Elk Dreams

DEEP IN THE BUFFALO AND RED MOUNTAINS, COLORADO — Dawn has come in a pallet of blues. Light blue and navy blue and cobalt blue and midnight blue so dark it could be just as readily be black. It’s an easy enough mistake to make, seeing as it is 6:27 in the morning.

Sunrises are a different breed of beauty than sunsets, with their explosions of oranges and yellows and reds, as if the day is bursting it’s final gasp of life onto the horizon. Where sunsets are loud, vibrant, sunrises offer a quiet beauty, elegant, a soft assortment of blues you didn’t know existed.

In this moment, I do not have the time to ponder such matters. There are other things on my mind, namely the two elk 200 yards in front of me, in a meadow glittering with the frozen crystals of days-old snow.

One of them is in my crosshairs.

***

I have never shot an elk before.

The largest animal I’ve killed with a gun is a frog. Bagged 30 of them this past February in Mobile, Alabama, with my good friend, JD. They were mostly target practice for a deer hunt to come, but two nights later, fried frog legs would serve as the appetizer to an all-wild-game meal before I flew back to California. On my first night back in Hermosa Beach with my wife, Delaney, we dined on more fried frog legs and venison back strap. It was just one dinner, but it was the first step in the direction we intend for our lives to go: A largely self-sustaining lifestyle, eating food we either grow or catch or hunt ourselves.

On that night, my 2023 New Year’s resolution was complete. I’d vowed to eat just one meal that included something I had caught or hunted myself.

“Now you’re on house money,” my buddy Stafford texted me.

I wanted more.

A more natural lifestyle was a path we set ourselves on in the early aughts of the COVID pandemic. Our jobs as professional volleyball players, like so many others, were put indefinitely on hold. So, too, was my main job as a writer covering volleyball, seeing as there was nothing left to cover. With the beaches closed, guarded by policemen at every entrance, we sought nature elsewhere. We found it in the mountains. Our first camping trip came in April of 2020. We set up our tent just off the Pacific Crest Trail, 30 yards from a few hot springs. It was cold and rainy. The springs were lovely. The river a delicious ice bath. Not a single person in our group used a phone for two days.

We were hooked.

With the leftover money from some of our wedding gifts — we had gotten married a little more than month prior — we bought camping and backpacking equipment of our own. Off we went, to any mountain that was still open. Slowly, we became accustomed, even craved, sleeping on the ground, our bodies separated from the earth only by a footprint and a sleeping bag. We were addicted to the full immersion that backpacking provided, the realness of it all. Gone were the virtual worlds that we carried in our pockets.

In was an existence that was bursting with life of the real variety.

On the seven-hour drive to one of our trips to Yosemite, we searched for a nature-oriented podcast and stumbled across a Tim Ferriss episode in which he hosted a man named Steven Rinella. The host of the MeatEater podcast and a hunting show of the same name, Rinella was eloquent, well-spoken, his knowledge of nature and hunting and animals as deep as any individual’s on any topic I knew. A writer with an MFA from the University of Montana, he had written several books of his own. It piqued both of our interests. When we returned from our 30-mile jaunt around Tuolomne Meadows, we watched our first episode of MeatEater.

Then we devoured 11 (soon 12) full seasons of it.

Rinella hunted elk. He hunted bear. He hunted animals both common — Sitka blacktail — and exceedingly rare — Alaska Dall Sheep, New Zealand Red Stag. He hunted in the biting cold of Montana and the warm waters of Hawai’i. He fished for catfish and walleye. Scrounged for sea cucumbers and pulled in crabs. The conclusion of many of the episodes features Rinella cooking up whatever it is he brought home. Here was a man living a life as natural as can be, displaying a reverence for animals and the environment and the conservation of it.

Here was a man providing the model of how we wanted to live.

***

“Elk hunt in Colorado?” 

The text comes from JD in late summer.

I do not know the other number in the group chat. I don’t care. I do not hesitate. I block off the proposed week of my calendar. I am in. Problem is: JD has not done the same. Weeks later, he’ll have to cancel. He’s out of PTO.

