In the beginning of 2018 Hunter came home from college with what we all thought was kind’ve a crazy idea, a self-guided Montana spot and stalk Black Bear hunt. Now just because we are Midwest kids doesn’t mean we are complete strangers to western hunting, just big outsiders. We have been archery Elk hunting the same drainage system in Colorado for over 7 years with many of those years bringing back bulls, but this planned bear hunt was something we have never done before. We had to pick an area to hunt out west, hunting an animal we have never even really encountered in the field before.
We did some research to find areas with the highest bear density and decided to try to plan the hunt for May of 2018. After having two people back out of the trip with 2 months out, Hunter and I decided that we didn’t feel prepared enough to go off into the unknown. So we decided to go on a Nebraska Public Land Merriam Turkey Hunt where we were both able to harvest birds using the OnX Hunt app. After the successful Nebraska hunt it gave us confidence to be able to make the 23hr drive to Montana the next spring.
On December 25th2018 we went ahead and booked the cabin we would be staying at, and started to study the OnX maps to familiarize ourselves with the area we would be hunting in the middle of May.
Our late winter/spring time was not a normal one, almost resulting in a canceled bear hunt. In late March Trevor had to go through an unexpected surgery, making the trip in May a complete unknown. We kept planning, setting a goal to do whatever we could to make sure we would still be able to go on the trip. We knew the injury would potentially change the way we would have to hunt, but we figured that we would still try to go to understand the area to be able to at least see a bear and develop a plan to have one of us harvest a bear in the next couple years doing the trip.
As we neared closer to the trip Trevor’s injury was getting better and it looked like the trip was actually going to happen. But two days before our trip Hunter had a back injury from lifting weights. The injury wasn’t anything major, but enough to really make the 23 hour drive an agonizing one. At one point of the trip, in the middle of nowhere Iowa we had to pull over because his pain was so bad he couldn’t bear it anymore, the question was asked, “should we just turn around?” After a pause Hunter said, “No, this pain is temporary but if we cancel we will regret this forever.” We wanted to overcome this adversity and try to fulfill our dream hunt. After getting through the drive we were extremely excited to be able to have nine days in the spectacular mountains of Montana.
The first four days of the hunt were a steep learning curve, we hunted multiple different areas with the same result, no places to glass in the thick cover and no bear sign. Even when you could glass, the areas were usually old clear cuts identified by OnXit was more or less just brush growing back, not good green grass like the bears want. After the fourth day we actually considered packing up and hunting different areas in the state. The particular area we were hunting was just too thick to do any glassing making it seem impossible to find any bears. Having a rental cabin, we figured we should just stick with it and just planned to adjust our plans to just walk logging roads. Our new plan for the rest of the trip was simple, utilize OnX maps to find gated off logging roads and walk all day when we found good bear sign.
On the fifth day our luck changed for the better. After walking a logging road at 5,000 ft for 5 miles we ran into piles of fresh bear sign and a beautiful cinnamon color phase black bear. At first we couldn’t believe it, we watched the bear feed for awhile over an avalanche shoot at a little over 70 yards away. After deciding that this was a legal bear, Hunter made the perfect shot with his 300 win mag on this beautiful boar.
We were extremely excited and couldn’t get over the beauty of these animals. We went into this hunt just hoping to see a bear and now we are packing out an amazing color phase bear out of the mountains, we couldn’t get the smiles off our faces. While packing the bear out that evening we ended up running into another bear at 9:44pm, this bear being jet black. On this particular day, legal Montana shooting light ended at 9:42pm, so we were just too late to be able double up that day.
The next day we planned on going right back up into the same area as the day before where we saw two bears and more sign than we could have dreamed of. After only walking for about a mile we ran into, what we assume to be, the same jet black bear as we saw the night before. We couldn’t believe that this bear was feeding along this green logging road at 2:15 in the afternoon, but we wanted to make sure we capitalized on this opportunity. After concluding that this was also a legal bear, Trevor decided to shoot this bear at 120 yards with his .270.
Just like that our dream hunt went way better than we could’ve ever dreamt. We totally credit the success of our trip to having the OnX Hunt maps. We were able to successfully harvest two legal animals we have never hunted before in a state we have never even been to. This isn’t to brag by any means, this is just to show that if we can do it, literally anyone else can. We have said it before and we will say it again, this mapping system is a game changer and I truly believe that if we didn’t have the OnX hunt system we wouldn’t have had any success during the hunt. Traditional spot and stalk Montana bear hunting simply wasn’t working with the thick cover, but thankfully we were able to develop other plans using OnX. So thank you to everyone who puts in the hard dedication and work into making the OnX mapping systems so great, your app was able to turn our dream hunt into a total reality.
As we close the page on our 2019 Montana Spring Bear Hunt we are extremely excited to see what else this year has to bring and all the great adventures the OnX Hunt app will guide us through in the future.
See the full video series here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgtj14N8A1hRkz6LzecOLWbnqR9yt9MJA