Once in a Lifetime: A Colorado Shiras Moose Hunt
Each year during the last week of May, my close friends and I watch our email inboxes with the same fervor a small child might have while checking the chimney on Christmas Eve. It’s not an email from Santa Claus we’re waiting for, but in the eyes of a hunter, it may even be better. We’re awaiting the results of the annual Colorado Big Game License draw. Each day of the week, Colorado Parks and Wildlife trickles the results out for one species, and hundreds of thousands of license applicants learn whether they will be among the lucky few to draw their desired hunting tag for the upcoming Fall.
This year, I returned from a ranch showing to find an email from CPW notifying me of my Shiras Moose draw results. Given that Colorado Moose tags are statistically near impossible to draw, especially given my relative lack of accumulated preference points, I barely glanced at the message before closing it. Just as I moved to exit the screen, something caught my eye – “Congratulations!”
For several minutes, I stared at the word in utter disbelief. I then hopped onto my CPW account and saw that indeed, a bull moose tag was sitting at the top of my active license list. It took a while to fully grasp what was happening and to gather myself enough to share the good news with my hunting partners Joe and Jason. The three of us have shared countless amazing hunts together over the past eight years, but this would be the first time any of us held a moose tag.
Bull moose licenses in Colorado are “once-in-a-lifetime” tags. Once you harvest a bull, you can never again hold a bull moose license. Because the opportunity is so limited, moose are also the only species for which CPW offers a “season’s choice” license, meaning each hunter can hunt the archery, muzzleloader, and rifle moose seasons, or any combination thereof, until they harvest. While I was more than ready to rifle hunt if necessary, I was especially excited to hunt the archery season during the month of September. September is my personal favorite time of year in the woods, and the opportunity to pursue Colorado’s largest big-game animal with a bow was impossible to turn down.
From the beginning of June to the end of August, any free time my hunting partners and I had was focused on preparing for the hunt. Beginning with extensive scouting on aerial maps, we located glassing vantages, analyzed promising habitat, and scoured public lands across the unit for overlooked meadows and creek bottoms where a big bull moose might hide. By comparing our ideas to CPW’s records of historical moose harvests and insights from past hunters, we were able to begin narrowing down our plan for the hunt.
As summer drew to a close, I knew it was time to put boots on the ground and scout a handful of top priority areas to see if they were holding a bull. Moose are notorious for disappearing from their summer range immediately after shedding their velvet, which often coincides with the first week of hunting season. An archery moose hunter’s best bet is often to pattern a bull while scouting and get the job done in the first few days of the season before the bull sheds and abandons its usual haunt. My first scouting trips yielded a lot of promising locations and several moose, but no first-day shooters. With one week left before the season began, Jason and I opted to head back into a high-alpine drainage located several miles from the trailhead. From there, we were able to glass a series of meadows which we assumed few other moose hunters would care to access. After a grueling five-hour hike to our vantage point atop an 11,000-foot peak, Jason quickly located a bull – and it was a big one.
The day before the opener, we found ourselves sitting atop the same vantage and staring at the same Shiras bull not 100 yards from where we’d left him the week prior. The bull had shed most of his velvet but seemed content to stay where he was. An opportunity for high odds stalk the next day seemed like a sure thing. We crawled into our sleeping bags that evening with hopes sky-high… but come opening morning, and the next four days of frantic glassing that followed, the bull had vanished.
Defeated, worn out, and soaked from several high-mountain thunderstorms, we hiked out of the wilderness with one day left to hunt before returning to work. We opted to return to an area where I’d seen a nice bull during my scouting, camping at the truck before hiking in pre-daylight. That morning, we located a group of three bulls and a cow and quickly dropped into the thick willow-lined basin to catch them. The rattling antlers of two bulls sparring guided us to the group, and soon we could see them moving through a clearing only 100 yards ahead. I army-crawled towards the largest bull while he tended his cow, reaching 65 yards and soaking myself in marshy grass along the way. My self-imposed shooting cutoff on this hunt was 50 yards, and before I could make that last 15, the cow fled into a wall of willows and dragged the bull along with her. I briefly followed them into the jungle before realizing it was fruitless and backing out.
