November 13, 2025 • 51 mins
In this episode of Spike Camp, Rich Froning discusses his recent rifle elk hunt, and recaps the trip with Scott and Watkins. Watkins goes through his first hunting experience and discusses how his training held up to the challenge the mountains provided.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And sure enough we turn around and as we turn around,
cow elk on the backside of that finger ridge, cow elk,
cow elk, And I take my binoes up and I'm like,
that's a legal bull.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And so I'm like, Curtis, give me range whatever.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
So I grabbed my tripod and in the moment I'm
like kind of start fumbling with.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
The clips and I was like, calm down.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
So I calmed down, slow, get them, get everything out,
put the gun in there.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
He gives me the range.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I look at the MOA or he may read out
the MOA, and then we subtracted the percentages we thought
and I get on him and I'm like, is he
the one in the back?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
He goes what And I.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Just shot And as soon as I shot it, he
just stopped and did that kind of like thing in
Idaho where he was like he was done, and.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Curtis is like another one.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
So I didn't want to take the chance, and so
he was like four hundred and sixty yards I think
that is what.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
He was out here.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
The stakes are real effective preparations starts with fittings, but
it requires so much more. This show explores the tools, knowledge, resilience,
and skills needed to be ready when it matters the most.
Join me Rich Browning as we apply the decades of
wisdom I've gained through training and competition to hunting in
(01:17):
the back country. This is in Pursuit, brought to you
by Mount Knums.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
In collaboration with Mayhem Hunt.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
All Right, um, this is post Trent Ellis. That's been
forever ago. Yeah, that's the hard part about these. Now
we're rolling out the new ones, rolling out.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
The new ones. All right, Yeah, so Trent. Trent just
said his baby.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I don't know if you guys following on social ad
said his baby killed a good deer on public ground
in Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So congrats Trent doing some stand up.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, so him and Watkins speak the same language.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Minwaukins speak the same language. He was a good dude,
good worked out with us a little bit. I think
that was kind of one of the first CrossFit workouts
he's done a long time.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
He said, he made fun of you for Collins.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
They're buffalo.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I call him both like, I'm I'm not one of
those people that's like, well, let me technically tell you
that it's it's actually bison.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I don't I always tell people, hey, call it whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
It's been called a buffalo for so long that you
can just kind of use it's interchangeable.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So, uh, we got.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Angelo behind the mic today. What fresh off of his
h Scotland trip.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
My World, My World Tour, Your World Tour, Stay Line
of Florida.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
How did how did the fishing trip go? Good?
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Oh my gosh, it was so good. I forgot I
haven't seen you and told.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
You I haven't seen you in like three weeks.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
We we like rode out and the captain got a
call while we're going out to the fishing spot he's
gonna take us to. He said, Hey, my buddy just
called me. There's a school redfish in this hole that
I go to sometimes hit or miss. He's out there
like an hour ago. You guys want to try it,
and we're like, sure, let's try it. And we got there.
It's there's no action for twenty minutes and then like
(03:00):
just like that, me and my brother both hit and
we both reel in like a good sized red fish.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
There's like a certain right now.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
There's a keep a certain size.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
It's it has to be a certain length and under
a certain length. So it's like there's a window because
like their adolescents or readers somewhere in between there, and
so we caught when they were something that were too big. Anyways,
long story short, we caught like thirty kill yeah. I
mean it was like two and a half hours of
NonStop just like and like pretty much you throw it
out there and as soon as it's water, if they
(03:29):
don't get it, and you might as well reel it
in and try again because as soon as they see
it that they go to it. So we ended up
we caught our limit of redfish and trout, and I
caught I.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Caught a catfish actually too.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
Yeah, and then uh no, catfish they're they're they're pretty nasty.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
As what we said, I've never had a saltwater catfish.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
Whether or not that to say, I didn't know there was.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
They're not as good as catfish run here. So we
caught a bunch of fish. It was like probably one
of the best days of fishing I've ever had. And
then we cooked it all up Boco, Grand Florida. The
it's usually oh no, that's not the best part that happened. Sorry,
there's actually a really something really cool happened. So like
both Grand is like the tarpain capital of Florida. So
(04:14):
there's there's just there's a huge bay and during i
think during the late spring, there's it's pretty much called
like Tarpin Bay, Like you go out there in w tarpinfish.
I caught like a two hundred and fifty pound tarpain
out there, which is I think like the world records
around to eighty or three hundred. So it's like it's
it's one of the biggest tarpin that they've ever seen.
And so that night we got down on the fishing
(04:36):
trip and the captain's like, well, yeah, you can fish
for tarp and just off the beach if you want to.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
My dad brought like all his fishing gear. He has
a pretty heavy due.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
Rod, and so we cast net out uh and just
catch some lady fish. You know, they're like eight inches long,
they're like little fish. Use it as bait, live bait.
We hook it on a big hook and we toss it.
We toss it out there and nothing for a little while.
My brother and my dad's like, hey, you guys, go
look for some more bay like this. That they get
the bait gets pretty dead. They die because they're on
(05:05):
a hook and they're like they're not moving right, So
every now and then we have to catch more bait. Anyways,
one time, same thing, like I said, he throws his
ladyfish out there, hits the water, and this tarpin freaking
just grabs onto it. We don't know what it is
because we're kind of fishing for sharks. Really grabs the
ladyfish and my dad starts fighting it and we just
see this tarp and they're like, you know, they're silver,
(05:27):
They're like totally silver.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Jumps out of the water and flops.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
We're like, holy shit, you caught a tarp and he
just like keeps frieling in really in and uh, I
mean it's like fighting him good. And he gets it
on the beach and it basically breaks off right at
the wave where the waves are crashing and it kind
of falls back in. But we got a good look
at it, like it was a good sized tarp and
it was. It was pretty crazy. None of us expected it. Yeah,
about two and a half three feet. It's maybe a
(05:50):
little short than that, like three feet.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
So yeah, we had a great fishing the Tuna Club.
Speaker 5 (05:56):
Yeah, it was that was probably the coolest part, just
like just like throwing something off the beach. It was
like it was like ten o'clock at night where it's
out there fishing, and then we end up staying out
there pretty late.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
You got a whisper.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
We ended up staying out there pretty late because I
mean we were just catching a lot of fishes, a
lot of fish to be caught. So no, it was
some of the best fishing I've ever been a part of.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
Actually it was cool. Tarp and just tuna.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
I don't know what.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
No tarpans like this. It's like, I mean, it's it
looks like gosh. The best way to explain is it's
like a It's like a huge bass. The only way
the reason I say that is because their mouths are
are like real bony and they open up really wide,
so like when you hold it up, it doesn't that
looks nothing like a bass, I guess, but like if
(06:43):
the the jaw is similar. Because of that, it's just
a big bony jaw and it's just a long silver fish.
Like I don't know how to explain it.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
How's silver experienced great fishing success? You guys got to
experience the great out hunting success. I got sick for
the last three hours of well, I was sick the
whole hunt.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yeah you started, I missed the last and you're like,
oh no, no, I'm not sick.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
And then they let me back up. All right.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So we got there. We left on Thursday, got there
Thursday night.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
So we could scout Friday.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
So we could scout Friday. We've never ever scouted before
in our lives. We always just show up the day
of and hunt.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Well.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
I think there is a ton of merit to scouting.
It did no good for us.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
No, because we found we found herds in every spot
we went to. Actually, one of the one of the
bulls we did find on Friday did get killed during
the trip.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
But the other herd that we found that you wanted
to hunt that bull never saw them again. They never
did that.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Again, never did it again. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
So we the morning, first morning, we went to low
Low spot on the property. We hunted way down at
the bottom. We saw pretty good bull, a five at
sure it's the one that my uncle ended up killing.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Well, the funny thing is we're watching all these whole herd,
which we had a we think had a mule deer bike.
There were two We're all staring at this and then
all of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I turned around. I turned around like.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Three to fifty yards behind us. We're having a full conversation. Yeah,
and we're just all I've got cameras. Y.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
This works.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
There's like five or six kind of big draws that
we can hunt, and all the way off to the
far end. I almost call it like the wall, Like
there's a wall on the one side that we can hunt,
and there's just elk pouring in, pouring in, pouring in,
and we're just watching them. There's one what we thought
was one shooter bull. We didn't even like press up
on them. We didn't want to booger them up too much.
(08:39):
That morning, we were like, we got eyes on them,
we know they're.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Here, they're down here, let's, you know, check it out.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And like Scott said, we were just sitting there looking
at them, and then all of a sudden, I just
kind of like went to stretch and.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Turn, and sure enough, Clere's a bull.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah. I think he was like five. He was five
hundred from where we were at.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
And then me and my uncle got up and kind
of went up on one of the fingers just to
get a good look at him, and there were more
elk in this this finger by.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
A huge fence post. You could just say, you.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Get your gun on there, get your range, which later
on we realize, if you're gonna hunt altitude, make sure
you do your calculations for altitude.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Because once you're up there, it's a little bit different.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So that was Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon or Friday morning,
Friday afternoon, Me, you and Watkins did our hike up
to what we call hell Hole. It was all the
way up to the top. We probably gained fifteen hundred feet,
I would guess, or more.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, I looked on an ax it was something like that.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, fifteen hundred feet and it was a it's cool
is this is way up on the backside, so it's
up about ten thousand feet on the tallest part of it,
and then it there's a nice big saddle between two
kind of finger ridges and there's a wallow right at
the top of it that they've hit. When Ben went
with us a couple of years ago, we sat it.
(09:53):
It's the longest we've ember sat in the woods and
never seen anything. And that's where all the action was
this time. But it was three twenty or three twenty something.
We're just sitting up on this ridge glass and kind
of looking. We can see for miles on this spot.
It's it's beautiful, beautiful view. But you there's just you
can see a ton of country. You can see down
into some of those finger ridges that we were talking
(10:14):
about that we hunt in the bottom. You can't quite
see the very bottom of those finger ridges, but you
can see the top. And so we just thought it
was a good place of glass. Well, sure enough we
turn around and come right comes out of the the
one high side behind us what eight to ten cows
four a nice cool shooter buoys a five by but
(10:34):
he underneath his fourth and fifth on his right side,
he had a.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
It was almost a full point. It looked like from
four hundred yards.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
With the binos of those sig binos are incredible, it
looked like almost a full point.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
So we'd been a five by six. He's a cool
bull and dude. They just hung out there.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
We we end up leaving at five fifteen or five
twenty because we just didn't want to mess with him. Yeah,
and at some point ten fifteen twenty more elk pop
out of there and and so they you know, we
we ended up leaving so we didn't mess them up, and.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
They worked to within like one hundred yards of us.
And then the crazy thing is that heard was out
in standing in the sun or it's like cloud cover,
but on and off sun for an hour and a
half two hours.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, and we left them. They didn't even leave. They
were still out there. When we left.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
We ducked down the ridge and took off to where
we didn't mess anything up. So that was Walkin's kind
of first day of elk hunting. Fitness wise, looking around wise,
what did you you know on that first day?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
What were your initial thoughts?
Speaker 6 (11:41):
So when we left the cabin to go up that
one the first spot were just straight up just that
first in clowns like, oh man, this sucks.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Yeah, well the very beginning is almost the worst part.
Speaker 6 (11:52):
Oh yeah, it's the worst part. Yeah, thought, heart rates
up and we just stopped, and of course we get
to that one little section, We're just like, oh, do
we go left, do we go ride? Do we go
straight up? And we made that backtrack. I was like,
oh man, like I don't know about this, and then
you guys took off.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (12:07):
I was like well, here we go, pray it works.
But the whole my whole time hocking that part was
I don't think it was a stepper where I did
so much stepper. It's like I wish I did more
sled pushes, but more importantly sled drags.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
For your quads, like reverse sled drags backwards.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
No, so you know where we just put like the
I wish I did this so much more. I think
that'd be and lower back, Yeah, like my lower back
never really got tied with that.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That climb to me, isn't super steep. There's some like
pitchy stuff in there where it's like the very beginning
of steep, and then it's.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Just just said.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
You know what sucked was that first day I'm like, oh,
hell yeah, we got this. This is this isn't bad.
It was day two dawod the tripod and the rifle
adding an extra twenty five pounds.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Was miserable and it was hot.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It was me, Curtis, I just wore you start doing
the thing where you're all pushing each other faster than
you need to.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, well, when somebody's walking beside you, you think you're walking slow.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
I wasn't sick. Yet and hadn't said it, and.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So we just hammered this hill. So then imagine walking
from the cabin straight up to hell Hole. There's a
trail up there now and it's just beautiful.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Oh it's awesome.
