Gun Talk with Harold Harton
Hunting trip to Montana was simply unforgettable

Harold Harton has been a contributing outdoors writer for the Dispatch Record since 1954.

One of my most memorable hunts was one on which I did not get a shot.

The year was 1958. My late friend Johnny Hotchkiss had a brother, Dub, who lived in Montana. Johnny called him and asked about a hunt. Dub said, "Come on up." So we started talking about it and made our plans, along with Howard Yancy and Olen Love.

Olen was the Ford dealer here at the time, so we all agreed to pay the fuel bill, and Olen would furnish the vehicle. The day before we were to leave, Olen traded for a station wagon that was licensed in Oregon. He had the shop check it over and declared it road ready. The next morning we tied onto the trailer with all our gear and headed out.

About one o'clock the next morning we were going through Deer Trail, Colo., where a highway patrolman was parked on the side of the road. He came up behind us and noticed we were pulling a trailer with a Texas license plate and an Oregon license plate on the station wagon. He stopped us.

No amount of explanation was good enough. He impounded everything, locked it in a garage and put us out on the sidewalk.

There was no motel in Deer Trail, and the last bus to Denver had already left. Olen kept talking with him about how we could satisfy him on our good character, or resolve the situation. Finally, we got him to haul us to Denver -- for a fee -- after he got off duty. After about 8 hours in Denver, we finally got on the road to Montana again.

We arrived at Dub's ranch in the beautiful Paradise Valley just south of Livingston, Mont., where we were met by Dub and his family. What hosts they were! Their home had a basement, and it was all ready for us. The next morning we were awakened to a breakfast of trout, eggs, biscuits and honey, and large mugs of steaming coffee.

Dub had made arrangements for horses we could ride while hunting, so we headed to the beautiful Gallatin Mountains. We set up camp on a hillside. The floor of our tents was at about a 15-degree angle. When we awakened in the morning, we were in the foot of the sleeping bags.

The first day Howard came in with some camp meat, so we took a couple of hindquarters with onions, carrots, potatoes, butter and lots of salt and pepper. We wrapped all this up in several layers of foil. We dug a hole in the ground about two feet deep. In the bottom of the hole we put a layer of about four inches of coals, then the package of foilwrapped food, then more coals on top, and covered it with dirt and left it all day. That night, after a hard day of hunting, we dug it up. What a meal we had! That meat, along with the vegetables, was the best we had ever eaten.

The next day I had an experience I will never forget. I was riding my horse along a ridge covered with snow when suddenly the horse sank through the crust of snow up to his belly. I got off and started digging the snow from around him and found that under the snow was downed timber, large trees, and my horse was straddling one big tree. He couldn't get traction with his feet.

I dug snow for what seemed hours and finally got to where I could take a wire saw I had in my pocket and cut enough timber to allow the horse to get free. What an experience!

The last day, as we were leaving, a blizzard hit. After getting back to Dub's house and saying our goodbyes, we headed for home. We rode that blizzard all the way to the Panhandle of Texas before we finally got relief. We drove night and day. Crossing Wyoming I remember the only way we could tell where we were in the roadway was by observing the tops of fence posts on each side of the road and trying to stay centered.

What a trip, and not one I would ever want to try again.

The memories remain.