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As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance. Can you hear it? Birds whistling in springtime, fresh grass and flowers budding, and you're sitting on the side of a mountain looking for an elusive black bear.
Now, while that might sound far off as you're probably sitting at home in some form of quarantine or social distancing yourself from others, right now we're in a crazy time. But that doesn't mean that we can't look forward to what we've got planned being out in the mountains in the near future. I got a ton of questions. I keep asking every week, send me your questions. What do you want to know? And a lot of them have been focused around spot and stock bear hunting and hunting bears in the spring.
Now, I believe that that question came up so many times because there was a common theme. People frustrated, had difficulty finding bears when they're out hunting and just an overall challenge of it. And I think that hits home because spring bear hunting or spot and stock type bear hunting, I believe is one of the more difficult hunts out West, especially to be consistent and successful.
Now, there's a lot of knowledge and time that goes into that consistency. But I think once you figure out a few of the basics, you can go from frustration to consistent success year after year. Bear hunting really comes down to knowing where to look. And that involves understanding bears, how to hone in on their appropriate food source for the time of year, and then just understanding bear habits in general.
From there, you need to take it a step further and employ the right hunting tactics, which might mean a form of sitting and glassing. It might be a form of moving through cover in logging roads, or it could even involve some tactic like calling.
It was asked so much and it is such an in-depth topic and such a challenging animal to be successful at hunting consistently. I'm going to break it into two parts. So the first part this week, we're going to talk about just understanding bears and knowing where to look. And then next week, we'll jump into the actual hunt tactics once you understand how to get into the right spot. Before we go there, I want to share a story of one of my favorite backcountry bear hunts in one of my favorite canyons.
Starting out, most of my bear hunting experience took place in the state of Montana. Now Montana, you could get a bear tag over the counter and was good for spring and fall season. Montana, unlike some other states, it was just spot and stock only for bears. So there are a few states where you could bait for bears. There's some that you could chase bears with dogs, but Montana has always pretty much been spot and stock only or no other form of bear hunting as far as bait and dogs go.
I will be honest, my bear hunting success started out very rocky. I had a lot of unfilled tags year after year. It really just seemed like finding a bear was more a thing of luck, but it was something that I would do. Every spring, every fall, I would look and hope that I would find something. Until one year during archery season, I happened to spot a bear while actually looking for elk. And that's how I took my first black bear.
Now after that, it really got me thinking, is this something that I could do consistently? And it turns out that I found out ways to be consistent at finding bears during the spring. One of those ways and one of my favorite things to do was to just actually head into the backcountry by myself and get up into the areas where the bears would first start coming out and some of the areas in the steep wilderness canyons in the back countries of Montana.
Part of that was because I found areas there was no one else hunting at the time. And it was just kind of an exciting place to be that time of year. Early April or mid-April through May, I could go into the wilderness and just start hunting, be by myself, and just really have a great backcountry hunting experience.
Now this story takes place in one of my favorite remote canyons. I like it because the time of year there's a few lakes up there, there's some streams that I could fish in, the days were pretty warm and nice, and I have what seems like thousands and thousands of acres to myself.
Not that this particular canyon is any better than others. It's just, I would go there, I'd park at the trailhead, I wouldn't see another truck, and I could hunt in there for a week and not see a single other person. There weren't a lot of bears, but there also wasn't a lot of competition. And I really felt like it was an area that just was under hunted, and I just had it to myself. The week started out like many others, just long days.
I feel like in this particular spot, if I hunt for five days, I would average seeing five bears in that five days. Now I might see three on the first day and then not see any until toward the last day. But over the course of the years that I'd been hunting this particular canyon, it seemed pretty standard to see what would amount to a bear a day.
I started out the hunt hiking in and actually on the trail in, I was working my way through the timber, not really on a trail or anything, but the way to get into the canyon. And I ended up spotting a really nice brown phase black bear. But I heard something. I peeked around the tree and could see the bear, but I heard something up higher. I look up and sure enough, here's two little cubs.
up in the tree and it happened to be a sow with two cubs. It was just a really cool encounter and it got me pretty fired up for thinking, okay, this is going to be a good trip. On the way in, I already bumped into a bear. Obviously, it's not a bear that I would take. One, because it's not legal and two, you just wouldn't, even if it were legal, most, I wouldn't really see it as ethical. So, I just took some photos of the bears and thought that was a pretty sweet encounter and continued on.
