Unlocking Public Access With MeatEater and onX

onX Founder Eric Siegfried joined MeatEater’s Ryan Callaghan to canoe into a difficult-to-access piece of public land to chase big-bodied deer. While things didn’t go exactly to plan, the trip highlighted the importance of knowing exactly where you stand while navigating through a complicated landscape.

Over the last two years, onX has been engaged in a project to identify landlocked public lands at both the federal and state levels across the West. With the help of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, these efforts identified nearly 16 million acres in 11 Western states.

In addition to inaccessibility, another concern is areas that are simply hard to get to. The piece of land that Eric and Cal hunted on this trip, for example, can only be accessed by a single public right of way—a river. Follow along in the video below as the guys canoe in, establish camp and put themselves and their equipment to the test against some monster bucks.