Ep. 18: The Bull that Loved Fire and How to Scout and Hunt Burns
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As a guide and hunter, I've spent thousands of days in the field. This show is about translating my hard-won experiences into tips and tactics that'll get you closer to your ultimate goal, success in the field. I'm Remy Warren. This is Cutting the Distance. This podcast is presented by Yeti. Built for the wild. Wildfires.

They can be bad news for a forest, but honestly, they can be great news for elk and deer. The abundance of new growth and feed can increase populations and provide some incredible hunting. Now, they might look like the face of the moon at first, but that new growth is really a super protein shake that animals love.

I've spent the majority of my time hunting various burns. While it sounds simple, find a burn, hunt it, there's a formula to finding productive burns and locating the animals within that area. That's the when, where, and how that makes the difference. One of my favorite hunts in a burn was with my buddy Josh in Northern Nevada on a trip that almost didn't happen. One of my best friends Josh happened to draw a really good late season elk hunt in Northeastern Nevada.

Now, I was guiding for most of the elk season in Montana and unfortunately couldn't hunt with him. So just as you do with your buddies, it's fall. I get a phone call calling, hey man, I'm constantly checking in. How's your elk hunt going? You know, what are you seeing? What aren't you seeing? As soon as he would get service, he would call. And he had hunted a couple weeks pretty hard, had a few encounters, but it was just one of those years. It was just tough hunting.

I happened to just finish guiding in Montana and he was on his way back home. There's a few days left in the season, but he had to get back for some work and some other things. I told him, look, man, you've only got a couple days left. If you can hold off, I will run down there and give you a hand.

I'd been guiding up Montana and hunting burns pretty much daily the entire season. I called another friend who had told me about a recent fire in there that year. I asked Josh if he checked it out. He's like, well, I've seen it, but you know, we didn't really hunt it. And I thought to myself, that's where I want to hunt. There's just a good thing about some of these fresh burns that late in the year is they get this green up. And I just thought that's what's going to draw the elk in.

I jump in my truck. I've got it all loaded up. My stuff that I've been traveling around for, oh, when did I leave? Probably left in August and now it's the end of November. Josh is headed out from Reno. I'm headed down from Montana. We end up meeting up on the road in a little town called Winnemucca. Like, all right, man, I'll hop in with you. Then we'll drive out, jump in his truck and start driving. It's pretty late this time. I realized by the time we hit Elko,

which is further east, that I forgot my boots in my truck. I have everything else, but I didn't grab my boots. And I'm not even sure I had shoes on at this point. I think I was just driving comfortably with my shoes off or sandals. I don't know what was going on, but it's late November and here I don't have any boots. It's also, I think, what was it? Probably midnight, one in the morning at this point. So you pull off to the old Wally World there.

I run in, I grab the only pair of boots that they have in a size 12, which was a pair of steel-toed work boots. So I've got some fresh boots for an elk hunt that are super heavy and extremely uncomfortable, but it's better than going barefoot in the freezing cold. We continue driving pretty much all night, pull over, sleep for a few hours before sunup, and then get into the area that I've marked on the map.

We're talking regular maps here, not digital maps, not Onyx. That just wasn't a thing then. Unfortunately, man, hunting is so much easier now with good mapping software and all the technology we have. But then it was a paper topo map, figured out a road and we're like, all right, we're pretty much in the middle of this burn. Let's get after it. Sun hadn't even come up yet. And this is his last day to hunt.

Now we're in the unit, picked a spot that seems to be in the middle of where the burn would be, waiting for the sun to come up. As the sun comes up, we start glassing, not really turning much up. It's a pretty fresh burn. It was that year's burn, but we knew that it was earlier in the summer, so it wasn't really late and it had a chance to get some of this, what we call green up, just new growth.

What I was looking for wasn't necessarily elk, but I was looking for some of this fringe habitat. An area that could provide some cover for the elk to hide in during the day and then be close to that new green up. Spotted a patch of mahogany off in the distance on a ridge. It seemed to be the only little patch that didn't burn in this giant swath of wildfire. Now this country is fairly open to begin with, but this one patch of mahogany just looked right.

Now it's mid-morning. I could see there's a little bit of shade in there. I put my binoculars up, start glassing. Sure enough, turn up a bachelor group of bulls laying in that patch of mahogany. Now it's time to get our stock on.

It's pretty open and there's not a lot of cover between us and those elk. And this is our only chance. This is our last day to hunt our first and last day to hunt together. But I really wanted Josh to get a bull. And I know he did as well. He had a great hunt with his dad and had an incredible time, whether he got one or not. He keeps telling me, oh man, this has just been one of the best hunts I've ever had, but I knew it'd be so cool to come out of there with a bull.

