My most memorable moment: taking my first elk (cow) after months of hard off-season scouting and preparation. Me and a buddy pitched our low-budget camp at the edge of a wilderness area several hundred yards from all the fancy high-dollar outfitter camps. I bet we didn't sleep or eat as well as they did and I guarantee they didn't work as hard as we did (the clients, I mean), but I also know our experience was much more meaningful. We hunted hard, stuck to sound hunting principles and ended up ambushing a herd coming into a park at about 10,500 ft. about a half hour before sundown. They never even knew we were there until I squeezed my one shot off at about 40 yards (of course I didn't have a bull tag, as I could have easily taken the nice 5x5 with the cows). I still can't get the smell of those elk out of my nose as they came up out of the drainage heading right downwind towards us. I also will never forget the sound of those animals crashing thru the timber on there way to have an early evening snack (a whole lot louder than the whitetails and muleys I am used to).

We quickly (but carefully) skinned, dressed and quartered the cow and humped every edible bit of that heavy son of a gun out on our backs over deadfalls through a hard snow pack and thru thick timber in the middle of the night (the most important lesson I learned - do NOT shoot the lead cow - take a smaller and LIGHTER cow!). by the time our work was done, we ate our luke-warm canned stew back at camp at 2:00AM, completely exhausted (food never tasted so good). Every time I look at those ivories, it gives me the chills.