Wendy Corr:
Well, Hey folks, welcome to The Roundup. We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast, and we feature interesting people from the Cowboy State. And I'm telling you, when you're talking about a family legacy of interesting people, the Eastman family IS hunting legend. And this is Guy Eastman, who is going to be our podcast guest today. And Guy has graciously agreed to be on here and tell us about his family, and tell us about hunting and about publishing. I mean, there's so many different ways that the Eastman family has really transformed the hunting genre in that way. And so hello, Guy, and welcome to the roundup.
Guy Eastman:
Hi, Wendy. Thanks for having me on today.
Wendy Corr:
I'm so glad we could make this work. We had a few technical difficulties getting started but you know, that's the way that it works on podcasts and technology - and I'm telling you, when it comes to technology and videos and things like that, Guy, you kind of know your stuff there.
Guy Eastman:
Well, I thought I did until I tried to come on the podcast, but I'm not as technical as some people. I'm kind of in that age group, or I'm in between the real techy kids and the old school guys like my dad, so I'm in between.
Wendy Corr:
But you have had the benefit of your dad's experience and your grandfather's experience, to tell us about the Eastman family legacy, when it comes to outdoor films and outdoor hunting adventures. Tell us about that.
Guy Eastman:
Sure. My grandfather started the outdoor filming industry, basically. He was a pioneer. He started filming hunts back in 1957 in Alaska, and just carried it through. He went on to work for Disney, in Hollywood for quite a few years, and just built a lifetime of hunting.
But his true passion was hunting, and cinema photography, it was called back then. And it was all on film, old school film. And when I was a kid I used to help him. We still filmed with that 16 millimeter film that had to be developed, and was basically more of a Hollywood quality, not digital to what we have now. So I've kind of gone from that transition, all the way through to what we have now, where I was out filming. My dad has a YouTube channel. For an old guy he loves - he's really a techie, more than me. And I was filming him doing some fishing stuff. And he's doing some history of fishing in Wyoming, from when he was a kid, growing up at Jackson Hole. And I was filming him doing some fishing here locally, and with my phone. He was completely blown away by what I could do just with my phone. And he looked over to me and said, ‘You know, your grandfather would kill us if he saw what we could do with a telephone now, or a phone versus what he had to pack around back in the 1950s and 60s.’
But anyway, that's how it started. He started way back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, traveled all over North America. You know, back then people hadn't seen the natural world, or a lot of people to that level. So he would come back from the North Country, which was Alaska, Canada, with all these animals. People hadn't really seen footage of them hunting and having adventures.
It wasn't all just about hunting, it was about outdoor adventure, seeing caribou, Dall Sheep, grizzly bears, brown bears, polar bears, you know, all these things people hadn't really seen. And we've traveled around to schools all over, to schools and auditoriums all over the country. I run into a lot of people still to this day - they're even in our industry - who, their passion was ignited for hunting in the outdoors by my grandfather traveling to their local auditorium, selling a ticket for 50 cents or $1 to come in, bring the whole family and watch a video or film, and he would live narrate it. And it was a very popular thing to do because there was no television back then at that level. It's certainly not YouTube or Netflix or anything that we know now.
Wendy Corr:
The on-demand now that we have, and that Eastman's has as well - that you guys have really taken that, and run with it. Where can - and we're kind of skipping to the end, but I'm gonna say this first - where can people find all of the various opportunities to watch hunting from Eastmans?
Guy Eastman:
The easiest way, oddly enough, probably common to everybody really, too, is YouTube. Eastmans has a huge YouTube channel. I think he's got 250 million views on there. It's huge. Huge. So there's thousands of videos to watch on there, and we have a - they have a weekly / monthly television show specific to YouTube on there that is updated with new episodes every week, every month. You know it kind of changes with the time of year and the season, but there's a lot of content out there - too much for one person to probably watch.
Wendy Corr:
Probably, but people will give it a try, I'm willing to bet, because your family has inspired generations of hunters and generations of outdoors people. Tell us about your history - your family history in Wyoming. How did the family get to Wyoming?
