Brian and I camped across the valley to a superb campsite at about 10,000 ft. Cold night but in the morning we hit some fine looking grouse covers where Brian got several birds last year. A couple of hours into the hunt a male flushed from the plentiful vaccinium directly in front of me, about 25 yards away. Shot twice but only got a couple of tail feathers. Unfortunately, we did not see anything else for the rest of the morning.
After lunch we broke camp and returned to our original campsite at Spring Creek Rd. We hunted out usual hot spot up on extremely steep footing. About 30 minutes into the hunt things went crazy good when we came upon a genuine covey of 6 or more duskies! As they only seldom fly, it's customary to shoot them on the ground. One walked out only about 15 yards in front of me and just stood there. Brian yelled for me to take it but it was standing right in front of a big rock, too much risk of ricochet, so I waited for it to move.
Meanwhile complete chaos ensued. Some birds flushed while others ran and some just walked a few steps and looked at us. Yeah, duskies do that a lot. I shot one of the walkers and Brian took one on a stump. We both shot at some of the flyers but missed. We walked up to collect our birds except, no birds. Not having a dog to sniff them out we searched and searched and eventually found Brian's stump hen but we could not find what would have been my first dusky ever. Part of the chao was that my my double barrel shotgun jamed, could not open the breach. Eventually, I got it open and reloaded in time to shoot at one of the flushes but I missed of course.
Next morning we were up with the sun and headed back to the same spot. This time it was much like ruffed grouse hunting in NY State: very sudden and very fast flushes from the ground and from trees. We heard but did not see at least 5 birds, saw 5 more but only had a fleeting moment to get a shot off. Brian flushed a large male from a tree and I had a clear but wickedly fast crossing shot which I missed. I'm not a good shot but sometimes I do okay.
The two hunts had more action than we could have hoped for. Brian was especially crushed we didn't shoot better.
We went out deep into the sage/desert in Brian's SUV scouting for antelope on roads that only a first class overlanding vehicle could handle but even after 4+ hours of searching we didn't see any prey.
I found it exhausting as I was worried that if we broke down out there we could not survive very long. I decided that night that 9 straight weeks of camping was enough- time to go home.
