Struck out....

Well, I wasn't overly optimistic going into it, but we pretty much struck out elk hunting this year. The weather wasn't very good for hunting elk, but it turned out to be really nice for Cathy and Eli with the average daytime temperatures in the mid 70's and although we had a few cool nights (one night it got down to 27) it warmed up pretty quick once the sun came up.

We spent the first 4 days hunting outside Yellowstone Park where my friends have hunted for many years. We had a couple good opportunities, but didn't connect on them. My friends son had a decent shot at a nice bull, but missed. Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of that area from this year.

Boone Creek. I really thought this was a neat place. The picture is deceiving though, the willows in the bottom are 10 to 12 feet tall. Sunset on the mountain. We heard wolves howling this night as well. The only drawback to this was that we had to hike down a pretty steep slope in the dark.
After hunting there for 4 days and seeing more hunters than elk and not even hearing an elk the last 2 days, we decided to try a different area. Some of the hunting areas south of Jackson were opening up a couple weeks early so we went down there and scouted around on Friday to be ready for the opener on Saturday.

Here are some pictures of the area that I was scouting out. We didn't end up hunting there on Saturday but it was some pretty country. I put my 4 wheeler to the test on a few of these "roads". Pictures never do justice to how steep things are.

This is a closer picture of the ridge line down below in the first picture. Cathy had ridden with me on the 4 wheeler earlier in the day along that ridge and we thought that was high. Then I found this trail that made that ridge seem pretty low. I was over 8,500' at this spot.

I thought this was a really neat spot. The colors were just starting to turn and this little pond was really neat. Too bad the elk didn't think it was as neat as I did.

This was a spot where a game warden had told us to check out. I'm afraid the elk could see us coming from a mile away here. Pretty country in it's own way, but we didn't pick this spot to hunt on opening morning.

My friend and his son actually ran into some elk on their scouting expeditions on Friday. We decided to try one spot and if it didn't turn out to try the other later. We headed up the trail in the dark and the elk were talking at daybreak. We got into some elk and I got a shot off at a rag horn bull but it was 550 yards away and I missed. That was pretty much it for elk hunting this year.

The area we ended up deciding to hunt was really a pretty area. A little more open than the area we hunt up near the park, but still some dark timber mixed in. There was plenty of sign that elk were around, we just couldn't get back into them after that first morning. The trail started at 6,300' elevation and I took these pictures about 3 miles up the trail at a little over 8,300'. There were some prescribed burns going so toward the afternoon things got pretty hazy and several of the pictures didn't come out super clear. There were some awesome views of the Tetons, but that was where one of the fires was burning so it was really smoky on those shots.
I got plenty of exercise and saw lots of pretty country. I took some more pictures but instead of filling the blog with them I'll just post a link to my photo gallery. http://padens.com/v-web/gallery/album07?page=7

The camping went pretty uneventful which is always a good thing. Towing the travel trailer didn't seem to be too difficult and we ended up averaging a little over 10.5 mpg for the entire trip of 2,583 miles so that was actually a little better than I was expecting.

We did have a problem with a water fill hose connection but I was able to fix that in Jackson before we headed out to the boonies. Had a little issues with battery life, not sure if it wasn't charging well or if something was draining the battery, or if the heater just takes that much juice, but we had to charge the battery a couple times the last few days we were out. The only other issue was that somehow the trailer is a little out of alignment as 1 of the tires wore pretty bad on the very outside edge of the tire. You can't really change the alignment on a trailer so I guess we are just going to have to rotate the tires on it and that should help for a while. I might check into taking it to an axle shop and seeing if they think they can fix it. I don't think many people pull their trailers 2,500+ miles in just over a week so it shouldn't be an issue if we are pulling it shorter distances.

Now I'm busy catching up at work and am hoping to get down to the land to plant some wheat and oats and some food plots for the deer.

I think that's about it for now.

Nathan