The alarm went off at a disagreeable 3am as planned, and we staggered out of bed, started coffee, and shrugged into clothes more asleep than awake. After getting enough coffee into our systems to give us a jump start, we felt pretty good. Certainly WAY better than we had when we crawled into bed.
I went outside in the brightly moon lit cold morning and started the trucks that were surprisingly agreeable to starting despite the cold air.
We hurriedly grabbed whatever crap we needed and said goodbye to our trailer and hit the road for the two hour drive home.
Traffic on the 89 to the I-40 which is typically miserable after dark was almost nonexistent, and we rolled up the blacktop at a brisk pace under a moon so bright we damn near didn’t need headlights.
It was just beautiful out, and the drive home was smooth and enjoyable.
We made it home at about 5:30-just in time for our next appointment that I alluded to in my last post.
And what, you might ask, was this appointment that was so time sensitive that Denise and I were running so ragged to meet?
Well, opening day of her cow elk hunting tag is the answer!😄😄
And because we had been so damn busy with work, we had exactly zero time to prepare for this hunt. 🙄 We really didn’t even have time to hunt, and had so much work back-logged that we considered just skipping the hunt altogether-but elk tags are hard to get, and we really like eating elk all year, so we made the difficult decision that come hell or high water, we were at least going to try.
And so it was that on that frosty moonlit morning I started running around like a chicken with my head cut off grabbing gear and hucking it into the Mud Taxi in a desperate attempt to get out well before first light to a hunting spot.
Meanwhile, Denise was throwing together food for the day in the house.
With just enough time to spare, we had the Mud Taxi loaded and we were off on the long, long trek of about 4 miles to the spot we decided to start her hunt from. 😄😄 Did I mention we live right in the middle of our hunt unit?
We got our glass set up with time to spare, and despite the cold, it was beautiful out with the moon setting, and the sun starting to lighten the sky on the opposite horizon.
The moon always looks spectacular through the spotting scope.
Several hours of glassing revealed…. Nothing!😄😄
Typical hunting:hours of boredom interjected ( if you’re lucky) with brief moments of intense excitement.
To give our eyes a break from the glass, we grabbed selfies. 😄😄
After a couple hours of staring through high powered glass and freezing our asses off, we crawled into the Mud Taxi, started the engine, cranked up the heater, ate cold breakfast burritos, and accidentally passed out in front seats from exhaustion. 😄😄
After about a 20 minute nap, we decided that there was nothing to see from where we were, so we packed up and headed to a local water hole to read whatever sign there might be.
Here we found the only animals we would see that morning:the local ranchers cows standing in the bottom of a mostly dry tank, hiding from the wind.
We called him and told him seeing as we had a cow elk tag, we figured one of his cows was close enough to our tag’s description to shoot and fill our tag!
He didn’t think it was quite as funny as we did. 😄😄
Hunting mid day around here rarely pays off unless you have already spotted something, so we decided to roll home and take a much needed real nap.
That evening, we decided that the high winds and cold called for a reverse glassing strategy-meaning we would find a good low ground location and glass up instead of the other way around.
We looked and looked, but all we saw was a small herd of deer hunkered down under some thick trees, hiding from the wind.
We weren’t surprised-with a full moon and less than ideal weather, animals had no need to risk being active during the day.
The next morning was agreeably calm, slightly warmer but….
A little snow storm had moved in!
We decided to return to our low-point glassing spot to start the day and see what visibility was going to be.
The snow fell intermittently throughout the morning with no real accumulation, which was kinda a bummer because snow on the ground would allow us to possibly hunt by tracks.
However, the air was beautiful, clear, slightly overcast, and with pretty even temperatures so there were no heat or cold waves to glass through. In short-it was perfect hunting and glassing weather!
We decided to move to a higher vantage point, so we packed up and made a run to a good hill we know to see what was up there.
We got glass out and started scanning. After about 30 minutes, Denise exclaims”Elk!”, and sure enough, there’s a small herd of good looking cow elk slowly making their way up the hill about 850 yards straight ahead of us!
Hot damn-the hunt is ON!!
Now, our rifle is by design a long-range gun ( It’s a Fierce CarbonFury with a carbon fiber Twisted Precision barrel, chambered in 300 Remington Ultra Mag, slinging 205 grain bullets at around 2800 FPS, and topped with a great 5-20 Swarovski scope, for all you gun nuts😊), and the previous owner has taken shots out to around 1000 yards-but even with the ideal position we had, and the excellent weather with zero wind, there is a lot that goes into a shot that long, and we didn’t feel comfortable with it. We want a clean kill, not wounded animals.
So we elected to draw back, loop around and get into a position that we thought they would be heading for.
A quick couple of miles in the Mud Taxi, and we parked and started our hike towards our intended place to shoot from.
We used trees and shrubs for cover, and made our way a couple hundred yards up slope to our firing position.
The herd was right where we expected them, and by this time we were both so excited we were struggling to keep our composure.
I ranged them right at 530 yards, slightly uphill.
Dang. That was still about a hundred yards longer than I’d hoped for, but well within our range and skill set. ( Denise shot her last elk at over 650 yards and dropped it with one shot. )
So I triple checked the range, dialed up the scope and got her as set up as I could.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, a good looking cow stepped our right where we wanted her, perfectly broadside, and posed for us totally motionless.
It doesn’t get much better.
Denise had me verify range and the animal one last time, called out “ going hot.” , and the show was hers…
The absolute thunder of a 300 RUM with a muzzle brake shattered the still early morning and I practically jumped out of my skin-there’s no way to not flinch. I got my glass back on the target and… her and all her buddies were staring curiously in our direction, not alarmed at all.
Oh shit!
To me, that meant we had missed the shot by such a large margin that we weren’t even remotely close. A near miss bullet strike would have made those animals panic and run.
Denise and I made the immediate but difficult decision to not continue this stalk or take any more shots. Something was obviously very wrong with either us or our equipment, and we’re pretty adamant about ethical shots.
Time constraints had forced us to skip range day before the hunt to double check our gear and ourselves, and that had just come home to bite us in the ass big time.
Worse, we were due to leave in just a couple hours to go to a thanksgiving/Christmas family get together for Denise’s family for the next two days, and the beautiful weather of today was forecast to be replaced with winds gusting into the 20 mph range on the next day we would be able to go test fire the rifle.
Disappointed and down, but feeling like we made the right decision, we reluctantly turned our backs on the herd of elk still calmly feeding on the hill, and made our way back to the Mud Taxi.
Damn!!