00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the Whitetail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week on the show, I'm breaking down my first deer hunt of the twenty twenty four season, and it was an Alaskan deer hunt. All right, Welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light and their Camo for Conservation Initiative and the brand new Whitetail line that came out this year. I hope you've heard all about it. I won't belabor the point, but you can check it out over at first light dot com. And today it's storytime. It's just you and me. I'm telling you a story. It's one of the most unique stories that I've been able to ever share here on the Wired Hunt podcast. And it is a deer hunt, which you've heard about plenty before. But this is a very different kind of deer hunt because this is a deer hunt that took place not in Michigan, not in Iowa or Ohio, or Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, Nope, I went way up north to Alaska. So today I want to tell you about why I went to Alaska, how I went to Alaska, what I was chasing, how I was chasing it, and how that hunt went down, and a few things about that location and the species up there that I think are worth knowing. So that's the game plan today. The heck of an adventure up there, was up in Alaska for almost two weeks. Just got back the other day, and so so yeah, I want to share that story with you and what I learned along the way, hopefully maybe inspire a few of you to explore this part of the country someday, maybe arm you with a little bit of insight that can help you plan and execute a trip like that and entertaining the rest of you if nothing else. So that's the game plan for today's show. A couple of house cleaning items before we do that. The Whitetail Edu series, our educational whitetail series that Tony and I have been doing on YouTube. That's wrapped up, so the first season of white Tail Edu is done. There are ten episodes now over on the meet either Clips YouTube channel. So you can watch all ten now the most recent episodes of covered topics such as choosing euromounts or shoulder mounts, what's the right mount for you? Shot placement on deer. We did a deep dive on that. We did a video on callington sure bucks a few weeks earlier, we did one about how mature bucks uniquely travel. So if you want to get some last minute deer hunting know how into your brain before the season kicks off, or maybe you're already hunting and you're just wanting some some refreshers before the next hunt, check those out. That's really the only thing other than I I guess this is just a general thing, but the rest of my hunting season is going to be kicking off here pretty soon across Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, maybe some other spots. And if you want to follow along with what I've got going on personally, if you want to be able to see videos and photos and more frequent updates on these adventures, uh, make sure you're following me on Instagram. That's where I share everything, that's my most active platform. So that the handle is wired to hunt all words at you know at wired to Hunt so head on over there if you haven't already, if you're not signed up for our white or sorry, are Wired to Hunt weekly newsletter. That's another big one. If you go to themedia dot Com website and go to the newsletter button where you can sign up for the newsletters, there's a Wired to Hunt newsletter option, and that gets you an email every Monday with a note for me, sometimes with updates on my hunts or a quick tip or an interesting idea I ran across, and then links to all of our most recent whitetail articles, podcasts, and videos put out across Media and Wired Hunt. So lots and lots of stuff coming out. You know that We've got a whole stable of different writers who are sharing whitetail how to articles. You know. On the podcast side, of course you've got this show, but then of course Tony's Foundations podcast, the ret Fresh Radio podcast that come out every Wednesday with updates from all over the country on what deer doing right now. Like all that stuff, you can stay up to date with that newsletter, so highly recommend you do that too. That's it, I guess as far as those quick little reminders. Let's talk deer let's talk Alaska, talked this hunt. I just came back from why did I want to go to Alaska and why did I want to go to hunt deer there. That's a good question, and it's where we should start, and some of it I can explain to you. Some of it I'm going to hold back because part of what inspired me to go up to Alaska for a deer hunt was a very interesting wildlife ecology phenomena underway right now. There's some interesting stuff going on in Alaska that I was interested in, and I wanted to do some reporting on it, some learning about it, some research on it, and I want to share it with you folks and many others. But that's still kind of in the midst of happening right now. This trip was part of that research process. I'm still doing some now. I want to wait to start talking about that until I have a very clear, comprehensive handle on this situation. But rest assured. We did a film. We produced a film up there in Alaska about this hunt and about this interesting ecological situation, and I will be diving into all of that, you know, in the next six months to a year, once we finally put all that together and bring that out to the world. So that's like I realized, like a ridiculous teaser to tell you there's this interesting thing and I'm not going to tell you about it, but I guess forgive me, I'm doing it anyways. So there's some interesting stuff going on with wildlife up there. That was one thing, and then as I found out about this interesting stuff, it got me more and more interested in blacktail deer and what their situation is up there, and how healthy is that population, how healthy is their habitat, what's the future look like for blacktail deer, what's the future of the landscape they live in up there? What do they need to survive and to thrive? What's going on up in this part of the world. And this part of the world is southeast Alaska. So for those who aren't familiar, and if you're watching on video, I'm gonna see if I can do this the right way. If you're seeing on video, this is kind of what Alaska looks like. I'm holding out my hand, my thumb's down, my index fingers out a little bit, and then the rest of my hand is kind of three fingers together. You've got this peninsula that sticks out to the south. That's southeast Alaska that branches down off the main body of Alaska down along the edge of British Columbia. And this is where Juno is. This is where Ketchikan is. This is where Prince of Wales Island is. This is where Steve's fishshack is. This is where, you know, the largest tempered rainforest in North America is the Tongus National Force. Is this incredible seventeen million acre rainforest in North America. It's it's vast, it's home to some of the largest trees in the world, an incredible breadth of biodiversity. And this, you know, huge swath of wild country too. I mean there's there's obviously some towns like ketch can do you know, you know others I mentioned, but it is wild too, and so you know, I wanted to get up there and see this. You know, I've heard Steve telling stories about this area. My buddy is you know, Yannis and Brody and all these guys have been out there, have seen these places. If hunted deer there, have experienced the fishing there, have experienced this landscape. And I wanted to see that too, And so I thought man, I can learn about what's going on with black tailed deer up there. I can go see this place firsthand for myself and learn a little bit more about why this place is so important and worth protecting. Even though I'm a michigan Er, I'm a guy who lives thousands and thousands of miles away. I keep hearing about the Tongus National Forest. I keep hearing about why some people call this the salmon forest or the climate forest, because this forest has an unbelievable set of dependencies I guess on The forest sucks up a tremendous amount of carbon, so it's helping with that whole situation. It provides much of the habitat that vast swaths of the salmon in the world depend on. The forest itself is actually built in part by salmon because salmon run up all these thousands of streams across Southeast Alaska, and as many of you probably know, salmon when they spawn, so when they lay their eggs, they then die. So salmon lay their eggs in these streams, deep into these islands or deep inside the interior of Southeast Alaska. Little baby salmon are hatched. They