Introduced to the outdoors Hunting Fishing hiking and camping then to start the blog and podcast and to appear and outdoor life and then in montana and wyoming and michigan new utah nevada colorado and elsewhere without further ado. [applause] thank you for being here. This is terrific so my first book thinking it would be appropriate to have a funny story. And with my first book and book tour i got to thinking about the first adventures to quickly come to mind that this is funny and subject so before getting here thought i should pass it through my common sense filter who is my wife. Last night i sat down in bed and said i want to start with a story so what do you think and so i walk her through it. And the further i get to the story it was in wyoming a number of years ago. And if it was concern or discussed you could tell straight off she was appalled and could not open tonights gathering with the story about the combination of human urine and that her sensibilities said it wasnt appropriate so i will save that story for after hours. But i do appreciate it is great to see this many people to come out about public lands and wild places and wild things. So to open things with a little bit of background who i am and how i got to the story and then read a short passage from the book, and finally is just an open dialogue. And then to spend a lot of time very rarely do i get people to talk back and i want to take advantage of that. And then i was raised in the outdoor family and we fished and hunted and hiked and hyped one does hiked we never did anything fancy and we were not going to disneyland. We never went to mexico or florida. If we took a vacation, it would be camping or seeing family or camping with family. That is the way i liked it. But we did not take any inclusive trips. Several years old i remember fragments of the trip but we were in Washington State camping alongside the shores i cannot remember if we were in the park or just outside but the beautiful campground right on the edge of the ocean and i remember there are sea lions and dolphins an absolutely beautiful place but a vicious storm came blowing through so much my dad and uncle tried to put up the big old kansas tent the walls are knocked over the polls are collapsing, the tent was completely filled with water and then eventually and reluctantly they decided or realized we could not camp on this one. We packed up all of the stuff and everyone got in the van. We drove off to the nearest tow town, the only hotel with vacancy and proceeded to pack my dad and my mom myself and my sister my aunt and uncle and cousins into one admittedly fancy hotel room. That was a high point a vacation. And then to have a cabin up north that we would frequently travel to and is much as the things we did outside i think they were relatively pedestrian which were fun but we have these aspirations and dreams and grow up reading books about people and exploring and traveling to alaska to the top of Mount Everest and i harbor the hopes of somebody on someday doing something that those types of places and experiences that was on the screen that we didnt have the skill set or the training to do Something Like that. We took a class my senior year in college called wilderness preparedness one oh one and it was just as cool and to have a great professor that was like bear girls but in real life, a field biologist who traveled all across the world studying big animals and wild places and was in antarctica and all the way down to the amazon in alaska and montana so this is the first time i was face to face and had done these things. By the time we got done with the class i fell armed with the tools that i needed i could read the topographic map , how to pack seven days worth of gear for the backcountry adventure and safely camp or hike in grizzly bear country and things i was not learning. So i graduated. Had that information in my back pocket and decided it was time to use it. Twentyone years old i a convince my girlfriend we should head west and career started in california we took three weeks to road trip across country rocky Mount National park in colorado, yellowstone and grand teton in wyoming. If any of you have been to some of these places you know what im talking about especially the first time you see Something Like that. It is lifechanging and paradigm shifting with anybody that appreciates the outdoors and open space, quiet encounters of animals if you appreciate those things when you head out to the bigger places you see the scale and the depth, it hits you right in the field and it happened to me. We climbed to the top of the mountain and backpacked over 12000foot passes and we saw the things open to that point were here and now they were there so i knew right then and there my poor girlfriend now my wife thought in my eyes as well that we werent going to be the same this would have to be a part of our lives from here on out. So i set my sights to do that so i continue to work in california but from that point forward any vacation day or any trip we took im following in the footsteps of my family and mom and dad wouldnt go to mexico or disneyland or fancy resorts we would sleep in the back of my pickup truck or camp in the tent and montana or maine or tennessee to see as many places as we could. I am fortunate i could swindle a deal to make a fulltime living from the outdoors eventually and start writing about the outdoors and speaking about the outdoors that allowed us to continue to spend more time outside. Eventually after buying the old camper and renovating it camping out on public land in idaho and michigan, throughout those experiences with hunting and fishing and camping and backpacking, i realized what an unbelievable inheritance we hav have, 640 million acres of public land spread across the United States that all belong to each and every one of us was Wildlife Watching , scuba diving, kayak whatever