Traditional archery Elk Hunt (Colorado mountains)

Good morning! I just woke up. Did you get your toothbrush? Get your knife? We've got a 5 hour drive. 4 mile hike. Season opens tomorrow. We are going up the mountain. It is the day before elk season. I have a bear tag too. Kramer has an elk tag. My dad has an elk and a bear tag also. Me and Kramer are going to try to find some elk. And then we're going to try to shoot one. I'll explain more later. That's the eyebrow. Going over those mountains. Is the goal. Alright, so here's the deal. We're going up for 5 days. Or 2 a week. You get everything compact. Nice and good. Unless, you're this guy. I don't know. I don't even know what's going on here. This is by choice. There's many other backpacks. You probably have between 10 to choose from. You choose a day white tail hunting backpack. How come? If you have to pack small. If you have enough room, you're going to fill up the backpack. I'm taking out this bow I built about 2 weeks ago. I'm going to see what we can do with it. It's raining bro. I didn't bring any rain gear. In this public land unit, where you can see, we ain't the only ones here. I've got a stick bow I built a couple weeks ago. The percentage is between 8-10% on average of people getting an elk in this unit. And on top of that, I don't know how to call elk. Cut to that clip right now. I got a mouth called a day. We got every disadvantage against us. So we're going to have a good time. This is how not to elk hunt. Watch us like get one and then it's like, let's go. What are you shooting Creed? I'm shooting a bear cruiser. A what? A bear cruiser with 3 arrows. You're only bringing 3 arrows? You must be confident. Yeah, I am. Last year, I lost 3 arrows. I only lost 2. I broke one and shot one. And I brought like 5 arrows. So if I only bring 3, I won't shoot at grouse. I brought a slingshot stick. Season opens tomorrow. We've got a 3.5 miles, 1200 foot elevation climb. Pretty easy stroll. If this rain holds off, we'll scout tonight. And we'll go put her down tomorrow. Seriously, we're like 15 minutes into the walk and it's a complete downpour. We're going to take the weather under this pine tree real quick to see if this will continue. If it clears up, we should be able to dry out. Yeah. If it rains all day, shelter may be harder. At least it's not hot. Yeah. If it rains all day, that would be annoying. Yeah. But it already seems like it let up just a little. Yeah, earlier today it said it was going to rain all day but it held off for a couple more hours than I thought it would. So I was like, maybe it won't come. Yeah, man. Yep. That's not really quite what we're looking for. Is it passing us? Is that the next couple hours? Oh, that's not the last few hours? What does it end at? What's the last time? Well, round 6. 6? 34. Well, we're not going to wait it out for, what, 6 hours? So let's go. Alright. Because then we can find a good place to put up camp if we need to before then. Or we can just hunker under a pine tree up there. But if we're already wet, we might as well hike for the next couple hours. Back on the trail. Look, the finish. I did a beeswax finish to make it matte. It's doing good. This is actually the perfect bowstring wax. I've got to put this camera away because it's coming down, but this is unreal. Just look at the fog and the rain. This is just beautiful. We're going to get up. I think we have a tarp. We can try to get dry under. And then it's supposed to light up at 6 o'clock. It'll get dark closer to 8, so maybe we can still scout a little bit. So, I need to put you away so you don't break. 30 minutes in. Was it relieving? Yeah. Did you go in your pants? You're wet anyways. Maybe in an hour? Yeah. Creed said we're going to see some of these trees. He said we're getting to the good area. I hope so. We just dropped broadheads off at the other half of the group. We need to dry off and get some hot chocolate. Do you have hot chocolate? No way. We made it to our camp for the night. I'm in a tent because it's been raining and we got pretty cold. Creed's got his hammock set up. I've got a tent. We're going to set this out. Hopefully it'll pass so we can do some scouting or glassing tonight and try to get warm in the meantime. What'd you find? Strawberries. Are they good? Hey. Strawberries. Might make some oatmeal. Maybe. We went out and tried to scout a little bit. Still raining. Everything's wet. My tent leaked a little bit because part of it was sagging. So at this point, even if we're damp, we're in a good situation. Non-stop rain all day. Hopefully it'll stop tonight and try not to freeze. Wish me luck. Your tarp leaked. Basically I could feel like a river running under my tent when it was raining a lot. So wherever I put pressure down on my butt or my back, it would slowly leak through and I would just get more and more wet. Oh no. So I would roll over to my belly to try to distribute my weight evenly so less water would soak through. The current time is 5... 