exbiologist
Member
So, we’ve been planning this hunt for nearly a year… We had been keeping an eye on the exploding elk population, yet extremely low bull harvests. But in order to hunt it properly, we knew it couldn’t be a mere truck hunt and would require a full on backcountry pack trip. Ryan had us talked into going in for a muzzleloader hunt in that unit to really get into the big dark timber bulls. Being primarily rifle hunters, the thought of getting into rutting bulls was pretty appealing, and a little out of our routine.
5 of us drew muzzleloader tags, two bull tags and three cow tags. Myself and Adam had the bull tags, and Adam was just coming off of a week of mountain goat hunting. I had tried to help him get his goat by opening morning so his mountain goat hunt wouldn’t cut too much into our elk hunt, but it ended up taking a lot longer to connect. We needed his horses, we needed to be fresh for this hunt, and he needed to be able to spend some time at home before taking off again for another big hunt.
In June we did a scouting trip on horseback. Probably saw over 75 elk up in the bowl that morning. Nearly every meadow we came across seemed to have elk in it. And the additional sign was incredible. The trail looked like an elk highway and the willows were browsed down to practically nothing. We came away very excited about our prospects.
Our plan for the main hunt was to meet at the trail head, late Tuesday night, pack up and hike in with the horses carrying our gear Wednesday, and Wednesday afternoon to Sunday morning, hopefully catching the best rutting activity at the tail end of the muzzleloader season. Because muzzleloader season is 9 days, encompassing two weekends, we also decided to investigate some easier to get to areas for an opening weekend hunt. Some of that country will be shown in the scouting video we are working on, but we got into elk off the easier roads too.
Because our scouting trip up to the bowl was on horseback, we didn’t have a good feel for how long it would take on foot. We knew it was all uphill (about 3,000 feet), took four hours on horseback and was going to be at least 7 miles, maybe more. We also knew that we’d be wiped out if we did do it on foot, and decided to try to rent a horse with a guide for the ride up to the bowl, then hiking the remainder in to camp while the guide took the horses back.
The scouting and legwork for the unit was the easy part for us, but getting everyone’s act together for the rest of the prep was much more difficult. Ryan was the only one in the group who owned a muzzleloader by the time we drew our tags, so the rest of us needed to buy or borrow. I had previously owned one, and had several fiascos deer hunting with it before selling it. I waited until early August to finally replace it with a .54 cal Lyman Deerstalker and a 57SML peep sight. Two of the guys borrowed guns from other friends and didn’t shoot them until about two weeks before leaving. Another bought his gun in late July, and spent several hours getting accustomed to it/fiddling with the sights in frustration. The point is, none of us felt super confident with our new toys.
By late August, we finally decided to contact an outfitter about setting us up for the ride up to the bowl, but at that point they were completely out of horses. And since they were the only outfitter working this portion of the wilderness, we were back to square one. We had to walk it. Oh well. However, one of our hunters also backed out, when he learned there would be no easy ride in, deciding to just hunt the opening weekend. It turned out to be a good thing, leaving more space on each horse for the rest of our gear and allowing us to go up with just one tent for four guys instead of two tents for 5 guys.
Summer flew by, and Friday, September 10th was here, quicker than we were really ready for. I backed out of the weekend hunt at the last minute, instead focusing on just the pack trip. Mike and Ryan saw elk on that quick hunt, but couldn’t make anything happen.
Despite logically knowing the hunt was coming up, I still didn’t feel prepared. We had been planning our whole year around the big pack trip hunt, and it was time to put our plans to the test. On Monday, the 13th, Adam had a minor emergency with a boarder’s horse at his place, but he basically lost the whole afternoon and evening for packing and gear prep. So, he and Jason, who were supposed to leave by about noon on the 14th so they could get to the trailhead with daylight to spare, only left an hour before myself and Ryan left after working all day. Those two had never been to that trailhead, and were going in in the dark with a horse trailer. Thankfully we found them by 11pm on Tuesday night without any real incidents.
