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

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the news show. On this week, we talked to a former smoke jumper who wants your vote. Spencer Catches, I mean reports on a forty four thousand dollars Iowa walleye. Some weird old people are being weird about swans and other waterfowl in North Carolina. We’ve got a few grizzly tags here in Montana going down, including a fatality. Spear fishermen are coming for your walllwyse in Michigan and I’m joining them. And Doctor Randall reports on public lands transfers in Alaska, plus a whole lot more. Welcome, But first is always our news.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: It starts.

00:00:43
Speaker 3: Hey, please subscribe to the Meat Eater podcast YouTube channel. It helps us a lot and you’ll be the first to know when new shows drop.

00:00:50
Speaker 1: Well you just read that that’s at the.

00:00:52
Speaker 3: Media and what’s that.

00:00:57
Speaker 4: No, it’s just the mediat podcast network.

00:01:00
Speaker 5: Yeah, it’s just really helpful for our network.

00:01:04
Speaker 6: If you all subscribe.

00:01:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, do a solid, Do a solid for your fellow Meeta Roast. We got a new episode dropping today. Me and Yanni have a showdown immediate to Roast and Me and Yanni’s wives judge it mm hmm. You know, someone pointed out to me. They said they’d never tell anybody this, but they said, someone that watched the cut said your wife hacks on your cooking, because she does, but he says she gets visibly defensive when someone else hacks on your cooking. Interesting, which I haven’t watched to take No, you know, I like that.

00:01:42
Speaker 7: I guys filmed that man, you honest, be honest, did not have a lot of good things to say about you. He said you were just like scattered all over the place, trying to do too much at once.

00:01:52
Speaker 8: He said that, oh, yeah.

00:01:57
Speaker 4: This is all getting cut out. By the way, you can’t spoil me up.

00:02:01
Speaker 1: Who’s the uh so our Save Tuckertown campaign, who’s got the Oh, the donation deadline is May fourteen.

00:02:07
Speaker 5: Yeah, so just just pay attention to that. And we’ve just got a couple more days.

00:02:12
Speaker 1: So again helped me.

00:02:14
Speaker 3: They’re at one hundred and sixty three thousand dollars raised out of the two hundred thousand dollars goal, which will be matched by one hundred thousand for Meat Eater and one hundred thousand for Onnex.

00:02:25
Speaker 1: And what’s the closest, what’s the closest municipality here. Well, how do we say in your neck of the woods, it’s.

00:02:33
Speaker 3: Southeast of Salisbury, North Carolina. Okay, uh, northeast of Charlotte.

00:02:40
Speaker 1: Okay. So two things out of North Carolina today, just as a recap.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: Halfway between Winston Salem and Charlotte.

00:02:45
Speaker 1: Alcoa, who’s having the luminum having the luna business. Alcoa owned a bunch of land near the Tuckertown Reservoir. They’d always manage it as public land. Alcoa wants to divest of that asset. Okay. So one option when divesting from an asset is they We’re just sell it off and then people are gonna buy it and it’ll become like houses, or you contribute to the effort to like buy it and make it permanently public land. So we’re at meat Eater working with on X and we’re doing a matching thing. Your donations come in, we match them dollar for dollar up to the point that we hit two hundred grand. No, is that right? Two hundred grand of matches, Yeah, something like that.

00:03:29
Speaker 3: Yes, we have two hundred thousand matching phones.

00:03:31
Speaker 5: So you guys can go to the medater dot com and search land access and our land Access twenty twenty six page will pop up and there’s a link to make a donation there.

00:03:41
Speaker 8: I killed a big old white tail buck on some former Alcoa land in North Carolina, no different state. It’s hanging in the med Eater store.

00:03:50
Speaker 1: What’s the.

00:03:52
Speaker 8: Uh Texas?

00:03:54
Speaker 1: Well, you’re being weird about it. I don’t know, because it’s like that, you know, Bot burned.

00:03:58
Speaker 8: Texas because tenn a. This is why I told you Texas and I decided it was okay.

00:04:05
Speaker 1: It used to be alcohol I heard on that podcast was some deer in Texas. Yeah, like going down there, Randall, Yeah, did you win?

00:04:15
Speaker 9: No?

00:04:15
Speaker 3: I didn’t. I didn’t.

00:04:16
Speaker 1: Uh that’s a talk about spoiler alert.

00:04:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I went down By the time you’re listening to this would be the weekend before last to the very southeastern corner of Wyoming, just across from the Kansas or I’m sorry, the Nebraska border.

00:04:34
Speaker 1: Jerney Turkey’s gobble. Nope, not a single gobble the whole time.

00:04:38
Speaker 3: Nope, Nope.

00:04:42
Speaker 1: Yes.

00:04:42
Speaker 3: Shot. The KRG Extreme e l R match hosted by High Planes Precision was So that’s extreme extreme long range, extreme extreme long range. Yes, yes, And this is something that there’s a lot of very dedicated practitioners of the of the discipline, and I went down there with zero preparation or training. I finished one eighteen out of one thirty seven, and I was going, you beat some guys, yeah, and actually.

00:05:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were like, you’re competing against like military snipers.

00:05:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just mostly enthusiasts. But I had There were only three people who hadn’t shot this exact match before, and I was one of them. So I like to think of as great, that’s like this it’s not about you.

00:05:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s about who you beat. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

00:05:31
Speaker 3: I was gunning for number one thirty six, and I surpassed my hopes and expectations.

00:05:35
Speaker 1: How many people did you beat?

00:05:38
Speaker 3: Nineteen?

00:05:39
Speaker 1: I think like you could have said, you could have said twenty one. I went down there and bested. Oh, I bested nineteen competitors on I’m doing all.

00:05:47
Speaker 3: My math rock.

00:05:48
Speaker 6: Yeah, like in some other world that’s like your.

00:05:50
Speaker 1: Place, I’d just say yeah, I’d say nothing more. Yeah, I bested nineteen competitors.

00:05:54
Speaker 3: So there’s a couple of ways of looking at it. Either I exceeded my expectation where I came in near the very tail end of the finishers, I hit like between twenty three and twenty four percent of my points and the winner only got seventy percent of the points available. So it was the longest shot you made in practice or during the match. During the match practice, during the match, my longest shot was thirteen fifty three. That was my first my long over a mile in practice, my longest first round impact. Yeah, I went twice. Well, I had three hits over a mile in practice. The longest one was twenty three to twenty three.

00:06:36
Speaker 1: You hit at that, yeah. Oh, I was saying to him that it’s long when there’s no year that was that year, Yeah, because he’s talking about other distances that had years. Yeah, but nineteen eighty five, eighteen thirty three. Yeah, But then you get into thing that a year that hasn’t happened. That’s a long ways a shot. It is because then you’re like to like twoenty twenty seven.

00:07:03
Speaker 3: But another way of thinking about the long way, ninety five yard shot is so much further removed from where we are today that it it Maybe that’s more alien than like twenty twenty nine.

00:07:16
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was good. Did you call yourself?

00:07:19
Speaker 10: I did?

00:07:20
Speaker 1: Did your wife go no?

00:07:21
Speaker 3: She found out how far away it was and she didn’t go.

00:07:24
Speaker 1: She backed out.

00:07:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, so did Phil. Actually, I had a couple of people that wanted to go, and then they found out I was driving nine hours and they didn’t go.

00:07:32
Speaker 1: But wild Phil back out.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: It’s just basically the drive time, Is that true, Phil?

00:07:36
Speaker 4: Yeah? Yeah, I thought it’d be a fun time. There was karaoke to be had.

00:07:39
Speaker 3: So yeah, you know, yeah lost my voice SiO.

00:07:42
Speaker 4: That was a big carrot for me, and I just did.

00:07:43
Speaker 1: The drive was too much as the karaoke rolled into the shooting contest.

00:07:47
Speaker 3: It’s sort of a natural outgrowth of the we We also did trivia. I hosted trivia on Friday Night with the match director what yeah, Yeah, this is the whole thing. I got it when I was deer hunting last year. I got a message on Instagram from jose Gardner, friend of the program, uh, and he said, look, I host this match in Wyoming in May, and I think you’d have a good time. Plus I’ve always wanted to have ballistics related trivia. And I said, I’m in who wrote the trivia?

00:08:21
Speaker 2: Him?

00:08:21
Speaker 3: No, I did, I did most of it.

00:08:23
Speaker 8: Did you did you set to be too hard for us? Because it’s all about long range shooting. We’re too dumb.

00:08:30
Speaker 3: But a man who wrote a book on ballistics told me it was good.

00:08:35
Speaker 1: Afterwards the trivia, Yeah, did you have anything in there about the Coriolis effect?

00:08:39
Speaker 3: I did?

00:08:39
Speaker 1: Oh, I prot the past.

00:08:43
Speaker 3: Have you seen the movie Shooter with Mark Wahlberg?

00:08:45
Speaker 5: No?

00:08:45
Speaker 9: I have not.

00:08:46
Speaker 3: It’s a key plot.

00:08:47
Speaker 1: Point, quick thing. I’ve talked about this book two times on the show, but I don’t know what it was. I knew that there was some kind of firewood book, and I knew that it had something to do with the Northern Europeans. I’m holding it my hand. Jim Zumble gave it to me. This is a fetishist text. If you have a firewood fetish, this book is for you. But find the mystery is solved. Norwegian wood chopping, stacking, and drying kind of redundant plumit.

00:09:19
Speaker 4: I think it’s Norwegian wood, right, then, that’s what it is.

00:09:22
Speaker 1: Oh, that makes more sense. The Okay, that’s true. I was it could be titled Norwegian wood chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian Way, or you could read it Norwegian wood chopping, stacking and drying wood the Scandinavian way. Either way, I would have never had a redundancy of words between my title and subtitle.

00:09:57
Speaker 4: Maybe yeah, there’s no better word.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: But I’m telling you what, man, if you get your jolly’s off looking at expertly stacked wood, Phil, how.

00:10:09
Speaker 4: Do we just where? Could I put point at the camera in front of you?

00:10:13
Speaker 1: Yeah? Can you zoom in on that? If I had that, I’d say, no one burned any of that ship? Can they see it? Good? Can I see what they see? Or can’t you do that?

00:10:26
Speaker 8: Oh?

00:10:26
Speaker 4: Yeah I can.

00:10:26
Speaker 1: I can show you that I want to see if there’s oh they can see it? Yeah, that’s nothing.

00:10:30
Speaker 2: Look at this.

00:10:31
Speaker 3: I like, cow, he’s used all those palettes.

00:10:32
Speaker 1: This dude build a house out of firewood? Wait a minute?

00:10:35
Speaker 2: Or that house meant for burning or living?

00:10:38
Speaker 1: That’s what we’re talking about. You can tell. You can tell a guy like, hey, man, just step into that little house there and make yourself comfortable. Can I show this one, Phil?

00:10:46
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:10:47
Speaker 1: Wow, there’s nothing yet.

00:10:49
Speaker 3: Damn, that’s nice.

00:10:50
Speaker 1: Nothing because wait till I find the house.

00:10:52
Speaker 6: Maybe that needs to be the new calendar.

00:10:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s some dudes in here to can stack some wood. Man, But there’s a guy that made up uh.

00:11:01
Speaker 4: Damn it and also just a quick the titles. I think a play on non the Beatles song nor Reegian would so I don’t think it’s a translation thing.

00:11:11
Speaker 2: Great song, Yeah, kind of a bummer.

00:11:14
Speaker 4: The Buddy Rich Big Band has a just face melting cover of it. If you like jazz, just throw that out there.

00:11:19
Speaker 1: Mm hmm did I ever tell you that? Jazz? Oh?

00:11:23
Speaker 3: Norwegian wood parenthetic?

00:11:26
Speaker 8: This one film was Silo.

00:11:29
Speaker 1: Wow, that’s a stack of firewood.

00:11:32
Speaker 6: Damn those people are talented long winters.

