Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring

Join Hal and writers David Quammen and Betsy Gaines Quammen for a bonus episode of the BHA Podcast & Blast. As we enter the season of giving thanks, of family in a time of social distancing, of reading good books by the fire, we hope you enjoy this wide ranging conversation, a love letter to writing and partnerships and the West.

David Quammen is the foremost science writer of our time, specializing in the linked fields of ecology and evolutionary biology. His 2012 book Spillover – exploring how the destruction of natural ecosystems around the world leads to new viruses crossing over from wildlife to human beings – has made him one of the most sought-after and informed voices on the Covid pandemic. Join David and Hal for an engaging, thought-provoking and exquisitely timely conversation.

Betsy Gaines Quammen is the author of the new book American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God & Public Lands in the West,which explores the intersection of religious belief and landscape. Quammen never set out to write about the Bundys, or Mormonism. But her interviews with Bundy family members and her exhaustive study of the history of the Latter Day Saints revealed a side of the anti-public lands movement that no other writer or scholar has even approached.

Graham Zimmerman is an alpinist, filmmaker and veteran of more than 30 international climbing expeditions. In the summer of 2019, Graham was part of a team that completed the first ascent of Link Sar in the Central Pakistani Karakoram via its Southeast Face. (It was a highly coveted prize; nine unsuccessful attempts had been made throughout the years.) Graham was born in New Zealand, raised in America's Pacific Northwest, and has become, through his experiences in the great mountain ranges and glacier fields of the world, a leading voice for the climate change organization Protect Our Winters. Hal and Graham talk about how one trains mentally and physically for a brutal ascent like Link Sar, expedition planning, learning whitewater boating on the fly (in anticipation of an expedition where those skills will be a matter of life and death), adventure partnerships, and the work of the brilliant energy expert and economic historian Daniel Yergin.

One of America's great outdoor writers, Don Thomas has hunted, fished and explored the world over – including Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Siberia and the South Pacific – while chronicling his adventures in 20 books and hundreds of magazine articles. Don spent a career as a physician in rural Montana and Alaska (while also working as a commercial fisherman, bush pilot and guide) and now writes full time; current roles include co-editor of Traditional Bowhunter and editor at large for Retriever Journal, among others. Sit back and enjoy this conversation between two great storytellers as Don talks trad bowhunting for sheep in the Brooks Range of Alaska, scouting in Africa with Kalahari Bushmen, the ongoing fight for public access, and why he votes public lands and waters.

This Thursday, Sept. 24, BHA and Patagonia are hosting an exclusive screening of Public Trust: The Fight for America's Public Lands – just in time for National Public Lands Day. Join Hal, Public Trust director David Byars and producer Jeremy Rubingh as they discuss the years-long process of making this film, the places, the people, the adventures, mishaps and terrors, regrets and joys. This is the first BHA podcast recorded remotely – David is in south Georgia visiting family, and Jeremy is in his new home – a sailboat currently anchored in Puget Sound.

James Pogue spent two years as an embedded journalist with the American militia movement. He was at the 2016 occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge with Ammon and Ryan Bundy, an experience that he recounts in his 2018 book, Chosen Country. During his time with the Bundys and other militia, he became deeply immersed in the debates over the public lands of the American West. James is an international conflict journalist and a contributing writer at Harper's Magazine. He also has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, The New Republic and Vice. Check out Hal's and James' no-holds-barred conversation infused with the history and politics of American public lands and waters.

Bill Cunningham caught his first cutthroat trout in Lolo Creek, a tributary of the Bitterroot River, with a willow stick, a hook and a piece of string at age five. That was 72 years ago. Since then, he has guided, hunted, fished and wandered from the Brooks Range to the Mojave Desert and beyond, all the while relentlessly, tirelessly fighting for wilderness, wild rivers and public lands. Listen in on this conversation with one of America's most experienced and knowledgeable conservation advocates, recorded in Montana the day after Bill and Hal had summitted two 8800-foot peaks on one of Bill's favorite traverses in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Jess McGlothlin is a wanderer, paddleboarding on the jungle whitewater of the Peruvian Amazon, fly-fishing lost atolls in the South Pacific or watching the rivers of the taiga unfold beneath the rotors of a battered vintage Russian helicopter. She started her own company at age 13, was a professional equestrian in Sweden, lasted exactly four days of college, and has been weathering the travel bans of the pandemic by photographing and documenting the protests and riots here in the U.S. She is the sole proprietor and lone employee of Jess McGlothlin Media, an outdoor industry powerhouse. Listen to her conversation with Hal and be inspired to plan your next adventure.

