10/04/2026
This past week we had 2 elk hunters, 1 guy was doing elk and whitetail combo. His dream was to go on a elk hunt and he shot a beautiful 7x6 bull at 13 yards mid week. The hunt was a classic with plenty of bugling and multiple bulls to entertain the hunter as what he described it as, just like on TV...lol. He also harvested a whitetail buck. Several bucks come out in a line down the trail that passes his stand at 12-14 yards. He said he swung his bow to shoot one of the 2 bigger ones, and he broke his arrow in half on a branch before he could get drawn. The bucks scattered and by the time he knocked another arrow this buck was the only one that stuck around to get a shot at.
The other elk hunter I had, we had a week we'll never forget. The first half of the week we were into elk but no real good opportunities. Then all that changed by the end of the week. We had so many close calls, moving on elk to only have elk bugling right where we just come from several times. Picking one spot to go and then have elk walk past where we sat the day before. Until the last day, we got into the path of a bunch of elk and the quiver started getting lighter. One bull bugled at a wallow we almost sat on at daybreak but instead, we moved further North to set up in a travel route we noticed from the week before, and earlier that week. We thought we made a mistake until bulls started coming by us from below, several times we thought we had one and then more elk come up and passed me at 20-25 yards. The hunter had moved to get in a spot for a different bull approaching and the big 6x6 in the one photo standing in the pines walked right past where he was standing 15 minutes earlier. He walked right past me at 20-25 yards. He moved again and here come more elk, most walked by him at 20-25 yards but the bigger bulls stayed out at 60+. He let a arrow go at the bigger one in the group but didn't get him.
Later, I spotted a big 7x7 standing with some cows in a open meadow on the hillside, (photos attached). We stalked as far as we could and settled into some nice sharp rocks waiting for a shot. We sat there not moving for over an hour as cows fed around and bedded at 60-85 yards. The hunter said he couldn't feel the lower half of his body as he was kneeling on sharp rocks for over 60 minutes, we couldn't move at all with all the cows nearby. The shooting lanes where super narrow as we were higher on a spine shooting down into a meadow through the timber. The 7x7 started pushing cows and stood slightly quartering away at 84 yards. The hunter dialed his sight to 85 and settled the pin mid body to angle forward. It looked perfect until it wasn't. A horizontal branch halfway there deflected the arrow and shot straight down. The branch was so high neither of us thought it would have been a issue but the arc of the arrow was more than we anticipated. After that we started walking back to the ranger and one bugled in our face that I think heard us walking and thought we were another elk. Her appeared instantly over the hill right in front of us. I set the hunter up and fell back into a deep ravine and started calling. The nice ivory tipped bull slowly worked his way down the hill and the hunter got a shot at him at 41 yards. We assumed he only clipped the bull low in the back of the front left leg. Watched him walk off and only a few spots of blood in the left hoof print where he stopped. That's the short version, one heck of a day!
