Ep. 62: How to Get Your Vehicle Western Hunt Ready
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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.

Hey, what's up everyone? Hope you're all doing well. It's that time of year. It's October. We are in the middle of our hunting season. If it's that September, October, November timeframe, all the stuff that we've been talking about up until this point has just been talk. Now it's time to gear up and get into some action.

I really like this time of year because there's a lot of new seasons starting. Maybe it's a muzzleloader season, a lot of general rifle seasons, a lot of cool stuff to be had, especially out west here. And as you load up, maybe you're going to head out for a hunting adventure this fall. I think there's a few items that you're going to want to consider adding to your kit. Really, if I think about it, one thing people often forget to talk about, or at least hunters forget to talk about when it comes to remote hunts is the fact that

you're probably going to be traveling a long distance off-road in some pretty remote areas with no services. So maybe you're a guy that's coming out west for the first time, or maybe you live out here and, you know, these are just some things that you're going to want to think about. Because what I'm going to do today is I'm going to give you a rundown for getting your vehicle western hunt ready so you can be self-sufficient no matter what the weather or trail throws your way. I'm going to give you a rundown of the 20 things that never leave my truck and how to use them.

Growing up in the state of Nevada, I really learned pretty young how to travel off-road. And I think so much of that is something that I often take for granted because, I mean, I remember I was out deer hunting in the middle of nowhere one time. And it's just, there's a lot of remote areas, a lot of really rough roads. And I was down this road that took me probably half a day to get down that I ended up setting up a base camp and hiking out from there. Just nobody around, not bothered. And I was like,

Coming back out that road and here come like a couple of Jeeps and some other, I don't know, maybe a land cruiser or forerunner or whatever. I'm like, what are these guys doing out here? They did not look like they had any hunting stuff with them. So I kind of pull over and talk with them and they're like, oh yeah, we're, we're overlanding.

overlanding. I've never heard of that. What the heck is overlanding? I didn't even realize that's a pretty big thing. It's like people go out and off-road and camp and whatever. That's just what I did all the time.

going hunting. I didn't even know that that was its own subset of essentially what I'm doing all the time. And when I came to think about it, I was like, oh man, I've been overlanding pretty much around the world. I mean, I've done those same things in Africa, the top end of Australia, New Zealand, all across the Western US. I mean, actually my older truck, I put over 120,000 off

off-road miles, like some pretty rough miles on that vehicle through all my guiding and just traveling and all that stuff. So over the years, I've put in a lot of this time off-roading and it's just something that I kind of always assumed people did or whatever and didn't even realize that it was such a thing to travel these remote roads. And it was just part of what we did, especially growing up in Nevada. It's like,

I would say in the lower 48, it's definitely, I would say the least populated or has the most remote areas. There's a lot of places that, you know, when I was growing up, it might be hundreds of miles between services and pretty rough dirt roads that you could get on. You might draw a deer tag in an area that there's nothing around and you got to get yourself, your vehicle, whatever there and back. And if something goes wrong, you got to be able to take care of it and get back to where you're going.

So I figured today I might as well tell a good story about quote unquote, an overlanding adventure, which is essentially me just going hunting and then parking. But, you know, I think of those places that I've been, there's been so many types of recoveries and situations that I've got in. I like to think of myself as pretty good. Like I'll pat myself on the back a little bit, but I don't think there's anything that I can get stuck in and not get unstuck. So long as I have a couple tools that I like to always have.

So I figure might as well tell a good recovery story. This one, while you might think is going to come from somewhere out West, let's just travel down to the South Pacific, the South Island of New Zealand. We've got a ton of people that love to listen to this podcast from there. So we might as well throw some stories, some sprinkle, some stories in there, some awesome New Zealand stories.

This story takes place the first year I actually went down to New Zealand. I don't even know the first time I went down there actually trying to think about it, but it was a while ago and I essentially booked like a three month long stay. It was like the maximum amount of time before I had to get a different kind of visa, which I ended up actually getting after that.

But I figured I would go down there and I just really wanted to like explore, hunt on my own. Hunting tar was like a dream of mine. And I just realized on my guide salary, it was not going to be, I mean, the price tag on those hunts was just astronomical for me at the time. So I figured, well, I'm going to go down there and see if this is something I can do on my own. I'd never heard of, at that point, never heard of an American going down there and DIY hunting.

