The Blacktail Coach Podcast
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The Blacktail Coach Podcast
From Field to Fork: Mastering Venison and Solo Hunts
Venturing into the wilderness alone creates a unique set of challenges that even experienced hunters must carefully navigate. In this practical episode, Aaron and Dave tackle listener Brian's questions about solo hunting strategies and venison preparation techniques that can transform how your family enjoys wild game.
The hosts share a counterintuitive secret that completely eliminated gaminess from their venison - leaving the hide on for several days after field dressing. Though this technique puzzled even their butcher friend, the results speak for themselves, turning venison from a dreaded meal into a family favorite requested for special occasions. They dive into the essential details of proper field care, aging techniques, and processing methods that make all the difference in the final product.
For the solo hunter, equipment choices become critically important. The conversation explores must-have gear including backup GPS systems, satellite communicators, and game retrieval tools that can save your back and your hunt. Dave recounts a powerful personal story about harvesting a deer while battling Lyme disease, illustrating how using terrain advantages and smart techniques can overcome physical limitations when hunting alone.
Beyond equipment, the hosts emphasize the importance of thorough planning, community connections, and mental preparation. Having clear strategies for different scenarios - from blood trailing in darkness to loading heavy game - transforms potentially overwhelming situations into manageable challenges. Their practical advice on leveraging natural terrain, using mechanical advantages, and knowing when to seek help provides a comprehensive guide for anyone heading into the woods alone.
What's your solo hunting story? Have you tried leaving the hide on to improve venison flavor? Share your experiences and join the conversation!
Welcome back to the Blacktail Coach Podcast. I'm Aaron and I'm Dave. This week we are going to be talking about solo hunting and responding to a question sent to us by Brian. He gave us an idea for a podcast, which led to kind of deciding some solo stuff. The first part was and I think we addressed this previously about the sense that episodes that I replayed for a month that were just replay episodes. We're talking about different scents that are now illegal in the state of Washington. They aren't synthetic. So make sure, as always, double check what your regs say for your area, your state, your province and that you're using what's legal for your area. So we're all synthetics. Now, unfortunately, we can't use companies like James Valley Scents. We have to go with tinks or something like that. First thing Brian was talking about was do we have any favorite recipes for our venison? His wife and daughter are fine with him hunting, but I'm trying to get them to enjoy the fruits of my labor more. So Dave doesn't cook, so I'm out.
Speaker 1:We're leaving him off the hook here. One of the things you mentioned and this was long before I ever started hunting you talked about how some butchers will mix the meat.
Speaker 2:Well, it doesn't happen as much as it used to. But you take your meat in and they weigh it and everything Through that whole thing. They have this little formula that they do You're going to get so many pounds of meat because so much of this is bone percentage wise, and they say this is what you're going to end up with. How would you want to divide that up? And so basically, what they're creating is a checklist. They have certain days where they'll go through and okay, today we're doing wild game, today we're doing elk, or today we're doing beef. If it's an elk day and they're processing elk that day, you know there were some butchers that would okay. So I got to get five pounds of steaks for this guy and 25 pounds of pepperoni here. They were just filling orders. So that doesn't happen much anymore. Now they're just processing your animal, start to finish. And what was bad about that is if you took good care of your animal, you didn't know what the next guy did. And they're just filling orders and you get part of that.
Speaker 1:The first time you told me about this. It was one of your first elk that you had ever gotten. It was the worst when we were roommates back almost 30 years ago. And elk is delicious. I mean, it is the best meat that I've had. I like it more than anything else that I've had any game meats. This was terrible. It was super gamey. It was really inedible. And you told me the butcher mixed the meat and stuff.
Speaker 2:I actually gave that whole thing away, but again that doesn't happen much. I haven't heard about that for a long time. But it was a thing in the past. I will say that.
Speaker 1:So really I think if people don't want to eat blacktail it's due to the gaminess of it and everything. But before we get into talking about what you can do to avoid that gaminess Blacktail it's kind of most of it is we do deer steaks and we do grind yeah, and it's just whatever recipe you have that has ground beef or steak, you can use that for anything, but with the I know it can be. It needs to be tenderized the steaks.
Speaker 2:The steaks yes.
Speaker 1:And KitchenAid. So Asha bought a tenderizer for the KitchenAid. So basically it turns it into cube steak. So she runs it through there once or twice and it makes quick work of it, instead of standing there where she's pounding on it for a couple of hours and making a big mess.
