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

00:00:04
Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show. Today, We’ve got Tony waging war on wakeboats, Jordan recounting how a backwoods hermit was charged with murder, Maggie educating us on antelope migration corridors. Brent wants Arkansas hikers to pay their fair share. Mark is covering unprecedented fishing closures across the West, and more. But first, our news n so satisfying, Phil, I like that, really really working your magic with that sounder. We’ve got all my favorite out of town people here today.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: That’s my news.

00:00:44
Speaker 1: We got Tony Peterson, Maggie hud Though, Mark Kenyon, Nate Mason not a not a town person, Jordan Siller’s and Brent Reeves. Once a summer we have them come to Bozeman for a thing we call the hooton Nanny. We hang out with our favorite folks, our favorite brands, and spend a few times, spend a few days together. My two favorite things that I saw this week that I think is noteworthy for for our audience. The first one was the can am ev ATV. They had talked about this ahead of time. They’re like, yeah, it’s really quiet, it’s actually silent. It’s like okay, yeah, silent, okay, silent ATV. It was literally silent. That thing didn’t make any noise. I feel like all the hunters there like, really, we’re trying to find the noise that that thing would make, and it just didn’t make any at all. That’ll be a game changer, I think for some hunters across the country. I didn’t know an ATV could be that quiet. It’s as loud as a bicycle. I would say that is pretty sweet.

00:01:47
Speaker 3: So many of us have seen the you know, electric bikes blow up in our in the white tail world, but I feel like when you have that added capacity of an ATV, that’s pretty that’s pretty slick.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: Wildly cool. Didn’t think it was pos.

00:02:00
Speaker 4: Everybody I was standing beside said, oh, Turkey season, Yeah, you could cover some ground with it.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: All right. Fur of our news, we got Jordan Sillers updating us on the Blood Trails mini series.

00:02:13
Speaker 3: Jordan, Yes, So, first Blood Trails miniseriies is out all three episodes.

00:02:20
Speaker 5: It’s called Paradise Prison.

00:02:22
Speaker 3: It’s about hunters and gun owners who were caught in Turks and Caicos, which is a Caribbean archipelago. They were caught with ammunition in their luggage. This came out really in twenty twenty four. It really went viral, partly because they were threatening them with pretty serious prison time. There was a mandatory minimum twelve years in prison for this mistake that a lot of people, like a lot of hunters, if you travel to hunt, if you go to the range a lot, this is something you worry about and you tried not to do, but it’s you know, it can happen, and these guys were were under some pretty serious threats, and so the mini series covers some things, a lot of things that didn’t come out at the time because these guys were on the island. They didn’t want to say everything that was happening because they were worried about retaliation. And so now they can kind of share the full story and it’s pretty wild.

00:03:19
Speaker 1: You know, our audience is probably vaguely aware of this story to some extent because we covered it in the past.

00:03:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked to them at the time. Yeah, we had an article. Steve talked to them briefly.

00:03:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that mini series is out right now. The first time I ever flew on my own in college, I was very anxious about, like following all the laws, Like what if I have one ounce too much toothpaste, They’re gonna throw me at jail. Right, Yeah, everything went fine going through TSA. The guy behind me who I worked with at the time, had a bullet in his backpack. He didn’t get on the plane that day, but it made me feel a lot better about my preparedness for flying.

00:03:56
Speaker 3: One of the women who was caught and jailed, she was actually handcuffed to a chair for four days because they didn’t have a facility for her. TSA caught her lotion in Florida, but not the bullets in her bag. Oh wow, And they threw the lotion away and let her on the plane.

00:04:13
Speaker 5: I made it through.

00:04:13
Speaker 6: One time I had I was going to a bear hunt in Quebec, and I had a knife, a metal decoy steak, and turkey loads shotgun shells in my bag, and they TSA pulled me aside and they’re like, man, you got a lot of stuff here, and I’m like, yeah.

00:04:29
Speaker 5: You got me.

00:04:30
Speaker 6: And then when I got to my destination, they never grabbed the shotgun shells, so they pulled the decoy steak in my knife and they just let me through with turkey loads.

00:04:39
Speaker 1: Terrorist, Tony, that’s why they call them. How many episodes, Jordan.

00:04:43
Speaker 3: There’s three episodes in the mini series. Okay, yep, yeah, they’re all they’re all out now, great, so go.

00:04:49
Speaker 2: Go listen to them.

00:04:49
Speaker 1: Maggie, Hold, what’s your news? What do you got going on?

00:04:52
Speaker 7: Oh? I got a couple exciting things coming up in August. My niece is five years old and we’re taking her on her first backpacking trip. And she just came up to me last night and she said, Aunt, Maggie, I’m so excited to go backpacking. I’ve never been on a backpacking trip before. Uh So we’re taking her up in the winds. We’ll see how it goes. She’s been practicing this summer, she’s been hiking. We’re not going very far, but a good first experience for her.

00:05:25
Speaker 1: Mar Kenyon, any advice for taking a young child on a backpacking trip. You have an experience with this.

00:05:31
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, for sure. We’ve been taking our boys that a long time. And I was gonna ask how many nights? How many miles?

00:05:37
Speaker 7: We’re only going in about five miles and it’s going to be two or three nights, depending on how things go. We’re flexible. Yeah, but it’s a very easy trail.

00:05:49
Speaker 3: One of the first big bat not big, but one of the first backpacking trips we did with our kids was in the winds up into one of the areas that you and I were just talking about earlier. I won’t mention it. We don’t want to spop her.

00:05:58
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know where you’re talking about.

00:06:00
Speaker 3: But yeah, bring gummy bears or some kind of easy access like incentive throughout the hike, so that whenever they’re kind of hitting that slow down period or starting to complaining and be like, hey, five more gummy bears, or if we can make it to that big rock, you get a gummy bear, or if we can.

00:06:17
Speaker 2: Think Dave does for me.

00:06:21
Speaker 3: So so yeah, lots of snacks. Find ways to add like games and stories throughout. Like story time is like a cheek code when hiking with our kids if you can just get a story going. Sometimes they just want to hear like real life stories, or other times, like last night, I took the kids for a run and they just wanted me to make up a story. So then we’ll kind of do a joint storytelling exercise where all start and then they’ll throw in like colorful details like, actually, Dad, he’s not riding a horse. How about he’s riding a robot cheetah. And then you just kind of go with dad, and so if you can do that, that will get you through those long kind of slogging miles on the back packing trip. And then yeah, I mean, just for me, it was an expectation reset when it came to camping and hiking with the kids. It just went from realizing that what I want to do and how far I want to go and what my goals are that has to just go out the window. If it’s going if it was going to be three miles, but instead we’re gonna go one mile. But the kids are having a blast. That’s a win. And I know they’re not your kids. It’s not your child, so it’s maybe a little different. Maybe you just kick her in the tail and they get going.

00:07:29
Speaker 7: I’ll love the candy in my pocket, not diabetics. So I got that locked down. And my mom is a school teacher for years, so she’s you know, she’s got the activities I’m sure already planned.

00:07:40
Speaker 3: It’s so fun to see them out there learning to love these things and experience them. You’re gonna have a blast.

00:07:44
Speaker 7: Oh, I’m very excited.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: Here’s how ignorant I am to this whole thing. You’re not going to carry a five year old, are you?

00:07:50
Speaker 3: No? No, no, So a five year old is going to be hiking on her own. Our kids probably Gosh, once they’re past two, it’s really not fun carrying. So yeah, one thing I learned was that I should have gone longer distance is when they were younger, because when you can carry them, you can actually cover a lot of ground. So we could have done like eight ten mile hikes when they were riding on my back. But we kind of moderated early because there’s like that worry like, oh, gosh, I’ve got a newborn infant, and if we’re seven miles back in the back country and something goes wrong, you know we’ll want to get out. But I could have done it.

00:08:25
Speaker 7: This was This was where Nate’s first backpacking trip was, and he walked in there when he was two. Okay, if that gives you any idea what my sweetheart’s spent a lot of time in those mountains.

00:08:39
Speaker 3: I gotta throw one more story about a trip with these kids into the same mountain range that you’re going into. We did this backpacking trip I alluded to earlier, So it’s at the time Colt was probably two or three, and then ever would have been four or five, so it must have been he must have been five or six somewhere in that ballpark. But either way, we went in there and we told my I, you know, my parents and my in laws are itinerary, Like, hey, we’re gonna be going in on this day. We should be out three days or four days later, you know, if you know, we’re back by dinner, so you should be able to get ahold of us. So this was like a part of a broader like ten or eleven day camping backpacking trip, some car camping, some in the back country. And our plans changed. I told my parents. My wife forgot to tell hers.

00:09:24
Speaker 5: So we go into the backpacking trip.

00:09:27
Speaker 3: Because the plans change, we ended up being in there a day and a half longer than we were at expecting. So as we are hiking back coming out, someone you know, says, hey, hi, you guys doing like were great?

00:09:39
Speaker 5: He’s like, are you guys from Michigan? We’re like yeah.

00:09:42
Speaker 1: He’s like, could you smell it on you?

00:09:44
Speaker 7: Yeah? Are you?

00:09:44
Speaker 4: Like?

00:09:44
Speaker 1: Are you guys?

00:09:45
Speaker 5: Are you guys okay, Like are you guys okay?

00:09:47
Speaker 3: I’m like, yeah, we’re fine, Like there’s people looking for it, Like what No? And then we keep walking and then another person says, hey, are you folks from Michigan? Like uh, yes, He’s like yeah, the Sheriff’s looking for you guys. And then all of a sudden, I mean, like, Kylie, did you tell your mom about the change in that teneration?

00:10:03
Speaker 5: She’s like I didn’t.

00:10:05
Speaker 3: So then I had to try to get a garment in reach message out to my wife’s mom. While I decided I was going to carry the kids to go as fast as we could. My wife was gonna sprint back to the truck as fast as she could to try to call off a search and rescue so we’re not having to pay for a helicopter bill or something.

00:10:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:10:23
Speaker 1: Comforting to know that people are looking for you, though, yes, if you go thirty six hours too long.

00:10:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just long enough to get them over the edge. They called someone in, So there was no helicopter. There’s no major search and rescue, but there was someone out there starting.

00:10:37
Speaker 1: What else you got going on, Maggie.

00:10:39
Speaker 7: Oh, the other thing I have going on? That I’m excited about is I’m helping out with this more than gathers. It’s it’s an experience that’s over two weekends put on by Wild Wyoming Wildlife Federation, and it’s a way for women to get their hunters certification. But it’s more than that. They you know, they get really into rifle handling, like actual hunting skills, how to break down an animal, how to cook an animal. So it’s it’s more of an immersive experience than just taking a hunter’s ed class getting the SERT. And it’s it’s women only, which is cool. I did. I did a duck hunting clinic with Venery out of Montana that is sort of a similar thing at Teller Wildlife Refuge, and it was really cool because I wanted to get into duck hunting. I’d done it a couple times, but I didn’t really have like the tools or the confidence to go out by myself. So one weekend just sort of helped me build up my skill set so I felt able to go out by myself, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to do. So I’m happy to be a part of that and I’m really excited.

