September 3rd, 2024 – The Final Montana Hunting Journal, Pt. 7 – Days 17-19
Hi All,
Like normal I had high hopes of getting this wrote sooner, but other obligations took priority. I’m happy to be back typing away and getting the last instalment put together to tell the last of our story, Just in time for this year’s hunting seasons to start opening up!
We woke up early on the morning of day 17 to head back in to the same old spot that had been getting very familiar to us over the last couple of weeks. We didn’t head straight back in to where we had been spiked out, but instead headed around to a glassing vantage that provided a better view of where we had been seeing elk, and the area surrounding it. A little farther from the action, but with a much better view. It was a nice cold morning and we glassed for the first couple hours, not turning anything up we decided to make a small fire to warm up while we had a coffee and breakfast.
After we had something to eat I decided I wanted to drop off the backside of where we were glassing from, into another spot that looked good when e-scouting. We couldn’t see most of this area from where we were, and hadn’t been into yet, so I was hopeful it was relatively undisturbed. Linds decided to hang back to continue to glass the same area we had been with the comforts of the fire, and I headed out with a plan to meet her back at the truck after dark.
I dropped a few hundred feet of elevation off the backside of our knoll and worked my way over to a series of connected parks that spread across a couple miles of rolling fingers coming off of the main ridge. I immediately started seeing game sign of various ages and could tell that a lot of elk like to use this protected slope to feed in. I began side hilling my way across slowly keeping my eyes open along the tree line edges for any animals that might still be on their feet feeding, but was pretty sure that most would be bedded with the warm midday sun beaming down. I worked my way around for a little over a mile and found a spot that provided me a good vantage over a lot of area and decided to sit it until dark to see if anything was going to feed out of the pockets of timber, some burned and some still alive.
With it being the hottest, brightest part of the day I figured there wouldn’t be too much action and laid back for a quick nap. I woke up about 20-30 minutes later with 3-4 more hours of daylight left, and got comfortable so I could start really paying attention and glassing around to try to pick up any movement. In less than an hour, and earlier in the day then I expected, I could hear a small herd of cows and calves mewing back and forth as they were working their way through the burn in front of me. It didn’t take me long to start picking up some bodies and moving legs in between the sparse burnt timber a few hundred yards below me . It was difficult to make out how many elk were actually there, and as luck would have it a heavy fog began rolling in totally obstructing my view of the elk. I used the cover of the fog to work my way closer towards the tree line with only my rifle, leaving my pack and unnecessary gear behind. The fog was moving fairly quickly and the conditions continued to cycle from totally fogged out to almost totally clear and back again. In the pockets of visibility I would quickly glass around trying to keep tabs on the elk and to figure out how many there were. At my best guess there were 7-10, all cows and calves. The fog was really messing with my rangefinder as I was trying to get a decent idea of how far out I was from the closest elk. I couldn’t ever get a true read, but knew I was inside 250 yards (probably closer to 200), so I abandoned the rangefinder all together.
Now this is about the point where my inexperience hunting such open country would be my downfall. Between the fog moving in and out, and the elk mostly having their heads down feeding in the brush, I thought I had enough cover to be able to close a little more distance across the very open and exposed hillside that I was crouching and crawling through. Well, not thinking about how different it looks when you are the elk in the brush looking out at the open hillside, vs. when you are on the hillside looking into the brush, I got spotted. I had kept a very close eye on the wind and it was blowing perfectly for me, but I got a little too cocky with my movements and the elk started to sort of trot together grouping up and heading in the direction they had been feeding, but at a much faster rate.
The elk weren’t totally spooked but they knew something was up and continued making their way at a trot. Recognizing the situation, I sat down and got very still hoping they would calm down and I could continue the pursuit. In the tail end of the herd was a lone calf that appeared almost suddenly in front of me at 150 yards broadside in the open between 2 trees. Without thinking I immediately flicked my safety off and shouldered the rifle resting my elbow on my knee. I lined up on the calf to find one small stick obstructing the vitals exactly where I wanted to put my bullet. Looking back I am absolutely certain that the 200 grain bullet out of my .300 Win. Mag. would not have been affected by this one small dead stick that close to the animal, but in the moment it made me hesitate. My mind was racing to make a decision abut whether or not to shoot, 50% playing it safe for fear of that one stick, and 50% greed that there were bigger adult animals in this herd that I might still have an opportunity on. I decided to not shoot and the calf hurried off to join the rest of the small group. They moved out about 800 yards through a thin dispersed finger of burnt trees onto another open hill side where they stopped to feed.
