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

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast - Episode 641: 15 Years of Living Off the Land in Alaska

Release Date: December 23, 2024

Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Randy Brown, Fisheries Biologist, Alaska Fish and Game Agency

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1. Introduction to Randy Brown

In this episode, Steven Rinella welcomes Randy Brown from Alaska's Fish and Game Agency to discuss Randy's extensive 15-year journey living off the land in Alaska. Randy brings a wealth of experience in fisheries biology, conservation, and firsthand insights into the challenges and rewards of Alaskan wilderness living.

Notable Quote:
Randy Brown reflects on his brother's recommendation, stating, “He just like, you know, he, he wants to treat people just like people. Men, women, gay or straight, whatever. You know, I don't care. It's not my business.” ([116:17])

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2. Randy’s Early Adventures: Living Off the Land

Randy shares his early years living in the remote areas of Alaska, detailing his transition from milking cows in the Palmer Wasilla area to venturing deep into the Yukon wilderness. He recounts building cabins, trapping, hunting, and the sheer resilience required to thrive in such an unforgiving environment.

Notable Quote:
Randy describes his initial foray into the Alaskan bush, “We just decided we were going to go up the Kandik and over into the Black river drainage. And so we were getting traps and everything. So and we just decided we're gonna ask for a year leeway from Doyon so that we could come in with a ski plane and move some things and take care of the cabin so it wouldn't be a trash pile at some point.” ([97:19])

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3. Conservation Challenges: The Bobwhite Quail Crisis

The conversation shifts to the alarming decline of bobwhite quail across their range. Randy discusses habitat loss and innovative (yet controversial) solutions, including the introduction of a dewormer to combat high parasite loads in quail populations.

Notable Quote:
Randy emphasizes the importance of habitat, “I disagree because he talked about Habitat a whole bunch.” ([06:19])

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4. Listener Interaction: Dealing with Hunting Opponents

Randy addresses a listener's ethical dilemma about facing harassment from a neighbor who opposes hunting activities. The panel debates strategies for respectful communication and maintaining hunting practices while coexisting with non-hunting neighbors.

Notable Quote:
Danny suggests a pragmatic approach, “If this lady's giving him heartburn, it's... like, here's another listener question.” ([13:02])

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5. Survival Tales: The Mystery of Smeagol

One of the most gripping stories Randy shares is the encounter with a man dubbed "Smeagol," who was found emaciated and deceased in a remote cabin. This tale highlights the isolation and perils of living off the land, as well as the complexities of human survival in the wilderness.

Notable Quote:
Randy recounts the discovery, “He was so skinny, his eyes were sunken into his face... And he was seriously. Skin on bone.” ([63:06])

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6. Personal Life and Love Story: Meeting Karen

Randy narrates his serendipitous meeting with Karen during a solstice fair in Fairbanks, leading to a lifelong partnership. Their shared love for the wilderness and outdoor adventures forms the bedrock of their enduring marriage.

Notable Quote:
Randy describes their meeting, “We struck up a conversation... And we got married the next year out on the river.” ([85:07])

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7. Education and Career Shift: From Bush Living to Biology

Transitioning from a solitary life in the wild, Randy pursued formal education in biology. He discusses his academic journey, starting with an honors program and eventually securing a position with the Fish and Wildlife Service, where he conducts significant fisheries research.

Notable Quote:
Randy reflects on his academic success, “I ignored it and, and I did just fine.” ([106:07])

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8. Environmental Conservation: Pebble Mine and ANWR

Randy delves into contemporary environmental issues, particularly the proposed Pebble Mine and its potential impact on Alaska's pristine ecosystems. He outlines the technical and environmental challenges involved in such large-scale projects and emphasizes the importance of sustainable practices.

Notable Quote:
On Pebble Mine's challenges, Randy states, “There's a big hurdle for any of these companies to go in and develop that they're going to have to figure out how they're going to get water.” ([132:28])

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9. Hunting Practices and Techniques

Randy shares his expertise on hunting practices, including bullet selection and calling techniques. He explains his transition from using .243 Winchester with lead bullets to a 6.5 Creedmoor with copper bullets to mitigate environmental impacts, particularly on birds of prey like condors.

Notable Quote:
Randy advises on bullet selection, “I didn't want to go there because there were people out there that shot 22, 250s and 70 grain bullets. And they won't break the neck.” ([130:53])

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10. Reflections and Personal Insights

As the discussion wraps up, Randy reflects on his life choices, the importance of adaptability, and maintaining a balanced outlook. He shares personal solutions for marital harmony and emphasizes treating everyone with respect, regardless of differing backgrounds or beliefs.

Notable Quote:
Randy offers marital advice with humility, “I treat Karen like A princess. And the new cabin. Yeah, totally.” ([120:21])

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Conclusion

Episode 641 of The MeatEater Podcast offers a profound look into the life of Randy Brown, combining tales of wilderness survival, conservation challenges, and personal growth. Randy's journey from living off the land to becoming a respected fisheries biologist underscores the delicate balance between human endeavors and environmental stewardship.

For listeners interested in outdoor adventures, conservation, and the intricate lives of those who dedicate themselves to understanding and preserving the natural world, this episode provides invaluable insights and inspiration.

Key Takeaways:

• The critical state of bobwhite quail populations and innovative conservation efforts.
• The challenges and ethical considerations of hunting in areas with opposing neighbors.
• The profound impact of personal relationships in remote living conditions.
• The complexities of environmental conservation projects like Pebble Mine.
• Evolution of hunting practices to promote sustainability and protect wildlife.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• “[116:17]” – Randy Brown on treating everyone with respect regardless of differences.
• “[97:19]” – Randy Brown on negotiating with land management regarding living off the land.
• “[06:19]” – Randy Brown on habitat importance for quail conservation.
• “[63:06]” – Randy Brown describing the discovery of Smeagol.
• “[85:07]” – Randy Brown on meeting Karen and their subsequent marriage.
• “[130:53]” – Randy Brown on responsible bullet selection for hunting.
• “[120:21]” – Randy Brown on marital harmony and treating his wife with respect.

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Related Topics:

• Sustainable hunting practices
• Wildlife conservation strategies
• Living sustainably in remote environments
• Environmental impact of mining and oil extraction

For more detailed discussions and stories, listen to the full episode on your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

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[Randy Brown]

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[Steve Rinella]

Not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Review Important [e-mail] Meater offer is subject to terms and conditions.

[Randy Brown]

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[Steve Rinella]

The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

[Randy Brown]

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light.com f I r s t l I t e.com joined today by Randy Brown from Alaska's fish and game agency. And Randy, I'm gonna, you're gonna, I'm gonna embarrass you a little bit, but not bad. It's in the, in the kind of way you want to be embarrassed where you hear a bunch of good stuff about yourself.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. Not, not. Not where you hear stuff bad about yourself.

[Steve Rinella]

Good stuff. You do know it's fish and wildlife service. Oh. Federal fish and wildlife service.

[Randy Brown]

Oh. Because that's where my brother works.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

That's why he. Okay, okay. I don't know. I'm sorry about that. That was Corinne's problem. U. S. Fish and wildlife service. And that, that helps that. That's a good tea. Into how. Why Randy's here. Randy, my brother Danny, who works for the U S. Fish and wildlife service, has never once in his life made a recommendation of someone that should come on the podcast. Ever. I don't want to say he's stingy with respect, but he just like, you know, he, he, you know, he, he called me and said, you know, who you need to have on this show is Randy Brown. Because he like in the 70s, moved up and lived in the bush in Alaska and lived off the land up in the Yukon and ate like a strict meat diet, raised his kids up there, had all these adventures, later decided to become a fisheries biologist, got himself educated, is doing all this cutting edge work on, on these kind of mysterious fish in Alaska. He's like, that's who you should be talking to. I had to convince you to do it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, you did.

[Randy Brown]

So thanks for coming down, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Hey, you bet.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. I wish we had you here for like three, two shows because I do want to do one show about living in the bush, living off the land in the bush, then want to do another show about fish. Yeah, but we're gonna have to condense it, you know.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I'm amenable to it.

[Randy Brown]

Okay. We gotta do two quick things. Three, a couple quick things before we get there. One, man, you weren't here for it. We had this guy on about quail. People got mad about that. So I don't know if you know about this, Randy, but down here there's like a huge problem with bobwhite quail just vanishing across their range.

[Steve Rinella]

I didn't know that.

[Randy Brown]

A host of problems with bobwhite quail. So we had a guy in who had developed. It's like a dewormer. They have high parasite loads in some areas. Particularly in Texas, they have a high parasite load. So a guy comes in, we call it the episode what Happened to the Bob Boy Quail. A guy comes in, he's like, oh, there's all kinds of things that are happening to bobwhite quail. One of them is a high parasite load. So he gets the first FDA approved drug for wildlife that is publicly available. Meaning any Joe Blow can buy this quail feed with a dewormer in it.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Randy Brown]

And you can put it out and try to reduce parasite loads in your quail. And he has found anecdotally and otherwise through research that it's helpful to quail in some areas where they have high parasite loads to deworm them. But man, oh man, oh man, the whole world, the whole quail world's very upset that he came on because they're like, it distracts from the main message of Habitat. I disagree because he talked about Habitat a whole bunch. But anyways, we're going to have another quail. We're going to have a better quail, not a better. We're going to have a different quail person on to explain why it's bad. Among other things. Like it'll be like, what re that episode will be called what really happened to the Bob White Quail. And in it I will press the individual to explain why it's bad to deal with if there's a big problem with 10 parts to it. Why it's bad to deal with one of those parts.

[Giannis]

Yeah, I'm guessing that the ratio between the, the size of parts is going to be.

[Randy Brown]

Dude, I'm not doing a great job of articulating all of the consternation because, yeah, a lot of consternation in the quail world. What was the world before we found was. Remember we talked about there was a world. Oh, the beekeeping world. Beekeepers get.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, very, very particular and yeah, sensitive.

[Randy Brown]

This is. That was our first. That was the first time we ever weighed in on the Bob White quail. So we're going to have a follow up episode about Bob White quail and we're going to talk about that Bob White quail episode. Quick question from, from, to put to the people in the room. This is from a fellow named Christian. So he's. Check this out. What state's he in?

[Ethan]

New York.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, okay. He's in New York. He gets a. This is a letter. He's 33 years old. Odd that he told us that he's 33 years old and owns 30 acres. Maybe he likes it. How how close his age is to his acreage? It says, I'm 33 years old and own 30 acres with his brother in upstate New York. His father bought the land in the 80s. He said he. Here's his letter, here's his question, here's his ethical conundrum. Over the last few years, we've been dealing with a landowner who owns the property next to us who is strongly against hunting. Now, keep in mind, these guys have owned this place since the 80s. Okay? While we are respectful neighbors and hunt by the book, she harasses us every year. Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with such an issue? So, on the day before the opener of New York's gun season, he receives this text. He cleaned out the names because he doesn't want the person to get harassed. His name and her name. He cleaned the names out. This is in New York State. She texts him on the eve of the opener of the deer opener. Good morning. Here we go again. Much to my dismay, you are back to kill the deer. Oh, sorry. You are back to kill the deer I love and for whom I provide a sanctuary that for you, becomes a killing field. It is a nightmare for me. So before you tell me not to text you again, I'd like to remind you that we share a property boundary. I encourage the presence of deer, and you can take advantage of this. It is not right. And as we still live in a partially civil society, I'm asking you with all civility to please stay off my land and not take care and not take advantage of the preponderance of deer that are here because I provide protection and a sanctuary for them. Best wishes.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm so curious about what her sanctuary looks like.

[Danny]

She signed off with best wishes and.

[Randy Brown]

Started with good morning and ended with best wishes.

[Danny]

Yeah, seems pretty civil.

[Steve Rinella]

But he's not moving on to her property. He's on his property.

[Randy Brown]

He's not on her property.

[Ethan]

And it seems like she's been doing this kind of thing for a while before you tell me not to text you again. Right, Yeah, I think Giannis had the right approach. We talked about it earlier.

[Steve Rinella]

What's that?

[Danny]

Lay it on us.

[Giannis]

Oh, maybe just go pay her a visit with. With a warden on your. On your hip.

[Randy Brown]

She hasn't done anything.

[Giannis]

Let's have a chat with her. Well, unless, I don't know at what point it becomes hunter harassment.

[Randy Brown]

A text. This begins good morning and ends. Best wishes to a neighboring property is not harassment. She didn't threaten them.

[Ethan]

No, it wouldn't be in There going to, like, threaten to put her in jail. Just have the warden give. Give her a little, like, education.

[Giannis]

If this is all she's doing is sending texts like this, then Christians should just reply to her and say, hey, we're not going to go on your property. We're going to continue hunting. We do everything by the law, et cetera, and it's over and done.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Giannis]

But if it's a. If there's something more than what we're seeing here because we're getting just a little snippet of this world, then I would say go and pay her a visit for sure.

[Randy Brown]

But I would think at this point, I feel at this point, it's like no one wants to get that text, but, I mean, she's asking him to do something. He just would reply and say, respectfully.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, Yanis, I respect my property. Thank you very much.

[Randy Brown]

I respect your. I respect your private property, but I'm gonna use my property in accordance with the law, and I expect that you'll behave in accordance with the law and. Sorry that we don't see eye to eye on this. And then I'd say, have you seen any Biggins?

[Ethan]

It'd make you not want to hunt that border, though, because you'd be worried about a deer running onto her property.

[Randy Brown]

If it runs onto her place. And he's only got. See, he's only got 30 acres.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

So, I mean, not only. That's great. It's more than I got, but.

[Steve Rinella]

Not.

[Randy Brown]

More than Yanni's got.

[Giannis]

That's a nice chunk for a Back East.

[Steve Rinella]

Well.

[Danny]

I feel like Giannis has some experience here that most of us don't. With the psychological burden that overbearing neighbor can put on you.

[Randy Brown]

That's right.

[Danny]

So if there is more here. Because it does. It just weighs on. You're like, oh, yeah. Every shot that goes off, I'm gonna get a text. Every truck that comes up our driveway, I'm gonna get a text. Every.

[Randy Brown]

You know, had that very similar situation around a raccoon. So he's scarred. That's why he's ready to get. He's ready to get the law. He's ready to throw down.

[Ethan]

Yeah. If this lady's giving him heartburn, it's.