Speaker 2:It makes a big mess but, it's therapy for her, getting out the rage.
Speaker 1:That's a really good attachment. Another thing to remember is deer has very little fat. It tastes fine for hamburgers, but they don't hold together well. So if you take it to the butcher, I think they'll ask if you want it mixed with beef tallow. I think they'll ask if you want it mixed with beef tallow, and so you can do a 90-10 or an 85-15, 80-20, you know whatever your preferred mix is. But that might be a good way to go and it would improve the flavor, because a lot of the flavor in meat comes from fat and a lot of the bad flavor can actually come from fat too.
Speaker 2:Beef or pork. They'll ask you either one of those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, some of the questions that Brian asks. It's how do you prepare, field dress your deer? A lot of it starts there. Absolutely A lot of guys are completely caping it. Is that the correct term? Actually, no, they're just cutting it completely apart and leaving the whole carcass out there. They're just deboning it out in the field. But you discovered a trick Personal story here. I hated venison. I would not eat it. Asha would say hey, we're having family dinner, mom's cooking venison stew this Sunday.
Speaker 2:And I'd be. That's nice. Oh, I'm busy, because you could not hide that gaminess. And the funny thing is you can smell it when you're cooking. If wild game, you can smell it if it's gamey. If it's not gamey, it should smell like regular meat yeah, it's terrible, I just would not eat venison.
Speaker 1:But then I remember I don't know if you learned this trick when I had lived down in California and I came back and you're like no, no, some old-timers told you this trick right, right.
Speaker 2:So I had a buddy who said this old-timer taught him this little trick to keep venison from being gamey. Now I have since been told that it doesn't make any sense that it shouldn't be this way, by somebody who is very intelligent and who would know.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how to explain this, but this is what I do. But it works. So the old timer said that if you leave the hide on for two, three days, that it pulls the gaminess out of the meat. Yeah, so we started doing that, and since then, the meat. So we started doing that and since then we go through so much venison now.
Speaker 1:It's ridiculous. I don't think I bought regular hamburger from the store in years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, deer steaks is my daughter's favorite meal. That's her birthday meal. She wants it every year and it's like before I was the only one in the family that would eat. That would brave it yeah, and I mean, like I said you could smell it, that it was okay. She's cooking the deer. I can smell it, but now you can't even tell and I know there's other tricks.
Speaker 2:Soaking it in milk overnight was a trick to pull out gaminess I see I've done that with turkey and I know that works for turkey and it does work.
Speaker 1:I just didn't think it worked real. Not as well as hanging it. But yeah, hanging it hide on, which means you're having to drag we're gutting it out in the field, but it's dragging the whole thing or getting the whole thing back to the vehicle and then hanging it in your garden shed. Hopefully it's cool enough out. So that's a big.
Speaker 2:This is all late season. We save our deer tags for November, December.
Speaker 1:When you were doing more early season hunting. I know you came across an old Pepsi cooler. Uh-huh. And had that plugged into your shop and you just hang it in there.
Speaker 2:I would do the elk in there, okay, but see an elk? I never did. I always skinned the elk. Yeah, you know, we always cut it into quarters, we pack it out skinned and then I would hang it in that cooler for a day or two and then I would take it in. So elk was never a problem, it was always venison. The black-tailed deer, white-tailed, never had that problem. Never had that problem with mule deer, pronghorn, it was just blacktail. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And blacktail being browsers and not grazers eating such a mixed bag of stuff all the time contributed to it. The other thing that I would say, it's in how you take care of your meat, and so I mean we always try and get the animal hung and get it caped and everything, and I would go in there and take that layer of skin off. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That little film. In it have all the dirt and extra hair and I'm picking all the hair off and everything, getting all the bloodshot out, and it would spend hours and hours and hours and I still do that as far as making sure it's clean, but I leave the hide on for two, three days and I know Jimmy and Jimmy, the pro staff. Before he was a vet, he was a butcher and he says it makes no sense and I have to agree with he would know. Yeah, something happens.
Speaker 1:He said the goal is to get it off the bone as quickly as possible. Right, but we leave it's the whole carcass hanging there and it was four days. I did my deer, which was in mid-November, for five days just hanging there. There were a couple of other guys who left their deer hanging before that, like at the end of modern, so late October, and it was cool enough and not sure if it's a mixture of the meat aging and that hide, it pulls the gaminess out of there. But yeah, it's just not gamey anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know how to explain it. I'm sorry, jimmy, something happens. I don't know if elves come out in that shed or what, but my whole family loves it now, and none of us have died. So we're still around kicking. That used to be common practice a long time ago, hanging and aging now, and none of us have died, so we're still around kicking. That used to be common practice a long time ago hanging in age yeah, I mean I remember my dad would do that.
