Misery, Pain, and a bit of LIVING – 2016 elk hunt recap, PA mtn whitetails later

[elkyinzer]

Sadly, my 2016 elk hunt has come and gone. I got to hunt in Central ID last week, DIY, OTC, public land, and had an absolute blast. I started writing a recap and will post it over the next week. Today was the first day back to work. Not. Fun. At. All.

Check back, I will be posting the hunting story within the next week or so. If you know much about me from here, you know it will not be a brief story. Sorry, I like to write…the post-reflection is one of my favorite parts of the hunt. Thanks for going along on the ride.

The title says it all how I feel about archery elk hunting. It is romanticized a lot these days, to the point of cliché. Rightly so, because it is some of the purest hunting left in a world otherwise ruled by trail cameras, ATVs, food plots, 1,000 yard shots, and a litany of other white noise that detracts from the essential primality of the hunting experience.

I am selfishly reluctant to tell the world how cool elk hunting is because frankly elk country is becoming more crowded each year.

At the same time, elk hunting is quite frankly miserable, painful, and confounding, and thus, only enjoyable to a select, somewhat-crazy group anyway. The logistics are complex. A working knowledge of biology, geography, and cartography plus a broad stroke of luck are basic requirements to find a good hunting spot. A combination of exceptional physical fitness and extreme pain tolerance is needed to navigate the brutal country and the aches, pains, and sprains that accompany it. Not to mention the costs of even the cheapest DIY hunt are a substantial commitment.

Yet, after all the pain and misery, there is nothing comparable to having a pissed-off herd bull close enough to literally smell him and hear him breathe, while he is screaming, drooling, and aggressively destroying a tree the diameter of your forearm. Instantly everything else in the world goes away and it’s just you and that bull, locked in that moment. That part is LIVING in all caps.

As the hyper-speed days of fall fly by and grow shorter, I will turn my attention to the local PA mountain whitetails and post those hunts here as well. Feeling very blasé about them after the elk hunt and it being about 85 degrees here today, but as the mercury starts dropping and woods turn colors here I will get into it in time for the rut.

This being the Rokslide take, I will be sure to throw in some gear impressions at the end. Just a couple new items tested this year, but maybe more importantly, another layer of abuse thrown on by which to judge the old reliables.

 

[scott85]

I can't wait to read the whole story!!! Me and a couple of buddies are planing our first trip out west and it will otc diy elk hunt in Idaho.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[tri2hunt]

This will be a fun and interesting tale.
Just a note, there are no elk in Idaho, so please use an alias state when indicating how nice Idaho is. We want to keep it a secret.

Look forward to the rest of your story.

 

[rayporter]

a darn sight better than a tv show, too.

 

[elkguide]

There is nothing as frustrating and thrilling and exciting all at once like elk hunting!

 

[Shrek]

Looking forward to your story. I love your title , really captures it.

 

[elkyinzer]

Hunt preparations, the all important context

Owing to the chosen title for this year’s hunt, no elk hunting story is complete without first describing the preparation that goes into it. So bear with me while I set up the context, I will get to the hunt tomorrow.

This year would be my third archery elk hunt. Last year I was fortunate to get a nice 6x6 in the same area. My confidence was brimming. Obviously I am still a relative greenhorn compared to the many hunters that kill elk consistently for decades. But having completed my crash course on mountain hunting and elk basics, for the first time I felt equipped to give the elk a good run for their money. Particularly, I had a ton of confidence that I could find the elk and get some close opportunities.

To even be able to go on this hunt at all was an exceptional privilege. We were blessed when our beautiful daughter Ayla was born in July. Being lucky enough to have such a fantastic, understanding wife, and having her ever-helpful parents right across town, she let me abandon the rigors of dad life to fly across the country to chase elk in the middle of nowhere for a week and a half, so to them I owe a great amount of gratitude.

