Zachary Craig Hanson's Blog, page 11

The Fall Trapping Countdown Is On...

Every time that July rolls around I am eternally shocked that bear season is over and that fall hunting and trapping will be here in mere weeks. Usually I suppress those thoughts and focus on wood chopping instead of getting as prepared as possible for fall success… But, not this year.

This year I am out of a job and I am going to take full advantage of that by going all in on trapping this fall. As a part of that I will be setting up a wall tent to work from deep in the back country where my lines usually end. In order to prep, I made time to actually degrease some new traps and re-dye my old ones well before the season starts.

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However, without a 55 gallon drum available (whoops, I guess I used too many for bear baiting) I had to get creative. Thankfully, I had a huge metal horse trough behind my place and figured I could use that to do all of my dirty work.

After commandering some cinder blocks from a neighbor, I got my daughter to help fetch wood and start a fire underneath the trough while we filled it with water. While we waited for the water to get to a low rolling boil (it took an hour or two), we pulled out all of our traps, snares, and anchors and laid them out in piles. Once the water was hot, we added some over-the-counter logwood trap dye and some pine and spruce boughs.

After stirring the concoction like a witches brew, in went each of the traps in different batches. About 1-hour per set was the ticket to get them each to a nice de-scented dark color. Given the number of traps, we kept the fire rolling and the traps soaking well into the evening. Once pulled and cooled we re-hung them and started to fantasize about fall and winter nights in our wall tent! Now on to waxing…

Wolf Trap Post Dye Treatment

Turning Feral w/ MTNTOUGH Fitness

So, the past few weeks have been… busy. Bear hunting (hard) and job searching (hard) have taken up most of my time, and it would seem as though I am coming up a wee bit short on both ends of that spectrum.

Despite the disappointment in not having gainful employment solidified (yet) or a bear on the ground (yet), I have had a blast getting to focus on two other passion areas… writing and fitness. As part of that investment I was fortunate enough to make it out to Bozeman a few weeks back to get absolutely mauled by the MTNTOUGH crew in a workout they dubbed “The Simulator,” before getting to sit down and chat about my book Turning Feral and my new company TheOutfitter.Guide. Take a listen below and make sure to plan on visiting Bozeman for Tough Fest 23’ in late June.

If you are interested in picking up the book itself, you can click here to buy Turning Feral for Father’s day: Turning Feral on Amazon

The Bone Scraper Free Audiobook

Now, if my story or getting smoked in workouts to get ready for the fall mountains isn’t your jam, there is something else that I was able to cook up with my historical fiction publisher… a free listen on the first book in my 3-part historical western series “The Bone Scraper.”

This book is Louis L’amore meet Quentin Tarantino and was a blast to write. It focused on real Idaho history in my hometown of Atlanta in the 1860’s. You can take a FREE listen to all three parts below:

Take a listen and let me know what you think!

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Spring Bear 2023

So, I have not been updating this substack very often the past few months. The typical excuses come to mind of losing my job, having young kids, being slow out of the gates on TheOutfitter.Guide, feeling uninspired blah, blah, blah… but it’s all bullshit. I just haven’t felt like writing.

Until now! Moving forward on a more frequent cadence I plan to use the LetMeDieLearning substack to cover as much as I can about offgrid living, hunting & trapping, and diving into the trade work industry in more depth. But for today’s blog, it’s all about bear.

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For the past three weeks I have been going hard on spring bear hunting with extremely varying levels of success. This year I decided to sit and bait two spots, one of which I had seen many bear on last year and is within (a steep) walk from my cabin, the other is a higher altitude rifle spot near some old mining equipment.

In preparation for the season (which started at the end of April) I had left two beaver carcasses in 5-gallon buckets from trapping season out to rot… a trick that I was assured by numerous “experts” would be the ultimate bait to bring in big spring boars. And one that brought a lot of flies to our yard. Yay!

But as early May rolled around, my somewhat rotted beaver meat was still… frozen. Yes, the beginning of May here in central Idaho was cold and snowy. A far cry from the dry and green early May we had seen the year prior, which meant that bears were simply not moving at our elevation. For weeks after baiting the first barrel with dog food and expired sweet treats there was nothing, until about late-April when something finally showed up:

First bear on camera for the season!

With the help of a good friend, we kept the barrel baited and started to get in a few different bears over the next week.

