Meeting On The Mountain – Jacob Albaugh

Guest (Male): All of us that have spent time in the mountains can attest to the feeling of a closeness to God. There's something special about being above everything with nothing to stand between us and heaven. On today's program, we'll hear about a different trip to the mountains. Most of this story is exciting and adventurous, but it turns disastrous and comes out with a meeting in the mountains with God. God calls our guest not only to himself on the mountain, but soon afterwards God calls him to a ministry and then to a business that not only serves outdoorsmen and women but also finances a ministry that leads men to a relationship with Jesus Christ through outdoor experiences. We're excited to share the stories of our guest and how God called him to a life of ministry. Please join us now as we head out on the trail to adventure with our host Dean Hulce and his guest in God's Great Outdoors.
Dean Hulce: Welcome to God's Great Outdoors on the Trail to Adventure. Today we're in Dayton, Ohio on the north side of Dayton, and we're with Jacob Albaugh. Jacob, it's good to have you.
Jacob Albaugh: Yeah, thank you for the invite. I'm glad we could make our schedules align before you head out of town.
Dean Hulce: It's a quick run. Yesterday we did an interview down at Answers in Genesis in Kentucky, and I was really glad this lined up. I wanted to start because we both have a similar passion. I'm not doing it anymore, although I long to go back to the mountains one more time to hear an elk bugle, but you love to elk hunt.
Jacob Albaugh: Elk hunting is my favorite, for sure. I just love the mountains. I love the challenge that is with them. I'm a late-onset Western hunter. I grew up hunting whitetail. My dad drug me along in Carhartts from the time I was pretty young, but he was a really late-onset hunter. He didn't start until he was 40. His first year hunting was my first year hunting. Luckily, I was young. I was just tagging along at that point. I always had a dream of going West. I think everybody here in the East does. I think everybody wants to go on an elk hunt and it just seems so unattainable. I had a college roommate that moved to Salt Lake City, and I was like, "We are going elk hunting. I'll help get your gear, whatever we have to do." I was a broke college kid, so I was like, "You get a tag. It's only 30 bucks, whatever. I'll come out." That was the onset of the passion. It started at that point. It wasn't love and passion in the beginning just because of how horrific we were as hunters. We climbed that public land plateau of trying to figure out how to be successful, and we just got our butts kicked for the first couple years. I loved the challenge of it and loved pushing far. I was on the brink of not enjoying it just because we weren't being successful and we weren't actually even finding game. Then just luck would have it, we had some tags come our way and we learned. It's been a total passion ever since.
Dean Hulce: Approximately how many years have you been going out?
Jacob Albaugh: I'm probably approaching ten-ish years, which doesn't sound like a lot. I raced motocross and woods racing very competitively. I always said that when I get done, Western hunting is going to be my new passion. I'm going to put everything I got into it just because I love pushing myself.
Dean Hulce: Motocross, your legs are all moving and your arms, so you must not have hurt yourself too badly.
Jacob Albaugh: Not too badly.
Dean Hulce: Well, that's good. I love elk hunting. When you hear an elk bugle in the mountains, there's something really special about that. Just being in the mountains, I think that's what keeps guys going. I know guys that have hunted for a dozen years and never killed a bull elk, but they still love going and they go with that hope that one day they'll get one. We were very blessed. My dad started elk hunting in 1958. He killed a spike first. Then when he started bow hunting in 1976 once he started bow hunting, he never picked up a rifle and went back out again. He loved the calling, getting them in close. He probably killed 20 or 25 bull elk in his life. Plus, he was always one, especially bow hunting, if it was a legal elk, he was bringing meat home. He loved that. You have one story in particular that I'd love for you to share. Before we do that, we're going to take a break just so Adam can share with our listeners who it is that comes alongside this program and makes it possible. I don't want to stop once we get going again on your story. I want to keep that going. We'll be right back. Adam will share with our listeners, and then we'll go on with the story with Jacob in the mountains of Idaho.
Guest (Male): For over 30 years, God's Great Outdoors Trail to Adventure has been broadcast to win men and women, boys and girls to Jesus Christ. This is only possible by the generosity of our listeners. Thank you to all who have supported us in the past. God has blessed us because of you, and we pray for you to feel his blessings as well. Additionally, underwriting support has been provided by Matthews Archery, the leader in the archery industry. Mission Archery with revolutionary crossbow technology. Hunter Safety Systems, saving lives is what we do. Center Shot Ministries, hit the mark with Center Shot. Wheelchair Whitetails, guided whitetail deer hunts for wheelchair-bound disabled hunters. And Hodgdon Powder Company, the gunpowder people delivering reliable performance and precision you can trust every time. God's Great Outdoors has produced many ministry tools, including tracts, DVDs, and books to help you reach others for Jesus Christ. You can access these items, other God's Great Outdoors items, and so much more at our website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. That's godsgreatoutdoors.org.
Dean Hulce: Welcome back to God's Great Outdoors on the Trail to Adventure in Dayton, Ohio with Jacob Albaugh. Jacob, we were just starting to talk about elk hunting. You have one story in particular that's really life-changing and could have been life-ending with the wrong situation. Why don't you share that with us?
