Day 4 - Final Day on Snake River Ranch

Another day of rising at 3:30 AM. Fortunately we were able to get to bed early and were sleeping well in spite of the cold. The roads were steadily improving and we made it to the southern check-in area at Snake River Ranch in record time. Dave helped chain up the front tires, which I deemed to be enough. The chains clanked every time my speeds exceeded 12mph so it was a long ride around to our position at Gate 3, the second to last position. When we arrived there were elk above and behind us on the hills. I didn’t bother looking for them but Dave and the guide said it took them about an hour to cross one ridge. Both estimated over 1,500 elk were present, all off the ranch property and completely safe. We arrived before shooting light and could constantly hear cows calling and bulls bugling. It was awesome!

Our shooting position was another barren hill. The guide, Tom, asked me not to walk out more than a few yards from the fence. The hill dropped off steeply so that I could not see the bottom. The ridge on the left, just above the grass line is 200 yards away. With the numbers of elk above and behind us I had little hope that any were left on Snake River Ranch. As shooting light came the binoculars showed this to be pretty much the case – no elk were visible anywhere on the ranch.


Three elk came over the hill to my left and crossed the ridge in front of me. I used the binoculars but quickly determined all three were bulls. The shooter on the hill to my right had come over and set up for a shot but he too had a cow tag. The bulls were headed in the general direction of BLM land to the east and he decided to follow them as he had a public land bull license. We never heard if he was successful or not but he left about 20 minutes too soon for cows.

Dave was back at the truck with the guide, Tom, and spotted a couple dozen elk headed our way but still over a mile away. They were coming down a hill to our left when I first found them in the binoculars. I knew the chances of them making it to my hill were slim, especially given the intervening terrain, but I prepared for a shot any way. Each of the hills in front of me, out to 400 yards, had been ranged with the laser range finder but I checked them again.


The elk were on a track to pass left to right in front of me but out of range. Suddenly they turned to follow a ridgeline that rose to the hill to my left. I lasered various points on the ridge and 350-400 yards was about as close as they would come. They were still 500 yards out when the two shooters on the hill started firing. Dave counted 8 shots and I lost track as I was trying to guess the range from the shooters to the elk. The number I came up with was 400 yards. Why the shooters started firing is anyone’s guess, but if they had waited the elk would have come right to them. Instead the elk stopped and turned toward their left. They went down into a drainage and came up on my side. Suddenly I knew I was going to get a shot. The elk kept coming and I stayed low and out of sight. Finally they were right below me but out of sight behind the curvature of the hillside. I slowly rose to me knees to get a better peek only to find a cow coming straight up the hill at me – and less than a stone throw away. The cow saw me at the same time I saw her and she bolted to my right, her left. The other elk followed.

Now I had a string of elk on my right, in the open with a hillside beyond and only 40 yards away, if that, and some much closer. I hit my ‘Hoochie Mama’ cow call to see if I could stop them. The lead cow continued on but several stopped. I took a kneeling position, found a lone cow and fired. The cow dropped at the shot but got up again. I fired a second shot and the cow disappeared over the edge of the hill.

As soon as the elk had disappeared over the next hill Dave and I started looking for the one I had shot. I found blood in the snow and followed it over the edge of the hill, fully expecting to see the cow at the bottom. It was not. The blood trail seemed to indicate my cow had gone over the next hill, but that didn’t seem possible given where it had disappeared.

In fact the blood trail turned out to belong to a cow wounded by the hunters to my left when they were blazing away at what for them was too long range. I followed the drainage down and found my cow had slid 50 feet down the hillside, ending up at the bottom of the drainage. She hadn’t moved since hitting the bottom. Once again I was disappointed as it was not a clean one-shot kill. As I walked up I was stunned to find she was still alive. I had left my rifle at the truck and asked Dave to go get it. Then, rather than waiting, I decided to hasten the inevitable and end the cow’s suffering by cutting its throat.

Now we had the problem of getting the cow out of the bottom of the drainage so we could start processing the meat. Tom drove down on his ATV but didn’t think he had the horsepower to pull the cow out. In the end I drove down with the F250 diesel, looped a chain around its neck and puller her out to a relatively flat area. Once the meat was in the truck we headed to Craig where we dropped it off at Mountain Meats for further processing.

We then headed up to the Wyoming border and took Moffat County Road 2 east to some state lands called the “Cedars”. Dave and I had hunted this area before and knew there was a half-moon bowl on the back side that often held deer. Several vehicles were parked on the road, however and we decided the area might be too crowded. Instead we decided to walk into a section of Colorado land north of Road 2 but just a mile from Highway 13. We had driven by this area many times but never investigated it. We worked our way up to a hill top where we buried ourselves in the sage and started glassing for deer. A fence line half a mile to the north marked the Wyoming line and just beyond the fence the ground rose up to hills covered with cedar trees. We watched a couple of deer on the Wyoming side of the fence for a couple of hours and we watched another group for several minutes as they disappeared over the hills. Dozens of antelope were in the valley below us to our right and we enjoyed watching them for over two hours. Dusk came and no deer had shown up on the Colorado side of the of the line so Dave and I gave up for the day.