The Hunting Stories Podcast
Elk. Bear. Hog. Turkey. Deer and More. Hunting Stories that will make you laugh or maybe cry; real life chronicles from the field.
The Hunting Stories Podcast
Ep 123 The Hunting Stories Podcast: Sam Soholt
Renowned videographer and photographer Sam Soholt joins us to share his incredible journey from childhood bird hunts to becoming a passionate advocate for conservation. From a memorable pheasant hunting trip as a youngster to spearheading initiatives like the "Stamp It Forward" project, Sam's stories are a testament to his deep love for the outdoors and commitment to preserving it. He offers insights into the significance of family hunting traditions and how they shape our appreciation for nature, making this episode a must-listen for anyone fascinated by the intersection of hunting and conservation.
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Howdy folks and welcome to the hunting stories podcast. I'm your host, michael, and we have a great one for you today. Today we're actually connecting with someone that I'm a big fan of. That I've been following for a long time, so I'm glad I finally got him on the podcast. That gentleman is Sam Soholt. If you don't know Sam, check out the episode. Also, check out the links below. He's doing a lot of cool stuff. I don't want to ruin any of the thunder and we'll get into it all during the actual podcast, so we'll just stop there, but for now, guys, let's go ahead and kick this thing off and let Sam tell you some of his stories. Thank you, all right, sam. Welcome to the Hunting Stories podcast, brother. How are you? I'm doing great Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, I'm super excited to have you. I told you before we hit the record button, but I've been a fan of yours for a long time. I'm wearing one of the shirts that you guys sell. I wear this all the time. The majority of people have no idea with Pitburn Robertson, dingle Johnson, but that's okay, I love it. And yeah, I've just been a fan for a while, so I'm excited to have you on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, I appreciate you following along with everything that I do and we do. And, yeah, I think the kind of the reason we made that Pittman Robertson shirt is because it seems like a solid conversation starter 100%. If people ask, you can actually explain to them like how some like one tool of conservation funding actually works. So that's kind of fun, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's great man. And I say, the people that ask me about it they always think it's like is that some sitcom shirt, like, is that from like the office or something? They're like Dingle Johnson, what's that? And then I get to explain the whole thing. So it is a conversation starter, but let's take, let's take a small step back, sam. Why don't we let you introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:so the people who maybe don't know who you are already will learn who they're going to. Hear some stories from today Sounds good. I am Sam Sohol.
Speaker 2:I have been a professional videographer and photographer in the hunting industry since 2011. I, more recently, have been known for doing a lot of conservation efforts, habitat initiatives, different things surrounding conservation, and then also trying to promote um more public access and protect the public access that we have. That's kind of been like the passion project over the last almost shoot almost decade now. Um, but yeah, I've been just in the hunting industry for a long time. I've been able to be very lucky to travel around and, uh, create content for a lot of really cool brands in the hunting industry. For a long time, I've been able to be very lucky to travel around and create content for a lot of really cool brands in the industry, and it definitely allows me a lot of flexibility to do a lot of my own hunting as long as I'm still delivering photos and video stuff that I need to do for all of my clients. So I'm a pretty lucky guy.
Speaker 1:Well, that's cool man. Yeah, yeah, and we'll talk. I want to talk a little bit more in depth about, uh, the one, my favorite thing that you do, which is the stamp it forward project. We'll maybe save some time at the end, uh, to go into that and, of course, my experience with it, because, um, as long as I've been interested in waterfowl hunting, I've been making sure to take advantage of your stamp it forward project. So, um, but we'll talk about it at the end and for now, we're just going to hear your favorite stories, brother. So why don't you set the stage? I don't know if you have any in mind. I didn't tell you to prep anything, but hopefully you have a couple that stick out in your mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess I'm trying to. Where do you want me to start? I guess that's a tricky question.
Speaker 1:I get that question a lot, lot but like I don't know necessarily your hunting background or, um, how about this? You've gone a little bit into, like your, your occupation, right, and what you do for your living. Like when did you start hunting? Let's just start there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh. So I started hunting, you know, started tagging along on hunts when I was, you know, six something like that you know five or six. Um, my dad did a lot of bird hunting when we were, when we were young and so you know, walking crp and cornfields and stuff, like way before I could shoot a gun, um, you know, I remember like there was one trip in particular and this is like I'll just do. This is one of my favorite stories, so when I was little.
Speaker 2:yeah, when I was little, my dad loved pheasant hunt. I had an older brother who was four years older than me, um, and and so I think I probably I think I would have been eight, because I think Josh was 12. He was actually hunting, um, on the pheasant hunt, and so I was just tagging along to kind of learn the ropes or whatever. And, um, before we left we had an old Ford Bronco and you know we're packing up all the gear and everything and getting the dog loaded and kennel in there and stuff. The night before and I was like, oh, I got to grab my boots, which were hand-me-downs from my brother, um, my brother was like oh no, no I grabbed them, um, and so I was like, okay, so, um, loaded up.
Speaker 2:We drove all the way out there. I think it was like four hours from our house, you know we're going to be there for three days and, uh, my brother had packed my boots. But he had packed both left boots from my old boots and then his other hand-me-downs, so I had two left boots that I could Two different sizes.
Speaker 1:Two different sizes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one was a little tight but luckily the bigger of the wrong foot was for I was able to wear on my right foot, so it all worked out in the end. But I got called left turn the entire, yeah, the entire week at hunting camp, you know, and as an eight-year-old going into like a camp of like 15 guys, like you know, it's not a nickname. You hope to have stick.
Speaker 1:But yeah, has that stuck since? Or was it just that camp? No, that did fade out.
Speaker 2:yeah, but I did get a lot of crap, you know, even though it wasn't my fault, well, I mean I'll take some blame for it, but uh yeah, even though it was.
Speaker 1:If you don't pack your own stuff, that's inevitably what's going to happen. Right, I know it is my fault, yeah.
Speaker 2:So lesson learned when I was a very, very young kid, that's awesome man.
Speaker 1:So you've been doing it for basically your whole life, then.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't remember a time before like even you know, like my dad would go out and come back and if he had whether it was a deer or ducks or pheasants or whatever Um, yeah, it's been absolutely my entire life that I've been surrounded by it.
Speaker 2:And then you know, obviously, um, he instilled so much passion in both my brother and I that we went on to like have careers in the industry. So I mean Josh, josh went to university of Wyoming so he could learn how to elk hunt and then him and his buddy from college started Gannett Ridge hunting equipment, which was in Fort Collins Um, they ran that for about 10 years, which was, you know, all back country hunting gear archery, pro shop, gun counter, um, the whole thing like everything from backpacks to sleeping bags to bows, to what you know. So, like I his passion, you know my dad's passion, instilled into both of us to like go chase whatever we wanted to chase. So Josh went that route and then I went the photo video route and then now we both own public Lante's um, which has been kind of a cool project for us to do together as brothers over the last, I guess, seven years now. That's awesome.
