EP 189: Digital Tools for Hunters with the Epic Outdoors Staff

They should have constrained the tag numbers a little bit in relation to those dates, knowing the take was going to be that much greater on big deer. It breaks down the whole preference point draw, what it's taken to draw. Anything to do with Western big game.

Welcome to the Epic Outdoors podcast, powered by Under Armour. Hey everybody, Jason Carter, Adam Bronson, John Peterson, Chris Peterson coming at you from southern Utah. It's a dry southern Utah. Again, not a lot has changed in the last few days, Bronson. I've been looking for it to change. It's a dry cold. Okay, I'll take that. Is that close to a dry cough? Instead of a dry heat, it's a dry cold. It's all we're doing with. It's all dry. It's dry. Whatever it is, it's dry and it's not good. I was thinking COVID.

I'm tired of COVID. And I haven't even had it that I know of except for back at the expo time last year when we were all sick as dogs. Have you had it, Bronson? Yep. Probably gave it to you or vice versa. All right. Well, I probably had it then. Didn't even know it. Maybe had a slight headache for a morning and the monster fixed it. Who knows? We've often joked that monsters have definitely killing the COVID because we've had no issues really. Yeah. Anyway. And Wyatt's the only one that has. But he drinks water. Anyway, we wanted to kind of talk to you a bit about what we've got going on here at Epic Outdoors. We've got the January publication, January 2021, if you can believe it already, out in the mail. You should be getting it any day. Yeah. I've been getting a lot of calls from guys regarding the Wyoming moose, sheep, goat, bison, and Arizona elk and antelope already.

And probably most listeners, by the time you listen to this, have got it in the mail. But we're just going to do a general overview of it here in a bit. But we also wanted to kind of talk about some of the new revamped, bigger and better than ever research tools that we've upgraded on our website, which is all included in our Epic Outdoors membership. So in addition to the magazine that you get and the consultation that comes with that and talking with you, discussing strategy, strategy, helping to book tags, helping you find the hunts that match what you're looking for to draw strategy and process and all that. You've also got ability to, on your own home computer or smart device. Or your phone. Phone. To research from drawing odds to a whole lot of other information, minimum points to draw, maps, you know, private land, public land ownership stuff, just a lot of different stuff.

So we thought it would probably be beneficial, maybe for people that are already members that have been there before, but just to bring it to everybody's attention, we got some upgrades on there. And that's all included for members in the members section of our website. We always did have a portion of our website. John, you can kind of add in here because you've been an instrumental part of it. But we have had drawing odds and whatnot on there. We've just kind of done a whole new facelift and added a bunch of features for this upcoming year, really is kind of the focus of the revamping of the Epic Outdoors website. Yep. And so let's get Kurt on the line. Kurt's the head of our web development team. And so Kurt and I work together a lot on this type of thing, kind of the look and feel and all of that and all the upgrades. So let's get him on the line and go through some of the new stuff.

Before we get him on the line, we just want to remind everybody that we do cover all the western states. From a non-resident perspective, we go through drawing odds, kill percentages, best units and whatnot. We crush it, put it out in printed form. And then you just can't print everything. Every single unit in the state sometimes. I mean, there's 100 antelope units in Wyoming. We probably only cover 50 of them in the magazine or 40, whatever it is. Every other one's on our website. 40 too many, maybe. I don't know. That's right. Maybe. Or elk in Wyoming. I mean, there's a lot in every state. We just don't put every single thing. We oftentimes will do it every moose, sheep, and goat in almost every state, open and on residence. That's not too many pages. But we simply can't publish a Bible every month with every single deer, elk, antelope unit breakdown in every single mag.

So we kind of hit some of the highlights. And the rest of it's on there. And the drawing odds, you can go there if you have a pet unit. Or you just want to do minimum point queries in the states like Utah, Wyoming, Colorado that set portions aside for maximum point holders. Type in your points. What could this get me? A lot of tools like that on there too. Pretty awesome. Yeah. And so anyway, with that $100 membership, and it's $100 a year if I didn't already say it, you do get the magazines. Then you get to go online, just like what John's talking about. You can log in with a username, password, about like anything in this life. That's what you've got to have, 14,000 of them in every other place, including Instagram, by the way, which I tried to take off my phone. But you can't post. You can't post or do much. It's a very limited version, right, Chris? Yeah.

And they're saying that these apps have little spiders that go and see all your chats and see all your contacts. It just bothered me. Do your banking for you. Yeah, do your banking for you and maybe write checks and things like that. And so anyway, I ended up having to put Instagram back on for a minute to throw something up on our story about things we were doing here at Epic. But anyway, I guess my point of it all is, is all of this e-stuff, this electronic scouting and different things, the odds and tools, we're up to speed. We're cranking with everybody because that's the way of the future, and we're pretty proud of it. We've got a lot going on on here. On our website, when you log in, you'll get to see guided hunts, a point tracker, which is for you to keep track of your own information. It's pretty tough. I've actually had spreadsheets from me, my kids, wife, everybody else.

And so anyway, you can now have a simple place to put it, and it's for you. Only you can see it in your account. And then there's also the research tools that Adam and John have mentioned, as well as access to the e-mags, which are basically these paper mags where you can flip through them electronically. And so we're going to dive in to what we've got going on here. That's what John was mentioning. Get Kurt on the phone. He's actually somewhat the brains behind it all. I would say, John, you've had an instrumental impact on that and whatnot in helping Kurt and working with Kurt on this. Anything you want to say to that? I think we're ready to go. All right. Let's give him a holler. He writes the language none of us understand. That's what Kurt does. Or want to understand. Or care to understand. Just kind of like taxes. We tell him what we want it to look like. Kind of like taxes.

I don't want to pay a lot of them. Figure it out and tell me what I owe. All right. Hold on. Here we go. Let's get Kurt on. Hello. How's ice fishing? It's been good.

Well, which lakes? Not to spoil things. You can give us a one or two week delay of where you've been just to kind of mask the freshness of what you're doing. That's right. Strawberry? Or are we going somewhere else? Deer Creek? Flaming Gorge? What are we doing? Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry. So does that mean? I love that lake. Oh, really? We go there all the time, yeah. How big a fish are you catching? So Kinsey caught a 24 and a half incher just Wednesday. Jeez. Rainbow cuts or what? It's a cut. So, yeah, we just chase those big cuts up there. So we – I have snowmobiles, so it doesn't matter if people know where I fish because I go away from everybody anyway. What do you mean you're on a lake? Like there's not like backcountry when you're on – it's all the same elevation. You're not in the backcountry. You're on the same lake. What do you mean by that? Elaborate.

Well, there's, you know, little honey holes no different than the mountains. We don't know. Elaborate. I don't. I mean, it's flat white ice. How can you get away? Seriously. So think about it. Just like the mountains, right? You get away from everybody. You're miles and miles away from everybody on the snowmobile. And then underneath you, you know, there's contours and little holes and points and springs. And over the years, we've just found some of those natural little spots where you can kind of go sit over the top of them and ice fish. I got you. So you're using GPS or Onyx or something that tells you where you're at? Like when the people go out deep sea fishing and it's nothing. There's no – there's no, hey, go to that ridge over there. It's just flat water. And then right here, put her down and hold on tight.

So just like I could sell access to my, say, my Onyx account with all my waypoints and Bronson, you could too. Kurt could sell his Onyx for fishermen. That's right.