00:11:35
Speaker 1: Well, Jim Zumbo, I never found the house. There’s a house made out of firewood in there. Jim Zumble said he has firewood O c D when he was on the show. He has like a problem with firewood, and so I think he does this kind of deal.

00:11:50
Speaker 6: Mmm, maybe you should do sheds at his place?

00:11:53
Speaker 1: Oh, meteor, Why has no one done that?

00:11:57
Speaker 6: Well?

00:11:57
Speaker 4: The great idea?

00:11:59
Speaker 6: Yeah, I’ll just call I love to do it.

00:12:01
Speaker 1: Okay, Uh randal me again? Are you doing this?

00:12:05
Speaker 2: Oh?

00:12:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:12:05
Speaker 3: For those of you that are gearing up for the spring summer or even getting a jumpstart on the fall, don’t miss out on our upcoming spring sales starting this Thursday, May fourteenth, we’ll have discounts on first Light, Phelps, Fahef and up to fifty percent off logo where on the meat Eater store will have And there’s a punctuation missing there. Anyway, there’s incredible thing guys, this Norwegian daily deals and new products for you to check out the daily deals. I understand. It’s like a different thing every day. And when we’re when they’re gone, they’re gone. So just keep checking in starts May fourteenth. It’s the spring sale.

00:12:47
Speaker 4: When did you become the guy who reads the copy in the spring.

00:12:50
Speaker 10: I don’t know.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: I like it though, I do like it. Yeah, okay, listener wrote in this is more news from North Carolina? Did you did you got more you want to add?

00:12:59
Speaker 3: No, I just like do more ad reads.

00:13:01
Speaker 1: If you should do it in the U maybe he can do him till he gets good at them.

00:13:05
Speaker 7: Should do it in I think you should do it in the Ken Burns voice.

00:13:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, we could do all kinds of different voice.

00:13:13
Speaker 1: A guy from North Carolina rode in lake. Yeah, what do you think it is? We agreed? Juniusca Western North Carolina. There’s a lake owned by the World Methodist Organization. Now follow along here. Okay, this is called this is about a thing called the Swan Patrol. The lake is approximately two hundred acres and is the only major body of water within almost three counties. Okay, it’s deep in the Appalachian Range. You’re not allowed to hunt on it, but guys like to fish it. For the last several years, this writer says. This listener says, a local group that has been dubbed the Swan Patrol has taken up the responsibility of feeding, herding, trapping, and relocating local waterfowl. The World Methodist Organization has granted the Swan Patrol permission to rope off exceptionally large sections of the lake’s bank to allow a safe nesting area for the birds. The Patrol not only does this to the small population of mute swans that live at the lake, but also to all but also to all types of waterfowl, including ducks, geese, and coots. They regularly go out in a group of up to five to six people and feed the bird’s massive amounts of corn. He’s saying they’re having such an impact that the birds don’t migrate out of there, They just stay there to eat the corn. He says, I know the lake has a right as property owners to restrict bank access, but everyone’s questioned around here as if they’re allowed to tamper with the wildlife to this extent. No, you’re not. One instance that caused much discussion locally it was one of the Swan patrol captured a swan that accidentally went over the dam. They crowded into a dog crate and moved it back to the upper part of the lake. Going to happen again. He says he’s seen them load wild mallards into cages in their cars to take them to other parts of the lake. Is this legal, No, it’s just how does the.

00:15:34
Speaker 7: Swan accidentally go over a dam?

00:15:38
Speaker 3: Like maybe full of corner?

00:15:44
Speaker 1: He says, I will mention, Like he tells you he’s gonna mention it, then he mentions it. The writer says, I will mention. This group does consist of members with ages raining ranging from the sixties to their eighties. It is kind of I don’t like it experience, Yeah, because like I could be like with those dudes and I might just seem like slightly younger. Yeah, but yeah, that’s not a thing you like just for the That’s not the thing you’re allowed to do.

00:16:15
Speaker 7: He’s got a point though, people that age like to tinker with shiite stuff like tinker.

00:16:24
Speaker 1: Okay, we got a special, We got a special Guests in the Studio night, joined by Sam forst Egg.

00:16:30
Speaker 2: Hey, Steve, thanks for having me. Guys.

00:16:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, So what you’re doing and the reason you’re here, Well, you’re here for a couple of reasons. One, you’re here because you’re running in the primary, that’s right. The So for background, if you listen to the show some time ago, we had on a representative, Ryan Zinki. He’s leaving m hm. And so there’s gonna be like things are getting spicy. Oh yeah, there’s a vacant seat. You’re running in the primary, seeking the prime, the Democrat primary. I am for the western Montana thing.

00:17:01
Speaker 4: That’s it.

00:17:02
Speaker 2: Montana’s first.

00:17:02
Speaker 1: What caught me, what caught my interest is your background. That And you might get sick of people saying this, but it just kind of it’s like said, every time I see your name, it’s thrown in there. How you were a smoke jumper.

00:17:15
Speaker 2: Smoke jumper, Yeah, union leader. I thought you were going to bring up the sauna.

00:17:18
Speaker 1: But what about the sauna?

00:17:20
Speaker 2: Oh, we got to hell a son in the back. Hered you’ll come over for the next time you have a sweet Yeah. Oh no, you think the Scandinavians are particular about wood shopping.

00:17:26
Speaker 1: Oh you you’re a woodman too. Yeah. So I keep saying this that you’re running and that you have no political experience. This is your first time, this is your this would be your.

00:17:37
Speaker 11: First time running for anything more than vice president of my union’s local. Okay, so I don’t mean no political experience, but on the national state. Yeah, and then spend all that spent four years as a smoke jumper.

00:17:47
Speaker 2: That’s right.

00:17:47
Speaker 1: Tell people what a smoke jumper is.

00:17:49
Speaker 11: Well, we parachute out a parachute into wildfires to stop them before they grow. I’m an idea of speed, range payload. That’s how you sell the program. We can get there quick, fixed wing airplanes put them out while they’re males. You don’t end up spending you know, tens of millions of dollars fighting a wildfire. And yeah, I spend eight years doing wild and fire in the last four as a smoke jumper.

00:18:07
Speaker 1: I never thought of that as a cost saving measure.

00:18:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s the idea.

00:18:11
Speaker 11: Before it’s on the national news and stuff. Yeah, I mean ideal. You get four guys on the ground, you can put something out at a quarter acre. It’s a lot cheaper than you wait till you gotta bring a bunch of heavy equipment, hand crewise all the rest in Yeah.

00:18:21
Speaker 1: Well, how did you wind up with for service?

00:18:23
Speaker 2: Well?

00:18:23
Speaker 11: I graduated um over in Missula. Hold it against me, and I worked two or three jobs. I went to school there.

00:18:29
Speaker 1: Oh you did?

00:18:29
Speaker 8: Yeah?

00:18:30
Speaker 2: Really well, you got your MFA.

00:18:31
Speaker 1: Yeah that’s right. Well, yeah, I mean in all soul, not a very degree.

00:18:41
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well we both leave around.

00:18:43
Speaker 11: Yeah, I loved it there. Did not love having to work two or three jobs at a time the whole time. And I still had debt on the back end. So I figured I’d do wild and Fire for a couple of years pay my debts. And when I heard you get paid to jump out of airplanes in the public lands, I figured I had to stick around long enough to do that.

00:18:56
Speaker 1: Is there an elimination process for that? Like, how do you go about getting in there? There is?

00:19:00
Speaker 11: So it usually takes folks till their fifth or sixth year and fire to get picked up by a jump program. Rookie training is a six week process, you apply for the program, yep. Yeah, so I applied for three years running before I got picked up my fifth year.

00:19:12
Speaker 1: Really yeah, fighting fire the whole time.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:19:15
Speaker 11: I started over in Lincoln, That’s how I knew, you know, how far north that little half it goes. And did three years in the Swan Valley and Condon on a hand crew, and then I got picked up for as a rookie candidate. In about fifty or sixty percent of people make it through. There’s better forty or fifty percent attrition rate wash out rate OLMIT.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: So you get accepted to a program and then there’s a wash out rate within the program. Yeah, like once you’re accepted. Yeah, and what what what mechanism do they use to find people’s limits?

00:19:45
Speaker 2: Well, so they’re kind of standard.

00:19:47
Speaker 11: Six week program is a week a hell week where they are just torturing the hell out of you. Depending on the base, you might have a twenty four hour line dig. Everybody’s got to go through a one hundred and ten pound pack test, eighty five pound pack test over rough terrains or on over five six thousand feet elevation, and really they just kicked the shit out of you for about a week. You got to go through units week. It’s a whole lot of the technical side of parachuting. Make it sure you can hook up a parachute harness without any airs, shooting up under two minutes, repelling out of what would be a tree if you were to tree up, and then four weeks of jump face and so there’s a lot of a lot of spots where you can mess up, and there’s.

00:20:20
Speaker 2: Not a lot of room for air.

00:20:21
Speaker 11: I have the ideas they don’t want anyone who’s going to end up in the program who might be a risk to themselves or anybody else, because yeah, there’s four of you in the woods. You don’t you don’t want to have to be calling life flight or anything like that.

00:20:31
Speaker 1: How many times did you jump in on fires?

00:20:33
Speaker 11: I got thirty four fire jumps total, in one hundred and thirty some altogether.

00:20:37
Speaker 1: Really how many states?

00:20:39
Speaker 11: I think eight states I got to jump in I I was lucky. Yeah, all over the West, so you got the jump. You’re jumping into places you’ve never been obviously. Oh, it’s some of the most beautiful corners of the country, even Canada, you know, back when they had their big fire season. A couple of years ago and you got you jumped into Canada. Yeah, yeah, when they had that for you know, terrible fire season was that twenty three? Yeah, I want to say, yeah, I was lucky enough to be on the first wave American jumpers to go up in thirteen years and yeah, four fires all over and it was I mean that I think they you know ten xt what they their previous record had been for acres burned, who was just unprecedented.

00:21:10
Speaker 1: You jump in on a plane, then get picked up in a helicopter or walk out.

00:21:14
Speaker 2: To your road or yeah, I mean the pack out is the famous way to get out of there.

00:21:17
Speaker 11: So you’re jumping in and see a smoke jumper, looks like you got a big diaper you’re wearing.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: That’s your packout bag. So got about one hundred and ten pounds.

00:21:23
Speaker 11: If you’re not ordering a chainsaw powerhead’s going to be another twenty five and usually schlep that stuff out of there and find a ride.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: So they’ll often tell you to walk out, like to walk.

00:21:33
Speaker 11: Out, Yeah, I mean that’s the standard procedure if you can get a helicopter and get a rockstar exit. Absolutely, But I mean the idea is self sufficiency. I mean that’s you talk about cost savings. I mean something a lot of folks don’t know about jumpers, as we manufacture almost all of our own materials, so everything short of the canopy is made manufactured in house. Ur Keviler jumpsuits are the bags that were carrying those pack out bags? Yeah, there’s a lot of sewing that goes on in the off season.

00:21:56
Speaker 1: What was the farthest you ever had to walk to get out of there?

00:21:59
Speaker 2: I think, my love, your pack out with six miles.

00:22:01
Speaker 1: So I got like, not like terror. I thought if you’d have told me thirty, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But yeah, yeah, I meaned I don’t know what I don’t know what kind of stuff you were doing, because thirty I’m calling a helicopter.

00:22:12
Speaker 2: It’s a lot. Yeah.

00:22:12
Speaker 8: Did you ever have to sleep out there while fighting fire?

00:22:15
Speaker 1: Oh?

00:22:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, So if you’re jumping, you should be ready to be out there for two weeks.

00:22:18
Speaker 1: What.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that’s that’s the expectation. Two weeks. You can extend to three.

00:22:23
Speaker 11: If you’re making it to two weeks, you probably didn’t catch that thing and you’re calling in a bunch of other resources to fight this fire.

00:22:27
Speaker 8: Real, what’s the longest you did spend out there?