My dad and I hunted together last year and we made a great team. My younger brother Nick was deployed last year, but this year he would be tagging along as well. I debated throughout the planning process how our three person hunting team would work. I really wanted Dad to get a crack at a bull this year. I wanted to pass along as much elk knowledge as I could to Nick to get him a good start and be hooked for life like I was. Neither has much for calling ability yet, so I was basically the caller by default. And selfishly, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to go off alone and try to kill an elk for myself. If we had several weeks, it would be easier to juggle all this, but the shortage of vacation days only makes a seven day hunt feasible. Even as we set out for the first morning of the hunt, I was not sure how this dynamic was going to play out.

By now there is no doubt, I am absolutely hooked on elk hunting. It's a full blown addiction. Not a day goes by that I don't think about elk. It is my motivation to stay in shape throughout the year. To some, elk camp is simply a chance to get together in the mountains and enjoy the scenery. That’s fine, but me, I go there to hunt. I want to test myself against the most brutal mountains. My goal is ultimately to be consistently successful despite the low odds of success facing a nonresident hunter.

As Pennsylvania thawed and spring turned into summer, I stayed in shape best I could despite baby preparations that included a move across the state, then a move into our new house the week before she was born. Talk about a mad scramble!

Finally, the calendar flipped to August and I began hiking the local mountains 4-5 days per week. I am lucky to now live near relatively large mountains for PA, with a steep 1,000 foot slope for training hikes. Having established a solid baseline, I tuned up my mountain legs in no time and was feeling confident.

Packing and last minute preparations were a little different this year. Added to the usual anticipation was a twinge of guilt for leaving my young family. I guess that will only get worse as she grows older.

Regardless, I was all packed and ready as the calendar finally hit September 9. Our flights went well and our luggage all arrived intact as we rented an SUV and began our preparations to head up into the mountains. Spirits were high as Nick, Dad and I were all together. With myself in PA, Nick in Ohio and Dad in Wisconsin, we are quite spread out and get together far too infrequently. We made the usual stop at Cabela’s for last minute supplies and racked up an obscene bill at the grocery store as we stocked up to feed ourselves for a week in the mountains. With our preparations complete, we left the city behind us and made the four hour drive to our rented cabin in the backcountry that would serve as base camp for this adventure. By the time we arrived it was too late for a hunt, so we drove around and scouted for other hunters, organized our gear, and made preparations to hunt the next day, Sunday.

 

[elkyinzer]

Day 1 Sunday 9/11

The first morning we hiked into the area I shot my bull last year. We arrived at the parking spot a half hour before shooting light and began the climb in the dark.

We climb about 1,000 feet up a ridge which falls off to one major creek drainage to the North, and two smaller adjacent creeks to the South.

There are four or five different listening points along the way where we can hear down into secondary drainages (or hollers as we call them in Pennsyltucky). The elk like to bed near the alders and willows that grow in these hellholes.

At each of these points we stop and listen for 15 to 30 minutes, preferring to let the elk give up their location on their own. If all is quiet, we cut loose a locator bugle. Then we try to sneak in close for a calling setup. That’s our basic strategy out here and what has gotten us the closest encounters.

We noticed very little elk sign on the way up and didn’t hear a single bugle as the temperature quickly climbed from the 30’s to the 70’s.


My brother Nick and I working our way up "listening ridge"

We hiked to the top of this ridge and bugled off the backside into what is basically a saddle connecting the smaller drainages to the primary drainage. At this point we are three miles back and into country we had not even explored last year, when we finally get a reply to our locator bugle. And it’s fairly close, game on! Nick’s face lit up after hearing his first bugle!

The problem is, it’s almost noon, the winds are squirrely, and we didn’t get a good pinpoint on the bull’s location owing to the fact that there was a sheer rock face opposite us playing havoc on the acoustics. We chose to hunker down and try to let the bull sound off on his own to get a better read. Eventually he let out a couple more bugles and we pinpointed him below us closer to the main creek, but it seemed that he could be on the move away from us. We eased down into the saddle when the wind was right and did some cow calling thinking maybe we could pull him up a couple hundred yards, but he kept moving the other way. We guessed where he was headed we could find him later that evening anyway.

