Bass Pro Fall Hunt Classic and Bear Scouting
We had another successful black bear hunting seminar at Bass Pro Shops on Saturday. We had 20-25 people in the crowd at any given time and it was a great experience being up on the stage sharing about hunting. Eric gave an excellent presentation regarding the law, Fish & Game, trespassing and what to look for when scouting. I gave a short talk on some of the gear in my pack and what you may or may not want to have on hand. We were limited to only 40 minutes, so it was pretty short. Afterward, we were surprised to have about half the attendees stick around to ask questions. We stayed and answered questions for another 45 minutes! We met some great people and truly enjoyed everyone’s enthusiasm! DIYbowhunter.com is scheduled for two more seminars this coming weekend. One on Saturday at 4pm and one on Sunday at 3pm. I hope to see you guys out there!
Sunday morning, Eric and I put our knowledge to the test. We hit the trail to do some bear scouting as the archery opener was less than a week away. We had scouted two weeks ago and knew the area we were looking for. I had the tracking (breadcrumbs) setting on in my GPS the last time, so we were able to map out the area. We adjusted our plan and found the area we knew we wanted to be in.
After a half hour of hiking we hit the jackpot! We got about 150 yards in and found a trail and tracks. A great sign! Then it turned into a black bear super highway. Trails, footprints, scat, more intersections of trails and then we found the food source. Choke cherry trees and elderberries! Boo-yah! They were just about ripe, too. That means in a few days they’ll be teasing the bears taste buds. The best part was getting just beyond the food. Eric was ahead of me and spotted a very large bear track. We found the trail this guy was coming up from and found the perfect tree for a stand. So, we hiked back up to the truck, loaded the stand on his pack and trekked about halfway down to the spot when we spotted smoke on the far side of the mountain. There was a large fire burning a few miles away. We waited for a few minutes and quickly decided to come back later this week to hang the stand. There was no sense in risking our lives over a treestand spot. It was still a very exciting day of scouting. All-in-all it took us about 6 hours of scouting, over two days, to find this location. Now we’ll get the stand up and in the next couple of weeks I hope to put a big bruin on the ground.
I did video much of our trip and that will be coming later this week!
Looking forward to seeing that video.
It's nice that you guys found a natural food source also, especially so close to season!
Good Luck! I'm rootin' for ya!