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On this final episode of In Pursuit, Rich, Angelo, and Jeff cover everything from Leadville training and endurance nutrition to pack-out strategies, backcountry fitness, and the gear that makes long days in the mountains a little more manageable.

The Mayhem Hunt team shares a big update for the future of In Pursuit. After a year of conversations, the podcast is coming to a close as the team shifts its focus toward more hands-on content. Less talking, more doing. Thank you for being part of the journey. The pursuit continues.

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Steven Rinella and the MeatEater crew discuss: Spencer’s rare bird sighting; goose removals lead to death threats; venison is on the menu at Wimbledon; Texas developers are shutting down shooting ranges; coyotes are eating iguanas; and the Trump family buys a tungsten mine.

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It wasn’t intentional, but I’m glad I did it. Over the last couple of seasons, I put out my usual summer trail cameras to gather pre-season intel. Some, I re-upped on batteries, while others just ran until they couldn’t. A few, built with solar panels, kept a charge through the North Country winter.

What those year-round cameras did for me was change how I view whitetails, particularly bucks. One of the most interesting takeaways involves predators and their impact on deer movement. Here are a few things I learned from year-round intel.

Back when we filmed the first season of One Week in November, I started my hunt on a property in south-eastern Minnesota. The first morning, while sitting over a pinch point and waiting on a cruising buck, I watched a forky bound through like he’d seen a ghost. A little while later, a coyote came down the main trail.

I figured that might be it for the morning, but it was the first of November and I had nowhere else to be, so I rode it out. An hour later I was standing over a 155-inch eight-pointer that came down the same trail. It was a good lesson, but it was still the prime rut where anything can happen.

The presence of predators at other times of the year must have a more outsized impact on immediate deer movement, or so I thought. After a couple years of running year-round trail cameras in northern Wisconsin, where the density of bears, wolves, coyotes, and bobcats is high, the truth became more evident.

I realized that at least with bears, coyotes, and bobcats, their presence seemed to have a short-lived effect on overall deer movement in the same locations, while wolves seemed to have a much more meaningful impact. While my sample size is small and highly anecdotal, my observations showed me two things.

If a single wolf comes in and hangs around, which happened a couple years ago on a property I hunt a lot, it seems like the deer traffic normalizes pretty quickly. An entire pack is a different story. This happened on that same property last year, and it pushed a heck of a lot of the deer and the coyotes to the fringe habitat closer to the roads and houses. It was a real eye opener, and one I probably won’t forget any time soon.

One spot I’ve run cameras on pretty much steady for three seasons is a pinch point next to a swamp. It’s not a very obvious terrain trap, but definitely funnels deer movement. It’s a rut hotspot, for obvious reasons.

It’s also one of the most consistent locations I’ve ever found for just general deer movement, which becomes much clearer when you hunt where the deer density is really low. Deer use that swamp edge all year long, with enough frequency to realize that focusing on terrain traps for mostly rut hunting is selling the whole thing way short.

While we all love sitting over a good food source or maybe a water source, if you want to have deer close and vulnerable, figure out the land. Learn where the deer have to walk, and then hang a camera and wait. Over three years I’ve watched that spot produce more action than I ever would have predicted. Hunt those pinch points and funnels during the rut, but don’t forget they can produce every day of the season if the deer have any reason to walk from one side to the other (which they probably do).

A week or so ago, I got a trail camera video of a young buck visiting a scrape. He raked his velvet antlers on the overhanging branches and just did his thing. I showed it to one of my daughters, because in the 2024 season we sat 40 yards from that scrape with a doe decoy out. With half an hour of shooting light left, a young buck popped out of the swamp, eyed up his potential girlfriend, and then put on a show. He pawed that scrape up, peed in it, stood on his hind legs, and raked the branches overhead. Then he made the mistake of trotting into bow range.

I’d rather hunt around a bunch of rubs than a community scrape for most of the season. The middle 10 days of October are an exception, but I am fascinated by scrapes. I’ve left cameras on a few of them for a couple years, and I’ve learned that I don’t know shit about scrapes and why deer use them.

They visit them every month of the year, and while they don’t always go to town and work them, it seems like every single deer that comes in will at least give the licking branch a little sniff and a taste. I’ve come to believe that the urine-soaked dirt is important, but not nearly as important as the licking branch. That doesn’t really matter much to a hunting strategy, but it’s an interesting takeaway.

It’s also just fun to realize that some of the sign we associate strictly with fall activity actually functions as a communication tool all season long. I never would have learned that if I had been responsible and pulled some of my cameras at the end of the season.

As Civil War Summer continues, host Clay Newcomb along with Dr. Misty Newcomb and Josh "Landbridge" Spielmaker are joined by guests former history teacher Ben Lagrone and host of The End of History podcast J.B. Shreve as they swap stories about Osage orange trees, neighborhood mailbox projects, , bulldozers, and the simple satisfaction of moving dirt. The group then turns their attention to the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln's leadership, family Civil War connections, and the lasting impact of America's defining conflict.

