{"id":12856,"date":"2026-06-22T09:27:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T09:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/range\/ep-892-ryan-callaghan-on-public-lands-and-conservation\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T09:27:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T09:27:04","slug":"ep-892-ryan-callaghan-on-public-lands-and-conservation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sawahsolutions.com\/range\/ep-892-ryan-callaghan-on-public-lands-and-conservation\/","title":{"rendered":"Ep. 892: Ryan Callaghan on Public Lands and Conservation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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00:00:08
\nSpeaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening toast, you can’t predict that anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. Good lord, it’s Ryan Callahan back from the dead. Yeah, you’re back from fatherhood. You had a baby.<\/p>\n

00:00:49
\nSpeaker 2: I assisted in having a baby.<\/p>\n

00:00:51
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I understand how long ago?<\/p>\n

00:00:54
\nSpeaker 2: Uh we So Friday is the birthday, so it’s very easy to keep track unless you’re in between Fridays like we are right now. So it’s two and a half weeks, three weeks, first child, three and a half weeks. Yeah, first first child ever and baby boy came out seven pounds five ounces.<\/p>\n

00:01:15
\nSpeaker 1: And that’s a stat that people share. But I don’t think that.<\/p>\n

00:01:20
\nSpeaker 2: That’s it’s all relatively Yeah, I don’t.<\/p>\n

00:01:24
\nSpeaker 1: Know that that means a lot to people.<\/p>\n

00:01:27
\nSpeaker 2: Everything perfectly average, like the doc said, like perfectly average, big hands, big feet, but might grow into those type of things, and it was kind of hilarious.<\/p>\n

00:01:38
\nSpeaker 1: Average little baby, yes.<\/p>\n

00:01:40
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, perfectly average, but you’re like, oh, kind of like clown hands and clown feet, which is funny. And then definitely my hairline, which is a bummer for that kid.<\/p>\n

00:01:49
\nSpeaker 1: The baby has your hairline. Yeah, it’s like high up.<\/p>\n

00:01:52
\nSpeaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, widows peak comes back real.<\/p>\n

00:01:55
\nSpeaker 1: Far born with widows peak.<\/p>\n

00:01:58
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah.<\/p>\n

00:01:59
\nSpeaker 1: What’s your biggest takeaway so far being a dad?<\/p>\n

00:02:04
\nSpeaker 2: I you know, like the biggest thing is I’m like, it’s not that big of a deal. Like I think we’re blessed for the fact that it’s not. We don’t follow in any like the horror story categories. It is a hands on thing. But the thing that I just keep coming back to is I’m like, oh my god, I cannot paid parental leave. How did people manage this without paid parental leave? I’m like, that is such an like that is the thing that makes this thing doable.<\/p>\n

00:02:43
\nSpeaker 1: Like just you know they give you in the military, the dad three days. Oh yeah, you got three days. Well.<\/p>\n

00:02:50
\nSpeaker 2: I was talking to my buddy Kyler, who I used to build houses with, and he’s like, two days per kid. That’s what we do, you know. And I’m like, I’ll just like so blown away by like I get a focus on this as my job and get through that initial learning curve. It’s all a learning curve, but and will be forever I suppose. But I’m just blown away by that, like this is and I just feel like it’s got to like make for better relationships with you know, between the parent and child bond.<\/p>\n

00:03:25
\nSpeaker 1: It gets to be there and help a little bit at first. Yeah, yeah, for sure.<\/p>\n

00:03:28
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah.<\/p>\n

00:03:28
\nSpeaker 1: You know. I took note that you somehow managed to get the baby out of the hospital without having a name. Yeah, And when we had our kids, I felt that by the time we went away, they had a name.<\/p>\n

00:03:46
\nSpeaker 2: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:03:46
\nSpeaker 1: How how did you What did you have to say to say that I don’t know the name yet?<\/p>\n

00:03:51
\nSpeaker 2: You know, the thing that I think got us out of there without the name is the fact that somebody was like, well, I thought you legally had to have a name him, and I said, no, you don’t, and the hospital admin person kind of pauses for a second.<\/p>\n

00:04:08
\nSpeaker 1: You get you guys discussed.<\/p>\n

00:04:09
\nSpeaker 2: It, yeah, yeah, because we were fully being like, oh, yeah, we’re going to see the little nipper. This is how the whole thing’s gonna go and by the time we leave, we’ll have the name.<\/p>\n

00:04:22
\nSpeaker 1: He looks like a chucky exactly.<\/p>\n

00:04:24
\nSpeaker 2: And You’re just bugged non stop to the point where I’m like, hey, Sam has got to get some rest, you know. But every shift change, there’s vitals and then all the things, and and so we just got to the point where, like, we have got to get out of here. There’s no rest, there’s no time to actually just like sit with this and figure things out. And then yeah, I will tell you that we are still nameless here at three and a half weeks in, but we are very very close to about three names right now.<\/p>\n

00:05:02
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, now the mother ye shared I heard his second hand. Sam shared with another friend of ours that she said it took Cal months to name his dog.<\/p>\n

00:05:17
\nSpeaker 2: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:05:18
\nSpeaker 1: So I don’t know, Maybe it’s gonna take a while.<\/p>\n

00:05:23
\nSpeaker 2: A lot of it might be a generational thing, or it might just be certain people. But I’ve a lot of the folks in my extended friends and family have been like, oh yeah, none of my kids Nate came home with a name.<\/p>\n

00:05:35
\nSpeaker 1: Oh really.<\/p>\n

00:05:35
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah.<\/p>\n

00:05:36
\nSpeaker 1: I felt like, I don’t know why, I don’t know where I got the idea, but I just came away thinking that it was like like it was like an edict from God that you name before they come out.<\/p>\n

00:05:48
\nSpeaker 2: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:05:49
\nSpeaker 1: Oh yeah, now that I’m learning, it’s not it’s too late. They all got names.<\/p>\n

00:05:53
\nSpeaker 2: My grandpa passed away like three months before. He had like this this series. The complications that were like, you’re gonna have to go in and get your chest drained and all these things in order to stay alive to meet this baby. And he was in perfect mind and and you know, so his bummer ninety one or ninety two, ninety one, ninety two and and uh and you know, he’s a James. And so I was like, you know, I can’t get the name James out of my head because I was so excited for this, for Grams to meet this kid. And then you know, I was like, hey, you got to stick around. He’s like, well, how long is that going to be? It was like three months, and he’s like yeah, and didn’t make it. Yeah, He’s like I’ll see him later technically, yeah, yeah, because he just was he had you know, he’s an old doc and stuff. Didn’t you know, do not resuscitate some of the things. Sure, he had his plan laid out of like that one.<\/p>\n

00:06:57
\nSpeaker 1: I didn’t know it so he passed away. Yeah yeah, maybe I can’t. I don’t think I knew that.<\/p>\n

00:07:02
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, it’s like three and a half months ago, now, you know so, but that was like and I think James is still in the running.<\/p>\n

00:07:13
\nSpeaker 1: Huh.<\/p>\n

00:07:14
\nSpeaker 2: But now we’re like so far down the name rabbit hole. There’s like the social pressure of being like, oh, you guys waited three months and you came up with Jim.<\/p>\n

00:07:22
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah. No, yeah, they’re expected some real razzle dazzle now, man, they’re expecting like something crazy, you know, exactly.<\/p>\n

00:07:28
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, And a bunch of folks were like, Snort was such an awesome name for your dog. We’re really really can’t wait to hear what you name the kid.<\/p>\n

00:07:38
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well you could take Snort, give that name to the kid, and then think of a new name for the dog, Yes, if you needed to do something like that.<\/p>\n

00:07:46
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, but we also kind of already did that because I had gotten in a panic about getting the new puppy to give Snort some backup prior to the kids showing. That didn’t happen. But the breeder that I got Snort from her, the Snort’s sister, the same litter was having her last litter, and uh, I was like, oh my god, I got to have one of those dogs. And I just just got that dog yesterday. Oh so that dog got one of the kid names right away, So we name named the puppy roll.<\/p>\n

00:08:25
\nSpeaker 1: Like you took a discard and gave it to the dog.<\/p>\n

00:08:28
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah.<\/p>\n

00:08:29
\nSpeaker 1: Oh, you you have a two and a half week old baby and you went and brought a dog into the house.<\/p>\n

00:08:33
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, but the dog’s way more advanced than the kid.<\/p>\n

00:08:36
\nSpeaker 1: Is.<\/p>\n

00:08:36
\nSpeaker 2: Dog’s eight weeks.<\/p>\n

00:08:37
\nSpeaker 1: Old because they’re living in dog years.<\/p>\n

00:08:39
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah.<\/p>\n

00:08:40
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, well, man much. I love babies. I want to talk about your other big life change. So, uh, A lot of your listeners know Cal from Cal’s Weekend review, and a lot of you know that Cal recently went over not even what I don’t know if you months ago, six months ago, six months now, six months ago, Cal took over as I believe that.<\/p>\n

00:09:05
\nSpeaker 2: Is it CEO as president and CEO president.<\/p>\n

00:09:08
\nSpeaker 1: And CEO of the conservation organization Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. What’s going on. How’s that been?<\/p>\n

00:09:20
\nSpeaker 2: Oh? I mean it’s been awesome. I mean, as you know, like I found like every which way to make all my previous jobs harder than they needed to be because I was always trying to find good conservation stories or angles or or ways to make bigger impacts. And that gets it’s a way more complicated job, but it’s also in a way more simple and focused because it’s like that’s what I’m doing as my job every minute of the day.<\/p>\n

00:09:57
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, and you’re leading a team of how many people.<\/p>\n

00:10:01
\nSpeaker 2: Right now? We are thirty six? Yeah? Yeah, So membership organization, active membership, you know, we got it like a bunch of members that aren’t active active membership. We’re a little over thirty thousand right now growing, which is great to see. And then forty four chapters active chapters across North America, you know we have they’re not chapters anymore because they’re officially standalone nonprofits in Canada at Alberta and British Columbia and which is you know out here we have a lot of cross border issues, conservation issues. And then yeah, we have everybody kind of works on everything, but it’s like a stewardship, so like hands on dirt, underneath fingernails, side of the house policy, and and I kind of break it down into like community building, right.<\/p>\n

00:11:14
\nSpeaker 1: So people know like people that follow these things, people that support the organ know that BHA, as it’s commonly known, the BHA stands for public lands, But like, like, how do you describe like a layer deeper? How do you describe BHA to somebody when you say, like, our mission is to what?<\/p>\n

00:11:40
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about this a lot because the scope of the organization and I’m not beating up on anybody, right, but it’s like trout unlimited okay general yeah, yeah, and then people are like, well, what does it at BH? What is it there?<\/p>\n

00:12:01
\nSpeaker 1: Got it?<\/p>\n

00:12:01
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, exactly our em EF Yeah. And intentionally, the scope of BHA was really broad because they wanted to fill all these gaps that were kind of getting left out of some of these species specific hook and bullet organizations and oftentimes that it would just be like b A lambland Okay, wilderness. Uh, And there’s wilderness organizations out there, but there weren’t any that were really like firmly pro hunt, pro fish.<\/p>\n

