Episodes
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We're spending Thanksgiving week with our families and bringing you one of our favorite podcast episodes from the archives: Ron Mills, an outfitter, hunting guide and packer in the Bob Marshall Wilderness since 1959! Ron has authored a new book called Under the Biggest Sky of All, 75 Years on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, a raucous and astoundingly funny account of his adventures as a guide, horseman and packer, farrier and ranch hand in some of the wildest country left on the planet. (Hal wrote the forward to the book, as seen in the spring 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal.) Ron and Hal discuss the book, life in the saddle and in 20 different camps across the Bob, and what it is like to work with a man who turns out to be a coldblooded American serial killer.
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Almost ten years ago, career firefighter and paramedic Beau Beasley embarked on a journey to tell the true stories of America’s veterans, honestly and in their own words. He was a respected outdoor writer and flyfishing guidebook author, and was deeply affected by the friendships he’d made through his involvement with Project Healing Waters, an organization that connects veterans with fishing and other outdoor opportunities.
“I had no idea what I was doing when I took this on,” Beau says. “I only knew I had to do it.”
Beau’s book “Healing Waters” holds the stories of 32 American military veterans who, through flyfishing, rod building, flytying, and being part of a vibrant outdoor community, “came across from the dark side of the river to the light.”
By turns harrowing, tragic, and joyful, these stories cut to the bone, portraits of the price that some of us are willing to pay for this mighty experiment in freedom and responsibility that is the United Sates of America. Join us, and please, if you are a veteran, or know a veteran, who could benefit from this book or this connection to Project Healing Waters or BHA's Armed Forces Initiative, listen and pass it on.
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THE VOICE FOR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS, & WILDLIFE.
www.backcountryhunters.org
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Missing episodes?
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Episode 191 with Jared Sullivan, former editor of Field and Stream and Men’s Journal, on his new book, Valley So Low, about the 2008 coal ash disaster near Kingston, Tennessee, its catastrophic aftermath on the health of those who cleaned it up, and holding our federal agencies accountable.
In 2019, Tennessee native and former Field and Stream editor Jared Sullivan reported on the aftermath of massive coal ash spill from the TVA’s Kingston Fossil Plant. That spill- at 1.1 billion gallons, the largest coal ash spill so far in history - flooded homes, obliterated a portion of the Emory River and sent poisons into the main Clinch River. It never should have happened- the coal ash pit was unlined, its dam was absurdly weak, the toxic ash should never have been stored there in the first place. But the real tragedy went far beyond the ruin of the rivers and lands.
The writing of the story introduced Jared to the many hardworking Tennesseans who worked in the multi-year effort to clean up the spill, and who were poisoned by the mercury, radium, arsenic and other heavy metals and chemicals present on the jobsite.
Jared’s new book Valley So Low is a legal thriller about a David vs. Goliath fight for justice, about federal agencies, lies, and lack of accountability, and the true human cost of treating our world like a dumping ground.
Any opinions expressed within this podcast do not necessarily represent those of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers.
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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.
Follow us:
Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org
Instagram: @backcountryhunters
Facebook: @backcountryhunters
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Blaring headlines: “Battle lines hardening in dispute over Mobile ship channel deepening project”
“No more federal mud dumping' — Standing room only at Baykeeper town hall”
A newly deepened and widened shipping channel created by the US Army Corps of Engineers makes Mobile, Alabama, the second fastest growing port in the US – the amount of cargo handled this year more than doubled from previous years.
Some of the world’s healthiest commercial and recreational fisheries, vibrant towns, waterfront properties that date back centuries, all because of the health of one of the most beautiful and historically and ecologically-important bays in the world.
90 million cubic yards of mud, dredged and disposed of over the next 20 years. Already the impacts on seagrass and reefs and fisheries are severe.
Join us to find out what’s going on, from the locals with everything at stake: William Strickland, Mobile Baykeeper, and fishing guides Capt. Patric Garmeson, and Capt. Richard Rutland.
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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.
