12AWEST Late hunt ???

[Blackknight]

Any pictures or stories on the success taken in the Kaibab late hunt???????

 

[CAelknuts]

I made a post on another thread about the east side hunt, which was very, very tough hunting. I don't know much about how the west side hunt went, other than the biologist at Jacob Lake told us they'd checked out way more deer from the west side, given the relative number of tags each side offers, than the east. Most of the bucks were said to be 2-4 year old deer on the west, as well as the east side, with only a small number of older deer. They did, however, show us a picture of a west side buck that was 37" wide and had something like 10 or 12 points per side. It was an incredible buck, but they didn't tell us of any other monster bucks. We heard a rumor of a 40" non-typical shot on the east side from a hunter who was leaving, but when we asked the check station about it, they knew nothing of any buck even remotely close to that caliber from the east side.

The best buck we heard of from the east side scored 195, and was right at 30". I doubt there was a single other 30" buck shot on the east side. A guided hunter shot it the first morning, after another hunter had missed it four times just a few minutes earlier. The guide told me that hunter needed 8 shots to get it. Most of the hunters that tagged out in the first four days shot small to medium sized bucks.

On the evening of the fourth day, we got a huge wind storm that knocked over quite a few tents and ripped a couple wall tents to shreds. The hunting was pretty much in the tank on Tuesday and Wednesday due to very high winds. I'm guessing gusts on Monday night of 50-60 mph with steady winds of 25-30 all night where we were camped. One poor fellow was camping alone just up the road from us, and on Tuesday morning his big wall tent was compelety shredded and his camp looked like it belonged in Louisiana after Katrina. We stayed at Cliff Dwellers on Tuesday and Wednesday nights just to get a good nights sleep, but we talked to several other hunters who had to sleep in their pickups for the last half of the hunt due to their tents being wrecked by the wind. Our tent survived all the wind, but we went to Cliff Dwellers to get some sleep those couple nights instead of hanging on to everything and hoping our camp would survive.

I don't think the east side probably produced more than 5 or 6 bucks that grossed over 175 from what we saw in camps or what we learned from the biologist at the check station when we left on Saturday afternoon. My son shot the only good buck he saw during the entire hunt, on Friday afternoon. It grossed just a bit over 188, and we were damned lucky to get him. It was, literally, the only buck we saw that was older than a 3 or 4 year old deer. Most of the bucks shot were 2 to 4 year old deer. We're very glad to have had a chance to do this hunt, but it was very, very tough trophy hunting. There were still 8-10 hunters looking for deer on the east side when we left at noon yesterday.

Sorry I can't provide more info about how the west side did. I'll try to post pictures of my son's buck in a day or two when I get them downloaded from the camera.