00:11:57
Speaker 1: More than gathers a very clever name. Kudo’s Day, whoever came with.

00:12:00
Speaker 7: Just Johnson I believe out Brett Reeves.

00:12:05
Speaker 1: We got going on.

00:12:06
Speaker 4: Uh, well, we just launched the Bear Camp twelve and twenty six. I don’t know Mark’s in here, but Clay’s not. Are we fil Is this a film or a video film? A film? It’s it’s been out now for a little bit and got it’s not the it’s not the regular old Bear Camp. There’s some twists and turns in it, really And what part of the world was?

00:12:31
Speaker 2: This was in Arkansas?

00:12:32
Speaker 4: Uh, it’s it’s when we do every year and have been doing for quite a while now, and it was in a different part of Arkansas. We usually hunt kind of down where Clays from and this one was in a different kind of nor More northern part, kind of a different zone there. And actually had Ted Copple in camp there for a couple of days as part of another thing that’s our CBS Sunday Morning deal that’s already come out, So that was a little different having Ted there, but Lake Pickle was there and the regular old Lukem family and myself and just it was a good time. It’s a good film. Got some good good lessons in there.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: Video is out on our YouTube channel. The podcast that talks about that video is also on our podcast network. Brent was telling me a story yesterday about I think it was the first time you and Clay had ever gone on a bear trip together in Saskatchewan. You had a long boat ride.

00:13:33
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:13:34
Speaker 1: I loved it so much. I want you to tell the audience about what happened at the end of this fifty five mile boat ride.

00:13:39
Speaker 4: Fifty is five and a half hours in a boat, in a john boat across Wallaceton Lake. It was absolutely treacherous. I thought, there’s no way I’m living through this. And Clay was in a boat ahead of me, and as they got on the dock, probably thirty minutes before we got there. And when we got there, I mean water, everything is soaked waters a third full of mean, the boat’s a third full of water. And we slide up to the bank and to the little dock that they had constructed there, and he’s standing at the end and he grabs my hand, pulls me out of the boat.

00:14:14
Speaker 2: And I looked at him and I said, nobody knows where the love of God goes.

00:14:19
Speaker 4: When the waves turned the minutes to hours, and his eyes bugged out.

00:14:23
Speaker 2: Of his head and he said, did you just make that up?

00:14:30
Speaker 1: I should have said, yeah, Brent actually wrote the rec of the Edmond. As we all know, that was the ghost Rider for Gordon Tony Peterson. What you got going on?

00:14:42
Speaker 6: You know, I have a new fishing project dropping here in a couple of days. I hope I have my fingers and toes crossed that this still happens. But a couple of years ago, I had pitched a fishing series sort of based on my style of public land bow hunting, which is my favorite thing to do is just show up somewhere new, figure it out, and make something happen in a really short amount of time. And so we ended up partnering with ONEX Fish to take that sort of mentality to the water and pick a challenge that was kind of outside of my wheelhouse on a lot of them, you know, go to a new lake, catch a trophy wall line, a couple of days, you know, figure out the whole thing and those so we filmed five episodes, you know, five target species basically five different states, and those will start dropping here in a couple of days. Like I said, and it was just a really it was the most fun I’ve had in a fishing project so far. So I hope people like it because I think it’s pretty cool on our YouTube channel, yep okay, I can’t wait to see that.

00:15:41
Speaker 3: I remember you and I riffing on that over pancakes, Yeah, like a summer or two ago, and it seems such a great idea. So the fact that’s actually happening is pretty sweet.

00:15:51
Speaker 4: Man.

00:15:52
Speaker 5: It was.

00:15:53
Speaker 6: You know, the challenge with fishing is how do you make it interesting? Right, Like a lot of the fishing content coverages turn because there’s built in drama, but the old school bill dance style doesn’t fly anymore. You know, people need a little bit more at steak and that one. You know, it just it just put me in a position to like truly have to figure something out in real time, not get any information ahead of time other than you know, whatever little eastc outing I could do. And it’s I think they turned out really cool. We caught a ton of fish.

00:16:23
Speaker 1: I’ve said this probably a dozen times on our airwaves that Tony Peterson is the best public land whitetail bowhunter that I’ve ever met that I know, and that we’re going to see if that now applies to fishing or not.

00:16:38
Speaker 5: Well, I appreciate that, buddy. I think it helped me a little bit.

00:16:41
Speaker 3: The pressure’s on because last time somebody talked big about Tony at the Mediator Sporting play shoot. This last week, everyone thought that Tony was going to win that competition except Tony.

00:16:55
Speaker 1: Howd that competition go?

00:16:56
Speaker 2: Mark?

00:16:57
Speaker 8: You know?

00:16:58
Speaker 2: For me? Great?

00:17:00
Speaker 3: Oh, because I did not come in last place, which was my only goal, not coming in last It was otherwise pretty fun. Me and Tony had a really good time once we got past the live filming portion. The live filming portion was the only part where were kind of uptight, and then after that we just had a good time. And although Tony kind of did spiral and I just stayed at my low level.

00:17:20
Speaker 6: Actually though, I went like this and dropped off a cliff and Mark started at the bottom of the valley and climbed his way to the top.

00:17:28
Speaker 5: It was actually fun.

00:17:29
Speaker 1: We live streamed like a two hour sporting place competition for my outdoor TV. We were all paired up with somebody, but we were competing on our own. My partner was Yannis, and I was doing considerably better than Yannis, like almost doubling his score to the point where I was like, son of a gun, I might win this thing. Turned out Yannis got last. Yi was not a good representation of how the crew was doing. I was just in the middle of the pack. But I was like, oh, man, Yanni, if this is how Yan he’s doing, I’m gonna get the first that did not.

00:18:03
Speaker 5: At least you got to live with some hope for a while.

00:18:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, for too long. Mark Kenyon, what’s up with you?

00:18:09
Speaker 3: Well, big news outside of work is that I moved to Montana. I’m no longer an out of towner. Okay, I mean I’m kind of out of town. I’m like, I’m an hour away, so I’m not gonna be here as much as you say, but but I’m sort of local now, which is exciting.

00:18:25
Speaker 1: You can still smell the Michigan on him though.

00:18:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s fresh. It’s been like just a little over a week. But so far, so good. Evagulations. We’re all very excited. Thank you.

00:18:36
Speaker 1: I have you around here more. Yeah, gonna be a new trivia competitor in the room more often.

00:18:41
Speaker 3: Now, come in.

00:18:42
Speaker 1: We need we need some more competition for Nate and Brody and Randall and Steve. Yeah, well so we made Mark Montana just to spice those things up.

00:18:53
Speaker 5: It’s been an adventure, you know.

00:18:54
Speaker 3: I feel like the last six months have been nothing but chaos, trying to you know, fine places, sell places, figure out where to go. We’re still you know, we had a number of different locations we’re considering, so trying to weigh all the benefits and then making the final decision should we move, should we not move. It’s been a thing we’ve talked about for like a decade and just finally realized, with the kids growing up so fast, if we want them to grow up out here and have these opportunities in this community, we better do it.

00:19:22
Speaker 4: How about learning how much stuff you had that you didn’t realize you had. Crazy When I got that store more building, I had my move my office from upstairs in the house to out there my studio, and guy says, man, I got a dump trailer if you needed I’m like, dump trailer, dude, I’m on hall of like three sacks of garbage or three sacks of stuff I don’t use.

00:19:44
Speaker 2: And long story short, I used a dump trailer.

00:19:48
Speaker 4: That’s what we had to use to get all the stuff that I didn’t realize I had.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: Good opportunity to cleanse yourself.

00:19:54
Speaker 3: So, speaking so Brent, speaking of you, and speaking of my move, one of the great benefits of moving out here is that now I can go for runs right from my house out like into some beautiful stuff. Where previously we were on a paved road lots of traffic. Was no fun running from home, but now we can just like take off be in beautiful country on a dirt road. So I got home last night from all these meetings we’ve been talking about, and I pulled the driveway and both my sons run out the door and they’re like, Dad, Dad, Dad, can we go for a run? And I was like, sure, that’s not a thing that they’re typically asking to do, but they want to go for like a trail around with Dad. It’s eight thirty at nine or whatever it is. I’m like, okay, let’s do it. So throwing the running gear, we start going for a run and we’re talking. They’re asking me about the trip what I was doing with you guys, and I’m asking them about what they were doing. And they brought up the fact that while we were at one of these meetings, a couple days ago, I was facetiming with them and then Brent and Jannis walked up and started talking to the boys on the cell phone, and my young son I bring, yeah, what do you think about Brent? And like, yeah, you know, he’s really funny. I mean, yeah, he is. He’s ever, he says, I used to think that was just a random old guy that hung out around. I’m like, no, it works here.

00:21:12
Speaker 2: Random.

00:21:14
Speaker 3: So I got a good chuckle out of that. Brent, You’re you’re so much more than that.

00:21:18
Speaker 1: What other updates you got for us?

00:21:20
Speaker 2: Mark?

00:21:20
Speaker 9: Uh?

00:21:20
Speaker 3: The only other thing is, uh, you know my new podcast series. We kind of teased it months ago when I was in here last It’s now out there in the world. It’s called Future Wild. We’re seven episodes in. That’s on our new meat Eater conservation feed. We used to be you know, Calskels podcast is still there, but now it’s my podcast as well, and these are more deep dive interviews into the world of hunting and fishing and conservation, some different kind of angles on things. We’ve had some different types of guests and maybe we typically hear from. That’s been refreshing and fun for me. And hopefully for the audience too. We’ve talked to people like Avon Schnard, the founder of Patagonia UH talking about his kind of way to simplify his outdoor experiences and how that might apply to conservation. We’ve talked to a famous climber about how the outdoor recreation community and the hunting and fishing community might be able to, you know, work together more often to protect public lands and things like that. Our most recent episode just came out with a renowned caribou biologist from Alaska talking about what’s going on with caribou populations across the world, which a lot of folks don’t seem to be paying attention to, but it’s it’s very important to start paying attention to. So it’s been fun. Hopefully people have been enjoying it. It’s on you know, the media to podcast, YouTube, podcast network and all the other places.

00:22:42
Speaker 1: New episodes every other week. Correct, every other week, yep, what day of the week. Thursday, every other Thursday, you can listen to Future Wild all right. Our last bit of our news this week is an update from Steve. We have a video here. I have yet to see it. All I know is he has a new fish cooking method. Take it away, Phil, everybody, here’s the new splash for you. We’re on a forty foot vessel.

00:23:07
Speaker 9: Called Sweet Caroline, ben.

00:23:12
Speaker 3: Throve it.

00:23:13
Speaker 8: What’s this bank hopes you may robs your bank.

00:23:18
Speaker 9: With a man named Tommy Whittle who goes to the long line of fishermen and he’s making dinner.

00:23:25
Speaker 8: And he’s what do you call it?

