Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Podcasts and Blasts

Jess McGlothlin is a wanderer, paddleboarding on the jungle whitewater of the Peruvian Amazon, fly-fishing lost atolls in the South Pacific or watching the rivers of the taiga unfold beneath the rotors of a battered vintage Russian helicopter. She started her own company at age 13, was a professional equestrian in Sweden, lasted exactly four days of college, and has been weathering the travel bans...

Missoula-based carpenter, elk hunter and bird dog man Malcolm Brooks is the author of the epic novel Painted Horses, a wild and beautifully written story of romance and collision in 1950s Montana, where ancient pictographs in unexplored canyons whisper stories about to be forever lost beneath waters impounded in the frenzy of the dam-building era. Painted Horses has been described by Rick Bass as...

Nathan "Shags" McLeod is the hunting- and fishing- est award-winning radio DJ you'll ever meet and has spent the past 15 years building a huge audience from his base in central Missouri. His fans come for his classic rock and roll and for his no-holds-barred, straight-from-the-heart reporting on conservation and the hunting and fishing that conservation makes possible. Shags can catch fish and pla...

From his most recent book Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization, back to his rough-and-tumble newspaper days covering the scorched-earth timber industry of the 1980s, Richard Manning is the go-to investigative journalist for pivotal books about everything from the American prairie to the future of global agriculture. He's a lifelong hunter, a fisherman, the author o...

Iowa-based Phil Bourjaily is America's shotgunner and one of North America's foremost experts on shotguns and shooting. In addition to writing a monthly column – for nearly three decades – for Field & Stream, where he is shotguns editor, Phil has authored Field & Stream's The Total Gun Manual (with fellow firearms writer David Petzal ), Shotgun Guide, and other books. But he is also a writer's wri...

In a recent interview with Filson , Minnesota-born and bred photographer Lee Kjos was asked to describe his work in five words or less. Kjos replied: "Original. Authentic. Genuine. Unique, and bad-ass." For anyone who has marveled at the understated power of Kjos'  hunting and fishing photography, those five words – each of them earned the hard way – sum it up. Although Kjos ' upbringing in the de...

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" are not just words in the Declaration of Independence. They are words to live by, and perhaps nobody is living them harder or better right now than Clay Newcomb of the Arkansas Ozarks, owner of Bear Hunting Magazine. Clay is a mule trainer, a bear, whitetail and small game hunting obsessive, a dog man, archer, writer and filmmaker. But he is first and f...

Hal travels to the Bears Ears National Monument to meet with Angelo Baca, a filmmaker and storyteller who grew up in and around Blanding, Utah, and has roots in this country that go back, literally, thousands of years. For this conversation with Hal, he is home in Utah, where he continues to be one of the leading advocates for the Bears Ears National Monument and for Native American engagement in...

Rudi Roeslein came to St. Louis, Missouri, as a child from the refugee camps and ruins of post-World War II Europe. He became an inventor and an international industrialist who never lost his deep love for hunting and conservation. Rudi has invested $60 million of his own money creating successful renewable natural gas projects in north Missouri and pursuing what he calls "the 30/30 Vision" – a pl...

Born and raised in Choteau, Montana, Maggie Carr is a wilderness hunting guide, backcountry skier, skilled horse and mule packer and co-owner of the unique wilderness outfitting business Dropstone Outfitting , which offers packstring-suppported hiking trips in the Bob Marshall Wilderness and adjacent public lands of Montana. Maggie's family has been here on the Teton River since her great-grandfat...

What's it like to be in charge of one of America's oldest and most read hunting and fishing magazines? As the spring issue of Outdoor Life hits newsstands, we bring you the wild minds behind the stories: Senior Editor Natalie Krebs, Hunting Editor Andrew McKean and their venerable leader, Editor in Chief Alex Robinson. This is the work, this is the experience and the adventure, and, in today's cha...

In the West, it's called "the checkerboard" – one square mile of public land (640 acres, called a section) then one square mile of private – a direct result of frontier-era policies where the federal government gave away millions of acres of land, some to homesteaders but many to politically connected industries such as the railroads and timber companies. The idea, beyond just enriching a privileg...

