Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 657, with guest Clay Hayes, winner of Alone Season 8.

Getting Ready for Hunting Season

Clay Hayes: Hey, my name is Clay Hayes, and you're listening to the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: Alright, Clay, how are you, man?

Clay Hayes: I'm doing excellent. Hunting season is just around the corner, and we're getting ready, all geared up and ready to go.

Tom Rowland: I know, I'm on the same program, I've inherited the elk bug for my son, shooting my bow and getting ready, it's all in preparation for that elk season. Is that your main fall season, or do you hunt all kinds of stuff?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, we do a little bit of everything, but my whole year kind of revolves around September, that September archery hunt, that's such a huge part of what we do. Up here we'll load up the whole family, wall tent, stove, everything, we just go live in the mountains until I kill an elk. This year my wife is gonna be doing some bow hunting too, and my youngest boy, Finn, isn't big enough to hunt elk with a bow yet, but I'm gonna try to get him on a deer with his little recurve. So we got lots of hunting to do.

Tom Rowland: Nice, and how old are your boys?

Clay Hayes: Ten and twelve. My older one is not into hunting, but the younger one is pretty much ate up with it, he loves it.

Tom Rowland: Right on, man. Well, that was certainly a big theme of you on Alone, how much your family meant to you, missing your boys and your wife, it's cool to see those kind of stories. Now are you, when you say up here, you're in Northern Idaho, is that where you live?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, we're about at the southern part of the Northern Panhandle of Idaho, so we spend about nine months out of the year up here, permanent residents, and then I grew up in Northwest Florida on a ranch down there, so usually in the winter we go down there and spend a couple of months.

Tom Rowland: Nice, well, that's a good time to be getting out of Idaho. Now I thought I saw somewhere that you used to live in Idaho Falls.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, I was a wildlife biologist for the state of Idaho for a number of years, and when I first moved up here that's where I got my first job. Awesome place, super cold, super windy. We eventually, after a couple of years down there, moved up to about an hour out of Lewiston, kind of up in that northern part.

Tom Rowland: I started my guide career on the South Fork of the Snake River right there, a lot of Idaho people would come over from Swan Valley and all that, just love that area, it's so nice.

Clay Hayes: Fantastic, I used to fish the South Fork all the time, I lived there, you must be familiar with Tex Creek WMA, I managed that wildlife management area, lived right there by Ririe Reservoir, and I would go fish the South Fork all the time.

Tom Rowland: Yeah man, it's such a great river, I love that river, that was a long time ago when I did my guiding there, but we still go back and fish it, and I think it might have even gotten better. It was different when I was there, almost every fish was like seventeen and a half inches because the eighteen-inch cutoff was the slot, so they were getting taken, but you would just catch seventeen-inch cutthroats all the time, it was an amazing river and almost all dry fly. And now there's a lot more browns there, but it's still one of my favorite rivers of all time, and that whole area, the Henry's Fork and the South Fork, it's just amazing, it's beautiful.

Clay Hayes: And so many little tributary creeks that you can just go and never see anybody, the fishing's fantastic.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, so how did you make your way from Florida to Idaho?

Clay Hayes: Well, I was in grad school in Mississippi, got my master's degree at Mississippi State, graduated from there, and they actually offered me a job in Mississippi with the USDA, I almost accepted it, it was a wonderful spot, we had a place near Starkville, great hunting, good people, I had friends there, but I always wanted to be out west. So I turned down that permanent full-time job to come out to Idaho for the first time for a temporary six-month technician position.

Tom Rowland: What do you do as a technician?

Clay Hayes: All the fun stuff. I worked in the habitat, for Idaho Fish and Game, that department is broken into fisheries, law enforcement, and wildlife, and the wildlife side is broken into wildlife population staff and wildlife habitat, I worked on the habitat side. The wildlife management area I was taking care of is basically like having a 30,000-acre piece of land you can do whatever you want with, within reason, so I was on a tractor planting various things, I planted tens of thousands of shrubs out there for habitat restoration, doing a lot of habitat work during the summertime, and then in the winter the place I was on was a big winter range, you'd have two, three thousand elk winter on this place and a couple thousand mule deer, so you'd get to take a snow machine out there and check out all that stuff, keep tabs on things. It was a lot of fun.

Tom Rowland: And was that enough that you said, no more Mississippi, I've gotta be in Idaho?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, I knew when I first started applying for jobs out West, I wanted to be somewhere around that greater Yellowstone system, so I was applying in Western Wyoming, Western Montana, and Idaho, just happened to get picked up in Idaho, and that's where I've been ever since. I got done with that first six-month stint, went back to Florida, came back the next year and got hired on full time, and stayed with Idaho Fish and Game for ten years before I went off and did my own thing.

Tom Rowland: So where in this adventure do you meet your wife?

Clay Hayes: My wife and I have been together since we were seventeen years old, we met in high school and have been together ever since.