Tyler Kirsch, a fellow volleyball player and the owner of the Wisconsin-based number, however, is in. Soon we are texting on a near-daily basis. This will be his tenth elk hunt, first with a rifle. He sends me everything I need to get my tag. Despite the gouging price, I buy it without a second thought. I rewatch every MeatEater episode in which an elk is involved. I watch every video and podcast Tyler sends me. I learn – or think I do – strategies on late-season elk hunting. Our hunt will be the third rifle, which means there will have already been a wave of hunters with bows and two with rifles. They will have wizened up by the time we begin our hunt. We’ll have to go deeper into the backcountry, off trails and into “elk sanctuaries,” as they are called. They sound nice but are, in reality, the toughest spots for humans to get to. Safe for the elk because, in essence, few hunters will want to go there; the few who do will be whittled to the even fewer that can.

But when I arrive in Colorado on November 9, after a 16-hour drive from Hermosa Beach, I’m greeted by a positively beaming Kirsch.

“I’ve had an eventful evening,” he says, enthusiasm rippling through every vowel, “to say the least.”

He’d scouted the area, glassing — the hunting term for using binoculars or a spotting scope to view an area — meadows and ridges he’d anticipated elk might be. He found a herd of 100 or so just barely off the road in our unit. The next morning, we’d glass together, seeing another ambling through a meadow on private property but close enough to the public boundary, where we could legally shoot, that we anticipated it would migrate back and forth. We are both excited.

We are going to shoot an elk.

CHAPTER 1: And it came to pass that we did take our bows and our arrows, and go forth into the wilderness to slay food for our families

Four a.m. on Saturday arrives cold and dark. Temperatures dip into the single-digits. I’ll come to learn that this is good: Brutal for humans who are sleeping on the ground, but excellent for hunters. The cold and snow drive the elk down the mountains. While I cannot feel my hands, and only barely so my feet, I am assured these are ideal conditions. We set off on a trail that would take us to the herd we scouted the night before. It is a roughly four-mile walk to the ridge that would overlook the meadow in which they gathered. We’d glass, slowly work our way in to 200 yards or so and take our shot at the one we wanted.

That’s the plan.

God must have had a good chuckle.

“ELK! ELK!”

Only in hunting can someone yell while whispering. Tyler manages this well. A hunter of close to a decade, he is leading our march through the woods. When he walks through a gap between two pine trees and glances to his right, he stops in his tracks and yell-whispers at me. I stop and crane my neck to where his finger is pointed, directly at a pair of elk 250 or so yards away, grazing on a hillside.

Beautiful animals, elk. Noble. A tanned, near bronze, flank glows in the sun. One is a bull. A smaller one — four-by-four, I’ll learn is the term. Deer hunters would call this an eight-point, but elk are measured by points on either antler. The other elk drifting just below the bull is a spike, a young male who has not yet fully formed its antlers, so they look like little spikes jutting out of its forehead.

They have no idea we are there.

They stand, broadside. A perfect shot. An easy shot. Tyler lines up the bull in his scope. Encourages me to take a look. I do so and know that we cannot draw up a more ideal scenario. The thermals are dropping, blowing our scent away from the elk. We’re hidden by the pines. It’s a by-the-book shot.

I cannot take it.

My tag is for a cow. These are not cows. If one of us is going home with an elk, it’s to be Tyler, who has a bull tag. But the bull is small. During bow-hunting season in September, he’d shot a four-by-four in Oregon. His freezer, then, is already packed with elk meat. A four-by-four is not what he’s here for.

“This wouldn’t do anything for me,” he whispers.

It reminds me of a Cam Hanes video I had watched the day before leaving. One of the best elk hunters of this generation, Hanes was bow-hunting in Utah. A bull crosses, broadside, just under 30 yards in front of him. I find myself holding my breath as it enters on the right and exits stage left. Hanes doesn’t shoot.

“Coulda smoked him,” he says, “but that’s not what were here to kill.”

I respected Hanes beyond words for that. The temptation! The resistance to it! How easy it would have been for him to shoot that bull.

What a waste, too.

As Hanes moved on from his bull, so do we.

We are barely 15 minutes into legal shooting light of our first day of a five-day hunt, and we had stumbled across a pair of elk we hadn’t even intended to find. The herd we seek is still a mile or so away.

There will be more elk, we say. A bigger elk for Tyler, a cow for me. We’ll have another shot.

We move on, leaving the bull and spike to their meadow.

An hour later, there are two massive shapes gliding through a cluster of aspens 100 yards to our right.

“Yo! Yo!” I shout-whisper.

