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Made it back from New Mexico safe and sore.... a friend and I were fortunate to draw a 16B New Mexico rifle tag for the second hunt. For those that are not familiar with 16B, it is a completely wilderness area. After scouting trips in the summer we decided to hire a packer to pack our gear into the unit as doing it on foot would have been almost impossible. Our hunt started off with a major problem. We met our packer at the trail-head and exchanged the normal signatures and the rest of the money. Our packer provided a sheet of paper. On the paper there were two GPS coordinates, one was pointed out (some time goes by and we enter the coordinates into our GPS). We take off on foot ahead of the packer and arrive at the location (surprisingly never passed by the packer on horses). We could not find our gear, thankfully we rented a satellite phone from PHI Satellite Phone in Scottsdale (great person to deal with) and called the Outfitter. We were about 3 miles away from the correct location (this was after hiking just short of 4 miles)....it was now 2 pm and we had to double time it to the location our gear was at. In the Gila 3 miles on foot may as well be 50.... it is a long way. Getting to the area at dark, we had the hardest time finding our gear. We took minimal items.... no food.... and limited water as we expected a 3 hour hike.... now…. 9 hours later we were about out of gas, as luck would have it, we found our gear. I want to be clear, I am not totally blaming the packer for us ending up at the wrong location. HOWEVER I sure learned valuable lessons 1. walk with your packer to the location 2. review a detailed specific map of exactly where your gear is. 3. spend the extra $$ and ride in on horses. Now on to the hunt…..the weather was warm and we herd no bugles at night..... this was the second rifle hunt, we were not expecting to hear bugles......merely hoping to hear one or two. The first day came and went without seeing a single elk. The second day we hiked a ridge together and split up. I went towards a distant mountain... luckily bugling was herd mid-morning coming from the dark, nasty, burned side of the mountain. Glassing from the opposite ridge, I could not see the ground of the hill side the bull was bugling from. Slowly moving in, a cow was spotted about 90 yds away, with the rifle on the shooting sticks I caught movement, I could see a bull walking towards the cow, only seeing the 4ths and 5ths I made up my mind to shoot. Having a limited window to shoot, I touched the trigger and the 6.5 x 284 dropped the bull. I called the packer and I was met at camp two days later. We rode horses to the deboned bull and life was good. The horse packed the elk out (and I got to ride a horse there and back something I was not expecting so the Outfitter made up for the extra walking I did on the first day). Unfortunately my friend’s tag was unfilled because of a rifle mishap…. Thanks for reading.