We hunkered down to eat lunch and take a nap in what turned out to be a carpenter ant metropolis. That really puts a damper on the nap experience, so we soon got up and circled into the edge of the smaller drainages to do some mid-afternoon listening and occasional locator bugle. All was silent, so we climbed back up the ridge as evening approached to listen down into the gully where we thought the bull from earlier was headed.

We listened to the silence for nearly two hours before we finally decided to let out a locator bugle. Just then he answered from the steep slope opposite us, so we quickly made a game plan to hustle down into the bottom where we knew there were wallows among the thick alders.

Before we were to the bottom, he bugled again, and he was close, really close. After circling down to where the now downward thermals were below the bull, I had Nick and Dad sneak up onto a little rise where I hoped they could see, took a big breath, and let out my loudest challenge bugle. Footsteps, loud ones, immediately headed our way. Just the response I was looking to elicit.

Within 20 seconds I heard antlers clanging and ripping up a tree. You could feel the tension and testosterone in the air.

I answered back with some raking of my own, and answered one of his bugles with a couple grunts thrown in for good measure. I fully expected to hear one of their arrows smack him at any moment.

Just then the bull started started barking. Not a mountain-shaking alarm bark, but different; quieter, but of the same basic nature. At the time I wasn’t sure what this was, but I have since learned it’s called a nervous bark or nervous grunt. Basically as I understand it, the bull is saying he feels weird that he hears all this elk noise but has not seen an elk yet. That is pretty much what my gut told me also, so I moved back 50 yards from the shooters and did some cow calling and then chuckled to make it seem like I was leaving with cows.

That didn’t work either as he just stayed in place and kept barking. Not knowing what move to make next, we backed out and worked our way down the mountain, getting to the truck right at dark. Convening to talk about it, it turned out the bull was only about 20 yards from Nick, but the alders were so thick he could only see flashes of antler. He was absolutely stoked about the close encounter, though. We had missed on the setup a little bit, which would become a theme for the week. This was to me the hardest part of hunting with three guys. With one you can move around like a ninja, finding the perfect shooting lanes. Two guys who are on the same page can work pretty well. Three gets pretty tough.

We had a quick meal of grilled salmon, grilled veggies, and sweet potato (cabin hunting sure beats mountain house!) and geared up for another day of excitement. Day 1 yielded 10 miles and 3,000 feet gained, so we were sure to be feeling some effects of lactic acid in the morning.

Warning: I likely will not get to Day 2 and beyond until next week, I have a busy weekend ahead. Really missing elk country this week!

 

[elkyinzer]

Day 2 Monday 9/12

Alarm, shower (cabin life is great), coffee, quick breakfast, and out the door. Yesterday was like a fire drill but quickly it becomes established routine.

We wanted to get up into our real honey hole today. This place is a brutal climb of approximately 1,500 feet and 55% slope, a real quad burner for sure. There is a very precise path up that calls for hitting several gaps between rockslides. As the faintest light of dawn began to appear we started the climb. By 8 AM we had scrambled up the last slope and arrived where it flattens out, relatively speaking, with a much more modest 1,500 foot climb to the actual top of the mountain. There are at least eight different ravines up high, all with wallows and bedding cover. To top it off, a patchy forest fire created incredibly lush meadows of fireweed and forbs. The whole mountain stinks of elk.

We heard multiple bulls bugling above us immediately. We aimed for a small rise a couple hundred yards ahead where we could formulate a game plan and grab a quick bite to eat. The granola still tasted pretty good at that point in the week. Just as we were setting our packs down, Nick motioned us to stop, and not 40 yards away a bull was staring at us. He was a raghorn, fairly nice by that designation but nothing too nice. He ambled behind a tree and Nick nocked an arrow as I gave a range for the next shooting lane. 37 yards....

