Imagine you're bent over, field dress in an elk that you've taken with your bow.

In rough country, in Wyoming or Montana or Idaho, or perhaps even British Columbia

and you hear a sound

you look up and there's a grizzly bear

coming at you full tilt from about 40 yards away. You got your little

backcountry hunting weight hunting knife in your hand.

And you have a gun with you,

but it's laying on your pack

about five or six steps away.

And there's not a cartridge in the chamber of that gun.

This happened a couple of years ago to a hunter. True story, and if want to hear the details, go back to the episode that we did on

bear guns and listen to that. This hunter died. You don't want to get into that sort of situation. And the reason I mentioned

this story again is because we're going to talk about how to carry your handgun in the back country, particularly in Grizzly Bear country, briefly.

Then we're going to move into a discussion on making your own pseudo-custom hunting rifle with all the components you want,

but doing it all yourself, just with the tools you probably already have in your garage.

That's going to be the body of this podcast episode and I'm really pretty excited to address this. Now this main episode topic comes from a

listener's question. Chapp is named Colin McKinnis.

And he wrote me a pretty cool email with some very well outlined questions about doing a project like this because he's

already you know he's ready to launch he wants to get going and do this now the

question about how to carry your backup sidear in the backcountry. That's been

posed oddly enough in the past couple weeks by multiple different hunters.

I'm just going to read the question from one of them.

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