A Hard Hunt Yields Great Result

By STEPHANIE BUNKER

Moapa Valley Progress

Moapa resident Matt Wolfley shot a bull elk this year. He to work awefully hard to get it. But his efforts paid off.
Area 23 late season hunts began a day before Thanksgiving. It was bitter cold with two feet of snow on the ground.

Due to blizzard conditions the Wolfley hunting party decided to go home the next morning and enjoy Thanksgiving with their family that day.

After a day of warmth the crew went back out into the wilderness on Friday and Saturday. As the weekend concluded, they still hadn’t shot anything; so they kept hunting on Monday.

They had been seeing plenty of bulls in the area but had not found one that Wolfley was interested in.
“We saw 60-70 bulls before we found this one,” Wolfley said. “All of the bulls we saw were broken up or small.”

Finally on Tuesday, just before dark, they spotted this bull about a mile and a half away. On Wednesday morning they got set up on a ridge and found him again within the first few minutes of daylight.
“My brother Allen stayed back and kept eyes on him while we hiked about a mile and a half till we could get a shot at him,” Wolfley recalled.

The bull was hanging out behind some trees and Wolfley could only see the top of his antlers. There was no opportunity for a kill shot.

Just about then, Wolfley had some bad luck. Another blizzard blew in and visibility was reduced to only 30-40 feet. So the brothers hiked back to their truck.

By the time they got back the storm had blown over. So they turned around and went back out to find that bull again.
“We found him again and at about 700 yards I set up to shoot him,” Wolfley said. “I hit him on the first shot and he stumbled off into some big ledges.”

They didn’t know whether they would have to track him. But it was clear that Wolfley’s shot had hit him.
“We had to go around the ledges,” Wolfley said. “By the time we found him and got to him it was 10 minutes before dark and it was snowing again.”

Thankfully Matt had marked in his GPS the location of the truck. “We were in the middle of thick trees and it was impossible to sense direction,” he said.

The party left the bull there in the dark and hiked off the mountain following their GPS guide out. The bull was an atypical 7×8 point with 51 inch main beams and a 50 inch spread. Wolfley didn’t have an exact score on him but he thought he would go between 360 and 370.

Wolfley managed to round up some help the following day to get the elk packed out. He had his brother in-law Jeff Johns from Cedar City, and a friend Travis Leavitt who they happened to run into and recruit help from.On Thursday morning the 4 of them went back on the mountain and boned out the carcass.
“It was a long day and it snowed the whole time till about 2:30 in the afternoon,” Wolfley said.

Wolfley had a lot of challenges during his hunt but it was exactly what he wanted to put into it.
“I wanted a good bull but I didn’t want it to be easy,” he said. “I hunted hard and earned that bull. I was thankful that I was capable enough to go out and hunt like that. Some people can’t get out and hike, there were plenty of times that my legs and lungs were burning but I was thankful for every minute.”

The hunt was a long and extremely cold one, but finding the right bull and facing the snow wasn’t the end of their challenges. The crew was having tire trouble as well.
“I took my wife’s truck up there, and it couldn’t go more than a day without getting a flat tire,” Wolfley said. “By the end of the hunt it had a whole new set of tires.”