[Randy Brown]

Like, here's another listener question. So that. So. So that my official answer. I mean, if anyone. I don't know, it sounds like from around the room. No. Yanni wants to get a game ward and go over there.

[Ethan]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like a preemptive.

[Randy Brown]

He wants to do a preemptive Strike.

[Ethan]

I like it.

[Randy Brown]

Yanni proposes a preemptive strike. I propose. I propose saying, sorry we don't see eye to eye. I'm gonna.

[Ethan]

I could see just doing nothing also.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Ethan]

Just go on with your life.

[Randy Brown]

Definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely justifiable to do nothing. Yeah, that's totally fair. Here's another question. Listener question. We got talking recently about pre chewing deer meat to give to your kids. Like when our kids, all of our kids, when they turn, like, pretty much the day they were nine months old, I would chew up deer meat and give it to them just as like a thing like to like a symbolic gesture. And then they would start eating meat at that point. I don't know what they say nowadays. This stuff always changes. But a decade ago, you're supposed to give them meat at nine months or they could chew up meat at nine months.

[Giannis]

Randy, does that apply when you're living out in the bush in Alaska?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I'll tell you what, what we did is take moose ribs that had been boiled up so nice and soft, and I'd give it to the kids and they would chew on it just like the dogs chew on it.

[Giannis]

No meat.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Well, there's some meat. Some. Not a bunch.

[Giannis]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Do you know roughly what age?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, they were still riding in a backpack for me.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

I. I took them around with a. A Jerry pack.

[Randy Brown]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, and they loved it. I had two hands to work with, and they had. They got to look at everything sitting.

[Randy Brown]

Back there, gnawing on ribs.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And if they dropped them, the dogs would take them.

[Randy Brown]

So this guy's wondering. He just shot a deer. Okay. He's a new father, so he had his first kid, shot his first deer with lead ammunition, and now he's wondering if. If it's okay to have his kid and his wife eat it because he's worried about the lead. Come on. Like. No. First off, when you cut it, just cut around the wound, mark. Cut around the wound and then go satisfy your curiosity that, that when people look at lead levels, there's not any evidence that. That hunters that eat a lot of deer meat have elevated levels of lead. There's also a lot of things about inert lead and lead that's like in shot form, but just cut around it. I mean, Paul, if you go and buy. What makes you think the stuff you're buying is so, like, sure. Different. I mean, okay, I don't want to feed them that, but we're going to eat ocean, big ocean fish.

[Ethan]

If it's really weighing on them. Just make the switch to copper bullets or tungsten shot for small game, whatever.

[Randy Brown]

Like. Sure.

[Ethan]

That's the other solution bugging you that much.

[Randy Brown]

But I would cut around it and I mean, that's the main. The main thing we, you know, the main thing we eat.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

I got a whole bag full of all the lead shot we pulled out of birds.

[Ethan]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You know what I'm gonna do with that?

[Ethan]

Reload it.

[Randy Brown]

No woman. I was at this event, we did this book event, and a woman came and she had this pendant that was like a dis. Like a dish. And it was full of all kinds of shot. And I was admiring it, and it was all the shot from her first turkey. And they sent. And her and her husband sent me a kit to make them. So I'm taking all the shot we've ever picked out, all of our food, because I always put in a bag and I'm making my wife a necklace. And it's got like this resin. So you take the dish.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And you put all the shot in the dish. It's like a pendant. And then you squirt this resin in there and then hold a black light on it and it makes like a necklace of all the shot you picked out of your food.

[Steve Rinella]

That's cool.

[Ethan]

Does your wife know she's getting this?

[Randy Brown]

Oh, yeah, I've told her about 10 times. I just haven't made it yet. I got enough for two necklaces, so I'm gonna have one for my wife, more for my daughter.

[Steve Rinella]

There was another person who wrote in about pre chewed food. He says that his mom was a dentist and when he himself had a kid, his mom was like, no, no, no, don't do the pre chewed food thing because. Or a dental hygienist because she said cavities develop. I don't think I. I don't think the logic is sound, but cavities develop because of bacteria. So if you take food and you chew it up and then you give it to your kid, that might increase their likelihood of developing cavities because you're introducing different bacteria.

[Ethan]

All their baby teeth are gonna fall out anyway.

[Steve Rinella]

That's why I didn't put it in the notes because I thought that was like.

[Randy Brown]

It didn't make any sense. They barely have any teeth and there's nothing on your mom's mouth that isn't getting on you.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly, exactly. That's why I didn't include it. But I thought I'd.

[Ethan]

I think the pre chew and th. Food thing has Been played out. We need to move on.

[Randy Brown]

Well, with that said, at least until.

[Danny]

We get another email or put it.

[Steve Rinella]

On a T shirt.

[Randy Brown]

So, Randy, what. What drew you to Alaska, man? Like, how'd you wind up in Al. Where did you grow up? And. And what drew you up there?

[Steve Rinella]

So I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And so that was Southern Rockies, where my stomping ground as a kid used to fish. And, you know, it was more like hunting for those little rainbows up in the headwaters. And I just. I don't know, I just wanted to live out in the woods. I'd read some of these, you know, books like the Big sky and some others.

[Randy Brown]

A.B. guthrie's.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And I always felt like I was born about 100 years too late. So that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to go out into the woods, and I had 10. Speed was my transportation at the time. So when I finished high school, I had got accepted up to university in Fairbanks and came up for one semester and quit and went and milked cows for the rest of that year and then moved out in the woods up onto the.

[Randy Brown]

Who'd you milk cows for?

[Steve Rinella]

They had a few dairies up in that Palmer Wasilla area just north of Anchorage that were partially subsidized by the state.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

And they never did. They never did make it. So they could compete with milk being shipped up from lower 48 because they. I think just with the cold and the inability to grow a lot of the grains, they. They had to ship grain up to increase milk fat. And in the dairy world, it's my understanding that milk fat content, that was what determined the price they got from it. And so they were always on the edge. But I worked at this one place. Room and board, 700 bucks a month. And you were there milking? It was about 200 cows twice a day. It was pretty wild.

[Randy Brown]

They fed you, housed you, gave you 700 bucks.

[Steve Rinella]

Yep.

[Randy Brown]

And you milked 200 cows?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Giannis]

How long did that take?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, it was about four or five hours of milking, if I remember right. You'd milk them in the morning and then milk them in the evening.

[Randy Brown]

And at this point, you're 18 years old, roughly.

[Steve Rinella]

I was 18.

[Randy Brown]

And when you say you went to live in the woods, how's that even begin? Like what?

[Steve Rinella]

So there was a buddy of mine that came up with me. He and I used to kick around in the mountains and winter camp and everything. So he and I had picked out off of a map that we were going to go up Onto the Totandic river downstream from Eagle.

[Ethan]

What, what like what year was this?

[Steve Rinella]

So it was 1976.

[Ethan]

So it was the Homestead act still in play there?

[Steve Rinella]

No.

[Ethan]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

So.

[Ethan]

So I might be jumping ahead but.

[Steve Rinella]

So, so the deal there was a Homestead act opening in the late 60s I believe and another one in 73. There have been some state land dispersals as well but those, those two acts were before I ever got out there and. And then the state gave away. They. They would have these land lotteries you know in various places. But it was kind of screwy I thought because. Because you were going to have a bunch of people going out into the same place and nobody could have. Could have made a living with that many people in those places. And a lot of. A lot of them didn't really survive. You know they would go out there, build a cabin and then realize I got to get in here with an airplane. There's four other people with places and. And a lot of people left or never proved up on it. You know so.

[Giannis]

So too many people trying to draw from the same resource.

[Steve Rinella]

That's right. Yeah. So. So out on the Yukon people were you know organized 10 to 20 miles apart down the Yukon up the side creeks. And so that was sufficient distance, you know provided they could establish trap lines in different places that they could make a living off of the. Off of the country there. They weren't stepping on each other's toes.

[Randy Brown]

So when you tried to pick a spot how did you know that you wouldn't be crowded in with other guys or didn't you?

[Steve Rinella]

We didn't. And in fact we went down to Teutonic river and there was a guy named Dick Cook who lived there and Tautandic River. So this is right up near the border with Canada Right where the Yukon comes in. There's a town of Eagle. It's got a road to it. And then Circle is downstream about 160 miles. And then there's several of these tributaries that are canoeable. And so Totandic river was the farthest upstream of those tributaries. Well actually 70 mile river that was from the south. But the Teutonic river flowed for about nine miles in Alaska before it plunged into the Yukon. But you had big mountains there. The Ogilvie Mountains. That's a big range. Goes from Dawson area all the way over to the border between the Yukon and the Porcupine River. You know all along that border is the western side of the Ogilvies big limestone mountains with sheep. And of course we didn't know Any of that, but we knew there were mountains there. But Dick. Dick let us know that. That he lived. He had a place five miles up to Tondic and a place down on the Yukon and that there wasn't enough room for us, and there wasn't.

[Ethan]

Did you just run into him or you knew he was in the area or how'd you make contact with him?

[Steve Rinella]

We made contact on the river. We were lining up the Tetondic River.

[Randy Brown]

Oh. To go establish a place to live.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ethan]

You're like, damn, there's a cabin here.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, we didn't see the cabin. He was downstream of that. But we pulled over, he was talking. Well, he. He saw us on the way in. And this guy Charles was about six and a half feet tall, and I was just about six. And so when we came back down, even though we realized we weren't going to be able to make a place there, we went up and explored around and fished and walked in the mountains and things. On our way back down, though, Dick was talking with John McPhee. That was the year John McPhee came out there.

[Randy Brown]

I'm aware that you had a run in with McPhee while he was writing coming into the country.

[Steve Rinella]

Right, right.

[Randy Brown]

So you pull up and he's literally talking to John McPhee.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And John McPhee. And John McPhee dips his cup into the river and offers it to us. And we're like, we don't need that. We've been drinking the river.

[Randy Brown]

What was that for?

[Steve Rinella]

Because he was amazed that there was a river that was clean enough that you could drink out of. That's what it was. And so he was, I don't know, offering it to the. We would kneel down and drink water and whatever. But. Yeah, but as it turns out, Dick was. When John was with Dick, Dick was looking at our tracks and he's telling John, okay, well, you can tell one guy's really big, you know, because of the stride lengths and everything. So John ended up. What did he call Dick? The grand Swami of trackers or something like that. But. But Dick never told him that he'd seen us before. So. So anyway, yeah, what a deal. But.

[Randy Brown]

So you're sort of incoming into the country.

[Steve Rinella]

Sort of. Not really, but sort of. And. And then we headed back to Eagle because we didn't know what the heck we were going to do. And when we were back there, there was a fire that was taking place on the Canadian side of the border, just north of the Yukon. And the Canadians and the U.S. they have these agreements. And so the BLM put the fire. They went out and worked on that fire, and they hired me and Charles out there. And so we went and worked on a fire. And during that period of time, I met this guy, Mike Potts. And Mike Potts had. Had. He lived in the village. He married a gal in the village, and. And he had a trap line.

[Randy Brown]

Was that his real name?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, Mike Potts.

[Randy Brown]

You ever hear of John Coulter? He was a mountain. He was a. They used to call it, well, the Yellowstone. Coulter's. Hell, yeah. Okay. He was over by where seth lives in 1808, and he was with a guy and they got caught by the Blackfeet, and that guy's name was Mike Potts.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh.

[Randy Brown]

And they cut Mike Potts all up in little bits and smeared him all over John Colter and then Coulter. Then they made Colter start running, and that was Coulter's run. That was Mike Potts.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Different mic. Po.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a different mic. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

This happens all the time. You subscribe to something, you forget about it after the trial period ends, and then you're charged month after month after month. The subscriptions are there, but you're not using them. In fact, 85% of people have at least one paid subscription that goes unused each month. Thanks to Rocket Money, I can see all my subscriptions in one place and cancel the ones I'm not using anymore and save money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps you find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitor your spending, and help lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all of the app's premium features. See all of your subscriptions in one place and know exactly where your money is going. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com Meater today. That's RocketMoney.com Meater Rocket Money.com Meater hey, guys, earlier this year, we launched Meat Eater Kids Podcast. And we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it, we were going to make more. And you did, and we did. And we're dropping a bunch. New five new Meat Eater Kids podcast episode starting November 25th. Again, it's a kids show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts. There's a little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson. There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to kids focused conservation organizations. So Meat Eater Kids podcast coming back. Round two, Meat Eater Kids find Meat.

[Steve Rinella]

Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts. Well, so Mike always. Well, several times he had people come out to his trapline south of Eagle, back on the north fork of the 40 mile and help him do building projects or haul meet and various other things. And so he invited me to go out there with him that winter. And he had a dog team at a couple cabins and wanted help with hunting and I went with him. Charles got involved with gold mining.

[Randy Brown]

This is six and a half foot Charles.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And so he went gold mining and I went trapping. And it was kind of like an apprenticeship, you know, building cabins with moss jinking, which is a, a wonderful way to go just with materials that you find out there in the woods and then taking care of meat. We ended up getting a bear and a big moose that was really fat. You know, these animals go through these cycles of fat and lean and big bull before they go into rut. Has enormous amount of fat on it. And so Mike showed me how to, how to, how to cut that stuff off and be able to render it into. Into oil.

[Randy Brown]

So rendering moose fat.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And he was using that moose fat as a frying medium or like for baking or. What was he doing with it, the rendered moose fat?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, yes, it was, it was to. For frying, but it was also just to eat with your meat. And then there was cracklings that was left over and those were also. So. So the deal with eating straight meat is you got to eat meat and fat and. And we would use it that way. Sometimes we'd render as much as 12 gallons. I think was the most we rendered off a single big bowl. Damn, that's kidney fat. Kidneys, Kidney fat that can fill a five gallon bucket. Once you take the kidney out, jam it in there and then all sorts of other fat in the intestines, the ribs, the brisket, the back.

[Danny]

So you were using primarily internal fat, not the external fat, not the back fat.

[Steve Rinella]

We used the back fat too.

[Danny]

Did you have separate uses or was it all just one oil at the end of the day?

[Steve Rinella]

One oil.

[Danny]

Okay, got it.

