00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wire to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan. This episode number one sixty six and today the show, we're joined by Josh Boyd, an outdoor writer and an avid big game hunter from northern Montana, and we're diving into Josh's experiences and lessons learned hunting big white tails in the hills and mountains of the Rocky Mountain West. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by sit Ka Gear, and today we are talking about hunting white tails and hilly and mountainous terrain and we're joined by a guy met earlier this year by the name of Josh Boyd. And Josh is a big game hunter from Montana, an outdoor writer, a force service employee, and a guy that knows how to kill really big white tail bucks in areas that most people would probably never think to chase them. And this conversation was actually recorded earlier the summer while it was in Montana for the Sick Gear Converge event, and I just really enjoyed this conversation and I think even if you hunt in an area far far away from the spots to Josh and Sunning and the spots that he talks about, I think you're still gonna be able to garner some new and helpful ideas. So in a minute here, we're gonna toss it over to that interview. But before that, I wanted to share just a few quick updates. And first, we're not going to have a normal new episode next week because I'm going to be in Alaska for my very first caribou hunt, which I'm very very excited about. But we will be back week after that, and our next episode will be recorded from the field in the middle of my very first white tail hunts of the year. As we've talked about over the past couple of weeks, I'm gonna be on a public land white tail hunt in Monte in A in a public land hunt in North Dakota. So hopefully when we get back, we're gonna have some good stories and lessons learned from all those experiences. Can't wait to share that with you. But in the meantime, I wanted to recommend a couple of our past episodes that you could give a listen to during our off week, especially if you're relatively new to the podcast and haven't gone through all of our old episodes. There's just an absolute huge wealth of information sitting there just waiting to be tapped into. So let me offer a couple for you to get started with, and then feel free to go back start the very beginning and listen in because I think even those old episodes you can learn something from. So first off, I would highly recommend you listen to episode number eighty three with guest Shane Mahoney. And if you're not familiar, Shane is an incredible speaker and conservationist and advocate for wild places and wild animals. And in our episode we go deep into a whole slew of different topics related to the history and future of hunting in America and hunting ethics and our responsibilities as hunters. And it's just a fascinating discus uh and and if you haven't heard it yet, it's it's just a must listen. I think every single person should hear what Shane has to say. I think it's so important, so valuable, So go ahead and get that download right now and queue up for next week. And secondly, if you want a more tactic related podcast. And if somehow you haven't heard this one yet, go back and listen to episode number sixty three. It is one of our very most popular episodes of all time, and it's just jam packed with helpful insights. Everyone talks about how they need to take notes on this one over and over again. And this is the episode with the mad scientist Mark Drury, and in this one we get into all of his theories related to the various factors that he believes influenced deer movement. So we talked about the wind and temperature and barometric pressure and moon phase and all sorts of different things. It's it's just fascinating, one of my favorites too, So there you go. After this episode, make sure to go back and listen to episodes number sixty three and number eighty three, and then we'll get right back into it with new episodes in mid September, hopefully good news from my Alaska hunt and updates on what the heck is happening in Montana and North Dakota. And I'm sure we're gonna hear something new about Dan's kids too, So until then, I hope you enjoyed this one. We're gonna kick it over to our Sickest Story now and then we'll get to my conversation with Josh Boyd. For this week's sick of Story, we're joined by Drake Pollard, who tells us about a special tree on his northern Missouri property. UM. I think for me, UM, the first time I get to north central Missouri for hunting, uh this year and in many years before. UM, I go to my family farm and I visit a stand or a tree that my grandfather UH hunted when he was growing up. And and my family and friends, we've we've used this location many of times, but it's predominantly myself that hunts up there now. And UM, every time I visit the farm, I go to that stand, I go and sit there. My grandfather was an avid hunter. UM. He taught us, you know, the ethical way of doing the right and wrong and and how things need to be handled. UM as an outdoorsman and UM as a kid. He passed away, and UM for me to go to that tree, UM to pay my respects figuratively speaking, UM, I just feel a sense of connection when he's still there. UM. I think it's important for hunters to to maybe get back to that a little bit misday and age and maybe figure out, you know, exactly why we do what we do. Um. Whenever we have an opportunity to visit a special place such like my farm in northern Missouri. So UM, I know as a white tail hunter, that always gets me excited every year to visit that section of the farm. UM and just pay my tribute, my respects to him. On Drake's early season haunts. He wears sick As Equinox system. If you'd like to create a sick of story of your own, or to learn more about sit because technical hunting apparel, visit Sitka gear dot com. So we are here at the sick of Gear Converge event. It's technically day three. I guess we are outside. It's range day. You're gonna hear some shotguns going off behind us, and we're here with Josh Boyd, one of the Big Game ambassadors for sick of Gear. Thanks for doing this, Josh, Yeah, you bet. Thanks for the invite. Mark Yeah, I've just met you two nights ago from our friend Matt McCormick, and he got you talking about the white tail stuff you're doing. He's good at that, and that got pretty excited. So I kind of want to pick your brain about what you're doing chasing these white tails out here in the mountains. And you're also obviously having a lot of success getting after Elk and other big games. So be warned. I'm gonna I'm gonna try to dig as much as I can, all right, just just don't make me lie. I won't do that. I won't do that. We won't ask you for specific locations. Um. So before we get started, though, can you just give a little bit of your background. It sounds like you've done some very interesting things leading up to where you are. Now, what where you're from? What do you do? So? Yeah, I live in northwest Montana, UM, right next to Canada, right next to b C. I'm forty miles as the crow flies from British Columbia, and I'm about twelve miles or so from the Idaho border. So I'm way up in that kind of remote part of the state. Not a whole lot of folks make it up there, and even you know people from Montana, they may be passed through it occasionally, but it's just it has to be a destination for you to go there. Out of the way. Yeah, so that's where I live, and I worked for the U. S Force Service up there, which is a federal agency. If people don't know, we manage all the US for Service, not to be confused with the National Park Service or the BLM or fishing game as people call them. Um. So we do mostly land management up they're not We don't necessarily manage game, so we will manage habitat. And so with the Forest Service, I work in the field of hydrology, specifically uh surface water. Yeah. So can you elaborate on that, because I found that pretty interesting. We're chat and the other day specifically the kind of stuff you're doing and paying attention to other thing. Yeah, So I look at and measure runoff. So I'll measure snowpack in the winter to kind of calculate what kind of runof we're gonna get into our streams in the spring. Um. And then I also you said, then I'll measure that runoff and the sediment that goes along with it. So you know, we're really concerned in that part of the world with bull trout and other native salmon. It's trout species mainly west slope cutthroat and uh so we're we're measuring sediment, uh, the bed sediment and also the suspended sediment, because trout have a hard time surviving and laying a and having those