But it was a dream of mine to chase Taurus specifically and Shammy as well. And Red Deer if I came across them. So I did months of research and loaded up my stuff and just headed down there. When I got down there, I ended up

buying a little Toyota Hilux surf, which is just like a, essentially it's for Americans. It's a forerunner, but it's a diesel. Mine was a diesel forerunner. And, uh, this one had a little bit of like aftermarket stuff, but it was, I got it from a guy in town that pretty much put some cool stuff on it, but never really, never really gave it a test run, you know?

which was perfect and it was a great deal so I bought that I called it the tar car and traveled around for a while down there and that we just go to different places hunting camping doing whatever so you know through the course of the time I've met a lot of good people and one of the guys that guided with me here in the U.S. ended up going down there as well so we decided we were going to go out and do a little bit of tar hunting up this one drainage that I've been hunting quite a bit

And so we're taking the vehicle out and we got kind of like a late start. We were a little bit further north and we're traveling down to this. I like to, I just wanted to explore as many places as I could. So I was exploring somewhere a little bit further north earlier and figured, oh, let's go back down to this Canyon where I had done pretty good on tar a few weeks earlier.

So we get down, we're going to drive up the river valley. And there was this hut at the head of the river that I'd parked maybe two huts before and hiked up there. But the hunting was really good once we got up there. So I figured I kind of like GPSed a way out.

But I didn't have any mapping software or anything. I just had like a little handheld GPS that kind of worked. And then it ran out of batteries. Well, and then I just, it's like probably the first time I'd used it, but I was hoping to try to find a good track to get up to this hut. And there's maybe, I don't even know how many river crossings. So you got a picture, you're just driving up, you get to the road, the road ends in this big wide river Valley. And Hey, I got a snorkel on the vehicle suite and

We're just going to drive across the river and pick our way through the rocks all the way up the head of this thing. And then just base out of there and do our big hunts from there. Because it seemed like a pretty good spot where it's like by the time I got there and whatever, it was like, man, it'd be nice to be able to just base out of this hut with all our stuff and then hike from there because we could get into some rougher country and some bigger bulls.

So we got a little bit of a late start out. We've got like this, I can't remember, we stopped at a service station. There was like one of those, it was almost like a cocktail napkin map of actually, we're like, oh, this is the river drainage we're going into. And I didn't have any maps of anything, but they have like this little map.

I don't even, it would be like an advertisement for something where it has all these ads around it. And then the map was kind of like just something to look at. So it had a couple of different drainages and showed some huts on it. So I'm like, okay, cool. It was like not to scale, at least I didn't think or whatever, but I figured it was based on something. And I didn't know that there was other huts across the river. So we get a late start out and we're like, Hey, maybe we'll just try staying at one of these huts halfway up. So we don't have to go all the way. Cause there's no way we're going to make it up this river Valley. It,

at night. So we start driving, we get to the first river crossing kind of where the road ends, cross the river, go up kind of picking our way through the rocks and it's starting to get dark. So we just keep driving, driving and finally kind of get to this point where it's like, man, I can't really figure out where somebody had been. There's some Cairns where people had driven before and some tire, you kind of see tire tracks, but

But it's just like, there's no good route. And I'm assuming that most of these routes change constantly just as the river blows out. Maybe even every time it rains, it changes. So I thought, I pull out my little cocktail napkin map and I'm like looking, I'm like, oh, hey, there's a hut over here. Maybe we should just check that out for tonight. Go stay there. Maybe hunt around in the morning. We'll keep heading up the river valley the next day. So Bart's like, sweet. That sounds good.

We kind of like in the dark, I'm like having him walk ahead a little bit with flashlight and we're taking turns driving and picking our way across the river, cross the river, get up on this little bench. I'm like, man, this looks kind of wet. I was like, you wait here. I'm going to go check it out and make sure something we can drive on. He's like, yeah, sounds good. So I like walk up and he's, as I'm walking, he's like driving behind me and I'm like, hold on. Like I give him a sign, like stop, stop, stop.

he kind of stops and I walk ahead and it's just marshy. And I'm like, okay, no. I'm like shaking my head. No, we're going to turn around. I start walking back and he starts coming toward me. And I'm like waving my arms like, no, don't come this way. Don't come this way. I don't know if he thought he could just like power through it or what, but he gets in the boggy part and just buries the truck.

instead of just like letting off a little bit he just floors it more and just sinks the vehicle right up to the floorboards so my gosh shit this sucks and now it's starting to rain i'm like oh man well whatever okay we'll just camp here so we grabbed some stuff hiked to the hut i'd actually been stuck somewhere in like a very similar situation so that's why i was out and i was by myself the last time so i was like that's why i was out walking at first so we didn't get buried

But we got buried. So then it started to rain and just start downpouring. I'm like, oh man, this is going to be bad. So in the hut all night, just like waiting out the storm and go back the next morning. And the truck just like sank because that everything just the water got deeper. Now it's like running water over it and pretty much sunk up to the doors, just completely buried.

