Oregon Hunters – Hunt Wyoming

for Antelope 2012!

Introduction on this story written by David K, aka DAK is the second on Antelope – Pronghorn, one being in 2010 on hunting in Oregon!   David is CFO for a major Oregon company!   CFO’s are like engineers and they are of course very analytical about everything, such as equipment and how they go about life.  My years of observation with buyers of RV’s or Sporting Goods has lead me to Dogma !   They have to do the Research!   So enjoy a real story from the “AVERAGE JOE”    Cobra

Back in 2010 my brother and I (with lots of advice from Frank) hunted antelope in Oregon’s South Wagontire unit.  It was a fantastic hunt and a great experience and we decided we just had to hunt antelope again soon.  The only problem was the 10+ years it takes to draw a tag in Oregon.  We started planning a trip to Wyoming.

My family has always hunted close to home.  As a kid, my father rarely hunted more than a few miles from the farm he grew up on.  Out-Of-State hunts were things that Eastman and Capstick and O’Connor wrote about in magazines.  My family’s hunting trips, if told honestly, sounded more like they were written by Patrick McManus, or Jeff Foxworthy.  But, that never discouraged us before and it was not about to this time.  We had a great time and learned a lot that will help us plan future trips.  In the hope that some of our experience might be helpful to other ambitious antelope hunters (and because Frank again gave me some advice that turned out to be golden) I’m passing this story on to him to pass on to all of you…

Note:  I got a fantastic buck in 2010 and had decided any mature buck would be what I was after.  My brother Brian had never hunted lopes but had studied them as a biologist.  Brian is a bit of an artist at heart and for him the experience of the hunt is a kind of art.  For him a B & C buck shot from the roadside would not be as meaningful as a small buck skillfully stalked in beautiful country.

Step #1 – Getting the tags.  This is surprisingly confusing!  Wyoming antelope tags are either “Any Antelope” or “Doe” tags.  Both of these have early and late season tags (4 possibilities).  These have “Special” draws (the tag costs more) and a “Regular” draw (8 options).  Each of these 8 options will have varying draw difficulties depending on the unit.  Once we figured all this out (not easy) we were able to put in for a “Special, Late, Buck” tag in a unit with good public land access and high draw odds.

Additional administrivia – In Wyoming if you were born before 1964, you have to have a hunter safety certificate.  You also have to have a “Resource License” in addition to your tag.  According to the local game warden these are things out-of-state hunters often miss.

Step #2 – Get good maps.  Frank advised me to get the Wyoming Plat Map for my Garmin GPS.  This shows the ownership blocks in addition to all the usual Topo Data and will jack into the computer so it can be viewed on a big screen.

Step #3 – Use the maps to figure out where in the unit to hunt.  Most Lope country in Wyoming is checkerboard private and BLM land.  You can only access the BLM land where public roads touch it and much of it is “landlocked”  The Topo maps showed some good big blocks of contiguous BLM land in parts of this unit.  The local game warden told me to sign up for the HMA’s.  These are Hunter Management Areas where the private landowners grant hunter access for those who sign up and agree to follow the ranch rules.  These HMA’s can be a few small blocks or 80 square miles, but you have to sign up for them online ahead of time.

So, we had tags, maps, a game plan, and 9 days to get it done (5 hunting days with 2 days travel each way).

Step #4 – Life gets in the way, deal with it…   A few days before the hunt Brian (my brother) finds out that his girlfriend’s mom’s boyfriend has passed away and the funeral is Saturday.  His girlfriend also has an appointment in Portland the Monday after the hunt and he will need to driver her there on Sunday.  Two days gone and the window is narrowing but we still have time for a good hunt.

Saturday evening after the service we get the camper shell mounted on Brian’s truck and find out the lights don’t work (mechanical difficulties have always figured prominently in our mis-adventures so this is no surprise).  After a few trips to the hardware store we have it fixed and are on the road.  Brian tells me his girlfriend’s Uncle Joe who came to the service had a nasty cold and he’s hoping he doesn’t come down with it.  We head east and, of course, he is coughing and sneezing before we hit Spokane.

We got as far as the Montana border before we had to pull over and sleep Saturday night.  We drove all day the next day (Brian coughed, sneezed, dripped and went through two boxes of Kleenex and a multitude of cold meds but he is tough and takes his hunting seriously) and by 10:00 Sunday night had reached the northern edge of our hunt unit.

Lesson #1 – Allow a full two days for the drive or you will miss some beautiful country and start your hunt already tired.

Got up Monday morning and headed into one of the big blocks of BLM land.  Once you get off the highway the two-tracks that go through this BLM land are pretty rutted out and can turn to soup when it rains.  Everything was dry, but we didn’t want to push the truck too hard with a camper shell on top.

