In this episode, we talk to International Man of Adventure, Remy Warren, about surviving a grizzly bear attack on a remote Alaska island. Remy and his brother were on a hunting trip when they came within inches of being attacked by a massive bear. They managed to escape, but not without major injuries. Remy talks about the harrowing experience, and how he dealt with the aftermath of the attack. We also talk about the challenges of surviving a bear attack, and what it's like to be on an Alaska adventure hunting trip with a big, hungry, hungry grizzly. We also discuss the dangers of being on an Alaskan island in the middle of winter, and the challenges that come with hunting in the dead of winter in the dark of night with no food or shelter. We hope you enjoy this episode and remember to stay safe out there in the wild! Stay safe Out There Out There! Cheers, EJ & Remy See ya next week! xoxo EJ and Remy! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE so we can keep sharing it with your friends, family, family and the rest of the podcasting community! EJ is a big thank you to EJ for making this podcast possible. We really appreciate your support and support. EJ's work is greatly appreciated! Thank you EJ, Remy, Rene, Rachael, Steve, and Jack. and the crew at The Meat Eater Podcast. - Thank you so much for all the support and love you all the love and support you all of your support! - we really appreciate it. Ej, Ej is a lot. Thank you for being a lot! -Reecem, Remy and the support you're a lot of love & support is so much of it means a lot more than you can do it. Ej and I appreciate you. XOXO - EJ Thank you, Remy & the guys are a lot, thank you for all of the support is much more than just the love you're being appreciated! -PODCAST -Reed, RYANCHOR - RYERY, RAYMAYO, RAAYO, JEANCHE, RABY, JUICY, PODCAST, JAYA, PYOTTER, KAROLA, KAOS, GRAVY, etc.
00:02:43.000My brother and myself have hunted elk on that island before, and it's just a miserable place to be.
00:02:51.000What's a fascinating hunt, the way you guys were describing it, because just the fact that you would choose, out of all the places you can go, you pretty much can go anywhere you want.
00:03:07.000Like, Rinello was talking about this once, and the way he described it is, like, there's things that are fun while you're doing them, but they're not fun later, like roller coasters.
00:04:02.000So the way the crow would fly, if you're just going a mile, and then another distance could take you half that time or a quarter of that time, but there's a big mountain in between where you need to go, plus the vegetation, and it's really steep.
00:04:17.000So you've got all that kind of working against you, plus you can't really walk in just a straight line there.
00:04:21.000You've got to navigate around all kinds of stuff.
00:04:39.000Yeah, I'll have to figure out, because right after the bear attacked, I pulled out my phone and was just kind of like recording everyone's reactions.
00:04:46.000And then I put it on my Instagram story.
00:04:48.000But I'll try to find it tonight and I'll post it onto some, I'll figure out a way to stitch it together.
00:04:55.000Yeah, Instagram stories, they let you save them now.
00:08:51.000And when I sat down, I took my pack off.
00:08:53.000And the whole week I'd been doing this thing where I take my pistol from the pack belt and put it on the holster on my body when I dropped my pack.
00:09:01.000And it was that weird deal where I took the pack off and I'm thinking about switching.
00:10:56.000So I kind of do like a football juke move, left, right, and then wheel around right, do like a spin with my back, and then start running to the left.
00:11:05.000And at that point, Giannis, I didn't know this at the time...
00:11:10.000Because I looked at some pictures afterwards, kind of piece everything together.
00:11:13.000So Giannis was sitting right next to me.
00:12:37.000And you'd hear the bear charge in again.
00:12:39.000And we only had the two pistols, Giannis and I. And the wind was so strong, there's no way we could use bear spray.
00:12:47.000So we hear the bear charging in, and me and Giannis are like pistols out, ready, waiting for this thing to pop out at point-blank range.
00:12:54.000And then it would, in order of yelling, bear, bear, hey, hey, hey!
00:12:57.000And then that thing stops, and then it would just crash off, and then it would charge in from the other direction.
00:13:04.000I like to circle around the tree the other way and did that I think three times that was just under It's like a horror movie where it keeps coming in from different angles.
00:13:13.000Oh, it was weird It was not a fun feeling you just felt so small So you guys had come back to the carcass that was hanging in the tree and it had probably claimed that carcass We don't know.
00:13:42.000Normally, they go around, they catch the scent, and they charge in.
00:13:46.000So I don't know if he'd heard something, if he was there.
00:13:49.000We saw what slightly looked like bear sign.
00:13:52.000Both Steve and I kind of pointed it out, but we weren't...
00:13:56.000We were thinking maybe it was something old or...
00:13:59.000When you say bear sign, you mean bear shit.
00:14:00.000Yeah, bear shit at the base of the tree.
