Welcome back to another episode of Cutting the Distance. We are in the middle of September, well, not quite the middle, it's September tenth. I decided to call up my good buddy Dirk and see how his seasons went. I know he's got to go out on a hunt with his
son Austin already. I've been out in the woods until the six and we're just gonna kind of jump into it, you know, talk about what we're seeing, what we're hearing, and then see if we can't, I if some of our experiences can't can't translate and help you guys out. Welcome to the show, Dirk.
Oh, hey, how's it going to day?
Oh it's excellent. It really sucks, though, to be sitting in my office on September tenth not hunting. I don't like it one bit.
I know this is the first time that being employed at Philip's game calls it. I've actually been home the first two weeks of September.
Yeah, it's weird. I don't want to spoil the story that's coming up. There's a reason in your home right now, but we'll get we'll get to that. Yeah. Uh no, we're gonna start off we've we've been doing some episodes, I haven't been getting into the our Q and A session, But today we're going to get back to you know, season opens up me and you've got Instagram, Facebook messages kind of rolling in on social media, and so we're gonna share some of those with you and we're gonna
jump into it. But I'm gonna have Dirk bring us into the Q and A.
You mean the the Pendleton Whiskey Q and A. That Q and A Letterbuck?
Is that the leading?
Is that? Yeah?
All right, all right, thanks Dirk. Yeah, so Pendleton's bringing us the Q and A today we we uh, we went and cherry picked three pretty decent questions, you know, from from our listeners and our followers and our customers. So our first one comes from Tanner Bartlin. I hope I got that name right. He's an organ he's on the coast. He said he's seeing lots of elk but just can't get them to respect. Are there any tips to get those elk to respond? Give them your best shot? Derek?
Yeah, that's a tough one. I feel like we get this question quite a bit. In fact, I kind of questioned myself quite a bit you'll be out there, you'll be seeing elk and they will not talk. And there's no amount of like special calling or secret, super secret little calls that will make them talk sometimes and it's just a game of like they're on the mood to talk. I've set there just out of archery range of bulls and called to them and they didn't even raise their
head before. So timing is everything, I guess. So don't get discouraged. There's a couple of things you could do. You could just sit back, wait by your time. I know that elk calling can work like a light switch. Like one day it is completely off, there's nothing working elk or not. You're seeing elk and they're feeding, they're not running, and the very next day it can be mayhem. You know, it's just gonna take a cow coming into
heat or whatever to get them going. And it seems like once you start getting some cows coming into heat, and even if you don't have one that's in heat that particular day, bulls know it's that time. It's like they've smelled it. They've they've chased around, they've played around, they've might have even courted a lady. So they're more callable at that point. But but if it's at a maybe earlier in the season and they're just not talking, maybe you're better off to kind of lay back and
bide your time. That's typically what I'll do. I'll kind of lay back by my time and either watch those elk from Afar or this is what I'll typically do. I will I'll change zip codes. I'll just keep moving. I will move and change areas until I can find one that's that wants to play. It's crazy. You can drive ten twenty thirty miles away from one group of elk to a different group of elk and they'll be
acting completely different. So that's typically what I'll do is if I can't find out that the bugle in one spot, I'm going to switch areas.
Yeah. I when this question gets brought up or we get asked, I always go back to that hunt that I had in twenty eighteen with Tyson and Idaho. It was maddening. I was so frustrated because we would glass bowls every morning. You know, you weren't spooking them. They had no idea you were there. You were bugling into their canyon, and they would literally maybe turn their head maybe acknowledge that a bugle came from that way, and
they go right back to what they're doing. And so then now I'm starting to get worried as we go by these timber patches that I can't see into, like are these elk not responding? And as much as I want them to respond, I don't think you necessarily need to to be effective at hunting at times if you are obviously tanner seeing the elk, you know, you can go into you can go into you know, spot in
stock mode. You know a lot of times if you're gonna use just cow calls early in the season, that bowl may come in silent anyway, so you can still go in and maybe effectively call without you know, getting them to bugle on their way in. So there's there's other, you know tips as far as like forcing them to call. I'm I tend to agree with Dirk, like there's just maybe sometimes there's nothing in your in your your your
toolbox it's gonna get him to work. I will typically go from like the high note typical location be agle to like a midnote bugle, try to get you know, change it up to see if I can get them to answer. But at times you're just gonna have to sit back, wait it out, you know, hunt them, spot in stock and and and make that work. If if if the country in the layout, you know, lets you hunt that way.
I will say too, depending on the day of the hunt. If this is early season, you've got a lot of time to hunt yet in the season, you know, maybe get to hunt. This is opening weekend and you got every weekend the rest of the season to hunt, or maybe you have a lot of time off. I just don't push it that hard.
Now.
If we're at the bottom of the ninth and it's your your time is short into the season, short into your time off as short, that's when maybe you know you don't have enough time to go relocate some elk. Maybe that's the time we dig in and yeah, we try to make something happen. Get in get in tight, get in close, maybe put the calls away. You know, I love calling elkin, but dang it, you know, if I got to sept the calls aside and sneak up close and shoot one, I will I will do it. Definitely do it.
Yeah, all right, So our second question comes from Abe Clark. Do we call differently in the morning versus the afternoon versus the evening.
I pretty much run the same play all day, whether it's the first of September or the later in the month. Now, I will say first part of September, when bulls are maybe not quite as vocal, maybe they're not getting wound up. It's more of a just a kind of a communication where they're kind of saying, hey, they're to each other. You'll you'll don't You'll know whenever you get those replies from bulls, when they're just that kind of that money bugle that you know they're not just doing full bugles
and screams and chuckles and stuff. You can just tell by their attitude. Then if the elk are doing those mony bugles, I'm going to start doing those mony bugles. Like use that the old phrase win in Rome right when in Rome doing this the Romans. So if those those elk are not being super aggressive with their calls, I'm pretty pretty non aggressive with them. But but I'll do that in the morning at first light, if it's the middle of the day, if it's evening, I will
do I will run the same place. I will run location bugles to try to hear bulls bugle back, I will use a few cow calls. I will usually typically kind of The first bugle will be a pretty light, non aggressive bugle, the second one, I'll turn it up a notch. My third bugle will be like Max ten and with a big, heavy, scream lit ball with lots of giant, thunderous bugles, and in between those all cow call.