Tom Rowland: Nice, so I had a similar kind of thing, brought my wife out west with me and then down to Florida in The Keys, didn't meet her there, we met in college. But how does your wife like Idaho compared to Florida, is she a Florida girl?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, she grew up probably ten minutes down the road from me. She likes both areas, down there we've got all the families, everybody's down there, we're the only ones that ever left, really, but up here in Idaho we've got our little farmhouse, twenty acres, and she's got a huge garden, she's really into food production and preservation, so she does a lot of gardening, canning, and preserving. We just got a freeze dryer, so she's got that running like twenty-four seven. So she enjoys both places, and she also likes to get out into the mountains and camp and fish.

Getting Selected for Alone

Tom Rowland: So let's move over to this Alone conversation, because prior to reaching out to you I had just watched the season you were on, and it was fantastic, I really like that show, I think that show is legit, the people on that show, the first time I watched it I was like, man, these people really know what they're doing. And the contestants, I don't know what the process is for picking them, I'd like to find out, but they seem pretty legit, yourself included, you've had a lot of experience in Idaho and Florida with fishing and hunting, which definitely benefited you. But what was the process like, and why did you even wanna be on the show?

Clay Hayes: Well, we'll start with why I wanted to be on the show. I was the same way you looked at it, the first time I ever saw Alone I was like, that's as real as it gets right there, there's nothing made up, and having gone through the process I can tell you that's absolutely the case, there's nothing fabricated about this show. When they take you and drop you off in the wilderness, it's up to you, they give you no support, you have a lifeline, a sat phone, you can call them to come get you if something goes wrong, but as far as feeding yourself and doing your shelter and all that stuff, it's all up to you. I looked at it as a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, when are you ever going to get a chance to do something like this, there was no way I was gonna pass that up. As far as the selection goes, there's I don't know how many applicants there are for this thing in a year, thirty, forty thousand, something like that last I looked, and someone had actually recommended me, so one of the casting agents got in contact with me, and we went through multiple rounds of selection. I don't know how many people they start off with, but ours was during COVID, so we couldn't go to an actual gathering place where they'd evaluate your skills, we had to do it all remotely, so they started off with like twenty-four people at that remote skills assessment thing, went through that, went through a number of interviews, and ended up with twelve people, so you have the ten people who go on the show, and two alternates in case something happens while you're at orientation camp, one of the alternates will step in. So that's basically the selection process, interviews, you had to demonstrate some skills, talk to the survival consultants, make sure they didn't put people out there who really had no clue what they were doing.

Tom Rowland: Right, because where they put you, did you have any idea when you were going through the application process what type of environment it would be?

Clay Hayes: No, not really, they said it's going to be cold and there's going to be snow, and that's about it, I guess it was pretty late, we took off probably around August 20th or something to go up to Canada, and it was probably mid-July before they would even tell us, okay, you're gonna be at a lake in British Columbia, and it's gonna be this mixed conifer forest at this elevation. And that's basically the only information we had to go on, we had to select all our gear based on just that, there was no opportunity to look at aerial photographs and do all the stuff you'd normally do for a hunt, if I was going on a hunt up there I'd spend a month looking at aerials, picking out topographic features, finding all the pinch points, and there was no opportunity to do that at all. Not even once we got up there, you had no idea where they were going to drop you, and the lake they put us on was fifty miles long, you can try to look at topo maps of that whole fifty-mile stretch of lakeshore, but you're not gonna remember any of it.

Tom Rowland: Right. And so when you're getting started, there's some sort of a list of things you could possibly bring, and then some strategy on which ones you'd choose. How does that work when you look at that list, knowing it's gonna be cold and snow and this elevation, I'd imagine you're looking at it from your own experience, like, well a bow would be nice, fishing gear would be nice, but how did you make your decision?

Clay Hayes: Well, let me, for folks that aren't familiar with the show, give a basic rundown of the concept. Alone is basically a last-man-standing or last-person-standing competition, we'll get into why I don't think it's really a competition, but they take ten people and you get to select ten very basic items, things like a pot, a ferro rod for starting fires, saw, ax, bow and arrow is one item, sleeping bag, just very basic things. You can't take a firearm, can't take a compound bow, can't take any modern traps. So you select your ten items, then they take these ten people out into the wilderness, drop you off with a case full of camera gear, and last person out there wins half a million dollars. Like I said, you do have a sat phone, so if you want to tap out, call them and say I'm done, come get me, you can do that, that's one way people leave. The other way is if your body condition gets too deteriorated, if your health declines too much, they can pull you out for medical reasons, periodically they'll come back and check on you to make sure you're healthy enough to continue.

Tom Rowland: Do they alert you beforehand, call on the sat phone, or do they just show up?

Clay Hayes: They let you know so you're there at your site, they don't have to track you down, they say, okay, we're gonna come tomorrow, be around camp, and it actually becomes a little bit of an annoyance because you got things to do and you don't wanna be sitting around, it's like the cable guy, he says, I wanna be here between eight and six, right, thanks. So you're putting a whole day to sit there.

Tom Rowland: Might be your one chance to kill something or have something walk into your camp right when they show up. You had all kinds of stuff, that first mountain lion deal was pretty cool. Did you ever see that mountain lion again after that?

