Your worst 24 hrs in the elk woods

[cnelk]

As we know things go bad.
But they dont stay bad for long.

What is the worst 24 hrs you experienced during your elk hunt?

[Lefty]

Cant say Ive had a bad day archery elk hunting,

At night I havent been able to stay awake enough to make it home with out multiple stops
The heat can be tiring
At night the leg cramps can be bad
Or replacing a tire when I should de sleeping

The bad days are the ones Im not hunitng


I did have two Redfield scopes go bad the same year. I could zero the gun and didnt know setting it on its side the lense moved
and a bull that I took an easy 200 yard shot rab up the hill t be killed by another group and scored 357, that was "bad"

[cnelk]

I agree there arent many bad days in elk camp...

But:
In 2007, opening morning.
My buddy and I jump in my truck at 330am to head to the trailhead.
300yds from camp my fuel pump goes out.
We push the truck off the road and hike back to camp to get his truck
[nothing is stopping us from opening morning]

We hunt the morning, get into some elk, then head back to my truck.
He pulls me 40 miles to the nearest spot where another buddy comes and loads my truck on his trailer and takes it to town to my mechanic.

We went back to camp and shot an elk the next morning

I hitched a ride to town 2 days later and drove my truck back to elk camp.

Like I mentioned, bad days dont last long

[WapitiTalk1]

I've had a few of those. Mid 80s, very early Saturday morning mid September, hunting buddy Joe M. and I headed out in my 77 Chevy to a place about 30 miles outside of Libby, MT. On the way up, my oil dummy light came on. Figured I may be a bit low as I had changed my oil a few days and maybe I didn't put quite enough in. Got to our jump off spot and hunted the day back into an area bordering the CM Wilderness. Got into one singer but no shots. Got back to the truck after dark and headed back down the mountain. Light still on but I was beat down and ready to head back to town. The truck died! This was back in the day before headlamps, and, before I was smart enough to pack extra batteries for any type of flashlight I had in my pack or truck . Checked the oil and it read "0". Looked underneath and "somebody" had forgotten to tighten up the oil drain plug. Yep, I'd been leaking oil for the past few days. No choice but to walk out. Was probably 10 miles by gravel mountain road but we decided to just cut straight down to HWY 2.. Great choice. Both of our flashlights died before we were more than two miles down. By a minimally cloud covered moon, we stumbled down many miles until we hit the highway around midnight and knocked on a ranchers door to use his phone. Called girlfriend and she had to track down some oil as nothing was open in town. Luckily, I didn't try to start the engine up when I virtually ran it out of oil and with 4 or 5 quarts poured in, it started up and I made it back to town unscathed but very, very tired.. That was a less than fun 24 hours.

[Z Barebow]

Never really had a bad 24 hours, but I did have a tough night.

I was in NM and sleeping under my sil tarp at the edge of a clearing. During the night, a strong front moves through. And I mean STRONG! I could hear the wind gusts coming from up the valley. When the gusts reached my camp, the tarp would flap so hard it would smack me in the face. This went on for several hours. Being from ND, I know what strong wind is like. I know there were gusts of 60 MPH.

Next morning, all was clear and calm. Needless to say, I caught a long nap later that day.

[Indian Summer]

The toughest 24 hours is the last 24 before breaking camp and ending a hunt. Yuk! Setting camp with anticipation of a hunt is fun. Nothing fun about breaking it down.

[pointysticks]

okay, i got one. brace yourselves.

my brother and i didnt grow up with any hunter mentors. we just kinda did it on our own. the internet wasnt readily available, so information was not easy to get.

my mom and stepdad owned a restaurant. this big tall, friendly cowboy ate with us regularly. his name was Lloyd. he was part owner of a ELK hunting outfit. he heard we were starting into hunting and said the magic words, "well boys, you ever think about coming elk hunting with me?" BOING!!!

he offered us a hunt for $900 each!! i was a broke college kid, and i think my brother was as well,,no he was in the police academy. we rounded up all of our money, and my mom seeing our excitement ponied up the rest. the game was on!! Lloyd gave us a list of stuff to bring and we were off. we followed lloyd in my brother's truck.all the way to colorado. near gunnison. we could barely keep up with that insane cowboy. he was towing a trailer with a steel box for firewood. he had to bring his camp up to some code.