19? 520? So we're about to head out. And he slept in his hammock without a sleeping bag because he didn't bring one for whatever reason. And he brought a tarp to cover the hammock that had a hole in it. So he plugged the hole with a plastic bag and basically he got dripped on all night. So I think we're both on three to four hours of sleep. But we're going to go up and try to get above the elk as it gets light. They tend to work up and over this ridge in the past so we'll try to cut them off if we can find them. But I don't know, we'll see. We'll make the most of it. Do you have anything to say this morning? Make sure your tarp doesn't have a hole in it. You ready? Uh huh. Alright, get your hunting brain on. This kid is loud. How old are you? Take a 15 year old hunting and they're loud. We made it up to where we're going to glass. Looks like there's some people camping down below. About 300 yards from where we were camping. And we didn't know that so that's good to know now. I still see their lights just moving in circles so I think they're at their tent still. It's still really dark because of the clouds but legally we can shoot. Going to be quiet for the first 30 minutes to an hour to see if we see anything. I can see a ton of land right now. If they're around here we should be able to see something pop out in one of these meadows. Literally above the clouds. The clouds are going through the valley below me. It's almost enough that I can't even see the ground below me. There actually are parts over there I can't. Cree is right over there. He can see more meadows that direction. I can see more this direction. So it might not be a bad idea to move through some timber and do some calling as well. We're just trying to figure it out. But we'll have a good time while we're doing it. And I'll probably let Cree do the calling. I actually might see one. It's game time. I just saw an elk. 300 yards from our tent. Just spotted our first elk. Right here. Can't you see it in the corner? Back right corner. I think it's a cow. But I can't tell. Oh it might have It might have antlers. Can you tell what it is? Yeah there's four muleys. One elk. It's a bull. Dude. I can't tell. But it's definitely a bull. And I walked into the timber. I had to zoom in on my camera but I finally figured out it's a 4x4 or 5x5 and it just bugled. We're just going to go for it. We think we know what the next meadow is going to pop out in. Kind of cut it off. Maybe do a little calling. But we gotta get way over there real quick. Cree thinks it was a different bull that bugled though. So. We'll see. But we know there's one over there. We're moving. Let's go. And let's not fall down this hill. Are you sure that's a different one that was bugling? And it's closer? Cree has way more experience than me with bugling elk. And he's saying there's another one and it's a lot closer. He says the one I saw is way too far. I hope he's right. We just heard another bugle. I think it's the elk we saw. I think it's the elk we saw bugling. Well, I mean that elk we heard it. And then it was moving away from us and we heard it again but we could barely hear it the second time. Or it was facing towards us when it bugled the first time. It could have been right in those trees. And is there another hunter that's going to get the elk? You know what I mean? I mean we saw those three down here so I think there's a lot less pressure. And Dad's over there as well. I'm hoping Dad's heard it. That'd be sweet. Because we also could stay up here. Because if we're going to go over I don't want to go down and then back up. I'm thinking we go over. Save that for later. Yeah, because we got all those aspens. Where you shot your elk last year and all that area. I think that's where it's going. But these hunters are down to the left. What were they doing? Were they riding bikes around the tree? Yeah, there's three of them. And they all had their flashlights on getting ready in the morning. But I never saw them leave. So they must have went through the tree's dark timber back the other way. That's funny. It looked like they were playing tag but just when three headlamps were walking in circles on their own tents grabbing stuff. That was so cool. I've never heard a bugle except one other time. There should be some meadows on the other side we can glass if we get to the right spot. If not, we'll do some calling because it sounds like they're pretty active. Do you want to call? Yeah, let's call. We're going to call as we walk. The area we're in is full of these game trails. We officially have no visibility. We took the high ground. We should be