A bear looking for night time treats. A nice sized chocolate bear coming in.

Knowing there was activity at our main barrel site, we decided to also branch out and set up a second barrel at a higher elevation. After scouring some old bait sites we settled on an area that had a great outcropping which would give an awesome 165 yard rifle shot and went to work hauling the barrel, bait, and rotten beaver into the area. With both barrels set and bears moving, the next thing was to actually go and sit them.

The Sit

With my focusing on archery hunting, I chose to sit the barrel that was directly behind my house. It was in a flat spot surrounded on three sides by hills which would offer natural blinds and allow me to sit within 35 yards of the barrel and see any bear that may be coming in. However, what I hadn’t accounted for on the first 4:30 am dark-walk into the spot was the wind…

Early morning hikes into bear country.

As myself and a buddy sat about 45 yards away from the barrel in the dark, waiting on a mountain monster to lumber through, we quickly realized that the morning thermals were carrying our scent directly into the barrel no matter where we sat. As it swirled and drifted, so did our dreams of seeing a bear that morning.

As we walked out and back to the house we discussed what one of our other, more hunting knowledgable friends had said to us… which is that, “it’s going to be a barrel we need to sit in the evening.” With that fact confirmed, we heading back home and decided we would sit the high elevation barrel and give the spot we just blew time to “cool off”.

Aggressively pointing out a rock outcropping that could hold bear.

After hanging up my bow for that day, I joined my other friend to re-bait our second high-elevation barrel and to sit it until sunset. It seemed there had been no disturbance whatsoever and save for a few circling crows, we watched the sunset on dry un-touched barrels.

With a full day of nothing in the books I went back to evaluate what I may need to do on my “archery” barrel to have some more success. I landed on two things:

I needed to set up a ground blind close to the barrel as our natural cover was scant, and;

I needed to sit it in the evening when the wind would be carrying our scent uphill and away from the barrel

With a plan hatched I made my way back up the hill for the next few days to sit our blind every evening.

Setting a ground blind

With some redneck engineering and a lot of shoveling, we made a somewhat level space to sit the ground blind and set up shop. Our plan was to sit from about 5 pm until last light at 9:45 pm. Settling in, we began the pursuit of boredom with only intermittent breaks as golden mantels, squirrels, and one curious pine marten came in to check out the feast in the barrel.

Curious Pine MartenThe Miss

As the clock pushed forward as it always does, I was sitting in the dirt when my friend nudged me and began speaking in a hushed tone. Through gritted teeth and with no movement in his neck or face, he whispered, “Zach, grab your bow. There is a bear. A good bear. 40 yards away.”

It was 7:30 pm.

Not believing him, I poked my head up to see that in fact there was a beautiful red-colored bear staring directly at us from a fallen tree 40 yards away. Slowly I nocked an arrow on my string and we both sat in silence. For 10 minutes this stare-off ensued while the two of us sat stone still. Yet, despite our discipline, the bear huffed at us and ran back up the tree and out of ear shot.

Disappointed, we talked about how cool it was to see him and discussed if the wind was still screwing us and whether it was our movement or scent that gave us away. With no answer we sat for another hour before we heard rustling less than 5 yards off to our right. With no clear view out of the side of our blind, we both grabbed our side arms (a 10mm for him and a .44 magnum for me) and assumed that maybe the bear had worked around us to get our scent. But just as the adrenaline was spiked for both of us, we saw two mule deer doe pop out right in front of our blind, oblivious that we were there.

Studying these two animals we both felt that our bear hunt was over for the day as I had always heard an old adage that “if you see deer milling about, there is likely no bear around.” Quickly, however, they trotted off and we resettled in to stick it out until dark. As our butts once again got comfy and less than 5 minutes after those deer left, I once again got an elbow in my side and another hushed whisper, “He’s back!”

It was 8:30 pm.

Sure enough, our bear was walking straight back down the fallen tree, but this time with more confidence to get into the prize sitting in the barrel.

This time we decided to be patient and wait. The goal would be for this bear to get his head into the barrel before I drew my bow so that he didn’t see us move so close to him. It took time as he cautiously moved in and all around us. At one point, I had a broadside shot, but no way to draw my bow as he was looking directly at our blind. Thinking I had missed my one opportunity we waited as he trotted off up the trail. We once again looked at each other with excitement thinking about the cool experience with a sense of gratitude. As the sun began to set and we were getting ready to pack it up for the day, the bear decided to come in once more and actually get into the barrel!

