Ep. 867: Jim Zumbo - An Outdoor Legend at 85

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast

Ep. 867: Jim Zumbo – An Outdoor Legend at 85

Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: Jim Zumbo
Date: April 27, 2026

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Overview

In this engaging and nostalgic interview, Steven Rinella sits down with legendary outdoor writer, biologist, and television host Jim Zumbo, delving into his 85 years of adventure and storytelling in the outdoors. Together, they explore Zumbo’s remarkable career—spanning over 2,500 articles, 21 books, years at Outdoor Life magazine, and his foray into television—while also touching on personal stories, outdoor culture, and the inevitable passage of time. The episode is brimming with humor, insights, and reverence for the wild.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Last Colorado Grizzly: Revisiting a Notorious Story

[02:38–12:41]

• Grizzly Bear Incident: Zumbo recounts being the first journalist to interview Ed Wiseman, the guide mauled by the last documented Colorado grizzly.
• Zumbo’s eye-witness reporting:

  "He was laying in that bed. He was... loopy and stuff. But I really admire that guy." (Jim Zumbo, 09:21)

• Details of the attack: Ed stabbed the grizzly fatally with an arrow while being mauled.
• Aftermath, confusion, and enduring controversy: Rinella questions whether the story is the whole truth.

  "If there's one bear in the San Juans, an old female, happens to maul a guy unprovoked... it just gets a little like..." (Steven Rinella, 11:18)

• Discussion on how myths persist in hunting lore and the challenges in verifying wilderness accounts.

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2. Origins: Childhood to Outdoor Life

[12:44–21:46]

• Upbringing in Newburgh, NY: Zumbo’s early fascination with wildlife, trapping, and humble beginnings.
• English teacher's encouragement and first published stories.
• From forestry school at Paul Smiths to Utah State:

  "I always wanted to be a game warden or a forest ranger. At one point, I thought I might like to be a writer." (Jim Zumbo, 13:14)

• First article sold to Outdoor Life for $350, launching his writing path.

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3. Building a Career in the Golden Age of Outdoor Media

[21:46–30:43]

• Zumbo’s tenure as Western Editor, Editor-at-Large, and ultimately Hunting Editor at Outdoor Life.
• On taking a pay cut for his passion:

  "Went to work for Outdoor Life for $9,000 and a handshake." (Jim Zumbo, 23:06)

• The era's shared experiences—magazines as cultural touchstones pre-internet.

  "I grew up just like... I just grew up with your name. I was reading your stuff as a child at my grandfather's house." (Steven Rinella, 30:18)

• Life on the road: seminars, TV shows, and the hustle outside of Outdoor Life staff duties.

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4. Wood, Fire, and the Art of Firewood

[30:43–44:42]

• Zumbo's firewood obsession:

  "I suffer from an illness called EC-FD: Excessive Compulsive Firewood Disorder." (Jim Zumbo, 30:57)

• Deep dive into firewood types, regional culture, and BTUs (“Osage orange... it’ll burn your grate and it damn near will.”)
• Firewood measurements (cords, ricks, face cords) and the call for government standardization.
• Surviving a heart attack while cutting wood; transition from hand-splitting to hydraulic splitter.

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5. Elk Calling Revolution and Outdoor Innovations

[44:42–52:57]

• 1986 article “Elk Hunting’s Newest Secret” on the cow call, which popularized a now-standard hunting technique.

  "That was probably, as far as having an impact on hunting, my number one story." (Jim Zumbo, 48:29)

• Partnership and friendship with Don Lawbaugh, inventor of the cow call.
• Changes in hunting practices, ethics, and the Yellowstone/Gardiner “firing line” elk hunts.

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6. Brush with History: The Milo Hanson Buck and Trophy Controversies

[54:37–74:28]

• World Record Whitetail: Zumbo recounts being in Saskatchewan when Milo Hanson shot the legendary buck.

  "My guide sitting next to me... he says, 'I know Milo Hansen... You want me to call him?'" (Jim Zumbo, 55:26)

• Eating sausage from the world-record buck.
• "Pushers and sitters"—the art and language of deer drives.
• The Rompola Buck Mystery:
  • Deep debate on authenticity, hunting politics, and the elusiveness of truth in record histories.

  "People wanted to X-ray it... he gets to the point where he says, with all the scrutiny, this isn't why I hunt." (Steven Rinella, 67:52)

• Jealousy and internet-age amplification of trophy controversies.
• The revelation: Milo's buck was only three years old—upending assumptions about deer age and antler growth.

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7. Calibers, Guns, and the Tools of the Trade

[74:28–85:08]

• Zumbo’s traditionalist tendencies—love for classic calibers (.30-06, .270) and his history with pre-64 Winchesters.
• Steven’s embarrassment (or pride) about sticking to his .300 Win Mag.
• Anecdotes about Claire Conley and Chuck Yeager, and Zumbo’s personal stories about memorable hunts and firearm choices.

  "You get a gun that is... just right. I love that gun." (Jim Zumbo, 77:07)

• On the importance of bullet placement over caliber size.

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8. Reflections on Age, Loss, and Legacy

[86:47–92:21]

• Living at 85: gradual limits, loss of close friends, and an attitude of gratitude.

  "First thing that happens pretty much is your balance starts going... Now I'm at the point where I can't ride a horse anymore. And that really hurts." (Jim Zumbo, 87:21)

• Remembering his best friend Louie Gizarelli and the pain of outliving most of his lifelong buddies.
• Coping with regrets about lost friends and memories that linger.

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9. On Writing and Books

[93:04–97:02]

• The journey from his first book, "Ice Fishing East and West," to his well-known “To Heck with...” series.

  "They're just stories... Each one has like 30 stories in them about crazy stuff." (Jim Zumbo, 95:04)

• Pat McManus collaboration and the world of outdoor humor.
• Regrets about book titles but pride in the impact and reach of his writings.

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10. Authoring Humor and Friendship with Pat McManus

[97:02–102:29]

• Doppelganger hunting stories: missing a bear due to a deflected bullet.
• Stories about McManus’s wit, writing process, and stage performances.

  "He could make anybody laugh, even the wives that didn't hunt." (Jim Zumbo, 101:34)

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11. The Smoked Trout Story and Brine Recipe

[103:07–106:13]

• Rinella recounts sharing Zumbo’s smoked trout with friends in the Bahamas.
• Zumbo divulges his perfected brine recipe:

  "2 cups of brown sugar, half a cup of white sugar, and 1 cup of Tender Quick. ...I let them soak for about nine hours, then rinse them off in cold water." (Jim Zumbo, 105:08)

• Tips on using a chainsaw for wood chips with vegetable oil for food-grade smoking.

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Memorable Quotes

• On interviewing Ed Wiseman:
  “He was hurt really bad... But I really admire that guy.“ (Jim Zumbo, 09:21)
• On career choices:
  "Went to work for outdoor life for $9,000 and a handshake." (Jim Zumbo, 23:06)
• On outdoors media’s golden age:
  "I just grew up with your name... dreaming about hunting the West and your stuff was there." (Steven Rinella, 30:18)
• On firewood:
  "I suffer from an illness called EC-FD, Excessive Compulsive Firewood Disorder." (Jim Zumbo, 30:57)
• On the Hanson buck:
  "We cut, no, he gave me the whole sausage." (Jim Zumbo, 60:57)
• On getting old:
  "I'm thankful every day I get out of bed..." (Jim Zumbo, 87:21)
• On Pat McManus’s humor:
  "He could make anybody laugh, even the wives that didn't hunt." (Jim Zumbo, 101:34)
• On smoked trout brine:
  “2 cups of brown sugar, half a cup of white sugar, and 1 cup of Tender Quick.” (Jim Zumbo, 105:08)

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Notable Segments with Timestamps

• [02:38] Colorado Grizzly story and the birth of controversy
• [13:14] Early roots: Childhood in Newburgh, NY
• [21:46] Becoming Western Editor, Outdoor Life
• [30:57] Zumbo’s firewood obsession and firewood lore
• [44:42] The invention and spread of the cow elk call
• [54:37] Milo Hanson’s world record whitetail: on-site reporting and sausage-sampling
• [63:27] The Rompola Buck controversy and how hunting legends live or die
• [74:28] Calibers, classics vs. new, and why placement trumps size
• [87:21] Real talk on aging, loss, and perspective
• [95:04] Highlights from Zumbo’s book-writing legacy
• [105:08] Recipe for perfect smoked trout

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Tone & Style

The conversation is candid, irreverent, and nostalgic—full of tall tales, self-deprecating wit, and the awe that lifelong outdoorsmen hold for wild places and wild stories. Both Zumbo and Rinella share a respect for the old ways, the culture of passing down knowledge, and the inevitabilities of aging and loss. Their camaraderie is warm and full of laughter, but not without reflection on what’s been gained, lost, and learned in a life outside.

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For those who’ve never listened to Jim Zumbo or The MeatEater Podcast before, this episode is a master class in storytelling, outdoor history, and the unique intersection of wildness and wisdom.

Transcript

[Jim Zumbo]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Steven Rinella]

my God, are we lucky. We're joined today in the 85th year of his life, very well lived, veteran outdoor writer, biologist and TV host, Jim Zumbo.

[Jim Zumbo]

Thank you, sir. Delighted to be here.

[Steven Rinella]

Multi decade tenure at Outdoor Life magazine to show Jim Zumbo outdoors on the Outdoor Channel. Known for big game hunting, known for cooking, known for being a great guy. Written, has written. By his own estimation, he tried to count this up one day, two 500 magazine articles and 21 books. Jim, thanks for coming on the show.

[Jim Zumbo]

Thank you. I'm just, it's a pleasure to be here.

[Steven Rinella]

I want to go back. I want to go back in time and talk about how you, your career and how you came to do what you want to do. But I'm, I'm too dying to talk about something else first. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is an article you wrote and a man you talked to. And we were talking about this before we started recording is I'm just going to refresh viewers on the story if they haven't heard it. The last known grizzly bear in Colorado, the last documented grizzly bear in Colorado was killed by an Archer in 79. In 1979.

[Jim Zumbo]

September of 79.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. It was an old female. The archer claimed that he was out hunting elk in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado. The archer claimed that he was attacked by the grizzly and he killed it. Now, for many years prior, no one had seen a grizzly at all in Colorado. They were hiding. Just very few of them. Some. Most people assume they were gone. After that grizzly was killed, people launched a monstrous search. That's not the right word. Monstrous. Yeah, A humongous.

[Jim Zumbo]

That's good.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Yeah, A mondo search.

[Jim Zumbo]

Mondo is good.

[Steven Rinella]

All through the San Juans trying to establish that there was a population there, never to find one.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

This story is.

[Steven Rinella]

This story has a lot of twists and turns, and there's some controversial elements to it, but tell us about.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

I.

[Steven Rinella]

Until this morning, I didn't know that you spoke to that man in the hospital. Yeah. Tell the story.

[Jim Zumbo]

So I was. I. I drawn a desert sheep hunt in Utah, in Southern Utah in 79, and hunted for a week. And I was on my way home to get more gear, and I heard on the radio that this guy had killed a grizzly bear with a handheld arrow. And I was western editor for Outdoor Life at the time, so I thought, holy smokes, what a story. So I called my boss in New York, and I told him. He says, get that story. Forget your sheep hunt for now. So I drove to Alamosa, Colorado, got a motel, and visited him in the hospital and spent probably five days. The nurses kept kicking me out because he was. He was hurt really bad. And so I was able to maybe spend 20 minutes or half hour a day with him. But I got the story.

[Steven Rinella]

What were the injuries he had?

