Colorado Recurve Elk Hunt - 2026 - Part 2

Okay, I can probably handle that. That's going to be a fast treat. Oh, ----. Through the forest like a ninja archer. So sly, so fly. Dodging all the tricky tricks. Tiptoe as I go. Got the know-how to stay alive. Like a hawk in flight so swiftly. Like a tiger in the night so stealthy. Now you see me, now you don't. I'm a ninja. I'm a ninja archer. Morning, Creed. Anna made this for you. It's a London fog. It's delicious. I don't know, what is it? What kind of tea is it? It's black tea with a homemade vanilla syrup and frosted milk. Thanks for the London Fog. He's a creep! Yeah, we could help you somewhere. Oh, that would help me. That would help quite a bit. I also packed a bucket hat, but this might be more fun. Bye bye! Get used to that. Take that out, we've got to start adding smaller ones. I hope you're beat, bro. I like things to add up, like one and one is two. Unless of course we're talking about zeroes, then it is OO. Here I go again, I'm over, I'm over... Yeah, 15 minute nap. 15 minutes? If you want it, go for it. I just got mine. Before we went off the cliff. There's a little bit of a cliff. I'll pay the kids to try this one out, whatever. Let's play this one last year. There's a handful of things that I wanted to do differently than last time. One is to... Not try and maximize every opportunity to hunt. It's just laughing at me. But to have an adventure and try and shoot an elk. I think I was trying to not waste any moments. But when you hold something so tightly, then you can't receive. Oh, that's last night. I was thinking about that. Closed fists never receive the gifts. Open hands. That's where it lands. That's kind of the change from the last time to this one. My rain jacket, well it's not a rain jacket but my jacket doesn't have the hood so I've got a cowboy hat. It's great, cowboy shoe dog all the time. A zipper, they should make a zipper that doesn't jam. It's gonna be worth a lot. Sweat clothes that don't get wet. It'd be nice if it wouldn't tramp around in the rain and heard elk right by our camp. Yeah we did. We got it. But at least it's not like, at least we're not just now getting back here. Day one we got camp set up while it was raining and we hiked in a ways and found that the elk were bugling back where our camp was at. So day two we decided to hike in even further to see if we could find elk but not the ones by our camp, different elk that were further away. Okay so we think that elk is gonna set up. We just did a There's a bugle back, probably 200 yards. The bulls continued to bugle, but they didn't come in immediately, and looking back, I wish it would have been more aggressive after 10 minutes or so of them not coming into the cow call. I feel like we should have gone after them, but we stayed for about an hour. As we were snacking, we heard a bugle about half a mile from us down this steep hill. The bull slipped away, but then we stumbled upon this. Oh, it's a battery. He just ate it and slid all the way down there. Now I've got to get down there somehow. That's wild. That'll still work. Maybe it won't work. Hey, you got lodged in there. You got a little dirty. I did, off a cliff. You literally stepped off of it. It's so slippery. Did you think you were going to be able to just walk down that? I was expecting to walk. I was expecting to slide a little more controlled. Oh, man. I used this to slow down. It just spilled something. Did you get it? No. It's clogged. We might not be able to bugle for a while. In the water, we can clean it up. As the rain rolled in and after the rain rolled in, there was mule deer everywhere. All right, it's raining. So we got under a tree because it's raining actually pretty hard. And guys, there's a cowboy hat. I got a cowboy hat. Oh, that's going to be loud. This tree, please. We're under the dollar tree. Not really, but fiery. So hopefully it rolls through. I mean, we heard thunder like 20 minutes ago, and then now it's kind of on top of this, so maybe in 20 minutes it'll be past. Yeah, hopefully. We heard it. We gotta assume the storm's a line, not a mass, but we heard a bugle right up here. I think it's probably like, it'd probably be pretty easy if they never hear you like that kind of noise. Yeah, let's see, hopefully the rain will calm down. Now we're... I think you should get ready. I think one might come by. You think so? Yeah. I hope they can shoot under here. It's cool. Granchy. Yeah, I guess if I twisted some of these. The rain calmed down, and we went to see if we could find that bull that was bugling. With the animals so active because of the rain, we worked our way from meadow to meadow, seeing what we could see. Come on, puppy. Jackal. The bull was about 60 yards away and could move back about 30 yards to call to see if we could bring him in. But as we were getting set up, the wind shifted, and he took off. And so we started our three-mile hike back to camp. That's one advantage of camping in the car is you don't have to carry everything, but disadvantage being you've got to hike back. This is the guy. Hey, that's Cory-O. Is it really? I think. You know him? Yeah. Okay. Hey, bro. Hello! Found yourself, Cam. The cord, it's got the cord in its mouth. The cord to the solar panel anyways. And the leaves. I'm telling you, the elk sabotaged this. The last photo