I ended up getting into the basin and it's still pretty early. I was hunting toward the beginning of the opener. So there's still a lot of snow up high. I ended up encountering quite a bit of snow in some of the south faces where I was planning on looking, where I'd hunted later in the season and they'd been open. This time of year, they were still snowed in. So I decided to just focus on
the north faces and kind of switch my plan to being on the other side of the canyon, glassing into some of the spots that I felt like would get some green up where bears would be feeding. The first day I actually, after the encounter with the bear on the trail, didn't really see much as far as bear sign. I ran into a couple of bighorn sheep and
And that was just an awesome, awesome experience. And that was just, to me, the whole point of being out in the springtime. It got a little bit of the rust out, got me in the outdoors, and I encountered so many different animals. Yeah, I'm looking for bears, but along the way, I'd seen at this point, one day in, some bighorn rams, elk, mule deer, white tails, and already some bears.
I decided to just go set up a camp in a good spot at the top of a ridge above a small Alpine lake. Went down, caught some fish that I'd used to grill up for some lunch and dinner, and then thought, "Okay, this is great." In the middle of the day, I was going to spend some time fishing, maybe catch a fish or two, release most of them, keep one for dinner. I wouldn't have to jump into my mountain house meals so soon. I did bring some seasoning and some little butter packs and some other things to fry the fish up with.
and then continue to hunt for bears. And that to me was just the whole, is still just the whole spring bear hunting experience to just be out there in a great time of year. Half the time I pick up a few good sheds and I'm out hunting and looking for bears.
it was a pretty slow go for most of the week but a storm started to move in and i thought okay this i don't know this is about day three or four i hadn't seen a bear that i was looking for i did spot a couple smaller bears come out for a short period of time along some of the avalanche shoots up there in this country you gotta to picture it it's like sheer cliffs on both sides with a big flowing creek in the middle
And as you get higher up into the Alpine, you're starting to get into snow and other stuff. Most of the trees, small aspens and other things don't really have their leaves yet. It's still pretty cold, but there is some grass poking out along the avalanche chute, some good springs on the north faces that are getting sun that have melted off and just good grass, water everywhere, lots of waterfalls.
So this particular day, I decided to go a little bit further back, probably about, I don't even know, six or seven miles, maybe seven or eight miles from the trailhead at this point. And I start out early because I want to be at this one high vantage point where I've seen bears in the past.
right when the sun starts to come up and then just watch it all day. So my plan was to get back there and just kind of pick a spot and watch for most of the day. There's so many times where I've been just sitting, staring at the hillside, and then all of a sudden, oh, out pops a bear or a
whatever. Things just start coming alive the longer you sit there. And it gets boring for a while. But for the most part, this day, I was like, all right, it's getting close to the end. And I want to just spend the day glassing and looking. So I start my way back there. On the way back, it's just really kind of a bad weather day. Lots of fog, lots of rain. I'm quite a ways from my camp. But
I look up on the hillside and through the fog the clouds clear and I see this big chocolate-colored bear up on the slide. Oh shoot, it's maybe a mile from where I'm at. So I start working up the canyon, have to cross the stream a couple times and the streams raging at this point because all the water's melting the snow coming off the mountain. So I'm just trying to find really safe places to cross, maybe some logs that I can cross across.