I'm like, man, this sucks. And this is a place you are not going to, nobody's coming to help you. You're not, this is way before satellite messengers. This is, I don't even know if, I mean, I owned a cell phone, but I don't think I had a cell phone that worked. Like this is not, nobody's coming for me. This is, this is not good. So we're like, all right, well, we'll just figure this out.

So we decide to... We've got the high-lift jack, and we just start trying to jack the truck up, but it just wouldn't bite because it was so, so soupy, so swampy. So we start walking to the river, loading up our backpacks with rocks, and then carrying our rocks up to the truck. I would have tried to winch it out with the high-lift jack, but...

There was nothing to winch to, and I couldn't get the spare tire out because we were just bogged so deep. So we start taking rocks, and we're just trying to jack the end up, put rocks underneath the tires, cutting branches and the trees. But we're right in the middle of between the forest and the river. So it's like a quarter mile of the river and a quarter mile of the forest. So getting materials to this particular spot was pretty rough.

So we've got our backpacks, we've got our rocks, we're just loading up the pack with rocks, hiking them to the vehicle, putting the rocks down. I think it took about a pack load of rocks every time to just jack the vehicle up. So the rocks would sink, sink, sink, and you just keep jacking the vehicle up and they would just keep sinking, sinking, sinking. Maybe 11 or 12 rocks stacked on each other. By the time it would actually bite and you could lift it up, then we'd stack rocks under the tires.

And then back out a little bit. Then it would sink again. We do it over, carry rocks, jack the truck up. It took us, I think, three days to get the vehicle out. And as we calculated, you know, we go to the river, quarter mile, come back, quarter mile, about a hundred pound pack. Cause we just had, I had the big, I actually think I had a, one of those old, like either Kelty freighter packs or like the Barney style pack frame packs. You could load that thing with some serious rocks.

we come back and i think we figured out we carried like two ton of rock or something over the course of those three or three and a half days just to get the vehicle out and we kept having to do that and we cut down big sticks or whatever put them under the tires and build like ramps jack the vehicle up get stuff underneath we had to jack the back end up and front end up separately

keep stacking stones and essentially build a road out of this thing that was now flooded and bogging the vehicle.

However, the bright side to the story is once we got the vehicle out, we did make it to that final hut. Instead of going home, no, we pushed forward. We made it to the hut that we wanted to get to originally. Now we only had one day left essentially to hunt. So we hiked up to the head of the glacier and we both shot some pretty good bull tar. We packed them back. I actually think I ran into a red deer on the way down, like a young stag.

I roared him right in, but I ended up passing him up because I figured, ah, maybe I'll find him a couple of years from now. Who knows? And we got our two big bull tar, got back to the truck and made it out successful. While most of our hunt was spent recovering the vehicle, it was definitely an adventure to remember.

Whether you're new to Western hunting or maybe you live out West, this is what you do. This is your life. I think that there's certain things that you should have in your vehicle that can make you self-sufficient, that can get you out of pretty much any situation. And there's some things that can really prevent, I would say, bad things from happening. Mostly it's a safety thing, but it's also just being self-reliant a little bit. As a guide and outfitter,

Every single year, I run into people that are from somewhere else or even people that are from nearby that are definitely underprepared in the terms of what happens if something happens. For example, just a few weeks ago, I ran into a guy that had driven up a road that not very many people probably drive up. And there was a windstorm and a tree, giant tree blew across the road.

This guy was just sitting there waiting and hoping and praying that somebody with a chainsaw would come by so he could actually get his vehicle out. These kind of things, I mean, I find in the desert in Nevada, people that don't have the right supplies or tools for their vehicles. Now, I'm not saying that you have to be a master mechanic. In fact, I am very mechanically uninclined, and I will admit that. Like, I'm not the type of guy that you're going to call to come fix your truck, but I can...

get you out of pretty much any situation. It was just a few things. Now I've had to improvise my kit so many times that now there's just things I leave in my truck year round. So I don't even have to worry about it. But this list of things is things that you should definitely consider. And I'll give you a few ways that I've used some of this stuff, some out of the box tips. I mean, I've had to

MacGyver my way out of many, many situations, some almost life-threatening in vehicles on icy roads where you almost go off the road and I'm

look in the back and here's what I've got. I've got a set of toe straps and like, that's it, you know, some ratchet straps and toe straps and some chains. So, you know, you can get by with very little, but I think that there's a few of these items that you're just definitely going to want to consider or maybe start to think about. So I'll run through this list and maybe give you some ideas and some of the ways that you can use all this. So the top of the list of 20 items that should just be in every hunter's truck when you go out

First one, we're going to go with a shovel. It might seem simple, but that shovel is going to come in in so many different ways. Not only for your base camp, digging a hole just for your bathroom, as you've probably heard me say other places before, don't leave your toilet stuff above the ground where it can blow around at a trailhead for everybody else and just be disgusting like that. Bury your shit.

