THE OUTDOORS : Guide to a Poor Man’s Montana Hunt
There’s just no substitute for intimate knowledge of the country you hunt and knowing what the animals in it are likely to do in a given situation.
That isn’t always possible, however, especially if you like to hunt in new places. So the next-best thing to knowing these things yourself is to hunt with someone who does, and that’s what four Washington hunters did this fall in Montana. The results were incredible.
“We’re going to walk this ridge from east to west,” Mike Weitz, our landowner-outfitter told us the first afternoon of our hunt together. “If any elk are on it, they’re going to want to come down the north side, near the west end, and head for that hill across the valley that we walked this morning. If they can’t do that, they’ll probably come down along the fence line.”
Weitz stationed one of our group near the bottom of the northwest slope, and another at a gate in the barbed wire fence a few hundred yards away. Then he and I and the remaining hunter in our party headed for the ridge’s east end to begin our walk.
About 90 minutes later, a gunshot erupted from the area where Weitz had left Mike Krei of Gig Harbor. It was followed by another, then a third, all widely spaced.
From the top of the ridge, I could see elk appear in the valley -- 14 of them -- running away from the ridge on which I stood, raising little plumes of dust as they galloped through the dry sage. They were heading directly for the hill to which Weitz had said they would go.
On the slope below me, Krei was admiring the elk he had killed; a nice, spike bull.
Weitz estimated the animal’s live weight at 475 to 500 pounds, and guessed it would dress out about 300.
The bull had walked off the ridge with the others, Krei said later, not alarmed, just moving out calmly ahead of us walkers and keeping out of our sight. Krei dropped it from a distance of about 100 yards.
It was a satisfying beginning to a three-day hunt. We had agreed beforehand to share any elk that we took, so with an elk quarter now figuratively in the freezer for each of us, the pressure was off. The first day was just ending, and already we had experienced a 25 percent success rate. We could relax and enjoy the rest of the hunt.
This was a follow-up to a poor-man’s hunt Dick Geist of Olympia and I had done nearby the year before. The 1989 effort had been our first in the area, and when it was over we had been skunked. We vowed to return this year and do right all the things we had done wrong in ’89.
Foremost among our earlier mistakes was the decision to guide ourselves on the Lewis and Clark National Forest, even though we never had been there before. Because the land was publicly owned, access to it cost nothing -- a feature we liked. But, in terms of productivity, we found that we got what we paid for.
This year we were back, with Krei and Rich Belt of Spokane, and two major things were different. First, we were hunting on private land in the Little Belt foothills, just outside the national forest boundary. Second, we were being guided by Weitz, the landowner, who knew every wrinkle in the topography here and knew how the elk would utilize it.
Naturally, we had to pay for the privilege, and Weitz charged $150 per day apiece for our three-day opportunity. Not a poor-man’s hunt, exactly. Call it lower-middle class. But in return for the money we got more than we’d dared to hope. It was the difference between no success the first year and a success rate the second that far surpassed even Montana’s usually high average.
Weitz, a friendly, bearded man in his early 40s, controls more than 17,000 acres a few miles north of White Sulphur Springs, and virtually all of it is utilized by elk, pronghorn, whitetail and mule deer. We were hunting with him the second week of the season, the earliest he would agree to take us. Longtime clients had booked the first week.
“Everything being equal, the first week usually is best,” he had said. “Hunting usually drops off the second week. Then, depending on the weather, it starts picking up again as animals drift back onto the ranch.”
On our 1989 hunt, Geist and I had found few elk on the national forest that occupies the higher elevations of the Little Belts. Most of the animals had fled to the ranches that surround the forest, we discovered, to escape the hunting pressure on public land. On the ranches, virtually all of which allowed hunting only for a fee, managers controlled the pressure to try to avoid chasing the animals away.
In Weitz’s case, for example, he allows hunting only three or four days a week, then gives the ranch a rest between parties.
Geist and I had learned about him through word of mouth. We’d been eating one night last year at a steakhouse outside of town, after more than a week of hard hunting without having seen any elk. At a table nearby, six Minnesota hunters were talking with a waitress.
“Have you gotten any elk?” the waitress asked.
“We’ve gotten four,” one of the Minnesotans said.
“How long have you been hunting?” she asked.
“Two days,” he said.
