I’m sure my TBH buddies and family are tired of hearing about this hunt. But it was such a great experience that I feel it deserves more than the few lines and pics that I posted in the teaser thread when I was in NM.
This quest started in 2015 when Curt Joslin (Curtintex) called me up when I was on my way to work and asked if I wanted to go elk hunting in a couple weeks. I told him I couldn’t do it because I needed more time to save up the money. He said, “No problem…it’s free. Me and my wife can’t go, and it’s already paid for”. I told him it would be a while before I could pay him back and he said not to worry about it. The hunt was paid for, and he didn’t want it to go to waste.
So TBH’er Randy Dudley (RANDY) and I found ourselves on a high dollar private land hunt in the middle of the Gila national forest. Randy shot a monster, and I missed a few close opportunities at giants. I knew right then that I was gonna keep going back until I got a big bull with my bow. Here’s the thread to that first hunt: Scratch that. Search function SUCKS!
My next trip was in 2016 with Zane Streater Outdoors out of Las Vegas, NM with TBH’er Kdenhead (Kevin Caddenhead). Trip SUCKED! Saw a couple young elk at a distance that avoided the last minute ground blinds the guide set up at a fence crossing. Waste of money.
My next trip was in 2018 with Milligan Brand outfitters. Other than the guide vaping in the woods all day and no elk spotted, it was awesome! Not really, you guessed it…it SUCKED.
I kinda put elk hunting on the backburner while I finished out my law enforcement career, moved out of Houston area to Centerville, and started homesteading/raising critters. Then I started hearing about TBH’ers scoring good elk at the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. I made some calls to TBH’ers Lance Odom and Heith Garcia and realized that I was dying to go again and now had a place that sounded promising. I talked to my buddy Curt to see if he was in, and he was in! The only problem was that the tags were first come, first serve via phone calls. So we hatched a plan to have me and my peeps and him and all his peeps that worked in his office start calling on D-Day at 8 am to get through and get two tags for us. Sounded like a plan, right? Nope. Chew Luck stepped in and reared its ugly head. They changed it up and instituted a regular draw due to the overwhelming popularity of their hunts.
So Curt and I sent in our application fee and crossed our fingers for a few months. Then I got a call from Hunter Blackwell (TildenHunter) saying he and his dad had gotten their call from the Jicarilla…they had been drawn. I checked my phone. Nope. 5 bars. Notta. Checked it again. LTE, mobile data on. Jack Squat! Checked it again. Screen was as blank as Biden’s brain scans. I shrugged my shoulders and started considering other options. About two hours later the phone rang. It was a real live Apache dude telling me that Curt and I had been drawn! Sex Yeah! (Close to what I said!).
Then reality set in. Write a big check and hope it don’t bounce. Get the bow and other gear ready. Lose 50 lbs. (after 3 months I only had 56 lbs. to go!). Get in shape. Take off work (new job after retirement). Get more money for guide fee, travel, rent house, food, copious amounts of adult libations, etc.
I’ll skip to the hunt. Curt and I chose to go two on one with the guide, Ryan. That means we hunted together and took turns. Curt insisted I get first shot. I argued for about 5 seconds. So we start hunting on a Tuesday morning. Met the guide in town and got in his truck. We were driving to one of his honey holes when he stopped the truck and pointed out a bull up on the hill (mountain to me) with a couple cows. This was not the place he wanted to hunt, but as the Apache say, Hunt where the elk are! We drove past the elk like we didn’t see them and parked on the back side of the hill.
Ryan hit the bugle call and we heard multiple bulls answer. It was on! Ryan set a good pace, despite Curt and I huffing and puffing behind him like a steam engine from an old Bonanza show. We hung in and kept up until we got fairly close to about 3 bulls bugling and acting like fools while surrounded by cows and calves. Every time we would try to sneak up close, the cows would spook and lead the whole dang mob over the hill, through a valley, and up another hill. I caught glimpses of a shooter bull and a young, illegal bull (has to be a 5x5). Note: Ryan was concerned about catching the herd. Bobby was concerned about how far we were getting from the truck!
