Three of us sat down after four days in the field. Cade, Cliff and Ryan (a student who just came off the elk class) and got into the small stuff that actually separates hunters who kill from hunters who don't. Not tactics you can read in an article. The judgment calls. When to move fast, when to sit down and wait, how much country you're actually willing to cross, and how much of your own hunting style you should be fighting versus leaning into. Ryan's primarily an archer with real backcount...

Over the last two months I put 40 hunters through live elk training in the field. Not lectures. Real stalks, real glassing, real archery setups that run two or three hours. The same three failures showed up over and over, and every one of them traces back to the flood of content hunters are drowning in right now. This isn't an anti-content rant. There are hundreds of skill videos on this channel and you need that baseline. The problem is what happens when guys try to apply every framework at...

I sit down with Corey Knowlton, one of the most experienced international hunters alive, to talk elephant hunting, North American hunting and double rifles. From there we dig into the Jim Shockey era of hunting TV, why North American trophy hunting opportunity is never coming back, and why a $30,000 archery elk hunt makes almost no sense when you look at what that money buys in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, or Tanzania. In this episode: Why it's easy to win the elephant argument logically — a...

Evan Koster has guided archery elk hunts in Colorado's Flat Tops for over a decade. This conversation covers everything that actually matters going into an archery elk season — and plenty of what hunters think matters that doesn't. Colorado is in a historic drought, and Evan breaks down what that means for where elk will be in September — it's not about elevation, it's about feed quality, and aspens are the answer. From there we get into how to search unknown country efficiently, why elevati...

We explain suppressors for the hunting use cases, from basic concepts to advanced. Most hunters obsess over decibels and a do-it-all can they move between rifles. This conversation makes the case that they've got it backwards — that length is the real king of a hunting suppressor, that the published sound numbers are mostly unreliable, and that a suppressor belongs to one rifle. We get into the engineering, the failure modes, and where this fast-moving market is actually headed. --- FOLLOW CL...

You almost always have a rock-solid rear rest on your body — and most hunters never use it. Cliff sits down with Mike from Tricer to break it down. This one gets into the weeds on glassing tripods vs. shooting tripods, stabilized binos vs. tripod-mounted glass, reading bullet trace, and the simple rear-rest tricks (a puffy jacket, your pack, even your bino harness) that turn a wobbly hold into a locked-in shot. In this episode: Why a tripod forces systematic glassing — and why stabilized bi...

Brian Gilroy runs Wildlife Partners, the largest exotic animal breeding operation in North America and a Cape buffalo herd that didn't exist in private hands a decade ago. He's also hunted Dall sheep in remote Alaska, muskox on Nunivak Island, and elk in New Mexico. This episode is a reality check on how the hunting industry actually works and why the free-range vs. high-fence moral war is mostly mythology from Brian's perspective. Texas is now on South Africa's radar as a direct competitor....

A 36-season Colorado wilderness outfitter, Scott Limmer, doesn't sugarcoat it: the new 50%-random draw is about to blow up point inflation and gut the predictability that made Colorado elk hunting plannable. We get into that, the big-bull reality most hunters won't admit, and a stack of Africa stories you won't hear anywhere else. In this episode: Why the 2028 draw overhaul tripled the exact point inflation it was meant to fix The hard truth about how giant public-land bulls actually get kil...

AG makes the most expensive and strongest flip-flops on earth. Sounds insane, but I like his business. This is a conversation about authentic materials, the economics of making something real, why almost everything in your life is fake, and what happens when an environmental group comes after you with a campaign. AG is the founder of Toehold, a Las Vegas-based company that sources elephant, hippo, crocodile, shark, and zebra hides — old-world vegetable-tanned leather, made in America, by han...

A decade-plus of guiding off horses and mules, distilled into a Q&A with Vince who is going on his first horseback elk hunt. Cliff doesn't sugarcoat it: horses are always a cost, sometimes a massive advantage, and never the shortcut people think they are. In this episode: Why packing horses is something you do after you have horse experience — not how you get into itBuying and culling stock: why disposition beats conformation every timeThe "herd effect" — using seasoned ...