Ep. 641: 15 Years of Living Off the Land in Alaska

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
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(00:31):
out at first light dot com. F I R S
T l I t e dot com. Joined today by
Randy Brown from Alaska's Fishing Game Agency and Uh, Randy,
I'm gonna you're gonna, I'm gonna embarrass you a little bit,
but not bad. It's in the in the kind of
way you want to be embarrassed. Where you hear a

(00:52):
bunch of good stuff about yourself. Okay, yeah, not not
not where you hear stuff bad about yourself. Good.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
You do know it's Wildlife Service, Oh, federof Fish Wildlife Service.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
Oh, because that's where my brother works.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
Yeah, that's why he Okay, Okay, I'm sorry about that.
Uh that was Krins problem US Fish and Wildlife Service
and that helps that. That's a good team too. How
why Randy's here? Randy, my brother Danny, who works for
the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has never once in
his life made a recommendation of someone that should come

(01:28):
on the podcast. Ever. I don't want to say stingy
with respect, but he just like, you know, he uh,
you know he he called me and said, you know
who you need to have on this show is Randy
Brown because he like in the seventies, moved up and
lived in the bush in Alaska and lived off the

(01:48):
land up in the yukon Ate like a strict meat diet,
raised his kids up there, had all these adventures. Later
decided to become a fisheries biologist, got him self educated.
He's doing all this cutting edge work on these kind
of mysterious fish in Alaska. He's like, that's who you

(02:08):
should be talking to. I had to convince you to
do it. Yeah you did, so thanks for coming down, man,
Hey you bet. Yeah. I wish we had you here
for like three, two shows, because I do want to
do one show about living in the bush, living off
the land in the bush. Then I want to do
another show about fish. Yeah, but we're gonna have to

(02:30):
condense it, you know, Well, I'm amenable to it. Okay,
we got to do two quick things. Three, A couple
of quick things before we get there. One man, you
weren't here for if we had this guy on about quail,

(02:50):
people got mad about that. So I don't love you
know about this, Randy, but down here and there's like
a huge problem with Bob White quail just vanishing across
their range. I didn't know that. A host of problems
with Bob Boy Quail. So we had a guy in
who had developed it's like a de wormer. Well, they

(03:13):
have a high parasite loads in some areas, particularly in Texas,
they have a high parasite load. So a guy comes in.
We called the episode what Happened to Bib Boy Quail.
A guy comes in, He's like, Oh, there's all kinds
of things that are happened in by boy quail. One
of them is a high parasite load. So he gets
the first FDA approved drug for wildlife that is publicly available,

(03:34):
meaning any Joe Blow can buy this this quail feed
with a dewormer in it, okay, and you can put
it out and try to produce parasite loads in your quail.
And he has found anecdotally and otherwise through research that
it's helpful to quail in some areas where they have
high parasite loads to deworm them.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
But man, oh man, oh man, the whole world, the
whole quail.

Speaker 1 (04:00):
World's very upset that he came on because they're like,
it distracts from the main message of habitat. I disagree
because he talked about habitat a whole bunch. But anyways,
we're gonna have another quail. We're gonna have a better quail,
not a better We're gonna have a different quail person
on to explain why it's bad, and among other things,

(04:22):
like it'll be like what real That episode will be
called what really Happened to the bob Woit Quail? And
in it, I will press the individual to explain why
it's bad to deal with If there's a big problem
with ten parts to it, why it's bad to deal
with one of those parts.

Speaker 4 (04:41):
Yeah, I'm guessing that the ratio between the size of
parts is gonna be.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Dude, I'm not doing a great job of articulating all
of the consternation, because, yeah, a lot of consternation in
the quail world. What was the world before we found
was Remember we talked about there as the world, Oh,
the beekeeping world.

Speaker 5 (05:05):
Bee keepers get oh, very very particular.

Speaker 1 (05:09):
And yeah, that was our first That was the first
time we ever weighed in on the Bob white quail.
So we're going to have a follow up episode about
Bob white Quail and we're going to talk about that
Bob whit Quail episode. Quick question from from uh to
put to the people in the room. This is from
a fellow named Christian. So he's check this out. What Statesian?

(05:33):
New York? Oh, okay, he's in New York. He gets
a this is a letter. He's thirty three years old.
Odd that he told us that he's thirty three years
old and owns thirty acres. Maybe he likes it how
close his age is to his acreage. It says, I'm
thirty three years old and owned thirty acres with his

(05:55):
brother in upstate New York. His father bought the land
in the eighties, he said. He here's his letter, here's
his question, here's his ethical conundrum. Over the last few years,
we've been dealing with a land owner who owns the
property next to us, who is strongly against hunting. I'll
keep mind, these guys have owned this place since the eighties. Okay,

(06:18):
while we are respectful neighbors and hunt by the book,
she harasses us every year. Do you have any suggestions
on how to deal with such an issue. So, on
the day before the opener of New York's gun season,
he receives this text. He cleaned out the names because
he doesn't want the person to get harrassed his name

(06:38):
and her name. He cleaned the names up. This is
in New York State. She texts him on the eve
of the opener of the deer opener. Good morning, here
we go again, much to my dismay, you are back
to kill the deer. Oh sorry, you are back to
kill the deer. I love and for whom I provide
a sanctuary that for you becomes a killing field. It

(07:02):
is a nightmare for me. So before you tell me
not to text you again, I'd like to remind you
that we share a property boundary. I encourage the presence
of deer, and you can take advantage of this. It
is not right, and as we still live in a
partially civil society, I'm asking you with all civility, to
please stay off my land and not take care and

(07:24):
not take advantage of the preponderance of deer that are
here because I provide protection and a sanctuary for them
best wishes.

Speaker 5 (07:36):
I'm so curious about what her sanctuary looks like.

Speaker 6 (07:39):
She signed off with best wishes.

Speaker 3 (07:41):
And good started with good morning, and ended with best wishes.

Speaker 5 (07:44):
Yeah, it seems pretty civil, but he's not moving on
to her property.

Speaker 4 (07:50):
He's on his prom he's not on it.

Speaker 7 (07:52):
And it seems like she's been doing this kind of
thing for a while before. You tell me not to
text you again, right, Yeah, I think Joannis had.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
The right approach. We talked about it earlier.

Speaker 6 (08:04):
What's that laying on us?

Speaker 4 (08:07):
Oh maybe just go pay her a visit with uh
with the warden on your on your hip. And she
hasn't done anything else to have a chat with her. Well,
unless I don't know at what point it becomes hunter harassment.

Speaker 1 (08:19):
A text this begins good morning and ends best wishes
to a neighboring property is not harrassment. She didn't threaten them.

Speaker 7 (08:26):
No, it wouldn't be in there going to like threaten
to put her in jail. Just have the ward and
give give her a little like education.

Speaker 4 (08:32):
If this is all she's doing is sending texts like this,
then Christians should just reply to her and say, hey,
we're not going to go on your property. We're gonna
continue hunting. We do everything by the law, et cetera,
and it's over and done. But if it's a if
there's something more than what we're seeing here, because we're
getting just a little snippet of this world, then I
would say go and pay her a visit for sure.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
But I would think at this point, I feel, at
this point it's like no one wants to get that text.
But I mean, she's asking him to do something. He
just would reply and say, I'm respectfully.

Speaker 4 (09:08):
I mean, I respect.

Speaker 5 (09:10):
My property, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
I respect your I respect your private property, but I'm
gonna use my property, uh, in accordance with the law,
and I expect that you'll behave in accordance with the law.
And sorry that we don't see eyed eye on this.
And then have you seen any biggins?

Speaker 7 (09:29):
It make you not want to hunt that border though,
because you'd be all worried about a deer running.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
If it runs onto her place. And he's only got
he's only got thirty acres, So I mean, not only
that's greats more than I got, but uh not Mortian
he's got.

Speaker 4 (09:47):
That's a nice chunk for a back east.

Speaker 6 (09:49):
Well, I feel like Giannis has some uh experience here
that most of us don't with the psychological burden that
overbearing neighbor can put on you, that's right. So uh
if there is more here, because it does, it just
weighs on your like, oh yeah, every shot that goes off,
I'm gonna get a text, every truck that comes up

(10:10):
our driveway, I'm gonna get a text every you know.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
That had that very similar situation around a raccoon.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
So he's a scar. That's why he's ready to get
He's ready to get the law. He's ready to throw down.

Speaker 7 (10:24):
Yeah, if this lady's giving him heartburn.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
It's like, here's an our listener question. So that's so
so that my official answer. I mean, if I don't know,
it sounds like from around the room, no Yoanni wants
to get a game warning and go over there.

Speaker 3 (10:37):
Yeah, to do a preemptive strike.

Speaker 2 (10:42):
I like it.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeahan he proposes a preemptive strike, I propose, I propose
saying sorry, we don't see eyed eye. I'm gonna I.

Speaker 7 (10:54):
Can see just doing nothing.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
Also, just go on with your definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah,
definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah, that's totally fair. Here's
another question, listener question. We got to talking recently about
pre chewing deer meat to give to your kids. Like

(11:17):
when our kids, all of our kids, when they turned
like pretty much the day they were nine months old,
I would chew up deer meat and give it to
them just as like a thing, like to like a
symbolic gesture, and then they would start eating meat at
that point. I don't know what they say nowadays. This
stuff to always changes, but a decade ago, you're supposed
to give a meat at nine months or they could
chew up meat at nine months.

Speaker 4 (11:37):
Randy, does that apply when you're living out in the
bush in Alaska?

Speaker 2 (11:41):
Well, I'll tell you what. What we did is take
moose ribs that had been boiled up so nice and soft,
and I'd give it to the kids and hey, with
chew on it, just like the dogs chill.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
No meat.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah, well there's some meat, not a bunch.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
Yeah, you know, roughly what age.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Well, they were still riding in a back for me, okay.
I I took him around with a jerry pack, no,
you know, and they loved it. I had two hands
to work with, and they had they got to look
at everything.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Sitting back there nowing on ribs yep, and if.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
They dropped them, the dogs would take them.

Speaker 1 (12:18):
So this guy's wondering, he just shot a deer. Okay,
he's a new father, so he had his first kid,
shot his first deer with lead ammunition. And now he's
wondering if if it's okay to have his kid and
his wife eat it because he's worried about the lead.

(12:38):
Come on, like, no, Well, first off, when you cut it,
just cut around the wound, mark, cut around the wound,
and then go satisfy your curiosity that that that when
people look at lead levels, there's not any evidence that
that hunters that eat a lot of deer meat have
elevated levels lead. There's also a lot of things about

(13:00):
inert lead and lead that's like in shot form. But
just cut around it. I mean, Plus, if you go
and buy what makes you think the stuff you're buying
is so like sure different? I mean, okay, I don't
want to feed him that, but we're gonna eat ocean,
big ocean fish.

Speaker 7 (13:19):
If it's really weighing on them, just make the switch
to copper. Bullets or tungsten shot or small game whatever
like sure, so bugging you that much, but.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
I would cut around it.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
And I mean that's the main, the main thing we
you know, the main thing we eat. Uh. I got
a whole bag full of all the lead shot we
pulled out of birds. Yeah. You know what I'm gonna
do with that? Reload it?

Speaker 8 (13:53):
No.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Woman. I was at this event, we did this book event,
and a woman came and she had this pendant that
was like a dish, like a dish, and it was
full of all kinds of shot and I was admiring it.
And it was all the shot from her first turkey.
And they sent and her and her husband sent me
a kit to make them. So I'm taking all the
shot we've ever picked out all of our food, because

(14:15):
I always put in a bag, and I'm making my
wife a necklace. And it's got like this resin. So
you take the dish, oh yeah, and you put all
the shot in the dish and it's like a pendant
and then you squirt this resin in the air and
then hold a black light on it and it makes
like a necklace of all the shot you picked out
of your food. That's cool.

Speaker 7 (14:34):
Does your wife knows she's getting this?

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Oh, I've told her about ten times, as haven't made
it yet. I got enough for two necklaces song, I
have one for my wife, more for my daughter.

Speaker 5 (14:43):
There was another person who wrote in about prechewed food.
He says that his mom was a dentist and when
he himself had a kid, his mom was like, no, no, no,
don't do the prechewed food thing because or a dental hygienist,
because she said cavity developed. I don't think. I don't
think the logic is sound. But cavities developed because of bacteria.

(15:06):
So if you take food and you chew it up
and then you give it to your kid, that might
increase their likelihood of developing cavities.

Speaker 7 (15:13):
Because they're.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Going to fall out anywhere.

Speaker 5 (15:18):
That's why I didn't put it in the notes because
I thought that it didn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (15:24):
And there's nothing on your mom's mouth that isn't getting on.

Speaker 5 (15:27):
You right exactly exactly. That's why I didn't include it.

Speaker 7 (15:29):
But I thought, I think the food thing has been
played out.

Speaker 1 (15:34):
We need to move on well with that said, at
least until we get another email or put it on
a T shirt.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
So Randy, what, uh, what drew you to Alaska?

Speaker 1 (15:47):
Man?

Speaker 3 (15:48):
Like, how'd you wind up? And where'd you grow up?
And what drew you up there?

Speaker 2 (15:51):
So I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and
so that was southern rockies where my stomping crown. As
a kid used to fish and you know, it was
more like hunting for those little, uh little rainbows up
in the headwaters. And uh and I just I don't know,
I just wanted to I wanted to live out in

(16:12):
the woods. I'd read some of these uh, you know
books like The Big Sky and some other baby gothries
and uh and I always felt like I was born
about one hundred years too late. But but so so
that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go
out into the woods. And and uh, I had a

(16:33):
tense speed was my transportation at the time. So I
when I finished high school, I had got accepted up
to university and Fairbanks and came up for one semester
and quit and went and milk cows for the rest
of that year and then moved out and woods up
onto the.

Speaker 3 (16:49):
Who's you milk cows?

Speaker 5 (16:50):
For?

Speaker 2 (16:51):
It was they had a few dairies up in that
Palmer while Silla area just north of Anchorage that were
partially subsidized by the state, and they never did They
never did make it so they could compete with milk
being shipped up from lower forty eight because they, I think,
just with the cold and the inability to grow a

(17:14):
lot of the grains, they had to ship grain up
to increase milk fat. And in the dairy world, it's
my understanding that milk fat content that was what determined
the price they got on it, and so they were
always on the edge. But I worked at this one place,

(17:35):
room and board seven hundred bucks a month, and you
were there milking it was about two hundred cows twice
a day.

Speaker 1 (17:47):
It was pretty wild. They fed you, housed, you gave
you seven hundred bucks, yep, and you milk two hundred cows. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (17:55):
How long did that take?

Speaker 2 (17:57):
Well, it was about four or five hours of milking,
if I remember right, Milk them in the morning and
then milk them in the evening.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
And at this point you're eighteen years old, roughly I
was eighteen.

