Come with us to Houston, Texas, to talk saltwater fishing, conservation, philosophy and life with Pat Murray, former light tackle fishing guide and President of the Coastal Conservation Association (CCA). Pat is the author of Pat Murray’s No-Nonsense Guide to Coastal Fishing and the just-published It’s More than Fishing, from Texas A&M University Press. He’s also the publisher of TIDES magazine, and an award-winning outdoor writer and reporter.

CCA was founded in 1977 to address the drastic commercial overfishing of redfish and speckled trout along the Texas Gulf Coast. The battles were fought on the water, in the statehouse, and wherever fishermen gathered to demand change before the fisheries were lost forever. That battle was won. New challenges, and new successes, abound.

The CCA now has over 125,000 members, with 224 local chapters across all three US coasts. “We work to protect not only the health, habitat and sustainability of our marine resources, but also the interests of recreational anglers and their access to the resources they cherish.” 

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson. 

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists. 

BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

Follow us:

Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

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Facebook: @backcountryhunters

RA Beattie was the man behind the camera for many of the most influential fly-fishing films of the past several decades. It’s no exaggeration to say his work changed the culture of fly fishing.

Beattie’s work has always told the story behind the story – transcending just a sport about catching fish, and allowing us to connect with the why.

From giant Arctic char to dorado in the Bolivian jungle, to steelhead on the Deschutes and milkfish in Dubai, RA has set the standard for fly-fishing films and inspired countless others to expand their work beyond “fish porn.” Watch two of his latest- The Hard Way and The Silent Spotter to see what we’re talking about, and then explore more of RA’s work through his Off the Grid Studios/RA Beattie Productions.

Join us for a conversation with RA about his work, his passions, and a life behind the camera in some of the most exotic flyfishing destinations on earth. And if he ever gets tried of traveling for filmmaking, he travels some more, to places like Suriname and Cameroon, to verify sustainable wood sources for a guitar maker. As RA says, every fly-fishing filmmaker needs a second job at times. 

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson. 

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists. 

BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

Follow us:

Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

Instagram: @backcountryhunters

Facebook: @backcountryhunters

During the deluge of Hurricane Helene, over 30 inches of rain fell in the headwaters of the iconic Nolichucky River in North Carolina, falling on ground already saturated from prior rain. The Nolichucky crested nine feet higher than its record flood levels, wiping out almost everything in its path. Although the river experienced scouring and erosion, it was the man-made infrastructure that fared the worst. Among the losses were almost 40 miles of railroad tracks owned by CSX Transportation.

Everyone wants the train tracks rebuilt, and the vital freight transportation link restored. But nobody could have predicted that the rebuilding project, contracted out to a company from Mississippi, would involve recklessly mining the riverbed, blocking tributary creeks, tearing up National Forest lands, and destroying one of the most beloved fishing and whitewater rivers of the entire eastern U.S.

None of this had to happen. Agencies tasked with permitting and watchdogging this operation seem to have failed entirely. The public’s demands for the work to be done in a less destructive manner have been met with silence.

Join Tennessee fishing guide and paramedic and BHA member Chris Lennon and North Carolinian Phillip Widener (Charman of BHA’s North Carolina chapter) to learn about what’s happening, and why it is so crucial, right now, to hold responsible parties accountable and stop this entirely avoidable assault on our public lands and waters.

Intentional destruction of the Nolichucky River must stop!

Listen and then learn more and take action at https://www.backcountryhunters.org/nolichucky_river_stop_csx_destructive_construction_activities

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson. 

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists. 

BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

Follow us:

Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

Instagram: @backcountryhunters

Facebook: @backcountryhunters

Wilderness meets Modern Society -- Seth Kantner Part II

Alaska’s Seth Kantner is back with us, as promised, for part two.

Seth was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River in the 1960s and has been hunting, trapping, fishing, and making a life on the land there ever since. He is the author of the novel Ordinary Wolves, considered one of the most powerful, gritty, and true-to-life Alaska books ever written. His non-fiction books, Shopping for Porcupine, Swallowed by the Great Land, and A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou, illustrated with the photos that have made him a world-renowned wildlife photographer, chronicle a life, a people and a landscape tangled in the conflict between the oldest powers of nature, wildlife and wilderness and the storm of changes wrought by the modern Anthropocene. Through it all, he’s maintained his profound sense of wonder, and his equally profound sense of humor. He even found time to write a children’s book (Pup and Pokey) about the mishaps and adventures of a wolf pup and a porcupine surviving on the tundra.

Join us for a freeform conversation with one of the most unique voices of our time.

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson. 

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists. 

BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

Follow us:

Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

Instagram: @backcountryhunters

Facebook: @backcountryhunters

As promised, John Leshy is back on the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcast & Blast to discuss his recently published and definitive book, Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands.

Our Common Ground is the most comprehensive and incisive history, both legal and political, ever written about the American public lands. It is an absolute must-read for anyone who loves our national forests, parks, grasslands or BLM lands, especially right now, when the entire institution of the American public lands is being questioned by so many- most of whom have no idea what they are putting at risk.

John Leshy is a former General Counsel of the Department of Interior and the Harry D. Sunderland Distinguished Professor of Real Property at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. He has been deeply engaged in public lands policy and law for over fifty years.

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The Podcast & Blast with Hal Herring is brought you by Backcountry Hunters & Anglers and presented by Silencer Central, with additional support from Decked, Dometic, and Filson. 