Jacob Albaugh: That story takes place in Idaho right up off the Snake River. That was a tag that when I started researching, it was some of the nastiest country in the state or in the country. Because of that, people it's not a super sought-after tag, so I was able to get it. I was already into fitness pretty heavily from the motocross phase, but that year was the year that the switch happened. I drew a good mule deer tag the year before that I got pretty serious on, but that year was like, "This is the year we're going to go from not having a clue what we're doing to I'm going to try to be successful this trip and I'm going to give it every single thing I got." I started e-scouting, and I had two plans. I had an A plan and a B plan. I had a bunch of plans. When we left Ohio driving out with a buddy named Damian Cook, we ended up driving out on this trip, flat trailer and a side-by-side. I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I just had two mapped locations. About halfway out, I talked to some guy who had a weird connection where a guy knew a guy and his cousin just hunted that area and he was like, "This is a great area." I was like, "I know where we're going." We rolled in there five days early before season because I had time and I had the vacation and I just wanted to find the elk. I didn't know if it would take us. We'd spend two days in that area and then go to the next area, but either way, I wanted to find elk. The very first day we get there, we pitched down a tent up top. It took us like an hour and a half to get up the mountain because we weren't experienced in the type of roads that are there, old Forest Service roads. Anyway, we pitched down camp and we ended up hiking in and we saw some elk right away. For me, I had been hunting the North Uintas in Utah and finding an elk there is like a needle in a haystack. You go five days without seeing an elk in that area. We had actually two bulls within rifle range of us and it was just like, "Okay, this is pretty cool." They were actually pretty close to the road. I actually hiked down to glass deep in, two and a half or three miles in. They just happened to be right below and I just had hunted enough to know that opening morning they wouldn't be there because of the pressure. As the pressure comes in, they're not going to be there. You can get there. There's a dirt bike trail right above it. It's three-quarters of a mile from the parking area. They're going to get blown out. It's all downhill and it's a big bowl and you can see straight down into it. I'm like, "Man, we could think we could stay here, but I don't think we can." Through that night, I start glassing where I had pinned, and we started turning up elk. We were super excited. We got elk and we're probably not leaving here. We scouted morning and evening, morning and evening. That area over there, I mean, there was an evening I have some phone footage that I literally don't understand what happened, but it was like ants. There had to have been 150 head just moving across this open space, a really far way away and it was through a really bad way to get there. I actually ended up running into some locals. I started to learn that the locals kind of have it figured out. They park up at the road with their 115mm spotting scope and they're looking at the same area that we were death hiking an hour in the morning and an hour out in the evening to see the same area. I happened to bump into them and I asked, "You guys been seeing any elk? You guys see those elk over there?" He says, "Oh yeah, we see them. They're there every year. There's a reason they're there." There's actually a creek drainage there that is called No Business. He's like, "That's because nobody has any business going over there without horses or anything." He's like, "Yeah, they'll be there, but they'll get pushed around by the horse guys or whatever." Nobody's crazy enough to try to go over there. Well, literally I remember the conversation as we were pulling away. I looked at my buddy. I'm like, "I'm crazy enough. We are crazy enough. We're going." That was two days before season. I had some people watching some weather for me, pulling the weather maps and sending it to my InReach. My buddy that is in Utah, he wasn't able to make it on the hunt. He's texting me and he knows weather and he says, "Man, there's a big storm coming. I don't know when it's going to hit, but I have a rough idea. It could be a massive amount of snow. It could not, but it's going to be an impactful storm." We actually ended up taking the side-by-side and truck and everything halfway back down the mountain, but I wasn't giving up, which hindsight is maybe could have been a little bit smarter. We're going to figure this out. We took it down before the storm, packed the side-by-side up. I went to town actually, got heat, put it in our side-by-side to make sure the fuel didn't gel up. I took a generator, put it in the bed of the side-by-side, put a trash bag over it. I had precautions and we were going to go stay up top. That way we would at least be up top and we could hunt down. We went up there and started to set up and I just got the bright idea. I'm like, "What happens if we pitch in before the storm? What if we spike halfway to them before the storm?" So I started getting the weather updates from Andrew and he told me the elevation that it was going to be snow versus rain. I thought, "If we sleep below the snowline, we'll be able to move around in the morning. We won't be socked in and we might be able to go get those elk." That's what happened. We ended up spiking in. We got there literally as the storm was setting in. We're pitching the tent and it starts raining. It worked perfectly. Exactly what I thought. It's going to rain all night. It poured rain. But when we woke up in the morning and looked up, there was two foot of snow, a foot and a half, two foot of snow above us.
Dean Hulce: Was this in October?
Jacob Albaugh: October 25th. So it's October 25th and it dumped. I mean, it had to have been two foot of snow overnight, but we weren't in the snow. We were in there might have been a dusting, but pretty much none and the rain was washing whatever away it was. I had to go down and then back up to get to these elk and it was a long way. I had this plan of where they had been there every single morning. I'm going to go in there. I even posted it on my Instagram story that I'm making a mad dash over there. We're going to shoot this bull. We're going to quarter them. We're going to string them in the tree and we're mad-dashing before we get hypothermia to get back because it's going to be 35 degrees and pouring rain. This plan, I thought, was a brilliant plan. I knew it was a risky plan. The only way to do it is we had to start at like 3:00 in the morning to get over to there in time. When we walked out of the tent, it wasn't raining. It was pouring rain. About 45 minutes into the hike, we're completely soaked to the bone, which wasn't a problem as long as you're moving. This is a rookie mistake. You have to be planning for when you have to stop or need to stop. We were already in a really bad spot, just didn't know it yet from lack of experience. Anyway, long story short, we went over there. The elk, it was 20 minutes till daylight and they lit up. I'm like, "Oh no, they're a thousand feet still above us." They haven't been there all week. They haven't been there and I'm like, "We got to move." I took off. I actually ended up leaving my buddy because I just took off to try to get there. I said, "We have to be there at daybreak." I ended up getting in there. It was the most still to this day, I've hunted a bunch since then, and it was the most magical experience there was. There was 120 head of elk. They came by actually at 100 yards, but they were so they had gotten bumped a little bit, so they were side by side and I couldn't shoot into it because there were like 120 elk. There were four or five bulls in there, obviously the one big herd bull. I've never killed a bull at this point, but I did understand scoring a little bit and there was a 370 or 380 bull in there, which is incredible. That area usually actually has one that's 360-plus every year because I've been back three years in a row now.
Dean Hulce: That's world-class no matter where you go.
