Gerald Martin
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2009
- Messages
- 8,643
Conversation waned in the wee hours of the morning as the campfire cooled to embers until each hunttalker headed for their sleeping bag. Thursday morning dawned clear and cool.
It felt as though our hunt was hitting a good stride and I had an intuition about the spot I wanted to head to that afternoon. I hadn't been in there for years and never as far as we intended to go today, but based on our past bear sightings and where we had been finding sign, I thought it would be a good place to look.
J.R. teamed up with Jeff and I and we were parked at the end of the gate forest service road by mid-afternoon.
Jeff loaded up the Howa with some premium Nosler Accubonds in anticipation of participation in the "Nosler Success" thread that is currently running.
We strapped on our packs and settled in for the long hike up.
Good bear signs right where we left the truck kept our optimism running high.
We hiked and glassed for the next three and a half hours walking this endless logging road up and up and up and up and ... Five miles into a road that ended at nine miles without a single sighting of bear scat or any other signs of bears we realized we were on a fools mission and headed back out to the truck.
The weather turned cool and windy and clouds started rolling in. Several of the others hunters who were hunting top of a ridge a dozen miles away endured a cold, miserable evening of hail, fog and high wind. If memory serves me correctly I don't think anyone saw a bear that evening.
We did learn some memorable aspects of J.R.'s character as he lamented the effects of having a desk job and then participating in a five mile uphill hike. While probably not as notable as "I have not yet begun to fight!"-(John Paul Jones 1779), or "I regret I have but one life to give for my country"-(Nathan Hale,1776) or "Give me liberty or give me death!"-(Patrick Henry,1775) his quote when asked if he was doing okay certainly deserves repetition on this thread. "I might die, but I won't quit."- (J.R. Young 2016)
Unfortunately the bears didn't seem to be impressed and neither did Jeff and J.R. when I tried to explain the northwestern Montana rules of mathematics when figuring out distance walked in relation to elevation gained. The way I figure, a hunter takes how ever far he walks and the elevation gained and then multiplies the actual distance by a percentage of the elevation to figure out how far he really walked. That made our uphill five mile hike with 1700' of verticle gain at least seven miles in length. You do not actually subtract any distance for down hill measurement so we walked seven miles in and five miles back out for a total of at least 12 miles that day.
Jeff didn't seem too encouraging when I asked if he thought I could make it as a math teacher in California if I tired of construction. Then again, he made up for his lack of encouragement by the exuberant display of spontaneous rejoicing after I showed him the first wild bighorn sheep he had ever seen. I glassed it up from at least two miles away on another mountain and after ten minutes of talking him through landmarks of " see that grey cliff band and that dead tree? Now go about fifty yards left and down. See that whiteish looking rock? That's a sheep's butt. I saw it walk there and bed down." I tell you he was so appreciative. We couldn't go for more than fifteen minutes on the hike back to the truck without him expressing gratitude that I showed him a sheep.
It felt as though our hunt was hitting a good stride and I had an intuition about the spot I wanted to head to that afternoon. I hadn't been in there for years and never as far as we intended to go today, but based on our past bear sightings and where we had been finding sign, I thought it would be a good place to look. J.R. teamed up with Jeff and I and we were parked at the end of the gate forest service road by mid-afternoon.
Jeff loaded up the Howa with some premium Nosler Accubonds in anticipation of participation in the "Nosler Success" thread that is currently running. We strapped on our packs and settled in for the long hike up.Good bear signs right where we left the truck kept our optimism running high.
We hiked and glassed for the next three and a half hours walking this endless logging road up and up and up and up and ... Five miles into a road that ended at nine miles without a single sighting of bear scat or any other signs of bears we realized we were on a fools mission and headed back out to the truck.
The weather turned cool and windy and clouds started rolling in. Several of the others hunters who were hunting top of a ridge a dozen miles away endured a cold, miserable evening of hail, fog and high wind. If memory serves me correctly I don't think anyone saw a bear that evening.We did learn some memorable aspects of J.R.'s character as he lamented the effects of having a desk job and then participating in a five mile uphill hike. While probably not as notable as "I have not yet begun to fight!"-(John Paul Jones 1779), or "I regret I have but one life to give for my country"-(Nathan Hale,1776) or "Give me liberty or give me death!"-(Patrick Henry,1775) his quote when asked if he was doing okay certainly deserves repetition on this thread. "I might die, but I won't quit."- (J.R. Young 2016)
Unfortunately the bears didn't seem to be impressed and neither did Jeff and J.R. when I tried to explain the northwestern Montana rules of mathematics when figuring out distance walked in relation to elevation gained. The way I figure, a hunter takes how ever far he walks and the elevation gained and then multiplies the actual distance by a percentage of the elevation to figure out how far he really walked. That made our uphill five mile hike with 1700' of verticle gain at least seven miles in length. You do not actually subtract any distance for down hill measurement so we walked seven miles in and five miles back out for a total of at least 12 miles that day.
Jeff didn't seem too encouraging when I asked if he thought I could make it as a math teacher in California if I tired of construction. Then again, he made up for his lack of encouragement by the exuberant display of spontaneous rejoicing after I showed him the first wild bighorn sheep he had ever seen. I glassed it up from at least two miles away on another mountain and after ten minutes of talking him through landmarks of " see that grey cliff band and that dead tree? Now go about fifty yards left and down. See that whiteish looking rock? That's a sheep's butt. I saw it walk there and bed down." I tell you he was so appreciative. We couldn't go for more than fifteen minutes on the hike back to the truck without him expressing gratitude that I showed him a sheep.
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) I saw Ty Stubblefield's face light up at the idea of pain and tough hiking and Julie affirmed that she was good and up for whatever she needed to do to kill a bear. Just like that, Ethan had to put his game face on and it was decided that Ty would follow them into "Steep and Nasty" to try and video them.