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, the bear had bitten through his left shoulder, and it had bitten through his right leg. Made hamburger out of it. And he just sustained all. All kinds of wounds around his body. He was hunting with a. He had a client, a farmer from Kansas, Mike, and they had split up. Ed was outfitting. He's a bow hunter. So he had his bow and the other guy had a bow. And they split up. And all of a sudden, this bear came charging at him. And before he could do anything, was on top of him, knocked him over. Now, Ed's a big guy. He could be a linebacker for an NFL team. He's a big, burly guy. So the bear's on top of him and chewing away and. And blood all over the place. And he knows he's going to die. There's no Way out. Unless the bear leaves. And he sees an arrow. He had his arrows in a quiver, and he sees an arrow laying on the ground. And he got the arrow, and the bear is on top of him. And he. He kept jabbing him, and he. He hit the aorta in his throat, whatever that vein is, maybe jugular, whatever. And the bear start bleeding all over him. And all of a sudden, the bear walked. Walked away and flopped over and died. So in the meantime, Ed screaming and yelling and whatever. Mike the guide comes running over, and he sees Ed, and he's in panic.

[Steven Rinella]

The guy that got mauled was the client or the guide?

[Jim Zumbo]

The guide.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

That's.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

That's what I thought. Yeah. Got you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Mike, the client come running over and he's. Ed's covered with blood, and he gets pretty upset, obviously. And one of the horses takes off because it's full of blood. They had two horses. So he tried to get up on a horse, and he kept passing out, and he just. It didn't work. So finally he got him on a horse and they headed toward camp. They were way back in the wilderness. I don't think the hunter. Mike had ever been there before. They got to a big clearing and where a helicopter could land. And Ed told Mike to get back to camp and bring some help and call a helicopter, because I had a satellite phone back in camp. So he told Mike how to get the. Mike had never been there before. There was a trail, but it would have been six miles out of the way. He told him how to get right to camp. So before he left, Mike dragged a bunch of wood over to start a fire. Cause in the mountains, it was going to get cold at night, and Ed was just. I mean, covered with blood, hurt, and he knew. He thought he was going to die, so he started a fire and he left. Went back to camp. His dad was a doctor, and he had a medical kid. Somehow he finds camp in the dark by riding his horse across the mountains. Comes back in the middle of the night, and somehow his dad and a couple other guys, they had gotten off the trail, and his horse went over a cliff with the medical gear, straight down and died.

[Steven Rinella]

You're kidding me.

[Jim Zumbo]

No, dude, I never heard that part of the story. That's exactly what I wrote, what Ed told me. So they finally got to Ed and got a helicopter and got him out and took him to the hospital in Alamosa. So that's basically what happened. Yeah, but like you said, there's been a controversy because people just. They didn't believe it. And how could this guy kill a bear with an arrow? You know, today everything's. A lot of it's fake news. Some. Ah, that's bs, you know, that. That didn't happen.

[Steven Rinella]

But I don't have a problem with this part. Well, because this. I mean, there's been. There's documented cases. People killing with 22s, people killing knives.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. You know. Yeah. But to have a bear actually ravaging her body and having the presence of mind to grab an arrow and just stab him. And like I said, Ed was a big. He was a strong guy.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

But I believe him because I was there. He didn't have time to think up any. Any lies. You know, he was laying in that bed. He was. You know, he was. He was. He was loopy and stuff. And. But I really admire that guy. And he since moved. He's living in the Midwest now. I think he's about 92 years old. Really? Yep. Wow. Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you care what I think?

[Jim Zumbo]

Sure. Yeah. What do you think?

[Steven Rinella]

I wasn't there. I never talked to the guy. I've been to the place where it happened. It just gets a little like. Okay, I'm going to paint a scenario for you that I use in situations like this. Like, let's say there's an omniscient being. Okay? God. An omniscient being who knows every. All the truth in the world. And he says to me, he says, is that the full story? Because he knows the truth. And he says to me, is that the full story? If you're right, you live. If you're wrong, you die. So I have to get it right. There's no being cute, okay? There's no trying to make a point. It's just what you got to make the best guess you can make. My guess is that there's more to that story. First, I want to throw in an interesting tidbit and see if this is true. As you remember, wasn't it that part of the thing was that they could tell from that there was a female and they could tell. I don't know how they can tell, but when they did a necropsy, they could tell that she had bore young. Something about there's some signature on the reproductive system or another that would demonstrate that she had had cubs.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right. And she was pretty old, too. I think she was 12 years old or 20 years old or some darn thing.

[Steven Rinella]

The fact that she had had cubs is part of what brought about this big search that people got involved in.

[Jim Zumbo]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

To Try to find others because it was like she had to have all. And she had. So she was presumably had bred with a male. Where's the male? And she had bore cubs. Where are the cubs? But no one ever. That was. Still remains today. The last grizzly. I think some. I think there's more in the story. I like. I don't know. I don't know if there's one. Like, if there's one bear in the whole state. There's one bear in the San Juans, and that bear, an old female had, happens to maul a guy unprovoked. To me, it's just more plausible that they. That they tried to get an arrow into it. Maybe they. Maybe. And it's excusable. Maybe the. The idea of there being a grizzly there was totally out of their mind. And they were like, oh, black bear. And I feel like they got an arrow into it. If I had to guess, not knowing the gentleman, they got an arrow into it. And that led to everything that follows. If I had to make a guess. Okay, what do you think about that?

[Jim Zumbo]

I don't know. I thought. I suppose anything's possible, but. Yeah, I don't know. Now, they were hunting separately. He was hunting maybe 150. They were just kind of still hunting through the forest. Yeah. And then it might occur to screaming and come running over, but. Yeah, I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

I had no idea you met. I had no idea you were on that story.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, now, you ready to back up now, back in time? Yeah, go even back deeper in time. How did you, like, where did you grow up and how did it ever click with you to. To get into the career you got into and to make a whole life out of, you know, hunting and writing about hunting and telling stories and.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And sharing, you know, your life and profiling other people's lives and capturing this whole culture for all these decades. How. Where'd that come from?

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, I. When I was a kid, I was. I was born and raised in Newburgh, New York, which is 60 miles north of New York City. It's in the Hudson Valley, 30,000 people. And I was raised right in the city. And ever since I was a little kid, I just loved anything wild in the outdoors. I'd lay on the sidewalk and feed crumbs to the ants. I'd feed spiders. I had names for the spiders, you know, And I always wanted to be a game warden or a forest ranger. And at one point I thought I might like to be a writer. Well, in high school I had an English teacher named Ms. Fink and I loved to read when I was a kid. I read books like Amic the Beaver and Tara the Otter and all sorts of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, I'm not familiar with those books.

[Jim Zumbo]

No, they're old. Look them up. Yeah, I was a teenager when I read them. That's a long time ago. But she. She read one of my compositions, said you ought to be a writer. So it didn't. I didn't pay much attention to that because I wasn't a great student. During lunchtime, I'd be trapping in the woods behind high school. We had raccoon sets out and stuff. Possums and stupid stuff and muskrats, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

What do you mean stupid stuff? You mean grinners? Possums. I'm not stupid about a possum.

[Jim Zumbo]

But anyway, I went to a little school in northern New York called Paul Smith, way up on the Adirondacks near the Canadian border as a forestry school. And liberal arts and hotel management. There were 400 students.

[Steven Rinella]

And on hotel management, liberal arts, forestry.

[Jim Zumbo]

Forestry, take your pick. Yeah. There were two forestry courses and one of them was terminal. The other was pre professional. The Pre professional course got you basically started for your bachelor's. We had to transfer to another university. I didn't take that one. I took the terminal course. We had cast classes like sawmilling and dynamiting and. And we had a sugar bush. We had a sugar mill. Oh, really? Yeah. Back in the. Now they use tubes to get sugar syrup.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Jim Zumbo]

And those days you drive a spigot in a maple tree in March, colder than hell, three foot of snow and put the. Hang a bucket on it. We go through the woods with a horse drawn sleigh, with a big vat. We take those buckets and then we put the. The SAP in the sugar house. And somebody had to keep throwing wood in the stove and it had to be so many degrees. Anyway, that was one of the courses. So what that does.

[Steven Rinella]

I gotta tell you something that you. That.

[Jim Zumbo]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

When we were little kids, we didn't know. We just knew it was maples. We didn't know sugar maples.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And we had like a lot of the wrong maples. We ran around, we would just drill holes in those maples and then like take a peanut butter tub or something and try to nestle it up under that hole, really tape it to the tree, you know. And we're always looking at it like, what gives, man? I never got shit.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, gosh. One interesting thing about the. The SAP from the tree. If It's. If it's 2% or better, it's fantastic. In other words, you get 2 gallons of syrup from 100 gallons of SAP. 3% is, like, impossible almost. Anyway, that was one of the courses. So that prepared me to be a woods boss or work in a pulp mill or whatever. And I had a good buddy who. He taught me how to trap. He was always two years ahead of me in school. And he went out to Utah. Say. He said, hey, you got to come out here and get your degree. He says, you want to. You know, if you want to be a game warden, you got to have a damn degree. So I went in Utah, in Utah State, okay. Up in Logan. So I went there. I got my bachelor's. I got a backup. I'm sorry. When I was at Paul Smith, you know, in a lot of these little communities, hunting communities, guys would say, oh, there's a big old buck out there. And there was a great big whitetail that everybody called Old Joe.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Jim Zumbo]

And he was supposed to be this monster, maybe a mythical buck. I don't know. So one day, I'm crawling around this cedar swamp, sphagnum moss, and I got my.30 30 model 94 carbine, you know, and I'm squeezing between a couple trees and out jumps this huge buck. And all I could do was just look at him because I couldn't even move. So I got a wild here, and I wrote a story about it for the. For the college paper. And they printed it, and I thought, holy smokes. You know, that's. I was just so impressed to see that stupid story in that little stupid paper. When I went out to Utah State, I lived with a bunch of foresters. And one of the guys worked on the. On the paper called Student Life, and he said, why don't you do a deer game forecast? I said, okay. So I did.

[Steven Rinella]

Tell me again. Do a what?

[Jim Zumbo]

A deer. Big game forecast. Deer, elk forecast for the upcoming season.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

So I did. And then he says, the editor wants you to see you want to write a column? And I said, yeah, I wouldn't mind trying that. Now, I never took any journalism courses or anything, and I wished I did, but I wrote the column. And one night, a bunch of foresters and a couple professors went up the canyon. It was a cabin up there, and we had a bathtub full of beer. And we were BS and we were cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. And this professor comes over. He says, zomboet says, you think you're a Hot shit. He said, you write that stupid column in that paper, I'll bet you a case of Lucky Lager beer that you can't sell a real story to a real magazine. So, you know, we were all kind of half buzzed, and I said, I'll take you up on that. So there's a lake called Bear Lake on the Utah, Idaho border, and there's a Bonneville cisco that is endemic only to that lake, and they only spawn in January, and it's colder than hell, 20, 30 below zero. They spawn close to the shore. So you go out there with nets, and it's a gala event. People come.