Gotta go, sorry! Be back later to finish day 2 and the rest of the hunt.

 

[elkyinzer]

Sorry.....

Wow, it’s been a brutally busy few weeks! I was hoping to get done telling my story during the window between returning home and before PA archery season but work and family stuff just pushed this to the back burner where it became totally forgotten. I cranked out the rest over the weekend, here goes...

 

[elkyinzer]

Day 2 Monday 9/12….continued after dramatic cliffhanger…

The bull never entered the shooting lane. He seemed to sense something was wrong and ambled off toward the bugles above us. When he was about 80 yards out, I whined the sexiest cow call I could muster. He turned on a dime and headed back toward us, but when he got to about 50 yards he hung up again. A couple more steps and I had a clear shooting lane, but he just wouldn’t cooperate. I snuck back down the rise trying to sound like a small group of cows walking away, but he was not to be fooled.

We quickly gave up on the raghorn and gave chase up the mountain toward the chorus of bugles. We never quite caught up to them that morning. It was one of those days they stayed just ahead of us on the move and we could never get setup on them.

At about 11 AM they shut down and we settled down for lunch and a nap.

The rest of the afternoon we hiked across the top of the ridge to check out an area we had not been to but looked promising. We did stumble across a deadhead that afternoon. The bull was massive. I really have no perception of elk score but he was 300 easy. Incredible mass all the way. Great beam length and fairly wide. He had been dead for several years.

That evening we had a couple bulls bugling above us as we started to hunt our way down, but again, we just couldn’t get close enough to set up on them and had swirling winds to contend with.

 

[elkyinzer]

Day 3 Tuesday 9/13

We drove to a spot that is relatively more accessible. This is basically one burnt ridge (feeding) that flattens out on top with a bunch of ravines and benches that bail off the back side toward the North (bedding). We were here last year and had a very close encounter foiled by the wind. We thought, that we had discovered a better (less steep) way in. As we neared two hours and three miles into our climb, we decided sometimes it is better just to go the shorter, steeper route and get it over with.

We heard a few distant bugles during our ascent but nothing close enough to pinpoint. It was nearly 9AM by the time we finally reached the top, and heard a bugle relatively close. We worked closer, then when he bugled on his own we immediately had him pinned in a saddle that crosses the ridge into the bedding areas, directly across from us about 100 yards away. I set Nick up along a fire break that would present an easy shot, and let out a bugle. He answered, and we could hear him within 50 yards or so but he stayed in the brush instead of coming out in the firebreak. Another setup just a bit off, the theme of the week. He sauntered off without us even catching a glimpse of him, and the rest of the morning was quiet.

Dad suggested instead of hanging out for hours on this small ridge, we drop down 500 feet and climb the ridge opposite us to check it out. I had never pinpointed this area in the map research, but it looked like it had some promising benches, so I agreed. When we arrived there, the terrain was pretty useless. There was no water to be found and little thick cover, which is a recipe for no elk. So, we came back down off that ridge and worked some lower benches on the way back to the truck. We heard bugles up on the ridge where we had been that morning, but simply didn’t have time to get back up to them. Today's lesson: trust your map scouting and have the patience to hunker down when you need to.

 

[elkyinzer]

Day 4 Wednesday 9/14

To this point the weather had been pretty typical of a high pressure system; clear skies, with lows in the 30’s then a rapid climb into the 70’s as the sun rose. Today would be different. A cold front was moving through. Based on my experience, today would be a good day.

I packed up the bivy supplies intending to spend that night wherever the hunt took me. “Nick”, I said, “packing this damn heavy sleeping bag up the mountain definitely means one of us is going to shoot an elk today”.

Back to our honey hole today. We started up the mountain earlier and approached from a different ridge to try to get ahead of the elk before they headed high.