But like I said, if it's early season and I haven't been hearing any kind of bulls doc like that, I'm probably just going to keep them simple to just mony type bugles.
Yep. Yeah, we'll get into our season recap, but I've got some points, you know, when we get to there. You know, I've been communicating with the cows more and I have the bulls it seems like in this early season, and so I'm going to piggyback on that. But I'm gonna save that more for for the current action we've had here in Washington. The third question, and I apologize I didn't get this guy's name. I just remember answering the question. I couldn't find it when I went to
go go back and look his name up. He asked, we had a pretty good hot streak there. I think you had you were in the nineties and Idaho I was just in the nineties here, you know, the September sixth and seventh, during that hot weather, are there times where you just go and sit wallows and try to take advantage of the heat and what they elk are going to do. And then if so, how do you use your calls when you're sitting at wallows?
Yeah, if that's what I'm left to do is sitting at wallow. First off, it's going to have to be an active wallow because if if you've walked around the September woods too very much and you're an area there's where there's quite a bit of water, you'll come across wallows pretty frequently and they may or may not have been used that day, and sometimes they just may happenstance just walk by, flop down and roll around and keep going onto the you know, to carry about their day.
If there's lots of water, I mean not set at a particular wall wallow and hang out. But if there is a wallow with a lot of traffic and there's not a lot of water close by, I would definitely put some time into it. And how I would how I would call there is. I would. I would sit down. I'd make a few cow calls. I might even whenever I first get there, I might even grab a big stick and splash it around. I did this one time. I splashed the stick and splashed wallow mud into my
friend's mouth, so it tasted like lp. And you know, be careful with where you're swinging that muddy stick. But splash around a bit, do some cow calls, and then maybe some bugles. Splashing around, and then just go down wind, you know, get down wind of the wallow where you could still shoot towards the wallow, and if there's a bowl at the wallow, you can still hit them. You're within your effective range. But I would sit on the down wheel it inside in case they come circle around down.
Why do you yeah, yeah, We've got to watch quite a few out the last couple of days come out into water and they do exactly that. They you know, even the older mature cows were out there splashing around and you could hear it from seventy eight hundred yards away, you know, those oak splashing and playing in the water when they'd come out of bed. You know, real hot day. But I'm with you. I think I don't got the patience to sit a wallow for very long, but I
also know what it sometimes takes to kill. And if I think those are my my my best bets, which it obviously would have been this last week, you know, splash around you natural sounds. And then when when real bulls get to a wall they will sometimes you know, if that herd's coming out and they're kind of scattered or they're kind of single file, kind of sporadically, that bowl is still calling when he gets there, So it's it's not it's not necessarily you know, you're allowed to call.
You know, you don't want to necessarily be quiet, so you want to let yourself, you know, let the other elk know that there's a bull out the wallow. You know, just use natural calls. Now, if I was sitting on a wallow like mid day and I think that I'm just trying to maybe you know, those bulls will get up out of bed and maybe go check a wall, or if they're bedding close to the wall, he may
able get a drink or kind of cool off. I may not elect to call as much in that situation, but yeah, you're you're you're you're allowed to call and uh, like I say, get down wind from where I think the elk are going to come. You may have to give them, you know, ninety degrees a wind to get him to come in. But you as long as you're you're conservative, and uh, the the wind isn't blowing in the direction you think they're coming from. I'm gonna get on that and make sure I've got good shooting lanes.
But yeah, this this hot weather streak sometimes it's your best bet to lay eyes on a bowl.
Have you ever seen that movie Predator with Arn Schwarzenegger.
I'm the worst movie buff ever. Like, I don't watch ar.
This is an old one. You've probably should have seen that on.
Your Maybe have, but I don't remember it if I did.
Yeah, Well, towards the end of the movie, when he's getting ready to kill this Predator guy, you know, he gets Arnold gets pretty serious and he covers himself with mud, and you know, and well, the only thing that's not covered in mud is his eyeballs because he's covering up his heat signature. He wants to be cold. He jumps in a cold lake and covers himself in mud. That way,
the predator can't see heat signature and anyway, uh. In twenty twenty two, I got the pleasure hunting this this big track to private land and I had to hunt with a guide and it was really weird. But you know, you know, when you get an invite like that, that's who's going to turn that down, right. So we're hunting and the guy says, hey, I know there's some good wallows down here. Let's go down there and we'll do some Maybe we'll sit by a wallow and do some calling.
And it was hot. We get down there and we walk up on the wallows and we're just kind of you know, we just walk and not really paying too close attention. We walk up to this wallow and all of a sudden, out of the mud erupts this bowl. There was a bowl laying sleeping in the wallow, and he was covering head to toe and mud. He would he looked like mud. He looked like he looked like Arnold Arnold on Predator. The only thing that wasn't covered
was his eyeballs. And it's like we caught him sleep and he jumped up like oh, like he was caught there.
In the headlights.
And then just booked it bolted out there. So we're like, oh man, this is going to be great. So we set down, We did a little bit of call and did just like I said, splashed around a little bit, set down, Me and Dave. Dave framed cameraman Dave. I'm like, Dave, you can sit in the shade. I'll sit in the sun because you know, I don't want to be a jerk. So I'm sitting there in the sun and the flies. The flies were so bad and it was like eight hundred degrees.
No. And once again, if you guys have any questions for me or Dirk or any of our guests, uh, feel free to email them to us at ctdapp phelps Game Calls dot com or seems like the way we get the majority of these questions just through social media, either Dirk or my social media pages.
