OCT-B-4
DENVER, COLORADO,
AND THE WHITE RIVER NATIONAL FOREST
AND OUR ANNUAL ELK HUNT IN THE ROCKIES
Oct. 18—25, 2002
The annual elk hunt in our camp, up near the peak of the “fourteener” Capital Peak was a great adventure, and made even better by the chance to visit with Don and Martheen in their Denver interim!
I arrived at the DIA and found Martheen, even before I picked up [the bags (I had the horse-packed duffel out in my hand containing my smaller backpack in order to reduce the size of the big suitcase to under 70 pounds to avoid a $75-surcharge for overweight) and the rifle case. The latter was a big concern in DC but not in Denver where they are used to such things. We went from the Griffioens’ first visit to DIA to my first visit to the Washington Park area where they have the house and church on South Ogden, easily accessible to Gene Moore’s house on Seventh Avenue. I had toured around and seen the church across the street as well as a bit about their pleasant neighborhood with smaller established houses, and then got dropped off at Gene Moore’s house, where I dropped the bags and rifle case and picked up the big Suburban. I promised to return to their house, and then went to the Safeway Store I had previously checked for the presence of orange boxes and in only 55 minutes, without a list or a concerted effort at memorizing what I would look for, I made a single pass through each aisle, and completely outfitted five guys for five days with all groceries and supplies for $326, and had the Suburban packed with the fruit boxes of supplies which are sturdy enough yet compressible enough to be packed in the horses’ panniers when we pack in.
I returned to Gene’s house and called him still at work, then said hello to Bo Henry who had gone to get beer and an SUV, and returned to visit with Don and Martheen for a quick dinner, and a return to Gene’s, necessary for the 3:30 AM wakeup and start toward the mountains. I got back in time to see Sarah who had been ill and had not gone to work, and showed Bo the MRI of what he thought was a difference in size and inflammation of the obturator muscle more than pyriformis, but he did not have it on a view box, and I might send it to his office so that he can examine it properly. We packed off to bed as soon as we had talked and showed pictures and house remodeling plans and other talk of the day—which mainly centered around the DC area sniper and the terror being spread even as far as Denver.
UP IN THE WHITE RIVER NATIONAL FOREST
MAROON BELLS MOUNTAIN SCENES
AT pre-dawn, with the two SUV’s loaded and a plan to meet Reg at the monastery, we took off. I drove through the spectacular Glenwood Canyon, always a pleasure, even before first light, and turned at Glenwood Springs and drove past Mount Sopris toward Basalt. We stopped at our usual quick food and gas stop, and had a second breakfast, and then went to the monastery where Rob Van Pelt was gong to drop off the horses. He was not there and neither was Reg. We went to the Suburban, and I drove it up the rutted road to the top parking lot, from which we retrieved it since the big bus would slide in the snow, which we were sure was coming shortly. It turned out that there was no snow for three days, but it had held off until it made it really worthwhile when it began falling, and did not stop for the final 48 hours of our high camp in the White River National Forest, Capital Peak Region of the Maroon Bells, between Basalt and Aspen—where we have so far successfully stashed our cache of camp gear and supplies that are able to overwinter each long year until our fall return. We came back down to the monastery and as we got lower down the naked aspen trees still had a few golden leaves at lower levels, all of which would be down at the time we left—but this time whipped down by heavy snowstorm at the end of our stay.
Rob Van Pelt, our cowboy, packstock supplier, rented us four horses and a mule—two of which horses were familiar—Big Jake, and Egypt a smaller black horse, and a sister to last year’ first-time ever mule Kit, this one Kate; additionally there was a brown horse “necklace” named after the wire white mark around its neck and another brown horse named, romantically enough, “#62.” I got to know these stock quite well, especially my returning horses.
Rob offered to trailer them up to the turn around below the lower parking lot, so as to save a half-hour ride of the one and a half-hour ride to the upper parking area where the trailhead takes off. I was elected to string up the horses and ride in with a tow of them as Gene put the Suburban in the lower parking lot.
I talked with Rob a bit about his equipment, since he seems to have several goose neck multiple horse trailers and a bunch of the Ford F-250 Power Stroke Diesels to pull them. I figured he had to talk to the lady who is looking for the ideal trailer/truck combination for horsing around with a large jumper.
