Ep. 3: High Desert Sheep Adventures and Better Hot Weather Meat Care

you just shot a buck. But now what Hot weather hunting is just a fact of the matter in many places, and especially for a lot of early season archery hunts. But what do you do with the meat on a hot day? Being successful is one thing, but you have to get that meat home safe. I want to give you a rundown of the steps I take in hot weather hunts to make sure the meat goes home unspoiled.

I want to tell you what I do right away, how to handle and cool meat when it's hot outside, as well as how to prepare a place for meat transport before you even leave the house. I've been on a lot of hunts in a lot of really hot places, whether Australia, Hawaii, but one hunt in particular really stands out in my mind. It was early September near the

Black Rock Desert of Nevada. I drawn a California big Horn sheep tag now the Black Rock Desert big Flat and then there's these volcanic type mountains around it, and those mountains during that time of year can get hot over a hundred degrees. The only saving graces the temperature does drop in the evenings, so you can cool off. It's hot nights, but during the middle of the day

it is scorching. There is zero, absolutely zero shade. My plan for this hunt was I really wanted to find a good mature ram before the season started because I wanted to be their opening day. I had high hopes of taking a ram the beginning of the season, but putting in my time preseason scouting so I knew where all the sheep were and then I could go in

the first day and start hunting. My plan was about ten days of scouting before the hunt actually started, so when I left, I had to be thinking of getting that meat home. So I scouted for ten days and then opening day comes around. I had a good ram picked out. I actually had a different ram picked out, but some other people moved in on that sheep, and I really wanted a good experience as well, so I decided to go after some sheep in an area that

I knew no one else would go into. Well, that's kind of problematic because that put me further and further from the truck. As the sun came up, I was a few miles from the trailhead and spotted a good ram, the ram that I wanted. Actually, now the way the crow flies, he was probably I would say six miles from the truck and a lot of elevation, descent and gain in order to get back. It was not easy place to get to, but I found what I wanted. I found the ram I was looking for, and I

found some solitude. However, the day was about the hottest day we'd had. The lava type rocks were just absorbing the sun. I was literally just cooking. I felt like I was frying out there. I had one of those fishing buffs on just to keep the sun off my body, sunglasses, tried to just cover up as much as I could, long sleeves. I had to carry all my water. I had stashed water in the area beforehand. However, the where

I had stashed. The water was still a mile past the sheet, so I had no opportunity to actually get to my water stash. I end up making my way toward the ram, and it's about mid day at this point. Probably took me a good I don't know, seven hours or more to hike in there. I got to where I last saw the ram, and luckily he was still there. He popped up, but then he worked his way behind a set of rocks. I was watching from maybe eight

hundred yards out. This gave me an opportunity to drop down, cut the distance and get to the ridge right across from him. As I got into the ridge, I was kind of expecting him to actually still be bedded there, but he popped up and started moving because as the day progressed, the shade got less and less, and I think he was actually just moving to a band of cliffs that still had a sliver of shade near him. Just like anything else. Man, that sun really beats down

on these animals. So I happened to position myself in a spot where I intercepted him walking to this band of cliffs where he's probably gonna bed down for the rest of the day. But I knew that I wouldn't be able to get a shot if he got in there, so as he was moving, I got set up. I was a couple hundred yards away, made a good shot and had the ram of my dreams down. This tag took me fifteen years to draw, so it was just a pretty exciting experience to now have the ram. The

only problem was it was freaking hot out. Now I'm getting towards the end of the day at this point, but the one thing on my mind was now I got to get the meat out without its spoiling. Having grown up in the desert, you really get used to dealing with meat and hot weather, so it wasn't not necessarily different, but there were a few things working against me in this instance. Because there were absolutely zero trees,

there is nothing to hang any meat from. At first sight, I think, man, there's nothing nowhere to hang this meat to cool it down. So that's all going through my head. I got the rams set up, I took a few quick photos a little bit of video, but I really wanted to get working before things got too hot, so I did the same method that I do every time, gutless methods. Skinned it up the back started peeling the hide off to dump the heat working from the hind quarter.

Up took off the hind quarter and then I had my game bags hung it in the game bag. But I had the problem of where do I hang it? Well, I happen to have some pecord with me. I tied some pecord to the center of a small rock and then made a peton out of it where I could put it in the cracks of the cliffs and rocks around me in order to create almost like a clothesline that I could hang in the meat from. As the sun then started to move across the sky that became shaded.

