My 2017 Elk

[charlie_horse]

The next bunch of scouting trips right through to pretty much September don’t bring anything of interest other than more old sign, while fighting smoke from all the fires in the province so I’ll leave those trips as is.


So the next time I get out its the weekend before Labor Day and my buddy Evan and I decide we will go check it out see if we can get any elk talking and hike around. So we head up first thing and check out different areas along the river and other side of the river where there aren’t any vehicles. Makes sense right? Bugling and cow calling brings us nothing, hardly any sign in areas where we’ve been told other than bear sign. Hiking km after km up and down the river before we would get bluffed or boulder fielded out and still nothing. We get to some areas in the middle of old growth where there is just serious boulder fields and it makes no sense, I slipped a couple times and nearly broke my leg and decide its time to hobble back to the truck and take a dip in the river and head home. At least it was hot out.


The next weekend is Labor Day and of course untilthelastbeat has MY goat draw so trying to go talk to the elk was out of the question as I had to hold his hand up the mountain, but it was an awesome hunt that took my mind off elk for a bit and its own thread.


Now after Labor Day I’m hitting Indian Arm hard. I’m going up every weekend obviously on top of 3 or 4 nights a week. I grew to hate that road, everyone says “oh its not that bad”. Well actually shut up it is. Now I’d like to point out that by this time, I had already made a thread here on hbc about the hunt and any helpful tips would be awesome. So my inbox was flooded with tonnes of great info, updates from people that were doing day trips out there and everything. I started off getting this draw telling myself I was going to be damn near willing to eat tag soup and hold out for a big bull. I say damn near because at the end of the day ifs the last few days of the hunt if need be a spike bull still puts an elk in the freezer. I was able to be confident like that because I was able to take a lot of time off work and living in Squamish. So by this point even though I haven’t seen a single living elk and nothing but mostly old sign and sheds and haven’t got a response to anything during what I would think would be peak rut (yes I can bugle properly and cow call) I’m still confident with my resolve to hold out for a big bull.

[charlie_horse]

Enter Russ into the picture. So I had my 10 year reunion a few weeks before draw results were out. Now I knew at this point untilthelastbeat wasn’t going to be able to pull off a trip longer than a weekend outing until our muley trip in November and Russ was sort of in the same boat with his hunting partner having a kid to start off hunting season. So we were drinking beers at my reunion and drinking more beers and more beers and talked and had tentatively planned a kootenay elk trip together as we are both pretty flexible with the time we can take off, but to be honest I really wasn’t sure if the conversation actually took place or if he would remember. Turns out we did, but we decided to just wait it out to make sure our main hunting partners couldn’t get the time off and to wait and see for LEH results. Another important piece to the Russ history is, well, he had the draw 4 years ago and dropped a beauty typical . So obviously we were going to connect before for him to give me a run down of where he was seeing elk and all that good stuff. However he was already committed to a kootenay elk hunt this year with someone else by this time, so I was really expecting to do this hunt mostly solo with help on the weekends as I couldn’t find anyone that could commit at least for the first week of opener. So by this time we had been talking more and something ended up happening to his other partner and his kootenay hunt got cancelled and being the opportunist that I am, guess who has an open spot in the empty wall tent. ^^this guy. With a supposedly guaranteed takeables draw and equal splitting of pure salmon fed elk meat, Russ was in for at least the first week of opener.


The weekend after the goat hunt Russ and I head up first thing and make the summit for first light and he is showing me all the areas where he had seen elk on his hunt. They seen a lot more than I did. It seemed like every 100 yards it was “seen bulls here, seen bulls there…”. So we go for a couple good hikes and hike up this creek a ways and get to this area where we finally cut some fresh sign. But it is thick with devils club and blow down alders all the fun stuff. So we fight our way through impossible to be quiet and but we were actually catching the occasional whiff of elk which was promising at least. We spent a few hours in there then hike back up and across to the gas lines. Fresh sign everywhere, finally. We decide this is a good place to set up 4 more cams on different trails that were clearly recently used. Over the next week I head up almost every night to sit on the gas and transmission lines where lots of info was given to me where the elk like to be and sit there until last light and I didn’t see a damn thing all week on primetime.


One of the trail cams being set up with russ. Lots of sign in there.

[835]

Sounds like you have more time in scouting than most guys get to hunt! A+ for effort so far... but just keep typing ok

[charlie_horse]

So the next weekend Sept.17th I head up first thing in the morning so I borrow my brothers quad and I’m up for first light and I know where I want to go, right into the shitbox where we were smelling the elk and seeing sign and I wanted a cam put up in there. Fighting the deadfall and devils club in the pissing rain I am pushing on and I get into some nasty big rotten deadfall and I slipped pretty bad trying to get over a log and as I’m falling over alls I see is a tanned body with horn off his head! Finally! I get up and start asking myself did I just see an elk? SNAP CRASH SNAP…yup. So I let out a cow call to the bull to see if I can get any answers or just get him to stay put so I can get a better ID on his “trophy calibre”. No response but I can hear him casually walking off so I let a bugle rip, stops for a second and it all goes quiet, I can feel he is still there in the thick but no response. I go in after him and just catch a glimpse of his ass and a little bit of bone as he walks away. Decent bull, but ultimately not what I was after with this draw. So I decide after a bit to just let the area rest and head back to the truck to head farther into the valley and hike into an area I wanted to check out across the river. I get to the area and start hiking and immediately find sign, fresh rubs all over the place and a well used trail in and out of the timber, up goes the cam. I cruised the timber a bit to see if I could bump anything but no luck and after trying some calling I decided to let the cams do the work for me. By this time its getting later so I decided to go hit the cams before Russ and I put up the week before. I check them and nothing, no elk. Wtf seriously? I think. So I take two of them and set them up on different spots of the gas lines and head home.

