snow jacks

[skb2706]

Just got back from a weekend trip coyote hunting with my son to "ground zero" the blizzard area of South eastern Colorado. Pretty amazing sites there as the hard crusted snow that was four weeks old was still drifted up over many old homesteads. Often we were walking on five and six feet of hard packed snow over fences and farm equipment. We had a difficult time getting around with many roads closed and nonexistent in some cases. Large numbers of cattle are starved and dying and ranch life is pretty difficult out there. Very surreal as walls of snow right up to the road cut straight up 8 feet like driving around on a bobsled track.

We didn't ever get a chance at a coyote as only a few of our setup spots were accessible and walking 1/4 mile was a task that challenged even the toughest bastards.

One of the oddest parts of the trip was that all of the jack rabbits for miles were gathered in ranch corrals for access to food. Each farm we stopped at ranchers were begging us to shoot all the jacks we had ammo for. There were huge numbers of jacks that moved in a bio-mass thru haystacks. The big problem most ranches were dealing with.....as they were attempting to move round bales of hay to feed starving cattle the strings holding the bales had all been chewed off. It was ugly... I wish we would have taken several thousand rounds instead of the few hundred we did take. All total we shot about 300 rds. and probably killed 250-270 jacks. We didn't make a dent, not even a ripple.

My young son who has many, many opportunities to shoot prairie dogs at his aunts had a grand old time. He said this was much more fun and at least as many shots. We would just stumble around and take shots ranging from only a few feet to a couple hundred yards. All from field positions...great practice. I wish now we would have taken his 10/22 and a couple bricks of ammo. We would still be there.