We glass the area of the moving shadows, and Tyler lets out a low laugh.

“Moose.”

They are both bulls, small for moose, clearly young. They are also the biggest animals I have seen outside of a zoo. They stare at us staring at them. I smile.

What a morning.

An hour ago, I had never seen an elk or a moose in my life.

We watch the moose for a bit until they get bored of us and back down out of sight. We glass a hillside and see a another pair of moose ambling through a clearing. A hunter sits on a ridge below, his blaze orange vest visible even with the naked eye and not our high-powered optics. We rest for a bit before moving on, closer to the area we had glassed the giant herd the night before.

There they are.

One hundred or so. Out in the plain light of day. Some of them graze. Others are bedded down. They are at once vulnerable and protected as if by a fortress. We pull up our onX, a remarkable app designed for hunters that will make the 2023 TIME list of 100 best inventions. Among its many features — 2D and 3D topographical mapping, trails, trackers, markers for areas you’ve scouted and have seen elk or whatever animal it is you’re hunting — one is an exact delineation of private and public lands within every unit. The herd is sitting in the middle of private land. They seem to know it, too, appearing to be unbothered by how vulnerable they are, out there in the open. They have food and warmth in abundance and need not fear any men in blaze orange with tags permitting them to shoot the elk.

This, I will learn, is a thorny issue among hunters. States grant private land owners a certain number tags. Some land owners will be awarded extra tags if elk or deer or other game animals are damaging their crops. Many of these owners will take those tags and sell them to guides and outfitters for a princely sum, who will then charge exorbitant amounts of money for guided hunts and a near-guarantee of success for the customer. Given that the vast majority of hunters are granted tags for public land only, the elk are significantly safer on private land than they are public, and they know it.

“They know exactly where those boundaries are,” a hunter I’ll meet named Matt will explain to me. “They don’t make mistakes.”

These elk will not. They know where their bread is buttered, and it’s not on public land. Still: It’s exciting to see. There are elk here. At least one bull and a spike on public. A hundred more on private.

We will get an elk.

“Want to shoot a f—ing elk?”

Tyler doesn’t even bother whisper-shouting. It’s 3:30 p.m. now, and we have walked eight or so miles to a different portion of our unit. We’re glassing a hillside we believe elk could be, mostly to scout for the following morning’s hunt. The first moment Tyler looks through his spotting scope, he sees the unmistakable glowing, tanned butt of an elk. The front half of its body is hidden by a pine tree, so we don’t know whether it’s a cow or bull. Not that it matters much: If both of us make a play on it, one of us will have the proper tag to shoot it.

We’d become discouraged in the seven-plus hours since glassing the herd and spotting this one. A blazing start to the day had cooled into a whole lot of nothing. We followed game trails into meadows and clearings. Glassed from ridges and mountainsides. Tracked footprints and poop. The only elk we saw was a dead one, likely shot during the second rifle season. Its decomposing bones and insides smelled horrific.

The vacillations of the thrill of the morning and the discouragement and frustration of the afternoon called to mind a quote I had heard on a podcast on my drive to Colorado: “Dopamine isn’t about the pursuit of happiness. It’s the happiness of pursuit.”

The moment we see that elk butt, a bongload of neurochemicals dumps into my brain. Once weary and exhausted, ready to call it a day, I am now tingling with excitement. Adrenaline kicks in. Tired? How could I be tired?

We speed-walk down our ridge and through a meadow, regularly glassing when we can. This attempt will be the first lesson I get in the unofficial Hunting 101 course of Things Are Not As They Seem. From our vantage point atop the ridge, the hunt for this elk seemed a relatively simple task. We’d snake down and around and, once at the bottom of the clearing, we’d have an easy shot up at the elk. It would be no different than this morning.

Yet when we get to the bottom of the clearing, we have no earthly clue if we’re even at the right one. Pines and aspens block our sight line, much less our walking path. We walk slowly left, then right. We glass everywhere. There is no elk in sight. Tyler examines his onX, zooming in, zooming out, flipping from 2D and 3D. We slowly back out. We will not find that elk tonight. We retreat back to the ridge, and Tyler stares at the clearing where the elk once stood, comparing it with the map on the onX.

“I don’t know how we’re supposed to get in there,” he says. I shrug. If he doesn’t know, I certainly don’t.

We pack up the scope and walk to our tent.

