Jason Hairston and Brendan Burns, founders of Kuyu, redefine hunting gear with ultra-lightweight, high-performance designs—like carbon fiber backpacks five times stiffer than competitors’—engineered through 18 prototypes and guide collaboration. Their 24-day Montana elk hunt (54-lb antlers) and Brendan’s decade-long pursuit of a rare 13-year-old bighorn ram (1 in 500 odds) highlight hunting as a discipline demanding extreme physical endurance, mental focus, and conservation ethics. Kuyu’s direct-to-consumer model bypasses retailers like Amazon, prioritizing transparency and fat-burning diets over sugar-based gels for sustained energy. Their success funds wildlife restoration, debunking myths that trophy hunting is wasteful or cruel. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I just got into it because I wanted to make stuff I couldn't find.
I wanted better performing products.
We created the category with Sitka back in the days, back in 2004, because I was wearing all mountaineering gear and wondered why I was the only person that wanted that style, that type, that performance level of hunting gear.
I didn't believe that I was alone.
And came up with a concept, introduced it in 06 to the hunting market, and it exploded.
Created the entire technical apparel category, and it's just, it's now what everyone's chasing, it's what everyone wants to wear, and makes a significant difference for our customers in the mountains.
One of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys on is because I've done the best job I can of trying to educate people as to what I see when I talk to people that are really intelligent, really ethical, very...
Very involved people that are fanatics about hunting.
Because I think people have a distorted perception of what hunting really is.
Well, there's not a lot of high performance, you know, super skilled things where you also have a lowest common denominator kind of guy that you're associated with.
I mean, if Mountaineers, you know, had a guy that was wearing a white tank top and was down at the climbing gym falling off breaking his head every week, people would perceive him slightly different.
It runs, you know, the guys that are doing the most extreme stuff in the world and The perceived person that's down here, you get lumped in with the lowest common denominator guy, which is not the case at all.
And I think companies like yours and what you guys are doing and the videos that you release on YouTube, especially when you're going over the extreme engineering involved in your packs and your gear and all the different things, to me, that stuff's fascinating.
Well, it's also, you guys have engineered these clothing, your clothing line is incredibly quiet, which is also a really important thing.
And there's so many different levels to getting it right when it comes to hunting gear, getting it right when it comes to, you know, I mean, it could be the difference between success and failure.
And this is one of the things that I wanted to kind of highlight about this pursuit.
I don't like to call hunting a sport or a discipline.
I mean, call it whatever you want, but it's not...
It is what it is.
It's weird that you have to lump it into this other thing.
But I think that people have a distorted perception of it because of what you said, because of this lowest common denominator guy, the Bubba thing.
But the more I've gotten into it, the more I've met people like you guys, or people like Cam Haynes or Steve Rinella.
Remy Warren and you get deep in you realize like this is a really difficult discipline very very difficult that has many many many layers to it really does I mean you look at the some of the expeditions we're doing up north you know we go up to the Yukon or Alaska or Northwest Territories and we're going from point A to point B like a normal expedition but we're hunting yeah on top of that exactly we got to manage the game that we take out on top of that yeah the weight and the extremes and the conditions and the weather I mean it adds to I mean,
you have to be really well prepared, really physically, mentally, and also with the right equipment and gear.
Yeah, I mean, you had in the mountains on some of the stuff we're doing.
I mean, it's not like, it's comparable with mountaineering, but, I mean, you don't have to, you know, it's not A to B. You just got to survive to A to B. I mean, you have to thrive in the mountains.
You have to understand what's going on with the animals.
You're up early, you're up late.
I mean, it's, it's, Even more in depth than just getting from point A to point B. And a lot of these places we're going, there is no reason to ever go there unless you were hunting.
I mean, there's some random mountain in the middle of an ice glacier that's not particularly tall, but there's no reason to go there unless you had something to go there to look for.
Match with us with this animal and you know you want to go see if you're up for the challenge I mean that's what we've been doing for is the world's oldest and greatest sport I mean if you're not you know you're either hunter or a berry picker yeah and the the level of intensity that's involved in that moment when you actually try to take that animal after that incredible hike in after 37 miles of risking your life to get to that point and then that moments there just the extreme amount of pressure and intensity involved in that moment That,
to me, is what defines the real challenge, the ultimate challenge of hunting.
And this idea that it's a bunch of people that like killing animals, or it's a bunch of fat yahoos that sit around drinking beer.
We always say you're either a hunter or you're, like Brendan mentioned, a berry picker.
It's in our DNA if you're a hunter.
And to be able to test that against the toughest conditions, against the hardest animals to hunt in the most remote places is, to me, the ultimate test of being a human being and the ultimate test of being a hunter.
And that's what drives me and what we do and why I train you around, why I'm always thinking about gear, about food, about weight, about how I can improve from what I learned on last year's hunt to this coming season's.
Yeah, and everything has to be done right every single time.
And what I like about guys like you two is you take two dudes like yourselves who are both like real goal-oriented savages and you put together a company like this that pursues that one ultimate experience and says, what is the best shit that we can make?
Having learned from Sitka selling to retailers the limits of what we can produce.
And I was super frustrated, the fact that I was walking away from the best materials and walking away from the best innovations.
And when we sold that company to Gore-Tex, I had the freedom to go start something new and to eliminate the retailer so I could go build a business platform specifically so I could go out and take these amazing materials, amazing designs to market that I couldn't do before and get them to market through this brand, Cuyo, which has made all the difference.
Well, isn't it interesting that this has all happened at the same time where the internet has kind of exploded in this way that people are doing a massive amount of shopping online.
I mean, I have one of those mailboxes where they get your packages for the company, and when I used them 10 years ago, I'd get a package every couple days or something like that.
Now, every time I go, there's stacks and boxes and shit, because I do all my shopping online.
When you can't produce the best products possible for your customers because they can't sell it, they can't add the value any longer because all they're offering is price and selection.
So price wins in a sea of selection with no one there to explain why a new product is so much better than the old product.
There's a problem.
And I saw it coming.
And now you see it getting exacerbated every day with new reports about retailers failing, malls going out of business.
Retail is in big, big trouble.
Amazon's made that happen faster.
The internet's made it happen.
And it's all looking back with Kuyu.
Timing was it's everything.
I mean as you know with business You know a lot of it is timing luck and be in the right place at the right time with the right concepts and ideas And we we totally nailed it We kind of came in at the exact same time with on it that you guys did with Kuyu and with the same exact model Selling directly to people getting the very best shit you can possibly get.
Like, if someone is, like, your packs, the way you guys engineer the carbon frame of your packs, like, I spent, like, a fucking hour and a half the other night watching videos of how you guys make packs.
The whole transparency thing has been incredible to watch.
Being direct, where you can communicate directly with your customers, as you know.
It's so frickin' powerful, and they love it.
And we're able to build so much trust.
I mean, I started blogging about Kuyu 18 months before it ever launched.
I talked about the fabrics, materials, the factories, the process of building a company.
And I really did it just to keep my name associated with the next brand.