things reach you know, young of the year, hatching out of the out of the gravel. So so we measure a lot of that stuff for our fisheries biology types. And then we also well look at and measure streams to see if they're functioning properly and if not, come up with a plan to fix them or enhance them. And that can range from anything between just adding a little bit of wood here and there, or planting some stuff on the banks right parian vegetation plantings, or it can be like full on channel reconstruction. So um, that's like where we'll we'll completely build a whole new channel and then put the river in it and and hopefully in a natural way. We're not channelizing it. We're actually un channelizing it, so we're sometimes we're putting sinuosity back into it, and we're putting our pools back into it and riffles and runs and all the features that go along with it. So repairing things that have been damaged in some way through I'm assuming man made actions in the past. Generally, yes, it can you know, it could be from wildfire. But also most of the time we're dealing with historic mining activities like plaster mining, and a lot of it is also riparian vegetation removal. So turn to the last century, there was a lot of logging in that country we did there. You know, the technology just wasn't there to build roads, so they used the most convenient way to get the timber out, which was either build a narrow gage railroad up the valley bottom and cut trees on both sides, which means that they're right next to the creek. Or they just went up the creek and cut trees and skidded them into the into the river stream, damned everything up, let the water back up, and then splash knock that damn over. They call them splash dams, and just do log drives down these rivers. So in order to get there wood down into the main system, they had to cut all the wood out of the stream and then they're drying, then they cut all the wood off the sides of the streams. And you know, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to figure out what that's gonna do to your due to your habitat. So where I live, it's it's very moist, we get a lot of rain, we get a lot of snow. Um, it's a very different hydrology up there compared to the rest of Montana. So when people think trout fishing Montana, they think the Gallatin and the Madison and these great, big, meandering cottonwood type deals. We don't really have a whole lot of that. Ours are like big cedar, big spruce, a lot of larch, some ponderosa, a little bit of cotton wood. But it's like big heavy, it's kind of like temperate rainforest types kind of Yeah. Yeah, it's it's Pacific maritime influenced. Yes, So how long have you been doing that? Um? Since I got out of college. Uh almost twenty years, eighteen years so, so it's been a while. And it's it's a learner, you know. It's it's I didn't just jump right in and start doing it. It's definitely takes years and years and years to learn what you're doing. So when you look at the health of our waterways in right parian areas like that, what direction ever had it since you started? Do you feel that things have been improving or they declining, and you're just feeling like you're patching up the holes as best as you can. Where are we going? That's a good question. Um, I think we're improving overall. Um. You know, there are some systems that I have a keen eye on and they are they're unraveling. You know, every year I see a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. But overall, like on the National Forest up there up to say, they're improving or or or just maintaining. Um. And we've got a lot of watersheds that are in great shape. So um, it's yeah there, but we have a few bad apples and sometimes those influence down you know, the drainage, you know, other other pieces down downstream. So what type of thing would be like you don't need to say specifics, but what would an example of the types of impacts to be that you're seeing in one of these bad apples that are making them that way in your eyes? Well, So, once these rivers sort of become destabilized, they tend to just make they tend to just keep unraveling. So what happens is the vegetation gets removed from the banks, so you have highly erotable banks UM and we have and that's what we have. We have a lot of glacial till up there and it's it's easily erodable. It is input into the system in a in a large manner. I guess, large quantities go in. When we start seeing UM banks coming apart, massive volumes come into the channel. And so when you start filling your channels up with sediment course sediment, usually UM, they fill up, so they lose capacity. So when they lose capacity, they spread out, so they start moving towards a more of a braided condition UM. And there's a lot of channels that are naturally braided, and they usually have a really high sediment supply like that you think of like the out wash of like glaciers in Alaska. They're all braided high sediment, and that's natural. But a lot of these weren't naturally braided. So what you see is just just continuous unraveling and there's just so much sediment put into the system that it just can't move it out because it's losing stream power. So you fill in the channel, you lose capacity. It spreads out into a larger area you lose um energy, so then it and then it's like it sets it back another step. And when you when a shell, when it spreads out like that, I imagine it's getting shell or which I imagine makes it more susceptible to warming temperatures as well. Absolutely, I was just gonna mention that. So, yeah, you get shallow water, you get increased temper chures, and you have you lose habitat. I e. Pools bad for fish, not good for fish. And we have a threatened species up there, the bull trout. And we have some sensitive and species of concern as well, the West Slope cut throat, and we have a native rainbow, the red band rainbow. Um. They all require cold, clean water, so when you start getting shallow, dirty, warm water, it's tough on them, I imagine. So that's that drives a lot of the work that I do. Interesting. Yeah, And so to get back to the original question, some of the stuff I see that's causing impacts are say bridges being undersized or culverts being too small so they can't pass the flow, and so they um, they squeeze the channel down into a real constriction and basically shotgun like they's going through a fire nozzle that squirts out the other sides, and sometimes it will cause a headcut, you know, downstream, or we have a flood event and the pipe can't handle the flow and flush it washes the road out and all that road sentiment gets washed down the channel. So those are some some modern day impacts that we deal with UM, and that can be from private industrial logging company land, or it can even be on Force service land. We have a lot of a lot of pipes that are that were put in in the fifties, sixties, seventies. UM by our standards today, they're they're too small and they're reaching the end of their lifespan. So UM it's time to replace them. But it's expensive to do funding and we have tons of them. We have a we have a big wish list, and we work on them as we get money trickling in. But it's tough. So that's I want to talk about that. I want to talk about funding UM. Being a Force service employee, how what's your perspective on I mean, there's for a long time there's been this kind of talk, but it's been a little bit louder lately as far as bashing on the FEDS saying that they're mismanaging our federal lands and because of that, these federal lands should be going to the states or private interests. So being within that organization, how does that make you feel? What do you think about that from the inside. Yeah, it's it's tough. So I you know, I live locally, spend all my money locally, and I grew up there, so I mean, I consider myself a local. Then it's tough to hear your neighbors and your you know, your fellow citizens in the area kind of bash on the Feds about how we just need to do this or do that, and you know, that's one opinion, but then we also have other opinions that we have to consider. Um, So, yeah, you know that the anti federal government sentiment is fairly high in that neck of the woods that I live. I mean it's I mean, don't quote, it's roughly eight might be more, might be slightly less federal land. So it's a big block of of federal land. And so I thought you're gonna say it's the people are anti federal lands. I was like, WHOA, Oh, well, I don't know what that number is. Very well could be, but sometimes some days it seem right. But you know, we you know, we try to manage it the best we can with the amount of money that we're given. Um