Actually, some of those crossings were pretty hairy, to be honest. I don't think that now I would really want to do many of those crossings again, but I thought to myself, well, okay, there's a bear up there. We'll make it work. So I get up to where I last saw the bear and it's gone. And a lot of the mountains now fogged in. So I just sit back and wait. I get set up underneath a big tree in hopes that it's going to come back again. I can't see anything very well.
then sure enough the clouds lift and the bear comes back out feeding. I set up my scope and double-check that it looks like a good mature boar, make sure that there's no cubs around and just wait and watch it for a little bit. Just make sure no other bears are there and make sure that it's the exact bear that I want. Once I decide that, yep, that's a boar, there's no cubs around, we're good to go. I load up my rifle, I get it set on the pack, I range it, I set my scope and
As the bear gets broadside, I slowly squeeze the trigger and I hear the hit report, but I couldn't actually see it because the way I was laying, I was shooting pretty steep uphill and I lost sight of the bear at that point. But now the bear wasn't there. So I knew that it sounded like a good hit and I just had to figure out a way to cross the stream and get up to where the bear should be.
After about, I would say, an hour of figuring out a good spot to cross, because at this point I'd moved pretty high up and the water was just like nearly a waterfall going down that canyon. It was just ripping and I just needed to find one good safe place to cross. So I actually had to go about a half a mile up to where it flattened out, cross, and then come back down and find the spot. At this point, I'm climbing up steep cliffs and avalanche chutes that are wet and slippery.
It just kept raining and raining and raining. I've got my rain gear on and I left most of my other stuff down at the bottom by where I'd shot from just so if I found the bear I could just put it in my pack and pack it out and then go grab my stuff later. I got to the point where I found where the bear was, looked down, and there he was laying just right below where I'd shot from.
skinned him out, quartered it up, put all the meat in game bags, loaded up everything, just soaking wet and worked my way back down to camp and back to the trailhead. If you want to be a consistently successful bear hunter, you really just have to think like a bear. Now, if we're talking about other big game species, that might be a little more difficult, but for bears, it's pretty easy to know what they're thinking. And most of them are all thinking the same thing, food.
you have to really understand what drives a bear. And that is bulking up for hibernation and then rebulking up after hibernation.
bears hyper phage in the fall. So what that means is they just constantly feed, they double in size and they just store fat. So then through the winter, they can essentially hibernate. It's not a true hibernation where they're sleeping the whole time, but they aren't moving much. They're sleeping. They are using their stored fat to get them through the winter. And then in the springtime, when food's plentiful again, they come back out and rebulk up and continue to feed.
That's often why there's two seasons in many states, a spring season and a fall season. Now, to successfully target bears, you really have to understand the food sources that they're targeting and the way that a bear thinks and operates. So let's talk about what I'll call the dinner bell effect.
Really, before we even think about what a bear is eating, we have to understand how they eat. So a bear's digestive system is a little bit different than most other animals where deer, browsers, elk, or grazers, bears are omnivores. They can eat both meat and plant-based foods.
I will say that probably, I would guess, 85% of a bear's diet comes from plants, but bears have an extremely inefficient digestive system when it comes to breaking down plants. So this really makes them animals that are driven to just constantly eat.
bear's majority of the day is spent finding food and eating that food. And they want to use as little energy as possible. Now, because they're trying to put on weight in the most efficient manner, they're going to find things that are the most efficient for gaining weight. So they have a very inefficient digestive system, yet they put on a
a lot of weight. And that's just because they're constantly eating, but they are very selective eaters. I think people think bears will eat anything. Well, bears will eat anything, but they will eat the things that give them the most energy or calories or whatever they can gain the most fat of for without having to move very much and in the most efficient way possible. So in the fall, bears will pick the berries off the plant one by one,
Now it seems like it might take a little bit, but they're targeting the most nutritious part of the plant. In the springtime, it's the same fresh buds, new grasses, green up, all that stuff has way more nutrients than older plants. So in the springtime, especially early in the spring, we're going to be focusing on the emergence of new plants, buds, new growth, because that's where the majority of the nutrients of the plant are. And you'll see, you can watch a black bear feed on a plant.