As I left and transitioned out of Sitka, I had no idea what it would create.
And it created this massive following.
People started engaging with me and asking me questions, and I was...
Listening to their suggestions on products and educating them on what great fabrics, what great design was, and they just ate it up.
And the consumer loves it.
The retailer wasn't giving it to them any longer.
You know, back in the day, I grew up working in an archery shop in Orange, California, from Bob Fromm, who's a really, really amazing archery shop owner.
And he was the guy, right?
I mean, you walked in and said, Bob, what's the latest, greatest stuff?
And he could tell you all about it.
You go to Cabela's now, Like you were saying, the guy on the floor has no clue.
The customer knows more than the retailer now.
And by taking with Kuyu and going directly to that customer and giving them all that information, giving them the power to make the decision, they ate it up.
And then being able to involve them through this process, They just build a ton of trust with you.
It's like they understand the brand, they understand you, they understand how you think and why you're making those decisions, and then they trust you.
And once you have the consumer's trust and you don't break it, you can really build a brand off of that now.
Well, a guy like me who loves to geek out on shit too, who gets obsessed with things, that's what I love, that I can go and watch all these videos and read all this stuff about all the different engineering that's involved in creating your products, and when I do that, it gets people more excited.
That's why I think it was a brilliant move to blog about it in between the time of building the company.
I mean, I look back now and it's like I had a blueprint on how to build a company today when we did that.
I look back and read the blog posts and And I just go, wow, I can't believe I actually did that without really knowing what I was doing, because it seems like I executed it so perfectly.
And I was just following my gut and interacting with the customers, and it was.
It was so, so powerful and such a big thing, because as I built this business model, which was the first of its kind in this industry, and even the outdoor market, people told me, cool idea, but...
How are they going to find you?
How are they going to trust you to buy your product to begin with?
How are you going to get customers soon enough so you don't go out of business and run out of money?
Because so many companies will go create a website, launch, and no one knows about it.
How do you create that interest in advance?
And create the demand.
Well, you can spend a ton of money.
You look at like a Warby Parker or a Hairy Shave or Dollar Shave Club.
Well, they spend more money than they're bringing in.
And they're burning cash like it's going out of style to create demand through high levels of marketing that's very, very expensive.
Or you can do it like we did and educate the customer and be transparent and build trust in advance and then launch.
And then you've got your best sales force in the world, which is your customer base.
You guys have this advantage in that hunting because it's such a difficult pursuit.
Because it sort of gets in your DNA.
You become obsessed with it.
And when you become obsessed with it, and you find a company that's also obsessed with making the very best shit possible, and then you guys geek out to such a high level on the videos and on these descriptions of what you're making, then these obsessed people become obsessed with what you're doing.
And they go, oh, well, if I'm going to do this right, I've got to do this this way.
I mean, people we meet and hunters we meet at hunting camp or traveling, I mean, it's amazing to me how much they know about our product.
And how much to know about the brand.
Like you said, they geek out on it and eat all the little details up, which I love because that's what I geek out on when I'm searching for these amazing fabrics and learning about new technologies and I share it.
Well, it's really sort of a master class in how to do things the right way, to follow passion, and being obsessed with something, but doing it to the utmost.
Because if you do that, then the word gets out.
The word gets out, people talk about it, and like I said, I found out about you guys through word of mouth completely.
The customers really see that no one else that's running a company, multiple hunts every year, believes in what we're building and takes it to the worst place our customers could ever go and use it.
People respect it.
They're like, not only that, that's what I want to do, but I know that he's done it, too.
Yeah, I mean, it's how we figure out the shortcomings of our product.
You can look at all the laboratory data, you can look at all the test results of what that's given back to you, but you really don't know until you put it in the conditions that we put it in.
Like Torre, who is my main fabric supplier, is the most innovative Japanese.
I mean, they are the bomb as far as technical fabrics go.
And it's the same way of why they produce such amazing fabrics and materials, and they're continuously pushing the bar as far as innovation, reducing weight.
And it's a partner for us that's just amazing.
I found Torre.
Well, before I started at Kuyu, I tried to build a Torre product line with Sitka, and it was just price prohibitive.
I took it to a couple of buyers at Cabela's, went at Shields Sports, and they said, beautiful, way too expensive.
And if you look under a microscope, it looks like a spring.
Right?
And so it can stretch out and then recover without any elastic.
Everybody else has to put spandex or elastic or lycra in their fabrics.
And elastic's super heavy.
It holds moisture.
And it's also, you know, it stretches and doesn't really recover until you wash it again.
If you wear a stretched pair of pants with a lot of elastic, they can kind of sag you after a period of time.
You'll notice with ours, They'll fit the exact same way on day 10 as they did on day 1 because of their fabric, because of how they make their yarn that stretches and recover that elastic.
Their pricing on their performance apparel is much higher in Japan.
The European market as well for their climbing industry and some of the ski brands run their fabrics as well.
But nobody's really introduced their product line like we have in the United States because it's been cost prohibitive up until Kuyu business model came out.
Tori, as a company, is a Japanese conglomerate, which is pretty typical of Japanese companies, and they're Their base, the start of their company was chemistry.
So they're a chemistry-based company that makes chemicals and make carbon fiber.
But it's chemistry that starts with everything they do and understanding how everything is produced and made.
And it's that foundation that allows them to put out these amazing innovations, to figure out nanotechnology and how to waterproof a downfeather, how to make membranes that breathe two and a half times that of Gore-Tex and still stretch and recover and are more durable.
It's that foundation of who Torrey is, is a chemistry company that allows them to push these innovations out.
And then you add in the Japanese culture of perfection and making things correct and having processes that continue to produce high quality products and materials over time.
And then what's great about them is always pushing.
And so they're coming to us with new fabric innovations, new technologies and innovation.
And we're able to find their limits because of our customers and what they use it for.
And I'm able to go back to their engineers now because I've developed a really big relationship with them, where they're now their largest customer in the world.
And work directly with their team and say, hey guys, your membrane works great except for these certain situations.
I mean, they'll commit themselves to fixing issues that we'll find.
The laboratory tests say they should never fail and we'll find the limits of it.
I mean, not necessarily Brendan and I, but our guides that are spending 200, 250 days of their life every year in the mountains, they'll come back and say, hey, guess what?
This happened in this situation.
That's rare, but it lets us go back to their development team and say, hey, we found limits on this thing.
And they listen.
And they go back and try to re-engineer it to figure out how to push the bar further so those failures don't happen.
Yeah, so it starts as a process in-house, and we'll put it through certain tests depending on the product, like the new pack frame we just introduced today earlier at Kuyu Live.
I don't know if you happen to see my live presentation for a travel flight down here.
Well, we introduced a new carbon fiber technology that just came out on the market a couple years ago.
Introduced as far as ability to start developing product with a new fiber technology called Spread Toe Carbon Fiber.
You'll love this because you geek out on stuff like this.
So carbon fiber, traditionally, the fibers are put into yarn, right?
So they take each individual carbon fiber, group them together and make a yarn.
Those yarns are then woven into fabric.
