“DUDE, I LOVE YOU, but I don’t think we should be doing this in the dark.”
I stop where I am, teetering between handholds on an impossibly steep boulder field, to look at Kali Parmley on the rocks above. I can’t see my hunting partner’s expression in the early-morning dark, but I can hear the unease in her voice. I can also hear bugles below us.
“OK,” I say at last, and reverse course.
I’m loath to abandon my plan for opening day, but Kali isn’t wrong. We left the tent almost three hours ago—plenty of time to hike 2 miles and slip into position above the elk we put to bed. Among them is the best bull I’ve seen in a week of scouting, and I want to kill him. So does every other hunter in the unit.
Staking out the high ground would give us the edge. But in all my planning, I never anticipated navigating such a hostile mountain. Each mesa I climbed while scouting leveled into a gentle summit. This ridgeline is a crooked balance beam. Kali and I kept falling off its saddles in the dark, losing elevation almost without realizing as we tried to bushwhack our way to the ambush point. Finally, we landed in this endless boulder field with nowhere to go but back.
By the time we retrace our steps, sweating and huffing from the beetle-kill timber, the precious first minutes of an opening day advantage have come and gone. And when the shooting begins in the valley below, there’s not an elk in sight.
A COMPROMISE, OF SORTS
It would normally take a nonresident like me 22 preference points to draw this Utah bull tag. Instead, I won a raffle to hunt a second-tier elk unit and bought a rifle tag during the rut without using a single point. High on such unexpected luck, my first impulse was to alert my usual hunting buddies and invite them