Hunting Grouse Is So Easy. Except When It's Not.
I'd thought physical readiness would be the biggest challenge on the 2022 Wyoming Chicken Chase. It was not.
This was my year to join our friend Jim Millensifer on his annual Chicken Chase - a hunt that he and a group of friends had been going on for decades.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s because I recently wrote about hunting with Jim in Kansas last year. My shooting was mediocre on that trip, and I failed to get the Kansas trifecta - pheasant, bobwhite and prairie chicken - not because of my lackluster shooting, but because my body crapped out on the day we devoted to prairie chicken hunting.
So this year, knowing that I’d be hunting with him again, I spent more time shooting skeet, trap and clays, and followed a rigorous summer training schedule.
Would it be enough?
Dumb question, as it would turn out. I walked the prairie all damn day like a champ, endured 45-degree angle side-hilling without crumpling an ankle, and powered up steep mountain trails at high elevation like a four-legged pack beast. Mind you, there were times my legs felt like jelly, but if I hadn’t already shot a limit, I was going to hunt either until I did, or until we’d exhausted our opportunities for the day. End of story.
Conditioning and shooting would not be my problem. The other challenge would be.
There are many reasons to go on a hunting trip with friends - camaraderie, making memories, and shooting delicious birds (there’s a slideshow at the end of this post that captures those elements), but the higher goal of this trip was for each hunter to complete the Wyoming grouse slam: sharp-tailed, dusky, sage and ruffed.
I’m not a Slammer - Hank wears that hat in our house. The achievements that matter most to me in hunting are finding birds and shooting well.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t be sucked into a challenge. And it didn’t seem like it was going to be much of a challenge, either.
At first.
Sharpies in drought
On Day One, we hunted sharpies near Cheyenne, walking the edges between grain fields and wild grasses in draws. The land was private, but open to hunting under Wyoming's walk-in access program, in which landowners are paid to allow public hunting on their lands.
Conditions were bad. Drought had limited the kind of growth and cover sharpies need. Corn crops were stunted, and the grass was short. By midday, only one shot had been fired in a group of eight hunters. It seemed that the slam quest might be over the day it started.
Then the hunting gods smiled on us.
We'd split into three groups, spreading out across the low rolling hills, but when two of our groups converged on a draw, half a dozen sharpies exploded from the grass between us. They were out of shooting range, but it didn't matter: We saw what direction they went, and we got into ‘em, one by one.
I finished that day with two.
Blues to go
The next day was a travel day, with our convoy heading from the sharptail prairie to the high-desert sage grouse country, with a stop along the way in the Medicine Bow National Forest, where we might get into some blue (dusky) grouse.
That stop made my heart sing. The terrain was like my beloved High Sierra, only with a slightly different mix of trees and understory. Rain that morning had drenched the steep mountains, the air was filled with aromatic terpenes that melt worries away, and occasional rays of sunshine made everything sparkle.
I could’ve stayed there all week.
Again, we split into three groups. Jim and I flushed some blues quickly, but didn't get any of them - they were too far away.
But I was still in my happy place, and feeling quite at home, I started getting my usual urges. When I'm in the mountains, there’s a voice inside me telling me to go this way or that, and it's almost always right when it comes to mushrooms or mountain quail.
I explained my Holly GoThatWay tendencies to Jim and followed my muse, having told him I was using a tracking app and could find my way back to the trucks if we couldn’t find each other.
I wandered a bit, keeping other hunters’ voices in range, but when I went to rejoin them, they were gone. So I went back to looking for the first birds we'd flushed, then slowly started working back toward the trucks.
BAM. Blues flushed 10 yards in front of me.
Back home, blues are wary. In big game-obsessed Wyoming, where we almost never saw other bird hunters, not so much. One of the birds that flushed went straight up into a tree, landing on a low limb where I could see it clearly. Not gonna pass up on that! Bang, down.
A couple more flushed, another one going straight up into a tree. Bang, down.
Still more flushed on that shot, but with two down and no canine assistance, I decided it was wiser to retrieve than to attempt to get my limit without having taken an extra step.