The BLM blocks had lots of Lopes.  We must have counted 50 in just 5 hours of hiking.  Three looked like decent bucks but all these animals were hyper alert and very skittish.  We saw a couple hunter’s camps in the distance and all the two-tracks had seen ATV traffic.

Lesson #2 – For the best hunting, find places the ATV’s can’t go or are not allowed too go.  The biologist had told me the same thing – get away from the ATV’s.

The wind in Wyoming is fierce.  During our whole trip it blew almost all the time at anywhere from 20 to 40MPH.  I had expected wind, but this was unreal.  Blowing dust, OK.  Blowing sand, still OK.  But blowing gravel was something I had never experienced.  This wind has all kinds of implications for how you hunt and the kind of gear you bring.

Lesson #3 – Plan for high winds, they affect EVERYTHING.

We headed to the southern end of the unit to hunt one of the HMA’s where no ATV’s are allowed.

On the way we probably saw another 100 or so antelope from the county road.  I turned on the Garmin GPS with the Plat Map.  Most of these animals were on private blocks, but some were on public land that had enough cover for a stalk but they were mostly younger bucks and we had just started to hunt.  A GPS with the Plat Map that tells you EXACTLY what is and is not public land opens up huge areas that can’t otherwise be hunted without the risk of a trespass issue.  These checkerboard lands often hold less pressured animals because ATV’s don’t go there (a one square mile block is not enough space to make deploying the 4 wheelers worthwhile).  Thanks for the advice on the maps Frank.

On the way to the HMA boundary we noticed a lone doe on the other side of the fence that paralleled the road.  She was running in circles about 200 yards ahead of us and acting nuts.  Then we saw her fawn, also about 200 yards ahead, and on our side (the wrong side) of the fence.  We had just driven past the gap in the fence and the two of them were separated.  We backed up 500 yards, but neither of them would come back to the fence gap.  We figured the only option was to get up some speed and blow past them and the fawn could work his way back then.  As we approached the fawn, he crossed the road in front of us and started to run parallel about 50 yards off the road and ahead of us.  Brian pushed the gas till the meter read 45 MPH and the potholes just about shook the truck apart and that fawn kept pace with us for the next mile till we hit another fence line and he circled back to join mom.  This fawn was all of 5 months old.

Once in the HMA we saw two big groups of 20+ animals which looked to hold a couple mature bucks.  They were a mile or so off when we spotted them and if we had not had just a couple hours of daylight left we would have tried a stalk.  We decided to come back the following morning and see if we could locate one of these bands again.

Following a county road back to town, just at dusk, we spotted another small band that had a buck in it.  They were following a fence line toward a waterhole to the south and would cross the road ahead of us if they continued.  The Garmin GPS showed them to be on public land.  In the low light I couldn’t get a good idea of the buck’s horns, but he had a dark cheek patch, heavy bases I was sure about, and was a big bodied animal.  Brian stopped the truck and I decided to have a go at him.

I bailed out and worked into a position where they would pass by at about 250 yards which was a distance I had practiced at.  I got seated, put the rifle on the bog-pod and let them get a little closer.  Based on the estimated wind speed and direction I figured about a foot of hold off.  Just as the shot broke, a sudden gust pushed me off by a good 2 feet (fortunately forward of him and a clean miss).  Even sitting from a bi-pod the gusts were nasty enough to affect aim severely, see Lesson #3.

I figured they would blow out of there like scaled cats.  Their reaction was exactly nothing.  They stared in my direction and in the dim light I don’t think they knew exactly what I was.  My dad taught us when you fire a shot you have to assume a hit and you are committed to finish what you started.  At the next shot the buck hunched up and staggered showing he was hit hard and then he lay down with his head still up.  The does were still staring but did not run even now.  My third shot rolled him over.  I had no clue why they had not run at the first shot, but my tag was filled.

Antelope are beautiful animals and I’ve always thought their horns were elegant and graceful.  As Brian and I approach this animal I discovered he was possibly the ugliest antelope I’d ever seen.  This was an old buck with stained and worn teeth who was more than a few years past his prime.  He was big in the body, with a broad, scarred nose from fighting over does.  His horns were heavy and gnarly at the bases, but the tips were chipped and splintered and the prongs were broken and abraded back almost to the main beams.  This old boy was too old to win his fights and not smart enough to know it.  I think this was a cool trophy in a different way and I was pretty happy about it.

We got him dressed out and in game bags.  We stowed these on top of the camper for the night to let the wind cool them.  Field dressing an animal in a 30 mile wind is a huge hassle, see Lesson #3.  By the time we finished it was late and we decided to camp right there and make a plan in the morning.  Brian coughed and sneezed all night in spite of the cold meds.

