Episode 7 - Epic Hunts and Wild Stories with Filmmaker Donnie Vincent

Summary

Legends of the Wild, A Field & Stream Production

Episode 7: Epic Hunts and Wild Stories with Filmmaker Donnie Vincent
Host: Sam Soholt
Guest: Donnie Vincent
Release Date: September 10, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Sam Soholt welcomes renowned outdoorsman, biologist, and filmmaker Donnie Vincent for a deep dive into the heart of wild hunting adventures, the art of storytelling in outdoor film, and the transformative effect of immersive time spent in the wild. Donnie recounts formative research trips, close calls in unforgiving landscapes, the slow craft of his films, and why hardship in the outdoors makes life richer. Listeners are treated to vivid stories, philosophical takes on hunting’s meaning, and thoughtful reflections on the evolution of outdoor media.

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Main Themes

• How deep time in wild places shapes a hunter and storyteller
• The collaborative, intentional approach behind Donnie’s acclaimed films
• Transformative power of outdoor hardship and extended backcountry trips
• The balance of sorrow and euphoria in the hunt
• The beauty (and risk) of pushing physical and mental limits in wild places
• Slow, meaningful content as antidote to the “junk food” of viral videos

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Donnie Vincent’s Unusual Path: From Biologist to Outdoor Filmmaker

[03:44] Donnie Vincent describes how a love of wildlife led him into biology and field research, never expecting it to turn into a career in hunting and filmmaking.

• Initial filming was just to share stories with family (“maybe I'll just take a Handycam…”).
• Breaks in the industry came via networking and helping fill TV show episodes.
• Meeting cinematographers Kyle Nicolai & William Altman sparked the long-form, high-quality approach now synonymous with Donnie’s team.
• Importance of collaboration: “I realized I couldn't tell the stories in the way that I saw them in my mind… without very talented individuals around you.” [06:13]

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The Power of Teamwork and Detail in Film

• Donnie’s team includes a dedicated composer/sound designer: “Casey Olson...scores all of our music and does our sound design custom, which is amazing.” [07:57]
• Importance of pursuing the exact shot, regardless of the hunt—a ptarmigan sequence required crawling through biblical mosquitoes for a unique moment, all for the artistry.

“We make things for what that piece is. We kind of want to give it a life of its own...Because if I built it for you or built it for someone else, then we would constantly be changing our direction, much like fashion.”
—Donnie Vincent [Taylor-made for his philosophy at [68:16]]

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Formative Field Biology & Wild Research

Tiger Research in Nepal & Bangladesh

[11:00–18:00] Donnie shares stories from field studies under famed ecologist Dave Smith:

• Capturing and collaring raccoons set the stage for rare opportunities abroad.
• Working by boat in the Sunderbans—navigating tiger, crocodile, pirate-infested mangroves:

  "It was really...one of the scariest places I've ever been in my life." [14:32]

• Elephant-based research in Nepal; culture shock and life lessons from life abroad.

Grouse Study and Alaska Genetics Camps

[18:34–24:26]

• Nighttime wildlife surveys include 15-kilometer, pitch-black hikes with bear encounters ("Run into an oil painting...").
• Five-and-a-half months in a remote Alaska tent fostered an appreciation for deep immersion, slow time, and the coming to life of a wild system.

“Laying there in bed staring up at the ceiling. My family's back home, my friends are back home, but then it transitioned from the quiet to I belong here and I'm home."
—Donnie Vincent, on his remote Alaska assignment [24:11]

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The Transformative Power of Time in the Wild

Donnie and Sam discuss how extended wilderness trips—and even hardship—reset the mind and fulfill a deep human need.

• The longer the hunt, the more alive Donnie feels (“Whenever I've done a 5-day, 7-day, even a 10-day hunt, I feel rushed...So I try to go for as long as possible now.” [24:26])
• Success is no longer tag-focused, but experience-focused (“the tag used to burn a hole in my pocket...Now, I passed a 63, 64-inch bull on the second to last day because I didn't like the scenario.” [27:44])
• The hunt becomes about immersion, chores, finding oneself in the rhythm of nature.

“Chasing the experience, not the end goal, just makes for a better...I am stronger than I know I am. And that's a powerful thing.”
—Sam Soholt [39:57]

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Euphoria, Sorrow, and Forest Immersion

[31:13–36:54]

• The emotional complexity of a successful hunt—euphoria of skill, sorrow for the animal, pride and physical fatigue of the pack-out.
• Research shows time in wild forests measurably changes physiology and mood (“lowers your blood pressure, increases your testosterone, increases your cognitive ability in your brain” [34:10]).
• Even fishing in the morning brings dopamine hits and resets the soul.

"Feeling that on the end of your line is...validation that food is on the end of your line...That's where it comes from."
—Donnie Vincent [35:12]

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Facing Danger and Close Calls in the Wild

[40:00–49:50]
Donnie recounts three life-threatening moments:

1. Bering Sea—Winds of Adak:
   • Passing through walls of water, risk of rolling the boat, and a captain who warns, “If we roll, you’re gonna let go...we're gonna lose you.” [41:24]
2. Chugach Mountains Dall Sheep Hunt:
   • One-handed cliff traverses with snow/ice, a thousand-foot drop below, and the strange calm after surviving.
3. Toque Sheep Film:
   • Climbing down a cliff, a massive rock breaks loose while Donnie clings by abs and fingertips, just inches from disaster.

“All the time, it’s weather, water, heights. People always want to talk about bears, but it’s always weather…” [49:47]

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The Value of Hardship

[54:00–55:54]

• Doing hard things makes returning to “normal” life richer and more meaningful.
• Sam notes it improves him as a man, husband, and father ("when I’m having conversations...I have a way longer fuse").
• Donnie adds: “The more you challenge yourself, the more alive you’re going to feel.”

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Reflections on Storytelling, Patience, and the Outdoor Media Landscape

[62:03–79:27]

• Donnie’s films often take 3, 7, even 14 years to bring to completion, in contrast to viral short-form content:

  “Short form content feels like digital junk food...but you won’t remember it.” —Sam Soholt [63:21]

• The Rivers Divide took 2 years to film, 1 year to edit; the bear film took 7 years of footage and another year to edit.

• Donnie’s patience is both necessity and intentionalism. They save stories until they feel complete, not rushing for the algorithm.

  • “We make things for what that piece is...We stay true to ourselves.” [68:16]
  • They now want these films to be free and available on YouTube, rather than locked behind paywalls.

Upcoming Work: The 'Fantastic Places' Series

• Retelling old adventures—"True Detective"-style—with contemporary narration over archival footage.
• Upcoming cadence: 2-3 “Fantastic Places” per year plus longform new work.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On risk in the wild:
  "It’s over in a whistle. It’s literally a blink of the eye." —Donnie Vincent, rockfall stories [53:41]

• On wild immersion:
  "We just take things one day at a time and...I just want to live a soulful life. I want everyone else to live a soulful life." —Donnie Vincent [80:25]

• On storytelling:
  "If I built it for you or built it for someone else, then we would constantly be changing our direction, much like fashion." [68:16]

• On accepting hardship:
  "Mother Nature is in control. Don't even...just have a good time. You're not in control. Mother Nature’s in control." —Will Primos, shared by Donnie Vincent [60:25]

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Memorable, Light-Hearted Moments

• Donnie discovering he lost his toenails after a mega-hike; “My toenails are all black... the article I'm reading says that you're a badass.” [76:09]
• The field biologist’s “beach party” funded by returning radio collars. [12:29]
• Donnie admitting he didn’t know they had a YouTube channel until they had ~50,000 subscribers. [79:43]

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Important Timestamps

• [03:44] — Donnie’s bio, origins, and first steps into media.
• [11:00]–[18:34] — Stories from tiger, raccoon, and grouse research.
• [22:43] — Extended time in a remote Alaska tent; the importance of immersion.
• [24:26] — The impact of slower, longer solo trips on perspective.
• [31:13]–[36:54] — Euphoria, sorrow, and the science of forest immersion.
• [39:57]–[49:50] — Three close calls with death: sea, mountain, and stone.
• [54:00]–[55:54] — Why adversity in the wild improves life back home.
• [62:03]–[68:16] — Outdoor media: the case for slow, high-value storytelling.
• [73:05]–[77:36] — The making of “Toque” and the “Fantastic Places” series.

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Where to Find Donnie’s Films

• YouTube: Donnie Vincent — For access to free films, both new and archival stories (“Fantastic Places”).

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Closing Thought

This episode captures the heart of hunting and storytelling: a call to seek difficult, soulful experience, to stay humble in the face of wild nature, and to pursue your own story—at your own pace.

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“I just want to live a soulful life. I want everyone else to live a soulful life. We're so very fortunate to live in this country and have friends like you...Like, when you asked me to do this podcast, I was blown away, quite honestly.”
—Donnie Vincent [80:26]

Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

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[Donnie Vincent]

Welcome to Phony Murders in the Building, the official podcast. Join me, Michael Ciro Creighton, as we go behind the scenes with some of.

[Podcast Announcer]

The amazing actors, writers and crew from season five.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

The audience should never stop suspecting anything. How can you not be funny crawling.

[Donnie Vincent]

Around on a coffin?

[Lee]

Yeah, that's true.

[Podcast Announcer]

Catch Only Murders in the Building official.

