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Well, here it is the middle of 1st Elk season, and I here I sit in the kitchen sipping coffee and typing on the forum.
Since I live in Waldport, and often work in the woods, I get a pretty good exposure to the Elk all year. This year I picked four likely spots and walked them out pre-season. One seemed really likely to produce, a low ridge with a lot of N facing gullies and canyons, and a game trail like a sidewalk. Scrapes, scat, prints, broken ferns, the whole deal. No ribbons or flagging, no boot prints.
I didn't see many elk on the river flats and down close to the beach (the kids and I have found elk prints on the sand a few times) in the days preceeding the hunt, so I figured they must have moved into the gullies and the dark timbered ridges.
I got up at 5am Saturday, and the pressure was't as high as I feared, but there were still a lot of trucks in the woods. Fortunately, I had located the ridge I wanted with GPS, and the launchpoint looked like a random spot on the road, so no one was there. I put in 24 walking/glassing hours in the last 48 hours, and man am I beat. I didn't see any animals, except a little doe I jumped. I saw several hunters, I am surprised how few guys wear orange. By that I mean, of the four hunters I saw or glassed with my binoculars, I was the only one wearing orange. I saw where somebody chased elk perpendicular to my ridge. It looked like somebody drove a roto-tiller out of a gully, across the ridge I was on, and down the other side. The hunter had flagged pink ribbons every hundred feet or so... I wonder if he got one?
Most of the trucks were parked at the heads of gullies and canyons to N and S of my ridge, I really thought somebody might push an animal up to me, but no luck. I figured with those guys beating the bottomland, and me being quiet and slow, I could just still hunt the ridge... both nights I came out of the woods wearing my headlamp, empty handed, and all the other rigs were gone.
My back and shoulders are sore, and I'm definitely tired. I think today I am going to change it up, and just drive to every landing and cut where I've ever seen elk and glass for a while, and just do short walks of a mile or so. That, coupled with the late start today, should give me a chance to rest up a bit, and then I will try one of the other areas I looked at tomorrow. The weather is calling for heavy rains and gusts up to 40mph, sustained winds, makes using binoculars a drag.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Since I live in Waldport, and often work in the woods, I get a pretty good exposure to the Elk all year. This year I picked four likely spots and walked them out pre-season. One seemed really likely to produce, a low ridge with a lot of N facing gullies and canyons, and a game trail like a sidewalk. Scrapes, scat, prints, broken ferns, the whole deal. No ribbons or flagging, no boot prints.
I didn't see many elk on the river flats and down close to the beach (the kids and I have found elk prints on the sand a few times) in the days preceeding the hunt, so I figured they must have moved into the gullies and the dark timbered ridges.
I got up at 5am Saturday, and the pressure was't as high as I feared, but there were still a lot of trucks in the woods. Fortunately, I had located the ridge I wanted with GPS, and the launchpoint looked like a random spot on the road, so no one was there. I put in 24 walking/glassing hours in the last 48 hours, and man am I beat. I didn't see any animals, except a little doe I jumped. I saw several hunters, I am surprised how few guys wear orange. By that I mean, of the four hunters I saw or glassed with my binoculars, I was the only one wearing orange. I saw where somebody chased elk perpendicular to my ridge. It looked like somebody drove a roto-tiller out of a gully, across the ridge I was on, and down the other side. The hunter had flagged pink ribbons every hundred feet or so... I wonder if he got one?
Most of the trucks were parked at the heads of gullies and canyons to N and S of my ridge, I really thought somebody might push an animal up to me, but no luck. I figured with those guys beating the bottomland, and me being quiet and slow, I could just still hunt the ridge... both nights I came out of the woods wearing my headlamp, empty handed, and all the other rigs were gone.
My back and shoulders are sore, and I'm definitely tired. I think today I am going to change it up, and just drive to every landing and cut where I've ever seen elk and glass for a while, and just do short walks of a mile or so. That, coupled with the late start today, should give me a chance to rest up a bit, and then I will try one of the other areas I looked at tomorrow. The weather is calling for heavy rains and gusts up to 40mph, sustained winds, makes using binoculars a drag.
I'll let you know how it goes.