eventually get larger and then swim out of the rivers and streams into the ocean. They spend some number of years in the ocean. They grow and grow and grow and collect all these ocean nutrients in their bodies. They then when they are going to spawn at the end of their life, they swim back up those streams to the very exact same place they were born, They lay their eggs, and then they die there, effectively bringing all of those ocean nutrients back into the interior into these four forests, where then they provide the best fertilizer in the world and essentially are the nutrient source for these massive trees and forests. So it's a very very interesting cycle that's going on there. So that's a long winded way of saying, there's some really cool shit in southeast Alaska that I wanted to learn about and that I wanted to see. So that's what kicked all this off. I became fascinated with this idea of learning about this deer species that lives there, Sikka black tail deer. They are a you know, one of the three ish main species of deer in North America. We've got white tailed deer of course, Then you've got mule deer, and then there's like a couple versions of black tail that you've got Colombian black tail deer, which are like a subspecies ish of mule deer. I don't even know enough about how they differentiate. I remember hearing at one point that there's basically just like a highway and they say, one side of the highways a mule deer, one side of the highways a black tail deer. But then if you go north, north north, you get to a very different blacktail, which is the Sikka blacktail deer. And these deer are stout and short and compact compared to their cousins down south. They have smaller antlers, darker. They live in these rainforest environments. They're native to southeast Alaska in that region, and they're super cool, these dark black foreheads a blacktail, as their name of course would clue you in on. And they live in wild places. Not only do they live in these rainforest environments, but they also can live up in the alpine kind of like you know, like the alpine mule deer habitat that some of us are used to seeing in Colorado or Nevada or something. Well, they're up high in these peaks in Alaska too, and so I got to thinking, how awesome would it be to go see this rainforest, climb through it, get to the top of the mountains, and find black tailed deer up there. So that's what I started exploring and researching and thinking about, which led me to reaching out to someone who has written about these topics in the past, written about a bunch of interesting things around Alaska and blacktail deer and bears a lot. And that's a guy named Bjorn Dila. Bjorn is a resident of southeast Alaska, there in Juno and one of the wildest, most wilderness savvy mountain men I've ever met. I mean, this guy is a legend as far as I'm concerned. And we started chatting. I started asking him questions about his experience his hunting blacktails in this area and this habitat, and the guy was kind enough to say, Man, why don't we just spend some time together. Let's go just hunt together. I can show you around, teach you a thing or two, and so that's what we decided to do. So Bjorn and I were going to meet up and we're going to do a black tailed deer hunt together in a place called Admiral t Island, which is an island just off the coast of southeast Alaska. It's a sixteen hundred square mile island that is mostly designated wilderness, mostly public land, a super super wild place, and home to approximately sixteen hundred brown bears, So sixteen hundred square miles sixteen hundred brown bears. Brown bears, you know, those are grizzlies, coastal grizzlies, very very big grizzlies that live on the coast. Subsist in a large way by way of fish and salmon. So there's about a brown bear per square mile on this island. There's a whole pile of them. So I also had some bear questions for Bjorn leading into the strip, and fortunately he's a guy who has a lot of experience with that, which gave me some peace of mind because not only is he an outdoor writer and an experienced hunter, but he's also been a bear viewing guy, which led to some very interesting stories. We're like, you know, he was part of a company where he would take people out to go experience brown bears relatively close. And then he's also a guy who natural history documentarians. So the people who make shows like you know, like Planet Earth or One Planet, or you know, all the Netflix, BBC National Geographic animal documentary films and shows, they hire Bjorn to be the guy who goes sets up all the logistics and who guides them safely to film bears and that kind of stuff. So the guy knows how to handle himself in big bear country and made it so I felt, you know, comfortable exploring a new place in a density of bears that I'm not used to. I've spent a lot of time in grizzly country down the lower forty eight, but this was just like another level. So so Bjorn was great to make sure I was on the right program, and then just the stories he has, I'm gonna I couldn't get him on the show this week, but he is going to come on the show sometime this fall or this winter, and we're going to talk about some of the stuf more detail with him, because he's fascinating. He is, lack of a better term, just legit, Like he is one of the most legit wilderness I don't know how to subscribe wilderness savvy. The dude has done some wild stuff and I want you guys to hear about it at some point. He's also a phenomenal writer. I'm gonna plug one of his books right here while we're talking. The beginning this book, A Shape in the Dark, Living and Dying with Brown Bears. I don't care if you never plan on going to Alaska, if you have any interest in grizzly bears and brown bears, if they fascinate you or they terrify you, or you just think they're really cool, or you want to hunt him someday, or you just want to see him. I just want to learn about him. This is an excellent book about brown bears and the history of brown bears in America and his many, many crazy stories with them. It's just really well done. So go buy that book right now. Highly recommend it, A Shape in the Dark. Okay, So Jorden's the guy who I spent time with. That's why I spent time with him. Admiralty Island is the place that I went to at the beginning of the trip. I went and spent some time with a biologist with Alaska fishing game talking about this ecological phenomena that I'll be sharing with you guys. At a later date I went and hiked and checked out a massive glacier from the Juno ice field to see some stuff going on with that glacier, which was really interesting and eye opening to see that was cool. But all that was kind of the preamble to the actual hunt. The plan for the hunt was that we were going to fly in a beaver I think it was super beaver. This one was called from Juno to Admiralty Island and get dropped off at a lake there, and then from there we would load up our backpacks and spike out make a spike camp up in the alpine on top of a mountain. The problem was that the day we're supposed to fly out it was rainy, foggy, cloudy and nasty mess and it pushed back our flight. So we went to a diner. Pushed back another hour, so we had a second cup of coffee. Pushed back another hour, so we ate lunch. Pushed back another two hours. So we went to Bjorn's house and hung out for a while and worked, and long story short, they eventually at like four four thirty something like that, they called and just said, hey, we're not going to fly today. We're gonna try again tomorrow. So that was a bummer. But my camera operator Colin, and I went and went fishing, went for a hike, so it was cool. Made the best of our off day. Saw some beautiful stuff. So hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of eagles, all these bald eagles congregating around this river where all these salmon were coming in. If you've never been to the Pacific Northwest, especially to Alaska or British Columbia where we still have salmon runs, just this incredible flow of life in and out of these river systems is just unbelievable. You have to see it and experience it. The the fecundity of it. I guess, it's just so alive, there's so much going on. You're like seeing the world, like mother Nature, playing out right in front of you in a very tangible way. It was just very very powerful, I guess to see that that's neither here nor there, not related to the deer, but that's something I kept seeing over and over again. That just kind of took my breathway. Anyways, the flight got delayed twenty four hours, but luckily the next day, even though it's