Speaker 3 (18:11):
And when you say you went to live in the woods,
how's that even begin?

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Like?

Speaker 1 (18:13):
What like what.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
So there was a buddy of mine that came up
with me. He and I used to kick around in
the mountains and winter camp and everything, and so so
he and I had had picked out off of a
map that we were going to go up onto the
Tautontic River downstream from.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
Eagle What what like? What year was this?

Speaker 2 (18:35):
So it was nineteen seventy six, So.

Speaker 7 (18:38):
Was the Homestead Act still in play?

Speaker 8 (18:41):
There?

Speaker 1 (18:41):
No? Okay, so the male jumping ahead, but so the deal.

Speaker 2 (18:46):
There was a Homestead Act opening in the late sixties,
I believe, and another one in seventy three. There have
been some state land dispersals as well, but those two
acts were before I ever got out there, and then

(19:06):
the state gave away. They would have these land lotteries,
you know, in various places. But it was kind of screwy,
I thought, because because you were going to have a
bunch of people going out into the same place, and
nobody could have could have made a living with that
many people in those places, and a lot of them
didn't really survive, you know. They would go out there,

(19:27):
build a cabin and then realize, I got to get
in here with an airplane. There's four other people with places,
and a lot of people left or never proved up
on it, you know.

Speaker 4 (19:39):
So too many people trying to draw from the same resource.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah, So out on the Yukon, people were you know,
organized ten to twenty miles apart down the Yukon, up
the side creeks, and so that was sufficient distance, you know,
provided they could you know, establish trap lines in different

(20:04):
places that they could make a living off the off
of the country. There they weren't stepping on each other's toes.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
So when you when you tried to pick a spot,
how did you know? How did you know that you
wouldn't be crowded in with other guys? Or didn't you?

Speaker 2 (20:19):
We didn't. And in fact we went down to Tatonic
River and there was a guy named Dick Cook who
lived there and and Tatonic River. So so this is
right up near the border with Canada, right where the
Yukon comes in. There's a town of Eagle, it's got
a road to it, and then Circle is downstream about
one hundred and sixty miles and then there's several of

(20:42):
these tributaries that are cannoeable and and so so Tatonic
River was the farthest upstream of those tributaries. Well, actually
seventy mile river was was that was from the south.
But the Tatonic River flowed for about nine miles in
Alaska before it plunged into the Yukon. But you had

(21:04):
big mountains there, the Ogilvie Mountains. That's a big range
goes from you know, Dawson area all the way over
to the border between the Yukon and the Porcupine River.
You know, all along that border is the western side
of the Ogilvies, big limestone mountains with sheep And of

(21:25):
course we didn't know any of that, but we knew
there were mountains there. But Dick Dick let us know
that that he lived, he had a place five miles
up to Tondick and a place down on the Yukon,
and that that there wasn't enough room for us and
so and there wasn't.

Speaker 4 (21:45):
Did you just.

Speaker 7 (21:46):
Run into him or you knew he was in the area,
or like, how do you make contact with him?

Speaker 2 (21:51):
I made We made contact on the river. We were
lining up the Tetonic River.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
Oh to go establish the place to live.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, you're like, damn, there's a cabin here.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Well, we didn't see the cabin. He was downstream of that,
but we pulled over. He was talking, well, he saw
us on the way in and sky Charles was about
six and a half feet tall and I was just
about six and so. And so when we came back down,
even though we realized we weren't going to be able
to make a place there, we went up and explored

(22:23):
around and fished and walked in the mountains and things.
On our way back down, though, Dick was talking with
John McPhee. That was the huge John see John mc
out there.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
I'm aware that you had to run in with McPhee
while he was writing coming into the country, right right,
So you pull up and he's literally talking to John McPhee. Yeah,
and John mcviee.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
And John McFee dips his cup into the river and
offers it to us, and we're like, we don't need that,
we've been drinking the river. But because he was amazed
that there was a river that was clean enough that
you could drink out of, that's what it was.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
And so he was, I.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Don't know, offering it to we would kneel down and
drink water and whatever. But yeah, but but as it
turns out Dick was. When John was with Dick, Dick
was was looking at our tracks and he's telling He's
telling John, Okay, well, you can tell one guy's really big,
you know, because of the stride.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Lines and everything.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
So John ended up what did he call Dick the
Grand Swami of trackers or something like that. But but
Dick never told him that he'd seen us before. So anyway, yeah,
what a deal.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
But so you're you're sort of in coming into the.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Country sort of, not really, but sort of. And uh,
and then we headed back to Eagle because we didn't
know what the heck we.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Were going to do.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
And and when we were back there, there was a
fire that was taking place on the Canadian side of
the border, just uh north of the Yukon and and
the Canadians and the US have have they have these
these agreements, and so the BLM put the fire. They
went out and and worked on that fire, and they

(24:17):
hired me and Charles out there, and so we went
and worked on a fire. And during that period of
time I met this guy, Mike Potts. And Mike Potts
had had he lived in the village. He married a
gull in the village and and he had a trap line.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
Was that his real name?

Speaker 1 (24:34):
Yeah, Mike Potts. Do you ever hear John Colter? He's
a mountain, He's a he's called the Yellowstone Colter's Hell. Yeah. Okay.
He was over by where Seth lives in eighteen oh
eight and he was with a guy and they got

(24:56):
caught by the Blackfeet. And that guy's name is Mike Potts. Oh,
and they caught Mike pots all up in little bits
and smeared him all over John Colder and then Colter,
and then they made Colter start running, and that was
Colter's run. That was Mike Potters. Yeah. Yeah, different Mike Pop.
That's a different mic post.

Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah. Well, so Mike Mike always well, he several times
he had people come out to his trap line south
of Eagle Back on the north fork of the forty
mile and and help him do building projects or or
haul meat and various other things. And so he invited

(25:37):
me to go out there with him that that winner,
and he had a dog team, had a couple of
cabins and wanted help with hunting, and I went with him.
Charles got involved with with gold mining.

Speaker 1 (25:52):
He this is six and a half with Charles.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Yeah, yeah, and so and so he went gold mining
and I went trapping, and it was kind of like
an apprenticeship, you know, building cabins with moss, chinking and
and which is a wonderful way to go, just with
materials that you find out there in the woods, and
then uh and then taking care of meat. And we

(26:16):
went and ended up getting a bear and a big
moose that was really fat. You know that these animals
go through these cycles of fat and lean, and big
bull before they go into rut has an enormous amount
of fat on it. And so Mike showed me how
to how to how to cut that stuff off and

(26:37):
be able to render it into uh into oil, So
rendering moose fat.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Yeah, and he was using that moose fat as a
frying medium or like for baking or what was he
doing with the rendered moose fat?

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Well, yes, it was it was too uh for frying,
but it was also just to eat with your meat.
And then there was cracklings that was left over and
those were also So the deal with eating straight meat
is you got to eat meat and fat, and we

(27:14):
would use it that way. Sometimes we'd render as much
as twelve gallons I think was the most we've rendered
off a single big bull.

Speaker 1 (27:22):
Damn.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
That's kidney fat. Kidney's kidney fat that can fill a
five gallon bucket once you take the kidney out jamming
in there, and then all sorts of other fat in
the intestines, the ribs, the brisk at the back.

Speaker 6 (27:35):
So you were using primarily internal fat, not the external fat.

Speaker 1 (27:40):
Not the back fat. Or he used the back fat too.

Speaker 6 (27:42):
Did you have separate uses or was it all just
one oil at the end of the day, one oil?

Speaker 4 (27:48):
Okay? Got it?

Speaker 2 (27:48):
And moose fat is hard, so you know when you
if you take it at root temperature, it it'll crack.

Speaker 1 (27:54):
Off in a chunk. You know.

Speaker 2 (27:56):
It's not like butter or anything like that. You know,
it just it breaks off in a solid chunk that
you can throw in the frying pan, melt it out,
fry the meat, and then when it starts cooling off,
you can dip it and get a big swath of
the fat on the on.

Speaker 1 (28:12):
The meat so that then you take your thumbnail and
scrape it off through for your mouth. There is that.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
But but the good thing about moose fat is if
you render it clean and decant it and pour it
off into a bucket. It will keep through a summer,
so you can have it without spoiling it. Bear fat,
on the other hand, will go rancid if it's not
kept very cold, so it's very different.

Speaker 1 (28:40):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:41):
Bear fat is more of a of a liquid, almost
liquid at room temperature, but it won't keep. You can't
keep it for over over a summer. I mean you
could if you had it in a freezer. We were
dealing with whatever the temperature.

Speaker 4 (28:57):
I feel like I've had to survive just in the
pantry at the house for a year plus.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
But it goes, it goes rancid. Yeah, my experience was it. Yeah,
it went rancid, and then it becomes dog food because
they don't care.

Speaker 4 (29:12):
Sure, Sure, can you give You're talking about some pretty
specific places on the map, and I think you're doing
a good job for people that know that area of Alaska.
Can you give just a little bit bigger of a
geographical context, because I think Eagle sort of has like
the jumping off point for a lot of people that
went to do what you did, and just kind of
where that lies and why it's there and why people

(29:34):
that are drawn to that are drawn to Eagle I
think that's important.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Well, yeah, so that's right at the border with Canada.
I mean it's just like ten miles downstream of the border.
And back in those days, anyway, that was after the
Native Claimed Settlement Act and before Anilka, and so there
was kind of a void and all all that a

(30:00):
lot of the land in Alaska at that point was
just sort of managed by b l M.

Speaker 7 (30:06):
Didn't we do a podcast on that native Native claims
and aspects of the Native Yeah, people are wondering.

Speaker 3 (30:14):
Yeah, can I do it real quick?

Speaker 1 (30:15):
Yeah, go for it and correct me where I'm wrong here.
During it was during the Carter administration they finally they
finalized a lot of it. But for a long time Alaska,
a lot of the land in Alaska was in a
sort of managerial limbo. That's correct, right, And it was
they knew that that that that Native Alaskan tribes would
would claim some and some things would become park but

(30:37):
for a long time it was just in a in
a limbo. And then during the Carter administration and then
leading up to the Trans Alaska Pipeline and oil and
Prude Obey, they started to figure out with greater clarity
this land is is. This land is going to be parked,
This land is state land, this land is native land,

(30:57):
this land will be BLM land. As that fairly accurate.

Speaker 2 (31:03):
Yeah, they discovered the so the Statehood Act laid out
basic acreages of land that would become part of the
state ownership versus federal ownership and uh and that there
had to be some sort of native claim settlement, but

(31:26):
it wasn't figured out. They didn't have it all sorted
out on where it was going to be or or
other things like that. There were some parks, you know,
like the Dnale.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
Was already there in the Arctic.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
They called it National Wildlife Range and rather than a
refuge and uh and that. So there's there's things that
were already sorted out for the for the federal system
when they when they found oil and they were looking

(32:03):
for a way to get it south. They the Secretary
of the Interior at the time is 'ed All and
he he essentially stopped everything, put a hold on everything.
And so that was the incentive to get the native
land claims settled.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
Right. God, if you're going to put.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
A pipeline through, we better figure out what land it is.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
As they goes like who's going to end up owning
what right?

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Yeah, And so so that took place, and and it
also laid out the d two lands, which were the
federal lands, conservation areas, refuges, parks, other things like that,
not necessarily where they were or or how big each
plot was going to be, but that there would be, uh,

(32:51):
these parks and refuges in various places.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
So in this area that we're talking about, like what
Yanni asked bout, were basically where the Ukon River flows
out of Yukon Territory into Alaska. At that time, in
the seventies, a lot of people were moving into that
area because.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
You could just go live right, yeah, And it was
So the deal was that BLM what I heard was
BLM had gone up into the forty Mile country and
gone down and burned two cabins they considered to be
trespassed cabins, and they got taken to court over that.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
And the legal.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Response was that they had to consider any cabin they
thought was trespassed, they had to deal with it in
the courts before they did anything with it.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
They couldn't.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
They had to treat it like private property. And so
they were just like hands off we're not going to
deal with it.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
Got it.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
And so there were people that went down onto the Yukon,
and there were people doing this in a lot of
different places, but that was where I knew about at
the time, But.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
But there was there.

Speaker 2 (34:01):
It was sort of a you just had to kind
of negotiate with neighbors, with other people that were living
there for a place that wasn't going to step on
somebody else's toes or interfere with their trap line. And
that's what Dick did with us, you know, he said,
you can't do it, you know, and we're thinking, Santa

(34:21):
Fe time, we'll be at least a mile away. You
did not, no twenty miles, you know.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
So when you spent that, when you did that apprenticeship
with the guy, did that lead you to find a
place you could go set up in? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (34:36):
So there was a He did it the year before
with this guy named Little John, little John Gottio, and
Little John was out there on the forty mile trapping
had a different cabin that same winter that I went
out and helped Mike. I helped him finish a cabin
in the snow and then took care of We had

(34:57):
a moose and a bear, and so I took care
of those out of his main cabin while he went
back and then came back out later in November or
something with his dogs. And during the winter, Little John
and I spent a lot of time together, and we
decided we were going to go well, we were initially
going to go up the Colin River the next the

(35:20):
next year, and when we started down the Yukon though,
Colina is a big tributary of the Porcupine River, So
to get there you'd have to go down to Yukon
a couple of hundred miles and then up the up
the Porcupine a couple hundred miles and then up the
Colin River. And how were you guys?

Speaker 7 (35:42):
Were you guys getting in by bush plane or were
you like traveling by boat or like, how were you
getting into this remote stuff?

Speaker 6 (35:48):
How were you and Little John hanging out together? Weren't
twenty miles apart.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
It's doubling canoes and we were lining. We had no motors, yep,
and so the winter dogs of course, Yeah, so little
John had dogs. I didn't at the time, but I
ended up getting a couple of puppies and h and
off a litter and so and so when we started
down to Yukon, though we had we had two canoes.

(36:16):
He had a canoe and I had one. And we
got down part way down and found out that nobody
was living on the Candick River. Candiic River is a big,
big tributary of the Yukon there between Eagle and Circle,
so it's about eighty miles the mouth. It is about
eighty miles downstream of Eagle and it also head watered

(36:38):
in Canada and flowed for over one hundred miles through
through Alaska. And we decided there was a guy living
at the mouth of the of the Candic River. And
it was a guy named Fred Beach. And he told you,
no one's upstream of me. Well, several other people did too.
They knew that there was nobody up there, and and

(37:00):
he reiterated that and said he rarely makes it past
three miles up. He had two dogs and and so
we decided we're going to go up there and check
it out. And so we started lining up the river
and feeding ourselves along the way. We had a gill
net and we had we would we would shoot beavers

(37:21):
and feed us and the and the dogs in that
way we shoot squirrels sometimes for the dogs. And what was.

Speaker 6 (37:30):
Your lining up process and what type of mileage could
you make going upstream like that?

