A lean winter...

  Hi everybody!

Hi, Doctor Nick!

  Well, it was not a successful autumn in regards to hunting. I made it out deer hunting on only one afternoon and my elk hunt was a total bust. Which sucked (the bust part, not the hunt part).

  If you recall my last blog post, I was starting to get tuned up for the hunt - I'd looked on the map and found some excellent-looking country between the Pacific Crest Trail and Highway 99. Two scouting trips turned up plenty of elk sign and activity - beds, trails, poop. Everything seemed perfect.

  My two friends and I rolled out to the site on October 11, the day before opening day. We picked a gorgeous campsite (with a bonus game trail next to it) and after we'd set up the camp we hopped into a truck and did one last bit of scouting around. Honestly, that should have been our cue to get the hell out - we passed four camps and at least a dozen hunters right in the sweet spot. However, I felt confident that at least one of us would get lucky on our trip. Fresh tracks and sign really led me to maintain my optimism.

 At camp that night we listened to something that sounded like a cross between cow elk calling, and coyotes. It was really weird, and not something I'd ever heard before. 

  Opening morning dawned - well, by dawn we'd already had breakfast and gotten set up for our morning hunt. We picked a treeline along a game superhighway that bordered a marshland that's about a mile wide and 4ish miles long. I stationed the guys at roughly 100 yard intervals - close enough to be able to support each other if a shot was successful but far enough away to not interfere. I picked a spot and watched the sun bleed colour into the world. It was absolutely gorgeous, but entirely too quiet. After an hour or so of nothing, I got a little antsy and took myself on a walk, slipping into the treeline and following the game trail up the marsh. I slid like a chunky spirit through the misty woods and aside from some squirrels, heard nothing. I looped back, picked up the guys and we drove to another spot.

  Lather, rinse, repeat. All day. We broke for lunch, looked at the maps, picked another likely area and walked and watched and listened. Everywhere we went we found new-but-not-fresh tracks and scat. I wandered through some incredibly beautiful country, like I was stepping out of real life and into some bucolic legend from my Irish ancestors. As frustrating as the lack of success was, I was really happy to be out.

  Nearing the end of daylight, we parked off of a confluence of three creeks and walked in - somewhere in the vicinity of a mile into the walk I caught sight of the literal south end of a northbound elk. Two bounces and it was lost in the trees. I never saw enough of it to determine if it was a boy or a girl, but at least I saw it. My friends, sadly, were looking the wrong direction.

  Still, I felt really validated. We spend another hour there, then packed up and went to a new location, on the opposite side of the confluence. We got turned around and missed the truck on the return - lost in unfamiliar woods after dark is not a good place to be. Fortunately, I pulled out my iPhone, picked up an LTE signal and we Google Mapped ourselves back to the truck - we'd missed it by a few hundred yards but it was on the other side of a stand of timber. I tripped on a stump and sprained my knee, but that was a small price to pay for not having to spend the night in the woods.

  Relaxing back at camp I had a revelation - it had been entirely too quiet of a day. I heard a small handful of gunshots, nothing close in at all. There was also no elk bugling. A picture started to form into my mind.

  Based on my sighting from the night before, we went back to the confluence the next morning. The general idea was that we KNEW that elk transited through that area, though we weren't sure of when. Evening hadn't been the right time, perhaps we needed to be there first thing. I started walked a hundred or so yards back up the road before angling for the creek - the plan was that I'd hit the creek well upstream from the other two and walk slowly towards them. In theory, if there were any elk between us, I'd pressure them downstream and give the guys a chance.

  I'm very good with directions, orienteering, and dead reckoning. If I go somewhere, I can get there again from any direction for years afterward. I'm not sure what happened, maybe it was the grey morning and lack of visual references (though I can dead reckon in the dark...), but I missed the creek. It was barely 200 yards from my starting point through some checkerboard clearcut. I walked for a half-hour, came to a road that I wasn't expecting, followed it for a few yards and saw the truck parked at the end of the loop... whoops. I parked my butt on the tailgate for a while, then went back for it. Walked for a half-hour, realized I was lost and Google Mapped my (now slightly frustrated) butt back to the truck. I'd walked a big circle, and while I *started* walking southeast, I was more than a half-mile northwest of the truck. A few minutes later, one of my buddies makes it back to the truck - he was starting to feel ill so he was going to hang it up and go home when we went for lunch.

  We helped him pack up and as he headed for home, the remaining party (two of us) went into the local town to get gas and hot food. In the restaurant, we over heard a waitress telling two grizzled old guys that NOBODY was having any luck.

  After lunch, we followed a different road that took us up behind the areas that we'd been looking - my new theory was that there was so much human pressure in the grid squares we'd been in that the elk had seen what was up when folks started arriving, and headed off to areas inaccessible. Possibly Maui. We apparently didn't go far enough. We drove and walked more than a dozen logging roads up canyon fingers, saw a lot of recent sign but nothing fresher than Friday morning at the earliest.

  We slept in Monday... packed and came home.

  I was honestly not expecting the level of human pressure that was there. I was so friggin' pissed off at people camping right in the hunting zones - you ALWAYS want to camp away from where the hunting is, so as to not encourage the animals to go to the summer house.

  I think I know where the elk might have gone, but it's going to take a while to figure it out. The area we hunted was apparently too accessible to humans, a series of canyons, draws, and drainages at the transition zone between the eastern side of the Cascades and the foothills. Looking at the map and the trails, there's a boundary wall of significant smaller mountains at the southern end of this network, and there's a saddle that looks like some motivated elk could escape through it - and according to the maps there's one road into that drainage network, and it ends about two miles from the good stuff. 2014 is going to feature a few trips into that area to see what I can learn about it.


  I'm sad that I'm going to end 2013 with no game in my larder, but that just inspires me to work harder in 2014.