[SPEAKER_02]: The cool thing about those community springs is just the way that they will draw all the trails together.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can go up in a lot of these travel corridors up high and you can see that there's a lot of trails in the area but they're spread out.
[SPEAKER_02]: They could be 15 different trails spread out within 150 yards but it's really too wide to really take full advantage of the whole travel corridor.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you put that spring in the middle, that exact same terrain set up, all those trails come together into one spot.
[SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, as soon as I figured that out, I haven't really focused on anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, Dylan Harper, what's up, Dave?
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to the podcast.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just hanging out, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I met you at the Mobile Hunter's Expo last August.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're recording this way ahead of time when it comes out.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're at the Unicoi Turkish Air right now in Northern Georgia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Might here's Turkey calls in the background, but we're talking dear and bear today.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I met you at the Mobile Hunter's Expo last year.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd been recommended to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd followed you on social media and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I immediately recognized you came up to the booth and you're like, let me show you something.
[SPEAKER_00]: You whip out your backpack and you pull out like a whole oak limb.
[SPEAKER_00]: This guy acres all over it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, we're loaded this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like heavy mass here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, anybody that shows up to the mobile hundreds of expo with a backpack full of oak limbs and acres and everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm like, I'm going to get along with that guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's first time I ever met you dude.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're out scouting, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: Check the master's.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'd actually got up early that morning, and I was going to the expo, but I had something to check, because I mean, it was getting pretty close to the opener, so just a last minute to do list, and I went up in there, and it was pretty impressed with what I saw, but yeah, I just brought a couple and just to show a couple of people that I met at the expo.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jacob Perry doing well.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my couch show until
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, um, so dealing up, I'm excited because first off, uh, one thing I've been following with you this year, I want to say you really started posting more about it last year, too, or I'm sorry this year.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like 25, you posted a lot about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think 2024, you posted about is how you like to hunt topography up here in the mountains north Georgia, but also
[SPEAKER_01]: water sources up high, play a factor for you, both deer and bear, and also repented with food sources.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of times when at least we've interviewed guys in the mountains but four, we never really got into specifically water sources and how that can play such a factor where
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, deer and just gang manals in general don't have to drop a bunch of elevation to get down to a creek system and how they can find it up high which has something we're going to talk about today which I'm really excited about and you just showed us an example of how you can find a kind of like a guaranteed one of those spots in the mountains which I think people are going to enjoy but I want to just start off what is your background hunting the mountains?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this something you do in your entire life and as you get into it later on in life?
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, so I grew up in a hunting club, actually, so, you know, from a young age, I was hunting in a two-man ladder stand with my dad.
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, it was probably about, when I was 18 years old, it came down to, you know, it's time for me to pay my own dues, but around that time when I was a teenager, you know, I thought sitting in a ladder standing all the time was just freaking boring.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'd get down and start walking around the club and I'd run into other members and they weren't happy about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they pretty much had to come to Jesus meeting and they said, dude, you can't do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, I just,
[SPEAKER_02]: The hunting club environment really didn't appeal to me anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: And me and my dad, we were talking about it one day, and he's like, well, you know where you're going to go?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, not really.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to figure something out and he said, oh, I got something for you.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he drove me to this little dirt road at the beginning of the mountains and pulled up in this little cold sack.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that was more of like a nudge still like, you know, you're going to find out what it's really like, and you're going to find out why people want to pay for a club
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I went scouting into mountains in the very first day I was in there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I swine discovered bears and that really just opened up a whole new world for me.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's really just the aspect of having a lot of land to work with and just having to freedom to move and not really worried about property lines and messing with other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, that freedom, especially when you start at a hunting club and that freedom of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres you can go run around on is one of those things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that catches some people's attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because if you are always stuck to individual spots you pin out on a hunting club, there's just a few thousand acres that club has, it's only so much you can walk.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, a lot of people, it's a lot of acreage, but if you like to walk, you like to scout, like to cover some ground, you really feel boxed in.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm sure these big pieces of the public, they make you feel like you can stretch your legs, which I know you can, and find some fairly untouched places, as well, which is a sense of adventure there, which is pretty exciting.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've had sailor cameras running in a couple of spots for three or four years now and I've yet to see another person walk through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can invest a lot of time in these places and not really worry about other people boogering it up or changing their patterns.
[SPEAKER_02]: The only thing is like you're kind of at the mercy of the mass crop.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got to spread yourself out a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: just kind of learn a wide range of areas, high elevation, low elevation, you know, different counties, different WMAs.
[SPEAKER_02]: And really, you want to
[SPEAKER_02]: Just learn as much as you can about as many places as you can, especially if you've got on X.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can just start dropping pens on all these spots that you find.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, at the end of the summer, whenever the mass crop is pretty much going to be what it's going to be.
[SPEAKER_02]: When you can just go back through this bank of information, you've collected over the years and just say, all right, 10 out of these 50 spots are what I need to focus on for the rest
[SPEAKER_02]: but that's pretty much the gist of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people say that there's no point in scouting during the summer for bears.
[SPEAKER_02]: People say there's no point in scouting at all until August when the mass crop is coming in because obviously there are more of the food driven animal, but it just goes back to having as many places as you can find and if you want to be efficient,
[SPEAKER_02]: It requires a lot more mileage.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a spot, bouncing.
[UNKNOWN]: Oh, oh.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, I've been getting it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to ask you this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if you track it or have a ballpark.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in a year, like, say this year, how many miles do you think you height from scouting and hunting?
[SPEAKER_02]: Not as many as I used to.
[SPEAKER_02]: It could be three, four, five, hundred miles a year.
[SPEAKER_02]: And most of that mileage is scouting.
[SPEAKER_02]: during the hot and season, I would say maybe 80 miles for bare, and then by the time deer season comes around, I've already got presets.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, when I find these spots, I will pretty much throw a loop of paracordinetry because I climb DRT, all I bring is a saddle and a rope, but yeah, I'll just go into my spot, pull the rope in the tree, and there's not really a whole lot
[SPEAKER_02]: a lot of campsites kind of preset that way, you know, a lot of the places that I go into or pretty remote just because that's the style of hunting I like, a lot of people say, oh, you ain't got to go that far to go get something which that's true, but it's just the experience that I'm after some.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, since the venture and the experience, so you'll spike camp I guess.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the longest year for stayed back in a spot camping.
[SPEAKER_02]: Really about three days.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: that's awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did so your dad got you into hunting the mountains.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was your dad a big mountain hunter?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, my dad wasn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: He was born with some kind of hit degeneration.
[SPEAKER_02]: My uncles are very big mountain hunters.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like I said, the majority of my childhood was, you know, in a hunting club.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there were a couple of times here and there when my uncles would drag me out and take me in the mountains.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's kind of
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess I kind of had to head start on how that works.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I went and totally, you know, just starting from scratch when I turned 18 and started hunting the public.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, okay, um, where did you learn a lot of the things that you know about typography right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, because you've got a pretty impressive knowledge of not only typography, but also like we're going to talk about light R and springs and everything like that, is that something you just studied on your own?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you learn that from your uncles?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, only piece of advice I was ever given was just to find lottoaks, and that's literally it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have met a couple of people along the way, and it seems like, you know, when you put two heads together, you know, you'd
[SPEAKER_02]: pretty much learned from other people, actually a good friends with a guy from South Eastern Ohio, and he's really the one that turned me on to very specific terrain setups as far as, you know, he had a background in trapping, so when he wanted to learn how to hunt bears, he set out a big spread of trail cameras and these very specific areas, and that was what turned me, turned me on to
[SPEAKER_02]: As far as the water table features, that started from a YouTube channel called the Geo Model Geologist Philip Prantz.
[SPEAKER_02]: He went up to investigate the triggers of the landslides from Hurricane Helene, and he was just, you know, it was completely unrelated to hunting.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he just started pointing out different things in the video of what he was seeing.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I was like, what, rewind the video and he starts saying, you know, this is a macro pour right here.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then when this busted from, you know, 30 inches of rain coming down, the ground kind of gave out, it left this scour.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then he'd pull up like a light R image of, you know, what was left of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like,
[SPEAKER_02]: I've seen hundreds of those, so then that's when I started, you know, using the light arm to find those scours, and then I'd go out and hide and see what they look like.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's pretty much where I'm at with that, only started doing that last year, by the way.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're talking when you say scour, you're talking about like a landslide.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so it's basically where, you know, so much rain came down on the ground that the soil
[SPEAKER_02]: just turned it a suit and it just gave out and went down the mountain and what happened was it exposed a macro pore which is basically like a think of a blood vessel under the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: So whenever the rain comes down it goes into the soil and when it you know goes down an elevation it all gets funneled into these little vessels when that scour gave out that vessel was exposed to the ground surface.