Speaker 2 (37:37):
So, so lining is a process where you have about
one hundred foot long rope and one ends tied to
the front of the canoe, ones to the back canoe.
They lining is more easily done if they got a
little keel on the bottom. And so what you're doing
is adjusting these two lines so that that canoe stays
off shore and tries to stay parallel with the So

(38:00):
a big gravel bar, you just walk up on the
gravel and it's out in the water, pulling it along.
And then when you want to create a cross, you
jump in it and cross and go up the other side.
If you have to get by a drift pile or
buy a big cut bank, you might use a pole,
about a ten foot spruce pole and just push yourself
off the bottom to get past.

Speaker 6 (38:21):
So are you kind of walking backwards when you're lying them?

Speaker 2 (38:24):
No, it's not that much. Well, if you were hauling
a moose, you might, yeah, not enough drag, not enough drag.

Speaker 1 (38:31):
It just goes real smooth.

Speaker 4 (38:32):
So by adjusting the two lengths of that rope. You're
just adjusting the angle of the canoe, and that's it's
basically faring in the current.

Speaker 1 (38:40):
Yeah, you just have it, did it's straight out from you.
You can just about yeah, yeah, just about yeah.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
And so there's boulder fields on the Candic River, and
so you could you it's if you got a keel,
it's like power steering and you can go around between
rocks and everything. So whereas if you don't have a keel,
it kind of bumps against shore. It's doesn't go very
well at all.

Speaker 1 (39:01):
How many miles were you making on that big river?

Speaker 2 (39:04):
You know, sometimes ten miles, more often.

Speaker 1 (39:08):
Six or eight a day. Yeah, and you got so
we get so.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
I don't know if you know this, but when the
Second World War came along, the government ended up when
we got involved in it, they shut down materials that
could be used for the war effort from going anywhere else.
And all of the mines in Alaska, with a couple
of exceptions, got shut down. And what people back in

(39:36):
the thirties and early forties were doing is trapping in
the winter and then working the mines in the summer.
And so the fur industry went down too, and they left,
and so that was all the cabins that we found
on the candy were of that vintage, you know. So
we were coming there forty years after anybody had been there,

(39:58):
and so and so we would we went up river
with one canoe and one of us would walk the
spruce groves looking for cabins, and the other would line
and switch off here and there. And and we found
a few, a few cabins, but none of which were functional.
They had because back then they didn't have, you know,

(40:19):
a lot of the waterproofing tarps and various other things,
and so they would develop a leak somewhere they had
They used tar paper on the roofs and sometimes dirt
over that or moss. But if they ever got a leak,
you know, then you'd get a rot going on in
the roof would fall in, or a wall would crash

(40:40):
out or something like that. But what we did see
was big piles of moose antlers, and then in the
upper river big piles of caribou antlers too. So we
thought piles, Well, what do you do with them?

Speaker 3 (40:52):
I mean, from the people that were living there.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
From the people that had lived them there, I see,
And they wouldn't.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
They wouldn't do anything.

Speaker 2 (40:59):
They bring him in, but they wouldn't do anything with him.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
So they throw him in a pile I see.

Speaker 2 (41:03):
And they would last for a long time, and so
I mean porcupines chew him and squirrels and things like that.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
But but they they they were still there.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
That it was a good sign because you and we thought,
why go to the kaleen, We're going to come up here,
and that's what we did.

Speaker 3 (41:18):
And then when you were seeing all those antlers, it
would show you where people had lived and also show
you where places that might be good hunting exactly.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
And in almost every case there was a thin area
open lead or something in the Candic River that would
for water in the winter. They were great places, dry
dry spruce woods.

Speaker 1 (41:39):
And and good water. And you found a guy that
had starved to death, right.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
I did, Yeah, Me and me and Fred we found him.
He was that was.

Speaker 6 (41:48):
Held where near a big pile of antlers.

Speaker 2 (41:51):
He was not.

Speaker 1 (41:53):
Well.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
So so little John and I had gone up and
we had built two cabins where most built two cabins.
And then we went back to Eagle and got traps
and things and and stoves, and we came back down
and and Fred came with us and a couple other
folks who were interested in having line cabins, just cabins,

(42:17):
emergency cabins, you know, if you get wet, because these
rivers that will overflow and sometimes you need to get
past anyway, and so you get wet, and having a
cabin in various places was was beneficial. So so Fred
wanted one about ten miles up the river. And and
he's the one that kind of designed this a little.

(42:39):
It was a it wasn't a very good cabin. It
was about five feet tall on the inside, and there
weren't any windows, and the door was just a piece
of plywood that we had found it in a drift
bile out on the out on the Yukon and and
it just had these leather hinges on it. So that
was what that. And and then a bunk it was

(43:01):
about six feet wide by nine feet long, somewhere to survive,
somewhere to get out out of the cold and have
a fire. And uh, and that's where Smigel ended up going.
We called him Smiegel. Well, so to deal with him,
he came down.

Speaker 1 (43:15):
Who's this guy?

Speaker 6 (43:15):
This is the dead guy.

Speaker 1 (43:16):
The dead guy eventually, sorry.

Speaker 4 (43:19):
So eventually you knew this guy before he died.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
I did not, but Fred had, Fred had seen him.
Fred was this gregarious guy that lived at the mouth
of the Candic and a lot of different people would
come in there. There was a slew that you could
catch pike and and things, and so everybody had it
on their on their on their maps, you know, they
would go in there, and he would go over and
trade things, you know, a beaver hide for a sleeping

(43:46):
bag or various things like this, and and uh. And
one year this guy that that we called Smigel, he
called himself John the Baptist. But he and a and
a buddy of his had floated down from Canada on
a raft, on a log raft, and there was a
big cabin just like a mile up stream of the
Candy and they had seen that and gone to spend

(44:08):
the night there, and his buddy during the night shoved
the raft off and left. And so he wakes up
in the shorting ditched him. He ditched him, did Smiegel,
and so and so he he had the clothes on
his back, the sleeping bag, and and uh and a
shotgun at twenty gates. You know those rossies with the external.
He had a twenty gage shotguns.

Speaker 6 (44:29):
You just got to wonder how much background have you
have you tried to do any background, like the ditching
the partner? Is that bad character of which one?

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Yeah, who was the who was the who was the
sort of dick you know exactly? I have no idea,
I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (44:44):
But but this guy wandered down and he didn't know
Fredwich Baptists on the Baptist Yeah, wandered down to uh
and this is like early September. He wandered down to
the mouth of the Candy and saw that there was
somebody in this cabin across the slough. And Fred came
over and got him. And Fred was always like, you know,

(45:05):
happy with the system, you know, and always wanted to
show it to somebody. A canoe back on a lake
where they go to hunt ducks and muskrats, you know,
and various other you know, a cash here or there,
you know, and and.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
Me just so unclear, like he had a sweet setup
and he shared he'd want to share, right, yeah, yeah,
like I catch pike here, I do this there, yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
And and he was not very ambitious, so he only
he might get a Lynx or two, you know, in
in Trapping or in eight or ten Martin, and you
know that would be enough for him.

Speaker 1 (45:39):
He just didn't. He wasn't very ambitious.

Speaker 9 (45:42):
And so you know, a very ambitious guy out there, tho,
it's gotta be fairly ambitious.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Maybe he didn't build the cabin they called it. Morris's
I always going back? Yeah, but but anyway, he he
he decided that he was going to go back east
that fall and he told he told this guy that
he had to catch a ride or build a raft
and go to Circle. They couldn't stay there, but the

(46:08):
guy stayed and Fred got a ride. There was a
there was a barge called the Brainstorm that ran out
of Circle and it would go up to Eagle and Dawson.

Speaker 1 (46:18):
I got I got interrupted discover I got lost from it.
So Fred, So Fred's living there. Yeah, and okay, let's
just stick with just calling him Smiegel. Fred's living there.
Smiegel comes down, Sniegel's been abandoned by his buddy. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Now, now who says they're going back? They got to
go east?

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Fred is Fred had his plan to go back east.
So he had he had a bunch of food stored.

Speaker 3 (46:40):
Oh, and he says. But he says, you can't stay
here at my house.

Speaker 2 (46:42):
You can't stay at my house. You have to find
a ride to Circle.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
And get out of here. I'm gonna be gone. I'm
gonna be out of town. And when I'm out of town,
I don't want you here eating my food. That's right,
got it? And about that?

Speaker 2 (46:55):
And Fred got to town by by hailing this barge.
The barge would pick people up. I mean, it was
a big enough barge. It could haul like a dump truck,
you know, on its deck and building materials and things.
And it would go down and go to fort Yukon
and then up to okro on the Porcupine in Canada.
But that was that barge's route, right and the and

(47:17):
the road that would you know, where supplies were loaded
was Circle. And so anyway that Fred got a ride
up and went back east, hitchhike back east and spent
till it was early November when he got back to
Eagle and put his It wasn't frozen yet. There were
there were ice flowing, you know. But he went downstream

(47:40):
in his canoe in amongst all these ice chunks.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
In November. Yeah, in November, not ambitious. Well he knew
how to do. You're not ambitious.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
Let me tell you what.

Speaker 1 (47:54):
I'm a picture.

Speaker 2 (47:58):
So he gets down almost of the Candic River when
the river is just jamming up a little too much
for even him, and he pulls his canoe out, walks
to his cabin and it's about twenty below and Smiegel
has moved his lamp and his sleeping gear to this
cabin up at three mile, three miles farther up, and

(48:19):
Fred was he was pissed. And then he left a
note on the door, I'm up at three mile cabin
John the Baptist, you know. And so and so Fred
goes up there and this guy, this guy has been
eating his jarred fish. He's been eating the moose that
he had, and has sewn clothes out of furs that

(48:42):
Fred had. He's loaded all of our ammunition we had.
Fred had this metal box bolted to a tree that
would kind of like an underbed box on a truck,
and it was back in the woods behind his place.
But of course he'd shown this guy that and that
was where all of us, me and Fred and little

(49:02):
John had reloading materials there. And so he had loaded everything.
We all shot two forty threes, and so he had
loaded it all but with different you know, you shake
it and it's none of it was consistent. None of
it was consistent. We're like, this is not good, and
we had to get a bullet puller then eventually undo

(49:23):
it all, undo them. Yeah, we weren't going to shoot him.
We had no idea about it, right.

Speaker 6 (49:29):
You're like, this one's good for grouse, this one might
might take down a moose maybe.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:37):
So so so anyway, I had left my snow shoes.
I had store bought snow shoes, but I left them
down there because I wanted to. I wanted to build
a pair, and I knew that if I had a
store bought pair, I wouldn't right, And so I had
left a pair down there and built a new set.

(49:57):
And but anyway, Fred fred is Bread is pissed off
at this guy. Fred used to grow pot on the
roof of his that cabin. He would he would throw
dog shit up there, and then he would throw seeds.
It wasn't it wasn't any good. That's like, yeah, it
wasn't any weed.

Speaker 1 (50:14):
What it wasn't good weed?

Speaker 6 (50:16):
No, like not for the area, good weed or not
good weed just can't be choosers.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Kind of weed.

Speaker 2 (50:22):
It It would give you a headache more than it
would give you a high. But anyway, this guy had
smoked all his pot too.

Speaker 7 (50:33):
He was living high on the hog while you guys
are gone.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
And Fred got pissed about that, and he says it
wasn't any good stick around anyway. Fred says, you got
to go circle or eagle after it freezes up. You
got to go because I'm going to kill you otherwise,
right and so and so this guy says, I'm not
going either. I'm going to chalk Keatsick. So chalck Keatsick
is on the Black River flowing down into the Porcupine

(50:57):
and and it's a long ways north from the Candic River.
But that's what this guy says. And so further into
the bush further h Yeah and so and so, uh.
Fred outfits him with with some some grain and some
rice and some beans and stems, gave him, gave him

(51:19):
a twenty two pistol, Holy cat. And and this guy
takes off with my snow shoes right and and cruises
up the Candic River because he's going to go up
the Candy and over into the the Black river drainage,
and and and so I came down late he left
uh late November, and h and.

Speaker 1 (51:40):
I had so I I freaking dart too.

Speaker 2 (51:43):
I was, Yeah, I was staying in this cabin above
Johnson Gorge, so about thirty miles up the river. And
and so I would line a canoe up there and
spend the winter. But there was a pass you could
go over some mountains and down to the Yukon, and
I preferred to do that and run the river because
the river would would overflow and then your trail would

(52:04):
be gone and things. If you could, you know, get
to a place that it was all water.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
So I came.

Speaker 4 (52:09):
Down flow, meaning that you get water flowing on top
of the ice.

Speaker 1 (52:12):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (52:13):
Yeah. So so once a river freezes over, you get
snow on it. Sometimes the flow is enough that it
it doesn't have enough room underneath the ice as it
starts thickening up weight on it and things, and it'll
seep up into the snow over the ice and then
it's it's it's slush for a while until it reaches

(52:34):
the surface and refreezes, you know. But anyway, so I
had come down over this pass and come down to
get my snow shoes because the ones I built I
broke and I had to splice them or anyway I
had I had. I got down there in early December,
like ten days after Smiegel had left Fred, and Fred says, well,

(52:58):
he took your he took your your snow shoes. And
I said, let's go and get him. And so we
we we started walking up the river, but that was
a really big snow yere and it was we We
went about five miles up and I decided, ye, he
he can go wherever he wants. But you know, I'm like,
he's not going to make it to chuck heat sick,

(53:18):
no way. And and it actually became a topic among
all of us living on the river, and uh.

Speaker 7 (53:24):
Where is megel?

Speaker 2 (53:25):
Well, we all we all knew from being out there
that you can't make a living with a twenty two
pistol in the winter. You might shoot a grouse or
a squirrel or something like that here or there, but
you can't feed yourself that way. And he didn't have
enough food to start with.

Speaker 7 (53:42):
Someone tells me his buddy had a reason to abandon
him after hearing this story.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
I think maybe. So. Yeah, we've honed in on who's
the dick? Yeah, I think maybe so.

Speaker 6 (53:50):
So just to pause here for a second. Again, it
became a topic amongst everybody on the river. What I
imagine this is mostly in your heads with little bits
of being together, because keep in mind, right now we're
in the days of instant gratification point being right there,
cell phones, text messages.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
Yeah right, Hey, sorry about that.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
Well that's over here.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
Oh it is.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
I should put mine on airplane too.

Speaker 6 (54:17):
So yeah, Phil will tell you not to have that
thing on the table either, Okay, yeah, get interference sometimes there.

Speaker 1 (54:25):
I'm gonna turn it off. Ye.

Speaker 6 (54:27):
Yeah, you're doing great. Large preamble just to ask how
often are you all getting together to have conversations in person?

