The Perseverance Hunt
By Brent Near
After drawing my first LE elk tag in Utah I got into the research portion of the hunt, which can be about as fun as the actual hunt with all the hunting friends that are made and the daily growth of anticipation for the hunt. I ended up meeting three guys through MM (MonsterMuleys.com) that really helped me put this hunt together.

With all the information gathered and a scouting trip completed, my hunting partner and I trekked the twelve hours to base camp on Wednesday, Sept 10th. We had two areas we would concentrate on. The first was a pack in hunt and the second was an area an hour and a half south where we would mostly hunt from camp.

We headed up to our spike camp Wednesday night to locate that magical bull before the Saturday opener, which was already set up at just over 10,000 feet. We spent all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday moving and glassing with not an elk spotted. Talk about discouraged. We had spotted some real good numbers and some good bulls just ten days prior. They'd obviously moved off and so did we.

We packed up our base camp, left our spike camp still intact just in case we had to come back and try again, and headed south.

Once down south the hunt took a turn for the better. The bulls were vocal and on the prowl for girls. The first two days down there we spotted six different bulls with cows. Only one seriously peeked my interest and the only other hunter we saw down there took him the day after I passed him. He was a dandy - long G1's thru G4's but fairly light on the top. I'm guessing he went in the mid 330's to 340. The next morning was when we found the bull I'd eventually take!

We spotted this bull from a good mile away at daylight. He had twelve cows/calves and one satellite bull. From that distance we were sure he was a monster, and knew he looked oddly wide. I was able to get to 600-700 yards before they made the safety of the cedars and I knew that this bull was awesome. We hunted this bull every morning and night for three full days and on the fourth morning I was able to finally get a bullet in him from 252 yards. It was a taxing four days chasing him around, as he was nocturnal only coming out right at dark and going back in at light. It was a game of elk and hunter... And after much persistence the hunter won! What a majestic bull - scored 376-0/8, 52-4/8 inch inside spread, main beams are 50-3/8 and 53-0/8, and he was 11 years old. It truly was a hunt of a lifetime! God is Great!