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Sunday, October 17th, Day 2. Daylon dropped Dad off at his crossing area and Jake and I went to the area of Golf Course where the elk had disappeared to the evening before. It was just getting light when we saw a decent bull sky lined on a ridge to our right. He had made us, but it was still dark enough and we were far enough away that he didn�t get too excited. He just meandered off the other direction. We snuck up to the ridge and glassed a ridge about 500 yards away and there was a whole heard there! Prolly close to 30 elk were grazing peacefully along. We looked closely and found a decent 5X5 as the herd bull. There were too far away and we only had one way to get closer. So we belly crawled about 75 yards to a little clump of trees. Once there, we studied that bull carefully. He would score about 260. I was hoping for a bigger one, but he was a nice bull. After looking him over for about 25 minutes, I decided to shoot him. We were on a steep (yep, everything out there is steep!) slope and the elk was to my right as I looked at the mountain. This meant that in order to pull off a 420 yard shot, I had to lay prone with my feet uphill. That left me in a very awkward position behind my scope. This is going to play a big role in a couple of minutes as I knew what was going to happen.

Both Sammy the outfitter and Jake the guide said never to aim over the animal�s back. No matter how far you think your bullet drops, don�t aim above the animal. Hold on hair is what they said. I said, at 420 yards, my bullet will drop 24 inches and I will miss low. After much conversation, I agreed to hold on the bull�s back. To complicate matters, the sun was right in my eyes. My scope would go white and blind me for a second if I held it just slightly wrong. Jake tried shielding the scope to help me out. But I had a good rest and there was no wind. The bull was just standing there. I let out a breath halfway, squeeeeezed the trigger and when the gun went off there was blood everywhere. Not on the elk, I shot right underneath him just as I had suspected. No, the scope had come back with the recoil and cut me between my eyebrows pretty good.


















I tried to get the blood out of my eyes to shoot again, but couldn�t before he took his cows and lit out for the next drainage. I felt bad about the miss, but was glad it was a clean miss. Pat and Bob were actually closer to the bull than I was, so they did a thorough check for blood. No blood and they watched the bull run for a long time with no issues. What a mixture of emotions! Bummed I had missed, but happy it was a clean miss. I knew what I had done wrong, so given another chance, I was confident I would make it count. Disappointed in myself for not trusting myself and my gun after all the practice I had put in and just a little of me was thinking that this bull was a nice bull, but there were bigger ones out there and maybe I will get a chance at a bigger one.

Jake and I went on to check out another basin on a marathon type walk (no elk). We had covered just about every basin in the drainage. We decided to hike back up to Waterfall as that is roughly where that big bull Dad had seen the night before had went. Down the side we were on and up the other side of the valley.

A picture of Waterfall, the basin on the right:




















On the way up into Waterfall, Jake�s horse threw a fit and tipped over backwards. Jake suffered cracked ribs, but gamely kept on. It was a close call as my horse, Half Moon, deftly skipped out of the way at the last second or we would have been in the crash too. We left the horses there and climbed up above timberline�.or at least that was the plan. When we got about 50 yards short of our goal, we both ran out of gas. Just completely out of fuel. So we leaned back into the slope and rested. I was exhausted and so was Jake. As I sat there, I could see little pieces through the pine trees way out across Waterfall to the other side and way up and beyond. I kept opening my eyes and checking for elk. But then I realized, I had glassed thousands and thousands of acres over the last 2 days and had only seen a couple of groups of elk. Now I was trying to look through a little hole in the branches to see an acre over 2 miles away! About 10 minutes later, I opened my eyes again and would you believe it, there was a little dot where I don�t remember there being a little dot. Should I go through the effort of raising my binoculars (remember, I was completely exhausted at this point)? But I was here to hunt elk, so I did. And it was an elk!! I kicked Jake and we both scrambled up a little ways to get a better look. Pretty soon the one elk turned into a bunch of elk. And with the group, was a big bull! Funny what adrenaline can do, but only a couple minutes after wondering if I had enough energy to raise my binoculars, we were discussing whether we had enough daylight to go after him. And he was way, WAY high. It would be a grueling climb to get up there. Where this herd of elk was located, would require the steepest climb so far. We decided that with only 3 hours of daylight left, we didn�t have time to get to him. The bull was big; you could easily see his big rack even from 2 miles with 10 power binoculars. Jake and I agreed this was a 300 inch bull. We put the herd to bed and hoped they would stay in that general area until tomorrow. That night at camp, I had visions of that bull dancing in my head!

How was Dad�s day? Well, he saw 15 moose and no elk. So we made plans for the next day. Jake and I were going up after him. Dad and Daylon were going to go up into Golf Course in case we boogered the herd and they spilled out that direction.