Chris Avena: Building American Outdoor News

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 492, featuring Chris Avena, founder and publisher of American Outdoor News, a digital outdoor magazine covering hunting, fishing, second amendment issues, and wild game cooking. Tom and Chris talk about starting a digital outdoor publication, bear hunting in New York's Catskills, gun rights, conservation funding, chasing beaches around the world, and Chris's interview with Bo Jackson.

Starting American Outdoor News

Tom Rowland: Chris, how's it going, man?

Chris Avena: Going great, Tom. Thanks for having me on.

Tom Rowland: Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. I'm looking forward to getting to know you a little better and finding out how you started this awesome business you've got going on.

Chris Avena: Well, I've been in the outdoor industry for a while now. I also own a social network called SeeMeHunt.com.

Tom Rowland: Okay, what's that about? SeeMeHunt, a social network. What is that?

Chris Avena: That's basically a place where all outdoorsmen can go and network and meet each other and talk about different gear, different hunts. It's multifaceted. There are forums, there are blogs, you can upload your videos and pictures. I haven't focused on that a lot lately, so I really need to redo that site and bring it up to date. And I was speaking to somebody about buying a publication. Their numbers were a little out of line — I think there were more emotional numbers than financial numbers. So basically I said, I don't need to buy your magazine, I could start my own. He said, go ahead. I said, hold my beer, and here I am today.

Tom Rowland: There you go. So what year was that, when you handed off your beer?

Chris Avena: That was a little over three years ago. We're just venturing into our fourth season now, and it's been a learning curve. It's been exciting. It's really developed along the way, and I'm excited for things to come.

Tom Rowland: So that's American Outdoor News that you started. Did you start it as a physical magazine or a digital magazine?

Chris Avena: I started as a digital magazine. The margins for print are shrinking by the day. I get magazines at my house all the time, and I'll pick one up and say, hey, that looks like a great issue, and I'll put it down — and before I know it, the next issue comes and I never read that one. I think the way people's mindsets are going, they're always on the move, they always have a phone or a tablet or a computer in their hand, and it makes it so much easier to just access the magazine at this point.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, for sure. That's kind of the way I developed my love for the outdoors, going hunting and fishing with my dad when I was young — we always had Field & Stream, we always had Outdoor Life, we always had American Rifleman around the house. I remember studying those magazines, reading them over and over, and you'd have a whole stack of them you'd go back to. I do kind of miss those days of physical magazines. You'd go into the doctor's office and see them sitting there. Things have definitely changed — advertisers aren't as excited about print as they once were, since there are so many other ways now, but digital seems to be the way of the future. I'm sure you're seeing that on a daily basis.

Chris Avena: Absolutely. And we can share our advertisers' ads or the articles on multiple platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. There are features in the magazine where you can share with your friends or on your own social media.

Tom Rowland: And so when you first started this, was the idea to basically be a hunting magazine, or was it all outdoors?

Chris Avena: You know, I'm in New York, so you wouldn't think I grew up in the outdoors, but I've always loved being outdoors — going camping with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts when I was young. My uncle would always take me camping with my cousins. He really introduced me to the outdoors and took me on my first hunt. I love kayaking, I love fishing, I love hiking — anything outdoors. So that's pretty much what the magazine is: shooting sports, really everything that we love to do. I don't want to pigeonhole it or limit it to just one topic.

Tom Rowland: Do you see that your readers and subscribers are kind of across all of the outdoors, or can you tell you have more hunters or more fishermen?

Chris Avena: I definitely have more hunters than anything else. But I'd say, overall, the hunter is an outdoorsman at heart, and most of them will pick up a fishing pole and go freshwater or saltwater fishing, or go on a hike. I think all of my readers really embrace the outdoors — they don't just rifle hunt or just bow hunt. It's a broad spectrum.

Growing Up Outdoors in New York

Tom Rowland: So you grew up in the New York area. You know, I read this book when I was probably in the fourth grade — it was probably the most impactful book on me, and maybe the only book I actually finished for a long time. I wasn't a great reader in grammar school, but it was called My Side of the Mountain, about a boy who runs away from New York to the Catskills, hollows out a tree to live in, catches a falcon, and starts doing falconry. I just thought that was the coolest book ever. Are you familiar with that book?

Chris Avena: No, I'm not. But the Catskills is where I've always hunted.

Tom Rowland: That's what I was going to ask — is that basically your backyard?

Chris Avena: Yeah, it's about two hours away from me. We had a club there for over twenty years — I was a member and on the board for ten or twelve of those. It was 600 acres, with a 60 acre lake and a couple of cabins. The owner just sold the property, so we lost all that, and we're scrambling for the season now.

Tom Rowland: Oh, that sounds like paradise, man. That 60 acre lake, what was in there — trout?

Chris Avena: Smallmouth, crappie, catfish, and bass. We had a lot of different fish to catch in there.