Before that happened, I actually had a small tarp in my bag as well that I used to shade myself and create a shade structure that I also peaked onto the rock. So while I was working, I was working in the shade. Then I got all the meat off the animal loaded in my pack. At this point it was perfect because the sun was just setting and I could do the majority of the pack out in the evening. When when the day cooled down, I packed it out. I ended up getting back to the truck at about

five am that morning. UM so It's a pretty long trudge back out, a lot more uphill on the way back out than the downhill on the way in. But I got back, got to camp, got the meat cooled down on ice that actually been sitting in these um large yetti coolers for about ten days, got the meat there well, I actually hung it before I put it in the cooler, and then the next day loaded up camp, had the meat and the cooler had a nice crust on it. Drove back home. Meat was all good, and

I had the ram of a lifetime. I've been on a lot of hunts in really hot weather, and honestly, I've never lost an animal to heat spoilage. Now, there's probably a lot of ways that people take care of meat, or different ways than myself, but this is just the way that I do it, and I really have no need to change my methods because I have had such a good track record with it. But first I kind of got to talk about what heat spoilage is, or why meat would go bad, and how you could even

tell if meat goes bad. Now, when when meat sours, it's pretty apparent based on the smell and coloration of it. What's happening is bacteria and micro organisms are essentially tainting the meat are growing rapidly and heat is one of the factors that can cause that. Now, some other things are um dirt, So if you're processing an animal in the field, dirt also plays a big factor in that.

So if you have something that gets dirty and something that gets hot, well, you're really setting yourself up for a disaster. Also, a lot of people don't realize, you know, moisture causes meat to go bad. Now, I've found that for heat related meat spoilage. Stuff that I've seen that other people have handled that has gone bad has been bone souring. So what's happening is heats being trapped around the bone and then souring from the inside out. A lot of the tips that I'm going to talk about

are just ways to prevent this. Even if it's hot out, there are things you can do to prevent your meat from spoiling. The first thing is and the most important, is keeping the meat clean, cool, and dry. I generally only always use the gutless method. Now, some people might think, oh, it's hot out, I'm gonna gut the animal first, dump the heat trapped by the body, which makes sense. Yet the way that I do it, I always think that the muscle groups that I'm taking are outside of that,

so the hides trapping the meat. So my thought is get the hide off first, because that allows it to cool the meat to cool down and start dropping temperature, also start drying out sooner rather than later. The key is getting air circulation around the quarters and the cuts that you take off the animal. As soon as you get it hung up and get that air circulating around it, it's gonna cool down. The body temperature of that animals

already high. So the odds are that if you get air movement and circulation of air, even if the air temperature is fairly hot, if you're able to keep it out of direct sunlight and get that air moving around it, it's gonna cool the meat down to a temperature below what it's already at. And that right there is the

key to hot weather meatcare. So you've got to think of bringing extra supplies if you know it's going to be hot out that allow you to get that meat in to somewhere where you can hang it and cool it down. Now, if you've got trees around, right, there's a given, So you gotta think of things that you're gonna bring. Well, you're gonna want game bags because another thing you gotta worry about when it's hot is flies

being attracted to the smell of whatever you shot. Flies lay their larva on the meat and then that contain it as well. You don't want a bunch of maggots getting in there. So I always bring like real high quality game bags when it's hot out, not the cheese cloth kind. I feel like there might be a place for those later in the season. They are lighter, but I bring the more I don't even know what you call it, like pillowcase type game bags, the ones I

use a caribou gear game bags. There's all different brands. Alan makes some they're similar, just the real thick cloth but yet breathable, so super durable but also breathable and allows the meat to cool down but keeps the flies off of it. So you'll want the game bags. You'll need something to hang it with, like paracord. That's what I use. And then you're gonna have to also think about is where you're hunting, is there a possibility for shade?

Is there trees? If not, a lot of times I'll bring a small either survival tarp if I want to go lightweight or even just a smaller tarp. The tarp can be used in two ways. It can be used to keep the animal off the ground as you're quartering it to prevent dirt from getting on it, because you've got to make it sure it's extra clean when it's hot out. Another thing that tarp can be used for

is creating a shade structure. Even if there's no trees around, you can um create a structure or a almost like a shade type umbrella based off of rocks around you. The way that I do that is I run pecord to the corners with a rock in there to keep it from pulling out, and then I can take a rock tire rock to the other end of the pecord and then wedge it between rocks to get it to

hang above me. You know, you might create the shade structure right where you're processing the animal or to the place where you're hanging if you can't find somewhere to hang up with shade. Just like that sheep hunt. You know, I used the pecord to hang it in the shade of the rock itself. You'd be surprised at the places you can find shade even in the open. The animals need it to survive, so it's probably around wherever you get something down. You just have to make use of

what's around you. When I'm doing the gutless method, the first piece of meat that I take off is going to be the hind quarter. I feel like the hind quarter has the bulk of muscle and it traps the most heat. So the first thing I do is I run a cut up from the back all the way up the neck and start peeling off the hide on one side, so up the back leg all the way up the back, and then start peeling from the hind

