LAST EDITED ON Oct-19-05 AT 03:30PM (MST)[p]First of all I want to thank dakodakid, who's insight really helped on this hunt. Sorry we didn't get to meet but thanks a lot!
Well this trip actually started last year. I drew an antelope tag on a unit that is pretty much all private land. Through a friend of a friend we had access to one of the most beautiful ranches I have ever seen. As some of you know I was very lucky and was able to take a monster 82 4/8? B&C pronghorn. Well my friend, who was friend of a friend with the rancher, is not a real serious hunter so he dropped the ball in lining up the hunt again this year. As we were driving to and from the ranch last year I remember seeing plenty of antelope on the other side of the highway that divided our zone into a different zone. Just out of curiosity I looked up some land status maps when I got home. Turns out those antelope were all on BLM land, and furthermore, most of that unit is public land.
So that started it all. My brother and I applied not really thinking we had a chance to beat the 18-20% draw odds. We got lucky and drew. I was really excited to hunt with my little bro who has recently been severely bit by the hunting bug.
With a few BLM maps, we arrived at the airport the afternoon before opening day and picked up our 4X4 SUV rental. Knowing nothing about this huge zone other than the small sliver of land where I saw goats last year, that is where we headed first. I really just wanted to learn some of the roads and get a starting point. We were immediately blessed with antelope sightings. They were literally everywhere we looked. We checked out several groups and saw plenty of animals but not any mature bucks. I immediately got the feeling this would be a hunt where we would see more quantity than quality. The roads were a bit tricky from some lingering rain but we managed to get by OK with the SUV. Thankfully it was drying out.
Several miles into our drive we came to a nice valley and I stopped to glass. Sure enough I pick up antelope right away. There is a good buck with several does and he is bedded down. This is the first mature buck we have seen so we mark his location on the GPS for future reference.
We continue on and right about last light, we find another large group of antelope. I get the spotter out and we see the best buck of the day. He was also with another mature buck that was just a bit smaller. So finally, we have at least two good bucks and one decent one, located and have a place to start the next day.
?Does it ever get light here??
Not knowing what time it got light, we woke at 4:30 am and were out the door for the 45 minute drive to our chosen spot. It's pitch black when we arrive, so we wait, and wait, and wait. Finally it's almost 7:00 and we get some grey light. We hike out to our ridge that overlooks the pasture where we saw the goats the last night. As it begins to get light, I spot antelope bedded down several hundred yards out. I keep looking and find the lesser of the two bucks off to our left. Then I find the bigger one out in front of us about 600 yards. We get closer before it gets completely light. There is a small ridge in between us and the goat and we decide we need to get there. On our bellies we go. Once we get behind the crest of the small ridge we can get up somewhat and do the crouched over stalk up to the crest. I slowly crawl up while Taylor stays behind. I spot the goat and then set up the Zeiss. He looks pretty good, not too long, but good mass and fairly decent prongs. I range him at 250 yards and crawl back down the slope to pow-wow with Taylor on the other side. We deliberate for a little while since it's only the first day of the hunt. Taylor crawls up and checks him out in the Zeiss. He comes back and says he wants to get closer and kill that buck. This could be his first animal with horns so he was really excited. He?d never even seen a pronghorn in real life before. I fire up the video camera and crawl back up to the rise and start rolling. I figure there is no way for him to get up and over this rise without the buck spotting him. Somehow, he does it though, and gets back down in the sage. Like a weathered veteran, he belly crawled right in on that buck. He easily got within about 125 yards. Just like we practiced, he rolled over on his back, took one strap off his backpack, then rolled over on his other side and took the other strap off. With a good solid rest, I thought this would be a slam dunk. The buck never knew we were there and was casually feeding. I see Taylor getting ready to shoot. BOOM!!!! No reaction from the buck. It runs 50 yards and stops looking back. BOOM! It's up and running again, and so is Taylor. He is trying to get an angle on the buck when it stops again. BOOM! He flattened it! His arm goes in the air with a celebratory fist pump and I let out a holler too. We walk up there and Taylor is stoked, grinning from ear to ear. It's a pretty good buck, and for a first one, on public land that we previously knew nothing about, it's a darn fine buck. We get him gutted and start the dragging. We get about half way and I leave Taylor to go get the vehicle and drive it closer. I run into a WY GFD warden on the way to the truck. He checks my tag and I tell him my brother has one down on the other side of the ridge. He goes to check Taylor?s goat while I drive behind. The warden ages the buck at 4.5 years old and signs the tag. We part ways and I have to figure out a way to skin and cape this buck with no trees for miles. We improvise and make a barbed wire fence work. Caped out, quartered and in the cooler, we head off to see if the other big buck we located the previous night is still around.