Tom Rowland: That sounds awesome. And what's the hunting like in the Catskills?

Chris Avena: We get a little of everything — a lot of deer and bear, turkey, coyote, really a little of everything.

Tom Rowland: With the proximity to so many big cities, is it crowded up there, or is it easy to get away?

Chris Avena: It's easy to get away. New York really has everything — beautiful beaches, cities, suburbs, and we're just a few hours' drive from going up into the mountains. I could drive six hours and be up in the Adirondacks, and the woods are as thick as being up in Maine.

Tom Rowland: The only real experience I've had being in the woods in New York was a long time ago — I did the Great Outdoor Games up in Lake Placid, and I fished the Ausable River. It looked a lot like the area I grew up in in Tennessee — rolling hills, a lot of rhododendron, that mountainous kind of terrain. It opened my eyes, because I'd visited the city a number of times and thought, I don't know how anybody would live here, you can't hunt or fish or do anything. It's nice to visit, but I sure don't want to live here with Central Park as my wildlife. But then you get your eyes opened to what the rest of the state of New York has, and you feel almost stupid — like, I had no idea this existed, and it's so easy to get away from the population centers. Lake Placid is amazing. I love that place.

Chris Avena: Yeah, they had the Olympics up there.

Tom Rowland: I know, I went to that place. After I'd read that book and later visited Lake Placid, I saw the movie Miracle — that historic upset between the Russians and the Americans, one of the greatest sporting events of all time. But you go into that arena today knowing that story, and it looks like a high school gym. It's not a big place at all. That place had to be rocking when that game happened.

Chris Avena: That whole town, the whole Lake Placid Village — they had the skiing events, the hockey, figure skating. It was really something. I didn't go up there during the Olympics, but I've been up there since. That whole region is called the Finger Lakes region, with a lot of lakes and beautiful little villages and towns, and a lot of bear up there.

Bear Hunting in the Catskills

Tom Rowland: Do the black bear up there get big, or are they on the smaller side?

Chris Avena: The typical New York bear is probably around 200 pounds. The big four-, five-, six-hundred-pound bears you don't see often, but they're there — big for a reason.

Tom Rowland: What are the bear hunting regulations like in New York? It seems like a topic that could easily get taken out of the hands of the biologists and game wardens and into the hands of people saying, let's not hunt bears here at all.

Chris Avena: We actually have an overabundance of bears. We're allowed to take one bear per season, no matter if you take it during bow, rifle, or muzzleloader season. Last year alone we took six bear off our property — that's a lot of bear off 600 acres.

Tom Rowland: And you're probably still seeing plenty even after taking six off.

Chris Avena: I didn't shoot one last year, but I saw some nice bears right under my stand — two separate sows with two cubs each, close enough that I could have thrown a rock at them, twenty yards and less.

Tom Rowland: And that's while you're deer hunting?

Chris Avena: Deer and bear run the same season, so I could have shot it with my bow, but it was a mother with cubs — I wasn't going to do that.

Tom Rowland: Right. And what do you like to do with the bear you harvest?

Chris Avena: Bear is delicious. I like to either throw it in the crock pot, season it with beef stock, and let it sit for a few hours, or put it on the smoker — burgers, sausage, all of it. I love to cook, and there's actually a cooking section in the magazine where we always feature different wild game recipes. This coming issue we have a duck recipe made in a sun oven.

Tom Rowland: In a sun oven?

Chris Avena: It's not gas, it's not charcoal — you put the food in this box, pull out the reflectors, and leave it in the sun for a few hours. It cooks, it steams, and you can't burn it. You can leave it in there all day. You can dehydrate food in there, make bread, make just about anything. It's amazing.

Tom Rowland: That's cool, I've never used a sun oven. Living in Florida for a lot of years, you could definitely bake just about anything — I think you can fry an egg some days on the deck of the boat.

Chris Avena: In Florida especially, you could put it out to roast for a couple hours and have a feast.

Tom Rowland: So who makes that, a company called Sun Oven?

Chris Avena: Yeah, Sun Oven is the name of the company, and it's actually going to be featured in the magazine this issue.

Grills, Smokers, and Cooking Wild Game

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. Do you use any other kind of grills?

Chris Avena: I just got a new Breeo fire pit with a grill on it. We put it over a fire pit and we're able to barbecue corn and steaks and whatnot — regular barbecue. I've also got my smoker. I love to smoke, I just started getting into that.

Tom Rowland: Do you have a dedicated smoker?

Chris Avena: I have a dedicated smoker, but it's not a great one — just a cheap one I picked up online to see if I liked it, and I'll probably be stepping up into something a little more elaborate.

Tom Rowland: A lot of the newer pellet grills let you smoke too. I had a smoker that was like a little college refrigerator — it worked great, but it was kind of hard to clean. You smoke all day, then you're excited to eat, and the inside really needs to be cleaned regularly, and that's pretty hard to do.

