Successful Hunting

Just wanted to let you know in case you did not know already… The 2011 British Columbia Limited Entry Hunting draw has been run and the results are posted online here:

http://www.env.gov.bc.ca/fw/wildlife/hunting/resident/leh.html#Status

Unfortunately this "hunter’s christmas" I did not get any of my draws which were for: Moose, Deer, Sheep, and Elk. I hope you all had better luck than me. At least in British Columbia there is a lot of oppertunities for hunting open seasons. I will probably head up to the alpine and hunt some mule deer in the early season and then maybe try for some elk and moose later as the season progresses.

October 4th 2010- The drive out east to the Kootenays took approximately 9 hours to get into our hunting spot.

October 5th- Logging trucks coming in around 3:00am to start their day and ours I guess.

6:15 am- large and wide 5×5 bull elk in logging slash with nice chocolate antlers and white tips.(6pt or better season) .

9:00 am- 2 White tail does.

4:00pm- Black Bear.

Oct 6

6:30am- 2 Mule deer does.

5:15pm- 1 4×4(single eye guards)bull elk with 4 cows.

Oct 7

7:45am- wt doe.

8:30am- 4 wt does.

Moved camp for night to different location due to heavy logging.

4:15pm- 4 cow elk.

4:30pm- 1-5×5 bull elk with a tiny sticker (not quite legal) and 1 cow.

4:45pm- 2 cow elk.

5:15pm- 1 cow elk.

5:40pm- 1 wt doe.

6:39pm- 1 wt buck w/ doe. (past legal shooting light)

Oct 8

7:58am- 2 Wt does.

8:12am- 4 cow elk.

9:00am- 4 cow elk.

9:15am- 2 wt does.

12:05pm-2 wt does.

1:22pm- 1 wt doe.

4:00pm- 3 cows.

7:15pm 4 wt does.

Oct 9 (back to original spot)

7:00am- 2 wt does w/ 1 WT buck (I took him as it was the first oppertunity at a legal animal)

8:30am-2 wt does w/ mature wt buck.(just my luck, right after I cut my wt buck tag there is a monster in front of me. Re-taught me a lesson-you cant take the big ones while you are skinning the little ones).

Oct 10 (wt does open up)

3:00pm- 3 wt does( I harvest one, my hunting partner harvests one).

3:40pm-4 wt does cross the road.

6:20pm- 3 mule deer does with one small mule deer buck. By the time we identified the buck it was too dark and approximately 200 yards away.

We break camp and get some sleep. Wake up at 2:00am and start heading home for thanksgiving dinner. We ended up seeing a couple of cougars at 3:00am crossing the highway. We got home at around 11:00am and brought our game to the butcher and had a great thanksgiving.

With my Elk Hunting trip coming up I thought I would work up my load a bit to see what type of results I can get. I loaded my .300 WM casing with 71 grains of IMR 4831 powder and topped it off with a 168 grain Barnes TSX bullet. I took 3 shots @ 100,200, and 300 yards. My grouping was 1" at 200 yards, and 2" at 300 yards with an overall bullet drop of 6" from 100 to 300 yards. It is an improvement over my last seasons round which included 70 grains of powder.

Mid August was upon me and I had an archery hunt planned for the 1st week of September. I decided to go and scout around the places I was planning to hunt. I first talked with hunters and checked my maps to find good areas along with the hunting regulations to find the most hunting oppertunities.

My wife and I drove to the hunting grounds and scouted around. We spotted an abundance of whitetail deer, some mule deer, and at dusk we came accross 2 bull elk. Mind you these were not herd bulls but they had at least 5 countable points on each side of their racks. This was close to where I shot my elk 2 years ago so I felt this spot would do just fine.

I also filmed these bulls so I was quite happy about that. I will have to upload my video footage of my scouting trip to share it with you all.

If anyone would like some Scouting Tips for Elk Hunting be sure to click the link.

I recently watched this elk calling video and practiced my elk bull and cow calls before heading up the mountain after ivory tipped beasts. The video has some good instruction but also has alot of fluff. You get your calling sounds and tips to make the calls perform well but you have to put up with some cheesey sales pitches and overpraise of the owner himself awgling his calls. All in all I would say this is a good video for learning elk calls so go ahead and watch it just ignore the over zealous Mr. Primos. 3/5.

to buy: https://shop.primos.com/pc-636-64-mastering-the-art-guide-to-calling-elk-dvd.aspx

I sat down and plugged in The Truth 9 Big Bulls from Primos to brush up on some elk hunting tips before heading out on my archery elk hunt and I realized that its a pretty darn good elk hunting video. There is 10 hunts featured on the DVD and kills with muzzle loader and archery. It is neat to see the close encounters of the hunters with the elk. I recommend this elk hunting video to anyone interested in the sport as it will give you a good idea of what elk hunting is about along with some hunting tips. I give this DVD a 4/5.