This was it. It was 9:30 pm

With the bear mounted on the barrel facing us, and with sunlight fading, I drew my bow. Yet, as I settled my pin on the bears vitals, his head popped up and he made direct eye contact with us. In a flash he had turned and jumped off right as I let an arrow fly. A clean miss followed by the sound of breaking branches and crushing buck brush as he ran off into the woods.

The above is the footage as the bear walked back to the barrel for the last time right before I took my missed shot… we were sitting in a blind 15 yards to the right of the frame.

All-in-all, you can’t be disappointed with such awesome encounters so close to bear. We have learned a lot this season and are still getting out almost everyday with the hopes of having another shot on boar before the season closes on June 15th!

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TheOutfitter.Guide

Who are we?

TheOutfitter.Guide is made up of a group of guides and passionate hunters who share two things in common: A love for hunting and technology.

Two of the co-founders at Western Hunt Expo booth in SLC 23’What have we built?

We have built the industry’s first B2B2C platform for the ~$400M p/year western big game hunting industry. We are focused on the untouched niche of backend outfitter support and white-glove customer experience for the paying hunter.

What are we not?

We are not a top-of-the-funnel search engine for outfitters. We do not seek to replace the commoditized side of the industry such bookyourhunt.com or outfitter.services.

What does it solve?

To answer this question we need to look at it from both of our main persona’s view:

OUTFITTERS: We provide a single point of entry for all of your hunters and their data in a digital web-based platform. Upload your hunt info, contracts, and waivers once, then with a click of a button add new hunters and watch their progress through your custom dashboard.

HUNTERS: If you choose to hunt with an outfitter who uses TheOutfitter.Guide, you will be treated to an easy five-step digital onboarding experience as well as custom communication from TheOutfitter.Guide team leading up to your hunt. With our affiliate partner program, you will receive custom hunt-prep info along with thousands of dollars in discount codes to some of the top brands in the industry to ensure that you are doing the most important thing: Focusing on the Hunt.

Awesome! How do I use it and how much will it cost?

We are currently in a limited beta, however, our GA release is imminent:

Outfitters: If you are interested in the services we are providing, reach out to us at zach@theoutfitter.guide or kyle@theoutfitter.guide and we can work to get you into our beta. Once released, there will be a single one-time $150 setup fee which will include a custom on-boarding experience to get you up and running. For every hunter you onboard there will be a flat $40 fee which can be rolled into the cost of the hunt, or you can opt to pay that out of pocket.

Hunters: If you choose an outfitter using our services, the cost of the platform is free. Once signed up though, you will receive customized pre-hunt prep communication and thousands of dollars in discounts to the industries top brands.

Subscribe for free to receive updates on our upcoming launch.

Trapline Partners

After a bit of a harrowing journey back up to our cabin this past Saturday morning, which included a blown sidewall on my wife's rig, we got settled in for a few glorious weeks up in the mountains.

Womp Womp… No one likes riding a donut off road… missing the full size spare.

With my parents coming in a week, we had a lot that we wanted to get done. We needed to chop some more wood, I needed to fix our snowblower, juggle work and kids, and of course... trap.

For me, my target for the week was going to be beaver and otter. I know where a large bank den is just up river from our electric dam that I wanted to target, as well as a known otter-hangout at the base of our towns fish ladder. To confirm the need for this control, our town electric co-op owner called me up to let me know that a humongous beaver dam was reported from several miles up stream in the sawtooth wilderness that was/is allegedly 6 ft' tall and causing a significant slow down in water flow. Something that unaddressed would cause issues in our ability to maintain enough water flow to keep the literal lights on until spring runoff next year. Though, I am excited to snowshoe in with tons of traps in the coming weeks, my first order of business were the problem children close to home.

So, after a full day of work I loaded up my truck with a few footholds on drowning wires and conibears and set out to get things placed. However, once I got out to the bank den, I noticed a problem... all of the waterways I had planned to trap were iced over. That is not inherently a bad thing and once I cleared the snow I could see air bubbles under the ice confirming that beaver or otter were actively using the channels. Yay.

So, crawling hands and knees on ice I got out my ax and started punching through the four inch layer. I knew I made it through when a big splash of ice-cold water shot into my face and removed any drowsiness that still lurked in my body. The only problem that I didn't take into account was that this channel was too shallow for my conibears. If I had placed one and left it, the jaws would have become frozen shut and my efforts would have been for naught.