Speaker 1:And is that based out of Fort Collins too? Is he still out there? Yeah, so he's-. I think the last time I ordered a shirt I was like what? I didn't know that Sam was based out of Fort Collins, and it turns out it was your brother, so-.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So Josh does all of the. You know I do all the sales and marketing stuff for the brand and Josh does all of the backend work, so Um. So if anybody listening has bought one of our public Lante's, it has been made in Josh's garage or basement um over the last seven years and shipped right to your door.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, man, that's amazing, um, and that, that history of kind of where you come from, that's what I'm hoping to have for my kids, like I told you and my listeners already know, but like I, am a newer hunter. Um, don't know anything about anything. I just keep going into the woods making mistakes and get a little bit better every day. But I'm hoping my son he's five, he'll turn six in January. I'm hoping to have him with two left boots coming with me into the woods here shortly.
Speaker 1:So I'm hoping to instill that into my family and kind of keep that tradition going, because I think it's really important.
Speaker 2:For sure, yeah, for sure, I think just being immersed in the outdoors, regardless of the activity, is the way to raise your kids.
Speaker 1:I've got an eight-week-old at the moment. Oh hey, congratulations man. Yeah, thank you. Is it your first First kid? Yep, oh, my gosh, she's eight weeks yesterday, Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that, and I had this sweet sty uh in my eye.
Speaker 2:Uh, it actually kind of got it healed up, starting to heal up today, but man, it looked like I got punched in the face the last week, um so that's pretty fun but yes, the fatherhood has been great and like, even right now she's just a, you know, very tiny little peanut and it's like when she gets kind of riled up or feisty or whatever, like I can walk out on the deck and the back walk around the backyard. It like just calms her right down, just that fresh air. So I'm definitely yeah my kid will be an outdoor cat 100.
Speaker 1:That's awesome man, that's awesome. I have a little girl too and uh, it's funny because, like, my son is definitely into hunting and like the concepts and what he hears me doing, but like my daughter is into it, she's three, three, yeah. And she's like yeah, she's like dad, I want to see the bloody pictures and I'm like, are you sure?
Speaker 2:I'm like all right, well, here's the antelope.
Speaker 1:There's lots of blood in that photo. So yeah, little girls are absolutely amazing and precious man, so congratulations.
Speaker 2:But yeah, thank you, yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I don't know.
Speaker 1:No, it happens every episode. What other stories do you have for us? The left boot or the left turn is great.
Speaker 2:I love that story.
Speaker 1:I love nickname stories, but what else you got?
Speaker 2:So I'll tell you my favorite deer hunting story. Perfect, I'll give you two. So first is a solo and then the second is a family trip. But the first one was we were on a family trip but we were all hunting separate and it was a new area to us and there's no secret that I'm a fairly major geek when it comes to whitetail hunting. And so Josh had actually picked like the camping location. He was like he's like I just knew that if I sent Sam like the location where we're going to camp, then he would just like whitetail the hell out of the area and figure out, like okay, like he's like I just knew that if I sent sam like the location where we're gonna camp, then he would just like whitetail the hell out of the area and figure out, like okay, here's like you know, and that's what I did, like he said he's like hey we're gonna camp.
Speaker 2:You know we're gonna camp here and like an hour later I sent a screenshot back to the family group. Um, it was my dad and uncle and my brother. I sent a screenshot back and I had, like I don't know, 75 or 80 pins on different locations that should hold deer within a 45-minute drive of our camping spot. So then I was like all right, here's the deal, here's all the pins.
Speaker 1:What state if you don't mind?
Speaker 2:me asking I'm not going to say it State of happiness. Okay yeah, I don't like talking about what states you hunt, because animals are animals you got to go find them.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:Yep, that's totally fine I think we need to normalize, not telling people what states we hunt. I need to do Okay, we all need to do better at that.
Speaker 1:I'm a big advocate of like you don't share the unit, you obviously don't share draws. I haven't gotten as grand as not sharing the state. Usually I'm open to that, but it's a concept I'm open to. Yeah, state of happiness is what I tell everyone.
Speaker 2:That's a good one. Yeah, so I said, you know I was like I'll share all the pins. Basically, what we're going to do is we're all going to leave camp in the morning, and every morning and every evening we're all going to hunt a new spot every time.
Speaker 2:And so you know, unless we get into deer, you know, if it's like we go there and they're like, oh, there's, you know, a lot of sign like hunted again.
Speaker 2:But the concept was like, okay, then we can gather, you know, four people's worth of intel every single hunt on different locations. And I was like by the end of the week, even if none of us kill a deer in this first time we've been in this area, at least we'll have, you know, it'd be like 56 new pieces of Intel, you know, by the end of the week, gotcha, and so um, so we, we went into it and you know, I think we all went out and hunted and then we'd come back. My favorite part is you go out and you hunt and then you come back and you tell everybody else like, okay, this is what I saw, this is what I found, this is how this lays out, this is how the deer moved through it. And then you like start to put notes on, you know, the pins and stuff, like sit here, don't sit here, use this wind. You know that kind of thing. You're piecing the story together. It's great, yeah. And I'm.
Speaker 2:I'm like full nerd about that stuff. So, like my on X maps, like I wonder how many hours a year I spend on on X. Uh, it's probably unhealthy but fun. Maybe third morning, um, you know, we all busted out of camp again. I'd picked a spot on the map. It was about 45 minute drive, uh, I didn't know. Basically there was like two drainages that I could hunt and it had a really heavy wind that day but I didn't like bring a stand or a saddle or anything. I was like I'm just gonna go in. This is like an exploratory.
Speaker 2:I can sit on this little bluff thing and kind of like overlook some of the ground as the sun's coming up, and then I'll go in and start, I'll do like a call set and you know grunt and rattle and you know kind of work my way through the whole property all morning and I got in there, I hiked in, sat down on this little bluff and just as twilight's coming up, I see I mean mean, it was probably you know mid to high 160s deer, just a giant like, but it was just moving off the public.
Speaker 2:I mean it was just cruising on a mission, you know, at about a half mile from me and I was like, all right, well, deer are on their feet, you know they're, they're up and moving. I'm just gonna stick to my plan, sit here for a while, didn't see anything else, and then I was like, okay, next part of the plan, just work in, start calling my way through, hunting my, you know, still hunting my way through had a heads-up decoy, just in case I got into a situation where I could try to call one in and that's awesome.
Speaker 1:Not many people still hunt whitetail from from what. I'm not an experienced whitetail hunter, but everyone always. Their stories are always blind, tree stand, whatever. So it's it's fun to hear that you were going after them. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's definitely the most common. You know, um, you do a little more more like. If you do more like prairie, whitetail stuff, like the whole center of the country, um, you can get away with doing a little bit more of like the still hunting Cause you can do like spot and stock with a decoy or, you know like, use the terrain to your advantage, whereas if you're hunting big hardwoods, man, it's that's still hunting stuff. You can do it and there's got old guys that do it. You know really well, but like most time you're, you know, working on pinches and funnels sitting in a tree.
Speaker 2:You're blind um so yeah, I was just trying to be aggressive you know you only have so many days to to hunt and then started working in, got down to this little drainage and immediately there was like rubs and scrapes and stuff everywhere. So at least, like you, start to get a little optimistic because you're like all right there's, there's lots of sign here.
