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Brent’s writing his own rules again and making up an imaginary theme for this week’s show. This week’s theme is “It’s my show and I do what I want”. Regardless of his shenanigans the stories this week are great and we think you’ll really enjoy them. Sit back and relax. It’s time for MeatEater’s “This Country Life” podcast.

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You’ve likely seen the big news already. But if not, the USDA has officially announced its proposed rule and intention to rollback the 2001 Roadless Rule in its entirety.

This means that the 44+ million acres of relatively unfragmented and still-wild national forest protected by that rule from new road construction and industrial-scale logging is now on the table for all that and more. To grossly oversimplify things, most in the hunting, fishing, and conservation world see this as a serious setback. When this rollback was first floated last summer, more than 625,000 comments were submitted in response, and ~99% opposed it.

It’s easy to see that and assume this is a no-brainer bad idea and leave it at that. But it’s not quite that simple.

I recently heard a noted thinker and journalist explain that a key tenet of debating or interrogating a viewpoint different than yours is to first consider the best possible version of that argument. You must understand and reckon with the most compelling and rational case for your opponent’s position before you can make a sound case for your own.

So, while many in the environmental world look at the Roadless Rollback as a disaster, it must be acknowledged that many on the other side of the issue might look at this as a similarly obvious and necessary action. And they might have some good points.

For example, Secretary of Agriculture Rollins explained in the USDA announcement that “for too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities.”

And here’s the thing: it has been widely acknowledged by most everyone across the natural resources world that our nation’s forests are in need of some degree of additional management. Wildfire season lasts longer than ever before, dangerous mega-fires are more common, and the impacts to the landscape, wildlife, and local communities are increasing year after year. This has a lot to do with drought, heat waves, and other climate factors. But, at least in part, it’s true that many forests are overstocked with "fuel"—otherwise known as standing dead timber and brush that can act as a tinderbox just waiting to explode.

Furthermore, many in the wildlife world acknowledge that a diversity of forest age structure and composition is good and necessary for many birds and animals. Wildlife of many types—both popular game species and threatened/endangered species—benefit from the early successional habitat and flush of nutritious growth that comes with the creation of new openings in an otherwise forested habitat. Unfortunately for many species, large swaths of our nation’s forests have instead grown into monocultures of mature timber that block sunlight from reaching the floor, eliminating the undergrowth and early successional habitat that many species require.

Some degree of increased thinning, logging, prescribed fire, and other forms of active management could absolutely help with both the fire and wildlife issues noted above. And, if I were told that the 2001 Roadless Rule was keeping that from happening across our national forests, I would have to concede that this is a problem.

But that’s not exactly what’s happening.

Our national forest is comprised of about 193 million acres—split into what we’ll consider as three different designations—and it’s important to understand what can and cannot happen on each.

37 million acres are designated as wilderness—meaning no new roads, no logging, no chain saws, or motors of any kind. Here, it’s true that active management and road or motor-assisted wildfire treatments aren’t happening.

Then there’s the 58 million or so acres covered by the 2001 Roadless Rule (or state-specific variations in ID and CO), meaning most new roads are prohibited and most major logging projects are limited. But not entirely. And this is an important caveat that Roadless Rule opponents don’t highlight. The Roadless Rule was written with explicit acknowledgement of the need for wiggle room to accommodate habitat improvements for wildlife and wildfire mitigation. According to a 2026 Trout Unlimited report:

“From the beginning, it included exemptions that allow land managers to protect public safety and ecosystem health, including removing small‑diameter trees and other vegetation. These exemptions are actively used by the Forest Service to address modern fire challenges, and former Forest Service Chiefs from both Republican and Democratic administrations have stressed that the rule 'specifically permits activities aimed at preventing and mitigating wildfire risks.'

Data drawn from the Forest Service dispels the myth that the Roadless Rule prevents fuel reduction. The agency’s Rocky Mountain Research Station found that while roadless areas contain approximately 21% of the total tree cover across the National Forest System, they account for 34% of the total fuel treatment activities and 8% of total area treated. Spatial analysis using agency data shows that hazardous fuels reduction projects have reduced fire risk on nearly 2 million acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas.”

