A quick story to go with the photos.

We were hunting public land in the foothills on the north side of the Rocky
Mountains near Fort St John, BC. Our elk area has several drainage
systems and plenty of small draws that we focus on. Our strategy
involves getting into the bush before first light and either working our
way down a draw or following an elevation contour around a drainage.
Each member of the group (there were three of us) were on elk every day.
But with many close calls and changes in wind, it took Chris until day 3 to
connect. His bull was bugling like mad from the edge of a mineral lick
(which he was trying to turn into a wallow). This made things easy for
Chris as had only to follow the handy game trail into the lick and let bull
keep giving away his position. Once he got within view, it was an easy
couple of shots and a short search (once the rest of the crew had been
gathered) to locate the bull. Unfortunately, Chris had walked straight
down hill from his drop-off point to where he shot the bull, which meant
that we had to either pack this bull up hill on our backs...or spend many
hours cutting several kilometers of quad trail through all the blow-down.
We choose (wisely) to cut trail and 13 hours after the first shot we were
back in camp.

The next day Chris put away his rifle and picked up his archery tackle.
We had slept right through our morning hunt, choosing to recover a bit from
the previous days events, and finally left camp around 3 in the afternoon.
On our way into one of elk spots, near a cattle ranch that we have
permission to hunt, we spotted a nice 4x4 mule deer near the edge of a
field. Being the thoughtful and generous hunting partner that I am I
offered to skip my evening elk hunt and instead grab the camera and follow
Chris as he made an attempt on this buck. It only took Chris and I 30 min
to get as close to the buck as the terrain would allow. After that we
waited for another half-an-hour for the buck to creep within Chris's
shooting range. Once in range Chris made an excellent shot through the
top of the heart and we had another round of high-fives in two days!

The next two days had no one seeing elk. For some reason or another the
elk just vanished...no bugles...no sightings...nothing. On Friday
morning my dad and I went out for one last morning hike while Chris stayed
behind to break camp. We got to the spot we picked for the last hunt and
were on elk right out of the truck! First in was a small 5x5. He came in
to our bugles and cow calls easily and presented a shooting opportunity at
40 meters. We opted to pass as he was very light antlered obviously an
immature bull. Another 30 min into our hike we started to here two
different bulls bugling to each other in the distance. The bugles were
echoing through the woods making it difficult to pinpoint a direct...this
had us wandering about in all directions as we tried desperately to get
closer. We finally moved in close enough to get one of bulls to come at
us. Once he was within about 150 meters my dad ducked behind a tree and
continued to bugle and cow call. I scooted about 50 meters further ahead
and few yards to the downwind side and found a bit of cover as the bull
moved within view. As luck would have it, he was coming straight at me and
he was only 40 meters away when he finally turned so I could get a look at
his rack. One glance was good enough for me as it was the last day. I
fired one round through the ribs and he took off at a trot. My dad bugled
and stopped and looked back! Not one to miss an opportunity I fired
another one through the boiler room and he went down after another short
dash.

Due to a handy logging road we only had to cut trail through 500 meters of
timber to get to the elk and we were loaded and gone by lunch....what a
great hunt!