Speaker 2 (54:40):
Hey, we had good dog teams. Okay, we cruised around
and h and we did talk, and we did have
big gatherings up there, you know, Christmas, New Year's and
various other things. No, we we talked a lot. Okay,
there'd be people traveling just to say hi or to
share some meat or or whatever. But there was discussion.

(55:01):
Everybody uniformly said there's no way he can make it
to Chalikisik. But there were those that said he probably
waved somebody down an airplane, but we didn't have hardly
any airplanes ever go by us there. And some people thought, well,
maybe he went up a little bit and then walked
around Fred's place and got onto the river and walked
a circle or or whatever, you know, and it's like, no,

(55:23):
we pay attention to.

Speaker 1 (55:24):
Tracks, you know.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
It's living out in the woods in the snow country.
You're always looking at tracks. There's nothing that gets by
you tracks. And so we were like, nah, he's got
to be dead, you know. And so the next spring.
So so the Candic River is great in the fall,
has lots of moose and other you know, bears and

(55:49):
things like that. But in the springtime the Yukon is
the place to be because there's the flyway, you know,
you get all the waterfowl coming into Alaska's going by there.
And then there's these big south facing bluffs on the
on the mountains that butt up against the Yukon, and
they call them step Community, you know, because they're just

(56:10):
at that angle.

Speaker 1 (56:11):
They'll drain all.

Speaker 2 (56:12):
Their snow really early in March sometimes and you get
all this new growth coming out, even though everywhere else,
you know, there's still three feet of snow laying around
and the bears would come out early there. So it
was the Yukon was the place to be in the
spring feeding yourself. And so that left me with my

(56:33):
canoe up at my upper place at thirty miles up,
and so I would have to walk the ridge and
down and then canoe down to get my canoe back
in the spring. So that's what me and Fred did.
We went up and walked in and get my canoe
and we're coming down and when we come to where
this cabin is back in the woods, we'd come around

(56:53):
this corner. I see my snow shoes hanging in a
tree right there. We're a couple of hundred yards up
the river.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
You know.

Speaker 2 (57:01):
He came around and I say, Fred, somem eagel's here
and he's not alive. And we get up there, and
he knew he wasn't alive. Well, he couldn't have been alive.
We didn't have any food.

Speaker 7 (57:12):
There, and the snowshoes were still there.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
And the snow shoes were there. He didn't walk away,
and so we get up there. We got five dogs,
Okay I had three and Spread had two at that time,
all in the canoe with you no, they're running the pad.

Speaker 1 (57:24):
Oh, I see, okay, they're just keeping up. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
And so we get there and walk up to the
cabin and the dogs are all running around, you know,
and they are just really they they focus on dead things, right,
they really like you know, if you shoot a bear
out of a tree or get a moose, you know,
they want to be there. It's just like that's the
thing of interest. So so so I opened the door,

(57:50):
and of course I knock on it, just in case.
But and and there's this sleeping bag on the bunk.
The bunk had been nine feet long and three feet wide,
and it was just these little black spruce back and
forth begins, back and forth, and then uh, you know,
on on two poles that were notched into the walls,

(58:11):
and so and so all of those poles except about
three feet of them had been burned. Had he had
a saw in the in the house. And so I
picked him up, and he was light, and I brought
him outside.

Speaker 1 (58:23):
He was he's in his bag. Yeah, he's in his bag.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
And so we we took him out in Fred's bag,
Fred's bag, and and uh and it was it was
he was so skinny as his eyes were sunken into
his face, and and we took his clothes off because
we just wanted to see what had happened there. And
he was seriously skin on bone.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
There was no meat.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
He had starved out and h and the twenty two
was hanging on a nail in the back wall. And
so he definitely didn't kill himself. And and the dogs
they were like twenty feet away looking the other way.
They wanted nothing to do with this. Wow, you can
see their ears are turned back to us, so they
were paying attention, but they didn't want to be anywhere

(59:11):
near it. Was almost like, you know, one of the
what we were thinking was that one of the gods
has fallen, you know, And because I don't know what
they think of us, but I think that maybe what
the dogs, yeah, yeah, oh that's interesting. They didn't want
nothing to do with it. They want to be near it.
They didn't want to smell it, close nothing, And so
we we.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
How long at that point, how long you think he'd
been dead?

Speaker 2 (59:36):
I really don't know. Was he froze he had been frozen,
but he was thought then and hair was starting to
slip on his forehead, but he didn't smell rotten, and
and so and so we were thinking, what do we
do with this guy? You know, we don't have a shovel,

(59:58):
the ground's still frozen. We can't bury him. Do we
try to take him somewhere? Do we take him to Circle?
That would be at least a three or four day
process to get down there. The Yukon was packed with
ice on both sides at that point in time, you know,
break up it put a bunch of ice on the banks.

(01:00:20):
Neither of us had a penny, and we were making
our living day by day going down the river, and
if we went down to Circle, we didn't know anywhere
where there would be where to go for food, whether
we could get him down there without him. You know,
we thought we could put ice in, have him in

(01:00:41):
the bottom of the boat with ice, but that would
put us out because we would get down there and
we wouldn't We'd have nothing, no way to make a living.
And so we just decided we're to leave him here,
and we put him back on some tundra a little
ways away, and we took off and then he was

(01:01:02):
I went back there later in the summer and he
was gone.

Speaker 7 (01:01:05):
So something did you guys eventually get word out to
like some authority.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
We told people that there wasn't anything anybody could do.
We didn't know who he was.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
As far as you know, has he ever been identified?

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
I have no idea.

Speaker 7 (01:01:22):
Probably probably a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (01:01:24):
That happened to a lot of people up there.

Speaker 6 (01:01:26):
Yeah, yeah, I don't think he was out there because
he wanted to stay in touch with his family.

Speaker 4 (01:01:32):
Right, So we should probably skip forward to what a
fellow does when he gets lonely and he figures he's
gonna need a companion out in this life. Could on this, Yeah,
because otherwise we are going to be here all day,
which is fine with me. I'll just cancel a couple
upcoming calls.

Speaker 6 (01:01:53):
Yeah, no, I mean that's that's amazing. I mean, if
you guys thought about it that much, I think it's
longer than I I would have thought about it. It
would have been like, well, hopefully at twenty two isn't rusted.

Speaker 4 (01:02:05):
Oh yeah, we used the sleeping bag.

Speaker 2 (01:02:09):
Fred took the sleeping bag.

Speaker 7 (01:02:10):
No, yeah, you got your snowshoes.

Speaker 1 (01:02:13):
I got my snow shoes.

Speaker 6 (01:02:16):
I was just thinking too, like, if he was that emaciated,
had you guys found him alive, probably wouldn't be anything
you could have done for him.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
I think that would be hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Where did you wind up? You eventually found your territory?
So did your whole time in the bush wind up
being in this river system that you're talking about now? Yeah? Okay, yeah,
and eventually got to where it like Johannie was saying,
eventually got to where you wanted a companion.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
That's absolutely true.

Speaker 6 (01:02:46):
The dogs weren't cutting it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:47):
Dogs weren't cutting it. Well, they were great, but it
wasn't the same. Yeah. Yeah, and uh, and I wasn't
running into uh, single women out there?

Speaker 7 (01:03:00):
How many How many years have you been doing it
before you decided ahead into the Fairbanks?

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
I think? Uh? I think three? Okay, so you're still young. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:03:14):
Were there some couples out there or was it mostly
single men doing this thing?

Speaker 5 (01:03:18):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:03:18):
There were couples out there. There were, yeah, yeah, most
most of the other people out there were couples. Oh
I see, yeah? They would they your third wheel? Well
not really. I wasn't there. I was the one wheel.

Speaker 9 (01:03:34):
When you say most of the people out there, like,
how many people were we talking about?

Speaker 2 (01:03:38):
There were about twenty people or so that lived between uh,
Eagle and Circle, okay, yeah. And how many miles it
verid one hundred and sixty miles okay, yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:03:48):
And how often would you see like, how long would
you go without seeing people?

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Well, so when I was up the Candy it would
be months.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
Oh really yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
Yeah, my father he came out to visit the first
year that I was out there, that I spent on
the Candic River, so I'd been out on the North
Fork at forty mile. And it was funny because he
was he was working for park Service. He got he
was a historian down in Southwest Region out of Santa
Fe for a while, and then he got offered a

(01:04:22):
job in Alaska to deal with the d two Lands,
which became the Parklands. He was park Service, so that's
what he dealt with. And he was up in Eagle
dealing with stuff relating to the Yukon what became the
Yukon Charlie Preserve, and he got buried in effigy there

(01:04:42):
by somebody because the Eagle did not like it that
the federal lands were coming around. But you know, they
were kind of laid out in statehood and they were
laid out in the native flames.

Speaker 7 (01:04:53):
That your dad ended up like right in.

Speaker 2 (01:04:54):
Near you, So I didn't I had no idea he
was there. But when Little John and I had gone
up and gotten the traps everything we were, we were
at our canoes ready to shove off, and my dad
pulls up right and he says, he says, Randy, where
are you at now? I said, well, up in Indian
Grave Creek. That's one of the tributaries of the Candick.

(01:05:15):
And and I was sixty miles up the Candick and
that was the cabin I was going to be staying in.
And he says, he says, I'm going to come and
visit you for Christmas. And when I say, fine, you know,
and we took off and he took off and and
come come that time of year. So I didn't have
a calendar or watch or anything, you know, out there,

(01:05:35):
so I don't really know when that was going to be.
But Little John had been at the at the lower
cabin near the near the past to the Yukon, and
he he had he had made a trip over there
and found out they were doing a big Christmas shindig
at this one place.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
On a lake beside the Yukon.

Speaker 2 (01:05:53):
So he came up to get me, and I said,
I said, I can't, I can't go. What if my
dad comes, He says, he's not going to come, that's
you know, how's he going to get up.

Speaker 1 (01:06:03):
Here, you know?

Speaker 2 (01:06:05):
And I said, it would be horrible if he came
and I wasn't here.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
So I stayed.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
I was getting caribou, and I was the only one
getting caribou out there at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
And so.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
Little John leaves and goes over to this party, and
and I'm hauling caribou in from a place that I
had gotten a few and at the time, the the
limit was no more than ten a day, no more
than no more than ten a day. And and so

(01:06:37):
anyway I'm hauling. I'm hauling this caribou back and uh
with the dogs. And I hear this airplane come in
and circle around and land. And it was it was
Ron Warblow who ran They had an air service out
of Toke and he was in a one eighty five
on skis, and Ron was not going to leave him

(01:06:58):
be at my place unless it was warm and fresh tracks,
you know, and which there was. So I come back.
I hear that plane leave, and I come back and uh,
and my dad is there and he he has a
number ten can of cookies and and uh a thing
of cough drops. And he didn't bring any other food.

(01:07:21):
He thought I had a bunch of food. I've got
just moose, moose fat, moose meat and caribou meat, and
that's it. And I had no coffee, no tea, no nothing. Right,
And he's he's going to try to quit smoking.

Speaker 1 (01:07:34):
So he's got you have salt. I had salt.

Speaker 2 (01:07:38):
And and so so he has he has Copenhagen because
he'd been a smoker pretty much all all his life
that I had known him. And uh, so he has
Copenhagen there to try to ease things up. Well, he
had he had a few different things he was dealing with.
One and you know, they eating just meat and uh,
and all I would do is fry it in a

(01:07:59):
pan and then eat right out of the pan and
and uh and then go dip.

Speaker 1 (01:08:04):
Buckets of water. So I had. I had water and
meat and fat. That's what I was eating.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
And then for light, I had a moose fat candle,
you know, an old like a tuna fish can with
a with a bent piece in it and a bit
of old levi as the wick. And you'd have to
set it on a stove. You'd have to set it
on the stove to melt it, and then you could
light it and it would keep going mostly and uh

(01:08:30):
and give off just a candle a candle light. So
that was my light. And so he he ended up
he ended up asking me to carve him a pipe
at one point and because he's going to start smoking
his Copenhagen because it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't doing
enough for him.

Speaker 1 (01:08:49):
But when people do that move, when they do the
when they do like the they're going to quit something, yeah,
and they're gonna be like, well, I'm gonna take advantage
of this remote or out of the country thing. Yeah,
they never fixed, but they never they never factor.

Speaker 3 (01:09:06):
In the people that are around them.

Speaker 2 (01:09:08):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
And then they going like, well, I decided I'm gonna
quit drinking. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna quit smoking while
you and me are away from that.

Speaker 6 (01:09:17):
I just talked to an outfitter who they had to
fly a guy out really yeah, dts because he's like,
this is the perfect opportunity for me to stop drinking.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 4 (01:09:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:29):
Yeah, So I bet those cookies your dad brought were good. Oh,
we finished them immediately. Up, I had, I had, you know,
I was adapted to the meat at that point in
time to just meet. But I still enjoyed some other things,
you know, And so yeah, I gobbled him down.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
Did you ever lose your salt tolerance? Like, did you
ever lose did you ever get to the point where
you didn't even want salt on the meat? No, you
just wanted it salted. Yeah, I like it salted.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Have you read Stephenson's My Life with the Eskimo?

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
Absolutely? Yeah. When they would go when they would go
into these in with these groups and with these Eskimo hunting,
they would find it to keep your supplies from getting diminished,
they would salt everything because they hated salt. Oh, that
was a protective measure against him. Yeah, so you'd have
your stash of food, right, they would just salt it. Yeah,

(01:10:26):
and then no one would touch it because they salted
it because they had They didn't do they didn't do
dietary salt.

Speaker 4 (01:10:32):
Eskimo didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:10:33):
No, he says, if you salted meat, they don't want
nothing to do with it.

Speaker 6 (01:10:36):
Don't you think they were getting salt from seal fat.

Speaker 1 (01:10:39):
And they weren't using it. They weren't using it as
a seasoning. You know, if you eat a fish out
of the ocean, he's not salty.

Speaker 6 (01:10:46):
No, but right, just your body chemistry, don't you need
like a certain amount of yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:10:52):
Right, So he mentions it like multiple times that just
they don't want salt, and then he he eventually arrived.
Stephenson arrives at a point because he has to go
without for months and months they run out of salt.
He goes months about salt eventually and then gets where
it ruins it for him. He doesn't want any kind
of salt on his food, and he talks about it
being like a it's a learned that that eating all

(01:11:15):
that salt is learned. It's a learned taste, and you
get if you go without it for a couple of
years or whatever, you don't you can't eat salty meat anymore.

Speaker 3 (01:11:25):
That's what he says. He was wrong about a few things.

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
So he did mention that that they considered polar bear
liver to be toxic, that you couldn't.

Speaker 1 (01:11:37):
Eat it without toxic amounts of vitamin A. Yeah, that's
a widely held belief. Is that not true?

