With success in our first year of “bear camp” we were able to lure a few more friends into going along up north for round two. It seems whenever you’ve had success previously, it’s a little easier to get people on board the next trip you take. We had 10 or 11 committed to going along with most of our original group. A couple of guys that went the first year couldn’t make it back up the second year but we seemed to have all that we needed to make a second attempt at it worth while.

This time we had a little more time to plan and even had a Saturday about a month before the season opener to take a day trip up to the area we had hunted before to do some scouting. Myself, Nick, and Justin decided we would leave home early on a Saturday before daylight, get to the nearby town by mid morning for some breakfast, then head up the mountain to do some hiking. Their was still a lot of ground we hadn’t covered, and with the extra men we could take on more area to drive for bear. Nick, armed with his GPS and extra batteries this time was ready to get some way points for the standers. Justin and I were along for the ride, in hopes of seeing new country and possibly some game in the woods.

Somewhere between breakfast and the 30 minute drive up to the top of the mountain Justin brought up hunting out west. It seems that most East coast hunters have this dream of going out west one day and hunting elk or mule deer. We had talked about it before and always kind of settled on the idea that someday, probably when we were much older, more financially secure, and had the time that we’d fork over the money and pay an outfitter to go on an elk hunt. The conversation quickly evolved into what we could afford and how long it would take us to get enough money together to do a guided hunt in one of the western states. I had talked to people before that hunted out west and they always said the same thing, if you want an easy affordable guided trip go for antelope. So we decided to look into a guided antelope trip when got back from the mountains and see how much money we were talking about.

When we returned home I went to work on my mission of finding the best state, best deal, and a date range that I could pitch to some of the guys to see if they were interested. When I go into research mode it sort of consumes me. I tend to think about nothing else than the task at hand and stop at nothing until I feel I’ve turned over every rock their is to turn. So I came up with Wyoming due to it’s massive antelope population and tag availability. I had a spreadsheet 35 outfitters long with hunt dates, prices, location, different amenities, flight costs vs. driving cost. In my research I noticed a lot of the outfitters offered dual species antelope and mule deer combo hunts, so I threw those numbers up their too. For just an antelope hunt we were looking at the high $1900 price point plus tags and transportation to get there up to the high $2k range. For the combo hunts you were easily in the low $5k up to the mid $7K range. Now, we all have fairly decent paying jobs and could maybe have afforded a combo hunt in a few years of saving so it wasn’t off the table. However, I was really into the idea of going west and forking that kind of cash out to an outfitter without a guarantee on an animal just wasn’t what I had in mind.

In my research of outfitters, I noticed many of them claim to have access to literally tens of thousands of acres of land. They outright tell you much of the land they have access to, is public land, it may be landlocked and they have a lease to access it but nonetheless it’s public land. That got the wheels spinning in my head, how hard would it be to do a public land hunt and what are our odds for success? I pitched the outfitter idea to some of the guys, they were okay with doing just a 3 day antelope hunt if we all really wanted to, but that didn’t really give us a lot of time out west to see the country.

We wrapped up bear camp finishing with only a pheasant from the day before to show for it. We had a great time but just couldn’t seem to find a bear to drive out of the thick stuff this time around. I returned home with a whole different set of challenges ahead of me and weeks of research to do in order to formulate a plan.