Follow us:
Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org
Instagram: @backcountryhunters
Facebook: @backcountryhunters
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Utah files landmark lawsuit challenging federal control over most BLM land
Yes, it is to retch over. Once again, the Utah legislature is coming for America’s public lands, this time by way of a lawsuit filed against the US government to lay claim to 18.5 million acres of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
Utah has a new website called “Stand for Our Land” designed to support the lawsuit – it’s a slick campaign, maybe the slickest yet- and chock-full of the half-truths and outright falsehoods long devised and parroted by the generations of would-be landgrabbers before them.
Some say this is just more performance politics, another ploy to lock-in votes from a mouth-frothing base that demands raw meat, however illusory, to stay motivated.
It is not. Utah is a complicated place, and the motivations and legal mechanics of this lawsuit need to be understood by every American who loves our public lands and our freedom to experience them, and who believes that freedom should be safeguarded for the future. Know what is happening. Join Utah BHA leaders Caitlyn Curry and Perry Hall, and BHA CEO Patrick Berry, for the inside look at what is happening, what is at stake, and exactly what is coming down this road.
“Once more into the breach!” as Henry the Fifth commended his valiant soldiers, and so must we, defenders of public lands and our American birthright, go, yet again, and as many times as it take.
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www.backcountryhunters.org
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From ballot initiatives that mandate wolf-reintroduction or banning the hunting of mountain lions and bobcats, wildlife management decisions are increasingly being made by voters instead of biologists.
It is called “ballot biology” and it is a result of some highly motivated anti-hunting and animal rights groups reaching out to a ballooning demographic of non-hunting, often urban, voters who may be well-intentioned (“protect mountain lions and bobcats from being slaughtered!”) but who don’t know how wildlife is managed, how it was restored from near-extinction, or who pays for habitat and biologists and all the moving parts of the world’s most successful wildlife model. Only about 6 out of every 100 Colorado residents buys a hunting license- if it becomes a contest of us against them, a hot culture war decided by votes, we will lose. The wildlife will lose with us.
There is trouble ahead, and a new and formidable challenge for all of us who love hunting and wildlife. Join us for an interview with Gaspar Perricone, who is on the frontlines of this battle in Colorado, and has a plan to win it.
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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.
Follow us:
Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org
Instagram: @backcountryhunters
Facebook: @backcountryhunters
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Join Hal and Florida archeologist Jeffrey Shanks for a lost tale of British Marines and Jamaican privateers, American maroons, Creek Indian warriors, rogue Choctaws, religious prophets, and the bloody and tenacious struggle for freedom.
The Apalachicola National Forest in Florida’s Panhandle holds some of the most remote swampland wilderness in the US, forbidding blackwater mazes of cypress and black gum and tupelo, whining with biting and stinging insects, the natural home of alligator and cottonmouth, redbreast bream and bass. It also holds some of the most fascinating and complex history in America.
On the far western edge of north Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest, there is a place called Prospect Bluff, a slight rise in the land that overlooks a channel of the mighty Apalachicola River itself. It’s the site of Fort Gadsden, a modest construction that played a small role during the First Seminole War, and then was abandoned during the American Civil War.
In 2018, Hurricane Micheal, a Category Five storm, wreaked havoc on the Panhandle and on the Apalachicola National Forest. On Prospect Bluff, massive oak trees, three hundred years old and more, were uprooted. Forest Service and National Park Service archeologists surveying the damage to the site found curious artifacts in the excavations left by the roots of the toppled trees. At some point, lots of human beings had lived here, and they had built a powerful fortification. They had farmed and traded and been well-prepared for war, which did indeed come to them. The story that came to light is one of the most complicated and fascinating episodes in American history, with echoes and ripples out as far as the Bahamas, Trinidad, Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia, where the descendants of the men and women who fought and died at Prospect Bluff are living right now.
