Scouting Report

[LckyTylr]

Hello Fellow ElkNutters!

I made my first trip to Wyoming this past weekend to scout for my upcoming General Hunt (I can hunt any unit that's OTC for Residents).

In short . . . it was awesome!

We left Boise at 5:15 and pulled into camp at 12:30 Friday night, sleeping by 1:15. We woke up at 05:00 and started our climb from 8,300 ft to 10,700 ft at the tallest ridge in the nearby area. On the way up, we stopped at a few knobs to glass from. At around 9,000 ft, I looked up to a nearby ridge (WAY up High) and spotted some critters that were siloutted on the skyline. With my binos I quickly determined that they were bighorns, the first I have ever seen in the wild. I quickly pulled out the Swaro spotter that my Boss let me borrow and realized that every one of them was a ram, all 10! Two were full curls, 3 more that were 3/4 curls, the rest were pretty young. Really cool stuff, I was having such a good time. We continued on our way and were at 9,800 ft by 08:00 and spotted our first elk of the trip, probably a 300" 6-point that was going to try and run us over. My buddy kind of freaked out when he saw the bull at 60 yards and made quite a commotion trying to alert me to the bull that I had seen a fraction of a second prior to him seeing it. The bull obviously took off like a scalded cat and seemed to run a long ways (bummer), but oh well. From that same vantage point, we quickly spotted 3 bulls working their way up a burn basin in our direction, two 6-points and a pretty big 5 point. One of the 6's was probably 320 or 330 (pretty exciting stuff). What an awesome start to the scouting trip, 10 rams and 4 bulls.

I'm not going to say too much about the deer, because this was an elk scouting trip . . . but dang they were everywhere! I wasn't really paying attention, but I don't think we went more than 30 minutes between deer sightings with the exception of the hours between 11:00 and 15:00. They were almost in our way as we couldn't just make good time between one point and another without bumping deer. It was awesome, running all over the place.

We dropped down the ridge to a saddle and then kept going up towards the highest ridge. Half way there, Matt realized that he left his phone at the knob when he was taking pictures of the scenery. He and Dax went back to retrieve it. JUST after they left, I spotted 2 bucks on the far ridge. One of them was a darn good 4 point. I'm not very good a judging mulies, but looking at his ears, he was about 28" wide. His tops and front forks were VERY deep and his main beams looked pretty long. He was an awesome buck. Both bucks were on their feet and meandering all over the place feeding and chasing each other around (the 4-point kept pawing at the forky). It wasn't easy keeping tabs on them as they'd enter a pocket of trees and then come out in a completely different spot than I'd anticipate. My buddies were taking FOREVER and I was getting worn out looking through the spotter. The bucks disappeared into a dark patch of trees and didn't come out, probably bedded. My buddies finally came back and missed their chance to see that magnificent typical 4-point.

By now, I was amped and full of energy, I couldn't wait to get to the ridge and look out into all of the nearby basins and over the other side. I was pushing my buddies pretty hard and egging them on to hurry up. One of my buddies just finished 3rd in the St. George Iron Man (for his age group) . . . so I was surprised at his pace. I think he was lagging back to keep me from burning out (I was pretty stoked).

Once on top, we sat down to eat lunch and immediately spotted a few bedded cows. That quickly turned into a small group of cows and calves that we could pick out under the trees. At some point, they must have got our wind and the lead cow started barking. They all got up on their feet and we could quickly see many more elk popping out of the trees including 2 spikes and a small rag horn 5-point. In all, as they started to nervously leave the basin, I counted 38 elk. After that, we didn't see any more critters as everything was bedded down, so we decided that we'd earned a nap. Around 3:00, I stood up to take in the view again and a little tiny 3 point jumped out of his bed about 40 yards away on the ridge. I couldn't believe it, he looked so surprised to see us up there . . . and I couldn't believe that he'd been SO close for that many hours and he didn't wind us. He MUST have winded us, but for some reason, he didn't go anywhere. Very strange.

As we headed down the ridge to get a little closer to camp, we glassed about every 300 yards and spotted deer ALL OVER the place. They were everywhere. We spotted another large buck, only a 3-point, but dang he had a HUGE frame! Another very impressive buck.

We continued to spot deer and elk all the way down to camp. I spotted one small 2-point bull at about 70 yards in his bed at the edge of a clearing. He was looking at us when I spotted him. I guess we weren't very intimidating (which I find offensive), because he didn't bother to get out of his bed. We glassed him, talked about him, made loud jokes about him . . . nothing . . . he wouldn't get up.

Sunday morning, we wanted to get a fairly early start on our drive back to Boise so we could see our families and since we'd seen/accomplished so much on Saturday. We hiked up to a different knob and I glassed up a small rag horn. On the way back out, we saw a cow moose with two calves and then two small bull moose.

What an awesome experience. I have never seen that much game in one weekend . . . and to be fair, we only scouted one day. I can't WAIT for my first trip over there during the season. I'm the only archery hunter in the bunch, so I'll be the guinea pig, trying two different units for my first two weekends to see what's there. If that doesn't pan out well, I'll spend the rest of my archery and rifle season in that unit.

Anyway, thanks for reading my (typically) long post. I hope you all had an equally amazing weekend.

[ST52V]

Hope you get a big one!! My brother is half way to Casper as I type this. He took a job there and left PA early yesterday morning. So I will not be kept out of wilderness ares anymore!! Ha ha As we understand it he will not be a legal resident until next September or so . He has 4-5 pts for deer and elk which he should be able to burn on some pretty good units. The beauty of his plan is to be able to scout his butt off and able to hunt in wilderness areas. Sounds too good to be true I hope Wyoming doesn't throw a wrench in it.

[zpd307]

nice, tyler! I would be pretty pumped too!

[MTLongdraw]

Tyler- sounds like you're right where you need to be. Do you have a deer tag too? Just bought my first wy elk point. Can't wait to hunt there some day.

[zpd307]

we bought out first wyo point also, this year. we have a guide waiting for us when we get enough points to draw in the big horns.....