pouring rain, they said Hey, we can do it. We're gonna give a shot. So we kind of race to the plane. It's a float plane. We load everything up in the rain, hop in the plane. I'm in the front seat, takes off. I'll be honest, I was a little bit sketched out because it was still pretty darn cloudy and windy and rainy. I'm thinking, how's this guy gonna get us there? Because these planes, these guys fly by sight mostly maybe entirely with these guys, and we were at times like to flying blind and then you'd come in and out of clouds and he's weaving his way across like gaps in the mountains and overwater bodies where there's a little bit more visibility. But it was also really cool, beautiful, and we did make it to the lake. Dropped us down at the lake and there was a four service cabin there that we'd rented as like a as like a backup base of operations. If we couldn't be in the alpine or if we needed to have someone to keep stuff dry, we'd have this little one room cabin. So we had that and we got dropped off, but the weather got worse and it got socked in and based on the forecast it looked like the rest of the day it was going to be like that. So we decided to kind of unload, reorganize, chill at the cabin. That first day do some fishing. There was a lake like I mentioned, and then a really cool creek coming out of it, so we fished and caught a pile a coastal cutthroat trout, which was a lot of fun. And then the next morning the weather was supposed to clear and we would be able to hike up the mountain, up into the alpine and actually start the deer hunt. So we did that. The next they got up, loaded everything in the backpacks for like three or four days up there in the mountains. Had to take a boat. We had like a little John boat in a pack craft that we had to take across the lake to the side where this mountain was that We're gonna hunt. Unloaded, and then started hiking. And you know, the crazy thing about this place is the terrain and the actual vegetation is just so different than anything that I'm used to deer hunting. Of course, the vegetation is the biggest thing. Like I mentioned, this is a rainforest, This is an absolute jungle. And so you'll go through some stretches where it's just open timber, like big old growth timber, and that's beautiful and not so bad to get through, except for the fact that there's dead trees everywhere, and so you're constantly going over dead falls and you're constantly falling into holes. Because if you can imagine like a thousand year old forest with all these dead trees falling down and slowly rotting away from all the moisture, you get just like a spongy floor of and you'll fall through that floor sometimes because it's rotten wood. So sometimes there would just be like a little bit of moss covering a hole or a thin veneer of rotten wood, and then as soon as you step on it with a heavy backpack on, you fall through. So you'd be hiking and walking and then all of a sudden, it's like you're post hauling in deep snow, but you're just falling. So that was interesting. And then you'd get to other spots where you didn't have the old trees, you had like younger growth spots where sunlight came in. Then you had like the low underbrush, just absolute nightmare. Jungle kind of situation that you're bushwhacking through it. There's no trials here, so we're just bushwhacking finding our way through this stuff. And the worst stuff was something called Devil's Club, which is like a I don't I gotta, I gotta go look and find like something I can compare it to. But it's like a long, tall, stocky plant with a big leaf at the end and then just spines all the way up and down it, and there's some kind of toxin in it because it causes you to blister different than like the regular thorns and stuff we have in the Midwest. These thorns would create these nasty, big red and then eventually white pussy blisters everywhere you got poked. And I got them all over my hands, and if you're watching the video, you can still see, like, I've got these blood blisters all over my hands that are just kind of the remnants of them. There's one right there, but it was like white pussy blisters all over my hand and parts of my shoulders and back and stuff. So just made it, you know, an adventure. And then you'd get to spots where it would just be so steep that you were basically, you know, using your hands to climb up the mountain side. It wasn't even like walkable. You were just like hands and feet and knees and everything, pulling your way up with a you know, fifty to sixty pound pack with your rifle, with all this stuff. So it was an adventure getting up there. It was obviously all wet still and muddy, so you're slipping and sliding to and this was an easy approach according to Bjorn, So you know, what I thought was kind of a death march. He's like, oh, this isn't that bad. So these guys, these guys are used to some tough stuff, and I definitely admire them for that. I thought I was pretty mountain you know, experienced in mountain savvy, and you know, I did fine. But it definitely was you know, it worked me, I guess, is what I'm saying. So we did that for how many hours and then punched out finally into the alpine a tree line, and then you're going up big like rock faces and shale slides and avalanche shoots and different stuff. So now we're like up in the mountains and we come finally up this steep cliffy side and get over top, and we'd get into this finally alpine plateau and right away, stay deer. There's like two little does and a spike buck and my first black tail deer of the trip. So really cool to finally see them, this beautiful deer. And I don't think they saw us, or if they did, they just weren't too terribly concerned. And that was one thing we found was that, you know, this is one of those kinds of places and one of those kinds of honey that you know, because of how hard it is to get there, they just don't see many people. So I do think that the deer were a little bit forgiving of our presence, definitely forgiving of our of our presence compared to like whitetail deer down here where if you know, if they see you walking across an opening, like they're gone. These deer, like if they saw a walk across an opening, some of them, at least the doughs would just stare at you for a while and think like, what's that about. So that was an interesting difference there, just you know, a totally different set of you know, just just they've learned different things over the years, right they have not been exposed to humans over and over and had negative interactions with them. So we get up there, these deer eventually move away. We go find a place it's got water and kind of hidden from the rest of the cliffs and mountain side that we can get hidden away and set up tents, set up our camp, and then after that we kind of regroup, talk about strategy, and headed out for the first hunt. The name of the game for this kind of hunt was that we would get high. It kind of approached like a like a mule or hunt, I think, in that we would get up high in glass and check different bulls like we would actually were going to the very summit of this mountain, and there's all these different like hanging valleys, like these different glacial cirques, I guess, these bowls coming off of the different three or four different sides of the mountain. And then you can get to the summit and then walk one direction, peer down to that bowl for a while, and then walk another fifty yards to one hundred yards to the other side and peer down there, and walk fifty yards another direction and peer down that side. And so you could see all these different little valleys that were still all above tree line, and there was different groups of deer in every one of those. So the first one we went to, we saw what was in there. We saw I spotted a bed of buck and a couple of beded does and a few other dos up and feeding, and that was exciting just to kind of see some deer doing deer things. In that first buck, you know, looked like a decent one, you know. I spent some time talking to Bjorn about what I should expect as far as the deer heard up there, you know, as far as like what's the deer you should take. And Bjorn was very much like, if you see antlers, shoot because you're not guaranteed anything up in these places. And he traditionally has been you know, hunting up here just you know, just for meat and getting as much meat as he can get, and you know, not much for passing up bucks and waiting to see what else was out there. So he was very much all about, like, man, take a crack if you can get one, which I respect him, was not opposed to. At