[Steven Rinella]

That lake has a. Has an endemic cisco.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yes, sir. They say that's the last lake in the Bonneville Ocean that still. But anyway, it's deeper than heck. Turquoise, beautiful water. So Lions Club was out there selling hot chocolate and coffee and hot dogs and people. Just a lot of people. Anyway, I wrote a story about that, and I'll be doing if Outdoor Life didn't buy it, for how much money? 350 bucks. Big money, though. Holy smokes. Yeah. I just got married. We're living in student housing, you know, and broker in hell. And so that kind of started it all. And then I started freelancing, and the next three stories I sent to Outdoor Life were rejected. I wrote one on rock chuck hunting, and the editor, Bill Ray, says, that's a massacre, Zumbo. He says, I can't use that story. But this guy, Bill Ray, of all the editors, Sports and Field, Outdoor Life and Field and Stream are all in New York City, right down in Manhattan. Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

And they were still running those places out when I started writing. They were still running those places out of New York. You'd be on the phone, and they're talking to people in New York.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. Yeah. Outdoor Life was on Madison Alien, which was. Advertisers were. Field was there, and. But at any rate, Bill Ray was the kind of guy that he would. He would encourage a writer even if he had gotten rejects. You know, a lot of editors would just, you know, we don't want your stuff anymore. But he was really a fantastic guy. I could probably tell you 10 guys my age or less, most of them passed on. That got a start from Bill Ray. But anyway, that's how it started.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

So he.

[Steven Rinella]

He rejected three, at least. What. Do you remember what else he rejected?

[Jim Zumbo]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you remember what the next one was that he bid on?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yes. I worked at West Point for eight years as a wildlife biologist and a post forester and a game warden. And a buddy of mine had developed a tip up with a battery on it and a light.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I remember those.

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, he said, hey, let's go out fishing at night for walleyes. And it's like. So we built a big fire and had a little whiskey, you know, and the lake went. We went out there. So I wrote a story called the Fisher Lighting. So sent it to Paul Smith, Paul Smith sent it to OUTDOOR Life, and they bought it. I thought, holy smokes, you know?

[Steven Rinella]

Wow.

[Jim Zumbo]

The next one was called Beacon in the Forest, where when I'm out there in the woods, I realized that in the fall, the first trees that turned yellow were hickories. And squirrels love hickories. So I'd spot a yellow tree, and I'd go there and I'd sit, and by golly, here's. Here's the squirrels all over. And then they work on the oaks, whatever else.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. So I wrote a story called Beacon in the Forest about hickories. Beacon in the Forest about hickories. They bought that one? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Back when you were selling those articles in the early days, were they paying you on. Were they doing a word count? Paying you on a word count?

[Jim Zumbo]

No, just a flat fee. Flat fee, yeah. Yeah. But then I worked for the government 15 years. I worked for the state of Utah Forestry and Fire Control for two years. Then I worked at West Point for eight years. Then I came back to Utah, worked as a wildlife biologist for the blm, and I got a call one day from Don Causey, who was executive editor, and he says, we'd like you to work for us as Western editor. I said, what does that mean? Well, he says, you'll run the Yellow Pages, the old Yellow Pages, and work with all these stringers in all the states and send us 720 lines of clean copy, plus maps and photos, and that's your job. I said, God, I can't do that while I'm working for the government, can I? He says, hell, no. I said, you mean I gotta come to work throughout their life full time? He said, yep. So I Talk. Took about 5 minutes to think it over, and I accepted the job for a huge cut in pay.

[Steven Rinella]

It was no cut in pay.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah. I had. I was making 18, 000 bucks with the government with all the perks, health benefits, you know, and all that stuff. And pension. Went to work for outdoor life for $9,000 in a handshake.

[Steven Rinella]

No kidding?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You were married at that point?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

How long were you married for?

[Jim Zumbo]

I was married to my first wife lost for 26 years and Madonna for 32. So, yeah, we're still fighting with each other.

[Steven Rinella]

Dude, that's a mark of fidelity. You hit like my old man managed to pull that off to hit like, what's that called? A silver anniversary.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

With two different women.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. But my wife, she's loyal.

[Steven Rinella]

She's kind of like, you could look at it two different ways. You look like amazingly loyal.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Or, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Or not.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. But she puts up with all my absences. Don't. I don't travel much anymore, but there were times when I was on the road for probably 270, 280 days. Now that included also shows. I did a lot of seminars.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

In fact, that's where I met her. She was running the ISE shows in her the sportsman's expos on the West Coast. But yeah, I, I, there were times when I take off and be gone for 30, 40 days. Then I got the TV show. And between the TV show and outdoor Life, I mean, it was just constant. I would go on maybe four hunts in a row. I'd go up to B.C. i love to go up to northern B.C. for elk. And then I'd Montana typically and Wyoming or Colorado and whatever else. Antelope, mule deer, moose. I love to hunt moose, black bears. So I mean, it was just non stop because he had to. I had to write a column a month for Outdoor Life when I became hunting editorial for first when I was western editor, then they did away with the yellow page. Then they made me editor at large.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

That meant I just, I remember that. Yeah. And then I became hunting editor and you got to have so much copy, you know, and you got to travel, obviously, so that's kind of where it's at.

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All right?

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[Steven Rinella]

When you were on the mast head or not on the mast head, but you were staff at Outdoor Life, but you would do seminars and do TV and stuff, was that all in on salary or was that more like, like a alak cart approach where, where you would get like additional money to do these different projects?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, I, I was on a seminar circuit. I had a contract with in International Sports Expo and I did shows in like six cities on the west coast in Denver.

[Steven Rinella]

But then you kept that money.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. And they'd, they'd Pay me a fee for that.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. And that didn't conflict with your. Your normal gig?

[Jim Zumbo]

No, it didn't. I. The only conflict was Outdoor Life didn't want me working for the competition. They don't want. They don't want me in field. And streamer, Sports of field, American Hunter, NRA magazine. They didn't care about that, you know, because that was a different deal. But so, yeah, it was. I was. It was crazy. It was a crazy time.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, that. That's a. I think. I think about that long era, like, just the years of your career. Outdoor Life, Field, Stream Sports, A field. There was so many more shared. Like, there were so many more shared national experiences back then. Do you know? Like. Like, I'm old enough that when I was a little kid, I mean, you. There's channels three on a TV. There was channel three, eight, and 13.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

It was like NBC, CBS, ABC, or whatever the hell it was. And that was. That was what it was.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Right. We still have, like. We still kind of retained a shared experience of the super bowl or something, but there used to be, like, many, many shared experiences that people would have. And I think some of those were just these magazines, because pre Internet, you know, if you were a hunter and angler, you were looking at those magazines. I think of going to my. My. My. My maternal grandfather was a muskie fisherman, big fisherman. He liked to hunt. You know, you'd go to his house and he would have the magazines, I mean, and I would, like, go home and. And bring them with. And it was just that. That all. It was sort of like all eyes in the outdoor world were on those things.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, Exactly. And in that way, I grew up just like. I just grew up with your name, you know, I mean, I grew up reading your stuff. I. I was reading your stuff as a. As a child at my grandfather's house.

[Jim Zumbo]

Holy smokes.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, but just being. Being. Yeah, I'm not young anymore, man. But, like, being there and dreaming about hunting the west and stuff. And, like, you know, and your stuff was there.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And things are so diffuse now.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, it is. Very much so. You got all kinds of stuff. Well, your show is everywhere, thankfully.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it gets out there.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Hey, tell me about firewood. You're big into firewood.

[Jim Zumbo]

I suffer from an illness called ecfd, Excessive Compulsive Firewood Disorder.

[Steven Rinella]

Let me hit you with one. Can I hit you with one?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

My brother Danny recently got himself. This might be a good book subject for you. He recently got himself a book about firewood? Yeah, it's from the. It's from the. Might be out of Norway or something.

[Jim Zumbo]

I might have that book, honestly. Okay, go ahead.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, no, I mean, yeah, I need to get me a copy. He's got a book. It's just a book about firewood. And there's a thing in there that I didn't. That I wasn't aware of. I want to run this bio. It's like, you know, we're always talking about this wood has. Puts off this BTUs. This wood puts off that BTUs. This wood puts off THAT BTUs. This book is saying that all wood is the same by weight, but not by volume. Like wood regard. If you. If you don't measure it by volume and measure it by weight, it all puts off the same BTUs. It's just a matter of efficiency in releasing those BTUs. Because a denser, like denser wood we think of as being hotter, but wood by weight has the same btu.

[Jim Zumbo]

I'll be done.

[Steven Rinella]

What do you think about that?

[Jim Zumbo]

I don't know. I will put that.

[Steven Rinella]

If you make a wood book, you got to either make that that's true or not true. I don't know what to make out of that. You know what I'm saying? But like.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because I'll tell you, dude, I grew up in the hardwoods in Michigan and I used to sell, like when I was selling firewood, we would get. You'd get 90 accord for dried hardwood. You could hold it till like February, January, February, and get 110 accord for dried hardwood. I would cut it and make this huge mountains of it and then deliver it when the prices were good. Only maple and oak, some beach thrown in. At that time, you could sell white pine. So if you could get a 90 bucks for a cord of cut and split hardwood, a quart of white pine was $35. People would talk where I grew up, they would tell you that you can't heat with pine. They would say that it'll burn your house down. Because the pit, I mean, it was like, you can't. You could. You go anywhere in that area. You never find a person, carry a piece of pine in their house and burn it. But then you move out west and that's all there is, right? Everybody burns.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, so.

[Steven Rinella]

So for decades, I've been burning that junk. But then I go back to my mom's and we go down on the beach on the lake in front of the house there, and I Make a big old pile of oak and get that burning. Dude, you can't. You can't even get near that fire. So it's like, that's. That's a wood right there, dude. That's a hot wood, you know?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So in reading that, it kind of threw me off that it's like, you know, that it's just. They're talking about by volume.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right. Well, I've always. I've always considered. I've looked at the BTU charts for both native woods in the US and all woods, and most of the charts will tell you that Osage orange, also called Bodak or hedge. Number one. BTU's.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

Number one. And they say it'll burn your grape, and it damn near will. I like to get wood from all over. I got some buddies from North Dakota who come on Antelope with me, and they bring a bunch of oak. Oh. From the yard, you know? And I went to Kansas to a writers conference, and Mike Pierce was a good friend of mine. He used to be the outdoor writer for the Wall Street Journal. And I said.

[Steven Rinella]

The Wall Street Journal writer?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, Michael Pierce. So I said, mike, if I bring my chainsaw over, can I cut some hedge? He said, yeah, there's all kinds of hedge around here. So as it turned out, he had a buddy who had a whole barn full full of hedge. He said, back your truck up and load it up. So I took it home, and I only burn it when it's really cold, but it burns hot and it burned long. But locust is another one that's got a lot of BTUs. So I don't know. You know, we live in Northern Rockies as you do, and the only two softwoods we have are aspen and cottonwood. Otherwise, Doug, fir, number one, limber pine, white bark pine, which is now endangered. You can't cut that, dude.

[Steven Rinella]

I never met anybody that cut that split into a piece of white bark pine, I don't think.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, but this. This Osage orange is so hard that you can't. You can't cut a. You can't drive a nail in it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And they call it hedge because in the old days, the pioneers would plant it and it would grow into. Into a row of really thick foliage, and the cattle couldn't get through it. But it's amazing stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Anyway, well, guys run that for. I mean, the. The industry there is cutting fence posts out of that stuff.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So how does your. If you got a. Like an OCD around wood, how does that manifest? Like what? Like how do you. What are the symptoms?

[Jim Zumbo]

The symptoms. Go cut more wood.

[Steven Rinella]

So you just like keep a good stash laid by.

[Jim Zumbo]

I once honestly had. I swear I measured it. A hundred firewood cords. No firewood cord, not a full cord. Four by four by eight. I'm talking two by four by eight. But I had 100. 100 chords. I did.

[Steven Rinella]

No, no, but I'm not getting what in the world you're talking about. We've been having this debate lately. Are you familiar with the term Rick?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. What do you. What do you. What is a Rick in your mind?

