00:00:08 Speaker 1: This is me eat your podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can't predict anything, um, Seth Morris. Can you tell everybody about the deal with the stop sign you were telling me about? Oh so um. In in previous podcasts, I've heard you guys talk about what you've heard. Turkey's Gobble too Yes, um, which is a long, expansive list list. Uh so um one. I'm from Pennsylvania. You can't hunt on Sundays, So, which is another thing I'd like to talk about. Yeah, if there's three things I like to talk about, Okay, it's deep Sunday hunting, laws and ship Turkey's Gobble Too perfect that's the things I'm interested in. So and this this ties in two of those things. If you were packing a dip, this would be a great story for me. That was that was high school I might have been. So this is my kind of story. Yeah, this is all the stuff I like in it. Yeah. So um on Sunday, So, me and my buddy went out on Sunday just listened for birds. It was during the season, and we went to the spot where we could like look down this big hollow in Pennsylvania. Calm hollows you do Yep, you guys can't do that. Yeah, we can hollow, No, not holler hollow. Okay, I was gonna accuse you of cultural appropriation. It's still the same way, but they actually pronounce it. We call him hollows. Really, Yeah, you grew up saying that. Yep, dude, I would have known what anybody was talking about. I live up curtain hollow. That's how I used to live up curtain hollow pencil. Someone asked me where I lived, I'd say, up curtain hollow. Do you guys say fixing? Some people do? That depends on the person. One time I had was getten the off from Missouri, and he told me I was getting a six pack of guys. So I would just kind of rotate through him throughout the week and we get back. You know, everybody's telling what they heard, what they saw. The old man looked at me and he said, I heard a bull over there hollering in the holler. I didn't know what he was talking about. They say hollow in Pennsylvania, yep, huh. Anyway, we're most have been when all them boys is up fighting at Gettysburg. They introduced when Lee raided the North. They must introduced that term. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know where it came from, but they use it. Um anyway, looking over this hollow and weren't hearing anything and just getting ready to leave, and there was a stop where at an intersection. M there's a stop sign there. So I pick up a rock, throw it at the stop sign. Okay, stop there. Uh? Were you hucking the rock out of stop sign as out of vandalism, out of a vandalism impulse? No, it was more of like, I wonder if I can hit that with a rock. Okay, I got it. Yeah, I'm with you. So I did that, and I hit it and two birds fired off up on the hill. So we've got the ads hooking rocks that stop signs. That's another one. That's something you could just carry on in your truck. A rock you don't you want to carry against your tire. You gotta get a new turkey vest that has a stop sign staples hung on the back of here. Um. Northing I want to touch on real quick is a lot of people wrote in about this. It's not that fresh of the story anymore. But there's a famous skier who, Yeah, he's heard of. How many people in here have heard of Andrew McClean the skier I have not? Mm hmm. You had heard of his book that he wrote, the Shooting Gallery, heard of the book The Bible of Yeah, Utah's wash Sash Mountain skiing. So this guy in his in his uh as his girlfriend or wife um famous skier pillars of the community. She's actually some kind of assistant city attorney wife. His wife Andrew McLean and his wife Polly Samuels McLean um out in the woods. Happened to be toting around I guess a set of bolt cutters and steal a dude in Utah um near Park City, steal a dude's tree stand, a couple of tree stands, and steal a trail camera. But they screw up and he misses one of the trail camps down the trail. So the hunter gets an image on his trail camp or the other dude packing out his trail cam and tree stands, and he goes and puts the image up online and a couple of hundred groups help him out bread and the image around and pretty soon it gets identified as this famous skier in his pillar of the community wife who now have felony charges facing felony charges. I guess he just came out said it's inexcusable. He has no excuse, horrible thing to do. I'd like to know if he's a skier, no man that everything. Listen. I haven't dug into it too deep, but I haven't read any suggesting that he was stealing the stuff because he needed a new tree stand. Well, he can't use it now if he's got felony, if he gets charged to felony, because we get a felony, you can't have a gun, right, Yeah he could bow hunt. Oh yeah, you could bow hunt. I have his tree stand. Oh, I see what you're saying, you know, like if he's stealing it for hunting purposes and now he can't even what's weird is he brought it home. Yeah, he didn't just go and throw it down in a ditch donna do or a hollo or a hollo. He brought it home. I I don't know if he's speaking to what his motivations were. Did he really need a tree stand in a trail cam? That bad? The like? I don't know. I can't back this up. I don't. I haven't looked into it, but everything I've read has carried with it the suggestion that they were doing it because they think that hunters can suck it. But I don't know he hasn't. I don't know that he said. It's just like people that the insinuation. Why don't just leave that note hunters can suck it on the guy's tree stand rather than take his tree stand because he likes he's a man of action. Did his wife comment, I haven't read where she's had a comment. He's got a lot more to lose. It sounds like because um, you know, he's he's like a person that people look up to in a outdoor enthusiast and probably has some has probably enjoyed some level of his life and success utilizing public lands. And here he is trashed on someone else's legal right to put a couple of temporary hunting implements out on public land and violation of nothing. So yeah, it looks pretty bad for the guy. I'm just I just read the little piece of Powder Magazines website did on it, and uh, they're also saying, well, they start off by saying that there's been animosity between skiers and backpackers toward hunters over the years, but it appears, according to reports, McLean decided to find takes in his own hands, which I feel like it's kind of bullshit because I've been living in both those worlds for over well over a decade, close to two decades, and I've never had seen any kind of animosity between those groups. You laurened man, you've never had any like you never had any like a little bit of trailhead tension. No, but it's kind of different a backpacker or a skier. It's from freaking some lady with a little micro dog that's from way out of town, not a not a mouth, a recreator like like that's or backpackers, Yeah, I got you, maybe some kind of animal rights activists, who knows, you know, but animosity between hunters and skiers doesn't seem to really I guarantee you go dig to this guy's garbage. There's some meat scraps in that garbage. I don't really know. I shouldn't say that. What am I talking about? I'm saying that he's meeting or not a vegetarian, But I'm just bumping Powder magazine is putting this out there that you know, someone should be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Um yeah I never really liked hunters either. Yeah, I don't say that and start start a thing where there's not a thing, you know. Yeah. They end their little piece here by saying somewhere a krusty local tips his glass fills. That mean because they said not to condone criminal activity. But but Andrew McLean may have just written himself deeper into backcountry ski lower with this one. No real, Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm a little disciple. Want to talk about something really really that says yeah, but okay, moving on? Uh. In an episode called an Object in Its Shadow, we were talking about an area where a ram, a doll ram was laying where he had a little cubby of rock that protected him his back. So he had he's viewing, he's looking out in a panoramic view, but he's protected from behind by an outcrop and overhanging outcrop of rock, and we were talking about how it's kind of like this perfect spot where he can see everything blow him, and then he's got a buffer, a barrier behind him, so something that comes immediately behind him might not see him, And I was saying, how white tail bucks like to lay it like that too, where they'll get on kind of like right towards the top of a ridge and they'll lay up with their back kind of curled against the log or an overhang or something, and they can look out down blown so they got some protection and hit their hidden from behind and can see below. And this dude wrote in to say that it sounds an awful lot like what the geographer Jay Appleton called the prospect refuge theory in his book The Experience of Landscape, and he says the prospect refuge theory goes that people humans prefer the edges of environments with a vista in front and protection from the back and sides, based on the evolutionary understanding that this increased the probability of survival for early humans by protecting them from unseen dangers. The theory is widely accepted and applied as a design principle in landscape architecture an interior design. That's interesting. On a similar note, Buck Bowden on another episode was talking about how and nature things are around and we got talking about, um, how we build humans build squares now, and he was saying it's just been proven time and again that that when it comes to buildings, squares are just a much more efficient use of space. And he mentioned imagine that you have a bunch of round objects and you stack them in place. You have a lot of empty yeah gaps. But you build square and fill with right you build right angles and fill with right angles, and you find that you have a lot less wasted space and more usable Yeah. Look at New York City. If everything was round, it wouldn't work, It would be a mess, would be another quick piece. Dude road in saying he can't listen anymore because we talk about DIP too much. I'm sensitive to that, and I don't want to talk about DIP anymore. But I have a couple of final thoughts on DIP because that for one guy that is sick of hearing about DIP, it seems like a lot of other people dippers want their voices to be heard. So I just shook a guy's hand today, great guy, and I'm walking up to shake his hand. I see him take his finger and scoop out with his shaking hand. With shaking hand him to like him like a lot, like him a lot. It's a little etiquette. Um, I'm assuming it sanitized it. So guy writes in to say this. He goes, you know, I'm glad you guys are discussing the finer points of dipping. And he was saying that he used to follow a hockey player named Miko Savonin, known as the Flying Finn. And this guy got himself a a plunger used in the application of his ministering drugs two dogs, because he would put his dip in his plunger and pack it real tight. I don't know what do you get out of packing it tight? He's like a nice tight pack. Does that make sense? Well, I guess you just don't want it to all apart and yelling your teeth. He put it in the tube and then use the plunger part to compact it and make it into a sort of plug. He then put this in his upper lip and no one could ever tell it was in. We called it the upper decker, not to be confused with the upper deck where you pooping this top jack of someone's toilet um. And I actually when when we're down here today, I have to go buy apart from my col or toilet um. Another guy wrote in to talk about the same thing where he's saying that in high school, dipping was so bad, and him and his friends dipped so much that when they came into class, the teacher to make them lying up and inspect their lips to make sure they weren't coming into class, and they took the hide and scold bandits in their upper lip to get away from it. He says that they would run both upper deckers and lower deckers at the same time, and they took the calling it a full stadium that customated even that much more fun to be different when you had to come in with like a chipmunk and have your teacher inspect your mouth and then sit down and be like, I still got two in advice, stadium to the full stadium is the best thing in the world. Man. Uh, that's infer any kind of newsy type of objects. We're just coming back from um coming back from big Yeah, you could probably go as far as it called a big elk hunt. A big elk hunt in extreme south eastern Washington State, which is some dry, rocky gass country. People that aren't from that area, I think like they didn't realize. How about the difference between Western in eastern Washington. Like people know Seattle right for all of its rain and everything, but you know half that state more and half the state lays and kind of in the rain shadow of the Cascades where whether you know, comes off the Pacific Ocean and the air is laden with water. And as all that air gets pushed up over the Cascades, that compresses, the water density increases, comes out as precipitation and then it's pretty much dry air that moves from there, and that and other factors has led to like great aridity in eastern Washington. And so we were hunting like a really dry ass desert ass place in Washington, and the unit, I'll just tell you, you could have plucked us from one of those mountain sides now up high, because down low in the bottom is a different story. But up high, you could have taken yourself off one of those mountain sides and put yourself on a Mexican hillside and then the Sonora and you wouldn't have known you moved. It was a lot like Sonora, dry rock, only grass stage lush bottoms. Give that place a little bit of soil and a little of water, a little bit of shade, and you get these thick hell hole bottoms. I'd go far so far as the calm hell holes. Yeah, john rock, juniper like juniper, ponderosa pine, western hemlock, yep, western hemlock. And then uh, and then down the bottoms of a great array of fruiting plants. Yeah, they were fern down there, and there's green thick aldership, wild rose, elderberry, choke, cherry um, which made it feel jungle like. I mean, we're crawling through some thick stuff down in there. Uh. The unit, I'll just I'll just tell you the unit. People are always calling us to ask us about what units we were in doing this, and that it was Unit one seventy two Mountain View because it's a really hard tag to draw. Um, we've explained this to thousand times. But like in hunting, you know, if you have if you have the supply of animals, it doesn't meet the demand. What you need to do is you need to you need to limit how many people are getting after it. And so you did do these things called permit draws. Right, So this area we're hunting, and they only give out I think they give out you know somewhere ten you know some of years ten or fourteen archery elk tags for a unit that's about a hundred square a hundred square miles uh and and and and you need to accumulate what's called bonus points to draw the permit, So you need to have a typically you would need to have applied unsuccessfully for one of these units, you know, between three and ten years, in order to have any reasonable chance of going and drawing the one seven to permit. And I, after living in Washington State for three years, accumulated enough bonus points to go and