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I drew a late season archery elk tag this winter, and decided to backpack hunt. It turned into quite an adventure, and the usual 'Campfire post turned into something like a short story in my notes, so I decided to post it as it lay. Photos were challenging, because I stashed my better camera in a gear cache that, as it turned out, was never used. And at the critical moment my cell phone sat in the pack far down the mountain. So I did the best I could.





The trail marker caught brightly in my headlamp. It was 4:50 the first morning of a backpack hunt in an Arizona Wilderness Area, and the stars were brilliant in the black sky. I avoided the loose rock as best I could for half a mile to the stand. The bow was freezing my hand but it didn't matter.

The stand was 33 yards uphill from a pothole bobbing with broken ice, one of a series of waterholes strung like pearls by a rocky little wash. The stand overlooked it, a superb ambush point found 6 months earlier, in the summer when dues are paid. It was late November now, and I had a bull tag.

Elk were destroying the trail, socked into deep cover far away from roads, quads, stock tanks and binoculars. Where the big boys go to chill in winter. I ranged the trail again; 33, 35 and 40 yards. Stood and drew the bow, stood and drew again, judging the cover where I would stand, where I would draw, as the bull came to water. My vantage was perfect. His vision was blocked by small trees in two places. I liked the odds.