Cliff Gray, a former finance professional turned wilderness outfitter, recounts quitting at 23 to guide elk hunts in Colorado’s backcountry, scaling from 12 to over 200 clients annually before selling his business. He critiques wolf reintroduction claims—like CPW’s forced Yellowstone relocation and the debunked Why Wolves Change Rivers video—arguing they won’t restore "wild" ecosystems due to human infrastructure. Gray highlights elk size variations (Alberta vs. Colorado) and grizzly unpredictability, contrasting with black bears’ vocal aggression, while dismissing taxidermy as unethical. The duo debates hunting’s physical demands, predator efficiency (e.g., wolves stripping moose bones), and its economic impact—one wolf could cost outfitters $30,000 in lost elk tag revenue. Ultimately, they frame hunting as a rigorous but rewarding skill for self-sufficiency and resilience, countering media villainization with practical, survival-focused perspectives. [Automatically generated summary]
So how did you make this choice to get off the path?
Because for a lot of people, I think one of the problems with the path is you get married, you get a house, you have kids, you have responsibilities, and then you're stuck.
Because you really can't change careers because you have so many dependents.
There's so many people depending upon you.
You have so many responsibilities.
You have to kind of just suck it up and keep doing this thing that you don't enjoy for your family.
Yeah, so to answer that question, man, I think I have to be a little humble about it, Joe, because I came from a family, including my wife.
When I met my wife, man, I was a guy that was well-educated and looked like a guy that was going to be on a traditional path to...
You know to great success as a finance guy and that's when I met my wife and then I like I tricked her man because I switched it up on her you know but she stayed with me the whole time and so I gotta I gotta give her that but also my family too man like you can imagine like you know my my parents you know wanted me to get a great education I mean they my family man like basically lived the American dream like none of them they didn't grow up wealthy you know nor did I but they kept me comfortable And
then, you know, they got great success and they wanted, you know, they got success through hard work and they wanted to see me, you know, have a path of like, you know, go to Wall Street, go be an attorney, go do something like that because that seemed like the easy path, I think, in their mind and seemed to make sense and they were giving me that opportunity.
But when I decided not to do that, man...
Not one time have my parents or my brothers for that part said like, dude, you're doing, you're being an idiot.
You know what I mean?
Like when I told them like, hey, I'm going to buy.
So essentially I bought an outfitting business that had been, you know, pretty much run into the dirt, you know, and it was just, it was just federal permitting where I could expand into a bigger, you know, guiding business in Colorado.
When I told them, I was going to do that.
I was quitting my job at the time.
I had transitioned working for a wealthy family who treated me awesome.
But when I said, hey man, I'm going to go be an outfitter, my parents were like...
I mean, my dad was like, sounds awesome.
You know, my brother was like, sounds awesome.
I can't...
And I don't think that everybody grows up in a family that's that supportive of it.
So I don't want to say that like...
I, you know, did it all, like, I'm just a guy that just said, hey, I'm gonna do something cool and independent.
It was what I wanted to do, and I had support, man.
Yeah, so I've been in, I mean, all through my childhood, you know, and then even when I was an undergrad in school, I hunted all the time.
And I had done a bunch of guiding, and I was exposed to it.
And the other thing, for my type of outfitting and guiding, I had been exposed to livestock and horses and mules my whole life.
And that's a big part of, like, wilderness outfitting.
You've got to be familiar with how to pack mules, how to pack horses, how to ride horses up in the mountains because that's a huge proportion of what I did just to get into remote areas.
Not to dive into the depth of my childhood, but I was exposed to that.
It, you know, the first 20 years of my life where, you know, I had that skill set.
So that's, that's the first part of it.
And then, you know, how I actually mechanically did it.
I mean, so the, just to give you some context, me and my brother start when I was young, at a business school, me and my brother started a financial company, and it changed, changed in a bunch of different ways, and he still operates it.
But when I was, I think I want to say like 22, 23, I started working for our biggest client.
And he was a phenomenal guy and I was doing more like family wealth management for him.
And literally, Joe, I was just kind of struggling day to day with being, I always wanted to be in the outdoors and I wanted to go do something else.
And I literally just walked into his office and And I was like, Bob, I love you, man, but I gotta go.
I gotta go do something else.
And I kind of had a plan to go back to Colorado.
I was born in the area where I did most of my outfitting and guiding.
And it was funny because he looked at me and he kind of laughed because I think he knew it was coming.
He knew I just...
I mean, he came from a different world.
He'd grown up doing business deals and all that, and I grew up from somewhere else.
I think that's why he kind of enjoyed having me around, because we would talk about our different backgrounds and stuff.
But he was just like, well, the first thing he said is, Cliff, I'm just going to ask you one time, man.
Can I give you more money?
I'm like, Bob, we shouldn't even talk about it, man.
So how did you go about starting and getting clients?
So if you're starting an outfitting business, you're a young guy, you're leaving the financial sector, and you're going and starting and getting clients.
No, I mean, you have to, in a lot of these areas, I mean, people think about Colorado, Joe, and they think, so I hunted what technically would have been the, they say the White River elk herd is the largest elk herd in the world, right?
So you have that perception that, oh, okay, well, you go there, you go into the flat tops, or you go into the surrounding forest, you know, Forest Service property, and you just put your backpack on, get off the road, and there's going to be elk everywhere.
Well, I mean, it's a ton of habitat.
