Jordan Manley has spent more time in the wilderness than anyone I know. We talk survival, best and worst kinds of guiding, white wolves, and what it means to be a cowboy.
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Jordan Manley has spent more time in the wilderness than anyone I know. We talk survival, best and worst kinds of guiding, white wolves, and what it means to be a cowboy.
Check out the new DECKED system and get free shipping
What's your favorite conspiracy theory?
Jordan Manley:This one's gonna open a can of worms, let's open it. My favorite conspiracy theory is that the Canadian Grey Wolves were not present here in Malawa County prior to European colonization.
James Nash:Let's talk through it. ["the Greatest Song of the World"]. These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with callous hands. I'm James Nash and this is the Six Ranch Podcast.
James Nash:Four years ago, I bought a new truck for the first time ever and I was so excited. It was incredible. It smelled good, it felt good. I wasn't constantly afraid of breaking down. It was awesome.
James Nash:But after I drove it for a couple of weeks, I do the same thing that I always do and the backseat started to fill up with stuff. I'm guiding elk hunters and deer hunters and I'm duck hunting and I'm fly fishing, and all that gear just accumulates. And pretty soon I wasn't able to take people with me anymore and I was embarrassed. People would ask for a ride and I'm like, no, sorry man, I've got too much stuff with me, but I couldn't put it in the bed because then it gets damaged by weather. So I go to the internet and I'm looking for options and I ended up buying a deck to drawer system. Now, this was a big purchase for me, but it's something that I felt like I needed and it looked like it was going to be a good product and it really was.
James Nash:Debt came out with a new drawer system this year and they've made some meaningful improvements over the previous one. You have almost no wasted space in your truck bed now, so you can access the sides of the drawers. And then the drawers roll a full 18 inches farther out so you can actually access the back of the drawer even if you don't have a lot of arm reach. There's some really strong tie-down points on top. They have a 400 pound load rating, so if you're going to haul something like a motorcycle or big coolers or whatever, you can really strap your gear down and make it secure. You can lock these drawer systems so you can lock the drawers, or if your tailgate locks, then nobody can access the drawers anyways. So I actually feel like my stuff is more secure inside this drawer system than in the cab of my truck. That's a big deal to me.
James Nash:The complete deck system is made in America by Americans, and you know that that's something that I love and appreciate. They've got one that will fit in any truck or van that's been made in America in the last 20 years plus. You can go to deckedcom, slash six ranch and get free shipping. But just being honest with you. They get free shipping to everybody. I also, while you're there, I want you to check out their deco line. So they've got a bunch of different boxes and storage containers that either fit on top of or inside of the drawer system, and those are built really robust.
James Nash:I saw the prototypes at an event this summer. I'm impressed. I'm excited to get my hands on them. I haven't yet, but the prototypes were super badass and the ones that are in production model they're available now over at deckedcom. So even if you just need a place for some tools or you need a new bow case or something along those lines, go check that out. And if you're driving around right now and your back seat is just full of gear and you can't haul people around, maybe you should consider looking at the full deck drawer system, because it's a good piece of gear. It was a good purchase for me and I hope it helps you All right, where do you feel like your story begins?
Jordan Manley:Oh man, that's a tough one, but definitely, I grew up in Lostine, you know. So I feel like I came into being looking at the Laos Mountains, you know. Obviously, I wasn't born here. I don't know if you know that I was born in Tennessee actually but yeah, growing up in Lostine and looking up at the mountains and then what like.
James Nash:There's sort of two different, two different types of folks that live in areas here, areas like this. There's some that are just voyeurs, right, they observe the view and they do it from the valley, and that's enough. And then there's another type that needs to get in it and you're that type and you've spent a huge amount of your life in the wilderness Folks. You know, I'm sitting here talking with Jordan Manley. Jordan and I have known each other a long, long time. We've guided together and we've come in and out of each other's professions periodically throughout our lives. But Jordan has spent more time in the wilderness than just about anybody I know Maybe more than anybody. So when did he start actually getting into the wilderness?
Jordan Manley:So you've probably read Fred Barstad's book the Guide to Hiking the Eagle Cap Wilderness Hiking Oregon's Eagle Cap Wilderness, I believe it's called, and I got a copy of that off the shelf at the general store there in Lostine M Crow, when I was about 14.
Jordan Manley:And I started reading.
Jordan Manley:You know, I'd grown up cutting wood and deer hunting and my dad is a logger so I spent a lot of time in the woods but not the wilderness, until I got that book and I started memorizing all the hiking routes described and looking at the old Imus Geographics, that old map of the Eagle Cap Wilderness, and just memorizing all the peaks and valleys and every inch of every trail.
Jordan Manley:And then I let's see it was senior year of high school is when I really started going and seeing those places on my own, once I got my own driver's license and could go on hikes and stuff. You know I started out going to Maxwell Lake was the first place and couple of the local peaks you can see from the valley, you know, and I chose to do my high school senior project on packing outfitting and a local outfitter, ed Millar, owned a Millar pack station and he was my mentor for my senior project. So my first time really getting on a horse in the wilderness was doing that. You know, senior project, getting my hours in. You had to do 40 hours in a profession or something like that and then write a big report on it.
James Nash:Yeah, and what did you learn from Ed that you continue to use?
Jordan Manley:today. Well, I mean, he taught me how to tie a crow's foot hitch on a mule. When I use that like easily on a weekly or monthly basis, you know you're around to packing stuff and going on pack trips and all that. So I still use my packing skills and livestock handling skills that he taught me all those years ago and other people in addition to him.
James Nash:Everybody has their own style and oftentimes their own language. How is a crow's foot hitch different from a box hitch?
Jordan Manley:So they're very, very similar. The box hitch, basically it doesn't hold the load from the sides. So a box hitch, you know, you have a rope that goes across in front of the pack and then a rope that goes under the pack and a crow's foot hitch it splits. So you have a rope going under the pack and on both sides. So it's a little better for loads that might wanna shift forward and back, but they kind of work equally the same.
James Nash:And as steep as a lot of our country is, and you know there's plenty of trails that are at a decent grade but there's also pitches oftentimes where mules are gonna have to lunge to get up and kind of shuffle to get down. And figuring out how to keep these loads centered is like that's your task. And I was never the guy that could pack stuff in the morning so that it rode like that all day. You know I was gonna have to get off and make some adjustments but you know I just didn't. I didn't do it for enough years to achieve that sort of master packer status who can imagine the entire trail in their mind and then tie everything on so that it's gonna stay like that.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, I mean there's definitely some guys like Barry Cox and John Winans that I packed with a lot, that were they would pack differently based on what the trail is gonna be like you know, If it's gonna be uphill, pull the whole way to where you're gonna drop a group of hunters off, then you'd pack to keep those loads from shifting backwards. And if you're going pack down into Hell's Canyon, then you wanna pack those loads so that they're the focus is on keep from keeping them from shifting forward.
James Nash:So, once you started actually getting into the wilderness, what feeling did you have about it that made you want more and not less of it?
Jordan Manley:It's hard to explain, but I recall going on these camping excursions and backpacking trips and mule horse packing trips and enjoying being out there camping and thinking to myself that I wished this was my life all the time, Like I wish it wasn't like I go camping and then come back to my life. It was like I'm camping and then I have to go do my life and then I come back to camping and I still feel that way. I feel the most whole and the most happy and fulfilled in the wilderness and it's like every wilderness trip, real life in between is almost kind of like the break and then real life is like coming back to the wilderness. So in my life I've definitely strived towards building a life that's more wilderness oriented. So I don't get that feeling like I'm missing out on camping and being out in the woods, you know.
James Nash:Yeah, if you would have asked me 10 years ago to predict where you were gonna be in 10 years, I do not think I would have said you know, loving husband and father, yeah, you know, that wasn't even on the bingo card.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, not at all, but here you are. I just met the right girl. You know you did yeah Lies is a good piece of gear.
James Nash:Yep, totally. How has fatherhood changed?
Jordan Manley:this, you know, it's just changed it in the aspect of now I just wanna do all the same stuff but then share it with my son, yeah, and he absolutely loves it. I mean, he can't get enough of talking about hunting and fishing and cutting wood. He knows more about cattle and horses and deer and wild animals and different kinds of trees and things than you know literally anyone his age.
Jordan Manley:I mean he's definitely picking it up fast. That's gotta be fun. Oh, it's a blast when we're driving down the road and he's like dad, you reckon those are ponderosa pines or Douglas fir trees growing.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, it's just funny stuff like that You'll see a deer and I think it was a white tail and I'll be like, no, that was a mule deer. He's like no, dad is definitely a white tail. I'm arguing with a three year old about whether it was a mule deer or a white tail you know, even you got a little and he might actually be right.
James Nash:You gotta look twice and be like, oh shoot, you're right, it was a white tail. Yeah, at some point you also decided to become really studious about your time in the woods and you wanted to not only learn the names of everything, but how it all interacted with each other, what the history of it was, the scientific names. If any time that we were on a trip together and I was kind of getting overwhelmed by questions from somebody that I was guiding, I'd often be like, hey, why don't you go ask Jordan about that plant right there, you know, and that was gonna be a good half hour of them learning more than they ever expected to learn about it. Now this has come in handy for you before too, where it wasn't just academic study but also, like you, needed to know the names and functions of all these things to survive.
Jordan Manley:Yep, tell me about that. Yeah, so I guess it was 2012. I met some really interesting individuals that were basically nomads you might say homeless people that were living off the land, like this rogue band of homeless hippies living off the land, and all of those people knew way more than I did about. I did know some about edible plants and different things like that, but they introduced me to a really intimate relationship with native plants and I started learning their life cycles and when you can eat what and what the Native Americans ate is a big part of that, and so a handful of those individuals and myself, in 2012, went on a two and a half month long survival trip in Hell's Canyon. So it wasn't necessarily a survival trip. I did bring food staple foods, dried fruit and rice and beans and stuff and was pretty well prepared, but a good portion of my meals on that was from wild gathered food, so I had to know what I was looking at. You know? Tell me more about that trip.
