Ep 57: Hunting, Fishing, and Public Lands, with Hal Herring
Hal Herring is a writer, hunter, angler, and conservationist. He has been featured in Field & Stream, High Country News, and Montana Outdoors, among many other publications. Hal grew up in Alabama, but now lives in Montana, where he enjoys chasing elk and high-country trout. In this episode, we cover his upbringing in the outdoors, the culture of southern outdoorsmen, the importance of public lands, and the government’s role in managing them for the good of the people.
Website: halherring.com
Public Trust Movie: link
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Katie
You're listening to the Fish Untamed Podcast, your home for fly fishing in the backcountry. This is episode 57 with Hal Herring on hunting, fishing, and public lands. if you just want to start I'd love to hear how you got your start in the outdoors I know it's been something that's been a part of your life for a while but what got you started in the first place?
Hal
Well, I was lucky that my father had stopped hunting. He was older. He didn't hunt that much, but my parents facilitated me in the outdoors for sure. My mother would give me a ride, for instance, to Guntersville Dam in Alabama. This is near Huntsville, Alabama, Madison, and Jackson County. My mother used to drop me off at Wheeler Dam on the Tennessee River, And she would go antiquing or do whatever and not come back for like eight hours. And so that was kind of an education in how to, like, if you're not catching X, how do you catch Y? Like sane and shad and using them as live bait and stuff. And so I was always obsessed with hunting and fishing as far back as I can remember. And I started really hunting. I was fishing when I was a little tiny child, but I really started hunting about nine years old. Um, and I had a, you know, I got, I think for my ninth Christmas, I got a single shot 20 gauge, Stevens. And, then we were lucky enough. We, we lived out in the country from age 11 until the time I left home in my twenties. So it was, I don't know, man, I can't remember a time when it wasn't the primary, really the primary thing.
Katie
Now, if your parents weren't, actively participating in it as much, did it, was it just something that you felt like you were born with that you were kind of pushing to be able to go and do that on your own?
Hal
I think so. And I didn't have to push much. I was, like I said, they gave me, I can remember I had a kind of top of the line, I had an Eagle Claw fly rod when I was nine with the automatic reel. And I wasn't a great fly fisherman. I just, I fished whatever. I fished hand lines. fished like trot lines, limb lines, game poles, bow and arrows. I mean, it was just like, I don't know where it came from.
Katie
Just a desire to, to be out there and, and looking for stuff.
Hal
And, then, I mean, I re I mean, it was partially, we were big readers in my family. And I, I remember the first book I ever read was like this biography of James Fenimore Cooper. And he was like, as a child, he was like in some kind of like out in the wilderness, you know, navigating and stuff. And I was obsessed with, I read Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, you know, all the stuff I ended up writing. Although I read more like adventure stories than anything else, you know.
Katie
So did you know from a young age that you wanted to pick up a writing career?
Hal
No, but I didn't at all. But my mother encouraged me to do that. And that sort of took, I think.
Katie
So what when did that kind of take over? When did you decide that that's what you wanted to do?
Hal
So I was writing when I for a long time I wrote I wrote fiction and I published fiction. I won a contest short story contest judged by one of my heroes, which is Peter Matthieson when I was in my 20s. And Matthew Essendon, of course, he wrote The Snow Leopard and he wrote Wildlife in America. Let me think of all the... Play in the Fields of the Lord was a huge book for me when I was in high school. It's about the Amazon. But I was able to... Okay, so I was working in the woods. I had published fiction and never made a dime, you know, at it. And I ran across some stories there about game farming that were going on right where I lived in Montana by this time. And I wrote a couple of versions of that story. This was captive trophy shooting stuff. And I ended up pitching one to Field and Stream, just right, what they used to call over the transom, which means unsolicited. And they took it. And I followed that story for some years. And it carried me into chronic wasting disease. This was all happening at the same time. This was around 1999, 1998. And I got an energy story up near where I live now on the Blackfeet Reservation. And the thing was, when I worked in the woods as a forestry contractor, most of the time we were broke. And so to get $750, $1,500, $3,000 at one time for a story was like, you're like, wow, I make more money doing this. I do thinning timber or planting or working and not more than working trails, but it was just like it seemed to work, you know.
Katie
Now, how did you get connected with the game farming? Not connected with them, but how did you become aware of this through your job?
Hal
They established a place that's gone now called the Big Velvet Elk Ranch right south of where I live in the Bitterroot Valley. and I was I did control burns back then on crews you know national forest contracts and I did trails I did fire lines all the regular wood what we call in Montana woods work you know and so I knew a lot of people and and they were all the neighbors to this ranch and some of them went to work on it and and the stories I was getting about the where you pay all this money and you drive up and if the guy wanted it to be like a real hunt the the guy would drive him around a flatbed and pretend like he was looking for elk and then they would just drive down there and you know kill one when when the guy got tired and I was really into elk hunting I was young and I thought you know this is the craziest thing ever was how I i felt I said I said people are really going to be interested in this I'm interested in this what kind of people do this you know and And so I started following that. I published that in High Country News, actually, which is a Paonia, Colorado newspaper that I worked for forever as a freelancer. And they took a chance on me, too. It was a very controversial story.
Katie
Yeah, I can imagine. Was it as controversial back then as it would be today?
Hal
Absolutely.
Katie
Okay.
Hal
I was kind of surprised. It was a lot of fire. This was before chronic wasting disease, which appeared in the game farm in Phillipsburg, Montana, shortly thereafter this. And so, yeah, I mean, and I mean, there's some it was and I got to tell you, like I know it's a for some people, they would say it's a terrible thing to, you know, to kill these elk like that. It's kind of degrading or whatever. Right. But I was also kind of conservative in that I bought the argument that this is your property, your private property. And if I want to hire, if somebody wants to pay me to come shoot my goats or whatever, you know, there's an argument there, right?
Katie
Like it's your right to sell off, you know, the resources that you have on your land if you want to.
Hal
Yeah. And stock it with a bunch of pigs and have people chase them around with dogs. You know, I mean, it's like it might be cruel or whatever, but that's in the eye of the beholder. So, but what happened there was that they were using these game proof fences, obviously, to keep the elk in. And one of those fences blocked. There's a law that says you can't have wild game inside those fences, right? The game belongs to the people. You can't enclose wild game. So I knew these kids that I rock climbed with. They're still great friends of mine, much younger than me. And they got hired to run through this ranch and scatter all the wild mule deer out. And, of course, we were all rock climbing up the Kootenai Canyon that time in Stevensville, Montana. And they said, you wouldn't believe what we just come off of. You know, these kids are like 15 and I'm 20, 30 maybe. And they said, you wouldn't believe this thing we're all doing. And I said, tell me about it. And they said, we're running around that elk ranch chasing mule deer out. And before they finish this fence. And so I was like, wow, that's pretty interesting. So I called the fish and game and asked them what was going on with that. They told me. And then the fence blocked a mule deer migration corridor there. And it pushed all these mule deer out on the Highway 93 where they were just getting massacred, you know. And I thought, well, you may have a private property right to shoot domestic animals on your ranch. But this thing has so many other implications.
Katie
Right.
Hal
And that's what I just got hooked on it. I followed that story for years. I followed it to the Atlantic Monthly and The Economist.
Katie
And what became of it?
Hal
Montana passed a ballot initiative. and I'll get the number wrong if I try to say it, that basically banned captive trophy shooting in Montana. And so that kind of, we dodged that bullet that like Utah and some other states are still struggling with in Idaho with captive shooting.