It was a pleasant ride up the steep mountain with a string of animals that proved unruly a few items, such as when the mule broke free and decided to go back toward the monastery. I went back to round him up, and when I caught up with her, the halter rope was tied to the saddle horn of my mount, “Necklace” who then decided she wanted no part of hauling a trailing mule and bucked and reared to try to get rid of me. Somehow I stayed on board and despite overextension of my left leg, which threw the stirrup, I stayed in control, and I coaxed the gelding up the mountain mule and all.
We loaded the panniers and saddles packs as we loaded our backpacks and rifles on our own backs, and tried the cell phone from the only place it had worked—and found Reg at home in Vail—with domestic troubles he would try to straighten out that involved leaking plumbing in the new house they just moved into two days before and much of his stuff missing in packing boxes. Further, he would be only able to hunt the weekend, and would try to come back in by hiking up the last day to give us a hand in wrangling out the horses. Gene’s son Peter would be going out with Reg to get back to his senior year in High school, so we tried to get Peter set up in a place such that he might be the first to shoot an elk cow or legal bull with any of our permits. Reg is the only one who has not fired a shot in the direction of an elk in anger, so I was not planning to use my elk cow permit at any early time in the hunt, but only if we got to the last day without venison. And so it went, in a good hunt, that was hard, and in the end, productive.
AND TWO DAYS OF HEAVY HUNTING IN SNOWY WINTER
It was dry and fall temperatures for the first three days of the hunt. I climbed heavy mountains, and at early morning, it was very cold, even with the down parka I had on my backpack for the purpose of sitting. On opening morning in the Charity Basin I saw nothing, but the second day I saw a group of five elk running toward me. One was a three by two bull (they have to be four by four to be legal), and another a spike bull. There were two large legal cows and a third yearling. I had a clear shot at all three legal ones, but did not want my hunt to be over so soon, and did not want to travel to Colorado for the purpose of only collecting venison, unless we had got to the last day without any. I watched the closest animal, the bigger of the bulls, through the scope for a long while, while trying to frantically call on the radio to alert Tommy and the others to look in the direction of the elk—in sotto voce, so the elk might not hear the radio squawk—but they did not turn their radios on until 8:30 AM by which time the elk were gone.
I carried the 22 pistol—my Ruger automatic—an ideal device for the wilderness such as Alaska or the Rockies—for the purposes of collecting grouse or the only meat I had collected in the last three trips for elk. I had checked it (without ammo) in my suitcase) and carried it every day, but saw no snowshoe rabbits or grouse, which would have been all over me if I had not packed it along, as happened several years when I did not have a pistol—one of which we had to shoot a grouse with Reg’s 30/06.
I saw several good mule deer bucks. Apparently a few permits are being given for some of them but none of us had one, and I could have got at least five if I had a license, one a very big wide spread rack.
On several occasions, we did a kind of drive, and on one of those it worked perfectly, and I pushed elk into Bo who was standing at the base of the Avalanche Chute as I climbed through the snow inside the deep timber—but it was the same spike bull I had seen the day before—this one coming within ten yards of Bo the next day as well.
It looked
like there would be a change in the weather—and it came. A bit of corn snow fell on our new tent, which
we fortunately had a large tarp I had bought three years before to put over as
a rain fly. But, the light dusting with
the frozen rain-like corn snow would not be anything to compare with what came
overnight on the fourth day, as I was fixing our elk burger concoctions from
our grocery stores—and, as it had been the last few years, I had figured it
just right so that we did not run out nor did we have to throw away or burn
food on departure—which is constitutionally impossible for me to do.
And, then, it snowed. Big time snow. We had climbed behind camp to the saddle that looks over the whole area, which made for spectacular pictures in panorama. We saw a herd of elk going up and over the peak into the Hell Roaring Fork—an area from which we could not possibly be able to retrieve an elk carcass even if we could catch up with them. We then pushed down through the heavy timber, and I slipped and slid down the steep forests with about two feet of old snow inside, encountering so many elk beds and such intense elk sign that I quit counting after 25 beds—some of them with steaming urine or droppings, but without seeing the elk I must have jumped, but which saw me before I even smelled them. I made my way over to the camp along the steep hillsideing before the snow started falling in earnest.
And down it came overnight. We estimated about six inches when we had gone to bed, and that had been about fourteen inches when we got up to trek into the Charity Basin under the new fresh powder—outrageously beautiful—and a lot of Kodachrome. I got to my stakeout in Charity Basin and watched with the radios on, having promised not to make any calls unless we spotted elk. The radios work very well for a range of only two miles if no mountain is in between and if there are good batteries in them—but they are very frustrating as the batteries fade and obstructions prohibit transmission which it turned out to be in the later day.