Shortly into our climb the first bugles rang out, and they were just one or two ravines over, but a good bit above us as well. This is when the preseason training really kicks in as we knew we needed to kick it up a couple gears to get level with these elk before they headed off to bed.

We made a brutal push to get level with the elk, got the wind in our favor, and worked across the mountain into the ravine the elk were in. When we arrived there, I bugled and got an immediate response from two different bulls. One was very close, just below us within 100 yards, and more importantly upwind of us, with a sheer rock face behind us so they couldn’t circle. The perfect calling setup.

Nick and Dad spread out to find shooting lanes as I again stayed back to call. The herd bull below us bugled and I cut him off and grunted. Within a couple minutes of that exchange, to my left I caught elk legs, then the flash of antler. The bull seemed on course to run Nick over, I expected to hear a shot at any second.

Just as I was wondering what the heck was taking so long, THHWACK!

One thing I have learned as I approach my 20th year bowhunting is that the sound of the shot is one of more important of the many clues that we have to mentally gather at and after the shot. I didn’t have a good feeling about this one. The classic sharp crack of a shoulder shot. A few minutes later, Nick motioned me down and we were just about to convene to talk about the shot when a bugle cut loose right below us.

The bugle snapped us from cerebral post-shot analysis back into instinctual hunter mode in a nanosecond. I told Nick to stay where he was. Dad and I snuck around a patch of alders to get a clearer view down the hill. I intended to keep him with me so I could send him out front for a shot opportunity, but sooner than I expected, I looked to my left and saw a bull standing about 50 yards away.

With no time to get Dad forward for the shot, I quickly ranged an opening he was headed for at 43 yards and clipped on my release. He stopped in the opening, I settled the pin on his vitals, and….there’s a pine sapling in the way. I did an instant mental calculation thinking it was about 20 yards to the sapling and I would shoot over it no problem as I anchored the pin behind his shoulder and squeezed the release….

The shot didn’t sound good and I knew I had miscalculated and clipped the sapling, but the way the elk reacted I thought I had possibly hit him. I took down the crucial mental landmarks where I shot and where the elk headed and convened to talk to Dad and Nick, all the while the herd bull still bugling below us.

Knowing we could possibly have two elk down, we debated and ultimately decided we couldn’t even go for a third and reasonably get them all packed out.

We sat down to digest and talk about what had just happened.

I ultimately felt because I clipped the sapling I probably missed and I would quietly look for signs of my arrow. It took a good 15 or 20 minutes and an adjustment of my landmarks but I eventually found it buried in the ground past where the bull was standing, free of blood. I had missed.

We talked about Nick’s shot. The bull was 25 yards and essentially broadside, possibly a slight quartering to angle. The bull caught movement as he drew, and he released a little earlier than he intended to. As the bull wheeled away to leave, Nick saw what he judged to be about half his arrow sticking out from somewhere near the shoulder area.

Having assembled all the clues and knowing that rain was heading in, we were conflicted knowing the best case scenario was probably a one lung shot. We took up the trail after an hour and a half when rain started moving in. We tracked a sparse blood trail about 200 yards when the real rain cut loose. There was no apparent lung blood, so we were thinking it was a shoulder shot the elk would heal from. Regardless, we gave the elk a little more time then spent the rest of the day grid searching the mountain as best we could without finding another clue. We also learned grid searching a steep mountain in Idaho is an entirely different proposition than it is back home.

It’s never an easy part of bowhunting to lose an animal, even feeling pretty confident that he lived on with nothing more than a sore shoulder. I can’t even accurately put into words how much it sucks. It was a terrible display of shooting by both Nick and I, but it can be part of the experience at times. We left the mountain that day soaked, cold, tired, and dejected. The highs and lows of bowhunting…

 

[elkyinzer]

The rest of the week

To say the least, the rest of the week was rather anticlimactic after our action packed Wednesday morning. Knowing the weather forecast and that we had trampled all through our honey hole Wednesday, we pretty well expected it so maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophesy of sorts. Such are the doubts that creep into a hunt after you return home.