We see several more antelope bucks on the way over but nothing mature. We get to the area and start glassing. Taylor quickly says ?there they are.? They are only 200 yards off the road, and there's the big buck bedded down again. Only one problem, the buggers are on the wrong side of the road in another unit. Crap! We leave, hoping we might be able to catch them on our side at a later time.
It's getting warm out and I wanted to get Taylor?s animal back to town and taken care of. He had decided to get the buck mounted and I did not want the hair to slip. We head to the taxi and then to the meat processor. The processor turns us onto a Walk-In area where his son missed a 15? during the first season.
We head that way and find goats immediately. Lots of small bucks. We hike out over a rise and look over this huge bowl. I later named this the Devil?s Punchbowl since the bucks that inhabit this pasture seemed to be satan-posessed. There are antelope as far as the eye can see. We go on a nice hike and see lots on bucks but again, nothing that got me too excited. We head back to town happy campers, but not before we see a couple trucks driving through the area we just hiked.
After a $26 dollar dinner consisting of an appetizer, 2 BBQ sandwiches with fries, and 2 pitchers of beer (yes, only $26) we hit the sack.
?Do we just suck or what??
We wake up an hour later and head out to see what we thought was a promising looking area on the map. On the way out, right at first light, a coyote passes in front of us running like a scalded cat. I jump out, grab my rifle, jack one in, and run off the road just in time to see him crest a rise and stop broadside. BOOM! SPLAT! Whacked him! I walked back to the truck and ranged him, 230 yards. That was a confidence booster. The area on the map ended up not so promising. We did see a really nice 170? mulie though. (We later turned a deer hunter on to this buck. He went out there only to find the buck in the back of a pickup.) We headed back to the Walk In area to look over the Devil?s Punchbowl again.
This time we sneak up over the rise a little more carefully and glass down into the bowl. There are even more antelope than there were before, including 3 or 4 mature bucks. After reading the ?Walk-In? rules I find out you can actually drive on some areas as long as you stick to the roads. So we try to drive around to the far side of the bowl for a stalk in from that direction. We park and begin our stalk down a creek bed. Just into it, and the animals bolt off 600-700 yards in the distance. They go out of sight behind another rise and I'm thinking this is our chance to close the gap. We start a very fast, crouched- over stalk to cover some ground. We cover 150-200 yards. Taylor is behind me and suddenly gets my attention. There is a buck and a doe out in front of us staring us down. He?s a real good one and I think he's within range.
I plop down on my rear and? OUCH! $h!+, CRAP, WHAT THE? Cactus, all in my a$$. I try my best to ignore it and move a couple feet to the side to set up my shooting sticks. This all takes place in about 2 seconds. As I sit down again, the remainder of the cactus quills that were only stuck in my pants, firmly implant themselves into my butt cheek. I ask Taylor for a range and he can't get a clear view. The buck spooks, but only runs a few yards. I get on him again, take my best guess, and let rip. BOOM! The needles in my a$$, my lungs gasping for air, the driving crosswind, and the unknown range, all factored in and I just plain missed. All the antelope in the bowl blow out and run up and over a ridge to the South. Taylor comments that it looks like Africa, watching 100+ antelope run out over the flats. I'm dejected and mad at myself. I think that was a pretty good buck. He was fairly heavy and had decent length. It was hard to get a good judge on any of the goats in the bowl because of the driving wind. It was impossible to keep the optics still enough. All I know is they were pretty good bucks and I would have shot any one of 2 or 3 of them.