00:23:27
Speaker 9: Cord fish, cord morning fish for dinner. We’round the deck of the boat. He’s got a big ass fish tug, got cod, and he’s gotten charm and he’s laying down a layer of salt in the bottom there, like fish salt, rock salt, like coarse salt.

00:23:46
Speaker 8: This is for dinner tonight.

00:23:50
Speaker 9: So he’s got a sprinkling of salt on the bottom. He’s got three cod plays, two chower plates, dolls, putting salt on top of it. His other in law says all of his food is too salt, but he doesn’t understand, so he’s sprinkled salt down there.

00:24:15
Speaker 8: Okay, so you’re gonna let him sit like that home on three hours? Three hours?

00:24:20
Speaker 9: Yep, this I stalked the time. He’s father on the phone. His father says he has people from all over, people from New York, US.

00:24:29
Speaker 8: They come up. They eat this. They say it’s the best fish they ever had.

00:24:34
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:24:35
Speaker 9: So he sprinkles salt all over. You’re gonna let him sit three hours, three hours. They we’re gonna fix it off with one of the some potatoes and pot for twenty minutes. There’s suffer corn fitch, cornfish, corn fishnight.

00:24:47
Speaker 8: We’re trying different. We’re gonna do cod and churn. Yep. So they also make salt fish for salt cod. But this is just corn fish for tonight. Three hours. When it sprinkling of salt print it all. K did you make like a bra your potatoes sticking out? Maris put it in a pot and enough loder and married the potatoes and the fish in twenty minutes. Good to go. We’ll just come back later tell you how we like it. There you go ruin.

00:25:15
Speaker 9: Okay for you people that can’t see this because you’re just listening, we’re uh fixing to have a shot of whiskey, which is which is part of the fish cooking.

00:25:26
Speaker 8: That’s nice.

00:25:28
Speaker 10: Here’s everyone paytrio here supposed to be the speaker, supposed to be Okay, it’s a return to our newsplash. It’s a it’s four hours later. The fish was salt. What you don’t agree? No, the fish was salt.

00:25:50
Speaker 11: The fish was salted in what we call rock salt, fisherman salt, A light dusting, the fla light dusting, sat for three hours, pulled it out, He rinsed it in salt water. He cut up potatoes. He put the potatoes in the pot, the fish in the pot.

00:26:09
Speaker 2: That’s it.

00:26:10
Speaker 11: The potatoes, the fish, fresh water, and they’re covered.

00:26:13
Speaker 8: It boiled it for how long? About twenty twenty two minutes? The easiest best fish recipe.

00:26:21
Speaker 11: Definitely very good. This is a new recipe, that’s what. That’s why this is news because this is a new recipe.

00:26:28
Speaker 1: Do you like it?

00:26:29
Speaker 2: Oh, it’s super It’s amazing.

00:26:31
Speaker 8: Yeah, warn wonderful, baby d Again he was asking where to buy that salt, and then they’re telling me I can make it, Chadwick, I was delicious.

00:26:44
Speaker 11: Another news items, we’ve just watched the polar bear climbing around on a hill for a while, which is which was the first.

00:26:49
Speaker 2: Polar bear I ever laid eyes on, So I’m happy about that.

00:26:52
Speaker 1: And then shortly there after a cariboot yep.

00:26:55
Speaker 8: You’ve seen a bunch of and almost cut my leg off and the chef saved my legs. Thanks guys.

00:27:08
Speaker 1: You can see that video on the Meat Eater podcast YouTube channel. Go watch this episode traveling with an amount of salt in their boat that you’d think they’re going to like de ice a home depot parking lot.

00:27:20
Speaker 2: That was it.

00:27:21
Speaker 4: I wonder if you can amount how big a part and if it’s part of the permanent part of the recipe that you drink whiskey before.

00:27:29
Speaker 1: You eat them mandatory. If they got Steve to take a shot, it must be an important All right, Up next is your news. Your news is brought to you by Banish suppressors. All right, we have two listener emails we are reading today. This first one is from the Meat Eater trivia question legend leland Hart. He sends me more emails, I think than any other trivia listener. He says, how to meet Eater podcast crew. Should I feel bad for making jerky out of backstrap? Is that a worthy purpose for such high quality cuts as the loin? Should I slice with reckless abandon or save the precious backstrap for more elevated purposes? I think this is an easy one. Don’t turn that thing into jerky. What’s the rest of the room think.

00:28:27
Speaker 7: I like using the bottom round, Like when I’m cutting up the hind quarter, I just take the bottom round and slice that and vacuum seal it into strips and then when summertime comes around, thaw that out and make jerky.

00:28:43
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don’t use the backstrap.

00:28:44
Speaker 2: No.

00:28:45
Speaker 3: I think in the Midwest whitetail world, where some people are taking a lot of deer, it’s a little bit more common. Like I’ve got a buddy who regularly is killing five, six, seven deer a year, and so he’s like, yeah, I’m going to dedicate some of that backstrap to some primo and he loves it. We were just talking about this on a group text the other day. You know, if you’ve got the supply of why not diversify.

00:29:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can kill like, I don’t know, five or six deer.

00:29:11
Speaker 4: I want to kill one or two a year in Arkansas, And I know folks that will put a whole deer into either sausage and half and half sausage and jerky.

00:29:21
Speaker 1: I think it’s too precious. Those those backstraps. There’s not enough of them. There’s not enough pieces of meat on a deer that are just like the perfect shape, the perfect size for all the more fun traditional preparations of backstrap. It even feels a little sinful to like throw a backstrap into grind, which I’ve seen people talk about if you’re, you know, really trying to impress the mother in law with a Venison burger, you know, maybe you throw half a backstrap in the grind. Even that seems kind of wrong.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: Well, that’s why we live in America.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: Spencer, that’s right, that’s right. So some of the room says you can. Others say no, Jordan, what do you think.

00:29:58
Speaker 3: I think if the backstrap is just so easy to get out of there, like you might as well just slice it up and make it into steaks.

00:30:07
Speaker 5: Like I don’t.

00:30:07
Speaker 3: I don’t really see why you do, jerky, But I’m like Brent, I also only kill a couple of deer, maybe maybe two, So it’s precious to me.

00:30:16
Speaker 1: Any other thoughts for Leland.

00:30:18
Speaker 7: There’s better cuts out there, but there.

00:30:20
Speaker 2: Those on the grill jerk it all fight.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: Nate Mason’s got this next email.

00:30:27
Speaker 12: Yeah, we had an email about wag Bag getting a listener out of a ticket. This is from Donovan. Hey, mediated your crew. Never thought I’d say this, but a wag bag and for those of you who don’t know, that is a bag that you poop into so you can pack your feces out of the back country. A wag bag got me out of a ticket. Earlier this year, my girlfriend and I were backpacking through a canyon in Grand Staircase Escalante Region in Utah. There was a three day trip and on the second day we ran into a ranger on the trail who asked for our overnight permits. When we got to the trail head, they’d run out of permit slips, so we just wrote our names and information on a piece of paper and dropped in the By the time we ran into the ranger, there really wasn’t any way to prove it. As he looked over our packs, he noticed the two wag bags hanging off the back. He said that anyone who cared enough to pack those in was helping take care of the land, thanked us for doing our part, and sent us on our way without a ticket. Man, that’s a good story that you guys ever get out of a I love a good poop bag story. You guys ever get out of a ticket for being good citizens, although you might have been in a sketchy situation.

00:31:27
Speaker 3: Well, I got out of a ticket not because I was being a good citizen in the hunting world, but because somebody felt bad about my bad fortune in the hunting world. So, to make a long story short, I had hit a buck and spent three days trying to find him and couldn’t recover him. This is down in Ohio. So I remember leaving after that three days of searching, just soul crushed.

00:31:50
Speaker 2: And it was late.

00:31:51
Speaker 3: I was driving home from southern Ohio up to Michigan. It was like eleven o’clock at night. The whole drive home, I was festering on it, just upset about it. Thinking on some backcountry road almost home now, almost to the Michigan border, and all of a sudden I see lights behind me and I got pulled over for speeding. I was like, I don’t know, I don’t know what it was those Ohio cops, dude, so I must have been going decently over the speed limit. And he pulls me over and asked me how fast I was going. If I knew how fast I was going, I was like, honestly, I’m not sure. I’m kind of in my head right now. And he looks in the back and he sees like Camo’s hunting gear in the back seat of my truck. He’s like, oh, you’ve been hunting. I’m like, yeah, I have, just can’t just come back from a hunt down southern Ohio and you get one. And I kind of gave him a short version of story. He’s like, no, but I got a shot at one, you know, three days ago, and blah blah blah blah. And I’ve been searching for him NonStop ever since. Haven’t been over recover him. It’s it’s been it’s been a rough couple of days. And he’s like, man, I’ve been there too. You just be careful going the rest of the way home, and no ticket for you. You’ve had enough of a bad day.

00:32:50
Speaker 10: Wow.

00:32:51
Speaker 2: Was he state?

00:32:52
Speaker 3: Was he highway patrol?

00:32:53
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:32:53
Speaker 12: Oh, those those guys.

00:32:54
Speaker 2: Got me good.

00:32:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, man, this guy was This guy’s nice, nice good on him.

00:32:58
Speaker 2: This guy can give you a store away from the other side of that.

00:33:01
Speaker 4: Oh. I can remember the time, and this was probably twenty five years ago, but I was working radar coming down the highway and it was five minutes till ten on a Saturday night, I meet this car doing ninety throw the lights on. They pull over and I walk up to it. And it’s in a rural part of the county and across the field you can see there’s a dirt road. You’re going up the highway and turn off, but across this field you can see a night light at a house.

00:33:31
Speaker 2: So I walk up to the car and the.

00:33:33
Speaker 4: Ray rolled a winded down and it’s a young girl and she is sobbing, and I said, I need to see your driver’s license. And I can hear crying. I said, are you okay? She says, yes, sir, but I’m going to be late. And my mama told me if I’m not home by ten, I’m going to be grounded. And I said, well, how far do you got to go? She said, that night light right there, that’s my house. I said, well five minutes. You’re not going to be late, but you’re driving too fast. Let me see your driver’s license.

00:34:00
Speaker 2: She starts boo hooing.

00:34:02
Speaker 4: She said, gonna make me late. I said, no, just let me see your license. She hands me your license. I said, well, I’ll tell you what I think you can make it home in time. But you today’s my birthday. It was not my birthday. You sing me happy birthday and I’ll let you go. And she said really, and I said yeah. She said, okay, happy birthday to you. I said no, no, no, I want you to sing it like Patsy Kleine was singing to me. I want you to make me feel it.

00:34:28
Speaker 2: And buddy did she ever? She said happy birthday?

00:34:32
Speaker 1: It was Where is this going?

00:34:33
Speaker 4: So I give her the license back. I said, okay, now you go home. You’ll be home before curfew, but leave earlier and go home. I don’t want you driving fast.

00:34:44
Speaker 2: She drives on.