So we plan our stalk, we get the wind right, we're using the contour of the land and start creeping up in there. We had to go around the mountain to keep them out of sight because they literally had a commanding view of the entire valley below. It was burnt to a crisp. There was no cover. So we just had to use the contour of the hill to stay out of sight. We get to the ridge in front of them, slowly crawl up. One of the bulls is now standing, but the rest are still bedded.

We thought, oh man, maybe it saw us. And then this magpie lands on its back, starts picking at it, and then the bull just lays down again. He was just readjusting for the day. Josh gets the pack set up, range him, pretty close shot, crosshairs on him, waits for the bull. The bull stands up to readjust, to re-bed, boom, shoots him, bull down. We were just both so excited.

I got the chance to pack out the bull in my awesome Walmart steel-toed off-brand work boots that were extremely uncomfortable. Lucky for us, it wasn't that far from the road where we ended up finding these things. Maybe a mile and a half, two miles at the most. And fairly easy terrain because everything was burnt out, except for the patch of timber that they happened to be living in.

Now, I've hunted a lot of burns in my day, all over Montana, Idaho, while guiding. I actually seek burns out, but it was awesome to know that you could go into an area I'd never been, find bulls, and help a good friend be successful. So why burns? Well, when you think about it, elk and deer really fringe animals. What that means is they live on the fringes of cover and feed a lot of times.

So what burns do is they create more fringe habitat while producing higher quality forage, especially in highly timbered areas. I actually remember reading a study that burns can have an effect, like a positive effect on elk populations for at least 10 years, depending on the type of cover that was burned. Now, heavily forest areas, one of the areas that I grew up hunting,

Once it burned, that elk population increased by over 70%. It's because cows take as much energy to make a baby as bulls do to grow their horns. So if you have about 10 times the amount of available food, those cows go into the breeding season heavier weights and are more likely to have offspring.

Also, the bulls in that area or deer or whatever now have more nutrients to grow better antlers. So over the course of time, you have healthier populations and rapidly increasing populations because of the burns. Now, this is more true in heavily timbered areas, but it's also true in areas that aren't that timbered because that new growth has a lot more nutrients than old growth or stuff that gets choked out by more mature plants.

Now, when it comes to hunting burns, not all burns are equal. Just because an area burned doesn't mean that there will be elk or deer there. Even though it's got the good grass and other things, there's a little bit of a formula on how to figure out where and what burns are the most productive. I think of it like this. It's the when, where, and what of a wildfire. So let's start with the when. When did that burn happen?

This is going to make a big difference. Was it an early burn? By early, I mean fire season would be, let's start it in the spring and then runs through summer, late fall. So was it early in the spring? Was it early in the summer? Was it June, July, or was it an August, September fire?

If the fire was late in the summer, like August or September, I generally will pass that area up for that hunting that same year. I just don't think that there's enough time for that initial regrowth during most hunting seasons and the elk won't be there because it's going to look like the face of the moon. Now, if it was that same year, but a earlier fire, let's say,

June, July, then I would definitely hunt it even the first year that is burned because you'll get that green up, you'll get that new growth, those little shoots. While it might look barren from what it used to be, the elk and deer know that it's loaded with nutrients.

I would say that a burn is most effective three to five years after the initial burn and probably peaking at the best. It hits its apex around seven years. That's the max benefit because the animals and the populations have had time to grow. They've had time to build up. You'll get better age classes out of it and you'll have an overall larger and more healthy herd.

Plus the area will have kind of stabilized after the burn. So you'll get a lot of animals that live there regularly and have built up to higher populations. When I'm looking for good burns, I generally like to pull out my onyx map, pull up the fire layers, and then look for those burns in the three to seven year category when I'm trying to pick a new area or looking at a new area to check out.

So let's talk about the where, the type of range that was burned. Not necessarily a state, but was it winter range or summer range? For overall burn use, it's better to find an area that has had a fire on a winter range as opposed to a summer range. Now studies show that elk use burns more frequently in the winter than in the summer. And this is because that time of year, food is more important during the winter months and shelter is often more important in the summer.

Elk will use those sunny sides to warm up and survive the big snows, especially if they have high quality forage. One thing I will say is that patchy fires in a winter range can help elk remain healthier even if it's a hard winter. Now, while fires on a winter range can be more beneficial than summer range, just as an example, the Yellowstone fire had a lot of complications for its elk herd.

And it's because it was a late fire that burnt up a significant portion of food right before a tough winter. So going back to the when, it was a late fire. It didn't have time to get that good green up going into a hard winter. And therefore, the elk herd suffered. However, after that, a few years later, the elk herd populations were able to rebound based on the new growth that came out from that same fire.

So now we got to talk about the how. And the how is the most important part when you're looking of in this giant burn, let's say it's a 200,000 acre burn, where am I going to focus in this burn area? And the how is going to be the first thing you look at on where to go. The best elk habitat is a patchy burn where at least 20% of the area remained unburned within that fire perimeter.

