With the results of the LEH coming in, I thought I would share the story of my first Grizzly hunt last spring. I hope it gets any rookies out there motivated.
This was my first grizzly hunt and to be honest I had no clue what to expect and barely knew where we were going. We ventured over the Columbia river and found our MU zone.
I couldn’t find anyone to go with, however I got lucky and my friend came along. He had never shot a gun before or hunted. So we had a day of practice before we headed out.
For the first 5-6 days of the hunt we explored some awesome country. I was told from a few fellow hunters to find the snow line and look for tracks. So that is what we did, we quaded as far as we could and then hiked 5-8km a day. On day three I ran into a mom with two cubs. She got up on her hind legs and ran off with the cubs, I was on my quad approx 15-20 meters away. A very cool experience..
We found some monster griz tracks on day 6 and followed them for 5-7 hours. We never ran into that one, but if we did it may have been the biggest one in the area.
The area was littered with black bears. We would see one every hour. With no luck and only 5 ish days until our tag expired we decided to head back into “town” more like a village and find out some information about the region. We were told of a guy named Tom who is a hunting legend of the area. We went to his house and he showered us with his past kills, the dude is a machine. He gave us some good advice on where to go and we went.
With two days to go we found a massive pile of snow that fell off the mountain. We could only quad so far and had to hike in. My friend was tired, however I wanted to walk in another 500ish meters. I had this gut feeling that I was going to come across something so I took the safety off. As I scuffled through the prickle bushes I came across the last bit of snow. I didn’t see any tracks and was about to give up. Then I heard this loud roar and saw this griz running to the tree line approx 50 meters away. Though I only had seconds to act, from the studying I had done I knew it was most likely a male. I found him in my scope and shot him while he was on the run. I nailed him right through the ribs and later found out my first shot blew out his lung. He kept moving towards the tree line (the strength of these animals is beyond words). It was getting late in the afternoon and I really did not want to go looking for him in the woods, so I let another two rounds fly, but missed as he was hiding behind a snow bank. He finally put his head up and I let one fly and his time expired.
While this is all happening my friend is in shock because he doesn’t know why I am letting rounds off. He honestly thought I was getting mauled and started running my way. To his surprise I was standing over our grizzly.
Now came the fun part. I had only skinned on bear before I took my time (3 hours). We had about a 5 km hike back and a 10 km quad ride. I didn’t have a pack, but we had rope so we tied the hide to a piece of fallen branch and put it on our shoulders. There were a few other groups with LEH tags in our area and they were very surprised at our success!! Felt good.
I am getting a full rug made from Ray Weins. The bear was male and measured approx 6.5 feet. In my opinion we had a successful hunt because of the advice we got from Tom, hard work (not being afraid of long hikes) and a whole lot of luck.
Last Years Grizzly
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