Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
In these columns, I usually try to write about positive topics as much as possible, and I think I’ve been fairly successful in doing so. There are so many places one can find negative road apples out there if one is inclined to search for that kind of writing. I just don’t want to add to it. However in this column, I’m going to make an exception.
For a few weeks, starting on the first of November, I hunted elk up on the Loop Road from the South Pass end. As I do every year when I secure that permit, I hope the weather isn’t so bad that snow drifts block the road, effectively blocking access for me and my 2011 Toyota Tundra.
During the first couple of weeks of the season access was okay, but not great. New tires helped compared to the slicks I had last year.
There had been a lot of snow, but also other Loop Road travelers, hunters I assume, keeping the road open with pick-up and ATV traffic. One of the reasons I like the late cow season is that I generally don’t have other hunters in my back pocket when I’m hiking to my preferred hunting spots. Being retired, I generally choose to hunt during the week just to avoid people like me.
I hunted opening day, November 1, with a friend who came along for moral support and to help pack/drag an elk back to my pick-up on the off chance that I actually killed one. Nothing doin’ that day.
But the next day, when I was hunting alone, I saw a couple of nice bulls in the gray light before the sun came up, just off the Loop Road. I was on my way to one of my secret hunting spots via an old abandoned two-track, where, more often than not, in the snow in front of me, I saw the tracks of other hunters going to their secret spot as I trudged up the hill.
The old, overgrown trail traverses its way uphill, where, in the gray light of dawn or just before dark, over the past fifty years, I’ve bumped into a few elk feeding in small clearings through which it passes. I’ve even killed a few. At the top of the ridge, the road enters a huge open, grassy hillside, where I’ve never encountered any elk, a puzzle I’ll never solve.
Also, more often than not, I’ll see elk tracks on top of the tracks of the other hunters, so I know they are around somewhere, but most often, where I am not.
A few days later, I decided to drive up for an afternoon hunt. When I turned off Highway 28 onto the Loop Road, I saw two hunters who looked to be in their thirties, standing alongside a pickup with an ATV atop a trailer hooked to the pick-up. Next to the trailer was a dead cow elk.
I continued up the Loop Road, where I could see that the hunter had obviously dragged the elk down the road with the ATV to the parking lot. About a quarter of a mile in from the highway, the tracks from the ATV entered the Loop Road from the north, down the slope, across an open sagebrush-covered hillside, through about 6 inches of snow.
Most ATV riders I have encountered have been very courteous and resource-conscious, but my first impression was that this guy was not. Driving off-road in the national forests is prohibited, or at least so I thought.
Rather than make accusations of a lack of ethics and breaking the law, I later decided to conduct a little research. If a law exists that prohibits off-road travel to retrieve a big game animal, it should exist online. The Forest Service states simply this on its website with respect to off-road travel: Cross-country travel is prohibited.
But, further research revealed that in certain parts of the Southwest, successful challenges to that mandate have allowed ATV riders to go off-road for no more than a mile to retrieve downed big game.
So, I’ll give this guy the benefit of the doubt, but later I found the gut pile about 100 yards from the Loop Road, and I thought that surely a young man of reasonably good health could manage to move a cow elk in pieces, either cut in half or quarters, the short distance to the main road. Hell, I’ve known individuals capable of dragging a whole cow elk that far.
I hunted that afternoon until twilight, seeing no fresh sign after trudging through the snow, blown free in some areas but drifted in other places up to a foot, the wind strong enough and cold enough to make me wish for a warm house and a hot meal.
So I decided to head down the mountain a little early. The trip to town was uneventful, as usual, until I reached the head of Red Canyon. Off to the north, just across the right-of-way fence, I often see where ATV users park their pickups and trailers to unload their ATV’s before motoring up toward Limestone Mountain. However, in the gathering dusk, I noticed something a little unusual hanging from the right-of-way fence.
As I drove a little closer, I could see the whole skins of two cow elk, with heads attached ghoulishly draped over the top wooden rail of the fence, an ugly display of unsportsmanlike behavior I can now never erase from my memory.
I have no doubt that the elk were harvested legally and the meat will be put to good use, but the image of two once-regal animals reduced to someone’s idea of a good joke is difficult for me to understand. I’m sure the intent was to offer the middle finger to anyone who may be offended by such crass behavior, which is the same message that jackass from Daniel sent last winter when he ran over a wolf with a snow machine, not killing it, and then taking the incapacitated animal to a nearby watering hole where pictures were taken all around and then shared with the world. I was a little sickened, but more disappointed than anything… disappointed that someone who enjoys the hunting season, like me, could prove to be so asinine and insensitive.
Lest you think I’m some sort of self-righteous animal rights liberal, I should inform you that I’ve taken countless pictures of myself and others with dead big game animals over more than five decades of hunting as a reminder of a successful hunt and time well spent with friends and family… for my own use. This situation was none of that. It was a blatant attempt to shock passersby using a tasteless display of what was just that morning two wild, free-ranging animals.
I’m not sure where these attitudes of disrespect for the land and its wildlife originate, but the main actors in the scenarios described in this column didn’t learn their behavior through osmosis. Someone had to have taught them that it’s okay to exploit public land and its wildlife without regard to commonly accepted expectations of guardianship and sportsmanship.
I hope my experiences that afternoon were an anomaly and not a growing trend of unruly and disrespectful behavior during our cherished hunting seasons. Until I’m proven wrong, I expect that next season, those folks I encounter in the field will renew my faith in the sportsmen and sportswomen of Wyoming, the orange-clad hopefuls who deserve the term “hunters.”