Jordan Manley:So we started out in just outside of Ibn Naha, kind of in a mid upper elevation trailhead, and we just made a long loop, about 250 miles through the Hell's Canyon wilderness, and the initial trip length was supposed to be 40 days and so half of the people on the trip bailed off and it was down to me and just one other person and we just decided we're gonna go for it and go try to make another 40 days. So I went out for an additional 37 days after the first part of the group left. There was all kinds of challenges. I mean, we had tremendous horse wrecks and what happened? Well, I lost my horses one time. That was a big problem for four or five days Like six, head For four or five days, yeah, six head of horses.
James Nash:They pull a high line down, or what happened.
Jordan Manley:They were as a combination of hobbled out, staked out and loose and one of them pulled a stake rope and they started want the three that were loose and then the one that was staked out started wandering off and then the two that were hobbled just went with them and they weren't very far away, they just couldn't find them. They were just in a little nice little grassy slope next to the spring just living. They probably would have wandered back into camp. Eventually we had some weather challenges on that trip. We were out and we started in May and I went until August and we had like a foot deep snowstorm in June, like mid June, up near let's see where was that Like Mormon flat, ward flat area and we just got buried.
Jordan Manley:All the horse feed was buried and everybody was hungry and we ended up calling a friend to bring in some bread and dog food for my dogs and stuff, cause it was just so. It was brutal. How did you keep your dogs fed? Basically fish mostly, but I packed like basically a whole pack horse with dog food and grain and little treats to keep the horses around camp and stuff. So small mouth bass was a big part of your diet. Oh man, it was huge. I ate way more than the recommended limit of what you're supposed to eat for sure, so I probably had mild mercury poisoning by the time, but maybe that helps with like the poison ivy that I got.
James Nash:I don't know I got some bad poison ivy on that trip. Yeah, you know I'm. I've gotten poisoned bad a couple of times, once fishing and once fighting fire and I'm really cautious of it. It's at the front of my mind anytime I'm in country that I think might have it.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, I don't eat. I don't eat the small mouth bass out of the Snake River anymore. I mean, maybe if somebody's having a little fish fry on a river trip I'll have my A-file, but I just once I learned more about the mercury poisoning. It's nasty Well.
James Nash:I was talking more so about the poison ivy.
Jordan Manley:Oh yeah, that stuff is terrible, oh yeah.
James Nash:You know, I ended up getting it when we were guiding down there several times, but I think it was always from clients that were like dragging their Paco pads through and stuff.
Jordan Manley:Oh yeah.
James Nash:I'm so scared of it. You know, I just stayed well away. Oh yeah, I still.
Jordan Manley:I stay way well well away from it too nowadays, but I think that in that case I got it real bad. I was just going on a hike exploring a side draw rush creek that doesn't have a good trail up it, so you're just wading through the poison ivy and I was really careful to you know, wear long pants and all that, but it just ended up the oils got on my pants or whatever. It got all over all my stuff and I kept reinfecting myself through my gear after so it'd come in waves and I mean it was bad. It's brutal, yeah, All over every inch of your body. It starts to get in the soft tissues, like under your eyelids, and just totally miserable.
James Nash:Yeah, gosh, you told me about learning some things about plants from watching what bears ate.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, definitely I learned one time this is also in that Lord flat area I was on a day hike during the survival trip and I was just glassing up bears and watching bears. And I was watching five or six bears in one basin and they were all eating Aeroleaf balsam root. But they weren't just munching on the leaves, they were breaking the stalks off, pulling the stalks out of the plant and then eating like the bottom two inches of the Aeroleaf balsam root and it's like a super pungent plant. You know it's bitter and astringent and it's not good if you just eat the leaf. But in the spring if you pull those stalks out and just eat that bottom two inches, it's like celery, it's delicious.
Jordan Manley:It's definitely something that is good Like. Even a picky eater would like it. It's tasty, yeah. And then fireweeds another one. I was watching bears. You've seen this too. The bears early in the spring they go right up to the snow line and they're eating something up there and we always assume it's the tube grass or the onion grass, but a lot of times it's fireweed is sprouting out, especially if it's a burned area. Yeah, and there's little two, three inch tall sprouts of fireweed and they're nipping that off Gotcha and I started doing that eating those and it's like asparagus, it's delicious.
James Nash:Did you ever see a bear eat something he shouldn't?
Jordan Manley:I've seen bears eat a lot of rotten meat, yeah, but I guess they're adapted to it, right? I've never seen a bear eat like a poisonous plant or anything like that. Yeah, stuff that's poisonous for us is not poisonous for them, like they eat poison ivy, you know? Oh, they do, doesn't bother them a bit, oh yeah, Early in the spring they'll eat the buds off the poison ivy Oof.
James Nash:They're so incredible.
Jordan Manley:Yeah.
James Nash:Such an incredible animal yeah.
Jordan Manley:It's amazing how good at getting calories. How could a bear weigh 500 pounds going into his den and just off of nuts and berries and rotten meat, you know, and larvae, yeah, yeah, bugs?
James Nash:It's phenomenal. Yeah, it is. You're often a champion of unloved animals, oh yeah, and it's something that I've periodically appreciated about you. Not always, but we're fishing. One time I'm guiding some clients down on the Grand Ronde and you had told them that Squawfish, which are now known as the Northern Pikemino it's not a sought after fish. There's, in fact, a bounty on them in the Columbia River. We're really trying to remove them Sections of the Snake River. There's a bounty, but they are native fish and our biologists here support them being in the ecosystem. But you had told these guys that they were good to eat and as far as everything that I'd heard, they were not. I was like man Jordan dang it and we caught a just monster. You know that was like a five or six pound fish. We caught them on a dry fly. It was the biggest fish we caught on the whole trip and the guys wanted to keep it and I was like, was that the?
Jordan Manley:trip, where that was the only fish we caught on the whole trip. No, we didn't catch a lot.
James Nash:We didn't catch a lot for sure, but I think we ended up going down to Bear Crick and we spent two nights there because the Grand Ronde was so blowing out and we cooked that fish up and it was tremendous. That was a good eating fish, it is. And you took those guys on a death march to the top of the canyon and gave them a dissertation on Sasquatch. I remember that, yeah, and the guy wrote a song about it.
Jordan Manley:He did that was a great trip bro those guys were a hoot. Yep, yeah, I was trying to convince them that Bigfoot was a relic population of early pre-human hominid like Homo erectus or something.
James Nash:Yeah.
Jordan Manley:And one of the lines in the song was I gained a new prospectus on Homo erectus.
James Nash:That was pretty funny. It was dude, it was. But yeah, you often see things in different species that nobody else does and you definitely don't like march with the rest of the band and just like something because other people do, and I think that that's often allowed you to look a little bit closer and see ways to interact and enjoy these species that other people are missing out on. So we're talking a little bit about African wildlife and some people want to hunt Africa, others do not. I love it. I could live there, loved it very much, but a couple of species that you said you were interested in are usually really low on people's lists. But yeah, you said warthog and hardebeest. I've got both of those things here in the studio and they're tremendous animals and I wouldn't want to go to Africa without hunting them. That hardebeest is one of the best-eating animals I've ever been around and it's one of the cheapest animals to kill in Africa Right.
Jordan Manley:And that's how I heard about them is they're very common. They do coal hunts, they use them for bait. They just chew them and weave them because they're damaging cattle operations. Same with the warthogs. And so they're cheap to hunt. You know, not counting airfare, it's like four grand for a combination hunt for hardbeest and warthog.
James Nash:That's cheap, you know. Yeah, you're hard pressed to travel and go on a duck hunt for that here in the States.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, and they're cool. They just have cool super cool horns.
James Nash:They're super cool. So the Swahili word for hardebeest is Kongoni. Oh nice, and they ruin so many other hunts Like they're really turned on and they bray. They make this terrible sound that I would not dare ever imitate. But yeah, Kongonis are constantly blowing you up when you're stalking something else and you end up just kind of mad at them and like they're a really common camp meat. If you're going to go out and shoot something for meat for camp, it's probably going to be a Kongoni and every time you're like that's what you get.
Jordan Manley:It's like those mule deer does. If you're hunting elk or something you know, and some mule deer does spots you and just her snort is just echoing through the canyon Every animal throws their head up and they're wondering what's going on.
James Nash:And she just keeps snorting and you know, and it's like dude, I'm not happy, Shut up, I'm not happy. I'm trying to help you. You'll have more food if you just leave me alone Totally. I think that ravens will sometimes help me on a hunt and sometimes they don't, and I'm convinced that elk speak raven they do, I agree with that?
Jordan Manley:Yeah, I think they speak pine squirrel too. Yeah, I really think so, because I haven't had that many experiences with ravens helping my hunt. I've definitely had them ruin some hunts before, but I've definitely spotted predators, cougars, because magpies and ravens were just raised in a ruckus, yeah, and they were, you know, harrying, it's called, you know bothering a cougar, you know that was bedded down in the sagebrush, hiding from them. They were just swooping in and I ended up spotting it because of them, you know.
James Nash:And you know coyotes have a mutual, mutually beneficial relationship with those scavenger birds. But cougars do not. And that's part of why cougars bury their kills is not just to hide it from coyotes or wolves or bears, it's because that doesn't really work. Those animals are going to smell it out anyways. But if you bury it you can't hide it from birds. Yeah.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's funny how cougars like it doesn't matter how barren of a landscape they kill something in. They will bury it something you know, sand if they have to scrape it within a 20-foot radius. You know they'll get something on top of it.