Yeah, we even have a super secret number. Yeah, if you'd rather, if you'd rather, just call in and leave your message and we'll play your message on the line. Call in at two zero eight two one nine seven seven zero one. Leave a message and it can't be over three minutes. I think it's three minutes and it'll cut you off. So keep it, keep your question short, get to the point, and we'll see if we can answer it.
Yeah. Yeah, So we appreciate all of you guys for sending your questions in so we can answer them here on the podcast. But now we're going to kind of jump into what we've seen so far in the you know, first first week, accept t plus or minus, and then what we're kind of you know, we're we're I feel like we're lucky. We get updates on hundreds of guys hunts, you know, whether it's you know, text or this or
that or sea bulls before they're ever posted. And and so we've got a pretty good idea what's happened the last couple of days. So we're going to jump right into that. How about you know, your your son, Austin, I believe, hadn't killed a bull for eleven thirteen years, and you guys had made it a made it a point to go out and hunt this year. So give us a little recap on early September before I even got to go out.
Yeah, so Austin hadn't really put any effort or time into hunting in the last thirteen years until this year. He's like, dang, it. I want to get an elk. I want to get some meat. He's married, got a baby on the way. I think he's trying to be a man. Maybe he's becoming a man. Maybe he just wanted to spend some time with the old man. But so he shot his bowl all summer and we went out hunting, and we I went out early. I put out some trail cameras and stuff. I had some some
elk on trail camp. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got a good spot. But the bad part is it was fairly close to town. It's pretty close to civilization, and I look close to a little mountaintown and sometimes, you know, I always figure sometimes there's these little places that are overlooked by people. They're like, uh, yeah, there's no elk there. They're gonna just drive because they want to get to the middle of dang nowhere in the mountains. You know, drive it the end of the road and then hike
another ten miles. But I thought, well, we'll try to hunt this opening weekend because it's hot. We want to be close to be able to get it out and get it to the locker while the meats, you know, get it cooled out. So we don't lose any meat. So we set up our hunt there our camp and opening morning, went out, walked around and the trails were just beat down with elk tracks. It looked like it looked like cattle trails, but elk tracks and no elk, not a peep, not a We didn't spook one that
we saw. We didn't hear one, but it's pretty quiet. And that the night before and that that morning on the trail cams the elk had been in there, but we just didn't see him. So we go back there in the evening and we're getting our way over there. We waited till the wind was right. So it's later in the evening and look up and there's a dude. He's whistling at us, waving. I'm like, ah, dang it, there's a guy. Well checked the trail cameras and there was no more elk on the trail cameras. Like the
next day, they're just like they're gone. So it's time to branch out. So we drove two hours from camp, away from camp into a place we'd never been before. I've never driven there. I've never been there in my life. We went out there. Phelps had given me a tip. He's like, I go out. There's one spot. There's a pretty good spot. You and Chuck had got into some elk the first time he went to Idaho. By the way, we didn't get any into any elk there.
Oh dang, I was waiting. I was waiting for you to tell me it worked out.
But about another hour past that spot, it was mid morning and pretty warm out, and Austin said, hey, we should check this place out. So we get out and it was kind of a kind of like a high alpine meadow, you know, a little bit of scruff timber around, and there'd been a fire and stuff. I'm like, yeah, this looks like a good place you'd find some elk. And we pull over and did a little bit of calling, and we get a little reply and like, is that a moose? It just like, oh, almost like a moose
would sound. I'm like, and it was kind of moosey, you know, it's kind of by these little meadow e boggy meadows, And so I kept calling a little bit. Pretty sooner made another little a little kind of a groany noise. I'm like, oh, that sounds like a bowl maybe, And then he chuckled a little bit, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that is a bowl. Well it's like ten o'clock and the sun's bright overhead, there's no shade and it's brushy, and I'm just like, ah, this is going to be
a low percentage move. If we move in on this elk. Now, it's gonna we're probably not going to get this bull so hard. As hard as it is, we're going to back out. So we back out. We go, we'd take a nap, we have lunch, we'd lay around, we'd go drive around some more and see the country. And man, it seems like that time of year when it's hot out. The day is ticked by pretty slow. So we get back there at six o'clock and hike in, get back in there where we heard the bowl, and sure enough
we get we get an answer. So we push in there towards him and I set up start calling and I didn't see if Austin said a five point came running in right up to me to like thirty yards. I never seen it. I never heard it. But he was set up looking from a different angle at me. He could see the whole thing. And finally it kind of disappeared, I guess. But the bowl we were interacting with, this five point didn't talk at all. This bull we're interacting with then he just not coming to us. So
I'm like, all right, we got to push up. So we pushed up, and all the while he's still doing those mony wimpy bugles. So I'm doing the same thing. I'm doing mony wimpy bugles, and these chuckles that are just those really weird goofy sounded almost like monkey chuckles, sound like a like a teenager that hadn't hit puberty yet, and their voice is weird and awkward. This is what this elk sounded like. So I'm doing the same thing. I don't want him to be scared, so I want
him to stand his ground. So he stood his ground. We got up, got up, snuck up, and there's these little it's like a whole bunch of little meadows, but with little clumps of trees. You know, you have sixty yards of trees and then opens up into a meadow and then sixty yards of trees. And we got to the edge of the trees and I said, okay, Austin, you slip out the edge of these trees. I'm like, I think that bull is right there. Don't get caught.
I'm like, just ease out, keep your head on a swevel, don't get caught, because I bet that thing stand there looking, watching, and he got to the edge of those trees. Sure enough, I heard hoofbeats take off running. So I doubled my efforts on calling. I start snapping, snapping sticks and twigs and started raking, and then started cow calling, and then another little wimpy bugle, and within a minute I heard thwining,
twack or whack whatever. I hear the bow go off and the arrow hit and the here a crash off and it crashes away and then circles around and comes running right over by me. I didn't I couldn't see. It's too thick, but it died like forty yards for me. And yeah, it turns out and all the while after the shot, that other that bowl was still bugling. Well, this was a different bull. So there was a bachelor group of young bulls. I think the one that was bugling was a young bull too. He just sounded like
it could be wrong. But the one Austin Shaw was a little four point probably should have been a spike but had four points, and he said he kind of felt bad because he's like yeah, and it kind of ran off and then it kind of stopped and looked and turned around him, come running back and had its head kind of bob inside to side, and it kind of kicked up its little heels a little bit, like kind of like kind of frolicking along. It come right up to him like twenty yards and he whacked it.
