Sheep Stories: Early Bighorn Research, Surviving TWO Plane Crashes & More with Kevin Hurley

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To the Hunt West Podcast, here's your host, Jaden Bales. Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Hunt West Podcast. This is your host, Jaden Bales. And I'm really happy you're here for this second episode of the Sheep Stories from the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundations Expo just last week. Keep in mind, I apologize that the audio quality is not as crystal clear as this is because we recorded it on the full floor of the expo. But I'm really excited to bring you this episode today. This is with Mr. Kevin Hurley. He's Vice President for Conservation Emeritus with the Wild Sheep foundation, that national organization. I kind of laid out a little bit of information about Kevin, what he's doing currently, and then I wanted to take a step back and like totally fill in all the gaps as to how he got to what he's doing. Now we talk a lot about some old incredible stories from backpacking for counting sheep in the 80s to plane crashes and multiple of them, matter of fact. And I'm really just excited to bring you this episode. Kevin is a great guy. He's doing some awesome work and he's dedicated his whole life to that, to the work of Wild Sheep foundation, he calls it Faz from back in the day. And I really am just really excited that you get to listen in on some great stories from Kevin Hurley. I hope you enjoy this episode. All right, Mr. Kevin Hurley, Vice President for Conservation Emeritus with the Wild Sheep Foundation. It is. How are you doing?

I'm well. You?

Oh, I'm doing good. So you and I sat down. Oh, I think it was during COVID when I was with Wyoming Wildlife Federation and we talked some, some sheep stuff. And I feel like the world of sheep is constantly changing. There's always new stuff though. What have you been working on these days?

Oh, boy. You know, I think back and I started in the sheep world in 1980, so been a few changes in 45 years. But you're right. And we joke about our soap opera as the Sheep World Turns. There's something new every day. So of late what I've been working on is I coordinate all the grant made funding for conservation projects for the National Latitude foundation based out of our headquarters in Bozeman. And so our grant aid funding cycle is the month of July and so it's all electronic. And so we have a new grant aid platform that we're going to unveil. It's going to be quite similar in appearance, but it should be more user friendly. So we typically get, oh, maybe up to 30 or more project requests of funding. And then we spend the month of August evaluating the requests. And then by the end of August our board takes action on our recommendations. So they usually ratify what we recommend. And so all the grant and aid requests that national gets goes through quite a rigorous review process, not only by conservation staff, but we have our separate advisory board. It's called PRAV is the acronym, but it's our professional Resource advisory board that looks at all the projects as well. And so independently, they score them and rank them. We score them and rank them. Then we get together and compare notes and arrive at joint recommendations. If we advance, I advance to Gray Thornton, our president CEO and then he elevates them to the board. So besides actual conservation work, I spent a lot of time doing the grant Nate coordination.

So basically like to put it in the layman's terms, you're the man with the purse strings for the National Wild Sheep Foundation. What made it so you got to that point? I mean obviously you said you started doing this stuff in like 80, so there's a lot of space in between.

There is a lot of miles between 1980 and 2025. So I'm not quite the keeper of the purse strings. I'm the administrator of the purse strings. What gets funded that ultimately it's our board. Like any non profit, our board has the final say. So but typically they ratify our recommendations. And so you know, my time in the sheep world started when I came to Wyoming for graduate school at the University of Wyoming. And I was. Where'd you grow up? I grew up on the Front Range of Colorado.

Okay, so you've been out west your whole life?

I spent time in Minnesota, I spent time in Michigan, I spent time in Wisconsin. But so when I my senior year in high school my dad took a job in Wisconsin. So we left Front Range of Colorado and moved to southern Wisconsin. I really didn't want to go because I wanted to stay with my buddies. I was going to an all guys Catholic school in southwest Denver. Athletically and academically it was a good place to be and who knows. But I did get to go to a co ed public school in Wisconsin for my senior year. So I was like what do I need? But anyway, so I spent, after I graduated with a bachelor's, I went to work for the U.S. forest Service seasonally in northern Idaho on the Clearwater National Forest at our Nocy Ranger Station, mainly working on elk and elk habitat, timber sales and things like that. Thinking I should probably get a graduate degree. But long story Short. I took four and a half years between undergrad and starting grad school. And when I went back to grad school, it was with a bit of a vengeance, you know, I had a blue flame turned up and so I might not have been a great undergrad student.

You poured it on in graduate school.

Grade A's in grad school.

Yeah.

I moved to Wyoming in 1981 to work on a mule bib project down in the southwest part of the state, the Carter Leaks. But the funding fell through and so I came anyways even though my project had evaporated. And so Dr. Larry Irwin was my advisor. I remember knocking on his door and I'd never met him, but he looked up and said, can I help you? And I introduced myself, he said, oh, you showed out. And I said, yes sir, that's what I do. And so I met Tom Rider, my lifelong friend there. He was the first guy a year in grad school together. Tom spent his career with Game and Kush. We're still buds to this day a couple of years later. But anyway, so after I had to find a project, I started beating the streets, talking to Game of Thrush headquarters in Cheyenne and came up with a couple of big one sheep project ideas. One down in the North Platte, the Douglas Creek herd, not we can't make it on the Douglas Creek side over south of Saratoga. And then there was another project working on what's called the trout peat curve west of Cody between Cody and Yellowstone Park. And so I wrote up two parallel study plans and budgets and I took them over to Danny Fish in Cheyenne and talked to Harry Harvey, he was the chief of biological services. Then I said, you know, which one of these projects would you guys favor if I can find some money? He said, the one about Cody. You know, the Douglas Creek herd was reintroduced. Bighorn sheep in the Absarokas have been there forever. And so that was a higher priority project. And so it's interesting how the threads tied together. But Wyoming governor Ed Hirschler, he's the only three term governor in Wyoming's ever had. And he and his folks came up with a novel idea back in 1980 to offer a conservation permit. Special governor's tag is where people always call them the vernacular. But the agreement that he made with the foundation for North American Wild Sheep, or fanav, which is a mouth bar. Yeah, was I'll give you this 100% fully donated tag provided you spend that like amount on projects for bighorn trees in Wyoming. And so they struck a deal and so I benefited from early, early sales at Governor Special tags.

And so do you remember what those went for? Oh, man, right off the bat.