Chris Avena: I've been shying away from those for that exact reason.

Tom Rowland: That's why I've been leaning toward one of those pellet grills with a smoker — you just turn it on high and burn everything off like a regular grill. It seems way easier to clean, even if I don't know that it's easier to cook.

Chris Avena: It's easier to maintain the exact temperature you want with a pellet grill, because it automatically feeds to hold that temperature — you can go run errands and know it's going to maintain the heat. I'm more of a hands-on guy, so I like feeding the wood myself and picking the wood I put in there. To me, it's an activity.

Tom Rowland: It really is an all-day kind of thing. My buddy Scott Walker loves doing that — he'll brine something on Friday, put it on the grill Saturday, and by Saturday night when everybody comes over, he's spent the whole weekend on it. But it's amazing when you eat it, and it's definitely worth it. So you cover all that in the magazine. What else do you cover? You've got 'news' in the name — do you cover a lot of news?

Chris Avena: We try to be topical. A lot of our writers send in articles based on their own experience, whether they're summiting Mount Kilimanjaro, going on an African game hunt, or going on a musk ox hunt. We also have a section where we like to stay current on Second Amendment issues.

Second Amendment Issues and Gun Rights

Tom Rowland: What's going on with that right now?

Chris Avena: There's a push to expand background checks, but expanding background checks isn't the answer. In most of these shootings, the person had purchased a gun legally with no record — no felonies, no assaults, no violent behavior in the background. Even a psychological breakdown wouldn't necessarily show up in a background check — anybody could have a breakdown, but that doesn't mean it's their norm. You can keep adding and adding to background checks and it's not going to help crime. If somebody is intent on committing a crime or a shooting, they're going to do it. The bills on the floor right now, H.R. 8 and H.R. 1446, are both expanded background check bills, but they're not going anywhere — they're not voting on them. I think the left knows they're not going to get the fifty votes, let alone sixty to beat a filibuster, and the moderate left is leaning more toward the right on that issue. In New York they also floated something about not hunting with lead bullets — but where are you going to get bullets right now, lead, steel, or copper? There's nothing out there. So if they can't ban the guns, they try to backdoor it by regulating the ammunition, and that's not going to work either. They're also talking about requiring insurance — I think it's $800 per gun — and the average hunter owns more than one weapon, so they're trying to make it unaffordable to own a gun, among other things.

Tom Rowland: Would that be a special kind of gun insurance, not part of a homeowner's policy?

Chris Avena: It would be over and above any insurance you're already carrying on your house. But that's backdooring registration — if you have insurance, well, you must own a gun. That's another form of registration.

Tom Rowland: And would people who already own guns be grandfathered in on something like that?

Chris Avena: I haven't heard that yet. And it's not just ARs, it's rifles in general. Handguns you already need a license for — you don't need a license for a rifle.

Tom Rowland: So those are things being proposed right now but not getting a lot of traction. How closely are you following all the momentum and proposed bills — do you keep your finger on the pulse of that all the time?

Chris Avena: I try. It's not always easy, but I'll listen to different YouTube channels and try to read whatever's coming out.

Tom Rowland: It's a tough thing. Nobody wants to see mass school shootings, that's a terrible thing to see, and then people feel like they've got to do something.

Chris Avena: There are over 300 million guns in this country and over 80 million gun owners. If there were truly an epidemic or a serious gun problem among legal owners, the public would know about it. It's not the legal gun owners — criminals will always get guns.

Tom Rowland: It's just hard to know what to do. I own a lot of guns myself, and it's a weird place to be in, because people feel like they need to do something, but what?

Chris Avena: This year alone there have been over 8 million new first-time gun owners, and that's been driven by a lot of different factors.

Tom Rowland: This year there have been a lot of things that make you think, maybe I need a gun.

Chris Avena: You've had the pandemic, you've had riots across the country — Portland, Seattle, Chicago, even New York. People want to protect their home and family.

Tom Rowland: And then you have the movement to defund the police — if you don't have police coming, who's coming to help if somebody breaks into your house? Probably nobody.

Chris Avena: I grew up in a police family — my father was a police officer, my uncle, my cousin, probably 70% of my friends are on the job. People don't realize what they go through on a day-to-day basis. It's a dangerous job — there aren't too many careers where you go to work in the morning not knowing if you're 100% going to make it home at night.

Tom Rowland: I definitely don't think defunding the police is the answer. My first thought is more training, more recruiting, getting the best possible applicants and having them be the most qualified — and that requires more funding, not less. But yeah, man, that's a really tough job.

Chris Avena: Maybe more hand-to-hand combat training, things of that nature. Look at that woman who got shot in Ohio — she was trying to stab somebody, and the officer shot her. They tried to make it a racial issue, and there's no real racial issue in this country the way it's being framed — all of us have friends of different religions, different races, different backgrounds, and I don't see an issue with that. I think that's a narrative being pushed. Then they tried to say the officer only had sixteen months on the job, but he's a combat veteran — he's got more real experience than a cop just coming out of the academy.