Join Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, the voice for your wild public lands, waters, and wildlife to be part of a passionate community of hunter-angler-conservationists.

www.backcountryhunters.org

Bjorn Dihle has lived his entire life in southeast Alaska, hunting and fishing from the Tongass National Forest to the northern Brooks Range and beyond. He is a family man, a wilderness and wildlife guide, a conservationist, and a contributing editor at Alaska and Hunt Alaska magazines. Bjorn is the author of the books Haunted Inside Passage, Never Cry Halibut, and A Shape in the Dark: Living and Dying with Brown Bears. Listeners might also know his work from his riveting story in Outdoor Life, entitled The Infamous and Murderous Sheslay Free Mike, about a mysterious and thoroughly-unhinged trapper that haunted the wilds of the Taku River country in the 1970s and 80s. Join us for an episode that veers from the usual nuts and bolts of life, hunting and fishing and conservation, and into the shadows of the paranormal, the places out beyond the light of the campfire, where anyone, and anything, might be lurking and watching. 

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BHA. THE VOICE FOR OUR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS AND WILDLIFE.

Follow us:

Web: https://www.backcountryhunters.org

Instagram: @backcountryhunters

Facebook: @backcountryhunters

“It is astonishing that this law has escaped fundamental change.” John Leshy, author of The Mining Law: A Study in Perpetual Motion

The 1872 Mining Law represents one of the most extraordinary give-a-ways of American assets in the history of our nation. It has been the target of reform and repeal almost from the very moment it was passed. No other nation on earth allows the mining industry to simply extract the public’s wealth without paying. The cost of administering it- the legal process of giving away America’s public lands and minerals- is astronomical. It has been used by grifters and scammers to privatize millions of acres of public land. It has resulted in an estimated 500,000 abandoned mines on public lands, $35 billion in cleanup costs, and over 10,000 miles of waterways forever impacted or ruined. Billions of dollars’ worth of gold, silver, and other minerals are taken out each year – nobody even knows the extent, because there’s no regulation to make them report the totals. Even the mining industry, until recently, was embarrassed by it.

As the US sees a new boom in mining on public lands- lithium, cobalt, the rare-earth minerals in such furious demand by the alternative energy and EV industry, the 1872 Mining Law should be the first item on the agenda of reform. But nobody is even talking about it.

Why not?

Please join us for a conversation with law professor and former General Counsel of the Department of Interior John Leshy, who literally wrote the book on the Mining Law, and has over fifty years’ experience in public land law and policy. Leshy is also the author of Our Common Ground: a History of America’s Public Lands, and will be returning to the BHA podcast to discuss that book in a few weeks.

Alaska’s proposed Ambler Road is back on the table, and Americans are once again asked a fundamental question about what we value and what kind of world we will pass on to our children.  We covered the Ambler Road controversy in Episode 168 of the podcast, and a quick re-listen to that episode will be handy for getting the information we need to make informed decisions in this coming time of decision and consequence. Here’s a quick breakdown of the issue: The proposed Ambler Road is a proposed 211-mile industrial corridor through public lands along the southern flanks of the Brooks Range and one of the last and largest protected roadless areas on earth. The road would be built from the Dalton Highway at Mile Marker 161 to the Ambler Mining District on the Ambler River, passing through the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, bisecting the migration route of the embattled Western Arctic caribou herd and crossing nearly 3,000 streams and 11 major rivers including the Kobuk and Koyukon.

Our guest today is Seth Kantner, who was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River in the 1960’s and has been hunting, trapping, fishing and making a life on the land there ever since. He’s a renowned wildlife photographer and a commercial fisherman, best known for his extraordinary novel Ordinary Wolves, his non-fiction books Shopping for Porcupine, Swallowed by the Great Land and A Thousand Trails Home: Living with Caribou, and a children’s book, Pup and Porcupine. We thought that, with all the controversy over the Ambler Road, we should find a person who could speak to what was there in that country now, and what is truly at stake if the road project goes forward. We’ll have Seth back to talk about subsistence hunting and trapping and life in the Arctic, but for now, let’s address this pressing issue of the Ambler Road.

We're spending Thanksgiving week with our families and bringing you one of our favorite podcast episodes from the archives: Ron Mills, an outfitter, hunting guide and packer in the Bob Marshall Wilderness since 1959! 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.

Almost ten years ago, career firefighter and paramedic Beau Beasley embarked on a journey to tell the true stories of America’s veterans, honestly and in their own words. He was a respected outdoor writer and flyfishing guidebook author, and was deeply affected by the friendships he’d made through his involvement with Project Healing Waters, an organization that connects veterans with fishing and other outdoor opportunities.

“I had no idea what I was doing when I took this on,” Beau says. “I only knew I had to do it.”

Beau’s book “Healing Waters” holds the stories of 32 American military veterans who, through flyfishing, rod building, flytying, and being part of a vibrant outdoor community, “came across from the dark side of the river to the light.” 

By turns harrowing, tragic, and joyful, these stories cut to the bone, portraits of the price that some of us are willing to pay for this mighty experiment in freedom and responsibility that is the United Sates of America. Join us, and please, if you are a veteran, or know a veteran, who could benefit from this book or this connection to Project Healing Waters or BHA's Armed Forces Initiative, listen and pass it on.

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THE VOICE FOR WILD PUBLIC LANDS, WATERS, & WILDLIFE.

www.backcountryhunters.org