Jacob Albaugh: I didn't realize how world-class it was at the time, but there were so many elk and it was so like I just couldn't take the shot and then they went down below and there was no shot. They were only 250 yards away, but they're in the bottom and I can't see them. Then it's the old burn, so they started to roll up the back side and I sat there trying to get shots off or trying to get a shot off, but I'm trying to find them in my binos, then range-find them, and then find them in my glass before he moves out of that ten-foot circle of opening that I can find him. Long story short, I ended up shooting a bull, but I didn't shoot him. I shot the second biggest bull, which was a very nice probably like 330 bull.
Dean Hulce: That's a trophy 99% of the places.
Jacob Albaugh: So I ended up shooting at this elk. I had a suppressor on at the time that was super high-recoiling, didn't spot my impact, was able to get back on them, realized that my shot was a little bit far back. By that time, he had went over the ridge. He followed the herd up. I seen how bad he was hurt. He's not making it far. He's probably going to die pretty quickly after that. Long story short, we just took off. I'm still naive to the fact of where we're at. I have just death-sprinted all the way over here. We've been hiking for hours and we're soaked to the bone, but I just shot an elk, so we're on cloud nine. We just ripped. I think we had to drop like 700 feet and then back up another 700, so it took us an hour or so. We got up there, started following blood, and where the elk had run off down this cliff ridge that these elk went through. It was amazing that they did it. The trail went down one trail, and it was his trail. We headed down the cliff after it and it's a shale rock face. It's straight down. We're slipping and sliding, trekking poles into the ground trying to make sure we don't slide too much. I had read my onX before we went and I looked at topo lines. I'm like, "Okay, this transitions from really, really steep to it gets a little bit more gradual." Well, long story short is the topo lines lied. They were cliffs. There was a portion of there that it missed that there was a 100-foot cliff that you can't go down. We had slid down all this way trying to go after this bull that had fell off, basically. At that time, I'm like, "Oh, we got to turn around. We have to go back up the what we barely just came down." That storm that I had tried to get below, as we turned around, we were barely started moving. I looked down the drainage and you know how the clouds start spinning in down into the drainage and it sucked it down into the drainage and it went to a whiteout blizzard like that. It dropped five, six inches of snow within a very, very short period. We're soaked to the bone and it went from probably like 35 or 40 degrees to 10 and there was a bunch of snow on the ground. Long story short is it made it impossible to climb out. I tried climbing up. I'd fall back down. My buddy would catch me. I'd go back up. We ended up Garmin InReach SOS. Quickly realized that nobody's coming to save us. If they're coming, they're going to come and find our bodies. We had to figure a way out of here. The only way out was to take our packs off, strap them to a tree, strapped a rifle to a tree. I had a bino harness with water and a little bit of emergency supplies and that's it. We ended up actually using the side that was pure cliffs and rock-climbed our way out because it was the only thing that we could get traction on. So we were putting a leg and shoving me up a log and then I'm pulling him up. That's how we went out and we ended up getting off that face. It was like maybe 250 yards vert that we had to go, but took us a long time. At that point, we thought we were good. SOS is over. I actually sent an InReach to my wife like, "Hey, we're okay." I just felt like an idiot for having to hit SOS. The backstory is don't feel like an idiot, hit SOS the very moment you think you're in trouble. I just started headed back to the spike tent and so I had to drop and then go back up and we thought we were in good shape and we quickly realized that everything that we had done that day had put us in a really bad place. We ended up severely hypothermic, no energy, no food, dehydrated, and we're trying to make it back to the spike tent. There was a lot of times that we didn't think we'd make it back. I had my buddy look at me and he's like, "You're going to have to leave me here." I was like, "I'm not leaving you here. We have to make it back to that spike. I'm not leaving you here and I'm not staying here. So we got to go." We started doing seven steps at a time. So we'd do seven steps, take a break, seven steps, take a break. We did that through the night. We ended up getting to the tent with just barely any energy. This is where this euphoric feeling starts to come into myself. I wasn't a follower of Christ up to this point. I was a believer in Christ, but really wasn't a follower. We ended up going in there. We luckily had some firewood that was dry. Pitched a fire in there and we both kind of went out of consciousness. We were kind of in and out of consciousness in that tent for the next 12 hours. We were in bad shape. We needed to be in a hospital, not on the side of a mountain. We ended up just sitting there. We had service enough to send InReach messages and we just sat there and tried to scoop snow and filter water and eat food and dry. We could just tell that the toll that it had taken on our body that we were getting worse by the hour. We ended up staying the night there, but I planned on staying until like 2:00 to recoup and by like 10:00, we were like, "We're in bad shape. Every hour that we're here, we're in worse shape. We have to get out of here." There was still nobody coming for us. We had a long ways to hike out. We tried everything to dry clothes and we didn't really get that much dry. I ended up having to hike out in basically base layers and it was 10 degrees. I ended up having to leave my buddy. He was still hiking, but he was moving at a pace that I couldn't stay warm at. I had to rip, otherwise I was going to die because he had a little bit more clothes than I did and I had to go really fast to stay warm. I ended up taking off and right when I seen the side-by-side, my knees just went out from underneath me. That is where I found Christ. He put me on my knees. I didn't mean to fall or anything. I had the most surreal experience that I wish I could go back and relive a thousand times because it completely instantaneously changed my entire trajectory on life. When it brought me to my knees, that's where I found Christ and it's an experience that I'm still trying to wrap my finger around. It's something I wish I could relive to understand it even more. Ever since that day, my life has looked a lot differently. There's been a lot of great things that have come from that from my family standpoint, everything, ministry, business, all of it. It basically what it feels like a restart button on my life.
Dean Hulce: Well, and there's a reason for that. I mean, God did that. He didn't waste that. The experience you went through was for a reason. I think of Job in the Bible. You think of others in the Bible that went through things that seemed unbearable and without reason sometimes. We think, "Why would I go through that?" But God shows you and he'll show you the rest of your life. I want to just talk real quickly because we're out of time. But when you looked at it was onX or whatever you were using to look at those gradual lines as you're coming up, looking for that flat spot going down the mountain and it's that's an example of our lives in Christ. If we're looking at the wrong things or the information isn't right that we're getting, we need to find the truth. That's really what happened with you in the end. This did something for you that changed your life. We need to be looking for those things because if we're following the wrong example in your case, it was you had the wrong information. But if we're following that, we're in big trouble. In the end, it was big trouble because if that would have been true, if you could have been more gradual down there, you'd have been safe.
