Ep. 33: Hunting Deep in Bruin Country and the Keys to Finding Spring Black Bears

elusive black bear. Now, while that might sound far off, as you're probably sitting at home in some form of quarantine or social distancing yourself from others. Right now, we're in a crazy time, but that doesn't mean that we can't look forward to what we've got planned being out in the Man Mountains in the near future. I got a ton of questions I keep asking every week, send me your questions, what do you want to know? And a lot of them have been focused around spot and

stock bear hunting and hunting bears in the spring. Now. I believe that that question came up so many times because there was a common thing people frustrated had difficulty finding bears when they're out hunting, and just an overall challenge of it and I think that hits home because spring bear hunting were spot and stock type bear hunting, I believe is one of the more difficult hunts out west,

especially to be consistent and successful. Now, there's a lot of knowledge and time that goes into that consistency, but I think once you figure out a few of the basics, you can go from frustration to consistent success year after year. Bear hunting really comes down to knowing where to look, and that involves understanding bears, how to hone in on their appropriate food source for the time of year, and

then just understanding bear habits in general. From there, you need to take it a step further and employ the right hunting tactics, which might mean a form of sitting and glassing, It might be a form of moving through cover in logging roads, or it could even involve some tactic like calling. It was asked so much and it is such an in depth topic and such a challenging animal to be successful at hunting consistently. I'm gonna break

it into two parts. So the first part this week we're going to talk about just understanding bears and knowing where to look, and then next week we'll jump into the actual hunt tactics once you understand how to get into the right spots. Before we go there, I want to share a story of one of my favorite backcountry bear hunts in one of my favorite canyons. Starting out, most of my bear hunting experience took place in the

state of Montana now Montana. You could get a bear tag over the counter and it was good for spring and fall season. Montana, unlike some other states, it was just spotting stock only for bears. So there are a few states where you could bait for bears. There's something that you could chase bears with dogs, but Montana has always pretty much been spotting stock only or no other form of bear hunting as far as bait and dogs go. I will be honest. My bear hunting success started out

very rocky. I had a lot of unfilled tags year after year. It really just seemed like finding a bear was more a thing of luck. But it was something that I would do every spring, every fall. I would look and and hope that I would find something. Until one year during archery season, I happened to spot a bear while actually looking for elk, and that's how I took my first black bear. Now after that, it really got me think, is this something that I could do consistently?

And it turns out that I found out ways to be consistent at finding bears during the spring. One of those ways, and one of my favorite things to do, was to just actually head into the back country by myself and get up into the areas where the bears would first start coming out in some of the areas in the steep wilderness canyons in the back countries in Montana.

Part of that was because I found areas there's no one else hunting at the time, and it was just kind of an exciting place to be that time of year. Early April or mid April through May, I could go into the wilderness and just start hunting be by myself and just really have a great back country hunting experience. Now, this story takes place in one of my favorite remote canyons. I like it because the time of year, there's a few lakes up there, there's some streams that I could

fish in. The days were pretty warm and nice, and I have what seems like thousands and thousands of acres to myself. Not that this particular canyon is any better than others, it's just I would go there, I'd park at the trailhead, I wouldn't see another truck, and I could hunt in there for a week and not see a single other person. There weren't a lot of bears, but there also wasn't a lot of competition, and I really felt like it was an area that just was

under hunted and I just had it to myself. The week started out like many others, just long days. I feel like in this particular spot, if I hunt for five days, I would average seeing five bears in that five days. Now, I might see three on the first day and then not see any until toward the last day. But over the course of the years that I've been hunting this particular canyon, it seemed pretty standard to see

what would amount to a bear a day. I started out the hunt high king in and actually on the trail in. I was working my way through the timber, not really on a trail or anything, but the way to get into the canyon, and I ended up spotting a really nice brown phase black bear. But I heard something. I peeked around the tree and could see the bear, but I heard something up higher. I look up, and sure enough, here's two little cubs up in the tree, and it happened to be a sow with two cubs.