and we seem to be given less money every year every budget cycle. It's like declining budgets, cost of livings go up. I mean, everything is on the increase, inflation, you name it. But our budgets are either flat or declining, which means we're getting less money overall. And we're talking about this at breakfast the other day. The politicians that are calling out the four serves and saying that they they're mismanaging the lands, they can't do a good job, they're doing a horrible job. Well, they are the ones that are slashing your budgets, So they are creating your inability to be able to do your job the way you should be. That then pointing it to you and saying it's your fault and making that as a reason for them to be able to say I should sell them, I should get rid of it. That's kind of the way I understand it. Yeah, and that seems like a just a crop job. Yeah, so that the idea is um. So this is I'm speaking as a private citizen now. But the way I see it is, uh, those politicians, they're they're kind of set out to sort of trip us up intentionally so they can turn it over to the state. They might actually, some of them might actually believe the state could do a better job managing all that property, all that land. But the State of Montana doesn't have a budget to fight the fires that we do, um, which is a huge chunk of our budget, by the way. Um. And and let alone try to fix a lot of these you know, undersized pipes and bridges and you know, unraveling roads and rivers, maintaining trails. So road maintenance backlog is enormous, So the State of Montana can't do it. So the theory is, or it's been thought that, well, in order to pay for some of that stuff, they're gonna have to sell some of that land off or develop it, lease it, do whatever, graze it. Who knows what they plant on doing with it. But um, overall, it's not good for the average American sportsman, not at all, or just recreationist. If you hike, bike whatever, yeah, I do all that stuff. I hike bike, fish. I would like the bird watch, I you know, there's all sorts of stuff, and I do it mostly on on public land. It's scary, Yeah, it's hearing those things and then seeing that stuff get momentum right and frustrating. Oh yeah, yeah, it can be very frustrating, but um so working for the Forest Service can be pretty rewarding now at times. So yeah, if you can separate. So I'm pretty much grunt on the ground out in the field all the time, and it allows me to like separate myself from a lot of that stuff. Um So, all the budget and policy and all that stuff gets dealt with at a higher level than me, and I'm thankful for that, and I've made a conscious effort to kind of keep it that way because I really like what I do. I like being outside, like seeing tangible effects. Absolutely, yeah, totally see that fishing. Finishing a project is is really fun and exciting, and even if it doesn't work the way you think it might or or fail for that matter, it's like you learn something and you're gonna go out with more enthusiasm the next time out. It would be cool as a as a hunter and angler too, and just outdoor recreationists in general. I mean, I feel like all of us, at least at least I do, and I think many look at these places and we there's we get so much out of it, so much enjoyment from these wild landscapes that we can hunt and fish, but I can camp and everything. And I feel like if you use these places enough, you enjoy of them enough, eventually we all get to a point where we saying, wow, I should he hope we can leave this here for our kids and our kids kids or leave it better. And it's got to be pretty neat in near position, and into your job, you are active, actually doing tangible things to make that really right. It really is. So I have a I have a daughter that's about to turn four, and she came down last summer. A co worker and I were working on a major, major stream restoration project. It was five years in the planning and implementation. We had a lot of heavy equipment down there, scraping out a new channel, putting wood in, putting rock in, dropping structures in, and and just rebuilding all the features. And my family came down one day middle of the day just to visit to see what it looked like. And she was running around, jumping up on the rocks, and the logs and looking at it um. And so the end goal for that project is to have you know, giant trees growing there on the banks holding it all together at the you know, but I probably won't see it, but it's gonna happen in her lifetime, and I hope she can remember that she was there and what it looked like. I mean, she was three and a half at the time. She probably won't. She's pretty smart, but I don't think she will. But we have photos and we have a ton of video footage of it, um of us doing the work, So it'll be interesting to see, um, see what she thinks later on in your life. Excuse me, I have over from I gotta getting over a cold. It's happens the best of us. So I can see that being incredibly rewarding, which just like a very cool feeling to be able to see that stuff and have your kids someday be able to look back on that. Yeah. So yeah, the the total success of a project probably won't be measured within my career. I'm thinking, Yeah, it's long term stuff. Yeah, for sure, I think think term and it's but in the meantime, we're doing what we can and trying to get good work done out there. So that's good stuff. But you're also doing some good stuff in the woods when you're out chasing some critters. And you were telling me that you, in addition to be an ambassador for second, you also did some writing to right. What was that? What were you doing there for a while? Um? Well, I started writing, uh for some various magazines. I think my very first published article was in bow Hunter, and I I kind of was looking at some of the stuff that was out there and just it wasn't reading anything that I really wanted to read about. I wanted to read about adventure. I wanted to read about sweaty, bloody toil and hard work, and I wasn't seeing that. I mean I would I would see certain certain writers would definitely gravitate towards that stuff. But I just wanted to write about it. So I'd stuff. Yeah, So I'd get some ideas in my head and I would just kind of put it on paper and then uh, then I would massage a little bit, and then I would eventually I decided to submit some stuff and then just kind of broke into writing. I mean it was like I never got anything turned down that I submitted. But I wasn't like trying to write for a living either. It was a sort of a hobby and so that's kind of how that started. I just just started writing what I wanted to read about, and um, the my process of writings were pretty pretty inefficient because I'm you know, I'm a scientist. I can't I don't write creatively very well, so it takes a while to get those juices going. So you're writing like a report and then you have to p insform that into an enjoyable article. So yeah, so I I started writing about that, and then I did a few gear gear reviews for some various magazines, and then, uh, lately I've been I did I wrote a column for um Corey Jacob's and had an Elk Hunting magazine a few years ago. I wrote the back country hunting column for that because I do most a lot of backpack hunting back country stuff for Elk and Mule Deer Um. And now I'm kind of writing for another website just off and on, mostly product review stuff because that's kind of there. It's a geared website. So so you've written for who who on the Eastman Eastman's Eastman's Bow Hunting, Bow and Arrow when it was still around. Um, bow hunting, bow hunter. And it seems like there's somebody else. Rock Slide is a website I've written for. Mm hmm, yeah, it seems like there's somebody else. But yeah, just a just a handful. So you you have a unique distinction as a Western hunter because you are, as I understand it, you are on the cover of Eastman's at one point with a white tail like the white tail which I don't think a whole lot of guys out here give a crap about them. Unfortunately, No, but you it was, you do, Yeah, it was. It was surprising, and you know it was an animal. Well, I mean, we have nice white tails out west, and I was really surprised that they put it on the cover, um because they have a selection of a lot of a lot of them, just nice beautiful animals they could pick from. But apparently this was an impressive enough white tail. And I had I submitted enough photos that they really liked it. They were going to publish my story no matter what, because they they really liked all the images and it was a decent story. But yeah, they picked it for a cover, which was kind of surprising, but yeah, I was how big um he