Speaker 6 (13:21):
Yeah, you get to that one section where it just
looks like you're in like a cast.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, yeah, that was cool.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, So Walkings is great. He uh you know, me
and Scott we only stopped once, right.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, we stopped one time for five six minutes.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Mabe versus when we stopped for Billings and d Lane. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
I mean this is like a whole ordeal too, where
you wear something that as soon as you get there
you take it off because you sweat through the entire shirt.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I think I talked to you guys into wearing T
shirt because at first, you guys, we're gonna.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Wear long sleeve, right, No, he was, I was, You're
still wearing the long sleep.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
The first day, a T shirt second day, but I
brought layers. I was just gonna ditch.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I just wore my orange vest on the second climb. Yeah,
but I didn't start all orange orange.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Best.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
That was good, to make that clear. I didn't stop
at all.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Oh, you didn't. You just kept kept trudging. Yeah. So
we got up there pretty quick. It was like forty
something minutes I think.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, and we got down quick too.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
We bailed out and came down.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
It felt good after the scouting, I mean, yeah, we
saw elk every single place we went. We identified bowls
every single place we went because uh, you your uncle Matt.
We had three bulltags in camp. Jim oh, he did. Technically,
he wasn't really hunting for a bull though he were.
He mostly wanted a mule deer buck.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
So we did have four bulltags in camp, but really
really he didn't care about his. He wanted a buck. Yeah.
And so we identified enough to where we could split
up the.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Next day and all go our own.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Yeah, try to make a move.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah. So the next morning we all went down to
the bottom.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
At that point, Curtis was there, so me and you,
Curtis and Jimmy kind of hunted together.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
You got paired up with Billings and bill that morning.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Yeah, we went down to the bottom. We separated and
went to that far heard thinking we can maybe find them.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
They never quite wanted to cooperate, and we don't even
do we see a bull in there. No, we never
split a second. Maybe we might have.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
He was pretty high up and there was no way
we could get to him. He was off our what
we were allowed to hunt. We could hunt some blm
and some private but he was on the neighbor's property,
so we couldn't couldn't quite get to him.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
That day was fine. That was when we took when
you glassed over and seen me Bill and Hill.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
The only bluff on the place.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
My sixty five year uncle has his walking stick, and
I look and Matt's coming around, Watkins is coming around,
and then sure enough Bill comes walking around with his
walking stick a foot off the edge of this bluff,
the only bluff on the property, thinking what is Matt doing? Yeah,
taking my uncle on that. So you guys, we we
got to that farest. That was the time we were
(16:02):
starting walking back down the trail and the calf a
cow and then a shooter I legal bull ran right by,
and uh, we couldn't quite Jimmy couldn't quite get a
shot on it. And but we had a pretty close encounter.
It was like four hundred.
Speaker 6 (16:19):
The weird thing was every time if you've seen a
good mule deer, then here comes a cow and here
comes a bull, and our situation it was anyways, well
just like movie was up on that hell ho, remember
we saw that mule deer first, and then the cows come,
and then the bulls came.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Oh we saw yeah, we saw yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
we saw a ton of mual deer this trip.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I didn't never had a mule deer tag and never
really had the itched mule deer hunt. But now after
this trip, they were everywhere, were everywhere, so stupid though.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Yeah, they prance around and the does are oblivious to anything.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
We were that last night. How far are we like
twenty yards from.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Him for ten fift ill peak sickness?
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, so that morning we just walked around a little bit.
You guys didn't really get on anything that morning either,
did you.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
Huh? The first Saturday, Yeah, so that was the day.
That was the day that me Bill, Oh.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
You guys tried to close in.
Speaker 6 (17:14):
Yeah, we tried to.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Couldn't quite get there.
Speaker 6 (17:16):
I think the furthest the closest that we got was
like sick something. Of course Bill.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Bill couldn't was that on the bull or on the cows?
Speaker 6 (17:25):
That was so that was the one day he got
Sunday exact same one, had to do same one.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
He was in the same same drainage. That afternoon.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
We sat up topiked up top, sat up top till dark.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Really there nothing came out there.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
We had that far out of the far seven yards,
so I ended up taking a shot on one from
seven hundred yards. I felt super comfortable with that rifle.
Shot really well. What we did not account for was altitude.
So we sighted the gun in at fifteen hundred feet
and we were up ten thousand. So when I looked
(18:01):
it up, you about a one percent of moa per
one hundred feet of elevation game for thousand feet of
elevation game, and.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
So we were up what nine thousand from almost ten thousand?
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah yeah, or sorry, yeah, up nine thousand from We
sighted it in, so shot high.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Curtis gave me the shot high.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Thought maybe it was just me shot high again, So
then I tried to compensate and shoot under.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
And when I shot on the video.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Well, the thing is we couldn't see at this point.
We couldn't see the video well enough correct, So we
just saw them storm off and so you and I
have to go down what a few hundred feet back
up a few hundred feet.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Over seven hundred yards to check and make sure we
found nothing.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
No blood, no nothing.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
And at this point though we're still all we have
is the little camera screen to go off of us.
So we didn't know until we got to the big
screen what had happened. But then we saw that.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
When we saw the big screen.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I don't know how this thing it wasn't a head
shot because the way I compensated, I went down to
about it's knee maybe and shot and the way it
was looking, the bullet had to have gone right over it.
You've maybe seen the video better since I haven't, but
I don't know how it.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
It was cool because you can see the vapor trail. Yeah,
so you see the first one miss. Your correction was
actually almost correct, like perfect, And somehow it it scared
that bull so bad a headache because he's looking the
other way and he just sees a hill blow up
right behind him. He probably felt that bullet was by
(19:40):
his head.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, So we couldn't couldn't, couldn't clue. We didn't hunt
the rest of that evening because.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Well, by the time we looked for him, it was dark. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
Chance, so when they all.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Almost get down.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
I'm just like, wow, we don't need to get down.
There's just like twenty yards in front of us. If
we get down, I thought they're just gonna run us over.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
Wild is sound going through the woods.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
It's crazy crashing horses.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, you guys were on the far side of the
up We were up above you guys, and they came
running down.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Come run down the hill.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
So next morning we all went back to the bottom.
We didn't see it or hear anything, right, No, And
then Jimmy decided to go after that cow.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah. We me, you, Curtis, Jimmy were sitting together. Yep,
there's a cow just standing out in the field wide
over a meadow. Yeah, and so okay, you should go
because he had a cow tag, a buck tag, and a.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Bullt old tag, and so we talked him into it.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Him and Curtis went after that. You and I just
went and walked around.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
We went and just checked out. We went on a
little Scott and rich uh ye.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Then I think for context, Ashton spotting your uncle's bull. Yeah,
And then he was like, so, for context, how many
years has your uncle been trying to get a bull?
I think he said he's Ashton is the one that saw,
which is even funnier. I forgot how many hunts he's
been on, but for thirteen years, I think he's.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Tried to get a bull. He's never gotten a bull.
He's got several cows. So Harrison, my oldest cousin, and
Ashton get in Saturday night. Yeah, Saturday night.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
No, Saturday, yeah, Saturday day night.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, And so they do some scouting. They kind of
you know, find some stuff up and around the cabin.
And then so that next morning we're trying to figure
out what we're gonna do. We all end up going
to the bottom of the property. Bill, Ashton, Harrison all
kind of divide up. Billings and Watkins divide up, and
then us three or four divide up. So we were
on this cow. Jimmy ends up shooting this cow well
(21:34):
in the process. And so Harrison is a pretty good
outdoorsman and a hunter like loves to hunt, hunts a
lot of white tail. I think he's been on a
couple of elkhons with Bill. Ashton does not hunt, but
he likes being outside, likes adventure, and apparently has a
really good eye for elk. Dude can spot him out
of nowhere. So has a little bit of add adhd
(21:54):
whatever you want to call it, and can't sit still.
So even when he was with us after this, he
would be like, Hey, I'm gonna go look up on
this hill and i'll you know, maybe you know, show
you guys with my hat if I see anything, because
he had an orange hat, and so I guess at
some point he split off from Bill and Harrison and
then somehow found this bull. This bull bedded up right
in front of him. He's kind of looking at this
(22:15):
bull and all of a sudden he beds down. So
he comes back, gets Harrison and Ashton or Harrison and Bill.
They get into position and I think it was like
a three hundred and fifty yard shot and they end
up killing this bull. So, man, that was awesome to
see Bill, the reaction from him killing that thing. You
guys got to walk up before I got to get
there because we were on the cow duty. We got
Jimmy's cow. He ended up shooting it across a valley
(22:38):
and we found it and got in there. It was heavy, nasty.
That was some of the thickest oak brush. I don't
even know, you know it what was crazy was. I
was watching this thing the whole time while Jimmy and
Curtis tried to close the distance on it, and it
literally just kind of feeds around and then beds down,
and then the way the sun goes, you can't see
(23:00):
it anymore.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
It's just gone.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, they can disappear. That stuff disappeared so quickly, and
you knew that the cow was still. I knew it
was there, and so once I knew what to look for,
once I saw it, you could like catch a glimpse
of it facing because it was bed at downhill.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
It was so weird, so crazy.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
So we get that day we had cow down and
then Bill got his bull, and what we could do
is we just drugged that thing down to the main
trail and we got a truck up there and lifted
the whole thing in the back of the truck.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Uh, cow and cow.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
And so that afternoon we went back up to our spot,
sat there for a while, and then once it got
to like five o'clock, we decided to, hey, let's hit
the bottom. There had been some action the previous night
in a wallow kind of right across one of the
main drainages. We hunted and there was a ton of
(23:48):
action that night before, so we thought, and that morning
I guess.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
I can't remember, and we weren't seeing anything.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
We weren't seeing anything. There was no movement, no nothing.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
We probably scared everything off the hill the night before,
and so we made a mad day got down there,
and sure enough.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
There was a bull in that wallow.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
So we tried to get in position and he was
already kind of working his way up to either bed
or feet or we were just behind him. This is
when Scott slowly started to This.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Is when the sickness was rapidly taking hold, I would say.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
And that's when you guys were way down at the
bottom again and you had your bull come out from
one thousand yards right at dark.
Speaker 6 (24:26):
Said the cos I was, I couldn't go back out
there after what thirty something hours?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I don't want to go.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Well, this is a good actually this is good, so
Watkins said. Physically he was fine, but mentally I was.
You were like, I can one more day of the spot?
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (24:40):
Not that spot. It was just glassing that long for
not just like a few hours, It was that the
whole day, the fifteen hours, and we just like to
go back there.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, you and Matt decided to just stay down there, stay.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
There the whole time, and then the next day the
whole time I was like, I can't, I can't go
back up.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Do you think it was harder to for you? Then
it was harder to like sit on the glass and
stay focused on this one spot then have to like
fifteen hundred feet up.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (25:06):
God just wanted to stay moving because that is what
I was I've been doing for so long getting ready
for it. I just wanted to stay moving and then
just sitting still and with the billains. Don't get me wrong,
it was a blast. Every fifteen minutes we was cutting up,
but I just wanted.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
To move, new spot move. Yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
Had a new spot because you like, we looked at
this area, then this area, then this area. But it's
just like you can only do that so much before
you just kind of go stir crazy.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Yeah, we don't do. I mean we sat some. It
was physical to get to where we were going originally,
but then we would sit for maybe an hour or
two up at the top. But yeah, we kind of
got burnt out on that spot too. In the afternoon,
so we were we had made the decision we weren't
going back there. Yeah, so I'm trying to think this
would have been second till last morning.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Well, we saw that, we saw that hurd of there
that night, so we were like, hey, let's just go
back there in the morning.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
And sure enough, we got above that wall though, thinking
we could get in to it, and then in that
process we got a little too close. I thought the
wind was perfect, but I guess it switched or the
way that.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Whole drainage works.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
They winded us and busted out of there. So we
never quite got a good eye of them. But apparently,
you know, looking at them through glass there, it was
a really good bull in there, and we saw him
kind of go up on the other side of the road.
So for the rest of the day we just tried
to kind of get back on them.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
We never did see that bull again.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I don't think I did. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I saw a couple of bucks working through timber at
different spots. We would, you know, the drainage it was,
it's kind of hot, high and tall on one side,
and so we'd get on the other one and try
to glass into it and just change our perspective. And
we saw a ton of cows. I ended up seeing
another bull later, but he was moving on. There was
really no reason for him to be moving on, but
he just did not. They're super skittish at that point.
(26:52):
I mean they've been hunted for a while. But yeah,
we just spent that whole day just glassing and moving,
glassing and moving, and decided to try to get back
to that wallow, thinking maybe something would come back in there.