00:22:30
Speaker 11: You know, I had thirty one days straight, which was kind of skimmed to a place you parachuted into, and we parachuted into the Three Sisters Wilderness a couple couple of years back. Spent just over two weeks out there, and then got rolled into a complex. I ended up managing a little task force heavy equipment.

00:22:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you like whatever, if you got a girlfriend or something, you’re like, hey, I’ll be back, like later or not.

00:22:49
Speaker 2: Whet avorce rate is high, Yeah for wild fire later or maybe in a few weeks. Yeah, it’s tough staying in touch with your family.

00:22:55
Speaker 11: And that’s the hard thing about wild and fire, whether you’re a jumper on a hot shot crew or an engine. I mean, there’s just not a lot of consistency, and you got to give up your summers, you know, if nothing else, and the only way you make money, especially if you’re making fifteen sixteen bucks an hour, which was I mean, my starting wage was fifteen bucks an hours a smoke jumper. The right you only make money if you’re making overtime. So if you’re not on a fire, you’re going broke fifteen bucks an hour.

00:23:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and that I mean adds outside of the McDonald’s better now.

00:23:21
Speaker 3: Tough, Yeah, full time at DQ in Livingston’s at twenty well, and a lot.

00:23:25
Speaker 2: That’s what it got me into this.

00:23:26
Speaker 3: A lot of it is.

00:23:27
Speaker 11: I mean, our public lands employees are not paid crazy wages by any means. I mean when I started, I was making twelve to seventy an hour on the engine and and that was the going rate. I didn’t hit fifteen until I was a rookie smoke jumper. And when I was vice president of my union last year, well that’s when all the dose cuts and all the rest started. And they ended up firing three hundred and sixty people in one day two Valentine’s Days ago. Eighty five percent of them are making less than twenty bucks an hour.

00:23:50
Speaker 1: Well that’s the new Valentine’s Day mask.

00:23:52
Speaker 11: It is absolutely and there’s a lot of inefficiencies in the federal government. Believe me, I’ve seen them. It’s not people making thirteen bucks an hour swinging a tool to keep a trail clear, road clear, right, And it’s all the most efficient.

00:24:02
Speaker 2: Workers we got.

00:24:03
Speaker 11: They had gs twos that they were firing in Montana. I mean that’s eleven dollars and some change keeping a trail clear. You know, it’s it’s absurdity. And these are the people who actually do the damn work. And that’s who was losing their jobs, having their lives turned upside down. And when I called congress Person’s Inkys office four or five times, I got crickets. So I said, if he’s going to take my coworkers and members’ jobs, I’m going to come take his.

00:24:25
Speaker 1: So when, like when you left, what was the path with leaving that and getting involved in sort of you don’t call it the like the policy end of things. Yeah, like you left being a smoke jumper and then came in and did were a union representative for who?

00:24:41
Speaker 11: So our union is the National Federation of Federal Employees. Okay, so not just fire crews, No, it’s it’s all. It’s the Forest Service branch of the Union, Forest Service Council, our locals, the Low Low National Forest, the bitter Root, and the Customer Gallon out here which we just organized last year, and some of the regional officers that are getting shut down right now as they can. Sull Day down to Salt Lake City in Denver and all the rest. That’s about eight hundred public servants and federal employees. And yeah, a whole lot of those folks lost their jobs, and we lost about a quarter of the agency in the state last year.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: And you were in this, you were in your role when that was going on.

00:25:15
Speaker 11: I was, I mean I stepped into it beginning of January, so I stepped in just in time for all these cuts to start coming down.

00:25:22
Speaker 9: What was that like?

00:25:23
Speaker 2: It was chaos and it was heartbreaking.

00:25:25
Speaker 1: I mean truly.

00:25:27
Speaker 11: We were getting stories and calls from members like Galcara down to the bitter Root. She was fifteen years into her civil service. She was an archaeologist down in Hamilton. She got fired one day with no notice, no cause, because she just happened to have taken a lateral transfer in the last year so she could do more remote work while she went through chemotherapy.

00:25:45
Speaker 2: Kara was not getting rich. I fell down.

00:25:47
Speaker 11: An enis on the custerer Galltin, who got a text while he’s in line at the airport for his mother’s funeral telling him that he’s lost his job. And he was only a GS five, so he’s losing the job. He was only making sixteen bucks an hour at in the first place. And it’s I mean, it is so agriv and because these folks were not making a whole lot to begin with. And again because this is not where the damn inefficiency is right. These are the people doing keeping all of these things together. And there are a lot of ways to sell off our public land. Selling off the acreage is just one of them.

00:26:12
Speaker 1: Right.

00:26:12
Speaker 11: The plan right now for the Forest Services to be is to draw it down to one third of the staffing levels we were at a year and a half ago. You got one third of the people managing all the same lands. It’s a hell of an excuse to turn around and say, like, well, why ain’t that trail clearer?

00:26:23
Speaker 2: It’s not working.

00:26:24
Speaker 1: We got to the point to the ways it’s not working out. Yeah, yeah, I hear that. I hear that all the time. I don’t know that. I’ll be curious to you guys think about this. I don’t know. I hear that, but I don’t know that that will be the playbook. Yeah, I don’t know. I hear it like that A logic would go, we don’t need to spend a ton of time on this, but that people will express that The logic would be deprive the land management agencies of funding have then watch how chaos ensues, fires, mismanagement, and then someone could say, look how bad they’re doing. What what a what a disaster? We need to do something about this and put this in the hands of someone that can better care for it. Sure, like I hear it. I’m not saying it won’t happen. I just don’t know if that’s well, that’ll be the sure rhetoric.

00:27:21
Speaker 7: You don’t think someone like Mike Lee might make that argument.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: Yes, because he makes every argument less time it was it it was the legal immigration. It was wanting to like do things one hundred miles into Montana because of illegal immigration across the Canadian border. So sure, there’s some grasping its straws.

00:27:39
Speaker 11: Yeah, well I’ll tell okay, sure, yes, And I mean Mike Lee is gonna go for he wants the acreage, right, he wants the land itself. Yeah, but what I see on the ground is I mean, this is it’s not new. They’re just stepping up the pace of this. And I mean I was on a fire this summer. We jumped the fire outside of Steamboat Springs.

00:27:53
Speaker 2: Huh and twelve of us jump in.

00:27:56
Speaker 11: This thing goes to five hundred acres, and so we were calling a bunch of resources in that three days in I’m managing a task force of hand crews, and we put in an order for the most some of the most basic firefighting implements pumps and hoses, and they tell me, well, we’re not getting those till the end of shift tomorrow because they just shut down the gear cash here and steamboat. So we got to overnight airmail the pumps and hoses from Denver. It’ll get here tomorrow. We got to have someone drive it up to the line. We’ll get it tomorrow night. So not only is the firefighting itself taken longer, but we’re paying so much more to overnight airmail thousands of pounds of equipment that used to be stored right there. I mean, that’s the point of a gear cash and those I mean, those examples are legion. You know, when I’m putting in order for a hand crew, it’s early July and you want a.

00:28:37
Speaker 2: Hot shot crew.

00:28:37
Speaker 11: That’s the most capable twenty people you’re gonna find for firefighting. And they tell me, well, we don’t, we don’t have any hot shot crews available, So instead of one hot shot crew, we’re going to order three contract crews because they have less capabilities than a hot shot crew. So on paper, it looks real good to say, well, one for one, one crew, one crew, but in reality, if you’re on the ground, you bet your order and more crews and we all end up pans so much well. And that’s that’s that’s what I mean when I say another way of selling these things off right.

00:29:02
Speaker 1: That’s one of the things I came to see about the like over the months or over the weeks about the Doge cuts was you came to see ways it brought to mind. You came to see that it created a lot of inefficiencies, like sort of accidentally made all these inefficiencies. And it reminds me of this passage in Elder Leopold Sand County Almanac. He talks about he’s talking about ecology, but you’re saying people are taking like watch parts and they don’t understand what the parts do, and they’re flicking them out, and then someone later’s like, you know, being like dude, that little thing you throughout that’s like turn that makes the whole thing click. That was important and so we’ve had other We had a guy from White River National Forest on who took the took the buyout left. He’s a supervisor with White Riff National Forest Man. He came in and told us just just like insane stories about things that were suppose the league gonna help, or ways in which he was forced to make cuts that turn around and cost money, costs, time, created problems from just having this like what turned out to be like a very ham handed approach.

00:30:16
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean, you want to know, the biggest way that we end up spending more money is if you don’t have ground resources to fight a fire. If I jump in there and we’re losing this thing because the wind’s blowing, well my best option is to call.

00:30:26
Speaker 2: In air resources.

00:30:28
Speaker 11: So you end up calling I mean, if I’m on the ground, I can’t get a hot tucker. That’s when you got to call in a large air tanker to drop fire retardan at seven thousand bucks a pop. And I’ve stood on fires and watched more money than I will make in my lifetime fall out the bottom of a large air tanker to put retarding along the side of a wildfire.

00:30:43
Speaker 2: And you know where that money goes.

00:30:44
Speaker 11: Well, it goes to the contracting service Ritter Aerospace that just so happens to be owned by the third richest man of the United States, Senate Tim Schehe. And you don’t have to look too far to see where the incentive structure is. Maybe we’re spending more money, it’s going to a different place. I’d rather have that money staying here for someone making fifteen bucks an hour on the district or on the fire crew, then paying to a contractor where it’s just getting sucked out of all our pockets tax pairs.

00:31:08
Speaker 1: You know, what do you think drives people like the time you spent there? What do you think drives people to take a job where they’re I don’t want to say compensated poorly, but take a job where the compensation isn’t the point? Do you know what I mean?

00:31:24
Speaker 11: Yeah, I mean there’s a what drew you to it? I love I love being on public lands. I like stomping around in the woods. If you can get paid to do that, especially in remote places, that’s the dream job, right. I’m sure all of us can relate to that. Beyond that, it’s you know, they call it being a public servant. It’s similar to why a librarian would work in a position where they’re not getting rich.

00:31:44
Speaker 2: Or my dad’s a public school teacher.

00:31:45
Speaker 11: Right there’s school teachers in the state making a starting wage of thirty ninety thousand dollars an hour. Right now, you know, it’s there is a sense of service to it, right, and there’s a there’s something rewarding about being able to look back and say, I’ve been swinging a tool for the last nine days and running a saw and I just tied in that fire line and that fire is not going to burn over that thing, right, And there are fewer and fewer jobs every year where you can really look at the labor and the fruit of your what your hands have done, and see what you’ve accomplished. Yeah, you know, that’s a that’s a rare pleasure that you can’t find very often in this world.

00:32:16
Speaker 1: I haven’t watched everything you’ve done and you know, bend to your talks and stuff by followed enough to know that you’re like you’re kind of pitch to voters in the state is really is really geared toward working Like you spend a lot of time talking about work, the working class, working class absolutely, yeah, yeah, And I I mean when you feel like that’s that’s your background, that’s your people.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that’s what we’re missing, right.

00:32:40
Speaker 11: I mean, the average congress person’s worth twelve to fifteen times the average American right now, And you wonder why there’s not a sense of urgency to address all these basic issues that so many of us are living with on the ground. And I mean I got to the end of the last fire season, and yeah, I have just watched the agency I work for be gutted in the name of efficiency, and I see inefficiencies. Federal hiring pretty damn inefficient. It takes nine months to get somebody hired on a fifteen dollars an hour job on a trails crew or a fire crew. That’s inefficiency, right, workman’s comp or HR. You got people spending dozens of man hours just to chase down a workman’s complaim for somebody who broke their back parachuting into a fire. You know, like that that is inefficient. The guy making thirteen bucks an hour swinging a tools not inefficient. And whether it’s fire or any other job, you can tell the difference when somebody making the calls has never been on the ground doing the work and that’s what it feels like in this country right now. You know, people are struggling to afford a roof over their head, or healthcare all the rest, and the people who are making the decisions have not experienced that. You know, when I was a kid, my belly was full because of food stamps for a while, my dad was getting his fet underneath them, thank god. You know, there’s not a lot of people in Congress who have ever lived through that, or who’ve been working three jobs at a time and still come up short on rent, like a lot of people in the state in this country are. And I think that that lived experience influences the sort of policy making you’re doing and where you’re going to be looking to cut if you are going to be making those cuts.

