Day three, I was up well before the sun and sitting on the edge of the bowl listening for any bugles. My buddies are generally a bit slow to roll out of their sleeping bags, so I had left them back at camp to get their stuff together while I headed out to start trying to locate the bull from the previous evening. The hillside below me was covered with brush that was nearly head high, as well as the occasional pine tree, and I realized that while a slope might look open from a distance, it was probably covered with brush that could almost completely conceal an elk.
As the sky started getting pink, I was joined by my buddies, and we continued glassing the bowl below us. After a few minutes, I picked out a cow and a calf, and soon spotted another lone cow feeding. There didn’t appear to be any bulls with them, and after watching for another 20 minutes, we decided to start working our way down towards the timber to hunt for the day. Far below, I noticed a large brown patch, and after looking through binoculars determined that it was a pretty active wallow. We figured that this was probably where the bull was when we could hear him the previous night, and this was reinforced soon afterwards by a bugle that came from further down the valley. We immediately started trying to make a game plan, but the wind was blowing directly from us to the bull. We decided to back out, circle down the road, and then come in on another ridge on the downwind side to try and get into position. We got moving, and to save some time, drove down about ¾ of a mile to the next ridge. To our frustration, there was another camp set up there, with boot prints going up the ridge that we had planned to take.
While we certainly could have gone in and continued with our original plan, it didn’t feel right, and we didn’t want to risk screwing up the other guys' hunt. After talking it over, we decided to check one more spot on this road and see if anyone was there, then relocate again if there were people there. As it turned out, the next two spots were all occupied, and we returned to our camp to find a quad parked right next to the truck that we had left behind. Evidently someone else hadn’t been quite as concerned about moving in on someone as we had been, and decided to hunt the bowl as well. That was kind of the last straw, and we packed up quickly to head to a different area.
The ride back down the mountain was very scenic, although a bit frustrating, but it was public land, and we had fully expected to run into people during our hunt. Staying flexible and adapting quickly was going to be our best strategy, and we headed up another logging road, hoping to further past where we had hunted the first two days. We passed a few more camps, but eventually began to see fewer people. The country got a bit more rugged, and we followed a cow moose down the road for several hundred yards before she finally found a spot that wasn’t too steep for her to get off.
After finding a place to park, we checked the map and made a plan for our evening hunt. There were several big ridges with bowls that were similar to what we had heard the bull in the previous night, so we began hiking in to overlook some of these for the rest of the afternoon. The woods here were a bit more open, and the occasional gap through the trees would give us a glimpse into some of the grassy meadows below us. We eventually came to a large burn, and decided to set up on the edge and do a bit of calling. Our initial cow calls went unanswered, but after sending a bugle down the hillside, I was answered fairly quickly by a bull to our east. The call sounded legitimate, so we continued with some light calling over the next half hour. We got one more response, but it was a bit further away than the first. From that point on it was pretty quiet for the evening, and we hiked up to the ridge to set up camp for the evening. This was the last day that my buddy from Idaho could hunt with us, and he was going to head out at first light in the morning.
Day four started out with a bit of excitement. For starters, my phone had managed to ping off of a Montana tower at some point, and was now an hour ahead of time. When my alarm went off, I woke up and started getting ready, only for my buddy to ask why I was up at 4 already. After getting that sorted back out, I grabbed another hour of sleep. When 5 rolled around, we got up, and my one buddy headed back down the ridge to the truck, while the two of us that remained got our packs set for the day. It was just starting to get light, and I could hear my buddy making some kind of noise. He likes to sing and hum to himself, so I kind of ignored it, but it continued, and I finally walked over to see what he wanted. That’s when I was finally able to hear him hiss that there was a bear right in the brush in front of us. That got my attention, and I quickly noticed a dark blob moving up through the trees away from us about 30 yards away. I had a bear tag, so I quickly grabbed my bow and took off into the woods after it.
After going about 60 yards, it occurred to me that I had never actually confirmed that this was a black bear, and had only gotten quick glimpses of it as it moved through the trees in front of me. I was a bit conflicted on what to do, but I kept going, eventually getting a good broadside look at the bear and confirming that it was a black bear. Unfortunately, he also turned and got a good look at me at this point, then turned and took off over the ridge. I returned to camp, where we shouldered our packs and headed out.
