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This year it was between Antelope for a fun hunt, or elk for an hard hunt. TJ and Yo decided they wanted elk.





This years hunt would be OC, TJ, Yo, and myself. RC and TG couldn’t make it do to work. TJ and Yo spent the summer hiking, shooting their hunting rifles and getting gear together. Both researched the area, learned what they could about elk hunting, and experimented with different gear.


Eventually we arrive at the time: the plan was for me to I drive up from my house, picking TJ and Yo up Thursday at the airport and meet OC at the trailhead that afternoon. However, OC was delayed due to a family issue for two days. He would meet us at the trailhead on Saturday.


After I picked them up we we decided to go to the trailhead that afternoon, hike up the ridge to glass for a bit, then come back down and camp at the truck that night.





We didn’t see anything but a group of Mule Deer feeding up and over a saddle about a mile away, but even this relatively short jaunt showed a bit of altitude issues.

Once it got dark we headed back down, and once back at the truck we decided not to setup the tipi as we were just going to break it down tomorrow and hit the trail to get to a ridge to try and locate elk by the time OC arrived.







The temp was only going to be mid 30’s and Yo had a Sierra Designs 20 degree down bag. Waking up in the morning, turns out he froze all night getting only an hour or two of sleep. Now to go back a bit, he was extremely nervous about being cold, as he doesn’t really do things in true cold weather, nor is he extremely comfortable backpacking in it. This was his biggest concern for the hunt. So the first night of him freezing really started to make him worry.

When we woke up before daylight he said he was freezing and just started to fall asleep, so I told them to go back to sleep and we’ll move after the sun comes up. I had a 19 hour drive to pick them up, and only had about 3 hours of sleep in the last two days leading up to it, so I could use the sleep as well.

Once the sun came up and hit Yo, he got warmed up enough to start moving. After trash talking him for not getting in the truck and turning the heater on- his response was “I didn’t want y’all to think I was a pssy”. This lead to the first lesson on gear with an explanation of how bags are “rated”. We switched out his bag for my Kifaru Slick 0 degree bag and Gore-Tex bivy, packed up and headed down the trail.


Enter the first learning point- sleeping bag ratings are generally not “comfort” ratings. The rating can, and are all over the map. Most are “survival” ratings, not comfort. To be comfortable most seem to need to use the EN “Comfort Rating”.



The ridge we wanted to get to was around 1.5 mile down a trail with a few half frozen creek crossings.





And then right at 1,000 vertical feet up. We arrived at the glassing spot around 9am, while it lightly snowed off and on. The wind was pretty decent at about 10-15 MPH. Got to the glassing point, put on puff suits even though it was only in the mid to high 30’s, fired up the Jetboils and started glassing.

Probably shouldn’t put aluminum mugs randomly in your bag....






Mid afternoon, the sun came out, and it warmed up to the mid 40’s. Yo was feeling a bit of altitude sickness and we had planned on there being snow up top for us to boil for water but it was dry as a bone, so around lunch time I made a water trip taking all the Nalgenes, dropping the 1,100 feet and back up in about an hour or so.


The best part of spot and stalk hunting....


Napping-











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