While hiking around up on the mountain, another plan came to me. In my tale last year I mentioned how thickly brushed this area is. It is very difficult to sneak around because there is extremely thick brush everywhere, from waist-high to over your head. You simply cannot get through this stuff with any kind of stealth. The best way to hunt the area is to find yourself a high spot where you can sit and observe for hours. That’s why the Sniper’s Lair is such a great spot. You are high, and overlooking a spot where game is likely to eventually show up.

But due to the recent rains, I wasn’t so sure that the water hole would be the best bet this year. The water hole was not the only place to get water right now. The deeper canyon bottoms had at least a little bit of water holding in remnant pools. There really was not a good reason for deer to risk the open exposure of the water hole.

On previous trips I had noticed that the place where I pulled off the rough trail to park the Ranger had a nice view over the canyon that leads down to the water hole. The plan was to establish a second observation post on this heavily brushed north-facing slope. When packing for the hunt, I tossed in a 6’x6’ mini-canopy thinking that it might come in handy. It’s blue, not camo, but it would do.

So after lunch, with some extra stuff thrown into the back of the Ranger, we headed back out into the field. After sending Ben off down the trail on foot, I found an open spot on the slope, downhill a ways from the Ranger. To see down to the canyon bottom, I had to do quite a bit of bush trimming, even though I located the canopy and a chair at the top of the open spot. The site afforded a nice view up the canyon, and some view down the canyon toward the water hole. However, due to the curve of the canyon, I couldn’t quite see the Sniper’s Lair which was only about a quarter-mile away. I named the spot OP 5400 for the elevation which was 5,400 feet.

When setting up the OP, I brought along a camp shovel to create a level spot for the chair. I had to dig in toward the top of the slope, and I used the dug material to fill below to create a level platform. I also brought along a small canvas table on which to place a drink, a book, binoculars, rangefinder, and whatever else. Neither Ben nor I saw any action on Saturday afternoon.

So we came in again at first light on Sunday morning. Ben went to the water hole sniper spot, while I occupied OP 5400. This morning I would finally spot some wildlife. At around 9:30 am, on the slope across the canyon in front of me, I spotted two beautiful healthy foxes. They had a salt & pepper grizzled gray back, an orange-ish chest and lower neck, and big bushy tails. They were neat to watch.

About half an hour later, I spotted a big herd of about a dozen javelina! This is much more entertaining than watching the shadows change on the vegetation. Ben and I were in text communication, and he was getting jealous, because there was still no sign of anything at the waterhole. By the end of the day however, neither of us had seen any of the deer that we had come out here to find.

Ben would only hunt the one more half-day, Monday morning. Same plan: Ben at the waterhole, me at OP 5400.

Settled in at the OP as the sun rose over the eastern ridge, the first rays of light began to illuminate the slopes of the surrounding hills. As I looked far up-canyon, I noticed a large light-colored animal grazing on a ridge. Yes, there are cattle in the area. Today I happened to bring along my large 12x50mm porro prism binoculars. Since I knew I wouldn’t be hiking, and that I would be just a few steps from the Ranger, they were no burden to bring along to the OP.

When I put the binos up to my eyes, I was totally blown away by what I saw. That large light-colored animal was a monster bull elk! I knew that there were supposed to be elk somewhere in this unit, but in this habitat, an elk was the last animal that I expected to see.

This unit is lumped together with several other units for a “Limited Opportunity” elk hunt. That means that though elk tags are issued, you can expect to go the whole hunt and not see even any sign of elk, let alone the buff-colored fur of one. They are very thinly distributed in these limited opportunity hunt units. Yet here before my eyes was one of the largest bulls I had ever seen. He was alone. As I watched him at 12x for nearly half an hour, I saw his antlers from the side, from the front, and from the back. They reached very high, very wide, and very far back. It was an incredible show. At one point I hit him with the laser rangefinder – 706 yards.

I had along a small pocket camera. I dialed it up to max zoom and attempted to get his picture. The photo above was the best one that I got. It’s not great, but I think that you can get a sense of how big this bad-boy was!

Eventually the bull wandered out of sight, and later the lunch hour arrived. Ben met me at the Ranger and we headed back to camp for lunch. We ate our lunch, Ben packed up his stuff, but he hung around until I was ready to head back out, at which point Ben left to go back home.

While sitting in the OP that afternoon, I became curious to know exactly where was that bull? I remembered a little-used function on the GPS called Sight ‘N Go. This function allows you to place a GPS waypoint somewhere besides where you currently stand. I knew the accurate distance from the OP to where the elk stood since I had hit him with the range finder.