We lost no time in getting to their table, and they told us they’d been hunting with Weitz.
This year, we arrived in White Sulphur Springs on a Saturday and checked into a motel. A call to the ranch revealed that Weitz had guided 11 hunters earlier that week, and had filled 10 tags. The 11th hunter had seen elk, but had missed.
The next morning we drove out the highway from town a few miles, then up a dirt road, and turned in to Weitz’s ranch, a prosperous-looking place with several whitetail deer in the front yard. Most of the elk had been run off his place by the first week’s hunting, he said, but he had spotted a bunch coming back last evening, and we’d try to get close to them this morning.
On the third drive of the day, Krei knocked down the spike.
The second day of hunting we kicked up several cows, but none of them ran by Geist, the only one in our party with a cow permit.
The final morning of the hunt, as we approached Weitz’s ranch we saw 75 to 80 elk in his pasture. Weitz soon drove up and told us that the elk, now bunched in a corner about 1,000 yards away, were trying to get to a line of hills behind his barns.
“Jump in,” he said to Geist and me. “Maybe we can get there first.”
He was right again. The elk were starting up the face of the first hill when Geist and I dropped a cow and a spike bull. Seven bulls had been with the herd, all of them spikes.
Final score for the hunt: two spikes and one cow, for a 75 percent success rate.
Montana average success rate for all types of elk hunting, guided and unguided: about 17 percent.
A poor man’s Montana hunt:
LICENSES -- If you plan to hunt elk or antlered deer in Montana in 1991, you should send in a request for license information in December of this year. Information and application forms will be mailed to you in January 1991. Applications must be returned by March 15. Write to Fish, Wildlife and Parks, 1420 E. Sixth Ave., Helena, Mont. 59620. Or phone (406) 444-2950.
LICENSE COSTS -- A non-resident big-game combination license costs $450. It authorizes the taking of one elk, one deer, one bear, fish and upland birds. It is the kind of license a non-resident must buy to hunt elk.
A non-resident license for deer-only is $200. Licenses for additional deer in specified districts are $50 to $52. A non-resident antelope license is $122. Antelope are not included under the non-resident combination license.
SEASONS -- Montana’s general elk and deer seasons open in late October and run simultaneously for about a month. Montana’s general antelope seasons open in early October and run about a month, overlapping with deer and elk seasons.
LAND ACCESS -- Access is free and unrestricted on national forest and federal Bureau of Land Management lands.
Since 1985, Montana has operated a Block Management Program that provides landowners various incentives for allowing free, public hunting on their property. Special rules, such as walk-in-only, apply to some units.
To find out about units, contact the Fish, Wildlife and Parks regional office in the part of the state in which you want to hunt. Regional offices are located in Kalispell, 752-5501; Missoula, 542-5500; Bozeman, 994-4042; Great Falls, 454-3441; Billings, 252-4654; Glasgow, 228-9347; and Miles City, 232-4365. All are in area code 406.
Many landowners offer hunting for a fee, and fees are widely varied.
OUTFITTER COSTS -- Costs of a guided hunt also vary widely. In 1990, elk hunting on the ranch of Mike Weitz, White Sulphur Springs (406) 547-2284, was $150 per day per hunter, arranged nearly a year in advance. That included guide service by Weitz, but no food or accommodations. Hunting on some ranches for trophy bulls can run as high as $7,000. Wilderness guided trips, which include food, base camp, livestock and guide service, commonly run $3,000 and up.
FINDING AN OUTFITTER -- Finding an outfitter is easy. Finding a good one is not. Word-of-mouth recommendation is best.
Without a recommendation, contact the Montana Department of Commerce, which licenses outfitters and guides. It will provide a list of those licensed, but cannot make recommendations. Call the department with potential choices, and it will tell you whether it has received complaints about that person. Landowner-outfitters, such as Weitz, require no license. The state has no record of them.
Another information source is the Montana Outfitters and Guides Association, P. O. Box 1339 Townsend, Mont. 59644. Or phone (406) 266-5625. It maintains lists of association members, some of whom are landowners.
ACCOMMODATIONS -- National forest campgrounds are free after services have been suspended for the season. Hunters also may camp dispersed in national forests providing they do not block roads with their camps.
Reserve motel rooms months early, at the time licenses are issued.