And it's the first time ever it's dark, and they're
starting to get dark and there's nothing going on. I mean,
we can't really see anything. Scott is literally just laying
(27:14):
full every layer he has on, has his hood.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
On, nit I don't really get cold either, no.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Nit hat, and he's just laying there shivering like you
can just see him every once in a while, like
doing this randomly, snoring, falling asleep, and I'm just sitting
there glassing and then finally it's like last a little
bit of light and I'm like, let's get him back
to camp, and Scott at no point said no, let's stay.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
He was like okay, And so we end up when
we got.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Back, well what happened. I kind of planned for us
to like switch spots in the middle of the day,
which I didn't plan well, but I had been alternating
between musinax and I have a profen to try to
control my fever. Well, I had no medicine since like
eight am this day because we stayed out the whole day,
and so by the time I got back to camp,
I'm trying to pour whatever it was. Either I would
(28:02):
proferm USINEX. I'm trying to give myself these pills and
I'm shaking so bad I can hardly even get it
into my hand to take it. So I would then
try to take these showers that are like thirty five
minutes long to get my body back of the temperature.
I've never I've not felt that bad in three years.
Speaker 6 (28:22):
We took that melon. That was pretty epic.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, Bill was just snored the whole time.
Speaker 6 (28:27):
He just just woke up.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
And maybe ten minutes after he laid down, you hear
him go like he had like one of those falling dreams.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Oh, it was so good.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
The thing that propelled me on the Wyoming hunt when
I got sick on this hunt is I I always
I always told every single day I was like didn't
want to be out there trying to film do whatever.
I knew. I knew the second I called it quits
for the shortest amount of time, you were gonna kill something.
And not only did I want to be part of
(29:02):
the experience from like a like a personal level, Yeah, yeah,
but you, but I wanted to like finish the project
properly and like have the video wrap up well. Yep,
And sure enough I spent about four hours in the middle.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
It's going to wrap up real well with me and Curtis.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Video.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
I spent about four hours the middle of that night
with my long John's, my sweatshirt pulled hood over my head,
five blankets, shivering, just awake in bed, just shivering uncontrollably.
And so your alarm went off. You're like, Scott, you're
feeling okay, how you feeling or whatever. I'm like, I'm
I'm worse.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
So the plan was we were we had to be
in we had to be back in Nashville for a
flight to Scotland Wednesday night. So in my head I'm thinking, oh,
we'll wait till Wednesday morning and fly out early Wednesday morning.
And I slowly like I'll check in the home and
like check the temperature, and I could slowly tell that
that was not gonna fly to show up on Wednesday
(30:02):
and have yeah, and have Hillary bring all three kids
in my bag. So I'd made the executive decision to
fly out Tuesday night at seven fifteen yep, and we
had about a four hour drive three and a half
four hours drive. So I knew, all right, the last
morning it's gonna be our full morning. We had to
we needed to leave by one o'clock at the latest.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, because you never know what's gonna happen going through
the past.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, And so we.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Make the executive decision book a flight, and we're like,
all right, we have to be you know, be done
hunting probably by eleven forty five twelve maybe depending how
far we are from camp. And so that morning, alarm
goes off and I'm like, Scott, how are you feeling, buddy?
He goes I've been shivering for the last four hours
and I've got long John's on sweatpants and I stole
(30:53):
Ashton's blanket.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, I'm like, Scott, won't.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
You just I was like, you're gonna have to cause
I thought I really was worried I was gonna hold
you back to where like you had to go after
a bowl and I'm just freaking dead on the side
of a mountain.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
And so when it was the coldest day, the cold
it had been temperature.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Baby thirties, mid low thirties. There was a couple of
frost round mornings, and then it would warm up to
like probably forty five fifty. Yeah, first couple days was
warmer than that, but the wind was killer.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yeah, and so and I knew that it being colder,
I was screwed. And the crazy thing is too, is
like I would say, typically I'm the warmest in the group, like.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Me and you were still Yeah, do you cat maybe
a little bit warmer in the cold, Yeah, do not
get cold when I'm moving, I'm probably just as hot.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
As soon as I was like cold the night before,
I knew there was gonna be no help in myself
the next day.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
So me Curtis split off from Billings and Watkins. I
think everybody had kind of left at that point. Jimmy,
Jimmy wasn't honting. He'd killed his Mealdier the night before
without any of us. We'd seen a bunch of good
Mualier and he ended up staying down low and busting
one Ashton Harrison Bill had left the night before tagged out,
so it's it's just basically the four of us really
going out. So Me and Curtis decide that we're going
(32:05):
to go to the spot that we saw the bulls
in the afternoon, the to Hell Hole up at the
top of the mountain. And so you guys stayed kind
of mid middle of the hill, yeah, and low, and
then end up coming up high. So Me and Curtis
decide to kind of still hunt this road right as
the sun's coming up and then try to be at
hell Hole at the wallow mid you know, like probably
(32:29):
thirty forty five minutes after daylight, thinking maybe we catch
something getting some water before it goes to bed or
back into the timbers.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
So we slow hunt.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
We heard something bust. I think it was a mule
deer right before dark as we were we probably started
like a touch too soon. But anyway, we get up
and now we're on the opposite side where we saw
the elk come out, so we're complete opposite side of
this little finger it we're on the other ridge and
so I get down and I'm kind of sitting there
glass and I want to be able to see into
(32:58):
the kind of meadow thing park that where they've been
coming out, and so I kind of come down the.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Ridge a little bit farther well, Curtis.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Stays up top kind of glasses, and all of a
sudden we look on the far edge, skylit, perfect cow elk,
so we're like, hell yeah, Spike comes up.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
We watched for hour hour and a half.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
As these elk just kind of sunned, and a bird
would hop on their back and start like, I guess
it's picking.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Bugs or whatever, and they would just let it.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
And so Curtis decides to go up top make sure
nothing's coming on the back side of our hill, and nothing.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
All of a sudden he comes running down. He's like, boll,
I think there's a bully with the group.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
So we're thinking there's a bull with that's heard, and
sure enough it's just this. It was a goofy looking
spike thick had like this weird curve to it, like
from far away you might be able to think it's
a bull. So we sit there and there's a county
road at the very bottom of this. I mean it's
shoot four or five hundred feet of elevation change or no, sorry,
(33:58):
about fifteen hundred feet of elevation, changing.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
All the bottom bottom, and so.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I heard a truck or something rolling through there, and
all these elk pile over back up before that, we're
sitting there and all of a sudden, we hear some
raking in the trees and the timber that I don't
know if it was a spike, I don't know if
it's a bull. We never got eyes on it. We
don't know if it's a meal deer because it busted off,
but we never saw him. And so we're thinking when
these cows busted through, it might push this bull out,
(34:23):
or he might they might pick him up, and maybe
they're coming up over the wall. So we sit there
for ten fifteen minutes, nothing comes through. We don't get
eyes on those cows or spike or whatever, so we
end up backing back up the top of the hill.
Curtis is like, let's let's get in the sun and
warm up a little bit and see if we can
glass the backside, because it's kind of it's hard to explain,
but there's another kind of big bowl behind us. And
(34:46):
so we get up to the top. Sitting in the sun,
you could smell elk real heavy in the way the
wind was coming. We kind of peered down into this
timber we're kind of looking. It was pretty heavily, pretty
heavy elk smell. So the plan was wait for a
little bit and then maybe just walk the timber and
bumped something up. We didn't have a ton of time.
We weren't, you know, gonna be there all day.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
You're really against the clock now.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And sure enough we turn around and as we turn around,
cow elk on the backside of that that finger ridge
cow elk cow elk. And I taken my biose up
and I'm like, that's a legal bull and so I'm like, Curtis,
give me range whatever.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
So I grabbed my.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Tripod and in the moment, I'm like kind of start
fumbling with the clips and I.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Was like, calm down.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
So I calmed down, slow, get them, get everything out,
put the gun in there.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
He gives me the range.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
I look at the MOA or he may read out
the MOA, and then we subtracted the percentages we thought,
and I get on him and I'm like, is he
the one in the back? He goes what And I
just shot And as soon as I shot it, he
just stopped and did that kind of like thing in
Idaho where he was like done, he was done.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And Curtis is like another one. So I didn't want
to take the chance.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
And so he's like four hundred and sixty yards I
think is what he was, and this was I know
what you can see on the camera.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Changed your MOA.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
At this point I dropped my MOA.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
I think it was like one point two or one
point four, because what I'd read is basically every five
hundred for every five hundred yards he drop at one
point four, depending on what.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
The calculation we had. So I dropped it at that
and it worked.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah, both shots were within four to six inches, and
he just piled up right there.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
But then then you're trying to race clean up duty.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
So then so then I knew we weren't gonna be
able to like pack out like quarters, right, So I
take off run and I ran probably three miles. I
think it was relatively flat. It's kind of flowy and
up and hill, downhill whatever to get the side by side.
To get the side by side while Curtis is quartering,
I get up there to I think he'd only had
(36:44):
the ham off when I got back and he'd done
all the hide and stuff, and so I helped him
with other shoulders shoulder, I did the shoulders, heated the hams,
and then we took the took a euro so we
got it done and then we picked watkins and met up.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
It's crazy too because you when you like back track
all this stuff and then we got to the airport
like right on time.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Didn't get to enjoy any of it. That was the
hard part is like I still haven't really enjoyed it.
And then I went straight to Scotland, so I didn't
even like well because normally.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
I mean for anyone that's killed a bowl like that,
I mean normally, assuming you're not like really racing the time.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
The heat, yeah, it was thirty degrees, it can like
if you're.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Not racing it, like we've we have experience where it's
really hot and you're trying to like get stuff and
you might have a really long pack out or something.
But if you don't have to hurry, it's usually not
something you rush through. It's like that's the whole experience
you've waited for. Especially this year, we had two unsuccessful
hunts and archery and then this one was like the
grand finale of going out West this year. So yeah,
(37:42):
it sucks for me to have like missed that, but
also for you guys.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
We had a text read and I'm just like, let's go.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
And my first reaction was so excited for you. My
second reaction was so massed off didn't go out.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (37:54):
The best part of that is like I didn't have
any service the whole time.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (37:58):
So we're going Chris Reason Metal Park where.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
You guys there hiked up pretty good little chunk. Huh.
We're sitting there getting bad to do that.
Speaker 6 (38:06):
You do the bear story. Yeah, we're Curtis seeing the bear.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh bear shit. Yeah, so I.
Speaker 6 (38:12):
Didn't know about that.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah, Curtis has seen a bunch of bear signed black
bear sign and had a bear tag.
Speaker 6 (38:17):
You dropped us off.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Oh yeah, how you didn't want to go in the dark,
Well I did. I didn't know, So hold on, way,
tell it from Billings perspective.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Billings goes, Yeah, Wakers didn't want to go, you know,
because they went to a new spot spot that head
and been it.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
It's good, should be a good spot.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
There's heavy timber, there's water blow, there's a good meadow
like all things that you would need or to have
a good spot, and so it's pitch black and we
drop them off to go to our spot, and so
Billings like, all right, let's head down there. And this
was in the spot where all the bear sign.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Was, and walk is like, I'm going down there. He's like,
there's a bear down there. I'll have a.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Gun and buildings like cool, I'm going down there. So
then you're gonna be standing here in the bear spot
without a gun, in the dark.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
And he's like, all right, I'll go with you.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
Kind of what happened because when you dropped us off
for there, of course it's cold, it's like seventeen degrees
and we're sitting there. I was just like, I was like,
all right, you're ready to go in. I go yeah,
to turn your headlamp. Your head lamp on. He's like,
why do we need that? I was like, you just
said it was bears in here. He goes, yeah, we'll
be fine. I'm just like, nope, I'm not going through that.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Nope.
Speaker 6 (39:17):
Through uh through that oak.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Brush is what It's like.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
I'm not going through that. Then I can't I can't
even see in front of my hand. He goes, ah,
he's like, we'll just wait a little bit. I was
just like, we're gonna wait longer than a little bit.
I was just like, I'm not going through that. And
finally I was just so cold. I was just like,
I guess it'll a seat. It was just going through.
Of course, I've never seen bear crap at all, so
as I'm walking through and we're kind of like brushing
the oaks away, I had to see this big old PILEO. Basically,
(39:42):
I was just like I was like, oh, that's bear.
I go, oh, that's cool. There's another pile. There's another pile,
there's another pile. I was just like, ah, just kind
of slowly work their way through this space. And of
course we went down to that spot I think two
days before. He didn't seemed like it took that long
to get through that. Dude, that morning, he seemed like
(40:03):
it took an hour to get through that because I
was freaking out, and be honest, I was just freaking
out the whole time. But like I said, the whole time,
I didn't have service. So we're sitting there, we're not
seeing anything, and I was like, all right, well, let's
just work away up top. He's kind of Mopey just
kind of just he ain't gotten anything, and everybody's getting something.