Tom Rowland: Did you see Charles Barkley talk about this on TV? Somebody asked his opinion, and he basically said there's not really a problem between black people and white people — it's the politicians, Republicans and Democrats, trying to keep people from getting along. I don't follow it that much, honestly, because I've been on a news blackout for a couple of years now. I just don't watch it, and the important stories still trickle down to me. Honestly, my life is better for it — I don't get all worked up about everything anymore. It's a way different life when you're not constantly plugged into it, even when you don't realize you're obsessing over it. I like it a lot.

Chris Avena: Being part of the media, reporting any type of news, is a privilege. Report it as it happens, not as you want people to hear it. Let people decide for themselves.

Tom Rowland: Is that what you do with your magazine? Because your readership is obviously fairly skewed — a lot of hunters and fishermen who are concerned about maintaining their gun rights. When you report on something like this, how do you present it to an audience like that?

Chris Avena: Admittedly, I'm very one-sided when it comes to the Second Amendment. I call things as I see them for the most part. But their narrative is out there, and they're hammering it home as hard and as fast as they can. For a long time we sat back and said, well, this is alright, and were very passive about it. Our voice needs to be heard, and that's my goal — let our opinion get out there, let our voice get out there. Like it or not, it's alright to think this way.

Tom Rowland: For sure. It's disturbing to see cancel culture and the movement away from real free speech. You can say whatever you want — well, not really, because people are getting their careers taken away over something they said, sometimes years ago. I think that's a pretty disturbing trend. I hope it doesn't continue, but at some point it has to get so ridiculous that people push back.

Chris Avena: I was never a PC guy — I'll say what's on my mind, in jest, as a joke, or seriously. The way I grew up, guys busted each other's chops about everything, and you either rolled with it or you were in a fight every day. Your feelings couldn't get hurt because your friends were busting your chops — that's just how it was. Now everybody's offended. What people don't realize is the Second Amendment was never about hunting — it was never about what you can own or how much you can own. It's about protecting yourself, your family, and your country from a tyrannical government, protecting yourself from enemies both foreign and domestic. If we ever had to rise up against our government because they weren't doing what they were elected to do, what, are we going to throw rocks at them? We have to be able to protect ourselves.

Tom Rowland: Right, and that's the original intention — to keep the government in check, that every citizen has the right to bear arms. We'll see where it goes, but that certainly was the original intention. What about fishing — how much are you covering the striped bass issue up your way? We've had a number of people on the podcast talking about the health of the striped bass fishery and the regulations from state to state.

Fishing Columns and Barometric Pressure

Chris Avena: I haven't been covering a lot of that. I do have a fishing column — Josh Bendoski, he owns Bendoski Power Fishing out in Utah, and he writes a lot of my fishing articles. This issue we have something about barometric pressure and fishing, how it affects the fish, different times to fish, how weather affects your day on the lake.

Tom Rowland: Barometric pressure is definitely a major factor. I've never really journaled all about it, except with trout fishing out west — a low-pressure system comes in, all the bugs hatch, and every fish in the river starts eating. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see it; the low pressure moving in does something to the whole ecosystem, and it's on. That's definitely the best time to go.

From a Wyoming Guide to a Key West Career

Chris Avena: How do you go from being a freshwater fisherman in Wyoming to a saltwater fisherman in Key West?

Tom Rowland: That's actually a pretty easy answer. If the weather in Jackson, Wyoming was like it is in the summertime all year long, I would have never gone to Key West. But I tried to spend a winter in Jackson and it was so cold, and I'm such a wimp about the cold that I went as far away from it as I possibly could and ended up in Key West. That's the answer in jest, but I really wanted to fish all year round. When I was guiding out west, we didn't have the season we have now — it used to be that around September, once school went back into session, tourism dropped by something like 80% almost overnight. That doesn't happen the same way anymore. Guides now fish all the way through September, October, November, then select days through the winter, and start again early in spring. When I was guiding in Jackson, it wasn't like that — you might get around a hundred days a year, starting a little before runoff, then the season really kicking off around July 4th and running until the tourists were gone. The fishing stayed great, but there just weren't that many people to take fishing. Even with all the good gear — Gore-Tex waders, a movie like A River Runs Through It bringing tons of people out there — school schedules still kept a lot of people from the fall fishing. So my choices were to get a real job like teaching, which leaves your summers open for guiding but means finding something else for the winter — some people built houses, were snowmobile guides, elk hunting guides, that kind of thing. None of that really appealed to me. I wanted to fish year-round, every single day, just like we did in summer. My first thought was to go somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere with trout, maybe Patagonia, Argentina — but I had no connections there, didn't know anyone, had never been. Then an opportunity came up through a connection between Jackson Hole trout guides and Little Cayman Island, at a place called the Southern Cross Club. My boss said if I wanted to go down there he could probably hook me up, and being reasonably wise about it, I said maybe I should go check it out first with my girlfriend at the time, now my wife. So we went down to Little Cayman — it was pretty rural, pretty rough, maybe a dozen people on the whole island, one little lodge. I would have been the one fishing guide, and my wife would have cooked. Let's just say it wasn't what we were looking for. It was an opportunity, and I appreciated it, but it just wasn't going to work for us.

