As some of you may remember I had the awesome opportunity to join my best friend on his first OIL tag in the wilderness of Idaho. I did a write up for the hunt and enjoyed sharing the hunt with the members here. Here is the link if you missed it:
https://hunting-washington.com/smf/index.php/topic,217644.15.html After draw results for WA came out I was waiting for the texts/calls to start rolling in letting me know about tags that were drawn. My phone was pretty quiet, mostly Not Selected like me, only a couple buddies reached out; a cow tag, an awesome Entiat rut hunt drawn by a fellow HW member, a doe tag...all exciting but I was really hoping for a special hunt for one of my buddies this year. Apparently it wasn't in the books.
I left town for work and was driving through a beautiful valley in Central Montana, between jobs when my phone dinged. I looked down and saw it was my buddy Mark; "You'll never believe what Dan drew, call me. Its a once in a lifetime tag!" I couldn't pull over fast enough. Our buddy drew a Washington Moose tag. The fall just got a whole lot busier. No matter what happens I am going to bust my butt to try to help Dan get his once in a lifetime moose. I had the privilege of joining Dan on a Mule Deer hunt here in WA that he had been applying for almost two decades last fall. We hunted hard but didn't find the giant that we had all dreamed about for Dan, but we had a damn good time in camp and he ended up killing a solid buck.
We're hoping we can turn up a bull worthy of the tag. With Dan's blessing I will update the HW crew on what we find and hopefully I can help someone else in the future based on what we learn about the unit and what we can find for quality of bulls. I'm looking forward to helping on another moose hunt and hopefully a couple mule deer rut tags as well! Come on fall!
Good luck to everyone this year. 2020 has been a weird year for sure, I hope we can all find solace and peace in the mountains and forget about all the turmoil we have dealt with so far this year.
Clint