Yeah, I want to say it was in below 20,000. Holy cow. You know, look at them now. But. And so that paid my graduate stipend. And so I moved. I did the academic year 81, 82 in Laramie. And then I moved to Cody in June of 82 and started the trout beat to study. And I read everything I could about that area. I mean, it's phenomenal country. And a guy like Teddy Roosevelt, who saw much of western America, he always referred to that 50 miles between Cody and the east gate of Yellowstone as the most scenic 50 miles in America. Oh, wow. And I remember driving Cody up over Dead Indian Pass, looking into sunlight basin, which is I think the most impressive view in the whole state of Wyoming. It's like, wow, I get to work here. Yeah, phenomenal. And so I started doing field work, looking at seasonal movements. I mean, there was really not much brew on surveyor inventory data. So I asked one of the game and fish guys in Cody, I said, how many bighorn sheep did you see on the last flight? And the answer was six. And I said, six what, like six hours? And he said, no, six sheep. Oh, man. And whoever had done the survey had a tendency to get air sick. So they took off. And when it got bumpy after six sheep, he's like, I'm sick. Let's go back, let's go. No, they didn't really have a whole lot of information. So What? I spent 30 months doing field work between June of 82 and approximately, you know, spring of August of 85. And man, I backpacked. That's fall. I did backpack and look, you see, my job was to walk and look.

Did you have a spot and scope that you'd pack around with you?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

I had all my, all my gear, a bunch of university gear. And then unfortunately, I had a university pickup. But living in Cody, somebody broke into my university truck and stole all my equipment. Oh, no. And a bunch of it was my stuff, but a bunch of it was the university's in law receiver, a tracking antenna, a dart gun, everything. Binocular spotting spot, my tent, my backgate, they took it all. So I called my advisor down at Laramie. I said, larry, what do I do? And he goes, well, Kevin, the university is self insured. And I said, what does that mean? He goes, means you don't have any money until we can find some money to replace your equipment, your sol. I don't Know what to tell you? Yeah. So I went into the foundation from North American Law, the street finales. I went into their office and there was a interim director, a guy named Arnie Johns, and he was an old sweet runner from northern Wisconsin, or Ensor, I guess Wisconsin. This is way be called the Internet. And I said, man, I'm dead in the water. They took my binoculars, everything. And Artie goes, give me 24 hours to come back in. And so I went back the next morning, and he had made a bunch of phone calls. This is way before email. And he goes, I raised $2,500 for you overnight. Go buy a new backpack, go buy a new tent, go buy a new binoculars, new spotting skirt, and get back out. Do what you're doing. That to me, was a real seminal, watershed moment for me, because they didn't have to do that, but I thought, what a cool bunch of people that is to step up and help me get back to work. And so that was one of the first, you know, decision points. I've been a loyalist for 45 years. But, I mean, that really did it to me. It's like, wow, what a great outfit.

So when you were backpacking for sheep, you said you had a dart gun and stuff. Like, were you basically, like spotting and stalking sheep to do research on them?

Well, the basics were, in the summertime, just inventory. Okay. Just counting sheep, naively.

Did you sleep a lot?

Yeah. Count sheep and go to sleep. I naively looked at the paper map and I thought, okay, I'm going to put a camp in over here on this high divide, and I'll just work along the top of the divide and I can look at all these side drainages going down to the north fork or going down the Sunlight Basin. Well, as soon as I got there, it was like, oh, crap, this country is too rugged and in the absurd volcanics. And so what I had to do is typically go up a drainage, get high, spend a day or two, then come back down, go over to the next drainage and go up and come out and try to did some kind of a regular cycle or schedule. And so I was trying to document unduplicated sightings. And there were no marked sheep there at the time. No radio collars, no ear tags, anything like that. And so I spent a lot of time pounding the ground, but that was my job, was to walk, backpack, and look for sheep. And so my first trip, I heard there's a grapevine that was a guy named Bob Modell who lived up Rattlesnake Creek. And now that I've known Bob for 45 years, we're very good conservationists, very involved with Luna Crockett Club. So I called Bob Mundell and I said, hey, tell me if I go through your ranch, I can save a whole lot of time and steps to get to Trout Peak. And he's like, sure. So I went up and met him and it saved me probably five or six hours of walking.

Yeah.

And so that got me started. And on the very first trip I took and I went by myself, I didn't really know where I was going. I didn't tell anybody where I was going. So I'm backpacking and you know how they absorb the volcanic. Sometimes you get a surface on it so that it's real hard. But that gravel rock, you know, you lose your footing. So I'm walking along the side hill and I lose my footing. I'm sliding down my ass, headed for a cliff and I somehow was able to catch on. And I looked up the hill behind me back to the east and on the top of that ridge there's a half curl ram who's standing there watching me like, what are you doing?

He's like watching this idiot fall down the mountain.

Yeah. And that again was one of those watershed moments where I said, okay, I guess I better tell people where I'm going and when I think I'll be back. And yeah, and so you learn, you know, back then you're bulletproof. But I spent the summer in 82, 83 and 84 backpacking. I don't even know how many hundreds of days in the year. In the wintertime I was doing surveys on winter rains and also radio collaring, shooting. And so Dr. Tom Thorne, he was our wildlife vet for game and Fish back then. And I was working out of the Cody office. I lived in a 16 foot trailer behind the old game and fish building in south of the airport in Cody and had straw bales around my university trailer. But it was cold.

Yeah, I bet.

But I spent 15, 16 months living in that before I moved into our. But anyways, that was my job. So I would help anything that I could with the game and fish department, check station, sage grass, lunch, whatever I could do to help them just to become known. Yeah, because I think that a barber, like a lot of agencies, they don't typically hire somebody they don't know something about. Yeah. And so, you know, I work out of the Cody office. A call came in, I would go with them to try and do something. I remember everything from Muskrats to a badger in our gunny sack, you know, and then those kind of calls. I would go help just to get the experience. But I did a lot of flying and fixed wing, a good pilot out of Yalu, guy named Bill Blakeman with Super Cub and we flew along.

And so how was the sheep herd doing back then?