00:12:38
\nSpeaker 1: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:12:39
\nSpeaker 2: They may have been at one point and they work on similar issues, but it’s not like the masthead and Uh, that idea is sound, but it makes the mission huge. I think the benefit is we can think a little more holistically. But the negative is we get spread really thin. So by and large, if we were a like a for profit business building the widget, as they say in the business world, that widget would be conservation leaders, and it’s like people who show up and want to do stuff, and that is advocate for their issues, which you know, if you’re working on behalf of BHA, it’s our issues too. But public land, public water, public wildlife, and the access word would be like access to those things, and that can get kind of nuanced on the wildlife side of things, but it makes the organization a little more swift and adaptable. And then on stewardship, it is literally coming out in augmenting landscapes, so habitat work, which for us would buy and large be trail improvements and juniper removal, some planting, but our migration corridor work is really really significant, and again because of our scope, nobody really knows about it. But we just got the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation Partner of the Year award, really which like we just punched so far out of our weight class. There are a lot of really big organizations get this, that have hundreds of employees and dealing in many, many millions of dollars of federal grant work to do this stuff. And so yeah, really incredible that that we got this award. And we almost exclusively remove or augment fence within migration corridors, which basically you have your big.<\/p>\n

00:14:57
\nSpeaker 1: Grazing is doing like the physical the physical work, so people might use GPS collar data or car crash data to know that these are problematic areas along migration corridors and do the physical hands on work of removing barriers.<\/p>\n

00:15:15
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, and oftentimes it’s it’s your grazer on the ground who has their allotment and they’re like, you can’t keep a fence up here. Oh, like we build them in the spring and winter migration comes and they all go down type of thing. And so we’ll go in there survey those fence lines. And so you have like your your allotment fences, which kind of by design of the BLM are always firm, like they’re always up, non negotiable, and we’ll go in and augment those those fences to wildlife friendly. And then you have your interior fences that basically create pastures within that A lot those ones are negotiable, so if they there’s a lot the US used to produce a lot of sheep, and there’s a lot of that, you know, uh, square fencing out there on the landscape that.<\/p>\n

00:16:20
\nSpeaker 1: I don’t know if you’re supposed to call it. And just for people listening, like everybody can picture a barbed wire fence, and you’ll talk about whether it’s three strand or four strand whatever, And and for wildlife friendly fencing, there’s considerations about how low the bottom strand is, meaning can prong horn or whatever get under it. There’s considerations about how high the top strand is, like can it well it stop stuff from being able to jump it? Right? Does that have barbs on it that could hang stuff up. Then there’s this other question of when you put these these panels in that have like eight inch squares, yeah, which no big games getting no big games getting through that by going under right, Yeah.<\/p>\n

00:17:13
\nSpeaker 2: And and it’s a small game thing too, or at their hell on sage grouse and like if you can picture an animal on the landscape, you can find it dead in one of those fences somehow, some way, mountain lions, bobcats everything. But so go in, cut that stuff down, roll it up, pack it out, also installing virtual fence, so there’s yeah, there’s big grants out there for the actual producer to trial virtual fencing. Right, so we’ll put up the and then it’s vents is the working, Yeah, put up towers for the creates the connectivity for each individual collar kid. And so there’s a bunch of cool stuff happening out there. And the BLM uses their own math to like measure impact on there and depending on where you are in those migration corridors, you can you know, it’s all hard. But we had one project last year that was a one day fence poll two point one miles and the impact because of the location was over thirty thousand miles of positive impact within that migration corridor.<\/p>\n

00:18:44
\nSpeaker 1: Help me understand that it’s.<\/p>\n

00:18:46
\nSpeaker 2: I think it’s because of bottlenecks that animals are moving through and dispersing too, got it? And then and then some of them are six miles and way less too. So our job, the steward teamship team’s job is to look at these projects. And then because most of what we do and this is like the doing things the hard way, but I think in the long run the better way is were trying to empower whoever wants to show up to do the work. So volunteers because we want people to have that sense of ownership in their public lands and resources. So and then they’re all mixed groups. So you have a lot of people who will because we’ll put up signage at like riis and and try to get people from all slices of the pie to show up, and they’re in this mixed group. And we try to get people to camp out on a Friday night, so you leave work with your car, camp and stuff, ideally show up Friday night. Oftentimes we try to have some sort of wild game food there for the volunteers, and then we get to talk about wild food and where it comes from and and everybody gets a taste of that. The next morning, you get a brief on what we’re going to do that day, you get tools, you get team leads. We get lots and lots of repeat volunteers on these things, so they get you know, you kind of have like crew chiefs that are volunteers too, and then you’re out there rubbing shoulders with hunters, non hunters, birders, whatever. You know, people who just thought it was was neat and certainly people at all across the skill level spectrum, and then you have this sweat equity in your public lands. You have Bureau of Land Management professionals out there. Oftentimes you have the grazers out there too, And it’s really the secret sauce, right, because you have people who are like, nobody gives a shit about this stuff, and then they kind of get blown away by.<\/p>\n

00:21:09
\nSpeaker 1: Like, oh yeah, man, he’s.<\/p>\n

00:21:11
\nSpeaker 2: Are really random people.<\/p>\n

00:21:12
\nSpeaker 1: People showing up and doing it.<\/p>\n

00:21:14
\nSpeaker 2: Care about this stuff. So we’ve gotten two thousand volunteers out on the landscape right now. And you know, the idea, right is like there’ll be like a little ripple effect within those communities and and they get it to be like, oh my gosh, this is really hard stuff, but it has an outsized impact and rub shoulders with new people tried wild game for the first time. And so our stewardship coordinators have a really hard job because they’re handling a lot of logistics and trying to find these projects where you can conceivably draw from a bunch of population centers to get people out and then make sure that you have people on the ground too that are supportive of the right because you have a lot of burned out folks on the landscape who are like because these contracts, some of these contracts don’t get bit on. Some of these contracts get picked up by groups that are well intentioned but just can’t get things done on the landscape. And we want to have a stellar reputation, right, and so far it’s working right. So we got got that award, which is you want.<\/p>\n

00:22:28
\nSpeaker 1: To get like if you say you’re gonna do it, you’re gonna do it. Yeah. Yeah, Now you guys here, you brought me this shirt, Phil, can you see this? Good? Cal brought me this shirt. So Michigan says this land is my land, but it’s like them I Michigan and it shows an orange, it shows public land.<\/p>\n

00:22:52
\nSpeaker 2: Thank you buddy, Phil.<\/p>\n

00:22:54
\nSpeaker 1: Tell me why you can best see this? Sucker. Okay, here’s Michigan. Those public land in orange. Okay, this is all public land in Michigan. And you were saying the point of the shirt is show here’s a stick like we Oftentimes a lot of guys, especially people out west, associate public land with out west and I’m just taught you. You mentioned big gain migrations, juniper encroachment. Okay, these are like these are sort of like Western things. But then you got forty four forty four chapters all over in the east, right, what like help me understand that? So Michigan, I get it. Like, man, there’s a boatload of public land in Michigan. But if you go south of there, Ohio, Indiana, right much less. Right, you get up in the northeast, you get more. But you got these pockets where there’s not much, but you got chapters there, and you got volunteers there. If what is the what is the eastern equivalent of pulling fences? What is the Eastern equivalent of improved grasslands by removing junipers in areas where junipers are encroaching on Western grasslands? Like what does that look like somewhere else?<\/p>\n

00:24:07
\nSpeaker 2: Well, the juniper like the green glacier thing that I know we’ve covered on meat Eater before. That juniper encroachment into our grasslands is a major issue throughout the whole prairie states. And we’ll do some of that work in Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and and then there’s there’s a lot of burning you know, out out in most states too. And then just low barrier to entry, right like what BHA has been doing well and and really My dream right is, is to have an accessible conservation group to where it’s like, if you don’t have a bunch of money, we still got plenty of things for you to do. If you don’t I want to go to a banquet, we got stuff for you to do if you know. I want the whole political spectrum, the whole working class spectrum, to be invested in their public land, public water, in public wildlife, even if you never step foot or interact with those things. I got lots of arguments as to why they should matter. But if you show up to these community events, you get to meet these people firsthand, and you may not have a thing in common other than the fact that you appreciate this stuff. But turns out that’s a lot right. So stewardship in some areas may never get beyond a public land trash pickup, but oftentimes we’ll make them. You know, it’s like what we talk about a lot, right, It’s like you can have a really strong mess message as long as it’s like eighty percent fun. So we’ll have a biologists come out and talk about turkeys, uh, and why what you’re doing picking up trash in this area is a good thing for that resource or talk about burning ecology stuff like that. Have giveaways, but make it like a family friendly event because you know, one of the things that I’m very convinced on is like we got to get this stewardship ownership mindset, like indoctrinated into people in as young as we can get them, because you know.<\/p>\n

00:26:32
\nSpeaker 1: That’s some Aldo Leopold stuff man like that being an active participant. Yeah, out on the landscape, man like his thing of like the you know, the the person wielding the person wielding the acts or whatever. You know, like like the person out working on the landscape as a conservationist, you know.<\/p>\n

00:26:55
\nSpeaker 2: And and I would ask.<\/p>\n

00:26:57
\nSpeaker 1: I mean, I love going down and winning. I love going down and bidding on auction items at the banquet as much as the next guy. But like there’s more to it.<\/p>\n

00:27:06
\nSpeaker 2: There’s this thing that I think has gotten us in trouble over the years, which is like somebody else will do it for us, and that that is part of the benefit of a membership organization. Like we have people at the state House at the capitol because you have a job and you cannot be there, but we work our asses off to empower volunteers to be there. Too, and get that feeling of empowerment and and ownership of I get to represent myself and my community at the Fishing Game committee or in front of Congress even, Right. But I feel really strongly that we kind of got in this like oh, the ranger will come by and pick that up type of mindset. The government’s going to do it for me. And it’s like, now we’re in this crazy political football age where you can take whole programs of the government doing it for you and they’re gone in the blink of an eye, right, and then it’s like, Okay, well, everybody gonna get so pissed that we’re gonna be like, okay, sell it. Right. Well, there’s all sorts of ways that we can try to prevent that through working within the political spectrum, but the surefire way to prevent that is if everybody just gives a shit and it’s like, oh my god, this is ours. It’s a national treasure. We’re invested in this, and I learned about this in kindergarten in grade school, and you know, we are invested as Americans in our natural resources, and so much so that they go on beyond the next administration. Right, we’re talking about these things in perpetuity. And that’s part of what community building will do, is you go, oh, the burden’s not just mine, it’s Steve Vanelli’s and Fill the engineer and all these people from across the spectrum, like we all are invested in this. It is ours, it’s our American right, and it’s you get away from some of this this kind of politics stuff, this choosing side stuff, because this stuff is squarely in the middle.<\/p>\n

00:29:36
\nSpeaker 1: There’s a level of realizing about public lands and public land resources and in a personal responsibility to them. There’s a level of maturity that is required to see those places that way. And I say this from my own experience, and I’ve mentioned I’ve talked about this a bunch before. I grew up near what was that Manistee National Forest. I think it’s got a slightly more complicated name now, but it’s time the southern end of Manaste National Forest. We hunted on it, hunted rabbits on it, trapped it, recreated on it, had bb gun wars on it. It was like we viewed it and treated it as though it fell from the sky. It was just that it was there, always had been there, always would be there. And there was no sense of personal ownership right, And it would be that you’d go to Keger parties and the Keger parties, he’d be on the National forest and you’d burn tires and burn palettes and you know, tenth grade whatever and then walk away because it’s just here. Someone will get it, do you know what I mean? And it was like it took and I don’t know if I if I had someone telling me the conservation history of those spaces and someone telling me what is required to maintain these places and the deliberate actions that took place to make them here and to make them available and make them public, even if you told me that, it might not have clicked. That I was a certain age anyway for sure, But I think that it would have definitely helped if someone had articulated it to me. But I don’t think it was really even known or recognized by our elders. Yeah, like people didn’t the turn like this is in Michigan. The vocabulary wasn’t there, yep, do you know what I mean? No one even are the grown ups. If I’d have said why is this here? No one would have said, oh, it was because of this act of Congress or the actions of this president, and like here’s the all all the deliberate steps that took place to make it what it is, And here’s the management strategy, and here’s what does happen and doesn’t happen, and here’s the work that goes into it. It was absent. It was absent. I don’t know what I’m telling you. I’m telling you something you already know. But when you go out in the woods, you see where people like just decided to like shoot trees down for target practice and like trash a place. It is it’s because it’s like they view it like a like a guarantee. Do you follow me?<\/p>\n

