New member and first time posting and hopefully I don’t ramble on but my brother told me I should go ahead and share my experience. First off I’ve been hunting since I have been old enough to go out with my dad but this past season was the first time I’ve ever considered grizzly hunting mainly due to a long time grizzly hunter I work with. I applied for the spring draw with no luck but managed to draw a tag for the fall in 7-28, I put on roughly 4,500 kms in 9 days trying to find a grizzly or huntable sign and never had any sightings from the road and only saw 4 different sets of tracks.
On one fateful day 2 weeks ago I was on my last hunt for the season due to feeling defeated by lack of sign and no sightings me, a buddy, and my dad were going down a old logging road in about 6-8 inches of snow we saw fresh grizzly tracks crossing the road and heading into heavy timber which wasn’t my ideal situation but due to it being our only hope we went in after it while my dad went further down the road to a cut block incase he circled that way. The timber was thick and visibly was only about 10 feet but that opened up into bigger openings but the deadfall was horrible and didn’t make it easy or quiet traveling and about half a kilometre in after going around a tree and under another tree and a slight bend I looked up and just caught the slightest bit of movement in the trees and I motioned for my buddy to stop and I looked back and I could see more movement and that’s when I realized I was finally looking at a very large grizzly at only 60 yards and he was looking at me but the problem was the timber and deadfall was so thick all I could see was his head moving around and the last few inches of his hind quarters and the rest of him was covered in trees that I could not see around to get a shot at his mid section.
We stood there for what seemed like an eternity waiting for him to start moving so that he would hopefully walk into a shooting lane but he just stood there moving his head around until the wind picked up and snapped a branch a ways off to our right and that’s when he lifted his head and started huffing and puffing and turned around and high tailed it back into the timber and up the ridge moving to quickly to offer a shot opertunity and I tried to turn him around or stop him with a rabbit distress call but that didn’t work. When we started continuing our stalk forward that’s when tension started to mount because now the grizzly knew something wasn’t right and when we got to where he was standing that’s when we realized why he didn’t move. Turns out he was standing on his kill, he found a black bear den, dug up the den, killed and was eating the black bear (pics to follow). After seeing that we figured that bear didn’t go far and quite possibly will be returning in an awfully big hurry but never saw him or heard him again so we got onto his trail and continued following him through the snow and found a pile of crap, then further down the trail he laid down but got back u when we neared him, then further on he stopped and meddled around a bit but then continued on never letting us get close to him again and never trying to circle us or circle back to the kill and after 2 kms of following him we turned back and headed back to the road.
That’s my story of my first year grizzly hunting, I’m not done with grizzlies yet and I’ll continue hunting them but it’s too bad everything changes after this year.
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Originally Posted by Whonnock Boy