draw the unit for one seventy two. And what they call it in Washington is they call a quality elk unit UM because there's a lot of stuff you can just go. You know, in the western part of the state, where success rates are extremely low and hunting conditions are extremely difficult because you're hunting coastal rainforest, UM, you can have a lot of people take a crack at it, and since it's so hard, very few and kill elk anyway. But in the eastern part of the state, where it's open country and just to kind of like the elk act differently and it's easier to find them, you need to limit access and so they give these these permit draws out and I drew one of these permits to go hunt one two, and I just got like a buddy recommended the unit to me. I never stepped foot in the place. Um, hadn't even really been that close to it. And so it was like one of those rare conditions circumstances where you go to hunt big game in a place you've never laid eyes on. We show up down there and uh ridge tell them the first thing that we saw, big old fire, big fire covered in smoke, a lot of smoke made for really we've showed up at sunset and like pop down this big ridge and look down in this valley. It's really pretty. But yeah, did not make it easy for glassing some of the days. Yeah, when we showed up, it was actually too smoky to glass the creek. The drainage. Real hunting is Manachi manatchi creek and show up and it's just like smoky as all get out, hot and sunny. What's wrong on um? And right away I get the idea, like like when you do something that you get in your head that it's gonna be um, you get in your head that's gonna be all you can think about, like all the good stuff, because if you look online, the reputation of this particular unit is that it's prohibitively steep, very nasty, but having tons of elk in it, which one of being very accurate assessment totally. But we show up and we drive to a spot, like every camp spot has someone camped in it, and then we drive to a spot and it's like, um, just trucks and dudes, lots of trucks, lots of dudes, lots of wall tense set up. What you don't agree with that, you, Alice, I mean, it's all relative to me. It wasn't that out of out of the ordinary what we saw go on, but it definitely freaked you guys out. You guys definitely felt like the pressure. I think, well, I didn't feel It's not. I think I was surprised by it because the last three trips that I've done have been in Alaska, where you just you fly in and you don't see anybody. The last three trips you don't those have all been Alaska. Yeah, it was the last one of fog Mack, and uh so you just fly in and see the dudes that you're with. You don't roll up to your spot and see like a bunch of in the next human trailers. I got you, So then you're coming from that. You're coming from that context. And then I'm like, oh god, there's a lot of people in our spot. But what's weird is what is like the weird thing is everyone we're talking to. We pulled into place and there's how many trucks are parked where we pull in where we slept two trucks there, and but both of them come up. Both of the guys come up at dusk separately, and both of them are like, dude, there's bulls everywhere, right, And he's like I was in there working them, and Tommy and Doug there camped down the other way. They were working them, and Bill and Harvey were working them. Jay and Dan are working them tomorrow, and it's like, wow, it's a chaos around here. And I got a little panicky and decided to go off somewhere. They had no elk ended up not having any help because I think it was coincidence because later we heard there were elk that is on. Yeah, well here's the other part. What So we get up on that big hill and to the left of us. As a smoke, it's like apocalyptic to the left of you're saying the movie Apocalypto. Yes, movies a real disappointment, real disappointment. Um, would you love that movie? I've never seen it? Okay, what was that little look thinking we might we might need to find out? Yeah, oh Apocalypto. Okay, it's about is it worth finding out for yourself? No. I was drawn to it because it involves hunting and hunters. But these are like pre Colombian um people in the people in meso America, like indigenous hunters from meso America. And the movie actually like ends with your ends with the arrival of Um, ends with the arrived of Europeans. So it's presuming me the action takes place and it's about a guy you know and his they get kidnapped by the bad as tex or whatever and he needs to get back and it starts just like just like Last of the Mohicans, just like, um, what was the really bad Mountain Man movie that Leonardo Revenant? The Revenuet Like it's a group of dudes. It starts out with a bunch of dudes chasing a big game animal. Like, if you want to get people sucked into a movie, apparently you have a bunch of dudes in a very unrealistic hunting situation chasing a big game animal creeping through the woods and they catch tape here in the beginning of Apocalypto, and knowing that these people probably would have used small stone flakes and probably very carefully disarticulated their tape here, instead he pulls out like a giant dagger and like stabs it into its guts, and I'm like, man, man, you know, why are you gotta Why are you gotta Just It's always like that when people are hunting movies. Um, what was I talking about? It looked apocalyptic, not Apocalypto the movie. It looked apocalyptic, like the end of the end of existence. But to the right it got tricky because some people would hear the sound we heard to the right and think it was apocalyptic, and some people would hear the sound to the right and think that it was utopian, which is a bunch of fricking wolves cutting loose. That was cool. Half of Americans, not half, a huge percentage of Americans would hear that and be like, oh my god, it's also so awesome. Yeah, but there's a little subset of Americans who would hear that and be like, come on, dude, I don't want to share. I don't want to share with those things. They're hunting the same thing we were, and they're just basically saying like, when hunting, you're trying to be all quiet, not let anything know you're around. These wolves are out there, like where could I kill you? I'm coming to cut you to basis just howling away. And guys, what they were saying that those wolves came into elks. Shut up. That shuts the elk down. They stopped bugling, wouldn't you. Oh yeah, I f had like a pack of wolves honing in on my locale because I was making a bunch of racket. I'd be like, easy, there's easy, let's do quiet. Let's do this all quiet, like, which totally makes sense because we saw that bull with the cows and he didn't make a peep. Yeah, we dropped down into that, Um, we dropped down into this this thing called the West Fork West Fork Trail to spend the night down in there, and all we're hearing about all these bulls screaming their fool heads off and here's the bull and narrow some cows and he never makes a peep. We watched them in the evening, slept listen through the night in our sleeping bags, woke up in the morning, never a peep, and there's wolf tracks right down on the bottom of that drainage. People get anxious about those wolves. Man, the wolves. I wonder if that's why those talk are all living on those steep hillsides, because of those wolves being around. I wonder if that's advantageous to them, Like it's harder for the wolves to get a killed. It's way harder from the hunt. They don't like hunting on that stuff. Lions like hunting steep stuff, but wolves don't like hunting steep stuff because wolves hunt by like lions hunt by surprise, very short jumps, and wolves hunt by just wearing you down, and so they don't like being on that jump. But the wolves have only been there for a couple of years, so I think there's probably some of that stories unwritten. But we get to the spot now it's like all these people running around talking about all these bulls and everything, and then um, yeah, it was like I did the classic like leave Elk to find Elk, right, But you didn't like none, did you? Annie? At that point, I didn't really care because I figured in that unit we would just walk down any trail and it was going to be the same thing. Yeah, because we were here in bugling Bulls at the same time we heard the wolves the first night, but then after the wolves had been in there, they shut up. Would you mind to introduce yourself? Uh, my name is Lauren Malton. I'm one of the camera guys. The first time you've ever been out with us, first meat eater hunt, which but you filmed like boatloads of hunts. I've had a few years behind the camera on different hunting shows like Randy Newburgh's On Your Own Adventures, Huntley Ridder's Outlanders, done some random stuff, uh, other kinds of hunts, big network TV shows. Yeah, work as a freelancer for a company out of Missoula, Montana. Do Mountain Men on History Channel. Uh, and then over the years have done a handful of other kinds of shows like that. And what we're talking about before I interrupted you, Oh, just the fact that we were here in Bulls Bugle right there out of camp and you guys were just mentioning that we left elk to find elk, which you know, as always, you never know what to do, right You think you just like Joanna said, you think it's gonna be like that everywhere you go, and then all of a sudden year hiking seven miles and not hearing anything. We did tons of like phone scouting, because if you go to a hunt a place you've never been, you have to start calling anyone you can think of. So in the months since we drew the permit, we talked to the local biologists, talked to the local game warden, talked to it not quite local game warden, talk to a not quite local biologists, talked to two guides, talked to a former tag holder who talked to another formal tag holder, talked to the pizza magnate Jimmy Doran, who talked to another former tag holder. Well, I didn't know that, and they all said the same thing, like unbelievably good elk con which proved to be true. So I thought you just would go and leave those elk and go find a whole bunch of other ones. Down in his bottom was canyons, and um, yeah, we just started wandering around out there. There were elk down there. We had to glass him up and then they you know, the other thing I was thinking about earlier is there all these campsites were full, but there were a lot of uh, spike and cow tags given out in that unit as well. Right, I think the just spike and I think it was over the counter. Yeah, anybody. That's the crazy thing too about Washington And I remember hearing this because my brother lived at Walla Walla for a while. He's working on a salmon project down there and live there, and you can, like any time Dick or Harry can go into any of these units with his bow and hunt spike elk over the counter. So you get, you get everybody goes like do you have a bull tag? That's everybody. That's the first question out of everybody's mouth, because there's a lot of dudes scrounging around and they're trying to scrounge up a spike elk an adolescent male, a one and a half year old male elk, which we maybe could have had a poke at one. We saw two spikes and one kind of hung out for a little bit, saw a couple of spikes. Yeah, we got some good chats that. Yeah, I had a spike stander. Yeah, he's stood there at seventy yards for a long time. Go ahead, I got a question, Kelsey Johnson says, girlfriend wildlife artists. Yes, specializing in wildlife, and I actually do some gun dog portraits as well. Kind of my little special yeah, specialized gun dog portraits. Um, real quick. As someone wants to get a picture of their dog drawn up, how should they get a hold of you? Um? I show a lot of my stuff on Instagram. I have my email kind of on there for people that want to reach out to me. Well, let's just go ahead and just tell them where it is. Now, let's go my Instagram. It's a k underscore r A E. John's j O h n s. So that's kind of my little art. That's your art a little YEA. Also work in the egg industry yep, Midwestern agg sales big egg, big corn and be big big egg and big art yep, big bucks down there. So uh, real quick, just as long as round the subject. How did you get in the business of drawing people's dogs? Ah, that's a good story. Um, well I have done a couple just for family members. You know, people love their pets right, Yes, they do. They. I've done a couple for family friends and then UM got connected with I actually saw a photo that Andy Tramp from Muddy Shotter Media took of gun dog from No Limits Kennels out of Heiser, Kansas. They just did a little photography photography session. I was looking for a challenging photograph to draw, asked set to get me access to that photo and just starting it for fun. And Andy's my good buddy from back, so he took the kind of got I just was looking for a little challenge, you know. It was. It was a good photo of a German short hair with a bird in its mouth. And um, the owner of the kennel found out about me drawing that while I was drawing it, and then he he wanted to buy it. So once his client base saw the drawing, they kind of I've got a little niche down there in that area. The people that have dogs from that kind of asked me to do portraits of their dogs or drawing to their dogs. But how is it different to draw a gun dog than normal dog? Um, I guess it's really not. But like there's you know, action shots or people have more photographs taken of gun dogs. They'll have a toten a bird to a dog or whatever. Yeah, better professional photos of you know, people are more into that. I guess, like more people take pride in their gun dogs. They're just like I don't get any you know. And they tend to be a nostalgic lot. Oh yeah, bird dog hunters are nostalgic, and they tend to be a steats. They have like an aesthetic sensibility. They're passionate about their animals, that's for sure. So it's it's fun to do, you know. I've kind of let got feedback. It's kind of a nice little keepsake for them forever. So I bet you there's a healthy portion of New Jersey cat ladies that would like to have that market some money. She used to paint dog porches for people, and they sure as hell weren't um hunting dogs. But but yeah, you gotta specialize, man, you gotta get no one within a certain circle this I don't know who knows that could be the only gun dog painter I know. And you put it all up on Instagram. Yeah, and it's it's colored pencil, by the way, what I keep saying, pain Yeah, Yeah, that's showed us some of your work and it's amazing. It's awesome. Go check it out on Instagram. Um, as long as we got sidetracked by then we have Chris gil Ridge Pounder here cameraman, and then in Seth Morris is with us working for us also for his first time. Awesome trip. You liked it. You can do bad jobs. All of these guys crossed three. You bought three kinds of cookies and they all missed the mark. I tried. I couldn't make it. He couldn't make anybody happy, could you. He almost won with the oreos, but double stuff. You always think that would be impossible to go and buy three types of cookies, bring him back to a group of hungry guys and have them all turned their nose and up. I took a bite and threw it out. I couldn't. I could not stomach the one. The like white that anyone that wants to do a grocery store, any American goes into a grocery store and here's all the cookies in the world laid out in front of him. Okay, wholes in America, and he's like white chocolate in the world. Does that man, it's