It will not be the last time we are out-smarted by an elk.

CHAPTER 2: And it came to pass that we did return without food to our families, and being much fatigued, because of their journeying, they did suffer much for the want of food.

There’s a book I pass every day as I enter my bedroom. It is Michael Easter’s The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self. It is a 284-page examination of how, as the jacket reads, “our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives” can “actually be the leading cause of many of our most urgent physical and mental health issues.” He is a tremendous storyteller, Easter, a former journalist for Men’s Health and Outside Magazine who uses a first-hand experience of a 33-day caribou hunt in the remote Alaskan backcountry as the backbone for the book, which promises to help you “discover the evolutionary mind and body benefits of living at the edges of your comfort zone and reconnecting with the wild.”

I already knew I wanted to hunt this year. The meat is what I’m here for. Wild. Natural. The healthiest money can buy, only you have a relationship with it: You know exactly where it came from and the work it took to acquire it. But the benefits of hunting stretch far beyond the simple benefit of forming a foundation of the healthiest, wildest diet in the world.

It is possible that hunting packs the most benefits per minute of any activity in the world. For 24 hours a day, you are outside. The air you’re breathing is fresh. The light you see is mostly only natural sunlight, save for the occasional headlamp and lantern in the tent. This is powerful beyond measure.

“Viewing sunlight within the first hours of waking (as soon as you can, even if through cloud cover) increases early-day cortisol release (the ideal time for elevated cortisol) and prepares the body for sleep later that night,” writes Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and host of Huberman Lab, one of the most popular podcasts on the planet. “A morning spike in cortisol will also positively influence your immune system, metabolism and ability to focus during the day. Further, morning sunlight helps regulate your ‘circadian clock’ — the body’s mechanism for anticipating when to wake up and go to sleep — and it manages other biological processes like hunger and body temperature.”

Hunters have sunlight in spades. In the six days we’ll be in Colorado, we are outside for all 24 hours. We will see six breathtaking sunrises and six magnificent portraits of sunsets. None of this is easy, waking up at four in the morning, more than two hours prior to the sunrise, trudging through single-digit temperatures, losing all feeling in your hands and feet.

That is also the point.

Hunting is hard. Hard comes with benefits.

“Over our species’ hundreds of thousands. Of years of evolution, it was essential for our survival to do hard shit all the time,” Marcus Elliott, who trains a number of professional athletes, told Easter. “To be challenged… Each time we took on one of these challenges we’d learn what our potential is. In modern society, however, it’s suddenly possible to survive without being challenged. You’ll still have plenty of food. You’ll have a comfortable home. A good job to show up to, and some people who love you. And that seems like an OK life, right? But let’s say your potential is this big circle. Well, most of us live in this small space. We have no idea what exists on the edges of our potential. And by not having any idea what it’s like out on the edge, man, we really miss something vital. I believe people have innate evolutionary machinery that gets triggered when they go out and do really f—ing hard things. When they explore those edges of their comfort zone.”

Elliott’s somewhat unscientific language is backed up by Huberman and his purely scientific vernacular. When we, as Elliott might say,  “do really f—ing hard things” we activate our AMCC (anterior mid cingulate cortex) which, Huberman says, “plays a pivotal role in generating tenacity and willpower for various tasks. And when we say you lose brain mass across your lifespan — most of it is from the AMCC.”

On the Modern Wisdom podcast hosted by Chris Williamson, Huberman elaborates further: “People who are given an easy task don’t activate their AMCC. But if you give them a hard task that they really don’t want to do — physically or cognitively — their AMCC levels of activity go through the roof. What shocked me the most is that if you’re a person who loves weightlifting, running, etc., you’re doing all sorts of hard things that the average person doesn’t want to do. You are not going to increase the AMCC levels, according to research data. In essence, you do the things you don’t want to do — subjective to each individual. The thing you want to do the least is what actually builds up your AMCC.”

There are many aspects of hunting I, and most, do not want to do. I do not want to wake up at 4 in the morning, in a tent whose temperature dips well below freezing. I, like most, want to stay in my warm sleeping bag. In the wild, if you want to get an elk, if you want to feed your family, there is no choice. You get up and walk.

I do not want to shit in the woods for six days. But when nature calls, even if that call is at, say, 2 a.m., even if you have to trudge through snow, the call must be answered.

