Twin Elements Podcast · Hunting Tips & Tactics

Lessons From Montana, USA - Trials, Tribulations & What We'd Do Differently

Thirty days of hunting in Montana. Four of six tags filled — a bull elk, a mule deer buck, and two pronghorn bucks. Missing two of six still stings a little for two driven hunters, but it's well above the statistical average for a first DIY nonresident trip in a brand-new unit. This is the full debrief: the lessons we're carrying forward, and the things that worked well enough to repeat.

In This Report

1. Part One: Lessons to Improve On
2. Part Two: What Worked Well
3. Listener FAQ: Camo Patterns vs. Solids

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Part One: Lessons to Improve On

1. Ranging and Distance Evaluation in a Treeless Environment

The Montana landscape was virtually treeless — a few shrubs aside, no vertical cover. That made stalking hard, but it also made it nearly impossible to range preemptively without spooking an animal by raising a rangefinder to the eye. Several pronghorn misses came down to exactly this: ranging a rock or shrub near the animal rather than the animal itself, then having it move a few steps and change the effective range.

The bull elk was the opposite case — bedded, stationary, ranged at sixty yards with total confidence, because he couldn't change that range before the shot arrived. That distinction, stationary versus moving target, mattered more than raw distance. Back home hunting chital, red, or fallow, there's almost always a tree or scrape to range as a fixed reference point — a luxury Montana's open country just didn't offer.

2. Positioning to Kill vs. Positioning to Simply See Animals

This one's borrowed from whitetail hunting logic: a stand on the field edge sees plenty of deer, but they're already in the open and out of range by the time you'd hunt them. A stand set back fifty yards on the downwind game trail sees fewer deer, but positions you to actually kill one.

For elk it was less relevant, since spotting one elk reliably led us to the whole herd and a target bull — glassing from high ridges, up to five miles out, worked well because elk in the September rut move as a mob. Mule deer were the opposite problem. Mature bucks in September, pre-rut and stripping velvet, are solitary and elusive, visible for maybe ten minutes at first light before disappearing into deep draws. Seeing does or young forky bucks didn't lead anywhere. The fix, worked out over several days, was to move in closer to where bucks were slipping back to for security — usually near private land boundaries or nasty thick draw heads — accepting reduced overall visibility in exchange for a real shot at a mature buck if one showed. Fewer deer seen, but a genuine chance when one did appear at 200–300 metres instead of a mile.

3. Composure When Decoying Pronghorn

Pronghorn commit hard and close hundreds of metres in seconds once they decide to come. The lesson here wasn't really about the calling and decoying concept itself — that's directly comparable to rattling fallow or hind-calling reds — but about the setup work beforehand: better cover, more deliberate planning before popping the decoy up. Watching from behind the camera on James's successful pronghorn stalk showed there was more time available during the shot window than it feels like from behind the bow. He converted in just two to five setups; the more difficult, comical failed stalks became a running joke — pronghorn are officially his new nemesis species.

4. Not Capitalizing in the Crunch

James spent nearly two weeks on one specific big bull. On the stalk that mattered most — thirty to forty yards, the bull bugling amongst around fifty elk, all within bow range — he took a shot and missed clean.

A textbook case of tunnel vision under pressure, after two weeks of emotional investment in one animal.

5. Switchability and Hunt Adaptability

The first two weeks, four of six tags filled, went almost perfectly. The last two weeks, zero tags filled, might have benefited from actually changing zones rather than staying emotionally attached to the one target bull and hoping to stumble onto a mule deer buck in the background. Increasing hunting pressure as September wore on — more hunters arriving — also changed animal movement patterns in ways we didn't fully account for. No guarantee a new zone would have produced a better bull or buck, but it's worth genuinely considering rather than defaulting to "stay the course."

6. Calling and Bugling Confidence

There's a real confidence gap here. A red deer hind call by mouth back home is essentially a lock — nailed nearly every time under pressure. Cow calls and bugles in Montana felt more like a coin flip. One costly example: James tried to rip a bugle on the target bull at the crucial moment, but his mouth was bone dry after six hours without water on a long stalk, and what came out was a weak, whiny vocalisation instead — the bull turned and walked his cows away. More diaphragm-call practice under realistic conditions, not just in the car or the office, is the takeaway for next time.

7. End-of-Trip Burnout

Not obvious day-to-day, but stark comparing day one to day thirty — roughly a thirty percent drop in sharpness and decision-making, even losing only about one percent a day. A few things fed into it. Sleep dropped to five or six hours most nights. Solo hunting in the first two weeks meant eating, sleeping, and hydrating on our own schedule; sharing camp with other hunters later meant socialising, alcohol instead of electrolytes and protein shakes, and even less sleep. A caloric deficit crept in too — long-duration hunts always end with noticeable weight loss regardless of diet discipline.

The biggest factor, though, was almost certainly a suspected case of giardia. After using water from a cattle trough to wash dishes early in the trip, we both had significant gut upset for three to four weeks. James was hit far worse — up to ten-plus bathroom trips a day, weight loss, lethargy, dehydration — while I suspect I had some partial immunity left over from a prior diagnosed case working as a vet in the NT.

