My son, James, and I recently purchased a portable blind at Cabelas. The main reason for the purchase is so I can photograph the birds here in my backyard. I inadvertently left the blind up in the mountains on a previous trip, so we decided to put it to use this past Wednesday evening. We practiced setting it up and packing it up while we ate supper around the campfire. It is not a fancy blind but it seats two comfortably. So off we went to give it a try. We assembled the blind and weren’t in it very long when James said, “There’s some elk.” Sure enough, there were four cows over on a distant field and then we spotted a bigger herd of elk just to the right of these first four. There were 40 elk in all! We also had deer come to within 50 yards of our blind. It was a very productive field test and we had a great father/son evening on the mountain!
We did see some elk this week. The highlight was Thursday morning when we saw an 8×8 bull–the biggest bull we’ve seen so far this year. Unlike our previous trip, we did manage to see more bulls, for which we were thankful. Their velvet is coming off and the bulls look uncomfortable with strings of velvet hanging all over their antlers and down in their eyes!
I will post some photos of our trip this coming week, but I think I jinxed myself. My most recent blog entry was about preparation. Well, I guess I jinxed myself because I got to camp with James on Monday around midnight only to realize I forgot my D300! I’ll bet Moose Peterson never did this! Thankfully, I did have my backup body–my old D70 and James let me borrow one of his lenses. I will post some of my photos in upcoming blog posts, but James definitely got much better photos than I did this trip! I guess I was just so excited for this trip that I overlooked grabbing and packing my camera bag into my truck. I even had it on my packing list! I can think of several words to describe what an idiot I am, but none of them are printable!
Now I really can’t wait to get back to the mountains of Elk County!!!
Hi Bob,
I really enjoyed talking to you and James and Buckwheat and Paul that morning. I only saw the one large bull on the hill and saw three much smaller ones, along with several spikes. I did find some in another area, but nothing as large as the one we discussed. Lamie Wehler was at that meadow at just the right time on two mornings as he got photos of him rubbing an autumn olive bush close to the road (that is thew type of activity I was looking for) on one morning and I think video on the next–although he may have taken both at the same time and I got confused, but he did see him two mornings in a row!
I also liked your post on preparing for a trip. Since I usually stay a week in Elk County, I take so much stuff that I find the morning that I leave to be intimidating even though I do prepare a day or so in advance. It seems I am always thinking of something else I need and loading the vehicle is a hard job–yet when I am ready to leave Elk County it is easy as everything is then in one place and it is just a matter of carrying it to the vehicle, which I can do very quickly.