Chris Avena: A little too desolate for your own good.

Tom Rowland: Yes. My wife had spent a ton of time on Grand Cayman with her family, so the Cayman Islands were familiar to us, but Little Cayman at the time was very undeveloped. On the way back we stopped in Key West to visit a friend, Simon Becker, and I was just blown away — after that desolate island, coming into Key West, and I think we happened to be there during Fantasy Fest, which is a total party. We were like, what is this place, this is amazing, we've got to figure out how anyone would possibly get started down here. Through Simon and another friend, Mike Pollock, and a lot of other people, an opportunity came together. I spent the first year down there just getting my captain's license without taking any trips, then went back out west to guide for the summer, and came back to Key West. I was planning to just keep learning for a while, and I was pretty hesitant about taking my first trip. But I finally took one, and it went pretty well, and that's what started it all. Eventually I gave up the West entirely and spent all my time in Key West, because we could fish 365 days a year there. Out west I was working for someone else, making at best half of the guide wage. In Key West I owned my own business — sure, you've got your own expenses for boats and everything else, it's all on you, but you keep everything, and you're in charge of your own schedule. I just liked it. That's how I started my career. And really, all kidding aside, I did flee the Jackson winters for warm weather, because I am kind of a cold-weather wimp. I can handle it, but I don't really like it.

Chris Avena: Key West is a lifestyle.

Tom Rowland: Man, it really is. Key West is the bottom of the funnel — or the top, depending on how you look at it. You see the best of the best down there, and sometimes the worst of the worst. Some of the best people I've ever known in my life have been in Key West, and some other people have trickled down to the bottom of the funnel instead of working their way up to the top. You can look at it a lot of different ways, but I love Key West. I think it's an amazing place, with a tremendous amount of history, and the fishing is otherworldly. It's just a great place to build a career.

Chris Avena: So after a hard day on the water, do you make your way over to the Hog's Breath?

Tom Rowland: Not at all. The funny thing is, I stayed about as far away from Duval Street as I could get, because Key West is super expensive to live in, and I was working every day — there just wasn't a lot of time for that. I was raising kids there too, so we lived one island up from Key West. There's the whole tourist circus on Duval Street, and then there's a big population of people who live in Key West and never go down there. We'd go to restaurants, there are a lot of fun things to do, but for the most part you're just guiding every single day to make ends meet — everything is really, really expensive there.

Chris Avena: Back in the eighties, they couldn't give houses away down there — you could buy a house for something like ten dollars.

Tom Rowland: Wow, I wish I'd bought a whole bunch of them. I did witness the real estate prices go way, way up, then way, way down, then back up again — Key West is a place where you'll see crazy shifts in the real estate market. A house will be worth a million dollars, then $300,000, then $1.4 million, then $250,000, depending on the hurricane season, the economy, all kinds of things. But for me, a house in Key West is one of the best investments I've ever made, for sure. Do you spend a lot of time down there?

Chris Avena: I've been down there a couple of times. I like to travel — I've probably been around most of the world, and probably 50% of the U.S.

Chasing the Ultimate Beach

Tom Rowland: How did you travel around the world — hunting and fishing, or otherwise?

Chris Avena: No, I was in search of the ultimate beach.

Tom Rowland: Just to hang out — are you a surfer, or what's the draw to the beach?

Chris Avena: Just to be on the beach, catch some rays, and relax.

Tom Rowland: So where is it, in your opinion?

Chris Avena: Probably one of the nicest beaches I've ever been to is in Venezuela. You walk out into the water and you're literally up to your chest — it's like standing in a glass of water, crystal clear salt water.

Tom Rowland: There's a lot of good bonefishing there too. What part of Venezuela was that? I know about the bonefishing destinations there, and it's supposed to be incredible.

Chris Avena: We were on a lot of the small islands off the coast, around Margarita Island and Puerto La Cruz. It's funny, we had a flight out of Caracas, and there was military in the airport at the time. I had about four hours to kill before my flight, so I went up to one of the military guys and asked where I could get a cab. He asked where I wanted to go, and I said I had a four-hour layover and figured I'd go see Caracas. He said, not a good idea. I asked why not, and he said, don't leave the airport — you'll get in the cab and you'll never be seen again. I said, well, four hours really isn't a lot of time anyway. Beautiful country, and I found the people very accommodating and nice, but Venezuela turned out to be Venezuela.

Tom Rowland: That's kind of scary — good thing you asked. So if you had to say your top three beaches, what would you say?