“Holly, was that you?”
It was Jim, closer than I’d’ve guessed.
“Yes!”
“Did you get one?”
“Two!”
“YEAH!!!”
I told him the direction the birds had flown, we walked that way, and soon Jim had two in the bag as well.
After hunting our way back to the trucks, the convoy continued to sage grouse country. This could be the most momentous part of the trip for me, because I’d never hunted them before, and you can’t hunt them in California anymore.
That night we camped in wall tents, and Jim laid it out for me: Finding sage grouse could be extremely hard or stupid easy, but if we got into them, the killing would likely be easy. They are not wary, he said.
On the road to sage grouse
The next morning, we were convoying through BLM land - an endless sea of rocks and sagebrush - toward a spot all the guys had hunted before, when the trucks came to a halt.
“Grouse!” Jim said. “See it?”
“Yep!” It was resting on the ground near the road, nestled against some sagebrush, soaking up sunlight as the morning frost melted.
“Want me to go get it?”
“Yes!”
I jumped out of the car, loaded my gun and walked toward the bird. You know me: I’m not averse to ground-pounding. But it was too close to shoot without destroying the meat, so I kept going until it flushed and got some distance from me. Bang, down.
“There's another one - do you see it?” Jim yelled. Actually, several people were hollering - I had an audience behind me.
I did see it, and I advanced on it until it flushed.
Two shots, down. And just like that, I’d limited on this iconic bird before we’d even gotten to our destination.
At first it felt anticlimactic. I’ll rarely turn down an easy shot, but it's always more satisfying to work hard for it. But as the day continued and the group walked miles and miles through the sagebrush with nothing but empty game vests and sore muscles to show for it, I was counting myself lucky. And feeling guilty that I had limited while it appeared the rest would go without.
But on the fourth and final walk of the day, that changed. We finally got into them again, and two other members of the party, including Jim, got theirs.
Now, this is the part of a hunting trips where I start getting nervous. Two of each species, three days in a row. Three-fourths of the way to the slam.
Luck and symmetry like that is rarely sustainable.
When we got back to camp that night, I was gritty and smelly, and I decided it was time for a sponge bath and my second set of clothes. Cleanliness is never so sweet as it is when you’ve been putting in a lot of miles in dusty territory - it’s almost as good as the first and only hot meal of the day, which followed my camp bath.
During dinner, Jeff, the organizer of the trip, said something about his lucky shirt, which was tattered and dirty and had been rescued at least once from his wife's urge to throw it away.
I quickly looked down at my clean clothes, and wondered if I'd just thrown my luck into the laundry bag.
The ruff road ahead
Day Four was another travel day, with a reduced convoy: We were down to five hunters now. It was an all-day journey west into ruffed grouse country, rugged mountains where we could also get into more blues. We made good enough time to set up camp in the Bridger-Teton National Forest and still have enough daylight left for a late-afternoon walk.
We traveled down a wide but heavily washboarded dirt road, passing legions of big game hunters en route to a spot with some history: Some years ago, the group had successfully hunted this draw before, then rested at the top, eating sandwiches. All the dogs were asleep. Then the wind shifted, and suddenly every dog was on its feet, the hair up on all their backs. The hunters never saw what set the dogs off, but obviously it had been something dangerous. A lion?
With that creepy thought in mind, Jim and I headed up the trail, all in shadow because it was nestled between steep mountainsides. I carried bear spray Jeff had given me. We were in grizzly country.
This was the terrain I’d trained hardest for: high elevation, steep, with a thick cover of snowberries, service berry and wild rose - all of which grouse eat.
We took turns, one hunting on the path and one off, and flushed absolutely nothing. Jeff was hunting (in his lucky shirt) off to the side of us, but we never heard him shoot either.
With sunlight fading, we took a break before turning around. A young couple came down the trail, he with a rifle, she with their toddler son on her back. Jim asked if they’d seen grouse.
“A bunch of ‘em,” the man said. “Like 10. This morning. Down where we parked.”
Of course.
Jim and I set off down the hill at a fast clip to put some distance between us and the couple so it would be safe to shoot if we saw anything. But we needn’t have worried -the dogs never got birdy.