He ain't gotten that.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
This is the last morning, this is the last thing.
I hadn't sent you guys a text yet.
Speaker 6 (40:25):
No, and if you did, I didn't get it. But
we're walking through and we go up that basically that
ridge that they all was calming up. We're sitting there
and everything. The phone goes off and I looked at
it and Chris Billing's a little bit behind me. He
just kind of dragging his feet basically, and it's just
the texts from you. It says, let's go. I was
just like, oh, I think Richard got something. And I
(40:47):
was like, what do you get? I was like, I
don't know. Then you set the photo. So I'm sitting
there and I'm like, do that Thing's huge? Just talking
about everything, and Billings is getting like kind of furious
about it. He's like, let me see, takes my phone.
He's like, I ain't got nothing yet. He's sitting there
looking at it and he goes, I was just like,
do you want to go get one? He goes, yeah,
(41:09):
I want to get one. We go. We don't have
enough time. I was just like because we've got two hours,
let's get up this mountain side and like we'll be fine.
He goes, okay, I guess. So we're kind of just
slowly trotting it up and then the more texts come through,
and I was like, Billing's we have an hour.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, you're just pumping photos now.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
Yeah, and just getting there and he's still not getting anything,
which is just making yeah super mad. It was like Billy's,
wee get an hour, let's get up here and go.
He's like all right, So we rush up to was
like the Red Clay or whatever. And then you take
that left so we could oversee down in the meadows
and uh, We're sitting there and not seeing anything. And
then you text us again and said, hey, be there
(41:48):
in ten. We're sitting I was like, hey, Richard, say
he's gonna be here in ten, and he's like all right.
All of a sudden, he just like jumps up real quick.
He's like cows, cows, cows cows. I was just like,
Richard said, hey, be ready, and in he goes tell
him to wait, give me five minutes, give me five minutes.
He's sitting there and see anything. And then you just
see him just it's kind of late, loose and realized
(42:09):
like he wasn't anything.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
That's a bad feeling he was.
Speaker 6 (42:12):
He was upset. You can tell he was about it.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, we would have had to change flights for sure
if he killed something or like eleven or twelve game over.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Like he would have made it, but we'd taking it. Yeah,
would have dealt with the contentt.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Hey he got he got his time to shine last year.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah. He's had several bulls off that place. That's the
first bull I've killed off that place.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
And we've handed it since twenty two. Yeah, twenty two
and the you kill the cow in twenty two.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
To twenty three. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (42:36):
He talked about it every single day besides that last
day about what how you always always get something in here?
This is a good spot. I always get something, never
gotten off.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
But it was a far shot.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Yeah, that was.
Speaker 6 (42:47):
Interesting, not too though.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
It was late.
Speaker 6 (42:49):
That was late. I just remember when he when he
took it, I was like, so do you think we
got it? I was just like, I don't know. So
I'm looking through the glass you can barely see. I
was just like he's still there. He's like, we wait
tim more minutes He's like, we'll look back through. We
looked through the glass again. I was like, hey, he's
still there. He's like, oh, I guess I got him.
Let's go get him. I was like, Jesu Louise, I
think we got back that nine, like nine thirty two back.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah, it was late. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
That's the hard part too, is you're getting back at nine,
nine thirty and up at five, and then you'd get
Bill who turn his damn light on it for four
thirty and four o'clock in the morning and just start.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
You know.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
The other thing that's tough too with Like that sucked
for me being sick is like every hunt camp is fun,
but that was like a really fun camp was awesome,
and I had I might be. I would go to
bed at like seven thirty or eight, like as soon
as I possibly could. Ye, I would go to bed
because I'm trying. Every night I think I'm gonna go
to bed, I'm gonna get better. Every night I go
to bed, I get worse. And I meant anything good
(43:50):
about the whole thing, Like because in Wyoming, I really
I was sick one day and I went I got
a lot of sleep that day, and I felt pretty
much better the next day, So I kind of thought
that was going to happen again.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
It did not happen, and welcome to being a father.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
Yeah. Well I don't even know if he got me sick.
It turns out probably, but anyway, but so then I
missed out on like all that stuff too, So I
don't know, I just have to I need to have
a good year next year because I was sick two
or three hunts out West.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
You go on a couple of hunts, now right, get
your well.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
Yeah, but I'm saying like yeah, it's like, yeah, the
Western hunting, like, being sick for two of them was
not fun.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Dude.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
I had like a little bit of a depression slash withdraws.
I mean we didn't get to really like have fun
or didn't get to enjoy the the kill, and we
like whisked away and then I had to go straight
to Scotland and man, it was like for a couple
of days it really had a I had a tough
(44:48):
time coming back to.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Reality and being in Man.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
There's just something about being out there and in that
mode and that's all you're kind of thinking about, and
then having to go back to real life was man.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
It was. It was tough.
Speaker 6 (45:01):
Driving from it till like fifteen hours left on the
trip back. That's when he kicked him. Like driving the
Sprinter back, that was when I kind of lost everything.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah, way to get on a flight and then we
got home at midnight, take the kids to school the
next morning, and then get on another flight for eight hours.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
So it was like right back to reality.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
Yeah. Yeah, now it's uh, now it's time to go
a big buck.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah, I'm gonna find some white tail.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
You gotta go up to annoys.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Maybe maybe I'll hit a different stride. I was had
a bad white tail year last year.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
Yeah, but you had a bad out here this year.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
So maybe maybe.
Speaker 5 (45:38):
The weather starting like Sunday or Monday is incredible Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
and Thursday. I think he's going to Illinois, that's.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
What he said, maybe tomorrow to check everything. Yeah, and
then I might either bring the boys up on Friday,
try to hunt Saturday all day, Sunday some and then.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Yeah this weekend.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, Illinois. Maybe it's gonna be good.
Speaker 4 (46:01):
I'll I go next week.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
You're going to Illinois next week? Yeah? With Nate with
Nate and yeah yeah, yeah, like five days got just
perked up.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
I'll get divorced if I go during my anniversary weekend.
Yeah yeah, starting like the nineteenth, when Angela and I
and Sam go to our neighborhood hunting, I'm like, I'm
like a deer hunting bender because I'm gonna be there,
and then right when we get home, I'm going up
to Michigan to like visit family.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
But also who are you coming back?
Speaker 3 (46:32):
Well, then I'm coming back whenever you tell me pretty much,
and we're going to text day Yeah okay, but yeah,
we'll figure that out. But I have like two and
a half weeks of I'm hunting. I'm hunting, and then
I'm filming that Texas.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Yeah, you just text me next we want to use
bow or rifle?
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Oh for sure? Yeah. Yeah. So there's it's it's full
on whitetail here. Now the rut is happening actively.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
I had a pretty decent one on the camera the
other day. I didn't send that to anybody because I
didn't even wadn't know about.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
It, did I? The one on Billings No, this is
this is at the house. He's not terrible.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
Oh yeah, he's not as big as the one of buildings.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
No, heck no, not one of bailings is heavy. But
there's two eights over on that one spot which Tennessee Wawkins.
You feel like you're prepared physically. We prepared you physically enough.
Speaker 6 (47:27):
Oh yeah, you can't ever train for that.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
No, whoever says that. Frank said that, right, yeah, then
originally Fursday.
Speaker 5 (47:35):
Right, Oh yeah, that's a that's a good quote from
you that you trained too hard for it because because
he was sick first.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Day when I was sick. Yeah, what's funny as that
same walla we sat over.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
We probably sat three time, yeah, four hours, three four
hours on Saturday this trip, Yeah, two or three hours
on Sunday.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Well, Friday, Friday, you're saying Friday.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Wait, we probably we said it a lot and nothing
and then we killed over it.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
And I don't mm hmm. We didn't really ride to
it this time. We walked to it.
Speaker 6 (48:14):
This is easy, but I got to do everything. You
got to hear the bugles. I got to hear that
really good bugle.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
I didn't really hear a good bugle. I mean I
heard a couple like faint bugles.
Speaker 6 (48:25):
Do that?
Speaker 1 (48:26):
I think seconds be my favorite? Now, man, I'm gonna
get a meal deer tag too next year. But yeah,
you got to do get to hear bugle. You didn't
get to gut or clean one per se, but you
didn't get to d bone one with Curtis.
Speaker 6 (48:38):
Well, you got to carry that. Help carry out the bills, yeah,
help carry then a shed de ship.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
I found a freaking toad of a deadhead toad. Crazy.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
I thought it was just a little forky when we
saw it dead I was like, I'm gonna go check
this thing out, giant.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
So what well you you change training for hunting next year?
Speaker 7 (49:02):
Then now that you've done it, slide drags, heavier, light,
light lot just for like a long period like that
workout that we did but two days before we left for.
Speaker 6 (49:13):
Staremaster and sled push that was perfect.
Speaker 4 (49:17):
Oh that workout Yeah, it was five minutes slid push
five minutes.
Speaker 5 (49:21):
I think they did it to like two weeks two
weeks ago on Monday.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Work out that like slow steady climb.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
A pull or a push push kind of sucks because
you're just stuck in this awkward position. But a drag
man it does does something.
Speaker 6 (49:37):
Take legs, core and cardio. Yeah, that's like the three
most important things.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
I you know, from wearing a pack all week. I
came home on was that Wednesday before we got on
the flight, and I worked out a bunch to try
to like just I knew it wasn't gonna work out
a ton and yeah, and I hadn't worked out a
ton and I started rolling on that death Star. But
it has the like one that has all the hobby
(50:02):
one knobs on it.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
It bruised me.
Speaker 4 (50:05):
I saw your back with bruised from it.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Back literally had I get bruised from it, pretty heavy bruised,
like I've never had that.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
But I but you don't feel.
Speaker 5 (50:11):
It in the moment, No, you don't feel it just
feels kind of good and kind of painful. And then
like like Madison will be like, hey, your back is bruis.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Hillary's like, what happened to your back? Yeah? It was?
It full of bruises. It was crazy.
Speaker 6 (50:23):
But when I told Bird, He's like, why Cardio, I
mean not Cardio, why cor I was like the.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Pack pack, Yeah, you're holding it and moved out.
Speaker 6 (50:30):
You're just I mean, find what twenty five thirty.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Pounds spawning scope Billings tried.
Speaker 6 (50:37):
I hated taking that thing off and putting it back on,
So I usually just kept it on for unless I
knew we was sitting. Oh, it just kept it on
and dude like twisting and turning.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
It's like, dude, but my back never got ted shivering.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
And if you do have to pack something out core
is a big deal with that.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
You yep, all right? Anything else that's it? Would you
go again?
Speaker 2 (51:01):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (51:01):
Yeah, I can't wait. Fucked a lot of sinker. Wait,
no way, Yeah, I calls.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
All right. Piece
And sure enough we turn around and as we turn around,
cow elk on the backside of that finger ridge, cow elk,
cow elk, And I take my binoes up and I'm like,
that's a legal bull.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And so I'm like, Curtis, give me range whatever.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
So I grabbed my tripod and in the moment I'm
like kind of start fumbling with.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
The clips and I was like, calm down.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
So I calmed down, slow, get them, get everything out,
put the gun in there.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
He gives me the range.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
I look at the MOA or he may read out
the MOA, and then we subtracted the percentages we thought
and I get on him and I'm like, is he
the one in the back?
Speaker 2 (00:36):
He goes what And I.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Just shot And as soon as I shot it, he
just stopped and did that kind of like thing in
Idaho where he was like he was done, and.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Curtis is like another one.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
So I didn't want to take the chance, and so
he was like four hundred and sixty yards I think
that is what.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
He was out here.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
The stakes are real effective preparations starts with fittings, but
it requires so much more. This show explores the tools, knowledge, resilience,
and skills needed to be ready when it matters the most.
Join me Rich Browning as we apply the decades of
wisdom I've gained through training and competition to hunting in
(01:17):
the back country. This is in Pursuit, brought to you
by Mount Knums.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
In collaboration with Mayhem Hunt.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
All Right, um, this is post Trent Ellis. That's been
forever ago. Yeah, that's the hard part about these. Now
we're rolling out the new ones, rolling out.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
The new ones. All right, Yeah, so Trent. Trent just
said his baby.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
I don't know if you guys following on social ad
said his baby killed a good deer on public ground
in Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
So congrats Trent doing some stand up.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, so him and Watkins speak the same language.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Minwaukins speak the same language. He was a good dude,
good worked out with us a little bit. I think
that was kind of one of the first CrossFit workouts
he's done a long time.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
He said, he made fun of you for Collins.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
They're buffalo.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
I call him both like, I'm I'm not one of
those people that's like, well, let me technically tell you
that it's it's actually bison.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
I don't I always tell people, hey, call it whatever.