James Nash:You know it's one of the ways that you can get a cougar to come over in front of a camera. You can just go out and take a rake and you can rake in from a big circle and make a mound right in front of your camera.
Jordan Manley:Yeah.
James Nash:And their eyesight is so good, they'll spot that from half a mile away and they'll want to come investigate it. And you know you're not you're not bathing, like. You can do this absolutely anywhere that there's cougars and they will come and investigate that if they can see it from someplace else. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, new tactic, new tactic. Yeah, lots of tricks. They're just cats, man. Yeah, they're just cats. So, like, if you can understand your house cat well, then you probably understand cougars better than what you think.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, you know, it's funny cougars. I have tried so many times to track one down and I've had probably 20 unsuccessful attempts at that, but I have had one successful attempt. I did track one down one time. Tell me that story.
Jordan Manley:So I was working for McLaren's down at Cal Creek, you know, helping him cav and do winter stuff down there, and I was working on some fence and I was heading out in the side by side towards Doug Barr to go fix some fence and there was this cow that had slayed and died down in a draw, like months prior, and these lions had been working it and they had been burying it and coming back to the carcass and it was a mother and two yearlings so full, you know, adult year, one year old yearlings. And I jumped their tracks in the snow coming off that dead kill and I tracked him. You know, I followed the tracks of the side by side about a mile down the road and all of a sudden they split off the road heading up hill and I knew that I had come around the corner in the side by side and jumped them off the road just because they were walking in a straight line. Then all of a sudden, straight straight up the hillside for no reason. So I got out and got my gun and forgot to bring extra ammo and that plays into the story.
Jordan Manley:Later I grabbed my 308 and started trucking up the hill after him and I tracked him about a mile up the really steep, brushy canyon and just on the horizon I saw one of them they'd split up three different directions and I saw one of them just skyline in and I just had enough time to throw up my range finder and it was like 250 plus yards and lined up. You know, it's two feet of snow and I'm wet and I'm wearing cotton work jeans, so I'm just like freezing, laying in the snow, couldn't get a rest, so I just had to take like a semi resting offhand shot at it and miss the first shot, miss the second shot, miss the third shot and finally I was like the last shot, you know in the magazine and I put it right on it and took my time and touched it off and dropped it. Wow, and that was cool. Yeah, yeah, last shot, yep. So now I got one of those like on my everyday carry my truck gun.
James Nash:I have one of those like butt stock things that has a little scab, yeah, keeping extra 10 rounds with it at all times. I've started using ones that stick to the side of the rifle just underneath the action, and it'll just hold two, oh yeah, but it's. They never fall out of there. I get them from from an Oregon based outfit called Paladin 33, but they're really nice, and then when you're going to actually do that like I ran out of ammo reload they're right there for you and you can just plunk one in the hole if you have a push feed rifle, exactly.
James Nash:That's handy, yeah yeah. There's things that like the and that's definitely started with the competition shooters. There's things from their world that bleed over into hunting that help. And then there's things that's like oh man, that's that's making it harder.
Jordan Manley:Sometimes you see the guys that are all strapped up with all the tactical stuff you know the I'm thinking of like chest rigs and extra stuff and the thigh rigs and stuff hiking and it's like that is not practical for what I do stalking right, you know, but teach their own, I guess.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah, I think chess is a is a great way to carry a pistol. You know it's it's the most out of the way but also available place that you can do it, that you can actually hold it. But yeah, some people get a little bit tactical doubt. One of the things that drives me really crazy about reloaders is they're so used to keeping all their brass that when they go to reload on an animal when they're hunting, they reach up and they try and catch their brass and a lot of times they'll knock it off the bolt and back into the gun and they're double feed. They're slowing the process down, causing a jam and a malfunction that you've now got to sort out. You get their mind out of the game trying to get them back into it. Yeah, it's like look, I know brass is everything to reloaders, but just like, we'll find it in a minute, yeah, go ahead and just reload?
Jordan Manley:Yeah, totally, and it's like if you lose a dollar and 20 cent piece of grass in the dirt, then so be it.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah, right Hunting yeah, we spent more than that on coffee this morning. Yeah, exactly, what's your favorite and least favorite type of guiding? Because you've guided a bunch of different stuff.
Jordan Manley:Yeah. So I would say my favorite type of guiding it's a toss up between mountain goat and big horn sheep and specifically I like guiding the statewide like auction raffle tag holders because they don't take anything for granted. They paid a lot of money for tag. They're fully committed to being fully there for the experience. So it's a big production. You have a lot of help, you're not expected to do too much.
Jordan Manley:It's not all on my shoulders if I'm the guide Right and usually I'm not like the guide, that's the personal guide of the hunter. I'm usually more in like a scout, like far away guide in the mule packer, and I just really enjoy the camaraderie of those hunts. And sheep hunting is a culture. You've got an outdad I've seen you've done it a little bit. I mean it's definitely its own culture that is kind of a little bit different and separate than your average elk hunts.
Jordan Manley:Which brings me to my least favorite to hunt is archery elk. I hate gutting archery elk but I've always done it on public land with low elk densities and had a lot of hunters that had way too high of expectations for the unit in the area that we're hunting, people that have watched way too many hunting shows and they think that just because it's the rut means you don't have to hike. So I just don't enjoy that anymore. I don't do it anymore. I think it would be funner if it was an area with higher elk density, like a ranch or something, or a really quality unit like the Wenaha or something like that. But I just got to where I just did not enjoy the archery elk hunting anymore. I really enjoy it myself, but I don't like having to do it for another person with another person.
James Nash:You know, I posted something on on Instagram yesterday asking who is the best female elk guide in North America, and I think a lot of people would be surprised at the results of that. So about 10,000 people looked at this, looked at this story, and the result of it was the submission of three names one name three times and then the other name twice. I think that there's less than 10 female elk guides on the continent. I think women guide elk less than any other species out there. I've been thinking a lot about why that is.
Jordan Manley:Maybe they just can't deal with. They're just the same things that I don't like about archery elk hunting that, the expectations and the machoism kind of that's around it. I've had a lot of hunters show up that say, oh, I've killed so many bulls and I am the best elk hunter. And then they make just absolute rookie mistakes and just keep blowing it for themselves. I mean one example I can name is I guided archery elk hunter a long time ago, like 10, 12 years ago, probably more than that. He was from Mexico and he was a well-known, renowned worldwide trophy hunter. He had been everywhere. He'd gotten the North American 29, like he'd been there, done that and that was by far the worst client I've ever guided. And we had a really good bulls in the N'Naha unit, which isn't known for monster bulls, but we had a really good bull like very mature, very nice seven by seven bull spotted and there was other hunters working them.
Jordan Manley:I could hear other hunters bugling their way up through the basin. So I knew that we had to get pick an elk trail that we thought the elk might escape the basin and get there before these other hunters push this elk up and get the wind right, get on the right side of the pass and let the bull come through. And I remember encouraging this guy like we can do it, we can get there, but it's gonna require a ton of effort on both of our parts, like it's gonna be very difficult, but if we get there first we can kill this bull. And I'm talking like this is a 350 plus, like a very, very nice bull, and that guy did not have the heart to do it. And I know that there's physical challenges of being in shape and stuff. But if a person wants it, they can dig deep beyond that and adrenaline can get you there.
Jordan Manley:And he was not willing to let adrenaline get him there and the excitement of the moment and just crush it. And I actually got broke down and had an argument with him on the hillside. I was like you have got to get your butt and gear and get there first. Like you're blowing this opportunity right now, like heart to heart, you know, like I had to get real with them. And he said you're pushing me too hard, I don't want to have to work that hard at it. And so he sat down on the hillside and refused to take another step and I said, okay, well, just sit here. I set my spot and scope off up and we watched a 350 bull walk dead upwind of a boulder that we could have been hiding behind and if we had just hurried and got there we would have got him, you know.
James Nash:Well, it is hard. It is physically hard, it's emotionally hard. Guiding, guiding archery elk is really. It's oftentimes really hard on my mental health because I am so emotionally invested in the success of the client and doing best by the animal and there's so many things that are outside of not only my control but just outside of my influence. Like I can't even touch it, yeah, and it's just. It's emotionally very, very hard, yeah, and at the end of archery season, man, I just feel older.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, I can relate to that feeling. You know I did it semi-professionally for a long time, about 15 years and I definitely can relate to that. Or even just it's tough when that feeling hits you, like on day two of the hunt. You know and you've got six more days with a group of clients and you're just totally over it you know, but the Mountain Goat Hunting is like a perfect counterpoint to that.
Jordan Manley:Like last year or it's been a couple of years now I've loose track of time 21. I had the Oregon State Auction Tag Hunter for Mountain Goat. I work with Eden Ridge Outfitters, which is based out of Myrtle Point, oregon, and we so we booked this client and the guy is the coolest guy, same type as the original guy I talked about on the elk hunt. Like had done the 29 and hunted Africa. Like, been there, done that, done it all with a bow, was excellent, very committed archer. Like he was into it and he had just had double knee replacement surgery and I took him on the most difficult stock I've ever taken anybody on on an animal ever.
Jordan Manley:We dropped over 2,000 vertical feet, wove our way through the rims. I mean this goat was in the most ridiculous spot, bedded on top of a rim and I got that guy within eight yards and he smoked or super nice Billy. And we had an easy recovery. The Billy didn't roll very far and that guy packed his head and horns Maybe I had the horn horns and he had a quarter or something and we packed up all the meat with two other guides and hiked out of there and this guy double knee replacement and he was just. We were all on cloud nine. I mean it was an epic experience for all of us and just made me just. I can't wait to go on another guided hunt. I just absolutely loved it. It filled my cup, you know.
James Nash:That's awesome. It is so rewarding when you get to hunt with a guy or gal that is. It feels like you're on a team together and I love that.