00:32:31
\nSpeaker 2: Oh? And there’s that, and there there is just what you said, like they don’t know yeah, like when we were Yeah, I’m having a lot of conversations with with landowners here in the state of Montana, like like mid level the large landowners in the state of Montana, and there’s a lot of just like for sure, and certain things that come out and and it’s like the percentage of folks who display poor behave you’re on private and public land. The vast, vast, vast majority just do not have a freaking clue at this point, sure, right, they have no idea about agriculture. They have no idea about a lot of whether it’s in the regulation book or not, the kind of like the Hunter’s Code, the ethics of certain things, the stuff that we talk about a lot like just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s right in all cases type of thing. And and then there’s a percentage that are just doing bad stuff.<\/p>\n

00:33:34
\nSpeaker 1: Right. But if I had, man, I feel like I feel like when I was a kid, if it had been that my old man dragged us out to go do a stream project on the national forest, or in some way instilled this idea that like, this is sweet and it’s here because people. It’s not here by accident, yep, it’s here because people work for it and cherish it. It might have set me off in a different direction earlier, but I think a lot of places it’s absent, Man, it’s absent. So what I’m getting at with that is it like that kind of work of just even results, like the labor that you’re talking about, results in a good result or sorry, it yields a good result moving a fence and proving migration. But it’s more than that because it probably is very eye opening for people to all of a sudden understand like, oh, I see what this is. You know, I understand now what this is. Man, This is like a thing we fight for.<\/p>\n

00:34:42
\nSpeaker 2: Cash to go that grant money we can it’s in our power to use that cash to go pay contractors, right and just third party of the whole deal.<\/p>\n

00:34:55
\nSpeaker 1: Sure, But.<\/p>\n

00:34:58
\nSpeaker 2: What’s the long term effect of yeah, right, it’s like I would say, not much in comparison.<\/p>\n

00:35:05
\nSpeaker 1: So yeah, to make it, Yeah, to build, to build a generation of people who kind of who just are invited to see it as a thing that you labor for. You know, that’s the thing that people labor for and is the thing that took deliberate actions to create for. You would make it a lot harder to go ship it up.<\/p>\n

00:35:23
\nSpeaker 2: And I think we’ve had as a nation as a buy and large like an ethos of serious reverence for public wildlife for instance, right, Like there’s all you can research all sorts of articles that were in papers of like saw a deer today, right, white tailed deer was spotted on so and So’s place out by whatever it was in the in the.<\/p>\n

00:35:55
\nSpeaker 1: Newspaper, like it was noteworthy.<\/p>\n

00:35:57
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, it was a it was a really big deal. And and so there’s this era of extreme scarcity that came on the back end of an era of I would say, like abundance to greed, which led into oh my god, I better get it before it’s gone. It’s going to be gone anyway. And then here comes this overwhelming surge of again reverence and what we call conservation today. And then I think your dad’s era, right, it was like, I really don’t want to think about anything. By and large, I’ve been through a lot. I’m more out here for a level of independence and therapy of some sort. And now I can point to, like many many examples across Westerns dates, they’re seeing a lot of hunter pressure relative to the history of those states, or doll Sheep in Alaska, where a hunter behavior anecdotally has really changed around that resource. Where it used to just be like you’d get laughed out of town if you shot a legal ram, but now it’s like a legal ram is what you’re after, because by god, if I don’t get it now, yep, it’s going away anyway. Type of mindset. Right, And throughout all of these changes in history, our federal workforce peaked in the nineteen seventies, and the demands on that public ground have only increased, and that workforce hasn’t increased along with those demands. And now we’re dropping way back down. And my only point here is that at the beginning of the national parks or the forest system, the refuge system, there was never a point in time where there were so many wardens on the landscape that you were going to get caught.<\/p>\n

00:38:11
\nSpeaker 1: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:38:12
\nSpeaker 2: Right, it was a social contract out there that was like, by god, you better respect this stuff.<\/p>\n

00:38:19
\nSpeaker 1: Now.<\/p>\n

00:38:20
\nSpeaker 2: It was the other users on the landscape that were really enforcing these things, plus the idea of the super sneaky woods wise game warden that was going to pop out of nowhere type of thing.<\/p>\n

00:38:32
\nSpeaker 1: Right. You know what’s funny about that, man, ih We hunted fished all the time. Because I was very little kid. I never got checked by a game ward until I was twenty years old. Yeah, and believe that twenty years old, never laid that, not that I didn’t lay eyes on one, never got checked by one, You’re right. I mean it really is like a like speeding. You know, you kind of don’t speed because you don’t want a ticket.<\/p>\n

00:38:57
\nSpeaker 2: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:38:57
\nSpeaker 1: But in fishing, game law there is a social contract. Right. You don’t go like, I better get a license because I’ll get checked today. You’re just like you feel this moral obligation to get your license.<\/p>\n

00:39:09
\nSpeaker 2: Right, The math does not add up on getting checked.<\/p>\n

00:39:13
\nSpeaker 1: You do it out of some like because you do it because you believe in the system to some degree.<\/p>\n

00:39:19
\nSpeaker 2: So yeah, I mean we were relatively small conservation group, right, But I mean, if that is the goal, it will never end. But I would sure like it too, right, Like if we had a nationalistic pride in these resources, and they are resources. Extraction is part of who we are as well. But there’s been many times throughout our history where we were like, oh my god, we need to self regulate, and that self regulation turns into it a whole system of regulations because it has just got to happen. And what’s really interesting right now is like I know through conversations, you know, from the White House, throughout the Senate and the House, there there is a drive right now for deregulation. Yeah, And a lot of the people who are pushing for deregulation are not connected to these resources at all. There are many degrees of separation, sure, but they are running off of well, that’s what the people want, right, and our job, as is the job of a TRCP and many other conservation groups, is to say, like, yeah, there’s changes that can be made, and there’s antiquated things out there that don’t make sense. But the reason that we’re having this conversation right now is only because of regulation and the adherence to.<\/p>\n

00:40:56
\nSpeaker 1: Those Oh that there’s anything left to argue about.<\/p>\n

00:40:59
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, on the hunt and fishing side of things, we just wouldn’t be having this conversation. Yeah, right, it’s I.<\/p>\n

00:41:07
\nSpeaker 1: Mean, you’re yeah, you’re bringing up a huge point. I always like to bring up this point that there’s not a politician alive today that wouldn’t like to be favorably compared to Theodore Roosevelt. Right, anyone would be like, oh, if you’re going to favorably compare me to tr please I’ll accept. Not only that there are politicians that claim the mantle of tr that are undeserving of that, but they want it so bad they’ll just take it for themselves. Yep, they’ll draw comparisons. It’s like, I’m sorry, he was a regulation guy. He was a regulation guy because lack of regulation had brought us into the dark ages. Of American wildlife. And so when we applaud when anyone applauds the North American model, when they applaud tr or TR being up on Mount Rushmore, what you’re applauding is you’re applauding someone saying we are going to put limits. We are going to regulate harvest, we’re going to regulate sale of wildlife, We’re going to regulate timber extraction. It to then land in the spot to land and then land in the luxury of saying that the American way is to deregulate, it’s it’s mind boggling. Memories are so short.<\/p>\n

00:42:40
\nSpeaker 2: Memories are so short. You know, obviously there’s an opportunity here right now too. But one of the things that is certainly part of our mission at BHA is like we have got to get if if you love doing anything on public lands, or seeing anything on public lands, or seeing migratory birds, songbirds, whatever, it is like you have got to get active here and you’ve got to start associating with other groups and finding these big common themes. Right So, obviously I know you guys have covered like Roadless Rule a bunch the Executive order on OHV use oil and gas lease sales. H deregulation through the big beautiful bill list really does go on and on. That is the theme that is happening here is broad deregulation, because that’s what the American people want, right, and we have got to be like wait, wait, not that and not that, and this could can be done better.<\/p>\n

00:43:57
\nSpeaker 1: And but there’s a model of there’s a model of pointing to there’s sort of a rhetorical strategy where you go find examples of regulations that are antiquated, or regulations that don’t work, or regulations that are just goofy, and maybe you always have been goofy right or excessive, and you go, because of that, let’s just ditch the whole thing.<\/p>\n

00:44:23
\nSpeaker 2: Yep.<\/p>\n

00:44:24
\nSpeaker 1: You know. It’s a point I bring up. Like a way I think about it is is if you look, if you go back to COVID COVID restrictions, you could look and say and I saw people do it. I did it. The minute someone’s like, man, you shouldn’t you need to be scared of the boxes that were delivered in your yard, like leave them out there for a couple of days, you know, And then you hear someone say like, well that that’s that’s ridiculous, and you’re like you get fixated on how dumb that was, and then you get to where like, I’m not listening to any of this stuff, right, you know what I mean?<\/p>\n

00:45:02
\nSpeaker 2: Like remember the box thing?<\/p>\n

00:45:03
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, like the box thing there far off, I’m done washing my hands. The box thing was crazy. That’s like a human way where you you find you sort of see this category of things. One of those things seems crazy, and instead of isolating out the crazy one, you get where you’re just done. Oh yeah, you’re done. You see it in friendships, you have a great friendship with someone and they do a thing a couple of times. Eventually you’re just like, I know, I know he’s got some nice things. I’m done. Yep. You know I think that there is We hit these in like regulatory stuff where you’ll hear about a crazy thing and then people get like, ah, yeah, absolutely, we’ll just go back to the old way, you know, and you kind of go like you want to be like, well, let’s let’s let’s address the real problems, but let’s keep our eyes on what the goal is here, yep, Like, like we agree that we want clean air and clean water and healthy wildlife population, Like we agree on that, and sure, let’s talk about these things that are off, but we don’t. We just we jump to a radical we jump to a radical thing. Absolutely there’s some government waste kill the whole thing, you know.<\/p>\n

00:46:15
\nSpeaker 2: Uh, insanely diverse landscape that we have, right, like blessed as an American with unbelievable opportunities that it can be so wildly different from an edge of one state to another state, or the end of a watershed to the top end of a watershed. The people on the ground understand that you can’t like blanket manage all of this stuff, Like it is complicated and it does take time, and it takes real on the ground knowledge to inform how that stuff doesn’t needs to be managed and that complicated, you know, time consuming approach to something that we will never be able to recreate ever gets wrapped up in this like, well’ll see the government can’t do anything.<\/p>\n

00:47:15
\nSpeaker 1: Right, yeah, right, what this might be hard to answer. What when you’re talking about like you’re you’re talking about doing work on BLM land, right, So you’re coming in and doing like you’re you’re coming in on there’s federal property and you’re coming in and doing work on federal property, So you have private people coming in and doing work on federal property, or you could have private people a private organization coming in and helping clear trails on federal land. So there’s jobs that need to be done on public lands that aren’t getting done, aren’t getting done all the way, and so there’s a need for private people to come in and do it. Have you seen in your time and your role and you’ve been involved in BHA for a very long time as a board member, but so in your time there, particularly in your time in the leadership position, have you seen like literal situations where doge cuts have left things undone that then that then private organizations have found a way to go in and get taken care of. Or is it not or is it not that literal?<\/p>\n