Clay Hayes: I saw sign several times, but I never did catch up with the cat, I actually did go out and try to cut its track, one of the things I wanted to try was cut that cat's track in fresh snow and see if I could just walk it down, never did that. I actually went out one time after a real fresh, heavy snow, and spent all day walking around in knee-deep, heavy, wet snow, that was probably day forty-something, day fifty, something like that, and I was already probably down to about a hundred and forty pounds at that time, super skinny, and after that day I just felt bone tired, I never caught up with him, but I did try several times.

Grizzlies, Big Cats, and the Wilderness

Tom Rowland: Now in Idaho, have you had experience with fish and game, or just hunting them on your own, do you have experience with cats?

Clay Hayes: A little bit, I see their sign all over the place, but that's the thing with lions, I know they're watching me when I'm in the woods but you rarely see them. When I was, they said it was day one on the show but it was really day three or four, that lion came up behind me, I was sitting there at my campfire looking into the coals, and this cat stalks up behind me at ten yards, that's the first time I'd ever seen a cat like that, really intimately, on his terms kind of, I've seen him in trees over dogs, but that's a whole different thing, it was super cool to have that cat come up so close and be on ground level, staring at each other.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that's awesome man, and that would turn into food in that situation, right?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, if I had my bow, I was probably twenty yards from where I had a tarp shelter strung up, and that's where my bow was. Man, if I'd had it, I probably coulda got an arrow in that cat.

Tom Rowland: That would've been good. You were successful with the fishing and successful with the hunting, it seems like the people who win this take down something big, at least the last couple of seasons, Jordan, we had him on here, he got a moose, and that was great even though he got his fat stolen by a wolverine and he's literally basically eating as much as he can and still losing so much weight. That's incredible, how lean wild game is, and when you're in that situation and that's all you're eating, you're still just losing like a pound a day. What was the weight loss situation for you, were you losing more than you thought or faster?

Clay Hayes: No, it's about what I expected, when you're in a situation like that you can pretty much expect, if you're already a fairly lean guy, to lose about a pound a day, if you're a really big guy, a pound and a half is pretty normal. So right now I'm about a hundred and fifty-three, and before I went in, when I first got contacted I started gaining weight, trying to gain, and it's not easy for me to gain weight, very difficult. I don't know when they first contacted me, April, May, June, July, August, and then they finally launched us in September, so for that whole time I was eating so much I was never not uncomfortably stuffed, and I gained twenty pounds or so, went in at about a hundred and eighty pounds. By week three I was already back down to about one sixty, and the lowest I ever got was about one forty, I actually gained a couple pounds before I came out, came out around one forty-two. But you're talking about being lean, that's you think of a wolf or a lion, they're lean animals eating meat, and you're basically top-shelf predator at that time when you're out there, running on the same stuff a wolf runs on, so yeah, you're gonna be lean, and right now I'm one fifty-two, but if I were living in the woods and doing really well, I'd probably be one forty-five.

Tom Rowland: And when you were getting the fish and the fat from the fish, could you feel the surge of energy coming from it, like when you haven't had electrolytes in a long time and you drink a Gatorade, you feel it, oh my god, that's amazing.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, definitely. I think I ended up shooting a grouse on day two or something, then made a fishing rod on day five-ish, ended up catching some fish, the fish I caught I filleted and smoked the fillets, and for that first meal I took the backbones and the heads, threw them in my pot and stewed them down until they melted, there's so much fat in a fish's head, those trout, and that stuff is absolutely fantastic. When you're depleted like that, you can definitely feel it.

Making a Fishing Rod From Scratch

Tom Rowland: So let's talk about the fishing rod you made, you made a pretty good one, you were able to cast pretty far. So what could you bring in terms of fishing gear, did you have to make a lure, what were you catching these fish on, what was the fishing like up there?

Clay Hayes: If you choose fishing gear as one of your ten items, what you get is three hundred yards of monofilament and twenty-five hooks. For our season there's different regs you have to follow when you're up there, it's not an open buffet, one of the regs we had to follow is we had to have barbless hooks, which really sucked.

Tom Rowland: You're fishing for survival with barbless hooks.

Clay Hayes: Exactly. That's one of the reasons I really wanted to build a rod, because I knew it was gonna be important to keep pressure on that fish, it's hard to do that with a hand reel. So I had to figure out a way to make something I could cast and also reel with, I ended up making, there's actually a reel that functions in that same way, called an Alvey reel, where you take the spool and put it in the orientation of a spin-cast to start with, so you can cast and then flip it to the side and retrieve. That's basically the way mine works, I had a spindle that stuck out the front underneath the rod, I'd take the spool the line came on, stick it on that spindle, and it worked just like a spin-cast rod, I would take that off, stick it on a spindle perpendicular to the rod, and took a peg and stuck it in one of the sections of the spool so I could then reel it. I would have to pinch the line between my thumb and forefinger and just guide it onto the spool as I was reeling it up. Actually in whatever episode they show me catching those fish, you can see the first fish I catch on it, I get so excited I forget to guide it, and the line comes off and wraps around the spindle and I can't reel, so I just throw the whole thing down and run up there and grab the fish. But after that I calm down and actually learn how to use it, and it was pretty doggone effective, I think they showed me catching two fish with that rod, and I ended up catching six or seven in total on it while I was there.