[SPEAKER_02]: So now you've got a spring
[SPEAKER_00]: very interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you say when you say I've seen hundreds of those, when people remember back at Inhalene, who's awful, but all those landslides, barren, down the side of the mountain, wide open, like the trees are gone, like that literally the earth just gave way, big landslide.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're not necessarily talking about seeing those like that around here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you talking about seeing older ones?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so 100 years ago?
[SPEAKER_02]: That could be thousands of years old.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean if you really look at the bottom like if you've got a main valley between two major ridges you'll see kind of at the head of the valley where I guess the face of the mountain starts to level out and you've got kind of a bottom you'll see the collection of just sediment you'll see piles of boulders and rocks that is from the remnants of landslides.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's cool, that's very, that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're picking that up on Blidar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: OK. Now, I want to say, what is the importance of finding these scours and like these spring hits?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what's the importance for you finding stuff like that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's really two different types of springs that I think they have two different purposes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's more than that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But there's only two that matter in my eyes.
[SPEAKER_02]: The scours are more of an isolated water source.
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll find them in really odd spots, just on a face of a mountain or just really steep places that don't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because most of the time, your good springs
[SPEAKER_02]: But with it being isolated like that in an odd spot, it's not near any significant trail or travel route.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just isolated in its own spot.
[SPEAKER_02]: The other one is, you know, I've totally made these names up for them, because I've never heard anybody else talk about them, but I call it a community spring.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's basically the type of spring that is dead center of a major travel junction.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's they're usually associated with a bench or some kind of flat level ground often that'll be produced by compounding terrain features or a topohub.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, just wear a bunch of stuff comes together.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think it really matters as much for deer.
[SPEAKER_02]: throughout most of the year.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the cool thing about those community springs is just the way that they will draw all the trails together.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I mean, you can go up in a lot of these travel corridors up high and you can see that, you know, there's a lot of trails in the area, but they're spread out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they could be, you know, 15 different trails spread out within 150 yards, but it's really too wide to really take full advantage of the
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you put that spring in the middle, that exact same terrain set up, all those trails come together into one spot.
[SPEAKER_02]: And honestly, as soon as I figured that out, I haven't really focused on anything else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that where you go to your bucks this past year?
[SPEAKER_00]: Spots like that?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I can't.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything in this spot, like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bears, deer, hairs, deer, pigs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, as far as the significance of it, I've noticed, because I did like a little miniature trail cam study this year, just to see what happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've only got one picture of a deer actually drinking water out of a spring from March to December, but during the rut,
[SPEAKER_02]: That's when all the bucks started traveling through that travel corridor.
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's really the main significance of it for the deer.
[SPEAKER_02]: But for bear and hogs, they are much more dependent on water.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because deer, you know, you've heard people talk about how they get most of their moisture content from the brouse that they eat, pigs and bears are not like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So water is much more significant to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you finding around these springs?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe not right on the spring, but just in the general area.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say within, I don't even know, half a mile.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you finding higher concentrations of deer in areas like that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is the feature a little bit too common to really...
[SPEAKER_02]: I think what those oscillated scours, a lot of times you get, like, jewel weed and, you know, a lot of green vegetation growing up through it, that's a lot softer, deer used that to browse.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as far as anything else, I don't know, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just thinking of an area that I hunt in Alabama
[SPEAKER_00]: I found something pretty much exactly like what you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a big rock scour down below, a big saddle on a bench.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I looked at it for years on the map.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finally walked into it this year, and you get to that rock scour, it's just boulders on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Me and my stepdad walked up to it, which I was telling you, he's a geologist, so he's real fun to go out there with, like, because he just can kind of explain what you're seeing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, uh,
[SPEAKER_00]: we were standing there on top of those boulders and there's like this weird like deep i don't even know like hum almost sound like what is that and we eventually realized it was water rushing underneath those boulders really you can't see a drop of water like can't see it at all but when you're standing there you could hear it and it was like 11
[SPEAKER_00]: 11 a.m. in the summertime hot outside and there is a cool breeze coming down those rocks where that thermal was still pulling down we go up to the top of the scour and it just ends abruptly like the rocks just literally end on that bench and then you keep going up a little bit more when you're getting near the saddle big Laurel thick it up there and then in that Laurel thick it there was
[SPEAKER_00]: there was like little spring seeps all over the place like water literally just bubbling out of the ground and there was all kinds of deer sun in there like the deer were clearly spending a lot of time and there was plants in there that you don't really see often in that particular area like you get in there and it's just different yeah and there was a concentration of deer sun and I've left a camera in there and it fell off the dang tree
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know what's in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lost a year of data.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a camera fall for tree.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would be user error, my friend.
[SPEAKER_00]: That one's on me, but anyways, that's why I was asking if that's something that you've seen in the past because it's just a weird feature.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's not really a lot of water up on the side of that ridge other than that.
[SPEAKER_02]: What I'm thinking of when you say that is how you set the water bubbles up out of the ground, but when you're below it, it was underground.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, it's not exactly the same in Georgia, but it really creates some isolated water source up high like that, because it'll come out of the ground and probably 15 feet or so to go back under.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I've heard people say, well, hell, all you gotta do is just follow a blue line on your
[SPEAKER_02]: the springs that we're talking about right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: There is no blue line leading to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Honestly, there's really no other way to find it than using LiDAR just putting boots on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: So with them being isolated like that, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that was a that was the that was the interest and thing about that spot because, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing that drew it to me is I could see the rocks and on the light aren't everything I'm like I gotta go look at this because it just looks weird and so we actually checked it on our way up to a different spot We kind of swung through there and going up up the ridge from the bottom
[SPEAKER_00]: there's no water in that creek at all you're walking a dry creek bed and we had a lot of floods this past spring so the creek beds all blown out there's no leaves and it's pretty easy walking and you're just walking and it's just your typical little dry creek bed up in the ridge and then you hit that boulder line and then you can hear the water and then you go a little bit higher and boom you got water way like far away from any other creek or anything like that so I'm sorry what were you about to ask?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, it was the Andrew's question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead of like talking about like concentration, more deer, do you find more bucks on around those kind of spots, specifically like pre-right getting into the rut?
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, for the community springs, yes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just simply because it's a travel corridor.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't think the water really has as much to do with it.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: but it's more so the trails kind of for whatever reason come all down to that same spot.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now I will say like my buddy, he's up in Ohio, he's run cameras, he's got a little private farm that he manages and he has water, what do you call it?
[SPEAKER_02]: Like little stock tanks, he'll set those up in specific locations and he has deer drink and water all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's got a creek that runs through his property.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he said that the deer really preferred a drink out of stagnant water for some reason.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've heard that too.
[SPEAKER_02]: And also, when you got a creek, like they have to go down below the bank to get to the water.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he thinks that maybe they don't fill quite a secure duck in their head down like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: But when you have the water just kind of on the flat surface and it's stagnant, like nothing's obstructing their ears.
[SPEAKER_02]: They can still see, so maybe it's a security thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, I've seen where you were going to get more into the nitty-gritty of all this and I really want to talk a lot about summer scouting, but I've got all these little one-off questions because I've been watching on social media for so long.
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing I saw you do, this was very interesting, is you took it to add gum shovel up into the mountains and you dug out some spring heads, I guess you were really doing that for bears.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what were you doing there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did you do that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Curiosity.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, really,
[SPEAKER_02]: Just in case those are drought, I kind of thought maybe if I've danned it up a little bit and dug it out, maybe it would be a little more resistant to the drought, which turns out it was.
[SPEAKER_02]: But that's really all it was.