[Steve Rinella]

And moose fat is hard, so, you know, when you, if you take it at room temperature, it'll crack off in a chunk. It's not like butter or anything like that. It breaks off in a solid chunk that you then throw in the frying pan, melt it out, fry the meat, and then when it starts cooling off, you can dip it and get a big swath of the fat on the meat. So that was our main.

[Randy Brown]

Then you take your thumbnail and scrape it off the roof of your mouth.

[Steve Rinella]

There is that. But the good thing about moose fat is if you render it clean and decant it and pour it off into a bucket, it will keep through a summer, so you can have it without spoiling. Bare fat, on the other hand, will go rancid if it's not kept very cold. So it's very different. Bear fat is more of a liquid, almost liquid at room temperature. But it won't keep. You can't keep it for over a summer. I mean, you could if you had it in a freezer, but we were dealing with whatever the temperature.

[Giannis]

I feel like I've had it survive just in the pantry at the house for a year, plus.

[Steve Rinella]

But it goes rancid. Yeah. My experience was that it went rancid and then it becomes dog food because they don't care.

[Giannis]

Sure, sure. Can you give. You're talking about some pretty specific places on the map, and I think you're doing a good job for people that know that area of Alaska. But can you give just a little bit bigger of a geographical context? Because I think Eagle sort of as like the jumping off point of. For a lot of people that went to do what you did and just kind of where that lies and why it's there and why people that are drawn to. That are drawn to Eagle. I think that's important.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, yeah, so that's right at the border with Canada. I mean, it's like 10 miles downstream of the border. And back in those days, anyway, that was after the Native Claim Settlement act and before anilca, and so there was kind of a void and all that. A lot of the land in Alaska at that point was just sort of managed by. By blm.

[Ethan]

Didn't we do a podcast on that? Native. Native claims, Aspects of the Native.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Ethan]

People are wondering.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, can I do it real quick?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, go for it.

[Randy Brown]

And correct me where I'm wrong here. During. It was during the Carter administration, they finally. They finalized a lot of it, but for a long time, Alaska. A lot of the land in Alaska was in a sort of managerial limbo.

[Steve Rinella]

That's correct.

[Randy Brown]

Right. And it was. They knew that Native Alaskan Tribes would. Would claim some and some things would become park. But for a long time it was just in a limbo. And then during the Carter administration and then leading up to the Trans Alaska Pipeline and oil and Prudhoe Bay, they started to figure out with greater clarity, this land is. Is. This land is going to be parked. This land is state land, this land is native land. This land will be BLM land. Is that fairly accurate?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. They discovered the. So the statehood act laid out basic acreages of land that would become part of the state ownership versus federal ownership and that there had to be some sort of native claim settlement. But it wasn't figured out. They didn't have it all sorted out on where it was going to be or other things like that. There were some parks, like the Denali was already there and the Arctic, they called it National Wildlife Range rather than a refuge. And, and that. So there's things that were already sorted out for the federal system when they found oil and they were looking for a way to get it south. The Secretary of the Interior at the time, Udall, and he essentially stopped everything, put a hold on everything. And so that was the incentive to get the native land claims settled. Right, Got it. If you're going to put a pipeline through, we better figure out what land it is as it goes, who's going.

[Randy Brown]

To end up owning what.

[Steve Rinella]

Right, yeah. And so that took place and it also laid out the D2 lands, which were the federal lands, conservation areas, refuges, parks, other things like that, not necessarily where they were or how big each plot was going to be, but that there would be these parks and refuges in various places.

[Randy Brown]

So in this area that we're talking about, like what Yanni asked about where basically where the Yukon river flows out of Yukon Territory into Alaska, at that time in the 70s, a lot of people were moving into that area because you could just go live, right? Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And it was. So the deal was that blm, what I heard was BLM had gone up into the 40 mile country and gone down and burned two cabins they considered to be trespass cabins. And they got taken to court over that. And the legal response was that they had to consider any cabin they thought was trespass. They had to deal with it in the courts before they did anything with it. They, they had to treat it like private property. And so they were just like, hands off, we're not going to deal with it.

[Randy Brown]

Got it.

[Steve Rinella]

And so there were people that went down onto the Yukon and there were people doing this in a lot of different Places. But that was where I knew about at the time. But there was. It was sort of a. You just had to kind of negotiate with neighbors, with other people that were living there for a place that wasn't gonna step on somebody else's toes or interfere with their trap line. And that's what Dick did with us, you know, he said, you can't do it, you know, and we're thinking Santa Fe time. We'll be at least a mile away. No, no, 20 miles, you know.

[Randy Brown]

So when you spent that, when you did that apprenticeship with the guy, did that lead you to find a place you could go set up in?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So there was a. He did it the year before with this guy named Little John. Little John Gaudio. And Little John was out there on the 40 mile trap at a different cabin that same winter that I went out and helped Mike. I helped him finish a cabin in the snow and then took care of. We had a moose and a bear and so I took care of those out of his main cabin. Well, he went back and then came back out later in November or something with his dogs. And during the winter, Little John and I spent a lot of time together. And we decided we were going to go. Well, we were initially going to go up the Colleen river the next year. And when we started down the Yukon, though Colleen is a big tributary of the Porcupine River. So to get there you'd have to go down to Yukon a couple hundred miles and then up the. Up the Porcupine a couple hundred miles and then up the Colleen River. And how were you guys, Were you.

[Ethan]

Guys getting in by bush plane or were you like traveling by boat or like how were you getting into this remote stuff?

[Danny]

How were you and Little John hanging out together? Weren't you 20 miles apart?

[Steve Rinella]

It's double end canoes. And we were lining. We had no motors.

[Ethan]

And then the winter dogs, of course.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So Little John had dogs. I didn't at the time, but I ended up getting a couple of puppies off a litter. And so when we started down to Yukon though, we had two canoes. He had a canoe and I had one. And we got down, partway down and found out that nobody was living on the Kandik River. Kandik river is a big, big tributary of the Yukon there between Eagle and Circle. So it's about 80 miles. The mouth is about 80 miles downstream of Eagle. And it also headwatered in Canada and flowed for over 100 miles through Alaska. And we decided there was a guy living at the mouth of the Kandick River. And it was a guy named Fred Beach.

[Randy Brown]

And he told you, no one's upstream of me.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, several other people did too. They knew that there was nobody up there. And he reiterated that and said he rarely makes it past three miles up. He had two dogs. And so we decided we were going to go up there and check it out. And so we started lining up the river and feeding ourselves along the way. We had a gillnet and we would shoot beavers and feed us and the dogs in that way. We'd shoot squirrels sometimes for the dogs.

[Danny]

What was your lining up process and what type of mileage could you make going upstream like that?

[Steve Rinella]

So lining is a process where you have about 100 foot long rope and one end's tied to the front of the canoe, one's to the back. Canoe lining is more easily done if they got a little keel on the bottom. And so what you're doing is adjusting these two lines so that that canoe stays offshore and tries to stay parallel with the current. So big gravel bar, you just walk up on the gravel and it's out in the water pulling it along. And then when you want to cross, you jump in it and cross and go up the other side. If you have to get by a drift pile or by a big cut bank, you might use a pole, about a 10 foot spruce pole and just push yourself off the bottom to get past.

[Danny]

So are you kind of walking backwards when you're lining then?

[Steve Rinella]

No, it's not that much. Well, if you were hauling a moose, you might.

[Danny]

Yeah. Not enough drag.

[Steve Rinella]

Not enough drag. It just goes real smooth.

[Giannis]

So by adjusting the two lengths of that rope, you're just adjusting the angle of the canoe and that's. It's basically fairing in the current.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, you can have it that it's straight out from you.

[Steve Rinella]

You can just go down river. Yeah, yeah, just about. Yeah. And so there's boulder fields on the Kandik river. And so you could you. It's. If you got a keel, it's like power steering. You can go around between rocks and everything. So whereas if you don't have a keel, it kind of bumps against shore. It doesn't go very well at all.

[Randy Brown]

And how many miles were you making on that big river?

[Steve Rinella]

You know, sometimes 10 miles. More often six or eight a day.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. And you got.

[Steve Rinella]

So we get. So. So I don't know if you know this, but. But when the second world war came along, the, the government ended up. When we got involved in it, they shut down materials that could be used for the war effort from going anywhere else. And all of the mines in Alaska, with a couple of exceptions, got shut down. And what people back in the 30s and early 40s were doing is trapping in the winter and then working the mines in the summer. And so the fur industry went down, too, and they left. And so that was. All the cabins that we found on the Kandik were of that vintage, you know. So we were coming there 40 years after anybody had been there. And so we went upriver with one canoe, and one of us would walk the spruce groves looking for cabins, and the other would line and switch off here and there. And we found a few cabins, but none of which were functional because back then they didn't have a lot of the waterproofing tarps and various other things. And so they would develop a leak somewhere. They had. They used tar paper on the roofs and sometimes dirt over that or moss. And. But if they ever got a leak, you know, then you'd get a rot going on, and the roof would fall in or a wall would crash out or something like that. But what we did see was big piles of moose antlers and then in the upper river, big piles of caribou antlers, too. So we thought piles. Well, what do you do with them?

[Randy Brown]

Mean? From the people that were living there.

[Steve Rinella]

From the people that had lived them there.

[Giannis]

Ah, I see.

[Steve Rinella]

And they wouldn't. They wouldn't do anything with. They bring them in, but they wouldn't do anything with them. So they throw them in a pile.

[Giannis]

I see.

[Steve Rinella]

And they would last for a long time. And so, I mean, porcupines chew them and squirrels and things like that, but they were still there.

[Giannis]

That was a good sign, because you're thinking.

[Steve Rinella]

And we thought, why go to the choline? We're going to come up here. And that's what we did.

[Randy Brown]

And then when you were seeing all those antlers, it would show you where people had lived and also show you where places that might be good hunting.

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly. And in almost every case, there was a thin area, open lead or something in the Kandik river that would. For water in the winter. They were great places. Dry, dry spruce woods and good water.

[Randy Brown]

And you found a guy that had starved to death, right?

[Steve Rinella]

I did. Yeah. Me and. Me and Fred, we found him. He was.

[Danny]

That was nowhere near a big pile of antlers.

[Steve Rinella]

He was not well, so. So little John and I had gone up and we had built two cabins, or mostly built two cabins. And then we went back to Eagle and Got traps and things and stoves. And we came back down and Fred came with us and a couple other folks who were interested in having line cabins. Just cabins, emergency cabins, you know, if you get wet because these rivers, they'll overflow, and sometimes you need to get past anyway, and so you get wet. And having a cabin in various places was. Was beneficial. So. So Fred wanted one about 10 miles up the river. And he's the one that kind of designed this. It was a little. It wasn't a very good cabin. It was about 5ft tall on the inside, and there weren't any windows. And the door was just a piece of plywood that we had found in a drift pile out on the Yukon. And it just had these leather hinges on it. So that was what that and then a bunk. It was about 6ft wide by 9ft long.

[Ethan]

Just somewhere to survive, somewhere to get out of.

[Steve Rinella]

Out of the cold and have a fire. And that's where Smeagol ended up going. We called him Smeagol. Well, so the deal with him, he came down.

[Randy Brown]

Who's this guy?

[Danny]

This is the dead guy.

[Steve Rinella]

The dead guy. Eventually.

[Randy Brown]

Sorry.

[Danny]

So eventually he's not there yet.

[Steve Rinella]

You knew this guy before he died? I did not. But Fred had seen him. Fred was this gregarious guy that lived at the mouth of the Kandik. And a lot of different people would come in there. There was a slew that you could catch pike and things. And so everybody had it on their. On their. On their maps. You know, they would go in there and he would go over and trade things. You know, a beaver hide for a sleeping bag or various things like this. And one year, this guy that. That we called Smeagol, he. He called himself John the Baptist, but he and a. And a buddy of his had floated down from Canada on a raft, on a log raft. And there was a big cabin just like a mile upstream of the Kandic. And they had seen that and gone to spend the night there. And his buddy during the night, shoved the raft off and left. And so he wakes up the next morning, he ditched him. He ditched him, ditched Smeagol. And so. And so he. He had the clothes on his back, sleeping bag, and. And. And a shotgun, a 20 gauge. You know, those Rossi's with the external. He had a 20 gauge shotgun.

[Danny]

You just got to wonder how much background. Have you. Have you tried to do any background? Like the ditch in the partner is that bad character of which one?

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, who was the. Who was the. Who was the sort of Dick. You know? Right, Exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

I have no idea. I have no idea. But this guy wandered down and he didn't know Fred was there.

[Randy Brown]

John the Baptist Smith.

[Steve Rinella]

John the Baptist, Yeah. Wandered down to. And this is like early September. He wandered down to the mouth of Kandik and saw that there was somebody in this cabin across the slough. And Fred came over and got him. And Fred was always, like, you know, happy with the system, you know. Always wanted to show it to somebody. A canoe back on a lake where they go to hunt ducks and muskrats, you know, and various other, you know, a cache here or there, you know, And. And me, just so I'm clear, like.

[Randy Brown]

He had a sweet setup and he Share. He'd want to share it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Like, I catch pike here, I do this there.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Okay. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And. And he was not very ambitious, so he only. He might get a links or two, you know, in. In trapping or in 8 or 10 Martin and, you know, that would be enough for him. He just didn't. Wasn't very ambitious. And so he's not very ambitious. Guy out there, though. It's got to be fairly ambitious. Maybe he didn't build the cabin. They called it Morris's. It was from back a long time ago. Yeah. But anyway, he decided that he was going to go back east that fall. And he told this guy that he had to catch a ride or build a raft and go to Circle. They couldn't stay there. But the guy stayed, and Fred got a ride. There was a. There was a barge called the Brainstorm that ran out of Circle, and it would go up to Eagle and Dawson.

[Randy Brown]

I got interrupted. Just. I got lost for a minute.

[Steve Rinella]

So Fred.

[Randy Brown]

So Fred's living there? Yeah. And. Okay, let's just stick with just calling him Smeagol. Fred's living there. Smeagol comes down. Smeagol's been abandoned by his buddy.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Now. Now, who says they're going back? They got to go east.

[Steve Rinella]

Fred is. Fred had his plan to go back east. So he had. He had a bunch of food stored.

[Randy Brown]

Oh. And he says. But he says, you can't stay here at my house.

[Steve Rinella]

You can't stay at my house. You have to find a ride to Circle.

