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Welcome to Cutting the Distance Field Reports, breaking news from the Elkwoods, and now your host, Jason Phelps.
Welcome to Cutting the Distance Field Report here. I just got done hunting Idaho with Garrett Bowen of Top Priority. Unfortunately, he had to run back home real quick for some work and then get ready for another hunt. So I'm just going to kind of wrap up what we saw here in Idaho myself. So we started the hunt on September 21st.
Bulls were bugling. One thing we did notice right out of the gate is that these bulls weren't necessarily locating from across canyons or they weren't locating from long distances. So as we kind of developed a strategy, we would hear them bugle, but they were bugling, I would say, kind of lackluster, a little bit on their own, weren't necessarily interested in responding to location bugles, to cow calls, etc.
Um, anything like that. So we realized early on, we were going to have to definitely, you know, no pun intended, cut the distance, get very, very close, um, in order for them to respond to our bugles. But what we did find, which was a little surprising is when we did cut the distance to, you know, under 300 yards, the bulls were very callable. Um, so that's kind of the quick summary of the hunt.
So on day one, you're right out of the gate. We, we climbed some distance. Um, one thing about these Idaho bulls, they, any, any stand of dark timber, um, surrounded by quakes, uh, seemed to hold elk. So that, that wasn't necessarily a problem. Uh, maybe not in large numbers, but we were always able to be an elk every morning and every evening. Uh,
The frustrating part was then getting them to do what we wanted to do. So back to opening morning, we climb up. We don't hear a lot opening morning. We were on the south side of a ridge, climb up. And as soon as we drop over the north side, we get there about 830. The canyon's lighting up. We've got what we assume to be the herd bull straight across from us. And we're assuming herd bull only because of, you know, the size of the beagle, the raft, the depth, all of those things.
We, he beagles three or four times on his own. We haven't even made a call to this point. And while we're making our approach based on the wind, we're trying to get down and under him. Um, so we can get across, uh, another bull beagles at 150 yards down the ridge. Um, we, we've got good enough wind on him that he won't win this set up to start cow calling. We set Garrett up, uh, you know, 50, 60 yards ahead of me, start to cow call, uh,
just like so many times on this trip, never to hear the elk again. And as I had mentioned earlier, we had multiple bulls going in this area, you know, a satellite near the herd bull, plus this bull that bugled on our side of the ridge. Once we cow called, we didn't hear any more elk from that point on. We didn't hear the elk within 150 yards of us. We didn't hear the elk across the canyon from us. We didn't hear the satellite across the canyon from us. So
A little bit of a frustrating start to how are we going to approach these elk.
So you kind of go back to drawing board and to piggyback on to Oregon, I'm really starting to question, is our system going to work? Are we going to locate elk? Are we going to get close? Are we going to cow call or bugle them in? Or are we going to have to continue to just spot and stalk and move in on these things? And that's not the why. It's not the reason why I'm out there in September. I want to call to bugling bulls that are interested in being tricked. So
I may have or may not have forgotten my elk tag in my office desk. So Garrett hunted that first day. We jumped off the mountain, drove back into town, got that all taken care of. Kind of sacrificed a night to just scouting. Where are the elk going to be? What should we do? And so we made the decision to
uh, you know, after looking at on X, um, we're going to, we're going to go in for, for two days or three days and two nights, we're going to spike in. Um, so that next morning, you know, we all loaded up. We take off at the trail at five. We get up there. Once again, we can hear bugles as we're hiking up the trail through some great elk country, but nothing, uh,
You hear a bugle, you stop and listen for it to bugle again, and we would wait, and we wouldn't hear a second or a third bugle. And you kind of start to lose confidence or faith in that bugle, and so we would leave it and move up. So by the time we finally get to where we want to set spike camp, we drop our camp, and we've had a bull bugle across the drainage a couple times, and we decide it's close enough to go after.
So we jump in on that one, and this is kind of where it all starts to come together is as we got close, this bull was very, very callable, very, very interactive. And so it kind of at that point had set the stage for, all right, these bulls are at least callable. And so we just learned at that point, these elk are going to be workable. We just have to get close.
so to fast forward, another thing, kind of an underlying theme of this whole hunt or, you know, back to back days is, is it gets closer to the end of September. Um, we expect the rut to start to pick up, uh,
And we would get a day, you know, we would get a day that was extremely, um, good, you know, multiple bulls calling on their own, um, responsive to calls. And for one reason or another, um, we could or couldn't, you know, we weren't able to make it work, but then we would show up in the same area, put all those eggs in the basket, um, on the next day. And for one reason or another, the, the area was dead, even though we could still, you know, spot the elk with our
with our binos or we would get enough responses throughout the day that we knew the elk were still there. They just weren't anything like they were the day before. And me wanting to break that down and understand why, I believe a lot of it is cows in the area, whether they're coming into estrus versus maybe they were taken care of or maybe that bull had pushed her off. I don't know what the reason is, but it was definitely...