But the shovel's for more than that. Growing up in the desert, the shovel's mandatory because, you know, if you happen to start a brush fire or something, you need something to put it out. I have actually put out another person's fire with my shovel, which who knows how big that fire would have got if I didn't have that shovel with me. But it's also good for later in the season when you need to dig out of things. Maybe you got high centered. Maybe you got...

You need to dig out underneath your tires. Maybe you're stuck in snow and you got to dig your way in or out to assist yourself in a recovery. The shovel is just a key piece that you can use essentially year round for so many different things. So shovel, one of the things must have. Another item, number two, we're going to say is a toe strap.

tow strap, just a big nylon strap that you can tow somebody with. I have had many instances, and this one happened to happen in New Zealand as well, where a vehicle broke down and we had to tow our way out for many, many miles. If you don't have that, it's going to be very hard to get that vehicle out. Now, I've also used a tow strap for other things like

pulling a tree out of the way. Toe strap I've used to secure my truck to essentially the high side of a mountain to keep it from sliding off a cliff. You know, so there's just a lot of different uses for this toe strap.

Number three, we're going to go with a jumper box. I don't know how many times I've got back to the truck and maybe a door was left a little bit of jar. I remember one time I was guiding. This was before I had one of these little jumper box things. So by jumper box, what I mean is something that can jump your truck.

without having to need another vehicle. The one I actually have, Linex, the spray and bed liner company, I got it from them. It's like this power bar. It's awesome because I can charge my cell phone, my cameras, everything off of it. So I actually, it's kind of heavy, but because I do so much filming and all that stuff, I carry it with me in my backpack when I'm packed in. It's like, instead of carrying a bunch of batteries, I'll bring that, charge up everything. But it also has these attachments where I can jump my truck off of it. And it's pretty small.

Pretty awesome little piece of kit. But having something like that, I mean, you can get something at Walmart, wherever, just something that you can jump your battery with in case you get back and you've got a dead battery. Nothing worse than being out of service, being miles from the road, getting back to your vehicle and the battery being dead. I used to actually just disconnect my battery at the trailhead all the time. I figured out it's a good way to not have people steal my truck.

and not worry about the battery dying. But, you know, having that jumper kit is really, really good. I know there was one time I was guiding, we just got back to the trailhead. It was like one of those days where it's just like a long, long day. You're just like, oh man, we're finally back to the truck. Yes, we get to go. One of the guys had left his door slightly open and I had the keys inside. His door was slightly open. Somehow the doors were locked and he goes, oh man, the door was left open and then shuts it.

And then the doors now lock. So now we've got a dead battery because I had the keypad thing. That's right. So I could have got into the truck to get the keys out, but the battery was dead. So not only do we have a dead battery, but we now have, we're locked out of the truck. And I'm like, ah, shit. It's like 20 miles back to the road, like the main road. I'm like, oh gosh. And it's now at this point, like, I don't even know what time it is, but

We'd seen some elk at a different spot from a long ways away. It's like tomorrow we want to get there. Otherwise we probably would just, you know, slept there, but all of our stuff is now locked in the truck. Like our backpacks and everything. Somehow keys got locked in dead battery. It was a terrible, terrible coincidence of events. I ended up breaking into, well, I ended up breaking my knife as well, trying to break into my truck. And then I decided to just say, screw it and walk out.

So I'm starting to walk out and I get about eight miles in and I get one bar of service. This is back when you got flip phones and just like one little bar. I'm like, oh yeah.

Oh, cool. This crazy. Yeah. Awesome. So I call my buddy. I'm like, hey, man, we're up at the trailhead. Can you come get us? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, bring some jumper cables and something to pry my door open with. He's like, all right, cool. And we ended up just hooking the jumper cables to the body and one of the lead wires. And I was able to use my code so I didn't have to pry open my back window and jump the truck. If I had one of those jumper boxes, I probably would have been a lot better off in that particular scenario.