[Jim Zumbo]

The wreck is a full cord. 4 by 4 by 820. 128 cubic feet.

[Steven Rinella]

No, no, a Rick is a face cord.

[Jim Zumbo]

It is. Okay, Should I google it? You know, I think you're right.

[Steven Rinella]

But what you're talking about, what kind of what a firewood cord. A 24 inch deep.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's a long cut piece of firewood.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, but that's. If you look it up, it says 2 by 4 by 8. Firewood or a face cord.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but who's. Whose oven door are you fitting 24

[Jim Zumbo]

inch pieces of firewood through my fireplace go separates. There's a big stone wall on both sides and it goes all the way through. You can open the doors on both rooms. And that thing's got a three by four foot box. So I can actually put a. Almost a 30 inch log in there. Yeah, but you're right, you know, most stoves aren't going to take that 24 inches.

[Steven Rinella]

I'd like to. You know, I'm not a big government guy generally. Well, in some areas I am. But I would like the government to come in and really put some enforcement and some structure around firewood measurements. I think it would do the nation good. Yeah, you know, because there's a lot of like people saying a lot of weird things.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, there are.

[Steven Rinella]

There's a guy, Spencer Newhart, this guy, Spencer Newhart, the host trivia and I actually it's a long story. We got in a big fight about this very subject. Bricks and face cords and cords and all that. So you cut too much wood, you sell it?

[Jim Zumbo]

No, I used to.

[Steven Rinella]

You just like to keep it because of the civilization collapse. You got all kind of wood.

[Jim Zumbo]

We use it. That fireplace does not go out from usually October until April, unless it's like this winter. You know, hell is 70 degrees in January and February. We didn't burn it. But my wife will say, what's going on? There's no Fire going, somebody, your fire sucks because it's, you know, because it's. There's no flame. Okay. I'm throwing a log in it. But we burn that, we probably burn 10 to 15, 20 cords a year. Seriously. And wow. But I get it from everywhere. Beetle kill. We had a big beetle kill infestation. I live just a. Maybe a quarter mile from the national forest, the Shoshone Forest. And as soon as those trees started going, I'd get a forest service permit for seven bucks or whatever and.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Zumbo]

And bring that with omen.

[Steven Rinella]

That's your exercise.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But you had a heart attack, right, cutting wood?

[Jim Zumbo]

I had a heart attack when I was rolling the log. Yeah, I was rolling the log with a pv. It was a big ass log and it was a rock behind it. And I put everything I had behind it. As, you know, a PV, you can roll a 500 pound log with that extra. And I felt a pain in my chest and I said, what was that all about, huh? Then I thought maybe I strained a muscle, you know, in my. My chest. So I had all the wood cut to throw in my truck. And I just said, I'm going to leave this wood sit, put the chainsaw, my truck and go home. And if I don't have this and I'm going to. When I get to the highway, I'm going to call my doctor, you know, I didn't because the pain went away. I never had that pain again until my 75th birthday. On that night, I was kind of short of breath, my right arm hurt, and there was a little bit of pain in my chest. I told my wife, and at that time, I was between doctors. I hadn't gotten a new one. My other doctor had taken another job in the hospital. So she drives me to town, takes two aspirins, get to the emergency room, tell a lady I got chest pains, and she's, boom. They stuck me on a. Whatever you call it, and did a ekg and it showed nothing. And then they did another test, I'm not sure what it was. And they said, he's having a heart attack right now. So they threw me in an ambulance, took me to Billings, and they put two stents in. And I had to wait six weeks for the real open heart surgery, which was December 15th of 2015. And that, I'll tell you, waiting that six weeks was a nightmare because I knew I was going to go under the knife and, you know, get the zipper. Oh. On the bright side, my surgeon had done 3,000 open heart surgeries in Billings. So I was pretty. He was a great guy and so got the. Got the operation, whatever he did work.

[Steven Rinella]

Because here you are.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. And I told my cardiologist, I said, when can I start swinging that six pound mall? He said, he said, you got to wait at least three, four months, you know. And so I did.

[Steven Rinella]

And you split all. You split everything by hand. You don't use it.

[Jim Zumbo]

I used to.

[Steven Rinella]

You switched to a hydraulic.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. And then when I turned 65, you know, my son was telling my dad still splits wood and he's 65 years old, you know. And. And I bought a splitter.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And I mean that takes all the work out of everything. You know. Trying to cut green split green cottonwood. You hit that with a mall and it just kind of, you know, just

[Steven Rinella]

full of water comes up out of there.

[Jim Zumbo]

It ain't gonna split. So you gotta hit it 15 more times. It's like hitting your sponge. Yeah. Yeah, man.

[Steven Rinella]

I used to work. The first tree service I worked for was outfit called professional tree service. This is when I was in community college.

[Jim Zumbo]

And

[Steven Rinella]

interesting thing about this dude that I worked with, he. He had bought this property. You're gonna think I'm making this up. I'm not making this up, man. He bought this property and when I'd get to work in the morning, he would be out in the morning with a metal detector, metal detecting his own yard. Because someone had told him that the old lady that he bought it from had been burying jars of money with metallic like bell ball and mason money jars.

[Jim Zumbo]

Really.

[Steven Rinella]

With metallic lids.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Had been burying money all around the yard. And this guy's morning rituals to get up and metal detect Holy smokes. This 10 acres, whatever he had. Funny hoping to dig up that money but he. So his middle finger is gone

[Jim Zumbo]

and

[Steven Rinella]

he used to run those sat. You know.

[Jim Zumbo]

Remember that?

[Steven Rinella]

Remember that? I don't know. They still make them sax dolmar chainsaws. Like horrible vibration control on those. Like no vibration control on those chain. They were just monsters.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He'd run those sax dolmar saws and he wouldn't. He had the. He'd buy a regular five finger glove obviously. But this middle finger is gone. So I used to laugh because anytime he was gripping something he'd be giving you the finger because there's no middle finger in there to. For the glove. And I always assumed he'd cut it off with a chainsaw. But we would. A lot of times all that wood, we. When we're doing a removal or whatever, just go Into a mountain. And then if there was nothing else to do, we'd go out there and firewood, all that. And it was terrible because you'd bring it home in all these weird chunks, you know, just lowering stuff right into a truck. So it's like elbows and odd and you just sorting through the pile, trying to find 16 inch.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Cuts.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And. And like I said, I never asked him about that finger, but I assumed he cut it off. But one day we're cutting and I'm doing something or not with that hydraulic splitter. And he says, me, that's just how I lost my middle for God. Lost my finger now on a hydraulic splitter.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, that's funny.

[Steven Rinella]

Let's go back to 1986. And it's funny to think about, but cow calling elk.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Even like bugling elk, man was. You know, I'm sure historically people figured it out. But like bugling elk, cow calling elk, that wasn't in hunter's toolkits.

[Jim Zumbo]

No, not at all. In fact, when I first started our bugle calls, we made them out of a piece of garden hose or maybe a piece of pipe, cut a little notch in it, you know, and they sounded horrible, but they still called elk and they were awful. And then I remember when the first calls came out, but I think when you say 1986, you're referring to the cow call.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Your article. Yeah. About cow call.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Your article. Elk Hunting's newest secret.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. Well, I had. I'd gone to Gardner a lot. Montana, which is literally on the border of Yellowstone Park.

[Steven Rinella]

Were you friends with. Were you parties with Don Lawbaugh?

[Jim Zumbo]

That Don Lawbach invented the decalco? Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. So Don and I, we. We'd hang out. He owned, like, the saloon in town and the motel and a restaurant, gas station. He owned a bunch. He was from Big Timber. Great guy. Anyway, one day we're sitting in his bar, and he pulled this thing out of his pocket. He says, you know what this is? I said, no idea. He said, well, listen. And he blows his thing, and everybody looks at him. He says, don't worry about them. I own the bar. You know, he makes this big shrieking noise. What does that sound like? I said, it sounds like a cow elk. He says, well, what do you think? I said, what do I think? I don't know. What do you think? He said, well, don't you think that, you know, cow, elk, they vocalize year round? I said, yeah, all year. Not just, like during the rut. Yeah, yeah. Like the bulls so he said, when you hunt turkeys, what do you sound like? You sound like a hen. You're yelping out there, you know? And he says, so don't you think you can use the cow call to attract bulls or whatever? And that makes a lot of sense. He said, I'll tell you. He says, it works. He says, I know it works because I've done it. He lived right in Gardner in the Elkworth, in his yard, year round.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

He heard him talking all time. So he said. He said, I'll give you a call if. If you don't mind. And. And would you. If you like it, would you write a story about. I said, absolutely. You know, Outdoor Life, like all. It's a service magazine. You know, people want to know how to do something, where to go, or maybe they want to read an armchair story. Me and Joe. But anyway, this was right up my alley, and I thought, this is a big deal. There's no such thing as a cow. Elk, nothing. There was no such thing. So I took it out and I tried it for a year, and he had given a couple to some outfitters up in that country, and it worked like a charm for all sorts of reasons, you know, not just to attract an elk during the rut, but. So I wrote a story about it in 86, I think it was the August issue. Elk hunting's no secret. And at the bottom, I put to order a cow call called Cow Talk from Bond Law Box. And so. And so 9.95 and three bucks to blah, blah, blah in Gardner, Montana. And before the article came out, I told him that we're going to put a plug for the call. And I asked him how much. How many calls he made. He said, well, me and my wife d. We made a couple hundred in the basement, you know. I said, well, maybe he'll sell them. I can't tell you how many sold. Thousands and thousands and thousands. But anyway, that. And it. That was probably my. As far as having an impact on hunting for something new. That was probably my number one story, but I didn't do it. I just happened to be the lucky guy that Don knew.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And passed the story on.

[Steven Rinella]

You didn't get a cut or commission on all those calls?

[Jim Zumbo]

No, no, no.

[Steven Rinella]

And then he invented the Power Bugle. Remember that?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he did a deer talk. A deer call or something. And. But his call went into the Cabela's catalog. And he sold a lot? Oh, yeah, a lot. But he's still around in Gardner. He's got a shop there.

[Steven Rinella]

But he's still alive.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He's a gardener all the time.

[Jim Zumbo]

I didn't know that. Yeah. Really? You can find a store. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, how old is. How old is he now?

[Jim Zumbo]

He. He's probably. He was probably a few years younger than me. Probably. Probably late seven. I. I don't know. I. I don't know. But he. He was so much fun. We go up in the famous firing line, you know, when the elk would come out of the forest, out of the park, and they get on and they stepped on the Gallatin National Forest, and holy smokes. One day I counted 96 hunters up there. Yeah, they had built snow forts to hide, you know, and heard of elk. And then you go to the bar that night, his bar, they call the town bar, and everybody talk about how many elk they get today. Well, I seen a herd at 95 come out and they killed 90, 94,

[Steven Rinella]

you know, but they changed that whole structure now, man. Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And then the war wolf stepped in. You know, they had, like, a couple thousand cow tags. It was nuts. And the wardens would ride around on horses, and I was there. I was just. I never hunted there. I didn't want to, but I just. Being a writer, you know, I walk around the ward. Would ride around on horses, and if they saw somebody shoot two elk, they'd give the guy a 50 fine and he could keep one elk.

[Steven Rinella]

Honestly, that's all they need.

[Jim Zumbo]

A long time ago. Yeah. But interestingly, one year, as you know, the Montana elk season runs basically five weeks from October to the Sunday of Thanksgiving week. One year, it was a really, really, really bad winter. During the general season, those elk came out by the thousands, and everybody in Montana headed for Gardner. And I heard a story that in one day, they killed, like, 700 elk. I mean, it was just crazy because anybody with a general tag could go, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

But so fascinating place. I spent a lot of time. A lot of the photographers would go there, and we'd film elk during the rut and mule deer during the rut. Bighorn sheep. But Gardner was kind of. It was second. Second home away from home for me. I spent a lot of time there.