Katie
Okay. Now, backing up a little bit, what brought you from Alabama out to Montana?
Hal
Well, a couple of things. One, I came out here, I was writing, And I came out to Yellow Bay on Flathead Lake to go to a writer's conference in like 1988, I think. And I was Tom McGuane was teaching there. And Tom McGuane is one of my heroes in art and literature and fishing and hunting. And so I took the train from Memphis, which sounds like a song. And it was a very romantic deal. It was really cool. And I got up to Chicago and then took the Highline train across Havre. I got out in Havre. I remember Montana walking around and I was like, wow. I mean, it blew my mind. I'd never, you know, I'd never been in the prairie, really. And so the Yellowstone was on fire that year. And all these people on the train that were going, they were firefighting and they were tree planters, right? With a ho dad, hand tree planters. And I was a tree planter. I even had a tree planting company in South Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, working for the paper company. And this guy said, hey, man, you can make the big bucks out here swinging that hoedad planting trees in the Rocky Mountains. And so I went back home to Alabama and I thought about that for about a month. And then I started packing up. And my girlfriend and I, my wife now, my wife ever since. We drove out here and we picked up jobs. I got a job managing a ranch off. I was on a hay crew and I got a job managing a ranch in a Bitterroot. And that's it. That was just like, it were everything. It's like, we didn't require much, right? I mean, we weren't looking for the, you ever seen that movie Lost in America?
Katie
No.
Hal
Where he, they take off to see America, him and his wife, and he's looking, he's a stockbroker or something. And they get, they broke, she loses all their money in a poker game. And he gets a job. It's like a crossing guard for a elementary school. And he asked the lady who's running the unemployment place. said she said what's your previous salary you know and he has some kind of huge figure and she said oh I don't think we have any of those jobs and so we weren't we weren't looking to you know to strike it rich and we didn't
Katie
well at least not monetarily I'm sure but in other ways maybe
Hal
right but it just really seemed like a lot of stuff we did work things fell into place they did and it and I was the first year I was legal I was hunting the bitter roots you know the first year I had residency and that was really long ago I mean we're talking about I think 30 more than 30 years ago and and one of the things I've written about too is it wasn't I never left Alabama because I didn't like it like I love Alabama to this day it did get a little crowded on us where I grew up. But the fishing in Alabama and the hunting if you have access to better private land. But I never left there because I didn't like it. I think I found in the West what I had loved as a child, but 20, 50, 100 times over.
Katie
That's actually something I wanted to ask you about, being probably the first person I've talked to from the Southeast, excluding maybe Florida and Georgia, which are kind of their own thing. From your area of the South, you're the first person I've talked to, but what's the culture like down there with fishing in general, but specifically with fly fishing? Because it's not some place that comes to mind when I typically think of a fly fishing area of the country. I think of the West, I think of the Northeast a little bit and the saltwater, but I'm sure there's a lot of opportunities down there. So, what is that culture like?
Hal
That's a good question. That culture has been built since I left and there is a a big fly fishing culture in Alabama particularly now for like spotted bass and red-eye bass all these these strange bass species that live in like these Alabama has it of course it has the most I could wax own and own I'm a big EO Wilson fan the the guy who was the the ant guy who wrote all the books he's a evolutionary biologist from Alabama and Alabama has this thing goes across the middle of it called the fall line and all the rivers go from like the Cumberland plateau and and all those mountains that you they continue on into north Georgia and then up into Tennessee and then all of those spill off of this fall line and then they go through the piedmont heading for the Gulf of Mexico right or heading for the Alabama river tensile river tensile delta which is America's amazon they call it it's like one of the most diverse places in the world but the the difference is there's all these rocky beautiful clear rivers in Alabama above the fall line and they have all these unique like every kind of unique fish in there that you can imagine and so there is a lot of opportunity for like a two-weight or a three-weight fly rod and there's not any trout no native trout you know what do you have introduced there's some rainbows under the dams and people do fish those there's some rainbows in this place called Nakaluka falls which is like a one of these rivers I'm talking about it looks like a trout river you know it's just too hot to sustain them but there were trout and I did catch them and I wandered around and and I would also when I got a driver's license you know your life is just exponentially greater. I mean, I mean, the world opens up. It does. I mean, there's nothing like, I talk to kids who are 14 or 15 and I'm just like, always just like, hold on, you'll, you know, make the best of it. You'll get there. Because if you're a real outdoors person, you know, it's like a driver's license is like the key to heaven. Right. You know, and, and I made the use of that. I was, I was all over North Alabama and Tennessee. The Elk River is a tailwater fishery in Southern Tennessee that is really important to me. I just fished it every chance I got. Wade fished it, walked it. I didn't fly fish it. I didn't really know how to fly fish like that at the time. But I caught a lot of trout in the elk, and I had a lot of adventures on that. And that was like, you know, 40 minutes from my house.
Katie
Now, what fish are native there? When you're talking about this, I don't remember what the region you mentioned was, but you said it was the American Amazon, just a really biologically rich place. What species of fish do you have?
Hal
Well, there's largemouth, of course, largemouth bass. And this is down, that tin saw country is more like tropical, but there's chain pickerel in some of the creeks. That's always really kind of exotic. But the America's Amazon stuff, there's a Gulf walleye that's still alive, barely, that lives in these weird rivers. It's an actual walleye. It's native to Alabama.
Katie
How does it differ from a typical walleye?
Hal
It's a completely different species. I mean, a completely different subspecies.
Katie
Like different forms of cutthroat, almost, but in the walleye world. Okay, I've never heard of that.
Hal
Some of those in southern Mississippi as well, like in the Pascagoula River. I've never caught one, but I'd like to.
Katie
Are they legal to target if they're super rare?
Hal
I don't know what there's a limit on them or what. I mean, they're being studied right now. And I'm not sure what the regulations are on them. I think you could spend a lot of time targeting them and not find one. But, you know, like, I don't know. It's hard to talk about. some of the history if you looked at that place pre-euro I mean we had the falls of the Coosa over in east Alabama that were you could hear them for like seven miles and there were Indian native American fish weirs there that filled up with fish every day enough for a week we damned all that up of course and got rid of it but the the in the history there like the black warrior that I used to fish when I was in college at Tuscaloosa that used to you used to could walk across that and they were like it was rocks and and and there were beds of freshwater mussels there that went for miles that the river would make this crazy noise going through if you if you read the old accounts I mean you know it's kind of a like paradise. it's a different world as a kid
Katie
did you ever fantasize about if you've been born a little earlier being able to experience this before?
Hal
I still do, That's never gone away. I was lost in that, you know, and I tried to live that as much as I possibly could.
Katie
Yeah, I think that's something that's common across a lot of people, even, you know, across the country. Just, you hear these stories and you just think, you know, what if I could have been there during that time? You just hear the stories that just don't sound real. Like, you know, in some place people could walk across the salmon or just stories like that where you just can't even picture it because there's nothing even compared to these days.
Hal
No, and it was all there. I mean, what part of the country are you in right now?
Katie
I'm in Colorado currently.
Hal
Yeah, so I mean, I was thinking of the bison in Colorado, like the Salmon Runs. And then I've been reading these weird books lately set on the Ohio River. It's a guy named Alan Eckhart. He wrote a book called The Frontiersman. And they talk about that when they're fighting with the Shawnee. And they burn these deer hides that contain 100 pounds of clear rendered bear fat. And there's like 20 of them. In addition to these panniers that go on that, they didn't have many horses, right? This is really early. But panniers that are packed with smoked bison meat that comes from there. The bison herds of Kentucky. It kind of blows your mind. I mean, you can't. I'm not sure what progress is, but I don't think what we got is progress.