8. Restructuring the Month Into Separate Hunt Blocks

In hindsight, breaking the back half of the trip into defined blocks — say, days twenty to twenty-four mule deer only, day twenty-five travel and resupply, days twenty-six to twenty-nine elk only — likely beats the ad-hoc day-to-day decision-making that crept in once fatigue and one fixated target bull took over. The first two tags worked precisely because there was a clear, simple plan: regardless of what happens today, we are hunting X.

Some of the best hunting days from this trip were the in-between style adventures! Hunting coyotes with assault rifles, shooting sharptail grouse in the sage, and covering country in search of new grounds to explore.

Part Two: What Worked Well

1. Filming the Hunt

The open landscape made filming easier than thick-brush country — no losing animals to cover, and the hunter and cameraman could maintain a shared angle. The trade-off was harder stalking in the open, but slow, deliberate movement got it done across all four tags. Our lens kit has been the standout since switching gear after the 2024 banteng trip — previously running 24–70mm and 150–500/600mm, now a 70–200mm that's ideal for the over-the-shoulder style where a tripod isn't practical inside thirty to fifty yards, while still zooming out for the full-frame shot at close range. We've got around twelve separate USA films banked from this trip — pronghorn decoying, elk bowhunts, mule deer stalks — releasing through 2026.

2. Gear Choice and Packing the Essentials

Everything we packed got used; nothing we needed wasn't packed. A gear-dump video is planned for early 2026 covering the full list.

Watch Now → Full gear review.

3. Accuracy and Archery Practice

Both of us had full bow builds done pre-trip at Venture Hunting's Springwood store with Dustin Ollerman, owner of Lethal Bowstrings and now running Venture's archery department. We moved from 70lb to 80lb Hoyt Carbon RX9s, paired with Hamskea rests, Option sights and stabilizers, and Day Six shafts — mine a 275-spine HD, James's a 250-spine HD — tipped with Kayuga broadheads, Zots for me and Pilot Cuts for James. Our practice standard is roughly a one-inch group per ten metres of range: one inch at ten metres, two inches at twenty, up to six inches at sixty. That's exactly what underwrote the confidence behind the sixty-yard bull elk shot — deliberately choosing a longer shot on a fully relaxed, unaware bedded animal over a closer but far more chaotic shot threading between thirty or forty moving elk.

A well placed arrow leads to the most noble of kills. This moment is the culmination of a thousand hard choices. Somewhere along the line we made the right one!

4. Glassing and Spotting Animals From Long Range

We consistently spotted game up to five miles out. Three things made that possible: quality glass — Leupold 10x50 Santiam binoculars plus a Leupold spotting scope on a genuinely solid tripod, essential in twenty to forty knot gusts; systematically gridding terrain left-to-right, step down, right-to-left rather than randomly scanning; and reading animal behaviour by weather, with elk and other game tucking into gullies and sunny faces on cold, windy mornings, and into shaded western faces during hot, still midday sun.

5. Target Acquisition Through the Spotting Scope

The specific skill of converting from naked-eye or binocular sighting to a fast, accurate pickup through the spotting scope is something we've built up from years of running camera gear. One piece of kit worth mentioning here is the MagView spotting scope phone adapter, which we use to film and record glimpses of animals before they disappear into cover. Recording the moment, not just watching it, allows trophy assessment after the fact and lets you pinpoint the exact terrain feature an animal vanished behind, rather than relying on memory when deciding whether to commit to a stalk.

6. Physical Preparedness and Conditioning

Months of stair-machine work and rucking meant no physical decline across all thirty days despite fifteen to twenty-five kilometre days on foot — the fatigue we felt was mental and decision-making, not physical soreness. That conditioning paid off directly in meat care too: the bull elk was packed out in hours rather than days, getting the meat out of the sun quickly in hot, dry, shadeless conditions.

7. Punching Tags — Statistical Context

Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks archery success-rate estimates sit around ten percent for pronghorn, twenty-five to thirty-five percent for mule deer, and five to fifteen percent for elk. Rough combined-odds napkin math on filling the same four-of-six tag mix comes out somewhere around one in sixteen hundred. However you look at it, that's a result worth being proud of on a first DIY nonresident trip in a brand-new unit.

Listener FAQ: Camo Patterns vs. Solids

Our preference is firmly for broken-up camo patterns over solid colours — patterns break up your outline the way natural predator camouflage does, think leopard, tiger, wild dog, the same way a spotted chital or dappled fallow can be harder to pick out than a much larger solid-black buffalo. That said, the bigger factor by far is movement and stalking discipline — moving slowly, staying in shade, choosing good approach lines, minimising hand movement, moving only when an animal's head is down. Get that wrong and no camo pattern, however good, saves the stalk.

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The Adventure Continues

Join the Twin Elements team as they head back into the field.

Want the full story behind this episode? Listen to the podcast or watch the Montana 2025 Playlist.

This piece is adapted from Episode 50, "Lessons From Montana," of the Twin Elements Podcast.