It was just a really cool encounter, and it got me pretty fired up for thinking, Okay, this is gonna be a good trip. On the way in, I already bumped into a bear. Obviously, it's not a bear that I would take one because it's not legal, and two you just wouldn't even if it were legal, most I wouldn't really see it as ethical. So I just took some photos of the bears and thought that was pretty sweet encounter and continued on. I ended up getting into

the basin and it's still pretty early. I was hunting toward the beginning of the opener, so there's still a lot of snow up high. I ended up encountering quite a bit of snow in some of the south faces where I was planning on on looking where i'd hunted later in the season and they'd been open this time

of year, they were still snowed in. So I decided to just focus on the north faces and kind of switch my plan to being on the other side of the canyon, glassing into some of the spots that I felt like would get some green up where bears would be feeding. The first day, I actually, after the encounter with a bear on the trail, didn't really see much as far as bear sign. I ran into a couple of big horn sheep and that was just an awesome, awesome experience, And that was just to me the whole

point of being out in the springtime. It got a little bit of the rust out, got me in the outdoors, and I encountered so many different animals. Yeah, I'm looking for bears, but along the way I had seen at this point one day in some big horn rams, elk, mule deer, white tails, and already some bears. I decided to just go set up a camp in a good spot at the top of a ridge above a small

alpine lake. When down caught some fish that I'd used to grill up for some lunch and dinner, and then thought, okay, this is great. In the middle of the day, I was going to spend some time fishing, maybe catch a fish or two, release most of them, keep one for dinner. I wouldn't have to jump into my mountain house meals. So soon. I did bring some seasoning and some little butter packs and some other things to fry the fish

up with and then continue to hunt for bears. And that to me was just the whole is still just the whole spring bear hunting experience, to just be out there in a great time of year. Half the time, I pick up a few good sheds, and I'm out hunting and looking for bears. It was a pretty slow go for most of the week, but a storm started to move in and I thought, okay, this, I don't know this. About day three or four, I hadn't seen

a bear that I was looking for. I did spot a couple of smaller bears come out for a short period of time along some of the avalanche shoots up there in this country. You gotta to picture it. It's like sheer cliffs on both sides, with a big flowing creek in the middle. And as you get higher up into the alpine, you're starting to get into snow and other stuff. Most the trees, small aspens and other things

don't really have their leaves yet. It's still pretty cold, but there is some grass poking out along the avalanche shoots, some some good springs on the on the north faces that are getting sun that have melted off, and just

good grass, water everywhere, lots of waterfalls. So this particular day, I decided to go a little bit further back, probably about I don't even know, six or seven miles, maybe maybe seven or eight miles from the trailhead at this point, and I start out early because I want to be this one high vantage point where I've seen bears in the past, right when the sun starts to come up, and then just watch it all day. So my plan was to get back there and just kind of pick

a spot and watch for most of the day. There's so many times where I've been just sitting staring at the hillside and then all of a sudden, out pops a bear or whatever. You know, you just start things just start coming alive the longer you sit there, and it gets boring for a while. But for the most part this day, I was like, all right, it's getting close to the end, and I wanna I want to just spend the day glassing and looking. So I started

my way back there. On the way back, it's just really kind of a bad weather day, lots of fog, lots of rain. I'm quite a ways from my camp, but I look up on the hillside and through the fog, the clouds clear, and I see this big chocolate colored bear up on the slide. Oh shoot, it's maybe a mile from where I'm at. So I start working up the canyon. Have to cross the stream a couple of times, and the streams raging at this point because all the

water smelting the snow coming off the mountains. So I'm just trying to find really safe places that cross, maybe some logs that I can cross across. Actually, some of those crossings were pretty hairy. To be honest, I don't think that now I would really want to do many of those crossings again. But I thought to myself, Wow, okay, there's a bear up there. We will make it. We'll

make it work. So I get up to where I last saw the bear and it's gone and a lot of the mountains now fogged in, so I just sit back and wait. I get set up underneath the big tree in hopes that it's gonna come back again. I can't see anything very well, and then sure enough, the