And if you don't know, Kurt – They're actually built right into my fish finder. So my fish finder has GPS. I go to the same spot. We actually use underwater cameras as well. I have two of them and we point them back and forth. So not only do we know the fish are down there, we can see what's working. Full HD color. Come on. And is that – that's a remote camera. You don't have a human trail underwater ice camera like Jason's had to do when he was a kid. You don't throw a kid down there with goggles on and say, look. When I was a kid, I was a human trail camera. We'd move past that nice fishing world. You guys.

Good. It's frowned upon to build – to drill a bigger hole and dunk your kids under there. Yeah. Is it clear? Can you see a cutthroat? Can you look down there and go, wow, that one's freaking awesome. Well, the winter – I've heard, yeah, winter water's cherry clear, isn't it? Oh, yeah. The other day we were fishing in 22 feet of water. You could look down your hole and see the fish and your jig at the very bottom. Oh, no way. Because there's just no wind to, like, churn the water up, right? Yeah. And the nutrient and all that stuff. It doesn't get all cloudy. Yeah. And we shovel the snow off of where our holes are in my tent, and it almost looks like you're in, like – it's kind of creepy. It's like a glass-bottom boat if you've ever been in one of those. Wow. Because all the snow's gone, and the ice is super clear right now.

And so, literally, you'll see fish swim underneath you, and it kind of creeps you out. Why do you do that? Just for that effect, for the fish under your feet effect? Or is there – Yeah. Why do you get rid of the snow? Well, because when the snow's on there, as your tent heats up, we have insulated tents and heaters. We literally put down, like, those mats that you work out on, those foam mats. We literally make a floor. So, if the snow melts, it creates a little, like, lake. I literally own a yoga mat. I've never done a – I do the fishing pose. You haven't done the downward dog? The downward dog is stronger. No, that's right. I do the dead fish pose, the dead fish dog pose. So, when you have this lake, does the mat just kind of cover – is over top of the lake of water that's now melted because of your warm tent? Is that what's going on? Yeah. Well, yeah.

So, if the snow's in there, it does melt. Melt faster. Yeah. But if we shovel off all the snow, put the mats down, that way it keeps your feet warm. You've got to remember, I have my kids there, and they get cold with everything, right? So, that way I just have a floor and heaters, and it's warm, and it's cozy. They stay there. We cook inside the tent. I mean – It's not really a tent. It's more like a little cabin. Well, I bought an Eskimo tent the other day. I thought I was doing something. Now, I've got to realize I've got about $1,400 in cooking things and mats. Yoga mats. You get about three more grand, and you'll be up to speed. Then I've got to wait until I'm out there, so I've got to go buy a sled. I have video cameras for underneath the water. Kurt, this is – So, as you can tell, I'm sure there's some listeners listening to this when I think, boy, Carter and Brat,

you guys have never ice fished, have you? Which, that's almost true. Well, I've been ice fishing a lot. I've gone with people. Just out on my own. Yeah, that's right. We caught some big fish last week. Yeah, but you're right. I don't – to that level, Kurt, if I ice fish, I stand in there and freeze out in the sun. I get wind burn. I get sunburn. And when it's bad, I leave. I need to be able to think about it. Go to my garage and 15 minutes drive away and not have – but – When I was a kid, and that sounds like something your grandpa would say, but when I was a kid, we would drive up the lake above Monticell, Utah with the wood-splitting mall, and we would chop our holes into the ice on the lake, so we'd chop like a zombie. That's all you – Oh, my gosh. That's what you did. You just chopped. That's all you – We didn't have augers. Hell, that was a luxury. Augers were what they moved grain.

It doesn't matter your grain. I love a propane auger, and I got a propane auger that's now not starting, so now I've got to do the hand auger. Yeah, forget that. You do an electric auger. All I can say is let's think about hunting, right? You got it all. It's in our personality. We don't do anything 10%, right? If you're in, you're all in. So we have – yeah. Gotcha. My ice fishing sled costs probably as much as my hunting pack and maybe even my golf bag. It's embarrassing. We don't even want to talk about it. So if we're going to go, we go all in. And it's about – you look at your wife and say, honey, for the memories, what's the time with our kids' worth to you? Priceless. Priceless. That's right. And you move right on. And they say, yeah, okay, see you. I'm really interested in the videoing of the fish. I think that's freaking awesome. Yeah, it's kind of like you got Carter's attention.

He's thinking trail cameras for fish. Is there a season? Yeah. Do they get ripped off? You can record it and everything. Well, but that's a bonus. Can I keep my tent on the ice and just leave? Yeah, Kurt. Could you leave a camera under the water? I know it's going to ice over the first night you leave. But then since it's GPS, go back there. Auger through. Grab your camera and check the footage for the last five days. Or is it not that sophisticated? Well, unfortunately, no. It uses a cable, so you'd have to leave it out there. They don't have any cell service. You can record, though. I could literally turn my camera on and record all night. But at the same time, it's not like, yeah, so this big fish comes by, and let's call him Leroy. It's not like we can go back and chase him. I mean, he might swim three miles away in the lake, and we never see him again. Yeah, they're not. Yeah.

They're in a lake. Let's move on to hunting just because it's more important. But real quick, Kurt, how big a fish are in there? Just how big a fish could you catch? Well, so, I mean, it has a slot for a reason, 15 to 22 inches. You can't keep anything inside of that because they're trying to grow big fish. Yeah. I mean, you can catch some 8 to 10-pound cuts through an ice hole, which is kind of crazy. Through an ice hole. I feel like we caught one. You've got to be careful, you say, through an ice hole. That's true. All the jokes you can think of have been used. Come on. I mean, okay, so anyway, we did catch a big old fish, and then it ended up, you know, we tried to angle him up through the hole. It's pretty hard. Angle him? Yeah. Well, he's swimming by the hole, and like, how do you get their head to come up through the hole without ripping the hook out of their mouth?

So, Kurt, I need some help, but anyway, it ended up, he ended up bending the hook out and getting off, and it just, ooh. Ooh. Giant fish. Giant fish. There's got to be a specific angler terminology for the procedure to flip him out of the hole properly. What would that be? There's some tricks. What would it be? I need a tougher hook. I need kids that are willing to reach down through the ice. I mean, there's a few things. Anyway. Any tips and tricks real quick? Well, we stick the pole down the hole, so that, because as they, the bigger fish, as they go around in circles, they'll try to cut your line, things like that, and we just let them take a lot of drag and tire them out, and then eventually, once the, once the fish get their head up through, then they usually almost push themselves out, but yeah, those big fish, you have to. That's a good tip.

Like, that's a good tip, because we lost the line. They cut the line. Stick the pole down the hole, and just run against the ice. So, yeah. Get it right to the tip, and then just pull him up. Growing up, I fished Flaming Gorge, and I still go down there, and you catch, like, 20, 30 pounders through the ice. Yep.

You got to wear them out. Do you use an inch hole for that, or what do you do? Use our eight-inch augers and drill a triangle of three holes. That's legal down there. I don't think it's legal in any other lakes. It's too big of a hole. Because. What do you. Yeah. Is that because they don't want you falling? Well, for safety. What do you mean illegal? You can only have a certain. 10 inches is the biggest one. Okay. That's like saying it's illegal to not wear a seatbelt. Exactly. But anyway, those big. Just drill the holes. Those big, fat lakes drop down in the gorge, they don't. They can't fit through the holes. Is it not fair to chase? I don't know. But that's the trick we learned down there is stick your pole down the hole, let them run for line forever, tire them out, and then work them. Yep. Wear it out. I use four-pound tests. Six or eight-pound. Six or eight-pound line.