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Therefore, I had to abandon that awesome idea and continue to investigate the surrounding. I found several slides which would have been prime for footholds and drowning wires, but I had limited time left to set before I needed to go tag in with the kids. So, I ended up doing something I have never tried, and put out a conibear on the bare ground about 8 feet back from the water line where it was clear a beaver was coming to get food. I set it in the snow and anchored it was a piece of rebar and called it good. A little castor oil to attract the beavers pasted on the tree above the trap and I went home to help with the kids.

The next day after a heavy snowfall I took my best little trapline helper, Ellis, to go check on what I had set the day before. Dragging her in her blue sled we came upon a coyote kill with blood everywhere and only the pelt left of a small yearling deer. Seeing this within 100 yards of where my land set had been placed I was nervous that if I had caught a beaver it would eaten up by the same pack of coyotes.

Beaver caught in a 330!

As we crossed the small bridge and I could see the slide, my heart sank as I noticed the trap was gone. All around it there was no evidence of a struggle or paw prints indicating something had been drug off. First, I cursed my trap stake for not holding it in place and second my mind went to figuring out how I would find what had toted off my trap. Yet, before that, I decided to investigate the slide into the water to see if I saw any evidence of something coming out of the water... then, to my relief, I saw in a six foot pool of water a beautiful 40+ pound beaver in the deep part of the water.

It must have come up the slide, gotten caught with a perfect head catch and had the power and instinct to turn around and get back in the water. Thankfully the dispatch was fast and the weight of the trap held him in place. With that relief I thought about how I would fish him out. I had left my waders at the house thinking I would not need them, but as always nature taught me a lesson in always coming prepared. I ended up leaving the beaver and taking Ellis home (after some more fun checks and sled riding) so I could get my catch pole and waders.

Shortly thereafter I returned, used my catch pole to snag the beaver by the tail, and pulled him ashore to free him from the trap. Another beautiful large beaver in the books and hopefully a few less sticks to be chewed and left to clog up our electric dam.

Stay tuned for the upriver exploits when I get ready for some real back country beaver catchin' in the coming weeks.

PS: My book is still available at a discount on Amazon... Check out Turning Feral and help support its continued growth!

https://geni.us/TurningFeral

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Media Tour

So, without many expectations for the release of my new book ‘Turning Feral.’ It’s been fun to see what has organically cropped up in support of it. Most notably I have been invited to speak on several podcasts in the outdoor industry with more in the pipeline. I wanted to share those links here for those who are interested in learning a bit more about my background:

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Otter-ly Fantastic

Today marks the official second day of the beaver trapping season here in the great state of Idaho. It also marks the first official cold snap of winter and it looks like we will have several feet of snow in bound to go along with our frigid temperatures over the next week.

Cold morning to get in the water!

In fact, while I was out on Tuesday morning at 3:30 am setting some known beaver lodge’s my truck informed me that it was a mere 8* outside. Had I not seen and taken a picture of the temperature gauge, it would have still been very apparent when I stepped out of my truck. In fact, I could barely see through the brightness of my headlamp as my breathe was creating a dense cloud in front of my face.

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Through that literal fog in the wee morning hours I had to strip down, take my boots off, and then put on my chest waders to get into the ice-covered waters. Behind my truck and already shivering I began to set two 330 conibears and one foothold trap attached to a drowning wire. The dam and lodge I was targeting was one that was jeopardizing our road with a washout, and we had twice (as the highway department) ripped it out only to have them rebuild it in short order. Net was, these beaver needed to go.

So with my cinderblock and pre-set foothold in hand, I made my way into the water. Against the glare of my light, I noticed movement in the water around me and was shocked to see that I was being circled by two extremely fast aquatic creatures. Assuming they were beaver, I was mesmerized out how fast they swam and how this normally shy creature was investigating me. Despite this heightening my nerves for fear of getting bitten by a beaver at 4 am in the middle of nowhere, it was definitely one of the coolest outdoor experiences I have ever had. With a quick splash of my hand on the ice, they disappeared into their den and I got to work setting my traps. Once set, I retreated to the warmth of my truck cab and made the drive home.

