It simply wasn’t meant to be this year. Every legitimate chance I had something was JUST off a bit to keep it from coming together… I had a few stop JUST on the other side of my shooting lane with the back half of the rib cage exposed… one big, fat cow that I’d stalked to within 40 yards who had her face buried behind some shrubbery who had NO idea I was even on the planet… I came to full draw and took a step to my right, needing another good foot or so of frontal ribcage exposed to get into the vitals… and JUST as I stepped to my right, she took a step forward, taking her vitals out of sight.
There were a bunch of things like that… solid 290-class bull… maybe 300… made me about crap my pants as I slipped down the side of a canyon at mid-day when he busted out of his bed 20 yards in front of me. He’d been hidden by a smallish clump of trees – the ONLY clump right there in the immediate area. If I’d happened to have been on a line 10 yards above him or 10 yards below him, I could have probably spotted him lying in his bed before he blew out of there…
About had a mulie buck pogo me to death the last night as I sat over a water hole on the very edge of a mountain overlooking three canyons coming together… I could literally hear his “boings” getting louder and louder coming down the mountain until he finally stopped one “boing” short of me. I thought I was about to feel like a bullrider getting stepped on…
I had some close calls – including a misjudged yardage shot on a decent-enough 5x5 across a canyon who had managed to slip by me as I checked out a sound up above me. Something told me to look back across the chasm, and there he was, already by me and walking down the mountain. I had to count points (bulls have to have four points to a side…), come to full draw, stop him with a “mew” and shoot in a split second… I shot him for 45, and later ranged the distance at 51. I nicked his chest right below where his heart would have been. I was able to hold him in the area after he bolted up the mountain a short dash by calling with my hand in my cargo pocket on the Hoochie Mama for at least five minutes, and even after all that I only found a few little drops of blood… So he’s no worse for the wear; only wiser.
Had a good time, saw some incredible scenery again… and marked a bunch of new wallows and watering holes as waypoints on my GPS.
I’ll be back. J
A couple canyons I worked my way down one day:
A beautiful secluded marsh I discovered on the side of the mountain behind camp:
Wesustained what felt likenear gale-force winds for the duration of one day... here's a tree down I came upon working my way up
a mountain the next day. You can't tell it in the picture, but the trunk of this tree is about twice as big around as me... snapped in
half like a toothpick. There were several like this littering the ground:
Fall Gray or Spring Green... I love my Gray Wolf Woolens Predator:
My camera lens was about froze up on this pic, rendering the hazy effect. Still, you can see how well the SG works in the
evergreens:
The other side of the mountain... simply awesome views:
Home sweet home for a week and a half:
Our shower. These things work surprisingly well:
We did eat well, though... especially since one of us put down a big, fat cow elk on opening morning. Those are thickly
cut backstraps in the other skillet frying up:
You get those in the skillet by concentrating on finding areas like this:
And my new background for my home computer:
