Ochocco Elk Camp
What a learning experience this elk season was. First off we got skunked, which didn’t set well with me. It was my first ever elk rifle hunt east. I have been hunting elk east for several years with the bow and have really been looking forward to the chance to take one of those big bulls I see every year.
We spent 4 days scouting the same area we bow hunt. Day one we spot a nice 4 point bull, and another one we couldn’t see but would bugle back at us. Day 2 we spot the 4 point again and the bugler still talked to us. Day 3 we scouted the other side of the main ridge and we couldn’t find an elk. Day 4 we go back to the original canyon and find the 4 point and another bull we couldn’t count points on. The bugler didn’t answer and I assume is the second bull we saw that day and couldn’t count points on.
Opening morning the 3 of us dove into the canyon and went after the 2 bulls we spotted that night. The elk had moved down the canyon a little and my buddy spotted one about an hour after light and couldn’t get to his gun quick enough to get a shot off. I go into the draw to run it out and come up on it bedded in a ton of blow down at about 40 yards. It jumps up and I cannot get a clear shot at a lighting exit plan of white flashes going thru the trees. [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img] We move on to hunt the second bull and my other buddy gets a quick 50 yard shot off as it left with a few cows at warp speed. We failed on both bulls [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img]
We hunted a couple more days and could not find an elk in the canyon, or the neighboring canyon. We looked everywhere and just couldn’t find much sign in the area. We heard rumor of lots of elk a few miles away in an area we have made some mid day drive bys when bow hunting in the past. We spend day 4 running down thru the canyon and what a bunch of sign we ran into. Rumor had it over 100 elk in the area for the last couple of months. The elk scat was so thick it plugged up the lugs on my boot soles making the boots heavy. Tracks going everywhere, looked like somebody had been dragging a roto tiller around the area. We concluded the elk had been ran out of the area since we didnt see any [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img] with lots of man tracks and plenty of horse tracks packing out meat. We had parked a truck at the bottom of the canyon and left the top on foot. If not for a GPS I would still be looking for the truck. It is amazing how you can get twisted around when running thru new country.
We moved over a couple ridges the next and last day trying to guess where they had been ran to and my one buddy spotted about 30 elk with a couple branch bulls. Myself and the other guy were one ridge over and out of position to get to the elk. We had a fresh inch of snow and not a track on our ridge. The guy in our party who spotted the elk and made a run for it since there were some guys ahead of him on the ridge. They had not spotted the elk and were bugling and cow calling up a storm when he blew right by them. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img] He got out on the end of the ridge where the elk had gone and he was right in the thick of the elk and could see horns over the small trees in the area inside of 100 yards. He never could get a shot, and finally a cow made him and all the elk left in a hurry.
Conclusion, The elk were about 1000 feet higher maybe a little more than where we started out hunting. I could not believe there were hardly any elk in the area we started hunting. I have never been there and not had plenty of elk to hunt in this canyon, but then again I had never been there in October. We should have not wasted 2 days of a 5 day season looking for the 2 bulls we ran off on the opening day. I learned a couple new canyons in the area and will probably move my future bow hunting to this area, as the ground and cover was more huntable.
On a side note, I wish I would have thrown in a shotgun. I saw lots of grouse every day. Usually I spend a week hunting the area and see several hundred elk and about 4 or 5 deer. Not so this trip. We only a few elk and hundreds of deer. There were groups of 4 to 10 deer standing in the road every where. You could not drive 5 miles and not see 50 to 60 deer. They just stood there and looked at you. They would walk thru camp and you could hardly run them off. We only saw a couple bucks, but the does were sure bunched up in the area. On the drive home yesterday, I had to have seen 500 deer between Paulina and Post. The were standing along the road in the fields in herds like milk cows in Tillamook.
I shot a coyote at about 10 feet with the 300 mag. almost cut him in half, I was surprised the bullet even expanded at that distance and that small of a target. Looked like a hand grenade went off in his belly.
Had a huge wind storm come thru Monday evening and almost blew the wall tent away. At one point nearly all the tent takes got pulled in a gust of wind. If not for the tie down ropes the tent would be gone. The next morning a 36 inch diameter fir tree blew down thru camp across our little drive way. If it had come down at 90 degrees to where it did, we would have lost a truck or a tent or ???
Wish I was still there.
Did run into a gammie. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img] He never checked out tags or harrassed us. He was probably the nicest gammie I had ever met. He needed some info on what we saw on day 4 knowing we hunted down thru the area, as he had 3 guys in the brush looking for kill sites, expecting to find wasted meat and illegal kills. Something about one guy shooting several bulls when he got into the herd of 100 plus on opening day. We were able to locate for him one kill site we found with only a partial head, rib cage and feet. We had a few laughs together and he let us go.
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I married better than my wife did!!
As time goes on, I find less and less people I care to be around
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