Chris Avena: Venezuela is one. Saint Croix is another — it's got some beautiful beaches.

Tom Rowland: Saint Croix is a place where you can shore dive, right off the beach.

Chris Avena: It's a very flat island. Hurricanes really ripped through it, though. I guess the next would probably be Saint Barths and Saint Martin — beautiful down there, love it.

Tom Rowland: What about Hawaii, have you been out there?

Chris Avena: Never been to Hawaii yet, so I can't put that on my list just yet.

Tom Rowland: I'm taking my daughter there in June — we're going to be in search of the ultimate beach, the ultimate wave, and the ultimate hike. I've been to Hawaii twice, but the more I learn about it, the more time I want to spend there. It's an amazing place, with incredible diversity in the wildlife, the vegetation, the terrain, and in what you can actually do — you can surf, you could conceivably ski, you can fish. There's a drop-off in sight of land where you can catch the biggest things that swim in the ocean, marlin and everything, right off the coast. It's not like an easy half-day trip — that's where the real fishing is. There's some incredible bonefishing there too, really big fish. Honestly the only reason I've been to Hawaii so far is stopping over on the way to Christmas Island, which is also spectacular — I love Christmas Island. But Hawaii has some of the most beautiful beaches, waterfalls, hiking trails, and these incredible volcanoes. We're going to drive up toward the summit of one of the mountains — you have to stop at 9,600 feet unless you have four-wheel drive, because the air gets so thin your brakes won't hold, so you have to go into a low gear coming back down. It's a 12,000 to 13,000 foot mountain with an observatory up there, the Keck Observatory, and even at the 9,200 or 9,600 foot level you're supposed to have zero light pollution and see the best star show anywhere.

Night Skies and Close Calls in Africa

Tom Rowland: The best stars I've ever seen were in Africa.

Chris Avena: I would have to agree with you.

Tom Rowland: Was that your experience there too?

Chris Avena: The night sky, and the sunrises and sunsets, are some of the most amazing things I've ever seen.

Tom Rowland: One of the coolest things I ever did in Africa — we were riding around in the jeeps, staying out to see some particular animal I can't even remember now, because what happened on the drive back is what I really remember. It got dark, we were driving along, and all of a sudden the guide shuts the jeep down, turns off the engine, and we're like, what's going on, what are we doing here? And he says, everybody just lean your head back and look up. Man, the stars were unbelievable. I've spent time in the backcountry of Yellowstone, far from any light, and seen some pretty awesome stars — pretty awesome stars in Argentina and Bolivia too — but to this day, nothing has compared to that sky. You could see depth between the stars, see the Milky Way like never before, and because we were in a different hemisphere, all the stars we were looking at were different.

Chris Avena: I think that's the trouble with our society today — nobody actually takes the time to appreciate what our world has to offer.

Tom Rowland: It's pretty amazing. I'm really looking forward to taking my daughter to that mountain, Mauna Kea — I probably just butchered the pronunciation, so sorry about that, Hawaiians — but I hope we get good weather and can see well. Apparently once you get up there the clouds are below you even if it looked cloudy on the way up.

Chris Avena: That must be an experience. I haven't been to the South Pacific yet, but that's on my list — Fiji, Tahiti. When I was in Africa, I shot a springbok at dusk, and the professional hunter with us seemed a little stressed and panicked. He said, come on, we've got to get this taken care of, literally threw the animal over his shoulders, and ran down the mountain with it. We got our pictures and video done, threw it in the truck, and he said, okay, let's get out of here — by the time we started pulling out it was pitch black, and the plains are not a safe place to be after dark. We went back the next day to hunt the same area, and sure enough we saw three male lions about 300 yards from where I'd shot that animal the day before. We could very well have been the hunted while we were hunting.

Tom Rowland: That's pretty scary, especially once you've seen how big those lions are in person — there's just nothing you could do, there's no way to run. They weigh something like 800 pounds, and they're used to taking down animals that are armored and fighting back, so to them we're nothing. I went on a mountain bike safari once, riding through those same kinds of areas, and I remember thinking, are we sure this is okay? Looking back, I think that was a pretty stupid thing to do — the next couple of days we drove through areas that looked exactly like where we'd been biking. In one particular spot we went through some high grass and stopped, and there was a lion sitting on the ground. Then another one came out of the tall grass silently, then another, and another — they just kept coming out of that high grass. I thought, man, we rode right through an area that looked just like this. That was not cool, and I'd never do it again.

Chris Avena: Classic story — death in the long grass.

Tom Rowland: Man, I know. Have you ever seen that video of the guy riding an elephant when the tiger leaps out of the long grass and takes his hand off? That's incredible, because an elephant is really tall, and a guy sitting on top of one is really tall too, and if you watch that video the grass barely moves — then the next thing you know, this tiger comes airborne from thirty feet away, all the way up to the top of the elephant. It's unbelievable and scary. Even if you watch it two or three times and know exactly where the tiger's going to come from, the grass never moves until suddenly it's right there. It's one of the craziest videos I've ever seen.

