I headed back down solo this weekend after having to work all of last week. I decided since I’d be solo I was gonna switch it up and hunt a less popular unit but I figured it had potential due to many recent burns and a lot of pinion juniper removal. Arrived on Friday morning and hunted a 3 year old burn. It was full of elk sign but it all seemed to be a week or more older, this burn was also devoid of grass it seemed, but man were there “deer” tracks in there, I was shocked with the quantity of “deer” tracks and elk scat that I couldn’t locate any game in this burn, about 10 AM I glassed off in the distance about 3 miles and noticed a herd of hundreds of domestic sheep, so the tracks I was seeing and the lack of elk and elk feed were instantly understood. The sheep had been through this particular area in the last few days and the game animals vacated, so I decided to take a drive with about an hour and a half left of shooting light. I found a road high on a ridge and drove out to the end and started glassing with about 30 min of light left. I immediately spotted a bull about 2 miles down the ridge, not enough time tonight but now I know where one is for tomorrow, continued glassing and spotted 2 more bulls about a mile out in a big open faced bowl, these ones really had me intrigued and excited for the next morning to come. I awoke early Saturday morning, hiked about 1/2 mile out to where I would be within about 1000 yards of the big open face and sat down to start glassing. I immediately picked up a bull and 5 cows feeding across the face but they were working away from me toward a jungle of P-J so I figured I would probably be waiting til evening for them to come back out, before they made it into the P-J’s they locked onto something below them. At first I couldn’t figure out what, the bull bugled and still nothing was happening, after a few minutes though I spotted another bull working across the face directly below them and he looked like he was on a mission. He did stop long enough to rip 1 bugle back at the other bull above then continued on his merry way, directly for a saddle about 500 yds in front of me. I quickly ducked off the backside of the ridge and started working toward the saddle, unbeknownst to me the bull had quite a harem of cows that had been below him just out of my line of sight, just as I reached the saddle all hell broke loose as the cows must’ve heard me coming across some shale slides. Shortly behind the cows came the bull and he hesitated just across the draw from me at 260 yds so I let him have it, he immediately wheeled and ran downhill and stopped behind a copse of pinions where I couldn’t see him. After about 5 minutes waiting for him to move I decided he must be down and got up to go check it out, he stumbled out from behind the trees and I put another one in him at 280 yds the next time he stopped in an opening. Bull down.
In the end I had a lot of expectations going into this hunt, but all of those expectations kinda went by the wayside with the mild weather this November. I’m definitely pleased with this bull especially given that I kinda bucked conventional wisdom and went about getting him from an area I was essentially told by a few to write off. At the end of the day all of the intel I was given was for naught, whether it was the bulls I found in July, that definitely were not back in that summer range come November or all the spots I was told would be full of elk and hunters that seemed like a ghost town when the season opened. I guess even when you have the best tags the hunt is still yours to make and I feel like I made the most of this one.
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