able to see 500 yards. We can see 30, 40 yards. That sucks. Say that again. Say that before they first wait. Until the clouds clear. We stopped for a snack break on the ridge here to see if it might clear up. We're trying to decide what to do. Right over the ridge where we suspected. I thought they were calling us while you were talking to me. Did you just hear that? Cree's going to see if we can get a response but they're bugling. We better not mess this up too bad. Is that what you're supposed to do? Bugle at the bugle? Watch a YouTube video. Yeah, we'll watch a YouTube video We have to figure out what to do here. Start moving. That was as close as that other one which means it's not that far. We call as we go. We got the fog on our side so that they can't see us so they have to get close. If they're going to see us they're within your shooting range. Probably within yours. Do you hear that guys? It believes in my shot. We heard six bugles now. Two more fired. Cree thinks it's that way. I think it's that way and we both think we heard one that way. There is one over there too. Where'd we go? I told you! It was over here. That's where we just came from. I'll try to film but if we get in the action you know the priority. This is what we're looking at. No joke, 30-40 yards at best visibility. What if we put face paint on? There's no way they would ever see us. But it's clearing up. Look at it clearing up. See it? Yeah. Is it a bull? Yeah it's a bull. I think. Maybe. It's grabbing. It's got something on its head. I think it's a spike. Looks like a spike. That's cool though. So you can't shoot a spike unless it's four points. Well a spike you can't because it has to have paradigms. No spike you can shoot. Unless it's broken off. It could be broken which I can't tell. That thing's mad. That's what it's doing? Yeah. Oh no no no that's not a spike. That's bigger. Shooter? Yeah that's bigger. Let's go. How do we attack this one? Let's check the wind real quick. It's facing us. Let's hit the shooter. Yeah definitely. I'm pretty sure it's got a rack on both sides. Okay that's awesome. I'll get closer. We could work our way up to this big ass thing right in front of us. I'm going to check the wind first. I don't know if our wind's that great right now. It's heads down it's eating so we can just sneak closer because the wind's moving. We're still 400 yards. It's probably barely a legal bull but Creed's over there. I tried crossing this ravine because on his side the cover was hard and he was going to call and I was going to get close bring him right past me. I think it saw me and ran. I was wallowing so I thought I could get across. It was only 15 yards where it could see me and Creed's like ready? Go go go go go! It's head was down so I took off and ran. I must have lucked out. Alright we're a long way away from our tent so we're going to head back and try to dry off. I'm soaked from last night and all today. Everything at the tent's still soaked so we're going to try to dry off and be careful on the way back because there's a few spots where you never know you could always run into them. We saw that one bull 300 yards from our tent and then we let that one go because we were already a long way away. Came over to the top we heard 10 bugles. I think I've only heard 2 in my whole life so that's a success and that's probably why I look like a kid when I hear them. Never heard that before that was super cool. Nuh uh. It is a bear? I don't think elk have that kind of teeth but do they? I have not seen enough skeletons to know. Looks like a bear head though. See how big it is? Oh yeah. Got back to camp and about 4 hours ago Creed decided that he wanted to change his sleeping setup since he was using that hammock with that tarp with a hole in it he was cold without a sleeping bag. I think he was trying to go really light. So we decided it would be worth it to go ahead and hike down back to the car and he had a backup tent sleeping bag and pad in there he was going to bring up. He told me that he would shoot to be back by 3. About 3.30 so we might get out a little late hunting today. Once he gets back we'll pack up and head out. It stopped raining about 2 hours ago I've been trying to dry everything off for us and it feels good to get dry for the first time in about 24 hours ever since we got here really so I'm not sure what we're going to do this evening. We did like 7 ish miles this morning Creed's doing about 8 to go back down to the truck and back up so I'm assuming he's probably not going to want to go too far considering he's just been walking all day. But we're getting close to getting after it again and it's nice to see the sunlight. I literally shut the camera off so that's awesome. Do you have any pack on? Kinda. Now that the rain's done Creed's getting all