00:14:02.000Yeah, and so I think we did some things that were wrong, but in the instance, what saved us all...
00:14:11.000Now, if we were to do it 100 times over, I would say I would do it differently, but it worked out how it worked out, so I obviously wouldn't...
00:14:19.000I would never opt to just have nothing and have this weird scatter effect.
00:14:23.000But I think that what saved anyone from getting hurt, which is a miracle, was the fact that when we scattered, it just confused that bear.
00:14:33.000Because he kind of had this look after he started wheeling around, kind of like trying to pick a person, and he couldn't target one individual.
00:14:43.000And then things started hitting him, and somebody's on his back, and I think it just freaked him out.
00:14:56.000How many people have ever gone through a bear attack unscathed like that in a group of six?
00:15:02.000Yeah, and the thing about it was it wasn't just a bear attack, but had, looking at it later, had someone even been grabbed and mauled, not to death, but injured, I think that it would have been very unlikely that that person was survived because the weather that came in was so bad.
00:18:15.000There was a spruce that we were using and we got behind that spruce tree and then put one of the teepee tents up, kind of tied it off to the spruce.
00:18:23.000And then Steve and I had two small backpacking tents that we put underneath a few of the limbs, cut out some limbs and got up under there.
00:18:31.000And it's still 100 mile an hour winds.
00:21:12.000I mean, Adam Greentree, who we were talking about before the podcast...
00:21:16.000Did this 28-day backpacking trip in Montana and Colorado and Elk hunting in September and solo all by himself and took a bunch of Instagram pictures and put them on an Instagram story of him holding up a pistol with a sow grizzly standing on her two legs looking at him in the distance while it's snowing out and she got within 15 yards.
00:21:42.000She bluff charged him within 15 yards.
00:21:44.000She was just trying to get him away from her cubs Different situation than with you guys.
00:21:49.000Because the sow, when they have the Cubs, they just don't want their kids to get fucked up by you.
00:22:36.000There was that really crazy video where the guy had half his head hanging off, like his scalp was hanging off his head, and he was explaining what happened.
00:23:12.000So a few years ago, when I was in Alaska, I met this guy, and he was an older guy.
00:23:18.000I don't know if I talked about this before, but he was an older guy that was on that same island, and he got attacked by a, I think it was like an 11-foot brown bear.
00:23:28.000While he was skinning a deer and killed the bear with a knife.
00:27:31.000I mean, it's amazing how our brains and the development of our intellect and our ability to use tools and houses have protected us from all these animals, and I wonder what we used to be like.
00:27:42.000I was thinking about that the other day, and I was kind of debating in my head whether our tools I think our tools are the only thing.
00:29:50.000Well, I feel like the California grizzly bears, this is just from my opinion, they would have been semi-coastal, so they would have been very similar to the brown bears.
00:29:58.000With a mild climate, they probably would not have needed to hibernate.
00:30:03.000They would have been very large bears.
00:30:14.000You know, a lot of the people that want to reintroduce wolves everywhere.
00:30:17.000Yeah, I say for everyone they reintroduce somewhere else, let's reintroduce a bear somewhere, you know, in the Monterey, San Francisco area where they naturally were.
00:30:31.000Yeah, I think people really have no idea what that is.
00:30:34.000They think of it as some sort of a thing that they've seen on, you know, the Discovery Channel or on some cool YouTube video where you see them wandering through the fields.
00:30:44.000But until you're there with it, what I was going to say about what Adam said, like Adam said, he's like, mate, he goes, it's a fucking monster.
00:33:04.000There's a crazy video of this guy who's a photographer who's taking pictures of what looks like 15-plus brown bears in this one river, and one of them walks up beside him and just sits down.
00:33:16.000Like, literally sits down about 10 feet away.
00:33:18.000And apparently this one particular area is so rich with salmon, no one's ever been killed there.
00:35:09.000Yeah, I mean, I think they're beautiful.
00:35:11.000I think they're amazing, and I'm glad they're there.
00:35:14.000But it disturbs me to no end that people don't really understand what they are, and they treat them as if they're some sort of mythical creature in some Disneyland movie, and they don't understand conservation and controlling their populations,
00:35:29.000which is what they did understand when they killed them all out of California.
00:35:33.000They were like, look, people are getting fucking killed at a regular basis.
00:35:59.000But if you fly in to where my friend Mike lives and talk to those people out there, first of all, they can hunt as many wolves as they want.
00:37:04.000The wolves I've never really been afraid of, but I did, one time I was in Idaho, it was springtime, and I heard something in the, it was like real thick brush again, and I hear something, and all of a sudden this wolf pops out like five or six feet away.
