Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 506: The Future of Alaska Hunting
Transcript
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
- 0:13Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listeningcast, you can't
- 0:18Speaker 1: predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you
- 0:22Speaker 1: by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands,
- 0:25Speaker 1: or scouting for el First Light has performance apparel to
- 0:28Speaker 1: support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at
- 0:32Speaker 1: first light dot com. F I R S T L
- 0:35Speaker 1: I t E dot com. Start off, I will I.
- 0:41Speaker 1: I don't know if you've been paying attention, but we've
- 0:43Speaker 1: been taught. We've been covering Phil's play.
- 0:47Speaker 2: Yeah, people are definitely aware.
- 0:50Speaker 1: Listen, man, I was sitting next to a guy who
- 0:52Speaker 1: was at that place because you heard about it on
- 0:54Speaker 1: the podcast. Really sitting next to them.
- 0:58Speaker 2: Really what I bet the last thing that guy expected
- 1:02Speaker 2: after hearing it on the podcast was like, I'm gonna
- 1:04Speaker 2: go down that plate and sit next to Stephen Reel.
- 1:06Speaker 1: Well, he was actually next to my daughter Rosemary. It
- 1:09Speaker 1: was me, my wife, my daughter, him, gotcha. So they
- 1:13Speaker 1: struck up a convo and then at the end of
- 1:15Speaker 1: the thing we took a picture and he said, yeah,
- 1:17Speaker 1: I heard about on the podcast. Came down nice and
- 1:21Speaker 1: Phil right there. Phil does kiss someone in that show,
- 1:25Speaker 1: and Krin painted it out like it was gonna be
- 1:27Speaker 1: real seedy. It made her uncomfortable.
- 1:34Speaker 3: It was it was just a little peck.
- 1:37Speaker 1: It was more in a peck, but it wasn't like
- 1:39Speaker 1: how would you describe it, phil.
- 1:42Speaker 4: On like a scale, like from from a peck to
- 1:45Speaker 4: a passionate French kiss. I put it at like I
- 1:49Speaker 4: don't know, a three.
- 1:50Speaker 1: I was gonna say a three.
- 1:51Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, Well maybe it's different from show to show.
- 1:56Speaker 1: Oh do you bring it something brings Depending on how
- 2:00Speaker 1: I feel, I'll mix, I'll slip in a little.
- 2:03Speaker 2: I won't tell every So.
- 2:04Speaker 1: Some nights you just bring it. Some nights you were
- 2:06Speaker 1: like you weren't in the mood.
- 2:07Speaker 6: No, that's that would be inappropriate, so.
- 2:10Speaker 1: You would do it the same every time.
- 2:12Speaker 6: Mostly it made you uncomfortable.
- 2:14Speaker 5: Yeah, a little bit. I said before. It's like watching
- 2:17Speaker 5: your brother like kiss someone.
- 2:20Speaker 1: It made me remotely uncomfortable.
- 2:22Speaker 6: Step and Steph enjoyed it.
- 2:23Speaker 2: I think.
- 2:25Speaker 1: I did, And then I got home my text Phyllis
- 2:27Speaker 1: said I didn't think it was that sexy, And he
- 2:30Speaker 1: said if he ever gets cast and something NC seventeen.
- 2:32Speaker 6: He'll let me know, he'll be the first to know.
- 2:36Speaker 1: So are you happy with holladall went Phil? Yeah? I
- 2:38Speaker 1: think so.
- 2:38Speaker 6: It was a lot of fun.
- 2:39Speaker 4: Yeah, those all those people I worked with are super
- 2:41Speaker 4: nice and had a really good time.
- 2:43Speaker 6: Yeah.
- 2:44Speaker 1: I can't.
- 2:44Speaker 6: I can't tell you what it was like to watch it,
- 2:46Speaker 6: but I hope it was okay.
- 2:47Speaker 1: Our kids even liked it.
- 2:48Speaker 2: Don't you have another one coming?
- 2:50Speaker 3: Well?
- 2:50Speaker 1: Our eight year old he didn't give it the best review, sure,
- 2:56Speaker 1: because he was ready to get going.
- 2:58Speaker 6: No, he was.
- 3:00Speaker 4: He probably wasn't interested in like the nineteen thirties Russian
- 3:02Speaker 4: politics that make up a lot of the third act.
- 3:05Speaker 1: I can sense that he got a little lost. Yeah,
- 3:07Speaker 1: he got a little lost and the stuff about the
- 3:09Speaker 1: Russians are and everything. So he probably wouldn't give it
- 3:12Speaker 1: the best review. But the other ones really liked it.
- 3:14Speaker 6: That's good, to be fair.
- 3:16Speaker 7: He'd rather be rolling around the mud.
- 3:18Speaker 1: Or something like that. It was cold outside, though, so
- 3:21Speaker 1: I couldn't send them out there getting his boots, and
- 3:23Speaker 1: then we got I got in a fight with my
- 3:25Speaker 1: kids up at the concession booth. Oh what Yeah, embarrassed
- 3:29Speaker 1: myself at the concession stand.
- 3:32Speaker 8: They wanted some candy.
- 3:33Speaker 1: Yeah, like, for whatever reason, the movie theaters the candies
- 3:36Speaker 1: are huge boxes. Yep, they got Every movie theater in
- 3:39Speaker 1: the world has the.
- 3:39Speaker 2: Same yeah, big box.
- 3:42Speaker 1: Yeah, like what it's like good? What's it good? And
- 3:44Speaker 1: plannies yeah, pis. So we go up there and I'm like, what,
- 3:48Speaker 1: pick one box out and they all grab a box.
- 3:53Speaker 1: I'm like, no, agree on one box. And meanwhile it's
- 3:55Speaker 1: people behind us in line. So Vince I said, never mind,
- 3:59Speaker 1: put all those boxes down hard Bet went back to
- 4:03Speaker 1: the seats. They didn't like that well, and then Ma
- 4:06Speaker 1: went up and got it. It's just they wound up
- 4:09Speaker 1: with I won. Essentially, I won because they wound up
- 4:11Speaker 1: with one box, Okay, but I lost in one You
- 4:17Speaker 1: came out even joined today by Tyler Freel Alaskan hunter
- 4:22Speaker 1: trapper podcast or writer guy that shoots bears with a
- 4:27Speaker 1: stick bow. Yeah, flesher what else?
- 4:34Speaker 9: I don't know, man, I do, I do, have do
- 4:36Speaker 9: and have done. I guess a little bit everything. Uh.
- 4:39Speaker 1: You know, you host host under Talk and you cover
- 4:42Speaker 1: Alaskan outdoor politics and not hunting and fishing yep, yep,
- 4:47Speaker 1: A bunch of stuff like that.
- 4:48Speaker 9: Yeah, No, it's uh we I don't know. Try not
- 4:52Speaker 9: to take take it too seriously. But we you know,
- 4:54Speaker 9: just a bunch of uh myself and a bunch of
- 4:57Speaker 9: buddies who you know, we live in Alaska and kind
- 5:01Speaker 9: of offer a good perspective and talk shit about each
- 5:03Speaker 9: other and share hunting stories and tips, and I figure,
- 5:08Speaker 9: if it can be entertaining with a little bit of
- 5:10Speaker 9: useful information, then uh, then that's a good goal.
- 5:13Speaker 1: So yeah, and you guys mix it up pretty hard.
- 5:15Speaker 1: So you guys are into you're into a lot of
- 5:17Speaker 1: the sophisticated stuff, yeah, which she.
- 5:19Speaker 9: Which yeah, oh yeah for sure. Which it makes it
- 5:22Speaker 9: kind of tough because a lot of those, you know,
- 5:24Speaker 9: are super serious subjects, and uh, you can you can
- 5:28Speaker 9: dive way into any given one and as a whole,
- 5:31Speaker 9: it's all just it's it's really more than any one
- 5:33Speaker 9: person can keep track of, see kind of you know,
- 5:36Speaker 9: you got to pick your battles. But I try to
- 5:38Speaker 9: do my best to stay on top of of what's
- 5:41Speaker 9: going on, stuff that comes up, and you know, I
- 5:44Speaker 9: can write about that and my my day jobs a
- 5:47Speaker 9: staff writer for Outdoor Life, so I you know, cover
- 5:51Speaker 9: cover a lot of that stuff in there as well
- 5:53Speaker 9: as you know, all my normal my normal duties.
- 5:56Speaker 1: Great, we're gonna getting all that. We're gonna cover a
- 5:58Speaker 1: lot of stuff that's going on in Alaska today. So
- 5:59Speaker 1: you've got any kind of interest in hunting in Alaska,
- 6:01Speaker 1: wildlife management Alaska. We're going to get into that and
- 6:05Speaker 1: hanging tune and we're gonna talk about Alexander super Tramp Boss.
- 6:08Speaker 1: This is the weirdest deal, dude, I've like. So I'm
- 6:12Speaker 1: just going to tease this. Then we're going to tell
- 6:13Speaker 1: the story in greater detail, like everyone knows Crack hours.
- 6:17Speaker 1: John Cracker is into the wild and they made that
- 6:20Speaker 1: movie out of it.
- 6:22Speaker 7: Eddie Vedder made that song.
- 6:24Speaker 1: Made that song. I read that whole here. I read
- 6:29Speaker 1: that whole book watching an avalanche slide for black Bears
- 6:32Speaker 1: one day, read the whole book. I didn't read it
- 6:35Speaker 1: till late in life. The bears didn't get one. But
- 6:39Speaker 1: there's a bunch of sand hill cranes. It was the
- 6:41Speaker 1: weirdest thing I always remember that day because there was
- 6:44Speaker 1: there was nothing was melted off except that avalanche shooting
- 6:46Speaker 1: sand hill cranees walking up and down that avalanche shoot.
- 6:50Speaker 9: Those cranes are a pain in the ass man, especially
- 6:52Speaker 9: moose season right about the time stuff starts popping off.
- 6:54Speaker 9: Oh my gosh, the crane show up and you can't
- 6:56Speaker 9: hear nothing.
- 6:58Speaker 1: All day, isn't that wild?
- 7:01Speaker 10: Yeah?
- 7:02Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the time I see that.
- 7:04Speaker 9: It's the thing man.
- 7:05Speaker 1: Coming through some pass nearby. It's like, turn that off.
- 7:09Speaker 8: I have never seen that many sand hills, and they
- 7:12Speaker 8: do that.
- 7:13Speaker 9: Dance, thousands of them a lot of time.
- 7:16Speaker 1: So funny you mentioned that man because like, like to
- 7:19Speaker 1: the last two times we've been moose hunting, it was
- 7:21Speaker 1: just like everybody like just stop that for a minute.
- 7:25Speaker 9: Well, and especially you know, you know it's you're working
- 7:28Speaker 9: with limited time and every dead ass calm morning and evening.
- 7:33Speaker 9: You know you're wanting like this is the time to
- 7:35Speaker 9: get some sound out there, and those cranes won't shut up.
- 7:39Speaker 9: It's it's really irritates again.
- 7:41Speaker 1: And you're hoping to hear that.
- 7:44Speaker 3: A lot of times.
- 7:44Speaker 1: You hit me with your bulgrount real quick. Yeah, that's
- 7:50Speaker 1: just hit me with a volume though.
- 7:52Speaker 9: All right, I can't, I gotta I gotta sit up
- 7:56Speaker 9: a little bit.
- 7:57Speaker 1: You get a little bit of I want to do
- 7:58Speaker 1: two things. I wanted to hit me with some volume,
- 8:00Speaker 1: and I want you to do like like our buddy,
- 8:01Speaker 1: Honis can make a noise. It sounds like an oak
- 8:04Speaker 1: way off. You know how you feel that noise before
- 8:07Speaker 1: you hear it. I want you to hit me with
- 8:09Speaker 1: some volume.
- 8:10Speaker 9: And hit me with a way off right, let's see.
- 8:14Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, now hit me with the ship. Is that
- 8:21Speaker 1: a bull? Yeah? That's good, dude. All right. So this bus,
- 8:29Speaker 1: so everybody knows that this kid, Chris McCandless was his name,
- 8:33Speaker 1: His nickname is his chosen name. As Brosie Brody pointed
- 8:36Speaker 1: out earlier, was Alexander Supertramp died in his damn bus.
- 8:42Speaker 1: Uh by MacArthur right.
- 8:45Speaker 9: No, by Healey, by Hely, right outside of MacArthur.
- 8:49Speaker 1: Yeah what am I saying? By Healey and the bus
- 8:51Speaker 1: sat out there and it became a tourist attraction. But
- 8:54Speaker 1: get that bus. Your family had like camped in that bus.
- 8:59Speaker 1: Oh yeah, way before any of this stuff went down.
- 9:01Speaker 9: Yeah. So from the time you know, that book became popular,
- 9:05Speaker 9: I think it was maybe even I can't remember what
- 9:07Speaker 9: year the book was, but it was right about the
- 9:09Speaker 9: time we moved to Alaska because I I I was
- 9:13Speaker 9: born in Colorado, but my dad was born and grew
- 9:16Speaker 9: up in Fairbanks. And after his After my grandpa passed
- 9:18Speaker 9: away in like seventy one, my grandma moved them back
- 9:21Speaker 9: down to Colorado. So that's kind of why we were
- 9:23Speaker 9: not there. But as soon as that book became popular,
- 9:26Speaker 9: my dad would just be like, oh, yeah, that was
- 9:27Speaker 9: our that was our camp. Like we spent many nights
- 9:29Speaker 9: in that bus, and so that that was all it
- 9:33Speaker 9: was for a lot of years, and yeah, became just
- 9:38Speaker 9: kind of a deadly tourist attraction, which it's it's sad,
- 9:43Speaker 9: and I mean not to make light of it, but uh,
- 9:45Speaker 9: like people were constantly having to be get rescued trying
- 9:49Speaker 9: to get out there because there, yeah, how did that
- 9:52Speaker 9: bus get out in the first you know, all all
- 9:55Speaker 9: this is like this, this whole story. So after people
- 9:59Speaker 9: were tired of this shit, they ended up making the
- 10:02Speaker 9: decision to helicopter it. Took a schnook and helicopter that
- 10:05Speaker 9: thing out of there, and uh, the University of Alaska
- 10:08Speaker 9: and Fairbanks got a hold of it and their plan
- 10:10Speaker 9: is to display it at the museum there. And I
- 10:12Speaker 9: had written a story about how that was like our
- 10:16Speaker 9: family's hunting camp back in the day, and the gal
- 10:18Speaker 9: that was in charge or is in charge of the
- 10:21Speaker 9: bus for the museum got in touch with me, say, hey, well,
- 10:25Speaker 9: you guys want to come check it out? And uh
- 10:27Speaker 9: so we did. My dad and my uncle and I
- 10:29Speaker 9: went over there and checked it out, and it was pretty,
- 10:31Speaker 9: you know, pretty cool. They hadn't been in it since
- 10:33Speaker 9: I think seventy two. Oh, And my dad's like, remember
- 10:36Speaker 9: when Grandpa, or remember when Dad blew up the wood
- 10:39Speaker 9: stove by starting by starting throwing gasoline there and there
- 10:43Speaker 9: to get it going and blew the stack and blew
- 10:44Speaker 9: the door off and anyway, so as we're sitting there
- 10:48Speaker 9: talking too, my my Dad's like, I know, I know, mom.
- 10:51Speaker 9: My grandma had eight millimeter footage of this some work.
- 10:55Speaker 9: She had a bunch of eight milimeter videos that she
- 10:57Speaker 9: had had taken and I ended up getting a hold
- 11:01Speaker 9: of him and digitizing him. But uh so, all this
- 11:04Speaker 9: and learning from the the kind of the history of
- 11:07Speaker 9: that bus, they figured out I don't remember the exact year,
- 11:10Speaker 9: it was maybe like sixty or sixty one, early sixties.
- 11:13Speaker 9: What year was the bus manufactured, I don't remember, but
- 11:16Speaker 9: it was a Fairbanks City transit bus for a while,
- 11:19Speaker 9: and it was part of a project to improve the
- 11:22Speaker 9: Stampede trail. They got a grant, which is a road
- 11:25Speaker 9: that goes out across the Techlanika and goes out there,
- 11:29Speaker 9: and so it was left out there by construction crew
- 11:31Speaker 9: road constructions. A guy had that was working for that
- 11:36Speaker 9: crew had bought it and outfitted it as like a
- 11:38Speaker 9: bunk house to bring his family along for. It was
- 11:40Speaker 9: like a whole summer project.
- 11:42Speaker 1: Well how did he get it in there? Though?
- 11:44Speaker 9: They drug it out there on a road and the road.
- 11:47Speaker 1: Yeah, but what's the whole deal? Here's what I understand
- 11:50Speaker 1: about it. What's the whole deal with you gotta like
- 11:52Speaker 1: cross the river to get to it? Yeah? Yeah, so
- 11:54Speaker 1: is a winner road or what?
- 11:56Speaker 9: No, it was I don't know what time of year
- 11:58Speaker 9: they maybe got across, got their equipment or cross there
- 12:00Speaker 9: early in the spring or in the winter. But my
- 12:02Speaker 9: dad they used to just drive across it in the
- 12:04Speaker 9: fall after because it's a glacial fed river and after
- 12:06Speaker 9: the water level start going down, they.
- 12:08Speaker 1: Just so it's like, yeah, so it's only tricky seasonally.
- 12:11Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, which is kind of what got him in trouble.
- 12:15Speaker 9: He came back and you know, tried to get out
- 12:17Speaker 9: apparently and surprised the river's too high. But uh, yeah.
- 12:22Speaker 9: So they drug it out there as probably as a
- 12:23Speaker 9: bunk house for this guy's family, and it broke, axle
- 12:27Speaker 9: broke or something happened to it, and they just left
- 12:29Speaker 9: it and intact. And later in the sixties, my grandpa
- 12:33Speaker 9: had been hunting up the Steeze Country in the forty
- 12:36Speaker 9: Mile Country and got sick of people dealing with people,
- 12:39Speaker 9: so he heard about this bus that was set up
- 12:42Speaker 9: as bunk house and they started hunting out there, so
- 12:45Speaker 9: through like the latter half of the sixties.
- 12:47Speaker 1: No kid. Yeah, And that dude died in that bus,
- 12:51Speaker 1: right in that bus.
- 12:54Speaker 2: So when did he stop. He's in it as a
- 12:56Speaker 2: hunting game.
- 12:57Speaker 9: I think seventy two was the last year, because the
- 13:00Speaker 9: my grandpa passed away in seventy one, and I think
- 13:02Speaker 9: it was seventy one, and my uncle has pictures where
- 13:05Speaker 9: he went back out there the next the following year,
- 13:07Speaker 9: I think they'd seed said they skipped a year, and
- 13:09Speaker 9: then seventy two was back out there, and he has
- 13:11Speaker 9: some pictures with like, you know, moose and caribou cut
- 13:13Speaker 9: up all, you know, kind of right there.
- 13:15Speaker 1: Yeah. I looking at some of the photos right now.
- 13:17Speaker 1: That's crazy.
- 13:18Speaker 7: It looks like some people were using it for target
- 13:20Speaker 7: practice for yeah it uh.
- 13:22Speaker 1: Oh people shoot? Where is are there today? Like I
- 13:26Speaker 1: believe the am things that have been shot? Oh we're
- 13:28Speaker 1: just driving on some and like some BLM land And
- 13:32Speaker 1: I was like you Al's had the plane ahead to
- 13:34Speaker 1: shoot that much stuff?
- 13:35Speaker 5: Yeah, bring it seemed like a seventy two inch flat
- 13:39Speaker 5: screen TV on public land just shot up.
- 13:43Speaker 2: That's great.
- 13:43Speaker 1: There was a trend for a while. We talked about this.
- 13:45Speaker 1: There was a trend for a while out I know
- 13:46Speaker 1: it's out Missoula where people come and shoot trees down,
- 13:50Speaker 1: living trees, shoot until they fall over. So a couple
- 13:53Speaker 1: of quick things, Tyler and I'll get back to this. Uh,
- 13:57Speaker 1: the wall eye my favorite subject.
- 14:01Speaker 9: I'm so sick.
- 14:04Speaker 1: What mean you sick of these guys?
- 14:05Speaker 8: Just they just I'm not sick of them. I just
- 14:07Speaker 8: can't wait to hear what they do next.
- 14:10Speaker 1: Well, you know, this is here's the thing, this is
- 14:12Speaker 1: this is what this is what everybody saying, this is
- 14:14Speaker 1: what everybody thinks. So everybody knows. Everybody knows. And we
- 14:20Speaker 1: had the guy on there's the Walleye cheating scandal where
- 14:24Speaker 1: the Jason Fisher who's been on the podcast it's conducting
- 14:30Speaker 1: a walleye tournament. There's some fish that, yeah, do I relate?
- 14:35Speaker 1: How what degree do I explain this?
- 14:38Speaker 7: He looked at He looked at their bag, knew they
- 14:40Speaker 7: weren't four pounder like they weighed at seven.
- 14:42Speaker 2: He knew they were four.
- 14:43Speaker 1: Cut them open, and yeah. The guy's weighing fish all
- 14:46Speaker 1: day long at the end of a tournament, and you
- 14:47Speaker 1: just know what fish look like, like a twenty inch
- 14:49Speaker 1: wall that weighs, this eighteen inch wall that ways at
- 14:51Speaker 1: and some guys bring some fish up and you're like, oh,
- 14:53Speaker 1: they got blank pounds of fish. But they weigh them
- 14:55Speaker 1: up and it's like, wow, that's really heavy. Takes a
- 14:59Speaker 1: leather man, which is sitting right behind Uncle Chastey in
- 15:05Speaker 1: a display case, takes that leather man and cuts open
- 15:10Speaker 1: the walleyes and they're pack full of weights and fish filets.