Speaker 2:He got a couple deer and he would do that. And then I knew other guys that had deer hunted, old timers that would do that. I say old timers, I'm an old timer now, you know well, see, now you gotta tell them yeah and they would do that and it was something that was pretty common. But as I came up that wasn't so common anymore. Guys were like, well, you need to get the hide off and get it deboned and get it into the butcher.
Speaker 1:Get it in the butcher quick and deal with it. So if you have a spot where you can hang it and keep it cool, cool and dry for four days, I do three, four, four days and it's good. You know, and mine was, I think, five or six days because we just didn't have time to get around me. You leah, if she's in town, dj, it's just an assembly line. You're cutting it off the bone, dj's cutting out the sinew and asha and I are cutting it into. I did more more stir fry and we did grind you have the grinder here at the house and steaks and everything. So there's just a lot that you can do with the meat once it's ready. It's just trying to get it to where you don't have that gaminess.
Speaker 1:And I don't think that might be the hurdle, or it's the mental aspect of eating a wild animal, and some people I think somebody had a bad experience.
Speaker 2:This guy didn't take care of his meat, bringing it out of the woods. It's all dirty, let it hang. It's got bloodshot all through it and stuff. Well, all that is going to add to that gaminess. And so somebody had a bad experience and just assumed that it's all like that, which is understandable, but you take good care of it, you hang it in a cool spot. The reality is, you guys, I don't want it to hang that long. What do you think it's going to do at the butcher's?
Speaker 2:They put it in a cooler and it's going to hang for a week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's in a queue before they can get to it.
Speaker 2:We're not cutting wild game this day. We don't cut wild game until next Thursday. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or there's mats, because you Matt's Meats Matt's.
Speaker 2:Meats out of.
Speaker 1:Longview Out of Longview, so they've done a pretty good job with other like the bear and everything like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're fantastic.
Speaker 1:But yeah, there is also the mental aspect of I just don't want to eat Bambi. Like I joked around with my cousin when I went camping that I was going to bring down some bear brats and cook them all up for everybody and have them eat them and then tell them after the fact that oh, by the way, you just ate a bear. And now they won't trust me because they do not want to eat bear even though they're delicious.
Speaker 2:Bear is easily one of my favorites.
Speaker 1:But yeah, there's that middle. Although I have eaten cougar in Sloppy Joe's you were eating cougar steaks one night I didn't want to eat a cat, even though I've been told by multiple people that it's delicious. I've had too many cats in my life as a pet. I don't want to eat a big one. Right.
Speaker 1:So you know there's a lot of that. But as far as processing it, it's either get it deboned as quick as possible that was Jimmy's advice and, you know, get it off the bone and potentially age it for a little bit Leave it hanging there with the hide on for three, four days. It's been really good.
Speaker 2:The key is to get that meat cooled down. Regardless of what you do, get the meat cooled down and take good care of it. Keep it clean. Yeah, you know, get all the hair off of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, all of that. So that was the first part of brian's question and now we'll get into talking about solo hunting. He was asking and I've expanded because it was more than just wanting to talk about solo hunting, but it was any tips on getting the deer into the truck when you're on your own and exhausted. One of the things I saw for if you're in a pickup is they had the tailgate down, they had the deer where it was rack up and they somehow got it leaned up to the tailgate. They just squatted down, stood straight up and then walked backwards and that was the way they could get it into the truck and it depends on how far out you're hunting. So most like I have a long set it was 0.6 miles from where I park and got that spike and it was still some work. Dj came out and helped me and it was still some work for the two of us to drag a spike a half mile but still dragging whatever 80 pounds or something of dead weight.
Speaker 1:I know that they make sleds.
Speaker 2:They make sleds. Game carts are probably more ideal. I've heard guys using toboggans. I've actually had friends that use toboggans for an elk Dragging it down the logging road, which is gravel. You've put 80 pounds worth of meat, a quarter or something like that in there Sometimes 80 pounds, sometimes lighter and you drag it on gravel and this buddy of mine turns around and says of course it burns holes because it just scrapes away the plastic. And now there's holes all through this toboggan and he's like I'm going to take this back and get my money back. I was like well, what did you think was going to happen?
