Ted's Elk

Good friend, retired Fish and Wildlife endangered species biologist,Ted Kuch is also an avid elk hunter and he shared a story with me about just one of his many adventures. “I'll tell you about the biggest elk I ever killed. This one actually had measured by the Pope and Young Club and it was like 305 points. Yep. Or inches or whatever it is. I already killed one or two elk by this point. And it was later in the season. I hadn't killed one this year yet, obviously. And so I left town at 5 o'clock on a Friday and drove up to the mountains. I got there at eleven o'clock at night and just wiped out. Crash at the trailhead. I wake the next morning. There's a fresh skiff of snow on the ground an inch of snow. And so I climb a mile up this mountain and there's this big hole in the backside where nobody goes because it's a big hole and there's no roads. And I had scouted that in July and I saw about 100 elk all over this mountain top around this bowl. You know, it's like September 25th or something. You know, toward the end of the season, I thought, this is it, this is my chance. So I get up there. The sun comes up. The wind is blowing. It's about 12 degrees in September. You know, on this mountainside and I am bundled up and I am glassing. And not only do I not see a single elk, I cannot see a single elk track in any of the fresh snow all around this mountain top. I'm thinking what could have happened? This is the most remote place I know in this unit. And there were tons of elk earlier.

How could there not be a single elk at sunrise when it's Saturday morning and no one else had been out there? That I could tell. I started to get frustrated and I saw a coyote and I thought, well, I'm going to try to get close to this coyote and call it in.

The story continues tomorrow.