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Woniya Dawn Thibeault, winner of Alone: Frozen, author of Never Alone: A Solo Arctic Survival Journey
In 2019, primitive skills instructor and master hide-tanner Woniya Dawn Thibeault was selected for the Alone Season Six challenge. She and nine other contestants were dropped off along the East Arm of the Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, in late fall, with the arctic winter closing in. It was a grim and unforgiving landscape unlike anything she’d ever encountered or even imagined. Her life there became a slow-moving race with starvation and brutal cold, fishing, eating grubs and running snares, perfecting her shelter and learning, learning, to listen to the earth for whatever it might offer her. Thibeault survived 73 days, becoming the second-to-last contestant, drawing on every reserve of tenacity and skill to meet the challenges of each day. Gaunt, near physical collapse and fifty pounds lighter, she tapped out and returned home to California. Her convalescence took months, and she re-entered her life an entirely changed person.
And then she did it again.
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Enter the MeatEater Experience Sweepstakes: https://go.bhafundraising.org/meateatersweeps24/Campaign/Details
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The Wilderness Act was passed by Congress in 1964, and has protected over 109 million acres of American public lands (53% of them in Alaska) since then. But the idea was born in 1924, with the vision of none other than Aldo Leopold, who was then the Supervisor of the Carson National Forest, and had spent almost fifteen years working on and exploring the wild public lands of New Mexico. Leopold argued that among the resources the Forest Service was mandated to safeguard for the American people were open spaces for hunting, fishing and real adventure. He argued, eloquently, that these values existed in abundance on the unpeopled lands of the Gila National Forest, that they were becoming more and more rare across America, and that the US Forest Service could choose to protect them for future generations.
This year, we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Gila Wilderness. The Gila was America’s first public lands’ wilderness, and the ideas and arguments that created it provided the template for all that we understand as federally designated wilderness today. How did this come to be? Join us- Hal, Karl Malcolm, US Forest Service ecologist, hunter and wanderer of the Gila, and Curt Meine, conservation biologist and author of Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, and Senior Fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation.
A wilderness area, Leopold wrote, was “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks' pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”
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Enter the MeatEater Experience Sweepstakes: https://go.bhafundraising.org/meateatersweeps24/Campaign/Details
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The bitter tide of privatizing public lands and waters is rising fast across America. Only the actions of quietly heroic citizens can stop it.
Nobody who hunted and fished the Cutoff wanted to tell the world about it. The Cutoff is also known as Creslenn Lake, a twelve-mile stretch of what used to be the Trinity River (it was “cut off” by a long-ago flood control project) between Navarro and Henderson Counties about an hour and half south of Dallas, Texas. The Cutoff has been a locals’ top destination for crappie fishing, duck hunting, jug lining and just enjoying this wild corner of Texas, through multiple generations (check out the Save the Cutoff Facebook page for the comments). Nobody dreamed that one day, a local landowner would simply declare the miles of public water his own fiefdom, hiring guards, closing roads, building illegal fences and excavating -- also illegally -- thousands of yards of dirt to block any hope of access. This is a David versus Goliath story, a battle fought on behalf of us all, by a very small band of hardworking rural Texans who simply will not lay down and take it.
Learn more:
https://www.backcountryhunters.org/local_outdoorsmen_rally_to_save_the_cutoff
https://www.facebook.com/p/Save-the-cut-off-100078227846990/
https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/east-texas-cutoff-trinity-river-land-dispute/
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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.
Follow us:
Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org
Instagram: @backcountryhunters
Facebook: @backcountryhunters
TikTok: @backcountryhunters
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Tony Jones, host of the Reverend Hunter podcast, and author of The God of Wild Places: Rediscovering the Divine in the Untamed Outdoors and eleven other books, outdoor writer, hunting mentor, guide in the Boundary Waters, father of three, hunter, fisherman, seeker.