And the thing about a lot of that country is all the habitat's good.
You know, you can go other places, and they've got elk, but you, you know, the...
Only 10% of the actual habitat is going to hold elk, right?
Well, the flat tops or, you know, these big chunks of space in Colorado, I mean, it's all good elk habitat.
You know, until you get massive amount of snow that limits the feed for elk, I mean, elk could be everywhere.
So what I'm getting to is they get crazy dispersed.
And the only way to get into a lot of these areas is either backpacking, you know, on your foot, hiking.
On your feet, hiking.
Or, you know, you've got to pack in with horses and mules.
Yeah, so if we're talking, so all the, if we're talking elk, the elk is a species, almost all of that was out of wall tent camps.
And we pack those in.
Now, I did a fair amount of sheep and goat guiding too.
Most of that we did out of backpacks.
Just because a lot of the habitat that mountain goats and sheep live in, it's not really conducive to packing with horses just because you end up getting above timberline and there's just some logistical reasons.
A lot of times it's just better to backpack on them.
But on elk, it's almost always, so you're packing your camp with horses and mules, and then you're coming back in.
Sometimes you'll hunt off foot.
You know, if the camp's in a situation where you can cover ground on foot and hunt, then you'll do it that way.
But a lot of times you'll actually bring horses back in and hunt a horse back, too.
And that's like a whole, people don't, I mean, you know, taking care of horses, you know, if you got 15 horses and mules in camp, like, you know, 12 miles back in the wilderness, like, it's, you know, it feels like going back in time, man.
So, dude, I got some Amish buddies that I love, man, and I don't, so I don't want to like, like, Mark, if you're listening, man, and you probably shouldn't be listening because you're Amish, but...
But no, so the answer to your question, man, is it just depends on, you know, what church they're from and the rules, you know, the rules that they have established, you know, and what they're doing.
So if it's for a business, a lot of them can use email.
For people who don't know, they have like a time period of an indefinite time period where they're allowed to just run around and party and do drugs and sleep around.
And then they have to come back to the church if they want to.
And when they came out to my place, they didn't do any of that stuff other than work.
You know, but...
But anyways, they would come out and what I noticed, man, is if you take an 18-year-old Amish guy and you're just doing stuff around like ranch, because we were outfitting and guiding a lot of time, but we also had to manage the livestock and we had kind of a ranch that we had to take care of.
Those guys at 18, they know a ton because they've already been working for seven years.
You know what I mean?
They know how to frame a door.
You know, they...
They could show up to my place, Joe, and they're wearing sandals and shorts, and you're thinking, this guy's never been around livestock, and you'd be like, hey man, go grab that mule and saddle it.
Every single one of them knew how to do it, because they grow up catching horses and putting them on a buggy every day.
It's just wild that they learn all these skill sets really early on.
So in some ways, from an education standpoint, None of them had a hard time communicating with me or, you know, we always could get through all that.
You know, maybe they didn't have as good as spelling or they didn't have as good, like, algebra skills or something because they missed out on some of that education, maybe.
But I can tell you from a work ethic and, like, a hands-on skill set, they're amazing, man.
It's interesting because we all want to think about education in terms of, like, things you can use in the corporate world or You can use in the business world, but the reality of education is you're learning things, and they learn so many things, I'm sure, that the average person who works in an office is never going to understand.
Take an average guy who works over at Google and say, hey man, go put a saddle on that mule.
And they're like, what the fuck are you talking about, right?
I'm sure some of them are really good at homeschooling their kids and some of them...
It's just like regular homeschooling.
I've met some homeschooled kids that are phenomenal.
They're really interesting kids, but the parents did a great job of giving them a very nuanced education and then also committing them to activities so they interacted with a lot of kids on a regular basis.
They just didn't go to school during the day with kids.
And it's like if you have that kind of time and that kind of commitment and you You know, maybe you're just not very happy with the regular school system.
Right.
People used to think that it was a bad idea to homeschool your kids, but during COVID, I think a lot of people kind of opened their eyes.
First of all, A, how difficult it is, but also that there's a value to being there while your children are learning things, so you can kind of communicate with them and go through, especially if you have an expertise in something.
My youngest daughters used to do martial arts, and It was kind of like a mixed martial arts class and I would go with them to mixed martial arts class and sit on the sideline.
And then a couple of times some stuff came up, and I said to the instructor, I said, actually, you shouldn't really do it that way.
Because, like, they weren't, you know, as a black belt in jujitsu, I'm like, you're actually going to get your back taken if you teach people this path.
And so I'd go on the mat with them and show them the difference.
The next thing I know, I'm doing it with my daughter, and I'm having her do it, and I'm working with little kids.
It was really exciting.
It's fun to be able to teach your kids something.
Yeah.
They love that you know something that they can learn.
It gives them pride.
These people that are learning from their families and from their community, it's a completely different way of life, but it's probably a more healthy way of life than the average person experiences just going to a regular, mundane, very regimented, traditional school system.
I'll tell you about a conversation I had with one guy that I consider a pretty good friend.
I'll be honest with you.
The Amish, from my observations, they don't make a real strong effort to have close relationships with people outside of the community.
At least I always felt that way.
But one individual I would say is a very good friend of mine.
And I asked him, like, well, dude, it seems like so...
It seems like, like, where do you stop the technology?
Where do you start?
And he actually had a rational explanation.