Tom Rowland: How would you string it through the rod, what did you use for that?

Clay Hayes: One of the other items I took was snare wire, so I just made eyelets with the snare wire.

Tom Rowland: And did you practice that beforehand, did you make one at your shop or anything to see how it would work?

Clay Hayes: I did, yeah. That's one of the things I personally did, I spent a lot of time trying to prepare for this thing, I made a bunch of friction fires because I thought I might not take a ferro rod, I learned how to make gill nets in the old way with a gauge card and a net needle, which is one of the things I did out there, I made a gill net and also a landing net.

Tom Rowland: Could you take that net needle, or did you take that?

Clay Hayes: I made one while I was out there, made the card and the needle while I was out there. But fishing, they always put you out on a big body of water, whether it's a river, the coast, or a lake, so from early on I knew fishing was going to be an important part of my strategy, because I don't have the body type to go out there and starve, I can't gain enough weight to do that and be the last one. So when you were talking about selecting the items, I wanted every possible way to feed myself, so I took fish stuff, my bow and arrow, and snare wire, those are the three primary ways you can feed yourself out there, and I took every single one of them.

Tom Rowland: Now had you not taken the ferro rod, what would you have substituted, it seems like you thought about maybe not taking it?

Clay Hayes: I actually thought pretty seriously about taking a block of salt, Himalayan pink salt, for electrolytes primarily, and also food preservation, which I didn't have a problem with, but the salt would have been super nice out there.

Tom Rowland: That was one of the items, how big a block would they have let you take?

Clay Hayes: I can't remember, it was either two pounds or five pounds, a block of salt. I actually took one, took a block of pink Himalayan salt up to BC with me and ended up taking something else. I took several things up there that I didn't end up actually taking into the woods, I took a tarp because I had considered making a boat while I was out there, and I'm glad in hindsight I didn't do that, because my section of the lake was so windy there would have been a very small handful of days I could have used it, super windy and wavy on my site.

Tom Rowland: It seemed risky too, man, because that lake, I don't know, they kept putting it up there that it was two thousand feet deep in places, and when they'd do the aerial photos it looked like there was a pretty significant drop-off. If you were even to go down in three feet of water when it's really cold, that could be bad, you think about it, well if you just got the truck right there it's no big deal, but you're out there, you got nothing.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, and then the other thing is being on the water just takes a lot of energy, you're constantly making adjustments for the waves, your body's constantly working, you're never at rest when you're on the water like you can be on land. But at the same time, if you can get the fishing figured out a little farther offshore it might make the difference. If I were to go somewhere like Vancouver Island, I would definitely make a boat there, because fishing is such a huge part of, they've done several seasons on that island, it's such a big part of people's success, there's basically no hunting there, there's black bears but for some reason they weren't able to hunt them.

Tom Rowland: Because of the regulations? So what about the bears where you were, that was a big part of the story, the grizzly bears everywhere, and it did seem real and not just being played up, lots of people were seeing them, what was your experience with the bears?

Clay Hayes: That was very real, there were grizzlies everywhere. When I first got there I walked up the trail to the spot where I would eventually make my camp, and there's a big lodgepole pine that had claw marks running down it, grizzly hair stuck in it.

Tom Rowland: This looks like a great camp.

Clay Hayes: But there were bears, bear trails all over my site, old bear scat all over the place, and I had several very close encounters with grizzlies. The first one, there's a place I picked berries, probably a quarter mile, half mile from my campsite, and I had a grizzly walk probably not much more than about five yards from me. As soon as it saw me it took off, it was a young boar, but when it was coming I knew it was a bear because I could hear it breathing, like, holy shit, and I got my bear spray out, got ready. I had the wind on this bear, but the bear spray has these safety clips, and when you pull that safety clip off it makes a clicking sound, and when I clicked that safety off, the bear heard me and turned and looked at me, that's what alerted it. But if I had done that more quietly, I think that bear would've walked right by and never even known I was there.

Tom Rowland: Wow, that is always a weird thing when you're hiking, do you make noise, do you not make noise, because I've seen it play out both ways. One time I was on Jenny Lake in Grand Teton in my drift boat, we put it in on the lake and were just fishing, and there's a very popular trail there that goes to Hidden Falls, I was with my dad and we looked up and there's this black bear coming down this scree slope, and we see people walking on the trail, and there's this collision course, it's gonna happen right at the same time. My dad's like, should we say something, and I'm like, I don't know, because I'm afraid if we alert these people they're gonna freak out and then maybe the bear freaks out, so let's just see what happens. The bear comes down, gets on the trail, walks a couple feet, hears the people, jumps up and gets behind just a rock big enough, they walk right in front of it, comes down on the trail, then here comes some more people and it jumps up and gets right behind, we're having this view from the water, it can't tell what we are, we're the boat out there. That's a situation where it just played out nicely, and probably happens more than you know, a cat or bear just kind of knows you're there, gets far enough off the trail that you don't see it, you walk right by, it keeps going, it doesn't want anything to do with you. But then there's the making noise and alerting, I would imagine the worst thing that could happen would be to get between the cubs and the mom, but in the situation you're talking about, all of a sudden you decide not to pull the safety off, it gets within two yards and looks over and sees you and never smells you, I would imagine that could be seriously bad, it just reacts.