When Tony Jones was growing up, all he ever wanted was to know and preach the Gospel, and to one day have his own church and congregation. He accomplished that goal, beyond his wildest dreams. He was a star in the pulpit, and as a scholar, with degrees from Dartmouth, from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. from Princeton’s Theological Seminary. He wrote influential books (including The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life) and lived an orderly life of service, study, scholarship and meditation, in a quiet home with his wife and children. But life is not orderly. As Tony writes in his blistering and thought-provoking journey The God of Wild Places, we are nature, and nature is unruly, unpredictable and beautiful in its ruthlessness. Join us, for an interview and a conversation about losing faith, and finding it again, in the whirlwind of the natural world.
More about Tony: https://reverendhunter.com/
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Michigander Mark Kenyon is the host of the Meateater podcast Wired to Hunt, and the author of the definitive book on the American public lands, That Wild Country. Mark is at work on another book about the future of American conservation, and the hunting and fishing that do not exist without it. He’s also hunting and fishing and gardening, raising outdoor kids with his wife, and establishing himself as one of our country’s leading voices in conservation, public lands and the outdoors. Mark has a concrete plan to put conservation back in the foundation of hunting and fishing, and he outlines it right here- don’t miss this conversation.
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A conversation with Jonathon Gassett, Ph.D., former Commissioner of Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, Southeastern Representative of the Wildlife Management Institute, National Conservation Leadership Institute and Patrick Berry, former Director of Vermont fish and Wildlife Department and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers
“Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.” Why does the US and Canada have a tradition of public hunting and wildlife conservation based on the public ownership of wildlife? Why don’t we hunt elk in fenced enclosures in Wyoming, as many hunt whitetails in Texas? Why are we not like Scotland, where hunters pay to stalk red deer on huge private estates? How about South Africa, where almost all “hunting preserves” are high fenced? Why do we have what we have? Why is it imperiled from all sides right now?
Political attacks on Pittman-Robertson Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration funds from the right, ballot initiatives to ban mountain lion hunting and take away the authority of wildlife biologists from the left. The wholesale dismantling of state fish and game agencies by both left and right. Scorn for the public trust. Hunting and the conservation upon which it is based is under massive fire from all sides, and from a growing apathy and indifference of masses of Americans who don’t have access to it, and so don’t understand or care about the careful stewardship of wildlife and fisheries that created a miracle of restoration almost 100 years ago. Today’s podcast episode is a conversation with experts at a time of crisis.
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20 Years of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers with Ben Long and Patrick Berry
Ben Long is a founding board member of BHA, the author of the Hunter and Angler’s Guide to Raising Hell, and a lifelong hunter-conservationist of the old breed. Ben came to Rendezvous this year to meet with new BHA CEO Patrick Berry of Vermont and help chart a course for the future of the most dynamic hunter and angler conservation organization in history. Join us as Hal, Patrick and Ben look back at the origins of BHA, the people, the fire, and the issues, and revel in the memories of where we’ve been and celebrate where we’re headed.
Recorded live at the BHA Rendezvous in Minneapolis.
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Alabama’s iconic Coosa River was recently named America’s fifth most endangered river. It’s vast watershed, all 280 miles of tributaries and lakes, begins in the mountains of north Georgia and flows south through the very heart of Alabama. The Coosa, like so many American rivers today, faces intense pollution from industrial-scale poultry production and other agricultural runoff, as well as an array of other threats. The Coosa is also one of Alabama’s most popular rivers for fishing, powerboating, kayaking and swimming. To clean it up, and keep it that way in the face of everchanging and growing challenges, the river needs tireless defenders who can be out on the water, day after day, mile after mile, in every season. Join us today to meet one of them, award-winning Coosa Riverkeeper Justinn Overton, born and raised on the rivers of Alabama, an outdoorswoman, hunter, forager, and a fierce advocate for the waters of her home.
