Hunting Misadventure Ends a Success

[rclouse79]

My neighbor wants to go elk hunting with me this year so I took him javalina hunting for a warm up. I had been to the spot I wanted to camp and hunt years before in my Nissan Frontier. I found out on the way to camp that my Suburban will not go everywhere the light little pickup used to go. We started skidding out on a steep section of road, so I backed up a bit and we felt drop. I tried to go back forward with no luck. My stomach dropped when I got out to see the rear passenger tire had gone over a rock that was now in contact with the floorboards. The first attempt to free the truck was jacking it up enough to put rocks under the tire to give it some traction. . . . fail. We jacked it up one more time and found that the big rock would wiggle a bit. Jacking up a suburban in the dirt on an incline was not exactly what I would call safe, and definitely had some pucker factor to it. We decided we had better not push our luck with the jack, and set our goal of getting that rock out of the ground. At this point I was thinking there was a good chance we were going to be screwed. Chris said I started digging at the ground with my bare hands like a honey badger. After tearing up my hands pretty good we found out a tire iron worked a little better. After digging a substantial amount of dirt away we were able to dislodge the rock. We filled the hole back in with smaller rocks so the tire would not fall in and drove right out. Once we were out we opened the back of the suburban and our cooler slid out spilling its contents all over the road. We spend the next few minutes picking up dirty ice so we would have something to cool down the javalina if we were successful. My buddy backed me down the hill a couple hundred yards till we could find a place to pull off and camp. I have never been so relieved or thankful to crawl into my sleeping bag on level ground. We really should have been screwed. The jack was completely broken after the second attempt. After our hunt we walked back up to get some pictures of that beast of a rock. It was one of our three trophies for the trip.

 

The next morning we got to our glassing spot just before sunup. By 8:30 I had spotted three pigs working their way up a ridge. I tried to get a spot to set my gun up with the bipod, but there was too much vegetation. I had never used my triclawps before, but decided to give it a shot. I set the tripod up low for a sitting shot, but Chris could not get a picture in scope so I raised the tripod up for a standing shot. He could not find the javalina for what seemed like an eternity. Finally he found them and I was watching through my binoculars. I told him to shoot when he was ready. After a while I looked up at him to see what was going on and he said he couldn’t shoot right now because he was shaking. That was the best part of the trip for me. He collected himself for a minute or two and took a shot at the javalina 220 yards away. I adjusted the tripod and got behind the gun to find another javalina standing broadside. I took a shot and saw the javalina started running straight towards us until I lost view of him behind a bush. I was not super confident about either shot because I had never shot off a tripod before and we didn’t see either pig go down. We decided to go check it out and found both pigs in short order. I used to think I was a good shot, but now I think it is just my rifle. We both hit just behind the shoulder. It was a great trip and was definitely not short on excitement.

[Evan]

What a story. Congrats on the pigs!

[Mocha1545]

What an adventure!!!!! Glad it all worked out. Congrats on the pigs.