- 15:17Speaker 1: These two individuals, what are these fellas' names?
- 15:20Speaker 5: Chase and I don't want to I think really the
- 15:22Speaker 5: most important one is.
- 15:26Speaker 1: So these guys become real famous for this cheating deal.
- 15:31Speaker 1: Then one of them gets in some other trouble soon after,
- 15:34Speaker 1: he violates a restraining order and he equips his kid
- 15:39Speaker 1: with a bunch of fake one hundred dollars bills and
- 15:41Speaker 1: they go and sends them down to the bowling alley
- 15:43Speaker 1: to buy stuff with the fake hunt our bills. It
- 15:46Speaker 1: makes the news. Now he's in the news all over again,
- 15:49Speaker 1: including at the meat eater dot com. He's in the
- 15:50Speaker 1: news all over again. Also deer poaching. However, this is old,
- 15:58Speaker 1: not new deer poaching. He's getting it. He's getting in
- 16:01Speaker 1: trouble for stuff he did a long time ago. Like,
- 16:02Speaker 1: for instance, let's say if I was twenty and I'd
- 16:05Speaker 1: gotten in trouble for setting snares illegally, and then all
- 16:10Speaker 1: of a sudden, my buddies are like, oh, you know
- 16:12Speaker 1: what to one night we were out jack lighting cottontail rabbits,
- 16:17Speaker 1: right and be like, you know, the guy got in
- 16:19Speaker 1: trouble for setting snares, he's in trouble now for jack
- 16:21Speaker 1: lighting cottondeal rabbits. And I'd be like, I did that before.
- 16:24Speaker 1: So everybody's telling on me now about everything that's a
- 16:27Speaker 1: situation he's in now, and I think I'm apologizing for
- 16:30Speaker 1: I'm just saying now it's like now they're just you
- 16:34Speaker 1: know what I mean, Like secrets are coming out.
- 16:38Speaker 2: Well, I thought I read something about this where he
- 16:40Speaker 2: had gotten in trouble for this prior to the Walleye stuff.
- 16:45Speaker 2: I think that's understanding, and that his license revoked.
- 16:48Speaker 1: Yeah, do you there? I jump it.
- 16:50Speaker 9: What are we buying one hundred dollars bills at a
- 16:52Speaker 9: bowling alley?
- 16:53Speaker 1: It's a great question.
- 16:55Speaker 9: We're worried about all this stuff. That's issue me.
- 17:00Speaker 8: There's some other stuff in there too.
- 17:02Speaker 1: The real issue is uh he so it was incriminating
- 17:05Speaker 1: about the counterfeit money. Is they have text exchange where
- 17:09Speaker 1: his kid, he gives his kid this money and it's
- 17:11Speaker 1: like it says, like not actual money. It says like
- 17:12Speaker 1: it's like movie money, and like movie money looks pretty real,
- 17:16Speaker 1: but it says you know, and what the hell says
- 17:19Speaker 1: movie money on it? Something sends and then they text
- 17:22Speaker 1: about it. He's like, dude, it worked. Great. Send someone.
- 17:30Speaker 1: He's like, Bobby's gonna come by and get some more
- 17:32Speaker 1: like it worked, you know, And they're celebrating that the
- 17:35Speaker 1: counterfeit money was accepted.
- 17:37Speaker 7: But I just at this point, you know, it's not
- 17:46Speaker 7: like a new you know, I thought there had been
- 17:49Speaker 7: rumors about him being a poacher flying around for a
- 17:51Speaker 7: long time.
- 17:52Speaker 2: Well he was I think I think he was a
- 17:54Speaker 2: convicted poacher.
- 17:55Speaker 7: Yeah, and the scrutiny from everything else certainly didn't help
- 17:59Speaker 7: his case. And like there's a lot of people eyeball.
- 18:02Speaker 1: On him that there's an age component because people in glasshouses. Right,
- 18:08Speaker 1: So we broke all manner as youngsters in high school,
- 18:15Speaker 1: we broke all manner of laws. Let me tell you,
- 18:20Speaker 1: for instance, ignorantly. No, let me tell you for instance.
- 18:24Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell this about a guy that's not alive anymore.
- 18:27Speaker 1: Nothing you can do to him. Smelt dipping with Eric
- 18:30Speaker 1: kern Okay, we're smelt dipping near White Lake Channel where
- 18:37Speaker 1: some smelt were spawning up on the gravel bar. No
- 18:39Speaker 1: one knew about not going into the creek, spawning along
- 18:42Speaker 1: the shoreline. And here comes by a salmon feeding on smelt.
- 18:47Speaker 1: Eric Kernan scoops it up and it is in the
- 18:50Speaker 1: smelt net. Now there's no way in hell he's gonna
- 18:53Speaker 1: let it go. But that's an illegal capture. He puts
- 18:57Speaker 1: the salmon down his waiters. You want to talk about
- 19:00Speaker 1: a mess. How old we were in high school? We
- 19:03Speaker 1: were olden drive.
- 19:04Speaker 5: So Chase Kaminski is thirty six and he's accused of
- 19:07Speaker 5: deer hunting between twenty thirteen and twenty twenty one. Twenty
- 19:12Speaker 5: thirteen is ten years ago, which would make him twenty
- 19:14Speaker 5: six time.
- 19:16Speaker 1: Too old for poaching. But let me just clarify, like
- 19:19Speaker 1: I'm not saying, let me get to my broader point,
- 19:23Speaker 1: and this isn't about me, this is Eric. Well, no,
- 19:26Speaker 1: because in our time, we sold our smelt to a
- 19:29Speaker 1: guy in high school tenth grade. I think sold smelt.
- 19:35Speaker 1: That's illegal. Point being if I had gotten in trouble
- 19:38Speaker 1: for something, all these infractions that seem like just minor issues,
- 19:42Speaker 1: like Eric caught a sam and put in his waiters,
- 19:45Speaker 1: dip smelt with the salm and nose first down into
- 19:48Speaker 1: the ankle of his waiters for like whatever amount of
- 19:50Speaker 1: time and then like took the salmon back out later. Okay,
- 19:55Speaker 1: all this like stupid stuff that I would never let
- 19:59Speaker 1: my kids do. But all this stupid stuff, if you
- 20:01Speaker 1: didn't got in trouble and all of a sudden all
- 20:03Speaker 1: this came out, you'd paint this really damning. You'd paint
- 20:08Speaker 1: this really damning portrait of an individual who just had
- 20:15Speaker 1: to be around a lot of like dumb decision.
- 20:17Speaker 5: Making around it or the ringleader of it.
- 20:25Speaker 1: I'm not condoning. I'm saying like it makes reading this,
- 20:29Speaker 1: it makes me look and say, man, at a point,
- 20:33Speaker 1: like when all the dirt comes out, all the dirt
- 20:37Speaker 1: comes out, it winds up looking. I just would invite
- 20:41Speaker 1: people out there who grew up in a rural atmosphere
- 20:44Speaker 1: and grew up like like a redneck upbringing to think
- 20:49Speaker 1: pretty hard. Okay, to think pretty hard.
- 20:53Speaker 2: Oh, they probably didn't when they were that age. They
- 20:55Speaker 2: probably just did shit and didn't even think about it,
- 20:57Speaker 2: think about it. I was on on nextually other day
- 21:00Speaker 2: looking at all the old spots I used to hunt
- 21:02Speaker 2: when I was real young and realize that none of
- 21:05Speaker 2: that ship was public.
- 21:07Speaker 1: I thought it was all public back then. We thought
- 21:09Speaker 1: public was that no one yelled at you when you
- 21:11Speaker 1: were there, never got yelled at us.
- 21:15Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I'm gonna look at that old
- 21:17Speaker 2: turkey hunting spot I used to go to all the
- 21:18Speaker 2: time and realize that it was deep into someone at
- 21:21Speaker 2: private property.
- 21:22Speaker 5: You know, Steve, we should start a new We should
- 21:25Speaker 5: start a new segment called confession Confessions.
- 21:29Speaker 1: I don't and here I would, I wouldn't even know
- 21:34Speaker 1: where to begin, but here's the thing about it. It
- 21:37Speaker 1: was so unusual by it. So in those days, like
- 21:40Speaker 1: you would have your mom, Your mom would apply for
- 21:43Speaker 1: a dough tag.
- 21:44Speaker 9: Oh yeah, that was very common in my circle.
- 21:46Speaker 1: So my mom might draw dough tag and you get
- 21:52Speaker 1: the the dope for mom. And I'm not like, I
- 21:56Speaker 1: just don't want to act like I don't want to
- 21:58Speaker 1: sit here now and act like I don't want to
- 22:01Speaker 1: sit here now and act like things didn't happen. That happened.
- 22:06Speaker 1: So with this fella now, with all this stuff coming on,
- 22:10Speaker 1: I just beg it looks bad, but just think about
- 22:14Speaker 1: your own life and think about the things you've done.
- 22:17Speaker 1: And once it came to be like like, are you
- 22:19Speaker 1: really telling me that if you like to drink? Are
- 22:21Speaker 1: you telling you never drove home when you might have
- 22:24Speaker 1: blown a drunk? But what does that look like when
- 22:28Speaker 1: you get caught.
- 22:29Speaker 7: I don't think that's the same as this guy though,
- 22:30Speaker 7: because he's just kept doing that shit and knew it
- 22:33Speaker 7: was wrong, Like this wasn't like oh back when I
- 22:37Speaker 7: was a sophomore in high.
- 22:38Speaker 1: School, you know, and cheating in him stuff and Walleyes
- 22:41Speaker 1: full of Walleye flays is like on a whole other
- 22:44Speaker 1: and like cheating people out of money and winning boats.
- 22:48Speaker 7: I think it's fair to say this guy's like a criminal,
- 22:51Speaker 7: a great a dirt bag.
- 22:53Speaker 1: Yeah, I got another confession for you when I got
- 22:57Speaker 1: my When I for Christmas, I got a Marl and
- 23:00Speaker 1: for Christmas, I got that bolt Action Marl and twenty
- 23:03Speaker 1: two mag that everybody had for a while. And pulled
- 23:07Speaker 1: a car over next to this thing called Tamawalla Lodge
- 23:11Speaker 1: and saw a fox squirrel perched up on a tree
- 23:14Speaker 1: and shot it out of the car window and then
- 23:18Speaker 1: ran and got it and jumped back over the fence.
- 23:22Speaker 1: Do you feel a lot lighter someone had seen me
- 23:25Speaker 1: do that?
- 23:25Speaker 2: You know what?
- 23:26Speaker 1: Like the list of things would have been illegal discharge
- 23:29Speaker 1: of firearm like I don't know this insane looking rap sheet.
- 23:36Speaker 7: But also back then, like maybe that would have happened,
- 23:39Speaker 7: but there was I also feel like there was a
- 23:42Speaker 7: little bit more tolerance for that kind of.
- 23:47Speaker 1: Yeah, stay tuned for next week's edition of I'll make
- 23:52Speaker 1: a list, because if I have a run for political office,
- 23:56Speaker 1: I'm gonna do this anyways.
- 23:58Speaker 5: Yeah, it's better to preempt it.
- 24:00Speaker 1: The first thing I'm gonna do is, here's everything bad
- 24:01Speaker 1: I've ever.
- 24:02Speaker 8: Said, now your planed, Steve, what you're gonna do?
- 24:04Speaker 1: If I do, that's what I'm gonna do. No one's
- 24:07Speaker 1: gonna come and say, like he I'll be like, dude,
- 24:09Speaker 1: So I'm I already told you every boy that, So
- 24:10Speaker 1: I'm like, list, should I did this? Real bad tell us?
- 24:16Speaker 1: Here's the thing that's even more surprising than the fact
- 24:18Speaker 1: that that fella has been in a lot of trouble Japan.
- 24:23Speaker 1: If I were to name for you place, if if
- 24:25Speaker 1: I said you name for me countries that have a
- 24:27Speaker 1: lot of bear attacks, it goes something like this America,
- 24:32Speaker 1: and then they'd be like dah Canada, and then they Russia.
- 24:36Speaker 1: They wouldn't know what to say. Oh yeah, you'd probably
- 24:38Speaker 1: get Russia.
- 24:38Speaker 7: Russia.
- 24:41Speaker 1: Japan has had one hundred and sixty seven bear attacks
- 24:44Speaker 1: this year.
- 24:46Speaker 5: That's a lot.
- 24:48Speaker 1: So you got to think about the positioning of Japan.
- 24:50Speaker 2: What kind of bears are those brown bears?
- 24:52Speaker 1: Oh okay, think about the position of Japan.
- 24:55Speaker 5: Like I thought they were black bears.
- 24:56Speaker 9: They got both. I think do they have black pers
- 24:58Speaker 9: have black bears too? I don't know if they're not
- 25:00Speaker 9: like American black bears, but some kind of.
- 25:02Speaker 1: Someone should look this up. I'm pretty sure that's correct.
- 25:05Speaker 1: But if you imagine the illusions right like when you
- 25:10Speaker 1: look at I wish we had this for scale. I mean,
- 25:15Speaker 1: just how far the allusions stretch out? Sure, Like it's
- 25:21Speaker 1: the width, like you imagine how big, Like you could
- 25:23Speaker 1: fit Texas, California, most of Montana into Alaska and then
- 25:27Speaker 1: the illusions basically extend Alaska by that distance. It's distance
- 25:32Speaker 1: all over again towards Japan.
- 25:34Speaker 2: Yeah, and just looking at the map, it looks like
- 25:36Speaker 2: it's about the same distance as it would be from
- 25:39Speaker 2: the coast to California to Hawaii.
- 25:42Speaker 7: I mean, Japan gets a lot of the same kind
- 25:44Speaker 7: of salmon run.
- 25:45Speaker 1: Yeah, that's yeah, that's what it's like a it's like
- 25:48Speaker 1: a Pacific rim, you know. And so they have this
- 25:51Speaker 1: like this suite of wildlife. Do you remember we had
- 25:54Speaker 1: the bear researcher in general all around good guy, Carl Melkaman,
- 25:59Speaker 1: And he talked when he talked about being researching bears
- 26:02Speaker 1: in China, and he was saying, yeah, he's saying, man,
- 26:04Speaker 1: the weird thing about is everything's kind of the same
- 26:10Speaker 1: but a little different. So he said, like you look
- 26:14Speaker 1: at a tree and be like man, it's a lot
- 26:15Speaker 1: like our beech tree, and there'll be a grouse. Be like,
- 26:19Speaker 1: that's a lot like our grouse. A little different. That's
- 26:22Speaker 1: a lot like our grouse. And the bear is like,
- 26:25Speaker 1: it's a lot like our black bear, but a little different,
- 26:27Speaker 1: he says. But the whole thing would fly out the
- 26:29Speaker 1: window when you're looking as a big golden monkey. He goes,
- 26:33Speaker 1: we don't have one of those. But anyhow, they got
- 26:36Speaker 1: this bear like like such a bear issue in Japan. Yeah,
- 26:43Speaker 1: they look they're set to it that they've exceeded their
- 26:46Speaker 1: twenty twenty record. Twenty twenty three has already passed up
- 26:51Speaker 1: the twenty twenty record of one hundred and fifty eight
- 26:53Speaker 1: bear attacks in Japan. Woman was just mauled to death.
- 27:01Speaker 1: All these bear attacks three fatalities, including a seventy nine
- 27:04Speaker 1: year old woman maul to death in her backyard. Bears
- 27:09Speaker 1: outskirts of Tokyo. They say it was a poor crop
- 27:13Speaker 1: of beech nuts. This is reported in Bloomberg. A poor
- 27:17Speaker 1: crop of beech nuts has left led to more bear
- 27:21Speaker 1: human interactions and they are offering like a compensation program
- 27:26Speaker 1: to bear hunters five thousand yen for each bear they shoot.
- 27:33Speaker 9: Is that really?
- 27:33Speaker 1: What does that mean? Why do you have forty five
- 27:35Speaker 1: dollars krinn, that's not what they're paying them.
- 27:37Speaker 5: Let me see, so yen is like it is like
- 27:40Speaker 5: about one hundred and twenty five or so to the dollar.
- 27:44Speaker 6: Let me just check that.
- 27:45Speaker 9: Well, you just got to watch Seinfeld and get the
- 27:47Speaker 9: creamer when he has the dudes that are millionaires that
- 27:50Speaker 9: have a million yen and he consmits them to spend
- 27:53Speaker 9: all their money and they end up sleeping into chest
- 27:55Speaker 9: of drawers.
- 27:57Speaker 2: I would love to know, like.
- 28:00Speaker 7: What their current management system is as far as hunting goes.
- 28:03Speaker 5: Yes, five thousand yen is like thirty three bucks right now,
- 28:08Speaker 5: that's the bounty, and there's yeah, and there's the Usuri
- 28:12Speaker 5: brown bear in the Japanese or Asiatic black bear.
- 28:14Speaker 1: What does the bear cause in all the trouble? I
- 28:16Speaker 1: remember Carl Malcolms saying the Asiatic black bear mixes it
- 28:18Speaker 1: up lots of scrabby little bear.
- 28:20Speaker 5: Yeah, I can't, I don't see that.
- 28:22Speaker 1: I'm guessing that's the one. I'm only saying that that's
- 28:24Speaker 1: the one because Carl Malcolm was saying, it's like a
- 28:27Speaker 1: it's like a it's like a got a temper. It's
- 28:29Speaker 1: like a fighting little bear.
- 28:30Speaker 5: Oh, there's a there's a picture in the Bloomberg article
- 28:34Speaker 5: of a group of hunters searching for a brown bear
- 28:37Speaker 5: that was on the loos in Sapporo a couple of
- 28:40Speaker 5: years ago. So maybe it's about both of them, both
- 28:43Speaker 5: both black and brown bear.
- 28:44Speaker 1: I mean, just don't picture iteez.
- 28:46Speaker 2: Well.
- 28:46Speaker 9: I think they have a commercial market for bear meat
- 28:49Speaker 9: over there be anyway.
- 28:51Speaker 1: Yeah, we covered that. MM have a vending machine. There's
- 28:53Speaker 1: a guy that you can buy bear meat out of
- 28:55Speaker 1: a vending machine.
- 28:56Speaker 9: It was expensive, Yeah, I remember seeing that pop up.
- 29:00Speaker 5: Thousand yend just doesn't seem like a lot. I know
- 29:02Speaker 5: that the that the dollar is strong to the end
- 29:04Speaker 5: right now.
- 29:04Speaker 1: But still fifty bucks is like no, man, fifty bucks
- 29:09Speaker 1: like that that'd be like just good, that'd be like
- 29:12Speaker 1: a good price for like a rack. Like really, that's
- 29:17Speaker 1: great fifty bucks for bare That's a lot of work, dude. Yeah,
- 29:20Speaker 1: so but if you can turn around and uh also
- 29:24Speaker 1: to do the sale right, speaking of bounties, that was
- 29:38Speaker 1: Krin's transition like that, speaking of bonies. This this is
- 29:44Speaker 1: this is one of those perennial stories that pops.
- 29:46Speaker 7: Up now and then but the numbers just keep getting higher.
- 29:49Speaker 1: Yeah, an angler earned. Can we get into the Can
- 29:53Speaker 1: we get into our personal connection to this or you
- 29:55Speaker 1: think we should not?
- 29:57Speaker 5: If you want to, I think that's fine.
- 30:00Speaker 1: An angler earned one hundred grand.
- 30:04Speaker 8: Now earned?
- 30:06Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know what he's got into this for overhead.
- 30:09Speaker 7: He's got a lot of time.
- 30:11Speaker 8: What kind of boat does he have?
- 30:12Speaker 1: So on the Columbia River in order to as part
- 30:15Speaker 1: of a salmon restoration program. I'm a back way up.
- 30:20Speaker 1: All the dam building we did on the Columbia has
- 30:26Speaker 1: the long term impact of really imperiling a bunch of
- 30:29Speaker 1: salmon runs. And you know, people say, some people when
- 30:33Speaker 1: people look at I've gotten to this before, some people
- 30:36Speaker 1: look at like why did the US win World War two?
- 30:40Speaker 1: You know, and you can get in all these things
- 30:41Speaker 1: like one way, we were able to produce more aluminum
- 30:44Speaker 1: more quickly than anyone else. So we're, you know, we
- 30:48Speaker 1: want that that's the limiting factor that allows to win
- 30:50Speaker 1: World War two? How they do that well, because we
- 30:53Speaker 1: had all these dams on the Columbia which generated so
- 30:54Speaker 1: much electricity, and smelting aluminum requires a lot of electricity,
- 30:58Speaker 1: and so we're you know, the long and short of
- 31:01Speaker 1: it is, they damn the shit out of that river,
- 31:03Speaker 1: and it's just the salmon runs are basically not salmon
- 31:08Speaker 1: runs anymore. And there's all these efforts now to try
- 31:11Speaker 1: to find some possible way to begin dismantling some of
- 31:15Speaker 1: these dams. But it has all this implication for agriculture
- 31:18Speaker 1: and shipping. It's one of the biggest problems that your
- 31:21Speaker 1: kids will be hearing about. Your kids will probably hear
- 31:24Speaker 1: a lot more about it than you will in your lifetime.
- 31:27Speaker 1: As part of the salmon restoration program, they're trying to
- 31:30Speaker 1: limit they're trying to kill off predators of salmon smoke, and.
- 31:35Speaker 7: The dam's also created ideal conditions for this pike.