[Steven Rinella]

My. One of my kids got accosted by a mean old lady and gardener. Yeah, we were in Gardner one time, and, you know, there's elk stand. It's the park, you know, just for people listening. This is the entrance to the park. Yeah, it's the Yellowstone national park, the north entrance. So you get a lot of these, like, Very, very habituated park elk. They're just kind of hanging around like they're hanging around the gas station, they're hanging around the hotels. Anyways, my kid is going up to one of these elk and these couple old ladies just cut loose on them. He was a little kid. You leave them alone.

[Jim Zumbo]

Really? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I was thinking about, you know, I didn't really get involved in it, but it's kind of like, lady, have you seen what this kid's doing to some elk?

[Jim Zumbo]

Was she with a park or was she just a civilian?

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, just some lady yelling at him on the side of the road for getting too close to a tame elk. Yeah, I thought that was funny.

[Jim Zumbo]

We took, when we took pictures in the park, we had have a commercial permit and we paid 100 bucks to. To film because we were in the business. We weren't just doing after slideshow at home, you know, and those rangers, if they saw you using a cow call, they get all upset because you're harassing the elk.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, you were trying to call them for photography.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, get them to. Get them to look at you or whatever, you know, and stuff. But anyway, they Yellowstone is. It's one of the reasons I moved to Cody because I just love the park. First, first time I was there, I was my wildlife class at Utah State took a bus, all those students and two professors and went in the park in, golly, 1963. And we looked out the window and there's a herd of elk. First. First elk I ever saw.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. We all ran over to the side of the bus, you know, and that was when they were. They literally killed like 5,000 in the park. They had regular shooters and they had butchers come by and save the meat and everything. That was. That was quite a deal.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, those days are passed right now, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Those kind of Elk numbers.

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Steven Rinella]

You spent time covering the. The Milo Hansen buck.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Talk about that.

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, I was in Saskatchewan hunting whitetails and I think it's the same thing, but in Saskatchewan, a non resident can't hunt below the bush line. You can't hunt in the agricultural areas. You got to hunt north in the bush.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

And Milo lives in bigger. He had a farm there, but he's.

[Steven Rinella]

He's south of the line.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bigger.

[Steven Rinella]

He just passed away.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, he did.

[Steven Rinella]

A couple months ago.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're having. We're having dinner and my outfitters, he had a farmhouse. That's where we stayed. And his wife did the cooking. And we were sitting around the table and she said, by the way, Milo Hansen killed a world record way till buck. And it's like home back.

[Steven Rinella]

I got refused. You're there when it happened?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, I'm there.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm sitting there having dinner and it just got killed.

[Jim Zumbo]

Just got killed like the day before or two days before.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. I thought you meant you were there later. Yeah, I didn't know you were there. When ago?

[Jim Zumbo]

I was there and they already.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

But they already knew it was a record.

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, what had happened, I didn't believe it, you know, I said, what it scores? She said, I think it was 214. Holy smokes. Are you kidding me? Typical. Yeah, yeah, I said. And then my guide sitting next to me, we're having dinner, he says, I know Milo Hansen. In fact, I sold him a box of ammo. Do you know Milo Hansen? He says, yeah. He said, you want me to call him? I said, yeah, you know. So he gets on the Phone, and he calls Milo, and Milo confirms, yeah, yeah, I had an official measure. And he says, I got a guy from outdoor life here. He wants to talk to you. So I talked to Milo, and I said, any chance I could come down in the morning and interview you? He said, yeah, no problem at all. So really nice guy. So I called in the morning just to confirm the guy was going to take me to his house.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And how far are you from the house?

[Jim Zumbo]

About 50 miles.

[Steven Rinella]

Dude, what luck, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

I know, I know.

[Steven Rinella]

That's like John Krakauer being on. That's like John Krakar being on Everest when that big disaster happened. Yeah, like right. Like right in the mix.

[Jim Zumbo]

So I call him in the morning to confirm. He says, geez, I'm sorry. He said, but Gordon. Gordon Whittington is sitting in my living room. Gordon was the editor for north American whitetail. Out of Georgia, I think, or South Carolina.

[Steven Rinella]

He was already there.

[Jim Zumbo]

He had flown all night, and he was sitting in Milo.

[Steven Rinella]

No.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Swear to God. Yeah, yeah. In fact, he scooped you.

[Steven Rinella]

He scooped you from Georgia.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, Georgia.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

In fact, I put this on Facebook. When Milo passed away, I did a couple pictures, you know, and Gordon chimed in. He says, yeah, that was a great time, but that he had a. He wanted to write the story real quick. Real quick. To have the issue ready for the shot show, which I think was in January. Yeah. So he wrote the story. And my boss in New York, he was, of course, he was all excited. I called him that night, Vince Brano. I said, vin, I said, my God, this is the story of the damn decade of the century whitetail. And he said, well, get the story. Blah, blah, blah. I said, well, I can't. Gordon's here. He says, we'll get second rights. We'll pay him some money, whatever. Exclusivity. I don't know what the hell he did. I don't get involved in that part of it. But at any rate, Gordon had the story in sports afield. And I interviewed Milo, and we talked about the whole deal was like an as to ATT story as told to Jim Zumbo.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And he told me the whole story. Went up to his farm and. Really great guy.

[Steven Rinella]

So he. He didn't live on that farm.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, he did.

[Steven Rinella]

So he. He lived there. Yeah, yeah. Tell the story. Him killing the world record buck, because then I want to get into whether it really is the world record buck.

[Jim Zumbo]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

You know where I'm going with this?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, I know where you're going. Well, evidently, that buck had been seen by the school bus driver, you know, and in fact, somebody had taken a shot at it and missed it. Really? Yeah. So the way they hunt up there, and this was somewhat controversial because what, these farmers, they're all Ukrainians, you know, and they hunt deer for sausage. That's what they do. They don't give a damn about horns. Just fact.

[Steven Rinella]

This is sausage hunters. Yeah, yeah, I know the kind.

[Jim Zumbo]

So they got all these. All this kind of open country with all this popple, which is like stunted Aspen. And basically they drive these different areas. And I think Milo was sitting there by his pickup.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, they do pushes.

[Jim Zumbo]

They do pushes. Yeah, yeah. So Miles sitting there by his pickup truck, and here comes his buck. Nice buck, you know, and he shoots it. It goes down, and he walks down to it this way. Told me the first thing he said is, that's a nice buck, but boy, not very big. I ain't gonna get much sausage off of that thing. It's exactly what he said. And it was a hole in the antler where somebody had hit him in the antler. And they dragged that buck by that. By that antler. Good thing it didn't break off.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Would have disqualified him.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. So anyway, he gets the buck home and people start hearing about it. So he calls a Boone and Crockett guy and. And he comes over and he measures it. And I think the score was what, 214 and something like that. So anyway, funny story. We're at the shot show, and Ian McMurchie was a Canadian photographer. He passed away. And Milo said, ian is the only guy that's going to photograph this buck. Now, the Life wanted to send some big shot photographer from New York to Canada to film the Bucket. And Milo said no. And so all the editors and they were all upset, like, what kind of picture we going to get for? They wanted to put it on the COVID Yep. In fact, the president of OUTDOOR Life was not a hunter. He was a three piece suitor from New York. And he says, we can't put that buck on the COVID in the April issue. That's the trout issue. We got to put a trout on the COVID Yeah. Is this true? So anyway, we put the buck on the COVID So we met Ian at the shot show and he comes over to our table. I sit with a bunch of guys and he said, I got something for you, Zombo. And he gives me a little sliver of sausage. He said, that's the world record.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. So we cut no he gave me the whole sausage.

[Steven Rinella]

You got to eat a chunk of

[Jim Zumbo]

that buck we got. So help me. Yeah. But anyway, that. Really.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, dude, you can sell that sausage for a lot of money now, man. It'd be a little old. Be a little freezer burn, but.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

No kidding. You had a chunk of the hands.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. True story. And Milo and I became friends on Facebook.

[Steven Rinella]

You've got to be kidding me.

[Jim Zumbo]

No, serious, honest. In fact, when I. I put that in my stuff, my little comment on Facebook and two or three other guys sitting at the table said the same thing. Yeah, that was really a great piece of sausage or whatever. Wow. I can't think of who I was. Well, with just, I don't know, some friends and writers.

[Steven Rinella]

But hey, when you. When you think of doing a push, what do you call the people? Like, what term do you use? Because buddies all around the country have different terms for it, like pushers and sitters. You know, like, what'd you guys call them?

[Jim Zumbo]

Usually the drivers and the standers.

[Steven Rinella]

You do drivers? That's. A lot of guys do that. It's wrong. Yeah, it's wrong.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's pushers and sitters.

[Jim Zumbo]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

A lot of people don't know this. They think it's drivers. And my buddies in Pennsylvania got some real dumb thing they call it, but. Yeah, yeah, they got, like. I can't remember what. They got some dumb things. They get it all. They get all confused now how to do. How to do a drive, you know? Yeah, that's pretty crazy, man. So. So obviously, you know where I'm like, remember when I made that comment, like.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Is it the world record? So I think that there's. So these records stand a long time, right? So there's only been a. It's only like the world record. Bucks only turned over a couple times.

[Jim Zumbo]

The first buck was a Jordan buck. That was. That was around for, golly, 50 years.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And that was scored maybe 209 or something. Maybe. I don't know. I forget.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. Then it got whooped in. The hell was it? 96. What year was it?

[Jim Zumbo]

93.

[Steven Rinella]

The Hanson Buck was nine. Oh, no. 96 was around Paula Buck. Ron Pole.

[Jim Zumbo]

Mitch.

[Steven Rinella]

Ron Po. So let's jump to that. Everybody still calls the Hansen buck. You know, it's the world record buck. But there's this. There's this question I'm obsessed with. The question is like, is it. Because then a guy in. In. In Al. Mitch Rompola outside of Traverse City, Michigan, mid-90s, he arrows a bigger buck, right? Shrouded in controversy. Shrouded in controversy. What's your take on that buck?

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, from only what I've heard.

[Steven Rinella]

Don't caveat at all. The hell, just tell me what.

[Jim Zumbo]

You know. Tom Hugler. Who? Tom Hugler.

[Steven Rinella]

Huddler?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, he's from Michigan. No, he's like the outdoor guy. He's got a big show and stuff. I went to his show one time. Expo show.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, you know. You know how you, like, meet people and kind of maybe like, the name doesn't click, but I'm not. I don't believe I'm familiar.

[Jim Zumbo]

Okay. Anyway, Tom and I were good buddies. I was in Michigan one time doing a. Doing a seminar in elk hunt or something. And. And from what I understand, this may or may not be true, but Mitch Ronpolo would not let anybody take a picture of that buck. Nobody. Well, no, I don't know. I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

There's pictures of that buck,

[Jim Zumbo]

but who took the pictures?

[Steven Rinella]

He did.

[Jim Zumbo]

He did. Didn't he kill other bucks with the same kind of frame? Big, wide?

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Zumbo]

In some honey. Honey hole somewhere.