Clay Hayes: Well, that particular bear was a young boar, he had no reason to have any interest in me at all, if it had been a sow with cubs that could potentially have been a very different interaction. When they have cubs, their first instinct is to protect them, and when something surprises them, protection means neutralizing whatever potential threat is there. Death, either that. So that's one very dangerous situation, and the other is stumbling upon a bear guarding a kill or any food source basically, those are the only two situations I was really cautious of out there. I ended up killing a deer eventually, and the kill site where that gut pile was, I avoided that, I didn't want to go back there and run up on a grizzly, which absolutely would have been there, there were so many bears in the area.

Tom Rowland: Did you go back to that gut pile area again?

Clay Hayes: I went back because I ended up leaving my broadhead and my arrow out there, and I went back like a month, month and a half later.

Tom Rowland: Give it a month, man, that would be tough to be out there by yourself with those grizzly bears, that's just, not that having somebody with you is gonna help that much, but even just, like, do you hear that, having somebody there that would be like, yeah, I heard that, that would be something. But I found that to be a questionable decision for the show, to put people in that area with grizzly bears, that's the apex predator in North America, there's some other places you could go, but I don't know. Did that surprise you at all?

Clay Hayes: A little bit, I guess, I don't know what their acceptance of risk is, but it must be fairly high.

Tom Rowland: Well, people almost starve to death every season.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, but they do have, when they come back for the med checks, a doctor comes and does all your vitals, keeps tabs on your blood pressure and all that, so I feel like they keep pretty good tabs on you from a health standpoint. But like you said, you're out there on your own, you do have a sat phone but they're hours away, and sometimes if weather rolls in they just can't get there, so you may call and maybe three days later they'll come see if you're alright.

Tom Rowland: You'd probably be feeling a little better by then. Could you say that, or once you call, is it over?

Clay Hayes: I don't know, I never approached that, I never did it.

Missing Family and the Hardest Part

Tom Rowland: And that was kinda the same way with Jordan when I watched his episode, both of you just never had the mental breaks other contestants had. Certainly one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, because what seemed to be weighing the heaviest on you was being away from your family, that was on your mind, and I don't know how they edited the show, but that was the story that came out. I have two boys like yours that are close together, followed up with a girl, and when I'm gone on fishing trips, that is absolutely the hardest part, being away from the family. So how did you manage that, staying focused on what you needed to do?

Clay Hayes: Well, before I left I talked with both of my boys and told them I needed their help, because I needed to know everything was gonna be okay at our home, because once you get out there there's no contact at all, I didn't talk to my wife or boys for two and a half months, and when they come out to do those med checks they give you zero information. So I needed to know they would not make it hard on their mom, that they'd try to make it as easy on her as possible, because if you got two boys you know how hard they can be on their mama. So I talked to them both individually, and while I was away, talking to Liz, they really stepped up and started pulling their weight, helped keep the house clean, helped cook dinner, helped with all these things, but before I went I made sure they knew I needed that from them. When I went out there, Liz is incredible, I knew she could handle everything on her own, I knew the boys would really help out, so I didn't really worry about that so much while I was out there, and that was a huge help. And the other thing I kept in my mind is that this thing is temporary, this is only maybe three months and some change at the most, and a year down the road when I get off of this thing, looking back this is gonna seem like the blink of an eye, even though it sucks right now and I'm half starved and I haven't seen my kids in two months, it's gonna end, it's gonna end fairly soon and then I'll be back and we'll pick up and live life as usual.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. So did you have a family meeting as well as talking to them individually, so everybody was on the same page that there was gonna be no communication, and the potential benefits to the family?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, everybody knew what to expect, and Liz and I talked about, she had the number for the producers, so if something happened, an emergency, she could call and let them know, and they would inform me, and I could make the decision on whether to come out or not. We talked about when do you call, and it's like, well, if by being here there's anything I can do to help the situation, yes, absolutely, call, if there's nothing I can do, what good is it gonna do to call. And that's where we left it, and she never called, she went through some pretty hard stuff here on her own and never called me, she's a strong gal.

Tom Rowland: She sounds like a strong girl. So when you get back, you learn about the things she went through while you were gone?

Clay Hayes: Yeah. So when I came out there's a recovery period, they don't just pull you out of the woods and send you home, you gotta go through a period where they have a nutritionist trying to get you healthy again, if your body condition is too bad, you talk to a shrink, make sure you didn't go crazy out there. During that time I had a lot of time to be on the phone with Liz, we spent hours a day talking, and the hardest thing she had to go through while I was gone, I think it was on launch day, actually, the day they put us in the field, she goes to the doctor for a routine scan and they end up finding what they thought was ovarian cancer.

Tom Rowland: Oh, wow.