00:48:35
\nSpeaker 2: There’s certain like staffing is a huge issue because like it’s not and like there was a time where there just literally wasn’t a person in the office who could physically handle the check, couldn’t write the check, sign it, put it in a mailbox. Yeah, you just that has to get done somehow, and there wasn’t a backup mechanism for that. When we talk about inventorying, a a fence line for example. You know there there’s a lot of communication on the ground with with the people on the ground, would be a rangeland ecologist or you know on the forest service side, Uh, any any number of people, right, h they get stretched in on a on a bunch of things because they’re not going out there to address problem A, and they run across problem B and they just ignore it. So there’s gaps that I think the private sector is is very capable of filling in. But oftentimes it’s that historical knowledge on a landscape. Sure, that is the real conduit to making that private sector work anywhere near efficient.<\/p>\n

00:50:09
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, Like you guys can’t just roll up in the truck and decide what fence you want to start working on. I mean it’s gotta go. Yeah, it’s got to go.<\/p>\n

00:50:16
\nSpeaker 2: You’re coming in on what road?<\/p>\n

00:50:18
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, I’ll see that.<\/p>\n

00:50:20
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, Well you need to drive three hundred miles around and come in on this road and it’ll be faster and way less wear and tear on your equipment than trying to come in on the road that’s fifty miles long.<\/p>\n

00:50:32
\nSpeaker 1: So you find places where like just those there’s gaps and those pieces yep, like like pass through individuals aren’t.<\/p>\n

00:50:40
\nSpeaker 2: There yep, yep. For sure, Yeah, for sure.<\/p>\n

00:50:45
\nSpeaker 1: Can you think of anything from the last let’s go back to the beginning of the current administration. What are things that happen in like Trump too, and a lot of things get I want to preface that a little bit. A lot of things get plugged to like the administration that are probably well outside of the White the view of the White House, right, Like you’ll hear like you know Trump is doing X or the administration is doing X. You’d be like, yes, the administration, but many layers removed from the White House, meaning in the White House, are probably not aware of this is coming from downstream? Right, But can you think of many cases or any cases of things that have come out in the last year and a half that that you can applaud, like, like, what are you looking at that excites you?<\/p>\n

00:51:42
\nSpeaker 2: Well, I mean I and I’m not.<\/p>\n

00:51:44
\nSpeaker 1: Saying you have to provide something because I see I’ve seen some.<\/p>\n

00:51:48
\nSpeaker 2: Things, oh for sure, But well I do I want many.<\/p>\n

00:51:52
\nSpeaker 1: Things to excite me as I’ve seen to depress me that.<\/p>\n

00:51:56
\nSpeaker 2: As you know, right, Like, if you’re you’re in a leadership position, you have a lot of people providing you with information and and some of those people may or may not have agendas, but they do want typically to make things go well, and they’re probably outsourcing information too. And we’ve come across many things here recently where we’ve heard directly from high level officials, conversations like, well, we were told that everybody wanted this, and you’re telling me that that’s not true. And why are we getting so much negative feedback on this thing that was overwhelmingly positive And you have the feeling in the back of your mind of like, oh, you were misinformed.<\/p>\n

00:52:46
\nSpeaker 1: Give me an example. So let me I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to leave you trying to struggle to understand my intents. Let me let me ask it a little bit differently our our organization, like like at Mediator, we’ve talked a lot about We covered in Trump won, we covered a little bit during the Biden administration. We covered again in Trump two of the move and Trump two being the biggest move in this direction was like freeing up hunting and fishing opportunities, refuges, refuges something so yeah. In some areas administered by the National Parks Service and we’ve explained it, applauded it, defended the rationale. Okay, the today, someone sends me an op ed of someone saying, like a lot of media organizations, he doesn’t name names, he’s like a lot of media organizations, a lot of wildlife organizations, a lot of conservation organizations, refuse to acknowledge any of the positives, you know. And I looked at that, and I’m like, man, that doesn’t ring true to me. Yeah, I’ve read about this refuge system all over They expanded hunting and fishing access on refuge systems. The New York Times attacked it unfairly, and I addressed why I thought it was an unfair attack. We applauded it when it happened the first time, applauded it. Now like no one’s ignoring this, But there has been a in my mind, there’s been an undeniable feeling of it, of of cascading bad news. And so I just want to I want to ask you from like a your position to not be guilty of what the op ed was saying, Like from your position, Yeah, what have you seen this? Man? Like, what are you seeing lately at the federal level that you’re applauding or that you’re liking, you.<\/p>\n

00:54:56
\nSpeaker 2: Know, I mean several executive orders h and I brought up the HB one. It’s a good example. It’s having negative consequences right now, unfortunately. But many of the executive orders are big statements that do at the end say like unless there’s currently a travel management plan.<\/p>\n

00:55:16
\nSpeaker 1: In place, yeah right, yep, Like I see, you know, I was put in the idea. I was putting like this, like if I said, let’s say I said to my kids, I’m like, don’t even ask me. Don’t even ask me if you can spend the night at your friend’s house. I don’t want to hear any requests about that. It’s done. And then later I say, I don’t know what the answer will be on an individual basis, but I’m okay to field requests now, but I don’t know what I’ll say. You can at least bring the request to me. So some of these things have this like this, and it gets put in the press like oh, it’s all open now, you can drive anywhere you want now, yep, you know, But you look at me, like if you read it, the fine print just says we’ll see case by case basis right, but something shifts.<\/p>\n

00:56:06
\nSpeaker 2: Yes, yeah, and when it comes time to have a new travel management plan, it’s going to be these things are going to be considered. Right, But for the time being, if there’s a travel management plan in place, that is the law. Yeah and yeah, A lot of a lot of media, because of this need want for hyperbole, have really really put a ding on our public lands because they’re saying, oh, all this stuff’s open now, and that is not the case. And I can go into a bunch of work that we’re doing right now to try to help some positive messaging around that.<\/p>\n

00:56:47
\nSpeaker 1: So what really is in the what really is everybody saw the headlines or not everybody, but there’s a lot of headlines like help me, help me describe the general headline off road use? Like what would be the general headline you saw about off road use?<\/p>\n

00:57:04
\nSpeaker 2: Oh, the general it would be like Trump rolls back bedrock travel management plans. It opens the paves the way for off road use would probably be the thing.<\/p>\n

00:57:23
\nSpeaker 1: Right, But what is happening there? Let’s take this example, like what is happening there? Well, so when I saw it, I didn’t get a I didn’t get a feeling without you know, my knee jerk reaction must be like, oh, yep, yep, I don’t like the sounds of that.<\/p>\n

00:57:42
\nSpeaker 2: First of all, off road on BLM and Forest Service Land is kind of a misnomer because you can go off road on these designated roads and trails, not cross country travel.<\/p>\n

00:57:59
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah. When I say off road, they mean off of pavement, off of designated highways, off of county roads.<\/p>\n

00:58:06
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, big thoroughfare er, main artery type of thing. And then that’s broken into single track motorized. Of course, there’s single track non motorized wilderness, no bicycles, right, And then you have your fifty inch or less width restriction four wheel and then you have your your full size like jeep trail, high clearance vehicle roads, and that’s like that’s where you do your off roading. And then there’s certain areas where there is a designated spot for ripping around wherever you want, and it is visually the place to do that. Hard to mistake it for.<\/p>\n

00:59:00
\nSpeaker 1: On some big sand dune or something.<\/p>\n

00:59:02
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah. And then so what the OHV order did was it said this Nixon era executive order. And then I want to say it’s Carter, I’m a little sleep deprived, right, now Carter Era OHV executive order, we’re going to rescind those they were you know, I would say like very forward thinking as far as like, hey, as this user group and technology expands, the impacts that we’re seeing today are only going to be exacerbated on the landscape. We have a lot of industry out and this is something that gets lost a lot, right, is we have a lot of extractive use industry that’s out there, and it will be a danger to individuals and an impediment to those industries if people are writing where every hell and gone, and it will impact the return that we have on our growing for us, for the timber industry, and it’s it’s a bad look. It causes erosion, which impacts our road systems and our culverts and our spawning habitats and our streams and you know the typical cascading effects. Right. And and then the thing that most people saw was the switch from a de facto closed unless posted open to open and less posted closed. And the way that that works is every district has m v U M, a motor vehicle use map, which I always thought was a really sweet idea. It’s you know, you can go get an armload of them if you want, and they’re typically at gas stations that are selling off road gas and they’re at your ranger district offices and stuff like that. But you have that map in your possession. It shows the exactly what’s open to what, and then it’s supposed to work. Is kind of like an affidavit in your pocket too, to be like, oh, I know the rules and then you know because of like years and years and years of litigation, the way those things are posted and signed. They all have open dates and closed dates, and if you want to color outside the lines on those for trail condition closures or whatever, if it’s not within the dates, you’re not going to get ticketed. You might get a talking to. But that’s how that whole system works. And the implication of those headlines being like, oh my god, it’s all doom and gloom, armygeddon, it’s all over a lot of people were like, oh okay, and more.<\/p>\n

01:02:12
\nSpeaker 1: What do you mean when you say okay? What do you mean?<\/p>\n

01:02:15
\nSpeaker 2: So we’ve just get been getting a lot of reports from districts all across North America saying like we’re seeing rampant cross country travel, motorized cross country travel and the destruction of signs and gates, and as well as the promotion of essentially fake news like that everything’s open now versus hey. Travel management plans right responsibly.<\/p>\n

01:02:49
\nSpeaker 1: Right, like any changes that actually occur are forthcoming as they consider rule changes. But it wasn’t something that all of a sudden announced from now on, unless if it doesn’t say you can’t go there, you can go wherever you want.<\/p>\n

01:03:03
\nSpeaker 2: Yep, yep, And you know there’s all sorts of implications there. But to go back to like the broader scale of management, when you kind of get into the nuances of all the tools in the toolbox of management, where you get really ticked. That is like, well, why is this for a service road? Buttery smooth and at the end of it, there’s a big maintained campground and nice toilets and potable water or you know, frost free taps that you can get instant water at your campsite. While as this camp this road is full of potholes, you got to go really slow, especially if you’re towing a camper. And then there’s primitive sites at the end of that, and it’s like, well, they don’t know what they’re doing. Well, a lot of times your travel management plan, your maintenance plan, those are always to disperse the amount of pressure that you get within your forest or BLM area. Right, So you’re like, yep, this one is you know, way more conducive to bringing in big pump trucks to hit the pit toilets and maintaining at a larger scale, and it’s very family friendly. We’re going to divert a lot of people here. This road over here is more of a pain in the butt. The site’s more remote, it’s actually more sensitive to so we actually want a little less human pressure up there. So that is the reason that the road’s a pain in the ass.<\/p>\n

01:04:54
\nSpeaker 1: Like no one’s trying to make it a high traffic area exactly.<\/p>\n

01:04:58
\nSpeaker 2: And we also don’t have the staff to maintain that one on every single day basis like we do down here, which is why we’re diverting more traffic down here type of thing.<\/p>\n

01:05:12
\nSpeaker 1: What do you think what on the on that OHV on the off road rule change or paving the way for rule changes going forward, What is the real deep down motivating factor? Like what is someone after?<\/p>\n