This is the spot that had that morning looked like what had a herd go through there and A LOT of rubs so I was pretty sure this was going to be a good cam and I knew I would have to let it sit for 2 weeks.


I head up a few times this week after work to sit on the river with no luck, but I was unable to make it out this weekend and I guess with good reason. Took the girlfriend camping for a long weekend and put a ring on her as I was expecting to go completely MIA over the next couple months with this elk draw and muley hunting didn’t want her to forget about me!

[DeepJeep]

you sure know how to tease people... come on now!

[Blainer]

Epic thread, the pictures are going to open some eyes. Great effort = FANTASTIC BULL
I shall follow along.
This thread has been long awaited friend

[charlie_horse]

October 1st I’m back out there with Ev after another week of unsuccessful nights after work and I decide to try a different approach. There are some old deactivated roads and cut blocks on the road side of the river that I haven’t checked out to much yet and thought wtf this isn’t working. And see if I can find a different area to set up my cams. So I pick a spot on the road and we start heading straight up, and we just keep going up, through thick deadfall, nasty dried up washed out creeks and canyons and steep old growth. It was hell from the beginning and we really weren’t seeing much. So Ev likes to come out to the bush to shed hunt/bear hunt/deer hunt with me and I’ve just sort of started to get him into hunting and he is getting more and more into it. But he really isn’t used to the make your own trail approach, and last year he came on his first hunting trip to a region 3 moose and deer hunt and unfortunately he didn’t get to be there for our moose but he was with me when I dropped a decent 4 point so that was his first trip and got to be a part of what turned out to be a pretty exciting deer kill. I mostly just mention this stuff because it seems like whenever I take him somewhere it always turns into what seems like a hike from hell and I can’t help but laugh at it every time. So we fight our way up for hours just straight up and we really weren’t seeing any sign whatsoever…typical…So we just keep gaining and gaining before finally just say eff it and start zig zagging our way down. At this point I’m mostly worried about finding sign, as nice as it would be to find a living elk I figure the sign is more important so I’m not too worried about noise and were a bit more talky now. Also Ev thinks he is hilarious, and to prove that I got to hear about 10times on the way down that I should actually be paying attention in the tree tops as thats where elk like to hang out and feel safe ???? Funny? So we are heading down and we eventually cut one of those deactivated over grown roads that the gps was showing and decide to give ourselves a break and take the easier way down. Were going down the road and just blacktail and bear shit. Old BT rubs, BT track BT heaven apparently. No elk. We continue down until we end up a lot closer to the road and sure enough we start seeing some elk sign, nothing super fresh but it didn’t look super old either. The lower we got and closer to the road we got the more sign we were seeing, which was actually kind of a piss off as I didn’t want to end up having road hunting as our best bet and I’m a glutton for punishment so I think I secretly wanted to shoot an elk on the top of the mountain. Anyways were about 400 yards up this spur from the mainline and there is a fork and clearly elk were in the area so up goes the cam to let that soak for a week.


checking cams with Ev



Finally an elk on cam, even if it was a dink but I didn't end up seeing any elk on cam where I seen all the track and rub which actually really surprised me for being out there for 2 weeks.


same elk different cam. I had another elk on cam but I can't find the pic.

[brownmancheng]

guaranteed takeables... lol classic!

[DeepJeep]

U r online Charlie_horse, so I am hoping you are typing the rest of the story.

Can't wait

[charlie_horse]

Now it is thanksgiving long weekend and 5 days before opener and by this point I’m a bit depressed. I have seen one elk and had two elk on cam a small 5 and 6 point. I started this hunt with so much confidence that I was going to shoot a big elk. Horn size was priority until closer to the end of the draw in my head. I had been talking to my partners and a few guys on hbc and was kind of venting my frustrations with the very minimal sign I’d seen for how hard I had been hitting pretty much everywhere in that valley. I was getting to the point where I was thinking maybe the herds aren’t doing good, I underestimated this draw and should never go into it thinking its a guarantee. And I was just thinking it would be hard to pass the first bull I seen with how much I haven’t seen. But I have the entire long weekend ahead of me to go as hard as I can with opener on the Tuesday. I had untilthelastbeat all weekend plus opener on Tuesday and Russ wasn’t going to make it until opener. I also talked to a biologist the week before who had a hand in transplanting the local herds and still watched and kept tabs on them for his work. He told me that scouting this draw was a bit of a waste as the elk don’t start moving in until closer to opener. So that made me feel better about my chances at least.


Now Friday night I head up after work with Ev and drop off a couple weeks worth of firewood. Saturday Untilthelastbeat and I go for a couple casual strolls but it was more just to show him the area where I figured we would be seeing elk based on the sign I’d seen and previous hunters with the draw. It was pretty casual driving and minor hikes which was a pretty welcome change, we have to head back to the summit by 2 and set up the wall tent so he can make it back to Langley and watch his kid. See you first thing and I head back out scouting on my own again.


Joel pretending he's a shark or something.




Sunday Untilthelastbeat and I hit it hard. We walked a lot into the back spurs of Indian arm where the biologist told us they migrate in from and we went up this creek to see if we could maybe intercept some elk moving in. We did end up hearing some cows chirping away with no visuals and I found myself a nice 5point shed from this year and lots of rubs. After a few hours we decided to head closer to the ocean, and see if there are any elk in those areas. I hadn’t scouted this area too hard as I was told it gets hit hard with FN so the elk are hard to find down there. Were hiking different areas and trying our luck with calling and just enjoying the salmon run in the river. After a hard day we head back to camp and have a couple beers and call it a night.


checking cams on Sunday