Well gang, as some of you know, I went to New Mexico with a group of 5 other buddies for the third week of their archery elk season, and I got back home in the wee hours of last Thursday morning... elkless... well sort of. I didn't have a single shot opportunity all week, but I was in elk every single day. My hunting partner and guide and I were chasing them around in mid-elevation oak brush above the wide open "parks" in the valley and below the dark timber and "quakie" flats up at the higher elevations. There were lots of elk and we had some very close encounters, but I was just never able to put it all together. I could have taken a through some brush shot at a small rag horn, but passed the "shot". There was a total of 12 hunters in the lodge. Our group was all from the Houston area. There was a group of 4 guys from the Dallas/San Antonio and George West area and the other two guys were from Western New York State. We had a great week of hunting, fellowshipping and fabulous food!!! We hiked 5 to over 12 miles per day, and I still managed to gain weight! The hiking was done in some mighty thin air too. We were up and down between 8200 and 10,000 feet, and believe you me, there's dang little oxygen in a breath for a Gulf Coast guy used to elevations in the range of 40 to 50 feet... In any case, in the process of unloading our gear from our trailers into the lodge, my hunting partner twisted his back really bad and struggled mightily with it the first morning hike. The outfitter had a stand that overlooked a wallow not far from where we had had 3 close encounters the first morning. I had watched a video of a nice bull in that very wallow when I visited the outfitter at the TTHA show a few months back and I told him and his wife that I wanted to sit right there and shoot me a bull... well my buddy climbed in the stand about 3:30 on the afternoon of the first day and while the guide and I were playing Will Primos and gang chasing elk around the mountain, my buddy shot this big ol' bull at 15 yards... RIGHT OUT OF MY STAND!!! He stumbled and went down in the wallow, then managed to get his feet under him again, and my buddy drilled him again at about 25 yards. The bull barely made it out of the wallow and into the oak brush. After drying time, he will go in the P&Y book at approximately 279!! This is only the second elk he ever saw in the wild!! The first one was a cow that came into the wallow to eat the grass about 5 minutes before the bull walked in. He was going to shoot the cow when he heard the bull bugle and heard the antlers crashing through the brush as he ran into the wallow and chased the cow off... My dad always told me that when you're lucky, anything will do for brains!! 
Seriously, though everyone please join me in congratulating my buddy Troy Coleman on a fine bull!! We're all signed up for the same week next year!!
Here's where he fell.
Here's Troy and me after knocking some brush down so we could see just how big he was (I'm the handsome one on the left
).
He was a big sucker bodywise too! After a bit of chain sawing we got the Kubota UTV to him and winched him up into the back (we were hunting private land).
Seriously, though everyone please join me in congratulating my buddy Troy Coleman on a fine bull!! We're all signed up for the same week next year!!
Here's where he fell.
Here's Troy and me after knocking some brush down so we could see just how big he was (I'm the handsome one on the left
).He was a big sucker bodywise too! After a bit of chain sawing we got the Kubota UTV to him and winched him up into the back (we were hunting private land).
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