one of my favorite cookies. Man, I like them. Um, well, yeah, no, I want to make and do may do they do? Well? Then you you mentioned about how you would love a sleeve oreos. You're like, I could pound a sleeveal oreos right now that I'm joking because I like double stuffers. Okay, well that's good double stuff. Honestly, it was the rest of us that they were scraping the filling, although I did eat probably close to a whole row over the course of like a day. Yeah, paro about sugar. Interesting about the dull stuff is it's only one F on this stuff. It's not it's not double stuff with one f. Yeah. Yeah. The comedian Mitch Edburg you taught about how you had a girlfriend Lynn, who spelled it with one end, and then later he had another girlfriend named Lynn who spelled it with two ends. But she could always tell if he said the wrong Lynn because he would go as long as long and so he get trouble. You get in trouble for it. Uh, what was it like? What was the actual first moment when we um Let me ask you this, so we go down and go This is a question for Jannest because Jannest is actually the one I'm the one hunting about, not the one hunting. I'm the trigger man because Johannest is the one who's calling, which is the hard part. Like any dipship can shoot something, but not anybody can call one in. Right, that's the hard part, absolutely, absolutely. There are other hard parts for this hunt. Yeah, the hiking rounds hard. Figuring out where they are doesn't if you're calling it good at calling, but you're not in his own with elk, that doesn't even much good. Yeah, there's components to it, right, There's like, there's a lot of components to it. There's there's being like in this particular spot, they're sort of finding them, which you can. Anybody with a set of ears and a pair of binoculars is gonna like find within Yeah, in two in forty eight hours of poking around, you would know where somebody you will find elk, but you will not be happy about where you found them because in this unit everything is below you because the way the land access works, it's like, imagine this, Basically you're hunting the entirety of a drainage, right, so you have the unit is kind of drawn around a drainage where you have the old ridgeline that forms the head of all the tributaries, and you're the only access points are up high. Even the lower access points aren't really lower because you still have the canyon to drop down into. So anytime you look at it elk from a from a road, you're looking down to the point where I think some people find that it's just is impractical that you would pursue them. Yeah, one to two thousand feet below an elevation game and drop because you have to then move several hundred pounds of ship back up out of you have to then pack several hundred pounds of the stuff. But if you're successful, but even just dragging your own butt up out of that hill after an unsuccessful hunt, I think it's real old, but it's front of mind. I think it should be front of mine. Like one, just going down there and coming back out is hard. It's very hard country to traveling. But I think for everyone who's hunting elk, you also have this idea that you gotta carry this thing back up, and so you're like, man, I'm already miserable. What would I possibly do in a situation where you know, and It might be that that you just can't hunt it, like by yourself in that area. The MOS's elk are just simply out of your reach. If you're hunting by yourself some places and like, depending on where they're at, it's almost irresponsible to try to take one by yourself. There is a packer that works that unit. Meet a guy with mules, you know that that said he can get anywhere in that unit? But has that he said? Yeah, yeah, I talked to him later. But even then when we called him, he wouldn't have been able to help us pack until the next day. He would have to hang the meat in the shade, which may or may not have kept it cool enough. And is that always his story? Or sometimes can he if he's in the unit? I mean, there's only fourteen people hunting, you know how many people are are actually gonna call him? So this is a mule packer who runs like a little little side business just packing. Yeah, I got and I got his name through the outfitter that I chatted with. What's cool is the outfitter too? We should talk about how we should name the outfitter because he was cool enough to give us a ton of intel man Yeah, it was bo Olsen of Wilderness Adventures. He gave us very accurate Willerness expeditions. Sorry. Yeah, he didn't have any clients who were hunting that unit that year and gave us very accurate information about the unit because he can do it because like he knows, you're not gonna be back. It's too hard to draw the tag. And he got sheep hunters in there too. Yeah, we saw a nice ram. I was surprised we didn't see more sheep. A lot of beds, a lot of droppings, lot of beds, a lot of tracks, thinking we running into more. We're really looking for him, that's true, but we were looking a lot, yeah, but not looking looking. We were looking looking for big tan sides. Yeah, when you're looking for elk, it's like a low touch look. It's not like looking for mule deer or CU's deer like you know, glass and for big horns. You actually gotta look look. It's kind of like you can just kind of go like, oh, pretty much tight, it's not an elk on that hillside in that there's not like some six hundred pound buckskin colored things standing in there, you know, going um, But yeah, I feel like, if you had spent more time looking, you might have found more. But then we had a lot of eyeballs out there with a lot of binoculars. So one ram but a big, nice, beautiful It was a beautiful him. Now you honest from a caller's perspective, from an ELK callers perspective, why were you not interested in? Why could I not excite you in the idea of going and trying to work that bull who wasn't bugling because you're in it for the bugle? Yeah? Um, well, you have a Canadian shirt up. It's a stone Glacier T shirt that has the didn't give you an American Median maple leaf on it. You know, I meant to ask him why they made it. Maybe you know the story behind Canadian outfitters and cheat hunters at their packs. The guy that wrote in about the full stadium Canadian. So yeah, I don't know. I've got nothing wrong, nothing against Canada. I don't have anything against those fellers either. Got a lot of friends out there, and uh, I just you know Bobby as being a little more American than that. But that's cool. It's like a little bit doing like diplomacy right now. So there's a bull you don't want to and I can't get you interested in looking trying to work them, trying to go around and work him right. So a couple of things that I didn't really like about it. There was a road like tuner yards above him, which made it intriguing, yeah, because you could easily get within tuner yards. About what made it intriguing to me was that he was a hiding in plain site. He was a bull who was hiding plain site, which interested in him. Yeah, because if you drove by on the road, it was so steep below the road that you couldn't see him. But dude, all day long, hunters passed within a hundred fifty yards. Because I shot away point where I thought he was, and then shot away point and then measured up to the road. He's one fifty yards and not forty five minutes would go by when you know, just watching hunters go back and forth, back and forth, and here's that bull is living out his deal. And they could They could have because it was so steep, you could have thrown a rock off the road bed and hit that bull. But you'd have to have one of the fourteen tags to begin with. Just something about that bull I liked. I liked everything about his little style. And he had to hike down into that drainage and up the other side to glass him up. Yeah, he just had well because we glassed him up off the trail on the first day Lake Lake Ridge Trail. Anyways, the hillside he was on was steep as could beat. Did you ever could uh real quick? Did I ever send you that stuff of that buck in Pennsylvania that was wearing a radio collar. And what that buck would do when hunting season came, Oh yeah, yah yah, hich No, he would hide on the side of the highway. Yeah, ditch. This buck roamed all over Hell all the time gun season would open. And he goes set up shop about fifty yards off a highway and right underneath the deer jumping sign, hiding in plain sight. And then uh Rick French told us about a place there's like a saddle, and he was taught about his whole life. They've been shooting elk in this area and there's a spot where they watch. He's out going bed and they watched and they go in bed on a four wheeler trail and lay seventy five yards from a quad Runner trail and just didn't watch quads drive by hiding in plain site. But that happens a lot. I was talking to my buddy Jimmy Miller this morning, who's coming up to visit me next week, and he was saying he's been out like the last two or three week weekends hunt was bow in Colorado, and every single animal he's seen, he's seemed like two or three bull elk, half dozen cows, a couple of bears, some moose. Everything's been off from near the road. As soon as he goes into the woods, he seens zero. They're learning more and more dudes are like willing to go farther to hunt. All the hardcore dudes that are actually gonna kill something or in the woods, and then the guys that are just driving buying four wheelers, you ain't gotta worry about them. I guess yeah. They gotta figured out like they're gonna if I go deep in the woods, suns bitches is gonna kill me. I'd rather be out here with these guys playing lightweight ball. But you know what, the whole this whole idea of roads and then being away from the road, being deep in the woods that's only a thing that we've made up in our own heads. The deer now might not look at it that way. Yes, I think they look that there's different types of disturbance, And I think that the sound of all day long going by they probably don't even like, I'm sure it registers him. They don't associate it with trouble. Oh I've seen him associate it. That bull doesn't, So tell me why you didn't want to work him. So he's on like a really steep hill side, So I figured like getting into because it's not like you're gonna stand on the road and start calling, right because I doubt that bull is gonna be like, oh yeah, that's probably a cow on the road. I go and see what she's up to. You think the bull is gonna be like no, no, no, and on that phone for that super steep So just like being like trying to do a setup setting up on a super steep hillside, it's just like you don't even you can't find a place to stand. You might start descending that hill and slide down into him. It was that kind of hey you watch out, um. Nothing was he had two cows and calm bulls away from cows can be a tough deal, and we knew that there weren't a lot of cows in this unit. We talked to some hunters that thought they had seen bulls, and it had seen half that in cows. That was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, is um, I've never seen it where you're where there's bulls running like groups of bulls hanging out and there's no cows. Mhm. That was a beautiful thing, just like just every elk hunter's dream. Yeah, it's like you get to where you see in elk. You just the assumption was it was a bull. You're like, oh my god, a cow if you saw one, I have a question. So like for the new hunter's perspective, is this yeah really yeah, not a lot of elk experience. Is this like peak rut? Definitely in the thick of it, in the thick of it. For the story, they are like very eager about going towards the sound of cow elk. Yeah too, Steep for you too, Steep, he's got a cow. He's not bugling watching him. He was he just like was sitting there feeding with his cow, with two cows. And so you figar with the word milk toast. Yeah, he was that. I don't know the definition people see. Here's the deal man, It's like it's spelled different than milk toast. Milk toast is is like a spelled like que. I believe it's spelled like m I l q u e means lame and different, timid or submissive. Yeah, it's a very milk toast bowl. What's the spelling, Johnie, like m I l q u e toast. But my whole life I thought it was milk. Like if you guys did a blandass meal and toast and soaking milk, R're like, dude, I don't want that. Yeah. My father other his term for milk toast was a term because he's from Italian ancestry, was raised by Sicilian immigrants. He's raised by his grandfather. Um, my father had several things that he would use terms he would use for people he didn't like, and they were they described different types of people. One of them was a horse's ass. Okay, that's like a very particular type of person he didn't like. I though it was a putts, which sounds Yiddish, and that was like another type of person he didn't like. But definitely not a horse's ask The guy's a putts. Another term for a person he didn't like. It's being like a lacking a little coordination. For Putts, that was like grumpy or old men. Yeah, horse's ass would be like a blow hard, Okay, Putts would be someone who messes everything up like a like a person just can't incompetence. Then there was a term a mingulu morta, which I've talked to people speak Italian, and basically he was saying a person who has non functioning sexual organs dead more to being dead meanular being a and I'm not saying the word right but me you know, he's he's basically yeah, so the bull is like a meingula more to bull. Well that or he's just being super super slick, like he had his two cows, he had his little hidy spot. He's pretty happy. He's you know, he's got anything going for him. And he's saying, yeah, do you ever find that there's a bull that uh, that gets cows and shuts up? Oh? Yeah, because he's like, why would I why in the world would I be like advertising my situation? But you know he still has to bugle right to the cow. Like there's the bugle between the cow and and him that goes on, not just between him and another bull. Right. I think I read once that when she says no, he has to bugle as like a sign of like like some sort of respect type deal will come come. That's in human terms, but as in like when it's like he's say no problem, yeah, like it's it's cool, I understand, we'll try again ten minutes or tomorrow, maybe five. But I've seen I've seen it happen a lot. There's like the the you know, the hurting or whatever you want to call it that he's doing, tending, tending, pushing him around, and then it's sort of like it gets close, it doesn't happen, and they sort of stopped. He always bugles, but I've seeing him bugle so softly that I could see him bugling, but I couldn't hear it. Two yards. I could see him go into the whole posture, stick his neck out, curls, you know, put his head up, see the steam come out of his mouth right after he chased the cow, and I couldn't hear him. I think that was why I think he was just like yeah, and he had a bunch of cows. This one that I saw do this. He's just staying chill about it. Yeah, so you so you couldn't you couldn't work that bull. Maybe maybe now. I just didn't feel like it was a high high odds, you know, it wasn't worth it from what it was gonna take us where we were and was gonna take us to a bore out of this drainage that we were in to go back up and out and put it, you know, put a half day effort just in getting into position. I just didn't feel like it was high enough odds that warranted