that's something they've never experienced to that degree in Colorado. And as of last week, the entire Yellowstone National Park, the entirety of all the rivers and streams in Yellowstone National Park are under the same kind of thing. So if you care about cold water fish and fishing for them, these days it is getting more and

more unlikely that you will get to experience it the way maybe you could have 10 years ago or 15 years ago during parts of the year. And so here's, you know, what's happening here. I mentioned that the higher water temperatures, right? You've got historically low winter snow packs in the winter, like what we had this past year across much of the west. You've got these record heat waves. You have this mega drought that's been going on two decades relatively consistently across

large parts of the West. All of this is leading to, you know, stream flows going down sooner in the year. River temperatures going up higher than they used to and staying high. All of that is just not good for a species that is relatively fragile and needs that cold water. And when you add on the stress of fishing, a catch and release type situation, you're taking a possibly already physiologically stressed fish and then adding in that physical exertion, it makes survival rates plummet. So the recommendation from Trout Unlimited and by most state agencies now is that once you reach

a 68 degree water temperature to give them a break, that's when severe stress and real concerns around survival rate hits. So 68 degrees and higher folks are saying, hey, let's get out of there, let's leave the Trout B, when you're getting above like 72 degrees, that's when we're reaching like lethal thresholds for these fish. When that happens consistently, a whole bunch of bodily functions start going down the drain for trout. Each different trout subspecies is a little bit different. So rainbow trout and brown trout handle the warmer water temperatures better than say cutthroat trout. So, you know, for the native western trout, cutthroat, there's a bunch of subspecies, but they really need that

really good cold water. They are on decline and have been struck. for all sorts of reasons, including the introduced species of brown trout and rainbow trout out competing them. So now with these warmer water temperatures, that's increasing that challenge even more so, because the browns are going to do a little bit better, the cutthroat are going to struggle more so. And so you're going to have this competition threat continue to kind of build as well. So you've got a lot of different things layering on top of us here that are going to impact those native trout of the West and really a lot of anglers, There's a lot of people that care about this resource, a lot of, you know, businesses and fly guides and, you know, shops and hotels and all of this, you know, that ride on top of this ecosystem and these species. So it's something that's, you know, as someone who's been a part-time resident out here for a decade plus, I've been seeing more and more and realizing, oh, wow, the way I experience this place is changing.

And I'm sure, you know, Maggie, you've been seeing it living here your whole life, how that has become. seemingly just a part of what it means to fish in the West is that, hey, August is a crapshoot. August might not be a thing anymore for big parts of the year. They're just not creek fishing in August. It's pretty much what it comes down to. Are Wyoming's closures voluntary? They're not even like, you have to be off the water. To this point, they're not making them legally enforceable, but they're like this very strongly

worded suggestion. And they're saying if anglers will follow. this and we're asking that they do so, then we won't be forced to go further. But this is like that step, this is the final warning before they have to do something further. The Antelope Corridor recommendation. Fishing when it's hot out recommendation. Wyoming doesn't like being told what to do. Are you stubborn, Maggie?

Depends. When I need to be. Yeah. Are you going to be fishing out there though? No. No, good conservationists. No, it's not that. The fishing also doesn't get, it's not that good when it's out.

hot. They're lethargic. They're not that fun to fight. I might be on the lakes trolling for some big Lakers because that water stays pretty consistent. We don't really get above 70. And the Lakers are pretty low. So when it gets a little warm, we go to the lakes, then we go to the mountains. And there's still cold water around. But I think that's a great point though, is making sure that people know about the alternatives. Like if we're reaching those higher water temperatures, yeah, give the trout a break in those rivers where you have that, but there are alternatives, the lakes, the high alpine tributaries, you know, switching to warm water species, chasing some bass, chasing, you know, something like that in these reservoirs.

This is, you know, we don't want to love these things to death. We got to, if it means we sacrifice a little bit of time, a little bit of that experience, I think that's certainly better for the long term. Two other things to consider when you're in that zone approaching the 68 degree kind of line. they do ask, you know, if you are still going to catch and release between like 65 to 68 degrees, you know, try to make sure that those fights with a fish are as short as possible. So don't baby them for 15 minutes to make sure you don't break off a fish. Like get that guy in, use a heavier tippet.

Don't take all these pictures and have like a five-minute photo shoot with a fish. Get these fish in fast, get them back in the water fast, give them the best chance for survival. I think if you do that, another thing I talked with a guide down in, Idaho, a friend of mine, Mike Dawkins, about this. And he said, just remember, like, as we are moving into this world of warmer water temperatures, increasingly stressed trout, you know, numbers don't have to be the thing. Like, so many people want to chase catching tons and tons of trout. Let's maybe focus more on the experience. Let's catch five trout in a way that it's really exciting to us and then enjoy the rest of the float. Or let's go do something different where you can still enjoy that fly fishing or that

trout fishing, however you like to do it. But we don't. need to pound every single possible fish because there's more and more people trying to do this. The conditions are getting more and more difficult for the fish. So we're all going to have to give a little to keep this around for the long term. Yeah, maybe time for those trout anglers to just start thinking about hunting season. It's only a month away. It's getting to be at time. Thinking about it. All right, that's the end of today's episode. Next week though, Steve is back and for the first time he's going to be doing a news show from the fish shack. So tune in to see how fun or weird or bad that goes.

See you back here then. Bye now. The wait is over. Join us Saturday, August 15th from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for the grand opening of the new meat eater store at 50th and France in Edina, Minnesota. Meet Clay Newcomb, Brent Reeves, Spencer Newhartth, and my personal whitetail sensei, Tony Peterson.

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