- 31:42Speaker 1: You build a giant structure that impedes the movement of fish,
- 31:46Speaker 1: and on top of that, you then create a reservoir
- 31:48Speaker 1: system that gets loaded up with small mouth bass and
- 31:51Speaker 1: pike minnows, and and that's stuff just hammers all the
- 31:54Speaker 1: salmon smelt smolt that usually in the past we don't
- 31:58Speaker 1: even really have to worry about paciforous predators. It's all
- 32:03Speaker 1: part of big mass. So there's like the elephant in
- 32:06Speaker 1: the room that's not really the accurate to put it,
- 32:10Speaker 1: because people do talk about it. There's the core primary issue.
- 32:14Speaker 1: The core primary issue is damning on the Columbia. You
- 32:17Speaker 1: can love the dams or hate them, but it's like
- 32:20Speaker 1: an objective reality that the dams on the Columbia are
- 32:25Speaker 1: driving salmon runs to extinction. You can be like, eh,
- 32:28Speaker 1: price you pay or whatever, but that's just the truth,
- 32:30Speaker 1: however you feel about it. So, since you can't take
- 32:34Speaker 1: care of the main issue, they're always trying to take
- 32:36Speaker 1: care of like little minor issues. And one of the
- 32:38Speaker 1: minor issues is predation on salmon small by pike minos.
- 32:42Speaker 1: So they've set up a bounty program. What's the pike
- 32:46Speaker 1: mental worth? They set up a bounty program where you
- 32:48Speaker 1: can kill pike minos.
- 32:50Speaker 7: It's a varying rate, six of dollars a fish for
- 32:56Speaker 7: the first twenty five over nine inches, twenty five to
- 33:01Speaker 7: two hundred fish eight two hundred plus ten.
- 33:06Speaker 1: So a dude krin talk to the guy that runs
- 33:10Speaker 1: the program. A dude netted himself. He caught ten thousand
- 33:18Speaker 1: northern pike mentos, landed himself one hundred grand. So that
- 33:23Speaker 1: becomes the headline. But I don't know what he's got
- 33:24Speaker 1: in it. For expenses. Yeah, I mean, and we tried
- 33:27Speaker 1: to get him to come on the podcast. But these
- 33:29Speaker 1: guys that are making big that, these guys that are
- 33:31Speaker 1: making living fish and pike mintos. What's funny is you
- 33:35Speaker 1: think that like they would be like, well, here's how
- 33:36Speaker 1: I do it. Let's get them all to save the salmon.
- 33:41Speaker 1: But he doesn't want to damage the resource.
- 33:42Speaker 9: Right, He wants to make sure he's got it.
- 33:45Speaker 1: He doesn't want anyone to know how he does it
- 33:47Speaker 1: because he doesn't want to damage the resource. They're supposed
- 33:51Speaker 1: to Yeah, I'm sympathetic.
- 33:52Speaker 5: There's supposed to be some steep competition and all kinds
- 33:57Speaker 5: of drama around, like who's known locally to be like
- 34:03Speaker 5: one of the top.
- 34:04Speaker 8: Sounds like a reality show. We should do.
- 34:07Speaker 1: No, they've been approached in fact, But isn't it funny
- 34:10Speaker 1: that this whole thing is to try to kill off
- 34:12Speaker 1: pike mentals. And then there's the guy that figures out
- 34:14Speaker 1: how to really do it, but he doesn't want to
- 34:15Speaker 1: talk about it because he doesn't want everybody killing.
- 34:20Speaker 8: If we can test that, I.
- 34:22Speaker 5: Was going to suggest that, like they take off some
- 34:25Speaker 5: time next season.
- 34:28Speaker 7: You can get you can do a little practicing for
- 34:30Speaker 7: those things right here in Montano.
- 34:31Speaker 1: The weird deal is these northern pike mentals are a
- 34:33Speaker 1: native fish.
- 34:34Speaker 7: Sure, and then uh, like Colorado, Utah, they're like a protected,
- 34:42Speaker 7: threatened or endangered species.
- 34:44Speaker 1: They can't have.
- 34:47Speaker 9: You know, they're doing very poorly there.
- 34:50Speaker 1: Twelve thousand people are getting after it. Twelve thousand people
- 34:55Speaker 1: are catching one hundred and fifty six thousand pike mentals.
- 34:57Speaker 1: But one dude is catching ten thousand pike mentals. Dall's
- 35:03Speaker 1: he doing? You know, netting? He's netting probably maybe a lot.
- 35:09Speaker 1: Would that guy say? Is he rotten and reeling them?
- 35:11Speaker 7: Or That's the thing is like, what's the what's a
- 35:13Speaker 7: legal method of take for this? Because like netting you'd
- 35:16Speaker 7: have buyketch of.
- 35:20Speaker 9: But if you can person like purse seeing them where
- 35:22Speaker 9: you can?
- 35:23Speaker 1: You know, I think they're hooking line and the man
- 35:25Speaker 1: you think well. In Karen's notes from her conversation, she
- 35:29Speaker 1: uses the term reeled.
- 35:33Speaker 9: Yeah are you?
- 35:34Speaker 1: Are you not just hammering away with facts right now?
- 35:36Speaker 1: You're on the phone with the guy.
- 35:38Speaker 5: Yeah, But I just I just put some book points
- 35:40Speaker 5: in there, So I probably wrote reel because he said real, Yeah,
- 35:44Speaker 5: I don't think I just pulled that out of thin air.
- 35:47Speaker 1: So that's not what you're gonna say. I just for
- 35:50Speaker 1: some reason, I thought.
- 35:53Speaker 7: I thought it was rotten reel catching for some reason.
- 35:56Speaker 1: Has pulled it out of.
- 35:59Speaker 10: Think it's something I think if it were rotten real
- 36:05Speaker 10: I would take I would run a fly rig on
- 36:10Speaker 10: the river where you got flies.
- 36:15Speaker 1: Up. This is the first year that someone that this
- 36:19Speaker 1: is the first year that a single er angle that
- 36:21Speaker 1: a single angler. I don't know if this is that true.
- 36:23Speaker 1: The first year that a singler single angler earned a
- 36:27Speaker 1: hundred k. The guy that earned a hundred k should
- 36:30Speaker 1: really come on the show. I won't you ask you
- 36:31Speaker 1: any specific questions.
- 36:33Speaker 5: He knows us, but he.
- 36:34Speaker 1: Knows he was flattered, right, yeah, yeah, it just come
- 36:40Speaker 1: on and you can. We'll bleep out anything that you
- 36:43Speaker 1: don't any trade secrets.
- 36:45Speaker 5: You know what we can do if we like record
- 36:47Speaker 5: him in the studio. You know how like with those
- 36:49Speaker 5: documentaries they just kind of do a silhouette. You can
- 36:52Speaker 5: just totally like.
- 36:54Speaker 2: Getting the picture with a bunch of special forces dudes,
- 36:57Speaker 2: how they like blur out their eyes will.
- 36:59Speaker 1: Blur out your We'll give you a mob. We'll give
- 37:02Speaker 1: you a mob. Informant keep a low profile, blur out
- 37:07Speaker 1: your eyes, any specifics about where you go or what
- 37:12Speaker 1: you do. And in terms of like word getting out, dude,
- 37:15Speaker 1: word is out. This is a widely reported thing. We'll
- 37:20Speaker 1: give you like a bunch of free clothes, cook up
- 37:26Speaker 1: some I'll have you for dinner. I'll have you for dinner.
- 37:30Speaker 1: We'll give you a brand new play knife so you
- 37:33Speaker 1: can flay your pipe. Mentals up and uh, and a wallet.
- 37:37Speaker 1: You put all your money in wallets. Oh yeah, because
- 37:44Speaker 1: you need it haul around all that money. Give two walts.
- 37:50Speaker 2: You might need a backpack that money.
- 37:52Speaker 1: We'll give you a backpack you put all your money in,
- 37:55Speaker 1: and just come. We'll give you a duffel to put
- 37:57Speaker 1: all your money in, and you come on the pod
- 38:00Speaker 1: has to talk to us. In twenty twenty two, the
- 38:04Speaker 1: rewards went like this, So the rewards for to five anglers.
- 38:09Speaker 1: So the top five anglers in twenty twenty two sixty
- 38:11Speaker 1: nine K, sixty three K, fifty six K, fifty four K,
- 38:15Speaker 1: forty three K.
- 38:16Speaker 5: Then it really drops off. Then it really okaya, But
- 38:19Speaker 5: I didn't know if it was like then by like
- 38:21Speaker 5: twenty grand it drops off, but it drops off.
- 38:23Speaker 1: So was the one hundred k guy in that top.
- 38:29Speaker 5: K yes, okay, yes, so he's a command like the
- 38:32Speaker 5: top couple are always our trading places.
- 38:37Speaker 8: Ten percent of the anglers catch eighty percent of the fish.
- 38:41Speaker 1: That's true in general with hunting. Yeah with yeah, hmm
- 38:47Speaker 1: hundred command master angler one.
- 38:49Speaker 7: Hundred and fifty six thousand of those things they removed
- 38:52Speaker 7: in twenty twenty three. Wonder if it's doing any good?
- 38:56Speaker 5: God love that a guy in the show Pike Mino's good.
- 39:00Speaker 2: I just want to know what else he's catching.
- 39:02Speaker 7: They used to eat him back way back in the day,
- 39:04Speaker 7: the Mountain Man era.
- 39:06Speaker 1: You know what, it looks like it could be better
- 39:07Speaker 1: than it is. It looks like you, like a wall
- 39:10Speaker 1: I had sex with a sucker yet have teeth.
- 39:16Speaker 2: Speaking of that, I wonder if you could turn around
- 39:18Speaker 2: and sell those to like, like uh for trapping bait
- 39:23Speaker 2: or something trapping babe.
- 39:24Speaker 7: They sell them for bait up in Northwest Colorado for
- 39:27Speaker 7: lakers and ship small ones.
- 39:30Speaker 1: My boys didn't get into the soccer fl a business.
- 39:34Speaker 1: Speaking of what you guys sent in a picture and
- 39:37Speaker 1: puts on. So we're trying to we're trying to like
- 39:40Speaker 1: get everybody's great cell phone or sell not cell phone
- 39:43Speaker 1: trail cam. Get everybody's great trail cam pictures. You know,
- 39:46Speaker 1: it's so funny it guys sent a picture of three
- 39:50Speaker 1: wild hogs all lined up in a exactly sensitive I'm
- 39:57Speaker 1: being sensitive here to a family.
- 39:59Speaker 5: They're a vertic we lined up in.
- 40:01Speaker 1: A copulatory posture, free in a copulatory train. And the
- 40:13Speaker 1: caption he wrote, I can't get over the cash he wrote,
- 40:16Speaker 1: is try to add a small town. But it looks
- 40:22Speaker 1: like a small town to me. I mean, this looks
- 40:25Speaker 1: like a big city. It's like all the woods. All right.
- 40:36Speaker 1: Back to our special guest, Tyler Freele, And here's where
- 40:38Speaker 1: I want to start. Tyler, what in sam Hill is
- 40:43Speaker 1: going on with doll sheep? Okay, doll sheep numbers and
- 40:49Speaker 1: doll sheep closures and break the whole thing down to
- 40:51Speaker 1: me and vast tracks of federal that you can't hunt,
- 40:54Speaker 1: tell us.
- 40:54Speaker 9: The whole Danswerry.
- 40:55Speaker 1: All right, so you've covered You've covered this heavily.
- 40:58Speaker 9: Yeah I will, I'll do my best.
- 41:00Speaker 1: And yeah, what's a doll sheep?
- 41:05Speaker 11: Uh?
- 41:06Speaker 1: Well?
- 41:06Speaker 9: There, Alaska's native wild sheep thin horn, very similar to
- 41:11Speaker 9: a stone sheep. They're predominantly all white. It's kind of
- 41:15Speaker 9: their their characters. They're defining characteristic they live in, whether
- 41:21Speaker 9: they say like officially seven or eight mountain ranges in Alaska,
- 41:25Speaker 9: pretty widespread all the you know, pretty much all the
- 41:28Speaker 9: suitable cheap habitat in Alaska has doll sheep on them,
- 41:31Speaker 9: and the population you know, goes over into Canada and
- 41:34Speaker 9: then transitions to stone sheep and then you know big
- 41:37Speaker 9: horn sheep down below.
- 41:39Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a that's the thing i'd read. There's a
- 41:41Speaker 1: book that are biologists out of Fairbanks put out. It's
- 41:46Speaker 1: kind of like it like a magnum opus. There's some
- 41:49Speaker 1: wildlife biologists, but he's kind of explaining that, you know,
- 41:54Speaker 1: what's what's the sheep in Siberia snow sheep. Yeah, there's
- 41:59Speaker 1: a couple of different subst You kind of imagine it's
- 42:01Speaker 1: like band of this like band of sheep, ye, right,
- 42:06Speaker 1: it would be uninterrupted. Yeah, so at a time, like
- 42:09Speaker 1: if you went back to the places scene when you
- 42:11Speaker 1: could walk from Siberia to Alaska, it's just like this
- 42:13Speaker 1: band of sheep, and it would go from Siberia into Mexico. Yeah,
- 42:20Speaker 1: right all down through like through Yukon territory. All the
- 42:23Speaker 1: Canadian rockies down and this thing would kind of like
- 42:27Speaker 1: peter out in Mexico, and it would they would if
- 42:31Speaker 1: you were to walk that journey, you'd probably recognize this
- 42:37Speaker 1: that they kind of like gradually changed. Yeah, you know,
- 42:40Speaker 1: they started out big and burly and dark and they
- 42:43Speaker 1: end up smaller and white. Yeah.
- 42:46Speaker 9: Small. Yeah, Well because the snow sheeper even smaller typically
- 42:48Speaker 9: than dull sheep from what I understand, but which it
- 42:52Speaker 9: may have been. This guy here, Wayne Heimer, who was
- 42:54Speaker 9: a longtime sheep research biologist in Fairbanks, was kind of
- 42:57Speaker 9: like the you know, one of the original cheap management
- 43:02Speaker 9: and research by bile just uh in the state of
- 43:06Speaker 9: Alaska at all.
- 43:07Speaker 5: You know.
- 43:07Speaker 1: Yeah, Tyler brought me this book, doll Sheep Management in
- 43:10Speaker 1: Alaska from Place to Scene to Present by Wayne E. Heimer.
- 43:15Speaker 9: Yeah. So, uh, these sheep are all all throughout Alaska,
- 43:20Speaker 9: and uh see where they're picking a spot to start with?
- 43:24Speaker 9: Uh with the way the situation now, So it's a
- 43:28Speaker 9: little bit of history, uh after statehood. Before statehood and
- 43:32Speaker 9: Laska was a territory, Uh, efficient wildlife was managed by
- 43:35Speaker 9: the Feds because it wasn't there. State didn't exist then
- 43:39Speaker 9: and at state what.
- 43:40Speaker 1: Was the yeah, that's yeah. So so prior to statehood
- 43:46Speaker 1: there was no sort of like territorial game management Agency.
- 43:50Speaker 9: No, it was all it was all the FEDS. And frankly,
- 43:52Speaker 9: like I mean, he talks, Wayne talks in his book
- 43:54Speaker 9: about how a lot of this management quote unquote was
- 43:59Speaker 9: like guess work, Like they didn't really know nobody knew
- 44:02Speaker 9: like what we really had except for certain you know,
- 44:06Speaker 9: certain areas closer to populations, you know, towns and whatnot,
- 44:10Speaker 9: and so into what we had in like the early on,
- 44:14Speaker 9: I think even in the territorial days, they had like
- 44:16Speaker 9: a three quarter curl rule for shooting rams, which that
- 44:20Speaker 9: was just borrowed from big Horns. That's what they did
- 44:22Speaker 9: for big horns. So they just this might work. And over,
- 44:26Speaker 9: you know, over and over Wayne's decades of research, they
- 44:30Speaker 9: developed like the full curl mature ramp theory that you
- 44:33Speaker 9: know and kind of goes along with vlarious geists, you know,
- 44:37Speaker 9: sheep sheep theories to develop the full curl management strategy,
- 44:43Speaker 9: which you know is kind of all kind of if
- 44:46Speaker 9: I don't remember touchback, I tend to my brain kind
- 44:49Speaker 9: of fires off in different directions a lot of times.
- 44:51Speaker 9: So so, uh, last it becomes a state, gets tied
- 44:59Speaker 9: up to the wildlife and the duty to manage them.
- 45:02Speaker 9: And the next like probably the biggest, well the biggest
- 45:06Speaker 9: impact you know to hunters was Anilka and Anska the
- 45:11Speaker 9: Alaska Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and then Alaska National
- 45:17Speaker 9: Interest Land Conservation Act, which those were a from what
- 45:21Speaker 9: I understand, a trade off to get the Trans Alaska pipeline.
- 45:25Speaker 9: So it was it was during the Carter administration. They
- 45:30Speaker 9: wanted they discovered oil and prude O Bay needed a
- 45:32Speaker 9: way to get that oil to market. So the Trans
- 45:35Speaker 9: Alaska pipeline was the solution. And to get that, they
- 45:38Speaker 9: the Carter administration wanted all this federal land set aside
- 45:42Speaker 9: and you know, for conservation purposes to protect it, which
- 45:45Speaker 9: I think is you know, a pretty good thing. So
- 45:48Speaker 9: and I don't know all the details. I wasn't I
- 45:50Speaker 9: wasn't around back then. This is uh I think it
- 45:52Speaker 9: was finalized in nineteen eighty, but our two senators uh
- 45:57Speaker 9: Ted Stevens and Gravel, I didn't like what Jimmy Carter
- 46:02Speaker 9: wanted to take. I don't know all the details in that,
- 46:05Speaker 9: but Carter basically told him, you're gonna give it to
- 46:08Speaker 9: me or I or you're gonna come back in a year,
- 46:11Speaker 9: begging for me to take it, and they said, you
- 46:14Speaker 9: don't have Alas Wayne describes, they told Carter that you
- 46:16Speaker 9: don't have the balls. Well, he'd had the balls, and
- 46:19Speaker 9: he signed an executive order. I think it was using
- 46:21Speaker 9: the Antiquities Act labeling or I don't know again details
- 46:29Speaker 9: but basically took subsistence hunting as an described it as
- 46:32Speaker 9: an iniquity in this executive order and locked up huge
- 46:35Speaker 9: portions of Alaska immediately, like you know, you're going hunting
- 46:39Speaker 9: there this fall, No, you're not. And my uncle describes
- 46:43Speaker 9: this like he was going cheap hunting and he was
- 46:44Speaker 9: gonna go sheep hunting the wrangles in a certain spot.
- 46:46Speaker 1: And this was a political move by Carter.
- 46:48Speaker 9: Yeah, to get a nilka, to get the land set
- 46:51Speaker 9: aside that he wanted for anilka from one of like actually.
- 46:53Speaker 1: Leveraged, yeah, leveraged hunting access for a greater political vide.
- 46:58Speaker 2: Yeah.
- 46:58Speaker 9: And it and it was a big impact to the
- 47:00Speaker 9: economy too. You know, it affected outfitters, resident hunters, everybody.
- 47:04Speaker 9: And so my uncle describes it as, you know, he
- 47:06Speaker 9: heard about this and then uh, you know went to
- 47:10Speaker 9: state fishing game in the state's official position was non compliance.
- 47:13Speaker 9: They told, you know, they told him, unless a FED
- 47:15Speaker 9: sees us, see you pull the trigger, have a nice hunt.
- 47:18Speaker 1: Oh really, so these guys have been real legit.
- 47:21Speaker 9: Oh yeah, big time. And uh after a year that
- 47:24Speaker 9: they uh yeah, they went and they gave him an
- 47:25Speaker 9: ilka and so yep, they came back.
- 47:29Speaker 1: He was right, you know, he took and saw. They
- 47:31Speaker 1: then they ended up settling where they got the corridor.
- 47:34Speaker 1: I mean they run that. I mean just for just
- 47:36Speaker 1: people understand. Like early we're talking about how big Alaska is.
- 47:40Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know what it is top to bottom. Well,
- 47:43Speaker 1: just like the Brooks Range, it's all the size of California.
- 47:46Speaker 9: Yeah, it's five, like five hundred miles from Prudo Bay
- 47:49Speaker 9: to Fairbanks and so that that then it's got another yeah,
- 47:53Speaker 9: another three hundred fifty you know, I mean maybe three
- 47:56Speaker 9: hundred dish miles.
- 47:57Speaker 1: It depends on where you're measuring from to You could
- 47:59Speaker 1: run the picture that you're you're trying to secure land,
- 48:02Speaker 1: you're trying to secure rights to a corridor that is
- 48:05Speaker 1: a thousand mile you know, almost one thousand miles.
- 48:08Speaker 9: I think it's I think it's I think the pipeline
- 48:10Speaker 9: is eight hundred miles roughly. But so it was a
- 48:14Speaker 9: big deal and they gave him a milka. And then
- 48:17Speaker 9: so there were already some existing National parks Denale, which
- 48:20Speaker 9: was McKinley at the time, and a few others. So
- 48:23Speaker 9: this created a bunch of new national parks Wrangle, Saint Elias,
- 48:26Speaker 9: and Gates of the Arctic National Park up in the
- 48:28Speaker 9: Brooks Range and created and it created a lot of
- 48:35Speaker 9: you know, also National Park Service managed preserve lands. It
- 48:40Speaker 9: expanded and I believe it also expanded. An war was
- 48:43Speaker 9: in existence at the time, but I think that expanded it.
- 48:46Speaker 9: And you know, basically federal lie or created all these refuges, parks, preserves,
- 48:52Speaker 9: all this stuff.
- 48:53Speaker 1: Yeah, is it kind of the way I've understood it.
