# Ep. 875: Grizz Attack, Mountain Lions Rebound, and a $44K Walleye

An episode of [The MeatEater Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/960902903), 12 May 2026, 1 h 38 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/63aba8bc-2dc8-4f89-807a-ae280065a7cd/2910d482-6aa7-4642-84c3-b447015640c7/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=3892b9a1-a960-4f9e-bee7-ae280065a7db

Steven Rinella and the MeatEater crew discuss: Smokejumper Sam Forstag running for Congress in Montana; people getting weird about waterfowl in North Carolina; grizzly attacks at National Parks; spearfishing in Michigan; public land transfers in Alaska; a $44K walleye in Iowa; mountain lion populations rebounding; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show. On this week, we talked
[0:03] Speaker 1: to a former smoke jumper who wants your vote. Spencer Catches,
[0:07] Speaker 1: I mean reports on a forty four thousand dollars Iowa walleye.
[0:12] Speaker 1: Some weird old people are being weird about swans and
[0:15] Speaker 1: other waterfowl in North Carolina. We've got a few grizzly
[0:20] Speaker 1: tags here in Montana going down, including a fatality. Spear
[0:23] Speaker 1: fishermen are coming for your walllwyse in Michigan and I'm
[0:26] Speaker 1: joining them. And Doctor Randall reports on public lands transfers
[0:31] Speaker 1: in Alaska, plus a whole lot more. Welcome, But first
[0:35] Speaker 1: is always our news.
[0:39] Speaker 2: It starts.
[0:43] Speaker 3: Hey, please subscribe to the Meat Eater podcast YouTube channel.
[0:46] Speaker 3: It helps us a lot and you'll be the first
[0:48] Speaker 3: to know when new shows drop.
[0:50] Speaker 1: Well you just read that that's at the.
[0:52] Speaker 3: Media and what's that.
[0:57] Speaker 4: No, it's just the mediat podcast network.
[1:00] Speaker 5: Yeah, it's just really helpful for our network.
[1:04] Speaker 6: If you all subscribe.
[1:05] Speaker 1: Yeah, do a solid, Do a solid for your fellow
[1:08] Speaker 1: Meeta Roast. We got a new episode dropping today. Me
[1:13] Speaker 1: and Yanni have a showdown immediate to Roast and Me
[1:15] Speaker 1: and Yanni's wives judge it mm hmm. You know, someone
[1:20] Speaker 1: pointed out to me. They said they'd never tell anybody this,
[1:24] Speaker 1: but they said, someone that watched the cut said your
[1:30] Speaker 1: wife hacks on your cooking, because she does, but he
[1:34] Speaker 1: says she gets visibly defensive when someone else hacks on
[1:37] Speaker 1: your cooking. Interesting, which I haven't watched to take No,
[1:40] Speaker 1: you know, I like that.
[1:42] Speaker 7: I guys filmed that man, you honest, be honest, did
[1:46] Speaker 7: not have a lot of good things to say about you.
[1:48] Speaker 7: He said you were just like scattered all over the place,
[1:51] Speaker 7: trying to do too much at once.
[1:52] Speaker 8: He said that, oh, yeah.
[1:57] Speaker 4: This is all getting cut out. By the way, you
[1:59] Speaker 4: can't spoil me up.
[2:01] Speaker 1: Who's the uh so our Save Tuckertown campaign, who's got
[2:05] Speaker 1: the Oh, the donation deadline is May fourteen.
[2:07] Speaker 5: Yeah, so just just pay attention to that. And we've
[2:10] Speaker 5: just got a couple more days.
[2:12] Speaker 1: So again helped me.
[2:14] Speaker 3: They're at one hundred and sixty three thousand dollars raised
[2:17] Speaker 3: out of the two hundred thousand dollars goal, which will
[2:21] Speaker 3: be matched by one hundred thousand for Meat Eater and
[2:24] Speaker 3: one hundred thousand for Onnex.
[2:25] Speaker 1: And what's the closest, what's the closest municipality here. Well,
[2:29] Speaker 1: how do we say in your neck of the woods, it's.
[2:33] Speaker 3: Southeast of Salisbury, North Carolina. Okay, uh, northeast of Charlotte.
[2:40] Speaker 1: Okay. So two things out of North Carolina today, just
[2:42] Speaker 1: as a recap.
[2:43] Speaker 3: Halfway between Winston Salem and Charlotte.
[2:45] Speaker 1: Alcoa, who's having the luminum having the luna business. Alcoa
[2:50] Speaker 1: owned a bunch of land near the Tuckertown Reservoir. They'd
[2:54] Speaker 1: always manage it as public land. Alcoa wants to divest
[2:58] Speaker 1: of that asset. Okay. So one option when divesting from
[3:02] Speaker 1: an asset is they We're just sell it off and
[3:05] Speaker 1: then people are gonna buy it and it'll become like houses,
[3:08] Speaker 1: or you contribute to the effort to like buy it
[3:12] Speaker 1: and make it permanently public land. So we're at meat
[3:17] Speaker 1: Eater working with on X and we're doing a matching thing.
[3:21] Speaker 1: Your donations come in, we match them dollar for dollar
[3:23] Speaker 1: up to the point that we hit two hundred grand. No,
[3:26] Speaker 1: is that right? Two hundred grand of matches, Yeah, something
[3:28] Speaker 1: like that.
[3:29] Speaker 3: Yes, we have two hundred thousand matching phones.
[3:31] Speaker 5: So you guys can go to the medater dot com
[3:33] Speaker 5: and search land access and our land Access twenty twenty
[3:37] Speaker 5: six page will pop up and there's a link to
[3:40] Speaker 5: make a donation there.
[3:41] Speaker 8: I killed a big old white tail buck on some
[3:43] Speaker 8: former Alcoa land in North Carolina, no different state. It's
[3:48] Speaker 8: hanging in the med Eater store.
[3:50] Speaker 1: What's the.
[3:52] Speaker 8: Uh Texas?
[3:54] Speaker 1: Well, you're being weird about it. I don't know, because
[3:56] Speaker 1: it's like that, you know, Bot burned.
[3:58] Speaker 8: Texas because tenn a. This is why I told you
[4:01] Speaker 8: Texas and I decided it was okay.
[4:05] Speaker 1: It used to be alcohol I heard on that podcast
[4:07] Speaker 1: was some deer in Texas. Yeah, like going down there, Randall, Yeah,
[4:14] Speaker 1: did you win?
[4:15] Speaker 9: No?
[4:15] Speaker 3: I didn't. I didn't.
[4:16] Speaker 1: Uh that's a talk about spoiler alert.
[4:19] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I went down By the time you're listening
[4:23] Speaker 3: to this would be the weekend before last to the
[4:27] Speaker 3: very southeastern corner of Wyoming, just across from the Kansas
[4:33] Speaker 3: or I'm sorry, the Nebraska border.
[4:34] Speaker 1: Jerney Turkey's gobble. Nope, not a single gobble the whole time.
[4:38] Speaker 3: Nope, Nope.
[4:42] Speaker 1: Yes.
[4:42] Speaker 3: Shot. The KRG Extreme e l R match hosted by
[4:46] Speaker 3: High Planes Precision was So that's extreme extreme long range,
[4:51] Speaker 3: extreme extreme long range. Yes, yes, And this is something
[4:55] Speaker 3: that there's a lot of very dedicated practitioners of the
[4:59] Speaker 3: of the discipline, and I went down there with zero
[5:02] Speaker 3: preparation or training. I finished one eighteen out of one
[5:07] Speaker 3: thirty seven, and I was going, you beat some guys, yeah,
[5:10] Speaker 3: and actually.
[5:10] Speaker 1: Yeah, you were like, you're competing against like military snipers.
[5:15] Speaker 3: Yeah, and just mostly enthusiasts. But I had There were
[5:19] Speaker 3: only three people who hadn't shot this exact match before,
[5:22] Speaker 3: and I was one of them. So I like to
[5:24] Speaker 3: think of as great, that's like this it's not about you.
[5:28] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's about who you beat. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
[5:31] Speaker 3: I was gunning for number one thirty six, and I
[5:33] Speaker 3: surpassed my hopes and expectations.
[5:35] Speaker 1: How many people did you beat?
[5:38] Speaker 3: Nineteen?
[5:39] Speaker 1: I think like you could have said, you could have
[5:41] Speaker 1: said twenty one. I went down there and bested. Oh,
[5:45] Speaker 1: I bested nineteen competitors on I'm doing all.
[5:47] Speaker 3: My math rock.
[5:48] Speaker 6: Yeah, like in some other world that's like your.
[5:50] Speaker 1: Place, I'd just say yeah, I'd say nothing more. Yeah,
[5:52] Speaker 1: I bested nineteen competitors.
[5:54] Speaker 3: So there's a couple of ways of looking at it.
[5:58] Speaker 3: Either I exceeded my expectation where I came in near
[6:01] Speaker 3: the very tail end of the finishers, I hit like
[6:06] Speaker 3: between twenty three and twenty four percent of my points
[6:10] Speaker 3: and the winner only got seventy percent of the points available.
[6:14] Speaker 3: So it was the longest shot you made in practice
[6:17] Speaker 3: or during the match. During the match practice, during the match,
[6:20] Speaker 3: my longest shot was thirteen fifty three. That was my
[6:25] Speaker 3: first my long over a mile in practice, my longest
[6:28] Speaker 3: first round impact. Yeah, I went twice. Well, I had
[6:32] Speaker 3: three hits over a mile in practice. The longest one
[6:34] Speaker 3: was twenty three to twenty three.
[6:36] Speaker 1: You hit at that, yeah. Oh, I was saying to
[6:39] Speaker 1: him that it's long when there's no year that was
[6:44] Speaker 1: that year, Yeah, because he's talking about other distances that
[6:49] Speaker 1: had years. Yeah, but nineteen eighty five, eighteen thirty three. Yeah,
[6:54] Speaker 1: But then you get into thing that a year that
[6:56] Speaker 1: hasn't happened. That's a long ways a shot. It is
[6:59] Speaker 1: because then you're like to like twoenty twenty seven.
[7:03] Speaker 3: But another way of thinking about the long way, ninety
[7:05] Speaker 3: five yard shot is so much further removed from where
[7:08] Speaker 3: we are today that it it Maybe that's more alien
[7:11] Speaker 3: than like twenty twenty nine.
[7:16] Speaker 1: But yeah, it was good. Did you call yourself?
[7:19] Speaker 10: I did?
[7:20] Speaker 1: Did your wife go no?
[7:21] Speaker 3: She found out how far away it was and she
[7:23] Speaker 3: didn't go.
[7:24] Speaker 1: She backed out.
[7:25] Speaker 3: Yeah, so did Phil. Actually, I had a couple of
[7:29] Speaker 3: people that wanted to go, and then they found out
[7:30] Speaker 3: I was driving nine hours and they didn't go.
[7:32] Speaker 1: But wild Phil back out.
[7:33] Speaker 3: It's just basically the drive time, Is that true, Phil?
[7:36] Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, I thought it'd be a fun time. There
[7:38] Speaker 4: was karaoke to be had.
[7:39] Speaker 3: So yeah, you know, yeah lost my voice SiO.
[7:42] Speaker 4: That was a big carrot for me, and I just did.
[7:43] Speaker 1: The drive was too much as the karaoke rolled into
[7:46] Speaker 1: the shooting contest.
[7:47] Speaker 3: It's sort of a natural outgrowth of the we We
[7:51] Speaker 3: also did trivia. I hosted trivia on Friday Night with
[7:55] Speaker 3: the match director what yeah, Yeah, this is the whole thing.
[8:00] Speaker 3: I got it when I was deer hunting last year.
[8:02] Speaker 3: I got a message on Instagram from jose Gardner, friend
[8:06] Speaker 3: of the program, uh, and he said, look, I host
[8:10] Speaker 3: this match in Wyoming in May, and I think you'd
[8:14] Speaker 3: have a good time. Plus I've always wanted to have
[8:17] Speaker 3: ballistics related trivia. And I said, I'm in who wrote
[8:20] Speaker 3: the trivia?
[8:21] Speaker 2: Him?
[8:21] Speaker 3: No, I did, I did most of it.
[8:23] Speaker 8: Did you did you set to be too hard for us?
[8:25] Speaker 8: Because it's all about long range shooting. We're too dumb.
[8:30] Speaker 3: But a man who wrote a book on ballistics told
[8:33] Speaker 3: me it was good.
[8:35] Speaker 1: Afterwards the trivia, Yeah, did you have anything in there
[8:37] Speaker 1: about the Coriolis effect?
[8:39] Speaker 3: I did?
[8:39] Speaker 1: Oh, I prot the past.
[8:43] Speaker 3: Have you seen the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlberg?
[8:45] Speaker 5: No?
[8:45] Speaker 9: I have not.
[8:46] Speaker 3: It's a key plot.
[8:47] Speaker 1: Point, quick thing. I've talked about this book two times
[8:50] Speaker 1: on the show, but I don't know what it was.
[8:52] Speaker 1: I knew that there was some kind of firewood book,
[8:57] Speaker 1: and I knew that it had something to do with
[8:58] Speaker 1: the Northern Europeans. I'm holding it my hand. Jim Zumble
[9:01] Speaker 1: gave it to me. This is a fetishist text. If
[9:05] Speaker 1: you have a firewood fetish, this book is for you.
[9:10] Speaker 1: But find the mystery is solved. Norwegian wood chopping, stacking,
[9:14] Speaker 1: and drying kind of redundant plumit.
[9:19] Speaker 4: I think it's Norwegian wood, right, then, that's what it is.
[9:22] Speaker 1: Oh, that makes more sense. The Okay, that's true. I
[9:29] Speaker 1: was it could be titled Norwegian wood chopping, stacking and
[9:35] Speaker 1: drying wood the Scandinavian Way, or you could read it
[9:39] Speaker 1: Norwegian wood chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian way.
[9:47] Speaker 1: Either way, I would have never had a redundancy of
[9:52] Speaker 1: words between my title and subtitle.
[9:57] Speaker 4: Maybe yeah, there's no better word.
[10:00] Speaker 1: But I'm telling you what, man, if you get your
[10:02] Speaker 1: jolly's off looking at expertly stacked wood, Phil, how.
[10:09] Speaker 4: Do we just where? Could I put point at the
[10:12] Speaker 4: camera in front of you?
[10:13] Speaker 1: Yeah? Can you zoom in on that? If I had that,
[10:18] Speaker 1: I'd say, no one burned any of that ship? Can
[10:24] Speaker 1: they see it? Good? Can I see what they see?
[10:25] Speaker 1: Or can't you do that?
[10:26] Speaker 8: Oh?
[10:26] Speaker 4: Yeah I can.
[10:26] Speaker 1: I can show you that I want to see if
[10:28] Speaker 1: there's oh they can see it? Yeah, that's nothing.
[10:30] Speaker 2: Look at this.
[10:31] Speaker 3: I like, cow, he's used all those palettes.
[10:32] Speaker 1: This dude build a house out of firewood? Wait a minute?
[10:35] Speaker 2: Or that house meant for burning or living?
[10:38] Speaker 1: That's what we're talking about. You can tell. You can
[10:40] Speaker 1: tell a guy like, hey, man, just step into that
[10:42] Speaker 1: little house there and make yourself comfortable. Can I show
[10:46] Speaker 1: this one, Phil?
[10:46] Speaker 2: Yeah?
[10:47] Speaker 1: Wow, there's nothing yet.
[10:49] Speaker 3: Damn, that's nice.
[10:50] Speaker 1: Nothing because wait till I find the house.
[10:52] Speaker 6: Maybe that needs to be the new calendar.
[10:56] Speaker 1: Yeah, there's some dudes in here to can stack some wood. Man,
[10:58] Speaker 1: But there's a guy that made up uh.
[11:01] Speaker 4: Damn it and also just a quick the titles. I
[11:04] Speaker 4: think a play on non the Beatles song nor Reegian
[11:05] Speaker 4: would so I don't think it's a translation thing.
[11:11] Speaker 2: Great song, Yeah, kind of a bummer.
[11:14] Speaker 4: The Buddy Rich Big Band has a just face melting
[11:16] Speaker 4: cover of it. If you like jazz, just throw that
[11:18] Speaker 4: out there.
[11:19] Speaker 1: Mm hmm did I ever tell you that? Jazz? Oh?
[11:23] Speaker 3: Norwegian wood parenthetic?
[11:26] Speaker 8: This one film was Silo.
[11:29] Speaker 1: Wow, that's a stack of firewood.
[11:32] Speaker 6: Damn those people are talented long winters.
[11:35] Speaker 1: Well, Jim Zumbo, I never found the house. There's a
[11:38] Speaker 1: house made out of firewood in there. Jim Zumble said
[11:41] Speaker 1: he has firewood O c D when he was on
[11:44] Speaker 1: the show. He has like a problem with firewood, and
[11:46] Speaker 1: so I think he does this kind of deal.
[11:50] Speaker 6: Mmm, maybe you should do sheds at his place?
[11:53] Speaker 1: Oh, meteor, Why has no one done that?
[11:57] Speaker 6: Well?
[11:57] Speaker 4: The great idea?
[11:59] Speaker 6: Yeah, I'll just call I love to do it.
[12:01] Speaker 1: Okay, Uh randal me again? Are you doing this?
[12:05] Speaker 2: Oh?
[12:05] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[12:05] Speaker 3: For those of you that are gearing up for the
[12:07] Speaker 3: spring summer or even getting a jumpstart on the fall,
[12:10] Speaker 3: don't miss out on our upcoming spring sales starting this Thursday,
[12:14] Speaker 3: May fourteenth, we'll have discounts on first Light, Phelps, Fahef
[12:18] Speaker 3: and up to fifty percent off logo where on the
[12:21] Speaker 3: meat Eater store will have And there's a punctuation missing there. Anyway,
[12:26] Speaker 3: there's incredible thing guys, this Norwegian daily deals and new
[12:31] Speaker 3: products for you to check out the daily deals. I understand.