ended up being like a hundred eighty something. He gross like two I think, but he had a he had a weird sticker kind of a like a weird in line that was sort of weird. It draw his net score netsor for fish that I keep hearing that, But he was still like netted. He netted like one seventies something. That's a giant. Yeah, it's a big western wig white deal anywhere? So can you tell us that story? Yeah? So I killed. It goes back, it starts the previous season. So I shot a really nice mule deer with my bow like September eighth or something, and I didn't have any other tags anywhere, so I killed a now killed now killed a mule deer. So then I didn't have tags in Idaho or anywhere else. So I was just kind of floating around, just sort of felt like a lost child. I didn't have anything to hunt in October November, so I did a ton of scouting in November, just during the general rifle season. And so I started poking around looking for a new couple of new white tail spots because we have we have a lot of white tails in that part of the world. And I did some outing and I found some big rubs and I hadn't seen any big deer, but I decided to go check out this area that I've always kind of want to check out. So I I thought, well, I'm gonna do a little trail run through there, small blogging roads that are kind of grown up, so it's on a trail run. It was the weekend after rifle season ended, and I just like popped over this little tiny rise and there was a giant buck standing there, like at forty yards, dark chocolate antlers, still running still after a dough, and he trotted into the into the timber. He's kind of right on the edge of this little clear cut and he was only yeah, he was close. He trotted into this uh in his patch of trees, and I I saw him and I thought he was kind of going away from me, and like, that thing is a giant deer that had to be hunting seven deer. So I went back to my house and I called my buddy at Homes like, man, I show him I saw monster and he's like yeah, yeah, yeah, right, whatever, how big? How big is he? And I'm like, oh, he's gotta be hunter in seventy in and he's like, okay, cool. So then I just became obsessed with this buck. I thought, man, they're gonna be shedding here. Towards the end of December, first part of January, it was a nice light winter. I knew he was a local buck. I knew he didn't get pushed in there from the snow, because that's part of the issue with where I live. A lot of our white tails get pushed. I mean they'll be there's summer range can be fifteen miles away, but it was still almost summer like conditions. I mean there's no snow in the mountains that year, and then that winter it just basically this was you're chasing these white tails in the mountains. This isn't the river bottoms, no, no, no, this is mountains. Yeah, it's big heavy conifer forests. So so it's so different white tail in it, right, Yeah, I think there's probably similar stuff would be like in the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia and stuff like that. Maybe essentially um never been there, never hunted him, but that's kind of what I guess. So I all this buck. I decided to figure out where he lives, how he's living, and see if I can shoot him the next year. So I found his sheds from the previous year, but I couldn't find the sheds from the year that I spotted him. But I saw a giant rubs all over the place, and I kind of put together this puzzle. I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna put a stand here here here, and I'm gonna hunt it before the rut kicks in. I think I can probably kill this buck if he if he keeps to the same patterns, because these rubs are finding were giant, like they look like elk rubs, but they were definitely white tail. They were way low and their full white tail here. But they have been The key I thought was they were rubbed more than one year. It looked to me like they were rubbed multiple years in a row. So if you don't mind, I want him pause you. I'm gonna try to break all this down as we're going. So you mentioned you found those sheds, So I mean, I first I want to know how you're you know, what kind of places you're looking for these sheds or how are you identifying where you think his bedroom is or's things like that. I mean, with these mountain white tails, do you think they have a consistent place or is are they romano all over the place or how do you how do you scout in that way to find these rubs, to find the bedroom, to find the sheds. Well, I guess it's like anything else, um if you just pay attention to the details. So everything's real subtle. So you're in a you're in a mountainous timber area, but it's not all just like continuous, homogeneous cover. There's patches of openings, there's patches of really dense timber. There's thicker brushier areas, draws, benches, and so they utilize all that stuff differently, and so you can kind of tease out like how they where they feed, where they might travel to, and from where they might be bedding that type of stuff. So I'm looking for that stuff as I'm shed hunting, and when i'm shed handing, I'm just going everywhere trying to learn everything about that area. And so I just travel every trail. It's basically I'm just gritting miles and miles of train and like documenting everything all on the way, and I was also picking up other nice sheds, So I'm like, man, there's more than just this deer in here. I definitely am hunting this no matter what. But I really, I really want to kill this big buck at least see him again to validate the my original sighting. I thought, God, he's got to be a giant. But so anyway, I scouted it, picked up sheds, figured out where I wanted to hunt, hang my stands, and how did you make that decision? I was basically hanging them right where those rubs were, and I could I kind of had a couple like you could figure out that they were definitely in a line. And so of course you have to figure out what your wind patterns are going to do. And they're pretty typical mountain wind patterns, which means down slopes in the mornings and evenings and up the open the day yet mostly thermal um. And so I had sort of some areas picked out and where I wanted to hunt it, where I wanted to hang, and how I wanted to hunt him, Like what time of day was it gonna be an evening site, We're gonna meet in the morning, that type of stuff. So so this this how you're saying, there's a line of rubs indicating some form of travel, travel router corridor. Was there some type of train feature or cover change? Like, why do you think that he was traveling there? Um? What was a little of both? Um? So there was. It was kind of some old logging activity. So that's another thing that we deal with up there, is that the whole forest is in different ages. You know, it's it's some of has been logged and it is now twenty years old. Again some of its old growth that could be right next to it, and so they'll use those those brakes to kind of to travel. So it's like an edge within timber. It's a subtle edge. Yeah, And they love the sudge as they do. Yeah, they do, and you'll see it. They'll they'll hang out on the fresh clear cut and they'll hang out on a twenty year old, thirty year old clear cut too. So that's kind of the stuff I was looking at. I was keying in on and I was seeing a pattern there. It's like, oh, yeah, there's a rub here, and there's one here, and I remember seeing one over there, and they're all big, they're all old, definitely from the same buck I found his sheds right there. It's like he's got to be right in here somewhere. But I never laid eyes on that buck again in the whole time that I was in their shed hunting. I saw a big buck that had shed one day I was out hiking and it could have been him me a big floppy years and a giant neck and just a big brisket hanging down. But I never did see him until this. It was the second night that I went into to hunt, and so it was November. I waited till November. I figured I'm gonna wait till November. Our white tails rut a little later, maybe then the Midwest. I'm not sure, but it seems like pre rut kind of kicks in hot and heavy, maybe early November. So I I think I I had three two stands up, and I wanted to hang a third one. So I hunted. I hunted a morning and I hunted one other evening in two different stands, and I'm like, well, I'm gonna just go hunt this last place and get a stand up and then I can really focus on um timing and just putting some effort in. So it was raining. We had like four days of straight rain up there. It was a fair temperature, fairly warm, probably in the fifties, but it's just that Northwest NonStop drizzle. So I crawled in, crawled in up into the brush, hiked in and I'm I