In the morning we decided to hunt back through the HMA and head back to town and see if we could get some dry ice to keep the meat cool.  We spotted two bucks, one of them nice, on a block of public land off the county road.  Brian bailed out and I drove on about a half mile to where the truck was out of sight, grabbed my spotting scope, and got to the top of a small rise to watch the action.

The Lopes were about 700 yards from where Brian bailed out and there were some deep gullies leading in their direction.  Brian used the gullies to get within 300 yards and crawled through the sage to work closer.  He got within 200 yards, took a bead on the larger of the two, and decided he wanted to get closer.  At 190 yards they busted him and blew out.  200 yards is a make-able shot for Brian.  I suspected this stalk just wasn’t the sort of hunt, the sort of memorable experience, that he had in mind and later he admitted as much.

For my father, hunting was about putting meat in the freezer and I often find myself thinking that way.  Over the years I’ve come a good ways towards seeing it the way Brian does.

Moving into the HMA, we spotted one the bands from the day before.  They were bedded on a bench on the other side of GW creek from the road about a mile away.  Just seeing the truck stop to glass made them nervous and they started to work away from us toward some knobs on the low ridge above them to the north.  There was at least one mature buck in the group.  I thought our odds of catching up with them were pretty slim, but this was the hunt Brian was looking for and he thought we could do it.

We drove 2 miles further up the road and parked.  Brian’s plan was to head north, cross GW creek and climb the ridge on the other side, then work our way west toward the knobs they had been headed for.  He thought that if they hadn’t totally blown out, they might be feeding and bedding behind the knobs out of the worst of the wind.

In the creek bottom we discovered an old mining claim.  I don’t know what they were mining for but the tailing’s had lots of red, orange, and pink Jasper.  We pocketed some of the prettiest pieces for our nieces.  We also discovered this country has lots of prickly pear cactus in spots.  This stuff grows low to the ground, is well camouflaged, and has needles 1-1/2 inches long.  It can make a stalk very painful in country where there is no good cover and you have to crawl to get closer.

The wind really started to howl as we crested the ridge and worked our way west.  Brian’s nose would drip and the wind would pick it up and blow it back onto his glasses so he had to wipe them off regularly.  The guys who write articles for hunting magazines never mention this kind of stuff.

Coming up around the shoulder at the base of the first knob I saw the backs and ears of lopes feeding just over the crest of a shallow rise on the other side of a very shallow wash.  I grabbed Brian (who saw them just about then) and we hit the dirt.

Brian stripped off his day pack and crawled on hands and knees down into the wash and up the rise on the other side while I fished out my camera (with good zoom) and took pictures.  As he neared the top of the rise he went down on his belly and scooted forward on toes and elbows, 4 inches at a time, till he could see the lopes.  He stripped off his binos so they wouldn’t scrape on the ground as he crawled forward.  His hat kept trying to blow off his head and go sailing across the prairie toward Sheridan (which would probably have spooked the antelope).  He belly crawled the last 50 yards.

There were a dozen does and 2 young bucks, one of which looked respectable, but no sign of the larger buck yet.  But, every little wrinkle of terrain in county like this can hide animals.  Brian took a bead on the bigger of the young bucks but just then noticed the back of an animal with his head down feeding down the next wash off to his left.  Might this be the larger buck?  Just then the young buck put his head up and stared hard at Brian.  On his belly, he would not have looked like a person or a predator, but he did look like a strange lump on the ridgeline that was not there before and might possibly have moved.  The smaller buck and a doe stared at him also and he figured he’d better take the shot now.  Just then the larger buck fed out into the clear.  Brian took him with one perfect shot at about 100 yards.  From where I was laying about 150 yard away the sound of the shot from Brian’s 30-06 was little more than a muffled pop.  The wind just whipped the sound away.  Another mystery solved.  The buck I took didn’t react at the sound of the first shot because he barely heard it over the 35 MPH wind.  Brian’s buck was a beautiful animal with long hooks and graceful curving prongs and the stalk and the country were classic.

We got his buck dressed and caped and packed it three miles back to the truck.  In addition to the GPS Plat Map, another piece of gear that was really golden was the “Just One” pack.  It is one of those wing style packs that folds down to a low riding day pack but when the main compartment is expanded will let you add 4 quarters, backstraps’, and a cape and head very comfortably.

Brian sneezed and coughed and went through 2 boxes of Kleenex on the way home and somewhere near Billings the grill over the camper’s refrigerator service port was torn off by the wind and went sailing away.  These things happen to Average Joes so we don’t start thinking we are Eastman or Capstick or O’Connor.  But, even those guys would have approved of how Brian got his antelope.  DAK aka David