Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both.

Big shout out to Onyx Hunt for their support of this podcast.

I'm your host, Blake Pickle, and we are officially in February now.

And I don't know about y'all, but for us here in Mississippi, February was always this kind of month where you would catch yourself looking around and wondering what to do. You can't deer hunt. That's over. He can't duck hunt. That ended in January 2. I suppose you could dream about spring turkey season, but that doesn't start till March, well, I'll tell you what I'm

going to do. Over these past few months, you and I have had the privilege of listening to some

pretty incredible and fascinating folks, grizzly bear specialist and marine biologists, botanist,

botanist, and beekeepers. We have heard from a wide spectrum. And that's one of the things that I've

come to love about doing this show.

One drawback that I have found, however, is that if you haven't noticed, Backwoods University

is a pretty stick-to-the-point kind of show. We don't really go down any rabbit holes,

which I think is overall good. But sometimes in these interviews, I will hear a real humdinger of a story,

but it's just slightly off topic, and I'm left scratch in my head wondering what to do with

this incredible piece of content. Well, I found the solution. In this episode, we're going to go

through some of the interviews from past BU episodes and hear some pretty awesome

tales that didn't quite make the original episode. I am supremely confident that you'll be

glad we found somewhere to put these. Let's dive in.

Our first story is going to set the tone for this whole episode.

From the time that I first heard it sitting across from Tom Parker in his cabin in western

Montana, I knew I had to find a way to share it.

It's simply too good.

Y'all will remember Tom from the Grizzly episode, and his stories about getting run up a tree

by an angry grizzly bear in his decades spent guiding in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Mission

...