Finally, there’s somewhere around 98 million acres of forest not impacted by either of the above restrictions—leaving them largely open to whatever management actions, treatments, and logging projects the agency deems necessary—with most of these landscapes being those closest to the wildland-urban interface where fire risk and mitigation are of most concern.

The point I’m trying to highlight here is that there are many tens of millions of acres of our national forest system open to necessary roadwork, habitat improvements, wildfire mitigation, and other logging and management activities. Of course, there might be other speed bumps, regulations, litigation threats, and land management plans that might impact those actions—but it certainly is not exclusively the 2001 Roadless Rule making any of it impossible.

On the other hand, what the Roadless Rule does make possible is the equally important presence of unfragmented fish and wildlife habitat and backcountry characteristics that are becoming increasingly rare today. You might say they’re not making any more of it. And in a rapidly developing world, this stuff is more important than ever. Just as important as any of the above are the memories made in these unique places.

I killed my first elk in an inventoried roadless area (IRA); my son’s first backpacking trip began in an IRA; the forest-covered mountains I can see from my back deck, that I trail run across, and where I’ll go hunting this fall are all part of an IRA. There are millions of hunters, anglers, climbers, hikers, and bikers with stories and landscapes held dear just like this too. Slice and dice these rare landscapes with new roads, litter them with clear-cuts and an unending parade of logging trucks, and you’ve fundamentally changed the lived experience for both humans and wildlife.

The debate over public land issues such as the Roadless Rule are never quite as simple as either side likes to make it out to be. There is a gray area, nuance, and exceptions to each and every rule. We would do well to remember this. And that’s likely the case with the Roadless Rule too. Is it perfect? Probably not. Could it be improved? I’m betting so. And maybe we should do that.

But when it all nets out, and when considering the ever-more fragmented, over-developed, and rapidly diminishing natural world around us, it seems this possibly imperfect rule is still one worth fighting for. If for no other reason than to still have the chance to build it into something better.

If you would like to weigh in on the future of the Roadless Rule, the public comment period opened today and is open until September 21. Click here to submit your comment.

This article comes from the MeatEater Conservation Substack Newsletter. If you'd like to receive more content like this straight to your inbox every other week, click here.

Question: I’m a new bow hunter who doesn’t have access to private land or a hunting mentor. Where should I start?

Answer:

The National Deer Association (NDA) offers a Field to Fork Program that allows adults to learn about deer hunting basics through a hands-on approach. These multi-day events teach hunters how to do everything from the start to finish of a hunt, including the butchering process. This event isn’t meant to teach you everything, but it’s a solid foundation that provides a launchpad for new hunters.

Alternatively, if you prefer to work with a hunting mentor, there are a few different ways you can find one. A lot of states offer hunting introductory courses through their wildlife and fish departments. You typically expect to find at least one of these per year, while some states may offer multiple opportunities annually. These are great places to meet hunting mentors that might be able to work with you personally or connect you with others who can.

You can also do the legwork of finding your own mentor the old-fashioned way. Ask friends, relatives, coworkers, and church members if they or anyone they know might be a willing mentor. Growing up, I had friends who came from non-hunting families, but some of them tagged along with us or learned from others in our community. Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking for help. Remember, you don’t need a hunting mentor forever. Learn the basics from them to get started, and then get out there and figure it out.

If you decide to go it alone, there’s never been a better time. This internet is a massive resource right at your fingertips. Plenty of podcasts like Wired to Hunt offer thousands of hours of expert hunting advice, how-to articles, and video series like Whitetail EDU can help you learn the basics to get started deer hunting.

Of course, there’s no better teacher than time in the woods. So get out there, and get started. You’ll fail, a lot, but that’s what makes hunting so rewarding.