00:34:00
Speaker 1: Are you, let’s say you get the nomination, are you sweating it for when the whole part of the campaign comes, when it’s just all like negative, negative, negative, and people are attacking you left and right, Does that make you nervous?

00:34:11
Speaker 11: You know, I’ll say, we’re in a primary right now. The election is June second, so everybody make sure you’re registered. But I mean every time I you know, get a new big endorsement or we you know, have more support kind of bubble up or a social media video pop up. The negativity starts already, and we’re really I’m making sure to make this a positive campaign and talk about I’m so tired of all of politics where it’s just anger, anger, anger, and people screaming into a cell phone screen like that doesn’t get us anywhere. That gets us to a Congress that’s the least productive in American history right now in terms of bills passed and the policy experience I do got is I did some organizing.

00:34:46
Speaker 2: An advocacy between fire seasons.

00:34:48
Speaker 11: I work for the State Library Association and group of homeless Shelters, just trying to do good where I could between seasons, and they still get things done. At the Montana Legislature. You got to pass a budget, it has to be balanced. They got to pay for everything. And even you know, we had the first Republican super majority in state history in twenty twenty three and we managed to get some made for homeless shelters pass Because we’re in Bozeman, right you have people living on the back of their cars and trailers who’ve been living here their whole life.

00:35:12
Speaker 2: That’s not a part of an issue.

00:35:14
Speaker 11: And you don’t get those things done by standing in a room and screaming at everybody about everything you disagree with.

00:35:19
Speaker 2: You got it. You have to be able to talk past that, and that just feels like a lost art in modern politics.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: I read somewhere that you were saying, when this is all done, you know that you’re don’t have to go back out and look for a job. Oh yeah, I’m broke. I’m broke.

00:35:34
Speaker 2: But that’s the point, right, Well, I think we need some broken people in politics.

00:35:37
Speaker 1: No, no, man like, yeah, you’d be like, you’d be like looking into help wanted ads.

00:35:40
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:35:41
Speaker 11: And I want to be clear, nothing wrong with success. You don’t have to villainize prosperity for any of this. But it ain’t what we’re missing when again, like the average congress person is worth fifteen times as much as as the average person, we have a lived experience gap in the halls of power in our decision makers. And I actually think that if we you know, one of the things I talk about what I learned in my advocacy time is there are dark, smoke filled rooms in politics.

00:36:06
Speaker 2: It’s called a conference committee.

00:36:07
Speaker 11: Anytime the two chambers of the House and the Senate pass a different bill, well they have to reconcile. And that ends up with eight or ten people in one room making all of the decisions for what is going to become law. And if every single person in that room is worth you know, multiple millions of dollars, well you bet they’re going to be a whole lot more willing to give away the money we’re spending on food stamps or snap benefits. They’re going to be able to They’re going to be willing to give away the people who are making fourteen bucks an hour because they don’t know that those are the people that make this thing work. And there are so many ways that we could find efficiencies in our government. We have not found them at all. We’re going to have a lot of rebuilding to do, public lands and everywhere else. And I would just offer that if we want a government that actually works for working people who are getting the short end of the stick on a lot of this stuff, we should send working people to Congress so we can we can fight for ourselves. And the way we win this is we don’t pick our own multimillionaire to go fight all the rest of them. You know, that’s not our champion, and it has not been working for or for too long, whatever parties in power.

00:37:02
Speaker 1: I told you when we met over the phone, I said, you and me probably disagree on fifty percent of things. I don’t know some amount, but that I think where we’re pretty much aligned is I imagine you’re not going to want to entertain ideas about large scale public land transfers.

00:37:18
Speaker 11: Oh, absolutely, Yeah, And it scares the hell out of me this notion under the Forest Service reorg of shutting down nine regional offices and turning it into fifteen state offices. Like I don’t know if they’ll ever be successful in a land transfer effort.

00:37:30
Speaker 2: But I hope to hell they won’t be. And that does not seem like a move towards efficiency.

00:37:34
Speaker 11: It seems like a move towards again taking decision making further away from where the actual work on the ground.

00:37:39
Speaker 1: Is going on.

00:37:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:40
Speaker 1: I don’t want to say this is the motivation, but it looks like sort of cast rating. But I haven’t heard. No one’s tried to sell me on it yet. Yeah, I’ve only had people tell me all the ways it’s wrong.

00:37:49
Speaker 11: Yeah, I haven’t heard. I haven’t heard the benefits of it. No, I mean, somehow we’re moving decision making for the Forest Service further away from the decision makers in DC and further away from where the work’s happening.

00:37:59
Speaker 9: Right.

00:37:59
Speaker 11: Not only do we lose the historic regional office in Missoula, we also lose the DC office where if the chief needs to get a message up the chain, you would think he could go across the street and talk to somebody.

00:38:09
Speaker 2: We’re losing all that. Yeah, oh man, thanks for coming and joining us, Thanks for having me.

00:38:15
Speaker 1: So. So the primary is.

00:38:16
Speaker 2: The second primary is June second.

00:38:17
Speaker 11: If anyone is curious, you can go to Sam Fromontana dot com and see what we’re all about. Got policies, endorsers, all the rest on there. And you know you mentioned that we probably Yeah.

00:38:26
Speaker 1: Well, as to say, one, I watched one of your videos where you did a house tour.

00:38:29
Speaker 2: Uh huh.

00:38:31
Speaker 1: He lives out of his houses, Like, I mean, it’s bigger in this, but it’s like the studio, black hair, and he’s got his bookshelf next to his stove, and he’s like, it’s very convenient.

00:38:40
Speaker 2: That is efficiency, that is what we need.

00:38:42
Speaker 1: I could just reach right over here, grab the book.

00:38:44
Speaker 11: Two more steps here in the bathroom, and uh yeah, And I was just that you said we probably disagree on fifty percent of things.

00:38:52
Speaker 2: Maybe it’s less than that, but I was just.

00:38:54
Speaker 1: Taking a ballpark. No, yeah, we haven’t talked. We talked about land management and we talked about you know.

00:38:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. What I found is you agree with we.

00:39:01
Speaker 11: I find I agree with a lot more than I would expect until I meet somebody. And part of what we’re doing in the campaign is a series of civil discourse conversations. So I just sat down with Michelle Binkley, she’s a Republican legislator in the Bergrreau Valley, and we talked about the fact that we do not agree on everything, and that is okay because Michelle knew what it was like to be on the virgil of homelessness raising two boys. She has worked as a waitress for fifteen years in the valley. And we agree on getting people basic health care. We agree on making sure that people living on the streets have access to mental health services, basic things like that, and I actually think that is as important as the policy specifics, is just getting back to a place where we can talk past our differences find the things we agree on, because there’s all these eighty twenty issues where we agree on all the basics, and we just spent our time yelling about the stuff we.

00:39:46
Speaker 1: Ran calling everybody evil exactly.

00:39:49
Speaker 11: Yeah, there are very few people in this world who do not think that they’re bringing the good in the way that they see it.

00:39:55
Speaker 1: Well, dude, thanks for coming out. Appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us.

00:39:58
Speaker 2: Likewise, Steve, I appreciate it you, Palli.

00:39:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks, Okay, I got a couple of quick news flashes yep today.

00:40:06
Speaker 5: Well, actually, now that you’re listening to this, it’s probably just a couple of days before it is Steve’s favorite person’s birthday party or birthday sorry, not party.

00:40:15
Speaker 6: Hopefully he’s there himself a party.

00:40:18
Speaker 1: That’s good.

00:40:20
Speaker 5: It’s sir David Attenborough turns one hundred years old. What a milestone. So we gathered a couple of interesting facts about him. He has more honorary degrees than anyone else.

00:40:35
Speaker 1: I will listen, like, here’s the dirty secret of the honorary degree. This is coming from an honorary You’re.

00:40:42
Speaker 4: Blowing up your whole thing, Steve.

00:40:43
Speaker 2: Right here.

00:40:44
Speaker 1: What it means is you were invited to do a commencement address. So another way to put it was he doesn’t pass up a chance to do a commencement address, would be another way of putting it right.

00:40:56
Speaker 6: So he has passed up. He has not passed up thirty one more commencement address invitations.

00:41:03
Speaker 1: I’m done with Katzman addressing Mark.

00:41:05
Speaker 3: I hate to do this, but according to the Guinness Book of World Records, he’s about one hundred and twenty on short.

00:41:12
Speaker 1: I know, ken Burns is way high.

00:41:13
Speaker 3: I figured like Kadaffi and Saddam had a lot of honorary degrees or.

00:41:17
Speaker 4: One of the most.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean who’s winning.

00:41:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Guinness says it’s the Reverend Theodore m. Hesberg, who’s the former president of the letter Dame.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:41:27
Speaker 6: Actually thirty two doesn’t seem like a really.

00:41:29
Speaker 3: Nelson Mandela maybe is one of the most more than fifty.

00:41:33
Speaker 6: Okay, there we go.

00:41:34
Speaker 3: King of Thailand has a lot.

00:41:35
Speaker 5: Too, Randall, thank you for correcting me at the spot. Yeah, so we don’t have like one hundred emails.

00:41:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, no corrections on this one. We already nipped it in the bud.

00:41:45
Speaker 6: Okay.

00:41:46
Speaker 5: He’s had dozens of species named after him, including I went through a whole a whole list of them, but this one was really cool to me. It’s called nepenthus attin burrow or attenborrow, which is a giant carnivorous pitch plant. So we’re looking at a picture here. Imagine a like bright lime neon highlighter green and kind of purple red vat looking plant that holds about one point five leaders. It’s been observed to have trapped and digested a shrew. And this was discovered in two thousand and seven in a remote area on a Philippine island. What else, he is one of the most, if not the most randall feel free to check me on this.

00:42:35
Speaker 1: Well, who by whose measurement?

00:42:37
Speaker 6: There are a bunch of websites that I looked.

00:42:39
Speaker 1: At that say he’s one of the most traveled people in history.

00:42:43
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I think this was nat G. It may have been that geo.

00:42:47
Speaker 1: I didn’t show up.

00:42:48
Speaker 6: I didn’t pull up all my sarcing.

00:42:50
Speaker 1: The dude never passed a driver’s test.

00:42:52
Speaker 6: Well, that’s a different thing everywhere.

00:42:55
Speaker 1: No, it’s like he never passed a driver’s test. He’s just been. He’s been. With all due respect, I don’t want to hack on an old guy. Let me just come out, so I’m not gonna say anything bad stuff about accept this my only beef with the guy. Like, I’m sure he loves his country. It’s not my country, so I don’t care. But I’m sure he loves his country, which gets you know points. I guess I suppose even though it’s not ours. My problem with this is how many nature documentaries he has ruined with his narration. That’s what sounds like all the time. He is a one man wildlife footage ruining machine.

00:43:39
Speaker 6: But I guess so many people would disagree because they keep hiring him.

00:43:43
Speaker 1: And their job over again. And I’m sorry I’ve been to like I’m a Morgan Freeman fan. He’s cranking out narration now, and they make him do the same annoying thing.

00:43:55
Speaker 6: So maybe it’s like the way that they’re dude, the minute.

00:43:59
Speaker 1: They get Larry the Cable guys start doing those, I’m all, if Larry the Cable guy was like that, if Attenborough, I’m the how old the brothers gonna live? Let’s say those another ten years. If in ten years that when he’s one hundred and ten, if he stops ruining nature movies. And they just had Larry the Cable Guy doing them, same footage, same material, Larry the Cable Guy does them, they would be good. Yes, it’s the same footage.