clouds lift and the bear comes back out feeding. I set up my scope and double check that it looks like a good mature boar, make sure that there's no cubs around, and just wait and watch it for a little bit, just make sure no other bears are there, and make sure that it's the exact bear that I want. Once I decide that yep, that's a boar, there's no cubs around, we're good to go. I load up my rifle, I get it set on the pack, I range, I

set my scope. As the bear gets broadside, I slowly squeezed the trigger and I hear the hit report, but I couldn't actually see it because the way I was laying I was shooting pretty steep uphill, and I lost sight of the bear at that point. But now the bear wasn't there, so I knew that it sounded like a good hit, and I just had to figure out a way to cross the stream and get up to

where the bear should be. After about I would say, an hour of figuring out a good spot to cross, because at this point I moved pretty high up in the water was just like nearly a waterfall going down that canyon. It was just ripping, and I just needed to find one good safe place to cross. So I actually had to go about a half a mile up to where it flattened out, cross and then come back

down and find the spot. At this point, I'm climbing up steep cliffs and avalanche shoots that are wet and slippery. It just kept raining and raining and raining. I've got my rain gear on and I left most of my other stuff down at the bottom by where I had shot from, just so if I found the bear, I could just put it my pack and pack it out

and then go grab my stuff later. I got to the point where I found where the bear was, looked down and there he was laying just right below where I had shot from, skinned him out, quartered it up, put all the meat and game bags, loaded up everything, just soaking wet, and worked my way back down to camp and back to the trailhead. If you want to be a consistently successful bear hunter, you really just have

to think like a bear. Now, if we're talking about other big game species, that might be a little more difficult, but for bears, it's pretty easy to know what they're thinking, and most of them are all thinking the same thing. Food. You have to really understand what drives a bear, and that is bulking up for hibernation and then re bulking up after hibernation. Bears hyper phage in the fall. So what that means is they just constantly feed, they double

in size, and they just store fat. So then through the winter they can essentially hibernate. It's not a true hibernation where they're sleeping the whole time, but they aren't moving much. They're sleeping. They are using their stored fat to get them through the winter, and then in the springtime, when food is plentiful again, they come back out and rebulk up and continue to feed. That's often why there's two seasons in many states, a spring season in a

fall season. Now, to successfully target bears, you really have to understand the food sources that they're targeting and the way that a bear thinks and operates. So let's talk about what i'll call the dinner bell effect. Really, before we even think about what a bear is eating, we have to understand how they eat. So a bear's digestive system is a little bit different than most other animals. Where deer browsers, elker grazers, bears are on divorce. They

can eat both meat and plant based foods. I will say that probably I would guess of a bears diet comes from plants, but bears have an extremely inefficient digestive system when it comes to breaking down plants. So this really makes them animals that are driven to just constantly eat. Like bears, majority of the day is spent finding food and eating that food, and they want to use as

little energy as possible. Now, because they're trying to put on weight in the most efficient manner, they're gonna find things that are the most efficient for gaining weight. So they have a very inefficient digestive system, yet they put on a lot of weight, and that's just because they're constantly eating. But they are very selective eaters. I think

people think bears will eat anything. Well, bears will eat anything, but they will eat the things that give them the most energy or calories or whatever they can gain the most fat of for without having to move very much and in the most efficient way possible. So in the fall, bears will pick the berries off the plant one by one. That seems like it might take a little bit, but they're they're targeting the most nutritious part of the plant. In the springtime is the same fresh buds, new grasses

green up. All that stuff has way more nutrients than older plants. So in the springtime, especially early in the spring, we're gonna be focusing on the emergence of new plants, buds, new growth, because that's where the majority of the nutrients of the plant are. And you'll see you can watch a black bear feed on a plant and you'll think, oh, he's just eating that plant, and when you really zoom in and look, he's actually just eating the buds off

of that plant. He's targeting the most nutritious and optimum food sources for where he's at. Now. If I'm gonna name a couple of things that I just off the top of my head, some of the first foods that I tend to see bears hit would be stuff like clover, even dan lions seem to be pretty popular with bears. Any kind of green grasses along uh snow melts, or fresh buds off of willows and other plants. They're really just targeting that green growth, that new stuff right out

