In the morning we were back on the hill glassing with no results. After lunch we were back at it and soon spotted a 65" bull on the far hillside. Now we had a plan for the am. We decided to take the proactive/stupid approach and go to him instead of trying to call him to us. We would hike around the basin (1 mile) and call in the bull.
As morning dawned we were packed and ready to go after the bull. Hitting the trail we made our way to the other side, stopping once to shoot at some ptarmigan. They proved to be just as hard to hit as grouse and we shot 0/4 only taking a few feathers for the stew pot.
When we arrived at the rock outcropping, the bull we had glassed the evening before was nowhere to be found. We set up and called for a while with no results so we glassed the surrounding hills. By golly there was another bigger bull on the next hill down the valley. Off we went like we had sense with a plan of just going over the next ridge to get a better look. Well one ridge turned into three and finally we were in position. The wind was fickle and we setup cross wind from where we had last seen the bull. John did his best cow in heat imitation and Jason was soon looking at a very large bull above him in the trees. It stopped head-on at 65 yds and slowly looked over the situation. Finally it turned and headed in my direction or so Jason thought. How the heck does 1600 pounds of animal disappear. We tried to setup a couple more times but the wind switched and we knew we had been had.
(the little lump in the middle is where the bull was. Pic is from camp.)
We took out the GPS to get a read on how far we were from camp. (1.75 miles as the eagle flies.) More like 3 miles as the fat man walks. The three on us headed back by cutting down to the creek and following the centuries old caribou trail up the valley. It was good going for a while with only a couple of crossings. We did encounter a large grouse as we spooked it from a tree that scared the heck out of us. We also saw a set of shed antlers that were huge and looked like they were dropped at the same time.
We traveled the first mile and found ourselves at "bear pond". There was lots of moose sign in the bottom and we were now at the base of the climb to out newly named "Bent pipe ridge"
The hill climbed through the berry bushes and willow for 50 to 100 yards at a time and now it started to rain. Great! We climbed and rested and climbed and rested. Jason led the way and seemed to get a lot more rest then John and me. We would climb for the same length of time but he would cover twice as much ground. Then stop and wait for us to catch up.
Product review: We were fueled on this climb by Slim Fast diet bars, which were both tasty and hearty. Unfortunately there was an unpleasant side effect to these bars, they gave the three of us horrific gas, I’m not talking about little toots, I’m talking about deep from within the earth out gassings, stop the rotation of the earth blasts, if there was a fire near by the northern hemisphere would no longer exist explosions, harvest the methane and power a small country for a year. And there were a lot of them. From here on out these bars shall be named “Fart Bars”.
Half way up, I ran out of gas and needed another bar or two to make the top. It took a total of 3.5 hours to travel the distance and when we reached the tent in the rain we thanked the bowhunting gods for not letting Jason shoot the big bull. We would have spent the rest of the trip hauling meat. LOL
More later,
Mike and Jason
Topic: Moose Hunt 2005. . .A wingnut /yellargnome production (Read 7905 times)
