Nathan's Blog

Heart Rate Monitor, a step backward?

2012-01-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm starting to get into this running stuff a little too much I guess. Reading some different information, and checking my heart rate on some treadmills I've been using working out in hotels when I'm on the road made me decide to go out and get a heart rate monitor to help me make my running more effective. I was really surprised to find out the results.

According to all the charts at my age I should have a 177 max heart rate, but I've managed to get a 187 recorded after doing some sprints immediately following a 6 mile jog so I'm going with the 187 as my max heart rate. To keep it in the aerobic zone I need to be between 131 (70%) and 150 (80%). Anything over that is the anaerobic zone and if you want to build endurance you are supposed to only go there if you are doing interval training and stuff like that. Otherwise most of the stuff I've read said to focus almost all of your running in the aerobic zone.

I had built up to where I felt like a 10:00 pace was a cake walk. My last big run before the heart rate monitor I ran in and out of the canyon 8.38 miles at a 9:56 pace and felt great. I even ran a 6 mile run on flat ground in an 8:56 pace and felt good. Now that I have a heart rate monitor it is telling me that I can't run anything over about 11:10 pace on flat ground without getting my heart rate in the anerobic zone. I ran my first long run yesterday with the heart rate monitor and jogged/shuffled along at a snails pace to keep my heart rate under 150. Going up the hills I had to switch to a brisk walk because I couldn't run at all and keep my heart rate under 150. Ended up going 10.2 miles with an average heart rate of 147bpm, but my pace was a whopping 11:32 overall!

I was pretty surprised at how quickly my heart rate responded to different paces and especially elevation gains. Even just a slight rise could bring my heart rate up and running down the hills I should have run even faster than I did because my heart rate dropped really fast even though I picked up the pace to 10:30ish going down the hills.

What I'm really hoping is that this won't take very long before I can at least get back to a 10:00 pace with my heart rate under 150. Some stuff I'm reading says that you can shave time off pretty quickly and other stuff says it takes years. I'm a sucker for gizmos and think it is really neat, but was surprised to find that even at my snails pace back when I was running 10:00 miles I was working out too hard according to the heart rate zones.

I'm going to stick with the heart rate training for at least a month or two and hopefully I'll start seeing results and end up with a healthier heart too.

That's it for now. Nathan

New well house, well kinda.

2011-12-20T18:04:00.000-08:00

Well, (pun intended) our well house has been looking pretty sad for the last year or two and really had gotten to the point that it was going to have to be repaired soon so it didn't fall down and break something. I have seen the fake rocks that people use to cover up items in their yard but hadn't ever seen one large enough that it would actually cover the well and pressure tank until on a recent flight looking over the skymall magazine. Once I got home I did some looking and there were actually a couple different sizes that would cover everything up. I decided to go with the one that would be large enough to cover up what it needed to without being way too large (the largest one I found was 5' tall and 6' square).

I was able to spend Saturday afternoon knocking down the old well house and swapping it out for the new hollow rock.

Here's the old well house. You can see it was in pretty bad shape.

Here's the well house with the new rock sitting next to it.

Here's the well house after I've started knocking it down. It came apart pretty easy, but getting the roof off without dropping it on the pressure tank or well was a little tricky. You can see how tall the pressure tank was compared to the height of the wall of the well house and also how tall the post is that had the electrical connections.

All the walls knocked down and starting to get them loaded in the ranger. In the last 2 pictures you can see the house in the background and see how odd it was to have a well house sitting out there so far from everything.

The rest of the debris loaded up on the ranger. It squatted down a little bit under the load but it actually has the same payload capacity as a 1/2 ton pickup.

Here's a test to see if the rock is actually going to work. I was for sure going to have to change up the way the electrical connections and cut the post down to get it to fit.

Electrical connections rearranged and the rock is ready to go.

Everything in place. Again, you can see the house in the background. The rock is actually held down by 3 stakes for now. Hopefully they will hold up to the wind. That was one consideration when getting the smaller rock, it should do better with less surface area to catch the wind.

One more look from a little distance. The rock is still noticeable if you are looking for it, but nothing like the old well house was. I haven't decided if I'm going to plant a few shrubs around it to help it blend in or just leave it as is.

I don't think anyone really cares other than me, but I really think the new rock looks a lot less out of place than the old well house did.

Ended up salvaging most of the timber and turning it into firewood. My chainsaw got a workout and I did too when I ended up spliting a bunch of wood with an axe. It's probably going to burn pretty quick being dry pine, but it should be easy to get it started. Spliting wood was actually fun and I for sure got a workout doing it.

That's it for a Saturday afternoon project.

Nathan

Eli is 5!

2011-12-15T12:21:00.000-08:00

Can you believe that Eli turned 5 yesterday!!! It is amazing how fast time flies!

We had a little party for him at Chucky Cheese before church last night.

He was really happy with his Mac truck that he got.

He actually smiled for a few of the pictures!

He was pretty excited to get to see everyone and with the presents he received.

Thanks everyone that was able to come!

Nathan

A few pictures from the Toys for Tots Race.

2011-12-14T07:21:00.000-08:00

Here's a few pictures from the Toys for Tots race last Saturday. The running club has a few volunteers who take pictures during the race and then they post them on their website so I copied the ones of Cathy and I and am posting them here.

This first picture I actually took myself on my phone as we were getting ready for the race to start. Nice dreary morning!

The remaining photos are courtesy Susan Caudle and the West Texas Running Club.

Here's the start of the race. This is as close as Cathy or I got to the leaders.

Cathy making the turn onto the bridge for the first time.

Here's me coming over the bridge for the 2nd time. Almost done with the first 2 mile loop.

Not 100% sure when this picture was taken. I was focused on running!

This is at the finish. I was actually ahead of some people and it almost looks like I am running instead of jogging!

Cathy at the finish. She finished ahead of some people too!

That's pretty much it for the pictures. Kind of nice to not have to worry about trying to take them on your own.

I'm a bit surprised at how much I have enjoyed going over the race results and looking at the pictures and where I finished in my category and things like that. I already signed us up to be members of the running club for 2012 and signed us up for the first race in January. It's only 5 miles, but hopefully the weather won't be too bad!

That's it for now. Nathan

Running....

2011-12-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

Well, hunting season is over and I'm still trying to stay in shape. My last day of active hunting was November 5th and I'm still getting out and running about 3 times a week. I still don't think I actually would be able to say that I enjoy running, but I sure do like the results that it provides. According to the runkeeper program I've burned over 67,000 calories this year jogging or hiking! According to the stuff I've read, it takes 3,500 calories burned to lose a pound so if I hadn't been working out and ate the same amount of food I would be about 20 pounds heavier right now!

One thing that I'm going to start trying to do is run in some of the local running club races that they have each month. I've run in a couple 5K races at LCU and one in Austin and one in downtown Lubbock over the last 10 or 15 years, but they were races that Cathy was running in already and she convinced me to go with her. This was the first time I actually felt ready to run in a race and the first time I actually pressed the issue of going. Cathy did mention it to me, but I lined up a baby sitter and decided that we were going.

It was just a 4 mile race, but it was a cross country race at Mae Simmons park and that is one place in Lubbock that actually has some hills. Not much compared to most places, but for folks around here they are memorable. I mentioned to a few of my co-workers that I was going to run at Mae Simmons and they groaned with memories from running it in high school. I felt like 4 miles would be a cake walk, but they had me a little concerned about the course.

Okay, enough lead in! We ran 4 miles and it was easy! I ended up running it in a 9:15 pace and Cathy ran it in a 9:35 pace. I didn't feel like I was pushing it very hard at all, I treated it as a training run and just tried to keep my pace. It was a little different than running by myself or with Cathy as there were 125 other folks out there doing the same thing. I ended up taking 62nd which was pretty much smack dab in the middle of the pack. Cathy finished in 71st.

Here's a picture from runkeeper showing the route and my splits.

We did a 2 mile loop twice to get to the 4 miles. The graph looks pretty consistent for each loop on the elevation. It was actually a pretty decent elevation gain for around here anyway.

In retrospect I probably could have run quite a bit faster, but since it was my first race when I was actually in shape I just didn't know. I ended up running another 6 miles yesterday and decided to push it a bit on the last mile just to see how I would do and was surprised that I was able to run the last mile in an 8:17 pace and actually broke an 8:00 pace for the last 1/4 mile or so. That was after running 5 miles at a 9:30 pace.

Just last week I ran a nice flat 6 mile route at the house and actually beat a 9:00 pace on it.

My splits were really close on that run with my fastest mile at 8:48 and my slowest mile at 9:04. It was a MUCH nicer day than yesterday though.

I've been tracking all of my running and hiking with the runkeeper program and it is showing that I'm up to 388 miles for the year. 229 of that is running and 153 of that is hiking with 6 miles on the elliptical thrown in too. I really didn't get started on running to get in shape until May and I've actually averaged 31 miles of running over the last 6 months. I'm hoping to get in 400 total miles by the end of the year and would like to get to 250 miles of running.

I'm still very slow compared to any real runners, but I'm closing the gap. Looking back at my first 6 mile run this year back in June I have cut my pace by over 2 minutes per mile! I the same route in an 11:18 pace and had to walk twice. I was beat when I was done and don't think I got anything else done the entire day. Last week I ran it in an 8:56 pace and felt great when I was done. That's over 14 minutes faster over the same 6 miles in just over 6 months of working out!

I'm sure I'm going to get to the point of diminishing returns pretty soon, and when it all comes down to it I'm perfectly fine being the slow big guy out there plodding along, but it is nice to see some results anyway. I'm setting a goal to run a 1/2 marathon in 2012 so I can't quit now.

Being in shape is really nice, I guess the time spent running is worth it.

That's it for now, Nathan

Mistaken Identity.

2011-11-29T12:09:00.000-08:00

Well, I’m a little late getting this posted, but I was able to sneak down to my hunting property in Fisher county for a Friday night, Saturday morning hunt last week.

A guy on another hunting forum is working on a solar/lunar type forecasting calendar that also takes into account local weather conditions. Here’s a link to his website - http://ranulos.com You just put in the nearest zip code to where you will be hunting and it projects a graph for the next six days based on the long term weather forecast. Anyway, I plugged the zip code nearest my hunting property in there and it showed that Friday evening was going to be an excellent day for hunting. I needed to go down to check on things anyway so I figured I would try to get in a quick hunt while I was at it.

I took the afternoon off work and hitched up the travel trailer and hauled it down to the property, backed it into its spot and headed off to my big blind on top of the hill. It was a little windy and it was going to be a full moon, but a cold front was heading in and I was hoping to get in on some movement from that.

No such luck. In the 4 years I’ve owned the property I’ve only sat in that particular blind and completely struck out without seeing a single animal one other time, but I didn’t see a thing that evening even if the fancy ranulos software said it was an excellent evening for a hunt. It sounds like the guy is really working on a good program, but for now it doesn’t seem to fail proof.

The program showed that the next morning was not going to be a good day to hunt, but I was down there and wasn’t going to pass up a chance to hunt. I was in the blind an hour before sunrise and watched the world wake up from my hill top view. Always a great thing. The wind was blowing a bit and the sun came up and nothing was moving. I did see some quail, but I was chalking up my complete strike out of seeing anything else to the fire that burned my place up back in May. I had been keeping my protein feeder filled all summer and there were deer eating at it, but at 12:00am and 4:00am and never during the daylight. I figured they were bedding far away from my property where the fire wasn’t as bad and moving to and from my place to eat at night and I was going to be out of luck this year.

I was going to sit for another couple hours, but figured it was pointless then out of no where I spot a nice 3 ½ year old 9 point about 150 yards to the south of the blind. I was surprised I hadn’t seen him earlier as with the fire I had thought I would be able to see anything within 300 yards because the brush was basically all gone. He was a nice buck, but not a monster and for sure had a few years of growth before he would reach his full potential. I’d had pictures of him on my trail cameras for the last couple years and I decided I was going to pass on him. I watched him for 30 minutes as he made a complete semi-circle around me. For the anti-baiting folks, I watched him walk within 50 yards of my protein feeder then walk right by two different spin feeders that had spun out some corn earlier that morning without even slowing down. He was for sure more interested in looking for does than looking for corn laying on the ground.

He was gone for a few minutes and then I spotted another buck about 150 yards to the East. I watched him a little bit and reached for my rifle. I was pretty sure that it was “Stubby”, a mature buck that I passed on last year and regretted it the rest of the season. I watched him a little and then a doe showed up and he chased her a bit. One thing I noticed was that his tarsal glands were not dark at all and the 3 ½ year old buck I had watched earlier had extensive tarsal staining on his back legs to the point that they were nearly black. Looking at him he was much bigger than the doe he was chasing and his antlers looked very similar to Stubby from the year before so I decided to take him.

Here's a picture of "Stubby" from last year:

He was right at 100 yards and it was an easy shot. I squeezed the trigger and he jumped and kicked out his back legs and I knew it was a good hit. He ran off about 100 yards and then slowed down and looked back. The doe was still around and she started walking off and he started following her. I decided I better shoot again and as soon as he stopped I shot again and hit him in the front right leg but it was low. The doe took off and he followed right behind her again. They actually came closer to me so evidently they had no clue where the shots were coming from. He stopped about 150 yards broadside and I decided I needed to keep shooting. I shot again and he went down. Somewhere in there I shot 1 more time and remember him jumping and kicking again but I can’t remember exactly where it fits in the sequence of events. At some point I thought I must just be missing, but it sure sounded and looked like I hit him with each shot.

I was pretty shocked to have 4 shots at a whitetail with my 7mm Mag with all shots taken at a stationary deer under 200 yards away. I waited a bit and got my stuff together and then walked over to where he was at and was surprised to see that the deer laying on the ground wasn’t Stubby. At first I thought he must be a 2 ½ year old buck based on how small his antlers were, but based on his body size, tooth wear, and the mass of the antlers I’m pretty sure he was a 3 ½ year old now. Either way it was clearly a case of mistaken identity, this was not Stubby, but probably one of his sons.

Here's a picture of me with the buck I shot.

The buck I had passed on earlier in the morning had much larger antlers, but I had passed on him because he was too young and then turned around and shot another buck that was probably the same age but had smaller antlers! Oh well, in theory I guess I could look at him as a management buck because he really had limited potential to grow much bigger antlers and the buck I passed on earlier in the morning should be a really nice buck next year.

Examining him as I skinned and quartered him I could see where I had hit him 3 times. The one that was low on the front leg wasn’t fatal but both of the other shots were. Then when I boned him out I found another hole in the front shoulder blade that I think might have been the 4th shot. I may have hit him each time, he just didn’t think it was time to go down.

I was lazy and took him to get butchered again and ended up with 59.3lbs of boneless meat off of him. If you do that math that would mean that he weighed somewhere around 180lbs on the hoof, so he was a decent sized deer for around here from a body size perspective, just not from an antler perspective.

So my hunting season is over it looks like. Not sure I’ll get a chance to do any trapping or anything else. I could shoot a doe, but I’m going to let my friend Ben hunt on my place if he wants and let him shoot whatever he wants, doe, big buck, little buck, whatever.

That's it for now. Nathan

2011 New Mexico Mule Deer

2011-11-08T11:41:00.000-08:00

Well, as forthcoming as I was about the exact location of where I hunted elk this year in New Mexico, I'm going to be the exact opposite in talking about where I hunted for mule deer. Unlike my elk hunt, there is still a chance I might be able to draw a tag for deer hunting in the same place next year and I don't want to reduce those odds of drawing any more than they already are going to be with the change in the New Mexico hunting laws next year.

After my New Mexico elk hunt went down to the last day, I didn't know if I was going to be able to spend as much time as I was planning on for my mule deer hunt. I had told myself that with the changes in the law and my drawing odds for this hunt going from about 40% to probably down to as low as 10% in future years that I needed to hunt the entire week and hold out for a monster, but I saw this guy and thought he looked big enough and decided that both the family and I would be better served with me tagged out and home instead of spending the next 5 days hunting.

I woke up at 5:30 and left out in the dark at 6:00 heading to where I shot my buck last year. I thought they had a good spot where I had jumped several deer everytime I had been there and expected the same this year. I got there right at shooting light and was surprised to only see 3 does hanging out in the sagebrush tucked in out of the wind. They are very hard to see and without scanning carefully with binoculars I would have never picked them out. I had jumped 5 deer just before shooting light on my way in but they were all does and a small forkhorn. The big groups of deer I had seen in this spot last year were somewhere else this year.

I watched for a while to see if anything else was moving, but everything seemed bedded down already and I decided to start moving. In the sandhills my hunting style is to try to get to a vantage point and see things moving at sunrise and sunset and then just keep moving the rest of the day and see if I can catch some deer bedded down out of the wind. The wind was picking up with gusts up to 30mph so it wasn't looking like a super pleasant day to be out walking the hills. As I was heading out I found a nice shed antler that was still in pretty good shape for this late in the year. It was pretty respectable, although the back tine wasn't forked where it should have been, but that is fairly common in this area.

I spotted another group of 4 does and they moved on off to the East so I followed them but tried to angle around where I would have the wind in my favor. The wind was pretty steady out of the southwest so I was trying to walk diagonally into the wind instead of having it blowing behind me.

I was up to about 6 miles on the boots by this time and trudging through some sand going to another area with a bunch of shinnery oak that looked like it might be promising. The area I was in didn't have any hills to speak of, but just a bunch of ups and downs maybe 10 to 15 feet of elevation. As I was trudging along I spotted a medium sized buck looking at me from about 50 yards away. He wasn't anything I wanted to shoot on opening morning so I didn't really try to be sneaky and pulled up my binoculars to get a really good look at him. About that time another buck stood up beside him and then another beside him and both of them were pretty good bucks and by the time I was able to pull the rifle off my shoulder and get it pointed in their direction there was about 25 deer making a bee line directly away from me. There were 2 nice bucks in the group and I couldn't figure out which was the better buck, but I was thinking either of them were probably shooters.

The group never offered a decent shot opportunity, but they weren't terribly spooked since I didn't go running after them or shoot at them so I decided to just try to keep going after them. A group of 5 does got split off from the main group and I was able to somewhat keep them in sight every 10 or 15 minutes while following them.

A mile or so later I was getting into the shinnery oak and just happen to catch a glimpse of a buck making his way to bed down in the shinnery. I put the sneak on him and got to within 25 yards before the game was up. He really didn't have a clue I was there, but I sat up a bit and let him see me while I tried to snap a couple pictures with my little point and shoot camera.

Not the best picture, but considering I was using a $100 point and shoot camera I thought it turned out pretty well and gives you a pretty good feel for how close I got to him before he decided to leave. Was a pretty fun little stalk.

I watched him go over the hill and then followed after him. I was trying to figure out if he was part of the larger group that just got separated, or just happened to be out there by himself. I then saw the group of 5 does again and thought they might be just the stragglers. I moved around some, saw the smaller buck again and then kept on walking the general direction I'd been headed the last several miles. I pulled my shooting sticks out of my backpack and was ready for some action. Just a little farther and I saw a large group of does. I didn't see the bucks with them, but this had to be the same group I had been chasing. Not sure if they saw me, but they were headed out to the south about 200 yards in front of me. The group got spread out and I saw the bucks coming down a hill a little farther away. This was the same group with the 2 large bucks in it.

I got sat down and put my rifle on my shooting sticks and got ready. They were all bunched up and there wasn't a chance for a shot and they were still moving. Last year I had carried my cow elk call with me and I had made some cow calls and gotten the deer to stop for me, but I had forgotten it this morning. I don't remember what I said, but I just screamed out a "hey", or something like that and the entire herd slowed to a stop and started looking at me. I have my rifle zeroed at 275 yards and I felt like they were pushing 300 yards away and still bunched up but I got a quick opening at the buck that I decided I wanted held right on him and pulled the trigger. Whack! It was a hit. The deer started running again, but the buck was struggling and getting left behind. He didn't go down so I chambered another round and aimed and fired again. The 2nd shot was a clean miss behind him. I hadn't compensated for the strong wind and missed him completely. I chambered another round and prepared to shoot again and he spun around and went down before I pulled the trigger. The other deer were still making their way over the next hill but he was down for the count.

I got my gear together and started over to where I saw him go down. I probably should have waited a while, but I had my rifle ready just in case he tried to get up. I got over to where he was and after looking for a minute or so I found him in some brush. He was still breathing, but I really didn't have a clean shot in the brush so I debated on what to do. He didn't seem to be suffering, but I didn't know where I had hit him so I decided I needed to put him down for good with a heart shot. I was less than 10 yards from him and had been watching him for a couple minutes and even saw him blink a few times, but as I moved around to get in front of him he saw me and jumped to his feet, turned around and started running directly away from me all in one quick movement. I pulled my rifle up to shoot him, but I had left my scope on maximum power and couldn't get him located quickly. He was obviously shot very far back as his left hind leg was broken. I hadn't compensated for the wind on the first shot either and it had pushed the bullet much farther back than where I was aiming.

He wasn't moving very fast and I didn't want to shoot him from behind again so I let him go. I looked where he had been laying down and was surprised to see very little blood. He ran about 100 yards up to a fenceline and laid back down. I snuck over to him again and this time was ready. I had my scope backed off to it's lowest setting and I got up on my knees about 25 yards away from him and when he stood up I shot him just behind the shoulder and he went down hard. I watched him and he was really struggling to breath. He was having a hard time holding his head up, but he just didn't want to die. I went ahead and chambered another round and shot him again, this time a little closer to the shoulder and a heart shot instead of a lung shot. He died right away on that shot.

That was the first time in a long time that the animal didn't die right away before I got close to them and it was pretty tough watching him from that close as he struggled to live. I'm not sure what I should have done differently, probably the big thing would have been to put my scope on the lowest power as I walked closer right at the start. Also I should have compensated for the wind better, it was a fairly long shot and the wind was blowing pretty hard, I didn't even think of it as I pulled the trigger and that resulted in a poorly placed shot right from the start.

Anyway, he was down and recovered and I was happy with the end result. As I started looking him over I realized that his left antler was a very close match to the shed that I had found earlier in the day. I put it up next to his antler and the resemblance was very strong. I would put about 95% odds that it was his shed antler from the year before. The first decent shed in 3 years that I found in the sandhills and it turns out to more than likely to be a match for the deer I end up shooting. Pretty cool.

Here's a few of the best pictures. It's always tough taking timed pictures off your backpack, but the wind had actually picked up and was now gusting over 40 mph. It actually blew the camera off the backpack several times before it was all said and done. I think the pictures still turned out decent though.

Here's a couple more pictures.

I scored him out and he looks a lot better than he actually scores. He lost a couple inches because his inside spread was more than his main beam, and loses 6 or 7 inches because he is missing his G3. Oh well, he looked good so I shot him. He was running with a buck that was shorter and narrower, but he had all his tines and would have probably scored better but I'm a sucker for the big tall frames. His G2's were both over 15".

The wind was miserable getting him cut up and ready to pack out. I hadn't done a good job sharpening my knifes after the elk hunt so that wasn't helping things either. The sand started blowing and it ended up close to a full blown sand storm before it was all said and done. Sand was blowing in my eyes, small sand dunes started building up around where I had set my pack, and worst of all it was blowing onto the meat while I was getting the deer quartered up. There was sand everywhere and sand burrs too. Ended up taking me a full hour to get him quartered up and I didn't end up saving the cape because I was just ready to get it done and get out of there.

According to the GPS it was 4 miles back to the truck but only 2 miles to a county road farther east so I talked my friend who was letting me park my trailer at their farm into driving over to pick me up. The only drawback was that what would have been a 6 mile walk was about a 20 mile drive so it didn't save a lot of time but it was going to save me 4 miles carrying out the deer. I loaded 1/2 the meat in my pack along with everything I already had in there and headed out to the road. My friend met me and we went back to get ice and the coolers out of my truck and walk back to get the last load.

Here's a picture of me carrying out the last load. It was half the meat plus the head. I really like my Eberlestock pack, it has now hauled out parts of 4 elk and 2 full deer in the last 2 years and done a great job.

When it was all said and done I ended up with 13 miles on the boots for the day according to the GPS. Kind of surprising was that it said I had 1,800' of elevation gain for the day as well. The graph looked like a heart monitor with constant the up down, up down, up down, of the sandhills. It seemed like a pretty easy day compared with most of the days that we were elk hunting though.

I think that about covers it. Not sure when or if I'll be able to spend much time hunting whitetails down on my property in Fisher county, but I'm hoping to get a couple days in at least. Season goes through the first week of January so maybe I'll get a few chances at it.

That's it for now. Nathan

2011 New Mexico Elk Hunt - Urraca WMA

2011-11-07T11:03:00.000-08:00

I actually already posted this all on one of the hunting forums that I frequent live as it was happening (for the most part anyway), but I probably should get it posted on my blog so I can keep up with everything all in one place. For the most part I'm just going to copy and paste, so I might have some past vs. present tense gramatical errors, but please bear with me. It's also going to be a novel.

My friend Ben went with me, he's about 15 years younger than me, so I'm counting on him to help pack some loads out hopefully if we get lucky. He was with me on my New Mexico elk hunt last year and was dumb enough to sign up to go back with me again this year. Went grocery shopping and ended up buying $185 of junk food pretty much, but based on last year's New Mexico hunt I know we will be too tired to do any cooking when we get back to camp so the only thing we are going to have to heat up to eat is we bought a few cans of soup for evening meals.

I have a packer lined out if I get one on the ground too far back, and I talked to him on the phone today and he said that the 3rd hunt week is going on right now and pretty much everyone is striking out and going home early. Most are saying they haven't even seen any animals. I'm going to be hunting the Urraca WMA and it's only 13,000 acres so it's not like you can really go somewhere else if the animals aren't there so sounds like most folks are just packing it in early. This sounds like both good news and bad news to me, I picked this unit and these hunt dates based on drawing odds and pretty good success rates the last several years, but last years success rates came out after I already drew my tag and the 3rd hunt ended up with a 70% success rate last year while the 4th hunt (the date of my hunt this year) ended up with a 10% success rate last year. With the 3rd hunt date being a bust this year, maybe that will mean that my hunt dates will be better. Some weather is supposed to be hitting tomorrow that will hopefully help to change things around there.

I setup a photobucket mobile account so I was able to take pictures and upload them while I'm there as well if the cell coverage cooperated which it didn't very often.

I've been working out pretty hard over the summer and fall and hopefully I'll be ready to tackle the steep elevation gains waiting for me this weekend. I'll be camped right around 8,000' and I expect to be working up in the 9,500' - 10,000' elevation range to be into the elk and I might even end up over the 11,000' mark if we end up having to work all the way to the back of the WMA.

I've never stepped foot or even laid eyes on this property before, everything I know about it has come from talking to folks on the phone and looking at maps and google earth. I feel like I know it pretty well from the time spent looking at it on google earth though!

Here's a overhead look at the WMA.

Here's some elevation shots from google earth. North side - looking East. The designated campsite is that little brown patch to the right side of the road before you get to the base of the mountains.

There are 10 bull elk tags for this 5 day hunt as well as 10 mule deer tags for a hunt going at the same time. There is no motorized travel allowed other than driving into the designated parking spot and there is a road that runs north and south about 1/2 mile to the west of the mountain front. There are several old logging roads, but they are off limits to anything but horses and people on foot.

Here's the center - still looking East. If you look right in the middle at the base of the mountain you can see a small pond that we ended up hunting over one morning.

Here's the South side - still looking East. This is where I expected to spend most of my time hunting based on looking things over on google earth, but when it was all said and done we only hunted here one evening.

Here's the end result of our hunting excursions. We scouted one day to try to help get us acclimatized to the altitude and then hunted for four full days and then killed my elk the last morning so we were there for 5 1/2 days. We covered a total of 51.4 miles and had a total of 12,450' of elevation gain over the time we were there. Here are the tracks downloaded from my GPS and placed on the map showing where we went. The long straight lines on the left of the picture aren't real tracks but where I turned the GPS off at camp and then back on again when we were at a trailhead. Also a lot of the tracks were out and back and just show up as one line on the map, but we covered both directions. You can figure out the real tracks pretty easy though. We felt like we pretty much got the area covered when it was all said and done!

