Solo Elk Hunt

            After four days of hunting deer in the high mountains of Colorado, I was almost looking forward to going home.  Thoughts of eating a good meal, taking a hot shower and sleeping in a comfortable bed started to enter my mind.  I’m not afraid to admit that the hunt was taking its toll on my body and I was starting to feel it.  My brother and I hunted the same muzzleloader season in 2004 and we both harvested nice bucks.  Trying to outdo ourselves this year, our sights were set a little higher.  Jon and I had seen some good deer during our summer scouting trips and we knew that the area was capable of producing some exceptional trophies.  Part of me was searching for that elusive thirty-inch buck, but I think either one of us would have taken a buck comparable to our previous trophy if we had the opportunity.  Unfortunately, most of the bucks we saw were young and still had a lot of growing to do.  Over those four days we ran into several B&C moose and quite a few bugling bull elk, but no monster muleys.

The interesting thing about the muzzleloader season is that it falls right in the middle of the archery season.  Jon had harvested a cow elk with his bow just a few days before our deer hunt.  I had to work so he headed up there alone and managed to bag his cow within a couple of hours.  If that’s not impressive enough, he managed to haul out the meat in two trips and made it home that afternoon.  I was bow hunting with him in 2003 when he shot his bull so I know how tough it is packing out an animal of that size.  I gave him the proper congratulations and mentioned that I wished I could have been out there with him.  I had never fired my bow at an animal and I was really hoping to get my chance this year.  But we immediately started planning for the muzzleloader hunt and I decided to focus on that.  I kept my bow in the truck, but we had hiked so far back in that I might as well have left it at home.  The first night of the deer hunt we saw a six point bull bugling above our camp.  Jon started mewing like a cow elk and the bull came in to check it out.  At one point Jon ranged the bull at 70 yards and I was trying not to think about my bow being back at the truck. 

The deer hunt ended on a Sunday and we had to head back home without filling our tags.  After a good dinner and a hot shower, I was already starting to feel a little rejuvenated.  Jon had to work the next day so I replenished my food supply and checked my gear for a three-day solo elk hunt.

Monday morning I left my muzzleloader and grabbed my bow, eager to harvest one of those bugling bulls that we had seen on the deer hunt.  Jon persuaded me to start at the wallow where he bagged his cow.  I didn’t get up there until about 7:30 a.m., but there were no other hunters so I wasn’t too concerned.  It was extremely cold and windy that morning, but I sat at the wallow for a couple of hours anyway.  I would call, using a cow elk call, and wait.  After a couple of hours, I decided to move up the ridge.  I moved up and found another wallow where I sat and called every so often but I didn’t produce anything there either.  It was a little frustrating and I made the decision to hunt my way up to the top of the ridge where we found the remains of an old cabin.  The cabin sat above a bowl-shaped drainage that we had spotted elk in many times before.  As I topped the ridge, I saw another bow hunter.  He didn't see me, and I was in no mood to chat with the competition, so I headed down around the drainage and up over the mountain.  I glassed the drainage on the other side and a distant peak where I had killed my mule deer buck in 2004.  I did spot some elk on the distant mountain, but knew it would be an impossible pack out for one guy in two days.  After glassing for a while, I headed back and camped between the two drainages.  I was still a little farther back in than I wanted to go, but I really wanted an elk.  The next morning I left camp at 3:45 a.m. and planned on going around the drainage towards the old cabin.  I made it half way up the ridge and was stopped in my tracks by the sound of a bugle.  The sound raised the hair on the back of my neck and I immediately dropped down to the ground.  I didn't need my headlamp because the moon was just about full and I put up my binoculars to see if I could locate the bull.  Less than 200 yards away stood a decent bull with about six cows.  I couldn't count points on the bull and I wasn't sure if they saw me, but the wind was in my favor.  The elk had me pinned down for about 30 minutes and then started to move around the drainage.  It looked like they were going to circle the drainage and I dropped down into the shadows and made a beeline for the old cabin to try to cut them off.  I never did see the elk again and I assume they either headed down into another drainage to the west or beat me to the timber on the north side of the drainage I was in.  In any event, I spent the rest of the day in the timber stalking silently and occasionally setting up to call.  I didn't see anything the rest of the day and only started to hear bugles when I got back to camp at sundown.  At this point I was starting to lose hope and couldn't help but think that the full moon was causing the elk to feed at night and then bed down in the timber during the day.  I'm missing all the action, I thought.  There didn't even seem to be an opportunity to see elk in the early morning hours or in the evening.  The week prior, my brother spotted a really nice 5 point bull up near the cabin and watched him chase his harem as the sun rose over the mountain tops.  It was my last night out there and the thought of not getting an elk started to enter my mind for the first time.