00:34:46
Speaker 4: I hear that’s the end of the story, or so I would think. Two weeks later, I get a call at the office and this lady gets on the phone. That secretary says, hey, Brent, there’s a call for you. This las get us on the phone. She says, Brent, this is so and SO like, yeah, hey, how you doing? She said it was your birthday last week? And I’m like, no, why She said, well, my daughter stop got stopped for speed and she came in the door telling this this the story, and I said, there’s I went to school with her she said, there’s only one person that.

00:35:15
Speaker 2: Would have done that. I had to be here. Yeah, it was me, But I didn’t want to write the.

00:35:20
Speaker 4: Girl a ticket, you know, and her mom and dad’s going out to pay it. So I thought, you know, if I give her a lasting impression of something, that it would be good.

00:35:29
Speaker 2: And so I guess it was.

00:35:30
Speaker 3: You’re a good cop, bro, Yeah, that cop.

00:35:32
Speaker 1: Now, if i’d have been in Ohio, yea more of the story, I guess, uh, pick up your poop, sing happy Birthday to the cops and driving the speed limit and tell him you hit a deer recently and you’re trying to find even if it’s like June, be like officer, I’m just trying to find this buck and recover him.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right.

00:35:55
Speaker 1: Next up, we have the news. First up, we’ve gotten Nate Mason covering a Cabbellas helicopter pilot.

00:36:07
Speaker 12: Oh yeah, you all may have seen the story about a helicopter assisted Cabela’s run in Wisconsin on August first, twenty twenty six. But what you haven’t heard is the story of the man behind the yoke, Dennis Pipping. Using my permission seeking super sleuthing skills, I got on the horn with Dennis, and you know, like a lot of the headlines they highlighted he’s a senior citizen and he wanted to skip traffic, and the vibe that I thought they were kind of trying to portray him as was like maybe an eccentric millionaire or this confused old man or something like that that couldn’t be further from the truth.

00:36:42
Speaker 1: I’m not familiar with the story. Yeah, Oh, he took a helicopter to a Cabellus.

00:36:46
Speaker 12: Yes, he landed a helicopter in a Cabella’s parking lot to, as we found out, to do his preseason hunting grocery run. Dennis is a blue collar concrete man with a for big old whitetail bucks. And before we get in the specifics of that August first run, I wanted to figure out where the journey to a Cabela’s HLZ or helicopter landing zone begins. And so nineteen eighty four, Dennis started flying. He got his VFR visual flight rating purely out of love for the game. He’s looking at planes his whole life and was like, I really want to do that. So he bootstrapped the hours, got his initial rating and he soon graduated.

00:37:25
Speaker 8: He just kept rolling.

00:37:26
Speaker 12: He felt limited by VFR, so he got an instrument rating, and he got his multi engine and eventually got his commercial And that was because he took up a neighbor who happened to have an engineering firm, and that neighbor said, I need you to fly my engineers around to the various job sites, and so he did that. At the same time, Dennis is growing his commercial concrete business, Pipping Concrete, which specializes in manure storage and methane digests, among other large scale, agg focused concrete products. In a process I don’t fully understand. Farmers use these, especially dairy farmers, use these facilities to either create fertilizer or biogas. The scale of these projects is what I want to comment on. These manure tanks start at a million gallons and have gone up all the way to thirty million. For those thirty million tanks are five hundred and sixteen feet across and twenty feet tall. For reference, an Olympic swimming pool has about six hundred and sixty thousand gallons, so that’s forty four full pools Olympic swimming pools of manure. It’s about a week’s worth of water in Bozeman, or recently, a data center in Fayetteville, Georgia owned by Quality Technology Services consumed thirty million gallons of unmetered and unpaid for water during construction, and so that gives you the scale of these these manure plants. Going back to Dennis’s business as it expanded, he pulled the old Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, and purchased a jet to manage his business activities. That worked for a while, but the preponderance of his jobs are in the Midwest, so he swapped that for a helicopter, Robinson R forty four Raven, which you can see in the articles. This brings us to Saturday, August first, twenty twenty six. As it turns out, Dennis a big whitetail guy.

00:39:12
Speaker 2: He’s got a great.

00:39:12
Speaker 12: Chunk of property in Fondo Lac County and he’s also got an eighty acre parcel in Buffalo County. He’s running a few cell cams on both. He’s got some deeries keeping tabs on, and so Dennis invites his neighbor to knock out their preseason shopping list down at Cabela’s. They hop in the old Robinson he hops in the old Robinson flies to his neighbor’s house. His neighbor hops in, and then he proceeds on to Cabella’s landing there before you land, he takes all the necessary precautions. He reconnoiters the HLZ, brings her down. They run in, they grab their batteries, their cameras, whatever else, and they check out. They pass a cop as they’re checking out, they’re loading up the helicopter, and that cop comes back out extremely politely, really respectfully, says, I’m responding to a drone incident. I think this is what this is a very large drone, but I’ve this is what I’m responding to. And he asked, do you have a license for this thing, at which point Dennis produces his license as well as his as the permits and the regulations that cover all this. And basically, if you’re a helicopter pilot and you’re following all the other laws and regulations, you can land pretty much anywhere you want as long as you’re not providing posing a hazard to people or property on the surface. And so explain that to the police officer. Police officer said, sweet, thanks, have a great day, and send him on his way, and so the next day he takes all his groceries he got, flies up to Buffalo County and sets up his new cameras. According to Dennis, he put this camera in a spot that he never hunts and he would never think of, but his wife told him he should throw this camera here and got a picture of sweet butt. So if you can pull that picture up, Phil, Yeah, that’s that’s a look at.

00:40:51
Speaker 3: That split G two.

00:40:53
Speaker 2: Man, that’s a big one.

00:40:54
Speaker 1: Give me, give me a score on that, Tony from that I was taking two days go to August fourth, I mean one sixties, right at least at least yeah.

00:41:06
Speaker 12: Man, So that’s uh, that’s the result of his whole trip is a picture that that big old.

00:41:11
Speaker 3: But yeah, you want to kill a one sixties, you just have helicopter.

00:41:14
Speaker 5: Helicopter.

00:41:15
Speaker 3: I think me and Tony’s chances of significantly plumbing benefits.

00:41:21
Speaker 2: That’s so rotated.

00:41:23
Speaker 7: Uh.

00:41:24
Speaker 12: Following this trip, you know, a few days later, he starts getting Facebook notes, calls from people like me and whatnot. And you want to make sure everything was copestic with Cabella’s, and so he calls the store manager and the store manager says, please come anytime you’re a loyal customer. All his business cards, like his company cards, are Cabella’s cards, so he can just shop at Cabella’s for.

00:41:43
Speaker 2: Free on all the points, but they will.

00:41:46
Speaker 12: He wanted to make it very clear the Richmond, Wisconsin cabell As welcomes all modes of transportation to their store, and so Dennis is going to keep on going. He wanted to communicate his gratitude of law enforcement, the cabell staff in the community for their respect and support of his aeronautical adventures. And he said, it’s no different than rolling up to a gas station in a snowmobile or pulling up to a restaurant and a bussure. And we would all like to see more acceptance of the vertically inclined methods of transportation. Now, finally, Dennis offered a discount to any member of the audience in need of manure storage or other agricultural concrete work. Right, so you’re a meat eater, amber who needs them, just hit up pipping concrete.

00:42:24
Speaker 1: He’s national Dennis being a concrete man. It makes me think of how Vegas like has all kinds of conventions going on any giving day. I used to go to a shot show about every year. I think I’ve been there three or four times since. This again happens in Las Vegas and Shot Show is the world’s largest gun convention. It just like kind of takes over the city for a week. But there’s still other things that are happening in Vegas. I imagine Tonio’s where I’m going with this. The three big shows in Vegas while Shot Show is going on is Shot Show, Uh, there is the Concrete Show, so you got all the concrete folks. And the third one is the Porn Awards are happening all at the same time, and so Vegas has, like this really wild. A lot of crazy ingredients get dropped into Vegas for this one week every January. The Porn Award, the gun convention, and the concrete people, and you try to kind of suss out like is this you know Nate Mason over here, is he looked like he’s concrete guns or porn?

00:43:28
Speaker 2: And you.

00:43:33
Speaker 12: You know the guys flying in first class, it’s the concrete guys.

00:43:36
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

00:43:37
Speaker 1: There was one instance where I was at a blackjack table just making small talk and this dude sitting next to me was trying to figure out like what he was doing here.

00:43:45
Speaker 7: Uh.

00:43:46
Speaker 1: He owned a strip club in Atlanta, so he was there for the porn awards and shot show. He was he was doing it too far while he was there. Yeah, good for him. He had to run some tight security at his gentleman’s club there in Georgia.

00:44:00
Speaker 2: They call that.

00:44:01
Speaker 5: Don’t worry, I’ll I’ll bleep up again.

00:44:06
Speaker 1: Now we’re over to Tony Peterson to talk about wakeboats.

00:44:10
Speaker 6: So first off, I would just like to say, unlike Nate Mason, I actually appreciate the Ohio.

00:44:16
Speaker 5: Okay law enforcement offers to so actually all law enforcement officers.

00:44:22
Speaker 6: And if we should ever meet anywhere, I hope you guys remember that I Tony Peterson support you, while Nate Mason does that.

00:44:29
Speaker 3: I only have a bone to pick with highway patrol. You guys have a cool logo, but I should just drive slower.

00:44:36
Speaker 2: What you should do would be quiet, all right.

00:44:40
Speaker 6: So this is this is an issue that’s sort of near and dear to my heart, living in Minnesota, fishing a lot of lakes, fishing over in Wisconsin. The court case that I ran across that put me on this sort of on this trajectory with a story is based in Wisconsin. But this is happening all over, which I’ll get into. But wakeboats are becoming a big thing, and for people don’t know. Most recreational watercraft are designed to either minimize wake or at least not amplify it.

00:45:09
Speaker 5: Not the case with wakeboats. Now.

00:45:11
Speaker 6: These boats cost on average sixty five grand to over three hundred grand, which is bonkers for a boat on a on a lake, right, or we would think so anyway, maybe not the helicopter to Cabella’s crowd. But why are they so expensive? So these boats have a couple features that drive me nuts. One is a premium audio system.

00:45:36
Speaker 1: I figured, man, that’s where half the budget goes on a wakeboat.

00:45:40
Speaker 6: If you don’t, if you’ve never been around one of these suckers when they’re when they’re cranking some music and know how that sound carries across the water, that’s not what I’m gonna talk about.

00:45:48
Speaker 1: What kind of music do they like traditionally?

00:45:50
Speaker 5: Not the okay lot of hip hop.

00:45:53
Speaker 1: Give me an example of like a playlist.

00:45:54
Speaker 6: You would hear a lot of hip hop, a lot of bro country, a lot of stuff that you might not necessarily want to have blasted in your face when you’re fishing with the kids or whatever. These boats are expensive for another reason. They have ballast systems so they can draw.

00:46:10
Speaker 5: In water and change the weight of the boat. So some of them can draw anywhere from lef that’s what they’re doing. Yeah, I had no idea.