Guy Eastman:
Actually a lot of people are surprised by this, but my mom's family goes back way further than my dad's in Wyoming. My mother's family homesteaded in what is now Teton Park, back in right around the turn of the century - the last century, not this one. So yeah, and we're not sure, I can't remember, it was in 1899 or 1902, somewhere around there, in what's now Teton Park. And of course that homestead was bought by the Rockefellers and then turned into the park. So her family goes way back. My great grandfather was the mayor of Jackson for like 40 years. So my great grandfather managed the Snake River Ranch for over 40 years, so my mom grew up on the ranch. She was actually born on Snake River Ranch. And so that family goes back a long ways.
My dad's family, the Eastman family, arrived in the valley in, I think, the early 60s, when my dad was just a boy. They came from Washington state.
Wendy Corr:
So that's how you guys got to Wyoming, anyway. And obviously, the love of the outdoors goes back generations, much farther back than even your grandfather. But your grandfather, then, like you mentioned, he created this wonderful opportunity for people to see and to bring the outdoors into our - not living rooms yet, but into the local movie theaters and things like that. But then your dad picked up the mantle on that. And he took that and ran with it. How did your dad change what your grandfather had started?
Guy Eastman:
Actually, the two companies coincided or operated at the same time for a while. My dad was selling - my grandfather, I gotta back up a little bit. My grandfather made these theatrical length films, called High, Wild and Free; Challenging Northwest Territories; North the Sun; a bunch of these that actually went in theaters after he did the auditorium tour, which was talking about - he made more theatrical type films that went in theaters.
Well, then in the 80s - and that company kind of died off a little bit as society changed. But in the 80s, with the advent of the video player, you could rent videos at a video store, the family got the idea we needed to put these on video. And so they put the films all on VHS tape and beta tape video. And my grandfather was one of the salesmen that would travel around and sell these videos to stores.
And he was actually in Pennsylvania - lots of hunters there, as everybody knows, and a guy who owned a video store said ‘Hey, would you be willing to come talk to some hunters? I'll set it up. It'll be kind of like what your father used to do. We'll have an auditorium and you can show about hunting out west in Wyoming.’ And all these guys wanted to hunt - mostly elk and big mule deer - to come out west, but they're from Pennsylvania. They didn't know you could do it on your own. You know, they thought it was more like Pennsylvania, you had to have a private place to hunt. You know, we have all this wonderful public land out here.
So my dad said ‘Sure, I'll come.’ And he worked with my grandfather to build a little film on a projector, 16 millimeter. And he showed up on a rainy night in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and the guy from the video store picked him up from the hotel and was driving him over to the auditorium to speak. And my dad was dumbfounded. There's lines of people out in the rain, just lines of hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people, and my dad said, ‘What in the world is going on? Do you guys have a football game or a basketball game?’ He said, ‘No. They're here to see you.’ He was figuring it’d be five or six people and it was like a thousand people. So he went in the auditorium, went in the bathroom, puked, came out, gave his seminar.
But anyway, that sparked the interest for him to take a new level to what we were doing, and start a newsletter. Like, you know, he had a newsletter that would come out, just real simple, on how to come out west, what's going on out here, and that's what morphed into what we know as the magazine now.
Yeah, so oddly enough, Eastman's hunting journal was born in Wyoming, but it was actually, the seeds came from Pennsylvania, believe it or not.
So now it's morphed into multiple magazines, TV shows, YouTube channels, podcasts, everything that they have going on over there now.
Wendy Corr:
Because of that, and because of your family's history, and because of the focus of the family business, you have become very much an expert on hunting, especially in Wyoming. And so, Guy, tell us a little bit about your views on hunting. How often do you get out to go hunt? I'm assuming you get to go a lot.
Guy Eastman:
Yeah, I probably hunt more - my wife would agree with this - I always tell a lot of people, or people when they ask. I hunt more than anyone probably should. I've been very fortunate, very blessed. It's not always easy. I mean, it's a job, there's a lot of pressure to it. It's not what a lot of people think, necessarily, but we've been very fortunate to be able to hunt all over the world. But my heart is here in Wyoming, always has been. Born and raised, third generation here, and so it's just - my daughter's fourth generation - and our core has always been here in Wyoming, which has the best hunting and fishing in the United States, I think. But I might be a little biased on that.