that effort that we should just keep hiking down the trail and go into some country we hadn't been into and strike up another one. Yeah, got you. Um, there's so much to explain down in there around like how it like what our thought processes were, because there's too many there's like two many options at a point in time, you know, when you're down in that area right at that point in time. Yeah, just yeah, I just wander around like you get frustrated quick and and um then you get like that wolf stuff stuck in your head. M hm. No, because we were thinking We're like, you know, one of the best units in the state, and all of a sudden it's been like twelve hours, haven't heard a bugle, twenty four hours, haven't heard of bugle. Well, when we were in that area, we didn't know about the wolf thing yet, right, No, Oh, we'd heard him ripping though, Yeah, we had heard him ripping, but we didn't know that they that. We didn't get the report later that he had been in there, had heard some elk and shut him down. Yeah, because another hunter later was saying that man, they were going they were going good in there, and then when the wolves came through, they shut up. And the guide that Janice talked to also said that the year before things were ripping, meaning bowls are bugling, pack of wolves came through raising hell and that it's shut down for three or four days. Everybody just gets quiet. Seth. Saw a mountline I did, sitting sitting on its ass. Yeah, looking over the mule of your spot. That was cool. Yeah, they're cool to see. You don't see that too often, No, And I don't view them as competition as much. You really should, yeah, you really should. Oh, yeah, you think elkill shut up from them? I don't know, but they kill a lot more elk the wolves do, not per one. But I mean like there's just there's just so much more widely distributed. I mean they're everywhere, right Like anywhere that has an elk has a mountline. Well, it's not the Eastern States, the Western States. Every elk is going to run into a mountainline. You know. Um you when I was getting frustrated by the lack of beagles and you, Janice felt that, um, you felt that that it was just we weren't in the rut zone. Yeah, we were just in the wrong spot. It wasn't that they weren't doing It's just we weren't in the place that they were doing it. Mhm. And we slowly just made a big long loop and ended up, you know, on the other side of the giant drainage that you described earlier, where back to where Dave Tom Bill will We're all working an infinite quantity of bulls out of a bull in a place where the outfit that we talked you said that you could just that you'd find a bull in every canyon. Well he actually recommended that we spend our whole week I was in there and then almost kind of accidentally called in the bull. Yeah, I was calling a little bit just to do some locating, to kind of take a sense as of what was out there. And uh, we had a bad win for this scenario. It's the wind was dropping down the hill from the morning thermals. The air was cool, it was dropping down the hill and I looked down below me in a couple hundred yards away, here comes a satellite six point. And you always know you're in a good unit when like a like a nice six is a satellite and he's coming in silent, and the satellite bull being a bull, it's like not a dominant figure in the herd. He's just not big enough the man because later there was a bull just crank him in that same zone. I don't know, I just I just I just feel like because he was coming in, coming in quiet, coming in, Yeah, he was a sneaky peat. He's like a you know, a nice six point bull that you know I shoot any day. Um. That's thing. This unit has a lot. This unit is kind of we now know, is known for bulls that are like seven by seven and seven by eight, some crazy bulls. Yeah, I bet you we saw them three or five seven by seven. So this bull comes just creeping in and then crept out seth some creep away wind. Yeah, definitely caught wind. So they come in to investigate, and then they quietly without announcing their presence, saying themselves, there's five dudes there. I'm leaving three smells like five we're doing We're doing zero cent control, We're just doing wind. Yeah, there's no point at that. What would like what would you even do? A wide variety of things. There's masking sense, okay, there's like odors that you could put on yourself too. I'm not saying these things work. These things that exist there are there's a line of clothing. Yeah, it's been kind of scientifically discredited, but some people remain firm believers in a line of clothing that has a filtration carbon filtration system built into it that sort of scrubs your odor emanating from your body. I think the problem with that is most of the older emanating from your body is being exhaled mm hmm, So they make a face mask to help filter your exhale. Has that really been proven that most of the others actually just coming from your breath? I should say most, but just but but but you can wear clothes, but you're still breathing out. Yeah. I shouldn't say most, but a lot of older you're exhaling a lot of I remember like there was like a hunters sent concealment gum came around. My dad used the hunt with the guy that would during honey season eat a lot of carrots. He tried to be food. I remember hearing the old nuts one time say that all he drank was apple juice, so that way when he would pee during hunting season, just smell like apples um. Yeah, but then you got like Doug buck Man during yeah, big. Yeah. There's also I think that Cabella's made for Bill Winky, a full gortex suit that had rubber gaskets ankles, wrists and neck and then maybe even a hood. That sounds like a good thing to hike up down just wear pretty much. Yeah, So it wouldn't work for what we did for hunting. You just have it like just the pants on top hanging down. You hike into your stands, slowly set up, get in there and put the top on, seal it all off. Some people out West that I know do this and they don't think that it completely breaks down, you know, keep you sent free. But they look at it as in buying you time before an animal might spook from scent and buying you distance that you can be from an animal before they sent you. But they will have a um plastic toe that has completely that has closed, and they probably did some special sort of washing too to eliminate all possible set no perfumes and dies and whatnot in there. Probably has pine boughs in there and some dirt and leaves and whatnot. But they have a separate tupperwear for every day of the hunt, and it includes everything from underwear, shoes, socks, top bottoms, bass layers, everything. Yeah, every day you swap out every day. Every day you just yeah, and you do the best you can by taking some sort of some version of a shower and then you put on those fresh clothes so you're not walking around and clothes like because this it was a hot hunt this week and we were we were going through I felt like a sweat cycle twice a day. Uh okay, archery hunting white tails, like what my dad did, what we did growing up is you kept your hunting clothes outside hanging up in the breeze. Before you went out hunting, you would shower. We wouldn't use special soap. They make a lot of soaps and no deal with no perfumes. There's nothing I get more nostalgic about. Sorry to interrupt, but is that green? Is it sent away soapy? Like the lines all surfaces and Dug Durn's bathroom. But I feel like of the white tail woods like hunting camps. It's like there's like ten of those bottles in various levels of fullness in the shower, right, it's like that green liquid. It's meant for your hair for everything. Steve Kendra shower, Yeah stuff and when yeah, when I like get in a shower and see that stuff, like, it's just a flood of memories of like yeah, because that's what we did. Exact products. Yeah, green gels soap, so you would keep your clothes hanging up in the breeze, take a shower with preferably with non perfumed soap. Put where rubber boots that you clean. You don't go and buy gas with these boots on, right, You put them on when you're ready to walk to your stand. You don't go to the gas station and get on nasturals. You don't wear them in your car. You don't even drive to your hunting spot in these clothes. You get to your hunting spot, you stripped down, You put your clothes on you've been storing in a separate container, and you walk a very slowly so as to not break a sweat, getting your tree stand, put on your outer layers, and the whole being. Of course, you're not gonna like eliminate your scent, but like to buy you a few minutes. When I used to trap fox um, which are difficult to catch, I would do I would have a I would have totes that would fill with straw, and I would keep my clothes and boot and all my other equipment in totals filled with straw, and then would use rubber gloves that you would wash fastidiously all the time, and then keep your and then only wear those boots on natural ground in order to try to eliminate some of the scent you were leaving behind when you're trying to catch fox. It's a lot of work. But here, like a basic here's what we could have done. Like, here's the basic thing you do. You least bring some soap and some body powder, and every time you hit a creek, you try to scrub up a little bit, and a lot of guys it's not too much either. And we weren't doing this because we're just working the wind. And we were to a place that had like steep slopes and a lot of thermals. So it's like, if you're willing to work thermals, then we did work them very successfully. Um, if you're willing to like do that, you can get away with this. But if you're in an area that's like just famously for swirled winds and stuff, and I think you had to do it, and you were really just gonna make the sacrifice, at least have your sort of like daytime hill climb and close and you might keep in your backpack in a bag in your backpack your actual stock and clothes. And as part of your deal, when you're getting ready for the evening hunt or getting ready for the morning hunt, you wash up, put some body powder on. Um, people just take a baking bacon soda, put in a spray bottle, put some water and bacon soda, scrub up, put your clean version of clothes on, and try to go about your business. But we just played wind. The question came up while we were there if the smoke was gonna have any effect on scent too, because we were in a smoky area. It was smoking enough for reals annoying and you got black, black gunk coming out of your nose. I wonder if it affects the elks. Has to help. It cannot hurt. There's no way it hurts. Does it cover your scent? Has to There's no way that they're gonna smell you better amid all the confusion of a bunch of smoke in the air. It's not gonna like enhance their ability to to detect smell. And then the other question was was that activity in that area moving the elk out of wherever the controlled burns were in closer to where we were. I don't know about closer, but I would say that it displaced and probably concentrated elk into areas of low activity. And I think the fact that all those bugles are coming from the bot tend to be coming from the bottoms of those canyons is not accidental. I think that the gradual activity of humans being around, pressuring and pressuring them is has to have the effect of pushing them into places where they're just not getting messed with as much. If you left with their own devices, they'd probably higher up on the slopes. I think about that hard to say more water in the bottom, that's true. Um, So we keep on hunting. We eventually and this is kind of how stuff goes. Have all kinds of adventures. See a black bear, see a big horn, see some mule deer, have a bunch of adventures. And there's a there's a spot, there's a there's a place we want to go hike. We want to like access area of our unit where the only access point is sort of blocked by a big, very elaborate wall tent set up. Like these guys are practicing like siege warfare man. They got like a camp. I mean, these guys like got splitting malls and stuff. They're splitting firewood. I mean they're camped out archery target, backstop, trailers, generators, pots and pants hanging everywhere. They did two gallon drums. I don't know what was in them for drinking water. I have no clue. Barrels of presumably water and maybe fuel or maybe just food storage for bears. Could be camping. And I want to say, is an extraordinary card on a one to ten. On a one to ten, that's nine or ten. Yeah, they were dialed. They had the wall ten and then like one of those like easy up canopies as like a porch. Yeah, you start running a tarp over the whole thing, big setup. They've been there sixteen days, seventeen seventeen days, um, And I'm uncomfortable with uh going and parking right next to their camp to hike in because because this comes from being that we're filming, I'm really I try to be sensitive of like people go into the wood. They're going to the mountains to have peace and quiet and and and enjoy a level of anonymity presumably, And so I'm always a little bit leery about like rolling up on people with five guys carrying cameras and just you know, I'll try to be sensitive to that because I wouldn't really love that a whole bunch if that happened to me. So I want to park elsewhere and then kind of like slip through their camp. Um park elsewhere and slipped through their camp real quiet, and go down below and start hunting right below their camp. But we have the show, but just a minute, they're rolling in with a bull like they're just like we like arrived the camp with the like Honestly these second that the truck pulls in with the dead bulls, school and meat in the back of the truck. And this is the funny thing about especialty unit like this too, like a hard to draw unit because no one has any ownership. No one has any sense of ownership over like their spot. You're not coming back or like they said, it will be six years and you have a whole new crop about that will be working. So he so it's not like a most place where no one's gonna tell you anything, you know, like hey, where'd you get that limited mallards right there? Does just say anything to you about it? Like I know now, not even to ask obviously, I'll be like, hey, what mountain range were you in or what like river were you hunting? But but this guy, he had it took him six points, so he had six unsuccessful application years drew the unit and he just spills the beans because who cares. Someone told him about it. And it's this little corner of the unit where um, this little corner of the unit where you're kind of on National forest land, but boxed up against some private stuff. And he just ribes an area where there's seven or eight bulls, um that they were like butcher and a bowl and there's more bulls bugle in a hundred yards away. Mayhem and craziness. Yeah, it sounded good. And we go down into this area and it was like it was sort of the elk hunting. It was the elk hunting that you always dreamed that you would experience but somehow never get to experience. But there it was. We're gonna skip forward to there. We've been on a long time and I want to spend time on on No, I understand, I want to make surely you're already jumping ahead of that, Yeah, because I want to spend particularly time on the when we'll talk about the one we got, but the setup where you called in a a scar attering of bulls into a location. Right, We go down in this area and there's some