Missoula-based carpenter, elk hunter and bird dog man Malcolm Brooks is the author of the epic novel Painted Horses, a wild and beautifully written story of romance and collision in 1950s Montana, where ancient pictographs in unexplored canyons whisper stories about to be forever lost beneath waters impounded in the frenzy of the dam-building era. Painted Horses has been described by Rick Bass as "Reminiscent of the fiery, lyrical and animated spirit of Cormac McCarthy's Borderlands trilogy, and the wisdom and elegance of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, Painted Horses is its own work, a big, old-fashioned and important novel." Hear what brought Brooks to this story and what drives him forward now.

Nathan "Shags" McLeod is the hunting- and fishing-est award-winning radio DJ you'll ever meet and has spent the past 15 years building a huge audience from his base in central Missouri. His fans come for his classic rock and roll and for his no-holds-barred, straight-from-the-heart reporting on conservation and the hunting and fishing that conservation makes possible. Shags can catch fish and play music with the very best of them; unlike most of the best of them, he also can talk firsthand alien encounters and passages through dimensions of space and time.

From his most recent book Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization, back to his rough-and-tumble newspaper days covering the scorched-earth timber industry of the 1980s, Richard Manning is the go-to investigative journalist for pivotal books about everything from the American prairie to the future of global agriculture. He's a lifelong hunter, a fisherman, the author of nine books and dozens of powerful magazine stories, and one of America's most innovative thinkers and writers.

Iowa-based Phil Bourjaily is America's shotgunner and one of North America's foremost experts on shotguns and shooting. In addition to writing a monthly column – for nearly three decades – for Field & Stream, where he is shotguns editor, Phil has authored Field & Stream's The Total Gun Manual (with fellow firearms writer David Petzal), Shotgun Guide, and other books. But he is also a writer's writer, a dedicated coach of youth trap and skeet teams, and a hunter who spends countless days chasing upland birds every fall, waterfowl every winter, and Midwestern turkeys every spring. Listen to a conversation between two passionate shooters and masters of their crafts.

In a recent interview with Filson, Minnesota-born and bred photographer Lee Kjos was asked to describe his work in five words or less. Kjos replied: "Original. Authentic. Genuine. Unique, and bad-ass." For anyone who has marveled at the understated power of Kjos' hunting and fishing photography, those five words – each of them earned the hard way – sum it up. Although Kjos' upbringing in the deep woods of Minnesota precludes him from ever saying it, those same five words could be used to describe the man himself. Join us as we discuss a life's work of happy obsession behind the lens and across the planet, where sometimes the greatest photos and the greatest adventures – farm, family, waterfowl hunting and good dogs – are right outside your back door.

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are not just words in the Declaration of Independence. They are words to live by, and perhaps nobody is living them harder or better right now than Clay Newcomb of the Arkansas Ozarks, owner of Bear Hunting Magazine. Clay is a mule trainer, a bear, whitetail and small game hunting obsessive, a dog man, archer, writer and filmmaker. But he is first and foremost a man of faith and family, and that fundamental strength is the foundation of a remarkable life of adventure, unfolding from his front yard in the Ozarks to the Rockies and beyond.

Hal travels to the Bears Ears National Monument to meet with Angelo Baca, a filmmaker and storyteller who grew up in and around Blanding, Utah, and has roots in this country that go back, literally, thousands of years. For this conversation with Hal, he is home in Utah, where he continues to be one of the leading advocates for the Bears Ears National Monument and for Native American engagement in public land management decisions.

Rudi Roeslein came to St. Louis, Missouri, as a child from the refugee camps and ruins of post-World War II Europe. He became an inventor and an international industrialist who never lost his deep love for hunting and conservation. Rudi has invested $60 million of his own money creating successful renewable natural gas projects in north Missouri and pursuing what he calls "the 30/30 Vision" – a plan to restore 30 million acres of marginal cropland to native prairie in just 30 years. At a time when our American agriculture and energy sectors could be described as broken, this Missouri wild-card inventor is working non-stop to build a whole new future – one based on working with the powers and rhythms of the earth itself.

