Nick Mott
speaker
64 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Nick Mott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hey, Ayesha. Thanks so much for having me.
You know, growing up like you, I was a bit of a city slicker. I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City, and this stuff wasn't directly relevant to my life. But after college, I moved out west. I was doing conservation work for the government, meaning things like trail building and cutting down trees and planting native plants.
And in that time, it seemed like endangered species issues were everywhere I looked. So I was trained on what to do if I came across a desert tortoise. And in diners, ranchers would sort of accost me about if I was on a tortoise crew because I was wearing a government shirt. I was –
cutting down trees to restore habitat for animals like the sage-grouse, which weren't listed yet, but there was this big debate about if they would be. And I spent weeks in Death Valley, too, where I saw this tiny population of fish that exists only in this one little tiny pool that inspired one of the biggest water rights debates this country's ever seen.
It just seemed like everywhere I looked, these Endangered Species Act debates were looming.
So Grizzlies exist really close to my house and they they're the ones that they say in certain situations you should play dead. OK, but it's a lot more complicated than that.
So I've had a handful of encounters, a couple that are really, really scary. So just about like two days after the first episode of the podcast came out. Which was about grizzly bears. I was out on a trail like less than an hour from my house with a friend. We were on sort of a trail run hike type thing going up a mountain. And we both had bear spray on our running vest. So on our chest.
So bear spray is kind of like a big can high powered pepper spray. It can spray out to 30 feet. You spray it at a bear charging you supposed to stop it in its tracks. So I was 15 feet ahead of my friend and we came around what turned out to be kind of a blind corner and I heard something. So I looked up and I saw these two silhouettes, a big silhouette and a little silhouette.
And immediately within a second or two, the big silhouette gets down on all fours and I see the sun hit its back. I see brown fur. I realize it's a grizzly and her cub, which is basically the worst situation you can be in in terms of a grizzly encounter. And this bear, she got down on all fours and she just started running at me and she was less than 50 feet away.
So this all happened in a matter of seconds, but it felt like an hour. I remember taking a couple steps back and I slapped my chest with both hands to grab the bear spray. And by the time I got it out, she was essentially to me. And the safety was still on the bear spray, so I couldn't spray it yet. In my head, I decided I'd jump off the trail onto the steep slope and
to my buddy Jacob, it looked like I was kind of just, I just fell. And anyway, I was sliding a few feet on my back and that gave me the extra second or two I needed to get that safety off. As I did, the bear continued coming towards me and I sprayed. And in my head, I was 15 feet behind myself. It felt like she wasn't that close.
My friend later told me she was at most two feet away from me as I was sliding down this hill.
Exactly. I sprayed. It hit her and she immediately sort of reared up. I remember seeing her ears perk up and she started snuffling like something was bothering her. And she she turned around and she ran back down the trail the way she'd come from. And then we got out of there.
Yeah. Had she been any closer, she'd have been on top of me. So that was far and away my closest encounter. And it was traumatic. I've still been flashing back to that moment. It makes me feel kind of nauseous and still sort of grappling with what that means for my own role in these activities I like to do, these places I like to go.
Absolutely. You know, one person I interviewed for the show said living in grizzly country is kind of like an enforced humility. There's a fear there. There's a weight that comes with knowing you're not at the top of the food chain. And as humans, we need to understand we're not necessarily always in charge.
And in terms of the Endangered Species Act, like this experience made tangible for me, maybe there are things I shouldn't be doing in certain places. And fundamentally, that's one of the questions the Endangered Species Act makes us ponder at this much larger scale. Like how can we coexist with wildlife and with ecosystems?
And are there places where maybe we shouldn't just be doing whatever we want?
Yeah. So the Endangered Species Act was passed back in 1973. So just over 50 years ago now. And I wanted to dig in, you know, what was going on before that time and when it was passed. And it turned out that was kind of hard to do because most of the people involved in the legislature, they've passed away. But there ended up being this one name, this guy that seemed to still be around.
And we actually found his phone number. We give him a call and he was really eager to take us back to those early days before the ESA got passed when he was tucked away in this office on the hill. It's a really wild story. So if you don't mind, I'd love for you to hear this part of the podcast and you'll see what I mean. So like I said, we found this guy and we called him up.
Buff grew up hunting and fishing in the Northeast. He loved the outdoors. Still does. When I talked with him, he was eager to get back outside and tend his garden. I'm still handy with a chainsaw. In his younger days, Buff served in the Army, then worked for the State Department. He was a bit of an adventurer.
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