MT WT quest round 3

[Little Big Man MT Chris]

Several members enjoyed my journey to get my 1st ever WT buck last year

and asked if I was going to do another thread this year , so I said sure why not.

We’re half way through the season now and I’ve only been out a few times , I have the next 2 weeks off and will be getting after it now

Early season recap… opening day

I was planning on heading down to my WT area where I killed my buck last year, the wife was scheduled to work opening day , then at the last second she got Saturday off and told me she wants to hunt Saturday evening….

Plus my parents moved to MT last year and this is there 1st hunting season in MT so they got tags also mom is 72 dad is 82 and still want to go out and hunt some. So I have a full plate this year being a guide for the wife and now the folks….

The wife works nights , so even though she has opening day off she’s gonna be asleep till noon at least opening day. So I scrap my plan to head to my WT spot because of the distance to travel and do a morning hunt and then drive all the way home grab the wife , gear up again and then drive out somewhere else for an evening hunt and just seemed like a lot of extra work. So I tell the folks I’m gonna hold off and just do an evening hunt with the wife and my parents are asking me for advice on what they think they should do…

So I told them go down to the Whitetail Meadow because they drove there last year and brought a game cart after I shot my buck and assisted.

I’m like there’s some elk that filter threw down there or you could see a buck be a lot of people on opening day maybe something will get pushed to you.

Sitting on the couch opening morning watching game day waiting for the wife to wake up , and keeping in touch with the folks and watching location sharing on my phone. Pull up my mom‘s location to check in on them about 10:30 ish and I see that they’re driving down the interstate back to Billings , I text my mom that was a quick morning hunt ! she reply’s gonna go get drunk. You should’ve been there.

So we live four houses apart I wait for my parents to get home. I walked down there and I go what happened ?
Proceeds to tell me that there was you know seven or eight rigs down there and they hiked into that spot , we sat down for for maybe 15 minutes and 25 or so branch bulls came piling into that meadow.

I was sick to my stomach, my mom had put a bipod on her rifle. She never hunted with one, and when she sat down, she never set it up and extended the sticks. So when the elk came out in front of her, she started fidgeting and trying to get them things set up, which alerted the elk to her presence. Dad had wondered away from mom and left his shooting stick up against a tree, and was standing exposed on the open hill side and not being able to move. Tried to get down on one knee and use his knee for a rest because he had wandered farther away from mom and the elk were he thinks 200 or some yards from him. right before he shot he lost his balance and rocked back he said and fired over the back of a bull , then the whole herd started running and alerted everyone’s else in the area to their presence and then they went up around my folks over the ridge and into a bunch of other hunters and three bulls got dropped and yeah, that was their morning.

I felt so bad for my mom and dad and wished I could’ve been there. It hit me hard.

After all the what ifs and might’ve beens if I’d been with my folks had I been there etc etc etc….

My wife likes mule deer hunting and I take her out to a spot that I hunted my first year here back in 2022 and passed on a young 4x4 mule deer


was looking forward to getting boots on the ground, clear my head and try to find a buck for my wife….

It was a decent 2.5 mile hike we saw 10 mule deer in total, one buck a small spike

had the wife set up at the top of the draw the deer filter into off the Prairie, Wait to see if a buck would come in late. This is the same draw that I took a picture of that buck above 2022. Nothing but a porcupine came through.


Cause we were in there a little bit, I didn’t want to wait till the last second of light and then take my wife out in the dark with a headlamp so we slow hunted our way down the canyon back towards the truck and the river, I ended up seeing a white patch through the brush and pulled up my binos and realized there was a mule deer in front of us in the draw, and then there was another one and another one, but the wind was sucking right down the canyon and they winded us and ran up the side and out of the draw , that was the one spike and the hunt we saw . The deer were dead center in the middle of this brush in the draw.


Getting ready to walk across the river at last light to the truck and that was the first day for us in MT

 

[Little Big Man MT Chris]

I have Fridays and Saturdays off , the next Friday rolls around and I tell my folks I’m gonna go down and hunt the infamous meadow now where my parents missed on an elk and stay the night and do the first cold camp with my new camper set up and see if we can make amends for what happened on opening day, I still have never seen an elk down there during season on public only on private!

Get down there in the dark and slip into the Meadow right at sunrise and get set up and wait. I set up in a different spot than I shot my buck in last year that’s about 30 yards to the right, which gives me a better angle of the rest of the meadow, about 9:30
I see movement about 300 yards to my right and realized that’s one big ass grizzly walking through my meadow !

