If my hunts keep going like this, I’ll have to start writing comedy.
By Justin Stapley | Shooting Director
My recent archery hunt proved that wasn’t the case.
The snowball effect began before I even made it onto the mountain to chase deer with my bow. For once, I tried to get ahead of the mad-dash packing fiasco we’re all familiar with. I inventoried all my gear and made my shopping lists. I even managed to find my old fly rod and reel, which to my amazement still worked.
I deflated from my excitement rapidly when I got back from Sportsman’s Warehouse and my wife set the water bill in my lap. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill billing notice. We’re talking an extreme anomaly or a severe leak. Worse yet, it was Friday night. I wouldn’t be able to call city utilities until Monday – the day I was headed out hunting.
Fast forward to Tuesday morning. I still had no clue what was going on with my water, but I’d thoroughly checked my house and grounds for any immediate problems and requested a work order from the city. I’d only lost a day. At least that’s what I thought.
The next morning, I woke up to sunlight shining through my window. My phone had died during a power outage, so the alarm that was going to wake me at six didn’t go off. Instead, I woke up at nine-thirty.
I finished packing, ended up having a conversation with my neighbor about the water problem, and didn’t get to my dad’s house until after noon. We hitched up his camper to his truck, the ATV trailer to mine, and got off thinking we had enough time to get to Cedar City, head up the canyon, and still hunt in the evening.
Yeah, that’s not how things were happening on this trip.
As we were getting close to Nephi, I suddenly found myself way ahead of my dad. I slowed down to 60 and drafted behind a semi for a good twenty minutes waiting for him to catch up. He never caught up, but I got ahold of him on the phone (via voice command folks, I promise). He told me his steering was getting squirrelly when he tried going over sixty.
We stopped in Nephi but couldn’t find anything wrong. I figured it was just wind pushing his outfit around through the canyon. To be safe though, we crawled along at 60 miles-per-hour to Cedar City. When we finally got into town, it was way too late to head up the canyon. We crashed at my grandma’s house for the night.
The next morning, we got up, headed up the canyon, and set up camp. The first hunting we were able to do wasn’t until Wednesday evening. We started with an ATV road-hunt through some trails where we’d seen a lot of deer in previous years. At this point, it was my bow’s turn to give me problems.
I’m pretty proud of my bow, though I get crap for it sometimes. After all, it’s a 1970s single-cam. But I’ve dropped two deer within five years and love the classic wood look. However, the manual screw-in site pins apparently weren’t designed with ATV engine vibration in mind. Just a half-mile down a trail, I heard a subtle plop-plop and looked down to see my pins falling off my bow.
Amazingly, I found all my pins but couldn’t sight it back in again until the next day. I’d practiced reflex shooting before and felt confident out to about 20 yards, so I wasn’t too mortified.
Not that it mattered. The lack of typical August rainfall seemed to have disrupted the usual late summer deer patterns. We didn’t see anything.
Thursday morning, I planned to hike down deep to my breadbasket area. Same place I’d dropped a four-point a few years earlier on my first archery hunt. I’m sure most of you would understand if I leave this little spot nameless. Suffice to say, it’s one of my favorite spots, both for the success I’ve had there as well as the family history in the area.
But even this sweet spot wasn’t good enough to overcome the current of crazy that was this trip.
While driving to where I usually start my hike, my check engine light comes on. When we stopped and turned the engine off, we could hear the radiator fluid boiling. Since it was too early for a shop to be open, we hunted for a few hours (saw nothing, again). Then, we headed down the canyon.
The head gasket had blown, and the negative pressure kept the radiator fluid from circulating which caused the engine to overheat catastrophically. How I was able to haul an ATV trailer all the way down to Cedar City and then up a mountain before the problem manifested itself is beyond me.
My dad had to head home early with his camper, so he could make a second trip back to get the ATVs. I finally got into the deer and spotted a few big bucks Saturday night but lost daylight before I could stalk close enough for a good shot. And that was that. I helped my wife pack up and leave in her car Sunday morning and came home with my dad Sunday afternoon when he came to get the ATVs.
It was sure a crazy hunt, but it wasn’t what I would call a bad hunt. Cedar Mountain was looking beautiful this year. Navajo Lake and the other smaller lakes nearby were full for the first time in years. In response to some of the fires up there in recent years, they’re finally letting loggers go after the trees killed by wood beetles. New, young growth is sprouting up everywhere.
One of the hikes I made took me up above 9,000 feet and gave me a spectacular view looking south towards Zion National Park. Southern Utah is truly God’s country, and even though my trip had been the hunt from hell in a lot of ways, I still got to walk in places that are the closest thing a mortal man can come to heaven. Sometimes, that’s all a hunter really needs.
Justin Stapley is the Shooting Director for Spencer Durrant Outdoors, and a political writer whose principles and beliefs are grounded in the idea of ordered liberty as expressed in the traditions of classical liberalism, federalism, and modern conservatism. His writing has been featured at the Federalist Coalition, the NOQ Report, and Porter Medium. He lives in Bluffdale, Utah, with his wife and daughters.
[…] (chasing elk through the Mt. Nebo Wilderness Area), as did our Shooting Director Justin Stapley (though he hunted deer). Usually I don’t hunt as long, or as hard, as I have this year. When I left for the elk […]