Chris Avena: Here in the U.S. we have a lot of opinions about hunting in Africa, about trophy hunters, but people fail to realize we don't live like they do there. They don't walk to the river for water without worrying about a lion coming out of nowhere, or a crocodile pulling them off the river's edge, or a hippo. To them, it's survival, day to day. So hunting is vital, not just to their economy but to the conservation of certain species and their continued existence.

Hunting, Conservation, and the Pittman-Robertson Act

Tom Rowland: Certainly. That's where the conservation message sometimes falls on deaf ears — it's not only the money pouring into the economy through hunting, it's that if that money weren't coming in, the alternative in a lot of those areas would be poaching. The guides and people making a living entertaining hunters would instead be making a living killing those animals, and there'd be far more of them doing it, with almost no money coming back in.

Chris Avena: All the money that hunters and outdoorsmen spend — not just through the Pittman-Robertson Act, but just in general — pours into conservation, preservation, and anti-poaching efforts. Meanwhile organizations like PETA raise money that goes toward hate campaigns, not conservation. It's hunters who actually fund that work.

Tom Rowland: Explain that act for anybody who doesn't know what it is.

Chris Avena: The Pittman-Robertson Act came into effect back in the 1930s, I believe during the Roosevelt era. Every hunting license, every round of ammunition, every firearm purchased carries a tax right off the top that goes toward conservation. It's a built-in insurance policy that we'll be able to see and manage these species for generations to come.

Tom Rowland: Yep — that's a self-imposed tax that a lot of people don't know about, even a lot of people who listen to this show. Most people don't realize how much money hunters and fishermen provide toward conservation — fish and game officer salaries, boat ramps, law enforcement, habitat protection, all the way down the line.

Chris Avena: And then there are organizations like the Dallas Safari Club and Safari Club International, nonprofits putting even more resources into that work.

Tom Rowland: That's one I'm not that familiar with — I know it's a reputable organization, but I don't know exactly what its focus is. It seems like it would be about African hunting, but maybe other people listening don't know either.

Chris Avena: Dallas Safari Club isn't just Dallas — there are fifteen or eighteen chapters across the country now. I'm actually on the board of directors for the Northeast chapter, which covers from Maine down to New York. We're involved in conservation efforts, bringing youth back into the outdoors, teaching them how to hunt, how to bow hunt, how to shoot a bow — conservation of the outdoors in general. It's not just Africa. There's a lot of conservation work happening here in the U.S. as well.

Tom Rowland: That's a really good thing to be doing right now, because we've had a real influx of hunters and fishermen due to COVID — a tremendous number of people introduced to the outdoors in the last year. Education is so important, on ethics, on limits, on general behavior in the outdoors, for a lot of reasons. We were just talking about this on the podcast the other day — if somebody goes hunting or fishing for the first time and gets a ticket from the game warden, the chances of them continuing are probably slim. They think, I thought this was going to be fun, now I've got a $500 ticket and a day in court, this is lame, I didn't know I couldn't keep this many fish. That's probably a rookie mistake, and it's going to take a dedicated person to push through it. But that could easily be avoided through any kind of outreach program teaching good ethics and good behavior in the outdoors — this is how you stay within the law, and the law is not a suggestion, it's the law. It's not like the speed limit, where going 30 in a 25 is probably fine. Five ducks over the limit is not okay. One duck over the limit is not okay. One fish over the limit is not okay. It's not around six fish a person, it's six fish a person — four or five is around six, but seven is over, period. Some people getting into the outdoors for the first time just don't know these things, and even after being told, it doesn't always compute, and they end up having a really bad day, which defeats the purpose of getting more people involved in hunting and fishing, which is the future of our sport and something we really need. In my opinion it starts with making education really available — there are three or four different organizations, whether it's the Dallas Safari Club, a state-sponsored fish and wildlife weekend, Trout Unlimited, whatever it may be. For somebody who's hunted and fished their whole life, tying a knot is just how you do it, but for somebody who's never done it before, the most basic things are the biggest challenges to getting into the outdoors.

Mentors, Public Land, and Learning the Ropes

Chris Avena: That's actually one of the things social media has made accessible. There are a lot of local groups where you can find a mentor to help you learn how to bass fish, tie off a lure, learn how to shoot a bow, or learn how to get into your tree stand for the first time. There are a lot of people willing to go out of their way to mentor you, to show you the ropes, to show you what not to do and what the right thing is. For me, my uncle took me on my first hunt, and granted he wasn't the best hunter — in fact I can't remember him ever shooting anything — but what he taught me was the whole experience, being in camp with the guys, sharing stories. For me that's half of hunting, being in camp with the guys. He taught me the experience, and the rest I kind of picked up on my own.

