Luck Returns!

For the last two years, our outfit has been blessed by receiving a number of Commissioner's tags, donated by members of the Wyoming Game & Fish Commission. If you're not familiar with these, they allow the recipient of the tag to hunt antelope, deer, or elk in any hunt area in Wyoming. Since a number of Wyoming hunt areas are nearly impossible to draw, they are highly sought after. We raffle these tags as a fund raising effort, to support our work in conserving wildlife and wildlife habitat in the Cowboy State.

Last year, we started an event called the "Hunt with Walt" in which the winner of one of the tags gets a guided desert elk hunt in Area 100. It's a fantastic area, with lots of bulls, and your chances of drawing a license there are about the same as your chances of being struck by a meteor. And, oh yeah, your guide is me. The first Hunt with Walt was fabulous. Our hunter was a guy from Washington, Steve from Spokane (see below). He was a great hunter and a champion of a guy. We had a great time. By the end of the hunt, it felt like he was one of the WWF team. We even managed to find him a bull. And we had a great time showing him around the desert country of southwestern Wyoming.


This year, our hunter was another great guy, and another Washingtonian - Lewis from Shelton. Lewis is a lifelong hunter with a lot of ties to Wyoming, having hunted for many years in the Sheridan area. I met Lewis in Lander last Sunday evening, and we talked about the hunt we'd go on the next morning. He was excited as a little kid on Christmas Eve. As for me, I was just hoping that I could show him a great time and maybe even find him a good bull. We decided to be on the road to the desert the next morning at 6:30 AM.

By 6:00 the next morning, Lewis was ready to go. I love a guy who has hunted as long as this good man, and who still gets this excited! We headed off into the darkness. Over South Pass and across the Sweetwater and into the desert we went. We had to wait for it to get light, but that gave us a chance to have a little breakfast and visit a little bit before we started looking for elk. I headed east as soon as it was light enough to see. It was chilly, maybe 25 degrees, with a screaming west wind. It seemed like a morning that elk would like to be out of the wind.

We worked our way into one of my favorite spots, and we saw some elk but they vanished as if the earth had swallowed them up. We saw four more elk - only one very small bull. After a look into Dry Creek and up over the rim, I decided to head off to the east. Lots of times, especially after they've been hunted a bit, these desert bulls go off into the big flats and just lay up to wait for the season to end. We headed east. And east. And east some more. We headed maybe 20 miles east, and kept going. On little two track roads that skirt the south side of the buttes, out through big greasewood flats, up on little rims where we could run the spotting scope and look for an elk. We jumped one bunch of 20 or 30, with yet another small bull. We headed off into country I haven't been in since I was maybe 10 years old. We saw wild horses - one bunch even had a mule running with them. We saw sage grouse - lots of them. We saw antelope and mule deer and eagles and ravens. By noon, we were so far out into the desert country, I swear I saw two little groups of Paleo-Indians living in pit houses and drying mammoth hides...but we couldn't find a bull for Lewis.

We turned north, crosses several more small desert creeks, and pulled up short of a big rim. I spotted 5 bulls feeding near the top of it, maybe two miles away. We decided to investigate. We made a great stalk, and found that these bulls were the advance party of about 50 or 55 more elk. Just as we were making the last little crawl to get Lewis in position to shoot, some yahoo came jouncing down the road in a pickup and spooked them. I was disgusted, but the elk simply filtered down a big draw. We got Lewis started down a parallel draw and I went back up to get the truck.

When I picked him up, he was grinning like a little kid. He'd killed a bull just over the ridge, and he was simply overjoyed. By the time we got it dressed and loaded, it was dark. We wandered west for an hour, first on one little two-track road and then another until I could see lights on the highway. We finally came out on a road I recognized about 9:00 PM. He must have thanked me twenty times. It was just a great day. I loved finding him a bull. I loved showing this wild place to a guy who loves wild places. I loved being in my Home Place.


Walt Gasson
Executive Director, Wyoming Wildlife Federation