not a lot going on with some bulls ripping vegle in here and there. It's like started in a slow morning, almost nothing. We heard a couple of descent vehicles. We kind of get to the edge of the private property. It sounds like there's one on the private then maybe a different bulls, you know, vehicles, but it's not like it's not a big rough ball like we were expecting, like we've been told about. But eventually we get where like, oh, there's a few bulls going like later in the morning, and it's mixed. It's like half open grassland and half dense timber. Very they're pretty steep area and we're kind of like halfway between the top land, like halfway between the ridge tops and half between the bottoms. And you can hear bulls enough for you couldn't even really tell who was what right, just as like a bunch of bulls going off and you start calling, walk through how that went, what you were doing? Well. First we got to a spot that seemed like a good spot for a setup. And I usually look for most importantly is I like to have a break in the terrain that I can hide behind. That was gonna if the bull wants to come and see what's making the noise, he's gonna have to come and look over that breaking the train, whether that's like a thick strip of vegetation, he's gonna come look through, or most often times in the mountains, it's going to be some sort of a ridge or like a horizon that you could be two hundred yards away from it, you could be twenty yards away from it. But if you want to see over it, you're gonna have to come right to the edge. Yeah. Picture of the worst case scenario would be that you're in a room and there's a loud noise of a cow and a bull comes into the room and he's like very quickly able to say that there is definitely not a cow in this room. That would be a bad situation. The best situation is he'd be like, where's she hiding? There's so many places she could be, yeah, or yeah, you're forced him to come to the doorway, yeah, to be able to look into that room he's coming and walk around the room. Yeah, no, just stick his head through the door at that point. At that point, if we've done everything right, you ought to be able to get a shot as long as he's not you know, facing some wonky direction, you know. But if he comes in there to look inside the room and go what's going on in here? Then that should be like the point of the shop. Yeah, And this was a knife edge was like he's in the hallway. He's not gonna come to the doorway. You're probably not getting a shot. And this is a this is a knife edge ridge. Yeah, it's like we're going we're walking down the ridge. It's kind of steep, but it drops off steeper to the left and to the right hill just sort of wraps around and he's bugling in this timber to our right that's wrapping around. And yeah, so you pick a tree to set up in front of with Chris. I just I don't know, western hemlock or a dug fur maybe probably want Yeah, good spot for me, man, I got all the footage. Yeah, bad spot in two ways, but I won't explain why it's a bad spot until we get to the part where the bulls started coming. Okay, so uh yeah, I just, um, I'm trying to think when I actually started out on the ridge, because like, until I feel like there's no reason for me to actually start hiding in that bedroom in air quotes until I know he's coming. Until then, I might as well stay kind of where I can see a lot and sort of be digesting the situation. And um, because I might see him a hundred yards away, I might see his antlers moving through the timber, and then I can adjust if I don't hear him down there or something. So I just kind of hide in plain sight, just kind of sitting around on calling and just seeing if we can get him worked up enough ntil he's moving our direction. The antlers on the elk, that's the point I want to bring up real quick. The antlers on the elk are extremely useful for hunting calling elk because you're always gonna see that bulb. Not always, there's a good chance you're gonna see that bull before he sees you by seeing his antlers, yeah, because he's got these things sticking two three ft right, So when he's like rolling up over a hill, he can't see what's up ahead. But you're like, oh, it happens time and again where you get to glimpse him before he has a chance to glimpse you, and then take it, take the necessary action. Yeah. Yeah. So I just started with some light cow calling, which should be just a couple of mus here and there, and uh, he seemed pretty responsive, you know, being pretty good bugling right on top of it. Yeah, And then it doesn't really mean that much, like you're not getting all excited at that point, Well, I'm not. I'll tell you. What makes me excited is what happens next. It's better better than not you no, no, no, no, you're right. But as we saw a night or two before this, you can make beaut you can make You can sit there and make bulls beugle for two hours, right, yeah, and you can be trying to read into what they're doing. But after a time you'd be like, that thing will not budge. So just getting them, just getting them the bugle doesn't mean much. What means something is all of a sudden it's quiet, and he rips again, and he is very definitely moved way in your direction. Then your heart rate goes, then your heart's in the back of your throat. So at that point i'll sort of I've fell off that ridge to the left metaphorically and got down there where I was in the bedroom. He was gonna have to come and he was gonna come out onto that spine and look down that hill to see, you know, the cow that he thought was down there. And so yeah, I continue to call and us usually at some point, like if I don't feel like the cow calls are doing enough, I'll start to add in like, oh, another bull is showing up to be like, hey, dude, if you want to you know, if you want in on this party, you better get over here, because someone else just showed up. And so I'll do a couple of things to imitate that. One you can bugle, sound like a bull bugle and and sort of challenge the other bull. And then you can make a lot of loud noises like a bull is tending a cow, which if you've ever seen in the wild, there they they chase them, and so they get run through bushes and they're cracking sticks, they're rolling rocks, especially on yeah, especially on steep hill sides. And so I'll start doing that to the point of working up a sweat. Yanni puts on put takes off his jacket, puts on gloves, grabs a big old log, and starts beating the snot out of the woods, hurdling rocks, kicking, jumping, banging. The beating the snot out of the woods is more like you're raking a tree. That's kind of what you're going after. When you start stomping and running and jumping through stuff, you're sort of like acting like to elk, which is you know, you're talking about now over a half a ton worth of animal probably running through the woods. I'm only two pounds. It's hard to replicate that, right. You have to do a lot more so. A lot of times I'll pick up like a ten or twenty foot log that then touches more bush as I'm moving through the woods, and I definitely get hurt doing it. But I think most people here, some of the people here where I think we're so blown away is by the situation. It's probably hard to even like grasp what all is going on. It's like seth and you can attest to that, and probably Lauren to that. When I would do that the very first time, the bull would go from like a pretty excited bugle to like his insides turning inside out or however you want to put that, like just like almost going from like a bugle whistle into more of like a blood curling Just I can't take that. Uh, talk about your epiphany, you're elk calling epiphany when people tell you to go in the woods and call three times for the whole day. Yeah. When I learned or was taught about calling out, it was all diaphragms. There was a couple of biting bowls probably on the market back then, and probably some external reads too. I just hadn't really gotten into it yet, but it was diaphragms, and everybody taught us like very soft, simple cow what I would call cow chirps. Just that, and go into a meadow in an hour before dark with the wind right, wait for the thermals, and make two or three of those chirps between the time you get there until you're about to leave. And that was it, because that's just how you called elk. Anything else was too much, too much, You're just gonna run him out of the woods and so. And it took me years, and you know, and of course reading books and watching primost the Truth about Bulls videos and stuff and being like, you know what, I'm gonna try some other stuff. And then I got good enough with the diret frame where I could go yeah, and then also a five point comes trotting over the hill and you go, well that kind of worked, you know. So, but it took three or four years too talk myself into trying to to have the boldness. It makes me uncomfortable, super fun to watch and film your honest going off like he's an elkin was. He had such enthusiasm throwing logs over rolling rocks down the hills that I wanted to join. And I'm holding the camera trying to keep the camera steady, but I'm like, I can probably help him out here. I want to kick a rock, actually got to throw rocks. Okay, Yanni. Here here's the way of expressing this. Yanni makes so much noise that at one point, jumping ahead, at one point a bull comes in between us and spooks and runs off down the hill. And it caught my attention, like, whoa, Oh that must be y Honest, I thought the same thing. I'm not happening. I heard that, and I was like, oh, back, and hey, what about the bull that was standing between us? That didn't even because you're so fixated on what was going down below us. I was like, wow, that really sounds like a damn elk running off right there. Yeah. So eventually, you know, so there was he there was a six point bull. Yeah yeah. Eventually the idea that there's multiple bulls and two are getting closer. Yeah, but I think that the young five point is what broke. The six point satellite bull came in quiet. He didn't come in quiet. I watched him multiple times. There you go, But I want to talk about where I messed up. Okay, round this ridge I'm calling a knife edge ridge, but it's like a half bevel it's one sided bevel knife where it breaks away very steep and rocky to the from from if you're looking downhill, lookers left breaks away very steep and rocky into the rights as a gradual timbered roll. And the bulls are the main bull we're calling to, whose bugle in the most is off to the right. I set up from basically out in front of a tree, right on the knife edge ridge, thinking that he's gonna stick to his course and come up and I might get a broadside around him. I should have anticipated I should have not been on that knife edge ridge, because what when I'm happening to white is bulls came up and hit that and it's the perfect place to travel. It's just this nice clear They came up the ridge, beautiful clear descending ridge. Even later, damn bull cow bull cattle came up the same ridge. It's just like a natural travel corridor. And I didn't anticipate that. Stupidly, I didn't anticipate that, you know what, I bet this thing is gonna hit this ridge and take this ridge up, So that I'm sitting on the ridge looking down, expecting to get a shot off my right, and all of a sudden, like without any announcement besides of some early bugling, here he comes like dead, like he's not stopping face to face. And there's one dead tree in front of me that was six seven yards close, very close. And the second his head gets behind that dead tree, I draw my bow and I like, what am I even gonna do? Unless he comes out broadside. He of course sees me drawing my bowl through the trees, and we just have a stare down through a tree that was intense, man, until I couldn't hold my bow back anymore. But a lot of times in that situation, man, it could have so easily gone the other way where he sees you up. But he still takes two or three steps it comes out from the tree, and instead of turning his whole body, he only turns his head and looks at you, and he goes, oh, what was that? And all of a sudden he's just presenting you with like a perfect listen, this is all hindsight, because even when I had my bow back, I was I was expecting that he'll step out from behind the tree and he'll be turned broadside, thinking I might be leaving but looking at me. But he was so close that wouldn't have mattered. Mh. But that's now. He did. He spun, but he spins, and often here's another bowl coming up the same exact trail. So that was the five point. He did that first, and then the six point came in behind. And then there's a six point standard, and it's six point was much warier, never came into never came into range. The five point. It's so convinced that there's a cow. He's like, yes, there's a man with a bow here too. Let me try a couple of different angles of approach, and he kept getting lucky and lucky. At one point, him and the six are both standing perfect wide open broadside at sixty seven yards, which I'm not gonna which is not a poke. I'm gonna attempt my bow um on a living, breathing creature. And then they're both staying there, staring the six leaves, and he's just gone. He goes off and starts biggling a hundred yards way again when he's done coming in. And meanwhile, this five point is just like probing trying to find a path in, and an unbellant to me eventually finds a path in and comes in between me and the honese. Yeah, I mean he's basically just on that knife. For it is just like I don't know, ten or fifteen yards behind you, ten yards from me, fifteen or twenty yards from Lauren, and he sits there and half acidly feeds and just look lifts up his head, looks, looks, looks, feeds a little bit, listen his head up, looks, looks, looks, looks. I had no ideal standing there, and the wind must have been blown to him. And that's what's crazy, is that even though like he's getting whiffs of man guarantee at this point, and he still stood there. For yeah, it seemed like a man. I mean footage is full frame bowl standing there kind of wondering what's going on, And we're so focused on what's going on below us, because there's still bulls ripping and wandering around below us, that I had no idea that you just standing there. Even when he ran off, I was like oh yeah, this is making an elk running noise. I think one of you guys that figured it out and spin spun around that he was standing there. I don't know there was some movement down below ever knewuntill I was told we have a little pow wow and talk about what all is going on? Um, Like, holy cow, I can't believe that happen so close and Allso there's another bull coming and one or a new bull comes in, gets wind takes off the same bulls messing around. Meanwhile down below us there's all these other bulls still going off, and then it starts getting hot, and they settle into like a dark north face and slope, and it winds up that just for an hour plus probably you just hear two bowls calling. We're watching other damn bowls winding around, but two bulls just calling and calling and calling from his north face and slope. And north face is significant because it's not a sunny and so you have a lot of timber and thick understory, and they can in there and getting the shade and hang out for the day. But they're just calling and calling and calling and calling, and by now the days heated up, so now you have the uphill thermals, and we make a pretty roundabout plan to go on