When it comes to finding land that you can hunt, you might have plenty of options right in your backyard. Most states offer public hunting opportunities in the form of national forests, wildlife management areas, nature reserves, or refuges. These state- and federally-operated public areas can be found with a quick Google search or by using OnX Hunt to find them.

If you go the public route, just know you’ll have to compete with other hunters. This shouldn’t dissuade you from hunting public lands. In fact, some of the best hunts I’ve experienced occurred on highly pressured public land.

Your other option, if you don’t already own land, is to try and score some private permissions. This takes some time, but if you’re willing to do a little door knocking, you might just stumble on a honey hole. Again, use OnX to locate potential properties that interest you. Big properties that look like good hunting spots usually mean someone’s hunting them, though this isn’t always the case. On the other hand, make sure you don’t overlook small properties that might hold deer. In fact, you’ll probably have better luck asking to hunt 10 acres as opposed to 1000.

Some states even offer public walk-in hunting on private lands. You’ll have to research and see if your state offers similar opportunities. If it does, these can be dynamite spots that get overlooked. Just make sure you adhere to local rules and regulations.

Whether you go the private or public route, just know that both options can suck, and both can give you some of the best hunting experiences available.

Have a whitetail related question? Send it to [email protected] and check back weekly to see if we cover it.

Steven Rinella and the MeatEater Crew discuss: Fishing with drones; hunting in Austria; Tim Walz: scourge of miners; constitutional rights to hunt and fish; roadless rule; and more!

Presented by Can-Am: maker of the best ATVs, SxS, and Utility Vehicles www.can-am.brp.com

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This week on the show we're running under-the-radar Ohio big buck hunter Mike Rex through the "What Would You Do?" gauntlet to see how he'd handle some of the most interesting and tricky deer hunting scenarios we can throw at him.

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This is the third and final installment of a three-part elk hunting story by FHF founder, Paul Lewis. You can read the first and second segments here.

I slid behind the rifle, scanning the dark timber. Silence reclaimed the woods. Then, suddenly, he was just there. He didn't walk out of the trees so much as materialize, standing motionless at the edge of the willows in the bottom of the drainage. Before I could get him in the scope, he stepped down into the head-high willows, and I caught only a glimpse of his frame from my elevated position. Wide, I thought, but in the dimming light, I assumed he was the smaller six-point Chris and I had seen earlier that week.

The silence returned, longer and heavier than before. A twig snapped to my far left, behind a stand of young pines, and fear flared in my chest. If he'd bypassed the waterhole and worked down the left side of the drainage, he'd briefly appear in a small opening before disappearing up a trail that led straight over the ridge behind me. I stood, gathering my pack to make a run to intercept him. The memory of my failure in the river bottom flashed before me, and I thought of Uncle George's promise to be watching over my shoulder. I didn't want him to see me make the same mistake twice. I forced myself to sit back down and trust the spot.

I raised my binoculars, burning holes into the dark willows, and found nothing. As I lowered the glass and my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw the hindquarters of an elk standing behind a solitary juniper just seventy yards below me. I swapped binoculars for the rifle, centering the crosshairs on his shoulder as he stepped out, his head still obscured. I could only see the last couple of points. His main beams looked short with weak 5th and 6ths. It's the small six-point, I thought. I heard Chris's voice in my head:"Don't shoot the small one."

I resolved to let him walk, already planning the next day’s sit, but then he took a few steps forward, clearing the willows, and raising his head in the last remnant of daylight. His front tines were long and heavy, sweeping outward into a remarkably wide frame.

This was not the small six-point, though I was still convinced it couldn't be Wide Guy. He began to quarter away, taking his first steps toward the dark timber. If he took three more steps, he'd be gone forever. This was a mature bull, and I'd told myself early in the season that any mature bull taken in this exact spot would mean more to me than a bigger one elsewhere. The years of scouting, the early mornings, and the family history of this place converged into a single moment. I set the crosshairs on the back of his ribcage, anticipating the bullet's path to his far shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle roared. I cycled the bolt in one fluid, practiced motion, and re-acquired him in the glass. He'd run thirty yards and stopped, head lowered, legs wobbling. He stumbled right, took three unsteady steps, and vanished behind a clump of junipers. A heavy crash echoed up the draw, followed by a long, absolute silence, the same silence I'd heard in the river bottom on September 21st, except this time, instead of panic and regret, I felt the calm finality of a completed circle.