Speaker 2:Like there's big rubs, you know it's like I just saw a big deer, you know, like it's just everything, like all these little factors are like it gives you tons of hope. And so I started working down this drainage and I would grunt a couple of times and then I would move, and then I found a scrape and I'd, you know like, throw leaves out of it with the boot and, you know, just make whitetail noises as I'm like slowly picking through, slowly picking through the timber, okay, and caught movement on the left side of my eye and I looked over and it was just like a little, you know, a little, forky, maybe a three by three, little year and a half old buck, and it was just like a little, you know, a little forky, maybe a three by three, little year and a half old buck, and it was. I was in the middle of the trees which were only about, you know, 60 yards wide, okay, it was moving down like the downwind edge of those trees and worked right downwind to me and then kind of just buggered off a little bit. I had the decoy up. It was looking at me, trying to figure it out, but smelled me and just kind of like didn't blow at me, didn't nothing? Just kind of like move down. And so I was like, okay, if even the year and a half old is just cruising that downwind side, like that's where I need to be, like I need to be working that edge in case there's anything else that's working that edge.
Speaker 2:Um, so moved like 35 yards, um, put my binos up and up at the top of the little ridge, above the drainage, probably like 300 yards to the south of me was this beautiful deer, like big, perfectly typical 10 point, like tall tines, not super heavy deer, but like you know, when you see a deer, like an old painting of deer or whatever, like it looked like that, it was just perfect, that's awesome. So I got the decoy on my bow and I was home, you know, getting ready to go, and like it was just perfect, okay, that's awesome. So I got the decoy on my bow and I was home, you know, getting ready to go, and like I was like okay, he doesn't see me yet. So I grunted at him and he literally like looked over at me, like took one, look licked, like kind of curled his lips and like did like the head bob and then started walking my direction and I was like all right goes that way every time.
Speaker 1:You're right, yeah, so, so he's coming, my.
Speaker 2:So he's coming my direction but I'm in like full sunlight so I'm like I mean, if he clears the like he had to go through a couple little ravines to get to me. I was like, if he clears this edge before I'm like kind of hidden behind a bush, or in the shadows at least, like I'm like this little hillside, um to like a tiny little scrub cedar bush. And so I'm sitting next to the cedar bush, I'm ranging all of the other you know trees and stuff that are on this hillside, like okay, like if he comes over there, it's 32. If he comes over there, you know that's 19. If he, you know, like trying to figure this out, I was like I think he's going to try to circle downwind of me a little bit so he should cover. You know, he's probably going to come out right here. You know, you just all these scenarios.
Speaker 2:And so I'm sitting there and all of a sudden I hear, I hear a snap of a big branch behind me, and so I carefully like looked over my left shoulder and I saw a deer moving up this little draw behind me at like well he was probably at like 40 yards and behind some trees, but I like I was like big body, you know, and so I saw him and so I couldn't turn, like I couldn't do a quick turn to the left, I'm left-handed, I couldn't just turn to the left through the bush, so I had to like while I'm on my knees I have to do like a full shuffle.
Speaker 1:180 degrees the other direction.
Speaker 2:And just as I get squared up with that decoy on my bow, he clears a couple trees and squares off to me and now he's at, like I arranged him between the bow and the decoy. I arranged him and he was already only at 28 yards and I was like, okay, he's close, so drop my range finder, clip on. And now this thing is like pissed that I'm in his territory. You know he must've heard me grunting and you know making scrapes and doing whatever.
Speaker 2:And now he's coming to kill me and that is like the look on that deer's face was like eyes rolled back in his head, like fully bristled up, like you know, like hackled up just mad, like his neck was so big that his neck was wider than his antlers and yeah, he just looked mad, like it looks like he's coming in to kill me, so I'm sitting there and he's just— I've never heard of a whitetail doing that. I know they do they spar and stuff like that? You?
Speaker 1:hear about elk coming in drooling and spitting all the time, but I don't often hear about a whitetail getting to that point. That's awesome. Yeah, this thing was just out of his mind.
Speaker 2:And so he's like on a mission to come fight me and he starts to pause like he's gonna. So a lot of times when deer are all hackled up like that, they'll like work in kind of like quartering to you. It's almost like they're crab walking, you know, and they're like trying to posture up and be as big as possible.
Speaker 2:So he's like kind of crab walking towards me and he pauses and I draw back as slow as I can and he, he paused and then he was mostly like straight on to me but quartering just a little bit and I let the arrow fly. It ended up he was at like nine yards or something like that when I shot and all I saw was the arrow disappear just inside the front shoulder, like you know, like into the chest cavity, and then he, like he, ran off and know like into the chest cavity and then he, like he, ran off and he ran down into the little drainage. I saw him come up out of and up onto the hillside on the other side and I'm just sitting there, like you know, like I was like I think I hit him.
Speaker 1:You know like I think I felt good about it.
Speaker 2:I don't know how I would miss it Nine yards and he runs up and he tips over on the other hillside and it was like the amount of adrenaline that like dumped out of my body at that point, Like I more like I basically just like fell over backwards on my back and I was just like laying there staring at the sky, Like I cannot believe that that all just went down right now. Yeah, that's amazing, that whole. And then and then I was like oh, that other deer is like on the way.
Speaker 1:How many texts do you have? In the state of happiness? I can only shoot one deer.
Speaker 2:But I was like, well, you know, I should at least go see if this thing was actually going to like work over to me. And so I just stood up real quick, went to the cedar where I thought he might cross, and, sure enough, like had I been, had that deer not coming behind me, the one I had originally called that would have shown up 45 seconds later and I would have shot him at 22 yards or whatever.
Speaker 2:Um, but yeah, I went over and I know like recovered the deer and uh, it ended up being my second biggest deer I've ever killed. So he was he was a. He was he's a true, just just an eight point, but he was a. He was, he's a. True, just just an eight point, but he was 158 inch, eight point um. So just like absolutely massive antlers and, you know, like 12 inch g2s, I mean just like huge, huge deer um and so like to have all that other deer that you originally were going after.
Speaker 2:Okay, it was quite yeah I mean probably, yeah, quite a bit bigger than the other one okay, so yeah, but man, like I still like every time I think about that hunt or like see, like, if I like look at that deer on the wall and think about how that all went down, I just like it still just gets me fired up, like my heart starts racing like being right back in that moment uh, yeah yeah, way too fun yeah, that's, that's super cool.
Speaker 1:I I've I'm a hundred and something episodes into this podcast.
Speaker 1:No one has told a like a still hunting white tail story yet so that is amazing um and then the fact that you just had, like, these two beautiful deer coming in from opposite angles and you kind of get to pick and choose which one you wanted. And yeah, I just can't even imagine I've had a white tail like stomping at me and at like 40 yards, but he wasn't massive by any means. I can't imagine what that was like to have this huge deer just wanting to kill you nine yards away.