Speaker 1:$10 slab for the kids.
Speaker 2:I like carts and trailer. I have an e-bike that has a trailer. That is super easy Without the bike. We've just walked that out. I walked Miles on that and it's so much easier Was it last year or the year before?
Speaker 1:I just had to walk in. I was walking in a block and I had two gallons of water, a 20-pound block and 16 pounds worth of water and two five-pound bags of mineral attractant and cameras, so it's like 50. It's like 50 pounds of stuff and I'm not walking a half mile with that. So I put it on the cart and wield it out there and that's like with the cart, you've got this whole cart with you. Well, one of the things you can do is you just wheel the cart out and just stash it in the bushes when you go into your set.
Speaker 1:So it doesn't need to go all the way in, it just needs to be not visible or far enough off a game trail and that's all I did. I stashed it and that helped me for the skidder road. Yeah, I know for solo, also thinking about some stuff I can leave either up in the stand or in the ground blind. So I know, last year, because it was kind of bulky, I had a heated vest I left out in the blind. I leave the pads that I sit on and behind my back for insulation I leave those out there. There's a few things you can leave out there.
Speaker 2:Right right, You're not terribly upset if it turns up missing, you know yeah.
Speaker 1:Bags of scent. I leave the big Ziploc bag there because I'm just using it to refresh, so there's no point in carrying it back and forth. Right, there's some stuff that you can just kind of leave out if you're going solo. But you've done a lot of solo hunting. You're going to actually go out solo this weekend with doing some elk Before you go. How are you going through your checklist of stuff to bring on a solo trip versus where you've got other people going with you?
Speaker 2:typically on a solo hunt. I'll take a gps of some sort, whether it's on x or whatnot. If I'm going out solo, I'll tend to take a second gps. I have a garmin that I'll take out with me, just because I can't afford. For you know, when you're going with other people it's like oh oh, my phone died. Well, theirs is still good and we've still got the mark, the truck marked on theirs or something happened.
Speaker 2:You know I fell in water or whatever. But when I have a backup because I can't take the chance of my phone dying or falling in water or something like that, and so I'll have that extra GPS number one, Number two, always let somebody know where you're going. The plan, yeah, so Bud is out solo hunting this past week in Oregon and every day he was sending me the onyx of where he was going that day. Okay.
Speaker 2:And so he goes. I need somebody to know. Well, if something happens to him, somebody's got to know where to go.
Speaker 1:To go look.
Speaker 2:And then my son is packing in, or he he did pack in today and we have an inReach mini two. What that is is basically it allows you when you're out of satellite area. It serves as a satellite and syncs to your phone so that you can text and keep in contact with loved ones, so he has a way to contact us and we have a way to contact him. When you're packing in, you have to prepare for the worst.
Speaker 1:Because there's also the chance that they could be separated during their hunt or something. I know iPhones and I think there might be some form of something on Android that's the same way, but iPhones now have an emergency satellite connection. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:You can send text messages via satellite. So last year I tried that out and it worked the first time. Every time after that it did not work. I couldn't and I mean I'm connected with the satellite, it just failed. So I would have to walk out to call or send a text. I'm driving five miles to get to the first cell signal so that I can start messaging, and whatnot.
Speaker 2:On my Manitoba bear hunt this last spring. I had that Garmin in reach and worked like a charm. Yeah. And there was no. You were not sending any texts or anything. If you didn't have that, Because we were what they call the bush, we were way out there, yeah, so there was no, no signal. It was as remote as you can get yeah and oh, I was just thinking of.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I leave out in the ground blind is I bought a I think it was a 10 pack of for field dressing an animal and it can't. It has a pair of rubber gloves and it's got the full arm sleeves on there, basically, so you're not covering your body and blood and guts and whatnot, but it's got a liver bag and everything can be stuffed back in as garbage so you can haul out all the garbage and everything. But I leave the stuff out in my ground blind so that I'm ready to go if I get something down and if I were by myself, so that I don't forget that. To me that's important, because DJ came out and he didn't think about bringing anything. All I had was this crappy knife. I did have the other two tools that I used, but you still need a knife to take care of everything. He's trying to use this terrible knife that I've got, which then caused him to buy me a good hunting knife so that he wouldn't be subjected to that.