[Donnie Vincent]

Podcast now streaming wherever you get your.

[Podcast Announcer]

Podcasts and watch Only Murders in the.

[Donnie Vincent]

Building streaming on Hulu and Hulu on.

[Podcast Announcer]

Disney for bundle subscribers terms apply.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

This is Legends of the Wild, presented by Field and Stream. Let's get into it.

[Donnie Vincent]

By the way, Sam, that's the toe cram up there.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Oh, nice. I was wondering which one it was.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah, that's a rifle from the Yukon. That's the Tokram. This is a bow kill from British Columbia. And that's Tiburon.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

It's not a bad collection.

[Donnie Vincent]

No. You shot a bighorn? Nope, not yet. I. I booked one for 65,000. Oh, God. And then as I was driving away from booking it, I was like, what? This is what I said to myself, what are you doing? I. I can do three doll hunts, which I'd much rather do three doll sheep hunts than one big horn and get my right grand slam. So I called a guy, It's a good friend of mine canceled it. He hung up the phone with me and called another guy and sold it for 85. One second later. And then now, you know, my, my process, my brain was, I could do $3 for that price. And now it's. Yeah, now that hunts over 125. And now a dollar six.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Could have done.

[Donnie Vincent]

Could have.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Yeah, could have hedge. But you add that you would have had to, like, cancel it.

[Donnie Vincent]

Book three immediately.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And still the outfitters probably wouldn't have honored it because the, you know, because the. The demand would have been going on.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Right. I'm just going to double check, make sure I don't mess this up.

[Lee]

Yep.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Two and three. Okay. Yeah, we're good.

[Donnie Vincent]

Okay.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

We're good. We're rolling, man.

[Donnie Vincent]

Okay.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Donnie, Vincent. Welcome to the Legends of the Wild podcast.

[Donnie Vincent]

I mean, I can't even convey to you how honored I am to even be asked to do this, to be completely honest.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Well, you, you know, right before we started recording this, you had asked me why I wanted you to be on it. Yeah, and for a couple reasons. One, we're friends. We've, you know, spent time at camp together. So I know who you are as a person, like in the field, but then I've, I've been a giant consumer of your content over the years and we're going to get into all this. But the. I think one of the coolest things that you have done is in an industry where more and faster has basically equaled growth, you've been able to like, build out long form, meaningful content and release it at your own pace. And I think that's just different.

[Lee]

Yeah, Everyone.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So, yeah, for anybody listening that doesn't know who, who you are, why don't you give us like the, you know, three minute elevator pitch of like, where you come from, what you've been doing, and then we'll dive way further in.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

I mean, early on, educated as a biologist because I wanted to spend time outside. I want to be around wildlife. Obviously, no one, I don't think anyone grows up thinking that they're going to, you know, hunt and fish for a living, which isn't even really a job, as you and I both know, but wanted to get a biology degree, wanted to be around animals, wanted to contribute to science, wanted to contribute to conservation and preservation and make a difference. And I was hunting. I. It's all I ever thought about, it's all I ever read about. And, and so through hunting in Alaska, hunting all over the place, hunting as much as I could, I started meeting other hunters and I started meeting people with TV shows. And then I started, I started filming my hunts because I would come home from, let's just say, Alaska. I'd come home, I'd sit there and talk to my parents and we'd kind of have a story night. And I tell them, you know, I saw this grizzly bear and I was coming down this ridge and I tell them this big tale. And then next time I was like, well, maybe I'll just take a Handycam. And I looked at it as almost like a collection of images. I wasn't trying to make a movie, but I'd literally be like, oh, there's a grizzly bear. And I would just film and I, and, and I'd even narrate and say, dad, so look at this bear. He's walking, he's eating blueberries. And then people that I would bump into in the industry, they would say, you know, hey, can I have a TV show? We're short on an episode this year. Can I?

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

So then just one thing kind of led to another and started doing some work for Sitka and then just started doing some shoots where, you know, for different shotgun companies from Lechos and Daniel, a big shoot for John Hafner for a cover story for Peterson's Hunting. And one little micro fiber of the hunting industry led to another, led to another. And then I had no, no ambitions of working in this full time or launching, I don't launching anything about a film company. But meeting Kyle Nicolaite, meeting William Altman, seeing that they had the skill set to actually bring, bring this stuff together, me being on camera, me, me being the hunter, me being the physical storyteller. Kyle, who compliments no one over anything ever was like, you're a really good storyteller and if you stay sincere to yourself, I think we might have something that people would want to watch. And we made the Rivers Divine, which.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Is an awesome film by the way. But like, I think that's a big part of, of why your stuff always looks so different is simply the fact that you realized that you couldn't do it all yourself. No, you couldn't tell the stories in the way that you saw them in your mind or whether you saw them like while you're out in the wild without very talented individuals around you.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And that, I mean that's honestly the difference because like, you know, a lot of people get trapped in that. Oh, I'll just bring a camera, I'll just self film or you know, I'll hire a buddy or you know, they don't seek out individuals who could like really turn that creative crank.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yes.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Work together well.

[Donnie Vincent]

And like having William who can see composition, he is in love with wildlife as well. So he and I will crawl. You know, this one time we were in the Arctic Circle and it was absolutely downpouring. The mosquitoes were biblical and we were, we were on a grizzly bear hunt. We were crawling out over this tundra flat and we're hunting with the same guy that we used in to Lance Kromburger used to get so crabby at us. And he, you know, we did our job, which I'll tell you in a second, and we got back to him and he was like, what the heck were you two doing? And William's like, we're filming a ptarmigan. And he just shook his head. He's like, why? And then we showed him the footage and we had snuck up on this ptarmigan eating Labrador berries. And I mean, we're 20 yards from the thing. You can see the berries going down into his crop. And Lance was like, that's maybe the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. And so having William, who could find composition, loved wildlife, would follow me into the lion's den. I mean, even if I said, william, hey, we're going to swim with great white sharks today, he'd be like, okay, let's talk about that. But okay. And then, and then having Kyle Nicolai, who is Hollywood level filmmaker, he's the real. I tell the stories because these are the things I experience and I'm addicted to the details and laying it all out. Kyle's the one that he knows. Okay, we need to go from right to left. This edit needs to go from left to right. We need to brighten this up. The music needs to get louder. And then no one ever even really talks about this or I don't. We have a guy named Casey Olson on staff who's a full time musician who can play 10 different instruments and he scores all of our music and does our sound design custom, which is amazing.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

I mean, it's details that the viewer might not recognize by just watching it, but it's the things that are actually going to keep you engaged into the film. You've really set the bar when it comes to high end produced storytelling in the hunting space. Um, and Kyle, the funny thing is I didn't trying to think the first. I think the first time I met Kyle was on a hunt with you. The first time we met in person. Knew kind of knew who he was and that he worked with you and whatever. But he started talking about all the stuff that he had done in the past and I was like, oh, well, you know, basically most of the things that you produced and put out there was stuff that inspired me to like, oh, I really need to like, up my game when it comes to film and photography because the storylines he was putting together, I was like, oh, that's how you do it.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And you know, even as simply did one for. I think it was Sitka, it was a turkey. Like a turkey hunt.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Him and Dustin L. But it was. I don't think there was any talking in the whole storyline.

[Donnie Vincent]

I don't believe so. Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

But like you were on the hunt. Yeah, like, so it's. It's cool to see the team you.

[Donnie Vincent]

Have around and, and yeah. And they did that piece. It was either for Sitka or they did it for a school project. And then Dustin introduced it to Sitka or whatever. That's how we all kind of started getting. Because Sitka is the one. I was a Sitka athlete at the time. I think they came to me and said, we kind of are getting the sense that you're interested in film. Well, we have some guys over here that are doing some film stuff. Maybe you should talk to them. And I talked to those guys. It didn't work out with those guys, but through them I met William and Kyle and I decided to start my own company. And I honestly have no idea why, but we did. And that was in 2011. So.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So now here we are 14 years later.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Which is 2011 was the year I got into the industry as well. So we've kind of been paralleling through the Earth universe.

[Lee]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

But one thing we talked when we were hunting together. You told me a bunch of stories about when you were a biologist. And I want to, like, I want to go back before hunting stuff because I want to like. I think it's a side of you that people haven't heard a lot about.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Because you did some really cool research projects.

[Lee]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So I don't care if it's tigers.

[Lee]

Whatever.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Whatever you want to talk about. Like, I want to hear some of those stories.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah. So studied. I'll tell you really quick how the tiger study happened. The University of Minnesota does a co project every year with the University of Michigan in Michigan at Douglas Lake Research center in the. Is the northern part of the southern part of Michigan, the main body of Michigan.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And they radio collar raccoons and then the University of Michigan radio collars them and then they challenge the University of Minnesota students to eczema.

