MM 300 | Register for The Experience Challenge

0:00Welcome to the Monday Minute of the Huntback Country Podcast. These are shorter and more informal episodes where we kind of normally answer listener questions. Today we'll answer some questions somewhat indirectly, at least Steve. We just launched the Experience Challenge last night, at least for the sheep spots, and then it is ongoing for the mountain goat and the challenge, only options. And we'll circle back to the Experience Challenge very shortly. But you guys did just get back Steve from the Northwest Hunt Expo in Hillsboro, Oregon. I did not make that trip genuinely, I have not talked to you, so how did it go? I know a great show, yeah, it was a lot of great people, great friends, you know, pack wise, it was fantastic, so quite a few packs and just catching up with customers, had a good trip.

1:02Yeah, the guys drove over on Wednesday because I had just gotten back from Birch Columbia on Sunday night. I flew over there on Friday afternoon and good friend Jeff picked me up from the airport. And then he's the one I drew that elk tag with up in Alaska this year. So we were chatting to make a hunt plan throughout the whole way to the place. And then yeah, went to the show and it was a good, really good show. Did it, the overall show seemed pretty similar to last year? Yeah, very similar, you know, same, same size attendance was definitely up. Probably, I would say 50%, I'm just throwing a number out, you know, like no idea, but it was just, it was busier. It was good. And then we, uh, we, we toyed around the idea of driving all the way home Saturday night. The show ended seven o'clock Saturday and by, I think we were on the road by 730, but we just started doing the math. And with the time changes, like I'm going to get home at five in the morning. That would kind of suck. So ended up, uh, get a hotel halfway and then finish on the drive, the rest of the way and got home.

2:04My kids, uh, it was a beautiful day in Boise. So they wanted to go ride their bikes to the Boise Zoo. We loaded up the truck and went to the zoo. And then I got home from that about 530 and took a good, long nap. Nice. I bet you did. We, the challenge, we launched that last night. I want to back up before we talk about the challenge registration. We launched that last night for the previous. Yeah. Yeah. I'll say I want to back up before we talk about that and kind of almost reestablish what this experience challenge is Steve. We've been talking about it for several weeks now on the podcast. I know for sure that some people are still just finding out about it and have questions about it. And maybe you've heard it mentioned, but hadn't heard details. We've also updated the landing page for it. So if you go to exo mountain gear, dot com forward slash challenge, there's more information there than there has been in the past. But let's start from kind of square one back in, uh, episode 296 that Monday, minute.

3:12We announced it, but when we announced it, then it was really a definitely a work in progress idea. Now that we're launching the registration, things that have come more together with the plan. Just, yeah, give us, I guess, step back to the high level overview of why we're doing this. What it is. Oh, man. Okay. Yeah. So obviously, this goes back to we did the experience project in 2024. The whole goal behind that was kind of condense everything we had talked about over the last 10 years of the podcast, everything we learned, everything we're doing, and just into this kind of central, like you could follow along with the podcasts. It had a flow to it that was like started in March. And by the time it ended and well, it really didn't really end in, but in August, we went on the hunt. And we just kind of talked about everything we've learned about becoming a, whether it was gear or mindset, physical fitness, you know, I did lots of YouTube videos on footwear

4:16and pack fitting and all sorts of stuff, right? And it was just kind of sharing our knowledge and like combining and be almost like if someone's been doing something for a long time, and they wrote a book about it. And like, all right, here's everything I've learned. Here's this book I can hand you. You could read. And that was the goal of the original experience challenge. Like here's follow along this year, and it's kind of kind of condensing everything into this little, this project. And then last year, kind of busy with other stuff, didn't do anything, then I was like, I was, it was very successful in what we did, like especially the engagement, the people that follow along. It was really, really cool. So this year's like, oh, it's putting it back and let's do the, I don't think one thing we didn't hit well on with the first one was like, how to actually take that and then implement it into a hunt. So take this information and implement it into a hunt. So this year was like the theme was the practical implementation, kind of our, our theme in