My drag is wide open, so. Down at Flaming Gorge, I don't. Okay. All right. All right. For somebody that wanted to move on to hunting, Carter, you've asked a lot of follow-up questions. Well, I just, I'm good at mining information from people, and I had a couple of questions that led to a couple more. All right, Kurt. So, we've opened this up already. Teetered up. Yeah. For you and John. John, of course, you guys, you know, worked our website over, and we appreciate you for that. I just maybe thought it, Adam and I talked about it. We thought it was just best, I mean, coming from you guys, of course, we use the drawing odds every single day, the minimum points query, things like that. But we thought coming from you guys, maybe you guys could tell us what's really on our website. What's been updated and why, I mean, it's really about ease of use, but that's kind

of, we can tell you and John what we want it to look like, what we think it'd have, but we, you write the language nobody can understand. Yep. That's right. And Kurt, maybe back up a little bit and talk about our philosophy. First, because I mean, we all know there, you know, at Epic, it's all about the magazine and the consulting and providing, you know, all our members, the tools to draw more tags. But online, we wanted to kind of take a, take it that step further. We live in a digital age. We live in an age where it's, you know, easy to pull up stuff on our phone. So kind of step one was, is, well, hey, let's get the magazine in the hands of the people wherever they are. Right. Like, yeah, you're at home and flip right through it. But if you want it on your phone or your iPad or online, you know, first step was get the e-mag out there.

Then since then, we've kind of really expanded it to get all those tools that when guys call in or we've been doing this for a long time and especially you, you know, Jason, Adam, you guys have been doing this forever. You know, I mean, you guys know what questions these guys ask usually when they call. So we, we tried to set up our online tools with that in mind. So if a guy calls in, he says, hey, you know what? I'm new to Mule Deer. Where do I start? Well, we have a research by species section or, hey, you know, my buddy goes to Colorado every year. Unlike Jason, I'm too shy to ask him for more information. So I'm going to jump out on, yeah, I know. I'm going to jump out on the epic site and say, oh, I'm going to click on Colorado and I can get all the information about Colorado. We've got guys out there that, you know, maybe want to dig a little bit deeper.

They're kind of geeks like me or even you guys where we're like, hey, I want to dive into the numbers of the drawing odds. Not only do I want to see what it takes to draw, say, a Wyoming elk tag, I want to know what it took over the last five years. I want to see trends. I want to see, you know, all these, what's going on in these units. So we have that available to people as well. You know, so basically whether you're just getting started or you're kind of already geeked out, we've got that and everything in between. We also have our guided hunts out online. So if a guy's like, hey, you know, I didn't draw crap this year and I'm still looking for a tag or right out of the gate, he's looking for maybe a guaranteed tag and hunt. I mean, he can go out there and search through them in his own time and look through all of them in the magazine.

We probably only highlight, I don't know what percentage you guys would know. But online, I mean, you know, if we update a hunt tomorrow, it shows up out there. It's immediate. So also, too, the other nice thing about the online stuff is, you know, speaking of tomorrow, let's say Wyoming decides to extend the deadline. Well, one of the things we've added this year is kind of a latest news section. Literally, as things change or as we release stuff, if you were to go out there right now, you kind of see that, you know, we just launched our Wyoming and Arizona and New Mexico odds. You know, we let everybody know when the e-mag is released. But let's say something related to an application came up. You know, Wyoming extended it over a weekend or, you know, they had some problems. Well, we can go out there and post and let our members know that, hey, you can apply a

little bit later now versus once the magazine's printed, you know, we can't do that. So I like that. And I can see it. I mean, we're following along again. We already know what's out there and whatnot. But it's it's I like the ease of use. You go and click on. We got a little you got your little tabs at the top. It's guided hunt. It says Jason. That's kind of cool. And then it says guided hunts, point tracker, research tools and e-max. And the research tools, there's a research by state like you were talking about, which goes through how Colorado works, how the point system works, the hunter ed requirements, whatever, all those little tabs. And then there's an and then if you go, you know, if you can go back or whatever.

Anyway, and then you can go to straight to drawing odds and info. Maybe somebody doesn't need to know that. They don't want to read about that. That's fine. You can go straight to drawing odds. Or you can get to the drawing odds by when you were in that state reading about the about how they conduct the draw or whatever. And so I just like the ease of it. You can just navigate through a state, navigate to specific species or whatever. And you bring up, you know, the navigation part is one of the big things that John and I overhauled and almost kind of launched a whole new version this year. For anybody that's maybe tried it in the past, you know, get back out there and try it again. Or if you haven't tried it, make sure you go out there. We tried to make it really easy to use. I mean, you hover over research tools.

I know you're kind of listening right now, but you hover over research tools. And in our menu, all those things that Jason just talked about just pop up right in front of you. So it's really easy to find them. You don't have to sit and go, oh, where do I even begin? I mean, you log in, land there. I mean, immediately, all the things we're talking about are right in front of you. It's real, just click on the species or click on this or hover over research tools, hover over e-mags and the latest magazines are right there for you. Super easy. You know, that was a big emphasis for us, you know, on this kind of this new version was to really make it easy to get around, easy to find all this stuff. And Jason mentioned the point tracker. I wanted to emphasize that one more time. That's a place where you can go in, add which states you're applying in and keep track of your points.

So you go in, you add deer in Utah, for example, and you say, okay, I've got two points. Update that. It'll keep track of it for you. The other cool thing is you can keep notes right in there. And so like, let's say, let's take Nevada, for instance, and you do a bunch of research this year and you come up with the units that you want to apply for. And you come up with a couple more that you just want to remember or keep track of. You can, you know, put in there, hey, look at a different unit next year, or I'm applying for such and such unit this year and keep track of all those points. So every year you just have one main place to go back to. You can keep track of your state IDs right there. And so you can keep track of your passwords and your login if you want for each state. So really, really convenient way to keep track of everything.

One reason, a lot of you guys may keep spreadsheets or things like that, which we all do and maybe we're used to doing that. But we did get requests from some guys that don't keep a spreadsheet to have a spot to put that, but the other thing, the reason why we decided to add that is guys are often either on their phone or maybe they're away from their computer where their spreadsheet's at and they want to pull up their phone and have that stuff because they're looking at the drawing odds while they're on their phone and maybe they're applying because it's towards the deadline. And they needed a place to where they could put it, you know, that, hey, while I'm on there looking at the odds, okay, that now I'm going to go, you know, check my points real quick and have them right there. So that was easy. So we said that's a pretty simple fix for us to add that for them.

And if you keep it on a spreadsheet, great. If you want to put it in there so that if you're ever caught with your tablet or just your phone in your pocket, it's time to apply. You got to verify how many points you have, hurry and check a unit and some odds online and hurry and get applied. It's all right there on our website. And Kurt, maybe go over the cool integration we've got if you do track your points on here. Well, and one quick thing before that, also if we do your apps, if you're part of our licensed application service, that's integrated as well. So if you literally click on your profile and then click on licensed application, you can see everything that we've applied you for. But also, if we do your applications and we track your points for you, all those points in all those states will show up there as well.

So whether you do it on a spreadsheet, you do it through our point tracker, or we do it for you, at any time you can come out here and take a quick glance where you sit in these different states. Really cool. Let's use an example of that integration of the point tracker. Like John said, you know, Wyoming Elk, it's kind of on our brain right now. Like the deadline's here at the end of the month. I literally just applied earlier today. Yeah. You know me, man. Did you? Well. Let's have it. Let's have it. I can guess. I could probably guess with a 99.9% certainty the unit you've applied. You can say it all day long. You want us to say it on air? It's a big secret. Go ahead, Adam. What is it? General. The only question is special and regular. We're out of Kansas. Okay. General elk regular. Yes. Are you going to take a shovel on that one? If you.