Speaker 2:It was so freaking cool, like just yeah, so freaking cool. And then I at the time I was still using the bus for deer camp, the old school bus that turned into a rolling hunting shack, and so, you know, was able to get that deer drug out of there and have a uh gambrels for the front, like bumper, hitch, receiver, hitch on the bus, and so I got to take a bunch of really cool photos of, like this, you know, huge deer hanging from the front of the bus and like you know, it's just some stuff that I have like framed up hanging on the wall.
Speaker 2:It's just, you know, special to me. That's cool man.
Speaker 1:That's a great story. That's cool man. That's a great story. That's a great story. What did the rest of you? What did? Like? I know your brother kind of picked that spot.
Speaker 2:What did he?
Speaker 1:say when uh, when you rolled into camp with that deer.
Speaker 2:He was like well, that's why we come here. You know, it's just um, you know, and then, yeah, the rest of the week. Um, I'm trying to think I don't nobody else killed on that trip, um, but we had some close calls and we learned a lot, um like, about the area.
Speaker 2:like so much though that, like last year, just my brother and I went back to that area and I ended up shooting a really nice deer on the first night, um, you know, and not in that same spot, but like just being able to spend, you know, a week. Then I think we went back two more times, like with the whole group over the years, um, and then went back alone after a few years and it was, yeah, it's just a cool area, um, you can get yourself into some some big deer, and it was that's awesome, yeah, fun to go.
Speaker 1:I forgot that it was public land. Man, that's even more impressive to get 150 plus inch public land whitetail that's, I love it.
Speaker 2:I love that puzzle. So yeah, I bet sounds like it uh cool, well, you said.
Speaker 1:Then you had another follow-up story which was like the whole family with the deer trip.
Speaker 2:So is that?
Speaker 1:that's not the same trip. That is a different one, not the same trip.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we-.
Speaker 2:Same location or different, different location, also, the state of happiness, but we try to do, whether it's my dad, my uncle, my brother and I, and then our brother, my brother and I's brother-in-law, our sister's husband has started joining us now um, but on this particular trip, it was just the four of us, um, and so my dad and uncle you know they'll get, you know like I do a lot of the work at this point in my life because, a, because I love it and b, like it's just easier for me and easier for them, like if, if I'm out hanging cameras and hanging stands and scouting locations and doing all this stuff, and then they get to show up and we all drink coffee together and then go out and hunt, and you know, um, and so it was just the four of us on this trip. And, uh, a day before everybody else showed up, the there's a spot where I shot a buck in 2016 and that you have to have a very like particular wind for it, and so I killed in 2016, and then in 2021, I got my dad in there and he killed a deer then, and then it was 2022 and the wind was perfect, like everything was right again, and I was like dad, what are you doing this afternoon? And he's like, well, I don't know, I hadn't picked a spot. And I was like, all right, I got a spot for you. So then I drug him in there, got him up the tree and I had I was probably gone for maybe 45 minutes, like I had walked in down this trail with him, got him in the tree and then I dropped over the bank and kind of walked down this little like really low spot out of there and I got back.
Speaker 2:I was going to like I was had been hunting hard and I was like I just need like a shower and nap and then I'll go like get him pick him up when, you know, when it gets dark. And I got back and I got a text. I think I got one. I was like what do you mean? You think you got one. So I called him and he's like I think I hit him, good you know. And so we went back and that deer ran like 35 yards, it was just thick.
Speaker 2:So my dad kills a deer. Well then my uncle shows up the next morning at about 10 and on the same day that my brother was driving, and so my uncle shows up at 10. I was like, all right, I'll go get you in a tree and then I'm going to go hunt, and then Josh will be here tonight and then we'll, you know, like tomorrow morning, it'll be all of us out there hunting. And uh, so went to another spot where we had been. I didn't have a stand, but we had a camera in there and there'd been, you know, decent activity in that area and it went in about 1230, hung a stand, uncle climbed up in it.
Speaker 2:I left, hopped in another stand and then, like 45 minutes later, after I was like settled in, I got a text from my dad. Was like is the game cart in the trailer? I was like I was like, yeah, did. Like. I was like what happened? He's like Jeff killed one. I was like all right.
Speaker 2:So so I got out of my tree, met him over there my brother had rolled in at that point and so we all went in and we pulled my uncle's deer on the game cart and rolled it about 300 yards. Josh climbed into the same tree. Sam, my uncle was in because it was still early in the day. We took a few photos, got his gutted out, got out of there, left. So then I didn't have enough time to go back to another like the same tree I'd been in earlier. So I just like hopped into this tiny little hole that is, you know, close to home, and I was like all right, I could just pop in here at night, maybe something will happen. And I had a bunch. It was sweet. I had a bunch of activity. I had little bucks chasing does around and had one decoy to me at like six yards like this, you know little, three by three and got video of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, just a really cool like nasty evening, kind of spitting rain and heavy North wind blowing in and about 45 minutes before dark Josh sends a text and says grab that game card again. And so so he had shot a deer from the same tree stand that my uncle had earlier in the day. And then yeah, yeah so. So now we're three of four already in this trip, and then how many days did you have?
Speaker 1:and this is all like what? Day one and a half. At this point, yeah, we're at day one and a half.
Speaker 2:So then, yeah, we, we had, uh. So then it's like I'm the last one with a tag and like I'm feeling pretty confident at this point, like I have now done hanging hunts, and my dad killed and my you know uncle and brother killed, and so we had this nasty storm roll in that night like it was. It was as gross of a storm, like a you know fall storm as you can get, just blowing 65 miles an hour rain, and and then it got down below freezing and so everything was just crunched, like we didn't even hunt the next morning because we were were like, uh, you don't, it's hard to know, like how safe that's actually going to be.
Speaker 2:Um, and so so we slept in, um, kind of assessed like how many? You know, there's lots of branches and trees that had blown down and stuff. And so that night we didn't want to get into a tree cause everything had kind of like iced over and snowed over and it was just like dangerous just to climb up, cause like lots of stuff was snapping. So we went back to a little hole that I had hunted the night before and got in there and I did this giant like rattling calling sequence where like I'm running back and forth and breaking branches and stuff, and, um, got back and sat down and then about a half hour later this really big deer works into the hole, just like kind of like comes in to check it out and I get drawn back and I had that heads up decoy on my bow again.
Speaker 2:Um, cause it allows you to get away with a lot If you like, if something comes in and sees you, yeah, so deer walks in, I draw back. Well, the bow, the branch that was above my head that I was sitting under. I didn't realize that the top of that, when I drew the top of that heads of decoy was pushing against it.
Speaker 2:And so when I shot, like basically I had down pressure on my bow hand and so this deer's, I think it was at like 34 yards or something like that, and I drew back and shot and the down pressure on my hand I shot just under that thing's brisket. Oh, I was so mad Like cause that was, you know, probably close to you know, somewhere in that 150 inch range, just like a really awesome deer, yeah. So you know, hopes dash and like the weather continued to get worse and worse. So, like you know, through the next day, like was feeling like pretty down about the whole thing, um, and then finally decided to like, okay, we're gonna give this tree stand a chance and see if we can get in there safely. And we my brother hiked in there with me to film it and that's the worst part, I have that miss on film too.