I love walking and hiking, but even I do not want to walk every single one of the eventual 58 miles with a pack and rifle, an activity commonly known as rucking. That, too, comes with benefits.

“When you’re walking down the hills, you’re really strengthening your legs,” Peter Attia, author of Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, told Oprah Winfrey. “This is called developing the brakes. When you get older, most people fall because they lose the brakes. What it does is it increases basically the strength and cardio fitness without increasing the joint tension.”

Our second day presents every aforementioned benefit.

Again, we wake at 4 in the morning and are on the trail by 4:30. By 6, we reach our ridge. Tyler’s excited. There is elk sign everywhere, as if an entire herd has stopped and held a brief flash mob. We sit and wait. And wait.

We wait some more.

Whatever elk were here have either spooked from our scent or simply moved on. We hike another mile or so to a new ridge overlooking a meadow on the other side of a valley.

“Want to see an elk?” Tyler whispers.

On the meadow, 1,800 yards away, are four elk, all bulls. They are practically glowing in the sunlight. Tyler focuses his spotting scope on one in particular, an older bull with mangled antlers. That one, he says, is cool.

Tyler has found his elk.

We continue glassing the meadow, seeing another six cows a few hundred yards east. There is not enough time for us to make a play on them. We just watch, content sitting in the warming sun as they graze and eventually disappear into a mess of pines and aspens. Tyler’s idea is to hang out for the rest of the day on this ridge until mid-day, at which point we will grab equipment to “spike.” This essentially means picking up a lighter tent and sleeping closer to the meadow across the valley. It means our packs will be heavier, our nights colder, our food more sparse. Our water source will be the river running through the valley. We’re excited, both of us.

Dopamine is the happiness of pursuit.

My pack is loaded with a sleeping bag, a lightweight stove to heat the tent, and enough food for two days. I’ve strapped my Teton sleeping pad to the outside. Tyler has the tent and everything else he needs. At sunset, we’re back on the ridge, glassing across the valley. Again, we see the elk.

We also see a problem: Two hunters, one on the east side of the ridge, one on the west. In the middle are six cows. They’re running what’s called a push: The east-based hunter is slowly moving west, bumping, or pushing, the elk into the awaiting rifle of his partner. We watch through our binoculars. It’s like watching a hunting TV show.

They’re brilliant animals, these elk. They do not behave as the hunters wish. Rather than staying atop the ridge, running directly into the awaiting west-side hunter, they skirt through thickets of aspen and pine. A shot — an ethical one, anyway — amid those trees is nearly impossible. They dance and run, dance and run, flitting through the cover of trees. The sun dips below the mountains. The hunters, with their high-powered rifles and magnified scopes, with their onX mapping software and camouflage clothes and all the advantages of the modern world, are outwitted, outsmarted, outmaneuvered by these magnificent animals.

When the elk have safely made it onto the borders of private property, we move down our ridge and into the valley. It’s dark, the temperatures steadily dropping, the only light coming from our headlights and a brilliant galaxy of stars. Our water source for the night and following day will be the stream splitting the valley. We find a flattish spot in the valley and Tyler sets up the tent while I saw off some firewood. We will not be insulated by a heavy tarp tonight, only a thin footprint. Throughout a fitful night of sleep, one in which I steadily slip downhill and pull myself back up, we’ll discover that the stove has gone out. I throw a log on but it doesn’t catch, and I’m too tired and lazy to start a new fire.

We close our eyes and pretend to sleep.

By 4:30 the next morning, our socks and boots have frozen solid. I’ll sit on my socks in an attempt to thaw them but it does little more than freeze my butt. I’ll punch them loose and jam them on my feet.

We are on the trail again.

The plan, concocted by Tyler via a combination of naked-eye scouting and onX, is to slowly creep up to the ridge bordering the edge of the private property, where the elk had escaped the night prior. Like the meadow from two nights previous, this one does not appear as it seemed. Shots up the mountain that once looked plain as day from across the valley are, in actuality, impossible, crowded by aspens and false ridges. An elk could be standing 50 yards in front of us and we’d have no idea. The brush, too, is an illusion. Walking up and around the side of the mountain proves formidable, the brush thick and stubborn and a few feet higher than expected. We continue our slog in an attempt to find a decent enough shooting position, stumbling along, slipping, cracking twigs, creeping best we can, quiet as a thunderstorm.