The first real test of the trip was just getting from our house out to pavement with our trailer! It rained pretty good overnight before the day we were leaving and then was still raining the day we were leaving. With 2 miles to get to pavement pulling a 29' travel trailer I got a little bit worried whether I was going to make it or not. Here's the truck hitched up to the trailer in front of the house.

Here's a shot looking back on the county road once I got the trailer to pavement!

We pulled into the campsite just after midnight and then did a little bit of scouting on foot trying not to wear ourselves out, but get a feel for the area at the same time. Found a little raghorn elk shed while we were out looking around.

Came across this crazy looking bear sunning himself on a rock. Almost looked like he was stuck or something. We got about 150 yards away and he looked at us, but didn't ever get up.

Here's a couple other pictures from the day we spent scouting.

Some very pretty country. Put in a total of 7 miles and 1,550' elevation gain when it was all said and done on the day spent scouting. We didn't carry our packs though so it seemed pretty easy going. We saw 2 cow elk and a small raghorn right at sunset, but other than that it was pretty slim pickings on elk sign.

Of course the guys who just hung around at camp saw 3 nice bulls and a dozen cows from the camper while we were out scouting. They all have deer tags, so we decided to go after them opening morning.

Got where we wanted to be about 15 minutes before shooting light, and had about a dozen cows in on us right before daylight. Several were less than 50 yards away. Saw what I'm assuming were the 3 bulls from the night before getting shot at by folks in 3 or 4 different vehicles as they crossed the road heading our way. They were well over a mile away when we saw them. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I saw they got off 20 shots at those bulls as they crossed the road. There were actually 4 bulls and they ended up shooting 1 of them, and maybe wounded another. We moved along the ridge line to try to intercept the 3 bulls that made it through the gauntlet, but lost them.

We kept going along the ridge that runs north to south and covered just under 8 miles on the day and climbed 2,700' of elevation when it was all said and done. Here's where we stopped and ate lunch at the south end of the ridgeline overlooking the south canyon.

We stayed up high until 25 minutes after sunset and with nothing moving at all we headed back down to try to use at least a tiny bit of light with 1,000' of elevation to drop through the brush. Of course we get back to camp and several folks saw our headlamps coming down the mountain in the dark and thought we were crazy. Even worse the said that right at the end of shooting light 3 bulls came over the saddle to the left of that picture in the oak brush. Coming down in the dark i was thinking we should have left out earlier, I guess we left 5 minutes too early. Seems like they must read our play book and know where we are going to be in advance or something.

Here's where we sat that first evening looking over the oak brush in the saddle. The oak brush was about 225 yards and across on the opposite ridge ranged from 400 - 500 yards. This is the spot where we were sitting the evening on opening day and the bulls came out in the oak brush after we left.

Here's a picture of camp after everyone cleared out after the weekend. If you look at the snowy ridge to the left of the front of the trailer that's where the bulls were supposed to have been on night before the opener and opening night when we left out too early.

This picture is taken from that ridge looking back at camp. You can see the road coming down and where it makes a bend and gets to the trees just over the top of the ridge is where our camp was.

Here's the view from up on the ridge above the pond in the center of the property. That's where we were on the second morning. If you look close you can see the pond right in the center of the picture.

We thought we had the skinny on a 6 X 0 that one of the deer hunters at camp saw yesterday, but we got skunked this morning. Pretty view though!

Here's a closeup of the pond. It was pretty, but not much activity around it. We didn't see anything all morning. We thought we might have an offhand chance if some bulls decided to run the gauntlet and cross the road heading for the hills this morning, but there were 7 vehicles staggered out along the road and either the bulls crossed earlier in the dark or after getting shot at yesterday figured out a safer place to cross.

Tried a different spot that afternoon. Sat watching the oak brush in an area where we thought the elk would come out right at sunset. They never came through on their part though. This ended up being our easiest day of the hunt when it was all said and done. Just 5.5 miles on the GPS and 1,550' of elevation gain. Here's a picture of where we sat that evening.

The next day was the biggest day of the hunt. We had the line from some other hunters on some elk up on a small pond that had been in there pretty thick. We woke at 3:00 am and actually started up the trail a little later than I wanted at 3:50. At 1.25 miles in we came to a fork in the trail and started to go left like the other hunters had said, but after going up the trail another 1/4 mile or so we second guessed ourselves and went back and took the right fork. I really should have sprung the $10 for a nice hard copy Topo map of the area instead of trying to talk to them with patchwork Topo maps on my phone. I navigated right to the map se had talked about on the map on my phone, but it was the wrong pond. 6 miles one way in and 2,700' of elevation gain walking through up to 8" deep snow to get to a frozen pond. Oh well, live and learn. It was really pretty though. Here's the walk in.

Here's the pond we worked so hard to get to. Frozen solid. Ben had a thermometer with him and it was 19 degrees at the pond that morning.

We had it figured out where the right pond must be, and headed back around the back of the property to find it. We got the right around noon with 11 miles on the boots, again with much of it spent trudging through snow. We were tired. We hung out and dried out and ate lunch and scouted around for good spots to sit. Someone had made a litte rock blind about 150 yards above the pond. Here's the view from there.

One bright spot in the day was that we met up with another hunter on horseback while we were on the backside of the property and he said that he had been at the right pond that morning and he hadnt seen anything, so all the side trip cost us was a lot of wasted effort. He was VERY suprised to see us all the way at the back of the property, none of the other hunters had been back there before that day even on horses.

Since the elk hadn't been the that morning, we decided not to sit the pond that evening, but hunt the oak brush over the ridge from it instead. Here's the view we we sat that evening. Recurring theme, sitting watching oak brush hoping to see elk start feeding before dark and hiking home in the dark disappointed.

By the time we got back to the truck we had 14.6 hard miles in with over 3,500' of elevation gain and much of it spent slogging through 6" to 8" deep snow and even worse some 4" to 6" crusty snow where you break through on every step.

At some point we talked ourselves out of going back to the right pond this morning and tried another spot on the north corner of the property where the elk were supposed to travel from the crop fields back into cover in the mornings. There was a good chance that they would be on private property, but at this point we were excited to just have the chance to actually see some elk.

We slept in and left out at 5:30 this morning and got setup in a good spot about 30 minutes before shooting light and just before shooting light we actually saw an elk! It was too dark to see antlers, but based on the fact that it was by itself I was going to assume it was a bull. It was 600 yards away and moving south so I decided to go after it. About that time we saw 20+ elk with several bulls moving off onto private property. We were distracted for a second and the lone elk we had seen disappeared into the pinons. I told Ben to watch the elk on private to see what they would do and I went after the lone elk.

I sidehilled for about 1/2 mile and thought I had lost it, but I caught a glimpse of tan hide moving through the pinons. I waited for a bit thinking at a little draw, thinking it might come my way, but after a bit I decided it wasn't going to and started sidehilling again.

I got to a spot with an opening and caught sight of it again, it was a bull! At first I thought it was a raghorn, but I'm pretty sure it was a 5 or 6 point on the left side with a pretty nice main beam and nothing on the right side. It was 450 yards away and moving pretty quickly and I didn't take the shot. He obviously knew I was there and was moving out. The worst thing was that he was closer to where our travel trailer was parked than he was to me. On our way out I ranged it from where he had been the last time I saw him before he disappeared into the pinons again and he was 355 yards from camp! According to my GPS I walked 5.8 miles that morning and a bull went within 400 yards from camp about 30 minutes after sunrise. Crazy. It seems like we were putting in too much effort, maybe we should start road hunting!

Even worse, some guys on horses went back to the pond where we were last night and shot a little 5x5 this morning. Wrong place at the wrong time.

That night we ended up going up pretty much the last spot that we hadn't hit on the WMA, the canyon on the very south side of the area. We headed up several hours before sunset with no intentions but to hike up until we could find a good lookout spot and then wait for dark to see if anything would come out. We got going pretty good and about 1/2 mile up the trail we got on a track of a wounded elk. I'm assuming a bull, but it wasn't an exceptionally massive track and there were no dew claw marks in the snow so I won't guarantee it. The season was for bulls only though so someone really messed up if they wounded a cow. The track was at least a day old, but the snow made it pretty easy to track and it was staying right on the trail so that made it even easier.

We followed the blood trail for over a mile and found one spot where it had stood there for a while and then instead of following the switchbacks, it had just gone right up the side of the hill so I didn't think it could have been hurt too terribly bad. Then I came to a spot right in the middle of the trail were it had laid down and there was a pretty good amount of blood there and I wasn't so sure.

Here's a picture where it laid down. Looks like it was bleeding from the right hindquarter. I know the snow makes it seem like more blood, but it looked like a lot of blood to me. It was walking on all 4 feet and when walking there was usually 2 or 3 drops of blood on every 4th step. Hopefully it's still alive somewhere.

We ended up following the blood trail for at least a mile and a half and that elk was still moving steadily up the hill. We never did see a good lookout spot and it was pretty close to sunset so we decided to quit the trail and started heading back down hoping that we might have a chance to see something moving. I was cow calling and bugled a few times but didn't get any responses.

It was right at the end of shooting light and we were going down the switchback that we had skipped following the blood trail on the way up and I let out a cow call while we were walking and a bull lit up about 200 yards off the trail. I tried some more calls and never could get him to talk again and it was too dark to see him even if he did so we headed on back down for another unsuccessful day spent on the mountain. We logged 12.5 miles for the day and 2,700' of elevation gain. Again, it seemed like we were putting in too much effort. We had followed that blood trail up to 9,800' and then on the way back down we hear the bull at 9,300'. If we hadn't been following the blood trail up the side of the hill instead of taking the switchbacks would the bull have piped up when we walked by earlier? Lots of second guessing.

We debated back and forth on where to go on the last morning. Since another bull was shot at the pond that morning we figured the elk wouldn't be back in there the next day and it would be pretty discouraging to hike 3 miles back there and not see anything. Our packer that we had lined up was also going to be unavailable that afternoon and I really didn't want to have to stick around an extra day if I got a bull down back there either. We had seen elk in the front corner the morning before and really had the best opportunity of the week there and no shots had been fired to keep them from coming back so that's where we decided to head in the morning.

We had scouted out a few good spots to setup the morning before during the daylight and had marked it on the GPS so we decided to get there at least 30 minutes before shooting light. We got to sleep in late and headed out at 5:30 since the spot we had marked was only a mile from camp. The spot we picked out was right at the edge of the pinions at the base of the mountain because once they got to the pinions it was almost impossible to really be able to move in on them so we wanted to intercept them before they got there.

We ended up getting to our spot 45 minutes before shooting light and hunkered down and tried to be as quiet as possible. For a second the wind got behind us and I worried everything was going to be for naught, but then it turned and started blowing right in our face. The sagebrush was so tall in front of our spot that we had to stand up to get a good view. We had a pinion pine for a backstop and started glassing about 10 minutes before shooting light. We adjusted our spot a little as it got shooting light and heard some elk moving in the pinons already. I heard an antler click on a branch not very far away. I decided to try to go after them and headed in their direction. I let out a soft cow call and got an answer less than 50 yards away, but the pinons were so thick I couldn't see anything. I tried to follow for about 100 yards and cow called a few more times, but didn't see or hear anything and decided to go back to the original spot.

One reason for optimisim that morning was that a front was coming in and we were hoping the elk would be feeding later that morning so it was pretty disappointing to have a group of elk move in before shooting light. The big herd that has sticking to the private land was still out on the alfalfa field though and we thought there still might be a chance. They started milling around and a car parked out on the highway and that seemed to bother them a little. They worked right then left then started moving out and were staying on the wrong side of the fence.

About that time I saw a cow elk headed our way and it was already on the right side of the fence! Then I saw a decent bull following behind her!! Our plan might actually work! He wasn't a monster but after all the hard work and lack of any real opportunity all week any legal bull was going to be in trouble.

They were about 400 yards away and moving south and where we were setup I was thinking they might cross about 200 yards out in front of us. Looking some more there was also a raghorn following back about 100 yards behind the cow and the larger bull.

We got setup and started watching the opening where they were going to have to cross. I had my shooting sticks up and was on my knees to stay above the sagebrush. It seemed like an eternity and they still weren't showing up! I was a little worried about the cow being out front that she might spot us and turn back before we got a chance on the bull. I was so tempted to try to stand up and see if I could spot them, but stayed put.

Out pops the cow in the lead VERY close. She is looking straight at us! We stay perfectly still, but we have absolutely nothing for cover in front of us, just the pinion behind us to block our outline. She looks for a good 30 or 40 seconds and then starts walking a few yards then stops and looks, then walks a few yards then stops and looks for what seems like forever. The wind is perfect and she knows something is odd, but can't figure us out. The bull is still no where to be seen. She ends up traveling about 30 yards and I'm barely able to see her in my peripheral vison but I don't dare even move my head.

Finally the bull shows up and is just walking by completely oblivious. He's a 5X5, nothing impressive, but a decent bull and plenty of meat on him. He's so close I don't even try to stop him, just take the shot as he is walking steadily. It's a solid hit, but he's still on his feet and moving, so I chamber another round and hit him again. He goes down. Right before he goes down he takes a breath and you can see the exhalation going out 2 seperate holes in his opposite side. It's over. All the effort put in over the previous 5 days and we now have a bull on the ground less than 1 mile from camp as the crow flies. The GPS reads 1.15 miles and less than 200' of elevation gain for the day! When I went over to where the bull was down I used my rangefinder and it was a whopping 65 yard shot.

It's about 20 minutes after sunrise but the sky is overcast and there are a few snow flurries starting to show up. We got the pictures taken and started working on getting him quartered up and packed out. There is one spot where the road ends up only .76 miles from where he went down so we'll go ahead and pack him out on our backs. It's pretty open and slightly downhill too.

Here's the glory shots.

Here's Ben with me.

And the start of the packout.

We found couple small elk sheds and a couple mule deer shed antlers as well over the course of the week. Here's a picture of all of them together.

When it was all said and done we ended up with over 51 miles on the boots and almost 12,500' of elevation gain. Most of that with 30+ lbs packs on and some of it trudging through deep snow. Lots of work, but the end result was worth it.

I think that's about it. If anyone needs any information about Urraca WMA let me know.

Nathan

I think I'm ready!

2011-10-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

Well, my New Mexico elk hunt is right around the corner and Saturday was my peak run as part of my attempt to be in shape for the hunt. I planned to go 7.5 miles and thought I might have a chance to make it in a 10:00 pace, but the route I decided on went down into the canyon and back up so I wasn't sure if I could make a 10:00 pace or not. The route I decided on had us walking about 1/2 mile from the house before starting our jog and then finishing about 1/2 mile from the house and having a cool down walk back to the house when we were done.

Cathy started out with me, but she hasn't been running as much as me lately and was having a little bit of a hard time keeping up. My iPhone updates me on the pace every 1/2 mile and she got tired of that at about the 3 1/2 mile mark and told me if I wanted to go on that I should. We were at a 9:50 pace, but that was little behind the pace I wanted, because I knew we had a very steep hill coming up out of the canyon that was for sure going to knock our pace down quite a bit.

We got to the hill and started walking briskly instead of jogging as we went up. To give a little idea how steep of a hill it is, the hardest I ended up breathing on the entire run was while we were walking up the steepest part of the hill. It is only about 1/4 mile on the steep part so as soon as we got close to the top we started jogging again.

We were now on a road that has quite a bit of traffic, and the next couple times my phone told me what my time was it was while traffic was going by and I didn't catch the time, but I did hear at the 5 1/2 mile mark that we were up to a 10:15 pace so that meant I was going to have to cut almost 2 minutes off of the last 2 miles to get back to a 10:00 pace overall. I was thinking about what Cathy had said about going on ahead and decided that since this was going to be the peak run of the year for me that I should go on ahead. She's run several marathons and half marathons so this wasn't much more than an easy training run for her. I didn't think I had much of a chance at making the 10:00 pace, but I thought I should at least give it a go. I was feeling really good and really not even breathing very hard. I picked up the pace a bit and headed for home.

When your phone starts telling you that you've been running for 1 hour and X minutes it gets harder to really tell how fast you are running those last few miles. I was doing some math in my head and thinking I was running around a 9:30 pace or so. I still felt great so I kept heading for home and was getting quite a bit ahead of Cathy now. We had briefly discussed that if I was feeling good at the end of 7.5 miles that I could go ahead and run the last 1/2 mile back to the house to make it a full 8 miles. I've gotten in a few 7 mile runs this summer, but 7.5 was going to be my longest run ever, but I was feeling good so I decided why not go ahead and make it 8! Plus I was thinking that if I added that last 1/2 mile I might have a little better chance to make my 10:00 pace.

As I hit the 7 mile mark, I was surprised to hear my phone tell me that I had already trimmed my pace to 10:00! I headed for home and was very familiar with this stretch as it's part of nearly every run that I do. I had made my 10:00 pace so all I needed to do was keep the 8th mile under 10:00 and I was set. I really wasn't trying to push it, just keep a nice steady pace so I was very surprised when I checked my splits at the end of the run and found out that the 8th mile was the fastest mile of the entire run and was under 9:00!

Here's the map of my run from the runkeeper software.

Here's the elevation and pace chart along with the splits for each mile.

I still don't consider myself a runner, but it really feels good to meet my goal and then some for getting into shape for my elk hunt coming up. We will be starting each morning at 8,000' elevation and climbing to between 10,000' and 11,000' each day so I'm going to need to be in shape. Lubbock is right around 3,000' elevation so I'm going to be breathing hard just walking the first few days I'm there with the big change in elevation. Hopefully this will have me ready for it.

That's it for now. Nathan

Getting in shape!

2011-10-12T08:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I think I'm finally getting pretty close to being in shape. I actually reached my goal of running 6 miles in 60 minutes anyway!

I was sick this past weekend so I didn't get in another long run, but last night I got in a great workout going up the steepest hill out here and still kept my overall pace under 10 minutes per mile! I did end up walking up the steepest part of the hill, but I'm still pretty happy with the overall results.

You can see where I walked from the pace line, but you can also see where the elevation gain was. On the 6 mile run I posted it looks like there was a bunch of ups and downs on the graph, but it was actually a pretty flat run. Those ups and downs were 5 feet here and 10 feet there so on the scale it looks like they were steep, but in reality they weren't hardly even noticeable. The hill I ran last night is VERY noticeable!

I've started to try to get in a little extra hill work just hiking up and down the canyon by our house as well. At one point I was going to see how it would work to haul Eli around in the backpack, and I actually ended up hiking about a mile with him in it, but I ended up swapping him out for some weights when I started going up and down the canyon. Here's a picture of him in the backpack when we were checking it out to see how he would fit.

When we actually went for the hike he ended up standing up in the backpack and that was a little more comfortable for him.

My New Mexico elk hunt is just a few weeks away. I'm a little apprehensive about it as I have still never set foot on the place and there are a lot of uncertainties with what the weather will be like that time of year and lots of other things as well.

I selected that particular area based on previous success rates and drawing odds and for 2007 - 2009 the success rates varied but were pretty close to 50%. The harvest reports for 2010 were recently released and the success rate for 2010 for the tag I have dropped all the way down to 10% for some reason, so that has me concerned as well.

Oh well, all I can do is prepare and do my best when I get there. I've been looking at google earth quite a bit and I really think the key will be to be in shape and be able to get back to the back of the area where no one else will want to go. We'll be starting out at 8,000' elevation and climbing to 11,000' in just a little over 3 miles so I'm going to keep working out and maybe we'll be able to close the deal on the first or second day while our legs are still fresh!

That's it for now. Nathan

Successful Wyoming Elk Hunt!

2011-10-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, where do I start? Do I make this a novel and include everything or do I just cut to the chase and write about the hunt itself? I’m leaning toward the novel!

Opening day was on a Tuesday this year so the travel schedule wasn’t going to work out quite as well as it had the last couple years. We made all our last minute plans and got everything packed in the travel trailer on Friday evening and planned to head out first thing Saturday morning. In the past we had been bringing one of our 4 wheelers for Cathy and Eli to be able to putt around camp with, but with our new trailer being heavier, it wasn’t going to work this year so we had to leave the 4 wheeler at home.

Saturday ended up being a long day of travel, we ended up pulling into a parking lot beside a McDonalds in Laramie, Wyoming about 10pm and spent the night. Headed back out the next morning and ended up having to change out one of the trailer tires because it was wearing funny in Rock Springs and made a last minute trip to Walmart while we were at it. After another few errands in Jackson, we headed out to our spot. The last 35 miles is all gravel roads and it was in pretty poor shape this year and it took two hours to cover that last 35 miles pulling the trailer. We ended up pulling into our camping spot for the week right at dark on Sunday night.

Monday was a day of relaxation and we had a great time just hanging around camp waiting for the opener. It really was a great day just hanging out with the family. The place where we camp has a nice creek running through and this time of year it is a perfect place for little boys to hang out. We’re going to have to do that more often in the future for sure.

Tuesday morning was opening day and we knew exactly where we wanted to be at first light. After a little bit of debate, we decided that we would need to leave camp at 4:45 am to have plenty of time to get where we wanted and get settled in before first light. It’s about a 20 minute drive from camp to where we park to hike in to our spot so we were loading on our backpacks and spraying ourselves down with scent spray just after 5:00.

As we were getting ready to roll we heard something that neither of us could figure out. Sounds are pretty hard to describe in writing, but the closest thing I can think of to describe the sound would be a severely constipated grizzly bear! A very loud growl/groaning sound that ended up almost like a moan. Whatever was making the noise was pretty close and big! There are moose in the area and at first we thought maybe it was a moose although both of us have been around moose and never heard one make that noise before. My friend Mike said he had heard bears making that noise before when they were grubbing and rolling logs over so that’s what we were leaning toward. I was already a little nervous about bears this year with 2 hikers being killed over the summer in Yellowstone less than 50 miles from where we were hunting and we always see plenty of bear sign in the area and actually saw a grizzly bear last year right where we were planning on hiking to this morning. We probably hung around the truck for 15 minutes and then decided that we weren’t going to kill anything hanging out at the truck so we needed to get going.

We kept our rifles at the ready and bear spray readily accessible and started out. It was 29 degrees and clear, but it had rained over the weekend and the brush was pretty wet and the deadfall was as well. It was about a half moon and bright enough to see pretty well. We tried to be extra quiet and skirted well to the west of whatever it was that was making the noise. About ¼ mile in we hear the growl/groan again and it was pretty much where we had heard it the last time, that gave us a little bit of comfort level and we headed in to our spot we wanted to be.

We got there just before shooting light and got setup. I sat in the same exact spot that I was in the year before when I shot a raghorn on opening morning. Sunrise came and we heard a few bugles off to our west. We made a few cow calls and nothing really responded. A bull was bugling off to the west still and we tried to decide on whether to go after them or what. We saw a few cows moving through the heavy timber and but they were headed away from us so we decided to commit to going after them. The problem was that the wind was right at our backs. We dogged them at about 100 yards and in the heavy timber we could just barely catch a glimpse of them every now and then. Both of us could have shot a cow, but our general tag was only good for a mature bull in that area. After a hundred yards or so either the wind got our scent to them or the heard or saw us or something, because they busted out and took off. Both of us were pretty sure we saw the bull, but neither of us saw his antlers so there was not really a chance at a shot.

They hadn’t busted out too bad, so we decided to keep after them. The wind wasn’t going to be against us as badly, and at least we knew we were after some elk. Probably 30 minutes later we ended up at the top of a steep ridge and made a cow call and we surprised to hear a bull pipe up from his bed less than 100 yards away from us! We thought that maybe we had broken up the bull and his cows and he was ready to hook back up with them. We just sat there for 10 minutes or so and then tried to close the distance on him as quietly as we could. We were as quiet as possible and the wind was blowing up to us from where he was below so we were pretty confident we could close the distance. We moved about 25 yards closer and somehow he had us pegged. He started moving through the timber about 50 yards away, but neither of us could get a good glimpse of him. In retrospect I should have tried to stay still and cow call, but I decided to get aggressive and cow call while I went down the hill after him. I caught another glimpse of him, but just a few tines and a bit of tan hide, nothing even close to a clear shot. That’s the biggest problem with the area that we hunt, the timber is so thick that we were within 100 yards of a bull elk for close to 30 minutes and never even came close to getting a shot at him. If they aren’t talking it is pretty close to impossible to hunt them.

The area we hunt is also very close to Yellowstone National Park, and after talking about it a bit we decided that the last thing we wanted to do is push the elk into the park so instead of keeping after them, we decided to go back to the spot where we were at first light and hang out there for a while. We checked out a few spots on the way back and then hung out for a while to see if anything else was talking. Everything had quieted down and nothing was moving. We ate lunch and went over the morning and I was kicking myself for the blown opportunities that morning. We were probably not aggressive enough on the first opportunity (we should have started moving that direction right when we heard the first bugles) and I was too aggressive on the 2nd opportunity (I should have stayed put and cow called instead of going after him). Chalk it up to learning experiences. We finished lunch and my friend had brought a can of coke with him and he stood up and crushed it with his boot and it made a loud crunch sound and low and somehow that triggered our mystery animal. It responded with the now familiar growl/groan sound from about 400 yards off to the south. It was directly between us and the truck and we decided that it would be better to figure out whatever it was during the daylight than having to worry about it on the hike back out in the dark so we gathered up our stuff and went after it. We weren’t exceptionally stealthy, but weren’t making a lot of racket and we got within about 100 yards of where it had sounded off and tried to get it to talk again to help us locate it to figure out what in the world it was. We tried moose grunts, cow calls, bugles, mimicking it’s growl/groan and couldn’t get it to talk again. After close to an hour, we gave up and headed back over to our spot to spend the afternoon sitting around twiddling our thumbs.

Mid afternoon whatever it was that was making the noise spouted off again but it was moving through the bottom to our west and going away from us. We still didn’t know what it was, but felt like it was probably a large grizzly bear and were very thankful that at least it was going to not be directly on our path on the hike out now. As it got closer to evening we started to hear some movement in the timber and then saw an outfitter and his hunter go through the timber on horseback below us. If nothing else it gave us a good feeling that we would be able to spot some elk if they did come through at least.

It was getting close to sunset and we started thinking about when we were going to need to start heading back to the truck when our mystery animal spouted off again right back where it had been after lunch. Same growl/groan as it had been all day. Whatever was making the noise was a large animal no doubt. We made some cow calls and some bugles and tried to mimic it again but didn’t get a response. With whatever it was back between us and the truck, we decided it was probably a good idea to start heading that way while it was still light. We got our stuff together and had just started that way when we heard it again with the growl/groan and then at the end of it there was a distinct chuckle of a bull elk trying to round up his cows. No mistaking it! The entire time it had been a bull elk growling/groaning. We didn’t waste any time heading his direction and decided that it must be injured or something and that’s why it wasn’t bugling and why it wasn’t moving much.

We had made it about 100 yards closer to it and we saw some movement in the tree line to our south. The reason we hunt this particular spot is that it is about the only place anywhere near that you can actually see any distance at all. Just a few seconds later and a cow elk breaks out of the tree line headed toward us. We were standing on deadfall and there wasn’t anywhere to really get down and get a rest for a shot and of course right after the cow breaks clear a nice bull comes out after her! Both of us shouldered our rifles with our packs still on, and started to try to get a good hold on for a shot. He was still coming directly at us somewhere between 150 and 200 yards away. After getting steady, I started to squeeze the trigger and BOOM, my friend Mike shoots first and the bull goes down like a sack of potatoes! I was too slow on the trigger!

I really expected to need to put a shot into him even if my friend hit him first and was surprised to see him drop so fast. We both looked at each other and were amazed at how fast everything had gone down. From sitting there dejected and bored to having a nice bull on the ground was probably a whopping 15 minute time difference. We went ahead and headed straight for him with our rifles ready, but as we got closer there was no doubt he was down for the count. He also didn’t have ground shrinkage and looked even bigger the closer we got to him. He was a nice 6X6 with decent backs and very big bodied.