kind of very cyclical and very quick. You wouldn't expect it to be on fire one day and dead the next day and then back on fire. So it was very frustrating to
maybe go in with certain expectations. But it's hunting. It's elk hunting. We've learned to just accept that the only thing that's certain is uncertainty when it comes to elk hunting. And you just had to deal with it. You still had to work hard. We still had to go find the elk. And once you did get close, they were definitely playable. One thing on some call-ins,
that is very, very hard for somebody that's elk calling. And I definitely had to test my patience a little bit more is in some of these timber patches, you can see a long ways and we would get bulls pretty fired up, you know, answering bugles, um, answering cow calls or the combination thereof and getting that bull worked up and, you know, stomping on his bugles, mimicking him, making sure that, that, you know, we're kind of setting the tempo, uh,
And then these bulls, when they got to 100 yards, would come in silent, which makes it very, very difficult, especially as we're trying to break brush. We're trying to fake rake in a tree, do some of those things that requires us to move. And then the bull to come in silent was a little bit difficult. And so we were setting the shooter up a little bit further, 50, 60 yards in front of whoever was calling and doing the raking, just so it would kind of...
you know, we would avoid drawing any attention to the shooter. But even then there were multiple times where as, as the raker and caller, I could see that bull playing his day and I would have to almost freeze, um, which I think can be a little confusing to an elk. You know, you've been raking and calling from a certain location for, for a set amount of time. And then all of a sudden you have to go completely silent. And that is due to,
One, you don't want to be seen. And number two, that bull can now see where he expects that bull or cow to be and things just don't add up. So I think that could have been a little bit of a detriment. I would have loved to set up in different locations or different spots so that we could have prevented that visual problem.
you know, visual location, uh, you know, visual identity from that bowl to where he expects a cow or bull to be. But, um, some of these, you know, big, big timbered slopes, the elk are where they are and you have to make do with what you can. But ideally we would have set up, you know, near terrain breaks, near vegetation breaks where we would have forced that bowl to pull through and then be at an archery range. So, um, yeah, silent bowls are very tough to deal with, especially when we're making decisions, um, on that. And then, um,
The other thing we struggled with a lot, which I've experienced more so in New Mexico where it gets very, very hot during the middle of the day. It was very hot in Idaho this past week. And so what we're getting is some good action from maybe 7 to 9 in the morning. And then the elk are in bed. You could tell when those bulls were on their feet bugling versus when they were now in their bed bugling by 9 o'clock.
15, 930, which makes it very difficult to hunt. You now...
you know, having to get within, you know, shooting distance of their bed. You've got multiple eyes looking at you, even if it's satellite bulls, you know, there's noise, there's brush, very, very dry, tough to stalk in without everything looking at you added some level of difficulty to this hunt. The other thing that we experienced on this hunt, which really kind of played out towards the end of the hunt is the high country in this unit was very, very dry. You know,
you know, what I would consider main creeks and main draws coming out of the high country were completely void of water. Um, which, you know, my normal thinking is if an elk can't, if I can't live here and elk's going to have trouble living here, you know, we weren't able to find wallows. We went and looked at Springs, you know, some of these things were just weren't coming up with any way for these things to drink.
What we noticed is that these elk were coming, you know, three to four miles down the water. They would water at night and then in the morning they would reverse that and it would be like a chase back up to the bedding. So after a couple of days of doing that, you know, at nighttime they would get out of bed, they would hang up on the mountain, they would do their feeding. But in the morning, if you wanted to chase these elk, it was more of a cat and mouse game as they went three to four miles back to where they wanted to bed.
So I think if we would have figured that out earlier and identified that, we could have intercepted them further up the mountain. But these elk are good at climbing mountains. They're climbing 1,500 to 2,000 feet every morning, and it's a definite chase. We've always got the wind in our favor. These elk are working into the wind. They're walking into the wind, but we're also chasing them.
So it's just kind of that cat and mouse game that can get very, very difficult. Like I said, if we could have identified that earlier, maybe went back to spiking out above them and intercepted them, it would have been a better play. Now, there would always be the issue of as they're walking up the hill in the morning, how do we keep our wind off to the side and make sure we don't get winded? But that's something we could have definitely dealt with, with just staying far enough off to the side or figuring out a right ridge to kind of intercept them.
So yeah, I think in my opinion, the rut is just starting to kick in. It's late September right now. Things are just starting to get cranking there. And I think they're going to, in Idaho, they're going to experience a better rut into the first part of October. And, you know, one thing I'm never one to say, oh, the rut's super late or use that as an excuse to justify, you know, maybe a hunting season that didn't go as I planned. But
I'm pretty confident that over the last four or five years with some of the later springs, some of the later winters and everything being set back, I am starting to maybe, you know,
come to terms with or settle on the idea that the rut is getting a little bit later, you know, at least over the last four or five years, you know, where we used to experience, you know, great red action starting September 10th on. And there are spots in the country, you know, where the rut is on fire by September 10th. So like I said, I just feel like the overall consensus is that it's moving back a little bit where we're getting a real, real strong peak of the rut, you know, September 30th to October 10th.
versus you know some of the areas i've hunted being you know september 20th or 30th so it's a very very small reset but from what i've seen in idaho um the rut is just getting going it's it's more consistent you know day-to-day is more action and uh yeah i think the rut's going to be strong into the middle of october this year but that's kind of our field report from idaho um it was a it was a good hunt i had a lot of action um quite a few bulls in at close range so uh
Yeah, overall a good hunt in Idaho. And yeah, appreciate you tuning in to Cutting Distance. Hopefully wherever you're at, the elk rut was going good and you found some success.
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