We got up at 5am Wednesday morning, hoping to hit the trail sometime just after dawn. But breakfast, packing and repacking gear in the panniers and saddlebags took a lot longer than anticipated. It was 9:30 before we hit the trail and was already starting to get hot. We balanced our loads pretty well on the horses, and they didn’t require much additional work. However, this is when things started to unravel for us…
First stop, we hit a creek about a mile and a half past our trailhead, just inside the wilderness boundary. While letting the horses get a drink, Adam set his shooting sticks down. By the time, he remembered, we were 3 miles up the trail. Not a big deal, but just a sign of the many things to come.
Next up was my turn. On my brand new gun, the ramrod guide tubes popped loose under the strain of being integrated into the sling swivels. I tied Sonny up to a very large dead Aspen, mostly because it was handy while I saw about dealing with my gun. Sonny, an otherwise great horse, has the bad habit of pulling when tied up. I forgot about this until he tore down the 40 foot aspen he was hitched to and freaked out, bouncing around with a 3 foot wide log attached to himself, laying waste to all the vegetation around him. Thankfully, I got him untied before he did any real damage to himself or the rest of us. We weren’t prepared to repair the gun at that moment, as my Leatherman tool was stowed in a fairly inaccessible part of the panniers. Barely two miles into our hike, I was now forced to put my gun into a scabbard and carry Jason’s gun, whose sling swivels thankfully did not come undone.
A mile after that, Ryan, who was carrying a six foot galvanized pipe that we were going to insert into the spring we were planning on camping at in order to better facilitate filling water bottle and buckets realized he set the pipe down sometime after my stop to deal with Sonny and the faulty sling swivels/guide tubes. He insisted we continue on without him and would meet us at a campsite that he and I knew of. At that point we were going to eat lunch, load our guns and fire fouling shots for those who hadn’t before leaving. That camp was about a mile from the border of our unit and still a long way from where we planned on camping and hunting.
At Lunch Camp, Adam couldn’t get his gun to fire on the first shot, it seemed his percussion caps were too small for the nipple. Turns out the friend he borrowed that gun from gave him #10 caps for a #11 nipple. Once again, not an insurmountable problem, but the last thing you’d want is to have to you gun go “CLICK!” instead of “BOOM!” with a bugling elk at bayonet distance. I had plenty of #11s, so that was no problem. Not long after we got Adam’s gun up and running, Ryan showed up, about 30 minutes behind our arrival.
I popped a few caps to clear out any cleaning residues in my nipple, then loaded a partial charge below a patched round ball to fire a fouling shot. However, I was out of caps and walked back to my pack to get another, hoping it would light the charge on the first cap in a still slightly oily barrel. Of course, it went “POP!”, instead of “BOOM!”, so back to my pack I walked (we were shooting at a bare hill about 75 yards from where the main camp was and where the horses were tied up). Next cap “POP!”, and the next, and the next one and the next one went “POP!”. ***?! I never marked my ramrod for a full charge, so I couldn’t tell whether or not the charge was still in there. I was scared to death of double charging the gun, so my next idea was to put a little bit of Adam’s FFg blackpowder into my nipple to hopefully light my Pyrodex charge.
Holding the gun well away from my face, with Jason threatening to put the video of this whole incident on YouTube (I’m sure it was funny to him!), I took a deep breath and pulled the trigger, “POP!”. But this time, the lubed patch from my round ball came flying out! Once again, ***!?, over? My guess is that while walking back and forth to my pack for caps, the ball and main powder charge fell out. I know the patches and ball were always kind of a loose fit in my bore, which explains the poor accuracy I had with anything but Powerbelts, but still, the ball fell out? Never heard of that. But, next charge and patch ball lit off without a hitch, leaving me feeling and looking pretty stupid, screwing around for nearly 45 minutes when we could have been hiking to camp.