Jordan Manley:Yep, yeah To come. Rotary is awesome, for sure.
James Nash:Mountain goats are a really badass animal and they're kind of an enigma because they only exist in North America. We think their origins are in the Himalaya. There's no fossil record of them there and goats don't fossilize well just because of where they live and oftentimes if they die they're going to die in a place that's really wintery and as that winter kind of comes and goes, they're just going to decompose. There's not going to be anything.
Jordan Manley:I've found their skulls that are no more than a year old and the horns are just flaked off to death and the rest of the skull is not far behind it, you know.
James Nash:Right, which brings me to the North American Ibex. I believe that Ibex were originally in North America, that there's Ibex in Mongolia, there's Ibex that span all the way across Eurasia, all the way to Spain. It doesn't make any sense that they would be one species that didn't cross Beringia. If we look at the petroglyphs in the Columbia River, a lot of them have horns that sweep all the way back to their butts and they have tails that stick straight up in the air. This is carved into rock.
Jordan Manley:But also petroglyphs have all kinds of crazy ridiculous stuff carved into them, they do, I mean ridiculous is the wrong word, but fanciful depictions of animals.
James Nash:Absolutely, but on some of these sticker walls you'll see what look very much like big horns with a tight curl that comes back, and then you'll see these other things that look very much like Ibex. What the North American biologists believe is that that's just a bad drawing that's carved into rock. I think that they were here. Now we had some massive events 10 to 14,000 years ago, some of which came through the Columbia River and a lot of our river basins and were tremendous floods, with walls of water that were 100 feet tall, going 60 miles an hour. If you want to lose a species in a moment, that's a good way to do it.
Jordan Manley:So is there any fossil record of Ibex in North America?
James Nash:There's not, but there's also none of mountain goats elsewhere right, it's interesting theory.
Jordan Manley:I mean I wonder if maybe there was perhaps another subspecies of big horn, another species of ovus that maybe had different type of horns, like the audads are different than the.
James Nash:Rocky Mountain sheep it could be, but same genus.
James Nash:Audad are another really interesting one. They don't quite fit into the mold with other stuff and there's some theory that they're the ancestor of bovines. The cattle are descended from audad and if you look at the North African cattle and their horn characteristics, it's not a big departure. And where you start drawing the line between sheep and cattle, if you get very far back into history that line gets real blurry. But yeah, audad come from Northern Africa, just like cattle do, and it's possible that that's where cattle came from as well.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, who knows, I'm not a record on that. You know, on the fossil record, I'm not an expert on it.
James Nash:I'm not either. I'm not either. I just like thinking about it.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, it's interesting to think about.
James Nash:Audad are moving around in Oregon a lot. They've moved kind of throughout the John Day river system and are even up into the North Fork of John Day now.
Jordan Manley:Muflon as well. Down near Madras I've heard.
James Nash:I'm a huge fan of audad. They're the people's sheep. Yeah, yeah, it's cool. It doesn't cost you $60,000 to go audad hunting.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, someday I'll make it to West Texas and get one. That seems like a cool trip.
James Nash:I think someday they're going to come to you. Yeah, I look forward to it. I think in 20 years we'll have audad in the Amnaha and in Hell's Canyon.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, Well, I guess we can say goodbye to the bighorn sheep, but that's already the case.
James Nash:it seems like so many of them are just wearing two-year tags and a radio collar and they just are not doing well.
Jordan Manley:I was just driving by a Heller Bar yesterday and there was a flock of it was probably over 15 of these bighorns in the road. Every one of them had a collar and ear tags, Every single one of them. Not everyone had a collar, but everyone had either a collar or ear tags. And they were just wandering down the yellow line of the road highway and I had my two dogs with me and I very easily could have turned my border collies out and herded those sheep wherever I wanted.
James Nash:Yeah, easily yeah.
Jordan Manley:I could have opened the back door of my horse trailer and set up a panel and my dogs would have loaded them in my trailer. I mean, they're that tame, it's ridiculous.
James Nash:So something I've been thinking about Jordan is how successful our Native Americans were on elk, and the reason I've been thinking about it is when I was talking with Jim A Kinson a while ago about the archaeological sites in the Frank Church. They only found elk bones in one of them, and what I have seen is some native gowns that have a bunch of elk ivories on them, but I know that elk don't show up in archaeological sites here very much either. It makes me wonder about two possibilities, one being maybe there weren't very many elk, and the second one being maybe they were really hard to hunt with the gear that they had. What's your take on it?
Jordan Manley:I think that's probably true. I think that their bows were definitely shorter range than what we can shoot today, just because the inconsistencies of arrow, spine and point, weight and whatever, they're not shooting 50, 60 yards with a recurve bow. They had good, strong bows, but I still think they weren't. It's tough to get close to an elk even when they don't really. In their areas like Yellowstone, if they're abundant maybe they're a little easier, but anywhere that they're scarce it's hard to get close to an elk.
James Nash:And their ribs are hard. If you're shooting a stone point, I think there's a good chance that that point doesn't survive through the hair and the skin and the ribs to actually get in there and do much damage.
Jordan Manley:I mean I definitely have heard anecdotally that they preferred to hunt bighorn sheep in this area in the Malala Mountains over elk for sure, and I don't know how many elk there were back in those days. I've also heard that the elk were more prairie animals. That gets thrown around a lot. If you just Google American elk, it will tell you that they only lived in the prairies prior to European colonization, but I don't necessarily think that's true either.
James Nash:I have a problem with that one. I think all of that originates with the Lewis and Clark journals and they were in elk when they were in the Dakotas in Montana where they could see. But as soon as they got into the timber and they couldn't see they damn near starved in the clear water and until they got down to where they met up with Ines Perse again and got some camis root which made them have dysentery so bad that they almost died again. You get in that clear water country and if I drive through that and I don't see an elk, I don't think that there are no elk, cause I can only see 20 yards into that cedar timber.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, I think that you know there's some speculation on wildlife biologist part. You know I've talked with Vic Coggins about this a little bit and I have my own theories that maybe that there was a prairie subspecies of elk that was more widespread, like into Montana and Clark Fork and major drainages and stuff you know and maybe didn't come as far over here, you know.
Jordan Manley:And then there was another species of elk that lived more in the mountains and you can see the difference. You know the morphological distinctions, or whatever you want to call it in the elk between one that lives in open prairie ground and one that lives deep in the minum you know they're different animal. They really are, you know.
James Nash:And you know some of these minum and wanaha elk. They look and act pretty different from the rest and I think that they're still kicking some genetics that were left over from the original Blue Mountain population.
Jordan Manley:I think there's truth to that, because in the minum, in Lost Teen River Drainages, when you talk to old timers and whatever, and you talk to them about it, they always say that there's an abundance of seven points and eight points. In the minum river there's like a specific style of rack. You're like you know some people could see a bull on a wall out of 10 bulls and be like that's the minum bull. You know it's got darker horns, it's got more usually more mass, more points, shorter times, more compact rack, darker main, smaller body, totally different than the zoom elk which are obviously descendant from the reintroduction efforts in the turn of the century. You know Sure.
James Nash:And now in the minum there's an abundance of wolves.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah so, yeah, that's the whole thing, dude. I've been hearing some interesting stuff. I've been reticent to talk about this, but I've been experiencing it and I've been hearing it from people that I trust. I think the wolves might be killing enough lions and bears to be offsetting their own damage to an extent in some of these areas. Yep, I agree with that. I know they're digging up a bunch of bears, yep, and the story of cats and dogs starts with lions and wolves, right, like that's nothing new. I was part of a project in Montana where over 20 lions were collared in a winter and most of them were killed by wolves that same winter. Yeah Right, so these were lions that could get away from hounds, who are professionals, and could not get away from wolves, who are full timers.
Jordan Manley:So just this morning I was watching a tidbit of the Joe Rogan podcast with Donnie Vincent and he was telling the story of a recent mountain lion hunt in British Columbia.
Jordan Manley:Did you hear about this at all? So this was a problem lion that had been harassing livestock and killing ranchers cheap. And so the outfitter you know, Donnie booked with an outfitter and they went up to pursuit specifically this lion with dogs and they followed this lion, for I believe it was nine miles and during that pursuit I think it was five or six different kills of the lions the lion visited. None of them were consumed, they were left whole. And they also found three different wolf tracks that had visited all of these same kills. Sure, and so they are kind of putting two dig two together, that this lion was killing these animals and stashing them and leaving them out, so the wolves would find him. So the wolves would be tied up, so he'd go through and make a bunch of surplus killings. The wolves would get busy on those eating those carcasses and then he would be free to hunt unharassed elsewhere.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah. Or every time he kills something, the wolves are right on top of him.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, that could be it, and maybe it just looks like that to a biologist or whatever.
James Nash:Yeah, I mean Donny's, about seven, eights, you know.
Jordan Manley:He's a storyteller. A grain of salt, yeah, he's a good storyteller, he is a good storyteller.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah, yeah, he hates agriculture.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, that's a shame. Yeah, Because he likes food.
James Nash:Yeah. He won't let her predicament, yeah, totally.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, yeah.
James Nash:Oh gosh, he must just live only on wild game, I guess. Yeah, no, I heard somebody talking about this the other day and they're like you know. You might see your doctor once or twice a year. You might see your accountant once a year. You need your farmer or your rancher three times a day. Yeah, yeah.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, it's funny Some of the encounters I have because I work in the livestock industry full-time now some of the encounters I have in the summer, like people will be camping and they'll like flag me down to complain about the cows in their campground and I'm like you are camped in the cows right under the cows favorite tree to hang out and when I you know, we turn cows out on the range in June 1st, you know, and that cow sleeps under that tree every day.
James Nash:And it's her favorite spot and when your tent is set up there.