00:46:16
Speaker 6: So they can draw in anywhere from two thousand to five thousand pounds of water, which changes everything. They also have these things called surf tabs on the back which work with that different weight to create custom waves. Essentially, depending off fast you’re going, you can create waves out of the right side, the left side, big waves, little waves.

00:46:36
Speaker 5: But they’re they’re meant to make waves.

00:46:38
Speaker 6: Wakeboats they burn a lot of fuel, they make a lot of waves, and they don’t make a lot of recreational boaters happy. So this is kind of the root and where I’m going with this issue. There’s the pro pro wake boat crowd, and then there’s the anti weightboat crowd, And now they’re meeting in the court system, and you’re going to see this a whole lot. I think the pro wakeboat crowd that you know, they say, we are licensing our boats, we are being legal. We are buying a legal product and using it in a legal way on the water. They argue that they’re being discriminated against, constitutional rights, are being infringed the whole thing. The other side says, you know, these boats which account for well, at least in Wisconsin from my research, account for about four percent of sales in twenty twenty.

00:47:27
Speaker 5: Five out of all boats.

00:47:30
Speaker 6: The other side says, you know, if you’re if you’re fishing, if you’re a kayaker, which kayak fishing is super popular right now, if you’re a stand up paddle border essentially, if you’re not a wake boat person and you’re using the water, this is impacting you somehow, right like if you’re just just imagine being out there in a kayak and having four foot rollers hit you all day long.

00:47:53
Speaker 5: There’s that component.

00:47:55
Speaker 6: There is also the component of the ecosystems of our lakes and this is this is a big one. We haven’t so this is kind of one of those things you see this with forward facing sonar and some of these other issues that are really hot right now. There was no reason to do any scientific research on whether wakeboats were impacting lakeshore habitat, fish ecosystems because we didn’t have them before. Now we have them, so this research is starting to kick in. University of Minnesota doing a study on this bunch of different methods to try to figure out how is it impacting vegetation, how is it impacting you know, sediment levels in the water, and how long that takes to settle, because that has impacts on all kinds of things and fisheries. And what they found was no surprise that this is happening now. To be negatively right, to be as objective as I can be in this issue, every boat that you operate in shallow water can have this have an impact to some extent. Right, it’s a scale issue. So long story short. Some of the recommendations coming out of this research and coming out of these you know, kind of I don’t know if they would call themselves anti wakeboat, but definitely concerned more about the fisheries you are suggesting. You know, they should be operated in at least twenty feet of water, give those waves a little time to dissipate before they hit shore, keep them at least six hundred feet off ashore. That study that the uf M did used a bunch of different cameras, a bunch of different ways to measure it. It’s a scientific study. It’s not just anecdotal stuff, and you’re going to see a heck of a lot more of that. What you also have as a component of this, which we understand on our side of things, is the amount of money that fishing generates. And so if you look at Wisconsin, it’s estimated that fishing contributes about two point three billion dollars in revenue every year and supports well over twenty thousand jobs. So when you talk about, you know, a very small contingency compared to the overall population using wakeboats, love and wake boats, feeling that they’re just they’re doing their thing and it’s not impacting anybody. You have to factor that in how it’s affecting this huge revenue generator. And this isn’t just a Wisconsin specific thing, right, You can you can find this in a lot of states. Wisconsin, for example, cells one point two million to one point four million fishing licenses a year. In Minnesota, I think it’s one point one or something. It’s big business, right. So you’re starting to see regulations come into place, but they tend to be like city ordinances. We haven’t seen anything obviously at a federal level. You’re starting to see some stuff show up at a state level, but so far it’s mostly been city ordinances.

00:50:44
Speaker 2: Right.

00:50:46
Speaker 6: So, the the lawsuit that I saw, couple of a couple of people from Florida owned lake shore houses in a county in Wisconsin. This town that this lake is on, that they’re on, enacted an ordinance that restricted the usage of it, didn’t ban it, but restricted some usage of wakeboats. They sued, saying their constitutional rights were being infringed. I just saw last week that a federal judge, as it worked its way up through the court system, a federal judge tossed it because he said, you haven’t proven any damage yet, Which is where it gets a little bit weird with this stuff, because even though a city can slap an ordinance on a body of water and say you can’t do this, you can do this whatever, there’s no enforcement and so there was actually no real damage suffered by them.

00:51:35
Speaker 5: But when you start going down this.

00:51:37
Speaker 6: Rabbit hole of wakeboats, you start seeing these court cases popping up. I found some in Minnesota, there’s several in Wisconsin. There’s at least fifty nine communities in Wisconsin at when I was researching this that have slapped some kind of ordinance on against wakeboats or limiting them. This is going to be a thing that’s coming state level, I would assume within the next couple of years, especially as you see a lot more of this research on this fisheries coming out.

00:52:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, the footage that you see from the cameras they have underwater, it’s really revealing, like what that can do to a fish. You’ll see a bluegill, you know, sitting in ten feet of water, who the wakeboat comes over and they just like get pushed out of the camera frame, and then they fight their way back, and then the second wave comes and they get pushed out again. In place like Wisconsin, Minnesota that’s loaded with warm water species, they spawn in very shallow water. It’s easy to envision how that could affect a fish’s bed that’s up in you know, knee deep water if these weightboats are driving by, you know, a dozen times a day.

00:52:40
Speaker 7: Right.

00:52:40
Speaker 6: So we just we just did a project up on Lake of the Woods on the Canadian side, and when you’re on that, when you’re in that lake, it’s rusty crayfish everywhere. And rusty crayfish came from the Ohio River basin in the nineteen sixties at some point dropped into this lake, somebody’s bait bucket or whatever they have taken over, knocked out the native crayfish. And what rusty crayfish do is is literally alter their habitat by snipping vegetation. And so the diversity of species in their game species game fish species to target has changed. You don’t find large mouth really, the smallies are blowing up. The walleyes are blowing up. And so you start thinking about that and go, yeah, that’s a that’s a multi decade thing, but it was. It was directly because of the impact on the vegetation in the lake. Now you look at this like you said, and you watch vegetation getting uprooted, you watch the sediment level not settling and changing. That’ll change water temperature, that’ll change which kind of species can live in that band of the water column.

00:53:42
Speaker 5: It’s it’s not going away.

00:53:43
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:53:43
Speaker 1: The water clarity, that’s also really meaningful. You’ll see, you know, after the wakeboat comes over, Oh, the water goes from clear to just you know, covered in sediment.

00:53:52
Speaker 2: Right, And that’s something that’s not going to take a decade to find out.

00:53:55
Speaker 6: It’s pretty quick, right, And you think about you know, if you’re a lake shore owner, you know you see a lot of work to mitigate lake shore loss, right because it’s just going to start peeling back up your yard. And you think about you think about throwing throwing those rollers all day long, and you’ll see you’ll see arguments against it, like, well, a bass boat, which is what I own, that throws a wake too. It’s like it certainly does. But I don’t go out and drive for six hours a day a circle in a circle, you know what I mean? So this is this is a unique situation.

00:54:25
Speaker 7: You’re also not going just up and down hot rotten by the shore to show off to all the girls.

00:54:30
Speaker 2: Well, no I do that. I what do you do in this?

00:54:35
Speaker 3: Wakeboards go past you and your fishing? Have you ever chased them down and give them what for?

00:54:39
Speaker 7: Well?

00:54:39
Speaker 5: No, I haven’t, and I don’t.

00:54:41
Speaker 6: I mean, it’s a tough situation, right because they are doing they’re being legal, you know, like they’re doing their thing. You know, it personally drives me absolutely nuts, but it’s like I’m also kind of a freedom guy, you know.

00:54:55
Speaker 5: But if that’s why I like, I like this study by the U of M.

00:54:59
Speaker 6: And I hope there’s a bunch more out there coming because if you can just demonstrate that listen, this is not good for the fishery, I’m like, okay, regulated.

00:55:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, what are what are the ways that this is being handled? Like what do these ordinances look like? What are some options for like kind of living together and like coexisting? Are they just damaging?

00:55:19
Speaker 1: Are they just outlawed, like straight up banning boats and no.

00:55:22
Speaker 6: And that’s the thing too, that’s that’s part of the reason why that case got tossed because it wasn’t like they couldn’t use them. So it’s distance to shore, time of you know, amount of time in the day because you’ll see this, uh you know with with jet skis, right, like some lakes, a lot of places they can only be used to like sunset and they’re off the water. So we already have precedent for this. But it’s like, you know, you’re talking to city ordinance with no enforcement versus a state regulation, and so it’s it’s a little muddy, but it’s it’s very individualized. You know, there’s nothing that’s I didn’t find anything that was like flat out we’re banning these like you just can’t use them.

00:56:01
Speaker 5: Pull them. But I’m sure that they’re worried that that’s coming.

00:56:05
Speaker 4: It looks like it would be maybe restrictive to bodies of water certain sizes or something, you know, once you get below a certain acreage of surface.

00:56:14
Speaker 5: Water, right, And it is.

00:56:15
Speaker 6: And it’s also you know, if you if you have a town on a lake in the Midwest, upper Midwest, probably a fair amount of the tax revenue is tied to recreating on that lake that’s not you know, wake boats. Yeah, you know, so it’s there’s there’s a lot of financial incentives in there too.

00:56:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:56:35
Speaker 1: This this is something that you see talked about across the country, but I feel like Minnesota and Wisconsin specifically are sort of the tip of the spear on this so far. That seems like it’s where there’s a real collision of lake life between the people who like to fish and the people who like to you know, be pulled behind a boat or you know, ride a wakeboard behind a boat.

00:56:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:56:57
Speaker 6: And I don’t even think I think that what we know, we’re so used to kind of defaulting to the fishing side of things, but there are you know, we spend a lot of time on lakes in Minnesota there are a lot of people who like to get up and go for a nice paddle board, you know, paddle across the bay or whatever. And it’s interesting to me because it might be a time when we would pair up with people who generally aren’t in the blood sports.

00:57:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes me think too about that.

00:57:24
Speaker 4: Being that far north, don’t you have it like a limited window when you’d be out there swimming for sure, for sure, as opposed to being well.

00:57:32
Speaker 6: And that’s that’s part of the problem too, is you know, you have maybe four months a year where the water tamp is right for everybody to be out, so there’s all these competing you know, recreational opportunities.

00:57:43
Speaker 1: More to come, I imagine this conversation will be very different, you know, next year, five years from now. Maggie heldo, what’s going on with pronghorn migration corridors.

00:57:53
Speaker 7: Well, this isn’t the newest news, but I was, I was involved with this, so we’re going to talk about it today.

00:57:59
Speaker 2: Great.