It's what you see of typical carbon fiber look, right?
The woven look you see on carbon fiber.
What spread toe is, instead of round fibers, they've figured out that if you flatten the fibers out, so instead of being round, they're flat, and instead of weaving them, they lay them next to each other and then sew.
They run sew lines across it, which you can see in our new frame.
And by doing so, when you mold it into a product, because that fiber is now completely flat And it's running the length of the product, it's much stiffer and stronger than if you weave it and the fiber has to go up and over other fibers.
It's not as stiff, not as strong in the performance level.
You give up quite a bit compared to spread toe.
So spread toe is all directional fibers and then what we've done in our frame is we now can determine exactly how many fibers run from the top of the frame to the bottom of the frame.
You count the fibers?
Of course.
And then lay in on a 45 how much stiffness we want and flex we want on the horizontal axis.
So if you want our packs, you'll notice that it carries a load really well because of the vertical stiffness, but it's also comfortable like an internal pack because of how much fiber we have running on the horizontal axis that controls that flex.
And so what we got out of spread toe, which we just introduced, for no weight penalty, we now have a frame that's five times stiffer and stronger than what we had previous, which is still a really good performing product.
Well, that's where the interesting aspect of the engineering comes in when it comes to packs, because the same weight with a different pack feels different.
It does, and geometry of how that load is transferred onto your back and the frame and balancing it.
There's a lot to it.
And, you know, in the past, before our frame came to market, you either had really stiff frames with external frame packs, metal or aluminum, and then you had this internal frame, which was really comfortable until you had to put weight in it, and then it wouldn't be stiff enough and it would end up putting a lot of pressure and weight on your shoulders and your hips.
Because once we get something down, we've got to get all that out.
So we're going to go from maybe packing them with 50 or 60 pound pack to all of a sudden now you've got a 100 plus pound load and you need to manage that.
So how do you get a pack that can do both?
Be comfortable with lighter weights and still have the ability to carry heavy weights.
And is it the closest you can get it flatter to your back as well?
You don't want it bulging out, right?
If you have a large...
If you have a hundred pounds and it's sitting in a two-foot square at the lower part of your back, that's not nearly as good as like flattened out to six inches and going over the entire surface of your back.
So, I mean, you start at the waist, put it all in, and then shoulder straps, all that kind of stuff, and stand up, and then your load lifters and all the way up.
I mean, it's an individual thing, how it fits, but you want to start with, I mean, your hips are your strongest, your center of gravity.
That's where you want the majority of the weight to be carried as close as you can.
And this is all trial and error stuff that's been done through mountaineering, through all these different guys that are going on these long backpack hikes?
And also, I mean, it's critical that you have a pack that fits correctly.
Most people have a pack that isn't set up correct.
And we found that with our packs, they're really easy to adjust the shoulder straps so we can get a perfect fit for each customer.
And we put an instructional video out there of making sure the geometry from your load lifters, which are the straps that come off the top of the pack down to your shoulder straps, that geometry is critical that it's perfect.
It has to be at a 45 degree angle and that will help take that load off your shoulders and transfer to your hips and help you manage that weight comfortably over a long period of time.
It starts at mathematics with the frame and designs and CAD and CNC machines and all that and the math and all through it and then it goes all the way through and you build it and then all of a sudden it requires testing and taking it in real life settings and people vary on what they like.
I mean there's some guys like to carry Things a certain way.
Some people like fit.
Some guys like their pack way up high.
I've fitted guys that like them way up.
You can only know by testing it, by doing it, by carrying some weight.
And how many different products are you individually overseeing?
See, that's the most daunting aspect of it, because you've got all this different shit going on at the same time, and on top of that, you're doing a dozen hunts a year plus, and you're out there in the field.
When you do something you love and you have a huge passion for it, I never stop working.
I work the second I get up in the morning until the time I go to bed.
If I'm not sitting in front of my computer working on stuff specific for Kuyu, I'm thinking about it.
It doesn't feel like it's a lot of work, although I look back now and go, fuck, that is a lot of work.
We put out some amazing products.
It's a process, and it's solving problems through finding materials and technologies and designs that solve those problems.
There's a lot to be solved in hunting, fortunately.
There's a big gap from some of the other industries that are out there before Sitka and Kuyus come along.
So there's a lot of work to do, and we've done a lot to take from where hunting apparel and gear was back in 2004 to where it is today in 2016. It's a massive change.
I mean, that's one of the things that I found interesting about this.
You can kind of see when there's someone like you that's at the head of something like this, and you're this driven, focused guy, you kind of see that.
When you see the actual brand itself, it reflects you.
So this idea of it being work, it's really like a passion project.
There's a lot of podcasters today that are joining in with these gigantic networks, and they think that being a part of a network is like being on NBC or being on CBS, which it used to be a big deal back in the day.
Like if you were doing a play, and NBC came along and said, we want to turn that play into a sitcom, you'd be like, we fucking made it!
But now, if you have a successful podcast and someone comes along and says, hey, we would love you to be a part of our gigantic corporation, you're like, get the fuck out of here.
And he lives it and breathes it studies it look where he is now Well when I met Brendan I met him this past weekend in Bozeman and one of the things that struck me is when you and you and I were Talking you have this fucking crazy fire in your eyes You're like I wanted to be the guy that kills the biggest bull every year when I killed one big bull I didn't want it to just be like oh, it was just a fluke when now you got to be consistent And I was like all right this crazy motherfucker.
I see where he's at and then when you told me that you had this gigantic Bull down in Schnee's, which is a store on Main Street in Bozeman.
I went to the store just to see that bull.
I was like, we gotta stop in.
I gotta take a look at this thing.
And there's this elk that looks like something out of the Lord of the Rings that doesn't even look like a real animal.
What's a fascinating pursuit, you know, pursuing the apex of the genetics, you know, finding the animal.
And it's also one of the things that's important about this, like, the pursuit of hunting is that this animal that you shot was probably, like, how old do you think he was?
It's the ultimate, I mean, like, when you get to the level where you're consistently killing stuff and You've gotten the point that the ultimate level is to kill the biggest, oldest, most mature, historically significant on the chain of events in history of all the guys that have ever killed elk.
Not all elk are going to be huge, but with any animals.
When you kill something that's super old, super big, super smart, that is the pinnacle of where your skills have gotten.
A lot of people never get there.
The biggest factor in doing that and getting to that point is having the time.
I spent a decade of my life putting a boot track everywhere you could put one, finding where every elk was in my state and looking for the biggest ones.
Like the work, it's consuming.
You have to love to do it.
It's not fun.
You just have to be driven to do it, to want to be able to do it.
Well, it's also the best thing from a conservation standpoint.
You're talking about an animal that has spread its genes for at least 10 years, right?
For 10 years, that thing has been spreading those superior genetics, and it's probably been forcing a lot of other males to get the fuck off the mountain.
Yeah, Alistair when he's on the Mexican supplements.
Yeah, the new Alistair might be a better fighter, actually.
It's interesting.
