BUG OUT: By 4am it was obvious that the wind wasn’t going to let up at all. It was still blowing and gusting just as hard as before. The tent was shaking violently and getting any more sleep was pretty much out of the question. Mentally i knew it was time to break camp and try a plan B. After tossing and turning for another hour the time to get up and make a go of it had come. Getting out of my warm Sierra Designs bag and stepping out into the wind from the shelter of the Nemo was especially difficult. Would have been easy just to stay inside tucked in and warm. But you can’t harvest a deer from inside your tent, and camps don’t move themselves. After a brief conversation among the group we decided to officially break camp and ride the 8 miles back to the truck. We would drive back to the campground as we knew there was a site there tucked behind a rock formation which would serve as a great wind break and allow us to do some additional recon for the evening hunt and last hunt Saturday. There was certainly some trepidation from the group about how brutal this ride was going to be but we sucked it up and headed out, pushing at first up the steep hills that dropped from the high ground down to our little gully where we had made camp. We crested the top of the rise and for the first time took the wind full on. If we thought the wind was strong below..it was simply insane up top. Admittedly it was pretty demoralizing at first but at some point I changed over from being discouraged by the task at hand to being thoroughly amused at riding in these conditions. The cross wind would literally blow you sideways and nearly topple you over. Staying upright became a game of sorts. When we would turn into the wind it was all you could do to not stop completely or even roll backwards. The whole thing was just so bizarre to me. Never had I been in wind like this. I kept thinking in my head of the crazy reporters standing out in the hurricanes to let people know that it had landed. The best were the moments when you turned with the wind. It was like having a 50hp motor on the bike pushing you along. Couple that with a nice down hill here and there and it was one of those down right giddy moments on a bike I’ll never forget. Eventually we reached the final rise of the butte and began our decent back to the truck below. Now this part was even more fun. I didn’t dare let it go completely with all the gear on the bike but we got moving pretty good. At one point a group of cattle started running with us. It was super cool. Felt like a cowboy at a round up or something. For the record…cows look really funny when they run. I did have a bit of scare as the herd took a sharp left turn in front of me. I was a bit too close to the mass of “killer” cattle for my own comfort but ultimately was fine. They turned again and then slowed as they collected in a near by open area. The final mile or so back to the truck was all down hill and went by extremely quickly. In total even with the wind we had made the roughly 8 mile trek back to the truck in just under 2 hours which was pretty fantastic. We piled the gear in the back of the truck and headed north to the campground. The site we identified earlier was exactly what we needed. Sheltered from the wind , a fire pit, and less important but welcomed...toilets. Some quick recon talking to other hunters and another park ranger on the way to the pit pot let us know that we had really been hunting in the wrong spot. We should have been hunting the north side of the highway. We packed up and headed out as soon as we could to find a place to sit for the evening. It was pretty immediately evident that there was a lot more deer here with the amount of sign we saw. And…the weather finally broke a little and wind tamed down. It was a great evening sit and was a welcome break from the wind. While we didn’t see too much movement that night the area had promise and we decided we would spend our last day on the north side. Maven Badlands First Lite NEMO Equipment, Inc. WOLVERINE BOOTS & APPAREL hoyt archery BOWTECH ARCHERY REFUSE TO FOLLOW Rage Broadheads Realtree Outdoors® Revelate Designs Gerber Gear Adventure Medical Kits Thule Sierra Designs The Will to Hunt Sunnto BirzmanKUIU
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 23:00:01 +0000
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