Oh well, bellies full, egos shattered, guns loaded and we were back on the trail by 3:00 pm. While messing with the guns, we did see two pack trains. One heading up and the other heading down. The wife of the outfitter had told us that the bowl we were headed to would be full of people during muzzleloader season. That seemed tough to believe, given that there was no more statewide muzzleloading tag. When we got up to the bowl(kind of a basin several miles wide, with strips of timber separating large meadows, bounded by heavy timber below solid rocky peaks), which is where the unit boundary started. About 1 mile in, we found a camp with several guys with rented horses from Pennsylvania. Thankfully, that was the last occupied camp we saw all week. Ol Linda was full of crap. In fact, the large outfitter camp wasn’t even occupied. It was getting late and we were exhausted, pushing on towards the camp we had intended to use. However, on the way there, we spied an even better spot, with better grazing for the horses. It was late, and no one was going to argue. At 6:30, we could finally stop hiking and start unloading horses.
What was a four hour horse ride back in June, took 9 hours this September! 6 of those hours through a unit we couldn’t hunt.
It didn’t take long to get camp set up, the horse corral built (electric fence), water bottles filled from the creek (no monkeying with the pipe was going to be necessary, but yes, we still filtered the water). By about 7:15 camp was made, and were feeling a little better. So 3 of us spread out to hunt the last remaining minutes of dusk. I head up towards where we intended camp to be, seeing a buck muley at our spring, Adam saw several does in the meadow below camp, and Ryan, who had a cow tag, put a stalk on a lone elk that night back towards the trail we came in on. In the falling light, he couldn’t make out whether or not it was a spike or a cow at 140 yards, so he let it walk. Jason stayed in camp, heating up some elk chili his wife made earlier in the week. After a long day and some good hot food, there wasn’t much lingering by the campfire. We hit the sack before 9.
Thursday morning we were up by 5, watered the horses, moved the 400 square foot pasture (3 horses can wipe out a 20x20 foot piece of meadow pretty quickly), grabbed our gear and headed out. Jason and I hunted together and Ryan and Adam hunted together so that we’d each have someone on had with either a cow or bull tag.
We started the morning sitting a meadow near a small saddle in the bowl, hoping to catch elk headed towards bed. No luck, so by 8 am we were stalking the timber and headed to a large opening at the back of the basin, up against the cliffs which would still be shaded. We took a little longer than anticipated going through the timber, but the large, wide trails just begged to be sat in hopes of ambushing elk headed to bed. We sat the meadow below the cliffs, glassing some bighorns above us until almost noon.
After that is was time to still hunt the timber. Within 30 minutes we were busted by two cows that we had no shot on. Oh well, that means slow down, but at least we were into elk. We spent the rest of the day investigating feature in the timber we had seen on the aerial photos. We found a small lake below a slide, several wallows, and some hidden meadows. The north facing timber that we cruised was absolutely littered with trails, sign and the familiar barnyard smells of a good elk hunting area.
At 4:00 pm we heard our first bugle of the trip, and it was within a half mile of the wallow we were presently investigating. The only call I carried was a cow call, as I’m not a super confident elk caller, and had always been of the belief that less is more with elk calling. Having called the biggest public land bull I’ve ever seen my just using my mouth several years prior to this, I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. Our first move was to cut a quarter mile of the distance between us and the bull before he bugled again. On his second bugle in the thick blowdowns, we felt we were close enough to start calling to him. My first mews had him immediately bugling in response, so we set up, with guns trained in his direction. What felt like eternity was probably barely 3 minutes, before I couldn’t resist calling again. Another bugle, and it sounded closer. So we sat still, hoping any minute he’d come up out of the small drainage in front of us and collide with a .54 caliber slug. A few minutes later, still nothing. So we call again, trying to sound like a desperate cow. He bugles in response, but was he further away now? We move forward, creeping towards the ridge above the small creek in front of us. Nothing. We call some more, nothing. We creep forward…. “CRASH! SNAP! THUD! CRASH!” Sonofa! I catch a black blur off to my left as our bull is headed out of Dodge in a hurry. He must have been wallowing in the black mud alongside the creek below us on that last bugle, making himself sound further away than he really was with a hill directly between us.