quarter up all remove the hind quarter, hang it. Then I'll take out the backstre up and then go in for the tenderloin right away, because that's going to be in a spot that you won't want to sit in the sun while you're processing the rest of it. The front shoulder, although it has a lot of bone to it, the majority of the meats sitting on top of the front shoulder, so I believe that it has a higher percentage of being able to cool down faster. But the

next is that same side. Take off that front shoulder. In between each step, I'm hanging everything with the bone in, but just getting it to initially cool down. I try to work as fast as possible and then flip the animal over, work the other side, back, quarter up to the front, up to the neck. Hang that now. I talked about bone souring earlier. One thing that I will do if it's going to be a long packout is I'll take the bone out to help cool the meat

down right away. But this is once they're already hanging in a shaded spot. Now you have to judge your next actions based on how much time it's going to take you to get back to the truck. If by the time him you've quartered the whole animal out, it's starting to cool down, develop a nice crust and dry off, it may just be more sensible to pack it out

now and then get it to your cooler. If it's gonna be a longer trip in the middle of the day, you're gonna want to take extra time while you've got it in the shade and ability to cool it down to help dump more heat by removing the bone. So it's really situational. When I pack an animal back, I'm really cognizant of where I placed the meat in my pack, as well as the time of day that I'm packing out.

If I know that I'm gonna be going through a long stretch and it's gonna be an all day pack, you might be better off waiting with it hanging in the shade where it's cooler, especially if you have a breeze. Then to put it in your pack and start hiking out in the middle of the day, you might be smarter to wait till it gets dark. And a lot of the places you hunt are more high alpine it cools off in the evening, so it's a better option to just pack out in the evening or early in

the morning if it cools down. If it doesn't cool down, then you're gonna just have to get to the truck or wherever your cooler is as fast as possible. Now, once the meat has cooled from hanging, or at least cooled down considerably from what it was, I'll put it in my pack. I'll leave it in the game bags, but oftentimes line my pack with a garbage bag. I know what you're thinking, that plastic is going to trap

the heat. It does, but you are not going to get enough breatheability by just dropping it in your pack. And what's gonna happen is if you've got multiple days, that pack is gonna get bloody and then it's gonna sit out and you're gonna have problems with bacteria growing in the pack. So it's just way cleaner to put it inside of that bag inside your pack. The reason you put in your pack is because inside the pack creates shade, so the sun might be beating on the pack.

But if you think about it, throw your lunch in the bottom of your backpack inside had something. That black bag will block out a lot of the heat and a lot of the direct sun, which actually keeps it cooler, so long as it's cooled down before you put it in. I will also leave the top open, so if there is residual heat in the meat, it can vent out the top. But I tried to plan my pack out by trying to avoid as much direct sunlight as possible.

If I do happen to stop, I'll then open up the pack, open up the plastic bag, and let it air out. As soon as I get to my vehicle, it comes out of that bag. It's only while I'm walking, So if I stopped for a little bit and need to take a break, I'm going to hang the meat up again and allow it to continue to cool hanging in the shade or whatever. When you get back to camp. That's where the crux of the whole operation comes into play.

This is the time where now you need to put the meat into something cold, which will be your cooler. The trouble might be is you may have left, in my case, on that sheet hunt ten days beforehand, so you need a cooler if it isn't all water that has ice still in it. And that's going to come from planning and the way that you pack your cooler before you leave. It's important because I don't like to just drop the meat into after it's been hot all day,

drop it into a bunch of water. You're you're really gonna just ask for trouble in that instance. So when I pack my cooler before I leave, there's a lot of things that I do. I'll take one cooler. If it's really hot out, I'll take one cooler. It is the designated meat out cooler. That cooler is just ice sitting for the animal. When I come back, I'll use like a really high quality cooler. I use the Yetti cooler.

I pack the bottom with block ice. Then I make a lot of the block ice myself, just freezing large bottles or anything I can to make large pieces of ice. Those tend to melt slower. I also, before I pack that ice in my cooler a few days beforehand, we'll just dump a bunch of ice in the cooler to pre chill the cooler. The worst thing you can do

is just drop ice into a hot cooler. So I pre chill the cooler before I leave the house a few days beforehand, with just ice that I'm actually just gonna dump out because I don't want that water in there as well. Then once it's chilled, I'll put big blocks of ice in the bottom. I then fill that ice with crushed ice around it, trying to kill any airspace. I have freezer packs that are frozen. They actually freeze colder than than water itself, which helps keep the ice frozen.