So I fiddled around with the GPS until I found Sight ‘N Go. Sight ‘N Go depends on the GPS having a built-in compass. The first thing you do is point the GPS at the position where you would like a waypoint. When you are ready, you hit a button to lock in the bearing to the position. Then it asks you to input the distance. This you can do in various units of measure including yards. So I typed in 706 yards and it gave me a waypoint. By checking the topo on the GPS, I discovered that the elk was just a quarter mile hike from the rough trail that we had come in on, but about .4 miles back from where we always park.

So the first thing the next morning, I tried to get to the elk’s position. Using the GPS, I was able to get to within 200-something yards. I ended up on a steep heavily-brushed hillside above the elk’s ridge. I could have shot him from here. But I had no appetite to go down this steep hillside, cross a canyon pushing through thick brush, just to get to the elk’s ridge. It was neat to know where he was and that I could have got to him using this GPS technique.

After this, my plan was to hang out in the Sniper’s Lair for the rest of the day. I had some leftover MRE food that I assembled into an MRE lunch. It included Cheese Tortellini in Meat Sauce, Mexican-Style Rice, and a pack of Nutter-Butter cookies. As I hiked down the trail after parking the Ranger, it hit me that I forgot to pack a spoon! A full unopened MRE always includes a spoon to dig the food out of those packets.

But I’ve been studying "bushcraft" lately. The idea popped into my head that since I was doing nothing but sitting and waiting, that I had time to carve a spoon out of a branch! So on the hike down, I found a suitable pine branch, cut it off, and took it with me to the hide. After my usual field breakfast of a bagel and apple juice, I commenced to freeing up the spoon that was trapped inside that pine branch. I had never tried something like this before. I was amazed and thrilled with what I ended up with. Using only the Browning Big Game folder, I created a very usable MRE spoon by lunch time.

After carving out the basic shape, I was able to get it quite smooth by using a scraping technique with the blade held perpendicular to the surface. For final smoothing, I picked up a rock off the ground and used it as a sanding block. Before lunch, I concentrated on getting the bowl functional for eating. After lunch I continued to refine the spoon some more, slimming up the handle and better defining the underside of the bowl.

Did any deer come to water while I was sitting and carving? Who knows? Yes I probably spent too much time concentrating on making the spoon, and not enough time watching the water hole!

I have nothing of interest to mention for Wednesday. For Thursday, the National Weather Service had been reporting that a significant rain event was coming in. I always keep track of the weather in camp with an emergency radio. I decided to take a day off from the hunt for Thursday. I slept in and relaxed in the camping trailer all day. I worked on the club newsletter and did some reading. The rain did indeed come down for most of the day, but I was as snug as a bug inside the mobile hunting cabin, and thankful for it.

I was still in “lazy mode” when Friday morning dawned. I let the day become illuminated before I woke up. Then I looked out the window and saw all the trees blowing around. Though the skies were now mostly clear, the exiting weather system would make Friday a cold and windy day. I was in no hurry to get out there in the cold wind.

“Alright, alright”, I finally said to myself. I dragged myself out of the warm sleeping bag, gathered up my gear and hopped into the Ranger to head to the OP.

As I sat there with the wind blowing, I noticed that the flapping canopy cover was making quite a bit of noise. And since the day was cold, I figured that the sun shining on me would not be such a bad thing today. I took the cover off the accordion frame and stuffed it under a nearby bush.

Not long after that, I saw my first deer of the hunt. He was up-canyon and across, about 350 yards away. I could see that he wasn’t as big as last year’s buck, but there was enough bone sticking up in the air to make him a shooter. I never got the itch to raise the rifle on him though.

With the heavy wind and the extended distance, it just seemed to be a shot too risky to take. For a rifle rest, all I had at the OP was shooting sticks. Those aren’t quite as stable as the Caldwell FieldPod. There was no way to get steady prone, due to all the bushes.

The distances straight across the canyon from me were from about 130 to 300 yards, and of course even farther. I felt fairly confident with shots out to 300 off the sticks, in a no- to low-wind situation. But here we had heavy wind, and the deer was up-canyon from me at a distance of 350.

I continued to watch him through binos, but in less than 5 minutes, he walked out of sight. After he was gone, I began to second-guess myself. “Dan, you’ve got lots of experience making shots of that distance in club matches.”