Thursday morning we were right back at it though and headed to the basin where I shot my bull last year. We got downwind of a herd with an aggressively bugling bull not too far from our parking spot while it was still dark. When we had enough light to shoot through the foggy morning, we worked in close and set up to bugle him in. And I’ll be damned if he didn’t start high-stepping and raking right toward us. Only problem was Dad again set up with alders between us and the bull and he just wouldn’t commit to coming across them. Chalk another one up to setup errror. He slipped away, and although we stayed with him for another hour or so, we never got back into his comfort zone.

After that encounter, the bugling screeched to a halt. Friday morning we did run into another rag horn while creeping through timber, and he came into 70 yards before his cows turned him up the mountain.

Saturday was our last day to hunt, and it was incredibly slow, we didn’t hear a single bugle. The warm weather and full moon weren’t doing us any favors either.

Sunday we headed home. Empty handed, but full of memories, experiences, and many more lessons learned. All in all another great experience with a roller coaster of widely varying emotions and comfort level in the mountains. We hunted together the whole time; my brother, my dad, and I; and although that lessened my chance of getting an elk, I could not be so selfish as to give in to that sentiment and mope for one second. I truly had a great time hunting with them and enjoying our time together and would not have traded the experience for shooting the biggest bull on the mountain on my own.

 

[elkyinzer]

Elk trip photos

Here are a few of the photos of the trip to Idaho. My photography skills and equipment are mediocre at best and worst of all I am not very good at remembering to take pictures but I got a few good ones.


Into the mist


One of the many wallows...oddly they all seemed less used than last year


This is what much of the mountain looks like where we hunt which causes some blowdown fields which cause misery and pain...but the elk just love the right areas in the burns.

Blowdowns on blowdowns on blowdowns...and some beautiful fireweed in retrospect. Beauty is the last thing on your mind after you make it through that bullshit with limbs intact.


This picture pretty much sums up elk hunting. What to expect? Excitement?...hell yes...Comfort? Nooope! Rolled an ankle on Wednesday...tape that swollen mofo up and keep hunting!

Backcountry life is good.

The big 6x deadhead we found

 

[elkyinzer]

PA Archery season weeks 1 and 2

So with that done, moving on to PA archery season….Recap of the first two weeks

I’ve been spending a lot more time hunting the early season than I typically do. The freezer is empty so I’ve been out looking for a doe or two. The weather has been nice and cool, and my work schedule has allowed the flexibility to hunt a few evenings a week.

Opening day I headed to Western PA to the family camp. Nothing beats the camaraderie and anticipation of downing a few beers the night before the opener. Our camp, contrary to most camps in PA is actually located in farmland among some of the best deer densities and antler growth in PA, but with it comes very heavy hunting pressure.

I missed a doe the first morning, one of about 30 I saw without seeing a single antler. For the first time I can ever remember, I am pretty sure I had one jump the string and duck the arrow, at least that’s the way it appeared after a perfect feeling release on a 25 yard broadside shot. Camp projects occupied the rest of the day and a thunderstorm rolling in sent us to the keg instead of the treestands.

The next two weeks I got out for about a half dozen evening sits. This season I am hunting the mountainous big woods full time again, and it’s really reinvigorated my passion for whitetails. I had become fed up of the hunting pressure, posted signs, and antler envy while living in Pittsburgh and hunting various tracts of public and private land in Western PA. I welcomed the chance to again hunt the big woods when we moved back to Central PA this spring.

I’ve been focusing on one particular tract of public land that has a fairly good deer population due to habitat management. Hunting peripheral areas and avoiding my best rut spots, I’ve seen deer each sit except one, which is pretty good for this part of the state. Unsurprisingly due to where I have been hunting, no decent bucks, but I have intel on a few shooters from scouting missions.