I saw a herd of eight elk run through the falling snow and radioed, alerting both Tommy and Gene. Each of them would have been looking in another direction, but hearing the call, each saw the elk coming. Tommy shot and missed, and Gene shot the cow. The illegal bulls just stood there then milled around within a hundred yards, so I surmised that this must have been a lead cow from whom they, as immature bulls, were taking cues on directions.
The radios still worked, so a call was heard by Bo, who went back to get two horses. I tried to proceed forward up the Avalanche Chute, fighting my way through very heavily drifted snow to get to where Gene and Tommy were skinning the elk, in time to take a number of pictures in this deep snowy background. I then set out to try to find Bo, who had never been up the Avalanche Chute, to guide him around the rim of the Basin to try to get the packstock to as close as we could get to pickup –which was about as hard as anything we have dope in the mountains, trying to literally swim through snowdrifts over our waists, and drag reluctant beasts up hill in snow up to their bellies when they would rather pull us off the slopes or block our upward progress to a point we can barely see through the blizzard, but we certainly cannot get there.
We shouted to Gene and Tommy to find them after all the batteries and radios died. They slid down elk quarters and we got the very recalcitrant horses up as far as
The Canyon where the quarters and the pack I had left could be tobogganed down the hill. Along with the elk quarters, we had taken the decapitated elk head, in order to be tested for CWD (Chronic Wasting Disease)—a disease that has decreased the elk herd and decimated deer and suspended the deer season. For a short time in the blizzard, I could “luge” the elk head down the dragline of the pannier I had dragged up, as I had struggled along in the waist-deep snow, grateful for my new boots and newly repaired gaiters. Somehow, we made it, but I was exhausted and Bo was sick and coughing up blood streaked hemoptysis. So, we had our venison, and could now stay in the tent, eating the last of our vittles I had bought in the grocery store, and digging out to strike camp in the morning, and try to pack out all the gear and elk venison in the heavy snow on five pack animals in the morning, or, more reasonably to be expected, afternoon.
THE HEAVY DUTY WINTER PACKING OUT,
AND A BIT OF A WRANGLING RIDE BACK TO THE MONASTERY
PRECEEDS A RETURN DRIVE IN A FOGGY SNOWSTORM THROUGH THE
I-70 MOUNTAIN PASSES AND TUNNELS FOR THE RETURN TO DENVER
And, it did not get any easier all along the way! We got up and I made a pancake breakfast, then we started to collapse the new tent and try to dry out the soaked equipment, loading it into panniers. About 11:30 AM I thought I heard voices in the vast winter wilderness of muffled white, and was assured I was hallucinating. Soon I saw Reg, and Sue, and their wolf dog Cody, carrying his own pannier. We had loaded most of the stuff and put a bunch into our hidden cache, and started out with me leading the way breaking trail through the high snow with big Jake. Reg had told us that he could not get up to the Upper Paring Lot with the Jeep [, so we went all the way down to the Lower Lot, then I rode Big Jake roped to the string of other packstock and brought them back to the Monastery at dark. I had cased up the Weatherby .340 Mag and its ammo and both scopes and left it with Reg to be put into his gunsafe rather than try to struggle back through the three most sensitized jurisdictions in the US with a cased rifle on return.
After unsaddling and storing the tack, I drove through the downslope to the Basalt fast food stop where I could wash the new boots of their accumulated mule dung and mud by flushing each foot three times in the commode, and then had microwave lasagna as we watched the denouement of the sniper crisis on national TV as the arrests were made which may bring an end to the shootings and make it possible for spectators to gather around the Mall in DC to watch the marathon, which, like the Rockville 10K was under threat of cancellation, as the MITP was on hold for two weeks later—since the Montgomery County Police are the officers who run the Marathon in The Parks. It ma y even be normal from here if there are no copycats.
I got in the Suburban and drove all the 180 miles from Basalt to Denver through the Glenwood Canyon and a fierce blizzard that filled the roads with slush, stopped big trucks, and then limited visibility with such thick fog we had to crawl. The windshield was so badly streaked and the windshield washer was out of fluid, so that I had to lean out to peer ahead. It was such limited visibility that we could not even see the exit signs, so we over-ran the usual turnout for Denver and came east on Colfax Road until we got to the relatively balmy Denver home of the Moores’ after emerging from the deep winter of the snowy Rockies.
Next chapter will be about the visit with Don and Martheen, the next part of this adventure to be recorded in Oct-B-5!