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
I think it is true, so, but it's also true
for grizzlies. So me and little Giant at one point,
after eating tried moosse meat for a week, we ended
up getting a grizzly and and cut him up, and
we're frying heart, liver, and kidney in a full panload,

(01:12:03):
and we both got headaches that just pounded us for
a couple of days.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
We couldn't get up.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
And I think it was vitamin A poisoning, no kidding, Yeah,
And so I think that it's not just polar bear,
but it's the predator livers.

Speaker 6 (01:12:18):
Did you get that grizz with the two forty three?

Speaker 1 (01:12:22):
Yeah, yeah, that was your gun. Huh yeah, yeah, talk
about I'm not trying to move you along. I'm just curious.
How old are you when you decided that I'm going
to make a go of it and I need a
wife and kids. Well, so.

Speaker 2 (01:12:40):
I must have been I must have been twenty or
twenty one when I decided I was going to make
a concerted effort to find a woman. I So I
built a raft and I floated down to Circle and
I hitchhiked into Fairbanks. I had been at the university

(01:13:01):
for one semester, so I knew there was these personal things,
so I left a personal note on there. I don't
know exactly what it says right now, but it was
something about it traffic.

Speaker 1 (01:13:11):
You made a raft go to circle hitchhike the Fairbanks
and then make it like a like a little flyer
for yourself.

Speaker 3 (01:13:18):
Yeah, with a little tear offf to advertising.

Speaker 1 (01:13:21):
No, there were no tear offf taps.

Speaker 2 (01:13:24):
Yeah, no, that was my first attempt.

Speaker 3 (01:13:26):
Oh you know, you know what's the.

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
Cutest thing in the world is uh uh Paul's daughter
Paul and Jen's daughter Brooke at the Mediator store downtown.
She's got a tear OFFF tab.

Speaker 3 (01:13:40):
That was bummed dear dad.

Speaker 1 (01:13:41):
Only one thing was tore off, So I don't know
if it was there that long I was.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
Gonna tear a couple. Maybe it was just to make
it look a little hotter.

Speaker 6 (01:13:48):
Well, maybe that's representative of folks not killing stuff walking
into the Mediator store.

Speaker 1 (01:13:52):
Well, could be that, or it could be that the
social media is her preferred mode too. Yeah, he make
an ad say so.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
Not only that, but I had a dog with me
and a rifle, so I had a double strap rifle,
right and just because then it's like a little backpack.
I gotcha, And that's how I carry my rifle to
this day. And then the dog had a dog pack,
and so what we did is we would walk down
the road and I would shoot. It was big rabbit

(01:14:22):
year then, and I would shoot rabbits on the road
and for our food as well as hitchhiking. Finally got
a ride all the way to Fairbanks, and then ended
up getting a ride on the other route going to Eagle,
and then built another raft and came down down river
from Eagle. In fact that was I ended up stopping

(01:14:42):
at Dick Cook's place and in the spring that year,
and he wanted to go hunting sheep, and so we
took off into the mountains there and he gave me
a two fifty seven robberts that he had and with
different he had different bullets loaded up for different purposes.

(01:15:03):
Right there was you know, for a moose load, or
to a goose load, or to you know, all these
different things. So he's got like five shells and and
we go up after sheep and uh, and I get
a shot at this uh, this big ram and it
uh and it was a poof and there's this bit
of sleeping bag fiber that comes out of it. So

(01:15:28):
it's a download, right, but it hits him in both elbows, boom,
and he's down.

Speaker 4 (01:15:35):
And what's a download?

Speaker 6 (01:15:38):
Like a bird shot load type of deals. He was
using the ticking for wadding.

Speaker 1 (01:15:43):
Is that right?

Speaker 2 (01:15:45):
That's right, so you you're not putting near as much
powder in and so it's a slower so it's a
bullet that's not gonna I mean we did that for
squirrels and grouse too. You know, we used full metal
jacket in two forty three.

Speaker 1 (01:15:58):
And you just stuff the exit, you just fill the
excess space was down, Yeah, because if.

Speaker 2 (01:16:02):
It's laying there and the powder is just spread across
the bottom, it can they say it can? It can
back back pressure? Okay, But but Dick had not kept trying.
This is a smiegel, you know, with all his things.
That's what we would have run into if we just
started using those. But he had assured me. Dick had
assured me that these were all big loads, which they weren't.

(01:16:25):
So this ram gets up on his back legs. I
don't know how he got up and ran on two
legs over the edge, and Dick ended up dispatching.

Speaker 1 (01:16:33):
Him down the hill a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:16:34):
But but but that was that was a crazy situation there.
But but then I got in my raft again after
after we had come down off of the mountains.

Speaker 1 (01:16:46):
Dick, how long? How long was the sheep hunt? One day?

Speaker 6 (01:16:49):
I got to tell you, this is the most interested
I've been in getting the lady story in a long time.

Speaker 3 (01:16:54):
And meanwhile you've set your trap. You baited the trap
with this note.

Speaker 2 (01:16:58):
Yeah, I never got any. My male address was Poba
General Delivery Eagle, right, and I never got anything. So
that was a failed What did the note say, though,
trapper living up on the Yukon is uh seeking a woman?
I think something like that.

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
Nothing about any kind of criteria young and handsome trapper?

Speaker 4 (01:17:23):
Yeah, he said, yeah.

Speaker 6 (01:17:24):
Twenty one years old.

Speaker 1 (01:17:25):
You didn't put anything about like like, you didn't put
down any parameters that you were hoping to like achieve here,
I did not. No, did you put your age down?

Speaker 2 (01:17:35):
I don't think I did. I think See, it was
a failed attempt. Okay, it was my first attempt. But
it was a failed attempt.

Speaker 7 (01:17:41):
Let's hear about the successful one.

Speaker 2 (01:17:44):
So so I went in again the next summer and
so but but there's a there's a problem, you know,
to get to to have a develop a relationship. You know,
I was going to have to move into Fairbanks and
get a job and and everything and then.

Speaker 1 (01:18:00):
And and I just couldn't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:18:02):
You know, you're going to miss you know, the King
Salmon Sea's in, you were going to miss and miss
the moose season. You're gonna you know, it doesn't work.
So so I went in and happened to be there
during the Solstice Fair. They have a big party on
Solstice every year. And and Karen, my my wife of
forty three years right now, was sitting taking care of

(01:18:25):
somebody else's dog and in front of a live music band,
and so I sawn Heed over there and we struck
up a conversation. Well, she was taking classes up at
the university to go out and teach, and I asked
her if she wanted to come and join me, and

(01:18:45):
she said when you go, and I said tomorrow. Was
she kind of a hippie, yeah, Birkenstocks. Yeah, everybody called
us the.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
Whole thing watching a dog at a music music thing. Yeah,
but back then hippies were kind of hard, like.

Speaker 3 (01:19:00):
They'd go live in the woods, different.

Speaker 4 (01:19:02):
Than there's still plenty of them in Alaska. I called
it's the hippie redneck of Alaska. They're rough and tough,
but kind of hippies at the same time.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
Yeah, I suppose I didn't.

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
I didn't if they were hippies, I don't see anything
wrong with them. They were great people that lived out
there and high functioning, doing a lot of different stuff. Sure, man,
I mean taking care of dogs and putting up food
for the winter and dealing with salmon, and building cabins

(01:19:37):
and traveling all over.

Speaker 1 (01:19:38):
Yeah, it was. It was a high functioning group. When
you met her, how like, how abruptly did you lay
out what the what the proposal was?

Speaker 2 (01:19:48):
Oh, within a couple hours.

Speaker 7 (01:19:51):
And yeah, he said he's got one day to make
a decision, right.

Speaker 2 (01:19:56):
Well, and she says, I'm not going to go bed.
Give me where do I write you? So she would
write me, and then and then the postmaster in Eagle
would would give these letters to people to go down river,
and so I would get a letter from somebody when
I was down on the Yukon. And of course I
had to borrow stationery, you know, right back. But but

(01:20:20):
we exchanged I don't know, three or four letters during
the course of that summer and fall, and then I
was up the Candic River and didn't get any more
mail until until I went down to the Yukon one time,
and and she had she had put in her note
that she was traveling down to San Francisco, where she

(01:20:45):
had gone to college, And so I came down and
met her at the airport in Anchorage.

Speaker 1 (01:20:54):
So so get this.

Speaker 2 (01:20:57):
I've got a beaver coat and moose hide pants, mucklucks
with beaver tops to him, beaver mittens, and hat. And
I get on an Alaska Airlines jet out of Fairbanks
and they take me just like that down to Anchorage,
right and my dad meets me down there and he's like,

(01:21:20):
Jesus Christ, Randy, you can't dress like this in the city.
So he takes me out and gets me new clothes
and boots and stuff like that. And so I met
her though at her airplane, and I had a ticket
to go with her. So I went down to San
Francisco with her, and it spent a couple of weeks,

(01:21:40):
and then she was teaching in Akiak, which is down
in the Lower Cusquin, a village down there, and.

Speaker 7 (01:21:47):
I don't want to diverge from your love story. But
when you got to San Francisco, was it like holy shit,
culture shock kind of thing?

Speaker 1 (01:21:54):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:21:54):
Yes, I mean I'd grown up in Santa Fe, you know,
so I mean, I mean it isn't like San Francisco,
but yeah, no, it's it was, Yeah, it was. It
was culture shock. She took me to New York one
time because she grew up back on the East Coast,
and I'm like, oh, that's Martin. Oh, that's you know, muskrat,

(01:22:14):
there's you know, a fox Burg, you know, all these
different fur.

Speaker 1 (01:22:17):
Coats that people were wearing.

Speaker 2 (01:22:19):
And and I also said, don't let go of me
because I don't think I could make it out of here.
And so anyway, we've had a lot of great adventures.
But but I did go down there with her and
we got married the next year out on the river.

Speaker 1 (01:22:35):
That's awesome. So and you've been you've been together how long?
Forty three years?

Speaker 4 (01:22:40):
And when you got married, did she move up on
the river with you?

Speaker 1 (01:22:44):
She did?

Speaker 2 (01:22:44):
And uh, And I took her to one of our
cabins that was about a nine y ten cabin and
showed it to her, thinking, this is there here, it
is this is the place, and she's going, I don't
really think this is a good place for me. But
we'd already been married, okay, and so and so I says,

(01:23:07):
Or we can go up river a mile or so,
and there's this old cabin that was there, and we
could build a new one.

Speaker 1 (01:23:15):
And that's what we did.

Speaker 2 (01:23:16):
And we built the biggest cabin that was out there
on the river.

Speaker 1 (01:23:20):
At that point.

Speaker 4 (01:23:21):
How big was it?

Speaker 2 (01:23:22):
It was eighteen feet square inside. Oh yeah, and two story.
Oh well, it wasn't full two story. It was a
two thirds loft.

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
Yeah, mansion. It was a big one. Were you peeling
those logs? Just leaving them and let letting the bark
fall off? Eventually I left them. They were dry trees though,
oh like fire killed trees or no, they weren't fire killed.
It was a big grove of spruce tree that was
growing along the Cantic River, and there was a there

(01:23:51):
was a green swath that was maybe fifty yards in width,
and then there was a dead one and I think
the primafrost just came in underneath them and killed him.
Oh I see.

Speaker 2 (01:24:05):
But they were big, big trees, big dry trees, all
of them. So firewood was not a problem ever.

Speaker 3 (01:24:12):
At that point, were you build them with a chainsaw
or all hand tools?

Speaker 2 (01:24:15):
I both saw on an axe and a two inch
ogger for pegged work. No, I didn't have a chainsaw
for a long time.

Speaker 6 (01:24:22):
Were you moving them on the snow or how are
you transporting big logs like that? And eighteen foot? What's
the diameter?

Speaker 2 (01:24:31):
They were twenty feet long and the big ones were
probably twelve inches at the butt and uh, you know,
nine or ten at the small end.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
They're real uniform. I just would grab them and haul
them in. Yeah, there you go. You know, like normally,
if you're married, it'd be you know, like you might
get in the big old fight about I don't know,
like oh we should stay home this Christmas or no,
we should go to so and so's this Christmas, And
that might be like a thing. Yeah, as you we're

(01:25:00):
married living out in the bush like that? Was there
like a major version of that, a major version where
it was like we should live like this living off
the land out in the bush, or we should go
live in the town. I mean, is that like a
constant source attention?

Speaker 2 (01:25:18):
No, it really wasn't. I think the biggest tension initially
was when we were leaving Eagle with our supplies in
our double end canoe, getting ready to go up the
Candic for the winter. Karen came up with this industrial
sized box of toilet paper. Okay, And I'm like, we
can't fit that, Karen, we can't fit it. She cause

(01:25:40):
it goes all or I stay. And so laid it
right out. She laid it right out. I says, there's moss, Karen,
and she goes, not going to use it. This toilet
paper goes or I'm not going. And so the toilet
paper came. That was That was. I mean, it didn't
last for very long because because you started using it

(01:26:02):
all No, no, no, I didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:26:04):
I didn't use it.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
She did, but but uh, but she she she made
her position known. So so we went out into the
woods and built that place and stayed there a couple
of years, and then she wanted to go and teach again.
So we went together out to Uh. In that case,
it was Chivak out on the Yukon Delta, and and

(01:26:31):
that that one didn't pan out very well because they
had they had financial problem. That was a b I
a school and and they hadn't accounted for all of
the funds from the year before, so b I was
withholding funds, so none of the teachers got paid for
like four or five months, and we we had She

(01:26:51):
had student loans, various other things and couldn't go that far.
So she quit and got a job in Dalton. So
I'm dealing with moving dogs, sleds, you know, all this
other stuff. And Non Dalton was a wonderful place. That's
over near Lake Clark, southwest of Anchorage.

Speaker 1 (01:27:09):
Beautiful place. And we were there for a couple of years.
And then did you set up and trap there too? Then?

Speaker 2 (01:27:15):
No, I hunted, but I didn't trap. I hunted and
I fished. I put gillnets under the ice down there
and would catch twenty or thirty of these great, big
humpback whitefish and some lake trout virtually every night in
non Dalton once the lake froze up. And so the
town folks in the town there would come down with

(01:27:37):
these sleds because they knew I was using it for
dog food, so they would trade dried sock ice for
fresh whitefish. And we did that all winter for two years.

Speaker 1 (01:27:48):
It was wonderful. And you were making no cash money
at that point, none you personally yeah. None.

Speaker 2 (01:27:56):
I did build my first birch bark canoe there though,
in Nondalton, just for fun in the teacher's housing.

Speaker 1 (01:28:04):
Yeah. Well yeah, yeah, to learn to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:08):
I wanted to learn to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:28:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:10):
And so these three, these three old guys there would
when they heard I was I was starting to build this,
they knocked on my door and I opened it. They
walk in, took seats, and they would sit there pretty
much every day and just watch everye Once in a
while they'd say something about how they used to do it.
But but nobody had been making making birch bark canoes

(01:28:35):
up there in the old ways since about the sometime
in the nineteen twenties they stopped building them. They would
they had got canvas then, and they started doing canvas
boats that were a bit easier to build. But anyway,
it was. It was great. And they they gave me
suggestions like to mix caribou hair cut up small into

(01:28:58):
uh into the pitch for doing the ceiling on the
birch bark canoes and.

