Gerald Martin
Well-known member
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2009
- Messages
- 8,632
Guys, I lurk here a lot but rarely ever post. I thought some of you might enjoy seeing my wife's first ever bull elk.
My wife is one of the luckiest people in the world when it comes to drawing special tags. She drew a bighorn ram tag after only two year of applying and killed a nice 170 ram. That was in 2005. She's killed several deer with her bow and rifle since then but our having small children has kept her from getting serious about pursueing elk here in region 1.
I've been putting her in for a Missouri Breaks permit for six years now with hopes that she could get lucky and score a quality tag for elk. This year when it came time to apply for special permits I had a hard decision to make. Our fourth child is due to be born in January and I knew it would be tough for her to hunt if she actually drew the tag. But odds for drawing her unit run about 3% or less so I figured I'd go ahead and put her in just to keep building her bonus points. Well you guessed it, of course she draws the tag. Now we've got a problem, she's seven months pregnant with the elk tag of a lifetime for Montana. Well I 'm a pretty optimistic guy and she is pretty gutsy so there was no question we were going.
Due to her "ahem" condition we decided to go as early as we could despite knowing that there would be a lot of cow hunters and deer hunters the first week. We arrived on Sunday evening at dusk only to find three other camps and two truck full of cow hunters at our chosen camping spot. All the other trail heads had similar crowding so there wasn't much option of going to find a less crowded spot. This was definitely not my idea of a quality hunt with this many hunters around.
We decided that having arrived in the dark there wasn't much use in busting into a brand new area before daylight so we waited until we could just barely see before leaving camp. As daylight broke we were discouraged to see orange in just about every direction from camp. The habitat we were hunting looks more like antelope country than elk and there wasn't at time during the morning when you couldn't glass up a hunter within about a mile of you. NOT the conditions we had imagined all summer. If figure that usually you can get away from the crowds by heading for rougher country so up over the top of the ridge we went. The other side was definitely more broken country but the hunter situation was just as bad. We had actually walked closer to another trailhead so we had hunters coming from that parking area toward us. "ARGH!"
The only encouraging thing was that all those hunters only had cow tags. There are 700 cow tags and only 60 bull tags given for this unit. At about 9 a.m. we did see one herd about two miles away running from some other hunters. Finally we decided that working hard wasn't going to work so we picked a high point and started glassing the open timber and broken coulees hoping to catch a glimpse of something bed or moving away from other hunters. I glassed up a good sized herd out on a huge grassy flat at least 6 miles away from us. They were in a wilderness area and the nearest anyone could drive was about five miles from where they we bedded. If it would have been up to me that's where my next day would have started but I knew that we would be in for a minimum of a ten mile round trip and with Irene being seven month pregnant I didn't want her pushing it that hard.
Towards midafternoon we started working our way back to camp we would take it slow, glass each basin and try to find something on our way back.
It was a cloudy overcast day and around 3:30 I noticed that there were fewer hunters around and the ones we were seeing were headed back to camp. Finally we were a mile from camp with 45 minutes of daylight left. We stopped to glass one last time in country that looked like it couldn't have hidden an antelope, much less an elk. To my shock and amazement I saw several elk emerge from a coulee and start heading our direction. Long story short, five bulls and several cows covered nearly a mile to come within 200 yards of us and Irene killed the biggest bull with two well placed shots. She was one happy lady and we were all pretty relived it worked out that way. Our kids were praying every night at Grandma's house that Mommy could kill a big elk and I'm convinced that God answered their prayers that night!"
My wife is one of the luckiest people in the world when it comes to drawing special tags. She drew a bighorn ram tag after only two year of applying and killed a nice 170 ram. That was in 2005. She's killed several deer with her bow and rifle since then but our having small children has kept her from getting serious about pursueing elk here in region 1.
I've been putting her in for a Missouri Breaks permit for six years now with hopes that she could get lucky and score a quality tag for elk. This year when it came time to apply for special permits I had a hard decision to make. Our fourth child is due to be born in January and I knew it would be tough for her to hunt if she actually drew the tag. But odds for drawing her unit run about 3% or less so I figured I'd go ahead and put her in just to keep building her bonus points. Well you guessed it, of course she draws the tag. Now we've got a problem, she's seven months pregnant with the elk tag of a lifetime for Montana. Well I 'm a pretty optimistic guy and she is pretty gutsy so there was no question we were going.
Due to her "ahem" condition we decided to go as early as we could despite knowing that there would be a lot of cow hunters and deer hunters the first week. We arrived on Sunday evening at dusk only to find three other camps and two truck full of cow hunters at our chosen camping spot. All the other trail heads had similar crowding so there wasn't much option of going to find a less crowded spot. This was definitely not my idea of a quality hunt with this many hunters around.
We decided that having arrived in the dark there wasn't much use in busting into a brand new area before daylight so we waited until we could just barely see before leaving camp. As daylight broke we were discouraged to see orange in just about every direction from camp. The habitat we were hunting looks more like antelope country than elk and there wasn't at time during the morning when you couldn't glass up a hunter within about a mile of you. NOT the conditions we had imagined all summer. If figure that usually you can get away from the crowds by heading for rougher country so up over the top of the ridge we went. The other side was definitely more broken country but the hunter situation was just as bad. We had actually walked closer to another trailhead so we had hunters coming from that parking area toward us. "ARGH!"
The only encouraging thing was that all those hunters only had cow tags. There are 700 cow tags and only 60 bull tags given for this unit. At about 9 a.m. we did see one herd about two miles away running from some other hunters. Finally we decided that working hard wasn't going to work so we picked a high point and started glassing the open timber and broken coulees hoping to catch a glimpse of something bed or moving away from other hunters. I glassed up a good sized herd out on a huge grassy flat at least 6 miles away from us. They were in a wilderness area and the nearest anyone could drive was about five miles from where they we bedded. If it would have been up to me that's where my next day would have started but I knew that we would be in for a minimum of a ten mile round trip and with Irene being seven month pregnant I didn't want her pushing it that hard.
Towards midafternoon we started working our way back to camp we would take it slow, glass each basin and try to find something on our way back.
It was a cloudy overcast day and around 3:30 I noticed that there were fewer hunters around and the ones we were seeing were headed back to camp. Finally we were a mile from camp with 45 minutes of daylight left. We stopped to glass one last time in country that looked like it couldn't have hidden an antelope, much less an elk. To my shock and amazement I saw several elk emerge from a coulee and start heading our direction. Long story short, five bulls and several cows covered nearly a mile to come within 200 yards of us and Irene killed the biggest bull with two well placed shots. She was one happy lady and we were all pretty relived it worked out that way. Our kids were praying every night at Grandma's house that Mommy could kill a big elk and I'm convinced that God answered their prayers that night!"
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