Instead of trying to take a picture, my first reaction is get your crap together, quietly break down my rifle get my butt pad attached to my backpack throw the pack on and then I go for my phone to take a picture of him but he never stopped walking and exited the meadow and is parallel to me in the brush so I immediately head up onto the Prairie where there’s no trees and wait to see where that grizz is going.

About 1000 yards off to my far right on the opposite end of the prairie where it goes back to timber I see three whitetails come flying out of the brush and there’s a trail over there in that corner hunters use to hike into that area so I start glass and looking to see someone’s walking out of there, but I don’t see anyone

Then in front of me about 700 yards up, I can see some orange in the trees straight ahead of me and I’m like oh crap they’re right in the path of that freaking bear. I say a quick prayer cuz there’s no way to warn them there too far ahead of me.

Eventually, I see them coming down the two track so I start walking up towards them and we eventually meet I tell them that there’s a bear right in there somewhere and they go yeah he just walked past us at 150 yards where we were laying under a tree, they told me after it walked past them , It hit the two track and then he just took off, running full speed across the Prairie and that’s when I realized he went into the brush somewhere where those whitetails come out of and that’s what spooked those deer and it wasn’t a hunter.

Understanding the direction that that Bear took and he ran away , I knew he wasn’t coming back so I slipped back down into my meadow and sat there the rest of the morning and then at about 1030 to 11. I had six deer filter through that far corner where that Bear had crossed. All does and a small buck.

After my morning, sit before I hike back to the truck for a jetboil and break. I decide to hike over to the edge of that Meadow, where the bear and all the deer had been to cut his tracks in the snow and take a couple pictures of his paw prints. In addition to finding his paw prints, I also found a really nice WT scrape over in that far edge of the Meadow. That a buck cleared all the snow and pissed all over everything.

The far edge that was the hot zone Friday morning


Got tracks !



Because it’s 329yds to the far edge of that Meadow from where I was set up and the amount of deer activity I saw over there that morning, On the way back to the truck ,I went and tried to find a different place for later in the season to use as blind to cut the distance for an easier shot and I found a tree that I broke the branches off in the middle that I plan to use later this season when I’m by myself




Went back and sat in a different spot of that Meadow Friday night didn’t see anything all evening, but I did come across My dad‘s butt pad that he lost on opening day a week earlier when the elk over ran them , I sent a picture to my mom. We had a chuckle.


Random pic of the day Friday


While I’m down at my spot. I get a text from my folks who went out to do a Friday evening hunt and said they had a deer in the back of the truck. I’m like what? oh yeah it’s a Whitetail, and I go. You found a Whitetail up there I’ve never seen anything but mule deer up in that area , mom said she was a little bummed because she shot the wrong Whitetail.

Come to find out they had jumped a doe and a yearling, the yearling went right into a draw, and then the doe went left the other direction into the brush , so mom wanted to fill her doe tag went left and somehow that yearling circled around her and then popped up right in front of her. She raised and shot it and then realized when she got up there, it was the yearling and a young buck she was bummed , wanted the doe for more meat then she goes but I’m 72 and I did it on my own .

The olds are on the board


The camper did OK in 30° sleeping temps , I got a little buddy propane heater I used in the evening and in the morning.

Beautiful sunrise Saturday morning had some early doe activity off my right and then about 930. Somebody hiked into the meadow opposite of me saw me sitting there and proceeded to hunt through the meadow right in front of me and took away my right side and I had been watching a young WT buck was at the far right end out in front of him but had anything Big stepped out. You know I wasn’t gonna sit there and shoot at an elk or a deer right past somebody. I’m like what a jerk to and intentionally cut me off like that when I was there first , so I just packed it up and called it a day and went home early that was the 2nd weekend.

Sunrise Saturday morning


The 2 does that morning


I did like the tree I found this year to sit under because it has a big overhanging branch that keeps the sun out of your eyes at first light and shades you while you’re looking for critters.


Looking left towards the does I’m not the first person to use this tree. There’s a whole pile of sticks there that somebody had put there years ago that used it also.


And looking right, where the jack wagon hiked out in front of me and then was cutting the edge right along the timber

 

[Little Big Man MT Chris]

So last Friday morning, I go dad let’s go back down to the Meadow. And do a Friday morning hunt , and after my story of the grizzly down there, mom and the wife said no thanks we don’t wanna go there anymore.