Speaker 1 (01:29:05):
Makes it more like a fiberglass or something. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:29:07):
Yeah, And and like straw in Adobe's and things like that, Yeah,
holds it together.

Speaker 4 (01:29:14):
Did you continue to use that skill in your lifetime.

Speaker 2 (01:29:18):
I built I think eleven or twelve birch bark canoes.
You're shipping me really, yeah, at the Baskin style once,
I like, I built two Eastern style, but the Athabaskan
style is a little different construction. And so I just thought,
we're in Alaska, we'll do them next way.

Speaker 1 (01:29:37):
Yeah. Damn. Well, at this point you've gone to school
one semester. Yeah that's true. So why did you like,
so you're how how educated are you now? I mean
you got a lot of school now, a lot of school.

(01:29:58):
I've got a graduate school, yeah I did.

Speaker 2 (01:30:01):
And that was so that was really one of the
more traumatic things was moving into town. Traumatic things for me.
So so we went back let me, let me please,
So we went back.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
In the woods.

Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
We we we went out a couple of times when
Caroen taught in Eagle and and for a little bit,
and I would go out on trapline then. But but
at one point, you know that remember the Native Claims
Settlement Act happened, and Nilka happened, and and and all
of a sudden, you know, people were there was a

(01:30:36):
there was a desire to start claiming land or getting
land that would go to one entity or another. And
in the interior, Doyon was the big regional corporation and
they had selected the land that our cabin was on.
It had been b l M land prior to that,
and it was just outside of the Yukon Charlie Park boundary.

(01:31:01):
And Doyan said that they hadn't figured initially because we communicated,
they had not decided how to deal with trespassed cabins,
how to permit them or not and everything. Well, finally
in nineteen ninety they they sent us a note telling
us that we had to leave, that we couldn't be

(01:31:24):
out there anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:31:25):
The tribal corporation.

Speaker 2 (01:31:26):
Did, yeah, yeah, the corp yeah, Douyan Native Corporation and
so but we were getting ready to go anyway because
we had one dog team and it couldn't take all
of us on a big trip into Eagle or to
visit other people. So so you know, we had like
five or six dogs at that time, great big one

(01:31:47):
hundred pound, hundred and twenty pound huskies. There were wonderful animals.
But it in order to have you know, the kids
with their own teams or or care and with her
own team, so you have you can travel as a family.
It would have been really costly. You know, you can't
fish in the Yukon, but go thirty miles off to live.

(01:32:08):
You know, you can't move that that much stuff, and
you got to feed those dogs, and you got to
feed all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:32:14):
They can't move all that fish.

Speaker 1 (01:32:16):
Can't move the fish.

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):
You know, if you you live on the Yukon, that
was a that was a resource that people used, but
we didn't. And so I wasn't willing to go and
try to manage a couple of dog teams. How would
we even go along the river? You know, as these
guys already ran the banks and uh and you know
the Yukon. We would run them for a while until
they got tired and then throw them in the canoe

(01:32:38):
and they would you know, we could manage it that way,
but uh, it just wasn't going to work.

Speaker 6 (01:32:43):
And so we were getting do you have no fishing
on your on your river? No char or grayling?

Speaker 2 (01:32:49):
Or there were grayling, there were grayling, there were suckers
along those suckers, there were you know, round white fish.
There were a few species. But you couldn't feed her
dog team with him. You know, you might feed them overnight.
You know, in the lower part of the river there
were Northern Pike, not in.

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
The upper part of the river. They didn't go up there. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (01:33:11):
We were we were we were getting ready to go anyway.
And so we just asked for a year leeway from
Doyon so that we could come in with a ski
plane and move some things and take care of the
cabin so it wouldn't be a trash pile at some point.
So so they they granted that to us, and uh,

(01:33:31):
and then we went into Fairbanks and that was I
hadn't worked a job since I was in high school,
well the milking the cows period, you know, just out
of high school. And and Karen had she she was
a full out teacher. She she could go into Fairbanks

(01:33:52):
and boom, she's teaching. And and I was I was struggling,
what the hell do I do now?

Speaker 1 (01:33:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:33:59):
No, And there was this one log yard and I thought, well,
I'd do log stuff, and so I walked over there
and asked if there was any work. And this guy
has these giant logs, you know that big, big scribe
log houses get built out of, you know, forty fifty
feet long, you know, and dirt and bark and stobs
and everything. I'll give you ten dollars a log for peeling,

(01:34:21):
you know. Well that isn't then again to even even
enough to do our rent on a monthly basis, or
pay for the kids stay care or whatever, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:34:33):
You know. And I had a gig for a while
doing those logs, and it was I feel like it
was thirty cents a foot. Yeah that's what we get paid. Yeah,
that's a miserable job. Man. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:43):
I peeled a lot of logs, and when it's your own,
you know, it's just one thing. But peeling them for
ten bucks a log. So so then I I said,
I'm going to go to college. And so I went
back to college.

Speaker 1 (01:34:57):
Walked up, walked over there.

Speaker 2 (01:34:59):
Yeah yeah, and uh and and so I had I
had one semester of credits and and and and went
there and was going to go into biology because I thought,
if there's anything I can do, it's it's these some
job in biology where they go out in the field

(01:35:20):
and do stuff, you know, because we met we met
people out on the Yukon taking care of peregrines. We
met people that were doing fisheries work or forestry work,
and we thought I can do that. That would be
something like.

Speaker 3 (01:35:32):
Oh, you'd run into professionals out doing their jobs.

Speaker 2 (01:35:34):
That's right, yeah, yeah, and so and so that's what
that's what I did. And and my first job was
with BLM, a seasonal job. This gal, Randy Chant, who
was a biology biologist with BLM, was doing waterfowl brood
surveys and wanted to hire somebody to be able to

(01:35:56):
do that. But they had to know the birds, and
and I knew all the birds, all of the ducks
and the geese and everything. You could see him from
a mile away flying and know what they were. And
so she took me out to test me around these
there's two lakes by the airport when they get a
bunch of ducks in the spring, and of course I

(01:36:19):
could identify them all.

Speaker 1 (01:36:21):
No problem.

Speaker 2 (01:36:22):
She's gonna be okay, well you might work. And they
were really nervous because here's this guy, I don't know
how old I was, thirty three or something like that,
and didn't have a job since he was a teenager.

Speaker 1 (01:36:34):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:36:35):
It made him a little bit nervous.

Speaker 1 (01:36:37):
But they.

Speaker 2 (01:36:39):
They they took the chance and and so I was
going to college in the in the winters and then
working for her doing waterfowl brood surveys. I started to
do fisheries work with BLM and and finished bachelor's degree

(01:37:03):
in nineteen ninety six. And one of the guys I
had worked with at BLM was running a big project
on the Yukon for Fish Wildlife Service, and I walked
into the office and he says, you're the man I want,
and he hired me to work out on salmon down
at Rapids, which is down near the mouth of the

(01:37:24):
Tananaw River.

Speaker 7 (01:37:25):
Did you kind of like, did you fall into the
fisheries thing or was that something you were like interested
in and wanted to hone in on yourself?

Speaker 2 (01:37:36):
That was really opportunistic. So in my undergraduate work, I
had done mammalogy and ornithology and I did fish biology.
You know, there were these different but I had also
done microbiology and genetics and I liked them all. Sell biology,

(01:37:56):
I thought that they were all pretty fascinating. And did
physics and chemistry and math and everything too. But so
I started there and the first year, you know, we
have this big fish wheel running and we're tagging chump
salmon fall chump salmon at four hundred and fifty fish
a day, putting these spaghetti tags. And we were doing

(01:38:19):
a mark recapture project trying to estimate the population upstream
of the Tanina. And while we were catching all of
those chump salmon, shefish were coming through in August and
September to the tune of you know, sixty or eighty
a day going through the fish wheel.

Speaker 7 (01:38:39):
Can you describe a shefish for people that don't know
what they are?

Speaker 2 (01:38:43):
She fish are a great, big fish eating whitefish, and
there can be as much as thirty forty pounds or
more and well over a meter long, and they're there
are a really great fish.

Speaker 1 (01:39:02):
So the tarpin and a whitefish had sex.

Speaker 2 (01:39:04):
Right exactly. It's kind of like that, And.

Speaker 1 (01:39:07):
Not that I've ever caught on. They just been described
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:39:11):
Yeah, I think that tarpin give a much more profound
fight than shefish do. But shefish are, they're a wonderful fish.

Speaker 1 (01:39:25):
When you got into this work and got into school
and all that, like did the whole time that you
know that you were real bright, like that you had
like a book learning ability. I mean, you had to
felt so fairal and wild right, Well, there is that,
But like to come back to it, were you surprised

(01:39:47):
to be like, oh, I can be in these classes
and get a's on my tests and write papers well,
or did you feel that that was there all along?
I didn't really know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:58):
So there were several of my friends told me, there's
no way you're going to keep up with these, you know,
lighteen early twenties test staking machines, you know, yeah, and
and but I ignored it, and I did just fine.

Speaker 1 (01:40:13):
My dad hung out with this. My dad was fought
World War two in a love of his bodies were
all World War two guys. And there's a guy who
lived across like across our lake and then over this
Isthmus and across the next lake. And he had been
a pilot during World War two, but he was kept
in a pow camp. He got shot down, was kept
in a pow camp. You know, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. Yeah,

(01:40:35):
this guy was Charles Lynn Back. He was telling me
that when he got home from the war, he just
assumed he'd go to school on the GI Bill And
he said that he went and sat there one time
and right off the bat he's like there's no way
and just walked out like couldn't do it, couldn't do it.

(01:40:59):
You know, that's was hard for me to picture like that.
You went off and got like undoctrinated and went wild,
but then came back and got redoctriny, like redoctrinate.

Speaker 2 (01:41:13):
Yeah, I suppose that's that's true.

Speaker 1 (01:41:16):
I don't know it.

Speaker 2 (01:41:16):
Uh, it was a wild time, but it was it
was really hard to to come to grasp uh the
the the change coming into town, and I struggled for
a while trying to figure out what what the hell
am I going to do?

Speaker 1 (01:41:32):
Yeah, because you're living like you're living like kill a
rab eat it, yeah, catch something slid, cut a tree down,
make a house. You're playing. Yeah, I also been playing
this like long game, like oh, if I do this
for four years, I'll get like a tech position, and
then maybe I'll get like a job.

Speaker 6 (01:41:51):
And the things that you have to do in school
right where you're like, Okay, I know this doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (01:41:58):
Yeah, but I ever asked me this as long.

Speaker 6 (01:42:01):
As whereas like jump back to last year, if you
didn't do what mattered, bad things goulda happen.

Speaker 1 (01:42:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:42:11):
Yeah, but I imagine just doing homework wasn't necessarily what
the challenge or what the irk was, right, Like, what
was the biggest thing that you sort of that you
had to come to grips with or face head on
when you made the change, like just in general in life,
Like what was it that confronted you that really made
it difficult.

Speaker 2 (01:42:35):
That That's a that's a good question, I guess you
know that that had been my identity for so long
being out in the woods. Coming in it was like struggling.
And our older boy he struggled with it too, did he? Oh, yeah,
yeah he did, and he just saw himself as being

(01:42:56):
the woods person that that he was and.

Speaker 1 (01:43:03):
He got over it.

Speaker 2 (01:43:04):
Although he see he's he he teaches. He teaches applied
math at University color Colorado, Boulder, right. And on his
web page it says Jed Brown was born and raised
by wolves in the Alaska wilderness.

Speaker 1 (01:43:19):
You know, so he.

Speaker 2 (01:43:22):
So he he he encompasses that. He likes it and
uh and likes that. That was what he did for
the first pretty much eight years.

Speaker 1 (01:43:32):
Of his life.

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
And he's still we he and I had gone out
sheep on inden and things for several times, and uh,
that's all really fun. Yeah, I guess, you know, when
I when I realized that if I'm going to get
into a job that I'm going to like I got
to go through this the university. And once I kind

(01:43:54):
of came to grips with that, I just I would
just go there.

Speaker 1 (01:43:57):
I just do it.

Speaker 2 (01:43:58):
And and it wasn't all that hard. It was just
I mean, there was time element to it.

Speaker 9 (01:44:04):
But was it tough being around people all the time,
going from like not seeing people for months to being
around people every single day.

Speaker 1 (01:44:16):
I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:44:17):
I don't really, that's probably probably true. That's not something
that I remember as as a as an issue.

Speaker 1 (01:44:28):
Though, gotcha, I did.

Speaker 2 (01:44:30):
We did get a place that was kind of, you know,
kind of by itself and there was woods around it
and I really liked that, and we had a bird
feeder right outside of the this window, and so so
I would it was definitely a good place for me
because I would come and decompress if there was decompressing

(01:44:50):
to do.

Speaker 7 (01:44:51):
So was it was it all fisheries research after that
first job at the fish Wheel?

Speaker 2 (01:44:57):
Yeah, So I got into the I got into the
the honors program as as an undergraduate, and in the
honors program, I did work out in Cole Bay, I
did a small mammal survey following after Murray's worked in
the nineteen twenties, and that that got put into what

(01:45:17):
they call an honors thesis. The honors program paid my way, essentially,
they paid my tuition and which was a good thing.
But it also there were classes you had to take
in that that were I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:45:30):
Know, maybe maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:45:33):
A little more philosophy, and anyway, it was, it was,
it was a good thing. And and so once I went,
once I got into that fish job, though I've had
that same job the whole time. I mean I wasn't
hired permanent initially it was it was a technician.

Speaker 1 (01:45:52):
But the sheefish work.

Speaker 2 (01:45:55):
There was a fell at John Burr that worked with
Fish and Game Department at the time, and he came
by to see it us at work down there, and
he said, you guys really should do something with these sheepish.
We've been working to try to figure out where they
go and where they came from for a long time.
And we were doing telemetry work with the chump salmon
as well, not only the spaghetti tagging, but a telemetry

(01:46:16):
program with it. And so we just with towers that were,
you know, up in the drainage, so you could tell
when they swim by these towers they would get a record.
And so that's what I did for my master's degree,
and I put out radio transmitters three years in a

(01:46:38):
row and also did that odalith chemistry and was able
to show that these fish spawned in this big braided
region of the upper Yukon flats right in the mainstem.
Nobody had a clue. And then when they finished in
mid October, they had back down to see and spend
the winters in the estuary, perhaps nearby coastal areas.

Speaker 1 (01:47:01):
I don't know. No one knew what the hell they did.
Nobody did.