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[Donnie Vincent]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn [e-mail] Triangulate them, set up traps and trap these pandas. Or trash pandas. Yeah, in get the collars back. And however much, however many callers you get back, the company that literally makes the collars gives you a deposit. And so then our professors would, you know, we'd go and have a beach party with whatever money we sure. Yeah. So he tasked me and another guy with taking the first round. And I don't believe anyone had ever caught all three raccoons or four raccoons, whatever had been radio collared. And the professor's name was Dave Smith. He's maybe the number one ecologist in the world for tigers. And me and this other guy, Josh went and attempted if we triangulated these raccoons, which funny because sometimes we would triangulate these things in or near a dumpster and oftentimes these particular three were in the woods and stuff like that. And then we went to the store and we got old herring and we got old cod flav from the store and green apples and some peanut butter. Anyway, we set traps. We caught all three of them in one night, which no one had ever sure done before. And Dave was like, he was so excited because it was always kind of this competition between Minnesota, Michigan, and so I just harassed him about I want to, I would love to come to Asia and see the research that you're doing. Sure. He was doing work in Bangladesh and the Sunder Bonds is the world's largest mangrove Swamp. One of the scariest places I've ever been in my life. And then in the Royal Chitwan National Forest in Southern Nepal, in South. So I went over there, worked from a boat in Bangladesh, because we're in all these little canals, like I said, one of the scariest places on Earth. The ocean is filled with saltwater crocodiles and bull sharks. The islands are covered with venomous snakes and tigers. And then there's pirates that roam this place that look to kidnap people for ransom or just to murder you and take your goods. And so it was really, uh. I felt very much like Indiana Jones assistant, because Dave Smith is very much Indiana Jones. And I. I don't mean Indiana Jones. Like, this guy is every bit of Indiana Jones.

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And he was like, 70 at the time.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Yeah, that's.

[Donnie Vincent]

And then. And then. And then went to Nepal and worked on the back of an elephant every day, and.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Normal life.

[Donnie Vincent]

Totally. Yeah. And this is how moronic I was when I got to my cabin, which was like 3am When I finally got to my cabin in. In. In Nepal, and there was a set of stairs going up and then a little platform. And I thought to myself, oh, somebody's building a deck and they haven't finished. And then I went to bed. I was very tired. And. No, that's how you get on your elephant. And so I'd never seen stairs going up from a cabin and then just ending on a deck. But that is how you got on your elephant every morning. And even.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Even never even thought about that. Like, it's like going to the circus when you're a little kid and they have you come ride the elephant and you climb up the stairs and you.

[Donnie Vincent]

Get on the elephant. And I did not put two and two together, but it was when I went. The last thing I'll say about that trip is when I went to see Dave, he took out a half sheet of paper and he started writing down. He always wears glasses on the end of his nose. And he always. He's like, okay, Donnie, you're gonna fly. I want you to fly from Minneapolis to Tokyo. Then from Tokyo, you're gonna fly to Bangkok, Thailand. You're gonna overnight in Thailand. You're gonna. You're not gonna talk to anyone. You're not gonna go do anything. You're not gonna go out on the town. You're gonna stay in this hotel or this area. Hotels. Then the next day, you're gonna fly. He's writing this on a paper, then he's like, then you're gonna Get a ticket to. You're going to fly to Dhaka, Bangladesh. He's like, then you're going to walk over to the domestic airport. You're going to fly to Joshua. He's like, when you get out of Joshua, it's going to be all dirt. He's like, don't talk to anyone. Don't do. He's like, they will murder you. Do not do anything with anyone. Just wait on the corner. I will find you. And there's a whole long story there, but I traveled for two and a half days across the other side of the world into a country that I think is, you know, terrorist, like, and sat on a corner, essentially. I ended up talking to murderers and thieves. And then three o' clock in the morning, here comes a Land Rover Land Cruiser with Dave riding in it. And I was just. It was. It was an adventure, man. From the word go.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So what year would that have been?

[Donnie Vincent]

Or, like, early 2000s. Yeah, early 2000s. Yep.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And I only went for a short time. Short time to Bangladesh, short time to Nepal. But still, it shaped me to see these cultures, to see. To have machine guns stuffed in my chest in the airport. You know, I'm an American from, you know, a bad day in America, somebody loses our bag. We complain about the flight being delayed. We. Yeah, our hot dog was cold at the airport. Or we spilled a drink. Like, this guy's shoving a machine gun in my chest, telling me my passport's invalid. You know, my heart's being on my chest. I'm like, this is. I'm like, it's. You know. He's like, where'd you get your passport? I'm like, from the United States of America. See the blue? Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Like, I did the whole process.

[Donnie Vincent]

Like, I sent her my phone, you know, and what. A lot of times what they're looking for is either bribery.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Or they might just hate you because, you know, out of whatever. Like, you're in their country. Right.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And you're an outsider.

[Donnie Vincent]

You're an outsider. Yeah. So you're going to get wrong, you know?

[Lee]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So crazy. And then. So from. So you did tiger research project.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yes.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And then where'd you end up after that?

[Donnie Vincent]

And then I did a small project with a friend of mine who was studying ruffed grouse for the University of Minnesota in northern Minnesota. He had done a large project in Cloquet. The University of Minnesota owns like a. I think they own it, five square miles of deep forest there. And he had done all of his grouse drumming. Log, vegetation, stem Count, which is how many little trees or bushes are in a particular area. Drumming log size and dbh diameter and all these things, and how far you can hear a drummer, and triangulating his position and finding his actual log in early spring when there's no leaves, middle spring, when there's little leaves, in late spring when it's fully bloomed. And so he needed a subset of data from a wild place to correlate with, because he did all of his studies on this five square mile, which is a controlled environment, if you will. So he needed somebody that he could trust. And so he hired me and another young lady to go out in this. We went out in the Chippewa National Forest and he came up with all these transects that we had to walk to get this data. And it was really cool because we had A days and B days and the transect was 15 km. So on a days you pulled your truck up, parked it at the trailhead, and at the exact same time every day of relationship to light. So let's just say 20 minutes prior to daylight, you'd start 20 minutes prior to daylight, even though that's moving a minute every day, you start 20 minutes prior to daylight and you'd, at a measured pace, walk your 15 mile, 15 kilometer transect, recording all the drums you could hear, triangulating them, finding their logs, all this stuff. Well, on B days, which is the very next day, you had to hike that 15km in the pitch black and start at B side 20 minutes before legal light and then walk back to A. And so, and I loved it both ways. But the part that I, you know, the part you hate about on the A day is when you're done, you have to hike 15km back to your truck. And on the B days you have to do that in the dark. And so your imagination gets a hold of you. And you know, I, a couple of times I would come around the corner and I ran into like easily 450, 500 pound black bears. And nothing was scary ever. The bears would just stop and I'd stop and I'm just sitting there going. You, I mean, you are maybe the most, when you're in northern Minnesota and spring is just coming, the skunk cabbage is just growing, the flowers are just starting to open up, and you see the black, rich, beautiful fur of a huge boar. I mean, you run into an oil painting, that's what it feels like. You come around a corner, oh, and he stops and I stop. And we're like 10 yards apart. And then he blows out of there, of course, and saw wolves. We discussed that last night. One time I was walking down the road and I looked on, there's three wolves sitting there. But it was cool, it was cool to watch. It was cool until the mosquitoes came out because eventually. So that's project number two. And then from there I was very fortunate to work for the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska and I got hired on as a remote biologist. So they sent us out to run a genetics camp in a remote place for I sleep in a two person north face tent for five and a half months.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

That's so crazy. I mean just like the amount of, it's a lot of time with your own thoughts. It, I mean I know you're working with other people kind, you know, a little bit. A little bit, yeah. But like being in a remote place for that long of time, do you think like how much influence did that project in Alaska have on now when you take a trip, like you know, most people when they book a moose hunt or a sheep hunt or whatever, like it's like okay, 1012 days, remember? And typically you're trying to go for 20, 30 days and really like expand it. How much influence did that project where you're living in this remote place by yourself have on the trips that you're booking for yourself now?

[Donnie Vincent]

A tremendous amount because I fell in love with that length of time. I hated some of the biologists. Like when I interviewed for that position, I studied up on all my books and studied up on my lingo and equations and all this stuff. And I went, flew up to Alaska to apply or to interview and he didn't ask me one biological question and ask me one thing about biological philosophies or ideas I might have. He asked me about my woodsmanship and about living in a tent for that long and am I going to have to come pick you up and are you going to be able to manage this mentally and do you have what it takes? And I was like, oh, I've got that part, yeah, you know, but still. Well, funny note is the first time I went up, I think it was maybe two or three nights before I left, I watched the Blair Witch Project. It's not, not a great time to do, not the best pre camping movie to watch. And so then I, I went up there and I got out in the wilderness and I met the Eskimos and I travel up the river and put the gear in the water and it was, I mean almost immediately the quiet slipped in. Laying there in Bed staring up the ceiling. My family's back home, my friends are back home, you know, but then it transitioned from the quiet to I belong here and I'm home. And I'm hiking now, and I'm seeing the wildlife and the wildflowers, and I'm watching the tundra go from being, you know, not dead, but being, you know, early season, being, you know, dormant.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And then I get to watch this come to life. And I still love. Alaskans say that when the last fireweed petals, the pink flower that you see in the photos of Alaska, when they, when all the petals have fallen, summer's over and I got to watch that the dormancy of the tundra come to life. And I got to watch the insects come to life. And even, even when the salmon. I'd go down to the river in the beginning and the river's crystal clear. There's no fish. I can see grayling and I can see dollies and pike, but no salmon. And then you go to the next day, no salmon. You go to the next day, no salmon. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, I hear like, you know, from my tent, and I was like, oh, I go out there in the morning and the river is full, full of fish. And seeing that system come to life. And then when the, when the salmon come, the eagles come, the grizzly bears come, the wolves come. And it was just that meant I was like, this is who I am. This is what I meant to do. And I am in the. And I think I was making $19 an hour. And I was like, this is the best job in the world. The most. Like, they're paying me so much money and I don't have to spend any money. It was, I mean, and then transitioning to your question, transitioning that to my hunts, Whenever I've done a five day hunt, seven day hunt, even a 10 day hunt, I feel rushed. And that rush poisons my brain to where I'm not slowing down and appreciating the things that I were out there for five and a half months. And so I try to go for as long as possible now, because then I notice I see more animals, I notice I have more experiences, I see more weather, I see, I have more peaks and valleys that I'm harnessing rather than traveling between trips.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Yeah. And I would imagine that because you have an extended period of time, there's a flow state you get into when you spend actual time in the wilderness where you're away from people and technology and just other Than a satellite message back. This is what happened on day one. I would imagine having that extended period of time allows you to slip into that flow state way faster than when you're like, I've got 12 days. Like, I'm here on a like, part of this, like, trip is like, I'm trying to kill a moose or I'm trying to kill a caribou. And the time constraint, I've had that happen before where like, I'll try to like squeeze another trip into the fall.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And I find that I'm just constantly thinking about what happened on the last trip. Cause I haven't like, decompress from that experience. And then I'm looking to the next one and I just. When I'm rushing so much like that I just feel like I'm missing. Like you said, you miss out on all of the little things that actually make the story.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Like that ptarmigan you snuck up on.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