There's a whole story behind that. I think we actually aired it out once. We probably did. I did. You caped an antelope with a shovel, but hey, let's just say that if it was done, it can't be done. We wouldn't recommend it. Easy ways to open fences and cape animals with shovels.

No. So, yeah. All right. So, anyway. So, let's just take it for example. So, you're in. Let's just say, hey, I want to go out to Wyoming. I'm going to look up Wyoming elk because it's on our brain. I go out there and I pick. I mean, I'm going to pick unit seven just because it's one that we kind of cover in the magazine. It's, you know, it's a popular one there. I'm literally doing this as I'm talking through it. I realize that's not visual. But the bottom line is, is when I go out there and I pick unit seven, it's a good example where you kind of see how we overhauled things for this year. And also, you can see that immediate integration with the point tracker. So, right at the very beginning, it tells me how many points. You know, preference point draw. It breaks down the whole preference point draw. What it's taken to draw unit seven over the last five years.

You know, I happen to have two points in there. So, for me personally, I would never draw unit seven. But at the same time, right off to the right, I can also see my random drawing odds real quick. So, yeah, I'm not going to necessarily draw it with points. It doesn't look like I would. But, hey, I've got a 2.47% chance, or at least I did last year, to draw a random tag. So, one thing, too, even though we're talking about how that point tracker integrates in, one thing we've added this year in Wyoming is this projected kind of calculation. So, I want all the numbers to know that this is just a math equation. This, you know, this is just literally letting the computer go out there and say, over the last five to six years, this has been the trend, and this is what it's taken to draw on. So, therefore, according to the math, so unit seven is a good example.

According to, like, when you say that, you mean according to the number of tags that they've been giving here. If it stays roughly the same or exactly the same as last year, and just based on how many people are working up from the next point level up, this is who we think will draw and how many points that will look like this year. No. Yeah, this is not us giving a human interpretation, Jason or I, on the spot saying we think unit seven is going to take, you know, 58% or 10 points on the regular. Exactly. When you've got five years. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. This is an intense formula massaged by a couple of people. I mean, you and John. Yeah. When you have five years of historical data, and then all those allocations and those statistics, as long as they generally issue the same number, like in unit seven, for example, I mean, it's

been 25, 27, 27, 26, 27 tags in the regular draw over the last five years. So, generally speaking, if that stays the same, you know, the last couple of years, it's taken in that 10 to 11 category this year, probably could be right around 11. So, again, it's just another way. It's just another tool we've added to try to help. It's for the geeks like me to go in there, and I really want to look at the numbers. You know, if you kind of look at those units in that detail, a nice little tool that you can look at.

Yeah. Anyway. Yep. Really cool. Really cool. I think it's awesome. I think it's well thought out, and it's well done, and whatnot. And so, anyway, I think it's super helpful. This is something I think what we want to convey to people is it's something we use ourselves. Like, it's something that we need. And when Adam and I feel like we need it, or you guys feel like you need it, then we do it. And I think that's, Kurt, we haven't talked a lot about your history. Back in the day, you were programming odds for fun. You and Aaron, right? Which is Adam's brother. You guys had a little company. You're out there programming, and you're just doing it for fun. Yeah. I mean, literally for fun.

But cranking with program, because you guys, you're into that. And so, that's how we got to know you from our prior company. We bought you guys out. You know, we wanted you guys to come on board and program for us. And so, anyway, that was kind of the beginning of our relationship. This isn't new to you. So, you've been hunting many, even Wyatt watched your elk hunt down there that we did there. Oh, that was a good time. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah, that was fun. On that limited opportunity. Oh, he was rolling. But anyway, I'm just saying, A, this is coming from a programmer, you and John, namely, that are hunters. Avid hunter that, yeah, like you said, geeks about the draw odds and all that. Not just, yeah, well, tell me what you want, and I'll plug some stuff in my spreadsheet and spit it out. You know, I mean, you have the hunter hat and hunter eyeglasses looking at this as you're

building it. No. I mean, I was looking at it the other day, like, yeah, I mean, that all started with hunt odds. If you guys, you know, hunt odds.com was the, and literally, I looked at it. Yeah, it was hunt odds. That web domain's like 12 or 13 years old now. So, yeah, it's been, I mean, we do. Yeah, of course we do. Who owns it?

Oh, yeah. All right. Just making sure. That's it. It's been my baby for years. I mean, that's, you guys hit the nail on the head. We're geeks that like to hunt. I mean, Aaron and I, Adam's brother, I mean, years and years ago, we thought there's no, nobody out there has these in one nice place. Let's just build it. It was a hobby for us because we're passionate about it. So, I eat, sleep, and drink these numbers. I mean, it's just, I'm a numbers guy and I happen to be a programmer that likes to hunt and fish and it just, it works out good. Yeah. It's awesome. Well, I want to talk a little bit about, and I think we can talk to Aaron about this as well, but just real quick, briefly overview the Epic Scout maps. The last thing out there that we haven't really talked about is not only do we have maps that you can purchase, we still have those great waterproof, you know, bomb proof maps.

We also have the maps where you can literally, you know, go out on our, out on our little member tool area and all the different states, like say, for example, Wyoming. And you can, it's got the topographic maps as well as all the layers that you can add on top. For example, you know, you want to look at the elk units, the elk unit you're in. And it just gives you a chance to go out there and kind of pre-scout the unit, get a little bit of a lay of the land. It's all part of the subscription that you already have. So, you might as well be using it. Works really slick. Very, very helpful too, especially if you're researching, you know, some states like, you know, deer, elk, or antelope that, you know, let's say you're a big public land, self-guided guy, you know, and you, the biggest thing you need to factor in is, is there enough public land or is there too much private land?

It's like, well, I see in the minimum points query, I can draw this, that, and the other. Next step is if you know nothing about it, is to go superimpose land ownership map and things like that, along with maybe in some of the states, the game distribution map over it, so you're like, all right, there, that's, that's why, or that's antelope country, and there's a lot of BLM. I can, I can do that. I can see that with my eyes versus just have to question or read it off the state's website that there's 42% public land, but when you see it and it's all blocked up really good in this half over here, and this half's private, but this half's got plenty of antelope in it, you feel comfortable. Yeah. I mean, just the other day. You'll figure it out. So, I like that as well, the base, like, just, just like selecting a base map, you guys got

everything from, you know, hybrid maps to, to topographic maps to street maps to National Geographic. I think there's 24. Yeah. On down to USA Topo maps. I mean, there's 14, let's call it 1400 options on there, as well as the details. You can go, you know, click on the details and whatnot, and then it overlays the unit boundaries like Adam Sand and whatnot. And so, man, you could, you could get lost in this and, and yet learn something about it, especially if you're. Yeah. I mean, just the other day I had a buddy that's never been to Wyoming before. He just wants to go shoot an antelope. And as you guys have talked about, I grew up in camera. So we pulled up the units around camera and we overlaid that, you know, the, the boundary or the ownership. And he was able to see, well, this one unit's pretty checkerboarded.