00:37:28.000I was about ready to kick it and it veered off the path and then I hear and then another one comes running in and I grab my gun and shoot into the ground.
00:38:02.000Well, I got my gun off after the first one, just thinking, well, I don't know what's going on here, but just in case something tries, you know...
00:38:14.000There's a video, if anybody wants to listen to the actual story on the podcast, you can find it, but he shot a wolf, excuse me, he shot an elk in BC. Yeah.
00:40:47.000You think they would have just like fed on the dead people?
00:40:50.000Well, I think there were so many wolves, like Siberia or Russia, wherever the fuck they were, there's a lot of wolves, you know, and they don't give a shit if you're a person or a chicken or whatever.
00:41:10.000I mean, they, they were just, guys would go out on scouts and they would just vanish and then they'd find their boot with like half a foot still in it and like, what the fuck?
00:41:18.000Like people don't realize like a wolf can cut through an elk bone with its teeth.
00:41:23.000Yeah, when you see a wolf actually take down an elk, it's pretty impressive.
00:42:06.000And then it got its stomach open, so it's dragging its guts.
00:42:09.000And then the elk finally would get its guts caught on the trees that it was going over, and then the wolf got it by the neck and just held it until it died.
00:42:19.000And you watched all this from how far away?
00:42:25.000A lot of it, some of it you couldn't see, you know, because it was a hill across from me, so you could see it, you'd lose it in the timber, then it'd come out in a patch, and then it was right below us, and then we just kind of backed out and left it to its...
00:42:36.000Dudley saw a grizzly bear swat a moose down with one shot.
00:42:51.000He said to see it is one thing, But to try to describe it, it's like, there's no way I want to describe, because the amount of power that thing had in its paw, it just gives you a totally different perception of what it's capable of.
00:43:06.000You know, you have an idea, well, the grizzly's big and the moose is big, it's probably kind of a brawl.
00:44:58.000These people that actually live there, like my friend Mike.
00:45:00.000It's like, okay, if you're not going to control the populations of them, Mike had to shoot one that literally had its face in his cabin.
00:45:08.000He opened the door and he shot it literally right there, where you are.
00:45:14.000It was trying to come in his cabin and he shot it.
00:45:16.000Yeah, I think that the reason there's...
00:45:19.000I've heard that there's more people who are attacked or affected by black bears than grizzly bears or brown bears, but it's just that not as many people live in proximity to them.
00:45:38.000And that's what's going on also in Montana.
00:45:41.000I mean, when these most recent attacks, it's just because there's a large population of bears there and you can't hunt them.
00:45:48.000And the good thing is that people hunted them almost to the brink of extinction and now through conservation they've brought them back to the point where they're no longer endangered.
00:45:57.000But there's the dispute between the animal rights people and the wildlife biologists and the hunters and, you know, trying to figure out what...
00:46:06.000How big does the population have to be before you realize that you have to chop some of them down?
00:46:12.000Nobody wants to eliminate grizzly bears, but you don't want 100,000 grizzly bears in the metropolitan Vancouver area.
00:46:22.000It's kind of a weird balance when you're talking about hunting and animal populations and then you throw in predators.
00:46:28.000Because I don't think a lot of people even understand how humans have affected the environment in such a negative way that nothing will ever be as it was.
00:46:44.000And so why would we need to control the predators?
00:46:46.000Well, we've upset the balance in such a way that if we don't insert ourself into the equation, which as far as we know, like humans have been in the equation hunting.
00:47:00.000Since the animals that are currently in North America have been around, brown bears have always been hunted by humans.
00:47:06.000You know, when you're looking at the way things were, I mean, indigenous people hunted them, people before, you know, settlers and whatever came in, the bears were being hunted.
00:47:17.000So humans were always a natural predator of the bears.
00:47:31.000The type of plants that grow in places they shouldn't be now will never get rid of those plants.
00:47:36.000So because those plants are there, native plants that the animals originally should be eating off of don't exist.
00:47:43.000They're outcompeted by noxious weeds and other things.
00:47:46.000So the amount of food source is smaller.
00:47:48.000So then the prey population cannot—they've lost their winter range because of developments and other things.
00:47:56.000And then if you just insert and said, well, all the predators will take care of those numbers, well, that's not true because the numbers can't get to what they were because there's less availability starting at the bottom level of food source and winter range and habitat.
00:50:33.000So one of my buddies that I hunt with over there, Robin, he started getting some of that rolling where they could go on the ranches, shoot the deer off, the excess deer, and then give them to people that need food.
00:50:55.000Yeah, that's an argument for hunting, that it's really difficult for animal rights people to argue against, because you already have this invasive species that's overpopulating this island, and either you're going to bring in wolves, which is another invasive species.
