17 October 2013, 08:48
ChezAntelope and Elk Report
I ended up drawing 2 Antelope tags this year. One in Wyoming and one in my home province of Alberta. The schedule worked out for back to back hunts which was great fun.First up was Wyoming. My brother came down with me to run the camera. We were hunting south of Casper on a huge ranch. There were tons of antelope which made for non-stop action with the binos and spotting scope but we never found any giant bucks. On the last day I took a heavier horned buck that I had seen previously. Obviously we had a bunch of snow which made it a pretty unique Antelope hunt. It was a great time and I will be putting in the draw down there again for sure.
We made made good time on the 1000 mile drive back home to get in a day of spotting prior to the Alberta opener. We had been watching one particular buck all summer and hoped to find him again right where we left him. He was still in the same area but he had attracted a fair bit of attention from other hunters so we knew we would not be alone in our hunt for him. I was thrilled to have my son with me on the Alberta hunt. He had been with me on some of the scouting trips and he was really excited to be there for opening day. I pulled him out of Kindergarten for a couple days to join us. We watched the buck until dark on the night before the opener. The next morning turned out to be quite a chess match with other hunters but we got lucky to find him first and I made the shot count. It was a 10 year wait for an Alberta tag for me. I was really happy to close it on this guy.
With the Alberta Antelope hunt done early, my focus changed to my Dad's Elk tag. Dad had waited a very long time for this tag and late in the summer he developed some serious back problems. He had back surgery in September and at that point I was pretty sure he would not be able to hunt for his Elk at all and the tag would go unfilled. He did make good progress in late september and got the green light from his doc to do more driving and walking. Luckily this is a prairie hunt and is usually not overly physical. The hard part is finding a good bull outside of the giant protected area where they spend 99.9% of their time. We got extremely lucky to find a big bull with a harem of cows in the hunting area while glassing one morning. I was so exctied after finding them in the binos, i could barely get them located in the spotting scope with my trembling hands. We made a 2 hour stalk / belly crawl to get in position and when the bull stood up, Dad was on him and dropped him straight back down. It is by far my Dad's best bull and certainly one of my greatest hunting experiences.