the same time, though, like this is my first time seeing blacktail deer, this is my first time in this place. I didn't really want to just like rush to get over with. I wanted to kind of savor it a little bit and see some of these critters and learn about some of these critters before I, you know, hunted and killed one. So that first valley we explored and glassed. You know, we said, all right, that's cool, let's let's keep looking, let's keep exploring. So then we hiked up this other big ridge line heading to the summit and peeled over and looked on this other side and on this other side the orange spotted dough. And then I started glassing. And as I'm glassing, I finally spot antlers. Here's a buck, a beded buck, and it looks like a pretty nice one. It looks like a pretty nice one to me, but I don't really know what a nice one is. I mean, I think it's a nice one, but yeah, I don't have that context. So I'm like Bjorn, what do you think about this deer? And he's like, oh man, that's a that's a really good buck. That's top shelf. And you got to you gotta know, like siic of black tailed deer much smaller antlers than mule deer or white tailed deer or even black tailed deer down on the west coast, these are smaller antler deer. And then even as far as Sika black tail deer's deer go, the ones on this island are small, antlerd than the ones on somewhere like Kodiak Island. So yeah, we're just not dealing with big racks here. But they're like stout body, super cool deer. Still. So what I was looking for, and what I eventually explained to Bjorn was, you know, I'm looking for a good representative of the species. So Biorn's like, gay, man, that's a good one. But let me just peek over this last little bowl and see what else is there. So I sit there with the digits scope. I start filming this buck. He's I think in Michigan we would call him an eight pointer or a nine pointer. These guys were calling him like a three by three because they subtract the brow times and make it all confusing. But it was, it was, It was a cool buck. Biorn comes back eventually, after I watched this deer for a while, he says, man, there's like four or five bucks on the other side within two hundred and fifty yards so maybe you should go take one of those. I'm like, well what about this one. He's like, well, yeah, they're probably smaller than that one. I said, well, I'm kind of falling in love with this dear. I've been watching him and like really cool, wide, big brow times obviously a big body. So we kind of think about it a little bit and then decide, hey, you know what, they're separate, like they're in different bowls. I could stalk and try to hunt this deer, and if I blow it, I could always go back to the summit and go to this other group and hopefully they would still be there. So that's what we end up deciding to do. To get around on this deer, we had to drop down off the summit and do a big, wide stalk, like a big loop to get down wind and behind him, and then to try to be able to creep in and get an angle and come over the crest of the mountain to be able to see him because he was bedded down next to a patch of pine trees, and so I kind of, you know, looked at stuff as best I could, took some pictures to try to identify, like to have like reference points visually so I could remember, Okay, that's what this bush looks like, that's where he was. I used ONYX to try to look at the aerial view and try to match up the aerial view with what I thought I was seeing in front of me, and then I tried to mark where I thought he was on the map. So I tried to have all these different reference points so that when I re you know, when I circled around and relocated, I hope I could find him again. So we get over there after that big hike around to get there, and as I'm creeping into where I think I should be able to see him, I spot other deer. And what ended up happening was that there was a whole bunch of deer in between me and him that I never saw earlier. I think there was I don't know, five dos, two or three little forks, a bigger like six point buck, a bunch of deer in there, and basically one of them had me kind of pegged, and the others, you know, I was worried that they're going to see me if I moved any more. And I could never get an angle to see this big buck. So for a while it's laid on my belly until it's seen that those deer will calm again. And then I realized, all right, I gotta reposition do something different here to try to you know, get closer or get an angle on the big buck without those deer seeing me. So the new plan was to belly crawl backwards out of sight and then do another loop back behind this set of pine trees and then try to come in like right above where that big one was. So we try to do that and make the move, me and Bjorn, and then we're followed by Colin, who is our camera operator, who is also awesome guy. He's produced some really good films. This isn't a side again, I'm going off another one of my tangents, but I want to plug him because he's produced some great work. He just had a tremendous film called House of School of Fish that is exploring the salmon situation up in Bristol Bay. Would highly recommend checking that one out if you want to learn more about the Tongus National Forest. He had a great film called The Understory. I'd recommend that one. Those are two pieces of work that would definitely suggest you check out from Colin so great dude, great camera operator, cinematographer, photographer, whatever you want to call him. So he's with this too. So we do this second loop, get into these trees, trying to edge our way out to try to see something, and again I get into a spot where I can't get around them enough to see down to him without this other group of deer seeing So I've kind of stuck there, edging forward a little bit every time that these other deer look away. But it just it wasn't a good situation, and I just kept thinking to myself, like I want to push forward to see this buck, but I just don't see how I'm possibly gonna be able to pull that off without him seeing us or without them seeing us. And then as I'm kind of debating that in my head and thinking like, is there any third option, I hear b you hear kind of like leaping away, and I look over a Bjorn he like points down beneath us and like mouths that, like there's a deer running with So in that moment, I was hopeful that that wasn't the end of our hunt and the end of our stock. But what I found later over the course like the next hours I continue to try to slowly squeeze or slip my way up. There was that I had ended up stalking him because of having to take this second like two different loops to try to get different angles, and ended up getting much closer to his bed location than I realized. And I think what ended up happening is that we end up getting within like seventy yards maybe of where he was betted. And I think that our wind dropped or swirled enough that it spooked him because we hear this deer run off, one solitary, big sounding deer, and then all the other deer look over in that direction, and then they just stayed latched on that area for like half an hour, and they didn't spook off, but they just kept staring over there. And then finally after thirty minutes or whatever it was, they finally started like moving off. There's like one bigger buck in that group, which maybe I mean, he had a much bigger buye than the other year, so he might have been mature compared to the others. I was still like trying to figure that out. He moved off, and then the two or three other little four kis moved off, and then the dos slowly over the course, like ten fifteen minutes, all kind of followed him away, and then I got up and moved and tried to look where it was, but there was no deal there, so blew that first stalk, which was disappointing, but at the same time, it was really cool to see a bunch of deer. It was fun to have my first attempt at one of these deer, and it was you know, especially nice to know that there was a backup option, there was a fallback plan. So we regrouped, talked about what happened, and then you know, decided, hey, let's try to go back to the sum of the mountain, hike back up there and get over to that other bowl and see if those other bucks are there. So that's what we start doing. But up to this point, I should point out, you know, it was cloudy and rainy all the day prior, and then as we were hiking up the mountain in the morning, it started to clear up. So everything was still muddy and wet, but at least it wasn't pouring rain anymore. And then by the time we got out to the alpine, it had cleared up enough