Or actually many other scenarios. Okay. So number four, that was just like a super tangent, whatever. It's my podcast. Number four. Oh, tire plugs. Yeah. I'm always amazed at how few people carry tire plugs with them.

you know, off-roading like rocks. I mean, as long as you don't damage the sidewall, you shouldn't do it, but I've repaired sidewall. I've like put 10 plugs in one sidewall thing. And just to get me out, especially in like a Ranger ATV. So if you aren't familiar with them, like this is stuff that I just always thought everybody knew about. And then I realized like, Oh, somebody has got a flat, they got a stick in their tire or whatever. And like, Oh yeah, just plug it.

So a tire plug is essentially how it just is like a piece of kind of like rope. You put some rubber glue on it. You've got a rasp so you can make the hole a little bit bigger, rough it up a little bit and you stuff the plug in, you pull it out and it seals the hole in your tire. They are super handy to have. They're like five bucks, I think, or you could get some pretty cool kits now on Amazon. I showed this year, spring bear hunting ran into a guy

flat tire. He's like, Oh man, you know, is there anywhere around? I was like, Oh, we'll just fix it right now. Pull out my plugs, fix his tire. He's like, Oh crap. Then he immediately got on his phone, Amazon tire plugs and found some pretty awesome kits for him for like 20 bucks on Amazon. So I probably should buy one of those or maybe put them on my website to sell, but they're pretty solid. Um,

So that's something that you should probably think about having and know how to use them. They're so easy. Like anybody can do it. And it sounds difficult maybe if you've never done it, but should just be something that you have in your kit. Cause if you get a nail, it's a long ways. I mean, even if you're just road driving from wherever, I mean, I've been driving from Nevada to a hunt in Wyoming, picked up a nail along the way on a Saturday at the middle of the night. And instead of having to go into a tire shop, I just pull over,

find the hole, plug the tire and keep on going on my merry way. Now, if you are going to use tire plugs, one thing you're going to need, and I suggest this, this would be what, number five, maybe a tire pump. I got one. I literally just picked it up at, I don't know, maybe Walmart, Harbor Freight. Not really sure. I think it's Slime Company makes it. It's just plugs into my cigarette lighter, goes, my dad has one that's like a

it looks like a cordless drill. It works with his cordless drill batteries, hooks up, you set the pressure and hit go. Yeah, I guess his is Milwaukee. Like you can set the tire pressure you want and it just pumps it up until it gets to that. Those are super handy to have, not just for recovering flat tires, but in the wintertime, if you're on snow and ice, especially if you've got like a really good short wheelbase and bigger, wider tires,

Go out there and just let a little bit of air out of your tires. Get those tires a little bit flatter, make some more like tracks. So you're running them like low pressure and man, you've got a lot better traction over the snow and ice. You can get a lot more places or get out of a lot more places. Then when you get back, pull your vehicle over, plug in your air pump, pump those tires back up. That pump's coming so handy for so many other people as well. Like, I mean, I've run into people just, oh, the tire's low, whatever, maybe just fill up along the way.

I mean, there's so many uses for that tire pump. I end up having to buy one every couple of years because I just use them and abuse them. But for the price of it, they aren't very expensive. And it's probably one of the best things in my truck that I use more than anything. It doesn't have to just be used when you run into a flat tire situation. Like I said, using it in the wintertime, I use it almost daily.

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Number six is going to just be a jack. Now, I just carry like a standard bottle jack or whatever kind of jack. I mean, this is something that every vehicle should have. I mean, I think it goes without saying, but we're going to go to number seven now, which would be a high lift jack. I always have a high lift jack in my truck. And if you aren't familiar with a high lift jack, I don't know the best way to describe this. Just look it up. It's a jack.

It's super handy though. So the high lift jack is just a really good thing to have for so many reasons. So yeah, it's just like having a jack where you can jack things up, but it lifts the body of the vehicle so you can get a lot higher. It's really good if you're stuck, you can kind of like maybe push yourself off of the jack off of whatever you're stuck on. Maybe you got high centered on a big rock or dirt mound.

