Welcome to the Vortex Nation podcast, brought to you by lovers of hunting, shooting, public lands, the Second Amendment, and good food.

What is up, everybody? Mark on the mic here at the Conservation Expo in Salt Lake City,

joined by my very good friend, Mr. Austin Atkinson from Hunting Fool.

If you guys aren't familiar with Hunting Fool, and Austin can't explain this a lot better than I can,

but you guys specialize in really a lot of things, Western Big Game,

but one of those things being Western big game,

tags, draw odds, hunts, things of that nature.

And I think the primary focus of our conversation today

is going to be a little bit of a state of the Western tag draw odds union,

which is, I mean, that's a big topic, but I think we can have simplify it, boil it down a little bit, and, you know, maybe a little bit of strategy stuff as well. Practice my words. We're on day four of the show here, Austin. I think I'm tired of talking to people. I might be out of words right now.

I don't know.

It's been great.

It's like it's awesome crew of folks. I mean, like this is the last of the show. The booth is still like pretty jammed up right now early in the day. It's cool. It's always one of my favorites and it's always great to see you. Yeah, it's been awesome. It's been really busy and just like everything else. it's not getting any cheaper and guys are trying to plan trying to find hunts find gear use their money and their time wisely yeah boy i mean i mean you

nailed it on the cost too like it just it really is going up there's a lot of hunts that you know

you're like oh maybe that's a little too rich for my blood right now, but in like, in two years I'll go.

But then you're just kind of like, you're always chasing it there, you know, point creep. You know, we can talk a little bit about that, but you think, oh, next year and you're kind of, you know, you chase that a little bit too. So, yeah, what's going on? I mean, what are you seeing out there? I mean, it's so easy to get discouraged right now.

And that's what we're really trying to do is keep people encouraged. There's still opportunities, but you can't do it all. There's no shotgun approach anymore. Everybody's got finite finances, and we just have to say, this is what I want to do. This is my budget. This is my time. And you should probably do it.

There's no sit around and waiting.

What are you saving for?

That's what I ask everybody.

Why not this year?

Because everybody wants to say,

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