that we were starting to see the mountains around us, and we could see sunshine and ended up getting really nice. So it was very pretty and open and visible for that first and for you know, when we first went to the summit. But now we're hiking back to the summit and now clouds rolling and it's like you're completely socked in, like you're in a cloud. So my worry as I was hiking up there was did I just blow my only opportunity to be able sea deer? Even? Like are we going to be stuck in this stuff for the rest of the day and the rest of tomorrow, you know, because we missed a day of the hunt because of the flight. You know, our hunt time was now significantly shortened because not only did we get our our day a flying was pushed back twenty four hours, but then when we finally did get here, we had to wait another day because the weather was too bad to get up into the mountains. So, you know, I was working with much less time than I originally thought it was going to So we're hiking up, we're in the clouds. I'm worrying a little bit about you know, what's going to happen now? And we hike up up up, up, up, get to the top of this mountain. It's like a knife edge ridge, very thin ridge that we're climbing at this point, and we get to the spot where I see these big, deeply imprinted round tracks on this ridge. And the ridge, like the tops of the mountains, is like like tundra, which you would imagine thunder like lichen and moss almost on the surface of the soil. And I asked the Armley, so what's this and he explains something that is one of the absolute coolest things I have ever seen out in the natural world, one of the coolest things I've ever seen. This was something that he called in what is known as a grandfather trail, and a grandfather trail is a spot on these knife edged ridges throughout Alaska and maybe other brown bear territory where grizzly bears, where brown bears will step into these footprints, the same footprints year after year after year. So imagine like seeing bear tracks, right, you were to imagine the path of a bear, and you would see each bear track in the dirt or the mud, but instead of it being in the dirt or the mud, it is pressed like twelve inches deep into the moss into the mountain's surface, into the soil, but like a foot deep, and just like perfectly laid out tracks, so it's not like it's a trail. It's just like track track, but twelve inches deep, pressed into the surface. And what these bear do is they step into those prints every year and they push their paws down there and they leave scent deposits. I'm imagining it's kind of like a buck making a scrape. They're leaving a chemical signature, a message of sorts, to communicate their presence, their dominance, anything else like that. And so all sorts of different bears come up and they walk these trails, and when they walk these trails, they carefully press their feet exactly into those steps as they walk across the ridge to leave this message. And what Biorna explained was that in these places is these same trails have been used since the glaciers melted away, so thousands of years, these trails, these prints have been pressed into by different brown bears over the course of hundreds and hundreds of generations of different bears. So I was standing there on top of a mountain looking at the tracks that thousands of different brown bears over the course of thousands of years, had pressed their paws into I mean, it was just a wild thing to consider and to see. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, grizzly bears are the epitome of wildness. And here was a place to see and touch something that had been created by and touched by that emblem of wildness for thousands of years. It was like one of the most direct connections I've ever had to something that happened so so so long ago. It connected me back to I don't know. I don't have the words yet. I have not had the time yet to think about exactly how to explain this, except to say that it was a powerful experience and something to see and something to be near and to imagine all the wild stuff that happened right there where I was standing. So very cool moment, and I kind of was talking to Biorn about this. I went, manly, this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. And then he says to me, well, what's also really cool is that there's probably still some bucks on the other side of this cliff, so maybe we should go check that out before it gets dark, which was a good point, and so We kind of sneak our way over to the edge and then eventually have to lay down and belly crawl up to this cliff because there's a sheer cliff drop down into one of these bowls, and just as we're getting there, the clouds parked and the sun setting just this beautiful light is kind of shining in now from the side, and we creep over the edge and look down to this bowl and here is like, I don't know, like an Alaskan Eden, this perfect landscape, bright green, open meadows with scattered trees and boulders and deer everywhere. There's does feeding over here. There's bucks feeding over there, there's does better there, there's a buck better over there, there's two bucks fighting here. There's just every different place you looked there was deer doing their thing, and you're viewing it all from like a bird's eye view. I'm way at the top of the mountain looking down at the deer. I don't know. It was like being a drone looking over all top of her beat. Like I said, a bird's I view an eagle flying over top of this scene. It was really kind of bizarre to experience and see deer from this perspective and just absolutely beautiful. So we're up there and I'm just watching. Bijorn's like, well, you're gonna shoot one, and I know, I was kind of like, I don't know if I want to shoot one. I don't know, I don't know what I want to do in this situation. I just kind of want to watch right now. So I just pulled up my binoculars and just watched for a while and looked at all the different deer and started wrestling with, you know, whether or not I wanted to shoot one. And I'm trying to also figure out, like, you know, are these young bucks, are these mature bucks? Or these big bucks? Are these small bucks? Is this you know, is this the right situation to shoot one? Is it not? Is it too soon? Is it just right? Is it? You know? Am I running out of time? All of these things started, you know, rushing through my head. After I first was taken aback by the whole thing and took it in, that next phase was like, okay, now what I had all these different things I had to think about, And so I'm looking at deer and Biora was kind of joking about how he never watched deer so much in his life as he does when it's with me. Because again, I'm taking my time with this. And as I'm sitting there thinking about stuff and debating about whether or not I want to take one, clouds rolled back in and we're just completely and everything's invisible again, and I'm thinking, like, ah, geez, I guess like mother Nature might just made the decision for me, because this looked like a big cloud. It looked like everything was cloudy. And it's funny how when you're in it, it feels like everything is cloudy and socked in. It kind of looks like, okay, this is everywhere. But somehow, every time I ever got to thinking that, relatively quickly it would open up and then you realized you were just in this little world that felt that way, but there's a much larger world around you that was open. And so as we're all stocked in it's cloudy, I start to, you know, chat with Beorn about kind of how you know, just started verbalizing what was inside my mind, how I didn't want to end it too soon, but at the same time I want I knew that we were running out of time, and really what I wanted was ah as I said earlier, like a good representative of the species, a mature buck. I didn't really care about the antlers. I wanted a deer that was relatively mature, that would you know, have, you know, a good bit of meat and you know, be a good average illustration of what blacktail deer are all about. That was kind of my realistic goal for this trip. And so he says, well, you know there's probably at least one, if not two down there that would be at least four. I was like, oh, really, like a four year old. That's you know, in my world of white tails, like a four year old is a pretty damn good deer. So he kind of explained it, like, you got to remember these are different, obviously different than white tails, even different from black tail deer and Prince of Wales Island or kodiak. These are smaller antler deer up here because of the habitat and the