^ Glad you like it, smokinyotes.
I am going to break this one into two posts. As if I haven’t typed enough yet, lol.
Well, I went to the Harmon Valley Uplands ACA site. I will give heads up to those planing to hunt moose in 520 in the future and say this: do not waste your time going there. At least not from the patch side (north and east). Could be dandy deer hunting, but as far as moose goes… Well, there is moose, on occasion, perhaps. Even if it is there though, one would have hard time finding it. Likely by luck.
I have spent about 3 hours there today, before it hit me: “Why the heck am I here?” Lol. In the three hours I have seen almost zero sign that moose was there this year. Not even kidding. No tracks, no poop, no recent trim (recent as in not since last year, at least).
Having said that, I still had a decent hike through some various bush, saw some cool things, etc. Can’t complain and now I know, but I would be better off heading somewhere north again (I did later in the day).
I thought of this spot when “map” scouting for places to go. Looks great, doesn’t it? It did to me, but I guess I should have looked better, lol.
Well, it ain’t. I’d say at least 70% of this site is muskeg.
Since there is no access other than on foot (literally), I parked at one of the pads in the oilfield and set off from there. Met a great guy working at the site who offered to help with his sxs after his shift if I shot anything in there. We exchanged phone numbers. He mentioned that it really has been a long while since he (or others) saw a moose there, but he did see some tracks on one of the roads that appeared to be at least a week old. I said something like “I bet you they are all deep at that aca site” or something along the lines, while laughing. They aren’t. I checked. Ha!
Then, you start on the cutline, which is flooded for the most part. I should say this is not the only way to access the site (and I actually initially was planning to access elsewhere), but most of the cutlines I passed by today were partially flooded.
Of course, it is all frozen now, so it doesn’t matter much.
Then, the muskeg:
So I hit that, following a game trail that led to what looked like better grounds on the map. A few dozen meters in, I hit some very fresh deer scat, which lifted up the spirits.
Closer to the “better grounds”, there was a scrape after a scrape after a scrape.
I started getting a bit distracted by all the scrapes before the better grounds:
I thought that was a nice place to find some moose sign, or possibly even a moose. A bit elevated, plenty of willow, etc. I did find sign and this is what it looked liked:
No moose has been there for a looong time. And it looked that everywhere I went. I did slow down a bit, walking on that scrape line, even though I don’t have a deer tag, but it would still be nice to catch one for a pic at least; maybe see who is scraping the place up; maybe come back with a deer tag next time, lol. Then, I hit the mother of all scrapes, lol:
This guy was digging with the vengeance, lol. Like really, one usually doesn’t expect a deer to do that. You can see my rifle leaned against the tree there for size of this thing. You could see (I should have taken a better pic) it’s been worked on a few times and today was the last time. I followed a deer trail with the fresh scat on it, but never caught up to the guy. I also wasn’t very cautious because, after all, it is moose I am after.
It does look like a nice deer spot. There are some well defined features, such spruce/poplar boundaries, muskeg/elevated grounds, nice funnels, etc. Maybe I will come back one day with a different tag. Funny thing is though, I haven’t seen too many rubs, rather a few lame ones like this:
Not a deal breaker, but still. I also wasn’t looking specifically deer activity and didn’t wonder off the trails much except for when I hit one that went into nowhere.
Then, more muskeg.
