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- May 3, 2001
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I took a few days off to "rest up" for the seasonal rush that is already beginning. I took my wife Resa out duck hunting Saturday morning then came home and packed for elk camp with some of my Basque friends in the mountains just a little up river from where I spend so much of my time kayaking in the summer.
I say Elk 1, Wink 2 because I never so much as saw an elk, although I did pass up a 400 yard shot on a nice forked horn deer. Although once a Marine Sharp Shooter, I consider a 400 yard shot to be unsporting with too much chance of wounding the animal that I respect so much, so it was an easy pass for me. Especially with a 30-06 which I consider a great short range gun, say 50-200 yards, but the bullet drop is just too much at over 250 yards.
However, I definitely made some points. I am the camp cook, and the duck I prepared Saturday evening was raved about all weekend to the point they were making jokes of sending me back for more duck, and they would take care of getting me some elk. Joseba stated that Enrique had been bragging about my duck for years, but he had never dreamed it could possible be this good. I should have accepted, these sixty year old legs find the climb up that mountain harder and harder each year, no matter how much I work out in the off season.
Imagine a 45 degree angle stairway that goes up 2000 feet. Now the stairs are not all nice and easy like they are up to your attic, but with slippery granite soil that slides back under your feet, so that you take three or four steps for every actual two steps that you advance, and lets add in some sticks and bushes as obsticals. This area was burned several years ago, so there are whole areas of blow downs that look sort of like jack straws or pick up sticks only the sticks can be six inches to four feet in diameter. Definitely NOT a walk in the park.
Any way, it only took an hour and a half to climb the 2000 feet of elevation. Some of it was only 10-15 degree climb, but some of it was actually more than I like to think about. When you look back at your back trail and start clutching bushes so you don''t fall off, you know it is steeper than you thought.
Once at the top of the ridge we went up on a gentle incline then actually down into a saddle that let me look over two basins where the elk normally like to come in the afternoon. Not this day though, they were no where to be seen. But the vistas, oh my good heart, the beauty of the place was worth the work to get here. Wink 1.
Going back down I developed a style I call "butt scootching". I would sit down, and scootch down the mountain at fairly high speed, digging in and walking around obstacles, then sitting down and doing it again. Once I ended up with a five or six inch layer of bark beneath my backside and got to sledding really fast, giggling and laughing all the way. I devloped this style as an accident, I fell hard when first starting down when a stick stuck in the bend of my boot between the toe and the arch and I had already transferred my weight. Blam, down I went. (I would find out later that I had completely destroyed the sighting in of my rifle as the scope moved from the ten ring (dead center at 100 yards, to completely off the paper, about four feet to the right and up three feet at 100 yards, making it largely academic that I passed on the shot, I would not have hit it anyway).
Still smarting from that fall I got to the steep portion of the mountain and looked down and got vertigo. I took a few steps and found my legs actually shaking with the effort of keeping me from running down the hill for those one or two steps it would take to launch me into terminal velocity. Then I involuntarily sat down and slid a few feet. That seemed like such a good way to go that I just kept scootching down the hill and actually made it to the bottom in about a third of the time it would have taken me to have walked normally down the hill. From the bottom of the hill it was only a mile or two back to the truck and back to camp. Oh, and did I say that "camp" is Enrique''s cabin in the woods at the base of some very beautiful mountains? One with a real shower and real beds, and best of all, a real kitchen for me to cook in?
That night Joseba made us a paella with shrimp, chorizo, fish, clams, (sorry, no fresh octopus), chicken and rice in a real paella pan from the Basque country, with some great red wines and a leek soup that also had chicken in it. In spite of all the climbing and calories expended, weight was gained, not lost...
The next day was a repeat of the first, but in gentler terrain for me. I wish I could say it is because my Basque friends are younger than me, but in reality one is two years older and the other only a year younger. They are just tougher than me! They did finally see the elk, but neither could get into position for a shot. I saw the deer and some more magnificent country. One really cool thing about early morning hikes in the mountains is that you sometimes get incredible ground fog.
I was at a perfect level, right at the top of the fog coming from the creek below. When I looked forward I could see dark shapes of the trees in the early dawn light, eerily fuzzy with the fog, but if I looked up, I could see the morning light striking the crystal clear mountain tops and illuminating their fresh fallen skiff of snow. If I looked down the mountains I could see under the fog with great clarity. When I finally did get to see the deer, even though only 400 yards away, it would have taken me nearly an hour to get where they were, so rugged was the fallen timber and terrain where they were. They spotted me also, so there was no chance of a stalk, and frankly I am not the young marine who would once have tried stalking them through that junk any way. (Pity the poor hunter that actually shoots one there, what a miserable thing it would be to get it down. Better to just bring a fork and eat it on the spot.)
Later that afternoon we put away the rifles and went fishing, and three limits were soon on the table for another delicious dinner, I did the fish, and Enrique did some peppers and served some tripe that his sister had made.
It was a great hunting trip. Fine food, great friends, many laughs and we even got to watch BSU perform miserably while still beating New Mexico State or Univerity of New Mexico, or someone with New Mexico in thier name. Late Tuesday afternoon, after another incredible walk in the woods, we all packed up and came home. Wednesday I took Resa hunting for ducks again, and it was the best hunt we have had in years. Just her and I and four or five thousand ducks dropping in to visit, albeit briefly, sometimes two or three at a time, and sometimes several hundred at a time. What an incredible few days of joyous celebration of this glorious state we call Idaho and her mountains and rivers and ponds. Clearly Wink 2 or maybe even 3, and the Elk 1. I''ll take that any day or any year!