of the gate. If we're gonna talk about food sources, we really have to break it down on the months and then kind of hone in on what the bears doing and maybe what food sources are available. So let's start in April that you know, mid April might be when most bear seasons across the West open up. Bears are just starting to come out of hibernation. Now a lot of bears will go den up at higher elevation,

so they move up high in canyons. They necessarily won't be in caves or something like that, as most people think, but a lot of times they just kind of lay by a log or whatever, let the snow cover them, and they call that a den. Some find other forms, maybe in crevices of rocks or behind a big rock. I've seen bear den's just on a ledge underneath a

big line that's growing. Just places where bears are going to be secure from other predators and even other bears, especially the females, will find try to go to places that seems safe from maybe boars digging up their young in the springtime. But for the most part, they're gonna be in an area that's completely covered in snow. They're gonna merge from their dens, and they're gonna be seeking food sources. So what they want is they want food

that's close, nutritious, and nearby. Early in the bear season, especially the spring season, I'm looking for places that have a lot of green up a lot of nutrients close by, but also provide shelter. When you think about spotting for bears, bears it's very difficult to find because they aren't like deer and elk. They don't herd up. They're very solitary and nature. They're an elusive animal because they're fairly low

to the ground. If you think about by mid spring, the height of the grass, it would cover up where most bears stand. You're looking for a single animal in a large area that is heavily timbered, and the grass or cover around them is taller than them. It's not that there's not a lot of bears where you're looking. The reason you don't see bears is because they're hard to spot. They're elusive, they're solitary, and much of the

places that they inhabit have a lot of cover. So in order to effectively hunt bears via spot in stock,

you know, not by baiting, not by using dogs. You have to hone in on those places where they provide a weakness where it gives you a little bit of an advantage, and that is finding places where they're going to be out in the open feeding and honing in on those food sources where you're most likely to run into a bear or spot a bear active where you could actually visually see them, so early in the spring,

I'm going to focus on things like avalanche shoots. Now, avalanche shoots are great because the rocks and if you get a north facing slope, it's gonna burn off on the edge of the snow as the snow starts to recede. It's generally near areas with thick cover, but it's open, and that open provides sunlight for new growth, and new grasses will grow at the bottoms of those near water seeps. There should be plenty of water this time of year. As the snow line recedes, you're gonna start getting green

up right along that edge of the snow. And those avalanche shoots have cleared out patches of thick country that now is visible. So when you're sitting there glassing and spotting, you have a spot where it's likely that you'll see a bear because it's open enough that it doesn't obscure

the bear, and it has a great nutrient food source nearby. Now, outside of avalanche shoots, anything like steep hillsides, meadows, high country, alpine basins, stuff where you don't have as much cover and the cover hasn't really started to spring up early. That's a great spot to start looking now. As the season progresses, food sources and the areas that you're looking

at are going to start to change. Once they've emerged from their dens, it's not going to be long before they start making their way to different areas, probably more cover where they can remain hidden, remain out of sight, but also close to food. So they're gonna be moving into more pine forest regions, but there's still gonna need that nutrient grass. So we're going from early to mid

April to now late April mid May. I feel like bears at this time, although they will still be up high, and that can be a great place to target bears because you might find a little bit more open, have more visibility of some meadows and some parks and some other things. As it gets later on, you're gonna start finding bears in that mid or lower elevation, and I start focusing toward other food sources. What's really starting to spring up now now you're starting to get more grasses

and clover in the conifers or in open areas. A lot of that will be logging roads where a part of the timber has been logged, or even just logging areas where it's clear it's in the middle of the trees, but most of the new growth. The snow started to melt, and you're getting a lot of new growth and a lot of clover, a lot of dandelion, a lot of other high protein grasses in those areas in a concentration.

That's a magnet to bears. Now, as we move on later in the spring, bears tend to first start on finding different plants to eat, you know, high nutrient plants. But what's another thing that happens in the spring deer fawning and elk caving and later on and say like late May to early June. I really like to focus on elk calving areas. If there's elk ground, if it's not an elk area, then deer fawning areas, places that deer feel secure. But that provides an ease, a super

easy snack and meal for a bear. It's nothing for a bear to use. It's excellent sense of smell to find calves and fawns. They're pretty defenseless. They're generally in a concentrated area and they put off a pretty good scent that is easy for the bears to find those areas.