He said, look, man, like, we make these judgments...
And I think a big part of it is we're just trying to judge, like, we know the value of having a certain pace of life, and these technology judgments are based on that.
We want to be able to still, you know, succeed, feed our families, because they still got to deal with, like, the realities of, you know, they got to buy land to have their farms, all that stuff.
But he's like, look, it's all about pace of life for us.
So if we look at a technology and it's going to change that dynamic, then certain churches may choose not to do that.
So I'm with you, man.
There's odd things that they do, but I kind of get that explanation too.
It might have been like, I know they feed a lot of silage, you know, like processed, feed that's been basically fermenting, and that's what that smell is a lot of the time.
But, you know, if you're in a wall tent camp, and you're hunting elk for like seven or eight days, and, you know, it's like half snow, or it's half snow, and then it melts, so it's like muddy, you got all these horses tied up.
I mean, horseshit's everywhere, man.
It's in every lead rope, it's in everything, and you don't realize, you know, you're out there, you know, out there feeding the horses in the dark, and then you go into the cook tent, and And, you know, you start eating and you don't realize, you know, you got horse shit on your hands.
Yeah man, so I think you hit on a bunch of things that would like bring me back to my opinion on it and that's that A lot of this stuff, so I know they've basically described two different areas in Colorado where they're going to put the two first sets of transplants.
And one of them is like right in where, I mean, I rode that country with a horse like all over the place and the circle of where they're going to put those wolves is right there.
So I know where they're going to put those, you know, one of the spots.
So my understanding is off the bat, the first year, and I believe their goal is by December of this year, it's going to be like between 15 and 30, I believe is the first bunch.
And they're going to have them in two different spots.
But in that, you know, in that Vail, Vail corridor, you know, up to the flat tops in there, you know, so they're probably going to put 15 to 20 wolves in there.
The thing that you hit on, Joe, that I think kind of forms my opinion is, I mean, these areas, when you go in them, man, they seem so wild, right?
Like, you know, I could, the flat tops, I could get on a horse and I could ride for 15 hours and not see a road, you know, Ten hours and not see a road.
And they seem so wild, even to me, being there.
But I don't think that people realize how much humans have already affected that landscape and how it doesn't matter.
This myth that putting wolves back in that landscape is going to turn it back to some ecosystem that was here 300 years ago.
I think it's a figment of their imagination, man.
And the reason I say that is because I've also spent a fair amount of time in British Columbia that seemed so much more wild to me.
And let me kind of like give you context of why that is.
Okay, so if you look at the dynamic of that area, there's a huge highway that goes from, Highway 70 that goes from Denver on the Front Range up, you know, past all the ski resorts into Vail, into Eagle, and then it kind of goes down through a big canyon, Glenwood Canyon, and kicks back into Aspen.
All the winter range there is split by this massive highway, and then that highway has an eight-foot game fence along the whole thing, and then along that Vail Valley where they are going to put these wolves, there's 50,000 full-time residents, and there's probably double that in the high season, ski season, plus you've got these huge ski resorts.
I guess what I'm getting at is when somebody tells me that the low-hanging fruit to kind of rewild that areas as wolves, it's just bullshit.
And if you're cool with going outside and seeing wolves eat your dog, Well, then you've made the right choice.
But if you're not, if you don't think they're gonna go after low-hanging fruit, if you don't think they're gonna go after easy prey, you don't understand wolves.
Talk to people that live in Alaska.
Anybody who lives in British Columbia, they have real fucking wolf problems up there.
And these are wolf problems that we used to have in the West, but they eradicated them.
I mean, I don't think it's good to eradicate them.
I'm not saying that what they did was right when they poisoned horses and left dead horses filled with strychnine and the wolves all died off, but they did it for a fucking reason.
And that's the thing that's so crazy about, you know, back to the process of how it happened.
Everybody who wants wolves in Colorado, and we can get into the depth they want them, because that's not really clear.
They just went through this whole setting up the plan for the CPW, and it became very clear in my mind, watching that process, that they don't really want there to be any management of wolves in Colorado either.
What happened is when the CPW did that draft plan, it included some discussion of wolves being lethally managed at all different stages.
You know what I mean, Joe?
Even now, if they were a real problem with livestock, could they be lethally managed?
But down the road, once they had...
Once they had hit certain population objectives, could they be hunted, right?
Like that was discussed.
Well, it turns out the ballot initiative basically says that wolves are a non-game species, and that was in the language of the ballot initiative.
So...
They can't really now say, the CPW can't really say that they're going to someday be a hunted species in Colorado.
I personally think, and everything's like 20-20 hindsight, but even when the ballot initiative originally was out there, I always thought it was going to pass by a landslide.
That's what's so crazy because it just barely passed.
But, um, I always thought, like, the problem with Colorado is it's different than these other western states, you know, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, because they're gonna keep the population in line through hunting or other, you know, other methods, but in Colorado, I don't think the politics are gonna allow that, man.
I think it's just gonna be, like, who knows what the top is on, you know, how many there is, how much they affect the ungulate population, you know, who knows, you know.
But what I was going to say is what's crazy about this ballot initiative and the bummer part about it is everybody that's going to deal with the negative consequences, they're people that voted no, but they're in the areas where the wolves are going to be transplanted.
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Everybody that voted for it, they don't have to deal with the downside.
