‘The Bob’ is a hunter’s paradise

The Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex in Montana is distinguished from the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness of Washington and Oregon by several factors important to elk hunters, including more elk, longer seasons and fewer restrictions.

Size has something to do with it.

The Bob, as it’s called, and its adjacent Scapegoat and Great Bear wilderness areas total 1.54 million acres compared with 177,500 acres in the Wenaha-Tucannon.

From an elk management viewpoint, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department officials consider the Bob Marshall Complex to be more than twice the size of the official wilderness, considering restricted winter ranges and roadless or road-management areas outside the wilderness boundaries.

“We’re talking about 15 hunting districts within portions of Lewis and Clark, Flathead, Helena and Lolo national forests,” said Gary Hammond, FWP elk program director.

Many lightning-caused forest fires are allowed to burn naturally because the wilderness area is so large and free of development, he said. “Fire has definitely contributed to maintaining good elk habitat,” he said.

Unlike many wilderness areas that are largely rock and ice, 92 percent of the complex is elk habitat, Hammond said. Because of all this real estate — large enough to support a thriving population of grizzly bears — elk hunting seasons can be long and liberal without decimating the herds.

Elk hunting opened in The Bob on Sept. 15, more than a month earlier than Montana’s general season, giving wilderness rifle hunters a rare chance to hunt during the elk mating season when bugling bulls can be lured by calls.

In contrast, the elk season in the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness and adjacent forest doesn’t open until Saturday and it will run for only nine days. Hunters can shoot only spike bulls, except for the four hunters who drew branch-antlered bull permits.

“The Bob is spring, summer and fall habitat, but when winter comes, they have to go somewhere else to survive,” he said. “It doesn’t take them long to figure out where they have sanctuary.”

The 20,000-acre Sun River Game Preserve, just one of numerous wintering areas for elk from the Bob Marshall Complex, isn’t large enough to fully contain the 2,700 elk that wintered in that area last year, Hammond said.

Land managers try to furnish public lands with enough forage to satiate the elk until spring, but they fight a constant battle to keep elk from concentrating and damaging crops on private farms and ranches.

“We have to go in and do a little herding occasionally to keep them from stacking up on private land,” Hammond said.

Despite the vast wilderness, the lowland winter range is the bottleneck in elk survival, especially when snow forces the animals into unprotected areas.

“Harassment by snowmobilers is a big issue in some wintering areas,” Hammond said.

Winter harassment is one thing elk have in common, regardless of what wilderness they reside in during the rest of the year.

The Wenaha-Tucannon elk winter almost exclusively on public land, but the growing interest and profit in collecting antlers the elk shed while they are on their winter ranges has been spooking the elk off the public winter ranges and south and east to agricultural lands, Fowler said.

“Then we have problems,” he said.