[12:35] Speaker 3: It's like a different thing every day. And when we're
[12:38] Speaker 3: when they're gone, they're gone. So just keep checking in
[12:42] Speaker 3: starts May fourteenth. It's the spring sale.
[12:47] Speaker 4: When did you become the guy who reads the copy
[12:49] Speaker 4: in the spring.
[12:50] Speaker 10: I don't know.
[12:50] Speaker 1: I like it though, I do like it. Yeah, okay,
[12:53] Speaker 1: listener wrote in this is more news from North Carolina?
[12:57] Speaker 1: Did you did you got more you want to add?
[12:59] Speaker 3: No, I just like do more ad reads.
[13:01] Speaker 1: If you should do it in the U maybe he
[13:03] Speaker 1: can do him till he gets good at them.
[13:05] Speaker 7: Should do it in I think you should do it
[13:08] Speaker 7: in the Ken Burns voice.
[13:10] Speaker 3: Yeah, we could do all kinds of different voice.
[13:13] Speaker 1: A guy from North Carolina rode in lake. Yeah, what
[13:19] Speaker 1: do you think it is? We agreed? Juniusca Western North Carolina.
[13:24] Speaker 1: There's a lake owned by the World Methodist Organization. Now
[13:31] Speaker 1: follow along here. Okay, this is called this is about
[13:34] Speaker 1: a thing called the Swan Patrol. The lake is approximately
[13:39] Speaker 1: two hundred acres and is the only major body of
[13:41] Speaker 1: water within almost three counties. Okay, it's deep in the
[13:45] Speaker 1: Appalachian Range. You're not allowed to hunt on it, but
[13:49] Speaker 1: guys like to fish it. For the last several years,
[13:53] Speaker 1: this writer says. This listener says, a local group that
[13:56] Speaker 1: has been dubbed the Swan Patrol has taken up the
[14:01] Speaker 1: responsibility of feeding, herding, trapping, and relocating local waterfowl. The
[14:10] Speaker 1: World Methodist Organization has granted the Swan Patrol permission to
[14:14] Speaker 1: rope off exceptionally large sections of the lake's bank to
[14:18] Speaker 1: allow a safe nesting area for the birds. The Patrol
[14:23] Speaker 1: not only does this to the small population of mute
[14:26] Speaker 1: swans that live at the lake, but also to all
[14:29] Speaker 1: but also to all types of waterfowl, including ducks, geese,
[14:33] Speaker 1: and coots. They regularly go out in a group of
[14:37] Speaker 1: up to five to six people and feed the bird's
[14:39] Speaker 1: massive amounts of corn. He's saying they're having such an
[14:46] Speaker 1: impact that the birds don't migrate out of there, They
[14:48] Speaker 1: just stay there to eat the corn. He says, I
[14:54] Speaker 1: know the lake has a right as property owners to
[14:56] Speaker 1: restrict bank access, but everyone's questioned around here as if
[15:00] Speaker 1: they're allowed to tamper with the wildlife to this extent. No,
[15:03] Speaker 1: you're not. One instance that caused much discussion locally it
[15:06] Speaker 1: was one of the Swan patrol captured a swan that
[15:10] Speaker 1: accidentally went over the dam. They crowded into a dog
[15:14] Speaker 1: crate and moved it back to the upper part of
[15:17] Speaker 1: the lake. Going to happen again. He says he's seen
[15:22] Speaker 1: them load wild mallards into cages in their cars to
[15:26] Speaker 1: take them to other parts of the lake. Is this legal, No,
[15:33] Speaker 1: it's just how does the.
[15:34] Speaker 7: Swan accidentally go over a dam?
[15:38] Speaker 3: Like maybe full of corner?
[15:44] Speaker 1: He says, I will mention, Like he tells you he's
[15:47] Speaker 1: gonna mention it, then he mentions it. The writer says,
[15:49] Speaker 1: I will mention. This group does consist of members with
[15:53] Speaker 1: ages raining ranging from the sixties to their eighties. It
[15:59] Speaker 1: is kind of I don't like it experience, Yeah, because
[16:03] Speaker 1: like I could be like with those dudes and I
[16:05] Speaker 1: might just seem like slightly younger. Yeah, but yeah, that's
[16:10] Speaker 1: not a thing you like just for the That's not
[16:13] Speaker 1: the thing you're allowed to do.
[16:15] Speaker 7: He's got a point though, people that age like to
[16:17] Speaker 7: tinker with shiite stuff like tinker.
[16:24] Speaker 1: Okay, we got a special, We got a special Guests
[16:27] Speaker 1: in the Studio night, joined by Sam forst Egg.
[16:30] Speaker 2: Hey, Steve, thanks for having me. Guys.
[16:32] Speaker 1: Yeah, man, So what you're doing and the reason you're here, Well,
[16:35] Speaker 1: you're here for a couple of reasons. One, you're here
[16:37] Speaker 1: because you're running in the primary, that's right. The So
[16:42] Speaker 1: for background, if you listen to the show some time ago,
[16:45] Speaker 1: we had on a representative, Ryan Zinki. He's leaving m hm.
[16:50] Speaker 1: And so there's gonna be like things are getting spicy.
[16:53] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there's a vacant seat. You're running in the primary,
[16:56] Speaker 1: seeking the prime, the Democrat primary. I am for the
[17:00] Speaker 1: western Montana thing.
[17:01] Speaker 4: That's it.
[17:02] Speaker 2: Montana's first.
[17:02] Speaker 1: What caught me, what caught my interest is your background.
[17:06] Speaker 1: That And you might get sick of people saying this,
[17:08] Speaker 1: but it just kind of it's like said, every time
[17:11] Speaker 1: I see your name, it's thrown in there. How you
[17:13] Speaker 1: were a smoke jumper.
[17:15] Speaker 2: Smoke jumper, Yeah, union leader. I thought you were going
[17:17] Speaker 2: to bring up the sauna.
[17:18] Speaker 1: But what about the sauna?
[17:20] Speaker 2: Oh, we got to hell a son in the back.
[17:21] Speaker 2: Hered you'll come over for the next time you have
[17:22] Speaker 2: a sweet Yeah. Oh no, you think the Scandinavians are
[17:25] Speaker 2: particular about wood shopping.
[17:26] Speaker 1: Oh you you're a woodman too. Yeah. So I keep
[17:30] Speaker 1: saying this that you're running and that you have no
[17:32] Speaker 1: political experience. This is your first time, this is your
[17:36] Speaker 1: this would be your.
[17:37] Speaker 11: First time running for anything more than vice president of
[17:39] Speaker 11: my union's local. Okay, so I don't mean no political experience,
[17:41] Speaker 11: but on the national state. Yeah, and then spend all
[17:45] Speaker 11: that spent four years as a smoke jumper.
[17:47] Speaker 2: That's right.
[17:47] Speaker 1: Tell people what a smoke jumper is.
[17:49] Speaker 11: Well, we parachute out a parachute into wildfires to stop
[17:52] Speaker 11: them before they grow. I'm an idea of speed, range payload.
[17:56] Speaker 11: That's how you sell the program. We can get there quick,
[17:58] Speaker 11: fixed wing airplanes put them out while they're males. You
[18:00] Speaker 11: don't end up spending you know, tens of millions of
[18:02] Speaker 11: dollars fighting a wildfire. And yeah, I spend eight years
[18:05] Speaker 11: doing wild and fire in the last four as a
[18:06] Speaker 11: smoke jumper.
[18:07] Speaker 1: I never thought of that as a cost saving measure.
[18:10] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the idea.
[18:11] Speaker 11: Before it's on the national news and stuff. Yeah, I
[18:13] Speaker 11: mean ideal. You get four guys on the ground, you
[18:15] Speaker 11: can put something out at a quarter acre. It's a
[18:16] Speaker 11: lot cheaper than you wait till you gotta bring a
[18:18] Speaker 11: bunch of heavy equipment, hand crewise all the rest in Yeah.
[18:21] Speaker 1: Well, how did you wind up with for service?
[18:23] Speaker 2: Well?
[18:23] Speaker 11: I graduated um over in Missula. Hold it against me,
[18:26] Speaker 11: and I worked two or three jobs. I went to
[18:28] Speaker 11: school there.
[18:29] Speaker 1: Oh you did?
[18:29] Speaker 8: Yeah?
[18:30] Speaker 2: Really well, you got your MFA.
[18:31] Speaker 1: Yeah that's right. Well, yeah, I mean in all soul,
[18:40] Speaker 1: not a very degree.
[18:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. Well we both leave around.
[18:43] Speaker 11: Yeah, I loved it there. Did not love having to
[18:45] Speaker 11: work two or three jobs at a time the whole time.
[18:47] Speaker 11: And I still had debt on the back end. So
[18:48] Speaker 11: I figured I'd do wild and Fire for a couple
[18:50] Speaker 11: of years pay my debts. And when I heard you
[18:52] Speaker 11: get paid to jump out of airplanes in the public lands,
[18:54] Speaker 11: I figured I had to stick around long enough to
[18:56] Speaker 11: do that.
[18:56] Speaker 1: Is there an elimination process for that? Like, how do
[18:58] Speaker 1: you go about getting in there? There is?
[19:00] Speaker 11: So it usually takes folks till their fifth or sixth
[19:02] Speaker 11: year and fire to get picked up by a jump program.
[19:05] Speaker 11: Rookie training is a six week process, you apply for
[19:08] Speaker 11: the program, yep. Yeah, so I applied for three years
[19:10] Speaker 11: running before I got picked up my fifth year.
[19:12] Speaker 1: Really yeah, fighting fire the whole time.
[19:14] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[19:15] Speaker 11: I started over in Lincoln, That's how I knew, you know,
[19:17] Speaker 11: how far north that little half it goes. And did
[19:20] Speaker 11: three years in the Swan Valley and Condon on a
[19:22] Speaker 11: hand crew, and then I got picked up for as
[19:24] Speaker 11: a rookie candidate. In about fifty or sixty percent of
[19:28] Speaker 11: people make it through. There's better forty or fifty percent
[19:30] Speaker 11: attrition rate wash out rate OLMIT.
[19:32] Speaker 1: So you get accepted to a program and then there's
[19:35] Speaker 1: a wash out rate within the program. Yeah, like once
[19:38] Speaker 1: you're accepted. Yeah, and what what what mechanism do they
[19:41] Speaker 1: use to find people's limits?
[19:45] Speaker 2: Well, so they're kind of standard.
[19:47] Speaker 11: Six week program is a week a hell week where
[19:49] Speaker 11: they are just torturing the hell out of you. Depending
[19:52] Speaker 11: on the base, you might have a twenty four hour
[19:53] Speaker 11: line dig. Everybody's got to go through a one hundred
[19:56] Speaker 11: and ten pound pack test, eighty five pound pack test
[19:58] Speaker 11: over rough terrains or on over five six thousand feet elevation,
[20:03] Speaker 11: and really they just kicked the shit out of you
[20:05] Speaker 11: for about a week. You got to go through units week.
[20:06] Speaker 11: It's a whole lot of the technical side of parachuting.
[20:08] Speaker 11: Make it sure you can hook up a parachute harness
[20:10] Speaker 11: without any airs, shooting up under two minutes, repelling out
[20:14] Speaker 11: of what would be a tree if you were to
[20:15] Speaker 11: tree up, and then four weeks of jump face and
[20:17] Speaker 11: so there's a lot of a lot of spots where
[20:19] Speaker 11: you can mess up, and there's.
[20:20] Speaker 2: Not a lot of room for air.
[20:21] Speaker 11: I have the ideas they don't want anyone who's going
[20:23] Speaker 11: to end up in the program who might be a
[20:25] Speaker 11: risk to themselves or anybody else, because yeah, there's four
[20:27] Speaker 11: of you in the woods. You don't you don't want
[20:29] Speaker 11: to have to be calling life flight or anything like that.
[20:31] Speaker 1: How many times did you jump in on fires?
[20:33] Speaker 11: I got thirty four fire jumps total, in one hundred
[20:35] Speaker 11: and thirty some altogether.
[20:37] Speaker 1: Really how many states?
[20:39] Speaker 11: I think eight states I got to jump in I
[20:41] Speaker 11: I was lucky. Yeah, all over the West, so you
[20:42] Speaker 11: got the jump. You're jumping into places you've never been obviously. Oh,
[20:45] Speaker 11: it's some of the most beautiful corners of the country,
[20:47] Speaker 11: even Canada, you know, back when they had their big
[20:49] Speaker 11: fire season. A couple of years ago and you got
[20:51] Speaker 11: you jumped into Canada. Yeah, yeah, when they had that
[20:53] Speaker 11: for you know, terrible fire season was that twenty three? Yeah,
[20:56] Speaker 11: I want to say, yeah, I was lucky enough to
[20:58] Speaker 11: be on the first wave American jumpers to go up
[21:00] Speaker 11: in thirteen years and yeah, four fires all over and
[21:04] Speaker 11: it was I mean that I think they you know
[21:06] Speaker 11: ten xt what they their previous record had been for
[21:08] Speaker 11: acres burned, who was just unprecedented.
[21:10] Speaker 1: You jump in on a plane, then get picked up
[21:12] Speaker 1: in a helicopter or walk out.
[21:14] Speaker 2: To your road or yeah, I mean the pack out
[21:15] Speaker 2: is the famous way to get out of there.
[21:17] Speaker 11: So you're jumping in and see a smoke jumper, looks
[21:18] Speaker 11: like you got a big diaper you're wearing.
[21:20] Speaker 2: That's your packout bag. So got about one hundred and
[21:22] Speaker 2: ten pounds.
[21:23] Speaker 11: If you're not ordering a chainsaw powerhead's going to be
[21:25] Speaker 11: another twenty five and usually schlep that stuff out of
[21:28] Speaker 11: there and find a ride.
[21:29] Speaker 1: So they'll often tell you to walk out, like to walk.
[21:33] Speaker 11: Out, Yeah, I mean that's the standard procedure if you
[21:35] Speaker 11: can get a helicopter and get a rockstar exit. Absolutely,
[21:38] Speaker 11: But I mean the idea is self sufficiency. I mean
[21:40] Speaker 11: that's you talk about cost savings. I mean something a
[21:43] Speaker 11: lot of folks don't know about jumpers, as we manufacture
[21:45] Speaker 11: almost all of our own materials, so everything short of
[21:47] Speaker 11: the canopy is made manufactured in house. Ur Keviler jumpsuits
[21:51] Speaker 11: are the bags that were carrying those pack out bags? Yeah,
[21:55] Speaker 11: there's a lot of sewing that goes on in the
[21:56] Speaker 11: off season.
[21:56] Speaker 1: What was the farthest you ever had to walk to
[21:58] Speaker 1: get out of there?
[21:59] Speaker 2: I think, my love, your pack out with six miles.
[22:01] Speaker 1: So I got like, not like terror. I thought if
[22:04] Speaker 1: you'd have told me thirty, I wouldn't have been surprised.
[22:06] Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, I meaned I don't know what I
[22:08] Speaker 1: don't know what kind of stuff you were doing, because
[22:09] Speaker 1: thirty I'm calling a helicopter.
[22:12] Speaker 2: It's a lot. Yeah.
[22:12] Speaker 8: Did you ever have to sleep out there while fighting fire?
[22:15] Speaker 1: Oh?
[22:15] Speaker 2: Yeah, So if you're jumping, you should be ready to
[22:17] Speaker 2: be out there for two weeks.
[22:18] Speaker 1: What.
[22:19] Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's that's the expectation. Two weeks. You can
[22:22] Speaker 2: extend to three.
[22:23] Speaker 11: If you're making it to two weeks, you probably didn't
[22:25] Speaker 11: catch that thing and you're calling in a bunch of
[22:26] Speaker 11: other resources to fight this fire.
[22:27] Speaker 8: Real, what's the longest you did spend out there?
[22:30] Speaker 11: You know, I had thirty one days straight, which was
[22:33] Speaker 11: kind of skimmed to a place you parachuted into, and
[22:35] Speaker 11: we parachuted into the Three Sisters Wilderness a couple couple
[22:38] Speaker 11: of years back. Spent just over two weeks out there,
[22:41] Speaker 11: and then got rolled into a complex. I ended up
[22:43] Speaker 11: managing a little task force heavy equipment.
[22:45] Speaker 1: Yeah, so you like whatever, if you got a girlfriend
[22:47] Speaker 1: or something, you're like, hey, I'll be back, like later
[22:49] Speaker 1: or not.
[22:49] Speaker 2: Whet avorce rate is high, Yeah for wild fire later
[22:53] Speaker 2: or maybe in a few weeks. Yeah, it's tough staying
[22:55] Speaker 2: in touch with your family.
[22:55] Speaker 11: And that's the hard thing about wild and fire, whether
[22:57] Speaker 11: you're a jumper on a hot shot crew or an engine.
[22:59] Speaker 11: I mean, there's just not a lot of consistency, and
[23:01] Speaker 11: you got to give up your summers, you know, if
[23:03] Speaker 11: nothing else, and the only way you make money, especially
[23:05] Speaker 11: if you're making fifteen sixteen bucks an hour, which was
[23:08] Speaker 11: I mean, my starting wage was fifteen bucks an hours
[23:10] Speaker 11: a smoke jumper. The right you only make money if
[23:12] Speaker 11: you're making overtime. So if you're not on a fire,
[23:14] Speaker 11: you're going broke fifteen bucks an hour.
[23:16] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and that I mean adds outside of the
[23:19] Speaker 1: McDonald's better now.