And you'll think, oh, he's just eating that plant. And when you really zoom in and look, he's actually just eating the buds off of that plant. He's targeting the most nutritious and optimum food sources for where he's at. Now, if I'm going to name a couple of things that I just off the top of my head, some of the first foods that I tend to see bears hit would be stuff like clover, even dandelions seem to be pretty popular with bears, any kind of green grasses along the
snow melts or fresh buds off of willows and other plants. They're really just targeting that green growth, that new stuff right out of the gate.
if we're going to talk about food sources, we really have to break it down on the months and then kind of hone in on what the bear's doing and maybe what food sources are available. So let's start in April that, you know, mid April might be when most bear seasons across the West open up. Bears are just starting to come out of hibernation. Now, a lot of bears will go den up at higher elevations. So they'll move up high in canyons. They necessarily won't be in caves or something like that as most people think, but a lot of times they just kind of
lay by a log or whatever, let the snow cover them. And they call that a den. Some find other forms, maybe in crevices of rocks or behind a big rock. I've seen bear dens just on a ledge underneath a big pine that's growing. Just places where bears are going to be secure from other predators and even other bears, especially the females will find, try to go to places that seem safe from maybe boars digging up their young in the springtime.
But for the most part, they're going to be in an area that's completely covered in snow. They're going to emerge from their dens and they're going to be seeking food sources. So what they want is they want food that's close, nutritious, and nearby. Early in the bear season, especially the spring season, I'm looking for places that have a lot of green up, a lot of nutrients close by, but also provide shelter.
When you think about spotting for bears, bears, it's very difficult to find because they aren't like deer and elk. They don't herd up. They're very solitary in nature. They're an elusive animal because they're fairly low to the ground. If you think about by mid-spring, the height of the grass is
it would cover up where most bears stand. So you're looking for a single animal in a large area that is heavily timbered and the grass or cover around them is taller than them.
It's not that there's not a lot of bears where you're looking. The reason you don't see bears is because they're hard to spot, they're elusive, they're solitary, and much of the places that they inhabit have a lot of cover. So in order to effectively hunt bears via spot and stalk, you know, not by baiting, not by using dogs, you have to hone in on those places and
where they provide a weakness, where it gives you a little bit of an advantage. And that is finding places where they're going to be out in the open feeding and honing in on those food sources where you're most likely to run into a bear or spot a bear immediately.
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So early in the spring, I'm going to focus on things like avalanche shoots. Now avalanche shoots are great because the rocks and if you get a north facing slope, it's going to burn off on the edges of the snow as the snow starts to recede. It's generally near areas with thick cover, but it's open and that open provides sunlight for new growth and new grasses will grow at the bottoms of those near water seeps. There should be plenty of water this time of year as the snow line recedes.
you're going to start getting green up right along that edge of the snow. And those avalanche shoots have cleared out patches of thick country that now is visible. So when you're sitting there glassing and spotting, you have a spot where it's likely that you'll see a bear because it's open enough that it doesn't obscure the bear. And it has a great nutrient food source nearby. Now, outside of avalanche shoots, anything like
steep hillsides, meadows, high country, alpine basins, stuff where you don't have as much cover and the cover hasn't really started to spring up early, that's a great spot to start looking. Now, as the season progresses, the food sources and the areas that you're looking at are going to start to change.
Once they've emerged from their dens, it's not going to be long before they start making their way to different areas, probably more cover where they can remain hidden, remain out of sight, but also close to food. So they're going to be moving into more pine forest regions, but they're still going to need that nutrient grass. So we're going from early to mid-April to now late April, mid-May.
I feel like bears at this time, although they will still be up high and that can be a great place to target bears because you might find a little bit more open, have more visibility of some meadows and some parks and some other things. As it gets later on, you're going to start finding bears in that mid or lower elevation. And I start focusing toward other food sources. What's really starting to spring up now? Now you're starting to get more grasses and clover in.
in the conifers or in open areas, a lot of that will be logging roads where a part of the timber has been logged or even just logging areas where it's clear, it's in the middle of the trees, but most of the new growth, the snow started to melt and you're getting a lot of new growth and a lot of clover, a lot of dandelion, a lot of other high protein grasses in those areas in a concentration. That's a magnet to bears.
Now, as we move on later in the spring, bears tend to first start on finding different plants to eat, you know, high nutrient plants. But what's another thing that happens in the spring?
Deer fawning and elk calving. And later on and say like late May to early June, I really like to focus on elk calving areas if there's elk around. If it's not an elk area, then deer fawning areas. Places that deer feel secure, but that provides a super easy snack and meal for a bear. It's nothing for a bear to use its excellent sense of smell to find calves and fawns.
