Skunked on the hunt

I drove home from my three-day hunt yesterday - sans elk.  I had a great time nevertheless, and part of the enjoyment of hunting is hoping to bag an elk, but never being sure.  In this case, hope deferred did not make my heart sick - I'll just look forward to next year all the more.  I also enjoyed spending time with some great guys and their sons, and Spencer's wife Annette cooked us a hot meal every evening when we came down from the mountain.

I left before dawn, and as I drove through the valley near Buena Vista and looked in my rear view mirror, and saw the image above.  I just had to pull over and take a picture.  The first snow had fallen the night before, and the sun was just hitting the tops of the peaks - it was breathtaking. 

I have to describe what it's like hunting with Spencer.  We would head out each morning around 5 a.m., to get to the spot we'd chosen the previous night before first light.  Elk tend to stay put at night, and start to move around looking for water and grazing at dawn.  By 10 am or thereabouts they will seek shelter back in the dark timber and wait until evening to come back out.  Spencer has been hunting these mountains his whole life (he's my age), so he knows the roads like the back of his hand.  He drives a beat-up old suburban, and we would take off at a break-neck speed down the highway, then turn onto a dirt road.  The road would soon became a track, and the track would eventually become a trail.  He drove that truck up and down roads that I thought impossible to navigate - all at high speed, in the dark, steering with one hand and drinking coffee with the other.  There weren't any seat belts in the truck (at least none that I could find), so all five of us would be bouncing around trying to hold onto our rifles and keep from knocking into each other.  We kept bullets in the magazines of our rifles, but nothing in the chamber (no danger of the rifle going off in the truck).  That way, if we saw something once we got up on the mountain, we could jump out - jack a shell into the chamber and let the lead fly.  At least, that was the theory.

  We would finally reach a parking place, and either find a spot to sit and wait for the elk to come out, or stalk through the woods.  In the three days I was out there, I never saw even one elk that I could shoot at.  We did see some elk on a ridge above the road as we drove out one evening, and almost turned around to get a shot - the only problem was that we were past hunting time (30 minutes after sunset), we were on a road (can't shoot from a road) and the elk were on someone's private property.  Just as Spence was about to turn around, he said, "Nope - can't do it.  I must have had a brain fart".  That was the closest any of us - other than Spencer's Dad - came to shooting at elk.  We sat, we walked, we tried driving the elk out of the woods - zippo.  C'est la vie.

 I had to take a picture of the Indian Head Rock that's not far from where we were staying.  What a great profile!

I've got to go so I can prepare for our Wednesday night Bible study at church.  Can't wait.