Take the above paragraph and repeat it about 4 or 5 times. That what we did. The guide would walk/run, me and curt would plod/shuffle, and then the cows would spook. I was just about to call a time out and have a Little Debbie/Gatorade break. I finally caught my breath as we saw a big set of antlers at about 80 yards. But he seemed to be walking away (again). I had an arrow nocked and was trying to control my breathing so I didn’t alert every elk in Northern NM that I was on blood pressure and cholesterol meds. Ryan squatted down next to me and started raking some brush with a shed elk antler. I told myself he was using that an excuse to catch his breath. He was giving it hell when I looked up and saw the bull’s rack getting CLOSER! Ryan was looking down when I said, “Here he comes”.
That bull went from 80 yards to about 35-40 yards and was coming straight at us. He was ****** and was not going to tolerate a newcomer getting close to his hoes. Without speaking to Ryan, I came to full draw when the bull was at about 35 and held it for some time. He eventually walked to exactly 25 yards and stopped, facing us dead on. He saw something wasn’t right and was staring at the slender, calm Apache and the hyperventilating fat boy (I consider myself 1/32nd Comanche but those genes chose to stay hidden on this day).
Sidebar: I can tell you right now. I was solid as a rock! I had come too far, waited too long, and spent way too much money to blow this shot. I had been shooting a plastic coffee can lid out to 50 yards and this 25 yard shot was NOT going to kick my butt. I was calm as the green glowing pin on my borrowed Mathews V3X 33 settled on the base of his neck. I thought for about 2 seconds…should I take this frontal shot? My mental mantra when shooting is “Take a breath, squeeze the tennis ball between my shoulders, let the shot go off” (back tension shot that allows me to trip the release without moving my trigger finger). It worked! The arrow disappeared right where it was supposed to go. The big bull whirled and ran back down the trail away from us. I closed my eyes and listened to a Chinese fire drill of elk running away, crashing through trees, stumbling on rocks, and then silence. The guide looked at me like, “*****! What just happened”. Little did I know that Curt was filming from about 10 yards behind me with his iPhone 3. It was glorious! An hour and a half after getting out of the truck, I had drilled a big bull.
http://youtube.com/shorts/Glnl2YvXs6...8iEwfZqIialKpS
We all high-fived. Talked about how the shot looked great. Told them about Chew Luck and how I was cautiously optimistic. Decided to wait about an hour to take up the track. Screw that. 8 minutes later the guide walked up to look at where the bull (now nicknamed Maximus) was standing. I watched Ryan look around for a bit, turn and give us two thumbs up. We quietly walked up to him and there it was…blood, glorious blood. And I don’t meet big fat drops of blood on the ground. I mean a freakin’ lung/heart/nether region spray of blood all over the place. I still wasn’t sure what happened with the arrow/broadhead and the elk, but I knew that beautiful SOB was not happy!
We trailed about 30 yards back down the trail with beautiful spraying blood everywhere and then he took a sharp right turn straight downhill into the depths of hell (not really, just a steep rock gully). Ryan was a little ahead of Curt and I and we were looking at all the blood. I looked up and Ryan had stopped and had his hand up for a high five. I was in denial. Had he never heard of Chew Luck? Getting cancer while bowfishing, falling out of a tree stand two weeks before an elk hunt, breaking my leg at my birthday party, and all the other evidence of a bad luck dude? Surely he jests. But he was not. I took a few more steps and saw Maximus the Monster bull lying there. No exit hole. No bloody side. No big puddle. Just a dead elk in all his natural glory.
I must say that I was brought to tears by the experience. I didn’t mean to cry. Didn’t want to cry. Didn’t want to thank the Lord out loud in front of the two stellar men. Didn’t want to sob like a TikTok dude that found his lost long brother after a 23 and Me DNA test…but I did.
http://youtu.be/J4HXGQg-gcs?si=IBm9NgUfITK89mnJ
After the shock wore off of accomplishing this bucket list item, it was time to get to work. Ryan knew he couldn’t get his truck to where we were (25,000 feet high on the side of Mt. Holysheetman). So he called his two brothers who are also elk hunters/guide. They weren’t tied up, so they agreed to come help us pack out the elk. When they arrived the knives were pulled out and they did the gutless quartering method. Skinned him on one side, folded out the cape, and quartered him/backstrapped him/tenderloined him. Then we rolled him over and repeated the process. Meat was placed into bags and strapped to multiple pack frames.