We hike back to the truck to be greeted by a large group of sage hens. That was cool. I bust out my Leatherman and pluck out all the cactus quills I can see. I'm too proud to ask my little brother for help. I crack a beer and suck it up. Hopping back into the truck seat only jammed some more stickers into my a$$.
So now that we had educated these bucks, we decide to see if we can make them even smarter. We drive back over the ridge where the goats went and start glassing. Nothing. We come around a blind corner and there they are! No, there they went! Gone again. We see where they went, hide the car and try to sneak in on them. No chance. They had us pegged from a mile away. Off they go again. Man, this is frustrating.
We get back in the truck and find a nasty mudhole that keeps us from getting out the way I wanted to, so we had to go back out the way we came. On the way back out we see another group of antelope and one of the good bucks is with them. They instantly spot us, again from 800+ yards away, and take off. They drop into a large canyon out of sight. Cool. We haul butt up to the spot where we last saw them. I stalk up to the canyon rim, expecting to see them just below. Taylor looks up and spots them over a mile away on the opposite side of the canyon already. I couldn't believe they were able to go down and up that huge canyon so fast. With heads hung low, we walked back to the truck. We decided we needed to get out of there. The bucks had obviously been hunted hard and knew the drill. So we leave Satan?s spawn and try to find some more cooperative antelope.
We go back to town, get some lunch, and head to the North end of the unit to see if that big buck had crossed back to the right side of the road. We get to the area and cannot find any antelope. They must have been spooked out of the area.
After a few miles we come to a place where the road skirts a high ridge that looks out over miles and miles of flats. I get out to glass and there are antelope as far as the eye can see. The wind is blowing so hard that I cannot judge any of the goats so we have to get closer. This meant dropping way, way, down off this ridge. The thought of coming back up the slope did not make me too jolly but we didn't come 2000 miles to puss out. We figure out how we want to stalk and get into a creek bed a ridge over from the antelope. Of course we bump a group on the way. There is a smaller buck in the group and fortunately, they run the other direction away from our group. We continue on our stalk and carefully crest up over the ridge. There are antelope all over below us. From close to very far. I pick out what I think is the best one, but it is still tough to tell in the wind. Of course he is the farthest one out. And he's out there a ways. There are 2 other good bucks that are closer, but I want the whopper. I get my pack off and take a solid rest. I ask Taylor how far. He comes back with ?332.? I'm thinking that sounds a little off but I've had a rangefinder prove me wrong before, so I take his word for it. I put the crosshair on top of the buck?s back and let rip. The recoil knocked me back so I could not see if I hit the animal. Some goats take off, but the two other bucks just stood there looking around. The muzzle blast startled my brother too so he did not see if I hit the animal either. I could easily shoot again and take one of the other bucks, but I wanted to make sure I did the right thing and not accidentally kill two bucks. Taylor says he'll walk me right to the spot where the buck was standing. He does and I tell him ?no way, I was shooting at a buck way over there.? The buck I was aiming at was another 125 yards away. It all made sense now. Communication breakdown. I walked over there and, of course, there was no sign of a hit. We hike back up to where I shot from and I range the area. It comes out at 456 yards. So we agreed that we had to communicate a little better next time. I'm absolutely wasted when we get back to the truck. I plop my butt in the seat, look over at my brother and ask ?do we just suck, or what?? We laughed at ourselves.
With only an hour our so of day light left we haul back over to the pasture where Taylor killed his buck the previous morning. I wanted a better look at the other one. We find him and his does immediately. It's blowing too hard to get a good look so we plan a stalk. We sneak up a little depression. We come up to the edge and he's only 170 yards. He?s got no idea we are there. He looks OK. A borderline shooter. They feed closer. Now they're at 156 yards. I spend 5 minutes vacillating. I really didn't want to end my hunt on the second day but conditions were not on our side. It was only supposed to get more windy tomorrow, it was getting more crowded as the weekend approached, the bucks were definitely getting more and more spooky, and deer season was to start on Saturday. Besides, this was our first time in this unit, which was completely foreign to us. We were on our own, on public land. Any animal would be well earned.