Well, my highest earned duplicated cow and it was, you know, I won't swear on a stack of bibles it was unduplicated, but as good as I could do. I figured they thought the estimate was around 750 sheep in that population. And again, from the north fork to sunlight and from Rattlesnake Mountain to the east boundary of the carp, the highest number of unduplicated sightings that I could account for was about 443 sticks. In my mind. I've still got my field moats from back 45 years ago. But it's like, okay, so if I physically saw that many from the ground, how many did I mit? Were there portions of the unit that I didn't go into that had sheep in it till, you know, I think 5 or 700 was probably a fair guess. But at part of the larger conflicts, the whole of Sorca range from the Montana border all the way down around the southeast corner of Yellowstone. We're over to Jackson. Hunter is 125 man. That was the stronghold of the mountain sheep. If you go back and read like Oswald Russell, 1842, Journal of the Travel, we talked about the thousands mountain sheep that he would see on those canyon walls. The entire Shoshone mountain. Shoshone sea beater, Indian people. Their whole culture evolved around big March sea. You know, they'd hunt them, drive traps. You know, they'd use the hair hides for clothing, the horns for bows, you know, bones for spoons. I mean their whole culture evolved around. So the Zoracus has been a stronghold for mountain sheep as far back as anybody could ever imagine. Other places, not so much. I think back to 1942 there was a publication by Game and Fish who was their wildlife bulletin number one by a guy named Ralph Honest and Ned Frost. And Ned Frost had a bunch of descendants that lived in the Cody area. But it was more focused on the Drobot herd over by Jackson. But they had quite a bit in there about park county and resortes. But with the Mountish Shishong people, Negro culture, you just knew that was a stronghold for Maldeshif. So that thousands a year and it's a lot of wilderness, it's almost all on national Forest. So the Shoshone National Forest was the first national forest in the system back in 1906, I think it was to be the Shoshone Forest Reserve, and they changed it to Shoshone. That from Forest and Wapiti Ranger Station on the North Pole. Very first ranger station in the U.S. oh, really?

So all this stuff is, like, really baked into, like, the culture of how the whole west ended up being managed, at least as far as national forest.

Lands are, you know, and like I said, Roosevelt, who saw a lot of Western U.S. he favored that country. You look at Buffalo Bill Cody and the Haska Lodge, East Gates, fabulous historic lodge. And what kind of digging ferries from Europe went through there and hunted with Buffalo Bill Cody, of course. And when Yellowstone was established as the first National park in 1872, they weren't hunting in the park. Man, all that forest land around the park was like parrots, thoroughfare, blue stone, all that outside the park. So I've been really fortunate to spend my career working around what I consider the Greater Yellowstone. And what now there are those. After I left Wyoming, moved to Montana. Now I'm back in Idaho, where I came from when I moved to Wyoming. So I spent, I don't know, 48 years in the Greater Yellowstone area. And to me, it's the finest real estate on the planet.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with you. So while you were, you know, in Wyoming, obviously you were on the ground doing the work for counting sheep and being involved in management stuff. But were you getting involved in conservation projects then too, outside of your work, or was it all baked in?

It was a little bit. But, you know, one of the biggest things I can recall is back then there was proposed seismic exploration from oil and gas and in the absurd volcanics, Knowing what I know now, you know, they're not the sedimentary traps like Beartus or other mountain ranges. And so the Forest Service was considering authorizing this seismic exploration. Would have been helicopters, you know, with explosive chargers, those big thumper trucks, you know, that vibrate and they pick up all the sensors trying to map the underground stratigraphy. Well, they didn't want to do it during the summer when all the tourists are there, right? And they didn't want to do it during the fall because hunting season around Cody, as you know, is such a big deal. So they said, well, they can't really do it in the wintertime because of snow. So how about we do it in the spring before the tourists start arriving to have them to and from Yellowstones? Based on the Telemetry data, the radio collar data, the lambing timing, the chronology and location of dropping lambs. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. March and April is not necessarily a good time to be doing this from a displacement standpoint of wildlife after they made it through a tough winter. And so I got involved in sort of those. I won't say they're political issues, they're resource issues, but with a lot of political intervention involved. And so I found my data being used more and more to help defend the integrity of San Diego, Big launchee to habitat. So there were early groups that formed around Cody, the Clark County Resource Council and things like that. And it was kind of funny because my older brother, he's a carbonate geologist and a petroleum engineer. He was working for Marathon out of Denver, and Marathon proposed a well on Grace Creek, halfway between Cody and Yellowstone. And so my data was being used to say, why not to bullet my brother in his position with Marathon? He was like, yeah, here's why we can do it and it's not going to cause an impact. And so my mom used to joke that she was going to write a novel. I was going to be the good sergeant and he was going to be the dark cern. But that never happened. But, you know, Marathon did a good job. They had to fly everything in which they opposed. Nobody wanted to see a Rhodes car going up off the North Fork highway in the Grace Bridge. And so, you know, cutting my teeth on those kind of resource issues, so to speak. And my time between graduate and undergraduate school, I'd worked seasonally for the US Forest Service as our wildlife tech misheard. And I remember multiple occasions going out with foresters, silviculturists, engineers, hydrologists. We'd go look at a timber share and I would offer my input. And I remember it happened a couple times where we would sit down after a couple days in the field, we'd sit down at a big conference table and start drawing maps for potential sales and cut blocks. And I would give my info. And I remember to this day, one of the guys said, we'll write this up this winter. Kevin won't be here if I would only work from May to November, if I was seasonal, not permanent.

Yeah.

And I'm like, hey, I'm sitting right here. Hello. And I felt really disregarded. And I said, nobody's gonna do that to me again. Again. And so that's one of the reasons the blue flame turned on. I went to graduate school because I had been burned that way, figuratively. And it's just Like, I felt an advanced degree and more experience. So I started graduate school when I was 27, which is older than most. Yeah, but it was. It worked for me for sure. So. But, yeah, I got involved with a lot of stuff. And the Sheep foundation, of course, had moved their opera to Cody in September of 82 from the Twin Cities, and they.

Really good timing right there, right? Yeah.

And I never got anybody to admit it, but I think they funded my project in Cody to help sort of grease the skids for their landing and arrival in Cody. So I moved to Cody in June of 82. Lloyd Zieman and Gretchen Stark come from the Twin Cities in September of 82. So I helped unload the boxes for their first office. And you're gonna know where I'm talking about, but where the old Cody rodeo ticket office was down that long, dark hallway in one of those buildings off of Main street off Sheridan. And I helped set up the first office.

Okay.

So my history goes back around those.

Yeah. So one thing I can't get out of my mind, though, is, you know, if I was a sheep hunter in 82 to 85 and I had one of those sheep tags, I know who I'd be calling.

Did you.

Did you go on some hunts in there?

I didn't, but in 1985, I drew.

Oh, really?

An area, two tags. And, yeah, I drew up my fair drawing just like anybody would. And there was some resentment. There was some rumbling. Like, I had a couple outfitters that helped me a lot, but they were not happy. And what I heard them say was, well, we're down here working all summer. You're up there. And I said, please don't say what I think you're about to say, that I was, what, screwing around? But they felt that was an unfair advantage because I knew something or a lot about where those sheep lived in and work. So I draw a tag in 1981, and I was finishing my mastery, and I didn't have time to go. I want to make sure I put the day track. Yeah. So.