Jordan Manley:That's still her favorite tree.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah, that cow's got some complaints about you too, yeah totally.
Jordan Manley:And then the camper leaves and then the cow goes right back to laying under that tree until November, you know.
James Nash:Yeah, no, it's funny, and there probably weren't leather shoes.
Jordan Manley:Yeah. Yeah, when the cooler full of meat and veggies and chicken and eggs, and everything. All of it glued together yeah. By unwrapping plastic Something made from bovine hooves.
James Nash:Yeah, Come on, come on, get with it. Yeah, totally Okay. So that leads me to another question what is a cowboy?
Jordan Manley:To me, you know, that term is broadly described these days. You know, to some people it's a pop cultural icon. You know, to some it's a style of fashion, a way of dressing. But to me, a cowboy is someone who takes care of bovines on a commercial basis, primarily horseback when possible. Yeah, that's what I think a cowboy is. I don't think it's a rodeo performer although I think many of those guys are cowboys but I think it's somebody who commercially produces cattle, not necessarily as the owner, but just as the worker.
James Nash:What do you? Is that what your job description is today? I would say so, yeah.
Jordan Manley:It's more. Like you know, I do all aspects of ranch work. I just spend a whole week. Mechanical, you know, but that's part of a cowboy's job.
Jordan Manley:It totally is you know, and that's you know. They're straight up cowboys. I call them guys that ride and on seasonally only on big outfits, that they're horseback every day and that's their job and that's great. But that is a very small percentage of working cowboys that don't have to hay, don't have to fence, don't have to irrigate. Most of us get to do all of the cowboy stuff and we have to fix the backhoe when the starter goes out and, you know, do everything else too. You know, yep, the best cowboys are hay farmers too, I feel like too.
James Nash:Oh, really, I think so.
Jordan Manley:I think, if you have to, you're producing the hay and feeding it to the cows. Then that kind of completes the circle a little bit, you know yeah that's an interesting perspective.
James Nash:Ranching and farming, although they often get lumped together, are quite different from each other. Yep, yeah, definitely, farming is easier and it's more profitable, and you get some time off in the winter.
Jordan Manley:Yep it's a little more predictable, although there's unpredictable parts of it too, you know yeah.
James Nash:I think the farmers are smarter yeah.
Jordan Manley:They get the tractor cab if that's what they're doing, but they still have to fix the equipment waller around in the ditch, fixing fences and irrigation and stuff too. You know.
James Nash:I'm not saying it's easy, I'm just saying it's easier. Yep, definitely. Which is the history of our species? Right? I think we probably moved into animal agriculture before we moved into, like, horticulture. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. But you know some really interesting stuff about the ways that Native Americans were farming and cultivating and that's becoming much more mainstream and knowledge that that was occurring. But it wasn't at all what we were taught in school. Yep, you know, we were definitely taught like these. These are nomadic people who are hunter-gatherers and occasionally warring, but the reality is there was a lot more agriculture going on than what we initially thought, especially on the East Coast, but definitely out here too. So you know what are some examples that come to mind for you in that regard?
Jordan Manley:Well, I think of the biggest one I think of. If anybody was to Google Zoom Walk Prairie and look at photos of the Zoom Walk Prairie, which is very near here, they would see that there's a lot of places in the ground that are dotted with these kind of inexplicable mounds that are almost dimpled like a golf ball. There's these mounds and they're very consistent. You know they'll stretch for miles on these ridgetops and inside those mounds. If you go out in the spring when all the wildflowers are blooming, you'll see these yellow wildflowers blooming in the cobble rock that's in between the mounds, and the mounds themselves are made out of more loose dirt. There's less like cobble rock, so all the loose dirt is mounted up and has deep soil and then in between the mounds is like really very rocky, sandy soil and in that rocky, sandy soil in between the mounds there's yellow flowers, which is the Lomatium genus, which is also called biscuit root, which is one of the most important staple roots of the Columbia Plateau tribes. And then up a little bit further on the mounds you get into onions, camis Brodia, various different kinds of lily family stuff. That is all edible that grows on top of these mounds and I don't think it's an accident.
Jordan Manley:I think people have lived here for 15,000 years. I think that it's not an accident that there's this like hyper abundance of these food species so concentrated in these mound areas and the Nez Perce elders. From what I've heard, some of them say that they're intentional. These mounds are created by thousands of years of people moving that soil into mounds and it's helped by, you know, the meltwater runs in between the mounds and freezes and it brings the rock to the surface. It makes the rocks easier to kind of orient in a certain way. So it's a combination of human and regular climatic things that make these mounds, but it's no accident the abundance of these you know edible plants that live in these mounds. So it's like, similar to the Incas would terrace the hillsides in Peru to grow potatoes. You know it's totally similar and this is a lot of speculation on my part. But I think more and more evidence is gonna come out that these widespread abundant mound structures out on these prairies or have more of a human made influence than just being a total natural occurrence.
James Nash:So when I built this place, I learned something fascinating about these mounds, because I've got them here.
James Nash:We've got them on the other side of the highway, you know, kind of on the north side of the sixth ranch, and I learned it when I was digging test pits for my septic drain field right, and the mounds that we're talking about folks are, I don't know, at most 18 inches above ground level from, like the rocky areas next to them and they are perfectly circular. Here's the crazy thing, jordan If we go to the cobbly stuff, I can dig down maybe six inches before I hit hard rock. If I move three or four feet to the right where I'm in that mound and dig down, I'm digging down six feet before I'm hitting a rock and it could be deeper than that. But they are buckets in some of the hardest rock that there is and I would love to know how this was created.
James Nash:There's bigger versions of it up in potholes in Washington where they think that during the Missoula floods which were folks the Missoula floods were six times greater than all of the rivers of the world combined at once. Right there's a huge amount of water and there were whirlpools that occurred and they think the boulders would get down into these whirlpools and circle and they would auger holes into the ground. I wonder if that wasn't happening here at some point.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, it's possible. I know that there's some of the theories geologists have about these. Are that they there was like ice sheets not seasonal ice sheets, not like glaciers, but like seasonal ice sheets on these flat prairie areas that took a long time to melt and snow melt has like a cupped appearance, you know, if it's on flat ground, and that as that snow progressed into summer and became hard, pack and had these cupped like that, certain parts of the cups would melt out, you know, before the others, and that had something to do with, you know, creating that structure.
Jordan Manley:But, there's no denying it, they're very important gardens you might call it for the. Nespers. I mean it's ancient, sacred, ancestral food source. You know it's widely used to this day by, you know, our local Nespers, kais Umatilla tribe.
James Nash:And they're exactly the places that I use for gardens today, right? So when I plant my orchard down here, I pick a mound to do it in. You know this spring, when, where I'm gonna find more places to plant potatoes because I didn't plant enough spuds last year yeah, I'm gonna pick mounds to do it in. And you really can't appreciate it until you get in the air and you look at it from satellite, you look at it from a drone, from an airplane, and they're just so evenly dispersed. It's incredible.
Jordan Manley:So I think the official geologist term for these mounds is Mima Mounds, named after, I believe, a town in Washington. So if a person, a listener, is interested in looking at pictures, just Google Mima Mounds.
James Nash:Yeah, huh, yeah, it's cool. What's your favorite conspiracy theory?
Jordan Manley:This one's gonna open a can of worms, let's open it. My favorite conspiracy theory is that the Canadian gray wolves were not present here in Wallowa County priority European colonization.
Jordan Manley:Let's talk through it. You know we have these wolves like OR7 that traveled all the way down to Central California. You have a pack in Sequoia National Park now that's descended from our Oregon wolves. So what would stop a Canadian gray wolf with big air quotes from being an Oregon gray wolf? Wolves don't understand political boundaries and I do know for a fact that there was my concession is. I know for a fact. There were multiple species of wolves that are no longer with us extinct species of wolves.
James Nash:One of the factors with canines is that their DNA allows them to express physical characteristics over a really wide spectrum. So we can have a Chihuahua, we can have a Great Dane, we can have everything in between, and they're all a dog Like. That's really remarkable among species that we can do that. You're not gonna find that with bears right Like you can go. There's a handful of bear species in the world, but they all share really consistent characteristics compared to a Chihuahua and a Great Dane, which you would think are completely unrelated.
James Nash:A great example of this is last week I was in North Carolina, in Eastern North Carolina I was duck and quail hunting, had a wonderful time, tremendous experience. But they have some red wolves there that have been reintroduced. Big project, tons and tons of money and they have now colored every single red wolf Well, right. So I think they've got 74, 75 head of them, something like that. But they're saying every single one of them is wearing an orange collar and part of the initiative in doing that is because they also have coyotes which are new to the area. Now I was down there in December and killed a coyote that looked unlike any other coyote I've ever seen in my life.
Jordan Manley:I see that all the time, just social media like Facebook, groups of trapping groups and in the East they posted pictures of these coyotes. If I killed that coyote I would not be shown a picture to anybody because I'd probably be arrested for killing somebody's dog. I mean, they do not look like coyotes to me.
James Nash:Yep. So there is such a thing as a coy dog, where they have domestic dog genetics mixed in. There's the coy wolf, which is happening very often, especially in this region with these red wolves, and there was one particular animal that was trapped and its characteristics were a little bit goofy. So they called the state. The state took DNA from it, kept it in a pen for a few days and they said well, this is 84% red wolf and the rest is coyote, like okay, so what is it? And they're like well, it's a coyote. It's got to be 85% in order to to be considered a red wolf. Like all right, so what are you gonna do with it? They're like well, we're just gonna dispose of it. I will.
