After spending many days since early May getting out after bears, I was definitely getting frustrated as the only bears I’ve seen so far this season have been while passing through provincial parks or on First Nations land. There also seemed to be a lot less bear sign this year compared to last.
I decided to head up once again to an area I know very well, and has a decent population of bears. I had a partner with me this time, a friend from work that is interesting in getting into hunting but has a wealth of outdoor experience.
We started the drive up to the area in region 3 a bit later than we had hoped but we’re still excited and positive we would connect on a bear.
Once we arrived we ran into some fog in the higher elevations so decided to stick to the lower deactivates spur roads and still hunt our way down slowly hoping to bump into a bear. The first road we picked was absolutely littered with bear scat every couple feet. Without turning up anything in the area for a couple hours, we backed out for a lunch break and knew that we had a good chance of connecting in the evening.
We had lunch and headed back up the mountain. At this point the clouds have lifted and it was still early enough so I decided that we check out another spot I like a bit higher up before we head to the road with all the scat.
I throw my pack on and we begin hiking. This spur road winds up to this beautiful hillside meadow. We scan the meadow over and over and don’t see anything. This meadow drops way down into a gully, and the other side is steep, thick and nasty with lots of blowdown and a partially burned area. So we glass across the gully into the thick stuff and right away we see a beautiful blonde colour phase blackie nestled against a really tall tree that sticks out from the rest.
We start getting super excited, can’t believe we glasses up this bear. The bear was slightly below eye level 200 yards across the gully and had no idea we were there. I took my pack off, laid down prone with my rifle resting on the back. I was rock solid on the bear. It had its head down and was facing away from me so I took my take and just enjoyed watching it, admiring its beauty. Finally the bear raised its head, I aimed for the neck and let the 155g terminal ascent out of my 7mm rem mag do the rest. I saw the bears head drop back down and after that it didn’t move an inch. Dead bear. We waited a few minutes glassing the bear just to confirm it had passed before we started our trek to get to it.
We started our hike by continuing up the road as it wrapped around the gully, with the plan to drop back down once we got to the other side. Thankfully the bear was bedded underneath the only 2 tall trees on that hillside so it was easy to use that as a landmark. We busted our way through the thick hell hole and finally came up to this beautiful bear.
This was only my second big game animal, and the first one I had to pack out. We got to work gutting and quartering. After about 90 minutes we had my pack loaded up and were ready to head out of the hole. That was definitely one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do, but I got it out and just kept telling myself not to stop. Once we got up to the spur road it was smooth sailing to the truck. My body is definitely feeling it today!
Extremely grateful for this beautiful bear. Once we got back to the cabin we dried up the heart in olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic and shared it. It was great!
Thanks for reading.
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Re: First bear harvest
Originally Posted by ElectricDyck
