Many opening-weekends often start the same: high hopes, fresh legs, and sometimes, more ambition than good sense. The first day of Montana’s rifle elk season is no different. With ample access to public lands and a healthy elk population, your average hunter has plenty of reasons to get after it on the first day in Big Sky country.
Knowing they’d be sharing the mountain with their fair share of blaze orange vests, Randy Newberg, Beau Baty of Wilderness Ridge Trail Llamas, and Lucas Burt of Leupold Optics hatched a plan to use the public pressure to their advantage. This meant taking Beau’s skilled trail llamas up to 10,000 ft in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and setting up a dry camp right in the middle of the local elk herd’s preferred escape route.