CouesWhitetail

Congratulations Mark and family! Amanda

Congratulations Ryan! That is awesome. And I gotta say that is some rough country! I can't believe you got up that thing in 30 mins! Wow. Must have been a tough pack out in the dark too! Amanda

LOVE that photo Josh!! That's great he loves the hat! Amanda

Hey Jim, Just found this thread this morning! I think I was up on the Kaibab when you posted it and it got buried before I got back. Excellent buck and story! I saw that video too, very nice. And great tshirt!! Congratulations! Amanda

Way to go! Congratulations to all of you, that's a great hunt! Amanda

Congratulations Scott, excellent story, thanks for posting it. I will grab it and post it in the hunt story section of the main website. California, huh? Ouch.... at least you got to enjoy some AZ country for awhile. Amanda

Well, I just got back last night from about 11 days up on the Kaibab. I was up there trying to help my friend's dad get a buck. This is his 2nd Kaibab tag in 3 years! I went up and helped him in 2005 also and we got a little forkie on the 2nd morning. This year he said he wanted to wait for a big buck. So we hunted hard the whole season, but came home empty handed. The hunter (Ray) is 75 years old and has hunted the Kaibab many, many times (before it went to a draw) with his wife and family. He is almost deaf and can't walk too much country, so it was a little tough trying to get him in on bucks. (but to his credit, he refused to road hunt, despite the fact that almost every other hunter we saw out there was doing just that and being successful at harvesting bucks). Ray is a remarkable man who even decided to scale down this year and not take his small camp trailer and instead sleep in a cot tent. I hope when I am 75 I can still be as tough as he is! Here is a photo of Ray that I took while we were sitting on a slope hoping some deer might come through a draw below us. I call this his buffalo bill cody look. hehehe (his family is all shocked that he has recently decided to grow his hair long! it's tied in a knot in the photo - and you should see the monster truck he drives! It's a classic jacked-up teenager truck! wish I took a photo of that) We didn't see deer in that spot that day but I did glass up an old skull that I suspect was a deer someone shot last year and didn't recover. Seems to be a lot of wounding loss up there. I found one fresh kill that must have been shot by a hunter and not recovered. The ravens had picked it clean already. We hunted in several different areas of the kaibab. We started lower and then went up high and then settled on some middle ground where it seemed the deer were really abundant. Here are some foliage and flower pics. One of the areas we settled on seemed to have lots of deer the evening before we hunted it. And so we were excited to go in there in the morning. However, the US Forest Service decided it was the perfect time to light a fire across the road from there and when we went there in the morning you could barely see the road we were driving on! We hunted it anyway and saw a few deer, so I guess they didn't leave, despite the smoke causing our eyes to burn and lungs to ache and it gave me a headache! sunrise in the area we hunted that morning: here is a look a the burn from a distance. It really looked like something we should run from rather than camp in! I gotta say it was some tough camping in smoke that thick. All my camping and hunting gear smells like smoke! If I get lung cancer in a couple decades from now, you guys will know why!! (we had already moved camp twice on the hunt and he didn't want to move again!) here is a sunset in the smoke. The fire was still burning on Halloween night and it looked pretty neat driving by it in the dark. It looked like someone had set out lots and lots of jackolaterns in the forest. That afternoon we had run to town to get supplies and saw lots of halloween candy, so we bought some. You guys probably won't believe this but my friend and I decided to go trick or treating on halloween night. We visited several hunting camps and sort of did reverse trick or treating since we brought the candy. We went in full camo including facemasks and walked up to camps in the dark! I was sure someone would pull a gun on us crazy people! It was a lot of fun though and most people appreciated it! One guy had just jokingly told his buddy that he needed to be ready for trick or treaters and his buddy told him he was nuts - "there won't be any trick or treaters up here!". hehehe, and then we showed up! The guy couldn't believe it! One morning I went out scouting an area while Ray hunted another. I saw another hunter shoot this large buck right in front of me. Later in the day I scored it for him. It went about 180 with those two nontypical kickers. Later I found this condor right near the gut pile from that buck. Took some pics of it while it was roosted in a tree nearby. You can see its wing tag and the radio transmitter on it also. It was pretty neat to see one so close. I digiscoped a few pics of it. They are pretty ugly, but they have a neat "mane" of black feathers with white highlights around the neck and chest. It looked to me like this bird had just finished feeding on the gut pile (which the hunter shot with a lead bullet, so I suppose it's highly likely that condor ingested some lead) Even though we didn't get a buck, we had a great time. Ray plays guitar and sings and so we had several nights of music by the campfire. And we got some squirrel hunting in and cooked them up for a meal one night. This was a whole different kind of hunting for me. Very little glassing and mostly just still hunting through the forest, which was really tough because everything was so dry that it just crackled with every step. I enjoyed it but am really looking forward to doing some glassing on my WT hunt coming up this weekend! Oh and here is a view of the vermillion cliffs on the way back down off the plateau. And on the way home we were in some traffic around flagstaff. Some guy saw the CouesWhitetail.com sticker on my jeep and waved the rack of a buck he had just killed that morning in unit 23. Hope that guy shows up here and posts his hunt story. Amanda