mean, I'm hiking in like a mile and a half probably to hang these stands, So it was not like right next to a row. I don't know. Now here's a question relate to that. You know in the Midwest, and we're planning on how to get into hunter places. Your access routes and exit routes are really important because you're always trying to fare out. How can I get to my stand without spooking these deer? Is that I mean? In this type of hatech I feel like that's really tough because there's cover everywhere. There's super tough. How do you do you worry about that? Yes? I did. Um, you just go the extra effort not to go where you think they're living, and that might mean walking across country, through the through the brush timber to get to your stand in the dark. Yeah, So make sure your routes are well marked and you know where your trees at and you can find in the dark type of thing. So you're so you're crawling in there, yep, crawling in there. But this hunt, that the hunt that I killed this deer was an evening hunt, and I had a route picked out going in there, and I hiked in there early afternoon, climbed in the tree and hung my stand. So I'm using like screwing steps and hang on stands, and and I just settled in nice quiet evening. The range just kind of let up, and I started tickling some antlers together a little bit. And then I heard the same thing, like, right out in front of me, there's kind of this old, grown up, clear cut, heavy kind of heavy region. You know, it's probably twenty year old region, so you could see into it a little bit, but not very well. And I had my bow. I was bow hunting, and this was general rifle season, so excuse me again, you're fine, I'll take a little drink. I'm not used to this dry weather. It's nice. Um. So I crawled in starticularly antlers, and out in front of me, I could hear some antlers getting tickled together. Like whoa, there's bucks right in front of me, fifty yards out in that fixed in that thick stuff and you could hear him just kind of clicking and clacking, and then I could kind of see like start of glassing in there, and I could see little body parts and a little antler here, and there ended up being three like small bucks, like three or four point in white tails. That's a six or eight point yea eastern. Sorry about that. That's sorry, I get confused language barriers. A couple of three and fours are hanging out in there, tickling, and so I think my rattling kind of got them all excited, and they're like each other, and they found each other and they started sparring. Then they fed a little bit in front of me, and then they tickled some more. They just kept working past me too, you know, off to my right, and they are, I mean, it never got more than a hundred yards from me, and I could eventually I could see them a little better. They got it in some more open trees and I could see him feeding and then they would spar and then I looked over and I could see another buck showed up about the same size. He just kind of walked out and then they all there's like four him now, just all kind of sparring, tickling, making quite a bit of racket, and I'm like, oh, this is pretty cool. Um, I'm gonna try some Doughe bleats. So I made some. I was using some Doughe bleats just to see what their reaction was, and I thought, man, they're way over here off to my right. I need to be paying attention and what's off to my left? So I just kind of glanced back and out in that region. I could see the top of this large tree, like a fifteen ft large tree, just whipping back and forth, and I'm like, whoas there's a buck rubbing that. I'm pretty sure and uh, and then like it stopped and and out walks this buck. I could see that he was just a big, heavy buck, but I couldn't tell exactly what he was because he kind of disappeared real quick in the trees. But he was coming on a bee line right down that edge that I was sitting on, and he was heading he was gonna go down eventually would have taken him down wind of those small bucks. He's probably gonna go down and sent check them. And am I ready to think that these deer are still like slick from the rain to the real dark foreheads and glistening antlers. Absolutely, it's a good way to paint the picture. Yeah, So yeah, they're very wet. Yeah, the antlers are just sheen, just very shiny, almost red looking. Well, and he was he popped out and I could see he was all kind of puffed up and kind of bristling a little bit, but coming definitely. He's like, well, that is a big buck. I don't know if it's that giant one I was looking for, but I'm going to shoot that one for sure. And and I didn't see him until he popped out fifteen yards in front of me, and I had my bow in my hand, and he was he walked out broadside and I just kind of did a little a little burpen black just nailed them perfect, and he whirled and he ran and I could see him fall over maybe fifty yards away, and I thought, oh, he's a big one. He's really heavy. But he looked like he had short times because looking at him at an angle from my tree stand, and but I could just the only was just webbed. He just seemed webbed out. And I god, he's just really massive. It's like that's a great great deer. So I was all excited, climbed out of my stand, went over there, and his head was kind of down in some brush. When I got there and I pulled his head out of the brush, It's like, oh, this thing is a big one. This is a really big one. So I was just a static and then I started looking at us, like, oh, this is definitely that deer that I was looking for. Is this that one that looks almost like it was related to a moose? That's the wu Yeah, that thing is just an absolute monster. So yeah, he he was. I mean, it's super rewarding. I put a ton of time and effort into it. Um. I have to say that when I was doing most of my scouting, my wife was in grad school and wasn't living in uh in the area. She was over in northern California. No wait, she's in Washington doing a re search stuff. So I was living on my own. So I was just a bachelor, just cruising around, just yeah, doing whatever I wanted. Yeah, it was nice. And my wife if gosh, you just thought I wasn't complete, It's like, what are you doing? You're going to go shed hunting again after work till dark in the rain. Okay, I think our wives would have a lot to relate to, but they she definitely knows it's a passion and she was super excited for me when I when I killed that deer and she came in the next day with me and helped me butcher it up and pack it out and stuff like that. That's cool. Yeah, so she's been you know, that's so nice to supportive super sparer in that way. That's so good off the sit there's oh yeah, good lord. We'll have to post this picture if you don't mind, because the left side of this deer is nuts. It's so widely palmmated. Then the G three has got this deep, deep split on the left side. That is a buck. Yeah, and so that's a public land ere. That's it's a public land buck. And um yeah, anybody can go hunt that spot. It's not easy, but um and I haven't hunted that I've killed. I kill a couple more deer in there after that, and they were all pretty nice. All right. We are going to take a real quick pause here for a word from our partners at White Tailed Properties and our producer Spencer new Hearth is going to take it from here this week with White Tailed Properties, we are joined by Rich ba, a land specialist out of southeastern Iowa, and Rich is going to be telling us about what factors are most important for a property to hold high numbers of big bucks. Okay, I think that mature bucks are are always gonna want to be in areas where they have a good thick cover and get escape routes, so that buy a hunter or something they have a way to escape about going across wide open country. So I look for properties with lots of thick cover um. And you know, one of the things you can do to improve that is you can you can play native grasses, you know in open fields or people that don't have a lot of cover. And then you can also do timber scan improvement work within your timber to to make it thicker and more enticing for for big dear to live in it. Another thing in the Midwest where it gets really cold and the ladder parts of the years is having property with self facing slopes on them. South aising slopes catch a lot more sun and are a lot warmer, and it's where almost all the deer you end up wanting the bed, you know, when it gets really cold. So those are some of the things that I would look for. If you'd like to learn more or to see the properties that Rich currently has listed for sale, visit white Tail properties dot com backslash ball. That's b A U G H. So that I mean, guys when they think about heading out