At the request from some others I am going to share my Wenaha elk hunt. I won’t share which unit but you may be able to figure it out.
I have been hunting the blues since I was a little kid. My dad has had some quality archery tags in Mountain View and the Tucannon so I was pretty familiar this. I also have deer hunted this exact area a couple times. I am 30 years old and have been putting in for quality elk points since I was 12 so I had 18 points when I drew this and it was my 3rd choice.
I had done a few scouting trips in August and September and found elk and knew where they were hanging out at least during September.
When season rolled around me and my dad hiked in 5 miles with my pack goats and hunted for 5 days. We had a really hard time turning up an elk. It looked liked a bunch of guys had been back there on horses hunting for deer. So we assumed pressure had them in the bottom. We did find one shooter bull and he was all the way in the bottom and would have been impossible for me and my dad to get out. Even with the goats. When I got back to civilization I quickly started making plans to come in the bottom and recruited a few dumb friends to go with me.
On the last weekend of the season we headed down to the bottom to come up. Well the trail hadn’t been maintained in years and was basically gone in a lot of areas. When we got about 3/4 down there we could glass up the canyon I had last seen the big bull. I glassed up some elk way up the top where me and my dad had been hunting a week prior. Here comes a really nice bull over the ridge. We all looked at eachother like “oh f****” and my one buddy says “dude I think we have to pull out of here and circle around and come in from the top”. So we hiked the almost 5 miles and 2500 verticals feet back to truck and got there right at last light. We slept at the truck and got up at 2:45 the next morning to go to the other trail head and start hiking in. We got to a camp at 9:30 dropped all our stuff and headed to a glassing knob I knew from the previous hunt.
When we got there it took probably 15 minutes and one of my buddies tells us there is elk like 500 yards below us. It didn’t take long to pick out a big bull in the herd. We were pretty sure it was the same bull from the night before because his giant third is hard to miss. I dropped down to get a better angle and slightly better shot but the bull beds down behind a tree and I can only see his butt. I sat on a rock waiting for him to stand for 2 hours. He finally does and feeds out and gives me a shot. 380 yard shot with my 300wm and he went 20 yards and falls over.
As soon as we got to him it started to rain, of course. We didn’t back to camp until 11:00 that night. We were soaked. It took us 2 hours to start a fire and dry off enough to stop shivering and go to bed. It took us 4 hours to hike all the meat back to the truck. I had 4 goats with me and they had literally all our gear. We all packed meat.