It is just a 1.2 mile hike to where we find a relatively nice vantage point.

It feels like 10 miles on a trail.

My legs are burning, lungs pleading for a bit more air – air that’s thinned to a considerable degree from the 9,600 feet of altitude. We sit. We wait.

Between our blundering mess of a hike and the two hunters last night, my once-confident hopes of shooting an elk are dashed.

No elk come.

Around 9, we ponder our options. Tyler calls his Uncle Tim, who has hunted this unit, and this particular area, a number of times, and asks if we should head back to the other side of the valley. Tim, with his thick, aw-shucks midwestern accent, doesn’t hesitate.

“No.”

And then he and Tyler dispense one of the more valuable, and obvious, bits of hunting wisdom: “Don’t leave elk to find elk.”

We stay across the valley, hiking another mile onto the back side of the ridge. We find a stream to fill our waters and lay down for a minute, concocting a plan to stay above the ridge at sunset and have a shot down at the elk. The thermals should, we think, be rising, so the odds of us getting winded are low.

It is a good plan. We like this plan.

We do not follow it.

Twice, we’ll nap on the ridge. And twice, Tyler, who is as fidgety as I am and prefers, I’ll find, a more active and interactive hunt with his bow, where he can be on the move and call the elk to him, suggests we scrap the plan. We debate the options, the risk-reward and cost-benefit of each new permutation. Even above the ridge where we are, the shot is still nearly impossible. Between the aspens, blowdowns, and pines, the longest shot we could reasonably take is 20, maybe 30 yards. But if we stay, we are not leaving elk to find elk, even if it means staying in a relatively hopeless spot, with its poor shooting lanes and abundant hunting pressure in the past 18 hours.

Leave, however, and we abandon an evening hunt, the highest percentage time of day to shoot an elk.

A new plan is made.

We’ll drop to the bottom of the valley and head west, to find the bull with the mangled antler. It’s an easier hike with a more visible shot. If we don’t get an elk, we’ll pack up our spike camp and walk the five miles back in the dark. We both like this plan.

Again, we do not follow it.

The wind kicks up, blowing our scent into the pines in which Tyler’s bull has taken cover. These elk are too smart to emerge from that cover with the stink of humans all over the meadow. Tyler shakes his head. It’s hopeless.

It is time to pack up.

As we walk back, across the valley and up the other mountain, we routinely glass the meadow we planned on hunting. It is the first time we will hope not to see elk.

No elk emerge from the pines.

We made the right choice.

Our mood lightens. We chat as we go, covering topics big and small. We talk volleyball and family. Talk my wife and seven-month old son and writing, of loved ones and loved ones lost. There are many ways to get to know an individual.

The fastest might be spending six days in a tent, hiking and hunting through wilderness.

I’d never met Tyler prior to this trip. There is little about our lives that we will not cover over the 50-plus miles we spend together. Even though we do not get an elk that night, our spirits are lifted. They’ll be lifted further when we run into our neighbor back at base camp. He’s glassing a hillside.

“You guys seeing anything?” he asks. It’s more lament than question.

We laugh. Tell him of our misadventures. He’s shocked, even impressed, that we had spiked the previous night.

“We’re watching the Broncos game in our tent if you want to come in,” he says.

We certainly do. We drop our packs, make a quick dinner of canned salmon, pre-cooked rice, and venison hot dogs, and walk the 30 yards to Scott’s tent.

It’s the Taj Mahal of tents, a 13×27 colossus that has more square feet than my first studio apartment in Newport Beach. The stove has warmed the place and is heating up a massive vat of soup on the grill that rests atop the stove. Scott’s friend, Mike, and Mike’s son, Nick, are already kicking back with a beer. We tell stories of our hunts, each enjoying the other’s misadventures. I learn more about elk that night than I could in 100 podcasts and 11 seasons of MeatEater. I learn that the temperatures, which will rise into the mid-40s during the day, are too warm, that the elk have no motivation to descend from the mountains. They’ll stay up top for as long as they reasonably can, a survival instinct navigating the delicate balance between getting killed by the winter or picked off by hunters. They do not know that hunters have a carefully managed limit, and that mother nature does not. Last year, many of the elk stayed too long; the unit they typically hunt, two hours down the road, saw 95 percent of the herd killed by a harsh winter. This year there were only 10 cow tags awarded in the entire unit.