Speaker 1 (02:13):
It's been called a buffalo for so long that you
can just kind of use it's interchangeable.
Speaker 2 (02:16):
So, uh, we got.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
Angelo behind the mic today. What fresh off of his
h Scotland trip.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
My World, My World Tour, Your World Tour, Stay Line
of Florida.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
How did how did the fishing trip go? Good?
Speaker 4 (02:31):
Oh my gosh, it was so good. I forgot I
haven't seen you and told.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
You I haven't seen you in like three weeks.
Speaker 5 (02:37):
We we like rode out and the captain got a
call while we're going out to the fishing spot he's
gonna take us to. He said, Hey, my buddy just
called me. There's a school redfish in this hole that
I go to sometimes hit or miss. He's out there
like an hour ago. You guys want to try it,
and we're like, sure, let's try it. And we got there.
It's there's no action for twenty minutes and then like
(03:00):
just like that, me and my brother both hit and
we both reel in like a good sized red fish.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
There's like a certain right now.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
There's a keep a certain size.
Speaker 5 (03:07):
It's it has to be a certain length and under
a certain length. So it's like there's a window because
like their adolescents or readers somewhere in between there, and
so we caught when they were something that were too big. Anyways,
long story short, we caught like thirty kill yeah. I
mean it was like two and a half hours of
NonStop just like and like pretty much you throw it
out there and as soon as it's water, if they
(03:29):
don't get it, and you might as well reel it
in and try again because as soon as they see
it that they go to it. So we ended up
we caught our limit of redfish and trout, and I
caught I.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Caught a catfish actually too.
Speaker 5 (03:42):
Yeah, and then uh no, catfish they're they're they're pretty nasty.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
As what we said, I've never had a saltwater catfish.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
Whether or not that to say, I didn't know there was.
Speaker 5 (03:51):
They're not as good as catfish run here. So we
caught a bunch of fish. It was like probably one
of the best days of fishing I've ever had. And
then we cooked it all up Boco, Grand Florida. The
it's usually oh no, that's not the best part that happened. Sorry,
there's actually a really something really cool happened. So like
both Grand is like the tarpain capital of Florida. So
(04:14):
there's there's just there's a huge bay and during i
think during the late spring, there's it's pretty much called
like Tarpin Bay, Like you go out there in w tarpinfish.
I caught like a two hundred and fifty pound tarpain
out there, which is I think like the world records
around to eighty or three hundred. So it's like it's
it's one of the biggest tarpin that they've ever seen.
And so that night we got down on the fishing
(04:36):
trip and the captain's like, well, yeah, you can fish
for tarp and just off the beach if you want to.
Speaker 4 (04:39):
My dad brought like all his fishing gear. He has
a pretty heavy due.
Speaker 5 (04:42):
Rod, and so we cast net out uh and just
catch some lady fish. You know, they're like eight inches long,
they're like little fish. Use it as bait, live bait.
We hook it on a big hook and we toss it.
We toss it out there and nothing for a little while.
My brother and my dad's like, hey, you guys, go
look for some more bay like this. That they get
the bait gets pretty dead. They die because they're on
(05:05):
a hook and they're like they're not moving right, So
every now and then we have to catch more bait. Anyways,
one time, same thing, like I said, he throws his
ladyfish out there, hits the water, and this tarpin freaking
just grabs onto it. We don't know what it is
because we're kind of fishing for sharks. Really grabs the
ladyfish and my dad starts fighting it and we just
see this tarp and they're like, you know, they're silver,
(05:27):
They're like totally silver.
Speaker 4 (05:28):
Jumps out of the water and flops.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
We're like, holy shit, you caught a tarp and he
just like keeps frieling in really in and uh, I
mean it's like fighting him good. And he gets it
on the beach and it basically breaks off right at
the wave where the waves are crashing and it kind
of falls back in. But we got a good look
at it, like it was a good sized tarp and
it was. It was pretty crazy. None of us expected it. Yeah,
about two and a half three feet. It's maybe a
(05:50):
little short than that, like three feet.
Speaker 4 (05:52):
So yeah, we had a great fishing the Tuna Club.
Speaker 5 (05:56):
Yeah, it was that was probably the coolest part, just
like just like throwing something off the beach. It was
like it was like ten o'clock at night where it's
out there fishing, and then we end up staying out
there pretty late.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
You got a whisper.
Speaker 5 (06:10):
We ended up staying out there pretty late because I
mean we were just catching a lot of fishes, a
lot of fish to be caught. So no, it was
some of the best fishing I've ever been a part of.
Speaker 6 (06:19):
Actually it was cool. Tarp and just tuna.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
I don't know what.
Speaker 5 (06:22):
No tarpans like this. It's like, I mean, it's it
looks like gosh. The best way to explain is it's
like a It's like a huge bass. The only way
the reason I say that is because their mouths are
are like real bony and they open up really wide,
so like when you hold it up, it doesn't that
looks nothing like a bass, I guess, but like if
(06:43):
the the jaw is similar. Because of that, it's just
a big bony jaw and it's just a long silver fish.
Like I don't know how to explain it.
Speaker 3 (06:52):
How's silver experienced great fishing success? You guys got to
experience the great out hunting success. I got sick for
the last three hours of well, I was sick the
whole hunt.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yeah you started, I missed the last and you're like,
oh no, no, I'm not sick.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
And then they let me back up. All right.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
So we got there. We left on Thursday, got there
Thursday night.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
So we could scout Friday.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
So we could scout Friday. We've never ever scouted before
in our lives. We always just show up the day
of and hunt.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Well.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
I think there is a ton of merit to scouting.
It did no good for us.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
No, because we found we found herds in every spot
we went to. Actually, one of the one of the
bulls we did find on Friday did get killed during
the trip.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:39):
But the other herd that we found that you wanted
to hunt that bull never saw them again. They never
did that.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Again, never did it again. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
So we the morning, first morning, we went to low
Low spot on the property. We hunted way down at
the bottom. We saw pretty good bull, a five at
sure it's the one that my uncle ended up killing.
Speaker 3 (08:01):
Well, the funny thing is we're watching all these whole herd,
which we had a we think had a mule deer bike.
There were two We're all staring at this and then
all of a sudden.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I turned around. I turned around like.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Three to fifty yards behind us. We're having a full conversation. Yeah,
and we're just all I've got cameras. Y.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
This works.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
There's like five or six kind of big draws that
we can hunt, and all the way off to the
far end. I almost call it like the wall, Like
there's a wall on the one side that we can hunt,
and there's just elk pouring in, pouring in, pouring in,
and we're just watching them. There's one what we thought
was one shooter bull. We didn't even like press up
on them. We didn't want to booger them up too much.
(08:39):
That morning, we were like, we got eyes on them,
we know they're.
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Here, they're down here, let's, you know, check it out.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
And like Scott said, we were just sitting there looking
at them, and then all of a sudden, I just
kind of like went to stretch and.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Turn, and sure enough, Clere's a bull.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
Yeah. I think he was like five. He was five
hundred from where we were at.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
And then me and my uncle got up and kind
of went up on one of the fingers just to
get a good look at him, and there were more
elk in this this finger by.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
A huge fence post. You could just say, you.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Get your gun on there, get your range, which later
on we realize, if you're gonna hunt altitude, make sure
you do your calculations for altitude.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Because once you're up there, it's a little bit different.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
So that was Thursday morning, Thursday afternoon or Friday morning,
Friday afternoon, Me, you and Watkins did our hike up
to what we call hell Hole. It was all the
way up to the top. We probably gained fifteen hundred feet,
I would guess, or more.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, I looked on an ax it was something like that.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, fifteen hundred feet and it was a it's cool
is this is way up on the backside, so it's
up about ten thousand feet on the tallest part of it,
and then it there's a nice big saddle between two
kind of finger ridges and there's a wallow right at
the top of it that they've hit. When Ben went
with us a couple of years ago, we sat it.
(09:53):
It's the longest we've ember sat in the woods and
never seen anything. And that's where all the action was
this time. But it was three twenty or three twenty something.
We're just sitting up on this ridge glass and kind
of looking. We can see for miles on this spot.
It's it's beautiful, beautiful view. But you there's just you
can see a ton of country. You can see down
into some of those finger ridges that we were talking
(10:14):
about that we hunt in the bottom. You can't quite
see the very bottom of those finger ridges, but you
can see the top. And so we just thought it
was a good place of glass. Well, sure enough we
turn around and come right comes out of the the
one high side behind us what eight to ten cows
four a nice cool shooter buoys a five by but
(10:34):
he underneath his fourth and fifth on his right side,
he had a.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
It was almost a full point. It looked like from
four hundred yards.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
With the binos of those sig binos are incredible, it
looked like almost a full point.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
So we'd been a five by six. He's a cool
bull and dude. They just hung out there.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
We we end up leaving at five fifteen or five
twenty because we just didn't want to mess with him. Yeah,
and at some point ten fifteen twenty more elk pop
out of there and and so they you know, we
we ended up leaving so we didn't mess them up, and.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
They worked to within like one hundred yards of us.
And then the crazy thing is that heard was out
in standing in the sun or it's like cloud cover,
but on and off sun for an hour and a
half two hours.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Yeah, and we left them. They didn't even leave. They
were still out there. When we left.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
We ducked down the ridge and took off to where
we didn't mess anything up. So that was Walkin's kind
of first day of elk hunting. Fitness wise, looking around wise,
what did you you know on that first day?
Speaker 2 (11:35):
What were your initial thoughts?
Speaker 6 (11:41):
So when we left the cabin to go up that
one the first spot were just straight up just that
first in clowns like, oh man, this sucks.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Yeah, well the very beginning is almost the worst part.
Speaker 6 (11:52):
Oh yeah, it's the worst part. Yeah, thought, heart rates
up and we just stopped, and of course we get
to that one little section, We're just like, oh, do
we go left, do we go ride? Do we go
straight up? And we made that backtrack. I was like,
oh man, like I don't know about this, and then
you guys took off.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (12:07):
I was like well, here we go, pray it works.
But the whole my whole time hocking that part was
I don't think it was a stepper where I did
so much stepper. It's like I wish I did more
sled pushes, but more importantly sled drags.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
For your quads, like reverse sled drags backwards.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
No, so you know where we just put like the
I wish I did this so much more. I think
that'd be and lower back, Yeah, like my lower back
never really got tied with that.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
That climb to me, isn't super steep. There's some like
pitchy stuff in there where it's like the very beginning
of steep, and then it's.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Just just said.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
You know what sucked was that first day I'm like, oh,
hell yeah, we got this. This is this isn't bad.
It was day two dawod the tripod and the rifle
adding an extra twenty five pounds.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
Was miserable and it was hot.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It was me, Curtis, I just wore you start doing
the thing where you're all pushing each other faster than
you need to.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Yeah, well, when somebody's walking beside you, you think you're walking slow.
Speaker 3 (13:08):
I wasn't sick. Yet and hadn't said it, and.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
So we just hammered this hill. So then imagine walking
from the cabin straight up to hell Hole. There's a
trail up there now and it's just beautiful.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Oh it's awesome.
Speaker 6 (13:21):
Yeah, you get to that one section where it just
looks like you're in like a cast.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yeah, yeah, that was cool.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, So Walkings is great. He uh you know, me
and Scott we only stopped once, right.
Speaker 3 (13:31):
Yeah, we stopped one time for five six minutes.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Mabe versus when we stopped for Billings and d Lane. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
I mean this is like a whole ordeal too, where
you wear something that as soon as you get there
you take it off because you sweat through the entire shirt.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
I think I talked to you guys into wearing T
shirt because at first, you guys, we're gonna.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Wear long sleeve, right, No, he was, I was, You're
still wearing the long sleep.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
The first day, a T shirt second day, but I
brought layers. I was just gonna ditch.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I just wore my orange vest on the second climb. Yeah,
but I didn't start all orange orange.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Best.
Speaker 6 (14:02):
That was good, to make that clear. I didn't stop
at all.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Oh, you didn't. You just kept kept trudging. Yeah. So
we got up there pretty quick. It was like forty
something minutes I think.
Speaker 3 (14:12):
Yeah, and we got down quick too.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
We bailed out and came down.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
It felt good after the scouting, I mean, yeah, we
saw elk every single place we went. We identified bowls
every single place we went because uh, you your uncle Matt.
We had three bulltags in camp. Jim oh, he did. Technically,
he wasn't really hunting for a bull though he were.
He mostly wanted a mule deer buck.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
So we did have four bulltags in camp, but really
really he didn't care about his. He wanted a buck. Yeah.
