This hunt took place in the fall of 2019. Up until this hunt we had never hunted in Montana. While driving through the western part of the state two years prior it quickly came to the top of our list for hunting. I had done my usual research, attempting to find the unit with the highest harvest rates, while maintaining a lower number of hunters. I had settled on a couple of general units to the south along the Idaho border. The harvest rates seemed good, the terrain seemed feasible, and there was plenty of public land. We had settled on staying at an AirBnB in the town of Dillon. It was a minimum of an hour drive to get to the edge of the unit from there, but the options for lodging were quite limited with not having access to the area prior. We arrived in Dillon on the first day at around 2 a.m., exhausted from the 36 hour drive. We quickly unpacked, decided we’d leave at sunrise so that we could the unit in the daylight. After a little over an hour drive with 2 four wheels on the back of the truck we made our way down a public road heading into the mountains. There was a small BLM plot that crossed the a road a few miles in with a turnaround/parking lot. We parked the trucks, unloaded the four wheelers, and headed out up the trail. It was another 30 minute ride up in the mountains to be able to hunt.

We spent the next 3 days hiking over 10 miles a day in the unit, hearing a few gunshots sporadically throughout the day. We ran into many other hunters throughout the three days of hunting. Each day we’d go further in, or further up, trying to get away from other hunters, only to get to a spot and see relatively fresh boot tracks with no sign of game. On third day Justin and I decided ride the four wheeler to the highest point in the area. A road we thought was closed that we ended up seeing atv after atv on ended up taking you up to about 9,400 feet. At that elevation, in late November, there was about 6 inches of snow on the ground with drifts easily being over 2 feet. We parked the four wheeler and headed on a trail that would take us a couple of miles back to a big bowl with a creek bottom that would take us 6 miles down to another road. We got to the top of the bowl in a good glassing spot as the sun was cresting the mountains ahead of us. We spent the entire morning watching the hillsides all around us for any sign of life. Our plan was to wait until about 2 hours after daylight then head down the creek in an attempt to either track elk in the snow or push some game out of the dense forest.

We headed down the steep hillside toward the bottom. Temperatures were in the 20s and cold weather gear wasn’t doing it’s job to keep me warm so I was ready to move. As we got to the bottom we spread out about 100 to 150 yards apart. A patch of trees was between Justin and I as we walked. I looked downhill to spot some orange ahead. At first I had thought it was Justin coming up the hill towards me to tell me something. As I looked closer I realized it was another hunter headed our way. Discouraged and annoyed that we had traveled so far out of the way in an attempt to get away from people, I noticed Justin had seen the man and was headed to talk to him so I dropped downhill to catch up with them. The man was in his 60s, dressed in Army fatigues with a Marine Corps boonie cap. He was carrying a cheap backpack and had an old Ruger rifle slung over his shoulder, duct tape was wrapped around the muzzle to the forend of the stock. The conversation started pleasant enough. He had told us that he started out at day break 6 miles below where we were headed, and walked the whole creek bottom up to us. He hadn’t seen a single fresh track in the fresh coating of snow on the ground. He told us that he was a native Montanan and had hunted in this spot his entire life. I sensed a bit of animosity in his tone as he was telling us that this was his hunting spot. He had asked us where we were from and we told him we drove over 2000 miles from Pennsylvania to hunt elk. I think he took some pity on us and asked if we were in shape to hike. We had told him if he gives us a line on some elk we’ll hike no matter how far it is. So he told us of a spot he used to go to that was quite the hike from the road and that he just couldn’t do it anymore in his old age.

We finished the that day off hiking around the top of the mountain looking for fresh sign, only to see the occasional old track where some snow had melted off, or single deer track. The next day we headed out excited about the new spot we had been told about. It was closer to the cabin and didn’t require the use of the four wheelers. We started hiking in while it was still dark out. We had about 3 to 4 thousand feet of elevation gain if we were to make it to the top of the mountains so the plan was to just pace ourselves and stop frequently to glass. Our first spot took us about an hour and a half to get to a good glassing spot. Right off the bat we saw a group of 3 guys who were camped about a mile down the road from us hiking in adjacent to us. They were on the opposite border of the public land than we were. As we were getting ready to tackle the next section of mountain Justin looked to the north and spotted what he thought was a herd of elk. We got the spotting scope out and tripod for my binos. It was a herd of 12 cows, according to the OnX they were about a mile and a quarter away at the edge of a clearing in the woods. We were excited to finally see game, it was even better that they were elk. We watched them for a half hour and decided that getting over to where they were was going to take hours and we didn’t want to risk travelling all that way only for them to be gone. We chose to continue up the mountain. We didn’t follow rule 1. “Never leave elk to find elk”.

We spent the day on top of the mountain overlooking a convergence of two ravines. There were some avalanche shoots, pockets of dense forest, and some meadows to watch. The wind had picked up that afternoon to 30 mph gusts and the glassing was pretty miserable. Justin was convinced now that elk were in the area and he sat exposed to the wind, zeroed in on a good meadow waiting for elk to emerge. About an hour before dark the idea that those elk would be out again at last light was eating at me. We talked about leaving a the spot a little early so that we could be in position to check out the hillside a little better. This time we would be positioned about a quarter to a half mile closer to hopefully be able to identify any bulls in the herd. We got up to leave and spotted a cow moose at around 400 yards in the meadow we were watching the entire day, along with 2 large Mule deer doe just below us at 100 yards. With game on the move we decided to sneak our way back down the mountain. We had about 10 minutes of daylight left and spotted the herd out in the same meadow. There were 13 elk now that we could see. One had a small set of antlers, but we couldn’t tell if it had the required brow tines to be legal in that unit. We knew exactly where we wanted to be the next day.