Last few years of life have been super busy with work, so when I found out I'd have some time to play with this fall, I went completely unhinged with applications. I ended up with three decent tags- a muzzleloader mule deer tag, an either sex rifle elk tag and a cow tag that were all approximately concurrent with each other. Flights and rental booked, gear picked, dope verified and OnX beaten up during every ten minute break I had in the preceding six months looking for sneaky infils into promising areas.
I was really stoked for the deer tag. The unit looked absolutely disgusting- wilderness with lots of aggressive elevation, really cool terrain, and supposedly some really big deer. Two of those things ended up being spot on. On day three, I found a bachelor group of bucks with a decent 4x4 and put a stalk on them. I ended up close enough for a momentary thermal swirl to let them know that something was up, and my guy stopped at 138 yards on his way over a ridge. I have a habit of letting perfect be the enemy of perfectly good as far as shot opportunities go, and waited just a few seconds to see if he'd turn and present a better angle. Nope. As he bounded off, I instantly knew I blew it. Over the next week, I got up to 45 wilderness miles with more than 12,000 of elevation gain, and never saw another antlered deer. Ran out if water once, rode out a pretty rowdy mountain thunderstorm, saw several dozen does and fawns but no bucks. An outfitter I talked to at the trailhead out the way out went 0 for 4 on archery/ muzzleloader tags. Good news is, the views were cool, it was a great opportunity to get acclimated to elevation and I found a pretty cool fishing hole on the way back to pick my buddy up for our elk gig. If you know, you know on the fishing spot.
Next up was the drive back to grab my buddy for our elk gig. This was a tag I had hunted a few years ago, and he had miraculously drawn the same bull tag with half as many points as it typically takes. Never expect anything but a good time from a hunt, but we knew how abnormally fortunate we were to both end up with tags and wanted to make sure no stone was left unturned on this one. Silly, wild fantasies of doubling on the opener flew as we drove to our unit. We arrived 3 days early- two to scout, one to let it rest and then the opener.
Scouting confirmed the movement patterns I had seen hunting this tag before. Our primary area was thick enough with sign that we turned back pretty quickly to avoid bumping anything. Secondary looked good enough that we spent the rest of our scouting period throwing some flies and passively observing out third, fourth and fifth options. Everything was going great so far, except that my buddy wasn't quite acclimating to the altitude as expected- even some of our lighter hikes to glassing knobs were taking a toll. This dude had a pretty wild active duty career as well as a 15 year base of running tris and ultras, so this was atypical. We chocked it up to being around 10 grand and were glad we'd budgeted three days to get settled.
Opening morning was pretty close to perfect. We hit a great infil and ended up watching the sun rise over a gorgeous meadow right in the middle of the sign we'd seen. Light wind in our face, mid 30s, no other hunters. But no elk. We finished the morning hunt, found a lunch spot and came up with a plan for the evening. By this point, the ATV crowd was out in force. Some dude even brought a street legal pickup with a toddler in the back to the glassing spot where we set up for lunch, several miles from anything that could be described as a road. With fresh motivation to escape pressure from entire family lineages, we decided on an alder choked hellhole about six miles from the trailhead for the evening. What better time than the opener to create a serious problem for ourselves? Aspens were peaking, conditions were beautiful and morale was high.
I was really stoked for the deer tag. The unit looked absolutely disgusting- wilderness with lots of aggressive elevation, really cool terrain, and supposedly some really big deer. Two of those things ended up being spot on. On day three, I found a bachelor group of bucks with a decent 4x4 and put a stalk on them. I ended up close enough for a momentary thermal swirl to let them know that something was up, and my guy stopped at 138 yards on his way over a ridge. I have a habit of letting perfect be the enemy of perfectly good as far as shot opportunities go, and waited just a few seconds to see if he'd turn and present a better angle. Nope. As he bounded off, I instantly knew I blew it. Over the next week, I got up to 45 wilderness miles with more than 12,000 of elevation gain, and never saw another antlered deer. Ran out if water once, rode out a pretty rowdy mountain thunderstorm, saw several dozen does and fawns but no bucks. An outfitter I talked to at the trailhead out the way out went 0 for 4 on archery/ muzzleloader tags. Good news is, the views were cool, it was a great opportunity to get acclimated to elevation and I found a pretty cool fishing hole on the way back to pick my buddy up for our elk gig. If you know, you know on the fishing spot.
Next up was the drive back to grab my buddy for our elk gig. This was a tag I had hunted a few years ago, and he had miraculously drawn the same bull tag with half as many points as it typically takes. Never expect anything but a good time from a hunt, but we knew how abnormally fortunate we were to both end up with tags and wanted to make sure no stone was left unturned on this one. Silly, wild fantasies of doubling on the opener flew as we drove to our unit. We arrived 3 days early- two to scout, one to let it rest and then the opener.
Scouting confirmed the movement patterns I had seen hunting this tag before. Our primary area was thick enough with sign that we turned back pretty quickly to avoid bumping anything. Secondary looked good enough that we spent the rest of our scouting period throwing some flies and passively observing out third, fourth and fifth options. Everything was going great so far, except that my buddy wasn't quite acclimating to the altitude as expected- even some of our lighter hikes to glassing knobs were taking a toll. This dude had a pretty wild active duty career as well as a 15 year base of running tris and ultras, so this was atypical. We chocked it up to being around 10 grand and were glad we'd budgeted three days to get settled.
Opening morning was pretty close to perfect. We hit a great infil and ended up watching the sun rise over a gorgeous meadow right in the middle of the sign we'd seen. Light wind in our face, mid 30s, no other hunters. But no elk. We finished the morning hunt, found a lunch spot and came up with a plan for the evening. By this point, the ATV crowd was out in force. Some dude even brought a street legal pickup with a toddler in the back to the glassing spot where we set up for lunch, several miles from anything that could be described as a road. With fresh motivation to escape pressure from entire family lineages, we decided on an alder choked hellhole about six miles from the trailhead for the evening. What better time than the opener to create a serious problem for ourselves? Aspens were peaking, conditions were beautiful and morale was high.