My hands began to shake. I pulled out my phone and typed two words to my wife, "Shot Out." It was the same tongue-in-cheek message I sent her five years earlier when I harvested my bighorn sheep, a phrase left over from my days on the tactical team. I messaged Chris next with my coordinates.

By the time I scrambled down the slope, the light was fading fast. I found him piled up at the edge of the willows, his head resting against a mossy log. I sat down beside him alone, preparing myself for the work ahead. I propped my phone on my pack to grab a photo or two before the light was gone.

Chris arrived with his frame pack and a fresh knife just as I finished caping the front shoulders. My stepdaughter, Brooklynn, had been studying taxidermy and had begged me to bring home an elk cape for her first shoulder mount. I promised her that if I took a bull in our home hills, it would be hers to mount.

Montana is grizzly country, and quartering an elk after dark in many of the state's western ranges is a hyper-vigilant, nerve-wracking exercise. But grizzlies are rare enough in this particular area of the state that they aren't something you actively worry about, and it was a welcome change to work by headlamp without the constant paranoia caused by every snapping twig.

We worked with a relaxed, easy rhythm, knowing our warm camper was close, down a well-worn game trail. Chris and I made two full trips that night, a rear quarter each on the first walk out, then the fronts and the loose meat, backstraps, tenderloins, and trim on the second. By midnight, all of it was safely stowed at the camper.

The next morning, we made one final easy hike to retrieve the head and cape. The morning sun gave Chris the chance to get some daylight photos of the antlers.

Once loaded up, Chris headed home, and I stayed behind to clean up the property before the mountain winter locked us in. It was already November, and in Montana winter doesn't knock before it kicks down the door.

The true climax of the story didn't happen on the mountain, though; it happened in the gravel driveway of my home outside Belgrade. My wife, Jen, met me at the truck with an ear to ear smile and helped me lower the heavy head from the tailgate. I was still operating under the assumption that I'd shot the little brother to our target bull, a respectable animal, but not him.

Jen knelt in the gravel, studying the antlers quietly. "This is Wide Guy," she said flatly.

"No, it's not," I replied, the self-proclaimed family elk expert. "The body's too small. His fifths are weak. It's a smaller six-point."

Jen didn't argue. She pulled out her phone, opened our library of summer trail-camera videos, and we sat there in the driveway comparing them to the animal at our feet. There was no denying it, the distinct, one-inch sticker point beneath the left brow tine, the aggressively downturned sixth point on the left main beam, the sharply hooked brows, and exceptionally long, sweeping thirds. It was him.

The exact bull we'd watched for three years. When Brooklynn skinned out his head, she pointed out his worn teeth and guessed him at eight and a half years old, later confirmed by the tooth I sent to Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks.

The trail cameras had misled us, but only because they couldn't capture his context. His small, weathered body had acted as an optical illusion, making his antlers look like a giant's. On the ground, he looked smaller, beaten down by winter and age.

I realized then that I hadn't been chasing a monster, I'd found a survivor. In the mountains of Montana, survival is a true trophy. When my coworkers Janis and Corey scored him at the office later that week, the tape stopped at 331 inches, including that little one-inch sticker under the brow.

Every hunter lives with a quiet contradiction. We spend months, sometimes years, pursuing an animal with an intensity that borders on obsession. We learn their bedding spots, waterholes, and rhythms of their lives. We project our own desires for wildness onto them, transforming them into legendary figures. If we're successful, we bring that legend to an end.

As I sit in my living room, looking at Wide Guy hanging on the wall, I feel an undeniable pride. I spent 31 days chasing elk and took my target bull in the exact mountain range where I caught brook trout as a child, on the slopes where my parents' ashes rest.

