Spring bear giants! Part 1 Skyler wins the coin toss and gets first chance.

Sorry its been so long since my last post, hunting and helping on over 25 days of spring bear hunts on the reservation along with a full work schedule left no time for anything else. A good friend of mine has his guide license on the White Mountain Apache Reservation for Bear and Mountain lion and both my kids had tags to try and harvest a couple big old bruins. On the reservation they are aloud to bait unlike state land. With numerous baits and numerous trail cameras it is sometimes over whelming on what bait to sit for the night. When the season first started the bears were staying close to the same baits but as the season went on the big boars were roaming looking for females in heat, so when this started it really added to the guess work of where that huge boar might show up. My youngest son was first after winning the coin toss, this did not set well with big brother but it worked out better since big brother was still finishing up high school baseball and Jr. High track was already over. Both kids were set on killing these big bears with there bow and arrows. We picked a bait that had some good bears hitting in the daylight hours and then every now and then a huge bear would show, and then he would be gone again for a couple days. We sat this bait in a ground blind so we could get close enough to shoot a bow when the time finally came. We sat for a couple days before one of the other hunters passed on bear that would make Skyler very happy especially for his first bear and with a bow made it even better. So the next night we switched baits and what a mistake that was. The bear they had passed did not come in that night, on the way back out we checked the trail camera of the bait we had been sitting and the bear we were after had walked in at 7:11 pm. It makes you want to cry when this happens but that is life and you move on.

After this happened we decided that we would sit this bait no matter how long it took to get a chance at this big cinnamon bear. After doing everything in our powers to increase the chances of this bear showing up in the daylight hours (buying sent sticks, and Ozonics to kill all sent, along with lots of honey on the barrel everyday) it finally happened. With two bears on the bait at 25 yards in front of us the big cinnamon finally appeared on the top of the hill and started his way to the bait. After chasing off both the other bears he looked as if he was finally ready to come to the bait. Skyler was ready with bow in hand for an opportunity at this awesome looking bear.

After looking like he was going to the bait the bear turned and started to walk away. A quick decision had to be made, either wait and hope the bear would come back for that perfect bow shot or trade over to the gun we had brought just in case. Skyler look right at me and said" GIVE ME THE GUN HE'S NOT WALKING AWAY". So we quickly changed weapons and he made a great shot on the bear as he walked away up the hill.

Here are a couple other pics of Skyler's bear from the trail camera before we were fortunate enough to kill this awesome animal.