Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Back from the deer hunt

Sorry for the delays, life and stuff…
So after we packed and ride out the rain, evening was coming on and we hiked up out of our valley over the ridge toward a meadow that overlooked a much larger ridge and hill side. We brought the goats with us and made Ragnar carry a pack full of rain gear and leashes and stuff.



As we settled in, the boys laid down which thankfully helps to make them less spooky to game in my opinion.
I immediately heard a bugle and some cow elk cross the meadow. While a few others crossed inside the timber behind us.
About an hour later, Nigel and Ragnar immediately stood up and looked back into the woods, staring intently. We knew something was coming but didn’t know what. A minute or two later a nice bull elk silently walked by the edge of the timber. I filmed it with the phone but hard to make him out.



A little before dark we saw a few more cows and heard several bugles. In the hike in and around the meadow we found no fresh deer sign, all of it pretty old.

At camp, the bulls continued to bugle off and on all night. Nothing intense but steady and put a smile on my face.

We took the goats down to the creek and they showed no interest in drinking, but we stayed down there to cook dinner, eat and filter water. The goats are weird like this, they never seem to drink on the first day. With the rain, I was even less surprised they didn’t drink this time. Still, I’ve got to give them the chance.

The next morning we hiked up a few hundred feet higher to another open hill side. The elk were still bugling a little bit off and on. We tied the goats up in the timber about a hundred yards from the meadow and the ridge. Katie immediately spotted a small herd of elk in the dark below us.



As the sun rose, we found three small bull elk hanging out with a large bull moose. A herd of 20 elk with 1 bull left the big meadow a few minutes after the sun hit grass.

We sat the the edge of the meadow glassing across the valley we were camped on and while seeing all sorts of elk, still no deer. The mountain range we were on went considerably higher so we wondered if the deer only moved through the area later in the season. So we had a hard decision to make, pack up camp and move higher or stay put and Hunt even further up mountain going through a ton of black timber on our way to higher ridges. In one direction the mountain turned to really high peaks and stayed in the wilderness, the other, there’s was a very high, gradual, open ridge line that had some motorized trails and some presumably closed roads ( looking at aerials and maps we could see logging activity but didn’t appear as those open roads accessed each cut over clearing.

I sure didn’t like the idea of packing through a wilderness only to get to motorized trails though, but we thought we needed to get higher and we were only a few miles away. Ultimately we decided we had try a new spot as we only had four total days and 1.5 into it we hadn’t seen a deer yet.

It sucked packing up wet [bleep] in a hurry but we knew it would rain again and so we wanted to get moving quickly. No meticulous folding of our stuff, we just threw it into the packs, weighed them and took off. Several goats looked off balance, but nothing we couldn’t fix with a few rocks.

We gained about 1500 feet, mostly on trail over the next few hours with only a little drizzle on us. As we created out of the wilderness into the logged area we finally saw a doe deer! We set up camp near some sort of corral that has a nice spring and big spruces for weather protection. By about three the thunder started rolling in again just as we got the tent up and the rain picked up. Didn’t bother with tarp shelters this time.

More to come…