[SPEAKER_02]: The what happened was when you start creating these pools of water, the bears are really attracted to it to wallo.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: to use there's like a bear hot spot pretty much okay from pretty much from March until the end of September it was nonstop bears time so explain what you were doing there like you you went dug out a spring head but like what were you actually doing like how how did you find the spot like what was your thought processor so as far as how I found the spot was just using slope angle
[SPEAKER_02]: Maybe cross-referencing with like a mass-producing o-clayer on on X.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not really reliable, so you gotta go look at it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Once I saw the amount of trails that were there, just dug it out, dammed it up, put a camera on it, just to monitor it out of curiosity, and also to start hanging presets.
[SPEAKER_02]: basically just taking a throw ball and throwing the paracord up in there and just having it ready for the rut.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's really it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not much more to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that really didn't do much for deer though.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, not really.
[SPEAKER_02]: One thing that kind of helps, you know, an august you have to do a lot of footwork as far as finding the mast and the elevation or whatever.
[SPEAKER_02]: I took a gamble this year thinking, okay, if I got these trail cameras set up, you know, various different elevations, maybe I don't have to work as hard to go find the mast because the cameras will tell me where it is.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because obviously, if you've got bears, deer, hog, whatever, just kind of a gravitate towards certain areas.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's where the mast is.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it pretty much worked out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to talk about your summer scouting, I guess, routine, like what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say 2026 going into this summer.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your process?
[SPEAKER_00]: When do you start, what are you looking for, thinking ahead to deer season?
[SPEAKER_02]: Uh, basically.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the winter time is when I will seek out new areas just because, you know, post-season leaves are down.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can still see a lot of the scrapes and robes and stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of the areas that I'm in, I don't really see a lot of that sign anyway.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, just looking for new ground in the winter in the summer time.
[SPEAKER_02]: or I should say the spring time before the summer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I like to get the cameras pretty much set by the end of March.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's before like the Bayer Star emerging, a really big problem with trail cameras is Bayer's very attracted to them.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's funny.
[SPEAKER_02]: You guys interviewed a guy, God, I can't remember his name.
[SPEAKER_02]: He trains the Knotts, and he was talking about how sent molecules and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tom Brownley.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So he was talking about how when they're, you know, trailing the bad guy, the dogs not actually smelling the person, but the disturbance in the ground that that person left.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we just collectively, as a group of people, my circle, just noticed that,
[SPEAKER_02]: If you set up a trail camera and it gets whack by a bear, it's usually within the first three days of hanging it.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think that episode of The Guide with the Dogs pretty much explained why that happens.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's, you know, I want to get the trail cameras up and in the tree and run and
[SPEAKER_02]: before the bears come out that way they don't follow my trail and find them pretty much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh so you don't think it's, I first of them guys talk about like, they smell the batteries maybe, but sure they do.
[SPEAKER_01]: But in your understanding or experience, if they're going to hit a camera, it's going to be pretty quickly after you put it out there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, their human foot prints look exactly like a bare stomped trail, so, I mean, just individual foot prints in the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if they think you're another bear or they're just following you out of curiosity, but I mean, if you walk in front of your trail camera during hot and season within 48 hours, you're going to have a bear on your trail, just following your footsteps.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, and you can hang them in the summer, it's a little trickier, just because, you know, everything is going to be a lot more active, but I've figured out that if you can create like a sent distraction off the side, so you want to, you know, hang your camera without scuffing up the tree and just, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: marking up the spot that you're in.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you walk away from your camera and you just start, kicking leaves out and breaking little saplings or whatever, whenever the bear is following your trail, there's going to be so much more set coming from the other direction that it usually diverts their attention.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you can get your camera to survive for three or four days, most likely it's going to survive for the rest of the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's very interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know a lot of our mountain listeners are going to greatly appreciate that tip.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because I mean, even if, again, got a bunch of trouble coming out for deer, that I see how effective that could be, especially if they're in a higher bay of density areas.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, Georgia and North Carolina East Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Send, which called it, send diversion, send distraction, send distraction.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, going back to summer scout and so you like and winter time when the leaves are off you like to look at new areas, you want to get your cameras pretty much set for the bears come back out.
[SPEAKER_00]: What about going into May, June, July?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you trying to do?
[SPEAKER_02]: just explore and stay in shape.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's really not much more to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Other than, you know, just monitoring the mass crop for the rest of the year and hanging the presets.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because I mean, like I said, most of the running locations that I'm picking out, like I'm pretty, I pretty much got all the spots that I want by June and then around August is when I will decide, you know, these are the ones you need to focus on, simply due to the mass crop.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, honestly, as far as the summer scouting, I think the best thing that you could use as far as determining which location might produce more deer, not as the amount of bears that travel through.
[SPEAKER_02]: The deer will pretty much replicate the same rut pattern that the bears do, so if you've got, say, four new spots that you've never hunted, you don't have any historical data
[SPEAKER_02]: but you've got a camera rigged up in all four of these and one of those cameras in particular just has a butt ton of, you know, big mature more bears coming through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: More than likely, that's gonna be where you have the most butt traffic.
[SPEAKER_02]: And...
[SPEAKER_02]: I say more than likely, only because you're still at the mercy of the mass crop.
[SPEAKER_02]: So just over time, if you can just collect as many spots as you can, and then just have a bank of information and places you can go, I mean, it's just so much easier by the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you typically running cameras on most of these seeps or do you put them on anything else like you're trying to inventory of what?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can put them on just basic travel corridors like a habitat edge or a bench or like a saddle, anything like that or topo hub.
[SPEAKER_02]: But,
[SPEAKER_02]: I like to hunt off three species.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the water source is really what I try to focus on.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: And just to clarify, you're talking about, like basically the bear right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, which is June.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bears rutting June, so.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you've got your camera rigged in March and it survives the next 30 days by the time the bears are in full rut
[SPEAKER_02]: That's basically when I get my deer hunting information, so they will tell me, you know, which areas I need to focus on them the fall.
[SPEAKER_00]: Based on terrain, just because if that terrain funnels the bears, it's going to funnel the deer and hogs and everything just the same.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, do you see bears though using, say, ridd systems differently as in where they like to walk compared to deer, or halox for that matter?
[SPEAKER_01]: As in, the first thing we're going to talk about, they like walking the spawner ridges and all that stuff, where deer might be a little more side-slope, and I don't know if you like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Bears would do that in the summer time, more so than a deer would in the fall, but in the places where you find these springs, it's hugely not on the top of the ridge anyway.
[SPEAKER_02]: I have seen deer use the top of the ridge but as far as like the I mean there's different types of ridge setups as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you've got like a sharp knife edge ridge I usually don't see anything using the tops but you know maybe coyotes or bobcats stuff like that but
[SPEAKER_02]: what really draws a lot of things is when you have like a softer, more rounded, ridge top, or even a creek bottom, you know, if you've got a really steep ravine, stuff doesn't like that, but if it's like a really broad, wide, flat creek bottom, that's, you know, the animals really prefer those as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to the trails that you keep mentioned, and you mentioned a couple
[SPEAKER_00]: You might find a bunch of trails in an area, but they all seem to converge in one spot.
[SPEAKER_00]: You put a big emphasis on trails, specifically for deer?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think what happens is, you know, throughout most of the summer, your bare and your hogs are basically the animals that establish a lot of these trails.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you'll notice right around the end of October, first of November, it's like flipping a switch.
[SPEAKER_02]: Soon as the leaves fall off of the trees, the bears go not eternal.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, most of the year, their daylight movers.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as soon as they go not eternal, and they start slowing down,
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry, I'm bouncing all over the place.
[SPEAKER_02]: Through the summer, you don't really see a lot of deer, but as soon as those bears go not turnle, you've get like this explosion of deer.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's like they swap places more or less.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the deer basically just following the trails that are established by the other animals earlier in the year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, and trails in the mountains are really interesting to me because whenever I find a trail whenever I'm hunting mountains, wherever I'm at, whether it's North Carolina or wherever, I'm like, that trail's probably been there for a very, very long time, because this terrain has
[SPEAKER_00]: ten times great grandfathers probably walk in that same trail right yeah and so do you find that trails or something that are very reliable year to year like if you find just a really nice trail that pretty much every year it's hot or did they change that really depends on the terrain set up again like if you got a really sharp knife edge ridge you know nothing really uses that sharp top
[SPEAKER_02]: So when they use the trail on the side hill, the ground's so steep that it pretty much gets cut into the side of the mountain.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you could walk on it without flexing your ankle, they're pretty flat.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as far as, you know, like the average trail that you'll see on more rounded ridges, it really just depends on, I mean, you can have a herd of hogs for a month come through and they will pretty much establish a new trail.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if they don't keep using it, it will disappear over time.