The problem is, is every person that I've interacted with in British Columbia, you know, or even in the western states that have a fair amount of wolves, every person that's just trying to make a living on the landscape, you know, he's a guide, an outfitter, a logger, a cattle rancher, whatever, like he's out there living, he or she's out there living with them and dealing with them.
They're all just like, when you ask about wolves, they're like, it's just like, you know what I mean?
Because they got to deal with the negative consequences all the time.
I mean, his whole world is focused on trapping them.
And I've sat and talked to him just about, like, the details, you know, like, boiling his snares, you know, how he goes in and puts his snares in, you know, how he goes in and checks them, like, all that matter.
Yeah, so I've heard mixed things, and this will be interesting because right where they're going to put some of these wolves in Colorado, there's some pretty big domestic sheep guys that run these Pyrenees dogs.
There's no limit to this logic of this trophic cascade idea.
Yeah, well, what's crazy to me, man, is like, so if you watch that video, and it's got like 50 million views on YouTube or something like that, it's narrated by a guy, I mean, it's really well done.
It's just cool to watch.
But you watch it, I mean, if you listen to the first 90 seconds, And the reason I bring this video up is because I actually think that this video was the start of what happened in Colorado.
A lot of people watch this and they're like, yeah, it makes sense.
One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades.
A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom.
And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we're slightly less aware that they give life to many others.
Before the wolves turned up, they'd been absent for 70 years.
That the numbers of deer, because there was nothing to hunt them, had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park.
And despite efforts by humans to control them, they'd managed to reduce much...
So the history of Yellowstone actually, you know, until like the 60s, there's two things going on in the park when they had excess elk, which makes sense.
Because what people don't realize, I mean...
They were killing predators before the 60s in Yellowstone.
They were suppressing lions in addition to the fact that they had already killed the wolves.
So there was predator suppression going on, even in the park before the 60s.
Well, in the late 50s and 60s, and I might be roughly off on these dates, but the park was actually capturing elk, and they were transporting them to all the other states that needed elk.
Yeah, that might be, man, because all the big transplants in Colorado, Idaho, outside of the park, they were Yellowstone genetics.
You know, and I actually even know, I know that some of the, you know, some of the elk that ended up down on the Indian reservations and stuff, they were originally...
Someone, I was hunting with this guy in Utah and he was telling me there's literally two different kinds of elk and the reason why these elk like in the Gila mountain range and the elk in Tohono Ranch and They're so big is because these are Yellowstone elk and that the Yellowstone elk have wider bases, more mass.
They're larger animals.
He was like, it's like, you know, you have a Roosevelt elk, you have a Thule elk, you have a Rocky Mountain elk.
Man, like I saw a cow on this particular place I'm talking about.
And it was bigger than any bull I had ever had a client kill in the fight.
What?
When we were like, the cow popped up in the brush there probably like 500 yards from us and I hadn't picked up my binoculars yet, there's no way you could have convinced me that was a cow.
I mean, part of that's probably, like, genetics, you know, or, like, you know, selective breeding of elk, too, over time, which, you know, that does exist.
There's an industry that does that, so that might be part of it, too.
It could be that these animals, too, like, much like what we're talking about with California, with Tihon Ranch, you have these animals that are used to living in Montana, say, with the California Tihon Ranch, and then all of a sudden they're living in...
You know, the Tachapi Mountains, and they have no winter to speak of, where they're deprived of food.
They have food all year round now, and so they have this body that's designed to consume as much food as possible, because winter's coming, and then winter never comes.
It's like, you hear people talking about killing wild elk, like, oh, I killed a bull.
He had to weigh, like, 900 pounds.
It's like, dude, I've, I mean, I've put a ton, quartered up a ton of bulls in my life, and a big wild bull is, you know, 650 pounds, 700 pounds would be a big one, you know.
They don't get as big as a lot of people say, you know what I mean?
I remember, you know, it's funny, like when you're riding in the mountains with, you know, you're riding a horse and maybe you've got like three or four mules with you, a lot of times you'll pick up off of them that they sent something before you see it, you know, because they smell something.
And usually they'll start like puffing their nostrils.
And a lot of times it would be moose.
I can hear them huffing.
Those mules and horses, what they're trying to do is they're trying to get more scent in so they can be like, they know exactly what it is.
And a lot of times as you're going around a switchback or something, you can hear them huffing and sure enough you come around the corner and there'll just be like a bull moose standing there in the trail.
Yeah, and they just look at you like, you're going to have to go around.
So several moose, I literally drug a string of mules up the hill, through the aspens, and crashing through a bunch of crap just so the moose can stand there on the trail.
And I've seen the videos and, you know, personally, I don't know that I could say 100% either way, but I do know that people for sure who have seen them in northern Colorado, like across the border, seen tracks, something like that.
Well, dude, the thing about them is they can, people don't understand, they can roam.
There's something that gets in, you know, bears' heads where they will, well, not just bears, like, I mean, Cats.
Yeah, cats, a little bighorn ram who he's just tired of getting the shit beat out of him from this band of rams he's been hanging out.
All of a sudden he just starts moving, man.
He's just gonna go find like a new place to live and they'll travel like crazy distances.
There's a cool bear study, and man I wish I knew the gal's name that did it, where they collared a bunch of bears and it was done I believe in New Mexico.
And it's crazy to see how far these bears will move.