west, they usually are thinking about mule deer or elk or something like that. But there are some serious white Til opportunities out here. And there there are yeah, um, there's stuff in the river bottoms um and that's a lot of the stuff you see on out like outdoor television. There's a lot of least properties and outfitters like up on the Milk River or even like right here down here and Yellowstone Valley. So um on your floehead. Yea, the breeze dies down and those things come out. What we're dealing with all sorts of stuff. We got wind, we have mosquitoes, we had shotguns. It is it is rough outdoor podcast. We can't complain. Look at this we've got. Oh, it's incredible beautiful mountains all around us. I've never recorded a podcast in such a pretty place, so this is this is pretty good. Yeah, yeah, I'm not going to complain at all. So so Mountain whitetail hunting. Yes, I kind of pride a little bit of how you're doing stuff there. But talk to me a little bit more about the habitat that you're looking for. Is it? Is it? Are you totally keying in on these logged out areas? Is that like if I were a new guy hunting in a forested mountainous region, whether it's West Virginia or one of these western states, I guess tell me more about finding them first. Um, in my neck of the woods, white tails can be anywhere, which is kind of confusing to a lot of people because everybody thinks they're they're hanging around egg or farm fields, which we have a little out in the valley that there's some hay fields on the old down in the private stuff, but um, most of it is timbered and our white tails they live down in the valley bottom. But I've seen them up at like seven thousand feet. Um, it's it's crazy. The biggest buck I've ever seen in my life was late August. I've got dropped off in a helicopter to go on the fight of fire put out a small fire on the ridge that was probably four miles from any road and it had to be six over six thousand feet. And I was walking down this ridge and up and right in front of me, twenty yards out of his bed stands a that was over. He was well over two typical. This is the white tail. White tail. Giant stood there, looked at me, and it just kind of sauntered off the ridge. But I, honestly I wanted to go back and hunt that gear. But I don't know how you do it. Honestly. There's no trail there. You've got this huge, immense ridge. It's like, what are you gonna do. You're gonna go just sit on that. You're gonna go hike four miles in and sit on this ridge all day and wait for him to maybe walk by you. It's really tough in any anywhere you go. He could have dropped into these big canyons that No, there's no trail, there's nothing. There's not even a logging road anywhere. There's a crick bottom in the down in the very bottom, and that's it. And so I don't that buck probably died from a lion or something, you know, or old age, but so we have they can be anywhere, and they can be any size. You never know what's going to step out. That's probably not going to happen for most people. But there there we have the genetics sounds like it, yeah, and they can reach an old age class because they have that cover to survive in pressure pressure places people are whited on. It's got to be minuscule, right. We have a long season, and there's a reason we have long season because we have very low pressure. So they can be anywhere. But if I'm like trying to narrow things down, probably burn areas, logging areas, said you said it earlier. Edges, yeah, ye, anything that creates an edge. So a lot of that is logging in our part of the world, or fires if it's in the right spot, definitely, um or even like you know, if you can find like some hay meadow or something I was gonna ask, you know, or naturally occurring meadows, but they generally tend to like they stick to two areas that aren't grassy. They like brows like the Forbes, other different things like that. So, so is there any So it sounds like you just covered it, But one of the things I was going to ask is where are we finding the feed, Like what's the preferred feed, So it's just random openings and these areas of region mostly yeah, pretty much. Yeah, they like um yeah, burn areas and logging areas. And they don't have to be clear cuts either. They can be like a selective cut, just like a partial thinning, young gole. Let some sunlight in and let that release the the forbes, the vege on the ground. You talked, You talked about how rubs played apart in that one hunt. What about scrapes? Do you pay attention to scrapes at all? You know? I see scrapes all over the place and they might mean something, but I haven't figured it out. It doesn't play a part in what you're doing. Not not for me. I haven't really utilized it. I'll definitely take note and be like, WHOA, there's scrapes here, and there's a bunch of them and they're in a row. But I've never really seen a deer traveling a scrape line. I just yeah, it just hasn't happened for me. Speaking of scrapes, do you ever in trail cameras for white tails? Is that a thing you've ever done before? Too busy with all the other things too. I have I own one trail camera and I set it up one time and it got bit in half by grizzly bear. That is something that I don't think anyone on my podcast has ever had an issue with. Yeah, I was like, well, I'm not doing this and even want Yeah, I don't know. They're neat and all. But I mean I like looking at people's trail camp phones. They're pretty cool. But I just I have no interest in it. I just don't care. I liked I guess I like to be surprised and what's out there. I understand that. Yeah, I've one I've been conflicted on that, Like there's a lot of fun and seeing what's out there and then getting excited about that and going after that buck or whatever. But then there's also something really cool about when all of a sudden you hear that crack crack, and then you turn over your head and then something giant steps that you never saw this comfort What is it gonna be here? Yeah? That's cool. Yeah, And that is neat about that area too, is you just never know what you're gonna see. You know me. You can have sheds from all these deer and you can have trail camera photos. I have buddies of put trail cameras up and you know, they think they know what's living there, and they do for the most part, but you just never know what's gonna step out and just show up. Like that buck living on that ridge. Who knows he might have traveled fifteen miles down valley to go rut in his pocketed dose somewhere. Yeah, but I never heard about him getting killed. I think he made made some some splash, I'd say, so, taking a buck out of that early country. Yeah. So the the neighboring forest a Flathead National Forest. Ah it it is uh, it has quite a rep reputation for producing giant white tails, mainly you know, from the eighties and nineties, so it was back a lot of those deer. There's like a bunch that are plus. Yeah, there's some giant ones from the from Flathead. I never really knew. But this has got me thinking, like what a cool just doing a mountain white tail hunt and like do it like an like a spike camp like backpack in set up a spike camp deep in there and then chase white tails in that kind of way. You got a backpack full all your gear. Then you throw a tree stand on top of that, I maybe you have a very heavy load, but what an adventure of a white tail, Oh for sure. So there's areas like that are pretty famous in in certain circles of the white tail any world, like the Swan River Country, Swan Valley on a white tails, there's there's been some giants killing in there, so not as many though in recent years. And I think a lot of it has to do with changes in habitat um fairly print a dance predator populations at the full suite of predators, grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions, and wolves. We've had some hard winters, some back to back hard winters, and it's just kind of adds up to a complex problem. And also vegetation management is probably part of it, you know, the four service isn't isn't cutting as much timber. They're not creating as much brows and openings and whatnot. And I think maybe our winter range is becoming more dense, densely grown or something I don't know that might have an effect. Interesting, So there's a whole bunch of aspects to it. It's complex. Back to something you're talking about a little earlier with that again, um, do you do you find that calling and rattling works pretty well? I'm I'm assuming as an outsider, I would think, Hey, I could see rattling and calling working pretty good in these areas because there's not as much pressure, and it seems like, at least from my experience out in the West, there's more balanced