Yeah, that’s right… SNOW! (You can click the picture to see it better.)
OK, so first of all, the snow was mostly melted by the time I got there, and secondly, it was all at or above 3500 feet in elevation… which is still not what most of us picture when we think of SoCal, but it’s not really that unusual either.
I’m rambling. Let’s regroup.
First of all, my apologies for dropping off the face of the earth at the end of last week. My plan, on Thursday, was to post up a pre-hunt teaser from the motel down in glorious Buttonwillow, CA. Unfortunately, their wireless broadband didn’t work back in my room, so I didn’t get that done. If I had, you’d know that I went down to Tejon Ranch for another weekend of hog hunting!
Now last year I had scheduled a similar hunt in January, but the ranch was closed due to the heavy snow and ice that made the entire place inaccessible. That’s a fairly unusual event, so I scheduled our hunt this year with optimism that it wouldn’t happen again. Man, we dodged a bullet! Earlier in the week, a couple of friends were barely able to get out of the ranch, even on the paved roads, due to heavy snow and icy conditions. Several hunters had to leave their campers parked in the camping area, because they couldn’t get them up the hill to the gate… which is just as well, since the interstate was closed down at the summit anyway.
Fortunately, the weather broke on Tuesday, and by our Friday check-in, it was sunny and comfortably cool. The worst of the snow was gone from the lower roads, although many of the high-elevation backroads on the ranch were still impassable. Nine of us (all from JHO) rolled through the gates that Friday morning with the understanding that we’d be burning a lot of boot leather over the weekend… and that’s exactly what we did.
With the weather still cool and the ground nice and wet , we figured the hogs would be active all day long, so no one wasted time in camp after getting set up. I went in my camper to put on my boots, and when I came out, the place was already a ghost town. I quickly followed suit, and headed off to the draw that leads up to my “honey hole”. I didn’t know if I would be able to drive up there, so I thought it would make for a good hunt to walk in.
For my hunt, I opted to try my luck with my relatively new, Mathews bow. Due to the fact that the ranch hasn’t seen a lot of pressure since December, and with the roads closed off to vehicles, I figured the hogs would be fairly unpressured, making for a great archery opportunity. Several of the other guys were also planning to start the weekend with archery tackle, only switching to firearms later in the weekend if the bows didn’t work out.
Barely 100 yards into the canyon, I hit a set of very fresh tracks. The wind was in my face, blowing steadily, and my heart started pounding. Most of the time when I hunt the honey hole, I’m on pigs pretty danged quick. With the rifle, the hunt is usually over within a couple of hours. If I can see a pig, I can usually kill it. The bow, however, was adding a whole new twist to the experience (which, of course, is why I brought it). Now here I was, hunting less than a half hour, and I was on a hot track.
The tracks wandered straight up an old road, heading up and out of the canyon toward a ridgeline. Pigs move fast when they’re moving straight like this, so I was hoping maybe it would find an inviting oak tree to root under. Staying on the track, I kept climbing up and up. As the canyon widened, the wind started to get sketchy and swirl. At one bend, I felt it briefly tickle my neck before coming back around to blow in my face. Sure enough, not 50 yards further up the trail, the hog (I imagined it to be a nice boar) broke into a run. I could see where he actually spun out, his tracks digging into the soft mud, toes splaying and sinking in. He ran about 20 more yards on the road, then turned and cut straight up the side of the canyon wall… a practically vertical ascent! I’m constantly amazed at the agility and strength of these creatures!
I glassed the hillside above in vain, hoping to at least get a glimpse of the boar, but I never saw him. I tried to follow the trail, but it was nearly impossible to climb the hill with the bow. I finally surrendered to the fact that I’d never catch this hog, but dropped back to the road with confidence that there are plenty more up in the canyon.
The rest of the evening passed with a lot of great scenery, and some hogs that came close but never showed themselves. I ran into fresh tracks on my backtrail (literally on top of my own footprints) as I was hunting my way back out of the canyon, but at the last minute the wind swirled again and it was all over.
At the last clearing, I stopped to glass once more. The bottom of the canyon was completely dark at this point, but the hillsides were still well-lit by the setting sun. Across the canyon I spotted a big boar, feeding alone. I ranged him at 600 yards. If I were hunting with the rifle, I knew I could have closed to a reasonable distance for a good shot. However, with the terrain and the lowering sun, I knew I’d never be able to get in bowshot range. I watched as he idled slowly along, until I finally realized I’d need to get moving if I wanted to get out of the canyon by the time it was dark.
Back at camp, I learned that there were three hogs hit, and one missed that evening. Of the three, one was still at large, and a tracking job would be required on Saturday morning. Everyone else had seen hogs, including a couple of guys who opted to pass due to range or the size of the pigs. This was the first time in a few years that I came back to camp empty-handed on the first night of the hunt.
Saturday morning, I tried the bow one more time. Unfortunately, except for lots of tracks and scat, I didn’t even see a hog. By 10:00, I was back at the truck, exchanging the bow for my fall-back plan, the Browning .325wsm. Show me a hog inside 300 yards (my personal limit), and there’d be meat in the freezer!
My friends Scott and Chris followed me up the road, in hopes of reaching “Speckmisser Ridge”… my honey hole. Unfortunately, the snow drifts on the road got too deep, and after nearly sticking Petunia up to the axles, we decided we’d have to hoof it. I won’t describe the entire hike, but it was fairly gnarly… especially knowing that we’d have to come back the same way to return to the vehicles.
Shortly after we reached the ridge and started working our way down, we got onto a group of hogs. A black boar stepped out into a clearing, and Scott (since he spotted it first) set up and made a nice shot. At the report, hogs started coming out of the woodwork! I took off down the ridge in hopes of getting a shot.