Jacob Albaugh: I would have been fine.
Dean Hulce: We're going to carry on. We're going to go right for those that are on the radio. You can jump on the podcast and if you don't have a place to listen to the podcast, go to godsgreatoutdoors.org and just go to listen now or listen to the programs and you'll be able to come right into the podcast portion. For right now, we're going to have to sign off on the radio. Join us every week as we head down the trail to adventure in God's Great Outdoors.
Guest (Male): For over 30 years, God's Great Outdoors Trail to Adventure has been broadcast to win men and women, boys and girls to Jesus Christ. This is only possible by the generosity of our listeners. Thank you to all who have supported us in the past. God has blessed us because of you, and we pray for you to feel his blessings as well. Additionally, underwriting support has been provided by Matthews Archery, the leader in the archery industry. Mission Archery with revolutionary crossbow technology. Hunter Safety Systems, saving lives is what we do. Center Shot Ministries, hit the mark with Center Shot. Wheelchair Whitetails, guided whitetail deer hunts for wheelchair-bound disabled hunters. And Hodgdon Powder Company, the gunpowder people delivering reliable performance and precision you can trust every time. God's Great Outdoors has produced many ministry tools, including tracts, DVDs, and books to help you reach others for Jesus Christ. You can access these items, other God's Great Outdoors items, and so much more at our website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. That's godsgreatoutdoors.org.
Dean Hulce: Welcome to the Trail to Adventure podcast. We are in Dayton, Ohio and we are in the middle of a story, kind of the end of the story that happened on the mountain, but the beginning of another story that's been life-changing and really is eternal life-changing not only for you but for many other people. Let's go back to where God brought you to your knees and we'll go from there.
Jacob Albaugh: Yeah, when I was brought to my knees, I didn't understand it at all at the time. I had zero understanding of it. I just knew what happened. It was super weird. It was almost like an out-of-body experience type of thing. It was just like my entire existence and the way I thought and the reason I did things just got reprogrammed. It was almost like a download of information, an instant control-alt-delete and copy-paste. That's exactly how severely divine it was. It wasn't like a slow gradual thing. It was instantaneously a total transformation of my life within mere seconds. It felt like I was out of my body for a long time, but it was probably ten or twenty seconds in total. I learned a lifetime of information in just mere seconds. When that kind of quit, that experience kind of went away and it came back to reality. Reality was that I still needed to hike another 150 yards, get to the tent. I needed to take care of myself real quick, get some hydration. Luckily, I had packed a cooler, a really nice cooler that ended up keeping everything from freezing. It was the opposite of a cooler. I went in there, I grabbed some BodyArmors, whatever. I chucked my stuff down. I grabbed a little bit of stuff in there and I grabbed it. I grabbed some liquid and I poured back down the mountain to find my buddy. I told him, "I will come back. I just got to get there before I end up in a bad situation." Luckily, I had a little bit of clothes there, so I threw a little bit of clothes on and took off after him. I actually found him. I was pretty worried when I left him, how far he would make it. I knew I would go back. I knew I'd go back and get him out of there, but I didn't think he was going to make it much further after I walked away. But he was actually not super far behind me. So I just went down there and ended up grabbing his pack and putting it on my back and carrying it out. We just got off the mountain. We went down to town, got food. I had a buddy that was supposed to fly in a couple days later. He heard about what was going down, jumped on a flight. He met us at this hotel halfway between the airport and there. We dried all our clothes, we regrouped, and I just wasn't done. I didn't want to give up yet. We had gear stranded across the mountain and an elk at the bottom. We had to go back. There was no option around it, but going over there before there's some snowmelt was an impossible task. Going the route that we went was not the right way. I found a new route in, but there's only one way to do it and we got to get some snowmelt first. We ended up starting hunting a couple days. We started hunting on the other side for a couple days and we actually got another opportunity on an elk. We just kept an eye on our gear, where our gear was and where the snowline was. It melted off and we're like, "Okay, we can go." We ended up actually taking it was like a three-day deal to get one day to get in, one day to finish hiking down to go grab the gear and then another day to hike out. Long story short on the bull is he was unrecoverable, completely and totally unrecoverable from even before we went out of the cliff, we knew where he was and short of having a helicopter, you couldn't get him out. By the time you'd have gotten him, he'd have been spoiled anyway. I was actually in direct communications with the DNR. Told them the exact situation. Told them I went back and everything and just a sad circumstance of the hunting space. That situation is exactly why Tenet, our business brand, exists. It's hilarious or crazy to think that one single thing in my life had so much impact. It stems from that impact of taking a shot and not being able to spot my impact and not being able to get a follow-up shot.
Dean Hulce: There's impact spiritually, there's an impact with your family. Since it changed you, it's a generational thing now of change. You've got two little boys. How old are your boys?
Jacob Albaugh: Five and three.
Dean Hulce: They got a little ways. Are they bugling with their mouth as you're watching videos on TV?