01:05:32
\nSpeaker 2: I think it is another case of just like the pendulum swinging really hard I think roadless rule is also a case of the pendulum swinging really hard where and we’ve gotten direct feedback as to I just want to say, like, our communication at BHA has changed a lot, and I’m adamant that we take an issue, we break it down in a non partisan fashion, take it or leave it. It is just what’s happening. There’s a page break. Here’s BHA’s position and why yep. And we’re a membership organization, which is awesome because I get to say, like, this is what the membership wants and we actually, yeah, we just we’ve had some high level meetings because people have been paying attention to our communications and saying like, hey, thank you for not raking us over the calls on this. Got it? We were told everybody wants this. No, like we were told that why is it that we’re getting beat up here here, here, here, and here, And I say, well, we represent a bunch of people who actually love this, and it is not always congruous with that. And the reason that we’re in this situation is because you know, certain we kind of divert certain people up certain trails, and we divert other people up other trails. And when you’re riding really fast on a dirt bike. You don’t really want to be stopping for backpackers all the time. And that’s kind of how we have this system. And conversely, you got to string of mules. You don’t want mountain bikes or or motorbikes ripping really fast, especially in spots where there’s no place to divert. Right so Capital w Wilderness and some WSA ground and stuff like that. Right So, there’s just a huge burden of education that has to happen here. And within the first Trump administration, this Trumpe administration, they move incredibly fast, ye incredibly fast, and there’s a bunch of catchup that’s happening. And I posted when this OAHV order came out said, listen, I’m not worried about the motorized use community at large. I’m not aware of any motorized groups that want to see habitat destruction, that want to see a decrease in wildlife populations that you know.<\/p>\n

01:08:14
\nSpeaker 1: No one has that policy.<\/p>\n

01:08:16
\nSpeaker 2: They don’t, they don’t, that’s not part of the mission statement. But every single user group out there has people that are more than willing to color outside the lines. And I am worried that because of the way that this is messaged, that we’re going to see those people out there representing the outdoor community, and it is it’s a burden on all of us. Right. It’s like if you get if you don’t have folks who are out there using public lands frequently, even just on like this is what I do most weekends type of basis, you show up and you’re like, oh my god, the people that come out to these places are total pigs. Right, Just as I’ve been reaching out to a lot of motorized industry folks and a lot of athletes right now to say like, hey, let’s work on some messaging that’s on responsible uset and the response has been like oh absolutely.<\/p>\n

01:09:14
\nSpeaker 1: Really yeah, yeah yeah. Now take the Roldest rule and you mentioned earlier, and the Roldest rule in very simple terms for listeners to understand the road. This rule. It’s one of those political ping pongs that bounce back and forth. But it’ll be like, are were cutting new roads onto national forest lands. It became especially relevant to Tongus National Forest where there was is remains a desire to cut in roads on national forests that would lead to old growth timber cuts, cut in roads where the government would cut in roads on national forest land to facilitate mining activities, and other things. The roadless Rule came out and said that not constructing large scale roads and areas that are through some formula designated to be like without roads, So not tapping into areas that are that are enough of a size to be regarded as an area that has that is roadless. Right, doesn’t prevent you from cutting a little whatever driveway somewhere or something, but from building roads to access new areas, and it would go in under an administration and then it would get revoked or people would attempt to revoke it. Right right now, we’re in process again of undoing the roadless ruling. Okay, So going back to the time of being able to cut in roads to facilitate mining, to cut in roads to facilitate to cuts in some cases, the cut in roads to facilitate timber improvement that isn’t even related to mining, but just to do timber improvement work. When I asked you on the OHV thing, I ask you, like, what is someone really driving at there? Like are they pursuing a particular end? And you said, it’s just kind of a pendulum swing of trying to do a large scale reversal of a of a restriction that was in place with the roleless rule. Is it like, is undoing the roleless Rule meant to drive a particular project somewhere or do you accept it as just a more general movement or is it tied to some like distinct thing that someone wants to do somewhere, but in order for them to do it, they have to undo the roleless Rule.<\/p>\n

01:11:58
\nSpeaker 2: You know, I think it’s both that there’s some you know, real specific projects in mind. I really don’t think it’s timber. I think I think it would be like mineral extraction, and it is just part of this theme of like broad deregulation. I think there’s parts of the roadless Rule that need to be like greatly reformed. We’re talking so every state could have had their own version of the roadless Rule. Idaho and Colorado are the only states that did that. So we’re really talking about like forty five million acres. And we’ve said from the very beginning, it’s like, well, tell us what you really want, because the timber industry says, this isn’t about timber, it’s not going to be forty five million acres, Like we’re talking a few thousand here here and here and and maybe a couple hundred miles a road. Let’s talk about.<\/p>\n

01:13:05
\nSpeaker 1: That, like inviting the conversation to get down to like if if this is about a thing, let’s talk about the thing. Yeah, yeah, got it.<\/p>\n

01:13:13
\nSpeaker 2: And we haven’t gotten there yet. I will tell you that there’s legitimate gripes on the roadless rule because it is open to a little bit of interpretation. And there’s been areas districts for us where the managers decided that they wanted to like a little extra buffer around their roadless they’re categorized roadless areas, right, And it’s like, yeah, I mean just think all the conversations we’ve had about like the national park has got an end somewhere you don’t get a buffer or else just call it park or don’t.<\/p>\n

01:13:57
\nSpeaker 1: You Yeah, just for listeners, what Cal’s refering to is you might have I mean, everybody in the world has sort of Yellowstone National Park. Oftentimes there’s wildlife management issues. There’s there’s wildlife management decisions that are made along the border where the park has a gray area, Right, there’s like if the if you imagine the park is black on a map and out of the park is white on a map. They create certain gray areas for wildlife management and for other management practices to to create like I said, a buffer Yeah, a buffer zone, meaning it won’t be that it wouldn’t be that cities get built up to the wall to the line, because you’re trying to you’re trying to mitigate impacts on the edge that might affect the interior.<\/p>\n

01:14:50
\nSpeaker 2: Yep, yep. And then from a wildlife perspective, red it’s like we have like wolf management zones in Montana that are right against the park ye. Because socially it was decided like, well, if wolves are gonna leave the park, they’re probably gonna get really beat up right on the edge of the park, and then there’s gonna be a little education curve, and the further they get away, the more wary they’re going to be, their survivability is going to be higher.<\/p>\n

01:15:24
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah. So some wolf pack that spends seventy five percent of the time in the park and they tend to wander over to some little area, there might be some extra regulation where they wander over in order to protect the integrity of the of a popular pack, wildlife viewing pack in the park. Yeah.<\/p>\n

01:15:41
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, Well, on the roadless side of things, you know, there’s like viable sold timber projects that were tied up in a lot of red tape because they were adjacent.<\/p>\n

01:15:56
\nSpeaker 1: To okay, right, and then it and that causes frustration.<\/p>\n

01:16:03
\nSpeaker 2: Big time frustration, right, and it like I can see how that leads to like it’s totally flawed through the whole thing out.<\/p>\n

01:16:09
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, Like someone’s saying, no, I get it, we can’t We’re not going to cut in the park. But you’re saying I can’t cut by the park.<\/p>\n

01:16:16
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah exactly, and not only not by the park, but how far away from the park.<\/p>\n

01:16:22
\nSpeaker 1: No, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n

01:16:23
\nSpeaker 2: And then the roadless rule as it’s written, you can build roads or reopen roads temporarily to go in and do wildfire mitigation. You can go in and do like habitat work. And oftentimes that stuff gets litigated to death and tied up. And sometimes it’s just not even a conversation that people are willing to have because it will get litigated and tied up.<\/p>\n

01:16:53
\nSpeaker 1: Got it.<\/p>\n

01:16:55
\nSpeaker 2: And so the proper implementation and this is where I think concerts has a real all of us groups have a real failure is we work like hell to build something like the roadless Rule, and then the implementation part, like we’re in it for the sanctuary areas, Like, by god, we got some areas carved out here where there’s not gonna be roads. It’s human powered only, it’s going to exclude folks who aren’t willing to do that. I’m going to have a little honey hole and that’s our focus. Or we protected, like really protected these zones from anything but natural erosion. We’re going to have great chinook sakae salmon boltrout spawning there forever type of thing. Well, we don’t show up when the litigation groups show up and say, oh no, you guys can’t do a habitat improvement project. You guys can’t go in there and do wildfire mitigation as it’s outlined within the roadless Rule. Yeah right, And so you know, I haven’t put my money where the mouth is yet, but I’ve had a lot of conversations to see, like how it would be feasible for a group like backcountry hunters and anglers two way in on those on behalf of proactive management. Yeah not, because I think that’s exactly why we’re here. But I do want to take that argument out of the quiver right and be like, yeah, we came to the table, we signed the dotted line. We agree that this is how the roadless rule should function, So shouldn’t we have some skin in making it function that way.<\/p>\n

01:18:48
\nSpeaker 1: It’s so interesting you bring that up, because I was discussing this with a friend of mine a couple of days ago, and we were talking about the way the conservation community will get activated around certain marquee very high value around the protection of certain marquee very high value areas and resist development on those places. We saw it with a coalition of people from across the sporting and outdoor and birding and commercial fishing spectrum in opposition to developing a mine in the headwaters of Bristol Bay. Right. Everybody saw that. We saw not nearly as dramatic, but a coming together around protecting the headwaters leading into the Boundary Waters Wilderness area. Maybe even less than that, but seeing a coalition of people questioning the idea of pushing back against the idea of building a two hundred and fifty mile industrial corridor into the range called Ambler Road. And what we were talking about is is like when it’s a no, we come out to say no, right yep. And if someone came to me and said okay, then okay, I get it. You don’t like that, you don’t like that, you don’t like that, what is okay?<\/p>\n

01:20:21
\nSpeaker 2: Yep?<\/p>\n

01:20:22
\nSpeaker 1: What is okay? It’s a fault. It’s like a negative about me. It’s a fault that I would say, I don’t know. I’ll have to tell you when I hear. Do you know what I mean?<\/p>\n

01:20:36
\nSpeaker 2: Because that’s an argument that we use on their roadless rule, right, It is like, okay, if you’re talking about timber, what about all this high alpine terrain where it’s so highly irrodable you can’t build a road and there happens to be no timber. Can we still call that inventory roadless? Yeah, if you want the timber, right, Like, so it’s the same argument, yeah, right.<\/p>\n

01:20:58
\nSpeaker 1: But I mean, like, but I sometimes wonder is if you if if you are, if you’re gonna come and you’re going to be in opposition to some things, at what point do you have an obligation to go and say, but here is what’s okay yep yep? Or is it morally okay to just be like, no, I’m the guy that tells you when it’s no. I don’t know the guy. I don’t know the yes guy.<\/p>\n

01:21:23
\nSpeaker 2: I I don’t think it is. I think the answer though, is like it is just complicated. We have a insanely diverse landscape, a tree faller back when those were the dudes really doing the work on the landscape, and there still are are plenty. But it’s a dye and breed. They will tell you like, you can’t cut the same tree twice, meaning that the asspect matters, the slope, the picture of the tree, all the things. It is a tree by tree calculation, right, which is why it’s it’s hard, and it takes skilled people with lots of lots of knowledge, lots of practice. So I think people are capable of being the yes person when it comes to a renewable project such as you know a good timber project, right, good timber project pays lots of dividends on the wildlife side of things. But you’re gonna have to wait, but it you know, it will come back. Right. You’re gonna eat that cow elk tag for for that zone maybe this year, but there’s gonna be parts of it next year. You can hunt and then there’s more of it the following year, yeah, right, and then it’s probably gonna suck for a while as once in fifteen years down the road, depending on where.<\/p>\n