They'll go where they're denning, and they'll travel, I want to say like two, three hundred miles, hit up an elk calving ground, and then they'll go another hundred miles for somewhere else that they like to hang out in the fall to hit acorns or something.
And there's these scary black bear encounters or black bear things you hear about where the bears are habituated to like campgrounds and stuff and they attack people in their tents.
I was listening to somebody talk about it recently.
I can't remember who it was, but there's something about when you get attacked in a tent and they think that in general, if it's grizzly or black bear, that is more of like a predatory, I'm going to eat you type of thing.
I mean, I've had them, you know, they, uh, have you ever, have you ever been around black bears when they're, when they're, they kind of, we call it jacking their jaws, but they jack their jaws.
It's a real, it's got, you, you can, you know, even if you never heard it before, if you hear it, you know exactly what they mean.
I mean, a sow will talk to their cubs quite a bit, too.
Have you ever heard that?
It's kind of like, I don't know what to say.
It's almost like a little mewing sound.
I mean, I call it a mew like an elk mew, but it's kind of that same tonal structure, but it sounds a little bit different.
And I hadn't heard it before, but, you know, I'll tell you this story real quick, Joe.
Kind of a wild deal.
I was guiding a hunter, and we were watching these bears, and they were in oak brush.
They were basically stripping acorns off this oak brush.
And a lot of times, what these black bears will do, the sows will kick their cubs up in the oak.
Like, this oak brush could be as high as this room, man.
And what will happen is they'll kick their cubs up in the oak brush, and when you're glassing the oak brush, You'll be looking in the oak brush and you'll just see the little furry cub and he'll be just hanging in the tree, you know?
And then you don't see the sow because the canopy of the oak brush is covering her, you know?
So a lot of times when I was guiding bear hunters, I always would look for that, you know, because you can't, you know, you, you know, obviously just from like, nobody wants to kill the mom of two little baby cubs, but it's also illegal to do that, you know?
So you're always looking.
You don't want to make a mistake.
So I would always be glassing the oak brush for cubs.
And so we were watching this hillside, and I saw a couple cubs, and then I could see their mom kind of cruising underneath them.
You know, every once in a while she'd pop out.
And then, so we were kind of paying attention.
We were just, they're cool to watch.
We were watching them.
And then a boar black bear came up the hill right in front of us.
It was probably like 200-yard difference or something.
And we watched him and the hunter wanted to shoot him but we didn't have a clear shot so we just kind of kept watching him and the bears kind of started mingling together and it was getting maybe the last like 30-40 minutes of light and finally this bear got out and I actually remember because he was he got a hold of like something that had been dead forever like and it was in the ground like an old winter kill or something this this bored black bear and he was just trying to tear it up you know and he's digging on it but that gave the hunter the shot And so he shot the bear and I saw
the bear start rolling down this canyon.
And so I was like, all right, you're good to go.
He goes down and he lands on a tree, like, you know, off to his left a little bit, just kind of came down the topography of the mountain.
I'm like, you're good, but we should get over there while we got light just to maneuver around the canyon.
So I get over there, and we get above the bear, and it's pretty steep, and I'm looking down, and I see him against the tree, and then I hear a cub up in the tree, up in the canopy, and I'm like, what is going on?
I know for a fact that that's not...
A sow.
Yeah, no that's not a sow.
But it made my heart bump like, oh shit, did we make some sort of horrible mistake?
So I trot down there and I remember grabbing this bear's back leg and I pick his leg up and I see his balls and I'm like, fuck yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, you know, because you don't want to make, like, I'd feel shitty, you know, I'd feel horrible.
So I'm like, dude, okay, that cub that's up in those trees is not, you know, this isn't the mom, so good deal.
But I'm thinking to myself, like, where's this cub?
So I look, Joe, in the same tree that this bear rolled down into, that cub was in it.
But those kind of situations, man, anytime I got between, you know, near cubs or like where the sow didn't have visual to the cubs, that would freak me out regardless if it was grizz or black bear, you know.
You understand what, you know, you understand the ecosystem.
You understand these animals and you spent so much time with them.
It's like those are the people that really should be making that assessment.
It's like if you want to vote on certain things and you do not have an understanding of that thing that you're voting on, you really shouldn't vote on it.
It's like, you know, it's like you can't If you don't have an educated perspective on it, then this is crazy.
Just allowing people to just guess whether or not it'd be good to bring back wolves.
And of course these pro-animal rights groups that want these animals, and look, they love these fucking animals, and I get it, and it's not that they're bad people.
It's just they're also misguided because people who love these animals aren't hunting them.
They're not out there.
You're not entrenched in the day-to-day existence of what it means to be a wild animal.
What it means to be a predator and a prey, what it means to be an undulate, what it means to be a cat.
If you've never locked eyes to eyes with a mountain lion in the wild, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
There's all these like...
Weird things that you're picking up off of Instagram videos.
Like, you know how a deer or an elk, if you just go with your knife and you just get through the hide, like circle the joint, you know, maybe you nick the tendons a little bit.
You know, most guys, if they hit it right, they can just snap it, right?
No way with a lion, man.
No way.
Because the tendons and just the structure right here is just totally different.
Because I used to watch them, and I'm like, what are they doing?
And so what I realized is that they're trying to hook.
Like, they want to reach out and hook the dog with that and bring the dog to their mouth.
Because they want the dog in their mouth, you know?
That's how they get a hold of...