So you ended up calling the bull back in that he bumped when seen him. Yep, yeap, gotcha.
So and the moral of the story with that is, well, there's two Like, like I said earlier, when in Rome, do as the Romans, you do the same kind of calling. So you're not gonna if they're not being aggressive, just talk to him. And then if you spook one, just keep up your calling. Because elk don't trust their eyes. Sometimes it'll be like, oh, I thought that was something else.
I guess it's an elk I heard, because then you make a bunch of noise and you sound like an elk, and they'll a lot of times they'll come back.
Yeah. Yeah, as long as they don't win you, usually you're all right. You know, they can hear something they don't like. They can maybe see something they don't like. But as long as your your wind's been good, yeah, I would at least. I mean, I always go to it. You try to call when something's books and if they stopped, great, and if not, they keep running. But I don't know at that point. You know, I always wonder like, are
you going to educate them? But then I don't like you said, as long as they don't smell you, I think you're still still all right.
Yeah, And I think we're early enough season two. It's those elk hadn't been messed with. They're still in their summer pattern. They had, you know, no human interactions all summer. They're pretty pretty collable. Just from the curiosity standpoint. I think.
I've I've been. I was out last went out the Friday before, which would have been I believe August thirtieth, so thirtieth thirty first, and then our opener was on the first, so we've talked about it before. I do a special tag that basically goes from September first to December thirty first, and if I could rewind time, you know, two months ago, I was thinking like I'm gonna be
out there the first week of September. We're gonna have a big bowl located, We're going to sit on him, and we're going to kill him in that first week before all the archer hunters get a crack at him. I found out over the last six or the first six day of September that that was an absolute crazy plan and it was never going to happen this year because there are no mature bulls anywhere near these cows yet.
So Washington, one of the best units in western Washington, seem to be trailing just from what I've seen around my house and areas. They're just the mature bulls weren't. With the herds. We were seeing one hundred to one hundred and twenty elk a day, plus or minus, not counting evening and morning. You know, you add all those together, but a lot of them are the same elk. We would see groups of thirty forty elk with a spike
or two in the group. You know, everything's got velvet on it, and there's not a hard horn bowl in the herd, which which was concerning to me because I feel like we all have seen the stage where the raghorns run the herd for a little bit. We weren't even there yet. We were I'm like, oh, boy, like
farther away than I think. But but what I think happened is that that scenario of the poor little raghorns, the two and a half and three and a half year old bulls didn't get very long because they're Towards Thursday Friday, which was the fifth and the sixth, some more mature bowls started showing up. And I'm getting reports back now from guys that are up there that there are you know, decent six point herd bowls kind of running the herds now.
But it was a it was an extremely slow start here in Washington and very frustrating as an elk hunter because what I found myself doing is I was kind of my head was out of the game, Like I just assumed every herd we ran into is just gonna have spikes in it, because we were seeing it, you know, over and over. We would we would get up high, work our tails off, and go spot three or four different herds first thing in the morning from a high point and not see a single you know, herd bowl.
And so what we tried to do was just cover lots and lots of ground. Like similar to what you said earlier, you're gonna just keep hunting and go trying to find the one. We were just trying to find the one, you know, the one herd that maybe had picked up a big bowl early or or had you know, the first hot cow, because you know, I've did some podcasts with some biologists and they always talk about the health of the cows is what gets them to come in early, and kind of kicks that off, and like, well,
we're in a we're in a great unit. You know, it's western Washington, not a not a huge snowload. These things should be coming in really good shape. So I was kind of baffled, but we just we just put on tons and tons of miles. But by time, you know, my my sixth day hunt was over, we did have a decent six point kind of join a herd, not quite what we're looking for yet, and so it was
trying to get turned. And then I've been watching my cameras pretty regularly, but they're either you know, the elk are on a pretty a pretty big pattern too, and so they're just not existing on my cams right now. But it seems like they're two or three days off, two or three days on, they'll kind of rolling in, really hang in that base. And so a real slow
start here in Washington. I've said it a lot on here, back in the day, I would argue with anybody, like the rut's gonna happen from you know, it's gonna you know, the bulls are gonna be in the herd August twenty fifth to October fifth around home, you know, in Roosevelt Country, and it's you're gonna see your peak from nine ten to nine to twenty five. And man, I'm almost from what I'm seeing, I feel like it's getting later and later every year. But it could just be you know,
happenstance or coincidence. But this this rut this year seems like, at the rate it's at, it's either all gonna happen very intensely in the middle of September or it's just going to drag out a little.
Bit longer in that particular place.
In that particular place. But all of you know, all the reports we're seeing at least here seemed to be that it was it was a pretty slow start. But we uh, you know, with us falling along on social media, getting lots of uh, you know, post sent to us and and people tagging us in posts. It seems like the last two or three days things have really kind of turned the corner, you know, on the elk elk rut, and the success is starting to kind of kind of be where we expect it to be for this time of year.
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like anytime you get to around the tenth from the tenth on, it usually starts picking up pretty good on up to the fifteenth and then depend on where you're at. I mean, sometimes you know, later in the month's good, sometimes earlier in the month's good, but usually by the tenth it's good. Just you're starting to pick up those bugles just about anywhere to go.
Yep, yep. I'm hoping we're gonna go down to New Mexico for an archery l hunt and then I'll be able to come back and jump in on that unit and it should be cranking by that time.