James Nash:These guys were like well, look, if you're gonna kill it, we at least want to mount it because it's interesting and this mount is fascinating. I'm convinced that the coyote that I killed in December that was farther south from there, like it, had some really similar characteristics to this. All this to say that when you have canine species that are similar, they're going to interbreed every single time. This is going to happen and it's gonna get mixed, so you can never draw a line and say this is a Canadian gray wolf, this is a timber wolf, this is a coyote, this is a prairie coyote. There's 19 subspecies of coyotes in North America, and they're only divisible by region.
Jordan Manley:You know, that's kind of my point, because you know, you know, you've heard of Bergman's rule, probably yeah which is you know, the the white tail deer in Nicaragua and the white tail deer in, you know hey River, northwest Territories, canada, are exactly the same species. They're different subspecies. One of them weighs 70 pounds and the other one weighs 190 pounds, 300 pounds.
James Nash:Yeah, big northern white tails for sure. So Bergman's rule is that animals tend to get larger as they get closer to the Arctic Circle.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, so I think it could be. You know the differences between the wolves that were here beforehand and the wolves that were reintroduced in Idaho in 1997 I think are the same species.
Jordan Manley:They just every animal conforms to the land that it lives in Eventually you'll see, eventually, and like some species, like feral hogs, you know, it only takes, like what, seven generations or something for a pink Hampshire hog to turn into a furry boar, you know. So I think that these wolves yes, they were larger, the ones that were introduced to what was here before slightly but that's, they will quickly adapt to the prey that's available and Whatever you know the climate conditions to become. We won't see it in our lifetime, you know.
James Nash:Yeah, maybe, but also maybe not, because there's, there's cattle to eat.
Jordan Manley:So there's totally different right.
James Nash:It's a different game the duck has been reshuffled, but when we have invasive non-native species, sometimes they can retain what they are and really take over, and plants are a great example of that. Like you look at noxious weeds, I Think napweed is pretty much napweed wherever it is, but if you bring it into a new environment it can roll.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, if it doesn't have the bugs and the Funguses that normally would cause problems for it.
James Nash:You know, to control the population you know, I look back at some old new newspaper clippings from the chieftain, from the trapping records and the bounty days, and At that time what they're calling wolves weighed 70 pounds. Yeah, but the first day of the first ever wolf season in Montana, I was out El Conte with my buddy Adam and we called in five wolves didn't fire shy, I was a frickin rattled.
Jordan Manley:Was it legal at that time? You had tags in your pockets. Yeah, yeah, wow.
James Nash:But it just wasn't in my mind. And I saw him like we're sitting on this ridge in this little dished out bowl and we're watching. We're waiting for daylight, it's dark and we hear some coyotes are howling. Then we heard wolves, how first time we'd ever heard them in our lives. It was awesome, it was crazy.
Jordan Manley:I'll make the hairs on the back here next stand up faster than here in a wolf howl in the dark.
James Nash:Emotional reaction for sure. And these coyotes shut the hell up, man. They were like they'd said enough. It was like wow, that was nuts, that was for sure wolves. So it starts to get a little bit light and look in the bottom and I can. I see him. But I don't want to be the guy that like literally cries wolf, right? Yeah, because I've heard so many people throughout my life at this stage like say things are lions that are actually coyotes, and like I've done it, we've all done it.
James Nash:Yeah, I don't want to be that guy.
Jordan Manley:So, you guys, there's some large and identified canines down here.
James Nash:So I'm looking and then I'm like, okay, a hundred percent for sure, two of them had come out at that stage and go Adam, there's some wolves down there and he's got a long bow. I've got a 45, 70 with open sights that I'm good for about a hundred yards with, and, and he goes, should we call them in? I was like, yeah, I think we should. So we both start squeaking a little bit and Ended up five of them that that we called in, but one of them was pure white. This is the reason that I bring it up.
James Nash:The pure white wolves almost every biologist out there will agree have their origins as as a color phase, if not as an Individual from the Arctic Circle, right, so that wolf May have, as an individual, started in northern Canada, yeah, like far northern Canada, and come all the way down Through the nine mile country in northern Montana, all the way down to Southwest Montana, and then showed up so a couple college kids could try and, you know, call it in. And man, they came into like 150 yards and they were bombing through the sage brush, coming uphill. I was like this is happening.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, that's good feeling at one point.
James Nash:Adam turned around. You know he's got his long bow right and he goes. Don't let him get me, we're dead serious.
Jordan Manley:You know it's funny to talk about now, but I get it.
James Nash:Yeah, but you see five wolves running towards you with the intent to kill and it feels. It feels weird. Yeah, anyways, you know, it's morning when cuts downhill, catches them in the face and dude, they vanished like a vapor. Yeah, and it was. It was so eerie that we we quit elk hunting. We went back to the wall tent and ate Snickers bars and giggled for the rest of the day.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, yeah, it's, definitely changes your day when you run into wolves.
James Nash:I just heard wolves killed somebody's hound here in the amnoha. The other day is Bobcat hunting and Killed his dog and followed him back to the truck. Yeah, he was running so hard he was throwing up coming up the hill with those wolves behind him.
Jordan Manley:Well, I'll go into his hounds, wow so I, right around Christmas, right after Christmas, I'd fork, fork how dogs all very well behaved when they're at home, I don't have to kennel them, they don't leave my place. They've got a hundred yard circle like they don't leave. You know, very loyal, good dogs, and they were all howling it might have been right after January 1st just howling like you wouldn't believe, like they're just raising a ruckus, like more than they do if the coyotes are local coyotes are howling, you know, and I thought it was weird and I kept telling to shut up and they wouldn't shut up this one dog in particular. And in the morning he was gone and I haven't seen him again since. It's been to almost two months, you know. So, man, so I don't know.
Jordan Manley:Wolves do circle through our neighborhood. They've been seen in my neighborhood down near amnoha and I don't know. I I'm inclined to believe that he might have been taken by wolves, because it's just, his disappearance is unex, inexplicable. You know, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, it's bummer it just he was a great dog. I don't know what the heck he just there was just something weird that night, you know. So I'm not gonna say it was wolves, but yeah, it's high on my list of possibilities for sure.
James Nash:Yeah, yeah, no, it's. It's tough man, it's hard, it's hard for people to realize until it affects them personally. Yep, even even if it's somebody that like that, that has has a love of something that will eventually be affected by wolves, whether that's wildlife or cattle or you know, just having a dog that runs around outside their house, yeah, people can hear that and be like man that sucks and and really have it not affect anything about their lives. But when it's their dog, yeah, or you know, suddenly like they can't help the way they always have, or you know it's their cattle or their sheep that are getting killed, they're like we got.
James Nash:It is something about this, yeah, but there's something interesting about it where it really doesn't move people to action until it affects them.
Jordan Manley:So my story is. That's very much the case. You know. I Definitely my opinions about wolves changed when I started Experiencing it firsthand with my cattle. You know, first I lost some horses when I was working for Barry, the local outfitter. We lost some horses to wolves. Yeah, I'm just in the summer pasture stud in the mirror, you know, and it was too late to call the fishing game and do the big. You know crime scene investigation. But I know it was wolves and you know cattle, as I started getting into the ranching business more and more about 10 years ago, started finding kills, you know, and missing cattle and fuzzed up cattle and all that and then losing dog, you know it.
Jordan Manley:My opinion is definitely changing. I'm still I'm gonna get some flak for saying this but I am still pro wolf. I think that they are species that should live in Oregon. I think this should be listed as a game animal and I think we should be able to hunt and trap them. But I do think that they're you know I'm not gonna say they're beneficial to the ecosystem, but I think it's cool. I want the sustainable fur harvest is what I want, you know. I want to be able to trap them and get those hides and make some money off of them, and you know, just like they do in Canada and Montana and wherever else you know.
James Nash:You know something that people just don't flat out don't understand hunters, included, a lot of hunters. You could turn. You could turn the spigot on like a fire hose and say, alright, y'all can hunt wolves as much as you want, you can trap them as much as you want. You cannot use poison, you cannot shoot them out of an aircraft. They could turn people loose no tags, no seasons, no limits. And All the King's horses and all the King's men, yeah, couldn't make there be no wolf, oh no.
Jordan Manley:I don't think. If you had all the latest mere military thermal imaging helicopters and War machines, you couldn't get eliminated every wolf. You know, you know there's no way.
James Nash:It took over a hundred years of trapping, poisoning, shooting, running with dogs Every single thing that we could do and a lot of poisoning, incentivize with bounties yeah, to reduce the wolf population If we did it by, by legal and ethical means, now they're not going anywhere in way. So I, I, I don't know if the preservation organ organizations Don't understand that or if they just want to keep making money, but it's. It's one of the two, because you could legalize wolf hunting everywhere and it wouldn't.
Jordan Manley:It wouldn't hurt the species no, not at all, and you know it definitely would. What you're the situation you're describing. When that does eventually happen which it probably will because the population is going to continue to grow the season will eventually be open in Oregon. I don't think that the population is going to decrease in proportion to the amount of hunting pressure. I think that it's going to stay relatively the same and maybe drop off a little bit. But the first year problems will will be mitigated, big and people feel better.
James Nash:Yeah, you know that's going to be. A big difference is, right now we feel like we're in a boxing match with our hands tied behind our back. Yeah and Uh. If you just say, hey, you can, you can protect your assets. Yeah, like you can go wolf hunting, you can protect your cattle, you can protect your dogs, still, like you have. You have what are considered working dogs, right, yeah, um, because they're cattle dogs. If I'm out walking through the woods with my labs and A pack of wolves show, shows up, um, and and starts killing my labs, it's illegal for me to kill those wolves because they're not considered working dogs or hunting dogs. Yeah, same thing with your pet, like that is bonkers, it is totally bonkers.
James Nash:You know, you, you've put me in a, in a situation where what is morally and ethically the right thing to do is illegal. Yeah, and I don't think people should be put in that situation. And there is something about the wolf that just evokes a lot of emotion on both sides, every side, not, I don't even want to say both. I shouldn't have said that yeah, because it is so multifaceted. Oh, it's, there's a hundred sides, you know, but there's something about the animal that really elicits emotion from people.