on the way, we stopped at some tiny town in New mexico..(las vegas, NM? maybe) here was when things went south. first some locals came up to us and got completely racist. they were pulling back their eyes and trying to speak with chinese accents. all jokes i've heard before. nothing original.."ching chong BS"..i raged but didnt do anything. getting my butt kicked would have sucked and my brother was on job probation. he would have been fired. the guys even got into their trucks to drive next to us, flipping us off, doing that eye thing..spitting. i envisioned shooting them. whatever..the HIGH ROAD sucks..but i took it. (btw, i'm an american born chinese dude)

we drove on, fuming..Lloyd then pulls over and runs to our truck. he said, "oh crap!..i forgot to tell you that you need HUNTER EDUCATION" he went on saying "he knows people..." dont worry.

well, we drive into the first town..and the game warden there tells us we are out of luck. zero chance of hunting. we get to camp/cabin and it is amazing. they had a pond (with fish) that had a dammed end with a water turbine generator!! huge hearth..camp cook. and elk and deer just about everywhere. we sat around scouting and getting close to elk for two friggen days. some "friend" was supposed to show up and give us a fast hunter ed class, but he never showed. it as awful. Lloyd felt horrible, but offered us next year, but every year after that he was booked solid with real paying customers. we never went back.

Lloyd passed, and the camp went away to somebody. bottomline it was our fault. the trip happened so fast, not so sure we could have gotten into any hunting class at that point.

awful. but lessoned learned. i read hunting proclamations backwards and forwards from then on out.

oh, i sprained my ankle bad fishing that lake. the entire drive home my foot was swollen. we made sure we had plenty of fuel to get past Las Vegas, NM without stopping.

[JohnFitzgerald]

Before cell phones became a norm, I got a flat and after putting the spare on it too went flat. The 12 miles hike out was not fun!

[Bullnuts]

My hunting partner and I had just come into camp after a morning hunt. We put a pot of coffee on and we were sitting under the pines off a 2 track, when a forest truck pulled up the road and stopped. The driver, a young kid with the forest service, looked scared to make contact with us even though my camp was nice and clean and I'm not the kind of guy who gets upset with the forest service pays a visit. Heck, they're normally the best source of information for where the largest concentrations of elk are in my area, so I was ready to offer him some coffee and pump him for intel.

The kid gets out of his truck kind of slow and walks over to us and tells us that the most tragic thing has happened. It was September 11, 2001.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Thousands dead? Thousands? Details of the attack were still coming in and we sat glued to the ranger's truck radio, listening as news reporters tried to explain what had happened and we tried to understand and comprehend the tragedy ourselves.

I've never felt so mad, deflated, hopeless, vengeful, and sad at the same time. I looked up into the sky and noticed for the first time that the regular contrails of aircraft were missing and not a single plane could be seen. It seemed, in fact, that even the birds had stopped singing. I thanked the ranger for his information and then took a ride around to the other camps that I knew about to help spread the word before going back to camp and packing up.

There aren't many opportunities for a bad trip to the elk woods. Weather, lack of game, broken equipment - those are all parts of the hunt that everyone seems to get around. This, however, was the incident that absolutely sucked the life out of my desire to be there in the pines. We headed home that afternoon, the news reports streaming from the radio, and we tried to make sense of it. I remember coming home and hugging my wife and kids, and wondering how we would ever be the same as a country. It was without a doubt the worst day I've ever experienced in the woods.

[Buglemaster]

Your right Bill, that was a lousy time to be in the elk woods. We weren't there on the 11th, but were a few days later & I still can remember the unsettled feeling we all had. Not seeing a single plane in the blue sky & the worry we all had about what the future held for our country. Yep, those were the darkest days.

[Mikeha33]

This isn't mine, but a friends, who isn't web-savvy, so Ill tell his real life nightmare, and leave out the names. Fall of '01, my friend, his two brothers, and their father, went into the CO mountains, about 10 miles in, on a 10 day horseback elk hunting trip. They had done it several times, being successful, and were fairly experienced hunters and campers. Anyways, about halfway through their trip, their dad suffered a massive heart attack in camp and died. They had no radios or cell phone service, and had to haul their father out of the mountains on horseback.
I couldn't even imagine. I don't know that it gets any worse than that.