You know, and so I think I bought. I mean, you know, life is busy. And so now like, I force myself to like, try to find things each day. Like, if I can get out for a half morning, I'm trying to force myself to like, soak up all the little details. But just having that long period of time has to be so nice to just like, okay, I'm here, like. And then all of a sudden you're just like part of the landscape. You're not just. You're not there to conquer it.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah. And you. That you. That's a very good point. Because I used to have this fever to fill my tag. Because if you don't fill your tag, what are you doing there? Is it a waste of money? Is it? You know, and like. And so I used to. The tag used to burn a hole in my pocket. And now, I mean, I passed. I was on a moose hunt. Not last year, the year before, but I passed like a 63, 64 inch bull on the second to last day because I didn't like the scenario. And the photographer that I was with, fourth row, he didn't like the scenario either. The bull was about 300 yards away and kind of wasn't coming to us. We had him at 20 yards, but we couldn't see him. And then by the time we could see him again, he was along with Wayne. So I could have easily filled my moose tag. But I didn't want to shoot a moose in that manner. I wanted a moose to be coming to us or to be crossing the valley, not kind of sneaking or running away. And it's an envelope of time. And even to this day, and we know this is where hunting has gone. Or some people I'll bump into somebody in an archery shop or something, and they start showing me pictures and they're like, yeah, I killed this one in Kansas last year. Killed this one in Illinois. I killed this one in Nebraska last year. Like, check this out. And I love hearing their stories and seeing the photos, but what they just described to me sounds like hell to me. Like, to go to a state for five to seven days, punch your tag as fast as possible on the biggest deer as possible, throw that thing in the pickup truck. And, like, I want it. Like, last year I killed that big seven pointer in Illinois and hung that thing next to the tent for a couple of days. And I'd get up in the morning and I'm drinking coffee and wood ducks are flying down the river, and belted kingfisher is. He's dive bombing and fishing the whole morning. And I'm watching the kind of fog lift off the morning, and I'm just looking at this massive old Illinois buck hanging in a silver maple next to my teepee. And I'm not in a rush to go anywhere, you know, And I took the next day. I took the whole day to skin it, you know, break it down. Had steaks that night or whatever. And just there's something charming about slowing down and having chores. You have to get water, you have to get food, you're building your tent, you're gathering firewood. But it's the simplest things. And as a human being, these are the things that we need to stay alive, and these are the things that fulfill us. And so seeing these huge landscapes, one of the reasons I, like, on the Arctic, there's not a lot of trees. It's the opposite of claustrophobia. It's, you know, like, sitting there and I'm going, I think that's an animal. And I look, I'm like, oh, my God. It's like a Boone and Crockett grizzly bears over there digging for ground squirrels. And I just feel so alive, man. So alive when I do it that way.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Yeah, absolutely. I've only got to, like, taste the, like, little bits and pieces of that. Like, I haven't been able to. Especially, like, on the way north stuff. I've done a lot less of that than I would want to.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

But every time I've gone and done an extended trip, I come back a different person.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Like, it's. Yeah, you just.

[Donnie Vincent]

You.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

I think you just Respect the landscape so much more. Like, when you go and put yourself through these. Through these experiences, and the chasing the experience, not the end goal, just makes for a better. Like, I don't.

[Donnie Vincent]

I don't know how.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Like, I'm trying to put this into words, but it just.

[Donnie Vincent]

I know exactly what you're saying.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Like, when we did that project for the Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter reached out to me to do an article on me in Men's Health magazine. And we said, we went hunting. We went elk hunting in the Shell Creek Range of Nevada. And he's like, you know, what does it mean to be a hunter a year? And I was like, oh, my God, this is such an easy question. And then I couldn't come up with the answer. And I was like, well, I love watching the sunrise. And he's like, that's not it. And so I told the story the other day, and I went through all of these kind of data points of hunting that I really like. He's like, yeah, you're kind of giving me ingredients, but you're not telling me why. And then through working with him and describing to him, and then he said, well, let's leave the why alone for a second. He's like, what is it like to kill a big elk? And I was like, oh. I said, it's actually kind of sad. You see him and you're excited. The predator takes over, and you want to get your shot, and you've been practicing all summer, practicing your whole life. And finally, the bull steps out from behind, and you come the full draw, and you really settle your pin down. And if you've done your job, it feels amazing. And the release of the arrow, all that stuff is euphoric. And then when the arrow hits the bull, of course, you realize that it's the end of this animal's life. There's a finality of it. This. This animal has now become a skin to you, meat for your family and for your neighbors, and potentially a pretty set of antlers that you hang in your cabin or, you know, whatever it is that you want to do with it. And so he asked me. He's like, so you. You. You. You feel a sorrow when the arrow hits the animal, but then you feel euphoria of all of your kind of balance and hard work leading up to it. I said, absolutely. And he said, how do you feel when you're leaving? And I said, oh, man, you feel like a superhero. You have the weight on your back, blood on your hands. You have this dried blood. You have Your bloody arrow or whatever you have your bow, and you just feel like a mountain man. I don't even care if you're in your backyard hunting gray squirrels in September. When the leaves are changing, it's the same thing. It's where you are mentally when you are doing these things. So then he went and did all this research that I couldn't articulate, but with Harvard University and with different. And he went and lived with monks in Tibet, I think, for a while. And he went, asked all these questions to different professors, different physiologists, and they found that through study, they had exactly what you're describing. This forest immersion changes your mind, changes your physiology, lowers your blood pressure, increases your blood volume, increases your testosterone, increases your cognitive ability in your brain. Like, they have done these before and after tests of a forest bath without technology. Interesting enough, doing the same thing with your phone cancels out any growth. So physiologically, and quite literally, both mentally, physically, physiologically, your body changes for the better. And so I think these are the things that we've been chasing. I think that is the kind of mechanism that we keep going into, of wanting to. When fall comes, we get goosebumps. We want to go outside, we want to see the leaves change, we want to watch a high school football game, we want to go in an apple orchard, and we want to go hunt the whitetail deer bearing around caribou or Dall sheep, whatever. And I think that's just us taking a phenotypical representation, a picture, if you will, of our DNA, of hunters and gatherers. This is how we evolved, and this is our euphoria. Even catching a fish, like we did this morning, we let all of those fish go. But still, I think the love of feeling that on the end of your line is because it's validation that food is on the end of your line. I think our ancestors, when they felt something like that or had an opportunity. The reason your heart rate increases and you get really excited because a meal is about to happen. Now, we let those muskies go this morning, but I think that's where it comes from. I feel like that's where it comes from.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Yeah, absolutely. I just, like. It's so ingrained, like, so deep down, that when you get back to that place where you're experiencing things that, like, our ancestors and, like, the reason we evolved, like that has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, you just get, like, a little slice of that again, like, back to, like, who we are as humans. Like, this morning, I was Telling you. And people are going to say. It's really easy to say when you had a successful morning. You know, we. But we went muskie fishing this morning, which I've never caught one. And we both boated a muskie, which is crazy to do in a morning. Amazing. Yeah, it was incredible. And so it's really easy to sit here and say, well, that was a successful morning. But I was telling you that. I mean, we'd maybe been fishing for an hour, and we came around the bend, a certain bend in this river and, like, came around the corner, and the sun was, like, basically lighting up this whole cathedral of oak trees and silver maples along the river. And the light is shimmering off the water and pull back in a cast, and all of the water, like, spooling off the reel, like, throws up right in front of my face. And so the sun's shining through that. And I got, like. I got goosebumps from that moment. And in. At that point, I was like, I didn't even know how bad I needed this to, like, disconnect from everything else and just be focused on being, like, spending time on the water, in nature, immersed in it.