Katie
Right. And I feel like there's a lot of species today that you find out, you know, you have an idea in your mind of where these animals are found. Like the clear example today, I feel like it's elk, you know, you know where elk are found and then you find out that elk, I mean, I don't know how many states they were in, but it was like across the country. And, you know, the fish have obviously changed so much just because, you know, you go out today and any given river has brown and rainbow trout and that, you know, wasn't a thing, at least for most of the country, but just how different things must have been so long ago.
Hal
Yeah. And some of that, I don't, I mean, I don't object to it. I love catching brown trout, you know, I mean, and I love shooting pheasants. So there's some of it, it's okay. And I mean, some of it, what would you do about it? You might as well float that hopper over that big brown trout, you know?
Katie
So you seem that you probably enjoy reading a lot about this, being a voracious reader and kind of not living the past in a bad way, but just kind of fantasizing about that time. I assume you probably plow through books that kind of take you back to a different place in time.
Hal
I have, yeah, all my life, really. But I've been on this book project, I'm on the public lands. I've been immersed in for really almost a year in just the history of public lands and how we got the United States, for instance. I started out early. And in doing that like I was reading about the creek nation in Alabama and what they're called the muskogee people you know and when they were finally they were militarily defeated at the battle of horseshoe bend by Jackson and Cherokee troops and in reading that history that's where we got like 25 million acres of land right they they had to give it up because because they lost they lost the war in reading that there's all of these chronicles and accounts of what what it was like then and what people were eating and what they lived on and and the people traveling in the creek cities attack I mean the creek nation was a very advanced bunch of folks with their own towns and you know like fish weirs and hunting parties and I mean it it was very advanced we went to war with people who are already there is they'd been doing it for a long time they knew what they were living in Alabama for a long time without damming up the Coosa river which I much appreciate but that's that's part of my fascination this current obsession I have with how things were it comes from this immersion and all this history and these kind of tangential accounts of all of what people were doing you know there's a I could go on this for a long time there's a story of Audubon, John James Audubon in in Ohio and they go up some river I think it's the canal and they meet and I'm not sure what this tribe was but they stay with them there's not there's not any fighting or nothing everybody's getting along and they're hunting swans they call them like for for winter probably larder and they're hunting bear and they're in this it's they call it a wild pecan grove which I don't really know if there's such a thing as wild pecan groves in southern Ohio but that all of the animals have come there to eat these nuts, whether they're hickory nuts or acorns or whatever. And so this Indians have set up, they set up a seasonal village there every year. And they hunt swans and they catch, they kill bears for the oil and the meat and the fat. And Audubon and them, they go hunting and they hunt, like they don't get anything in the morning, but in the afternoon they they you know kill whatever not limits there weren't limits obviously because we got rid of all of them but it's a it sounds like paradise just flush with game and flesh with game there were parakeet the Carolina parakeets I have heard the Carolina of the Carolina parakeet before yeah and then passenger pigeons by the you know millions
Katie
so did it mention anything about the the fishing at that time like what they were finding the rivers?
Hal
they do they do talk about catching catfish and I think drum but I think it's hard I think they had to use I don't think they had hooks like like black you'd have to build a hook at a blacksmith's shop like like what they were using I don't know that's a great question I think they use nets and then the the natives had fish they had weirs built of rocks that channel that that went with the current push the fish kind of like what they use in Alaska now as a fish wheel
Katie
Yeah, yeah.
Hal
But these were made out of rocks, and some of them were 1,000 years old. You know, I mean, that's pretty handy.
Katie
Yeah. It is just cool to, like, think back on all that, too, though, just, like, how things have changed. If you think about today's, like, sport fishing culture, which obviously, like, most of us kind of feel attached to in some way, and just how that has – I mean, it's not necessarily directly developed from something like the fish weirs, but just the different ways that, through the course of history, people have all been kind of participating in the same thing, but for different reasons and via different methods.
Hal
And I don't think there's any doubt that everybody was having a blast hunting and fishing back in the, like 1600s, you know?
Katie
Well, yeah, but I wonder if there's a different mentality about it, if your life depends on that, you know? Obviously, those of us who hunt and fish, a lot of us eat what we get, but, you know, if we don't, we can go to the grocery store and buy something. And I wonder if there's a bit of a different mentality, if that might be your life.
Hal
I would love to know. And, and I'm assuming that like, where I live on the prairie now, right out of Western Great Falls, Montana, and life before the horse here, like before 1700 or whatever. I mean, I'll be pretty hard, pretty different. If you're on your own foot on this vast prairie and antelope and or pronghorn and bison are your thing. Not getting one. Like me and you talk about fishing for Gulf walleye, not getting one, you know? Oh, darn. One's a little different when the kids are all back at the teepee.
Katie
But like you said, I agree that I can't imagine that there are people who weren't enjoying it in some sort of recreational way back then. You know, even if it is for your livelihood, you know, at some point during the year, you probably are going to be flush with food. You know, I'm sure it's a cyclical thing that sometimes you're you're flush with food and sometimes you're starving. But I imagine during those times where you've got a lot of food that, you know, it feels like almost a human experience to have a little bit of fun while you're out there.
Hal
I think so. There's a there's a pronghorn jump. You know, everybody talks about bison jumps or buffalo jumps or they call them Pishkin. And there's a pronghorn jump down in the Madison River that is right next to this hot springs complex. It's on private land now but I guarantee that when they dumped like 50 pronghorn over that thing and everybody had them all cut up and sitting in the hot springs it was a hell of a good time but yeah I think I think I think people are people all the way back I think they I think loving hunting and fishing is part of it comes from that you know the the predatory nature of going after say like like one like like fishing with a dry fly or say fly fishing for largemouth bass you know with a popper I don't think that the the drive to do that is any different than the drive of people 3 000 years ago you know crouching with a bow and waiting for say a big drum to come by in a rocky creek in Alabama you know I think I think they're having a good time just like we are now
Katie
I mean even if even if the reason you're excited is that you're getting dinner that night I mean having a fish on the line is it's fun. I mean, you can't, you can't deny it. I mean, you might have a little bit more terror going on if you know that this, if this fish gets away, there's higher stakes, but at the end of the day, it's fun.
Hal
Yeah. I'm sure of it, man. I'm sure of it. And I think the, I think that's where the drive comes is I think it's survival that has in, in the, in the presence of more luxury has kind of transmogrified into what we call sport.
Katie
Well, it makes you wonder, like, I mean, where else would that have come from? I idea of of catch and release fishing in if there's not some sort of innate drive to get that fish into your net I almost feel like that's just taking that instinct of I need dinner and turning it into you know I don't actually need dinner tonight but there's still something in me that just draws me to this I wonder if there's anyone who's kind of looked into the metamorphosis from the drive to just get food and how that has kind of evolved into the traditions and just kind of the culture around hunting and fishing today where it's just a strong part of people's lives regardless of how much food.
