Monday 10-22
Finally got everyone out of bed and heading to the BLM land. I wanted to be in glassing position BEFORE light and it was a two mile hike to get back to where I wanted to glass from. Last year this turned up 100 elk, to bad all I had was a deer tag. Tried to help out two other hunters last year but they did not believe that Elk would be any other place then up on the mountain. Oh well, I tried.
Wind is something awful. Got into position and glassed for about an 30 minutes to an hour before the other started to get antsy. Group B (2 to a group) had enough after 30 minutes and head back the way we came in to “walk” the ridge and other pockets to see what they could stir up.
Group A took off to the north to drop down into the bowl to the southwest. Area has lots of high sage and conifers.
my friend from work and I were going to climb the ridge and to get a better look into the bowl. This would put us real high with the wind into our face. This took us an hour to get half way as we started out at 8400 and half way up we were at 92 with another 2k to go (estimates. Will get more once I get it off the GPS)
Half way up we found a great little pocket that you could not see from where we started and found a big doe feeding. We dropped our packs (which the others gave us grief for carrying, “Too much weight”) and started to pick apart the sage, scrub oak, and confers for bucks. I figured I would deer hunt that day as my friend only had a Deer tag.
As we glassed we turned up 3 Cow elk bedded under the confers. Great, Elk!!! Too bad we left the spotting scopes in the truck to cut weight. (opportunity for lighter gear?? Any suggestions??) We sat there for 45 minutes trying to map out the best way around to try and drop in on the Elk, while still picking apart the area for more deer. Where there is one deer there are more deer. The deer was 400 yard downhill with a 30+ mile wind into our face and the Elk was at 800.
Group A saw we had not moved for some time and radio if everything was oaky, told them we were into deer and elk. Saw that they started to change course to head in the direction of where we were. Only problem was they were up wind.