I just got back from the MT 2007 public lands hunt. After an event free road trip to camp (usually there is an extraordinary event getting to camp like flat tires, broken trailer axles, leaf sprngs, etc) we arrived last Sat mid-day to set-up camp and cut some firewood. This is the camp after a fresh snowfall.
This is the area we were hunting.
Sunday morning rolled around and the hunt began. We organized a six mile hunt that ended back at our base camp. After running into a spike upclose (need brow-tine to be legal) and several cow elk (legal but too far away), we were on the last leg when Bob and Bob Jr. entered some timber, jumped and dispatched these two bulls just before dark. Even though it was only a mile from camp it was a late and dark night of field processing and retrieval that even carried into the next day. The one antler of Bob's bull was damaged early in the growth process and ended up with a stob.
After a week of hard hunting we ended up with two more cow elk. Cows don't make good pics to me so I added this one of "all hands on deck" trying to raise one in one of the many hanging trees.
On the deer side, young Hunter (aptly named) spotted this nice MT Muley for his grandpa just before dark. Then he helped grandpa do an after dark retrieval. They both made it back to camp late and exhausted. This was the best deer in camp this year. At age 11 this year, Hunter will get to apply for his own license and tags next year.
Here is a pic of Bob Jr's nice 4 pt. One of the antlers was damaged during the dispatching process.
There were other small deer taken but not worthy of pics.
We attribute some of the success this year to our camp mascot. This deer was taken last year by Bob and retrieved from the taxidermist on the way to camp.
I learned to use my new long range camera (Panasonic FZ-18) during this trip. Early on, I took several pics of nice whitetails on Ted Turners ranch that were too blurry for publication. I was able to get long range shots of this bighorn and these antelope.