elevation and everything. So you know, you gotta don't assess too much by the antlers, which is a good reminder for us down here in the lower forty eight two. So lucky, luck luckily, that's what I'm trying to say. Luckily, the clouds part again and we can see everything again, and Jorn's like, yeah, like that one right down there, I bet you he's a four year old. I have all this deer and he is what I would call this, Well, they were calling a fork. I would call a six pointer, almost a seven pointer, because you kind of hang a ring. You know, in Michigan we say if you can hang a ring on it, you can count as a point. So I'm gonna call him a seven pointer. But like you could tell, the antlers were heavier and darker than the other deer. His g twos were kind of thick and bladed, which I thought was pretty cool. And then he's got this pudgy belly and these deer, like I mentioned, they're short and stocky, and they're like they've got pot bellies. So that kind of ended up being the way you could tell if it was a mature deer because the fat ones were those older bucks. So there ends up being one of these pot belly deer that is relatively close to me broadside and feeding, and two bucks are like sparring right in front of him. It was like very cool taking it all in. So when I see that, and Beorna explained that was a mature bouck. Guy just said, okay, you know what, that's that's the deer I want. Then, so got lined up, got comfortable. It was, you know, a perfect shooting position. Again, this is a rifle hunt, which is something I don't do a lot of, but enough. But was nice that I could be laying down. I was like in a prone position, elbows on the ground, I had a little bipod in the front of my rifles. I had like great support and yeah, got a shot in broadside, dropped him in his tracks. Absolutely gorgeous. You know, the whole thing was just gorgeous, and it was pretty wild. I mean, it was just like a marathon of a day. Shot this blacktail got a really good, quick ethical kill. We hiked down off the mountain down into that bowl. We're able to recover the deer, do some work, and then we kind of got to realize and like, oh, well, it's gonna get dark really quickly here and this is super thick bear country. We're gonna have to either figure we're going to figure out how to get this deer out here quick and ideally not after dark. So we just got to work skinning, quartering, packing, you know, gutting ahead of all that, and you know, from Bjorn's perspective, the best thing would be to just get the deer back to camp and then just do it fast and you know, make some noise, have your gun close to you, have a bullet chambered while you're doing all this because you don't want all this smell and blood and gust to be around you, and then have your back to a bear approaching. So you know, he chambered around and just kind of kept an eye on things while we got to work. And fortunately, no bear problems, no issues. We got that deer all packed away. After dark. We ended up having to hike in the dark, but that was fine. Traversed around this mountain, got back to camp, and you know, there's no big trees up high in the alpine. There's that kind of scrubby stuff. So we basically just had to hang the meat on these little scrub pines like three feet off the ground, which was not gonna help with bears at all, but it would hopefully help with Martin's American Martins, which I guess can be kind of aggressive and get into your food. So we did that. Turns out that didn't help. We did not have bear problems, but we did have a martin get into my meat and eat some of the meat, and he actually stole my knife. I had a Montana knife, like one of their ultra lights that has the handle wrapped in para cord, and I'd use that to gut my deer. So that paracord had soaked up a lot of you know, just blood and bile and who knows whatever else's liquids and stuff. So I'm sure it smelled really bad and there's some dangling cord off of it. So instead of putting that in my tent or something, I just left it there with the meat on the ground because I didn't want that in my tent and attract bears. So the next morning that when I go over there to check the meat, not only was the meat bag chewed up, but my knife gone. So my assumption is that that martin took it, dragged it off somewhere, and it's hidden underneath some bush or in a hole or something. But we actually follow the martin up in the tree over top of us, just hanging out there watching, which was interesting. Cute little critter, but that was a hunt. That was the hunt well, the next morning we actually hiked back up to the summit because we had a little more time that day. Hiked up there and just glassed that bowl and watched to see if a bear would come on the gut pile. Nothing did, but we saw a bunch of deer still in there, so I got to watch some more deer, have some good chats, got to check out that Grandfather trail again. And then that afternoon did the hike down the mountain back to the cabin. And that was a death march because now I've got a full deer in my back. Bjorn actually shot a deer that morning too, so Bjorn had a deer in his back and all of his backpacking and hunting gear. I had a deer in my back and all my backpacking and hunting gear, so heavy packs. Going down this super steep, wet jungle mountain. Every step you're like falling down and something or tripping on one of these bushes. Your gun stuff, Your gun's getting caught up in the Devil's club and hanging up on things. It was just kind of a It was a trip, but made it down and survived it. Just find grilled up some backstrap and heart on the open fire that night. Back of the cabin told a lot of good stories. Colin and Bjorn had a lot of fun stuff to share from their previous adventures, and it was just a hell of a trip, a great experience. I learned that, you know, there's some things about deer that like deer deer, right, like white tails, black tails, mule deer, that there's some things they share in common, you know, like they lived by their noses. That was a big one, right, That was something that kicked me in the butt on this first stock. But at the same time, it's so interesting to hunt these different versions of deer in these different kinds of places, to see how they operate differently. You know, in this case, you know, these deer felt very comfortable on the open because they're not used to humans messing with them. So basically, if you could get to this place, you could find you know, virgin territory where deer were being deer hanging out in these wide open meadows because they weren't threatened by us, And that was cool to see. I think one special thing about traveling to these still wild places is that you get to see deer operating as they did before they learned to associate, you know, humans with danger, and so I found that to be really special and valuable and worthwhile to see. So I just came await from this trip with a new found respect for sick of blacktail deer, a new found respect for the terrain they live in. I felt like when I had seen previous blacktail deer hunts, like on you know, people in Kodiak or Steve's hunts on Prince of Wales, it never looked that rugged. Maybe I just hadn't been paying attention enough, but it always kind of seemed like there's some kind of like nice easy hills and it didn't seem like tough country. But at least this hunt, I felt like we were in some you know, we're in some stuff. We're up there, you know, we're traversing ridgeline that if I took one wrong step, I'd be sliding down along ways. We are steep stuff with heavy packs. That you just had to respect the territory and respect the deer that lived there, And that was eye opening and impressive. So I took that away from this hunt too. And I think if I were to, you know, provide any kind of guidance for somebody who wanted to do a black tail deer hunt themselves, you know, still having relatively little experience myself, I would tell you a couple of things. Number One, if you can find a way to get to one of these places away from people, I think you're going to have a really special experience. That's first and foremost. So I talked to, you know, the people I talked to mentionally, Hey, it's different when you're on a road system, and there is there are places you can hunt black tails on the road system in southeast Alaska and you can have success, but they're they're going to be more like your white tails. They're much more edgy, they're much more cover dependent, they're pressured, and so you would have to hunt them like you hunt pressure deer down here. But if you can find a way to get a floatplane trip or a bush