MARQUETTE -- In his 30 years of filming U.P. outdoors show "Discovering," host Buck LeVasseur has met hundreds of people along the way. He says it's these 'characters' that are what his audience remembers and talks about for years to come.
Every week while filming Discovering, Buck LeVasseur meets someone new.
When I asked him who were the most fascinating characters he's met over the years, he says it was a struggle to narrow it down, but he came up with a few examples.
First of all, there was Solomon Taddeucci, an older hunter who once helped drag a buck seven miles. "Exactly seven miles, and all uphill Buck, all uphill," recounted Taddeucci in a previous Discovering episode.
And then there was John Syrjamaki who just happened to shoot one of the biggest bears Buck has ever seen. "I was walking, hunting deer and I stopped to take a leak, nature called," said Syrjamaki to LeVasseur.
Then there are names that almost everyone in the U.P. would recognize, like Ted Nugent. "Anybody that is against hunting, is unnatural; you're weird," said Nugent, "and we won't stand for it anymore."
And an avid fly fisherman named John Voelker. "I wrote a book called Anatomy of a Murder once," said Voelker in a Discovering episode.
Voelker wrote that book under the pen-name Robert Traver; he was also an attorney and a Michigan Supreme Court Justice. But it was his passion for the outdoors that brought him to Discovering.
"Unfortunately, we're running out of the real characters; it's somewhat hard today to find that real gem," says LeVasseur. "But I know there are some, and sooner or later, I'll hear about them."
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