set up and we're going to head out and go to a new area and try to explore. It'll be less elevation which is a big difference but we're just going to follow the sign and follow the elk hopefully. We're sickening, sackening. Okay. There's too many people in this road. No there's not. There's too many people on this mountain. Not where I'm going. I think there's a lot of people on this mountain. Just cause you've been here for 14 days. Haven't seen an animal in the past 7. We are going into the clouds. This is actually right where I marked it to go up. Do you want to try to go up through that or through that meadow? Those guys are probably up here now. Got a couple mule deer bedded down 50, 60 yards. Is there a fawn and a doe? Yeah. Should we just keep walking and see if they... How did they not run off? I think cause they're quiet and we're moving away from them. Yeah I think we're gonna go that way. Still gotta get over that before we even start hunting. Made it to the top? Yeah we did. Not really, the top's right there. Let's see what's over the ridge. The mystery. Goodness gracious. We made it over the saddle we were looking for but there's a lot of land. It's really steep. We don't know what to do now. That's just so vast. Muzzleloader season started and the parking lots have been full of cars so our goal was to get just try to get a little further distance further away from people. There's only one person parked where we parked. It's a can opener. It literally is. That's amazing. Some guy was eating can of soup up here broke his can opener and probably had the worst day of his life honestly. It really sucked. You know you bring a can opener up here with your can of soup. At least I got my can of pork and beans. Let's keep that. I can restore that. It still has the gear thing. I know. How cool would that be? I've lost five pounds of muscle. I'm deteriorating. This meadow we're in now has like no sign of animals really. We're gonna head down to that meadow there. It should allow us to glass across and maybe make a move on something if we need to. But we're gonna go try to find some more sign. I think we're up a little too high. You agree? Yeah like we're above tree line. Like level across we're basically above tree line. Alright let's do it. Well we made it down here and there's like no sign of elk and it's really steep. He said he's gonna call it if nothing responds. There's no elk here. Sounds like a dying whale. Not that I could do better. 63% of the time that we've gone there we've seen elk. I just don't wanna walk down that. I don't wanna come back up it. And I dread going back up that after going up this. You know what I mean? That's gonna take us an hour to get up. Well we just came down? No. We're gonna be crawling on our hands and knees. Yeah maybe it will. So you wanna head back towards the car on our way back down? I think so. As we're talking there's an elk way in there. Right there that's it. Here hold the camera let me see if it's filming. Well that is so hard to hunt. Well I guess there's one elk here. That doesn't mean we have to go after it. Well our wind's good to go after it but there's no way we can get there easily. Wait. Don't bugle yet. I ain't gonna bugle. We just heard a bugle. Right over there where that elk is. Should we start working our way that way just quietly? I think we put camp up here. So just run after it and then come back to here? Okay so we've got an hour and a half and it's only three quarters of a mile side hill there's an elk and we also heard a bugle. I don't know if the one we're watching is a bull or not but we're gonna set up camp here. We're just gonna leave our packs here bring some water the bows, calls whatever and flashlight so we can make our way back here tonight. Creed just said he heard three bugles as I was talking over here. So we're gonna see if we can go get in them this last hour and a half. Let's go! I need to get some pants on. This could be our shot. There's two elk now. Me and Creed can move really quick without gear. It's gonna be a balance of moving super quick as well as being smart to not run up on them and spook them because right now it hasn't moved yet and it's just standing there. So waiting on Creed. There's a really dark elk just above on this meadow and then the other one's in the same spot. See that elk? Let's go get in him. I think there's enough in the area. We just need to be careful not to spook nothing. I don't think we should go. That's probably them bugling though. Probably the one other hunter in the parking lot. I see his blaze orange. It's muzzleloader season. And he's within 100 yards of the elk. Maybe we can watch him shoot it. Or we can go after him. No, I'm not gonna go interrupt his hunt if he's on him already. We were gonna leave and then we're like, oh, I