[Steven Rinella]

Listen, dude, this is why the story makes. It starts to, like, really make its own gravy, you know, it goes deeper. And this. This story is a bottomless pit.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Kills the buck. He has a recovery video. I thought about. I'm obsessed with this thing, man. I'm gonna make a documentary about it. So kills a buck, makes a recovery video, right? Gets some pictures. I mean, there's so many twists and turns to this thing. A handful of people handle the buck. I once sat on the phone with a guy that. I spent two hours on the phone with a guy that held the buck. Okay, But in. In quickly. There's a lot of skepticism about certain aspect. I'm making a short version here. There's a lot of skepticism about aspects of the buck. It gets measured. Some people come forward and they're like, the buck ought to be X rayed. Right. There's varying explanations of what he did to it. You know, some people say that he kind of made like a sort of Franken rack. Like, he constructed Iraq. Killed a buck. Opened its. Opened it up like this. Took the skull plate out, put a skull plate in there. Right. Fabricated.

[Jim Zumbo]

Fabricated the thing. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, but this guy I was talking to one time, he had the weirdest observation about it, man. He said that. I don't want to give his name, but he said that when he went to see the buck after it was killed, he said it was in a truck with a topper on it. You'll get this because you're a hunter. It's in a truck with a topper on it. And picture when you jam a deer into a truck with a topper on it. Right. They're hard to get in there.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And he says that that buck was like jammed into this truck with a topper on it. And then you kind of like cock the head up in there, right?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So he says when he goes to look at the buck, it's cocked in this trailer. Like where its head and rack are kind of jammed into the topper as you're looking into the topper on the left side. And he talked about him kind of wrestling, because it stiffened up. He talked about him kind of wrestling that head out of there. And he's like, if that was a make believe Franken rack, would you have jammed it into a topper like that?

[Jim Zumbo]

It's true.

[Steven Rinella]

It's an interesting point.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But he wouldn't submit it to an X ray because people wanted to X ray it. And eventually he gets to this point, he eventually gets to the point where he says, with all the scrutiny, he says, this isn't why I hunt. You can all shove it up your ass. And that's not his words, but this isn't why I hunt. And he takes his buck home, never to be seen again. And that's been the, that's been the stance since. It's like he didn't play the game. But people point out he was playing the game. He was playing the game. Video, video photography declared it right. And eventually there was a, with the Hanson estate. They signed a deal, they signed a contract.

[Jim Zumbo]

Heard about that, that he would cease

[Steven Rinella]

and desist, that he would stop saying it was the world record buck.

[Jim Zumbo]

A lot of people wonder why he doesn't want to claim it. I mean, you know, it.

[Steven Rinella]

So I've sat on so many sides

[Jim Zumbo]

of this thing, man, like I'm sure you have.

[Steven Rinella]

I, I got a buddy from, I got a buddy from back home. He's an outdoor writer. We went to high school together. He was a trapper. He, he, he, he always felt that the, he, he always thought the buck was, was bs. Okay. But one day he told me one day he went to a guy's house that. To touch the buck. Did it handle the buck. And he said when I walked out of his house for a period of time, when I walked out of his house for a period of time, I knew it was real. And he goes. And I think, as he explained to me, he doesn't know where he stands on it.

[Jim Zumbo]

Now.

[Steven Rinella]

I've gone back and forth both sides. One day, I was explaining to someone. I was telling someone, like, I was trying to explain to someone that doesn't hunt how everybody has an opinion about this, okay? And as we're talking, I'm like, everybody's got an opinion about this thing. So I sent a text message, like, just watch. So I'm trying to think of people that he would know about. And I sent a text message to Jeff Foxworthy, and I sent a text message to Nugent. I'm like, hey, what do you guys think of the Independently, not in a group text. What do you think of the Ron Paula buck?

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

One of them comes back with an answer. I don't buy it. One of them comes back with the answer. I give him the benefit of the doubt. Oh, geez, dude. I'm fascinated by the whole story, man. I would like nothing more than to touch that buck. I had always heard this rumor. I don't even know where I heard it now. I'd heard a rumor that it had burned up. Like, I can't even think of who told me this. It burned up in some fire or something. But I was talking to a guy. He's like, man, Mitch lives in the same house he's lived in when he killed the bug. That buck ain't. That house ain't burned down.

[Jim Zumbo]

Geez. You know, I wonder, did the Boone and Crocker Club ever approach him?

[Steven Rinella]

It's not certified with the Boone and Crockett Club.

[Jim Zumbo]

It's not? No.

[Steven Rinella]

Because of these questions about. I think it's like, well, if it was. If it was. I mean, I, I. You know what? I take that back. I don't know. But if it was certified, if it was BNC certified, then. Then it would be the world record.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But you know what's crazy, man, about this whole deal? A weird part about this whole deal is it, like, you know, all that scrutiny came on him. Like, a lot of that scrutiny is motivated by jealousy and stuff, because we had on the podcast a hunter named Dustin Huff who killed the. The big. He's. He holds the biggest typical whitetail in the US So this the.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

The.

[Steven Rinella]

The nation's record, but not bigger than the Hanson buck, which is the world record. So he has the biggest whitetail in the US when he killed that whitetail, he killed it flat out, fair and square. But what do you think happened when he killed it all over right away? All the ways in which he must have cheated it? Do you know what I mean?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He anticipated it coming and calls his Fish and Game office and he says, I just killed a huge buck. Like it might be the big. It might be a record buck. I just killed it. No one calls him back.

[Jim Zumbo]

Really.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, then a while later, they do call. You know why they call? Because all the reports they're getting about how he cheated the system he tried to get hold him in the first place. Isn't that wild? So a lot of that stuff just comes because there's so much jealousy and bitterness.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh my gosh. Totally.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, but it's a real mystery, dude.

[Jim Zumbo]

I've never killed a 375 elk, buna, crocodile. I've gotten some 350s. But I always figured if I did, you know, all hell is going to break loose, you know, just because people get so damn jealous. And you know, being the fact that I, you know, I hunt full time.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, well, he got it on his ranch or, you know, they had that elk, you know, filming them every day. Blah, blah, blah.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure, sure.

[Jim Zumbo]

It's just.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you're gonna hear about it.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah. One other thing about the Mile Hansen buck with. That buck was three years old. Only three years old.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the thing I tell people too, man. I didn't know that till just recently.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All that talk about six, seven years. Six years old. Seven years old. The biggest. I was like the biggest buck ever killed.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Three.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Isn't that nuts? Would he have been bigger the next year?

[Jim Zumbo]

Probably, I suppose.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, another little wrinkle about the Ron Polo buck.

[Jim Zumbo]

What?

[Steven Rinella]

That place don't make big bucks.

[Jim Zumbo]

Doesn't it?

[Steven Rinella]

It don't make big bucks. Big bucks don't come out of there, you know.

[Jim Zumbo]

Boy, what a story.

[Steven Rinella]

But someone told me it's a freak. And freaks can happen anywhere. But it's like it doesn't make big bucks. You remember Gordon Eastman, Yoya dude, I remember him interviewing. I remember listening to an interview of Gordon Eastman interviewing Don Lawbach about the call. I thought it was Law Bow or whatever. Lawbach.

[Jim Zumbo]

Lawbach. They. They became partners, you know, and they did a bunch of videos together.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

But Gordon Eastman, he lived in Cody for a while. We got to be pretty good friends. He told me some wild stories when he'd take his little plane up in the Arctic and live with the Eskimos. But he told me every Boone and Crockett buck is a freak. Oh, every Boone and Crocker buck is a freak. I mean, that's what he Said so anyway.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's what this one. One guy I was talking to you about, that buck, he's like, it's a freak. And freaks happen anywhere. It's a freak. So maybe it was a freak year for a freak buck or. No, no, sorry, not. I mean, sorry, what. I'm talking about the youngness of the Hanson buck. I mean, maybe that was like a freak. That it was, you know. But you wonder what he. At 5, would he have been like extra. The world record?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Or when you've gone downhill.

[Jim Zumbo]

I don't know. Yeah, well, since he was only three, I think he would probably be bigger. But I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

What's your. You know, old fellers like you and me.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like I always shoot like people. Yeah, people are always like, hey man, what, what's your, you know, people ask

[Jim Zumbo]

you something you Steve? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They ask you like, you know, youngsters, young little whipper snappers will come to me about cat want to talk calibers, you know.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And at this point I'm like, like, it's like a tinge of embarrassment, you know, when I talk about. I shoot a.300 win mag a lot, right? I shoot it a lot.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I have other stuff. My kids shoot 6, 5 because I trained up my kids on suppressed 65 creedmores because I just didn't want them to develop, you know, fear of recoil, fear of noise. So suppressed 65 is like a very. It's a great way to break them in. Yeah, I would shoot a.300 win Mags. I just like, you know, I just. I just shoot it at whatever, you know. It's a great gun. What's your. Where do you stand, you know, with all the new calibers and stuff? Do you feel a need to stay hip to the new calibers? You shoot the old classics.

[Jim Zumbo]

I shoot the old classics. You know, way back in 64, I graduated. When I graduated from high school, my father in law told me to. To go to a store and buy a gun. Now that was just when the pre 64 were going away. It was 64. It was an old electrical store in Vernon, Utah. And they sold everything from diapers to washing machine and everything. They had a few guns on the wall. So I went in there and was going to pick out my gift and I wanted a 270 because I was a huge Jack O' Connor fan, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

So do no 364. 270s. They had some 270s but they were brand new and I didn't want one. But they had a.30 06364.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. And explain what you mean when you say. Because people. A lot of guys aren't gonna know what you mean. Okay, when you say a pre 64.

[Jim Zumbo]

19.

[Steven Rinella]

The claw extractor.

[Jim Zumbo]

And yeah, in 1964, Winchester came out with a modified super version of the old 1964. But I'm not exactly sure what the differences were, but I just knew that O' Connor was a serious fan, you know, of the.270. And.

[Steven Rinella]

But I think that pre. I can't remember, man. Like, guys are going to crucify me for not remembering this. I can't remember what all the selling points were. It was like, I think, point of manufacture on pre 64.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Something about the way the extractor.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, it was a claw extractor and post wasn't. But for. For decades after that, people were built, built custom rifles off pre 64 actions. They didn't want the rest of the gun.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

They want the action.

[Jim Zumbo]

Exactly. Yeah. So anyway, I picked out that. That. 30 06. And I was 24 years old, and I used that gun for probably 20 years on Elk and deer and moose, whatever. And I mean, you know, you get a gun that is. You're sweet on it because it works, you know, when you put it up through your shoulder and, you know, it's just. It's just right. I love that gun. And being hunting editor and writing about it so much in the magazine, My boss, Claire Conley, he said, zombo, you write too much about that damn Winchester. We got other advertisers, you know, we got Remington and Savage and Marlin and Ruger and stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

He says, you got to start using different guns. So. Okay. So I went on a trip one time, and Bridge called me with Chuck Yeager and.

[Steven Rinella]

Chuck Yeager. Yeah, yeah, the right stuff. Chuck Yeager.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. Yeah. Yep. We went up there hunting. Hunting elk. And it was perfect time of the year. Like September 26th, prime bugle time. The woods were silent as hell. And we were staying in a cabin with an outfitter, and he was hunting with a guy down one mountain. I was hunting with a guy down another mountain. Long story short, I finally saw a bulld elk standing in a small opening long, long ways away. There were no range finders in those days, and I had to shoot kind of over a canyon. I don't know how far he was, but I took a shot. And I'm pretty sure I shot under him because he just stood there, took another shot. Nothing happened. The third shot, he kind of lurched and he ran off. And my guide was kind of standing behind a tree, and he didn't really. Couldn't see it, get a good view of that elk. So we went down and we looked for it. Couldn't find anything. We crawled around. No hair, no. No blood, no fur, nothing. And we just made big circles. And after literally 45 minutes or an hour, Carl, my guide says, you must have missed him. I said, maybe I did. I don't know. I said, I just thought I heard him. And he says, well, I'm going back. We had the horses tied up on a ridge. He says, I'm going back up on the ridge. I said, I'm going to look a little bit more good for you. Yeah, he looks with me. And so we left, and we're halfway to the horses, and all of a sudden I had this weird sensation, like ESP or whatever, and I heard that. I heard a noise like an animal hitting the ground. And I saw that bull lurch in my mind, I saw it. I said, carl, that bull's dead. He said, what are you talking about? I says, that bull dead. Wait here if you want. I'm gonna go find that bull. And I ran straight to it. Really, I swear to God.

