Rocky Mountain Magic

Tommy Garner

I lightly touched the focus ring on the 10x binoculars to see the elk more clearly. I watched as the 5 x 5 bull stretched his neck out and bugled. Many seconds later the faint, eerie, high-pitched bugle of the bull on the distant mountainside floated through the thin Rocky Mountain air. If there is a call of the wild, it has to be the sound of a rutting bull elk when he bugles, telling the whole world that he is the king of his domain.

I contemplated the situation before departing my elevated perch atop the huge granite boulder. There were several other bulls which I could hear bugling in the distance, but they were in the bottom of a canyon to the east where Roger Hedgepeth had gone earlier in the evening. Roger, who owns Archery USA in Springfield, MO, and I had hunted together enough that I could recognize his bugle from those of the elk which he no doubt was working. Not that Roger's bugle didn't sound like an elk because it did. It was the bulls which were bugling that had a distinctively different sound to them. They were growlers with very deep voices. The one bull sounded more like a Black Angus bull with his tail in a combine. I seriously considered the fact that if Roger didn't get an arrow in one of the bulls in a hurry they might beat him up.

I took a deep breath of chilled mountain air as I descended the mountaintop in pursuit of the distant bull. It would be dark in an hour and I figured it would take me almost that long just to reach the park where I last saw the bull chasing a cow above timberline. My feet hurt with every step because of the huge blisters I had gotten two days before. One of the other hunters in camp, Reggie and I got caught in an early snowstorm that took on blizzard conditions. If the ground had been frozen when the snow started there would have been four feet of snow on the ground before it quit. Later, we learned that there were hunters in the same area which were camped at a higher elevation and they had to be air lifted out. Reggie and I had been looking for a cow elk he had shot right at dark the evening before on a distant mountainside. We left camp before daylight to reach the place where Reggie shot the elk and hopefully recover it before the storm hit. Soon after leaving camp the wet, heavy snow started to fall. For whatever reason, I had a rain jacket but no rain pants. Each glob of wet snow that hit my legs went through my jeans to the skin. That wasn't too bad, but eventually my heavy wool socks began to act as a wick and pull the water into my boots. That in itself was not bad either until we found the elk which we spent the next two hours butchering and boning out. Of course, now we were walking and leading our horses. There was a foot or more of snow on the ground, the scrub oak brush, the blue spruce trees, quaking aspens and other trees were bending under the load and it was not possible to walk or ride anywhere without almost being consumed by the snow which was also falling in wet, cotton ball sized flakes. I would not have been any wetter if I had jumped in one of the many nearby beaver ponds.

Our horses were doing a good job of navigating in the snow-covered mud until we had to go down a steep mountainside. During a break in the heavy snow, we spotted two big bulls in a park fringed by black timber below us on the mountain. The pair of bulls were awesome in the snow. The smaller of the two had a very dark mane, but was yellow from his shoulders back to his rump. Today I can still see them trotting out of the park with their antlers laid back, almost touching their flanks and disappearing in the swirling snow. It was as though they were an apparition, which appeared for a few seconds and then vanished, maybe a figment of our imaginations.

Just after seeing the bulls, my horse lost his footing and fell down. Floundering wildly in an attempt to regain his footing and neighing in a high pitched squeal, the big sorrel slid down the trail. I screamed at Reggie and he jumped to the side just before my horse hit his horse full force, knocking it off its feet also. Now both horses were headed down the steep, slick, snow covered mountain trail on their sides, backs, noses and rumps. Watching this scene unfold before my eyes, I felt as helpless as I ever have in my life. I felt an unfamiliar wave of sickening panic begin to grip my inner being. We were more than twelve miles from the closest road, we were in a blizzard, I had been soaked for the last five hours and had already began to shiver uncontrollably, knowing I was in the early stages of hypothermia and now our horses were tumbling off the mountain in the snowstorm. Things had gone very bad very quickly.

Fortunately, the horses managed to stop their descent off the mountain and regain their feet. They were terribly shaken, gear and bags of elk meat were strewn for several yards, saddles were hanging in the wrong places, but there were no serious injuries like broken legs. Reggie and I resaddled and repacked everything in the blinding snow as we gave thanks to the Lord that neither we nor the horses were injured. Being a seasoned outdoorsman, Reggie knew I was in trouble. We discussed the fact that our spike camp was two miles closer than our main camp and I had dry clothes and rain pants there. We changed courses and headed for the spike camp where I dried off before crawling into a warm sleeping bag. I told my friend that I felt if I stayed at the spike camp I could recover from the shock, which was racking my body. He stayed close for an hour or more before heading back to the main camp for the night. Sometime later in the evening as the storm diminished its fury, I finally stopped shaking and drifted off to sleep. With some sleep and rest, I regained my composure but my feet had suffered a lot of damage from the long trek in the wet wool socks.

The next day I simply put my wet boots back on over dry wool socks but my feet hurt with every step and this was my hesitation on pursuing the bull on the distant mountainside. I almost didn't have another mountain pursuit left in me at that point. It had been a grueling, difficult deep wilderness pack hunt, one of the toughest of my life. I was in top physical condition when I left home but lost eleven pounds during the course of the hunt. We would be breaking camp tomorrow at midday and packing out. Reggie had killed a cow and Roger would arrow one of the big bulls bugling in the canyon before the evening was over.

Almost an hour later, in the last fleeting moments of shooting light I caught up with the big 5 x 5 bull but blew the shot by misjudging the distance. I attempted to dig my Rocky Mountain Razor broadhead out of the quaking aspen tree in the edge of the park but finally gave up and unscrewed the XX78 arrow shaft before heading back to camp in the dark. I would leave Colorado without the big bull in the park or any other elk this time. I would lose the bottoms of my feet in the shower upon arriving home. It would take months for my feet to make a full recovery, I would never get the strange smell out of my boots but I retained ten wonderful days filled with the wonders of nature's splendor and beauty indelibly imprinted in my spirit, the sight of the bulls in the snowstorm, the giant 6 x 6 mulie buck that I never caught up with, the 5 x 5 chasing the cow in the park, the multiple strings of elk on the mountainsides every morning and evening, the massive herd of elk that contained more than eighty bulls, cows and calves as they fed through the scrub oaks on the mountain crest, the record class bull on the mountaintop, enduring nature's furious snowstorm and many more memories that will last me for a lifetime. Though I don't have an elk or mule deer rack from that hunt hanging on the wall, it was one of the most memorable experiences I have ever had. That's why I go back again and again, enduring the difficulties and challenges involved in a self guided, pack-in wilderness bowhunt deep in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It is simply Rocky Mountain Magic!