is an elk. The elk sabotaged. Look, yeah, look at them. They're just a little low, but not bad. We got back fairly late last night, so we slept in this morning, and it was thunder and lightning last night, rained quite a bit, but it stopped raining this morning, and we heard a bugle like 400 yards from the tent. That's probably an hour ago now because we got up and got breakfast and got ready but then we heard a couple more bugles so not too far from here so could be a hunter but maybe not. We're just drying out my fletchings see if that will puff them back up because they're pretty tiny right now with being all wet. Feathers. Duck feathers use duck oil. Turkey feathers use motor oil. I feel like turkeys don't have Don't ducks sound like some sort of... Yeah, they do. On that morning hunt, the rain picked up again and we hunkered under some trees. This mule deer hung out with us for about 30 minutes. It was pretty wet and rainy. We hid under a tree for a while, but we weren't staying the driest. And then, because we were wearing wet socks from yesterday, our feet got really cold. So we started hiking, warming up our feet. Well, it's been about an hour and a half and the rain's not slowing down. Pretty wet. And chilly, so I might have saw something on the other side I don't know Yeah i It's pretty chilly, so I think we better go get dry and warm. Or we could hike up three more miles. We could hike up three more miles. I would be down for that if it wasn't raining, because then we could get dry, and we could wait it out another couple minutes. We just got stopped. Yeah, it doesn't feel like it. So we heard some back at camp True. Maybe they'll be there. All right, maybe we should just go for it. Yeah, let's go for it All right, let's go for it. After getting soaked, the sun just came out for a little bit. So we've got some stuff out to dry. I thought that was you. And so hopefully the sun stays out for a little bit. There's clouds up there, but there's also blue sky. And yeah, hopefully we get all dried out because we got soaked. So cloud came down. Yeah, we could be up in that storm up there. Yeah, it's like still, it's literally right above us, right where we were going to be. And it's been that way for like an hour now. Those elk are probably still bugling up there, though. Probably. So this is not supposed to be sticking out. Somehow, randomly walking around his truck, Creed saw this pin sticking out that's supposed to be holding the brake pads in. So he took one of the pins like this from the jack, because that's what fell off. That was allowing that pin to pop out. Does it look like it's going to work? Yeah. It's better than the ones that are on there. That one, still there, but this one was missing. Yeah and we still got brake pads too. That's great. I'm bringing a fishing pole. We're gonna go up the lake. Every time we leave it rains. It's literally just starting to rain. It's hiding. It's hiding something. Let's go find it. I've got a hood this time and a cowboy hat so I just think I'll be okay. After sleeping in in the morning and then getting rained out, we decided just to take it easy. We went not too far from camp and just chilled by a lake. I don't know. Unfortunately, I only had a bull tag, so we continued to work our way up the mountain to where we saw two bulls and heard a bunch of bugles just two days before. The cow's got a grouse. He's eating it off his neck. It would be interesting to fly that against it. After hiking most of the day, we decided to get set up in an area, and so we just found a place where we saw some fresh elk tracks. And we sat down, and the wind kept on changing, and so it felt like there was no chance that we were going to see anything. I'm not sure about the big part, but Creed's right about me being mad. I wasn't super mad, but I was disappointed. And as we were hiking up to see if we could get these bulls that were bugling, I'm like, man, this would be the coolest redemption story. Like, I missed, but then, boom, come back, we get a bigger bull, redemption. And I felt like God told me. He said, no, that's not the redemption story. The redemption story is that you can have joy right after you've missed. We did get fairly close to a handful of bulls, at least two, maybe even three, that were, they did sound really bad. It got dark before we could get close enough for a shot. Last morning, we got a bird dog encompass here. I'm trying to find the kill. The place we'd been here in the elk bugle right by our camp we'd been saving for the last morning because we didn't have a ton of time and so we finally went in that area and we heard them bugling first thing. Whenever Creed was calling and I would set up somewhere I would try and set up downwind of Creed assuming the elk would want to come in and smell whatever they're coming into and so that's what I did here but then I heard another bugle more on the upwind side and so I moved but I wish I would have stayed where I was at. Tell me per second. We heard more bugles, but did not get anything. Handful of lessons we learned from this trip. One, to be aggressive if they're not coming. Two, is to go downwind all the time. And three, is God redeems us. Dang, I had to aim like a foot high. A foot into a lap. Who knows what could be going on with this truck. I mean, there's been some wild things.