Speaker 1:But that's another thing to be ready for the harvest. If you're filming, you might want to have a light out there or something. But just kind of being ready for what could come up. So thinking about you've had to pack out an animal on your own right. Yes, Walk us through that. An elk would be a completely different story, especially if you're miles back in, but even a deer though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny you say this because the worst experience I've had was my son's first big buck, and I was right in the throes of Lyme's disease when I was at my worst. I took both my daughter and my son out and he ended up shooting a big buck his first you know, and he's, my goodness. What was he?
Speaker 1:10, 11 years old, I think he was 12 by the time he got that one.
Speaker 2:We didn't find it that day. So I went out the next day. He had a soccer game. Both my son and my daughter had soccer games, and so my wife was taking him to the games and I was going to go out and look for that buck. And I did find the buck, when I was that sick with Lyme's disease, I couldn't walk 40 yards, just a regular 40 yards. I mean, I had a fever, you know, 24 hours out of the day, for six months straight, you know. And it was crazy how sick I was and extremely weak, having been limited on what I could do for so long. It was four and a half years of this when I found the buck.
Speaker 2:I realized, you know, I've got about, oh, 150-yard drag downhill to where the truck is, six, eight steps, and I would have to stop, you know, and rest, you know. And by the time I got to where the road was below me and it's like how am I going to get this in the truck? There's no way I can lift it. I was drenched in sweat, barely, my legs were all shaky and everything. I mean, it was just I was in bad shape. But then, you know a little trick that I'd learned throughout the years is to get your animal on a little mound or something where you can back your truck up with the tailgate down. Okay that you're hitting that mound or that hillside and you can either pull the deer or whatever you're dragging straight in, or it slides downhill into your bed. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And on that particular occasion I managed to get to a little hill where I could back the truck up to and I just pulled the buck over to the edge and it slid right back down into the bed of the truck. And I mean, it was God, because I spent the next 45 minutes to an hour and 15 just sitting in the driver's seat trying to recover from that drag.
Speaker 2:And so you know that's a little trick. I've killed a big buck day after Thanksgiving, one year out, by myself and had to load it on a four-wheeler, Basically did that same trick as far as backing up to a hillside and then dragging the buck down the hillside onto the back of the four-wheeler where it had a rack, and I just strapped it to that rack. Your body's only got so many hunts left in it. You have to do everything smarter. You know, when we're young we're able to do things harder. You know, because we still have that invincible mentality. Embrace it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's part of the adventure that you're going into it for seeing how far you can push yourself, and that's great. I used to be that way. I can't afford to now that I have Lyme's. It's a life-changing experience. But my son is there. He's working out all the time and he's on his backpacking hunt right now for elk. He's having a great time. I'm jealous, but life is what it is. You roll with the punches and make the best of it. These are the things you take into consideration when you go into the woods. What is my limit? If I do get one down, how am I going to get it out?
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you have some people that you can call? That has been one of the more incredible things about our community that we have guys who will just drop everything and go help somebody who they have only met once or twice and help them with pulling something out of the woods and stuff. And that's kind of what we want, because we want people to be helping each other out in the woods celebrating successes. But I just think if I didn't have DJ, how much of a pain in the butt that would have been. I could have drugged that spike out of there by myself. It would have taken me four times as long, you know, as I'm trying to figure out how to gut this thing.
Speaker 1:Right right, and then you know it's a spike so I can't. That's one of the things that we had to drag it by its hind legs, so we're dragging it against its fur, which always makes it harder. Not a lot, but it was just that little extra. You got to pull it over a log or maybe uphill a little bit. So there's always that little bit of extra that if you can just be able to reach out to somebody who can lend that hand, and even if they're not necessarily another hunter, it's good to have a community where you could say if I gave you a call, can you come out?
Speaker 1:and help me. At least just drag this thing out of the woods.
Speaker 2:Right Part of the trophy is not just what you put on the wall If you get that opportunity. The main part of the trophy, the part that keeps giving throughout the year, is the meat that you get off that animal and the high protein that you're going to get from an animal that is very lean. There's no, everybody wants to farm, raise this and grass fed this. Well, you're not going to get any better than wild game.
Speaker 2:If you want to be that way, take up hunting. If you don't, don't be naive to how that meat got on your plate, whether it's beef, wild game, fish, whatever. You have to understand that it got there in a certain way and that way is necessary to sustain by somebody killing our community, our world.
Speaker 2:it's a harsh reality and it's one that we don't want to deal with because we feel like, oh well, that's mean, that's cruel. That's just part of quote Lion King, the circle of life. That's how it works there are feeder fish and there are sharks when you're an apex predator that's how it works.
