Here's the story of my first opening day (Sep 10th) Open Season hunt over 4 days with my brother-in-law.
TL;DR - we didn't bag anything...(skip if you only want to see dead animals... )
But hopefully there is something of value to gain from our experience, probably mostly to do with what we did wrong, and learn from our mistakes. Any comments about whether we are off-the-mark with my opinions or comments are WELCOME. Please do not hesitate to poke fun either, I can laugh at myself, in fact, need to in order to push through to finally bag that big game.
I got hit hard with the 'Adult Onset Hunting' bug last year, and did roughly 30 days, broken up over the 2018-2019 season for elk, deer, and bear. No luck bagging anything. I have been obsessed with researching the web, such as this site, videos, podcasts, and bought a few books to help with the learning curve, having never learned to hunt since I didn't have a father figure who hunted at all. In fact, I had a very ignorant, leftist view until my eyes were opened after watching a documentary on factory farming... hunting started to make a lot of sense. My brother-in-law just got back into hunting (he hunted as a kid in Sask), so when he invited me to his next hunt, I quickly signed up for my PAL and CORE, and went on a week long elk hunt with him in Oct 2018. I helped him spot his LEH cow, and break it down in the field with him. I was hooked.
This year we took a day to scout a location 2 hours out of town in the summer, which looked to be promising for an opening week hunt. We saw sign, deer and moose in a large, several hundred acre cut block with mountains and hills throughout. We were convinced this was the THE location to hit for our opening 4-day hunt.
In the meantime, we hit the range (crown land - cleaned up after ourselves), I bagged 3 snowshoe hare (first game I have ever harvested!) my bro bagged a few as well, in anticipation for the big hunt. We saw an ad for a free freezer and picked it up, and threw it in the back of my Dodge 1500 to use as our cooler. We froze 2 18 gallon water jugs to help keep the freezer cool while unplugged.
Of note, the night before we left, a four point buck was across the street from my brother's house (he lives close to the hills) who walk through his neighbours property followed by some does and fawns. I thought "What a great Omen!".
I WAY over packed, but since we planned on having a day camp close to our hunting location, I wasn't too worried about it. I will definitely need to make adjustments in a back country, mobile situation - but that's in the future a ways...
Day 1, Monday: The day before Opening Day
After driving in the rain, we were happy to see that the area we planned to hunt had no other hunters nearby, in fact not many people at all nearby camping or fishing. We quickly set up our tarps, tent, tables, and built a fire from wood we picked from slash piles in neighbouring cut blocks. We were cursing ourselves for not bringing wood from a previous camp area that had a bunch of dry wood. We ate some snowshoe hare stew my bro's wife made the night before - dang, was that ever good! We hit the hay at 9:30pm-ish, alarm set for 4:30am.
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What I learned: 1) Buy a chainsaw (done), 2) bring dry wood in case we come into rain (duh), 3) Snowshoe hare is delicious if prepared right.
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