So what I look for is a fire that has almost, if you were looking at an aerial imagery, it would be a mosaic pattern where it's got patches that are burned, patches that aren't burned. So as elk, if we're specifically talking about elk, they're edge animals, they're herbivores, they're grazers. They like that new growth. They like that grass, but they also need that shelter. Rarely will you find elk more than I would say 1200 yards away from good shelter.

So they might go into these big openings, but if there isn't that patchy burn where they've got cover mixed in with that new growth, they're probably going to avoid those areas altogether. They'll change their habits and they'll focus on those areas where they've got the fringes, where they have the cover, the food and the water within that 1200 yard radius. So a little less than a mile, they will rarely venture out into these giant swaths of burn if they don't feel safe.

Those patchy areas, those are the places that I focus my attention. Now, if it's a new burn, you might not be able to find that on satellite imagery, but just cruising through an area, glassing over it, when you glass through a big burn, if you see big swaths of timber or patches of timber, those are the places that you're going to look for. Like that story with my buddy Josh, the thing that I looked for in this burn that seemed like it took away everything was the few patches of trees within that burn.

And that was where we found the bulls. So now that you've pinpointed the place in the burn, let's talk about how to hunt it. One of the things that I love to do is glass into those pockets of live timber. The majority of the elk using that burn are going to spend the most of their day in that. And that's the exact strategy I used in an area I'd never been. Taking a friend into that burn was thinking a little bit outside the box. Places that other people might not look.

this burn that looks like it's got everything and then in the middle of the day when they should be bedded glassing into the standing timber from across the way where i could see in and look into the shadows that was a great place to start looking now hopefully you see them in the burn feeding in the mornings or the evenings but it's something you can hunt all day is just glassing into some of those timber pockets maybe they're feeding in the night in heavily pressured areas and

If they're getting pressured, they're going to stay in those timber pockets in the daylight. So it's a good idea to just start your focus glassing in and around those timber pockets. I like to get a ways away from where I'm looking and then hopefully glass say multiple patches from afar because sometimes you can catch those elk when they first move out into the burn in the evenings to feed and that's the best time to make a play, make a stalk and get them when they get out into the open.

The only trouble is sometimes they can see you better from there as well. So if you set yourself up where you can glass multiple timber patches and understand their patterns and where they're living, you can actually make plays in the morning as they go back into cover and then set up in the evenings as they come back out later that day.

Now, one word of caution that I will say about hunting burns is when they start to get older and it's a standing burn timber patch, you really have to watch out for falling trees. I say that from experience because I've almost been crushed twice. And that's a scary, scary thing. What happens is the roots start rotting out in these burns. Then you get some wind going and trees just start dominoing around you.

Now, the odds of actually getting smashed are pretty low, but if you're out there a lot, hunting these burns a lot, the odds increase. So when it gets windy, I'm always cognizant of which way the wind's blowing and looking for where other trees have fallen, which direction, and try to stay away from trees that I know if they fall over will crush and kill me. I'm always looking up and being aware of my surroundings because having guided in some burns that are now getting to that point where trees are falling a lot, I

I've had some fairly close calls, but I'm always aware of it. And I just think that if you're going to be the type of person that hunts a lot of burns, you really need to keep that in the back of your mind always. And don't get complacent thinking, oh yeah, I'll just sit down here when it's windy or take a nap here when it's windy, because you really have to pay attention to those falling trees.

I had one time I was stalking in on a mule deer, windstorm came up and this giant pine crushed down right between me and this deer. The buck went running one way and I went running the other. So it's just one more thing to think about if you're hunting burns, just as a little safety tip before I sign off. I just want to make sure everybody's safe as well as successful.

It's getting later in the year and depending on where you live, unless you live in Hawaii, which is a great warm hunting destination this time of year, you're probably starting to feel the effects of winter chilling. Next week, I think I want to talk about winter camping, winter travel, and backcountry hunting. When everybody else wants to leave that backcountry, that might be a good time to go in.

Now there's a lot of things you got to think about. It's different than hunting the rest of the year. Four season camping and late season hunting can be tricky, but I've got some tips that will make you comfortable and maybe some little out of the box things that you haven't thought about. And we are cruising on these podcasts. It just seems like yesterday we started.

But I want to keep thanking you guys for listening. Like the response has been incredible. I really appreciate it. It's that time of year that the season's almost over, but I think it's also time to pick up. If you missed anything during the season, go back because all these little things listen to throughout the year. We're going to keep it going, give you more tips, more things in the coming future.

And as always, I say it darn near every week, but I'm not tired of saying it. Thank you. Keep sending me everything that you're sending me. It's just awesome to see. And I appreciate it. Oh, okay. We're like almost a half a year deep and people are loving the no sign off. Maybe the rest of these sign offs, I'm just going to use all the suggestions that I've got is great.

Why do I have so, I'm the guy that like is a friend that you talk to and you're like, no, you hang up. No, you hang up. Like, bye. Bye. See you later. Bye. Bye.

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