Speaker 6 (01:47:06):
And like in brackish water like a high saltwater content.

Speaker 1 (01:47:09):
Yeah really, yeah, I didn't know that.

Speaker 2 (01:47:12):
Yeah yeah, and uh and and those they go down
their feed all winter, whereas there was a lot of
them since then, you know, telemetry programs with with the sheefish,
a lot of them just sit in the Yukon. And
I have this vision of them with their spectral fins
in the gravel and their mouths open facing up river

(01:47:33):
and just spending the winter that.

Speaker 7 (01:47:35):
Way, not feeding, just feeding, sit dormant.

Speaker 2 (01:47:39):
Yeah, yeah, and so so that was that's one of
the one of the papers that I just sent off
to a journal. We'll see how they how they accept it,
you know, they sent it out to review and and everything.
But but I think it's it's an important piece because
not all the populations do that, you know, spawning populations

(01:48:01):
of the shefish. They some of them don't go to
sea and some of them do and why who knows.
But that's for somebody else to figure out. But so
so that's what I did initially for my master's degree.
And because I had done odalith chemistry work, the professors
up there anybody else who wanted to go into odelith

(01:48:23):
chemistry would get me tagged to be on their committees.
And so I've been on twelve different graduate committees with
people doing odalith chemistry work. And I think largely because
of that, they the university gave me an honorary doctorate

(01:48:43):
a few years ago.

Speaker 1 (01:48:44):
That's cool, man.

Speaker 2 (01:48:45):
Yeah, So so yeah, I got PhD.

Speaker 1 (01:48:50):
So to speak more or less, Uh, I got another
question for you about the living in the bush versus
coming into societ when you're on the bush like I'm
trying to think of how to put this. You know,

(01:49:10):
being alive now in today's atmosphere, you become very aware
of all the cultural conversations, right and you become aware
of like how you who you identify as? You know,
you're like, Okay, I identify as, you know, an American,
identify as a member of my family. I identify as

(01:49:31):
a member of my community. Right when when everything's so
stripped down, like the way it was, and you're not
aware of all the like every little thing in the news,
or every little societal fracture that's going on every blow
of campaign and like the presidential campaign season, right, where

(01:49:54):
do you sort of land in terms of what you
are or what you identify as?

Speaker 3 (01:50:01):
Jemmy, Like do you feel like.

Speaker 1 (01:50:02):
Like, well, I'm an American, you know, or like where
do you land at what you are? M m hmmm?
Do you are you a.

Speaker 3 (01:50:13):
Community member of the Yukon?

Speaker 1 (01:50:15):
Like?

Speaker 3 (01:50:15):
Like what it sort of And if someone says like
who are you? Like what are you?

Speaker 1 (01:50:19):
What? What would you have said you mean now, no, no,
sorry when you were living in the bush, Like, what
would you have said if someone asked you sort of
explain yourself to me? You'ro what. Yeah, I it was.

Speaker 2 (01:50:35):
It was much more as a as a resident of
the of the Woods.

Speaker 1 (01:50:40):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:50:41):
I remember my brother came and visited me one time,
flew in on a on a ski plane and we
mushed around. It was in the winter, and he said,
was during Reagan administration. Right, He's going like, how can
you how can you sit out here? You know when
the real world there's so many things going on?

Speaker 1 (01:50:58):
Is sais?

Speaker 2 (01:50:59):
I think this is the real world. That's how I felt,
this is the real work. I didn't know that Reagan
was president, right, I am no clue.

Speaker 3 (01:51:06):
That's kind of what That's what That's what I'm getting at.

Speaker 1 (01:51:07):
And I didn't care.

Speaker 2 (01:51:09):
Yeah, it didn't affect you, no, And I mean maybe
it did, but yeah it did.

Speaker 1 (01:51:14):
It did?

Speaker 3 (01:51:14):
It did in a macro way. Yeah, like it did
in a macro.

Speaker 1 (01:51:17):
Way, meaning you know, like like oil prices, right, you know,
I mean like these things would come, these things would
come for you.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
Yeah, and I didn't buy any gas because I didn't
have any motors.

Speaker 1 (01:51:29):
But yeah, you know, like eventually it would be that
you got a letter saying you got to move off
the land. And that is in a macro sense, all
this global stuff has impacted you. But that's like, but
when you're out there, like that's the falls away. And
just so you're a guy in the woods, Yeah you're
not all pissed off about who's using what bathroom, not
even guy guy in the woods, not even a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:51:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've tried to bring it into I
mean it. It was definitely a big part of of
who I am and how I think about things, you know.
You know that that all I don't know some of
the some of the social issues that are so so
much conflict right now. It's like I don't really care
what somebody else does, you know, I just I just

(01:52:13):
don't and or who somebody is, you know, I just
I try to I try to treat people just like people,
men and women here straight whatever, you know, I don't care.
It's not my business. I have a hard enough time
taking care of myself. I'm going to take care of
everybody else too, or try to define their problems, I

(01:52:36):
don't think.

Speaker 1 (01:52:37):
So do you have do you have any regrets about
the timeline that you spent how you how you spent your.

Speaker 2 (01:52:42):
Life, not even a little bit. You know what was weird?
All my friends at college when I said I'm gonna
leave and I'm gonna go and live out, and was there.

Speaker 1 (01:52:50):
Going, you can't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:52:51):
You got to finish college.

Speaker 1 (01:52:52):
You know you're going to ruin your life and everything.

Speaker 2 (01:52:55):
Neither of my parents told me that at all. They
I don't know what they thought I was getting into,
but they didn't discourage me at all, not even a
little bit.

Speaker 1 (01:53:07):
And I find that surprising.

Speaker 7 (01:53:09):
But do you still do like field work where you
get to go spend extended period of time like out
in the woods or.

Speaker 2 (01:53:16):
Two falls ago was my last field project. Over the
last few years, I've been losing my central vision. It's
a genetic mutation that doesn't usually affect older folks, but
it is with me. So I have a hard time
right now. I'm not driving, I can't read a book.
I can read it on a computer with high contrast

(01:53:39):
and stuff. But that last project I was we were
fishing for sheafish and that was big enough.

Speaker 1 (01:53:44):
I could see it.

Speaker 2 (01:53:45):
Yeah, But but I wouldn't drive a boat right right now,
and and I wouldn't be the one taking measurements and
things like that. And so my my functionality in the
field has has declined. To the point where I won't.
I'm not going to be going out anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:54:07):
How old you know? Sixty six?

Speaker 2 (01:54:10):
Give me sixty seven in a couple of weeks.

Speaker 1 (01:54:13):
Give me a piece of marriage advice.

Speaker 2 (01:54:18):
I don't really know. I just I just I treat Karen.

Speaker 1 (01:54:25):
Like a princess. I have tried that yet, and I
went wrong.

Speaker 7 (01:54:34):
You start out with a toilet paper move right.

Speaker 4 (01:54:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:54:38):
Yeah, that's princess treatment.

Speaker 2 (01:54:40):
And the new cabin.

Speaker 3 (01:54:42):
Oh, that's princess treatment.

Speaker 1 (01:54:43):
Yeah, told me.

Speaker 2 (01:54:44):
Yeah, no, I and and I just levered the pieces
and and always have and always will.

Speaker 1 (01:54:51):
Yeah, that's been your attitude. It's been my attitude. Yeah,
you're not like, well, I'll see next year. I'll see
the next year after that, how I feel. No, that's god, man, dude.

Speaker 3 (01:55:03):
There's a lot of people that view of the world
like that.

Speaker 1 (01:55:05):
Man, I get it.

Speaker 4 (01:55:06):
But are there any plans to live in the woods again?

Speaker 2 (01:55:11):
Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so.
I mean, we kind of live on the outskirts. We
have a we have a forty acre plot of land
with nice birch and spruce on it where the latest cabin,
big big scribe blog place that I built. Let's see,

(01:55:34):
I started in I started that one in my late forties,
finished it in.

Speaker 1 (01:55:39):
Mid fifties. We've been living there for.

Speaker 6 (01:55:43):
Gotta let those things settle, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:55:45):
Yeah, So I love it. I love it. It takes
a little work to man maintain. But got a great
big sauna, baby wood fired sauna, which Dany helped get
the stove for out of Wasilla. He and his boss
went up and picked it up.

Speaker 7 (01:56:04):
He's still feeding yourself with.

Speaker 2 (01:56:06):
Uh, yeah, to some extent. Yeah, yeah, I went moose
hunting this year, but we didn't. We didn't get anything,
which is rare. So so my my moose hunting adventures
have been to go up to that same place where
we lived, up on the Candy and uh, there's just
some good lookouts and open country and and you know,

(01:56:27):
when you live in a place for long enough, you
know where the moose are crossing and and so we've
always seen sometimes several bowls and uh, and we go
up a couple of my buddies and and I go
up there and uh, and we've never come back without
a moose except for this time.

Speaker 1 (01:56:45):
And we just never saw a bull. Do you guys call? Yeah,
we call, Can you can you rip a call for me? Okay?

Speaker 2 (01:56:51):
So I have been around when cows call, So this
is a real call. And and it is very similar
to us to a cow, regular dairy cow ball.

Speaker 1 (01:57:05):
That's it. Mm, that's your call. It's a cow call. Yeah,
you don't do any of that crazy cow call like.

Speaker 2 (01:57:14):
No, but they do that and and and so if
it's a small bull, you want to do a cow call,
guy's a big bull.

Speaker 1 (01:57:25):
Hit me with your normal like, hey, get out there,
you're you're there, Okay, all right, boys, we're gonna start hunting.
Everybody be quiet. You're gonna do what hit me with it?

Speaker 2 (01:57:32):
Well, if it's uh, if you're looking for a big bull,
you know it's going to be a grunt.

Speaker 1 (01:57:39):
No, no, no, I mean the bowl noise, I mean
the cow noise. I did do it.

Speaker 3 (01:57:44):
That's your main. That's your main. That's your main cow
call that you're using.

Speaker 1 (01:57:51):
That is okay. You never do the big long plaintive.

Speaker 2 (01:57:54):
Like no, my buddy does this. Guy Scott McLean, he
goes up there. He's got a fiberglass accelerator type thing
and he'll do that and then do a couple of
grunts afterwards, and it works.

Speaker 7 (01:58:08):
Too, But you were saying cow call for small bulls,
bullgrunt for bid.

Speaker 2 (01:58:14):
So if you do a big grunt and it's a
small bull, he doesn't want to be anywhere near a
big bull, yep. And if we see a small bull around,
we would always do cow calls and they'll come. And
one of the beauties of this particular place is that
you can see how these bulls are responding.

Speaker 1 (01:58:31):
I mean, they could be even a mile away, and.

Speaker 2 (01:58:33):
Then you'll see this this big antler's turn and they'll
start walking your way. And if you do it too much,
they'll they'll go away, And so you just want to
let them do their thing.

Speaker 1 (01:58:43):
Yeah, man, why do you don't worry? We're going to
wrap up pretty quick here. But it's got a couple
of technical questions for you. In your mind, why would
a bull walk two miles to come and do like
walk like he's just coming, there's not nothing in the
world's going to stop him. And then all of a
sudden he's like, but I'm going to lay down, then walk.

Speaker 7 (01:59:04):
Away, lay down for a couple hours, then get up.

Speaker 1 (01:59:07):
There and then get up go the other direction, Like
what is he what is in his mind?

Speaker 2 (01:59:13):
Well, I have no idea to tell you the truth.
I I think that there are some bulls that get
really damaged in fighting. Okay, we were watching there was
a big bull and a little bowl, well a kind
of a bullwinkle walking along this one open hillside at

(01:59:35):
one point, and they were not responding to us at all,
and the big bull would hit this little bowl every
once in a while, and finally the little bowl turns
around and nails him in the butt with his horns
and then hauls out. And we watched them with the
big bull after this little bull go over a couple

(01:59:55):
of hills, across a stream, and then up another hill
until they disappeared. But that little one had to know
that he was going to be on the run because
that bull was going after him. Yeah, and I think,
I mean, we've we've got him when they've punctured.

Speaker 1 (02:00:11):
So he's coming in and he's like, man, I'm not
going in there and fighting. I'm gonna linger on the
outside and see what's happening.

Speaker 2 (02:00:18):
Or or he doesn't hear it again and and thinks
it may be not there anymore.

Speaker 1 (02:00:24):
I don't know. It's hard to get in their head, man,
I know.

Speaker 2 (02:00:27):
But I do know that if you if you grunt
too much or if you call too much.

Speaker 1 (02:00:32):
Turns them off. Turn off. Yet, you know you mentioned
that that little bull hitting that big bull and ass.
Me and Seth last year were messing around with We
were messing around with a there's a company, Dave Smith Decoys,
and he makes a posturing buck. So it's a buck
that's kind of all bristled up, and you'll see other

(02:00:57):
bucks come and you always think when you see bucks fighting,
you associate them being antler to Antler. Nos knows, of course, right, yeah,
because they're squaring off. But here he is. He's looking
at a buck, but the buck doesn't move, so you
get to see what he would prefer how he would
prefer to fight in a situation where the buck isn't

(02:01:19):
always facing at him. He would prefer to fight, come
in behind it, get alongside of it, and drill it
right in the rib cage, like that's what he wants
to do. Yeah, So you mentioned that little bull hitting
that little bull in the ass or something like that,
Like I imagine when they can get the jump on
each other, they probably do. And that's a way different
hit than hitting antler. Oh yeah, when you're driving those

(02:01:42):
times into something.

Speaker 2 (02:01:44):
Yeah, every once in a while, these big bulls will
lock their horns together, you see, get stuck. Yeah, And
I've never seen it in practice, but I've seen those
the sets of antlers that are put together. Department of
Fishing Game in Fairbanks has one sticking hanging up right

(02:02:05):
over there information thing and where people come in to
get hunting license, fishing license and things like that. And
there's also one in Eagle. This helicopter pilot had spotted
these two bulls stuck together. It has to be a
desperately bad situation for them because any wolf coming around

(02:02:27):
or a bear coming around just starting eat them.

Speaker 4 (02:02:31):
Yeah, you're still shooting two forty three when you go
moose hunting.

Speaker 1 (02:02:35):
You know what?

Speaker 2 (02:02:35):
I changed to a six ' five creed more. And
the reason I did that is so I could shoot copper.
Because despite what people's views are with lead, lead in
the oval of deer down in California is what almost
put California condors over the edge. And when they found

(02:02:56):
out how that was going down, because they were testing
these condors and they had lead poisoning. But they're eating
that stuff where all of that lead fragment is sitting
and scavenging all over the mountains there, and.

Speaker 7 (02:03:12):
The acid in their guts can break that lead down
to where it becomes toxic, I suppose.

Speaker 1 (02:03:16):
So I think that's what the issue is.