00:51:09.000Isn't that similar to what they tried to do in Australia?
00:51:12.000In Australia, they tried to bring in a bunch of...
00:54:22.000But Cam posted a bunch of videos because a bunch of people were, you know, it's always going to be a bunch of people complaining about hunting.
00:54:40.000While the mother was off, just like 30 yards away, freaking the fuck out, and she's watching this big old grizzly just tear her elk calf, and it's going...
00:54:50.000Making weird noises where it just gets mauled.
00:54:54.000I don't want that to happen, but it's going to happen.
00:54:59.000I'm not happy that it's happening, but it's fascinating to watch.
00:55:02.000If I was there, I would definitely watch that.
00:57:11.000But through the process of watching what I do, the respect that I have for the animals and going, okay, this isn't as bad as I had always thought it was.
00:57:19.000Not that it was bad, but she gave it a try and just like...
00:57:24.000And then when we, you know, she, the first time she killed something, she cried a little bit, but immediately after she was like, I'm actually really excited.
00:57:32.000I'm really happy that I got this, this deer.
00:57:35.000And then last night we cooked it up for dinner when we got home.
00:58:24.000You know, when you described it once, I think, in a great way, like that when you pull out an elk steak from an elk that you shot, it's almost like it's sacred.
01:00:03.000I mean, I'm not a neuroscientist, obviously, but there's some shit that's turning on in your head that's like from the caveman days when you shoot an elk with a bow and arrow and you see it go down and you realize you're going to eat this thing.
01:00:22.000There's certain experiences in life where once those experiences happen, you go, whoa, I didn't even know that that was a part of my brain.
01:00:30.000Being a father is that way, in a more intense way.
01:00:32.000Once you have kids and then you realize how much you love your kids, you're like, wow, this is a part of my brain that I didn't even know was there, and that was fully lit up and overcoming all of my senses and thoughts.
01:03:24.000And one of the things, for people who don't know what it was, you traveled all over the place and tried to learn from the way different animals would hunt things.
01:03:32.000But I remember when you came in here and you were talking about octopus.
01:04:11.000Yeah, these fish, that's actually how I saw the one that I got.
01:04:13.000I swam down to go shoot a fish and he was pecking at it because they get into the reef and they'll just keep going for it until it gets out of there.
01:04:21.000Spear fishing is supposed to be really fun.
01:05:33.000It's just a cool experience of being underwater and you get that little bit of a panic and you start to use your oxygen and then you just try to relax, relax, relax, relax, and you just can stay longer.
01:05:45.000And so this guy, is he giving you like techniques to relax?
01:05:48.000Techniques to breathe, slow your heart rate, and then just knowing the fact of how to hold your breath, don't let it out.
01:05:57.000and the fact that what your body goes through the stages that your body goes through when you are out of oxygen When you get to that end period, you actually almost feel like you don't need to breathe.
01:08:20.000Because as you freak out, you get scared, your heart rate goes up, and you use more oxygen.
01:08:24.000It's one of those things, if you're running out of gas and you want to speed up to the gas station and you just burn more gas, instead of slow down, drop it down to 35 and cruise, you're going to go 70 if you can.
01:08:38.000Dude, you've lived a really fascinating life when it comes to your experiences in the wild.
01:09:54.000Me and my brother went to Iceland in the summer when I was in high school, and the person that we stayed with was like a breakdancer and just taught us how to breakdance.
01:11:58.000But when you're there, and you're in Montana, and it's fucking nine degrees out, and you've been sleeping on the ground for five days and hiking around miles every day, and you're kind of half out of it and laughing, and we're in the middle of quartering a deer.
01:12:13.000And he just starts, guys, guys, let me tell you what I do.
01:13:05.000So that trip, and that's what I knew too, like on the first hunting trip, and I knew he was like, out of all my friends, he's one of the ones that I knew would be able to tough it out.
01:13:14.000Like all the other guys that are urban guys, stand-up comedians, like what are the odds that I can get one of those guys to go to Montana for seven days?
01:14:15.000But there's just certain things that when you're there, it's said a certain way.
01:14:18.000Well, when we went and borrowed your truck when we went bow hunting outside of Reno, that's when I got to see the Nevada that you guys know.
01:15:20.000That's the worry for places like Utah where they're shrinking their monuments and they're starting to sell off rights for drilling and mining.
01:15:28.000People are really concerned about this administration and what they're doing with the environmental protections.
01:15:35.000Because today, Trump signed some new thing allowing for offshore drilling.
01:16:38.000The whole thing is quite, it seems surreal.
01:16:40.000Like every couple of days, I'll look at the paper and it says President Trump and I'll go, oh yeah, that guy's the president.