[23:21] Speaker 3: Tough, Yeah, full time at DQ in Livingston's at twenty well,
[23:24] Speaker 3: and a lot.
[23:25] Speaker 2: That's what it got me into this.
[23:26] Speaker 3: A lot of it is.
[23:27] Speaker 11: I mean, our public lands employees are not paid crazy
[23:30] Speaker 11: wages by any means. I mean when I started, I
[23:32] Speaker 11: was making twelve to seventy an hour on the engine
[23:34] Speaker 11: and and that was the going rate. I didn't hit
[23:36] Speaker 11: fifteen until I was a rookie smoke jumper. And when
[23:39] Speaker 11: I was vice president of my union last year, well
[23:41] Speaker 11: that's when all the dose cuts and all the rest started.
[23:43] Speaker 11: And they ended up firing three hundred and sixty people
[23:45] Speaker 11: in one day two Valentine's Days ago. Eighty five percent
[23:48] Speaker 11: of them are making less than twenty bucks an hour.
[23:50] Speaker 1: Well that's the new Valentine's Day mask.
[23:52] Speaker 11: It is absolutely and there's a lot of inefficiencies in
[23:54] Speaker 11: the federal government. Believe me, I've seen them. It's not
[23:57] Speaker 11: people making thirteen bucks an hour swinging a tool to
[23:59] Speaker 11: keep a trail clear, road clear, right, And it's all
[24:01] Speaker 11: the most efficient.
[24:02] Speaker 2: Workers we got.
[24:03] Speaker 11: They had gs twos that they were firing in Montana.
[24:06] Speaker 11: I mean that's eleven dollars and some change keeping a
[24:09] Speaker 11: trail clear. You know, it's it's absurdity. And these are
[24:12] Speaker 11: the people who actually do the damn work. And that's
[24:14] Speaker 11: who was losing their jobs, having their lives turned upside down.
[24:16] Speaker 11: And when I called congress Person's Inkys office four or
[24:19] Speaker 11: five times, I got crickets. So I said, if he's
[24:21] Speaker 11: going to take my coworkers and members' jobs, I'm going
[24:23] Speaker 11: to come take his.
[24:25] Speaker 1: So when, like when you left, what was the path
[24:29] Speaker 1: with leaving that and getting involved in sort of you
[24:31] Speaker 1: don't call it the like the policy end of things. Yeah,
[24:35] Speaker 1: like you left being a smoke jumper and then came
[24:38] Speaker 1: in and did were a union representative for who?
[24:41] Speaker 11: So our union is the National Federation of Federal Employees. Okay,
[24:45] Speaker 11: so not just fire crews, No, it's it's all. It's
[24:48] Speaker 11: the Forest Service branch of the Union, Forest Service Council,
[24:51] Speaker 11: our locals, the Low Low National Forest, the bitter Root,
[24:53] Speaker 11: and the Customer Gallon out here which we just organized
[24:55] Speaker 11: last year, and some of the regional officers that are
[24:58] Speaker 11: getting shut down right now as they can. Sull Day
[25:00] Speaker 11: down to Salt Lake City in Denver and all the rest.
[25:02] Speaker 11: That's about eight hundred public servants and federal employees. And yeah,
[25:06] Speaker 11: a whole lot of those folks lost their jobs, and
[25:08] Speaker 11: we lost about a quarter of the agency in the
[25:09] Speaker 11: state last year.
[25:10] Speaker 1: And you were in this, you were in your role
[25:13] Speaker 1: when that was going on.
[25:15] Speaker 11: I was, I mean I stepped into it beginning of January,
[25:18] Speaker 11: so I stepped in just in time for all these
[25:21] Speaker 11: cuts to start coming down.
[25:22] Speaker 9: What was that like?
[25:23] Speaker 2: It was chaos and it was heartbreaking.
[25:25] Speaker 1: I mean truly.
[25:27] Speaker 11: We were getting stories and calls from members like Galcara
[25:30] Speaker 11: down to the bitter Root. She was fifteen years into
[25:32] Speaker 11: her civil service. She was an archaeologist down in Hamilton.
[25:36] Speaker 11: She got fired one day with no notice, no cause,
[25:38] Speaker 11: because she just happened to have taken a lateral transfer
[25:41] Speaker 11: in the last year so she could do more remote
[25:42] Speaker 11: work while she went through chemotherapy.
[25:45] Speaker 2: Kara was not getting rich. I fell down.
[25:47] Speaker 11: An enis on the custerer Galltin, who got a text
[25:49] Speaker 11: while he's in line at the airport for his mother's
[25:51] Speaker 11: funeral telling him that he's lost his job. And he
[25:53] Speaker 11: was only a GS five, so he's losing the job.
[25:55] Speaker 11: He was only making sixteen bucks an hour at in
[25:57] Speaker 11: the first place. And it's I mean, it is so
[25:59] Speaker 11: agriv and because these folks were not making a whole
[26:01] Speaker 11: lot to begin with. And again because this is not
[26:03] Speaker 11: where the damn inefficiency is right. These are the people
[26:06] Speaker 11: doing keeping all of these things together. And there are
[26:08] Speaker 11: a lot of ways to sell off our public land.
[26:10] Speaker 11: Selling off the acreage is just one of them.
[26:12] Speaker 1: Right.
[26:12] Speaker 11: The plan right now for the Forest Services to be
[26:14] Speaker 11: is to draw it down to one third of the
[26:15] Speaker 11: staffing levels we were at a year and a half ago.
[26:18] Speaker 11: You got one third of the people managing all the
[26:19] Speaker 11: same lands. It's a hell of an excuse to turn
[26:21] Speaker 11: around and say, like, well, why ain't that trail clearer?
[26:23] Speaker 2: It's not working.
[26:24] Speaker 1: We got to the point to the ways it's not
[26:26] Speaker 1: working out. Yeah, yeah, I hear that. I hear that
[26:30] Speaker 1: all the time. I don't know that. I'll be curious
[26:35] Speaker 1: to you guys think about this. I don't know. I
[26:36] Speaker 1: hear that, but I don't know that that will be
[26:38] Speaker 1: the playbook. Yeah, I don't know. I hear it like
[26:42] Speaker 1: that A logic would go, we don't need to spend
[26:46] Speaker 1: a ton of time on this, but that people will
[26:48] Speaker 1: express that The logic would be deprive the land management
[26:53] Speaker 1: agencies of funding have then watch how chaos ensues, fires, mismanagement,
[27:02] Speaker 1: and then someone could say, look how bad they're doing.
[27:06] Speaker 1: What what a what a disaster? We need to do
[27:10] Speaker 1: something about this and put this in the hands of
[27:12] Speaker 1: someone that can better care for it. Sure, like I
[27:14] Speaker 1: hear it. I'm not saying it won't happen. I just
[27:17] Speaker 1: don't know if that's well, that'll be the sure rhetoric.
[27:21] Speaker 7: You don't think someone like Mike Lee might make that argument.
[27:24] Speaker 1: Yes, because he makes every argument less time it was
[27:27] Speaker 1: it it was the legal immigration. It was wanting to
[27:31] Speaker 1: like do things one hundred miles into Montana because of
[27:34] Speaker 1: illegal immigration across the Canadian border. So sure, there's some
[27:37] Speaker 1: grasping its straws.
[27:39] Speaker 11: Yeah, well I'll tell okay, sure, yes, And I mean
[27:42] Speaker 11: Mike Lee is gonna go for he wants the acreage, right,
[27:43] Speaker 11: he wants the land itself. Yeah, but what I see
[27:45] Speaker 11: on the ground is I mean, this is it's not new.
[27:47] Speaker 11: They're just stepping up the pace of this. And I
[27:49] Speaker 11: mean I was on a fire this summer. We jumped
[27:51] Speaker 11: the fire outside of Steamboat Springs.
[27:53] Speaker 2: Huh and twelve of us jump in.
[27:56] Speaker 11: This thing goes to five hundred acres, and so we
[27:58] Speaker 11: were calling a bunch of resources in that three days
[28:00] Speaker 11: in I'm managing a task force of hand crews, and
[28:03] Speaker 11: we put in an order for the most some of
[28:04] Speaker 11: the most basic firefighting implements pumps and hoses, and they
[28:08] Speaker 11: tell me, well, we're not getting those till the end
[28:10] Speaker 11: of shift tomorrow because they just shut down the gear
[28:12] Speaker 11: cash here and steamboat. So we got to overnight airmail
[28:14] Speaker 11: the pumps and hoses from Denver. It'll get here tomorrow.
[28:17] Speaker 11: We got to have someone drive it up to the line.
[28:19] Speaker 11: We'll get it tomorrow night. So not only is the
[28:22] Speaker 11: firefighting itself taken longer, but we're paying so much more
[28:25] Speaker 11: to overnight airmail thousands of pounds of equipment that used
[28:28] Speaker 11: to be stored right there. I mean, that's the point
[28:30] Speaker 11: of a gear cash and those I mean, those examples
[28:32] Speaker 11: are legion. You know, when I'm putting in order for
[28:35] Speaker 11: a hand crew, it's early July and you want a.
[28:37] Speaker 2: Hot shot crew.
[28:37] Speaker 11: That's the most capable twenty people you're gonna find for firefighting.
[28:41] Speaker 11: And they tell me, well, we don't, we don't have
[28:43] Speaker 11: any hot shot crews available, So instead of one hot
[28:45] Speaker 11: shot crew, we're going to order three contract crews because
[28:49] Speaker 11: they have less capabilities than a hot shot crew. So
[28:51] Speaker 11: on paper, it looks real good to say, well, one
[28:53] Speaker 11: for one, one crew, one crew, but in reality, if
[28:55] Speaker 11: you're on the ground, you bet your order and more
[28:57] Speaker 11: crews and we all end up pans so much well.
[28:59] Speaker 11: And that's that's that's what I mean when I say
[29:01] Speaker 11: another way of selling these things off right.
[29:02] Speaker 1: That's one of the things I came to see about
[29:04] Speaker 1: the like over the months or over the weeks about
[29:09] Speaker 1: the Doge cuts was you came to see ways it
[29:11] Speaker 1: brought to mind. You came to see that it created
[29:14] Speaker 1: a lot of inefficiencies, like sort of accidentally made all
[29:18] Speaker 1: these inefficiencies. And it reminds me of this passage in
[29:21] Speaker 1: Elder Leopold Sand County Almanac. He talks about he's talking
[29:25] Speaker 1: about ecology, but you're saying people are taking like watch
[29:29] Speaker 1: parts and they don't understand what the parts do, and
[29:33] Speaker 1: they're flicking them out, and then someone later's like, you know,
[29:37] Speaker 1: being like dude, that little thing you throughout that's like
[29:40] Speaker 1: turn that makes the whole thing click. That was important
[29:43] Speaker 1: and so we've had other We had a guy from
[29:47] Speaker 1: White River National Forest on who took the took the
[29:52] Speaker 1: buyout left. He's a supervisor with White Riff National Forest Man.
[29:55] Speaker 1: He came in and told us just just like insane
[29:58] Speaker 1: stories about things that were suppose the league gonna help,
[30:02] Speaker 1: or ways in which he was forced to make cuts
[30:04] Speaker 1: that turn around and cost money, costs, time, created problems
[30:10] Speaker 1: from just having this like what turned out to be
[30:14] Speaker 1: like a very ham handed approach.
[30:16] Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean, you want to know, the biggest way
[30:18] Speaker 11: that we end up spending more money is if you
[30:20] Speaker 11: don't have ground resources to fight a fire. If I
[30:23] Speaker 11: jump in there and we're losing this thing because the
[30:24] Speaker 11: wind's blowing, well my best option is to call.
[30:26] Speaker 2: In air resources.
[30:28] Speaker 11: So you end up calling I mean, if I'm on
[30:30] Speaker 11: the ground, I can't get a hot tucker. That's when
[30:31] Speaker 11: you got to call in a large air tanker to
[30:33] Speaker 11: drop fire retardan at seven thousand bucks a pop. And
[30:36] Speaker 11: I've stood on fires and watched more money than I
[30:37] Speaker 11: will make in my lifetime fall out the bottom of
[30:39] Speaker 11: a large air tanker to put retarding along the side
[30:42] Speaker 11: of a wildfire.
[30:43] Speaker 2: And you know where that money goes.
[30:44] Speaker 11: Well, it goes to the contracting service Ritter Aerospace that
[30:48] Speaker 11: just so happens to be owned by the third richest
[30:49] Speaker 11: man of the United States, Senate Tim Schehe. And you
[30:53] Speaker 11: don't have to look too far to see where the
[30:54] Speaker 11: incentive structure is. Maybe we're spending more money, it's going
[30:57] Speaker 11: to a different place. I'd rather have that money staying
[31:00] Speaker 11: here for someone making fifteen bucks an hour on the
[31:02] Speaker 11: district or on the fire crew, then paying to a
[31:04] Speaker 11: contractor where it's just getting sucked out of all our
[31:06] Speaker 11: pockets tax pairs.
[31:08] Speaker 1: You know, what do you think drives people like the
[31:10] Speaker 1: time you spent there? What do you think drives people
[31:14] Speaker 1: to take a job where they're I don't want to
[31:18] Speaker 1: say compensated poorly, but take a job where the compensation
[31:21] Speaker 1: isn't the point? Do you know what I mean?
[31:24] Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean there's a what drew you to it?
[31:26] Speaker 11: I love I love being on public lands. I like
[31:29] Speaker 11: stomping around in the woods. If you can get paid
[31:30] Speaker 11: to do that, especially in remote places, that's the dream job, right.
[31:34] Speaker 11: I'm sure all of us can relate to that. Beyond that,
[31:37] Speaker 11: it's you know, they call it being a public servant.
[31:39] Speaker 11: It's similar to why a librarian would work in a
[31:42] Speaker 11: position where they're not getting rich.
[31:44] Speaker 2: Or my dad's a public school teacher.
[31:45] Speaker 11: Right there's school teachers in the state making a starting
[31:48] Speaker 11: wage of thirty ninety thousand dollars an hour. Right now,
[31:51] Speaker 11: you know, it's there is a sense of service to it, right,
[31:53] Speaker 11: and there's a there's something rewarding about being able to
[31:55] Speaker 11: look back and say, I've been swinging a tool for
[31:57] Speaker 11: the last nine days and running a saw and I
[32:00] Speaker 11: just tied in that fire line and that fire is
[32:02] Speaker 11: not going to burn over that thing, right, And there
[32:04] Speaker 11: are fewer and fewer jobs every year where you can
[32:06] Speaker 11: really look at the labor and the fruit of your
[32:09] Speaker 11: what your hands have done, and see what you've accomplished. Yeah,
[32:12] Speaker 11: you know, that's a that's a rare pleasure that you
[32:14] Speaker 11: can't find very often in this world.
[32:16] Speaker 1: I haven't watched everything you've done and you know, bend
[32:19] Speaker 1: to your talks and stuff by followed enough to know
[32:21] Speaker 1: that you're like you're kind of pitch to voters in
[32:26] Speaker 1: the state is really is really geared toward working Like
[32:29] Speaker 1: you spend a lot of time talking about work, the
[32:31] Speaker 1: working class, working class absolutely, yeah, yeah, And I I
[32:34] Speaker 1: mean when you feel like that's that's your background, that's
[32:37] Speaker 1: your people.
[32:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's what we're missing, right.
[32:40] Speaker 11: I mean, the average congress person's worth twelve to fifteen
[32:42] Speaker 11: times the average American right now, And you wonder why
[32:45] Speaker 11: there's not a sense of urgency to address all these
[32:46] Speaker 11: basic issues that so many of us are living with
[32:49] Speaker 11: on the ground. And I mean I got to the
[32:51] Speaker 11: end of the last fire season, and yeah, I have
[32:53] Speaker 11: just watched the agency I work for be gutted in
[32:56] Speaker 11: the name of efficiency, and I see inefficiencies. Federal hiring
[33:00] Speaker 11: pretty damn inefficient. It takes nine months to get somebody
[33:02] Speaker 11: hired on a fifteen dollars an hour job on a
[33:04] Speaker 11: trails crew or a fire crew. That's inefficiency, right, workman's
[33:07] Speaker 11: comp or HR. You got people spending dozens of man
[33:10] Speaker 11: hours just to chase down a workman's complaim for somebody
[33:13] Speaker 11: who broke their back parachuting into a fire. You know,
[33:16] Speaker 11: like that that is inefficient. The guy making thirteen bucks
[33:18] Speaker 11: an hour swinging a tools not inefficient. And whether it's
[33:21] Speaker 11: fire or any other job, you can tell the difference
[33:23] Speaker 11: when somebody making the calls has never been on the
[33:25] Speaker 11: ground doing the work and that's what it feels like
[33:27] Speaker 11: in this country right now. You know, people are struggling
[33:30] Speaker 11: to afford a roof over their head, or healthcare all
[33:32] Speaker 11: the rest, and the people who are making the decisions
[33:35] Speaker 11: have not experienced that. You know, when I was a kid,
[33:38] Speaker 11: my belly was full because of food stamps for a while,
[33:40] Speaker 11: my dad was getting his fet underneath them, thank god.
[33:43] Speaker 11: You know, there's not a lot of people in Congress
[33:45] Speaker 11: who have ever lived through that, or who've been working
[33:47] Speaker 11: three jobs at a time and still come up short
[33:49] Speaker 11: on rent, like a lot of people in the state
[33:52] Speaker 11: in this country are. And I think that that lived
[33:54] Speaker 11: experience influences the sort of policy making you're doing and
[33:56] Speaker 11: where you're going to be looking to cut if you
[33:58] Speaker 11: are going to be making those cuts.