Wendy Corr:
Just maybe a little bit. But what is the best Big Game Hunt in Wyoming? What are you telling people? If you’re going to hunt one big game animal in Wyoming, what are you going to tell them to hunt?
Guy Eastman:
At this time, probably elk right now are up. Populations are through the roof. Elk is a very desirable hunt for most people. A lot of out-of-staters, when I was a kid, it was mule deer. Now it's kind of switched to elk, just the way the populations have exploded. The quality is very good. Wyoming offers the best quality for the most opportunity of any state in the West. I study them all - bar none, Wyoming is the best opportunity state for an elk hunter.
Wendy Corr:
That’s great to know. And I know that a lot of our people who are watching are going to feel the same way. I'm sure the mule deer population really is taking quite a hit in this last year. And from your expert opinion, what's the prognosis for that mule deer herd, especially down there in the southwest, where it really got hit hard by last winter?
Guy Eastman:
Yeah, it's just devastating. Beyond a once in a lifetime event. You know, the populations were down in excess of 30% before that winter, and then now we're getting the data back that it's, you know, 50 to 60% of those deer that were remaining died. So we're down - I did the math the other day, in some areas where there would be 100 deer, there's only 15 left. I mean, that's how bad it is. That's the bad part.
The good part is, is time will, hopefully and it always has up to this point, you know, rectify that situation. My dad and I've had the fortunate good fortune of talking to a lot of old timers, I mean real old timers in this state, and this is not out of the ordinary. If you go back far enough, like when my grandfather was a kid back in the ‘30s - ‘20s and ‘30s - the populations in Wyoming were very, very low. An old timer told my dad that back before the depression, they saw almost no mule deer down by Evanston, which then in the ‘80s - or ‘60s and ‘70s and into the beginning of the ‘80s, populations were massive. And so I have to believe that it's not out of the ordinary, although it's shocking for us.
You know, humans tend to think that the world's history is just their lifetime and it's not. So time's going to hopefully rectify the situation. And we've had a good year so far. The winter was mild, spring has been somewhat wet, fairly mild. We've had a few storms, and so we just need to know, those deer will just bounce back. I'm just afraid it's going to be a seven to 10 year bounce back, so we could be a decade behind on those. The antelope will be quicker, probably three to five years, but the deer will take longer.
Wendy Corr:
So you're not going to tell people, don't go hunt, even with this big die off. Are you going to - what's your advice to people who want to hunt mule deer in Wyoming, even with the big die off? I mean, I know that they were going to reduce the number of tags that are available. Is that correct?
Guy Eastman:
Yes. We’ve seen significant tag reductions, which is good, that's a good thing. But I tell people, don't, always - there's a difference between volume and quality. So the volume of deer is way down, way, way down. But it doesn't mean there can't be a big buck out there, you know, somewhere. Historically, growing up here, we've had die offs - not this major of one, but you know, pretty significant die offs before. And immediately after those, the guys kill some really big deer. Mostly because of the habitat improvements, you know, with those winters, it’s just kind of mother nature's way of cleaning it off, it just scrapes the palate clean and puts brand new paint on there, we kind of start over. It's kind of like a reset, and it's painful for us humans. But you know, this goes way beyond our control. And I think that there's going to be some good opportunities coming up.
In the meantime, I'll just be chasing elk and wait a few years to really hunt deer seriously, but for guys who really want to get out there and hunt deer, there are still pockets in Wyoming that are doing fairly well. Up here where I live, we didn't get near the winter die off that the other parts of the state got.
Wendy Corr:
Oh, absolutely. So my next question for you is, you have had the opportunity to hunt everywhere and you've taken your rifle around the world - and tell me, outside of Wyoming, what was your favorite hunt? I think people will want to know what stories you have. What was your favorite hunt outside of right here in Wyoming?
