Well, we gave it our best shot.... My dad and I went out for our first attempt at bow hunting in Oregon. Bryce was good enough to help us scout a place near him and give us some pointers. My dad and I are from Wisconsin and are used to hunting white-tails. This elk hunting is a whole different ball game. The terrain is thick! this place is a jungle sometimes, thistle, oregon grape, devils club, black berries, all kinds of stuff to shred you up.
The first weekend we got skunked. All we could find was old tracks and droppings, nothing fresh and no sightings. We did get to explore the area fairly well though and that will give us an advantage next time we go in.
This weekend we had a slightly better idea of what we were doing and we had the added advantage that the commercial timber land opened up due to low fire danger so that meant the clear-cuts were fair game. On Saturday morning we slowly walked around the edge of a clear cut looking for sign and when we got all the way around and to the top of the ridge, spotting a big black-tail buck on the way, I looked across the clear cut and saw some movement. At first I thought they were deer but then i saw that characteristic swooped necks and I knew we were finally into some elk. I got out our binoculars and glassed them, they were two bulls making their way up the other ridge and into the thick woods. We must have spooked them at some point in our circuit and sure enough we found fresh sign where we where, showing that they had cut all the way across the clearcut. We then heard a couple of bugles and cow calls coming from down in the creek bottom on the other side of the ridge. It certainly could have been hunters but given that we had just seen two elk come from that direction we decided to take our chances. we spent the rest of the day setting up some blinds to cover some heavy trails. Bryce offered to come out and call for us that afternoon and by 6ish we were all set up and ready to go. Bryce put on quite the show, delivering a veritable elk orgy of sound but we had no takers, not even the two bulls that had scooted off that morning.
Oh well. It was exciting to see some elk even if we didn't set up any shots. We clearly have a ton to learn about hunting elk out here and now we have a whole year to study up and scout. There are a lot of resources about rocky mountain elk but very few if any about Roosevelt elk. They seem to require a different set of skills to some degree so if anyone knows of a good resource, I'm all ears. We were so busy slogging through the jungle that I didn't take the time to take many pictures. I might get out for another weekend before the season's over but if not there's always next year.
