Elk Hunt

Friend and colleague, Tommy Allen, accompanied his brother Austin on and Elk hunt in the state of Washington. “It is elkseason and brother Austin has a branch bull tag. I just got back from a business trip and had not had much time out there scouting and he had been out there looking the whole time and he saw one decent bull that he thought maybe was 300 class. We start off in the morning, meet up there in the dark. It’s just a foggy, rainy, nasty day, pouring rain and we were just getting soaked, didn’t have the right clothes and we almost thought about just bagging it and heading back down. The fog started to lift and as we were glassing this ridge, probably 1000 yards away or more, I told Austin that there was a bull right there. He put a spotting scope up and took a glance and saw that it was way bigger than the one he had seen before. So we knew that it was go time. We get up there and get a plan of attack as far as either how we were going to come off this knob to get in range or sneak down this draw. We start sneaking along and pretty soon we look off to the right and there is a whole herd. But this lone bull was quite a bit further away. We put a sneak on him but couldn’t get closer than 500 yards without being busted by the cows on the hillside. We put up the shooting sticks and he is pretty confident in his long range shooting, so we arranged it at 565 yards. He put his gun up and practiced squeezing on it. He pulled the trigger and all of a sudden I saw the rain coming off of the elk’s shoulder and he just crumpled. 317 2/8.