[SPEAKER_02]: this year, you know, a lot of the the major trails that I saw, they weren't there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm not really sure what the reason was, we had kind of a weird wide-o crop this year, the same like, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: They got hit for a little bit in the higher elevations.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right around the last week of August, first week of September.
[SPEAKER_02]: But for the rest of the year, it seemed like a lot of the animals were dropping down in elevation.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you could sit there and watch the trails that were established over the summer.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, especially after the leaves fell.
[SPEAKER_02]: It covered everything up.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, if nothing's sitting there punching holes in it, you know, it's not going to get re-established until something does.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good tip.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's just a good woodsman tip.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wismen ship tip right there, because when we talk to Joey Youngblood, we drive through North Georgia, interviewed him on our way to go hunt, Western North Carolina.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were going to do a mountain bow hunt up there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one thing that Joey told us, he's like, hey, when you find these trails, if the leaves aren't just chopped up, like you literally came in there chopped them up, he's like, they're not using it right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It might be a really good looking trail, but the leaves weren't even really falling yet, but he's like, you can still tell,
[SPEAKER_00]: when those leaves are just chopped up.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where the deer are at.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, and then like two days later, we rub their hunting.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's pretty much exactly what we saw.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's just a little thing you can pay attention to, where you don't really need cameras or anything like that, but just like a little woodsmanship.
[SPEAKER_00]: tip of how you can tell whether or not a trail is being used.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that something, do you do something similar to that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like just picking up on small things?
[SPEAKER_00]: For dear, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_02]: About this year, I've got a pretty big curve ball, simply because of that elevation shift.
[SPEAKER_02]: a lot of the hardest places that I was pretty much back and on were completely dead.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I ended up dropping down an elevation.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it was night and day difference.
[SPEAKER_02]: You could see maybe one rub tree up high and the trail was just so faint that I mean,
[SPEAKER_02]: you just look at it.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're like, there's no way anything's using this anymore, but you know, you go down in the bottom and you can see that once again, like after the fresh leaves have fallen, they've still just got it cut down to the dirt and there's fresh rubs and everything's like, it's pretty obvious where they are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if somebody was wanting to go out, let's say that don't have a big roll of decks of spots from years of hunting mountains or anything like that, what would be one of the first thing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, let's just say we pick you up and just drop you in a totally new area.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would be the first thing that you'd be looking for again, let's say in the summer months?
[SPEAKER_02]: Terrain-based travel corridors.
[SPEAKER_02]: and basically you guys interview Chuck Young and this guy's
[SPEAKER_02]: probably my favorite person to listen to out of everybody, just because you, I really like the guy.
[SPEAKER_02]: But he talks about compounding terrain features.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've kind of got a different interpretation of what he does.
[SPEAKER_02]: He talks about how like this continuous sequence of, you know, maybe a saddle will run into a batch and then there'll be a draw at the other side, you know, just bam, bam, bam.
[SPEAKER_02]: What I'm basically looking for
[SPEAKER_02]: terrain features that are stacked on top of each other.
[SPEAKER_02]: Most of the time, I'm going to be looking for a bench or something associated with it, like a flat spot, maybe where a couple of ridges come together in a topo hub, what that does.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's basically what creates the spring head that draws all the trails together.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, just get on a lot of our map and use some slow-pangle shading.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they stick out like a sore thumb if you really know what you're looking for.
[SPEAKER_02]: That really be the first thing that I would look for.
[SPEAKER_02]: Once you find it on the map, just put boots on the ground and see if there's food nearby and if there is.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's not much more to it, honestly.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's say you're using slow-pangle shading like on ONX.
[SPEAKER_00]: What are you looking for on that slow-pangle shading in that situation?
[SPEAKER_02]: basically you want to have a high peak nearby and then you know it can be shaded purple it could be shaded red even yellow but if there's like a really defined green spot and then it turns back to a red or yellow whatever it is that's it but you want to have steep steep topography on both sides of the bench like above it and below it.
[SPEAKER_00]: okay and then so that's how you identify the bench and then once you find the bench you're looking for a saddle up above it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah so with the community springs I say they're a terrain-based travel corridor I'm going back to like the compounding terrain features a lot of the best ones that are even
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to say drought resistant, but not drought proof.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's, you know, if you find a bench that's directly underneath a saddle, you know, a saddle is more or less a water table funnel.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, all the water gets channelled into one spot and then when you have the bench directly underneath it, I mean, you've got a mega-sprain coming out of it.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, those, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh-
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess that's the compounding terrain features that really produce the best water source and also produce the best travel corridor at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, when you walk into a spot like, let's say you go find four or five of them on the map.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you walk into them, what are you looking for on the ground that tells you, okay, this is it, this is the one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cause I'm assuming you probably go check a couple that as they're just done.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's not a lot of debts, but you'll see that, you know, as far as like historical sign, every now and then, certain ones will be better than the other, just because, you know, maybe the mass from the previous year didn't really pop in one spot.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you gotta take that into consideration, but, I mean, it's usually pretty obvious when you go into one and, you know, there's just not a lot of mass producing trees or there's
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll have traveling animals, but if you don't have, like, residents and travelers at the same time, your opportunity rate's gonna be a lot lower.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is very interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're looking for the ones that have a Muslim in Oaks?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, you don't have a mixture of Oaks, whether it be Wadoaks, Reds.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, even chestnut Oaks, a lot of people, don't really pay attention to those, but, you know, sometimes,
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, they do get hit depending on the year, but if you've just got a mixture of food, that's really the best case scenario.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, there's chest and I was by the way, we talked about them pretty often on the on this podcast and negatively, negatively, but usually every year I'll find one, usually very early that it's just getting absolutely hammered.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I found one on my club this year and since we're Alabama, it was like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the first, the first feed tree that was just like mutilated with the deer were really using.
[SPEAKER_00]: They ended up missing a buck right next to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: mutatolated, is there really Greg Mayher says mutatolated?
[SPEAKER_00]: So you made the point about you're looking for a spot that's got residents but also travelers.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do you mean by that?
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess the guy that really sat at best was Bobby Worthington, the way he talks about long range funnels and short range funnels, especially the same scenario.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess just worried a little bit differently, but she've got certain animals like maybe just say a doke group Or you've got a sal bear that just kind of she's got an established home range and don't really wrong very far You know groups don't really wrong very far They're pretty much residents of the area.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they're usually gonna be your repeat customers that you'll see over and over again
[SPEAKER_02]: your travelers are going to be just, you know, bears oftentimes, I mean, they'll roam for hundreds of miles across different state lands.
[SPEAKER_02]: not all of them do that but you have that uh... they have a potentially bigger home ranks but you know bucks during the rut i mean they're covering a lot of ground as well so i would say a cruising buck is going to be the one that's traveling you know covering you know a lot bigger distance and then you've got your dose that are the residance so if you're catching them both at the same time then
[SPEAKER_02]: your opportunity rate, the amount of times that you see an animal or at least have an opportunity of taking it, goes up.
[SPEAKER_00]: OK, yeah, that makes perfect sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those things I wanted to ask on the terrain features.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you go in there and you check them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to find paths on, you want to find trails, and you want to find brows and mass-producing trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: getting into later summer, it sounds like you've recheck those areas to kind of monitor your mask crops.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what's your process of monitoring basically where the mask crops going to be?
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, there's what I do and what a shit do for one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can relate to that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I need to get me a pair of binoculars and actually start glass and treat tops.
[SPEAKER_02]: I haven't done it, but really I'm just walking around looking for storm damage.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, picking up broken limbs, checking for acres that way, or, you know, red oaks off them.
[SPEAKER_02]: They'll just shed a corn's all year long.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hickory's do the same thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm just walking around checking for nuts on the ground and just blowouts, really.
[SPEAKER_00]: and you're trying to correlate that with a specific elevation.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's really important because, you know, if all your acorns are up high, but you're in a spot that's down low, it's pretty useless.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you don't have the food there, especially with the game density being as low as it is here, I mean, you'll go a whole season, and only see one or two animals easily.