[34:00] Speaker 1: Are you, let's say you get the nomination, are you
[34:03] Speaker 1: sweating it for when the whole part of the campaign comes,
[34:06] Speaker 1: when it's just all like negative, negative, negative, and people
[34:09] Speaker 1: are attacking you left and right, Does that make you nervous?
[34:11] Speaker 11: You know, I'll say, we're in a primary right now.
[34:14] Speaker 11: The election is June second, so everybody make sure you're registered.
[34:16] Speaker 11: But I mean every time I you know, get a
[34:19] Speaker 11: new big endorsement or we you know, have more support
[34:23] Speaker 11: kind of bubble up or a social media video pop up.
[34:26] Speaker 11: The negativity starts already, and we're really I'm making sure
[34:29] Speaker 11: to make this a positive campaign and talk about I'm
[34:31] Speaker 11: so tired of all of politics where it's just anger, anger, anger,
[34:35] Speaker 11: and people screaming into a cell phone screen like that
[34:37] Speaker 11: doesn't get us anywhere. That gets us to a Congress
[34:39] Speaker 11: that's the least productive in American history right now in
[34:41] Speaker 11: terms of bills passed and the policy experience I do
[34:45] Speaker 11: got is I did some organizing.
[34:46] Speaker 2: An advocacy between fire seasons.
[34:48] Speaker 11: I work for the State Library Association and group of
[34:50] Speaker 11: homeless Shelters, just trying to do good where I could
[34:53] Speaker 11: between seasons, and they still get things done. At the
[34:55] Speaker 11: Montana Legislature. You got to pass a budget, it has
[34:58] Speaker 11: to be balanced. They got to pay for everything. And
[35:00] Speaker 11: even you know, we had the first Republican super majority
[35:03] Speaker 11: in state history in twenty twenty three and we managed
[35:05] Speaker 11: to get some made for homeless shelters pass Because we're
[35:07] Speaker 11: in Bozeman, right you have people living on the back
[35:09] Speaker 11: of their cars and trailers who've been living here their
[35:11] Speaker 11: whole life.
[35:12] Speaker 2: That's not a part of an issue.
[35:14] Speaker 11: And you don't get those things done by standing in
[35:16] Speaker 11: a room and screaming at everybody about everything you disagree with.
[35:19] Speaker 2: You got it. You have to be able to talk
[35:21] Speaker 2: past that, and that just feels like a lost art
[35:23] Speaker 2: in modern politics.
[35:24] Speaker 1: I read somewhere that you were saying, when this is
[35:26] Speaker 1: all done, you know that you're don't have to go
[35:29] Speaker 1: back out and look for a job. Oh yeah, I'm broke.
[35:33] Speaker 1: I'm broke.
[35:34] Speaker 2: But that's the point, right, Well, I think we need
[35:36] Speaker 2: some broken people in politics.
[35:37] Speaker 1: No, no, man like, yeah, you'd be like, you'd be
[35:39] Speaker 1: like looking into help wanted ads.
[35:40] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[35:41] Speaker 11: And I want to be clear, nothing wrong with success.
[35:43] Speaker 11: You don't have to villainize prosperity for any of this.
[35:46] Speaker 11: But it ain't what we're missing when again, like the
[35:48] Speaker 11: average congress person is worth fifteen times as much as
[35:51] Speaker 11: as the average person, we have a lived experience gap
[35:54] Speaker 11: in the halls of power in our decision makers. And
[35:58] Speaker 11: I actually think that if we you know, one of
[36:00] Speaker 11: the things I talk about what I learned in my
[36:02] Speaker 11: advocacy time is there are dark, smoke filled rooms in politics.
[36:06] Speaker 2: It's called a conference committee.
[36:07] Speaker 11: Anytime the two chambers of the House and the Senate
[36:09] Speaker 11: pass a different bill, well they have to reconcile. And
[36:11] Speaker 11: that ends up with eight or ten people in one
[36:13] Speaker 11: room making all of the decisions for what is going
[36:15] Speaker 11: to become law. And if every single person in that
[36:18] Speaker 11: room is worth you know, multiple millions of dollars, well
[36:22] Speaker 11: you bet they're going to be a whole lot more
[36:23] Speaker 11: willing to give away the money we're spending on food
[36:26] Speaker 11: stamps or snap benefits. They're going to be able to
[36:27] Speaker 11: They're going to be willing to give away the people
[36:29] Speaker 11: who are making fourteen bucks an hour because they don't
[36:32] Speaker 11: know that those are the people that make this thing work.
[36:34] Speaker 11: And there are so many ways that we could find
[36:36] Speaker 11: efficiencies in our government. We have not found them at all.
[36:39] Speaker 11: We're going to have a lot of rebuilding to do,
[36:41] Speaker 11: public lands and everywhere else. And I would just offer
[36:45] Speaker 11: that if we want a government that actually works for
[36:46] Speaker 11: working people who are getting the short end of the
[36:48] Speaker 11: stick on a lot of this stuff, we should send
[36:50] Speaker 11: working people to Congress so we can we can fight
[36:52] Speaker 11: for ourselves. And the way we win this is we
[36:54] Speaker 11: don't pick our own multimillionaire to go fight all the
[36:56] Speaker 11: rest of them. You know, that's not our champion, and
[36:59] Speaker 11: it has not been working for or for too long,
[37:01] Speaker 11: whatever parties in power.
[37:02] Speaker 1: I told you when we met over the phone, I said,
[37:06] Speaker 1: you and me probably disagree on fifty percent of things.
[37:08] Speaker 1: I don't know some amount, but that I think where
[37:11] Speaker 1: we're pretty much aligned is I imagine you're not going
[37:14] Speaker 1: to want to entertain ideas about large scale public land transfers.
[37:18] Speaker 11: Oh, absolutely, Yeah, And it scares the hell out of
[37:20] Speaker 11: me this notion under the Forest Service reorg of shutting
[37:23] Speaker 11: down nine regional offices and turning it into fifteen state offices.
[37:26] Speaker 11: Like I don't know if they'll ever be successful in
[37:28] Speaker 11: a land transfer effort.
[37:30] Speaker 2: But I hope to hell they won't be. And that
[37:32] Speaker 2: does not seem like a move towards efficiency.
[37:34] Speaker 11: It seems like a move towards again taking decision making
[37:36] Speaker 11: further away from where the actual work on the ground.
[37:39] Speaker 1: Is going on.
[37:39] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[37:40] Speaker 1: I don't want to say this is the motivation, but
[37:42] Speaker 1: it looks like sort of cast rating. But I haven't heard.
[37:45] Speaker 1: No one's tried to sell me on it yet. Yeah,
[37:47] Speaker 1: I've only had people tell me all the ways it's wrong.
[37:49] Speaker 11: Yeah, I haven't heard. I haven't heard the benefits of it. No,
[37:52] Speaker 11: I mean, somehow we're moving decision making for the Forest
[37:54] Speaker 11: Service further away from the decision makers in DC and
[37:57] Speaker 11: further away from where the work's happening.
[37:59] Speaker 9: Right.
[37:59] Speaker 11: Not only do we lose the historic regional office in Missoula,
[38:02] Speaker 11: we also lose the DC office where if the chief
[38:05] Speaker 11: needs to get a message up the chain, you would
[38:07] Speaker 11: think he could go across the street and talk to somebody.
[38:09] Speaker 2: We're losing all that. Yeah, oh man, thanks for coming
[38:13] Speaker 2: and joining us, Thanks for having me.
[38:15] Speaker 1: So. So the primary is.
[38:16] Speaker 2: The second primary is June second.
[38:17] Speaker 11: If anyone is curious, you can go to Sam Fromontana
[38:20] Speaker 11: dot com and see what we're all about. Got policies, endorsers,
[38:23] Speaker 11: all the rest on there. And you know you mentioned
[38:25] Speaker 11: that we probably Yeah.
[38:26] Speaker 1: Well, as to say, one, I watched one of your
[38:28] Speaker 1: videos where you did a house tour.
[38:29] Speaker 2: Uh huh.
[38:31] Speaker 1: He lives out of his houses, Like, I mean, it's
[38:32] Speaker 1: bigger in this, but it's like the studio, black hair,
[38:35] Speaker 1: and he's got his bookshelf next to his stove, and
[38:37] Speaker 1: he's like, it's very convenient.
[38:40] Speaker 2: That is efficiency, that is what we need.
[38:42] Speaker 1: I could just reach right over here, grab the book.
[38:44] Speaker 11: Two more steps here in the bathroom, and uh yeah,
[38:48] Speaker 11: And I was just that you said we probably disagree
[38:51] Speaker 11: on fifty percent of things.
[38:52] Speaker 2: Maybe it's less than that, but I was just.
[38:54] Speaker 1: Taking a ballpark. No, yeah, we haven't talked. We talked
[38:57] Speaker 1: about land management and we talked about you know.
[38:59] Speaker 2: Yeah. What I found is you agree with we.
[39:01] Speaker 11: I find I agree with a lot more than I
[39:03] Speaker 11: would expect until I meet somebody. And part of what
[39:06] Speaker 11: we're doing in the campaign is a series of civil
[39:07] Speaker 11: discourse conversations. So I just sat down with Michelle Binkley,
[39:10] Speaker 11: she's a Republican legislator in the Bergrreau Valley, and we
[39:12] Speaker 11: talked about the fact that we do not agree on everything,
[39:15] Speaker 11: and that is okay because Michelle knew what it was
[39:18] Speaker 11: like to be on the virgil of homelessness raising two boys.
[39:20] Speaker 11: She has worked as a waitress for fifteen years in
[39:23] Speaker 11: the valley. And we agree on getting people basic health care.
[39:26] Speaker 11: We agree on making sure that people living on the
[39:28] Speaker 11: streets have access to mental health services, basic things like that,
[39:32] Speaker 11: and I actually think that is as important as the
[39:34] Speaker 11: policy specifics, is just getting back to a place where
[39:37] Speaker 11: we can talk past our differences find the things we
[39:40] Speaker 11: agree on, because there's all these eighty twenty issues where
[39:42] Speaker 11: we agree on all the basics, and we just spent
[39:44] Speaker 11: our time yelling about the stuff we.
[39:46] Speaker 1: Ran calling everybody evil exactly.
[39:49] Speaker 11: Yeah, there are very few people in this world who
[39:52] Speaker 11: do not think that they're bringing the good in the
[39:53] Speaker 11: way that they see it.
[39:55] Speaker 1: Well, dude, thanks for coming out. Appreciate you taking the
[39:57] Speaker 1: time to come talk to us.
[39:58] Speaker 2: Likewise, Steve, I appreciate it you, Palli.
[39:59] Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks, Okay, I got a couple of quick news
[40:02] Speaker 1: flashes yep today.
[40:06] Speaker 5: Well, actually, now that you're listening to this, it's probably
[40:08] Speaker 5: just a couple of days before it is Steve's favorite
[40:11] Speaker 5: person's birthday party or birthday sorry, not party.
[40:15] Speaker 6: Hopefully he's there himself a party.
[40:18] Speaker 1: That's good.
[40:20] Speaker 5: It's sir David Attenborough turns one hundred years old. What
[40:25] Speaker 5: a milestone. So we gathered a couple of interesting facts
[40:30] Speaker 5: about him. He has more honorary degrees than anyone else.
[40:35] Speaker 1: I will listen, like, here's the dirty secret of the
[40:39] Speaker 1: honorary degree. This is coming from an honorary You're.
[40:42] Speaker 4: Blowing up your whole thing, Steve.
[40:43] Speaker 2: Right here.
[40:44] Speaker 1: What it means is you were invited to do a
[40:47] Speaker 1: commencement address. So another way to put it was he
[40:51] Speaker 1: doesn't pass up a chance to do a commencement address,
[40:54] Speaker 1: would be another way of putting it right.
[40:56] Speaker 6: So he has passed up. He has not passed up
[41:00] Speaker 6: thirty one more commencement address invitations.
[41:03] Speaker 1: I'm done with Katzman addressing Mark.
[41:05] Speaker 3: I hate to do this, but according to the Guinness
[41:08] Speaker 3: Book of World Records, he's about one hundred and twenty
[41:10] Speaker 3: on short.
[41:12] Speaker 1: I know, ken Burns is way high.
[41:13] Speaker 3: I figured like Kadaffi and Saddam had a lot of
[41:16] Speaker 3: honorary degrees or.
[41:17] Speaker 4: One of the most.
[41:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean who's winning.
[41:20] Speaker 3: Yeah, the Guinness says it's the Reverend Theodore m. Hesberg,
[41:24] Speaker 3: who's the former president of the letter Dame.
[41:26] Speaker 1: Yeah.
[41:27] Speaker 6: Actually thirty two doesn't seem like a really.
[41:29] Speaker 3: Nelson Mandela maybe is one of the most more than fifty.
[41:33] Speaker 6: Okay, there we go.
[41:34] Speaker 3: King of Thailand has a lot.
[41:35] Speaker 5: Too, Randall, thank you for correcting me at the spot. Yeah,
[41:40] Speaker 5: so we don't have like one hundred emails.
[41:41] Speaker 3: Yeah, no corrections on this one. We already nipped it
[41:44] Speaker 3: in the bud.
[41:45] Speaker 6: Okay.
[41:46] Speaker 5: He's had dozens of species named after him, including I
[41:50] Speaker 5: went through a whole a whole list of them, but
[41:51] Speaker 5: this one was really cool to me. It's called nepenthus
[41:54] Speaker 5: attin burrow or attenborrow, which is a giant carnivorous pitch plant.
[42:01] Speaker 5: So we're looking at a picture here. Imagine a like
[42:05] Speaker 5: bright lime neon highlighter green and kind of purple red
[42:11] Speaker 5: vat looking plant that holds about one point five leaders.
[42:16] Speaker 5: It's been observed to have trapped and digested a shrew.
[42:20] Speaker 5: And this was discovered in two thousand and seven in
[42:23] Speaker 5: a remote area on a Philippine island. What else, he
[42:30] Speaker 5: is one of the most, if not the most randall
[42:33] Speaker 5: feel free to check me on this.
[42:35] Speaker 1: Well, who by whose measurement?
[42:37] Speaker 6: There are a bunch of websites that I looked.
[42:39] Speaker 1: At that say he's one of the most traveled people
[42:42] Speaker 1: in history.
[42:43] Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I think this was nat G. It may
[42:46] Speaker 6: have been that geo.
[42:47] Speaker 1: I didn't show up.
[42:48] Speaker 6: I didn't pull up all my sarcing.
[42:50] Speaker 1: The dude never passed a driver's test.
[42:52] Speaker 6: Well, that's a different thing everywhere.
[42:55] Speaker 1: No, it's like he never passed a driver's test. He's
[42:59] Speaker 1: just been. He's been. With all due respect, I don't
[43:02] Speaker 1: want to hack on an old guy. Let me just
[43:04] Speaker 1: come out, so I'm not gonna say anything bad stuff
[43:05] Speaker 1: about accept this my only beef with the guy. Like,
[43:09] Speaker 1: I'm sure he loves his country. It's not my country,
[43:11] Speaker 1: so I don't care. But I'm sure he loves his country,
[43:13] Speaker 1: which gets you know points. I guess I suppose even
[43:16] Speaker 1: though it's not ours. My problem with this is how
[43:19] Speaker 1: many nature documentaries he has ruined with his narration. That's
[43:29] Speaker 1: what sounds like all the time. He is a one
[43:33] Speaker 1: man wildlife footage ruining machine.
[43:39] Speaker 6: But I guess so many people would disagree because they
[43:41] Speaker 6: keep hiring him.
[43:43] Speaker 1: And their job over again. And I'm sorry I've been
[43:47] Speaker 1: to like I'm a Morgan Freeman fan. He's cranking out
[43:52] Speaker 1: narration now, and they make him do the same annoying thing.
[43:55] Speaker 6: So maybe it's like the way that they're dude, the minute.
[43:59] Speaker 1: They get Larry the Cable guys start doing those, I'm all,
[44:02] Speaker 1: if Larry the Cable guy was like that, if Attenborough,
[44:05] Speaker 1: I'm the how old the brothers gonna live? Let's say
[44:07] Speaker 1: those another ten years. If in ten years that when
[44:10] Speaker 1: he's one hundred and ten, if he stops ruining nature movies.
[44:14] Speaker 1: And they just had Larry the Cable Guy doing them,
[44:16] Speaker 1: same footage, same material, Larry the Cable Guy does them,
[44:20] Speaker 1: they would be good. Yes, it's the same footage.
[44:26] Speaker 3: Like ten years ago there was there was a wildlife
[44:30] Speaker 3: documentary series and I can never remember what it who
[44:33] Speaker 3: actually narrated it.
[44:34] Speaker 8: Or dog did it.
[44:35] Speaker 3: There was one I want to say it was like
[44:37] Speaker 3: it wasn't actually Sam Elliott, but it was like this
[44:40] Speaker 3: young American's heading out on the open range for the
[44:42] Speaker 3: first time and it's like a little bison standing up.
[44:45] Speaker 3: But it all sounded like.
[44:48] Speaker 5: I'm going to move through the rest of these quickly.
[44:50] Speaker 5: But one last thing, and happy birthday, David Attenborough. We
[44:56] Speaker 5: talked about you all the time on the show. There
[44:58] Speaker 5: We Go, But shouldn't we It's like a new whole
[45:01] Speaker 5: you know, video show. Thing that we do is like
[45:05] Speaker 5: film some nature documentaries and have you know what voice them?
[45:09] Speaker 1: Why don't you.
[45:12] Speaker 5: You voice?
[45:14] Speaker 1: Here's so I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it
[45:15] Speaker 1: like this. You're gonna be watching the amazing footage. I'm
[45:18] Speaker 1: gonna come in now and then and be like that's
[45:20] Speaker 1: a blue shark.