[Randy Brown]

I'm gonna be gone. I'm gonna be out of town. And when I'm out of town, I don't want you here eating my food.

[Steve Rinella]

That's right.

[Randy Brown]

Got it.

[Steve Rinella]

Sorry about that. And Fred got to town by. By hailing this barge. The barge would pick people up. I mean, it was A big enough barge, it could haul like a dump truck, you know, on its deck and building materials and things. And it would go down and go to Fort Yukon and then up to Okro on the porcupine in Canada. But that was that barge's route, right? And the road that would, you know, where supplies were loaded was circle. And so anyway, Fred got a ride up and went back east, hitchhiked back east and spent till it was early November when he got back to Eagle and put his. It wasn't frozen yet. There were, there were ice flowing, you know, but he, he went downstream in his canoe in amongst all these ice chunks.

[Randy Brown]

In November.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, in November.

[Randy Brown]

Not ambitious.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, he knew how to do stuff.

[Randy Brown]

When I hear not ambitious. Let me tell you what I'm pict. This show is sponsored in part by Better Help. And we're coming up into the holiday season. And listen, during the holiday season, like, we're going to go visit the grandmas, everything. I love spending time with family. I like to cook for family and friends. It's a great time of year. But I'm not the first one to point out that the holidays can bring on a lot of stress. It can bring up a lot of family dynamics that are hard to deal with. And maybe you will come into or out of the holiday season thinking that you might like to have someone to talk to and try to run through, through some of the things that are going through your mind. Someone who's impartial. It can help you work through some issues. Well, that's the case. Give Better Help a try. Okay. It's entirely online therapy. It's designed to be convenient, flexible, suited to your schedule. You just fill out a brief questionnaire and get matched with a licensed therapist. And you switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. So find some comfort this December throughout the holiday season with better help. Visit betterhelp.commee eater today you get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp h lp.commeater.

[Steve Rinella]

So he gets down almost to the Kandik river when the river is just jamming up a little too much for even him. And he pulls his canoe out, walks to his cabin, and it's about 20 below, and Smeagol has moved his lamp and his sleeping gear to this cabin up at Three Mile Creek, three miles farther up. And Fred was, he was pissed. And then he left a note on the door. I'm up at Three Mile Cabin, John the Baptist, you know, and so, and so Fred goes up there and this guy, this guy has been eating his jarred fish. He's been eating the moose that he had and has sewn clothes out of furs that Fred had. He's loaded all of our ammunition. Fred had this metal box bolted to a tree that would kind of like an underbed box on a truck. And it was back in the woods behind his place. But of course he'd shown this guy that. And that was where all of us, me and Fred and little John had reloading materials there. And so he had loaded everything. We all shot.243s and so he had loaded it all, but with different, you know, you shake it and it's. None of it was consistent. None of it was consistent. We're like, this is not good. And we had to get a bullet puller, then eventually undo it all. Undo them. Yeah. We weren't going to shoot him. We had no idea what he did.

[Danny]

Right. You're like, this one's good for grouse. This one might, might take down a moose maybe.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So. So. So anyway, I had left my snowshoe. I had store bought snowshoes, but I left them down there because I wanted to, I wanted to build a pair and I knew that if I had a store bought pair, I wouldn't. Yep, right. And so I had left a pair down there and built a new set. And. But anyway, Fred, Fred is, Fred is pissed off at this guy. Fred used to grow pot on the roof of his, that cabin. He would, he would throw dog shit up there and then he would throw seeds. It wasn't, it wasn't any good psychedelic weed that's like mushrooms. Yeah, it wasn't any good weed. What?

[Randy Brown]

It wasn't good weed?

[Danny]

No, not like, not for the area. Good weed or not good weed, Haggars.

[Ethan]

Can'T be choosers kind of weed.

[Randy Brown]

It.

[Steve Rinella]

It, it would give you a headache more than it would give you a high. But anyway, this guy had smoked all his pot too.

[Ethan]

He was living high on the hog while you guys were gone.

[Steve Rinella]

And Fred got pissed about that. And he says it wasn't any good sticking around. Anyway. Fred said you got to go circle or eagle after it freezes up. You got to go because I'm going to kill you otherwise. Right. And so, and so this guy says, I'm not going either. I'm going to Chelkisik. So Chuquitsuk is on the black river flowing down into the porcupine. And it's a long ways north from the Kandik River. But that's what this guy says further.

[Randy Brown]

Into the bush further.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And so Fred outfits him with some grain and some rice and some beans, some stems. Gave him a.22 pistol.

[Danny]

Holy cow.

[Steve Rinella]

And. And this guy takes off with my snowshoes, right, And. And cruises up the Candic river because he's going to go up the Kandik and over into the. The Black river drainage. And. And. And so I came down late. He left late November. And. And I had.

[Randy Brown]

So I. Freaking dark, too.

[Steve Rinella]

I was. Yeah, I was staying in this cabin above Johnson gorge, so about 30 miles up the river. And so I would line a canoe up there and spend the winter. But there was a pass. You could go over some mountains and down to the Yukon. And I preferred to do that than run the river because the river would overflow and then your trail would be gone and things. And you could get to a place that was all water. So I came down.

[Giannis]

Overflow, meaning that you get water flowing on top of the ice.

[Steve Rinella]

That's right, yeah. So once a river freezes over, you get snow on it. Sometimes the. The flow is. Is enough that it. It doesn't have enough room underneath the ice as it starts thickening up. Weight on it and things, and it'll seep up into the snow over the ice. And then it's. It's. It's slush for a while until it reaches the surface and refreezes, you know. But. But anyway, so. So I had come down over this pass and come down to get my snowshoes because the ones I built I broke and I had to splice them or. Anyway, I got down there in early December, like 10 days after Smeagol had left Fred. And Fred says, well, he took your snowshoes. And I said, let's go and get him. And so we started walking up the river. But that was a really big snow year. And it was. We went about five miles up and I decided, yeah, heck, he can go wherever he wants. But, you know, I'm like, he's not going to make it to Chelchitsik, no way. And it actually became a topic among all of us living on the river.

[Ethan]

Where is Smeagol?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, we all knew from being out there that you can't make a living with a.22 pistol in the winter. You might shoot a grouse or a. A squirrel or something like that here or there, but you can't feed yourself that way. And he didn't have enough food to start with.

[Ethan]

Something tells me his buddy had a reason to abandon him after hearing this story.

[Steve Rinella]

I think maybe so, yeah.

[Randy Brown]

We've honed in on who's the dick.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I think maybe so.

[Danny]

So just to pause here for a second, again, it became a topic amongst everybody on the river. I imagine this is mostly in your heads with little bits of being together. Because keep in mind, right now we're in the days of instant gratification. Point being right there. Cell phones, text messages. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Hey, sorry about that.

[Randy Brown]

Well, that's over here.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, it is?

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I should put mine on airplane too. So.

[Danny]

Yeah, Phil will tell you not to have that thing on the table either.

[Steve Rinella]

Okay.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Sorry to get interference sometimes.

[Randy Brown]

Throw it on your coat over there.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm going to turn it off.

[Randy Brown]

Yep.

[Danny]

Yeah, you're doing great. Large preamble. Just to ask, how often are you all getting together to have conversations in person?

[Steve Rinella]

Hey, we had good dog teams.

[Danny]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

We cruised around and, and we did talk and we did have big gatherings of their, you know, Christmas, New Year's and various other things. No, we, we talked a lot. There'd be people traveling just to say hi or to share some meat or whatever, but there was discussion. Everybody uniformly said there's no way he can make it to Chalquitasik. But there were those that said he probably waved somebody down an airplane. But we didn't have hardly any airplanes ever go by us there. And some people thought, well, maybe he went up a little bit and then walked around Fred's place and got onto the river and walked a circle or, or whatever, you know, and it's like, no, we pay attention to tracks. You know, us living out in the woods in the snow country, you're always looking at tracks. There's nothing that gets by you with tracks. And so we were like, nah, he's got to be dead, you know. And so the next spring. So the Kandic river is great in the fall. Has lots of moose and other, you know, bears and things like that. But in the springtime, the Yukon's the place to be because there's the flyway. You know, you get all the waterfowl coming into Alaska is going by there. And then there's these big south facing bluffs on the mountains that butt up against the Yukon. And they call them steppe community, you know, because they're just at that angle. They'll drain all their snow really early in March sometimes and you get all this new, new growth coming out. Even though everywhere else, you know, there's still three feet of snow laying around and. And the bears would come out early there. So it was. The Yukon was the place to be in the spring feeding yourself. And so that left me with my canoe up at my upper place at 30 miles up. And so I would have to walk the ridge and down and then canoe down to get my canoe back in the spring. So that's what me and Fred did. We. We went up and walked in and get my canoe, and we're coming down. And when we come to where this cabin is, back in the woods, we come around this corner. I see my snowshoes hanging in a tree right there. We're a couple hundred yards up the river. You know, we came around, and I say, fred Smeagol's here. Not alive. And. And we get up there, and you.

[Randy Brown]

Knew he wasn't alive.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, he couldn't have been alive. We didn't have any food there.

[Ethan]

And the snowshoes were still there.

[Steve Rinella]

And the snowshoes were there. He didn't walk away. And so we get up there, we got five dogs, Okay. I had three, and Fred had two at that time.

[Randy Brown]

All in the canoe with you?

[Steve Rinella]

No, they're running the pace.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, I see. Okay. They're just keeping up.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And. And so we get there and walk up to the cabin, and the dogs are all running around, you know, and they are just really. They. They focus on dead things, right? They really, like, you know, if you shoot a bear out of a tree or get a moose, you know, they want to be there. It's just like. That's the thing of interest. So. So. So I open the. The door, and of course, I knock on it just in case, but. And. And there's this sleeping bag on the. The bunk. The bunk had been nine feet long and three feet wide. And it was just these little black spruce back and forth, big ends back and forth. And then, you know, on. On two poles that were notched into the walls, and so. And so all of those poles, except about three feet of them, had been burned. Had been. He had a saw in the. In the house. And so I picked him up, and he was light, and I brought him outside. He was in.

[Randy Brown]

He's in his bag.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, he's in his bag. And so we.

[Danny]

We took him out in Fred's bag.

[Steve Rinella]

Fred's bag. And he was so skinny, his eyes were sunken into his face. And we took his clothes off because we just wanted to see what had happened there. And he was seriously. Skin on bone. There was no meat he had starved out. And the.22 was hanging on a nail in the back wall. And so he definitely didn't kill himself. And the dogs, they were like 20ft away, looking the other way. They wanted nothing to do with this. Wow. You could see their ears are turned back to us. So they were paying attention, but they didn't want to be anywhere as near. It was almost like, you know, one of the. What we were thinking was one of the gods has fallen, you know, and. Because I don't know what they think of us, but I think that may be.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, that's what the dogs think. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, that's interesting. They didn't want nothing to do with it. They didn't want to be near it. They didn't want to smell it close. Nothing. And so we.

[Randy Brown]

How long. At that point, how long you think he'd been dead?

[Steve Rinella]

I really don't know.

[Randy Brown]

Was he froze?

[Steve Rinella]

He had been froze, but he was thawed then and hair was starting to slip on his forehead, but he didn't smell rotten. And. And so we were thinking, what do we do with this guy? You know, we don't have a shovel, the ground's still frozen. We can't bury him. Do we try to take him somewhere? Do we take him to circle? That would be at least a three or four day process to get down there. The Yukon was packed with ice on both sides at that point in time, you know, breakup had put a bunch of ice on the banks. Neither of us had a penny. And we were making our living day by day going down the river. And if we went down to circle, we didn't know anywhere where there would be where to go for food, whether we could get him down there without him. You know, we thought we could put ice in, have him in the bottom of the boat with ice, but that would put us out because we would get down there and we wouldn't. We'd have nothing, no way to make a living. And so we just decided we're gonna leave him here and we put him back on some tundra a little ways away and. And we took off. And then he was. I went back there later in the summer and he was gone. So something had.

[Ethan]

Did you guys eventually get word out to like some authority?

[Steve Rinella]

We told people, but there wasn't anything anybody could do. Yeah, we didn't know who he was.

[Ethan]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

As far as you know, has he ever been identified?

[Steve Rinella]

Not. I have no idea.

[Ethan]

Probably a lot of people. That happened to a lot of people up there.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah. I don't think he was out there because he wanted to stay in touch with his family.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Giannis]

So, yeah, we should probably skip forward to what a fella does when he gets lonely and he figures he's gonna need a companion out living this life.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Ethan]

We could go on this.

[Giannis]

Can we? Yeah. Because otherwise we are going to be here all day, which is fine with me. I'll just cancel a couple upcoming calls.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Danny]

No, I mean, that's. That's amazing. I. I mean, if you guys thought about it that much, I think it's longer than I would have thought about it. It would have been like, well, hopefully that 22 isn't rusted.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Giannis]

Oh, yeah. Did you reuse the sleeping bag?

[Steve Rinella]

Fred took the sleeping bag. No. Yeah.

[Ethan]

And you guys got your snowshoes.

[Steve Rinella]

I got my snowshoes.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Danny]

I was just thinking too, like, if he was that emaciated, had you guys found him alive, probably wouldn't be anything you could have done for him.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, I think that would be hard. Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Danny]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Where did you wind up? The. You eventually found your territory. So did your whole time in the bush wind up being in this river system that you're talking about now?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And eventually got to work. Like Yanni was saying. Eventually got to where you wanted a companion.

[Steve Rinella]

That's absolutely true.

[Danny]

And the dogs weren't cutting it.

[Steve Rinella]

Dogs weren't cutting it. Well, they. They were great, but it wasn't the same. Yeah. Yeah. And. And I wasn't running into single women out there.

[Ethan]

How many. How many years have you been doing it before you decided to head into the Fairbanks?

[Steve Rinella]

I think. I think three. Okay.

[Ethan]

So you're still young.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Giannis]

Were there some couples out there or was it mostly single men doing this thing?

[Steve Rinella]

No, there were couples out there. There were, yeah. Yeah. Most. Most of the other people out there were couples.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, I see.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. They. Would they come third wheel? Well, not really. I wasn't there. I was. Or the one wheel. When you say most of the people.

[Giannis]

Out there, like, how many people are we talking about?