Get down there hour before sunrise first one of the spot gear up start taking the two track with no headlamps on cause I’m so familiar with that area now in the limited light I don’t need it to stage for shooting light before we start to the meadow.

It’s shooting light and off we go, We start cutting through the sage right at the timber transition we’re 150 yards now off the two track in the low light and I discover in front of me a dead elk barrel that somebody had done the gutless method on. Examining the carcass, no predator and chewed on it. There hadn’t even been birds on it which I thought was strange because I was guessing it was 24 to 36 hours old give or take. Point out to the Old Man I’m like a Check this out. I said somebody got a bull in the last day or so, Maybe we’ll get lucky today.

Pressing on slowly walking to the edge before it drops into the meadow or you can start to see the far edge of the Meadow and I just stopped to see if there’s anything out there and then I noticed a raven right in front of me I look up and watch them kind of circle around or whatever and I look back towards the Meadow , again right in front of me I catch movement again. I see a magpie fly into the tree. Looking at it and processing the info , I see a couple more magpies so I take another step forward and then I see more like six or seven.

I get that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I pull my pistol and I look over my shoulder at dad who’s couple yards behind me and I whisper there is another dead elk, Somebody shot right freaking below us and I can’t see it. This is not good.

Straining my eyes in the low light, I can see bird movement and I know there’s a little dip right down in the bottom where it flattens out to the meadow and I can’t see anything and I whisper to my dad. We need to start going side hill now because I need to get a different angle into that brush to see if there’s a bear with it.

So we’ve gone about 15 yards now and I’m just looking, looking being deathly silent and still can’t see good in the darkness because the rising Sun hasn’t hit that area yet, suddenly I see this big ass Grizz head pop up out of the brush and he’s facing away from us and the wind is blowing right to left and we’re behind him and he’s to the right of us , thumbs up

My dad is still a yard or 2 behind me and I whisper big ass Grizz. We got to go now. And I just silently start making tracks. I don’t know how far I travel and I look over my shoulder to make sure I got my dad on my ass and what did he do. He went forward to the lip of the edge and was staring at that grizzly. I’m like WTF !! I go back and grab my dad by the arm and I’m like what are you doing? We gotta go and my dad he just right there and the commotion of that exchange that bear heard us and it spooked him because we are right on top of him. Then my dad says look he’s running away.

I turn my head to see that big ass bear run into the brush away from us, and then I start talking normal. Go what the Frick were you thinking that thing can run 30 miles an hour or faster and could’ve been up here in seconds and my dad‘s like I just wanted to see a grizzly again , because when we lived in Alaska, we’ve seen a couple out hunting before and at 82 my dad couldn’t resist the opportunity to look at a grizzly in the wild one last time.

And then I turned back to my dad and I’m still kinda chewing his ass and then he says again , It’s right there and I look up again and that bear cut out into the middle of the meadow right in front of us about 150 yards and was slowly walking away from us and I go that things gonna hook and circle back and he’s gonna get annoyed with us and we better not be here when he gets back And I finally got my dad out of there.

Got back out towards the two track and then I’m like well there’s another meadow about 1000 yards up that I’ve never been to so why don’t we go up there and hunt that cause that bear is gonna stay right here and we won’t have to worry about him,
So we went and sat on that upper Meadow the rest of the morning and never saw anything else,

and then drove around that afternoon and showed my dad a couple other spots of public in that area that you can hunt deer on and when we got home told the whole story with the bear to mom and the wife and my dad was sitting on the couch with a big shit eating grin and said quote “studs don’t run” I’m like holy hell old man

My 82 year old dad in some of my gear the morning before our bear encounter, still looking good old man


The upper meadow we sat after our bear encounter


Needless to say my season has year has been the year of the GRIZZ

 

[Little Big Man MT Chris]

My dad and I went back down to the meadow yesterday morning and hunted there all day we went and looked at what was left of the elk after the grizzly got done with it. I did some ranging and came to the conclusion. We were 40 yards ish when we first came on top of that thing.


We only saw one deer all day. It was a fork by one that came right through the meadow in front of us broadside at 120 yards at 4 in the evening with about an hour of shooting light left,
I sat there with a smile on my face wondering if my dad was gonna shoot it. He was 20 yards to my right looking at it through the scope and watching it he said later he didn’t want to be out there in the dark all night. He said he was getting cold so he’s like if it was closer to truck I woulda pulled the trigger.