Speaker 2:So I couldn't't even like not tell anybody about it, yeah, so so then we go and, um, we go into this spot, um, that we call the rooster, um, there's pheasants around, so we um, go into this spot, climb up the tree, and that morning got to have, you know, my brother in the tree with me when this awesome nine point came in and his antlers were like covered in ice and like it was snowing lightly that morning and he chased a doe down in there and I got drawn back because the doe ran through and I just figured he'd been chasing around a little bit and I figured that he was going to hit that opening and then move and I was gonna have to stop him.
Speaker 2:And so, as he came into the opening, I drew back and then he stood there facing me not looking at me but facing my direction with offering no shot, and I was drawn back for two minutes and 25 seconds before he finally turned Like I was sitting in the tree stand and I got drawn back and then I started to shake and I had to put the bottom cam of my bow on my knee to like, yeah, just stabilize it a little bit. And then when he finally offered me a shot, I had to like basically lean like all the way over off of my tree stand seat. Uh, because because of the snow and the heaviness like of everything, like it had pushed the bows down like over, like my main shooting lane, and so, like I was able to like more or less like hang all the way off the tree stand, like pretty recklessly, but I was a safety harness and everything.
Speaker 2:So but, he finally turned and gave me a shot and I made a good shot and he ran and you know, died after 50 yards or whatever, and then got the whole gang come in and help, you know, pull this thing out of there and like so we went four for four on deer in um I guess I ended up taking four days to do it, but the first three were yeah, like a day and a half.
Speaker 1:Um, that's amazing. Yeah, pretty. Did you get that pretty fun? Yeah, did you get that like leaning over? Shot on video too? Your brother was there, right, did he?
Speaker 2:yeah, my brother was there. He was just focused on the deer, so we don't have the video of me like, okay, leaned all the way over.
Speaker 1:But that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah I should have had the gopro running, but I some out when deer start coming in Like. I'm really bad at self-filming, like a lot of times I'll bring all the camera gear and then like a deer will come in and I'm just like focused on the killing, like killing him.
Speaker 1:So if I ever do this, I need to like hire a camera guy. Yeah, right, I've thought about filming and I'm like I'm not a good enough hunter to like add anything to the equation. Like what am I thinking I'm going to like start hitting you know record buttons and stuff like that? No, just just try and put the animal down Like it was too. It'd be too much for me. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:It's a lot of extra work. It is fun in like you know after the fact like it's a blast, but man, it's yeah, it's a pain.
Speaker 1:A lot of the time, but that's how I make a living, so it's all good. Yeah, it is fun after the fact. My very first elk archery kill was two seasons ago and there was a camera guy there with me. Sweet, they were like hey, can we film your hunt, because I was there with a couple world champion elk callers.
Speaker 2:And I'm like, yeah, if you guys are going to go, with me?
Speaker 1:absolutely. Yeah, you can do whatever you want. Like I'll just tag along, um, and they got a perfect shot where you get me and the elk and uh, I don't know if you know jermaine hodge, but he's all in shot and you just see my arrow right through the elk because it's got the um luminox.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's just like you see it show up and he's trying to focus. He's trying to focus. It's right behind jermaine, but eventually he gets it focused backs up. You see me draw back lower down and I'm like I watch that video weekly. Basically, oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a good morale boost anytime you're feeling down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. Something else you mentioned that was cool is like when you first sat in that like that little hole and you're talking about all the cool animals it's. It's fun to have those moments in the woods where you make the story and the story is literally just enjoying what the animals are doing. I have one that was just like that.
Speaker 1:I was elk hunting in Colorado and I don't have a mule deer tag, but we see a bunch of mule deer on this hillside and we're just sitting there watching them and then we see a coyote come in and we're talking like they were across a canyon Nothing we will affect, anything's happening there and then this coyote starts just going crazy, shooting after these mule deer and everything's running and it's going back and forth. And then we hear a gunshot off in the distance and a herd of like 500 elk came pouring over this mountain and we're like holy crap, this is just. This is why we do it just to be here and to see all this wildlife. I had no point had an opportunity for like the next three years after that moment, but being there and just having all those animals do all that cool fun things, like like no one's watching is just special.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad that that was part of your story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean getting to watch animals do what animals do is the best part. I mean the obviously fill in a tag and all that stuff like that is that is super awesome and that's the goal. But if you're not taking the time to soak up all that other stuff like, what's the point?
Speaker 2:like if you're just so driven you know, on the tag filling side of things you miss a lot of stuff and I've been there before. I mean you know, I've. You know, when you're young and hungry and really trying to make a name for yourself and like both the photo and hunting world, that whatever, like there was times where I would catch myself just rushing through stuff and whatever and man, most of the time all the best hunts I've ever had, like most successful hunts I've ever had, have been the times when you truly like slow down and kind of like it's like you're moving with like the woods instead of like trying to conquer them, kind of thing. Yeah, um, yeah, just we get into that flow and everything starts working out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I agree. Another example that I have is like one time I think I was hunting in Hawaii and the sun was rising and I was just seeing spider webs crossing everything and just everything was illuminated in this silver. So I was like I was like this is such a cool moment and I just like didn't care about anything except just like absorbing this.
Speaker 1:And then, when it was all done, I was like ah, I think I walked through that. That's gross. I'm probably covered in spider webs, but at the moment I was just like blown away by just the beauty of this? Like radiant glow over the entire world, it's yeah, it's very cool yeah, all right, that's our picturesque moment of the day. Uh, you got more stories for us, sam.
Speaker 2:Trying to think let's see, I could tell a good one about a hunt that I filmed that like literally everything went wrong.
Speaker 1:How's that Perfect?
Speaker 2:Perfect, okay, perfect.
Speaker 1:I love when things go wrong. Yeah, yeah. Well, this was a comedy of-. Well, it's not to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Comedy of errors. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this was a comedy of errors. So when I was kind of coming into the industry, I was pretty young in it, I was living in Montana at the time and I got hired to go up and film a stone sheep hunt in British Columbia way, in Northern British Columbia, in the Kaziar Mountains. I was young in shape, willing to do whatever, like go on big adventures, and I did a lot of that. It was, you know, super fun, yeah, um. So yeah, I get hired to go up to Northern BC and it's going to be me, and then I was going to be like secondary camera guy, then there was a main camera guy and then we had a packer, the guide, and the hunter, the host, and so from the get-go like started like it was like we started doing things wrong.
Speaker 2:So we go up there the stickeen river, which is the river that so you can get to camp a couple different ways, so you can go to a town, hop on a float plane, fly into camp, like land on the stickeen right at camp. Well, they wanted to. Instead, they wanted more adventure so they were going to bring. They pulled their jet boat all the way. Wanted more adventure, so they were going to bring they pulled their jet boat all the way up there. So then we were going to run 100 miles of the stikine river and, like, run our way up to camp, which whatever cool you know like that's that's pretty fun, but none of us had ever been on the river, we don't know what it's like.
