Guide Life: Josh Clendaniel
Jacob Morris for SPLIT REED
It’s a cold crisp Utah morning and you are flying across the great Salt Lake in a duck boat with Central Valley Outfitters. You have always wondered what it would be like to hunt one of the saltiest lakes in the world, but never thought it would be quite this unique or hardcore. The boat comes to a stop and its nothing but ice all around, time to cleat up and start walking across the lake to the hole your guide Josh has been scouting for your hunt. “This is crazy,” slides in and out of your head for a second, but it’s the thrill that is yet to come that keeps you intrigued and wanting more. When it starts breaking daylight you see the awesome mountain back drop that surrounds you on almost all sides. It’s nearly as breathtaking as the groups of ducks that are consistently pouring into this open ice hole. A few hours later your hunt group has limited out with 13 different species of ducks that you are proudly toting out of the marsh. That’s exactly the kind of hunt which could happen if you book a hunt with one of the most hardcore guides, Josh Clendaniel. He is the owner of Central Valley Outfitters and guides mainly on public land in Utah on the Great Salt Lake, as well as surrounding marshes.
Josh is from Delaware, where he grew up hunting tidal river systems of the East Coast. His dad is the one who got him into hunting. He said “My dad deer hunted more than anything! He took me duck hunting a little bit when I was really young, but after a short while we sort of lost contact with waterfowl hunting. The name of the game in Delaware is that if you are not dumping a ton of money into a property to rent it, you don’t really do that good day-in and day-out.”
Josh’s father introduced him to duck hunting when he was only 3 or 4 years old and he has been hooked ever since. Even though his dad had stopped waterfowl hunting, Josh on the other hand, was addicted and would watch the Fallin’ Skies Series with Jeff Foiles on replay. He would even convince people to give him rides to the marsh until he was able to drive himself. Josh got a relatively early start on waterfowl hunting and an even earlier start in his guiding career. “I got my first guide job working for a club in Smyrna, Delaware, and my payment was that I got to shoot my 2 geese once the clients were done. I set the decoys, I called, and I picked the geese up. Once the clients would shoot their limit and go back, I would shoot the next two geese that came in then pick up the decoys, get a ride out of the field and go home.”
Josh grew up hunting some really tough spots on the Delaware bay where he would have to put in the work on the sketchy tidal marshes. It was a normality for them to put out decoys in 20–30 feet of water. This experience contributed to his hunting style, which I say is unique and hardcore. Josh guides on public land most of the time; one of the toughest feats in the industry. He went on to say the duck hunting around Delaware has really gone downhill in recent years. “We had two of the greatest refuges ever on the east coast and both of them were breached by the hurricanes. Neither was ever repaired so the saltwater marsh took over.” Its crazy how much conservation really ties into an area that you hunt; it not only keeps the birds in the area but paves the way for those migrating birds and future duck hunters for years to come. An example Josh used was the Prime Hook NWR where they filmed a Ducks Unlimited episode. He said it looked like Canada at one time, just the sheer volume of birds was incredible. Between shrinking bag limits, and dwindling waterfowl migrations to that area,
Josh began searching for better opportunities. He wanted a place where he could start his own outfitting business and guiding career. “I realized that I could never be serious with guiding on the east coast, your only allowed 2 mallards, 1 goose, and have a short 30-day season. So I left and went to Utah with $2,000 in my pocket and a mud motor in the U-Haul.” You probably had the same question as me how did he end up Utah? When he had to pass through the Mississippi and Central flyways which is home to some of the best waterfowl hunting in the nation. One would think opportunities would be abundant in those areas, but according to Josh “Every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a dozen speckle belly decoys and a few mallard decoys is a guide now. Everybody with a 5-acre bean field that can put an inch of water on it wants to put a pit in it and charge $250 with a free breakfast. I am not about that If it’s not 5 stars then I am not going to run it.” He did look at the Dakotas, Kansas, and my own home state of Oklahoma. However, none felt right for him. A lot of it was because of the high startup cost associated with those areas, which include leasing and getting access to private land. That is why he eventually landed on Utah, which is one of the states where you can have a truly unique hunt. Typically known for its big game hunting, it is a sleeper state when it comes to waterfowl hunting and a place where you can shoot a diverse group of birds on any given day. It is one of the few states where you can kill Swans and Cinnamon Teal (one of the most beautiful birds in my opinio), and Utah also has one of the longest waterfowl seasons with liberal bag limits and has thousands of acres of public land to hunt. You combine all of that with low competition because of the amount of public land (which we all have our horror stories on that subject) and you get the perfect spot for Central Valley Outfitters. A place where you can have that truly unique and hardcore waterfowl hunting experience that tops anywhere else in the country.
For a lot of us everyday people, the weekend warrior types, we think that being a waterfowl guide is a dream job. We do not think about the incredibly hard work these guides put in day in and day out to keep their clients happy. Even the sacrifice they make oftentimes running on little to no sleep for 60-100 days out of the year just to run a top touch outfitting business. As Josh says, “ Being a guide is about sacrifice I lost a 5 year relationship over it and when I lost my pop pop I couldn’t even carry his casket or go to his funeral because I had hunters and couldn’t reschedule because nobody was there to run it, it was just myself at the time. The sacrifices you make are what people don’t understand, that’s the biggest part that people do not see or realize. One day I may have kids and will probably miss a lot of things with them because of this business. You don’t just get to leave when you want. It takes a special breed to be a successful outfitter long term, we are like the special ops of waterfowl hunting”. After saying this he said that it was all worth it and very rewarding in the end. The next time you are on a guided hunt and you are carrying your tote full of birds out of the marsh remember the sacrifices and hard work the guides put into each hunt and say thank you, at the very least.
Interested in booking a hunt with Josh? Visit our Trusted Outfitters page here.
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