Hal
I was thinking about that quote from I don't know if it was Chief Seattle or whoever but he said when the bison are gone and so and so is gone we'll hunt mice because we're hunters and that's what we do you know that's who we are. So I don't know if anybody ever has. I do I go for both like I love to I mean I love to hunt elk. I mean I think that's like one of the great pursuits in my life, you know, but, I hadn't killed a bull in, I don't know, 16 years, maybe. I just shoot, you know, I kill a cow if I can get a cow tag and it's all meat hunting. And it's just, it's just meat hunting all the time. Whitetail deers too. It's just like, it's, we get as many tags as we can get and we fill them. And it's, it's just as much wild. I mean, it's not tracking down some giant mule deer and just you and him out in the woods for a whole season or whatever, Or like people in the South, they hunt those giant whitetails out of a stand and they just going to shoot that one whitetail. It's not like that. This is meat catching.
Katie
Now, for fishing, do you tend to keep a lot of what you catch or is it mostly catch and release for you?
Hal
For trout, there are these stockers in these lakes around here that in the spring and winter, like we were talking about ice fishing, I will keep those fish and smoke them. but I don't really keep fish out of small creeks at all. And I don't keep fish out of most of the rivers. But I do go, I make these pilgrimages to the big Missouri River below the trout fishing part. And I'll catfish for, I probably do that 10 days a year. And we keep all of those. We'll catch smallmouth catfish, walleye if we can get them. Anytime, even keep drum. And then we eat, that's what we eat. Most trout I let go.
Katie
Okay. Is that from a, I don't know, some sort of inner spiritual connection to trout and something like that? Or is it just a practical, you know, there's cutthroat trout, native cutthroat trout there that you don't want to mess up? Like, what's the motivation behind that?
Hal
Okay. So with cutthroats, it's definitely I don't want to kill them.
Katie
Okay.
Hal
I don't think they're doing that well. Like, there's a lot more people than there are cutthroats. Right. And so with brown trout, I don't really like them on the table. I'll eat them fried, but I don't really like them. And I also find them to be like kind of this like incredibly beautiful creature that are, there's things that are like too pretty to kill, I guess you'd say. But there's things that are so dramatic that they just don't really belong in the food category to me. Right. But these big rainbows that are stopped, they go well in the smoker. and like in the winter ice fishing I'll keep I'll keep the limit of those and I'll smoke them we put them on salads we make stuff out of them crap you like fish cakes out of them but none and like on that Missouri trout fishing river I've never kept a fish like on the in the Craig Montana section of the Missouri I've never kept one out of there
Katie
okay what about what about whitefish? do you ever keep any whitefish?
Hal
yeah I figured you might say that yeah when I lived in the bitter we I would go, I wouldn't say we, nobody else was that interested in it, but I would go white fishing in the winter, like in the open water with a maggot. And you, you, you, if there's a technique to it and then they go in the smoker as well.
Katie
Yeah. I haven't actually eaten a whitefish. I've been planning to go out and try to keep a couple because I, I've been hearing more and more that you can smoke them and make some pretty good, just like smoked whitefish or like dips and things like that. And I'm like, I should go out there and keep a couple for that. I think so.
Hal
They're definitely better in the winter though.
Katie
For catching or eating or both?
Hal
For eating. In really cold water. They're just, and I don't know if this is something I just made up, but they're harder and they stay together better and they're just better in the winter.
Katie
Like mushy in the summer?
Hal
Yep.
Katie
Okay.
Hal
They are. And so is everything. I mean, so are all the Missouri river fish that I catch like down there, catfish and stuff, but I fry them. I don't really matter. But those whitefish were better in the winter.
Katie
Yeah, I've heard people describe certain species as mushy, like certain species of trout as mushy. And species of trout that I've eaten many times and would never think of the word mushy. And I've come to decide that it must just come down to the location you catch them, the size and the season, because I've never noticed a consistent, you know, mushy fish.
Hal
Mushy fish, right. And also how people handled them. Right. That's like saying they were pronghorn, you know. I remember when I was younger, people go, I don't eat pronghorn. I don't eat antelope. And I was like, well, antelope's one of my favorite things on Earth's eat. And I don't know where these people got a bad antelope, you know.
Katie
Well, I think a lot of antelope come from hot prairies that might get driven around in the back of a pickup truck for a couple hours.
Hal
That's it. I think that's it. And, you know, once bitten, twice shy, unless you're really hungry, right? You know, and that's the other thing is like, it depends on how hungry you are.
Katie
Yeah.
Hal
Right?
Katie
Well, like you even mentioned, though, I mean, just a different preparation can kind of save something, too. Maybe you do get a fish that stays out too long and then you decide to deep fry it instead of baking it in butter. There's just different things you can do to fix it if you've messed up a little bit.
Hal
Do you do any warm water fishing?
Katie
I do a little bit in Colorado. I did a lot growing up in Pennsylvania. I still do when I go back to Pennsylvania. Out here, the warm water fishing in the Denver area is a lot of reservoirs with a lot of motorboats and stuff like that. Or just small city ponds. I'm more inclined to go up in the mountains and fish up there.
Hal
Right. Well, you got some of the best mountains in the world, too.
Katie
Yeah. Yeah. I have nothing against warm water fishing at all. I just happen to be located in a place where the cold water fishing just far surpasses it.
Hal
Yeah, you bet. And that's true here, too. I think I do it in part just because I'm hooked on it since a child. I have to go throw that big catfish rig down in that hole with the big night crawler to see what's down there. just you know and trout fishing as much as I love fly fishing for trout it doesn't do the it's it's two different two different joys you know
Katie
yeah I saw on your website that you you know you grew up a pretty well-rounded outdoors kid. you know hunting, fishing, as I even said like picking ginseng and so I imagine like even I asked about the fly fishing culture in the south before but what what's the rest of the fishing culture like like what are people run for fish what is the the the main thing, if you show up down there, what are you going to see people doing?
Hal
There's different cultures there. And I was going to say that I want to find this little book that Matt Roberts wrote on fly fishing for these shoal bass, red-eye bass. But the culture is there. So there's a very utilitarian culture of people with like a Zebco 202 and a bobber. like like put as many brown bluegill into a cooler as you can legally pick up and carry you know so there's that that part and there's and then there's like the tournament bass fishing right and there's like serious largemouth bass anglers and it's just a it's very and then there's like there's there's the legions of catfishing you know cat fishermen and then some of these people are generalist as well like you'll you'll but you'll meet like great bass fishermen are also crappie fishermen which is which is a complete pursuit of its own you know and I it's hardest man it's so diverse you got me really like wishing I was down there so diverse like like like there was when I was a kid when I was about leaving there in my 20s people started like drifting live shad under pickwick dam for these like eight pound smallmouth to just barrel fish you know like they're in all those swarms of shad and stuff so I got really interested in that I've never I've never successfully done it but people do it all the time now I want to look up that book but that the diversity of fish in there is it's just amazing
Katie
that's kind of the impression I had of it. I mean I've never fished down there but I just get the impression that there's a lot more ways people are going about getting fish out of the water than I would encounter walking down the street here and just asking asking anglers how they how they procure their fish there'd be a handful of answers but I just get the impression that the south has a lot more of those answers
Hal
yeah and then I mean there's like like like poorer people who are really their subsistence fishing is part of their deal like you can go down under the dam at Guntersville and catch like wipers white bass hybrids and I don't know what the limit is but you can catch a lot of them and and like eat for you know five days frying fish you can I was obsessed with crappie fishing when I was before I got a driver's license I had a lake near my house that had a good crappie in April and you'd go in there with like if you could have used a cane pole which go in these brush piles and you just drop the minna down with a single little split shot and the copy are all suspended in a certain depth you know and when you catch them you you can you could use a slip bobber it took me a long time that out but that would suspend that men at that level you know and so there's there's a I mean all of it is skilled or semi-skilled at least you know you can I mean there's cat fishermen can just out fish you 20 to one on catfishing just because they know something you don't so I i don't know I always it's I'm jonesing for some summer Alabama fishing
Katie
is summer like the main time to fish down there? I would expect it's really hot but really hot it's early early morning and nights
Hal
it's you know late afternoon but you can wet wade everything you know and and then top water it cools off a little bit but but in march it's really there's days in march when the weather's stable when it's really great you know it's like waking up it's not that good in my experience December, January or else I don't know where how to do it but yeah March April there's a lot of great stuff going on. I heard that it had been raining so much this year that everything's been blown out like for a long time.