Good scrape line

Chestnut oaks are the preferred food source where I hunt, and wow, did they ever produce this year! That tends to dampen deer movement as they don’t need to travel far (or at all) between food and bedding. Expectedly, most of my sightings have been late in the evening and I have watched groups of does feed under the same oak tree for more than an hour.

This past Friday I was fortunate enough to get a big doe down, as she gave me an easy shot quartering away while crunching on acorns 5 yards from the base of my tree. The broadhead took out the center mass of the lungs and exited the sternum, and she crashed within 15 seconds but not before covering 150 yards on a dead sprint. I had a .75 mile drag, all uphill, and debated quartering her out but ultimately decided on the drag so I could butcher in the more sanitary conditions of my garage. My sore quads and achy knees really thanked me for that decision.

Big old mountain doe down!

The weather Saturday was fantastic, cool and crisp, but I opted to take the day off for some family time to accrue goodwill for the upcoming rut. Did the whole pumpkin patch and family photos in flannel shirts ordeal. Really it was a good weekend though and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy that every bit as much as taking a nice buck.

Fresh tenders grilled over oak and a six pack, I'll take it over any 5 start restaurant in the world.



I was delighted to hear Saturday afternoon that my best friend whom I have mentored into becoming a bowhunter over the past 5 years took a nice 10 point, his second buck in a row after striking out a few years. It's been cool to see him get into, tough out a couple rough years, and use the learning experiences to become a killing machine.

Yesterday I cooked the ribs from my doe. First time I have tried that after seeing it done somewhere on the net, maybe even here. After trimming the copious layer of tallow and braising them for four hours, I seared them on the grill with an Asian barbecue sauce. I’ll just say they didn’t last long and I will never be putting ribs in the ground meat pile ever again. They are a lot of work but legitimately jumped into my top 5 venison cuts.

These turned out just incredibly

This week it’s supposed to hit 80 a couple days, so I will try to get ahead on work and get my doe butchered and in the freezer. Only one more week until what I consider the start of the rut, then I’ll hit it hard until the end of the season hoping for a decent buck.

 

[elkyinzer]

GEARHEADS start here

Anyway I know gear being a big mantra on Rokslide I took a few notes.

My stable was pretty consistent this year I didn't "run" a lot of new gadgets.

Leukotape P – Long time duct tape user, finally got my hands on some leukotape. It is the shit, there is no comparison. I put some on my hips where my pack belt rubs, it stayed there all week. I sprained an ankle and taped it up with this stuff and was good to go. This is possibly the best gear purchase I’ve made in years.

Trophy taker shuttle T’s - NOT impressed. I guess a little backstory would help. I used 3 blade VPA’s the past couple years. They fly perfectly, but I could never get them as sharp as I like honing them on a diamond stone. Finally, a friend told me you have to file an edge onto them first. DUH! So now I am getting VPA’s scary sharp and my reason for switching is negated. But I bought a couple packs of TT’s to try thinking the interchangeable blades would be the answer.... 1 out of the 6 in the package didn’t spin right from the start. Otherwise they shot well. But… I shot one through my target practicing, landed in soft dirt backstop, and it bent the ferrule so badly I couldn’t get the blades out. Same thing happened on an elk I missed, ferrule was wrecked. Small sample size, but the ferrules seem too fragile. TT's went to a friend and I am back on the VPA train.

Inreach SE – switched from renting a sat phone to texting home with this little guy. It does the job reliably for checking in. No keyboard, so very slow typing messages (I didn’t carry my phone, so I was missing out on the Bluetooth syncing feature). Looking forward to seeing what Garmin does with this after acquiring them. And please come out with one that runs on AA’s. I don’t trust rechargeable shit in the backcountry nor do I feel I should have to carry a solar panel around feeling like some crunchy hippie dude.

FL aerowool – Very comfortable. It definitely dries faster than the 100% merino. Great for warmer weather hunting. Lived up to its billing. Please, please start making a t-shirt out of this fabric. I’ll buy like 10 of them.