5:17our head as we're developing the content. The practical implementation of this, whatever, of this knowledge about footwear, what to do. So it's more like, it's not me and a YouTube video and Justin's garage talking about footwear. It's me on the training hike, breaking in new pair of boots and like physically showing like, here's the three different pairs of socks I have that are all slightly different thicknesses. Here's the two different insoles. Here's me hiking with one insol, my left side, one insol, my right side, here's me side healing. That's very specifically on this nasty little spot, just so I could feel the differences between the two insoles right, like showing that actually in the field and that train is heading through all the way to filming our hunts this year and doing more educational stuff. And so then at some point, I came up with the idea of let's do, let's like, so showing this to people, let's actually engage with people and bring them along and have them do do some of these challenges, I don't know the challenges, these preparation things that we're doing to get ready for hunts this fall, have them do it with us.

6:20And then the idea popped into my head when I was at the sheep banquet and Reno for the sheep show. Oh, let's not only do that, but let's give away a hunt or two to really motivate people to join in on this. And then that's when it opened up, you can't worms. All of a sudden, there's so many possibilities and what we could do and the downside when you give away something of value, the sheep hunt, you know, legits can cost us $50,000 and obviously people are paying for registration and offsetting most of that cost, but it's still costing us money. That you get money involved and then people just get very, so I'm asking lots of questions and also all the details and yeah, that's what we're, we want this to go smoothly, but it's, I know we're going to learn a lot of lessons this first year doing it, so we've kind of keep saying the message like, just bear with us guys, like we're, we're having a company around, we're busy, this is like a fun side project.

7:22It's not, like it's not meant to be this overwhelming thing. I mean, registration's last night and I believe you're sitting on, you know, probably close to 1,000 emails of people like they registered so fast, they did the wrong shirt size and they changed this or they did the address or they're having questions about this and questions about that and it's kind of overwhelming for you, certainly at the moment, but yeah, the whole goal here is like to have fun with this, push people to do something hard and for some people, maybe they're doing really hard things and this is kind of like, oh, I'm already doing all these things great. This will be easy for you. For other people, this is going to be like a monumental task as you got on, people are coming from very different levels, right? They're starting out very different places, but overall, it's like we, you know, April and March is going to be the challenges are broken down. March, April, May, June. Yeah, correct. Yeah, and then you've got, and then you have three high level challenges that can be done

8:25anytime between now and July, July 19th, and they start out simple. March is like just start, you know, March is develop a hot plan, journal, talk to yourself about like really analyze, if you've been successful, why, if you failed, why, just write this stuff out, maybe some people already doing it, I would venture to guess 99% of people don't do this, just sit down and write out and think about what's allowed you to be successful, and then certainly if you're someone who's gone on multiple hunts and still hasn't filled the tag, you know, you need to kind of analyze why and not just attribute it to kind of random about this on my, on our last podcast or couple podcasts ago of like, you can't, in my mind, you can't ever blame anything else but yourself. It's, oh, fishing game, that's too many hunters in this unit, oh, there's too much hunting pressure, oh, you know, the weather was crap, like if you're not successful, frickin' own up and it's your fault, and I think it's just a good way to approach things, it's

9:27the only way to approach things, and figure out how you can make it better, like you control your own destiny, you know, the idea of failure, you could blame the rifle scope company that your rifle scope lost zero, but honestly, it's your fault that you didn't do your research and figure out that that scope had the potential to lose zero before you went on not, right? Like don't ever blame anyone else for your failures, blame yourself. So that's March, like I want people to think, just think, start using your brain, think about life and success will not develop a plan, we want you to pick a hunt this fall that scares you. So I use the example of Justin Nelson that works for us, he's, he's working on a film right now that last year, they've always hunted this elk spot and it, it blakes down like thousands of feet and they're kind of had a mental line, like we don't cross this elevation border because if we kill something down there, it's going to suck. And I've just always had that, this mental line in her head is this like hard stop. Last year, they finally went, like, quote, unquote, manned up and went down there and he killed