the flavor is it is there for us. Its very easy to take for granted and i have most of my life. We have a cabin up north and right next to public land and i never once wondered how we got that or why it was there and what it meant. I didnt realize it wasnt there by default or accident , people had to fight for those places and they still have to fight for those places. This is something i was slowly learning more about is also coming to find out these things were not guaranteed , there are many pressures on these places political, business, wanting to take advantage of the landscape for different reasons. That became pretty ubiquitous in the Outdoor Community with the idea the claims transfer movement you have probably heard about it the basic idea that it seemed pretty radical but the idea the government should not have public land instead sell it off to the highest bidder were transferred to states to let them do with it as they will. This seems like not a good idea if you hear about selling public lands millions of people go every year to drive the economy around the recreation of the places that harbor huge wildlife populations make sure they have clean air and clean water and renewable resources. Important stuff. But you come to find obviously people have different ideas about that different goals and priorities. This is all happening im spending more time out here learning more about this idea that this thing could possibly influence the future of these places i was falling in love with and then we get to 2016 early in the month of january radical ranchers storm into the National Wildlife refuge and took it over again point you may have seen it in the news it went on for days and days and weeks and weeks this group occupied the refuge and use that stand off as a bully pulpit to spread their rhetoric that government should not have any land we should give them back to the people in the big thing here there was a lot of concerning elements but the biggest was that it was normalizing the idea because it went from being a topic just discussed and little backyard gatherings in certain parts of the country to now cnn and fox news because of the mainstream major of the conversation now all of a sudden it made it more plausible it could be a real thing. It went so far as president ial candidates talking about supporting this idea. Things are looking dicey they seem to be in a position that are seemingly impossible idea to lose the pet one the public land isnt so impossible so at this point my wife and i turned to a wild piece of public land we drove across the country to utah and arizona for ten days of hiking and camping which brings us to the passage of the book i would like to read that several pages and to the on stage days into the trip and those that were leading the takeover were led by bundy the standoff goes hundreds of miles away from where we were but while that is going on we are outside trying to see these places and find myself increasingly contemplating what could happen if they are not around. After spending a few more days in canyonlands we moved our camp driving down to arizona and the glen canyon recreational area. Then we returned to the Colorado River this time at the mouth of the grand canyon 300 miles south of our first stop. I remember in the early 19 hundreds the grand canyon faced uncertainty with mining corporations and tourist Industries Seeking to have it parceled out to landowners but soon after president roosevelt stepped up to the plate to ensure that didnt happen he addressed the people of arizona. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it man can only marr it but what you can do is keep it for your children and your childrens children and for all who come after you if he could travel at all for every american we got past the stage my fellow citizens if we treat any part of our country is something to be skim two or three years for the present generation whether the water or scenery, whatever it is, handle it so your childrens children will get the benefit of it. Five years later the authority he permit a protected the grand canyon for future generations standing there before that seemingly impossible chasm watching the waters of the colorado race by avalanches of froth with each new rapids carving the canyon deeper and deeper with a near vertical walls of sandstone and above it all was a dome ceiling with my wife by my side i cannot help but wonder how different the canyon might be if not for roosevelt and his contemporaries and how different our own lives would have been. Company parking lots, i. C. E. Cream stands or smokestack or no trespassing signs. A few days later we were home in michigan when the standoff came to a dramatic close. January 26, 2015 on the way to a meeting outside the refuge bundy and other leaders were pulled over and arrested by the fbi. One member of the group led the police on a highspeed chase running his car into a snow bank he disappeared orders and was shot and killed. Soon after the rest of the occupiers released one dish relinquished control despite the violent ending the anti public message was broadcast loud and clear it didnt take long for mainstream politicians to push the Land Transfer agenda forward a new Republicancontrolled Congress was elected with a gentleman the agenda to singlemindedly to destroy the public land system as we know it in the monk number of bills were proposed standing in the way of federal lands others would have Law Enforcement and one came out called for the million acres of land owned by the american people. As they watch these headlines unfold it seemed everclear the greatest National Treasures were stolen from right out from under us. I decided i need to do something i couldnt singlehandedly stop a politician or convince a president to stand up but at least i could make sense of how we got here
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