[Steven Rinella]

What do you think it was?

[Jim Zumbo]

What had happened was.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean, what do you think? You just, like, your mind pulled up an image that you. Yeah, like that you kind of hadn't thought of as you reviewed your memory?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, it's like another time. I was hunting moose, and all of a sudden it was real foggy. Something was drilling into my back. Something was looking at me. And the fog finally left, and it was in Newfoundland. And there's this moose. But anyway, I went right to that bull. What had happened? There was an old spruce tree. It was kind of down in the ground, and it was typically. It had kind of a big space around it, and there was these big branches growing out. That bull had fallen into that. Into that hole. And it was about that much of his tine sticking out. And I don't know why I didn't smell it, because, you know, an elk, a bull elk, he's going to wreak a little bit. I think I was probably within three feet of that bull, crawling and looking, and I yelled to Carl. I found him. He says he. He couldn't believe it. But anyway, long story short, so Jaeger's up on this mountain, and he hears me shoot three times. So we go to camp that night. I said, what the hell happened? Why did you have to shoot three times? He says, I Said, well, I don't know. What are you using? I said, I'm using 30 odds. I said, well, that's your damn problem. We're sitting around the campfire, right? So he walks over with his Weatherby Mark 5. 300. He says, Here's a man's gun. Get rid of that goddamn pip squeak. So he didn't know it, but I had promised that gun to my son because Claire Conley told me to use other guns. So I got his Weather Bay and I. That's when I had to finally quit using that. 30:06. But as far as other guns, you know, I've. I don't know. I'm just kind of a traditional old, old school guy. And I use a.300 rum right now for elk, you know, Remington Ultra Mag. And, you know those, those cartridges, you put them next to a.375. If you don't look real close, you can't hardly tell a damn difference. I mean, it kicks like a mule and it. It's not suppressed. But I love the gun. I use it for elk, boosts bears. And for deer and antelope, I use a Kimber 270. And that was kind of a special gun. One time, Chuck Yeager, they wanted him to be a guest speaker for Pacific Northwest steelheaders in Portland, Oregon. And they knew I knew Chuck. And if I invited Chuck on a trip, he didn't want his regular stipend. He wanted to trade for a hunting or fishing trip. He was a hunting, fishing nut. Yeah. So I made a deal with him. I said, chuck, if you'll come to Portland, I already had research. I'll get you set up with five guides on five rivers in the Northwest area, fishing for salmon out of boats and stuff. So we made that deal, and he came while we were there. We went to the Kimber factory, which was in Portland at that time. They knew we were coming. And when the tour was over, they gave Chuck a rifle, 7mm, which is his favorite. And it said Mach 1 in gold. That was a serial number. And they gave me that.270 and it said Zumbo for the serial number. So special, I still shoot it, so. Oh, really? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

That's great, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

But, you know, as you know, everybody knows it, it's bullet placement, you know, for the most part. Yeah. I remember O' Connor saying, When you shoot an elk with a.270 right behind and that crease right behind the shoulder and get a double long shot, that Bull's going 80 yards and he's dying, which is pretty much, you know, not always true, but it pretty much is. But so, you know, a lot of people come out west from east coast or when they're hunting whitetails, and they think they gotta have a great big giant gun, but it's not really. And, and they're afraid of it, you know, and they hate to shoot the damn thing, but they think they gotta have it. So I always say, you know, shoot what you can shoot best, you know, back home, but don't bring the 30. 30? Yeah, you know, unless you're in the woods or something. But.

[Steven Rinella]

First deer I ever killed with a gun.

[Jim Zumbo]

Pardon?

[Steven Rinella]

I said the first deer I ever killed with a gun. Yeah, I shot it with a open sight, model 9432 special.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, did you?

[Steven Rinella]

This dude, I've told the story 100 times, but this, this dude was kind of a mentor and good buddy. My dad's. He had this cabin. His name is Eugene Groaters, and he had the, he had these gun racks built into the ceiling of the cabin. He was in his 80s, like yourself. And when I was a kid, though, and he would do this thing with kids, he did it with me where he'd say, you know, I, I, I try to have one gun for every year I've been alive, really, in the roof. And when I was little, and he says, you know, when I counted the other day and realized I have an extra. And he would do this with kids, you know, I have an extra. And so he pulled that gun down and, yeah, shot deer with it. And the dumbest thing I ever did. The dumbest thing I ever did is I took it down and sold it at a place that sold wood stoves and guns.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, geez.

[Steven Rinella]

And that dude gave me 300 bucks for it because I wanted a bolt gun.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, wow.

[Steven Rinella]

Dumbest thing I ever did, man. Dumbest thing I ever did.

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Steven Rinella]

getting action, you know, Thing I wanted to ask you about, like, you do. I mean, you're like, for your age, dude, you're doing, like, phenomenally well, right?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What, what's it like in life when you get to where, I mean, you know, more people that are. You've known more people that are dead than. There are a lot I do. You know what I'm saying?

[Jim Zumbo]

All my buddies back east are dead. Every one of them. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What's that start to look like? You know, I mean, like, how do you start. How do you think about all that? What's that starting to feel like?

[Jim Zumbo]

Well, I'm thankful every day. I get that. I get out of bed, you know, being 85, because, you know, I'm way beyond the. The normal age for. For white men and stuff. But I just wrote a. I'm writing a story right now for Bugle magazine on that very thing, on. On aging and how you feel. First thing that happens pretty much is your balance starts going like just putting on a hunting boot, no problem. But I got to the point where I realized it was easier to sit down or, you know, to lace the thing up so little things like that happen. And now I'm at the point where I can't ride a horse anymore. And that really hurts.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, what, what, what, what, what happens when you go to ride a horse,

[Jim Zumbo]

Your balance and just getting up on the thing. Okay. You know, yeah. When I go upstairs, I gotta have a railing, use a cane sometimes.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

But. But I have a foot issue, a knee issue, and the heart, the heart seems to be okay. You know, my back, I've got back serious Back issues, but. And I haven't taken care of myself. You know, I. Most of my hunts were remote wilderness hunts on horseback and a lot of hiking in tough country. Early on, I was a forester. I did a lot of wildfire suppression and. Which is I think, the toughest job you can have because you're going. There's no timetable. You know, you got those. But so I was. I was always in pretty doggone good shape. But then I realized, well, like right now, somebody wants me to do something this fall. And it's like, well, maybe I'll be able to. Maybe I won't be here. I mean, you can't sit around and cry about it. A lot of people say you're so damn lucky, you know, that you can still do stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

Because a lot of guys 20 years younger than I have given up hunting because they just can't, you know, they can't get around. So it's a sobering thing. One day I drove up the south fork near Cody, which takes you up to the famous thoroughfare where Jack o' Connor has hunted a lot. And I've hunted a lot. And I was sitting on the. On the dirt road where the trailhead is, and I saw these guys come down. They had. They were on horseback and they each led two horses. Nice set of elk antlers. Six point bull and all the mate, two bulls. And I thought, I'll never go up that trail again. Oh, yeah. So. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But you know, the only alternative is that you're dead.

[Jim Zumbo]

Right? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

People complain about getting old. You know what I mean?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's like. Well, what would be the opposite of that? Yeah, it's being dead.

[Jim Zumbo]

My dad lived in 92.

[Steven Rinella]

Did he?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. And that's because he fell and broke his hip. When you fall and break her hip

[Steven Rinella]

at a certain age, death sentence, you're

[Jim Zumbo]

going into rehab and then you're going into assisted living, then you're going to rest home and then you're done.

[Steven Rinella]

Who are the people you miss the most?

[Jim Zumbo]

Who? What?

[Steven Rinella]

Who are the people, the friends that you've lost? Like, who are the people you miss the most?

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, gosh. Oh, golly. There's a lot of them. Oh, gosh. One of my. One of the. My all time best buddy. His name was Louie Gizarelli. Real Italian name.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Zumbo]

And we were buddies since we were 12 and we were in boy Scouts together. And we hunted and fished like crazy. We trapped. And we'd be riding our bicycles at five in the morning before school to check our muskrat traps, and we're the best of friends. And the year before I joined outdoor life in 78, he got killed. He. Somehow. He had. He had rolled off a bridge and his truck landed. The water was only 2 foot deep, and his truck landed on its. On its top, and he drowned in the truck. Oh, and. And I missed that guy. We'd go to Newfoundland, fishing for Atlantic salmon and hunting bears, you know, and we had. So. I mean, we'd catch yellow perch and bluegills. The hell won't have it. And a lot of times I'd be hunting squirrels, and I have them in my game pocket, and at the end of the day, they're all stiff, you know, and it's hard to skin. Louis said, leave the damn things here. I'll do it. That kind of guy.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

We'd always fight over the best minnows in the bucket, you know, when we're on a boat and the best worms. Yeah, he was. He was special. But, golly, they're just. Most of the guys that I miss a lot were. The guy's. Back east, we had a cabin in the Adirondack in the Catskills. Deer cabin. Typical deer cabin, you know, and. But so, yeah, it's. It's tough because, you know, people are dying every day, especially as you get older, and sometimes there's. There's a. You know, they get killed in an accident or whatever. So,

[Steven Rinella]

yeah, it is tough, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, the thing.

[Steven Rinella]

I got a real good buddy I lost. And you know what haunts me the most about that is the times I had negative. That I had negative comments about him to other friends, about whatever. We get into a skirmish about something, you know, and I'd have negative comments about him. Yeah, that sticks to me now, man, the feeling of how I should never have said that anytime. We had. We knew each other for many, many years. So of course we had, like, disagreements. That sticks with you. Tell people about your books. You got a handful of them here. I didn't know that your first book. This is crazy, but your first book was called Ice Fishing east and West.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I didn't know about this one.

[Jim Zumbo]

I know these ones that was out of print.

[Steven Rinella]

It's out of print.

[Jim Zumbo]

But it's funny, that cover. Articat sent me that cover. Look at those snowmobiles. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Fish cleaning. Oh, snow travel.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Safety on the ice, where to find fish. Yeah. That book, let's say I wrote it in 76, I think. God Almighty. That's more than 50 years old, huh?

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know how I didn't know about this book, because we. We. I come from a long line of ice fishing, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, well, the editor of that book, he was with Outdoor Life, and he worked for David O. McKay Co. In New York City. And he saw me at the shot show, and he said, why don't you write a book on ice fishing? Why don't you write a book on cottontail rabbits? I said, who the hell's going to buy that? 10 people. Me. So, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You sold one copy.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

If I'd have known about it. Did this ice fishing book sell any copies?

[Jim Zumbo]

No, not really.

[Steven Rinella]

I can't picture. It would.

[Jim Zumbo]

That was back in the days where you do the royalty thing. Like, you get 10% of this first. First 10,000 bucks and 12 for the next 10 and 15 for the next. And I don't think that. I don't know what. It's all.

[Steven Rinella]

They never want to make any jingle for you.