age structure of these dear like comparedly in Michigan. It's like like gray Hunt, I'm seeing like eight percent of the bucks I see our year and a half olds and then one three and a half yearld or maybe one four and a half yearld. I mean, it's crazy. When I came out here, I'm seeing very nice balanced one two, three, four, I mean a lot of older bucks and um, the buck door ratio seems somewhat decent compared to some of the places I'm at. Is that accurate? I guess? Is my assumption accurate there? And then be does that lead to pretty good reactions to calling? Do you think yes? And yes? So yeah we have are it seems like our age a structure is healthy. We have a lot of mature deer and they can live to be fairly old. Um, which creates competition. Um, so yeah, I've had great success. Oh man, I'm sorry about that. Man, it's dry and my throat back, my throat dry. Um. I would say pre rut rattling works really well. The it seems like once those those big bucks start cruising though, there's nothing going to bring him in. I mean, you might have that anomaly where it will happen and it works, but I don't go for it. After I start seeing him chasing really hard, they're going to be on those doughs, yeah, and they'll push them into these little secluded pockets and you might not see him for a few days. There'll be times when I'll be out whitetail hunting and I'll see, you know, forty dos and not one buck, and like, what is going on? Well, that means that that's like the the peak interesting because they're locked down. They're locked down, just disappear and then three days later, everywhere you look there's a buck running somewhere across the hillside through a clear cut, or you know, jumps across the road in front of you. So yeah, I need to get out of here there on the rut because when I was sitting, I like with all the bucks I'm seeing. I cannot imagine what the rut must be like out here, because the competition must be just intense. Yeah, I don't. I wouldn't compare it to Texas. It's nothing like that. But it's definitely i'd say it's healthy, yeah, yeah, and it's it's definitely fun for a white tailed people. They get pretty excited about it when they come out and hunt. Yeah. And we get a fair bit of pressure from like we get a lot of Washington and Idaho guys coming over um and we'll see you know, places from We've I've seen Michigan guys, Wisconsin guys coming out here. So it's not unknown. It's just not super popular. And it's it's tough hunting, you know, it's not it's not easy easy. You gotta be prepared to move to hike, to struggle a little bit, right, Yeah. It's not like what walking fifty yards the tree stand in the backyard and sitting there right. Yeah. And it can be intimidating because it's you're hunting in big mountains and it's it's hard to figure out where to start. So if you have the basics, start thinking about edges and think about where they like to bed just those little weird, subtle key components that they all need and you'll you'll have it figured out. Speaking of betting, have you found mountain of if you've had just maybe haven't needed to go to this level of detail, But do you find that they're betting with any certain types of train features in mind, Like in the East and the Midwest, and like the sledder hill country, we see these bucks lots of times betted on ridge, little knobs off of ridges and stuff where they can have the wind coming down their backs and they can look out on ahead of us. Do you see anything like that happened with these white tails mountain country too. It's a little more random. It seems to be pretty random, but they will, I guess they do prefer places like that. They're kind of like and that's kind of like what a meal or elk they'll bed where they can see below them and smell what's coming from behind him, and that happens to be a lot of these little benches and key features. But yeah, that we're talking features though. One of the things that I like to key in on in that country are like like little dips in a ridgeline like a saddle type like that little saddle, sometimes subtle, sometimes very distinct that those deer will they'll, you know, they'll traverse the side of that thing and then drop into the saddle to cross over the other side to see what's see what's back there. So they generally don't travel our ridge tops like you think that's just to avoid being skylined or just I think it's this laziness to be honest with. It's just the most efficient way, not laziness. But yeah, I mean every everybody wants conserve energy at least resistance, So I think that's what it is. That makes sense. Yeah, And humans seem to travel ridge tops a lot, a lot of trails and stuff. Bro Yeah, just yeah, it's this easy walking for us so side owen's hard for us, and deer are a little better at it. So yeah, it seems like that maybe they'll do it to avoid maybe predators to I don't know, there's cats cruise ridge lines or not. I would assume they would, do you see have you ever seen a cat while any type of big game on out western Oh? Yeah, I see mountlines all the time. Yeah, we have tons of them, and uh yeah, I see them I feel like they're kind of the ghosts of the woods. It's pretty crazy when you do see one. Trying to think when the last time I saw them was. It was seeming like it was just a couple of years ago. But yeah, I would say a maybe about every three or four years, I'll see a lion that hasn't been trigued by rounds. Um, We've got a lot of guys that chase cats in that part of the world out there. It is really neat. I read a close call, see one up clothes are they always offer them the distance kind of slinking away. They usually just slink away. Yeah. Yeah, I have seen a few that, um, I didn't know I was there, But most of the time they do school and they're heading away. Yeah, it's pretty cool they are. They're amazing. That tail is just immense. When you see it hanging off the back of it was like it's kind of shocking, like how big it is? A big Yeah, they're really neat. And then when you walk up, like I've been on some hound hunts before and you walk up to one in a tree, you'll have four, three, four or five dogs at the bottom of the tree just barking like crazy. But when you walk up, that lion is just looking at you and and only you. It's just like watching you walk around, and it doesn't even care about the dogs. It's it's kind of eerie. Yeah. Yeah, I think you'd get used to it as a as a houndsman, but I'm not. I'm not a houndsman, and maybe I'm maybe I'm weird like this, but there is like a certain something I enjoy the idea of knowing I'm not the only predator out there, and knowing that I'm maybe not the top of the food chain. It's humbling and it's there's little more electricity in the air. I feel like when you know there's some other critters out there that are, you know, above above you on that chain and doing the same thing you're trying to do the too. I agree, No, it's uh, it adds a different feel knowing that you're in an intact ecosystem. I think if they weren't there, it just you know something's missing. Yeah, So it's nice to have predators. I like them, I mean, and I think they need to be managed as well. But um, yeah, I have no issues with sharing the world with those things. I mean, they're they're making a they're trying to make a living out there, right, and it's a tough place. I can't imagine respect for that. Yeah. Yeah, if I get tired and hungry, I'm just going to go home. Yeah, grab some n eat, snuggle up by the fire with a cup of coffee. They're out there in the rain and that easy, trying to eat some then every day. Yeah, it's an existence. It is. It's amazing and uh yeah, they're amazing creatures. So I don't I've seen a few wolves out and about, um, but it's so thick, you just it's tough to get a good view of things. You know. You just see maybe a glimpse of them going across the road because you're you know, I'm out in the woods lot driving around at work, so I see a lot of stuff at work, but usually it's just a streak. I was like, well it was a big black dog with a collar. That was definitely a wolf. Yeah, grizzly encounters had many of those, Um seeing a bunch Yeah, no real, I wouldn't say encounters. Um, they usually just turn around and get the heck out of there. Want to do the thing. Yeah, yeah, they up where I live there pretty uh, there's not very many. I mean there's like the they estimate the population to be like fifty five or something, and that's for the entire eco system there, so it's pretty rare. Yeah, they think there should be roughly about a hundred living there, but so they're roughly halfway there for Recovery interesting. But yeah, you'll see him every once in a while. Saw look