Jacob Albaugh: Oh yeah. My three-year-old is starting to worry me a little bit. He sleeps with a shotgun. 24/7, that kid has a Nerf gun in his hand or some type of toy gun. He's got a special shotgun, Nerf shotgun, that he sleeps with, the little double-barrel one. He's ate up as it can get for being so young. I don't really push hunting on him. My five-year-old, he loves going whitetail hunting. He loved it more until he realized that you go and you're supposed to see animals. For the first few times, we never seen anything. He thought that was hunting and he just got to spend time with Dad. Now that he knows that you're supposed to see animals and we don't see animals, it doesn't go too well. We're going through that lack of patience. It completely changed everything. Long story short, we ended up finishing hunting. I was in really bad shape still. I didn't understand why, but I was on my way home and I just texted my wife. I remember the text. I actually have screenshots of it. I said, "I don't know what this means, but our life is going to look a lot different." She was just like, "What?" But our life is going to look a lot different. That's all I knew at that point. I haven't processed. I haven't had time to process. I was still in a really bad shape physically. We ended up driving home. Stopped in Salt Lake with my buddy, spent a quick four hours of sleep in there and buzzed it home on four hours of sleep and lots of caffeine. Long story short, on the physical side, I actually ended up with pretty severe rhabdo. Rhabdo that I didn't diagnose because I got home and it's been four weeks and my legs feel like I've been doing a leg workout every day since I got home. They're getting worse. They are painful, sore from a workout and I hadn't done a single workout since I got home. I went in and my liver enzymes were not good. It had been four weeks. They're like, "Yeah, you needed to be in a hospital." Anyway, we got that taken care of and it took like six months, actually, for my liver enzymes to come back to normal, for my liver to completely and totally heal. To where it's in a normal state took full six months. That would have been October 25th when it happened. It was like December 16th, I got home and I'm like, "I don't know where to go to church." I was married Catholic and I just had this weird feeling that I wanted to change. I only had one friend that I knew who to text. So I texted him. I said, "Hey, you mind if we go? I'm going to go to your church on Sunday. Where's it at?" He told me where it was and I started going there. It's a big church right here called The Living Word. I went there for three weeks, four weeks, something like that. Over this whole time, now we've got about a month and a half. I'm an engineer, so I'm trying to understand what just happened, to be honest. What happened out there because it was such a divine experience that I understand. So I'm researching endorphins and researching near-death experiences and all of this stuff. I'm like, "Man, it just doesn't feel like it was just chemical." I'm pretty in tune with my body. It doesn't feel like it was chemical. I don't understand it at all. I'm in church on a Sunday and there's a pastor giving a sermon. It has nothing to do with me. It has nothing to do with anything like this. But the lights in the room, the same exact thing that happened on the mountain, just went dark. It was like the pastor was talking to me, but I don't even know what the pastor said. It looked like nobody else was in the room. The pastor was talking to me and it was dark. It was basically God just saying, basically what Primal Faith, our ministry, is. This is my vision and you're the shepherd of it. That was all the message was. All I knew, it was hunting, it was taking people hunting and bringing them to Christ. That's all I knew at the time, but I had no idea what it looked like and it sounds crazy. Take people hunting and bring them to Christ. That makes no sense. How does that work? I ended up walking out of the church that day. The lights went back on, went back to normal. I'm just sitting there process as we were walking out. I had 45 minutes to an hour to process. I told my wife I'm just being blunt. I'm just that kind of person a little bit. Instead of telling her what happened, I'm just like, "Hey babe, I'm going to start a ministry and we're going to take people hunting." She looked at me like I had three heads, but she had seen the difference in me since I had been home that our life rapidly changed in that month and a half. She just looked at me with just like, "Okay, I don't understand, but I know you mean it." I had no idea what I meant. I just know that this message was given and I need to follow it. That was Sunday. Monday, I filed 501(c)(3) paperwork first thing in the morning. I got it all done, put it together. I didn't have a clue what we were going to do. I didn't know how we were going to do it. I didn't know how we were going to afford to do it. I didn't have any clue. I didn't know who was going to be on my board. I didn't have anything. I filed the paperwork on Tuesday because I had to finish calling a buddy that was on the hunt with me. I called the buddy that was on the hunt with me and the buddy I went to church with. I was like, "Hey, I need board members. Will you guys be board members?" "Of what?" I was like, "A hunting ministry." "Yep." So I put their names down and filed paperwork Tuesday. What I've learned through that experience is when God gives you direction and you go, you don't have to understand what's going to happen every single time. We could spend an hour talking about Primal Faith and all of the things that over the time have just been like he's been there the entire time and every time you need anything, he's there. He's handed the right people to us. He's handed the funding to us. He just brings the right people in at the right times and the right things and the impact that it's made is just been it's awesome and it's still going on today. One of our biggest pain points of ministry, to be completely and totally frank, I have a phenomenal board members now. But not a single one of us is good at going and asking for money.
Dean Hulce: Oh, that's the case with pretty much every ministry.
Jacob Albaugh: Nobody likes that. It's no fun. People want to be able to give and give their blessings and serve through that, but it's just not fun to go out and do. Fundraising feels like you're monopolizing faith a little bit. I just didn't enjoy that portion of it. God had a plan for that. It was a struggle point. It was a pain point for us, for sure. We took phenomenal people, phenomenal results. Last year, we took I think it was 75 people from Ohio out to Utah on an elk hunt. Had pastors who came in, some of them flew in, some of them drove in. We had sermons on the mountain, no service. It was the most life-altering experience that you could have. It was an awesome experience. Long story short, God had this plan. I met a lot of people. They're on my board, actually. Very good friends, but they're almost brothers at this point. Brothers, mentors, friends, whatever. They're quite a bit older than me. Brandon and Heath, they became a part of this ministry. From that experience, I was hunting suppressed and I wasn't able to spot my impacts and that was a problem. It almost killed me. That's the way I saw it. I'm like, "I will not go to the mountains again with a gun with a suppressor that doesn't cut recoil." I'm an engineer background, so I just started prototyping things for myself. Had no intentions of building a business. I literally was just taking as redneck as it gets, chopping suppressors in half, flipping them over, threading the other end and screwing this aluminum block into it that made a brake and I had the best of both worlds. It started pretty rudimentary and then I'm like, "I think we can do this." I found a shop down in Dayton to bring my ideas to fruition a little bit. I just started hunting with these things. God's plan, that's what I've always learned. The only thing you can see is like a headlamp and he's got the entire path right now. You just got to follow it. That personal idea that I wanted to have for myself grew and grew and grew and it started to turn into something. I was actually going to bring it out underneath a different brand. My board members Brandon and Heath, they wanted to get involved and they're like, "Everybody was around me was like, you got to quit keeping this to yourself." I took them out, we'd go shoot or whatever and they're like, "This is game-changing. This is incredible." It takes high-recoiling rifles and makes them not recoil and the sound is good where your ears aren't bleeding. It's the best of both worlds. We had to bring it to market. Those two individuals came in and they're like, "Let's put this into a business." We started our brand that is now called Tenet. We had no idea what the name was actually going to be. All we had is a product. We only had a product that the basis of it was built. When we actually started the business, we were still doing subtractive manufacturing and welding suppressors. Once we said we're going to bring this to market, the passion to do everything to the nth degree, we got real serious real quick. We started iterating very, very fast and getting people involved and getting help and we ended up taking a product that was really good. It was honestly pretty revolutionary. We just kept iterating and just kept defining new standards for what is possible. We did that in so many atmospheres and we just didn't plan on launching until we had the figured it out. We ended up coming up with some products and they're geared directly towards the Western hunter. They're extremely light, extremely short, and they cut recoil down like a muzzle brake, but they make it quiet enough to where your ears are good. We launched that brand in May, just two months ago.
