Was fortunate enough to harvest this nice bull at 12:01pm on opening day of the rifle hunt. My brother was hunting the same unit during the muzzleloader hunt and we spotted this bull on the last day of his hunt. He was on the move and we couldn't get any closer than 600 yds. We knew if we could find him on the opening day of rifle, he was a shooter.
Opening day of the rifle found us hiking 2 hours in the dark to our vantage point. We spotted 5 different bulls that morning that were all in the 285-320" range. Around 7am, I found our bull nearly 2.5 miles away feeding in a steep drainage. It took us nearly 4 hours to hike to the saddle where we thought we would be within 500 yds of where we last saw him. After setting up the spotter and glassing the steep hillside for over an hour, we found him in his bed. We knew it was just a waiting game at this point. At exactly 12:00 he stood up out of his bed. We hit him with the rangefinder and he was standing broadside at 465 yds. My first shot hit him solid and I fired off a second shot to make sure he wasn't going anywhere.
The packout was pure hell as we were over four miles from the nearest road and it took two trips to get everything off the mountain. We got the last loads of meat off the mountain at 9pm that evening.
Opening day of the rifle found us hiking 2 hours in the dark to our vantage point. We spotted 5 different bulls that morning that were all in the 285-320" range. Around 7am, I found our bull nearly 2.5 miles away feeding in a steep drainage. It took us nearly 4 hours to hike to the saddle where we thought we would be within 500 yds of where we last saw him. After setting up the spotter and glassing the steep hillside for over an hour, we found him in his bed. We knew it was just a waiting game at this point. At exactly 12:00 he stood up out of his bed. We hit him with the rangefinder and he was standing broadside at 465 yds. My first shot hit him solid and I fired off a second shot to make sure he wasn't going anywhere.
The packout was pure hell as we were over four miles from the nearest road and it took two trips to get everything off the mountain. We got the last loads of meat off the mountain at 9pm that evening.