01:22:49
\nSpeaker 1: You’ll be sweet for ten years after the cut and then laying for a year and then like increasingly better than eventually Yeah, go away, and you look forward to that.<\/p>\n

01:22:58
\nSpeaker 2: But those areas also do their own job of spreading out the pressure on public land, right, because we all have those spots where it takes us years to be like, you know what, this place used to be sweet, but I’ve just been coming here and it sucked the last three years. Time to go find a new spot. Well, you’ve been sitting there pounding your head against you know, a dense mat of trees. Somebody else is being like, oh my gosh, this place is sweet. There’s nobody here, you know, on the other side of that block, right, And so those changes in the landscape are always a negative and a positive for all of us out there. It’s just like the game. So yeah, I do think it is possible to be the yes person, but you got to be involved enough to be like, oh, this project’s proposed, is there a mechanism for us to weigh in on that.<\/p>\n

01:24:02
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, I think that that probably I think that it would be a good pressure relief valve if the for the conservation community to maybe get more involved in what’s more involved in pointing out and facilitating what’s okay. But a lot of it is there’s just absolutism, yes, and and and and there’s been a lot of absolutists that are very celebrated yep, and regarded as effective, you know, like like like Edward Abbey was a desert absolutist to the point where he’s sort of to the point where he not even tacitly, to the point where through fiction he like glorified eco terrorism, right, Like, he was an absolutist, And a lot of people would look and say, like absolutism, anything else is you know, anything else is you’re weak? Anything else as you have cracks in the you know, you have cracks in the fence. But I do wonder about being more like like if and I don’t even know the answer to this, that if there had been a greater effort toward negotiating certain things, we would not be in this situation of talking about repealing the of repealing the role in this rule you know, I don’t know. Another case of absolutism gone wrong in a different direction, the wild Horse and Burrow Protection Act YEP. Is, there was a time when there weren’t that many wild horses around. People thought they were being abused and thought they were going to vanish. They made a absolutism case and now it has generated enormous friction YEP with wildlife managers where you’re like, they just left no room. There’s they left no room for logical, meaningful corrections to a problem.<\/p>\n

01:26:17
\nSpeaker 2: Well yeah, because you kind of get to this trap, like we said in the beginning, right, like we got to think beyond this administration, right, and so this OHV deal. Like I’m I spend a lot of time, Like I feel like everybody knows that I gravitate towards human powered love, my wilderness areas, love big backpacking trips. You know, it’s just not like, certainly not a proficient motorized guy, but I’m like, listen, every single trip I take starts with a four wheel drive truck getting me to the trailhead, right, So I can’t be anti motorized use, right, Like that is the thing that facilitates everything, you know, ninety nine times out of one hundred for me. And so when these headlines come out and it’s like, oh, all the motorized people want this, and I was like, no, they really don’t. I know that. Or it’s all the motorized folks or slobs and they’re tearing the things up, and I’m like, well, there’s lots of different groups out there that preach hard, responsible use all across the landscape, and they are policing their own their own community, and you know, that’s like something that we have always done is like, is that social contract? If you’re going to represent single track dirt bikes, do it in this manner. Don’t do it like this, right because there is the pendulum swinging the other way. It’s like, oh, you lose access to all of it stuff, and access can be weaponized. Like it was the first thing that I saw on this job, right is like everybody you know, Dave six or seven on the job. I went and testified in the House Natural Resources Committee, which is pretty wild, you know, because I did have like a moment of like, oh, I could tank the entire organization right now, live on c SPAM stressful, I can just say whatever and it would probably just be done, no coming back. But you know, everybody there was talking was like access, access, access, access, And I was like, well, wait a minute, what do you mean.<\/p>\n

01:28:50
\nSpeaker 1: I’ve run into this, right, it means different things to different people.<\/p>\n

01:28:53
\nSpeaker 3: It means different things to different It’s like you’re like, oh, if we’re gonna if that’s good, I’m going to define how I want and know that everyone thinks it’s good because the word is good.<\/p>\n

01:29:05
\nSpeaker 2: Yep. And and then we have to have this more in depth conversation of being like, listen, the thing that you’re after is only going to survive for so long. If that’s where we punch a big road in, if we remove the seasonal closures that exist for wintering range or calving areas. Like the reason that those regulations are in place are so you can go have that experience. It’s just it’s only going to be there if you do it in this way.<\/p>\n

01:29:43
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, that’s a great point. What you want to, what you’re so dying to get to, is there because you can’t.<\/p>\n

01:29:53
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, in these fashions, right, that’s.<\/p>\n

01:29:56
\nSpeaker 1: This time of year or whatever. Right, what you’re wanting is your wanting to You’re wanting to drive to a thing that wouldn’t be there if you could.<\/p>\n

01:30:05
\nSpeaker 2: And like I high country mule deer, right, I used to just love spending so much time, uh early season scouting for mule deer and and then archery hunting that high country big basin mule deer. Right, And it’s like, if they see you one time, they’re just gone, right, and it can take them weeks to come back to that spot. And yeah, you can go find them again somewhere. But having this notion that you can create access as defined by whatever, Like there’s some things that just are not going to tolerate no, Right, If.<\/p>\n

01:30:45
\nSpeaker 1: I could just drive in there and finally get them big old bucks that are hiding back.<\/p>\n

01:30:48
\nSpeaker 2: There, yeah, yeah, And it’s like, well you can drive aways in there and then get really really sneaky and hike off trail and you know, play the wind and do all the things that you pick up over the years. And then if you really have the mental fortitude at the end of a long day, drop all your stuff and slide on your stomach up there and peek your head over like your good chance, like you’re gonna see one unless some jackass was there before you and stood up on the ridge right, So, and those are tough conversations to have because you know there’s a lot of folks out there too who are like, well, man, I’m a disabled veteran. Are you against me having that experience?<\/p>\n

01:31:33
\nSpeaker 1: Understand?<\/p>\n

01:31:34
\nSpeaker 2: And it’s like, no, I want you to have that experience. I would love to help facilitate that. But as a guy who’s had that experience a lot, you just got to trust me that like that, you just can’t get in there that way and have that experience.<\/p>\n

01:31:52
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah.<\/p>\n

01:31:53
\nSpeaker 2: Like, and we pick and choose all the time until if we go back to roadless or this OHV executive order, Like I can be a big enough person to be like, Okay, well what are we going to open up? But what are we going to close?<\/p>\n

01:32:11
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah?<\/p>\n

01:32:12
\nSpeaker 2: Because we we have to have that because there’s just there’s too many of us doing too many of the things to you know, point literally, like point that gun of impact at these areas.<\/p>\n

01:32:25
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, because.<\/p>\n

01:32:28
\nSpeaker 2: We know through our history that it will have this adverse effect that we just can’t think about when we’re so gung ho on the opportunity.<\/p>\n

01:32:38
\nSpeaker 1: Right. Sure, let’s jump subjects and talk about the ongoing corner crossing debate, and I’ll put it to you this way, well, just I hate doing the bat. We talked about this so much, and it’s such an important issue. We’ve covered it so many times. It’s always it’s always changing. But just a very quick, very very quick recap corn corner crossing if you’re just kind of joining our sort of universe of shows right now. Corner crossing has to do with imagine that you’re looking at a checkerboard and the black squares our public land? Are they black and white? I don’t know, black and red on the checkerboard, got of checkerboard. The black squares are sections of miles mile by miles sections of public land. The red squares are mile by mars mile by mile sections of private land. When we refer to corner cross and we refer to whether it is legal or not to step from the corner of a black square to the corner of another black square, that’s corner crossing, and so that your shoulder, your feet are never leaving the black, but your body’s passing over the red. And this is a this has been a debate that’s playing out for a long time, particularly in the American West, where you have what we call checkerboarded landscapes that are laid out in that same fashion through the sorts through federal court. Corner crossing was made legal in Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico helped me out here.<\/p>\n

01:34:12
\nSpeaker 2: Uh yeah, the tenth Circuit, tenth circuit. Yeah, the whole the whole tenth Circuit. So and I wouldn’t say made legal. I would say confirmed.<\/p>\n

01:34:22
\nSpeaker 1: Legal, confirmed legal, Yeah, okay, not mad Yeah, like yeah, that’s a great question. Was yeah, it was. There was there was a there was a debate. It was never It wasn’t like a change in the law. It was just defining the existing law and clarifying the existing law because there was there was confusion about it. Yep. But it’s still a big swath of the American West where it’s up in the air yep. And different states have different interpretations. Different states open interpret you know, put out different guidelines. If you had to crystal ball it a year or two years, where do you think things are gonna where do you think things are going to land. Do you think that we’ll see more confusion, more obfuscation of whether you’re you’re allowed to do this, or do you think that it’ll that we’ll see more clarity about what really is allowed and what’s not allowed when it comes to corner crossing.<\/p>\n

01:35:19
\nSpeaker 2: Well, I think the reason that we’re seeing this debate get more and more intense because it used to just never. Never, it was a question. Certainly here in the state of Montana, it was never an intense debate. There’s many areas within the state where it was just what people did.<\/p>\n

01:35:38
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah. For a long time, it was a question that rolled around in the back of a small number of people’s heads. Yes, and then it became a question that was in the front of many people’s minds.<\/p>\n

01:35:50
\nSpeaker 2: Yes. Yeah. And you know the reason that that is right is because, like we are just developing more and more of the West and people are are planting their flag permanently in places that were seasonal at most, right, And you know, I think there is absolutely no question whatsoever as to the legality. I think there’s many many questions right now that are getting played out. So, for instance, back in the tenth Circuit in Wyoming, there’s a push to provide landowner compensation to people adjacent to corners. So there’s people walking from public ground to public ground without ever touching private property. Can we monetarily compensate the landowners who own the private lands that touch those corners.<\/p>\n

01:36:55
\nSpeaker 1: There’s but but that’s not that would just be help help me understand that, but.<\/p>\n

01:37:03
\nSpeaker 2: Help that state question that’s coming up.<\/p>\n

01:37:06
\nSpeaker 1: But the state would be doing it as a good will gesture that they’re not doing it. They’re not they’re not being legally forced to do.<\/p>\n

01:37:14
\nSpeaker 2: Legally forced to do it. There’s an ask as to like a real legal one would be, can you corner across from federal to state? Right? In states where we have a kind of a de facto public access, we use state ground as public ground. Well, this was a federal decision I see, not a state decision that needs to be figured out.<\/p>\n

01:37:49
\nSpeaker 1: I’ll tell you it’s it’s interesting you bring that up. I would never considered that. Like if I was in a clarified corner crossing legal state and I saw where federal land and state land were connected by corners, I would never even question whether you were allowed to hop that corner.<\/p>\n

01:38:06
\nSpeaker 2: Right, Yeah, And that that is like one of the things, right, like the huge broad general public. You give them a pop quiz on this. It is just pure confusion. They’re like, why in the hell would that not be legal? Right? You’re not touching private property. And then you get in circles where people have really really gone through the grinder on this and they’ve looked at case law and it gets overly complicated. Like you you start start getting into these conversations where you’ve kind of lost the the on the ground fact a long time ago, where it’s like you’re you’re just walking from here to there. So no question in my mind as to if it’s legal. It is legal, I think because kind of like we talked about on your your motorized community or non motorized community. I remind people all the time, like if you’re on the private side of that fancy, you’re a public landowner too, and you also have way better access to that square that you’re you’re trying to get to. So it behooves all of us to come up with common language assurances that clearly define the private property, the public property, and the access.<\/p>\n