Here it was Thursday night and I had given myself until Friday morning to hold out for a good one before shooting the first half way decent buck I saw. We were leaving on Sunday, but with deer season opening Saturday, we would have to have any animal into the processor by Friday afternoon to have it done in time to leave. Taylor finally summed it up when he whispered that this buck was probably way better than the dink I might have to shoot the next morning.
BOOM! The buck never took a step. My .270 WSM layed him right out. The shot took out both lungs and the top of the heart. Walking up to the buck, I noticed he had the biggest body of any pronghorn I'd ever seen. Easily 150 lbs. He also has the start of another horn growing at each base. We took some pics and dressed him out. Dragged him to the truck and got him loaded. We raced over to a county road sign and hung him there. I got him skinned out just as we ran out of light.
The rest of our time was spent sight seeing and blasting prairie dogs. Those little buggers are a blast to shoot. I could do that all day. We also took a drive way up into the Big Horns and saw some awesome country. We saw a couple of nice 300+ bulls that were killed up there too.
Again, I fell in love with Wyoming. I love everything about the place. The wide open spaces, the kindness of the people, and more game than you could imagine. It is a Western hunter?s Nirvana. Combine that with a median home price of only $160,000 (and people were complaining about that), and it makes a man want to up and move.
Overall, we had an absolute blast. I can't think of too many better ways to spend a few days. It would have been nice to see some bigger bucks, but I'm not in any way disappointed. We did see a couple hogs but they were on private land, of course. We may have passed up some better bucks but it sure was hard to field judge in the wind. Not that antelope are easy to field judge in the first place. The fact that the bigger ones were extremely wary did not help either. It's hard to judge them when they spook from a mile away, even when you are belly crawling. We probably looked at over 80-100 legal bucks on legal land. We still killed 2 of the top 7 or 8 bucks we saw. In retrospect, I would have been at the Devil?s Punchbowl at first light on opening day to try and get on some of those bigger, more skittish, bucks. But not knowing the area put us at a disadvantage. Oh well, next time. This would be a great hunt for a spouse, an older person, or a kid. It's not too strenuous and you cannot get bored. One thing?s for sure, I can't wait to go back.
Here are a few pics.
Well this trip actually started last year. I drew an antelope tag on a unit that is pretty much all private land. Through a friend of a friend we had access to one of the most beautiful ranches I have ever seen. As some of you know I was very lucky and was able to take a monster 82 4/8? B&C pronghorn. Well my friend, who was friend of a friend with the rancher, is not a real serious hunter so he dropped the ball in lining up the hunt again this year. As we were driving to and from the ranch last year I remember seeing plenty of antelope on the other side of the highway that divided our zone into a different zone. Just out of curiosity I looked up some land status maps when I got home. Turns out those antelope were all on BLM land, and furthermore, most of that unit is public land.
So that started it all. My brother and I applied not really thinking we had a chance to beat the 18-20% draw odds. We got lucky and drew. I was really excited to hunt with my little bro who has recently been severely bit by the hunting bug.
With a few BLM maps, we arrived at the airport the afternoon before opening day and picked up our 4X4 SUV rental. Knowing nothing about this huge zone other than the small sliver of land where I saw goats last year, that is where we headed first. I really just wanted to learn some of the roads and get a starting point. We were immediately blessed with antelope sightings. They were literally everywhere we looked. We checked out several groups and saw plenty of animals but not any mature bucks. I immediately got the feeling this would be a hunt where we would see more quantity than quality. The roads were a bit tricky from some lingering rain but we managed to get by OK with the SUV. Thankfully it was drying out.
Several miles into our drive we came to a nice valley and I stopped to glass. Sure enough I pick up antelope right away. There is a good buck with several does and he is bedded down. This is the first mature buck we have seen so we mark his location on the GPS for future reference.
We continue on and right about last light, we find another large group of antelope. I get the spotter out and we see the best buck of the day. He was also with another mature buck that was just a bit smaller. So finally, we have at least two good bucks and one decent one, located and have a place to start the next day.
?Does it ever get light here??