This past weekend I took a small group of women camping on the San Carlos. These are women that have attended the Becoming an Outdoorswoman workshop (BOW) that I teach classes at and they wanted to get out and do something more. We call it Beyond BOW. So Linda Dightmon and I planned to take the ladies to camp and fish and squirrel hunt along with listening to the elk and enjoying other wildlife. The ladies came from all over the state (as far as Yuma!) and met at my house in Globe. Then we cruised on up to the rez and camped up in the Dry Lake area. We had tons of great food and a really enjoyable time. We hunted the numerous Abert's squirrels in the area and cooked some up in a dutch oven one night with some cream of mushroom soup. Wow was it good!! Makes it a lot easier to shoot those cute little furry guys when they taste so good! here is a picture of a lady who has never hunted and who took my big game hunting class this past Aug. She hasn't even hardly camped before (my friend Linda outfitted her with tent, sleeping bag and such). But she wants to learn how to camp and hunt so she can take her two young sons out as they grow up. She even wanted to learn how to gut the squirrels and after showing her one, she did her own by herself! That's some dedication! here is a pic of her and her first squirrel! she made a great shot after showing lots of patience by waiting for just the right time and taking careful aim! I was impressed! All the ladies got at least one squirrel each, so it was fun. And the same lady who is in the photo above, had not seen or heard an elk bugle before, so she was amazed at all the singing they do! We went out in the early morning and snuck up on a bull (which was pretty amazing considering it was 6 women and my dog!. I took a little video of it. He is a nice one! In addition to some elk we saw lots of turkeys too, but no bear (which suprised me, but was fine with the other ladies). We tried a little fishing at POP lake and had no luck. http://www.coueswhitetail.com/video_clips/beyond_BOW.wmv Anyway, it was a great trip full of all kinds of extravagances....like pink champagne and orange juice for mimosas (and some pink champagne in the squirrel stew), fresh flowers in a plastic vase on a nice table, all kinds of amazingly good gourmet cheeses and wine. Carne asada, stuffed portabello mushrooms and much more great food. Those of you with wives or girlfriends or daughters that you want to introduce to the outdoors, I highly recommend the BOW program. It's a great way for women to get skills they need to get outdoors and have fun! Amanda

Congratulations on a fine buck! I like how you set up that first photo. Amanda

Excellent story, thanks for all the details! Amanda

Good luck and let us know how it goes. Amanda

I sure would like to see one of those critters! Glad you figured out what you saw Lance! Amanda

Congrats Terry! Amanda

I think the camp will be at the corner of the 429 and 22 rds. I am not sure on the dates of the camp, maybe Stanley knows? Or call Rich Leightner at 928-645-9669 and ask him. He coordinates those camps up there. Amanda

If you want, you can email me pics of his lower jaw and I can compare it to the photos they have in the AGFD big game aging book. Amanda

Great buck, congratulations! Amanda

Nice buck and nice shirt HBU Amanda

LOL! Amanda

That is so sad. What a waste. Amanda

Great deer! Wow! Thanks for posting the pic and a bit of the story. Amanda

Awesome Josh!!! That is so cool that we have been able to watch that buck along with you! And such priceless moments with your son finding that shed and loving your buck! It's a great story! Congratulations! Amanda

Nice article, thanks for posting Bill. Amanda

Yes, if you use photobucket to host the photo and then use a link to post the pic here in the forum, then you are not using any of our server space. So those that know how to do that, please do. It really helps. I don't know if photobucket automatically resizes pics, but it might and even if it doesn't, it still hosts the pics and doesn't take up space here. Amanda

I had to delete a bunch of old photos to make space. We had exceeded our quota. You should be able to post pics again now. For those that know how, please, please size down your photos. There is no need for a 1.3 MB photo! They can be sized down and look just as good and only be a few hundred KB. Size them down to about 600 pixels by 400 pixels and they will still look good. Amanda

Looks really cool Foundryman! It's great to have so many talented artists around here! Do you have a closeup photo looking at it front on? I would kind of like to see it that way. Amanda