Here's a couple pictures of my friend Mike with the bull.

We didn't get any pictures of us together with the bull, but here's a picture of me with his bull.

The sun was now setting and even though we had one less boogey man to fear in the woods since our mysterious animal ended up turning into a nice bull elk, we still didn’t want to mess around too long and needed to get to the job at hand. We took some pictures (it never seems like you end up taking enough pictures) and were about to start working on getting him cut up with another outfitter walks out of the timber toward us. He told us they had been shadowing this bull much of the day and he wanted to make sure if we got him or not. He was actually the same outfitter that ended up on a 370” bull 2 years earlier that we had been dogging all day and then they shot him the next day so we didn’t feel too sorry for him that we had shot this one. He said he was happy it was us that got him instead of the other outfitter that we had seen. Seems like they are having some territorial disputes over some of the areas that they hunt. This bull wasn’t 370”, but we felt like he would push the 320” mark and for sure he was the biggest bull Mike had shot and he has been hunting this same area for nearly 20 years and is 53 years old. I was very happy that he ended up being the one that squeezed the trigger first and he is very happy with him.

Talking with the outfitter a little more we discussed the crazy growl/groan that this bull had been making and he said that they have been seeing more and more bulls doing that lately and fewer and fewer bulls making the high pitched bugle at the front end anymore. Speculation of course is that they are doing it because the higher pitch brings the wolves in from a long way off, but no idea if that is right or not. For sure it was a noise that I had never heard in the woods before. He also said that was one of the largest bodied elk that he had ever seen as well.

It was pushing dark and we had a lot of work to get done. I had bought a havalon knife and was really looking forward to using it to see how it worked, but somehow I lost it before I even left on the trip so it was the old standby gerber for me. Mike worked on caping him while I got to work on quartering him up and we made pretty decent time on him. I bought some new Caribou game bags and those worked out pretty nicely as you can just drop the quarters right in the bags without worrying about any dirt getting on them. No need to have a drop cloth setup to work off of. After we had him quartered and caped we ended up with 5 bags of meat plus the head and cape. It was full dark and even though it was only about a half mile to the truck in a straight line, there was some up and down between us and LOTS of deadfall and brush. The temperatures were plenty cool so we decided to just hang everything and come back for it in the morning.

We found a good tree about 100 yards from the carcass and moved the game bags over to it and got to work hanging them. Last year I we had trouble hanging my elk in New Mexico due to the friction of the rope on the tree limbs so I had a pulley in my pack to help with that chore this year. The problem was that there was no way we were going to get all of this hung up on one rope. After trying to think through a better option we never came up with one so we ended up using the pulley for the head and cape and just rope over the tree branches for everything else. We had plenty of rope and were able to hang the hind quarters and loose meat individually and had to hang both of the front shoulders on the same branch. We struggled to get the meat high enough as with the friction of the rope on the tree branch you can only get the meat as high as you can reach over your head with one guy pushing the meat up and the other guy pulling on the rope. We decided that with it in bags and at least off the ground 6 or 7 feet it would have to do though. We hung our florescent orange vests on the antlers and on a tree branch, hung a glow stick and a LED flashing beacon up and pee’d on the bushes around the base of the tree and called it good.

The hike out was very uneventful and it was so nice to get to the truck about 11:20 and rolled into camp just before midnight. Our wives were awake and a little worried about us as my friend is a diabetic and if he ran out of food it could get ugly, but we had packed plenty of food as we expected to be out all day and he was fine.

We went ahead and slept in the next morning and went back after the meat about 9:00. We figured that we could get it done in 3 loads with me hauling the head and cape with one load, then each hindquarter for the other 2 trips and he would take out the loose meat with one load and a front shoulder on the other 2 trips. When we got in there we ended up running into the outfitter that we had talked to the evening before and another guide with the same outfitter and they had 4 hunters in there. One funny note is that they had seen the florescent orange that we had hung in the tree and assumed there were already some other hunters over there and hadn’t gone over to that spot. Lots of traffic for a tiny little spot that’s for sure.

The guy we talked to the night before said we were crazy for trying to take the head and cape out together, but I figured that it was only a little over a half mile and I would be fine. He gave us a few tips on caping out the head if we decided to do it and we nodded and smiled and they ended up leaving. I got everything loaded up on my pack and started toward the truck. It was heavy and it was awkward, but I could do it. I’m sure I could have done it, but after about 200 yards away climbing over deadfall and busting brush with a 100+ lbs awkwardly on my back the elk decided he didn’t want to cooperate and somehow a strap came loose and it tumbled off my back onto the ground. Sitting there looking at it I decided I might be willing to try to cape it’s head!

Mike decided to continue on to the truck and while I attempted to cape the head. The tips that the outfitter had given me was to start around the eyes and get that all done as far as I could reach through the eye holes, then do the scent glands as deep as possible and then do the lips as close to the teeth as I could. I set to work and it really wasn’t as bad as I was dreading. The left side went really well and I think I got overconfident because I ended up with a few nicks on the right eyelid and I didn’t get the right scent gland as deep as I had on the left one. I felt like I did pretty good on the bases of the antlers and the lips and nose though. I was using my same Gerber knife and the biggest problem was that it was a little too big and that’s why I ended up with the nicks on the eyelid and not getting deep enough in the scent gland. Not sure if it was easier because it had set overnight than if I had caped it when it was fresh or not.

Once I got the head caped I cut the tongue out and all the other loose meat that I could get to and that trimmed a bit of weight off of it. Mike still wasn’t back from hauling his load to the truck so I went ahead and grabbed the antlers and hoofed them to the truck without my pack expecting to run into Mike going or coming. Somehow I missed him both ways but when I got back he was there wondering where I ended up. He grabbed the cape and started hauling it to the truck and I went to where we had everything hung to grab another load.

Sometimes I think I’m pretty much of a stud and I decided that I would haul both front shoulders in one load so that we could still end up getting everything out in 3 trips. In the dark the night before I hadn’t boned anything out, but I typically don’t bone the front shoulders out anyway so I figured I would just grab them and go. I got them in my pack and got my pack on but after about 50 yards I decided that it wasn’t going to be worth killing myself to feel like a macho man. I haul the front shoulders back to the tree, set them down in the shade and pulled a hind quarter down. I quickly boned it out and threw it in my pack and it was a much more manageable load!

We got back to the truck and ate an early lunch then headed back to the tree. We decided that the only way that we were going to get everything out in one more trip would be to bone out the front shoulders. We got to the tree and I set to work and it really wasn’t that bad at all. Not as easy as boning out a hind quarter, but I was able to keep the entire quarter in one piece and bone it off the shoulder blade pretty easy. It was amazing how much weight we lost taking out both front shoulder bones, what was a borderline unbearable load ended up being very manageable. I boned out the last hindquarter and Mike hauled it out and I hauled out both boned out front shoulders.

I should have taken a picture of the tree when we had everything hanging, but I didn’t. The Caribou game bags really did well and the reflective tags really is a nice touch when we were working in the dark that night. One of the knocks on the synthetic game bags is that they don’t ventilate as well, but the meat was nice and glazed over the next morning when I pulled it out to debone it. The temperatures overnight got down below freezing and the meat was very cool even after lunch when we made out last trip out. I was able to wash them in the creek and they would have been ready to use the next day if we had needed them.

It took longer than expected getting everything out, but we did keep at a pretty leisurely pace when it all comes down to it. Still we ended up with a little over 3 miles on the clock with half of that hauling some pretty heavy loads through heavy deadfall and thick brush. We made a quick trip into town to get the meat in coolers and on ice and send out some pictures and messages to everyone, and got back to camp just in time for an evening hunt. It was pretty uneventful and VERY quiet. Seems like the woods had pretty much shut down with all the pressure from the first two days.

We got back in our routine on Thursday and left camp at 5:00 and headed back to where we were on opening morning. We struck out completely there not hearing or seeing anything and then decided we would put our boots to good use instead of just sitting around like we did on opening day and moved out. We checked out several of our spots from previous years, a known wallow spot and some known bedding areas but the whole place just seemed dead. Thinking it through there was a lot of pressure put on the elk that opening day with us and two different outfitters in a pretty small area and I think we pushed them right on out of there. We were seeing plenty of sign, but that just means that they had been there, not that they still were there. We got in some miles and some pretty good elevation changes but didn’t have anything to show for it. We got back to the truck mid afternoon and went back to camp for a bit then tried a different spot that evening with the same results. Didn’t see or hear anything and everything just seemed eerily quiet. We hadn’t even heard any wolves which is usually the explanation for why things are quiet.

We decided to try a different area the next morning and put in some miles and elevation gains on our boots and we got to see some pretty country, but didn’t see or hear any elk and not a lot of sign. We took the boys out that afternoon to another spot and planned on it being more of a hike with the boys (they are 4 and 5 years old) than really a hunt and it pretty much turned out like we planned. Not much sign, didn’t see or hear anything. That evening was going to be our last night there so we went back to the spot we were opening morning on the slight chance things had calmed down and the elk had moved back in there. The recurring theme continued as we didn’t see or hear any elk, but we did see the fattest black bear sow either of us had ever seen. We were sure it was a big boar when we first saw it, it’s ears were very far apart and very small compared to the rest of it’s head, but then we saw a 2nd year cub about 10 yards behind it. The cub was almost a good sized bear in it’s own right and a really nice chocolate color. They were about 20 yards away and we watched them for several minutes, but we were after elk, not bears and they weren’t even legal if we were after bears so we made some noise and started walking toward them and they scooted off into the timber.

We setup and watched the sun go down and made a few cow calls and didn’t hear a thing. We saw the bears again but they were even farther away and moving away from us so we didn’t think they would really affect anything, especially since there didn’t seem to be anything around anyway.

Saturday morning arrived and we made one last ditch effort in another spot and saw some sign but didn’t see or hear anything else. The area where we were hunting is very dark timber and the chances of just stumbling onto some elk and getting a shot off is about zero. If they aren’t talking it is pretty close to impossible and either the elk just weren’t there after opening day, or they weren’t talking. Probably the latter, but we sure spent some time looking for them and didn’t even hear anything bust out ahead of us, let alone have to worry about trying to get a shot off. We packed it up, hooked up to the trailer and headed home. Here's a picture just before we pulled out Saturday morning headed for home.

The trip home was pretty uneventful, we got a whopping 10.8 mpg pulling the trailer home and 9.9 mpg on the way up there for a round trip average of 10.35 mpg. Pretty close to what we got the previous two years with our smaller trailer so that was nice. I was super nice to have a queen sized bed to sleep on instead of the jackknife sofa that I was sleeping on in the smaller trailer. We had a great time and I was very happy to be there with my friend Mike when he shot his biggest bull of his life. Going through it all again in my head, I’m really happy that I was slower on the trigger pull than him and he was able to end up with a really nice bull on the ground.

This has turned into more of a epic book than a novel, so I’ll end it here. I might go back and add some thoughts on some of the gear and other things later.

Hope you enjoyed the read, I know I will sometime down the road when I come back and read this again and relive some of the details I will have forgotten by then.

That's it for now! Nathan

Hunting season is almost here!!

2011-09-13T12:30:00.000-07:00

Okay, the clock is ticking! Next week at this time I will be halfway through the opening day of my Wyoming elk hunt! Based on my last 3 years up there, that would mean there would be a 66% chance that I may have an elk on the ground by this time next week!!! At least I can hope!

I'm still working out, and Cathy actually worked up a workout schedule for me finally. I'm running 2 short runs (2 and 3 miles) during the week and then one longer run on the weekend (last one was 5 miles). I'm not quite to 6 miles in 60 minutes yet, but Saturday I did run 5 miles in 50 minutes!

That's a snail's pace to most "runners", but that's something I've never claimed to be, I'm just trying to get in shape. It felt good and I could have kept going at the end of the 5 miles so I think I'm ready for Wyoming. I'll keep working out after I get back and hopefully I'll be hit the 6 miles in 60 minute target that I set for myself this spring.

I shot my rifle this weekend and although it wasn't sub 1" groups or anything like that, I think I should be good for an elk out to 300 yards or so. I think I'll punch some more paper one evening this week just to make sure though.

Finalizing my last minute packing and getting things ready this week, very happy to be moving from the planning stages to actually spending some time in the woods soon!

That's it for now. Nathan

Summer is over!

2011-08-31T14:37:00.000-07:00

Well, summer is gone and I haven’t done a very good job of keeping my blog updated!

We did take another trip back to Montana and got to enjoy the cool weather and some nice scenery again. Didn’t get in as much hiking this time, but did end up making the 14 mile round trip back up to Crystal Cave again. There was still more water than normal, but at least this time we were able to do some exploring.

Here's a picture of Mike making his way upstream. Usually the water here is only a trickle, but it was about 2 feet deep at least this time.

The main entrance to the cave is huge, probably 30 feet wide and 10 feet tall. One finger that we climb up ends up with a few small exit though! This is Ben looking back inside after he made it through the exit. We had to do some dirt moving this tiime to get out because the creek had brought plenty of debris with it.

Here's Mike making his way out of that same exit. It doesn't look that tight in the picture, but it is a belly crawl and you have to squirm your way out.

We hauled our ATVs up there and were able to enjoy some trail riding. This picture was taken on a 20 mile loop that is closed to anything over 50” wide.

We bought a new ATV pretty much just for this trip and it worked out really good. We got a really good deal on it as it was a 2007 model with over 11,000 miles on it which is pretty much unheard of for an ATV. It had spent it's entire life running dry dusty trails in West Texas and the week afer I bought it, it was able to cool it's wheels in some Montana snow.

Here's another picture of it at the top of another ATV trail.

Saw this beautiful cinnamon black bear and her two cubs one day. Watched them for about 15 minutes from the road until they ambled off.

Still working out to try to be in good shape for hunting this year. Got in 37 miles in during July and 41 miles in August. Not quite where I wanted to be by this time, but getting there. I probably won’t be at a 10 minute pace for 6 miles by the time we leave for Wyoming for my elk hunt there, but I really want to be there before my New Mexico elk hunt.

Still haven’t gotten much rain down on my hunting property and it is looking pretty sad. I’m filling my protein feeder up every 2 to 3 weeks as that’s about the only decent food source available around. No monster bucks showing up on camera, but I did get this picture with 7 bucks all in the same picture waiting for their turn at the feeder.

They are showing up well after dark and leaving well before dark so I’m afraid that they are bedding a long way from my property which would make sense since there isn’t much there for them right now. No point in planting any fall food plots right now because the ground is still too dry and there really isn’t anything better in the forecast. Long term they aren’t expecting any decent moisture until next spring so I may be filling feeders for a while longer.

Have some work to get done down at the land and hopefully I will be posting some more soon on some projects down there. Hunting season is right around the corner!

That’s it for now. Nathan

Montana Vacation #1.

2011-07-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a month since I posted so I guess I should update this a little bit.

Been trying to keep up the work out schedule to get in shape and actually got a 6.5 mile run in a couple weeks ago. Didn't keep it at a 10 minute pace, but but overall was pretty happy with my progress. Spent a week in Montana and got in 35 miles of hiking with 14 miles one day. Still liking the runkeeper app for my iPhone, really nice using it to keep track of my runs and hikes. No blisters on my feet with my boots that I bought last year either!

It is amazing how much snow is still on the ground up there, especially since things have been so hot and dry down here in Texas.

Here's a few scenery shots from my hikes in Montana. Lot's of snow still on the mountains!

The 14 mile hike was to a cave that we've been exploring over the last few years. Out of the 700 feet or so of passages that I've mapped, only about 75 feet of them were accessible due to the water running through with the heavy snow melt. Was interesting to see it with that much water though, maybe we'll find some new spots when we go back in August.

Here's the entrance to the cave.

Lots of water flowing this year.

In the end I got plenty of exercise and saw lots of pretty scenery. Something that is severely lacking in my part of Texas.

The snow was so heavy it broke the roof on this old mining shack.

Still a TON of snow on the Beartooth pass!

We had a VERY enjoyable trip and were not ready to come home. Coming home over the Beartooth pass it was 44 degrees at 1:00PM local time. When we got home the next day the temperature topped out at 112 degrees at the house! Quite a change!

Still praying for rain and not getting much. I did make it down to the hunting land and got some work done down there. I'll make another post on that.

That's it for now. Nathan

Finally got lucky on this years draws!

2011-06-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

Well the New Mexico results are in and I finally got some luck!

When the emails came out last night all I got was an email notifying me that I was successful on my 3rd choice elk tag but didn't get any other emails. They only send out emails to the successful applicants so I figured I struck out on everything else.

I was still happy with the elk tag, but a little disappointed that I didn't draw my 3rd choice deer tag because this will be the last year with really good odds on it since New Mexico will be completely revamping it's drawing system for nonresidents and the odds for the unit I apply in for my 3rd choice are going to go from around 40% to somewhere closer to 10%. I also passed on some decent bucks in that unit last year and shot an older buck instead so hopefully they will have all had a year to grow older and bigger!

The results post to their website at midnight MST time and I actually thought about staying up to check on it, but decided against it and went to bed. When I woke up this morning the first thing I did was go check the results though and was surprised to see 2 green boxes instead of just one for the elk tag. I drew my 3rd choice deer tag too!

Of course if I was REALLY lucky I would have drawn the sheep tag or the ibex tag, but I'll settle for the deer and the elk tag!

Here's my official results!

The 3rd choice elk tag is for a unit that I did a lot of research on the computer for, but I haven't stepped foot in the unit in person. The success rates are pretty good and the drawing odds were decent (about 30% last year for nonresidents) but it isn't known for it's quality. From what I understand a 300" bull would be a very good bull for that area, but that's plenty big enough for me.

The other interesting thing about the area I drew is that it is a Wildlife Management Area (WMA). This will be the last year that nonresidents are allowed to hunt them in New Mexico so that will be kind of unique too.

I've got the map of the WMA overlayed on google earth and have been looking at it already. I will definitely need to keep working on getting in shape, the unit is roadless and the elevation starts at 7,700' and tops out at 11,000'! Of course if I stick with my typical strategy I will want to go to the thickest nastiest spot in the WMA because that's probably where the elk will be!

Only negative is that my friend who hunted with me last year on my New Mexico elk hunt also applied for the same areas that I did and he didn't end up drawing. Hopefully I will still be able to talk him into going with me though!

That's it for now. Nathan

Unsuccessful....

2011-06-02T19:18:00.000-07:00

I don't think I've blogged about this here on my blog yet, but I've somehow decided that I would like to hunt a mountain goat before I get too old to climb to the mountains where they live. The problem with that is the only options are to get really lucky and draw a tag, or to spend some bucks and hire an outfitter in British Columbia or Alaska.

So far I'm opting for the getting lucky and drawing a tag, but it isn't working out very well so far.

My first rejection came from Colorado. I actually applied for a nanny goat tag thinking that there wouldn't be nearly as many people applying for a nanny goat tag as for a billy, and I was right, but there still were enough folks applying for the 1 nanny goat tag that I wasn't lucky enough to draw it.

Here's my first rejection notice.

After Colorado came Idaho. I did quite a bit of research and felt like I had a decent chance at Idaho, but when it comes down to it nonresidents are limited to a maximum of 10% of the tags in Idaho and what I thought were close to 10% odds ended up closer to 5% odds when it was all said and done. That's still better than it is for most states, but I pulled another "unsuccessful" result in Idaho.

The next rejection came from Utah. I really didn't have much of a chance in Utah so I wasn't really suprised, the only reason I even applied there was because I was already applying for elk and it was pretty cheap to add an application for bighorn sheep and mountain goat so I did. The odds were well under 1% though so it would have been like winning the lottery if I had actually drawn in Utah. No lottery winner here, some more unsuccessful results.

Those were the only 3 states that I applied for a mountain goat tag, but I'd been doing some research and decided to go ahead and start applying for elk in Nevada. Of course since I was applying for elk I went ahead and decided to apply for deer and antelope as well since it was cheap to add them, but not to worry I was unsuccessful on all of them as well!

One interesting thing with Nevada is that they list out all the applicants. I was suprised to see that there were 2 other Padens that applied and had the same bad luck as me. Not sure if I am related to them but there is a chance that I am.

I still have some applications pending for New Mexico so there is still a chance that I may have another tag in my pocket before it is all said and done, but right now my Wyoming General Elk tag is all that I have other than my Lifefime Texas license. I have a chance at my 3rd choice elk tag and my mule deer tag in New Mexico but both of those have less than 50% odds so I still need to get lucky.

Hopefully I'll be updating the blog with good news in a week or so!

That's it for now. Nathan

Wildfire - Part 2

2011-05-20T19:12:00.000-07:00

Now for the results of the fire. Here are some panoramic pictures from a the highest vantage point I have on my place. Pretty much the only thing that didn't burn was bare dirt. The road and some long narrow food plots that I planted last October but they never grew because it didn't rain.

This picture is a little over 180 degrees of panorama. It starts off looking north and then pans around to the southeast. Just click on the image to see it full size.

This picture starts off looking northeast and ends up looking southwest.

Last panoramic picture. This one starts off looking southwest and ends up looking due north of a complete 360 for all the pictures combined.

The area looking north was the thickest nastiest stuff on my property and you can see from the ashes that there was plenty of fuel to burn there. That area took the brunt of hottest fire. There were actually a few stumps still burning today when I was down there checking on things. The rest of the place didn't exactly come out unscathed, but some of the trees look like they just might have a chance.

Now for some close up pictures of the damage. Our travel trailer is toast.

The blind on the hill made it.

Protein feeder made it.

Grain drill is going to take some repairing.

Some of the stumps were still on fire when I was down there today.

My biggest and oldest mesquite burned from the inside out.

I took a timed shot with the camera to try to give some perspective on how big it was.

Another big mesquite gone.

Lost another smaller blind that I had in a different spot.

Maybe you can see it in this closeup?

My tripod stand made it but the big mesquite behind it didn't.

Here's what it looked like when I first put it up.

Not much left of my south fence line. Wooden posts don't hold up very well to fire.

The crazy thing is that the brush seems to have just completely burned up with no trace left behind. This area had lots of brush mixed in with the grass and it is completely wiped clean.

Not just a pass on by type of fire.

I only found 2 dead animals walking the place. A cottontail rabbit and this bird. Craziest looking bird I've ever seen. Several folks have identified it as a Painted Bunting. Too bad it is dead, it was a beautiful bird!

And this picture just shows the worst of the fire. The tree in the front center of the picture still has green leaves for now, but it completely burned up at the base and then fell over.

That is not a small tree by any means either, just a couple trees up from it is the large mesquite that I was sitting on in one of the timed pictures. The tree laying on it's side was at least 30 feet tall and I wouldn't be able to reach my arms around the trunk of it.

I'll try to get some before and after pictures posted as well. I will be documenting the progression for the next several years as well. The big trees can't be replaced in my lifetime, but with a clean slate hopefully the habitat can even better than it was before the fire.

That's it for now. Nathan

Wildfire on my hunting land - Part 1

2011-05-18T07:35:00.000-07:00

Well, our hunting property burned up last week, but I'm just now getting around to posting in on the blog. I was actually down there the Saturday before it burned up and that was when I shot the pig in the last post. The fire occurred the very next day. According to the newspapers the cause of the fire is thought to be lightning, but they haven't completely confirmed that yet. The fire burned a total of 8,500 acres so I was by no means the only one affected. No permanent homes were lost, but a lot of damage was done.

At least I got some neat pictures. I had 5 trail cameras out when the fire hit and ended up with pictures of the fire on 3 of them. 2 of the cameras are going to be okay, 1 might make it and 2 are toast. I didn't have the time on the cameras syncronized, so I can't really tell how long it took to go from one setup to the other, but you can see by the time stamps on the pictures that it was moving pretty fast.

Here's the camera that got hit first. Picture quality isn't very good, I'm guessing it was struggling with the smoke. You can see the leading edge of the fire toward the top of the picture.

50 seconds later and the fire has moved a bunch. The flames weren't even in view on the left side of the picture on the first one and they are pretty close on this one.

Just 3 seconds between these two pictures and the fire noticeablely advanced.

4 more seconds and it is back burning pretty intensely. I mowed a path in front of this camera and that slowed down the advance quite a bit when it hit the shorter grass, but it didn't stop it because the straps burned off the camera and it ended up on the ground. It might be salvageable.

Next camera. This one is setup on my protein feeder which somehow didn't end up burning up. This one doesn't have seconds on the time stamp so you can't really tell exactly how long elapses between each picture. These pictures do give a pretty good feel for the intensity of the fire. Notice all the ash in the air in the first picture.

You can even see flames coming in front of the lens on this shot. This camera was pretty melted and I'm pretty sure it is toast but the SD card seems to still be fine.

The brush is burning pretty intensely in this shot.

Just 2 minutes on the time stamp from the first picture and the fire is already moving on with pretty much everything burned up. You can see that the plastic housing on the camera has melted and is covering up some of the lens.

This camera is setup on one of my spin feeders. In the first shot no actual flames are evident. Lots of smoke though.

37 seconds later and there are now plenty of flames.

32 seconds after that and things are pretty well engulfed. This is just one minute and 9 seconds from the first picture when you couldn't even see the flames.

37 seconds later.

Less than 2 minutes later and the fire appears to be already out. Notice the temperature recorded on the bottom right of the screen, 128 degrees!

A few minutes later though and if you zoom in you can see that the fire isn't out, it's burning in the crack of the big mesquite tree.

The fire would burn in the crack of mesquite trees and over the next several hours burn the heart of the tree completely up and even down into the roots. The tree in that last picture ended up burning completely to the ground at the stump.

Here's an example of another tree that suffered the same fate.

Pretty amazing to have the fire documented with the trail cameras. The damage to my property was pretty severe with nearly all of my largest mesquite trees destroyed and my travel trailer and a few other items burned up as well. I'll post the details of the damage on another post.

That's it for now, Nathan.

Turkey hunting = pork?

2011-05-09T09:39:00.000-07:00

I made a quick run down to the land Saturday afternoon and was hoping to find some Turkeys, but after spending the afternoon without hearing a gobble, I hung the shotgun up and grabbed the Rock River Arms AR-15.

I was afraid that the pigs would have skipped town for the summer since my pond was dry, but I figured I might as well sit for a couple hours and see what showed up. I saw lots of deer, at one time I could see 8 all at the same time in 3 different groups. The bucks are starting to grow antlers, they had nubs a couple inches long or so.

Solo boar came in to one of my feeders and the RRA put him down.

Amazing that a tiny little piece of lead can smoke such a big animal if you put it in the right spot. I didn't put him on the scale, but I'm guessing him right around 200lbs, maybe a little more. He had really good cutters for his size, and they were both intact (sometimes the bigger boars end up with a broken cutter).

Took some work since I was by myself, but I got him on the tailgate so I didn't have to bend over quartering him up. A LOT easier on the back. He looks a lot bigger on the tailgate.

Quartered him up and was home for Mother's day! He's on ice now and I'll probably turn him into pulled pork this week. I need to buy a bigger smoker! Need to do an inventory on my sausage before I turn him all into pulled pork though.

That makes pig #4 off my 160 acres so far for 2011. My friends from Wyoming came down and shot 2 back in March. They actually shot more than 2 but that's all we recovered. Pigs vitals are so much farther forward that a lot of deer and elk hunters shoot them too far back and they can run forever and don't bleed much at all if you shoot them too far back.

With it being so dry, the conditions were perfect for finding old sheds. The grass has withered up and is flat as a pancake compared to normal. Didn't find any from this year, but found 4 old ones. I would prefer rain over finding these old sheds, but they were a nice bonus.

The Northern Rockies are still dealing the affects of record snowfall this winter, and the Midwest is having record 100 year flooding this spring, but it hasn't really rained here in over 6 months.

Here's what the pond down at the land looked like Saturday!

And here's what it should look like in the spring. This picture was taken on May 5th, 2007.

We don't normally get a lot of rain, but here's our total precipitation for the last 7 months.