Born and raised in Choteau, Montana, Maggie Carr is a wilderness hunting guide, backcountry skier, skilled horse and mule packer and co-owner of the unique wilderness outfitting business DropstoneOutfitting, which offers packstring-suppported hiking trips in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and adjacent public lands of Montana. Maggie's family has been here on the Teton River since her great-grandfather was a horseback doctor in the wild homestead years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hal and Maggie talk guiding and blizzards, hunting and grizzlies, why anyone would get into the business of outfitting.

What's it like to be in charge of one of America's oldest and most read hunting and fishing magazines? As the spring issue of Outdoor Life hits newsstands, we bring you the wild minds behind the stories: Senior Editor Natalie Krebs, Hunting Editor Andrew McKean and their venerable leader, Editor in Chief Alex Robinson. This is the work, this is the experience and the adventure, and, in today's changing media landscape, this is the sacrifice and lack of security that comes with the dream job. Recorded live at the SHOT show in Las Vegas, just before the whole world went bat-soup crazy.

In the West, it's called "the checkerboard" – one square mile of public land (640 acres, called a section) then one square mile of private – a direct result of frontier-era policies where the federal government gave away millions of acres of land, some to homesteaders but many to politically connected industries such as the railroads and timber companies. The idea, beyond just enriching a privileged few and scoring political power, was to encourage development of the West – timber for railroad ties and mining supports and lumber mills. The result, in our modern U.S., is a tangle of ownership and, sometimes, an access and land management nightmare. The Crazy Mountains of Montana are one such landscape, a garbled mix of public and private sections, and one where private landowners seem to be playing another old game from the frontier era: blocking access to public lands by controlling sections of private land

Colorado's state trust lands have been held in an iron fist by some of the most anti-public access policies and regulations found anywhere in the Western states. The battle has been simmering for decades: Clearly, Coloradoans were demanding change. Since 2012, BHA's Colorado chapter has been leading the battle for increased access … and Colorado Parks and Wildlife responded, announcing last summer the opening of 500,000 acres of state trust lands for fishing and hunting over the next three years. Hal travels to Denver for a deep dive into these issues and questions with BHA State Policy Director (and obsessive waterfowler) Tim Brass and Liz Rose, a hunter, scholar and researcher who has helped BHA uncover the paths that can lead us to a better future for all outdoors people across the nation.

Hal meets with his old friend (and sometimes editor) Matt Miller in Matt's hometown of Boise, Idaho, to talk about life and Matt's new book Fishing Through the Apocalypse: An Angler's Adventures in the 21st Century. Matt and Hal have known each other since they both started out writing for Bugle magazine before the dawn of the present century, and Matt – an obsessed fisherman, elk and deer hunter and mentor to a nascent fishing and hunting son – has traveled the world as the longtime science writer for The Nature Conservancy (as well as written for Field & Stream and other outdoor publications). If you think you are a fishing obsessive, it might make you feel better (or worse) to know that there are people many times more obsessed than you are, and some of them are probably even weirder than you. Matt fits right in.

BONUS EPISODE! Here's a special edition of the BHA Podcast & Blast, just in time for Pheasant Fest 2020! It's guns, it's dogs, it's wild flushing roosters on the wind, it's conservation and clean water and better farms…and it's Howard Vincent, the grand leader of Pheasants Forever, laying down the history, the future and the now of American upland bird hunting.

Wyoming native and star outdoor reporter, with nine years of writing the outdoors column for the Casper Star-Tribune, Christine Peterson has been immersed in Wyoming's hunting and fishing, mountains, rivers, plains and wilderness in a way few people will ever match. She talks with Hal about that life – the deadlines, the adventures, the stress and the love of newspapers and reporting – and her decision to leave it behind after the birth of her daughter Miriam, to take up freelancing full time and own the freedom to focus on a new life as an outdoor mother and writer.