10:31a great bowl, packed it out and was like, yeah, part of it sucked, but it wasn't new as bad as he thought and he killed this great bowl and had an awesome memory made. So I think a lot of people have probably something similar to that of, it could just be, I have never done a solo backpack hunt because I'm scared to or it could be, I've always wanted to go back to this basin to hunt mealdair, but it's 10 miles deep and that's too far. I'm not ready for that. I don't have the right gear or not fit enough. So we want people to find something like that that scares them that they haven't done. They've always wanted to do pick it and then this whole process between now, March and, and at hunt is let's get ready for it. There's some of the things we're doing, we're doing death hikes, we're going and shooting a lot and getting in mountainous terrain and practicing, we're training, you know, pretty much, not every day, but three to five days a week from now until that hunt happens. We're getting our gear ready. We're not waiting until August 15th to figure out what our rifle load is going to be or

11:33figure out what ails we're going to buy, right? So we're going to tell people, like, make sure you're getting all that figured out in advance and we'll kind of kind of set some like, hey, buy June, you need to be dialed in and a lot of this too. I guess from a, we're asking people to do all this stuff. The documentation is pretty simple. Like, take some photos, take a short video at the end of the month. We email you a form, you upload it all and then no one's looking at that except until you, whoever the winner is, then we got, we're going to go back and verify they did everything. Yeah. I think that's easy to, yeah, you can see how it works. It gets complicated because I don't know who's I do is and what we want to do is achieve with this project and the complexity of, you know, we're going to have a couple thousand people in here. The sheep on scapped to 500 graduation went last night. It oversold by a little bit. So we got to go through and we're not sure. A lot of people kind of got in there and somehow we're able to buy twice because I don't know if they have multiple screens open or what. So we got to kind of let all the dust settle and get through the emails today to see where

12:35the actual numbers came out at. Yeah. Overall, it's going to be freaking cool. We're going to create this community and people will be able to chat and engage through an app called Discord, which is like like-minded hunters. The big vision of this is going to be freaking awesome. Yeah. Unfortunately, well, yeah, I don't want to go there. It's not interesting. You're going to have some negative people like you had some guy emailing you complaining about stuff over the weekend and it's just like, come on, man, like, we're just trying to do something cool here like, you know, give us a little slack. It's like, not going to be freaking perfect. Yeah. As you said, so many of you heard because you're in it and this is done. But just again, for those of you who are new, if you get on there and you see the mention of the sheep hunt, that's a dull sheep hunt happening this August in Alaska, those spots are taken. As you said, Steve is limited. We did the pre-registration. We had a pre-registration challenge for that. So there's many people who have been following along and seeing that.

13:37But for those of you who are new to this and just hearing it, really just through this week, we are keeping registration open for a phenomenal mountain goat hunt on Kodiak Island, Alaska. And then there's also this challenge-only option. And that's for many reasons. If you don't want to be considered or not eligible to be considered for the hunt, you know, as I said at this point, sheep hunts sold out. But even for the mountain goat hunt, there's some certain requirements on this year. We are keeping the hunts only open to U.S. residents. And so if you're international for one, you couldn't join the hunts. But we wanted you guys to be able to join the challenges and get involved in that. Or some people just aren't sure if they have all the time this year to commit to these challenges and complete all of them. But if you want to sign up under this challenge-only option, it's just 20 bucks. It's really to cover the cost of the shirt and some of the other stuff we're going to send out. But then you're still going to get all the challenge info.