a round about fashion and circle around and get up wind of this bowl, this little timbered bowl where he's elk are hanging out and get in close enough to shake hands almost. I thought we'd be within three hundred, but I think we ended up being within a hundred when we set up. Yeah, he was close. No, I think we were about a hundred seventy yards seventy Where does that number come from? My GPS unit? When we trailed him, I think he came off that. I think he came off that same my feeling who was up in that same betting area because when because when you first cow called, what did I say to you, Pounder? I don't remember. I said he's up on that ridge top up there, and I said you come forward. Oh that's right, and we had to bump. Yeah. Well, I said it's safer now he's up high. And then he quickly like it, very quickly, not up high, but I think he rolls up out of those beds that we later found. It's interesting from our perspective, it sounded like he was below you. Yeah, no, no, no, no, not that first he was higher than eye level at first, for for for seconds he was It didn't take long at all, and he was on the moon. There was two balls that were in there. One was bowls everywhere. Yeah, it's like if I put my how do you explain this? If I put my two hands together. The bull we killed was in my right hand, that that bowl, and the bull we didn't was like in my left hand up higher because that that thing kind of like from our perspective, had like this two bulls, like it seemed like two separate timber bowls that actually weren't that way once we got in there, you know what I'm saying. But the bull that we were mainly after when we first, when you first called, he was higher than the eye level and there's all those beds up there. That was not good. I was trying to prevent that when we went in there to set up, but did not want to be blowing. I thought he was blow us just from where yeah, from where we from where we were just I thought it sounded like he was blow us. But when we set up a little bit higher than you guys, you know, when we started calling, so I felt, well, I mean it doesn't matter especially either way. Either way he ends up below it, which is where we wanted him because we had and we had and we had a set up where we had a really probably the best wind we'd had the whole trip, and you had that that same thing, a different kind of barrier, but like a barrier basically like a little rock a rocky ridge spine, the same exact thing. Yeah, And we get set up like we don't know, really know before he starts calling, we don't know where the bull is gonna come from. We don't know where he is, and we don't know what his avenue of approaches. So you have to kind of get in the spot where you got a little bit of a game plan about, well, if he seems to me this way, it will go there. Do I have a shooting lane? If he seems to go that way, I'm gonna duck over there. Do we have a shooting lane? And we kind of had a number of scenarios. I had three setups in my head where I could stay at one spot and know that I could duckt to my right and have shooting lanes going for one approach. I could bounce out and get out in front of her behind a ponderosa and cover a bunch more and in the off chance that he's somehow circled way up higher than us, I knew that I could go out around this rock outcrop and see up that direction, and you had in your head places where you could go to keep it where he couldn't see the source of the noise. It was very like pretty perfect situation. There wasn't one of those like make do things. Yeah, we knew it there. It was only so much timber that he could be in, and uh, it's he's not going anywhere. It's a hot day. It's a hot sunny day at eleven thirty in the morning, and he's in his bed and location and he's not going anywhere. And we were we were within fifty yards of the edge of the timber, So it wasn't like we were trying to call him a mile away, which can be a big time hindrance, which I think is what you were talking about when we worked those three other bulls. They're not in your strut zone, yeah, like you were, just we were just not close enough to pressure him. Yeah, we worked some other bulls where we had watched one of these bulls and he kind of had like his place where his little area where he'd wander back and forth raising hell. And we're trying to like invite him into some other part of the mountain, which calling turkeys, I think is the same thing. It's hard to like, it's harder to call a turkey into someplace he's not hanging out as it is to call him over to a different part of his hangout zone. And the biggest reason we did that is because the the opportunity to get closer really wasn't there. It was burned, it was open, wasn't live. Timber just wasn't a lot of space places where we can circum prevent his position, you know, without making like a four hour tour. And as soon as you started going on this bowl, he got out of his bed and he was pissed, but he did not want to leave his timber patch, so he trapped. It's a pissy sound sounding sound, but he's actually not pissed, no I know, but it's just an expression. He's definitely not pissed. He's excited. I guess say he's pissed because um, because the sound that he makes sounds like sounds like if you were projecting that sound, you'd be like, I'm gonna punch a hole in the wall, you know, or you think of a bull that not a bull but a cattle bull bull cow. They get mad when he grunts the snorts when he's pissed. But he's pissed. I'm not as familiar with the vocalizations of mook cows. You've never been like snorted at by cows that are mad at you. They don't want to make love, do you? They might get out of it. So you say like pissed, But he's definitely not pissed. He's in he's he's uh, this isn't a word I like to throw around lightly. He's titilated. He's titilated by the sounds, and it's very excited. But he's also not wanting to He's also been around the block long enough. He's old, and he knows that there's At the time, no, no, I knew because the sound owns he was making the sounds he was making. He reached down ridge Pounder's throat and grabbed dude. Ridge Pounders ridge powder couldn't handle it anymore. Thank god, there's stabilization on that lens. Dude, because I was like when he finally came up into view, I could see him like kind of pacing below through the trees, and I would like seeing that. I was already like, oh my god, I shouldn't be seeing this. And then when he came up the hill and was like looking at us, I was like looking at me as I'm filming him. Yeah, I was just rattling, like if you had had enough, you had said you'd had enough. Oh my god. Emotionally hand, I can't take another one. I have a heart attack. It's so intense. And he's just right there. And then he just like turns and faces us and just lets one rip, and I'm just like trying to make sure that I like the whole time, I never looked at him in person. I don't think that you found it emotionally taxing. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, it's hard, man. I just kept looking through the camera and that was the only thing that kind of like, they're so big, especially this one, and they want it so bad, my goodness. Yeah, it was intense. A slave to one's passions, slave to one's passions, to his detriment. It would be like if you we're single and you gotta and you get a booty call from someone in the middle that late at night if the bars closed, and you're like, man, it's probably a thirty chance that someone's gonna shoot me when I go over there. But now I'm gonna risk there. But this dude, and I knew he was big because everything about the sounds he was making, because at that point we'd watched a number of like big bulls bugle in and you get there's like it's sort of get tuned into like we like and there's a there's like a thing at the end of their bugle that just is you could like feel the weight at the end of the bugle and you could be like, oh fun, like you want to go down and offer him up. The halls met elliptics between where I was seth Lauren on one side of the ridge, and you got to be like you were in the bowl with him, and like, yeah, there's a whole different sort of like the acoustics are different. The acoustics just the space that the sound takes up. It's pretty wild and on their same hillside and they're doing and you can just you can pinpoint them, so you're seeing his movements. You know, you're you're you're not. It's almost like it's so he's so close and you can pinpoint the noise so exactly that it's like you're not actually watching something because you're looking into a timbered bowl with a lot of brush. You're not actually watching it, but you like it kind of occurs to you that you're not watching it because you feel as though you're watching it because the sounds are so constant and and and allow you to pinpoint just looking right down where thing. You feel like you're like observing him wandering around. And then he realized I'm not even seeing him, but it's just like the audio is so spectacular, but I'm paints is very vivid picture and he's doing a number of vocalizations. He's making a cow call, but not yeah, you know, I think that was the first time I've ever heard of that. He would kind of go and then bugle and he's just going boom mm hmm boom. He must have done that a lot room He's seem to do it when he's walking pacing. I got a question for you guys. So, like, you know, when your turkey hunting, you gotta bring him in close. And if your white tail hunting with a rifle out East because this is the first archery hunt I've ever done. But the other two hunts that I've been a part of where you get close to the animal, are like out East white tail, like Midwest white tail where like you're generally pretty close, and Turkey, where you get pretty close but like you don't. Like when I saw those animals come in, I wasn't like, oh my god, this is crazy, but like when that elk came in, it was like an experience because there's so much bigger than you are. Yeah, in the in the in the there's so much more that can go wrong. Yeah, maybe that was there's like a you're like, because I get excited, but it's not dread. Yeah, when the bulls coming, it's it's like that's what you're there for. But for me, it's sixty dread. Yeah, dread that I'm gonna spook it, Dread that I'm gonna wound it, dread that whatever. It's just not I'm not in a happy spot. When a turkey's coming, I gotta smile. It's ear to ear man, it's all up. Yeah, turkey time. I'm like, yeah, it's coming, this is great. When the bulls coming. I'm like, oh oh man, go back, Oh my god, no, but yes he's coming. There's no getting out of this. Now you've done it to yourself. Now you just gotta like take it. Yeah, you just gotta take it. Something is really gonna happen. Yeah, like this is really going on. Man. The pressure is high, you know, not only for the hunter but the camera guy. Like, so that adds to your intensity beyond because you don't want to mess it up, just like your bowshot, you know, it's that important, don't mess the shot up. Well, here comes this bull and you're looking at the screen. You're not looking at reality, You're looking through this camera lens. And it becomes you know, in my focused am I am? I doing this right? Is everything? I'm going together because this is the five seconds I have to nail in. And we've got five people in there. Yeah, a lot of a lot of people. We got a caller, a hunter, three camera people. Yeah, it's a lot of stink. It's a lot of yeah, a lot of variables. So this bowl, well, I'm Sorryry about like three percent chance you can walk in. You're gonna get shot. This bull knows enough, he's been around the block enough to know that he does not want to leave that timber line. It was very reluctant to leave that timber line and just paced up and down, not wanting to go out into the open, out into the grass and come up the hill. Just walk in the timber line, screaming in agony. Yeah, but not. He's just really happy and excited. J honest, is making him feel like there's an another bull right over that ridge line. You never gave another bugle. You gave him the sound and that set up. We never went to the other bull. Didn't need it, just but you busted ground, didn't You know. You're rustling, rustling around a little bit, but more just like just general elk if an elk's on the steep hillside, just feeding. They're making more noise than than just a couple of cow calls here and there. You know, it's just adding some just some death to the picture I'm trying to paint. You know, you didn't go a full Yanny on him, No, but you were making some You were making the ground noises to you, you were pulling grass out of the ground, making it sound like they're feeding. That That was pretty Yeah, he gets detail oriented. I don't know what the hell he's doing. When he started ripping up grass, it's working, and he, like Yanni, wore that bull down. Yeah, he finally had to come and stay in the bedroom. Man, I'm gonna have to walk up out of here now because the wind was just He had not a prayer because what he wants to do more than anything is he wants to go around and get a whiff. Yeah, and he's like, I'll tell you when it's a cow. You don't tell me when it's a cow. I'll go up and have a smell. But there's no way for him to do that without really doing some kind of roundabout trip out in the open at noon on a hot sunny day. There's no where, there was no way for him to do it, and I think he was aware of that in his own elky way and eventually just was like okay, and a smart elk hunter typically, a smart bow hunter typically and this is a lot of experts will say this, including our good friend Jason Phelps, the game call maker. Um, he's like, sure, there's a risk of you being out in the open when someone's calling for you and you're and you got the bow there's a risk of being out in the open, but because you're gonna get spotted more easily. But the risk of you being out in the open isn't as great as the risk that comes from you being not having good shooting lanes and having obstructions. So he's like, sure, when there's a tree and you're in front of the tree, you're more exposed to the bull, but that's not as bad as being behind the tree and having so many places you can't shoot. Very common mistake, I think. But our first setup, when you called in the multiple bulls, I was out in front of the tree and that was good. In this setup, it was blazing sun. To be out in front of the tree, you were illuminated like something on display. And he had a lot of ground. He had a lot of open ground across and it wasn't like a confusion of trees. It was like a tree in a ton. The open space he had to cross. And I felt that I was just asking a little bit too much, So I got up where a small ponder roast that was between me and the bull's line of approach, and I snapped some limbs which fit in. Because there was a lot of Joanni was making some noise. Anyways, I just like busted off limbs, not even trying to be quiet, just grab him and snapped the limbs off and had a couple of pockets. And I was trying to will that bull up the left side because I had a good cover and a great shooting hole through the tree if he broke to my left. But he starts coming and he breaks to my right. And now in the psychele like in the for me man like I get rattled. I've I've done enough Like rifle hunting, I'm like almost clinical about it. Um, I've got to like an almost clinical space about shooting my rifle in real world hunting situations. But with a bow, it's