Dejected, we decide to head back towards the meadows as evening was coming on. We sat the edge of a meadow, just above the large creek that lead towards camp, watching deer browse along the edge and a couple of grouse putter around, doing whatever it is they do when they aren’t busy scaring hunters. With 15 minutes of shooting light left, we hear another bugle, this one within a quarter of a mile, but just inside the tree line along the creek. We scoot around the edge of a spruce and give off a few cow calls, making us seem really desperate to the bull. Another bugle! Maybe 100 yards away, still inside the timber, but much closer now. Our guns our up and we wait. Nothing. Tick, tick, tick, tick, we are running out of daylight, so I call again. The bugle is further away now, down the creek towards camp. So we scoop up our packs, run to the trail, then jog/walk at a brisk pace until we hear him again. Our camp is now within sight, and just I’m about to call, I say to Jason, “where are the horses?” I could see the white electric fence in the falling light, but no horses. He picks up his binoculars and says, “they’re gone!”.
Oh crap. This bugling bull is now the last thing on our minds as we race down there to look at the fence. The stakes are strewn about, the fencing is stretched across the meadow and there are no horses to be seen. Softly, I call for Tango and Honey and Sunny. I knew it was a futile effort, but it was all I could think of.
10 minutes later, I get Ryan on the radio, who informs Adam of situation. I’m glad I wasn’t there when he heard the news, it could not have been good. He was surprisingly calm about it when he got to camp, saying there’s nothing we could do about it now, and that tomorrow we would have to go look for them.
We were all hoping that the horses would just show back up in the middle of the night, but at dawn on Friday we were not so lucky. We hiked the 2.5 miles down past the outfitter camp and to the Pennsylvanian’s camp. They had seen the horses run right by their camp the night before, but could do nothing to stop them. Unfortunately this now meant the horses had to be all the way down at the trailer, as there was no other place they were likely to stop at, except maybe the outfitter’s small ranch where he kept his horses.
Adam didn’t want us to ruin our hunts by going all the way down with him, but Ryan graciously insisted on going with him. He had two bridles with him, but the saddles were in camp, so whoever went down was going to have to ride the horses bareback all the way back up the mountain. In the end, Ryan and Adam both hiked all the way down to find the horses while Jason and went back to hunting.
5 of us drew muzzleloader tags, two bull tags and three cow tags. Myself and Adam had the bull tags, and Adam was just coming off of a week of mountain goat hunting. I had tried to help him get his goat by opening morning so his mountain goat hunt wouldn’t cut too much into our elk hunt, but it ended up taking a lot longer to connect. We needed his horses, we needed to be fresh for this hunt, and he needed to be able to spend some time at home before taking off again for another big hunt.
In June we did a scouting trip on horseback. Probably saw over 75 elk up in the bowl that morning. Nearly every meadow we came across seemed to have elk in it. And the additional sign was incredible. The trail looked like an elk highway and the willows were browsed down to practically nothing. We came away very excited about our prospects.
Our plan for the main hunt was to meet at the trail head, late Tuesday night, pack up and hike in with the horses carrying our gear Wednesday, and Wednesday afternoon to Sunday morning, hopefully catching the best rutting activity at the tail end of the muzzleloader season. Because muzzleloader season is 9 days, encompassing two weekends, we also decided to investigate some easier to get to areas for an opening weekend hunt. Some of that country will be shown in the scouting video we are working on, but we got into elk off the easier roads too.
Because our scouting trip up to the bowl was on horseback, we didn’t have a good feel for how long it would take on foot. We knew it was all uphill (about 3,000 feet), took four hours on horseback and was going to be at least 7 miles, maybe more. We also knew that we’d be wiped out if we did do it on foot, and decided to try to rent a horse with a guide for the ride up to the bowl, then hiking the remainder in to camp while the guide took the horses back.
