It’s been too long since I’ve been out in the woods with either of my boys. But last weekend, Logan and I were able to pick up a couple of leftover elk tags and head out in search of the wily wapiti.
We were hunting an area we’d never been to before, because we had to settle for tags that were still available, so we didn’t know where the likeliest places to find elk would be. We spent several hours poring over topographic maps and all the info we could get off of OnX Hunt, and we realized we would have to take our chances with the spots we could get access to. There weren’t many of those in the area we got our tags for. That’s probably the biggest reason there were leftover tags for that area. The public access is slim.
However, we do know a couple of landowners in that area, and though we didn’t ask them if we could hunt their land this time around, that’s always a possibility for later in the season. There’s still quite a bit of that season left, so we might be able to go back again before the end of the year.
We made our way up to the area on Saturday, and we spent the bulk of the day hiking the mile or so from where we had to park to the southern boundary of our area, then we snuck around up there looking for any cow elk we might be able to scare up. We didn’t see any elk – or even any elk sign – but we had a good time wandering through the woods, anyway. We saw lots of other tracks, including what I’m pretty sure were several bobcats and at least one mountain lion, and we explored some new country we hadn’t seen before.
I think if we go back again, though, we’ll definitely need to ask those landowners for permission to hunt, or at the very least to travel through their land to where we can get to the national forest.
But elk or not, it was good to get out hunting again, and even better to be out there with my boy.