Speaker 2:So we pull into the town where everybody's going to do like, or most of the crew is going to fly in on the float plane, and we're talking to somebody and they're like uh, yeah, you can't run that river, like there's a narrows like between these two cliffs, and they're like it's flooded so bad because of all the rain we've had, like it's impassable. So I hear that I'm like all right, so we uh booking that float plane, or you know like what's going on we'll be we'll be all right, so step one bad decision.
Speaker 2:Okay so we dumped the boat in and we're going up and luckily that narrows was not nearly as bad as everyone had described, so we kind of like blew through that, no problem, all right.
Speaker 2:So I'm like, okay, feeling a little more confident. You know we're good. Well then we stopped to do a bunch of filming because we needed to film, you know, the jet boat running up the river and you know fly the, you know do a bunch of different stuff and get more clips for the story. So we stopped and we filmed for like an hour. Well then we started going again and you know it's getting later in the day and for anybody that runs jet boats or runs rivers, you know you don't want to be doing doing, you don't want to be running a river after dark, you know, especially not like in twilight, you know, because of rapids and rocks, and you know you can't read the river and it's just.
Speaker 1:Plenty of things can go wrong, plenty of things can go wrong.
Speaker 2:So we ran the last like 45 minutes to an hour of that trip, like either in twilight or just flat out like almost dark and the whole like that. Last hour my buddy and I who was the other cameraman were like we've got our sleeping bags, we've got tents, like we can even sleep in the boat, we can just anchor up next to shore and we'll just like bob in the waves and we'll just sleep through the night and then we don't have to think about bears and you know, like let's just, let's pull over. This is dumb.
Speaker 2:And he's like no, no, no, we'll make it. So I'm glad someone on the boat was saying this was dumb yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah so the worst things happen when everyone's confident as long as someone's got a little hesitancy, but all right go ahead.
Speaker 2:So we didn't pull over, we just kept going. So we do make it to camp unscathed. And we get there and the outfitter more or less just yelled at us. He's like he's like how far did you run? Like how many miles did you run after twilight? And we're like, oh, it was like you know 20 miles or something, 15 miles or whatever. Yeah. And he's like he's like you had to have gone through like the crystal rapids or something. He's like like you can't be doing this stuff, like that was so dangerous, you have no idea.
Speaker 2:So we made it to camp, we sleep for the night, we wake up and then the next day we aren't going to like real camp until, you know, in the afternoon, after we get picked up by the float plane there, fly to a different lake.
Speaker 2:And so the way that this whole hunt had been painted to us was we were going to show up, I was going to be the main camera guy. After we got there, my buddy was going to stay back and do a lot of like story building at the camp and then he was going to get flown out, but then the outfitter was going to be flying the area with the plane. And then when they found a band of Rams or whatever they were going to try to they, they had a few of rams or whatever they were going to try to they. They had a few like landing strips around and so they were like they were. They would pick us up, fly us within, however long. Then you have to wait, like uh, it's like you know, 12 hours until the next day and then we hike in and try to shoot a ram.
Speaker 2:Well, when we got there, well, his plane was broken and so that was out of the question, and so instead we got on a float plane, flew to a lake and then we were supposed to take this. We had an argo because we had so much gear to try to film, like really document, this whole trip. So I alone had a sony ex1, a sony fs 700 and a canon 5d mark 3, tripod, batteries, whole thing, plus all my camp and food. So my pack was like 80-ish 85 pounds.
Speaker 2:Okay. And then I had a camera in each hand.
Speaker 1:And so.
Speaker 2:but the plan was okay, we've got this Argo that'll take us to our first spike camp and so we can load that up with all the gear and then you're not carrying all that much. Well, they're like oh yeah, the Argo Trail is easy. It's marked by pink, you know, like the pink flagging tape. Okay, well, the Argo Trail hadn't been used in I don't know three years or whatever. So everything's completely overgrown. So we left. We stayed over camp at this little like on the lake camp for a night. We got up up, got everything packed in, the argo, took off, we started moving at like it was like 7 am and by the time we stopped that night we set the tents up at midnight.
Speaker 1:so yeah, so how many miles?
Speaker 2:not enough in, okay, not enough in 17 hours. You know, we got to the point like we couldn't find the trail. It kept missing the trail. There was old moose, like you know, packing moose trail that were flagged with the same tape, and so, you know, we ended up going up over this ridge with the argo, which was crazy dangerous, and two of us were on the bottom side so it didn't flip and it was just like the whole thing was an absolute you know cluster so, oh, I forgot.
Speaker 2:That morning the outfitter almost died because he hopped on his four-wheeler to run an argo tire down to the dock and the argo tire fell off the four-wheeler and so he tried to cut it off with the four-wheeler, like the argo tire was rolling ahead of him so he started to go, so he tried to cut it off with the four-wheeler.
Speaker 2:He caught a tire over the bank that went down to the river and rolled off. This 20-foot bank got rolled over on by the four-wheeler and, you know, basically came back up the hill like completely beat up like limp and real bad.
Speaker 1:I was pretty sure he broke something in his hand.
Speaker 2:So that was the how that morning before started anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we Feeling confident in this, this outfit, or two right Broken plane just crashes? Yeah, pretty, pretty confident Money well spent, yeah.
Speaker 2:So then, uh, and you know, like food rations, and so it was like our daily food ration was like a mountain house and then a candy bar, a fruit snack, a cliff bar.
Speaker 1:I mean, it was just not very much for you know like for the amount of effort putting in. So you said they, they is the people organizing the film, or the outfitter. No, the outfitter, okay, yep.
Speaker 2:Okay, yep. So so then we, yeah. So then, uh, yeah, we fly in, we meet the guide, we get in the Argo 17 hours later, or whatever. We're setting up the tents. We slept, we got up, we went over and we thought we'd last a nice big ram, you know, thought we'd found it. We just kind of sat on it all day and didn't end up putting eyes on it again. And so we're like, all right, well, I still have the map. It's this old black and white top of map and you know, there's like a couple of little dashes on it and it's like, well, the spot we were trying to get they were calling the cathedral and and that. So like we took off the next day to try to get to that and like work through, and so all right, back down the mountain into the bog and then back up the mountain and then back down and then back up, you know, like you know, and all the while carrying, you know, tons of weight, tons of you know all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Um, not getting enough calories, not getting enough calories. So that night we got to this spot. Well then, at this point it had been like I don't know a couple of days in, or whatever. So the plan was we're going to bring in a light load of food and then they were going to do a food drop. And so we get to the top, where we're going to camp, they fly over with the plane, do a food drop, and the host and my buddy go down to grab the food. Well, we had spotted a grizz.
Speaker 2:Well then, when those guys were walking down there, the grizz sees them and stands up on its hind legs and I got video of it sprinting at the host and my buddy and you know they're yelling at it and everything. Well then, thankfully you know they hunt grizz up there, so the bear circled downwind of them, caught wind that it was humans and then that thing just like barreled off. But you know, not before that got within like 25 yards at full speed.
Speaker 1:No thanks, and I'm watching this from like 400 yards away going.