Wink
I say Elk 1, Wink 2 because I never so much as saw an elk, although I did pass up a 400 yard shot on a nice forked horn deer. Although once a Marine Sharp Shooter, I consider a 400 yard shot to be unsporting with too much chance of wounding the animal that I respect so much, so it was an easy pass for me. Especially with a 30-06 which I consider a great short range gun, say 50-200 yards, but the bullet drop is just too much at over 250 yards.
However, I definitely made some points. I am the camp cook, and the duck I prepared Saturday evening was raved about all weekend to the point they were making jokes of sending me back for more duck, and they would take care of getting me some elk. Joseba stated that Enrique had been bragging about my duck for years, but he had never dreamed it could possible be this good. I should have accepted, these sixty year old legs find the climb up that mountain harder and harder each year, no matter how much I work out in the off season.
Imagine a 45 degree angle stairway that goes up 2000 feet. Now the stairs are not all nice and easy like they are up to your attic, but with slippery granite soil that slides back under your feet, so that you take three or four steps for every actual two steps that you advance, and lets add in some sticks and bushes as obsticals. This area was burned several years ago, so there are whole areas of blow downs that look sort of like jack straws or pick up sticks only the sticks can be six inches to four feet in diameter. Definitely NOT a walk in the park.
Any way, it only took an hour and a half to climb the 2000 feet of elevation. Some of it was only 10-15 degree climb, but some of it was actually more than I like to think about. When you look back at your back trail and start clutching bushes so you don''t fall off, you know it is steeper than you thought.
Once at the top of the ridge we went up on a gentle incline then actually down into a saddle that let me look over two basins where the elk normally like to come in the afternoon. Not this day though, they were no where to be seen. But the vistas, oh my good heart, the beauty of the place was worth the work to get here. Wink 1.
Going back down I developed a style I call "butt scootching". I would sit down, and scootch down the mountain at fairly high speed, digging in and walking around obstacles, then sitting down and doing it again. Once I ended up with a five or six inch layer of bark beneath my backside and got to sledding really fast, giggling and laughing all the way. I devloped this style as an accident, I fell hard when first starting down when a stick stuck in the bend of my boot between the toe and the arch and I had already transferred my weight. Blam, down I went. (I would find out later that I had completely destroyed the sighting in of my rifle as the scope moved from the ten ring (dead center at 100 yards, to completely off the paper, about four feet to the right and up three feet at 100 yards, making it largely academic that I passed on the shot, I would not have hit it anyway).
Still smarting from that fall I got to the steep portion of the mountain and looked down and got vertigo. I took a few steps and found my legs actually shaking with the effort of keeping me from running down the hill for those one or two steps it would take to launch me into terminal velocity. Then I involuntarily sat down and slid a few feet. That seemed like such a good way to go that I just kept scootching down the hill and actually made it to the bottom in about a third of the time it would have taken me to have walked normally down the hill. From the bottom of the hill it was only a mile or two back to the truck and back to camp. Oh, and did I say that "camp" is Enrique''s cabin in the woods at the base of some very beautiful mountains? One with a real shower and real beds, and best of all, a real kitchen for me to cook in?
That night Joseba made us a paella with shrimp, chorizo, fish, clams, (sorry, no fresh octopus), chicken and rice in a real paella pan from the Basque country, with some great red wines and a leek soup that also had chicken in it. In spite of all the climbing and calories expended, weight was gained, not lost...
The next day was a repeat of the first, but in gentler terrain for me. I wish I could say it is because my Basque friends are younger than me, but in reality one is two years older and the other only a year younger. They are just tougher than me! They did finally see the elk, but neither could get into position for a shot. I saw the deer and some more magnificent country. One really cool thing about early morning hikes in the mountains is that you sometimes get incredible ground fog.
I was at a perfect level, right at the top of the fog coming from the creek below. When I looked forward I could see dark shapes of the trees in the early dawn light, eerily fuzzy with the fog, but if I looked up, I could see the morning light striking the crystal clear mountain tops and illuminating their fresh fallen skiff of snow. If I looked down the mountains I could see under the fog with great clarity. When I finally did get to see the deer, even though only 400 yards away, it would have taken me nearly an hour to get where they were, so rugged was the fallen timber and terrain where they were. They spotted me also, so there was no chance of a stalk, and frankly I am not the young marine who would once have tried stalking them through that junk any way. (Pity the poor hunter that actually shoots one there, what a miserable thing it would be to get it down. Better to just bring a fork and eat it on the spot.)
Later that afternoon we put away the rifles and went fishing, and three limits were soon on the table for another delicious dinner, I did the fish, and Enrique did some peppers and served some tripe that his sister had made.
It was a great hunting trip. Fine food, great friends, many laughs and we even got to watch BSU perform miserably while still beating New Mexico State or Univerity of New Mexico, or someone with New Mexico in thier name. Late Tuesday afternoon, after another incredible walk in the woods, we all packed up and came home. Wednesday I took Resa hunting for ducks again, and it was the best hunt we have had in years. Just her and I and four or five thousand ducks dropping in to visit, albeit briefly, sometimes two or three at a time, and sometimes several hundred at a time. What an incredible few days of joyous celebration of this glorious state we call Idaho and her mountains and rivers and ponds. Clearly Wink 2 or maybe even 3, and the Elk 1. I''ll take that any day or any year!
Wink
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