You're listening to the Waypoint TV Podcast Network, brought to you by Academy Sports and Outdoors.
Hey everyone, this is Captain Steve Roger from Into the Blue TV.And as soon as I feel a little break from this heat, I know that hunting season is upon us.Actually, the first time I ever went hunting, a buddy took me.
It wasn't my father or my grandfather.In fact, I took my father on his very first hunt. Well, Academy Sports and Outdoor Stores has everything to gear up for the field for less.
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What's your favorite hunting tradition?My brother Thomas and I like to get all our gear out, clean it, organize it, and then we sit down with our counters and plan out the season.
Well, hunting season is finally here and at Academy Sports and Outdoor Store has everything to gear up for the field for less. Plus shop a wide selection of ammo, shotguns, rifles, feeders, gang cameras, camo, and more from the brands you trust.
If you need a hunt license, it ain't no problem.You can pick it up in store while you're shopping.Text HUNT24 to 22369 to take $20 off $100 when you shop hunting supplies at academy.com.
That's HUNT24 to 22369 to take $20 off $100 when you shop at academy.com.
All right, y'all, we're trying something new.This podcast series is focused on the experiences and motivations of adult onset hunters, anglers, and foragers in the field and in the kitchen.Now, if that's you, come on in.Welcome.
We're glad you're here.We're going to kick this off with a story. It's late August 2021, and I'm in the mountains of northern Utah on a private land cow elk hunt.
The last couple of days have been hot, but now I'm sitting on a little knob under an old pine tree with low branches, trying to make myself small against the trunk and wait out a downpour that has blown in behind chilly winds.
A guide sits next to me, dozing off and seemingly unaware of the weather. The surrounding meadow and the L-shaped hillside some 300 yards away have disappeared behind a veil of hard rain.
As the wind intensifies, the rain is blown under the pine's branches and my natural roof is starting to leak.With dry ground in short supply, I'm getting wet and I'm getting cold.
The rain finally starts to let up from deluge to drizzle, but I can't see much through my glasses that are all fogged up and covered with raindrops.
Nothing to do but to wipe them off with the windshield wiper swipe of my finger and think warm thoughts as the wind continues to blow, because now I'm starting to shiver.This is my first hunt.
I had made the decision to become a hunter earlier in the year, bought a rifle, put in time at the range, and watched every YouTube how-to video on hunting, at-home meat processing, and cooking wild game that I could find for months.
Then I drove 13 hours from Arizona to Utah.But that's not where my journey began.
Welcome to the Wild Fish and Game Podcast's new show, The Rookies, presented by Harvesting Nature, a podcast series exploring the food journeys of adult onset hunters, anglers, and foragers.I'm your host, Ken Chapman.
I'm a newbie hunter, a poor angler, wannabe forager, amateur cook, and full-time eater who is on a journey to know where my food comes from and have some great meals with good friends along the way.
This series is for us and by us, the first timers, the newbies, the rookies.
In each episode, we'll meet new hunters, anglers, and foragers, real people discussing real food on a real adventure to learn how to put wild fish, game, and forageables into everyday meals.
We'll learn what inspired them and how they're building their knowledge and skills.We'll talk about their experiences in the field and at the table. Most importantly, what keeps them coming back for more.
Since this is our first episode, we're starting out with all the get-to-know-yous and telling stories of, well, yours truly.
I was raised in an agricultural town in Arizona that has long since been swallowed up by the concrete expansion of the Phoenix metro area and turned into endless rows of cookie cutter houses.
Most of my youth was spent doing farm chores on my grandparents' small subsistence farm and trout fishing in Arizona's White Mountains during the summer.But like my hometown, that lifestyle changed dramatically as I grew older.
First it was the grocery stores that replaced the family garden and livestock.Then it was the fast food joints that became the primary source of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.No more fishin' either.
My physical and emotional health became the product of a lifestyle based on high stress jobs, junk food, and too much booze.
Over the decades, what began as a weight problem and drinking a little too much on the weekends became something different entirely.
By 2014, I weighed over 600 pounds, needed to drink every night just to get to sleep, and was dealing with the high blood pressure that would stroke out a small horse. But it was the depression that was killing me faster than anything else.
That's when a friend saved my life and rescued me at my lowest.Among a number of wisdoms they gave me was one that will always stay with me.You never know how many chances you have left to save your own life, to choose a different path for yourself.
The turnaround in my mental and physical health wasn't full of quantum leaps of progress that you see in commercials or social media. The first step, don't eat food from any place with a drive-thru window.
