Stone Cold Determination During Deep Snow Elk Hunt

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This was not going to be a true mountain elk hunt, but something closer to an elk shoot. A layup. The kind of thing that rarely happens in elk hunting and certainly never happens for me.

“Get down here, I have 300 head of elk right out on the field by the lodge,” my old buddy Fred Eichler said on the phone as I stared out the window at a whitewall of a blizzard from my home, two hours north. “There’s 8 or 10 nice bulls.”

I am not an elite purist, and stay pretty mad at the elk, I have suffered so mightily in the wapiti woods. I will 100 percent take a layup if I can get one. So I should have been ecstatic, but instead my stomach knotted up. Highway I-25 to southern Colorado was shutting down fast, and he had only a handful of hunters that had made it in early to the lodge, all out-of-staters. Here I was just two hours to the north, in my home in the Rockies, but stranded. The snow had started on a Monday as a raging blizzard and for almost 5 days never stopped for long. When it did, in November 2024, well over three feet of snow had fallen on the plains near Trinidad and in the Spanish Peaks mountains. It proved to be the largest snowstorm in Colorado since 1991, a historic disaster that had destroyed elk and deer herds and cattle.

But there was no way to make it south to Fred’s east ranch without a long snowmobile ride, and I don’t own one. At daylight, his hunters knocked down 5 or 6 elk, and some really nice bulls. Some passed on animals they shouldn’t have. It was getting brutally tough to get into elk country at all, with only main access roads slowly opening over the entire week.

Mad Dash

I made it down by midday that Saturday, but too late. The hunt that would unfold for me would involve deep snow hike in the mountains, vehicles stuck in ditches and lots of sweat, and that’s fine. It’s always the hard way for me. And I had a Christensen Ridgeline rifle to test along with Hornady’s ELD-X bullets...I needed a real story to write about, not a show-up-and-shoot deal. Careful what you wish for.

The great opening morning shootout happened on Eichler’s east ranch, a strange place to hunt elk, because it looks more like west Kansas. Cottonwood bottoms, alfalfa fields and sage brush hills. But it is the most productive hunting ground I have ever seen. It is jammed with animals, including lions and bears and big, big, deer in two flavors, and it is not uncommon to see his big hay-bale hauling tractor cruising around with two dead bulls hanging from the bucket and headed for the skinning shed. Animals stream onto it from surrounding ranches, and it’s a place I have grown to love. From chasing quail and predators and turkeys and ungulates and waterfowl along the Purgatory River, it’s an unassuming piece of ground that is crazily productive.

By contrast, his west ranch up in the Spanish Peaks is the Rocky Mountains of your dreams, classic elk country of rimrock and pines and ridges and mountains and streams and black timber, all of it crawling with lions and bears and some whopper bulls that leak onto his place from the wilderness migration and surrounding huge ranches.

His Full Draw Outfitters Lodge on the west ranch is c’est magnifique, a hunter’s dream spot of giant animal heads, tall ceilings and tall tales flowing non-stop every night with the bourbon. You have a pretty good chance of killing your dream bull off the front porch on any given Sunday. But they hadn’t seen jack squat on the West Ranch since the storm. It appeared the elk were all hunkered down somewhere shell-shocked from the blizzard. A common reaction while they take a few days to get things sorted, and then awesome migrations can unfold once they are un-confused.

A Guide's Nemesis

The intrepid young veteran Seth Crummer was to be my guide, and he had cut an exciting set of what appeared to be big bull tracks in a few spots, the only sign of living elk on the west ranch. But I had a double guide situation in Matt Reickoff, a veteran past guide for Full Draw Outfitters who was not guiding anymore but hunting deer, visiting, and who also knew the lay of the land and ultimately spotted my animal.

Seth was hoping I’d get a shot at his nemesis, a monstrous bull that he thought laid the tracks he’d seen here and there. I didn’t know it, but I was hunting a true giant. A low-end 360, high-end 380 with not a tine broken and beams past his front shoulders and great length on all points. At least a 7 on each side with kickers. Two clients had seen the bull and said it was biggest they’d ever seen and both had killed multiple elk.

It should have been dead. One client had him in the Leupold earlier in the year, but got on his binos instead of the gun to check him out. Instead of shooting, he turned to high five Seth because he was so excited about how big the animal was and assumed he had time on a bedded animal for such nonsense.

Um, no. That’s not how they get huge. The bull got out of his bed and started up the ridge and never stopped once.

Smart Bulls

“He  paid no mind to my bugles and cow calls and just kept going,” Seth said. “I got on him a few other times but couldn’t get him in a scope under 700 yards, but he hung out in that area for at least three weeks…it was pretty strange. I haven’t had many hole up like that.”

From tracking that big bull, he said, he “kinda learned where those loners like to bed in the timber.” This would lead to our success, but not directly.