The scouting and legwork for the unit was the easy part for us, but getting everyone’s act together for the rest of the prep was much more difficult. Ryan was the only one in the group who owned a muzzleloader by the time we drew our tags, so the rest of us needed to buy or borrow. I had previously owned one, and had several fiascos deer hunting with it before selling it. I waited until early August to finally replace it with a .54 cal Lyman Deerstalker and a 57SML peep sight. Two of the guys borrowed guns from other friends and didn’t shoot them until about two weeks before leaving. Another bought his gun in late July, and spent several hours getting accustomed to it/fiddling with the sights in frustration. The point is, none of us felt super confident with our new toys.
By late August, we finally decided to contact an outfitter about setting us up for the ride up to the bowl, but at that point they were completely out of horses. And since they were the only outfitter working this portion of the wilderness, we were back to square one. We had to walk it. Oh well. However, one of our hunters also backed out, when he learned there would be no easy ride in, deciding to just hunt the opening weekend. It turned out to be a good thing, leaving more space on each horse for the rest of our gear and allowing us to go up with just one tent for four guys instead of two tents for 5 guys.
Summer flew by, and Friday, September 10th was here, quicker than we were really ready for. I backed out of the weekend hunt at the last minute, instead focusing on just the pack trip. Mike and Ryan saw elk on that quick hunt, but couldn’t make anything happen.
Despite logically knowing the hunt was coming up, I still didn’t feel prepared. We had been planning our whole year around the big pack trip hunt, and it was time to put our plans to the test. On Monday, the 13th, Adam had a minor emergency with a boarder’s horse at his place, but he basically lost the whole afternoon and evening for packing and gear prep. So, he and Jason, who were supposed to leave by about noon on the 14th so they could get to the trailhead with daylight to spare, only left an hour before myself and Ryan left after working all day. Those two had never been to that trailhead, and were going in in the dark with a horse trailer. Thankfully we found them by 11pm on Tuesday night without any real incidents.
We got up at 5am Wednesday morning, hoping to hit the trail sometime just after dawn. But breakfast, packing and repacking gear in the panniers and saddlebags took a lot longer than anticipated. It was 9:30 before we hit the trail and was already starting to get hot. We balanced our loads pretty well on the horses, and they didn’t require much additional work. However, this is when things started to unravel for us…
First stop, we hit a creek about a mile and a half past our trailhead, just inside the wilderness boundary. While letting the horses get a drink, Adam set his shooting sticks down. By the time, he remembered, we were 3 miles up the trail. Not a big deal, but just a sign of the many things to come.
Next up was my turn. On my brand new gun, the ramrod guide tubes popped loose under the strain of being integrated into the sling swivels. I tied Sonny up to a very large dead Aspen, mostly because it was handy while I saw about dealing with my gun. Sonny, an otherwise great horse, has the bad habit of pulling when tied up. I forgot about this until he tore down the 40 foot aspen he was hitched to and freaked out, bouncing around with a 3 foot wide log attached to himself, laying waste to all the vegetation around him. Thankfully, I got him untied before he did any real damage to himself or the rest of us. We weren’t prepared to repair the gun at that moment, as my Leatherman tool was stowed in a fairly inaccessible part of the panniers. Barely two miles into our hike, I was now forced to put my gun into a scabbard and carry Jason’s gun, whose sling swivels thankfully did not come undone.
A mile after that, Ryan, who was carrying a six foot galvanized pipe that we were going to insert into the spring we were planning on camping at in order to better facilitate filling water bottle and buckets realized he set the pipe down sometime after my stop to deal with Sonny and the faulty sling swivels/guide tubes. He insisted we continue on without him and would meet us at a campsite that he and I knew of. At that point we were going to eat lunch, load our guns and fire fouling shots for those who hadn’t before leaving. That camp was about a mile from the border of our unit and still a long way from where we planned on camping and hunting.
At Lunch Camp, Adam couldn’t get his gun to fire on the first shot, it seemed his percussion caps were too small for the nipple. Turns out the friend he borrowed that gun from gave him #10 caps for a #11 nipple. Once again, not an insurmountable problem, but the last thing you’d want is to have to you gun go “CLICK!” instead of “BOOM!” with a bugling elk at bayonet distance. I had plenty of #11s, so that was no problem. Not long after we got Adam’s gun up and running, Ryan showed up, about 30 minutes behind our arrival.