Not knowing what time it got light, we woke at 4:30 am and were out the door for the 45 minute drive to our chosen spot. It's pitch black when we arrive, so we wait, and wait, and wait. Finally it's almost 7:00 and we get some grey light. We hike out to our ridge that overlooks the pasture where we saw the goats the last night. As it begins to get light, I spot antelope bedded down several hundred yards out. I keep looking and find the lesser of the two bucks off to our left. Then I find the bigger one out in front of us about 600 yards. We get closer before it gets completely light. There is a small ridge in between us and the goat and we decide we need to get there. On our bellies we go. Once we get behind the crest of the small ridge we can get up somewhat and do the crouched over stalk up to the crest. I slowly crawl up while Taylor stays behind. I spot the goat and then set up the Zeiss. He looks pretty good, not too long, but good mass and fairly decent prongs. I range him at 250 yards and crawl back down the slope to pow-wow with Taylor on the other side. We deliberate for a little while since it's only the first day of the hunt. Taylor crawls up and checks him out in the Zeiss. He comes back and says he wants to get closer and kill that buck. This could be his first animal with horns so he was really excited. He?d never even seen a pronghorn in real life before. I fire up the video camera and crawl back up to the rise and start rolling. I figure there is no way for him to get up and over this rise without the buck spotting him. Somehow, he does it though, and gets back down in the sage. Like a weathered veteran, he belly crawled right in on that buck. He easily got within about 125 yards. Just like we practiced, he rolled over on his back, took one strap off his backpack, then rolled over on his other side and took the other strap off. With a good solid rest, I thought this would be a slam dunk. The buck never knew we were there and was casually feeding. I see Taylor getting ready to shoot. BOOM!!!! No reaction from the buck. It runs 50 yards and stops looking back. BOOM! It's up and running again, and so is Taylor. He is trying to get an angle on the buck when it stops again. BOOM! He flattened it! His arm goes in the air with a celebratory fist pump and I let out a holler too. We walk up there and Taylor is stoked, grinning from ear to ear. It's a pretty good buck, and for a first one, on public land that we previously knew nothing about, it's a darn fine buck. We get him gutted and start the dragging. We get about half way and I leave Taylor to go get the vehicle and drive it closer. I run into a WY GFD warden on the way to the truck. He checks my tag and I tell him my brother has one down on the other side of the ridge. He goes to check Taylor?s goat while I drive behind. The warden ages the buck at 4.5 years old and signs the tag. We part ways and I have to figure out a way to skin and cape this buck with no trees for miles. We improvise and make a barbed wire fence work. Caped out, quartered and in the cooler, we head off to see if the other big buck we located the previous night is still around.
We see several more antelope bucks on the way over but nothing mature. We get to the area and start glassing. Taylor quickly says ?there they are.? They are only 200 yards off the road, and there's the big buck bedded down again. Only one problem, the buggers are on the wrong side of the road in another unit. Crap! We leave, hoping we might be able to catch them on our side at a later time.
It's getting warm out and I wanted to get Taylor?s animal back to town and taken care of. He had decided to get the buck mounted and I did not want the hair to slip. We head to the taxi and then to the meat processor. The processor turns us onto a Walk-In area where his son missed a 15? during the first season.
We head that way and find goats immediately. Lots of small bucks. We hike out over a rise and look over this huge bowl. I later named this the Devil?s Punchbowl since the bucks that inhabit this pasture seemed to be satan-posessed. There are antelope as far as the eye can see. We go on a nice hike and see lots on bucks but again, nothing that got me too excited. We head back to town happy campers, but not before we see a couple trucks driving through the area we just hiked.
After a $26 dollar dinner consisting of an appetizer, 2 BBQ sandwiches with fries, and 2 pitchers of beer (yes, only $26) we hit the sack.
?Do we just suck or what??
We wake up an hour later and head out to see what we thought was a promising looking area on the map. On the way out, right at first light, a coyote passes in front of us running like a scalded cat. I jump out, grab my rifle, jack one in, and run off the road just in time to see him crest a rise and stop broadside. BOOM! SPLAT! Whacked him! I walked back to the truck and ranged him, 230 yards. That was a confidence booster. The area on the map ended up not so promising. We did see a really nice 170? mulie though. (We later turned a deer hunter on to this buck. He went out there only to find the buck in the back of a pickup.) We headed back to the Walk In area to look over the Devil?s Punchbowl again.