Then this morning, after first light, I set back out to see if we had any luck on the water line. Quickly my headlamp caught a shape near where I had set a conibear. I could see that a small juvenile beaver was humanely caught, which gave me motivation for the other two traps. As my headlamp panned around, though, I could see that my second conibear was untouched. When I then looked to where I had broken their dam and placed a foothold trap, the dam had been repaired and there was fresh beaver scat floating in the water. I assumed at that moment the beavers had successfully avoided my trap and built around it (not the first time this has happened to me)… but as I looked closer, I could see my foothold was gone and there was something at the bottom of my drowning wire… Maybe I did get one of them!

Getting into the water to investigate closer, I started to break up the ice with my hammer and pull on the long drowning wire to see what was on the other end. Eventually what was pulled out was not a beaver, but a beautiful black and grey river otter who looked like he had been filling himself quite well on the local trout. I then registered that what had been speedily circling me in the water just a day ago were otter and not beaver! This was amazing as otter were something I had been looking to target for some time, but my first catch was pure luck. Once home, I quickly called it into Idaho Fish and Game (You can only catch 3 per season and the regulations are tight around checking in the pelts within 72 hours) and began the skinning process of this coveted pelt. Being extremely cautious to not puncture the hide, I spent over four hours skinning, fleshing and boarding this beautiful (and fatty) creature.

My daughter checking on the first day’s catch. Fleshing the skin and removing all fat to get it ready for processing. First Idaho river otter measured 5.5 ft from nose to tail!

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The Highway Men

One of the things that many people do not know about me is that I am “technically” an elected public official in the great state of Idaho. More specifically, I am the chairman of the Rural Atlanta Highway District, which consists of a team of two operators and a meager budget. We are responsible for keeping the roughly 40+ miles of dirt road open (plus another 40 or so “unofficial miles”) year round.

Some of our more tame winter road that must be maintained.

This consists of removing boulders and rock slides, snow slides, and anything in between… fallen trees from storms or beaver, washed out roads, and helping stranded passersby. It takes untold amounts of preparation to keep dust abated in the summer and snow cleared in the winter. We often have to battle aging equipment, weather, bureaucratic red-tape, and unsatisfied patrons.

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Our daughter hanging out at the Highway District Building.

Despite the hurdles, we always press on. We are constantly working to secure funds, acquire new equipment, and improve the quality and longevity of our cherished rural road. Those efforts largely go unnoticed, but sometimes there is cause for silent celebration. And silent celebrate we have done this past year. Without it getting put on the broader radar, we have secured grants from the Forrest Service, overflow funds from a broader ITD project, and most recently dissolved our odd grandfathered-in district voting rules. All of this is an amazing achievement for a small end-of-the-road highway district who had been stagnating for some time.

With that said, I am proud of where we have been able to take our little highway district in the two years that I have been serving. As I step down from my role at the end of this year I can’t wait to see where the other commissioners (and ones to be appointed) take our great little group!

A successful resolution passed to dissolve our districting… This took more effort than you would think :-D

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Splitting Wood

With early season archery elk behind me, it’s now time to focus on preparing for winter. My wife, myself, and our two little ones finally made it up to our cabin in order to leverage the last two weeks of my paternity leave to relax (some) and get a head start on wood chopping and fall cabin cleaning.

My daughter and I working the log splitter at our cabin.

Over the last two winters here in Atlanta, Idaho (where snow accumulations often reach over seven feet) we have been able to dial in our needs pretty well. With our small 900 sf cabin, we have two wood burning stoves, one upstairs and one downstairs, which requires about four and a half cords of wood to get us through the winter and into spring. A cord of wood roughly equates 128 cubic feet, or about a full-sized truck bed of wood stacked 4 feet high. It takes a few trees to get what we need and comes in at thousands of pounds. Pounds of whole round pine that needs to all be lifted, split on a log splitter, and then carried and placed into our wood shed for easy access during the long winter months.

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Stacking wood

Now, in the past I would split all of our wood with an axe with the intention of getting a good workout in over the summer months. But, with the new addition to our family and hunting commitments this summer I only had a very small (one week) window to get our wood acquired, split, and stacked. This meant that for the past week I have been cutting non-stop.

With my wife fully on infant duty with breast feeding, I had to take advantage of the hours that I had to get stuff done… which meant that our oldest daughter (1.5 years old) was my side kick for much of my morning splitting. She thankfully was very keen and did well strapped to my back (with proper hearing and eye protection) while I split whole round after whole round for hours at a time. She even sang me her favorite Cocomelon songs loudly in my ears as we toiled away.