When you see an animal like that, and you realize how difficult it is to reach 12 years of age in the wild with mountain lions, wolves.
I mean, Montana, it's like he's just got everything after him.
Grizzlies, everything's after him.
And to be able to be that smart to get to this position in life, and for you to solve that puzzle, and to get in and shoot that elk, That's one of the things that sort of embodies the really intense difficulty in hunting.
And when you eat that animal, I mean, the amount of satisfaction that comes from sitting down to a meal that you procured in the most difficult way humanly possible.
I mean, you shot that thing with a bow and arrow in the mountains, and now here you are eating it.
I mean, the thing about trophy hunting that's not understood is, like, it's the ultimate...
It's the pinnacle of combining, you know, what you love to do and then this incredible skill set that you're developing to be better than, you know, I'm not saying better than anybody else, but it takes a lot of work.
Well, the term is kind of screwed up because it's applied to things that people shoot where they don't eat it, which seems to be like a cruelty, like a pursuit, a vain pursuit of going out and shooting lions and shooting things that you're not going to eat.
The weird thing about that is I was talking to a guy who was doing an article for the New York Times, and he said, I don't have a problem with hunting as long as you eat it.
And I just said, you don't have a problem with hunting.
I mean, you legally have to take the meat.
I mean, the amount of people that would shoot something and not take the meat is, you know, the same as people that are thieves out on the street.
I mean, it's so uncommon.
So, like, the perception of, you know, guys just shooting it and, you know, just because 10 years down the road all I have in my garage is the head doesn't mean that I didn't use it.
And so the perception, again, against the lowest common denominator guy, you hear about one horrible thing going on or somebody that doesn't take the meat and all of a sudden everybody's lumped into it.
I grew up in rural Montana.
I never had a beef steak at a restaurant until I was on a recruiting trip in college.
I mean, I grew up eating wild game my entire life.
I mean, one of the things that's made us be able to be so comfortable and have air conditioning is technology and advancement.
But it's also allowed us to be completely disconnected from where food comes from.
And that's what allows people to stand up on these pedestals and point down at people that they think are doing something wrong when they're responsible for just as much death.
Yeah, I mean, I've been, because of Kuyu, been in New York doing a bunch of media tours over the last year.
And to be interviewed by these people that live in a big city that have no...
The idea of what hunting is like or what it's about is really mind-blowing to me because it's been such a big part of my life and everyone I'm associated with and friends with typically hunts or understands hunting.
Their perception of it is so amazing to me that we would just kill an animal, cut its head off, and leave everything.
I don't know anybody that's ever done it.
It's completely illegal.
But that's what mainstream media has made out hunting to be.
And it's like a mission of mine now to change that perception.
Yeah, I mean, like this New York Times guy, I was just like, yeah, it's, you know, I took him through like the wanton waste laws and all that.
And he was just like, he's like, wow, I mean, you legally have to take it.
Like, it's not something that's new.
You know, like, it's always been that way.
And there is this cool meat movement that's been going on.
Yeah.
You know, one thing is like, don't get it lost that, you know, guys in the 60s, 70s, all, you know, and since, you know, aside from market hunting back in the day, which isn't real hunting, it was just extermination for, but I mean, it's, you know, people hunt, and they consume what they eat, like anything else, just like eating, you know, bread or anything else.
I mean, you have, you know, it's like, you know, you got studs in your house, they came from a tree.
Not actually the last 50. Yeah, well, it's when you see things like the Cecil the lion thing, and then everybody gets up in arms about hunting, and it just becomes this really distorted version of what it actually is.
Yeah, but the stuff with Cecil, that's not even true.
I mean, he wasn't living full-time in the park.
There's a new thing that just came out in the hunting report about the whole background of it.
I mean, there's a lot more to it than that.
And it's all how it's said, too.
It's like...
Oh, the guy killed Cecil Lyon, who's this super old male who had been kicked out of the Pride, apparently, and the whole thing with his brothers and the family and all that stuff.
Beheaded but don't you think that part of the reason why people get upset about lions is because people generally don't eat lions So when someone says that someone goes and shoots a line like why would you shoot this beautiful rare majestic animal just so you could stick it on your wall and And just think you're a badass because you've got this thing that could kill you if you didn't have a weapon and you got it on your wall now Well, I mean, it comes down to, like, predators need to be controlled.
I mean, it's not one of those things that's pretty and people really love to hear that, but at the end of the day, it is true.
I mean, like, you know, you were just down where I grew up.
I grew up just north of the greater Yellowstone Elkhard, you know, between Gardner and Livingston.
That's where I grew up.
And when I was in high school, there was 19,000 elk in that herd.
You go down there in wintertime and see 1,500 bulls.
I mean, it was amazing.
And they're down to 2,000 to 3,000 now because of the reintroduction of the wolf.
You have to control predators.
Anywhere, wherever they're at.
It's insane to think that we don't exist and these houses and fences and highways and stuff are not there and that you can just turn something loose and just let it run its course.
People are even appalled by the natural core.
A young lion take over the pride and Cecil gets chomped and destroyed by two other younger lions that came in and got him.
And the other thing that's going on is that people love to broadcast how horrible...
The people are that hunt these things and how these lions are, they need to be preserved and so important.
Like Leonardo DiCaprio had something on his Instagram page the other day where it was like an anniversary of the death of Cecil and he was talking about how, you know, few of these animals that are left, they have to be protected.
Very conveniently ignored is the fact that Zimbabwe is going to kill 200 lions now because no one's going over there to hunt those lions.
It's very inconvenient when you look at the actual facts of hunting over there.
Even hunting, you know, just quote-unquote, for trophies.
That is where they get a massive amount of their revenue.
It feeds a lot of the people that are over there.
It makes a huge impact on their economy.
And a lot of people don't like that, but I urge people to watch the Louis Theroux documentary about his trip to Africa, where he spent several weeks in this African hunting camp.
And, you know, it's the same thing.
It was like a high fence operation where they had lions and they were throwing, like, calves over the fence to feed these lions.
And there's, like, two fences separating him from the lions.
And he got to see, like, in depth what's going on.
He's essentially saying that these animals, the only reason why they're here at all, like, massive amounts of them, is because they're worth something to people to come over.
And if it wasn't, they're like, this place is so poor and so crazy that these animals would have been wiped out.
And they were on the verge just a couple of decades ago before they introduced hunting.
So it's such a catch-22 because they have more animals than they've ever had before.
But the reason for that is because they're worth something to hunt.
You know, I mean, what makes a little kid who, when you're in the yard and there's a bird right there, like some kids, you know, just look at it and some kids want to chase that thing down.
And it's like 10,000 years where the genetics that say...
Two million, actually.
Yeah, you want to do it.
Like, this is something that is built in you want to do.
Well, I almost think, I mean, I don't think anybody should be forced to do anything, but I almost think that it would be good for everybody to have to kill something and eat it, if you do eat meat, just to experience it.
And, I mean, that's just killing something.
But to actually go out and hunt something down and kill it and eat it, I think would...
