It's truly odd, I usually do pretty well at guessing what people will do but on this hunt I'm wrong pretty much 100% of the time, it feels like every camp is hunting the ghost of the one elk that they killed 20 years ago, no scouting, no glassing, mass numbers of people all together... I forgot...
I decided that since it was too late for another plan I’d give the area a good look, I climbed a big ridge that gave me a pretty good look at the entire drainage, while glassing I heard a couple of bugles but they were so faint that I couldn’t get a direction on them. At this point it was about...
Day 2:
I decided to start up higher in the drainage I had seen the elk in to see if I could relocate them, no such luck so I rolled back and took down camp, time for plan C, I drove to the most promising of my e scouted spots, which was about 12 miles as the crow flies but required a 2-hour...
on this hunt you get weird looks for having binos, I can't even begin to list all the bizarre things I have witnessed, last time my brother was glassing and had a grown man with a daisy BB gun set up below him glassing through the scope?
you guys are doing it right, most of the time only one of you has a tag... I go along on every elk hunt I possibly can as a spotter/packer... get that time in so you have gut feelings to act on...
I still hunted through thick aspen flats and into the really thick timber, popping out to canyon rims to glass as often as possible, but managed to turn up zero elk, the temperatures were incredibly warm, reaching 70 in the sun by 9 AM and changing the wind to an uphill thermal by an hour into...
I figured I would start by going to the general area where we had had success the time before, but as a backup, I E scouted a couple of other spots that had similar terrain features and vegetation…
I rolled in mid-afternoon and set up camp, then went to glass, I hadn’t been on the binos more...
I think its a practice thing, the first hunt of the year it's always hard to flip the switch to "woods mode" The second go seems to happen almost instantly for me...
I 1000% agree with not hunting with someone, I operate on whims and gut feelings most of the time, it works great for me but...
Hunt 2 was an OTC tag that wasn’t in CO... that should be all the info needed to figure out where I was, read the rest of the story and ask yourself if you really want to subject yourself to this hunt before you get too excited….
I had actually bought this tag before acquiring my archery tag as...
I feel like this crowd is about 10X as sympathetic as was deserved, and when that sympathy was ignored then it went about where it should have...
FWIW I'd take a pretty good online ribbing for a pin drop from @Greenhorn...as long as it wasn't in the form of a link.
if you want the spot be up early enough to be the first one there, and not just sitting in the truck drinking coffee, pack ready, rifle ready, if it makes sense to start at her truck, or be hiked in if that makes sense... if I'm the first up the trail I have no problem aggressively going...
Yeah, no arborist experience for me but I keep a SPRAT cert...
I thought I was hot stuff doing rescue drills with a 100lb bucket of concrete, turns out arms and legs make things 5x harder...
Quitting is said a bit tongue-in-cheek...
It kills me a little to not take it down to the wire, even though in this case I was truly out of time...
thinking back after I read your story I was really considering my internal dialog, interestingly being solo I'm able to reach my best focus, after...
It was a frustrating walk back to the truck after that one, I watched the herd go into a basin I couldn’t really ethically hunt solo with the daytime temps, and the entire time I could hear the dude bugling and hot cow calling until I was out of the basin, really my only interaction in the field...