So if i have areas that I'm glassing and I'm seeing a lot of elk, and now those same areas will also probably be more open meadows with good feed close to where they have some kind of cover and security and water nearby everything a bear needs in one location.

I'll often glass those because you might catch a bear that's coming out to eat some more late spring crops, like even balsam root is a good one that time of year, or it depends on where in the country you are, but there's a lot of different plants, different kind of sun chokes, different kind of flowers that come out that bears will focus in on. And then you also have the option of looking into elk calving and

deer fawning areas. Now as a as a big game hunter, I also like hunting bears and predators in those kind of areas because you can kind of help protect some of the fawns and next year's crop of elk and deer by hunting predators in those areas where they're fawning, because that's where most undulants get hit The hardest is in that late early spring when the fawns and calfs don't have as much natural defense. But if we're focusing on bears, that's an excellent food source to focus in on.

When I think about finding bear spots, I like to think of it as as the snow decreases, I start trying to find spots where the foliage is the lowest and I have the best of you at the optimal time of growth. So I I generally start high and follow the bears down. So I'll start my season high, looking at high open meadows, high parks, and then as the season progresses, all kind of change that same philosophy to lower open areas, mid mountain open areas, while still

paying attention to some of that high stuff. But as the snow starts to go away, the bears are gonna start leaving those areas, and they might even still be there, but the grasses begin to get too tall to where I can't spot the bears. So I go to more open meadow areas on the edge of thick cover or elk calving areas, and just start following the food source as the season progresses. Now that we've talked about food. I think one of the main overlooked things about bear

hunting is their pattern ability. A lot of people don't really understand a bear's pattern And I say that because it's one of the most easily exploitable facets to to spot and stock bear hunting, but because it's on such a large scale, we don't really hone in on it like I think other hunters do. If you're if you're a white tail hunter, you'll really understand this this concept because white tail hunters. White tails just have a smaller home range than bears, but bears have a very predictable

and patternable nature. Now, I've been too places um in in southeast Alaska, even in Montana and and in Nevada and California where you'll see what we call a bear trail. One of the craziest bear trails I've ever seen was actually from brown bears in Kodiak, where the bears actually, year after year walk the same path and over years, bear generations of bears have been walking these same trails. He's seen passed and they're putting their feet in the

exact same places year after year. One particular one on Kodiak. It's in the granite you can actually it's worn down bear tracks on this granite ridge that I I saw. But I've seen these bear trails other places where year after year, bears are are walking the same route the same way, pretty much, putting their feet in the same spots,

and other bears tend to follow suit. Now that's not to say that if you sit on that particular bear trail you're going to see a bear, because who knows when they're using those trails or what they're using them for, But many of them will follow some sort of pattern every year. There's one particular canyon that I hunted in and I spotted this bear that was pretty identifiable, just

a It was a young boar. He had like this weird split ripped year and just kind of a weird marking on his neck as well, and I just noticed and we passed him up. This was on the Saturday of Memorial Weekend. The following year, I went up there the Saturday of Memorial Weekend whatever. It maybe a different date, but pretty much around the same exact time. At three thirty in the afternoon, I looked up in the same hillside and saw that same bear. Okay, that's pretty interesting.

The following year, I went back the same day, uh, not the calendar day, but the same Saturday of Memorial weekend whatever, the same time of day, mid day that morning I glassed that spot. That evening I glassed that spot, but midday on that particular day, that bear was out feeding at three o'clock in the afternoon. Three years in a row. Now, not all bears will be exactly that patternable, but it just really went to prove how predictable bears can be. When you find a spot where you're seeing

bears a certain time of year, key into that. Now, some of it might be seeing a Memorial Days a little bit later in the season, So maybe it has more to do with the way the snow is melted and why it's in that area. And it happened to be three similar years. But if you're in a certain spot one year with a certain amount of snow and you start seeing bears, make a note of that and go back and hunt those same areas year after year, because the bears are gonna do quite a bit of

the same thing. They're denning in the same canyons. Maybe not exactly the same den but they're they're following the same patterns year after years, some of them following the same trails year after year in generation after generation. Because of a bear secretive nature, the way that they live, and how difficult they can be to spot. The real question comes into how long do I stay in an area and how do I know that a bear is there?