[SPEAKER_02]: But,
[SPEAKER_02]: If you're in that, you know, good travel corridor with the trail pants and you got the food nearby.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you can see dozens.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, dozens of animals in the year.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I don't know about around here, but in Alabama, these past two seasons, so 2024, 2025, we had two complete opposite years.
[SPEAKER_00]: 2024, we had an absolute blessed.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had a very bad drought.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of the Oaks aborted their mass crop, and there was absolutely no acorns on the ground.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was,
[SPEAKER_00]: tough.
[SPEAKER_00]: I struggled that year.
[SPEAKER_00]: This year was a complete opposite.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did not have a drought, and we had a bumper year, which I think those two, I need to ask the biologist about this, but I think those two go hand in hand, like they'll usually be a bumper year after a couple of bad years, because those oaks were trying to make up for it, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, uh,
[SPEAKER_00]: different guys depending on how you hunt, tackle it differently.
[SPEAKER_00]: I do better on heavy mass-years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just always have better luck on heavy mass-years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know guys who like a thin mass-year were just not a lot of oak straws, because I guess it concentrates the deer more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I haven't figured that out yet, but I'm curious these past two seasons how you approach those two situations.
[SPEAKER_00]: Assuming that happened in Georgia too.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hmm, not exactly, uh,
[SPEAKER_02]: As far as having a isolated mass crop, I mean, I think that's everybody's dream here, because there's not a whole lot to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Once you figure out that isolated food source, I mean, that's where all the animals are going to be.
[SPEAKER_02]: Most people hate it when you have a heavy mass crop.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it is a little bit tougher while your opportunity right will be a little bit lower.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, if you've just got, you know,
[SPEAKER_02]: a good travel corridor with very important habitat features.
[SPEAKER_02]: You also have to have those.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you're still going to see animals either way.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I just, I don't think most people really look at it that way.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when you have a heavy mast year, you know, they struggle a little bit more with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think the heavy mast years kind of go down that
[SPEAKER_01]: Normally, and we saw this past, we saw this in 2025, a lot of states, specifically in the southeast, our harvest record, harvest number for deer, were down tremendously.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a lot of biologists were talking about it, it's because of the very heavy mass here across the southeast, because majority of hunters typically are hunting some kind of foods, or especially around probably hunting food plots, corn, bait, whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: that's what a lot of people sit on and if there's tons of mass still out there they don't have to come and feed at those food sources very often.
[SPEAKER_01]: So your harvest harvest your harvest numbers are going to be damaged.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't really move as much.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, exactly they don't have to and they won't they can be where they want to be instead of where they have to be because women to food.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: It goes back to if you're a train hunter hunting travel corridors, it almost doesn't matter that much because if a buck is still going to cruise through there in the deer or spread out and he's got to move, he's got to cover Graham, so that's where it's almost seems like kind of just tried and true with the really tight or not tight, but this highly optimized travel corridors, especially in the mountains that you're still going to have the highs, I'll just assess no matter if it's a bustier or if it's a bumper crop here.
[SPEAKER_02]: When you have a spring head and a travel corridor like that really is like the tide of travel corridor that you can find that I'm aware of you know Yeah You get the interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I know we've talked a lot about the spring heads, but get me more more interest in that because I've seen that One hundred of those art mountains in Arkansas were a bear hunt
[SPEAKER_01]: not going to get off such as the bears but where the bears were also where the deer at because it was a very sporesh mass here.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was one during his sister and my brother had found he was in school up there.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had found a section that they had specifically red oaks.
[SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't any white oaks up there but there was a lot of red oaks that had produced in a lot of hickeries.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it was just that duration.
[SPEAKER_01]: He tracked up different parts of this mountain system for probably a five mile stretch.
[SPEAKER_01]: And all the locals are talking about how bad the mass was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, every bear and every deer was in that journey.
[SPEAKER_01]: And obviously, during this system, it's not like a little dirt.
[SPEAKER_01]: This thing's like a mile and a half wide and like six miles long.
[SPEAKER_01]: and that's where the all the animals are stacked and I had an awesome hunt and one day not never killed a bear had the hunter your life that he had nine cameras out in the spot and every day he had bears on camera but he had it all sort of a bunch of deer on camera
[SPEAKER_01]: Had a shooter bear come by a day like that, if I was a lot smaller and went into it being I let it get to 17 or 13, 14 yards stand there for a little bit facing me and they finally went turn to the walkway that's how I realized how long the bear was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like shut shut that one, he slipped off the bench.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then Rattle in, or run it in, two bucks, really nice shooter just a really nice eight point, not huge, but really nice deer came in at like eight, 30.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then I moved further down the bench that afternoon and probably 400 yards.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've been around a little bit of a ridge point and there was a bluff gap right there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there's deer feeds on, there's bare feeds on, there's deer scatter, there's robes, there's scrapes, there are a couple of scrapes, there's bear drops and everywhere, I just sat on my, this is it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna hopefully kill something and kill a bear at like four o'clock coming up that bluff gap.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was,
[SPEAKER_01]: awesome to awesome and then we try to do it or he tried to do that same point again the next year I couldn't go the next year and he's like do it sucks he's like because it was a better match your master spread out and like the deer was spread out and this is also an october by the way they're right in November but
[SPEAKER_01]: Deerers spread out bearers spread out.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't even find a bear That next year And there's just crazy from here to here that there's the change between that one spot Yeah, like you would have thought this is the best honey hole in your entire life But it wasn't really like a big We weren't hunting during the rut, but wasn't like a really big travel corridor.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's had a lot of good stuff going on And one system and deer bear were just stacked in there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, one thing that Jacob said a minute ago that actually you said to me, it's my 100s expire.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember this was on a heavy mass year where they have food everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: They can kind of just go to where they really want to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not forced to go to any one specific area, which, by the way, another thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I say I do better on a heavy mass year, I'm mostly hunt pine farms in Alabama.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we don't have a ton of oaks.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the oaks that we do have are going to be down in your little drainages and creek bottoms and SMs.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're already isolated.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you have that bumper year to me, it makes it easier in a situation like that because I kind of know right where they're going to be, because if I know that there's oaks in a bottom, I know that they're dropping basically.
[SPEAKER_00]: I go in there and I can find Sond on bad years, it's not like that and you've got to walk so much and usually the oaks that are dropping in like weird little spots that are kind of tough to hunt, but also I'll find it like last year I found one wide oak on my club that was dropping, and I mean there was some Sond under it but it wasn't anything very impressive at all and I'm like I think that they just don't
[SPEAKER_00]: really need to eat these as much as people make it out like they've got so much browsing those pines that they can go eat instead and it's like I don't know they're not going to they're not going to go way way out of their way to go find that one oak tree that's this real hot or anything so I think that is different and that's one reason I like talking to guys like you who hunt these real big woods mountainous settings because if you ever look at something like this on a map
[SPEAKER_00]: it's just a vast mountain range that's all gray on the map because it's all hardwoods it's all looks exactly the same on the map but then when you get out there you've got a narrow it down so we've talked a lot about terrain are there any habitat features that just jump out into you where you're like oh I gotta go look at that yes and no we don't really have a lot of
[SPEAKER_02]: our premium habitat looks like is usually from, you know, just like the eastern bands of hurricanes that hit us, you know, you'll just have like a whole swath of trees that get knocked down.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just pretty much like what happened with Hurricane Haleen last, or I guess those two years ago now, tornadoes, wildfires are pretty good.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't really like those as much
[SPEAKER_02]: pretty much highlight that and everybody in their brother can see them.
[SPEAKER_02]: But we do have a lot of what I call short lives like wild lightning fires.
[SPEAKER_02]: And you'll see there are certain spots that, I mean, they got burnt, burnt, burnt.
[SPEAKER_02]: But they weren't big enough and they didn't really last long enough to draw a lot of attention to it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you won't find those on on X or, you know, burn records.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you just pay attention to that, sometimes you can just see like an old tree that fell over in the bottom of it that just have that old char mark on it and you start looking around you're like dying.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm actually in a barn right now.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a good one.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mostly for deer bear, I really think hardcover is more important.
[SPEAKER_02]: But you got a deer, you know, also the water's not important, but for bears, you got to have the food to cover and the water.
