High Country Elk

Copying with Warm Weather and Added Elevation

- Jack Ballard

We were high, but our quarry was higher. Hunting a secluded drainage south of Jackson, Wyoming, with my elder brother, we were four days into an early fall adventure for elk. The day before the season opened, we pitched our camp at 7,500 feet. Heavily timbered, north facing slopes, stately groves of aspens shimmering in autumn yellow and grassy basins just above our bivouac appeared as ideal elk country. Yet three days of hunting found us appraising few of the large-racked quarry we sought, save a small herd discovered just before sunset.

On this day, we hoofed it up a winding trail onto a lengthy ridge, its pale top of short grass yielding to shady, timbered basins on either side. A bull had answered our bugles from one sylvan ravine. As my brother kept whistling, and air gushing past the elk’s ivories with occasional bugles of its own, I snuck through the timber to view an aggravated 5-point with curved, white-tipped antlers tending a few cows. It was a 6-point bull I’d have or nothing, or so I decided at the beginning of the hunt. I pointed my boots up the ridge, abandoning my hunting partner on a vague agreement to meet at the trail head by dark.

The day began cool, but by noon I was hunting comfortably in no outerwear save a thermal top. An afternoon ramble took me six miles down the wandering ridge line, each furrow in its treeless spine beckoning to the next pocket or deep ravine that might hold elk. In one shady hollow, an old outfitter’s camp was discovered. An overgrown refuse heap prickled with rusty cans with their decomposing sides yielding to a poked finger with a hole and flakes of oxidized iron. A moldering hitching rail nailed between two lodge poles revealed where the horses were tied. Just below the abandoned camp, I filled my water bottle from a spring gurgling between two mossy boulders where glowing, fallen aspen leaves floated in a bathtub-sized pool.