That is one of the hardest questions to answer. So outside of seeing a bear, instead of when I go into a new area, I like to look for bear sign as opposed to just looking for bears. It's a lot easier to find the sign of bears in many instances than it is to actually find a bear. So if I go to a spot and I glass it and it looks like it's got everything. I'm up in a high alpine base and I sat there glassing. I've sat there for a day and didn't really see anything.

I think to myself, Okay, is this an area bears are using. If I if I look at the mountain and realize there's a lot of cover on this mountain, it's I can see ten percent of it. I've got ten percent of the mountain that I can actually see in the nine of it is in in cover of some kind where it would be very difficult to spot a bear. What portion of my time should I spend there?

But it looks like great country, So I'll go to those open areas where I can and seat, and around those areas where they should be feeding, where those food sources are concentrated, and I'll look for sign mostly droppings. Also, I'll look for bear trails or tracks, especially if there's snow. If I can even glass and see maybe some tracks going across the snow, I'll go up, investigate and see

if those are bear tracks. And then I also look for scrapings and other markings, and then I use that information in a way similar that white tail hunters would when planning a way to set up a tree stand. It's just on a much larger scale and at a in a different distance. If I find a scrape or a marking, that's marking its territory. Bears are extremely territorial, and as they go into that later into the spring. Many states, their seasons go into June. That's when bears

start to rut. The boars are extremely territorial. They keep cruising and checking marking posts. There's many times where I've found maybe uh, scraped up tree and some bear hair, and then I go, Okay, as it gets closer towards the running period, I'm going to get back into this area in glass because there's probably multiple bears that will check this area. And you know, I'll sit on areas

and and watch areas where I see a lot of droppings. Now, maybe that those bears are using that area at night. But as the moon's change and things change with weather or whatever, you'll know, Okay, a bear is for sure using this area. Now I just have to sit and wait, much like a white tail hunter would on a on a deer trail or whatever, and know that your time's

well spent because there's bears in that area. One thing that I I've started to think about using more and more is something like a trail camera, where I know, if it's legal in your state, where you see bear sign, put up a camera and see and try to understand its patterns. For a long time, I was fairly against the use of trail cameras to kind of aid in hunting, only because I just kind of felt personally it just seemed a little unethical. But I've used them for fun

in the past. And the amount that I've learned about the different species I've used them on is just incredible. One thing in particular comes to mind when I'm thinking about bears, and it was just an accidental discovery an area that I hunted elk a lot, there was a wallow. I just put up a trail cam to see what kind of activity was in the area, and I ended up leaving the trail cam there pretty much year round, just to kind of see what was moving through. You know.

I got some cool stuff with wolves in the winter walking through, and some deer and some milk and some moose. But the craziest discovery was as it got hot, bears were constantly using this wallow. Now I may be seen a little bit of bear sign in that area, I've never actually laid eyes on a bear, but through the course of the pictures, I discovered that there was over six different bears using this one small wallow in this

one canyon. And that really opened my eyes up to how many bears are actually in most of these places that you never see so exploiting something like a food source that they're using, a trail that they're using, a rubbing area that they're using and just understanding when and where they're going through there. You can kind of take some white tail tactics and just put it in a large spot in stock frame, if that makes sense. So you've got a pattern ability of a bear, and now

most of the patterns evolve around a food source. So you find the food source, you find sign of the bear, and then you hunt that area and try to exploit and find the pattern that the bear is using and

use that knowledge to intersect his path. Now you can also have multiple areas where you're finding sign, where you're finding good food sources and maybe some other a good vantage where you have clear openings near thick cover that the bear will likely live in, and you can go from area to area and then once you figure out which one is the best spot for you to be at, you position yourself in that spot and then the waiting