[Donnie Vincent]

And it's basically a free. Yeah, like, these are just things that you're craving that are experiences that you want to live and see and touch and feel. And the more we get to do them, the. You know, we. You and I talked this morning about. We were joking about if we won the lottery or something like that. What would happen? Well, we would unplug. We would disconnect. We would go away. Chos always says it to me. Lee always goes, dude, if I ever. You know, he talks and he's like, no one would ever see me again. And then he kind of pauses for a second. He's like, well, you might see me again, but no one else would see me again because he would go to the places that he finds the most wild. And Lee's very good at this anyway. He's really good at immersing himself and cleansing himself for each season. He's very good at it. It's something that I'm very much inspired by. And he's always sending me pictures and videos, and that's what we would do. That's who we are. That's what. And I think. And dare I say, like, even people that live, you know, in downtown New York City or downtown LA or wherever, Chicago, if you could trick them into going or if you could kind of pull them out of the city, I think. I think you could take just about anyone, even through the misery of it all, I think. And get them to kind of feel that euphoria, too. It's almost when your back's against the wall, when you have to do something very hard. Like if, let's say, you're in something horrible, you flip a raft, you lose your raft. You're 100 miles from your takeout, and now you and I have to work together to hike that 100 miles out. Wildlife crossing rivers in dangerous spots. All the things that we would have to do to get physically out to save ourselves, that would be a euphoria. It's a really bad day. But that would be a euphoria that would be difficult to describe once you.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Saw take out, like, on the back end of that. On the back end, yeah. Like. And it'd be something that, if that happened to you and I, only you and I could understand that experience. That's right. Even trying to tell that story, you'd never be able to convey, like, the amount you learned about yourself in moments like that.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

The exhaustion, the fear.

[Lee]

Yeah, Right.

[Donnie Vincent]

And it's like, you know, a lot.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Of people say, like, to simplify it, it's type two fun.

[Lee]

Right?

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

You go and put yourself through these miserable things, even though they're, you know, they're not really miserable. But it's like, we very hard things. You might be soaked for a week. You might hike. You might lose £20 in 12 days, which I did on when I was filming a sheep hunt one time. I mean, like, stuff like that, in the moment, it can feel so terrible. And you question every decision you've ever made in your whole life that brought you to that point. But when you get to the other side of that, it's like, oh, like, yeah, that sucked. But, like, I did it, and now I have a whole new respect for myself. Not just for, like, a euphoria, for, like, just the experiences. Like, I. I am stronger than I know I am. And, like, that's a powerful thing.

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Always.

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So you're a storyteller. So one story that I'd like to hear that I've never heard is we all. Everyone who's ever lived has been close to death. Like, we're all gonna die someday, but that you know of. What's the closest you've ever been to punching the clock on one of these trips?

[Donnie Vincent]

I have. And I'll make this very quick, but I have three.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Perfect.

[Lee]

I love it.

[Donnie Vincent]

Three. I probably have more than three. Like, I can think of a flight through The Himalayas, out of Kamindu. That didn't go great, but I'll back into it. So number three, if you will, was filming Winds of Adak, just being in the Bering Sea, and we got caught in the. The night that I killed my caribou both going to my caribou and then coming home from the caribou. We were in walls of water. I don't know if I've ever felt that out of control in my life. I've never seen waves that big. The water was black. It's ice cold. And you know Corey, the boat captain that we had on that trip, he's an amazing captain, and he. Both Kyle, Nikolai and I were outside of the cabin of the boat holding onto these big metal posts on his boat. He kept yelling at us. He's like, you gotta come inside because we're. We're gonna roll.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And if we roll, you're gonna let go. I know you don't think you're gonna let go, but when you're underwater, you're gonna let go. And if you let go, we're gonna lose you. Like, we are not gonn. And so I was like, dude, I don't want to come inside because we're going. The waves were disorganized. It wasn't just going in a singular direction. They were coming because the. The depth is so sharp there it goes from like 25,000ft to 500ft deep. The wind was blowing one particular direction, the current was going another. So picture a bathtub where you're kind of making waves with your kid and you get all these sharp peaks. That's where you're going through. The boat was. At times, the boat was falling like 30ft, smashing on it. And then the next one, the wave would push us up and over, and we're skidding down the side of that wave. And so it was hours of that.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Both on the way there. And like, when we went to this part of the island for Adak, Corey looked at me and he said, you have 45 minutes to find a bull killable and get that bull back on this boat, or we might not make it home tonight alive. So I was like, okay, let's do it. And in that amount of time we went to shore, found the bull that was all tangled up in the rope, cut that young bull free, went over there. Do not ask me why I did this. I shot two bulls. I had two bull tags. I shot two bulls, a big bull and then a one horn bull, which. Whose horn is right there. Antlers right there. And then I just gutted them. Usually I would skin them and everything.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Right.

[Donnie Vincent]

I just gutted them. And me and the crew, we dragged them back to the beach, got them back on the boat and we steamed home. But we went through that water again all night long to where the other crew that was on the main part of the island near the town, because that's only on one part of the island, they were flying drones trying to locate us because it's like 2 o' clock in the morning and we're not off the ocean yet and we're going through. It was, it was extremely scary. I didn't realize how big of waves could get next to a bolt like that and be so disorganized and so unforgiving.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Okay, so that's three.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And you're not at like just to like specify, you're not in like a giant boat here, like here?

[Donnie Vincent]

No, we're in like a 50 foot boat, right?

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Which is a big boat, but it's not like a crab catching boat.

[Donnie Vincent]

No. You know, in fact, we had talked about doing a project where the crab boat, we were going to take a crab boat way far west and the crab boat was going to pick our boat up and put it on their boat and then we're going to steam out there and they're going to drop us off. So our boat fits on a crab boat, right?

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And can be picked up by the crane of a crab boat. So.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

So that's number three. Number two was an archery doll she put in the Chugach Mountains in October. And William Altman and I were going after a really big ram. It was in a blizzard. We actually climbed. We were in such good shape. We went up that mountain so fast. But we were, we got up above this ram, he was 85 yards away. And I would have taken the shot if it wasn't blowing 60 miles an hour, but it was snowing blowing 60 miles an hour. And it was really crazy. So we had to go up and around this big huge chute and then we came down and to get into position to shoot this ram, William and I had to cross this cliff that was probably, it wasn't very wide. I'd probably be overestimating it. It's probably like maybe 30 yards across, but it was, it was super, super steep. And then right at the end of the steep part, which was only probably, I bet not even 50 yards. Probably another 30 yards was a thousand vertical feet straight down. And so this is in October and so it's been snowing all day. The rocks are icy. And I have a bow, so I'm doing this one handed. William has a camera, so he's doing this one handed. And we're just like. You can't look down because if we fall, we're dead. Like, we're not gonna be able to stop our bodies before we go off the cliff. And so we would just bury our boot leather into a little ledge. And there was no ledge. Ledge. We're talking about quarter inch, eighth inch, little ribs of dirt or rock. And so you'd kind of like try to stomp the ice out of the way, get your boot seated. And then you had to put your weight on that boot. And then your next step, of course, isn't to a non icy spot because you still have to kind of kick that away a little bit. So we'd put all our weight on this boot. One hand, take the step, and then like nestle that boot in. So we did it and we ended up getting over there. And we were probably 40 yards from the ram. And then the wind swirled. Ram got our wind. I've never been so happy for a ram. I. He stood up and his. He was so stunning. And he just walked. You know, he got our win. So, yes, like, something's up. And he just stiff leg and he walked into the blizzard and just disappeared into the white. And I was. It's so weird to say this, but I was thinking, like, good, good for you, dude. Like, like you got our wind and you know, the jig is up. And he just walked away. And it was just so cool to see. But Liam sat there and we just sat there quiet because now we have to go back across a cliff.

[Lee]

And.

[Donnie Vincent]

And he goes, man, it was way easier crossing it when there's a ram.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

But he's like, now there's no ram and now we have to cross this same thing to go back with no.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Motivation other than just getting back across and staying alive.

[Donnie Vincent]

So we crossed it. We just. We. I was maybe more afraid than he was. He's very comfortable with heights, and I am. I always say I'm afraid of heights. Then Kyle always corrects me and he says, you're not afraid of heights. Everyone is afraid to do the things that you're doing. You just don't want to fall to your death. And sin. I say, okay, that's a good point. But we just took it one step at a time, measured. And I suppose going back was slightly easier because we kind of. We went along the same. Yeah. And so that's number two. And then number one actually was just in the film we just released Toque. And this is not going to seem nearly as goosebumps scary as the other two, but you can see in the film, actually, we're coming down a pretty sharp cliff, and it's pouring rain, and. But we got to an area where we couldn't. Film is too treacherous. And we got to this spot where you'd. We're on a sheep trail, and the sheep, obviously are low, so they go under this outcropping. And then. So we're all making our way down. And I get to the outcropping, and, like, I flex my abs and I bend my chest to go, like, around the cropping. And while I'm doing this, I have my fingers on the backside holding it, and the whole rock broke, and it went. And, like, behind me is 40ft straight down, and I'm gonna land in rocks with this.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

With a boulder.

[Donnie Vincent]

I don't even know what that thing would weigh. 3, 4, 500 pounds.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And I'm just. I'm flexing my abs. Like, it feels like my spine is gonna break in half holding a snowmobile. Yes. And I'm just holding onto it, and I'm just trying not to move at all. And I'm just sitting there, flexed. And William. I looked up, and William's eyes were just huge. And I just literally, like, shimmied a foot and moved a butt cheek and then shimmied a little bit because I had to use my abs to basically put all my weight, like, on a foot and then move.

