2018 was a good year but a tough year in several respects and I’m actually kind of glad this one is over with. Thanks to Lira I hiked close to 2000 miles this year and we managed to get out and do quite a bit of fishing and hunting, logging 108 days total in the water, hills or fields. I also somehow managed to build a boat for the sole purpose of taking her fishing with me since she coludn’t quite work out in a float tube. Catherine and I had a lot of fun spending many days exploring the Middle Fork Valley this year and also camping and hiking on the Oregon coast.
Tag Archives: Elk
Elkless in Oregon
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.
Tips for the adult-onset hunter
I was given a shotgun the day I was born, that is how much my dad was into hunting back in 1960. I grew up having him teach me to shoot and ultimately tagged along on many a hunting trip going after squirrels, rabbits and pheasant. By the time I was 14 or 15 I was going out with friends fishing or hunting, sometimes both in a day. My parents would drop us off in the woods with loaded shotguns and come back to pick us up hours later, it is amazing no one ever got hurt. I did my last hunt as a teen home from college break, some college friends wanted to go bird hunting so I went along and bagged a pheasant which was possibly the first thing I ever shot on my own.
I stopped hunting shortly after that trip and didn’t do it for decades. I kept fishing most of my adult life but it was almost all catch and release trout fishing. I even gave up fishing for part of the time but ended up back into it since I just loved it so much. When I got sick and needed to eat meat I got back into hunting which was a bit of a challenge as an adult even having grown up doing it. Now there are aspiring adult-onset hunters or fishers out there and they face a big challenge getting into the sport. Having done it I hope I can offer a bit of advice.
2017 – A lot of firsts!
My seasons of 2017 – spring lake rainbows, spring turkey season, tenkara trout, summer fly fishing, summer steelhead fishing, pheasant hunting, elk hunting, late deer season, chukar hunting
I can hardly believe that 2017 is drawing to a close already, where did it go? As I sit back and look over the year I realize that I have had one heck of a year with a lot of firsts. For the first year in a while health was just not an issue, as you can tell from my lack of health related blog posts, so it freed me up to get back into fly fishing, to really get into hunting and to finally reach my goal of stocking my freezer by myself. On top of spending almost one-third of my days in the field I was able to get out for daily hikes (and later runs) with Lira and still find time to work all year long.
Dealing with CWD
This year I went on my first elk hunt to an area near Craig, CO known to have Chronic Wasting Disease, CWD. In fact, the units we were in had a high enough incident of CWD among the deer population that they required all bucks be tested. Elk testing was optional since the rates were only 1-5% but we chose to test mainly because I’m health paranoid after all I’ve dealt with an no sense risking a fatal disease especially when a recent study shows it can possibly transfer to humans. A few weeks after the hunt was over I got back my negative result from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and would have immediately eaten some elk had it not been for the fact I already had some other meat thawed that needed to be cooked. Before I got around the getting elk out my friend called and said his elk came back Suspect for CWD and that he had to wait another 7-10 days for more testing. On top of that he was pretty sure that we had mixed up the two heads that were dropped off for testing and that it possibly was my cow that was suspect. Another few weeks went by and we found out that the elk was indeed positive for CWD and now we weren’t 100% sure which elk was the positive one.
Processing an elk by yourself
You know the saying that you eat an elephant one bite at a time, well I found out this past week the processing an entire elk by yourself is about like eating an elephant. After our hunt it took me basically a full week to get from the time the elk hit the ground until I got everything packaged up and in the freezer not counting the 1.5 days the elk meat was in transit on the way home. The good news is that the freezer is mostly full and we should have plenty of meat to get through the year. Meat crisis averted!
First elk
Way back during tag hunting season in February my friend Tom asked me if I’d be interested in going on an elk hunting trip with he and his two teenage daughters in the fall, it was to be their first elk hunt too. After my Idaho mule deer hunting trip last year I was up for an elk. We both looked for outfitters and he finally found Hellander Outfitting in Craig, CO that had openings during the 3rd Rifle Season hunting out of Yellowjacket Ranch between Craig and Meeker. I had to quickly go through Hunter’s Ed and take the Colorado opt-out test so I could put in for tags in time for the hunt and decided that for my first elk trip I would just target a cow figuring a cow elk would be plenty to feed Catherine and I for a year since it would have as much or more meat than the quarter cow we usually buy in the fall. In July we found that we all drew tags, the girls and I for cows and Tom for a bull and it just became a matter of getting geared up fully and waiting until the end of October to roll around.