Dean Hulce: Just this May, just two months ago.
Jacob Albaugh: That's correct.
Dean Hulce: And it's Tenet. I should say T-E-N-E-T for someone looking for you. Tenet Suppressors. Tenetinc on Instagram and stuff. Our website is tenet.inc as well. That's probably where you can find us. We're on YouTube some. We're kind of getting the YouTube going pretty good now, pushing out some videos and you can kind of see who's behind the brand on there. We're trying to tell the story of who we are. This is the funny part about God's plan is the board members on our ministry are the same people I'm in business with. The brand is called Tenet, but the actual business is 4K LLC and that stands for For The Kingdom LLC. That is what Tenet really is, to be honest. It's purely a Kingdom thing because ever since my experience, I just have this really, really weird feeling of complete and total owe him everything. It set it straight for me to where it's like everything in my life is for the Kingdom. I got it tattooed on my wrist, actually. This business was going to be an extension of that. It's a for-profit business, but we're truly just a ministry that wants to do good in this world because you just want to try to make an impact.
Dean Hulce: In the outdoor field, if you really look around, there's actually a fair number of businesses like that. Mathews Archery is one. Matt McPherson, we've had him on the show and he's been the biggest supporter for God's Great Outdoors. But he gives away everything he can give away. I mean that with his own money. It's an amazing mindset. I think you hit it right where we've all got that actually in us. That's God's plan. The Old Testament talks about tithing, giving 10%. Really, the New Testament talks about everything. Everything God gives us is his. Everything that we have is his. What are we going to do with that? And that's our time, that's our money, that's our business, that's our pleasure. I mean everything. Our focus, our drive, every single part of it. Our kids, raising your kids up to be evangelist and for the Kingdom and grow the Kingdom and shed a light. It's everything. Everything that I have is God's including my wife, including my kids. Absolutely. I use this fairly often and I've just really been doing more study with it and getting but Psalms 37:4 says you can delight yourself in the Lord and he'll give you the desires of your heart. And what a I mean that's really exactly what we're talking about. When we delight ourselves in the Lord
Jacob Albaugh: That's my number one quoted scripture that I always quote, that exact one. On my archery hunt last year, every single one of my arrows had that written on it. Because that's your life. Now, I mean, that's and but that should be all of our lives all the time.
Dean Hulce: If we know Christ. I'm going to challenge our listeners with that. That's a big step. That's life-changing. When we do that, that's how I got really into outfitting. That's how I got into ministry. Linda and I, you talk about your what you're doing with with your Primal Faith is Linda and I decided years ago, we're going to only continue to outfit and we outfitted all over North America, not just in the mountains, not just in Michigan where we came from, but all over North America. We decided it's either ministry or we're not doing it. When it became ministry, those that hunted with us over the years, one after the other started falling into, "Hey, what can you tell me more about your faith?" Life is short. You almost didn't make it out of the mountains. Life is short and we've only got so much time. If God didn't want us to do this, God doesn't need us, but God wants us and he wants us to follow him and do the work he's laid out for us. And that's sharing him to the world around us. Whether you do that through making a suppressor that's also a recoil reducer with breaking the sound everything, or it's engineering, or it's going hunting, or it's taking your kids out. If all those things reflect back to working for Christ, he gives us the desires of our heart because our desires of our heart at that time become what he wants of us. Most of us never grasp that. Honestly, I believe most Christians go through life without ever grasping that. But when you've grasped it, no matter what happens, you see God in it.
Jacob Albaugh: It seems for me and it's just like still a learning point because I'm still fresh, I'm three years into this. But it seems I am so thankful that it wasn't like a peak and now I'm in the valley. Obviously, there's highs and lows and seasons and stuff like that, but my passion for it just keeps growing because I said yes once for Primal Faith. I've seen that scripture coming to reality because I didn't do it for myself. I did it for I did exactly what he wanted me to do and what I felt like he was leading with no personal incentives to it. On the back end, he just gave me the desires of my heart. My passion is hunting. Sure, some people might call it an idol, but it's not an idol, it's a passion. It's where I find Christ. It's where I found Christ. It's where I connect, it's where I do the best. He's just given me like every single time when you when you just lean into God's plan for the Kingdom. It just seems like he subconsciously like you could work your entire life trying to build something that you wanted from a passion standpoint and never get there. Most people, that's the case with most people because they're too that's an idol at that point because they're chasing the idol and not chasing to the Kingdom. It's just such a blessing. I am beyond thankful. I probably am in tears a couple days a week just thinking about it because I want to never forget it. I try to not forget it. Sometimes I go through some rough seasons with stress and all that and get distracted.