And so we identified enough to where we could split
up the.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Next day and all go our own.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Yeah, try to make a move.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Yeah. So the next morning we all went down to
the bottom.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
At that point, Curtis was there, so me and you,
Curtis and Jimmy kind of hunted together.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
You got paired up with Billings and bill that morning.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Yeah, we went down to the bottom. We separated and
went to that far heard thinking we can maybe find them.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
They never quite wanted to cooperate, and we don't even
do we see a bull in there. No, we never
split a second. Maybe we might have.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
He was pretty high up and there was no way
we could get to him. He was off our what
we were allowed to hunt. We could hunt some blm
and some private but he was on the neighbor's property,
so we couldn't couldn't quite get to him.
Speaker 6 (15:29):
That day was fine. That was when we took when
you glassed over and seen me Bill and Hill.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
The only bluff on the place.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
My sixty five year uncle has his walking stick, and
I look and Matt's coming around, Watkins is coming around,
and then sure enough Bill comes walking around with his
walking stick a foot off the edge of this bluff,
the only bluff on the property, thinking what is Matt doing? Yeah,
taking my uncle on that. So you guys, we we
got to that farest. That was the time we were
(16:02):
starting walking back down the trail and the calf a
cow and then a shooter I legal bull ran right by,
and uh, we couldn't quite Jimmy couldn't quite get a
shot on it. And but we had a pretty close encounter.
It was like four hundred.
Speaker 6 (16:19):
The weird thing was every time if you've seen a
good mule deer, then here comes a cow and here
comes a bull, and our situation it was anyways, well
just like movie was up on that hell ho, remember
we saw that mule deer first, and then the cows come,
and then the bulls came.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Oh we saw yeah, we saw yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
we saw a ton of mual deer this trip.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
I didn't never had a mule deer tag and never
really had the itched mule deer hunt. But now after
this trip, they were everywhere, were everywhere, so stupid though.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Yeah, they prance around and the does are oblivious to anything.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
We were that last night. How far are we like
twenty yards from.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Him for ten fift ill peak sickness?
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Yeah, so that morning we just walked around a little bit.
You guys didn't really get on anything that morning either,
did you.
Speaker 6 (17:04):
Huh? The first Saturday, Yeah, so that was the day.
That was the day that me Bill, Oh.
Speaker 2 (17:13):
You guys tried to close in.
Speaker 6 (17:14):
Yeah, we tried to.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Couldn't quite get there.
Speaker 6 (17:16):
I think the furthest the closest that we got was
like sick something. Of course Bill.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Bill couldn't was that on the bull or on the cows?
Speaker 6 (17:25):
That was so that was the one day he got
Sunday exact same one, had to do same one.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
He was in the same same drainage. That afternoon.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
We sat up topiked up top, sat up top till dark.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Really there nothing came out there.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
We had that far out of the far seven yards,
so I ended up taking a shot on one from
seven hundred yards. I felt super comfortable with that rifle.
Shot really well. What we did not account for was altitude.
So we sighted the gun in at fifteen hundred feet
and we were up ten thousand. So when I looked
(18:01):
it up, you about a one percent of moa per
one hundred feet of elevation game for thousand feet of
elevation game, and.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
So we were up what nine thousand from almost ten thousand?
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah yeah, or sorry, yeah, up nine thousand from We
sighted it in, so shot high.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Curtis gave me the shot high.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
Thought maybe it was just me shot high again, So
then I tried to compensate and shoot under.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
And when I shot on the video.
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Well, the thing is we couldn't see at this point.
We couldn't see the video well enough correct, So we
just saw them storm off and so you and I
have to go down what a few hundred feet back
up a few hundred feet.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Over seven hundred yards to check and make sure we
found nothing.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
No blood, no nothing.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
And at this point though we're still all we have
is the little camera screen to go off of us.
So we didn't know until we got to the big
screen what had happened. But then we saw that.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
When we saw the big screen.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
I don't know how this thing it wasn't a head
shot because the way I compensated, I went down to
about it's knee maybe and shot and the way it
was looking, the bullet had to have gone right over it.
You've maybe seen the video better since I haven't, but
I don't know how it.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
It was cool because you can see the vapor trail. Yeah,
so you see the first one miss. Your correction was
actually almost correct, like perfect, And somehow it it scared
that bull so bad a headache because he's looking the
other way and he just sees a hill blow up
right behind him. He probably felt that bullet was by
(19:40):
his head.
Speaker 1 (19:42):
Yeah, So we couldn't couldn't, couldn't clue. We didn't hunt
the rest of that evening because.
Speaker 3 (19:47):
Well, by the time we looked for him, it was dark. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (19:50):
Chance, so when they all.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Almost get down.
Speaker 6 (19:56):
I'm just like, wow, we don't need to get down.
There's just like twenty yards in front of us. If
we get down, I thought they're just gonna run us over.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (20:02):
Wild is sound going through the woods.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
It's crazy crashing horses.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, you guys were on the far side of the
up We were up above you guys, and they came
running down.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Come run down the hill.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
So next morning we all went back to the bottom.
We didn't see it or hear anything, right, No, And
then Jimmy decided to go after that cow.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Yeah. We me, you, Curtis, Jimmy were sitting together. Yep,
there's a cow just standing out in the field wide
over a meadow. Yeah, and so okay, you should go
because he had a cow tag, a buck tag, and a.
Speaker 2 (20:34):
Bullt old tag, and so we talked him into it.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Him and Curtis went after that. You and I just
went and walked around.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
We went and just checked out. We went on a
little Scott and rich uh ye.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
Then I think for context, Ashton spotting your uncle's bull. Yeah,
And then he was like, so, for context, how many
years has your uncle been trying to get a bull?
I think he said he's Ashton is the one that saw,
which is even funnier. I forgot how many hunts he's
been on, but for thirteen years, I think he's.
Speaker 1 (21:02):
Tried to get a bull. He's never gotten a bull.
He's got several cows. So Harrison, my oldest cousin, and
Ashton get in Saturday night. Yeah, Saturday night.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
No, Saturday, yeah, Saturday day night.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, And so they do some scouting. They kind of
you know, find some stuff up and around the cabin.
And then so that next morning we're trying to figure
out what we're gonna do. We all end up going
to the bottom of the property. Bill, Ashton, Harrison all
kind of divide up. Billings and Watkins divide up, and
then us three or four divide up. So we were
on this cow. Jimmy ends up shooting this cow well
(21:34):
in the process. And so Harrison is a pretty good
outdoorsman and a hunter like loves to hunt, hunts a
lot of white tail. I think he's been on a
couple of elkhons with Bill. Ashton does not hunt, but
he likes being outside, likes adventure, and apparently has a
really good eye for elk. Dude can spot him out
of nowhere. So has a little bit of add adhd
(21:54):
whatever you want to call it, and can't sit still.
So even when he was with us after this, he
would be like, Hey, I'm gonna go look up on
this hill and i'll you know, maybe you know, show
you guys with my hat if I see anything, because
he had an orange hat, and so I guess at
some point he split off from Bill and Harrison and
then somehow found this bull. This bull bedded up right
in front of him. He's kind of looking at this
(22:15):
bull and all of a sudden he beds down. So
he comes back, gets Harrison and Ashton or Harrison and Bill.
They get into position and I think it was like
a three hundred and fifty yard shot and they end
up killing this bull. So, man, that was awesome to
see Bill, the reaction from him killing that thing. You
guys got to walk up before I got to get
there because we were on the cow duty. We got
Jimmy's cow. He ended up shooting it across a valley
(22:38):
and we found it and got in there. It was heavy, nasty.
That was some of the thickest oak brush. I don't
even know, you know it what was crazy was. I
was watching this thing the whole time while Jimmy and
Curtis tried to close the distance on it, and it
literally just kind of feeds around and then beds down,
and then the way the sun goes, you can't see
(23:00):
it anymore.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
It's just gone.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Yeah, they can disappear. That stuff disappeared so quickly, and
you knew that the cow was still. I knew it
was there, and so once I knew what to look for,
once I saw it, you could like catch a glimpse
of it facing because it was bed at downhill.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
It was so weird, so crazy.
Speaker 1 (23:13):
So we get that day we had cow down and
then Bill got his bull, and what we could do
is we just drugged that thing down to the main
trail and we got a truck up there and lifted
the whole thing in the back of the truck.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Uh, cow and cow.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
And so that afternoon we went back up to our spot,
sat there for a while, and then once it got
to like five o'clock, we decided to, hey, let's hit
the bottom. There had been some action the previous night
in a wallow kind of right across one of the
main drainages. We hunted and there was a ton of
(23:48):
action that night before, so we thought, and that morning
I guess.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
I can't remember, and we weren't seeing anything.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
We weren't seeing anything. There was no movement, no nothing.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
We probably scared everything off the hill the night before,
and so we made a mad day got down there,
and sure enough.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
There was a bull in that wallow.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
So we tried to get in position and he was
already kind of working his way up to either bed
or feet or we were just behind him. This is
when Scott slowly started to This.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
Is when the sickness was rapidly taking hold, I would say.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
And that's when you guys were way down at the
bottom again and you had your bull come out from
one thousand yards right at dark.
Speaker 6 (24:26):
Said the cos I was, I couldn't go back out
there after what thirty something hours?
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I don't want to go.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
Well, this is a good actually this is good, so
Watkins said. Physically he was fine, but mentally I was.
You were like, I can one more day of the spot?
Speaker 2 (24:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 6 (24:40):
Not that spot. It was just glassing that long for
not just like a few hours, It was that the
whole day, the fifteen hours, and we just like to
go back there.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Yeah, you and Matt decided to just stay down there, stay.
Speaker 6 (24:51):
There the whole time, and then the next day the
whole time I was like, I can't, I can't go
back up.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Do you think it was harder to for you? Then
it was harder to like sit on the glass and
stay focused on this one spot then have to like
fifteen hundred feet up.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (25:06):
God just wanted to stay moving because that is what
I was I've been doing for so long getting ready
for it. I just wanted to stay moving and then
just sitting still and with the billains. Don't get me wrong,
it was a blast. Every fifteen minutes we was cutting up,
but I just wanted.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
To move, new spot move. Yeah, yeah, you.
Speaker 6 (25:22):
Had a new spot because you like, we looked at
this area, then this area, then this area. But it's
just like you can only do that so much before
you just kind of go stir crazy.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
Yeah, we don't do. I mean we sat some. It
was physical to get to where we were going originally,
but then we would sit for maybe an hour or
two up at the top. But yeah, we kind of
got burnt out on that spot too. In the afternoon,
so we were we had made the decision we weren't
going back there. Yeah, so I'm trying to think this
would have been second till last morning.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
Well, we saw that, we saw that hurd of there
that night, so we were like, hey, let's just go
back there in the morning.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
And sure enough, we got above that wall though, thinking
we could get in to it, and then in that
process we got a little too close. I thought the
wind was perfect, but I guess it switched or the
way that.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Whole drainage works.
Speaker 1 (26:11):
They winded us and busted out of there. So we
never quite got a good eye of them. But apparently,
you know, looking at them through glass there, it was
a really good bull in there, and we saw him
kind of go up on the other side of the road.
So for the rest of the day we just tried
to kind of get back on them.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
We never did see that bull again.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
I don't think I did. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
I saw a couple of bucks working through timber at
different spots. We would, you know, the drainage it was,
it's kind of hot, high and tall on one side,
and so we'd get on the other one and try
to glass into it and just change our perspective. And
we saw a ton of cows. I ended up seeing
another bull later, but he was moving on. There was
really no reason for him to be moving on, but
he just did not. They're super skittish at that point.
(26:52):
I mean they've been hunted for a while. But yeah,
we just spent that whole day just glassing and moving,
glassing and moving, and decided to try to get back
to that wallow, thinking maybe something would come back in there.
And it's the first time ever it's dark, and they're
starting to get dark and there's nothing going on. I mean,
we can't really see anything. Scott is literally just laying
(27:14):
full every layer he has on, has his hood.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
On, nit I don't really get cold either, no.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Nit hat, and he's just laying there shivering like you
can just see him every once in a while, like
doing this randomly, snoring, falling asleep, and I'm just sitting
there glassing and then finally it's like last a little
bit of light and I'm like, let's get him back
to camp, and Scott at no point said no, let's stay.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
He was like okay, And so we end up when
we got.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Back, well what happened. I kind of planned for us
to like switch spots in the middle of the day,
which I didn't plan well, but I had been alternating
between musinax and I have a profen to try to
control my fever. Well, I had no medicine since like
eight am this day because we stayed out the whole day,
and so by the time I got back to camp,
I'm trying to pour whatever it was. Either I would
(28:02):
proferm USINEX. I'm trying to give myself these pills and
I'm shaking so bad I can hardly even get it
into my hand to take it. So I would then
try to take these showers that are like thirty five
minutes long to get my body back of the temperature.