- 48:55Speaker 1: I never I never knew this thing about how they
- 48:58Speaker 1: settled it. But the way I've understood it is that
- 49:05Speaker 1: like that move forced a lot of people to decide
- 49:10Speaker 1: how they're going to carve the pie up. Yeah, for sure, right,
- 49:13Speaker 1: Like and they had like formalized ownerships. Okay, so all
- 49:17Speaker 1: this federal lands, some will be this, some will be
- 49:19Speaker 1: that the state's going to get this, Uh, and then
- 49:23Speaker 1: are going to get there and and it forced a
- 49:26Speaker 1: sort of codification of who owned what in that state.
- 49:29Speaker 9: Oh for sure.
- 49:30Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 49:30Speaker 9: And then and that's just the base layer to it.
- 49:33Speaker 9: Then you get into another layer of like management styles
- 49:36Speaker 9: and principles and uh what the word, you know what
- 49:39Speaker 9: how to describe it? You get into the preservationists versus
- 49:44Speaker 9: conservationist mentalities. Uh so anilka effectively, like I mean a
- 49:49Speaker 9: lot of and there's still like the people that were
- 49:51Speaker 9: around like do not like Jimmy You don't want to
- 49:54Speaker 9: bring up Jimmy Carter around them because they've got some
- 49:56Speaker 9: still source to a very sore and uh and a
- 49:59Speaker 9: lot of peop but don't understand why. But that's that's
- 50:01Speaker 9: why they just took it. And uh, you know the
- 50:05Speaker 9: result of even just wrangle Saint Elias and gates of
- 50:07Speaker 9: the Arctic National Park. Gates the Arctic at the time
- 50:10Speaker 9: they figure had six thousand to ten thousand cheap, so
- 50:14Speaker 9: just they cut a huge chunk out of what hunters
- 50:17Speaker 9: could access.
- 50:18Speaker 1: The least visited national park. Yeah, it makes zero sense,
- 50:23Speaker 1: but it's a national park. It makes zero sense, you know.
- 50:25Speaker 9: And a lot of this country I'm fully behind protecting it,
- 50:31Speaker 9: you know, like I don't I don't want to destroy
- 50:33Speaker 9: or see all that stuff destroyed. But let us use
- 50:35Speaker 9: the freaking lands man.
- 50:37Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's been I mean hunting it has nothing
- 50:40Speaker 1: to do with that.
- 50:40Speaker 9: No, no, it doesn't. It doesn't.
- 50:42Speaker 1: You know, like let let people like the most most
- 50:44Speaker 1: ridiculous land use Oh for sure, we have zero implications.
- 50:48Speaker 2: You know.
- 50:48Speaker 9: Yeah, and in fact, you know, like where the world
- 50:51Speaker 9: record doll sheep was killed is now in the Hard
- 50:54Speaker 9: Park Wrangle Saint Elias National Park, and oh is it
- 50:58Speaker 9: really Yeah, there's a guy a ram Glaciers where Swank
- 51:02Speaker 9: killed that ram, and since that you would think, oh,
- 51:05Speaker 9: well there's got to be all sort of those rams
- 51:07Speaker 9: running around in there. And that's not the case anymore.
- 51:09Speaker 9: Since that became a national park. I mean, people quit
- 51:11Speaker 9: using it as much. There's still some subsistence allowances, like
- 51:15Speaker 9: if you live in glenn Allen or some of these
- 51:18Speaker 9: other little towns, you can hunt the Hard Park, but
- 51:20Speaker 9: you can't. The access is extremely restricted.
- 51:22Speaker 1: Can you explain this is the term out here Alaskans
- 51:24Speaker 1: use all the time. Can you explain hard Park? Okay,
- 51:27Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, no, so so explain it, like you're taught,
- 51:31Speaker 1: like explain it, like if it was Yellowstone.
- 51:33Speaker 9: Yeah, so yellow says, I know nothing about Yellowstone. But
- 51:38Speaker 9: you have Yellowstone National Park, which is hard National Park.
- 51:43Speaker 9: You cannot hunt there. You gotta have a beare proof
- 51:47Speaker 9: food container in your backpack, you gotta you know, all
- 51:49Speaker 9: these The list goes on for rules.
- 51:52Speaker 1: It's the hard part, hard park.
- 51:54Speaker 9: So the preserve is technically part of the park, but
- 51:58Speaker 9: it a lot has allowances for the general public to hunt.
- 52:03Speaker 9: You know, they still got some some pretty silly rules.
- 52:06Speaker 9: But you can hunt preserved the takeaways. You can hunt
- 52:09Speaker 9: preserve land. You can't hunt hard park land generally.
- 52:12Speaker 1: You know, I'm a soft park man myself.
- 52:14Speaker 9: Oh I'm a.
- 52:18Speaker 1: The you guys got so many terms that like I'm
- 52:22Speaker 1: just rattling off, and you know, I love it. I
- 52:24Speaker 1: love it. But yeah, so when I hear when I'm
- 52:26Speaker 1: talking to friends mine up there and I talk about
- 52:28Speaker 1: like the hard part, you know, and I always look
- 52:31Speaker 1: to people that I know have no idea what they're
- 52:32Speaker 1: talking about, and I'm like, or if they're gonna ask
- 52:34Speaker 1: what he's talking about, they never do.
- 52:37Speaker 11: No.
- 52:37Speaker 9: Well that and that like, I'm glad you asked that
- 52:39Speaker 9: because with a lot of Alaskan issues. There's a big
- 52:43Speaker 9: disconnect between understand like what some of the details and
- 52:47Speaker 9: context of what goes on up there versus what the
- 52:49Speaker 9: general sure outside as we call.
- 52:52Speaker 1: It, that's another term, the outside.
- 52:55Speaker 9: Yeah, like I'm a like, I'm a stranger in a
- 52:57Speaker 9: strange land right now.
- 52:58Speaker 1: I saw their day that this country has. I'll tell
- 53:00Speaker 1: my buddy Danny who's from Hawaii, Danny Bolton. I was
- 53:03Speaker 1: telling them that this country hasn't effectively integrated Hawaiians and
- 53:07Speaker 1: Alaskans yet because they're so bad. They're so bad at
- 53:10Speaker 1: lower forty eight yard there, like, I don't give me
- 53:17Speaker 1: the state that borders Illinois, I don't. I don't know.
- 53:23Speaker 9: Yeah, well I would be at that point if my
- 53:25Speaker 9: kids weren't learning some geography.
- 53:28Speaker 1: Story and learn a thing or two about jo They
- 53:31Speaker 1: got this.
- 53:32Speaker 9: States game that we've been playing, and yeah, luckily as
- 53:35Speaker 9: a reference map. So anyway, so that's what a hard
- 53:39Speaker 9: park versus soft park. Then you have wildlife refuges, which
- 53:43Speaker 9: are in all all the parks and preserves are managed
- 53:47Speaker 9: by the National Park Service. The US Fish and Wildlife
- 53:51Speaker 9: Service manages refuge lands. And there's a ship pile of those.
- 53:55Speaker 1: About thirteen percent of the state, and that's been an
- 53:58Speaker 1: issue we've spent a bunch I'm on covering over the years.
- 54:01Speaker 1: Is the whip saw of the whip saw of the
- 54:08Speaker 1: Feds overriding states wildlife management practices on refuge land ye
- 54:16Speaker 1: meaning refuge and yeah, the whip saw of the Feds saying, well,
- 54:22Speaker 1: we're gonna, we're gonna take away management practices you have
- 54:27Speaker 1: traditionally exercised on portions of your land, like Obama brought
- 54:30Speaker 1: it in, Trump brought it out.
- 54:33Speaker 9: That was the whole.
- 54:36Speaker 1: The most Yeah, it was.
- 54:37Speaker 9: It was like, it's such a yeah, so steer me
- 54:40Speaker 9: back to sheep.
- 54:42Speaker 1: But this is all essential to understand this whole thing,
- 54:45Speaker 1: which is a really complicated but interesting thing that I think.
- 54:50Speaker 1: Remember earlier, I was saying, your kids are gonna hear
- 54:52Speaker 1: a lot more about the dams and on the Columbia
- 54:54Speaker 1: than you will, because your kids are probably gonna see
- 54:56Speaker 1: a lot some of those dams come out. If you're listening. Now,
- 54:59Speaker 1: that's just my crystal balling. My crystal balling is you're
- 55:02Speaker 1: going to see that that what Tyler is talking about
- 55:05Speaker 1: in Alaska is going to become more and more of
- 55:09Speaker 1: an issue in the American West and elsewhere. Yeah, meaning
- 55:13Speaker 1: this like this sort of going from an ethnic standpoint,
- 55:18Speaker 1: who has access to.
- 55:21Speaker 9: You know well, and initially, you know when I was
- 55:23Speaker 9: I was actually talking with Wayne about this the other
- 55:25Speaker 9: day when they were first drafting a nilka, you know,
- 55:29Speaker 9: because a nilka brings in subsistence use. Ye, And initially
- 55:33Speaker 9: it was I Wayne said, initially the language was race
- 55:37Speaker 9: oriented for subsistence use. And then they're not in our
- 55:41Speaker 9: in our modern world like we that's not okay. And
- 55:44Speaker 9: so they basically the primitive like search and replace with
- 55:51Speaker 9: a location based or where you know where you live.
- 55:53Speaker 9: So the funny story, I I actually was listening to
- 55:57Speaker 9: that episode where you guys were talking about this, the
- 55:59Speaker 9: latest back and forth.
- 56:01Speaker 5: Uh.
- 56:02Speaker 9: I was listening to it while I was sitting in
- 56:03Speaker 9: a blind in Alberta over a bait pile, waiting for
- 56:06Speaker 9: a pack of wolves. And I was interrupted by a
- 56:09Speaker 9: pack of wolves that showed up. And despite my you know,
- 56:13Speaker 9: my my delusions of being a frank laser, I only
- 56:16Speaker 9: hit two of them. But uh so, the one thing
- 56:22Speaker 9: you talked about the administration, the administrations I think do
- 56:25Speaker 9: have something to do with it. But I think that
- 56:28Speaker 9: it's more of a factor of what people in place
- 56:32Speaker 9: at the agencies in Alaska are restricted from or allowed
- 56:36Speaker 9: to do by an administration. Like I don't think Joe
- 56:41Speaker 9: Biden's a mastermind, like yeah, decide there, like.
- 56:44Speaker 1: Yes, I'm den digging, you know, he's not like personally.
- 56:48Speaker 9: No, no. And but what it is is I think, well,
- 56:51Speaker 9: in this case, it was the back of the back
- 56:54Speaker 9: and forth is just exhausting. But you know when under
- 56:59Speaker 9: under the Obama bomb administration, it was all preserve National
- 57:05Speaker 9: Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service managed lands
- 57:09Speaker 9: and then it got reversed, and then this time I
- 57:11Speaker 9: believe it was just the Park Service pushing it. But
- 57:14Speaker 9: I think that's a matter of just the Park Service saying, look,
- 57:17Speaker 9: we can get away with this right now, because they
- 57:19Speaker 9: generally and I know there's a lot of good people
- 57:23Speaker 9: work for the federal agencies to take with the grain
- 57:24Speaker 9: of salt, but there's the axis of evil of sorts.
- 57:28Speaker 9: The Park Service is kind of the most restrictive or
- 57:33Speaker 9: worst one when it comes to allowing hunter access, and
- 57:36Speaker 9: they've got a long history of let's say, managing to
- 57:42Speaker 9: for minimum human interference with the landscape is like a
- 57:46Speaker 9: politically correct way to put it, I think, And so
- 57:49Speaker 9: they do that through regulation, you know, and some of
- 57:53Speaker 9: it has you know, there's stuff you'd see in US
- 57:55Speaker 9: Fish and Wildlife. But the key is, I think it depends.
- 57:57Speaker 9: It's more depending on the people that are in place
- 58:01Speaker 9: in different positions at these agencies in Alaska than an
- 58:05Speaker 9: administration telling them.
- 58:07Speaker 1: But there is a there is a real trickle down
- 58:11Speaker 1: because the heads of these agencies are appointed by the administration.
- 58:14Speaker 9: The Department, the Department of Interior, you know, Secretary of
- 58:19Speaker 9: the Interior has does have a lot to do with it,
- 58:21Speaker 9: and they'll know. I'm sure there's something.
- 58:23Speaker 1: In the head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service,
- 58:25Speaker 1: Yeah for sure.
- 58:28Speaker 9: So in this all, this whole like appointed position thing
- 58:30Speaker 9: trickles down to the Federal Subsistence Board and the issues
- 58:33Speaker 9: like we're dealing with with them.
- 58:35Speaker 1: But we're gonna get into that.
- 58:36Speaker 9: Yeah, So that's where.
- 58:39Speaker 1: But you got to understand that this is great. Don't
- 58:41Speaker 1: don't be embarrassed about the level of detail because it
- 58:43Speaker 1: has a very complicated wildlife manage thing and it's educational.
- 58:46Speaker 9: Like sometimes I have to just take a break from
- 58:48Speaker 9: it because it's it's just depressing an entire to keep
- 58:51Speaker 9: up with all of it. It's and that's part of
- 58:53Speaker 9: the tough thing about it. Like the fight is you can't.
- 58:56Speaker 9: You can't, like it's too much for any one person
- 58:58Speaker 9: to keep up with.
- 59:00Speaker 7: Like speaking of the fight, is this like while all
- 59:04Speaker 7: this is going on, like is Alaska fishing games perspective? Like, man,
- 59:09Speaker 7: this is just like not a fight we can win
- 59:12Speaker 7: like that it's not.
- 59:13Speaker 9: Worth like they're they're trying, you know, like I think
- 59:16Speaker 9: there are some I'm not wearing specifics of them, but
- 59:18Speaker 9: there are, Like I know they have like lawsuits and
- 59:21Speaker 9: they're like that's their only recourse, right, but their position
- 59:25Speaker 9: is that it's illegal what the Feds are doing, that
- 59:28Speaker 9: the state has title to all the wildlife and the
- 59:31Speaker 9: responsibility for managing it. And it's just to me, looking
- 59:35Speaker 9: at as each one of these federal closures rolls out,
- 59:40Speaker 9: it just to me, it doesn't add up. And like
- 59:42Speaker 9: we can get into that too, but like the A
- 59:45Speaker 9: plus B equill see like does not equal see.
- 59:48Speaker 1: Well, we'll get to the get to the moves that
- 59:50Speaker 1: are happening around doll sheep, so doll sheep, but also
- 59:53Speaker 1: get into the you know, there's the issue of severe winners,
- 59:59Speaker 1: severe winners, low numbers. But then there's also the suspicion
- 1:00:02Speaker 1: that that's being there's also the suspicion that that's being
- 1:00:06Speaker 1: like exploited for political game.
- 1:00:08Speaker 9: I think it absolutely is, but so doll sheet and like,
- 1:00:13Speaker 9: you know, backing up into the doll sheet management, I
- 1:00:16Speaker 9: did recently get to go to a presentation kind of
- 1:00:18Speaker 9: on the status of everything and some of the history
- 1:00:20Speaker 9: by one of our current cheap research biologists. He you know,
- 1:00:25Speaker 9: that he laid out the history of since you know,
- 1:00:27Speaker 9: since the data was being recorded of cheap hunter numbers
- 1:00:30Speaker 9: and harvest. Harvest is basically the only hard data like
- 1:00:34Speaker 9: that we could find in a lot of those years
- 1:00:36Speaker 9: because it was before surveys, and surveys is another is
- 1:00:39Speaker 9: another interesting kind of sidebar to that. But so cheap
- 1:00:45Speaker 9: have had a lot you know, the like cariboos especially,
- 1:00:48Speaker 9: they'll have population swings or any other big game animal
- 1:00:51Speaker 9: in a like relatively natural state, their populations oscillate and
- 1:00:56Speaker 9: sheep are very sensitive to weather conditions. They can't they
- 1:01:00Speaker 9: don't dig for their food in the snow, so they're
- 1:01:02Speaker 9: they're very dependent on wind blown slopes for their feed
- 1:01:06Speaker 9: in the especially late winter, and populations have been like
- 1:01:11Speaker 9: you know, there was a big crash in the third
- 1:01:12Speaker 9: I think the thirties, and there's been isolated just total crashes.
- 1:01:16Speaker 9: In nineteen ninety. There's an interesting diagram he gave of
- 1:01:19Speaker 9: showing the uh, the number of sheep and sheep hunters climbing, climbing,
- 1:01:23Speaker 9: climbing basically to double what it is now of harvests
- 1:01:26Speaker 9: and sheep hunters. Wasn't really yeah, I mean it was
- 1:01:28Speaker 9: well in this year. The last two years have been
- 1:01:30Speaker 9: really low harvests, but uh, you know, the numbers climb, climb,
- 1:01:35Speaker 9: climb of hunters and harvest. And then nineteen ninety it
- 1:01:37Speaker 9: just like there was a huge crash in the central
- 1:01:40Speaker 9: Alaska Range in nineteen ninety.
- 1:01:42Speaker 1: Oh, and you'll see that sheep population crash reflected in
- 1:01:46Speaker 1: the harvest now and in participation as well.
- 1:01:49Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, for sure, Like now there's there's half the
- 1:01:53Speaker 9: sheep hunters participating now than there was like three or
- 1:01:56Speaker 9: four years ago, and it was half the sheep or no, yeah,
- 1:01:59Speaker 9: I mean it's the numbers have taken a hit. So
- 1:02:01Speaker 9: the winters between twenty twenty two, so twenty twenty, twenty
- 1:02:08Speaker 9: twenty one, and then the following winter both had like
- 1:02:12Speaker 9: real like pretty state wide tough condition winter conditions and
- 1:02:16Speaker 9: it hit hammered on a lot of sheet populations. And
- 1:02:20Speaker 9: it's not it's not great news, like they're the sheet
- 1:02:22Speaker 9: populations are down pretty much statewide, and.
- 1:02:26Speaker 1: There's there's an additional there's an additional irritant about this
- 1:02:30Speaker 1: as you're talking about the way populations can recover, but uh,
- 1:02:36Speaker 1: it takes ten years ago trophy, Well, yeah, yeah, you
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: know what I mean, it's it's like takes I mean,
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: you you take a white tail buck, you can have
- 1:02:43Speaker 1: a smoker white tail buck in four years. Yeah, but
- 1:02:46Speaker 1: it's it's a slow process show.
- 1:02:48Speaker 9: And you know, and the way, you know, the full
- 1:02:50Speaker 9: curl look under what we'd call full curl management, you know,
- 1:02:53Speaker 9: whereas a ram is legal to kill once he's full
- 1:02:55Speaker 9: curl or eight years old, and there's some other criteria,
- 1:02:59Speaker 9: but basically eight year old rams are at the time
- 1:03:01Speaker 9: in their life when they become dominant and take over
- 1:03:06Speaker 9: most of the breeding, and then their mortality just shoots
- 1:03:09Speaker 9: through the roof once they're eight Steve has said it
- 1:03:12Speaker 9: at their and then they're dead. Basically once they turn eight,
- 1:03:15Speaker 9: they're on borrowed time though.
- 1:03:18Speaker 1: Yeah, it's no, like there's no like old man period. No, No,
- 1:03:23Speaker 1: it's like on top of your game if you like,
- 1:03:25Speaker 1: if it'd be like if dudes died at like thirty eight.
- 1:03:29Speaker 9: I just turned thirty eight, so I yeah.
- 1:03:41Speaker 7: So Tyler, like, with these cheap declines, is there anyone
- 1:03:46Speaker 7: like pointing finger at a finger at hunter harvest as
- 1:03:49Speaker 7: any kind of impact or is that like not?
- 1:03:53Speaker 9: So that's yes and no, yes and no. So that
- 1:03:57Speaker 9: that does play into some of the excuses used for
- 1:04:01Speaker 9: closing these areas. And they're like some areas got hit
- 1:04:04Speaker 9: harder than others in some areas already have been experiencing
- 1:04:07Speaker 9: a ton of pressure compared soul like for the amount
- 1:04:12Speaker 9: of hunters that are out there, Like, yeah, there's fewer
- 1:04:13Speaker 9: legal rams running around, you know what Wayne Heimer the
- 1:04:19Speaker 9: fishing game, Like all those biologists they and they are
- 1:04:22Speaker 9: doing studies right now. Start they started a study this
- 1:04:25Speaker 9: year to compare a hunted area versus a non hunted
- 1:04:29Speaker 9: area that are basically side by side to compare this
- 1:04:32Speaker 9: ram mortality. So some of these people are taking Geist's
- 1:04:35Speaker 9: theory and what Heimer kind of verified that if you
- 1:04:39Speaker 9: remove all the mature rams from the landscape. As you know,
- 1:04:43Speaker 9: we're in Heimer's study area in central Lascarens during the
- 1:04:45Speaker 9: three quarter curl days, like there was not any full
- 1:04:48Speaker 9: curl rams running around really, and they observed like a
- 1:04:52Speaker 9: higher mortality in younger rams, understandably because they did more.
- 1:04:55Speaker 9: They're more disorganized, they're less you know, less Uh well,
- 1:05:01Speaker 9: I don't even know that they're less able to cope
- 1:05:03Speaker 9: with the circumstance the breeding, because the older rams tip
- 1:05:06Speaker 9: off pretty pretty quickly too. But there, you know, nobody's
- 1:05:12Speaker 9: buying it, you know. And the position is that hunting
- 1:05:15Speaker 9: under a full curl reg regulation has zero impact on
- 1:05:19Speaker 9: that recovery has zero impact. And even Heimer stuff showed
- 1:05:23Speaker 9: it because they went from three quarter curl to know,
- 1:05:25Speaker 9: with a lot of resistance, to seven eighths curl, which
- 1:05:28Speaker 9: was kind of a compromise between three quarters and full
- 1:05:31Speaker 9: and then they moved a full curl. And then you know,
- 1:05:34Speaker 9: people were afraid that you make these restricts, these restrictions,
- 1:05:37Speaker 9: there's gonna be a lot fewer harvestable rams. Well, after
- 1:05:40Speaker 9: a few years, boom, then you're at a different level
- 1:05:44Speaker 9: and it's a lot healthy in like this. I've only
- 1:05:46Speaker 9: ever known that world during the full curl Yeah, me too,
- 1:05:49Speaker 9: the full Curl era. You know, it's and I still
- 1:05:52Speaker 9: kind of think of myself as a pretty young sheep hunter.