Guy Eastman:
Oh, probably - this will be no surprise to people who watch the YouTube channels - hunting Marco Polo sheep in Tajikistan which is halfway around the world in Southeast Asia. Very, very high elevation. In November. Very cold, 20 below, windy. Kind of like Wyoming in January. But it was extreme - 16 to 17,000 feet elevation. And it was, there's a film on it on the YouTube channel, it has a whole bunch of views. So if anyone's interested, they can go watch that.
Wendy Corr:
Very good. Why was it your favorite, though?
Guy Eastman:
It's just the most extreme. You know, to define favorite, I guess it is kind of difficult for me. It's the most extreme, the most memorable. My favorite hunts though, consistently - Africa. Anyone who wants to do hunting should experience Africa sometime in their their life, even if you're not a hunter. I mean, it's a continent that is very fascinating. The wildlife is incredible. I'm not sure what the future holds for that continent, so it may not be like it is now for our children's lifetime. I don't know, but it's one of my favorites. The weather's nice there. It's kind of a gentleman's hunt, you know, kind of like a pheasant hunt would be.
Wendy Corr:
But you're hunting big game there, obviously. When it comes to the most exotic, you'd say probably Africa as far as getting the most exotic animals.
Guy Eastman:
Yeah, and the volume of animals, and the different species, and the ecosystems in Africa are very complex. Africa would be like, if you took Wyoming and just shrunk it down into one square mile and everything was living in that one square mile. You’d just have - it'd be incredible what you’d see. And you can go out and see 10, 15 different types of animals in a single day. You know, it's just very, very lush with habitat and wildlife. And it's very fascinating.
And there, contrary to popular belief, the African countries have done a very good job of protecting a lot of that wildlife. In some ways they are even ahead of the United States. They've kind of taken our North American model, tweaked it for what works for them, and put a value on the wildlife, which works.
Because I mean, if they all got hungry, there's enough people living on that continent, they’d just eat everything in about a week.
And that is another fascinating thing, Wendy. When you travel around the world you get to see how each country handles their wildlife and the conservation there for the wildlife, and it's very interesting to see how that all works. And a lot of it's American money and influence that goes into how that works, but you know, contrary to our mule deer situation here in Wyoming, wildlife is thriving in a lot of countries around the globe, well beyond what it used to be, even 20 years ago,
Wendy Corr:
That's fantastic. You know, something that people who don't hunt, or who don't live in an area where hunting is so high priority, is that hunters truly are the most, I guess, vocal conservationists. It doesn't seem to an outsider that that's the way it is. But hunters are all about conserving what we have, and conserving the wildlife populations. Hunters don't want over-hunting. And so, tell me about your efforts to kind of promote conservation in that way.
Guy Eastman:
But yeah, exactly. Hunters, for the most part, foot the bill for global conservation. You know, the governments like to say they do, but it's really the hunters' dollars, and the hunters’ influence that perpetuate and fuel global conservation. And there's just unbelievable successes all over the world, if you really dig into some of these countries and what they've done, and a lot of it's hunting dollars. And it's a little different in the United States.
Global hunting conservation is more like what they would have in Texas. You know, we have a very unique system in North America, because we have so much public land, the states own the wildlife, and manage the wildlife. So there's a lot of opportunity for us locals to go hunting.
Whereas, other countries, that's not the case. You know, the locals, they can't afford to go hunting, and a lot of it is is perpetuated by out of country hunters - Americans mostly, that come there and pay to hunt and put the value on the wildlife, that then fuels the habitat that the wildlife needs, and controls the populations as well. Because some of these countries, Africa included, the populations of that wildlife can just explode if it's not kept in check, and really - they’ll eat themselves out of house and home.
I mean, I always give example of elephants - elephants in Africa, when they're hungry, they just knock the tree down and eat it. Well, if they do that too much, then you have no trees, and without the trees, you have no umbrella of shade that grows all of the habitat that the other wildlife need, and it becomes a desert. And so you have to really keep that in check - which the North American model is what has kind of created that mindset. And like I said, other countries have taken and tweaked it a little bit.