MR Metcalf - After very nearly pulling the trigger on a kifaru system, I stuck with MR but got a good deal on a Metcalf bag to shave a couple pounds off my crew cab setup. The Metcalf worked great as a daypack and cinches down to nothing. Only reason I am keeping my CC is to pack meat and odd loads around home.

Elite Answer and MBG sights – My bow is going on 4 years old and I just want to recognize these two companies for making a product that takes a beating. That’s what I look for in quality products. I took a hard fall one day and managed to clang both my sight and bottom cam/limb on a rock. I mean I hit the sight freaking hard, might as well have tossed it on a rock. The marks are there to tell the story but the point of impact never moved. Without confidence my bow can take that kind of abuse I might as well be carrying a spear.

 

[elkyinzer]

Back to PA Whitetails

Took a whole week off hunting. We had a couple days with highs in the 80's then a front came through that dropped about 8 inches of rain at my house, more in surrounding areas. In my experience deer just don't move in those conditions, but you better be ready to go when the weather breaks.

Saturday it finally did that, albeit with 35 mph wind gusts. Regardless, I wanted to get out at least in the morning. I went to a bench near the top of a ridge on State Forest land. I've hunted this general area for years, but just found this particular spot last winter scouting when I found three converging trails. The wind direction was forecast right for that setup and I hadn't set foot in the area early season not wanting to stink it up.

Hiking in the dark I got a little off the path I wanted to take in and got into a serious mountain laurel thicket which got me all sweated up by the time I fought through it. I got to my tree and discovered that the one next to it had 3 glow tacks and old climber scars on it, imagine that 1.25 miles back in. Could have been a rifle hunter anyways, I'll have to do some more investigative work as I have never seen anyone back there in archery.

I settled in for a cold sit as I had slightly underdressed. All was pretty quiet until 8:30 AM when a doe and button buck slipped in on me. Always tougher when you can't hear them coming.

They filtered through, then a half hour later I caught a glimpse of another deer coming up the mountain on the same trail, just 20 yards behind me. Intuitively I just knew this would be a buck so I grabbed my bow, caught a quick glimpse of a decent rack, and drew when his head went behind a tree. He let out a grunt at that time which was pretty cool. When he emerged, he was behind some laurel so I had to hold at full draw for at least a minute. At this time I was able to analyze the buck and decided I would shoot as he looked to be a decent 8 point and I was set to have a slam dunk shot at 10 yards. He finally walked into an open lane and I squeezed the release. I saw the arrow bury behind the shoulder and knew I had a good hit. He didn't even run, just casually walked 20 yards and laid down like he was going to sleep. If we could draw up how we take every animals' life this would be it, there was no struggle at all.





I was a little over a mile back in and had nicked guts with the slight quartering to angle, so I decided to use the gutless method and pack him out. I called up my father in law and he came out with my backpacks to help me and a couple hours later we had him all packed out.



It's always a little bittersweet to fill the buck tag this early before the rut really gets going but you gotta take the opportunities you're given. I knew of a couple nicer bucks and one true dandy on a different tract of public land, but with only one vacation day left and my three month old baby girl at home, I knew this was not the year to start trophy hunting. I am happy with this buck, he was big bodied and his neck was already swollen up. Likely at least a 3.5 year buck, some around here just never grow very big racks. I'll get to grouse and turkey hunt and scout up new spots for next year the rest of the fall.

Penn State took out our hated conference rivals Ohio State that night which just capped off a truly awesome day!

 

[realunlucky]

Enjoyed tagging along your adventures this year. Congratulations on a nice buck. Hopefully I get out in a couple weeks

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[paleraider]

This will be a fun and interesting tale.
Just a note, there are no elk in Idaho, so please use an alias state when indicating how nice Idaho is. We want to keep it a secret.

Look forward to the rest of your story.

Exactly! I tell everyone when they ask that I hunt in Utah, CO, MT, or NV!