just things are so close, and you're so aware of the mistakes you can make, and there's so many more mistakes you can make, and it's so much less forgiving that all that stuff enters your head and and I've got it distilled down, Like I've mentioned this the hunter times before. When I was a kid, my dad would put a sticker on our bow. He had these stickers and said, stay calm, pick a spot, um, now, my little manstra that I try to put my head is like elbow up, pick your spot, elbow up, pick your spot, elbow up. Because I'm like, if I can remember to do those two things, I feel that everything else falls into place. Like if I can just like get in my head like and do that, that's like the baseline of my that that's the of my like personal checklist. Like everything else falls into place if I'm doing that. And this bowl mingled so long, and when he first showed up, I was so rattled, but I got he lingered so long that I that I got unrattled, and I got my mantra in my head and I was ready, you know. I felt like I was ready, and I felt like I was ready to place an arrow. And he starts coming and I was like feeling very confident and very confident. And he comes up, and sure enough he comes up with the in line with the center of my tree, where there he is in range, and I'm like, why did I not get in front of the tree? Why did I get in front the tree? And then it puts you in this like negativity spiral that starts to happen. He breaks out and then he's like looking at me like not knowing what he's seeing but looking at me. Um turns away. I get a range on him. He's thirty two yards but obscured by the tree. He moves and so his left his right side is facing me, and then he kind of turns so his left sides facing me. And at this point he's very interested in what I am because I'm trying to like get and I have to get down on my knees. But he doesn't budge. And I got down on my knees and I get my bow back and he doesn't budge. And I got where I felt like things were exactly right, and I had my spot picked, I had the right pin in the right place, I had my elbow up, I had I thought everything was perfect. I touched that release and hit him back behind the ribs, and my god, the feeling of of failure and self loathing that like overcame me in that moment of being that Um, like my brother put it best, man like for me, like my perspective put it best. Where when he messes up a shot, he's like, why am I so greedy and want this so bad that it actually in that it actually impairs my ability to do it? Like i'mself I wanted so bad that it become self defeating. So I can punch paper all day along with my bow and call my shots all ranges, all day long, punch and punch and punching. But the into something I really want bad, I can't do it. Like when it matters, it all falls apart. Rogan says, it's consequences. He says, we're like, we become intimidated by consequences. Isn't that how he put it? I freaking up. It's interesting. So you enter an arena. I was talking about this with raising kids. I don't mind putting them into an arena of consequence, meaning I don't mind letting them play with a hatchet um And I think a lot of parents are afraid of letting their kids in the habit an arena of consequence. But they're like, when you're pulling the bow back and trying to kill something in weighs six hundred pounds with an arrow, it's like the consequences get so high, and all of a sudden, there it is like the easiest ship. Like in all the target shooting, I could never shoot an arrow that far off at that distance, but there it was, and my God was that like the one of the worst moments for me. I've been through it before. Doesn't get at you better. I didn't get to see it well. In your defense too, we did review the footage and he clearly jumped the string. He was gone before the arrow left. The bow man clearly dumped the string. It seems like it's hard, It's like it's so hard to piece together, but it seems like he was sprung. Yeah, but do you hear much about up There's some animals that are famous for jumping the string. Oh sure, but no elk do it when they're tuned up like that. I mean I saw him do it over the years of guiding. Not a lot, but they do it. People talk about access. You're being literally gone by the time the arrow gets there. Now, there was a frame where you could see your arrow in like a dark patch of timber moving through, and then you could see the bowl. Like when you pause footage every and if nothing's moving, everything's like clear, it looks like I'm just a regular photograph. But as soon as something moves, you get a little bit of motion blur. And there's a shot where that arrow was going through and that bowl is like starting to get blurry. He's already on the move. Yeah, so you can see that he's already like whoa, And then he just pushed forward just enough, probably just to kick it back. In my collection of interesting ship I have a deer skull that has a three bladed a steel feral type three bladed broadhead from the fifties that's embedded perfectly into dear's brain pan and the entrance hole is right dead center in its forehead. And it was from my father, and he there was a deer feeding in a field and vehicles would go by, and the deer wouldn't spook that bad from the vehicles was so used to highway traffic. My dad had his recurve and and had had his body take his van with the door open so that my dad could jump out of the moving van into a ditch with his bow to get the approach. So his buddy drives by slowly. My dad rolls out of the van into the ditch, um the deer watches the van roll away, and my dad rolls up with his boat and lets an arrow go, and so much time elapse between the noise of the arrows release that the deer was able to swing its head around in the direction and blackout its chest with its own head and caught it right there and dropped. He killed it. Yeah, but it jumped the string and the worst worst way imagine. Um. So yeah, man, the arrows is back and I was feeling real, real down. Um. We went and laid low for a few hours. It's probably three hours, because here's the thing, man, Like, if you get a situation like that, you should lay low a long time. But it's so hot. It's hot, and we're very far away from the vehicle, and you got dark coming. There's coyotes and bears and wolves hanging around. Um, and it's, like I said, very warm, uncomfortably hot that day, lay down for three hours, swarmed with flies and bees and ants like that kind of weather, and start trailing and it's just pinpricks. Remember I think Seth you said, like literally a pin prick. It's like if you dipped a pin and all the blood we were find it would be like on the left side of his line of travel, he would brush off blood about three ft off the ground. One of the clues we found to help in the tracking is Jana's found a scratch mark on a tree that was where the knock of the arrow scratched the tree. Yeah, he split two trees that weren't that far apart in the knocks scratched. And we were tracking. We were looking for heavy foot, heavy tracks, heavy foot, heavily placed foot tracks, footprints, um following those, trying to coordinate those with little pinpricks of blood. I didn't think about it now, but when he brushed against that tree, or was forced to brush against that tree with that arrow that was still stuck inside, that probably did a fair amount of damage. I thought a lot about that, even at the time. I was like, that's like a whole that's helpful. Um, So it would be that you'd get a bit of blood, and you'd find us set of tracks and and make sense of the tracks, and follow the tracks and try to corroborate your instincts with another drop of blood that verifies that it's right or not. And we're tying little ribbons in the trees, and so you can also sort of get this sense of travel. And it really made sense to me that he would have followed the river bottom but didn't, and uh cut up and we tracked him and how many hours you think it took roughly three trailed for three hours, and you traveled three miles of zig zagging. Your GPS showed that you traveled three miles. Yeah, you had a phone with the on X app on it. And since we started tracking, we went. We moved the track one seventy yards as the crow flies, but you zig zag three miles looking for droplets of blood. Three and then so now it's about six hard dark is eight. It's about six, and we're here an elk. I jump and out at seventy five yards away from me, and I hear it storm off and then go quiet, and we suspect that, like we bumped him, now we have to wait till the morning two get after him. And that's bad because it's gonna be it's not getting cold at night. It's not getting cold at night. And then hike takes a couple of hours to hike out of there. Go back to what I did. Last thing I did is I took and shot away point in the in the cardinal direction that I thought the sound was and guessed that it was maybe seventy five yards away and set that way point. And we went back up in the morning and Jonas and Seth started trying to work the track, like work out the track and the trail. And I jumped ahead to where I thought it jumped from and looked there and couldn't find the bed. But eventually we found where it laid down and bled, and I went to the where I thought the sounds had gone and where the sound ended and picked up a little pinprick of blood, and that let us jump the trail quite a ways. Yeah, Lauren actually found that bad that he was better than then. We had a fair amount of blood in it, but yeah, you made a big jump. We jumped like a solid and a hundred yards and then the weirdest saying one of the weirdest things ever happened in the woods happens all of a sudden, I hear what I swear is a person whistling. That's what it sounded like to me too, And it took me a few minutes realized it was in fact a person whistling. And at this point we traveled up where we're only less than two yards from a property boundary, and I'm like, oh, we're gonna get pre yelled at by a landowner or something like why else is this guy like hot to talk? To us. At this point, we're very close to what would become the end of the blood trail. This guy is another bowl hunter out and he glasses up a bull laying in a weird spot and it wound up being the heat glass stop our dead bull, and had gone down there to take pictures of it to show to his friends and act like he got her, make a gag on his friends. And he starts yelling to us, and we realized that just that, I mean, we would have hit it and wouldn't be long. We would have hit it anyway. Yeah, we'd probably been on it in less than fifteen minutes there. It was piled up. In hindsight, I believe that when we jumped it, I think it ran down that hill and died. I know you don't agree with that take. That's what I think happened, just because of how it was piled up there and what was going on with the where it was, and he ran down the hill and died. But it was a warm night, it was a warm morning. We had a long hike in there, but this point it was hot out. Yeah, we found him. I think about ten am. All those flies that had been on us, we're on him, and at that one it was like a big bowl, man. And at that point it's just like getting in there and and and it's like a thing that's had. I can tell you that the four it's happened to be four times out of many, not just mine, but me being present for four big game kills where meat was lost because the heat, and they all had to do with Three of the four had to do with not finding an animal the day you got it, but finding it the next day. Three of the four. The fourth was just just having my first out west hunting experience and not realizing how quickly things can go south if you're not careful. The other three were all from We're all from not finding something to have to find finding something the next day, but lost lost meat, lost a considerable amount of meat, yeah, possibly half the animal, which is like makes it sickening. Man. It's like you want to be happy, you know, you want to be a have you bought it, But in the end, it's like it's just always winds up being like a little bit tainted, and it's like a bull of a lifetime, man, Like I won't get a bull like that again. I mean maybe I will, but I don't deserve to. I don't expect to, but you always got that and you and you, and so you run in your head and it's like, Okay, you try to do your shot right, and you did. Maybe there's an excuse why, like maybe you jumped the string. Well that's partly your responsibility to don't shoot arrows and stuff that's aware of you. If it's already like hyper keyed into your presence and it's already like half thinking about bolting, maybe you don't let the arrow go, but you did because you're greedy. Then you blow your shot, and then you're like, Okay, the thing to do when you blow your shot is give it a while, give it a long time, so you don't pressure it. So you give it a long time. If you bump it, don't keep going back out pick it up the next day. But if you pick it up the next day, there's you know, you gotta wait twelve hours whatever, You gotta give it plenty of time. During that time, spoil itge occurs. So you run back in your head. You're like, man, all these ways in which I wish we would have done things better, but it's like I feel it kind of did everything you're supposed to do when the and he sort of wound up with a shitty outcome. There's no lesson. Oh, it's definitely some lessons within our experience. I don't know if there's like a hard lesson, not a hard lesson. There's no like next time, No, but next time you jump on when you're trailing it, you're gonna go running after it. No. No, but these lessons would be would just would be the sort of like reinforcing lessons that you would do what we did because I think that we did end up with a because with our blood trail, we could end up not finding him and we could have bumped him some more and he might have not been laying out on an easy rage to find him. He could have gone another half mile farther and died in some hell whole tangle where you know, the dude from the nest side didn't see him. We lost the blood trail, lost the heavy tracks as he comes out on the open ground with his rocks and it's hard to track. So you know, I feel like we like did pretty good. There's been a lot of other many much worse scenarios. There are lessons to be learned in fortifying things you already think are true because it makes you more certain. But in some ways this shook that up because, like I said, the thing is when you bump something, never pressure. But I think if we had walked over it would have been land or dead. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll never know learn when we think about all that. That's the end of my story. The end of my story. It worked out, big, huge giant bowl, were stuck with it and recovered the bowl of a lifetime for you. Uh yeah, to everyone's credit, I think it was. It was one of the best bits of tracking. Yeah, very much a team effort, best track. And I've been around rich ponder he even, uh, I was getting in there despite what about this orange leaf? I found one one spot of blood after we are like somebody had found on the way ahead, and as we were walking there, I like turned and looked and found one spot of blood and I was like, all right, I found one spot. I didn't totally fail, even though it like it wasn't didn't help the investigation at all, But I was stoked that my eyes weren't totally shot. Yeah, that's a crazy task to have the track just drops of blood like that I couldn't see anything. Uh, I didn't find a single spot of blood. I saw a bed eventually from looking at obvious heavy tracks and a wet spot in dirt. So it had to be pretty in my face to see anything. So it was amazing. Yeah, it takes a level of focus that I think that uh, most humans aren't normally used to doing. Uh. That what it takes to be on a track like that when you're going down to when you're going well, when it gets down to pin drops every ten or twenty ft, it is just so easy to be like, I'm done giving up. You know. Sometimes they're on the leaf, sometimes on the ground, so you're just kind of like looking everywhere, and the leaves had like little me and Stets are talking about that there's like weird like as the least for changing, there's like weird little like liquid e looking ambery, brownish spots like every time you look at leaf you're like, oh there's oh no, it's not blood. Um. When you're filming Haunts, Lauren, uh, how much you live in like the the product and how much are you live in? Uh, the the experience of being along. I think it kind of goes both ways that It's been a while since I've done a real serious hunt, Like I think I've had a couple of years off. But before I did any hunting filming at all, I really didn't have any interest in hunting whatsoever. But that experience and that education in in watching people who knew what they were doing, change my perspective on all of it and kind of gave me a passion for it in and of itself. So I think it's a little bit of both. You know, if you're behind the camera, if you're producing anything, I think you want to produce something that's going to be as top shelf as you can possibly make it. So that comes into play all the time, ah as being a high priority because you don't want to put your name on something that isn't taught shelf. But the experience too, you know, it can't be replaced by anything because you're not going to get that experience as a camera guy, as a hunter without going and doing it and experiencing and checking it out and learning about it. I think about two that you got started filming by filming like like extreme white water kayaking and like stuff where people die, So you probably uh early on learned, Um, this idea that was that it wasn't always something that could be separated out, like there was like a real like filming that kind of stuff, that there was like a real risk there, you know, um, and you were living something kind of real. You were filming something that was happening in a very real way to people. Like it's like taking like extremely challenging risks both to capture it and what the people were doing. And so it probably felt like really uh, like I was saying earlier consequence, Rich, Oh yeah for sure. And you always in the back of your head wondered if the camera gave that person some sort of courage they wouldn't whether otherwise would have had uh like someone drowned and you're like, man, he would have never done that if we if we weren't filming it. Yeah, I mean there was the gnarliest thing during White Water for us, for me personally, was watching a guy go off a waterfall and break both of his legs. It changed his life. He never you know, he kept kayaking after that, but it was a moment in time in his life that just completely shaped his life for the rest of his life. And so the consequences were super real, and you kind of, as the camera guy, even felt guilty for being there just to capture him doing his passion. Following his passion, major consequences and that. You know, I think as you get older, that priority or that desire to try and push the limits changes. But um, I don't know how you equate it to hunting. It's just obviously it's very different. But you are still taking risk. But you're the consequence there is You're like, you're you're you're dealing in life and death. You're dealing out death, which isn't the light thing. You know, You're out there dealing it. You're Yeah, you're like in this position of Yeah, you have like substantial sort of power that you're wielding with a weapon, right making choices about how things will die. Um, there's a necessity. There's like a definite necessity to it. There's an inevitability to it for things that typically are dying violent deaths, violent painful deaths, regardless of your involvement in it. But all of sudden, you're inserting You're you're inserting yourself into it. You know, rich is this final thought? Yeah, man, it's a chance for your concluder you don't have to have one. I don't care. No I got I got one. Well, I don't know if I got one. It just took chewing some four seats. Yeah, we got into that. No dip, no dip on this trip. Just just spits, man, spit seeds, just fit seeds. But I don't want to feed your concluder to you. Uh, no concluder. I hadn't. I was kind of wrapped up in Lawrence. A little thing there that was a that was a good man. Um No, just the whole experience was crazy. Just seeing those elk that close and here in the vehicles and being out there is just I hadn't done anything like that before, despite being on l hunts before. It was he can be religious. I have two clients I know of that they came back so many times that they've worked through probably all the guides over the years, but that they both wanted at least one all of his ashes and the other one part of his ashes spread out on those mountains that we used to hunt, because it was just so special to him to be there in September in those woods and and you know it being part of what we just did last week off whistle. What else you got? Ah, it's about it, man. Both these guys killed it on their first mediator trip. Did a great job. It was a great to be a part of wonderful footage. Wonderful footage which I look forward to people seeing. Yeah, me too, Kelsey, I have like a concluder question. Oh that's great man. Okay. We talked about like the loser ship factor a little bit, and I feel like, you know, me as a new hunter not having that experience, thinking about it in the future someday. A lot of people, you know, they prepare by shooting at a target at best, like a total archery challenge style preparation. You know, like, what would you say to people? How do you how do you prepare for that experience where you go out there all of a sudden you have a bow and arrow in your hands and there's a screaming out, you know, thirty five yards away? What what do you? What can you do? My My My feeling is that it's the only thing is exposure to the thing itself. I don't think it's replicable. Um, but that's in season. Yeah. But our friends, but but there's people that disagree, like our friend Rory Denver, who was involved in in training some of the most like elite combat soldiers on the planet, feels that through realistic scenarios and constant drilling and realistic scenarios, he feels that you can achieve something close to actual experience where you can get people into a situation where it becomes roight. It becomes so right, kicking in the door and storming a compound, did it becomes so rot And you've done it so many times you know just exactly what to do that when you're doing it for real for the first time, you feel like you've already been here. But I don't think you can achieve that in this situation. Well that's what I'm saying, because like, what the hell would it be you only have this situation once a year, because like, I mean, I can I've been that close to ELK many times in my life, but the pressure wasn't there. Yeah, the scenario of a route wasn't there. You know. It's like, how do you prepare yourself for that intensive experience where you're literally losing your ship and you have to accomplish something. I feel like it's just it's it's it's exposure to the thing itself. I don't think it needs to be. I think it would absolutely help if you were just standing with someone or with the car, just any amoun exposure to it. But it's not a trainable thing. I think you can. Yeah, there is just nothing that's gonna trip you up emotionally and psychologically that that will like, let's say they had like some mechanical elk. You know you're not gonna be like, oh man, I've been through this before with that super realistic target that has an vehicle noise it makes. It just isn't gonna do it. And there's some people that are never going to get over it. And there's some people that are just cold blooded and don't mean that in a negative way. I mean some people that can separate. I would like I lost it when I had like gobbling turkeys my first turkey season this year. So I'm like, man, when am I gonna do? You know? I called a turkey and for a guy that never hunted the spring and when that turkey showed its head, he said, oh my god, the turkey, but it's stunned him. Yeah. I think that's just like an ongoing question. Everybody has to prepare yourself for the fact that you're not going to just be okay. Well, a lot of times it gets worse because the beginners can have like a beginner coolness because you just you just so um. You don't even have enough exposure to know that you should how excited you should be. And so the first couple of times you can, everybody's like, damn, you just did that perfectly. It was like no big deal. And then the next time you sort of like you're just a little bit more relaxed, and somehow there's more chemicals entering your brain and your body. And I mean, how many times when we were kids both hunt where you like trying to pull on that string and you were like, I physically can't pull my bow back because of buck fever. I had buck I had buck fever, might even been doe fever. I was late in high school and I couldn't pull my bow back. I had a set too high. I don't honestly keep it mind when I'm setting my bow like, I don't just go to like Max. I go to like dude, when you're in panic mode, this bow gunna grease back? Nice, That's what I think about. Because I had like you're cold, too cold to get it back, and too nervous, And so I don't run like I don't just like keep cranking until I'm like pulling to get the bow back. I can pull my bow back nice thinking about that stuff. Yeah, And I can call bulls in and get all these experiences and sit there and be half asleep on the hillside just with a smile on my face, rock in your hands on your face. If I if I had just jumped over the ridge and put a bow in my hand, it's just it's just completely changes, like the blood pushures through the roof. But there's things that we did in our camp um in Colorado that a lot of guys said helped him a lot. Like we had a three D course set up, didn't have a bunch of targets, you know, maybe six or eight or so, and we would set up just funky crazy ship like shooting through a bunch of tight aspens where the lane was only eight inches, or we'd have them set up on a bench and we would make it so like we'd all stopped before you could see the target and be like, okay, here's how this shot works. Not gonna arrow, you're gonna take three steps, you're gonna be able to see that elk. You need to draw your bow and count to three in your head and make a shot, because that's how it happens in real life, right, And so we would sort of play out these scenarios. And again, these were seasoned hunters, you know, they're out on a paying, paid elk hunt. But we would do a lot of stuff like that where it wasn't just like we were just out there shooting a target or just even if it was an elk target, just shooting an elk target out in the field. But we would, you know, make scenarios up in our heads. You know, we did a lot of times have guys shooting stuff that was two and three yards away, because you tell you what, a lot of dude, especially confound bow guys, they have no idea where the arrow is gonna hit when it's at two yards, and sometimes crazy ship like that happens, and you need to have that confidence to just be like, yeah, whatever, all my pins on his heart and touch it off. But if you've never gone through that, and also there's an elk at two yards or three yards, you can very well freeze up and never pull the trigger or or or whatever. Just be so and never pick a spot, because even in two yards, you better pick your spot and not just go, oh, there's an elk and pull the trigger. You're gonna end up with one of the guts. I took one of my old girlfriends out once and we get out from a bugle and bowl and he comes over fifteen yards away fully reaction. She never pulled her bow back. He's got up, stood there bugle a couple of times, walked on the Earth's other bridge. I'm like behind her, I get like, what happens? She's like, I don't know. Never pulled the bow. It was just too much. We used to make do ten or twenty jumping jack's then knock an arrow and take a shot in three or three to five seconds, just to get their heart rate up. But yeah, still like buck fever. I don't think you're you're not gonna replicate it. And I'll tell you what makes it worse is messing up. It makes it worse the next time. Put in the hole. Yeah, if you start out on flat ground, it puts you in a hole. Seth, how ready get after the big old flathead catfish. I am I'm stoked for that flatheads and some squirrels. H No, I just had a blast, man. It was a good group of guys and awesome hunt, challenging, rewarding. Um, I'll try to help my cookie game next time. I'll work on that dates I'll write that down. But yeah, awesome trip. Congrats to get on the big jam bull. Yeah. Um. Do you feel because you've done a bit of elk hunting? Do you feel that after're going to a unit like that? Does it kind of like make everything seemed like a little bit of a bummer? Maybe a little bit. I don't I'm struggling with that if all spots were like that, spots like do you really need to go back to the kind of place where someone blows a call and it just explodes with the reach, like the wood just explodes the outgoing to other directions? Yeah, her like, dude, it's dude, I know that sound the yeah, the morning you shot your bull. I don't know. I don't think too many elk hunters get to experience something like that. That was crazy. No, No, they don't. Yeah, I agree, it is to you far between, but hard to appreciate those haunts without being out on a bunch of public land haunts where if you call a bull a day in or even just have an interaction with a bull per day, like that's good. What's cool about this is public land? Yeah, so it's kind of fun like that where it's like there's like at least a chance. And we had ups and downs. I mean we had two days of zero bugles and feeling like, oh what are we doing? Like we have no idea how to hunt elk kinda you know, because it's gonna call it would cost to go have that, to go buy that experience is twenty yeah, close to it for sure to buy that experience. But with public land, luck of the draw could happen to anyone. Yep. It sounds like not for non residents in Washington though, as you explain, I don't know what the odds are there and around right like there's like great, you know, it's great. Units of Colorado, there's units in Utahler's unions in Arizona. There's units of Montana, like because units every state, like there's every state has a couple of those spots that you could just hit without costing what you paid for a vehicle. No, no closing thoughts for me other than I can I can't wait to. Uh have you learned how to call it real? Good? And then called big and I told you already doesn't have to be an eight by eight, just a seven by seven will be cool. I got that's the one, all right. Guys, Thank you all for coming, Thanks for having us going hunting jerious. You are