What would you do?

[Coach]

I've been holding this post off for a couple weeks, to let all the youth hunts finish up.

 

Situation: You know of a spot where post elk rut is hot, and you're trying to get a youth hunter (your own son) on his first elk. You park an hour before daylight listening for bugles or cow calls to make a morning plan. After sitting and listening to bugles and cow calls for 45 minuntes, you know where the elk are and where they are headed. You start getting on packs and making ready for the stalk. Another truck comes rolling up in the darkness as you and your son are getting set for the hunt. No problem, he'll see there are other hunters here and move on by, right?

 

Wrong. He sees that you are getting set up for a stalk and realizes there must by elk close by, so he pulls up 100 yards and parks. Now he's out listening, and you know he's going to get right in the middle of your hunt.

 

 

What would you do?

 

Does it matter that you can tell right off the bat that he's totally clueless, and the only reason he stopped there in the first place was that he saw other hunters getting ready for a stalk?

 

Just curious - really try and put yourself in that situation.

[firstcoueswas80]

Unfortunately, that is Arizona public land.

 

Though, I would probably talk to him and explain to him where I plan on hunting and why... Really spell it out so he kind of gets the idea. HOPEFULLY thats enough, but if its not I would move on to another area.

 

Guys like that are probably ones that would shoot at a sound with out having a sighting of anything.

[oz31p]

I would either pretend I was looking at my truck like I heard a noise from the under the hood

 

Or follow him around for a while.

 

 

[azslim]

Or how about the guy that parks 20 yds from your camp in the back country on a coues hunt where the hunters are 3 kids, boy & 2 girls and the oldest is 14.

 

I was not nice............

 

Was it my tag I would suck it up, when kids are involved I can be a touch belligerent..........

[CouesWhitetail]

That's a bummer for sure. I would (and have) just go pursue the elk anyway and hope you guys beat them to the elk or that you just end up in a better situation for a shot than they will. If it was convenient I would go talk to them and try and come up with plans that don't conflict. But really how do you know they just stopped because you were there? How do you know they didn't hear the elk in the area previously and planned to go listen there in the morning? And was it another youth hunter?

 

 

 

[Huntaholic]

So Coach how'd you handle the situation?

[Coach]

Well, I actually didn't get a chance to do anything. I'm usually pretty non-confrontational, but in this case I would have politely reminded them that it's a big unit and there's plenty of elk, yada yada.

 

However, the guy I was with has a little shorter fuse than I do, and said something to the effect of, "I'll bet you 5 bucks he's not parked there in 45 seconds", and off he went toward their truck. Sure enough under a minute he's back and the truck is pulling away. Suffice it to say the conversation was short and to the point.

 

To answer Amanda's question about whether I'm sure they were intentionally piggy-backing, we ran into some other guys we know later in the day and it turns out that after leaving our area, the knot-heads went about a mile down the road, found these guys heading after some elk and did the exact same thing.

 

You know, you don't want to have to get into any type of confrontation with people in the field, but I guess sometimes you just have to remind people about common courtesy. You'd think they would be able to figure out that jumping right in on someone else is a good way to get people feeling a little peeved.

[Tines]

I'd consider myself non-confrontational as well but my fuse is a tad short too. Sometimes people just need to be "educated" and they're not screwing up your hunt intentionally. Most guys, unfortunately, know exactly what they're doing....

[200"mulie]

elk it think it is different than coues hunting . . .at least you can work for eachother see if you bump deer into each other.

 

but elk in the rut........ i'm sure he was driving down a road listen for bugles and heard one stopped and planned on going out, but like you said how do you know he didn't just see you went down the road stopped and got out in front of you hopefully get a shot at a bull.

 

i would of at least have a quick word with him and hopefully would understand

[Coach]

200" muley, it was a Jr. cow hunt, but the elk were fired up in this area, still bugling hard, clashing horns, etc. I think the thing that got me a little torqued, was just how blatently they got right in the middle of a group of hunters clearly already in persuit. Just by their actions and attitude it was obvious that they would have no problem whatsoever outrunning us to the elk and shooting one right out from under us.

 

In this event, there were actually 2 trucks that came in - but they were together. The first parked about 100 yards up, and the second was only 50 yards from us. It's the closer one that my buddy had a chat with, but they were clearly on radios or cell phones with the other truck. I hate to stereotype, but the first words out of both of our mouths were "valley hunters" because the closest vehicle was a jeep with one of those hitch reciever ice chest holders.

 

Certain things just shout out newbie, but if you're cruising around in your scatchless Rubicon with a hitch-mounted ice chest, looking not so much for elk, but someone who looks like they know what they are doing, with hopes of following them to the elk, you might want to consider the possibility of confrontation.

 

When confronted, one group, the ones in the jeep, went back down the road and found someone a little less intimidating to piggy back. The other truck continued up the road maybe a mile or so, got out upwind of the herd and started bugling - yeah, upwind blowing bugles, of the nastiest sort... I can't imagine how they thought this might help them. We had to adjust our plans to let the butt-hats run the herd back to us.

 

In a way, they helped out by being totally clueless. We could predict how the elk would move ahead of them, and fortunately, Matt took his cow that morning. It was all good because we knew how to use their stupidity, but at the same time kind of frustrating.

 

Maybe I'm just an old fart, and a little jaded. I don't think you should have to plan your stalk around some bunch of clowns, and constantly adapt to clueless hordes with no concept of etiquette or common courtesey.

[200"mulie]

200" muley, it was a Jr. cow hunt, but the elk were fired up in this area, still bugling hard, clashing horns, etc. I think the thing that got me a little torqued, was just how blatently they got right in the middle of a group of hunters clearly already in persuit. Just by their actions and attitude it was obvious that they would have no problem whatsoever outrunning us to the elk and shooting one right out from under us.

 

In this event, there were actually 2 trucks that came in - but they were together. The first parked about 100 yards up, and the second was only 50 yards from us. It's the closer one that my buddy had a chat with, but they were clearly on radios or cell phones with the other truck. I hate to stereotype, but the first words out of both of our mouths were "valley hunters" because the closest vehicle was a jeep with one of those hitch reciever ice chest holders.

 

Certain things just shout out newbie, but if you're cruising around in your scatchless Rubicon with a hitch-mounted ice chest, looking not so much for elk, but someone who looks like they know what they are doing, with hopes of following them to the elk, you might want to consider the possibility of confrontation.

 

When confronted, one group, the ones in the jeep, went back down the road and found someone a little less intimidating to piggy back. The other truck continued up the road maybe a mile or so, got out upwind of the herd and started bugling - yeah, upwind blowing bugles, of the nastiest sort... I can't imagine how they thought this might help them. We had to adjust our plans to let the butt-hats run the herd back to us.

 

In a way, they helped out by being totally clueless. We could predict how the elk would move ahead of them, and fortunately, Matt took his cow that morning. It was all good because we knew how to use their stupidity, but at the same time kind of frustrating.

 

Maybe I'm just an old fart, and a little jaded. I don't think you should have to plan your stalk around some bunch of clowns, and constantly adapt to clueless hordes with no concept of etiquette or common courtesey.

 

 

 

ya i would of had a word or two to say . . . lol sratchless jeep!! and why the heck would you bugle (your right there newbie's) well glad you still got one it's amazing hope some people can be so greedy or selfish and hopefully won't happen again in the near future. good luck on fuure hunts

[480 stu-ffer]

That's a bit of a problem here in Az because of the great road access... but it's really bad along the road systems in Alaska and the fishing there has the same problem but you can still fly out over and past the mess and when you get on the ground you don't hear road vechicles, just vechicles in the air which still tends to break the solitude.