Speaker 1:Thinking about the solo it's a big part of it. Think about a cart and maybe you don't have the option, you've got to keep it and you've got to quarter it out because you've got to put it in some game bags and throw it into a backpack to carry it out. But a cart or some sort of toboggan sled thing to where you can get it out of there. Just kind of think of a process ahead of time. And I know that they make a handle that attaches to, if you get a big enough buck, the antlers and you can drag it out. That way You've got a handle. Address the issue before it's a problem.
Speaker 1:Right right, I'm going to go out and get a buck. So if I'm going to get this buck, I need to have my process of how I'm going to get that out of there. And that's part of it of me thinking about and this is a really good example me thinking about bear hunting. Well, I've never skinned out or seen a bear being skinned out and I can probably watch it on youtube. But the first time I would having somebody who's shot a bear out there who can come out and meet me. So then it's thinking about well, I gotta make sure that somebody's around to do that for that first time. But going forward, well, there are 300 400 pound bears out there. If I shot one of them, I got to get that thing out of there. I've got to have that process.
Speaker 1:I use this example in interviews all the time. They would talk about these unforeseen problems that would come up. I oversaw some parenting classes with childcare and half of my childcare staff would call in sick or they wouldn't be available and so I'd have to have a plan to cover that. And they're like what days were those? I was like I didn't know. All I knew is twice a year it happened. So I had a plan in place on how do I be prepared for this thing to happen. And that's the whole idea of solo hunting is be prepared for this thing to happen.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Whether it's a safety issue, whether it's a harvest issue, be prepared for that to happen. And then you've got a plan where, okay, so it's right before dark and you get this buck down and you can't see, you're so low, so maybe you come. You just it's part of your plan that if you shot one and it's dark out and you're not going to be able to safely get it out of the woods, you come back the next day and finish getting it out of the woods or something like that, and I mean with blood trailing. For you guys who are archery hunters, there's lots of times you've had to come back the next day because you couldn't find it at night. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, with solo hunting, have your plan in place before it happens. If it's, how do you get a buck into the back of a pickup? Well, you know where you're hunting. You can look around and see that oh there's no hills.
Speaker 2:A little bit of preparation goes a long way.
Speaker 1:There's no hills I can back up to. That was one of the things I saw on the YouTube video where the guy propped it up. I think he tied a rope to the antlers so that he could pull it up. Then he could reach the antler standing on the tailgate when it was down and then he just squatted and stood straight up and then walked backwards and that's how he was able to get this buck, a big white tail, into the bed of his pickup without any assistance. Yeah, you got to kind of think those through, Because deadlifting a dead deer in the back of a pickup, yeah that would be a lot of work.
Speaker 2:And deer are probably the easiest of all big game bear. There's no handholds on bears. They're, they're just the. They're the hardest thing to drag out, they're the hardest thing to load, you know, they're just. There's no way to grab them where you feel like like you got a handle, you know what I mean with a deer you can, but with an elk you're doing quarters. Very seldom are you able to load it whole. It does happen, but very seldom in comparison. So the deer is the easier one of the big game.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe grouse are a little easier.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe yeah.
Speaker 1:Unless you get a lot. It was that one year.
Speaker 2:Lift with your legs.
Speaker 1:So I think that's what it comes down to with solo hunting have your plan in place, visualize what you're going to do ahead of time, know the situation you're getting yourself into.
Speaker 1:And invest in the tools that make it easier. I thought about if I got a deer, maybe I should have a hand truck, because there's a lot of area that I could actually use a hand truck getting along those skidder roads and then I wouldn't have to drag it quite as far. But then I've got to also think about how am I going to strap it to the hand truck? Or there's a lot of those things where, okay, how would I do that? And I've thought about those and I'm hoping that I've got enough friends now in the hunting community. Hey, come up here, I need some help, but you also have to be willing to go help other guys, absolutely, absolutely. So, brian, thanks for sending in that question, that podcast episode idea. I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Hope we were able to answer some questions for you and we stayed on topic. If you have a topic that you think would be great, feel free to send us an email blacktailcoach at gmailcom, or you can go to the website theblacktailcoachcom. There's a place where you can go to the website theblacktailcoachcom. There's a place where you can message us. We always respond to the messages. Whether or not we turn it into a podcast, we will always respond to you Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you again next week.