It would open up a lot of doors inside your mind, open up a lot of areas of perception, and give you this real understanding of what it means to consume life.
There's a lot to it.
It's a very complex thing that's going on when you're eating an animal.
People think just because it's in a package at a grocery store or in a cellophane with a styrofoam thing underneath that it didn't come from an animal or something.
Remember that whole cow thing that went on a couple years ago?
I think it was in a slaughterhouse down in Southern California and those cows are sick and they're falling over and they got video of it and it got out there about the processing of meat and all these people up in arms about it.
And people were appalled by it, but that's the reality of beef and industrial food complex versus the animals that we hunt.
We're going to have a great life.
Most of them, like the animals Brent and I hunt, which are the older ones, they've had a full life and they've had the opportunity to experience things in nature and reproduce and have what an animal's life should be like.
We're a cattle or any type of industrial type of food animal like chickens or cows or pigs.
My wife's father has a big ranch in eastern Montana You know, raise and process all their own stuff and, you know, like people talk about, you know, like all the beef and meats, horrible and stuff.
Not where I come from.
I mean, they take really good care of those animals and it's very important and they don't go to the, you know, the giant stockyards and all.
You think about the amount of effort that has to go for you to get this $5 steak.
The amount of effort.
The animal has to grow, it has to be fed, it has to be taken care of, then it has to be slaughtered, cut up, packaged, processed, sent to stores, put on the shelves, and then you go and buy.
I think it's good, though, that people are being aware of this, and I think it's good that people are up in arms, because I think there is something really disgusting about factory farming.
Undeniably disgusting.
And I think the education of people...
Getting to understand, like, yeah, this is a system that you're a part of.
Even, like, the really hardcore, radical animal activists that, you know, risk their lives and make these crazy fucking videos and get inside slaughterhouses and, you know, violate those ag-gag laws.
We shouldn't be shielded from the truth in any way, shape, or form.
And that's one of the things that's allowed this factory farm system to get so disgusting, is the fact that people haven't been able to have their input.
They haven't been able to see it and protest against it and say, like, hey, you shouldn't be treating living things like this.
And I think the reasonable people who love animals and maybe they don't have any desire whatsoever to eat them, those are the people that I think respect the pursuit of hunting and respect the idea that, look, it's not something for everybody, but neither is marathon running, neither is weightlifting, neither is football, jiu-jitsu, anything difficult, wrestling.
This is not for everybody.
Everybody's not going to do a lot of things that are hard to do.
But if you want to procure meat, That's the best way to do it.
I mean, honestly, it's like, you know, you see it all the time, a guy wearing leather shoes and a leather belt, you know, talking about, you know, his impact and how little, you know, being vegan or whatever.
It's like, man, that's just, the hypocrisy is insane of people, you know, like living in a house, like how much is...
Animal byproduct from from everything you use and it's like well, yeah, but I just had a salad today It's like yeah, that's I mean 50 rabbits when they harvest it It made you feel good, but in reality you're just bullshitting yourself Yeah, but they don't even know they're bullshitting themselves if they if their Perception of what they're doing was accurate then they would have a good point But it's a it's an ignorance to what was actually involved.
When something goes wrong, like their scent gets screwed up or the queen dies or the queen gets removed but the scent's still there, the ants will circle.
They're following pheromones in some sort of a way.
But when they're doing this, I mean, this just shows that this being, these ants, have no...
You don't have to just find an actual explanation for it, not a video.
But when these animals are doing this, they don't have any free will.
They have this sort of directive.
This is what they do.
They make the nest.
They build a beehive.
They do this.
A friend of mine was Ben O'Brien.
You guys know Ben O'Brien?
He used to work for Peterson's hunting magazine.
I don't know if I did.
He was telling me about one of his friends had a queen bee somehow or another got stuck in their car, and this hive of bees followed them for 20 miles.
They followed the car for 20 miles because the bee was in the car.
And they have these really weird things that they do.
If you've seen, like, videos on different ant species where the females will chop the male's legs off.
I think, is that leafcutter ants that do that?
I forget which one.
But they chop, they take the male and they're going to breed with him, and they essentially cut his legs off so that he can't move, and then they carry him to wherever they want to fuck him, and then they take him and breed with him.
I got a four-year-old son and he watched this little show called The Lion Guard which is like in all these animals Get together and they're all friends and we started watching he would ask questions and stuff and and now I'm like we watch you know if you want to watch the Lion Guard that's fine and but I've explained to him like the cheetah and the lion and the hippo they don't get along they're not buddies and we watched Discovery Channel and he watches you know like the day we just watched the wildebeest a couple days ago which the wildebeest getting eaten by the by the crocodile and he was just like Whoa!
You know, it's like, and now, like, when it comes up, he's like, well, that's just pretend, but I want to watch that.
And it's like, that's fine as long as we know, you know, that's not really how it goes.
You know, we'll go to Discovery Channel and watch, you know, Killers on the Savannah, and, you know, it's like, wow, you know, the lion doesn't get along with anybody.
He eats everybody.
And, you know, I don't want my kid...
To think that, you know, well, it's just a big peaceful thing and they're all this big symbiotic relationship and they all love each other.
But if we were there and we're laughing, then people get upset.
There's an instinct to listen to those guys laughing while it's happening because they're filming it right through the fence and go, wow, a bunch of assholes laughing at death.
But meanwhile, it's okay to laugh at it if it's on a YouTube video.
I mean, you do as good a job as you can at putting forward an educated...
You know, opinion of why, what we do and, and, and at the same time being, you know, where I'm unapologetic about it too.
It's not like somebody, there's not a conversation that could convince me that what I'm doing isn't what I was meant to do.
You know, when it comes to hunting, I mean, you, you, you, you know, you put forward that, you know, we try and tell people about it and educate people as to what it is and people are going to feel how they're going to feel.
But at the end of the day, I mean, nothing's going to change with us either.
Well, after I killed that big elk, I started writing some stories.
And like I told you, I really...
You know, there's a lot of guys that get something, have a great stroke and luck in life, and all of a sudden they kill one big thing, or they win one small lottery or whatever, and you never hear from again.
And that was like, you know, growing up being a hunter, like, to kill this huge elk was, yeah, I was just, I mean, right place at the right time.
An amazing thing for me, but I was, at the time, super conscious that I don't want to be a one-hit wonder.
I mean, I want to do it more.
I want to be really good at what I'm doing.
I mean, like I grew up reading hunting books and like the best hunters in the world.
I want to, I want to, I want to defend his title.
Yeah, exactly.
I want to keep the strap after every year, you know, and so, um, I just, you know, put the work in and then I was doing some writing.
I was at a trade show when I met him and I didn't work at Sitka.
I was the first, uh, they had an athlete team and one of the first ones for first year, not really an athlete team.
You have the credibility to say this is good stuff or not, and not because you did social media reps, but because you actually had been out there using it.
So I met him at trade show, and like I said, every now and again in life you have something that's just right place at the right time, and I had killed that big elk, and it kind of was getting known, and I met him in the booth, and he's like, you're that kid that killed that big elk.