That’s why they’re here, in this unit instead, getting skunked like Tyler and I. It shouldn’t, but it makes me feel better when they admit they haven’t so much as seen an elk. They’ve glassed the same herd we have, the one on private property, but other than that? Not a thing. Barely any sign, either.

For a few hours, we’ll exchange stories while watching the Broncos stun the Bills.

Two groups of men bonded by football and hunting.

It is, I feel, a truly American evening.

CHAPTER 3: And I was led by the spirit, not knowing beforehand the things which I should do.

I am on my own.

Tyler wanted to investigate a clearing we had spotted an elk at sunset one night. Uncle Tim’s words stuck in my mind: Don’t leave elk to find elk.

I want to return to the meadow we had seen the bull and spike on our first morning. Maybe a cow will show. Tyler wishes me luck.

I’m out at 3:50 a.m., scarfing two spoonfuls of peanut butter and a handful of almonds for breakfast. The walk is unseasonably warm. It takes just 10 minutes for me to begin sweating, a hunter’s kryptonite. I remove my First Lite Uncompahgre Puffy Jacket and strip down to an Origin Hoody and a long sleeve. Even then, I’m roasting.

I can hear Nick’s gruff voice in my head: It’s too damn warm.

There are, generally, three uncontrollable factors when it comes to the weather, and hunting: the temperature, wind, and moon. A new moon, Nick told me, is optimal for hunting, because the elk have trouble seeing without it. This means they have to wait until daybreak to feed. But a full, or even half, moon will provide enough light for them to move around and eat during the night. Their motivation to come out of their beds during the day, then, is minimal, and your chances as a hunter plummet.

It’s a new moon. Clouds blanket the sky. There will be no soft pallet of blues this morning.

That darkness is the only factor I have going for me.

The temperatures have risen to the point that streams which were frozen solid on our first day are now running freely, and I have to hopscotch around them rather than walk directly over them. It’ll take me an hour and a half to walk the three miles and crouch down behind the pine trees with the perfect view of the meadow. For two more hours, I’ll wait, sitting on a small patch of snow, my sweat freezing onto my shirt.

The elk do not come.

I hadn’t expected them to. Not by this point.

I sigh, pick up my pack and rifle, and move further into the mountains.

Hunting and backpacking share certain obvious similarities: Both include walking with heavy packs around mountains. Both include sleeping in tents. Both feature a ubiquitous dose of nature. But hunting, I’ve discovered, is infinitely more stressful. You’re constantly on high alert, strung out. A snap of a twig will have you freeze. Every meadow and clearing presents the potential of an animal to shoot. You step light, careful. Your mind is focused. Sometimes you hallucinate, thinking an oddly colored stump is an elk.

Backpacking, on the other hand, is light and careless. Your mind is free, able to wander. You lose track of time and direction. Sometimes you’ll look up and discover that you’ve covered five miles and haven’t really noticed. It produces an effect I’ve come to call the backpacker’s bliss.

On this day, that is what I’ll find.

My hopes of finding an elk are all but shot. I still do my due diligence, of course. I carefully slip down game trails, examine every potential clearing. I track sign. But I do so without the strung-out nature of the first few days. At nine, I reach a clearing overlooking a valley. A few hundred yards away sit the herd we glassed on our scouting trip, sitting, untouchable, on private property, safe as an elk can be. For an hour, I’ll simply watch them. It’s comforting, honestly, to know that elk still exist, that they aren’t an illusion my mind has concocted. I border the private property line in hopes one of them makes a mistake, gets careless, cocky, and ventures onto public land. They’re too smart for such deadly mistakes. I shrug, too unsurprised to be disappointed.

My plan for the day is to take a trail until I see no more human footprints, the idea being that if I hike further and deeper than any other hunter, the pressure there will be lower than any other we have examined in our unit and the elk will be less skittish and more abundant. It takes five miles for me to achieve that goal.

Along the way, my mind is enjoying the backpacker’s bliss.

That’s a whimsical term I’ve made up, but the effect is actually one backed by a considerable amount of science. Researchers at the University of Michigan discovered that just 20 minutes outside, without a screen, three times per week is the dose of nature that efficiently drops people’s levels of the stress hormone cortisol. In nature, your brain enters a mode learning science researcher Rachel Hopman calls “soft fascination.”