This time we sneak up over the rise a little more carefully and glass down into the bowl. There are even more antelope than there were before, including 3 or 4 mature bucks. After reading the ?Walk-In? rules I find out you can actually drive on some areas as long as you stick to the roads. So we try to drive around to the far side of the bowl for a stalk in from that direction. We park and begin our stalk down a creek bed. Just into it, and the animals bolt off 600-700 yards in the distance. They go out of sight behind another rise and I'm thinking this is our chance to close the gap. We start a very fast, crouched- over stalk to cover some ground. We cover 150-200 yards. Taylor is behind me and suddenly gets my attention. There is a buck and a doe out in front of us staring us down. He?s a real good one and I think he's within range.
I plop down on my rear and? OUCH! $h!+, CRAP, WHAT THE? Cactus, all in my a$$. I try my best to ignore it and move a couple feet to the side to set up my shooting sticks. This all takes place in about 2 seconds. As I sit down again, the remainder of the cactus quills that were only stuck in my pants, firmly implant themselves into my butt cheek. I ask Taylor for a range and he can't get a clear view. The buck spooks, but only runs a few yards. I get on him again, take my best guess, and let rip. BOOM! The needles in my a$$, my lungs gasping for air, the driving crosswind, and the unknown range, all factored in and I just plain missed. All the antelope in the bowl blow out and run up and over a ridge to the South. Taylor comments that it looks like Africa, watching 100+ antelope run out over the flats. I'm dejected and mad at myself. I think that was a pretty good buck. He was fairly heavy and had decent length. It was hard to get a good judge on any of the goats in the bowl because of the driving wind. It was impossible to keep the optics still enough. All I know is they were pretty good bucks and I would have shot any one of 2 or 3 of them.
We hike back to the truck to be greeted by a large group of sage hens. That was cool. I bust out my Leatherman and pluck out all the cactus quills I can see. I'm too proud to ask my little brother for help. I crack a beer and suck it up. Hopping back into the truck seat only jammed some more stickers into my a$$.
So now that we had educated these bucks, we decide to see if we can make them even smarter. We drive back over the ridge where the goats went and start glassing. Nothing. We come around a blind corner and there they are! No, there they went! Gone again. We see where they went, hide the car and try to sneak in on them. No chance. They had us pegged from a mile away. Off they go again. Man, this is frustrating.
We get back in the truck and find a nasty mudhole that keeps us from getting out the way I wanted to, so we had to go back out the way we came. On the way back out we see another group of antelope and one of the good bucks is with them. They instantly spot us, again from 800+ yards away, and take off. They drop into a large canyon out of sight. Cool. We haul butt up to the spot where we last saw them. I stalk up to the canyon rim, expecting to see them just below. Taylor looks up and spots them over a mile away on the opposite side of the canyon already. I couldn't believe they were able to go down and up that huge canyon so fast. With heads hung low, we walked back to the truck. We decided we needed to get out of there. The bucks had obviously been hunted hard and knew the drill. So we leave Satan?s spawn and try to find some more cooperative antelope.
We go back to town, get some lunch, and head to the North end of the unit to see if that big buck had crossed back to the right side of the road. We get to the area and cannot find any antelope. They must have been spooked out of the area.