[45:23] Speaker 7: You're gonna narrate it the same way you narrate it
[45:26] Speaker 7: to your family at home.
[45:27] Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm like, no, no, no, those are rainbow smell.
[45:31] Speaker 1: I'm gonna say stuff like that because that's all I'm wondering.
[45:34] Speaker 1: It's like when I'm watching I'm like, I just want
[45:36] Speaker 1: to know what it is. I don't want to hear
[45:39] Speaker 1: you do like verbal gymnastics of throwing your voice over.
[45:42] Speaker 1: I just want to know is that a blue shark?
[45:44] Speaker 5: But I think we should do It's like Steve series
[45:48] Speaker 5: of the same video, the Randall series of the same right, perfect.
[45:54] Speaker 3: Do you remember that show what is called like Mystery
[45:58] Speaker 3: Mystery Science Theater.
[45:59] Speaker 7: Yeah, they like comment on a movie as they're watching it.
[46:02] Speaker 7: What you should do is comment on a narration as
[46:06] Speaker 7: you You know how they like to like be like, oh,
[46:08] Speaker 7: the two animals love each other and they like make
[46:11] Speaker 7: them like people.
[46:11] Speaker 1: And sh just taking a stroke.
[46:18] Speaker 8: Orcus.
[46:19] Speaker 7: Because I know when when you're watching that stuff with
[46:21] Speaker 7: your family, they're like, they don't actually do that. That's
[46:24] Speaker 7: not true.
[46:26] Speaker 5: I think we've got we're onto something here. Okay, moving on,
[46:29] Speaker 5: So we've talked about this before. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina,
[46:33] Speaker 5: North Carolina.
[46:34] Speaker 6: And whether or not on a state level.
[46:39] Speaker 5: They'd be able to manage Atlantic red snapper, and that
[46:45] Speaker 5: that's now the case. So so those four states have
[46:48] Speaker 5: extended seasons. I'm not going to go through all the details,
[46:52] Speaker 5: but like last year in twenty five, the season for
[46:57] Speaker 5: commercial snapper was two days. Before that it was just
[47:00] Speaker 5: one day, and this year it's about a month, a month,
[47:04] Speaker 5: month and a half in most of these states. So
[47:08] Speaker 5: greatly expanded number of days.
[47:10] Speaker 7: Made a fish snapper recreational.
[47:12] Speaker 6: Recreational. Sorry sorry, I said commercial recreational. Okay.
[47:19] Speaker 5: Some bear attacks, one, unfortunately, we've discovered, has ended in
[47:26] Speaker 5: the death of a hiker.
[47:27] Speaker 12: This take.
[47:27] Speaker 5: This took place in Glacier National Park, which is in Montana.
[47:33] Speaker 5: The body of a hiker was found after being reported
[47:36] Speaker 5: missing on the Mount Brown trail about two and a
[47:42] Speaker 5: half miles up that trail, fifty miles from the trailhead.
[47:46] Speaker 1: No, no, no, he was fifty feet from sorry just.
[47:50] Speaker 5: Said miles, My goodness, fifty feet off the trail. And
[47:58] Speaker 5: when he was found, it looked like the injuries that
[48:03] Speaker 5: he or she Because they haven't released the identity of
[48:07] Speaker 5: the individual, the injuries made it seem as though there
[48:11] Speaker 5: was an encounter with a bear.
[48:13] Speaker 6: So that was just the other day.
[48:15] Speaker 8: First fatal attacking Glacier since ninety eight. I can't believe
[48:18] Speaker 8: that I.
[48:19] Speaker 1: Have just drawing like an arbitrary line, like I spent
[48:22] Speaker 1: plenty of fatal attacks in like Northern Continental Divide.
[48:25] Speaker 8: Sure, but I can't believe they went twenty eight years
[48:28] Speaker 8: without The Night of the Grizzly sixties was fifties, I
[48:33] Speaker 8: don't know, was it that long ago?
[48:36] Speaker 1: Easy to find?
[48:39] Speaker 5: And the other incident happened sixty seven just in our
[48:44] Speaker 5: backyard in Yellowstone. There were two hikers that happened. They
[48:48] Speaker 5: happened to be brothers, and they were mauled initially one
[48:54] Speaker 5: in serious condition, when in critical I think reports say
[48:58] Speaker 5: that they are both probably gonna make it there in
[49:02] Speaker 5: a hotel in a hotel in a hospital in Idaho,
[49:06] Speaker 5: and they were.
[49:07] Speaker 6: They were both airlifted. So hopefully they make it.
[49:13] Speaker 1: And you know, this one they do like the last time,
[49:18] Speaker 1: you know, and it's usually some long time ago. Yeah,
[49:21] Speaker 1: the last time someone was so it's the spring, right,
[49:24] Speaker 1: The last time someone was injured by a bear in
[49:26] Speaker 1: the park was the fall?
[49:27] Speaker 6: Yeah, yep, so September twenty five. So, and then the last.
[49:33] Speaker 5: Fatality in Yellowstone from a bear was twenty fifteen, so
[49:39] Speaker 5: much more recently than the last fatality in Glacier.
[49:43] Speaker 8: Now closed down a section of the park. I was
[49:45] Speaker 8: fishing in that closure really three days before this.
[49:48] Speaker 1: Oh, no kidding, I don't think they should do that.
[49:50] Speaker 6: They closed an they closed a big area.
[49:53] Speaker 5: It's like I was just looking at the map, like
[49:56] Speaker 5: maps by five by like almost that's ridiculous mile area
[50:03] Speaker 5: that was.
[50:03] Speaker 6: That was the other day.
[50:04] Speaker 5: So I'm not sure how long they'll continue to keep
[50:07] Speaker 5: that closed. It's it's just temporary, but that that area
[50:10] Speaker 5: is closed to visitors.
[50:12] Speaker 1: Two guys got It's pretty crazy. Two guys in Montana
[50:20] Speaker 1: got charged with having two hundred and twenty three ducks
[50:27] Speaker 1: over their limit. Two guys are hunting in the sun
[50:32] Speaker 1: River in January and they again they're hunting on private
[50:36] Speaker 1: land and a game ward and sees them. He goes
[50:38] Speaker 1: up to see what they got going on. Two guys okay,
[50:41] Speaker 1: daily bag limited seven ducks. These two guys have sixty
[50:44] Speaker 1: six ducks laying there. Then they go to one of
[50:48] Speaker 1: the guy's shops and they had that brought the total up.
[50:52] Speaker 1: When they go to his shop and see like his
[50:54] Speaker 1: butchered partially butchered and butchered ducks brings him up to
[51:00] Speaker 1: two hundred and twenty three ducks. He had two days
[51:03] Speaker 1: in January when they killed one hundred and twenty ducks.
[51:08] Speaker 1: His claim was it it had been a slow year.
[51:15] Speaker 1: It had been a slow year, and he was just
[51:17] Speaker 1: trying to get stocked up.
[51:20] Speaker 7: I understand trying to explain yourself, but it ain't like
[51:23] Speaker 7: that's gonna.
[51:24] Speaker 1: Get you out of Oh yeah, okay, na, I understand.
[51:30] Speaker 3: Give me your best give me your best shot.
[51:31] Speaker 1: Here he's like, yeah, he's like sitting in like a
[51:35] Speaker 1: mountain of dead ducks. Give me your bed, Like, help
[51:37] Speaker 1: me understand what I'm saying. Yeah, it's been a slow year.
[51:41] Speaker 7: And to be fair, like I'm not justifying this in
[51:45] Speaker 7: any way at all, but it's actually impressive that they
[51:49] Speaker 7: were like butchered and stored.
[51:52] Speaker 1: Yeah, what's impressive. This is the thing people always overlook
[51:55] Speaker 1: on stories like this. I feel I had to say
[51:58] Speaker 1: to say it, what's impressive? This is the thing you
[52:03] Speaker 1: shouldn't say. But I'm just gonna say it. That is
[52:09] Speaker 1: some very good duck hunting. Yes, yeah, that is one
[52:13] Speaker 1: of them days.
[52:14] Speaker 7: They must have hit a migration like perfect.
[52:18] Speaker 1: Most of my brain goes toward you, sons of bitches,
[52:22] Speaker 1: but a part of it goes to what in the
[52:26] Speaker 1: hell spot they got?
[52:27] Speaker 3: Yeah, again, it's been a slow year and then it
[52:32] Speaker 3: got really really rightly.
[52:34] Speaker 1: That is an amazing two guys to get a sixty
[52:42] Speaker 1: six duck morning is an unbelievable day of duck hunt.
[52:46] Speaker 1: They must have been having such a good time.
[52:48] Speaker 7: The funny thing is that's a slow day down in
[52:50] Speaker 7: South America. When those guys are shooting hundreds of them
[52:53] Speaker 7: a day.
[52:54] Speaker 1: Yeah, unbelievable hunting and also probably I hate to say it,
[52:58] Speaker 1: probably good wing shooting. Unna stop.
[53:04] Speaker 5: Neighbors somewhere in Bozeman, maybe someone, maybe someone feels like
[53:08] Speaker 5: getting a tip from them to pass to you.
[53:10] Speaker 1: So yeah, unbelievable day of honey. But also very very
[53:15] Speaker 1: very bad, also very bad, But within that I recognize
[53:19] Speaker 1: what an unbelievable day of honey.
[53:23] Speaker 7: Moving on to mountain lions. Pretty cool story out of Minnesota.
[53:29] Speaker 7: They discovered what they they discovered the first like set
[53:34] Speaker 7: of kittens. It says bleeding mountain lions, But I like,
[53:37] Speaker 7: you can't necessarily confirm that the breeding took place in Minnesota.
[53:42] Speaker 1: If you want that I have a feeling that took
[53:45] Speaker 1: place thereabouts.
[53:46] Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, but some people like she could have
[53:48] Speaker 7: walked in. Okay, but this just happened in April. Researchers
[53:54] Speaker 7: from the University of Minnesota's Voyagers Wolf Project, which is
[54:01] Speaker 7: Voyager's National Park. But this was this video was taken
[54:04] Speaker 7: just south of the park first confirmed evidence of mountain
[54:08] Speaker 7: lions reproducing in Minnesota. Then more in more than one
[54:11] Speaker 7: hundred years there and like obviously they knew, arguing that
[54:18] Speaker 7: right where those things were.
[54:19] Speaker 1: That's not a Mississippi jaguar either, I mean, that's a
[54:21] Speaker 1: mountain lion.
[54:22] Speaker 9: Yeah.
[54:24] Speaker 7: So it's a female and three like sub adult no way.
[54:29] Speaker 7: They believe that these kittens were probably born seven to
[54:33] Speaker 7: nine months ago, so fall folish of twenty twenty five,
[54:40] Speaker 7: Minnesota's had no documentared uh cougar reproduction for over a century.
[54:45] Speaker 7: They've seen they're seen occasionally often, like we hear this
[54:50] Speaker 7: story over and over again, like transient males wandering in
[54:54] Speaker 7: from places like South Dakota. The South Dakota mountain lions
[54:58] Speaker 7: seemed to get around a lot.
[54:59] Speaker 1: But that's all deer hair all over the ground. Yeah,
[55:03] Speaker 1: a hoof flapping Look at that man, What a cool
[55:07] Speaker 1: freaking cat.
[55:08] Speaker 4: Yea.
[55:10] Speaker 7: So they were historically native to Minnesota, became locally extinct
[55:14] Speaker 7: because of the same old reasons hunting over hunting, habitat,
[55:17] Speaker 7: lost predator eradication.
[55:20] Speaker 1: Campaigns, poisoning campaign ye.
[55:24] Speaker 7: And since the early two thousands, they've been seeing them
[55:28] Speaker 7: now and then, like I said, coming in from from
[55:30] Speaker 7: western states, and it's kind of a connection to a
[55:34] Speaker 7: broader recovery in the Midwest. In Michigan's Upper Peninsula. What
[55:40] Speaker 7: was it, Steve last year.
[55:43] Speaker 1: I can't remember, it was last year, the year before,
[55:45] Speaker 1: but yeah, some cats, some kittens show.
[55:49] Speaker 7: So that was the first one. They found some kittens.
[55:53] Speaker 7: And this was in the up and Michigan.
[55:56] Speaker 1: And we're looking at a picture of a kitten hiding
[55:59] Speaker 1: under a truck.
[55:59] Speaker 7: Tiger And at one point they saw these things and
[56:05] Speaker 7: then they were seeing them without the mom around, so
[56:08] Speaker 7: they're like, oh, you know, they probably died, they probably
[56:12] Speaker 7: didn't make it. Well, fast forward to this past winter
[56:17] Speaker 7: and you can't at the very top of the screen.
[56:22] Speaker 7: Oh yeah, So it's like and it's they're saying, that's them,
[56:27] Speaker 7: So it's it's.
[56:28] Speaker 1: The man running the logging road.
[56:31] Speaker 7: So Wisconsin, they're seeing more lions, so like they're coming back,
[56:36] Speaker 7: and it's a pretty cool story.
[56:37] Speaker 1: Bring them on, dude, And then long it is like,
[56:40] Speaker 1: bring them on, and then when there's those stable, good population,
[56:43] Speaker 1: bring on a mountain lion season and I'm.
[56:45] Speaker 4: Happy, yeah, man.
[56:46] Speaker 7: And the way I look at is maybe those extinct
[56:50] Speaker 7: Eastern cougars are gonna come back someday, like.
[56:53] Speaker 1: All those dudes back, all those dudes back twenty years ago,
[56:56] Speaker 1: all over those areas.
[56:57] Speaker 7: It sounded crazy.
[56:58] Speaker 1: It would see him and the ear nuts yep, and
[57:02] Speaker 1: they're right. But at the same time, in Mississippi you
[57:05] Speaker 1: are crazy.
[57:06] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[57:07] Speaker 7: Yeah, But like Pennsylvania, New York, like you could you
[57:10] Speaker 7: could see him get into like the Eastern Continental Divide
[57:14] Speaker 7: in the Appalachians and doing fine.
[57:18] Speaker 1: Man, that's crazy.
[57:20] Speaker 7: Yeah, it's a cool story.
[57:22] Speaker 1: And here's my message to Americans. No, you will not
[57:26] Speaker 1: be killed by a lion.
[57:29] Speaker 7: And this story loosely ties into another mountain lion story
[57:34] Speaker 7: that came in. We had a fan right in about
[57:38] Speaker 7: it to have us cover. He was pretty worked up
[57:40] Speaker 7: about it. In Texas, they're looking at changing a little
[57:47] Speaker 7: bit how mountain lions are managed in the Texas Parks
[57:52] Speaker 7: and Wildlife Department is urging commissioners to adopt a new
[57:57] Speaker 7: reporting system for mountain lions in the state. Should basically
[58:00] Speaker 7: be if you kill a lion, you got to report
[58:03] Speaker 7: it within twenty four hours. And I think now mountain
[58:06] Speaker 7: lions are kind of handled like vermin in Texas.
[58:10] Speaker 1: Texas weirdly, and I don't know, I think that Texas don't.
[58:14] Speaker 1: I'm not sure a lot of Texans are aware of this. Yes,
[58:18] Speaker 1: you are an anomaly. Yeah, mountain lions are generally across
[58:26] Speaker 1: their range in North America, Mountain lions are generally managed
[58:32] Speaker 1: as a big game species. Just if you're in Texas,
[58:37] Speaker 1: and I'm not telling you not to be worked up
[58:39] Speaker 1: about this, because I'll get to that in the minute,
[58:40] Speaker 1: But if you're in Texas, this is a message to you.
[58:43] Speaker 1: Like here we have regional and unit quotas that when
[58:51] Speaker 1: those quotas get filled and they have female and male
[58:54] Speaker 1: components to them, it doesn't even matter if the season's over,
[58:57] Speaker 1: the quota gets filled, it just shuts down. It is.
[59:00] Speaker 1: There's like mountain lion tag draws.
[59:02] Speaker 7: Yeah, and like you're only allowed one a year, no
[59:05] Speaker 7: matter like in most states.
[59:07] Speaker 1: There you got to like put in for a permit.
[59:10] Speaker 1: Wyoming manages them like a big game animal. Idaho manages
[59:15] Speaker 1: like a big game animal. Colorado manages like a big
[59:17] Speaker 1: game animal. So a little bit, it's like, yes, you
[59:21] Speaker 1: had to report them. I hunt turkeys in Wisconsin. You
[59:25] Speaker 1: have to report a turkey. You have twenty four hours
[59:28] Speaker 1: or forty eight hours to tell them you got a turkey.
[59:31] Speaker 1: So like the simple fact that you'd have to report
[59:34] Speaker 1: a lion is not unusual. No, it's unusual that your
[59:40] Speaker 1: state manages them like a possums. Yep, like there's no
[59:44] Speaker 1: close season, no bag limit. And here's where I empathize
[59:48] Speaker 1: with textans that are worked up about this. Is my
[59:50] Speaker 1: understanding from private conversations with people who are in the know,
[59:54] Speaker 1: is that this is coming from You always gotta look
[59:57] Speaker 1: at where is it coming from. Like if it was
[59:59] Speaker 1: houndsman in mountain lion hunters saying, you know what, we
[1:00:02] Speaker 1: should all get together and have a reporting structure, then
[1:00:06] Speaker 1: you'd be like, Okay, these are probably guys you could trust,
[1:00:09] Speaker 1: and you know who's it coming from. What I've been
[1:00:12] Speaker 1: told privately is this is coming from people whose aim
[1:00:16] Speaker 1: it is is to end the harvest or killing of
[1:00:20] Speaker 1: mountain lions and so that's why people are suspicious.