The streak was over. Day Four was a big zero.
On the morning of Day Five, we tackled a big mountain, even steeper than the trail we’d hunted the night before. On our way up, we encountered a big game hunter on horseback coming down, and asked him if he’d seen grouse.
“They’re everywhere!” he said.
“Good!” we said.
I powered up the trail, which would take us up 1,600 feet in elevation. I went off trail and plowed through thick cover, rich with berries grouse love. I navigated mazes of deadfall that felt like an Army boot camp obstacle course.
Boom!
The shot came from Jim’s direction, so I made my way toward the sound.
“Get one?”
“Yep!” He’d completed the 2022 Wyoming Grouse Slam.
We continued on, and Jim encouraged me to walk through aspen thickets to try to push up birds. I did, and at one point, I flushed one out of a tree ahead of me, but a Hail Mary shot through a narrow shooting window got me nothing.
We continued to the top of the mountain, with a view of the Grand Tetons, eating miniature quiches (really!) and waiting to see if anyone would join us (no one did). Jim told me about a time they’d hunted that very spot, and sat there eating for 20 minutes when a bunch of blue grouse flushed from the trees 15 yards away from them.
That didn’t happen this time.
We hunted our way back down without flushing a single bird, and rejoined the group. Jeff had gotten one - another slam completed - but that was it. Wherever that horseman’s mythical “Everywhere” was, we hadn’t found it. Might as well have been Xanadu.
So we ate lunch, then headed to another spot, this one a fairly level dirt road. On one side, far below us, was a river. On the other side, the mountain rose steeply. I decided to hunt below the road, thinking if a bird flushed from the road, it would take the easy escape route downhill, and I’d be able to intercept it.
Wrong.
While I was down there, a group of birds flushed from the side of the road and one jumped straight up into a tree. Jim got one.
I stuck to the road after that, but another flush yielded nothing because we never got the birds in our line of sight.
And that was it for Day Five. I was feeling a whole lotta “I told myself so!” about the 2-2-2 streak being too good to continue. I contemplated changing into my old shirt. On the bright side, our next stop would be the Astoria Hot Springs, where everyone was looking forward to a hot soak after five days of hard hunting.
When we went to check in and pay, I saw a notice on a table explaining that Wyoming Public Television was filming there that day, and entry constituted consent to be filmed.
Maybe they were done filming?
I looked through the entry and saw a tripod with a small camera aimed at the hot spring pools.
Oh hell no.
I am ragingly insecure about my body. It was going to be hard enough for me to bare so much skin in front of the guys I’d been hunting with for the past five days, much less to an entire public television audience.
“Fuck that,” I told Jim. “I’m out.”
I’d opted to get a motel for the final days of hunting anyway, so I at least had a hot shower waiting for me. I went back to my car and encountered Alex, another member of our group, as he was heading in. I told him about the TV thing.
He was undeterred. God, how I wish I could not give a shit like that.
“I’m gonna find a place to hunt,” I told him. The thought of heading to my motel while the sun was still up was unbearable. I’d worked hard and traveled a long way for this. “Any suggestions?”
“Why don’t you go back to where we just hunted?” he asked. He thought I’d be likely to see grouse around 6 p.m., when they tend to come out of cover and hang out on roads to pick up grit that aids digestion. And it made sense that I might see them, since we’d seen them going out and coming back the first time.
So I found my way back there around 5:30 and started walking. My plan was to head out walking toward the sinking sun, and turn right back around at about 6 p.m. with the sun at my back. Hopefully I’d find a bunch of grouse milling about on the road for a nice triple skillet shot.
It didn’t turn out that way. Instead, I’d been walking for about two minutes when I heard a flapping sound on the bank of the uphill side of the road. Flapping, but no flight. I squinted into the shadows, and there it was, a poor unwary ruffed grouse thinking I wasn’t much of a threat after all.
Sorry, bird. I aimed high, and just about shot its head off - it didn’t feel a thing.
And like that, I’d completed the slam. Alone. While everyone else was sitting in a hot spring.