0.01 0.00 0.04 0.35 0.20 0.00 0.09 = .69 inches!

Did see one hen turkey, and she showed me that the neighbors pond isn't dry yet since she headed that way and came back with muddy feet, but we sure need some rain!

Oh well, thought I would share my Saturday.

Nathan

Weekend in Vegas!

2011-05-06T08:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm back to being behind on posting again already! I'm finally getting around to post on our weekend trip to Las Vegas from 2 weeks ago.

Getting in shape seems to be a constant battle for me. I like to eat, and I like to sit around and be lazy so those two things don't really correlate to being in tip top shape without making some effort. Top that off with the fact that I sit behind a desk for my job, and being in shape is something that I really have to make a constant effort at.

I'm starting to jog again after a layoff during my busy season at work, and have been using a program on my iPhone called Runkeeper. It is a pretty neat little program that tracks your distance, time, average pace, etc. and then gives you a nice little graph at the end of each workout. I'm jogging a little over 2 miles each time I get out and my average pace is just over 10 minutes right now. Not great, but I hope to push the distance up to at least 6 miles and am actually flirting with the idea of running a 1/2 marathon sometime late summer early fall. Not sure if I'm going to make that or not though.

Anyway, a few weeks ago Cathy and I went to Las Vegas, Nevada to celebrate the end of my busy season and our birthdays. One thing we love to do when we go out there is hike in the Red Rock Canyon recreation area. I was hoping to talk her into going a little farther out of her comfort zone and try some shed hunting in the mountains farther north, but still a close drive from Las Vegas but I didn't get it done. We did break out of our standard routine at Red Rock though and went on a nice loop hike that ended up being just over 7 miles.

We hiked up to Laguna Springs which is supposed to be your best chance of seeing some wildlife, including desert bighorn sheep, but all we saw were lizards.

Here's a picture of the springs.
Usually we stick to the most popular area which is right at the front, but this time we made a loop around a huge outcropping of rock. Pretty much a little mountain sitting off by itself.

Here's the back side as we made our way around it to the north.
Another picture looking back the way we came up.
Here's a picture of the mountain itself. I thought about going over the top while Cathy hiked around the base, but we ended up hiking around the base together.
Last picture. This is as we were leaving and looked back and you can clearly see the mountain sitting out all by itself. It really was a neat hike.
Here's a screen shot from the runkeeper program. There are several other screens that show your pace, elevation, etc., but I thought this was a neat representation of the loop.
The only problem is that it burns through batteries and it would be tough to leave it running all day. It took us just over 3 hours to do the 7 miles and I was down to less than 10% battery when I got back. The area we were hiking didn't have cell coverage so that probably burned the battery a little faster looking for coverage the whole time, but I'm not sure if I can turn the phone part off and keep the runkeeper program running or not. I may just have to keep my workouts to under 3 hours!

Oh well, not exactly what most people do on a weekend in Vegas, but we had a great time.

That's it for now, Nathan

A LOT of work for a couple antlers!

2011-04-17T21:39:00.000-07:00

Spent a couple days in New Mexico where I hunted last year looking for sheds.

They had a very mild winter this year as far as snowfall so the sheds are supposedly all way up high. Spent 10 hours looking before I found these 2 on my way back to camp the first day with about an hour of sunlight left but couldn't find the other sides so I went back to try to find the other sides the next day, and spent 5 hours looking and came up empty. All said and done I was hoofing it for 16 hours and found these 2 sheds! At least they are decent ones.

I got so excited when I finally found them that I forgot to take pictures of them as they laid. This is the closest thing I have, sitting on my backpack waiting to get strapped on.

Here they are strapped on my pack. Heading back down the trail as the sun was setting.

I got to try out some of the new gear I've been buying off Camofire and I think it is going to work out pretty well. I got the Trekker poles at Cabelas and they really do work!

Still haven't figured out my boots. Either I have wimpy feet or I'm not meant to climb up and down such steep loose slopes. Wore a couple big ol blisters in just 2 days.

A LOT of work for a couple of sheds when it was all said and done. I for sure got my exercise! One last scenery shot.

That's it for now. Nathan

A very timely post!

2011-04-09T19:52:00.000-07:00

Wow, I'm actually making a post about TODAY!

Made a whirlwind trip down to the land today with Eli and one of his friends and got lucky and found some shed antlers! I've spent hours and hours looking for shed antlers over the years and average about 1 shed found for every 2 or 3 hours of looking. Today I practically stepped on some!

Right off the bat I stepped out of the truck and saw this: I found another little shed about 10 seconds later within 10 feet of that one and then looked around some more but didn't find anything.

Eli and his friend were getting restless so we went to go check on a trail camera and as we were driving off I spotted another shed from the truck! It ended up being the other side of the first shed I found making my 2nd matched set I've ever found on my place.

Here's what it looked like as it laid. We looked for another 30 minutes or so but didn't find anything else of course since we were looking. I've been meaning to hinge cut some trees so I decided to try it. I used my sawzall on this tree and pulled it over.

Eli wasn't actually crying in this picture, that is actually a smile, but he was hot and had actually been crying earlier, he doesn't like cactus! The hinge cut seemed to go pretty well though! We all ended up hot and tired, but overall it was a great success. I found 4 sheds in less than an hour of looking and got all the cameras checked and feeders filled. Plus Cathy and Eli's friends mom got a break for the afternoon!

Here's the end result back at the house. Oh well, I'm just proud of myself for actually being current for once! I still have a ton of stuff to go back and update though!

Way behind on my posting!

2011-04-04T13:54:00.001-07:00

Okay, well it is somewhat expected, but somehow I got way behind on my posts!

Each year I try to tell myself that I am going to be better about posting on a consistent basis, and each year I will go a month or more without updating my blog. Oh well, I guess there are more important things in life than keeping my blog up to date!

One of the reasons that I don't post more frequently is because I personally get more enjoyment reading other people's blogs and posts on discussion forums if they have pictures to go along with the story. Lately it seems that either the pictures that I take don't turn out quite as well as I want them to, or they are on a memory card at the house or some other factor that makes getting the picture posted along with the narrative difficult, so I just don't end up posting anything on that topic. I've decided that I'm going to go ahead and write up the narrative and get it posted regardless of whether I have a picture or not though. After all, when it is all said and done, this blog truly is more of my personal online diary than anything that people are actually waiting on pins and needles for me to get it updated!

So with that said, I'm going to start posting on a regular basis again with or without pictures included. Of course it is going to help that my busy season at work is slowing down and I'll actually have a little more time to get it done too.

So take this as a warning shot across the bow, I'm going to try to start posting again. I would like to make a post on processing a pig, I took my friends from Wyoming on a successful pig hunt as well, plus I am thinking about putting up some posts on all the different hunts that I'm applying for this year and some other fun stuff like that. I've also bought some new gear that I'll try to either do some reviews on or something like that.

That's it for now, Nathan

Shed trap!

2011-02-12T09:29:00.000-08:00

Well, last weekend I made a quick trip down to the land to fill the feeders and check the cameras and try something new, I put up a shed trap.

I'm sure a lot of folks are probably thinking, "What's a shed trap?". So I'll explain that part first. Every year deer shed their antlers in the late winter. These are called shed antlers. I've spent way to much time over the last few years scouring my property for shed antlers and found some, but not as many as I would have hoped and spent a lot of time on it that I could spend on other things so this year I'm trying a shed trap. The idea is to get something to knock the antlers off the deers head when they are ready to fall off instead of letting them fall off where ever they happen to be. The other key is to set things up so that there isn't a risk of trapping the deer along with the antler or injuring the deer by using too much force so the antler is knocked off even if it isn't ready to come off. There are actually a couple commercial versions of shed traps out there, but I wasn't really wanting to spend several hundred bucks for something that may or may not work so I decided to make one on my own.

This time of year is probably the most popular time for my protein feeder so I thought the best thing would be work something up that involved it. I read a few posts on different discussion forums and came up with my idea. Placing t-posts on each side of the spout that the deer feed out of and then streching bungee cords slightly higher than the spout and back 6 inches or so from the spout. The deer could still feed, but they would have to push against the bungee cords with their antlers a little to get to the spout. If the antlers were still firmly attached it shouldn't bother them too much, but if the antlers were starting to get loose, it might just knock them off. For $30 or so in materials I figured it would be worth a shot.

Here's an example picture of the deer feeding.

Here's a trail camera picture when I was just about finished with the shed catcher.
Here's a picture of the finished project.
Here's a farther off view where you can see the hog panels around the entire setup to keep the pigs out.
A few of the bucks have already shed this year so I'm for sure not too early in getting it setup. Looking over the pictures I think I may have gotten the bungees a little too high and I'm not sure if I put them far enough away from the spouts or not. I may move a few of the bungees down a little bit next time I'm out there. For $30 or so and about 15 minutes to set it up it isn't going to hurt to try it out though. I don't think there is any way that a deer could get tangled up and injured in this setup.

We'll see if it worked or not in a few weeks.

I did get to spend a little over an hour in my hunting blind Saturday evening after I got everything setup, and I saw 7 different deer, but didn't see any pigs or coyotes so nothing hit the dirt.

That's it for now. Nathan

Making miracles happen with a hair dryer!

2011-02-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

Well maybe that's stretching it a little bit, but my wife's hair dryer sure earned it's keep this morning!

Last night a cold front blew in with north winds up in the 20 to 30 mph range and temperatures dropped down to 5 degrees. We had just gone through a cold spell with no issues, so I really didn't think much about it. This morning we woke up and went through our morning routine with no issues, toilets flushed, water ran, etc. Everything was working perfect until I went to take a shower and discovered that there was no hot water! The water wasn't cold, there just wasn't any water when you turned the hot water faucet on.

The cold water was working and that's why we hadn't noticed it earlier so I had the idea that I would just run the water for a while and maybe the hot water pipe that was frozen would be close enough to the cold water pipe that was unfrozen that maybe it might warm it up a little. Well water is supposed to be 60 degrees year round so I figured it was worth a shot. After running the water for about 5 minutes it slowed to a trickle and then stopped. My bright idea didn't turn out too bright as now we didn't have cold water either!

Time for the hair dryer to come to the rescue!

We have an outlet at our well house and the fact that water was running for a while told me that the pipes were okay from the well pressure tank to the house, but the pressure tank must not be refilling. I have a bunch of insulation wrapped around the pipes at the well, but evidently not enough and actually it appeared that some of the insulation may have blown loose a little and allowed a gap to open up that cold air could get in. I concentrated on that area and spent about 15 minutes running the hair dryer on the pipes. I manually switched the pump on and off at the pressure switch and it sounded like it was running so I called Cathy on the cell phone and had her check the water. It was working! I had her run it for a while and made sure the pressure switch activated by itself when the pressure dropped back down in the tank and called it good. I wrapped everything back up in the insulation and headed back to the house.

At the house the hot water was still not running. The water heater is in our garage and normally would stay well above freezing, but it is on the north side of the house and the wind was blowing hard enough that might have had something to do with it. I setup the trusty hair dryer again blowing on the cold water line coming to the water heater and left it running on full blast. I started running the cold water in the house again and sure enough after about 5 minutes or so the hot water started running! The water heater had plenty of hot water in the tank so when it was all said and done it took about 30 minutes from finding out we didn't have running hot water to have everything back up and running. I'm sure luck had quite a bit to do with getting everything going so easily, but miracles do happen with a hair dryer sometimes!

Just thought I would share in case anyone else wakes up with no hot water, and has a hair dryer available it might be worth a shot!

Nathan

Christmas Vacation!

2011-01-24T19:21:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm still behind on getting things posted!

We spent Christmas Vacation in Durango, Colorado this year and had an amazing time! Eli turned 4 years old just a few weeks earlier so he was able to go to ski school and he really seemed to catch on pretty well. Cathy and I really enjoyed spending a couple days skiing while he was in school too!

We were going to go the week before Christmas, but there was only a 20" base of snow and only 2 out of 10 lifts were open so we decided to wait a week. During that week it snowed 53" and they ended up opening up all the lifts and nearly the entire mountain was up and running by the time we showed up. The days that we skied ended up being beautiful and we had a great time.

Eli loved the snow and was happy playing in the snow pile in the hotel parking lot before we even headed to the ski resort.

Once we got there, the slopes were wide open and the runs were awesome!
They had groomed most of the runs but there were several that still had some fresh powder.
The mountains are just beautiful.
We have pretty much decided to make this an annual vacation. We had a great time together as a family!
After a couple days of skiing we decided to take Eli on the Durango Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. It is supposed to be a beautiful train ride anytime, but it is supposed to be especially pretty in the winter. It was!
According to the conductor, this spot is over 400' straight down. It sure seemed to be every inch of it to me!
During the winter they don't go all the way to Silverton but stop about halfway there in the middle of the national forest. I think this is the Animas river.
Here's a picture of the return trip. It was like going back in time watching the steam engine chugging down the tracks.
We really had a great time and I highly recommend it to anyone. It was a wonderful Christmas vacation!

Long time, no post...

2011-01-04T18:22:00.000-08:00

Well, it has been a long time since my last post. Sorry about that, but I've been pretty busy, both at home and at work.

I did manage to go hunting for a day and a half on our property in Fisher county, and I did see "Stubby" several times and chose to pass on him and in retrospect I shouldn't have. I was hoping to see "Mr. Big", but he didn't show up on camera for about a month before I was able to get out there and hunt and I didn't see "Tilt" on camera either. I haven't been down to check on things down there for a while so hopefully I'll have some pictures of them and they will have made it through the season to give me a chance at them next year.

Here's a picture of Stubby from a few days before I ended up seeing him and passing on him.
He is about the biggest bodied deer I've seen on my place and for sure is a mature animal and that should have been my criteria for deciding on whether to shoot him or not, but the thought of pulling the trigger on him and then seeing "Mr. Big" later on made me greedy and as a result I'm ending up with tag soup for this year on Texas Whitetail.

I've been posting on http://www.monstermuleys.com/ in their Hunt Adventure Challenge section on all my hunts this year and was very happy to find out that I was picked in the top 7 out of maybe 50 folks who were attempting to log their hunting seasons for everyone. For the most part the posts are very similar to what I've posted here, but some are in a little more detail and there are some that I didn't end up posting here. I doubt I will finish much above 7th place, but it is still neat to be picked in the top 7 and I'll at least win a hat and a T-shirt and a little bit of cash so that's pretty neat. If you are interested in reading the thread here is the direct link - Hunt Adventure Challenge Thread.

Of course things are really picking up at work, but I'll end up with more time stuck in a hotel room and am hoping to actually get caught back up on my posting maybe.

We spent Christmas in Durango as a family and got to get in some skiing with some great snow and beautiful weather and I'll try to get that uploaded and posted soon.

Sorry again for getting so far behind in my posting.

That's it for now. Nathan

Only in New Mexico!

2010-11-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

In my post on my New Mexico Elk hunt, I mentioned that something went down on the night before the opening day of the season that I would expand on later. Well, I’m finally getting back to that.

After scouting that afternoon I was tired and we decided on a 3:30 AM wake up call so we tried to go to bed around 9:00 PM that night. Of course my head was filled with thoughts of the 350 class bull we had seen and the key thing for me was that I “tried” to sleep. I just couldn’t get my mind to quit racing so for the most part I was just lying there hoping to maybe get some sleep before the alarm rang.

Somewhere around 10:00 or so I heard some folks in one of the other campsites arguing. I didn’t think much of it other than I wished they would be quiet and go to bed so I might be able to get some sleep. A little while later they fire up a generator and I can hear them arguing again, but after a little while they shut the generator off and seemed to quiet down. I didn’t look at my clock so my timeline is probably off, but around midnight they started shooting off fireworks! Insanity!

I got out of bed and looked out the window of the trailer and was surprised to see flames about 20 feet in the air over at their campsite! The first thing I thought of was whether or not I needed to get the truck hooked up to the trailer and get it moving out of there, but the wind was fairly calm and actually blowing away from us so it looked like we were pretty safe. Ben got up (I think he had actually been asleep unlike me) and we watched the fire for a while and tried to figure it out. Somewhere in there we heard an explosion and the flames were even higher. A few more small explosions and the fireworks are still going off and I decided that some of the juniper trees must have caught on fire and the popping noise was knots in the wood as it burned. About that time the campground manager got over there with his forest service truck with a tank of water and started spraying it all down. He didn’t seem to be very aggressive in getting in close with the hose and we figured out why when we heard even a bigger explosion that had to have been a propane tank. Then we figured out that it was a travel trailer that was on fire, not a juniper tree!

We watched for a while longer, but I was tired and the alarm was less than 4 hours away so I went back to bed. I heard the campground manager make a trip for a second tank of water but it seemed that things were pretty much under control. An hour or so after the fire started a couple fire trucks arrived, but the fire was already out by then thanks to the campground manager and his forest service truck. Somewhere in there I finally did get some sleep, but it sure didn’t feel like it when the alarm went off at 3:30 AM.

We left camp in the dark and got back to camp in the dark for the next couple days so we didn’t know what had actually happened. I hadn’t ever worried about our trailer burning down before, but it got me thinking about the propane heater, propane fridge, propane water heater, stove, oven, etc. and wondered how the fire could have started. I came up with about a dozen different ways the fire could have started but never had a chance to find out.

After I shot my bull and we were waiting around camp for the packers to come back with it, we had a chance to talk to the campground manager and find out the story. It is so unbelievable that I had a hard time believing it, but there is a saying that I’ve used many times that seems to apply here. “Only in New Mexico.”

The folks at the campsite next to us were two brothers and two of their friends. The campground manager knew them and said they were a pretty rough crowd. Evidently when they got to arguing, he snuck over in the trees around their campsite to see what they were up to and make sure they didn’t get too far out of hand. I have no idea how much alcohol they consumed, but I’m guessing it was a lot!

This is the story that the campground manager told us. I have no reason to not believe what he said, there may be a few holes in the story, but that could be as much of my recollection of the story as anything else. I’ve been checking the Ruidoso News website to see if there is a story on this, but the website is a bit out of date and so far nothing similar has been posted.

Evidently the two brothers ended up getting into a heated argument. From what the campground manager said, this wasn’t anything new. What was new was that this time the argument escalated out of control. At one point in the argument one of the brothers pulls a gun to shoot his brother. One of the friends sees this and knocks the pistol out of his hand. The brother that pulled the gun then reaches down and pulls a knife and swings out and cuts his brother’s throat! Thankfully the cut wasn’t deep enough to cut the jugular, but according to the camp manager it required 28 stitches to close.

So the friends come to the brother’s aide that just had his throat cut and proceed to beat the brother that did the throat cutting senseless. Evidently the brother that had his throat cut was still okay enough to get in some punches and kicks and the brother that did the throat cutting ended up in worse shape than the one that got his throat cut. Missing teeth, etc. After beating him senseless, the friends and the brother with the throat cut jumped in a truck and headed down the mountain and ended up at the hospital to get medical attention for the cut throat.

The brother that was left who did the throat cutting, evidently wasn’t down for too long because according to the campground manager he proceeded to get up, grab a 5 gallon can of gasoline, soak the travel trailer with it and light it on fire! I’m not sure exactly what the campground manager was doing here and didn’t think to ask him, but I’m assuming that the gun was still around there somewhere and I’m not sure I would want to confront someone who had just pulled a gun on his brother and then cut his throat.

The brother then jumped in his truck and headed down the mountain leaving a travel trailer ablaze behind him.

The rest of the night unfolded as we had seen, the big difference was that the fire was by no means and accident. The fireworks that we had heard was ammo exploding in the fire. It must have been several hundred rounds popping off over the course of the fire.

Talking with a few different folks, we really weren’t in that much danger from the ammo exploding as the bullet needs the barrel to really gather enough pressure to go somewhere and do some damage. Without the chamber of the barrel it might hurt you if you are within a few feet of it, but we were probably 50 yards away and not in too much danger. We couldn’t find any evidence that the trailer or the pickup were hit by any flying debris.

Still nothing in the news, but talking to the campground manager, even if the brother who got his throat cut and his trailer burned down won’t press charges against his brother they are going to pursue charges against him for reckless endangerment for starting a huge fire in the middle of a national forest service campground were 30 or more people were staying that night. If things had gone differently and the wind had picked up it could have gotten out of hand really quickly and put everyone in the campsite at risk.

We took a couple pictures of the burned up trailer. It was a really nice 5th wheel trailer and I had actually thought about going over and talking with those guys that afternoon before we headed off to get some scouting in. In retrospect I’m pretty happy I kept my distance. Not much left of the trailer.

I think some of the smaller explosions were heard were the tires and maybe the generator. It really is amazing that none of the trees around the campsite caught on fire, the flames were at least 20 feet tall.

Not much that was even identifiable let alone salvageable.

So that was our first night in camp! You can’t say that it was uneventful that’s for sure!

Nathan

2010 New Mexico Mule Deer.

2010-11-08T11:38:00.000-08:00

Well I’m back from New Mexico with a nice mature mule deer. This was an interesting hunt because I really wasn’t sure what my expectations were on what kind of deer I was willing to shoot. I usually go into a hunt with an idea of what size of animal it is going to take to get me to pull the trigger, but after putting all my focus on my elk hunt this year, I really hadn’t had much time to think about my mule deer hunt.

I stayed at my friend’s farm like I did last year, but this year since I had a public land tag and they were going to be hunting there place I decided to hunt on the neighbor’s state land instead of hunting on their place. I logged a lot of miles on my gps and saw lots of deer, but no real monsters. There should be some pretty good hunting for several years to come based on the number of good young bucks that I saw though.

Opening day was Saturday and I spent most of it walking. I hadn’t scouted out the area I was going to hunt and based on my interpretation of the hunting regulations I’m not sure I really could scout that area because it is state leased lands, so I slept in until 6:00 AM and started walking just a few minutes before shooting light. I was a little worried about my feet because of the blisters from the elk hunt, but I bought some new inserts for my boots that seem like they are really going to help and I had the bottom of my feet nearly covered in moleskin and they held up really well. It really was amazing how much easier it was to hike at 4,000 feet elevation instead of 8,000 feet and on some nice up and down sand hills instead of loose steep mountains. I put in more miles that day than any day on my elk hunt and I never felt out of breath or like I needed to stop and rest to keep from having a heart attack! I ended up putting in 16 miles in 2 days per my gps, but it wasn't anything compared to the elk hunt last week.

Saw one nice shooter buck on Saturday, but didn't get the deal closed on him. Saw 30+ does and fawns that morning along with 12 bucks and saw 13 does and fawns and 2 bucks in a different area that evening. A couple of the bucks were tempting in the 150" maybe 160" class that I could have shot, but they were pretty easy to pass on opening day. The buck I wanted to shoot, but couldn't close the deal on was probably pushing 180" as a clean mainframe 5x5 with good deep forks and around 28" wide. Not super tall, but a real nice deer.

The daughter of the people who are letting me park my travel trailer on their farm killed a crazy looking buck with a massive spike on one side that measured 9" circumference at the base today. I helped them quarter it up and get it iced down in a cooler. I'm going to use my beetles to clean the skull for her so she can do a European mount on it.

On Sunday I decided that I needed to leave out earlier so I could have the sun come up to my back instead of hunting into the sun so I set my alarm for 5:00 AM which was 4:00 AM with the daylight savings change. I was out walking in the dark at about 4:30 and got a little over 2 miles in before it started getting close to shooting light. I got to the top of the nearest sandhill and watched for a while. I saw some bucks about 600 yards off and a couple of them were fighting pretty good, not just your normal sparring match. I decided to move in on them and get a closer look. A few route changes here and there and I was less than 200 yards and watching them. Turned out they were the same 3 bucks that I had seen the day before in almost the same location. One of them was a really nice 5x5 that was tall, but not very wide yet. He will be a really nice buck next year if he makes it. The other two were wider but one was a 3x4 and the other was a 3x3. I watched them for a while and decided to try my luck elsewhere.

Since those bucks were in the same spot as the day before I decided to go back where I had seen the shooter buck the day before. I saw a few does on the way and another nice 5x5 that needed another year. I happened to watch him going into some brush to bed down and even though I saw him go in there it took me a while to find him again once he bedded down. I was around 100 yards away from him and he ended up bedding down with his back to me and his face into the wind which I thought was odd.

I altered my route to go around where he was bedded so I didn’t blow him out and spook anything else and instead blew out 5 does that were on the other side of the hill. Some of the does and fawns seem to just stop and stare at you from 50 yards away and then slowly move off, but these didn’t like something and one blew pretty hard even though I was downwind from them. They moved off 400 yards or so and stopped then slowly moved off. As I was watching them I saw a nice buck with deep forks. I backed up to the other side of the hill and started moving around it. I had to go closer to the buck that had bedded down, but if I blew him out he would go away from where the nice buck I saw was. He stayed put and I moved around and found that there wasn’t just one buck where the does had gone by, but two. Both looked pretty good.

I watched for a while and ranged them and they were 286 yards off. The first one I had seen had nice deep forks and was a very pretty 5x5. A few of his tines almost looked like they were webbed together at the bottom of the forks. He was right at his ears on his inside spread and overall a pretty nice buck. Probably right at 160”. The other buck was noticeably bigger and older and looked crazy tall. His fronts weren’t much, and I never did get to see him turn his head enough to get an idea of his spread, but I was going to struggle to decide which of these bucks deserved a bullet.

After watching a while I decided that I could back out and get closer to them. I went back around the hill and ended up walking within 30 yards of where the first buck was bedded down. I kept expecting him to bust out of there like a freight train, but he never did. The brush he was bedded in was really thick and I never did actually see him in the brush as I walked by, but I sure never saw him leave and am pretty sure he was in there the entire time.

I ended up on another hill and this time I was right at 200 yards away from the 2 bucks. I probably watched them for 15 minutes this time and still had no clue which one I wanted to shoot. The younger 5x5 was dozing hard and his head would droop down as he dozed off into la la land. One thing I thought was interested was how close together they were bedded. They couldn’t have been more than a couple feet apart from each other using the same piece of sagebrush for shade. I debated on blowing a cow call or something to see if I could get them to stand up for a shot and ended up deciding that I was going to try to move in closer. They were bedded down for the duration and weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

I backed out and went around the side of the hill and started moving in on them. When I was up on the hill I made sure I had the spot they were at identified so I would be able to get about 100 yards away and decide what I wanted to do once I was there, but as I moved over toward them, the sandhill ridges started looking all alike. I started to second guess myself and which ridge they should be on when the younger 5x5 stood up about 25 yards away from me. After a split second, he turned and ran straight away and then the older buck stood and ran all in one smooth motion without offering me a shot when he first stood up. Somewhere in there I decided I wanted to shoot the older buck even if he wasn’t going to score as well as the younger one.

They were both running almost dead away from me, but then they angled just a little bit to the left and I thought I had an opening to squeeze a shot in. It was about a 100 yard shot and I took the shot offhand. I recovered from the shot and cycled the bolt and looked down a split second for my brass, and when I looked up I didn’t see him. The younger buck was still out ahead and I cow called with my diaphragm and he stopped and turned broadside at 150 yards and stared at me. I kept scanning for the older buck, but he had disappeared. After what seemed like a minute the younger buck started off again and I headed after them. I saw a white patch in the sagebrush, but it didn’t look like a deer so I was still thinking I must have missed and the older buck must have cleared on out before the younger one somehow. As I got closer, the white spot looked like a deer’s nose and sure enough, it was the older buck, piled up in the sagebrush. He was down for the count.

The bullet had entered his left side just in front of his hindquarter. I looked for an exit in his front but couldn’t find one. When I caped him out I found my bullet right under the skin in front of his right shoulder. It turned out to be a perfect (lucky) shot and he must have dropped so fast that I never saw it happen. You could see that he had plowed up some sagebrush as he fell, and actually ended up almost on his back with his nose up in the air and his antler caught in one last clump of sage.

I wasn’t disappointed when I got to him. He was for sure a mature buck and although he wasn’t going to score very well, I was happy with him. His backs go almost straight up and look even taller than they really are. His is missing an eye guard and a fork on his right side, but I can live with that. I’m curious to pull his jawbone and see what it looks like. I’m guessing he is a 5 ½ year old or older.