[1:00:22] Speaker 7: That's what like it says hunters, and some hunters and
[1:00:25] Speaker 7: trappers have been vocally opposed to it because they see
[1:00:29] Speaker 7: this as a step towards ending the take of mountain
[1:00:33] Speaker 7: lions in Texas, which, man, if you're going to fight
[1:00:38] Speaker 7: that battle, Texas probably not the state to fight it in.
[1:00:40] Speaker 1: But no, no, I sit on both. I sit on
[1:00:44] Speaker 1: the fence on this one because like report, like there's
[1:00:49] Speaker 1: a certain size of something like a hundred pound cat.
[1:00:53] Speaker 1: If you've killed a hundred pound cat, it just isn't
[1:00:57] Speaker 1: surprising to me that they would want to know. It's
[1:01:03] Speaker 1: like at the state that the state Fishing Game Agency
[1:01:05] Speaker 1: would be curious to know that you killed a big
[1:01:09] Speaker 1: game animal that is not like this is not a
[1:01:11] Speaker 1: shocking thing.
[1:01:12] Speaker 7: Probably because of how they've been managed historically in Texas,
[1:01:17] Speaker 7: which is not managed the Fishing Game Department probably doesn't
[1:01:20] Speaker 7: have a lot of information on them to begin with.
[1:01:22] Speaker 7: Then this is a good way to start gathering some
[1:01:25] Speaker 7: data on mountain line.
[1:01:27] Speaker 1: But if it's coming from people who are like, our
[1:01:29] Speaker 1: goal here is to end mountain lion hunting, Step one
[1:01:34] Speaker 1: is to do this thing so that we can get
[1:01:36] Speaker 1: some reporting and then use that reporting to turn it
[1:01:39] Speaker 1: into how there aren't many lions around or whatever. Yeah,
[1:01:45] Speaker 1: and it's gonna you're gonna be danned if you do dan,
[1:01:47] Speaker 1: if you don't, If that's where it's coming from, if
[1:01:49] Speaker 1: it's coming from an anti hunting org or anti hunting people,
[1:01:52] Speaker 1: they're gonna they're gonna screw you. Either way. You're all
[1:01:55] Speaker 1: gonna report and they're gonna be like, my god, Texans
[1:01:59] Speaker 1: are slaughtering a thousand mountain lions a year or none
[1:02:04] Speaker 1: of you report, and they're gonna be like, my god,
[1:02:07] Speaker 1: there's no mountain lions. Yep, Like there's no If it's
[1:02:11] Speaker 1: coming from the wrong place, you cannot win.
[1:02:13] Speaker 7: Yeah. But again, I just feel like Texas is a
[1:02:16] Speaker 7: good luck fight in that battle, you know. If that's
[1:02:19] Speaker 7: where it's coming from.
[1:02:20] Speaker 1: My message to Texans is, I don't know. I don't
[1:02:23] Speaker 1: know what to think about that.
[1:02:26] Speaker 8: I'm gonna tell you about Walleye Weekend. Last weekend, May
[1:02:29] Speaker 8: second and third was Walleye Weekend at the Iowa Great Lakes.
[1:02:33] Speaker 8: The Iowa I'm sorry, the Iowa Glacial Lakes. The Iowa
[1:02:37] Speaker 8: Glacial Lakes are in northwest Iowa, refers to a chain
[1:02:41] Speaker 8: of lakes, with the headliners being Okoboji and Spirit Lake.
[1:02:44] Speaker 8: Those are the two biggest natural lakes in the state.
[1:02:47] Speaker 8: Those lakes are known for two things. One is they
[1:02:49] Speaker 8: have a very strong boat culture that gets a lot
[1:02:53] Speaker 8: of bachelor and bachelorette parties to wind up there. Here
[1:02:56] Speaker 8: is me at a bachelor party there.
[1:02:58] Speaker 1: What's on your face?
[1:03:00] Speaker 8: Trying to figure that out. I think we were playing
[1:03:02] Speaker 8: beach volleyball that day and being being dumb smudging, So
[1:03:05] Speaker 8: I don't know what was on our face. This was
[1:03:07] Speaker 8: probably circa twenty thirteen.
[1:03:11] Speaker 7: Were even legal drinking age back then.
[1:03:13] Speaker 8: Yes, I would have been freshly twenty one. I think
[1:03:16] Speaker 8: wearing a Stefan Marbury to Wolves Jersey. Yeah, So that's
[1:03:21] Speaker 8: thank you. That's That's one thing that Okoboji has going on.
[1:03:24] Speaker 8: The other is they have really great fishing, like some
[1:03:26] Speaker 8: of the best fishing in the state. Multiple state records
[1:03:29] Speaker 8: have come from Okebogi and Spirit Northern pike, smallmouth bass,
[1:03:33] Speaker 8: musky tiger, musky white bass, fresh water drum. All of
[1:03:36] Speaker 8: those Iowa state records were caught in these two lakes.
[1:03:39] Speaker 8: Here is a picture of the state record muskie that
[1:03:42] Speaker 8: was caught by Kevin Cardwell on Spirit Lakes two that
[1:03:48] Speaker 8: that musky tiger musk muskie that is a standard muskie.
[1:03:54] Speaker 8: But the tiger musky state record also came a.
[1:03:57] Speaker 1: Bunch of fish. I mean, with all the respect I've
[1:03:59] Speaker 1: caught it, it's a bullshit fish, just a hybrid, just
[1:04:03] Speaker 1: with all due respect.
[1:04:05] Speaker 7: With all due respect, they can control like rough fish.
[1:04:09] Speaker 3: Popular, I know, but it's.
[1:04:10] Speaker 1: It's a make believe fish. It is.
[1:04:11] Speaker 7: I don't, I'm not.
[1:04:12] Speaker 1: It's a make belief.
[1:04:13] Speaker 8: I would imagine they are native to Iowa Brody because
[1:04:15] Speaker 8: the Mississippi River flames the border.
[1:04:19] Speaker 7: I was thinking because he's from South Dakota.
[1:04:22] Speaker 1: He says something. I feel like it's about he can
[1:04:25] Speaker 1: be showing like jungle pictures and I feel like, I
[1:04:28] Speaker 1: don't know. That was the south coast.
[1:04:30] Speaker 8: So you know, the Spirit Lake and Okoboji, they got
[1:04:34] Speaker 8: good fishing and good bachelor parties while I weekend. Now
[1:04:37] Speaker 8: it's been going on for forty years. It's put on
[1:04:39] Speaker 8: by the Iowa Great Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce. Is
[1:04:43] Speaker 8: it glacials greatly, I don't know. Glacial Okay, it's it's
[1:04:47] Speaker 8: the Iowa. We should have rob sand report this Iowa
[1:04:52] Speaker 8: Great Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce. They've been doing this
[1:04:55] Speaker 8: for forty years. Last year they had record breaking attendance
[1:04:58] Speaker 8: twenty three hundred parti pins from twenty two different states.
[1:05:02] Speaker 8: It costs thirty dollars to enter, and that entry feet
[1:05:05] Speaker 8: puts you in the running for a bunch of raffle prizes,
[1:05:07] Speaker 8: door prizes, a big old trophy that they give out
[1:05:10] Speaker 8: at the end of the weekend, and then all sorts
[1:05:11] Speaker 8: of contests. Here's some of the contests that you're entered in.
[1:05:15] Speaker 8: Heaviest Northern pike, heaviest walleye, heaviest stringer of three walleye
[1:05:19] Speaker 8: under nineteen inches, heaviest stringer of.
[1:05:22] Speaker 1: Back up, the heaviest stringer of wye under nineteen inches.
[1:05:27] Speaker 8: I'm assuming this plays to their limits, like your limited
[1:05:30] Speaker 8: three walle line you can only have one over twenty
[1:05:32] Speaker 8: inches something like that. I assume that's hunning.
[1:05:35] Speaker 7: It plays that people shove and sinkers in their stomachs.
[1:05:39] Speaker 8: It just plays into a very boring way in They
[1:05:42] Speaker 8: have all kinds of contests.
[1:05:44] Speaker 1: My favorite one though, what was the biggest pike this year?
[1:05:47] Speaker 8: Wasn't big? It was like nine pounds. That's that's not
[1:05:49] Speaker 8: a real special pike. My favorite one of them all though,
[1:05:52] Speaker 8: is the heaviest stringer of ten bullheads. That's one that's good.
[1:05:57] Speaker 1: I like that.
[1:05:59] Speaker 8: I will get to that.
[1:06:00] Speaker 1: I don't want to.
[1:06:00] Speaker 8: I don't want to ruin that part of the story.
[1:06:02] Speaker 8: The real prize, though, and this is why everyone.
[1:06:05] Speaker 1: Enters Visible has under eight inches.
[1:06:07] Speaker 8: No, no, just any bullhead the real prize. This is
[1:06:10] Speaker 8: what gets them, you know, to have twenty three hundred
[1:06:12] Speaker 8: people sign up. It's a chance to catch one of
[1:06:14] Speaker 8: the ten tagged walleye. Now, these ten whileye are tagged
[1:06:18] Speaker 8: with what's known as a Floyd tag. It's a little
[1:06:20] Speaker 8: wire tag. It's like an inch or so depending on
[1:06:23] Speaker 8: the fish in the state. It has a series of
[1:06:25] Speaker 8: numbers on it. It's usually goes around the dorsal fin
[1:06:27] Speaker 8: of a fish. It resembles like electrical wiring.
[1:06:31] Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, it looks like i'll chunk
[1:06:32] Speaker 1: of wiring hanging out of the fish. Yeah, a cord
[1:06:34] Speaker 1: from are Maybe there's a wally dog in there.
[1:06:37] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[1:06:38] Speaker 8: Typically Floyd tags they don't contain any micro data. These
[1:06:40] Speaker 8: are not chipped things. It's just basically an ID tag.
[1:06:43] Speaker 8: The numbers that you see on the Exeter year of
[1:06:46] Speaker 8: the tag. That's that's what you get with these things.
[1:06:48] Speaker 1: Uh.
[1:06:49] Speaker 8: Now, the tagging is done by the d n R,
[1:06:51] Speaker 8: and these fish are released about a week before Wileye
[1:06:53] Speaker 8: week starts or while I Weekend starts. They're released in
[1:06:56] Speaker 8: both Okoboji and Spirit Lake.
[1:06:59] Speaker 1: Oh no, they kept local wally dogs, yes, tagging them
[1:07:02] Speaker 1: then putting them back. Yes, they're not bringing out of
[1:07:04] Speaker 1: town wally dogs in there.
[1:07:06] Speaker 8: I think these are walleye from Spirit.
[1:07:08] Speaker 1: Could that be like a little weird If the DNR
[1:07:10] Speaker 1: is he's hungry, he doesn't know what's going on.
[1:07:13] Speaker 8: I'm guessing they're not pulling. Typically states don't have like
[1:07:16] Speaker 8: a brood stock of walleye. They're going out and they're
[1:07:18] Speaker 8: getting their walleye wild and getting.
[1:07:21] Speaker 3: Their eggs that way.
[1:07:23] Speaker 8: Now the tag is done by the DNR and then
[1:07:25] Speaker 8: they're released a week beforehand Ten of these walleye between
[1:07:28] Speaker 8: Spirit and Okoboji. If you win the grand prize this year,
[1:07:31] Speaker 8: that was forty four thousand dollars for catching one of
[1:07:35] Speaker 8: these tagged fish. And if multiple people catch a tagg fish,
[1:07:39] Speaker 8: the pot gets split between them.
[1:07:42] Speaker 1: That rarely, I was thick, and that could get expensive.
[1:07:44] Speaker 8: Good what I've learned is that their forty four thousand
[1:07:48] Speaker 8: dollars prize is ensured by a third party in cas
[1:07:52] Speaker 8: This word to come to fruition. That way, they're not
[1:07:55] Speaker 8: always sweating out.
[1:07:56] Speaker 3: What they're going to pay this.
[1:07:57] Speaker 7: What's the time frame for catching it?
[1:08:00] Speaker 8: So the contest starts at midnight on Friday and it
[1:08:04] Speaker 8: ends at noon on Sunday, so you have thirty six hours.
[1:08:07] Speaker 7: So like you can catch a tag fish a month
[1:08:09] Speaker 7: later and be like, give me.
[1:08:10] Speaker 8: There is a side pot that happens. You pay an
[1:08:13] Speaker 8: extra twenty dollars. And if you catch one of these
[1:08:15] Speaker 8: tagged walleye throughout the rest of the summer I think
[1:08:17] Speaker 8: you have until August, you get a much smaller prize,
[1:08:19] Speaker 8: but they're still relevant. This thirty six hour window. This
[1:08:22] Speaker 8: is where when you want to catch one of the
[1:08:24] Speaker 8: ten tagwe This feels.
[1:08:25] Speaker 1: To me right for like a really smart person to
[1:08:29] Speaker 1: figure out what's up and rig it, because all they're
[1:08:33] Speaker 1: doing is they're logging that tag number. Someone has access
[1:08:37] Speaker 1: to that tag number.
[1:08:40] Speaker 7: You don't think you'd have to provide the tag you
[1:08:43] Speaker 7: bring the fish in, I.
[1:08:44] Speaker 1: Know, so when they let them go, someone knows the
[1:08:47] Speaker 1: tag number and it's not released to the public because
[1:08:50] Speaker 1: then you have all kind of walleye with that tag number.
[1:08:52] Speaker 1: Someone knows maybe they got some way that like they
[1:08:57] Speaker 1: only know half of it and someone else knows half
[1:08:59] Speaker 1: of it. I'll have to ask around.
[1:09:01] Speaker 8: I don't think it would benefit you though. Again, there's
[1:09:02] Speaker 8: no microdata. There's no like chipping these.
[1:09:04] Speaker 1: Walleye tag with that number and put in a walleye and.
[1:09:08] Speaker 8: Go ha okay. If yeah, if the DNR wanted to
[1:09:11] Speaker 8: help cheat the contest, so I'm saying they could rig
[1:09:13] Speaker 8: it some way, so thirty six hours movie and to
[1:09:19] Speaker 8: win the forty four thousand dollars grand prize. Now people
[1:09:22] Speaker 8: take this very serious because of the pot that's available,
[1:09:24] Speaker 8: and they start fishing at midnight when Walleye Weekend begins. Well,
[1:09:28] Speaker 8: this year, Walleye Weekend starts with a lot of excitement.
[1:09:31] Speaker 8: At three a m. Which is three hours into the contest,
[1:09:34] Speaker 8: a tag walleye gets caught. The anglers immediately head to
[1:09:38] Speaker 8: the bait shop they have their fish verified to claim
[1:09:41] Speaker 8: their prize. But it turns out this tag was from
[1:09:44] Speaker 8: last year's event twenty twenty five, so that last year's
[1:09:49] Speaker 8: she's holding a twenty twenty part breaking tag.
[1:09:52] Speaker 1: So she went in there thinking she had that much money, didn't.
[1:09:55] Speaker 8: Did not count. The really heartbreaking thing is the Floyd
[1:09:59] Speaker 8: tag was the same color. So like seeing the yellow
[1:10:01] Speaker 8: Floyd tag, it's like, we did it. We got the
[1:10:04] Speaker 8: fifty thousand dollars walleye, let's go claim our prize. So
[1:10:07] Speaker 8: a real devastating start for.
[1:10:09] Speaker 1: Walley o drinking man.
[1:10:12] Speaker 8: Now it gets worse, it gets worse, It gets worse.
[1:10:16] Speaker 1: Seven heartbreak.
[1:10:18] Speaker 8: Seven hours later, at ten am, a second tagged walleye
[1:10:21] Speaker 8: shows up at the bait shop. Here's what happened. The
[1:10:24] Speaker 8: anglers said they started fishing at midnight. They caught a
[1:10:27] Speaker 8: limit or roughly a limit. It couldn't get the exact
[1:10:29] Speaker 8: details and how many walleye, but they had a number
[1:10:31] Speaker 8: of walleye. They head home around four am after four
[1:10:34] Speaker 8: hours of fishing. They throw the walleye on ice, go
[1:10:36] Speaker 8: to bed. They get up at nine am to clean
[1:10:39] Speaker 8: their fish, and it's then when they realized that one
[1:10:42] Speaker 8: of their fish is.
[1:10:44] Speaker 1: Tag because they were drunk.
[1:10:45] Speaker 8: They didn't previously. Maybe I don't know what that BAC was,
[1:10:51] Speaker 8: but they find that when they go to clean one
[1:10:53] Speaker 8: of their fifteen inch walleye has a tag on it,
[1:10:56] Speaker 8: so this time the tag is from twenty twenty six,
[1:11:00] Speaker 8: so it's an eligible fish. But here's the problem. The
[1:11:03] Speaker 8: fish is stone cold dead and the rules explicitly state
[1:11:07] Speaker 8: that a fish must be alive to count in the contest.
[1:11:10] Speaker 7: What fish?
[1:11:12] Speaker 8: Phil has a picture of the flyer for us, and
[1:11:15] Speaker 8: this is just page one. I highlighted the three spots
[1:11:17] Speaker 8: where it says this, while I must be alive, all
[1:11:20] Speaker 8: fish must be alive, WHILEYE must be recently caught alive
[1:11:23] Speaker 8: and tagged. So it they mean it when they put
[1:11:27] Speaker 8: in the rules that your fish has to be alive and.
[1:11:29] Speaker 1: That fish is dead, Yeah, very dead.
[1:11:31] Speaker 7: Here it's a walleye. Come, I mean who you know us?
[1:11:38] Speaker 10: Yeah?
[1:11:38] Speaker 1: Yeah? The rules is rules.
[1:11:40] Speaker 8: It was a twenty twenty six fish. It was thrown
[1:11:42] Speaker 8: on ice. Poor guys didn't realize it later though.