I popped a few caps to clear out any cleaning residues in my nipple, then loaded a partial charge below a patched round ball to fire a fouling shot. However, I was out of caps and walked back to my pack to get another, hoping it would light the charge on the first cap in a still slightly oily barrel. Of course, it went “POP!”, instead of “BOOM!”, so back to my pack I walked (we were shooting at a bare hill about 75 yards from where the main camp was and where the horses were tied up). Next cap “POP!”, and the next, and the next one and the next one went “POP!”. ***?! I never marked my ramrod for a full charge, so I couldn’t tell whether or not the charge was still in there. I was scared to death of double charging the gun, so my next idea was to put a little bit of Adam’s FFg blackpowder into my nipple to hopefully light my Pyrodex charge.
Holding the gun well away from my face, with Jason threatening to put the video of this whole incident on YouTube (I’m sure it was funny to him!), I took a deep breath and pulled the trigger, “POP!”. But this time, the lubed patch from my round ball came flying out! Once again, ***!?, over? My guess is that while walking back and forth to my pack for caps, the ball and main powder charge fell out. I know the patches and ball were always kind of a loose fit in my bore, which explains the poor accuracy I had with anything but Powerbelts, but still, the ball fell out? Never heard of that. But, next charge and patch ball lit off without a hitch, leaving me feeling and looking pretty stupid, screwing around for nearly 45 minutes when we could have been hiking to camp.
Oh well, bellies full, egos shattered, guns loaded and we were back on the trail by 3:00 pm. While messing with the guns, we did see two pack trains. One heading up and the other heading down. The wife of the outfitter had told us that the bowl we were headed to would be full of people during muzzleloader season. That seemed tough to believe, given that there was no more statewide muzzleloading tag. When we got up to the bowl(kind of a basin several miles wide, with strips of timber separating large meadows, bounded by heavy timber below solid rocky peaks), which is where the unit boundary started. About 1 mile in, we found a camp with several guys with rented horses from Pennsylvania. Thankfully, that was the last occupied camp we saw all week. Ol Linda was full of crap. In fact, the large outfitter camp wasn’t even occupied. It was getting late and we were exhausted, pushing on towards the camp we had intended to use. However, on the way there, we spied an even better spot, with better grazing for the horses. It was late, and no one was going to argue. At 6:30, we could finally stop hiking and start unloading horses.
What was a four hour horse ride back in June, took 9 hours this September! 6 of those hours through a unit we couldn’t hunt.
It didn’t take long to get camp set up, the horse corral built (electric fence), water bottles filled from the creek (no monkeying with the pipe was going to be necessary, but yes, we still filtered the water). By about 7:15 camp was made, and were feeling a little better. So 3 of us spread out to hunt the last remaining minutes of dusk. I head up towards where we intended camp to be, seeing a buck muley at our spring, Adam saw several does in the meadow below camp, and Ryan, who had a cow tag, put a stalk on a lone elk that night back towards the trail we came in on. In the falling light, he couldn’t make out whether or not it was a spike or a cow at 140 yards, so he let it walk. Jason stayed in camp, heating up some elk chili his wife made earlier in the week. After a long day and some good hot food, there wasn’t much lingering by the campfire. We hit the sack before 9.
Thursday morning we were up by 5, watered the horses, moved the 400 square foot pasture (3 horses can wipe out a 20x20 foot piece of meadow pretty quickly), grabbed our gear and headed out. Jason and I hunted together and Ryan and Adam hunted together so that we’d each have someone on had with either a cow or bull tag.
We started the morning sitting a meadow near a small saddle in the bowl, hoping to catch elk headed towards bed. No luck, so by 8 am we were stalking the timber and headed to a large opening at the back of the basin, up against the cliffs which would still be shaded. We took a little longer than anticipated going through the timber, but the large, wide trails just begged to be sat in hopes of ambushing elk headed to bed. We sat the meadow below the cliffs, glassing some bighorns above us until almost noon.