But for me personally, you know, I'm very involved in organizations that do a lot of the conservation work and a lot of the lobbying, because unfortunately, there's a lot of politics that go along with it. Safari Club International does a lot of global outreach all over the world; Sheep Foundation, which used to be here in Cody, now it's in Bozeman, they do a lot of work with sheep and mountain species all over the world and meeting with those global leaders and working with their conservation and supplying funding and biologists to do the study for all the wildlife to help, you know, keep the those wildlife species in check.
And not all of them are huntable wildlife. There's a lot of them, that a lot of work they do that is non huntable. It's like you know, a lot of people think, ‘Oh, they're just dumping money in so they can blow the population up and hunt it.’ And that's not true. They do a lot of work on non huntable wildlife, birds of prey, reptiles, anything wildlife conservation wise, they're usually at the forefront, sitting there with an open checkbook and a lot of political pull behind them to make sure - and a lot of species we see all over the world are still alive today, mostly because of those efforts.
You know, when I go to Tajikistan their funding and their footprint and fingerprints were all over those projects. Those sheep that I hunted there were down to less than 2000 sheep at one point, and now they're almost 30,000 strong. So they brought them from 2000 to 30,000 or more sheep, and mostly because they had to create funding that bought off the ranchers - and there's a lot of livestock, domestic sheep and goats there. And so these organizations went in and basically paid the local ranchers not to graze the top third of the mountain range, and leave it for the wild sheep - and the population exploded, and so it was a win-win for everybody. Sheep population exploded, the domestic farmer rancher was happy because he didn't have to raise as many sheep, because he was getting - basically they were leasing the top third of the mountain from them. So they got paid, good ol American dollars, which are very valuable in a lot of those places in the world. And it just worked. And that's just one example. I could name 50 of them all over the world that work like that.
Wendy Corr:
That's fantastic. That's wonderful. Quick question, Guy, when it comes to your family, how do you feel like your family has really helped to promote this type of conservation and this type of model?
Guy Eastman:
Well, I think mostly through adventure, and film, and reading, through the magazine. But you know, the magazine is a little different, because we're kind of preaching to the choir on that a little bit. But there's new people coming into the magazine constantly that don't necessarily know these things, a lot of people from back east or, or down south that don't understand quite how things work out west.
But mostly, a lot of it's through visual - video, film, you know, just telling those stories and explaining. And the good thing about the great thing about YouTube is you don't know who's going to watch that, right? If we go on TV on the Outdoor Channel, again, it's kind of preaching to the choir, not 100%. But when you go on YouTube, anybody could be fed that video, or find it somehow watch it and figure out, ‘Oh, this is how that works.’
Because a lot of people are naive. I do talk to a lot of non hunters. They've done the polling, and a lot of people are on the fence, so to speak. They're not hunters, but they had a grandpa or an uncle, or a dad that hunted, and so they're not against it. But they don't know why they should be FOR it. And so when you can tell those stories and those conservation successes, then people connect those dots easier - because people are smart, they're not stupid, Americans are smart. They connect those dots and go, ‘Oh, that's how that works.’ Yes, when you go up the North Fork of the Shoshone here and see all those sheep butting heads in the fall, or in the fall during the rut along the road, everyone’s taking pictures of them, and it's really great. Hunters are paying for that. Those of us who are applying for those sheep tags, spending all that money filtering through Game and Fish.
Game and Fish, you know, worked real hard to make sure those sheep populations are in check, improving the habitats through conservation organizations like Muley Fanatics, and the Wild Sheep Foundation, and various organizations. And then they connect the dots and figure out, ‘Oh, okay, this all just isn't about blood and guts and a head on a wall.’ And it's more than just filling your freezer, you're actually leaving a legacy for the next generation of Wyomingites to enjoy.