Now I'd still overeat everything else, and drink too much, but skipping Mickey D's and the other fast food chains became a line in the sand, a line that I haven't crossed in over 10 years.
Next was cutting back on the booze, followed by walking a little at a time, because remember I was the size of a vending machine. I dropped over 100 pounds just with those changes alone.
The following year, I had gastric bypass surgery and dropped another 100 pounds.Then I hit the gym.Two workouts a day, plus hiking any chance I could get, and that got me under 300 pounds.
During this transformation, my relationship with food changed as well.It wasn't just about eating less.It became about eating better, in every sense of the word. I wanted to have a better tasting meal, with better nutrition, from better sources.
I saw the industrial food system spewing out food that was literally killing people, and it had come real close to taking me out as well.
I also started to pay attention to what the industrial food system was doing to farmers, ranchers, and food workers.
It was around this time that I began to see access to healthy, culturally appropriate food as a fundamental right for everyone, and understand the need to defend the folks who grow, raise, harvest, and get our food to the table with renewed importance.
I also knew that I needed to be more active in doing that work myself.Memories from my childhood started creeping in.Grow your own food. know where your food comes from.
Those long dormant lessons had ignited a new purpose, to find fresh, nutritious food that is independent of the industrialized food system.
So I tucked my then girlfriend now wife into turning the backyard of our quarter acre single family home into a garden.Then I built a chicken coop so we could have our own eggs.Then a beehive and planted some fruit trees.
Even started growing mushrooms in a spare bedroom closet.Pretty soon we had ourselves a little urban homestead. What we couldn't grow, we would buy directly from farmers that we met at the farmer's market.
Eventually, we became friends with them and started lending a hand on their farm, helping them build their business, and even volunteering to get rid of a rabbit problem that was destroying crops.We ate a lot of rabbit that year.
Within three years, we were growing the vast majority of our vegetables in the backyard and knew who grew nearly all the rest. my wife's daily avocado addiction and my off-season watermelon craving here and there were the two major exceptions.
We would only go to the grocery store for staple items and meat.So I started fishing again as a way to offset buying some meat.
Arizona has some great little trout streams for the fly rod and those mountain lakes of my childhood were right where I left them all those years ago. At the time, hunting seemed unapproachable.
I didn't grow up around hunters, never butchered anything other than poultry, and had no idea how to cook wild game.Being an adult onset hunter is a choice, one that comes with responsibility and a steep learning curve.
Luckily I like to learn, I find magic in the outdoors, and you know I love good eats.
So I took shooting classes, watched a lifetime's worth of YouTube videos, listened to countless podcasts, read some books, and have even attended a couple of Harvesting Nature's hunting camps.
Over the last couple years, I've had the opportunity to go hunting for wild pigs, deer, elk, and most recently, snow goose.I also started saltwater fishing for halibut, salmon, rockfish, and even tried crabbing.
Now, we only buy beef fat, mainly for burgers, and pork fat for sausage from a family-owned meat shop to turn our wild game into more delectable good eats.
After putting in a lot of effort to know where our food comes from and how it's harvested, I felt obligated, for lack of a better word, to level up my cooking skills.
I'm constantly on the lookout for new ways to use every part of the animal harvested, new recipes, and different preservation techniques including canning, smoking, and dry curing as a way of unlocking more potential.
I also added baking bread and making cheese to the culinary repertoire.That's French for how to sweet talk my wife into letting me go hunting and fishing more often.Somewhere in the midst of all that, I discovered something.
Sharing my wild food adventure with family and friends became an unexpected gift. Meals made with wild game and backyard ingredients came with stories of adventure and built deeper connections to people that mattered the most in our lives.
Those connections between people are a powerful antidote to a society that generates mental health issues, particularly depression among men, in epidemic proportions.
I believe that a good meal harnesses a universal power to build understanding, heal divisions, and even bring the wandering souls back to the fold, if only for a moment.
To foster that magic a little more, I started a tradition that I call Pop-Up Kitchen.
It's an obligation-free, come-as-you-are invitation to share a meal with folks across the different facets of my wife and I's network of incredible humans that we're privileged to know. The gimmick is, the timing is entirely random.
No holidays or special occasions, just a text with a date and time, typically only about 48 hours notice.Location varies as well, it could be our house, a state park, or a random spot in the woods.
If you can make it great, if not, we'll catch you on down the road. There is something truly special about preparing a meal while some of your favorite humans laugh and joke, swap stories, get to know each other, or reconnect after long absences.