I hunted a snow field that evening where a lot of elk have been shot crossing and you can see up to 500 yards. A cool spot surrounded by black forest and ridges elk travel on. But only one old forlorn set of deer tracks crossed the entire meadow and I didn’t see so much as a tweety bird. It was arctic cold and white, and tough to hike just 300 yards to the blind, swimming in snow.

Tashia Molina from Hornady was the only one to see an elk that evening, a lone bull on the east ranch, where she made an insane shot of 300+ yards off her knees and brought the meat home.

My Gear

I had a suppressor from Silencer Central on my gun, a sweet-shooting Christensen Arms Ridgeline bolt rifle in 7mm Remington Magnum. With the Banish Backcountry titanium silencer, it was a lightweight and low-recoil, state-of-the-art death machine in my hands, and Hornady’s Seth Swerczik had personally sighted it in and sent the dope along. I was highly confident that anything I chased was in trouble with this setup, and had confirmed it in camp on paper. I had a massive crush cooking on that rifle, topped by the industry benchmark, a Leupold VX-6HD 3-18 x 44.

The old-school 7mm Rem Mag had been sent along in a shuffle when a 7mm PRC hadn’t worked out on short notice, but I was grateful for a chance to use the old caliber that I’d hunted the Northwest with all through my younger years, crushing black bears and mule deer and whitetails galore. Amid all the excitement over all the new .28 caliber chamberings, it would be a fun comparison, using the old belted magnum.

But honestly, the 162-grain bullet I was using I thought was a little light for elk, yet the foot pounds of energy are awesome in that tradeoff of speed and trajectory, always a confusing mix about what really matters in the field. Energy on paper versus real world penetration and a bullet that holds together, right? I would be proven delightfully and decidedly wrong before it was over.

The ELD-X is one of Hornady’s many great triumphs, a true groundbreaking bullet that is built for perfect expansion at all ranges. I have killed at least four elk with it, including two whopper-bodied bulls at 300 or more yards, all with one shot. I am very quick to make a second shot on a bull elk whenever I can but most of the time with this load they just drop and offer no follow up opportunity for my trigger-happy inclination. It performs happily at closer ranges and the Heat Shield tip pushes back to initiate expansion at longer ranges where velocity is lower.

Icy Conditions

The next morning the snow had stopped but we spent most of the time trying to get un-stuck in the truck repeatedly. Seth got us far up one road with no spot for us to turn around in the snow tunnel of a road, and he must have driven that truck backwards for three miles before ending up in a ditch. Some real Evil Knievel maneuvering, very impressive.

We realized we could access very little country. And this is why you trust your guide when the chips are down.

Seth decided we would dive into the black timber. I was apprehensive about how we could even move through this kind of snow, and certainly not without making a lot of noise since it had a bad crust. Just a hunch, he said, and, “You and I have hunted enough we are bound for some good luck, too.”

He said that last bit later. I like to hunt elk in areas with a lot of elk sign. This was not that. But the young tough handsome sinewy cowboy was ready to deep dive. I must admit I was cynical. And we really needed snowshoes. The snow was mid-thigh all over, and deeper still in the drifts, and your boots would punch through a strange bottom layer crust and burst often into running water and ice. Terrible conditions. I’m a know-it-all elk hunter with 40 years in the elk wars, and I know that elk cannot fly. When there are no tracks to speak of they are just not around, right? And we saw only one set, not nearly enough to hunt an area in my opinion. There was no elk food in sight, a key element in such frigid conditions, and we could rarely see more than 100 yards in the timber. That’s a problem, because with all the noise we were making in the crunchy deep snow, there was no way we would not get busted by any animal that was within visible range.

On The Prowl

I thought we must be hiking to a spot where we could watch a really large bowl area with food in it, one of my favorite techniques for deer or elk in the Rockies, but it seemed we were just cruising the timber. But I was wrong on every count.

We cruised through the deep snow with Seth breaking trail, an unbelievable tough-guy stunt that only a scrappy, physically fit elk guide could pull off. Sweating and huffing, we’d stop every 30 yards and look and listen. I don’t mind hunting hard, but I like hunting smart, and didn’t see how we were hunting smart. How could we get close enough to anything to make a kill? And there was only one set of tracks.

An hour in, darkness falling fast, and Matt tenses up, grabs Seth, and points into the timber slightly uphill.

“Elk,” he hisses.

Think Fast

I don’t get excited, not quite believing, and move to his side. A bright yellow school bus body, standing there, shockingly beautiful against the dark green timber and trees and bright snow. I will never forget it. A bull. 159 yards. Staring our way, but his head behind a tree limb. I move over to Seth, get on the sticks, for every second matters. This is not a bedded or bugling or happily feeding animal, it’s an alert bull elk on his feet one step away from disappearing in any direction.