14:38You're going to get entered into some monthly giveaways. If you complete the challenges in those months, you'd be eligible for those giveaways. We're going to have other gear discounts from brands that we kind of know and trust. So there's a lot more to come there. So registration is only open this week, both for mountain goat and this challenge-only option. It's going to stay open through Sunday, so through March 15th. And that's so that we can really close registration, know who is in here, who's participating this year, and then kick things off Steve, like you said, right away in March with this first challenge or this reflection hunt plan. So all that will be coming really as soon as we close registration. Next week we'll kick things off with the first challenge. We're going to have the challenge community launching. We're going to lay out more about all the requirements for each of those high level challenges. You mentioned Steve, not the monthly specific ones. Those will come closer to each month.

15:39We'll give you a preview of what's coming, but not every detail. But for those high level challenges, like the backpacking, the shooting, and those high level challenges will be sharing all that. Once again, yeah, exo-mountaingear.com forward slash challenge is where we can final the info for what this is, what those hunts are, there's a frequently asked questions section in there for things like how are the winners selected, what's you need to participate, what type of time frame, you know, should you a lot to these challenges. And keep in mind, you mentioned this in there Steve, the challenges we are laying them out with requirements, those are minimum requirements. We want guys to get the most from this. And so if you look at the minimum requirements, oh, that's actually not that challenging for me. Well, good. Great. For you. Go do more. And that's the case for everybody. You're only going to get out of this what you put into it. And so we have to come up with a way to track things.

16:41It gets tricky to start tracking stuff when it gets too complex and too cute and too creative. So we wanted to lay a framework that one, we can track. And then two is challenging enough, especially for guys who aren't coming from maybe the background of having as much experience in the mountains or in the backcountry or maybe aren't where they want to be physically in their fitness level. And so do the minimum, but do more if you can and get the most out of it. I think that's it for now. Yeah. Registrations open this week. Check out all the info in the FAQ. And for those of you who signed up last night, like you said Steve, we have a bunch of emails with, hey, I need to fix this, change that, do whatever. Be patient with us. We'll get you taken care of here soon. And for anyone who signs up, whether that's cheap goat challenge only, I would say just be patient. But things are going to be kicking off here really, really soon with the group in a whole lot more. It's going to be good. What else Steve? It's hard for me like mentally to get past anything other than this challenge right

17:44now. I want you this thing and get it going. The first thing you said this morning was like, oh, man, I'm mentally wiped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Um. Dawson, we have so excited for the, it's like my, um, my energy level right now. I'm just like 190 percent, um, like just springs come in. We got this badass bear hunt plan here in early May, where you're coming out, get this, we're going to go loose hunting this fall, do this elk tag, a couple of buddies got some sheep's eggs. Um, it's just exciting. We got the next, for me, the next two months, um, along with all the cut going on. I literally, I got to put my blinders on and really, really like polish up and finish some K4 X design stuff that I've been working on and go crawl, I kind of crawl in a design hole and just knock all the, I've got some, some new ideas popped in my brain on, like,

18:46I want to try and implement and I just got to like get to work on that and, yeah, man, just excited. That's a lot of, not a good energy right now. So keep kicking ass. Well, cool, guys, there's more to come on the podcast. We have full length episodes. And as you said earlier, Steve, part of what we will be getting back to is podcasts that not just relate to this challenge of particular, but get back to some of what we did kind of with the experience project on deep dives that really matter and kind of make a difference for anyone, whether you're in the challenge or not, but if you're working towards hunt goals and want to continue to learn and grow and improve, whether that's within very technical gear aspects, whether it's more on the strategy of hunts, whether it gets into fitness, all that's coming with some great guests that we have lined up and are still continuing to line out. So it's going to be a great time.

19:46Hope that you guys are able to follow along if you haven't yet. Just hit subscribe or follow in the podcast app. You'll continue to get all those updates and then we'll also be getting back to listener Q and A as well. So if you have any questions for us, just send an email to podcast at xonmoutinq.com. I appreciate all the feedback and support definitely excited for what's to come this year. This will be a good one. Glad you guys are along. We'll talk to you soon.