Here are the glory pics. I learned my lesson last year on the self timed pictures and actually made sure the camera was focusing on the deer and not on a clump of grass in front of the camera this time.

Here he is by himself.

And a timed shot using my backpack as a tripod.

I caped him out and am going to give the cape to my taxidermist and do a european mount on him myself. The deer in that area are the fattest game animals I’ve ever seen. This guy had about 2” of fat on his back and you basically had to skin the fat off to get to his backstraps to cut them out. They are big bodied animals as well. I’m guessing this guy was pushing 250lbs live weight.

I had right at 1 ¼ miles to pack him out and instead of killing myself I went ahead and did it in 2 loads. First load was ½ the meat plus my gun and everything I had in my pack (including a spotting scope), and then on the second trip I emptied out my pack and carried out the head and the other ½ of the meat. My friend came with me on the 2nd trip and although she didn’t help carry anything she was there for moral support and took some pictures of my packing out.

Here's a farther off shot showing some of the terrain.

That country doesn’t look like much, but it sure is packed with deer.

Here’s a tailgate shot with the results of the weekend. The buck on the right is the crazy buck that the daughter of my friend shot on the first day. I nicknamed him “Igor”. The one on the left was shot by my friend’s brother. Real nice mainframe 5x5 with a kicker coming off his right G3. It scored right at 164”. My buck is in the middle and rough scored only 144”, but you can see that he looks to be the biggest of the bunch at first glance. I’m happy with him and I guess that’s the important thing.

This morning we took our traditional glory shots at the house with Eli. He thought it was a big one. I can’t wait for the days when he can go out with me on these hunts!

I was going to dress him in jeans this morning to take the pictures, but he was adamant that he wanted to be in all camo.

Overall a very successful hunt in my opinion. If I can close the deal on a nice whitetail on my hunting property here in Texas it will be pretty hard to top this year’s hunting season even with striking out on antelope.

That's it for now. Nathan

Successful New Mexico Elk Hunt!! (Novel)

2010-11-03T15:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I’m been thinking about how I’m going to post this for a few days now and still really haven’t figured it out. Lots of stories to tell and not sure if I should put it all in one huge post or try to break it up into several different ones. I guess once I got it written it ended up mainly as one huge post. Believe it or not I still have a few stories to add to this, but I’ll do that later.

The area we were hunting is a limited entry area like all of New Mexico for elk. Only a certain number of tags are drawn each year and I was lucky enough to draw one of those tags this year. The first thing that you notice in the area we were hunting was that there were elk everywhere. I think the fewest elk we counted on any day that we were out hunting or scouting was 30. On the day that I shot my bull we saw 6 other bulls that were 5x5 or better. Amazing how many elk were in the area.

The other noticeable feature about the area we were hunting was that it was ROUGH. The day I shot my bull we were a little over 4 miles back and that might not sound like much, but trust me, it was! The terrain was very steep, but it was also loose and you were constantly slipping and trying not to fall down. There was also cactus of every type imaginable up there and you were getting poked by some cactus somewhere on your body about every 3rd step it seemed. My shins, hands and forearms look like I tangled up with a wild cat there are so many cuts, scratches and bruises on them. Even with my fancy new boots I struggled with blisters and ended up with blisters the size of silver dollars on the balls of both of my feet. Both heels had visible white hot spots about the size of a silver dollar that never ended up turning all the way into blisters and one of my big toes had a blister on it as well when it was all said and done. I sure hope I can get these boots figured out and that they will last a long time once I do get them figured out.

I was nervous and apprehensive about this hunt, mainly because of the tremendous numbers of unknowns involved. The first step that we had to deal with was finding a good camping spot. I had found a nice forest service campground right where I wanted to be, but most of the sites were setup for tent camping and not a travel trailer. There are something like 18 total campsites, but only 4 or 5 of them are big enough to park even our small travel trailer in. I left the house at 6:30 AM Friday morning and picked up my friend Ben who had actually volunteered to go with me. I was hoping to get to the campsite early enough to get a decent spot and when we pulled it at just after noon, we were happy to find out that there was still a few nice spots left and the one we were assigned to was actually the one that I would have chosen if all the other spots in the campsite were available. The first step on the journey was a success.

We ate lunch and the plan was to go up to where I was planning on being on opening morning and getting some waypoints set on my GPS so we would be able to get back where I wanted to be in the dark the next morning. Up the mountain we went and although I was in a little better shape than the last time I went up that particular slope in August, it still kicked my butt. We didn’t see any really fresh sign, but when we got to where I wanted, we saw our first elk of the trip. 5 different spikes and a raghorn were bedded on the north facing slope right where they were supposed to be, the problem is that none of their dads or older brothers had read the books and had decided they should be somewhere else. We got our spot marked on the GPS and went on up the mountain a bit and looked over on the reservation and saw the dads and older brothers. I didn’t keep a count of elk that we saw on the reservation side of the boundary, but it was a lot. Dozens. Saw one really nice bull and he was intent on one thing and one thing only, feeding. I bugled and cow called a few times and got immediate responses from bulls on the reservation each time. Either I got them riled up or they got themselves riled up, because even after I quit bugling, they kept on going. Except the big bull. He never looked up from feeding when I bugled or when one of the bulls over on the reservation with him bugled. He had more important things on his mind, like feeding.

After watching and listening to the elk on the reservation for a while and realizing that they were not going to even think about coming our way, we decided we should head back to camp. It had gotten a little bit later than we thought and we were going to have to hoof it to get back before dark. We started down the mountain and were marking a few more spots on the GPS on the way down and after seeing a few elk that turned into rocks after looking at them with binoculars I spotted a really nice bull about 700 yards on the other side of finger ridge we were on. We setup and looked him over pretty good and there was no doubt he was the bull I wanted to shoot if I could. We had plenty of distance between us and the reservation boundary and he was the bull of my dreams, literally. I’m a sucker for the big whale tails and that’s exactly what this guy had. Looking through the spotting scope I couldn’t keep my eyes off his 12” 5’s and his main beams ran probably 18” past his 5’s and downward toward his back. We watched him for 15 or 20 minutes and he was all by himself feeding hard. Light was fading and I tried to get a few pictures of him but didn’t get any that turned out very well at all. We hadn’t planned on being on the mountain at dark and I didn’t bring my headlamp or much else and we decided we better get moving. We didn’t beat the dark getting off the mountain and stumbling back into camp after dark ended up becoming a recurring theme for the rest of the hunt.

Here’s the best picture I got of him through the binoculars as light was fading. Not much of a picture, but it’s all I have.

We ate a quick supper and went to bed around 9:00 with our alarms set to 3:30 AM and planned to be headed up the mountain in the dark at 4:00. That would get us on a vantage point where we should be able to see the bull and make a move on him as he came back up the mountain to his bed the next morning. Needless to say I couldn’t sleep. I was tired for sure after getting up at before 6:00 AM and driving 5 ½ hours and then hiking up and down the mountain, but that bull was in my head. His 4’s were really nice as well, but I realized I never even looked at his fronts I was so focused on his backs. I decided that he was for sure a 340”er and realistically could be up around 360” or maybe even a little bigger. I replayed everything in my head dozens of times trying to decide exactly what the best way to go after him in the morning.

After a sleepless and eventful night (I’ll save that for another post), I might have gotten an hour of sleep before the alarm went off at 3:30. We were headed up the mountain at 4:00 as planned and did pretty well hiking the steep loose slope in the dark. We were at the spot we had decided on the night before a full hour before shooting light. We ditched the spot I had planned on being on opening morning for the last 3 months the second we saw the big bull in a different spot. The next hour crawled by and we ate some breakfast that we had thrown in our packs before we headed up. Shooting light was just around the corner and we repositioned a little to get the best vantage point of the area we had seen the bull the night before and get as close as possible without giving up the wind or our elevation. Shooting light came and went and then sunrise came and went and there was no bull to be found. No elk to be found. We had heard some other hunters on horseback moving up the trail at the bottom of the canyon and originally thought that would work to our advantage and that they might push them up to us, but it didn’t appear that was going to happen.
After waiting around a while longer we decided to head up to another spot and see what else was going on. We moved over near the spot I had originally planned on being on opening morning and saw some elk. Saw a small bull and either a cow or a spike way down in the bottom moving up and then saw a group of 6 bulls right on the reservation boundary. They were on our side of the boundary but just barely and it would have been really tricky too keep them on the right side of the boundary once the shooting started. They were about 600 yards off and the best bull of the bunch was a 6x5 that would probably go 270ish. After watching them for a while and trying to figure out where they were going to go we decided to push on.

As we were moving we heard a real low growly bugle maybe a couple hundred yards off on the reservation side of the ridge. We hunkered in and setup and waited to see what was going to happen. A few minutes later a spike comes through a saddle at 65 yards and a minute or so later a raghorn moves through in the same exact spot. After a few minutes I got impatient and make a few cow calls and the bull did the growly bugle again in about the same spot we had heard him originally. 30 minutes later and still no bull and I cow called again and didn’t get a response. 15 minutes later I heard some of the wild horses neigh in close to the same spot and they didn’t come over the saddle either. I thought we were okay on the wind, but up on the top of the ridge it was swirling around a little and in retrospect they must have been able to catch our scent at some point. After waiting a little while longer I moved around a bit and saw some wild horses a good ½ mile off on the reservation side of the boundary. I’m guessing that’s where the growly bull ended up as well. As usual there were at least a dozen elk over on the reservation. I didn’t see any huge bulls and didn’t see the bull from the night before over there but my gut feel says that’s exactly where he was.

Off we went again, up and up. We had heard a few shots by that time but not as many as I would have thought. Talking with the campground host the day before he said there were 2 other bull tags and 2 cow tags in camp but that was around noon and the campground had filled up quite a bit later that afternoon and evening. Across the canyon to the north we saw about 15 elk with one decent bull in it but they were close to a mile away and the main trail was between us and them so I figured even if we went after them someone else would get there first so we just watched them for a bit and then moved on. I was still thinking there was a chance we might see my bull somewhere. Did I mention that we were moving up? Did I mention that it was steep and loose? Well it was, and we kept going. We got right up against the reservation boundary for a while and actually had to move off the top of the ridge to stay off the reservation.

Here’s a picture I took of the only sign I saw showing the boundary. Thankfully my GPS showed a clear line where the boundary was so I didn’t have to rely on the signs.

What had looked like a good vantage point on the map and on google earth turned out to be a little too thick to see very well, but it turned into a decent place to eat lunch and take a nap. Sleep still eluded me, but Ben got some. I got antsy and moved around some. Saw a small Muley buck and heard some more wild horses but didn’t see them. Went back over to where we had eaten lunch and did see a pretty good bull somewhere around 300” maybe a little better, but he was ½ mile away with a big canyon between us and the way the reservation boundary was where we were at we would have to drop pretty much all the way down and then back up to get to him. He looked like he was heading to a north facing slope to bed, but with the distance that we would have to cover and then the uncertainty of whether we could find him once we got there as well as the fact that the wind was wrong helped us decide not to go after him. Plus I was still thinking about the big bull we had seen on Friday night and wanted to be back there when it got closer to evening.

We decided to head back that way and got to another vantage point where we could see the area the big bull had been on Friday night and settled in. I posted a quick update on my hunt adventure challenge thread from my phone and checked and saw that Texas Tech was getting beat and tried to conjur up that big bull from my dreams. The wind was pretty gusty and one minute it would be blowing up the canyon and then the next minute it would be blowing down the canyon so I’m sure that wasn’t helping anything. On the way over to where we were going to sit we found a couple decent sheds from this spring and that was surprising. I found a decent 5 point shed really close to the top of the ridgeline where anyone walking the ridge should have seen it. Ben found a nice 6 point shed a little farther off the ridgeline when he looked around a little thinking he might find the other side of my shed. The crazy thing is that I had walked the same ridge in August and didn’t see either of them.

Somehow I got mixed up on the time difference and decided we needed to start heading off the mountain an hour early. We started heading down the ridgeline again and I found 2 more nice sheds. They were laying right beside each other and I’m pretty sure they are a matched set. One of them has a really neat abnormal point that I’ve never seen on an elk before. I realized that I’d messed up on the time when sunset came and went based on what time I thought it was, and the sun was still up! We decided to hang out on the ridge a little while longer thinking we might see something come out to feed, but we didn’t see anything else. Here’s the sheds packed up and ready to head down the mountain.

At sunset we started heading off the mountain and realized we probably should have started earlier. It was less than ½ mile from where we were to the trail back to camp, but it took over an hour to make it down there. This was probably the steepest and loosest slope we were on the entire time we were out there. Mix in some deadfall and packs weighed down with sheds and tired legs and rapidly approaching darkness and we were VERY happy when we got to the trail for the last mile back into camp. It was after dark and that was the first time we had stepped on a trail the entire day. We ended up getting back to camp around 7:30 and ate a quick supper and were in bed by 9:00 again.

The sheds were a nice bonus, but I was pretty disappointed that we hadn’t seen hide or hair of the big bull from Friday. Somewhere in there we had heard a barrage of shots down in the canyon below us that seemed to go on forever, at least 8 or 9 shots over a 5 minute span, and I’m sure that didn’t help the big guy stick around if he was still anywhere near. If I had more patience and if I had been in better shape I might have decided to stick it out and keep looking for him in the same area each day, but we decided to try a different spot on Sunday a little farther away from the reservation boundary. It was pretty frustrating seeing elk only to know you couldn’t go after them. We also decided that we were going to have a hard time keeping up the same pace for 4 more days and maybe we needed to think about a less strenuous day. Since we were going to an area that we hadn’t been and didn’t have any GPS coordinates marked there was no point in getting there in the dark so we decided to sleep in and set our alarms for 4:30 AM. After a little bit chores around camp and a light breakfast we were on the trail in the dark at 5:15. Shooting light found us about 2 ½ miles down the trail right about where we had hoped to be.

There was a nice ridgeline that looked like the place to be for a good vantage point so we started up. After getting to the first knob, we looked a little and decided we needed to go higher so we started up again. We sat for a minute and ate some more breakfast and I spotted a few cows about 300 yards below us on the south facing slope. We had noticed that the day before that in the mornings the elk were on the south facing slopes feeding into the morning and then moving either down and over the north facing slopes to bed or moving over the top of the south facing slope to bed on the other side of the ridge. I hung around a little bit thinking that the 3 cows might be part of a larger group and a bull might come up after them but something below them got their attention and they moved off.

After waiting a bit the recurring theme started playing out and we headed on up the ridge. As we were heading up I happened to look behind us and saw the biggest black bear I’ve ever seen in the wild. At first glance I thought it was a grizzly with a shoulder hump and the whole works. It was a dark brown color and fully furred out for winter and about as fat as a bear can get I would think. I’m pretty sure that’s what the elk had seen and I understood their desire to move out seeing him. He was actually following the same path we had taken up the ridge so that kept our attention checking our backs for a while, but he must have decided to go another direction because we never saw him again.

So, up the ridge we went. We found a nice spot to sit and glass and the mountain was alive with elk. We saw several way down in the bottom but they all appeared to be cows or spikes, then we saw a group of about 15 above us about ½ mile and they had one decent bull in with them. Then we saw another bull on our side of the ridge and he looked pretty decent as well. We also spotted another black bear and this was a sow with 2 cubs. After watching a while, there was another bull with the larger group of elk and he was for sure worth a closer look. With a little added spring in our step we started up the ridgeline again. We hit a big rock outcropping and had to decide how to tackle it. There was a fairly established game trail going around it on the same side of the ridge that we had seen all the elk but I was worried they might see us and decide to move out so I started us around the other side of the outcropping.

A few hundred yards of that and it was pretty easy to see why the established game trail went around the other side. Lots of rocks, lots of cactus and brush and not much in the way of an easy way anywhere around on that side of the ridge, but we pushed on. We’d made some pretty good progress and were getting fairly close to where it was time to start thinking about going back up on the top of the ridgeline when we spotted some more elk on this side of the canyon. First we saw 3 bulls and they all looked pretty decent then we spotted another bull a little closer and he was for sure a decent 6x6. They were about 1,000 yards away, but there wasn’t any real cover to help us put a sneak on them. They were very focused on feeding and seemed oblivious to us so we decided to just press on and move as quietly as we could.

We got to the top of the ridgeline and make some pretty quick progress out of sight of the group of bulls and dropped back over thinking we should be getting fairly close. We’d gotten closer, but we could only find 1 bull now and he was still 600 yards away. The side of the ridge was even rockier, steeper and had more cactus and brush than before, but we decided to just go after him. Originally I thought about leaving Ben there to keep watch on the bull so if he moved off he could tell me where he went as I put a stalk on him, but as we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do the bull started moving and went behind some trees. We decided to both move closer and try to keep an eye on the bull if he moved off.

We ended up dropping into a little trough and then back up on a finger ridge and thought that would put us right where we wanted to be. The wind was still decent, but the forecast was for it to switch from the west and that would be bad if it did so we didn’t want to give them the chance to wind us and move out if we could help it. We snuck up on the top of the finger expecting to see our bachelor group of elk waiting for us and were greeted by nothing. As the way it goes with hunting so many times, you work hard on getting where you think you want to be only to find out that the animals had a different plan than you did. Dejected we sat down and started thinking about our next move.

There were still at least 3 bulls on the other side of the big ridgeline from us that were definitely an option. They might have had a chance to bed by then, but 2 of them were with a pretty good group of cows and surely we would be able to find them if we tried. The bad part of that plan was that we had dropped several hundred feet of elevation coming down to the finger ridge thinking we were stalking the bachelor group of bulls and we had that plus several hundred feet more to climb back over the top of the ridge.

I was about to pull some comfort food out of my pack when two 5x5 bulls came out of the trees 300 yards away from us, right where they were supposed to be! We were sitting pretty much out in the open on the finger ridgeline, but they seemed oblivious to us. We looked them over pretty good and they were both decent 5x5’s, but neither were the 300” 6x6 minimum that I had set for myself. Even with the minimum I had set for myself I was thinking about shooting one of these bulls. It wasn’t like we weren’t seeing any elk, we were seeing tons of elk, and it wasn’t like we hadn’t seen any good bulls, we had seen a great bull and a couple other pretty good ones, but when it came down to it, I was tired and wondering if I could take this for another 3 days. There is also a big difference in seeing a bull 800 yards away and having one right there in shooting range. I also thought that there had been 4 bulls in the area and for sure one of them was a 6x6 so I decided to go ahead and get closer and see if I could see one of the other bulls that we had seen from back on the ridgeline.

I grabbed my shooting sticks and my rifle and headed toward them. Ben stayed put this time where he could see them and pulled the video camera out to see if he could get a good video of them. They had started sparring a little and it was pretty neat just to watch them. I debated bringing my rangefinder, but for some reason left it and started putting on a stalk. With the bulls sparring and some pretty decent cover it wasn’t a very hard stalk. I got to about 200 yards away and setup the shooting sticks and got ready to make a decision. I kept my eyes open just in case I might see one of the other bulls and about the time I got setup I saw another bull up the canyon a couple hundred yards! I could see it was a good bull with my naked eye, but through the binoculars it was a definite 6x6, the same one we had seen earlier from up on the ridge. I quickly swung my rifle around and got my shooting sticks setup and got ready. I had just been seriously considering shooting a 270”ish 5x5 so there was no doubt in my mind that a 6x6 was on the list. I felt pretty steady and amazingly calm and squeezed off the first shot. The bull didn’t seem to move a muscle. I cycled the bolt and took aim and squeezed off another shot. The bull lurched forward and then stopped. I cycled the bolt, took aim and squeezed off another shot. The bull went down and he went down hard.

I’ve always been told that on an elk you keep shooting as long as they are standing even if you feel good about the shot, and then you stay ready to shoot again if they try to get back up. It was a good thing that my bull didn’t attempt to get back up because I had been foolish enough to leave the rest of my ammo with my pack a hundred yards up the finger ridge. I’m not sure if I was just that confident in my shooting or if I had doubts in the back of my mind on whether I would be willing to shoot one of the 5x5 bulls or what, but I should have never left the rest of my ammo in my pack, plus I should have at least put another cartridge in my magazine after chambering the first round before I started my stalk. Then I would have at least had 1 more shot if I had needed it. Hopefully that will be a lesson learned and I got away with it this time at least.

I started looking around for my casings and for some reason couldn’t find a bright silver casing right at my feet. After spending what seemed to be an eternity looking for my empty cases I gave up on finding the 3rd one and started heading up to where Ben and our packs were. I looked back over to where the two 5x5 bulls had been sparring as was surprised to see them standing there looking at me! I’d shot 3 times just a couple hundred yards away from them and they hadn’t run off. I sent a text to Ben that I’d shot a bull because from where he was sitting he couldn’t see down into the canyon where the bull I had shot was and didn’t know what I was shooting at. I got back to him and the two 5x5’s were just then deciding that they should probably move out, but even then they didn’t run off, but just walked quickly over the next finger ridge. I didn’t ever see the 4th bull of the group, but Ben thought he saw it move out right when I first started shooting. We never did get a spotting scope on that 4th bull so I’m not sure exactly what it was, but I know it wasn’t a monster so I’m not that worried about whether it might have scored a few inches more or less than the bull I ended up shooting.

After I got back to Ben I told him that I had shot a decent 6x6 and he hadn’t read my text yet so was wondering what was going on. With the first shot he had expected one of the 5x5’s we’d been watching to drop and then after the 2nd shot he figured out I was shooting at something else and then after the 3rd shot he was wondering if I was missing or what was going on. I sat and collected my thoughts for a bit and then we gathered up our packs and started over to where he had went down. I had watched him go down and he had rolled down the slope a bit but didn’t move afterwards so I didn’t think there was much of a point of waiting very long. Maybe 50 yards that direction and we could see him through a gap in the trees and he wasn’t moving so we knew everything was good.

Here’s a picture of the side of the finger ridge that he was on. If you know exactly where to look you can actually see him laying there in this picture, just a white spot about 1/3rd of the way from the left and about ¼ of the way from the bottom of the picture.

We dropped down into the little finger and climbed back up the other side and things hadn’t gotten any flatter just because we had a bull on the ground. If anything things may have gotten even steeper! Just climbing up the 50 or 60 yards out of the bottom to him was a chore, and even though he hadn’t moved an inch from where we had seen him last, it still took about 10 minutes to find him.

Here he is the way we found him. He had rolled down the slope about 10 or 15 yards and come to rest on this game trail. The large cut you see just under his right leg is from the fall, not from a bullet. He has a few scrapes on his antlers from the rocks, but it didn’t look like anything had broken off.

Anyone who has ever had an elk on the ground knows that is when the work starts. It’s hard to tell in the pictures, but where he ended up wasn’t exactly level ground. The game trail was almost like a ledge but we worked on getting him setup on the trail to take some pictures and start butchering him and it wasn’t going to work. There was another wider game trail a few yards below the one he ended up on so we ended up sliding/dragging/rolling him down to it. Even then it was still quite a chore just getting him setup to take pictures of and having a reasonably level spot to work on getting him quartered up. I’ve talked to people who have stories of having to tie the elk to a tree to keep it from sliding down the hill while they are quartering it and the only thing that kept us from having to do that was the game trail that we were able to get him on.

Here are the glory shots. You can get a feel for how steep it is by the fact that I’m a couple feet below him and Ben was several feet above us just to get the picture taken. If you look off to the right side of the picture you can see that it is nearly straight down over there.

Here he is from the front.

It quickly became evident that I had been deceiving myself when I had originally thought that I could handle this by myself. When I had shot my bull in Wyoming I had practiced moving it around a bit by myself and had done all the quartering and deboning and felt pretty good that I could handle it by myself. On a steep slope with a little larger bull it would have been a nightmare. I think I probably could have gotten him quartered up and deboned, but getting him caped out and keeping the meat clean would have been nearly impossible. Even with both of us it was work getting him moved around and flipping him over after we had the quarters and backstrap off the first side. I did struggle a little with keeping my knife sharp and that didn’t help, but I was VERY thankful to have Ben along to help! Even taking good pictures would have been difficult, we had a hard time getting a decent timed picture with both of us in there. This is the best one we were able to get.

Here’s Ben with the elk.

I had tentatively set some guidelines on whether we were going to try to pack the elk out if I got one or if we were going to hire someone to pack it out on horses for us. The guidelines I had set was that if I shot one less than a mile from camp then we were going to for sure pack it out. If I shot one between 1 and 3 miles from camp, it was going to be decided on a case by case scenario (how rough it was, how much the packer was going to charge, etc.), and if it was over 3 miles from camp then I was going to for sure hire it packed out. According to my GPS we were 4.31 miles in so one of the first things I did was start calling numbers I had of people that would pack out animals. My first call was at 10:30 AM about 1 minute after I saw my bull go down. The bad thing was that I kept getting voicemails and not actually getting a hold of anyone.

Regardless of who was going to do the packing out, the first order of business was getting him quartered up and caped out so we set to work. About 3 hours later (did I mention I was having a hard time keeping my knife sharp?) he was quartered up and caped out and pretty much ready to go. The bad thing is that I still hadn’t heard back from anyone on the pack out. In retrospect, I should have called beforehand and made arrangements for a potential pack out, but I had thought that would be presumptuous of me since the first order of business was actually getting a bull on the ground before lining up someone to pack him out, but after not connected with anyone after over 4 hours I started to get worried. I called a friend and got some more numbers and called all of them and left more voicemails with each number. I still had yet to actually talk with someone.

We needed to get the quarters up in a tree and away from the carcass so we Ben moved the quarters down in a cool shaded area about 100 yards from the carcass, while I spent the time on the phone trying to find a packer. Ben earned his keep there. A little time spent throwing rocks tied to ropes over tree branches (and then throwing rocks into trees to free up misplaced throws) and we had the quarters hung. They weren’t the best but it was as good as we could do with what we had. An item I probably need to add to my pack is a pulley. The rope over the tree limb created a lot of friction so when you tried pulling it up it wouldn’t go. I lifted then pushed them over my head while Ben pulled and we could get the quarters about 7 feet off the ground and that was going to have to do. If a bear really wanted them, it would be able to get to them, but we hoped that by moving them away from the carcass and getting them up off the ground that would at least make a bear have to work to get to them and for sure would keep any coyotes off of them. Here’s a picture of the quarters in the tree.

After still not hearing from anyone the plan became that Ben would pack out the backstraps, tenderloins and neck meat and I would pack out the head and cape that night and if we still hadn’t heard from anyone we would come back in the morning and start packing out the rest. The weather wasn’t too bad and it was supposed to get in the lower 40’s upper 30’s overnight so the meat would be fine from that perspective. I loaded up the head and cape on my pack and got ready to head out. When we got ready to hang the quarters I had to take my pack back off and to my surprise, the antlers made a pretty good pack stand.

I’m going to have to buy a scale to leave in the trailer to actually weigh some of these loads. The last time I caped out an animal I almost didn’t leave enough cape for the taxidermist so this time I wanted to make sure I left plenty and probably went overboard. With the cape and the head and the antlers along with my gun and everything else that was already in my pack I was for sure carrying a HEAVY load. On top of being heavy, it was awkward and wide with the antlers catching on every tree, brush and cactus on the way. The drainage we were in was steep and loose like everywhere we had been and the main goal continued to be to keep from falling down. Here’s a picture of me starting the packout with the head and cape.

I’d looked at a few other ways that folks had the heads on their packs, and the best way looked like the way I had it, but I needed something to keep the head straight up and the antlers straight down. I didn’t want to tie anything around the nose of the elk because I was afraid it would rub so I just left it like this. If it looks awkward, believe me, it was.