This episode of BHA's Podcast & Blast was recorded at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado! We're talking wildlife migration corridors, wildlife crossings and the future of Western wildlife with Colorado's best and brightest. The numbers are sobering: 3,000 wildlife and vehicle collisions per year in Colorado, 600 collisions in one stretch of Highway 9 between Kremmling and Silverthorne alone, human lives lost, life-changing injuries sustained, millions of dollars in damages to vehicles, and thousands of wildlife slaughtered. Join Hal as he interviews Dan Prenzlow, director of Colorado Parks and Wildlife, Jessica Myklebust of Colorado Department of Transportation, and Luke Schafer, wildlife warrior of the West Slope from Conservation Colorado, about problem-solving for wildlife and human beings on an epic scale.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." –Wallace Stegner. This week's podcast is an in-depth conversation with Mark Kenyon, Michigan-based hunter and fisherman, founder of Wired To Hunt, leading contributor at MeatEater Inc. and author of the new blockbuster public lands book That Wild Country. Mark and Hal talk hunting and fishing, reading and wanderlust, freedom, fatherhood, and Mark's epic journey of writing a book that combines the best of everyman's adventures with a powerful dose of history, conservation, and the nuts and bolts of our public lands.

"Photosynthesis puts things together. Fire takes them apart." – Dr. Stephen J. Pyne. While many people talk of the "Anthropocene" – the age of humankind, when nearly every natural process seems to be affected by the actions of billions of individual people – Stephen Pyne reminds us that we also are living in the Pyrocene, the age of fire, and that the history of humankind is inextricable from the history of fire, the most elemental and implacable force on this planet. Join Hal in Queen Creek, Arizona, for a conversation with Dr. Pyne, 15 years a firefighter on the crew of Grand Canyon National Park; a renowned writer, speaker and teacher; author of 35 books; and the world's foremost scholar and historian of fire, about the Pyrocene, about forests and public lands, and about the future of life on this Earth.

Imagine an undiscovered Eden in the heart of South Dakota, a major river lying untouched and forgotten for decades – with epic fishing amidst thunderous solitude. It exists, and Dan Frasier, a pioneer of fly fishing for big carp and author of an Orvis guide to carp flies, found it: 39 miles of the Missouri River, almost inaccessible to the public, almost unknown. He was sorely tempted to keep his discovery to himself. Why he did not is a message for all American conservationists.

DJ Zor is vice chair of the Arizona chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a public lands hunter extraordinaire and Navy nuclear sub veteran, and Brad Powell of Trout Unlimited is a 32-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service – former supervisor of the Tongass National Forest, the entire Northwest Region, the Davy Crockett National Forest in Kentucky, and so on … a pragmatic but firebrand conservation leader for five decades. Our conversation starts and ends with the Land and Water Conservation Fund and its critical role in safeguarding everything from urban ballfields to rural economies and public lands access, but hold on – they also talk Missouri (both DJ and Brad are native sons) Coues deer and javelina in the Superstitions, uranium mining, colonial economies and Arizona, the place where you can ski, hunt elk and antelope, shoot quail and go swimming in a creek, all on the same day.

Hal sits down in Montana with Chris Parish and Leland Brown to talk copper bullets, lead fragments, falconry, raptors, condors, Mexico and California, a love of good guns, wild animals and wild meat – all following a long day of rifle shooting with everybody from the Hellgate Hunters and Anglers (a Missoula-based rod and gun club) to former U.S. Army snipers. Chris and Leland are co-founders of the North American Non-Lead Partnership, which educates hunters about the effects of the lead we shoot – on ourselves, on our environment and on the wildlife we love.

Ron Boehme of Twin Lake, Michigan, has been hunting and training bird dogs since 1973 and is a senior judge with the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association. Ron is the host of the extraordinarily popular (and rightfully so – the podcast is a riot) Hunting Dog Podcast. He has a whole lot of knowledge and a whole lot of stories. Ryan Busse, chairman of BHA's North American board, joins in because one cannot have a raucous conversation about bird hunting, dogs and guns without attracting Ryan, like a moth to a flame. Join us.