“Instead of mind wandering and lightly focusing inwardly,” she told Easter, “you’re lightly focusing outwardly on the nature around you. You’re taking in all these things in the outside world that are nice to look at. But they’re not overwhelming. Your attention network is turned down, but you’re aware of the outside world.”

Forget walking: A study, conducted across multiple offices with hundreds of workers, found that having plants in your office correlated with a boost of 15 percent more work being done. A study in Science in 1984 discovered that having a view of nature outside of a hospital window helps people recover quicker.

In my own anecdotal experience, I am at my creative, and even personal, best when I walk, without a screen, through nature for an extended period of time. This day is more than an extended period of time. I’ll cover 13 miles by myself, allowing my mind to wander. I think of my wife and son. Of friends I should reach out to when I get back to service. I write stories in my head, brainstorm ideas for my podcast and what steps I’d like to take in my career. Easter, too, feels a similar effect on his caribou hunt.

“My mind feels like it’s riding a different wavelength than the ones it typically does back home,” he writes. “It’s more ripple than riptide. Despite the cold, wind, and rough ground, my stress levels are nonexistent. Interesting new ideas are bubbling out of the ether.”

I track an elk into a meadow until the footprints disappear. The disappointment of not finding one melts away, the backpacker’s bliss taking over. I pull out a verse from the Book of Mormon that my wife, a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, printed out and sent me with. The week has been turning into a spiritual experience, me connecting with the real world , not the virtual one so many of us are sucked into by our tiny little screens in our pockets. My screen time will plummet to 18 minutes per day, all of which were used on onX or looking at pictures of my wife and kid. I am as homesick as I have ever been, my appreciation and love for my little family exploding.

I line I read stands out, clear as a 6-by-6 elk: “And thus we see that by small means, the lord can bring about great things.”

I rest against a tree, leaning my head back on its trunk. The sun warms me. A field mouse scurries around my feet. The only sound is that of a thawing brook. It is as peaceful a moment as one can imagine.

It is one of my favorite memories of the year.

CHAPTER 4: And it came to pass that we did again take our journey, traveling nearly the same course as in the beginning; and after we had traveled for the space of many days we did pitch our tents again, that we might tarry for the space of time.

Our final day is a Hail Mary. The odds are slim. We know it. Neither of us believe we’ll find an elk in the clearing we have decided to explore.

We won’t.

Skunked again.

There is one more desperate chance we have. A hunter we met along a ridge one morning mentioned he had shot a cow about 15 miles away, at a different spot in the unit. We decide to pack up our tent and give it one last, final go. We say bye to Scott and Nick and Mike, who had invited us over for pasta and meatballs at the Taj Mahal the night before, chatting life and hunting, each showing pictures of their best kills. Given that I have zero, I passed around my phone with a picture of my son.

“In this tent,” Scott said, laughing as we left, “has been a pilot, a Navy recruiter, Army Green Beret, and a professional volleyball player. Who would have thought?”

Four radically diverging worlds, connected via a reverence over our natural world.

I didn’t expect to miss the ridge upon which we made our home base. It’s stunning, truly, but I had imagined it being a welcome goodbye. Instead, there are the unmistakable pangs of not wanting to leave, one of those rare times where I am nostalgic for the moment before it has even passed. Tyler and I grab a picture together, load up his Ford F-250, and begin the winding road down the mountain.

Our new location has every possible feature you’d want in an elk hunt. Meadows and clearings. Ridges with clear shots. Aspens and pines.

There are, however, no elk.

The temperatures are in the 50s now. A beautiful day to hike. A bad day to hunt. Half an hour before sunset, we sit upon a ridge, overlooking a gorgeous swath of country below. We stay until legal shooting light has passed.

The sun dips below the mountains.

My first elk hunt is over.

That night, we splurge on a cheap room at the Quality Inn. We order Domino’s Pizza and cheesy bread and scarf it down in minutes, adding much-needed calories to our frames, which have shed — in my case — eight pounds throughout the week. The shower is sublime, washing away layer after layer of dirt and grit and grime and a malodorous scent that I’d imagine the Sex Panther cologne in Anchorman might smell like.

And as I lay in the comfortable bed, under warm covers, in our temperature-controlled room, with the Bourne Ultimatum on the television, I’ll slowly drift off to sleep.

When I do, I’ll dream of elk.