Olympic peninsula Hoof Rot Incentive Tag

[Westside88]

Great Bull, I love hunting that area. You did well!

[Falcon]

Huge congrats.    All your hard work paid off with a beautiful bull

[grundy53]

Nice bull! Congrats!

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk

[PsoasHunter]

A few updates on the processing:

1. These coastal Rosie's are HUGE bodied elk. Every cut is blowing my mind during the butchering. Here's the backstrap.

2. It tastes delicious! Fresh backstraps and tenderloin tonight with grilled garden tomatoes and foraged morels from this spring are excellent compliments.

Thanks for all the kind words everyone, I'm very grateful for the opportunity of this hunt and for the chance at this beautiful bull.

[JakeLand]

More pics of the bull !

[Suka]

Great Bull, love those Rosies

[MountainWalk]

Fantastic and outstanding! Way to go, bud.

[PsoasHunter]

The Story

Part 1

I got out to the peninsula on Thursday around 6 PM.  My buddy got there about 2 hours earlier and found our preferred camping spot wasn’t taken yet, so we were off to a good start.  We got camp set, cooked up a good meal, and got ready for the hunt.  I went to sleep dreaming of bugles and what the next day would bring.  Other Labor Day weekends when backpacking I’ve been woken overnight by bugling bulls, and I was disappointed to instead be woken up by my alarm at 4:45 am instead. I set out from camp walking the washed out road towards the unknown, not knowing what to expect from this early season hunt.

This hunt ended up being a hunt of firsts: First time hunting this unit, first time hunting elk in September, first time using a bugle/diaphragm calls/doing any calling beyond a few cow calls.  It ended with being my first bull, my first time using the gutless method, and my first pack out of an animal that took more than one trip.

Friday was a fun day spent checking out a lot of new areas, still hunting through great elk country and habitat, but seeing no recent evidence of elk.  I found a wallow, lots of rubs from this season, great areas to sit and stalk, but all the scat I was finding looked a week old or more, and I didn’t hear a single bugle or elk all day.  Not used to hunting in September, I didn’t know what to expect, but all the podcasts, how-to-call videos, ect all talk about the different set-ups and how fired up bulls get, so I was a little bummed.  I was also realistic: I’d heard these Rosie’s don’t talk much from some gracious members on here who shared some advice, and from the state bio I talked to as well, who hunts this GMU annually. I also figured this weekend was mostly another intel-gathering trip, and my late September hunt would be the real exciting week.  I went to bed happy on Friday with the spots I’d seen so far, knowing I had a lot of hunting left ahead of me.  Still though, it would be nice to tag out early with all my current family commitments…

[PsoasHunter]

Saturday morning came early, out of the tent at O-dark-30 again, this time driving to another drainage I’d scouted more.  About 15 minutes down the gravel road, I realized I forgot my phone in the tent, with my onyx offline maps, and annoyed at the loss of time, went back to get it.  Maybe that timing worked in my favor.

I got to my preferred area and headed off downhill.  My plan was to hunt the bottoms in the morning, then head uphill to the bedding area I had scouted and try to catch them heading in or out of their beds if the bottom didn’t pan out.  The day before I had played with different calling techniques, from no calling and listening, to sporadic locator bugles with 5 to 30 minutes of sitting and waiting 20-40 yards from where I had bugled, to aggressive bugling, to cow calling.  As I was walking the timber this morning, I was throwing out a few locator bugles, nothing too aggressive, maybe every 2 to 20 minutes with some cow calls mixed in.  I was in some very thick dark timber with some small hemlocks mixed in, where the elk trails are like tunnels in the brush.  I hadn’t bugled much in about 30 minutes, but had thrown a few cow calls out and was moving very slowly, but not trying to be particularly silent,  I heard the faintest cracking of twigs about 150 yards behind and to my left that just barely registered.  I waited, hearing nothing, but also knowing there’s not much that would be snapping twigs. I recalled some advice given that bulls in this area will typically come in completely silently… I took a few more steps and heard a few more cracking twigs, closer now, that then stopped.  I took 2 more steps to get behind a giant downed cedar tree that served as cover. Within a minute the biggest bull I’ve seen in the wild was 40 yards from me, coming in on a line directly at me. I quickly confirmed he was a mature 6x6, which was everything I’d hoped for, and I did not think twice about whether he was a shooter.  I have 4 months to hunt with this tag, yet there was no hesitation about looking for a bigger monster: this was a huge bull for me. 

But I had no shot.  It was very thick and his vitals were covered.  A few agonizing steps later and his vitals appeared, quartering towards me between the trees.  I was ready.  My shot hit him in the lungs, he turned, took about 5 very strong looking steps away from me, then I lost sight of him behind a stump.  I was waiting for him to step out for a second shot, or make a death noise, but he stopped there.  I took a step to my left to assess, he stood up, and presented a second shot, which I took.  He went down and stayed down. 

I’ve shot 5 cow elk before.  Walking up on each has always been a reminder of how big these animals are, but I can’t put into perspective how much bigger this elk looked. His body was massive!  His rack was gorgeous, dark, with mass, symmetrical, and beautiful.  But his body was truly mind-blowing.  Deer and elk look like they have long skinny legs, beef cows’ legs look short and stocky – his legs and hooves looked like a beef cow.  I quickly got to boning him out, employing the gutless method for the first time.  I will state the casual comment I recall from the instruction on this method I got included “you just reach in and pull the tenderloins out”, which I now know is not quite as easy as it was made to seem, but I got the job done.  I put my new orange aglow game bags to work and they worked great! Until they were filled.  There was so much meat it didn’t fit in 5 elk game bags, fully boned out.  It was a nice problem to have that I and my family will enjoy all year as we enjoy this bounty of meat. 

I got the first load to the truck about 6 hours after killing the bull.  I drove back to camp, picked up my buddy, then got ahold of another buddy who was already on his way to camp for the remainder of the trip.  I had him stop to pick up an extra cooler for all the meat, gave him coordinates, then hiked back in to finish boning out the last front quarter.  He met us and we enjoyed a nice pack out, being very thankful I had gotten this bull down in the river bottom, where the elevation wasn’t too severe yet, instead of the 40 degree slope I was planning on climbing in the afternoon to hunt.

We got all the meat and head back to camp at 7:30, just with a little light left in the day.  I should probably go buy a lotto ticket, because I feel like I continued to get lucky with this tag.  Not only lucky to have noticed the WDFW email last year announcing the tag, but to win one, then get time off to scout and hunt it with great friends, then to find an amazing bull ticking all the boxes I was looking for, on day 2 of my hunt!  I also was able to come home a day early so I could spend all day today butchering, processing, and cleaning up in time to make it to work tomorrow before flying to Alaska on Wednesday, which is pretty lucky.  I put a lot of work into this too, but I’ll take good luck any day and it’s better to be lucky than good.  Thanks to everyone who chimed in with advice and tips, starting with Redi who suggested this particular GMU, getting me off on the right foot from the get-go.   

I’ll try to add some more details from the trip, but have to call it a night for now. I got a nice bull on my game camera that might be my bull, but G3’s look a little weaker on that pic and can’t confirm it’s a 6 w/ the branches in the picture.

[PsoasHunter]

As he lays, walking up on him at the first pic

[PsoasHunter]

Big quarters and the pack out.

[PsoasHunter]

A few more pics of the rack.

[Pete112288]

Amazing bull and great write up.
This is all great to see considering I was also one of those 129 or so that were in that drawing.
No tag for me, but I am ok with it and will live vicariously through your post 

[JakeLand]

Awesome bull and thanks for sharing!

[redi]

Great bull and write up. You made the most of your tag. Congrats