Yeah. Fingers crossed Buddy, Corey Miller, he's he's hunting. He went hunting with a friend. He don't have a tag there, but he went hunting with a friend in that unit. I have an archery tag for and opening weekend, and he said there were bulls bugle and all over the place, saw tons of ol heard bulls bugling. He said they weren't aggressive, they weren't just screaming their brains out. He said, they were just talking.
Gotcha, yeah, I got. I got a good report for my buddy Jerry with for Love of the Hunt Loh Outfitters in New Mexico. He said on September first and second, their first season opener. He's never seen it that good ever down in New Mexico, but it was kind of a weird. I talked to him again today. They had like a crazy September first second, you know, two hundred and fifty plus bugles a morning, both those mornings, and
it kind of like tailed off. They got some hot weather, they had some weather move in and things kind of killed it off. So you know, we always argue whether the weather affects it or this. You know, moon affects it, weather affects it, but it may not affect it completely. But I think it's definitely one of those like factors that plays in to the action you're getting. Because he said,
there's no reason for it to just die like that. Besides, the temperature jumped fifteen to twenty degrees all on one day, so it's you know, it was cranking down there. But yeah, I think I I think it's gonna be It's gonna be about right here, you know, nine to fifteen, middle of September. Things should be going, you know, really really good.
Yeah, I can't wait to get out. I'm gonna head out tomorrow and go pack in for a couple of days, basically a scouting trip for my rifle tag in Idaho. This I got it, picked up a second rifle tag tag for Idaho and and scout for next September too. I'm hoping to you know, see some here, some bugles, and see some action. Maybe I'll get an archery tag for there next year. But I'm going to pack my
rifle for mister Bear. I'm hoping to hoping to find a bear, maybe a huckleberry patch with a bear in it, and that'd be awesome, but I probably won't be so lucky.
Yep, yep. I uh well yeah, New Mexico. And then you're going to be in Idaho with you know, Bradley and Cody are good buddies, so that'll be you know, fun to to kind of check in with you guys when you get back from that one and see how everything goes. I found myself this tag that I've got
pretty unique. I'll have two days the rifle Hut when I get back, but I'm frantically getting my mussloaders set up this week because one of the conditions in my tag is I can hunt from September first to thirty first, but uh, I have to use the weapon if if there's a season in that unit at that time, I have to use that weapon. So I didn't plan on
using my mussloader. I didn't realize that the muzzleloader hunt in this unit starts a week earlier, and so oh, I'm I'm strapping on uh, you know the one X scope that's now allowed in in Washington, and made some changes to my ultimate, my seven hundred ultimate musloader, put a new breech plug in there, so I can, you know, extend my rains a little bit from what a typical muzzloader should be able to do.
Typical muzzleloader, I think you can run out there about one hundred yards with the catcher's met and pick up that that round ball coming at you can't.
Talk yeah, or catch that the you know, is it Sabbath or some sabo I kind of sends in.
I feel like it's kind of how you comb your hair. Since you don't have any any hair at all, maybe you could say Sabbath.
Yeah. So some of these guys, you know, you get out there one hundred and fifty yards, you just catch it tumbling because the thing's done spinning. It's like, I give up on this. I'm a short, fat little bullet and I'm gonna start tumbling. But no, that's gonna be fun. I haven't you know, I got the muzzled hunt last year, but prior to that, I hadn't really muzzled or hunted you in the last ten years. So I love always
picking that up. But I'm not gonna lie. I really hope I can get it done with the rifle in those first two days and not have to pick a muzzleloader up. But I'm going to be prepared for that.
Yeah, and you you intended on hunting with Grandpa's old rifle. I did, and that kind of fell through, didn't it. Dang it?
Oh it was. It's kind of hard. I don't you want to talk about it? I'm still a little emotional about it, Derek, No, not not really, but I I Grandpa had a gun that it always kind of came out prior to hunting season. You know, my dad's family very tight knit and close, and we'd always go side our guns in together, so as everybody grabs your hunt rifle, we all go out to the range and meal shoot
our guns. Well that time every year, this beautiful gun would get pulled out of the you know, out of the gun cabinet at Grandpa's and nobody ever got to hunt with it. Grandpa just trusted as old thirty odd six and the old seven mag would get put back. So I always remember this gun being around, and happened to be on a family vacation and my uncle that has the gun was there and I'm like, you think Grandpa would want me to kill an elk with that gun? He's like, I don't see why not, and which was
a surprising answer. I was expecting him to say, no, it's not meant to be hunted with, or it's not going to be hunted with. And my dad and uncles all kind of agreed, and Grandma kind of agreed, and so I got it all set up. But I'm like, man, this thing's got a ten pound trig you know, it's an old Mauser action. My grandpa's cousin, Chet built a stalk, which is like the most beautiful piece of quilted maple ever. It's just it was a beautiful gun. So I get it all set up and I'm like, or get it
from him, and I'm like, this triggers ten pounds. This ain't gonna work. And then I'm like, it's got like a nineteen forties Bushnell on a I don't know when, but it's older than the Hills, and that's not going to work. So I get a loophole, you know, just a three and a half to ten. I don't want any long. I just want it to be more like what it was, almost identical scope to the Bushnell like size, and everything gets a trigger put on. Take it to
the gunsmith. And now we know nowadays, like this, the swivel stud was actually bolted into the barrel, you know, so now everything that we know, like you bet the action and that barrel should float from the No, this thing was bolted in. So my gunsmith mills it out and puts a nut in there and gets gets it all set up so we're not touching the barrel and
get everything set up. It's got a two pound trigger on the nose, and so I will go and grab a box of bullets and I grab a couple of my reloads that I used to shoot, you know that I used to shoot on my old seven mag and take it to the range. And I first took it up to my magneto speed, so I wanted to get some speed testing out. And this gun is spitting the bullets like estimated spread at ten right. This thing's very very tight. Speeds are all very consistent out of this gun.