to me like kind of a younger male grizzly this year when I was out spring bear hunting. Um he was standing on the road just kind of look warder what that guy was. But yeah, it was pretty neat to see. Yeah, you see him every once in a while. I don't see him every year, but I mean a guy probably could if you wanted to go find him, look for him and find some grizz every year this spring when we're out, we're down this neck of the woods this spring earlier, and we saw right around here that's insane over the course of like a week. That is awesome. Yeah, they're a whole different beast when you see him. They just have a whole different demeanor. Yes, it seems like in the the temperature in the room rises when they're somewhere there. When you're looking at one of those, everything is a little bit more yeah something. Yeah, yeah, this this part of the state is it's dance with grizz You know. It sounds like it sounds like they're working on delisting. So I heard it happened, didn't get announced like yesterday towards it. Yeah, that's interesting. It's a whole another conversation, absolutely, and one I don't know much about. Yeah, so you can read the paper get more information, and there's lots of talk about that. So we've been talking about western white tail stuff. But there's also a whole lot of guys in Michigan or Ohio or New York or Alabama, all these guys that dream of coming out here someday to chase elk or mule deer, antelope or something like that. Do you have any advice for someone who wants come and try hunt like that? And you've been living this and doing this whole life, but if you were new, um, what do you wish that you knew at the beginning that maybe these guys could pick up from you now? M I would say, guys that want to come out and just experience a western hunt. Just just dip their toe in the in the stream, so to speak. Um, I would say, come out and try an antalope punt, trying a rifle, analope punt slash mule deer, combo hunt or something rifle. Um, because you can do that out on the prairie. The logistics are fairly easy. You see a lot of animals. You kind of figure out what it's like to drive out this way because it could be a long drive and that can be logistically kind of a nightmare and costly. So you kind of get that worked out of the system and figured out and maybe how to do things a little more efficiently. UM I would I would say start out with that. But if you're just dying the hunt mule deer or elk in the back country or even the front country, just go with low expectations trophy size. Everybody comes out with a number in their head. It seems like I want a hundred and seventy in mule deer and I want a three twenty inch bowl. Come out here and try it, and then shoot an elk wherever, shoot any elk and pack it out and just see what you think of experience it. Yeah, and you might think this is the worst thing have ever done. I am never doing that ever again. So, I mean, everybody likes to research gear and they like to think about the glory of success. But I just say to the guys that want to come out, try it and just go small. Think small, and and and simple at first. Guys. I you read about all the time on on rock Slide, guys that were coming out for the first trip and they want to go do a ten day backpacking trip for elk solo, Like, are you kidding me? He that is gonna be a nightmare of a trip. Unless you are a person of just another world. That's a tough hunt. I mean, yeah, right, I live. I live in some rugged country and I hunt solo all the time, and I backcountry hunt solo quite a bit, and just getting an elk out of the mountains is unbelievably hard by yourself, and to do it in the back country, it's it's crazy. So, um yeah, i'd see, just set realistic goals and um yeah, take some baby steps. Don't just dive head right on. Just you know you're not gonna just dive straight into a stream and think you're gonna come out looking great. It's gonna be tough. You might it might happen, but boy it's gonna be rare. So do some research. Get the right here. Do you do research on here? But also just yeah, do research on what you think you might be able to handle, which is tough to do. And that's why I say take baby steps when you come out. And I like your advice too, to shoot the first thing you have an opportunity or do something, because that is a big part of that experience. And and and for me, it was like in the moment, it might feel like the worst, but it's it's the best. It is, it's all said and done. You did that like the after I packed my first alcohol and after what was I don't know. We think like sixteen miles that day, up and down, up and down, and we dropped that pack. It was like I shot my bowl at eight in the morning. By nine o'clock at night, we finally made it to back to the minivan. We took a minivan out of ice, made it back to the minivan after eleven thirteen hours of whatever this was, and dropped that pack, collapse on the ground and laid there for thirty minutes, just trying to breathe, and I was like, oh am, I still alive. But looking back on that as like the coolest thing I've ever done. Yeah, you were more. Yeah, You're probably never more alive at that point. Absolutely, and have to get that opportunity is even if it was a year and a half old cow or great big bowl no matter what, or mule there mean experience that. Yeah, No, absolutely, and then you can move on to bigger and better and greater hunts. Yeah. And you you you kind of learned. It takes a while to learn an area. We're talking about this earlier. It's just nice to go someplace new and put boots on the ground and just learn it, explore. Have an adventure. Doesn't have to be a back country kill yourself adventure, just but have an adventure. Keep an open mind, be curious and coositive and and figure stuff out. That's it's super fun. Guys that want to come out and hunt, they'll most of them love it. I feel like in the white tailed world, it's easy to get hung up on two things. It's easy to get hung up on hunt in the same place all the time. A lot of guys just hunt their little piece of property that they grew up on or that they have access to it, and so they always do that. Or it's easy to get hung up on the big buck mentality because the media pushes giant antlers. All right, there's those two things. That's so easy to get stuck in that kind of rut. And I just I've been fortunate to have some opportunities to go some new places, and man, it is so worth just trying to get out of that rut. Don't worry about the antlers. Don't worry about going on outside your comfort zone, because when you do, you find some pretty incredible places, some incredible experiences, and and that's what it's all about in the long run. Ye. And you make some great you meet great people too when you do it, it seems like and then by trying this new thing, you become a better hunter and that can translate back to everything else you're doing back home too. Um, you're gonna learn things about yourself, about these animals, um, and that all helps in the long run. So get out there, do this stuff. Absolutely awesome. Well, I think we kept a long enough. Josh, this is fun. Yeah, thanks for having me, Mark, I appreciate it. Any any final, any final words of wisdom. We want to leave our listeners with to say, if you want to come out and hunt Western white tails, do it. Don't think I don't. Don't think that they're the same creature that they are back East, because they're slightly different, and keep an open mind and you just might be really surprised at what you're gonna find out there. So yeah, awesome, But all I gotta say, well, I can't wait to get back out here. Yeah, all right, thank you, Josh, you bat Mark, And that is it. Like I just mentioned a little earlier at the beginning, well at the beginning of the show, we are off next week, like I mentioned, so I'd highly recommend you checking out episodes number sixty three with Mark Drury and episode eighty three with Shane Mahoney to get you through that that week gap. Although although there might be a little bonus episode coming, I'll give a little teaser here if you're if you're still listening, there is something worth checking back for next week. But other than that, check out these other two. And before we go, I want to give a big thank you to our partners at SI Gear. YETI Cooler's Matthew's Archery, may of an Optics, Whitetail Institute of North America, Trophy Ridge and Hunter a Maps, And finally, of course, thank you all for listening. I hope you enjoyed this one, and if you're hunting seasons opening up soon, good luck out there, and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt,

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