Month: August 2018

Packing it all out

You’ve downed your animal and are ready to start cleaning it. You’re probably realizing (or remembering) that from here on out, the fun part is over and it’s work. Your next steps will determine just how much work you’ve signed yourself up for.

The work begins after your animal is down.

I’m on foot; I’ve hiked supplies to last me 10 days several miles into the national forest in Colorado. In and out, it’s all on my back…no horses, no ATVs, no vehicles. By far the best method is hunting with friends who have no problem helping whomever is successful hike out their meat. With this kind of help you may only have to make one trip. But even one trip can be a nightmare if your meat isn’t optimally loaded.

The end result

My goal is to be comfortable. I want to be pain-free before, during and especially after the hunt. That goal infuses every decision I make. In the context of packing out my animal, I’ve made the important decisions in advance. I’ll be boning out all of the meat. If I’ve shot a bull or buck, my preference is always for a European mount, so I’ll only need the head. So how do you best get over 200 pounds of meat and an elk head out of the woods?

Most important question

Where are you going to put it? Backpackers carry substantial loads every day and place their heaviest items—food, stove fuel and bear canisters—high and tight to their spine. Learn from their example. Moving the weight to the absolute bottom of your pack bangs into your butt with each step, overworks your hip flexors and leg muscles and saps strength fast. Strapping the meat to the outside of an already loaded pack shifts your center of balance comically far; I’ve seen hunters compensate with nearly 45 degrees of forward lean, which guarantees a nasty, miserable trek. Meat is very heavy and often leaks a lot of blood when compressed in your pack. If you’re with me on loading high and tight to the spine, a thick, unscented black trash bag keeps the blood from soaking anything else in your pack.

I don’t use the “meat shelves” that are all the marketing rage on packs. They don’t put the weight where it needs to be for miles of hiking with lots of vertical gain and loss.

Your options

Game bags. My shoulders and quads still tingle from memories of hauling my first elk out with game bags made from stretchy cheesecloth material. Everyone I’ve ever hunted with has a set of these bags and for quartering an animal or undoubtedly every situation where you are not strapping the meat to your pack they work. When you place them in your pack the stretchy material immediately transforms into meat bowling balls that limbo their way to the bottom of your pack. They are hard to strap in place and I don’t recommend them for packing meat out for any serious distance. To cure the problem of excessive material stretch, I tried a synthetic game bag designed for boned out meat that had minimal give. What I didn’t anticipate was that these bags—over a foot wide by 30 inches in length—are simply too broad to secure in my pack. Again I’m sure I’m not the ideal user for this bag…what I want to accomplish is a little more extreme.

What I finally found is a strong silnylon sack make by Kifaru that measures 9” wide by about 24” long…it holds an honest 70 pounds of meat and has a strap that will allow you to–strength permitting–pull it up a tree for drainage and critter protection. I put jackets, sleeping bags or whatever I can under the vertically oriented meat bag to support it and keep it as high and tight to my spine as possible. And with the meat in the trash bags, nothing leaks on my gear.

Summary

For comfortably packing meat out and hiking miles to make that happen—with multiple round trips—keep the meat in a tall, narrow tube. Pack the meat in your pack, tight to your spine about midway up your back extending up towards your neck. Following this formula won’t negate the fact that you have another 70 or more pounds on your back, but it will maximize your chances of being able to make multiple trips without reaching for an excessive amount of ibuprofen when it’s all over.

Recommended meat bag:

Kifaru Meat Bag
9×26”
1oz
$24
www.kifaru.net

Elk Hunting Packs: Part 1

At the end of the hunt the difference between a great pack and a just okay one will save (or trounce) you. Learn from my mistakes and both your body and wallet will thank you.

With sixty pounds of elk meat on my back in addition to my normal load of the survive-the-night stuff and four miles to go to the cooler in the back of the truck, I’m looking at the Colorado mountain stream in front of me with less than my usual enthusiasm. While perhaps not plunging, the water is quickly threading its way down a steep, rock-covered narrow gorge. Dead trees have been strategically thrown across the stream at waist or chest height. This should be fun.

It was round one of a tough hike made harder by a pack that wasn’t fully up to my expectations. Add in that I should have loaded the pack better, and I was in lots of pain after the second trip the following morning for the last of the meat. I avoided a third agonizing round trip because my friend Dave carried a load out with me the previous day.

Packs

Daypacks range in size from miniscule to about 2,000 cubic inches (ci). They usually have a minimal amount of padding and lack a hard frame of any sort to transfer weight. Midrange packs come in from 2,000-4,000 ci and large multi-day packs start at 4,000 ci and can run to 7,000 ci or even larger. These two packs (mid-and multi-day) usually incorporate an internal (or external) frame to help transfer heavy loads from your back to your hips which helps tremendously with long-term comfort. These size ranges aren’t set in stone; I just want to give you an idea of the three sizes I’ll be writing about.

Daypacks: Little wonders…

Daypacks keep your essential gear when beginning your hunt from a cabin or a vehicle. Just large enough to get you through the day, they’ll hold rainwear, survival gear, food, water and whatever else you like to keep with you. They are svelte, lightweight and designed to carry small loads. I’ve managed to backpack many miles in and then hunt for a week from a daypack. It wasn’t ideal and it wasn’t very comfortable on the hike in or out (not to mention loading it with elk meat) but I made it work.

Midrange and Multi-Day: Packs with a backbone…

Midrange and multi-day packs are very similar, usually it’s only a matter of size that sets them apart…think small SUV vs large SUV. The step up here is that these packs usually feature an internal frame structure that drastically increases the amount of weight you can comfortably carry. The trade-off is that they are larger and a little heavier than daypacks. With a well-made pack in this class, the only limit to the weight you can haul is usually your level of fitness. I’ve hauled 70 pounds of meat with ease and gone on winter camping excursions where my load was well over 100 pounds.

Packs need to stand up to all kinds of abuse. Including getting gnawed on by curious pine squirrels.

What are you looking for?

At this stage, there is no shame in not knowing what you are after. In fact, that mindset is advantageous. Let me say it now: The perfect pack doesn’t exist. I’m fine with that. I do lots of different things outside–photography; mountain biking; backpacking with the kids; hunting for squirrels or elk or geese–and no one pack will help me to do all that. It’s about expectations and compromise.

Are you hunting from a cabin? Hiking in from a parked car? Or packing in all of your gear and setting up base camp miles from the road? How comfortable do you have to be? Can you still deal with using a daypack when you have to carry out an elk quarter—four times? Can you handle the size and weight of a larger pack for day hunting, even if you don’t harvest an animal? Are you hunting where it’s flat or where you need to traverse steep ridges all day?

What works for me…may not for you

I prefer to hike in several miles to be closer to the animals, further from hunters and closer to where I think the action will be. I’ll camp out for a week or more if need be. I’ve done this with a daypack but don’t recommend it. Cramming all of my gear into and onto a small pack isn’t fun, fast or comfortable, never mind how it feels to haul out as much of your animal as you can and then repeat until done. I’ve moved on to a large multi-day pack with ample room for everything I want to bring–after I down my animal and debone it, I can immediately carry meat back to base camp. I’ve downed an elk within a football field of tree line and had to traverse hundreds of feet up and down and back again over several miles just to get the meat to our base camp. Being able to haul as soon as I’m done deboning the animal and having a pack that makes repeating this process comfortable is extremely important.