The Great Hunting Roadtrip - Illustrated Edition

A few pictures from my just-completed hunting trip to Wyoming:

The ranch where I hunted is located at the base of the Bighorn Mountains, about 30 miles east of Sheridan, Wyoming. It encompasses a wide variety of terrain, from gently rolling open prairie to the mountain range's foothills to the mountains themselves. It also borders the Bighorn National Forest.

View from the prairie looking towards the foothills and mountains.

I mentioned previously the lengthy stalks through rugged terrain when we were hunting antelope. Here's an example of a ravine we followed in an attempt to circle around a band of those elusive critters. The picture does an inadequate job of portraying just how steep that ravine was.

Uphill all the way - and at an elevation of approximately 5500 feet. Gasp...

Once we finally made our way to the top, there wasn't an antelope in sight.

Where'd they all go?

From the top of that ridge we could see all the way to Montana, about 30 miles away.

That dark ridge line off in the distance is Montana.

To give you some idea of how long that stalk was, here's a shot looking back at the truck. It's that tiny, tiny little white speck way far away.

I told you everything on that ranch is uphill.

Here's a view from the foothills looking at the mountains where we went after elk. There's no pictures of that because that day the wind was howling, the snow was pelting us, and it was too damn cold for me to take my heavy gloves off to snap pictures. Thank goodness we had nice weather for the antelope hunt. It was bad enough hiking all over God's green earth, but at least we weren't hiking and freezing.

 Here's my elk-hunting horse. Notice how cold and miserable he looks.

Two Bits wasn't very happy about lugging me up the mountains, and then back down.

Finally, here's another picture of the nice whitetail I bagged. There's a little creek bottom behind that stand of reddish-orange brush behind me. The buck came out of the creek bottom, worked his away around the brush, and was headed towards some doe a few hundred yards away.

You can tell from the light that this was early morning - about an hour after sunrise. We had him skinned and caped out, with the carcass hanging in the cooler, in short order. We dropped the head and cape off at the taxidermist and were having a celebratory cold one at the Mountain Inn by 11:30 that morning.

A great way to start the day!

It was a great hunt with some fine people in beautiful country. I can't wait to go again next year.