Jordan Manley:It does. Yeah, yeah, the charismatic megafauna. It's interesting because you have these wildlife Organizations that do a lot of good conservation work, that are very Pro wolf and I'm not trying to say that that's a bad thing but a lot of their focus is on, you know, restoring wolf populations in Oregon. Whatever, they do not care one bit about mule deer, which are much more closer to like extinction than wolves will be, and they're doing literally nothing. Not one sink defenders of wildlife, oregon wild. Not one single dime goes towards actually Helping mule deer.
James Nash:Yeah, you know, they still don't consider, like they're not managing mule, deer and white tailed separate species over here, which is ridiculous that is.
Jordan Manley:I was gonna actually change the subject to that at some point. I think that is the most ridiculous thing. We're the only state, so so Wyoming, I believe don't correct me if I'm wrong in the far west and inner mountain, northwest Wyoming, montana, idaho, oregon, washington have white tails, and Oregon is the only state that doesn't have separate seasons For white tail and mule deer.
James Nash:Yeah, I, I don't know all those regulations well enough, I Don't. Just briefly glancing through the Idaho regulations in.
Jordan Manley:Washington recently. Yeah, I'm seeing like Multiple different seasons for mule deer and white tail that are separate. You know, I think Washington and Idaho both have General season tags for certain classes of white tail, like maybe less than a certain number of points or something like that, right, and then the mule deer tags are limited numbers and and a controlled application. Yeah, so I believe in Oregon we should definitely be managing them separately. You know there's 100 series deer right, 600 series deer. There needs to be a Series for white tails that's separate than the mule deer and black tail.
James Nash:Well, and we do have Columbia white tail tags, that are only Columbia white tail tags. We have black tail only tags.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, so what? Why is it different in western Oregon than here?
James Nash:You know well, so last year I called Through the ladder of ODFW the, the, the labyrinth, I guess, is a better word and got a hold of the director of elk and deer. Yeah, and I asked him that point blank.
James Nash:I was like why don't we manage these as separate species? Just crazy idea, you know, because mule deer are crashing um and they need some help and right now, since you just allocate buck tags that are for either species, a lot of these Year and a half whole deer are getting shot next to the road Right um, and it's it's hurting us. And he said it's not a priority for the state.
Jordan Manley:It's so interesting because you know I am passionate about white tails. I love white tails and that's what I prefer. That's what I hunt. I don't hunt mule deer at all. I mean, if one walks under my tree stand and it's nice, I'm gonna shoot it. But I'm targeting white tails a hundred percent. Every deer tag I ever have I'm 100% targeting white tails and uh, they taste better, they taste better and they're just such an interesting.
Jordan Manley:So I've been running mock scrapes on trail cameras in some off-the-wall places that you would never, ever guess. Like you know the mid elevation logged over timber. Like you know your chest, nimb sled springs, pine creek unit, you know the stuff that is usually just good old boys driving around and pickups cutting wood, like it's not like considered prime deer habitat by any means. And I've been putting in these mock scrapes and running cameras and just seeing a crazy number of deer Living in the timber, mountain bucks living in the timber, that you would never. You would never think there was a white tail and I wouldn't either.
Jordan Manley:There's some of these places. One time I was out driving around and just saw a white tail buck cross the road, so I backtracked him and put a little pile of corn in front of the camera and he was back on it and I put in a mock scrape and I hunted that sucker all season. I never got him, never even had him under my stand. But it's just fascinating, like the the in. It's not encroachment, but the growth of the white tail population into habitat that normally is not considered white tail habitat.
James Nash:Expansion of their range.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, usually they're in like a few limited riparian areas and agricultural alfalfa fields and and cottonwood river bottoms, but there is way more white tails in the woods Then most people would give them credit for and the canyons.
James Nash:Yeah, uh, if you took some of these east coast midwest skies and showed them the steepness and that some of these white tail are living in yeah, I'm not gonna name names, but I know you know exactly where I'm talking about. Uh, it is freaking incredible that there's white tail in there. It's amazing to me, uh, but they are the more adaptive species.
James Nash:Mule deer are not doing well and I kind of have to check myself a little bit because the way I feel about bighorn sheep, which is that you know they're, they're just on life support, um and largely just being hunted by the extremely wealthy or the extremely lucky, uh, and and really not having much of an ecological impact on the land at all. So, yeah, I would like to see auded come in where we have a food source, where we have An opportunity for everyone to recreate with, where we have a really beautiful and interesting animal that can utilize some of these grasses and reduce our fire hazards and reinvigorate the soil, like all all these benefits that you get from having on your let's on the land. I have to check myself because I wonder if I'm, if I'm playing favorites with mule deer too much, and I need to just recognize that. You know, yeah, they're a native species or one of my favorite animals, but they're also just not making it. Uh, so maybe we just need to let them go.
Jordan Manley:Well, I don't know that I I don't agree with letting them go, but I definitely shifted my focus to hunting white tails when it became apparent like how much the mule deer were struggling you know it's so bad Like.
Jordan Manley:There's places where, you know, in my early 20s I'd be on pack trips and there's a certain mountain in the eagle caps, I won't name where. One time I saw 29 mule deer in the summer and most of them were bucks, and uh, my wife and I went back and hunted, uh after a fresh snow during rifle buck season and we cut like three tracks Right and you know a long weekend of hunting.
James Nash:How many?
Jordan Manley:line tracks? Did you see? I don't think we saw any line tracks, but we saw two wolf tracks had come through and the deer were all migrating, which doesn't help, you know, but sometimes it can help if they migrate into you.
James Nash:They're so easy to spot though.
Jordan Manley:Yeah you know, in the fresh snow. Oh man, it's nice. But yeah, the white tails showing up in alpine areas. You know, as bow camp did 8 000 feet and had a White tail. My camp buddy was a forkish horn white tail. I'd just sit in camp in the afternoon with my bow and he'd come closer and closer and closer and I'd pick up my bow and he'd fade back into the timber and like three or four times I almost got that little sucker, but not quite.
James Nash:What do you like about bow hunting I?
Jordan Manley:Like the fact that it makes me gear down to a completely different Gear than rifle hunting.
Jordan Manley:You have to pay so much more attention to the little details the minute, like where you're gonna put every foot, how you're gonna weave your way, you know, duck under the branches and weave around the branches the way that you're gonna. You know you have to play the wind and and you have almost kind of developed this sense like three-dimensional View in your mind's eye of the wind, you know it's gonna be going down in this gully and up on that ridge and then down in this gully. You know, and you have to stalk everything out or plan out every stalk, you know, based on all those little factors. And it's almost like an altered state of consciousness when you get really into the zone on a stock or you're calling something and it's getting close, it is a truly heightened sense of awareness that you know or it's hard to get without Substances or whatever you know it's. It's like a runner's high without exerting yourself, kind of, and I just really like that. It's like some people are adrenaline junkies and I'm a bow hunting junkie, you know.
James Nash:So it's a. It's a forced Proximity, like you have to get all that stuff right in order to get close enough. Yeah, what if you Used a rifle and just said I have to get within longbow range?
Jordan Manley:So I have done that before and I enjoy that. You know, a muzzle loader tags are a good opportunity to do that and I hunt with the open-sided 30 30 occasionally. But I think there's definitely there is a factor of that that I would like to get more into. You know, like using I've always been fascinated by antique, vintage firearms, you know, and I like wooden walnut and I like old black powder cartridges and stuff and I've always seen myself like getting a trapdoor Springfield or something into high-nilk with you know, and getting really, really close. But it's not the equipment, it's it's, yeah, the choice to get close to an animal. Yeah, I Feel like I'm already making that choice by hunting with a 80-year-old rifle with a fixed four-power scope on it. You know, like that's already definitely like 300 yards, absolute Maximum max. Like 300 yards is a long range shot for me. You know it is a long range shot.
James Nash:Yeah, it is Something that I've got a little bit of heartburn about is the work that I've done over the past I don't know five or six years with different companies and in developing rifles and optics and stuff. We're producing ugly guns, ugly guns, yeah, the chassis guns.
Jordan Manley:I know you like one, so I'm not talking trash.
James Nash:No, I love what they're capable of. Yeah but a lot of times they're unpleasant to touch.
Jordan Manley:They don't feel good in your hand. They're not a companion on the trail, they're like a Obstruction that you have to strap to yourself and carry like it it's. You know what I mean. It's kind of like annoying to carry one versus like a pre-64 model 70 in your hand.
James Nash:There's nothing like it, like the warm feel of the wood, you know and and I think that a lot of it is that I grew up imagining beautiful guns and and really wanting to own them. And I, I only ever owned one rifle that was truly beautiful, and I broke the stock on it, oh geez. And. And I ended up having to Replace it with a synthetic stock because that's what I could afford and I didn't want it to break again.
James Nash:Yeah, but I grew up thinking and lusting after these, these carved, these carved metal and beautiful wood rifles, and High-grade walnut and jarring and good deep blue ink and and if, if you ever get to hold a great rifle in your hands With a carved stock that's made out of a selected piece of wood, it feels like something. Yeah, that is completely missed with aluminum and polymer, yep.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, so I have a rifle. It's a husk of Arna. Most people probably didn't know that husk of Arna not only makes chainsaws but rifles back in the day, and some great sewing machines.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, please but you know it's made night in the 1940s and it was imported from Sweden because the gun laws changed in Sweden and a lot of people they're limited to a certain amount of rifles, so a lot of people dumped their, some of their collection and those ended up in the States and I got one of them and and it has 25 kill notches on it and you know it's either roadier or moose but I'm in my mind it's all 23 moose that were killed. You know, and there's just something cool about that, that history. I'll never know who the man was or multiple people that made those notches, but it's really cool adding my own notches to it and, you know, continuing that legacy and, yeah, just just very cool to me to like have something with some history, you know.