01:39:40
\nSpeaker 1: But there is and I guess I can speak to Montana where we’re sitting right now, I can’t speak to other places there. There is like an uncertainty here where the if you go and get your hunting regulation, there’s not a part of the hunting regulation that clarifies corner crossing is okay, right, right, you get a mixed am I wrong? No, you get a mixed signal yep.<\/p>\n

01:40:14
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, it used to be if like ours are not suggestion, different word are. What Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks would like you to do is to contact the adjacent landowner for permission to corner cross That was, and then if if somebody were to try to get a warden out there to cite you, the warden would then have to contact the county prosecutor in order to issue that citation. And then you know, that language ramped up to the point where the state was implying, like this is illegal. If you write the governor, you get a response back that says it’s illegal, and always has been. The secretary, not the secretary of the state. The lieutenant governor, you know, offered her opinion. A couple of our state senators said, there it is. That’s the law. It’s illegal, which is not how we create laws.<\/p>\n

01:41:29
\nSpeaker 1: In the They offered the opinion that it was forbidden.<\/p>\n

01:41:32
\nSpeaker 2: Yep, based off of case law, you.<\/p>\n

01:41:36
\nSpeaker 1: Know like that. They offered an interpretation which was then received as someone as the giving of the law.<\/p>\n

01:41:44
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it is I mean, it is tricky. It’s not tricky to read this stuff. It’s not tricky to come up with your own interpretations. But if you were to listen to the Lieutenant governors kind of case that she made, she’s using all the same cases that you would use to say it’s legal. She’s just using different excerpt of those cases and a narrow, narrower interpretation, which also is like how the law works a lot of times. Right, So I’m not like bad mouth and the Lieutenant governor at all, but it is just been very, very interesting.<\/p>\n

01:42:34
\nSpeaker 1: What do you think will happen?<\/p>\n

01:42:36
\nSpeaker 2: Well, ideally we have a legislative session coming up that we’re going to see some some legislation that comes up to clarify this. At a state level, backcountry hunters and anglers we entered into a lawsuit with the state of Montana after hitting this wall that you know, we were just told flat out out said, hey, even if this went back to the previous memo where it’s like corner crossing is a gray area, that’s okay for right now until we can get legislation through because the people that want to do it do it, and the people who don’t don’t. And you know, ranchers don’t want to see a bunch of people piled up at corners. Hunters don’t want to see a bunch of people piled up at corners. We want this to be quiet. Yeah, is the best thing for everybody.<\/p>\n

01:43:31
\nSpeaker 1: But if if the state, okay, in Wyoming, you had a case where it got moved to federal federal court, yep, If the state, if state legislators were to come in and say it’s illegal, yep, wouldn’t that then open a pathway for someone to say, you’re probi is in violation of federal law. And that’s a no no.<\/p>\n

01:44:05
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, and yeah, I mean that that is a thing. And that’s why by and large, we’re talking about broad acceptance of legal access through the corners. We’re talking about extremely broad acceptance of if you enter or damage private property, that’s that’s trespass. So there’s a ton of middle ground here. And I think that we’re capable of coming up with a state solution that you know, prevents a federal case.<\/p>\n

01:44:49
\nSpeaker 1: It prevents an escalation.<\/p>\n

01:44:51
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, And and part of this is is totally out of our hands, like that that could happen anyway.<\/p>\n

01:44:58
\nSpeaker 1: But you know, it’s a question I never thought that. I never thought to ask, do you have any sense if you went to Wyoming, Let’s say there had been a ballot initiative yep, and it was just very clear and everyone’s on everyone’s ballot during a presidential election year. It just said like corner like, should corner crossing be legal? Yes? No? And you put it out to the voters in Wyoming before all this happened, What do you think the answer would have been? Like?<\/p>\n

01:45:32
\nSpeaker 2: Overwhelmingly yes, do you think so? Yeah?<\/p>\n

01:45:35
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah?<\/p>\n

01:45:35
\nSpeaker 2: I mean you know, TRCP and BHA hosted listening sessions across the state. Obviously not everybody shows up to those things. Yeah, but I drove over and and sat in on a few, and I was really shocked by how few people actually wanted to talk about corner crossing because it was just like a given. They were like, oh, yeah, this is something everybody else is talking about. Uh, it’s something we do and will continue to do kind of regardless of what everybody else comes to the conclusion of. So yeah, I And then yeah, I mean there’s a long there’s more paper history of corner crossing in Wyoming than there than there isn’t in Montana. There’s there’s a decent amount of cases that apply in the state. There’s you know, no actual you know, anything that’s really specifically corner crossing in Montana has always been thrown out. It’s never made it to a judge’s decision.<\/p>\n

01:46:43
\nSpeaker 1: That that’s what that that blows my mind.<\/p>\n

01:46:46
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, for something that’s always been illegal.<\/p>\n

01:46:48
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, that there are not people out there sitting in jail or whatever who got in trouble for it.<\/p>\n

01:46:57
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, but we do have, you know, several state programs. We have a lot of money sitting in the Habitat Montana Fund, which was you know, part of the marijuana tax money forty one million bucks in counting that has to be used for access programs or acquiring land. You know, it’s a little little broad on what, but it can be used for habitat, building boat ramps, acquiring a new ground, stuff like that, or else that cash sunsets and it can go into the general fund. Some people speculate that it’s not being used.<\/p>\n

01:47:37
\nSpeaker 1: Because they wanted to go into the general to go.<\/p>\n

01:47:40
\nSpeaker 2: Into the general fund. But I mean, there’s a lot of tools in our tool belt that can make this a state led initiative. I’ve talked to a lot of folks long before we entered into this lawsuit, and then after we’ve entered into this lawsuit, who are both all of them landowners both for and against corner crossing. The folks that are against corner crossing and willing to talk to me, uh or asking asking me to call them more more accurately.<\/p>\n

01:48:21
\nSpeaker 1: They do you make those calls?<\/p>\n

01:48:22
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, it’s awesome. I mean I love talking to old rancherws so, but uh, they get fed up with bad hunter behavior, which I totally get. And most of them have been working for years to do land swaps with the BLM and and can’t get them through. And you know, so that’s something that that where we’ve offered to help. And you know, I just just talked with uh one one fella just like this and and did some due dealer jents on whether or not this was like an actual good land swap and it sounds like it really is. So we’re trying to help accelerate that process. And then we have a program where you can identify corners and we can come out and mark those so people have no excuse this is public, this is private. We can augment fence so you can have an access point there that, as one old dodger pointed out to me, he’s like, you know, I get that the lance public, but that fence isn’t. So we can augment that private fance and keep it in good work and shape and allow legal access. And then there are these corners typically called problem corners, where there’s just no way to legally access public to public without stepping on private.<\/p>\n

01:50:03
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, like just for people listening, picture that the pictures that don’t just it’s a tree, yep, picture, there’s a there’s a twelve inch tree at the corner, yep, right, and you gotta.<\/p>\n

01:50:17
\nSpeaker 2: And you’re supposed to do the right.<\/p>\n

01:50:19
\nSpeaker 1: You wiggle around that tree, you’re off where you’re not supposed to be.<\/p>\n

01:50:22
\nSpeaker 2: So yeah, So identifying those and and where the only entity of any kind out there, we use r g I S on the b h A website so you can just punch in your lat long of where that corner is. And then we have some surveyors that have reached out that do this work professionally, that have offered their services to to come out and mark corners. And these are folks who have actually like worked with the BLM to adjust corners to where they’re truly supposed to be, yeah, because some of them do migrate over the years because they you know, people have moved pins where the pins never existed, so they were going off of landmarks and those change generationally sometimes. And then you know, we can augment that that fence at the same time to wildlife friendly fencing and and do it at no cost to the landowner. As again kind of like our Stewardship project idea is, I’m like, man, if you’re fed up with bad hunter behavior, I can’t say I’m gonna fix all that, but I will bring a crew of people out there that you’re going to be really impressed with that really do give a crap, and at minimum, it’s going to give you a little bit of fuel back in the tank that hopefully lasts you until your next bad encounter and then which I typically do get a chuckle out of that. And then I’m working like hell trying to get some funding and some folks together to put together a hunting around agriculture program that ideally states will want to adopt, because we hear all the time that something’s got to be done because people don’t know how to behave around working farms. And ranches anymore, and they’re drawn like flies to them for hunting purposes. And just the basic stuff etiquette, where to park, where not to park, how to operate.<\/p>\n

01:52:36
\nSpeaker 1: Gates, driving on wet roads you shouldn’t be driving on. Yeah, driving across freshly planted fields, leaving gates not the way you found them, yep, spooking, spooking the hell out of cows.<\/p>\n

01:52:48
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, yeah, recognizing where you got a bunch of colcalf pairs that just got moved in from the range. They’re super scared. Probably just leave it alone. Yeah, you know. So not not hard stuff at all, but something that everybody is getting direct asks for and it’s not being addressed unfortunately. And we can put together the program that is built off of producer feedback. Right, the farmers and the ranchers are then tell us what they want and then you know, meat Eater will hopefully distribute that out. But we really need states to adopt this as well and use it in a fashion where people have to pay attention. Right, So I want like, hey, you just bought your big Game combo license. In order to complete purchase, take this five minute tutorial, right, and and you know people want to hunt in these places so bad. I don’t think that that’s going to be a barrier to entry at all. Hunters being hunters, we’re going to complain, but I think we’re going to take the test. And I really do believe like, if we can just educate a big group, right like forty thousand hunters hunting Montana every year, if we can educate them a one and a half percent more, that’s going to be a big impact on the landscape. And if we’re not working hard to kind of hold up our side of the social contract, we’re going to lose access on the front range and everybody’s going to be in the back country.<\/p>\n

01:54:39
\nSpeaker 1: Man. Yeah, I like a lot of what you’re saying. I like it really rings true to me, and you know, congratulations on viewing it this way. But I appreciate the way you’re willing to acknowledge and take responsibility for ways that your own community could be working against their own better interests. Meaning, you know, let’s talk about bad hunter behavior. Let’s talk about people kind of exploiting this corner crossing thing to feel that they can just get on that land however they want to get on it right, and kind of holding your own community up to like a certain standard and acknowledging the people that are offended by bad behavior that yes, this is true, what you’re seeing is true. I want to make that go away, right.<\/p>\n

01:55:35
\nSpeaker 2: Well, I mean what other choice do we have too.<\/p>\n

01:55:37
\nSpeaker 1: Right, well, just just ignore it, yeah, ignore it and let the tensions faster.<\/p>\n

01:55:43
\nSpeaker 2: Let the tensions faster. And then what everybody’s feeling, the state agencies, the agricultural producers, the hunters in areas where we’re seeing this really big increase in hunting pressure and demand and on the resource is like that scarcity mindset creeps in and it’s like I don’t care. I gotta get mine before somebody else does, right versus you know so many times, you know, I had great hunting mentors growing up, and really it was like, oh, well, Pard, let’s leave that one for another day. Somebody else is already on it type of thing, right, And looking back at those scenarios then, like it’d be hard to talk some people into being like, well, there’s only one truck at the trailhead, why wouldn’t we go type of thing, right, It’s like, well, somebody beat us to it, let them have it. We’ll go down to the next trailhead.<\/p>\n

01:56:48
\nSpeaker 1: You know, what do you imagine We’ve talked about a bunch of things that are in the news now being talked about right now, kind of hot, hot button issues right that are on everybody’s mind. What if we’re having this conversation a year from now or this conversation two years from now, what do you think, what do you think we’ll be talking about, Like, what do you see kind of lurking that’s going to be jumping into the that’s going to be jumping to the front of the line in terms of hot button issues.<\/p>\n