game comes in. You you glass all day, you glass evenings and mornings, whatever you decide to do, and try to figure out when that bear is coming out and intersect your path with where the bears are based on your knowledge of food sources and their patterns in the area. Now, I hope that that gave you an understanding a little bit of focusing on the type of areas where bears are going to be, and it really does all revolve

around food sources and then pattern ability. So next week, what I'm gonna do is we're gonna take it a step further. We're gonna put that knowledge into action in hunting application and how to exploit it with hunting tactics. So we're gonna talk about glassing and how I would set up in a canyon if if I think that I've found the spot where they're feeding and have those

patterns recognized. I'm going to talk about a moving hunting bear tactic, which is pretty much walking logging roads, and I'm going to talk about the ways that I kind of figure out when the bears are go going in which roads to walk and and what times a day and all that kind of stuff. And then another tactic that I've used a lot in both spring and fall

is calling for bears. So we're gonna cover all that next week, and I think that that will really kind of give you the necessary tools to take where do I look and then how do I hunt and make you more successful. I want to quickly before we get out of here, answer a question. I'm gonna pull it up right now. This one. You know, last week we talked about backcountry food and so um I got a

question here through Instagram from Jesse right. He says loved the food back country pod last week, and this question is how are you cooking with your the jet boil in the back country? You said you fry up meat sometimes with oils. Are you packing a pan with you? That's a great question. So my standard stove system, I've used jet boils. I also really like the msr um reactor. It's pretty much just like a jet boil. It's just a little bit faster boiling, and I kind of like

that one a little bit better. But yeah, so I do a couple of different things. It depends on how far I'm going whether I pack a pan or not. It is nice to have a pan, especially um, well, if we're talking about spring hunting, I like to bring a pan just to fry some fish in. Um, it's worth it to maybe just bring a little bit larger pot that I could fry stuff in or boil water

in and just use that one pot. Sometimes I'll just bring a really lightweight, small fry pan, or I will just cook it right in my jet boiled cup or whatever. I've done that many times. I'll use that coconut those coconut oil single serve packs, I'll just put it in the jet boil cup. The key is they just try to turn it down as low as possible and fry it up that way. Now, another way to do it is use your jet boil and I build like a rock.

I set like four rocks around the jet boil a few inches above the flame, and then whatever pan I bring, I set that on top. One thing you should know, if you just took like a fry pan, just a random fry pan, and you set it on the top of your jet boil to fry your food, it will actually catch your jet boil on fire and melt all the plastic. I know that because I've done it. It's just they have like the jet boil cups or even the MSR reactor ones that has to have a special

gap built into the cup. Now, they make some fry pans that you could use, but I just feel like there's some lighter weight ones that you can take in smaller that you can just get on your own outside of the ones that they sell. But to use them correctly. I actually stack rocks around the jet boil and then use that to prop the pan above my flame, And that also helps me control the heat because some of those you can't turn down that low to fry stuff.

It ends up just searing and burning the outside, but leaving the meat inside fairly raw or rare. UM. So if you want to get it like cooked better, I'll just add some oil, build up rocks and then put a light pan on it. If I'm not going crazy far, that little extra weight is just a creature comfort. If I am going a little bit deeper, you know, you can you could think about getting a bigger pot, like a wider pot that's more that also boils water, but has a little bit more room for frying up some

meat and other things. And then you know, you just kind of sometimes have to deal with the water a little bit tainted flavor water the next time you cook, but it's not too bad. So that's that's what I do with that. I appreciate you guys listening in, and I'm excited to answer all these questions everybody has on

bear hunting. UM. I hope that between this podcast the next week's you really gain a better picture and some insight and make it not so frustrating, But just have an idea of is what what you're doing gonna work and be successful because bear hunting can be long. It can be long days, a lot of glassing and not seeing a lot in that spot in stock method, depending

on the type area you're in. So I think just understanding that you're doing the right thing is half the battle of keeping that persistence and then keeping you successful. So until next week, Uh, stay quarantined. You know social distance and uh, well, what what are we gonna do. We're gonna this is closing the distance. So we're gonna open the distance. We're opening the distance. Yeah, have a great week and open the distance. See you