You had to finish up your masters in, like, September, even though.

Yeah, I'm trying. I want to make sure I get the dates right, because it was. It was 1985. Right. Drew. But anyways, bottom line, I was looking for one particular ram into that scene, and I knew where he lived, but I could not find that ram, and so I never filled my cat.

Oh, really? And, okay, did you backpack all this, or did you have friends with horses?

I took one horseback trip and got spoiled because I. I Went with my boss from Game and Fish and we had a wall tent, we had steak for dinner. I'm like, I gotta go back to freeze dried foods in my backpack. Well, I'm not doing this right.

Probably like an old frame pack that had bungee straps of everything on it.

Like a nice jansport pack. And I still have it.

Oh really?

I've saved it. My son didn't want it, so now I'm hoping my grandson someday will use it. But.

Well, if they don't want it, I'll take it.

Yeah, I did an Oscar on my tag in 1985 in Area 2 and people were like, what the hell were you doing if you couldn't even find a sheep? You know, did you learn anything? But I was holding out for one particular ram and I couldn't find any.

Yeah.

So fast forward 12 years to 1997. I was working for Gamer Fish and I was managing area 5. Frank Speakperf up the gravel, up the wood and I drew a tig in there. Like I killed a 10 year old ram opening morning and my buddy Ron Lockwood, Sam's dad is with me and he'd never been on a sheep car and we're laying there in the rocks and we shadowed these rams for 36 hours day long. So I knew where to be on opening morning and he asked her. He was like, are you sure that's the hunt? You want it? The ram? You want to end your. So I killed a 10 year old gram opening morning and he's like this sheep button's easy.

Yeah, but, but you guys have been in there scouting and stuff for a few days before.

Yeah, yeah, but you know, and then other people said, oh, it's no fair. You get to fly that. And I said, now wait a minute, I fly in January, but I hunt in September like anybody else would.

So you're not in the same spots.

I've asked this question through the decades and not had anybody ever come up with a good answer. But I say if you're a sheep run or not boat run or people that manage your sheep and go herring opportunities, they also like to sheep and go her. Tell me the downside of that.

Yeah, yeah, there's not.

And wouldn't you rather have somebody that gives a rip about your passion also being passionate about that rather than being detached and it's like, man, yeah, I'd never hunt one of those, but I'm gonna set your hunting season. Yeah. And so I still believe that to this day. It's like, you know, so when I got into a supervisory position and the guys who worked for me as district biologist when I got to be the supervising biologist, they all hunted soup. Not because I made them, because they wanted to. And I said experience. So Doug McWhorter, he came and volunteered with me in 1985 as a young kid from Wichita, Kansas. And we've been fast prems for 40 plus years and have done all kinds of sheep and goat stuff together. Tom Easterly over in the Graver, he died in that accident back in 2014. What's going on, Kidder? Good there. Good to see you. And. And then Bart Kerr. Yeah, I knew Bart and his dad Dick, he had worked for the BLM in Moreland.

And Bart just retired, right?

This retire.

Yeah.

So when I knew I was getting promoted from Thermopolis to the Cody coordinator job, I called Bart and I using Douglas as the biologist and I said, you ought to think about putting in here. So I've already been looking because I knew you'd get picked to be the coordinator. So I move Bart's great friend, Doug's a great friend. Tom's unfortunately gone there. But yeah. So I still believe that strongly that the people that manage your hunting opportunities, if they don't like to hunt or are a non hunter or an antel hunter, bad situation.

Yeah. And so I feel like that's what we run into in not really in Wyoming I have a metabolist, he's not also interested in. In hunting in some way, shape or form. But I think a lot of other states they end up with people who don't understand it or don't like it and then that's when we get a whole cascading effect at issues it is.

And so the best example I can think of and Ron Larkwood and I were best of parents for a lot of years and Andrea Orebona was the non game bird biologist around me. Gaming fish, not a hunter. But she drew a moose tag one year and Ron helped her somewhere down on near Kemmer. I don't remember which drainage they were in. So she wound up shooting a nice bull moose. Not a great big monster, but a nice bull. Yeah. And I've got a photo of her smiling and proud of herself. And so here's a woman non game bird biologist. And so whenever people would say, and these game and fish agencies, they just don't have people that hunt her fish anymore, I said, you don't have to worry about that, Nyl.

Yeah, that sure seems to be the case.

Tell me that she's not A happy hunter.

That's right.

You know, and I have seen that in my 45 years. It is challenging. You know, there's more and more conservation biology graduates that aren't really disciplined in what I would call fish and wildlife management. Traditional old school kind of managers approach. Like not saying who's right or wrong, but it's different, it's changing. Yeah.

And that's. I, I would need to get Sam Lockwood on the podcast, but I also had to, would have to gear up for a three hour podcast probably. He's, he's a good friend of mine and. Yeah, no, that's a great, that's a great example though. So you did a couple sheep hunts in Wyoming?

Two, three for myself.

For yourself.

In 85 unsuccessful and then 97 successful. But yeah, I went with other brands. Yeah. And so helped them. And.

Were there any of those other ones that stuck out? Like that was like a crazy trip or. I mean back then I, I would imagine maybe the bear problems weren't as bad or like if it wasn't quite.

As the bears were around, but it's not like it is now.

Yeah. Well, I was thinking about you backpacking around up there by yourself and I'm like over here thinking, I don't know, I would want to spend 200 days in a tenant Cody anymore by myself.

Well, in 1984, and that was the year that the, the Swiss Mist got eaten in Pelican Valley in the park there, Virginia Friedenhausen or some name like that, she got killed by Grizzly and Eaton over the Pelican Dollar. That was two weeks before this episode. I'm going to tell you a week later, a kid from New York State got drugged out of his tent over Grant Village by Grisby. And so the next week I had gotten special dispensation, special permission from Steve Malish. He was the poor supervisor on the Shashas. But I could get helicoptered into the wilderness.

Okay.