Dean Hulce: Everybody's that way. But we're going to and that's spiritual warfare lots of times around us. I'm going to give you a quick and my our listeners because this I speak to myself with it. There's several ways to keep from going from those highs and lows. One is being in God's word. I mean, he's going to feed you through that. And we're going to go through lows, but to maintain that and you understand the mountains, so you understand what it's like to sit on top of a mountain and enjoy that view and listening to elk bugle below or whatever. You also can relate to being down low and having to look up and seeing where I got to be. Besides the Bible, the other main thing in my opinion is keeping yourself surrounded by Christian men and women that are going to pour into you and they're going to be brutal with you at times if you're not in the right place. If we're not doing that, it's way too easy to just slip back into life, just life.
Jacob Albaugh: Both of the parts are extremely, extremely important. The second one seems to be over time being proven to me even more. When I started the ministry, I got big portion of that is wanting to just get like-minded men together because it doesn't exist in society. Not in the way most of us hunter. To be honest, I was missed from a ministry standpoint. I almost felt like I was missed because I didn't quite fit in with the white collar Sunday best atmosphere. A hunter, outdoorsman, like a little bit of adrenaline. Anyway, through that, the group of men that I have been blessed with in my life and families, not just men, families, wives, spouse, kids. When I have went through those seasons of lows, they have helped drive you back. There's a lot of seasons where Primal Faith I was pouring into other people. I just went through a season not too long ago earlier this year, actually, where I had some pretty bad stuff and it probably would have put me over the edge and I was like, "I'm not going tonight. I'm not going to Bible study." I went there and then everybody that had been there that had been growing from this environment poured back into me and I'm like, "Ah, this is exactly how God wants us to operate." He wants us to be close. The devil wants us in isolation. God wants us with our brothers and sisters of Christ to do this life because it I think it's just a stronger setup to where when one falters, they can help.
Dean Hulce: That's biblical. If one falls and nobody's there to pick them up, what'll happen? And that's true and I will say you mentioned families, having those families around you. One of the things I've noticed and we've learned with God's Great Outdoors is and it just happened, but our wives as a group, when we sit down for prayer as a board, we sit down at least part of that time with our wives there amongst us and praying and they're going to be our biggest supporters and our biggest prayer partners usually. Praying with them, we did it last night over one of our board members who's going through some health issues. We surrounded with husbands and wives around him and prayed. It's important for men to do this. There's something special and there's something biblical about men holding other men up, but also families holding each other up and our wives, that's our best, that's our number one support. If it's not, we got to straighten it out. We figure a way to do that. But I'll challenge you with your ministry, with your business, with everything you're doing is to continue to surround yourself. What else can you tell me? What else do you want to share in what's gone on in your future? Anything else that you want to share?
Jacob Albaugh: I think that tells the story up to today. I think God's got much bigger plans. Every time I think that we're at the end of the road, the road is much, much bigger and much, much longer than what if you just keep saying yes over and over and staying in the word. I've recently been blessed with being completely and totally honest. For 31 years, reading the Bible is one of the hardest things for me to do. I'm extremely hyperactive brained. I knew I needed to be reading the Bible. I would actually take my chair down by the creek that I live on a creek and using the rapids to try to drown out some noise with shockwave headphones in at full blast to try to calm my brain down enough to where I could get into the word. Some days I would succeed and some days I wouldn't, but most of the time I wouldn't and it's just been an absolute uphill battle, can't bring myself. I'm super for the Kingdom. I pray all the time. I really enjoy doing pack workouts and doing prayer and listening to Christian music and worshipping. That's kind of my point of connection when I'm not out in the mountains. Mountains is my favorite, no questions. That's kind of my I connect better there than I do in a church on Sunday. It hasn't been that long, but reading the Bible is one of my favorite things to do now. It's actually been since we started the business. I just started and then there was just one day. It was a Sunday morning before church and I got my coffee and I went on the front porch and for something was different. Not a little bit different, it wasn't gradual. It was just like it almost comes alive to me now and it is one of my most fun things to do. I thoroughly enjoy it. The weird part is I used to have to read one thing and then read it again and read it again for my brain to settle down enough to understand what it was saying. It wasn't that fun because I had to work so hard to understand. I wanted that to change and I've been praying about it. Like, "How can I learn more if I can't read the Bible?" I'm going through a season now that I read it and it's almost instantaneous. I understand it. It's like English. It was Spanish and now it's English for me. It comes alive and it's been super fun. I'm super thankful. I thought I was in a good spot and everything once that started happening. It's like, "Man, there's so much more to this." I'm burning through the Bible. It's actually sitting on my desk over there right now every time I can get a little bit of time, I'm burning through chapters and burning through the Bible just because I can.
Dean Hulce: One of the things that really brought it to life to me is I went back and I was raised in a good solid gospel preaching church my whole life. I've been involved and had great people around me, but when I really learned to appreciate the Bible, enjoy the reading, I went back and read a lot of the stories of especially the Old Testament, which we call giants in the faith. I went back and learned what they went through and I read it as in, "These were real people facing real things." The life of Joseph and what he went through in slavery and his brothers selling him and ending up in jail and you look at that and you see the way God worked and say, "That same God is working on me." When I did that, that's where I came to the place like you're talking about is because God became real in those scriptures, not just Bible stories and like you said sometimes until we get to that point, it's almost like noise instead of truth. Now challenge our listeners for that. If you're having a hard time getting anything out of it, just don't give up. Just stay in it and go back and reread what God has done all the way and then the whole Bible doesn't matter what it's all of a sudden it makes sense. Any plans on where you're going from here with is Tenet looking at anything else, any other ideas that you're looking at?