It is 80 miles or so by boat down the intensely braided and ever-changing Yukon River to the village of Fort Yukon, Alaska (at the confluence of the Yukon and the Porcupine), where Hal meets Walter Peter, a Gwich'inhunter, trapper and fisherman – provider for his family and elders and others, taking meat and fish and whatever else the earth will give, eight miles above the Arctic Circle. Their conversation ranges from Native concerns over fish and wildlife management to climate change and opening the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – the birthing ground for the caribou herds on which the Gwich'in have depended for thousands of years.

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert is petitioning the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a new, state-specific Roadless Rule that would impact 4 million acres of National Forest lands in Utah. Does anybody in Utah want to protect roadless lands, which offer some of the world's best backcountry hunting, hiking, fishing, skiing; some of the world's most scenic places; and some of our most valuable fish and wildlife habitat? Yes, they do. Two of them are Utah BHA board member Andrew Wike, a hunter, climber and ski mountaineer based in Salt Lake City, and Andrew Rasmussen, field coordinator with Trout Unlimited, who lives in Logan. Surprises abound in this podcast, as well as a window into Utah's rather unique politics.

Hal is traveling the Wasatch Front, snarled in traffic beneath the spectacular snow-covered peaks, still trying to understand Utah politics. How can a state legislature pass a law that makes it illegal for the its residents (as well as visitors) to fish or wade or swim in more than 90 percent of their own rivers and streams? What is going on here? We go "once more unto the breach" (to quote Henry V's famous line inciting his warriors) with the Utah Stream Access Coalition's Chris Barkey.

The American outdoor recreation industry is the largest industry on the planet – to the tune of $887 billion dollars annually – that until recently has not demanded political representation for its interests. And what are those interests? Clean water, public lands, public access, wildlife habitat, trails, sustainably managed lands and waters – the same elements that make for a strong, healthy and ecologically resilient nation, one worthy of the dreams of our founders and the hopes of our own children. This podcast is the first to bring together three heads of the new offices of outdoor recreation in Montana (Rachel VandeVoort), Wyoming (Dave Glenn) and Oregon (CailinO'Brien-Feeney).

Meet BHA Capital Region Co-Chair Samantha Flowers, BHA Pennsylvania board member Don Rank and BHA Regional Manager (and Pennsylvanian) Chris Hennessey, who are fighting the good fight to end Sunday hunting bans all across the Eastern United States.

Calling all American public land owners! The time for action is upon us. In wildland firefighting, a backburn is setting a fire to stop a fire … burning fuels ahead of a conflagration that must be stopped. This episode of BHA's Podcast & Blast, featuring Hunt Talk's Randy Newberg and BHA President and CEO Land Tawney along with host Hal Herring, is our version of a backburn. We are setting a fire in our country, raising a public land owner's flag and marching on Washington, D.C. The administration's appointment of William Perry Pendley, an outspoken proponent of selling off our American public lands, to head the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 248 million acres of our lands and waters, poses an unprecedented threat to our outdoor traditions and shared resources. We cannot allow it to proceed unchallenged.

When you are shooting a classic Beretta over and under shotgun at the trap range or in the field, you are handling a finely made weapon built by the same company that made the arquebus barrels used to quell the Ottoman Turks at the ferocious Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Heck, Beretta Arms was already almost 50 years old by then! The Fabbrica d'Armi Pietro Beretta, with its headquarters in Brescia, Italy (in the Val Trompe, a center of iron ore mining and smelting since the days of the Roman Empire), is the world's oldest gun manufacturer and one of the world's all-time finest. Hal talks shotguns, shooting, history and more with Beretta's Dakotah Richardson, a former Olympic shotgunner, and Cory Mays, a Beretta gunsmith who literally grew up in a gunsmith shop.

The decline in the numbers of American hunters and anglers is not just bad news for our connections to the natural world and for our heritage. Because the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation is based on the robust sale of hunting and fishing licenses, the decline is hitting us all right where it hurts most: in funding for habitat projects, public lands management, restoration, scientific research, access, and on and on. What is the answer? Hal goes to the primary sources: Samantha Pedder of the Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports, Mark Norquist of Modern Carnivore, and BHA's own Trey Curtiss, who runs BHA's highly successful Hunting for Sustainability program.

Ashley and Jesse Kurtenbach are board members of the South Dakota Chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. Join them as they sit down with Hal Herring on the heels of a snow goose hunt to explore a life of hunting and fishing on public lands and waters.