00:44:26
Speaker 3: Like ten years ago there was there was a wildlife documentary series and I can never remember what it who actually narrated it.

00:44:34
Speaker 8: Or dog did it.

00:44:35
Speaker 3: There was one I want to say it was like it wasn’t actually Sam Elliott, but it was like this young American’s heading out on the open range for the first time and it’s like a little bison standing up. But it all sounded like.

00:44:48
Speaker 5: I’m going to move through the rest of these quickly. But one last thing, and happy birthday, David Attenborough. We talked about you all the time on the show. There We Go, But shouldn’t we It’s like a new whole you know, video show. Thing that we do is like film some nature documentaries and have you know what voice them?

00:45:09
Speaker 1: Why don’t you.

00:45:12
Speaker 5: You voice?

00:45:14
Speaker 1: Here’s so I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna do it like this. You’re gonna be watching the amazing footage. I’m gonna come in now and then and be like that’s a blue shark.

00:45:23
Speaker 7: You’re gonna narrate it the same way you narrate it to your family at home.

00:45:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m like, no, no, no, those are rainbow smell. I’m gonna say stuff like that because that’s all I’m wondering. It’s like when I’m watching I’m like, I just want to know what it is. I don’t want to hear you do like verbal gymnastics of throwing your voice over. I just want to know is that a blue shark?

00:45:44
Speaker 5: But I think we should do It’s like Steve series of the same video, the Randall series of the same right, perfect.

00:45:54
Speaker 3: Do you remember that show what is called like Mystery Mystery Science Theater.

00:45:59
Speaker 7: Yeah, they like comment on a movie as they’re watching it. What you should do is comment on a narration as you You know how they like to like be like, oh, the two animals love each other and they like make them like people.

00:46:11
Speaker 1: And sh just taking a stroke.

00:46:18
Speaker 8: Orcus.

00:46:19
Speaker 7: Because I know when when you’re watching that stuff with your family, they’re like, they don’t actually do that. That’s not true.

00:46:26
Speaker 5: I think we’ve got we’re onto something here. Okay, moving on, So we’ve talked about this before. Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina.

00:46:34
Speaker 6: And whether or not on a state level.

00:46:39
Speaker 5: They’d be able to manage Atlantic red snapper, and that that’s now the case. So so those four states have extended seasons. I’m not going to go through all the details, but like last year in twenty five, the season for commercial snapper was two days. Before that it was just one day, and this year it’s about a month, a month, month and a half in most of these states. So greatly expanded number of days.

00:47:10
Speaker 7: Made a fish snapper recreational.

00:47:12
Speaker 6: Recreational. Sorry sorry, I said commercial recreational. Okay.

00:47:19
Speaker 5: Some bear attacks, one, unfortunately, we’ve discovered, has ended in the death of a hiker.

00:47:27
Speaker 12: This take.

00:47:27
Speaker 5: This took place in Glacier National Park, which is in Montana. The body of a hiker was found after being reported missing on the Mount Brown trail about two and a half miles up that trail, fifty miles from the trailhead.

00:47:46
Speaker 1: No, no, no, he was fifty feet from sorry just.

00:47:50
Speaker 5: Said miles, My goodness, fifty feet off the trail. And when he was found, it looked like the injuries that he or she Because they haven’t released the identity of the individual, the injuries made it seem as though there was an encounter with a bear.

00:48:13
Speaker 6: So that was just the other day.

00:48:15
Speaker 8: First fatal attacking Glacier since ninety eight. I can’t believe that I.

00:48:19
Speaker 1: Have just drawing like an arbitrary line, like I spent plenty of fatal attacks in like Northern Continental Divide.

00:48:25
Speaker 8: Sure, but I can’t believe they went twenty eight years without The Night of the Grizzly sixties was fifties, I don’t know, was it that long ago?

00:48:36
Speaker 1: Easy to find?

00:48:39
Speaker 5: And the other incident happened sixty seven just in our backyard in Yellowstone. There were two hikers that happened. They happened to be brothers, and they were mauled initially one in serious condition, when in critical I think reports say that they are both probably gonna make it there in a hotel in a hotel in a hospital in Idaho, and they were.

00:49:07
Speaker 6: They were both airlifted. So hopefully they make it.

00:49:13
Speaker 1: And you know, this one they do like the last time, you know, and it’s usually some long time ago. Yeah, the last time someone was so it’s the spring, right, The last time someone was injured by a bear in the park was the fall?

00:49:27
Speaker 6: Yeah, yep, so September twenty five. So, and then the last.

00:49:33
Speaker 5: Fatality in Yellowstone from a bear was twenty fifteen, so much more recently than the last fatality in Glacier.

00:49:43
Speaker 8: Now closed down a section of the park. I was fishing in that closure really three days before this.

00:49:48
Speaker 1: Oh, no kidding, I don’t think they should do that.

00:49:50
Speaker 6: They closed an they closed a big area.

00:49:53
Speaker 5: It’s like I was just looking at the map, like maps by five by like almost that’s ridiculous mile area that was.

00:50:03
Speaker 6: That was the other day.

00:50:04
Speaker 5: So I’m not sure how long they’ll continue to keep that closed. It’s it’s just temporary, but that that area is closed to visitors.

00:50:12
Speaker 1: Two guys got It’s pretty crazy. Two guys in Montana got charged with having two hundred and twenty three ducks over their limit. Two guys are hunting in the sun River in January and they again they’re hunting on private land and a game ward and sees them. He goes up to see what they got going on. Two guys okay, daily bag limited seven ducks. These two guys have sixty six ducks laying there. Then they go to one of the guy’s shops and they had that brought the total up. When they go to his shop and see like his butchered partially butchered and butchered ducks brings him up to two hundred and twenty three ducks. He had two days in January when they killed one hundred and twenty ducks. His claim was it it had been a slow year. It had been a slow year, and he was just trying to get stocked up.

00:51:20
Speaker 7: I understand trying to explain yourself, but it ain’t like that’s gonna.

00:51:24
Speaker 1: Get you out of Oh yeah, okay, na, I understand.

00:51:30
Speaker 3: Give me your best give me your best shot.

00:51:31
Speaker 1: Here he’s like, yeah, he’s like sitting in like a mountain of dead ducks. Give me your bed, Like, help me understand what I’m saying. Yeah, it’s been a slow year.

00:51:41
Speaker 7: And to be fair, like I’m not justifying this in any way at all, but it’s actually impressive that they were like butchered and stored.

00:51:52
Speaker 1: Yeah, what’s impressive. This is the thing people always overlook on stories like this. I feel I had to say to say it, what’s impressive? This is the thing you shouldn’t say. But I’m just gonna say it. That is some very good duck hunting. Yes, yeah, that is one of them days.

00:52:14
Speaker 7: They must have hit a migration like perfect.

00:52:18
Speaker 1: Most of my brain goes toward you, sons of bitches, but a part of it goes to what in the hell spot they got?

00:52:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, again, it’s been a slow year and then it got really really rightly.

00:52:34
Speaker 1: That is an amazing two guys to get a sixty six duck morning is an unbelievable day of duck hunt. They must have been having such a good time.

00:52:48
Speaker 7: The funny thing is that’s a slow day down in South America. When those guys are shooting hundreds of them a day.

00:52:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, unbelievable hunting and also probably I hate to say it, probably good wing shooting. Unna stop.

00:53:04
Speaker 5: Neighbors somewhere in Bozeman, maybe someone, maybe someone feels like getting a tip from them to pass to you.

00:53:10
Speaker 1: So yeah, unbelievable day of honey. But also very very very bad, also very bad, But within that I recognize what an unbelievable day of honey.

00:53:23
Speaker 7: Moving on to mountain lions. Pretty cool story out of Minnesota. They discovered what they they discovered the first like set of kittens. It says bleeding mountain lions, But I like, you can’t necessarily confirm that the breeding took place in Minnesota.

00:53:42
Speaker 1: If you want that I have a feeling that took place thereabouts.

00:53:46
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, but some people like she could have walked in. Okay, but this just happened in April. Researchers from the University of Minnesota’s Voyagers Wolf Project, which is Voyager’s National Park. But this was this video was taken just south of the park first confirmed evidence of mountain lions reproducing in Minnesota. Then more in more than one hundred years there and like obviously they knew, arguing that right where those things were.

00:54:19
Speaker 1: That’s not a Mississippi jaguar either, I mean, that’s a mountain lion.

00:54:22
Speaker 9: Yeah.

00:54:24
Speaker 7: So it’s a female and three like sub adult no way. They believe that these kittens were probably born seven to nine months ago, so fall folish of twenty twenty five, Minnesota’s had no documentared uh cougar reproduction for over a century. They’ve seen they’re seen occasionally often, like we hear this story over and over again, like transient males wandering in from places like South Dakota. The South Dakota mountain lions seemed to get around a lot.

00:54:59
Speaker 1: But that’s all deer hair all over the ground. Yeah, a hoof flapping Look at that man, What a cool freaking cat.

00:55:08
Speaker 4: Yea.

00:55:10
Speaker 7: So they were historically native to Minnesota, became locally extinct because of the same old reasons hunting over hunting, habitat, lost predator eradication.

00:55:20
Speaker 1: Campaigns, poisoning campaign ye.

00:55:24
Speaker 7: And since the early two thousands, they’ve been seeing them now and then, like I said, coming in from from western states, and it’s kind of a connection to a broader recovery in the Midwest. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. What was it, Steve last year.

00:55:43
Speaker 1: I can’t remember, it was last year, the year before, but yeah, some cats, some kittens show.

00:55:49
Speaker 7: So that was the first one. They found some kittens. And this was in the up and Michigan.

00:55:56
Speaker 1: And we’re looking at a picture of a kitten hiding under a truck.

00:55:59
Speaker 7: Tiger And at one point they saw these things and then they were seeing them without the mom around, so they’re like, oh, you know, they probably died, they probably didn’t make it. Well, fast forward to this past winter and you can’t at the very top of the screen. Oh yeah, So it’s like and it’s they’re saying, that’s them, So it’s it’s.

00:56:28
Speaker 1: The man running the logging road.

00:56:31
Speaker 7: So Wisconsin, they’re seeing more lions, so like they’re coming back, and it’s a pretty cool story.

00:56:37
Speaker 1: Bring them on, dude, And then long it is like, bring them on, and then when there’s those stable, good population, bring on a mountain lion season and I’m.

00:56:45
Speaker 4: Happy, yeah, man.

00:56:46
Speaker 7: And the way I look at is maybe those extinct Eastern cougars are gonna come back someday, like.

00:56:53
Speaker 1: All those dudes back, all those dudes back twenty years ago, all over those areas.

00:56:57
Speaker 7: It sounded crazy.

00:56:58
Speaker 1: It would see him and the ear nuts yep, and they’re right. But at the same time, in Mississippi you are crazy.

00:57:06
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:57:07
Speaker 7: Yeah, But like Pennsylvania, New York, like you could you could see him get into like the Eastern Continental Divide in the Appalachians and doing fine.

00:57:18
Speaker 1: Man, that’s crazy.

00:57:20
Speaker 7: Yeah, it’s a cool story.

00:57:22
Speaker 1: And here’s my message to Americans. No, you will not be killed by a lion.

00:57:29
Speaker 7: And this story loosely ties into another mountain lion story that came in. We had a fan right in about it to have us cover. He was pretty worked up about it. In Texas, they’re looking at changing a little bit how mountain lions are managed in the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is urging commissioners to adopt a new reporting system for mountain lions in the state. Should basically be if you kill a lion, you got to report it within twenty four hours. And I think now mountain lions are kind of handled like vermin in Texas.

00:58:10
Speaker 1: Texas weirdly, and I don’t know, I think that Texas don’t. I’m not sure a lot of Texans are aware of this. Yes, you are an anomaly. Yeah, mountain lions are generally across their range in North America, Mountain lions are generally managed as a big game species. Just if you’re in Texas, and I’m not telling you not to be worked up about this, because I’ll get to that in the minute, But if you’re in Texas, this is a message to you. Like here we have regional and unit quotas that when those quotas get filled and they have female and male components to them, it doesn’t even matter if the season’s over, the quota gets filled, it just shuts down. It is. There’s like mountain lion tag draws.

