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Cont....

All day the weather came and went. Blowing snow, sunshine, a bit of hail, then the sun would pop out. Every time the snow would blow in, Yo would say “hey bro, why don’t we build a fire?” TJ and I kept messing with him and saying you can’t as it will scare all the elk. Really I just wanted him to figure out his clothing system, and learn to trust it.




By the time dark hit, it was below freezing, and the wind had picked up to over 20mph.








We moved over to the backside of the ridge to setup the tipi. Found a decent place out of the wind mostly, threw the 4 man SO tipi up and started a fire.

This made Yo quite happy.




It was at this point that I realized that in sleeping at the truck and fixing Yo up with my extra bag, I had left my quilt in the front seat of the truck where I put it so I wouldn’t forget it. Tonight wouldn’t be the best sleep ever. Grin.



Enter the second learning point- once gear is packed, do not switch and use vital gear without a quick layout afterwards. Also, having insulating layers separate from the sleeping system and an emergency bivy/blanket can be quite important. We all carry an “emergency bag” with certain items such as an emergency blanket, fuel, lighters, signaling gear, snickers, tourniquet, etc., and no one has ever had to get into it before. To the point where some started asking if we really to need to carry it. Yes, you do. I have never forgotten a major piece of equipment before, but it can happen. Carry enough to get through a night.


We ate and went to sleep. I slept on my sleeping pad wearing my puff suit and inside a SOL emergency bivy. I was quite warm, but of course when I woke up a few hours later, the outside of my clothes were completely drenched in sweat with about a 1/4 inch of water/sweat was in the bottom of the bivy. Pulled that off of me and was generally pretty cold the rest of the night.


The next morning we woke up to frozen ground and headed over to glass. About an hour after sunrise I spotted a herd of twenty-eight elk with several small bulls in it, leaving the tree line about two miles away and heading up and over the ridge.

Yep




We watched for a while to see if they came back once they fed over, but after an hour or so we hadn’t seen them again and figured they had bedded down. We had to meet OC in a couple of hours, so we would go out to meet him, grab lunch and my quilt, repack and head across the valley to be below the elk that afternoon.

We popped back over the ridge, and broke down the tipi. While shouldering my pack, I grabbed the quick release on the gun-bearer, and the rifle slammed down on the frozen ground from shoulder height with the scope taking the full impact. I looked at TJ and Yo and said “it’s fine I’m sure, but we’ll check it when we go out today”.





With that we went back around to the glassing spot where Yo spotted some elk about a mile to the left of the initial herd. There were just shy of fifty elk, but no bulls we could see.






We marked where they were on the map, and headed back down to the trailhead to meet OC.








To be cont......