And so even though we talk about it in the magazine and even on our online stuff about it being private, he's visually could see. Yeah. Okay. Well, it looks like it might have a lot of public because it's checkerboard. I'm going to stay away from that versus the unit right next door has a whole big chunk of BLM land. That's, that's just real easy to go. Yeah. So immediately he knows that he can go and hunt that unit. You know, he, he, it's that visual to see where the public land is versus, you know, on paper, yeah, it's 50%, but because it's all checkerboarded and, you know, in Wyoming, that can be a pain to hunt that checkerboarded land. He avoided that one unit and went to a different unit. And he used that for that very reason. It was pretty slick. So.

I did have a guy hit me up and he's like, Hey, I was wondering if you could do the roads and just tell us if those are County access roads or if they're a private road. I'm like, well, that's next level. I've never heard. That's County recorder. And you got to read deeds on row. I mean, it's like, it's not, I don't know anybody that does that, but Hey, Kurt, if you want to make a killing, I'll take 10%. You develop it. We'll tell the world about it. How about that?

Anyway, I had another guy that says, Hey, is there any way I can look at a map and tell how bumpy it is and how, how hard it's going to be on my vehicle? Cause there were some of these roads that were really dark red lines and they were crap, you know? And I'm like, he was pulling his cabin trailer to a point of no return. He could turn around 30 footer. So anyway, that's, that's going to happen. We laugh about it, but five years from now, Kurt, you'll figure it out and we'll integrate it on our website. How about that? Yeah. They'll have imagery and digital elevation models programmed into it over the imagery and figure it out. No, better not take a, you know, lower riding too. That's right. That's right. I could have used that in New Mexico. How many tires is this road going to require? I would like to point out though, there's a few features out there that maybe some of

our listeners have never, or don't realize it's out there. I mean, we're talking about the roads and the topo maps and the unit boundaries and the public and private, but Colorado is a good, another state where maybe just a quick highlight, we actually have the winter range out there. We have where mule deer concentrate, you know, straight from the biologists there. And, you know, that's a data layer that they track. So, I mean, in a state like Colorado, you can go even a little bit deeper. So, not only can you see, okay, well, it's public, private, maybe where am I going to go in? You can actually kind of see the winter migration and, or sorry, the migration routes as well as like where they concentrate. So, you might be able to kind of hit the ground running on one of those late season Colorado hunts when before you're like, well, I've never hunted, say, unit, I don't even know,

70 before. And I want to go out there and I drew a tag this year. And where do I even begin? You can kind of look at some of those things. So, just a little side note that there's a little bit more data than just, you know, just the public and private and roads and total maps. So, we clicked on it. So, we clicked on it, Kurt. So, for example, we'd go, you know, you'd go under, say, research tools. And then underneath there's over on the right-hand side of that, when it opens up, there's a state map. You click on it. And anyway, and then you can go over to, say, Colorado. We click on it. And then over on the left-hand side, there's under details.

It's catching up to me here. It takes a minute to load. But anyway, you can go under details. Here it is. And then under content, click content on that. And then there they are. There's the Colorado GMUs, of course, roads, mountain goat sheep, land ownership, whatever it is you need. There's mule deer winter range, mule deer concentration. I can click those. Scroll in on a particular unit. And then, hey, for second, third, fourth seasons, probably ought to go to where these mule deer winter range, you know what I mean? I find myself consulting a lot. If it's an area that I haven't been to personally, it's fine to see or read how much public lands in a unit based just totally on a computer program, factoring in public-private ownership and spitting out a percentage. But if you then overlay, if you say you're looking at a third season and you overlay that over

the land ownership on deer concentration and you realize, well, all the summer rains is 99% public, but the winter rains and the concentration areas is 90% private, you're probably going to have a problem finding access there. So you might need to look at a different unit where the winter concentration areas or the winter rains and critical winter rains has at least enough. You're going to run into private land in Colorado and winter rains. That's where people settled. That's where the water is, all that more of the easier access areas. But you can definitely avoid some units that are like almost all private land and you're going to have a problem finding a place to hunt third, fourth season. If you overlay those concentration areas on top of land ownership and there's plenty of others that have a lot of mixture of BLM, you can hunt till your heart's content. I like it.

I've been laying, I'm looking at stuff right now and I can see the land ownership. I changed my base map and anyway, to the topo and I can see the land ownership and then I got to see all the mule deer winter range and whatnot. And so super easy. It's anyway, again, all of this is for a hundred bucks. You get the publication, you get to be able to log in. And you can track your points, you can go to all the e-mags, even prior years. You can go to the research tools and go check out online odds and how states work and all of these kinds of things. Have a browser behind another browser so you can act like you're working at work. And then every once in a while you go click on, right? Right, John? Come on. That's right. That's what people do. Put some, browse around, put some ear pods in and listen to the podcast while you're browsing around. There you go. On the clock. That's right. Okay.

Whatever you're doing on the clock. Hey, and most of the people are doing it from home anyway because of COVID. So they don't even have to do it. They don't have to hide it. I don't understand this, Kurt. They're saying that people are more effective at home than they've ever been while actually going down to the office. Do you believe that crap? I won't comment on that.

I personally, I personally don't know since March. And I do know that there's less distractions. I feel like I can kind of get a lot more done and set my thing. But I'm a social person. I miss people. So it's been kind of brutal for me. But anyway, so. Oh. But, yeah. I agree. If I had to Zoom the crew every morning about. Yeah. Not as fun. I had to wear a mask for three straight hours the other day and I thought I was going to die. Another good reason to work from home, I guess. I know. I'm with Bronson. I had to go to back-to-back ball games and, of course, you've got to scan your QR code to get in. Prove that you're a parent. Answer 15 challenge questions to prove that it's your kid that you're there to watch. A retinal scan. Open your mouth. Look at your tonsils. And then have your tight-fitting mask for three straight hours. It's like, geez. I'm embellishing a little bit. I'm just.

Oh. It's not too far away. Well, I think one thing we didn't. We've covered a lot of the tools and the resources that our members have. I think one thing that really sets us apart is you do your research. You come up with three units that you're looking at in Colorado for your point, you know, totals. And then you can call us and you can say, hey, what's your opinion on this unit versus the next unit? Yeah. A lot of guys can get a lot more leading questions, I guess, when they call us because they've looked at their minimum points query. They've looked at some of these tools that we've talked about with land ownership, deer concentration, different things like that. And so when they call us or say, I think I can get unit X or Y. It looks like there's plenty of public land. Could you steer me away from that or is that a good idea?

And it just allows you to be able to gain more confidence in the direction you're kind of looking at using your points, maybe bouncing idea off us kind of last thing versus saying, hey, there's 102 deer units in Colorado. I got four points. What do you think? Which we get questions like that. And we welcome. And we can give you our two cents, all that. But you then have to start boiling down a lot of different things. What season? You're going to hire a guide. You're going to do a self-guided. I mean, so if you can look on this, you can weed out a lot of that stuff that you know is not an option for what you're looking at. You can come prepared with real questions and whatnot. And of course, we could vet some more out with you. But anyway, same kind of thing. We give them four options. They go back at home and start looking at those four options and really work through the process.

Ratify it like you said your buddy did, Kurt. He can see unit X over here has 50-50 public and private, but it's check reported the whole way. Unit Y next door is 50-50 private. Very chunked. Heavy white private here. Heavy BLM in the southern half. And another thing, too, let me point out that he mentioned to me is, you know, we didn't really talk about this specific, but just a second ago, Adam, you mentioned your guys' two cents on a unit. One thing that kind of sets us apart a little bit different is because we have the consultant piece and the consultants, we take the consultant notes from the magazine and put them online with our research tool. So, for example, I'm staring at that unit seven again. If I click on the unit profile, I get to actually, I can read real quick the epic consultant notes that were in the magazine as well.