After finishing the quartering process, Ryan said, “I’ve got to see where that arrow went”. He got a bone saw and cut out several ribs to access the chest cavity. He gently put his hand inside the elk and said, “Holy crap. There’s the fletching.” He took his knife an made a few cuts and pulled out the entire heart………….with my entire arrow through it and fully intact. I had made a perfect shot. The heart and lungs were destroyed. The broadhead was perfectly centered inside the bull with the fletchings near the front of the chest cavity and the broadhead barely puncturing the stomach area. We took it back to town just like that so the other guides could see it. Chew Luck had been conquered!
I hiked out the cape/horns/head which weighed approximately as much as a 1975 AMC Gremlin. Seventeen long hours later we made it to the truck. Or maybe it was 17 minutes. Not sure.
We got the elk back to the meat locker in Dulce and we finished cutting him up, tagging all the parts, and putting him in the cooler. My work was done. It was whiskey time! Curt was just as happy as I was, and I love him for that. What a great, selfless guy to hunt with. My 8 to 9’ish year quest was over. I had shot a 306 1/8” bull with my bow. Well technically it was with my son’s bow since my limb blew up right before the hunt (remember the Chew Luck that I mentioned earlier).
The rest of the week was a blast as Ryan the Apache Super Guide led Curt to a monster 317” bull. I was there to witness the shot and help with the blood trailing and I must say it was just as fun and exciting to find his bull as it was to find mine. Hunting brings men together like nothing else. Especially when you’re sleeping head to toe on a twin mattress in an IKEA bed.
Thanks for following along. We have some outstanding pics that the guide took on his phone, but I guess he’s busy guiding again because he still hasn’t sent them. Here’s all I got.
This quest started in 2015 when Curt Joslin (Curtintex) called me up when I was on my way to work and asked if I wanted to go elk hunting in a couple weeks. I told him I couldn’t do it because I needed more time to save up the money. He said, “No problem…it’s free. Me and my wife can’t go, and it’s already paid for”. I told him it would be a while before I could pay him back and he said not to worry about it. The hunt was paid for, and he didn’t want it to go to waste.
So TBH’er Randy Dudley (RANDY) and I found ourselves on a high dollar private land hunt in the middle of the Gila national forest. Randy shot a monster, and I missed a few close opportunities at giants. I knew right then that I was gonna keep going back until I got a big bull with my bow. Here’s the thread to that first hunt: Scratch that. Search function SUCKS!
My next trip was in 2016 with Zane Streater Outdoors out of Las Vegas, NM with TBH’er Kdenhead (Kevin Caddenhead). Trip SUCKED! Saw a couple young elk at a distance that avoided the last minute ground blinds the guide set up at a fence crossing. Waste of money.
My next trip was in 2018 with Milligan Brand outfitters. Other than the guide vaping in the woods all day and no elk spotted, it was awesome! Not really, you guessed it…it SUCKED.
I kinda put elk hunting on the backburner while I finished out my law enforcement career, moved out of Houston area to Centerville, and started homesteading/raising critters. Then I started hearing about TBH’ers scoring good elk at the Jicarilla Apache Reservation. I made some calls to TBH’ers Lance Odom and Heith Garcia and realized that I was dying to go again and now had a place that sounded promising. I talked to my buddy Curt to see if he was in, and he was in! The only problem was that the tags were first come, first serve via phone calls. So we hatched a plan to have me and my peeps and him and all his peeps that worked in his office start calling on D-Day at 8 am to get through and get two tags for us. Sounded like a plan, right? Nope. Chew Luck stepped in and reared its ugly head. They changed it up and instituted a regular draw due to the overwhelming popularity of their hunts.