see an elk. Oh, there's some bugles. Oh, there's a hunter. This guy's gonna get one. Yeah, the elk's walking away and the guy's like 80 yards below him. That sucks. Yeah, we gotta figure out what to do now because I see no reason to go try to chase the elk if he's already on him because then you're just gonna mess up his hunt or something. I feel like that's not respectful, I'd rather. Plus, if he gets one, that'd be awesome. Man, it's a super tough call because Creed's been here for a week. Kind of hunting off the road. Hasn't seen anything so we're like, let's get back in here. Go four miles in. Really hard terrain. A smart hunter had the same idea and beat us here. So we know there's elk here but there's also another hunter on them and in the other direction we were thinking of going, I don't know if we can get down. I'm scared of heights, kind of at this level. Like, come on. That's not one. That's really scary. He just shot. That's crazy. He might have just shot that elk. We literally saw that unfold. My goodness. That's awesome. I don't know what we're going to do. I need to go talk to Creed. Did you see that unfold? I didn't see an elk but I saw a blaze orange. I saw him run into these right here. Those. I haven't seen anything. Well... That elk he was shooting. Maybe he's farther that way? I don't know. If he took a second shot, he's finishing it off. Or he missed twice. I mean... It takes you about that long to reload with muzzleloader. I know, but I figured I'd run off because with muzzleloader, no scope you're within 100 yards pretty much. You can keep 300 yards with those things. I don't know. I've just never been told. So the only way down is where that hunter is. Or hunters, we're not sure. We've heard three muzzleloader shots now. Um... I heard calves. Is calves hunting here? That's her brother. I don't think he has this. Um... We're going to hike four miles back to the car now. And uh... It's not that far up this and then it's downhill the rest of the way. We got just over that. And then it'll be downhill for the last three and a half miles. But we can see those meadows on the way out so we can see the opposite side of... I got some more spots we're going to have to check out, but we've got tonight, tomorrow, and then one morning hunt. So we don't got much time, so on the way out I'm going to be planning where to go next. Alright, Creed, we need to get going. How hard was that hike right there coming up the hill? It was pretty hard. Um... Maybe like a seven on the hardness. It wasn't enjoyable. It was that hard, you know what I mean? You get to a point where it's just not enjoyable. What's a ten then? No. Is a ten just like straight up rock climbing? Rock climbing with an elk's a ten, so that's a seven. Okay, fair enough. That would have been an easy one. Four miles. Walking level ground and then just uphill, barely. You think that's what they did? That's what that guy did. Alrighty. That's only a mile probably going up like this. Like this gradual, I bet you. Maybe a little worse, but... I guess we didn't see any boot tracks after the top here. Yeah, but it was that guy. Alright. Just a little further up. Alright, we... What is that? This? Want some? No, I do not want some. He's eating instant mashed potatoes and an ice cream sandwich. That's crunchy. Goodness. It is far too late for us. It's way past our bedtimes. It's only... We don't even know where in the world we're at. We just found a random place and parked. As far as we know, we went all the way to New Mexico. Yeah. I wonder if we did drive three hours. I think we did. It's been a long time. At least we didn't fall off a cliff. Good night. Far too late for any human to be awake. See, it's 10.49 p.m. I'm used to being in bed. Come on. Good night. We slept in. We're going to finish packing up and then we're going to go back to the same area area we were in yesterday, but take a different angle at it to get up high and even further back. We're going to take a different access point in so that we don't have to go so high up and over. Hopefully we're going to go explore. It's been a fairly easy walk. We've walked for two hours, but we need to find some water. There's a river down here. We're going to see if we can get down and then refresh and make a plan for the evening, if we can get down. So we hit a cliff. Oh, man. So our plan was to hit this drainage and then go down to the water and then follow the creek and hunt a little bit, but it's a rock cliff. Yeah. So we're going to backtrack a mile and then we know we can get to the creek there, and then we'll see if we want to follow it up or make a game plan from there, but it's about noon, so we're going to go get some to the creek, get some water, get some lunch, make a plan. There's supposed to be trout in there, so I brought a