The next morning I broke camp at about quarter to five and headed towards to old cabin.  I was hoping to catch some elk out in the open and I felt like that would be the best spot for an ambush.  I knew that the odds were against me, but thought I'd give it a shot.  I made it to the edge of the timber on the north side of the drainage and waited.  After about an hour or two I decided to work my way back towards the road and hunt the wallow for the rest of the morning.  I knew this was my last chance because my dad's antelope hunt was the next day and I had to get back to prepare for that.  My plan was to head back to the truck about 11:00 a.m. because I knew everyone back home would be expecting me by late afternoon.  I wouldn't get cell service until I reached town and the thought of calling my brother up and telling him that I didn't get anything was hard to swallow.  I knew that if I didn’t get an elk on this trip then I’d have to wait until next year.  But I was starting to accept the hard facts and began my decent towards the truck.  As I stalked through the trees, I heard something that got my heart pumping...it was a bugle!  I began to move slower and tried to identify the direction of the noise.  After several minutes I heard the bugle again and this time I could tell where it was coming from.  The bugle was coming from the drainage to the west (about a mile from the road).  Because it was Wednesday morning, I thought it had to be a bull.  I strapped up my pack and almost broke into a full sprint as I honed in on the sound.  As I got closer, I could hear two distinct bugles and I dropped my pack a few hundred yards from where the sound was coming from.  I set a waypoint on my GPS, grabbed my range finder and my bow, and set off again for the bugles.  The wind was shifty and I had to zigzag to keep it working in my favor.  My heart seemed to beat faster with each step and I had to consciously work to calm my nerves.  As I approached, I spotted an elk on the edge of a meadow.  I was hidden in the shadows of the timber and the wind was perfect.  I moved closer and knelt down behind a small conifer.  Not a minute later I could see a cow moving out in front of me.  She came out into a clearing about 25 yards away and as she put her head down I drew my bow.  She detected my movement and put her head up.  The cow was looking straight at me and there was a small tree blocking any shot at her vitals.  A second later she bolted in the opposite direction.  I cow called right away, hoping to calm her down, and was relieved to see her head out in the opposite direction of the other elk.  I cow called a couple of more times and heard two elk bugle in the timber.  I knew that I had to reposition so I moved closer and behind some larger trees.  As I cow called again I saw another animal spook and it appeared to be a calf or a small cow.  Again, I used the push call to try to calm the elk.  As I knelt down with my bow on my knees I saw what I had been waiting for...a bull was coming in silent!  He came out into an opening about 10 yards away.  I put my head down and he walked a little further behind a small group of trees.  I drew back and the bull came out and stood staring directly at me at 17 yards.  There were some small conifers blocking a perfect shot and I put my pin on the edge of one of the small saplings and pulled the trigger.  As the bull spun around, I could see blood far back on his body.  I quickly cow called again and waited.  I could hear the other bull bugle and I just sat there for about ten minutes, calling every so often and listening.  The other elk didn't appear to be bothered and I decided to move out the way I came.  I set another waypoint and followed my GPS to my pack.  My initial plan was to wait about 30 minutes and then try to find my arrow, but I was finding it very hard to wait.  All I could think about was the shot and how it appeared to be too far back.  I knew that I couldn't sit there for much longer, so I decided to hike back to the truck.  It was about a mile and a half to the truck and I knew this would keep me busy for an hour or two.  At the truck I dropped off my sleeping bag, tent and a few other nonessential items and took some more game bags.  Two hours later, I was back to where I shot the bull and I began the search for blood and my arrow.  Right away I could see good blood sign and after a fifteen-minute search I found my arrow.  The sign on the arrow was good and I was starting to feel a little better.  The blood trail was easy to follow at first but I started to lose sign as I moved into the timber.  I could see drops of blood hear and there and pretty soon there was no more blood.  I went back to the place that I last spotted blood and starting following tracks.  I trailed some tracks until they started to cross other tracks and that's when I began to panic.  I was having trouble telling the tracks apart and soon found myself just going where I thought the bull might go.  I was moving slowly and would stop to glass every few steps.  I moved further into the timber and after about fifteen minutes of this I saw the bull.  He laid dead about fifty yards from where I was standing.  The bull hadn't gone more than a couple hundred yards from where I took the shot.  There was an immediate sigh of relief and then I started to calm down.  I knocked an arrow and moved towards the bull.  He was down for the count.  I could see that my shot placement wasn’t as bad as I thought and realized that he must have been slightly quartering to me.  It was a nice 5x6 and I was just overjoyed.  I had no idea it was a Pope & Young bull when I took the shot and didn't even count points.  All I knew when I first saw him was that he was legal.  It was about 11:00 a.m. when I found the bull and it took me about three hours to fillet him and bone out the meat.  I was able to fit all the meat in the six game bags and hauled them all out in four trips.  The first trip was just the backstraps and tenderloins and I decided to head straight through the timber and hit the road.  That turned out to be a mistake because I had to hike up the mountain and then back down and it turned out the road curved away from where I was.  So the first trip was about two and a half miles one way and I decided after that to just take a main trail up and then cut across.  I would hike about a mile up the main trail and then cut across through the timber another half a mile.  The second and third trips I hauled out all four quarters and it started to rain.  It was taking me about an hour and fifteen minutes per trip and I knew that family back home was starting to worry.  The last trip I hauled out a hefty load of flank meat and neck meat, which probably weighed almost as much as a hindquarter, and the head.  That trip was the hardest because, not only was I tired, but it was raining heavily and was dark by that time.  It's a good thing I had my headlamp.  I made it back to the truck by 8:15 p.m. and called my dad from a payphone before I got to town.  I guess everyone was starting to panic and my brother went from packing for the antelope hunt to packing for a rescue mission.  I knew they wouldn't call search and rescue until morning though and I didn't see that I had any other option.  My dad called my brother and he and my sister were at the house to greet me when I got home.  Jon was extremely excited and couldn't believe the size of the bull.  When we got inside, I showed them a video diary that I had made while I was out there.  It was great to be able to share the experience with everyone and I’ll never forget my first solo elk hunt.