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Tom Reed, of Harrison, Montana, is a founding board member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and a true son of the Western plains and Rocky Mountain wilderness. Born in Colorado, Tom worked as a horse and mule packer and a small-town reporter in Wyoming, edited a bass fishing magazine in Arizona, spent years with Wyoming Fish and Game as writer and editor. Throughout his life, he’s pursued the foundational passions that drove him as a youngster- horses, hunting and fishing, wilderness, dogs, good guns, family. And he’s written beautifully about it all, in books like Great Wyoming Bear Stories, Blue Lines, and Give Me Mountains for My Horses, and in hundreds of columns and stories for Trout magazine, Wyoming Wildlife, Mouthful of Feathers and many other publications. Join us in a conversation with one of the American West’s most powerful voices for conservation and public lands, recorded in Tom’s writing cabin on the backside of the Tobacco Root Mountains.
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In April of 2022, Libby Tobey, Hailey Thompson and Brooke Hess skied into Marsh Creek in Idaho’s Sawtooth Range, towing their kayaks and a sled full of camping gear. The goal: trace the route of anadromous fish from the source of the Salmon River to the Pacific Ocean and advocate removing the four dams on the Lower Snake River that block that migration and are killing that river system.
78 days and 1000 miles away down the tiniest tributaries to the massive whitewater of the main rivers, through soul-killing paddling slogs in dead impoundments, portages amid highways and traffic, wind and sun, joy and tribulation, they found themselves on a spit of sand and mud at the mouth of the Columbia, drinking champagne amid wind-driven waves of salt water. Hal caught up with Libby Tobey in Idaho and with Hailey Thompson in Alaska for an account of the adventure, and a discussion of what is at stake in the debate over the fate of the lower Snake River dams.
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Representative Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and Representative Gabe Vasquez (D-NM) are co-sponsoring The ‘Public Lands in Public Hands Act” which would ban the sale or transfer of most public lands managed by the Department of the Interior or the Department of Agriculture (which includes the vast majority of federal public lands – Bureau of Land Management is under Interior and the National Forests are under Agriculture).
The bill also requires Congressional approval for disposals of publicly accessible federal land tracts over 300 acres and for public land tracts over five acres if accessible via a public waterway.
Are we witnessing the beginning of a bipartisan consensus on the value of our federal public lands? What motivated these two Western Congressmen to draft and sponsor this bill? Does it have a chance to become law? Join us for the answers to these questions and a lot more.
Read the bill here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/12Z21FJ6XLZwyma9qaDajehFH1luY2xxa/view
Read the press release from New Mexico Representative Gabe Vasquez: https://vasquez.house.gov/media/press-releases/vasquez-introduces-bipartisan-public-lands-public-hands-act
Read the press release from Montana Rep. Zinke: https://zinke.house.gov/media/press-releases/zinke-introduces-bipartisan-public-lands-public-hands-act
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Jim Heffelfinger, Arizona Game and Fish Wildlife Science Co-ordinator, Chairman of the Mule Deer Working Group, wildlife conservation professional, author of Deer of the Southwest.
Coming at you live from the 2024 Mule Deer Expo in Salt Lake City, Hal catches up with one of America’s rockstars of wildlife conservation and research, Arizona’s Jim Heffelfinger. The conversation roams and wanders, from mule deer and blacktails, habitat and CWD, to Mexican wolves and hunting javelina, with a side trip into the mystique and glory of the Colt 1911. If you have half as much fun listening to it as Jim and Hal had recording it, this episode will rank among the best ever.
Also, this episode celebrates the publication of the comprehensive textbook, Ecology and Management of Blacktailed and Mule Deer of North America, which Jim co-edited. Hal and Jim forgot to talk about the book, but it is a crucial resource for anyone interested in the current state and likely future of our mule deer and blacktails.
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Journalist Jimmy Tobias started out working on backcountry trails for the US Forest Service and Montana Conservation Corps. Since then, he has become one of America’s hardest-hitting investigative reporters specializing in public lands, conservation, and the outdoors. Tobias’ story about the link between ecosystem disruption and tick-borne illnesses, “How Lyme Disease Became Unstoppable,” was published in June 2022 in The Nation. That story was the original inspiration for this interview, but Hal and Jimmy range far afield, from ticks to endangered species protection and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which promises to dismantle federal public lands and their management once and for all. Join us.
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