Speaker 2 (02:03:18):
Yeah, but so so what I headshot with the with
the two fourty three was one hundred grain hornity bullet,
and bullets I think are everything. A lot of people say, oh,
it's not big enough for Alaska game. They don't know
what they're talking about. But that hundred grain horneday hunting
bullet is it rolls back, it stays together, and uh

(02:03:39):
and usually on a moose, if I shoot it just
behind the shoulder, it'll be either in the ribs or
the or the skin on the other side with a
lot of bleeding through the lungs. And and if you
shoot it right in the ear, it'll just shatter that
big vertebrae right behind the head. So it's it's a
it's a very very good bullet. And I've tried a

(02:04:02):
lot of other bullets, like a nozzle partition. Nozzle partition
do not work in a two forty three, And the
reason for that is that back part of it doesn't
have enough mass by itself. Once it explodes, the front
part explodes, doesn't carry through. And I shot a couple
of caribou with that load, and you have this grapefruit sized,

(02:04:26):
you know, damage on the outside, but it never went
into the lungs and it killed them. But it would
not be a good bullet to have. And so so
right now though, I wanted to go lead free. And
if you go down to Copper in a two forty three,
you're down to eighty eighty five grains.

Speaker 1 (02:04:48):
And I didn't want to go.

Speaker 2 (02:04:49):
There because there were people out there that shot twenty
two two fifties and seventy grain bullets and they won't
break the neck. They will kill a moose, and but
they're they're you know, getting down there closer to the edge,
and and the two forty three hundred grain that I

(02:05:11):
was using will break any bone in the body, no
matter what angle you're you're dealing with. Some people say, well, yeah,
but you've got to be really precise you do with anything.
You know, you've got to shoot a moose with a
thirty hot six, it's going to run for long ways.
And yeah, so so I tained change to a six
y five creed More, same rifle, Winchester Model seventy and

(02:05:38):
but it can shoot a twenty one hundred and twenty
grain copper bullet.

Speaker 1 (02:05:43):
I like it. Uh, this was my last question for you. Yeah,
then maybe the boy's got more questions for you too.
But how do you feel what's your general attitude about
protections of annwa are about the proposed Ambler.

Speaker 3 (02:06:03):
Road pebble mind, pebble mint, pebble mind.

Speaker 1 (02:06:09):
Like are you with the time you spent as more
in kind of the equity you've built up in that place,
do you encourage do you do you encourage that development
around job creation or do you just want or do
you have a view that you just want the wild
to stay wild? Like? What what's your personal take as

(02:06:31):
much as you're able to comment on that with your
position at work?

Speaker 2 (02:06:34):
Yeah, yeah, and sometimes I can't.

Speaker 1 (02:06:37):
I did.

Speaker 2 (02:06:38):
I was part of the the biological team on the
e I S for the for the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge for the Coastal Plane and one of the big
things that's that's an issue in that and they they
put their opinion out I think it was last week

(02:06:58):
on that the seis that was taking place. But there's
no water out there, none of those rivers flow during
the winter, and the oil production depends on that water
a lot for ice roads, for the drilling, for the camps, everything.

(02:07:21):
So there's a big hurdle for any of these companies
to go in and develop that in that they're going
to have to figure out how they're going to get water.
There's six hundred meters of primafrost. There's a handful of
these perennial springs that come from the south side of

(02:07:43):
the Brooks Range, hit these big fault zones and go
down and muscle their way up through there somehow. And
and so there's this water in certain places that will
provide a couple of kilometers of of habitat water that

(02:08:04):
all of the fish in those streams like the Hula
Hula or the Saddle of roach it that have that
have fish in them, all of them are there. And
the rest of the river goes dry in the winter.
And that's true all across that coastal plain. Where they

(02:08:24):
get water.

Speaker 1 (02:08:25):
I have no idea.

Speaker 2 (02:08:26):
Some people have thought, well, maybe they'll melt snow, maybe
they'll do a dece out plant, maybe they'll truck it.
But you know, you can't truck water across an ice road,
you'll break it up and then you'll be just continually
doing that. So there are some some steep hurdles to
doing that, but.

Speaker 1 (02:08:46):
There are.

Speaker 2 (02:08:47):
And the last time that there were sails there, it
was this development group with Alaska Ada that bought most
of the most of the plots. Two companies from somewhere
else that didn't have any capacity to develop them bought
the other two. I think just on a speculation that
if one of the big companies decided to go in there,

(02:09:09):
they would have to buy those leases from them or something,
and that was what Ada was doing too.

Speaker 1 (02:09:15):
Ada can't develop it either.

Speaker 2 (02:09:17):
And so it's it's I mean, they've showed from over
in Prudo that they can develop without the oil without
ruining places. But they got all the water in the
world over there, so I don't know how they're going
to do it. I don't No big company bid on

(02:09:38):
the last group, and I think they probably also thought
that okay, this is this is too fast, you know,
and we got to see what happens, and so they
have that ability. Right now, it's opened up for four
hundred thousand acres of lands that people could companies could

(02:10:03):
bid on. I'm not sure when they're going to do that.
But but they'll have to figure out they would they
would only want to bid if they have some sort
of thought on how they would go about doing that,
how would they would get over some of these.

Speaker 1 (02:10:19):
Hurdles because it's money out of pocket right off the
bat for them. Yeah, yeah, so you can't because of
your involvement, You don't. You're not You're not in a
position to say, like what you hope happens or what
you wish would happen, except with that would compromise your.

Speaker 2 (02:10:39):
So so I I don't. I don't really see it
quite that way because I'm not. I'm not a player.
And where whether it should or shouldn't understand and uh
and uh, the the mining is is a little bit
of a different issue. I wrote a piece in our
Community Perspective for for the Fairbanks Daily News miner on

(02:10:59):
some of the mining prospects around in the interior and
just laid out the dynamics of acid mind drainage and
the longevity of it, you know how far into the
future it will continue to have to be taken care of.
And the newspaper and I just everybody else puts just

(02:11:19):
their name and where they live, and that's what I did.

Speaker 1 (02:11:21):
But the news miner looked me up. I mean they've.

Speaker 2 (02:11:24):
They've I write letters to the editor every once in
a while. They know who I am, and they they
put my affiliation with Fish and Wildlife Service, and I
got a little bit of a spanking for that, even
though I didn't do it, and I didn't put it
on there myself. But Pebble is one of those that

(02:11:46):
has not been approved, but they're going to as long
as the minerals are there. Somebody's going to come back
over and over and over until maybe the politics.

Speaker 1 (02:11:53):
Are right to be able to do it.

Speaker 2 (02:11:55):
But that's in Bristol Bay, right And it's it's on
that past going over one side down to the New
Shigak Great Big Fish River, the other side down to
Lake Iliamna. The biggest of this Saki runs in all
of Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay is booming, It's been booming
for a long time. And and that is I mean,
that fishery is booming. The fishery, yeah, and and.

Speaker 1 (02:12:18):
It's kind of the hottest fishery in the globe. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:12:21):
And and that Pebble mine is an acid mine, and
it would require taking care of for thousands of years.
How does that work?

Speaker 1 (02:12:36):
That's pretty young.

Speaker 2 (02:12:39):
I don't know how the hell that works myself. So
I wrote a piece, you know, detailing that for the
for the Mancho mine, the Mancho mine out in their
Tetlan is is also an acid mine. And the state
and the tribe have and the companies involved have have
gotten through without having an eis done. And nobody knew

(02:13:01):
it was an acid mine. And I had gotten some
of the some of the documents from somebody that had
gotten it through a public records thing and thought that
it was and h and brought that to light. But
they're doing it anyway, and and how it'll play out.

(02:13:23):
Maybe they can take care of it. They think they can,
but it hasn't been looked at from a broader audience.
But Tetlan will rue the day they did that if
it if it isn't going to be contained on their end. Yeah,
it's a big deal. We've got a bunch of them
in lower forty eight here that are you know, I

(02:13:46):
call them, you know, oozing sores on the landscape. My
geologist friend of mine said he thought that was kind
of over the top.

Speaker 1 (02:13:53):
But well, has he been to Berkeley Pitt, I know,
down the road here.

Speaker 2 (02:13:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, and.

Speaker 1 (02:14:00):
That one is gonna go on little outlass humanity. It will.

Speaker 6 (02:14:03):
And that's like an example I always use, right because
people are like, oh, well, technology has changed so much
that you're thinking about this old stuff. I'm like, okay, well,
so the Berkeley pit as an example where like a
bird lands on it, it dies, right, is that taken
care of? In your mind?

Speaker 4 (02:14:22):
Like technology has made that?

Speaker 1 (02:14:25):
Okay?

Speaker 6 (02:14:27):
Like I don't, I don't understand the argument.

Speaker 2 (02:14:29):
Right, Well, the state has a has a policy that
if somebody is opening up the earth in an acid mind,
that they have.

Speaker 1 (02:14:38):
To put aside a huge bond.

Speaker 2 (02:14:42):
That will take care of maintenance on you know, in
in perpetuity, they call it. And I mean, I you know,
I don't think that societies are gonna are gonna you know,
there isn't an investment fund that you could guarantee that
it's going to be true for very long.

Speaker 1 (02:15:03):
So oh yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:15:05):
And that's why like a lot of these companies, uh,
they have working permits in the state that they're in,
but they're not based there. They're based internationally. Yeah, to
give them a little more protection, should they just so
happen to default on that.

Speaker 1 (02:15:18):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's the way it is
in Alaska.

Speaker 2 (02:15:21):
Most of these big companies are Canadian or Australian or something.

Speaker 1 (02:15:26):
Well, my kids were real little. I made the mistake
one time of explaining to them this idea that the
sun will burn out, you know, like the sun's kind
of like in its midlife crisis right now, you know,
and that as there'd be a day when the sun
like it's not getting recharged. Yeah, you know, the Sun
like theoretically will burn out and the solar system will die.

(02:15:51):
And that messed them up because they couldn't They couldn't
picture the geological time I was talking about, you know,
so I kept trying to walk it back. Wow, probably
not won't really happen, you know. But now I've taken
to now they're older, I'll tell them, I said, Man,
someday like all people are gonna be gone. People are
gonna be gone, and a bunch of time is gonna

(02:16:14):
go by, and the Earth's gonna be full of all
these kind of new crazy animals and it's gonna be
sweet here, you know, So don't worry about the future.

Speaker 3 (02:16:24):
They like that version better they like that better than
the sun going out.

Speaker 5 (02:16:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:16:29):
Yeah, yeah, it's a hard thing to grapple with, even
as an adult, when you're.

Speaker 3 (02:16:34):
Talking about these mines. Yeah, a thousand year mind.

Speaker 1 (02:16:38):
But yeah, and then you know, it's like you're stuck
with the contradiction, right, Like we all got these phones
and you know, titanium fucking coffee mugs when you're camping and.

Speaker 3 (02:16:50):
Ship you know, I mean it's like it's you know, it's.

Speaker 1 (02:16:52):
A mass man being alive is hard.

Speaker 2 (02:16:56):
Well, that's true, yeah, yeah, situation. Yeah, but the responsibility
of financial responsibility of the of the public to take
care of these places after these mining companies take it.
You know, I don't see the oil in the same way.
You know, there's other issues with oil, but it's it's
not you know, poisoning the landscape in that way.

Speaker 1 (02:17:22):
So, man, I appreciate you coming down to talk. My
brother was right, Danny is right. I should get you
on the show. I think you've got to come back
again someday though.

Speaker 6 (02:17:36):
Oh I got so many questions. We just don't have
any time.

Speaker 1 (02:17:40):
Yeah, what a deal. So you're going from here to
see that boy of years that you raised up in
the woods, that yeah, yeah, I am doing that.

Speaker 2 (02:17:51):
His daughter's so his his older daughter is.

Speaker 1 (02:17:56):
His jewel j o U l e. Right. Oh you
like the like the vight Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:18:08):
Like like like like energy.

Speaker 4 (02:18:10):
Yeah, not like.

Speaker 2 (02:18:16):
Some of its head some of his friends. Some of
his friends were trying to talk him out of it.
She'll have to tell teachers how to how to spell
it and everything like that. And and I think it's
a great name, but you may have to pay for it,
so anyway. Yeah, and then Neviy, their younger daughter. She's

(02:18:37):
wonderful too.

Speaker 1 (02:18:38):
That's pretty name.

Speaker 2 (02:18:39):
That uh n e with an accent v he with
an accent. So that's a certain kind of a snow
on high altitudes really in the mountains.

Speaker 1 (02:18:50):
Yeah, sounds like you raised your boy, right Yeah. I
hope so.

Speaker 3 (02:18:56):
Well, Man, thanks so much for coming on. Man, it's
been great.

Speaker 1 (02:18:59):
Yeah, you bet.

Speaker 2 (02:19:00):
Yeah, there's still a story or two to tell about.

Speaker 1 (02:19:03):
I tell that man, you're an interesting guy. Man.

Speaker 9 (02:19:06):
Yeah, we didn't even get into like fish like Oh
I want to hear more about the dogs and just
weird stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:19:15):
Yeah. I wanted to get into staying real warm when
it's forty below zero, no tent, but we'll have to
you have to come back. Yeah, yeah, we did that.
We come back. We come back on the show. Just
for a technical technical, purely technical questions. Backwoods know how, Yeah, yeah,
I do it. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:19:34):
Just coordinate it with your next trip down to visit
the family.

Speaker 2 (02:19:37):
Yeah, well I definitely do that. It's like a family
at Albuquerque too. Okay, and so one way or another.

Speaker 1 (02:19:45):
Do little Rocky Mountain loop. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to
run the spine of the Rockies all the way to
the end. Yeah, that's what That's what it would be.
Oh man, Well, thank you very much, thank you, thanks
thanks for having me. This has been great. Appreciate it.

Speaker 8 (02:20:00):
Yeah, well the hun day is over, and this time
to pack it in. STEVEE got another and I got
skunked again.

Speaker 4 (02:20:20):
But that or I can mountain sunset this afternoon was pleasing.
But it's my last dead campsule.

Speaker 8 (02:20:30):
I'll see you next season. There's nothing alike the sunrise
over mountains in the fall.

Speaker 4 (02:20:44):
Now I hear distant bugle, these answering my call.

Speaker 8 (02:20:51):
If we may see the warden, if we give him
a reason.

Speaker 4 (02:20:58):
But it's my last day in camp, so I'll see
you next season. If I trall another I'll be back
here again.

Speaker 8 (02:21:13):
We'll find out in the summer when the lottery calls in.

Speaker 2 (02:21:19):
My fingers crossed.

Speaker 1 (02:21:21):
My friend all wish every.

Speaker 2 (02:21:27):
One good luck.

Speaker 8 (02:21:29):
I'm heading home then this evening, because it's my.

Speaker 2 (02:21:34):
Last day in camp, and I'll see you next season.

Speaker 1 (02:21:41):
I'll see you next season.

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Host

Steven Rinella

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