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.

Tuning up for the hunt

  My big hunt this year is going to be elk - getting together some friends, camping out in the very heard of the wilderness, and hopefully filling the freezer with a few hundred pounds of meat.

  In preparation, we've inventoried our gear (need to fix up the stove and the lantern, maybe acquire a ground cloth for the tent), found a place to hunt, and now it's all down to the details.

  Part of those details are getting back into shape with my shooting. I'll be honest, folks, it's been 20 years since I've shot with any regularity and I wasn't exactly a marksman back then. After working out a nice recipe for my inherited Remington 760 .30-06, I took a box of homemade rounds out into the field this past Saturday and proceeded to learn how to aim.

  A buddy of mine that went with us (and who will be on the elk hunt) brought his armor-plated steel targets. We set them up about 250 yards out from our firing line. These things are VERY cool; I haven't shot steel very often, but the feedback you get on a successful hit is nice. He hung the 18", 12" and 6" plates for us to play with and with a few shots, I was semi-consistently hitting the 18" plate. At the end of the day, I was about a 60% hit rate - not good, but much better than it could have been. My buddy did me the favour of taking a few shots with the rifle, hitting the 6" plate and proving that the accuracy problems were all shooter, no gun. 

  I also pulled out the Model 99 Arisaka, put a box or so of rounds through that. I aimed at a stump about 50 yards out and figured out where the gun was shooting - then swung up to the 18" plate and rang it on my first try! I should have stopped there, of course, but I tried to do it a second time... and failed. Ah, well. It's a very fun shooter. I'll be playing with it a lot more.

  Mama Bear got a spherical reactive target for working on her shooting skills, and WOW! That thing is nine kinds of fun. It's made of a self-healing rubber and the card says it'll handle anything from .22LR up to .50 cal... but I rather doubt that last one. We're gonna have fun with this thing for a LONG time.

  All in all, it was a great day out in the woods with friends. 

I'm still standin....

Wow, it's been months and months since I posted something here.

Folks, it's been a long, hard summer and the latter half of the month of August sucked like two things that suck a lot. I won't go into too much detail and I apologize for the lack of content, but I had to tend to my own house before coming here and sharing cool things and news stories that make my hairs stand on end.

Mama Bear and I DID manage our first woodlands trip yesterday, we drove out into the mountains and scouted out the area I've identified as a likely place to find elk come the middle of October. Boots on the ground, it looks exactly like the world-class-elk-hunting area from the Old Country. With just a bit of luck, I'll connect with my first elk that WASN'T felled with a 1970 Ford F-100 California pickup truck.

Took a few guns out, Mama Bear had her Single Six (Jayne) and Remington 518 (Vera) to play with. I took Papa's Remington 1100 shotgun and 760 .30-06 deer rifle. I had the box of handloads for the 760 and intended to do a good ladder test - but I didn't bring stuff to make a stable shooting rest. I tried using the bipod against the rear hatch frame of the van and that would have been functional for an elk shot, but not for something like a ladder test. Also, the lightest loads seemed to perform the best (all of them hit within a 5" circle) while the heaviest loads missed the target box ENTIRELY.

Had a lot of fun with the Rem 1100 - I'd never shot it before and after teaching Mama Bear how to throw clay pigeons, I managed to tag the VERY FIST THROW.

Then I missed the next 5

Hit one.

Missed three more and we called it a day, we had to head back.

All in all, it was a fun time and it looks like elk camp's going to be a success.

Pre-hunting season is upon us!

  One of the biggest reasons I shoot is for hunting - I grew up in a hunting family and every fall, we'd tramp out into the woods and (hopefully) bring back game. My father is far, far better at it than I am. I shot my first deer when I was 11, my second at 13, and then... nothing. I'm 35 and haven't connected with a big game animal in almost 23 years. I'm hoping to change that...

  So, new state, new group of shooting friends, and I'm going hunting. Two different camps this year, deer and elk.

  Dear season is sometime late September (depending on where you go), and elk is late rin October/November.

  Preparations have begun! I've picked up maps for two of the units I'm looking at for hunting. I'll study them carefully and lead expeditions to scout them out. A day in the woods with friends is always a blast.

  I'm also starting to load up some ammo for my venerable Remington 760 in .30-06. It's a tiny, vengeful god that speaks great fire from the bore and punishes the wielder. Only the pure of heart and dedicated of intent may use it safely.

  Misremembering the recipe for the gun, I bought the wrong powder AND the wrong bullets. I meant to get IMR4064 powder and Hornady spire points, and instead came home with IMR4350 and a box of Nosler AccuTips. How I got so confused, I'll never know. I just need to smile and take my medicine - working up a ladder test to see which rounds are the most accurate for my purposes. At least I got the bullet weight right - 165gr. I'll post results from the ladder test.

  Reloading will get its own series of posts, I'm still pretty new to it and have rookied just about everything I can. I got a case stuck fast in the depriming die(got it unstuck with the RCBS stuck case remover), I failed to seat a primer fully (got that fixed when I got the depriming die unstuck), mashed the necks on some cases... spilled powder. It's been one big Learning Opportunity, but I'm enjoying it.

The ethics of short-tail food chains

  I'm a hunter. Plain and simple. I've been hunting since I was a wee lad and hunting for food is my big "shooting sport."

  Which is why I was very excited to see this article on the Ottawa Citizen:

Ethical killers: Hipster hunters take up guns as part of sustainable food movement


  Basically, it boils down to a trend up north of more and more young people taking up hunting - enough of them to reverse a 30 year trend downwards in hunting applications. Among the reasons that these young hunters are taking up the hobby is because they're thinking more and more about their food and the sources that provide that food.

  The locavore revolution is turning a corner.