~3 cords of wood stacked in our “5-cord” woodshed

All in, we were able to get about 3 of our 4.5 cords split and stacked and will have to postpone the last 1.5 cords until we are back later in October. The rest of the time we had needed to be spent relaxing with the family, cleaning, and celebrating my wife’s birthday. We even got in some reading time and cold plunges down by the river and my wife got some alone time at our hot springs. All of the goings-on at the cabin the last two weeks has reminded us how lucky we are to get to live where we do!

Re-reading Atlas Shrugged ~36* water is a good shock to the system, especially followed by ~110* hot springs Raising feral kids in paradise! Our youngest about to get in some river-side naps.

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Deploying Tactics - Archery Elk 2022

Six days. Six days is what I had this year to try and seal the deal on my third year of going after archery elk in September. As a DIY hunt, this one would be different and saw my hunting buddy and I employing tactics we had picked up in years prior working with top-notch outfitters, and would include:

Quickly changing locations and topography until we found elk.

Leveraging OnX maps for e-scouting and boundary marking.

Bear defense.

Our own calling with reeds and bugle tubes.

Praying.

Lots of miles both on foot and behind the wheel.

More praying.

The Location

Our tags were for the Island Park region in the Eastern part of the state that butts up against Wyoming and Montana. In fact, our meetup point was just a short thirty minute drive to old-faithful and you could tell the town of Island Park was built around seasonal tourism to Yellowstone Park. However, we were not going to be going to the park, instead we were focused on navigating the grizzly bear-riddled woods near the Madison Range following along the Continental Divide.

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Looking like a Garmin ad.

Knowing that we had several areas to check out, we arbitrarily picked a location off our list for our first evening and set out to find a wallow we had previously scouted. This area had been overrun by high-mountain open-range cattle and for a few hours we sat amongst vocal bovine until we realized that we would likely not be getting any elk encounters that night. After a quick walkabout we found what looked like a bobcat den with feathers-galore spread about in a macabre an ominous way and made our way out of the woods and back to our trucks.

With no luck on night one, we picked out another area on our map and went to set up camp nearby so we could hit it at first light in the morning. Similarly, though, the morning was a bust with no signs of elk and none returning our pleading calls into the dank darkness of the pines

Mountain lion prints following a young fawn.

It wasn’t until day three and our third location that we finally heard the sweet sweet call of an elk bugling back at us and we knew the chase was on. For the rest of the hunt, we spent our time in this area working a herd that we could hear in the dense vegetation, but never actually got eyes on. Miles were put on our boots and we tried every trick in our small playbook, which included sitting in blinds over an active wallow for hours on end, cutting off the heard, and stalking known bedding areas at mid day.

The Problem(s)

All of our efforts during the week were being hampered by two key events. Warm weather and a full moon. The former, warm weather, was something we had known was coming. It has been exceedingly hot here in Idaho for the past two months and the break in the heat wave was not looking like it would relent before our hunt. We knew this would mean that the elk would be moving less and seeking shelter from the burning rays during the day giving us a smaller window in which to hunt.

Cold nights gave way to hot days.

To exacerbate the heat, we were also hunting during the full moon. Aside from the added threat of wear-wolves, this was presenting a very real problem where with the added light at night, the elk were rutting during the “safe” night-time hours. I thought this would truly be hogwash, but one of the first nights of our hunt we spent the afternoon hunting the periphery of H****man State Park and didn’t see or hear a single elk… Until later that night. Right as rain, once the bright light of the moon hit, we heard an elk rip a bugle at about 10:30 pm, and they kept it up all night. They gave a small window of chase opportunity at first light around 6:45 am, but it didn’t last long before they all worked their way back into the safety of the park and quieted down after a long and eventful night for them.

‘Frag Out’

Throwing out the weather and astrological problems, we also had a rough start in general. Our first morning we were excited and in my truck heading to a trail head at about 4:30 am. My partner in crime was in the passenger seat and working to get his boots on when we heard a sound that neither of our pre-coffee brains were able to register.

“Pssssssssssssssssshhhht”

Curious as to what the noise was, I turned to my buddy who had a shocked look on his face and just yelled, “BEAR SPRAY!”