00:58:00
Speaker 7: So, on June twenty sixth, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon officially designated the first Analoge migration corridor in the nation, which is pretty big news. It’s over two million I think that’s right. Yeah, two million acres and this has been in the works for years. So the part of the process I was in was a working group. It was sort of like the final review of this, but it’s backed on twenty years of data collection that the Game and Fish have done. So I was in what was the governor appointed Local Working Group. So I live in Pinedale, Wyoming, that’s in Sublet County. It consisted of commissioners from Sublet, Teton, Lincoln, Sweetwater counties I think that’s all of them, and then various stakeholder groups. So I was representing wildlife, conservation and hunting. There were also representedives for industry, agg motorized wreck So we had like a lot of different opinions, you know, different different looks on how we should be approaching this. So what we were tasked with doing was looking at this one hundred and fifty page biological risk assessment compiled from the Game and Fish and so what they had done at this point was identified the corridor from all this data that they collected, and so it was broken down into originally ten segments that got whittled down by the time we were reviewing it to eight segments. So it was our job to like look this over see if the corridor provided too many protections not enough, what other recommendations we would give. So we met with representatives from counties, people like planning and zoning, oil and gas reps, a lot of wildlife biologists. Took some time for public comments every month, so this was like a six month process that we were meeting and going over all these details. So the actual designation, what this doesn’t doesn’t do, I’ll go over I think it’s important to recognize that private land is included in that two million acres, but it’s not really impacted by designation. There’s nothing that like private landowners can or can’t do because of this. If anything, there’s a benefit. They’re more likely to get funding dollars to do things like habitat improvements or fencing improvements on their properties if they have old barbed wire fence that they want to make wildlife friendly because they’re located within the court or they’re more likely to get the funding dollars for that. Now, So the corridor itself is broken down into low, medium, and high use areas and then they’re stopovers and bottlenecks, and the way the protections are distributed within the corridor are dependent off of that. So the I mean it’s pretty straightforward, like low end medium use areas have the least amount of protections because the way the GPS collar data, you know, they’re seeing the least amount of migrations happening in these areas, but they’re still enough to determine that, yes, this is where the animals are using this area for migration.

01:01:38
Speaker 8: So it’s.

01:01:41
Speaker 7: The way that the wording is phrased is like surface disturbances, and what that means is like new developments, drilling a gas well, drilling a mind, setting up solar facility. So if you’re doing any of these things on public lands, you have to go through a process. You have to speak with BLM, you have to speak with the game and fish. So this sets up sort of the conversation that these industries have to have with game and fish and BLM in order to develop these areas. So low and medium use surface disturbances can occur, but human presence is limited during migration periods, and each segment of the corridor has a window of time during spring and fall migrations that sort of determines when these human present times. If that makes sense, So it’s sort of it gives a buffer period of like, okay, this is when people should not be in this area. So it’s the same but a little bit more intense for high use areas. So high use areas it’s defined as surface disturbances shall not disturb the functionality of the corridor. So a high use area, you can develop there as long as it’s not impinging on how antelope migrate through that area. So the difference between that bottlenecks. Bottlenecks are where the protections really come into play, and that’s where the corridor has been funneled down to this small area where there’s a lot of antelope moving through a very small window. So an example of this, down by Rock Springs there was a bottleneck and so there was a cliff on one side, a highway on the other side, and things got pushed through really fast. There was a solar plant that was put in the middle between the cliff and the highway, so the antelope have nowhere to go, nowhere to move through there except for the highway. So back in twenty two twenty three, we had this really severe winner. We also had pneumonia, We had really really crazy animal die offs. I mean there were there were just herds of animals that laid down and died on the side of the roads. It was devastating for our populations. So this was one of those areas, these bottlenecks, where they recognize that, Okay, we have to keep these open because if not, that’s where you’re going to see piles of animals on the side of the highway if we don’t keep this open. So bottlenecks only make up seventy five hundred acres of public lands within this corridor, and that’s where there are no surface disturbances allowed and no human presence during migration. So the bottlenecks are really where the most protections come into play within the corridor. And so it’s really not a super strong legal like, it’s not law in Wyoming. It’s guidelines for development. It provides opportunities for conservation dollars, and it opens the potential for more protections for prong worn and more years to come. And you know, when we were asked to apply to this group, we were asked to consider the Teddy Roosevelt quote, conservation means development as much as it means protection. And I think what this cored or designation does is a pretty reasonable balance between those two things. You know, we need development to support our communities. It pays for some conservation for It’s like, we can’t exist in a world without development, so we need to be able to do it in responsible ways while still being mindful of our other natural resources like wildlife. So this designation isn’t saying we can’t develop, it’s only saying that in those very fragile bottleneck areas. So I’m really proud that we got this pass through to designation. I really you know, our analoge populations have been bouncing back, and it’s it’s good to see, it’s promising to see, and I hope this opens up more money for more fencing work and more habitat change, and you know, hopefully maybe one day some good karma for me so I can draw an analope tag.

01:06:17
Speaker 1: Do you think that like the private ranchers who live along this area are are they aware of this new recommendation or if they were listening right now, this would be news to them.

01:06:27
Speaker 7: No, I think they’re aware of it. I think, you know, we had ad representatives there, and I think there’s a big push for ranchers to change to wildlife fence friendly fencing in our area, which would look like what So for pronghorn it means moving the bottom wire up because they tend to go under. The issue is that twenty two to twenty three Winner we had an abnormal amount of snow at lower elevations, so the fences were buried. So there’s you know, there’s this push for research to figure out what con fencing look like in the winners when they can’t get under it. There’s lay down fencing, there’s areas where we have gates that we can open, so it’s there’s there’s more opportunities to research sort of how we can work with ranchers because I mean, we have a ton of public land where we live, but there’s also a ton of private land. I don’t live around a lot of people. I like it that way, but it’s you know, private land. It’s it’s very it’s just as important for wildlife as it as public land.

01:07:35
Speaker 3: Is I think something worth noting on this one too, And first off, kudos Maggie, thank you so much for being a part of this program. We’re being on that working group. That’s amazing. You know, this is a pretty renowned migration route, right, It’s it’s branded very nicely the Path of the prong Horn. But this is the longest known land animal migration route in the lower forty eight States. So these pronghorn are going from around Grand Teeton Nash Park one hundred and fifty to two hundred miles all the way down past where Maggie lives in Pinedale into that Korean River valley. So that’s a substantial distance, pretty amazing wildlife feet that’s still happening in the lower forty eight. But you know, there’s a lot of change, and you can speak to this much better than me. But with the gas field and Pinedale, with the growth of the community, there’s a lot of fragmentation of that habitat now, right, there’s a lot of development now that is making these protections so much more important. So this is like very important at a crucial time as that area that they used to pass through, that they depend on is changing rapidly.

01:08:37
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I forgot to speak to this, but we’ve already had the mule Deer Migration Corridor established in the area. We have things like winter range areas acknowledge that sort of restrict access. We also, you know, this benefits more than just prong horn. There’s studies out that show sage gus and prong horn have a lot of similar habitats. So this is sort of I see this having a ripple effect, that this is going to impact positively more than just one species. You know, it’s it’s helping our whole stagebrush ecosystem because it is it’s a huge amount of land and it’s i mean, looking at how things have changed. It it’s impossible to ignore the changes, you know, with development, but.

01:09:33
Speaker 8: It is what it is.

01:09:34
Speaker 7: That that’s sort of there’s no way around it. So I think the more we can have conversations like this and set up for success with you know, responsible development. So we’re being mindful about like how we can do this without putting a solar plant, you know, and in a place that is going to be a pinch point where animals are moving, I think the better we will be going forward.

01:09:57
Speaker 2: And Maggie, and that’s how I’m going to refer to you of my own is aunt Maggie.

01:10:02
Speaker 4: Has there been a lot of our any substantial pushback on any of the things.

01:10:07
Speaker 7: There was some, I mean we went back and forth a lot. There was a point during the process where I thought people didn’t want it to be designated because they thought, well, this isn’t doing anything, this is just going to cause troubles for me, you know, trying to get permits to drill a gas well. So we had a lot of pushback, but I think, you know, I think people realize if they want to drill, if they want to mine, if they want to you know, set up a data center in this place that we live, we care a lot about other resources there too, so they’re going to have to come to terms with that. So you know, they pushed, we pushed back, We came to an agreement, and there are we put out. I mean, it’s a multi page document of recommendations of things going forward, because we heard things like, well, you know, the BLM doesn’t always listen to what’s written in the mule deer migration cord or recommendations, and there’s disconnect between them and the game and fish. So you know, we put out that there should be an MoU and and nothing that we wrote was necessarily like a legally like defined thing. It was just like, hey, we think that the Governor’s office should do this, So It’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here. But just getting to the point of designation as something that’s worth celebrating.

01:11:34
Speaker 1: Good stuff, Maggie. All right, now we have Jordan Sailers bringing some Blood Trails flavor to the Deuce Show.

01:11:42
Speaker 5: What do you got?

01:11:42
Speaker 2: Jordan’s right.

01:11:45
Speaker 3: So, this is a story that I’ve been paying attention to for a little over a year, and I hope to cover it in greater detail in a Blood Trails episode, but as you’ll see now, is just not quite the right time for it. So Ian Eccles was a forty six year old turkey hunter who went missing in Kittius kit Titus, Kittatus County, Washington. And so this happened back in twenty twenty and so, like I said, I I’ve been tracking it for about a year now, but there was recently a major update just last month, which we’ll get to in a minute. I also spoke with one of the game ordens who was involved in this case. So you’re gonna get some information here, which is why you listen to the Meet Your News podcast that you’re not gonna get anywhere else. So to give a little bit of backstory here, Ian was last scene on May seventeenth, twenty twenty, and the plan was to he was gonna go turkey hunting with his buddy, but he was gonna go up and camp by himself the night before and then meet up the next morning. This is near the town of Liberty in Washington. It’s of a mix of there’s a big national force there, there’s also some some state land. His buddy goes up the next morning and he doesn’t find Ian. He’s not where he was supposed to be camping, and so he goes hunting, but he’s kind of increasingly concerned. This is Ian’s friend, and so he calls Ian’s other friends. They come up to look for Ian because they’re like they’re concerned. It’s not like they think, maybe, you know, he’s he went to a different campsite, or maybe he got lost in the woods, and like he needs help.

01:13:29
Speaker 5: We need to go find him.

01:13:30
Speaker 3: So they’re looking for him and they’re not super concerned until they see Ian’s car. It was a Toyota FJ Cruiser, but someone else is driving it, someone that they don’t recognize, and the back windshield of the car was broken and like gone, and they knew it was Ian’s car because the driver was wearing Ian’s hat and they recognized his hat, and so they flag him down. They’re like, hey, like where’s Ian and the guy just drives off. And so at this point, like we’re pretty concerned, So the Sheriff’s office gets involved. It becomes a you know, a man hunt basically not only for Ian, but also for this guy that was driving Ian’s car. And so about a week later they find Ian’s car. It had been abandoned, and what they find inside is not promising. There was blood everywhere, it looked like there had been some kind of fight. The back windshield it appeared had been shot out rather than you know, broken in some other way. And so along with all that stuff they find Ian’s ID, so they know it’s his car, but they also find the idea of someone else. This guy’s name is Jorge Oma al Kantara Gonzalez, and al Kintara was kind of a known criminal in the area.

01:14:57
Speaker 5: He hung out like in the woods, and he.

01:15:01
Speaker 3: Was implicated in another vehicle theft of an elderly woman who was found dead inside her house. He had her car at one point, and it’s unclear what his involvement is there. He’s also linked to like robberies of like cabins in the area, things like that.

