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As promised, I wanted to write a little bit about my recent scout trip with my good friend Matt Hogue. Our goal was to get a spike camp on our backs and head into the area we have tags for and do a little scouting. 2 weeks before on a family camp trip we hung one trail camera on a water hole/wallow. There was a ton of snow up there at the time, and everything was pretty wet - all good news. We were anxious to see what would be on our trail camera as the wallow we hung the camera over seemed to produce a lot of activity in years past.  We got to the trail cam and were happy to see elk. First sequence of pictures were single cows. Then we had a couple of sequences with two then three cows. Finally we got to a day where a small herd of cows were feeding in and around our camera (See last blog post for some of those pics). The good news was we got some pics. The bad news was that not only did we forget batteries, but a storm was moving in pretty quick, and we had another 500 vertical feet to get to where we were planning on doing some scouting. The rain came, we threw on ponchos, and continued onward and upward. We got to a high point where we could glass 2 distinct basins. One was a Western facing and one Southern facing. As soon as we sat down we had 3 bulls up at about 11,000 feet feeding on the Western hill. It was pretty miserable sitting in the rain and glassing, but we pushed through it and the glassing session really paid off. We ended up glassing 76 total elk, and 23 confirmed bulls. Most were in small groups of 5-10 elk. We had one group closer to 11,500 ft of 8 bulls all together. The biggest herd we glassed that was grouped was 26 elk. The rain finally tapered off, and since we already had the tent spiked, we camped on the ridge we were glassing from. 
While I was boiling water, I caught Matt heading over the ridge down from our camp. When I looked up he was giving me some signal that I am still not entirely sure what it meant, but I did abstract out that there was an animal with antlers below him. Matt and I belly crawled with our binos about 50 yards down and found a 4X4 bull with 3 cows with him. That bull hung out at 50 yards from us for about 10 
minutes. He stayed pretty much in the tree line feeding, but eventually came out into the meadow we were above, and gave Matt and I both the chance to range him at 54 yards broadside, and take "make believe" draw actions at him. They finally spooked and blew down the hill, and when we stood up and walked around the plateau we were bellied up on, we found another 9 cows with 5 calves. Pretty cool - all about 100 yards from our tent. Overall a pretty successful trip. We were very happy with the amount of elk (and more specifically bulls) we were seeing, however, when we hiked into some of our typical mule deer sections, we were more than dissapointed. Did not see a single buck on this trip, and only caught a few does bedded here and there. I am afraid this Colorado winter may have hit the deer a little harder than maybe I was originally thinking. Or, maybe the bucks just weren't out and about that day. So, to round out the weekend in "hardcore" fashion, when I arrived home I found a box with the 3 new Stealth Cams I ordered. Since I had to get up at 4:30 AM on Sunday to take my family to the airport, I decided to pack the cameras in my daypack, drive the 3 hours back up the hill, hang 3 cameras, and come back down to round out the 6 hour round trip drive. It will all be worth it if in a couple of weeks we have some better pics of where that "big boy" may be traveling. How is everyone else's scouting coming along? I've seen some really cool trail cam pics on the forums. For the Eastern brethren - do you have stands hung yet? Is it too early? I am interested to hear what you are all doing in July/August to scout your areas. Leave a comment and let me know. PS - Here is my first try at digiscoping. I have a Nikon CoolPix camera that is about 8 years old (and therefore bulky and heavy). I don't have my bracket system in yet, so I just shot these 3 bulls by holding my camera up to the scope. Matt and I were testing out our new spotting scopes. We are both using Nikon Fieldscope III and Matt has the IIIa (which is angled) since he wears glasses. So far so good with the Nikon glass! We'll have more to report later in August as Matt and our good friend John North will further test the scopes as John has drawn a Rocky Mountain Big Horn Sheep tag here in Colorado.
Peace to the nations, Aneal |
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