And so conservation is not easy. It's politically charged, and it certainly isn't cheap. So, you know, we have to have ways to fund that. And the more people we can get involved, the better. And I think a lot of Wyoming people know that. I mean, I'm talking as a general audience of tourists that come to Wyoming. Most people who live here or have for very long, they understand how all this works, even if they don't necessarily partake in it, or they buy a fishing license or, or whatnot.
But the outsiders or the people new that are moving into Wyoming - I have a lot of them around here in my area, they don't quite understand. But after living here a while, talking to people, then they start to figure out, ‘Okay, that's how all this works. I understand it now. This isn't just a free for all, go out and fill your freezer, it's way way much, much more than that.’
And I've personally been involved in converting a fair amount of hunters that were non hunters, and some of the most passionate hunters I have come across are actually new to the sport. You know, they didn't grow up and like I did, kind of very fortunate, that was passed down from generations. And historically, that's how the hunting tradition has been passed down in America, is from generation to generation. But there is this new group of newcomers coming in that don't have that connection. And they're new to it. And boy, a lot of those, once that fire is lit, they go completely full steam headfirst into it, which is great to see. Great to see.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely. We're about out of time here - we've had such a wonderful conversation and learned so much, truly I'm very grateful, Guy that you're able to talk to us today. Real quickly, where do you think - just to kind of wrap up - what do you see the future of hunting in Wyoming?
Guy Eastman:
I think Wyoming is a, you know, Wyoming is a very unique state. The hunting heritage here is so strong. And like I said, even with the people moving in, a lot of people are moving here because of our hunting and fishing and outdoors. And so I think, you know, in our state, it's going to be preserved for a long time. I think there will be hunting, definitely for my daughter, probably for my grandchildren.
I can't say that for other states, I just got back from Colorado, they have a lot of crazy political things going on down there right now with their hunting, mostly because they didn't pass the ‘Right to Hunt’ legislation, when they should have, 20 years ago before all those people moved in and changed that state politically. But Wyoming, I believe, did, and so it's, it's more in legislation here in Wyoming than other states around us that have issues.
And so I think we're in good shape here. I think the Game and Fish Commission is going to be charged with more and more of a balancing act as time goes on, because that resource is finite. And as there's more and more pressure on it - I mean, just to give you an example, Wendy, the amount of non residents who applied for elk tags in Wyoming before COVID, 2017 was about 65,000. Now it's almost 200,000. And so, that's how much pressure - now that's outside pressure. But we've had a lot of people move in, and people are moving into Wyoming because of our resource, which, it's going to put more and more pressure on that. And I've seen that, you know, because I studied that data - as time has gone on, even our resident odds have gone down, down, down, just simply because - well, the quotas have fallen because of the winter, of course, but even before that, because there's just more people applying more people, you know, moving in, so it's a balancing act with with a finite resource and more and more demand on it.
But trust me, I travel all these states and talk to a lot of people. We are very fortunate, what we have here in Wyoming as residents, it is the best place for outdoorsman to live, period. Let Montana have all the TV shows and the movies and all that. But Wyoming is where it's really at. I've talked to people who moved here from Colorado that say, ‘I moved to Colorado because I thought, this is what I thought it was. Now I've moved to Wyoming and it's what all the other lot of the other states try to claim - we have it right here.’
Wendy Corr:
Yes, we do.
Guy Eastman:
Hopefully we don't have a lot of people listen to this and move in even more, but it's really true. Wyoming is just, it's the last best place. I know other states claim that, but we really have. It really is here.
Wendy Corr:
Yes, it is. Guy Eastman, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today and for being our guest on The Roundup. It's a treat to be able to talk to you, and get your expertise on these things.
Guy Eastman:
Well, thank you.
Wendy Corr:
Thank you, and thank you for your family, and what you've done for Wyoming. And thank you folks for tuning in to The Roundup, and to our conversation today with Guy Eastman. Please check out the YouTube channel, check out Eastman's Hunting Journal, check out all of these wonderful resources that the Eastman family has provided to us and to outdoorsmen and women for generations. And thanks for tuning in! So stay tuned next week, we're going to have another fantastic guest, so you don't want to miss out on that. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you, Guy, very much. And folks, have a great week.