Maybe there's a scenario where you're stuck and you need to put stuff under the tires Well, you can jack up the whole back end and stuff things underneath the tires a lot more efficiently Now one thing you want to think about is if you aren't familiar with a high lift it essentially can lift the body the whole half of the vehicle so What will happen is that your suspension will keep the tire and axle down? So you all you have to do is just strap your axle to the body and then jack it up stuff stuff underneath and

It's also really convenient as a winch. It's kind of hard to explain how to do it, but what it is, is there's like a big handle that acts like a fulcrum that pushes the jack up. So you can actually use your toe strap, which was up there in item two.

hook that to the vehicle and then maybe the next item on the list chains to something further away. And then you can actually use it as a winching device to winch your vehicle out. Sometimes to get unstuck, what I found is all you need is just a little push, a little bit of some kind of pull in the right direction to get you out from wherever you're stuck at. And it doesn't always take like a winch to do it. Now, if you've got a winch on your vehicle, that's great, but sometimes

Sometimes that takes a lot of extra wiring, a bumper, some things that are expensive, even though they've been getting cheaper lately. But you can use your high lift to winch yourself out. I've done it so many times. One of the ways that I normally do it is because if I'm stuck somewhere, it's probably I'm bogged in something where there's not many trees around. So what I would do is I'd use my

spare tire or bury something. So I go out, I take my shovel, which I always have. I dig a hole. I bury that spare. I mean, I've even actually winched my truck off of my tire iron and

like burying it and then putting some rocks on top, you'd be surprised how much strength you can get by just burying something and then running some rope or whatever through it. Then using the high lift to just winch myself out on whatever I've buried. I've even taken logs, buried logs in a boggy area or in sand, like in snow. I mean, it happens in snow so much. Sometimes all you need is just a little bit of pull out of the ruts you buried yourself into and you can quickly pull yourself out and readjust. So

The high lift is like, I think that every truck should have one or vehicle. Okay, so we're going to jump on to number eight. And I said chains, and I forgot that I made some notes here. What I meant was tire chains on this one. Number eight, you definitely need to have a set of tire chains in your vehicle. It surprises me. I get asked the question a lot, like, hey, when do we put chains on? When should I use chains? Last week in the Q&A, I think this question kind of spurred this whole thought of,

we should definitely talk about stuff that should go in your vehicle for people that might not encounter snow a lot, for people that might not off-road a lot, for people that might not just know this stuff. So tire chains. I go chains for all four, but I'm doing this a lot. You have to realize like out West, there's so many roads, say Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, where it's a logging road. It

They are great roads for driving on. You could drive pretty much a sedan up them most time of year. But what happens is in the wintertime, you get the snow that turns to ice. That ice now makes it a very, very slippery road. And these roads are carved out of a mountain. They're essentially one lane roads carved out of a mountain that if you slip going up or down, you're probably going to go off a cliff and it's not going to end well for you.

That's why I carry chains. And you will encounter these kinds of situations if you're hunting at a lot of places out West, especially in that October to November or later timeframe.

One of the places that I absolutely changed were necessary to keep me on the road. There wasn't much snow. It was a New Mexico hunt in area 2B that I drew. Those roads got so muddy. I had to chain up just to stay on the road to get out of where I was originally at. If I didn't have four chains, I think I would have just been stuck on the side of the road like a couple other vehicles that we saw during that trip. So tire chains are a must.

The question last week was, how do you know when to put tire chains on and why chains over four-wheel drive or more than just four high, four low, when do you throw chains on? I throw chains on when it's icy and you're slipping around. When you think that the conditions warrant you that you could lose control and go off the road, four-wheel drive can't keep you on the road because you need the traction first off. So it's whenever you lose traction.

Two years ago, I drove up a road in Montana, had a couple of guys with me, drove up in the morning. It was like, it wasn't bad, whatever. It was a normal day. A little bit icy, a little bit snowy, but four wheel drive going up. Come back down, the roads weren't bad, but there's one shaded side and it was pretty late. What had happened was it had melted during the day and then turned to ice. I kind of thought about it in the back of my head. Maybe I should chain up, but man, it's been so good.

So you're driving down and I've got it in four low, the vehicle, and now it's like the back end starts to go. The road's slanted the wrong way. It's a big cliff and my back end starts to pass me. I'm about to go off the road. I bury the nose in the right side and the back of the truck slides sideways and my truck stops perfectly sideways,

on the road with the back tires, just a little bit off. Like I didn't fall down the other side, but the tires were definitely over the threshold of the road. And now we're just sitting in the middle of the road sideways. I'm like, okay, I opened up my door, put my feet on the ground and boom, I go right underneath the door and just start sliding down the road. Oh, this is black ice. This is bad. This is should have been chained up. You know, it would have definitely helped. I

So I ended up getting out, hooking my tow strap and like a ratchet strap, one underneath the vehicle, one to the tire. I know this is kind of hard to explain, but to a tree up on the hill, it was super MacGyver, but I ended up running it on my tire in a way where I could, somebody could slightly gas it and use it to winch the back end over using the tire as the winch. Cause I didn't have a winch or anything. And I didn't have my high lift with me either.