01:15:18
Speaker 5: So they’re looking for this guy.

01:15:21
Speaker 3: Three days later, a warden sees a guy carrying a shotgun in the area and he doesn’t know who it is. But like at this point, all the hunters had been like, you guys need to be out of this area. They’d cleared the area of hunters because they’re looking for, you know, a murder suspect. This has been a week now since it’s been missing. Yeah, it’s it’s been about a week maybe a little bit more. He sees this guy carrying a shotgun. He’s like, hey, you need to stop and talk to me. The guy drops a shotgun, runs into the woods. It’s Ian shotgun. They think it’s it’s all Kantar. So they know he’s like out there just like hiding out in the woods. And so you know, at this point, like the manhunt is huge. The game ward and I spoke with said one of the biggest man hunts in the history of the state. Tons of agencies involved, like the Warden Service, the Sheriff’s office, the FEDS are involved, and the ward and I spoke with really emphasized like the danger of this hunt, and you can kind of imagine, like you’re a game warden looking for this guy.

01:16:20
Speaker 5: You’re walking through the woods.

01:16:21
Speaker 3: You don’t know whether he’s like behind a tree looking at you from a ridge, Like he’s clearly armed. He’s you know, dangerous. He knows how to survive in the woods, and so it’s a very dangerous operation for these guys like looking for al Kantara. His family was pretty cooperative and they sort of explained like, yeah, he goes up there and like lives in the woods all summer. You know, he forges, he poaches, he you know, probably steals from cabins to just like survive. So he just like lives up there. So and it’s a giant area, like it’s extremely difficult to like find like search through every nook and cranny. They got close a few times. The game wardens said they found fresh human feces that they had reason to believe were his, and so they you know, they know he’s close. They dispatched like playing closed wardens to just like act as hikers, right, and so if they run into him, he won’t just run away.

01:17:21
Speaker 2: So they did that.

01:17:22
Speaker 3: They said they set out trail cams hoping to you know, hoping to spot him somewhere. But this is, like he said, it was kind of like a siege strategy because it’s such a big area. You’re not going to like find him wherever he’s hiding out. You’re just going to kind of keep the pressure on until something happens, right, And so something did happen twenty three days into the search.

01:17:43
Speaker 5: So now we’re into June of twenty twenty.

01:17:46
Speaker 3: Someone calls from a cabin and says, Hey, I see someone in my neighbor’s cabin, but I know they’re not supposed to be home, and so they think, okay, this is a pretty good and I think they had reason to believe he was in that area.

01:17:58
Speaker 5: So the warden I spoke with one up there with three other two other guys.

01:18:01
Speaker 3: So there’s only three of them up there, And like, in this type of situation, you would want more guys, right, you would want more people to like get this guy out of this cabin because they know he’s armed, but they also know he’s slipped away several times.

01:18:15
Speaker 5: They like need to find him, so they go up there. Sure enough, they see him inside.

01:18:20
Speaker 3: He’s like making food in the kitchen, they see a gun next to him, and they, you know, I imagine the conversation, maybe Brent, you can speak to this was like do we wait for other people to show up or do we just go in? And they decided to just go in. So they approached the house. They yelled like, hey, come out with your hands up. I imagine like if he’d grabbed his gun, it would have ended much differently, but he didn’t. He came out of the house, he was arrested kind of without incident.

01:18:49
Speaker 2: Good.

01:18:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it ended well in that sense. It the story gets a little confusing at this point. So this happened all the way back in twenty twenty. This guy’s clearly suspected in a murder, but everyone was kind of confused because he wasn’t.

01:19:06
Speaker 5: Charged with murder.

01:19:08
Speaker 3: He was charged with eight other felonies for stealing the car, stealing guns, and he pleaded guilty and went to prison. So everyone’s like, like, what’s going on. This guy’s clearly implicated. He’s been named but not charged. What we’ve since found out is that the strategy was we’re gonna charge him with these felonies, We’re gonna get him, you know, off the street or out of the woods, right where he can’t hurt anyone, get him in prison, and then build the murder case against him. So this is the big update that happened just last month, as his release date was approaching for those other felonies, he was charged with murder.

01:19:48
Speaker 5: And you know, the case is pretty convincing.

01:19:50
Speaker 3: They have the forensic evidence from the car there was, They have GPS evidence linking him to the area.

01:19:57
Speaker 5: They have apparently they have go pro.

01:19:59
Speaker 3: Footage of him, like using Ian’s tent and like his stuff, like three days after Ian went missing.

01:20:07
Speaker 1: Who’s GoPro?

01:20:09
Speaker 5: I’m not sure. Actually it could have been Ian’s. I imagine it was.

01:20:14
Speaker 3: But at the same time, like and I and this is all speculation, right, I don’t I don’t know exactly all the evidence they have because they haven’t released all of it. The defense could argue, like, hey, this guy just found Ian, like he just wandered in found Ian. Ian was dead, He got scared, he you know, put Ian’s body somewhere, stole all this stuff. He didn’t have anything to do with murder, right, So you can imagine that kind of defense, and so you can see why they took all that time.

01:20:43
Speaker 5: To build this case is a lot different than right it is.

01:20:49
Speaker 3: Fine. Well, and that’s that’s the thing that’s like the kind of you know, besides Ian’s death, the most tragic part of the story is that they still haven’t found Ian.

01:20:59
Speaker 2: I am.

01:21:00
Speaker 3: And so you can also imagine, again pure speculation, you can imagine some kind of plea deal where he tells them where he left Ian. He gets closure for the Eccles family as part of some kind of plea agreement. But who knows, who knows, you know, whatever that will happen. So you know, if if you live in this area of Washington State, I know his family, uh, you know, ever before hunting season every year, does some media like, hey, please be on the lookout for our you know, our brother, our son because he’s still up there somewhere and no one knows where.

01:21:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, Brent, how common is that that, like you would know without a doubt that this person did this crime, specifically a murder. We just like can’t get the courts to you know, agree with us. Yeah, it’s without a doubt. Thing, it has to be without a doubt, you know.

01:21:48
Speaker 4: And then it’s I’ve seen that, I’ve seen that similarly happen before, where you you’ve got to lead pipe since conviction on something that you go and get him to confess to or that you don’t have to confess that you can get them to sign. Yeah, I’ll do you know, six years or whatever, and then you know we’d be able to case from that. So I knew where he was going with that when they didn’t charge him with murder to begin with. Oh yeah, well they don’t have the facts yet, and you’re going to do that once. You know, if you take somebody and they’re found not guilty, you didn’t have all your ducks in a row, then you know you’re sol to do it again that it ain’t going to happen.

01:22:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jeorge, what’s it going to take to make this into a full episode?

01:22:30
Speaker 2: Do we need a conviction? Yeah?

01:22:32
Speaker 3: So at this point in the case, no one’s talking because the guy’s been charged but not convicted, and so prosecutors you know, are never going to talk to me. And then they also tell the family, hey, don’t talk to the media because and I get it, and I’m not like it’s fine because they don’t want to mess up the case. They don’t want to mess up the prosecution. By releasing some kind of information. And so that’s really what I need to do a Blood Trail’s episode is you know, access to people who can tell me what happened.

01:23:00
Speaker 5: And right now that access just isn’t there. So I’m waiting for you know, the triald happened.

01:23:05
Speaker 1: Okay, we’ll be on lookout for that, all right. Brent has an update around hikers in Arkansas. What do you got, Brent Man? This is the first of its kind.

01:23:14
Speaker 4: In Arkansas that I’m familiar with, and it has caused a bit of a the social media blow up. But while owned wildlife management areas, which is areas in Arkansas that are completely owned by the Arkansas by the state, by the Game and Fish Commission, lakes and ground, which I think makes up like twelve percent of the total public land in Arkansas is state owned and managed by the state.

01:23:41
Speaker 2: To access that, now, to.

01:23:45
Speaker 4: Paddle a boat, hike, bird watch, or non hunting or non fishing activity just to be there, you’re going to have to buy ten dollars and fifty cent permit. And it has it went into effect. You lie the first and man, all my social I get messages all the time about so I can’t believe this is such big money grabbed by the Gaming Fish. All they want to do is make extra money so they can waste it on something else. But when it first started, I started trying to keep an open mind about what was going on, what was happening, So I started talking to other hunters, and then I eventually started talking to the administration of the Gaming Fish, a good friend of mine, he.

01:24:34
Speaker 2: Is a deputy director, and I absolutely see it.

01:24:38
Speaker 4: You know, the trend has been like in out West, I think you guys are probably more familiar with this type of permit access permit than we are. Like, you got to buy a pretty expensive permit to drive through Yellowstone and you’re not. I mean, that’s that. That was a new one to me my first trip out here. Let’s go to Yellowstone, Okay, Well, first thing you got to do is get a permit and I’m like, oh, to drive on the highway. You got to be kidding. So it’s a reflection of that that is the use change or the usage has changed over the last few decades where there are more people who are going there that are not just hunting and fishing, so it’s a bigger impact on the area.

01:25:25
Speaker 2: And with a bigger impact on the area.

01:25:26
Speaker 4: It’s going to cost more to regulate it, upkeep and that kind of stuff. So I think this regulation for this permit is an absolute got our counter person counter to see how many are actually used in the land, because you know, you can they got a formula to used by how many game wards check fishing license and hunting license and the surveys that they send out for who’s using this piece of property, and they can kind of get an idea of the impact they’re going to have on that, but no idea about folks that are not hunting and fishing there. The caveats to the permit is if you’re under sixteen. If you’re fifteen and under, you don’t have to have a permit. The Game and Fish can sanction activities to do it, like you know four h or FFA or academic groups going out there to study. If you have a fishing license or a hunting license, you’re exempt from it.

01:26:28
Speaker 2: So it’s obviously a.

01:26:31
Speaker 4: To me, you know, try to figure out how many folks are doing it, and in the there will be penalties for it if you don’t have it. But it was implemented in July the first and there’s they’ve got a grace period to where they can get the word out and people can can realize, you know, if I’m going out there to watch redbirds, I’ve got to have this permit before I go.

01:26:55
Speaker 2: And the interesting thing that I that I saw was when they did this, they did the survey back in February.

01:27:04
Speaker 4: It went from February the nineteenth to March the sixth of this year. They put that survey out to all license holders of anything in Arkansas. They got eight thousand, four hundred and seventy seven responses to the WMA permit question that specific question. Support for it was at forty one point five percent, Opposition to it was twenty four point seven percent, and thirty three point eight percent had no opinion, like they didn’t care. But it kind of goes back to the social media thing. The social media ain’t very social because the majority of things that I see and there is negative for it, and it was you know, almost half of the people that were supported.

01:27:57
Speaker 1: Do they have a gas as to what kind of revenue this will drive?

01:28:00
Speaker 4: They didn’t. They don’t, and I think that’s part of it. They really have no idea how many people are going out there but with that revenue, if it’s if it is you know, significant, it’s only going to improve.