I've never I've not felt that bad in three years.
Speaker 6 (28:22):
We took that melon. That was pretty epic.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, Bill was just snored the whole time.
Speaker 6 (28:27):
He just just woke up.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
And maybe ten minutes after he laid down, you hear
him go like he had like one of those falling dreams.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
Oh, it was so good.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
The thing that propelled me on the Wyoming hunt when
I got sick on this hunt is I I always
I always told every single day I was like didn't
want to be out there trying to film do whatever.
I knew. I knew the second I called it quits
for the shortest amount of time, you were gonna kill something.
And not only did I want to be part of
(29:02):
the experience from like a like a personal level, Yeah, yeah,
but you, but I wanted to like finish the project
properly and like have the video wrap up well. Yep,
And sure enough I spent about four hours in the middle.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
It's going to wrap up real well with me and Curtis.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Video.
Speaker 3 (29:19):
I spent about four hours the middle of that night
with my long John's, my sweatshirt pulled hood over my head,
five blankets, shivering, just awake in bed, just shivering uncontrollably.
And so your alarm went off. You're like, Scott, you're
feeling okay, how you feeling or whatever. I'm like, I'm
I'm worse.
Speaker 1 (29:39):
So the plan was we were we had to be
in we had to be back in Nashville for a
flight to Scotland Wednesday night. So in my head I'm thinking, oh,
we'll wait till Wednesday morning and fly out early Wednesday morning.
And I slowly like I'll check in the home and
like check the temperature, and I could slowly tell that
that was not gonna fly to show up on Wednesday
(30:02):
and have yeah, and have Hillary bring all three kids
in my bag. So I'd made the executive decision to
fly out Tuesday night at seven fifteen yep, and we
had about a four hour drive three and a half
four hours drive. So I knew, all right, the last
morning it's gonna be our full morning. We had to
we needed to leave by one o'clock at the latest.
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Yeah, because you never know what's gonna happen going through
the past.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
Yeah, And so we.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
Make the executive decision book a flight, and we're like,
all right, we have to be you know, be done
hunting probably by eleven forty five twelve maybe depending how
far we are from camp. And so that morning, alarm
goes off and I'm like, Scott, how are you feeling, buddy?
He goes I've been shivering for the last four hours
and I've got long John's on sweatpants and I stole
(30:53):
Ashton's blanket.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, I'm like, Scott, won't.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
You just I was like, you're gonna have to cause
I thought I really was worried I was gonna hold
you back to where like you had to go after
a bowl and I'm just freaking dead on the side
of a mountain.
Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
And so when it was the coldest day, the cold
it had been temperature.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Baby thirties, mid low thirties. There was a couple of
frost round mornings, and then it would warm up to
like probably forty five fifty. Yeah, first couple days was
warmer than that, but the wind was killer.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
Yeah, and so and I knew that it being colder,
I was screwed. And the crazy thing is too, is
like I would say, typically I'm the warmest in the group, like.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Me and you were still Yeah, do you cat maybe
a little bit warmer in the cold, Yeah, do not
get cold when I'm moving, I'm probably just as hot.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
As soon as I was like cold the night before,
I knew there was gonna be no help in myself
the next day.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
So me Curtis split off from Billings and Watkins. I
think everybody had kind of left at that point. Jimmy,
Jimmy wasn't honting. He'd killed his Mealdier the night before
without any of us. We'd seen a bunch of good
Mualier and he ended up staying down low and busting
one Ashton Harrison Bill had left the night before tagged out,
so it's it's just basically the four of us really
going out. So Me and Curtis decide that we're going
(32:05):
to go to the spot that we saw the bulls
in the afternoon, the to Hell Hole up at the
top of the mountain. And so you guys stayed kind
of mid middle of the hill, yeah, and low, and
then end up coming up high. So Me and Curtis
decide to kind of still hunt this road right as
the sun's coming up and then try to be at
hell Hole at the wallow mid you know, like probably
(32:29):
thirty forty five minutes after daylight, thinking maybe we catch
something getting some water before it goes to bed or
back into the timbers.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
So we slow hunt.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
We heard something bust. I think it was a mule
deer right before dark as we were we probably started
like a touch too soon. But anyway, we get up
and now we're on the opposite side where we saw
the elk come out, so we're complete opposite side of
this little finger it we're on the other ridge and
so I get down and I'm kind of sitting there
glass and I want to be able to see into
(32:58):
the kind of meadow thing park that where they've been
coming out, and so I kind of come down the.
Speaker 2 (33:05):
Ridge a little bit farther well, Curtis.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Stays up top kind of glasses, and all of a
sudden we look on the far edge, skylit, perfect cow elk,
so we're like, hell yeah, Spike comes up.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
We watched for hour hour and a half.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
As these elk just kind of sunned, and a bird
would hop on their back and start like, I guess
it's picking.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
Bugs or whatever, and they would just let it.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
And so Curtis decides to go up top make sure
nothing's coming on the back side of our hill, and nothing.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
All of a sudden he comes running down. He's like, boll,
I think there's a bully with the group.
Speaker 1 (33:37):
So we're thinking there's a bull with that's heard, and
sure enough it's just this. It was a goofy looking
spike thick had like this weird curve to it, like
from far away you might be able to think it's
a bull. So we sit there and there's a county
road at the very bottom of this. I mean it's
shoot four or five hundred feet of elevation change or no, sorry,
(33:58):
about fifteen hundred feet of elevation, changing.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
All the bottom bottom, and so.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
I heard a truck or something rolling through there, and
all these elk pile over back up before that, we're
sitting there and all of a sudden, we hear some
raking in the trees and the timber that I don't
know if it was a spike, I don't know if
it's a bull. We never got eyes on it. We
don't know if it's a meal deer because it busted off,
but we never saw him. And so we're thinking when
these cows busted through, it might push this bull out,
(34:23):
or he might they might pick him up, and maybe
they're coming up over the wall. So we sit there
for ten fifteen minutes, nothing comes through. We don't get
eyes on those cows or spike or whatever, so we
end up backing back up the top of the hill.
Curtis is like, let's let's get in the sun and
warm up a little bit and see if we can
glass the backside, because it's kind of it's hard to explain,
but there's another kind of big bowl behind us. And
(34:46):
so we get up to the top. Sitting in the sun,
you could smell elk real heavy in the way the
wind was coming. We kind of peered down into this
timber we're kind of looking. It was pretty heavily, pretty
heavy elk smell. So the plan was wait for a
little bit and then maybe just walk the timber and
bumped something up. We didn't have a ton of time.
We weren't, you know, gonna be there all day.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
You're really against the clock now.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
And sure enough we turn around and as we turn around,
cow elk on the backside of that that finger ridge
cow elk cow elk. And I taken my biose up
and I'm like, that's a legal bull and so I'm like, Curtis,
give me range whatever.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
So I grabbed my.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Tripod and in the moment, I'm like kind of start
fumbling with the clips and I.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Was like, calm down.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
So I calmed down, slow, get them, get everything out,
put the gun in there.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
He gives me the range.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
I look at the MOA or he may read out
the MOA, and then we subtracted the percentages we thought,
and I get on him and I'm like, is he
the one in the back? He goes what And I
just shot And as soon as I shot it, he
just stopped and did that kind of like thing in
Idaho where he was like done, he was done.
Speaker 2 (35:53):
And Curtis is like another one. So I didn't want
to take the chance.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
And so he's like four hundred and sixty yards I
think is what he was, and this was I know
what you can see on the camera.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
Changed your MOA.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
At this point I dropped my MOA.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
I think it was like one point two or one
point four, because what I'd read is basically every five
hundred for every five hundred yards he drop at one
point four, depending on what.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
The calculation we had. So I dropped it at that
and it worked.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Yeah, both shots were within four to six inches, and
he just piled up right there.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
But then then you're trying to race clean up duty.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
So then so then I knew we weren't gonna be
able to like pack out like quarters, right, So I
take off run and I ran probably three miles. I
think it was relatively flat. It's kind of flowy and
up and hill, downhill whatever to get the side by side.
To get the side by side while Curtis is quartering,
I get up there to I think he'd only had
(36:44):
the ham off when I got back and he'd done
all the hide and stuff, and so I helped him
with other shoulders shoulder, I did the shoulders, heated the hams,
and then we took the took a euro so we
got it done and then we picked watkins and met up.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
It's crazy too because you when you like back track
all this stuff and then we got to the airport
like right on time.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Didn't get to enjoy any of it. That was the
hard part is like I still haven't really enjoyed it.
And then I went straight to Scotland, so I didn't
even like well because normally.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
I mean for anyone that's killed a bowl like that,
I mean normally, assuming you're not like really racing the time.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
The heat, yeah, it was thirty degrees, it can like
if you're.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Not racing it, like we've we have experience where it's
really hot and you're trying to like get stuff and
you might have a really long pack out or something.
But if you don't have to hurry, it's usually not
something you rush through. It's like that's the whole experience
you've waited for. Especially this year, we had two unsuccessful
hunts and archery and then this one was like the
grand finale of going out West this year. So yeah,
(37:42):
it sucks for me to have like missed that, but
also for you guys.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
We had a text read and I'm just like, let's go.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
And my first reaction was so excited for you. My
second reaction was so massed off didn't go out.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (37:54):
The best part of that is like I didn't have
any service the whole time.
Speaker 2 (37:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (37:58):
So we're going Chris Reason Metal Park where.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
You guys there hiked up pretty good little chunk. Huh.
We're sitting there getting bad to do that.
Speaker 6 (38:06):
You do the bear story. Yeah, we're Curtis seeing the bear.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Oh bear shit. Yeah, so I.
Speaker 6 (38:12):
Didn't know about that.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Yeah, Curtis has seen a bunch of bear signed black
bear sign and had a bear tag.
Speaker 6 (38:17):
You dropped us off.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Oh yeah, how you didn't want to go in the dark,
Well I did. I didn't know, So hold on, way,
tell it from Billings perspective.
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Billings goes, Yeah, Wakers didn't want to go, you know,
because they went to a new spot spot that head
and been it.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
It's good, should be a good spot.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
There's heavy timber, there's water blow, there's a good meadow
like all things that you would need or to have
a good spot, and so it's pitch black and we
drop them off to go to our spot, and so
Billings like, all right, let's head down there. And this
was in the spot where all the bear sign.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Was, and walk is like, I'm going down there. He's like,
there's a bear down there. I'll have a.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Gun and buildings like cool, I'm going down there. So
then you're gonna be standing here in the bear spot
without a gun, in the dark.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
And he's like, all right, I'll go with you.
Speaker 6 (38:57):
Kind of what happened because when you dropped us off
for there, of course it's cold, it's like seventeen degrees
and we're sitting there. I was just like, I was like,
all right, you're ready to go in. I go yeah,
to turn your headlamp. Your head lamp on. He's like,
why do we need that? I was like, you just
said it was bears in here. He goes, yeah, we'll
be fine. I'm just like, nope, I'm not going through that.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Nope.
Speaker 6 (39:17):
Through uh through that oak.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Brush is what It's like.
Speaker 6 (39:20):
I'm not going through that. Then I can't I can't
even see in front of my hand. He goes, ah,
he's like, we'll just wait a little bit. I was
just like, we're gonna wait longer than a little bit.
I was just like, I'm not going through that. And
finally I was just so cold. I was just like,
I guess it'll a seat. It was just going through.
Of course, I've never seen bear crap at all, so
as I'm walking through and we're kind of like brushing
the oaks away, I had to see this big old PILEO. Basically,
(39:42):
I was just like I was like, oh, that's bear.
I go, oh, that's cool. There's another pile. There's another pile,
there's another pile. I was just like, ah, just kind
of slowly work their way through this space. And of
course we went down to that spot I think two
days before. He didn't seemed like it took that long
to get through that. Dude, that morning, he seemed like
(40:03):
it took an hour to get through that because I
was freaking out, and be honest, I was just freaking
out the whole time. But like I said, the whole time,
I didn't have service. So we're sitting there, we're not
seeing anything, and I was like, all right, well, let's
just work away up top. He's kind of Mopey just
kind of just he ain't gotten anything, and everybody's getting something.
He ain't gotten that.
Speaker 2 (40:21):
This is the last morning, this is the last thing.
I hadn't sent you guys a text yet.
