Hunters: Dustin Sales and Matt Schultz
Story by: Matt Schultz
Species: Rocky Mountain Elk
Location: Wyoming
Method: Archery, self-guided
Dustin and I started self-guided archery elk hunting in 2015. We have not missed a year of elk hunting or a week of scheming against the elk in ten years. We love everything about elk hunting, and (no lie) we talk about it every week—just ask our wives! It's a year-round quest to learn from the prior season and to be better for the upcoming season. We’ve spent a decade learning about elk hunting, training year-round, analyzing gear, e-scouting, and perfecting our calling, shooting, hunt logistics, and overall skills to become better archery elk hunters.
In 2025, we decided to use our thirteen Wyoming points for a quality archery tag. Arriving at the unit, we noticed that there were very few hunters or camps around. We even watched a five-by-five bull feed in the bright open sun at 2:00 p.m. from our camp as we set it up. Normally we would have been scrambling for our bows and on our way to close the distance, but we decided to hold out for a better six-by-six bull. We thought there must be elk everywhere if that bull was feeding mid-day along the road!
As our hunt progressed over the next few days, we got a massive reality check: our expectation of an epic archery elk hunt filled with lots of screaming, aggressive bulls was a dream. We had come to learn that we were hunting a quiet, low-density elk population in dense timber, which was making hunting extremely difficult.
Five days and fifty hiking miles into our sixteen-day hunt, with only one good elk encounter, I was thinking to myself, “This unit sucks. I would rather be in any OTC or general unit that I’ve hunted rather than this overrated unit that we spent our thirteen preference points on to draw.” As Dustin and I discussed the situation, we knew we needed to stay positive. We were finding elk, but they were very quiet and would not cooperate with calling. Experience told us that once the rut started to pick up, things could change fast, but for the time being, the hunting was poor—except that we had the entire mountain to ourselves.
On the morning of day seven, we found ourselves doing our daily routine: hike, bugle, glass, hike, bugle, glass. Bugling had picked up a little over the last day and a half but was minimal. As we crested the top of a ridge where we had glassed a bull the evening before, I bugled down into the finger drainage below and was answered immediately by a bull only a few hundred feet below us. We had a perfect steady wind, but there was a ton of blowdown between him and us.
Dustin made the call that we needed to back out and loop around to get below the blowdown before slowly approaching him to get set up. As we were moving slowly down an elk trail towards his location, Dustin thought he heard an animal run off and stopped briefly to see if I’d heard it. I had not. As Dustin started to take his next step looking downhill, I could see tines coming through the branches just off to his left. I quickly gave him a little mouse squeak with my lips and a subtle finger point in the direction of the bull without moving my arm. I had a look on my face that Dustin knew meant, “Elk! Don't move!”
As Dustin slowly turned his head, a nice six-by-six walked into view. He eventually saw Dustin and began a fifteen-minute stare-down with him at twenty-five yards. The wind was perfect, the bull was calm, and he even let out a soft bugle to a bull across the drainage. He didn't like Dustin standing there and decided to calmly turn and walk away.
As the bull moved slowly away, Dustin carefully took a few steps every time the bull did until he made it about fifteen yards to a patch of open timber. At the same time, I was moving back to a potential calling location just over a small rise. As I was about to call, I heard two quick cow calls from Dustin. As I turned my head, he came to full draw, and the shot was off through a narrow gap between two trees. I heard the arrow make a solid rib-cage hit, and we watched the bull run a short distance before he expired in sight. A perfect thirty-five-yard shot and Dustin’s first six-by-six bull!
The next morning, our plan was to head back to the same drainage to locate the bull that was bugling when we were quartering Dustin's bull. The action was slow. We located a couple of bulls on a different ridge that needed to be hunted in the evening for the right wind, but there was nothing in the drainage we were hunting. After a couple of hours of working along the side of the drainage, we finally got a bull to bugle. He was on the opposite side and a good distance away. After a brief snack to discuss our strategy, we began making the dreadful drop in elevation to the bottom of the drainage. Then began the climb to close the distance.
When we were 150 yards from the bull, I stalked in closer and Dustin stayed back to call. The timber was a very dense stand of young lodgepole pine, and shooting lanes were very limited. Once in position, Dustin gave one soft cow call, and the bull screamed immediately. I knew just from his intensity that he was going to come in. As Dustin continued to call a couple more times, the bull closed the distance fast. All I could see was his massive royal coming through the trees, and I thought to myself, “It's a giant!”
I quickly noticed he was going to flank to my right, out of range. I knew I needed to reposition fast, so I quickly made an aggressive move: with the bull only eighty yards away, I crept about ten yards to an open lane in the timber. As the bull entered the lane roughly forty yards away, I stopped him and the shot was off— only to get deflected by a branch. As fast as I could, I nocked another arrow and drew, but the bull had moved slightly, and I didn't have a shot.
As the bull began to move off, I had Dustin’s coaching in my mind, telling me, “You need to be aggressive and make the shot happen.” When it comes to elk, Dustin is a very aggressive shooter and makes the shot opportunity happen. I am the exact opposite in nature: stealthy and cautious, minimizing all unnecessary movement to avoid detection.
Hesitantly, I moved about ten more yards. I could only see flashes of the bull heading to my right through the trees until he stopped perfectly in the narrow shooting lane I was standing in. As I drew, I quickly estimated his range at sixty yards, but as I settled the pin, knowing from practice that I tend to overestimate my distances in the woods, I quickly adjusted to fifty yards and sent the arrow. I heard a thud that sounded like an arrow hitting the rib cage and then the sound of metal on rock. I did not see the hit and wasn’t sure whether or not I’d actually hit him.
We gave the bull an hour, then quickly recovered my bloody arrow and found a very good blood trail. The bull went a short distance and bedded several times, so we gave him another nerve-racking hour just to be safe before we recovered him a short distance from the shot location.
As we pulled him out from under the spruce branches he had fallen in, there was no ground shrinkage. A bull straight out of every elk hunter’s dreams lay before us. In twenty-six hours, our decade of preparation and two shot opportunities culminated in successfully harvesting both of our biggest bulls.
As we finished our hunt the next day with a picture of both bulls next to the tent before breaking camp, I thought back to our first self-guided elk hunt a decade ago. We’d been young, inexperienced, and ambitious. Dustin and I would talk about how, someday, we were going to know a bunch of good elk spots and harvest some good bulls. Well, we now know more spots than we can hunt in a year, and we’ve been fortunate to harvest some good bulls over the years. It’s sad thinking we will probably never set foot in this unit again. It was a great hunt to close the chapter on our first decade of elk hunting, and it marked the turning point into our glory years of elk hunting! You never know—maybe we’ll get lucky in the random draw!
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