[Steve Rinella]

There were about 20 people or so that lived between eagle and circle. Okay. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And how many miles is that?

[Steve Rinella]

It varied. 100, 160 miles.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And how often would you see. Like how long would you go without seeing people? Well, so when I was up the Kandik, it would be months. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. My father, he came out to visit the first year that I was out there that I spent on the Kandic river. So I'd been out on the north fork at 40 mile. And it was funny cause he was working for park service. He was a historian down in southwest region out of Santa Fe for a while. And Then he got offered a job in Alaska to deal with the D2 lands, which became the Parklands. He was park service, so that's what he dealt with. And he was up in eagle dealing with stuff relating to the Yukon, what became the Yukon Charlie Preserve. And he got buried in effigy there by somebody because the eagle did not like it that his federal lands were coming around. But, you know, they were kind of laid out in statehood and they were laid out in the native claims.

[Ethan]

It's crazy that your dad ended up like right near you.

[Steve Rinella]

So I didn't. I had no idea he was there. But when Little John and I had gone up and gotten the traps and everything, we were at our canoes ready to shove off. And my dad pulls up, right? And he says, randy, where are you at now? I said, well, up at Indian Grave Creek. That's one of the tributaries of the Kandik. And, and that was 60 miles up the Candic. And that was the cabin I was going to be staying in. And he says, he says, I'm going to come and visit you for Christmas. And. And when I say fine, you know, and we took off and he took off and. And come, come that time of year. And so I didn't have a calendar or watch or anything, you know, out there, so I don't really know when that was going to be. But Little John had been at the. At the lower cabin near the pass to the Yukon. And he had made a trip over there and found out they were doing a big Christmas shindig at this one place on a lake beside the Yukon. So he came up to get me and I said, I can't go. What if my dad comes? He says he's not going to come. How's he going to get up here? And I said it would be horrible if he came and I wasn't here. So I stayed. I was getting caribou, and I was the only one getting caribou out there at the time. And so Little John leaves and goes over to this party and, and I'm hauling caribou in from a place that I'd gotten a few. And at the time, the. The limit was no more than 10 a day.

[Ethan]

No more than.

[Steve Rinella]

No more than 10 a day. And so anyway, I'm hauling this caribou back with the dogs and I hear this airplane come in and circle around and land. And it was Ron Warble who ran. They had an air service out of Tok, and he was in a 185 on skis. And Ron Was not going to leave him be at my place unless it was warm and fresh tracks, you know, which there was. So I come back, I hear that plane leave and I come back and my dad is there and he has a number 10 can of cookies and a thing of cough drops. And he didn't bring any other food. He thought I had a bunch of food. I've got just moose fat, moose meat and caribou meat and that's it. And I had no coffee, no tea, no nothing. Right. And he's going to try to quit smoking. So he's got.

[Giannis]

Did you have salt?

[Steve Rinella]

I had salt. And so he has Copenhagen because he'd been a smoker pretty much all his life that I had known him. And so he has Copenhagen there to try to ease things up. Well, he had a few different things he was dealing with. One, you know, they're eating just meat and, and all I would do is fry it in a pan and then eat right out of the pan and, and, and then go dip buckets of water. So I had, I had water and, and meat and fat. That's what I was eating. And then for light, I had a moose fat candle. You know, an old, like a tuna fish can with a, with a bent piece in it and a bit of, of old Levi as the wick. And you'd have to set it on a stove. You'd have to set it on the stove to melt it. And then you could light it and it would keep going mostly and give off just a candlelight. So that was my light. And so he ended up asking me to carve him a pipe at one point because he's going to start smoking his Copenhagen because it wasn't doing enough for him.

[Randy Brown]

But man, when people do that move when they do the, when they do like the. They're gonna quit something.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And they're gonna be like, well, I'm gonna take advantage of this remote or out of the country thing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

They never fit, but never, they never factor in the people that are around them.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I know.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. And then they go in like, well, I decided I'm gonna quit drinking.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You know, I'm gonna quit smoking while you and me are away.

[Danny]

I just talked to an outfitter who they, they had to fly a guy out.

[Randy Brown]

Really?

[Danny]

Yeah. Dts.

[Randy Brown]

Because he's like, this is the perfect opportunity for me to stop drinking.

[Danny]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So I bet those cookies your dad brought were good. Oh, we finished them immediately. We just dug into them and ate them up. I had, I had you know, I, I, I was adapted to the meat at that point in time, to just meat, but I still enjoyed some other things, you know, and, and so, yeah, I, I gobbled him down.

[Randy Brown]

Did you ever lose your salt tolerance? Like, did you ever lose, did you ever get to the point where you didn't even want salt on the meat?

[Steve Rinella]

No.

[Randy Brown]

You always wanted it salted.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I liked it salted.

[Randy Brown]

You ever. Have you read Stefanson's My Life with the Eskimo?

[Steve Rinella]

Absolutely.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. He would, when they would go, when they would go into these, in with these groups, with these Eskimo hunter, they would find that to keep your supplies from getting diminished, they would salt everything because they hated salt.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, that was a protective measure against.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. So you'd have your stash of food, right? Yeah, they would just salt it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And then no one would touch it because they salted it. Because they had, they didn't do, they didn't do dietary salt.

[Giannis]

The Eskimo didn't?

[Randy Brown]

No, no. He says if you salted meat, they don't want nothing to do with it.

[Danny]

Don't you think they were getting salt from seal fat and.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, they weren't using it. They weren't using it as a seasoning. I mean, you know, if you eat a fish out of the ocean, he's not salty, you know?

[Danny]

No, but. Right. Just your body chemistry. Don't you need like a certain amount of iodine?

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, yeah.

[Danny]

Right.

[Randy Brown]

So he mentions it like multiple times that just. They don't want salt. And then he, he eventually arrives. Stefanson arrives at a point where, because he has to go without for months and months, they run out of salt. He goes months without salt eventually. And then gets where it ruins it for him. He doesn't want any kind of salt on his food. And he talks about it being like a, it's a learned. That eating all that salt is learned. It's a learned taste. And you get, if you go without it for a couple years or whatever, you don't. You can't eat salty meat anymore. No, that's what he says. He was wrong about a few things.

[Steve Rinella]

So he did mention that, that they considered polar bear liver to be toxic. That you couldn't eat it without toxic.

[Randy Brown]

Amounts of vitamin A. Yeah, that's a widely held belief. Is that not true?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I think it is true. So. But it's also true for grizzlies. So me and little John, at one point, after eating dried moose meat for a week, we ended up getting a grizzly and, and cutting him up and we're frying heart, liver and kidney in a full panload. And we both got headaches that just pounded us for a couple of days. We couldn't get up. And I think it was vitamin A poisoning.

[Randy Brown]

No kidding.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And so I think that it's not just polar bear, but it's the predator livers.

[Danny]

Did you get that Grizz with the.243 or in a trap? Yeah, 243.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

That was your gun, huh?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Talk about. I'm not trying to move you along. I'm just curious, how old are you? When you decided that I'm going to make a go of it and I need a wife and kids.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, so I must have been. I must have been 20 or 21 when I decided I was going to make a concerted effort to. To find a woman. So I. So I built a raft and I floated down to circle and I hitchhiked into Fairbanks. And I had been at the university for one semester, so I knew there was these personal things, so I left a personal note on there. I don't know exactly what it says right now, but it was something about it. Travel.

[Randy Brown]

You went. You made a raft, go to circle, hitchhike the Fairbanks and then make like a. Like a little flyer for yourself. Yeah, with the little tear off a little advertisement.

[Steve Rinella]

No, there were no tear off caps. Yeah, no, that was my first attempt. Oh.

[Randy Brown]

You know. You know what's the cutest thing in the world is Paul's daughter, Paul and Jen's daughter Brooke at the mediator store downtown. She's got a tear off tab. Oh, nice. Yeah, I was bummed the other day. I saw only one thing was tore off. So I don't know if it was there that long. I was gonna tear a couple. Maybe it was their second one just to make it look a little hotter.

[Danny]

Well, maybe that's representative of folks not killing stuff walking into the mediator store.

[Randy Brown]

Well, it could be that or it could be that. That social media is her preferred. Yeah, mode too.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Anyways, go ahead. So you make an ad. What does it say?

[Steve Rinella]

So not only that, but I had a dog with me and a rifle. So I had the double strap rifle. Right. And just because then it's like a.

[Randy Brown]

Little backpack I got you.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's how I carry my rifle to this day. And then the dog had a dog pack. And so what we did is we would walk down the road and I would shoot. It was big rabbit year then. And I would shoot rabbits on the road and for our food. As I was hitchhiking, finally got a ride all the way to Fairbanks and then ended up getting a ride on the other route going to Eagle, and then built another raft and came down downriver from Eagle. In fact, that was. I ended up stopping at Dick Cook's place. And in the spring that year, and he wanted to go hunting sheep. And so we took off into the mountains there. And he gave me a.257 Roberts that he had with. With different. He. He had different bullets loaded up for different purposes. Right. There were per. You know, for a moose load or to a goose load or to, you know, all these different things. So he's got like five shells and. And we go up after sheep and. And I get a shot at this. This big ram. And it. And it. It was a poof. And there's this bit of sleeping bag fiber that comes out of it. So it's a download. Right. But it hits him in both elbows. Boom. And he's down.

[Giannis]

Hold on. What's a download?

[Danny]

Like bird shot load type of deals. He was using the ticking for wadding. Is that right?

[Steve Rinella]

That's right. So you're not putting near as much powder in. And so it's a slower. It's a bullet that's not going to. I mean, we did that for squirrels and grouse, too. You know, we used full metal jacket in 243.

[Randy Brown]

And you just stuff the. You just fill the excess space with.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Because if it's laying there and the powder is just spread across the bottom, they say it can back pressure.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

But Dick had not kept track. This is a Smeagol, you know, with all his things. That's what we would have run into if we just started using those. But he had assured me. Dick had assured me that these were all big loads, which they weren't. So this ram gets up on his back legs. I don't know how he got up and ran on two legs over the edge. And Dick ended up dispatching him down the hill a little bit. But. But. But that was. That was a crazy situation there. But. But then I got in my raft again after. After we had come down off of the mountains.

[Randy Brown]

Dick, how long. How long was this sheep hunt?

[Steve Rinella]

One day.

[Danny]

I gotta tell you, this is the most interested. I've been in a getting the lady story in a long time.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. And meanwhile, you set your trap. You've, like, baited the trap with this. No.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I never got any. It was my. My mailing address was PO B General Delivery Eagle. Right. And I never got anything. So that was a failed.

[Randy Brown]

What did the note say though?

[Steve Rinella]

Trapper living up on the Yukon is seeking a woman. I think something like that.

[Randy Brown]

Nothing about any kind of criteria.

[Ethan]

Young and handsome. Trapper.

[Danny]

Yeah, he said, yeah. 21 years old.

[Randy Brown]

Like you didn't put down any parameters that you were hoping to like achieve here?

[Steve Rinella]

I did not, no.

[Randy Brown]

Did you put your age down?

[Steve Rinella]

I don't think I did. I think, see, it was a failed attempt. Okay. It was my first attempt, but it was a failed attempt.

[Ethan]

Let's hear about the successful one.

[Steve Rinella]

So I went in again the next summer and so. But there's a problem, you know, to get to develop a relationship, you know, I was going to have to move into Fairbanks and get job and everything and then. And I just couldn't do that. You know, you were going to miss, you know, the king salmon season. You were going to miss the moose season. You're going to, you know, it doesn't work. So I went in and happened to be there during the solstice fair. They have a big party on Solstice every year. And Karen, my wife of 43 years right now was sitting, taking care of somebody else's dog in front of a live music band. And so I, I sauntered over there and we struck up a conversation. Well, she was taking classes up at the university to go out and teach and, and I asked her if she wanted to come and join me and she said when are you going? I said tomorrow.

[Randy Brown]

Was she kind of a hippie?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Birkenstocks.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Everybody called us on the river.

[Randy Brown]

The whole thing. Watching a dog add a music. Music thing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

But back then hippies were kind of hard. Like they'd go live in the woods different than.

[Giannis]

And they still plenty of them in Alaska I call it, it's the hippie redneck of Alaska. Like they're, they're rough and tough but kind of hippies at the same time.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I suppose. I didn't, I didn't. If they were hippies, I don't see anything wrong with them. Yeah, they, they, they were great people that lived out there and high functioning, doing a lot of different stuff.

[Randy Brown]

Sure, man.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean taking care of dogs and putting up food for the winter and dealing with salmon and building cabins and traveling all over. Yeah, it was a high functioning group.

[Randy Brown]

When you met her, how abruptly did you lay out what the proposal was?

[Steve Rinella]

Within a couple hours. Yeah.

[Ethan]

He said he's got one day to make a decision. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, are you leaving? And she Says, I'm not going to go, but give me. Where do I write you? So she would write me and then the postmaster in Eagle would, would give these letters to people to go down river. And so I would get a letter from somebody when I was down on the Yukon. And of course I had to borrow stationary, you know, right back. But. But we exchanged, I don't know, three or four letters during the course of that summer and fall. And then I was up the Kandik river and didn't get any more mail. And until, until I went down to the Yukon one time and, and she had, she had put in her note that she was traveling down to San Francisco where she had gone to college. And so I came down and met her at the airport in Anchorage. So, so get this. I've got a beaver coat and moose hide pants, mukluks with beaver tops to em, beaver mittens and hat. And I get on an Alaska Airlines jet out of Fairbanks and they take me just like that down to Anchorage, right? And my dad meets me down there and he's like, Jesus Christ, Randy, you can't dress like this in the city. So he takes me out and gets me new clothes and boots and stuff like that. And so I met her though, at her airplane and I had a ticket to go with her. So I went down to San Francisco with her and spent a couple weeks. And then she was teaching in Akiak, which is down in Lower Cusquim village down there.

[Ethan]

I don't want to diverge from your love story, but when you got to San Francisco, was it like, holy shit, culture shock kind of thing?

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yes. I mean, I'd grown up in Santa Fe, you know, so I mean, I mean, it isn't like San Francisco, but. Yeah, no, it was, yeah, it was culture shock. She took me to New York one time because she grew up back on the east coast. And I'm like, oh, that's Martin. Oh, that's, you know, muskrat, there's fox fur, you know, all these different fur coats that people were wearing. And I also said, don't let go of me because I don't think I could make it out of here. And so anyway, we've had a lot of great adventures, but. But I did go down there with her and we got married the next year out on the river.