So it ended up working. I ended up sliding the truck down and having it anchored up higher. So it actually didn't go off the road. Then I chained up and then I drove out fine. So those kinds of things where it's slippery, whatever, that's when you want those chains. As a side note, I think this is probably one of the biggest takeaways of this whole trucks, chains question. I don't know if other people do this. Let me know if you have a lot of experience. There's a good portion of our season where we have to chain up a lot.

I always chain up the fronts first. And I think people don't really realize that they think, oh, put them on the back tires because that pushes you. I think like you're in four wheel drive. You need to be able to steer yourself out of anything. It doesn't matter what the back end does, as long as you have control and it kind of helps you stop a little bit going downhill. If you only got two sets of chains and you're driving in the mountains, I'm not saying like roads or anything like that. That's completely different, like paved roads, whatever. I'd put them on the back. If

If I'm driving in off-road mountains, I chain up the fronts first if it's in four-wheel drive. So that's just what I do and I've had a lot of success with it. Number nine, we got a wood block. I always have a wood block, especially later in the year. I use it for a lot of things. I use it to chalk the tires if I have to. I use it as protection against my vehicle for the high lift because the way that high lift jack works, you either need like metal sidesteps or a big bumper. I don't have that on my new truck. So mostly I...

winch from my tow ball, but I put that wood block against the truck and the high lift to keep it from going forward and smashing a hole into my vehicle. If you're new to high lifts, you'll realize that the first time you try it and it falls forward and you just damage the crap out of your side paneling or whatever. But I also use it in the wintertime. I don't drive over my chains when I put them on. I go over the top, hook them from the back first, and then finish hooking them in the front from underneath.

You do not have to drive over chains to put them on and off. So practice that before you get out here, putting chains on a lot of people that have never been in snow conditions, haven't had a lot of practice with it. So do that. I have found though, that if I've got those wood blocks, I'll drive up onto the wood block and then I can get those chains on super tight because I've got that gap off the ground where I can work a little bit easier and it's just a little bit faster. So I keep that wood block at my truck, especially later season for just throwing chains on and off real quick.

All right. The next one on the list, a gas can that goes without saying, if you're going to be hunting a long ways away from other things, it's always good to have a little bit extra gas with you. And that kind of rolls into the next item on our list, which I highly suggest a chainsaw and all the fixing. So bar oil, oil, gas, whatever. Chainsaw is really good if you're in timbered areas, but it's also good. I mean, I've used a chainsaw to get us unstuck and

in the flood plains of Australia because we were able to cut boards that we could use as levers as well as things to stuff under the tires when we got bogged in like a buffalo wallow wasn't driving

Somebody else was, and we got stuck in it. So like the chainsaw is really good for that cutting things. I mean, it's also good for other camp stuff, cutting firewood. It also just makes you feel awesome. When somebody needs something cut and you have a chainsaw, nothing feels more manly than owning a chainsaw. There's so many times where I have found, I've literally been driving down a road coming up that I just drove up big tree across it. One time last spring, I thought,

I drove in one way, a tree fell. I went to, I didn't want to spend the time to cut it away. So I'd turn around to go cause I could get back out the other way. A tree had fallen that way as well. So I was stuck between two trees.

Every year I have to cut a tree out for someone that doesn't have a chainsaw and some of those people have been waiting a long time. So if you're hunting, I would say Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, maybe even someplace in Colorado, it's probably not a bad idea to have a chainsaw in the vehicle or a saw of some kind. If you want a handsaw, handsaw. I mean, there's plenty of times where I just use a handsaw or have some kind of saw. If you're a guy that's flying and renting a car, have some kind of wood saw with you. I mean, something to saw your way out, worst case scenario.

Number 12, some form of large ratchet strap. It's really good for securing things. Maybe you've got your big elk rack in the back. I mean, this podcast is getting long because I keep just going off of tangents, but I have had a caribou rack sitting in the bed of a truck driving down the road, semi pass too close. The air from that semi through the entire caribou rack out of the truck. I'm the secure it guy for sure. In the group of guys that

They were like, ah, let it ride or throw a strap on it. I'm surprisingly throw a strap it on guy in a family of guys that just let it ride. The one time I didn't strap something down, my caribou flew out of the back of the truck and started skidding down the highway we were on. We stopped and the caribou skidded past us. Fortunately, nothing was broken except the back tines lost about six inches each. But outside of that,

You know, it's good to have those straps to secure whatever you've got, but it can also be good to help you in recovery. Like I said, I used it to keep my truck from falling off the side of a hill. Probably not ideal, but it's what I had at the time. Number 14, you should make sure you got jumper cables in your vehicle. Nothing worse than having a dead battery asking for a jump and nobody having jumper cables. Number 15,

a toolkit, just a basic toolkit. If something's loose, if something needs fixed, being self-sufficient, having what you need to get something simple fixed. It doesn't mean you need to be a mechanic, but

I mean, I've had the connections on my battery go off and it's like, oh man, all you need is a ratchet of some kind just to fix it, just to get the vehicle started. Little things. I mean, maybe your air filter. I had an aftermarket air filter that fell off one time and just like sucking air uphill that wouldn't work. So I just, a little bit of a toolkit, a couple little things here and there, something to fix something with.

