A Good Day On The Mountain
Brother Cody, with best friend since 1st grade Cody Goff, on his early Arizona bull hunt. Nope, don't know how big it is and I don't much care about such things anymore. The ultra competitive quest for size, credit and fame is obscuring the real reasons we hunt. This bull was taken for the right reason. It was the right bull at the right time. Congrats bro.
Cody and Cody, or "other Cody" as my kids refer to him, picked me up this morning at 0'dark thirty and we headed up Highway 87 like we have done about a million times before over the last 25+ years. By first light we were all firmly ensconced behind our tripods and glasses. It wasn't but a few minutes until I heard the first "I got deer" whisper.
We were up pretty high on an old two tracker that terminated about 400 hundreds yards in front of us and then the mountains took over. We stopped at this spot because it offered a good vantage point and it never makes any sense to push further into the area that you want to glass. And...the road didn't go anywhere else anyway. About an hour after the sun had been up it was getting colder, funny how it does that, and I heard the faint sound of an ATV somewhere far down below us. Twenty minutes later a Polaris Ranger with three guys, three bows and pretty much nothing else drove through our little gathering of high end optics and continued on up the road. They didn't stop. They didn't say good morning. They didn't inquire as to what we were doing or what out intentions were. They just drove right up into and through the area that we were obviously glassing. We watched them park and walk just as big as you please along the top of the ridge directly in front of us.
Now, even though this kind of thing is becoming more and more common, it never ceases to amaze me. Actually, it flat pisses me off. No respect, no courtesy, no nothing. Never mind that they were about two hours late to the show. Never mind that they ruined anything that we had going. Here is the best part. They spent 50 minutes, on the dot, dicking around up there, then walked back to the Ranger and drove back the way they had come, again, without stopping or saying a word. I can guarantee you that they didn't see any of the dozen or so deer that we had been watching before they barged in.
The funniest part about these incidents is how each Cody handles them. One eggs me on to say something and the other one pleads with me not to. In the end, the confrontation just isn't worth it. People who do those kinds of things and others like throwing cigarette butts out the window or parking in disabled parking spaces when they don't need to wouldn't understand a word I said to them even if I did decide to take them to task. Total waste of time. It is pathetic, disgraceful and a loud comment about how far off track our "modern" society has gotten.
Oh, and by the way, if you don't see what was wrong with what these yoyos did then you are part of the problem. I swear, with the exception of a very few, the more time I spend with people the more I like being around dogs and horses. And I'll tell you what else, after all the garbage I have witnessed this year, I am not too interested in hunting with anybody whose sir name isn't Nelson, Goff or Schamadan.
What should they have done? Well, at the very least they should have come up, shut the Ranger off and started with "good morning guys, what's going on" in a low tone. If it were me, I would probably have found a different place to "hunt" especially considering that the road ended there.
Anyway, we ended up hiking up the road and sitting that ridges ourselves and glassing the back canyons. We saw two good shooters and a bunch of doe in less than an hour. So, in the end, as aggravating and classless as those guys were, they were such lousy hunters that the only thing they really cost us was a little time.
It ended up to be a great day. I got to spend it with two of my favorite people doing something that we love, in a place we treasure. I can't remember laughing so hard and having so much fun. That's what counts. Thanks guys. I love ya.
Wade Nelson
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