Yeah, and so we hit it off and I started helping him test and gear and shot a commercial for him down and stuff and we just became really good friends and then when the whole deal went down in Sitka, he, you know, it's like when your guy, you know, your guy is, you know, There and is leaving, you know, you have a choice.
You can either go with your guy or you can, you know, stay with whatever the best thing you think is to do.
And I was like, man, whatever you got going on next, let me know.
And when you see the pursuit of excellence in another form, you go, well, there it is.
Like, that's how it is with me when I started seeing your company, and I see a company that's trying to, like, deeply and seriously engineer something.
I geek out on shit that I'm not even interested in buying.
Like, if someone's making the craziest grandfather clock in the world, and I see this guy that's engineering these things so it's accurate to, like, one 18th of one second over 20 years, I'm like, oh, What's going on in this dude's brain that makes him want to make this unbelievable grandfather clock?
I'm fascinated by pursuit.
When someone's trying to do something better than the people that have done before it, I'm fascinated by that.
And I know what I like, and I know when I see a good idea.
The one thing is, I'm not...
I wouldn't say I'm necessarily the best at doing like super intricate things or knowing exactly how to get there but when you see somebody that knows how to get there and like it'd be a good combination and you can you know assist in that and somebody that when they're headed on the on the right direction it's like yeah I'm down with that and and then you know I have my input on what what we do but you know at the end of the day it's you know a lot of it is you know and how he goes about stuff it's cool to watch I mean it's like it it's I always tell people like at what we do is It's
exactly what you think it is.
You step in the room and it's like, oh yeah, this is some other guy's stuff.
When you look at the future of this, How far can you keep pushing this?
I mean, this is a fairly new thing that people have been ridiculously engineering hunting and outdoor equipment, and it obviously exists in the mountaineering world and the REIs.
Every year, they're trying to come up with better and better stuff.
But how far can that go?
Is there a point where you're going to have it done?
Like, this is the best backpack anybody could ever possibly make.
You know, today, innovation's happening faster than it ever has.
And with this business model, we can implement those innovations quickly, and we're always looking for the next greatest thing.
I always am.
I mean, I search the globe on a continuous basis for what's new, what's next, align myself with the innovation leaders for every single category, whether it's marina wool, whether it's leathers, or whether it's For our gloves or whether it's carbon fiber for our packs.
We had our designer down at Stanford meet with a carbon fiber scientist down there that's working on some leading edge technologies around carbon fiber that won't even get to market for a few years.
We're that interested in seeing what's next.
Because we can implement it.
Because we have no price restrictions.
For us, it's a never-ending pursuit.
And there's always new ways to make things.
And that's why I tag the line for the business of Ultralight.
Because if I can find a way to shave an ounce or a gram, There's a reason to redo that product.
There's a reason to reinvent that product because that makes a difference.
And that was my focus with this is that Toray's technology and how they make their yarn, carbon fiber, it all led to ultralight.
And ultralight means performance in the mountains.
And so my goal is to get our weights continuously to come down as far as our product without giving up performance.
And that's through using really innovative technologies and designs that are all focused around that.
And, I mean, from where we started to where we are now, I mean, we've taken pounds and pounds of weight out of people's kits and packs and seen the results, and it's been amazing to watch people that normally would walk into the mountains with a 70-pound pack, now leaving with a 40-pound pack and coming back and saying, made all the difference in the world.
Now, have you guys thought about implementing any sort of workout routines or diet routines or things like that on your website and sort of shaping people's ideas about getting your body prepared?
Yeah, I mean, when you get up early in the morning, if you're not glassing every single time with the same enthusiasm and the same, whether it's your grid system or whatever, you have to be as intense on day one as you do on the last day because you could miss what you're looking for.
You can't let up.
That's the beauty of it.
I mean, physically fit, I mean, there's lots of different stuff.
He's got his whole training regimen and everybody's different, but whether it's yoga or cardio and how much you're eating, it never ends.
There is no magic bullet.
You're always breaking it down and doing a new puzzle.
We have these sand bags that are set up for putting over the booms in our video room, is now what I use.
You can buy them in 20 pounds, 25 pounds, 30 pounds.
Increments and that's what I put in my pack to train with and so like right now as we're rolling and we're about 45 days away from a sheep hunt in the Yukon I'm really stepping up my weight so I'm training with a 90 pound pack now and I'll do a two or three hour hike 1500 to 2000 vertical feet and now I'm doing it in the middle of the day with the heat we're having because it adds another mental toughness factor to it plus as you know It adds a whole other level of fitness too when you're training in the heat.
So my goal is to try to train in situations with weight and conditions that are harder than what I'll experience in the hunt.
Just for the mental strength as much as it is the physical part of it.
Because you get beat down on day three or day four and you just...
I see a lot of guys just fold in the towel and say, I've had it.
When you're doing something like that and you're preparing for something like that, do you start off with 20 pounds?
How do you do that?
And how would you advise someone?
Say if there's someone listening right now that says, hey, I'm going to go on a hunt this winter or this fall, and I need to really get physically prepared, but I don't want to blow it all out in one shot.
I come out of hunting, I go right back into my training.
But for a lot of guys that are just getting into it, ease into it, right?
I mean, you want to, like you said, start with 20 pounds and build yourself up over time because the last thing you want to do is go into hunt and hurt.
I've done that before.
I've overtrained or done too much going into hunt.
And you have to be careful, especially as you age.
I tend to get tendonitis and joint pain more than I ever have.
And so it's managing your body through that process and having something left when you leave.
But being fit enough and having your feet in good enough shape and your boots broken.
I mean, there's a lot to it besides just the cardio part of it that goes into the hunt.
Yeah, I think people would benefit from seeing if you could make a blog on how you do it or outline how you start off and how someone would build into it and maybe consult with someone who's an expert trainer and figure out what's the best way to get people prepared to develop an actual workout for pack hunting.
Even hiking.
Any sort of thing where you're walking uphill in the mountains with weight on your back.
It's like, boy, that is an unbelievably difficult thing to do all day, every day, for several days at a time.
I used to trail run a ton before I hunted, and that was enough.
And as I've gotten older, I've realized that I need to train more specifically for hunts.
And that's carrying a pack with weight.
And it hits different muscle groups, as you've felt.
It gets more up in your hips and more in your glutes, and it hits a whole different muscle group than trail running does or that weight training does or training on an elliptical stairmaster or whatever that is.
There's no substitute for spending time in a pack with weight.
As much as I lift weights and work out and kettlebells and all this stuff, I packed 100 pounds for like three quarters of a mile in the fall, and I was fucking dead.
When it was over, I was like, oh my god.
I can imagine 70 pounds on my back for three days at a time, walking all day.
I used to bring lots of bars and Clif Bars and Power Bars.
Now it's real food.
And Brendan and I have both gotten into that.
Nuts and whole grains and...
Getting away from dehydrated meals so much, to have high sodium, not a lot of nutritional value, and really trying to focus on bringing breads and peanut butters and cheeses and things that will stick with you versus high sugars and quick burns.