So Curt and I sent in our application fee and crossed our fingers for a few months. Then I got a call from Hunter Blackwell (TildenHunter) saying he and his dad had gotten their call from the Jicarilla…they had been drawn. I checked my phone. Nope. 5 bars. Notta. Checked it again. LTE, mobile data on. Jack Squat! Checked it again. Screen was as blank as Biden’s brain scans. I shrugged my shoulders and started considering other options. About two hours later the phone rang. It was a real live Apache dude telling me that Curt and I had been drawn! Sex Yeah! (Close to what I said!).
Then reality set in. Write a big check and hope it don’t bounce. Get the bow and other gear ready. Lose 50 lbs. (after 3 months I only had 56 lbs. to go!). Get in shape. Take off work (new job after retirement). Get more money for guide fee, travel, rent house, food, copious amounts of adult libations, etc.
I’ll skip to the hunt. Curt and I chose to go two on one with the guide, Ryan. That means we hunted together and took turns. Curt insisted I get first shot. I argued for about 5 seconds. So we start hunting on a Tuesday morning. Met the guide in town and got in his truck. We were driving to one of his honey holes when he stopped the truck and pointed out a bull up on the hill (mountain to me) with a couple cows. This was not the place he wanted to hunt, but as the Apache say, Hunt where the elk are! We drove past the elk like we didn’t see them and parked on the back side of the hill.
Ryan hit the bugle call and we heard multiple bulls answer. It was on! Ryan set a good pace, despite Curt and I huffing and puffing behind him like a steam engine from an old Bonanza show. We hung in and kept up until we got fairly close to about 3 bulls bugling and acting like fools while surrounded by cows and calves. Every time we would try to sneak up close, the cows would spook and lead the whole dang mob over the hill, through a valley, and up another hill. I caught glimpses of a shooter bull and a young, illegal bull (has to be a 5x5). Note: Ryan was concerned about catching the herd. Bobby was concerned about how far we were getting from the truck!
Take the above paragraph and repeat it about 4 or 5 times. That what we did. The guide would walk/run, me and curt would plod/shuffle, and then the cows would spook. I was just about to call a time out and have a Little Debbie/Gatorade break. I finally caught my breath as we saw a big set of antlers at about 80 yards. But he seemed to be walking away (again). I had an arrow nocked and was trying to control my breathing so I didn’t alert every elk in Northern NM that I was on blood pressure and cholesterol meds. Ryan squatted down next to me and started raking some brush with a shed elk antler. I told myself he was using that an excuse to catch his breath. He was giving it hell when I looked up and saw the bull’s rack getting CLOSER! Ryan was looking down when I said, “Here he comes”.
That bull went from 80 yards to about 35-40 yards and was coming straight at us. He was ****** and was not going to tolerate a newcomer getting close to his hoes. Without speaking to Ryan, I came to full draw when the bull was at about 35 and held it for some time. He eventually walked to exactly 25 yards and stopped, facing us dead on. He saw something wasn’t right and was staring at the slender, calm Apache and the hyperventilating fat boy (I consider myself 1/32nd Comanche but those genes chose to stay hidden on this day).
Sidebar: I can tell you right now. I was solid as a rock! I had come too far, waited too long, and spent way too much money to blow this shot. I had been shooting a plastic coffee can lid out to 50 yards and this 25 yard shot was NOT going to kick my butt. I was calm as the green glowing pin on my borrowed Mathews V3X 33 settled on the base of his neck. I thought for about 2 seconds…should I take this frontal shot? My mental mantra when shooting is “Take a breath, squeeze the tennis ball between my shoulders, let the shot go off” (back tension shot that allows me to trip the release without moving my trigger finger). It worked! The arrow disappeared right where it was supposed to go. The big bull whirled and ran back down the trail away from us. I closed my eyes and listened to a Chinese fire drill of elk running away, crashing through trees, stumbling on rocks, and then silence. The guide looked at me like, “*****! What just happened”. Little did I know that Curt was filming from about 10 yards behind me with his iPhone 3. It was glorious! An hour and a half after getting out of the truck, I had drilled a big bull.