Speaker 2:hmm, this is going to be interesting See how this plays out. So luckily did not get, you know, actually charged by a grizz.
Speaker 1:And then it's terrifying. The episode right before this was a guy who, just like in August, got charged by a bear and him and his dad shot. It swatted him but it hit the frame on his pack, knocked him over. He gets his pistol out and just unloads. His dad unloads.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God.
Speaker 1:The after effect. The bear did die, but he ended up shooting himself in the leg. He was the one.
Speaker 2:There was a clip of him like explaining that on Peterson's right Like on social yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he keeps getting taken down, but I got him on the podcast to tell the whole story and it is insane. That is wild.
Speaker 2:I actually. My comment on that post is the most liked comment on that post, which was, you can hear the clanging of his giant steel balls all the way in the lower 48.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, you can hear the clanging of his giant steel balls all the way in the lower 48.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, you can. I don't know if he was in shock or whatever, but the way he was explaining the whole scenario, in just very no emotion I called him out on that.
Speaker 1:I'm like dude, you are cool as a cucumber during this entire thing yeah. Apparently. His dad is a retired game warden, so his dad was the perfect person to be there, knew everyone he was. He was messaging people specifically, not just hitting the panic button on the unreached right. He was like a firefighter and up there in alaska. So like these guys are, like you said, steel balls man steel balls, but that story was insane. It's unbelievable, yeah, yeah but, sorry, I interrupted.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, it's good so so, then, that this, so this video of this uh stone hunt is actually um out there in the world like.
Speaker 2:So it's like an episode of uh steve's outdoor adventures and so we had gotten I think we'd gotten like a five-day food drop that day. Um, and there's a clip of me doing inventory of all the food because I like once it was there I had gone through and done inventory on everything and then like be like, all right, we're good for five days. Well then we were two days. Two days later, we still hadn't killed the sheep, hadn't seen a sheep, you know. Um, I did like another inventory on everything and I was like we've got a five day food drop. It's only been two days and we're down to we were down to like a day and a half of food.
Speaker 2:Please don't tell me the outfitter was eating extra. The outfitter was not. Uh, it was a, it was a common. You know. It was a combo of I don't want to throw anybody under the bus it was a combo of of things. But yeah, so we're like, okay, now we're low on food, like great, we've already been, you know, burning lots of calories.
Speaker 2:And so then we made another move. We finally made it to this place called the Cathedral. We did run into a band of sheep. It was young rams, like sickle horn rams, and then some ewes and stuff, and so it didn't end up seeing a legal ram had to like. This is just like I'm doing this kind of fast, but it's just like this was days and days and days. So we, over the course of a 12-day hunt, we ended up hiking roughly 100, somewhere between 100 and 120 miles. Um, I lost 18 pounds, um, okay, and two days left in the hunt we got weathered in and ran out of food and jet boil fuel, so so we couldn't, couldn't cook anything and all we had like I mean, I think there was one whole day that the only thing I had was a cliff bar um jesus.
Speaker 2:and so then we finally decided, like, okay, like this is, this trip's just not gonna happen, so we're gonna hike back to where we had very first camped, and then we'll spend the night, and then from there we'll hike back down to the lake and, you know, then we'll get out of here.
Speaker 1:Get the hell out of there, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we took off and we're trying to plan a route. You know, we've got about I don't know how many miles it was, back to our first camp where we had like stashed some things and left a tent and whatever, and quite a ways, um. But like we were trying to plan a route and I was like, okay, if we like I'm looking at the terrain going if we shoot down this ridge, I think we can just find a moose trail like along this uh creek, and then we can work, you know, all the way to that little like gully that we need to go up and over.
Speaker 2:Well, I got outvoted and so we ended up boulder hopping like these giant Volkswagen-sized boulders for all day trying to get across this thing and we get all the way. They were like we don't want to lose elevation. So then what did we do? We ended up losing all the elevation anyway to get around through this giant boulder field and looking from that little gully, like look back and be like, oh yeah, you can see the moose trail that we could have taken all the way from the bottom of that ridge Like oh so it would have been one third the time, but that, you know, whatever.
Speaker 2:So we, we didn't even make it back to our main camp. Like all of a sudden it's like two in the morning and we're like, screw it, we're just going to sleep, you know. So we rolled up the sleeping bag, slept under the stars, woke up it was pretty cool. We had some mountain goats right above us. That was really, you know, kind of a cool way to cap off the trip. And then went, made it back to camp the next morning, packed everything up, bailed off, got back to the Argo, you know, and then the Argo broke down and had to repair that.
Speaker 2:And then, you know so, anyway, by by, you know, twilight that evening, a little before that, we got back to like the log cabin or like the on the beach and, um, we, I found some old they had some fishing rods in there and I found like I cobbled together like a jig and an old swimming body and I went and caught like three or four trout like in the lake, and then so we got to eat like trout cooked over the fire because the only thing else we had was mountain houses.
Speaker 2:It was an amazing meal, it was the best fish that I think any of us have ever eaten. I believe it believable but yeah, I lost 18 pounds um In 12 days.
Speaker 1:That is crazy, do you mind? If I ask like, what's your normal carrying weight? So like put 18 in perspective.
Speaker 2:So at the time I think I was running, it was typically around like 205, 210 pounds somewhere in there, so I was in like the low 190s after the trip. And the host of the show lost 35 pounds.
Speaker 1:He probably had more to lose, though he did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean he had broken a foot earlier in the summer, like it got stepped on by a horse and so he's up there. Yeah, and it was a wild trip, but now, like I lived through it, I have this awesome story from that trip. I honestly didn't want to go back on another sheep hunt for a long time and I didn't until I went and filmed, for I filmed Jason Matzinger a couple of years ago on his doll sheep hunt, which was a blast.
Speaker 1:And hopefully it went a little bit better from the get go, oh it was such a different story. It was so different. Yeah, we had a great time, yep.
Speaker 2:He ended up killing a 12-year-old ram on day nine, and it was sweet.
Speaker 1:That's amazing man. It's funny how the stories were like literally nothing goes right, and if you were to talk about doing it ahead of time and ending up that way, you'd be like I'm not going to go, just screw that Absolutely.
Speaker 1:There's nothing about that. I want to go Now. It's like this fond memory of just the huge suck that you endured for 12 days. So it's funny. It's funny how it works out that way. But, Sam man, we're running out of time and I want to be respectful of your time, so let's do a couple of things. Why don't you tell the people? I mean, if you have more than you want to talk about than just the Stamp it Forward project, we can talk about whatever you want to, because I have time, but if that's all you want to about, we'll just do that perfect yeah, uh, so one of the initiatives, so public land teas.