If you really look at their calories, they're not that many calories per ounce.
They're light, and some of them have higher calories per ounces than others, but I mean, Brendan's come up with a really good recipe with peanut butter and some noodles and stuff.
That's one of the things that's so exciting about it.
It is this unbelievably difficult Huge test, man.
Now, if you're going, like, explain to me a hunt.
Like, say if you're going to go on, like, a mountain goat hunt or a sheep hunt, where you know you're going to go into very difficult terrain, and you have X amount of days, how do you pack for that?
Yeah, they're very filling and they're very big and dense, but try eating one for 10 days or three of them.
A day for 10 days.
At the end of it, you don't even want to eat it.
And so I believe now, for me at least, and what I recommend to our customers is bring food you like now that you love and focus on that stuff versus trying to get crazy on something new you haven't tried and thinking, okay, I'll go to REI and buy all these different type of exotic bars and that'll be my food source.
If you've never done it before and, you know, all of a sudden you go on this great big trip and you're stressed, you know, you're traveling and all this stuff and all of a sudden, you know, it's like throwing diesel into an unleaded car.
I mean, if you've never ran on that before, you don't really know how you're going to run on it.
Well, hunger goes away in some sort of a weird way.
And there's also a bunch of different people that are involved in this now that are coming up with snacks and different foods that you could take with you.
That's one of the reasons why I wanted to ask you guys what you're carrying around.
But once your body's into ketosis, then you just need high-fat, high-fat Fat content foods, and you've got to figure out how to keep them okay, or keep them from going bad while you're out there in the mountain.
Really interesting and new stuff that's coming out is that these guys that are taking it, they're finding that when they're doing their blood tests, that their testosterone levels are higher, their growth hormone levels are higher.
It's really interesting stuff.
I think your body is designed to eat that natural food, like plants and vegetables and meats.
If you go back five years ago and you read some of the studies that are done and what people recommend for as far as diet, now, today, it's totally contrary to that.
He beat down Mayhem Miller as a TKO. But the TKOs, yeah.
I mean, he's also sitting down on his punches better.
Jason Perillo, his boxing coach, has really been working with him and done a fantastic job with him and with Chris Cyborg and a bunch of other people that he trains.
Yeah, and the last thing you want to be is the guy that says, this guy can't beat me, I'm gonna go in there and fuck him up, and then you wake up with a flashlight in your eyes.
And then you have to deal with that ego that allows, like, the ego tells you that it's gonna protect you from all this, you know, you're the baddest motherfucker ever, you don't have to need to worry about shit.
Hoo, I don't even have to worry, and then BLAM! And you're like, God damn it, ego.
Like I said, I only have a couple hobbies watching MMA. Hunting, that's it.
They're very comparable from going from being a wrestler.
It's exciting.
It's slow portions of nothing and this training and grinding and all of a sudden.
Every now and again, you get to step in and see where you're at.
Like you always say, two guys, that's a strip down as it gets.
You either win or lose it.
50-50.
I'm either going to win or I'm not.
Same with hunting.
At a certain point in time in that hunt, You either get them or you don't like that the percentages work out like that I mean, it's that's that's the cool thing about it.
Well, I think also like honey, it's very It's not perceived correctly by a lot of people.
It's very misunderstood And a lot of people think of it as this barbaric awful thing involving bullies and assholes when really they're incredibly intelligent difficult people were pursuing one of the most One of the most difficult things to do with dire physical consequences if you fail.
Well, they don't have the understanding of who they actually are.
In order to face your own fears, like a lot of the bullies and the assholes, you can get a certain...
Distance with that, with physical power and genetic attributes.
I mean, some guys just hit fucking hard, and they're just good at taking a shot, and if you stand in front of them and wail with them, they might catch you and knock you out and beat your ass, and you just got beat by a bully.
But the reality is, when those guys get to Estipe Miocic or Cain Velasquez or, you know, the best of the best, they're going to get fucked up.
Every one of them I've met, we have some guys that are customers of ours, TJ and Mendez, and I mean they're really sharp guys, very sharp, and very nice, very polite, not assholes, very thoughtful, I mean just great people to be around.
It's this medal trophy thing that you get for playing football in college.
And then he's the quarterback for now the Cardinals, but then he was Cincinnati, and he had a guy on the team that took him hunting during one of their bye weeks.
Put him up in a tree stand.
He'd never been hunting before.
He grew up in Orange County like I did.
And he said the first time a deer walked under his stand, a buck, The adrenaline and the DNA of that process took over, and he is just a diehard hunter now.
It's all he wants to do.
When he's done playing football, he only wants to hunt.
He wants to invest in Kuyu so he can be involved with hunting.
I mean, it's just that happened for him like it happened for you.
I see it happen so much with athletes.
We have Brent Burns plays for this game called Hockey.
Yeah, and I'm really into pursuing the art of cooking it in a bunch of different ways, too.
And that's another thing that I learned from Rinella.
I'm getting Hank Shaw, who I think lives up your way, too.
He's a wild game cook, a famous chef who's Turned to becoming a hunter because he was interested in trying to prepare this food and being more connected with food.
So then he started hunting and then using...
He uses a lot of local ingredients, too.
A lot of, like, ingredients from the area where the animal actually lives.
Chefs like Anthony Bourdain, he took me hunting in Montana recently.
We went on a pheasant hunt, and he's a big fan of doing that as well, as cooking the animals that he hunts himself and showing you how to prepare it properly.
He's done that a bunch of times on his show and very involved in it.
You can do a quick age in your fridge where you put up like on a rack in like a pan or a plate with like a wire rack that gets it off the bottom of it and then put foil over the top and let that blood drain out.
It just seems weird because people don't do it, but it's like a guy I know, that big African PH, he'll take a whole hindquarter and Steve Cobreen, he told me this.
He'll take a whole hindquarter and put it in a fridge at his house for 30 days.
Well, when I hunted with Ronella the very first time and shot a mule deer, and then we ate the liver that night, we hung up most of the meat in the tree because it was pretty close to dark, and we went back the next day to pack it out.
But when we went back to camp and ate liver and onions...
Like, from an animal that died two hours ago.
It was like the most insanely delicious food I've ever had in my life.
We spent a whole segment of the show concentrating on the balls of the sheep.
Like, Ranella made a video.
See if you can find this, because it's pretty funny.
We were there, and Ranella is obsessed with these bighorn sheep and their balls, and he's like, the moment I kill one of these things, I'm going to kill it, and I'm going to take one of those balls, and I'm just going to eat it.
When you go home and tell people what a bad spot I took you to, and you say, boy we didn't see a lot of bighorns though, what they're gonna say is something like, what kind of dumbass hunts mule deer in bighorn country?
Well, he's another really important factor in educating people about hunting because he's a very well-read, very intelligent guy, very educated, and really very, very ethical.
Well, he had this guy on his podcast, Dan Flores, who is a wildlife biologist, wildlife historian, I should say.
It's an amazing podcast where he details the history of animals and European settlers coming over here and wiping out of the various animals and what's being done to try to restore that.
