I spent the last two weeks of September bowhunting for elk in Colorado. The bowhunting success rate for elk in Colorado is an extremely low 10%. On this hunt, my hunting buddy and I were part of the 90% of hunters who go home with tag soup. On the outside looking in, the hunt was unsuccessful ... but the hunt was a success in our minds. There was a lot of gear that we wanted to test. There were also several hunting methods we wanted to try on the trip. We spent two weeks hunting hard and testing equipment. We discovered what our equipment was capable of as well as what we were made of.
One of my goals was to spend several nights miles from our base camp sleeping near the elk. After many days of hunting in areas that were covered with hunters, we decided to pack in several miles from our base camp and sleep under a tarp. Everything I brought into the backcountry had to squeeze into my Blacks Creek Backpack. It was filled to the brim and weighed about 40 pounds when we left. It was full of rain gear, food, a sleeping bag, iodine tablets, my camera, and a few elk calls. My hunting buddy carried the same amount of stuff and a tarp. The tarp was a Kifaru backpacking tipi - but to cut down on weight, we left the pole and stakes at the truck.
We constantly checked our topo maps and GPS for good
elk hunting areas that wouldn't receive much hunting pressure.
Sleeping under a tarp isn't all that bad.
It is a lightweight shelter which is what we
needed when we packed miles into the wilderness.
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My buddy survived on Snickers bars and flavored rice meals that simply required adding water. He stayed full most of the time. I made peanut butter sandwiches beforehand and packed them. The sandwich was my dinner every night. Peanut butter has lots of protein and the bread was filling. For breakfast, lunch and snacks, I had Wilderness Athlete bars. Each bar has about 18 grams of protein and tastes far better than most protein bars on the market. A sandwich and several bars a day kept me going. I was losing weight which isn’t hard to do when you are hiking several miles every day.
Our biggest problem was finding water. Much of the area we hunted in didn’t have an abundance of streams and rivers. We found ourselves digging out a hole in the side of a mountain where a small trickle of water went downhill. We placed a bugle tube in the hole to form a faucet. The water came out of the tube into a pan we placed under it. It took several hours to fill up our water containers. We put iodine tablets in the water to be safe and then added a hydration drink powder from Wilderness Athlete to the water. We didn’t find much water, so the powdered drink helped keep us going.
 Here is our make-shift water spout. A bugle tube has many uses.
After several days of camping under the tarp we returned
to a base camp and the comforts of sleeping in a real tent.
To those who seek adventure, purchase a ten dollar tarp and go hunting. It is an experience you will never forget! |