And so I had two field assistants working with me. And so we dropped them in one spot. One spot or me in another spot. So I was up on the very top of Niper Mesa looking over what was called Mount Pleasant ahead of the Sweetwater drainage. And we were in radio communication with my technicians. So we said we were going to check in at like 8 and 6, 8am at 6pm and so they got picked up and taken out. I stayed in longer and right after this Swiss woman got killed and New York kid got mauled. A week later I'm getting supper rain. I'm A high point on this ridge and there's no trees. And I'm looking at a sow and two cubs through my spotter scroak over across the head of Studbire Creek. And I was talking to some seasonal forest service at the summit ranger stress. And I still remember to this day the guy asked me, it's like well what is that? Are they yearling cubs or are they cubs of the year? And so I had bumped my spotting scope with my leg and so I went to refocus and I was looking at a sow that had this big golden strike on her back but the other one didn't have. And I was like wait a minute. Well there was two sets, two sows with two cubs each. Oh geez. They were about maybe 100 yards apart. Feeding on. What we didn't know at the time were these Miller moth, Army Cutler moth insect feeding site, moth feeding sites. And so I watched these six bears and they're at my contour elevationally coming around the head of snoot water. And I had, you know, had my pistol that I carried, I don't think I had bear spray back on and stashed my food up in the racks. And I thought right, I hope, I hope I don't have a problem. And I remember the last thing and I turned my radio off forcer to flip radio off just because I wanted to save the batteries. And the last thing I heard from Sunlight Raymond station was well we hope we talk to you in the morning.

Oh nice.

Over and out. And I was like oh crap. And as it turned out I didn't have any problem but man that was a long night. And so you know, I didn't sue that many grizzlies back then in the early 80s. But now it's like. And I remember I was the biologist in Thermopolis from 1987 to 2003 before I got promoted to Cody. And Bart came in, Bart Boger came in after I was there and Dave Moody and Mark Purseno and the bear guys over in Lander, they were flying these high elevation moth sucks up in the Taylor State. And the Morngus standing record that I ever knew of in the last few just as sort of lead in. But it's like Bart, what's the most grizzly bears you've ever seen in a two hour fixed ring flight up high on the absorption. And he told me 52 bears. Oh man, in two hours. And now being here in Casper this weekend, I just got here yesterday but somebody is telling me that the current biologist in the Mount Wessel wool. I'm beyond sur versus living, but apparently she hiked in there this supper on Frank's Peak, which is a hot spawn for bears. She saw 106 grizzlers.

In one hike?

In one hike. Oh man. And so it's like what's the estimate of brizzers across the Greater Yellowstone? Maybe a little higher than what we did. You can count 106 in one spot. Oh man. In one hike. So to me, I never thought 52 would ever be exceeded and that was a flight. But anyway, so you know, I was doing all kinds of sheep were always mine pet passion. But I had other duties and responsibilities when I was in Gillette when I started. And then no, it was 1986 that I drew my first hike, not 85 because I had taken a furniture job over in Gillette.

Oh, okay, so you had to drive all the way?

Yeah. So I asked my boss over in Sheridan, Roger Wilson, I said, can I get some time off to hunt what was the fall of 86? And he goes, we have work long out because I started July 1st and by September one, he goes, you've only worked two months, so no, you can't get two weeks off. Would you rather have the job or the sheep? And I said, well clearly I'd rather have the job. And so I made three long weekend trips through Gillette back over and I just couldn't, couldn't get it done. And so it was 11 years later in 97 when I drew. But anyway, so I did a lot of other convoy help. Deer, whitetail, mealbirds, moose, waterfowl, you name it, all the other things different biologist duties and sheep are always my favorite. So whenever I'd get a chance I'd work on sheep. But you know, I unfortunately had two plane crashers, fixed wing crashers while I was doing game and fish survey work. First one was in December of 91. We were doing a winter crownhorn survey south and east of Laurelin.

So what happened with that plane?

Well, the first one, yeah, so we took off from Worland and there was a little bit of wind but in Worland's quite a bit lower elevation. And so we flew south and east up the no water to the head of the no wood and could tell it was a two seater, not a Super Cub but an arctic turn which has got a lot of glass and it's better visibility. But the pilot was trying to turn left downright and he was fighting it. So he turned, just went and dropped about 300ft and hit with the right wingtip. Oh, sweet. Slid sideways, tore the landing gear off course, broke the spar and it was a bow wing door. And I'm a fairly big guy, but I got skinny and I got out. And so we were both.

Both you guys are fine.

Well, with injuries that we survived. And so we were able to radio call back to the Worland hangar and they called the Orchard Ranch. Oh yeah, Robbie Orchard was her friend. He was flying himself lioness Catter that day. And so his wife Phyllis came up. There was a place called Lightning Ridge and now they call it Hurley Peak because there's a little rock chimney there. And it was some kind of a wind shear. You know, it wasn't anything beyond that. It just. But we both survived with injuries. I had some neck injuries anyway, but.

Do you guys break some bones and stuff?

No, not that bad. And that was the day. That was in December of 91. In October of 91, the department had lost the two guys in the backcountry. Kirk Ember, Kevin Roy and Ray Austin was at Ohio and what's the largest search ever modded in Wyoming's history. And we couldn't find the planes. So four years later, Sunel Connor sent him up with us, in fact, where I kept my horses, Caster. So husband and wife, they were hunting with another couple up the Soda fort and they found the plane. And the guys, the husbands had gone one way and the wives went. They came back at camp that night. Dan asks his wife Michelle, it's like, did you see any outfits? She goes, yeah, I got one. And he goes, where? She said, oh, it's up in the trees up there by the plane. And Dan's like, what plane? What plane? Oh, wow. And so they had just bowed in and anyways, but so two months after that, I had my craft. And that day was a Saturday. Game and Fish was given the game articles with jam in shire. So when I got back to Worland to my truck, I currently had bag phones. And so I called the wildlife division office and got through to Jay Lawson was the chief demo and then John Talbot was the deputy assistant wildlife chief. And there was all the guys in the room and I called and they said, well, we're a little busy today, what's up? And I said, we just wanted you guys to know that I crashed this morning doing a pronghorn survey. And it's like, wait, wait, put you on speakerphone. So there might have been six or eight guys in the room. And what happened? And so everybody was prepared after the October 91 crash. And then I crashed two months later. And so the department stood down on flying fuel until we developed and adopted a really strict flight following CO protocol that every 20 minutes you had to call in with a latitude, longitude and a direction travel. Because what happened when Kirk and Kevern and Ray were killed? They were seen over an outfitter backcountry camp in the thoroughfare at like 10:20 some morning. And that's where the search started. And they went to infinity.

Oh, they didn't have any place to start. And in that back country it's.