But beneath that pride lies a lingering sense of loss. I'll never see him slip across the screen of my trail camera again. I'll never search the spring snowdrifts of the surrounding gulches hoping to find his sheds. I'll never wonder if he's bedded in the timber above our camper. By harvesting him, I solved the mystery of Wide Guy, but I also erased it.

For me, hunting has never been about the simple act of killing. It's about the preservation of our connection to the land, the exploration of wild spaces, and the honoring of those who walked these ridges before us. Wide Guy is gone from the mountains, but his story remains etched into the timber of that home draw, a permanent part of the landscape that shaped my past and continues to call me home.

There’s a quiet code among hunters when it comes to dropping unit numbers, and even with the names stripped from these pages, anyone who knows these mountains will likely recognize the dirt. I didn’t write this to advertise a destination, but to dismantle a myth: this coveted tag isn’t a golden ticket, and it’s certainly no guarantee. Many who finally pull this permit treat it like an easy harvest, only to go home humbled by public pressure, UTV traffic, and the sheer size of the unit. This story isn’t a map to a honey hole; it’s an honest look at my ties to the land, and what it actually takes to hunt a landscape that anyone can access, but very few truly understand. The country is real, the history is real, but the exact draws, parks, and waterholes remain hidden except to those who’ve put in the miles.

One Tennessee man recently lost his hunting privileges for life. A tip to a wildlife hotline led game wardens to Austin Hale’s home, where they found 18 deer mounts, 52 turkey beards, 84 turkey spurs, and one fan mount. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA) says the vast majority of the wildlife parts were obtained illegally. They were confiscated as evidence and later ordered forfeited when Hale pleaded guilty to six counts of possession of illegal wildlife.

TWRA received a tip in March about two wild turkeys they believed were killed illegally near Alexandria. The concerned citizen gave game wardens photos of the suspect’s vehicle, which led them to Hale, who admitted to being in the area when the turkeys were shot. However, he did not admit to doing anything illegal.

During the investigation, game wardens noticed several discrepancies in Hale’s harvest reports. He had apparently killed deer outside the legal season and then reported them as if he’d tagged them on legal dates.

This wasn’t a case of a hunter making one questionable decision and ending up on the wrong side of hunting regulations. TWRA built a case involving multiple deer and turkeys over several years.

The investigation moved beyond harvest dates when game wardens executed a search warrant for Hale’s digital devices. The devices showed evidence of illegal harvests dating back to 2023, according to TWRA. That discovery led to a warrant to search Hale’s home, where game wardens uncovered “a substantial amount of illegal wildlife parts,” including deer mounts and turkey beards and spurs.

Hale pleaded guilty on July 24. The court ordered the seized trophies forfeited and revoked his Tennessee hunting license for life as part of the plea agreement. Hale’s Tennessee revocation was also reported to the Interstate Wildlife Violator Compact, which means all participating member states will recognize the loss of his hunting privileges. He was also given six years of supervised probation.

Hale was allowed to keep two of the seized deer mounts in exchange for a $1,000 donation to Tennessee’s Hunter Education Fund as part of his deal.

Images via TWRA.

For men, taking care of your body can often slip down on the priority list, but your health is a savings account you can either make deposits or withdraws. On this episode, host Clay Newcomb is joined by Dr. Jason Lofton an Dr. Adam McCall as they discuss the most important things that we as men can do to remain healthy, fit, and provide maximum longevity of the bodies we have been given. It's the most important gear we have to be good husbands, fathers, friends, and outdoorsmen and it takes work to maintain. Tune in to hear helpful info, hot tips, and the truth about how to keep that bank account full and maintain the edge we need in a world that is trying to drag it down.

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Spencer Neuharth hosts MeatEater Trivia with Janis Putelis, Max Barta, Cory Calkins, Nate Mason, Reva Hansen, Omar Lopez, and Laura Mascari.

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