Pressure's off
When we met the next morning for our sixth and final day of hunting, we lost two more of the crew, who’d decided to go fishing that day. It was down to me, Jim and Jeff.
“Now that you’ve finished the slam, and there’s just three of us, everything’s probably going to come easy,” Jeff said.
We all laughed. That would be about right.
We drove and drove and drove to our first spot, a valley with aspen-lined ridges on either side. It was cold, and I shivered as we walked into the shadow of the ridge toward the closest group of aspens. They were still green, but not for long - fall was at hand. I couldn’t wait to warm up with a little walking.
That’s when about eight blue grouse flushed out of the trees ahead of us, bounced by the dogs that we hadn’t thought to call back closer to us yet. We pursued the birds through the trees, and each of us got one.
Then we worked back to where we started to begin the walk we had originally planned. And that’s when five or so ruffed grouse flushed out of the trees. We got two of those.
Well, that was fun!
We went back to the trucks to take a quick snapshot and stash those birds, then headed out again.
We got into another group of blues before lunch, then took one final grueling (did I mention how sore we were?) walk, where we got into the ruffs three more times. At one point, we neared a tree and Jim pointed out that he’d flushed grouse from that very tree before, and within seconds, one flushed from that tree.
By the end of it all, my shooting was getting pretty ragged. I shot my last bird - a third ruffie for a limit - out of a tree, and utterly neglected to raise the muzzle a bit to aim for the head. I cringed when I picked it up and saw more holes than I’d care to see on a bird I’m going to eat. But I would find out when I plucked it back at home that it wasn’t too bad, thankfully.
We finished the day with twelve birds between the three of us, five in my bag, raising my total for the trip from seven to twelve in one amazing day. We were exhausted, having put in easily 40 miles of hard walking in six days, but jubilant.
When it comes easy like that (or like my first two blues of the trip in that lush forest, or the sage grouse in the desert by the side of the road, or that ruffie that announced itself by the road two minutes into my solo walk), it can trick you into feeling like it could always be like that. All you’d have to do is choose the right spots at the right time, every time, and you could save so many miles of walking.
But nature’s not like that. If you want those moments that come effortlessly - the moments we tell stories about for the rest of our lives - you have to put in a lot of time and miles in which there is little to no reward, aside from deep body aches and frustration.
These are the odds we play. This is the reason we train hard and push through. It’s what make the rewards actually rewarding.
And it’s why I can’t wait to get out and do it again.
Now, don’t forget to scroll down to the end for the slideshow … I know there’s one slide that’s gonna spark lots of questions.
Huge thanks go out to Jeff, who organized the whole trip and called the shots on where we’d hunt; to Jim for allowing me to hunt with him and his gorgeous German wirehaired pointers Jazz, Rae and Jenna; and to the entire hunting party, which undoubtedly made lots of individual sacrifices to give me the best possible chance of getting the Wyoming grouse slam on my first time out. I couldn’t necessarily see all those sacrifices, but I know they happened, and I really appreciate it. Hope y’all think it was worth it!
Great read! This line was particularly enchanting: I quickly looked down at my clean clothes, and wondered if I'd just thrown my luck into the laundry bag.
I just got back from a 7 day grouse hunt in northern Ontario, which looked A LOT different than yours! I hunted over my 8 month old small munsterlander, Arrow, for the first time and it really took the pressure off of getting birds. I never knew hunting with my dog would be so joyful, whether or not we bagged a limit.
Never met a grouse hunter with shiny boots. ;)
The horseman was probably just toying with you. Because the problem has always been that they CAN be everywhere. Which means you may have to look everywhere to find one.
I have a place in Wyoming where I have hunted sage grouse for about 20 years or so. I have flushed coveys of them 100 feet out of camp and have walked and driven all day without a flush.
The best part of grouse hunting to me is the uncertainty and the fact that you need to apply boot leather to up the odds of crossing paths with a bird. Sage grouse in particular are fun that way for me - walking through an endless sea of sage puts me up close and personal with the landscape. The sage looks lifeless until you start working it on foot. I am always amazed at what I come across on those trips.