01:57:22
\nSpeaker 2: Well, I think there’s just two broad themes that are possible, right, And it’s kind of like what you said about like being the no no no. I’m just in the no guy. I point out the things that that’s wrong, and the solution I don’t want any part of that person is real and they exist. And if everybody turns into that person, or the majority of us turned into that person who are like I don’t want the hard work of being at the table. I just want to sit back and throw stones and tell you what’s wrong. As I see it, that it’s very possible that there’s a bunch of those people who go Holy cow. I wish I would have drugged myself to the table, because I never ever thought the end result would be something like this God or there’s the opposite of like I dropped a bunch of partisan bs. I really focused on the things that I really value and I know I want other people to see because they will value it as well. And I kicked, screamed, claud drug myself to the table. And I was consistent until like we turned the tide and people saw the middle ground. Because what I’m seeing, and there’s all sorts of people who get ticked me for this is like I do see a lot of people. There’s some people who just want their thing and they don’t care about anything. But I do see a lot of people who really want to do the right thing, and they’re just grossly missing for And it takes big moments right now, like we saw during the public land sell off budget reconciliation, where it was just like every user group was getting to the table and coming together and being like, yes, this is valuable, we want this, we don’t want it to go away, how dare you sell it? And being engaged even in the minutia in broad coalitions are the things that’s going to turn this thing around.<\/p>\n

01:59:32
\nSpeaker 1: Right.<\/p>\n

01:59:32
\nSpeaker 2: So that example, and I know I’m kind of beating it to death here, is like I can talk about motorized groups all day, and I know there’s tons and tons of good representatives out there. But the thing that’s going to turn the tide for motorized groups to be like, oh, hey, travel managements plans are in place, practice responsible use, ride responsibly. Are people within the motorized community saying, hey, I want this cross country moto experience that we do every year because of the fact that it’s pristine and the solitude and the gorgeous views and all this and the limited use it gets. I don’t want to turn this experience into that true you’re sand Dun experience, or like there’s this event every year called King of the Hammers where it’s like, you know, you get to really show off what you can do on off road no road. It’s like that stuff can exist and this stuff can exist, and because we like both doesn’t mean we have to turn this into that, right. So but again, like I think a good step is acknowledging like, even though I am not a representative of the motorized community, I drive a four wheel drive truck to every trailhead, right, and some of those roads are really long, you’re real bumpy, right, But that that is my I don’t know my vector for backcountry travel for the human powered stuff too.<\/p>\n

02:01:13
\nSpeaker 1: So what else has come? What other kind of issues are coming down? You’re you’re catching wind of.<\/p>\n

02:01:20
\nSpeaker 2: I am very concerned about Ambler Road that seems to be making progress. There’s a lot of a lot of the typical things that we’ve been seeing. We’re like big broad statements of like everybody in Alaska is for this, all the Alaska tribes are for this, all the communities. You know, I have a lot of calls every week from guide outfitter communities saying like I don’t care if they say this road is not public.<\/p>\n

02:01:56
\nSpeaker 1: It is going.<\/p>\n

02:01:57
\nSpeaker 2: To create a huge impact on you know, caribou, moose trapping, all all the things, the fisheries components. And and then there’s the side of like that road’s not supposed to be for us, it’s a hall road, they’re super dangerous. People aren’t going out there. Why is public? Why are our public dollars being spent on this thing that the public isn’t going to use? And then there there’s just like all the like the real biological science things there, and the fact that like I don’t care what type of mitigation we do out there, like it is not coming back. That scars there forever, right, Like you fly over the Arctic, the coastal plane up there and where they were doing that seismic testing like in the seventies, Like those wheel wheel routes are still there, you know. And it’s I think we’re big enough to say, like we have to have some car bouts for what always has been and can always be, and like having that baseline, that through line should be again of national importance to Americans.<\/p>\n

02:03:18
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, I think we remain I think our country remains in a strong enough position where we can continue to afford to have wild places in this country. You know. Oh, We’re in a strong enough position where we can continue to invest in that and practice restraint and some of our biggest contiguous pieces of wilderness. And by saying that, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to recognize it like that stuffs a luxury. It’s there because we decided to let it be there, and we have restrained ourselves from certain activities. And that’s why we have it. Like you look at for a long time, we had wilderness because we hadn’t wilderness wild places. Wildlife was there because we hadn’t gotten around to destroying it yet. And then there’s a switch, yep, and we crossed like this threshold and it became it’s around because we choose it to be around.<\/p>\n

02:04:13
\nSpeaker 2: I mean, And that’s what every single person needs to understand, Like, none of this is luck, right, It is all here because people before us made real choices, sometimes very unpopular, and that is why we have the luxuries that we have, being able to float fish, you know, camp on public lands, hunt game and take it home like that is an absolute luxury. And you know, the world is full of examples of places that went the opposite way, right, And it’s like I definitely like picking and choosing there, right, But like if you look at Australia and the battles that they’ve had just to have egal regulated hunting in that country, because it’s like it just got social, got turned in such a way to where so few people did it. What did it matter? Gun rights in the UK few so few people, What doesn’t matter? Right access to wildlife in the UK for the purposes of hunting. You know, it was always this thing that was for somebody else and it was very exclusive. So what does it really matter? Right, And you know, for the folks who are on the private side of the fence, and they might be thinking this another public lands conversation, what doesn’t matter. It’s like, well, maybe not too much to you right now, but if you just look at the history of every other place on this planet, it’s coming for you. So you better you better keep other folks involved, you know, have a little equitable access to while places and wild things, or else it’s going to cross the fence and get you too.<\/p>\n

02:06:06
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah. You see that expressed, like in the case of Washington State. I’ve seen it expressed where people actually say they’ll point out so few people engage in spring bear hunting they shouldn’t even be allowed to where it’s like that they pointed out yep, you know, yep.<\/p>\n

02:06:31
\nSpeaker 2: And I always this is all of extra active use. But you know, we come up with fun arguments, right. It’s like, by and large we all agree that sex is a good thing, Like we need to have sex. It’s how people are on the planet, it’s how we reproduce. It’s just an accepted thing. At the exact same time, we all kind of agree that sex shouldn’t happen wherever, whenever. Right, It’s just like socially we’re like, yeah, not on the city bus.<\/p>\n

02:07:04
\nSpeaker 1: You know, we’re open to nuance when it comes to sex. Yeah, we take a nuanced approach.<\/p>\n

02:07:11
\nSpeaker 2: But when it comes to like in the case of the boundary waters, right, by god, we need copper, we need mineral extraction. Like you’re either for it or you’re against it.<\/p>\n

02:07:22
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah.<\/p>\n

02:07:22
\nSpeaker 2: I was like, well no, not necessarily. It’s like, yeah, I am a consumer of goods, but you’re telling me that I have to blanket before this type of operation in all landscapes at all times.<\/p>\n

02:07:39
\nSpeaker 1: I gotta support sex in the airport, right, Yeah, to remain consistent. Yeah. Yeah, you tell people how to tell people how to get involved with BHA and like, and what you need most? You guys want members I’m sure, But what do you guys need most?<\/p>\n

02:07:59
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, I mean membership is the absolute life blood, right Like, if if you want an independent organization, membership is the key, right, Like, if you don’t want to be beholden to the changing tides, a membership organization is a really nice thing to be a part of because those membership dollars give you that independence, meaning that you’re not subject to giant government grants and you may hold off on certain programs.<\/p>\n

02:08:37
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah you don’t. You’re not. You don’t need to curry political favor favorite at all times. And also your whole program doesn’t get shut down when when a grant doesn’t come through.<\/p>\n

02:08:46
\nSpeaker 2: Yep. Yeah, So members membership is huge, and and that’s that’s really my biggest ask. I’m so the reason that I’m in this position is because I have always just been so blown away by the rank and file member of the organization and how impressive BHA members are because they are there to be proactive and do something. And at this point, having been around the organization for ten years, we have members that are in the Senate, in Congress. They are fish and Game commissioners in many states. They are community leaders for stewardship projects, water keepers. They’re out really doing good work. And they literally started because they showed up at a pint night, very low barrier to entry, have a beer, talk about conservation. Here’s a couple of the issues that we’re working on. And you know, we got the people in the door and they were like, oh my god, I’m not just a fundraiser. I’m a doer. I want to go out and do stuff and and those are the that’s what we want, we want to make more of and we want to enable and empower those people to step up and represent at that commission meeting. Or go pull a couple miles of fence that benefits thirty thousand miles in a migration corridor, and we can give you the straight dope, the non partisan dope on what’s happening. And really we need to get to this point where we’re really providing the proactive legislation, right, like the proactive policy that prevents some of these things from being political footballs. So lots of ways to be involved, will give you the tools to do it, and you’ll be a part of an awesome community, and the ripple effects of that community are going to turn everybody into stewards from this this tall on a ideal.<\/p>\n

02:11:04
\nSpeaker 1: So I don’t get to see as much now and I don’t get to have as many laughs with you, but man, I’m glad you’re in that. I’m glad you’re in that role. Man. I think it’s great. Oh thanks to you over there. Thank you.<\/p>\n

02:11:18
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, I mean it’s it’s consuming. And now with the little nipper at the house, it’s, uh, it’s more powerful in a lot of ways because I’m like, oh man, I all the talking ad nauseum about like doing this for my kid certainly is a little more impactful.<\/p>\n

02:11:39
\nSpeaker 1: Yeah, sure, yeah. Uh.<\/p>\n

02:11:41
\nSpeaker 2: And I’m like, I’m like, can I get he’s you know, almost four weeks old? Now can I get this guy up to the Arctic in August? Like, is it like he’s gonna be able to see something? Right?<\/p>\n

02:11:59
\nSpeaker 1: I remember, all, yeah, I remember all those I find that it’s generally you can generally get a you can generally pull off more than most people think you can pull off. But I also have my ass handed to me a couple of times taking kids to do stuff. You’ll figure it out, all right, ladies and gentlemen again, Ryan Callahan, chief executive officer at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a membership based organization. You can just go to BHA dot.<\/p>\n

02:12:27
\nSpeaker 2: Org, Backcountry Hunters dot org.<\/p>\n

02:12:29
\nSpeaker 1: Oh sorry, backcountry hunters dot org see what they’re up to. You can sign up for I find them quite helpfully, and sign up for email. Keep your prize on stuff. You’ll get like Cal’s take on things and other issues and stay educated on what’s going on, follow along and hopefully hopefully find it a need to support the organization, support the great work they do.<\/p>\n

02:12:51
\nSpeaker 2: Thanks Cal, and the action alerts well will you’ll get the information. Hit the action alert. It puts you directly in touch with your representative or member and it’s just makes it easy. You can use the form letter, but we want you to do it on your own, so use the info. Say where you’re from and what you want review. Oh my god, Cal’s wee can review. Lots of good info there and it’s it’s.<\/p>\n

02:13:27
\nSpeaker 1: Yes, I’m looking at you like I’m looking at you totally like the the b h A CEO right now.<\/p>\n

02:13:32
\nSpeaker 2: Yeah, man, life’s not worth doing if you’re just doing one thing. You to spend those plates.<\/p>\n

02:13:37
\nSpeaker 1: Also here Cal’s hot take on everything conservation related. Gets and also get some of those laughs I was talking about by tuning in Cal’s week in review right here on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. Thanks man, Thank you<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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