I’m back on the board in 2024, six 6 points in the last 7 years, called for a buddy with a OIL tag all last season and broke my streak, but it was totally worth it. Told myself I wasn’t sending an arrow unless he was over 300” and made it happen.
I spent the first week of the season hunting deer mostly, missed a giant 35” wide mule deer shooting off a cliff with him straight below. Spent the second week in the wilderness with the pack goats hunting elk which was super fun. Only saw one shooter but got super close and passed up several bulls, my friend that was with us missed a couple nice bulls.
After the wilderness hunt got rained out I decide to go to a spot in the desert where I killed a nice bull a few years back. The first day there we saw a nice 6x2 bull that my friend put a stalk on after that we continued up drainage. We had a plan to get to a far draw and watch it for elk coming into the drainage. We hiked in about 3 miles to this spot and had two large river crossings to make.
Once we got the spot we sat down to setup the spotters and eat lunch. We hadn’t been sitting down for 5 minutes and I looked up and saw elk headed into the drainage, a half dozen cows with this bull right on their ass. There wasn’t time to drop a couple hundred feet of elevation to get to the river so we decided to just back off the ridge line so they would see us. As we were moving back 4 more bulls came running down the same trail. One bull split off at the bottom and was alone going up drainage right below us. I took some film of him and then peaked over and didn’t see the rest of them. I told my buddy to keep an eye on that bull and I’d go back to the draw we just passed which was full of sign and see if the rest were coming up.
I walked a couple hundred yards back to the draw and slowly peaked in, I could see cow heads under me so I took a knee, nocked and arrow and got a range. The cows were moving at a decent clip and the bull was close behind. I had my range and slowly drew the bow, the cows stopped and looked over toward me but I already had the pin following the bull and as soon as he stopped I held slightly forward due to some high winds and executed the shot. The arrow didn’t drift and I hit more forward than I’d like but the arrow blew through the front of his shoulder, went through his heart and exited through his leg.
He hardly flenched on impact and the cows turned and walked away slowly up over the ridge 30 yards above and the bull followed. I could see blood pumping out both sides and knew it was bad news for the bull. He stopped and stood skylined for a few seconds and when the other 3 six point bulls walked up behind him he slowly walked off.
My buddy was down ridge and watched the shot. He couldn’t see the elk but saw me draw and watched them leave, I gave him the he’s dead hand signal and he walked up. Knowing the shot was well placed I decided to go check right away. I walked to where they had been standing and found all but 5” of my arrow which broke off inside (nock end broke off) the evolution Hyde worked excellent and looked like new laying there. We followed heavy blood up to the ridge top where he stopped and found a pile. We continued to follow blood slowly for about 30 yards and he was laying there just around the knob about 100 yards from the shot.
We admired the encounter for a minute, got a few pics and quickly went to work breaking him down. It’s was a long rigged pack out with just the two of us making multiple trips. It ended up being 13 miles of walking half loaded with meat, we packed meat from about 3:00pm until around 10:30pm. We had to go up and over 2 large saddles, cross two creeks and climb up out of the canyon, hard work but very rewarding.
10:30 In the moonlight
After passing though the bull.