01:28:15
Speaker 2: I think, I think it’s a.

01:28:16
Speaker 4: Good thing, and I think everybody should pay their way. I’m paying my way to go out there.

01:28:20
Speaker 6: So let me ask you this, because the most common devil’s advocate here for our side is, you know, we buy hunting a fishing licenses like crazy. We support the management for fisheries wildlife, you know, in a disproportionate way generally in a lot of states. When you so like a backpack tax or whatever, this hiker tax. On the surface, it’s like, yeah, we let somebody else pitch in if they’re going to be you know, recreating out there. But at the same time, do we want to give up a spot at the table? Do we want to give up any level of you know, power we might have in the decision making process because of how we like to use it. And so there’s it’s kind of a double edged sword, right, like we want more people to pay, but these groups start pitching in, Yep, they have a seat.

01:29:05
Speaker 5: At the table, you know, and they might not like shooting deer.

01:29:08
Speaker 3: Well that ships sailed though, Like they already have a seat at that table, so they might as well be paying for it, Like more and more and more of those other interest groups are having more influence. Well, that’s true, and so are regardless of what we may want. This idea that claiming that forever we’re the only ones to pay for it is going to give a soul right to dictate how things are managed. That’s just not holding up anymore. Definitely won’t be in five or ten years.

01:29:31
Speaker 4: Well, another part of that I liked it is you know, if you’re you’re buying a permit for this one of twelve places there in the state of Arkansas that that the game official owns, that money is federally law. It’s a federal law. That money goes back to that specific spot. So well that part that’s good.

01:29:50
Speaker 7: And this is ten dollars a year, right, not yeah, ten dollars. I mean like we have we have things like conservation stamps that are you know, through game and fish that it’s like you have to have one with your hunting tag if you use game fish lands, like you have to have one.

01:30:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, that won’t bout stay.

01:30:09
Speaker 7: There’s things like that. But I mean, if you’re gonna use you know, like a pit toilet, or whatever. Toilet paper ain’t free, you know, road main insane free, you can’t. There’s no such thing as free lunch. So I think if you’re going to bitch about a ten dollars fifty a year, you can maybe go deal with your own stuff.

01:30:30
Speaker 5: Thanks what you saying?

01:30:35
Speaker 6: That brings PTSD to me when I see it in Minnesota when they’re like, we haven’t raised the fishing license price in seventeen years.

01:30:42
Speaker 5: And we want to raise it a buck, and people lose their mind.

01:30:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s always like an immediate shock to the system, but it only takes a few years and it’s just very normalized and you’re just like, yeah, it’s the ten dollars thing you pay to go enjoy public lands if you want to watch birds or use the pit toilets that they offer.

01:31:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:31:01
Speaker 3: Well, Utah tried this like pretty recently and the backlash was so severe they like, forget it, They abandoned the effort.

01:31:10
Speaker 5: It’s crazy.

01:31:10
Speaker 2: So well I’m I’m going to be for it. So send the hate mail to Spencer.

01:31:16
Speaker 1: Okay, and then I’ll tell you to send it to Mark, who has our last story of the day about some historic fishing closures. Across the western part of our United States.

01:31:26
Speaker 3: What do you got, Mark, Yeah, Well, since we’re you know, we’ve been talking for a while, we’ll try not to labor this too much. But the headline here is that high water temperatures across much of the West have been leading to catch and release fishing closures that are at you know, kind of all time highs now. This is something that over the last decade plus, you know, anybody who spends time, especially trout fishing out in these Western states has gotten used to seeing this. It’s happening more and more and more, seemingly though every year, and just recently some some relatively attention grabbing new updates that have popped up. Most notably, your home state of Wyoming has implemented the first voluntary closures what they call it for catch and release fishing on the renowned Snake River. So this is iconic water that runs from Yellowstone National Park through Grand Teton National Park to the state border. This is kind of like the jewel of Wyoming of fly fishing imaginations, and now from noon to sunrise, they are asking anglers to stay away. They’re asking anglers not to be out there catching these fish because of the fact that these high water temperatures, which lead to lower oxygen levels as well, put high stress on these fish. And this is happening not just on the snake, but also many of the other major rivers in Wyoming. It is impacting the Green River, the North Platte River, the New Fork River, the Big Horn River. And actually there’s a full closure now on a segment of the Big Horn River, which is another huge draw, huge tourist draw to Wyoming. Then if you move on down you’ve got similar hootile restrictions across almost every major trout fishing river destination in Montana. I think it is twenty four rivers. At least twenty four rivers now have hoot owl restrictions, which is what they.

01:33:17
Speaker 2: Call Yeah, explain that because that was a new term for me. Yep.

01:33:20
Speaker 3: So hoot all is simply something similar to what Wyoming put into place in Montana. That means, from two pm on they’re asking And this is not so much a voluntary closure but an actual more enforceable closure on Montana rivers. Hood all means after two o’clock, catching, release fishing is a no no. So that’s twenty four rivers at least twelve hundred miles of river is covered by that in the state of Montana. Now most of them are like very notable bodies of water, Oh yeah, Beaverhead, Yellowstone, Big Hole, Bitter Gallon in Missouri, I mean krem Dela, creme of what trout anglers are traveling to Montana to go experience now half the day you can’t experience them. In Colorado, at least nineteen rivers now have similar restrictions, something like six hundred and thirty five river miles impacted, and state officials are calling that unprecedented. So that’s something they’ve never experienced to that degree in Colorado. And as of last week, the entire Yellowstone National Parks, the entirety of all the rivers and streams in Yellowstone National Park are under the same kind of thing. So if you care about cold water fish and fishing for them, these days, it is getting more and more unlikely that you will get to experience it the way maybe you could have ten years ago or fifteen years ago during parts of the year. And so here’s what’s happening here. I mentioned that the higher water temperatures, right, you’ve got historic, historically low winter snowpacks in the winter like well we had this past year across much of the West. You’ve got these record heat waves, you have this mega drought that’s been going on two decades relatively consistently across large parts of the West. All of this is leading to stream flows going down sooner in the year. River temperature is going up higher than they used to and staying high. All of that is just not good for a species that is relatively fragile and needs that cold water. And when you add on the stress of fishing a catching and release type situation, you’re taking a possibly already physiologically stressed fish and then adding in that physical exertion. It makes survival rates plummet. So the recommendation from Trout Unlimited and by most state agencies now is that once you reach a sixty eight degree water temperature to give them a break, that’s when severe stress and real concerns around survival rate hits. So sixty eight degrees and higher, folks are saying, hey, let’s get out of there, let’s leave the trout. B When you’re getting above like seventy two degrees, that’s when we’re reaching like lethal thresholds for these fish. When that happens consistently, a whole bunch of bodily functions start going down the drain. For trout, each different trout subspecies is a little bit different. So rainbow trout and brown trout handle the warmer water temperatures better than say, cutthroat trout. So you know, for the native western trout cutthroat, there’s a bunch of subspecies, but they really need that really good cold water. They are on decline and have been struggling for all sorts of reasons, including the introduced species of brown trout and rainbow trout out competing them. So now with these warmer water temperatures, that’s increasing that challenge even more so because the browns are going to do a little bit better, the cutthroat are going to struggle more so, and so you’re going to have this competition threat continue to kind of build as well. So you’ve got a lot of different things layering on top of us here that are going to impact those native trout of the West, and really a lot of anglers, a lot of people that care about this resource, a lot of you know, businesses and fly guides and you know, shops and hotels and all of this, you know that right on top of this ecosystem and these these species. So it’s something that’s you know, as someone who’s been a part time residentut here for a decade plus, I’ve been seeing more and more and realizing, oh wow, the way I experience this place is changing. And I’m sure you know, Maggie, you’ve been seeing it living here your whole life. How that has become seemingly just a part of what it means to fish in the West is that, hey, August is a crapshoot. August might not be a thing anymore for big parts of the year.

01:37:24
Speaker 7: There’s not creek fishing in August. It’s pretty much what it comes down to.

01:37:29
Speaker 1: That’s are Wyoming’s closures voluntary. They’re not even like you have to be off the water to this point.

01:37:36
Speaker 3: They’re not making them legally enforceable, but they’re like this very strongly worded suggestion, and they’re saying, if anglers will follow this, and we’re asking that they do so, then we won’t be forced to go further. But this is like that step, This is the final warning before they have to do something further.

01:37:52
Speaker 1: The Antelope Corridor Recommendation fishing when it’s hot out recommendation.

01:37:58
Speaker 5: Told what to do?

01:38:00
Speaker 1: Really, are you stie? Depends when I need to be Yeah, are you going to be fishing out there?

01:38:07
Speaker 2: Though?

01:38:08
Speaker 7: No, No, it’s not that it’s the fishing also doesn’t get it’s not that good when it’s that hot, right, they’re lethargic, they’re not that fun to fight. I might be on the lakes trolling for some big lakers because that water stays pretty pretty consistent. We don’t really get above seventy and the lakers are pretty low. So when it gets a little warm, we go to the lakes, and then we go to the mountains and there’s there’s still cold water around.

01:38:36
Speaker 3: But that’s a great point though, is like making sure that people know about the alternatives. Like if we’re reaching those higher water temperatures, yeah, give the trout a break in those rivers where you have that. But there are alternatives the lakes, you know, high alpine tributaries, Uh, you know, switching to warm water, species chasing, some bass chasing, you know, something like that in these reservoirs. This is you know, we don’t want to love these things to death. We got to if it means we sacrifice a little bit of time, a little bit of that experience. I think that’s certainly better for the long term. Two other things to consider. When you’re in that zone, approaching the sixty eight degree kind of line, they do ask, you know, if you are still going to catch and release between like sixty five to sixty eight degrees, you know, try to make sure that those fights with a fish are as short as possible. So don’t baby them for fifteen minutes. To make sure you don’t break off a fish, like get that guy in, use a heavier tippet, don’t take all these pictures and have like a five minute photo shoot with a fish. Get these fish in fast, get them back in the water fast, give them the best chance for survival. I think if you do that. Another thing I talked with a guide down in Idaho, a friend of mine, Mike Dawkins, about this, and he said, just remember, like as we are moving into this world of warmer water temperatures, increasingly stressed trout. You know, numbers don’t have to be the thing. Like so many people want to chase catching tons and tons of trout. Let’s maybe focus more on the experience. Let’s catch five trout in a way that it’s really exciting to us, and then enjoy the rest of the float. Or let’s go do something different where you can still enjoy that fly fishing or that trout fishing however you like to do it. But we don’t need to pound every single possible fish because there’s more and more people trying to do this. The conditions are getting more and more difficult for the fish, so we’re all gonna have to give a little to keep this around for the long term.

01:40:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe time for those trout anglers to just start thinking about hunting season. It’s only a month away.

01:40:27
Speaker 5: It’s getting a bed, all right.

01:40:29
Speaker 1: That’s the end of today’s episode. Next week, though, Steve is back, and for the first time, he’s going to be doing a news show from the Fish Shack, So tune in to see how fun or weird or bad that goes. See you back here then by now,