What I've noticed about them, just my observation, so I might be talking out of my ass a little bit, but it sure seems like if they can do it, They want to hold stuff with their mouth, and they're using their hands to bring it, you know, to bring it to their mouth.
And the fact that it's wearing a collar, and the fact that it's with the Hollywood sign in the background, so this thing is in the middle of An incredibly dense, heavily populated area.
I even saw already there's like a robocall company that's going to make it so that if you get a call from like a scammer, you hit a button on your phone, and I'm not even sure where you hit it, it instantly creates a thousand word lawsuit to go against them.
So it says, tarpon are rarely eaten because their flesh is filled with small, hard-to-clean bones.
In the United States, the tarpon usually is caught for sport and then released as a bony, strong-smelling saltwater fish and maybe more trouble than pleasure to eat.
Because there's so many, like for people that don't know, like say if a guy catches, like one of my neighbors is a big time bass fisherman and he just sent me, I'll pull it up for you because he's pretty hardcore and he just caught this, shout out to my friend Alan, he just caught this 13 pound bass.
That is a weird, like some people have trophy rooms in a house where their entire room is filled with these animals like a sheep that's on fake rocks looking around.
Dude, I'll admit, if I go somewhere and somebody has one of those, I like walking around it with them and they tell me all the stories about all the hunts.
Well, I think a lot of the topics we're talking about, Joe, it's just a reflection of this distance between the reality of being a human and the distance that we've put in between.
If you go behind any fancy steakhouse, like you go behind Gibson's in Chicago, one of these fancy steakhouses or somewhere in Manhattan, and if you went through the dumpster, you would find a bunch of half steaks.
You'd find three quarters of a steak, half a steak.
To me, it's crazy to think about that probably a lot of people that are eating in that restaurant, they're probably against hunting, but they're willing to take half a steak and throw it away.
But it's also, you know, my time spent there, Joe, it actually, Puerto Rico is an interesting place.
Like the whole like legal structure of the place is interesting.
But actually from like an outdoorsman perspective, it has like all this, to me at least, like all this untapped stuff.
But the problem is I'm like a...
I'm like from that one kid's cartoon where the dog sees a squirrel and is like, squirrel?
With outdoor stuff, I'm like that, man.
So I'm like, oh, tarponfish is dying!
And then spearfishing.
So I tend to get drawn every way.
But when I'm there, I'm like, dude, there's so many cool outdoor stuff to do there.
I mean, I have a home there, but we were only going to stay there a couple months.
We homeschooled our kids, and now we've been there for like six months.
Just kidding.
Anyways, back to the fishing part, man, I didn't mean to get sidetracked, is what's crazy with the catch and release thing, like my little boy, he cannot believe that we would release anything.
Do you feel like you get that from, do you feel like the feeling like when a bull comes in when you're archery hunting or you make a good archery shot on a bull elk, do you feel like you get a similar feeling than you do like a related feeling when you're fishing?
You get that little charge out of catching a fish.
But a bull elk is that times ten, times a hundred, times a thousand.
It's not even...
Derek Wolf said it best.
He was talking about sacking Tom Brady.
He's like, it's not even close.
He's like, sacking Tom Brady's fun.
Don't get me wrong.
But it's not even close to shooting a bull elk.
And I'm like, I'm so glad he said that.
Because that's how I feel about when people say...
They ask me, God, you do so many exciting things.
You do stand-up, you host the UFC, all these different things you've done in your life.
You used to fight.
What's the most exciting?
I'm like, bowhunting elk is about as heart-pounding and as exciting as possible.
When you're hiding behind a tree and you're at full draw and you see the tips of those antlers moving through the brush and you know he's about to make it into the opening, and you're like, Holy shit!
And you're at full draw, just sitting there, and then he comes in there, and then the arrow releases, and I use Illuminoc, or Nocturnal.
You see that green knock just sending it right through the golden triangle.
I interviewed, I believe his name is Jake, who runs it.
I interviewed him on Jay Scott's podcast, actually.
And, dude, it's amazing to hear the rundown of, like, the process of how they kill them.
Because they have like a...
I don't want to get into the depths of it because I'll butcher it, but if I recall, they essentially go in the field and they have a mobile USDA-approved system that they put it through.
It's pretty crazy, man.
I talk to them about...
Just, like, the marksmanship component they went into, because they have to kill them all by hitting them in the skullcap, even though they're wild deer, you know?
When you were guiding, was like archery hunting, was that like the most sketchy?
Like, hey man, let me see you shoot.
You know?
Because there's so many people, I think, that pick up their bow like two weeks before elk season and shoot it 20 yards a few times like, oh, we're good.
I don't want to just pick on archery in this respect.
I think it goes for all hunting.
I think if you're not exposed to, I guess, hunting slash death a lot, you don't realize how messy it can get.
You know what I mean?
And that goes for guns and archery equipment.
If I was being honest...
I would rather guide a guy with a gun.
Just because all the situations over...
I mean, I've guided a lot.
I had a lot of guides working for me, so it's a lot of numbers.
It's not like everyday occurrence.
But you get into those situations where something gets hurt, and I'm talking like, you know, you could be following stuff for days, you know, trying to get it killed, and, you know, once you're exposed to that enough, you become like, you just want everything to be right, you know what I mean?
And I've guided people who, you know, adults, you know, they seem like competent guys, and there's so much pressure around a shot opportunity, or at least they're manifesting it around them.