I pulled the trigger at 10:30 that morning and by the time we had everything hung and were actually packing out it was a little after 4:00. The going was rough and I was tired. I gave it my best effort and about ¼ mile down the drainage in some very rough and steep stuff, I made an executive decision that we were going to have to come back in the morning for the head and figure out how to get the rest out if we couldn’t find a packer. It was going to require more than 1 trip in and out if we were going to be packing it out so I decided I would rather carry it out in the morning on fresh legs than continuing on with tired legs and heading down an unknown drainage (we came in on the ridgeline) potentially in the dark at the rate I was going.

I found a tree that looked like it would work and we put the head up in the fork of the tree. It was about 6’ off the ground and I left my vest on it thinking that it would maybe keep a bear honest with the human scent. We tied it the best we could with the parachute cord I had in my pack and divided up the rest of the meat and headed on back to camp a whole world lighter! Here’s the head in the tree where we left it.

We were making good time then, but between going at a snails pace while I had the head and cape on my pack and finding a tree and getting the head secured in it, it was getting even closer to dark. I wasn’t really happy about leaving the head as it for sure had a higher risk of being bear food than the quarters did but I was hoping it would be okay. Probably 30 minutes later I finally get a call back from one of the packers I had left a message with only to find out that he is out of the state and can’t help me. He said he would try to find someone else for me, so I felt a little better having actually talked to a person.

Another mistake I made was not having enough water with me. I have a 3 liter hydration bladder and it has always been plenty in the past, but between the difficult terrain and the effort spent quartering up the elk I was completely out by the time we were headed down the mountain toward camp. It wasn’t a huge problem because we were just 2 or 3 hours from camp, but I sure was thirsty. As we got into the main part of the drainage we saw the welcome sight of running water. Things also started to flatten out and we even hooked up with a trail that turned out to be decent! About that time I got a call from another guy who said he could come and pack the meat out in the morning! Life was good! A few iodine tablets and 30 minutes later life was really good!

Here’s a picture of the creek bottom. It really was pretty with the sun going down. The bad part was that we were still over 3 miles from camp.

A couple hours later, and lots of whining on my part, we were back at camp a little after 8:00. My body was tired, but my feet were screaming. I guess I still haven’t figured out my fancy new boots because I ended up with 2 big blisters on the ball of each foot and on one of my big toes and both heals had visible hot spots the size of a silver dollar that hadn’t quite turned into blisters yet. I actually had mole skin on the balls of both feet on the 2nd day and I still ended up with blisters. As soon as we got back to camp I heard back from another one of the packers I had left a message with and they also said they could pack the meat out in the morning, and at quite a bit cheaper price than the first guy that had called back, but since I had already made a deal with the first guy I told them thanks but I already had it taken care of.

We sprung for our best dinner option that we had available which was soft tacos and ended up in bed around 10:00 after sending out messages and calling folks telling them about our success. The only problem was that I was still a little worried about the meat and the head back up on the mountain and hoping that everything would be okay come morning. Another sleepless night was ahead of me, but I think I managed 3 or 4 hours of sleep when it was all said and done.

I met the packers the next morning there at camp and gave them my GPS with the coordinates marked where the head and the quarters were. I had thought there was going to be one guy with 3 horses but it ended up being 2 guys, 2 horses and a small mule. They reassured me that everything would be fine and we made sure we had each other’s phone numbers and they head up the mountain to get the meat around 8:00. With nothing left for us to do, we headed into town to get a hot breakfast and buy some ice to have it ready when they got back.

After a good breakfast we got back to camp and started getting ready to head home. I asked the packers how long it would take them and they said 3 or 4 hours so I wanted to be ready to go when they got back. We got the truck hitched up to the trailer, everything sorted and organized and were pretty much ready to go around noon. Noon stretched into 1:00 then 2:00 and I started to get worried again. The campground host said that he thought that it was a mistake to left it up there overnight and everyone that he had seen do that had ended up with most of it eaten by bears so that didn’t help my anxiety any. I tried calling the packer at 2:00 but he didn’t answer his cell phone. We decided to go ahead and eat lunch and there wasn’t anything else we could do but wait.

Around 3:00 I heard hoof steps and some a cowboy clicking his tongue encouraging his horse to keep moving and I was very happy to see them coming into camp! I ran over to check it out and it looked like everything was fine. Here’s a picture of them coming into camp.

One thing for sure, hiring them to pack it out for me was worth every penny! A job that took them 7 hours on horses would have taken us at least 2 days to get it out. The horses were drenched in sweat and I felt pretty sorry for that little mule. I had thought they would divided the meat up a little and carry some of it out with the horses but that little mule carried all 4 quarters plus the head and cape! Here’s a picture of him as they came into camp.

We were pretty much all packed up and ready to go so we got the meat in the coolers, got the ice on it and we were head out within 10 or 15 minutes. I never did get a good picture of the campsite we were staying, but it really was a nice place. Here’s a picture of the back of the truck as we stopped to check on things on the way home that afternoon.

With the sheds back there and the antlers from my bull sticking way up out of the truck I thought we might get some waves or comments at the gas stations on the way home, but no one seemed to notice or care from I could tell. I was sure one happy hunter on the way home though!
Believe it or not after that novel, I still have some other stories to tell and I’ll try to get them posted soon.

That’s it for now if you made it this far! Nathan

Mmm... Pork!

2010-10-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

Well, after doing some good deeds after church, I ended up finally getting away around 4:45 to head down to the land. It's a 1 1/2 hour drive and the sun is setting around 7:00 right now so it wasn't looking very good for an evening hunt.

The stated purpose for the trip was to fix one of my feeders, and I got to the property just after 6:15 and it took about 30 minutes to fix my feeder and swap out cards and batteries on my trail cameras. I decided to just park my pickup at the bottom of the hill that my big blind is on instead of driving back out to the front of the property since it was so late I didn't think I had time to drive back out to the front of the property and walk back to the blind before sunset and that would increase the chances of spooking something away. So I just grabbed my AR-15 and went to the blind.

I figured it was a lost cause since I had just been driving around and my scent was all over at the feeder from fixing it and messing with the camera, but I was down there so I figured I could sit for 45 minutes until it got dark.

It was looking like my hunch was right and then about 5 minutes before the end of shooting light a lone pig came into the feeder. 99% of the time a lone pig is a boar and after waiting a few seconds to see if anything else was going to come in with him I took aim and eased the trigger back on the RRA predator pursuit. Bang! The pig dropped in it's tracks.

It was a pretty decent sized pig and I was a little worried on making a shot behind the shoulder with the .223 because the vitals on a pig are tucked right up behind the shoulder and with it getting dark I really didn't want to mess around on a tracking job. So I aimed right behind his ear where the spine connects to the head. Pigs have such a thick skull that a true heat shot is sometimes iffy, but tucking the shot in behind the ear is deadly.

Cathy had our little canon camera with her this weekend so I had the Nikon DSLR and couldn't figure out how to take a timed picture with it so you don't get to see my ugly mug on this one.

Pigs are kind of like bears in the fact that they are pretty hard to judge the size without something else in the picture for a reference. I took this shot with just the rifle and the pig in it and the pig looks pretty small.

Then I took a picture with the cooler behind the pig for a reference. The cooler is a 68 quart cooler and is 30" long and 18" tall.

Gives a little different perspective to me anyway. I've shot almost 2 dozen pigs in the last 3 years and weigh most of them on a scale, but this pig wasn't going to set any records and I didn't feel like messing with it so I didn't weigh this one. I tried to load him up in the back of the truck to move him to the front of the property to carve him up, but I couldn't get him in the back of the truck. Either I was tired or he was heavier than I thought or maybe a little of both. I'm guessing him right around the 200lb mark based on other pigs that I've weighed.

Here's a look at the shot placement.

The amazing thing was that the bullet didn't exit. I should have spent some time figuring out exactly what happened to it, but it was late and I had an 1 1/2 drive left ahead of me so didn't mess with it.

I've got the meat on ice and will be turning him into sausage sometime this week. I'll probably turn the backstraps into Canadian Bacon and smoke them though, the last few I've done that with have turned out really good.

That's it for now. Nathan

Busy couple of weeks!

2010-10-16T21:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I've had a couple of busy weeks since I got back from the elk hunting trip!

Work has been very hectic as I do a lot of employee benefit plan audits that all have an extended deadline to file an informational return with the IRS by October 15th. Plans over 100 have to have an audit attached to their return so I have to have the audits completed early enough for them to attach them. This year all plans had to file their returns and attachments electronically and I picked up 5 new audits this year so it was quite a chore getting them done. But they are done now! Whew!

I ran down to the land last weekend to do a last ditch fall food plot planting and was very happy and surprised to find that I had a pretty good crop of volunteer winter rye coming up! I had disced the field the weekend before going on the Wyoming elk hunt and there was a lot of standing rye in the field that had seed heads still. About a week after I disced there was a decent rain so the end result was a nice crop of volunteer rye that I didn't even have to plant! There were a few spots that didn't get a very good start so I disced those again and planted a rye and oats mix.

Here's the volunteer rye. You can see here where I disced up a weak spot and replanted.
Here's one of my shooting lanes. This one didn't have any seed left when I disced it under so I had to replant the entire thing. Still a LOT better than redoing all the fields. I had planned on having to plant about 7 or 8 acres and ended up only planting a couple acres total.
During the rain a few weeks ago, the water gap on the fence between my neighbor and my property washed out and I ended up with about 20 head of Black Angus cows on my land for a week or so. It sure is surprising when you are looking at trail camera pictures of deer, pigs, coyotes, etc. and all the sudden then next picture is a HUGE cow! Overall it didn't bother me much, but they did break one of my feeders so that gave me an excuse to go back down there again this weekend. I was hoping to get some pork for the freezer since we are out of sausage, but the piggies didn't cooperate.

I did end up shooting a coyote this morning though. It came in to a rabbit in distress mouth call. I sure like the Rock River Arms predator pursuit rifle. It is a tack driver. It wasn't a very long shot (125 yards), but it was a quick one and I don't think I've missed with this rifle yet. I'm sure hoping to get a chance at using it on a nice sounder of pigs sometime soon.

Here's the coyote.
My dermestid beetles are pretty much done with my elk skull so I decided to bring the coyote skull home to give them something to eat. It will save me some money on hot dogs as they are up to being able to eat a couple hot dogs a day now.

Here's the skull in with the beetles. With the cooler weather during the nights they aren't quite as fast as they were in the summer, but they should have the coyote cleaned in just a couple days.

I have a bunch of new trail camera pictures that I need to post as well, but I'll save that for another day.

That's it for now. Nathan

Wyoming Elk Hunt - Part 2.

2010-09-28T20:09:00.000-07:00

Continuing with the baseball theme, it turned out that the Wyoming elk hunting trip turned out to be a solid double. My friend Mike was able to connect on a nice bull a few days after I got mine.

We continued to hunt hard after I shot my bull, but things weren't looking too good. Mike had a black bear tag, so the next day we decided to stop by the carcass of my elk and see if anything was coming into it. Sure enough, a bear had been on it overnight, we just weren't sure what kind of bear. The area that we hunt has as many if not more grizzly bears than black bears so it is pretty hit or miss on what kind of bear is on a kill site. We decided to hang around a while and after a bit, we see a very dark colored bear coming in to the kill. At first glance it looked like a large black bear and then all the sudden it spooked and took off.

A few minutes later it showed back up and came in to the kill site pretty fast. It grabbed a large piece of meat from the carcass (I'm guessing the liver) and turned around and took off on a dead run. It ran at least 100 yards until it went out of sight down the canyon. Now, this wasn't a huge grizzly bear, but it wasn't a small one either. It was about the size of the carcass so we were thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of a 300 - 400lb bear.

The whole episode really made us scratch our heads. Generally in the area that we hunt, once a grizzly bear finds a kill site, it stays on it until it wants to leave. Even if a hunter shows up, most of the time a grizzly will be very reluctant to leave a kill site, that's why you always move the good meat a good 100 yards away from the carcass before you haul the first load out. The only reasons we could come up with for why this bear was so skittish was that there was another VERY large bear in the area, or this bear had been shot at or harassed in some way at a kill site before. The idea of a bear large enough to have this one acting so skittish seemed the most likely explanation, however that didn't give us a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that we'd been stumbling around in the dark and would probably be doing it again for the next few days.

Okay, back to the elk hunting. We did hear one bull bugle on Tuesday morning, and tracked him a bit, but he was moving away and not talking much. We weren't seeing near as much sign as usual and for sure weren't hearing or seeing anything.

Wednesday we went into a spot where we've always seen lots of sign. We were within a few hundred yards of where I shot my first bull elk a couple years earlier waiting for shooting light to get there. As opposed to a couple years ago, we didn't see or hear anything once shooting light got there. We investigated a few wallows we had marked on the GPS and although there was plenty of water and the spots looked good, nothing had been using them to wallow in. We continued to look around and although the habitat looked great, we just didn't see much sign that the elk were hanging out there at all. We headed back to camp early feeling pretty dejected.

Thursday morning we decided to go ahead and go back into a canyon that we always dread going in and out of, but where there generally are some elk to be found. We had been sleeping in the last few mornings until 4:30 and leaving camp at 5:00 and we did the same on Thursday.

We parked in the same spot we had on Monday and Tuesday and headed up the hill in the dark watching the GPS to take us where we wanted to go. We were headed for the least steep part of the canyon where you drop about 600' of elevation in less than 1/4 mile. Usually it's not a big issue going down, (it is always an issue coming back up, especially if you shoot an elk down there) but we were a little early and we decided to at least wait for shooting light before heading down. We were just about to sit down to wait for shooting light when we heard something blow about 100 yards away and start crashing through the brush. We cow called to try to convince whatever it was that we were an elk and not a couple of hunters bumbling around and to our surprise whatever it was stopped to listen. Of course then I started thinking of the fact that I had killed my elk less than 1/2 mile from where we were now and the grizzly we had seen coming into the kill site was coming from the direction that we were now. That and the fact that it was still nearly 1/2 an hour before shooting light and I was about to convince myself that the animal crashing through the brush 100 yards away was a bear and with us cow calling we were ringing the dinner bell for it when to our relief we heard a very weak bugle.

Instead of worrying about getting eaten, now the challenge was going to be keeping the elk interested without bringing it in before shooting light. We also discussed that it sounded pretty small and we both agreed that even a spike up on top sounded like a better deal than a mediocre bull down in the canyon. Of course being the positive thinker that I am, I figured on the worst case scenario would be to shoot a spike at the top of the canyon and have it end up running down into the canyon and we would still have to end up packing it out of the bottom.

We tried to lay off the cow calls but we could hear him moving away from us and periodically we would cow call. About the 3rd time he bugled for us, he added a pretty impressive growl at the end and we decided he might not be that bad of a bull, but we still didn't want to get him too excited before shooting light. A few calls back and forth later and shooting light arrived. We started to cow call in earnest and even threw in a weak bugle a couple times and it quickly became obvious that the bull was not going to come to us. He had moved off a couple hundred yards and was actually starting to move away farther. A few of his bugles had a really nice growl at the end of them that really started to get us excited.

We talked it over and decided that we were going to have to get aggressive and go after him. Mike headed out first and I stayed back about 30 to 40 yards and would periodically cow call to see if we could get a response to help us locate him. We started this at around 6:45 and kept after it slow and steady. About every 5 or 6 minutes I would cow call or if the bull bugled I would answer him. I bought a mouth diaphragm call this summer and had been practicing with it and I guess I'm getting decent with it. The bull wouldn't respond to any other calls, but would bugle for my mouth call.

We went about 200 yards and through a clearing and could hear the bull in the dark timber behind it. At one point it sounded like he was just barely into the dark timber, but we never could see him. He was sounding bigger and bigger, there was no way he was a spike. He would still just let out a soft short bugle and then throw in a big growl at the end with the last of his breath. We got to the edge of the dark timber and Mike kept after him while I hung back and cow called periodically. At one point Mike must have tripped and made some pretty good noise crashing through some deadfall so I cow called and got a bugle in response. I was into the dark timber by this time and it sounded like we were getting pretty close. A few minutes later I cow called again and got an immediate response. Maybe a minute later I hear a shot! I didn't hear the traditional thump of the bullet hitting and Mike started to cow call so I threw in some cow calls as well. I heard some crashing in the brush and Mike shot again and I kept cow calling. I figured he either missed or made a bad shot and the bull was running away.

I started running his way and kept throwing in cow calls and heard a 3rd shot. Again I am just hearing the shots without hearing them hitting anything so I'm guessing misses, but as I get closer there is Mike standing over a nice bull!

We debriefed quickly and it turns out that there were at least 2 bulls the entire time. Mike had seen a raghorn and was about to pull the trigger on him when I cow called and the larger bull responded and he decided to pass on the raghorn to see if he could connect on the larger one. The larger bull evidently decided to move the raghorn off, because he immediately moved toward where the raghorn was and gave Mike a shot opportunity. The first shot was a hit but he was so close that explained why I had only heard the shot and not the hit. Doing the post mortem, be determined that the first shot hit him in the neck and he went down immediately. The crashing through the brush that I heard was actually the bull thrashing after he went down. The bull tried to get back up and that was when Mike shot again and based on the post mortem it looked like that shot was a miss. The 3rd shot was a finishing shot that Mike actually made with his lead based bear spray (a 44 mag).

Mike went back to the spot where he had made his first shot and I ranged it at a whopping 37 yards! Even at that short of a distance he was only able to see glimpses of the bull it was so thick.

Okay, after the novel, here are some pictures.

Here's both of us with the bull.
Although I didn't pull the trigger, I really felt like I really contributed to getting this bull on the ground.

My pessimistic thoughts on shooting a spike and having it run down into the canyon didn't turn out either. The entire time we were shadowing the bull it was actually moving closer to the truck! When it was all said and done he went down a whopping .37 miles from the truck.

A couple hours of cutting and we were headed down the hill toward the truck.

So Thursday around lunchtime and we are both tagged out and back at camp! It was a beautiful day and we took the opportunity to take some pictures.

We ended up going back over to where we normally camp and asked how they were doing. We figured that with horses they were able to cover a lot of ground that we weren't able to cover on foot and were curious what they were seeing. None of the 6 hunters had seen an elk in the 4 days they had been there! We had shot both of our elk less than 3 miles from where they were camped and they still hadn't even seen one. I would like to think it was our mad skills as hunters, but I know that a whole lot of it was just luck and being in the right place at the right time. I think that was a big key as both elk were on the ground by 8:00 in the morning and both times we were back where we wanted to be long before shooting light arrived. I think the 2nd bull did take some skill along with the luck, but I know that luck did play a big part in it.

Anyway, I doubt many people took the time to read through this entire post, but I wanted to get it written so I could remember it for myself if nothing else. We really had a great time in Wyoming and I would have considered it a great trip even if we hadn't connected, but the fact that we both tagged out early was really nice.

The 24 hour drive going and coming home wasn't all that fun but the time spent when we were up there was worth it!

That's it for this one. Nathan

Wyoming Elk Hunt. - Part 1

2010-09-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

Well, if my New Mexico Antelope hunt was strike one, then my Wyoming elk hunt would have to be a solid single.

Things didn't start off looking too promising as when we arrived at the normal spot where we camp we found a group of 6 other hunters and the site was loaded up with about a dozen horses and pack animals along with 3 fancy horse trailers, full blown wall tents, cook tents, electric fencing, etc. Finding another place to camp wasn't too difficult, but knowing that there were a bunch of new hunters so close to where we did most of our hunting wasn't to encouraging.

We got camp setup and it was probably a nicer spot to camp with a creek running right by it and some nice shade trees and a pretty flat spot to park the trailers. Here's our side of camp with our trailer setup and the new solar panel setup that I got on sale at Harbor Freight. The solar panels worked great and we only ended up charging 1 time all week for less than an hour and we probably didn't even need to do that.

Here's a picture of camp with Cathy and Eli hanging out at the camper.

We decided that we would start out on opening day as planned regardless of whether there were extra hunters around or not. Normally there are 2 outfitters who hunt the same area pretty hard each year so we are fairly used to some competition. We also decided that we were not going to be picky, we were going to shoot the first legal bull we saw, even it it was a spike.

Opening morning started with a wake up alarm at 4:00 and in the truck headed to the place we wanted to park by 4:30. Losing our normal camping spot added about 15 minutes to the drive and we were parked and headed off into the dark looking at our GPS at 5:00. A little under an hour of wading through waist high brush and crawling over deadfall in the dark brought us to the spot we wanted to be at a little early at around 6:00. We heard some wolves going off to the northwest of us a mile or so and that quickly brought our spirits down even farther. Typically when the wolves are talking the elk aren't so whatever we did was going to have to be without relying on calling. Thankfully our plans for opening morning mostly involved sitting and waiting for someone else to push the elk our way.

A little before 6:30 we adjusted our positions a little to get the best view possible. We were on the edge of one of the few clearings in the area and could actually see about 300 yards in some areas. Based on previous experienced we expected one of the outfitters to come through on horseback and hopefully push some elk into the clearing for us to possibly get a shot at them. They were a little early though and we could hear them coming toward us about 15 minutes before shooting light. We could still see with the bright moon and binoculars, but we didn't see anything come through the clearing.

Shooting light finally rolled in around 6:40 and we sat in our spot as the outfitter worked his way around the clearing. A bull moose came up behind us and blew a few times trying to scent us, then worked down through the clearing to the south of us. He was a pretty decent bull and seeing him gave us a little hope for the future as the moose population in that area has been in a steady decline over the last several years.

The outfitter worked his way all around the clearing with nothing happening. The guide bugled a couple sick sounding bugles but nothing responded. They worked their way off to the west and out of earshot which is quite a way on a quiet morning when they are riding horses.

After we'd been sitting for about an hour and my friend Mike decided he needed to take a potty break. He wandered off about 50 yards and I heard him make a cow call a couple minutes later. I decided to make a few cow calls myself and then a few minutes later he cow calls again so I cow called again too. He started walking back my way and I kept looking through the clearing and into the timber surrounding it and as I'm scanning back to the east I see an elk coming our way! It was a bull and that's all that mattered. I didn't bother to use the range finder because he seemed pretty close to me. He was trotting and turned broadside for a second and I didn't think to cow call to stop him, I just took the shot while he was still moving.

Talking things over with Mike after it was all over it turned out that when he went to take his potty break, he is pretty sure that he jumped this bull out of his bed. He never saw him, but he gave a squeal and busted out of his bed when Mike walked up to the edge of the canyon. That's why Mike made the cow call that I heard. Thinking it through it seems like the bull was circling around to try to get a fix on the cow calls when I saw him.

I took the shot and he turned and pretty much started heading straight at us. I thought I had hit him with the first shot, but with an elk I've always been told that you keep shooting them until they are on the ground so I shot a 2nd time as he was severely quartering to me. After that shot he came to a stop, teetered for a second and then went down hard in a cloud of dust.

After giving him a few minutes we walked over and he was down for the count. After the fact I ranged the shot at 127 yards. Upon close inspection I was surprised to find that I must have had a complete miss on the first shot. The 2nd shot was exactly where I was aimed and did a great job on him though. I've recreated the shot a dozen times and can't believe that I missed. The only thing I can think of that would explain it would be either a very poor shot on my part or the fact that there was a small pine tree in front of the area where I was setup and took the shot. Possibly I could have nicked a limb on it and sent that first shot errant. I'm sure glad I followed up with that 2nd shot!

It wasn't until after he was down that I even began to think about how large he was. We had discussed the fact that we would shoot the first legal bull that we saw and I knew he wasn't a monster, but I didn't know if he was a raghorn or a decent bull. Turns out he was closer to a raghorn than a decent bull, but I'm still happy with him.

Here's Mike with me.

Everyone who has been elk hunting and had a successful hunt knows that the work begins when the animal goes down. Even a small bull elk is a very big animal and takes some work to get out. I had some game bags in my backpack and we decided to go ahead and quarter him up and skin and debone him to make the pack out as light as possible.

Here he is quartered up and ready to pack out. I used my space blanket out of my first aid kit as a tarp to keep the quarters clean while we got them deboned and bagged up.

This year I bought a new backpack that is called the "Just One" pack. I mainly bought it for the rifle scabbard that it has that allows you to carry your rifle in the pack on those fun hikes in and out in the dark, but it also expands to allow you to haul out on your first trip back to the truck. Their slogan is to "go in light and come out heavy" and it lived up to it's reputation. On my first load back to the truck I hauled everything that I started with in the pack, plus one front shoulder and the head. I would have liked to weigh it, but I think pretty conservatively I can say that all told it weighed at least 100lbs.

Here's me starting the pack out.

One very nice thing about the spot we were hunting was that it was close to where we parked the truck. On the way in we skirt around the clearing so we don't spook anything out and it is close to a mile in, but on the way out we took a direct line and according to the GPS we just had .57 miles back to the truck!

It was a good thing too! The pack handled that heavy load easily, but I was more than ready to get it off my back when we got to the truck.

We made it back to camp in time for lunch and then went back to get the last load. On the last load I hauled out a boned out hindquarter and a front shoulder in one trip. I figure that load weighed in close to 120lbs with my rifle, hydration bladder and the weight of the pack itself figured in. Here's the pack expanded out and loaded up for the trip back out.

That makes the 2nd time in the last 3 years that I've had an elk down on opening morning. This one wasn't as big as the one I shot 2 years ago, but I'm still very happy with him.

I spent the rest of the week hunting with Mike to see if we could get an elk for him and I'll post more on that later.

That's it for now. Nathan

Strike one! :-(

2010-09-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Well, I'll avoid the suspense again on this post and just let you know up front that I struck out Antelope hunting in New Mexico.

After a few hiccups getting over there (busted water line on the travel trailer, driving into a headwind, leaving the trailer keys at Walmart, etc.) we got the trailer dropped off and drove over to do some last minute scouting on the ranch that I had been assigned to. We got there a couple hours before sunset and started driving around the ranch a little to get our bearings on everything and low and behold we actually saw some antelope! Even better was the fact that they were actually on the ranch I was assigned too! There were about 6 or 7 does and 2 bucks, one was pretty small, but one was pretty decent. They ended up going by us at about 125 yards while we sat in the truck and I got a few pictures of the bucks.

The nicer buck stopped and shook his head around for a little bit a couple times while we were watching. Not sure exactly what he was doing, but the rut was starting up a little so I figured it was something related to that.

Here's the nicer buck in the front and the smaller on behind him.

Not the best picture, but you can get a decent feel for the length and width of the horns from this blurry picture. He wasn't a monster, but I would have been proud to have him on my wall if I had gotten the chance.

We watched them move off to the south and decided we should probably just leave so they aren't spooked and made out plans for the morning. Had a few more hiccups as the battery on the trailer was dead and it was out of propane, but we were optimistic that it wouldn't matter much anyway as we would hopefully be tagged out in the morning and headed home.

The first morning of the hunt arrived and everything was looking good. Nice cool morning, and right off the bat we spotted the antelope. It looked like they were going to do the exact opposite of what they had done the night before so we moved over to intercept them on their way. After about 30 minutes of waiting, we started to wonder where they were and went over to where we had last seen them. They had disappeared! How 8 or 9 antelope can just up and disappear is a mystery, but it can happen. We drove around the rest of the ranch and saw some other hunters standing on the fence line looking onto the ranch we were assigned to and asked them if they had seen anything and they said that they hadn't. Seemed like they were looking at something, but we drove around and didn't ever see what they were looking at.

We headed back to the spot that we had started out that morning and after a while we did see the small buck by himself headed our way looking lost. The rut was just starting and the night before we had watched the larger buck chasing the smaller buck off on a regular basis. The small buck was trailing the group, but evidently they had even lost him when they disappeared. I put a stalk on him and got about 150 yards away, but I just couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on such a young animal. I ended up walking back to the truck and the small buck moved off to the north.

The ranch that I was assigned to was 4,640 acres, but most of it was sand hill country that didn't seem like the antelope would be very likely to go. After a few more hours of not seeing anything we decided to check out the sand hill country anyway. We did end up seeing a buck and 4 does but they were north of the ranch we were assigned to and moving away from us. After a couple hours of that, we went back to the area where we had started out that morning.