01:16:47.000That's why for what I do, I just get to unplug for very long periods of time.
01:16:53.000But that's not even the right way to go about it sometimes because then there's things that affect me and what I love and I get hit blindsided by it because I'm gone and out in the woods enjoying what I like and then I come home and everything's gone.
01:17:07.000Do you have a hard time relating to a lot of people your age that don't experience the things you experience?
01:17:13.000Because your life is so vastly different than the average 33-year-old guy.
01:17:18.000I mean, I think people respect, if you're really passionate about something, whether if you were passionate about something that isn't even non-hunting, at least I'm like, well, I give you respect, you're passionate about it, you're doing your thing.
01:17:32.000I think a lot of people get that with me, whether they hunt or don't hunt.
01:17:36.000We can relate to anybody because everybody's kind of passionate about something.
01:17:39.000There's that group of people that have no passion and you're like, well, okay.
01:17:51.000If your thing is whatever, video gaming or whatever, that's not my thing, but if you like it and you're passionate about it and I can tell that, then we can have a conversation about it because I think that's cool when people are passionate about something.
01:19:26.000If I have two options, option A is just this go hunting in a place that there's very few animals and you probably won't have any success and it's just really shitty weather and it's tough in big mountains.
01:19:38.000Or there's this one where I'm guaranteed that I'll get some big animal and I'll have a lot of encounters and I can just drive around.
01:19:45.000I'm going to choose the really hard one.
01:20:16.000You know, it's not like this is like a desperado meat hunt.
01:20:18.000Yeah, and I think that that's part of it.
01:20:20.000Because sometimes I might go, if something's too easy, if I go somewhere and I think, man, this one's too easy, then I'll look for an animal that might be bigger or harder to find or a certain one just to give myself some kind of challenge.
01:20:33.000And that was part of the thing of filming myself while hunting and going out there is that added challenge of being alone, the added challenge of filming myself, all those challenges just to...
01:20:45.000You know, create that experience of the struggle of it, I guess.
01:20:49.000It's like I crave that struggle a lot as well.
01:21:12.000Like, if I come home from the gym, I work out hard...
01:21:15.000I worked all day, worked out hard, come home from the gym, I'm fucking exhausted, and I can put my feet up on the couch and I can enjoy a TV show.
01:21:35.000It's the reason why people like working out hard is because your body desires struggle.
01:21:40.000I think that's the way human beings evolved.
01:21:43.000I think we evolved to have a certain amount of our reward system geared towards us accomplishing difficult things because that's how people survived.
01:23:08.000And then, also, you see the results in your body, whereas if you just give in to that I'm lazy thing all the time, then you just have this dumpy, doughy body, and then you feel like shit when you're naked.
01:24:38.000I mean, you just got so much weighted down, so much compression all the time.
01:24:42.000A lot of jujitsu people have turned to yoga now to realize that they, like, there's a lot of guys that for the longest time, me included, what we did was, uh, Like working out with weights, maybe kettlebells, like heavy explosive stuff, box jumps,
01:24:57.000things along those lines, and then jujitsu.
01:24:59.000So the idea was that the working out with weights would prepare you for the jujitsu, but then everybody gets injured.
01:25:06.000A lot of guys have turned now towards yoga and jiu-jitsu because there's something about the rugged smashing and crushing and pulling and yanking of jiu-jitsu that it's complemented by the stretching and elongating and holding static positions and completely non-explosive actions of yoga.
01:26:43.000That balance is those muscles that you can't lift for.
01:26:46.000It's the weird being able to stand on one leg and move around in every direction because especially when you've got weight on your back, you're packing something out.
01:26:56.000That kind of weird agility strength training and those guys that do those kind of sports like...
01:27:45.000Everybody wants to do curls and bench press and stuff and get jacked.
01:27:49.000For functional strength, there's very few things that are as good as a Turkish getup.
01:27:52.000There's something about pressing that weight on your back, getting up to your knees, anchoring your body up, standing all the way up, and then lowering yourself all the way back down again.
01:28:02.000It's just phenomenal for all these weird muscles.
01:29:37.000For a person who lives, like say if you live in the Midwest, like say if you live in Kansas where it's all flat and you want to prepare for an elk hunt.
01:29:47.000I guess box steps with like a weighted pack over and over and over again?
01:29:52.000You know, I get asked that question a lot and I'll kind of, when I start, when I was say late teens or whatever, trying to I'd see elk and then just trying to be able to get that endurance where I never had to stop.
01:30:08.000And what I would do is I would go out and I would do something that was prolonged to where the point that I had to stop, I wouldn't stop, but I would switch the way that I did it.
