Went out for the first weekend of my cow elk hunt, did not have any success. Along the way to Steamboat I stopped to do some fishing around Walden on Thursday night and Friday morning. I only caught one small fish around midnight on North Delaney, and it was probably the smallest rainbow I have ever caught there. I did find some Browns spawning in a mud line on the north end of the lake, but they seemed very disinterested in the large crayfish pattern I was using, so I decided to let them do their thing. The next morning I fished the Michigan river to no avail, but did spot a couple of nice fish as well as had some chases on a sex dungeon from some smaller trout. The Michigan is a very slow, slough-like creek with heavy irrigation and grazing damage, but I have seen pictures of large browns taken from the deep undercut banks.
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| Looking at some lenticulars over the Cameron pass region. |
I arrived at the Hinman Campground on Friday afternoon and was a little disappointed to see all of the hunting traffic in the unit for which I had drawn a cow tag, but I guess I forgot that there was an OTC hunt for bulls going on at the same time. It was cool to see some of the hunting compounds that people had set up for the coming week and I couldn't help but think that these camps would more than qualify for homes in many parts of the world.
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| The makings of a great dinner |
The first day I decided to hike about 4 miles into 3 island lake where I assumed there would be little pressure. There was about 6 inches of snow on the ground back by the lakes and I followed a set of elk tracks for about a half a mile, but never caught up to the animals. The tracks were maybe 8-12 hrs old and appeared to be a cow and a calf, but I also found some human tracks to the east of lake (and I have no idea how they got there since they didn't take the same trail as me).
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| A partially frozen 3 island lake at sunrise |
After about 2-3 hours of working around the area I decided to head back to camp and hunt a little closer to the trail head since I didn't want to pack something out that far later in the day. After some glassing and still hunting back towards the trail head I decided to call it a day and head back for dinner, undecided as to what to do next.
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Hybrid tepee-cabin. This thing lit up like a fucking champ. Re-inventing the game out here.
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That evening I saw some cool clouds and decided to drive to an area to the north of where I was and check out the hunting opportunities in a more heavily roaded section of the unit. All I found were more hunters and no sign of elk, but it was nice country to do a lot of glassing.
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| Too many to count doesn't seem like a valid excuse |
Next weekend I will be joined by my father and hopefully we can make some magic happen, but as of yet I have yet to actually see an elk in my combined 6 days of hunting/scouting the area. I might need to get farther off the beaten path, but with temperatures in the 60's I'm not sure I can reasonably expect to pack out an elk by myself that is over 4 miles from a trail head. Maybe I'm making excuses. Hopefully there is still some snow on the ground in a week!
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| Categorize this cloud |
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