The morning was beautiful, and we worked along the ridgetop, calling occasionally. We heard several very faint bugles, but nothing that was close enough that we could realistically do anything about. It was a bit frustrating knowing that there were bulls there, but at the same time knowing that the pack out would have been nearly impossible from a few of these locations. We hoped that the bulls might work their way up the ridges as the morning progressed in order to get the thermals to their advantage, and we also hoped that by already being on top, we’d be right in the action.
We eventually came to a peak, and seeing as we were there, we figured that we might as well climb it and see what the view was like from the top. This took us about 45 minutes, and when we arrived at the top, it was almost completely socked in with fog. We could hear one bull bugling off the backside of the peak, which dropped off nearly vertically. We tried to scheme up a way to get to that one, and after a couple of failed attempts, we decided that tempting gravity 6 miles from the truck was probably not the best idea. We ended up working around the peak, spotting several mountain goats in the process. We spent a good half hour watching them scramble around on near vertical rock walls, and running along rock ridges that didn’t seem hardly wide enough to get a hoof hold on.
After finishing up watching the goats, we worked down a lake, which had a bit of old elk sign around it. There was an old wallow next to it, which didn’t appear to be active, and we decided to try and do a bit of calling here before moving on. We got no responses, and after a half hour, we started working our way back in the direction that we had heard bulls that morning. There were several benches that we thought might hold elk, and spent the majority of the afternoon working our way through these areas. There were wallows and rubs, but we couldn’t seem to locate whatever bull had made them. We ended up sitting for the rest of the evening near the wallows, just hoping we would hear a bull bugle, but never heard anything. It had also started to rain at this point, and we weren’t really sure how rain affected elk. I figured that if the rut was happening, they wouldn’t alter their behaviour too much, but we weren’t positive.
We eventually decided to hike out at dark, and ended up running into another hunter who was coming down the same ridge that we were. His report lined up pretty well with ours, saying that the bulls that were talking were all in the bottom of the valleys. He had been hunting that area for the past 4 days without much luck, and was pulling the plug to try somewhere else. At this point we were a bit torn. I’ve always been told that you don’t leave fish to find fish, and we were certainly finding the “fish”, just nothing that was huntable. We had a discussion and decided that we would keep this spot in mind, but maybe we would return to where we had hunted the first day to see if some of the people had moved out. That area had been much more manageable, and odds were that if we heard an elk, he would be in a position that we could get to. With that plan in mind, we finished our hike through the rain, arriving back at our poor rental truck to find three of the four tires were flat. These tires certainly weren’t designed for what we were putting them through, and we were both a bit surprised they had lasted as long as they did. Fortunately we had bought a plug kit and a small air compressor, and after a half hour of patching and inflating, we had 4 round tires once again. We ran into multiple trucks on the drive out, with everyone saying the same thing. The elk weren’t moving, so they were relocating.
It took about 2 hours, but we rolled back into our camp from the first night around 10. We ate a quick dinner, set up the tarp, then called it a night. The rain on the canvas was a nice sound to fall asleep to, and I was almost out when a truck came roaring down the road, skidded to a stop next to our truck, then turned and parked at the gate that we had planned to go past in the morning. I was starting to learn that common courtesy wasn’t real popular when it came to elk spots, and I spent the next hour or two trying to decide what to do for our morning hunt.
The following morning, we woke up well before daylight to give ourselves plenty of time to hike into a different location. The truck was still parked at the gate, and the hunter jumped out and hurried up the trail as soon as he saw our lights in camp. He must have really wanted that spot.
We decided to head in the complete opposite direction and try some other valleys that all funneled down into one big gulley. The map showed an old trail that followed along the edge of one of these valleys, so we began making our way along, bushwhacking through overgrown sections, and occasionally having to take a detour around particularly thick areas. There was elk sign, although it was all fairly old, and we hadn’t heard a bugle all morning. After going a little over a mile and half, we came to an open point that gave us a good vantage point down the gulley, so we sat and glassed for a while. I noticed a cow feeding on a slope several hundred yards away, but she appeared to be all by herself. Neither my buddy or I were going to be picky on our first elk, and had we been able to, either one of us would have gladly taken a cow. However, the area that we were in was bull only, so we had to be content with just watching. She eventually fed out of sight on a seemingly open hillside, which once again reminded us how tall the brush was, and how easily an elk could hide if it wanted to.