If it seems like there is a recurring theme here, believe me, it seemed like it in person too. There just wasn't much area for us to hunt and we could see nearly the entire place sitting in one spot, so we would park there and glass the ranch and periodically drive to the few spots we couldn't see and then return to the high spot where we could see most of the ranch and then repeat, repeat. I'm not very fond of road hunting, but it seemed pointless to walk the property when you could sit in one spot in the truck and see most of it and then you could drive to another spot and see the rest of it.

The way the state of New Mexico does it's ranch assignments, the ranches are classified as "Ranch Only", or "Unit-Wide". For the most part the larger ranches are "Ranch Only" and the smaller ranches are "Unit-Wide". The one benefit to being on a small ranch that is Unit Wide is that if you aren't seeing antelope on the first day, you can call the local game warden and he can reassign you to a ranch where there are antelope. At least that's the theory. After not seeing anything else, I called the game warden around 2:00 and asked him if I could be reassigned to a ranch that had antelope on it. He said he needed to do some checking around and he would get back with me. We decided to go ahead and stick around just in case that original group of antelope ever decided to appear again.

Probably not even 15 minutes later, I look out and they are crossing the road about 600 or 700 yards in front of us! I hesitated and wasn't sure if I should try to drive up to them or if I should get out of the truck and try to walk up on them, but they were moving pretty good and so I started the truck and started toward them. I was pretty indecisive and drove too slowly and by the time I got there they were about 300 yards away. It all happened too fast and I didn't even have my range finder out to know how far away they were for sure. The wind was blowing pretty hard and they were milling around pretty good and I never felt like I had a great shot so I decided to hold off. They didn't seem too spooked and hopefully they would just move off a little way and I could walk them down.

They ended up moving off and I started after them. The biggest concern was that they were only 1/2 mile from the ranch boundary and I was hoping they wouldn't move too fast. I got to where I could see them again and sure enough, they had crossed the fence and then stopped about 50 yards onto the neighboring ranch. I watched them for a while and then they moved off farther.

It turned out that was going to be my only real opportunity for the weekend. In retrospect it is easy to see that I should have just driven right to them as soon as they crossed the road, but I hesitated for 15 or 20 seconds that would have probably made the difference. I second guess myself less on the shot. It was blowing pretty hard and I never felt confident in the shot and I don't want to just be throwing lead at an animal and hoping that I can hit it. I want to have confidence when I pull the trigger that the animal is going to go down and stay down.

Anyway, after a while we drove the ranch again, glassed some more and then decided to go back the the trailer to grab some drinks and snacks. On the way there we spot the same group of antelope from the county road. They are about 1/2 mile north of the ranch I was assigned to. We pull up to a gate and park to see what they are going to do. They were 375 yards off and after watching us for a while, they end up moving toward us to a windmill to get a drink. We watched them for probably 15 minutes and then another hunter that was assigned to that ranch showed up and the antelope took off, but they went north instead of south back to the ranch that I was assigned to.

That the last time we saw a buck. We hunted hard from before sunrise to sunset (I was surprised to learn from the guy I was hunting with that New Mexico legal hunting only goes to sunset instead of 30 minutes after sunset like most places do) and only saw 2 does the last day that were not even on the ranch I was assigned to. I ended up putting a few miles on my boots the last day doing anything I could think of to try to scrape up an antelope sighting but it didn't happen.

Overall it was pretty depressing that I was assigned to a ranch with very few antelope and those were mainly just passing through. Generally if that is the case you can just move to a different area, but that wasn't an option so we just stuck it out. I doubt that I will be applying for another public land antelope license in New Mexico in the future. The luck seems to be more related to which ranch you get assigned instead of just drawing the tag. I'm really curious to see what the final success rate ends up.

That's it for now. Nathan

The blind is back on top of the hill!

2010-09-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess I’m not much of a suspense writer with a title like that, but I’m just very happy that it is back on top of the hill, and in one piece. It took plenty of work and some creative thinking, but it’s done.

I got a little cocky when I was able to get there early by myself and get the floor loaded up on my pickup, haul it up the hill and get it setup and leveled out by myself. I figured that if I could do that by myself, then the rest would be easy with a helper. Here’s the floor back up. I talked my friend Ben into coming down to help me, and his wife Tabitha came with him as well, and it turned out to be a very good thing because there were a couple times that we really needed her help. I put a pop-up blind on top of the floor that I had setup and we were hoping that some hogs would come in, but we struck out. Saturday morning started off with a flat tire and getting the spare lock to release is always a joy when changing out a tire on a pickup. The we started out collecting pieces of the blind from the bottom of the hill and hauling them back up to the top. Here’s the first load.

After we got everything picked up and hauled up to the top of the hill, we sorted out the broken and unbroken pieces and started putting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. We would set the plywood down on the floor and then line up the pieces and assemble the frame, then flip it over and screw the plywood back to the frame. Lots of bent and broken screws and the reciprocal saw got quite a bit of use sawing ends off of screws that we couldn't get out. Lots of liquid nails used as well on some of the cracked and splintered wood. The worst part was just getting started, once we got going we had all the walls repaired in just a couple hours.

After we got all 4 walls repaired, it was a pretty simple matter of putting them where they went and screwing them into the floor and then screwing them together. The easy part was now done! I had been counting on the hunters that lease the property to the north of me to be on their place working on setting all their feeders up and getting in some dove hunting over labor day like they have for the previous 3 years that I've owned the property. I figured that with 3 or 4 of them plus Ben and I we could simply pick the roof up and set it on the top of the blind. I was a little worried when they didn't show up Friday night, but when they weren't over there by lunch on Saturday I was concerned. I figured we would just finish the walls and leave the roof for some other time, because there was no way we would get it put on assembled with just the two of us. We decided to see if we could even move it, and did manage to get it flipped over and we could actually pick it up about a foot off the ground, but once we had it picked up we couldn't move. We put a 2x12 laminated beam I had brought under it to see if we could slide it, but it was a no go. We could move it a few feet at a time, but it was going to take all day to get it the 30 yards or so back to where the blind was. We were stuck.
After talking it through, the only other option was to try to get my tractor up the hill to help out. I had actually brought some pallet forks with me that attach to the front of the bucket, but I had never had my tractor up on the hill before and wasn't so sure that I wanted to attempt it. The hill is pretty steep and tractors have a short wheel base and a high center of gravity and they can and do tip over pretty easily. I decided the safest way was to actually back the tractor up the hill since I had my shredder on the back and that would act as a counter weight to keep it from tipping. I made sure the tractor was in 4 wheel drive and started for the top, backwards! Things went really well until right near the top and the rear wheels started to spin a little and it started bouncing. I had the loader bucket set low so if it started to tip it would hopefully stop it, but after an anxious moment I was at the top! Once on top I was able to hook up to the roof and using a strap around the top, I used the tractor to pick up the roof and set it up on top of the rock outcropping on top of the hill where the blind was. This gives a good perspective on the size of the rock outcropping at the top of the hill.
The problem was that there was just no way to get the tractor up n top of the rock and get next to the blind. I got it as close as I could and set it down. After setting the roof on the laminated beam I had brought, we were able to slide it over in front of the blind. Now the work was really about to begin.
The next step was to get the roof tilted up and resting on the plank so we could slide it up onto the top! It sounds a LOT easier than it was. This was the first step where we couldn't have done it without a 3rd person. Ben and I picked up one side of the roof while Tabitha moved the beam underneath it. We took a break after this step!
Here’s a picture of the tractor at the top of the hill. Not sure if I will ever have it up there again so I went ahead and took a picture of it up there. Yes it is as steep as it looks!
This is where I just decided to man up and put the roof on! Actually this was the first spot where one of us wasn't required to keep the roof from crushing the other while we were lifting it up and we could get a picture taken. It is amazing what leverage can do, with just a couple feet of the plank sticking out the other side I could hold up one side of the roof pretty easily while Tabitha cranked on the come-a-long on the other side.
Here's Tabitha cranking on the come-a-long while I'm holding the other end up to help make it easier. You can see the extra 2x4 screwed onto the outside of the top of the wall, the top 2x4 broke on the first attempt to wench the roof up, and we had to reinforce it for the 2nd attempt.
Here it is all put back together and ANCHORED! It is a little worse for wear after taking a tumble down the hill, but it actually went back together really well and still seems to be plenty sturdy. The windows and door ended up in the worst shape and I've been planning on changing out the windows anyway so that won't be a factor for much longer. I used 3/8” eye bolts and 1/8” steel cable to anchor it in. The rock on the left is the smallest anchor point out of all of them.
I brought a masonry bit for my drill and was able to get a hole drilled in the rock outcropping to put an anchor in for the predominant Southwest wind. If the blind comes off this time it is going to take a tornado.
And my last picture. The finished blind up on the hill with my pond in the foreground. It’s about as full as the pond has been in a couple years, everything sure is green for early September in West Texas.

When it was all said and done it ended up costing less than $25 in supplies to repair it. I didn't do a good job of really looking it over to know what I needed and lucked out bringing 5 2x4’s and that ended up being exactly how many I needed. That and a few tubes of liquid nails and the eye bolts were all that I ended up spending in dollars, but it was a pretty hard day of labor getting it back together. Still, overall it did go together pretty smoothly and it probably took about 6 hours of actual work time getting it back together.

VERY happy that it is back up and very thankful to have friends willing to help out!

That’s it for now. Nathan

New Mexico Elk Scouting Trip

2010-08-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, I finally made my first official scouting trip!

I hit the road after lunch on Friday afternoon headed for Ruidoso! After a quick 4 ½ hour drive I ended up north of Ruidoso Friday night checking out a spot that a MonsterMuley member had told me about. It doesn’t look that impressive on a map or on Google Earth, but I thought I would check it out anyway based on his tip. I was out of my vehicle at about 5:00 and by 6:00 I was already into elk. About 10 cows and calves and 2 spikes. I had brought my nice Nikon DSLR with a 300mm zoom lens since I wasn’t packing a rifle, but sure enough, the memory card that has been threatening to give out for a year or so now finally gave out completely and I was left with my little Canon Powershot SD1100 IS.

Here’s the first group of elk I came across. They were about 300 yards away and never did seem to indicate that they knew I was around. I watched them graze for about 10 minutes and then continued on.

The very next draw I saw another group of about 6 cows and calves and I circled around and over them. Some young bulls were bugling a little and I assumed that it was the spikes that were with that first group. I made a few cow calls and got some answers which I thought was neat. Where I hunt in Wyoming I’ve never actually heard a cow talking, I assume due to the heavy wolf predation. On the way back to the car in the dark I heard what sounded like a larger bull bugle a few times and I bugled back. He ended up starting to circle downwind of me and I decided to quit calling since it wasn’t going to do me any good and might make a more cautious bull for others.

I spent the night in my trailblazer and moved about 2 miles up the canyon to continue scouting the next morning. I found plenty of sign that elk were in the area and plenty of sign that elk had died in the area as well, I just didn't see any elk that morning.

Here was a skeleton of a cow that looked like it had been quartered out. Within 50 yards was another skeleton in the same draw.

Some really pretty country and I really enjoyed getting out and putting some miles on my boots, although I did end up with blisters again and am going to have to change something up or maybe even return the boots if I can’t figure something out. They are nice boots and seem to fit well, but when I climb I end up on my toes and the boot is so stiff that it doesn't bend and so my heel rides up and down a little bit and that's where I'm getting the blisters.

Here's a couple pictures I took when I was out walking around.
I moved to the other side of the unit on Saturday around lunchtime and hit the trail about 2pm. (actually my only time on a trail either day was walking back to the car in the dark) I had thought the other area I was scouting was pretty steep, but this area was STEEP with a capital S T E E P! I climbed over 1,500’ in elevation before I got a mile from the trailhead! I was seeing lots of elk sign but most of it was pretty old. When I got to the top I got really discouraged when I started to see horse poop. I had planned and selected where I was going to hunt based on the steepest roughest spots where I didn’t think I would have to worry about any competition from an outfitter on horses. I decided they must have a trail someplace up higher and be coming down the ridges or something. I was pretty dejected.

2 hours into my hike I decided that either I was not in near as good of shape as I thought I was or the terrain was way steeper than I expected and I decided that it was both. I was sweating profusely and having to stop and catch my breath every few minutes. I found a neat saddle between two ridges and ended up climbing up to a really nice overlook. I took this picture of it when I was on my way up.

I was dejected about the horses and the lack of current elk sign, but I figured I was at least getting my exercise. I decided that I would at least make it to the top of this point before calling it quits for the day.
Here’s a picture across the canyon. The area I was climbing wasn’t quite as steep, but it was pretty close!
I got to the top of that particular ridge, I was a little over 8,100’ and there was still plenty of room to keep climbing. There was a nice overlook and I sat down to rest and was surprised to hear a bull bugle. I got situated and started glassing and didn’t see anything for a while then spotted a cow, then another then a spike, then a raghorn, and finally ended up seeing about 20 head of elk on the ridge over from me. They were about 600 yards away and they were on the reservation. First I only saw some raghorns and couldn’t figure out which one was bugling. Finally I found the bull who was bugling, and he was still laying down in his bed. After watching them about 30 minutes to an hour they were pretty much all up and moving across the ridgeline. A few of the smaller bulls and some cows headed toward the wilderness area but the bigger bulls headed farther onto the reservation. While watching them I also saw at least 30 elk grazing on Sierra Blanca which is well onto the reservation (probably about 2 miles from where I was).

As I mentioned before, I had brought my Nikon DSLR with a 300mm telephoto lens specifically to take pictures of elk if I saw any. With the memory card on the fritz I ended up having to improvise with my Canon Powershot free handing through the spotting scope. Of course I forgot the piece that goes with my tripod to hook up the spotting scope to the tripod so I was holding the spotting scope on my backpack and taking the pictures through it with the Canon Powershot. I thought they actually turned out decent considering everything.

Here's an full frame picture before any cropping.
Here’s the biggest bull of the bunch, nothing spectacular, but a good solid 5x6. I figure somewhere around 280 – 290”. Would be hard for me to pass him up if I saw him in shooting range on opening day off the reservation, but I think I would.

Needless to say, my spirits were lifted considerably since I was actually into elk and legal bulls at that. Of course I wasn’t happy that they were on the reservation, but I figure that in the next two months their patterns will change and there is a good chance they will be moving around quite a bit. At least I saw some elk.

I decided to try to go down a different way and follow a ridgeline to the trail and didn’t want to be covering new ground in the dark so I picked up and headed down the mountain. It turned out to be a really good decision since I ended up hitting cliffs a couple times and having to re-route around them. As I started down I saw the answer to the horse poop I had been seeing. Wild horses!
Actually at first I thought they might be someone’s stock that was turned loose, but I talked with the guy at the campsite and he said there were quite a few wild horse in the area. That made me feel a little better that my plans were not going to be completely shot by some outfitters riding down the ridgeline that I was working so hard to climb up.

I made it to the trail just as it was getting dark and made it back to the campsite in the dark. My wife wasn’t feeling well back at home and my feet were hurting and I’d managed to wear a few blisters so I made an impromptu decision to go ahead and drive back home that night and skip the next morning scouting time. It took right at five hours to drive home and I was back home at 3:00am this morning.

Overall I felt like it was a pretty successful trip. I didn’t see a monster bull, but for spending just a couple days I felt like my time in person was matching up with the information I had received from others and what I was seeing on Google Earth and on my topographical maps. I wasn’t prepared for how steep it was, but it was very good to experience it to know that I will have to alter my plans a little to match up with realistic expectations of what I can accomplish. I had told myself that if I end up going without seeing any elk that I would break down and hire an outfitter so it looks like I’m still DIY for now on this one.

That’s it for now. Just two weeks until hunting season officially starts with my New Mexico antelope hunt. I’ll update on the status of that in another post.

Nathan

Whoops! Where did my blind go? :-(

2010-08-23T13:29:00.000-07:00

Well, I thought that my blind was heavy enough to sit on the top of the rock hill without being anchored down. I was wrong.

Here's a trail camera picture from the morning of August 7th, look in the top left corner for the blind.Here's a trail camera picture from that evening. (Note that the blind is now gone!)
Here's what I arrived to find this weekend when I went down to the land to check on things.
The roof is still in one piece and near the top of the hill, but it weighs at least 500lbs and I am trying to figure out how I'm going to get it picked up and set on the top of the blind after I rebuild it.
Here's a picture of what it looked like when it was still on top of the hill!

The blind has been up for a year and we've had some 50mph winds during that time and it has done fine. I've even been in it when it was blowing 30 - 40mph and it didn't even budge. Looking at the historical weather from the nearest weather reporting stations on August 7th the highest wind was a 24mph gust but that is about 30 miles away from my property. Not sure if it caught a microburst or what.

I'll be attempting to rebuild it and try to figure out how to put the roof back on without taking it apart. The top has shingles on it so that is what really adds to the weight and would be a pain to remove them.

I guess maybe I could assemble it all laying on it's side and then stand it up and then put legs under it. That's the best idea I've been able to come up with.

I also need to figure out a good way to anchor it. The rock is a mixture of sandstone and caliche type rock and I'm not sure how easy it would be to drill anchor holes in it. I haven't ever tried but I will bring some masonry bits down next time and see if it can be done. I have the guy wire and eyelets already purchased but I didn't ever get them installed, procrastination did not pay off for me this time.

The floor and 2 of the walls are pretty much intact and I should be able to repair the other 2 walls with a few replacement 2 x 4's. Everything is screwed together so I'm hoping I can have it repaired in 8 to 12 hours of hard labor. If anyone has any ideas on the roof I'm all ears!

Nathan

Trail Camera Pictures

2010-08-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

Well, in between our trip to Kentucky and our trip on Montana I did manage to run down to the land to fill the feeders and check the cameras. I was also hoping to shoot a pig or two, but they didn't cooperate on that aspect.

I was very happy with some of the deer that I got on camera this month! Several of them are going to end up being pretty decent bucks and one of them could potentially be a Booner! He is already pretty impressive and based on the way the tips of his antlers are still rounded he still has some more growth ahead of him. I'm really looking forward to my next trip down to the property to check the cameras and see if I have any more pictures of him. I think he may be the 3 1/2 year old 11 point that I passed on a couple times last year. He is definitely at the top of my hit list for this year!

Here's a couple pictures of him. From the front.
Here's another buck that would be hard to pass up if I saw him first.
I thought this was a pretty neat picture. There are only 3 spouts to feed out of and 4 bucks hanging out wanting to eat. Looks like a boxing match broke out over the open feed spout!
And it looks like the pigs are back from a hiatus this summer. Hopefully I'll be able to take a few of them out or I'm going to end up completely overrun!

There are 23 pigs in this picture.

Oh well, I'm pretty excited about the bucks I'm getting on camera. Getting a picture of one in the summer isn't anywhere near the same as putting one on the ground during hunting season, but hopefully I'll be able to seal the deal on a big one this fall. I counted at least 9 different bucks on camera on a pretty regular basis so I should have a few to choose from anyway.

That's it for this post. I'll try to keep catching up.

Nathan

Vacation in Kentucky

2010-07-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm more than a month late posting this, but we had a great time visiting family in Kentucky and spending some time on the lake.

Eli is such a great little traveler, we flew on an unscheduled Southwest Airlines flight because they only let you change planes twice on a scheduled flight. To get from Lubbock to Louisville we had to change planes 3 times going and coming so we used some rapid reward tickets and with some very quick connections the flights all turned out great. Eli even managed to catch a few Z's on one of the flights.

After some family visiting, we went with one of my brother's down to Dale Hollow lake which is right on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee. You actually drive into Tennessee to go the Marina where his boat(s) are. He just purchased a new 58' house boat and hasn't sold his smaller one yet so we were able to pack a bunch of folks on them. I think there were 15 of us there for supper one night.

Here's a picture of the boats parked in a cove. We had a lot of fun and spent a lot of time just relaxing. We spent some time knee boarding (and I either cracked a rib or pulled a muscle as it still hurts a little even over a month later) and the highlight for me was doing some diving. My brother has a subsurface air delivery setup where the air compressor floats on a inner tube and you are hooked up with a 100' long air hose. We dove along the bottom of the cove we were in and it was pretty neat. Between the 2 of us we recovered 2 boat anchors, 5 swim masks, a snorkel, 6 golf balls, and ended up picking up a 32 gallon trash can full of beer cans and bottles from off the bottom. It averaged about 30' deep and there was a thermocline at about 25' so it was pretty interesting going from the cold water down deep to the warm water when you surfaced to get rid of the items you had collected.

Here's a picture of me after unloading my catch. My brother is diving at the end of the other air line and my nieces are snorkeling above where he is diving.Overall we had a great trip and it was really good to see my brothers and sisters who live there. I'm WAY behind on my blog and I'm going to try to get it caught up over the next week or so.

That's it for now though. Nathan

New pair of boots!

2010-07-06T18:47:00.001-07:00

Well, another riveting post coming up on buying a new pair of boots!

My previous experience with boots was to always buy the cheap ones for $40 and then end up wearing running shoes because they hurt my feet.

2 years ago I upgraded to a pair of Irish Setter Shadow Trek's, and a pair of Rocky Stalker's. They were a big improvement, but the Irish Setters leaked and tore up pretty quickly and the Rocky's did pretty well, but are nearing the end of their useful life.

Reading through some of the posts on some hunting and hiking forums I found that there are several brands of boots that I had never even heard of that are considered the cream of the crop. Kenetek, Lowa, Hanwag, Asolo, Meindl, etc. The common denominator in these boots are that they are all made in Germany or Italy. They are also all pretty expensive!

After a ton of research I ended up buying a pair of Lowa Ranger GTX's on sale and then went to Cabelas in Fort Worth over the 4th of July weekend and tried them on along with a pair of Meindl Denalis.

Here is a picture with both boots side by side. The Meindl Denali is an 8" boot and the Lowa Ranger is a 6 1/2" boot. The 8" boot is what I'm used to in a hunting boot and really seemed to support my ankles, the 6 1/2" boot was at just the wrong height for me.

Here's the Lowa Ranger:
Here's the Meindl Denali:
I ended up deciding on the Denalis simply because they fit me better. The Lowas actually appeared to be better constructed with stronger eyehooks and thicker leather and a better sole, but when you are going to spend hundreds of miles in a pair of boots, how they fit is a pretty important part of the puzzle. It's not like the Meindl's were poorly constructed by any means, they appear to be a very nicely made boot and hopefully they will serve me for many years to come.

Another interesting thing was that I ended up buying a wide boot in the Meindl Denali. Usually I wear a regular width, but the Meindl's must run narrow because the wide width fit just right. Another nice thing about the high end boots is that you can try them out (they prefer you stick to carpet inside your house) and if you don't like them you can return them with no questions asked.

I got the Lowa Ranger's at http://www.footwearoutfitters.net/ and would highly recommend them to anyone looking for some top notch boots. I really wanted to like them, but the lower boot just wasn't what I was looking for. They are coming out with the Lowa Ranger in an 8" boot within a month, but I'm ready to quit shopping and get started putting the miles on mine. I think I'll be happy with the Meindl Denali.

I'm thinking that by the end of the year I will have between 150 and 200 miles on them so it should be a pretty good test. If I think of it I'll post an update on how well they are doing. My first test for them will be hiking at camp in Montana the first of August.

Well, that's about it for now. I'm sure everyone was on the edge of their seat worried about which boot I was going to end up buying!

Nathan

Hunting Preparations..

2010-06-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm posting my process of getting ready for my hunting trips this fall on an online forum called www.monstermuleys.com. They are running a special forum with prizes that they are going to give away to the folks posting some of the best stories on the entire process so I figured I might as well try my hand at it. I doubt I'll win anything, but as lucky as I was drawing my tags, maybe I'll get lucky on winning something with the hunt challenge.

Anyway, I figured I would start posting some of the same information here on my blog. Probably pretty boring, but some folks might enjoy it.

Right now I've been working on long distance scouting. I ordered some maps from www.publiclands.org and have been looking over the maps plus looking at Google Earth trying to figure out where I would be living if I was a mature bull elk.

I've been using image overlays in Google Earth where I take a pdf map and convert it to an image and then overlay it in Google Earth. You can change the transparency of the overlay from 0% to 100% and it zooms in and out with you when you so you can get as close as you want and be able to tell whether you are on national forest, wilderness, private land, etc. Still not a substitute for a good old map though, pretty hard to haul around your notebook computer on the trail with you.

Here's a screen shot from my computer.

I also finally got started on getting in shape with a run to the mailbox and back last night. Doesn't sound like much of a workout, but that's a 2 mile round trip for me. I'm starting on the elliptical tonight.

My current hunting boots are some Rocky's that are nearing the end of their useful life so I've been researching boots and asking questions on monstermuleys.com. I'm not much closer to making a decision than when I posted (maybe even farther from a decision since I was given several new options), but I think when it comes down to it, any of them should be a big step up from any boots I've had in the past.

I also went back down to the land this weekend and pounded in some T-Posts to mark the Quail CRP boundary line. Not sure if more of the native grasses are coming in, or some other invasive grasses are coming in but there is a lot of green. I think most of it is Johnson grass. I did ID some of the partridge peas that I planted coming in and some native sunflowers (that I didn't plant but I think aren't a bad thing).I ended up pounding in 48 fence posts for the markers. I had to put them every 100 feet. Got a little bit of exercise in while I was at it!

The electric golf cart is working out pretty well so far. I have a few squeaks I need to work out, but overall it is getting used more than I thought it would. It worked great for hauling the posts around. You can see my hill top hunting blind in the background. It's about 800 yards away.

I guess I'm in the wait and see, hope and pray process right now. I did see some sand burrs in the mix this time as well, but hopefully the NWSG and Switchgrass will out compete it over the next couple years.

That's it for now. Nathan

Feeling Lucky!

2010-06-17T18:41:00.001-07:00

Well, I am behind on posting again and have a few minor projects I should probably post on, but I'll start out with the results from my New Mexico hunting applications.

New Mexico isn't like most of the other Western states that work on a bonus point system where you have very limited chances to draw some of the tags in the best units until you "build points" by applying year after year and after a while you have so many points that you are almost guaranteed a tag. In New Mexico it is a pure lottery and someone applying for the first time ever has the same chances of drawing a tag as someone who has been applying for 20 years. Since I already had my Wyoming elk tag in my pocket, I figured I should at least start the process of applying in New Mexico, and since I already had one elk tag I decided to apply for some of the hardest units to draw a tag. That way if I drew I would be willing to put in the extra effort to work that extra hunt in. I applied for 2 super premium units with my 1st and 2nd choices with less than 2% draw odds, and then just for fun threw in a premium unit that had about 10% draw odds as my 3rd choice.

I figured I would also put in for an antelope tag in New Mexico since the drawing odds were so low (about 5%) that statistically I would need to put in for about 10 years before I got to a 50/50 chance of drawing one of those tags.

I also applied for a deer tag in the same unit that I hunted last year. I figured that way I wouldn't be limited to the private property I was hunting and if I saw a monster buck hanging out on state land I could go after it. The drawing odds were about 70% on that tag but I applied for a few super premium tags that had less than 1% draw odds as my 1st and 2nd choices and the unit I hunted last year as my 3rd choice.

Well, guess what? I ended up drawing all 3 tags the first year I applied! I got my 3rd choice for elk and deer and my 2nd choice for antelope! The red "unsuccessful" is from my oryx application earlier in the year. Here's the screen shot from the online draw results page.

Needless to say I was pretty stunned to draw all 3 tags. The first thing I had to do is get a calendar out and figure out if any of the seasons actually overlapped each other or not. Thankfully everything actually fit on the calendar without overlapping and as of right now I actually think I'll be able to keep them on there.

I've never hunted elk in New Mexico and am not really familiar with the unit that I drew other than the drawing odds and harvest statistics so I'm working on getting more familiar as much as I can. I've put some overlays of public land maps onto Google Earth and have been scouting using my computer as much as possible. I've been searching for any tidbits of information I can find online and will probably make a trip over to scout in person sometime toward the end of the summer.

