New 2008 Spring & Fall Bear and Blacktail

We just had one spring bear hunter, as it turned out it was probably a good thing. We had just gone through one of the worst winters in years, huge snow pack and hard wind storms. Which made for a lack of access and alot of road clearing. We had sold our Argo and went with a Ranger with a track kit and found it actually handled better in the snow. Two weeks before the hunter came in we weren't sure we could even get to our best spots. We took a scouting run and found ourselves fighting ten foot snow drifts. The meadows and clearcuts were still covered with snow, the next week we got hot weather 90-100 degrees, the snow came off and the spring grasses came up. We were scheduled to hunt the last week of May which is our last week of season, and as luck would have it the weather changed again. It started raining and snowing with lots of fog. The high country was totally socked in, we couldn't see across the canyon for three days. The first day the weather cleared we saw five bear, the next day our hunter killed a jet black boar with almost a 20" skull. Fall bear opens the first of August and we had a few days to hunt for ourselves so we took our travel trailer and the Ranger and set up camp in the high country. We hopped in the Ranger and started scouting for sign, the most sign we saw was in the same general area that Abe had killed his spring bear. So the next morning we loaded up the electronic caller and headed back to that area. We walked down a short skid trail, set the call up in a partial cut draw looking up hill. Cranked the call up and after about 10 minutes we could hear a bear coming hard at about 200 yards uphill. Janet was set up in the bottom of the draw with a rest on a blowdown, I was 50 yards up the skid trail running the call. She shot the bear, it ran about 50 yards sidehill and then started rolling over and over, I guess about 30 mph straight down to where Janet was standing. You wouldn't think a 52 year old woman could run up a skid trail that fast. She got to me just about the same time the bear hit the deadfall she was resting on. The bear was dead and it was going to be a very hot day. It took us about 1/2 a day to get the bear out and load up the trailer and head home. So our fall bear hunt lasted a day and a half, we had other things we needed to do, guides don't get to hunt as much as people think.

Our preseason scouting for blacktail deer is indicating a very good upcoming season. We just got updated information from Don Huffman and the big blacktail he took last year officially scored 160 7/8 non-typical which he informed us makes it number 1 in SCI non-typical. Don took this buck on a relatively new piece of property, last year we picked up four more new pieces of property. Three of which are in the November rut archery hunt area. My guides along with our landowners saw great bucks on each piece, two of the properties had non-typicals, needless to say we were excited about the 2008 blacktail season. But as luck would have it high pressure moved in and the blacktail went back to their nocturnal patterns. It was only the third time in 19 seasons we were not 100% on the muzzleloader rut hunt. No doubt due to the economy we had one late season archery hunter and four cancelations. As often happens in archery hunting, Murpheys law took over and because of a bow malfunction our archery hunter missed a very nice 3x4 at 20 yards, his one opportunity. We had a muzzleloader hunter in what we call the meadow stand for two days and decided to move him the next day to the upper stand where Don killed the 160 buck the year before. You have probably already guessed, the trail cam got a picture of a very nice 3x3 at 7:30 at the meadow stand. Bob our muzzleloader hunter from Wyoming, who loved the stand we put him in the first day and would stay there from daylight to dark was seeing 10 - 20 deer a day. The bucks always showed up on the trail cam 1/2 hour to an hour after dark, so to give him a break I took him up on top in the Ranger and we hunted a different area. On the way back we had to pass right by his stand, it was just late enough that it was just past legal shooting hours and there was a 4x4 at the stand. The trail camera showed it was there before dark, I guess we needed a better guide or at least better luck. The pictures below will start with Don's buck from the year before taken on one of the newer properties, the bucks we did take last year and some trail cam pictures.

Check out our 2008 Spring Bear hunt photos below. Click on picture for more details