On the opening day of elk season, Wade Bauer of Vancouver counted 47 rigs parked along a two-mile long stretch of road a few miles south of Mount St. Helens.
“There were more hunters than there are damn elk,” he grumbled.
Despite the crowding on the Forest Service Road 8123, hunters spotted in the area earlier this week were hauling antlers in the backs of their pickup trucks.
It’s been several years since Weyerhaeuser and other private timberland owners allowed elk camps, so real estate is crowded on Forest Service land south of the volcano this week.
The Forest Service allows camping nearly anywhere there’s room to park a trailer, make a pile of firewood and string up some blue plastic to ward off the rains.
Elk hunters can congregate in their camps through Tuesday, the last day of the Western Washington general elk season for modern firearms.
On opening day Nov. 6, Bauer headed east to the lahar area and hiked up a trail before first light, joining other hunters with head lamps and flashlights.
“It looked like fireflies, all the way up to Pine Creek” shelter, he said.
“I hiked 10 miles and then 10 miles back down,” Bauer said. “Then I hiked back in” a couple of miles to help a friend retrieve an elk.
A few miles away at the Kalama Horse Camp, Bob Manthe of Castle Rock was returning from his own 10-mile walk through the woods, off- and on-trail. He’d seen two elk that were out of range. “There are elk in there, but it’s hard,” Manthe said.
Weyerhaeuser has opened many of its gates for elk season, but because of logging activity, not the 7500 road near Merrill Lake. This left hunters to park on Road 81 and walk into the woods. “You can go in but you got to hoof it,” observed Jeff Adams of Vancouver.
The hoofing paid off for two hunters in Adams’ group of eight, who got their elk the second day of the season. The following day, he was empty-handed. “There’s nothing but orange out there this morning,” he said.
Well, there were elk for the fortunate hunter. “You just have to go in there and find them,” Adams acknowledged.
A couple of other hunters from the Seattle area were doing just that. They put on packs and walked down the 7500 road to help a companion with a felled elk.
The 7500 closure complicated hunting for a group of Clark County residents camped near the Kalama Horse Camp. They decided to take a detour of about 70 miles to drive to their hunting area. From the flanks of Mount St. Helens, they left camp at 4 a.m., drove all the way down to Woodland, then up to Kalama and into the Weyerhaeuser woods from the west.
All that driving paid off for Dustin Meyer of Ridgefield, who shot a 3 by 3 bull about 300 yards from a road. Meyer’s father, Kevin, got a 5 by 4 much farther away. “It took us three hours to get it out,” Meyer said.
The following day, hunters near Mount St. Helens were in good spirits despite falling rain mixed with snow.
Robert McBain of Vancouver is one of those guys with an “I’d Rather be Elk Hunting” sticker in the back window of his pickup truck.
“This is what we live for every year,” he said. “Whether we get anything or not, it’s nice to be in the woods.”