Maybe that's what I'm after with this podcast series.Deeper connections to the things that matter and a life well lived in community. Now my wife is the brains of the outfit.
She clocked my interest in becoming a hunter before I did, or at least was willing to admit out loud.She would tease me about watching episodes of Meat Eater, but then give her endless lists of reasons why I wouldn't try hunting.
Don't know how, don't have time, don't have money, etc, etc, etc. I was full of excuses.Some were valid, but many just covered up for the fact that I didn't know if I was a hunter.
I would watch a meat eater episode and dream of the big adventure followed by the tasty meal.But the Steve Rinellas of the world grew up hunting.They lived it as a practice and as a cultural identity. So they were the hunters and I was, well, not.
Not just because I didn't have the experience, but because I didn't have the shared sense of community with hunters.
But once I started taking my wife's advice, something that she would note I should do more of, I began to realize that I could gain the experience, but more importantly, grow into a community that was right for me.
There is no one-size-fits-all journey to harvesting wild fish, game, or forageables.Your adventure for wild foods is yours and different from mine.
But our adventures have shared bonds that tie you and I together and connect us to the arc of big human history.From our ancestors, known and unknown, to our distant future relatives on this land, we share experiences across space and time.
Think about that the next time you're tapping into your inner hunter-gatherer as you mindlessly walk the grocery store, near endless rows of processed and preserved food, virtually devoid of any effort on our part to harvest the prepackaged bounty.
But I digress.Community.That's what I was talking about.To me, community is a verb.It's an action word, because it takes work. I believe we all have the ability and obligation to be community builders.
When it comes to hunting, angling, foraging, or heck just being outdoors, there are lots of different local, regional, national, and digital formations that provide rookies with a sense of belonging, a place to learn, and be supported by folks with a little more experience.
There seems to be fewer cooking communities, especially for Wild Game.I've gained a lot from harvesting nature, so I wanted to give something back.
I've also found a special joy in bringing my friends into hunting, angling, and the outdoors for the first time.
Sharing in their first experiences with Wild Game, the struggles and successes in the field and in the kitchen, has expanded our now shared community. Together we make contributions to our community.
It's like paying our dues for what we get from our community in return.The mutual give and take of our community is how we earn our keep and pay it forward. Back to that little knob under a pine tree in Utah on my first hunt.
The rain and wind is starting to do a number on me.I'm shivering, mentally going through the list of things that I wish I had like rain gear, extra layers, and some gloves.
That's when a quick series of events started that, to be honest, I would have missed had it not been for the guide who was now awake and laser focused on a cream colored fuzzy butt of a cow elk on the opposite hillside.
He says, there's an elk, with a tone that says, duh, right there. Now, I had decided to do a private land hunt as my first hunt so that I could learn from hunters, you know, real hunters, and see how it's done.
I had questions, lots of questions, but what I had gotten to that point was more of, I got you this far, you take it from here kind of vibe. It felt like an embarrassing eternity of time before I found that elk standing next to a bush on the hill.
She had been bedded down waiting out the worst of the storm and hidden from us.But when the rain let up, she stood up and was standing broadside grabbing a snack.All I could do is think, well, this is what you came here for Chapman.Let's get it done.
With that, I slide into a crouched shooting position, using my backpack on an old log.I'm going through the process that I had been taught and done hundreds of times at the range.First, find the distance, 300 yards, at a slight up angle.
Glance at the cheat sheet taped to my rifle and dial in the elevation turret on the scope. steady the rifle on the backpack, get in position behind the rifle, maximize bone support, relax my muscles, check the natural point of aim.
But it's not working.I'm wobbling and muscling the rifle around, the raindrops on my glasses are giving me fits, and I'm having trouble seeing through the scope.Everything is starting to go wrong. Okay Chapman, get it together.You got plenty of time.
She ain't going anywhere.I reposition and start settling in.Pretty soon I'm a lot more stable and my natural point of aim is at least on the elk this time.Time to get that breathing under control and try to get locked in.
I know that I can make this shot.I've done the equivalent at the shooting range over and over and over. But here's where I start overthinking things.There's wind.It's blowing right to left, and I can see leaves moving in the distance.
How much wind should I adjust for?Is it eight miles an hour, or is it 10?While my mind is wrestling with the windage math, popped into my head that I had another question.Where should I aim?
She's standing broadside, so the classic right behind the shoulder makes a lot of sense.But I could try a high neck shot that would ensure that I save the most meat.And that's what I'm here for.