I gave them a bit of time to calm down and then started crawling my way over. I knew I had to make it to that slim finger of trees being very exposed along the way. Then I would have some extra cover and would just have to work through that finger to the other side of it, and should have a shot at one of the elk inside 300 yards. Well, about halfway through the finger of trees, just as things were starting to look promising, I was greeted with an elk hunters worst nightmare, the alarm “bark.” One of the cows picked me up crawling through the grass and timber and let out a loud bark, I knew the gig was over but to my surprise they didn’t take of running. All of the elk were on high alert and were looking in my direction but were still there. A few seconds passed and she barked a second time, and then a third. Having read about this behavior in the past, I figured she had seen me but hadn’t yet caught my wind and didn’t know what I was. She continued to bark looking for a response in case I happened to be another elk and not a predator.
Now we typically elk hunt well after the rut is over when the elk have become far less vocal, so I don’t carry any calls with me, nor am I versed in using them. Figuring I had nothing to lose I mustered up my best vocalized mew and called back. Hoping I could convince her I was a lone elk that had gotten separated from the herd, and not a hunter. She would bark, and I would mew in return. We must have done this 4-5 times and I thought that just maybe they were going to actually calm back down and by some miracle I hadn’t blown this stalk for a second time. Well, I was wrong. Finally, they had had enough (likely of my terrible elk calling) and took off running over the rise in the hill and out of my view. I took a walk to see over that rise just in case, but as I expected they were gone for good this time. With a couple hours of daylight left I headed back to my pack to go sit and watch until dark. My tail between my legs, but excited at the encounter that I just had and already reflecting over the things I did wrong and the lessons learned. The biggest being how little credit I gave their eyesight as I was stalking in without cover. I should have just hunkered down and not moved until they worked through and then got behind them and caught up to them feeding.
I sat back down to have a snack hopeful that since I hadn’t shot or made any real noise that there was still a chance to see something else in this clearly busy area before the day was over. Well, with about an hour of daylight left, that hope was confirmed as I could hear what was clearly two bulls talking back and forth while working their way up out of the tree line towards the same hillside that the cows had stopped to feed in. In the following picture you can see what I was working with. The cows had stopped to feed on that hillside just beyond those trees, and from the sounds of it that is the same place the bulls were headed.
The bulls weren’t full on bugling, but I could tell from the change in the vocalizations and the pure raspiness of their calls that they were bulls. I knew they were getting close so I started really picking apart the fairly open, burnt timber and was able to pick up a rear end, and then a shoulder, and some other fading glances as they were shifting around feeding on the grass right on the far edge of the tree line. Not wanting to blow this opportunity and knowing I now had a chance on a bull, I decided to just stay put to see if they would feed out onto the open hillside where I could get a better look at the pair and make a plan.
Well after about a half hour of waiting I only had another half hour of daylight left, and a bit of ground to cover to get within range. The elk hadn’t really moved, and I decided I better start working in if I was going to make a play on them. Knowing they couldn’t see me from where they were I was able to move decently quickly into the finger of timber. The elk were on the right side of the above image, on the far side of those trees tucked into a sort of corner where the tree line rounded up to the fading little arm you see in the photo. I headed into the trees on the left side of the photo, uphill from the elk, hoping to get across that thin line of trees undetected where I could pop out on the their side a few hundred yards up from them and set up a shooting position.
I made my way across and got amongst the trees, but to my surprise I looked up and saw the two bulls now feeding across the same hillside the cows had been on. Where they originally were I figured I would be about 200 yards from them when I could see them, but now they were over 300 and feeding slightly quartering away. They didn’t seem spooked at all, so I don’t think my moving bothered them. It seemed as though they staged up on the timbers edge until it was almost dark and they were now finally comfortable moving out into the wide open. At this point I only had about 5 minutes of legal shoot light left. For the first time I got a very good look at both bulls between two trees about 100 yards from me, and the elk were about 250 past that. Both were very respectable bulls, not huge but both looked to be 6×6 frames, I would have been absolutely thrilled to take either one!
I could see both elk through my little window in the trees in front of me and it dawned on me that if they took a few more steps I wouldn’t be able to see them any more and didn’t have enough daylight to try to move or reposition, it was now or never. I pulled my rangefinder and grabbed my data, they were at 350 yards. I adjusted the turret on my scope for that range and took a deep breath to calm down a bit. The grass was too long for a prone shot, and I had left all of my gear back where I had been sitting so I didn’t have a pack or anything to shoot off of. I sat down and rested an elbow on each knee and found the elk in my scope. I lined up on one of the bulls with no intentions of shooting yet, I wanted to see if I thought I could even get steady enough. The rest wasn’t perfect but I felt confident I was holding the crosshairs within the vitals of the bull.
In this time however the bull in the rear had fed up and was overlapping the other bull in my view. Knowing I couldn’t shoot until they separated I used the opportunity to double check my range and my scope adjustment. I got the exact same data as I did the first time, so I was confident everything was correct. Just as I looked up from double checking my scope the lead bull took a couple of steps forward and was now completely out of my sight window. I had one lone bull standing at 350 yards and about 3 minutes of daylight left. Less time really, because when he decided to follow in two short steps he would be out of my sight as well. I brought the rifle up and found the elk, took one last breath exhaling down to an empty lung and started squeezing the trigger.