On the hike back to the truck that buck and crossed in front of us again and made a giant 1000 yard loop in that last hour he was just cruising looking for a doe so the rut is starting to kick off I would say

I was running on three hours asleep all day Friday so we slept in this morning and after breakfast, we’re gonna gear up and I’m gonna go take the wife out for an evening hunt somewhere. See if we can’t fill a doe tag or find her a mule deer buck

 

[Little Big Man MT Chris]

Took the wife out for an evening mule deer hunt same spot she got her buck last year , on the hike out a WT came down the small valley! I was like what the heck , I do the write up tomorrow. Tonight I celebrate

 

[Wild Bill]

Heck ya

 

[Bowmannate2000]

Took the wife out for an evening mule deer hunt same spot she got her buck last year , on the hike out a WT came down the small valley! I was like what the heck , I do the write up tomorrow. Tonight I celebrate
View attachment 349437

Congrats on the buck!

 

[Little Big Man MT Chris]

After sleeping in yesterday, the wife was super excited and ready to hunt, I had several ideas going through my head on where to do an evening hunt.

I ended up choosing the piece of public my wife got her buck on last year, and the evening before she tagged out last year , the biggest mule deer I’d seen on public in MT since moving here was in the back corner on the high ground, then last year some other hunters beat us to the spot I wanted to get to that morning and we had to hunt away from them in the sage along the timber when my wife’s buck walked into us.

That big mule buck has never left my mind and I’ve looked at the map and the area around it , there’s another chunk of public above it with a piece of private in the middle. So I do a road scout to go drive to that piece of public and get some eyes on it , I also checked another piece of public in the area that has some AG by it that I’ve never hunted but have seen mule deer on it and around it

After the road scout I get to our park point at 1:30 ish , this is only the 3rd time I’ve hunted this piece, and the first time coming in from the right side , last year came in from the left twice.

It’s a giant grass land and sage flat with some wooded timber draws on it, the plan was hike up hit the timber
work slow along the edge of it and find some spot in the back to watch the tree line and see if a buck feeds off of private onto the public.

The wind was perfect all evening blowing west to east and we were hunting along the east edge , after a short steep hike onto the flat we hit the timber and decided to drop back off the sage flat and work along the small valley and then go through the timber again back up a ridge at the top and then find a spot to set up

We bumped a small 3 to 4 inch spike buck in the timber draw dropping in and the got busted by a doe bedded under a tree at the top of the draw opposite of us , she blew at us twice before running away

We finally get to our spot , it’s rolling grass with a little bit of sage, and I pick a sagebrush to lay behind and watch the back corner of the timber to see if anything feeds out in the general area where that big buck was the year before, we were set up about 225 yards off of private the wooded tree line was 186 yds nothing ever showed up and feed out ,

We’ve been laying in the prairie there for almost two hours. It was 4:15 . I knew we had about 45 minutes of shooting light left and I could tell my wife was starting to get cold so I said do you want to just slow hunt out back to the truck and she said yes.

We stand up get everything together. I kinda creep forward and look over the grass ridge over the big sage flat to see if anything was out feeding. I couldn’t see a single thing . So we had for the timber overlooking the little valley. just before we get ready to drop off the ridge my wife says did you hear that?

I said no cause my hat was pulled down over my ears because the wind had been been blowing and it was a little chilly so I rolled up my hat above my ears , I said, what did you think you heard? She said sounded like a branch breaking or something and I go well there could’ve been a deer in the draw and wr just blew it out.

So I kinda started looking down through the trees, expecting to see a deer running away from us, but I didn’t didn’t hear anything and then just before we started to drop off the ridge there was a split in timber about 20 yards wide. And gave you a partial view of valley, and with the naked eye, I’m like what is that? Is that a deer?

Pull out my binos , yeah it’s a deer. It’s got its head down in a bush and then I see its tail flicker and I’m like holy crap it’s a whitetail! It suddenly lifted its head spins 180 and starts walking and I’m like that’s a big old buck.

We were about a mile or so off the Yellowstone river there was ag fields across the road from where we parked, and I had seen lots of whitetails in previous seasons way out on the ag fields down by the river but had never seen a whitetail on this side of the road. So I was a little shocked.

I look at my wife and I say we gotta go that Buck is heading for the river and we need to get set up because he’s going to come right in front of us, I think he was 300 to 400 yards off to my left when I spotted him from the Ridge above , And the finger red, we were on, dropped hard to the right, and I went as fast and as slow as I could, because I knew the hill was gonna block the noise it was a little Rocky

I got down towards the bottom and I had a choice to go straight ahead or hit the dip and go right and so I chose to stay right because I was worried if I pushed too far any more forward in front of me he was gonna hear me because I was expecting him to come on my side of the draw.

Sit down, extend my bipod , and wait I don’t know how much time went by a minute, two minutes give or take and I’m like where is he ? He’s not here. He should be here. What the heck ! so I think about pushing another 50 yards to try to get to the left edge so I can look around the corner to see where he’s at , so I slowly stand up and all of a sudden I catch moving out in front of me holy crap he’s on the far side of the draw looking right at me. I was so focused on the front part of the valley that I didn’t even notice him walking a little farther out even though he was right in front of me in the open.

I slowly sit down lean into my rifle. He’s kind of quartering to me with his head, looking right at me, put it on his chest and pull the trigger.

He rocked back and just hit the ground. I look at the wife and go buck down because she was a little farther up on the draw. She never saw the deer and she was just waiting watching.

I make it about 20 or 30 yards towards the deer and then he starts thrashing trying to get up I laid down and he was now facing the opposite direction that he was walking. The shot spun him. I grazed his rib cage with the second shot and hair went flying everywhere.

I started to move forward again another 10 or 15 yards. He had kind of righted himself and was just laying there on all fours and I could see him kind of breathing a little bit and laboring so I lay down and put one clean through his rib cage, and one side and the other, and then he just laid over and that was it

When I got to the deer that second shot that grazed his rib cage was like 13 inches long about 2 inches wide and inch and a half deep it was nasty a bullet graze.

So I was talking with the buddy this morning about how I was shocked to see a Whitetail so high up in the stage away from the river and he said with the rut going on, he thought that maybe a bigger came in and ran that buck out and Pushed him up high. anyways picture time

Wife walking up the small valley I would later shoot my buck in that evening, I ended up shooting that buck about 300 yards out in front of where my wife was standing to the right of her in this pic



Back up on top in the grass getting set up , in the background of this picture, you can see that timber across the sage flat that’s where we were last year when we saw the big mule deer buck and where my wife shot her little buck last year



Looking north towards to the tree line where that buck showed up last year


The final view from our set up


Had my wife not thought she heard something we wouldn’t of stopped at that one spot where the trees were open just enough that I could see that Whitetail buck up on the private headed towards our public piece. Because if we had pushed a deer off the ridge, it would’ve ran down and that buck would’ve been alerted to our presence and been gone before I ever saw it , interesting how things work out sometimes

As he lay, if you zoom in you can see where that bullet ripped across his side when I shot the second time and all his hair on the ground behind him


This pic is looking back towards the ridge we dropped off and I shot from somewhere in that red circle over there. It happened fast.


Looking down the valley we hiked up


The pack out wasn’t horrible. It was a little over 1000 yards but we couldn’t go straight out the valley because there was some private at the end so you had to go up the ridge through the trees across the stage flat and then drop down to the truck.

The first trip out I had the small pack so I took the trimmings , Heart tenderloins, backstrap and the head.
The Ridge we dropped down on coming in was straight up and down and I’m like there ain’t no way I’m going up this with 4 qtrs , so on my way back in it was a full moon to my right, and it lit up the hillside on my left and about the third finger ridge up the valley it looked a lot flatter in the moonlight, and I’m like could I be that lucky? After I got loaded up with the second trip, I started making my way towards the other ridge and found a giant cow trail like foot and a half wide and I’m like that’s how these cows get up on top and just walked there trail and it was 2/3 less steep, a gentle, easy grade out.

Last trip, love the mystery ranch pack helps carry the load for sure


Feeling victorious back at the truck , I was still on a high with how that happened so fast and came together, I was still in disbelief I got a WT


Just hanging till morning


A different angle of the buck


Really looking forward to being a guide the next two weeks and helping my dad and wife find a buck plus we all have 4 Whitetail doe tags as a family as well

Time to take care of the meat and gear up , back in the woods tomorrow ! Yee Yee