Indoor Season

The outdoor, fishing, hunting, RV, guns, knives, etc., show season has definitely hit its stride.

Will just returned from SHOT in Las Vegas, where every firearms, shooting and hunting manufacturer was present. From the attendance and excitement at SHOT, you would never know this country went through a recession in 2009.

Montana has its own quality outdoor shows. Bill Reier, Jr. has done a great job of finding good venues in Montana's biggest markets, with a nice mix of outdoor vendors and good traffic. Here the schedule for the Great Rockies Sport Shows:

Billings: January 15-17 at MetraPark

Bozeman: January 29-31 at the Gallatin Country Fairgrounds

Great Falls: February 5-7 at the Montana ExpoPark

Kalispell/Whitefish March 12-14 at the Flathead Country Fairgrounds.

Check out the shows and stop by the Montana Sporting Journal booth and say Hi. And yes, Bob Jacklin is holding a spincast rod in the picture. His fly fishing instruction is still legendary.

Precious Partridge, Running Roosters

Staying at home in Montana over the Christmas holiday has its advantages. I am always well-fed and if the weather is not too frightful, bird season is still open.

Christmas day was just what I had asked from Santa: hunting with Dad and our dogs with December weather that was nearing 20 degrees and no wind.

Never mind that the snow had a icy crust on it, allowing the roosters to run a football field's length ahead of the dogs. The Huns, they were jumpy after a season of being bothered by man and companion, with a dozen or so sets of eyes to stand guard in each covey.

But, like anything, if you work hard enough, eventually a pheasant holds tight and Huns sit long enough for the dogs and the hunters to get into position.

In late December, you don't expect to shoot limits nor do you need to. You are walking the big spaces of Montana with cold hands and chapped faces, knowing that it is a long wait until next September. A day in the field in December is simply a great Christmas gift.

Don't Believe What I Write

More than once, both in print and in conversation, I have stated how any avid blue grouse hunter, best be in the mountains in September. The rationale is two-fold; it is usually too hot to hunt down low in early September and by mid-October, the snow makes hunting blues impractical at the higher elevations.
However, I was recently persuaded into giving it a shot and it turns out I was wrong.
Good friend Ryan Young was in my neck of the woods and had never shot a blue grouse, despite being a bird hunting fool of late. He was determined to give it a go, but I made him no promises. I warned him that blues are just as likely to spend their winter months perched in trees instead of wandering on the ground, so the attempt could simply be a walk with guns, uphill and through deep snow.
Once again, I was wrong. The snow wasn't deep enough to be a factor. And since we waited until mid-morning before making our ascent, the birds were on the ground, enjoying the warm morning sun. The dogs did their part, and we made out shots count. Ryan, who has spent his whole life in eastern MT, was in heaven. I wouldn't want to open an outfitting business guiding folks to blue grouse in November and December, but for now, I was glad to be wrong.

A Good Boot, Made Better

After having owned both the Danner Sharptail and now the Sharptail II, I can say that the improvement on the latter was significant. As promised in the Sept/Oct issue of Montana Sporting Journal, here is a follow-up on the durability of the Danner boot after a season(40 days) of hunting in the boot:
While the boot does indicate some normal wear, it definitely is still fit enough to hunt in and will carry me into next season. The Sharptail II endured the Minnesota north woods swamps, cactus and sage of eastern Montana and many miles of looking for the big bull during elk season. In the past, a season of many hard miles hunting birds in tall grass and thick brush, would nearly make my hunting boots "one and done". It will be nice having a proven boot ready to roll into 2010.

Success

A cold turkey sandwich and lukewarm thermos coffee comprised my Thanksgiving day meal. The menu was meager compared to the gluttonous spread of Thanksgiving day delicacies that millions of American's were indulging in. Yet deep in the Lee Metcalf Wilderness with an unfilled elk license in my pocket, there was nowhere I'd rather have been.

As I was growing up and learning to hunt alongside my Dad, hunting on Thanksgiving became something of a tradition. It was, and still is, an extended weekend at the tail end of hunting season that provides a few days respite from the responsibilities of work and school.

Unfortunately my Dad couldn't be with me on this Thanksgiving day, but it was a particularly memorable holiday spent far from the comforts of sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie and college football. Throughout the day I was into elk, spotting a sizable herd at first light as they fed high above my location on a grassy, south facing slope. The herd slipped into dark timber long before I was able to cut the distance, but it was an encouraging sighting. By the time I set foot on the drainage divide where the herd had been, my GPS indicated that I'd climbed 2,000 vertical feet from the trailhead, over the course of about 2.5 miles. There was no way I was giving up that hard earned elevation so I spent the mid-day hours nearby, still hunting timbered slopes littered with elk sign. As the shadows lengthened, my attention turned to the transitional fringes of timber and the open, sage slopes where the herd had been feeding that morning.