They're pretty defenseless. They're generally in a concentrated area and they put off a pretty good scent that is easy for the bears to find those areas. So if I have areas that I'm glassing and I'm seeing a lot of elk and now those same areas will also probably be more open meadows with good feed close to where they have some kind of cover and security and water nearby. Everything a bear needs in one location.
I'll often glass those because you might catch a bear that's coming out to eat some more late spring crops, like even balsam root is a good one that time of year, or it depends on where in the country you are. But there's a lot of different plants, different kind of sun chokes, different kind of flowers that come out that bears will focus in on. And then you also have the option of looking into elk calving and deer fawning areas.
Now, as a big game hunter, I also like hunting bears and predators in those kinds of areas because you can kind of help protect some of the fawns and next year's crop of elk and deer by hunting predators in those areas where they're fawning, because that's where most undulants get hit the hardest is in that late, early spring when the
fawns and calves don't have as much natural defense. But if we're focusing on bears, that's an excellent food source to focus in on.
When I think about finding bear spots, I like to think of it as as the snow decreases, I start trying to find spots where the foliage is the lowest and I have the best view at the optimal time of growth. So I generally start high and follow the bears down. So I'll start my season high looking at a
high open meadows, high parks. And then as the season progresses, I'll kind of change that same philosophy to lower open areas, mid mountain open areas while still paying attention to some of that high stuff. But as the snow starts to go away, the bears are going to start leaving those areas and they might even still be there, but the grasses begin to get too tall to where I can't spot the bears. So I go to more
open meadow areas on the edge of thick cover or elk calving areas and just start following the food source as the season progresses. Now that we've talked about food, I think one of the main overlooked things about bear hunting is their pattern ability. A lot of people don't really understand a bear's pattern. And I say that because it's one of the most easily exploitable
facets to spot and stalk bear hunting, but because it's on such a large scale, we don't really hone in on it like I think other hunters do. If you're a whitetail hunter, you'll really understand this concept because whitetail hunters, whitetails just have a smaller home range than bears, but bears have a very predictable and patternable nature.
Now I've been to places in Southeast Alaska, even in Montana and in Nevada and California, where you'll see what we call a bear trail. One of the craziest bear trails I've ever seen was actually from brown bears in Kodiak where
The bears actually year after year walk the same path. And over years, generations of bears have been walking these same trails, these same paths, and they're putting their feet in the exact same places year after year. One particular one on Kodiak, it's in the granite. You can actually, it's worn down bear tracks on this granite ridge that I saw. But I've seen these bear trails other places where year after year, bears are walking the same route, the same way,
pretty much putting their feet in the same spots and other bears tend to follow suit. Now that's not to say that if you sit on that particular bear trail, you're going to see a bear because who knows when they're using those trails or what they're using them for, but many of them will follow some sort of pattern every year.
There's one particular Canyon that I hunted in and I spotted this bear that was pretty identifiable. Just a, it was a young boar. He had like this weird split ripped ear and just kind of a weird marking on his neck as well. And I just noticed him, we passed him up. This was on the Saturday of Memorial weekend. The following year, I went up there the Saturday of Memorial weekend, whatever, maybe a different date, but pretty much around the same exact time.
At 3.30 in the afternoon, I looked up in the same hillside and saw that same bear. Okay, that's pretty interesting. The following year, I went back the same day, not the calendar day, but the same Saturday of Memorial Weekend, whatever.
the same time of day, midday, that morning I glassed that spot, that evening I glassed that spot, but midday on that particular day, that bear was out feeding at three o'clock in the afternoon, three years in a row. Now, not all bears will be exactly that patternable, but it just really went to prove how predictable bears can be. When you find a spot where you're seeing bears a certain time of year,
key into that. Now, some of it might be seeing it Memorial day is a little bit later in the season. So maybe it has more to do with the way the snow's melted and why it's in that area. And it happened to be three similar years. Um,
But if you're in a certain spot one year with a certain amount of snow and you start seeing bears, make note of that and go back and hunt those same areas year after year, because the bears are going to do quite a bit of the same thing. They're denning in the same canyons, maybe not exactly the same den, but they're following the same patterns year after year. Some of them following the same trails year after year and generation after generation.