I'm all right, we're going to be good. But those bayonets affect your accuracy. So I go take that off and start to shoot for a group, and I am just fighting this thing all over the board. At one hundred yards, it's it's everywhere here left, right, up, down, and so I just I'm like, I'm not touching the
scope anymore. I'm just gonna shoot three groups, three three shot groups, let the gun cool down five to ten minutes between each group, and I the best one of those three was like a four inch group at one hundred and I'm like, Man, you know, yeah, it's a hunt that we should be able to call elk in. Do I need to be able to shoot any better
than that? But that's like ideal conditions off of a bench, and if you have to shoot two hundred yards, I just it's it's I'll get this gun fixed up and hunt with it eventually, but I owe it to the animals not to go out there with the gun that I have that much confidence in. So Grandpa's gun is going to be saved for a different day. But it's an absolutely beautiful you know, ninety eight fn Mauser action. It's got like the half lock safety, it's it's done
up really nice. But Grandma gave me permission the other night to to send it off to a gunsmith if we need to and get it kind of dialed in and work up a load. So at some point we're gonna hunt with this thing, just not on this hunt.
Oh man. Yeah, So I was bummed for you. I was like, oh, that's a beautiful gun, beautiful story. And then but to be continued, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, Well we'll find a western Washington elk with it. I feel like it needs to be a Western Washington Bolks. That's really where you know, Grandpa did all of his hunting. You know, he didn't do all the traveling that I do now, and everything was kind of done around home. So we'll we'll figure it out. We'll find something to hunt around here.
So yeah, yeah, it'll happen. It'll happen.
Yeah, yeah, No, it's a yeah, it's just cool that the family kind of like decided that that, you know, guns are meant to be hunted with and you know, put meat in the cooler. So yeah, well we'll want with it here one of these one of these days. But well, and then what do you have after So you're going to have a late archery hunt in Idaho as well, or you just have a rifle hunt.
So the fifteenth through the thirtieth in Idaho September for my archery and then rifle in Idaho here in October. So that's what I was going to scout for here for a few days before ago on my archery hunt, and then of course Oregon that's coming up in November, first week in November basically, so yeah, more more rifle heavy this year. You know, dang it, I'm just I'm dying that I'm not out chasing Elk right now.
Yeah, but you and Austin are just too good.
Yeah, just too good. You know, we made plans to take up a lot of time at this first part of the season, and then you know that all fell through.
Yeah, yeah, it's good. I know. One I want to note that you you promote the Maverick, but I believe your son Austin, who killed the Elk, is a big user of the pink. So I don't care what calls were used. I do want to point out that's nice seen the video one time that you're.
All of a sudden up. I was set up. He put that in his in his in his uh in his call pouch to uh to full with me and fouled me up. I almost disown him for it.
Oh no, it's it's been good so far. We've uh, we've got to do some I don't know if we should even talk about. We got some exciting stuff coming out for next year on the olcohol category. It's it's always fun because in Elk season we get to go out and test new stuff, right or ideas that we had to see if it's worth a crap. You know, sometimes things pen salt good on paper or in the office, you're like, I think this thing's got some legs. We should go out and test it, and then we get
to go out and actually put it. So that's one thing. You know, a lot of people I don't know whether they do or not, but we're always testing stuff prior to ever releasing it. You know, I don't think we've ever really released a product that we haven't got a year on to fine tune, tweak, make changes. And so we're out there testing new stuff. We've got a lot of our other guys out there testing new stuff, and
and that's all to provide better calls. And and I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here, Dirk, you grab me and bring me back down the center if we need to call there. You know, there's there's this competition calling side, which we support. We've got great callers that use our stuff. But everything that me and Dirk do is for hunting. Like I feel like hunting calls ELK calls are meant to fill the freezer. They're a tool to help a good hunter be able to
fill the freezer. And so that's what we're looking for. We're not looking for the absolute best stage call. We're not looking you know, even though sometimes he's sings correlate and overlap. We're looking for does this new call just absolutely rattle the canyon? Does this new call allow people to run this call and sound right with it? You know?
You know, we can build the best diaphragms in the world, but if somebody can't use a diaphragm, they need the easy sucker or the next best thing, which is what we're out there. We're out there, you know, trying to test these hunting calls, and we give some samples the not very good callers, like, hey, can you use is
did it give you the confidence to call? And so you know, I think I think that boy you called in for Austin you had everything you used was something new that we don't even have in the lineup currently.
Yeah. Uh it. The bowl was called in by this combination, the first bull elk ever called in in the history of humankind with this specific kind of bugle tube and this kind of diaphragm too. Now, I will say now, the diaphragm part of it was new, but the latex was good old Maverick latex. I mean, let's see, he got I mean, and that's you built me that call at Turkey Camp back in April May, and I've been horning on that thing since then and it's still ripping.
So I'm pretty excited to see, uh, these diaphragms come out. And then also that tube. The cool factor of the tube, I think, you know, I feel, I feel like lately bougie tubes have become a thing. I don't know, it's it's they've they've they've kind of some people have taken things up a notch with with bougie tubes. Now are they better? Who knows? But I think you can go like, like we've said before, you can call in Elk with
the radiator hose if you had to. But the cool factor of this tube that I used, it's pretty damn cool and I can't wait to show everybody that. But this this was your brain child. And then we have another tube we have coming out that's super cool too, And I haven't I haven't taken into the field yet, but I'm gonna take it here later in September and run it through the paces and and I hope, I hope that well, it's gonna do great. It sounds sounds great. So yeah, I can't play with it.
Yeah, And then our process as we go out, you know, dur say, hey, I didn't like this or this about this tube, and I'll go out and like, I really like this or this about this tube, and we'll come up with the pros and the cons list of every product, like, hey, this this diaphragm sounds great but doesn't last as long,
or this diaphragm lasts forever but doesn't sound great. And so we'll tell you we'll kind of look at all of the feedback we get from all of our users, all of our pro staffs, all of our testers, and we'll see if we can like accomplish or or get all the cons removed without affecting all the pros, you know. And so we'll take a look at this and try to dial this up. And then we've got to make some quick changes to get these out for the twenty
twenty five production. So that's that's part of the process that I absolutely love that, you know, I nerd out on is, you know, and Dirk helps me a lot on this is Hey, we don't want to give this or this up, but we do need to tweak this. We've had enough guys say, you know, this is bad about it, and we'll try to make the tweaks and if not, we'll throw it back on the design rack for a year and try to test it again in
the future. But if it's small enough tweaks that we can live with, we'll we'll go to production.
