LAST UPDATED: May 8th, 2015
For those of you guys who have not met Dean Elbe from Treehopper, he is a phenomenal guy. Next time you are at a show, it is absolutely worth stopping by and seeing him. The product of his that most of you have seen is the Treehopper belt. This is a great system to be used when hanging stand sets and we highly recommend it. We always recommend using safety belts when hanging any tree stands.
Treehopper’s products are available here on the website. We have also recently built treehopper’s website at www.treehopperllc.com. Dean just emailed me a story and some photos from his Alberta hunt. Read below and enjoy his story!
Bowhunting in Alberta
We drove back to the area we had seen an unusual antelope the day before. His horns went forward on his head and then flared until they were almost parallel with the ground. He would not score well, but was really unique and I wanted to try and get him.
We found him right away, that proved to be the easy part. We made one stalk on him right away and got to within 100 yards before we popped the buck decoy up. He quickly rounded up his does and left, he wanted no part of a fight. We waited 5 minutes and decided to go back after him. This time we went with the buck decoy and 2 does. He only had 6 does with him so we thought he might want to add more and take them from the little buck decoy we had.
We knelt down about 150 yards from him. When I kneel down I ball my right hand into a fist and rest it on the ground for balance. I put it squarely on a small cactus. Dang that hurt. I yanked my fist up and had 2 cacti attached. One was easy to pull out the other I could not get off. I finally had to ask Troy to yank it out; he put gloves on and pulled it.
The buck had moved another 50 yards away so we hustled after him with me pulling cactus spines out of my knuckles with my teeth. We closed to 100 yards again, he had no idea we were there until the decoys popped up. Again he quickly lined up his does and bolted.
We decided to go find a more cooperative buck. Soon we glassed one and studied it and himmed and hawed about the size. I finally decided that if we were trying to talk ourselves in to catching him he was not big enough, so we headed out to look for a different one.
An hour later we saw two bucks together one dink and one NICE buck. They showed no real signs of rutting so we grabbed a doe decoy and got within 150 yards of him. We could not get any closer. We popped up the decoy and the big boy saw it instantly. It was not until the little guy came towards us that the big boy committed. He trotted in to 32 yards. I made the shot count. The G5 Striker did its job; he went 60 yards and piled up.
What a humbling experience. We have scored him over and over and had a P & Y measure on the phone walking us through it. He grosses 87 inches; I will never shoot a buck that big again wow what a rush. Decoying antelope is addicting.
That afternoon we set up a ground blind on the field we sat on the night before right next to a round hay bale that had a lot of deer around it the night before.
Dan won the coin flip so he took the ground blind and I a tree stand about 200 yards from him. At 6:30 six bucks walked to him, 5 year and a half olds and 150 inch 10 pointer. The 10 pointer winded him at 76 yards and bailed and took his posse with him.
Ten minutes later a nice 8 pointer walked 25 yards from him. Dan shot and hit him farther back than he wanted. We decided to leave him over night.
It took us over an hour to unravel the 100 yard blood trail this morning, blood was very scarce. We found him dead in his bed Dan hit liver and one lung. High fives all around!
It is supposed to break 100 tonight so it will be tough but we will wait to see wind direction and pick a stand.