Katie
Oh, really? It's been wet down there too?
Hal
Yeah, really wet. Unlike the West.
Katie
Well, I was going to ask what your weather's been like because the West usually includes us here in Colorado. We're usually in that Western fire news headline every summer, but this year we've gotten more rain this year already than we did the entirety of last year. And we're having a pretty wet year and we only have a couple of fires going and they're not They're not terrible. We're getting all the smoke from Oregon and Northern California. But what's your weather been like? Are you kind of included in that drought?
Hal
East of here, yes. And it's really severe east of here drought. But we had the same thing y'all got, which is traveling down that Rocky Mountain spine, I guess. Is it? Yeah, and these weather, like tumultuous weather things that are dropping rain. So we're in a bubble and we don't brag about it because like east of here, people are suffering, you know? Right. And so, but it's been pretty, it's pretty green, looking pretty green.
Katie
Yeah, this is the greenest I've seen it here in years. And it's not the typical, like we've been up in the mountains every weekend for the past month or so now. And normally we're used to an afternoon thunderstorm. And instead it's been like multiple hours of rain at a time that just doesn't, it rains into the night, rains down here in the front range. And I'm just like, I'm going to take it as long as it's willing to keep giving it to us.
Hal
And what was y'all's snowpack like?
Katie
I don't know the actual measurement of how the snowpack was because we're just, as skiers, we kind of note it as either good winter or bad winter. But half the time, it's just, you know, the place you're skiing is either good or bad. So you have this idea of whether it's good or bad. So I don't actually know statistically whether it was a good or bad winter. It felt like not a great winter.
Hal
Yeah, us too. It wasn't bad. And then we got, which is hard on our sharptail grouse, but we got these May blizzards, really late May blizzards that they were super heavy wet snow. And it really charged up. Like you could just see the change. We don't get on, we probably get 9 to 12 inches of rain a year. It's like, it's almost a desert, you know, but the mountains catch the snow. So it feeds the water comes down from the mountains. I mean, it's almost like a perfect system, really. as long as you don't put dams on it and suck all the rivers dry. We have a big problem this year. The snowpack was really bad in the Yellowstone. And this is a very controversial thing to introduce, I guess. But we're having a real bad problem with dewatering and losing the better fisheries in the state of Montana.
Katie
Yeah, I think I heard that they closed a bunch of rivers recently. Is that they just straight up closed them?
Hal
Closed them, and then they were on hood owl hours really early. Hoot owl hours means you can only fish from like daybreak to 12 or two o'clock and that's because the temperatures get too hot you know afterwards but and people want to talk about climate change and that's fine it's true all that but we just have a we have a serious dewatering problem from irrigation I mean you just can't you just can't dewater all the creeks and then have fish and work that way you know
Katie
so what are the guides doing do you know how the outfitters are handling these closures because I assume that affects a huge part of their business
Hal
they look for rivers that aren't closed and then they they just fish early and they're off at two
Katie
okay I wasn't sure maybe because I heard maybe two days ago that some of the rivers were just closed entirely to recreational
Hal
and they go moving around and then that push pressure on fish other fish probably can't take it. it’s tough man I mean it's it's a it's a problem that needs addressing and I Somebody needs to, we need to, we need to have been talking about it 25 years ago.
Katie
Right. Which we can't go back and do, so.
Hal
No, and Trout Unlimited did some hero's work down on the Big Hole River, trying to put some extra, get some work with ranchers and ranches that had irrigated hay fields to get some more water in the river. And that was good. And we need more and more. We're going to have to. I mean, the Gallatin, the Jefferson, the Madison, they're all just like, they're super low.
Katie
Yeah, the Madison was what I heard about.
Hal
Yeah. And of course, I mean, for people in America, right? Those are the three, that's the three forks, right? Three Forks, Montana. Well, that's the three forks of the Missouri, man. That's the biggest, like the second biggest river in the United States, right? So it's like, it's not really a local trout fisherman's problem. Right. This is like the mighty Moe, right? This is the big Missouri River that goes all the way to the Mississippi. So it's interesting those ecological, like how everything is connected, right? But you're not going to have the same fishery unless we figure out this, some in-stream flows is what we need. You need a minimum in-stream flow that protects other aspects of the economy and that encourages people to use water in a more judicious and effective way and you kind of got to go all the way back to frontier times to when all this water started getting allocated to to do that it's not going to be easy nobody wants to touch it
Katie
yeah and especially these rivers that go through multiple states it's not as easy as one state making a decision I mean right that's obviously a big thing on the Colorado too you know we have water here that doesn't make it to the ocean. I'm not going to blame a single state, but especially with a river running through the desert where people are trying to live and they're using a lot more water than someone who gets a lot of rain might.
Hal
Yeah, I think there's 40 million people that are on the Colorado River one way or another dependent upon it. You could pray for rain, but yeah, I think that's the future, right? That's Phoenix and Vegas.
Katie
It's going to have to get figured out at some point, but it's not going to be an easy route to do that. There's no easy fix.
Hal
I think you could do it locally though you could get minimum in-stream flow laws and say that that river is is survives and thrives at x number of cfs cubic feet per second and that's what needs to stay in there and everybody who has a water right can work with that too but that but that's your baseline is the river has to survive because other things depend on it
Katie
On a more positive note, I'm going to get too sad. I guess maybe to go back a little bit, moving from Alabama to Montana, I'm sure was a huge shock for you. Just in terms of everything, I mean everything, but fishing wise, when you came to Montana, how did your fishing transform and where are you at these days in terms of where can someone find you on the water and what might you be doing out there?
Hal
Okay, so I fish a lot of small creeks. I go up real high and fish for cutthroats, you know, at least four or five times a summer. But I do a lot of that wandering around the Missouri on the warm water stretch, like throwing spinning gear. But if somebody and I go down to the Blue Ribbon stretch of the Missouri in that late in the afternoon, it's only it's 45 minutes from my house and I'll blast out of here and get get there and fish like the last three hours of daylight, you know, when it's not on hoot owl hours and so I i always fish that every year I roam around a lot and I still fish like I like I like places that are out of the way headwaters stuff that and I don't mind if they're small fish you know I remember one time fishing on the room plateau I think the biggest fish we caught was like as long as you're like not even as big as your long as your hand you know but it was like one of the best days I've ever had those so but yeah and I do fish a lot I still you know and I don't it's like we have some rivers around here that are very dewatered but you can go and find like spring holes and you'll fish them when it's when it's not too hot I do quit fishing when it's so hot because it yeah I think it kills them you know and we're so we're far enough away from the mountains where that's a real thing like like the mountains are over there with their kind of cool water fisheries and cold water But by the time you get out to about where I'm at, there's trout. But water temperatures is a real thing.