Clay Hayes: And the thing wouldn't have been so bad, but she used to work at this hospital, knew everybody in the imaging department, so she convinces them to just give her the report with no doctor there, and she gets this report with a handwritten note on the side by the radiologist saying, this is probably ovarian cancer, we need to get this looked at, with no explanation. Ovarian cancer kills like seventy percent of the people diagnosed with it, so she's standing there with this paper in her hand, and in her mind she's looking at her own death sentence. She goes through abdominal surgery to have this growth removed, they do a biopsy, and thank God it ends up not being anything, it's benign, but she goes through this whole thing, she has a week of not knowing, a week before her surgery and then a couple more days before they get the results, so a week or ten days of her not knowing what's going on, and she never calls me. She never calls, because she knew this was something important to me, and she knew if she called I would come home, and that I would always wonder if I could have done it, and she didn't wanna take that away from me.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Clay Hayes: And that's not what I meant when I said if I can't do something about it, don't call, of course I would have had her call me, if I had known that was going on I'd have come home in a second. But she took that upon herself to go through that entire thing by herself, no family up here in Idaho, so that I could live out this dream.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but you did, that's pretty amazing to me.

Clay Hayes: I was blown away that she was willing to do that for me.

Tom Rowland: It's for your family too, though, I'm sure she knew, she had confidence in you that you could do this, that you could win, that this would be good, right, that this isn't just something you wanted to try, but you had the potential of winning.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, she absolutely did, and both boys did as well, and that's one of the things, when I was out there, after about day twelve or so, I mean, I wanted to come home, I didn't wanna be there, I wanted to come home every day, and that's one of the things that kept me out there, they did believe in me, the boys were a hundred percent convinced, oh yeah, game over, you're gonna win, and I was like, there's no way I was gonna tap out with them having that idea in their head.

What Seventy-Four Days Alone Teaches You

Tom Rowland: Wow. So you end up making it seventy-four days, is that the number you made it, and you could have gone longer, you seem like you were just hitting your stride at that point. You've had a good amount of time to reflect on these seventy-four days, you've written a book about it, what did these seventy-four days do for you and your relationship with your wife and your kids, I know it changed you, you can go on a weekend camping trip and it changes you in some way, seventy-four days is legit, by yourself, have you had an opportunity to say, this is the major takeaway from that deal?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, having time like that, the unique thing about Alone or any experience like this is you're completely taken out of your everyday life, where you have responsibilities and distractions and always things to occupy your time, and when you're completely removed from that, my only responsibilities were to feed myself and not get eaten by a bear, that's it, that's the only things I had to do. So you can look at your life from a step removed, you get a different perspective on your entire life, and that is super valuable and something so very rare today, I wish everyone could do that, because when you can, you see paths you're going down that might not be the best way to go, you question how you live your life, why do you do things the way you do them, are you living your life in accord with your core values, that's something super valuable, and this experience gave me the opportunity to do that. One of the things it teaches you is to suffer well, another is to find opportunities in every obstacle, and that has to do with how you look at things, things happen to us all the time, we can either look at them and say, oh, this sucks, this is bad, and it will be bad because of your perception of it, or you can look at that same thing and say, okay, this has happened, how do we move past this, how do we use this to our advantage. That might seem a little cliche, but when you're out there it's so true, there's so many things that happen, and one perfect example is my fishing and the deer I ended up getting. I caught like six or so fish on that fishing rod, but I did all that in the first two weeks, and then after that I couldn't catch a fish on that rod. By the time I ended up killing this deer, I hadn't caught a fish in like a week, and I was running out of fish, so I went hunting. Now if you look at that and say, man, the fishing sucks, this is bad, I can't catch a fish, well, the bad fishing led me to go hunting, if I hadn't gone hunting I wouldn't have got the deer, I might not have been the last one, so did that situation really suck, I don't know, it ended up being, or was it a doorway to a new situation, exactly. So one of the things I really came to realize is you can't know, it's impossible to know if something is truly good or bad until time gives you the perspective to look back on that thing. And then the last really big thing, I think that's a universal realization for everybody who goes out there and spends significant time, is how important your family is to you, that's everything, everything else is peripheral when you're out there, and that's one of the things you really come to realize, your family is the most important thing in your life.

Tom Rowland: Wow, and did you, I'm interested in the mindset of looking at every obstacle as an opportunity, do you think you kind of always had that, or did this solidify it even more, did this change the way you think about that?

Clay Hayes: I think that's always kind of been part of my operating system, something happens that's not conducive to whatever direction I think I want to go, I've never been one to get hung up on that and worry about it, I'm just looking, okay, how do I get around this thing, how do I get over it, how do I get past it. But going through a situation like this, it really takes things you kinda know in theory and it's like now it's part of your soul, it's in your bones type of thing.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, and I'm sure there's, like, you come back and you have these realizations, but at some point do you ever see yourself, you had these realizations of why you'll go down this road, or why you act this way, and then you come back and think, I'm not gonna do that anymore, but then you get back into the real world, there's a little bit of social media, a little bit of other things, do you find yourself slipping back into those habits and catching yourself, saying, this is the lesson I learned out there, why am I doing this?

