12/18-19/2011: Hungry Ridge, ID

With only a few days left of bow season I hoped to get out overnight to hunt hard and get a late season buck. I was surreptitiously packing when my middle son figured out my secret and pressed me to come along. Very quickly my oldest son also decided to come along as well. I tried to talk them out of it, describing the cold and snow and that I was going to tarp it. In the end I lowered my odds of getting a deer, but increased the odds of a good time.

Wyatt, Colter and I left as quickly as I could pack after church. A very mild and snowless winter made the trip to our destination easy, only about six inches of snow lay on the ground at 4,400 ft. We parked the truck and shouldered our packs as flurries fell intermittently.

We only walked in about 3/4 of a mile before setting up the tarp under a large Douglas fir. The thick canopy of the tree had kept the ground beneath it free of snow and the needles helped to insulate us from the cold. We then found a spot to sit and wait for deer to begin to move. The boys managed for a little more than an hour before the cold began to make their fidgeting more than either I or they could bare. With sunset upon us (before 4:00 in the afternoon) we made our way back to camp.

The boys built us a fire while I fixed dinner. In the inky blackness of 5:00 in the afternoon I had the boys guess the time. One though 8:30 and the other 9:00. We spent the next four hours by the fire before retiring to our sleeping bags.

Monday morning dawned clear and cold. The boys decided that it would be a lot more fun to warm up by a fire than to sit over a cold game trail with the bows. We warmed up, ate breakfast and as the sun crested the trees we made our way back to the truck.

The highlight of the trip for the boys was getting to walk on the ice beneath the culvert back at the trailhead. The three of us spelunked our way through it before firing up the truck and heading home.