Katie
Yeah. Every year. Yeah, that's the thing here, too. I mean, I think the Colorado River, there's a certain stretch of it right now that's under voluntary fishing closure. And I think they're talking about maybe making a mandated fishing closure. But luckily, the mountains are close enough that we can adapt to that by just going higher and higher until the water temperature isn't a problem. That's it.
Hal
Well, y'all got, and also the beauty of Colorado is that 9,000, 10,000, 11,000. Like, we don't have that, you know, right? Where I live, the mountains top out about 9, 8.
Katie
Oh, really?
Hal
Yeah. And even in Glacier, you know, a 10,000 foot peak is really rare. And so we've got lower elevation than Colorado and you can feel it.
Katie
Now, have you spent much time down here?
Hal
Not really. Not really. I've driven it quite a bit and I've visited and my daughter is fixing to go to Fort Collins to go to college. And so I might be getting into more, seeing it more. But no, I haven't. When I moved here, I work in Idaho. I've worked in Idaho a lot. I just did, I did big trips in Wyoming last year. But there is an aspect of the Northern Rockies, which you can, you're never going to see it all. And you sort of just get absorbed into the fabric. Because like I said, you're never going to see it all.
Katie
It's almost overwhelming. I feel like I'm sure you're a map person too, just like looking at maps and I'll spend hours a day just, just looking at basins and streams and what would it be like to get there. And it's, it's simultaneously motivating and just almost crushing to think I would love to see this, all of this, but there's no chance I'll ever see even 1% of it. So I've got to make it count when I, when I go see something, but.
Hal
That's it. And I, and, and you go and you see what you can, like when you have the time, like you got to work, you know, unfortunately yeah this was like it and I and that's one reason I think that I stuck with that forestry work for so long is like you just live outside yeah you get out there you do you don't get to see a lot like I i worked in the cabinet mountains up in northern Montana for a while and I they had hoot out hours you couldn't run a chainsaw afternoon because it was so dry and so I hiked the cabinet mountains that's the only time I've ever been to the cabinets you know and it was just I happened to be there and I couldn't work but a lot of this I mean a lot of this country you end up seeing like for me I saw it from a hoedad or behind a chainsaw you know.
Katie
Well there's a difference between I and they're both I don't mean to say that one's better than the other but there's a difference between seeing a lot of different things and getting to know one place really really well and I still haven't decided which I prefer because there's something to going back to the same place over and over and over again and feeling like you know every bend in the river and every hole and every rock and really feeling like you know that place and you're intertwined with it but also not wanting to go back to the same place to the detriment of everywhere else that is still out there to be seen so it's kind of this weird balance of do you want to see more or do you want to get to know it more intimately?
Hal
I think that's a great point. I've never settled that I've never found that balance you know I've at times when you don't have much money and you really focus on, say, a 50-mile radius around where you're at, then you can get there. But you're always going to be restless. I am freaking out, and I can't go because I'm working on this book project. I just really want to go to Alaska. I just want to go up there and fish southeast. I've done it a couple of times. I want to do it again. And I mean, I would just like – I'm so restless about it. It's just driving me crazy. And instead of like fishing locally and enjoying, you know, the places that I know, my head is in Alaska and places that I've never even been.
Katie
Right. But that's part of the fun, though. It's just fantasizing about what could be or, you know, again, like looking at maps and planning things out. I mean, planning can be half the fun.
Hal
It's an incredible luxury, isn't it? Like to have all of this that you can, that you could see.
Katie
Yeah.
Hal
Have you ever done so much saltwater fishing?
Katie
Nope. I've saltwater fished, I think, once in my life with spin gear.
Hal
I mean, I've never, I haven't fly fished in salt water like at all. And I mean, what would it be like to go to the Bahamas and walk down those things and catch those bonefish, you know? And you can, yeah. Or roosterfish in Southern Baja, which is another thing that I'm obsessed with that I've never done.
Katie
A bucket list item?
Hal
Absolutely. To see roosterfish coming down those waves like on the East Cape. Yeah.
Katie
Have you seen Running Down the Man?
Hal
No. Tell me about that.
Katie
I haven't seen it in a long time, but I don't know if you've seen the movie Eastern Rises. It's a short fly fishing film about Russia, but it's made by the same guy, I think. And it's just a short fly fishing film about rooster fishing. And I think they're in Baja, but you should definitely check it out. Running Down the Man.
Hal
Okay, I'm going to write that down.
Katie
Yeah, if that's on your bucket list, I think you'll enjoy it.
Hal
Oh, yeah. And I, that's a, you know, and I've fished in Baja a couple of times. I was there for other, for, for writing jobs. So like I've never been to Baja just for fun. Actually, I don't really go anywhere just for fun. It always, it's either an assignment or it's like, I would like to try that, you know.
Katie
Oh, you've mentioned your, your book a couple of times. And I did, I did promise you that I would circle back around to this if we didn't touch it. But since you mentioned it, I think this would be a good time. Tell me about the book and the movie that came out with Patagonia, because it sounds like they're pretty intertwined with each other.
Hal
Okay, yeah. And first, let me go back to that Alabama red-eye bass, which I did a podcast with Matt Lewis. And he's the red-eye bass fly fishing king of, well, he wouldn't call himself that. But Matt is a hell of a fly fisherman in Alabama. And he's a geneticist, I think is what he does, in fisheries. so he's like really really knowledgeable about these these unique fish species in those rivers I was talking about I wanted to make sure I got that because I was I i plan I hope to fish with him someday down there so to go to that project so two or three two or three years ago I don't know what it was several years ago I did a I i was I was at I've been a public lands journalist in a way for 25 years like like because so much of what happens in the west happens to do with public lands right which is I'm talking about federally managed public lands. forest service, BLM, u.s fish wildlife refuges and so several years ago I drove over to cover the occupation by the Bundy group of the Malheer wildlife refuge in Oregon in outside of burns Oregon. and I wrote a story about that that got a lot of traffic it was like it was very interesting to people which I didn't really know when I was writing it at all and so some months after that I got contacted by these guys who became friends of mine David Byers and he was making a movie called no man's land and David had actually been embedded at the Malheur refuge I didn't meet him there but he was making a film about the occupation of the wildlife refuge and what these guys They wanted a lot of things. They wanted to turn the refuge back over to people and have people graze it. And they were against any kind of protection. They hated the government, and they were against protecting anything from anybody ever. And they were armed and loud and all that. So David was making this film. He interviewed me about my time there at the refuge, talking to these folks, interviewing them. And it was on a movie. And that movie led David to take on a project which came to be called Public Trust, which was like the future of our public lands. Because so much of what was happening at the Malheur Refuge with Ammon Bundy and the militia was anti-federal government. And they were anti-public lands. Now, how you become anti-public lands, meaning, I don't, I mean, they're pretty confused. Like this is before QAnon, but these guys have got a lot of theories that don't really hold up to the light of fact, you know. But anyway, they're anti-public lands. And so I got, David came to me and he said, you've been doing this for 25 years. Do you want to be a part of this film? And we're going to travel all over and interview people about public lands. And I had been pitching a book project on this subject for about a year and a half at that point. And so I wasn't really getting too far with that. And so we took this film on. And over the course of about two years, they made this movie. They did all that. I'm just kind of the talking head, the interviewer. But I did start, I did land the book project with Patagonia Publishing. And I'm working on that book now.
Katie
And write me the name of the movie and the book.
