TWO FOR TWO: AN IDAHO BEAR STORY

We walked slowly through the woods, looking for any black bear sign that we could muster up. After little luck in the trees, we decided to gain some elevation and started up a ridge. Steve went one way, and Rusty went the other way. I started to follow Rusty when suddenly, Steve came barreling back at us grinning from ear to ear – he had spotted a black bear.

We ran up the ridge, hastily dropped our gear, and quickly got set-up. Steve walked me onto the bear, and I got him in my crosshairs. He was moving quickly, so it was going to come down to a split-second decision. The bear cruised into a timber patch, and as soon as he walked into the next clearing, I squeezed the trigger. With almost no recoil, courtesy of the HX-QD 762 on the end of my barrel, I was able to quickly get back on target in time to watch him start rolling down the hill.

We made our way down to where we thought the bear had landed. After gridding the hillside for a few minutes, Rusty waved us over. He found our bear buckled up in a bush not 30 yards from where I shot him. After photos and high fives, we all took a moment to let it all sink in – it had been only four hours and one minute from the time we purchased our tags to the time we harvested our bear. Hunts rarely go like that, and it was made clear to me that bear hunts never go like that.

We were hunting in Grizzly country, and while we didn’t see any black bear sign on the way in, we saw plenty of grizzly bear tracks. During this time of year, it’s said that grizzly bears have been known to come into gunshots in the hopes of finding a carcass. We weren’t about to wait around long enough to find out. With Koda watching our six, we hastily quartered the bear, packed up the meat and the hide, and made our way back without any encounters.

Still basking in how the first evening of the hunt unfolded, we made our way to the trailer feeling a little lighter after shedding the weight of a successful hunt so early in the trip. We got back, fired up the grill, cracked some cold ones, and started planning for the next day's adventure.

DAY 2

Steve made it clear the night before that he saw little reason to wake up at 4:00am to go chase black bears. Considering that we didn’t end up eating dinner until near midnight and already had a bear in the cooler, he didn’t meet much resistance from the rest of the crew.

After an easy start to our morning, we broke camp and headed east. The strategy was going to be different this time; instead of going up, we were going to still hunt the lower elevation timber patches. We cruised the snowy forest service roads, keeping our eyes peeled for sign, and around midday, we finally cut a track. We hopped out of the truck, grabbed our gear, and ducked into the forest.

After a couple of hours of turning up mostly grizzly bear tracks, we decided to set up under some trees to try our luck with a predator call. Designed to mimic the cries of a dying animal, the sound of a predator call was extremely unpleasant. It also required that we be on high alert as predator calls don’t discriminate, and the odds of calling in a Griz were just as high as a black bear. We tried a couple of different setups to no avail before we decided to head back to the truck.

Famished from the late morning hunt, we broke open the coolers and ate lunch. Jake and I had packed the multi-day river trip lunch staple - wraps with all the fixings. We introduced Steve and Rusty to the old kettle chip in the tortilla move, and after their first bites, we were given nods of approval. With full bellies, we headed out to meet with the fish and wildlife officers to get our first bear tagged.

If you kill a black bear in Idaho, you’re required to do a mandatory check and report with the Fish and Game department. This process helps wildlife biologists understand and assess the impact of harvest on the bear population. Also, by recording age and sex, biologists can more accurately model bear populations.

We linked up with a couple of officers in the parking lot of a nearby state park. I passed off my licenses and bear tag to the younger officer and hopped up onto the flatbed. I pulled the bloody game bag out of the cooler and carefully removed the hide for the officer’s inspection. After confirming sex, he proceeded to remove the premolar and tag the hide. While the younger officer worked through the paperwork, Rusty and Steve had struck up a conversation with the other gentlemen. They talked for about an hour covering everything from the appropriate tool for grizzly bear defense to the time someone brought in a donkey for a Report and Check thinking it was a cow elk.

We finally got back on the road and decided to try a different approach. After about an hour of driving through the mountains, we pulled over to glass a large sagebrush-covered mountain. As the crow flies, we were probably about a mile from the hillside. After spotting roughly 20 head of elk, Steve turned to the group with that same smile he had the day before – again, he had spotted a black bear.

I don’t know if anybody else in the group actually spotted the bear from that distance other than Steve, but we were fully confident taking his word for it. We hopped back in the rig and took off down the road. Rusty was manning OnX, and found a little spur road that would lead us up to the base of the mountain. After confirming that the road was just on the right side of public, we rallied up to the mouth of the draw.

It was about 7:30pm by the time we got out of the truck, and light was starting to fade fast. Steve is a straight-up mountain goat in the hills, so we let him set the pace. We covered about 1000 feet of elevation gain in 45 minutes before we crested a ridge just as the sun was setting. We spread out and started glassing the adjacent hillside. Just as we were about to move to a different position, Steve spotted movement. Just like the previous day, we scrambled into place and got set up for the shot.

The one thing that I’ve heard unanimously from bear hunters is that “bears are always moving.” Unfortunately for us, this bear was the exception to that rule. He decided to hole up in a scraggly nest of timber for what had to have been 30 minutes. We waited and waited, but he refused to come out.  

The end of legal shooting hours is 9:15pm, and by 9:00, we were staring down the barrel of last light. The bear hadn’t budged, so Steve made the call to send one shot just outside of the timber patch in an attempt to bump him out into the open. Steve got set up and sent a suppressed round; the bear didn’t move - we don’t think he even heard the shot. Rusty followed up with an unsuppressed .300 WSM round to the other side of the timber patch and the bear started to book it out into the open. Rusty quickly chambered another bullet, got back on target, and connected with the bear. He sent one more down range for good measure, and at 9:13pm, we had our second bear down. With two working headlamps, we rushed down the hill to recover the bear.

Surrounded by Grizzly tracks and nightfall in full swing, we knew we needed to get moving. Lucky for us, this was about a 3-year-old boar, and he only weighed around 100lbs. Rusty made the call to load him up whole and haul him out on his back. Moving as quickly as possibly, we made it down the truck, arriving at around 10:00pm. Exhausted, we got back to camp about an hour later, and Rusty cooked us burgers for dinner. We ate, drank, and shared stories before finally calling it a night.

It is difficult for me to imagine a better first bear hunting trip. We hunted hard, we laughed hard, and we worked hard, forging new friendships all along the way. Definitely one for the books that won’t soon be forgotten.