All or Nothing - 2018 Missiouri Breaks Elk

Wow! What a bull!

Keep the write up coming. A few of us had a pretty physical bird hunt out of the Fourchette Bay campground :D.

Nice job on the bull. I got a laugh out of the visual of your buddy throwing you the bipod.
Me and my buddy watched the while thing from the other side of the drainage. At first we thought something was wrong and we're making plans for some sort of rescue. Once we figured out all was ok it was pretty funny. mtmuley
 
Good grief buddy 6 months to do a quick write up and pics ? ! Cmon man your killing us ! So far tho great story and nice bull congrats !!!
 
This one is the ultimate hurry up and wait getting a guy all excited type of post. Great tags to have glad y'all had a great hunt.
 
HAHA alright alright I promise a write up tonight, on the packout(s). Sorry I'm not the best of writers so it takes effort(funny b/c my dad used to write for an outdoor magazine as a side hobby) and between hunting, work, studying for my PE, and now that I'm engaged... planning a wedding in 6mo it's been busy! Also I found a new found glory in wild trout flyfishing in PA and i'm kind of addicted... but enough excuses... I'll get some nice brews, sit down and write up some more tonight.
 
As hard as these guys worked for their bulls, anything would have tasted good. mtmuley
 
I killed my bull on Monday, this next section covers the next 2 days, two days of agony… as someone said earlier, two bulls down, ouch. Ouch was right….

My dad goes me too, I’m ecstatic but him being 68 and an overdramatic worrier his mind goes into overdrive freaking out. I said just give us some time and let us break down my bull we’re going to get out what we can and hang the rest then we’ll be over to you. He ended up gutting his bull, when was shot tried running up a hill and flipped backwards down on top of the junipers. I don’t think any of his bull was touching the ground in it’s final resting place. Anywho… back to us. We had full packs, intending a day trip so we unload the majority of our packs and hide it in bushes including extra clothing. It’s probably between 55 and 65 during the day during out trip. We finally we em broke down and hung and we decide to take the loose meat(back straps, loins, neck and rib meat, and the head as well as what gear we could repack in the bags. So off we go, down into the valley back up the valley then the breaks traditional down up down up down up for the next 3.5 miles… by the time we get out it’s 8:30pm and the moon is starting to rise into the sky. Here’s some pics from the packout, that’s the moon in the background. While we're packing out in the near dark, bulls were bugling in the drainage we just killed mine in. I think the last photo in the next couple is from another day but I still liked it.

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We get there and there’s my dad at our truck. He hands us some waters and says he’ll meet us up at the trailhead where his bull was shot and to take our time. So we did… sat down, cooked some mountain houses and had some quality beers (busch haha). We’re sitting there and were like funny we haven’t seen mtmuley all day today and we’ve seen em every day so far. No more than 30 seconds later you hear the noticeable glug glug glug glug of his buddies diesel and we’re like no shit… we BS’d with them for a bit them off we went to the next trail head. This was about 60-90min drive from our trailhead to my dads, we got there maybe around 11 I’d say. Fortunately my dad’s bull was only about 1.25mi in and downhill there, which wasn’t fun on the way back… got to his bull and started breaking it down. This time my bud took the head, my dad took the loose meat and I took both fronts bone in. We were exhausted, we headed back to the truck about 1am. There was a little path we took to drop down into the canyon and with a heavy pack, pure exhaustion, pitch black and 30mph winds it was extremely intimidating. There was a section maybe 50yds long where I basically held my breath haha!

Finally about 3am we’re back in camp, a LONG 19hrs of hiking breaking down elk and packing elk… I told my bud he could hunt the morning if he wanted and I could get these bulls out but he turned it down. I think he mostly did this to sleep in haha!

The next day my dad has us cooked up a nice breakfast in the morning and we get some coffee and my bud and I are hitting the road to go get my dads and get it back to him by noon so he can take it to town. We go in and just grab the last to rears and haul those out with no problem. The mountain goat path(seemed like it) was still pretty intimidating tho, I wasn’t fully recovered from the day before. Here’s some pics at the top from the morning packout.
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Finally we’re off to my bull, we set off about 3:30 and get back in there by 5ish and debone the entire bull in maybe a half hour(I can’t remember but it seemed crazy fast). We got it all in bags and back on our back and off another 3.5mi back to the truck with a deboned front and rear in our pack.
Those were some steep hills in the breaks, many of times I hit the ground out of exhaustion and thank god for the knee pads on the sitka gear granted it didn’t help my elbows when I crawled through them on the stalk to kill my bull.

Well about 9pm we wrapped up that pack out and ate some of the biggest meals we’ve had. We had mountain houses at the truck with some jerky then went back and had elk chili and obviously come celebratory beers with the neighbors.

Here’s my dad and my bull, it was a pretty heavy 5x5 just broke off it’s main beam.

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Next part is my buddies bull... to be continued. And also on a fun note, we actually drew the archery tag for this unit this year too, not sure what we did to get our luck that we've been having.
 

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Just some miscellaneous pictures for you guys...

Some of the many bighorns we saw:
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Someone killed this, met him later on out the trail. Snake scared the crap outta me, not the last one we'd see on this trip. Didn't realize their "rattle" sounds awfully like the pesky grasshoppers out there.
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Some gorgeous moon rises, the dark picture, the light in the top left is the moon coming up105023
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Thought this photo was cool, can you see the shed?
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Some miscellaneous photos
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Then there's another photo of this guy again:
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