[Ethan]

That's awesome.

[Steve Rinella]

So, and you've been together.

[Randy Brown]

You've been together how long?

[Steve Rinella]

43 years.

[Giannis]

And when you got married, did she.

[Steve Rinella]

Move up on the river with you? She did. And, and I took her to one of of our cabins that was about a 9 by 10 cabin and showed it to her, thinking, here it is, this is the place. And she's going, I don't really think this is a good place for me. But we'd already been married. Okay. And so I says, or we can go upriver a mile or so and there's this old cabin that was there and we could build a new one. And that's what we did. And we built the biggest cabin that was out there on the river at that point in time.

[Giannis]

How big was it?

[Steve Rinella]

It was 18ft square inside and two story. Well, it wasn't full two story. It was a two thirds loft. Yeah. Mansion. It was a big one.

[Randy Brown]

Were you peeling those logs, just leaving them and letting the bark fall off?

[Steve Rinella]

Eventually I left them. They were dry trees though.

[Randy Brown]

Like fire killed trees.

[Steve Rinella]

No, they weren't fire killed. It was a big grove of spruce tree that was growing along the Canic river. And there was a green swath that was maybe 50 yards in width. And then there was a dead one. And I think the permafrost just came in underneath them and killed them.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, I see.

[Steve Rinella]

But they were big, big trees. Big dry trees, all of them. So firewood was not a problem ever at that point.

[Randy Brown]

Were you building with a chainsaw or all hand tools?

[Steve Rinella]

A bow saw and an axe and a 2 inch auger for peg fork? No, I didn't have a chainsaw for a long time.

[Danny]

Were you moving them on the snow or how are you transporting big logs like that? An 18 foot, what's the diameter?

[Steve Rinella]

They were 20ft long and the big ones were probably 12 inches at the butt and you know, 9 or 10 at the small end. They're real uniform. I just would grab them and haul them in.

[Danny]

Yeah, there you go.

[Randy Brown]

You know how like normally if you're married it'd be, you know, like you might get in a big old fight about, I don't know, like, oh, we should stay home this Christmas or no, we should go to so and so's this Christmas and that might be like a thing.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

As you were married, living out in the bush like that, was there like a major version of that? A major version where it was like, we should live like this, living off the land out in the bush or we should go live in a town. I mean, is that like a constant source of tension?

[Steve Rinella]

No, it really wasn't. I think the biggest tension initially was when we were leaving Eagle with our supplies in our double end canoe. Getting Ready to go up the Canic for the winter. Karen came up with this industrial sized box of toilet paper. And I'm like, we can't fit that Karen. We can't fit it. She goes, it goes, or I stay.

[Randy Brown]

Laid it right out.

[Steve Rinella]

She laid it right out. I says there's moss, Karen. And she goes, not going to use it. This toilet paper goes, or I'm not going. And so the toilet paper came. That was. I mean it didn't last for very long because you started using it all. No, no, no, I didn't use it, I didn't use it. She did, but she made her position known. So we went out into the woods and built that place and stayed there a couple years and then she wanted to go and teach again. So we went together out to. In that case it was Chevac out on the Yukon Delta. And that one didn't pan out very well because they had financial problems. That was a BIA school and they hadn't accounted for all of the funds from the year before. So BIA was withholding funds. So none of the teachers got paid for like four or five months. And she had student loans, various other things and couldn't go that far. So she quit and got a job in Dalton. So I'm dealing with moving dogs, sleds, you know, all this other stuff. And non Dalton was a wonderful place. That's over near Lake Clark, southwest of Anchorage. Beautiful place. And we were there for a couple years and then back.

[Randy Brown]

Did you set up and trap there too then?

[Steve Rinella]

No, I hunted, but I didn't trap. I hunted and I fished. I put gillnets under the ice down there and would catch 20 or 30 of these great big humpback whitefish and some lake trout virtually every night in Nundalton once the lake froze up. And so the town, the folks in the town there would come down with these sleds because they knew I was using it for dog food. So they would trade dried sock ice for fresh whitefish. And we did that all winter for two years. It was, it was wonderful.

[Randy Brown]

And you were making no cash money at that point?

[Steve Rinella]

None.

[Randy Brown]

You personally?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, none. I did build my first birch bark canoe there though, in on Dalton.

[Randy Brown]

Just for fun.

[Steve Rinella]

In the teachers housing? Yeah, well, yeah, yeah.

[Randy Brown]

To learn to do it.

[Steve Rinella]

I wanted to learn to do it. Yeah. And so these three, these three old guys there would, when they heard I was, I was starting to build this, they knocked on my door and I opened it. They walk in, took seats and they would sit there pretty much every day. And just watch. Every once in a while they'd say something about how they used to do it, but. But nobody had been making. Making birch bark canoes up there in the old way since about the. Sometime in the 1920s. They stopped building them. They had got canvas then and they started doing canvas boats that were a bit easier to build. But anyway, it was great. And they gave me suggestions like to mix caribou hair cut up small into. Into the pitch for doing the sealant on the birch bark canoes.

[Randy Brown]

And makes it more like a fiberglass or something.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And. And like straw in. In adobes and things like that. Yeah. Holds it together.

[Giannis]

Did you continue to use that skill in your lifetime?

[Steve Rinella]

I. I built, I think, 11 or 12 birch bark canoes.

[Randy Brown]

You're shitting me. Really?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Athabascan style. Once I like, I built two eastern style, but the Athabascan style is a little different construction. And so I just thought, we're in Alaska. We'll do them this way. Yeah, damn.

[Randy Brown]

Well, at this point, you've gone to school one semester.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that's true.

[Randy Brown]

So why did you. Like. How so you.

[Steve Rinella]

You're.

[Randy Brown]

How. How educated are you now? I mean, you got a lot of school now.

[Steve Rinella]

A lot of school.

[Randy Brown]

I. I go to graduate school.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I did. And that. So that was really one of the more traumatic things, was moving into town. Traumatic things for me. So. So we went back. Let me, Let me, please. We went back in the woods. We. We. We went out a couple times and cared. Taught in Eagle and for a little bit. And I would go out on Trapline then. But at one point, you know that. Remember the Native Claim Settlement act happened and Nilca happened, and all of a sudden people were. There was a desire to start claiming land or getting land that would go to one entity or another. And in the interior, Doyon was the big regional corporation. And they had selected the land that our cabin was on. It had been BLM land prior to that. And it was just outside of the Yukon Charlie park boundary. And Doyon said that they hadn't figured initially because we communicated. They had not decided how to deal with trespass cabins, how to permit them or not and everything. Well, finally in 1990, they sent us a note telling us that we had to leave, that we couldn't be out there anymore.

[Randy Brown]

The tribal corporation did.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, Doyon Native Corporation. And so. But we were getting ready to go anyway because we had one dog team and it couldn't take all of us on a big trip into Eagle or to visit other people. So you know we had like five or six dogs at that time. Great big 100 pound, 120 pound huskies. They were wonderful animals and but in order to have you know, the kids with their own teams or Karen with her own team so you have, you can travel as a family. It would have been really costly. You know, you can't fish in the yukon but go 30 miles off to live, you know, you can't move that, that much stuff and you got to feed those dogs and you got to feed all the dogs.

[Randy Brown]

Like you can't move all that fish.

[Steve Rinella]

Can't move the fish. You know if you, you live on the Yukon that was a, that was a resource that people used but we didn't. And so I wasn't willing to go and try to manage a couple of dog teams. How would we even go along the river? You know as these guys already ran the banks and, and you know the Yukon we would run them for a while until they got tired and then throw them in a canoe and they would, you know, we could manage it that way but it just wasn't going to work. And so we were getting.

[Danny]

Did you have no fishing on your, on your river? No char or grayling or.

[Steve Rinella]

They were grayling. They were grayling. There were suckers, long nose suckers. There were, you know, round whitefish. There were a few species but you couldn't feed a dog team with them. You know, you might feed them overnight. You know. In the lower part of the river there were northern pike. Not in the upper part of the river. They didn't go up there anyway. We were, we were getting ready to go anyway and so we just asked for a year leeway from Doyon so that we could come in with a ski plane and move some things and take care of the cabin so it wouldn't be a trash pile at some point. So they granted that to us. And then we went into Fairbanks and that was. I hadn't worked a job since I was in high school. Well the milking the cows period, just out of high school. And Karen had. She, she was a full out teacher. She, she could go into Fairbanks and boom, she's teaching and, and I was, I was struggling. What the hell do I do now? Yeah, you know, and there was this one log yard and I thought well I do log stuff. And so I walked over there and asked if there was any work. And this guy has these giant logs, you know that big, big scribe log houses get built out of, you know, 40, 50ft long. You know, and dirt and bark and stobs and everything. I'll give you $10 a log for peel them. You know, like. Well, that isn't gonna. Even, even enough to do our rent on a monthly basis or pay for the kids daycare or whatever, you know.

[Randy Brown]

You know, I had a gig for a while doing those logs and it was. I feel like it was 30 cents a foot.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Is what we would get paid. Yeah, that's a miserable job, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I peeled a lot of logs. And when it's your own, you know, it's just one thing, but peeling them for 10 bucks a log. So then I said, I'm going to go to college. And so I went back to college.

[Randy Brown]

Just walked over there.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah. And so I had one semester of credits and went there and was going to go into biology because I thought if there's anything I can do, it's some job in biology where they go out in the field and do stuff. Because we met people out on the Yukon taking care of peregrines. We met people that were doing fisheries work or forestry work, and we thought, I can do that. That would be something I'd.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, you'd run into professionals out doing their jobs.

[Steve Rinella]

That's right. Yeah. And so, and so that's what, that's what I did. And my first job was with blm, a seasonal job. This gal, Randy Jant, who is a biology biologist with blm, was doing waterfowl brood surveys and wanted to hire somebody to be able to do that, but they had to know the birds. And I knew all the birds, all of the ducks and the geese and everything. You could see them from a mile away flying and know what they were, you know, and, and so she took me out to test me around these. There's two lakes by the airport when they get a bunch of ducks in the spring. And, and of course I could identify them all no problem. And she's going, okay, well, you might work. And. And they were really nervous because here's this guy, I don't know how old I was, 33 or something like that. And Nan didn't have a job since he was a teenager. You know, it made him a little bit nervous, but they, they, they, they took the chance and. And so I was going to college in the, in the winters and then working for, for her doing waterfowl brood surveys. I started to do fisheries work with BLM and finished bachelor's degree in 1996. And one of the guys I had worked with at BLM was running A big project on the Yukon for Fish and Wildlife Service. And I walked into the office and he says, you're the man I want. And he hired me to work out on salmon down at Rapids, which is down near the mouth of the Tanana River.

[Ethan]

Did you kind of like, did you fall into the fisheries thing or was that something you were like interested in and wanted to hone in on yourself?

[Steve Rinella]

That was really opportunistic.

[Ethan]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

So in, in my undergraduate work I had done mammalogy and, and ornithology and I did fish biology. You know there were these different. But I'd also done microbiology and genetics and I liked them all cell biology. I thought they were all pretty fascinating and did physics and chemistry and math and everything too. But so I started there and the first year we have this big fish wheel running and we're tagging chum salmon, fall chum salmon at 450 fish a day, putting these spaghetti tags in them. We were doing a mark recapture project trying to estimate the population upstream of the Tanana. And while we were catching all of those chum salmon, she fish were coming through in August and September to the tune of 60 or 80 a day. Going through the fish wheels.

[Ethan]

Can you describe a she fish for people that don't know what they are?

[Steve Rinella]

She fish are a great big fish eating whitefish and they can be as much as 30, 40 pounds or more and, and well over a meter long. And, and they're, they're, they're a really great fish.

[Randy Brown]

It's like a tarpon and a whitefish had sex, right?

[Steve Rinella]

Exactly. It's kind of like that.

[Randy Brown]

And not that I've ever caught one. They just been described to me.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I think that tarpon give a much more profound fight than she fish do. But she fish are, they're a wonderful fish.

[Randy Brown]

When you got into this work and got into school and all that like did the whole time that, you know that you were real bright like that you had like a book learning ability. I mean you had to felt so feral and wild, Right?

[Steve Rinella]

Well there is that.

[Randy Brown]

But like to come back to it, were you surprised to be like, oh, I can be in these classes and get A's on my tests and write papers. Well, or did you feel that that was there all along?

[Steve Rinella]

I didn't really know. So there were several of my friends that told me there's no way you're going to keep up with these, you know, late teen, early 20s test taking machines, you know.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And, and, but I ignored it and, and I did Just fine.

[Randy Brown]

My dad hung out with this. My dad was. Fought World War II and a lot of his buddies were all World War II guys. And there's a guy that lived across, like across our lake and then over this isthmus and across the next lake. And he had been a pilot during World War II, but he was kept in a POW camp. He got shot down. Was kept in the POW camp. You know the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

This guy was Charles Lynn back. He was telling me that when he got home from the war, he just assumed he'd go to school on the GI Bill. And he said that he's. He went and sat there one time and right off the bat he's like, there's no way. And just walked out like, couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. You know, that's what's hard for me to picture like that you went off and got like undoctrinated and went wild, but then came back and got redoctrinated. Like, redoctrinated.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I suppose that's true. I don't know. It was a wild time, but it was, it was really hard to, to come to grasp the, the, the change coming into town and, and I struggled for a while trying to figure out what, what the hell am I going to do?

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. Because you're living like, you're living like kill a rab. Eat it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Catch something, sell it. Cut a tree down, make a house. Yeah, yeah. Also you're playing this like long game. Like, oh, if I do this for four years, I'll get like a tech position and then maybe I'll get like a job.

[Danny]

And the things that you have to do in school, right. Where you're like, okay, I know this doesn't matter.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

But never ask me this as long as I.

[Danny]

Whereas like, jump back to last year. If you didn't do what mattered, bad things could have happened.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Giannis]

But I imagine just doing homework wasn't necessarily what the, the challenge or what the irk was. Right. Like, what was the, the biggest thing that you sort of. That you had to come to grips with or face head on when you made the change, like, just in general in life, like, what was it that confronted you that really made it difficult?

