back from CO

well made it off for some pronghorn huntin once again this year. Went to northern colorado this weekend. knew nothing about the area, no scouting, no maps, just kinda winged it. It was just me, my dad, and my uncle (dads brother) who went along. Just thought we'd have some fun and see what we could. drove there late, late friday night and got a motel. woke up well before sunlight to figure out the roads and area boundries and what not. never saw a thing til around 8 pm. and we were real worried about that as we covered a lot of ground in the truck (we're strickly road hunters on pronghorn hunts :-$ ). we started seeing some elk and within an hour we had seen easily a couple hundred (4-5 hundred at least) and many of em great bulls! We thought about buying tags, pulled out our big game procs and were sad to read the hunt didnt open for another week in this unit. most of the bulls were on private lands but i think it'd be pretty easy to catch a good bull walk onto some public land. anyways that was pretty cool but we were still worried as we had not seen a single goat and the only other truck we'd passed hadn't seen any either (they were scouting for the elk hunt). Around 9:30 we finally saw a single doe. we drove down a couple hundred yards and we finally found em! a large group of around 30 at least, i think 4 bucks were in there and they were all just decent. We decided to make a stalk as we hadnt been seeing much so we hid ourselves out of sight with a hill in between and began walking to pop up where we thought they were, well they were all so spread out and we couldnt keep track of all those eyes and ended up blowing it at the top. we decided not to push em and loaded up to drive for an hour or so. we checked a lot more country and saw no more antelope, came back, made a quick 30 min. stalk, and pops blasted the biggest one of the herd. we decided to drive to the far south of the unit just to check it out and we finally ran in to some other hunters. they'd been there 2 days prior, camped out, and were stayin all week. I never knew antelope hunters got so serious about it! but they seemed like they were having a good time. they said they'd seen a lot but were looking for something real big. they spotted ours in the back of the truck and said we made a pretty good choice on it. I kinda feel bad we lucked out with comin in there one day and takin a decent one when they were so serious about it and were only spottin small ones but thats the way it goes sometimes i guess, hopefully their dedication payed off though.

Overall i'm a little disapointed with colorado antelope hunting (where we were at anyways) it took my dad 7 yrs. to draw that tag, or so he says, and it really wasnt all too great of a unit considering that long of a wait. from what we heard form talking to other hunters there, and from what we saw (of course we dont have much of an opinion as we didnt make it into much of a hunt) I just expected a little more game and some bigger bucks in the area. Anyways, I think we'll be stickin with the annual wyoming hunt for pronghorns and leave colorado trips for elk n deer from now on. but we had a great time and i sure as heck loved gettin away for the weekend! Colorado is a great state with some wonderful wildlife, so dont get me wrong, i absolutely loved the trip and we did luck out with a good goat.

http://i101.photobucket.com/albums/m42/hound_hunter/wesndad.jpg" alt="" />