We eventually decided to try and continue the trail that we were on, and tried following it around the head of a cut. It very quickly became apparent that this trail hadn’t been used in a while, as we ran into a completely impenetrable wall of brush and pine trees. We walked back and forth trying to find a way to breach the brush, but couldn’t find a single gap to get through. Our next idea was to try and cut directly down one side of the cut and back up the other side, intercepting the trail when it looped back. This plan worked ok going down, but we soon found ourselves in a very tight spot with no way up and out aside from the way that we had just come. The skeleton of a cow elk lay at the bottom, half consumed by a bed of moss and ferns, and I figured that she must have had the same idea as us, and starved to death trying to get out. A fate that I wasn’t completely ruling out for us as we tried to find a way through. Eventually we had to cut our losses and retreat back up the hill that we had come down, then cross another valley and climb a steep hill (with several breaks) to reach another logging road up top.
By now we were both a bit frustrated with this game of hunt and relocate, but with someone in the spot that we wanted to go, and the opposite direction being very difficult to move to, we decided a move was in order once again. I had another spot in mind that we had bear hunted that spring and seen quite a few elk in that I figured could be worth a try, so we hiked back to the truck, drove back down the mountain, crossed the river, then headed up the other side on another tight and twisty road. There was no way anyone was getting a camper up this road, and it was encouraging to not pass a single vehicle or camp on the drive in. At one point we stopped to glass a large bowl, and I was in the process of watching a large black bear feeding across the valley from us when I heard a hissing sound from behind me. I turned, only to find our rear driver’s side tire almost completely flat. It seemed as though we had found another sharp rock and punched a pretty good hole in the tire. After another road of patching and inflating, we were ready to go again, and drove until we reached the trail head that we planned to hike in. We still hadn’t seen any sign of other hunters.
After getting our packs loaded with two days worth of supplies, we started hiking, following the rocky trail along the side of the hill and enjoying the views. The bright orange mountain ash berries added some color to the mountainside, and I wondered if that’s what the bear we had watched earlier had been feeding on.
About a half mile in, I spotted a grouse sitting in the middle of the trail, and quickly waved my buddy forward. He really wanted a grouse with his bow, and he moved past me with a judo nocked and ready. I should preface this with the fact that my buddy is one of the best shots that I know with a bow on targets, but he absolutely falls apart when shooting at game. He gets more excited than anyone else that I know, and that was the case here. As the bird saw him coming, it left the trail and walked uphill in the brush, stopping at about 15 yards. As he drew back, I noticed another bird about 5 yards in front of him, and quickly got his attention and directed him to the closer target. I could already taste grouse over the fire when his arrow impacted a rock behind the grouse and about 4 inches over its back. The bird took off, landing in a tree almost directly above him and looking down. He retrieved his arrow, avoiding eye contact, relocated the first bird that was now about 20 yards away, then drew back again. The 2nd arrow took tail feathers, but nothing more, and this bird landed in a tree above us as well, seemingly none the worse for wear. I was choking back a laugh, but didn’t say anything that might come back to bite me later.
The trail continued on for another two miles, eventually ending at a fire watch tower. By now it was late afternoon, and we were ready to find a spot to sit, listen, and glass for the rest of the night. There were several ridges that looked like good vantage points, so we found one and settled in for the evening, watching the green hills slowly fade to a dark blue as the sun sank over the horizon. I spotted another bear, and found it a bit funny that while bear hunting here this spring, we had seen one bear the entire trip, and tons of elk. Now that we were elk hunting, we were seeing a lot of bears, but very few elk. There were lots of large piles of bear crap along the trail as well, some of which were large enough that it had me questioning what flavor of bear had left it.
The evening progressed with no bugles, and I found myself wondering if there was a reason that we hadn’t seen anyone else back in here. It looked like great country, but we had yet to see any elk, or even sign of them. We found a flat spot to set up camp for the night, spooking a whitetail doe in the process. She circled back several times to blow at us and bound away again. There was a full moon, and the scenery below in the moonlight was fantastic. I sat on the hillside eating my rehydrated biscuits and gravy and thinking how lucky I was to be sitting where I was and enjoying all of this.
That night I had to move several times, as it was almost like having a spotlight shown in my face as the moon progressed overhead. The doe came back several times as well, a few times coming to within a few yards of my sleeping bag before scaring the heck out of me and running off into the darkness again. We had heard no bugles, but planned to give it all of the following day and see what happened.
Topic: My first elk hunt (Read 371 times)