http://youtube.com/shorts/Glnl2YvXs6...8iEwfZqIialKpS
We all high-fived. Talked about how the shot looked great. Told them about Chew Luck and how I was cautiously optimistic. Decided to wait about an hour to take up the track. Screw that. 8 minutes later the guide walked up to look at where the bull (now nicknamed Maximus) was standing. I watched Ryan look around for a bit, turn and give us two thumbs up. We quietly walked up to him and there it was…blood, glorious blood. And I don’t meet big fat drops of blood on the ground. I mean a freakin’ lung/heart/nether region spray of blood all over the place. I still wasn’t sure what happened with the arrow/broadhead and the elk, but I knew that beautiful SOB was not happy!
We trailed about 30 yards back down the trail with beautiful spraying blood everywhere and then he took a sharp right turn straight downhill into the depths of hell (not really, just a steep rock gully). Ryan was a little ahead of Curt and I and we were looking at all the blood. I looked up and Ryan had stopped and had his hand up for a high five. I was in denial. Had he never heard of Chew Luck? Getting cancer while bowfishing, falling out of a tree stand two weeks before an elk hunt, breaking my leg at my birthday party, and all the other evidence of a bad luck dude? Surely he jests. But he was not. I took a few more steps and saw Maximus the Monster bull lying there. No exit hole. No bloody side. No big puddle. Just a dead elk in all his natural glory.
I must say that I was brought to tears by the experience. I didn’t mean to cry. Didn’t want to cry. Didn’t want to thank the Lord out loud in front of the two stellar men. Didn’t want to sob like a TikTok dude that found his lost long brother after a 23 and Me DNA test…but I did.
http://youtu.be/J4HXGQg-gcs?si=IBm9NgUfITK89mnJ
After the shock wore off of accomplishing this bucket list item, it was time to get to work. Ryan knew he couldn’t get his truck to where we were (25,000 feet high on the side of Mt. Holysheetman). So he called his two brothers who are also elk hunters/guide. They weren’t tied up, so they agreed to come help us pack out the elk. When they arrived the knives were pulled out and they did the gutless quartering method. Skinned him on one side, folded out the cape, and quartered him/backstrapped him/tenderloined him. Then we rolled him over and repeated the process. Meat was placed into bags and strapped to multiple pack frames.
After finishing the quartering process, Ryan said, “I’ve got to see where that arrow went”. He got a bone saw and cut out several ribs to access the chest cavity. He gently put his hand inside the elk and said, “Holy crap. There’s the fletching.” He took his knife an made a few cuts and pulled out the entire heart………….with my entire arrow through it and fully intact. I had made a perfect shot. The heart and lungs were destroyed. The broadhead was perfectly centered inside the bull with the fletchings near the front of the chest cavity and the broadhead barely puncturing the stomach area. We took it back to town just like that so the other guides could see it. Chew Luck had been conquered!
I hiked out the cape/horns/head which weighed approximately as much as a 1975 AMC Gremlin. Seventeen long hours later we made it to the truck. Or maybe it was 17 minutes. Not sure.
We got the elk back to the meat locker in Dulce and we finished cutting him up, tagging all the parts, and putting him in the cooler. My work was done. It was whiskey time! Curt was just as happy as I was, and I love him for that. What a great, selfless guy to hunt with. My 8 to 9’ish year quest was over. I had shot a 306 1/8” bull with my bow. Well technically it was with my son’s bow since my limb blew up right before the hunt (remember the Chew Luck that I mentioned earlier).
The rest of the week was a blast as Ryan the Apache Super Guide led Curt to a monster 317” bull. I was there to witness the shot and help with the blood trailing and I must say it was just as fun and exciting to find his bull as it was to find mine. Hunting brings men together like nothing else. Especially when you’re sleeping head to toe on a twin mattress in an IKEA bed.
Thanks for following along. We have some outstanding pics that the guide took on his phone, but I guess he’s busy guiding again because he still hasn’t sent them. Here’s all I got.
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