- 1:05:54Speaker 9: I've been doing it for twenty years. Every year and
- 1:05:59Speaker 9: I just feel every year I feel like there's more
- 1:06:01Speaker 9: I got to learn about them. But uh so the
- 1:06:04Speaker 9: hunt like it's in the federal side. People will argue,
- 1:06:09Speaker 9: which I'll get into that. So you have the Federal
- 1:06:12Speaker 9: Subsistence Board, which I think is kind of the more
- 1:06:16Speaker 9: they get, the more the box has opened up and
- 1:06:20Speaker 9: they can and you know, people are seizing these opportunities.
- 1:06:23Speaker 9: So the Northwest art at Caribou Herd, I don't know
- 1:06:26Speaker 9: if you guys have talked about that, that closure, which
- 1:06:28Speaker 9: that's a closure that doesn't make any sense. They closed
- 1:06:30Speaker 9: it to non locals because and that's a whole other
- 1:06:35Speaker 9: layered thing. They closed it as non local hunters because.
- 1:06:38Speaker 1: It's basically like a quadrant of the state.
- 1:06:41Speaker 9: Oh yeah, huge huge. I think they didn't get it
- 1:06:44Speaker 9: in the northern twenty unit twenty six, but a huge area.
- 1:06:49Speaker 9: So they they we've on it.
- 1:06:51Speaker 1: Yeah, I've on a carribo that are closed now.
- 1:06:54Speaker 9: Yeah, the uh, the excuse was because the population is
- 1:06:58Speaker 9: in decline, and it hit that, you know, their survey
- 1:07:02Speaker 9: conveniently with a margin of error or the degree of certainty.
- 1:07:06Speaker 9: The survey hit it on just under two hundred thousand animals,
- 1:07:09Speaker 9: which a whole other entity called the work you know
- 1:07:12Speaker 9: that Northwest Artcurred Working Group has in their kind of
- 1:07:16Speaker 9: they have like a rubric for different management levels and
- 1:07:19Speaker 9: intensity of management and suggestions. They're just like a consultation
- 1:07:23Speaker 9: group made up of a lot of different parties that
- 1:07:26Speaker 9: can make recommendations for management. They don't have management powers,
- 1:07:29Speaker 9: but so it hit this two hundred thousand level and
- 1:07:32Speaker 9: you're getting proposals from this you know, regional council that
- 1:07:37Speaker 9: makes recommendations to the Federal Subsistence Board, which it's like
- 1:07:40Speaker 9: a it's like a carbon copy sort of of the
- 1:07:43Speaker 9: States model where they have regional Advisory account committees. These
- 1:07:47Speaker 9: ones are councils. So they get this proposal to and
- 1:07:51Speaker 9: they've happened, but they get this proposal to close the
- 1:07:54Speaker 9: area to non local hunters because you know, they cite
- 1:07:58Speaker 9: because the herds in decline. You so in theory, you
- 1:08:01Speaker 9: know a reason would be to recover numbers, and because
- 1:08:04Speaker 9: they assert that non local hunters are impacting and diverting
- 1:08:09Speaker 9: the caribou's migration, which I wrote a story on this.
- 1:08:12Speaker 9: I talked to the National Park Service biologists who did
- 1:08:15Speaker 9: a lot of this study up there, and he said,
- 1:08:18Speaker 9: there's no evidence to support it. And the driver, you know,
- 1:08:24Speaker 9: if you learn anything about caribou herds and like a
- 1:08:26Speaker 9: lot of animals, the drivers of populations are the mature cows.
- 1:08:29Speaker 9: You know, mature cows have calves and caf recruitment. Those
- 1:08:32Speaker 9: are the two most important things. So non local hunters
- 1:08:35Speaker 9: kill about three hundred bulls per year, whereas they estimate
- 1:08:41Speaker 9: they don't know, they estimate subsistence harvest at about like
- 1:08:44Speaker 9: ten to fourteen thousand animals, which you know, like that
- 1:08:47Speaker 9: subsistence resource is important. Don't get me wrong, I'm not
- 1:08:51Speaker 9: knocking that, but just the equation doesn't make sense. And
- 1:08:56Speaker 9: so they they and but they close it to non locals.
- 1:09:00Speaker 9: They don't even make any recommendations to stop shooting cows
- 1:09:02Speaker 9: and caps. So it just doesn't add up.
- 1:09:05Speaker 1: It's like that you're like, you you're taking advantage of
- 1:09:09Speaker 1: the situation to remove an annoyance. Yeah, that has nothing
- 1:09:12Speaker 1: to do with the resource.
- 1:09:13Speaker 9: And you can you know, I could get my ten,
- 1:09:15Speaker 9: I could get My life would be better.
- 1:09:17Speaker 1: My life would be better if there weren't non locals here.
- 1:09:20Speaker 9: Yeah, and this and this is getting a little and
- 1:09:22Speaker 9: I understand those sentiments, and they exist in a lot
- 1:09:25Speaker 9: of places.
- 1:09:25Speaker 1: Out there, but it's ubiquitous.
- 1:09:27Speaker 9: You could get a little tinfoil hattie. But I've been
- 1:09:30Speaker 9: told by guys like this that have been around, had
- 1:09:32Speaker 9: seen this whole process that you know, you're not crazy
- 1:09:36Speaker 9: to suspect that there's some interplay between the agencies and
- 1:09:41Speaker 9: these committees and crafting these proposals. Oh you know, so
- 1:09:46Speaker 9: and it gets worse. So the Caribo one happens, then,
- 1:09:50Speaker 9: you know, all of a sudden cheaper in trouble.
- 1:09:52Speaker 1: So just to just to put like a very clear
- 1:09:54Speaker 1: point on it, just the people that are follow who
- 1:09:57Speaker 1: don't follow this issue, you're normally chinliehud. Okay, if you
- 1:10:07Speaker 1: look at a normal wildlife resource, like from a lower
- 1:10:11Speaker 1: forty eight perspective, you look at a normal wildlife resource,
- 1:10:13Speaker 1: you might imagine the pie being divided up between what
- 1:10:17Speaker 1: we'll call what they call recreational hunters and fishermen and
- 1:10:22Speaker 1: commercial use. Okay, so let's say we're gonna go out
- 1:10:24Speaker 1: to the East coast. We're gonna go to the East coast,
- 1:10:26Speaker 1: Chesapeake Bay. We're gonna look at like some fishery. It'd
- 1:10:31Speaker 1: be that there's the recreational harvest and the commercial harvest right,
- 1:10:34Speaker 1: and those two on some resource, and those two entities
- 1:10:40Speaker 1: are gonna be at odds. They're gonna be just generally
- 1:10:43Speaker 1: gonna be arguing over who gets a bigger piece of
- 1:10:45Speaker 1: the pie. Right, the commercial the recreational industries are gonna fight, like,
- 1:10:49Speaker 1: we want more fish. You're messing up our fishing. You're
- 1:10:52Speaker 1: inflicting our ability to make a livelihood. This tension always
- 1:10:56Speaker 1: exists all over the place. In the in the Rocky
- 1:10:59Speaker 1: Mountain less than lower forty eight, there's there's constant tension
- 1:11:03Speaker 1: between you know, it's not ugly necessarily, but there's tension
- 1:11:07Speaker 1: between outfitter okay and and non outfitted. So it's a
- 1:11:11Speaker 1: it's a minor issue. But there's outfitters who are like,
- 1:11:14Speaker 1: we would like to have more permits so we can
- 1:11:17Speaker 1: do more guiding and have more clients. And then non
- 1:11:20Speaker 1: guided hunters are saying, we would like to have greater
- 1:11:26Speaker 1: animal tag allocation go to us and not peeling off
- 1:11:29Speaker 1: so much for the guides or the conflict could be.
- 1:11:33Speaker 1: We have you have state residents and non residents, and
- 1:11:38Speaker 1: that's the sort that's attention, meaning state residents. Like you're
- 1:11:40Speaker 1: giving you're letting too many non residents come in and hunt.
- 1:11:44Speaker 7: It's impacting side x percent of tags for non residents.
- 1:11:49Speaker 1: Yeah, like why I've been applying for a sheep tag
- 1:11:52Speaker 1: for thirty years? How could a non resident get a
- 1:11:56Speaker 1: sheep tag? And when I live here, I never got
- 1:11:57Speaker 1: a sheep tag. All these sources attention. In Alaska, you
- 1:12:00Speaker 1: have this additional layer of subsistence, so you know, the
- 1:12:05Speaker 1: same way you have like local non local, commercial, recreational,
- 1:12:09Speaker 1: you have this element of people that live in rural
- 1:12:13Speaker 1: areas having a right to subsist and having a different
- 1:12:18Speaker 1: set of regulations that would govern your fishing practices. For instance,
- 1:12:24Speaker 1: where Seth Seth and I have shacks in southeast Alaska
- 1:12:28Speaker 1: and we fish under a set of regulations, and but
- 1:12:32Speaker 1: if if we were to move there and live there
- 1:12:34Speaker 1: and make that our legal address, we would also fish
- 1:12:36Speaker 1: under completely different right. We can set long lines for hal.
- 1:12:40Speaker 2: Of it right there and keep species that we can't keep.
- 1:12:43Speaker 1: We set like one hundred hooks, skate for black cod whatever,
- 1:12:46Speaker 1: and right now you're allowed eighty year, but you could
- 1:12:48Speaker 1: set you have unlimited black cod harvest if you live there.
- 1:12:53Speaker 1: So it's just this added source attention. Oh yeah, for sure,
- 1:12:57Speaker 1: and like like like fighting over the pie.
- 1:12:58Speaker 9: Yeah, and it's you know, as an example of how
- 1:13:01Speaker 9: silly some of it is, Like it has nothing to
- 1:13:03Speaker 9: do with how much wild game you eat. And I
- 1:13:06Speaker 9: will you know, I say again, like I think protecting
- 1:13:08Speaker 9: with your income, protecting the subsistence lifestyle and and just
- 1:13:13Speaker 9: the ability to hunt is important. But I can't hunt
- 1:13:16Speaker 9: spring waterfowl. I live right outside of Fairbanks. If I
- 1:13:20Speaker 9: move thirty miles down the road, I can hunt spring
- 1:13:21Speaker 9: waterfowl when they're all nice and fully plumed up. And
- 1:13:26Speaker 9: it's a sort of subject. And I'm not even a
- 1:13:28Speaker 9: duck hunter.
- 1:13:29Speaker 1: So at high level, like many issues, at high level,
- 1:13:32Speaker 1: the sort of bifurcation of subsistence and non subsistence makes
- 1:13:36Speaker 1: you get it makes tons of sense. But like anything,
- 1:13:38Speaker 1: when you get down into like like, hm, you mean
- 1:13:40Speaker 1: so if I move across the road, yeah, yeah, literally,
- 1:13:43Speaker 1: and all I could make I could make I could
- 1:13:45Speaker 1: have a salary of a million dollars a year and
- 1:13:48Speaker 1: I could move across the road, I'd be subsistence.
- 1:13:50Speaker 9: Yep, yeah, exactly.
- 1:13:51Speaker 1: But I'm dirt poor on this side of the road
- 1:13:54Speaker 1: and I'm not subsistent.
- 1:13:55Speaker 9: No, that's exactly how it is. And to complicate that, well,
- 1:13:58Speaker 9: there's what FEDS consider subsist us and state. The state
- 1:14:01Speaker 9: considers all residents of subsistence user, but they generally are.
- 1:14:07Speaker 9: Their goal is to satisfy subsistence needs of state residents
- 1:14:10Speaker 9: through the sport, hunting and fishing regulations. So they closed this, uh,
- 1:14:18Speaker 9: the you know, the the northwest start occurred, you know,
- 1:14:20Speaker 9: Unit twenty three for cariboo and moose. It's not completely closed.
- 1:14:24Speaker 1: Way, my big, big wrap up, my big explanation. Sorry, no, no, no,
- 1:14:28Speaker 1: you brought me back on track. Okay, So, but like
- 1:14:31Speaker 1: I mean thousands of square miles right, oh.
- 1:14:33Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I can't remember. At one point I added
- 1:14:36Speaker 9: it up. It was like sixty million acres.
- 1:14:38Speaker 1: Or something like that. No, so, meaning so you're what
- 1:14:41Speaker 1: you said.
- 1:14:41Speaker 9: They closed it for moose too, Yeah, for for moose, moose,
- 1:14:44Speaker 9: and caribou for non locals during Basically it's not year
- 1:14:47Speaker 9: round because like I in the winter could go up
- 1:14:49Speaker 9: there and hunt caribou, but during the time when everybody
- 1:14:52Speaker 9: is wanting to travel up there and hunt.
- 1:14:53Speaker 3: In the fall.
- 1:14:54Speaker 2: Yeah and uh, and they say moose are on the decline.
- 1:14:58Speaker 9: Decline out there. But in you know, carent had had
- 1:15:01Speaker 9: given me an article by Seth Seth Cantner, who I
- 1:15:06Speaker 9: think he lives up on the Kobuk and he has
- 1:15:08Speaker 9: you know, has some books and like he offers like
- 1:15:12Speaker 9: his perspective and you hear this a lot, and like
- 1:15:15Speaker 9: the anecdotal stuff and observations over time I think are important.
- 1:15:18Speaker 9: But you also have to look at the a larger context.
- 1:15:22Speaker 9: You know, me and me in an outsider and if
- 1:15:24Speaker 9: you know, I can understand someone living there who for
- 1:15:27Speaker 9: years and years and years, there's thousands of caribou came
- 1:15:29Speaker 9: right through this down this trail every single year. We
- 1:15:32Speaker 9: could count on it, like I would feel very strongly
- 1:15:35Speaker 9: about it too. But being on the outside, not really
- 1:15:38Speaker 9: having any any fingers in that pie, you look at
- 1:15:44Speaker 9: historically like, well that heard wasn't always that big, and
- 1:15:47Speaker 9: in nineteen seventy five there was only seventy five thousand
- 1:15:50Speaker 9: of them. I think it was the roughly date and
- 1:15:53Speaker 9: number that I looked at because there you look at that.
- 1:15:55Speaker 9: That working group has some newsletter publications and you can,
- 1:15:59Speaker 9: you know, pretty easily skim valuable like details from that
- 1:16:03Speaker 9: and some of the historical context. But they you know,
- 1:16:07Speaker 9: they even have in some of their newsletters they have
- 1:16:09Speaker 9: quotes from some of the elders that talk about remembering
- 1:16:12Speaker 9: when there was no caribou out there and they just
- 1:16:14Speaker 9: had reindeer, and then the caribou started showing up and
- 1:16:16Speaker 9: pulling the reindeer. They would start shooting all the caribou
- 1:16:19Speaker 9: that came because they didn't want to take the reindeer
- 1:16:21Speaker 9: with them, and they did. But there there never used
- 1:16:24Speaker 9: to be caribou come out there, at least for you know,
- 1:16:27Speaker 9: X period of time. There never there never was caribou
- 1:16:30Speaker 9: that came out on Seward Peninsula like that out of
- 1:16:32Speaker 9: that herd. And the Park Service biologist Kyle Jolie I
- 1:16:36Speaker 9: think was his name, he told me that, you know,
- 1:16:39Speaker 9: because I kind of posed the questions like, well, what
- 1:16:41Speaker 9: do you what do you think when you're or me?
- 1:16:44Speaker 9: And he and he was very tactful in how he answered,
- 1:16:46Speaker 9: not like definitively, but just giving me some context. You know,
- 1:16:50Speaker 9: I'm like, well, do you know half expecting it to
- 1:16:52Speaker 9: be climate change, because that's what a lot of people
- 1:16:55Speaker 9: will will dive on to, you know, as you guys
- 1:16:57Speaker 9: have been talking about that's the popular monetarily beneficial culprit.
- 1:17:03Speaker 1: But it's it's a catch all and is deserving of
- 1:17:06Speaker 1: a conversation. It is, it's become a catch all to
- 1:17:08Speaker 1: explain everything, and it doesn't explain It doesn't always explain everything.
- 1:17:14Speaker 9: No, And the way he put it was he said,
- 1:17:16Speaker 9: think about this, he said, you know, he didn't blame
- 1:17:18Speaker 9: climate change. He said, think about this that herd changes
- 1:17:21Speaker 9: in size and number said. When a caribou herd, you know,
- 1:17:24Speaker 9: grows exponentially, it expands its range. When it shrinks, the
- 1:17:28Speaker 9: range change the range, and migration patterns shrink too. So
- 1:17:32Speaker 9: that's just you know, in a lot of these issues,
- 1:17:35Speaker 9: like the overall length of time, you look at and context.
- 1:17:38Speaker 9: And I've learned a ton just by you know, reading
- 1:17:40Speaker 9: about some of the cheap, cheap management history. But so
- 1:17:45Speaker 9: this closure happens, and then we have a couple of
- 1:17:49Speaker 9: bum winners and the sheep are hurting, and then up
- 1:17:52Speaker 9: pops another proposal, which you know, I want to be
- 1:17:57Speaker 9: cared because I don't know the guy, and I don't
- 1:17:58Speaker 9: want to be careful. I want to be careful, not
- 1:17:59Speaker 9: to not to just sling mud. But on paper, the
- 1:18:04Speaker 9: Central Brooks Range closure is the result of one guy
- 1:18:08Speaker 9: and he, you know, he's kind of a leader of
- 1:18:11Speaker 9: a small community, and they're in Wiseman, and their council
- 1:18:16Speaker 9: wrote this proposal that is not scientific at all. Basically says,
- 1:18:19Speaker 9: I drive the road and all the and all the
- 1:18:23Speaker 9: mature rams are gone. There's nothing left. And you know,
- 1:18:28Speaker 9: and I think they have they have a pretty you know,
- 1:18:30Speaker 9: it's right next to gates of the Arctic National Park
- 1:18:32Speaker 9: and this is this is bordering hard Park National park
- 1:18:35Speaker 9: land where only subsistence hunters can hunt. And I don't
- 1:18:38Speaker 9: think there's not very many of them that do it,
- 1:18:40Speaker 9: only like in isolate like at an Anactotic pass. You know,
- 1:18:43Speaker 9: I'm sure those guys, those guys subsistence hunt some sheep.
- 1:18:46Speaker 9: But and so they formalize this proposal, and the Federal
- 1:18:52Speaker 9: Subsistence Board passes it, closing the whole Central Brooks Range
- 1:18:56Speaker 9: on federal land. There's some small state land portions, but
- 1:19:01Speaker 9: most of it just yeah, it locked up. And the
- 1:19:04Speaker 9: only reason given is, you know that the sheep are
- 1:19:07Speaker 9: on the brink and they need you know, we surveyed them,
- 1:19:10Speaker 9: which the state and the FEDS do their aerial surveys differently,
- 1:19:13Speaker 9: like that's a whole entire another subject. But they close
- 1:19:17Speaker 9: all this up, which includes I mean, it's it's the
- 1:19:21Speaker 9: most like user friendly kill. I killed my first sheep
- 1:19:25Speaker 9: hiking in up there on that path in two thousand
- 1:19:28Speaker 9: and four when I was eighteen, and so they closed
- 1:19:33Speaker 9: like the best like walk in access opportunity. It's not
- 1:19:37Speaker 9: that walking guys are killing a bunch of sheep. The
- 1:19:39Speaker 9: success rates low just in general, and there's some areas
- 1:19:44Speaker 9: that people will fly in that kind of within that
- 1:19:46Speaker 9: you see, yeah, yeah, you know, but the opportunity is there.
- 1:19:51Speaker 9: And they also close the five the corridor, which extends
- 1:19:54Speaker 9: five miles on either side of the Dalton Highway. That's
- 1:19:56Speaker 9: bow hunting only. And that's the heart of what like
- 1:20:00Speaker 9: where he's talking about up there's no legal there's no
- 1:20:02Speaker 9: mature rams left at least, you know, that's the way
- 1:20:05Speaker 9: his proposal.
- 1:20:05Speaker 7: Reach for context like how many sheep, how many dollars
- 1:20:10Speaker 7: sheep are in Alaska, and how many get killed by
- 1:20:12Speaker 7: hunters a year?
- 1:20:14Speaker 9: So I couldn't I don't know that the like current
- 1:20:18Speaker 9: and historic population estimates, but I can tell you at
- 1:20:22Speaker 9: up to a peak in nineteen ninety, I want to say,
- 1:20:25Speaker 9: it was like a couple thousand sheep getting killed a year,
- 1:20:30Speaker 9: and then it's gone down to this year. They don't
- 1:20:33Speaker 9: know that it's even gonna break four hundred.
- 1:20:35Speaker 1: Are you serious?
- 1:20:36Speaker 9: Yeah? But with that and you know, and it's been
- 1:20:38Speaker 9: like the situation is not great. It's it's a hard
- 1:20:40Speaker 9: time to be a sheep hunter in Alaska. But the
- 1:20:45Speaker 9: relationship between there's a linear relationship between the number of
- 1:20:48Speaker 9: hunters and the heart and the number of harvest, you know,
- 1:20:51Speaker 9: uh Wayne, in my discussion with him the other day,
- 1:20:53Speaker 9: he talked to one of the Wildlife troopers who you know,
- 1:20:56Speaker 9: take it with a grain of salt, but their impression
- 1:20:58Speaker 9: was that the success rate in Unit twenty A, which
- 1:21:02Speaker 9: is Central Alaska Range, you know, it's it's a very
- 1:21:06Speaker 9: hard hunted area, that the success rate was relatively pretty
- 1:21:10Speaker 9: much like normal, you know, and the and the age
- 1:21:13Speaker 9: structure of rams that's been getting killed is the same
- 1:21:15Speaker 9: as it always has been.