Jacob Albaugh: Yeah, we've got a lot of ideas. We're fresh. We launched in May. We were a business for quite a while in the back burners, but we came to market and it got really real when we came to market. We went to a competition prior to, did really, really well, and we kind of went viral a little bit when we launched and that's only through God's doing. Some of the ideas that we were able to pull off in such a short time, like I still tell the guys, "I am not this smart. God gifted those ideas to me. That's not something that I solved. He just gave it to me." That's a Matt McPherson thing. Matt McPherson, God gives him the things that he's got. If you talk to him, he'll say this was all God-given, it wasn't me. We have some phenomenal technology in my opinion. We have some state-of-the-art revolutionary technology and that didn't come from my brain. That was gifted by him. It's really clear to me that God's behind this brand and what it stands for. We have some phenomenal people too that are in the brand that God brought to like we needed marketing, we needed all this stuff and he just like, "Here you go. Here you go. Here you go." Across the way every single man just like warriors of faith for the Kingdom. It's just been awesome. I got a buddy that I actually met him through Primal Faith. We went through a very similar experience to me what we were together. He had already been there a little bit, but that's kind of where he met Christ. He was already a big time believer, but like really got to meet Christ in a thing and he actually starts for us full-time on Monday. He's grown to be one of my best friends, salt of the earth guys. But yeah, he comes in Monday. Summary is when we went viral is we've had to go from a startup to a pretty we just had to scale extremely fast and it's got its growing pains for sure. There's a lot of sleepless nights, but we have phenomenal team to stay on top of all that. I think we have only scratched the surface. I think God's got really big plans. If not, I wouldn't understand why he would have done everything that he's done to this point to not have. So yeah, we have some really, really big plans. We've got way more product designed that we can't get launched because we're trying to scale with what we have launched to try to catch up. But we're getting that. We're adding staff members on every side and man, it's just like they're all the right people. Even people who have been in the industry for a long time, they're like, "This isn't normal. The way the people were like these relationships usually take years to develop and they're calling you as a startup." God's involved. There's just no question to it. He might take it all away tomorrow if he wants. We don't know. But as of right now, it sure feels like he's involved and man, I love every second of it. The fact that you and I are even on this podcast. That same guy that'll start on Monday was talking to a guy at church and here you are. So I'm sitting here going through this podcast and it's like, "Oh my. Like this is like of like getting I didn't go searching for this. God brought this here. This is a voice to spread spread like what what we're doing in the ministry and the word and the story." So absolutely was a thing I'm saying yes to and now it's like it's just another there's been so many of them that it's almost you just have to laugh at some point. God's already got the plan that you didn't. I never thought about doing something like this. It's been a journey. He's been involved. He just seems like he's super, super behind what we're doing. He only gives you a headlamp and you have to just follow the headlamp if you ever want to make it where you're at. He's not going to give you the whole picture. I just have been through enough times where saying yes and then just watching his plan come into fruition so it's been fun.
Dean Hulce: And I think that if we follow that light that he's showing us instead of looking beyond and following that and then waiting on his timing. Because it's easy, especially as men that have a drive, especially outdoors and other things, looking for God's timing and looking for his leading when we just want to push ahead. We just want to drive it. Just allowing God to do it. I challenge you with that. I challenge our listeners. There's so much here that is a this is a business now, it's a big story, but God still has this for every one of us. It's just going to be in a different level, a different scale, a different way when our hearts are open to that. Tell people first of all how they can find the Primal Faith if they want to learn more about that.
Jacob Albaugh: So Primal Faith is primalfaith.co on the internet. Primalfaithofficial on Instagram. And then Tenet would be Tenet Incorporated on Instagram, so tenetinc. And then our website is tenet.inc as well. That's probably where you can find us. We're on YouTube some. We're kind of getting the YouTube going pretty good now, pushing out some videos and you can kind of see who's behind the brand on there. We're trying to tell the story of who we are. I watched the the development and I watched the barrel. There's no movement on your barrel. I don't know how big of a rifle that you were using.
Jacob Albaugh: 300 PRC.
Dean Hulce: And there's I mean it's got recoil like a 22 as far as the barrel movement. I was amazed by that. Like I said, I didn't come looking for you. Actually, our friend Jeff from church and he that's on my board and said, "Hey, there's this guy at church. I think you need to meet him." And that's the way God works. When we're looking for that, when we're open and we're just looking for, "Hey, what has God got for us?" That's how I got to God's Great Outdoors. I mean, this is a 30-year-old ministry and God called me to it long before he had he had prepared this a way ahead of time for that to happen. No different than in your life and how one thing rolled to the next. I think if we continue to keep God at the forefront and others around us that are doing the same, whatever happens in life, we can trust in him on that. Well, it's been great having you. Hopefully, we'll get together again sometime when things are up and rolling a little bit more and some other growth and as God moves when I'm down here, I'd love to get together. I'd love to stay up with you anyhow and maybe meet your other guys sometime and just visit because anything I can do, anything God's Great Outdoors can do to help you, we'd love to do that. Well, thank you to our listeners for joining us. We're going to sign off. Join us every week and if you have interest in getting with the company with Tenet or with Primal Faith, look them up and if you need more information, get a hold of us and we'll we'll lead you to them. But join us back here every week as we head down the trail to adventure in God's Great Outdoors.
Guest (Male): What a great story of meeting God on the mountain with a life-changing experience. God is always looking to meet us in experiences like this. Jacob happened to have an amazing change and he's living out a different life than he ever thought he would. God spoke to Jacob in a major storm and a near-death experience, but the Bible says in 1st Kings where God often speaks to us in a still small voice. God might speak to you through a traumatic experience, but be listening for his still small voice as well. This mountain experience changed Jacob's life in a major way and it keeps happening because Jacob has been giving his all to God. In Psalms 37:4, there's a great promise. It says delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. That same promise applies to all of our listeners. We hope that you saw how God works in our lives on today's program and we hope it challenges you to keep God first in all aspects of your life. If you've enjoyed today's program and would like to hear the extended podcast version, you can find it by looking for Dean Hulce or Trail to Adventure wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. This program is provided by and can be contacted at God's Great Outdoors, P.O. Box 414, Powers, Michigan 49874 or on the website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. Please join us next week and every week as we head out on the trail to adventure in God's Great Outdoors.