So I'll put those on top of that, I'll put one more layer of ice. Some people mixing rock salt, I don't actually do that because I end up using dry ice a lot. I'll put dry ice on top of that ice but not touching the water. So I'll do like a layer of either just like a garbage bag layer or something, try to keep it from touching or keep the dry ice in a plastic bag that came to. If you're using dry ice and have the ability to use it, you need to remember that the

dry ice on top keeps things frozen. Dry ice on the bottom refrigerates. A lot of people make mistakes landing the bottom of the cooler with dry ice. Then everything melts. The dryest turns it into a cooler bomb because it can't vent. But in order to keep it frozen dry ice on top, then I kill the airspace by using some form of insulation like um a garbage bag with just actually house insulation inside of it to kill any

dead air space on top. If the cooler is not completely full with ice, if you got too big of a cooler or whatever, then I pack that I lock it down, and I don't touch it. I don't open that cooler until I'm ready to put meat in it. And that's if you're going on long haul hot weather. The other thing is keep that cooler in the shade for the duration of the time that you're out there, because I've gone as long as two weeks with ice and the same cooler in hundred degree heat and had

no problems. But it's all based on the way that I prepped the cooler before I head to the field. If you don't take your time and prep it wrong, you'll probably lose that ice in a few days, even with a good cooler. Sometimes just leaving it out in the sun. Putting an ice in a hot cooler, it's not gonna last. So a lot of keeping your meat from spoiling in the field or on the way home is having a good place and a good source of cold ice when you get back to camp, no matter

how long you've been out there. Now, let's say you're in a backcountry hunt and you just do not have the ability to get back to a base camp where there is ice right away. Maybe you're in Alaska early August, say, caribou hunt, and a plane is not going to pick you up for a few days. What do you do

well in those kind of situations. A lot of times the places you're at will cool down at night, so you got to remember that even if it's hot in the middle of the day, you will probably have ample time to cool the meat by hanging it at night. Now here's a few things that I've done in those situations just to kind of keep the meat cool in the middle of the day if I didn't have good shade or good breeze. One of the things is, and I know a lot of people have done this, is

put it in a cold water source. Now here's the caveat to that. I will never stick meat into water, but I do often carry dry bags. So if I ever had to do that, and I've done it once and it worked, okay, was I put meat in a dry bag. Then I submerged the dry bag into a lake with a para cord. The hard part is it wants to float, so you gotta press all the air out of the dry bag with the meat in it, and then submerge it at the bottom of the lake. As long as that lake is cold, it should keep

the meat cool. The one thing I will do, though, if I do that, is pull the meat out of the dry bag in the evening and then hang the meat so you can get air circulation and remain dry, not sweating in that airtight dry bag all day and

all night. Another option I've done this as well. Is in the tundra, cut out pieces of moss and cover it in the middle of the day to create shade, and then in the evenings create a clothesline system where I can hang the meat or set the meat up off the ground to cool once the sun's gone down

and the day cools off. This can be done even just by creating little teps with sticks that you get other places, a clothesline type system, or just keeping it slightly off the ground, building little racks just to get air circulation around it. That way it stays dry, it stays cool, and then you can bury it again and create that shade by digging a hole or whatever, just to try to keep it out of direct sunlight during the middle of the day. I really think that you

shouldn't let hot weather hinder your hunt. I give the question all the time about hot weather meatcare, and people talking about, well should I not hunt? Is it too hot out? You know? I think with a lot of pre planning and thought to it, and just getting the meat cool and off the animal right away, you can

hunt in pretty much any temperature. You just have to take extra steps to make sure that you'll be able to take care of that meat when you get it back to the truck or while you're in the field, and that might include bringing extra gear like the game bags, the parachord, having that cooler pre prepped, as well as thinking outside the box a few ways to keep that

meat cool. There's other times we're all be hunting and I might see something in the middle of the day, but I have ample opportunity to harvest and I'll just wait until it gets closer to the evening. So I'm working on it when I don't have to deal with the hot direct sun. There's a ton of workarounds when you're out in the field, but you shouldn't let hot

weather dictate whether you hunt or not. Sometimes that's a great time to hunt and there's no other option, so with a little bit of pre planning, you can make sure that your meat comes home unspoiled. As always, I really appreciate you listening to this EP, so you know it would be awesome if you could give us a good review, drop some good comments, give us a good rating. Yeah, next week. It's about that time year elk season is coming up. It is one of my favorite times of

year because I love calling elk. Now, I have some pretty successful ways that I have learned to call elk, especially from guiding. When your task there's your job to call in elk for people, day in and day out. You figure out little workarounds when the elk don't want to cooperate. So I don't know if these secrets have been divulged before, but I'm gonna give you the best secrets for calling in elk, especially when they're being very difficult.

When other people might say their call shy. I'm gonna debunk that myth of call shy elk and teach you how to be more successful when the elk don't want to cooperate. So make sure to check that out. Feel free to if you've enjoyed it, share this with your friends, and yeah, I appreciate you. Catch you next week.