He went right down! He was still trying to move so I yelled at Mark to put another shot in him. I looked and saw that he had his riffle pointed in the direction of the meadow, then BOOM! The elk came in looking for the herd bull and gave Mark a perfect broad-side shot. I would call a few times then move so that I sounded more like a group of cows. I dropped back about 50 yards or so and started cow calling. Mark dropped his pack and sat up against an aspen so that he had a clear view of the meadow that we anticipated he have to cross. The old bull bugled immediately and then another bull bugled from our left that sounded even closer. We hiked about a mile until we thought we were as close as we could get without spooking them and I started cow calling. Now we were on the same ridge as the big heard bull and down wind, things were looking promising. It took us over an hour to go down and back up. When I say steep I mean REALLY steep and snow covered. So, we climbed to the top of the next ridge only to realize we had one more drainage and a steep ridge to climb. By this time it was 12:15 so we sat down and had some MREs for lunch.Īfter lunch we decided to follow the herd we had heard the bull bugle a few more times on the next ridge over. He had one of the smaller bulls in his sights, a 3x4, and decided to pass, but before he could check out the others they started moving again. ![]() I had no way of communicating with Mark because he was 100 yards away but I could see he had his gun up. It was hard to pick out a single elk in all the movement but I could see two smaller bulls and one that looked to be a 5x5. Then, suddenly we saw several bulls and cows running along the hill side. I decide to sneak to Mark’s left and get as close as I could to call so that maybe the old bull would think I was sneaking around to take his cows and give Mark a shot. ![]() We just couldn’t get the bull to come out of the cover and show himself. I thought for sure Mark was going to get a shot. The bull was on the other ridge behind the trees and we couldn’t see him but we saw dozens of cows as they moved along the hill side. Mark belly crawled across the opening and got as close as he could to the other side, about 230 yards. I started calling and he really got fired up. We set up the spotting scope to glass the hillside and heard another bugle only 300 yards or so away. We could see a cow elk lying in the snow on the hillside. We climbed back up the other side to see if we could circle around a glass the southern slope where we thought the elk were bedded when we heard a bugle behind us. There was still snow on the northern facing slopes and we could clearly make out some sizable bear tracks. We were awake now and decided to head out so we hiked down into a drainage past a water hole. I awoke to the sound of something walking through the leaves and when I looked up there were two coyotes standing about 15 yards away looking straight at me! I called to Mark until he woke up and he was able to see them as they went back down over the side. Neither of us slept well the night before so minutes after we sat down under some aspens we were asleep. It was about 10:00 so we stopped for a water break and had a snack. I tried calling to him for a while he responded several times but no luck he wouldn’t come in. It took us about an hour and a half to get back up to 9,800 feet. It was 700 hundred feet to the bottom of the ridge we were on so we climbed down, crossed a creek then climbed back up to where we thought he was. ![]() Now, we just had to figure out how to get to him. I tried bugling to him and he responded along with several others throughout the basin. Mark raised his binos and said “bingo” the first place he looked there were several cows and a nice 6圆 bull a little over a mile away. At 10,200 feet we could see the entire basin so we decided to do some glassing. What a hunt! We parked the truck and hiked over a ridge at 6:45 am.
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