One of the things about hunting this country is that it’s easy to lose track of how much elevation you lose when you’re focused on your quarry. As things settled down after Scott’s shot, I realized I’d dropped off onto a finger that had dropped me way down off of the main ridge. The sun was going down fast, my left knee was aching, and I was dreading the ascent and the hike back to the truck. If I shot a hog, it would be way down in the bottom of all of this mess!
Just then, Scott radioed that he was going to bone his pig out, and pack it back to the truck. The idea dawned on me that, since he was going back to his truck, I could hunt my way down the canyon, and end up at the draw I’d hunted that morning. Then he could come down the paved road in his truck, pick me up, and drive me back to Petunia! If I shot a pig, I could pack it out through the bottom, in the same place we’ve packed so many others. My optimism brightened the evening, and then, as if on cue, a group of hogs fed out onto the hillside directly across from me!
I ranged the closest of the group at 440 yards. While this rifle is capable of that kind of shot, and I could probably do it if I had to, I don’t like shooting that far. I decided to close the distance to less than 300 yards. I moved further down the hill, hoping the pigs would stay out in the open. They complied, and I checked the range again… 340.
I dropped down some more, and finally got a reading of 260 yards. Beyond that point, the ridge dropped off vertically into the chemise. Most of the hogs had fed into the brush, but there were two black ones and a red hog still in the open…totally oblivious to my approach. I tried to settle down and get a rest, but I couldn’t get situated on the steep ground. I moved a couple of times until I finally found a spot where I could sit down and brace the rifle on the monopod. I took a breath, put my cheek down on the stock and sighted through the Leupold… and watched as the red pig disappeared into the brush.
I waited as shooting light faded, but the pigs never reappeared. One small, black hog ambled out into the open, but it couldn’t have been more than 30 pounds… I couldn’t bring myself to shoot him. I still had Sunday morning to hunt (new ranch rules state that we had to be off the ranch by 16:00 on Sunday afternoon), and hoped I could shoot something a little bigger than that four-legged football.
I’ll spare you all a re-telling of the tribulations related to getting back to the vehicles that night, but suffice it to say that all three of us, Scott and mysef particularly, really questioned our sanity and intelligence by the time it was all done. We weren’t the only ones, though. The guys who’d scored on Friday night spent the better part of five hours getting their pigs out of the canyon and back to their truck. The third pig was never located. They had video-taped the shot, and when I reviewed the tape it looked to me like the bullet may have passed through the hog’s neck kind of high, and while it flattened him briefly, it probably wasn’t a fatal hit. The lack of a blood trail reinforced my theory.
By the end of Saturday, with only Sunday morning left to hunt, we had five hogs for nine hunters. Two of the empty-handed hunters had taken and missed shots, and the other two of us had passed on shots, but had opportunities. It was a successful hunt by most criteria, but it wasn’t over yet.
The Sunday morning hunt was a quick one. For the first time in many years at Tejon, I went into the last day without a pig on the rack. To say I was a little disappointed would be an understatement, and I was feeling some pressure to fill that tag (at $550 for the hunt, the idea of going home empty-handed was not very palateable). As the morning started to lighten, I still couldn’t decide where to hunt. I knew those other guys had been seeing a lot of pigs out near the front of the ranch, but I hate to give up on my honey hole. There’s a feeling you get that, whichever choice you make, the pigs will be at the other place.
Finally though, I decided to go for what I know and head back over toward “my” ridge. There’s a second road to get up there, but we’d chosen not to try it on Saturday. It’s a little steep and precarious, but I’d glassed it from the other ridge and it looked like the snow was mostly gone. With Petunia in 4-wheel, low, I was able to chug my way to the top. Chris rode with me, and I’m sure he was having visions of our near-disaster on this road back in 2003. He was a good sport about it, though, and before long I was parked and we were loading the rifles. Oddly enough, this spot is where I’d killed my first hog ever at Tejon… on Sunday morning of the last day of the hunt!
We split up on separate finger ridges, the idea being that we’d be able to glass the hillsides for one another and spot hogs coming out of the chemise. On these steep ridges, you can see for miles around, but you can’t see what is right under your own feet. By teaming up, you up your odds of success.
Of course, all the planning got short-shrift when I approached my glassing spot only to see that it was already occupied… by a large, calico hog!
The problem is, I wasn’t expecting this at all. Remember a while back when I posted some important tips? One of them was “look close, then look far.” Well, I forgot that one and was watching the distant hills and practically stepped on this bedded hog. She popped up at a distance of about three feet. I was holding my monopod in one hand, and the rifle was slung over my shoulder. I’m quick, but not that quick, and the pig was out of the bed and disappearing over the edge before I got the safety off.
I trotted toward where I’d last seen her, hoping to catch a shot at her as she moved away through the canyon. Suddenly, I was slightly stunned and amazed to see calico colored pig hair coming back toward me… fast. She was closing the distance while I stood there looking a little stupid. I think I had a hard time believing what I was seeing, but at some point the rifle came up, I somehow found her in the crosshairs… or rather, I was able to pick out a light, brown spot on her forehead.
The .325 has been pretty devastating on hogs out as far as 220 yards, and as the report echoed through the canyons, I saw that it’s pretty wicked at 10 feet too! The sow flipped over backward and was done! The bullet entered just to the right of her left eye, ran through about six inches of spine and exited just above the shoulder. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Barnes bullet break apart, but there were several shards of copper mixed in with the exploded vertebra.
Unfortunately, I was the only person to take a hog on Sunday morning. We finished up the hunt with six pigs for nine hunters. Not too shabby, especially since everyone saw hogs and everyone except one pulled the trigger.
Next visit to Tejon? May 22-24.
And now, if you’ve read this far you’ve earned the money shot…
Fred
Great story, and a great pig!