Speaker 2:We started it with the mission to give back to the organizations who actually have boots on the ground every single day and they're fighting for more public land, more access, better habitat, like basically protecting all the things that we enjoy, and so when we started, we decided that five bucks from everything we sell on the website we we will donate back to different initiatives, and so started doing that from day one, but one of the like we tried to incorporate kind of bigger projects in among that, and so one of the things that we started doing in 2019 is called the Stamp it Forward project, which revolves around more or less leveraging a conservation tool that's already in place, which is the duck stamp, and, for anybody that doesn't know, 98% of the purchase price of a duck stamp has to be spent on wetland conservation. So if you are over the age of 16 and want to waterfowl hunt, you have to buy one, but anybody can buy one. You don't have to be a member of anything, you don't have to have a hunting license, you don't have to sign up, for anything can buy one. You don't have to be a member of anything, you don't have to have a hunting license, you don't have to sign up for anything. You can just buy a duck stamp and know that 98% of that will be spent on the National Wildlife Refuges conservation easements. More, they have what's called the Small Parcel Acquisition Act, which is started in I believe it was in the 50s as part of the duck stamp program. But what they do is they buy parcels of land which have good grassland habitat. Good grassland and wetland habitat for breeding. In the prairie pothole region is where a lot of that money goes. But they buy chunks and then that's actually open to the public for hunting. So it's good for ducks, it's good for pheasants, it's good for deer and it has opened up a ton of access in the prairie pothole region where 70% of the ducks end up breeding anyway.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so we started Stamp it Forward and the first couple of years we literally just asked people to send us money and then spent all of it on duck stamps. And then, once we get a big stack, we start giving the stamps away with every single item we sell on the website. And so year one, you know, we bought a thousand stamps. Year two, we bought like 1600 stamps. Year three was like 12 or 1300. Year four and five we made it over. Year four we did 2000 stamps. It took all fall Like we got the last big donation from Shields Outdoors for like 15 grand. We got that in December and that pushed us over the top.
Speaker 2:And then last year we put a little twist on it and I actually did a hundred mile, called it the duck ruck, but did a hundred mile walk over three days, started in North Dakota, hiked into South Dakota and at a national wildlife refuge which I was only born about 30 miles from, and as a way to earn people's donations. And then we did a little over 2000 stamps again last year. And then this year was fully prepped to do another hundred mile hike. Had kind of a big to do another 100-mile hike. Had kind of a big marketing deal with it, had a fairly large name, going to come walk some miles with me and then do a hunt together or whatever. Well then I, like an idiot, tore my Achilles in June.
Speaker 2:And so I had surgery at the end of June and a 100-mile walk was way out of the question for me this year. But it's been fun. There's been people all over the place that have been going out and doing a little walk and and uh helping raise dollars, and right now we're at uh twenty seven thousand seven hundred dollars raised for duck stamps.
Speaker 2:So that's um about 11, a little over 1100 stamps yeah, um, and you know to know that 98 of that by law has to be spent on more wetlands just means that there's, you know, it not only helps migratory birds, but it helps survive 700 different species.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That rely on it. Yeah, and, like I said, I've been a fan for a long time. I'm not even a waterfowl hunter. I want to, I just don't. Yeah, it's a hard. There's a little bit of a barrier to entry to me in Colorado. Like you got a reserve locations, you need decoys. So someone gave me some decoys, which is amazing, and last year I went and actually shot my first duck, but using one of the stamps, cause I bought, not this shirt, a different one.
Speaker 1:Um, I don't remember which one but I have three different times I've purchased a shirt, got the stamp and then I actually purchased my own stamp and then gave that to a friend because I'm like, yeah, let's just keep giving it out.
Speaker 2:Yep, um, but man, it's, it's great what you guys are doing. Um, off subject, how'd you tear your achilles? I've done that. It sucks. Oh, you have done that. That's yeah. Yeah, it's not fun.
Speaker 2:Um, but I was down at vortex doing they were running us through like pistol training and so we were doing moving handgun drills and I, um, it was just a simple like, shoot twice, run forward 10 yards, shoot again. And I shot twice, went to run forward and just snap, yep, and just it felt like I stepped all the way through the concrete and next thing I know I was down, face down, and thankfully I didn't shoot myself or anybody else.
Speaker 2:Uh, I had good figure finger control over the trigger and uh was you know, I had finger up on the slide so it didn't mess that up, um. But yeah, just you know, and in the moment I thought I was like I think I tore my achilles, um, and then I went to the er realization. Huh, you know, you're like, yeah, but I went to the er what the hell was that? And then, immediately you're like.
Speaker 1:I know what that was like within 10 seconds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so uh, I thought that was. And then I went to the ER and they told me I had not torn my Achilles. What, yeah Right, they did like the test or whatever, and my foot must have moved just a little. And so she's like I think you just tore your calf muscle. So I walked on it for four days. Jesus, and then I went and saw an ortho and he was like oh no, you 100% full rupture no you 100 percent, uh, full rupture.
Speaker 2:So okay, jesus, yeah. So then I got in for surgery, went on a monday, saw the ortho, got in for surgery on thursday and had that fixed up. So now I'm let's see. The 27th will be four months post-op, so it's getting a lot better, but it's just so you're off crutches because that was like three months.
Speaker 1:So you're in a boot now.
Speaker 2:Slowly I'm uh let's see, I was non-load bearing for two weeks and then I was in a walking boot with you know, so started with crutches, with a walking boot, and then out of that, so in a walking boot for about eight weeks, and so I have been walking in shoes since then. Um, but like, literally, just like in the last two, three weeks, like I can navigate stairs a lot better, um you know, like anytime I go in the woods I'm still throwing the walking boot on Cause there's like risky re-injury is not going to happen.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, man, it was funny, as I I ruptured it. I want to say it was like right before Thanksgiving, and so I was healed up and ready to go for the next elk season. When I was in Washington that year, my buddy buddy, we saw some elk and he's like let's run up this mountain. And he starts running up. I'm like, no, I'll go around the mountain Like I just can't Right.
Speaker 2:It's a slow recovery yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, that was a side trip there. Okay, sam, why don't you tell the people where they can find you?
Speaker 2:and we'll wrap this thing up that I'm doing or we're doing. Uh, just follow my Instagram, which is at Sam Soholt. Or, uh, our public land teas, which is at public land teas. Um, we also have the Soholt brothers YouTube channel that we put a little bit out on, not nearly enough, but, um, but yeah, it's pretty easy to find us. So, yeah, either my page or the public land teas page, and we'll just keep doing what we can to push forward the conservation initiatives.
Speaker 1:Awesome, man, Awesome, and I will put links to all that stuff in the show notes as usual. Make it easy to find Sam. Thank you so much, man. I really do appreciate it. It was great to meet you, hey, and if you're ever in the Colorado area, you'll probably visit your brother at some point. Let me know and I'd be happy to buy you a beer or something.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I like that.
Speaker 1:Let's do it All right. All right, guys. That's it. Another couple stories in the books. I do want to thank Sam, of course, for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure to meet him, Loved hearing his stories and, like I said, I've been a big fan of his for a long time. So thank you, Sam. I really do appreciate you View listeners. Thank you, guys for tuning in man. I also appreciate you, guys If you can get on whatever app you're on, whatever you're listening to, and go and review the podcast and then share it with one person. That way we can just share the love, get more people hearing it and more people with crazy stories reaching out to me. But that's it, guys. Thank you again. I appreciate you all. Now get out there and make some stories of your own.
