Elkwhisper
Well-known member
My daughter Cassidy has had quite a year. She was able to take her first bull elk in October and it was a dandy! She was also lucky enought to draw one of the very limited either sex bison tags for West Yelowstone, which was lucky enough. But her luck is so good, we even got the snow needed to make this hunt doable.
As many / most of you know thanks to the episod Randy did, this is a migration hunt near the west boundry of Yellowstone National Park. And the only way hunters have a chance at success is if we get the snow needed to push the buffalo out of the park into the surrounding national forest near the town of West Yellowstone. In the past several years mild weather has kept the majority of the animals in the park and hunter harvest has been very low. This year we have had PLENTY of snow which has kept the bison on the move and harvest has been pretty steady.
I have been lucky enough to hunt all over the U.S. from Alaska to Texas, and even a few far off foreign countries. Big adventures and challenging hunts are not really that new to me. This one presented some new logitical hurdles that made what some might call an "easy hunt" something that turned out to be pretty demanding and definitely rewarding.
Because this hunt takes place when and where it does, there is really only one way to access the hunt area.... by snowmobile. We do not own a snowmobile...nor are we snowmobilers, which created the first of several logistical challenges. Many of you saw and responded to my initial thread here on HT about wanting to borrow / trade a snowmobile, and wouldn't you know it the HT community came through and good ol' dk88 came through, and was nice enough to lend me the snowmobile he bought for his bison hunt 2 years ago. Dave turned out to be a great guy and shared lots of useful knowledge about the hunt, and I can't thank him enough. I was also able to borrow a couple of additonal sleds from some close friends, and before you knew it I had a trailer full of horsepower and we were ready to hit the hills.
The second logistical challenge when it comes to this hunt, is that bison are just BIG animals. And while I have certainly pulled apart and trasported my share of critters, dealing with something that size in 3-4ft of snow is not somethign you want to take on by yourself if you can help it. That's where a strong support crew comes in. My daughter's boyfriend Hayden wasn't going to miss out on this and accompanied us an every trip. And hunting buddies, Ross, Russ, and Jace came along on different trips to lend a hand as well
Cass and I can't thank them enough. But the real game changer, was when good old HuntTalk came through again, and HT's own Red Fox reached out and offered his help. Dusty lives close by to the hunt area and made a couple of trips over to do some in season scouting for us, and ended up being just the kind of guy you want and need on an adventure like this.
Cassidy was super excited for the opportuntiy to hunt bison, and completely understood how rare a chance like this is. That said, as a college student with a couple of jobs, it ended up being pretty difficult to be "on call" to take off when we got word that the bison were on the move. We ended up having a really good network of people that were sharing information on bison movements, which definitly helpped and kept her excited. But in the end we pretty much just had to schedule times when she would be available and hope that our scheudules matched up with the big wooly critters.
We made our first trip over in early Decmeber, and once we got things figured out with how to run the snowmobiles and get all our gear on board, we hit the trails. And honestly, much to our surprise, the first trail we went down was coverd in fresh buffalo tracks and cow patties. Didn't take any amazing tracking skills to figure out which way we needed to go. About a half mile of "tracking" put us right on top of our first group of legal bison. The heard of about 12 cows, calves and a yearling bull were well inside the national forest, and withing 15 minutes of her first buffalo hunt... Cassidy was staring through the scope at thousands of pounds of wild and wooly critters.
As many / most of you know thanks to the episod Randy did, this is a migration hunt near the west boundry of Yellowstone National Park. And the only way hunters have a chance at success is if we get the snow needed to push the buffalo out of the park into the surrounding national forest near the town of West Yellowstone. In the past several years mild weather has kept the majority of the animals in the park and hunter harvest has been very low. This year we have had PLENTY of snow which has kept the bison on the move and harvest has been pretty steady.
I have been lucky enough to hunt all over the U.S. from Alaska to Texas, and even a few far off foreign countries. Big adventures and challenging hunts are not really that new to me. This one presented some new logitical hurdles that made what some might call an "easy hunt" something that turned out to be pretty demanding and definitely rewarding.
Because this hunt takes place when and where it does, there is really only one way to access the hunt area.... by snowmobile. We do not own a snowmobile...nor are we snowmobilers, which created the first of several logistical challenges. Many of you saw and responded to my initial thread here on HT about wanting to borrow / trade a snowmobile, and wouldn't you know it the HT community came through and good ol' dk88 came through, and was nice enough to lend me the snowmobile he bought for his bison hunt 2 years ago. Dave turned out to be a great guy and shared lots of useful knowledge about the hunt, and I can't thank him enough. I was also able to borrow a couple of additonal sleds from some close friends, and before you knew it I had a trailer full of horsepower and we were ready to hit the hills.
The second logistical challenge when it comes to this hunt, is that bison are just BIG animals. And while I have certainly pulled apart and trasported my share of critters, dealing with something that size in 3-4ft of snow is not somethign you want to take on by yourself if you can help it. That's where a strong support crew comes in. My daughter's boyfriend Hayden wasn't going to miss out on this and accompanied us an every trip. And hunting buddies, Ross, Russ, and Jace came along on different trips to lend a hand as well
Cass and I can't thank them enough. But the real game changer, was when good old HuntTalk came through again, and HT's own Red Fox reached out and offered his help. Dusty lives close by to the hunt area and made a couple of trips over to do some in season scouting for us, and ended up being just the kind of guy you want and need on an adventure like this.
Cassidy was super excited for the opportuntiy to hunt bison, and completely understood how rare a chance like this is. That said, as a college student with a couple of jobs, it ended up being pretty difficult to be "on call" to take off when we got word that the bison were on the move. We ended up having a really good network of people that were sharing information on bison movements, which definitly helpped and kept her excited. But in the end we pretty much just had to schedule times when she would be available and hope that our scheudules matched up with the big wooly critters.
We made our first trip over in early Decmeber, and once we got things figured out with how to run the snowmobiles and get all our gear on board, we hit the trails. And honestly, much to our surprise, the first trail we went down was coverd in fresh buffalo tracks and cow patties. Didn't take any amazing tracking skills to figure out which way we needed to go. About a half mile of "tracking" put us right on top of our first group of legal bison. The heard of about 12 cows, calves and a yearling bull were well inside the national forest, and withing 15 minutes of her first buffalo hunt... Cassidy was staring through the scope at thousands of pounds of wild and wooly critters.
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