00:59:02
Speaker 7: Yeah, and like you’re only allowed one a year, no matter like in most states.

00:59:07
Speaker 1: There you got to like put in for a permit. Wyoming manages them like a big game animal. Idaho manages like a big game animal. Colorado manages like a big game animal. So a little bit, it’s like, yes, you had to report them. I hunt turkeys in Wisconsin. You have to report a turkey. You have twenty four hours or forty eight hours to tell them you got a turkey. So like the simple fact that you’d have to report a lion is not unusual. No, it’s unusual that your state manages them like a possums. Yep, like there’s no close season, no bag limit. And here’s where I empathize with textans that are worked up about this. Is my understanding from private conversations with people who are in the know, is that this is coming from You always gotta look at where is it coming from. Like if it was houndsman in mountain lion hunters saying, you know what, we should all get together and have a reporting structure, then you’d be like, Okay, these are probably guys you could trust, and you know who’s it coming from. What I’ve been told privately is this is coming from people whose aim it is is to end the harvest or killing of mountain lions and so that’s why people are suspicious.

01:00:22
Speaker 7: That’s what like it says hunters, and some hunters and trappers have been vocally opposed to it because they see this as a step towards ending the take of mountain lions in Texas, which, man, if you’re going to fight that battle, Texas probably not the state to fight it in.

01:00:40
Speaker 1: But no, no, I sit on both. I sit on the fence on this one because like report, like there’s a certain size of something like a hundred pound cat. If you’ve killed a hundred pound cat, it just isn’t surprising to me that they would want to know. It’s like at the state that the state Fishing Game Agency would be curious to know that you killed a big game animal that is not like this is not a shocking thing.

01:01:12
Speaker 7: Probably because of how they’ve been managed historically in Texas, which is not managed the Fishing Game Department probably doesn’t have a lot of information on them to begin with. Then this is a good way to start gathering some data on mountain line.

01:01:27
Speaker 1: But if it’s coming from people who are like, our goal here is to end mountain lion hunting, Step one is to do this thing so that we can get some reporting and then use that reporting to turn it into how there aren’t many lions around or whatever. Yeah, and it’s gonna you’re gonna be danned if you do dan, if you don’t, If that’s where it’s coming from, if it’s coming from an anti hunting org or anti hunting people, they’re gonna they’re gonna screw you. Either way. You’re all gonna report and they’re gonna be like, my god, Texans are slaughtering a thousand mountain lions a year or none of you report, and they’re gonna be like, my god, there’s no mountain lions. Yep, Like there’s no If it’s coming from the wrong place, you cannot win.

01:02:13
Speaker 7: Yeah. But again, I just feel like Texas is a good luck fight in that battle, you know. If that’s where it’s coming from.

01:02:20
Speaker 1: My message to Texans is, I don’t know. I don’t know what to think about that.

01:02:26
Speaker 8: I’m gonna tell you about Walleye Weekend. Last weekend, May second and third was Walleye Weekend at the Iowa Great Lakes. The Iowa I’m sorry, the Iowa Glacial Lakes. The Iowa Glacial Lakes are in northwest Iowa, refers to a chain of lakes, with the headliners being Okoboji and Spirit Lake. Those are the two biggest natural lakes in the state. Those lakes are known for two things. One is they have a very strong boat culture that gets a lot of bachelor and bachelorette parties to wind up there. Here is me at a bachelor party there.

01:02:58
Speaker 1: What’s on your face?

01:03:00
Speaker 8: Trying to figure that out. I think we were playing beach volleyball that day and being being dumb smudging, So I don’t know what was on our face. This was probably circa twenty thirteen.

01:03:11
Speaker 7: Were even legal drinking age back then.

01:03:13
Speaker 8: Yes, I would have been freshly twenty one. I think wearing a Stefan Marbury to Wolves Jersey. Yeah, So that’s thank you. That’s That’s one thing that Okoboji has going on. The other is they have really great fishing, like some of the best fishing in the state. Multiple state records have come from Okebogi and Spirit Northern pike, smallmouth bass, musky tiger, musky white bass, fresh water drum. All of those Iowa state records were caught in these two lakes. Here is a picture of the state record muskie that was caught by Kevin Cardwell on Spirit Lakes two that that musky tiger musk muskie that is a standard muskie. But the tiger musky state record also came a.

01:03:57
Speaker 1: Bunch of fish. I mean, with all the respect I’ve caught it, it’s a bullshit fish, just a hybrid, just with all due respect.

01:04:05
Speaker 7: With all due respect, they can control like rough fish.

01:04:09
Speaker 3: Popular, I know, but it’s.

01:04:10
Speaker 1: It’s a make believe fish. It is.

01:04:11
Speaker 7: I don’t, I’m not.

01:04:12
Speaker 1: It’s a make belief.

01:04:13
Speaker 8: I would imagine they are native to Iowa Brody because the Mississippi River flames the border.

01:04:19
Speaker 7: I was thinking because he’s from South Dakota.

01:04:22
Speaker 1: He says something. I feel like it’s about he can be showing like jungle pictures and I feel like, I don’t know. That was the south coast.

01:04:30
Speaker 8: So you know, the Spirit Lake and Okoboji, they got good fishing and good bachelor parties while I weekend. Now it’s been going on for forty years. It’s put on by the Iowa Great Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce. Is it glacials greatly, I don’t know. Glacial Okay, it’s it’s the Iowa. We should have rob sand report this Iowa Great Lakes Area Chamber of Commerce. They’ve been doing this for forty years. Last year they had record breaking attendance twenty three hundred parti pins from twenty two different states. It costs thirty dollars to enter, and that entry feet puts you in the running for a bunch of raffle prizes, door prizes, a big old trophy that they give out at the end of the weekend, and then all sorts of contests. Here’s some of the contests that you’re entered in. Heaviest Northern pike, heaviest walleye, heaviest stringer of three walleye under nineteen inches, heaviest stringer of.

01:05:22
Speaker 1: Back up, the heaviest stringer of wye under nineteen inches.

01:05:27
Speaker 8: I’m assuming this plays to their limits, like your limited three walle line you can only have one over twenty inches something like that. I assume that’s hunning.

01:05:35
Speaker 7: It plays that people shove and sinkers in their stomachs.

01:05:39
Speaker 8: It just plays into a very boring way in They have all kinds of contests.

01:05:44
Speaker 1: My favorite one though, what was the biggest pike this year?

01:05:47
Speaker 8: Wasn’t big? It was like nine pounds. That’s that’s not a real special pike. My favorite one of them all though, is the heaviest stringer of ten bullheads. That’s one that’s good.

01:05:57
Speaker 1: I like that.

01:05:59
Speaker 8: I will get to that.

01:06:00
Speaker 1: I don’t want to.

01:06:00
Speaker 8: I don’t want to ruin that part of the story. The real prize, though, and this is why everyone.

01:06:05
Speaker 1: Enters Visible has under eight inches.

01:06:07
Speaker 8: No, no, just any bullhead the real prize. This is what gets them, you know, to have twenty three hundred people sign up. It’s a chance to catch one of the ten tagged walleye. Now, these ten whileye are tagged with what’s known as a Floyd tag. It’s a little wire tag. It’s like an inch or so depending on the fish in the state. It has a series of numbers on it. It’s usually goes around the dorsal fin of a fish. It resembles like electrical wiring.

01:06:31
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, it looks like i’ll chunk of wiring hanging out of the fish. Yeah, a cord from are Maybe there’s a wally dog in there.

01:06:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:06:38
Speaker 8: Typically Floyd tags they don’t contain any micro data. These are not chipped things. It’s just basically an ID tag. The numbers that you see on the Exeter year of the tag. That’s that’s what you get with these things.

01:06:48
Speaker 1: Uh.

01:06:49
Speaker 8: Now, the tagging is done by the d n R, and these fish are released about a week before Wileye week starts or while I Weekend starts. They’re released in both Okoboji and Spirit Lake.

01:06:59
Speaker 1: Oh no, they kept local wally dogs, yes, tagging them then putting them back. Yes, they’re not bringing out of town wally dogs in there.

01:07:06
Speaker 8: I think these are walleye from Spirit.

01:07:08
Speaker 1: Could that be like a little weird If the DNR is he’s hungry, he doesn’t know what’s going on.

01:07:13
Speaker 8: I’m guessing they’re not pulling. Typically states don’t have like a brood stock of walleye. They’re going out and they’re getting their walleye wild and getting.

01:07:21
Speaker 3: Their eggs that way.

01:07:23
Speaker 8: Now the tag is done by the DNR and then they’re released a week beforehand Ten of these walleye between Spirit and Okoboji. If you win the grand prize this year, that was forty four thousand dollars for catching one of these tagged fish. And if multiple people catch a tagg fish, the pot gets split between them.

01:07:42
Speaker 1: That rarely, I was thick, and that could get expensive.

01:07:44
Speaker 8: Good what I’ve learned is that their forty four thousand dollars prize is ensured by a third party in cas This word to come to fruition. That way, they’re not always sweating out.

01:07:56
Speaker 3: What they’re going to pay this.

01:07:57
Speaker 7: What’s the time frame for catching it?

01:08:00
Speaker 8: So the contest starts at midnight on Friday and it ends at noon on Sunday, so you have thirty six hours.

01:08:07
Speaker 7: So like you can catch a tag fish a month later and be like, give me.

01:08:10
Speaker 8: There is a side pot that happens. You pay an extra twenty dollars. And if you catch one of these tagged walleye throughout the rest of the summer I think you have until August, you get a much smaller prize, but they’re still relevant. This thirty six hour window. This is where when you want to catch one of the ten tagwe This feels.

01:08:25
Speaker 1: To me right for like a really smart person to figure out what’s up and rig it, because all they’re doing is they’re logging that tag number. Someone has access to that tag number.

01:08:40
Speaker 7: You don’t think you’d have to provide the tag you bring the fish in, I.

01:08:44
Speaker 1: Know, so when they let them go, someone knows the tag number and it’s not released to the public because then you have all kind of walleye with that tag number. Someone knows maybe they got some way that like they only know half of it and someone else knows half of it. I’ll have to ask around.

01:09:01
Speaker 8: I don’t think it would benefit you though. Again, there’s no microdata. There’s no like chipping these.

01:09:04
Speaker 1: Walleye tag with that number and put in a walleye and.

01:09:08
Speaker 8: Go ha okay. If yeah, if the DNR wanted to help cheat the contest, so I’m saying they could rig it some way, so thirty six hours movie and to win the forty four thousand dollars grand prize. Now people take this very serious because of the pot that’s available, and they start fishing at midnight when Walleye Weekend begins. Well, this year, Walleye Weekend starts with a lot of excitement. At three a m. Which is three hours into the contest, a tag walleye gets caught. The anglers immediately head to the bait shop they have their fish verified to claim their prize. But it turns out this tag was from last year’s event twenty twenty five, so that last year’s she’s holding a twenty twenty part breaking tag.

01:09:52
Speaker 1: So she went in there thinking she had that much money, didn’t.

01:09:55
Speaker 8: Did not count. The really heartbreaking thing is the Floyd tag was the same color. So like seeing the yellow Floyd tag, it’s like, we did it. We got the fifty thousand dollars walleye, let’s go claim our prize. So a real devastating start for.

01:10:09
Speaker 1: Walley o drinking man.

01:10:12
Speaker 8: Now it gets worse, it gets worse, It gets worse.

01:10:16
Speaker 1: Seven heartbreak.

01:10:18
Speaker 8: Seven hours later, at ten am, a second tagged walleye shows up at the bait shop. Here’s what happened. The anglers said they started fishing at midnight. They caught a limit or roughly a limit. It couldn’t get the exact details and how many walleye, but they had a number of walleye. They head home around four am after four hours of fishing. They throw the walleye on ice, go to bed. They get up at nine am to clean their fish, and it’s then when they realized that one of their fish is.