plane and get dropped off into one of these places, and yet that does take some extra money and resources in time, so that's not realistic in every situation. But if you can get some bodies together and pull some money to get that and go into one of these places that's really off the beaten path. Even if it's once in your lifetime to see these deer in their natural environment doing the things they were doing three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years ago. It's, as far as I'm concerned, worth seeing once. And maybe it's not blacktail. Maybe maybe you are going to do one hunt like this in Alaska or Canada or somewhere. Maybe it's caribal, maybe it's moose, maybe it's black bear. Whatever it is, I would say that every hunter an angler, it would be worse while if you could somehow save up the money to go up to one of these places and experience it just once, at least once in your life, just to see how it used to be. I think that was one of the biggest epiphanies. I had. One of the greatest things that kept coming up over and over and over again during my couple weeks up there. It was that we used to have this, We used to have some version of this down in the lower forty eight, whether it be millions and millions and millions of salmon running up our rivers every year, or whether it was great, big herds of deer that were relatively comfortable in the open and feeding and not constantly on edge and not constantly threatened. We used to have places you could hike out and hunt in where there was the most impressive predator in the world present all over the place. We used to have grizzlies and brown bears all over the lower forty eight states. This was a wild country and you had to respect that. And when you walked across North Dakota, you were in grizzly country and you were respecting the land and the wild critters out there, and your senses were turned up to eleven because you weren't at the top of the food chain. And I don't care what you think about that. It changes the dynamic. It makes it more electric. And if you've never spent time in brown bear or grizzly country, I can tell you that it changes your relationship with it. And I personally believe it changes it in a positive way, in a way that you are humbled by the landscape and the animals around you, and because of that, you appreciate it more. I don't know how to describe this in any other kind of way, but imagine that kind of feeling, like where you're driving down the highway and then all of a sudden, like you witness a car accident right in front of you, or someone swerves in front of you and you almost hit them and you just narrowly escape, or whatever. You get this massive adrenaline dumb right, or some other thing almost happens to you, like a bad thing almost happens. You have this huge rush of adrenaline, hyperventilating. Your whole body is on fire for a second, right, for many of us, In those moments, your memory goes into hyperdriver, or you almost go into a slow motion where like everything is clearer and crisper, and you remember it all. It like imprints into your brain so perfectly. You can remember those moments as if they were yesterday, as if it was a movie playing out in your mind. Right, that's what happens in these intense moments. Well, that same kind of thing, to a degree, occurs when you are in such a wild landscape that you are no longer top of the pole, not top of the totem pole. Right, Everything is more vivid, the colors are richer, the sounds matter more, the smell are more pungent. And that was like every day in Alaska you felt like that. And so this is a long winded way of saying that we used to have these incredible wildlife populations and these wild, wild wild places and these infinitely dark skies. This was everywhere down here, and we've lost much of it. We still have pockets, We still got our things. We still have white tailed deer, we still have elk, and it's incredible that we don't bring these animals back. But it used to be so much more and you can still experience it in British Columbia or Alaska or the Yukon, different places like this, and I think it's worth seeing and worth remembering, worth remembering that there's still stuff like that worth fighting for, and that we have so far to go still down here in the lower forty eight. Like there's this risk of shifting baseline syndrome, which we've talked about before, But basically this idea is that every one of us, when we're born and we're kids and we experienced the natural world, we kind of set our baseline of what wild is from what we experience as young people. So what my wild was is what I experienced in the nineties and early two thousands that felt wild to me, those levels of wildlife that felt good to me, right that was my baseline, And if I didn't know anything else other than that, I might think, well, that's how it used to be, that was those of the good old days. But I wouldn't know that. Fifty years prior to that, or eighty years prior to that, or one hundred and fifty years prior to that, things were so much different, maybe so much wilder, maybe so much more undeveloped, so many more animals. That baseline keeps changing, and we keep accepting this new baseline because all we've personally ever known, so our new normal, though, might be god awful compared to what the normal baseline was for someone twenty years before, and twenty years before and twenty years before. And so by going up north to this place that was still relative untouched, it was kind of a resetting of the baseline for me, and I realized, and I was reminded of the fact that, man, maybe if I had been born two hundred years earlier, I would have seen this down in northern Michigan or Montana. But we we lost a lot of it. I'm very thankful we haven't lost all of it, and I'm gonna fight hard to make sure we don't lose the rest of it, but let's make sure we don't screw up these last best places too, And I think it'd be worth, like I said, everyone having that experience at least once. So that's one thought. Second thought, Southeast Alaska's wet. That's no surprise. That's not news to anyone's ears. That's been said many times before. But it's one thing to hear, it's another thing to experience it. Make sure you've got really good rain gear. Make sure you've got rain proof boots. I brought waterproof leather boots, but I also brought knee high rubber boots based on Berange recommendation, and I ended up wearing those a lot, just like in day to day life around the camp. Around Juno fishing, like was almost always in the high rubber boots, and a lot of guys do that there they're wearing their extra toughs and now I understand why. So definitely bring rubber boots. Definitely bring the best waterproof stuff you can bring. I had waterproof stuff, sacks, waterproof backpack liner for my big backpack, waterproof everything, and it was needed. So recommend that, you know, definitely come prepared for bears. That's again, that's nothing no surprise I think for anybody. But I do think like you just have to be really respectful of that fact in these places that they're there. You don't need to fear them, you don't need to let them stop you from going and experience in these places. You just have to respect it and be properly prepared. And if I learned anything from Bejorn, it was that it was that you need to be prepared for all circumstances, but also understand that they don't want to mess with you. Nine point nine times out of ten, read their body language, talk to them, avoid if need be, don't escalate the situation, and most of the time they're gonna go on their way. So so that was that was a good reminder. And I brought bear spray. I had my rifle, of course, and I also brought a ten milimeters pistol. And the key thing is to always make sure you have stuff with you like a gun or bear spray is never going to do any good if it's in your backpack, on your back, or if it's ten feet away while you're taking a piss. Always have your thing. That was a key thing that Bjorn mentioned, like you know, don't even go to the outhouse without spray or your pistol or something like, always be prepared just in case. So that would be something else I would note for anyone planning a trip like this for the first time. And I guess the last thing I would say, and again, this is not like a thorough how to of this trip. These are just more some overarching thoughts. But the last thing I would say is that this trip also I realized like an aft like looking back on it, and Alaska in general is more accessible than maybe I realized. I kind of always looked at Alaska as out of reach. I kind of