They're trying to do something called the American Serengeti, where they're trying to put together an area, a protected area as big as Yellowstone, but that's actually going to involve hunting.
And that's also an interesting thing, these auction tags, which is really weird, where you let someone, you give them this opportunity to hunt, and a lot of times these guys are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Well, that's the big contradiction when people talk about hunting and hunting being for conservation and how it helps conservation.
That is one of the biggest examples of it is how much money goes into helping these animals and habitat preservation and reintroducing them to areas like what the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation has done with reintroducing elk to a bunch of different places.
Basically into a few places, and they've brought them back through.
And it's strongly been through money by guys that are fortunate enough to be able to do it.
It's a total misconception.
I mean, you are paying, the guy is paying money as a tax donation, and he's giving money to something he truly cares about, that he loves, and has probably grown up doing.
This guy was self-made, started painting boards in West Virginia, and started a bank and made a billion dollars.
He loves hunting.
That's what he loves to do.
It's not some rich guy paying to You know, put a head on his wall and he was glad to do it.
And you're paying for the opportunity.
I mean, the thing that's always lost in it is the dead animal or whatever.
The guy's paying for the opportunity.
We had no advantage over anybody else.
It was the same season everybody else did.
And the guy, we ended up killing, you know, a great big ram, which was, you know, obviously the goal.
But, I mean, one sheep raised a half a million dollars.
It'd be a hell of a lot easier to buy a great big head to put on your wall than it would to spend that much money and then go out there and maybe not get them.
It's basically a three-year story of following one ram.
This ram we call B-52.
And in 2010, a friend of ours was with a guy who killed a ram up in the brakes, same deal, exact same area you were in, and there was a big ram standing with it.
There was two big rams together, he killed one of them.
And the next year when we were up there scouting, we came across this ram, like, that's the same ram in the photo.
They took a photo right before they killed it.
And then we tried to hunt him in 2012, didn't get him.
And in 2013, it was like this ram, he was really big, and then he slipped through two years.
Nobody got him.
Smart old sheep.
I mean, really smart.
And it was all of a sudden, you know, we let a few guys know that, hey, there's not an unusually big ram up here.
And if you want a chance to hunt it, it's unique in the time frame and the fact that There's not always big sheep around.
I mean, this is one year, this ram is alive right now, and we told a few guys, and five guys went, you know, there was five guys that were willing to pay half a million dollars.
I mean, there was five guys bid in over $460,000 for the opportunity to hunt this area.
I snuck him into 12 yards, came over the top on it, and a resident hunter Being a dick, came down the ridge and spooked the sheep, spotted us, knew we were hunting a sheep, and came down and spooked the ram, but he should have killed it with a bow.
And we had seen him for a couple years and he had a really small body and he was actually a non-dominant sheep and was just kind of floating around out there.
For an animal like that to live that long Nature is so incredible in its diversity that this is something that we have here in North America, this incredible animal, just a strange looking...
We're so used to them, we know they exist, so I don't think we kind of appreciate them as much as if you were just introduced to them as an adult, if you'd never heard of or seen it before, it'd probably blow you away.
I always say, like, with desert sheep, you know, they have this tiny little neck, and it's like, when you see one out in the desert, a desert sheep, a big ram, it's like, they wouldn't look any stranger if they were green.
Like, if they landed on Mars, if they landed on Mars, and all of a sudden there was a desert sheep pop to set up, you'd be like, that's about what I thought it'd be here.
When they hit, and then there's like this state of right after a guy, you know, right after you take a huge uppercut, and they just stand there and kind of go, oh.
And then they kind of come back, and they're like, all right, let's do that again.
So it's this move right here, and then when they're posturing and kicking each other around, their other move is they get behind each other and smash each other in the balls.
Well, being out there in the wild, you get to experience firsthand the diversity of all these wild, like mule deer with their incredible racks, or elk, or bighorn sheep, and there's so many bizarre creations.
And it's also strange to me how you see when it's all over, they bachelor up.
When the rut's over, we went moose hunting in BC last year, and when the rut was over, we found these bachelor groups of moose that probably were trying to kill each other just a couple weeks ago.
And it's like everything else gets tuned out, too.
It's like this laser focus of what's happening right then.
All your senses go way up, at least for me, as far as smell.
And you can feel the slightest breeze in your face.
You know, you can see that animal move really, really close like you'd never would notice before because of that laser focus intensity just kind of takes over your whole system.
I think it's amazing and we're so lucky in this country that the people like Teddy Roosevelt and the people that founded these areas for public land, they set them aside and allowed these places to be established where these animals can live and we never have to worry about them being taken over and they build malls there.
I mean, it's a really beautiful part of America.
Even if you don't have any desire whatsoever to hunt, the fact that you can go up there and backpack and camp and That's awesome.
So yeah, I mean I was after this one sheep and I thought, and you know like when you talk about really getting to know animals, he had showed up on the winter range and twice.
We had pictures of him two years in a row on the winter range and it's just like okay we got a picture of this big ram.
Well, you know, I start looking at the pictures and comparing them and all of a sudden I noticed that in one picture from 2013, or from 2012 and one in 2013, he had the same two young rams with him.
A year apart, 10 miles apart in distance, and he had the same two sheep with him.
So all of a sudden I'm like...
You know, most people would be like, oh, it's just a sheep, and then there's a little half curl, and then there's a young, kind of unique looking ram with them, and I'm looking like, it's the same ram.
So all of a sudden, I got a ram band that I'm looking for there.
You know, it's kind of a symbiotic relationship.
Young rams allow old rams, or old rams allow young rams to follow them around.
They show them kind of the hills, and they kind of tolerate them.
It's not like, hey, you're my buddy or anything.
They just kind of like, when the senses start to slip, you'll see old rams with young rams.
And they're keeping an eye on their back for them.
So I figured out this ram who was 13 years old, which is the oldest.
So I ended up killing him, obviously, and he was 13 years old, which is the oldest ram killed in the whole state of 150 by two years.
So he's off the charts old.
So he had these two young rams with him.
Basically, knowing enough about sheep behavior, I was like, okay, I'm looking for this old ram in this massive area, but I'm actually looking for three sheep.
Because if I see either of those two young rams without him, I'll know he's dead.
He's kind of changed his management plan in the area a little bit.
He knows more about it.
That's hilarious.
I went in there because since I was a little kid, it was like, man, that's something I always wanted to do.
You're going to get this opportunity.
I'm not going to go do the easiest thing.
I passed big rams, big rams with my bow.
I wanted this ram.
I wanted to have like an epic hunt and just to see if I could do it, see if I could find him.
And I hadn't found those young rams in the 23rd day.
I said I heard them popping heads, started glassing, cutting the timber apart, and all of a sudden, you know, another key to the puzzle, all of a sudden there's that little young ram that was with him standing in the timber.
Well, that's a good story to end this with because that sort of embodies what I appreciate about what you guys do.
That you guys are really like the one-tenth of the one-percenters of the outliers of the crazy people that are pursuing this as just an incredibly difficult biological puzzle.