And you know what, I let you know what I love about this process the most is because I'm not like a yes man. If anything, I'm like I can if Jason says it's white, I say black immediately.
Yeah, you're a thief of joy in this process for me, I am and I don't know if I want to say a pain or a thorn, but it's something in my ass the whole. You're a giant thorn or a pain. But it's good. It's good because if Dirk just said yes to everything, it would just you know, when we'd push it through. Versus if he's got some you know, feedback, then it forces me to kind of can we make a change, And then you know, how's it affect the costs, How's it affect the tooling, How's it affect all of
these things? And so we work pretty well together on this. But yeah, you are a giant pain in my ass, but I'll hand you back over the mic.
Yeah, the finish. Well, the reason is is because I'm just advocate for the for the hunter, the for the the caller who who may not be you know, well versed in calls and maybe they're new or or maybe they don't get it or whatever. Like I've I spent eighteen years work in retail, interfacing with customers every day in the tire business that didn't understand tires or vehicles a lot of times. And man, you you just assume people know something about something, but you don't wanna you
don't want to. I don't want to assume people know anything about the calls or but I don't want to, you know, talk down to him either. So I just try to advocate for the consumer. Like, we have to make these as user friendly as possible. They have to be they have to have some cool factor, they have to be usable, they have to sound right. There's a whole bunch of things they have to that that that check off the list. And yeah, and and and and sometimes I'm like, God, Phelp's gonna hate me for this.
And I'm like that thing stupid, that's dumb. I don't like that idea, And I'll just say it and I'm like, I here we go. And I know he's thinking, oh god, here we go. There we get and I know he don't like it because sometimes he'll hold these projects pretty tight to his He'll like he'll he'll hold that little baby bird egg all the way to the end, and they're like, oh yeah, where guy? Is everybody too late for any changes? And like that's the trick, Helps, that's
a trick. You just wait till like you're under the gun and there's no extra float in the time and the schedule. You're like, hey, Derek, it's unfortunately I'd love to, you know, to look at that, but we've got to push the button now. I'm just kidding. There are times where we're under the gun, but you like the labrador like sniffing, sniffing pockets for treats. What are you working on, Phelps?
You know? And then it's been challenging because there there are things. You know, we're good at running a diaphragm, right, So most callers that are good running the diaphragm find a tube with the right back pressure and sound and you're almost ninety nine percent of the way done. But we've been challenged over the last three years, which we get the chance we're one of the few guys. Well
I guess not, but we're one of the guys. We get to sit in our own booth, right and we get to hear hundreds and hundreds of guys walk through our booth until say, yeah, I just man, I wish i'd call like you guys, but we just can't use a diaphragm, or I don't like the beagle, but I like the cal call. So we've actually been we tasked ourselves and challenge ourselves to design the easy bugler, which we're not going to probably use. It's it's got a
case we design, you know. We challenge ourselves to design the easy sucker, which we're probably not going to use because we're good enough with a diaphragm. We we've got something new coming out next year which we probably won't use a whole lot. But but it's it's kind of fun to go backwards and like, let's pretend we don't
know how to make an out call. Can we make these things so simple, stupid easy to run that guys that have you know, issues with their mouth, you know, or they're just the inability to call can then also still find the same success or the ability to call in the woods. And so that's been kind of a fun undertaking where I think, you know, a lot of other companies are just designing those mainstream diaphragms, beagle tubes,
external cal calls. I feel like we've really kind of went after it from a hey, we're gonna have to reinvent the wheel or a new process, right, and so it's challenged us to like figure out new ways to make that happen, and that's been well received.
Yeah. Yeah, I feel like we're you know, fixing real, real solutions for real world problems. I don't know if that's a movie line or something.
I think, yeah, well if not, you should probably trademark that.
Write that down, Yeah.
Right, write it down. But no, you know that's you know, we've got something new which I think is going to be amazing for next year.
You know.
And you challenged me a lot on that. You didn't like the sound, and so I would sit in my my nerd lab here and cut something up or you know, run out and build some new voices. And I think I think we're all going to be excited where that landed. So I know we're talking in a lot of hidden bs, but I think you guys, you know, any elk hunter that uses our calls or any calls is going to be able to benefit from what we've got coming out in twenty five on the on the elk side.
Yeah, Phelps, he hadn't even sent me one of those yet. And I had to get up in front of our corporate full our whole company, at a corporate meeting, go to market meeting for twenty twenty five and present you know these new cool calls, and I'm like, wait, now, what what are these? Like? Phelps, I haven't even tried this thing yet. And the first time I blow and I'm like this saying sucks, and I send him in it. I send him a scathing text message in a video
like this saying sucks. But Corey, thank goodness, Corey, our business manager's he was pretty good with it. And I don't know, I feel like the process that they made the manufacturer there was a three D printed or something that I don't think mine was the same as his, because I just couldn't get it to work. But since then we've we've sat down and spent a few hours on the phone back and forth. I think we got it dialed.
And that's what's nice. You've got a press at your house. I've got to press at our house. So I say, hey, build one of these. You build one, you go a little bit different. You tell me to build one of those, and we're able to like hone in on these things, you know, really really quick. So yeah, I think I think we're gonna knock out of the park. I'm excited for the next couple of weeks. You know, you get
to go test the new stuff. We gotta go test some new stuff and kind of just see how they perform in the field and then it should all translate to better OLT calls for everybody. And just continuing to push the envelope on the ELK call side.
Yeah, Yeah, that's it's kind of a bread and butter. We just we've that's kind of how how we got it known as the ELK Call Company, and we've branched into other stuff, of course, but we still we still love our ELK calls and still keep pushing that envelope.