And my buddy pointed that out with the antelope unit that he was researching, is he could go out there real quick and see what you guys wrote about them as well. And so that way, you know, he doesn't have to flip back and forth to the magazine. He's like, man, I can't remember if these guys, what these guys thought about this unit. He can look right there online. It's a cool little integration right there. And then, so not only have they done all the research, they've also gotten your guys' take on the unit. Then when they call, they're a little more educated, like you guys said. Then they can go back to the website, dig a little bit deeper. We try to make all this information, I mean, the bottom line to everything we've been talking about today is just making it nice and easy to use. And combining all that between the consultant work, the online odds, statistics, information

about the unit, maps, everything that you want to know about that unit. We're trying to get that out there online to make it a little bit easier for you to either draw tags or do your research. And that's the goal, right? That's the goal. Okay. All right. Well, sounds good. I think it's awesome. I did. I was thinking about some mapping. I was wondering if maybe, like, if we developed our own, let's, I'm going to just say Onyx, right? So let's just develop the Epic version of Onyx. But then we integrate all of people's past experience. Ever experience. And they can load in waypoints. And then when I load into Epic, I sign in. I'm going to go hunt this unit. Boom. I can prove. I put in my tag number. That would allow all these waypoints to load into my Epic Onyx, so to speak. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, 200. Yeah, 200-inch was killed here.

So-and-so saw this here. By the way, he took a picture and uploaded it to this waypoint. Interesting. Anyway, I'm just saying, Kurt, like, I've got millions and millions of amazing ideas. Jason's got plenty of distractions running through his head right now, it sounds like. And anyway, if you ever get some spare time, why, let's work on that project. All right. Okay, well. It's just, yeah, this, in summary, this world that we live in, you know, the paper magazine at home is nice. I still like those. I'm not, I don't think I'm that old, but I still like a paper mag. I love paper. And, but I realize my phone is where I probably spend majority of my time, and then my other time is in front of the computer. So it doesn't matter where I'm at. I get a call. I get a message from somebody. I can pull something up on my phone or my computer here at work.

Or if I'm at home, there's a magazine, and I have all those tools there to be able to jump in and answer questions or give a unit recommendation or things like that. But it's just for convenience of our members. And we haven't added or increased our membership at all. A hundred bucks still gets everything we've always done. We're just adding to it. This type of service has been a hundred bucks since the mid-90s. And here we are. Look what it now includes. Yeah. It's crazy what it now includes. I mean, guys aren't needing to pay more than that. And if they don't want to, it's all here. Give it a try. I don't think you'll be disappointed. Yeah. And ability to call and talk to us as well and add another layer of confidence, I guess, in picking a unit or getting a validation on your thoughts or research that you're doing or things like that. That's included.

I think part of it is you're not just – this doesn't just happen. The research doesn't just happen. We're out doing it in the field as well. You can e-scout so much. You can, you know, make so many phone calls, whatever, but we're out doing it. And then integrated with Kurt, obviously, what you and John are doing and whatnot, just think it's a heck of a combination. Hard to be beat. So, anyway, anybody that's interested, give us a holler. 435-263-0777. If you're a current member, go log in. There's a lot there for you. A lot more than has been in the past. Although we have had a lot of these features, it's just you've made a – a heck of a stride there, Kurt, in making it very user-friendly. And John as well. Thank you. It's been awesome. It's great. We use it every day. Maybe just bring up, I mean, or odds, odds. No matter where you see them or no matter where you go to look at them,

is this information the same as, you know, some other XYZ company can give you? Or what's the difference, you know? What would be the advantage to a client to use our information versus somebody else's? Well, I just think – and, Adam, you can chime in as well. But I just think being – Adam and I have talked a lot, okay, because we're here early. We're cranking through a publication. We get excited about whatever it is that we happen to be dived into at the moment. And I think a lot of it is interpreting changes of dates. What does dates affect this unit? How does an early season deer hunt affect this unit? And I think we are old enough now, and we've seen a lot, that we can see what that – what kind of opportunities those are going to create. We can almost see things that are going to happen before they happen. I would agree with that.

It's the – we have to do certain judgment calls on some of these odds, like some of the Arizona data, you know, of what it takes to be in the maximum point draw for a resident and a non-resident. The state's not super clear about making an easy spit-out thing that the whole world can interpret clearly. We make judgment calls based on how we know how the draw works there, and so we publish that in the magazine. To another extent, yeah, you can look at things like season dates this year in Colorado. All right? Even our anticipated drawing odds, Kurt, based on the last two, three years or whatever in Colorado or Wyoming or wherever is going to use the past two- to five-year trends. What is a burn, a change in management strategy that we're aware of, or monumental season date changes like Colorado is going to occur this year?

You've got to add the human element of intelligent, you know, researchers and consultants to be able to really say, yeah, you've got two points. That unit took two points last year, third season. I wouldn't plan on it. Everything's going to bump up. Or, you know, a unit that has very low tag numbers, 30 total tag numbers, maybe eight to go to non-residents using a round number. It doesn't take very many tags to make eight total tags jump up by three to four points in one year by some factor, like the season dates or just a bunch of great reports coming off the winter range or a great hunt on that unit last year and a light winter that doesn't, you know, have any of the big bucks get killed. So I guess the human consultant eyes that maybe we look through all the time, we dream about, sleep about, you know, whatever. That's just how we see this data.

We're looking for angles for ourselves, but we don't have the points that, you know, sometimes we use points, we get back to zero, but we're still, we look that way at this stuff and we're looking for angles to get tagged. I think that's 100% right. And we're also looking at things from a perspective of some of these units, Adam, these deer maybe migrate through and these late dates are actually too late. There's that. That's a fact. And there's a few of those units and we're looking at them going, ah, you know, that was an awesome unit last year. These late dates, yeah, they're going to be rutting, but they might be rutting in a different unit, maybe even a different state. And, you know, and so we're looking at things like that. We're also looking at things like, for example, the New Mexico unit 2B youth. It offers 150 tags. They were in October.

Now they're at the end of November during Thanksgiving. They're smoking giants. But what's that do to the rest of the next year? The quality after three or four years. To the whole unit. And so we're looking at it going, well, man, we're kind of half okay with them changing the dates. Take advantage of it if your kids can draw. But they should have constrained the tag numbers a little bit in relation to those dates, knowing the take was going to be that much greater on big deer, on old deer. And so, but they didn't. They overlooked it. Maybe even on purpose or whatever. And so now you're seeing big deer being taken, but we know it's for a season. We know it may be for a couple seasons, whatever. And at some point you're going to see a decrease in overall quality in that unit. We're constantly analyzing that kind of stuff.

And I think that's just being from being out there and being in it and understanding it and whatnot. And just like what you're saying, Adam, we're taking literally, I don't know how many phone calls a day apiece. We're taking dozens and dozens and dozens of phone calls. And we get a good feel for, yeah, that unit took 16 points, but it's going to jump to 20. By the way, there's four non-resident tags, and I know four guys over 20 that are applying. Yeah, and so it might jump five or six points. You know, just like last year, 5B north in Arizona. Okay. The archery updates got shifted later because they had an early firearm season in 5B south. That rotates throughout the state. But to keep it uniform, they just made 5B north dates a little later as well. We knew before the end of the application period, people that were putting in. It's going to take 16, 17 points. Yeah.

