Bux_N_Beards
Active member
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2014
- Messages
- 83
Did a CO 3rd season drop camp hunt for elk in the early 2000’s. Did all the usual legwork vetting the guide, talking to successful and unsuccessful clients. At that age of the internet there wasn’t a whole lot else to go on. Pretty hefty snowstorm came in 2 days before season. We arrive the day before opening day and theres’s about 8-10” of snow at the trailhead. I ask about snow at the elevation our camp is supposed to be at and am assured it’s good. We start riding in and as we’re getting closer to camp, we’re literally dragging our stirrups in snow drifts. The last hour of the ride into camp there’s no sign of elk tracks - mind you we’d seen elk and plenty of sign earlier in the ride. We get to camp and the wall tent is completely collapsed with snow and the “water source” frozen solid. This is where it gets good.
After an exchange of words about lack of due diligence the outfitter informs us that we’ll have to move to a lower elevation camp (duh), but they’ll have to ride us in the following day which was opening day, and not get camp setup until sometime that afternoon. I ask where the lower camp is and he says we’ll pass close by on the way back. I tell him I want to see it so we get there as it’s approaching dark and one of the wranglers (country boy from the Southeast so we got along well) says he’s got a 4 man dome tent on his horse. I talk to my group and tell him to pop it up, we’re hunting tomorrow and they can ride camp up the mountain and set it up while we’re hunting.
That was a long, cold night, as a blizzard blew in. We woke up opening morning to a complete whiteout. They got camp setup later that afternoon but what firewood was there was wet and frozen and there was a dead mule deer in the spring we were supposed to access for water. Despite all that, we were in elk.
I killed my bull 2 or 3 days into the hunt and my Dad and I got it quartered and moved to a trail by dark, at which time we radioed the base camp to have them come pack it out the next day. The outfitter had stressed that he didn’t like 7mm Magnums bc as he put it “guys back east don’t know how to shoot and wound a bunch of elk with bullets made for whitetails.” Alrighty dude. Maybe so, but not me.
The wrangler from the Southeast was the one that brought the horses up to get my bull the next day and as I helped him load it onto the horses I asked him to PLEASE make sure he told the outfitter that it was cleanly killed with one shot from a 7mm Magnum. I put an original Barnes X through both shoulders, anchoring him in his tracks.
Total rodeo with a lot of additional related drama but we still laugh about it to this day, calling it the Eco Challenge Hunt. My Dad has been doing western hunts DIY since the mid 80’s and to this day that’s the only trip where an outfitter was involved in any way. I did an outfitted hunt in Wy this past fall for elk, but it was the first fully guided hunt I’ve ever done aside from some company paid-for whitetail and waterfowl hunts many years ago.
After an exchange of words about lack of due diligence the outfitter informs us that we’ll have to move to a lower elevation camp (duh), but they’ll have to ride us in the following day which was opening day, and not get camp setup until sometime that afternoon. I ask where the lower camp is and he says we’ll pass close by on the way back. I tell him I want to see it so we get there as it’s approaching dark and one of the wranglers (country boy from the Southeast so we got along well) says he’s got a 4 man dome tent on his horse. I talk to my group and tell him to pop it up, we’re hunting tomorrow and they can ride camp up the mountain and set it up while we’re hunting.
That was a long, cold night, as a blizzard blew in. We woke up opening morning to a complete whiteout. They got camp setup later that afternoon but what firewood was there was wet and frozen and there was a dead mule deer in the spring we were supposed to access for water. Despite all that, we were in elk.
I killed my bull 2 or 3 days into the hunt and my Dad and I got it quartered and moved to a trail by dark, at which time we radioed the base camp to have them come pack it out the next day. The outfitter had stressed that he didn’t like 7mm Magnums bc as he put it “guys back east don’t know how to shoot and wound a bunch of elk with bullets made for whitetails.” Alrighty dude. Maybe so, but not me.
The wrangler from the Southeast was the one that brought the horses up to get my bull the next day and as I helped him load it onto the horses I asked him to PLEASE make sure he told the outfitter that it was cleanly killed with one shot from a 7mm Magnum. I put an original Barnes X through both shoulders, anchoring him in his tracks.
Total rodeo with a lot of additional related drama but we still laugh about it to this day, calling it the Eco Challenge Hunt. My Dad has been doing western hunts DIY since the mid 80’s and to this day that’s the only trip where an outfitter was involved in any way. I did an outfitted hunt in Wy this past fall for elk, but it was the first fully guided hunt I’ve ever done aside from some company paid-for whitetail and waterfowl hunts many years ago.