The shot broke and I immediately felt good about it. Despite not having a perfect rest, especially for that range, I felt controlled through the whole process and it felt good. What didn’t feel good was watching how seemingly unscathed both of the elk were after the shot. As soon as my rifle went off both bulls wheeled around and sprinted back in the direction that they had come from, neither one appearing to be hit at all. Not a problem I tried to reassure myself, a lot of animals don’t behave hit for the first few seconds and go 100 yards and fall over. I took 15 minutes or so to calm down and to let the elk either run off or bed, and headed over to where they were when I shot. Knowing they ran at least an easy 200 or more yards to the tree line, and then who knows how much farther, I wasn’t too worried about potentially bumping them if one was hurt and bedded. To be sure of this I circled wide and came in from above so as to not potentially pressure them further.
To make a long story short, I grid searched in the dark for a couple of hours and never found even a pin drop of blood. I began my long hike back out to the truck with about every possible emotion running through my head during the nearly two hours I had to myself to think about it. Disappointed I missed what could’ve been my first elk, extremely happy it didn’t seem as though I had wounded it, but further disappointed that I even took a shot that could have had that result, and finally just a lot of excitement for the absolutely crazy afternoon of elk hunting that I had just had. We got back to camp late so I slept in a little and returned the next morning in the daylight to do some more searching for blood to really rule out any chance of a wound.
I didn’t find any blood, but what I did find was that the window I was shooting through, wasn’t nearly the window I thought it was at all. In the very low light, and with my focus on the elk out 250 yards past the trees, what I didn’t realize is that I was shooting through a lot more brush than I thought. The following picture shows the area I was shooting through, in the low light I could see the vertical trees, but when my eye was focused on the elk much past them, I didn’t notice all of the horizontal limbs.
Now I want to make it clear I’m not trying to make excuses. I think it is more likely that I just flat out missed trying to take that long of a shot with an insufficient rest, but it is also possible I touched one of those branches and my bullet deflected a long ways before the animals. Regardless of what happened, I was losing daylight and was rushing to make a decision, and I made the wrong one. Hindsight is 20/20 but I wish I had never pulled the trigger at all. Not because I missed, we have all been there, but because I took a shot that wasn’t good enough and could have wounded the elk. And on top of that, I completely blew what could have been a great opportunity. It was too close to dark and things didn’t go to plan, I should have just backed out quietly a while after dark and continued to hunt that area for the remaining two days of the season. Once I had blown out that whole hillside with gun fire the already heavily pressured elk were nowhere to be found. I blew my best lead on elk and we were running out of time.
After spending the morning of the second last day confirming that I didn’t hit the elk, I picked a vantage point overlooking the same area and sat it until dark hoping (but not too faithfully) that I would get lucky and see some more elk passing through there. Maybe a new group that was unaware of the transgressions of the previous evening. No such luck. I hiked back out to meet Linds at the truck who had been glassing from the same spot she had been the day before, also without any luck. We headed back to camp with a new area to try on the last day of the season for one last final effort.
To wrap up this post the last day was pretty uneventful. We hiked 10 miles or so total working into a completely new area sort of still hunting and glassing through what looked to be really nice country, but not turning up any elk or any real sign to speak of. We had one close encounter to a whitetail doe and her fawn that never clued into us being there so we watched them for a while on our hike out. When we got almost back to the truck with about an hour of daylight left we cut fresh elk tracks in the snow that had crossed our boot tracks from going in that morning. At some point during the day a small herd moved through, and as luck would have it on this trip, we just missed them. As a last ditch effort we followed the tracks through the woods as they were headed to a clearing I could see on the GPS. Thinking it was possible they would be feeding on the grass up there we pursued them working as quickly and quietly as we could to get to the meadow before dark. When we did, there wasn’t an elk to be found. At this point it was dark and the season was over so we headed back to the truck.
Although I was a little disappointed with my own choices at the very end of the hunt, we learned a TON of valuable lessons. On this trip we were able to hunt a lot of new country and found a lot of elk doing so. We still haven’t got one on the ground but we are learning how and where to find them and are really enjoying the process along the way. We had a great time sharing another hunting camp with Jake and everyone came home with a good mule deer. We had 4 close opportunities to shoot an elk this year, 2 were spoiled by circumstance, and 2 I managed to spoil for myself. That’s elk hunting and why the harvest success rates are sub 10%. Sooner or later we will be coming home with one, and until then I couldn’t be happier hiking up and down the mountains until we do.
To close out the last hunting journal post I’ll leave you with a picture of our tent from one of the last nights there, and our final tent footprint picture we like to take whenever we leave a spot. This time for the year as the season was now complete!
Ryan