01:30:19.000So say I pick a mountain or stairs or whatever, and you can run and then the point that I'd have to stop, I would turn around and start walking backwards.
01:30:28.000And then I would turn and start sidestepping and I would refuse to stop.
01:30:31.000So I'd pick a point that I knew I couldn't or almost couldn't get to.
01:30:35.000If I walked up a mountain one day and thought, I have to stop now.
01:30:38.000At that point where I had to stop, I would just switch the type of muscle and movement that I would do.
01:30:42.000So I thought, okay, like if you're some kind of workout, whatever that workout is, but like some kind of, say, stairs or whatever.
01:30:52.000If you're running stairs and you go...
01:30:55.000Until your body's like, absolutely, I cannot go anymore.
01:30:59.000But keep moving in just a different muscle group.
01:31:06.000If I'm doing like kickboxing on a heavy bag and I'm exhausted, like say if I'm throwing punches and roundhouse kicks and I get so exhausted I'm almost done and I know there's still a minute left of the round, then I'll switch to front kicks and weirdly enough, I have energy to do that.
01:32:32.000It's like all the hiking every day with the pack.
01:32:35.000I thought, oh, no, this will be no problem.
01:32:37.000And I get on that bike and get my ass kicked.
01:32:39.000It's like you have to do to do in a certain level.
01:32:44.000But there's certain things you could probably do.
01:32:47.000I could pedal a little bit, and then I'd be on a stationary bike every day, and then you'd have more muscle memory for that type of action.
01:32:56.000So if you did the stair thing, I think that's probably the closest you could get to get that muscle memory.
01:33:01.000Yeah, I think it would be a stair thing.
01:33:20.000That's what people in the Midwest, where it's flat, should open up gyms, like rent stairwells.
01:33:25.000You just have packs at the bottom, and people get a membership, and they can just go up the stairs as many times as they want, up and down the stairs.
01:33:32.000It's amazing how just carrying your body up hills is so difficult.
01:33:36.000To a person who never does it, you're like, oh, we're hiking?
01:33:40.000Oh, it's like walking, but you're walking outside.
01:37:51.000Yeah, well, I think, you know, he just didn't, he's like, just toughing it out, and I'm just going to tough it out, and he didn't do anything for it.
01:37:56.000I don't, and I probably didn't hear it because it hurt to take the sock on it, so he's probably, I don't really know what his situation was, but it wasn't good.
01:38:05.000Putting the, so he probably had it in a boot, sweating all day, rubbing on it, getting sweat and bacteria, who knows, and then it just got infected.
01:39:05.000And I think somebody that's getting into hunting, if they go with somebody that fits that stereotype, then they're probably going to have a bad experience.
01:39:41.000The things that I notice someone else might notice, so I point those out to them and just give them an overall good experience of why we're out there and what we're doing.
01:39:52.000Well, I think a lot of people have an idea of what a hunter is from television or from the movies or from Duck Dynasty or something like that.
01:39:59.000And a lot of that is maybe even tree stand hunters who are maybe overweight and not fit.
01:40:08.000Western, big-game-style hunting like you do is really an athletic endeavor as well as a skill as well as a really comprehensive, knowledge-based approach to problem-solving.
01:40:36.000There's a lot of people that do it, but they don't have those little nuanced skills that you pick up over time.
01:40:43.000There's a lot of things that I do that maybe people that have hunted their whole lives won't even notice.
01:40:48.000The more you do things, the better you get at it, the more you notice.
01:40:51.000The more you've had times, the more times you've fucked up and then figured out why that got messed up, and then you try to remedy it in the future and don't do it this way, and you just start paying attention to really small things that Yeah.
01:41:36.000When you pick areas, that's what people that I hunt with, I'll go into a new area and I'll be fairly successful for not going into that area, but I've done it enough times to where, okay, I do things a certain way and it is constantly changing too as the environment changes, but If I'm going into an area,
01:41:53.000instead of going down that hill, I go around the other way and look at the hill facing me.
01:42:38.000I think that most people, if they're carrying their child in some kind of danger, they would do some kind of natural, instinctive movement to get that child away from that danger.
01:43:53.000Well, it's that time, too, when you're hunting and you go, like, it's an animal, whatever, and you just have that feeling like I should sit here.
01:44:47.000Yeah, there's definitely parts of us that we...
01:44:51.000I don't think we're ever going to really experience it unless you're doing something physically.
01:44:56.000You know, you don't even probably know you have the instinct to get the fuck away from a bear as it's charging or to juke a bear until it actually happens.
01:45:05.000That was more like, get the fuck out of here.
01:45:07.000But the fact that your brain was capable of coming up with that move in that moment while this 11 and a half foot monster fucking bear was coming down on you.
01:45:17.000Well, and I think that Giannis, man, hitting that thing in the face with the trekking pole.
01:45:36.000And just, and that, that's what turned the bear, I had no clue that he did that, because I, when Garrett was on the back, he's like, I was on his back, and I was like, yeah, I juked it, and the bear ran away.
01:45:47.000And you know, it's just like, no, dude.
01:45:49.000I hit it in the face with the trekking pole, that's why it ran away.
01:46:23.000And because you're looking for an animal, you're hiking, you're exhausted, day in, day out, you're out there for a long time, and then all of a sudden it comes down to one moment.
01:46:32.000And that one moment literally might be five seconds.
01:46:34.000Holy shit, he's coming out from behind that tree.
01:47:10.000I guess with my bow, the one thing I think, because I have a trigger release, so I just try to feel the trigger in my finger, in the corner of my finger, so then I know that I'm not going to like...
01:47:33.000Did you ever have any classic archery training?
01:48:41.000It made no sense, but I'd be out there.
01:48:43.000I had a ball on a string in the backyard, like a softball, and I'd swing the softball back and forth and just tell myself, be the arrow, be the arrow, shoot.
01:49:04.000So in the process of switching the way that I shoot, I developed a few bad habits, which now I think, if I would have just stuck with it, it would have been fine.
01:49:16.000But now that I've tried to switch, then I kind of try to, all those bad habits that I had originally, try to creep back in.
01:49:23.000And it doesn't really, in the end, I do really well.
01:49:35.000You should go over some coaching with him.
01:49:38.000What's interesting to me is that I've seen a bunch of guys who are very accomplished hunters and very accomplished archers, and they get real weird around him.
01:52:23.000You know, I might do one or two hunts a year.
01:52:25.000I always, the one hunt, generally, because I guide during the elk season in Montana, so my thing is elk meat is my number one thing that I want in the freezer.
01:52:37.000So I generally save a few days at the end of the season to go out and try to kill an elk with a rifle.
01:52:42.000It's mostly just because I want that meat in the freezer.
01:52:46.000And there's nothing wrong with rifling.
01:52:48.000And the thing about if I take a rifle, it's also that challenge thing.
01:52:53.000So I might go into an area where the odds of me getting something with a rifle even would be a hundred or say multiple times less than the odds of me going into an area with a bow and getting something.
01:53:09.000Right, because it's just low density of animals.
01:55:34.000I don't actually have the stats, but it seems like almost every year somebody dies from a grizzly now, or multiple people.
01:55:42.000A lot of people have been getting attacked, and I think it's just...
01:55:45.000The amount of people that are there and just think that they're cuddly, cute animals and they don't really have precautions.
01:55:53.000Because I think if you go on a hunt in Alaska, where we went, in a Fognac, you're probably a lot safer than the tourists going into Yellowstone.
01:57:10.000Those bears, they do have a different temperament.
01:57:12.000Now, I think that the bears in Montana, we'll just keep going back to bears, but the bears in Montana, landlocked grizzly bears, just seem to be slightly more aggressive than the larger coastal brown bears, just because they don't have as much food.
01:59:34.000It's got its mouth open, trying to bite through the glass, and its head is so fucking big.
01:59:39.000Yeah, I mean, there's a heartbreaking video, I don't know if you saw it, it was going around a couple weeks ago, of a polar bear starving to death.
01:59:47.000And, you know, they're attributing it to climate change.
02:01:00.000I'm still doing the solo stuff, and then, yeah, I've got some stuff in the works for the coming future that'll be exciting.
02:01:09.000I just can't really divulge a lot of it yet.
02:01:12.000Well, I hope you do something that allows people that are more mainstream, that aren't on outdoor TV, to get a look at your approach and your philosophy and the way you look at things.
02:01:23.000Because I think that guys like you and Rinella and Cam Haynes and Yeah.
02:01:44.000This is more like an endurance skill thing on top of being a hunting thing.
02:01:49.000There's a lot of variables here that most people don't take into consideration.
02:01:55.000That's why I really enjoy having you on a podcast and having guys like you on to talk about this stuff so people get an understanding of it in a different way.
02:02:52.000I just think that a lot of times what's happening with just stories that are being told about hunting, everyone's preaching to the converted.
02:03:23.000And very respectful pursuit and really hard to do.
02:03:26.000You were talking about the kind of physical fitness levels that are required of you, the knowledge and understanding.
02:03:32.000This is not like some easy thing where you go into the mountains and just go find an animal that's trying to survive and kill it, especially with a bow and arrow.
02:04:12.000It's not like where I go into remote wilderness areas where the animals are completely wild and You have no support system, no net of safety, and you just have to rely on your skills and your ability, and you're just another predator out there on the mountain.
