618-Flatlander
FNG
A little late with this, but my buddy and I finally put it all together and both found success last year. It was an awesome hunt all around with some amazing views. My buddy got his deer with a couple days left for me to try and put it together. We sat down for dinner the night before we were planning on leaving and I was ready to call it quits. We ended up deciding that we would hunt the morning and head home around noon instead of leaving first thing in the morning. Lucky enough, we saw some deer feeding out at around 100 yards while walking in. I got set up and took the first legal buck I saw. This was a huge success for me, even if it wasn’t a big one. I’ll take it for my first mule deer especially when the hunt was down to the final minutes. I was also able to put a perfect heart shot on him, which was huge for me since I had put a ton of practice in with this being my first rifle kill (I mostly grew up shotgun hunting for birds and bow hunting for deer here in Illinois). We ended up hunting in grizzly country and while cutting up my deer, in the dense creek bottom, we heard a loud thud in the water of something running right at us. He was able to draw his pistol and I stood there terrified with a skinning knife in my hand. Thank God, it was a big bull elk, that ended up stopping about 7 yards from us. First time we both saw an elk in the wild and it about ran us over. That hunt will be a hard one to beat.