Hal
Okay, so the book is going to, I don't know what the name of the book is. It's a very amorphous project at this point. I have 60 volumes on the floor right here that you can't see that start with like the Creek Nation in Alabama and they end with the FLIPMA, which is the Federal Land Management Policy Act of 1976. So I've been kind of embroiled in this project. So the movie is called Public Trust. You can see it for free on YouTube. And probably the amazing thing is it has 2.5 some odd million views. So this thing struck a chord. And I don't think any, I won some awards. I don't know which ones. We released this thing during the pandemic. So let me go back. We didn't do anything. I interview people on this movie. David and Patagonia and Jeremy Rubing, the producer, They made this movie and they released it during the pandemic, right? We released it in February. Everything slowed down and stopped. And so all the film festivals and all that were virtual. But the movie did really well. People were interested in it. And I'm hoping that I can write a book now that will add to the people's knowledge over what federally managed public lands mean to the United States, mean to people. and I have been covering that beat a really long time. And then I was a contractor on, on forest service and BLM for a really long time. I still am. And so maybe I have a unique perspective to offer as to somebody who hunts, fishes, works, and enjoys public land camps. You know, I hope I have something to offer.
Katie
Oh, I'm sure you do. Why do you think public lands have become such a talking point in the past couple of years? Because I hesitate to think that it's just related to the Bundy incident because a lot of people aren't even familiar with that. But I feel like even after I had moved to the West and, you know, had started recreating on public lands, it wasn't a big talking point. It was just something you did and, you know, you had available to you. But I feel like in the past, maybe four to five years or so, it's become a major thing. I don't know if it has anything to do with Trump because I feel like it even started kind of before that. but do you have any insight on when that became such a huge conversation piece?
Hal
I do. So when it under Clinton, when they started, he made the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in Utah. And that infuriated like the Utah politicians. And so there begin and the Sagebrush Rebellion was clear back to the 1980s. right? And Reagan and James Watts, Secretary of Interior under Ronald Reagan, he hated it. He didn't like the idea of public lands. They don't want the federal government to own land. And so in the last five years, what happened was, one was the Bundy thing happened, but there was also a group called, there's two groups, American Legislative Exchange Council, which is kind of a Koch brothers, kind of right-wing thing, Heritage Foundation, and they write legislation for state legislatures, and they are very anti-public lands. They don't think the government should manage public lands. They want the lands to be privatized and sold and have everybody make money and whatever they would do. They don't believe in any kind of commons, right? And so, So this is kind of confusing, but at the same time, there was a group called the American Lands Council. A guy named Ken Ivory ran that in Utah, and they had this campaign call. It was very well publicized called Free the Lands. Give the lands to the states and then let them either manage them or sell them. And so with the Bundys who hate the federal government and don't believe that the federal government owns land or manages land for the people, they don't believe in that concept. That whole thing kind of came together in, I wouldn't say a perfect storm at all. It simply rose to prominence amongst people who say are elk hunters. and amongst all the people I know who may be anti-federal government they're like I hate the feds don't you hate the feds and I'm like well I you know I i don't really hate the federal government that's like I'm kind of a patriot and the government is of the people by the people as long as it's that I'm kind of for it and I have a lot of different nuanced opinions about all that but I'm going like I don't know you know you're saying you hate the feds and here come the American and Lounge Council, and they're saying we hate them too, and we're going to sell off the National Forest. So what would that mean to people? And that's why it became more prominent. There were, I'm not sure, if you watch the Public Trust movie, we go through a bale of bills, congressional bills, you know, legislative stuff that all has to do with privatizing the National Forest and the Bureau land management lands. And so it's a real thing. And it's in the Republican platform that right up front that they don't believe the federal government should own land and that the land should be given to the states. And then at the same time, Utah was selling off a lot of its state land that was granted to it by the federal government back at the time of statehood. And some of the ranchers who who were firebrand hated the federal government. Well, they found themselves that the state government had sold off the land that they leased that was their cattle operation. And so they were now caught between a rock and a hard place of like despising the state, hating the feds, but not having enough money to buy land of their own. So that kind of made a twisty deal into it. And that became more prominent. Like, what do we do? Like, if you're not, if you don't have enough money buy 20,000 acres of grazing land, and the state decides to sell off these sections that you've depended on to lease for your cows. Right.
Katie
It's kind of a weird predicament to be in, to think, or to be anti-public lands, but also if you don't then have private land, it's, I don't know, it's just, it's a little bit easier to stomach public lands when you don't have the ability to have your own land. And it might be easier to write off public lands as unnecessary if you have thousands of acres of land that you have access to.
Hal
Yeah, if you were Ted Turner, for instance. Although Ted Turner's not anti-public lands. This is a movement that, the reason I started this project with the book, this is a movement that I'm convinced that the people who say they don't agree with having federally managed public lands like Forest Service haven't thought it out. I mean, I am convinced. They go like, who do you hate? And they go, federal government. And then nobody ever says, well, like, okay, okay. You know, and the truth of it is, is we have 640 million acres of public land in the United States and people depend on it for grazing, for hunting, for watershed protection. I mean, it's all, it was, it's there because nobody claimed it back in the homestead days. And it's there because Teddy Roosevelt, back to President Harrison, set it aside so that we wouldn't wreck all the watersheds and then dry up the west. I mean, and then in 1911, the eastern forests all got started because we had logged places out to the point where they no longer, they collapsed into the rivers and filled up the Hudson River with sediment so you couldn't navigate it. And so they started setting aside forests that kept the dirt from washing down the Hudson and stopping the shipping.
Katie
Well, it's an interesting issue, too. I mean, not to make it a political topic here, but it's difficult because I feel like some people get really connected to the idea of anti-federal government. And on the flip side, people get too connected to the idea of having the government be there to take care of everything. And I feel like there's sometimes this mismatch where people don't. Like, my personal beliefs would be like, I don't need the federal government in my house, you know, making laws about things that I can do in my own home, in my own privacy. But I very much support the idea of them managing public lands for everybody to use. That seems like a very good use of that broad power that no one else really has the ability to do. I mean, that's the only group in this country that can really have that, the ability to do that, to manage that large piece of estate. So I think that there's sometimes people get too connected with the idea of I don't like the government in, you know, for example, messing with my private life in my own home. And therefore, I shouldn't support this. And it's like it's it's this weird thing where you kind of have to be able to separate those two things and say, I can support it in this instance, but not in this instance.
Hal
And that's that's that's exactly that's exactly right, Katie. I mean, I mean, so one of the things that if you're going to have a government at all. Right. I mean, people seem to demand governance, right? Anarchy has never really worked for very long. And I don't mean like violent anarchy. I mean, just people will go, well, we don't want a government. We're all going to agree on this or whatever. It just, they don't do it. So there's always governments. And if the government is going to do something, there's going to be a government, then I want it to do the things that I can't accomplish on my own.
Katie
Right, right.