[SPEAKER_02]: Deer is really more cover.
[SPEAKER_02]: Deer got to have the cover, the food, and really the right terrain to follow the movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: What about mountain laurel when it comes to deer?
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't really like low to the road of dendrin, it seems to be too thick, I mean you can't really get through it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Young mountain laurel usually grows in an area where there's a lot of new sonic sposers so you'll have browse coming up with it, but as far as security cover, it's got to be pretty much here.
[SPEAKER_02]: So everything can kind of get through it, you know, they're not really fighting with it, but it's just dense enough to where they fail safe and secure, but not so dense that it really hinders their movement.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know Jake had a lot of questions on the bear hunt and he kind of started talking about it a minute ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got off.
[SPEAKER_00]: When it comes to bear hunting, specifically,
[SPEAKER_00]: are you more of an early season kind of guy like you want to go out there as soon as it opens and you're trying to bow on them or are you waiting for the for the gun season to come in.
[SPEAKER_02]: It really doesn't matter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Both season is just an extension of the rest of the season.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think a lot of archers really lighten the fact that
[SPEAKER_02]: those first few weeks of September, the acorns aren't really dropping yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the bears are much more likely to be climate trees.
[SPEAKER_02]: And as an archer on foot, it is so much easier to stalk a bear while it's feeding in a tree than it is to stalk one on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's really the major
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, around the time of gun season start kicking off, that's really like the last week of September.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's like an explosion of bare movement.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at cameras, you'll see that.
[SPEAKER_02]: just for whatever reason there's a huge spike in movement.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's right before the mast really dumps, but a lot of your cells that get bred, they're going to get ready to dead.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I think it might be like an intersignal form to start, you know, just search in for dending locations.
[SPEAKER_02]: But yeah, I mean, there's advantages to every part of the year.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, even late season, there's an advantage to that.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, just any time you can get out, don't really matter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, with bear hunting, I mean, you've kind of touched on the like the water sources huge form of these seeps, but when it comes to being successful bear hunting, like I've got friend who's hunted north Georgia, quite a few times, early season by hunting for bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he seems a small one, he's been kind of choosy about trying to kill a better bear and just has it killed one.
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think is if someone's trying to target Bayer where do you think people go wrong?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm just trying to find a Bayer early season if you're just trying to find a Bayer during season.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just finding a Bayer or finding a finding a finding, yeah, find it, yeah, find it, you find them but they didn't get an execute an opportunity.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, where do you think people go wrong with that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Bears are pretty low density, despite what a lot of people might think.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's going to require a lot of covering ground just to find the sign.
[SPEAKER_02]: The understanding that once you find some really hot sign, you're within 200 yards of the bear.
[SPEAKER_02]: Most likely if you look at some of the if you find a really hot area one year and then you just kind of reflect on it and you look back You know, say you start studying them out Most of the time there's going to be those habitat features involved.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Anyway
[SPEAKER_02]: If you just found some really good hot sign and you're there, you know, standing in the middle of it and you got a variable wind, like more than likely, you might have, you know, even bucked the barrier out of there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just because they don't really travel that far from where they're feeding.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got a bunch of questions about that actually, so I've never killed a bear.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd really like to.
[SPEAKER_00]: At some point, I've been wanting to come to North Georgia to bear hunt for years, and I just haven't made it happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a complete novice when it comes to bear hunting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't really know what bear sign is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know how to deer hunt.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what would you tell someone like me who wants to go and try to kill a bear in the mountains?
[SPEAKER_02]: Basically, to be as successful as possible, it's gonna be a time investment, especially as a non-resident.
[SPEAKER_02]: You're going to want to put some boots on the ground ahead of time.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess the most beneficial time to do it would be in August that way you're putting boots on the ground to see the landscape and find in everything, but you're also looking at the mass crop at the same time, right before it dumps.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean as far as, you know, finding the spot, you can do a lot of that just by e-scouting, but as far as when you're actually there hunting, I guess the best way to hunt would be in like a triangular pattern, like you just walk, walk, walk until you find the feet and sign, you know, I guess I'd look for the food first, once you find, you know, there's
[SPEAKER_02]: you really don't have very long to assess the situation unless you have like a good consistent wind that's blowing the way that you came.
[SPEAKER_02]: More than likely they're going to be bedded within 200 yards and they're going to bed.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're up on a ridge top.
[SPEAKER_02]: and you found the sign more than likely they're going to be down off the side because they always want to bed on a slope if you ever like check up against the base of the trees you can find where they bed they'll scratch the bark of the tree so I mean it's pretty easy to identify where they're bed and that's going to be the first thing I look for after I find the feed.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean the best way to find it especially if you've got some steep ground nearby
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, even if you're driving down the road, bears don't have really good traction on steep ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: So when they walk off the top of the flat onto the steep ground, they leave freaking skid marks.
[SPEAKER_02]: So as far as tracking a bear to it's bed, it's really not that hard.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you found the feed sign, and then you found the bed, but you still haven't found the bear, but you know, it's obvious that he's there.
[SPEAKER_02]: look for the water source.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the triangle.
[SPEAKER_02]: Food, bad water.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you just make that full rotation, you've usually got it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Unless you wind bump it or you see you, you know, it's up to you at that part.
[SPEAKER_01]: Are you typically going to find water around where they're feeding or could they be traveling good ways though?
[SPEAKER_02]: That really just depends on the air.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you got to oscillate at mass crop and, you know, it just happens to be in an area where there's no water.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's kind of is what it is, but a year like last year when you've got food everywhere, it's very important.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they're whole loss pretty much revolving around just packing on as many calories as they can while expending the least.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if they've got food right next to the water, that's going to be a more desirable area for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's pretty easy to see, especially if you walk a ridge that's got a bench somewhere in the middle of it, you'll walk through widows the entire time and not see any sign, but soon as you get over that bench with the water source, now you start seeing bear sign and then you walk away from it, it kind of dries up again.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's all because of the water source.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, speaking of that, too, when we hunted North Carolina that time, I was just telling you about, it was the first day that we walked up in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we went up to this little shelf that we were looking at it and we're like, yeah, that looks pretty good.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's probably some wide-oaks up there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we're using the Oak layer on OnEx, like, yeah, there's some wide-oaks up there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a flat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's go check it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're looking for deer, and we get up there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're like, oh, there's a pile of bear scat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looked a couple days old.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I think we found some broken limbs or something.
[SPEAKER_00]: Those up, we got to the shelf, Oaks were dropped and we're like, yeah, this looks good.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're looking for the base of the tree and we turn around and here comes the bear, walking right at us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one bear season yet.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that was the first bear I'd ever seen in the woods.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I found whole layers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Seeing more than, yeah, that was funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that bear came in that thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: They brought it way 80 pounds, 85 pounds fired up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, dude, he's getting jacked to my bro.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can't shoot it!
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don
[SPEAKER_00]: and I don't go that slow.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll try to be quiet depending on the situation but like I'm I'm trying to cover ground especially when I'm in a big area like if you're if you're hunting up in north Georgia if you're hunting in eastern Tennessee or North Carolina whatever it's a big landscape and you it's hard terrain to cover and I'm trying to cover ground how do you balance
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to cover ground while also still being in hunt mode where you're like where you're not walking into the middle of that sign and you're like oh there's a bunch of sign right here but you were loud getting in and you probably blew the barrel out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, as far as blowing a bear out, it's not like deer.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they're totally different animal.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you bop a bear off of the area that it's sand, it's there for a reason.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's a really comfortable spot for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's gonna come back.
[SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes, with them two or three hours, I'm gonna hook on right back where it was.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I wouldn't really worry about that as much.
[SPEAKER_02]: But as far as covering ground, it's important to kind of have a general idea of where you're going.
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... just doing e-scouting the best you can of course you know you can't see everything going in blind like that but really if you're in a undesirable area or if you're on a high control just book it because unless you're in a really particular hot spot where mean everything's attracted for a reason i mean you're wasting your time everywhere else uh... one of the best things that i've ever figured out is to do it with a partner
[SPEAKER_02]: especially in the mountains but I mean you can do this anywhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: Take two vehicles, park one of the vehicles and then ride together a couple miles away that way you can both walk in the same direction.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can double your mileage that way and really if you know where you're going,
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, just book it as fast as you can until you get to where you need to be and that's where you slow down, investigate it if it's not really looking all that good, then just go to the next spot, hot tail it and it's really a matter of getting where you need to go as fast as you can and then stopping when you get there, if that makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's your hunting with your ears more so than your eyes at the same time, especially in archery season.