[1:11:46] Speaker 7: They were hauling him in so fast they weren't looking
[1:11:48] Speaker 7: for tags.
[1:11:49] Speaker 1: Then what happened?
[1:11:50] Speaker 8: Well? I talked to Mason from Stans Bait and Tackle.
[1:11:53] Speaker 8: He was the one who checked in both the twenty
[1:11:56] Speaker 8: twenty five whileye at three am and the dead walleye
[1:11:59] Speaker 8: at ten am. He personally knows the anglers who caught
[1:12:02] Speaker 8: the dead walleye, and they want to remain anonymous, but
[1:12:04] Speaker 8: I got a lot of details from Mason. He said
[1:12:06] Speaker 8: the anglers were aware of the rule. They pretty much
[1:12:09] Speaker 8: knew when they brought the fish in that they weren't
[1:12:11] Speaker 8: going to get their forty four thousand dollars prize, but
[1:12:13] Speaker 8: they went registered anyway. Then someone from the Chamber of
[1:12:16] Speaker 8: Commerce showed up and confirmed the bad news that this
[1:12:18] Speaker 8: fish was no longer eligible because it was dead. Mason
[1:12:22] Speaker 8: said the anglers were pretty bummed and that they had
[1:12:25] Speaker 8: basically accepted their fate before they even got to the
[1:12:28] Speaker 8: bait shop that morning, because they knew what was up.
[1:12:31] Speaker 8: There's also this other wrinkle in this story. The two
[1:12:33] Speaker 8: men didn't know which one of them caught the walleye,
[1:12:37] Speaker 8: and this was going to create another issue.
[1:12:39] Speaker 1: They're drunk wyes onto a cooler.
[1:12:43] Speaker 8: This creates some other issues. It's an individual tournament, not
[1:12:46] Speaker 8: a team tournament. And then they also administer a lie
[1:12:49] Speaker 8: detector test, and under this scenario, neither one of them
[1:12:53] Speaker 8: would be able to firmly say that they legally caught
[1:12:55] Speaker 8: this fish during the tournament hours. So the whole thing
[1:12:58] Speaker 8: was layered with problems again. Mason said that these guys
[1:13:02] Speaker 8: knew they messed up, and they didn't really hang their
[1:13:04] Speaker 8: heads too much.
[1:13:05] Speaker 9: Uh.
[1:13:06] Speaker 8: He said they planned to get the while I mounted
[1:13:08] Speaker 8: actually to commemorate the experience that they had.
[1:13:11] Speaker 3: Remember the giant missed opportunity. That's right, a life changing
[1:13:17] Speaker 3: amount of money.
[1:13:17] Speaker 1: You kids would have gone to college.
[1:13:22] Speaker 8: And actually the community has handled the news worse than
[1:13:27] Speaker 8: those anglers did. Phil is now going to play for
[1:13:29] Speaker 8: you a clip of someone from the Chamber of Commerce
[1:13:31] Speaker 8: making this announcement at Walley Weekend. I want you to
[1:13:34] Speaker 8: listen to how the crowd reacts just how devastated they are.
[1:13:38] Speaker 8: This video is via Travis chin Take it away.
[1:13:40] Speaker 1: Phil got a call.
[1:13:42] Speaker 12: From Mason at Stands yesterday afternoon. Have a tag walleye
[1:13:46] Speaker 12: coming in. Good news news, good news, tag walleye coming in.
[1:13:51] Speaker 12: Bad news.
[1:13:52] Speaker 8: Walle was dead.
[1:13:55] Speaker 1: On the rules sheet all.
[1:13:58] Speaker 12: Tag fish, all fish must be alive.
[1:14:02] Speaker 1: So that fish was not alive.
[1:14:04] Speaker 12: That unfortunately, the folks fished until four four thirty in
[1:14:07] Speaker 12: the morning, went holmesers napp got up to clean fish.
[1:14:11] Speaker 1: Oh crap, we've got a tag walleye.
[1:14:15] Speaker 7: So we felt extremely horrible about that.
[1:14:18] Speaker 5: Uh.
[1:14:19] Speaker 12: The other The other issue is it's an individual tournament, right,
[1:14:22] Speaker 12: This isn't a team tournament.
[1:14:24] Speaker 1: They didn't know which.
[1:14:25] Speaker 12: Angler caught the fish, so that's a double all. Okay,
[1:14:32] Speaker 12: Mason is here from Stance and they don't want to
[1:14:35] Speaker 12: be recognized, but they're going to get a prize that
[1:14:38] Speaker 12: Mason is providing on behalf.
[1:14:40] Speaker 1: Of Dan's baby tackles.
[1:14:41] Speaker 12: Let's give Mason's big hand.
[1:14:44] Speaker 8: There's a lot of sad news.
[1:14:45] Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have. I feel like I would have
[1:14:48] Speaker 1: if I was that guy. I would have told the
[1:14:51] Speaker 1: story in a different order. Jemmy.
[1:14:55] Speaker 8: Yeah, okay, give us an example.
[1:14:57] Speaker 1: I would have done like a narrative. He told he
[1:15:00] Speaker 1: he spoiler alerted his story.
[1:15:05] Speaker 8: Now here's Here's like the biggest reason folks are upsent.
[1:15:07] Speaker 8: It's something Mason told me has been talked about for years.
[1:15:11] Speaker 8: The rules of the tournament conflict with Iowa's ais aquatic
[1:15:15] Speaker 8: Invasive Species rules. This is from page eighteen of the
[1:15:18] Speaker 8: twenty twenty six Iowa DNR Fishing Handbook and big red Letters.
[1:15:23] Speaker 8: It says, quote, help stop the spread of aquatic invasive species.
[1:15:26] Speaker 8: It's the law. Then below that they explain the clean
[1:15:29] Speaker 8: drain dry regulations and say drain water from all equipment
[1:15:33] Speaker 8: motor live well builds, transom oil ballast system before you
[1:15:37] Speaker 8: leave water body. Drain plugs must be removed at the
[1:15:39] Speaker 8: water access and remain open during transport. So, as you
[1:15:42] Speaker 8: can see, that makes it really difficult to deliver the
[1:15:45] Speaker 8: Chamber of Commerce a live walleye. When they're making you
[1:15:48] Speaker 8: pull plugs.
[1:15:48] Speaker 1: They should say the boat unless you have a forty
[1:15:52] Speaker 1: four wally dog, then it's okay.
[1:15:55] Speaker 9: Yeah.
[1:15:55] Speaker 8: Despite this, to Mason's knowledge, this has never happened before.
[1:15:57] Speaker 8: This has never been a problem where a dead walleye
[1:15:59] Speaker 8: shows up up during the contest.
[1:16:01] Speaker 1: But as you can see, he's nitpicking.
[1:16:04] Speaker 3: Make it hard.
[1:16:05] Speaker 7: So no one won a big prize.
[1:16:06] Speaker 8: Nobody has wonted. No, but Mason has said that they've
[1:16:10] Speaker 8: been mumbling about this problem for years the community at large,
[1:16:14] Speaker 8: and that he actually heard that this week there's going
[1:16:16] Speaker 8: to be a meeting to talk about these clashing regulations
[1:16:19] Speaker 8: that they have. You know, maybe this forty four thousand
[1:16:22] Speaker 8: dollars walleye is what's going to finally inspire a change
[1:16:24] Speaker 8: to allow an angler to bring in a legal walleye
[1:16:28] Speaker 8: that's not transporting the water from a lake.
[1:16:30] Speaker 1: You're not supposed to God, Man, what happens the story?
[1:16:33] Speaker 1: That story's got layers, Dude, what.
[1:16:35] Speaker 8: Happens the prize money if no one wins, it increases
[1:16:39] Speaker 8: the next year. Actually, yeah, the weekend tournament's over again.
[1:16:42] Speaker 8: If you paid the extra twenty dollars, you have a
[1:16:44] Speaker 8: chance to catch one of these walleye later this summer.
[1:16:46] Speaker 8: It's a much smaller prize at that point, and my
[1:16:49] Speaker 8: understanding is the prize money will increase next year because
[1:16:53] Speaker 8: of that.
[1:16:53] Speaker 1: You know, you talk about that insurance outfit that ensures
[1:16:56] Speaker 1: those kind of things. Yep. I was at this event
[1:16:59] Speaker 1: one time. There you could roll. It was a Conservation
[1:17:02] Speaker 1: Org event and you could roll dice to win a truck,
[1:17:05] Speaker 1: brand new truck. I think he had to take a
[1:17:09] Speaker 1: five or six pack of dice and roll all one
[1:17:12] Speaker 1: of a kind, which is I looked it up at
[1:17:15] Speaker 1: the time. It's not gonna happen, But he did happen.
[1:17:18] Speaker 3: You have yazis.
[1:17:21] Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn't it. No, No, it wasn't it was.
[1:17:24] Speaker 1: I think it was six. Shake it day is five five, Yeah,
[1:17:27] Speaker 1: it goes six. Anyways, they had the insurance guy was there.
[1:17:30] Speaker 1: I was shooting the breeze with him. You know what
[1:17:33] Speaker 1: he did. He's got these dice, they got that. He's
[1:17:36] Speaker 1: got this thing out he had. He weighs, he weighs
[1:17:39] Speaker 1: all the dice, inspects all the dice, and he took
[1:17:43] Speaker 1: a caliber, a digital caliber. Love this to the dice.
[1:17:47] Speaker 9: You have to.
[1:17:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And no one even came close to win
[1:17:54] Speaker 1: that truck.
[1:17:55] Speaker 8: I paid for shake a day for the table at
[1:17:57] Speaker 8: the bar, and this was a few months ago, and
[1:17:59] Speaker 8: ran Handel won the damn thing. Uh until we like
[1:18:02] Speaker 8: started going crazy. It was a seventy dollars.
[1:18:04] Speaker 3: Pot so I bought. I bought the most loaded nachos
[1:18:08] Speaker 3: I could for the table, and then I thought the
[1:18:12] Speaker 3: server wanted to cash us out, and I gave her
[1:18:16] Speaker 3: all the cash, which included a rather generous tip, and
[1:18:21] Speaker 3: I said, you know, the rest is for you, and
[1:18:24] Speaker 3: she said I know, and then it was too late
[1:18:28] Speaker 3: to take it back. It was the most sort of
[1:18:30] Speaker 3: passive agress in that moment.
[1:18:32] Speaker 1: I went, was she mad at you?
[1:18:34] Speaker 3: I went for feeling very large, very small?
[1:18:36] Speaker 1: And the ships up. I don't know, were you guys
[1:18:39] Speaker 1: being rude?
[1:18:40] Speaker 5: No?
[1:18:40] Speaker 1: We were.
[1:18:40] Speaker 4: I thought we were places out of business.
[1:18:42] Speaker 1: Now, yeah, I spr so you guys went out drinking
[1:18:46] Speaker 1: without me.
[1:18:47] Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah we did. Yeah, there were other co works.
[1:18:51] Speaker 8: You feel even worse, you see a lot.
[1:18:54] Speaker 1: Yeah, it was never drinking.
[1:18:57] Speaker 8: No, what was never acknowledged? If that pot had been
[1:18:59] Speaker 8: like twelve hundred dollars randall, what what percentage would I
[1:19:01] Speaker 8: get of that for buying your one dollar shake a day?
[1:19:04] Speaker 3: Would I would have ordered some sort of strange curiosity
[1:19:08] Speaker 3: off eBay for you that's related to rocks or made
[1:19:11] Speaker 3: up animals.
[1:19:12] Speaker 8: Yeah, because I would have felt entitled to a little
[1:19:14] Speaker 8: bit of that.
[1:19:15] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I want to be asked to do stuff,
[1:19:18] Speaker 1: but I don't want to be asked, you know, I'm
[1:19:20] Speaker 1: just gonna say no.
[1:19:21] Speaker 8: Yeah. Now, at the end of the video earlier, you
[1:19:25] Speaker 8: heard the dude and the mic say that Mason from
[1:19:27] Speaker 8: Stan's Bait Shop gave the two anglers a prize because
[1:19:30] Speaker 8: he felt so darn bad for them. Mason didn't need
[1:19:32] Speaker 8: to do that. These prizes come from the Chamber of Commerce,
[1:19:36] Speaker 8: and he said that Mason that they felt like, you know,
[1:19:39] Speaker 8: they deserve something, so he gave him a couple of
[1:19:41] Speaker 8: Saint Croix tournament rods, which is like, that's a great
[1:19:44] Speaker 8: Walleye rod worth in north of you know, three hundred bucks,
[1:19:46] Speaker 8: so good on Mason.
[1:19:47] Speaker 3: Awesome, that's a great tackle shop.
[1:19:48] Speaker 8: And while I had Mason on the phone, I asked
[1:19:50] Speaker 8: him for a fishing report so I could deliver, you know,
[1:19:52] Speaker 8: some real information to our Iwejien listeners here. It is
[1:19:56] Speaker 8: Spirit Like has been pretty good for twelve to fourteen
[1:19:58] Speaker 8: inch while eye, but you need to do a lot
[1:19:59] Speaker 8: of sorting to find the bigger ones. There's some good
[1:20:02] Speaker 8: crappie and perch fishing. Two oh Keboji guys are doing
[1:20:05] Speaker 8: real well in seventeen to nineteen inch whileye some twenty
[1:20:08] Speaker 8: plus inches being caught. Not quite as much action as Spirit,
[1:20:11] Speaker 8: though the panfish and bass bite has been hot lately
[1:20:14] Speaker 8: for either lake. He recommends trolling crank baits in eight
[1:20:17] Speaker 8: to fifteen foot of water. Sweet Spot seems to be
[1:20:20] Speaker 8: around the ten to twelve foot range.
[1:20:22] Speaker 7: He says.
[1:20:23] Speaker 8: Guys are also finding success pitching jigs around the basins
[1:20:26] Speaker 8: in eighteen to twenty feet of water. So there's your
[1:20:29] Speaker 8: mid May fishing report. Where I was excited it was
[1:20:32] Speaker 8: great lakes. Now to circle back, what I found to
[1:20:35] Speaker 8: be the most interesting part of the contest is the
[1:20:37] Speaker 8: ten stringer bullhead contest. The winner this year had a
[1:20:40] Speaker 8: bag of fourteen point three two pounds. That means his
[1:20:44] Speaker 8: average bullhead was about one and a half pounds. That
[1:20:47] Speaker 8: is a lunker bullhead, Chris Daisy. He was the champion
[1:20:52] Speaker 8: for the fourth year in a row. Here's a postgame
[1:20:54] Speaker 8: press conference interview that Dave Mashoff got with mister bullhead
[1:20:58] Speaker 8: champion played Phil.
[1:21:00] Speaker 9: We're here at the forty fourth annual Great Walleye Weekend
[1:21:03] Speaker 9: and the heaviest stringer of bullhead was fourteen point three
[1:21:06] Speaker 9: two pounds, won by Chris Daisy of Spirit Lake. And
[1:21:09] Speaker 9: this is the fourth year in a row that you've
[1:21:11] Speaker 9: won that category, Chris. What's the secret, specialists?
[1:21:14] Speaker 10: Lots of fishing, lots of lots of night drawers and
[1:21:17] Speaker 10: lots of sore fingers.
[1:21:19] Speaker 9: Well, what were you using for bait on those bullheads?
[1:21:22] Speaker 10: Mostly nightdrawer leadhead, just casting up underneath the tubes are
[1:21:26] Speaker 10: at Buffalo run up on the grid.
[1:21:28] Speaker 9: Does that seem to be a pretty hot spot? No,
[1:21:31] Speaker 9: it was.
[1:21:31] Speaker 10: This was a hard year for bullheads. It took a
[1:21:33] Speaker 10: lot of fishing, a lot of swording.
[1:21:36] Speaker 3: What do you attribute the tough goal for uh?
[1:21:40] Speaker 10: My grandpa used to bring me up here as a
[1:21:41] Speaker 10: little kid, so I just keep it going.
[1:21:45] Speaker 9: You said it was kind of tough fishing for the bullheads.
[1:21:47] Speaker 9: Colder water or what do you attribute that to?
[1:21:50] Speaker 10: I think it is, yeah, a lot colder water. We
[1:21:52] Speaker 10: had a cold snap up here, so it slowed everything down.
[1:21:55] Speaker 10: I mean, the big walley were biting good this weekend,
[1:21:57] Speaker 10: but everything is slot fish so had to move for something.
[1:22:01] Speaker 9: Well, congratulations again a fourth year in the row on
[1:22:03] Speaker 9: the heaviest stringer of a bullhead fourteen point three two pounds.
[1:22:06] Speaker 8: You don't want to see Chris Daisy entering your bullhead content.
[1:22:11] Speaker 1: That interviewer, this is Dave, Dave mash Off. You see
[1:22:15] Speaker 1: that move he did. He asked the guy a question,
[1:22:18] Speaker 1: the guy didn't understand and answered something different. He didn't
[1:22:20] Speaker 1: so he just very smoothly did his question over again
[1:22:24] Speaker 1: with different words and then nailed it the second time
[1:22:27] Speaker 1: and never it never phased him.
[1:22:29] Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, kept on trucking, you know what I mean,
[1:22:32] Speaker 8: hard hitting journalism there.
[1:22:33] Speaker 1: Yeah, he's never like hey, you misunderstood, or you know,
[1:22:36] Speaker 1: he just is like bam, that's.
[1:22:38] Speaker 7: An underrated fish man the bullhead.
[1:22:40] Speaker 1: Yeah, Randall, that was a great segment, had a lot
[1:22:44] Speaker 1: of layers to it. Uh, like like money won and lost.