Number 16 is huge, especially if you're in a hot summer hunt or desert type area, extra water. It's actually mandatory, I would say, in a lot of places because you want to have water with you. You've got it at your base camp or whatever. If you get stuck, you've got water, but it's also really good if your vehicle starts to overheat.

Or if, God forbid, you start a fire of some kind, you've got that, or something starts a fire, you've got that to pour on in combination with your shovel as fire suppressant. And a lot of areas, I would say, should make that mandatory or it already is mandatory because, as you've seen, man, fires can start pretty easy, especially in September, even into October. So being fire conscious, not driving off-road in tall grass.

If something does happen, having tools to put that fire out. Number 17, your truck's going to be your base camp, but you should always have something warm in it, whether you're just driving across country or whatever. If you get stuck, I mean, I've been stuck driving through Wyoming on a highway that was closed on both ends. And it's like nowhere to go. There's a drift here. We're stuck. I got to sleep in my truck and it's 20 below having that like something warm just in case that happens.

I mean, it seems like common sense, but you hear stories all the time of people being underprepared. Number 18, I always keep some kind of fire starter in my truck, a lighter and some fire starter just because if you are stuck and you got to spend the night having that. Now, obviously you might think, well, I should have all my camping stuff, but

You know, you go do a day hunt. You don't think about it. These are just things that I leave in my truck. So I don't have to think about it. I know it's there. I have extra stuff for when I'm packing in or whatever. This is just stuff that I leave in my vehicle. So it's always ready. Number 19,

Solid, solid piece of equipment. Leather gloves for doing all the things like putting chains on, getting your vehicle unstuck, jacking your vehicle up, cutting wood, having gloves, moving trees, and having a set of leather gloves that always stay in the vehicle is awesome. And then finally, number 20, a good first aid kit. It's always good to have it at a base camp somewhere, something that has a little bit extra than what you'd pack in.

You know, it might be one of those scenarios where if something did happen or you're in a vehicle and the vehicle rolls, you're going to want to have a good first aid kit or a good trauma type kit and know how to use it. I've done quite a few online courses and some other things with some of these really good trauma packs. I'll try to find it and maybe put it on my story. Some of the ones that I've seen recently, having those, those better like trauma first aid kits, um,

You never know. I've heard stories. Things happen. I mean, you don't want it to have to happen to you, but if you have it nearby...

That could be a lifesaver or just definitely making things more comfortable. And it might be something that you have to just get into randomly, rarely, hopefully rarely, hopefully never. But having that good first aid kit at your vehicle is always a plus. And then one last note on all this truck stuff. It's just good to keep it organized and know where it's at. I mean, I've got like a deck system where I can just keep... I keep all my recovery stuff in the left drawer and...

It doesn't look pretty, but I just throw everything in there. So it's always in there. I don't have to think about it. Chainsaw oil and all that crap. I just put in one and just keep it. There's the bed of my trucks a little bit more organized. And then I got some of the other stuff in a box, but it's good to just have it organized, know where your stuff's at. So if something does happen, you need to get out. You're quick, efficient, and you've thought about it before you head out West and are relying on some random outfitter or guide or another hunter to drive down the road and save you. That's my public service announcement for the week.

I hope everybody found some of that stuff useful and helpful. I know it kind of went long. In my mind, when I'm planning these out, I think these list things will fly by and then it kind of just adds up. But I think it's fun stuff to talk about. I threw in a few extra stories there. Just a little bit of rabbit hole action, but that happens every once in a while. Go off on some tangents. Next week, I'm going to gear you up for opening day of rifle season. That's

That can be one of the busiest days on the mountain, but it can also be very successful. So I'm going to give you some of my favorite tactics for opening day success, how to plan your hunt, how to find some areas ahead of time and how to be the guy that's tagged out on day one, because that can be a great day to hunt. So make sure you check that out. Come back here next Thursday. I

I really appreciate you all listening. And until next week, don't get stuck. And if you do, know how to get out.

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