02:04:31.000And there are things in some of those places that want to eat you, and you just have to adapt and deal with it and be prepared and go off those skills.
02:04:38.000Are those solo backpacking trips your favorite ones?
02:05:19.000And to be honest, there's times that I've been in there by myself and taken less precaution.
02:05:24.000And I remember one specific time I was stocking a blacktail and I had my pistol in my backpack, which now obviously I would never do again, but I had my bear spray on my...
02:10:16.000So in that particular area, the predator populations got so high...
02:10:21.000That the moose populations and undulant populations were in severe decline and in danger of not being able to provide food, an adequate food source for the people that lived.
02:10:35.000And when I'm talking people, people live in these remote areas.
02:10:42.000It's a lot more real than the shows, but they live in these areas where there is no access to other food sources.
02:10:48.000One of the guys that I met, the only thing he eats for an entire year is bear meat.
02:10:53.000He has no other, I mean, I don't know if he gets some kind of, he grows some kind of garden and forages as well, but his main food source through the winter is bear meat.
02:12:32.000This guy is living as close to the land as possible, but yet there's some millennial behind a camera telling him, hey man, can you pretend that you just found that again?
02:12:43.000Just put it down, pick it up again, like, whoa, can't believe this is here.
02:12:48.000Yeah, I think some of those people, I've met quite a few people that live, like, that aren't on television, that live in the, and they're fairly strangely normal people.
02:13:00.000It's kind of, you would think, but they, some of them have, they might live in a shack, but they've got some kind of, like, internet service off their generator that they run every once in a while.
02:14:56.000And then had to skin it and send the skull in and, you know, had to tell the wildlife people, like, hey, this bear tried to kill my dog, so I had to shoot it.
02:15:06.000Yeah, defensive life, you can shoot, or defensive life or property, technically.
02:15:11.000Yeah, but this guy, again, like you're saying, remarkably normal.
02:15:50.000It was summertime too, so it would have been eating fish and seals and whatever it could find, dead seals mostly.
02:15:57.000Because I remember Rinello telling me that he shot a black bear once that had eaten nothing but fish and that they smoked it and that he borrowed a friend's smoker.
02:16:05.000He didn't say it was terrible, but he said he borrowed a friend's smoker and he said, hey man, you've got to clean that smoker out.
02:18:39.000And I cock my fist back to punch it in the face.
02:18:42.000And it hits the brakes and starts skidding because it's running downhill.
02:18:47.000So I think my estimation of what happened was I'm sitting there with my hands in camo and it saw maybe the flash of my hands working on the phone or maybe something in the flash of the phone and thought it was a small animal.
02:19:00.000Probably thought it was a rabbit or something.
02:21:40.000Well, what it had done, it had drug the calf into that patch of grass and then they kind of bury it and it had just been gorging on it and it was laying on top of it.
02:21:51.000And I didn't even see any of that because I'm so focused on the tracks and everything else.
02:22:44.000They pay money for permits to allow these cows to graze?
02:22:48.000Yeah, you lease it, and then you pay X amount to the Forest Service for grazing atonement in certain areas, and then generally you have to have them off by October 1st.
02:22:58.000So, like, me and Dan Doty, we're on a stalk, and we're moving through this area, and then we hear some noise, and there's fucking cows standing in front of us.
02:25:36.000I thought that was amazing when they showed how they preserve buffalo, where they would cut it really thin and hang it on clotheslines to dry it and make machaca out of it.
02:26:43.000I thought it was an extremely high-quality show for that network, and those high-quality shows cost too much for that network to make, is what it ended up being.
02:29:54.000A lot of people live close to them, probably don't even take advantage of them.
02:29:57.000But there's a lot of cool places and a lot of cool things you can do in the U.S. and in the western U.S. There's just a lot of cool places around.
02:30:05.000Well, one of the things that I said when we were in Nevada, when we were up there outside of Reno, it's like three hours outside of Reno, somewhere like that?
02:30:51.000And that's one of the reasons why people like backcountry hunters and anglers and conservation groups are so important to preserve your access to these places.
02:31:01.000Because there are so many places like that that are just fantastic.
02:31:06.000They're there for you, and most people don't even know about it.
02:31:09.000Even if you have zero desire to go hunting, just go and visit.
02:31:12.000Just go and wander through those woods in Idaho.
02:31:20.000It's just cool to walk into a spot, especially Idaho's got huge wilderness areas, walk in there and look around and think, it's what everything looks like when there's no roads, when there's nothing.
02:31:32.000You might be the only person for, it's a cool feeling to know that there's no one else around.
02:31:37.000And it's not much different than it was 5,000 years ago.