After an action-packed few days of work-related ranch visits, I was able to sneak back out for a day and a half of weekend hunting. Jason and I traveled to the northern portion of the unit, hiking up a steep scree field to glass into one of the unit’s major meadow complexes. We were almost immediately greeted by the sight of several new bulls, but stalking through the swampy creek-bottom and head-high willows proved challenging. Saturday passed by without us ever getting within range of a moose. Sunday morning, we located a lone bull a long way off but in a more approachable habitat. We rushed down the hill and covered ground quickly towards the bull, but just as we prepared to close the final distance, a gunshot rang out. Unbeknownst to us, another moose hunter had located the same bull we had and had attempted to take him with a muzzleloader, for which the season had opened the previous day. The muzzleloader hunter was unsuccessful in harvesting that bull, but certainly successful in sending him packing. We were back to square one.
After a busy week of ranch transactions, I found myself headed back out for what would be the final stint of my archery hunt. I had specifically planned this longer trip late in the season to coincide with the beginning of the moose rut, which I hoped would help keep the moose on their feet throughout the day and potentially allow for some productive calling setups. To help us get the job done, Joe, Jason, and I were joined on this trip by my girlfriend Audrey, an equally enthusiastic hunter. While we managed to create some exciting encounters in the first days of this hunt, including calling a small moose to only 10 yards, and stalking a nice bull to 60 yards before spooking him, our time on the hunt was passing by quickly with little to show for it. Growing internal pressure to seal the deal was compounded by what felt like constant barrages of rain, which seemed to limit moose activity and left our team drenched and in dwindling morale.
On day six of the trip, the weather finally broke and offered us a sunny afternoon with great glassing visibility. We ascended an old mining claim road, arriving atop a steep canyon that provided nearly 360-degree views to the valley floor below. As shadows from the newfound sunshine began to lengthen, the landscape came to life with wildlife that included bears, deer, and, of course, moose. That evening, we located 11 moose across several different groups, far surpassing our previous record of six seen in a day. Once again, we crawled into our sleeping bags that evening with high hopes for the morning hunt.
On the morning of day seven, we approached one of the areas where we’d seen moose the evening before. While we didn’t see a bull, we watched as a cow fed from the sagebrush hillside into an Aspen grove and assumed if there was a bull with her, he would likely do the same. We crept into the island of neon-orange Aspens, eventually locating a clearing that we could call from close to where the cow had entered. A few minutes after Joe’s first set of pleading cow calls, we heard a bull grunting in the distance. We were ecstatic to have a response, our first in several days, but after waiting nearly an hour, the bull hadn’t arrived, nor had he responded again. We moved to a different spot and set up a second time atop a clearing with several shooting lanes. As soon as Joe began to cow call again, the bull responded, now closer than he had been previously. As the bull grunted, Joe countered by mimicking grunts of his own, challenging the bull and creating a sense of competition. As the bull’s grunts grew increasingly loud, it became evident that he was engaged and would be on us any second. Moments later, we caught a glimpse of antlers snaking through the trees, and the bull stopped just 30 yards from us to investigate the scene. After not seeing an antlered adversary, the bull moved to continue up the hill towards Joe. I drew my bow as the bull stepped behind a tree, settled my pins on his vitals as he stopped, and watched my arrow find its mark a mere 20 yards away. The bull took off, crashing out of sight just a handful of seconds after the shot.
Knowing the arrow had done its job, Joe and I waited for Jason, who had watched the scene unfold from atop a glassing vantage up the hill. The three of us then followed the blood trail less than 100 yards to where the bull lay. As antler tips and dark hide came into sight, I once again found myself in disbelief of everything that had happened, from simply drawing the tag to the highs and lows of what turned out to be an arduous hunt, and finally walking up on a once-in-a-lifetime Colorado Shiras Moose. Over the course of the next many hours, Joe, Jason, and I quartered the bull and hiked hundreds of pounds worth of moose meat up steep slopes and back to the truck.
I cannot fully express how immensely grateful I feel to have harvested a bull Shiras moose on public land in Colorado. Beyond that, I am even more grateful to have shared the opportunity with my closest friends and my partner, who I could not have come close to succeeding without. Though I will never hold another moose tag in Colorado, the memories from this hunt will last well beyond a lifetime.
