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Various Pics of camp trailer, the San Juan Mountains, me and my partner, Kelpy
My background includes fifty-three years experience starting with hunting whitetails (both rifle and bow) with my father in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, not far south of the Canadian border. The year was 1973 and I was just twelve years old. I would go on hunting with my dad throughout my teen and college years until I moved to Colorado after graduation where I continued hunting for both deer and elk. I would alternate years, hunting archery season one year and go rifle the next. But I missed numerous seasons due to conflicts with my project load at work. I remember the sacrifice and the strong yearning to be in the woods. That feeling would stick with me for months.
That first year hunting in the West was in 1984 and I was just twenty three. I already had eleven years under my belt when I began my hunting journey as an adult in the best physical condition of my young life. And I did so as a soloist with just a few exceptions. Not that I would have changed anything, but my career in engineering meant that there would be times when I couldn’t breakaway. For me, that was just part of the game if you wanted to hold on to a good job in the mountains of Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah. I hunted big, rough country alone, without the aid of horses or an ATV, and would regularly cover eighteen or twenty miles in a day. For a long time, I was a competitive mountain athlete and was constantly training for an upcoming event or for the simple pleasure of being at the top of my game. Forever waiting for hunting buddies to catch up was not my idea of “fun” and I learned quickly that I enjoyed the solitude far more than the companionship – with the exception of being with my father and later, my nephew when he came of hunting age. Other than those exceptions, I would spend the rest of my hunting days going it alone.
I have hunted in every kind of weather Colorado can serve-up. Snow storms were my favorite. As an accomplished alpine and backcountry skier, I’ve skied hundreds of miles in the backcountry of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming and was more than comfortable in deep snow and temperatures ranging from ten degrees to twenty below. Horizontal rain, sleet, hail were no fun, as was the case on warm days, but they didn’t keep me in camp. In Colorado, archery seasons are nearly a month long, taking place from late August to late September and some years, it doesn’t cool down until a couple of weeks into the season. This meant hiking around at or above treeline shouldering a twenty-five pound pack and sweating through my shirt and hunting pants and having to stop once or twice a day, strip down, and hang my clothes to dry. I’d put on another layer to thwart getting chilled while my clothes were drying. This was just part of staying safe and it’s so dry in Colorado, that the drying process would typically last no longer than twenty minutes. Time for a sandwich and I’d be on my way again. For the first ten, or so, years, I had entire areas pretty much to myself but, sometime in the early 90’s, the Colorado Division of Wildlife, in its infinite wisdom, crammed a two week long muzzleloader season into the last two weeks of archery. Muzzleloading had become a trend to be reckoned with, bringing thousands of additional hunters and their money into the state each fall. While growing in popularity, archery hunters quickly became the minority and with the muzzleloaders growing in such numbers, many of whom were from out of state, I began to feel pressed for space. In came the mega-travel trailers and ATV’s along with groups of hunters ranging from four to a dozen. Many of these guys waited and looked forward to their hunting trips all year long (I couldn’t blame them) and their presence in, what were just a few years earlier, wilderness settings made it feel more like a school playground than a wild place where large, wild creatures roamed freely. Back then, when it was archery only, there were seldom enough archery hunters in a given hunting unit to have any sort of long term impact on the animals that called these places home. Often, I could hunt for days before seeing another hunter. In retrospect, it was the end of an era. A time in my life that I’m thankful to have had. I’m now sixty-four and have no one left except for my eighty-five year old dad who remembers these times in the way I do. He agrees and has stated that, for all of the same reasons, he had it even better than I did, hunting for most of his active years well before the woods were full of people and the sounds of trucks and ATV’s everywhere, and some bonfire party just a few hundred yards from what either of would consider an ideal camp.
Hunting in Colorado and many other Western states has become a huge industry. In a few states, hunting and fishing is the primary breadwinner for the state and it is the means by which many small western towns exist. The woods have become super-saturated with the sheer magnitude of hunters such that the deer and elk have changed their movements in order to avoid the mass onslaught of people roaming the woods with guns and blaze orange every autumn. The elk can no longer be found in or near their historical places, places they called home for centuries during this time of year, which included mating season (also known as “The Rut”). One reason that I’ve always enjoyed bow-hunting over rifle hunting is simply the bow and how quiet it is. Additionally, it makes hunting much more challenging than if one were toting a rifle. With a bow, it’s not unusual to shoot and miss but not scare your intended target in the slightest as opposed to the ensuing chaos a shot from a high-powered rifle can bring. The gun shots are typically followed by the sound of ATV’s and trucks driving around on the network of Forest Service access roads in an attempt to locate the downed or injured animal. Once the shooting starts with muzzleloader season in mid-September, most of the wildlife in any given hunting area all but moves out, often seeking refuge on the private lands below and staying there for several months or, depending on the location and the inclination of the individual landowners, the animals might stay straight on through to the following spring.
