Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game A great antelope hunt in Idaho...

This hunting season is off to a great start. Saturday morning was one of the most fun days afield I've had in a long, long time and we're not even into October yet. I'm getting ahead of myself though.

As per usual, my son (Rowdy) and I applied for controlled hunts for antelope, deer, and elk in Idaho. As per usual, I drew none of those tags. While he also struck out on deer and elk, much to our surprise Rowdy was lucky enough to draw a pretty great tag for antelope. I don't know which of us was more excited. He's a sophomore at the University of Idaho and has his hands full academically this year, so we knew his time would be a bit limited as the unit is 6 hours away from UI. Luckily for him it was a short drive from our home in Boise which allowed ample scouting opportunities for me.

Time seemed to craaaaawl by these last three weeks. I busied myself as much as I could with load development for his rifle in the mornings, and scouting in the evenings. Load development went fairly well. I "built" a fast-twist 25-06 for his HS graduation present a little over a year ago. It wasn't anything fancy. I used the action off the first rifle I ever bought in college some 25 years ago, and a McMillan stock I'd picked up along the way. I had a new stainless 1:7.5 twist barrel screwed on, installed a TT primary trigger for it, and painted it myself. Finished weight was 6.8 pounds and most of the weight was in the barrel out front. I developed a nice load using 131 ACE Blackjacks, which immediately sold out of course. No bullets have been available for more than a year now. I was very pleasantly surprised when Berger announced a 135 Hybrid Long Range in .25 cal earlier this year. It's a "target" bullet, but after a little bit of research I convinced myself they'd likely be just fine. R26 was a rock-star with this bullet, but I quickly ran out of that too. I had three pounds of R23 at hand, and soon developed a repeatable load. It wasn't spectacularly accurate, but it was consistent which is just as important imho. This was a pretty typical group with my given load....






I've killed a handful of bucks with my bow over the years but I'm by no means an expert on judging them. We'd have 5 days to hunt at most, and even that would require him driving down from school on consecutive weekends. After talking it over with Rowdy, we both came to the conclusion that "trophy" hunting probably wasn't a reality given our constraints. Idaho isn't known as trophy state for antelope anyway. Both of us landed on wanting to find him a "mature representative of the species". That's a bit subjective of course, but I was confident we'd know it when we saw it. I located several bucks I thought would fit that description and sent him some terrible photos I took through the spotter. We agreed that both/either of these bucks would be a good one to take if given the opportunity...




Finally, the morning of the 25th dawned after a night of fitful rest. Rowdy's best bud (and college roommate) would be joining us for the adventure. My main hunting partner and buddy wanted to be a part of the hunt as well. 4 is a lot more than I usually like to hunt, but in this case I was pretty confident we'd find something to put a tag on so it could be a great experience to share with our friends. After a relatively short drive from the house, we pulled off the side of the road to park, only to see a pretty fair buck standing there looking at us. He was about 180 yards out. We climbed out of the truck and then I noticed the doe he was tending. He ran her to 150 yards from us and stopped to stare at us some more. We were literally 30 seconds into the hunt and had a mature buck within gun range on a piece of ground we could hunt. We all just started laughing. There was NO WAY Rowdy was going to shoot that buck. Yes it was legal....but it just didn't seem right. To each their own, but that's not the experience either of us had been dreaming of all summer. Here is a picture of our band of goofballs not long after setting off hiking from the pickup....