Well, they had a start, but they had nowhere to go. How, how far out? And so once the department went to a 20 minute flight following protocol, it was like, okay, how far could you fly in 20 minutes? So that defined the radius of a search. And so, and that was unforgiving. If you didn't call in at 20 minutes, you got called by central disk guy and you had to break off your flight. We circle so you could get up and trip one of the recruiter tests. And if you didn't call in at 20 minutes, they'd call you. And if you didn't answer, thinking, okay, he's behind a ridge or in some hole somewhere, at 40 minutes they start launching cruise. So fast forward to August of 2002. Okay, doing another pronghorn survey, this one in August. So it's a preseason age of sex classification survey. And it was a new pilot, new to us. He was experienced. He was 44 years old in Fargo, North Dakota, but he had been in Worland. He'd been a flight instructor at crop Duster. So he's an experienced pilot. I just don't think he had done very many wildlife surveys. And so I flew with them three different times. The game orders each fly with them once just to see if they got along, you know, and how they fit. And on my fourth flight with this pilot, Jeff Schroeder, we were in outside our little buffalo basin southeast of Matichi. And it's a flight that Jerry Hyatt and I had done a dozen times through the years. He was the pilot I crashed with the first time. So he's up high that morning doing a grizzly bear flight. Got winded out up high. So he's sitting on the ground in War river and I'm flying this pronghorn survey southeast of Matiti. And Jerry was like, I'm at the hangar and you guys should have been in radio contact the whole time. And so at 20 minutes, when I didn't Respond. All right. They started looking and launching people at 40 minutes. They launched search of rescue crews and Jamie fish people from Cody, from Matizi, from Thermopolis, because we were somewhere around along the county line, but not sure where. Jerry jumps into the plane he'd been flying that morning. Flies to our last reported locations and resumed the flight that he and I had done a dozen times. And so he found us, but we flipped over.

What happened? Yeah, he stalled.

He stalled. And so, you know, pronghorn, they think they're the fastest animal on the counter. So they think they can outrun anything. So I had a tape recorder. That's how you usually classify. You start at the back of the line. Because the Roy is a mature buck back there. Garbi's flock or bird. And so I've still got the tick recording and I listen to it every now and then. But it's a buck do do fawn do do buck dodo fawn dodo buck. And the pastor I'm talking means live on bio. And so the pilot could hear everything I was saying over the headset. And I think because I was looking this way, I think he looked that way and he pulled the stick and we just went.

Just crashed right there.

We went in about a 65 degree angle, upside down. Oh, geez. And he got killed. And I got really hurt. Fractured my ribs, fractured my arm. Most of the damage I took is right here. I crushed my whole orbital arch. Whenever I get a new dental hygienist and they do a panoramic X ray, you can always hear them talking behind the curtain. They're like, oh God, look at the metal in this guy. We've got nine plates and 30 screws and picks.

See?

So that changed my world. That was in August of 02. Sixteen days later, I went back to work.

Did you get back in a plane? That was insane.

A trach. I was wired shut, really. And my jaws were wired. Tracheotomy fracture disarm was in a walker. But Ron Markwood and I were here at this very venue to have to do the banquets for the hunting and fishing Heritage Expo. And that comes shuffling in. And a walk. There's 550 people in this room down here. Or no, that was out at the parkway, I guess. And yeah, but I was trying not to show how that I was tough. I just wanted to show my co workers here wasn't dead. Life goes on, keep going until Travis Bominson, who was my family doc in Tomopolis, he's here. He's an avid wild sheep supporter but I got, I could, you know when we got ban on it were you.

Able to get to radio or anything.

Or you were pretty out of helicopter. We always would wear a flight helmet in a fixed wing we'd wear a headset. So when we flipped over and again I'm one big guy but I broke the anchor points on the shoulder of the lap belt, hit the back of Jeff's seat on my ribs, perfect line across there and then leaned off the dash. Has a lot of sharp angers and so I took most of the damage right here. So my one eyes goofed up. I can see out of it but it's never constrict, it's always dilated.

Oh I guess so I can tell now.

Yeah. And so like healthcare professionals when you go to them they're like hey, what's up with your eyes? Because they're unequaled and. Yeah. And I've had eye surgery and anywhere but yeah. So I got, I could, I could hear a plane and as imagine we flipped over so I was on the underside of the left wing. This arm was fractured. My flight suit was our bloody but it wasn't my blur. Oh yeah, jump was hanging upside down in this harness dead. I didn't know it but I'm sure I was tugging on him. But then I hear a plane and I look up and this eye's crushed. I could see plane and Durie Hyatt, he saw my white hair, he ragged the rings and he circled for about a half hour talking in the ground crews. And then I heard vehicle coming and I heard Boise. Well somebody laid their band on my shoulder and it's off. Lights up.

Really? So you were conscious just until they got there.

Yeah, I just gave it up then. And so they took me off of there in some kind of a four wheel drive ambulance out to the highway, put me in another ambulance and screamed to Cody. So I was probably 40 minutes, 40 miles away. But they took me right to the ICU or in the ER and Tim Fagan, one of the game herdings, big friend, he ran to Thermopolis and tripped up my wife at the time and my son who was 11 when they brought him right to me in the ER my head was Gigi Mahas. Oh, scared my son. But they went to, they sent the light flight helicopter down from Billings to transfer me. And the way the story went was they motored me in there and they said the wind has come off Cody. A notoriously windy place it was but he said we can do this. So he ticked off a couple minutes later, sat back down and said, I can't do this. When they put me in drowned ambulance, tricked me to Billings. I was in ICU for like 8 days. Had all the surgeries and then got transferred back to Thermopolis, Shrivas, Bollinger, my dock. I said I needed to go to Catchburg. And he's like, seriously, you're going back to work already? What are you going to do in Casper? I said through, you know, wired shut. I said, I have to emcee three banquets and two seminars and manaboot for three days. And he's like, try again. What's he going to do in Casper? And I said, show feeble not dead. He's a. He authorized that. So I talked to Travis last night and you know, he's. He's a real shoot supporter, but we chuckle about that.

That's crazy.

But anyway, so that changed. Physically, it changed what I could do. But I think I got even more intense. I've always been pretty intense, but people that know me a long time because I didn't know when my next crash was. And so I. I became a workaholic fanatic.

Do as most you could, right? Yeah, yeah.

Because you don't know us. And it's like, you know, that cost me personally, you know, with my marriage and things like that, just because I was so focused on Worth. And it's like. But I'm sure I short circuited my son, you know, when he was growing up, because I've worked all the time. But anyways, we keep going.

Yeah, that's right. So you ended up after all that in Wyoming, you ended up in Montana. Next.