Today I had in-hand my Browning Stainless Stalker A-Bolt in .260 Remington. This is one of my favorite rifles. I shoot it well and have utmost confidence in my ability to hit with it. The load I was hunting with was the Sierra 120 grain ProHunter at around 2800 fps. With this rifle and load, earlier this year I had bested the field in both the CF Rifle Silhouette Match and the Buckhunter’s Challenge. I knew that the rifle was sighted in nuts-on with this load. In addition, the rifle is equipped with a ballistic reticle scope that I took advantage of to make long range hits at the Silhouette match. But all of that was with low wind. It was today’s stiff wind that made me lose my confidence in the shot presented. So if this were the Buckhunter’s Challenge, I took a zero by declining the shot.

With the lost opportunity gnawing on me, I decided to try to get closer to where I last saw him by walking up canyon on my slope. I probably got about 100 yards farther up-canyon before being stopped by impenetrable brush and a side canyon. I returned to the chair at the OP.

As lunch rolled around I pulled another (full, unopened) MRE out of my pack and chowed down. With my mid-day hunger satisfied, I decided to hop in the Ranger and head up the quad trail to get to that other up-canyon lookout point that I could not reach by foot from the OP. The trail goes around the head of the side-canyon that stopped me earlier.

As usual, I had to fight through a maze of scrub oak, juniper and manzanita to reach the edge of the ridge that overlooked the canyon. I now had the OP about 200 yards to my right (east), and the elk position about 500 yards to the left (west). But now I was probably only about 200 yards from where the deer stood earlier today across the canyon to the north. Looking into some fresh slopes, this was a great new vantage point for me. I took a seat on the ground at the top of an open spot to sit and observe for the rest of the afternoon.

As the afternoon wore on and the sun was about to dip below the western ridge, I had not seen that buck again. I decided to go back to the OP to take down the naked canopy frame, and pack it up. At this point there were only two days left in the hunt, Saturday and Sunday. I might as well start putting things away.

As I fought my way through the maze to get back to the Ranger, I decided to dial the scope down to 3-power. There was a chance that I could jump a buck at close range as I worked my way through the jungle. I found the Ranger, stowed the rifle in the ATV scabbard, and drove back down to the OP.

After parking, as I walked down the slope to get to the OP, I slowed and looked across the canyon just in case there might happen to be a buck over there. Nope, saw nothing. I stood the rifle in a bush off to the side of the clearing because I didn’t want to knock it with the canopy frame as I wrestled it into submission.

First I pulled the stakes that had held the canopy down for these several days. Then I removed and stowed the guy lines. Then it was click-push-click-push to get it collapsed to fit in its backpack sized bag. I folded the canopy top and stuffed it in the bag too. I got it all zipped up and noticed that I probably still had about 15 minutes of light left in the day. I decided to plop my butt down in the chair, relax, and watch the day come to a close.

As I looked up canyon, I noticed the rifle out of the corner of my eye in the bush about three steps away. As I turned my head to scan down-canyon, I thought to myself that I need to grab that gun and put it on the canvas table beside me so that it’s in-reach. Then I saw the buck.

When I first noticed him, he was looking the other way. But as my eyes locked on and focused on him, he turned to look directly at me. I don’t know what animal-magic allows them to sense that they have been seen by a human.

Since I was sitting in the chair, I did not present a human silhouette to him. Plus the bushes in front of me probably hid everything from him except for my upper chest and head. I raised my butt just barely off the chair and crab-walked three steps to the left to reach the rifle. Then I crab-walked back and dropped my butt back into the chair.

There was a lot going on inside my head, but none of it took any time away from the process of putting the cross hairs on him and pulling the trigger very quickly. I ranged him by eyeball at about 200 yards. I sized up his rack and came to the conclusion that he was smaller than last year’s buck, but he was good enough to shoot. It was very likely that this was the same buck that I saw this morning. He was looking at me the whole time that this was going on, not understanding that he was about to be shot.

CRACK!! As soon as the crosshairs found the front half of his body, the rifle went off. He started moving away, but in a limping fashion. Work the bolt - swing into him as he moved – CRACK!! He’s down! As I often do at times like this, I talked to myself. “Now you’re in trouble, Dan.”

Due to the steepness of the slope down to the canyon bottom and the thick growth all over it, it wouldn’t be easy to go straight to him. The best way to get to him was to hop into the Ranger and drive down to the water hole, then hike back up-canyon to find him. Time was not on my side.

Using my guess of 200 yards, I tried to use the GPS to tell me when I was 200 yards from the OP. I searched and searched until it got dark but I could not find him. I tried to picture what I saw at the moment I fired when I was on the ground searching, but it didn’t help. Darkness came so I reached into my pack and donned a head lamp. I continued searching hoping that the beam would illuminate his eyes to help me find him. I searched for about another 20 minutes in the dark with no luck. I made the decision to abandon the search and come back in the morning ...