Like, you know, you've been in the mountains, you've been, you know...
You're on a backpack, you know, sheep hunt or something for six, seven days, and there's a bunch of money involved, a bunch of time involved, and then the guy gets a shot opportunity, and there's so much pressure, and there's like, at that moment, and then boom, the gun goes off, and the first question I always ask, because it tells me a whole lot about, you know, what probably happened, I always ask a hunter, how did it feel?
You know, that's my first question to a hunter after he shoots, because that'll tell me a lot about, you know, what's going on.
And I can, several times I've had a guy go, I wish I wouldn't have shot.
Because my deal is like, and this is a very basic way to look at it, and I'm sure Joel would have a more sophisticated way for people to have time to go through the process.
But I always tell guys with rifle hunting, the primary thing you have to do is you have to get a good rest in the mouth.
Yeah, and that's what I, like, in the discussion I have, is like, look, first thing we're gonna do is gonna get a good rest, and then if you cannot keep the crosshairs within a defined vital area that we're talking about, you tell me, and we're gonna move your rest, get you a better rest, adjust your rest, maybe go from your pack back to your bipod, something like that, or we're gonna get closer.
But please do not shoot.
And a lot of, some of that's practical, you know what I mean?
Right, but it's also, I don't want one to get hurt and it to go, you know, it to become, you know, a negative experience for everybody, you know, the animal.
But the thing is, you know, Joe, mountain goats, where the sheep stop, mountain goats start.
You know what I mean?
Dude, I cannot tell you how many times I've sat on goats and been like, there's no way we're going to kill them there because there's no way we'll get them.
You know what I mean?
And then, I was actually talking to one of my guides about a week ago about it, and he's like, Cliff, you know, there's like There's three times that I felt like there was a chance of me dying in my lifetime, and two of them when I was guiding mountain goats for you.
Dude, it's just, they live in the steepest shit you can imagine, man.
And in terms of hunting opportunity, you know, because they have so much over-the-counter stuff, which is starting to change a little bit, it's way more than other states.
Back to what we were talking about on that, man, because I don't think I did a great job of explaining myself with the Yellowstone deal.
In that video, what I was getting at, Joe, is that people don't realize that when Yellowstone originally had a problem with the elk, they were sending all these elk out as transplants.
So that was a way to actually control the population in Yellowstone.
And then the rangers in the 60s, they were actually shooting them too.
You know, they were shooting them to suppress the population.
And they actually, what happened in the early 60s, they had like massive controversy on the park.
And this is all documented.
I'm a nerd, so I've read the history of it.
But they wanted to have a hunt on the park.
To do exactly what this video claims the wolves did in the 90s, there was a lot of discussion in the 60s of having a draw or whatever and getting a bunch of hunters on the park to solve the range issue.
Because see, what happened was they quit transplanting the elk off of it because they didn't need to.
Nobody wanted the elk.
So the elk started to do some damage to the range there.
So one of the proposals was to have a hunt in Yellowstone, you know, maybe just a temporary one or whatever, to dissipate the elk.
And one of the main reasons it didn't happen is that the park officials, and then I know there's some push from Washington, is they didn't want the elk to not be habituated to people.
In the 60s, it's documented that one of the reasons they didn't have hunters in there is they wanted the elk to be comfortable with people.
So to me, and people listening may not find this interesting, but to me, it's like a total bastardization of history, right?
It's like, look, you're saying that the wolves did what they did in Yellowstone.
And yeah, they did help because there was way too many wolves or way too many elk, particularly in those valleys and stuff, and they were hurting their range.
But saying that it was attempted to do it with human intervention and it failed is a total lie, man.
Well, also, there's a lot of value in taking those elk from there and, like, moving them to Kentucky and Pennsylvania and all those places where they've repopulated elk.
Because elk used to be in basically every state, right?
That, oh, because Joe Rogan, there's a picture of him with a dead elk, that somehow that's different than somebody who indirectly still just lives their life and consumes, right?
When I did the UFC last weekend, when Jon Jones fought, Daniel Cormier, who's the commentator next to me, and he's a good friend of mine, I always would bring him snacks.
There's this company called...
Carnivore snacks, and they make these delicious snacks.
So I'll bring him beef jerky, and this time I brought him deer sausage.
And he's like, man, I can't eat deer, because I ate bad deer once, and I eat deer, I get sick, and I go, just try a little piece of the summer sausage, just try.
He said, oh shit, this is good.
So he started talking about it on the air.
He's like, Joe's got me eating deer sausage.
So in the middle of one of the fights, he's talking about me feeding him deer sausage.
From individuals that started hunting that are older than 25 and didn't have a father that hunted or a family that hunted, you're responsible for way more than 1% of them, man.
I mean, the New Zealanders got some great opportunities, too.
It's just a little bit different.
But here, it's like, I mean, it's, like you said, like, you know, it's probably the most economical hunting situation I think there is in the world if you're an American.
When I got into hunting them, Joe, when you know dogs have one treed or in a cave or something like that, and you're making your way up there, it'll make your heart blow out of your...
The thing that's interesting to me is also the pushback on the dogs, and I get that.
I really do get that, especially as someone who loves dogs, because sometimes the dogs die.
Yeah.
But the fairness aspect of it, which is interesting, and that's where I think education is very important and people understanding, especially from someone who's being honest and objective about it.
