Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Elk Hunting camp cook kills a bull … on an OTC tag … on public land … using old levergun, factory ammo

I had gotten conditioned to admiring this view from camp. I make sandwiches for the crew each day and use bagels for the bread so they don’t get crushed in their packs. I add a candy bar for desert. One morning at first light I was delivering the bagel sandwiches to the canvas tent where he guys were staging their hunt and I looked up at the clearing above.
A small herd including a bull ran across.
I ran up to the canvas tent to alert the crew.

The chase itself unfolded a strange way. I tracked the herd about 3 miles that day from camp at about 9500ft on up to 11,000ft. Snow really helped. Back in the years before back pain would wake me up every night I would compete in the Pikes Peak Marathon and even now I can still move OK for my age. To my surprise after several hours I caught up to the bull. He briefly showed himself through a gap in the timber. He had a sort of golden tint color and was probably a 5x5. He vanished through the only angle in a line of trees where I did not have a shot. As the chase proceeded he did things to shake me – like sharp turns on the spots free of snow. He was smart. I liked him. By early afternoon it appeared that he had figured out that in the deeper snow and steeper slopes he had the advantage. At timberline he had widened his lead and was heading for the patches of evergreen trees at the higher elevations. I was losing the race and I was too tired, too exposed, and too far from roads or any help.

He had won.



I began following the old logging roads back down the mountain in the direction of camp. I was hoping to hear a shot from one of the other guys. I passed the tracks of a very large bear. Several times I resisted the urge to follow fresh elk tracks heading in the opposite direction. Then a set of bull tracks going in more-or-less the same direction as me got my attention. At least by following these I’d be getting closer to camp. I had barely processed that thought when I heard a grunt and a thump from behind a small stand of spruce ahead. A bull walked into the middle of the logging trail. This bull was the same size as the one I had been chasing all day but his behavior could not be more different. It was evident that the two animals had gotten very different upbringings. The bull stood broadside and stared at me on the logging road. Fatal mistake. My offhand shot landed low on the ribcage. I followed him a short distance and put him down with an additional shot.

I’ve noticed that at the shooting range I am usually the only club member there that will practice offhand shooting. I estimate that with about 75% of the elk I’ve taken that has been the shot option available.



DIY hunt, Over-the-Counter bull tag, public land (Uncompahgre Nat’l Forest), old levergun, factory ammo – Federal Partitions. Probably the only element of the hunt that wasn’t old and ordinary (including me) was this Leupold thermal tracker.



Never needed the Leupold thermal tracker but played with it a little here.