Speaker 6 (40:25):
No, and if you did, I didn't get it. But
we're walking through and we go up that basically that
ridge that they all was calming up. We're sitting there
and everything. The phone goes off and I looked at
it and Chris Billing's a little bit behind me. He
just kind of dragging his feet basically, and it's just
the texts from you. It says, let's go. I was
just like, oh, I think Richard got something. And I
(40:47):
was like, what do you get? I was like, I
don't know. Then you set the photo. So I'm sitting
there and I'm like, do that Thing's huge? Just talking
about everything, and Billings is getting like kind of furious
about it. He's like, let me see, takes my phone.
He's like, I ain't got nothing yet. He's sitting there
looking at it and he goes, I was just like,
do you want to go get one? He goes, yeah,
(41:09):
I want to get one. We go. We don't have
enough time. I was just like because we've got two hours,
let's get up this mountain side and like we'll be fine.
He goes, okay, I guess. So we're kind of just
slowly trotting it up and then the more texts come through,
and I was like, Billing's we have an hour.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Yeah, you're just pumping photos now.
Speaker 6 (41:28):
Yeah, and just getting there and he's still not getting anything,
which is just making yeah super mad. It was like Billy's,
wee get an hour, let's get up here and go.
He's like all right, So we rush up to was
like the Red Clay or whatever. And then you take
that left so we could oversee down in the meadows
and uh, We're sitting there and not seeing anything. And
then you text us again and said, hey, be there
(41:48):
in ten. We're sitting I was like, hey, Richard, say
he's gonna be here in ten, and he's like all right.
All of a sudden, he just like jumps up real quick.
He's like cows, cows, cows cows. I was just like,
Richard said, hey, be ready, and in he goes tell
him to wait, give me five minutes, give me five minutes.
He's sitting there and see anything. And then you just
see him just it's kind of late, loose and realized
(42:09):
like he wasn't anything.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
That's a bad feeling he was.
Speaker 6 (42:12):
He was upset. You can tell he was about it.
Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah, we would have had to change flights for sure
if he killed something or like eleven or twelve game over.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Like he would have made it, but we'd taking it. Yeah,
would have dealt with the contentt.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Hey he got he got his time to shine last year.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah. He's had several bulls off that place. That's the
first bull I've killed off that place.
Speaker 3 (42:30):
And we've handed it since twenty two. Yeah, twenty two
and the you kill the cow in twenty two.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
To twenty three. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (42:36):
He talked about it every single day besides that last
day about what how you always always get something in here?
This is a good spot. I always get something, never
gotten off.
Speaker 2 (42:45):
But it was a far shot.
Speaker 3 (42:46):
Yeah, that was.
Speaker 6 (42:47):
Interesting, not too though.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
It was late.
Speaker 6 (42:49):
That was late. I just remember when he when he
took it, I was like, so do you think we
got it? I was just like, I don't know. So
I'm looking through the glass you can barely see. I
was just like he's still there. He's like, we wait
tim more minutes He's like, we'll look back through. We
looked through the glass again. I was like, hey, he's
still there. He's like, oh, I guess I got him.
Let's go get him. I was like, Jesu Louise, I
think we got back that nine, like nine thirty two back.
Speaker 2 (43:11):
Yeah, it was late. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
That's the hard part too, is you're getting back at nine,
nine thirty and up at five, and then you'd get
Bill who turn his damn light on it for four
thirty and four o'clock in the morning and just start.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
You know.
Speaker 3 (43:25):
The other thing that's tough too with Like that sucked
for me being sick is like every hunt camp is fun,
but that was like a really fun camp was awesome,
and I had I might be. I would go to
bed at like seven thirty or eight, like as soon
as I possibly could. Ye, I would go to bed
because I'm trying. Every night I think I'm gonna go
to bed, I'm gonna get better. Every night I go
to bed, I get worse. And I meant anything good
(43:50):
about the whole thing, Like because in Wyoming, I really
I was sick one day and I went I got
a lot of sleep that day, and I felt pretty
much better the next day, So I kind of thought
that was going to happen again.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
It did not happen, and welcome to being a father.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
Yeah. Well I don't even know if he got me sick.
It turns out probably, but anyway, but so then I
missed out on like all that stuff too, So I
don't know, I just have to I need to have
a good year next year because I was sick two
or three hunts out West.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
You go on a couple of hunts, now right, get
your well.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
Yeah, but I'm saying like yeah, it's like, yeah, the
Western hunting, like, being sick for two of them was
not fun.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Dude.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
I had like a little bit of a depression slash withdraws.
I mean we didn't get to really like have fun
or didn't get to enjoy the the kill, and we
like whisked away and then I had to go straight
to Scotland and man, it was like for a couple
of days it really had a I had a tough
(44:48):
time coming back to.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Reality and being in Man.
Speaker 1 (44:52):
There's just something about being out there and in that
mode and that's all you're kind of thinking about, and
then having to go back to real life was man.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
It was. It was tough.
Speaker 6 (45:01):
Driving from it till like fifteen hours left on the
trip back. That's when he kicked him. Like driving the
Sprinter back, that was when I kind of lost everything.
Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah, way to get on a flight and then we
got home at midnight, take the kids to school the
next morning, and then get on another flight for eight hours.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
So it was like right back to reality.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
Yeah. Yeah, now it's uh, now it's time to go
a big buck.
Speaker 2 (45:27):
Yeah, I'm gonna find some white tail.
Speaker 3 (45:29):
You gotta go up to annoys.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Maybe maybe I'll hit a different stride. I was had
a bad white tail year last year.
Speaker 3 (45:34):
Yeah, but you had a bad out here this year.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
So maybe maybe.
Speaker 5 (45:38):
The weather starting like Sunday or Monday is incredible Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
and Thursday. I think he's going to Illinois, that's.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
What he said, maybe tomorrow to check everything. Yeah, and
then I might either bring the boys up on Friday,
try to hunt Saturday all day, Sunday some and then.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
Yeah this weekend.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
Yeah, Illinois. Maybe it's gonna be good.
Speaker 4 (46:01):
I'll I go next week.
Speaker 2 (46:02):
You're going to Illinois next week? Yeah? With Nate with
Nate and yeah yeah, yeah, like five days got just
perked up.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
I'll get divorced if I go during my anniversary weekend.
Yeah yeah, starting like the nineteenth, when Angela and I
and Sam go to our neighborhood hunting, I'm like, I'm
like a deer hunting bender because I'm gonna be there,
and then right when we get home, I'm going up
to Michigan to like visit family.
Speaker 2 (46:30):
But also who are you coming back?
Speaker 3 (46:32):
Well, then I'm coming back whenever you tell me pretty much,
and we're going to text day Yeah okay, but yeah,
we'll figure that out. But I have like two and
a half weeks of I'm hunting. I'm hunting, and then
I'm filming that Texas.
Speaker 2 (46:45):
Yeah, you just text me next we want to use
bow or rifle?
Speaker 3 (46:48):
Oh for sure? Yeah. Yeah. So there's it's it's full
on whitetail here. Now the rut is happening actively.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
I had a pretty decent one on the camera the
other day. I didn't send that to anybody because I
didn't even wadn't know about.
Speaker 2 (47:03):
It, did I? The one on Billings No, this is
this is at the house. He's not terrible.
Speaker 3 (47:12):
Oh yeah, he's not as big as the one of buildings.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
No, heck no, not one of bailings is heavy. But
there's two eights over on that one spot which Tennessee Wawkins.
You feel like you're prepared physically. We prepared you physically enough.
Speaker 6 (47:27):
Oh yeah, you can't ever train for that.
Speaker 2 (47:29):
No, whoever says that. Frank said that, right, yeah, then
originally Fursday.
Speaker 5 (47:35):
Right, Oh yeah, that's a that's a good quote from
you that you trained too hard for it because because
he was sick first.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Day when I was sick. Yeah, what's funny as that
same walla we sat over.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
We probably sat three time, yeah, four hours, three four
hours on Saturday this trip, Yeah, two or three hours
on Sunday.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Well, Friday, Friday, you're saying Friday.
Speaker 1 (47:59):
Wait, we probably we said it a lot and nothing
and then we killed over it.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
And I don't mm hmm. We didn't really ride to
it this time. We walked to it.
Speaker 6 (48:14):
This is easy, but I got to do everything. You
got to hear the bugles. I got to hear that
really good bugle.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
I didn't really hear a good bugle. I mean I
heard a couple like faint bugles.
Speaker 6 (48:25):
Do that?
Speaker 1 (48:26):
I think seconds be my favorite? Now, man, I'm gonna
get a meal deer tag too next year. But yeah,
you got to do get to hear bugle. You didn't
get to gut or clean one per se, but you
didn't get to d bone one with Curtis.
Speaker 6 (48:38):
Well, you got to carry that. Help carry out the bills, yeah,
help carry then a shed de ship.
Speaker 2 (48:45):
I found a freaking toad of a deadhead toad. Crazy.
Speaker 1 (48:52):
I thought it was just a little forky when we
saw it dead I was like, I'm gonna go check
this thing out, giant.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
So what well you you change training for hunting next year?
Speaker 7 (49:02):
Then now that you've done it, slide drags, heavier, light,
light lot just for like a long period like that
workout that we did but two days before we left for.
Speaker 6 (49:13):
Staremaster and sled push that was perfect.
Speaker 4 (49:17):
Oh that workout Yeah, it was five minutes slid push
five minutes.
Speaker 5 (49:21):
I think they did it to like two weeks two
weeks ago on Monday.
Speaker 2 (49:25):
Work out that like slow steady climb.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
A pull or a push push kind of sucks because
you're just stuck in this awkward position. But a drag
man it does does something.
Speaker 6 (49:37):
Take legs, core and cardio. Yeah, that's like the three
most important things.
Speaker 1 (49:42):
I you know, from wearing a pack all week. I
came home on was that Wednesday before we got on
the flight, and I worked out a bunch to try
to like just I knew it wasn't gonna work out
a ton and yeah, and I hadn't worked out a
ton and I started rolling on that death Star. But
it has the like one that has all the hobby
(50:02):
one knobs on it.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
It bruised me.
Speaker 4 (50:05):
I saw your back with bruised from it.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
Back literally had I get bruised from it, pretty heavy bruised,
like I've never had that.
Speaker 2 (50:10):
But I but you don't feel.
Speaker 5 (50:11):
It in the moment, No, you don't feel it just
feels kind of good and kind of painful. And then
like like Madison will be like, hey, your back is bruis.
Speaker 2 (50:18):
Hillary's like, what happened to your back? Yeah? It was?
It full of bruises. It was crazy.
Speaker 6 (50:23):
But when I told Bird, He's like, why Cardio, I
mean not Cardio, why cor I was like the.
Speaker 2 (50:28):
Pack pack, Yeah, you're holding it and moved out.
Speaker 6 (50:30):
You're just I mean, find what twenty five thirty.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
Pounds spawning scope Billings tried.
Speaker 6 (50:37):
I hated taking that thing off and putting it back on,
So I usually just kept it on for unless I
knew we was sitting. Oh, it just kept it on
and dude like twisting and turning.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
It's like, dude, but my back never got ted shivering.
Speaker 3 (50:49):
And if you do have to pack something out core
is a big deal with that.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
You yep, all right? Anything else that's it? Would you
go again?
Speaker 2 (51:01):
Oh?
Speaker 6 (51:01):
Yeah, I can't wait. Fucked a lot of sinker. Wait,
no way, Yeah, I calls.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
All right. Piece
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Ruthie's Table 4
For more than 30 years The River Cafe in London, has been the home-from-home of artists, architects, designers, actors, collectors, writers, activists, and politicians. Michael Caine, Glenn Close, JJ Abrams, Steve McQueen, Victoria and David Beckham, and Lily Allen, are just some of the people who love to call The River Cafe home. On River Cafe Table 4, Rogers sits down with her customers—who have become friends—to talk about food memories. Table 4 explores how food impacts every aspect of our lives. “Foods is politics, food is cultural, food is how you express love, food is about your heritage, it defines who you and who you want to be,” says Rogers. Each week, Rogers invites her guest to reminisce about family suppers and first dates, what they cook, how they eat when performing, the restaurants they choose, and what food they seek when they need comfort. And to punctuate each episode of Table 4, guests such as Ralph Fiennes, Emily Blunt, and Alfonso Cuarón, read their favourite recipe from one of the best-selling River Cafe cookbooks. Table 4 itself, is situated near The River Cafe’s open kitchen, close to the bright pink wood-fired oven and next to the glossy yellow pass, where Ruthie oversees the restaurant. You are invited to take a seat at this intimate table and join the conversation. For more information, recipes, and ingredients, go to https://shoptherivercafe.co.uk/ Web: https://rivercafe.co.uk/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/therivercafelondon/ Facebook: https://en-gb.facebook.com/therivercafelondon/ For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iheartradio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com