- 1:21:17Speaker 1: My brother who lives in alask and he likes to
- 1:21:19Speaker 1: hunt sheet he said, when you look at harvest data.
- 1:21:23Speaker 1: A lot of times it tells you more about the
- 1:21:25Speaker 1: weather than it does sheet.
- 1:21:26Speaker 9: But absolutely it can.
- 1:21:27Speaker 1: Meaning you know, we've hunted up there in years when
- 1:21:30Speaker 1: you just have these massive systems that just make poor visibility.
- 1:21:36Speaker 9: Oh yeah.
- 1:21:36Speaker 1: And he's like, you'll you'll then see that reflected, and
- 1:21:40Speaker 1: you'll see that reflected, and how many rams are getting
- 1:21:42Speaker 1: no for sure broad and you can't and you look
- 1:21:45Speaker 1: and you want to try to draw these sort of
- 1:21:46Speaker 1: like population trends out of things that could have been
- 1:21:48Speaker 1: like it was cloudy.
- 1:21:50Speaker 9: Yeah, or it was smoky, yeah, Like we had a
- 1:21:52Speaker 9: lot of late wildfires this year and a lot of
- 1:21:54Speaker 9: country was smoky. But over time, like the data, it's
- 1:22:00Speaker 9: pretty consistent. It's not like an enormous amount of younger
- 1:22:04Speaker 9: rams are getting clipped off or sub legal rams, Like
- 1:22:06Speaker 9: the percentages are all pretty much in line with what
- 1:22:08Speaker 9: they have been historically.
- 1:22:11Speaker 1: Do you think it would make it all if the
- 1:22:13Speaker 1: stuff that is getting closed to if the stuff is
- 1:22:18Speaker 1: getting closed to hunters, do you think it'd make it
- 1:22:24Speaker 1: like this discussion of moot point, if it actually if
- 1:22:28Speaker 1: sheep numbers improved, then they actually opened this landscape back
- 1:22:31Speaker 1: up again, or do you think this is just like
- 1:22:32Speaker 1: a play, and that's how it is now.
- 1:22:34Speaker 9: I think it's a play. I think theoretically if it
- 1:22:39Speaker 9: in most sheep hunters, any serious sheep hunter, if there
- 1:22:43Speaker 9: was strong evidence to show that, hey, if we stop
- 1:22:47Speaker 9: hunting these sheep right now, we're gonna like the population
- 1:22:50Speaker 9: is gonna recover quicker now that and you get into it,
- 1:22:53Speaker 9: like you have to, you have to kind of define
- 1:22:55Speaker 9: what you're talking about.
- 1:22:56Speaker 1: Because because they are still hunting.
- 1:22:57Speaker 9: Yeah, because well because talking to talking to a biologist
- 1:23:02Speaker 9: whose interest is like maximum sustainable yield, you know, just
- 1:23:07Speaker 9: wanting to have huntable populations and looking out for the
- 1:23:10Speaker 9: well being in general of the of the sheep as
- 1:23:13Speaker 9: a whole. He's gonna be talking about one thing. The guy,
- 1:23:17Speaker 9: you know, the one of like the some of the
- 1:23:19Speaker 9: very hardcore sheep hunters up there that are like intensively
- 1:23:24Speaker 9: like self managing sheep they find and have been, you know,
- 1:23:28Speaker 9: in spots, have been for years. You know, the guys
- 1:23:30Speaker 9: that are saying like I don't want to shoot a
- 1:23:32Speaker 9: ram unless he's ten years old and has reached his
- 1:23:34Speaker 9: potential or he's genetically inferior, like, you know, they get
- 1:23:38Speaker 9: really into it. You know, there may not be with
- 1:23:41Speaker 9: a lot of pressure under the full Carol rule. There
- 1:23:43Speaker 9: may not ever be a huge abundance of giant rams,
- 1:23:48Speaker 9: but there's gonna be huntable rams, and even a lot
- 1:23:50Speaker 9: of Like like Wayne and a guy named Joe Want
- 1:23:53Speaker 9: have been doing age recording like age studies for harvested
- 1:23:57Speaker 9: rams to show that in the you know, part of
- 1:23:59Speaker 9: this age structure thing that if a rams harvested when
- 1:24:03Speaker 9: he was ten, he was legal the year before, and
- 1:24:05Speaker 9: he was legal the year before that to kind of
- 1:24:07Speaker 9: get an you kind it's got an extrapolation, but you
- 1:24:10Speaker 9: kind of have an idea of all right, well, how
- 1:24:12Speaker 9: many more legal rams were out there after the season
- 1:24:16Speaker 9: that they've just been able to pretty much punch holes
- 1:24:18Speaker 9: in the argument that we're killing every ram is assusing
- 1:24:22Speaker 9: we're clipping them all off.
- 1:24:23Speaker 1: Let me explain thing you said, because this is interesting too.
- 1:24:27Speaker 1: A RAM can become legal, So in the general management
- 1:24:30Speaker 1: area is a ram can be legal three ways. He
- 1:24:32Speaker 1: gets full curl, and what that means is if you're
- 1:24:34Speaker 1: looking at him in profile, his horn describes a three
- 1:24:38Speaker 1: hundred and sixty degree circle. So like the imagine a
- 1:24:41Speaker 1: curled RAMS horn, the tip comes around and appears from
- 1:24:45Speaker 1: a side view to join up to the base, or
- 1:24:49Speaker 1: he's eight years old, and that would be that you
- 1:24:52Speaker 1: count annually because they don't always grow. They don't always
- 1:24:56Speaker 1: grow in a tight curl like they can grow in
- 1:24:59Speaker 1: his wide spy or they're never gonna hit full curl
- 1:25:02Speaker 1: or not never. But yeah, they'll be eight years old.
- 1:25:06Speaker 3: But not full curl.
- 1:25:07Speaker 1: And the only way you know he's eight is there's
- 1:25:09Speaker 1: these things called annually. They have a growth ring. And
- 1:25:11Speaker 1: if you know what you're doing, and you really need
- 1:25:14Speaker 1: to know what you're doing, like to shoot a ram
- 1:25:16Speaker 1: off of growth rings, you gotta it's risky, you gotta study,
- 1:25:21Speaker 1: You got to look at a lot of sheep and
- 1:25:23Speaker 1: really know how to use optics and all that. But
- 1:25:25Speaker 1: you can, theoretically, and now that's beyond theoretically, you can
- 1:25:28Speaker 1: count growth rings and kill a ram that's eight years old. Thirdly,
- 1:25:33Speaker 1: that ram can can braid off or snap off the
- 1:25:37Speaker 1: tips of his horns, and it has to do it
- 1:25:41Speaker 1: in a way that there's a thing on a ram's
- 1:25:42Speaker 1: horn called lamb tip, so it's its first year growth.
- 1:25:45Speaker 1: It used to not be clearly explained, but it's clearly
- 1:25:47Speaker 1: explained in the regulation, it has to grind away or
- 1:25:51Speaker 1: snap off that whole tip. If he does it on
- 1:25:56Speaker 1: both sides, he's never gonna become full curl. Then he
- 1:26:00Speaker 1: becomes legal. But young ones don't really do.
- 1:26:03Speaker 9: That, yeah or yeah, or you can't count on him
- 1:26:05Speaker 9: because you could never fairly judge whether they would have
- 1:26:08Speaker 9: been full curl or not. Like there's some slash like
- 1:26:10Speaker 9: but yeah.
- 1:26:11Speaker 1: Generally, and that's called it double.
- 1:26:13Speaker 9: Broomer, and it's you know a lot of times older
- 1:26:15Speaker 9: rams will be like that.
- 1:26:16Speaker 1: So so what Tyler's talking about is if you go
- 1:26:19Speaker 1: and you look and be like people are shooting full
- 1:26:22Speaker 1: curl rams, there's still legal that there's still legal lams
- 1:26:26Speaker 1: on landscape. It meaning if you shoot a full full
- 1:26:28Speaker 1: curl and he's and you count his age rings, his
- 1:26:32Speaker 1: growth rings, he's got ten annually, he's been legal and
- 1:26:35Speaker 1: not dead, yeah for two years.
- 1:26:38Speaker 9: And they'll also they'll also measure horn segments to show,
- 1:26:41Speaker 9: you know, to show that, hey, this ram has been
- 1:26:43Speaker 9: full curl, because you can look at him and judge
- 1:26:46Speaker 9: like how long. But yeah, so so he.
- 1:26:48Speaker 1: Slipped through the cracks as they might look at a
- 1:26:50Speaker 1: ram and be like he was managing to slip through
- 1:26:52Speaker 1: the cracks as a full curler. Yeah. Yeah, so every
- 1:26:54Speaker 1: ram that's full curls not getting killed.
- 1:26:56Speaker 9: No, not not not even remotely. You know, there may
- 1:26:59Speaker 9: be on a macro level, there may be this creek
- 1:27:02Speaker 9: there's no legal rams in right now. But on a
- 1:27:06Speaker 9: large scale, yeah, that that regulation protects that, you know,
- 1:27:12Speaker 9: younger age structure, younger rams generally, and uh, you know
- 1:27:16Speaker 9: that like you get some weird sometimes, you know, you
- 1:27:18Speaker 9: get a real young ram that just has tremendous growth.
- 1:27:21Speaker 9: And I've told myself, I don't want to shoot another
- 1:27:23Speaker 9: seven year old ram. But if there's a seven year
- 1:27:25Speaker 9: old ram that I think is over forty inches, are
- 1:27:26Speaker 9: probably gonna pop him, I'll make that sacrifice.
- 1:27:30Speaker 1: You're not interested in a seven year old ahead of
- 1:27:32Speaker 1: tight That's just.
- 1:27:34Speaker 9: That's just legal.
- 1:27:35Speaker 7: When uh, when these closures are happening on federal land,
- 1:27:41Speaker 7: what what's happening on state land with Alaska fishing game?
- 1:27:45Speaker 7: Like are there have they adjusted their management style?
- 1:27:49Speaker 9: They're still you know, they're no, their management style is
- 1:27:52Speaker 9: the same, and they're like there's different issues that can
- 1:27:55Speaker 9: be contentious, you know, like gout, you know, guide a
- 1:27:58Speaker 9: different guy out on state land Outfitters are not held
- 1:28:01Speaker 9: to it. They're an exclusive area where only they can
- 1:28:03Speaker 9: outfit there. So you get some conflict like that. But
- 1:28:07Speaker 9: the takeaways that that you know in these areas for
- 1:28:10Speaker 9: decades that full curl through a lot of big population
- 1:28:14Speaker 9: swings and crashes and booms, has shown that it allows
- 1:28:20Speaker 9: the sheep to recover back to that healthy level just
- 1:28:23Speaker 9: by you know, you may you may, you may have
- 1:28:27Speaker 9: hard hunting for a few years, but you have the
- 1:28:29Speaker 9: opportunity to go and harvest a serp like a ram
- 1:28:33Speaker 9: that is a surplus to the population, and not feel
- 1:28:36Speaker 9: bad about it because you're not You're not having any
- 1:28:40Speaker 9: any sensible effect on the population itself.
- 1:28:43Speaker 1: I want to hit another point here, which which I
- 1:28:46Speaker 1: think is a little bit to the crux of the issue.
- 1:28:47Speaker 1: You've spoken on it a bit, but I'm gonna tee
- 1:28:52Speaker 1: this this comment up by I talk about something that
- 1:28:54Speaker 1: happens in our own state here in Montana in the
- 1:28:58Speaker 1: early two thousands, around two thousand, there's a region of
- 1:29:03Speaker 1: the state, like the state's broken up in these seven
- 1:29:06Speaker 1: The state of Montana's broken up into seven regions, and
- 1:29:09Speaker 1: then each region is broken up into all kinds of units,
- 1:29:13Speaker 1: so they can they can manage wildlife on a very
- 1:29:15Speaker 1: micro level, and he's in you know, a unit. They
- 1:29:19Speaker 1: use the term union district district. Sorry, regions are broken
- 1:29:22Speaker 1: up into district. The district could be like a drainage, right,
- 1:29:25Speaker 1: so you have broadly, it's the state of Montana, six
- 1:29:28Speaker 1: hundred and forty six miles east to west. The state's
- 1:29:31Speaker 1: divided into seven regions, and each of those regions has
- 1:29:34Speaker 1: dozens of districts. Yeah, sometimes dozens of districts, meaning there's
- 1:29:41Speaker 1: micro management occurring. In two thousand, two thousand and one,
- 1:29:45Speaker 1: two thousand and two, in Region seven, they were giving
- 1:29:51Speaker 1: out something like thirteen thousand pronghorn tags. Every one of
- 1:29:57Speaker 1: those thirteen thousand people that would draw up prong horn
- 1:30:00Speaker 1: tag could buy up to two dough tags pronghorned dotags.
- 1:30:07Speaker 1: So in those years, I was going out pronghorn hunting
- 1:30:11Speaker 1: usually with three tags in my pocket. Numbers are down,
- 1:30:17Speaker 1: They're not down because the habitat destructure down because of
- 1:30:20Speaker 1: weather issues, predation, weather like variables, right, not like not
- 1:30:25Speaker 1: like wholesale destruction of habitat. And what is it now,
- 1:30:29Speaker 1: seven thousand, nine thousand, Okay, no one's walking around with
- 1:30:32Speaker 1: two dough tags in their pocket. Some number are walking
- 1:30:35Speaker 1: around with a dough tag in their pocket, but they've
- 1:30:37Speaker 1: cut almost in half the allocation. Now I'm not sitting
- 1:30:42Speaker 1: here saying they're stripping my rights. It's like, I have
- 1:30:46Speaker 1: a lot of faith that these allocations are reflective of
- 1:30:53Speaker 1: the situation on the ground, Meaning I have state and
- 1:30:56Speaker 1: I have faith in my state Fishing Game agency that
- 1:30:58Speaker 1: my state fishing Game agency is doing a a generally
- 1:31:02Speaker 1: great job of counting wildlife, making an assessment about what
- 1:31:07Speaker 1: the harvest rate can be, and doing it. And I
- 1:31:09Speaker 1: would look at be like, hey, my prong horn hunting opportunities,
- 1:31:13Speaker 1: you know they've been cut in half, sure, but but go.
- 1:31:16Speaker 7: On, Well it's it's easy to look at it and
- 1:31:20Speaker 7: be like, well, what they've cut dough tags? Right, So
- 1:31:23Speaker 7: I feel like and general tags in general, the general
- 1:31:27Speaker 7: tag is either sex. You can't just go buy do
- 1:31:30Speaker 7: go kill those wholesale anymore, which is how you keep
- 1:31:34Speaker 7: numbers where you want them, right.
- 1:31:35Speaker 1: Yeah, But what the point I'm making is there's been
- 1:31:38Speaker 1: a massive reduction in the amount of prong horn hunting opportunities,
- 1:31:41Speaker 1: but it's reflective of the situation on the ground. Meaning
- 1:31:44Speaker 1: if we get like prime conditions and prong horned numbers. Skyrocket.
- 1:31:50Speaker 1: I have a lot of faith that tag allocation, well, skyrocket.
- 1:31:56Speaker 1: What we're talking about here with this is like is
- 1:31:58Speaker 1: like a The problem here is people don't have that
- 1:32:01Speaker 1: faith because rather than being like, oh, it's going to
- 1:32:04Speaker 1: a draw, it's going to this is going to it's
- 1:32:06Speaker 1: just like shutting down huge chunks of ground. Ye, And
- 1:32:10Speaker 1: there's not a lot of faith that they're gonna turn
- 1:32:12Speaker 1: it back on No's and it winds up being like
- 1:32:14Speaker 1: one of these situations where like as you demonstrate non
- 1:32:17Speaker 1: resident caribou hunters up in that northwest quadrant of the
- 1:32:19Speaker 1: state killing three hundred bulls or something like that, it's insignificant,
- 1:32:22Speaker 1: meaning someone's looking and they're saying, there's a thing I
- 1:32:25Speaker 1: want to happen. I'm gonna use this. I'm gonna bullshit
- 1:32:30Speaker 1: everybody and use this thing I want to happen and
- 1:32:35Speaker 1: make a thing I want to happen happen. But I'm
- 1:32:37Speaker 1: gonna do it under a dubious justification, meaning I'm gonna
- 1:32:40Speaker 1: do it by talking about something other than what I'm
- 1:32:43Speaker 1: talking about.
- 1:32:44Speaker 9: I think that's exactly what's happening.
- 1:32:46Speaker 1: And you don't. It's hard to have faith that that
- 1:32:49Speaker 1: sheep numbers will improve and that five years so now
- 1:32:52Speaker 1: they're gonna be like welcome back hunters.
- 1:32:55Speaker 9: Well and even and it was a two year closure, well,
- 1:32:57Speaker 9: I mean, anything could happen, obviously, but I don't think
- 1:33:00Speaker 9: anybody's expecting it to open up because it's not. And
- 1:33:03Speaker 9: people hunters tend to, I think, you know, and cheap
- 1:33:06Speaker 9: like we tend to want to grab it any solution
- 1:33:09Speaker 9: that's going to flip a switch and make and bring
- 1:33:11Speaker 9: it back, make it right immediately. And it's not going
- 1:33:13Speaker 9: to happen like that. It's going to take a long time.
- 1:33:15Speaker 9: But just by the nature of it.
- 1:33:16Speaker 1: Yeah, the only way to really find out on the
- 1:33:18Speaker 1: issue is the wait and get out of these sort
- 1:33:24Speaker 1: of like dull sheep dark ages and have some recovery
- 1:33:28Speaker 1: and then stand back and say, okay, but if you're
- 1:33:31Speaker 1: looking better, what's going to happen now?
- 1:33:34Speaker 9: But I think as far as if you're looking at
- 1:33:36Speaker 9: what what we can look at to justify doing this
- 1:33:40Speaker 9: or not doing this, We've been through cheap crashes and
- 1:33:44Speaker 9: had even even through like more you know, liberal hunting.
- 1:33:47Speaker 12: Strategy them and you know, like it just the data
- 1:33:53Speaker 12: that we have show in your implies shows whatever you
- 1:33:56Speaker 12: want to say, concludes that hunting is just not doesn't
- 1:34:00Speaker 12: have an impactful doesn't play an impactful part on the
- 1:34:03Speaker 12: overall sheep as a whole.
- 1:34:05Speaker 1: Yeah, meaning you got you like, when you send a
- 1:34:07Speaker 1: hunter into the mountains, that hunter can only get one thing.
- 1:34:10Speaker 1: He can get a full curl ram. Yep, A full
- 1:34:12Speaker 1: crew ram is a dead man walking exactly, not the
- 1:34:14Speaker 1: thing that's driving that population.
- 1:34:16Speaker 7: The last number I can find is like roughly forty
- 1:34:21Speaker 7: thousand sheep. And if they killed four hundred.
- 1:34:25Speaker 9: Yeah, and I'm sure it's not right. Yeah, No, it's
- 1:34:28Speaker 9: a very small percentage of the sheep population that gets killed.
- 1:34:33Speaker 9: And uh so if one guy you know, And this
- 1:34:36Speaker 9: is why it's all very suspicious to me, and I
- 1:34:38Speaker 9: think there's some cahoots. And my personal opinion is that
- 1:34:42Speaker 9: the Federal Subsistence Board had their mind made up before
- 1:34:44Speaker 9: they ever even got the proposal. Sure, you know, at
- 1:34:47Speaker 9: the recommendation of one guy who's just says I drive the.
- 1:34:52Speaker 1: Road, and don't I've read writing about his reports.
- 1:34:55Speaker 9: Yeah, so it does. It doesn't add up. And you
- 1:34:59Speaker 9: want to go a step further. This year twenty twenty three,
- 1:35:03Speaker 9: a few days before the season, the Feds surveyed the
- 1:35:07Speaker 9: Yukon Charle of the forty Mile Country Tannana Uplands, and
- 1:35:12Speaker 9: the Park Service comes out with this announcement that they're
- 1:35:14Speaker 9: requesting an emergency closure of the Federal preserve lands on
- 1:35:19Speaker 9: the Charlie River in the forty Mile Country. And because
- 1:35:24Speaker 9: they're mighty person and it was uh and it was
- 1:35:28Speaker 9: a you know, as result before there's sheep, yeah for sheep, honey,
- 1:35:33Speaker 9: because they're because their survey numbers were so low. And
- 1:35:37Speaker 9: I'll just hint at Wayne Heimer, who's done flowing a
- 1:35:40Speaker 9: lot of sheep surveys, and any guy who's flying surveys
- 1:35:42Speaker 9: or if you're flying around a cub looking for sheep,
- 1:35:44Speaker 9: you are not seeing all the sheep that are there. Wayne,
- 1:35:47Speaker 9: like he you know, told me estimates Wayne that in
- 1:35:50Speaker 9: his sheep surveys he figured he was seeing at most
- 1:35:52Speaker 9: sixty percent of the sheep that were there. So there's
- 1:35:54Speaker 9: that tidbit. There's just a lot of hard side of
- 1:35:58Speaker 9: a mountain. Yeah, yeah, you know, And they're like I
- 1:36:00Speaker 9: can sit at a mount look at a mountain, or
- 1:36:02Speaker 9: up a drainage all day and not see a damn thing.
- 1:36:04Speaker 9: And at eight o'clock in the evening.