[1:22:48] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[1:22:49] Speaker 3: Well uh. The Department of Interior announced this week that
[1:22:54] Speaker 3: they're officially conveyed or have conveyed, one point four million
[1:22:57] Speaker 3: acres of BLM lands along the Dalton Highway to the
[1:23:01] Speaker 3: state of Alaska.
[1:23:03] Speaker 1: Phil, do you have the.
[1:23:06] Speaker 3: So what we're looking at here on the screen is
[1:23:08] Speaker 3: a map of the Great State of Alaska and you
[1:23:11] Speaker 3: can see the Dalton Highway running there from goes from
[1:23:16] Speaker 3: Fairbanks up. I don't really know if it officially starts
[1:23:18] Speaker 3: in Fairbanks, but basically goes from Fairbanks up to prudo
[1:23:21] Speaker 3: O Bay, like across the north slope.
[1:23:24] Speaker 1: Well, yeah, no, it does. Yeah, So I mean the
[1:23:27] Speaker 1: pipeline goes all the way down right right.
[1:23:31] Speaker 3: So anyway that basically you'll see this called a public
[1:23:36] Speaker 3: land transfer, and that's exactly what it is. However, under
[1:23:40] Speaker 3: the terms of the Alaska Statehood Act, that law authorized
[1:23:45] Speaker 3: the transfer of approximately one hundred and five million acres
[1:23:48] Speaker 3: of federal land to the state of Alaska, and not
[1:23:53] Speaker 3: all of that land has been transferred up until now.
[1:23:55] Speaker 3: So there's I think what I saw there's approximately five
[1:23:59] Speaker 3: point two two million acres that the state was entitled
[1:24:02] Speaker 3: to and the state has wanted lands along the Dalton
[1:24:06] Speaker 3: Utility Corridor. The utility corridor is essentially a two hundred
[1:24:13] Speaker 3: and forty four mile strip aground along the pipeline that
[1:24:19] Speaker 3: was set aside by the Nixon administration in the seventies
[1:24:22] Speaker 3: with public land. I guess ordnance just PLO five five
[1:24:27] Speaker 3: zero and five to one eight zero, and it was
[1:24:30] Speaker 3: a buffer zone. It also importantly connects a bunch of
[1:24:34] Speaker 3: other public land, so it it borders the Committee National
[1:24:41] Speaker 3: Wildlife Refuge, the Yukon Flats National wild Reif Refuge, and
[1:24:45] Speaker 3: both the gates of the Arctic National Park and anwhar
[1:24:49] Speaker 3: So it's essentially strip alongstrip of BLM land that's now
[1:24:54] Speaker 3: been transferred to the state for energy development. And the
[1:24:58] Speaker 3: way this basically went down was they had passed the
[1:25:01] Speaker 3: resource management Plan for these BLM lands in the past
[1:25:06] Speaker 3: few years. Congress used the CRA, which is the Congressional
[1:25:11] Speaker 3: Review Act, the same thing that they did with the
[1:25:12] Speaker 3: Boundary Waters to nullify that resource management plan, and then
[1:25:19] Speaker 3: Secretary of the Interior Burgram revoked Plo. Five to one
[1:25:23] Speaker 3: five oho and five to one eight oh in February,
[1:25:28] Speaker 3: I believe, and then finally they did this transfer. So
[1:25:32] Speaker 3: it's been a long, sort of slow running process that
[1:25:36] Speaker 3: led up to this. It wasn't really something that was
[1:25:39] Speaker 3: like out of the blue overnight. The state has always
[1:25:43] Speaker 3: wanted these lands for resource extraction.
[1:25:46] Speaker 1: I mean it's an industrial yeah, I get, it's an
[1:25:50] Speaker 1: industrial corridor as is. It's called the Hall Road, right,
[1:25:54] Speaker 1: It's like a road that parallels a giant pipeline.
[1:25:58] Speaker 3: Yeah, and so so, I mean I talked to several
[1:26:00] Speaker 3: people about this, and their take was it's a bummer
[1:26:04] Speaker 3: that they gave them basically everything that they asked for
[1:26:08] Speaker 3: because some of it really isn't suitable for resource extraction.
[1:26:12] Speaker 1: They're not going to restrict the state's not going to
[1:26:14] Speaker 1: restrict access off that.
[1:26:16] Speaker 3: No, No, the state is entitled to make these claims.
[1:26:20] Speaker 3: One concern, it doesn't green light Ambler Road, but it
[1:26:23] Speaker 3: removes one of the barriers to building the Ambler Road.
[1:26:27] Speaker 3: And so again that's the two hundred mile road that
[1:26:30] Speaker 3: would cut west across the Brooks Range. And so it's
[1:26:37] Speaker 3: you know, there's kind of two different kind of two
[1:26:40] Speaker 3: different takeaways. One is like, yeah, ideally maybe this wouldn't
[1:26:46] Speaker 3: have happened, But at the same time, the state is
[1:26:49] Speaker 3: entitled to these lands under the Statehood Act.
[1:26:53] Speaker 1: And so they will eventually get they will eventually do
[1:26:56] Speaker 1: their claims.
[1:26:57] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and so it's kind of you know, wait
[1:27:00] Speaker 3: and see what happens. But again, like also keep your
[1:27:04] Speaker 3: eyes on Ambler.
[1:27:05] Speaker 1: There was some of that. There was some of that
[1:27:08] Speaker 1: transfer down where we hang out down in southeast Yeah,
[1:27:11] Speaker 1: I mean the state has Yeah uh, I've hunted off
[1:27:15] Speaker 1: that highway a fair bit, but always north of that,
[1:27:19] Speaker 1: always north of those new lands.
[1:27:22] Speaker 9: Yeah.
[1:27:22] Speaker 1: Yeah, it's because they own right over the crest of
[1:27:25] Speaker 1: the over the so that there's the seating. The land
[1:27:28] Speaker 1: there's seating is on the north side of the Brooks
[1:27:31] Speaker 1: Range and we used to hunt off that Hall Road
[1:27:33] Speaker 1: north of there yet.
[1:27:34] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's and it's like a popular walk in
[1:27:38] Speaker 3: area for caribou hunting.
[1:27:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, we would canoe in, but yeah you can't. You
[1:27:41] Speaker 1: can't fire a rifle within five miles of that pipeline.
[1:27:43] Speaker 1: So it's a big boat hunting corridor through there.
[1:27:46] Speaker 3: So that's the that's the news and public lands this week.
[1:27:52] Speaker 1: Okay, over to Michigan. Over to Michigan, they have banded
[1:28:01] Speaker 1: the controversial for no reason. They have expanded Walleye spearfishing
[1:28:07] Speaker 1: in Michigan. So in twenty twenty one, the state came
[1:28:10] Speaker 1: in and created a spearfishing season for walleye, Lake Trout
[1:28:17] Speaker 1: and northeast Northern Pike. And they did this experimental thing
[1:28:22] Speaker 1: where they created two zones. They made a zone in
[1:28:26] Speaker 1: Lake Michigan everything south of the Southern Pier and Grand
[1:28:29] Speaker 1: Haven south Lake Michigan, only not the interior waters was
[1:28:35] Speaker 1: open to walleye spearing. And then they took an area
[1:28:39] Speaker 1: in Lake here On and it was south of Thunder Bay.
[1:28:42] Speaker 1: They made it open for spearing Lake Trout, walleye, northerns
[1:28:49] Speaker 1: fish that previously you had not been able to do
[1:28:51] Speaker 1: underwater spearfishing. You could underwater spear you could you could
[1:28:55] Speaker 1: through the ice spear Northern Pike, but you couldn't underwater spearfish.
[1:29:00] Speaker 1: A lot of walleye fishermen had a conniption about it.
[1:29:04] Speaker 1: What they did was because like they're gonna kill all
[1:29:06] Speaker 1: the walleyes. So they did was you had to get
[1:29:09] Speaker 1: a special walleyeer, you had to get a special spearfishing permit,
[1:29:12] Speaker 1: and you had to report all your harvests. Okay, they
[1:29:17] Speaker 1: did it for their three years. They had another year
[1:29:21] Speaker 1: with reporting and now they have greatly expanded spearfishing opportunity,
[1:29:27] Speaker 1: underwater spearfishing opportunity.
[1:29:29] Speaker 7: You may not know this, but like for the the
[1:29:32] Speaker 7: who might not you, I'm gonna ask you for all
[1:29:35] Speaker 7: the like thousands and thousands of Walleye Roden reel anglers
[1:29:40] Speaker 7: that were mad about the spearfishing. Do they know how many?
[1:29:44] Speaker 7: How few people?
[1:29:45] Speaker 1: Actually, I'm gonna tell them they're gone. What I want
[1:29:48] Speaker 1: to know some stats? I want to know. They're gonna
[1:29:51] Speaker 1: know some stats. The controversy is not over with these proposals.
[1:29:55] Speaker 1: So a friend of mine, Jonathan Dirka was is like
[1:29:59] Speaker 1: a spear fisherman who has like really been ushering this process.
[1:30:03] Speaker 1: I wound up speaking to two commissioners in Michigan over
[1:30:09] Speaker 1: the last months before it has happened. I did phone
[1:30:12] Speaker 1: calls with two commissioners and wrote letters pleading for these expansions.
[1:30:17] Speaker 1: And they've done the expansions. Can you can pull up
[1:30:19] Speaker 1: the expansion map. These are the Michigan waters you're not
[1:30:22] Speaker 1: allowed to speare You're allowed to spearfish underwater spearfishing for
[1:30:27] Speaker 1: walleye northerns and Lake trials. So you got basically like
[1:30:31] Speaker 1: from Chicago. So the Illinois Michigan line or there it's
[1:30:34] Speaker 1: the Indiana Michigan line up to uh it's like a
[1:30:37] Speaker 1: little wedge of Indiana in there between Illinois and Michigan.
[1:30:40] Speaker 1: On the shoreline, you can you can underwater spearfish from
[1:30:46] Speaker 1: the Indiana Michigan line up to up to the forty
[1:30:53] Speaker 1: fifth parallel there is where they draw that line, and
[1:30:56] Speaker 1: then all the innery you know, Grand Traverse Bay is
[1:30:58] Speaker 1: out so the forty fifth parallel out runs south runs
[1:31:01] Speaker 1: across the state. South of Traverse City, there's a little
[1:31:06] Speaker 1: wedge down an erie yep, kind of like south of
[1:31:12] Speaker 1: Detroit down to the Ohio state line. You could spearfish.
[1:31:15] Speaker 7: That's right where the is that where the Saint Clair
[1:31:17] Speaker 7: River pop is.
[1:31:18] Speaker 1: That's big. Yeah, it's just right there. Huron. You could
[1:31:23] Speaker 1: do here on all inside the Thumb from Thunder Bay
[1:31:27] Speaker 1: basically Thunder Bay down to the bottom of Lake Huron
[1:31:30] Speaker 1: out to the Canadian border in northern Lake Michigan. They
[1:31:35] Speaker 1: opened a big stretch along the southern Upper Peninsula offshore
[1:31:41] Speaker 1: with some key areas removed, and they opened up a
[1:31:44] Speaker 1: bunch of Lake Superior on the off the northern coast
[1:31:47] Speaker 1: of the Upper Peninsula minus some some big spawning grounds
[1:31:52] Speaker 1: out there that are closed. So that's great news. However,
[1:31:57] Speaker 1: the Chippewa Otto tribes are protests, not the expansions. They've
[1:32:03] Speaker 1: written a letter of protests saying they want to bring
[1:32:05] Speaker 1: back reporting and they want to bring back the special
[1:32:09] Speaker 1: license because they're saying there's no way to know how
[1:32:12] Speaker 1: many people are out there doing this. Well, check this out. Okay,
[1:32:18] Speaker 1: when they open up the spearfishing license, you had to
[1:32:20] Speaker 1: go get a free certificate. You had to get like
[1:32:23] Speaker 1: a spearfishing stamp. Okay, guess how many people went and
[1:32:26] Speaker 1: got a spearfishing stamp?
[1:32:28] Speaker 3: Forty three, one hundred.
[1:32:29] Speaker 1: And twelve way fourteen four thousand. Out of those four thousand,
[1:32:36] Speaker 1: guess how many shot a fish? Or five hundred, two
[1:32:42] Speaker 1: hundred shot of fish. Out of those two hundred spearfishermen
[1:32:48] Speaker 1: that shot a fish, those two hundred people killed a
[1:32:51] Speaker 1: total of four hundred and thirty. Wow, they killed four
[1:32:56] Speaker 1: hundred and thirty walleyes.
[1:32:59] Speaker 7: There's probably now the half a dozen that are really laying.
[1:33:03] Speaker 8: Into another movie.
[1:33:04] Speaker 1: My body pulled him out. The number product drops down
[1:33:07] Speaker 1: to three point thirty. So so with the Chipewa Auto
[1:33:11] Speaker 1: tribes are saying, well, they're doing so much to promote
[1:33:14] Speaker 1: underwater spearfishing, it's gonna blow up if they don't have reporting,
[1:33:18] Speaker 1: and so we need to know what they're up to. Well,
[1:33:20] Speaker 1: angler hours on underwater spearfishing isn't going up. It just
[1:33:25] Speaker 1: goes down, down, down, as people realize what a bitch
[1:33:29] Speaker 1: it is.
[1:33:29] Speaker 7: Yeah, the barrier to entry thing is just like, it's
[1:33:32] Speaker 7: not something everybody's gonna go do.
[1:33:34] Speaker 1: Four thousand guys thought they'd go. Two hundred guys went.
[1:33:39] Speaker 1: Annual angler hours went from two thousand, three hundred to
[1:33:43] Speaker 1: one thousand, nine hundred to one thousand, four hundred.
[1:33:46] Speaker 7: Yeah, and I'll bet the four thing is out that
[1:33:48] Speaker 7: it sucks. I'll bet the more cold.
[1:33:51] Speaker 1: You can't see anything, it's it's cold.
[1:33:55] Speaker 7: And the four thousand we're like, people are like, yeah,
[1:33:58] Speaker 7: I'll get it.
[1:33:58] Speaker 3: It's free.
[1:33:59] Speaker 7: Yeah, a lot weren't ever gonna go.
[1:34:01] Speaker 1: So again, get they killed these fishermen one of these years,
[1:34:05] Speaker 1: these fishermen killed four hundred and thirty walleyes. Now allow
[1:34:08] Speaker 1: me to ask what, okay, oh, let me back up
[1:34:13] Speaker 1: angler effort. Sitting at about fourteen hundred hours of spearfishing
[1:34:17] Speaker 1: angler effort, guess how much many man hours of roden
[1:34:20] Speaker 1: reel effort occurrent Michigan point four million, one point four
[1:34:28] Speaker 1: million man hours of fishing effort versus one thousand, four
[1:34:33] Speaker 1: hundred of spearfishing effort. Last year in Saginaw Bay they
[1:34:37] Speaker 1: killed five and Saginaw Bay they killed five hundred thousand
[1:34:45] Speaker 1: walleye spear fishermen statewide, four thirty the Detroit and Saint
[1:34:52] Speaker 1: Clair rivers, four hundred thousand walleye. So between Saginaw Bay
[1:34:59] Speaker 1: which is that little thumb notch, and then down there
[1:35:02] Speaker 1: on the bottom of that little spearfishing area nine hundred
[1:35:07] Speaker 1: thousand wally dogs spear fishermen three forty oh no, my buddy, spearfisherman,
[1:35:15] Speaker 1: four thirty, my.
[1:35:16] Speaker 7: Buddy on the Saint Claire. Right right there on that
[1:35:18] Speaker 7: Saint Clare. They're out there hammering them right now.
[1:35:20] Speaker 1: You know, And that that Saginaw Bay fishery eight walleye
[1:35:24] Speaker 1: a day thirteen inch minimum, eight a day thirteen inch minimum.
[1:35:28] Speaker 1: They are listen. I don't care how you feel about
[1:35:33] Speaker 1: dudes swimming around underwater with a spear gun. It doesn't matter.
[1:35:38] Speaker 1: It does not matter. I will be there in June
[1:35:46] Speaker 1: hitting it hard.
[1:35:47] Speaker 3: We should do it.
[1:35:48] Speaker 1: I'm going to kill all your walleyes.
[1:35:51] Speaker 3: We should do a T shirt with you in a
[1:35:53] Speaker 3: wet suit and fins and says it does.
[1:35:55] Speaker 1: Not mess to matter or don't worry about it. It
[1:35:58] Speaker 1: does not matter. If people want to go in the
[1:36:02] Speaker 1: water and risks, shallow water, blackout and get all cold,
[1:36:06] Speaker 1: let them. The question is this, since it does not matter,
[1:36:12] Speaker 1: I look forward to Michigan passing a salmon spearfishing season
[1:36:16] Speaker 1: that will be the most awesome thing on the planet.
[1:36:21] Speaker 1: Cannot wait.
[1:36:22] Speaker 7: Would you hit them like right outside the river? Mouse
[1:36:25] Speaker 7: or where would you?
[1:36:27] Speaker 1: I'm thinking flashers? Oh, you go down and no, I
[1:36:30] Speaker 1: think you'd free drift. I think you just free drift
[1:36:33] Speaker 1: of flasher chains, maybe some chum if you can chump.
[1:36:36] Speaker 1: You can't chum, but maybe they'd let you chump. But
[1:36:39] Speaker 1: they're not gonna let you chump. I think you'd have
[1:36:41] Speaker 1: to use a string of flashers. Yeah, dude, ultimate challenge man,
[1:36:46] Speaker 1: big old and people.
[1:36:48] Speaker 3: Like they're gonna kill all The.
[1:36:52] Speaker 1: Come is like they got two, they got two thanks
[1:36:59] Speaker 1: for joining the new show.
[1:37:01] Speaker 3: They got two

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