I'm going to have to make sure I have things taken care of at work this summer to be able to take so much time off this fall, but I think I can make it work. Of course I already had an extra week of vacation planned this summer visiting family in Kentucky so I'm going to find out how well I can organize getting everything completed on time!

Hopefully my luck will hold out and allow me to actually fill the tags this fall!

That's it for now. Nathan

Flesh eating beetle update

2010-06-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well, I've had the flesh eating beetles for a few months now and thought I would post an update on them.

First off, they stink. They got banished to the barn and Cathy pretty much refuses to even go in the barn unless the doors have been open for a while. I think they don't smell that bad, but maybe my sniffer is off.

However, they do seem to be doing a pretty decent job of cleaning skulls. I added a pig skull and my bobcat skull when I first got them and it took them forever to get them clean, but they have grown as a colony now and I added the skull from the pig my friend shot when he was down here a few weeks ago and they made pretty short order of it.

Here's the skull just a day or two after I added it. Not sure what the light brown stuff on there is, maybe Beetle poo.

Here's the skull as of this morning. They have about got it cleaned up. The dark brown that you see on the skull are the beetles doing some final cleaning. It basically took them 2 weeks to clean it.
You can see my bobcat skull in the bottom of that picture and the original pig skull on the bottom right side of the picture. They are pretty much clean now, I just need to soak them in some degreasing solution (dawn dishwashing soap) and then soak them in peroxide to get them gleaming white. I am going to wait until all of them are done and then do them all at once.

I need to start finding something else for them to eat pretty soon.

Nathan

New Kiddie Pool

2010-06-02T09:06:00.000-07:00

Well, Eli's existing kiddie pool was getting a little small and he really enjoys being out in the water so we decided to spring for a larger one this summer. We ended up buying a 12' diameter Easy Set pool that is 30" tall. It was pretty cheap (under $100) and included a filter and looked like it would be pretty easy to setup and leave up all summer instead of having to fill and empty it every time we wanted to use it.

Part of the problem with his old kiddie pool was that the dogs seemed to like it even more than he did so it got dirty pretty quick if you left it up, so we wanted to make sure we got one tall enough that the dogs couldn't get in it but short enough so that Eli could enjoy it and that's where we came up with the 30" height. The water level inside the pool is only 24" which is just over waist deep for Eli which seems about perfect. The only issue is that he can't get in and out of the pool by himself, but that may be a good thing.

Anyway, we picked out what we thought was a pretty level spot next to the house and put a tarp down and started filling the pool. Here it is when we first got the top ring inflated and started filling it. It doesn't look that big, but when it is full to the bottom of the top ring it is just over 1,300 gallons so it takes a while to fill up. Eli helped work out the wrinkles in the bottom while it was filling up. Here it is after it was full the first time. If you look in the bottom left corner of the pool, you can see I'm already starting to drain it. I gave up on the garden hose draining method pretty quick though as it would have taken all day, and pulled out a 3,000gph submersible pump I had sitting around and had it drained in less than 30 minutes. Eli got to enjoy it for about an hour before we drained it. You can't really tell it in this picture, but the pool was off level by about 4 inches.
Why mess around with a shovel when you have a tractor? I actually ended up putting 4 scoops of dirt on the low side when it was all said and done. I packed it down driving back and forth over it with the tractor and we smoothed it back out and spent a few minutes picking rocks up and moved the pool back over and started filling it back up again.
Here it is now. We could probably put another couple inches of water in there, but it is level now. We bought a cover for it, but it has already blown off twice so not sure if that is going to work out or not. Eli LOVES it. If he had his preference he would spend the entire day in it. He is going to be taking swimming lessons toward the end of the month and we are going to spend some time with my brother on his houseboat in Kentucky in July so it is probably a pretty good thing for him to get used to being in the water.

Not too bad of a view from the pool. There are definitely some disadvantages to living out in the country, but being able to sit on the back porch looking out over the canyon more than makes up for them!
That's it for now. Kind of crazy to have a blog post on setting up a kiddie pool, but it ended up being a lot bigger project than we thought it would be. I think it will be worth it though.

That's it for now. Nathan

Replaced my tractor seat.

2010-05-28T08:34:00.001-07:00

Based on the title, that doesn't sound like much of a project, but believe me, it was.

My tractor seat has been in disrepair ever since I bought the tractor 4 years ago. It has been getting worse and worse and for the last year or so it has been more like riding a bucking bronco than riding a tractor. Cathy was helping me with a minor repair of the steering a week ago and I needed her to sit on the tractor and turn the steering wheel while I put the pitman shaft in and when she went to sit down she almost fell onto the floor of the tractor so I figured I really needed to break down and replace the seat.

My tractor had somewhat of a hard life before I got it, so I'm not sure what happened to the seat to break it in the first place, but the factory parts to repair/replace it were over $500. You can buy a complete new seat at Tractor Supply for $100 so of course that was the option I went for first.

I knew it would possibly take a little extra work and maybe even some drilling in the floor of the tractor, but the aftermarket seat even looked a little more comfortable than the stock seat so I thought it would be worth it. After getting the seat home and checking it out I found a problem. The seat was too tall.

Here's a picture of the stock seat next to the one I bought at Tractor Supply. It doesn't look like that much difference, but it was. The distance from the floor to the base of the stock seat was 5" and the distance from the floor to the base of the new seat was 9". That 9" gives plenty of room for a suspension to improve the ride, but it put my head into the canopy of the tractor and knees into the steering wheel. It was not going to work no matter how many holes I drilled.

Here's another picture of the bottom of the stock seat. I didn't do anything to bust it up or anything, just set it on the floor and you can see how bad of shape it was. I had pieced it back together before and it stayed for a while, but it was pretty much beyond repair now. I may hold onto it and practice my non existent welding skills on it sometime as there is a metal bar that is broken and missing that holds the suspension parts in place.

After looking around online, and posting on a tractor discussion board, I finally found a nearly identical seat to the one at Tractor Supply at http://www.agrisupply.com/ that was only supposed to be 4" between the base instead of 9" like the one from Tractor Supply. The stock seat was 5" so I was thinking the new seat would work perfect. Well there was a little bit of false advertising, the seat was 5.5" from the base to the bottom of the seat, but I thought it would still work. 2 hours and plenty of drilling and creative thinking later I had the seat installed. It is still a little bit higher than the factory seat when it is all said and done. I think it will work though. I have to mow the yard this weekend so I should find out for sure pretty quick. It will be interesting to see how much different it rides when there is actually a suspension in the seat vs. in the past when every bump I hit went straight up my spine (and there are lots of bumps when you are running a tractor).

Oh well, not very exciting, but not very many of my posts ever are!

Nathan

Hog Hunting

2010-05-24T18:16:00.001-07:00

Last week we had some friends come down from Wyoming for their daughters graduation from ACU and for a change they were able to stick around and actually spend more than 1 night trying to hog hunt.

We made it down to the land and hunted the first night but it was really windy and we got in the blind kind of late and didn't see a thing. The next morning was a bust as well and we had some rain in the forecast and I had been working on getting some warm season grasses planted so I spent the afternoon planting and spraying roundup on some newly sprouted weeds while my friend checked the cameras and set out some raccoon traps.

I got everything finished with a few minutes to spare, and we got in the blind around 6:00. Sunset was set for 8:30 so we had a long wait ahead of us but hopefully we would see something and make the wait worthwhile. It was still pretty windy, but not near as bad as the night before. Around 7:00 we saw some deer moving through some trees, but it still seemed pretty dead. We had setup an special LED light over the feeder so we were prepared to be there for the long haul. The night before a boar hog showed up around 9:30 and we had left the blind around 9:00 because it was getting too dark to see, so we were prepared with the feeder light.

Around 8:30 we saw a pig moving through the trees. I stayed back in the trees about 20 yards to the north of the feeder and then moved out. Before I ever hunted over a feeder I had always heard how the animals got used to the sound of the feeder going off and would come running. Either that isn't true or I do something wrong because I don't recall ever seeing any animals come running to my feeder when it goes off. (Of course it probably doesn't create a sense of security when their buddy ends up getting shot when they do end up coming into the feeder!).

Anyway, the pig left and it was getting close to dark. We had setup the feeder light during the day and it is activated by a sensor and only comes on when it gets dark so we were hoping that we had it setup right because it looked like we were going to need it. Then about 10 minutes later the same pig comes back toward the feeder from a completely different direction. It looked like he had circled completely around the feeder to see if he could smell anything. He was very cautious, but not cautious enough!

After about 30 seconds he moved broadside and then my friend put him down with his .300 WSM. He dropped right there. Turns out we didn't need the feeder light after all.

Since I had all my farming implements including my tractor there doing my planting, I was able to just go pick him up with the front loader of the tractor. Pretty decent sized hog. The bucket on the tractor is 5' wide.

Something that I try to do whenever possible is actually weigh the animals that are taken on our land. Sometimes I am unable to, but with the tractor down there it made it easy to weigh this one. Here's a picture of him on the scale with my friend standing next to him. My friend is 5'10" and weighs 185lbs for perspective. The pig's nose is about 2" off the ground.

When I told my friend that I thought his pig was a 200 pounder he seemed a little bit disappointed. When we got him on the scale it turned out I had under estimated a little and he weighed in at 210lbs on the hoof. I told him that it was an ACTUAL 210lb pig, not someone just guessing. I told him that most people who say they shot a 300 or 400lb pig didn’t actually put it on the scale, they just guessed.

To prove my point I posted pictures of the pig on 5 different bulletin boards and asked other hunters to guess how much he weighed. Overall there were 115 guesses and the average guess was 285lbs. The highest guess was 700lbs and the lowest guess was 145-150lbs. I’m not 100% sure that the 700lbs was a legitimate guess, but the next highest guess was 470 and that was a real guess based on the comments by the poster. There were 10 guesses that it was 400lbs or bigger and 43 folks had it at 300lbs or bigger. The overall results were brought down by 2 places I posted this where people are more experienced hog hunters, otherwise the average guess was over 300lbs on the 2 general hunting forums I posted it on.

That makes guided hog hunt success number 2 now. I really think the key is being able to spend more than 1 night hunting because they can be pretty unpredictable. My friend was actually prepared to spend another night if we didn't connect on the 2nd night but it worked out pretty good. We were able to turn the pig into sausage and a started the backstraps curing into ham and they were headed back to Wyoming with time to spare.

The only negative to the hunt was that it was a boar hog that came in by itself so I didn't get a chance to try out my AR-15 to see how many little piggies I could count with it!

That's it for now. Nathan

New gun safe.

2010-05-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

Well, after buying the AR-15 and the new turkey shotgun, and after reading about several folks getting their homes broken into and their guns stolen, I decided that I probably should buy a gun safe. Also, I ended up buying one with a 1 hour fire rating and probably the most important reason is to keep the guns locked up so Eli can't get into them unsupervised.

I ended up making a whirlwind trip to Dallas to present an audit and decided to drive the pickup and pick up the safe at Cabelas on the way home. The safe weighs 700lbs, but it really ended up being pretty easy to pick it up (3 guys helped load it in the truck) and was amazingly easy to unload and setup at the house. My brother in law came over and the 2 of us had it out of the truck and set where I wanted it in about 15 minutes.

The thing that did not go as smoothly as I was expecting was anchoring it to the cement slab. You would think that a 700lb safe wouldn't need to be anchored, but If 2 of us could unload it and move it, then it wouldn't take too many folks if they were determined enough to take the entire safe. (Of course the 700lbs is empty, I probably already have 100lbs of stuff in it!).

I ended up using up 3 masonry bits to drill the holes in the cement, and it probably took 4 hours to get the anchor bolts installed, but they are rated at 6,000lbs of horizontal force each so I really doubt that safe is moving anywhere now.

Here's Eli helping out when I was working on drilling the holes. You can see that the safe fits under the stairs in the garage VERY snugly. That should make it even harder to move if anyone ever wanted to try. Here is the finished product and most of my hunting stuff stacked up next to the safe in the nice little cubby hole that should work pretty well. It was always a pain to haul everything upstairs where I used to put it all, so hopefully this will make it easier when I get back home to get everything unloaded out of the truck and into the safe or beside it.
Here's what's inside it now. Plenty of room to grow! It says it is a 24 gun safe, but I've only got 5 in there right now and I think it would only comfortably fit about 10 or 12. I think I'm going to buy a 1 hour fire rated box that I am going to put all of our important papers in and then keep it inside the safe. That would give the important stuff at least 2 hours of fire resistance. Hopefully we will never have to find out how long it is actually good for!Oh well, not that exciting of a post, but I'm a few projects behind on getting things posted and this seemed like a good place to start.

Nathan

Bobcat mount is back!

2010-05-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Well, after a short 4 months, my bobcat is back and sitting in my office! I really like the laying down pose as it give a lot of different options on where to place it. There's a picture on a world famous taxidermists website of a bobcat mount laying on the couch that looks awesome, so I took a couple pictures of it on the couch in my office.

I think it is going to go on my credenza for now.

Here's a couple close ups of it's face.

I'm one of those guys who hasn't seen very many bobcat mounts that I like in the past, but I'm very happy with this one. This mount isn't perfect, but it is pretty darn good I think. The price was pretty reasonable, and the turn around time was pretty good too. It worked out pretty easy shipping the skin and he did an awesome job with the packaging shipping it back to me after it was mounted. I should have taken a picture of the way he had it boxed up, that was an art form by itself. When it is all said and done I'm REALLY happy that I shopped around and sent it off to a guy I knew would do a good job.

Another thing I noticed is how hard it is to take a picture of it that does it justice. I'm sure if I had a nice light colored backdrop and some good lighting I could make it look really good, but I just took pictures here in the office with a little point and shoot Canon camera.

Thought I would share.

Nathan

Porcupine!

2010-04-20T19:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I got a call from Cathy around 1:00 this afternoon with the news that the dogs had a run in with a porcupine. We've had this happen a few times with Jake several years ago but thankfully porcupines are not really common around here, especially up on top of the canyon rim.

Cathy was able to get the dogs loaded up and took them to the vet to get the quills removed. Theoretically you can do it by yourself, but holding down a 100+ pound Rottweiler while you are torturing it by pulling quills out of it's face isn't my idea of fun. The vet puts them under anesthesia and pulls them out while they aren't feeling a thing. If it was a matter of 5 or 6 or even 10 quills I might try it, but our dogs didn't just run into the porcupine, they tried to EAT the porcupine.

Here's Baby at the vet.
And Pedro.

We are babysitting a dog for a friend and he must not have tried to eat the porcupine, but he got close enough to get some quills in his face.
Well, the last time our dog Jake got into a porcupine a few years ago we took him to the vet and got them removed and within a month he had another run in and ended up worse the second time than the first. Our current dogs appear to have less intelligence than Jake ever had so I started thinking that it was pretty important to find that porcupine and remove it so the dogs didn't have another run in with it once they got back from the vet so I decided to head home and see if I could find it.

I got home around 2:30 and rode around on my 4 wheeler looking for it, but after about an hour decided I wasn't going to be so lucky. Eli woke up from his nap around 4:15 and we decided to go riding around on the golf cart to see if we could find it. We don't have just a ton of trees around the property so of course we were looking in the trees for a porcupine. Eli kept telling me that he saw a porcupine around every corner, but he was pretty adamant at one tree that there was a porcupine in it. I told him there wasn't one in the tree and tried to get him to show me where it was. I ended up getting out of the cart and looking and low and behold there was a porcupine in the tree! (Of course it wasn't anywhere near where he was pointing).

I had brought my .22 pistol so I shot the porcupine out of the tree and brought it back to the house. Here it is in the golf cart once we got back to the house.
I guess this is the first animal that Eli was actually out there with me when I shot it. He seemed to think it was pretty cool.
I pulled the guard hairs off and am going to try to find someone who wants them. There is a market for the quills, but I didn't think I had the patience to mess with pulling them out. As many quills as the dogs had in their faces you would have thought the porcupine would have been bald, but really it still had the vast majority of it's quills, just a few small bald patches.

Well that's about it for now I guess. Hopefully we don't have to mess with another porcupine for several more years.

Nathan

Rock River Arms Predator Pursuit is here!!

2010-04-10T19:07:00.000-07:00

Picked my rifle up from my FFL this week! Took about 6 weeks from when I ordered it.

It's a Rock River Arms Predator Pursuit with a 20" heavy match grade barrel and a 2 stage national match grade trigger. It has the RRA Hi-Rise scope mount and is topped with a Nikon Monarch 4-16x 50mm scope with the BDC reticle. I had an extra stoney point rapid pivot bi-pod setup since I bought a prone and a kneeling version so I hooked that up on it too.

Here it is:

I was surprised at how compact it is. Just about the same size as my Ruger 10/22, just weighs about twice as much with the heavy barrel!

I was able to make it out this afternoon to get it sighted in. I spent a little over an hour sighting this bad boy in and I'm VERY happy with it.

Started out at 25 yards, then went to 100 yards and ended up shooting 40 rounds total. I was shooting the cheap 100 round Federal Value Pack 55gr FMJ from Walmart.

Here's the first 2 targets. On the left is shooting at 25 yards, then I moved out to 100 for the one on the right. I didn't even think about bore sighting it. I already had it assembled so I just shot it and luckily it hit the paper with the first shot (the one on the bottom). I adjusted the scope and it looked pretty much good to go. Moved out to 100 yards and shot 3 times and could easily see it hitting high with the Monarch scope on 16x so I adjusted it and then gave it 10 shots pretty in pretty quick succession. Next 2 targets. I cleaned it after the first 18 shots and shot my 7mm Rem Mag Browning A-Bolt while I was waiting for it to cool down with the copper bore cleaner in it. That's the target on the right. Then after I got it cleaned I shot a single with the PP on that target. Then I shot 5 shots with the PP on the left target.
Last 2 targets. I adjusted the scope and shot the first 2 rounds in the target on the left and could see it was off, so I adjusted it and shot 3 more times on that target. I guess the PP already lived up to it's accuracy claim because that 3 shot group ended up right at 3/4"! I decided it was good to go and shot 10 more shots at the target on the right. Nothing spectacular, but without the one on the top the group was under 2" for a 10 shot group, not terrible by any means for cheap factory ammo on basically a brand new gun.
Didn't have a single misfeed, and I could have put a 2' diameter shallow bucket and caught nearly every single piece of brass. I had 2 that ended up about 2' from the pile. The placement of the pile was perfect as well, about 6 feet to my right and 2 feet behind me.

Lastly, this wasn't shot at a range with a fancy benchrest setup. I shot it on my property in a caliche pit. I have a wooden bench made out of an old picnic table and I was using an old futon type pillow for a rest. The wind was light and variable so that was nice.

I'm VERY happy with this gun so far! I've got a few more different brands of ammo that I want to try, and I need to get a badger tach latch put on it sometime as well.

I guess I'm an official card carrying black rifle owner now! That's my initial report.

Nathan

P.S. - It really was fun to shoot!

Trying to pattern a shotgun for Turkey.

2010-04-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

Well, Turkey season starts Saturday so I've been trying to get things ready to do a little Turkey hunting. I have a Mossberg 835 12 gauge shotgun that I'm wanting to pattern to be able to shoot effectively out to 40 yards. It came with a full choke already so I was hoping that it would work without having to change anything else.

Monday evening I went out and shot some paper plates at various yardages hoping I could get out to 40 yards with a good pattern. I should have used a larger target, especially after seeing what happened when I did use a larger target, now I probably need to go back and shoot the stock choke again just to make sure. Anyway here were the results. The top left was at 25 yards and the bottom 2 were at 40 yards. The top right was the last shot and it was at 35 yards and was pretty much a clean miss. Shooting 3 1/2" Magnum 12 gauge shells at paper targets actually hurts. So after researching several different chokes, I bought a Primos Jellyhead and a Truglo Gobbler Stobber to try out. They have colorful names if nothing else! I also bought another box of shotgun shells to try out as well. Some Remington NitroTurkey shells that were also 3 1/2" Magnums.

I used some packaging paper from work to give me a larger target so I could see the hits better and drew some 8.5" by 11" squares on it and put tape in the middle. The packaging paper is 24" tall. I thought I was going to be able to shoot 3 times on each target, but I changed to only 2 times on each target after seeing how wide the spray of the pellets was. All shots were at 40 yards measured with a rangefinder.

This is with the Truglo choke. Winchester Supreme 3.5" #5 shot on the left and Remington NitroTurkey 3.5" on the right. Both shots with the Remington NitroTurkey in the Truglo choke ended up pulling left. Could easily have just been poor aim though, I was mimicking actual conditions using shooting sticks and the wind was blowing pretty good.I didn't bother to draw a circle or a square on any of the other targets, just the tape where I was aiming. I think you can still get a pretty good feel for the pattern though.

This target was both with 3" Hevishot 1.5 oz. Left was the Truglo and right is the Jellyhead. Again, not a for sure because I wasn't on a bench, but every shot with the Jellyhead ended up a little high. Both of these shots are with the Jellyhead. Winchester supreme 3.5" #5 on the left and Remington 3.5" NitroTurkey on the right. Both shots were a little high.
On this one, I used the Jellyhead with the Winchester supreme 3.5" # 5 on the left and the Truglo with Remington 3.5" NitroTurkey on the right. Again the Jellyhead was a little high and the Remington NitroTurkey out of the Truglo was a little to the left.
Last target I stuck with the Truglo and shot Winchester 3.5" #5 on the left and the 3" Hevishot on the right.
When it is all said and done I think I'm going to go with the Truglo with the Winchester 3.5" #5 for now. I'm probably going to try a few more with a better target and make sure it is hitting where I want it, but it seemed to be the best pattern out of all of them. I might try a couple shots with the stock choke as well just to make sure my first test shots with the paper plates were actually showing the true pattern and weren't actually misses in one direction or the other.

I also put a Limbsaver recoil pad on the shotgun and while it still kicked like a mule, I don't think I could have shot 10 times at paper targets with the factory recoil pad on there.

Not very exciting, but hey, no one ever said this blog was exciting!

That's it for now, who knows, maybe I'll have a Turkey on the ground Saturday.

Nathan

Country Living.. Very wet winter for around here.

2010-03-27T09:06:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post some pictures of our muddy roads several times this winter and just haven't gotten around to it. I finally did take some pictures after our last rain that we got and am actually going to get them posted.

Overall, we really enjoy living out in the country. About the only negative is the fact that the roads can be difficult when it rains. We live 2 miles off pavement with 1 1/2 miles of that being county roads and 1/2 mile of that is our driveway. Believe it or not, our driveway is not the problem, the county roads are.

After a big rain or even worse, a steady rain or even worse than that, melting snow, the roads get pretty bad. This year has been the worst year in the 11 years that we've lived out there.

I've posted pictures like this of the muddy roads before.

But this time after they dried up a bit and the ruts were still there, I got out and took a picture to show how deep those ruts actually are!

In case you haven't measured one recently, a coke can is just under 5" tall. That would mean that the ruts are between 10" - 12" deep here. We didn't do anything special to make the ruts deeper or wider than any other time, we just drove in them to get back and forth to the house until the road dried up enough and then we straddle the ruts until the county grades the road again.

Thankfully the county does grade the road fairly regularly after a big rain or snow, but it is very important to get that first set of tracks in as straight as possible so you can straddle them after it dries up. When it is still wet, the road is strictly one lane as there is no way you could get out of the ruts to pass someone if you tried. You actually don't even need to hold onto the steering wheel, the wheels just bounce back and forth and it feels like you are inside a pinball machine almost. It feels that way whether you are trying to steer or not.

There is no doubt that we would have been unable to get back and forth to the house this year without both of our vehicles being 4 wheel drive. My company vehicle is a Chevy Trailblazer and when the ruts get deep like they are in the picture, it ends up dragging high center periodically. If you are in the ruts, that means the road isn't dry enough to straddle the ruts so it basically just plows through the mud, but this year has been a chore to keep the vehicles even remotely free of mud. On both vehicles we've had to wash the wheels to get the mud off several times because the mud stuck to the wheels was causing them to be way out of balance and the vehicle would be shaking violently at anything over 50 mph.

Spring is here, so hopefully no more snow, but I haven't hear whether this is supposed to be a wet spring and summer or not. They said that this was going to be a wet winter and they definitely got that right!

That's it for now. Nathan

My 2009 Mule Deer is back from the Taxidermist!

2010-03-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

Well, the title pretty much says it all! I got my 2009 New Mexico Mule Deer back from the Taxidermist!

Here is the living room the way we currently have it. Hopefully one of these days I'll have a trophy class whitetail to go with him, along with a pronghorn and an elk!

That's it for now, very happy to have him on the wall. The taxidermist doing my bobcat said I should be getting it back in 2 or 3 weeks so hopefully it will turn out good too.

Nathan

Flesh eating beetles!!

2010-03-18T19:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I broke down and bought me some flesh eating beetles!!!

To be specific they are dermestid beetles and they are commonly used to clean the skulls of animals for European style mounts. They sound pretty scary, but they pretty much can only eat the flesh when it is drying and decomposing. You have to skin the animals head in order for them to feed on it. The biggest danger they pose if they get loose is that they might try to eat any leather that is around the house!

Anyway, I ordered some beetles online from a guy in Kodiak, Alaska of all places. I guess they must have the perfect climate for growing these beetles, because he sells a lot of them and is about the cheapest place that I found and came highly recommended on top of that.

Here's his website - http://www.bonesandbugs.com/

The beetles arrived today and thankfully the box was intact and they only took 5 days to get here in relatively mild temperatures. The beetles were packaged in a cottage cheese cartoon inside the box and appeared to have made the trip in good shape.

Here's the box that they arrived in.

If you look closely he punched very small holes in the lid so the bugs could get some air, but they were small enough that none of them were able to get out. Included with the beetles was a very nice 4 page write up on how to care for the bugs once they arrived as well as how to use the bugs to clean skulls.
There are supposed to be 1,000 total bugs in the cartoon. I didn't try to count them. There are adult beetles as well as larvae that look like little worms. In the instructions it states that the fluffy stuff the beetles are packaged in is called frass. It is made up of digested flesh, chewed up Styrofoam (that's what they bed in), and shed skin from the larvae when they molt. Sounds yummy and smells worse!
Here's where I'm setting them up for now. Hopefully they won't be able to climb the sides of the tub very well, but I'm not 100% sure about that yet. The net is more to keep other insects out than it is to keep the beetles in. The shredded paper is for bedding material and the black plastic dish is where I'm going to put the skulls for now. I may switch to something else though. The idea behind the plastic dish is in case teeth fall out of the skull when they are cleaning it, this way I won't have to be digging around in the "frass" looking for a tooth. Also this will keep any wet or damp things out of the bedding and prevent any chance of mold.
Here's when I dumped the beetles in. There were a lot of them that's for sure. I should have taken a little video clip because pretty much everything was moving. You could hear them rustling around in the paper.
I added some wet paper towels for them to drink from and some ham to get them started. I don't want to start them on a skull right away because all my skulls have been outside and everything I've read says about the worst thing you can do is introduce fly larvae into the colony. I don't think any flies are out right now to lay eggs in the skulls, but I'm going to put the skulls in the freezer for 24 hours before feeding them to the beetles to kill any fly eggs just in case.
Here's the plastic tote with the netting over the top. Hopefully it will do a good job of keeping the beetles in and keeping any other bugs out.
I'll probably post some updates on the first few skulls that I clean. I tried the boil and scrub method and just didn't seem to be able to get the hang of it. Hopefully this will work out, if not I guess I'll have to get better at the boil and scrub method.

Right now the beetles are in the garage. They need a pretty narrow temperature range from about 60 to 80 degrees to get the best results. I can get fairly close to that in the garage, but I'm not sure if Cathy is going to let me keep them in there long term. If they start to stink, I'll probably have to move them out to the barn and I'm not sure they will make it through the summer out there. I've got 3 pig skulls, 3 deer skulls a bobcat skull and a coyote skull that I would like to get cleaned and even if that's all that I get done before the colony dies off I will be way ahead of what it would have cost to have someone else clean the skulls for me.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

That's it for now.

Nathan