- 1:36:05Speaker 6: Boop, sheep, sheep, sheep.
- 1:36:06Speaker 5: You know.
- 1:36:07Speaker 9: So it's fallible, but they they do this survey imperfect,
- 1:36:11Speaker 9: but it's like the best thing you can do, yeah,
- 1:36:13Speaker 9: for sure. And uh so they survey this and you
- 1:36:17Speaker 9: and for people that don't know that Yukon Charlie area
- 1:36:19Speaker 9: is kind of it's marginal sheep country. There's spots of
- 1:36:23Speaker 9: sheep country and the population is historically like sparse, like
- 1:36:27Speaker 9: it's there's been cheap there for as long as anyone
- 1:36:30Speaker 9: has known. But they're not like concentrated. It's not like
- 1:36:34Speaker 9: the last age.
- 1:36:35Speaker 1: You'd think that there weren't. Yeah, I remember being surprised
- 1:36:37Speaker 1: with Pilot's pointing and saying, like I saw a ram
- 1:36:39Speaker 1: there one time. That's a bit it had to walk
- 1:36:41Speaker 1: through the timber to get.
- 1:36:42Speaker 9: There, well, and and that and something to consider when
- 1:36:45Speaker 9: you're saying, you know, you've seen the conclusions they come
- 1:36:47Speaker 9: to with this survey. Those sheep are sparse, and they're
- 1:36:51Speaker 9: down in the trees a lot, and you just find
- 1:36:53Speaker 9: them like talking, you know, I know old timers have
- 1:36:56Speaker 9: hunted and flown it for fifty years, and like they're there.
- 1:36:58Speaker 9: You'll find them in the weirdest spots. So you have
- 1:37:01Speaker 9: all that to consider, but we need to close this area,
- 1:37:05Speaker 9: and it averages one point four rams per year killed
- 1:37:10Speaker 9: in the entire area.
- 1:37:12Speaker 1: Basically, you can they can say they saved that.
- 1:37:15Speaker 9: Yeah, it's again like there's nothing and not only not
- 1:37:20Speaker 9: only well it is because not only it's an emergency closure,
- 1:37:24Speaker 9: not that. I don't believe that they give much about
- 1:37:27Speaker 9: public input anyway, other than they have to sit and
- 1:37:29Speaker 9: listen to it. Sometimes no public input. They just closed it.
- 1:37:34Speaker 1: And it was funny my body flying through that country
- 1:37:36Speaker 1: one time, my buddy showed me a spot where he
- 1:37:38Speaker 1: picked up two dead heads.
- 1:37:39Speaker 9: Yeah, because he.
- 1:37:39Speaker 1: Saw all the blood and snow. Yeah, and some wolves
- 1:37:41Speaker 1: that killed two rams. It's funny that little incident was
- 1:37:44Speaker 1: more rams than hunters killed. Yeah.
- 1:37:45Speaker 3: Yeah, How it is.
- 1:37:57Speaker 8: How much of an impact I mean this subjec like,
- 1:38:01Speaker 8: do you think wolves are playing on these sheep?
- 1:38:04Speaker 9: I think predation is is certainly an impact in fishing
- 1:38:08Speaker 9: game is considering how how they do you know, you
- 1:38:12Speaker 9: talk to you know, and and one of the things
- 1:38:15Speaker 9: like that people ought to keep in mind. They closed
- 1:38:19Speaker 9: the fishing game. State fishing game went along with closing
- 1:38:21Speaker 9: the entire western half of the Brooks Range a few
- 1:38:24Speaker 9: years ago due to you know, they had a weather
- 1:38:26Speaker 9: event and sheep were low, and you know, at least,
- 1:38:30Speaker 9: you know, you kind of got to take everything with
- 1:38:31Speaker 9: a grain of salt. But you talk to some old timers,
- 1:38:34Speaker 9: you talk who remember, well, all the outfitters up there
- 1:38:37Speaker 9: used to go airplane the heck out of wolves every spring.
- 1:38:40Speaker 9: Whether it was legal or not at the time, they
- 1:38:42Speaker 9: just did it. And you know, whether that's the reason
- 1:38:46Speaker 9: there was a big boom of sheep out there or not,
- 1:38:48Speaker 9: you know, like you can take it for what it's worth,
- 1:38:50Speaker 9: but it does play a factor, but it's it's kind
- 1:38:55Speaker 9: of a case by case thing. You know, some coyotes
- 1:38:58Speaker 9: in the Alaska Ranger a big sheep press editor, but
- 1:39:01Speaker 9: brad winling our sheep. You know that current research biologist
- 1:39:06Speaker 9: talked about a study over a couple of years that
- 1:39:08Speaker 9: a guy did observing lambs. One year, the leading cause
- 1:39:11Speaker 9: of mortality was drowning because there was a lot of runoff,
- 1:39:14Speaker 9: you know, and then the next year it was golden eagles. Yeah,
- 1:39:18Speaker 9: you know, so it's it all plays a factor for sure,
- 1:39:21Speaker 9: and I think you know, predator control is the one
- 1:39:23Speaker 9: button that could feasibly pushed, although I don't think it
- 1:39:28Speaker 9: would in every case, would be would make.
- 1:39:31Speaker 1: The difference, It's not necessarily.
- 1:39:33Speaker 9: But so they closed. They closed it like a few
- 1:39:36Speaker 9: days before the season for basically and there's not even
- 1:39:39Speaker 9: an established subsistence sheep hunt in there. So why is
- 1:39:42Speaker 9: the subsistence board closing an area that doesn't have a
- 1:39:45Speaker 9: subsistence sheep hunt? They said, for you know, possible future
- 1:39:48Speaker 9: subsist you know, just some bullshit reason and the subsistence to.
- 1:39:52Speaker 1: Keep to keep some aspirational sheep hunter from basically wasting
- 1:39:57Speaker 1: his time in the area.
- 1:39:58Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, you know, and uh and you uh you know, hey,
- 1:40:05Speaker 9: when I man, I was on a roll, lost my train,
- 1:40:07Speaker 9: you're doing so we uh you know, you close this
- 1:40:10Speaker 9: area and uh boy, I'll get it. Reminds me of
- 1:40:14Speaker 9: a sheep hunting presentation I gave one time where my
- 1:40:16Speaker 9: computer quit working. I had, Yeah, it was sweating it then,
- 1:40:22Speaker 9: but so where was that we you know, they closed
- 1:40:25Speaker 9: this area. So the subsistence board, you might think, oh, well,
- 1:40:28Speaker 9: that's like some like democratically elected type of thing. All
- 1:40:32Speaker 9: this federal Subsistence Board is the heads of I believe,
- 1:40:35Speaker 9: five agencies Park Service, Fission, Wildlife BLM, Forest Service, Bureau
- 1:40:40Speaker 9: of Indian Affairs. And then I think it's three people
- 1:40:43Speaker 9: that they appoint or someone at interior points. So the
- 1:40:48Speaker 9: voting majority of the Federal Subsistence Board making these decisions
- 1:40:51Speaker 9: is just the agencies. It's just them doing what they
- 1:40:53Speaker 9: want to do.
- 1:40:54Speaker 1: Essentially, this is my this is my last question on
- 1:40:56Speaker 1: this subject, and this is like total gut. Do you
- 1:41:00Speaker 1: think it's being driven Do you think it's being driven
- 1:41:04Speaker 1: by anti hunting sentiment like what we're seeing in Colorado,
- 1:41:08Speaker 1: what we're seeing in Washington, like by an animal rights agenda,
- 1:41:12Speaker 1: or do you think it's being driven by a agenda
- 1:41:16Speaker 1: of uh, I don't want to deal with other people.
- 1:41:21Speaker 9: I think I think it's a little bit of both,
- 1:41:24Speaker 9: but the UH. And it goes back to this seemingly
- 1:41:29Speaker 9: long standing mode of regulating to keep people, like for
- 1:41:36Speaker 9: regulating for minimal human use of the landscape. You know,
- 1:41:39Speaker 9: there was a excuse me, Dave's killer bread coming back
- 1:41:44Speaker 9: to get me, Jill you But so like years I
- 1:41:47Speaker 9: just an anecdote years ago, I remember one of the
- 1:41:50Speaker 9: the refuge manager for Anwar was trying to ban vibrant
- 1:41:53Speaker 9: bootsoles in antwar because they tear up the tundra. Hmm,
- 1:41:57Speaker 9: when the impeliots, it's just still.
- 1:41:59Speaker 1: Get Did you get anywhere with that?
- 1:42:01Speaker 9: No? But no he did not, but got it.
- 1:42:05Speaker 1: Yeah. Like there's like a like a sentiment like that
- 1:42:08Speaker 1: that like to look at the landscape and see human
- 1:42:11Speaker 1: however ephemeral, yeah, and non permanent, but like to see
- 1:42:15Speaker 1: that level of human use is sort of like falls
- 1:42:17Speaker 1: outside of what they feel is the best.
- 1:42:19Speaker 9: Yeah. I I think that's that's probably the biggest way,
- 1:42:22Speaker 9: which would be like a total preservation and it's a preservationist,
- 1:42:26Speaker 9: you know. That's why you see kind of a tearing
- 1:42:29Speaker 9: of it. You know, the Park Service is the quote
- 1:42:33Speaker 9: unquote worst than you know, fish wild life then b
- 1:42:36Speaker 9: LM unless you're unless you're a small time minor.
- 1:42:39Speaker 1: But but but hunting isn't you know, I don't even
- 1:42:45Speaker 1: think like like the kind of hunting we're talking about
- 1:42:47Speaker 1: isn't incompatible with like unless you're one hundred percent preservations
- 1:42:51Speaker 1: hunting isn't incompatible with the preservations perspective.
- 1:42:53Speaker 9: You're preaching to the choir man.
- 1:42:55Speaker 1: But but I want, but I want to have time
- 1:42:56Speaker 1: to I want to have time to jump into our thing.
- 1:42:59Speaker 1: Give me your take. Give me your take on what
- 1:43:02Speaker 1: should happen with.
- 1:43:03Speaker 9: Anwar as far as the oil drilling stuff.
- 1:43:07Speaker 1: Give me your take on how how people in your view,
- 1:43:10Speaker 1: how should people sort of conceptualize anwar, and what's your
- 1:43:14Speaker 1: take on what should happen in ant war.
- 1:43:16Speaker 9: You know, I'm not even convinced at this point that
- 1:43:20Speaker 9: that we need to or should drill it. I'm kind
- 1:43:23Speaker 9: of somewhere in the middle, you know, kind of undecided.
- 1:43:27Speaker 9: I don't see an imminent need to drill it right now.
- 1:43:30Speaker 1: So you just you mean, from a national security perspective,
- 1:43:33Speaker 1: from economy, oil prices, I think there's I think in Alaska.
- 1:43:37Speaker 9: Alaska is a resource state for sure, and there's a
- 1:43:40Speaker 9: balance to be struck between development of those resources and
- 1:43:45Speaker 9: what we want to keep as untouched or is what
- 1:43:50Speaker 9: we perceive it to be untouched, you know, like the
- 1:43:53Speaker 9: Aryan ant war that they you know, is kind.
- 1:43:54Speaker 1: Of up for so ant wir just just clarify Arctic
- 1:43:57Speaker 1: National Wildife PRESU And so this there's been a long
- 1:44:01Speaker 1: simmering the state.
- 1:44:03Speaker 9: People from the state have been pushing to open this
- 1:44:06Speaker 9: area ten O two they call it, which was set
- 1:44:08Speaker 9: aside as for potential oil exploration and drill and eventual drilling.
- 1:44:15Speaker 5: And I.
- 1:44:17Speaker 9: I don't want to talk out of my ass because
- 1:44:19Speaker 9: I don't remember a lot of the details. But there
- 1:44:21Speaker 9: was a book on the creation of ann War and
- 1:44:23Speaker 9: how that area was not originally supposed to be part
- 1:44:25Speaker 9: of it. It could have been folded in there with
- 1:44:26Speaker 9: a nilka. I don't know, but the ten o two area, yeah,
- 1:44:29Speaker 9: the ten o two so, and that area was our
- 1:44:33Speaker 9: It was completely seismic surveyed in the eighties, like as
- 1:44:36Speaker 9: a lot of Alaska people think of Alaska as being
- 1:44:38Speaker 9: completely untouched. Man, there's seismic lines running everywhere. Yeah, and
- 1:44:42Speaker 9: uh so straight straight yeah, well, excuse.
- 1:44:50Speaker 1: Me, Tyler got into a bread seed stuff in his throat.
- 1:44:52Speaker 9: It's ironic. We got a cop and then we got
- 1:44:54Speaker 9: a coffin shaped table here, so as and as uh well,
- 1:45:01Speaker 9: my good buddy and hunting partner, I call him doctor
- 1:45:05Speaker 9: Frank Schultz. He's not really a doctor, but that's a
- 1:45:07Speaker 9: whole nother story.
- 1:45:08Speaker 1: He was.
- 1:45:09Speaker 9: We recently discussed he would talk to someone who was
- 1:45:11Speaker 9: actually I think it was there one of their family
- 1:45:13Speaker 9: members were actually participated in this statewide survey. You know,
- 1:45:17Speaker 9: seismic survey lines where they in the winter they wait
- 1:45:20Speaker 9: for the ground to freeze and drop the dozer blade
- 1:45:21Speaker 9: and go ye. But different, different kind of subjects. So
- 1:45:26Speaker 9: I think the important thing, whether we end up drilling
- 1:45:30Speaker 9: it or not drilling it, is just to look at
- 1:45:32Speaker 9: a little there's a little more context around than what
- 1:45:36Speaker 9: the general public knows. You know, you get a lot
- 1:45:39Speaker 9: of or back when it when it was like kind
- 1:45:41Speaker 9: of the hot button issue, you get a lot of
- 1:45:43Speaker 9: like emotionally driven pictures and sure arguments made to be
- 1:45:47Speaker 9: like well, you know, any reasonable person would oppose this,
- 1:45:52Speaker 9: but you know they'll they'll say, like the caribou of
- 1:45:55Speaker 9: great concern, which they are, but you know, there's these
- 1:45:58Speaker 9: theories that it's gonna death to make the porcupine caribou
- 1:46:01Speaker 9: herd if we if we move into that area, well
- 1:46:05Speaker 9: there's drill pads like fifty miles away, and the the
- 1:46:08Speaker 9: data or any like data we could look at fifty
- 1:46:12Speaker 9: miles away, or I guess Pruto itself is more farther
- 1:46:14Speaker 9: than that, but right next door. The central art occurred
- 1:46:18Speaker 9: exploded during the expansion of prudo bait oil fields in
- 1:46:22Speaker 9: the pipeline, and there was a lot of worries. There's
- 1:46:24Speaker 9: a lot of worries about what would happen with them.
- 1:46:27Speaker 9: I mean they built like sections of the pipeline that
- 1:46:30Speaker 9: go underground for Caribo to cross, because that was a
- 1:46:32Speaker 9: big concern. They didn't know what they'd never seen anything.
- 1:46:34Speaker 1: Like what they would do with the overhead structure.
- 1:46:36Speaker 9: And as you know, time has shown they don't care,
- 1:46:38Speaker 9: and they'll in fact like flock to the pipeline and
- 1:46:41Speaker 9: a lot of the oil field buildings because the windows
- 1:46:43Speaker 9: run under them.
- 1:46:44Speaker 1: It's like it's like you almost take it like a
- 1:46:48Speaker 1: like a propaganda photo that came out of that time
- 1:46:50Speaker 1: would be Caribou getting in the shade of the pipeline.
- 1:46:53Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The love it, you know, and even
- 1:46:57Speaker 9: even the you know Jim Reardon who wrote Alaska's wolf
- 1:47:00Speaker 9: Man and wrote a lot of a lot of stories
- 1:47:02Speaker 9: for Outdoor Life over the years. I have the original copy.
- 1:47:04Speaker 1: That's one of my favorite books of all time.
- 1:47:06Speaker 9: Oh me too, It's it's phenomenal. So one of he
- 1:47:10Speaker 9: wrote an article kind of pre pipeline, like wondering what
- 1:47:14Speaker 9: what the heck's going to happen? Yeah, yeah, it's a
- 1:47:17Speaker 9: it was a two part story. I've got the original
- 1:47:19Speaker 9: copies of them.
- 1:47:20Speaker 1: But uh, but the caribou that I mean, if caribou
- 1:47:23Speaker 1: did well in prude Obey with the oil, it wasn't
- 1:47:26Speaker 1: because of the oil. It was just because it's a
- 1:47:27Speaker 1: cyclical Yeah, I think so, I guess someone could look
- 1:47:30Speaker 1: at say it didn't have it didn't have obvious negative
- 1:47:34Speaker 1: impacts on an already cyclical thing, and in fact we
- 1:47:38Speaker 1: saw the up down cycle continued. Yeah, I think the
- 1:47:42Speaker 1: I think you still saw good peaks, you know.
- 1:47:45Speaker 9: Yeah, I think at the very least you could say
- 1:47:46Speaker 9: that that has shown that they're not incompatible.
- 1:47:49Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:47:50Speaker 9: So there's you know, and that's one of the big
- 1:47:52Speaker 9: one of the big arguments. And in kind of looking
- 1:47:57Speaker 9: researching this stuff, I uh, a guy had sent me
- 1:48:01Speaker 9: a I think it was Environmental Impacts Impact Environmental Impact
- 1:48:05Speaker 9: study by the American Ecological Society, and their assertion was
- 1:48:11Speaker 9: that the three D seismic survey that would have to
- 1:48:13Speaker 9: happen would be the riskiest part of the whole because
- 1:48:16Speaker 9: they've got to roll this equipment around. But they did
- 1:48:18Speaker 9: concede that that the environmental regulations for conducting that are
- 1:48:22Speaker 9: so strict that they should it should keep you know,
- 1:48:26Speaker 9: some of these things they're worried about happening from happening.
- 1:48:30Speaker 9: And that's another thing that people don't understand quite how
- 1:48:33Speaker 9: restrictive the rules are, even in existing oil fields and stuff.
- 1:48:36Speaker 9: I haven't worked up there a bunch back in my
- 1:48:39Speaker 9: my pipe covering days. I was on jobs up there
- 1:48:42Speaker 9: and saw some of it. But a guy put put
- 1:48:45Speaker 9: it to me was pretty good illustration. He said, if
- 1:48:48Speaker 9: you're up you know you're up there, and you have
- 1:48:50Speaker 9: a half million dollar piece of equipment, and a seagull
- 1:48:53Speaker 9: lands and makes a nest on there, you can't touch
- 1:48:55Speaker 9: that piece of equipment till that seagull's gone.
- 1:48:57Speaker 1: Mm hmmm.
- 1:48:58Speaker 9: It doesn't matter if you got to get another one
- 1:49:00Speaker 9: shipped up there to use it for the time being,
- 1:49:01Speaker 9: it doesn't matter. You can't touch it, you can't interact
- 1:49:03Speaker 9: with it. Where's a reasonable person to be like, all right,
- 1:49:06Speaker 9: sorry about your luck this year, mister Siegell. You know,
- 1:49:09Speaker 9: I guess it would be missus seagull.
- 1:49:10Speaker 1: But miss.
- 1:49:12Speaker 9: I had to read strange times these days.
- 1:49:15Speaker 1: Did the Willow did the fact that they expanded into
- 1:49:18Speaker 1: that Willow oil field? Did that take pressure off of
- 1:49:22Speaker 1: the ant war conversation about whether or not to move
- 1:49:24Speaker 1: into antwar it may have, you know.
- 1:49:27Speaker 9: And I think a lot of the uh, I think
- 1:49:29Speaker 9: a lot of ant war is just like used for
- 1:49:31Speaker 9: political jostling as much as anything. I don't know that
- 1:49:34Speaker 9: there's like a very real, like realistic possibility that it's
- 1:49:38Speaker 9: gonna happen anytime soon, And I don't know that it's needed,
- 1:49:42Speaker 9: you know.
- 1:49:42Speaker 1: So so you feel it's like that argument is chilled
- 1:49:45Speaker 1: out right now?
- 1:49:45Speaker 9: Oh yeah, for sure, you know, there's always going to
- 1:49:48Speaker 9: be people that want it, but whether and there's always
- 1:49:51Speaker 9: going to people be people who don't want it no
- 1:49:53Speaker 9: matter what. But whether it even is like a relevant
- 1:49:57Speaker 9: issue right now, Like I think there's a big it's
- 1:50:01Speaker 9: a it's a in my opinion, it's kind of a
- 1:50:03Speaker 9: distraction from I think the loss of hunting opportunity that's
- 1:50:08Speaker 9: just like cascading throughout the state. Now, I was more
- 1:50:11Speaker 9: of an important issue to me.
- 1:50:12Speaker 1: Yeah, I worry about both those things. And the reason
- 1:50:14Speaker 1: I worry about them in tandem, and I don't think
- 1:50:16Speaker 1: it's like I worry about them both, but I worry
- 1:50:21Speaker 1: about them both from the same perspective, is that I
- 1:50:26Speaker 1: want there to be as much wildlife on the ground
- 1:50:31Speaker 1: as possible, and I want hunters and anglers to have
- 1:50:35Speaker 1: maximum access to that wildlife. So the restrictions, the sort
- 1:50:41Speaker 1: of the seemingly arbitrary kind of conniving restrictions on hunting
- 1:50:45Speaker 1: access bothers me, as does the loss of wildlife habitat.
- 1:50:50Speaker 5: Ye.