[Jim Zumbo]

That was back in the day when. I mean, when you ice fish nowadays, you got all kinds of stuff. You know, obviously just a ton of new stuff. Back in the old days, you drill the hole and you stood there with the warmest clothes you could, like a man. Yeah. You stick her hand in that damn cold bait bucket and grab a minnow and. And wind or whatever. You just stay there. And so it wasn't. There was no really technology to it today, you know, there's all sorts of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Even when I was young, so much ice fishing gear was homemade.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, my old man would make his ice fishing.

[Jim Zumbo]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

A lot of it was homemade.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it. But these books took off, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, they did really well. Those To Heck with Deer, To Heck with Elk, To Heck with Moose. Basically, those are just stories that I've written. Like, each one has, like 30 stories in them about crazy stuff, you know, each one of them is the Hunt. The Heck with Moose is actually a compilation of everything other than deer and elk, like moose, caribou, sheep, antelope. So those are all kinds of different stories. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You regret naming it To Heck with.

[Jim Zumbo]

I do. You know, people say, what the hell? What's. What's wrong with that book? I said, oh, it's just a title,

[Steven Rinella]

you know, and it bugs you.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah. But once I explained it, then they looked at. I said, yeah, okay. And Attack with How to get an Easy Elk. That's kind of just a. In fact, Pat McManus wrote the forward in that book.

[Steven Rinella]

That was a funny man. I never met him, but my God, is that guy funny. We were emailing around favorite Pat McManus quotes the other day. Oh, yeah, just the other day.

[Jim Zumbo]

It was so much fun.

[Steven Rinella]

But that dude was a funny, funny guy.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, he. He was.

[Steven Rinella]

I would read him as a kid.

[Jim Zumbo]

Can I tell you a quick Pat McManus, please, ma'.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

Am.

[Jim Zumbo]

The editor of OUTDOOR Life said, why don't you and McManus go on a hunt somewhere and write a double feature, you know, side by side, and each of you tell what happened on that hunt. So we decided, well, let's go and hunt something that's got fangs and corpse, you know, to make it. Make it real, real interesting. So we went on a bear hunt in British Columbia with Remington and a bunch of writers. And it was a real crazy spring. It was snow everywhere, and the bears were not out. They were in the cottonwood trees, way up in the cottonwood trees. And you could look out over this river and see five or six bears, black blobs. But they. They were kind of smallish bears, you know, I don't think there's a six

[Steven Rinella]

footer up there up eating in there.

[Jim Zumbo]

In. In British Columbia, like, normal.

[Steven Rinella]

They're laying up or they're up there.

[Jim Zumbo]

No, they're eating. They're eating.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

Eating those big buds.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep. So. Well, nobody's doing very well. And. And on the fourth day, Pat got a bear.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Jim Zumbo]

Okay. So, of course, he's a humorator. He gets a bear. I don't have a bear yet. Right. I'm not. Yeah. So the last day, my guide and I are driving around, and there's a bear standing there looking at us like, 70, 80 yards away. Piece of cake, you know, meat on the table. And he's just looking at us in the snow. So I get out of the truck, set up my sticks, and I said, you know, this is. There's my bear. I fired, and he just looked at me. He didn't do a damn thing. He just. Then he kind of just ambled off and waddled away. That bear would not hit. So the guy. So I said, I missed him. The guy said, you sure as hell did miss him. What the hell happened? I said, I don't have any idea. So I said, I'm gonna go up there where the bear was. I'm gonna find his tracks, and I look for blood, too, but they will know. And I'm gonna. You stand right where I shot from. Draw a straight line. And I looked, and there is the top of a Douglas fir tree laying in the snow. There was A little hole in it. That bullet had deflected. Yeah. So we go back to camp, pass in our tent. Here's his pull up. Do you get one? I says, yeah, I got one. Where is it? I said, right there. And he looks at that piece of tree and they're laughing like how I told him the story. So there's a little place where you get cell service. So I called the editor in New York and I said, I gotta. I got an interesting story. I said, pat got a bear. And I didn't. And there's a silence. He says, well, we can't run that story. I said, well, think about it, you know, It's a fun story. What does Pat write? He said, zumbo was after that Doug fur. That trophy. Doug fur. And he waited for that bear to walk around behind it to present a good silhouette, and he fired and he got the fur. But that's just Pat, you know? Yeah, he. Golly. We used to do a stand up act for the Elk foundation on stage, and he'd tell his famous deer on a bicycle story, people. I saw one guy fall off his chair. He was laughing. So, you know, what the hell am I doing up here with Pat McManus? You know, we were close friends and, and, and. But all I do is tell some stories. I didn't try to get funny, but he was.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, because you kind of. You're not gonna outfunny that guy, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

He was hilarious, but he wasn't really funny in person.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, is that right?

[Jim Zumbo]

We go to lunch.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, that's the weird deal about real funny people. The funniest people aren't funny in person.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They don't have the. They run. They run out of energy a little bit, I think. Yeah. The funniest, funniest people. Performers aren't funny in person. And sometimes the funniest people in person aren't funny in performers.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a weird deal, man. So when you're hanging out with him, he's not just cracking jokes left and right?

[Jim Zumbo]

Was that what.

[Steven Rinella]

When you're hanging out with Patrick McManus, he's not just cracking jokes left and right when you're driving down the road?

[Jim Zumbo]

No, we just. We just. I don't know, we talk about the magazine, you know, and business jerks. We know. And one. One interest.

[Steven Rinella]

Did you guys know a lot of jerks?

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Some of the editors were. They're all from New York and New Jersey and Connecticut, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

So were you.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah. But I. I took off out west, and I started hunting at a young age. Those guys never got it.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it, Got it.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. But Pat was the kind of guy where a stranger could walk up to him, and he'd start talking to him and say, you want to go to lunch with us? I mean, he was that kind of guy. But one of. One of my greatest articles was when Pat died. The editors asked me to write a tribute to him on his back page. Now doorway.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh. To take his column.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. And write about him.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

So that was fun. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

God, guy was funny, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. He sold so many books, Some of them made the New York Times bestseller list, you know, And. And he also had someone do a play.

[Steven Rinella]

I didn't know that.

[Jim Zumbo]

Especially around Montana and Idaho, he'd actually impersonate Pat and.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Pat wasn't there, but he impersonated him, you know, Did a great show. Yeah. But Pat could make anybody laugh, even. Even the wives that didn't hunt. You know, he like. He write about backing up a trailer, a whole column. Make it. Make it funny as hell. No. One time. Yeah. He actually started with Field and Stream and Clear. Connolly stole him away from Field and Stream, got him Outdoor Life. But Pat told me one time, an editor called and said, the artist wants to know what your next column is going to be about so we can start working on it. Pat had no idea. He said, it's about a box. He said, okay, what kind of box? He said, a green box. A green box? How big? Oh, about as big as a coffin. Okay. So they went with that. He had no idea what. And he wrote about it. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

That's good. That's good. Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show and taking the time to drive up here.

[Jim Zumbo]

I'll tell you, I'm. I've wanted to meet you for a long time, because I know you are. You can tell. You're so genuinely involved in hunting and fishing, and I get so much out of your podcast. You did one on CWD recently. I learned a lot of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, you do?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I saw when you went to North Dakota to that bobcat sale.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

Learned a lot of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Nevada. Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, was that Nevada?

[Steven Rinella]

Yes, sir.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. No, I really enjoy your stuff, and it's a pleasure to meet you and do the podcast, so I appreciate that.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, I want to share this with people that we met down in Cody, Wyoming, and you gave me some smoked trout, and it's great. Smoke trout. Everybody loved it. But I wound up. It wound up Being well traveled. Smoke trout. Because I took that. I took. I had one pack left and I took it to the Bahamas. We brought our own food down.

[Jim Zumbo]

Oh, my gosh. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

We chartered a plane to get out to a remote area. So we brought, you know, deer and elk and whatnot. And I threw that smoked trout in there. And so we're sitting out there in the Bahamas on, like, the, you know, the queen mother fishing grounds. You know, all these dead fish on ice, right. And we're sitting around eating that smoke trout. My buddy down there.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He's fished all over the world, you know.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And we're eating Zombo smoked trout. And he's just blown away how good it is. And he's like, man, how could I make this with something down here, you know? What would I use down here?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah. I didn't tell you this, but I got that right. I've been smoking fish all my life in my. Since my 20s. And I had one of those little. Little Chief smokers, you know.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[Jim Zumbo]

And Lord Jensen, I think out of that. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Everybody. Yeah. That was like the.

[Jim Zumbo]

Those.

[Steven Rinella]

The smoker.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. But I never was happy with the. With the brine. Just wasn't happy. And I go to Alaska, man, they had such good stuff. And one day I'm ice fishing at Cody on Buffalo Bill Reservoir. And there was a bunch of old guys there, and I didn't know we got bs and one guy said he had retired from a meat processor. Wild meat processing business. I said, oh, well, that means they cut up stuff and you smoke stuff, right? He said, yeah, yeah. We smoke deer, hams and pheasants and ducks and. Because you smoke fish, too. He says, oh, yeah. I says, now that you're retired, could I get your brine recipe? Because this guy's a pro. He says, wait a minute. He goes up to his truck and he's got a package of smoke trout. He gives it to me and I said, holy smokes. I've been looking for this all my life. So I didn't do it. I just got that from him.

[Steven Rinella]

Are you willing to share?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. Tell people right now.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, lay it out.

[Jim Zumbo]

2 cups of brown sugar, half a cup of white sugar, and 1 cup of tender Quick.

[Steven Rinella]

Morton's Tender Quick.

[Jim Zumbo]

Tender Quick.

[Steven Rinella]

If you want to make like. If you want to make your own, like, corn meat, this is like the quick and easy way of doing it.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

That product. I buy that product.

[Steven Rinella]

I order that on Amazon.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because it's hard to find.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I found it in Albertsons and Cody. It's, it's made by Morton. Morton Salt.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Jim Zumbo]

And it comes in a blue bag, maybe two pound bag. But it is, it's actually a meat cure. It's got sodium nitrate. Nitrate. So I've actually sent smoked fish across country and you know, it takes four or five days and it's warm and it's, it's okay because. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You take it down to the Bahamas, dude.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. But anyway, I put it on dry, you know, take your fillets, take the flies, skin on. You know, of course I'm going to smoke them and just lay them in a tub and just keep sprinkling that, that mixture on them. And then. And as soon as it hits the cold fish, it turns to liquid. It looks just like maple syrup. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Starts drawing that moisture out. Yeah.

[Jim Zumbo]

And I let them, I let them soak for about nine hours. Then I rinse them off in cold water.

[Steven Rinella]

I like how you take your own chainsaw and you cut your own wood chips for your smoker.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Just pick up your, your saw cuttings.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

You ever rip it lengthwise to get bigger cuttings?

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get those big, big curlicues. Yeah, yeah. But what I did is I took, I had a friend in an outfitter buddy in Montana, Billy Stockton. Billy Stockton, he lived in Wise river and he had a chainsaw and he put vegetable oil in it and he cut his elk.

[Steven Rinella]

So he had food grade chips.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah. So that's what I did. I had a saw and I put. Take all the old oil out and put vegetable oil. So really, so when you're cutting the wood, you didn't have oil residue on the wood, you know. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's a good move, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, again, man, I so much appreciate you coming out. It's a real honor to me. It's honor to the show to have you on.

[Jim Zumbo]

Thank you, sir. I really appreciate it.

[Steven Rinella]

Everybody. Jim Zombo. Thanks, man.

[Jim Zumbo]

Thank you.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Steven Rinella]

to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

[Sponsor/Announcer]

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[Jim Zumbo]

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