01:10:44
Speaker 1: Tag because they were drunk.

01:10:45
Speaker 8: They didn’t previously. Maybe I don’t know what that BAC was, but they find that when they go to clean one of their fifteen inch walleye has a tag on it, so this time the tag is from twenty twenty six, so it’s an eligible fish. But here’s the problem. The fish is stone cold dead and the rules explicitly state that a fish must be alive to count in the contest.

01:11:10
Speaker 7: What fish?

01:11:12
Speaker 8: Phil has a picture of the flyer for us, and this is just page one. I highlighted the three spots where it says this, while I must be alive, all fish must be alive, WHILEYE must be recently caught alive and tagged. So it they mean it when they put in the rules that your fish has to be alive and.

01:11:29
Speaker 1: That fish is dead, Yeah, very dead.

01:11:31
Speaker 7: Here it’s a walleye. Come, I mean who you know us?

01:11:38
Speaker 10: Yeah?

01:11:38
Speaker 1: Yeah? The rules is rules.

01:11:40
Speaker 8: It was a twenty twenty six fish. It was thrown on ice. Poor guys didn’t realize it later though.

01:11:46
Speaker 7: They were hauling him in so fast they weren’t looking for tags.

01:11:49
Speaker 1: Then what happened?

01:11:50
Speaker 8: Well? I talked to Mason from Stans Bait and Tackle. He was the one who checked in both the twenty twenty five whileye at three am and the dead walleye at ten am. He personally knows the anglers who caught the dead walleye, and they want to remain anonymous, but I got a lot of details from Mason. He said the anglers were aware of the rule. They pretty much knew when they brought the fish in that they weren’t going to get their forty four thousand dollars prize, but they went registered anyway. Then someone from the Chamber of Commerce showed up and confirmed the bad news that this fish was no longer eligible because it was dead. Mason said the anglers were pretty bummed and that they had basically accepted their fate before they even got to the bait shop that morning, because they knew what was up. There’s also this other wrinkle in this story. The two men didn’t know which one of them caught the walleye, and this was going to create another issue.

01:12:39
Speaker 1: They’re drunk wyes onto a cooler.

01:12:43
Speaker 8: This creates some other issues. It’s an individual tournament, not a team tournament. And then they also administer a lie detector test, and under this scenario, neither one of them would be able to firmly say that they legally caught this fish during the tournament hours. So the whole thing was layered with problems again. Mason said that these guys knew they messed up, and they didn’t really hang their heads too much.

01:13:05
Speaker 9: Uh.

01:13:06
Speaker 8: He said they planned to get the while I mounted actually to commemorate the experience that they had.

01:13:11
Speaker 3: Remember the giant missed opportunity. That’s right, a life changing amount of money.

01:13:17
Speaker 1: You kids would have gone to college.

01:13:22
Speaker 8: And actually the community has handled the news worse than those anglers did. Phil is now going to play for you a clip of someone from the Chamber of Commerce making this announcement at Walley Weekend. I want you to listen to how the crowd reacts just how devastated they are. This video is via Travis chin Take it away.

01:13:40
Speaker 1: Phil got a call.

01:13:42
Speaker 12: From Mason at Stands yesterday afternoon. Have a tag walleye coming in. Good news news, good news, tag walleye coming in. Bad news.

01:13:52
Speaker 8: Walle was dead.

01:13:55
Speaker 1: On the rules sheet all.

01:13:58
Speaker 12: Tag fish, all fish must be alive.

01:14:02
Speaker 1: So that fish was not alive.

01:14:04
Speaker 12: That unfortunately, the folks fished until four four thirty in the morning, went holmesers napp got up to clean fish.

01:14:11
Speaker 1: Oh crap, we’ve got a tag walleye.

01:14:15
Speaker 7: So we felt extremely horrible about that.

01:14:18
Speaker 5: Uh.

01:14:19
Speaker 12: The other The other issue is it’s an individual tournament, right, This isn’t a team tournament.

01:14:24
Speaker 1: They didn’t know which.

01:14:25
Speaker 12: Angler caught the fish, so that’s a double all. Okay, Mason is here from Stance and they don’t want to be recognized, but they’re going to get a prize that Mason is providing on behalf.

01:14:40
Speaker 1: Of Dan’s baby tackles.

01:14:41
Speaker 12: Let’s give Mason’s big hand.

01:14:44
Speaker 8: There’s a lot of sad news.

01:14:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would have. I feel like I would have if I was that guy. I would have told the story in a different order. Jemmy.

01:14:55
Speaker 8: Yeah, okay, give us an example.

01:14:57
Speaker 1: I would have done like a narrative. He told he he spoiler alerted his story.

01:15:05
Speaker 8: Now here’s Here’s like the biggest reason folks are upsent. It’s something Mason told me has been talked about for years. The rules of the tournament conflict with Iowa’s ais aquatic Invasive Species rules. This is from page eighteen of the twenty twenty six Iowa DNR Fishing Handbook and big red Letters. It says, quote, help stop the spread of aquatic invasive species. It’s the law. Then below that they explain the clean drain dry regulations and say drain water from all equipment motor live well builds, transom oil ballast system before you leave water body. Drain plugs must be removed at the water access and remain open during transport. So, as you can see, that makes it really difficult to deliver the Chamber of Commerce a live walleye. When they’re making you pull plugs.

01:15:48
Speaker 1: They should say the boat unless you have a forty four wally dog, then it’s okay.

01:15:55
Speaker 9: Yeah.

01:15:55
Speaker 8: Despite this, to Mason’s knowledge, this has never happened before. This has never been a problem where a dead walleye shows up up during the contest.

01:16:01
Speaker 1: But as you can see, he’s nitpicking.

01:16:04
Speaker 3: Make it hard.

01:16:05
Speaker 7: So no one won a big prize.

01:16:06
Speaker 8: Nobody has wonted. No, but Mason has said that they’ve been mumbling about this problem for years the community at large, and that he actually heard that this week there’s going to be a meeting to talk about these clashing regulations that they have. You know, maybe this forty four thousand dollars walleye is what’s going to finally inspire a change to allow an angler to bring in a legal walleye that’s not transporting the water from a lake.

01:16:30
Speaker 1: You’re not supposed to God, Man, what happens the story? That story’s got layers, Dude, what.

01:16:35
Speaker 8: Happens the prize money if no one wins, it increases the next year. Actually, yeah, the weekend tournament’s over again. If you paid the extra twenty dollars, you have a chance to catch one of these walleye later this summer. It’s a much smaller prize at that point, and my understanding is the prize money will increase next year because of that.

01:16:53
Speaker 1: You know, you talk about that insurance outfit that ensures those kind of things. Yep. I was at this event one time. There you could roll. It was a Conservation Org event and you could roll dice to win a truck, brand new truck. I think he had to take a five or six pack of dice and roll all one of a kind, which is I looked it up at the time. It’s not gonna happen, But he did happen.

01:17:18
Speaker 3: You have yazis.

01:17:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, it wasn’t it. No, No, it wasn’t it was. I think it was six. Shake it day is five five, Yeah, it goes six. Anyways, they had the insurance guy was there. I was shooting the breeze with him. You know what he did. He’s got these dice, they got that. He’s got this thing out he had. He weighs, he weighs all the dice, inspects all the dice, and he took a caliber, a digital caliber. Love this to the dice.

01:17:47
Speaker 9: You have to.

01:17:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And no one even came close to win that truck.

01:17:55
Speaker 8: I paid for shake a day for the table at the bar, and this was a few months ago, and ran Handel won the damn thing. Uh until we like started going crazy. It was a seventy dollars.

01:18:04
Speaker 3: Pot so I bought. I bought the most loaded nachos I could for the table, and then I thought the server wanted to cash us out, and I gave her all the cash, which included a rather generous tip, and I said, you know, the rest is for you, and she said I know, and then it was too late to take it back. It was the most sort of passive agress in that moment.

01:18:32
Speaker 1: I went, was she mad at you?

01:18:34
Speaker 3: I went for feeling very large, very small?

01:18:36
Speaker 1: And the ships up. I don’t know, were you guys being rude?

01:18:40
Speaker 5: No?

01:18:40
Speaker 1: We were.

01:18:40
Speaker 4: I thought we were places out of business.

01:18:42
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, I spr so you guys went out drinking without me.

01:18:47
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah we did. Yeah, there were other co works. You feel even worse, you see a lot.

01:18:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was never drinking.

01:18:57
Speaker 8: No, what was never acknowledged? If that pot had been like twelve hundred dollars randall, what what percentage would I get of that for buying your one dollar shake a day?

01:19:04
Speaker 3: Would I would have ordered some sort of strange curiosity off eBay for you that’s related to rocks or made up animals.

01:19:12
Speaker 8: Yeah, because I would have felt entitled to a little bit of that.

01:19:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, I want to be asked to do stuff, but I don’t want to be asked, you know, I’m just gonna say no.

01:19:21
Speaker 8: Yeah. Now, at the end of the video earlier, you heard the dude and the mic say that Mason from Stan’s Bait Shop gave the two anglers a prize because he felt so darn bad for them. Mason didn’t need to do that. These prizes come from the Chamber of Commerce, and he said that Mason that they felt like, you know, they deserve something, so he gave him a couple of Saint Croix tournament rods, which is like, that’s a great Walleye rod worth in north of you know, three hundred bucks, so good on Mason.

01:19:47
Speaker 3: Awesome, that’s a great tackle shop.

01:19:48
Speaker 8: And while I had Mason on the phone, I asked him for a fishing report so I could deliver, you know, some real information to our Iwejien listeners here. It is Spirit Like has been pretty good for twelve to fourteen inch while eye, but you need to do a lot of sorting to find the bigger ones. There’s some good crappie and perch fishing. Two oh Keboji guys are doing real well in seventeen to nineteen inch whileye some twenty plus inches being caught. Not quite as much action as Spirit, though the panfish and bass bite has been hot lately for either lake. He recommends trolling crank baits in eight to fifteen foot of water. Sweet Spot seems to be around the ten to twelve foot range.

01:20:22
Speaker 7: He says.

01:20:23
Speaker 8: Guys are also finding success pitching jigs around the basins in eighteen to twenty feet of water. So there’s your mid May fishing report. Where I was excited it was great lakes. Now to circle back, what I found to be the most interesting part of the contest is the ten stringer bullhead contest. The winner this year had a bag of fourteen point three two pounds. That means his average bullhead was about one and a half pounds. That is a lunker bullhead, Chris Daisy. He was the champion for the fourth year in a row. Here’s a postgame press conference interview that Dave Mashoff got with mister bullhead champion played Phil.

01:21:00
Speaker 9: We’re here at the forty fourth annual Great Walleye Weekend and the heaviest stringer of bullhead was fourteen point three two pounds, won by Chris Daisy of Spirit Lake. And this is the fourth year in a row that you’ve won that category, Chris. What’s the secret, specialists?

01:21:14
Speaker 10: Lots of fishing, lots of lots of night drawers and lots of sore fingers.

01:21:19
Speaker 9: Well, what were you using for bait on those bullheads?

01:21:22
Speaker 10: Mostly nightdrawer leadhead, just casting up underneath the tubes are at Buffalo run up on the grid.

01:21:28
Speaker 9: Does that seem to be a pretty hot spot? No, it was.

01:21:31
Speaker 10: This was a hard year for bullheads. It took a lot of fishing, a lot of swording.

01:21:36
Speaker 3: What do you attribute the tough goal for uh?

01:21:40
Speaker 10: My grandpa used to bring me up here as a little kid, so I just keep it going.

01:21:45
Speaker 9: You said it was kind of tough fishing for the bullheads. Colder water or what do you attribute that to?