Because of a bear's secretive nature, the way that they live and how difficult they can be to spot, the real question comes into how long do I stay in an area and how do I know that a bear is there? That is one of the hardest questions to answer. So
outside of seeing a bear, when I go into a new area, I like to look for bear sign as opposed to just looking for bears. It's a lot easier to find the sign of bears in many instances than it is to actually find a bear. If I go to a spot and I glass it and it looks like it's got everything. I'm up in a high alpine basin. I sat there glassing. I've sat there for a day and didn't really see anything. I think
I think to myself, okay, is this an area bears are using? If I look at the mountain and realize there's a lot of cover on this mountain, I can see 10% of it. I've got 10% of the mountain that I can actually see and then 90% of it is in cover of some kind where it'd be very difficult to spot a bear. What portion of my time should I spend there?
but it looks like great country. So I'll go to those open areas where I can see and around those areas where they should be feeding, where those food sources are concentrated, and I'll look for sign. Mostly droppings. Also, I'll look for bear trails or tracks, especially if there's snow, if I can even glass and see maybe some tracks going across the snow. I'll go up, investigate, and see if those are bear tracks. And then I'll also look for scrapings and other markings.
And then I use that information in a way similar that whitetail hunters would when planning a way to set up a tree stand. It's just on a much larger scale and in a different distance. If I find a scrape or a marking that's marking its territory, bears are extremely territorial. And as they go into that later into the spring, many states, their seasons go into June. That's when bears start to rut. The
The boars are extremely territorial. They keep cruising and checking marking posts. There's many times where I've found maybe a scraped up tree and some bear hair. And then I go, okay, as it gets closer toward the rutting period, I'm going to get back into this area and glass because there's probably multiple bears that will check this area. You know, I'll sit on areas and watch areas where I see a lot of droppings and
Now, it may be that those bears are using that area at night, but as the moons change and things change with weather or whatever, you'll know, okay, a bear is for sure using this area. Now, I just have to sit and wait much like a whitetail hunter would on a deer trail or whatever and know that your time's well spent because there's bears in that area. One thing that I've started to think about using more and more is
is something like a trail camera where I know if it's legal in your state where you see bear sign, put up a camera and see and try to understand its patterns. For a long time, I was fairly against the use of
trail cameras to kind of aid in hunting only because I just kind of felt personally, it just seemed a little unethical, but I've used them for fun in the past. And the amount that I've learned about the different species I've used them on is just incredible. One thing in particular comes to mind when I'm thinking about bears, and it was just an accidental discovery. It
an area that I hunted elk a lot. There was a wallow. I just put up a trail cam to see what kind of activity was in the area. And I ended up leaving the trail cam there pretty much year round just to kind of see what was moving through. You know, I got some cool stuff with wolves in the winter walking through and some deer and some elk and some moose. But the craziest discovery was as it got hot,
bears were constantly using this wallow. Now I'd maybe seen a little bit of bear sign in that area. I'd never actually laid eyes on a bear, but through the course of the pictures, I discovered that there was over six different bears using this one small wallow in this one canyon.
And that really opened my eyes up to how many bears are actually in most of these places that you never see. So exploiting something like a food source that they're using, a trail that they're using, a rubbing area that they're using, and just understanding when and where they're going through there.
you can kind of take some whitetail tactics and just put it in a large spot and stock frame, if that makes sense. So you've got a pattern ability of a bear. And now most of the patterns revolve around a food source. So you find the food source.
you find sign of the bear, and then you hunt that area and try to exploit and find the pattern that the bear is using and use that knowledge to intersect his path. Now, you can also have multiple areas where you're finding sign, where you're finding good food sources and maybe signs
some other good vantage where you have clear openings near thick cover that the bear will likely live in. And you can go from area to area. And then once you figure out which one is the best spot for you to be at, you position yourself in that spot. And then the waiting game comes in. You glass all day, you glass evenings and mornings, whatever you decide to do, and try to figure out when that bear's coming out and intersect your path with where the bears are
based on your knowledge of the food sources and their patterns in the area. Now, I hope that that gave you an understanding, a little bit of focusing on the type of areas where bears are going to be. And it really does all revolve around food sources and then pattern ability.
