Nov. 11–YAKIMA, Wash. — Any elk hunter who spent the last week and weekend of October in the hills northwest of Yakima or northeast of Ellensburg already knows this: The season was, well, just OK.
The weather didn’t cooperate — too warm, too little snow in the higher elevations and, instead, just rain — and so, in many areas, neither did the elk.
Harvest figures won’t be known until after Jan. 31, the deadline by which the more than 15,000 modern-firearm elk hunters who hunted elk in Yakima and Kittitas counties must report to the state their hunting success or lack of it.
But based on anecdotal reports from game wardens, meat processing facilities and wildlife area volunteers and staffers, those numbers are likely to reflect a season somewhere between frustrating and fulfilling.
“It was kind of just an average year,” said Skip Caton, an enforcement officer with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife who works many of the popular elk-hunting draws along the Highway 12 and State Route 410 corridors.
“It seemed like some areas were good, others spotty, and some were like it was the worst season we’ve ever had. A lot of it has to do with where you were hunting.”
Reports from a handful of wildlife enforcement officers gave these brief descriptions in local game management units (GMUs):
–Cowiche (GMU 368) — “pretty good in some areas.” … “I talked to a lot of guys who have been hunting there for years and they said they did pretty good.”
–Bethel (GMU 360, encompassing much of the Oak Creek Wildlife Area) — “fairly good” and “fairly consistent the whole season.” … “One part of Oak Creek, the South Fork, I checked quite a few bulls the opening few days.”
–The Rattlesnake (Nile, GMU 352, and Bethel 360) — “pretty good, just kind of spotty.”
–Rimrock (GMU 364) — “dead” and “didn’t check hardly anything in the Rimrock area.”
–Cleman (mostly in Umtanum 342 and Little Naches 346) — “Pretty slow.” “Bald Mountain had a few animals killed.”
Anecdotal reports from the Colockum were much the same, telling a tale of occasional success for some and, for others, long hours and days of seeing nothing, or at least seeing nothing you had a permit for.
Two local meat-processing companies that do a lot of business with elk hunters said it was anything but a banner year. Don Baggarley at Ahtanum Custom Meats called the season “just kind of average.”
Said Steve Hernandez, manager at C.J.’s Custom Meats in Wapato, “It seems like elk is going down this year. We got more last year. I don’t think we even got anything the opening weekend; we might have had a few, but it was pretty slow. I was thinking it was because of the weather.”
Of course, it’s always about the weather.
“When it’s warm like this, elk will not come out of the high country,” said Jim Andrews, a Wildlife Education Corps volunteer at Oak Creek. “They just won’t do it, because snow drives the elk.
“Hunting’s changed a lot, too. There’s a lot of road hunters these days, it seems like. It’s hard for people to be able to get time off to do the scouting and be able to get into the backcountry.”
Even those hunters who were willing to put in the time to hoof it for hours over ridges and through draws had it tough with wide swaths of fog.
“When you have limited visibility, it’s tough,” WDFW enforcement Sgt. Morgan Grant said. “There were days, like the day I was going across the 1500 at Bethel, where you’d have maybe 30 yards of visibility. And that’s just tough hunting, no matter how prepared you are.”
That kind of visibility, paired with hunters’ fervent desire to harvest an elk, can lead to mistakes — and, with them, tests of personal principle.
“Shooting illegal animals in a spike-only area, it’s not the crime of the century, but we do have some guys who turn themselves in,” Caton said. “Most people, when they find out they messed up, they tell the truth, they make a statement and we go from there. He’ll probably be charged with something, but it won’t be as bad. The guy who shoots (an illegal elk) and walks away, he loses his gun (to confiscation).
“We want people to make sure they know what they’re shooting at.”
Andrews, the Oak Creek volunteer, had his faith restored in hunter honesty when a young man from western Washington — “a very ethical hunter,” Andrews said — drove to the Oak Creek headquarters and wanted to call for a fish and game officer.
“He’d shot an elk, and it wasn’t a true spike,” Andrews said. “He shot it from the left side, and when he saw it, he could see that on the left side there was a kicker coming off the spike. That’s OK — you can do that as long as the other side is a true spike — and, of course, when it dropped, he went over to take a look at it and, guess what, there was another kicker just beginning to come off on the other side.
“Some guys would have cut it up and thrown it in the back of the truck and hauled it out. I love to see guys have ethics when they’re hunting and nobody’s watching them. It’s up to them to do it right.”
The guy who responded to the call was Sgt. Grant, who quickly decided the second kicker’s development was minimal enough that it really came down to officer discretion — and that the hunter, clearly trying to do the right thing, didn’t deserve a citation.
But Grant wanted to make a point. He pulled out a quarter and asked, “Are you a gambling man?”
The hunter, clearly confused, mumbled something along the lines of “No, not really.”
“Well, you want to gamble on this?” Grant asked. “I flip this coin, heads I give you a ticket, and tails you walk away scott-free.”
The hunter said that didn’t seem like a very professional way of solving the issue. Grant, who had no intention of making a coin-flip decision anyway, agreed.
“You’re exactly right. It isn’t professional, and it isn’t the way I did business,” Grant told him. “But one way you could look at this is, you did flip the coin when you pulled that trigger, because you weren’t absolutely sure what you had in your sights.
“When you pull that trigger, you have to know without any doubt you have taken the right, lawful animal. You can’t gamble.”
And only then did Grant tell the hunter he wasn’t going to issue a citation and the young man was free to go, taking his elk with him.
So, at least for that hunter, it was a very good elk season.
Thanks for the article.