[Lee]

Right.

[Donnie Vincent]

And then I got around that and. But I mean, another two inches, and.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

That whole thing's coming over.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah. And I would have went backwards, and that thing would have just. It. I don't know if I would have been killed, but, I mean, I would have fallen 40ft, landed in these. There's kind of, like, jagged rocks, because in the sheep mounds, you know, stuff is always kind of breaking down. But there's been a few, man. We. I've had a. I had a tree step pull out of a cottonwood with William again one time, and we were, like, 30ft up. Why? I don't know. But I ended up hanging by one arm, and William was like, just a minute. He came down and he helped me because he's. He's. He's like a howler monkey or a spider monkey in the trees. But there's been a few, you know, and there's flights, there's Always flights where you're clipping alders or, you know, we've had pilots fly off of cliffs on purpose because we couldn't get the wind to take off the proper direction, stuff like that. And there's blizzards. It's always weather. People always want to talk about bears. It's always weather. Yeah, it's weather. Water and, you know, heights. Weather water.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

The water is super scary.

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Water is super scary.

[Donnie Vincent]

Super scary.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

You know, the.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

When you're in sheep country, I think the one of the biggest things that I underestimated you talked about how rocks are kind of always shifting, you know, and you're holding on a thing and, you know, it shifts a little bit. But like when you're in those mountains, you hear rocks falling all the time. All the time. And a couple years ago I was filming a sheep hunt and we, you know, we. It was my fault, but we had kind of worked along this like cliff system for probably three quarters of a mile. And you know, it's just like in and out of this, like real steep stuff. And it was really cool. We got really close to some rams and filmed those close and got really cool footage for the project. Did a little spot in stock, ended up like two yards from this legal ram right there, you know, but really, you know, and I'm filming between Matzinger's, you know, shoulder and, or like his armpit and the bow and like the ram curl right there.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Okay, so all this really cool stuff. Well, we got to the end of this basically like cliffed out chute and we're gonna move locations and so we're gonna get a pickup and we're gonna leave that day and shift. Cause we had been in there for four days and had a ramble out. Anyway, I just like looked up to the top of this ridge and I was like, what's on the backside of this? Like, just mostly curious. And our guide, Dustin Rowe goes, oh, let's go check it out. My fault. So then we proceeded to walk through boulder fields for like the next seven hours to get up to the top. You know, on the way up it wasn't bad because it was a lot of the shale and stuff was, you know, call it, you know, soccer ball size, like that stuff. And you just kind of work your way up, got over the top. Well then on the other side it's giant boulders. And so we're working our way down this thing. And Dustin's a smaller guy and he's been in the mountains his whole life. And he's just like flying across this. Matzinger grew up in the mountains, lives his life in the mountains, does this stuff. He's kind of like working in behind. And then you got me who they were calling. I was wearing all gray stuff in a quote unquote. Competing camel company was brand. But I just, I'm just gonna wear solids. They started calling me the elephant because I'm bigger than both of those guys. And we're moving through and.

[Donnie Vincent]

And I'm third.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And so I'm like an elephant working across this boulder field. And I get to a spot and I look up and there is a boulder about the size of the couch you're sitting on. Okay. Flat, long, about 4ft wide, you know, 7ft long and about 18 inches thick.

[Donnie Vincent]

Okay.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And I looked up and I was like, I really don't like that boulder above me. And I was like, well, it's still a few yards ahead of me. I'll work around it. I took one step, and that moved a boulder the size of a softball. And then it triggered a. Triggered a domino effect. And that boulder slid past me like so fast and down the mountain. I was like, that's how fast you, like, get, you know, swiped out. And you're going downhill with a, you know, thousand pound rock.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Or under a thousand pound rock.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Right?

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Yeah. So, like, the amount of respect you have to have for every step in that stuff is next level.

[Donnie Vincent]

We, we, we hunted. I went with some buddies that hunted desert sheep on Carmen island this year in Mexico. And we killed a ram and we went across the face of this and it was all same thing. Basketball to wheelbarrow size or maybe even car hood sized boulders. And it was a very dished out face. And we went across the base of it and we, you know, we talked about before I even did it, because we're like, you. If anyone shifts a rock here, this whole thing's coming down on top of us. And so we just were very particular about what rocks we stepped on and what we did. But, yeah, it can happen. And you can sit there and think, I'll jump out of the way. I'll do this. It's over the whistle. Yeah. It's literally a blink of the eye.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Because in the moment, you have to like, be like, that rock's coming towards me, like gravity's in full effect. And you're just, see ya.

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

It's just, you know, and people might wonder, like, why do you put yourself in those situations? Because then when you come home, everything Feels easy.

[Donnie Vincent]

And you're alive. Right. You think differently about pizza and you think differently about talking to your mom or your sister, your wife and senior buddies and it's like everything is, colors are richer. It's just the more you do difficult things, whatever that may be for you, the more alive you're going to feel. The more you challenge yourself, the more alive.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

When you feel. It's that simple.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And on our drive to go fishing this morning, I was saying like, I think it makes me a better man. Like I'm a better husband to my wife, I'm a better dad to my daughter. I'm a, you know, like when I'm having conversations, like I have a, a way longer fuse. Like when it comes to like.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Working through stressful stuff or you know, just all of the, all of the life stuff that's happening.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

It's like when all that starts to build up, it's easy to get a real short fuse where if one thing goes wrong it's like ah, like just real frustrating.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And then you go doing something hard and you come back and it's like oh, just mellowed.

[Donnie Vincent]

Whatever.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Whatever.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Like, oh, well, you know, we can get, we can get through this.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And, and you're happier. You know, you're, you're feeling more complete as a man or a woman in whatever instance. Like you are feeling more of your self worth. You're feeling more complete. It's, it's, for me, it's everything and it's, it takes the shape of hunting and fishing for me because that's where my interests lie. But, and I do think, I've talked about this in the past, but I think if you're a birder, it's different than if you are going to kill birds. And this is that you're going to bring, bring home for your family and you're going to actually enter the cycle of predator and prey. You're going to enter into this environment even though that you don't live in this ecosystem as a predator full time. You know, you showed up and, and you're engaging with the wildlife. I just, I, I, it blows my mind that people don't do. It blows my mind that people don't.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Do it in some way, shape or form. You know, whether that's hunting, fishing, you know, really hard, like just really hard tasks.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

In that book, the comfort crisis that you were talking about, I'm going to pronounce it wrong. Misogy.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Basically it's, it's picking something that you have a 50, 50 chance at failing at and doing something really hard at least once a year. Because if you do push yourself, like, I mean, the moral of the story is, like, do hard things and then don't die.

[Donnie Vincent]

And then don't die. He says, that's the first rule. Don't die. And I often think the things that. And I'm saying this, I don't want anyone else to necessarily think this, but the things I live a difficult life challenging myself, I'll spend on any given year. I'm spending, I don't know, four, five, six weeks in Alaska. It's always under hiking conditions, heavy backpacks, crossing scary rivers, taking scary flights, if you will, being around big bears. And these are things that I love this, you know, but this is the reality of things. And so I wonder. I always wonder about, like, with the Masogi, like, should I be doing something else that is, you know, in addition to the things that I feel like.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

You'Re already doing it, you know?

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

I feel like, yeah, you're just putting yourself in those situations. But for, like, if you're normal everyday people where, like, you're a weekend warrior for hunting stuff, like putting together a trip where it's, you know what? I'm gonna hike 100 miles, I'm gonna pick some trail, and I'm gonna hike 100 miles this week or whatever it might be. Stuff like that will just change your brain chemistry enough.

[Donnie Vincent]

And I took a guy last year. He came to, basically was kind of auditioning to be a photographer, and it didn't work out. And he was pretty defeated right away. And he said to me, the first night we were on the Alaska Peninsula and it was pouring rain, it was kind of sideways. And he's like, I've always admired your work. And I always thought it was very difficult. I now, I'd never realized it was impossible. And it made me giggle because obviously it's possible and it's not even. And so. But he let the details own him. So the first night out, I said, we're gonna camp here. We just got dropped off. We don't want to see a big caribou tonight because it's illegal for us to kill him. So we don't want to see one tonight. Yeah, let's just set up our tents right here. Get that thing out of the way. Let the sun set, come back up. Get that out of the way. And so the next day, I'm like, okay, you see that peak? That's where we're hiking. And he started Laughing And. And I started laughing. I was like, what are you laughing at? He's like, oh, we're walking on that peak. And we are walking on that peak. And he's like, are you. Are you serious? And I go, yeah. He's like, I can't do that. I said, we haven't taken a step. You can do that. And he's like, I can't do that. And I said, okay, you see this? There's a couple of, like, light rises in these hills. He said, yeah. I said, you see that big bush that looks like a car? He said, yeah. I said, we're going to go there first. And so. And we hiked there, and he was lagging behind, like, quite a bit. Enough to be worrisome because he would lag behind like a half a mile. Yeah, we're in really big bear country. And, you know, the bears are very, you know, I don't want to say docile, but they're brown bears. They're pretty well fed. But I mean, if you look like a prey item out there by yourself and you're kind of looking at your feet and slogging around like, I'm not telling you that a big young boar or s not going to jump on you and take lunch. But. But he just. He just had it in his head the whole time. And. And. And he wouldn't eat. He was so kind of nervous about the trip. I don't. I think he ate dinner once in like, six days or seven days.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And he ended up leaving. He ended up leaving early. And, you know, he thanked me for the experience, everything like that, but he. He's just like, this is so hard, dude. Like, this is like, we haven't even found a caribou yet. Like, we hunted four or five days. We didn't even see a Caribbean. Like, not even a cow. He's like, this is so hard. And we're looking miles and miles and miles in the distance, and we can't see caribou. And then. So finally the pilots came, picked us up, dropped us off another location. But he had already, in his mind, it was already too far, too big, too hard, how many steps. He was already wanted out. I was like, man, let's just do it. Let's just do it. And then all we can control is the next step.