That were 15, we thought, yeah, they'll probably get it. By the end of the application period, we told them, you're probably not going to get it based on what we had heard and what we had seen. And they didn't get it by 15. And that jumped for five points in one year. Oh, yeah. And then my son happened to draw a random tag with 10 points. Eight or some, 10, yeah. Yeah, two, a loyalty, a hunter-ed, and his regular eight years. And so anyway, but 100% right. There's a lot of interpreting odds and effects on units and season dates and overall management strategies, practices, whatever. Adam, there's an archery desert option here in Utah. Going to be in January in this particular unit. Your initial reaction? I'm not going to guide somebody there. Okay. Wouldn't even take money. Okay. 15 grand. No. Maybe Aaron will do that. Okay. Okay.

My point is, but on paper, everybody's going, well, there's a new opportunity. I'm super excited about this, and I'm an archer. This seems like a natural. And I just think there's so much more that goes into just what's on paper. That's what we're here for. That's what we write about. That's what you're going to read about, either in an e-mag, either in a paper mag, or, Kurt, when you take our comments on these units and load them up on the website when they're doing that in the research tools. And so I think there's just a lot to it, and there's just a ton on here. You can get lost in what we've got going on in the amount of information that's published. And I would point out, John, to your question. Anybody can go read a report and look at numbers, but I think Adam started to talk about it. Arizona is the prime example of where we take it that next step further.

I pulled up real quick, Unit 10, Elk in Arizona, the early season rifle. If you just were to glance at the tables, you'd say, I got 24 points. I'm a non-resident. I'm putting in. Because if I look at the thing, they issued tags to people all the way down to 21, you know, with 21 points last year. But going into that next extra layer, peeling away the data and realizing that because of our quota up to 10%, really it took 26 points as a non-resident last year. And we have that information out there. So, you know, at first glance, you think, well, I can draw that tag and, you know, maybe I'm going to plan on it. I'm already booking my vacation and I don't apply for anything else the rest of the year. When in reality, no, as a non-resident, you're going to need 27, 28 points going into next year. I mean, that kind of level of detail, you can never get that from just staring at numbers.

And so, yep. Just spitting a number out because it's going to show that the last maximum point tag went to a guy with 24 points. Okay, what that printout doesn't tell you is that it skipped guys with 25 and some with 26 that didn't draw. And so that tells you, well, those 26 and 25 point guys that didn't draw had to be non-residents because the quota got met by another guy with 26 or 27. The non-resident quota got met. And so it skipped the rest of the non-residents and started issuing tags in the max point guys with 24 and they had to be residents. And we've seen that like in Colorado odds where you go in as a dual application, you go in with the lowest point total. Your buddy has zero, you have four. You didn't draw, but you should have drawn on paper. Why did that guy not draw? Because he was dual with his buddy who had zero. So there's just a lot of interpreting that goes on.

I think part of this too is you get it from answering the freaking phone. And anymore this day and age, people don't want to answer the phone. They don't want to give customer service. They don't want to talk to people. We get a lot of that, you know, just from being willing to talk to people, answering the phone, going over things. And then we also get to learn what they've been out doing, what they saw, where they hunted, what they killed. We're also managing photos and stories. And there's just so much information. John, this place is like the information highway. Yeah, it is. Really. For hunting. You know, and you can get your information in several places, but the quality of information you cannot get anywhere else. So, well, I'm a little biased, but I 100% agree with that. So, anyway, I think that's about it. Kurt, we were going to possibly call Aaron. We give him a little grief.

He's, of course, got a huge background in mapping. And you and him were partners on that, hunodds.com or whatever. But, anyway, and kind of go over the mapping stuff. But we've been a little bit windy today. And we don't want to give him too much trouble about buying a new truck or trying to find a vehicle with four wheels and four-wheel drive. You know what I mean? He did text me this week and said I got a VIN number. So, it means the frame has been stamped in Detroit or wherever it's been made. He ordered one. He had to get one brand new. We'll see if he takes possession of it. All right. Anything else? Do you want to add anything else real quick, Kurt? Do you want to go back to work and do something else? No, I have anything else to add. I mean, I think you hit it for me a minute ago when you said, Hey, maybe if you've tried it in the past but you haven't been back out there recently,

whether you're a member or not, go try this stuff out. It's a whole new look and feel. I think you guys will really like it. Okay. Well, I've learned a lot. I appreciate the ice fishing tips as well. I'm going to teach my kids, and they're going to think I'm amazing and knowledgeable. You bet. And I appreciate that, Kurt. I owe it all to you. Thanks, guys. See you. All right, guys. Have a great day. Appreciate it. Okay. Well, fellas, it's unbelievable. Real quick, let's finish this thing real quick. We did cover in the January issue Arizona elk and antelope. Adam, you mentioned it to begin with. Wyoming sheep, moose, goat, elk, and bison. All the information is in there. There's some changes. You'll want to check it out. Deadline for Arizona is February 9. Yeah. Elk in Wyoming is February 1. The other deadlines are staggered.

It's one of those states that has deadlines, you know, March 1st and March 31st for sheep, moose, goat, March 31st for bison. Of course, the deer and the antelope we don't cover in this issue because they're due June 1st this year. And so we'll cover that later in the May issue of the magazine. That always allows us antelope and deer a little bit more susceptible to winter loss and things like that. So if you write something in December, January, it might be a whole lot different in May when you, you know, have the chance to, you know, evaluate the winters, which sometimes this year we're not in that situation yet, but sometimes Wyoming can be prone to bigger winters. So we put that off and do the antelope and deer a little bit later. Um, are a few changes that are definitely noteworthy. Um, I guess probably most notable for Wyoming. We want to start there.

Uh, in the past, the, the point for moose and sheep has not been optional. If you choose to apply for them in the draw as a non-resident and apply for them, they will ding you 150 bucks for those points, uh, out of your refund. That's now an optional thing. I don't know if they saw a mass exodus. People quit applying, missing out on app fees, whatever, or just being nice. I don't know why, but now you can opt out of that. So for some of you that think that that extra $150 on top of, you know, the application fee and the two and a half percent on top of what they take from you having to front the tag fees is too excessive and just want to apply. You can consider doing that for moose and sheep. Just make sure you apply for a unit that has random tags because you're going to be in the random draw. If you don't have enough points to be in the maximum point draw, don't put in for a tag

that has a low enough quota. You know, you got to have at least four tags for non-residents to, for have one of them go in the random draw. So pay attention to that. It's all spelled out in our tables. So there's really not very many. Last year was only like four sheep units and five moose units that gave random tags. I'm going for memory, but it's very limited. So pay attention to that. So while you mentioned that the elk deadline was February 1, we also have the modified date of May 10th. So you can go in and plug and play a little bit and, and, uh, option, you know, change your op, change the unit selection that you initiated your application with and whatnot. And so anyway, it gives you an option there as well. I changed that last year. You may remember it was like a quick turnaround. We found out in February if you're going hunting. Now you don't.

But if something changes between February 1st and early May and you draw something or your plans change, you can just go withdraw and do points only in the summer. You also got to do points. Even if you apply for elk and deer and antelope right now, you have to remember to go back in the summer and buy your point. They just don't give it to you like in the past. And that has caught guys. We've heard some people gnashing teeth. And we knew it would happen. It's a natural thing. It did. With, with change comes people who, you know, don't keep up with the change and, uh, and end up forgetting to do it. I had a mask, max point guy now to two behind. Yeah. He, he applied, he's applied, but he, uh, didn't go in the summer and buy his elk point or his deer point. Well, he applied in his mind. He should get a point. Well, they've changed that a couple of years ago.