looked as like prohibitively expensive, like out of my league. And by doing this trip, this is my second time to Alaska and the most I've been involved in like planning logistics and doing stuff myself, I kind of realized that it's not that much different than planning any other kind of big trip like this, like whether it be going to the Rocky Mountains for the first time or going on a camping trip to the Grand Canyon, whatever. Like there's planning, there's logistics, there's definitely things you need to have, you know, in order and it definitely is an investment in some travel costs, but not disproportionately more those other things, Like a plane ticket up to Juno was no different than if I wanted to take a plane ticket to California or something. So I definitely came out of this trip realizing that I could do this more often, and I could take my family there more often, Like this is not out of my league, nor is it out of yours. And as I said a few minutes ago, I think my big thing is see it at least once, experience it at least once. It's your country just as much as anybody else's, and it is an unbelievable gift that we still have places like this. If we're going to keep places like this, we need to experience them so we can care about them and know them enough to continue that fight. So that is kind of where I end on this whole thing. I'm looking forward to getting back up there get I'm looking forward to continue to follow what's going on in Alaska and caring about the issues up there in Alaska, just like I care about things down in here in Michigan or Idaho or Montana. You know, a couple things worth noting if you are ever interested in going on a black bear hunt in the Tongas National Forest, or a deer hunt like this, or if you want to go salmon fishing or do any of these things that are down there, we're just incredible opportunities for this stuff. Pay close attention what's going on with the Tongus National Forest. Like I mentioned, this is an incredible place, seventeen million acres I believe, but it has been in to varying degrees at risk. A handful of years ago, the previous presidential administration had removed the roadless rule protections from nine million acres of this forest, So more than half of the forest lost protections that had been placed on it several decades prior. That kept this place from getting clear cut, That kept this place from getting new roads punched into the last few places that don't have roads. This is one of our last best wild places. And so they had placed these roadless rule protections on it in the early two thousands that would protect those areas that had not yet been carved up in clearcut, because a lot of it had. And in those places there's all sorts of like ecological ramifications and downsides, for example, in the places that were clearcut, which again were big chunks. What happens is that you clearcut a forest, and you know, down in the whitetail world, when we think about cutting trees, we think about benefits to wildlife, and there are some immediate benefits when you cut trees in that you're getting sunlight to the ground and new growth. Right. But clear cutting, especially in forested ecosystems up here up north especially has you know, trickle down effects that are not so good. So in the immediate couple of years after that you would see better food available for blacktail deer. But blacktail deer need old growth forests because they need protection from snows. They need to survive these gnarly, gnarly winters up there, and old growth high canopy forest is the habitat that they need to survive that. Now, what happens is that when you get these clearcuts, they lose a bunch of their wintering habitats. So that's bad, but they do some food. But then you have these clear cut areas that do start growing back, and they start growing back very thick and all the same level. So what you eventually have is something called canopy exclusion, where these second growth forests get to a point at I don't know, fifteen twenty five, thirty five years old, where they are forests. Again, they're very thick forests, and they are completely dark forests on the top, and so there's no sunlight that gets to the bottom, and there's no diversity in the age structure of the forest, and so there's no understory. And what you have then is a deer desert. What deer need there is old growth in which you have naturally occurring diversity and aige structure of forests because you've got the big old trees that provide your winter cover and your canopy. But then there's dead and dying trees scattered throughout. So you get these different pockets and openings where sunlight does come in, and so you get understory and you get over story, and so what you want is a balance of both of those things. There are examples where there's been like wildlife thinnings coming into these second growth force and trying to recreate that. So trying to create some pockets and open up things a little bit, and that's a good thing, but the big thing is we can't have these clear cuts happening again that are not only bad for blacktail deer, but they're also bad for salmon. They're bad for the streams, they're bad for the trout, all the different fish species in these rivers. When you clearcut these rivers, you remove the habitat that's preserving the banks of the streams. You get siltation and dirt and erosion and all stuff rushes into the rivers. It covers up the gravel beds that spawn that salmon need to spawn. All sorts of different kind of trickled on effects from it. So this is my rambling way of saying that the roadless Rule has been something that has been very good for fish and wildlife in that area. We had it for a while. It was taken away in like two thousand and I can't remember eighteen or nineteen or something like that. But then again they were put back in place recently a year or two ago, so we have those roless rule protections on the tongus. Again, there are work that's work being done to have better habitat for deer and for fish. They're doing some of this wildlife fitting work. They're trying to find ways to have some level of timber harvest because hey, we need some logging, we need jobs, we need that, we need managed habitat for wildlife. That's a good thing, but we need to do it in such a way that it's not going to destroy the habitat, that's not going to level these things, that's going to still preserve the wild spots that we have left. So I'm very much in supportive of the roleless rule. I would suggest you learn about it because you know the political pendulum swings, and I would not be surprised if we see a debate come up about these things again in the future. And if you want to chase blacktail deer someday or go see this place someday, you won't experience the same thing I did if we lose those protections. And I hope if you've listened to this you can see the value in protecting these places and hopefully being able to see them someday self too. So that is the story of my Alaskan deer hunt. I actually got to stay around for about another just a little less than another week, and got to go in a whole nother excursion learning about salmon and the issues impacting salmon. I got to do some saltwater fishing in the ocean. I caught caught coho salmon. I saw humpback whales. I went to Bristol Bay. I caught massive rainbow trout, the biggest grailing I've ever seen in my life, pink salmon. Just all sorts of really, really fascinating things. I learned about, some incredible places, some incredible animals, and once again I'm just more fired up than ever to do whatever i can to keep these places wild, to keep these wild animals out there, and to make sure that all of us and our kids can experience these things someday in the future as well. So that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Hope you enjoyed this one, and if you have any questions, you know, hit me up on Instagram or social media. I'll try to answer some questions here in the coming days and weeks about this hunt and about this experience, if there's any of you that want to try something similar in the future. But I think that's it for today. Starting next week, we'll be right back into our usual Whitetail content. The season's kicking off here in Michigan in just a handful of days, so I'm about to get real serious about white tails. I'm sure you are too, so until then, best of luck. If you are out there hunting already, you know, dot your eyes, cross your t's. If you're getting ready for the season to start here in a couple of days, shoot your bow. And until next time, my friends, stay wired to hunt.