[Lee]

Right?

[Donnie Vincent]

That's all we can control. I was just with Will Primos last week doing a project with Will, and he said to me, I love this. He was on an elk hunt, and conditions weren't great. And one of the guys was like, what are we going to do? And he was saying, he's like, man, mother Nature's in control. So don't even just have a good time. You're not in control. Mother Nature's in control. So let's just keep hunting. Let's keep doing our job and just have fun. Because we're on control. And he's a million times right.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And as soon as you accept that, the rest of it gets easier. You're just there to have the experience and then whatever. I mean, you have to be intentional about things. But whatever mother nature is going to do, like Will said, is not any of your concern. Really. No, you're just, you're just bisecting this moment in time and whatever's going to happen out of everything that you can control will happen.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah, you said it. Intentionality.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Just maintain intention, have intention, know your path, keep your eyes open, hunt smart, keep the wind right. Look in the places that look like they would hold an animal. You keep doing that over and over and over again and you'll either be successful or you will walk out of that trip with your head held high and not sitting there going, I could have went harder. I could have sat another day, I could have hiked another mile. Like, do that stuff and you'll fill your tag. When you do that stuff filling your tags start to shrink and then it happens.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Absolutely. So one of the things I've always admired about what you and your team do is as, I mean, and I'm a content creator, you know, I'm a photographer, videographer. And so as algorithms change, as the industry changes, as people's time, attention span changes, a lot of what gets created and gets put out there. And I do a lot of this is short form content. And so a lot of the time, and even like teasers for this, like, are short form, like. And a lot of times it feels it's easily digestible. A lot of it is really cool. But it's a lot like junk food. Short form content feels like digital junk food where it's very, it's it the big dopamine hit right in that moment. But you won't remember it. You won't like come back to that. And so one of the cool things that you guys have always done is you're willing to like sit on lots of content for a long time. Yeah, I mean, we're going to talk about fantastic places, which is 14 years of footage backlog that's, you know, being released. But like, even like the Rivers divide like the. A whitetail film. How many, how many, how many years of footage was that? One film?

[Donnie Vincent]

It was two years of footage, but it was sitting, you know, I don't even know how many times we sat to hunt that deer. And we sat in one spot. We weren't. Well, he might be on this ridge top. We knew, I didn't know where he, where his bed was, but there was a big, thick, 40 acre woods. We knew the deer's nickname was Steve. We knew he would travel through there and we knew he would end up in this alfalfa field like a mile behind us every single night. But we didn't know what trail he was going to take. And because these deer could get buggered so easily, we hunted him in one spot the whole time. And I mean I, we sat I don't know, 50, 60 times for that deer. And so yeah, it was two years of footage.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So two years of footage. But then how long after two years of footage did the final product?

[Donnie Vincent]

Oh, so the next year. The next year.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Three years though.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah, yeah, three years. That was our first film. That was a three year project.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Which is typically unheard of, you know.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

In the world of tv it was typically your film first season, everything gets released the next year. And then now like you have a lot of like semi live style content. Like the, you know, the guys, the hunting public were absolutely crushing it with that type of stuff. And so everything's become, you know, faster and faster and faster. And this isn't just in the hunting industry. This is across the globe content is being released almost instantaneously. But then you had a bear film that was like seven years of.

[Donnie Vincent]

Seven years of filming.

[Lee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And a year of editing.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Right. So you're talking about almost a decade before you drop that film like that. I mean, what's the. I guess how do you hold on? Like how do you do that? Yeah, how do you, how do you. What's the mindset behind. Is it just simply like I want to tell this story the way I want to tell this story and it's going to take what it takes or is it like what's the, what's the. I guess not. Lack of urgency isn't the right term. Well, like what's the mentation.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah. What's the patience behind it? I mean that's, I'd love to tell you that this was intentional and that we set out and said, you know, we're going to take our time here. But the reality of it is we would, you Know, when we filmed the Rivers Divide, you know, I wound the deer. And then so we're trying to finish that project. So that becomes a total focus of finishing that project and then editing and putting it out. And then our next film that we came out with was Terra Nova. Three Days on the Island. And that was really cool because we went to Newfoundland and we hunted at Tuckamore Lodge. We hunt in the wilderness, but under Tuckmoor Lodge's guiding area, outfitting area, and Barb Grange, the woman that runs Tuckmoor Lodge, when we showed up that day, she's basically said, I know you have a two week hunt, but you're only gonna have three days because it's gonna blow 100 kilometers an hour in three days. And she's like, I don't know what that, how long that wind is gonna blow. And so, and all of that, the ups and downs, I was going through target panic in that film. And so the ups and downs of missing caribou, skipping arrows off their back, and the whole thing kind of just came together in three days and we had that. And then that's how some of our pieces have gone. But other pieces, like, I'll go to the Alaska Peninsula and hunt brown bears for 10 days, you know, don't shoot a brown bear. Didn't see the right brown bear. Still saw bald eagles and salmon and all these amazing things and flew in and I mean, blizzards and huge care were walking by and bull moose, like had fantastic experiences, wolverines, but didn't kill a big brown bear. So then go back and do another brown bear hunt and then do a black bear hunt. And then all these things kind of come together. And so I just called Kyle one day and I said, I think I want to make a bear film out of all of our bear experiences kind of interwoven. And instead of doing a bear film about a brown bear hunt. Yeah, I want to do a bear film about bear hunting and bears and what it means, because I wanted to hunt. I start out that film by saying I've wanted to hunt brown bears on the Alaska Peninsula since before I knew how to ride a bike. And that's a fact, because when I would see Chuck Adams photos and when I would see Fred bears photos and you'd see these behemoth brown bears. And it's probably the testosterone and the ego of a young man, the man versus wild kind of mentality you have when you're young to want to go and face an animal like that. My very first hunt I ever did in Alaska was A self guided bear hunt. And it was so incredibly rewarding, it wasn't even funny. But those projects through us, kind of brainstorming, where they kind of come to shape and then fantastic place is the luxury or laziness perhaps of having clients.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

You know, in the beginning, when clients would call us and say, hey, we would love if Sickmanta would film us a TV commercial, I would say no. You know, I kind of thought we had this secret sauce that we needed to keep for our films. And companies kept calling and I kept saying no. And then eventually I was like, maybe we should do one of these because we're super broke and they seem like they have money that they want to give us. And so we did one of those projects and it was unbelievably rewarding to sit down with a client, hear their story, look at their store or their wares and their gear, see, you know, why did you make pants like this? Why'd you make a gun like this? Why'd you, why do you run your department store like this? Why did you start a, you know, a hardware store? Tell me all these things. And you get to learn this person's story. And then you match them to a music and to a voice and to a dialogue into imagery. And then to have them call afterwards and say, that was the best commercial we've ever done, or our sales are way up. And you know, my mom cried when she saw the commercial and all these things. And I was like, man alive, that's as rewarding as doing our own work. And so then we started doing more commercial work. And then. But I was still hunting. I'm not going to stop. And we're still filming because we would kind of film because if one felt perfect, we'd come out with it. And then we had this intersection with Winds of Adak because Benelli, through Lee, chose Benelli, hired us to do a narrative film. So it was both a commercial project and a wildlife hunting film because Benelli was launching these three new guns. The over under, the Super Black Eagle three, and then their first bolt action rifle, the Lupo. And they said Lee's the one that talked him into it. They would go to Lee oftentimes for their inspirations. And Lee's like, hire Donnie Vincent and his crew, go to Adak, hunt ptarmigan sea ducks and caribou and just let Donnie do his thing. Don't put him in a box, don't constrain him. Let's see what he wants to do. And that's what we Went and did. And then now we have sheep hunts, caribou hunts, grizzly bear hunts, bromber hunts, whitetail deer hunts, mule deer hunts. All in the can, all in, you know, sitting in our. In our hard drives and. But now, you know, I said to Kyle a couple months ago or a year ago or whatever, remember, True Detective with Matthew McConaughey is such a brilliant TV show, maybe the most brilliant piece of work I've ever seen in that nature of film or TV show. When they sit there and retell a story, Matthew McConaughey sits there and retells the story. Smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, he's long hair. He tells her this horrific tale of this serial killer and this person that kind of harassed this town. And I was like, why don't we tell our stories like that? Because our footage isn't good enough from back then. We didn't know what we were doing. We're still the same people. And I can sit down and tell the story as I remember it, and the details and the things that I experienced that were behind the scenes that we didn't capture on film. And then also we have the supporting film. I said, I think it would be really fun to kind of tell some of these old stories. And if you, I were the audience. We don't make things for the audience. And that's the truth. That's the truth of it. We make things for what that piece is. We kind of want to give it a life of its own, make sure the story's good, make sure the music good, make sure the imagery is good, and tie it all in a bow. Because that thing has to earn what it is, the completeness of it, the beginning, middle and end, if that makes sense. And we build that animal, if you want, until it's complete, and then it is its own thing. Because if I built it for you or built it for someone else, then we would constantly be changing our direction, much like fashion. We'd be trying to chase what is popular at that time. We'd probably be splicing up content, trying to make it a little bit more fast paced right now, because people sometimes want that, but we don't. We make it for what it is. And we stay true to ourselves, stay true to who I am in my philosophies and ethics of hunting. And we build those pieces. And luckily we have. I mean, we probably have, I say 12 to 15. It could be even more pieces that we will. I will sit here in this living room looking on a barrel of the camera and tell the Story surrounded with imagery of things that we had captured and experiences that we've had. And I think it's going to be a really enjoyable series, if you will. Do you guys have.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So the first one just launched a week ago.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So all the time people. Two weeks ago.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

It'd be like six weeks. Ish. When they hear this. Like when that first one dropped, so called toque.