Well, what's interesting is I retired from David Fish at the end of January 2011. And back in 2007, there's an organization that goes back over 100 years. It's the acronym is WAFWA, but it stands for the Western association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. And they have all kinds of special committees and working groups on western native trout, sage grass, mule bear, mountain lion. Well, the issues in the west were getting so involved with mountain sheep. Jim Karpowitz, who had been a sheep biologist for Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, he worked his way up to the directors. And In January of 07, Jim Karpowitz made a motion at the WAFLER winter meeting that said, I will be the director. He would be the director sponsor of a newly formed wild sheep working group, provided Kevin Hurley Obama gave him fish charity.

Okay.

And Terry Cleveland who was my director at the time, he's like done. And so I took on west ride responsibilities. We're still working full time for Wyoming Cayman fish. But half my interest was on sheep stuff outside of Wyoming and half inside. And so my sheep experience going back to 1981, 1982, I spent all those decades learning everything I could about sheep. Yeah. Talking to people, reading literature, you know. And so when it came time, I was really fortunate to be picked. Drafted wherever you want to.

Yeah.

Drafted to do that. But it was an opportunity that let me expand something that I really enjoyed doing. And so. But I was doing my regular game and fish job at the same time as the supervising mile of the Cody Regent. That was in 07 and 08. I said, I can't keep doing this. So I went full time sheep in 09 and 10. Again, half focused, half my focus was in state sheep, half is out of state sheep. And so that waffle wild sheep work eater is now, is still built 18 years later. And there's been four chairs ever. I got to be the first one for four and a half years. Clay Brewer from Texas Parks and Wildlife chaired it for about five plus years. Mike Cox from Nevada Department of Wildlife for about six years on Darrell Lutz with Melanoma Game Fisher.

Okay, I know Daryl real well.

So Daryl and I worked together forever until I was just at the waffle wild sheep meeting in Provo this week. That's what I was doing. So I guess bottom line is I've had a lot of years and decades of wild sheep conservation and management challenges and opportunities. And so the job I got with Wildcat foundation kept evolving through time. And so when I went to work for them full time in February, I took one night off in retirement.

Yeah. One night. Is that what you said?

11 hours?

Yeah, 11 hours. Good.

So on February 1st, I'm knocking at the door at the Cody office for finaz and nobody answered. I'm like. Because I didn't have a key to get in. And so I waited in the parking lot and people started trickling in about quarter to eight. I'm like, let's go. What time do people get to work?

I got stuff to do. Yeah.

And so, but you know, it's been, it's just been an incredible opportunity. And I'm so grateful for people that have helped me along the way and given me opportunities and so on. They're incredible loyalists.

Yeah.

You know, when they helped buy me gear to go back in the field in 1982, said I spent a large part of my salary given back. They had all kinds of giving societies and I'm in the. I'm right at the. Near the top of the heap. But it's because I believe so much in their cause and their mission. And you know, as we come up on our 50th anniversary in a year and a half, that's quite a. Quite a mark as a real milestone. Simplest terms, our founders were a bunch of sheep hunters that had hunted all over the world and they could see that sheep hunting license rabbit was never going to pay the bill. And so the Wild Sheep foundation was formed in 1974. It was incorporated in 1977. So we come up on our 50th, or in that time, we raised and directed more than $150 million to wild sheep conservation all around. And these governor's tags was always the vernacular. Conservation permits is a better, more apt descriptor of those. Those do so much good. And so I've got stuff I carry with me all the time in my briefcase. But what we have done, one of the things that I've done for the Chute foundation is. Oh, shoot, can't. Here it is. The last couple years we put together a conservation impact document. What projects did we fund and what did we fund? What did we learn? What did we accomplish? And so there's a sort of a composite map. And this is a year old, but if you look the new one. And I've got posters downstairs and posters over where Tim, one of my co workers, has set up over $110 million since 1983. That's awfully good by jurisdiction. So you can see in Wyoming where we're sitting at $3.9 million and that's grant nae funding for projects. But it's also Kermit proceeds returns. Right. I was the beneficiary of early governor's tag proceeds in Wyoming and I absolutely support that if the agencies are transparent with what they do. And that's what I said this morning about the Wyoming Governor's Big Game License Coalition. And again, it's kind of hard to pat myself on the back, but that was my idea.

Yeah.

And so I took that to Governor Hershel, or sorry, Governor Freudenthal, 18 days into his first term, and pitched an idea and he said yes. And here we are 22 years later and that Big Game License Coalition has generated millions of dollars for Wyoming humans.

It's still putting good money on the ground. Yeah.

That may be the one work thing that I'm most proud of.

Yeah. Oh, that's Great.

I watched it for over 20 years as other agencies mimicked Wyoming and started selling them special kermits. But they were doing something different with the money, borrowing it into the resource. Where in the early years that money didn't necessarily go back to the sheep research. And after 21 years, I finally formulated an idea and I had an opportunity to present it to Governor Friedenthals. And he's like, done. Is it right? Do it transparently. If it crashes, it's not in my head. So anyways. But that's sort of a stone tablet history of what we've done. And so I've gotten to work all across North America, in every jurisdiction on the Central Asia stuff. We're very active in mountain sheep and mountain goat ibex work. Yeah, I haven't done it myself, but Kurt Alder, our staff, is our Central Asia lead. But you know, I'm just incredibly thankful for the opportunities I've had over the last 45 years. And I think I will do this until I drop over.

Yeah, I'm happy for it. So as you think about guys my age, people coming up, you know, whether or not we get sheep hunting opportunity, specifically ram hunting opportunity, is yet to be seen. Right. But what do you think are like the top couple, three, four of things that a guy like me can pay attention to or be educated about so they can make a difference with the sheep? I mean, it's a big question, but like, you know, a lot of us go like, well, where do we start? We don't have disposable income to be buying tags, you know, or whatever.

That was always the saying, you know, you need a 60 year old's bank account and a 20 year old's body to be a sheep owner.

That's right.

That's right. And you know, there's some truth to that. We've got publications that we written in the past. It's called Sheep Hunting on a Budget.

Right.

You know, Sheep Hunting on a Budget, volume two. It hasn't been updated in quite a long time, but you know, it is. There's so much demand. Our founders knew that the demand was in upstrip with supply. And so to me, what a lot of states have done is both an auction permit and a raffle permit so that the guy that's not the banker, but the deep pockets can also participate. And virtually every state that I am aware of, the province that has an auction tag also has a raffle tag. At our chief show in Reno every year. Our network has three dozen chapters and affiliates. There's all kinds of app. It's the Weimer chapter. When I'm life member number I'm member member Torna. You know so I've been at this for a while now. We're over 735 life members or whatever. And so I, I do think you have to play the preference point game bonus points. You know, every state is different. I tell you, when I left Wyoming it was still 75:25 issuance or sheep licenses to residents versus non resident. So it was a 3 to 1 ratio. They always had to have hunting seasons in multiples of four. A couple years ago it went to 9010.