[SPEAKER_02]: If they're up in the trees, you're not going to be able to see them unless they're in like this little short, stumpy, you know, door folk, because I mean, there's been several times, several, several times where they're
[SPEAKER_02]: me in a body we'd be standing at a base of a tree and they'd be acorns landing on our head and just bark tree limbs falling ever.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean we'd know there's a bear up there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And we're both just kind of for 15 minutes just walking in circles around the tree looking up and we can't see it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I mean
[SPEAKER_02]: I've even had times that I've walked right up underneath a bear that was feeding a tree.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know it was up there.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then soon as I passed it, I mean, that sucker'd slide down the trunk of a tree, like a farm and pole and take off running, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: But bears, it's funny, they can be so stealthy, it would surprise you, but at the same time, they can be the loudest animal in the woods.
[SPEAKER_02]: And like in archery season, when they're up in a tree top in their feet and gorge and they are just making the most gone awful racket.
[SPEAKER_02]: As soon as they stop, then you can't hear them anymore.
[SPEAKER_02]: But basically, you wanna just move slow enough to where, or quick enough to where you're covering ground,
[SPEAKER_02]: You're not really looking as much as you are just like listening in every direction and then you just basically follow the sound until you find it and once you find it you might still have to wait another hour before it gives you a shot opportunity.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what intrigues me about it because I love the squirrel hunt in the early season and I mean it kind of sounds like squirrel hunt Like when I'm squirrel hunting I'm slipping along ridges and I'm just listening I'm listening for the limb shake and then you might see a limb shake way out through the woods Then you stalk up on it and you guys sit there and watch for a little while figure out where the squirrel's at let him give you a shot
[SPEAKER_00]: you know obviously bears are different, but that sounds very similar as far as that goes.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, when you find one up in a tree like that, I mean, are you shooting them out of the tree with your bow?
[SPEAKER_02]: No, sick, that's cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're all hot and with a bow, man.
[SPEAKER_02]: But the thing is, big bears don't really climb trees.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're after an older age class animal, and you see one in the tree, I mean, you might see one, it's about 200 pounds.
[SPEAKER_02]: But if you're looking for like a trophy class animal, you're never gonna find one in the tree like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what are they doing different, then?
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, there's just some freaking fat man.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know, but I'm saying that they do feed you that time of the year.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they're not get up in a tree, or they just like getting the wear sums, knock and eight cords out, or hickory nuts out or something.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if they're rough or some feathers on this, but, uh, chest nut oaks man, like Andrew was saying earlier, they're the first ones to drop normally.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the big bears, they can't climb.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, they don't want to climb.
[SPEAKER_02]: Usually, they'll be just picking up a chestnut oaks that are on the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: If there's not any nuts available, they're still hitting soft mass.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you've got like high-blush blueberry in a lot of areas.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they'll hold fruit in a November, really.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, they don't even get ripe till they end up August a lot of times.
[SPEAKER_02]: But also, those study done by the University of Tennessee
[SPEAKER_02]: show how different bears interact because they're not all the same.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got young bears or small bears.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've got old dominant bears and then you've also got sals with cups and you have to understand the relationship and how they all interact and also the packing order.
[SPEAKER_02]: Your sals with cups are very vulnerable
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the boars are going to be territorial, they're going to go after her cubs and kill them.
[SPEAKER_02]: So usually she's going to be in the most undesirable spot that she can find that way there's much less chance of her cubs get in March.
[SPEAKER_02]: So if you're seeing a bunch of sounds with cubs, that usually should tell you that you need to look somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_02]: older boards usually spend a lot of their time at significantly lower elevation than all the younger bears.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that's really associated more with the water sources.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you get up high, you know, water is a lot less common, obviously.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, if you, the mast is always going to dictate that from here to here, but if you have like a wide spread mass crop, usually you can see the younger bears are going to be up high.
[SPEAKER_02]: Your older bears are going to be down lower elevation and then your mother's house are just going to be tucked into some isolated corner trying to stay away from everybody else.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we say little real advice for those big birds.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're like, not necessarily down at the bottom of the mountain.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's, okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I found me a neighborhood mayor.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's some subdivision.
[SPEAKER_02]: You got a trash can in Toro.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna show you some pictures for more dogs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because you texted me and said, the turkey show I said, actually I went for a drive for a few minutes.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I went about 10 minutes down the road, and I was looking at bear sign from the truck.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'll show it to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: From the truck?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, um,
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm curious what's the what's the biggest bear for something that you've ever killed, but what's the biggest one you've seen that you can get shot at?
[SPEAKER_02]: The biggest one I've killed probably about 250 to 75 The biggest one I've ever seen
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I was saying in multiple times, it was probably 2022.
[SPEAKER_02]: I started talking about him on Facebook and figured everybody knew who this bear was, apparently.
[SPEAKER_02]: The name was Scar.
[SPEAKER_02]: He had like this big old strip of fur on this backside that was missing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Usually that's from whenever they, you know, rub up against trees during the rub.
[SPEAKER_02]: But this was like a very obvious, like there wasn't any hair growing there from year to year, because he got to get hit by a car, I think.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't mean this dude was huge.
[SPEAKER_02]: I was on a pretty popular trail system and I just walked up on him, you know, dead middle of the rut and he had no care about me whatsoever unless I got too close.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I ended up falling in for like two hours.
[SPEAKER_02]: He dropped off of the high ridge and he just starts, you know, making his way across the landscape and he's leaving stop trails and he just bulldozes through all these little trees and everything.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well,
[SPEAKER_02]: He was pretty much, you know, what's you would call a resident bear that didn't really travel very far from year to year.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I found him again during art races and put a 40-yard shot on him and I actually hit a piece of mountain wall and I watched my arrow go like 30 feet over him.
[UNKNOWN]: It was terrible.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's one of them shots where you're like, I don't even look for a blood trail.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no possible way I hit that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, just a giant.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like one of those bears looks at the head just more fun to tell like a body.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, people just, you know, they'll post a trail camera picture of him on Facebook and everybody just goes absolutely nuts.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, oh, I've seen that thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, don't tell nobody.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you learn anything from tracking that bear through the woods when you saw him and just followed him?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: And this more or less the way
[SPEAKER_02]: dominant bears behave as far as, I don't know if it even be a dominant, but just male bears in general.
[SPEAKER_02]: They like to walk through those saplings and basically the tree rubs up against their belly in their underside and they're more or less leaving a set trail everywhere they're going.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's territorial behavior, so if you translate that behavior into honey season, well, they're still just as territorial over the food as they are the females.
[SPEAKER_02]: So often times, you know, a dominant bear, it's no secret where he's at, because he's got it marked up for everybody to see, he's basically telling everybody to stay out.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is my spot, you know?
[SPEAKER_02]: So you can follow those little bent-over saplings, and honestly this year,
[SPEAKER_02]: I took a lot of pictures and I made a Facebook post about it, but there was this spot that I've been hunting for two or three years now and it's just a straight-up mountain laurel jungle.
[SPEAKER_02]: and uh... i started finding those bent over trees this was such a hot spot but i could never figure out why because i couldn't find a water source but just by following those bent over trees from that board he led me straight to the spring head that i've never been able to find a lot of our side a lot or anything so i mean just there's probably so many things that you can learn from just following them around but you know
[SPEAKER_02]: put somebody on the spot and try to remember every single detail.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if you could really remember every single thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Have you already in closing counters with bigger?
[SPEAKER_01]: That was not optimal.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've only had run, well, two negative encounters.
[SPEAKER_02]: The first one was really just because I was a bonehead and I left my tent out in the woods.
[SPEAKER_02]: Instead of pre-setting my stand, I preset my campsites.
[SPEAKER_02]: When I came back, my whole camp was destroyed, and it was like midnight when I found out.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just got off work, I had three miles in, out in the middle of the woods.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're no camp, but as far as like the other negative encounter, it was with a
[SPEAKER_02]: It's such a rare occurrence, it's funny.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've lost count of how many times I've bumped into sales with Cubs, and one of the most funny encounters was turned to corner, and I bumped into her, well, she took off and left the Cubs with me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you got to understand there really just goofy animals in general.
