The 2018 elk hunt, such as it was
This year’s hunting was kind of a bust. I was going to go hunt the “Big Hole” in the Coeur d’Alene Mountains with my brother Paul, but the group didn’t want any more hunters, especially old ones. I didn’t make the draw for an eastern Oregon hunt, dawdled around before deciding to try for a deer in the open hunt west of the Cascades. It’s a zoo. So when I got around to getting my tags the woman behind the counter at OF&W in Clackamas told me I had missed the deadline and there was a “special charge” for late tags. It was a pretty fair amount, doubled the price of the tags.
She asked me, “Well do you want the tags or not?” I thought about it before telling her no and driving back to Portland.
Last 3 years, Paul has been going out on a winter muzzle-loader hunt in the breaks of the North Fork of the Clearwater. It’s all family, my son-in-law Wesley, his brother and niece, a couple guys from Wesley’s church. They see elk every year, sometimes even get one if their smoke-poles go off. They have been after me to come along, but I was a little hesitant to buy a $450 tag for a 4-day hunt. This year I did come along, no tag, borrowed a .22 for grouse.
It was great, just like hunting used to be. There was snow on the ground and tough going over the Palouse Divide. We camped just below snowline, about 2500 ft. above Breakfast Creek, west of the Dworshak Reservoir (what used to be the North Fork). This is a very rough area, most hillsides are 100% grade or more. Not all of them, but most. Getting around calls for careful picking of your route. Up side of this is that it is too steep for the wolves to operate. They stay in the creek bottoms or on ridge tops, or follow traveled roads. Where there are wolves, there’s lots of trax. On the hillsides, no sign of them.
So we hunted around. I wanted to hunt uphill, where the only roads were closed-off. We did that the second day, Paul took a stand and I rattled the brush … walked along a closed-off logging road, around a corner and there was an elk with its face down in the grass. 25 yards. I stood there a while, then her head came up and she stood there looking at me. Maybe 20 seconds, then she walked off, followed by another, smaller cow. Me and my .22, no tag. Poked around a little, startled another animal, then heard (but didn’t see) a fourth, probably a bull, grunt in the tules downhill.
Next day we hunted low, easy going but no animals. We decided to hunt up high in the afternoon, looking for elk on the south-facing slopes. We sneaked up on a herd of five cows grazing downslope of us and Paul shot the fattest one. They all ran but she didn’t go far. We managed to get her gutted by the time it got dark and were going to come back in the morning. Then three men in their 30’s who were hunting together came by and swooped in, cut the whole animal up and packed most of it upslope. We offered them some meat but they said they had all they needed and were just helping us for fun.
Paul and I each took a quarter and some backstrap & loin. Wesley is going to divvy up the other half. We are eating some already plus I canned a bunch or scraps. The front quarter I hung for a week and will probably freeze some. The cow was tender and juicy, not gamey at all. The liver was great. She had a fair amount of wild-game-aroma body and abdominal fat, which I grabbed as much as possible. We figured her for a two-year-old, probably on her first pregnancy.
The season was just like hunting used to be. The weather brought the elk down from their summer range and improved chances of finding them. If you looked in the right spot. The animals we saw, deer, elk, grouse & non-game were all in great shape. The cow had all her stomachs so full we could hardly lift them out of her body. We came back the next morning to scavenge the carcass and no sign of wolves, coyotes or ravens around the gut pile – we could probably have left the butchering for morning no problem. Except for the cold – it was zero or below at night and the meat would have been like concrete.
It’s no secret that the climate has changed, and changed really fast. Hunters, farmers, ranchers can see it plain as day. In the long run there is going to be hell to pay, but for what’s left of my hunting life I think the winter hunt might work out OK.
elk_liver_2018_a.jpg elk_liver_2018_b.jpg winter_hunt_2018 _a.jpg
That's Paul and a plate of elk liver, potatoes and onions. The windshield photo was taken a ways above where we took the elk, maybe 3500 feet. This is what hunting season USED to look like in Idaho.
More later
jn
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