James Nash:Yeah, there is. There is something that's very special about about beautiful guns, and I Hope that they never, never go away. I don't think that they ever will. I would love to see them come back and you know, the the functionality, the ruggedness, the accuracy of Some of these modern rifles is unparalleled. Yeah, like you know, I can, I can take some of these guns and and we could drive out to the range right now and I bet you a jelly donut that I'd hit on my first shot at the thousand yards, which is it is a tough thing to do. Yeah, you know it gets talked about a lot more than it actually gets done, but I bet you a jelly donut that I could do it. Yeah, I could not do that with with any of these, these pretty guns that I had before, but I do think that we can get to a point where we can get it all.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, oh, it's totally possible and people are doing it. I mean, you get the right betting and the right trigger in a classic firearm and you're getting the right Barrel on it and the right loads and the right optics, you can do it, you just you have to get it to fit you.
James Nash:Yeah, that that's a big deal, right. And that's that's what was largely missing in the guns that we grew up with, was they built them for one size, and humans are Different sizes. Like you're like eight feet tall, right? Yeah, like five feet wide, yeah, like we need different guns.
Jordan Manley:Yep, totally. Yeah. Yeah, they get in the cheek, weld right and the length, pull and everything. It's definitely. But some guns like a Winchester model 94, 30, 30, it's like whether you're fat or skinny or tall or wide or whatever, like you just do it make it work.
James Nash:You know, yeah, when you throw them up, those sights are there. Yep, exactly.
Jordan Manley:It's like pointing a shotgun, you know?
James Nash:yeah, definitely and you know they were built for guys who needed to shoot them like that, yeah, who were shooting at running animals at close range, and you know they they needed to build those guns so that they could come up, yeah, and be right where they needed to be.
Jordan Manley:I was just looking at some old historic hunting photos of your Papa Doug I believe that's your step-grandfather, right His father Jig tippet. I have a really great photo I should dig it out for you of him and Joe Bly and Pete Edgman, two other legendary old timers With 25 35s and 25 20s and 32 20s, which for people that don't know, are like Weak yeah, cartridges with six-point bull elk. Yeah, it's like. How the heck did they take that thing? Maybe took all three of them with all three guns.
Jordan Manley:I sure, but yeah, probably wasn't pretty like no more than a 22 mag powered rifle. Yeah. Yeah, they were too happy to get their military surplus infield 30 out sixes when they finally came around, you know.
James Nash:I would like to know more about jidge. He's oh man.
Jordan Manley:I know a lot of his story like whatever, yeah, yeah, yeah, cuz I work on, you know Work, the range that used to be his you know, and it's cool there's the marks of them are still out there. You know there's wooden carved log troughs that he probably made that are still out there watering cows, you know I mean he, he amassed so much land.
James Nash:Yeah, during a time 30,000 acres, more than that was it. It was a lot more than yeah. Yeah, because he gave that much ground to every one of his songs. Right, yeah, yeah that's cool. And starting in the early 1900s, after all the good stuff had been got. Yeah, something goofy happened in there. Yeah, I've got some theories about it, but I'm not gonna talk about it yet.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, yeah, it's cool Working his old range and looking at some of the old pictures and stuff. Even his daughters too, betty and Barbara. They were both, yeah, phenomenal ranchers and cattle women themselves when they were younger, you know.
James Nash:Yeah, doug bar.
Jordan Manley:Yeah.
James Nash:Yeah, freaking. So I got a, I Sold, I had my, my granddad's jet boat that the Doug bar boat, yeah, which was 1958 Riddle, one of the first ever all all welded aluminum boats, and I ran it in hells even though I had no business doing that, but I did it and I survived and I sold it and it's been parked down there at Doug bar Sold like five years ago, and I recently got a warning letter from the Forest Service for it being parked on Forest Service land for over 30 days, I think, lived on Forest Service ran for 50 years you know before it was Forest Service land.
James Nash:Yeah, right, yeah, like the eminent domain took this land, yeah and yeah, doug bar was deeded until the htn Ra.
Jordan Manley:Right, yeah, yeah, well, yeah those, those pop of dogs. Yeah.
James Nash:Yeah, I mean, he grew up there. Yeah, so I mean it just feels like such a gut punch to have that land get taken by the government. And then the boat that's longer than this deal, that that I've sold, even though you know Somehow the Forest Service tracked it down to to my name. Still, like now I'm getting a warning letter in the mail for that thing sitting there for 30 days.
Jordan Manley:It just sticks in me, oh man with all the junk they've left all laying around all over the place, you know. They're allowed to weave old Hain equipment at Doug bar, but you're not allowed to leave your boat, which is even yours.
James Nash:Find something better to do yeah totally All right, jordan, you're, you're a handy guy. You, you make a lot of your own gear. What is, what is a skill that you would like to see taught in high school to make, to make kids more self-reliant? You know, they they all come out of it. You know knowing something about Geometry. They know that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. They know a handful of other things that that they may never use again. What, what is a hard skill that you've learned that you wish high school kids could learn?
Jordan Manley:so I think that Game processing and butchery in general, not just game, but all animal, from killing the animal, from slaughter to Preparing, I think should be taught like not just I'm not talking, just home act where you know how to cook a pot roast, I'm talking about like Actually getting into it, gotten animals, like getting that connection with living animals and teaching kids to understand that their Susnits comes from other living beings will would make the world a better place.
Jordan Manley:I feel like you know, a lot of the issues we're talking about with things like wolves and various hunting things we talk about. You know, people just had a better understanding of the true value of an animal's life, I think that the conversation would be different, you know yeah, a little bit more Empathy and understanding for further food and where it comes from and you know people are used to driving around in a field and and seeing a cow, and some of those people get pissed at the cow, leaves big cow patty and stinks up their campsite.
Jordan Manley:You know, but you and I being around it and calving, pulling calves, you know, and being around it and you know babysitting cows all summer out on the range and all the stuff that goes into that cows life and you know the calves that she creates and those calves lives going on and what they create and like really Understanding all aspects of the animal itself. I think. So that kind of ties into like more like you know, ad class a little bit.
Jordan Manley:Yeah maybe ag places ad classes, the place to teach butchery, you know yeah, I.
Jordan Manley:Think that that's great, but stuff, like you know, welding is something that I learned when I was in chop class, when I was a freshman how to weld with just a regular old arc welder and 6011 rod. And just the other day I spent several entire days welding new hay forks on a backhoe. And I learned that skill when I was in ninth grade. No one else taught it to me. That's where I learned it. Yeah, and I'm still using it and it's huge like save thousands of dollars from hauling that machine to town to hire somebody to do it. You know, like yeah.
James Nash:Yeah, this, this gate down here that I put in the summer. I Don't have a welder, or I didn't, so I called around to my buddies who are welders and of course they're real busy and it just needed to get done. So I was like man, I haven't welded since high school. But one bought a welder and it's still there like I.
James Nash:You know, I'm the same way I can still chase a little puddle around and it's not that pretty. You don't want to look at it too close, but it's not gonna fall off either. Yeah.
Jordan Manley:Yeah, I did exactly the same thing and I had the additional challenge of no access to electricity when I was working on this backhoe, so I had to bring the electricity to the backhoe. So I literally got a Lincoln arc welder out of a junkyard and, for you know, just picked it up someone's junk pile, you know and Got a night. We got a nice generator we use on the ranch and I had to make my own adapter cord because the welder is from 1925.
Jordan Manley:Yeah and the generators from 2022. So I had to make my own adapter cord and I googled, like how to make this adapter cord and it was like do not attempt to make this Cord, like if you screw it up, like it's gonna burst into flames and be really bad. I was so nervous when I flipped that switch Turned the welder on it fired up and no flames came shooting out. So I said, all right, we're good, you know yeah.
James Nash:I started welding, I had the same problem all these California compliant plugs.
James Nash:Oh, they don't fit anything anymore and yeah, like come on. Yeah Well, I think that that's great advice. I I Would love to see something like that happen. You know, and you know for you young folks that are listening, there's plenty of people out there who are more than willing to take all the time in the world out of their own lives to teach you something. If only you show up and show interest and you just don't know when that skill is gonna gonna be needed, but you're gonna appreciate it when we, when you have it, yep for sure. Where can people follow along in the adventures of Jordan Manley?
Jordan Manley:So you just look my name up on Facebook and follow along.
James Nash:I have public Facebook and then you can follow me on Instagram, which is walk talk it yeah which is a good way to good way to describe you, yeah, and this will give you glimpse into what it looks like to to be a cowboy in the West today In an unsentimental way like that. It ain't Yellowstone, it's real life. This is how it is and and if you've you've got any kind of question, I'm sure Jordan would be happy to answer it. So thank you, sir, for your time, thanks for your stories, and it's fun to catch up. Yep, thank you, james. All right, bye everybody. Thank you all very much for listening.
James Nash:I'm going to keep bringing you these stories from normal people Just like you, who have done extraordinary things. Everyone is an expert at something and they have interesting perspectives on life and work and and the environment all the things that we care about. I'm gonna keep bringing that to you and I want to thank you so much for making this show possible. I also want to thank Emily Bratcher for producing this show. She does a great job editing. Really appreciate her. I want to thank John Chattelin he did the art for the six ranch podcast and Celia, soon to be Harlander. She digitized that so that we can get it out there on the internet for you. I also want to thank Justin Hay for writing this original music and the beautiful whistling that you're listening to right now. You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. Please keep listening to the show, write me a review if you feel like it and Just keep doing your thing and we'll all learn from this together. It's been fun and you know we're just getting started.