[SPEAKER_02]: But under this one circumstance where it was bad, I was actually, it was in the summertime.
[SPEAKER_02]: Look at this cliff edge, because the way it was, it just had a lot of soft mass all around it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I just knew if I go up there in the summertime, I'm probably gonna be able to take some pictures of theirs.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, got up there.
[SPEAKER_02]: I started walking across the edge of the cliff and it's one of them, like if you step off of it, you're done.
[SPEAKER_02]: So as I get to the other side of it, I'll start here and just just,
[SPEAKER_02]: What the, what is that?
[SPEAKER_02]: So I start going over towards it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Next thing you know, it sounds like there's a freaking ball and ball running down the mountain.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's actually a 30 pound cub.
[SPEAKER_02]: It sees me and then it climbs up a tree about 15 feet away from me.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm like, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I'm trying to figure out what's going on.
[SPEAKER_02]: The screaming stops, and then here comes a cell with a second cub.
[SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know it at the time, but there was a bore actually killing her third cub.
[SPEAKER_02]: So the third one was dead, and she's coming around and straight at me, trying to get away from the bore that's killing her cub's.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm right in her.
[SPEAKER_02]: her path of travel, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: So she's runnin' just full fighter flight mode and then she sees me and then that's just like, oh, pull out my gun.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, hey, pop, pop, pop.
[SPEAKER_02]: Shoot three times in the ground.
[SPEAKER_02]: Just anything to get her to stop, because she was charging, bud.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that finally got her to stop and then, you know, she turned sideways and what she did was she gave me an escort.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, she started popping
[SPEAKER_02]: You can hear them pop their jaws like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's a warning.
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, she sit there and pound the front feet.
[SPEAKER_02]: But every time I take two or three steps back, she'd take two or three steps forward.
[SPEAKER_02]: She started nudging me back across the cliff.
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I was far enough away from the cub that was in the tree, that's when she turned back around.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she, you know, they make like this an audible grunt that we can't hear.
[SPEAKER_02]: But their cubs can.
[SPEAKER_02]: She pretty much signaled for the cub to come back down and once it did, all three of them took off running.
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, that one, that's probably the only time I was ever actually scared.
[SPEAKER_00]: My favorite part of that story is how you're like, I heard this terrible sound, so I started walking towards it.
[SPEAKER_01]: If anything, something that white guy would do, I don't want to lift the strap.
[SPEAKER_01]: Straight out of the horror movie.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's go listen to that terrible sound.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's see how it goes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever find that commit that board kill?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
[SPEAKER_02]: Tell me.
[SPEAKER_02]: A true little impotulation.
[SPEAKER_02]: I found an adult bear that was killed by another bear.
[SPEAKER_02]: And it was actually like half-eaten.
[SPEAKER_02]: Of all.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that was a little bit cannibalistic, but yeah, I've seen a couple of bears that were killed by other bears, but I've never actually seen one kill it and eat it.
[SPEAKER_02]: That makes sense.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I tried to find that one and never could.
[SPEAKER_02]: the most part, as far as, you know, just being nervous around him in general, I mean, they're just overgrown cones really.
[SPEAKER_01]: If you had to come back to the camp when you spoke to him for all the time, but no, anything?
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: would usually camp up on reds tops, but if you're there for a couple days, you got to have water to cook and drink and stuff, and it's just such a tour to always have to dip down and get water.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I started camping closer to the water sources, and when you do that, I mean, it's all the time they're coming into your camp.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, at one time it was two or three times in a night that I just had to get out and pop her around off in the air, just
[SPEAKER_02]: Hogs do the same thing.
[SPEAKER_02]: I started just you know wearing earplugs to sleep at night Just because every time I freak and stick breaks or something like you you wake back up like oh, what was that?
[SPEAKER_02]: Dude
[SPEAKER_02]: If you do this for a month straight, like you got to sleep, you can't keep waking up all the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I started using earplugs.
[SPEAKER_02]: I woke up the next morning and the group of hogs had pretty much rooted a 15 foot radius around my campsite.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, they just, the whole ridge top was rooted, except for like this circle around my tent.
[SPEAKER_02]: So I got up that morning and I was like, huh, maybe I shouldn't wear to earplugs, but, you know, those are one time, dude.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a no for me dog.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a no for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you if you want to go This is just imagine you're sleeping in a hammock and that's something bolts should You're like three you're like three kill.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're going to some bumps into you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey That's actually
[SPEAKER_02]: a semi-common occurrence on the southern end of the Appalachian Trail, because you know they say there's like 30, 40,000 people at a time that go hype the Appalachian Trail in the springtime, well that's basically like the spring emergence when the bears come out and they're starving and hungry and you got a lot of inexperienced hikers that you know toss out their ramen noodles to the side of whatever so the bears get really accustomed to people
[SPEAKER_02]: so they've lost their fear like they're not aggressive but I've sit there and had them follow me down the app election trail when I was hiking you know over the summer me you could sit there and yell at it and sit there and swing sticks at it I mean a lot of times they've become such a nuisance that they need to be taken out but bear team six man that's so wild overgrown kids
[SPEAKER_00]: that's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's cool, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Overkill, I overgrown Koon, kill at least two people in four of this year.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I was faster.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, we're out for you though.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, big old Koon mess you up, son.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think we did buy a Koon.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were talking about this on the pie.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was last year.
[SPEAKER_01]: We were talking about this is such a side note.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, what animal the woods of your size of like, made a listen right in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, it's my brother.
[SPEAKER_01]: So then this video question.
[SPEAKER_01]: What animal?
[SPEAKER_01]: Would you be most scared of in the woods if it was a size of a golden tree or like 80 pounds?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I found something like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a squirrel.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there, I mean, it'd be kind of pretty gnarly.
[SPEAKER_01]: My meds ain't much crazier than a black bear, but big squirrels ain't got personality.
[SPEAKER_01]: They're right at free-toe.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, 80 pounds squirrel would be pretty vicious.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's got some teeth, bro.
[SPEAKER_02]: Dude, I had all the size of the teeth on the 80s.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't come, trees would be breaking limbs, left and right, trippin' timbering.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they could move as fast as they came in their little and that big, woo, son.
[SPEAKER_01]: They've been to horror movie, good, and grief, man.
[SPEAKER_01]: We should film those a horror movie.
[SPEAKER_01]: That squirrel's attack.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dillon Man, this has been awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: This has been a great conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're a full dude.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: And anytime we talk to someone who just goes out and does crazy stuff, like what you do, it's always a good conversation, man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet you realize how few people hunt like how you hunt.
[SPEAKER_00]: very few people in the whole country out of all the people that hunt get to experience the things that you experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's pretty cool, man.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I've tried to get out of the people to tag along and I figured out pretty quick.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm pretty much doing this song alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen, if I ain't injured tough it out, so I ain't injury with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: He likes songs sometimes.
[SPEAKER_01]: He ruck for a little
[SPEAKER_00]: Dylan, if you had to give anyone who's going to start hunting the mountains, just one piece of advice, what would it be?
[SPEAKER_02]: Just learn how to write a topo map.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's really it.
[SPEAKER_02]: The topography and a low animal dense or a low animal dense the area is really going to be what drives your success.
[SPEAKER_00]: very cool.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then what you post a lot on Facebook, you're in a couple of groups that you're real active in, and your posts are really awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll post some map stuff and scouting, and it's actually really helpful, like seeing what you put out there.
[SPEAKER_00]: What groups you active in, in case someone wants to go and kind of tag along?
[SPEAKER_02]: Here lately, I've been posting in the mobile honor, and I've helped run the Georgia Bearhunter's page.
[SPEAKER_02]: and 99% of what I share would be in the bearhunter's page.
[SPEAKER_02]: Cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sweet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't preach to you in the podcast, brother.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for all the audio listeners out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: Audio listeners.
[SPEAKER_01]: Video watchers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Appreciate you all watching podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Listen to the podcast and we'll catch you back here in the next episode of the Southern Outdoorsman.
[SPEAKER_01]: And remember guys, y'all stay Southern.