Colorado's state trust lands have been held in an iron fist by some of the most anti-public access policies and regulations found anywhere in the Western states. The battle has been simmering for decades: Clearly, Coloradoans were demanding change. Since 2012, BHA's Colorado chapter has been leading the battle for increased access … and Colorado Parks and Wildlife responded, announcing last summer...

Hal meets with his old friend (and sometimes editor) Matt Miller in Matt's hometown of Boise, Idaho, to talk about life and Matt's new book Fishing Through the Apocalypse: An Angler's Adventures in the 21st Century . Matt and Hal have known each other since they both started out writing for Bugle magazine before the dawn of the present century, and Matt – an obsessed fisherman, elk and deer hunter...

BONUS EPISODE! Here's a special edition of the BHA Podcast & Blast, just in time for Pheasant Fest 2020! It's guns, it's dogs, it's wild flushing roosters on the wind, it's conservation and clean water and better farms…and it's Howard Vincent, the grand leader of Pheasants Forever, laying down the history, the future and the now of American upland bird hunting.

Wyoming native and star outdoor reporter, with nine years of writing the outdoors column for the Casper Star-Tribune, Christine Peterson has been immersed in Wyoming's hunting and fishing, mountains, rivers, plains and wilderness in a way few people will ever match. She talks with Hal about that life – the deadlines, the adventures, the stress and the love of newspapers and reporting – and her dec...

This episode of BHA's Podcast & Blast was recorded at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado! We're talking wildlife migration corridors, wildlife crossings and the future of Western wildlife with Colorado's best and brightest. The numbers are sobering: 3,000 wildlife and vehicle collisions per year in Colorado, 600 collisions in one stretch of Highway 9 between Kremmling and Silverthorne a...

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope." –Wallace Stegner . This week's podcast is an in-depth conversation with Mark Kenyon, Michigan-based hunter and fisherman, founder of Wired To Hunt, leading contributor at MeatEater...

"Photosynthesis puts things together. Fire takes them apart." – Dr. Stephen J. Pyne . While many people talk of the "Anthropocene" – the age of humankind, when nearly every natural process seems to be affected by the actions of billions of individual people – Stephen Pyne reminds us that we also are living in the Pyrocene , the age of fire, and that the history of humankind is inextricable from th...

Imagine an undiscovered Eden in the heart of South Dakota, a major river lying untouched and forgotten for decades – with epic fishing amidst thunderous solitude. It exists, and Dan Frasier, a pioneer of fly fishing for big carp and author of an Orvis guide to carp flies, found it: 39 miles of the Missouri River, almost inaccessible to the public, almost unknown. He was sorely tempted to keep his...

DJ Zor is vice chair of the Arizona chapter of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, a public lands hunter extraordinaire and Navy nuclear sub veteran, and Brad Powell of Trout Unlimited is a 32-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service – former supervisor of the Tongass National Forest, the entire Northwest Region, the Davy Crockett National Forest in Kentucky, and so on … a pragmatic but firebrand conser...

Hal sits down in Montana with Chris Parish and Leland Brown to talk copper bullets, lead fragments, falconry, raptors, condors, Mexico and California, a love of good guns, wild animals and wild meat – all following a long day of rifle shooting with everybody from the Hellgate Hunters and Anglers (a Missoula-based rod and gun club) to former U.S. Army snipers. Chris and Leland are co-founders of th...

Ron Boehme of Twin Lake, Michigan, has been hunting and training bird dogs since 1973 and is a senior judge with the North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association. Ron is the host of the extraordinarily popular (and rightfully so – the podcast is a riot) Hunting Dog Podcast . He has a whole lot of knowledge and a whole lot of stories. Ryan Busse, chairman of BHA's North American board, joins in...

It is 80 miles or so by boat down the intensely braided and ever-changing Yukon River to the village of Fort Yukon, Alaska (at the confluence of the Yukon and the Porcupine), where Hal meets Walter Peter, a Gwich'in hunter, trapper and fisherman – provider for his family and elders and others, taking meat and fish and whatever else the earth will give, eight miles above the Arctic Circle. Their co...

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert is petitioning the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop a new, state-specific Roadless Rule that would impact 4 million acres of National Forest lands in Utah. Does anybody in Utah want to protect roadless lands, which offer some of the world's best backcountry hunting, hiking, fishing, skiing; some of the world's most scenic places; and some of our most valuable fish a...