Tom Rowland: That's where you learn how to be successful — you have to learn that on your own. But you're right, the camaraderie and the whole experience really is the biggest part of hunting and fishing — there's a lot more to it than the actual harvest. For the most part, when you're getting started, there's not a lot of harvesting, especially if you're hunting public land and trying to learn how to hunt public land.

Chris Avena: Good luck to you.

Tom Rowland: It does happen, you can kill stuff there, but it's going to be a longer process — you need to be pretty dedicated, and there are going to be a lot of days you don't see anything, or it's about to happen and somebody walks right through your whole setup.

Chris Avena: All of us have found our stands on public land only to wait for sunrise, look around, and see two or three other hunters right around where we are — and you didn't even hear them come in.

Tom Rowland: That's not always the worst thing, though — they could bump something toward you that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, and you could do the same for them. I had a buddy on the show talking about turkey hunting, one of the best turkey hunters I know, and he talked about public-land techniques — you might call a gobbler in only partway, but he's so used to being called that he runs back down the ridge line toward where your buddy is already set up. You over-call on purpose, and it sends the bird right to him. That's a good hunter, recognizing that and using those wary public-land birds to his advantage. That's how you find success — not exactly the way the textbook articles describe it. That's experience.

Chris Avena: I never had a lot of luck turkey hunting — they always seem to show up the day after the season ends.

Tom Rowland: They're good at that. So are big deer, by the way. They show up right after the season, and they were there plenty the day before.

Chris Avena: I was bow hunting deer last year, and the day after turkey season ended I had about thirty birds in front of my stand.

Tom Rowland: They know, man. They definitely know.

Bo Jackson and Wrapping Up

Tom Rowland: Well, listen, Chris, this has been a great conversation, I really appreciate it — I learned a lot about what you do. What about the podcast you have? How much time are you putting into that? I saw the one you did with Bo Jackson — that's a pretty awesome guest.

Chris Avena: Bo was on the cover of one of our magazines, the winter edition I believe, and he was so gracious and accommodating — it was a real thrill to meet such an icon. He is a diehard, obsessive hunter. He makes his own arrows. He's the real deal.

Tom Rowland: I was listening to that podcast and heard Bo Jackson say he's a pretty good shot with a bow, and I thought, really? I asked my buddy Connor, who's a lot younger than me, if he thought Bo Jackson was a good shot with a bow, and he said, yeah, of course. I said, I'd guarantee you Bo Jackson is probably one of the best archers on the planet, because I'd bet he could pick up almost any sport — bowling, pool, name it — and within a week be world class if he wanted to. That guy is literally one of the finest athletes this planet has ever produced. And now that his passion is bow hunting, I guarantee he's relentless in his practice. It's like when you'd have certain guys on the boat and hand them a fishing rod, and within two minutes you could tell, that guy's a real athlete — there's more to it than just picking it up.

Chris Avena: He's a fanatical fisherman as well.

Tom Rowland: I'd love to get him on the show sometime.

Chris Avena: We were talking about his nyala hunt — they're very spooky, jittery animals, hard to get close to — and he said if he could get one within seventy or eighty yards, he could make the shot. A seventy or eighty yard shot with a bow is basically unheard of, it just doesn't happen.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but you're talking about a different kind of human there — whatever you or I could do at 30 yards, he can do at 80.

Chris Avena: Fastest man on the planet.

Tom Rowland: He's incredible. I got to see him play — I went to the University of Alabama, and I saw the Alabama-Auburn game with Bo Jackson going up against Bobby Humphrey. I took my dad to that game. Auburn won, and Bobby Humphrey was also one of the top running backs in college at the time and went on to a solid pro career, but you'd just watch Bo take off and think, I saw that guy play in college, you always want to be able to say that.

Chris Avena: Best athlete of our generation, maybe of any generation.

Tom Rowland: He's incredible. So when I hear him talk about shooting an apple off somebody's head, I'm pretty sure that actually happened.

Chris Avena: He actually shot it out of somebody's hands. That was insane — and with a 90 pound bow, too.

Tom Rowland: Wow. I'm sure he could do it, man. He could probably make a half-court free throw ten times in a row, the guy's just unbelievable.

Chris Avena: He said he can't play basketball, though — he called it an indoor sport, said he's an outdoor guy.

Tom Rowland: Well, I bet he could still kick it into the goal somehow.

Chris Avena: I promise you he could.

Tom Rowland: He's a pretty incredible guy. Alright, well listen, man, thanks — how did everybody hook up with you and see what all you're up to?

Chris Avena: They can find me on Waypoint — listen to our podcast, watch our streaming video, and pick up our publication at AmericanOutdoorNews.com.

Tom Rowland: Alright, sounds good, man. Well, I hope you have an awesome day. We'll do this again, and thanks for your time.

Chris Avena: Thank you so much for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

Tom Rowland: Alright, nice, okay, we'll see you.

Chris Avena: Alright, bye bye.