A buddy and I pounded the breaks along the Middle Fork of the Salmon River last week looking for Muley's and Elk along the breaks and whitetail higher up. We stayed in Dixie at the Silver Spur Lodge - great hosts there who treat you right. Nothing like a wall tent camp in the high country but staying at the log-pole lodge was a nice change of pace. The weather cooperated with 6 inches of snow and we saw a few cows and a handful of deer but no shooters except one and we couldn't close the deal - all the wolf and cougar sign there told the story. The locals in Elk City said they are even starting to buy beef now.
We headed home planning to detour through Spokane to pick up my son's moose meat from the processor - he got a nice cow during his Mount Spokane Youth hunt. We stayed overnight at Coeur d'Alene to take a drive in the Panhandle National Forest in the morning for a couple hours before heading home - thinking maybe we might run into a whitetail if we got lucky.
Not knowing the area we grabbed a state road map with coffee in the morning and headed east getting up into a foot of snow on huckleberry mountain. There were lots of moose tracks and every set had a wolf or two following them. I don't know how many wolf packs they say are in Idaho but there has to be over a thousand wolves in the state from the tracks we saw. We didn't see much deer sign and after a couple hours we turned back and started heading out towards home - figuring we were eating our Idaho tags this year.
But, its never over til its over - we drove around the corner along a creek bottom on the way out and a couple big whiteflag does bounded across the road and while glassing them we spot these two bucks following them. They stopped right along the stream bank. My buddy dropped the front one with his .338 and I followed up on the larger one which ran about 50 yards after one shot from the .300. We were pretty pumped filling our tags in the last hour - and we didn't have to spend a day packing them out of the Salmon River Canyons either which gets a little harder when you get on the wrong side of 50.
We boned them out filling half the coolers we had along and picked up the moose in Spokane filling the rest and came home loaded - wrapping up another great hunt.