Rather than descend en masse with the main herds, splinter groups comprised of fifteen to twenty, up to thirty individuals will move into heavily treed (often referred to as “dark timber”) and steeper and more rugged terrain on north facing slopes (to escape the remaining warm days) until driven downward as the early, heavy snows, and cold temperatures begin to encourage them to move down low enough to survive the winter and any remaining hunters. It is only after hunter-pressure ceases in mid-Dembember that they again move about more feely to get to better sources of food and warmer temperatures associated with dropping a couple thousand feet in elevation.
What I haven’t mentioned but is a tremendously important factor in the survival of the species is the major interruptions that occur during the critical time of breeding season which takes place (approximately) from mid-September and runs through a large portion of October. This is where things get complicated and the long-term impacts from hunting can be seen by comparing the health of the gene pool from forty or fifty years ago to that of today. Because these results vary depending on where a particular herd is being studied, the topic warrants a much more thorough analysis than I can present here but I may make an attempt in future writings. Suffice it to say that there has been an overall deleterious effect due to hunting pressures and differing herd management protocols from state to state. I believe it has gone so far as to become a very big example of animal cruelty. Imagine you and your chosen mate attempting to do just that while being shot at and chased for weeks on end, never afforded the luxury of stopping and remaining in one place for long enough to be successful in this primally driven endeavor. Now imagine what it must be like for a mature, dominant bull elk to marry with as many females as he can, all the while being challenged by other bulls on top of being shot at…for up to two months a year! By the time the rut is over, the cold snows and winds of winter take over while many of these bulls are a hundred pounds underweight and too stressed to survive yet another Rocky Mountain winter.
Unfortunately, after spending thirty years in Colorado, I had the need to relocate with my wife to Central Texas. We found a place far out in the country on a slice of land and live a good life here with our three dogs. My last hunting trip was to Southwest Colorado with my dog, Kelpy, for the whole of archery elk season in 2013. I’d not hunted there in several years and in that brief period of time, hunting as I had known it for so many years had come to an end. I’d hunted this same area in 2010 but it seems that it had been “discovered’ during the three years I’d been gone. I got in there a couple of days before the season opened to find a good, out of the way place to camp, well hidden off the Forest Service access road. I was roughly thirty-five miles in on that road, and the country it serviced was steep and uninviting. My dog and I spent a wonderfully quiet night under the stars. The next day would be a long one, hiking some 20+miles reconnoitering the area. I located some elk about ten miles in from camp and observed them for a couple of hours before heading back. By now, there were a number of other camps within a few hundred yards of ours.
All things considered, this wasn’t too bad. You couldn’t see my campsite from anywhere on the road, and I sensed that no one knew we were in there. The elk I spotted weren’t accessible by road or ATV and were far enough away that it would be unlikely that any of these guys would get that far off the trail I’d used to get within five miles and the next five were gotten only by hiking off-trail. I was well prepared and knew the area well. I spent the next three weeks hiking out in the early morning after I had taken Kelpy on our run, and back an hour or two after dark. As I had expected, the first week was almost too warm to hunt as the animals wouldn’t be moving around much and mostly remaining bedded down. The next week brought torrential rains and I hunted mornings but spent afternoons with Kelpy in my military tailer reading and catching up on rest. I wanted to be ready when the weather broke, which it did for a couple of days when I was able to call-in a couple of smaller bulls. From the tracks leading in and out of the area, I knew there was one big bull in there, amongst a four and a five point and around a dozen cows, spikehorns, and yearlings.
I would get just three days and three opportunities at the medium-sized bulls, and then two days of snow followed. The temperature dropped a good twenty degrees and I hunted through the storm being careful to stay on a perimeter of a couple hundred yards. What I was waiting for was another break in the weather, which came along with eight inches of cold, dry snow on top of mud from the rains, which had saturated the ground. I had just two days left and now that I had my weather and the clock was ticking fast, it was time to employ some more aggressive tactics. I would slip in closer letting out a good close-range bugle and a lost cow chirp. I got some cow chirps in return and could hear what I knew was the big bull approach toward my position, which I changed before he got too close. I had a clean shot at sixty yards but thought I could bring him in closer. I let out some grunts and that lost cow chirp, and that did the job. It was getting dark quickly as he circled a bit while at about fifty yards but much of his body was now obscured by a bunch of deadfall…maybe six or seven downed fir trees. I stayed put, waited for as long as I could before darkness descended. Forty yards but no clear shot. Right about then (this is a situation to always be aware of) I was “made” by a couple of curious cows checking on the lost cow call. I would have heard them were it not for the freshly fallen snow. I don’t believe they even saw me at first but the evening breeze had gone from being in my favor, to swirling just the littlest bit. I’m pretty sure they’d winded me until they saw me draw back in the direction of the bull in case he somehow presented me with a shot. He’d picked his way through the deadfall up to about thirty five yards, turned and ran in the opposite direction, as did the cows. I was crestfallen, with nothing to do but go over it in my mind while making my way uphill and back towards camp. Going for a big bull during archery season is more miss than hit, so the turn of events hadn’t surprised me. While I didn’t beat myself up over it, I was bothered by it enough that instead of using my one remaining day, I decided that I was done for the year. I was exhausted and may well have run into trouble getting an animal out on the off-chance that I did shoot something. It wouldn’t have been a smart thing to do.