I always hunt with a round in the chamber but this time it’s empty. Because of the horrible conditions I was worried about safety, and the snow was so crunchy and noisy I figured any shot we got would be at long range…I was wrong. This bull was right here in my face on his feet and ready to take one step into the timber and vanish forever.  I prayed a little bit desperately as I chambered a round, and he doesn’t bolt. Seconds count and I whisper and ask for reassurance that he’s a legal bull and Matt and Seth both said yes, yes, yes,  there’s five on at least one side. In this part of Colorado it’s a four point minimum or 6 inch brow tine to be legal. I am not concerned with getting a monster bull. I have killed one before so what I need now is just to feed my family and cut our grocery bill by thousands of dollars, and to make a good shot, and get all the meat home. My wife gets flaming mad when I pass on a legal animal and “trophy hunt.”

The bull is angled quartering, and like my daddy and Will Primos taught me, I visualize the exit wound, not just the spot the sights are on. “Go ahead?” I ask.

“Yes, if you’re good.”

Make It Count

That moment we live for. I hold between his shoulder and brisket, from the front, and squeeze, no hesitation. Should be heart, both lungs, and some shoulder bone. He hunches at the shot and instantly disappears. When you don’t hesitate to shoot, you immediately wonder if you rushed it after the shot. It’s happened all my life. What happens next, I will never forget. The most forlorn and sad wailing sound erupts from the forest, a long pealing cry that stabbed me in the heart. I’ve never heard an animal make it, and don’t ever want to again. And so doubt sets in as it sounds like the mournful cry is getting further and further away. I must have rushed the shot. I’m pretty sure he has made the ridge 300 yards away and I’m cursing myself for using the light bullet.

We wait and listen and the sad, long cry happens three times and finally gets weak like it’s going far away, and I wonder how I managed to shoot this elk through just one lung. We wait like you’re supposed to and then come up with a plan. I will circle around to watch the ridge if the bull is bumped, while Seth tracks from where he was hit. It’s getting darker by the minute.

Seth disappears into the black forest and after just a few minutes lets out a happy whoop.

I blunder uphill through the impossibly deep snow, aiming for tree wells where it is less than three feet deep, wishing my legs were longer, and there is my beautiful 5 x 6. A young bull, bigger than a raghorn but not quite mature and a beauty, big bodied and perfect for our hungry freezer. Meat for the year. I am so joyous, so happy about a clean kill after the self-doubt, and wonder how I could’ve been so wrong about thinking he had only been injured and headed over the ridge…he barely made it 50 yards, a perfect heart shot snaked through the trees by a hunter confident in his setup.

A Guide's Intuition

How did Seth think hiking into an area with no real sign or food and just deep black timber snow was a good idea, when we couldn’t even see a reasonable distance?

“The tracks we cut in the snow from driving the road went into that timber, and I figured it had to be a bull and seemed like a decent one from the tracks. It was from the night before and so I figured he’d hung out in there, in some heavy canopy bedding and fed as much as he could that night and didn’t move much in the afternoon. That place has pretty good grass in there…three feet of snow covers it up, but I’ve seen quite a few bulls stay in spots like that after they separated after the rut, and we had a monster in there the year before.”

I was beside myself—there appeared to be no food in there, so what was the elk doing?

“Probably not much,” Seth said. “But they don’t need to do a lot right away. If it’s a freak weather event for us it’s freaky for them, too, and they hole up and don’t do much for the first few days,” Seth said. “There is 2 ½ foot tall grass in there in that timber. They eat oak brush and mountain mahogany when it’s super cold, too. So I was hoping he was around.” And hey, let’s have a little faith. Like he said, we’d had enough hard luck over the years, it’s bound to shift, and we got lucky with that perfect hole in the brush for me to send that ELD-X through the timber. A shortish range, but high-urgency shot from the good ‘ol 7 mm Rem Mag.

HOW TO WIN IN DEEP SNOW

So how the heck did we make that happen, I asked him later. Crunchy deep snow and very little sign, a pretty bad situation.

“Try to keep the wind right and if they are moving don’t push into any bedding area…it was getting prime time of day for us (late evening), so I was hoping they would be up and moving, because if they are  moving that crunchy snow is louder on their ears than ours. So if they’re moving they can’t hear very well either. If they are bedded you’re screwed …you gotta see ’em from a ways off…but we were moving slow and stopping every 30 yards. What saved us was that bull was on the move,” he said. “I think he was going to try to get something to eat. That coldest part of the day he wanted to move and stay warm and find something to eat. That or predators coulda been in there. I was gonna swing through some of the high points in the bedding areas on that side on the way down,” he said.

As for the monster bull of our dreams, he’s still out there. Seth had told his client to get on the gun when they had a shot but the guy just didn’t get it.

“Man, I told him multiple times to get on the gun. That one still haunts me. We tracked that bull to where he jumped off probably a 7-foot rock ledge the second to last day of that season and not startled or anything. It haunts me I never could get him.”

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