My Henry Mountains Hunting Adventure

[a_bow_nut]

Now that my hunt is set to start in just a few days I thought that I would start a thread now to drag the story for a few days.

This story starts back on April 23rd when I got the following email.

Dear ALLAN :

Thank you for your recent applications for the Big Game Drawing. Your results are:

Appl # Hunt # Result
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
219571 971 ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT UNSUCCESSFUL
219570 003 BUCK DEER SUCCESSFUL for hunt 003 HENRY MOUNTAINS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After the shock of the email everything was kind of a dream until this showed up in the mail.




After being called a multitude of names for drawing my tag early I got to work finding out as much about this hunt as I could. Then when the deer had some antlers that were worth looking at my brother (who has a bison tag), my friend Gary( who drew a muzzy tag for this unit also), and I heqaded down to start our scouting to get an idea of the size of the animals that we would be chasing this fall.

Had a little trouble getting in to set up camp.




A storm had rolled through a couple of days earlier and the washes in the low lands were still a little soft so it took some manuvering to get through the next couple of draws.

The rest of the scouting story can be seen here.

http://www.muleymadness.com/forum/viewt ... =2&t=10914

More to come soon.

Thanks for reading.

[NotEnufTags]

I'm excited for you I'll bet your like a 6-year-old on Christmas eve. It's so close. I appreciate you taking time to share your scouting and hunt with us. The Henries is amazing. I love seeing posts and reading stories of hunts from the area. When I saw your stucki in the mud pic it reminded me of shed hunting down there earlier this year. Some the alkalai clay roads down low get pretty much impassible when it's wet. I hope you have the hunt of your life down ther and can't wait to hear about it.

[MT Backcountry]

I'm looking forward to reading your post hunt story...

good luck!

[MuleyMadness]

Glad your starting this thread. Man I hope you have a blast and come home with a great buck. Afraid it might be pretty muddy this weekend with all the rain?

[DeadI]

Can not wait to see the monster buck you will get!

[killerbee]

this is gonna be good!! take lots of pics

[a_bow_nut]

It's a good thing that you guys said something about the mud. That was one thing that hadn't even crossed my mind.

Will add both sets of tire chains to the list of hunting stuff to load up.

THANKS.

[Bowtech43]

Looking forward to hearing the story. Good luck!

[a_bow_nut]

So after suffering through the latter part of summer and seeing pictures of all the nice bucks and bulls that people were getting on the archery hunt I thought that I was going to go right out of my mind.

Thankfuly as the end of September rolled around I was able to get somewhat of a fix for this terrible addiction of mine by going on my friend Gary's muzzleloader hunt to help out.

What an awesome time we had out camping and hunting with good friends and family. I spent most of my time looking for back up bucks in the event that Gary couldn't close the deal on the current buck that he was after. But by the second morning he had his buck down.



So I beat feet over to where they were to lend my strong back and weak mind in the effort for cleaning and packing that beast out to the truck and then back to camp.





We were blessed enough to have Gary's dad come down with us for the hunt.



Gary and his long time hunting partner Doug.



After we had the meat slicked off and cooling on ice it was time for me to practice on my taxidermy training and work on caping out the head.



We stayed an extra day to rest up a little from the previous days activities and to do a little more scouting for my hunt. We made our way over around the Horn and went onto the southwest side to look around and saw a couple of nice little four points feeding up into the brush to bed down. As we were having a snack ourselves we saw a huge three point that had to be around thirty inches wide and was nice and tall also make his way up out of the bottom and head over to join up with the other buck.

As with any hunt like this my time was up all to soon and it was time to head back to pack up camp and head on home.

I would like to say thanks to Gary for letting me tag along for this hunt, it was just the fix that I needed to keep my from pulling out what little hair that I have left waiting for my turn to go down and play in this amazing sand box that they call the HENRY MOUNTAINS.

As always thanks for putting up with all of my blabbering.
Allan

[a_bow_nut]

After digging my 7MM RUM out and starting to practice with it, it became obvious that some modifications were in order.

This was before my gun before (spingville shooter) set me straight.


And after.




I would like to thank Mr. Springville for showing me the lighter side of the muzzle break world. That little thing turned this hand howitzer that was just miserable to shoot into a little pussycat that I acutaly like to shoot now.

It never fails to impress me just how much energy that a bullet carries down range. This is a peice of half inch steel plate that I shot at 150 yards.



It almost made it all the way through.




Now that the gun was squared away and a few rounds of practice are under the belt this last weekend was the time to load up the the final bunch of bullets for the hunt.



I decided to go with the Barnes Tipped TSX bullet in 150 grains loaded with 90.5 grains of Hodgon's H1000.



I'm taking fifty rounds with me so I hope that I have enough ammo to harvest one buck deer.

I will take a few shots when I get down there to make sure that it is still hitting where it is supposed to and if I get lucky while scouting maybe I can pop a coyote.

Time is getting close and sleep is getting harder to come by lately as you may be able to tell by the time of the last couple of post times. But I still wouldn't change it for anything in the world right now.

I think that I should just go back to work and get the last ten hours out of the way and start my adventure even earlier. It's not like I've really been thinking about work at work for the last week now anyway. (hope that the boss doesn't read that part)

Allan