[Lee]

Yep.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And it's about a dull sheep hunt.

[Lee]

Yep.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And that was like your number one.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Met William Altman at the trailhead.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Met William Almond. But then also like almost died. Like so.

[Donnie Vincent]

Almost died.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So going back to the. That story, like that's, you know, if anybody goes and watches it, which you should. That was, you know.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Bear hugging a snowmobile, trying not to die.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And height. That's still one of the farthest times I've ever hiked in my life. Yeah. And.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And I watched the film and I know you guys, I mean, you're not going to film a 25 mile hike out. Right. But talk about rugged. Like go through that stuff with weight on your back and trying to, you know, you're soaked like because like if you're not, if it's not rain, you're sweating through everything.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yep. And then we had the cross river like 50 times, right?

[Lee]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

So I mean, your toenails fall off.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really funny because when they fell off, I could feel them in my shoe. I could feel them in my boot. And then we hiked. I mean, we hiked so far. It, it. We left camp in the morning. And Lance never. Lance will not tell you the plan because he doesn't much like the photographer I had last year.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

He doesn't want your mind telling you no.

[Lee]

Right.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

You just keep going.

[Donnie Vincent]

That's right. So we left camp, climbed, let's say 1200 vertical feet, went however many miles to the ram, found the ram, told the story, took the photos, butchered whatever was left of the ram. We hiked however many miles back back down to 1200. Then we hiked down a glacier, down the main body of the canyon to the main system, hike that main system all the way out. I don't know how far it is. And finally got out. Like, I can't even tell you how heavy the backpack was because my shoulders were just getting like cut in half. I could feel things rattling around on my boot. Like it felt like my sock was funny or whatever. And I'm not telling you this to, I'm not bragging or boasting at all. We finally got the hotel, and it's a long story, but Lance, when we finally got to where, like, he could use the sat phone, he called the local diner in the town of Tok and said, hey, we're not going to be out until 3am and the lady's like, lance will be closed. He's like, will you please make us four cheeseburgers? Because there was another guy named Alan Skinny McGinnis, a firefighter from Montana. He's like, will you please make us four cheeseburgers and just leave them on the sidewalk and I'll leave cash, like, there. She's like, you can pay tomorrow. It's no fine. So she's like, well, I'll leave them on. Lo and behold, she left the restaurant unlocked for us and so we could go inside and eat at a booth. And these are the things that you experience in Alaska when you are around other bush people or other people. This is the willingness and generosity that you run into on ranches with cowboys. You might meet a cowboy that you've never met before. And he said, hey, come have dinner with my family. I see that you're trekking along and come have dinner and blah, blah. I'll give you a bed for the night. Whatever. It's like being on the Ponderosa.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Anyway, my toenails, I pull my boots off, and it was the type of thing that I panicked and I hit it. I pulled them off and I saw toenails, and I. And then I pulled my sock back on. I was like, I don't want anyone to see this because I don't know what's going on. So then I text a friend of mine and I said, hey, my toenails are all black. I don't have service. I don't have Internet. Will you Google what it means? And so she googled hiked long distance. Toenails turn black. And she texted me back and says, the article I'm reading says that you're a badass. And. And I started laughing. I said, what do you mean? She said, it's just saying if you hike far enough for your toenails to turn black and fall off, you're a badass. And so it was on, like, REI or something like that. And. But yeah, that was toke, man. That was. It was an incomplete film. It was filmed, dare I say, poorly. I did poorly on camera. William did the best he could. I did the best I could. And we blended that all together and.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And the whole time Lance was saying, I want to Take your bow and I want to take your camera. I want to throw him off the nearest cliff. And because we'd get to like 200 yards from the ram and then, you know, 200 yards is not a bow shot.

[Lee]

Right.

[Donnie Vincent]

And then when it finally worked, I'll never forget the whole way home, however long the drive is from Tok to. To Anchorage, all these people would call and he's like, yep, nope, nope. We got a giant. Nope.

[Lee]

Yep.

[Donnie Vincent]

With a bow. Nope. All on camera. And I was like, funny. A few days ago you wanted. You roll my bow off a cliff and my camera off. And it's funny too because I've angered some outfitters. I always pay for my hunts. I don't want people to think I get my hunts for free. I pay full price. In fact, I pay more because I have to pay also for the photographers and more flights. And yeah, the days of saying, hey, I have a TV show, I want a free hunt. I never experienced that by that for a long, long.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

By the time I came into the industry, all the TV boys had used up that.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

Those generosity. And so, you know, it was, you know, it's, it was what it was. And Lance was just like, he just, you know, he wanted me to get a ram. And you know, the camera's a lot and the bow was a lot. But you know, when we were driving home, he was proud of the. The four of us. And yeah, to was cool. It was really cool.

[Lee]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

That's awesome. So do you, do you have a. Well, let's see. Yeah, we'll wrap this up this. Perfect. That was perfect. But like, do you have a cadence that you'll put these films out at?

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah. So we're launching kind of three projects simultaneously. There's going to be current work which would be long form films, fantastic places, which will be all these older pieces that I've told you about. And then there's also going to be DV Unfiltered, which is like, like we did a whitetail hunt last year. It was like seven minutes long or eight minutes long, which is still long for some people. Right. For us it's very short and, but fantastic places. We want to come out with two or three of them a year in addition to doing a long form piece of current work as well. So we're looking, I mean, we haven't made a film in long time since Winds of adac.

[Lee]

Right.

[Donnie Vincent]

And so I don't know how long it's been five years or whatever. And so. But now we're going to. It'll be, you know, I'd say one to three films a year minimum. If not three, four.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

So, yeah.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Where can people. So is it. What's the YouTube channel? It's all being launched on YouTube. Platform.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yep. Just look up Donnie, Vincent, D, O, N, N, I, E, not Y. And Vincent like Van Gogh, V, I, N, C, N, T. And then Kyle always tells me to tell everyone to subscribe and hit the notification button.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

That's right.

[Donnie Vincent]

Because it wasn't that long ago that I realized we had a YouTube channel.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

And so you got to remind people that it's good for them to follow along.

[Donnie Vincent]

It's good for them to follow along because I'm always. I've always been the hunter in our group and the storyteller in our group. And I write the voiceovers and I write what you see on Instagram, but I've never posted anything on Instagram ever in my entire life. Our guys do that. I honestly didn't know we had a YouTube channel. I probably found out we had a YouTube channel when we had probably about 50,000 subscribers. And so I just don't concern myself with that part of life. I just want to be outside living my life, shooting my bow, just exercising.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Intentional about what you're trying to do.

[Donnie Vincent]

That's right.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And so. And I. And I go on Instagram and I write people. I really enjoy engaging with people, but I do it as a slice of time. And then I'm out.

[Lee]

Yeah.

[Donnie Vincent]

And then I probably have to start doing it for YouTube too, because we were going to sell our content, Sam. That's how we were going to generate for this company all along. And then we've now come to the grips or the fruition or understanding that we want this content to be free to everyone. Kids can watch it, parents can watch it, people can stumble upon it. And so, you know, all of this stuff is going to find its way to YouTube and we're just going to keep building this page as long as that is a platform, if you will. And we just take things one day at a time and. Yeah, yeah, I just want to live a soulful life. I want everyone else to live a soulful life. We're so very fortunate to live in this country and have friends like you. It's so incredibly important to me. Like, when you asked me to do this podcast, I was blown away, quite honestly. I think Field and Stream is one of the most inspiring platforms imaginable. I still get old Field and Stream magazines for Christmas. And I mean, they couldn't have a better host. This couldn't be a better platform. I just am very, very thankful to be asked to be on it.

[Michael Ciro Creighton]

Well, just can't. Thank you so much for being one of the first guests on this thing. And like I said, you and other people we have on the show, like in some way, shape or form, you have kind of changed the arc of the hunting industry, fishing industry like, and the way people view it. So just thanks again for hopping on with me.

[Donnie Vincent]

Yeah, man. Thank you.

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