Those words aren’t something you generally want to hear anywhere, but especially when you are cruising in a closed cab at 40 mph at 4:30 am. About the time he uttered those words my brain connected the dots and my throat began to close quicker than expected. I pulled over, struggled with my seat belt, and eventually rolled out of the cab to breath some of the relieving cold morning air and figure out what the heck happened.

Laughing, we both couldn’t believe that we had unintentionally bear sprayed ourselves— with my buddies pants and leg taking the full blast. It turns out that the bear spray canister my partner had grabbed was missing the safety latch, and when he went to put on his boot, his heel struck the trigger of the can that was in his bino pack — yeehaw!

Fully awake, we tried our best to air out the truck and then proceeded to the trail head a few miles away with our heads hanging out of the windows like some goofy cartoon characters. The only thing we could think from a positive perspective was that we were pre-sprayed with bear deterrent, which may keep any grizzly’s from attacking us without the need to even discharge our spray!

The impact site… sadly his bare leg didn’t fair much better.Near Misses

Despite the weather, mishaps, and other challenges we were on two different occasions able to call in elk within bow range. One of the mornings, we awoke from camp and got ready, only for me to let out a bugle and hear four bulls calling back. The issue with this scenario was that three of the four bulls were on the Montana side of the continental divide (thanks, OnX), and only one was in Idaho where we could legally take him.

With some deft maneuvering, we were able to work our way around this group—with the wind never quite being in our favor—to try and work the Idaho bull. Blasting our way through thick vegetation and beautiful aspen patches, we got into a position where we thought we could call this beast in.

With a series of cow calls, we could hear the bull getting worked up and making his way in our direction. Once the raking of his antlers became louder, I positioned myself behind a pine tree and ranged the tree line that I was hoping he would emerge from. 50 yards. A long, but doable shot, for me to take.

As his presence was being felt and the breaking of limbs was getting louder, I nocked an arrow onto my bow and prepped for a relatively close encounter. Yet, as he neared the tree line, the same issue I have run into on every spot and stalk hunt I have ever done occurred— the wind shifted. Then, with the snap of a finger, the bull caught our scent and disappeared as if he had never been there. Tough break.

Calling out to anyone who would listen.Solo Trek

After the first five days of hunting together, my buddy and I both had some business to attend to back west and packed up our gear to go home. My job was to get back to full-time daddying and round out my paternity leave with a list of chores longer than you could ever imagine (mostly chopping wood for the impending winter at the cabin). As I pulled in to the driveway I felt relief to see my two babies and to help out my amazing wife who had spent the last 5 days taking care of a four week old infant and our toddler daughter — yet, after a nights rest, my amazing wife encouraged me to take another day or two to drive back out and see if I couldn’t have more luck with the cooling temperatures and waning moon.

After some mental wrestling and latent feelings of guilt, I took her up on her offer and re-packed my truck to head back out for another day and a half of hunting. Once back up into the high-country I was focused and determined to give it my all in that time frame. The one morning I had was amazing. Bugles were not too distant and I was able to lay chase to at least one bull who was willing to play the game. I chased him for a total of about 5 miles through steep terrain which taxed my body in a way that felt ‘worthy’ of the time I was now spending away from my family. However, in the same fashion of the bull my buddy and I called in a few days prior, this guy would not quite commit and never presented me with a shot.

Later that evening the wind turned on, gusting at more than 30mph for hours on end, shutting down any effective hunting. So, I went and sat a wallow for a few hours, turned up a few grouse, and bumped into a moose that scared the crap out of me. After the moose and with the wind still ripping I sat to glass up a nearby hillside only to quickly locate a very large Grizzly bear poking around in the area I had hunted just a few hours prior. With that sign, I decided to call the hunt good and get back to my wife and kids and put the pin on a great few days of hard bow hunting.

Stumbling on to the wrong quarry.The Outcome is not the Goal

Though I have now closed the chapter on my third year of ‘unsuccessful’ bow hunting for elk in the Rocky Mountains, I am not discouraged. This sport is hard and doing it yourself is even harder. Being able to replicate and leverage mouth calls to bring in huge beasts to within bow range will never get old, and Septembers will always be reserved for that experience. I can’t wait to evolve and eventually bring my entire family out to drop camps around the state and give them the joy of hearing the bone-rattling bugles of the coolest dang animals out there— elk.

Getting a bugle back to one of my calls.

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