Another epic Bob Jonas adventure. Got home Sunday night from campaigning for Hillary in Reno. Monday Bob goes out for an hour to scout elk at 6:30 am. He is tired and thinks that the elk have moved. Nina and Andreas go out to help herd the elk towards him. No elk so Nina and Andreas return at 9:30 a.m. without meeting up with Bob, but they saw him on the ridge.
I started to worry about 12:30 pm and went out to find him- able to follow his tracks in the snow for 1 1/2 hour but lost them so decided to call Search and Rescue at 2:30 p.m. Nina agreed. After all, Bob told us that it was a 2 hour outing, starting at 6:30 a.m. And he started out tired.
Search and Rescue said that they don't normally start a search until some one is out over night but when I said that he went out for 2 hours, was 74 years old and said he was tired. Code Red Search began.
Fortunately, Bob walked out by himself at 5:30 p.m. before the Mobile Incident Command Center arrived at Lake Creek.
Without a cell phone, he couldn't let us know that he found the herd and patiently approached them and by 1:30 pm had his elk. By himself, he gutted, quartered, trimmed and hung the 900 lb animal so that the meat would not spoil. Search and Rescue was called off. I was so proud of him bringing home the "bacon", I wasn't angry. And Nina's comments "Bob just being Bob!"
The next two days were exhausting. We borrowed a plastic sled, put it on the small trailer that is hooked to Bob's Mt Bike, and push it up the trail as far as we can go, then drag the sled another couple hundred feet up to the elk. No predators had taken a snack and the animal was intact. Yeah.
Two days of climbing, pushing the bike and trailer uphill, butchering the animal and hauling it home have left us happy but exhausted. Getting the meat into the freezer will keep us focused for the next couple of days.