After that is was time to still hunt the timber. Within 30 minutes we were busted by two cows that we had no shot on. Oh well, that means slow down, but at least we were into elk. We spent the rest of the day investigating feature in the timber we had seen on the aerial photos. We found a small lake below a slide, several wallows, and some hidden meadows. The north facing timber that we cruised was absolutely littered with trails, sign and the familiar barnyard smells of a good elk hunting area.
At 4:00 pm we heard our first bugle of the trip, and it was within a half mile of the wallow we were presently investigating. The only call I carried was a cow call, as I’m not a super confident elk caller, and had always been of the belief that less is more with elk calling. Having called the biggest public land bull I’ve ever seen my just using my mouth several years prior to this, I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn’t. Our first move was to cut a quarter mile of the distance between us and the bull before he bugled again. On his second bugle in the thick blowdowns, we felt we were close enough to start calling to him. My first mews had him immediately bugling in response, so we set up, with guns trained in his direction. What felt like eternity was probably barely 3 minutes, before I couldn’t resist calling again. Another bugle, and it sounded closer. So we sat still, hoping any minute he’d come up out of the small drainage in front of us and collide with a .54 caliber slug. A few minutes later, still nothing. So we call again, trying to sound like a desperate cow. He bugles in response, but was he further away now? We move forward, creeping towards the ridge above the small creek in front of us. Nothing. We call some more, nothing. We creep forward…. “CRASH! SNAP! THUD! CRASH!” Sonofa! I catch a black blur off to my left as our bull is headed out of Dodge in a hurry. He must have been wallowing in the black mud alongside the creek below us on that last bugle, making himself sound further away than he really was with a hill directly between us.
Dejected, we decide to head back towards the meadows as evening was coming on. We sat the edge of a meadow, just above the large creek that lead towards camp, watching deer browse along the edge and a couple of grouse putter around, doing whatever it is they do when they aren’t busy scaring hunters. With 15 minutes of shooting light left, we hear another bugle, this one within a quarter of a mile, but just inside the tree line along the creek. We scoot around the edge of a spruce and give off a few cow calls, making us seem really desperate to the bull. Another bugle! Maybe 100 yards away, still inside the timber, but much closer now. Our guns our up and we wait. Nothing. Tick, tick, tick, tick, we are running out of daylight, so I call again. The bugle is further away now, down the creek towards camp. So we scoop up our packs, run to the trail, then jog/walk at a brisk pace until we hear him again. Our camp is now within sight, and just I’m about to call, I say to Jason, “where are the horses?” I could see the white electric fence in the falling light, but no horses. He picks up his binoculars and says, “they’re gone!”.
Oh crap. This bugling bull is now the last thing on our minds as we race down there to look at the fence. The stakes are strewn about, the fencing is stretched across the meadow and there are no horses to be seen. Softly, I call for Tango and Honey and Sunny. I knew it was a futile effort, but it was all I could think of.
10 minutes later, I get Ryan on the radio, who informs Adam of situation. I’m glad I wasn’t there when he heard the news, it could not have been good. He was surprisingly calm about it when he got to camp, saying there’s nothing we could do about it now, and that tomorrow we would have to go look for them.
We were all hoping that the horses would just show back up in the middle of the night, but at dawn on Friday we were not so lucky. We hiked the 2.5 miles down past the outfitter camp and to the Pennsylvanian’s camp. They had seen the horses run right by their camp the night before, but could do nothing to stop them. Unfortunately this now meant the horses had to be all the way down at the trailer, as there was no other place they were likely to stop at, except maybe the outfitter’s small ranch where he kept his horses.
Adam didn’t want us to ruin our hunts by going all the way down with him, but Ryan graciously insisted on going with him. He had two bridles with him, but the saddles were in camp, so whoever went down was going to have to ride the horses bareback all the way back up the mountain. In the end, Ryan and Adam both hiked all the way down to find the horses while Jason and went back to hunting.
I'm sorely tempted to ask you for the gmu you hunted, but I'll let it be. 