Clay Hayes: Yes, yeah, absolutely, you do, and it's something I have to constantly remind myself, it's one of the things I wrote about in my book, it's amazing, you're out there and you're like, this is it, this is my core being now, and then you get back into the real world and you can start to lose that stuff, so I do have to remind myself of these things every single day, but I do, I do now, and those lessons I learned there, they're part of who I am now.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, do you think, so many people will go on a camping trip or get out into the woods and have a very small degree of what you went through, they'll get back to nature, I find myself doing it, you go on an elk hunting trip, a deer hunting trip, a fishing trip, everything is just so cool, everything's great, and you're thinking, okay, these are the most important things, and then you go back into your life and find yourself slipping, and then it's time for a reset, man, I gotta get back out there. Is there that full reset, to where if you haven't been out in the woods for a while and then you get back out there and you're like, yeah, this is it, why do I not come out here more, and it's, well, because I got a family and a job and all these other things, but these are the things I love to do. But you gotta hit that reset all the time, and it seems like with you on an extreme end of this, having seventy-four days out there, and you're saying, yeah, you get back and you gotta remind yourself, gotta hit that reset button, gotta get back out there. Is that what you're doing with your family now, taking your boys out there and your wife, when you pack the bow up and go elk hunting for the month of September, is it like you're doing that for your family and for a reset of your own?

Clay Hayes: Well, I think for me the reset is more like I'll catch myself doing things and I'll say, yeah, you know what, that's not the direction I wanna go, right back here, that's where I need to be. But as far as getting back into the woods, for my whole family I think that's really important, I just got back from a backpacking trip with the boys, took them into one of the alpine lakes up here in North Idaho, got bit by bugs and caught a bunch of cutthroat trout, it was a lot of fun. I feel very, very fortunate because that's what I do for a living, and that's just what we can do all the time, being in the woods is just a normal thing for us.

Building a Life and Business After Idaho Fish and Game

Tom Rowland: How do you make your living now after this win, and you mentioned you went off and did your own thing from Idaho Fish and Game, what do you do for a living?

Clay Hayes: So, let me back up, I started a YouTube channel probably in February, started making videos showing people how to make self bows, wooden bows, and just kept doing that stuff because I liked the subject matter I was teaching, I like teaching people and I like making videos. Never in a million years would have thought it would have led to anything, I was just doing it because I like to do it, and started making a little bit of money doing some freelance videography and video production, I did a series of educational videos for a group called Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, started selling some things on the website, and eventually by 2017 or so I was actually making a fair bit of income. It got to the point where I was like, I can't progress any farther here and work a full-time job at the same time, so I had to make a decision, and just my personality, I enjoyed working for Fish and Game, got to do some super cool stuff, but I never would have been fulfilled working for someone else, I felt like I needed to build something for myself. So I made the decision to leave Fish and Game, go do the YouTube thing full time, and I was also teaching bow building classes, writing magazine articles, publishing, I've got a couple books I've done. It was super risky, but at the same time potential for huge rewards, and it's worked out fantastic, my freedom is top for me, I value that and my family above all other things, so if I have to take a huge pay cut to be free, I'm fine, I'll take it, I don't want the money, I wanna be free, free to do what I wanna do when I wanna do it, I don't wanna have to be on a schedule. And that's what we did, we were actually doing pretty doggone well before Alone ever even came on the radar, but the YouTube stuff actually ended up leading to Alone, because that's how the person that recommended me knew about me. Ended up being the last one out there, walked away with half a million dollars, was able to pay off the house and start the kids some college funds, but Liz blew up her car while I was out in the woods, so we had to buy her a new car. We're completely debt free, living on our own schedule, it's been freaking awesome.

Tom Rowland: That is awesome, I love that story, and we've gone through so many of those kinds of stories on this podcast, finding people who get in that situation of, I wanna be a guide but I have this full-time job and I'm guiding on the weekends, but then I just wanna do this, and there's just this moment where you gotta jump, and I love to hear that moment for different people because it's always different, some people have a couple kids and some aren't married yet, sometimes that makes the decision easier, sometimes harder, but to jump. We've had a number of people who've done it with YouTube just like you have, you're making a little bit over here, but if you continue doing what you're doing you're gonna keep making a little bit over here, where you have no idea, but if you jump and do it, man, it's awesome, and then you're debt free and smart with your money, it's just an awesome story, man, couldn't happen to a better guy, I love it, it's fantastic. So how do people watch your videos, get your book, learn more about you?

Clay Hayes: If you just get on YouTube and look for Clay Hayes, you'll find my channel, Instagram's Clay Hayes Hunter, the book is available on my website, Twistedstave.com, you can get signed copies there or off Amazon, I've got one about Alone called Surviving Alone, I've got a bow building book, and a small book of my previously published bow hunting articles and stuff, kind of a short one.

Tom Rowland: Do you do personal classes still for building bows?

Clay Hayes: I'm taking a break on the classes because I wanted to focus more on writing, so I got the book about my Alone experience done, that's published, and now I'm working on another one, like a bushcraft-slash-survival type book. That's more the direction I wanna go, writing, because once that's done it's all passive income, and I can turn my attention to something else, whereas the classes pay really good but it's a one-off thing, you do it and it's done.