fishing pole. That could be fun. Catch a trout for lunch. Let's go backtrack. What do you have to say about that? There's a common pattern when you go hunting with Kramer. You usually do the same thing twice. Why do we got weeds like it's Kansas? I hear water. Let me tell you, that kid is like a mountain goat. He's so good up here. I'm trying to keep up. Just don't let him know I said that. How's it look? Oh, it's not as big as I thought. No, it's pretty small. Alright, we had lunch. Creed's filling up water. And we're going to head up the creek. So that is where we were up there. Me and Creed have been walking a lot, and we just got a message on the inReach that one of our friends shot an elk in this unit. A mile from the road, 8,000 foot of elevation. That'll make you question what you're doing. Hiking for today. I mean, we went a little bit the wrong direction, but we'll go about six hours of hiking before any hunting. It's like, what? They're shooting bulls within a mile of the road? Topo lines on the map say it should open up here soon. That's where we're going. We're going to fill up some water and go up there and camp up there and then hunt way up there. That's the goal. This is brutal. What? What happened? Your water bag? Oh, no. Yours did or mine did? That sucks. I got mine both full, so we should be good tonight. Oh, my goodness. His water bag busted. It gets easier right up here. There's some big rock holds. Oh, goodness. This is not an easy climb. We should not have done that. Oh, goodness. That'll get your heart pumping because that little scree rock. If we slipped, I don't know. I thought it kept going all the way to the bottom, so we're going to probably find a different way down. There's a better way. There's a better way down. That was scary, dangerous almost. I slid really far. I got this, though. How'd you stop? Use your bow to stop yourself from sliding? I'm probably not going to shoot. Well, we got good news, bad news, a little bit of both. Good news is it appears we're the only ones that have been back here, at least from this direction, which is pretty much the only direction. Bad news is we don't know how we're going to get out. Maybe the other bad news is that we only have tonight and tomorrow to hunt. This looks good, Creed. There's dark timber everywhere, and then just these few flat meadows with nobody. They could only come up the creek because there's rock cliffs everywhere else. We saw one boot tracks in the creek, but they came in and went out, and they kept going further than we are now. Gosh, you know you're anticipating things when you see branches blowing, and it's making you go crazy. The tents are set up, camp set up. We relaxed for a little bit of time, and now we're going to go out for an evening hunt. We're going to go through some dark timber, and then we'll go into some meadows. We're just going to move real slow, maybe do a little bit of cow calling along the way, and if we're really, really desperate, we'll let them bugle. It worked yesterday. It kind of worked yesterday. You started it. I'm pumped, because this place looks good. We have a wallow like 15 yards outside of our tents. It doesn't look active, so we just went ahead and set up our tents here. On the way back, we'll see them right there. It could be a drinking hole, but it doesn't look like they're wallowing in there. There's not a lot of fresh tracks, so we're going to just kind of work our way on and hopefully get something. Let's go crush this. We're always about safety, so we got our bear spray on our bino harness. You don't even have to take it out. I got a bow. I got five arrows this time. You know they say the third time's the charm. This will be my fourth. Your fourth shot on an elk this year? You're third this year. It's going down. Looks like it. Welcome back. Chicken nugget. He's Big Mac. Big Mac. Big Mac. Dude, it's game time. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen. Well, the more we start exploring, everything seems like old, old sign. Well, probably not old, old. A month or two old or something. Creed says a week old, so maybe a week old. The main thing is we saw more hunters sign. We saw a little fire pit. And where they sat, that looked recent. They could have got one or something and been in here a lot. It could not be so good. I'm not sure what to do now. There's just so much tracks and trails. Just no fresh poop or anything. In the wallows, you don't see any fresh footprints in them. You just see all the old ones. So Creed's going to bugle, and then we're going to keep moving and try to find something. Your bugle scope. What do you think about this evening? What happened? There has been elk here in the past. That's a verifiable fact. The problem is, they're not here now. I zip it up, and then I sleep on it. Good.