Yep.

So I wrote a screaming letter to my former headquarters in Cheyenne because as a now a non resident my points stayed but my opportunity got cut from 25% of the tags down to 10%.

Right.

I guess I didn't feel quite right like a lot of non residents guy. But now Wyoming 9010 is more in line with most western jurisdictions. And so you know, I do think people need to start young guy like yourself, you know, I'm racking up points because back then I drew in 97. You had to wait five years. So I started resuming Ryan points in 2002. But I think my sheep hunting days are over. But my son who's 34, he started buying points for him when he was 12 years old. And so he will draw at some point. And so one of the things that I see is there is a real need for yew harvest in a lot of places in the West. If you look around and you know, we put together a document. I started it in 1996 and it was printed in 2015. So it took us 19 years to put this document together. But it's a record of every wild sheep translocation ever done over almost 1500 pantalaths. Over 22,000 animals murdered.

Wow.

And so the opportunity and in a lot of places is there where it went away. You know, by the 1950s drop places didn't have merciful.

Right.

Texas, West Texas, Washington, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota. And so it's been a long slow climb back and we're not there yet. If you think back to like Ernest Thompson Seton, 1928 he published Wives of Game Mammals. He were of early naturalists and he guesstimated 1.5 to 2 million bighorn sheep in the West. It's like he didn't fly, he didn't have computer battles, he didn't hike every one of those ranges. So that was a Hip pocket gastroemen. And knowing what we know now about fine scale habitats in I'd say Maybe it was 500,000 sheep in the west. Suffice it to say right now there are fewer than 200,000 down sheep in all of North America, including Canada and Mexico. Oh geez.

Yeah.

And so, you know, places that didn't have them got back in the sheep business through early efforts of agencies, but also conservations. And so, you know, a place like Texas climbed back from none to over 1600 and now they're back down to about 400 to 500 because of disease. Respiratory passengers are hell on nautilus shoe and they're physically very tough. But respiratory, they're real and wimpy. Right. So if you look at them sideways and cough at them, they may affect someone to kilo the dead. It's really, it's hard to dust yourself off and keep trying. Every time you do a transplant and it takes off and it's succeeds for a while, then it plateaus and then it crashes and then we go, okay, let's try that again. And so we've learned some things about pathogen profiling of your source sheath and target sheath, your recipient sheath. And so, you know, if we do then what we know now, we wouldn't have done some of the transplants. But I find it really hard to criticize the managers in the 50s and 60s and 70s because they were doing the best they knew at the time. You know, people were like, man, you should have never done that. Well, it was the best thing that they could think of at the time. And so we all learned from mistakes. And I Remember in Wildlife 101 I learned the art and science of wildlife management. And there was a hell of a lot more art to it than there is psycho. Yeah, it's just a reality. So human dimension game, you know, I remember all the undergrad they never taught interpersonal relationships and effective communication and all the human dimensions type stuff was like when did deer breed? You know, what do rabbits do at? You know, basic ecological knowledge. But now it's a lot of social people management.

Yeah, I mean that seems to be at least 2/3 of it these days. Like, I mean a lot of the what we end up doing with our hunting seasons and whatever else is based on social pressure or not.

Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, I remember starting my Wyoming game and fish career. We had some of the game and fish elders come over from Cheyenne to layer them in and talk to us and they'd say, look at all you smiling, shining young faces, you're going to save the world, aren't you? And they said the best thing you can hope to do is slow down the decline of wildlife during your career. That you will preside over the decline of wild rural. Oh man, thanks guys. Let me find a butter knife and slice me to wrist or something.

Yeah, yeah.

But you know, so it's got to be willing. That's why after being gone 10 years from Wyoming and I get back here periodically, I really miss the wildlife here, miss the people here. I always say that if you live in Wyoming, you gotta want to live here.

Oh yeah.

And you know, I'm happy where I'm at now. Five years in Montana, fighters in Idaho. But man, I miss wild and I miss it's wildlife because there's no place that I've ever experienced that has the visible wildlife that we do have here in wrl.

It's pretty incredible, man. That's why we just decided to make livings doing this kind of stuff. Stuff, you know.

Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, for, for the Wild Sheep foundation, you know, it's absolutely been a huge part of my life. They've given me a ton of opportunities. I tried really hard, earned my keep. Yeah. Payback. And so yeah, I probably will keep doing this as long as I draw breath.

There you go. What's your, what's your final thought for someone who is interested in sheep? What should, you know, piece of encouragement or thing that they can do to help? Like one final thing.

You know, it's a paraphrasing church that's like don't ever give up. But never ever ever give up. You know, there's no magic bullets, there's no secret formulas. You know, it just takes a lot of commitment. And that's one of the things that's really gratifying to me is the generosity of our members. A lot of them who never have hunted sheep and maybe never will hunt sheep.

Right.

If they're interested, they still want to put something, some effort. Gray always says time, talent or treasure. If you don't have all three, give what you can. We have your time. Use it your talent, use it your sweat artery. But man, it's, you know, I hope I've got too little drink sons six and three. It's like I'll never be around to go sheep hunting with them. But I respect beer.

Yeah, no kidding.

So I hope my son takes them. Yeah, it's. They're just such a cool animal. And I've had so many experiences when I started. There was an old tunnel, Peter and Cody named Bud hall. And I was 27, but I was still green kid. And he invited me up to his cabin on Big Creek on the north wharf. And he had hand built that hut. Bud was about 5, 6. All his doorways I had to bend over to glute in because his roof was low.

And he had. He built it himself. So he built it to his size, right?

Yeah. And I remember he told me, he said, kid, you can take a horse anywhere an elk can go, and a man can walk anywhere a sheep can go. And so I remember starting when I watched our sheep, then I was like, that liar. Can't go. Get rid of.

That's funny.

Yeah. How we doing?

Oh, we're a little over, but I just was enjoying all the. All the stories, so. Man, thank you for spending your whole life doing this kind of stuff, though. I mean, it's like people like you who set up a foundation for the rest of us to keep coming and keeping doing it, so.

Yeah, I enjoyed it. And, you know, there's so many people that I've learned from and that I respect and. And I hope get to think of you that way soon.

You bet. I know I already do.

All right, J.D.

Cool. Thank you. Best podcast.

Yeah.

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