This year I didn’t really get any good draws so have decided to do a muzzleloader mule deer buck hunt in late September and to try for a cow elk in the early season in Oregon to see if I could fill the freezer in August and take the pressure off of getting a buck. With that in mind I headed down to John Day in smoke filled skies with temps in the mid-90s on the last day of July to go elk hunting on the opener with Broken Horn Outfitters. After a six hour drive I arrived in John Day, got unpacked at the hotel and talked to the guides to set up a meeting time for early the next morning. I roamed around town a bit and saw a bunch of quail and a few deer, my hopes were up.
Glassing lots of country
The alarm waking me up at 3:15 am was a bit much but I crawled out of bed, ate some breakfast and headed into Mt. Vernon for our 4 am meetup time, almost hitting two deer on the drive. There I met Freddie and Franco, our guides along with Bill, Savannah and Curt the other hunters for the next few days. After transferring gear we were off with Bill and I going with Freddie. We drove up onto the ranch and followed a dirt road a while and then got out and started walking in the dark. We arrived at a great glassing spot just as it was getting daylight and spent a good hour there looking for elk, all I found was a few moo cows. We walked the trail around the butte we were on for quite a while and the country kept looking more and more hopeful, we found actual green areas by some seeps and even elk tracks that were not too old but no elk. We hiked a 7 mile loop total, stopping to glass at quite a few spots and all we saw was one more actual cow cow, two grouse and a small mule deer spike shed.
Great looking evening pond setup
That evening we regrouped and went up into a different part of the ranch to some ponds where we hoped the critters would be coming out for a drink. After some initial glassing we just set up at the pond and started waiting. This country looked good and in no time a coyote came trotting down to the pond to give us something to look at. That coyote was the only animal we saw all night long. Before hiking out at dark we checked the trail cam at the lake and nothing had been there at all. The other crew had no luck either though did see one cow elk that evening, it was just way out of range and on another property though they did see some elk in the alfalfa fields down by the road after dark.
What to do? No elk to be found.
The next morning we decided to get above the alfalfa fields in hopes that the elk would head back up in the hills to bed down. We all headed to the same basic area but we went to the far end of the road then hiked up to the ridge. We found elk almost immediately but they were about 800 yards away and across a fence and didn’t seem to want to move out of the draw they were in and up onto the land we could hunt. Cows were calling, a spike bull was bugling and they were roaming around but just wouldn’t come up the next hill. We waited a while on the ridge but the elk started bedding down shortly after sunup so we headed out, wandering the ridge until we hit the other group of hunters mid-way then hiked back to the truck.
We then went and checked several creek bottoms and the trail cams on them and found nothing except one dead mule deer fawn that had been taken by a predator and that fawn was the only thing on the cams. Things were not looking great for evening so I opted to just bail and head home as did Bill who had to leave. The other group sat on top of the alfalfa field and found nothing that evening so it wasn’t a mistake to come home early.
The good news is that they invited me back in December to try again since we never even had an opportunity to take a shot. So, I’ll be back on December 4th and hopefully the elk will be moving around more on the property than they were in this heat.