01:21:50
Speaker 10: I think it is, yeah, a lot colder water. We had a cold snap up here, so it slowed everything down. I mean, the big walley were biting good this weekend, but everything is slot fish so had to move for something.

01:22:01
Speaker 9: Well, congratulations again a fourth year in the row on the heaviest stringer of a bullhead fourteen point three two pounds.

01:22:06
Speaker 8: You don’t want to see Chris Daisy entering your bullhead content.

01:22:11
Speaker 1: That interviewer, this is Dave, Dave mash Off. You see that move he did. He asked the guy a question, the guy didn’t understand and answered something different. He didn’t so he just very smoothly did his question over again with different words and then nailed it the second time and never it never phased him.

01:22:29
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, kept on trucking, you know what I mean, hard hitting journalism there.

01:22:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, he’s never like hey, you misunderstood, or you know, he just is like bam, that’s.

01:22:38
Speaker 7: An underrated fish man the bullhead.

01:22:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, Randall, that was a great segment, had a lot of layers to it. Uh, like like money won and lost.

01:22:48
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:22:49
Speaker 3: Well uh. The Department of Interior announced this week that they’re officially conveyed or have conveyed, one point four million acres of BLM lands along the Dalton Highway to the state of Alaska.

01:23:03
Speaker 1: Phil, do you have the.

01:23:06
Speaker 3: So what we’re looking at here on the screen is a map of the Great State of Alaska and you can see the Dalton Highway running there from goes from Fairbanks up. I don’t really know if it officially starts in Fairbanks, but basically goes from Fairbanks up to prudo O Bay, like across the north slope.

01:23:24
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, no, it does. Yeah, So I mean the pipeline goes all the way down right right.

01:23:31
Speaker 3: So anyway that basically you’ll see this called a public land transfer, and that’s exactly what it is. However, under the terms of the Alaska Statehood Act, that law authorized the transfer of approximately one hundred and five million acres of federal land to the state of Alaska, and not all of that land has been transferred up until now. So there’s I think what I saw there’s approximately five point two two million acres that the state was entitled to and the state has wanted lands along the Dalton Utility Corridor. The utility corridor is essentially a two hundred and forty four mile strip aground along the pipeline that was set aside by the Nixon administration in the seventies with public land. I guess ordnance just PLO five five zero and five to one eight zero, and it was a buffer zone. It also importantly connects a bunch of other public land, so it it borders the Committee National Wildlife Refuge, the Yukon Flats National wild Reif Refuge, and both the gates of the Arctic National Park and anwhar So it’s essentially strip alongstrip of BLM land that’s now been transferred to the state for energy development. And the way this basically went down was they had passed the resource management Plan for these BLM lands in the past few years. Congress used the CRA, which is the Congressional Review Act, the same thing that they did with the Boundary Waters to nullify that resource management plan, and then Secretary of the Interior Burgram revoked Plo. Five to one five oho and five to one eight oh in February, I believe, and then finally they did this transfer. So it’s been a long, sort of slow running process that led up to this. It wasn’t really something that was like out of the blue overnight. The state has always wanted these lands for resource extraction.

01:25:46
Speaker 1: I mean it’s an industrial yeah, I get, it’s an industrial corridor as is. It’s called the Hall Road, right, It’s like a road that parallels a giant pipeline.

01:25:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so so, I mean I talked to several people about this, and their take was it’s a bummer that they gave them basically everything that they asked for because some of it really isn’t suitable for resource extraction.

01:26:12
Speaker 1: They’re not going to restrict the state’s not going to restrict access off that.

01:26:16
Speaker 3: No, No, the state is entitled to make these claims. One concern, it doesn’t green light Ambler Road, but it removes one of the barriers to building the Ambler Road. And so again that’s the two hundred mile road that would cut west across the Brooks Range. And so it’s you know, there’s kind of two different kind of two different takeaways. One is like, yeah, ideally maybe this wouldn’t have happened, But at the same time, the state is entitled to these lands under the Statehood Act.

01:26:53
Speaker 1: And so they will eventually get they will eventually do their claims.

01:26:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, and so it’s kind of you know, wait and see what happens. But again, like also keep your eyes on Ambler.

01:27:05
Speaker 1: There was some of that. There was some of that transfer down where we hang out down in southeast Yeah, I mean the state has Yeah uh, I’ve hunted off that highway a fair bit, but always north of that, always north of those new lands.

01:27:22
Speaker 9: Yeah.

01:27:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s because they own right over the crest of the over the so that there’s the seating. The land there’s seating is on the north side of the Brooks Range and we used to hunt off that Hall Road north of there yet.

01:27:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it’s and it’s like a popular walk in area for caribou hunting.

01:27:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, we would canoe in, but yeah you can’t. You can’t fire a rifle within five miles of that pipeline. So it’s a big boat hunting corridor through there.

01:27:46
Speaker 3: So that’s the that’s the news and public lands this week.

01:27:52
Speaker 1: Okay, over to Michigan. Over to Michigan, they have banded the controversial for no reason. They have expanded Walleye spearfishing in Michigan. So in twenty twenty one, the state came in and created a spearfishing season for walleye, Lake Trout and northeast Northern Pike. And they did this experimental thing where they created two zones. They made a zone in Lake Michigan everything south of the Southern Pier and Grand Haven south Lake Michigan, only not the interior waters was open to walleye spearing. And then they took an area in Lake here On and it was south of Thunder Bay. They made it open for spearing Lake Trout, walleye, northerns fish that previously you had not been able to do underwater spearfishing. You could underwater spear you could you could through the ice spear Northern Pike, but you couldn’t underwater spearfish. A lot of walleye fishermen had a conniption about it. What they did was because like they’re gonna kill all the walleyes. So they did was you had to get a special walleyeer, you had to get a special spearfishing permit, and you had to report all your harvests. Okay, they did it for their three years. They had another year with reporting and now they have greatly expanded spearfishing opportunity, underwater spearfishing opportunity.

01:29:29
Speaker 7: You may not know this, but like for the the who might not you, I’m gonna ask you for all the like thousands and thousands of Walleye Roden reel anglers that were mad about the spearfishing. Do they know how many? How few people?

01:29:45
Speaker 1: Actually, I’m gonna tell them they’re gone. What I want to know some stats? I want to know. They’re gonna know some stats. The controversy is not over with these proposals. So a friend of mine, Jonathan Dirka was is like a spear fisherman who has like really been ushering this process. I wound up speaking to two commissioners in Michigan over the last months before it has happened. I did phone calls with two commissioners and wrote letters pleading for these expansions. And they’ve done the expansions. Can you can pull up the expansion map. These are the Michigan waters you’re not allowed to speare You’re allowed to spearfish underwater spearfishing for walleye northerns and Lake trials. So you got basically like from Chicago. So the Illinois Michigan line or there it’s the Indiana Michigan line up to uh it’s like a little wedge of Indiana in there between Illinois and Michigan. On the shoreline, you can you can underwater spearfish from the Indiana Michigan line up to up to the forty fifth parallel there is where they draw that line, and then all the innery you know, Grand Traverse Bay is out so the forty fifth parallel out runs south runs across the state. South of Traverse City, there’s a little wedge down an erie yep, kind of like south of Detroit down to the Ohio state line. You could spearfish.

01:31:15
Speaker 7: That’s right where the is that where the Saint Clair River pop is.

01:31:18
Speaker 1: That’s big. Yeah, it’s just right there. Huron. You could do here on all inside the Thumb from Thunder Bay basically Thunder Bay down to the bottom of Lake Huron out to the Canadian border in northern Lake Michigan. They opened a big stretch along the southern Upper Peninsula offshore with some key areas removed, and they opened up a bunch of Lake Superior on the off the northern coast of the Upper Peninsula minus some some big spawning grounds out there that are closed. So that’s great news. However, the Chippewa Otto tribes are protests, not the expansions. They’ve written a letter of protests saying they want to bring back reporting and they want to bring back the special license because they’re saying there’s no way to know how many people are out there doing this. Well, check this out. Okay, when they open up the spearfishing license, you had to go get a free certificate. You had to get like a spearfishing stamp. Okay, guess how many people went and got a spearfishing stamp?

01:32:28
Speaker 3: Forty three, one hundred.

01:32:29
Speaker 1: And twelve way fourteen four thousand. Out of those four thousand, guess how many shot a fish? Or five hundred, two hundred shot of fish. Out of those two hundred spearfishermen that shot a fish, those two hundred people killed a total of four hundred and thirty. Wow, they killed four hundred and thirty walleyes.

01:32:59
Speaker 7: There’s probably now the half a dozen that are really laying.

01:33:03
Speaker 8: Into another movie.

01:33:04
Speaker 1: My body pulled him out. The number product drops down to three point thirty. So so with the Chipewa Auto tribes are saying, well, they’re doing so much to promote underwater spearfishing, it’s gonna blow up if they don’t have reporting, and so we need to know what they’re up to. Well, angler hours on underwater spearfishing isn’t going up. It just goes down, down, down, as people realize what a bitch it is.

01:33:29
Speaker 7: Yeah, the barrier to entry thing is just like, it’s not something everybody’s gonna go do.

01:33:34
Speaker 1: Four thousand guys thought they’d go. Two hundred guys went. Annual angler hours went from two thousand, three hundred to one thousand, nine hundred to one thousand, four hundred.

01:33:46
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I’ll bet the four thing is out that it sucks. I’ll bet the more cold.

01:33:51
Speaker 1: You can’t see anything, it’s it’s cold.

01:33:55
Speaker 7: And the four thousand we’re like, people are like, yeah, I’ll get it.

01:33:58
Speaker 3: It’s free.

01:33:59
Speaker 7: Yeah, a lot weren’t ever gonna go.

01:34:01
Speaker 1: So again, get they killed these fishermen one of these years, these fishermen killed four hundred and thirty walleyes. Now allow me to ask what, okay, oh, let me back up angler effort. Sitting at about fourteen hundred hours of spearfishing angler effort, guess how much many man hours of roden reel effort occurrent Michigan point four million, one point four million man hours of fishing effort versus one thousand, four hundred of spearfishing effort. Last year in Saginaw Bay they killed five and Saginaw Bay they killed five hundred thousand walleye spear fishermen statewide, four thirty the Detroit and Saint Clair rivers, four hundred thousand walleye. So between Saginaw Bay which is that little thumb notch, and then down there on the bottom of that little spearfishing area nine hundred thousand wally dogs spear fishermen three forty oh no, my buddy, spearfisherman, four thirty, my.

01:35:16
Speaker 7: Buddy on the Saint Claire. Right right there on that Saint Clare. They’re out there hammering them right now.

01:35:20
Speaker 1: You know, And that that Saginaw Bay fishery eight walleye a day thirteen inch minimum, eight a day thirteen inch minimum. They are listen. I don’t care how you feel about dudes swimming around underwater with a spear gun. It doesn’t matter. It does not matter. I will be there in June hitting it hard.

01:35:47
Speaker 3: We should do it.

01:35:48
Speaker 1: I’m going to kill all your walleyes.

01:35:51
Speaker 3: We should do a T shirt with you in a wet suit and fins and says it does.

01:35:55
Speaker 1: Not mess to matter or don’t worry about it. It does not matter. If people want to go in the water and risks, shallow water, blackout and get all cold, let them. The question is this, since it does not matter, I look forward to Michigan passing a salmon spearfishing season that will be the most awesome thing on the planet. Cannot wait.

01:36:22
Speaker 7: Would you hit them like right outside the river? Mouse or where would you?

01:36:27
Speaker 1: I’m thinking flashers? Oh, you go down and no, I think you’d free drift. I think you just free drift of flasher chains, maybe some chum if you can chump. You can’t chum, but maybe they’d let you chump. But they’re not gonna let you chump. I think you’d have to use a string of flashers. Yeah, dude, ultimate challenge man, big old and people.

01:36:48
Speaker 3: Like they’re gonna kill all The.

01:36:52
Speaker 1: Come is like they got two, they got two thanks for joining the new show.

01:37:01
Speaker 3: They got two