Hal
That's about it. Like, you know, I can't really, I could get together with people and build an interstate highway. You don't really want to. I don't want to. And as far as like keeping the water in the river, so that the, like you don't put 10 million sheep up in the Bob Marshall wilderness until there's not a single piece of grass left and all the creeks collapse and we don't have any water down here, you know? So the government, that happened. And the government, like they set aside the Lewis and Clark National Forest and then the Bob Marshall Wilderness to protect the North and South Fork of the Sun River. And that's the water for this part of the world. You know, private enterprise just wasn't working. They were personal profit motives back there. We're going to take away the resources from all the people downstream. And so you have a government and it worked. And like you said, people seem to have a hard time separating out. I don't want them to do this, but I do need them to do this. You know, you take the baby and you chunk him out with the bathwater completely and you find yourself with nowhere to go hunting
Katie
right it becomes a side of do I like them or do I not instead of instead of what do I think that they should be involved in and what do I not think they should be involved in and I feel like that would be a much more useful conversation overall in this country because I feel like most people tend to agree on those things like most people don't want to be told what they can do in their private lives and most people do want the government to like you said build an interstate no one wants to spend their time building interstate. And so it's, you know, it's not a team thing. It should just be a, you know, people get elected to do a specific task. And can they be kept on track to do that task and not overstep the bounds?
Hal
And no, they can't, not without eternal vigilance, you know, because power corrupts. Absolutely. Right. I mean, we all know that the government has to, we empower the government. We consent to be governed. We empower the government to do X, Y or Z that we think it should do. And then you, and you got to watch it like a Hulk, right? You have to keep it in this, it's called the narrow corridor. You have to keep it in this place. You can't let it expand out and just do whatever some people think it should, right? One of the things I have, I could get this back on this, on this, to why I did this. I believe that most of the federal public lands, if people understood how we got them, what they do and the freedom that they offer people and the ecosystem services and resilience that they offer, I believe it won't be right or left or Republican or Democrat either. I think that we're going to actually, this, if people knew what I'm trying to put in my work and what's in public trust as well, that it wouldn't be a political thing. Yeah, I would tend to agree. Yeah. And how we manage those lands, we can fight over that tooth and nail. Like we should, right? Like, shall we log this? Should we preserve that? Should we have a wilderness here? Shall we have X, Y, or Z? That you have this incredible federal lands that belong to all of us. And we definitely want to argue over what to do with them, what the management should be. I'm all for arguing because, you know, I mean, nothing gets done like Kim Jong-un or whatever his name is in North Korea. You know, nobody argues with him. He just he just chops you up or whatever. And so nothing ever happens. Right. So what you want, good old American like conflict, good old American compromise to over, you know, nobody gets what they want. That's what you're hunting. Nobody gets exactly what they want.
Katie
Everyone gets a little bit of what they want. Ideally. Yeah.
Hal
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's and so I'm not anti-conflict. I just honestly think I honestly think that this will go beyond politics. And it'll be neither Democrats nor Republicans, neither right nor left at some point. If people understood like the glories of those national forests that y'all fish in up there in Colorado or that where I hunt here or where I can hunt like in like the Sipsi wilderness in Alabama. That's the headwaters of the Sipsy River that makes Smith Lake. Smith Lake is the cleanest lake in Alabama because its headwaters are in the Bankhead National Forest and are protected in a forest.
Katie
Right. It's all connected. It's all connected.
Hal
And and it's and the other thing is, is like I'm often freaked out by people who are so willing to just like blow stuff up. That's working, you know, like this work in the National Forest is pretty good. Yeah, it's a lot of conflict, a lot of trouble, all this stuff. But it's pretty great to be able to go hiking for two weeks and fishing and hunting. And he's like, why do you want to just like burn this down? That's a good question. Yeah, that's my soapbox. That's my current soapbox.
Katie
When do you hope to have the book out? I know I don't want to lock you into anything.
Hal
I'd say I'm a year and a half out. And that's not optimistic. That's where I'm supposed to deliver.
Katie
Okay. Well, I mean, not to agree to anything, but when it comes out, I'd love to talk to you again and just kind of talk about how it went. And maybe once it gets released, kind of spread that out. Because I love the idea of what you're doing and the idea of making it not a political division thing, but just an American thing that everyone can benefit from. And I think it'd be a great thing to spread out to people.
Hal
I appreciate that. I'd love to come back. I just think that your audience too, it's not a niche audience. Everybody in America should be interested in this or at least paying attention to it a little bit. And the other thing about it is it's extremely unique. There's just things that the United States of America does better. We just do certain things better. We were the best at killing off the bison. We were the best at restoring. But then we were the best at restoring all this.
Katie
We've been the best at a lot of good and a lot of bad things, but hopefully we can focus on the good in this case.
Hal
Yeah. But this is like this is something that we did uniquely in the world. You know, I mean, the Canadians have crown land, but the people and Australians do, too. But the people don't have a lot of say in it. In America, like, man, this is like this is like the I mean, we're just wilder. It's wilder people. They just don't, we just don't, we're arguing and thinking and questioning and our government doesn't just get to say we're going to do this. And the people own these lands and the government manages them in trust for us. And I'm going to make a big trip. I think when I get done with this, like in a week, I'm going to try to go across the Bob Marshall, about halfway anyway, like 35 miles. And that'll be all on Lewis and Clark National Forest, Bob Marshall Wilderness. Where else could I do that? With my dog. What's your plan? Are you going, you got any trips planned this summer?
Katie
Well, we've just been on some, but I've got a lot of scouting to do over the next month or so. And we've got some weddings and stuff that we have, some administrative tasks we have to take care of. But once that's done, it's going to be, I'm actually going out on Wednesday to stay overnight and work late the next day to go check out a new spot for deer. So it's in the thick of things right now.
Hal
Yeah. Do you get an elk tag every year?
Katie
I do. I don't get an elk every year, but I do get a tag every year.
Hal
Right on. Well, that's cool, man.
Katie
But yeah, where can people find you if they want to reach out? Either check out your writing or I know, please plug the podcast too. We haven't even mentioned your podcast, but.
Hal
So Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, I handle the podcast for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. It's called Podcast and Blast. We've got over 100 episodes. And that has been a pretty incredible experience for me. I didn't, I didn't, nobody planned that. And it turned out to be pretty interesting, really interesting. And you can go to my website, which is halherring.com and see like my old work. And I've been working on this other project now for about a year. So I don't have a lot of new stories. I'm between the podcast and blast and the, this book project. I'm pretty, I'm not overwhelmed. I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm here a lot. And I, and I'm lucky in that, well, I've got a good cow tag for Easter here this year. That's kind of a trip out on the Missouri breaks, but I do a lot of, I do a lot of my hunting. I'm not, My elk hunting is catch as catch can. I haven't been that good successful in the last few years. But I do a lot of wandering around hunting during hunting season. I'm pretty lucky in a lot of ways. If it doesn't cost a lot of money, I'm probably doing it.
Katie
Yeah, as I say, sometimes I get your catchphrase stuck in my head, just wandering around wearing out a pair of boots.
Hal
Yeah, exactly. I'm good at that. I'm staring into space.
Katie
Well, Hal, thank you so much for coming on. This was just a fun chat, and I'm glad to hear about your book coming along. It sounds like it's going well, and I'm going to go check out that Public Trust movie because that sounds like a good way to spend my evening.
Hal
Cool. Well, thanks for having me. This is cool. I was aware of your podcast, but I'm now much more.
Katie
Well, you're a great addition to it, but thank you again, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
Hal
You bet. Thanks, Katie.
Katie
All right, guys. Thanks for listening. don't forget to head over to the website fishuntamed.com for all episodes and show notes and also please subscribe on your favorite podcasting app that'll get my episodes delivered straight to your phone and also if you have not yet please consider going over to Apple Podcasts and leaving a rating or review that's very helpful for me and I'd greatly appreciate it other than that thank you guys again for listening and I will be back in two weeks bye everybody
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