[Steve Rinella]

That, that's a, that's a good question. I, I guess, you know, that that had been my identity for so long. Being out in the woods, coming in, it was like struggling. And our older boy, he struggled with it too.

[Randy Brown]

Did he?

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah, yeah, he did. And he just saw Himself as being the woods person that he was. And he got over it. Although he teaches applied math at University of Colorado Boulder. Right. And on his webpage it says, jed Brown was born and raised by wolves in the Alaska wilderness. You know, so he, so he encompasses it. He likes it and likes that. That was what he did for the first pretty much eight years of his life. And he still, he and I had gone out sheep hunting and, and things for several times. And that's all really fun. Yeah, I guess, you know, when I realized that if I'm going to get into a job that I'm going to like, I got to go through this, the university, and once I kind of came to grips with that, I just, I would just go there. I'd just do it. And it wasn't all that hard. It was just, I mean, there was time. Element to it. But was it tough being around people all the time? Going from like not seeing people for months to being around people every single day? I don't, I don't really. That's probably, probably true. That's not something that I remember as, as a, as an issue though. Gotcha. I did, we did get a place that was kind of, you know, kind of by itself and there was woods around it and I really liked that. And we had a bird feeder right outside of the, this window. And so, so I would, it was definitely a good place for me because I would come in and decompress, if there was decompressing to do.

[Ethan]

So was it, was it all fisheries research after that first job at the fish wheel?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So I got into the honors program as an undergraduate, and in the honors program I did work out in Col Bay. I did a small mammal survey following after Murray's work in the 1920s, and that got put into what they call an honors thesis. The honors program paid my way, essentially. They paid my tuition, which was a good thing, but it also, there were classes you had to take in that that were, I don't know, maybe, maybe a little more philosophy. And anyway, it was a good thing. And so once I got into that fish job, though, I've had that same job the whole time. I mean, I wasn't hired permanent. Initially it was a technician. But the sheepfish work. There was a fellow, John Burr, that worked with fish and game department at the time, and he came by to see us at work down there and he said, you guys really should do something with these sheepfish. We've been working to try to figure out where they go and where they came from, for a long time. And we were doing telemetry work with the chum salmon as well. Not only the spaghetti tagging, but a telemetry program with it. And so we just. With towers that were, you know, up in the drainage so you could tell when they swim by these towers, they would get a record. And, and so that's what I did for my master's degree. And, and I, I put out radio transmitters three years in a row and also did that oolith chemistry and was able to show that these fish spawn in this big braided region of the upper Yukon flats right in the main stem. Nobody had a clue. And then when they finished in mid October, they head back down to sea and spend the winters in the estuary or perhaps nearby coastal areas. I don't know.

[Randy Brown]

No one knew what the hell they did.

[Steve Rinella]

Nobody did.

[Danny]

And like in brackish water, like high saltwater content.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Really?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Danny]

I didn't know that. That's crazy.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And, and, and those, they go down their feed all winter, whereas there's a lot of them since then. You know, telemetry programs with, with the she fish. A lot of them just sit in the Yukon. And I have this vision of them with their pectoral fins in the gravel and their mouths open, facing up river and just spending the winter that way.

[Ethan]

Not feeding, just sitting dormant.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's one of the papers that I just sent off to a journal. We'll see how they accept it. You know, they send it out to review and everything, but I think it's an important piece because not all the populations do that. You know, spawning populations of the she fish. They. Some of them don't go to sea and some of them do. And why? Who knows? But that's for somebody else to figure out. But so, so that's what I did initially for my, for my master's degree and, and because I had done otolith chemistry work, the professors up there, anybody else who wanted to go into otolith chemistry would get me tagged to be on their committees. And so I've been on, I don't know, 12 different graduate committees with people doing otolith chemistry work. And, and I think largely because of that, they. The university gave me an honorary doctorate a few years ago.

[Randy Brown]

Well, that's cool, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So. So Yeah, I got PhD, so to speak, more or less.

[Randy Brown]

I got another question for you about the living in the bush versus coming into society when you're out in the bush. I'm trying to think of how to Put this, you know, being alive now in today's atmosphere, you become very aware of all the cultural conversations, Right. And you become aware of, like, who you identify as. You know, you're like, okay, I identify as, you know, an American. Identify as a member of my family. I identify as a member of my community. Right. When everything's so stripped down, like, the way it was, and you're not aware of all the, like, every little thing in the news or every little societal fracture that's going on, every blow of campaign, Campaigning, like the presidential campaign season. Right. Where do you sort of land in terms of what you are or what you identify as? Do you know, I mean, like, do you feel like. Like, well, I'm an American, you know? Or like, where, where do you land at what you are? Like, do you, are you a community member of the Yukon? Like, like what? It sort of. If someone says, like, who are you? Like, what are you? What, what would you have said?

[Steve Rinella]

You mean now?

[Randy Brown]

No, no, sorry. When you were living in the bush, like, what would you have said if someone asked you sort of, like, explain yourself to me. You're a what?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I, I, it was, it was much more as a, as a resident of the, of the woods.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I remember my brother came and visited me one time, flew in on a, on a ski plane, and we mushed around. It was in the winter, and he said it was during Reagan administration. Right. And he's going, like, how can you, how can you sit out here, you know, when the real world, there's so many things going on? I says, I think this is the real world. That's how I felt. This is the real world. I didn't know that Reagan was president. Right. I had no clue.

[Randy Brown]

That's kind of what, that's what, that's what I'm getting at.

[Steve Rinella]

And I didn't care.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Giannis]

It didn't affect you.

[Steve Rinella]

No. And I mean, maybe it did, but.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, it did. It did. In a macro way.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Like, it did. In a macro way, meaning, you know, like, like oil prices.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Randy Brown]

You know, I mean, like, these things would come, These things would come for you.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I didn't buy any gas because I didn't have any motors. But yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You know, like, eventually it'd be that you got a letter saying you got to move off the land. And that is, in a macro sense, all this global stuff is impacting you. But that's like, but when you're out there, like, that stuff falls away and you just, you're a guy in the woods.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You're not all pissed off about who's using what bathroom?

[Steve Rinella]

Not even a little bit.

[Randy Brown]

You're a guy in the woods.

[Steve Rinella]

Not even a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've tried to bring it into. I mean, it was definitely a big part of who I am and how I think about things, you know? You know, that whole. I don't know, some of the social issues that are so much conflict right now. It's like I don't really care what somebody else does.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I just. I just don't and. Or who somebody is, you know, I just. I try to treat people just like people.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Men, women, gay or straight, whatever. You know, I don't care. It's not my business. I have a hard enough time taking care of myself. Right. I'm going to take care of everybody else, too. Or try to define their problems. I don't think so.

[Randy Brown]

Do you have. Do you have any regrets about the timeline that you spent, how you. How you spent your life?

[Steve Rinella]

Not even a little bit. You know what was weird? All my friends at college, when I said, I'm going to leave and I'm going to go and live out in the woods, they're going, you can't do that. You got to finish college. You know, you're going to ruin your life and everything. Neither of my parents told me that at all. They. I don't know what they thought I was getting into, but they didn't discourage me at all, not even a little bit. And I find that surprising.

[Ethan]

But do you still do, like, field work where you get to go, spend extended period of time, like out in the woods or Two Falls?

[Steve Rinella]

Go was my last field project. Over the last few years, I've been losing my central vision. It's a genetic mutation that doesn't usually affect older folks, but it is with me. So I have a hard time right now. I'm not driving. I can't read a book. I can read it on a computer with high contrast and stuff. But that last project we were fishing for, she fish. And that was big enough I could see it. But I wouldn't drive a boat right. Right now. And I wouldn't be the one taking measurements and things like that. And so my functionality in the field has declined to the point where I won't. I'm not going to be going out anymore.

[Randy Brown]

How old are you now?

[Steve Rinella]

66. Give me 67 in a couple weeks.

[Randy Brown]

Give me a piece of marriage advice.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't really know. I just. I just, I. I treat Karen like A princess.

[Randy Brown]

I haven't tried that yet.

[Steve Rinella]

And, and you, obviously that might be.

[Randy Brown]

Where I went wrong.

[Ethan]

You started out right with a toilet paper move, right?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. Come on, that's not princess.

[Steve Rinella]

And the new cabin.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, that's princess treatment.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, totally. Yeah. No, I, and, and I just love her to pieces and, and always have and always will. Yeah, I, I don't know.

[Randy Brown]

That's been your attitude.

[Steve Rinella]

It's been my attitude? Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You're not like, well, I'll see next year, I'll see the next year after that how I feel.

[Steve Rinella]

No, that's good, man.

[Randy Brown]

Dude, there's a lot of people that view the world like that, man.

[Ethan]

I get it.

[Giannis]

But are there any plans to live in the woods again?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think so. I mean we kind of live on the outskirts. We have a 40 acre plot of land with nice birch and spruce on it. Where the latest cabin, big scribe log place that I built. Let's see, I started that one in my late 40s, finished it in, in mid-50s. We've been living there for.

[Danny]

Gotta let those things settle, you know?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. So. So I love it. I love it. It takes a little work to man maintain, but got a great big sauna, maybe wood fired sauna which Danny helped get the stove for out of, out of Wasilla. He.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

He and his boss went up and picked it up.

[Ethan]

You still feeding yourself?

[Randy Brown]

That's my question. Game?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, to some extent. Yeah. Yeah. I went moose hunting this year, but we didn't, we didn't get anything, which is rare. So. So my, my moose hunting adventures have been to go up to that same place where we lived up on the Kandy.

[Ethan]

Oh, cool.

[Steve Rinella]

And there's just some good lookouts and open country and, and you know, when you live in a place for long enough, you know where the moose are crossing and, and so we've always seen sometimes several bulls and, and we go up a couple of my buddies and, and I go up there and, and we've never come back without a moose except for this time. And we just never saw a bull.

[Randy Brown]

Do you guys call?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, we call.

[Randy Brown]

Can you, can you rip a call for me?

[Steve Rinella]

Okay. So I have been around when cows call.

[Randy Brown]

So this is a real call.

[Steve Rinella]

And, and it is very similar to a, to a, a cow. Regular dairy cow ball and say.

[Randy Brown]

That'S your call.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a cow call.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah. You don't do any of that crazy cow calling like.

[Steve Rinella]

No, but they do that.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And and, and so if it's a small bull, you want to do a cow call. Guys, a big bull.

[Randy Brown]

Hit me with your normal, like. Okay, get out there. You're. You're there. Okay. All right, boys, we're going to start hunting. Everybody be quiet. You're going to do what? Hit me with it.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, if it's. If you're looking for a big bull, you know it's going to be a grunt.

[Randy Brown]

Oh, no, no. I don't mean the bull noise. I mean the cow noise.

[Steve Rinella]

I did do it.

[Randy Brown]

That's your main. That's your main. That's your main cow call that you're using.

[Steve Rinella]

That is.

[Randy Brown]

Okay. You never do the big long plaintive like.

[Steve Rinella]

No, my buddy does this guy, Scott McLean. He goes up there, he's got a fiberglass accelerator type thing, and. And he'll do that and then do a couple of grunts afterwards, and it works, too. And.

[Ethan]

But you were saying cow call for small bulls, bull grunt for big grunts.

[Steve Rinella]

So if you do a big grunt and it's a small bull, he doesn't want to be anywhere near a big bull.

[Ethan]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And if we see a small bull around, we would always do cow calls. And they'll come. And one of the beauties of this particular place is that you can see how these bulls are responding. I mean, they could be even a mile away. And then you'll see this big antlers turn, and they'll start walking your way, and if you do it too much, they'll go away. And so you just want to let them do their thing.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, man. Why do you. Don't worry. We're going to wrap up pretty quick here. But I just got a couple technical questions for you in your mind. Why would a bull walk two miles to come and do, like, walk like, he's just coming. There's not. Nothing in the world's gonna stop him. And then all of a sudden, he's like, but I'm gonna lay down, then walk away.

[Ethan]

Lay down for a couple hours, then.

[Randy Brown]

Get up, and then get up, go the other direction. Like, what is he. What is in his mind?

[Steve Rinella]

Well, I have no idea, to tell you the truth. I. I think that there are some bulls that get really damaged in fighting.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

We were watching. There was a big bull and a little bull. Well, a kind of a bullwinkle walking along this one open hillside at one point, and they were not responding to us at all. And the big bull would. Would hit this little bull every once in a while. And finally the little bull turns around and nails him in the butt with his horns and then hauls ass across this hill. And we watched them with the big bull after this little bull go over a couple of hills, across a stream, and then up another hill until they disappeared. But that little one had to know that he was going to be on the run because that bull was going after him. Yeah. And I think. I mean, we've. We've got them when they're punctured.

[Randy Brown]

So he's coming in and he's like, man, I'm not going in there and fighting. I'm gonna linger on the outside and see what's happening.

[Steve Rinella]

Or. Or he doesn't hear it again and. And thinks it may be not there anymore. I don't know.

[Randy Brown]

It's hard to get in their head, man.

[Steve Rinella]

I know. But I do know that if you. If you grunt too much or if you call too much, Turns them off, they're gonna turn off. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You know, you mentioned that little bull hitting that big bull in the ass. Me and Seth last year were messing around with. We were messing around with. There's a company, Dave Smith decoys, and he makes a posturing buck. So it's a buck that's kind of all bristled up. And you'll see other bucks come. And you always think when you see bucks fighting, you associate him being antlered. Antler. Nose to nose, of course. Right?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Because they're squaring off. But here he is, he's looking at a buck, but the buck doesn't move. So you get to see what he would prefer. How he would prefer to fight in a situation where the buck isn't always facing at him. He would prefer to fight. Come in behind it, get alongside of it, and drill it right in the rib cage. Like that's what he wants to do.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

So you mentioned that little bull hitting that little bull in the ass or something like that. Like, I imagine when they can get the jump on each other, they probably do. And that's a way different hit than hitting antler.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Randy Brown]

When you're driving those tines into something.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Every once in a while, these big bulls will lock their horns together.

[Randy Brown]

You see it stuck.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. And I've never. I've never seen it in practice, But I've seen those. The. The sets of antlers that are put together. Department of fish and game in Fairbanks has one sticking. Hanging up right over their information thing. And. And where people come in to get hunting license, fishing license, things like that. And there's also one in Eagle. This helicopter pilot had spotted these two bulls stuck together. It has to be a desperately bad situation for them because any, any wolf coming around or bear coming around, just start eating one.