You used to be able to, you know, click the box, you know, pull price elk with preference point option or without. And they don't know you just apply now, but they make everybody go back again. This is for the deer and elk. They make everybody go back in later. So, so anyway, um, Arizona's out as well. Elk and antelope we cover now. We'll do sheep and deer later. Uh, their application will, will be due for sheep and deer would be a second Tuesday in June. Generally speaking for the last, I don't know, 20 plus years. Um, deadline is February 9th. You can go in and crank on an application there. They do, uh, have unit changes with regards to the early rifles and early muzzles and, uh, switching, rotating a few out to give, uh, all the units a little love, so to speak, and spread out the pressure a little bit there. Um, anyway, we cover all those things in the publication as well.

One thing you're probably going to want to go to, you may have gotten an email if you're a past applicant of Arizona, you may have gotten an email in the last several weeks about your online username or password being changed. And there's it for their, huh? Involuntarily. Just, it was a mandatory change. Yeah. And they tell, they now tell you what your, your new customer ID number is. Yeah. And, and so you have to go, don't get caught last minute and not be able to go log into your portal and all that. Um, want to go respond to that email, dig it up, look for, look for it. You may end up having to call them, but make sure you can get into your portal and have everything set up there. Part of the reason I bring that up is, or if you've never done that, go set up a portal. Um, this is one of those years last year was, um, you know, pretty good antler growth year for elk.

Ended up being very tough during the hunting season, very hot, dry, delayed rut and all that. This year we're going into the winter, fairly dry, still too early to clearly tell if it's a bail out of Arizona situation. We're not saying that yet, but at least if you have your point guard in place and you apply by the February 9th deadline for elk and something becomes very clear by March, April, May, June, that this is a, this drought has a big grip on it. You'd have an option to pull out. If you don't, if you have a bunch of points you want to protect. And we ourselves have used the point guard option. Yeah. Just because we didn't want to go. Yeah. It wasn't even necessarily due to antler growth. Yeah. Sometimes you end up drawing other tags, you get too busy, whatever. Um, like Bronson saying. And so you do have that option one time and the next time your points will go to zero,

uh, no matter what. And so, well, let's call it two. If you have the loyalty and hunter ed loyalty, meaning you applied for that species for five consecutive years or went down there and took an abbreviated hunter education course, you'll get a permanent point for doing that for every species. So anyway, we just wanted to breeze over that. We're not going to crank it out. That's what, uh, the member benefits are of joining Epic Outdoors as far as going through unit by unit by unit and, uh, really vetting it out heavy. We did want to talk about our, uh, publication. We wanted to talk about our website and some of the changes there, and then just let you know a few of the, uh, brief changes within the publications as well. And so anyways, we're, uh, kind of finishing up here. We do want to throw a shout out to MOA rifles, uh, super good dudes over there. They know what they're doing.

They're coming out with some amazing stuff and, and whatnot. Um, dude, they're awesome. Bronson, we've talked about it many times. You've got one of their rifles, killed a lot of stuff with it. In fact, you even took a heavy gun on one of these hunts and we're wishing you had old Sheila. Yeah. Yeah. It's just when you're packing a little six, five PRC mountain type rifle, which I have from them. And then you pack one of your, our bigger guns, which we have, which are awesome. You just notice a difference. You really do. And, uh, I was missing it at times, you know, I got to spread the love between the guns. I mean, I don't know. I just kind of, I don't like to see one of my guns sitting there unused. If it's a Wazoo gun, I have guns collecting dust. Don't get me wrong. That are sentimental guns, early college days sitting in there. I'm not going to get rid of, but the guns I use.

I rotate a little bit based on the species of the hunt, but anyway, yeah. Great. Make great guns. MOA rifle. Awesome. So anyway. I just ordered one of their bipods too. Did you? Yep. On their website. Easy to, easy to order. So they sell all kinds of different knickknacks and from rugged Ridge outdoors. Yeah. So anyway, um, MOARifles.com. Go there, check them out. If you need a rifle, uh, give them a holler. Another shout out we want to give is to Vortex Optics. They're another one of our partners here at Epic Outdoors. We're also optics dealers. Um, and Vortex is one of the brands that we are dealers for here at Epic Outdoors. Call us for pricing. If you're looking for any optic, whether it be Vortex or anything else, call us, uh, before you purchase somewhere else, uh, for pricing. We'd be glad to give you an option there to consider it a great deal.

So, but speaking specifically of Vortex, great partner of ours. We've actually got, uh, our cover winners, uh, for every cover that we get, get, uh, a pair of 18 by 56 UHD vinyls as well. That's right. The Razor UHDs. Razor UHDs. And, uh, appreciate Vortex being a partner of ours. You know, you can check them out at vortexoptics.com. A lot of guys will go on there ourselves as well as we'll actually consult with, uh, optics buyers over the phone. They have a great, they've got all their makes and models. You can see all the different various rifle reticles, which are very helpful online. Compare the specifications, you know, height, weights of scopes or different things like that. And, uh, and then call us when you are, you know, a lot of guys will call us and say they know the scope they want by going to Vortex's website. So check it out at vortexoptics.com. I like it.

Good quality products right there. All right. Anything else, boys? We good? Let's see. We do want to throw a shout out to ourselves. How about that? Let's give us a little love here. We do have our epic hunt, uh, giveaway. We're cranking out some hunts, some of the best hunts that we can find. Uh, Adam and I and John specifically hand select these hunts. We've got Yukon stone. We've got an Alaska doll, Nevada deer, including the Nevada, uh, 231 deer tag, the Acoma reservation elk hunt. I mean, these are hunts you just can't go out and buy necessarily. Uh, line, incredible lion hunt, Texas barbary sheep, as well as a wolf hunt for two guys. And then we're giving away an incredible amount of optics. We're talking $13,000. Uh, you can go to page 14 and 15 for more information in our January issue. Should have it any day. If you don't have it already, it's online as well.

You can go log in epic outdoors.com. Go check it out. You can also, uh, purchase tickets online. Epic outdoors.com. You can call us, whatever. If you refer a new member, you're going to get a free ticket into one of these drawings for any hunt that you choose. Uh, the new member will get a ticket and you'll get a ticket for referring him. So anyway, tell the world about us, especially if they're good dudes. We like, we like hardcore hunters in the epic outdoor service. And so anyway, uh, tell your buddies about it and you'll get a ticket into the giveaway. And if you're a podcast listener and like listening to us, uh, haven't joined for whatever reason, it's a great time to do it. You'll get a ticket in the hat for one of those hunts. If you do it right now, up until, uh, February 28th, that's the deadline to enter this membership drive.

And you know, great time to join too, because again, it's application season. It's kicking off. Get the first magazine of the year at the January magazine. You won't miss state a state issue, which is the ones we published from January to June. So give us a call either go online at epic outdoors.com or give us a call at 435-263-0777. We're here Monday to Friday, sometimes in between and early or really, really late in John's case. You said a ticket in the hat and I just reminded me, we got a box of hats. We got a box. We sell hats here at Epic Outdoors. If you need hats or decals for your truck or whatever, let's tell the world about us. Throw a decal on there, huh? Skull of a deer. What's wrong with that? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Anyway, you can call us for those too. So, all right, everybody have a good one. Enjoy the publication. Apply and draw. Let's do this.