After a few miles we come to a place where the road skirts a high ridge that looks out over miles and miles of flats. I get out to glass and there are antelope as far as the eye can see. The wind is blowing so hard that I cannot judge any of the goats so we have to get closer. This meant dropping way, way, down off this ridge. The thought of coming back up the slope did not make me too jolly but we didn't come 2000 miles to puss out. We figure out how we want to stalk and get into a creek bed a ridge over from the antelope. Of course we bump a group on the way. There is a smaller buck in the group and fortunately, they run the other direction away from our group. We continue on our stalk and carefully crest up over the ridge. There are antelope all over below us. From close to very far. I pick out what I think is the best one, but it is still tough to tell in the wind. Of course he is the farthest one out. And he's out there a ways. There are 2 other good bucks that are closer, but I want the whopper. I get my pack off and take a solid rest. I ask Taylor how far. He comes back with ?332.? I'm thinking that sounds a little off but I've had a rangefinder prove me wrong before, so I take his word for it. I put the crosshair on top of the buck?s back and let rip. The recoil knocked me back so I could not see if I hit the animal. Some goats take off, but the two other bucks just stood there looking around. The muzzle blast startled my brother too so he did not see if I hit the animal either. I could easily shoot again and take one of the other bucks, but I wanted to make sure I did the right thing and not accidentally kill two bucks. Taylor says he'll walk me right to the spot where the buck was standing. He does and I tell him ?no way, I was shooting at a buck way over there.? The buck I was aiming at was another 125 yards away. It all made sense now. Communication breakdown. I walked over there and, of course, there was no sign of a hit. We hike back up to where I shot from and I range the area. It comes out at 456 yards. So we agreed that we had to communicate a little better next time. I'm absolutely wasted when we get back to the truck. I plop my butt in the seat, look over at my brother and ask ?do we just suck, or what?? We laughed at ourselves.
With only an hour our so of day light left we haul back over to the pasture where Taylor killed his buck the previous morning. I wanted a better look at the other one. We find him and his does immediately. It's blowing too hard to get a good look so we plan a stalk. We sneak up a little depression. We come up to the edge and he's only 170 yards. He?s got no idea we are there. He looks OK. A borderline shooter. They feed closer. Now they're at 156 yards. I spend 5 minutes vacillating. I really didn't want to end my hunt on the second day but conditions were not on our side. It was only supposed to get more windy tomorrow, it was getting more crowded as the weekend approached, the bucks were definitely getting more and more spooky, and deer season was to start on Saturday. Besides, this was our first time in this unit, which was completely foreign to us. We were on our own, on public land. Any animal would be well earned.
Here it was Thursday night and I had given myself until Friday morning to hold out for a good one before shooting the first half way decent buck I saw. We were leaving on Sunday, but with deer season opening Saturday, we would have to have any animal into the processor by Friday afternoon to have it done in time to leave. Taylor finally summed it up when he whispered that this buck was probably way better than the dink I might have to shoot the next morning.
BOOM! The buck never took a step. My .270 WSM layed him right out. The shot took out both lungs and the top of the heart. Walking up to the buck, I noticed he had the biggest body of any pronghorn I'd ever seen. Easily 150 lbs. He also has the start of another horn growing at each base. We took some pics and dressed him out. Dragged him to the truck and got him loaded. We raced over to a county road sign and hung him there. I got him skinned out just as we ran out of light.
The rest of our time was spent sight seeing and blasting prairie dogs. Those little buggers are a blast to shoot. I could do that all day. We also took a drive way up into the Big Horns and saw some awesome country. We saw a couple of nice 300+ bulls that were killed up there too.
Again, I fell in love with Wyoming. I love everything about the place. The wide open spaces, the kindness of the people, and more game than you could imagine. It is a Western hunter?s Nirvana. Combine that with a median home price of only $160,000 (and people were complaining about that), and it makes a man want to up and move.
Overall, we had an absolute blast. I can't think of too many better ways to spend a few days. It would have been nice to see some bigger bucks, but I'm not in any way disappointed. We did see a couple hogs but they were on private land, of course. We may have passed up some better bucks but it sure was hard to field judge in the wind. Not that antelope are easy to field judge in the first place. The fact that the bigger ones were extremely wary did not help either. It's hard to judge them when they spook from a mile away, even when you are belly crawling. We probably looked at over 80-100 legal bucks on legal land. We still killed 2 of the top 7 or 8 bucks we saw. In retrospect, I would have been at the Devil?s Punchbowl at first light on opening day to try and get on some of those bigger, more skittish, bucks. But not knowing the area put us at a disadvantage. Oh well, next time. This would be a great hunt for a spouse, an older person, or a kid. It's not too strenuous and you cannot get bored. One thing?s for sure, I can't wait to go back.
Here are a few pics.