So next week, what I'm going to do is we're going to take it a step further. We're going to put that knowledge into action in hunting application and how to exploit it with hunting tactics. So we're going to talk about glassing and how I would set up in a canyon if I think that I've found the spot where they're feeding and have those patterns recognized. I'm going to talk about
a moving hunting bear tactic, which is pretty much walking logging roads. And I'm going to talk about the ways that I kind of figure out when the bears are going and which roads to walk and what times of day and all that kind of stuff. And then another tactic that I've used a lot in both spring and fall is calling for bears. So we're going to cover all that next week. And I think that that will really kind of give you the necessary tools to take where do I look and then how do I hunt
and make you more successful. I want to quickly, before we get out of here, answer a question that
I'm going to pull it up right now. This one, you know, last week we talked about backcountry food. And so I got a question here through Instagram from Jesse Wright. He says, loved the food backcountry pod last week. And this question is, how are you cooking with the jet boil in the backcountry? You said you fry up meat sometimes with oils. Are you packing a pan with you? That's a great question. So
My standard stove system, I've used jet boils. I also really like the MSR reactor. It's pretty much just like a jet boil. It's just a little bit faster boiling and I kind of like that one a little bit better. But yeah, so I do a couple different things.
It depends on how far I'm going, whether I pack a pan or not. It is nice to have a pan, especially if we're talking about spring hunting, I like to bring a pan just to fry some fish in. It's worth it to maybe just bring a little bit larger pot that I could fry stuff in or boil water in and just use that one pot. Sometimes I'll just bring a really lightweight, small fry pan.
Or I will just cook it right in my Jetboil cup or whatever. I've done that many times. I'll use those coconut oil single serve packs. I'll just put it in the Jetboil cup. The key is to just try to turn it down as low as possible and fry it up that way. Now, another way to do it is use your Jetboil and I build like a rock base.
I set like four rocks around the Jetboil a few inches above the flame. And then whatever pan I bring, I set that on top. One thing you should know, if you just took like a fry pan, just a random fry pan, and you set it on the top of your Jetboil to fry your food, it will actually catch your Jetboil on fire and melt all the plastic. I know that because I've done it.
It's just they have like the Jetboil cups or even the MSR reactor ones that has to have a special gap built into the cup. Now they make some fry pans.
that you could use, but I just feel like there's some lighter weight ones that you can take and smaller that you can just get on your own outside of the ones that they sell. But to use them correctly, I actually stack rocks around the jet boil and then use that to prop the pan above my flame. And that also helps me control the heat because some of those you can't turn down that low to fry stuff. It ends up just searing and burning the outside, but leaving the meat inside fairly raw or rare.
So if you want to get it like cooked better, I'll just add some oil, build up rocks and then put a light pan on it. If I'm not going crazy far, that little extra weight is just a creature comfort. If I am going a little bit deeper, you know, you can, you could think about getting a bigger pot, like a wider pot. That's more that also boils water, but has a little bit more room for frying up some meat and other
and other things. And then, you know, you just kind of sometimes have to deal with the water, a little bit tainted flavor water the next time you cook, but it's not too bad. So that's what I do with that.
I appreciate you guys listening in and I'm excited to answer all these questions everybody has on bear hunting. I hope that between this podcast and next week's, you really gain a better picture and some insight and make it not so frustrating, but just have an idea of is what you're doing
going to work and be successful because bear hunting can be long. It can be long days, a lot of glassing and not seeing a lot in that spot and stock method, depending on the type of area you're in. So I think just understanding that you're doing the right thing is half the battle of keeping that persistence and then keeping you successful. So until next week, uh, stay quarantined, you know, social distance and, uh, we'll, what, what are we going to do? We're going to, uh,
This is closing the distance, so we're going to open the distance. We're opening the distance. Yeah. Have a great week and open the distance. See ya.
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