[Randy Brown]

Dude.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ethan]

Eat them alive.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Giannis]

You still shooting 243 when you go moose hunting?

[Steve Rinella]

You know what I, I changed to a 6, 5 Creedmore. And the reason I did that is so I could shoot copper. Because despite what people's views are with lead, lead in the opal of deer down in California is what almost put California condors over the edge.

[Randy Brown]

Sure. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

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

[Ethan]

And the acid in their guts can break that lead down to where it.

[Steve Rinella]

Becomes, becomes toxic, I suppose.

[Ethan]

So I think that's what the issue is.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. But so, so what I headshot with the, with the 243 was 100 grain Hornady bullet. And bullets I think are everything. A lot of people say it's not big enough for Alaska game. They don't know what they're talking about. But that 100 grain Hornaday hunting bullet is. It rolls back, it stays together. And usually on a moose, if I shoot it just behind the shoulder, it'll be either in the ribs or the skin on the other side with a lot of bleeding through the lungs. And if you shoot it right in the ear, it'll just shatter that big vertebrae right behind the head. So it's a very good bullet. And I've tried a lot of other bullets like Nosler partition, nozzle partition do not work in a.243. And the reason for that is that that back part of it doesn't have enough mass by itself. Once it explodes, the front part explodes.

[Randy Brown]

Doesn't carry through.

[Steve Rinella]

Doesn't carry through. And I shot a couple of caribou with that load and you have this grapefruit sized damage on the outside, but it never went into the lungs and it killed them. But, but it would not be a good bullet to have. And so right now though, I want it to go lead free. And if you go down to copper in a 243, you're down to 80, 85 grains. And I didn't want to go there because there were people out there that shot 22, 250s and 70 grain bullets. And they won't break the neck.

[Randy Brown]

Got it.

[Steve Rinella]

They will kill a moose and, but they're getting down There closer to the edge. And the 240, 300 grain that I was using would break any bone in the body, no matter what angle you're dealing with. Some people say, well, yeah, but you got to be really precise. You do with anything you gut. Shoot a moose with a.30 06, it's going to run for a long ways. And yeah, so I changed to a 6.5 Creedmoor. Same rifle, Winchester Model 70, but it can shoot a 120 grain copper bullet. I like it.

[Randy Brown]

This is my last question for you.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And maybe the boys got more questions for you too. But how do you feel, what's your general attitude about protections of anwr, about the proposed Ambler Road.

[Danny]

Pebble mine.

[Ethan]

Pebble mine?

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, Pebble Mine. Like, are you, with the time you spent and kind of the equity you've built up in that place, do you encourage, do you encourage that development around job creation or do you just want, or do you have a view that you just want the wild to stay wild? Like what, what's your personal take, as much as you're able to comment on that with your position at work?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And sometimes I, I, I can't. I did, I was part of the, the biological team on the EIS for the, for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the Coastal plain. And one of the big things that's an issue in that and they put their opinion out, I think it was last week on that, the SEIs that was taking place. But there's no water out there. None of those rivers flow during the winter. And the oil production depends on that water a lot for ice roads, for the drilling, for the camps, everything. So there's, there's a big hurdle for any of these companies to go in and develop that in that they're going to have to figure out how they're going to get water. There's 600 meters of permafrost. There's a handful of these perennial springs that come from the south side of the Brooks Range, hit these big fault zones and go down and muscle their way up through there somehow. And so there's this water in certain places that will provide a couple kilometers of habitat. Water that all of the fish in those streams, like the Hula Hula or the Saddle Rochette, that have, that have fish in them, all of them are there and the rest of the river goes dry in the winter.

[Randy Brown]

Got it.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's true all across that coastal plain. Where they get water, I have no idea. Some people have thought, well, maybe they'll melt snow Maybe they'll do a desal plant, maybe they'll truck it. But you know, you can't truck water across an ice road. You'll break it up and then you'll be just continually doing that. So there are some steep hurdles to doing that. But there are. And the last time that there were sales there it was this development group with Alaska ADA that bought most of the. Most of the plots and two companies from somewhere else that didn't have any capacity to develop them bought the other two. I think just on a speculation that if one of the big companies decided to go in there they would have to buy those leases from them or something. And that was what ADA was doing too. ADA can't develop it either. And so it's. I mean they've showed from over in Prudho that they can develop without the oil, without ruining places, but they got all the water in the world over there. So I don't know how they're going to do it. No big company bid on the last group and I think they probably also thought that okay this is too fast and we got to see what happens. And so they have that ability right now it's opened up for 400,000 acres of lands that people could, companies could bid on. I'm not sure when they're going to do that but they'll have to figure out they would only want to bid if they have some sort of thought on how they would go about doing this. How would they would get over some.

[Randy Brown]

Of these hurdles because it's money out of pocket right off the bat for them.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

So you can't. Because of your involvement, you don't. You're not, you're not in a position to say like what you hope happens or what you wish would happen because that would compromise your.

[Steve Rinella]

So, so I, I don't, I don't really see it quite that way because I'm not, I'm not a player in where the. Whether it should or shouldn't understand. And, and the, the mining is. Is a little bit of a different issue. I wrote a piece in our community perspective for, for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner on some of the mining prospects around in the interior and, and just laid out the, the, the dynamics of acid mine drainage and, and the, the, the longevity of it, you know how far into the future it will continue to have to be taken care of and the newspaper and I just. Everybody else puts just their name and where they live and that's what I did. But the news miner looked me up. I Mean, they've. They've. I write letters to the editor every once in a while. They know who I am. And. And they. They put my affiliation with Fish and Wildlife Service, and I got a little bit of a spanking for that, even though I didn't do it and I didn't put it on there myself. But. But pebble is one of those that has not been approved. And. But they're going to. As long as the minerals are there, somebody's going to come back over and over and over until maybe the politics are right to be able to do it. But that's in Bristol Bay. Right. And it's. It's on that pass going over one side down to the Nushagak Great big fish river, the other side down to Lake Uliamna, the biggest of the sockeye runs in all of Bristol Bay. Bristol Bay is booming. It's been booming for a long time. And. And that is mean.

[Randy Brown]

That. Fisheries. Booming.

[Steve Rinella]

The fishery.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And.

[Randy Brown]

And it's kind of the hottest fishery in the globe. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And. And that pebble mine is an acid mine, and it would require taking care of for thousands of years. How does that work? I don't know.

[Randy Brown]

That's pretty young.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know how the hell that works myself. So I wrote a piece detailing that for the Mancho Mine. The Mancho mine out near Tetlin is also an acid mine. And the state and the tribe and the companies involved have gotten through without having an EIS done. And nobody knew it was an acid mine. And I had gotten some of the documents from somebody that had gotten it through a public records thing and saw that it was and brought that to light. But they're doing it anyway, and how it'll play out. Maybe they can take care of it. They think they can, but it hasn't been looked at from a broader audience. But Tetlin will rue the day they did that if it isn't going to be contained on their end.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

It'S a big deal. We've got a bunch of them in lower 48 here that are, you know, I call them, you know, oozing sores on the landscape. My geologist friend of mine said he thought that was kind of over the top, but.

[Randy Brown]

Well, has he been to Berkeley Pit? I know, down the road here?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. No, and that one is going to go on.

[Randy Brown]

It'll outlast humanity.

[Steve Rinella]

It will.

[Danny]

And that's like an example I always use, Rick, because people are like, oh, well, technology's changed so much that you're thinking about this old stuff, I'm like, okay, well, so the Berkeley pit as an example, where, like, a bird lands on it, it dies.

[Steve Rinella]

Right.

[Danny]

Is that taken care of in your mind? Like, technology has made that okay? Like, I don't. I don't understand the argument.

[Steve Rinella]

Right, well, so the state has a. Has a policy that if somebody's opening up the. The earth in a. In an acid mine, that they have to put aside a huge bond that will take care of maintenance on, you know, in perpetuity, they call it. And I mean, I. You know, I don't think that societies are gonna. Are gonna. You know, there isn't an investment fund that you could guarantee that it's gonna be true for very long, so.

[Danny]

Oh, yeah. And that's why, like, a lot of these companies, they have working permits in the state that they're in, but they're not based there, they're based internationally.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Danny]

To give them a little more protection should they just so happen to default on that.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the way it is in Alaska. Most of these big companies are Canadian or Australian or something.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, well, my kids were real little. I made the mistake one time of explaining to them this idea that the sun will burn out. You know, like, the sun's kind of like, in its midlife crisis right now, you know, and that there'd be a day when the sun, like, it's not getting recharged.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You know, the sun, like, theoretically will burn out and the solar system will die. And that messed them up because they couldn't. They couldn't picture the geological time I was talking about, you know, So I. I kept trying to walk it back. Well, probably not won't really happen, you know, but now I've taken to. Now they're older, I'll tell him. I said, man, someday, like, all people are going to be gone. People are going to be gone, and a bunch of time's gonna go by and the earth's gonna be full of all these kind of new crazy animals, and it's gonna be sweet here, you know, so don't worry about the future.

[Giannis]

They're okay. They like that version better.

[Randy Brown]

They like that better than the sun going out.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a hard thing to grapple with.

[Randy Brown]

Even as an adult when you're talking about these mines. Yeah. Thousand year mine. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But it. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

And then, you know, it's like you're stuck with the contradiction. Right. Like, we all got these phones and, you know, titanium coffee mugs when you're Camping and, you know, I mean, it's like. It's, you know, it's a mess, man. Being alive is hard.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, that's true. Yeah. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

There's been lies.

[Steve Rinella]

No perfect situation. Yeah, but. But the responsibility, the financial responsibility of the. Of the public to take care of these places after these mining companies take it. You know, I. I don't see the oil in the same way. You know, there's other issues with oil, but it's. It's not, you know, poisoning the landscape in that way, so.

[Randy Brown]

Man, I appreciate you coming down to talk. My brother was right. Danny is right. I should get you on the show. I think you got to come back again someday, though.

[Danny]

Oh, I got so many questions. We just don't have enough time.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, what a deal.

[Randy Brown]

So you're going from here to see that boy of yours that you raised up in the woods?

[Steve Rinella]

That. Yeah, yeah, I am doing that. His daughters. So his. His older daughter is his jewel. J, O U L, E. Right?

[Randy Brown]

J, O, U. Oh, like the. Like the vape.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Ethan]

Like energy.

[Danny]

Yeah, it's a measurement.

[Steve Rinella]

Energy.

[Giannis]

That's J.

[Randy Brown]

Shows where my head's at.

[Steve Rinella]

Some of his friends. Some of his friends were trying to talk him out of it, say, oh, she'll have to tell teachers how to. How to spell it and everything like that. And. And I. I think it's a great name, but you may have to pay for it. Yep. So anyway. Yeah. And then Nevi, their younger daughter, she's wonderful too.

[Randy Brown]

That's a pretty name. How's that spelled?

[Steve Rinella]

N E with an accent. V E with an accent. So that's a certain kind of snow on high altitudes.

[Ethan]

Really?

[Steve Rinella]

In mountains? Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

Sounds like you raised your boy right.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, I hope so.

[Randy Brown]

Well, man, thanks so much for coming on, man. It's been great.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, you bet. Yeah. There's still a story or two to tell, but I tell that man.

[Randy Brown]

You're an interesting guy, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, we didn't even get into, like.

[Randy Brown]

Fish, any of the grizzly, like.

[Danny]

Oh, you want to hear more about the dogs and just weird stuff. Grizzly bears and.

[Randy Brown]

Yeah, I wanted to get into staying real warm when it's 40 below zero. No tent. But we'll have to. You have to come back.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, we did that.

[Randy Brown]

When you come back. When you come back on the show, just for a technical. Technical. Purely technical questions. Backwoods know how?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I do it.

[Giannis]

Nick, can we do. Is coordinate it with your next trip down to visit the family?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll definitely do that because I Got family in Albuquerque too.

[Randy Brown]

Okay.

[Steve Rinella]

And so one way or another, do.

[Randy Brown]

A little Rocky Mountain loop.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Randy Brown]

You're gonna run the spine of the Rockies all the way to the end.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, that's what it. That's what it would be.

[Randy Brown]

All right, man. Well, thank you very much.

[Danny]

Thank you.

[Steve Rinella]

Thanks. Thanks for having me. This has been great.

[Randy Brown]

Appreciate it, man.

[Steve Rinella]

Ye. Well, the Hun day is over and it's time to pack it in. Stevie got another. And I got skunked again. But that Rocky Mountain sunset this afternoon was pleasing. But it's my last day in camp so I'll see you next season. There's nothing like a sunrise over mountains in the fall. I hear a distant bugle he's answering my call and we may see the.

[Randy Brown]

Warden if we give him a reason.

[Steve Rinella]

But it's my last day in camp so I'll see you next season. And if I draw another, I'll be back here again.

[Randy Brown]

We'll find out in the summer when.

[Steve Rinella]

The lottery comes in. Fingers crossed, my friend. I wish everyone good luck. I'm headed home this evening cuz it's my last day in camp. And I'll see you next season. I'll see you next season.

[Randy Brown]

A lot of you guys remember the old ceremonial hunting tradition of eating the heart out of the first animal you kill. Meat from those organs are among the most nutrient rich foods on the planet. You can get those same benefits your ancestors craved via convenient daily capsules from heart and soil. Find out [e-mail] co. And remember, use code Me Eater for 10% off your purchase. Hey guys. Earlier this year we launched Meat Eater Kids Podcast. And we made a deal where if you guys liked it and loved it and listened to it, we were going to make more. And you did. And we did. And we're dropping a bunch. New five new Meat Eater Kids podcast episode starting November 25th. Again, it's a kids show. You listen to it with your kids. It occurs in three acts. A little history lesson or a wildlife ecology lesson. There's a animal call game that you play by listening to animal calls and trying to guess what animals you're hearing based on some clues. And then real live kids come in the studio and play kids trivia and work together to build up a little pot of money to donate to kids focused conservation organizations. So Meat Eater Kids Podcast coming back. Round two Meat Eater Kids Find Meat.

[Steve Rinella]

Eater Kids wherever you get your podcasts.