Finally, at last light I spotted a small group of cow elk grazing just a hundred yards away, unaware of my presence. Using my pack as a rest I settled into a prone position and steadied the crosshairs. My 300 Weatherby roared and the Accubond found its mark. Working long into the night I took care of the meat, carrying out what I could in my NICE Crewcab and returning early the next morning with a sled and two friends whose willingness to put strong backs and legs to work was greatly appreciated.

I didn't harvest a mature bull elk as I'd hoped to this season, but in the end it doesn't really matter. I cleanly killed a public land elk and earned every pound of the meat that will fill my freezer, for that I give thanks.

Name That Elk Country

I've always enjoyed RMEF's "Name That Elk Country" feature in Bugle magazine. Some of you may know just where the photo above was taken. It was my first time to this particular area and we really had to work to get up there. Had I known there would be two feet of snow on top, I'd have packed the snowshoes along! Since this photo was taken, the Bozeman area has had another major winter storm that dumped 18" - 24" in town!

No elk were harvested on this day, but it was a great hunt, in superb elk habitat. The elk have migrated off this high elevation divide for this year, but I look forward to hunting this very place early next fall.

Mr. Lupus and company had been in the area very recently. The photo above was one of the larger sets of tracks in the pack. For reference, that's a .375 H&H Magnum cartridge.

There are still two weeks left in the Montana general deer and elk seasons, good luck to those who still have tags to fill.

The Task At Hand

While the original intent was to hunt while the Montana antelope season overlapped with the start of the deer season, the plan was more one-dimensional than expected. Maybe it was due to the fact that we had good success on muley bucks last fall or simply that I did not devote enough time the previous autumn to hunt antelope. Regardless, once afield in eastern Montana, cousin Brian and I were definitely focused on pronghorns (his expensive nonresident license was probably the biggest factor).
Obviously, antelope and mule deer don't necessarily occupy the same habitat. But, if you hunt full days in the area we set up camp, you will see both species. We even saw some whitetails that ran off into the sage country, something that we are witnessing more of each year.
However, we did avoid our "classic" muley haunts, "The cedars", "Hells Kitchen" and "The Bedroom". The mule deer we did come across or glass at a distance, we ignored. Sure, if we had seen something that was out of the ordinary, we may have traded our antelope loads for something slightly heavier.
As it turned out, it was a good antelope hunt. Now I can get back to the bird dogs and give them the attention they deserve. There may even be time to hit those muley locations later.

New Water

On Friday of last week a friend and I made the journey to explore a far away and somewhat unlikely trout fishing destination here in Montana. It's the type of place that you hear very little about, it's a long way from anywhere. To get to this water you have to pass by other rivers, fisheries far more famous. The prodigious number of MT fly fishing guidebooks on the market provide little, if any, useful information on this river. There are no shuttle services, guides or fly shops on this river, we were on our own to figure out the nuances of the fishery. That said, we did stop in at the Big R Fly Shop en route, where we loaded up on quality streamers without breaking the bank. These guys probably fish our intended destination more than anyone and provided some first hand knowledge.

We got our first glimpse of the river a few hours after departure. The water looked good, albeit it looked like more of a warm water river than a trout river - deep and slow. It was early enough in the day that we had time for a quick float to test the waters. At the put-in we could hardly get rigged up fast enough as a heavy caddis hatch had the river boiling with rising fish. Several casts later our X2 caddis only produced whitefish. As we floated downriver we were starting to wonder if there were any trout in this river. We continued to pick up quite a few whitefish (up to 19") on both dries and nymphs, but no trout. Finally after the sun dipped below the western horizon we connected with our first trout of the trip, a healthy 15" rainbow that drilled a flashy streamer in fast water. We were highly stoked to get that first trout out of the way, now we could get down to business.

Over the next two days we fished long and hard, floating and wading, stripping streamers, drifting nymphs and on occasion doing a little head hunting. We had good success for trout, although that success was concentrated to a few select locations on the river and came only after rotating through numerous fly patterns. By Sunday afternoon we'd learned a thing or two about this river and its trout, yet it hadn't been quite what we'd hoped...

That is until we decided to fish one last hole on the way home, a big run that we'd not yet fished. In that final hour of the trip and on what were essentially the proverbial last casts we found what we had come for...big browns. Look for a more in depth piece on this trip in a coming issue of Montana Sporting Journal.