Yep, yep. So anything else you want to talk about on today's episode, Derek, Anything else. That's it's it's September. Anything else that you've thought of that we haven't talked about all year?
Oh man, I feel like you're just setting me up here, and maybe you've you've thought of something. I feel like we should have a contest or something to to the loser has to dress up like a I don't know what you know, but.
Last time we did that, it didn't work out good in my favor.
I know, and that's why I want to do it, because my motivation to win. I know that even with that really humongous order that we got for the pink the pink diaphragms, in case anybody needs to needs a pink diaphram and they like them, you might want to go pick them up at a certain retailer because I feel like they fat fingered their order. They ordered a whole bunch. And that's the only reason Jason got ahead of me. This summer on on call sales, the Pink
ones sold more than the Maverick. But here in the last you know, as always, you know my people, the Maverick folks are just coming in. They're just bringing the heat.
It's just raining what you're saying.
There are people like me. They're the procrastinators and they're just like making it rain on those things like I don't know that you're not around. You go around here in the Treasure Valley, try to buy a Maverick. I'll challenge it. You probably can't even buy one, so they'll sold out.
Speaking of that, you segued into that, I do want to make it like, I want to put it on record that I don't think there's any way that Maverick can catch up this year unless there's like a big Black Friday movement or something. It's got to be huge. Thank to Maverick is now number two.
No, it's caught up. I think it's caught up and pulling ahead, like if it's like the old dark horse Man.
It's like, all right, on the next podcast, we're gonna get some official numbers from Corey and we're gonna report what are those when they corrected? On the next episode, we're gonna do one of those and we'll yeah, we'll give you like a correction to the record.
You'll make me eat some humble pie.
Then yeah, no, No, it's it's all good. It's a it's a healthy little battle, and it seems like we definitely have our camps and both are good calls, so it's always fun to create a arrival rivalry within the same brand.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people like both of them.
Yeah, it's it's all good. So well, thanks for jumping on, Derek. I know we're busy. It's the middle of September, even though we're both stuck at home unfortunately for a little bit. But we'll both be back out chasing bowls here within with the week. And uh yeah, any advice you got one? One last little piece of advice for for people out el cunting the September.
Yeah, you've only got so many ilk and so many Septembers in your lifetime. You made plans you're gonna go hunt, you know, whether it's just a weekend or a couple of days, or maybe you have the rest of the month to hunt. Don't waste it. Go dig in. Try hard every day. If it's day one, try hard as as it was if it was day ten. Because when about on a ten day hunt, when it's about day eight, you're like, dang it, I should have been shouldn't have been on autopilot the first part of the hunt. I
should have been hunting harder. It seems like it's easy to fall on that rut and then you know, give it you're all, don't go home early. Just if it's if you're if you're having some struggles hunting, you know, too hot, not enough help, bugles, too many people, whatever, just don't give up. Just stick it out, see it through, because it can change in an instant. Even on Austin's hunt, I think it was day three actually when he killed.
But but man, it was miserable. It was hot as all get out is in the nineties every day and there's no ELK activity. You know. I'm just like, man, what are we doing up here? There's people everywhere. Maybe we should just go home and try again later on. But his time was very limited, so I'm like, no, we're gonna just keep sticking it out, and uh guess what it just it can turn around that fast.
Yeah, that's That's really similar to my best advice I've got is, you know, go where other people won't go. Find ELK that aren't being messed with. Go, you know, if it go the extra you know mile, so to speak, if you need to get into a basin where nobody else is touching if you need if you think the alkor in that you know, mess a timber or that
old growth piece. And nobody's going in there because they'd rather sit up above tree line in glass like go into that patch of timber, like do what others aren't willing to do. To go find success, you know, go make success. It's not just gonna, you know, very rarely is it just gonna fall into your lap and you're gonna get lucky. You got to create that luck. And so you know, walk a little rather, hike a little higher, get up a little earlier, you know, stay out a
little later. Whatever it is. Those little things that give you an advantage are going to add up, you know, in the end. And and uh we joke about all the time, and we got a new film coming out here pretty soon. But it just takes one It just takes one elk to do the right things or to be in that right area, or to read the script and to find success. And that hunt's going to flip on a uh, you know, a one eighty real quickly. So just do everything you need to. You're gonna be fine.
If you get back to camp a half hour later, if you've got to turn your head lamp on and hike the camp later. If you've got to hike in the dark in the morning, get in position to do everything you need to be successful. Yeah.
If you if you kill an elk and you get back to camp at two am and a bear has got into your camp and wrecked it like we had happened this year, Yeah, just for all the crap of the back of your truck and get the heck out of there. See, I'd heard from Jason Phelps twice now when he's had a bearon camp with meat and then things are ruthless. They'll climb in the back of your truck and scratch it and everything. And so I'm just like, well it's two am, I am dead tired, but let's go.
So we cleaned up the mess the bear made and throw our tent and oliver supplies in the back of the truck and we headed back home and got home at like seven am the next morning, pulling all nighter. Guess what that sucked? Guess what? Ah, it's all a vague memory. Now, that bad part is like, oh yeah, whatever, you kind of laugh it off. You know, you can sleep when you're dead.
Yep. Yep. Now I'm finally on a truck right now that doesn't have bear scratches all over, like a bear entry and a bear exit out of the back of my truck. So I'm pretty stoked about that right now. I'm not putting anything back like it was just remnants of the hight and the meat being back there. They
would jump up in there. So I don't know how you prevent it, but I'm just it can't happen again, right if it happens again, and I don't know, but yeah, thanks for thanks for joining Derek, have a great rest of your September. I'm sure everybody else can follow you on social and kind of see how your adventures go. And I'm looking forward to getting down in New Mexico
and should be a real fun hunt. And we'll report back on the back side of those trips, and you know, when you're done in Idaho, we'll have to, you know, get back together and you know, do a recap on on the end of September.
Yeah, sounds good. Sounds good.