As the 116th Congress builds momentum, Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico traveled to Boise, Idaho, for BHA's 8th Annual North American Rendezvous. One of the most enthusiastic sportsmen on Capitol Hill, he is also an indefatigable champion of public lands. During the ruckus of Rendezvous, Sen. Heinrich took time to sit down with Hal and talk desert ecotones, maverick tarantulas, migration corridors and the sage steppe, the state of hook and bullet advocacy in Congress, and the everchanging nexus between grassroots conservation movements like BHA and the legislative machine. Listen in for the senator's take on the future of the public lands movement in North America.

Corey is the perfect match for the world's leading hunting gear company (and Podcast & Blast sponsor): a hunter with both bow and rifle, angler with whatever gear is at hand, obsessed rock and ice climber, ski mountaineer and wanderer of the high places from the Adirondacks of New York state to the wildest and most windswept of the wild Rockies. Corey talks about how surviving in Montana led him to one of the toughest and most quintessential Western jobs: setting chokers, or "hooking" for a logging crew where the real value of bombproof, four-season gear became utterly clear to him.

Chef Eduardo Garcia and Hal Herring sat down at the 8thAnnual North American Rendezvous to talk about wild landscapes, their outdoor pursuits and seizing the opportunities that life affords you.

Hunter, writer, thinker, scientist and wildlife expert, Shane Mahoney of Newfoundland is the foremost and most powerful voice of our time for hunting-based conservation and the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. Come and sit in on a conversation between two die-hard and lifelong hunter-conservationists for whom hunting and a life outdoors is as natural, and as necessary, as breathing.

Hal catches up with Drew and his Llewellin setter, Penny, on the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, and they set out on a long hunt for ruffed grouse. The second half of this epic conversation is all about a lifelong pursuit of ruffed grouse and woodcock and the good dogs that make the chase a million times better.

Epic floods due to the filling and draining of wetlands, duck numbers falling, fisheries collapsing, federal flood insurance $25 billion in debt, water pollution at levels not seen since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 – and all this before the recent floods in the Midwest. The common denominator is our failure to protect U.S. wetlands and rivers and streams. Yet the administration is considering a revised rule eliminating wetlands and stream protections under the Clean Water Act. Hal talks to Blan Holman, a lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center who specializes in water law, to try and make sense of it all.

Anthony Licata and Colin Kearns stand at the helm of the most iconic magazine titles in the outdoor industry. Anthony is the editorial director of Outdoor Life and Field & Stream where Colin serves as its editor-in-chief. In this episode Hal catches up with them in the midst of Shot Show, the day after the gang celebrated our public lands at the BHA bonfire in the Nevada desert. Join the trio as they reminisce about their adventures hunting and fishing North America's wild landscapes, the sometimes torturous process of writing and editing, literature, authors, guns, conservation and the wealth that is our public lands and waters.

Back by popular demand: Ron Mills, an outfitter, hunting guide and packer in the Bob Marshall Wilderness since 1959, returns for Round Two in the BHA Podcast & Blast! Ron has authored a new book called Under the Biggest Sky of All, 75 Years on Montana's Rocky Mountain Front, a raucous and astoundingly funny account of his adventures as a guide, horseman and packer, farrier and ranch hand in some of the wildest country left on the planet. (Hal wrote the forward to the book, as seen in the spring 2019 issue of Backcountry Journal.) Ron and Hal discuss the book, life in the saddle and in 20 different camps across the Bob, and what it is like to work with a man who turns out to be a coldblooded American serial killer.

Hal goes south to meet up with old friend and former U.S. Navy SEAL Madison Parker in the hurricane-battered backcountry of north Florida and talk about survival, spears and slingshots, pit bulls, blacksmithing, baskets, knives and traps, and that place where function becomes inseparable from art.

How does a 2013 graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism find herself pulling a pulk (gear sled) on an ice fishing expedition into the frozen wilderness of the Boundary Waters of Minnesota? How does a cutting-edge multimedia journalist make a living these days while pursuing the stories and the adventures of which most of us can only dream? We ask Natalie Krebs, senior editor of Outdoor Life, these questions and discuss a lot more.