Tom Rowland: Unless you video it, and put it out as like a masterclass thing.

Clay Hayes: Well, I've got that too, I've got a Patreon site where there's like fifty bow building videos on there, super detailed, very detailed bow building videos, so lots of folks sign up for that too.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome, man, well, congratulations on all the success, and really the success by taking a huge risk, I love that part of it, that's really the best part to me, because I had to do the same kind of thing, I could've, my dad was in the insurance business, I could've gone down the insurance path, and I'm sitting there like, really don't wanna do that, and you jump into guiding and it's a total unknown, and I've been able to make my career like that, so it's fantastic.

Clay Hayes: It's a hard thing to do, because there's so many expectations, society expects certain things of you, you're supposed to do all these things, you're supposed to be responsible, and what I did, taking that risk, was probably not the most responsible thing I could have done. I could have settled into another twenty years with the department, had health insurance the whole time, retirement, all that stuff, but I decided I wouldn't be happy doing that, so I decided to take this risk, we didn't have health insurance for a little while, took a pay cut, there's no direct deposit, no security there, and I think that just holds so many people back, that fear of the unknown, that lack of security.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, but you can look at it like that, or you can look at it like the fear of regret, like your wife did, saying, you know what, I know he'll always wonder if he could have done this, that goes back to the story of her not calling, because she knew you would have always wondered, and if you had not made that jump to the YouTube and the writing and this other, more risky thing, and settled in, you'd just been living in quiet desperation, wondering what would have happened if you could have done that. Some people can deal with it, but the thought of living with regret of not doing something is painful.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, one of the things that helped me make that decision to make that jump, have you ever read The Four Hour Work Week, by Tim, that's a great book. There's an exercise he suggests, define what you wanna do, then think of the worst possible outcome, then think of what's the probability of that actually happening, and most of the time it's such a small percentage that's gonna happen, but we let that tiny little chance rule our entire lives, and I couldn't do that. I knew that even if I left Fish and Game, even if the YouTube and all the other stuff didn't work out, I knew I could make a living somehow, I could go build barns, I could work for a farmer, we're not gonna starve to death, we're not gonna lose the house, I knew that. So I was like, alright, let's give it a go.

Tom Rowland: Well, you only get there by taking those big risks, and it has certainly paid off for you, that's awesome, man. Hey, we should try to go fishing one time when you're down in Florida, you ever get down to The Keys?

Clay Hayes: Yeah, Liz and I took, I've got a little seventeen-foot G3, we took it down, launched in Flamingo, is it?

Tom Rowland: Flamingo, yeah.

Clay Hayes: And went all the way to Islamorada, fishing all those little flats and mangrove islands, we stayed out there in one of the chickees, one of the islands, and had a fantastic time. I'd love to hook up if we're back down there, we may end up going back down this year if we have the time. We're actually, we've got tickets down to Saint Croix in February, so we're gonna be down there for a couple weeks.

Tom Rowland: Wow, well I might be down there too, we have a trip down there, I'm taking the family to the Virgin Islands, and we're gonna be in Saint Croix in February, maybe who knows, I'll be like, hey, Clay, what's up.

Clay Hayes: Well, if our time there overlaps, we'll have to get together and maybe do some free diving or something.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, there's some good bonefishing, I went down there last year, there's some pretty good bonefishing right around there.

Clay Hayes: That, see, we went down there last year, it was just Liz and I, but this year we're taking the boys too, and I spent all my time free-diving, spearfishing, but I didn't know anything about actual fishing down there, and I couldn't tell you, it's kinda like the wild West down there.

Tom Rowland: It's kinda weird down there, everybody I talked to said they don't eat the fish there, that they have ciguatera or something, and they just said, we don't eat the fish here, so I didn't wanna argue with the captain, if he says it's gonna make me sick, okay, but I can't imagine it's that different than the fish we have in the Keys.

Clay Hayes: I mean, we were eating them.

Tom Rowland: They're migratory fish, moving all over the place, but fishing is just not that big a deal down there. Now there are bonefish guides and they're pretty good, there's a lot of bonefish, some pretty big ones. Did that a little bit but a lot of snorkeling, it's just kind of a cool area, I like it, and just like you, I went down there with my wife and thought maybe we'll bring the kids back down. So that's what we're doing this year, my kids are a little older than yours, one's about to get married, the next one is '22, so a '24, a '22, and an '18, those are our ages, we're trying to get in one last trip together before they start spreading their wings and flying away, which seems to be closer and closer. But yeah, man, I'd love to stay in touch with you, get together and do some fishing, or show me how to shoot a traditional bow.

Clay Hayes: Yeah, happy to do that.

Tom Rowland: Alright, man, hey, good, good, this was really great, thank you for your time, and really congratulations on making a really cool life and having a great story, it's awesome.

Clay Hayes: Well, thank you, I'm...

Tom Rowland: Thanks, Clay, we'll be in touch, and that's it for this week, we'll be back with another episode next week, alright, see you.