- 1:50:51Speaker 1: So if I look at like from my perspective, if
- 1:50:53Speaker 1: I look at a thing where you have a chunk
- 1:50:57Speaker 1: of land that's not exploited and it's cordoned off, and
- 1:51:01Speaker 1: there's a basic understanding of it being unexploited, even outside
- 1:51:04Speaker 1: of any like super detailed understanding of where the boundary
- 1:51:07Speaker 1: lines and how the boundary lines are drawn and any
- 1:51:10Speaker 1: fuzziness about that, I would just look and say, like
- 1:51:13Speaker 1: I will look from my perspective and say, theoretically, even
- 1:51:17Speaker 1: though I'm even though I might not understand every nuance
- 1:51:20Speaker 1: of every drainage and all that, I would say, if
- 1:51:22Speaker 1: there's chunks of ground that aren't touched, I celebrate not
- 1:51:26Speaker 1: touching them.
- 1:51:27Speaker 9: Yeah, And that's and that's a logical thing.
- 1:51:29Speaker 1: In terms of just maintaining in terms of maintaining wildlife habitat.
- 1:51:34Speaker 1: Because however you play, I don't think I like toy
- 1:51:38Speaker 1: with the global perspective but I more imagine, like I
- 1:51:42Speaker 1: look sort of my perspective as very American, like like
- 1:51:45Speaker 1: the United States of America, right, And of course you know,
- 1:51:50Speaker 1: I pay extra concern around my immediate area, and I
- 1:51:54Speaker 1: do a lot of hunting in a particular state. So
- 1:51:56Speaker 1: I look at the wildlife politics in that state. I'm
- 1:51:59Speaker 1: not in all asking, but I look at it as
- 1:52:01Speaker 1: a place I love. It's part of a country that
- 1:52:04Speaker 1: I love. And so I look at a thing like
- 1:52:06Speaker 1: a wire, I'm like, man, I don't I don't want
- 1:52:08Speaker 1: to mess with it. I don't want messic I don't
- 1:52:10Speaker 1: want to mess with any of the areas we have
- 1:52:13Speaker 1: that aren't developed. Yeah, Like, and it's just it's just
- 1:52:17Speaker 1: for me, it's as simple. It's just as simple as
- 1:52:21Speaker 1: if there's big chunks of ground that aren't developed. I
- 1:52:24Speaker 1: just hate to see him developed. Yeah, because I think
- 1:52:26Speaker 1: that down the road one hundred years from now, two
- 1:52:28Speaker 1: hundred years from now, I won't be around. But when
- 1:52:32Speaker 1: looking at when weighing it out, I'm like, two hundred
- 1:52:35Speaker 1: years from now, that'll be celebrated like that, that that
- 1:52:40Speaker 1: decision of restraint, and you look at like even to
- 1:52:43Speaker 1: take something, and I don't want to make too much
- 1:52:44Speaker 1: of a point about this. But you take something like
- 1:52:46Speaker 1: what wrote what Theodore Roosevelt did when he was creating
- 1:52:53Speaker 1: the National force system. He pissed everybody off when he
- 1:52:56Speaker 1: did the Midnight Forest, which is what twenty some he created.
- 1:52:59Speaker 1: Twenty some that they didn't call him national force at
- 1:53:02Speaker 1: a time serves the exact number.
- 1:53:05Speaker 10: Uh.
- 1:53:05Speaker 1: Here, there was a there was a bill moving through
- 1:53:09Speaker 1: Congress that was gonna make it that was gonna strip
- 1:53:11Speaker 1: him of an ability to create national forests, and he
- 1:53:14Speaker 1: was going to veto it, but he knew sentiment against
- 1:53:17Speaker 1: him was so high that if he vetoed it, his
- 1:53:21Speaker 1: veto would be overridden. So they call him the Midnight
- 1:53:25Speaker 1: Forest because his ability to create these things would expire
- 1:53:29Speaker 1: at midnight. He then goes and creates like twenty four
- 1:53:32Speaker 1: or twenty seven more preserves, and then it wakes up
- 1:53:35Speaker 1: in the morning and signs a bill saying he can't
- 1:53:37Speaker 1: do it anymore, and what happens. They carve him on
- 1:53:40Speaker 1: Mount Rushmore. So I'm just saying, like, like, over long
- 1:53:43Speaker 1: periods of time, I think that that that that over
- 1:53:46Speaker 1: long periods of time, that that desire to create undeveloped
- 1:53:53Speaker 1: areas and protect undeveloped areas is celebrated. But I'm so
- 1:53:58Speaker 1: myopic in my intro and so my opic and my
- 1:54:01Speaker 1: views that if you do all that and make it
- 1:54:03Speaker 1: that people can't hunt it, I look, it's not a
- 1:54:06Speaker 1: win anymore.
- 1:54:07Speaker 9: No, I feel, well, yeah you did, but.
- 1:54:11Speaker 1: You threw out the baby with the bath water well
- 1:54:13Speaker 1: and a lot of people. Man, it's a win in
- 1:54:16Speaker 1: some like some hazy distant environmental way perhaps, but like,
- 1:54:21Speaker 1: it's not the win I'm after. Yeah. The win I'm
- 1:54:24Speaker 1: after is access for like access for people who hunt fish.
- 1:54:30Speaker 9: Yeah, you know, and sometimes that access is going to
- 1:54:33Speaker 9: be tough, but at least you have the.
- 1:54:34Speaker 1: Opportunity theoretically whether or not you get, whether or not
- 1:54:37Speaker 1: you go there or not. Like, I don't know. I
- 1:54:39Speaker 1: still I never have hunted the Frank Church. Never hunted
- 1:54:43Speaker 1: the Frank Church, the celebrated wilderness area that we have
- 1:54:46Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight, I never hunted there. I
- 1:54:48Speaker 1: wouldn't be surprised if I died. Never hunted there. I
- 1:54:51Speaker 1: like it being there. I would be livid if they
- 1:54:54Speaker 1: tried to strip hunting rights from it. But I've never
- 1:54:56Speaker 1: been there. Yeah, Tommy, never, you know, It's just like
- 1:54:59Speaker 1: I like knowing it's there. Yeah, and it's a win
- 1:55:01Speaker 1: that it's there. It's a win that you can hunt it. Yeah.
- 1:55:03Speaker 9: I think that's a totally reasonable way to look at
- 1:55:06Speaker 9: it too. I think just when and not arguing for
- 1:55:09Speaker 9: or against because a lot of these projects, you know,
- 1:55:11Speaker 9: these potential projects and whatnot that come up, I'm not
- 1:55:15Speaker 9: even necessarily for them or against them, or I kind
- 1:55:18Speaker 9: of lean. I lean that way where I don't want
- 1:55:20Speaker 9: to see development that's not necessary or is going to
- 1:55:23Speaker 9: be irresponsibly done or what that. But yeah, the uh,
- 1:55:27Speaker 9: I feel the same way that what good. You know,
- 1:55:29Speaker 9: not necessarily that it's not good to have that land,
- 1:55:31Speaker 9: but if I can't hunt it, or you're taking my
- 1:55:34Speaker 9: opportunity to hunt it, so you know, so a few
- 1:55:38Speaker 9: guys can have a private playground understood.
- 1:55:40Speaker 1: Yeah, what was your take on this is kind of
- 1:55:43Speaker 1: like another one that sort of went away. What was
- 1:55:45Speaker 1: your take on Pebble Mind? That was the thing that
- 1:55:47Speaker 1: generated enormous amounts of interest from out from outsiders.
- 1:55:51Speaker 9: Yeah, it was huge.
- 1:55:53Speaker 1: How did you sit on that?
- 1:55:54Speaker 9: I generally kind I just leaned against it. I didn't
- 1:55:57Speaker 9: have like a firm but it's like, eh, you know,
- 1:55:59Speaker 9: it just it seemed like talking to people who live
- 1:56:02Speaker 9: in the area and like have a lot of vested interest,
- 1:56:06Speaker 9: like personal interest, it probably was not the right thing
- 1:56:09Speaker 9: to do.
- 1:56:09Speaker 1: Yeah, So, but you didn't you didn't view it as
- 1:56:12Speaker 1: that this is the thing that will break a last No.
- 1:56:15Speaker 1: So now what's your what's your take on do you
- 1:56:19Speaker 1: what's your position on Ambler Road?
- 1:56:22Speaker 9: I would I'd say I'd lean more against it because
- 1:56:26Speaker 9: I mean, well, for one, they're not going to offer
- 1:56:27Speaker 9: any public access supposedly, but they did say that with
- 1:56:30Speaker 9: the pipeline or the adult the know, the Hall road,
- 1:56:33Speaker 9: initially that was not not a public access.
- 1:56:35Speaker 1: Road, and initially it was not planned to ever be.
- 1:56:39Speaker 9: No, it was just strictly an oil an oil company road,
- 1:56:43Speaker 9: you know, or oil oil resources road. So yeah, at
- 1:56:47Speaker 9: that point, you know, my outlook is like, well, do
- 1:56:50Speaker 9: we really need this here right now?
- 1:56:52Speaker 1: And it's not going to increase your access anyway.
- 1:56:54Speaker 9: It's not going to increase my access. If there was
- 1:56:57Speaker 9: like a firm plan to you know, to allow some
- 1:56:59Speaker 9: hunter access, you know, yeah, I'd be okay for it,
- 1:57:02Speaker 9: I'd be I would be more willing to that might yeah,
- 1:57:07Speaker 9: at least create like a win. Yeah, for sure. Like
- 1:57:10Speaker 9: there's there's a road outside of Fairbanks. You guys drove
- 1:57:13Speaker 9: right by it to Pogo Mine, and it's not near
- 1:57:16Speaker 9: as long a road or through as controversial a territory.
- 1:57:20Speaker 9: I remember guys when they first put that road in,
- 1:57:23Speaker 9: would take their four wheelers up there and sneak, you know,
- 1:57:25Speaker 9: they weren't supposed to, they would. They couldn't do anything
- 1:57:27Speaker 9: to you if you're off the road. They just couldn't
- 1:57:29Speaker 9: catch you on the road speaking to some you know,
- 1:57:32Speaker 9: some some sketchy stuff. And the hunt was up was
- 1:57:34Speaker 9: pretty good up there for you know, till they really
- 1:57:36Speaker 9: cracked down on it. But there's still no public access
- 1:57:38Speaker 9: to that road. You know, Like the resources are important
- 1:57:41Speaker 9: and access to them is important, but you know, it's
- 1:57:46Speaker 9: just got to be balanced.
- 1:57:47Speaker 1: I think. So tell folks how to tell folks how
- 1:57:50Speaker 1: to find all your work, because if you if you're
- 1:57:52Speaker 1: interested in you know, I always use the term wildlife
- 1:57:55Speaker 1: politics if you're interested in wildlife and management in Alaska.
- 1:57:59Speaker 1: Plus we've spent all our time talking about like some
- 1:58:01Speaker 1: controversial political stuff. But you're also very accomplished, avid hunter.
- 1:58:07Speaker 1: Do you everything from fur handling, like I said, hunting bears,
- 1:58:11Speaker 1: with long bows.
- 1:58:12Speaker 7: Yeah, we got to have him back to talk some
- 1:58:14Speaker 7: fun stuff.
- 1:58:15Speaker 1: Talking about fun stuff. So, but tell people how to follow,
- 1:58:18Speaker 1: like where to listen, how to follow your adventures.
- 1:58:21Speaker 9: Yeah. So I'm staff writer for outdoor Life, So outdoor
- 1:58:25Speaker 9: life dot com and published on what on uh usually
- 1:58:29Speaker 9: a couple of stories a week. I do like a
- 1:58:31Speaker 9: triminted a lot of gun stuff, a lot of like
- 1:58:34Speaker 9: gun reviews, stuff like that, but all dip into important
- 1:58:38Speaker 9: you know, Alaska based issues and the odd you know,
- 1:58:41Speaker 9: hunting story. Like the most narrative stories are like are
- 1:58:43Speaker 9: my favorite.
- 1:58:44Speaker 1: Like most everything I read about the issues we've been
- 1:58:46Speaker 1: talking about. Most everything I read is your work.
- 1:58:50Speaker 7: You're gonna sounds good because it's no nonsense.
- 1:58:53Speaker 9: No, And that's what you know. Which is funny is
- 1:58:56Speaker 9: I'm staying with my coworker, our shooting editor, John snow
- 1:58:58Speaker 9: here in town. He lives here in Bozeman, and uh
- 1:59:01Speaker 9: like he's he's put a tremendous amount of work into me,
- 1:59:06Speaker 9: and like this is how we're gonna be, this is
- 1:59:08Speaker 9: the type of gun content we're gonna do, and just
- 1:59:11Speaker 9: it's it's a lot of fun. I love my job,
- 1:59:14Speaker 9: So old Life dot Com and Uh, I have my
- 1:59:18Speaker 9: podcast is.
- 1:59:18Speaker 1: Called thunder Talk and that's your own podcast.
- 1:59:20Speaker 9: Yeah, that's mine. Okay, So it's uh, it's a fairly
- 1:59:24Speaker 9: like it's just me and other hunters and from Alaska.
- 1:59:29Speaker 9: I mean, we talk about Alaska last you know what
- 1:59:31Speaker 9: we've been up to this last week kind of fixed
- 1:59:33Speaker 9: you know, I had to fix this generator. Here's how
- 1:59:35Speaker 9: I did it. There's a whole variety of just kind
- 1:59:38Speaker 9: of you know, loose like casual stuff, but a lot
- 1:59:42Speaker 9: there's there's so many people up there. I'm not that
- 1:59:45Speaker 9: special up there, Like I'm just a dude. There's a
- 1:59:48Speaker 9: lot of cool people who do a lot of cool
- 1:59:50Speaker 9: stuff up there, and that's kind of what I want
- 1:59:52Speaker 9: to share in my podcast. So it's called thunder Talk.
- 1:59:55Speaker 1: And yeah, to get one, but you guys have that
- 1:59:58Speaker 1: you still do that mergery? Do those making my boots?
- 2:00:01Speaker 9: I have some stickers at I don't have, but I have.
- 2:00:05Speaker 1: Like the hoodies with Mickey What do you guys call
- 2:00:07Speaker 1: them boots?
- 2:00:09Speaker 2: Yeah?
- 2:00:09Speaker 9: Yeah, no I can. Uh, I've been getting bugged to
- 2:00:11Speaker 9: do another order of those, so I'll make sure. I'll
- 2:00:14Speaker 9: make sure you get one right now.
- 2:00:15Speaker 1: You got your uh, you got your talks, thunder talks.
- 2:00:19Speaker 9: This is how I get all my clothes is I
- 2:00:20Speaker 9: just do bulk quarters of clothes and sell some of
- 2:00:23Speaker 9: them and then I don't have to buy clothes. But
- 2:00:26Speaker 9: uh that's the old Skidu tundra one cylinder.
- 2:00:29Speaker 1: And tunder talk is anywhere you find podcasts. Anywhere you
- 2:00:31Speaker 1: find podcasts, and you're on social media.
- 2:00:33Speaker 9: Social media, uh Instagram, primarily just at the Tyler freel
- 2:00:38Speaker 9: because I couldn't think of something more.
- 2:00:40Speaker 1: Do you do you like or hate when people write
- 2:00:43Speaker 1: you emails and hey, I want to come up? Where
- 2:00:45Speaker 1: should I go?
- 2:00:46Speaker 5: No?
- 2:00:46Speaker 9: I get a lot. I get a lot of it.
- 2:00:47Speaker 9: So that's kind of part of it. I mean, my
- 2:00:49Speaker 9: that's my station is you know the type of stuff
- 2:00:51Speaker 9: I do, And that's part of it. And I can't
- 2:00:54Speaker 9: always get back get to everybody, but I try to
- 2:00:56Speaker 9: give what help. I'm not gonna tell I'm not gonna
- 2:00:58Speaker 9: tell you where I hunt where I don't.
- 2:01:00Speaker 1: You don't give cordon no no, but guidance.
- 2:01:03Speaker 9: But you know, logistical like get a lot of logistical
- 2:01:05Speaker 9: questions stuff like that. So yeah, I'm happy to happy
- 2:01:08Speaker 9: to entertain that stuff as best I can know. And uh, yeah,
- 2:01:12Speaker 9: I do piss some people off occasionally, you said, you
- 2:01:15Speaker 9: mentioned long bows. You would think that shooting a grizzly
- 2:01:19Speaker 9: bear with a stone arrowhead.
- 2:01:20Speaker 1: Would be universally celebrated or.
- 2:01:23Speaker 9: Me, So you would think that would be more controversial
- 2:01:28Speaker 9: than shooting one with a six or five creed more.
- 2:01:31Speaker 9: But you would be wrong.
- 2:01:33Speaker 1: Seriously. Oh yeah, Oh you get more pissed.
- 2:01:36Speaker 9: Oh yeah, way more when it's on a video that
- 2:01:40Speaker 9: I could tell you I shot this with a three
- 2:01:42Speaker 9: thirty eight and you would believe me. Anyway, that's a
- 2:01:45Speaker 9: whole other.
- 2:01:47Speaker 1: People are Yeah, people get annoyed. Well, we got to
- 2:01:50Speaker 1: have you back on to talk about like the good
- 2:01:52Speaker 1: not the good stuff.
- 2:01:53Speaker 9: We have the fun stuff. Yeah, not depressing talk about.
- 2:01:57Speaker 9: So I'm sorry if I was waiting like.
- 2:01:59Speaker 1: It's not depressed. I think, like I I watched with
- 2:02:01Speaker 1: fascination because I think that they're So it's just a
- 2:02:08Speaker 1: really great lesson about It's a really great lesson about
- 2:02:12Speaker 1: land access, land administration, the pushing pull of different interests.
- 2:02:18Speaker 1: You can learn, you know, I mean when when it
- 2:02:21Speaker 1: comes to fighting about wildlife, Uh, you'll learn the most
- 2:02:25Speaker 1: watch in Alaska.
- 2:02:27Speaker 9: Yeah, I think so it's still pretty well has got
- 2:02:30Speaker 9: like a.
- 2:02:30Speaker 1: Dozen big game animals. I mean, it's just like, there's
- 2:02:32Speaker 1: a lot. There's a lot going on up there. If
- 2:02:34Speaker 1: you're interested in how these battles get fought and won
- 2:02:38Speaker 1: and lost. Look to Alaska, man, you know it's uh
- 2:02:43Speaker 1: and and following your work's a great way to follow it.
- 2:02:45Speaker 1: So yeah, I appreciate you coming on.
- 2:02:46Speaker 9: Man, but Alaska sucks. Don't tell your tell your friends.
- 2:02:49Speaker 1: Sure you should make it seem a lot worse.
- 2:02:52Speaker 9: Yeah.
- 2:02:53Speaker 1: Like, and then they closed the whole state to non
- 2:02:55Speaker 1: resident All right, thanks a lot, ladies and gentlemen. Tyler
- 2:03:02Speaker 1: Freil check him out. Uh he's at outdoor life dot com,
- 2:03:05Speaker 1: thunder Talk, Instagram, Instagram, like at Tyler Freil at the
- 2:03:10Speaker 1: Tyler Freeld one. Yeah, don't go to some bake Tyler
- 2:03:13Speaker 1: Friel last week, thank you.
- 2:03:15Speaker 11: I love those dag big big white tails, those bag
- 2:03:23Speaker 11: bi big white tails. I love those beach by a
- 2:03:31Speaker 11: shot g e E tales. I love those beachy bi
- 2:03:35Speaker 11: white tales.
- 2:03:39Speaker 3: Big white tails, big white tails, big white tales are great.
- 2:03:44Speaker 3: Hold what fun it is to sit in the freezing
- 2:03:47Speaker 3: cold tree all day? Big white tales, big white tails,
- 2:03:52Speaker 3: big white tails are great? Hold, what fun it is
- 2:03:57Speaker 3: to sit in the freezing cold tree all day, dashing
- 2:04:01Speaker 3: through the woods for the morning light, turns grave across
- 2:04:06Speaker 3: the fields and draws creep in all the way, climb
- 2:04:12Speaker 3: into the tree. Big bucks are on the wave. What
- 2:04:17Speaker 3: fun he is to sit and wait for my gosh
- 2:04:20Speaker 3: don deer all day? Oh big, I'm sorry?
- 2:04:25Speaker 11: What is this?
- 2:04:26Speaker 3: Pisocado strings?
- 2:04:28Speaker 2: Who do you think?
- 2:04:29Speaker 1: I am?
- 2:04:29Speaker 11: Enya?
- 2:04:30Speaker 2: Get this add here?
- 2:04:31Speaker 1: I don't want to hear it.
- 2:04:33Speaker 2: Thank you?
- 2:04:33Speaker 3: Big white tails, big white tails, Big white tails are great.
- 2:04:39Speaker 3: Hold fun it is to sit in the freezing cold
- 2:04:42Speaker 3: tree all day. I hope sand dreams are high the
- 2:04:47Speaker 3: he's finally here. Mark said, it's the most wonderful time
- 2:04:52Speaker 3: to kill the whitetail deer bingch points and pettings where
- 2:04:57Speaker 3: you'll find me hang? It's want to feet in a tree,
- 2:05:00Speaker 3: grunt tubes, my bowel inspector camos really campy be.
- 2:05:06Speaker 1: He or two ago?
- 2:05:09Speaker 3: I thought that this was fun, But now I'm frozen
- 2:05:13Speaker 3: to my seat and the good times they are gone.
- 2:05:17Speaker 3: I've ate up all my snacks, my hands and toes
- 2:05:21Speaker 3: are numb, and we're gonna climb down from my stand.
- 2:05:24Speaker 3: That son of a but decided to come.
- 2:05:27Speaker 11: I love those Beagy be whiteas those you rug Beagy
- 2:05:35Speaker 11: Big White tales.
- 2:05:38Speaker 3: I love those Beagy Big Doug Yo eight shot g etails.
- 2:05:44Speaker 3: I love those big white tails all day