Sit down, grab a cold one. This is going to be a very long one. I wrote this up a few months ago but have finally gotten it together to post it with pictures.
It all started with my Dad and a friend saying we should enter LEH for moose again this year. So myself, Dad, my brother, Marc, and friend, Alex, all put in for moose, but up in Region 7. We had been drawn in 2014 for region 3 but that had been a lost cause and a total bust. We clearly had no idea what we were doing and were completely winging it with zero intel, other than a family friend that has property in the area and gets a moose walking across his property every so often. (Dad, Alex and I have been hunting together numerous times, as a group with Alex, occasionally with different friends as our fourth, for 9 years on and off without any successful harvests together. Some of us have had success, but not all of us together. It has been fun, infuriating and frustrating over the years.)
Fast forward to this year, 2022. My plans for this year had been to really focus on whitetail. We live in the lower mainland but I had put cameras in the Okanagan and found a good spot full of whitetails in 2021 and this year there were tons of big guys around. Honestly, I was hoping that we wouldn't get drawn. I even laughingly told my wife that I knew we WOULD get drawn precisely because I didn't want us to. I wanted to learn and figure out these whitetails, maybe get an antlerless one in October and just generally spend time up there exploring the potential of the area and hanging out in my treestand and blind, possibly with my oldest child. Clearly, that was not meant to happen. I don't remember if I had received an email or saw on HBC that the LEH results were out. So, I took a few minutes at work to sign in online and see if we had been drawn......well, it looked like my whitetail plans were going out the window because we had been drawn and were heading to Region 7 for Any Bull Moose!
I messaged the group and informed them of our success. An HBC member had posted up his wall tent and stove setup this past spring and after sending the post to my dad, he went and bought the whole setup. A two week moose hunt in the bush in a wall tent has been his dream for many years. It just so happened that we were finally going on a real moose hunt with that setup this year. It was a fortuitous purchase and we were excited. Unfortunately, even with help from “parrothead” and his crew, we could not get that diesel stove to run. Try as we might, we couldn’t make it happen. So we settled by bringing my friend’s Buddy Heater. There were a flurry of messages on our group chat, gear talk and planning, videos of how to moose call, etc. The summer was full of planning and booking time off for the first two weeks of October.
I saw Marc a couple days later and Marc said, “You know we’re going to kill the moose, right? You and I.” I laughed because I had been about to say the same thing, jokingly of course.
E-scouting would have to do for this trip, even though I had initially been aggressively serious about doing a scouting trip. The prohibitive cost of fuel this past summer didn’t make a scouting trip feasible. In order to access our drawn MU, we had to pass through another MU no matter where we wanted to drive in from. There were a variety of factors that went into choosing our MU, one of which was the fact that it could only be accessed through another MU. My thought was that people really don’t want to drive far from comfort, since most will stay in town or like to be close to town or in lodges, and we would have less competition for the draw and for the actual hunt. Using iHunter, I marked multiple locations and kindly had some intel for access and camping and timing sent to me by “Kr999” and rut info from a thread on the MU from HBC. I had also planned on calling “Srupp”, but was just too busy. I did have some PMs with him and picked up some Mare-in-Heat synthetic cow moose urine and some tampons for application.
St. Hubert is the patron saint of hunters. Marc and I were talking a few days before the hunt and Marc said, jokingly ” So, Luke. I had a chat with St Hubert.” “Oh yeah?,” said I . “Yeah. You’re going to kill a moose on day 7 and I’m going to kill one on day 9.” “Day 7 of the trip or day 7 of actual hunting?,” I asked. “Day 7 of actual hunting,” he said. I responded, “So day 9 of the trip it's me and on day 11 of the trip it's you?”. “Yep”, he smiled. We both laughed.
Day 1
At long last, the appointed time for departure finally arrived. Our plan was to be gone for 14 days, departing my house at 3:30am in Mission and arriving in Vanderhoof sometime around 1-2pm and then heading towards our MU. Departure ended up being delayed until 4am but we made it; Marc and I in my truck, Dad and Alex in Dad’s suburban. South of Ashcroft, as the sun was breaking above the mountains, Marc and I saw two mulie bucks just off the highway coming out of the corn fields. A couple of beauty four point trophies with the morning sun shining off of their dark racks. It was exciting. Marc and I hadn’t spent a lot of time together over the last number of years and it was great to spend time together for hours on end listening to music, laughing and talking.
With a stop for fuel, breakfast and some ingredients for lunch in 100 Mile House, we all continued our cruise North. Coming in to Prince George, we turned towards Vanderhoof, still thinking that Dad and Alex were ahead of us.
Marc and I were cruising to Vanderhoof and had messaged the other two that we were a few minutes out when we received a message back saying they were just leaving Prince George. We looked at each other and thought Dad and Alex were just kidding with us. They had stopped for lunch in Prince George and then were stopped on the highway by a work crew for 20 minutes which put them 45 mins behind us. We didn’t believe them and told them so. They said, “Ok” and hung up. Alex then sent us his live location and we were very confused how they had ended up so far behind us. Meanwhile, Dad and Alex were confused how they had ended up so far behind us since they had thought they were way ahead of us. Marc and I reluctantly decided to believe them and went to get some pizza for lunch at Cozy Corner Pizzeria.
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