At the home range, I'm pretty competent at this distance.So should I try the harder shot?Also, what's, what's that noise? It was the guide whispering, shoot, shoot, shoot.But it was muffled by my ear protection and my mind's intrusive questioning.
I took a deep breath, let it out, and felt the trigger pull all the way to recoil.Then I did the thing that every shooting instructor tells you not to do. pop up like a prairie dog and look over the top of your scope to figure out what happened.
And there was no elk.There was nothing from the guide.I just sat there and scanned the hillside in desperation and hoped to see something, anything that resembled an elk, even if it was just running away.
That's when the guide stood up and started packing up his gear.I looked at him puzzled, and he must have sensed that I was confused and more than a little uncertain of what had happened.All he said was, good shot, and in that same tone as before.
And then he started walking in the general direction of the hillside.Well, if it was such a good shot, where was the elk?
Come to find out, she had dropped where she stood, in the same spot where she had been bedded down and out of sight from us during the rainstorm.
Sitting with that elk, inhaling the smell, touching her fur, sometimes words can't capture the gravity and grace of a moment.You just had to be there. Back at home, I made the most out of every part of that elk.
Steaks and roasts were regulars on the menu.But what if you've got an elk liver the size of the yellow pages?Well, you make pate by the pound.How about cured and smoked elk ham?Yes, please.Elk tongue became corned elk hash.
There were also brats and breakfast sausage and elk burger that would outshine beef every day of the week.
Between normal meals with my wife, sharing meat with family and friends, and my pop-up kitchen meals, my first elk was gone in under four months.
A friend once asked me a question after my weight loss journey that has always stuck with me as a guide for reflection on the consequential milestones and life-altering events that reshape our lives.
The question, rooted in her indigenous cultural wisdom, was simple and profound.After this event, what do you know to be true? Now before the internet gets in an uproar, these are my truths.You go get your own.
And then we'll sit around a campfire someday and compare notes.Maybe swap some lies too.After my first taunt, here's what I know to be true. First, dare to be bad at something for a while.Like, really suck.
Cause every new skill and every bit of hard-earned wisdom is on the other side of sustained failure.As the preeminent philosopher Jay-Z would remind us, a loss isn't a loss, it's a lesson.Appreciate the pain, it's a blessing.
That leads me to the second thing.Hunting and fishing, like every other outdoor activity or sport in the US, is dominated by corporate marketing and brand tribalism.
Top gear lists and the latest must-have gadgets have displaced the development of experience and ability.As a result, gear becomes a larger than necessary barrier to entry and a consumer shortcut to higher performance for those who can pay.
My grandfather, who was a farmer from the Ozarks, would say, take pride in what you can build, not what you can buy.I take his words to heart.And as a result, I never want to stop learning and growing.But that also means see rule number one.
Number three, when it comes to nature, from wide open spaces and wetlands to animals big and small, it's not ours.It's just our turn. When wild spaces become your grocery store, you care about them in a different, more tangible way.
Like the bumper sticker says, take care of Mother Earth and she'll take care of you.Finally, in the words of Honorary Poet Laureate of the Rookies Podcast Series, Bruce Springsteen, when the promise was broken, I cast in a few of my dreams.
Here's what I know to be true.We have all made that trade in our lives.And occasionally, the loss of those dreams takes a brutal cost.And like the boss said, something in your heart grows cold.
Now this isn't a high school valedictorian style, follow your dreams speech.This is a reminder that you never know how many chances you have left to save your own life and to choose a different path for yourself.
So I have to remind myself of that every day.Take some small steps, make some different choices, so I can move in alignment with how I want to live a healthier life in stronger communities.
To all the wild fish and game newbies out in podcast land, I hope that the Rookies becomes a part of your hunting, angling, foraging, and cooking community.And to those who have yet to take the plunge, jump on in.
The water's fine, and we're learning together.
In the last few years, there have been millions of adult onset hunters, anglers, and foragers who have stepped into the woods looking for game, cast a line to a rising trout, or harvested wild edibles for the first time.Each one of us has a story.
We got into hunting, fishing, and foraging to find something.Maybe it was to fill a deep sense of purpose, or to make a connection to nature, seize on a lifelong dream, or simply find a better way to get some goodies.
We're going to let a few rookies tell their story, and in those stories, maybe we'll find a little inspiration, build some community, and have a greater connection to things that matter.
We'll see you next time on The Rookies, presented by Harvesting Nature.