A huge saving grace, my forever best friend, Kelpy, was happy to see me stagger back into camp. We embraced for a moment before getting ourselves fed and going on our nightly walk. I’d played it through in my mind on the long and dark hike back to camp. Relative to the circumstances, I had made no mistakes. Don’t get me wrong, I have made a number of mistakes when in-close with large bulls during past archery seasons but had learned something during each of those encounters. Downing a large bull like that one was is no mean feat. So many obstacles to overcome just to have a chance at one. He was a big-bodied six by seven of probably seven or eight years. That’s a long life for a any bull found on public lands during hunting season.
Depending on where you are in the Western US, several things have impacted the relative livelihoods of various wildlife over the many years of hunting and game management practices. Different states manage game animals in different ways and certain states are fairing better than others. While Colorado has the overall largest number of elk that call it home, the herd as a whole is not as healthy as places like Idaho and Arizona, but I’m not an expert on land use. Administering conservation practices against huge revenue generating fish and game activities on millions of acres of land with overlapping jurisdictions between the state wildlife agencies, the USDA Forest Service and the Federal Bureau of Land management) is a huge and highly complicated job. But the statistics taken over many years strongly indicate that some wildlife management practices work far better than others. Otherwise, the health of our country’s deer and elk populations wouldn’t be so different when comparing big game states against each other. The only thing that stands in the way of each state adopting the best overall strategies to maintain healthy individual animals and appropriately sized herds is money. As with most things, there is a strong countering relationship between managing for quality and managing for quantity. In my opinion, Colorado sells far too many elk tags to have a sustainable, healthy herd, and the overall health of Colorado’s elk has been in decline for decades. States that place more emphasis on herd quality don’t sell more tags than their herds can sustain over a long period of time.
Another significant change that I’ve witnessed over the years with elk is the amount these animals are verbally active. Hunters use various calls to get the elk communicating with them in an attempt to call their quarry into shooting range. The most exciting part of calling is in learning how to call a big, mature bull from where he is, perhaps, three or four hundred yards distant and, while continuing to call, use that little bit of time to get yourself situated and prepared to shoot should the opportunity arise. The idea is in getting your bull so focused on fending off this particular challenging bull (you) that he momentarily drops his guard and approaches straight towards you, as you draw your bow and launch a well placed shot. This is probably one of the single most captivating moments in all of outdoor sports, the feeling that you’d just accomplished what you set out to do at the beginning of the season.
During my last few hunting seasons, I began to hear an unusual trend and, by the time this season rolled by, I noticed that the elk were barely “talking”, that there was much less vocalizing than in any of my prior hunting seasons. With so many people calling or attempting to learn, the elk have become much more selective in what they discern as genuine, or false. It should be obvious that the time to learn is well before the season begins. All it takes is one bad call and the elk you’re after may choose to vacate the area, leaving you and your fellow hunters high and dry. There are many types of calls on the market but, in my opinion, reed calls can be the best. You just slide the little disk into your mouth and learn to use it such that you seldom let out a suspicious call. It can take years of practice not only in terms of the technical aspect , but in learning enough about why, when, and how elk communicate to know the when’s and why’s as to your own calling. As gratifying as “talking with the elk” can be, the fact that they’ve all but ceased must have farther reaching implications that don’t bode well for these animals. Imagine the disruption to humankind if we could no longer communicate using verbal language, even if it were limited to a couple of months a year. And that’s assuming they revert back to normal behavior once the combined hunting seasons come to an end. I would guess that that’s not nearly the case.
These things have conspired to make elk hunting much less enjoyable (at least for me) than it was fifteen years ago. It has bothered me enough to call an end to my years as a hunter. For years, affluent hunters have been paying large fees, including the cost of highering a guide and paying for a private lands hunt that they find to be the most desirable. Game processing is typically included. The pay-hunts like these don’t interest me and even if they did, I don’t have the kind on money to afford the associated $5K to $15K, or more, for a tag that would only be good at the game ranch I had chosen. While archery hunts of this nature have their place and have success rates of seventy-five percent, a public lands archery hunt averages around twenty percent. But, for me, I put more emphasis on the quality of the total experience and refuse to pay someone else to take me to the elk and do so enough times that I finally get my bull. I wouldn’t do it if you paid my way.
To have an opportunity like I had just a day before season’s end was a thrill I would not trade for a large bull on an expensive paid hunt. As a wonderful bonus, I had brought along my best friend, my dog, Kelpy, with whom to share the experience. That put my trip over the top! After driving down into Cortez, getting a hotel, cleaning up, and getting a good night’s rest, we were on our way home with just 1,670 miles to go! I am forever grateful for my years of roaming Colorado before it evolved into one big “sacrificial park” (where everyone goes so that other places may remain pristine).
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