Like, I could absolutely understand why someone would say it is not fair to hunt mountain lions with dogs.
But I will tell you, That if you want to shoot a mountain lion, you're not going to unless you use dogs.
It's one of the best situations in terms of the way it's managed.
It's really beautiful.
If you have a state like California that doesn't allow mountain lion hunting, you go, oh, well, that's good.
We need to preserve the mountain lion population.
Incorrect.
They kill the same amount of mountain lions.
They kill them, though, with mercenaries.
So they bring in some guy who's a mountain lion hunter, and he uses dogs, and he finds these mountain lions that are troubled mountain lions, and they wind up killing the same number of them.
But now the state pays.
This guy to go do it, instead of you paying the state.
So instead of the Pittman-Robertson Act applying where all this money now, where all these people apply for tags, all these people get tags, they go mountain lion hunting, and all that goes towards conservation.
I mean, I have pictures from outfitting from cameras and stuff like that where you'd see these female lions with two kittens, and if I showed them to you, you're like, dude, that's not...
Those aren't baby lions.
It's like a pride of mountain lions because they keep them with them.
They keep their kittens with them for a couple years sometimes where they're big.
Well, and the thing is, I get what a lot of people are going to say about the wolves thing.
They're going to be like, well, Cliff, Joe, you guys are being dicks because really what you want is you just want more animals to hunt and you want to suppress the wolf population because of that.
And so, I was doing the math, like, your elk hunting in Colorado is basically, the success rate on most of the units is, you know, 10 to 15%.
It's fairly low.
It's tough hunting, you know, in these, in their, I call them over-the-counter units, and just so your listeners know, that just means you can go buy a tag.
Jamie, see if you can find that photo that I put up on Instagram when I was hunting with my friend Mike Hawkridge and Ben O'Brien up in B.C. Where these wolves...
We had found this moose calf right after these wolves had torn it to shreds.
And, you know, they have all these tactics and stuff.
I don't know how much of it's true or proven, but I've been with guys in British Columbia.
They say they use the roads.
The wolves use the roads to kill moose, you know?
Really?
Because, you know...
You get in areas in British Columbia that used to be real remote, and then they put in logging, and then logging, you know, there's a bunch of logging infrastructure.
And I don't know for sure if this is proven or true or whatever, but the guys say that the tracks are like this.
These wolves will get on the logging road, and the main pack will work the logging road because it's easier in the snow.
There's no downfall and stuff.
So they'll work the road and then they'll basically cycle a couple wolves off the road, you know, off into, you know, they'll go out into the trees and try to pick up, you know, moose or whatever out there.
And then, and then that wolf will get tired and he'll come back to the logging road and then another one will go out.
You know, like this is like, I get infatuated with these things.
So me and my little boy, like every morning at sunrise, like we're going to go catch bait to go fishing, you know?
So, what you realize is I get up at, I call them like my little glassing points, but they're literally like, I mean, my house is in a country club there, dude, so I'm like cruising down on my golf cart with my cast net.
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Like, I'm the only guy in the country club that does this kind of shit, you know?
But anyways, we go to my little glass spots where we can look, you know, down the marina, we can look on the ocean for birds or whatever working bait, but a lot of times how we find the bait is you can see the tarpon, like, kind of pushing them around.
Really?
Yeah, and then they'll get that bait over on the side somewhere where I can throw a net on it.
I thought that was an interesting moment in, you know, technological history.
Because, you know, when you got a guy who's as influential as Mark Zuckerberg and with a giant company like Facebook, they literally changed their name to Meta.
Yeah.
Pump these Oculus headsets out and this is the next level thing.
Mark came here and he gave us a demonstration of this stuff.
Man, dude, in the technology and hunting, in like, just the whole gear component of hunting has grown so much.
In a positive way, in a sense...
That, you know, gear to go out and do a backpack hunt or something like that in, you know, pretty rough conditions where it's cold at night and all that, it's so much easier now.
That's the most pressure, the most stress, but it's also the most relaxing.
Just being in the woods, no cell phone service, no nothing.
Just stalking and just hiking the mountains.
And also knowing that I have to be in amazing cardio shape.
When I'm working out in fucking February, I'm literally thinking while I'm working out in February, the more I push, the less tired I'm going to be in September.
Difficult things that are very rewarding and I don't think I don't think there's very many things that are as rewarding as hunting because you're actually getting food from it and actually feed family and friends and you feed yourself and it's so nutritious and so much better for you than any other kind of food that I think that it's it's one of the most rewarding difficult things and I think the more difficult things that a person does on purpose that are rewarding you know I'm not talking about like life struggle I'm talking like Choosing
to do things, whether it's workouts or tasks or problems you're trying to solve on purpose, those are very valuable to your overall resiliency as a person.
I'm sure I got some pictures on my phone, but it's pretty neat how they'll cover it up and it'll be tidy and they'll come back and they'll peel it back.
One of the things about Texas, there's a lot of opportunities for invasive pigs.
And my friend Jesse Griffiths, who is the head chef and owner of Dai Due Restaurant in Texas, he has an organization that trains people, teaches people how to hunt, takes them out hunting, shows them how to hunt, how to butcher the pig.
What is it called?
New school of traditional cookery.
Yeah, this is...
Jesse's the best.
And Jesse is an amazing chef.
If you're ever in Austin, Dai Due restaurant is the fucking shit.