I’ll circle back in a minute and explain the title. Whew! My elk and deer hunting has been tough this year.
I was in South Dakota on a deal but made it home to archery hunt the third week of September, which is when I was wanting to hunt.
My youngest daughter was a week overdue the day I got home so of course I couldn’t take off that week.
And the little granddaughter decided to wait another week to show up. Of course, with all that is going on in the world, you can’t much blame her for wanting to stay put for a while!
So, with the above said I was now out of archery season since she ended up not delivering until September 30th.
But no biggee, I’d just rifle hunt. I started off hunting way to low. The first couple of weeks there was no weather at all to drive them down.
I then jumped up higher but still not high enough. We did have some fun though.
My new son-in-law wanted to start deer hunting so we had a good time. As usual you always wish you could have spent more time. We saw some deer but nothing shootable.
I had hunted pretty hard off and on for three weeks now with nothing to show for it. It was now time to kick it up a notch and make something happen!
My buddies Shawn and Orrin Lee were going to have a camp set up and invited me to come up and join them.
Another buddy Matt was also coming up to join us.
I hit camp after Church Sunday and met up with Shawn and Orrin.
They both confirmed that everything was still up high so Orrin and I decided we were going to jump up on top.
We were going to hit the top and go down the ridges checking drainages. About ¼ to 1/3 of the way up we heard a shot and saw a deer come tumbling down the mountain. I don’t know how far it rolled before it stopped. It was steep country.
We went over and talked to the hunter for a few minutes. He was a nice young man named Cody and lived in Nampa. Wel, actually he’s a Marine and had come home to hunt. Of course, we had to ask him if he thought he’d be getting deployed to Israel. After talking a bit, we started climbing again.
No doubt, horses are the way to go when hunting in the mountains. Dash is Shawn's stud and the best mountain horse I've ever rode. he can go all day.
On the way up we veered and hit all of the drainages. It started off rough but the last 2-hours it got really steep. Here’s how steep. I picked up an 18-inch stick to use as a walking stick and 6-inches of it was extended up above my clenched fist. We were crawling on all threes for a good bit of the hike up.
We hiked along the ridge a ways checking drainages on both sides. We then hiked the ridge back towards the West
That’s the bad deal about hiking up that high to hunt. It takes 3-hours to get up and you have to start back down before the afternoon hunt really gets good. The only way to really hunt it is to set-up a spike camp on top.
That way you can roll out of your tent at daylight and be in elk/deer country right away. And then you can hunt right up until dark and only have a 15-minute hike over to your tent.
The mountain was super steep. If we’d of slipped we’d have rolled probably 400-600 yards down the mountainside before piling up on a rock or brush line. It’d taken us about 3-hours to jump up on top. Of course we could make it down a little faster but as steep as the other side was I figured it’d take a good 2 to 2.5 hours.
There was a saddle and four deer came bounding over. I’m betting that it’d probably be a good spot to set and wait for something to cross. It was getting dark by 7:15 so about 4:45 we started heading down.
It was a tough hike coming down. Overall, I think we’d seen something like 16 deer. When we got down near the bottom it got really brushy.
Luckily right as it was getting too dark to see, Orrin found the trail above the river. That would have been a killer plowing through the brush.
We hiked on this trail for a good 20-30 minutes and final got to the trailhead about 8:00-and it was pitch dark.
Luckily Shawn and Matt had seen our flashlight and were waiting at the trailhead to pick us up. Whew, that was a life saver. That saved us another mile hike back to camp. We’d been hiking hard all day and we were both beat.
Now to explain the title to this article. The next morning Shawn thought we ought to ride up to the top on another mountain.
Simple minds are easily confused so we all agreed. This climb wasn’t as steep as yesterday but it was steep. Shawn said we’d have to get off and lead the horse in 3-4 spots.
This is where we have a differing opinion. I would say that we needed to be leading the horses in 6-8 places!
Shawn has some good mountain horses and they can go places I never thought that horses could go. We’ve had numerous horse adventures together. To sum it up in one short story, one time Shawn had asked me to go somewhere or another on a ride.
After a while I merely pointed out that we weren’t on a trail. Shawn said “look behind you. Do you see any tracks? Ok, we’re on a trail”.
During our ride this day I reminded Shawn of the above paragraph. Orrin then said yeah, we’ve been after him for years to write a book titled “Where Elk Don’t go, Shawn Does”. And with that we will close.
Tom Claycomb is a hunting enthusiast and writes a bi-monthly column for Great Basin Sun.