Thank you to our sponsor, Tecovas.

If you have comments on the show, send us a note to [email protected]

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Spencer Neuharth hosts MeatEater Trivia with Janis Putelis, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Cory Calkins, Sarah Delany, and Nate Mason.

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This week on the show I'm joined by Chris Wood, the president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, to explore what lies ahead for trout and salmon in America and reasons why that future could be bright.

Thanks to our sponsor, Conservation First Bank.

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We’re excited to announce that the MeatEater Auction House of Oddities is back for 2026 and open for bids now!

For those not familiar, the Auction House is our one-of-a-kind hunting and fishing auction extravaganza featuring eyebrow-raising outdoor gear, mementos, and paraphernalia donated by MeatEater personalities, employees, and friends of the brand, all in the name of raising money for conservation.

100% of proceeds from the Auction House go to MeatEater’s Land Access Initiative, our in-house public lands access campaign that’s laser-focused on making sure hunters and anglers have more opportunity here in the USA.

To date, our Land Access Initiative has helped fund new public land acquisitions such as the recent 200-acre Tuckertown acquisition in North Carolina, the 328-acre Wildcat Bend acquisition along the Yellowstone River in Montana, the 215-acre Shiloh Pond project in Maine, and more.

So when you place your bid on that one-of-a-kind piece of MeatEater history, you can rest assured knowing that your hard-earned dollar will be going to one hell of a good cause.

Speaking of MeatEater History, this year's Auction House inventory is as deep and absurd as it’s ever been. Highlights include:

The Auction kicks off July 8 and runs for two weeks. So place your bids now to get your hands on some MeatEater history and become a meaningful part of our next public land access campaign.

After hauling my two daughters through spider webs, oppressive heat, and a few meltdowns to drop a new trail camera at one of my hunting spots, I started reconsidering whether or not my summer scouting efforts were worth it.

While summer scouting might benefit you come October, do you really need to burn the boot leather during beach season to have success this fall? After all, plenty of hunters fill their tags on quick out-of-state hunts with no prior experience in a place. Here are a few reasons to consider whether or not you need to spend a ton of time summer scouting.

Getting a buck on camera in August is great, but that hardly guarantees you’ll wrap your tag around him come October. Unless you’re planning on hunting an early September opener, your scouting intel from August probably won’t tell you where the deer will be this fall.

That doesn’t mean summer scouting can’t offer you valuable intel. You could look for historical sign, travel routes, and potential bedding cover to determine if you should revisit a spot in the fall. But you could also do that in February when the snakes, ticks, and spiders aren’t out. Besides, if you’re scouting an area where deer are browsing on new green briar shoots, honeysuckle, and other seasonal vegetation, that will change after summer.

I’m not saying you should procrastinate your scouting duties. Instead, you should be more methodical in how and when you execute them. I enjoy watching a velvet buck slip out of a cutover or cross a field, but I’d much rather find a big track as I’m scouting my way into an evening hunt in October.

Prioritizing a few intentional days of scouting just before the season opens (or even during) can give you more real-time intel than hacking your way through the middle of summer. It’s easy to think that you have to spend as much time on stand as possible during the season, but that time on stand doesn’t really help if you aren’t hunting the deer where they’re at.

Instead of hanging and hoping in a random spot, go in super early and scout your way into a place. Done right, this is the true benefit of mobile hunting. Look for fresh tracks, droppings, and feeding sign to tell you where to set up.

If you’re hunting acorns in early October, you should find this feeding sign under a tree that’s dropping. Now, you might not know the caliber of bucks in that area, but some fresh tracks might give you a clue.

Dropping a few cameras or hanging stands during the summer is one thing, but you should already have these spots marked from historical data. This might seem counterintuitive, but finding fresh rubs or scrapes at the end of deer season is much closer to when you’ll actually hunt them as opposed to the middle of July.

Winter scouting gets talked about a lot, but it’s something that few hunters actually do. I get it, you’ve slogged through an entire deer season, burned all your brownie points, and probably feel slopes-of-Mount-Doom levels of exhaustion. But even a few days of winter scouting can go a long way.

Assuming nothing drastic happens to the landscape or local deer herd, there’s a good chance the intel you find winter scouting will show you how to hunt a certain area the next year. That way, you can focus on the archery range and dialing in your setups during the summer months.

For most folks, you don’t need to make a special summer trip just to scout. Even if you’re planning a multi-day out-of-state hunt, take a day to scout a few areas instead of going in blind. You’ll have hot intel on the deer come fall without skipping out on a few cold ones this summer.

We often underestimate how bucks eat to not only survive, but thrive. It pays to think of them as animal athletes, and to learn what food sources offer them the most protein, fat, carbs and general nutrition. Focusing on a buck's diet throughout the summer and the season is a strategy that will keep you in the game all season long.

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With its many diverse, stupendous landscapes and public lands, the West has long been a region of bucket list adventures. A descent down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon has always been near the top of the list for almost everybody. Here’s what it’s like.

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Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters" and "Mountain Men"

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